I will take guidance.
The central stairway winding up the tower was too cramped for an entourage, so it was Mattuel who performed the honour of carrying his father to the top, accompanied by the Pythia herself. Honalee carried her grandmother, while the rest of the family surrounded the base of the tower.
‘Dear Lady, I haven’t been up here since the day Finitan was guided,’ Edeard said as they neared the top.
‘Yes, Father.’
‘You know, this is the same tower which Owain’s thugs pushed me off.’
‘I know, Father.’
Edeard smiled softly to himself as they rounded the last curve and went out into the bright sunshine. Eight tall spires guarded the edges, their tips bent inwards slightly. As always, the wind was a lot stronger on the open platform than it was down on the ground. It whistled faintly as it blew around the spires.
A gaggle of Novices and Mothers were clustered round the entrance to the stairs, each of them openly anxious to see the Waterwalker as he was settled on to a pile of comfortable cushions. They had escorted the others who sought guidance, of which there were fifty on the platform. Most of them resting on similar cushions, though a few were stubbornly insisting on standing to face the Skylord’s arrival.
‘About time you turned up,’ Macsen said.
Edeard tipped two fingers to his old friend. Even as he did he wondered how on Querencia the Mothers and Novices had ever got the enormous Master of Sampalok up the tight stairwell. Macsen seemed be almost globular these days. He hadn’t managed to get out of bed unaided for over four years.
Edeard looked round at his friends, humbled and delighted that they would all be travelling together. Kanseen on a bed of cushions next to Macsen, her terribly frail frame struggling to breathe. Dinlay, standing of course, gaunt yet with a straight back, his Chief Constable’s uniform immaculate, dignified at the last. He was by himself; to everyone’s amazement his final marriage had lasted thirty-two years (a record) and remained current, but his wife was eighty-seven years younger.
‘Everyone together,’ Edeard said.
‘No matter what,’ they all chorused.
The Pythia bowed to Edeard. ‘Waterwalker, may the Lady Herself bless your journey. She will greet you soon I’m sure. What you have done for this world is beyond praise. The Heart awaits you with eagerness, as do your friends who dwell there now. You go there with the undying thanks of all of us who live on Querencia, whose fulfilment you have worked so hard towards.’
Edeard looked up into her face, kind and stern as all the Pythias seemed to be, but radiant with concern. A concern that extended a great deal further than the tower. Should I tell her? Somehow, he couldn’t risk the woman’s disapproval, so all he said was: ‘Thank you.’
The Novices and Mothers began their walk back down the tower’s spiral stair.
Macsen let out a comfortable groan as he slumped back onto the cushions. ‘Right then, we’ve got a minute, anyone bring some booze?’
‘I think you’ve had enough now, dear,’ Kanseen longtalked quietly. Watching her juddering breaths, Edeard knew it was willpower alone which kept her body alive. Dinlay came over and perched beside Edeard. The lenses in his glasses were like balls of glass they were so thick. Edeard knew very well he was virtually blind. It was only his farsight which allowed him to move around these days.
‘Do you think Boyd got there?’ Dinlay asked.
Edeard smiled wistfully. ‘If he didn’t, we’ll have to organize a search of the Void for him.’
‘I’m sure a Skylord would help,’ Kanseen longtalked. ‘He deserves his place in the Heart.’
‘Wouldn’t that be something?’ Kristabel said. ‘A voyage across the universe; a bigger version of our trip around the world.’
‘Yes, my love, it would be quite something.’
He saw her head turn to stare at him, eyes narrowing in that oh so beautifully familiar expression. ‘Is there something wrong?’
‘Not wrong, no. But tell me this, all of you: if there was something you knew, an ability you had which could change everything, the way you lived, your beliefs, the way you thought, even, would you keep it to yourself?’
‘What ability?’ Macsen asked keenly. ‘The way you talk to the city?’
‘No, something much greater than that.’
‘Would it change things for the better?’ Kristabel asked.
‘It just brings change. How it is applied, for better or worse, depends on the user.’
‘You cannot judge people,’ Dinlay said. ‘Not even you, Water-walker, have that right. We have our courts of law to maintain order, but to decide the nature of a person’s soul is not something we are worthy of. The Heart alone decides.’
‘If the ability exists, it exists for a reason,’ Kanseen longtalked.
‘I thought so,’ Edeard said.
Down below, the city gasped then cheered as the Skylord rose above the horizon. The tremendous flood of rapturous blessings directed from Makkathran’s crowds rose to a crescendo. It was enough to bestow Edeard’s body with a final surge of strength. He reached out with his third hand, and drew his friends to him. They held hands as the Skylord swept in across the Lyot Sea. Wind rushed on in front of it, causing their robes to flap about. All around them, the spires of the tower began to glow, a vivid corona of light that spilled out across the platform, filling the air with sparks, as if the stars themselves were raining down.
‘Will you accept us?’ Edeard asked of the Skylord. ‘Will you guide us to the Heart?’
‘Yes,’ the giant creature replied benevolently.
Tears of gratitude seeped down Edeard’s cheeks as the light grew stronger and the shadow of the Skylord slid across Eyrie. This was his last chance.
The light flared, overwhelming his eyes. He sensed his body starting to dissolve into whatever force the towers unleashed. Yet his mind remained intact, if anything it grew stronger, his thoughts clearer than they had been in decades. His perception expanded, taking in the whole of the city.
‘I have one last gift for you,’ he spoke to the glittering enraptured minds below. ‘Use it well.’ And he showed them how to travel back through their own life to begin again where they chose.
‘That’s how we always won?’ a laughing Macsen asked.
Edeard’s soul shone with happiness. Rising beside him into the giant fluctuations of light that ran through the Skylord’s body, Macsen’s spectral form had returned to his handsome adolescent self.
‘Not always,’ he promised his friends. ‘And not for two hundred years. I swear upon the Lady that your achievements here are your own.’
‘Whatever will they do with it?’ Dinlay asked, looking down at the world shrinking away below the glare of their disintegrating bodies.
‘The best they can, of course,’ Kanseen said.
‘You did the right thing,’ Kristabel told him.
Edeard cast his perception up, growing aware of the songs calling down from the nebulas. They seemed to speak directly to him, a promise of such glory he was filled with wonder and anticipation. ‘They’re so beautiful,’ he exclaimed. ‘And we’ll soon be there.’
8
Oscar munched away absent-mindedly on his chocolate twister as he reviewed the astrogation charts his u-shadow was extracting from various files. On the other side of the exovision displays Liatris McPeierl was running through an energetic exercise routine, stripped to the waist to show off perfectly proportioned chest muscles which were gleaming rather nicely with sweat. A sight that was not a little distracting; Oscar found it hard to concentrate on trans-galactic navigation with all that joyous hunk-flesh flexing lithely just a couple of metres away.
Liatris finished his routine and reached languidly for a towel. ‘I’m for a shower,’ he announced, and twitched his bum in Oscar’s direction as teasingly bogus thoughts of lust burst out into the gaiafield.
Oscar bit firmly down into a big chunk of his pastry, inhaling a lot of the dusty icing sug
ar it was coated with, which made him cough, and that made him look really stupid. He took a drink of tea to clear his throat. When he’d finished, Liatris was gone and Beckia was giving him a piteous smile from the other side of the starship’s main cabin.
‘What?’ he grumbled.
‘Liatris is spoken for back home,’ she said.
‘Back home is a long way away.’
‘You’re a wicked old Punk Skunk.’
‘And proud of it. Wanna take a look at my scorecard?’
‘You just have no dignity at all, do you?’
He flashed her a lecherous grin, and ordered his u-shadow to pull files from the unisphere on all previous known and rumoured trans-galactic flights. ‘Part of what makes me lovable.’
‘Part of you is lovable?’
Tomansio and Cheriton rose up through the airlock chamber into the centre of the cabin, both of them wearing toga suits with quite flamboyant iridescent surface shimmers, and gaiamotes emissions toned down to zero. Letting everyone know they were staunch Viotia citizens and nothing to do with Living Dream in any respect.
‘It’s not getting any better out there,’ Cheriton complained.
For a couple of weeks now the team had been accessing and experiencing the attempts of Viotia’s government as it tried to re-establish normal services and deal with the damage caused by the invasion. An operation not helped by the lynching of their Prime Minister two days after the Ellezelin troops had withdrawn from the capital, Ludor. It had been a messy affair with a mob storming into the National Parliament building while the guards had been content to stand back and let natural justice take its course. The rest of the cabinet, fearful for their own bodyloss, had been reluctant to stand up and issue instructions. Relief was mainly being coordinated by local authorities while tempers were given time to cool.
Given that Colwyn City had sustained by far the worst damage, its infrastructure was still limping along as repairs and replacement operations were implemented. Bots and civil engineering crews were hard at work, aided by equipment delivered by starships flying in from across the Commonwealth. But commerce was sluggish, and a surprising number of businesses still hadn’t reopened despite the urging of the city council.
‘I think they’ve done well, considering the general apathy,’ Tomansio said. ‘It’s going to take a couple of years before everything gets back to pre-invasion levels. It doesn’t help that Likan’s company is currently shut down. It was a huge part of the planetary economy. The treasury will have to step in and refloat its finances. And the cabinet isn’t strong enough to orchestrate that right now. There’ll have to be an election to restore public confidence in government.’
‘Which is the main problem,’ Oscar said. ‘What’s the point? Our gloriously idiotic Dreamer is going to launch the Pilgrimage fleet in seven hours. You’re not going to get an election if there’s nothing left of the galaxy to hold an election in.’
‘So remind me while we’re still here?’ Tomansio said.
Oscar was going to launch into his usual impassioned plea for hope and faith based on that five seconds of raw face-to-face impression he’d gained of Araminta back in Bodant Park. He had been so utterly certain that she was playing Living Dream somehow. But the team had heard it all so many times from him, and now here he was examining ways to flee from the galaxy in one of the finest starships ANA had ever constructed. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, surprised by how hard the admission was. It meant the mission was over, that they could do nothing, that there was no future.
He wondered what Dushiku and Anja and dear mercurial Jesaral would say when he landed outside their house in a stealthed ultradrive starship and told them they’d have to flee the galaxy. It had been so long since he’d spoken to them they were actually starting to drift away from his consideration. Which wasn’t good. He really could survive without them. Especially now I’m living life properly again.
A dismayed groan escaped his lips. Oh, you treacherous, treacherous man. Beckia is right, I have no dignity.
Cheriton, Tomansio and Beckia exchanged mildly confused glances as the rush of conflicting emotion spilled out of Oscar’s gaiamotes.
‘What will you do when the expansion starts?’ he asked them.
‘The Knights Guardians will survive,’ Tomansio said. ‘I expect we will relocate to a new world in a fresh galaxy.’
‘You’d need to find such a world,’ Oscar said cautiously. ‘For that you’ll need a good scoutship. An ultradrive would be perfect.’
‘It would. And we would be honoured for you to join us.’
‘This is difficult,’ Oscar said miserably. ‘To acknowledge we have failed so completely, not just the five of us but our entire species.’
‘Justine is still inside the Void,’ Beckia said. ‘Gore may yet triumph. He clearly intends something.’
‘Clutching at straws,’ Oscar told her. ‘That’s not strong.’
‘No, but part of what I believe in is having the strength to admit when you’ve been defeated. We didn’t secure Araminta, and she’s made her own choice – despicable bitch that she is. Our part in this is over.’
‘Yeah,’ he acknowledged. He still wasn’t sure how his life partners would react to all this. Not that he was so shallow he’d fly off without making the offer to take them. But they all had family, which made an exodus complicated. Whereas he was truly alone. Probably the closest connection he had to anyone alive today was Paula Myo. A notion which made him smile.
Every one of Oscar’s exovision displays was abruptly blanked out by a priority protocol as his u-shadow reported someone was activating a link from an ultrasecure onetime contact code.
‘Bloody hell!’ he blurted.
‘Hello, Oscar,’ Araminta said. ‘I believe you told me to call.’
*
Even with a combination of smartcores and modern cybernetics and replicator factories and a legion of bots and effectively bottomless government resources, not to mention the loving devotion of every single project worker, building the twelve giant Pilgrimage ships was a phenomenal achievement by any standards. But for all that, the prodigious amount of processing power and human thought which had been utilized to manage the project was primarily focused on planning and facilitating the fabrication itself. It was unfortunate, therefore, that a proportional amount of consideration hadn’t been given over to working out the embarkation procedure for the lucky twenty-four million.
Mareble had been reduced to tears when she and Danal had received confirmation that they’d been allocated a place on board the Macsen’s Dream. She actually sank to her knees in the hotel room and sent the strongest prayer of thanks into the gaiafield, wishing it towards Dreamer Araminta for the kindness she’d shown towards them yet again. For days afterwards she’d gone through life in a daze of happiness. Her brain was stuck in such amazing fantasies of what she would do when she walked the streets of Makkathran itself that it was a miracle she even remembered to eat. Then her wonder and excitement was channelled into preparation; she was one of the chosen ones, an opportunity she must never waste. So she and Danal spent hours reviewing the kind of supplies they wanted to take. Allocation was strictly limited to one cubic metre per person, with the strong advice not to bring any advanced technology item.
It was her deepest wish that she could somehow become an Eggshaper, like the Waterwalker himself. For years she’d studied the techniques he’d employed in those first dreams; she was sure that she could emulate the ability if she could just get into proximity with a pregnant default genistar. So once the basic clothes and utensils and tools were packed, she set about filling the precious remaining space with the kind of tough coats and jeans and boots that were essential to any branch of animal husbandry, with practical veterinary instruments occupying the last remaining cubic centimetres. Danal filled his container with some luxury food packets and a range of seeds; but mostly his allowance was taken up by old-fashioned books printed on superstrong paper by a small specialist
replicator unit he had bought for the occasion. He wanted to be a teacher, he told her, which was why he also took pencils and pens and all the paraphernalia necessary to make ink.
Embarkation began three days after the drives and force fields arrived. Before she’d met Dreamer Araminta, the unsavoury origin of the technology would have troubled Mareble. But now she’d witnessed Dreamer Araminta confront the disquieting Ilanthe-thing, she had confidence that their Pilgrimage wasn’t being perverted for a Faction’s sinister agenda. Araminta was quite right: the Void would prevail over any wickedness. So when their capsule arrived at the construction yard she was carefree and dizzy with the prospect of the flight itself. Everything her life had been devoted to was about to be consummated.
The capsule had to wait outside the yard’s force-field dome for seven hours, stacked three hundred metres above the ground in a matrix resembling a metallic locust swarm, all of them awaiting landing clearance. When they finally did get down outside one of the matériel egress facilities, bots loaded their containers on a trolley, which quickly slipped away through the air. Mareble and Danal had to walk through the facility past an array of scanners and sensor fields before they were finally out under the domes which cloaked the evening sky in a pale purple nimbus. Long braids of trolleys buzzed high through the air, forking and flowing like a dark river tributary network as they glided to their designated ship to offload. Staring up at the appallingly complex, fast-moving streams, Mareble glumly resigned herself to never seeing her personal container again.
Below the trolleys, a strata of solido signs hovered above the wide avenues between the starships, carrying directions and stabbing out flashing arrows. To complement that, her u-shadow received a series of guidance instructions that would take her to entrance ramp 13 of the Macsen’s Dream. Her and two million others. What those instructions amounted to was: join the three-hundred-metre-wide queue filling the avenue and shuffle along for five hours.