The Thrones of Kronos (59 page)

When he felt that tremble underfoot, he held his breath and
leaned forward.

“Now it begins,” he repeated, this time in a whisper.

In the crew’s quarters, Anaris felt the Rifters’ attention
as an almost physical pressure.

He could not tell if this was actual perception, mediated by
the tempath, or merely his awareness of their suspicion. He studied Ivard, who
surprised him by smiling back, radiating confidence, with no trace of fear.

The other Rifter, Lokri, returned his look unflinching out
of startling pale gray eyes as he leaned with insolent grace against the back
of Ivard’s chair, his fingers possessive. But Anaris sensed his unease.

In the Throne Room, Vi’ya tensed herself against the steep
incline and closed her eyes, raised her hands, and brought them down on the
Heart.

For a moment there was nothing. Her fingers dwelt on its
infinitely smooth surface, its affectless lack of temperature, neither cold nor
warm. Then, in the depths that opened before her inner vision, something
stirred, a presence so vast it shrank her instantly to a sharp, buzzing,
dimensionless point of quiddity, drowning her identity in the approach of something
beyond personality.

If it touched her, she would die.

NOT YET!

The thought exploded from her, and to her surprise and
infinite relief, the presence subsided, leaving behind only a sense of welcome,
of question, of a vibration, deep and slow, like the memory of an organ tone in
the cathedral on Desrien, like the restless rippling of a rock-ringed pool,
green-glass bottomless and cold.

Now freed, her consciousness expanded through the station,
strengthened by that diapason of presence. Wave upon wave of synesthesia
assaulted her, until Ivard’s bright glow established a beacon of identity—and
purpose—and a complex yet infinitely clear knot of threaded fire materialized
in her hands-not-hands, quivering with meaning that connected it to every
member of the Unity and her crew, save one, and every part of the vast
construct around her, except the deep pool where she dared not go.

The station trembled again. In the crew’s quarters, Ivard
closed his eyes, and Lokri shifted from leaning to a strong stance. Anaris shut
out the shiftings and breathing behind him as he made an effort to reach for
them inside his thoughts. This was supposed to be a unity, not a collection of
people whose distrust was apparent.

A unity centered on Vi’ya. Her name fired the intensity of
memory. He had to make an effort to dismiss that.
Is this why she insisted I participate from here, instead of joining
her in the Throne Room?

He had offered to accompany her there, now that he could
control his TK. He’d thought it a good idea to attend a session, since all
along he’d required Barrodagh to report the scheduling of the attempts. But
Vi’ya had been emphatic: there was to be no alteration in the accustomed
procedure.

Despite the danger, Anaris was pleased by the notion that
his physical presence would be so distracting for Vi’ya that she might not be
able to encompass him and the Suneater at the same time.
It creates a promising balance between us.

The floor jolted. He still sensed nothing. The redhead slipped
into a trance state, his head falling back against the rakish Rifter’s body. A
long, lean hand brushed Ivard’s hair out of his eyes with a tender gesture.

Ivard had sunk into the safety of the blue fire deep within
him. He felt Lokri’s strong hands holding him, the enfolding presence of the
Kelly, the bright, darting glitter of the Eya’a, the steady flame of Vi’ya’s
mind.

Sensation flooded into him as she touched the Heart of
Kronos, weight upon weight of color and scent and touch and impulses for which
he had no name, nor his nervous system any referents. He felt her flinch,
thrusting away some perception that he could not grasp, and then the
synesthetic clamor coalesced into a spinning blur. He reached out with his
hands-no-hands and touched it, provoking an explosion of rays of crystalline
light, some piercing him with sweet thrills of pleasure, others drilling him
through with tremulous pain to which he opened himself, passing them along to be
reified by the alien experience of the Kelly and the Eya’a.

Gathering the Unity around him, Ivard spun a web of meaning
from the flood of impressions beating on their minds, bringing it into
synchrony with the demands of their bodies. He reached further, identifying and
celebrating each of his fellow crew members, then wedding them, too, to the
web. With them, borne on Sedry’s calm wisdom, came another; Ivard smiled and
wove Tat in as well.

Regret diffused icy cold through the web as he reached one
last time for the missing one and was refused. The web was still incomplete. A
bright core of raw perception unmediated by conceptual intelligence presented
itself to him, as from outside the limitations of flesh he was peripherally
aware of a familiar ratcheting purr. Its quicksilver emotions, predatory
without guilt, filled the lack and brought with it a selfless loyalty the lost
one never could have offered. Lucifur!

He shifted threads about and rewove them into completeness.

Then the chair creaked under Anaris, and Lokri’s startled
silver gaze lifted in mute question. Anaris heard someone draw a quick breath
as he felt gravity release him. He tried to relax. Then, slowly, awareness of
the station began to pervade him. He was dizzy, almost nauseated, as his kinesthetic
sense expanded into his surroundings. Gradually his sense of bodily identity
expanded, yet did not rarefy as the substance of the Urian artifact seemed to
meld with his body. Disoriented by the dissonance between what his vision told
him and what his body signaled, he closed his eyes. Now he experienced his
surroundings exactly as he did his own body, with the same immediacy and
imprecision.

The station twitched again, more violently, and Anaris
experienced it as a ripple in his own flesh. Frowning, he tensed and applied a
counter-pressure, damping the movement. Then another jolt ripped through him,
and another. The door to the chamber squelched open, echoed by sucking noises
from the walls. Pain exploded in him as malevolence blossomed in his flesh.

Such must cancer feel
like,
he thought, and fought back. If he was a part of this Unity, why
could he not sense the others? Pain swamped conscious thought, and time became
naught but an equation of agony and the rage that sustained him against it.

The moment he centered the sensitive and infinitively
responsive web around Vi’ya, darkness erupted around it, bringing a tidal
seiche of torment that surged higher with inexorable intensity. Ivard cried
out, reached for the Kelly, who spun away until only the flame remained,
shining steadfast against the looming, hungering dark.

Lucifur yowled.

Ivard almost lost his place in the web, but steadied himself
against the hands upon his shoulders, the pulse beating strongly behind the
flesh where his head rested. Strengthened by that human contact, now nameless
but remembered deeply in sensation and past experience, he reached again for
the flame.

Vi’ya took the knot, teasing out the thread linking them to
Anaris, bringing in his strength but letting no communication flow back along
the path. The station seemed to fit itself around the Unity like its own body,
a body with many minds and but one will.

Vi’ya’s inner eye took one last look at the pool, dangerous
and beckoning, holding answers she had never thought to ask. But even as she
did so, darkness stained it, spreading swiftly, blotting out and absorbing the
vibration and the green-glass peace. She cried out, clutching at the knot that communicated
anguish to every part of her. She heard the chatter of the Eya’a, saw the
blue-fire flicker of the Kelly, and across a great distance, groped for the
solid strength of Anaris, who, locked in the Unity’s pain, made it all
unknowing his own.

She reached for the others, regaining strength by regaining
identity. She melded their strengths into the Unity: flashing pride and
newfound love from Lokri; rock-steady, grim determination from Montrose; sorrow
and loyalty and generous power from Jaim; even the wordless, savage innocence
of Lucifur—and then, surprising her, an echo of the green-glass peace from
Sedry, and a calmness she could not understand. The harmonics resolved into
music as a new presence made itself known: female, warm, welcoming closeness,
replacing the one who had refused the Unity.

But still the darkness expanded, towering in negation of
life and love. She threw the Unity against the malevolence as she reached
toward that strange echo of the power at the heart of the Suneater—and thence
toward Sedry, the Unity’s link to the human artifacts that controlled the substance
of the station.

Now!

o0o

It took Tat longer than usual to orient herself. Vast
obelisks of data rose all around her, echoing the arrays in the lab around her
body that she no longer sensed. A shimmering construct of gem-like rays darted
before her: Sedry. She followed her along a twisting path that changed before
and after them.

She found herself in a vast open space, megaliths of data
all around her, as if cradling a site for rituals of power. Light blossomed
before her, painfully bright. Throwing up a sieve of gloom to save her virtual
vision, she saw a bird of flame, glittering and powerful, perched upon a nest
of writhing sticks and threads. The scent of costly spices tickled her nose.
She rarely experienced smell in dataspace; this was a powerful construct.

The bird’s gaze shot filaments of light that pinned her
against a megalith. The Sedry-gem interposed itself, spun a cloak of darkness
out, behind which Tat sensed an interchange of data not meant for her to know.
The cloak spun back into the gem, and the bird rose up, its wings spanning the
vast monument around them, shadowing them as it hovered. Under it a path
appeared.

“Go,” Sedry said, the words appearing as geometric sparks.
“My place is here. A place of power awaits you.”

Tat darted forward, space melting around her, and she stood
at the center of a rayed mandala extending in all directions across a limitless
plain lit sourcelessly by a light whose color she could not name. The rays were
narrow; raised from the surface; they moved under her feet, as though she stood
on the keys of a vast, circular clavisynth.

All around she felt presences: the
Telvarna
Rifters, and Anaris, a Kelly trinity, the strange little
aliens she never saw but with Vi’ya, even the big cat. They loomed vast on the
horizon, watching, waiting, beseeching. She existed someplace far more potent
than mere dataspace, and she began to dance.

First slowly, stiffly, her feet sticking as if in mud.
Gradually she found the measures and the rhythms of the dance, spinning,
pirouetting, now on her toes, one ray at a time, now flat-footed in chords
increasingly harmonious.

Then the light failed. Black clouds boiled up from all
around. Discord struck at her, painful, disorienting, but still she danced,
stumbling through the rhythms in loyalty to the watchers all around that she
could no longer see.

In darkness absolute, with knives piercing the soles of her
feet, Tat whirled and leaped and stepped.

As Sedry confronted the Phoenix, horrified by her
recognition of what it was, exultant in what that meant to her Rifter comrades
and their plans, she perceived that she had crossed into someplace that bore
the same relationship to dataspace as a sphere to a circle, a tesseract to a
cube.

Higher up and farther
in.
Had she heard those words in childhood, or merely thought them? But
then, as the Unity reached for her, fitting her into a transcendence that for
the first time made sense of a doctrine she’d always parroted but never
understood, the selfsame view of Telos that the Kelly found so natural, she
heard the voice of the Phoenix.

“Do you fear me, Sedry Thetris?”

“You should not exist,” she replied.

Humor burst from the construct, which she perceived as an
exaltation of iridescent bubbles, conjuring up a memory of a long-ago childhood
day, chasing the summer-scented effervescence of a bubble tree.

“Think of it as Original Sin.”

The comment disturbed her deeply. Did this entity, however
it had come to be, suffer that same conflicted knowledge?

“Who are you?” There, she’d said it—acknowledged its sentience.

“Both the greatfather of an Arkad and his child. But there
is no time to discuss my identity, even here. What would you have of me? I will
give it to you, if I can, but my goals are not your goals.”

Sedry brought her hands together and opened them in a
sweeping movement. Images fountained forth, swifter than discourse.

“I have sensed it,” the Phoenix replied. “But it is now too
strong, and still growing. There is more, is there not?”

Again Sedry gestured.

“Ah.” She felt its satisfaction as a wash of warmth. Behind
her, around her, thunder grumbled, echoing from the megaliths. The light of the
Phoenix’ pyre pulled in closer; wings of shadow enwrapped them, towering.

“I will summon my greatson, then.”

The Phoenix dipped its head into the flaming nest, bringing
forth a red gem. Stretching forth its long neck out of the fire, it touched the
gem to her lips, which burned with sweet anguish.

“As for Norio, speak then, as you will.”

Its wings swept down, scattering the pyre in a shower of
embers as it shot up, dwindling swiftly to a spark in the dimensionless sky
above. Around her, the megaliths began to crumble. Obscenities whispered in the
darkness, glorying in destruction and the death of hope. Far off, a web of
light hovered, like the afterglow of a sunset.

No! Sun
rise
.

Where the pyre had been, a pool glimmered, a soft light
shining up from it, glass- clear. The shadows could not touch it. Sedry advanced
to peer down into it, and glimpsed her reflection, strangely young. Then it
rippled, clearing to a view of the black hole and its accretion disk, but she
saw it now with different eyes. Not awesome strangeness, but the homely warmth
of a hearth, and an echo, of an earlier, far vaster conflagration. Birth,
escape, longing.