Once it felt right to go back to the story, I said, “How long did Osa and Esma remain locked up in that room before—before it happened?”
“Two days.”
“Two days!?”
“The Pedestal assumed that the place was booby-trapped, and/ or that there might be other Valers lurking in it. But they had to do something, since the hostages were running out of air. It was either that, or watch their people die on the speely.”
“So they were scared to death.”
“Yes,” Ala said, “I think so. Maybe shocked is a better word. Because they had thought for a while that they had us locked down in Tredegarh, which they had infiltrated. Then you and your friends unmasked Jules Verne Durand, so they lost their eyes and ears on the ground. At the same moment, the Convox—and all of the other big concents—dispersed into the Antiswarm.”
“That was a great idea! Who dreamed that up?”
She blushed, and fought back a smile, but wasn’t happy with my turning the attention to her, so went on: “They are really afraid of the Thousanders—the Incanters—and must have noticed that all of the Millenarian maths had been emptied out. Where did all of those Thousanders go? What are they cooking up? Then, the two-hundred-missile launch. Very upsetting. A lot of data to process. Zillions of bogeys to track. They think they see a ship—it blows up—they think they’ve dodged a bullet. But a few days after that, out of nowhere, comes this horrifying and devastating attack on their biggest strategic asset. For two days afterwards, it is all that they can think of—they are worried sick about the hostages trapped in that vertex. Not only that, but some other dudes in black suits manage to gain entry to the ship, and are only foiled because they can’t breathe the air—”
“They mistook us for another squad of Valers?”
“What would you think, in their place? And the biggest concern of all in their minds, I believe, was that they couldn’t know how many others were out there. For all they knew, there were a hundred more of you on the way, with more weapons. So, the result of it all was that—”
“They decided to negotiate.”
“Yes. To initiate four-way talks among the Pedestal, the Fulcrum, and the Magisteria.”
“Pardon me, what was that last one?”
“The Magisteria.”
“Meaning—?”
“This happened after you left Arbre. One magisterium is the Saecular Power. The other is the Mathic world—now the Antiswarm. The two of them together are—well—”
“Running the world?”
“You could say that.” She shrugged. “Until we come up with a better system, anyway.”
“And would you, Ala, be one of those people who is currently running the world?”
“I’m here, aren’t I?” She didn’t appreciate my humor.
“As part of the delegation?”
“A wall-crawler. An aide. And the only reason I made the cut was that the military likes me, they think I’m cool.”
I was about to point out a much better explanation, which was that she had been responsible for sending Cell 317 on a successful mission, but she read it on my face and glanced away. She didn’t want to hear it mentioned. “There are four dozen of us,” she said hurriedly. “We brought doctors. Oxygen.”
“Food?”
“Of course.”
“How did you get here?”
“Geometers came down and picked us up. Once we reached the Daban Urnud, we came straight here, of course.”
“Hmm,” I reflected, “shouldn’t have brought up the subject of food.”
“Are you hungry?” she asked, as if it were astonishing that I would be.
“Obviously.”
“Why didn’t you say so—we brought five hampers of absolutely the best food for you guys!”
“Why five?”
“One for each of you. Not counting Jules, of course—he’s been stuffing his face since he got here.”
“Um. Just to prove I don’t have brain damage, would you name the five, please?”
“You, Lio, Jesry, Arsibalt, and Sammann.”
“And—what of Jad?”
She was so aghast that my social instincts got the better of my brain, and I backed down. “Sorry, Ala, I’ve been through a lot of weird stuff, my memory is a little blurry.”
“No, I’m sorry,” she said, “maybe it is a result of the trauma.” She looked a little quivery, scrunched her face, mastered it.
“Why? What trauma?”
“Of seeing him float away. Knowing what happened to him.”
“When did I see him float away?”
“Well, he never regained consciousness after the two-hundred-missile launch,” Ala said softly. “You saw him collide with a payload. He got stuck to it. You made the decision to go after him—to try to help. But it was tricky. The grapnel missed. You were running out of time. Arsibalt was coming to help. But then you nearly got sideswiped by the nuke. Jad drifted away. Re-entered the atmosphere. And burned up over Arbre.”
“Oh yeah,” I said, “how could I have forgotten?” I said it sarcastically, of course. But I was carefully watching Ala’s face as I did. The circumstances of my recent life were such that I was more exquisitely attuned to Ala’s facial expressions than to anything else in the Five Known Cosmi. She believed—better, she knew—that what she’d just reminded me of was true.
There were, I was sure, records down on Arbre to prove it.
* * *
Rhetor: A legendary figure, associated in folklore with Procian orders, said to have the power of altering the past by manipulating memories and other physical records.
—THE DICTIONARY, 4th edition, A.R. 3000
All I could think of was getting to the food. First, though, I had to stop being naked. Ala slipped out, as though it were perfectly all right to see me nude, but watching me dress would be indecent. The Arbran delegation had brought us bolts and chords and spheres. The four Geometer races were more or less fascinated by the avout, and might take it the wrong way if we attempted to hide what we were.
Once I got properly wrapped, the hospital staff helped me don a backpack carrying a tank of Arbre oxygen that was connected to the tube beneath my nose. Then I followed a series of pictographic signs to a terrace on the roof of the hospital, where I found Lio and Jesry elbow-deep in their hampers. Fraa Sildanic was there. With a resigned and hopeless air, he cautioned me not to eat too fast lest I get sick. I ignored him as heartily as my fraas were doing. After a few minutes, I actually managed to lift my gaze from my bowl, and look out at the artificial world around me.
The four orbs of a given stack were so close that they almost kissed, and were linked by portals, a little bit like cars on a passenger train. When the Daban Urnud was maneuvering or accelerating, the portals had to be closed and dogged shut, but they were open today.
Laterrans lived in Orbs Nine through Twelve. The hospital was in Ten, not far from the portal that joined it to Eleven. This rooftop terrace, like all other outdoor surfaces, was intensively cultivated. A bit of space had been cleared for tables and benches. The tops of these, though, were slabs of glass, and vegetables grew in trays underneath. Bowers arched over our heads, supporting vines laden with clusters of green fruit. As long as one maintained focus on what was near to hand, it looked like a garden on Arbre. But the long view was different. The hospital consisted of half a dozen houseboats lashed together. Each had three stories below the water-line and three above. Flexible gangways linked them to one another and to neighboring houseboats, which spread across the water to form a circular mat that seemed to cover every square foot of the water’s surface. But because “gravity” here was a fiction created by spin, the surface—what our inner ears, or a plumb bob, would identify as level—was curved. So the circular mat of boats was dished into a trough. Our inner ears told us that we were at its lowest point. If we gazed across it to the other side, rather less than a mile away, our eyes gave us the alarming news that the water was above us. But if we w
ere to make the journey blindfolded, it would feel like walking over level ground—we’d have no sense of climbing uphill.
Of the orb’s inner surface, about half was under water. The remainder constituted the “sky.” This was blue, and had a sun in it. The blue was painted on, but it was possible to forget this unless you looked at the portals to Orbs Eleven and Nine. These hung in the firmament like very strange astronomical bodies, and were linked by cable-chair systems to houseboats below. The sun was a bundle of optical fibers bringing processed and filtered light that had been harvested by parabolic horns on the exterior of the icosahedron. The fibers were fixed in place on the ceiling of the orb, but by routing the light to different fibers at different times of day, they created the illusion that the sun was moving across the sky. At night it got dark, but, as Jules had explained, fiber-pipes were hard-routed to indoor growing facilities in the cellars of many houseboats so that plants could grow around the clock. The system was so productive that these Geometers were capable of sustaining a population density like that of a moderately crowded city solely on what was produced in the city itself.
It was good, in a way, that the view from the hospital roof afforded so many remarkable things to look at and talk about, because otherwise the conversation would have been paralyzingly awkward. Lio’s and Jesry’s faces were stiff. Oh, they had cracked huge smiles when they’d seen me. And I could not have been happier to see them. We’d shared those feelings immediately and without words. But then their faces had closed up like fists, as much as forbidding me to say anything out loud.
We were eating too hard to talk much anyway. Fraa Sildanic and another Arbran medic kept coming and going. And, though I didn’t wish to think ill of our Laterran hosts, I had no way of knowing whether this terrace might be wired with listening devices. Half of the Laterrans were pro-Pedestal. Even the pro-Fulcrum ones, though, might not take kindly to the role we had played in assaulting the Daban Urnud. Some might have had friends or relatives who had been slain by the Valers. To divulge in casual conversation that a Thousander had breached the hull and then vanished would be the worst thing that could happen right now. Once I had sated my hunger a little bit, I began to get physically anxious about it.
When Arsibalt showed up, and made for his hamper like a piece of earth-moving equipment, I waited until his mouth was crammed before raising my glass and saying, “To Fraa Jad. Even as we think of the four Valers who died, let’s not forget the one who sacrificed his life in the first ten minutes of the mission, before he even made it out of Arbre’s atmosphere.”
“To the late Fraa Jad,” Jesry echoed, so quickly and forcefully that I knew he must be thinking along similar lines.
“I’ll never be able to erase the memory of his fiery plunge into the atmosphere,” Lio added with a patently fake sincerity that almost made me blow the libation out of my nose. I was keeping an eye on Arsibalt, who had stopped chewing, and was staring at us, eyes a-bulge, trying to make out if this was some kind of extremely dark and elaborate humor. I caught his eye and glanced up: an old signal from Edhar, where we would, by a flick of the eyes at the Warden Regulant’s windows, say shut up and play along. He nodded, letting me know he had taken my meaning, but the look on his face made his shock and confusion plain. I shrugged as a way of letting him know he was in good company.
Sammann showed up, dressed in the traditional Ita costume, and, showing remarkable self-control, went around and shook our hands and gave each of us a squeeze or pat on the shoulder before tearing open his hamper, full of infinitely better-and spicier-smelling foods than anything we had. We let him eat. He went about this in the same quiet, contemplative style I had once grown used to, watching him take his lunches on the top of the Pinnacle at Edhar. His face showed no curiosity as to why there were five people and five hampers, instead of some other number. In fact, he was altogether reserved and impassive, which, combined with his formal Ita garb, stirred up all sorts of old habits and social conventions that had long since settled to the bottom of my consciousness.
“Earlier we were raising a toast to the memory of the late Fraa Jad and the others who died,” I told him, when he paused in his eating and reached for his glass. He gave a curt nod, raised the glass, and said, “Very well. To our departed comrades.” Yes, I know too.
“Am I the only one who suffers from funny neurological sequelae?” Arsibalt asked, still a bit rattled.
“You mean, brain damage?” Jesry asked in a helpful tone.
“That would depend on whether it is as permanent as what ails you,” Arsibalt fired back.
“Some of my memories are a little sketchy,” Lio offered.
Sammann cleared his throat and glared at him.
“But the longer I’m awake, the more coherent I seem to get,” Lio added. Sammann returned his focus to the food.
Jules Verne Durand stopped by, took in the scene, and beamed. “Ah!” he exclaimed. “When I saw the five of you, out of your spacesuits, gasping for air, like beached fish, in the observatory, I feared I would never be able to look on a scene such as this one.”
We all raised glasses his way, and beckoned for him to join us.
“What of the others—I mean, what was done with the four corpses?” Jesry asked. Five sets of Arbran eyes went to the Laterran’s face. But if Jules noted any discrepancy in the figures, he didn’t show it. “This became a topic of negotiation,” Jules said. “The bodies of the four Valers have been frozen. As you can guess, there are those of the Pedestal who wish to dissect them as biological specimens.” A cloud passed over his face, and he paused for a few moments. We all knew he was remembering his wife Lise, whose body had been subjected to the biological-specimen treatment at the Convox. After getting his poise back, he went on: “The diplomats of Arbre have said in the strongest terms that this would be unacceptable—that the remains are to be treated as sacred and handed over, undisturbed, to this delegation of which you are now a part. This will occur at the opening ceremonies, which are to take place in Orb Four in about two hours.” The Pedestal doesn’t know yet about the Everything Killers lodged in your bodies, and I haven’t spilled the beans—but it’s really making me nervous.
Had even more Everything Killers been brought up by the delegation? Were hundreds, thousands of them now salted around the Daban Urnud? Were there some in the delegation who had the power to trigger them? I “remembered”—if that was the right word for something that had not happened in this cosmos—the silver box in Fraa Jad’s hand. The detonator. Who of the four dozen were carrying them? More to the point, who would press the trigger? To a certain kind of mind, this would make for an acceptable trade. At the cost of four dozen Arbran lives, the Daban Urnud would be sterilized, or at least crippled to the point where its survivors would have no choice but to surrender unconditionally. Much cheaper than fighting a war with them.
For more than one reason, I was no longer hungry.
Everyone else was thinking similar thoughts, and so conversation was not exactly sparkling. In fact, it was nonexistent. The silence became conspicuous. I wondered what a blind visitor would think of the place, for the sonic environment was distinctly odd. The air didn’t move much in these orbs. Each was warmed and cooled on a different diurnal schedule so that the expanding and contracting air would slosh back and forth through the portals and stir faint breezes down below. But it never blew hard enough to raise waves, or even to blow a leaf from a table. Sound carried in that still air, and it ricocheted strangely from the ceiling of the orb. We heard someone rehearsing a tricky passage on a bowed instrument, children arguing, a group of women laughing, an air-powered tool cycling. The air felt dense, the place closed-in, deadening, stifling. Or perhaps that was just the food catching up with me.
“Orb Four is Urnudan,” Lio finally said, waking us all up.
“Yes,” Jules said heavily, “and all of you will be there.” Nothing personal, but I want you walking bombs out of my orb as soon as possible.
“It is
the highest-numbered of the Urnudan orbs,” Arsibalt observed, “meaning—if I understand the convention—the farthest aft, the most residential, the, er…”
“Lowest in the hierarchy, yes,” said Jules. “The oldest, the most important stuff, the highest in the Command, are in Orb One.” That’s the one you’d want to nuke.
“Will we be visiting Orb One?” Lio asked. Are we going to have an opportunity to nuke it?
“I would be astonished,” said Jules, “the people there are very strange and hardly ever come out.”
We all looked at each other.
“Yes,” said Jules, “they are a little like your Thousanders.”
“Fitting,” said Arsibalt, “since their journey has lasted for a thousand years.”
“It is doubly unfortunate that Fraa Jad perished during the launch, then,” I said, “since Orb One sounds like a place he would make a beeline for—that is, in a Narrative where he had made it here with someone like me to open doors for him.”
“What do you imagine he’d do once he reached it?” asked Jesry, keenly interested.
“Depends on what kind of reception we got when we came in the door,” I pointed out. “If things went badly wrong, we would not survive, and our consciousnesses would no longer track that Narrative.”
Sammann chopped this off by clearing his throat again.
“How long will it take for us to get from here to Orb Four?” Jesry asked. I think he was the only one capable of speech; Lio and Arsibalt were gobsmacked.
“We should leave as soon as convenient,” Jules replied. “An advance party is already there.” Everything Killers are already in Orb Four, nothing can be done about it.
We began wrapping up our food, repacking our hampers. “How many Orth interpreters are there?” Arsibalt asked. Do we get to hang out with you?
“With my level of skill, there is only I.” I’m about to become extremely busy, I won’t be able to talk to you after this.
“What kind of people make up the Arbran delegation?” Lio asked. Who’s got his finger on the Everything Killers’ trigger?