“Quite a funny mix, if you ask me. Leaders of Arks. Entertainers. Captains of commerce. Philanthropists such as Magnath Foral. Avout. Ita. Citizens—including a couple well known to you.” This was directed at me.
“You’re kidding,” I said, momentarily forgetting about all of the grim subtext. “Cord and Yul?”
He nodded. “Because of their role during the Visitation of Orithena—watched by so many on the speely that you, Sammann, put on the Reticulum—it was seen as fitting that they come here, as representatives of the people.” The politicians are pimping them to the mass media.
“Understood,” said Lio. “But among all of those pop singers and witch doctors, there must be at least some actual representatives of the Saecular Power?”
“Four of the military, who strike me as honorable.” Not the ones who will trigger the EKs “Ten of the government—including our old friend Madame Secretary.”
“Those Forals really get around,” I couldn’t help saying. Sammann raised an eyebrow at me. Jules went on to rattle off a list of the names and titles of the Saecular Power contingent, going out of his way to identify some of them as mere aides. “…and finally our old friend Emman Beldo, to whom, I sense, there is more than meets the eye.” He’s the one.
Whatever praxis would be used to trigger the EKs, it would be advanced, possibly nothing more than a prototype. It would have to be disguised as something innocuous. They would need someone like Emman to operate it. And he would take his orders from, presumably, the highest-ranking Panjandrum in the delegation. Not Ignetha Foral. She was here on Lineage business, of that I had no doubt. Whatever her nominal title and brief might be in the Saecular Power, she and her cousin—or whatever he was—Magnath had not come all this way to follow the whims of whatever Panjandrum happened to have most lately gained the upper hand in the infinite clown-fight that was Saecular politics.
Did the Forals know about Fraa Jad? Were they working with him? Had they framed a plan together during our stay at Elkhazg?
There was so much to think about that my mind shut off, and all I did for the better part of the next half-hour was take in new sensations. I had turned into Artisan Flec’s speelycaptor: all eyes, no brain. With my Eagle-Rez, my SteadiHand, and my DynaZoom, I dumbly watched and recorded our discharge from the hospital. Paperwork, it seemed, was one of those Protic attractors that remained common and unchanged across all cosmi. We were given over into the care of a squad of five nose-tube-wearing Troäns in the same getups as the goons who had assaulted me and Jad in my dream, hallucination, or alternate polycosmic incarnation. Lio ogled their weapons, which tended toward sticks, aerosol cans, and electrical devices—apparently, high-energy projectiles were frowned on in a pressurized environment. They gave us a good looking-over in return, paying special attention to Lio—they’d been doing research on who was who, and some of the Valer mystique had rubbed off on him.
Two of the soldiers and Jules went ahead of us, three followed. We crossed a gangplank into someone’s garden and I looked through an open window, from arm’s length away, at a Laterran man washing dishes. He ignored me. From there we crossed into a school playground. The kids stopped playing for a few moments and watched us go by. Some said hello; we smiled, bowed, and returned the greeting. This went over well. From there we crossed to a houseboat where a couple of women were transplanting vegetables. And so it went. The community did not waste space on streets. Their transportation system was a network of rights-of-way thrown over the roofs and terraces of the houseboats. Anyone could walk anywhere, and a social convention dictated that people simply ignore each other. Heavy goods were moved around on skinny, deep-draught gondolas maneuvering through narrow leads of open water—whose existence came as a surprise, because they tunneled under flexible bowers, and so, from the hospital terrace, had looked only like dark green veins and arteries ramifying through the town.
In a few minutes we came to a boat that served as the terminal of the cable-chair system. We rode up to the hole in the sky two by two, each Arbran accompanied by a Troän soldier, until all had collected in the portal that joined Ten to Eleven. The wind was blowing in our faces strongly enough to sting our eyes and whip our bolts around.
While waiting for the others to catch up, I stood in the portal and looked at the theatrical machinery behind the blue scrim of the fake sky, the bundles of glass fibers that piped in the light. The sun was bright, but cold; all the infrared had been filtered out of it. Warmth came instead from the sky itself, which radiated gentle heat like an extremely low-temperature broiler. We felt it strongly here, and were glad of the wind.
Then another chair ride down to Orb Eleven’s houseboat-mat, a walk across, and a similar ride up to the next portal and into Orb Twelve: the highest-numbered, farthest-aft of the four Laterran orbs. Hence, there was no next portal; we had reached the caboose. But the sky supported a tubular catwalk-cum-ladder that took us “up” and around to a portal in the “highest” part of the sky—the zenith. Gravity here was noticeably weaker because we were closer to the Core. We tarried on the ring-shaped catwalk below the portal, which, down to the last rivet, was just like the one in Orb One where Fraa Jad had taken a shotgun blast. I looked around and saw details I clearly “remembered,” and I perched my butt on the railing to check it against my “memory” of being knocked over it.
Jules had to identify himself at a speely terminal and state his business to someone in a language that I assumed was Urnudan. The leader of the soldiers chimed in with bursts of gruff talk. We five had to take turns standing in front of the machine and have our faces scanned. While we waited, we examined the ball valve, which felt, and therefore looked, as if it were in the ceiling, straight above our heads. It was old hat to me. In its design I recognized the massive, thunderous praxic style—call it Heavy Intercosmic Urnudan Space Bunker—that dominated the look of the ship as seen from the outside and the Core, but was mercifully absent from the orbs.
That great steel eye would not open for us today. Instead we would use a round hatch just wide enough to admit Arsibalt, or a Troän grunt in his cumbrous gear-web. This eventually swung open by remote command, and we queued up to climb through it.
“A threat,” Jesry snorted, and nodded at the colossal ball valve. I knew his tone: disgusted that he’d been so long figuring it out. I must have looked baffled. “Come on,” he said, “why would a praxic design it that way? Why use a ball valve instead of some other kind?”
“A ball valve works even when there is a large pressure difference between its two sides,” I said, “so the Command could evacuate the Core—open it to space—and then open this valve and kill the whole orb. Is that what you’re thinking?”
Jesry nodded.
“Fraa Jesry, your explanation is unreasonably cynical,” said Arsibalt, who’d been listening.
“Oh, I’m sure there are other reasons for it,” Jesry said, “but it is a threat all the same.”
One by one we ascended a ladder through the small side hatch, up a short vertical tube, and through a second hatch—an airlock—and collected on another ring-catwalk on the bore of the vertical shaft that rose twelve hundred feet “above” us to the Core. I checked out the keypad: just where I remembered it.
Lio had passed through first, and was donning a sort of padded blindfold. Jules handed them to the rest of us as we emerged from the airlock. “Why?” I asked sharply.
“So you don’t get sick from the effects of Coriolis,” he said. “But, in case you do—” And he handed me a bag. “Come to think of it, take two—the way you were eating.”
I took a last look up before putting on the blindfold. We were getting ready to ascend a dauntingly tall ladder. But I knew that “gravity” would get weaker the higher we went, so it wouldn’t be that arduous. We would, however, be experiencing powerful, disorienting inertial effects as we moved closer to the axis. Hence the concern about motion sickness.
I groped for the lowest rung. “Slow,” Jules said, “se
ttle on each step and wait for it to feel correct before moving to the next.”
Since the whole ladder was enclosed in a tubular cage, there was scant danger of falling. I took the rungs slowly as recommended, listening for movement from Lio, who was above me, before going to the next. But above a certain point the rungs became mostly symbolic. A flick of the wrist or finger floated us to the next one up. Still the Troän soldier at the top maintained the same steady pace—he’d learned the hard way that those who climbed too fast would soon be reaching for their bags.
I was thinking about that keypad. What if Fraa Jad had punched in one of the 9,999 wrong numbers? What if he had attempted it several times? Eventually a red light would have gone on in some security bunker. They’d have turned on a speelycaptor and seen a live feed of two firefighters screwing around with the keypad. They’d have sent someone to shoo them off. That person probably would not have been issued a shotgun—just the nonlethal weapons that our escorts were toting.
Jesry’s words came back to me: A threat. He was right. Opening that ball valve had been a way of putting a gun to the head of the whole Orb. No wonder those soldiers had simply rushed up and blown us away! In a cosmos where Fraa Jad knew—or guessed—the number on the keypad, we were sure to get killed. Freeing me, apparently, to end up somewhere else.
But what would have happened in all of the vastly more numerous cosmi where he’d punched in the wrong random number? We would have been taken alive.
What would have happened next in those cosmi?
We’d have been detained for a while—then taken to parley with Gan Odru.
My ears told me I had emerged from the top of the shaft, my hand pawed in the air but didn’t find a next rung. Instead the Troän intercepted it, hauled me out, hauled back the other way to kill the momentum he’d conferred on me, and guided me to something I could grab. I peeled up my blindfold and saw that I had emerged into the Core. The ball valve leading to the aft bearing chamber was just a stone’s throw behind us. Its length in the other direction was inestimable, but I knew it to be two and a quarter miles. It was as I “remembered” it: glowing tubes strung down its inner surface emitted filtered sunlight, and the conveyor belt ran endlessly with well-lubed clicking and humming noises.
Three other well-shafts were plumbed into the Core at this nexus. The one directly “above” or opposite us led into Orb Four; it looked like a direct, straight-line continuation of the shaft we had just finished climbing. A ring-ladder ran around the Core wall, providing access to all of them. Those who were practiced at this kind of thing could simply jump across.
There was a wait. To begin with, those below me on the ladder had to catch up. Moreover, a traffic jam had already developed in the shaft to Orb Four. There were safety rules governing how many were allowed to use the ladder at once, being enforced by a soldier stationed at the top rung. Some other delegation was going down ahead of us—though from our point of view they appeared to be ascending the ladder feet-first—and we would have to wait until they had reached the bottom.
So, Lio and I began screwing around. We decided to see if we could make ourselves motionless in the center of the Core. The goal was to place oneself near the middle of the big tunnel while killing one’s spin so that the whole ship would rotate around one’s body. This had to be done through some combination of jumping off from the wall just so, and then swimming in the air to make adjustments. Desperately clumsy would be a fair description of our first five minutes’ efforts. From there we moved on to dangerously incompetent, as, while flailing around, I kicked Lio in the face and gave him a bloody nose. The Troän soldiers watched with mounting amusement. They couldn’t understand a word we were saying, but they knew exactly what we were trying to do. After I kicked Lio, they took pity on us—or perhaps they were just scared that we’d get seriously hurt and they’d be blamed. One of them beckoned me over. He grabbed my chord in one hand and my bolt, at the scruff of my neck, at the other, and gave me a gentle push combined with a little torque. When I swam to a halt in the middle of the tunnel, I saw I was closer than I had ever been to achieving the goal.
Hearing voices in Fluccish, I looked up the Core to see a contingent of perhaps two dozen coming to join us. Most were floating down the middle of the Core instead of using the conveyors, so even if they hadn’t been speaking Fluccish I’d have known them for tourists. One of these suddenly bounded ahead of the group, drawing a rebuke from a soldier.
Cord hand-over-handed her way along the tunnel wall and launched herself at me from a hundred feet away. I feared the impending collision, but fortunately air resistance slowed her flight, so that when we banged bodies it was no more violent than walking into someone. We had a long zero-gravity hug. Another Arbran was not far behind her: a young Saecular man. I didn’t recognize him, but I had the oddest feeling that I was expected to. He was slowly tumbling on all three axes as he drifted toward me and my sib, flailing his arms and legs as if that would help. For that, he was very impressively dressed and coiffed. One of our soldier escorts reached out and gave him a push on the knee that stopped his tumbling and slowed his trajectory to something not quite so meteoric. He came to a near-stop with respect to me and Cord. Gazing at him past Cord’s right ear, which was pressed so hard against my cheek that I was pretty sure her earrings were drawing blood, I saw him raise a speelycaptor and draw a bead on us. “In the chilly heart of the alien starship,” he intoned, in a beautifully modulated baritone, “a heartwarming reunion between brother and sister. Cord, the Saecular half of the heroic pair, shows profound relief as she—”
I was just beginning to have some profound—but not quite so heartwarming—emotions of my own when the man with the speelycaptor was somehow, almost magically, replaced by Yulassetar Crade. Associated with the miracle were a few sound effects: a meaty thwomp, and a sharp exhalation—a sort of bark—from the man with the speelycaptor. Yul had simply launched himself at the guy from some distance away, and body-checked him at full speed, stopping on a dime in midair as he transferred all of his energy into the target.
“Conservation of momentum,” he announced, “it’s not just a good idea—it’s the law!” Far away, I heard a thud and a squawk as the man with the hairdo impacted on the end-cap. This was almost drowned out, though, by chuckling and what I took to be appreciative commentary from our soldier-escorts. If I’d been startled, at first, to learn that Yulassetar Crade had been made part of—of all things—a diplomatic legation, I saw the genius of it now.
Once Cord had settled down enough to release me, I drifted over and bumped bodies (more gently) and shared a hug with Yul too. Sammann had emerged from the Orb Twelve shaft by now, and greeted them both in high spirits. Of course, there was much more that I wanted to say to Cord and Yul, but the man with the speelycaptor had crawled back close enough to get us in his sights—though from a more respectful distance—and this made me clam up. “We’ll talk,” I said, and Yul nodded. Cord, for now, seemed content merely to look at me, her face a maze of questions. I couldn’t help wondering what she saw. I was probably drawn and pasty. She, by contrast, had gone to some effort to dress up for the occasion: all the milled titanium jewelry was on display, she had gotten a new haircut and raided a women’s clothing store. But she’d had the good sense not to get too girly, and she still seemed like Cord: barefoot, with a pair of fancy shoes buckled together in the belt of her frock.
Others filtered in: a couple of ridiculously beautiful persons I didn’t recognize. Some old men. The Forals, drifting along arm in arm as if members of their family had been going on zero-gravity perambulations for centuries. Three avout, one of whom I recognized: Fraa Lodoghir.
I flew right at him. Spying me inbound, he excused himself from his two companions and waited for me at a handhold on the tunnel wall. We wasted no time on pleasantries. “You know what became of Fraa Jad?” I asked him.
His face spoke even more eloquently than his voice knew how to do—which was saying a lot. He knew. He
knew. Not the false cover story. He knew what I knew—which probably meant he knew a lot more than I knew—and he was apprehensive that I was getting ready to blurt something out. But I shut my mouth at that point, and with a flick of the eyes let him know I meant to be discreet.
“Yes,” said Lodoghir. “What can avout of lesser powers make of it? What does Fraa Jad’s fate mean, what does it entail, for us? What lessons may we derive from it, what changes ought we to make in our own conduct?”
“Yes, Pa Lodoghir,” I said dutifully, “it is for such answers that I have come to you.” I could only pray he would catch the sarcasm, but he made no sign.
“In a way, a man such as Fraa Jad lives his whole life in preparation for such a moment, does he not? All the profound thoughts that pass through his consciousness, all the skills and powers that he develops, are shaped toward a culmination. We only see that culmination, though, in retrospect.”
“Beautiful—but let’s talk of the prospect. What lies ahead—and how does Fraa Jad’s fate reshape it for us? Or do we go on as if it had never occurred?”
“The practical consequence for me is continuing and ever more effective coöperation between the tendencies known to the vulgar as Rhetors and Incanters,” Lodoghir said. “Procians and Halikaarnians have worked together in the recent past, as you know, with results that have been profoundly startling to those few who are aware of them.” He was staring directly into my eyes as he said this. I knew he was talking about the rerouting of worldtracks that, among other things, had placed Fraa Jad at the Daban Urnud at the same time as his death was recorded above Arbre.
“Such as our unveiling of the spy Zh’vaern,” I said, just to throw any surveillors off the scent.
“Yes,” he said, with a tiny, negative shake of the head. “And this serves as a sign that such coöperation must and should continue.”
“What is the object of that coöperation, pray tell?”