City Without End (34 page)

Very slowly, Helice knelt down next to the mSap and touched the screen. The box outside the porthole was emitting a tight-beamed light stream of encoded data. She selected the mSap’s decryption functions. The thing in the river had an unusual energy signature, with fundamental particles exploding from nowhere in what had the appearance of a sustained virtual light. So the thing was only virtually present and yet sending messages, a nice little feat.

The mSap had not yet made sense of what was surely a message. So far it looked very much like static. It could also be something that looked like random static: a perfectly encrypted message.

While the mSap worked, Helice lowered herself to the floor, propping herself up against a piece of abandoned furniture. Through the distortion of the exotic matter, the faces on the cube’s sides were clear: a Hirrin, a Jout, Ysli, Inyx, Chalin. Tai identified a creature she’d never seen before, a Gond.

“Tell me what you know,” Helice whispered, and Tai did: He called it a rivitar. It came now and then to portholes here. Some of his friends had seen it often. But he knew, essentially, nothing.

Whatever this was, it had made an effort to elude Tarig detections. That by itself made the object an item of interest. Perhaps it had been attracted by the pings Helice had been sending. She indulged her curiosity; she’d give the mSap an hour to decode the static.

A hot weariness fell over her. She let herself close her eyes. . . .

The mSap woke her up with a vibration.

How she could have fallen asleep under the circumstances astonished her, but she was wide awake now. “Don’t let me sleep,” she instructed Tai. He sat on his heels, staring at the thing in the river.

On the screen, a line of type.

She scrambled over to it, peering closely.

. . . PLACE SUFFICES. JINDA CEB HORAT CONCEDE TO ANY PRIME REGION. MESSAGE REPEATS.

It was a recording.

JINDA CEB HORAT ACKNOWLEDGE SENTIENTS. ONCE OF THE PRIME REGION, JINDA CEB COME AGAIN, NOW WITHOUT THREATS.

You will find pleasant interface. Do you acknowledge?

On the same frequency, Helice sent a ping.

JINDA CEB HORAT, ONCE OF THE PRIME REGION LONG SIGHT OF FIRE, SEND PLEASANT QUERY. JINDA CEB REQUEST JUNCTION. TAR IG NAME US PAION. ONCE, IN LONG SIGHT OF FIRE, TAR IG WISHED TO DIMINISH ENERGY EXPENDITURE THAT SUSTAINED THE JINDA CEB HOME. THE DWELLING PLACE SEVERED, JINDA CEB BECAME ALONE. JINDA CEB APPROACHED WITH UNPLEASANT INTERFACE TO SECURE THE DWELLING PLACE AT LOCUS AHNEN-HOON. WHAT HAS BEEN THE CAUSE OF DYING IS UNNECESSARY. JINDA CEB SEND QUERY TO RETURN. PLEASANT DWELLERS OF THE PRIME REGIONS MAY DECIDE. TAR IG DO NOT DECIDE. JINDA CEB HAVE PROCEEDED MANY DAYS TO LIMIT ENERGY DEMANDS. JINDA CEB HORAT LIVE A BILLION DAYS BEYOND YOU OF THE ALL, IN A TIME STREAM OF HIGH VELOCITY. JINDA CEB ASK FOR JUNCTION. ONE SINGLE SMALL PLACE SUFFICES. JINDA CEB HORAT CONCEDE TO ANY PRIME REGION. MESSAGE REPEATS.

Helice pinged again. The message repeated.

Tai looked at her with barely controlled excitement. “What does it say?”

He couldn’t read it over her shoulder. The message from the Jinda ceb Horat had been in English.

“It said—” Helice paused to gauge how much she wanted to tell Tai.

This apparition in the exotic matter was a challenge to the Tarig, and no mistake. Undoubtedly, this was another highly technically capable species; one so advanced it knew to send the mSap a message in English. She considered telling Tai it was confidential, but that might not be wise. If he was going to risk even more danger for her, a little trust was in order.

“The message, it claims, is from the Paion.”

He turned a dumbfounded expression on her. “Paion?”

Helice was still staring at the cube submerged in exotic matter,
diving
in it as though it were a real sea. How did it happen that the message came to her in English? Perhaps the cube had accessed her mSap. That was a troubling thought. She was nothing without the mSap and she’d have no one fiddling with it.

The cube winked out of existence.

Helice let go a breath she hadn’t known she was holding. A Paion. It was trying to stop the war, and it was going around the Tarig to do so. She wished, she mightily wished, it had stayed longer.

She sat back against the wall, her mind racing. “It was an image bearing a message. It just repeats the same thing, over and over. But yes, it was Paion.”

Tai ran his fingers along the porthole in wonder. “What did they say?”

“They claim to be very old. Their time—Paion time—has been going much faster than yours. They may be a couple million years older than your civilization by now.”

“Time changes speed?”

She blinked at him. Didn’t they teach these people anything? “Each universe, each dimension is different that way.” She went on, “It sounds like they want some land. Land they once had in the Entire and that the Tarig took away.” She went back to the mSap, rereading. “No, they want to
attach
to any of the primacies, not just the . . .” here she traced the words on the screen with her finger . . . “not just at the Long Gaze of Fire. So, attaching to a primacy would make them a minoral.”

Tai was gazing thoughtfully into the pale light of the river. “They used to have a closed-off minoral, so the dreams say.”

Yes, Sydney and the horses were busy again, doing their dream spam.

How had she known, or how had the Inyx discovered, that the Paion had been cut off in their minoral? And what a fine piece of propaganda it was, to make the Tarig look ruthless! Apparently it was true, or the Jinda ceb wanted people to think so. The topic begged for resolution, but she had to put it away for a time. She was exhausted, and more immediate work lay ahead of her.

Meanwhile, it was important that no one know about this. No one must know she had an mSap.

“Keep this secret, Tai. Or the Tarig will come for me. You don’t want that, do you?”

“Haven’t I proven this?”

He was hurt. It was difficult for her to nurture him along, to know how much to tell him. She softened her tone. “Yes, you’ve proven yourself, Tai.

You’ve been a good man. The Rose will thank you.”

She closed her eyes, resting them, thinking. The Paion message suggested they were trying to stop the Long War. And that they wished to return to what they apparently thought of as their homeland. How could this be useful? But she didn’t have time to figure the Jinda ceb into her strategy.

They were, if anything, a distraction from her purpose. The last thing she needed right now was a game-changing new player on the field.

That being the case, it was lucky that she and Tai were the only ones who’d heard this message.

Renaissance was still on. Time to get back to it.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Galaxy
. Theoretical construct said to exist in
cosmic space
.
An aggregation of
stars
and associated orbiting
planetesimals
that is bound by
forces of attraction
, travels through the
void
,
and rotates around a center.

—from
Arcane Nomenclature of the Dark Cosmologies

S
U BEI WAS TOO AGITATED TO SLEEP
. He stared at the membrane that covered the veil of worlds as it briefly showed a series of wondrous scenes.

He and Anzi had been traveling for thirty-eight days, time enough to wear blisters into their feet and run out of food and primals. But here— finally
here
, in an abandoned Reach of a minoral in the Radiant Arch Primacy, Bei’s old eyes had fallen upon a thing of legend: a third kingdom.

Scholars had known there were, or guessed that there must be, more realms than the Rose and the Entire, but never a glimpse, not even one ever reported to the Magisterium. No wonder that scholarship had kept to the Arm of Heaven and its productive minorals, viewing the richness of the Rose cosmos. But Anzi had said there were hundreds of realms, or so she had heard Lord Oventroe say.

Here was the proof. On the veil before him flickered a cosmos with structures like the Rose. But it was not the Rose. Bei was at this very moment face to face with a planetoid of the third kingdom. Using both the correlates and his cosmography studies, he knew the correspondence here was between the Entire and a third cosmos. He had the mathematical proofs. There was an isomorphic relationship between the Entire and the kingdoms it touched. They
mapped
to each other. The correlates, by their very existence, implied this. But to see it in evidence before him in a third kingdom! It made him young again, and it made him ambitious, for his cosmography work had just proven its immortal worth, when the many data points of his great map did not correspond to the data at this veil. It drove him to look for correlations beyond the Rose, and thus the hypothetical
bubbles of universes
suggested by Anzi had just been confirmed.

He gazed with rapt attention at the veil of worlds, that membrane over the crevasse that pierced the next realm. Here, projected onto the membrane were beings—by happenstance, very like the Hirrin.
Hirrin
, the progenitors of the Hirrin of the All, likely on their originating planetoid. One might well conclude that the correlates tended to search out places of interest; this could explain his luck in finding another cosmos and planetoid after so brief a search.

Upon first setting up their stone well machines in this particular reach, he and Anzi had found the planetoid quickly, and watched until their eyes could stare no more. She slept now, but Bei could not.

They had not found the lords’ universe, the Heart. They had merely confirmed the conjecture that such a thing could exist, because the third realm did. Why not a fourth? A fifth? A fiftieth? Anzi had accepted such a possibility with ease, but Su Bei had grown old waiting to see miracles and perhaps wonder came easier to him, as light will be more noticed the darker the room. Already he was developing this realm’s geocosmic placement in relation to the Entire and in relation to the Rose. It was possible—likely, even?—that some of the realms—if there were yet more—existed without touching the Entire. It was possible—was it not?—that such and such a realm might touch the Entire, and the next realm would touch only a further realm, so there were links outside the All. . . . Yes, it was growing into a dumbfounding but unified complex of . . . bubbles.

He let his mind roam. It was elegant. It . . . It . . . but what name could be found for
It
, this supreme complex of realities? It was a boil of realms, a froth of worlds. Bei wanted a suitable term for It. For the sum total of everything.

The scene on the veil of worlds showed the roots of titanic trees waving in the air, perhaps taking sustenance from the soup of the atmosphere.

His mood darkened when he thought how the lords
used
the realms. For fuel. Was that not a heinous crime? What was a nurturing land for a particular civilization was nothing but a lump of dried dung to the Tarig. The engine at Ahnenhoon was beginning to eat at the Rose, or so Anzi had explained. Nor were other realms the only casualties. Bei had seen his own minoral destroyed, chewed up like some bale of goldweed destined for a beku’s trough. He grieved that loss, his home of eighty thousand days. He suspected it had not been destroyed to conserve fuel but to prevent intercourse with the Rose—in his mind, a greater sin. The lords had ended archons of scholarship and viewing of the Rose. If, that is, the rumors were true, and all the minorals of the Arm of Heaven were gone. If true—and he prayed it was not—then the days of viewing the Rose were ineluctably over.

Even the thought staggered.

Not only was scholarship of the Rose ended, but passage, too. The lords feared more assaults on Ahnenhoon. Moreover, they were no doubt determined that Titus Quinn not escape home. In that, they were wrong to worry.

Titus was here for the duration. He was here to sit bestride their passageway to the Heart. He was going to bar the routes to the lords’ renewal.

And it was up to Bei to point Titus in the right direction.