The Spacetime Pool (12 page)

A shout came from the
courtyard, and her pulse leapt. Another shout—and with relief, she realized one
of the monks was telling the other to hurry up.

The cart jolted into
motion. She held her breath, though she knew, logically, they couldn’t hear her
through piles of rugs. A different voice called out, and the cart stopped while
conversation trickled into her hiding place. Did Maximillian know she was gone?
Let it be something else.
Anything. Maybe a sentry had to check their
identification.

The rickety cart
started again. Its wheels creaked, planks groaned, and the rugs whispered
against each other.

After a while, she
breathed more easily. She parted the rugs a bit, to make a spy-hole. They were
rolling through the encamped army. It seemed to go on forever, soldiers
everywhere, with biaquines, oxen, supplies, and the many helpers who tended to
the needs of a military force. Gradually the sea of people thinned out. She
couldn’t see much through the hole, only that they were headed toward the
mountains.

Janelle lay still,
wrestling with her thoughts. She felt as if she were part of a jigsaw puzzle. A
prophecy pulled a mathematician from one universe to another; a gate relied on
an abstract concept somehow turned into reality; a fabulous hall was named
after a mathematician. Dominick understood abstruse theoretical concepts with
little background, and his twin also had an unusual knowledge of math.
Why?
She could see the pieces, but not the overall picture.

Her stomach growled,
a reminder she had eaten nothing since last night, when Maximillian shared his
trail rations. Taking care to be quiet, she checked the goods crammed tight
around her, several sacks and a crate. The sacks held grain. It tasted awful,
and she disliked taking supplies from monks, but she liked the prospect of
starving even less.

Then she hit gold.
Or, more accurately, wine; the crate held ten bottles. It took a while to dig
out the cork in one, but she managed. She drank in gulps, soothing her parched
throat. By the time she finished half the bottle, she felt amazingly content.
She had escaped Max the Nightmare, and she could almost forget she had no
refuge.

The pain in her
wrists was harder to ignore, and she feared the lacerations would become
infected. Then it hit her: she had an antiseptic. Shifting her weight, she
poured wine over the cuts. It stung like the blazes, but she was so tipsy it
dulled the pain. She opened a second bottle as a reward for her efforts, and
soon after she started it, she fell asleep.

* * * *

Fire licked her
wrists. Flames, heat, burning, burning,
burning...
”

Janelle opened her
eyes, passing from sleep to waking without the usual moment of pleasant
nothing. The agony in her wrists made that impossible. Tears wet her cheeks.
Her spy-hole revealed that night folded over the land with only a flickering
glow to light the way, probably from a lamp near the driver.

With clumsy hands,
she cleaned the cuts on her wrists again. Then she ripped strips of cloth off
one of the sacks and bandaged her wounds as well as she could manage. She drank
more wine to ease the pain. Eventually she dozed, floating in a sea of flame.

Birdsong woke her.
Bleary-eyed and hung-over, she peered through her hole and saw dawn lightening
the world. The pain had receded, and she dozed more easily this time. Around
noon, she roused enough to change her bandages. Dried blood caked the cloth,
but the scabs were clean, without infection.

Sometime in the
afternoon, the cart rattled up to a building of dark red stone that could be
the monastery. Square towers rose at its corners. Voices rumbled nearby, and
she glimpsed two men walking from the cart to the building.

With caution, she
widened her spy-hole. The cart stood in a yard paved with stones and mud.
Mountains rose behind the building, sharp in the sky, rough-hewn sentinels not
yet softened by erosion. Moving stiffly from her cramped sleep, she squeezed out
of the cart and eased down by its large wheel. Her head swam, but even as she
sagged against the side, voices came from the left side of the building.

She took off in a
limping run, and dodged onto a narrow path between the right wall of the
monastery and a muddy hillside. Her vision blurred, but she kept going, holding
her bells against her body and praying no one heard the infernal clinking of
those she couldn’t reach.

Janelle wasn’t sure
what to do. She could ask for sanctuary, but she questioned whether anyone
would honor that request. She doubted they wanted to provoke Maximillian,
particularly in the matter of this odious prophecy.

She came out behind
the monastery. The roughly mortared wall in the back had two entrances, each a
wooden door with iron braces. The first opened on a storeroom stacked with
crates, which didn’t bode well if the monks were about to unload the cart. She
went back outside and ran to the second door. It opened into a foyer, with a
staircase to the right. After easing the door closed, she limped up the stairs.
At the landing, they turned right, and sunlight slanted through a round window
high on the outer wall. She looked out onto a walled quadrangle in the center
of the building, a yard open to the sky. The three men crossing it didn’t fit
her image of monks; instead of robes, they wore trousers, work boots, and
simple shirts.

She continued up to
another landing, this one with a door. When she leaned against the portal, she
heard nothing. She edged it open, and a long hall stretched before her. She
limped to the first door and listened; voices rumbled in the room beyond. At
the next one, silence greeted her. Holding her breath, she opened the door.

A library. An
empty
library.

Janelle slipped
inside and locked the door with a large key she found on a hook inside. Then
she took stock of her refuge. A table occupied the center of the room, old and
exquisitely carved with vines. But what compelled her were the
books.
They filled shelves on every wall. The only open space was a panel across the
room, where a cushioned banquette stood below a window. She hurried to the
window and looked out. The quadrangle lay below, empty now except for vegetable
plots and apple trees.

With a sigh, she sank
onto the bench. The worn look of this place suggested either the monks had
forgone material wealth or else they had poor support. She fingered the coins
on her girdle. Would it backfire if she offered them payment to send for Dominick?
With all the gems and precious metals she was wearing, she might have some
bargaining power. Then again, Maximillian would probably reward anyone who
returned his wife, and she doubted her bangles had much value compared to his
wealth. Nor were her jewels likely to tempt people if they feared helping her
would earn them the type of punishment the emperor had threatened her with in
the tower.

Janelle raked her
hand through her hair. She needed to know more about this world. She went to a
shelf and pulled out a book at random. The text had an odd title:
Elektron
Motion: Antique Editions, Monografs of Rekord. Elektronik form: Alhambra
Graphiks.

The date was 1546
a.d.

She squinted at the
cover. If dates were the same here as in her world, this book was centuries
old. Elektronik form? From
1546 a.d.?
The title implied it was a
collector’s monograph, an “antique” created from an electronic publication.
Given everything she had seen, that level of technology five hundred years ago
made as much sense as cave men with cell phones.

Then again, these
people could step between universes.

She flipped through
the book. A preserving finish protected its pages. Reading wasn’t as difficult
as she expected, despite the odd spellings; physics was physics regardless of
language. The first chapter dealt with electronics and the second with an
electron gas. A chapter on electrochemistry followed, then one on quantized
energy levels of an atom. Unlike texts in her world, which treated the topics
as different subjects, here they were lumped into one text on “elektron motion.”

She replaced the book
and took another. Even older than the last, from 1489 a.d., it discussed heat
flow. Although the models differed from those in her world, they gave the same
results: heat came from molecular motion and was a form of energy.

Eager now, she pulled
out a fat tome titled
Dynamical Analysis.
The first half focused on her
specialty, differential equations, and the rest applied their solutions to
problems in classical motion and semi-classical models of molecular behavior.
Other books followed the same form, opening with chapters on theory, followed
by applications. A book on genetics described how biaquines had been
bioengineered from horses for strength, speed, and the ability to fight.

Then she found a
treatise on tensor analysis.

By themselves,
tensors were just arrays of numbers. Nothing unusual. But they appeared
extensively in certain sciences, including general relativity. Einstein’s
bailiwick. Einstein had believed it was impossible to travel faster than light,
a result that would limit the ability of humans to leave the solar system. This
theory closely resembled his work, with one difference—its author assumed
faster-than-light travel existed. A chill ran through Janelle. This read like a
historical text, one written
after
the advent of such travel.

She began a
methodical search then. And she found what she sought. Titled, simply,
Advanced
Formulations,
it covered wormholes, space warps, and complex speeds that
circumvented the singularity at light speed. One chapter presented resolutions
to the paradoxes for superluminal travel, including a discussion of alternate
spaces and times. It proposed a “Riemann screen” that could offer views of those
other continuums. Then she understood; the “Jade Pool” of the prophecy was a
viewing portal into alternate universes.

The final chapter
detailed the design of a starship drive.

Janelle sat at the
table, surrounded by books, too stunned to read any more. If this record was
accurate, these people had achieved interstellar travel
five centuries ago.
What the blazes had happened since then?

Footsteps sounded
outside.

Janelle froze. A door
opened nearby, then closed. She glanced around quickly, but saw nowhere to
hide. As the doorknob to the library turned, she jumped to her feet, and her
clothes jangled.

The footsteps
receded.

Janelle went to the
door and leaned against it, straining to hear what was happening outside.

More footsteps.

She backed up until
the table stopped her retreat. A key clinked in the lock.
No.
To have
come this far, to have made this incredible discovery, only to be caught—
no,
not now.

The door opened.

* * * *

VII

Prophesier

A slender man stood
in the archway. Wrinkles surrounded his eyes, and he wore his gray hair long,
in a queue. His clothes were simple, brown trousers and an unadorned gray
shirt. For a long moment he stared at Janelle. Then he stepped inside and
closed the door.

“This is an odd place
for a bride,” he said.

She folded her arms
over her skimpy clothing. “I need to contact my husband.”

“I’ve seen that
girdle,” he said coldly. “The emperor’s aunt wore it at her wedding. So will
the bride of the emperor’s brother.”

“Yes, I’m Prince
Dominick-Michael’s wife.” In truth, she had no idea who she was married to, but
she wasn’t about to tell him that. “I need to send him a message.”

He spoke dryly. “My
apology if this is too blunt—but why are you in a monastery, alone, on your
wedding day?”

“It’s not my wedding
day.”

“Why else would you
dress that way?”

“The wedding already
took place.”