City Without End (51 page)

With calls in to the senior staff, Ned took a closer look at the readings and waited for the quantum gravity folks, the ones whose research grants paid the lion’s share of SMGT, to descend.

In most respects the reading had the properties of a gravitational wave. It did not, for example, register in the electromagnetic spectrum. Quite a lot was known about gravitational waves, and thus it was easy to spot a bogey like this. It had been a major breakthrough in physics when gravitational waves had been directly measured for the first time in the mid-twenty-first century. Since that time, gravitational astronomy had become a major field. So unless it was a malfunction of some kind, it was a bogey, and he was quite interested to know what could have caused it.

His fingers were sweating on the keyboard as he ran a few analyses of the problematic data. Could the source be close by? Nobel Prize kept tickling the back of Ned’s mind.

But that prize was likely going to the lucky devils studying the star extinctions. Incredibly, Sirius was the latest disappearance. It had vanished without a whimper—no outburst of stellar material, no fluorescing gases— and its extinction had been confirmed on observatories throughout inhabited space. The astronomical community had been calling them
occlusions
. But the public and the newsTides were calling the phenomenon
lights out
.

Sometime later, when Ned was rather far back in the circle now crowding around the mSap control board, they found themselves with quite another issue, causing—incredibly—the complete sidelining of the question of
source
.

The sapient engineer had detected very small waves riding on the gravitational wave. In other words, there was information hitching a ride. The wave had an embedded signal.

Hearing this, the group of astronomers and quantum physicists generated a silence that spread out in its own stupefying wave. If this was an extraterrestrial message . . . but Ned was getting way ahead of things. Then again, what else could it be, but an advanced communication method, a method not even contemplated by those searching fruitlessly for messages from galactic civilizations?

“Try to decrypt?” Program Manager Laurel Friedman said, her voice showing the steadiness that Ned was fairly sure he couldn’t have mustered.

The quantum engineer nodded, leaning in to the keyboard.

It took him longer to type in the command than it took the mSap to unlock the code. Sitting back and staring at the screen, he said, “You’re not going to believe this.”

The signal was in English.

From the dark to the bright.

With the message on the screen still lit up in his mind, Booth Waller furiously drove his all-terrain rig off road, sending up clouds of dust. The quickest way between the detector facility and the transition camp was straight across the flat scrub-steppe. This was a message he’d deliver in person.

From the dark to the bright.

The fact that Booth happened to be present at the detector module when the signal came in was nothing short of miraculous. Now he drove like a madman, windows open, the sage wind hurtling through the car, the last of the sun beating on his elbow outside the cab. It felt like the last ride he would ever take. Likely it
was
the last ride. The transform was just a few days away. He pushed that thought aside. There were too many last times to endure; it would make you crazy.

He would never forget the image on the screen: six innocuous typed words carrying the freight of a permission to launch. A full year in development and assembly, their small-sized detector was viciously accurate and cooled to a few microkelvins above absolute zero. It was enormously expensive to run. They’d spent half the combined resources of renaissance to run the thing in the last few months.

It was a phenomenal success. The message had come through just as Helice and her crew had originally predicted: by gravitational wave. The Tarig wouldn’t use radio waves to reach Earth; the brane interface would form an impervious barrier. Helice was counting on gravitational waves, and she had been right. Even more critically, she’d secured their right to cross over, or demanded it.
From the dark to the bright.
The exact words contained another message, previously agreed upon:
Expect difficulties with the Tarig; bring no
weapons.
It gave him some pause about what they would face when they got there. But, come over, Helice said.

What must the rest of quantum gravity research be making of this message? They’d be picking it up in Japan, Italy, Sudbury, Hanover. . . . It didn’t matter that there was no way to keep others from reading renaissance’s private communication; at first they’d be astonished; by the time they’d finished conferencing about it, it would be too late. Damn shame though. Those who were even now puzzling over messages riding gravitational waves were the very people who should be going along.

Booth shook that thought. Only a small number could go—the minimum likely to carry a sufficiently varied gene pool. Tarig paranoia would prevent a much larger group from migrating in. A damn waste.

As he came to a halt in front of the reactor building, the cloud of dust he’d stirred from the sage flats caught up with him, and he stepped into its sun-fired presence, squinting at the obscured surroundings as though he were already fading from the Earth. A few people were waiting for him, no doubt having seen his trail as he came barreling over the desert.

Peter DeFanti was foremost among them, but others were hurrying to join the small knot that converged on Booth’s ATV.

Booth caught DeFanti’s sharp gaze and nodded. “It’s started.”

“Holy shit,” someone said.

“Yes,” Booth murmured. That about summed it up.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

To begin anew, destroy the old.

—Si Rong the Wise

I
N LORD NEHOOV’S COOKING ROOM, WENG WAS NERVOUS
. These were uneasy days in the Bright City, with Tarig gathering in the streets and outlaws captured. But today was worse. She had never accustomed herself to the silences of the mansion with its changing rooms and reconfigured paths, all empty, or nearly so. Once lost in a Tarig lord’s habitation, one could not count on meeting another servant to show the way. The lords preferred solitude and favored mechanicals to perform needful tasks.

Lord Nehoov, however, was particular about his food, and he liked Weng’s cooking.

For this reason he had graciously created special path lights for her to follow down the halls to the cooking room and to his dining platform. She need never worry about getting lost, no matter how many times the mansion altered itself.

In the midst of scraping plates, she heard a sound nearby. She stopped and looked behind her. It had been a definite thunk. A normal-enough sound among normal sentients—but she was in the house of a lord. Still, it did not repeat. Her hands, for some reason, were sweating.

Something was wrong in the city; everyone felt it. It would have been best for her not to go abroad in Shadow Ebb, but Tarig must eat twice a day, and evenly spaced meals were their preference. She would just serve the lord’s after-dinner skeel and leave, letting the mechanicals clean up after the last course.

The noise again.

Wiping her hands on her apron, she walked to the end of the chopping table and peered into the corridor behind the cold boxes that held Tarig delicacies.

A shadow moved behind the last box. Or had the lights dimmed for a moment? Weng saw nothing further. But she followed the line of cold cabinets down to the very end and swung around to face that part of the cooking room she’d just been working in. Empty.

“Bright Lord?” she called.

He never came into her cooking room. Perhaps what she had glimpsed was a mechanical, although they were small and could not have cast a shadow as large as she had seen. Or thought she’d seen. Sighing, she went back to her station, resolving to leave quickly this ebb.

Placing the decanter on a tray along with a filigreed cup, she gathered her self-possession and carried the heavy tray toward the dining room.

Halfway down the connecting hall—and following the light path, showing faintly but clearly in a mansion already light-filled—she considered how it might have been well had she put two cups on her tray, in case Lord Nehoov had company. But she would be late if she turned back to the cooking room, and the lord expected things on time.

The lords had little use for doors. Often, when they wished for an opening, they ordered one. Thus, when she came to her accustomed access to the dining area, she was only mildly surprised to find it gone. It was a long walk around to come in from the far end of the dining hall, a passage usually left open.

Arriving, she turned into the room. Lord Nehoov was alone. However, there appeared to be a broken container on the table. It had leaked. Crumpling her face in worry, Weng approached the table. As she did so, Lord Nehoov slowly fell forward. His forehead crashed horribly into the table, and he sat immobile in that impossible position. Weng rushed forward, skewing the tray, losing the decanter in a crash onto the floor, followed by the cup. She still held one end of the tray as she stared at the lord, bleeding robustly from the neck. “My lord, wake up!” she whispered. He must sit up and heal himself, he must . . . “Bright Lord, please!”

He was a Tarig. One of the Five. He could not be struck down, could not be hurt. A Tarig lord, oh, a Tarig lord.

He didn’t move, his proud, giant form bent over at the waist, and his neck bleeding onto the tablecloth as it hung over . . .

Weng opened her mouth to scream. Even in this extremity she hesitated to scream in front of a Tarig. But scream she did, a wail that frightened even her. She called out, “Help! Oh Woeful God! Help!”

But who was there to hear? None except the murderer. Weng spun around, searching the room. As she looked toward the doorway that had disappeared, she saw that it wasn’t a solid wall after all. It was open again. She glimpsed a swath of fabric that glinted before disappearing down the hall.

She looked back at Lord Nehoov. The table, set so formally a few minutes before, was now smashed, with a gout of blood darkening the white tablecloth.

Weng put the table between herself and the door. She screamed again, unable to contain herself. She still held the tray. Bringing it to her breast, she held it over her vitals like armor. Something had hurt the lord, woefully hurt him.

Lord Nehoov had not moved. He would never move again. Oh Frowning God, Lord Nehoov was dead.