Foreigner (24 page)

And then she awoke, with a start, as her head banged against the lifeboat’s ceiling.

Banged against the ceiling…

Novato’s heart skipped a beat, and she scrunched her eyes tightly closed. She felt her whole body go rigid as she prepared to crash back to the floor. But that did not happen. Instead, her back touched the ceiling again, gently this time, like a piece of wood bobbing in a calm lake. She opened her eyes. At first she’d thought perhaps she’d been slammed against the roof by rapid deceleration, but in the light of the countless stars and eight visible moons she had no trouble making out the rungs of the tower’s ladder-like sides as they passed. They were going by at steady rate.

She was neither accelerating nor decelerating.

And yet she floated.

She wasn’t completely weightless. She was drifting slowly downward, and her equipment still sat stolidly on the floor. Still, she now weighed so little that her tossing as she slept had been enough to lift her off the floor and send her drifting toward the ceiling.

It was a giddy sensation. Her arms were spread like loosely folded wings, her legs were bent gently at the knees, and she could feel her tail swaying behind her.

She’d been aboard the lifeboat for almost nine days now. The world below looked like a giant ball, filling most of her field of vision. About two-thirds of it was illuminated; the other third was in the darkness of night. Breathtaking as that sight was, even more spectacular was what was slowly becoming visible
behind
the world. Orange and yellow light spilled past the edges of the illuminated disk, and already she could see a hint of the vast colored bands of cloud.

The Face of God. The planet around which the Quintaglio moon orbited.

The lifeboat continued upward. As the sight of the world with a single equatorial landmass diminished, more of the Face of God beyond became visible. Her world looked now like a vast blue-green pupil in the center of a yellow eye. As time went by, she could see the two superimposed spheres — the Face and the Quintaglio moon — waxing and waning through phases in unison. When they were both full, as they were at high noon, the glare from the ring-shaped Face behind was so intense that Novato had trouble looking at it without her inner eyelids involuntarily sliding shut.

It was spectacular. When seen from the deck of a pilgrimage ship, the sight of the Face, with its roiling bands of cloud, its infinitely complex array of swirls and vortices and colored whirlpools, its vast majestic grandeur, was enough to induce an almost hypnotic state in a Quintaglio. But to see her own world, with its cottony clouds, its shimmering blue waters, and the endlessly convoluted shoreline of Land, and at the same time to also see beyond it the glory of the Face of God — that was almost too much beauty, too much wonder, for the mind to grasp. Novato found herself transfixed, mesmerized. If she hadn’t already been floating on air, she would be now.

Emperor Dy-Dybo was lying on his dayslab in his ruling room, hearing the appeal of a young Quintaglio who had been accused of theft. He couldn’t deny the crime, of course: his muzzle would betray his lies. Still, he sought clemency on the basis that what he had taken — spikefrill horn cores from the palace butchery, items often used in Lubalite ceremonies — would simply have been thrown out anyway. Penalty for theft was to have one’s hands amputated. This fellow’s lawyer contended that such an act would be cruel punishment, for the youth apparently had a flaw that would prevent the hands from regenerating. As proof, he offered his client’s left foot, which had only two toes; the third had been lost kilodays ago and had never regrown.

The ruling room’s doors burst open and in ran an elderly female Dybo didn’t recognize. The imperial guards quickly stepped forward, interposing themselves between the emperor and the intruder; there was always the chance that someone mad with
dagamant
would get into the palace. The stranger was panting hard, but her torso was steady. She held up a hand, showing that her claws were sheathed, and caught her breath. Then: “Your Luminance, forgive me. I’m Pos-Doblan, keeper of the maritime rookery north of the city.”

“Yes?” said Dybo.

“A homing wingfinger has just arrived. I wouldn’t have interrupted you, but the message is urgent.” She held up a coil of leather. Dybo was recumbent on the slab, tail sticking up like a rubbery mast. He flicked it, and a guard moved forward, retrieved the leather strip, took it to Dybo, then backed off to a respectful distance. Dybo unwound the strip and read it quickly. “God protect us,” he said softly.

One of Dybo’s advisors rose from a katadu bench. “Dybo?” she said, the lapse into informality within the throne chamber betraying her concern.

Dybo’s tone was decisive. “You, page” — he never could remember names — “summon Afsan right away. And send word to Fra’toolar that Novato should return as soon as possible. I’m going to need my best thinkers.” He pushed off the dayslab and began to leave the chamber.

“Emperor,” called the lawyer for the youth. “What about my client?”

“No punishment,” snapped Dybo. “We’re going to need all the hands we can get.”

“I have a feeling we have not gone back far enough,” Mokleb said to Afsan. “What’s the earliest memory you have?”

Afsan scratched the loose folds of the dewlap hanging from his aeck. “I don’t know. I remember, well, let’s see … I remember my vocational exams.”

“Those would have been when you were ten or eleven. Surely you remember older things.”

“Oh, sure. There’s that time I got lost in the forest; I’ve mentioned that before. And, let’s see, I remember getting in trouble for biting off the finger of one of my creche mates when I was young.”

“Did you do it in anger?”

“No, we were just playing around. It was an accident, and the finger grew back, of course.”

“What else do you remember?”

“Learning to cut leather. Catching butterflies. Let’s see … I remember the first time during my life that Pack Carno picked up and moved itself along the shores of the Kreeb River. I remember — what else? — I remember all the commotion when some dignitary came to visit the Pack. I didn’t know who it was at the time, but I later learned that it was Dybo’s — ah, what would the term be? Dybo’s grandmother, the Empress Sar-Sardon.”

“You remember an imperial visit to Carno?”

“Vaguely, yes. They took us youngsters down to the Kreeb and washed us off so we’d look clean for her. I remember it because it was the first time they’d actually let us near the river; they were always afraid the current would sweep us away.”

“What else?”

“Learning to play
lastoontal
. God, what a boring process that was: walking up to the game board to make my move, then backing off so the other player could come up and make his or her move.”

“Anything else?”

“Oh, many things, I suppose, but they all seem trivial. A great thunderstorm. The first time I experienced a landquake. Finding a dead wingfinger.”

“A wingfinger? Was it purple?’’

“No, it was white with pale orange stripes. A banded swift, I think.”

“What else?”

“Learning to read; memorizing endless series of glyphs and the words associated with them.”

“And do you remember which of these things came first?”

“It’s hard to say. They’re jumbled together in my mind.”

“What about anything that disturbed you, or frightened you, when you were a child?”

“Well, I mentioned the landquake: that scared me. Of course, one gets used to them. And I was quite frightened when I was lost in the forest. But no, nothing really shocking, if that’s what you’re looking for.”

“Yes,” said Mokleb. “That’s
exactly
what I’m looking for.”

Finally, it was about to happen: the moment Novato had been waiting for and dreading. The four blue sides of the ladder were no longer simply fading into nothingness. Instead, she could see where they ended. Far, far above, she could see the actual summit of the tower. Novato’s claws hung half out of their sheaths, and her tail, floating in the air behind her, twitched left and right.

She thought of
Rewdan and the Vine
.

A giant blackdeath.

A wingfinger that laid eggs of gold.

Which would it be?

The four sides of the tower flared into a vast blue bulb at the top. Long panels were extended from the sides of the bulb, panels so dark as to be visible only because they blocked the stars behind them. The whole thing looked like some deathly daisy with black petals and a blue, impossibly long stem.

The lifeboat began to slow, preparing to stop at the summit. Novato drifted toward the roof.

Any moment now.

The lifeboat slid up, farther and farther, past the bottom of the bottom into the cavernous interior. It jerked slightly as it came to rest.

Novato was breathing rapidly. It took a while to absorb what she was seeing through the transparent walls: a vast chamber with a myriad of levels, all constructed of the blue material.

She steeled her courage as the lifeboat’s interior walls fogged over. Then the door appeared. The successful return of the test lizards notwithstanding, she’d been terrified that there’d be no air inside the chamber up here. But everything seemed fine. She gave a gentle kick off the lifeboat’s rear wall and floated out the door.

Ten days had elapsed since she’d first entered the lifeboat. If she was right about its speed — one hundred and thirty kilopaces per daytenth — then she was now some thirteen thousand kilopaces above the surface of her world. Here at last she felt no tendency to drift downward at all; she was completely weightless, the centrifugal and gravitational forces in perfect balance.

She floated along, kicking gently off walls to keep herself moving. At last she entered a massive cubic chamber.

Her heart pounded.

There were nine windows on one wall arranged in three rows of three. Thick black lines connected the eight outlying windows to the one in the center.

Novato tried to take it all in, but couldn’t. For a time, she simply floated there, numb, the bright colors in the windows hypnotic but devoid of content. Slowly, though, her mind began to make at least a small amount of sense out of what she was seeing.

Somehow, each window was looking out on a different scene. As if that weren’t strange enough, the scene each window was showing changed every forty beats or so. Some of the scenes at least were partially comprehensible — why, that one showed a grassy plain and cloudy sky, and this one showed water lapping against a shore, and surely those things in that window over there were buildings of some sort. But the views through other windows were so strange, Novato could make nothing of them.

Each window was numbered in its upper left corner using the six numerals of the ark-makers. But they weren’t numbered one through nine. Rather, the one in the center had the simple horizontal line the ark-makers used for zero, and the other windows had numbers that changed each time the view through them changed.

She scanned the nine windows, looking for something — anything — she recognized.

And suddenly she found just that: something familiar in the maelstrom of confusion.

Emperor Dybo.

Yes, the right-hand window in the bottom row was looking in on Dybo’s ruling room. The number in the window’s upper left was 27.

Except…

There was no window in the ruling room at that point; indeed, were were no windows in the ruling room at all.

And yet here was a view of that room from above, as if standing on a ladder, looking down on Dybo, who was lying on the marble throne slab. To his left and right were the
katadu
benches for imperprial advisors. Three elderly Quintaglios were sitting on these.

Dybo had a long strip of leather in his hands that appeared to have writing on it. The Emperor looked worried.

Still — Dybo! How good to see him again! But how was this window here, on the top of the space tower, able to look into Dybo’s ruling room? What magic made this possible?

She stared through the window, trying to make out details. And suddenly she realized that these glass-covered squares were not windows. If they had been windows, the view would shift as she moved her head left and right, but that did not happen. Also, Dybo was in sharp focus, but the background was not. The tapestries on the rear wall were simply a blur. If she’d been looking through a real window, she could have focused on whatever she wanted. An

optical process was at work, then, as though — as though she were looking through the eyepiece of a far-seer, perhaps. A far-seer that could see through walls.

And then her heart soared as someone else walked into the picture.

Afsan.

God, it was wonderful to see him again. Novato found herself calling out his name, but he didn’t turn, didn’t react. Dybo was shaking with great agitation, but Novato couldn’t hear the words. And then…

The view in the window changed. Novato scanned all nine squares, hoping to find Afsan again, but each of them was showed something unfamiliar.

Her mind was reeling. The cascade of images was incredible, hypnotic. It was all so much to absorb. She decided to concentrate on just one window. She choose the bottom right, the same one that had shown Dybo’s ruling room.

But what she was seeing now through that window was nothing at all like Capital City. Nothing at all, in fact, like any part of her world.

There were no familiar objects in the picture — nothing to give any sense of scale. Still, Novato eventually realized she was seeing a portion of a city. But what a bizarre city! Everything seemed to be made of one continuous piece of material, as if the whole thing had been … been
grown
all at once. The material was pinkish-tan and pockmarked, reminding Novato of the coral reefs she’d seen off Boodskar. But this was no random atoll; if it was coral, it had somehow been made to grow in a specific pattern. At regular intervals, dome-like buildings rose out of the gently undulating surface — they were clearly buildings, for they had windows arranged in neat rows and wide openings for doors. Elsewhere, ornate spires stretched toward the sky, and in some places deep circular pits were sunk into the material, their interior walls also lined with windows. There were no seams anywhere, no dividing lines between where one part ended and another began.