But that was not what they did. Instead they all looked up into the sky.
Something was coming.
The hovering aerocraft had received the message too: the pitch of their engines changed, their lights shifted as they spun to new headings, banked, and sidled away, gaining altitude.
The soldiers by the fetch had turned inward on one another, though they kept glancing skywards.
“Hey!” I said. “Hey! Look at me!” I finally got the leader to swing his face shield in my direction. “Talk to us!” I shouted. “We can’t hear! We don’t know what’s going on!”
“…mumble mumble mumble EVACUATE!” he said.
Ganelial Crade didn’t need to hear that twice. He swung himself up into the cab of the fetch and started the engine. Suur Maltha and one of her assistants climbed into the back with the “casualty.” I decided to circle back to the probe first, just to make sure my friends there had gotten the same message—and to chivvy Orolo along if he decided to be difficult. All around the plaza, soldiers were waving their arms, herding avout toward the base of the ramp. Gnel’s fetch was headed that way at slower than walking pace, pausing here and there to pick up slower-moving avout. Yul’s vehicle had begun to do likewise, and I was comforted to see Cord in the front seat. But the ramp was already jammed with pedestrians, so the vehicles would not be able to go any faster than the slowest could walk.
Or run, as the case might be. “MOVE! MOVE!” someone was shouting. An officer had ripped his helmet off—alien infections be damned—and begun shouting into a loud-hailer. “If you can run, do so! If you can’t, get on the truck!”
I ended up a straggler along with Sammann and Orolo. We jogged toward the ramp. I threw Sammann a questioning look. He shrugged. “They jammed the Ret as soon as they got here,” he said, “and I can’t penetrate their transmissions.”
So I looked at Orolo, who was keeping an eye on the western sky as he jogged along. “You think something else is coming?” I asked.
“Since the probe was launched, about one orbital period has expired,” he pointed out. “So, if the Geometers wanted to drop something on us at the next opportunity, then now would be the time to expect it.”
“Drop something,” I repeated.
“You saw what was done to that poor woman!” Orolo exclaimed. “There is insurrection—perhaps civil war—in the icosahedron. A faction that wishes to share information with us, and another that will kill to prevent it.”
“Kill us, even?”
Orolo shrugged. We had reached the base of the ramp and got stuck in a traffic jam. Scanning the ramp circling round above us, I could see avout and soldiers, all mixed together, running. But some inscrutable law of traffic-jam dynamics dictated that those of us at the bottom were at a perfect standstill. All we could do was wait for it to clear. We were the last avout in the queue; behind us were two squads of soldiers bent under heavy packs, waiting stolidly, as was the timeless lot of soldiers. Behind them, Orithena was depopulated, empty except for the alien probe.
Orolo squared off in front of me and favored me with a bright grin. “Regarding our earlier conversation,” he began, as if inviting me to dialog in the Refectory kitchen.
“Yes? You have something to add?”
“As to the actual substance, no,” he confessed. “But things are about to become quite chaotic indeed, and it’s possible we may get separated.”
“I intend to stay by your side—”
“They may not give us a choice,” he pointed out, running his finger around his collar. “My number is odd, yours is even—perhaps they’ll sort us into different tents, or something.”
The people in front of us finally began to move. Sammann, sensing we were trying to have some kind of private conversation, went ahead. We shouldered and jostled our way onto the lower stretches of the ramp. In a few moments we were walking, then jogging.
Orolo, still casting frequent glances at the western sky, went on: “If you find yourself at Tredegarh, let us say, talking to people of your experiences here, and you tell them about what we spoke of this afternoon, the kind of reaction you will get will depend quite strongly on who they are, what math they came from—”
“As in, Procian versus Halikaarnian?” I asked. “I’m used to that, Orolo.”
“This is a little different,” Orolo said. “Most people, Procians and Halikaarnians alike, will deem it nothing more than idle, metatheorical speculation. Harmless, except insofar as it is a waste of time. On the other hand, if you talk to someone like Fraa Jad…”
He paused. I thought it was only to catch his breath, for we really were running now. Above us, aerocraft were settling in for landings outside the front gates, and the noise of their engines forced Orolo to raise his voice. But when I glanced sideways at him, I thought I saw uncertainty on his face. Not something I’d learned to associate with Pa Orolo. “I think,” he finally said, “I think that they all know this.”
“Know what?”
“That what I told you earlier is true.”
“Oh.”
“That they’ve known it for at least a thousand years.”
“Ah.”
“And that…that they do experiments.”
“What!?”
Orolo shrugged, and got a wry smile. “An analogy: when the theors lost their atom smashers, they turned to the sky and made cosmography their laboratory, the only place remaining to test their theories—to turn their philosophy into theorics. Likewise, when a lot of these people were put together on a crag with nothing to do except ponder the kinds of things you and I were talking of earlier, well…some of them, I believe, devised experiments to prove whether they were speaking truth or nonsense. And out of that arose, over time, through trial and error, a form of praxis.” I looked at him and he winked at me.
“So, you think Fraa Jad sent me here to find out whether you knew?”
“I suspect so, yes,” Orolo said. “Under normal circumstances they might simply have reached down and hauled me up into the Centenarian or Millenarian math, but…” He was scanning the western sky again. “Ah, here it comes now!” he exclaimed, delightedly, as if we had been waiting for a train, and he’d just spied it coming into the station.
A white streak sliced heaven in half, moving west to east, and ending, with no loss of speed, in the caldera of the volcano a few thousand feet above us.
In the moment before the sound reached us, Orolo remarked, “Clever. They don’t trust their aim enough to score a perfect hit on the probe. But they know enough geology to—”
After that I could not hear anything for half an hour. Hearing was worse than useless; I was sorry I’d been born with ears.
Fraa Haligastreme had taught me some geological terms which I will use here. I can imagine Cord shaking her head in dismay, giving me a hard time for using dry technical language instead of writing about the emotional truth. But the emotional truth was a black chaos of shock and fear, and the only way to recount what happened in a sensible way is to give technical details that we only pieced together later.
So, the Geometers had thrown a rock at us. Actually, a long rod of some dense metal, but in principle nothing fancier than a rock. It penetrated a quarter of a mile into the solid cap of hardened lava on top of the volcano before it vaporized of its own kinetic energy, creating a huge burst of pressure that we knew as an earthquake. The pressure vented up along the wound that the rod had left through the rock, widening the hole as it roared out, founding systems of cracks that were immediately blown open by the underlying lava. This lava was wet, saturated with steam; the steam exploded into gas as the overburden was relieved, just as bubbles appear in a bottle of soda when the lid is removed. The lava, inflated by the steam, blew itself up into ash, most of which went straight up, which is why everything for a thousand miles downwind ended up buried in grey dust. But some of it came down the side of the mountain in the form of a cloud, rolling down the slope like an avalanche, and easy for us to see, since it was gl
owing orange. And once we had gotten over the shock of what we had seen and staggered back up to our feet after the leg-breaking jolt of the explosion and sprinted to the top of the ramp in a desperate mob, what we clearly saw was that this thing, this glowing cloud, was coming for us, and that it would simultaneously crush us like a sledgehammer and roast us like a flamethrower if we didn’t get out of its path. The only way of doing that was to get on the aerocraft, which had landed on the open slope between the walls of the concent and the souvenir shop. There were exactly enough of these to carry the soldiers who had arrived in them, plus their gear. So they had chivalrously dropped their gear on the ground. They were abandoning everything they had brought with them, the better to carry passengers—avout—away from danger. They were even flinging armloads of gear—fire extinguishers, medical kits—out onto the ground to make room for more humans.
What it came down to then was a simple calculation of the type any theor could appreciate. The pilots of the craft knew how much weight they could lift off the ground and they knew how much a person weighed, on average. Dividing the latter into the former told them how many people might be allowed on each craft. To enforce that limit, the pilots had their sidearms out, and armed soldiers posted to either side of the doors. The soldiers, by and large, knew where to go: they simply returned to the same craft they’d arrived in. The Orithenans swarmed, streamed, surged in the open spaces among the aerocraft, tripping on or vaulting over abandoned gear. Pilots pointed at them one by one, hustled them aboard, and kept count. From time to time they figured out a way to throw out more equipment and accept another passenger. This had already been going on for some time before Orolo, Sammann, and I came running out the gates. Most of the places were already taken. Full craft were lifting off, some with desperate people hanging from their landing gear. The few who hadn’t yet been chosen were running from one aerocraft to another, and I was heartened to see that many were finding spaces. I saw Gnel’s and Yul’s vehicles parked with lights on and engines running, but didn’t see them—they must have made it! I’d lost track of Orolo, though. A running soldier grabbed my arm and hurled me toward an aerocraft that was revving up its engines. I staggered toward the door through a cloud of flying dirt. Hands grabbed me and hauled me inside as the craft’s skids were leaving the ground. The soldier climbed on to the skid behind me. I spun around in the doorway to take in the scene below. I could not see Sammann and I could not see Orolo—good! Had they found places? Only two craft remained on the ground. One of them lifted off, shedding two Orithenans who pawed desperately at the frame of its door but couldn’t get a grip. At least ten other people had been left behind. Some sat despondently or lay crumpled on the ground where they had fallen. Some ran for the sea. One took off running toward the one remaining aerocraft, but he was too far away. Some part of me was thinking why couldn’t they only have taken a few more? but the answer was obvious in the way my aerocraft was performing: engines screaming full tilt, yet gaining altitude no faster than a man could climb a ladder, and shedding a hail of small objects as people found odds and ends that could be hurled out the open door. A flashlight bounced off the back of my head and tumbled to the floor; I clawed it up and tossed it out.
It almost struck a bolted figure hurrying over the ground, harshly lit from behind by the lights of Gnel’s fetch, bent under a heavy burden—light blue. The dead body of the Geometer, forgotten and abandoned in the back of Gnel’s fetch. The man bent under it was headed straight for the only aerocraft still on the ground. Arms were reaching out from the door. The runner put on a last, mighty effort, planted both feet in the dust below the aerocraft, and gave a mighty leg-thrust to hurl the Geometer’s body upward. Hands grasped it and hauled it aboard. The soldier in the doorway showed his teeth as he screamed something into his microphone. The aerocraft rose, leaving behind the man who had delivered the dead Geometer. I forced myself to look at him, and saw what I had expected and dreaded: it was Orolo, alone before the gates of Orithena.
We had enough altitude now that I could look over the walls and buildings of the concent and up the slope to see what was coming. It looked very much as Fraa Haligastreme had described it to us from ancient texts: heavy as stone, fluid as water, hot as a forge, and—now that it had fallen several thousand feet down a mountain—fast as a bullet train.
“No!” I screamed. “We have to go back!” Not that anyone could hear me. But a soldier behind me read my face, saw my eyes swing toward the cockpit. He calmly raised his sidearm and planted its muzzle in the center of my forehead.
My next thought was do I have the guts to jump out so that Orolo could have my place? but I knew that they would not set down again to pick him up. There was no time.
Orolo was looking about curiously. He seemed almost bored. He sidestepped to a position where he could get a clear view uphill through the open gates and see what was headed for him. That, I think, gave him a sense of how many more seconds he had. He picked up a trenching tool that had been discarded, and used its handle to slash an arc into the loose soil. He turned, again and again, joining one arc to another, until he had completed the graceful, neverending curve of the analemma. Then he tossed the tool aside and stood on the center, facing his fate.
The buildings of the concent imploded before the glowing cloud even reached them, for the avalanche was pushing an invisible pressure wave before it. Destruction washed across the full width of the concent in a few seconds, and slammed into the walls from the back side. The walls bulged, cracked, shed a few blocks, but held, until the glowing cloud hit them with its full force. Then they went down like a sand castle struck by a wave.
“No!” I screamed one more time, as Orolo withered under the pressure wave. He flopped to the ground like a hank of rope. For a moment, smoke shrouded him: radiant heat shining out as a harbinger of the glowing cloud. Our aerocraft rocked and skidded sideways on hard air. The cloud erupted from the gates, vaulted over the rubble of the wall, and fell on Orolo. For a fraction of a second he was a blossom of yellow flame in the stream of light, and then he was one with it. All that remained of what he’d been was a wisp of steam coiling above the torrent of fire.
Part 9
INBRASE
Convox: A large convocation of avout from maths and concents all over the world. Normally celebrated only at Millennial Apert or following a sack, but also convened in highly exceptional circumstances at the request of the Saecular Power.
—THE DICTIONARY, 4th edition, A.R. 3000
A tide of milky light spilled in over the forests and the greens and congealed into sticky haze. It was a day without a dawn. The aerocraft’s window had grown a million-edged network of tiny fractures that pulverized the light into a dust of rare colors. I was seeing it through the visor of a balloon suit. On the seat next to me was an orange suitcase that breathed and burbled like a torso, killing what ever came out of me. The avout and the Panjandrums who’d been summoned to Convox from all over Arbre were too important to risk infecting them with alien germs, and so I was living in a bubble until further notice.
This did not make sense. Why bring me to Tredegarh if there was any risk whatsoever? No dialog between rational people could have ended in the conclusion that I should be brought here—but only in a balloon suit. But as Orolo had said, the Convox was political, and made decisions by compromise. And it happened all the time that the compromise between two perfectly rational alternatives was something that made no sense at all.
So my first glimpse of the Precipice was through several layers of fogged, scratched, and cracked poly, and miles of haze: smoke, steam, or dust, I couldn’t tell. The poets who wrote of it always seemed to behold the Precipice at dawn or sunset of a glorious day, and liked to wonder what the Thousanders were doing up in their turrets. They must not have known, or perhaps were too discreet to mention, that the lobe of granite beneath was riddled with tunnels for storage of nuclear waste, and that its Inviolateness was due not to the strength of its walls or the bravery o
f its defenders but to a deal between the mathic world and the Saecular Power. I wondered what a poem would read like, written by one who saw the Precipice as I did now, knowing what I knew. A snort of laughter fogged my visor. But when it melted away, and gave me back again that stark, hazy, color-sapped prospect, I decided it could actually be a cool poem. The Precipice looked a thousand years older than anything on Ecba, and all of the stuff that so obscured my view gave me the same emotional distance as a cosmographer looking at a dust cloud through a telescope.
Tredegarh had been built somewhat farther away from the great cities of the late Praxic Age than Muncoster and Baritoe. That and the rugged look of the Precipice had given it the reputation of being isolated. The cities that surrounded Muncoster and Baritoe had, of course, fallen and been remade a dozen times since then, while similar ebbs and flows had lapped around Tredegarh; still, people in the mathic world insisted on thinking of it as a woodsy retreat. But we landed at a busy aerodrome no more than half an hour’s walk from its Day Gate, and as we drove there I could see that what I’d identified as forests were really arboretums, and the pastures were really lawns for the pleasure of Saeculars who lived in great old houses tucked in at the verge of the woods.
The Day Gate was so lofty I didn’t notice we’d passed through it. An inlaid road of red stone, wide enough to drive two mobes abreast, veered to the right and plunged under a huge Mathic pile that I mistook for the Mynster. But this was merely their Physicians’ Commons, and the red road was a sign for illiterate patients and their visitors. I was being squired around on a motorized cart, since the suitcase grafted onto me was awkward to carry. My driver veered onto the red road and swung wide to dodge an old patient who was being aired out in a wheeled chair festooned with drip bags and readouts. We plunged through a portal arch, then turned off the red road into a service corridor. We hummed down long rows of chilly rooms with metal counters and sinister plumbing fixtures, then up a ramp and into a courtyard. This was about the size of the Cloister back home, but it felt smaller because the buildings around it were higher. Planted in the corner of this space was a housing module, brand-new, with pipes and ducts snaking out of its windows and leading away to whirring machines, or through windows to a lab. I was directed to go inside and take off my suit. When the door closed behind me I heard it being locked from the outside, then the farting of a poly tape dispenser sealing the cracks all around. I kicked my way free of the suit and powered down the suitcase, then stuffed them under the bed. The module had a bedroom, a bath, and a kitchen/dining nook. The windows had been reinforced on the outside with metal mesh—so that if I turned out to be claustrophobic and prone to panic attacks I couldn’t claw my way out—and sealed with thick, translucent poly sheeting.