“How long until this reaches Naderville?” Frick asked.
“I don't know,” Brion said.
“A week or less, I estimate,” Salap said. “Are your people prepared?”
“I don't know how we can be prepared,” Brion said. He started down the opposite slope of the hill. I turned and surveyed from our relatively high vantage, locating the inlet, the waters of the lake reaching to the horizon in the south, and back around to the pillars again. A breathy warbling whistle, soft and plaintive, came from the south, perhaps from the lake shores. The sound made me shiver. That so much power and moving change would make such a simple, birdlike noise, seemed both typical of Lamarckia, and terrifying.
To the west, cumulus and glowering thunderheads built soft mountains. Brion called from the margin of the silva, as it again parted before him, “The ecos makes its own weather. There will be rain within a few days—wait and see.”
“Yes,” Salap muttered. “We've experienced that phenomenon.”
We caught up with Brion again five minutes later. He stood in a blind alley, the scions ahead refusing to part. He paced back and forth, sweat streaming down his face. Frick handed him a marked canteen and he drank deeply and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. Frick handed us other canteens. Brion drank from his own and nobody else's.
Brion took a deep breath. “It wouldn't lead us this far and no farther...” He continued pacing, brushing past me. Again, from the south, the breathless warbling. Salap took advantage of the pause to more closely inspect the morphology of these new green scions.
“I think they are all experimental varieties of food-makers,” he concluded. “She—the ecos, I mean—is experimenting with the most efficient structures. Storing nutrients, using them to promote scion production in the center ... Where we are going.”
Beneath our feet, brown tangles and shreds like twisted and splintered dead branches formed the floor of the silva. Pale white tubes pushed through the detritus. Where one of us had stepped on a tube near the surface, it leaked a milky fluid in steady drips. Salap applied a drop of the fluid to his tongue. “It's sweet,” he said.
A new machine, a new experiment.
“Would you have done this?” I asked Salap as Brion restlessly stalked back along the trail, out of hearing.
“I don't know,” Salap said thoughtfully. He cocked an eyebrow at me. “If I had thought of it, who knows what I would have done? We do not know what he was bargaining with ... What sort of form, organism, he and his wife were communicating with. Or how they communicated.”
“I saw them,” Frick said, hunkering down to wait. He nodded and wiped his forehead with a cloth. “They were small, black worm things, on seven or nine legs. They made sounds like human speech, and they took things from us, our food and equipment, and brought back other things in exchange. Brion and Caitla showed them plants in pots and in bottles, and in days, the black things brought back imitations. Caitla was ecstatic. Later, on the third trip, I saw the first one that tried to look human. It even tried to speak. We communicated by gestures, but it didn't have real eyes. It—she ... it tried to appear female—tracked us by our heat, I think. Ser Brion and Caitla showed it more plants. Caitla's favorites. It made even better imitations and we took them back with us to the vivarium.
“But I've never seen her. The one he's hoping for. When we were last here, after Caitla died, I stayed on the boat. None of this jungle was here.”
“Is he hoping for something like his wife?” I asked. “An imitation?”
Frick didn't enjoy that thought at all. He shifted from one crooked leg to the other and wiped his eyes with his fingers, grimacing. “I knew Caitla,” he said. “She was a stern but fine woman. She suited Ser Brion wonderfully. When she died, we all felt her loss deeply. Ser Brion was devastated. Hyssha, too.”
I could not equate any of this with the raids and murders. In the middle of so much change, death and cruelty and incompetence might lose all their importance. My own death might be completely appropriate, or meaningless. I would give up trying to reconcile those cruelties. After my outburst in front of Brion, I had lost any sense of mission or role; I was no better, no more powerful, than Frick. I had finally earned my humility, my perfect sense of mortality.
I wondered what it would be like to be in the middle of this greening, growing silva, alone, for days or weeks.
Shirla provided the only frame of reference I could not shake myself loose from. I wanted to see her, to make sure she was well. If we could meet again, I would have new bearings, a new sense of purpose, free of Thistledown and the Way.
Brion returned to the trembling barricade again and stood silent, head bowed. “I am patient,” he murmured. “I am patient.”
Still, the barricade remained.
“We have enough food and water,” he said. “We'll wait here until tomorrow. I'm sorry. This hasn't happened before.”
“None of this has happened before,” Salap said.
We slept on the detritus with the silva shivering and growing around us. Every few hours, a sudden rush of motion through the walls around the path made a sound like wind blowing through trees. I slept fitfully and did not remember any dreams, and awoke feeling groggy, not prepared for anything. Several minutes after waking, after eating a cake and drinking from the canteen Salap and I shared, I regained my alertness. The ration of water was not sufficient and I felt thirsty, but not parched.
Brion knelt before the barricade. “She's preparing something,” he said. “She would not lead us this far just to block us.”
“She is intelligent, then?” Salap asked.
Brion laughed and shook his head. “How many times have I asked that question? How many times did Caitla and I talk about it? And after Caitla died ... Of course, I would like her to return. That would be wonderful. To have her somehow absorbed in all her beauty, her thoughts ... by something larger. Intelligent.”
I thought of the discussion on the Vigilant. Lamarckia would be a poor substitute for eternal bliss, but a fair compromise compared to the nullity of empty death.
In the cleared path behind us, we all heard simultaneously the tones and gutturals of human voices. Brion jerked his head sharply around. The look of panic that came to his face, and the searching of his eyes across the whispering, trembling walls flanking the trail, struck me almost like a knife. Here was the face of a man who did not actually want to see the ghost he desired above all else.
Frick's conscience might have been clear. At any rate, it was he who first recognized the voices. “It's Hyssha,” he said. “And Grado, I think ... And Ullman.”
A tall man with close-cropped black hair and suspicious black eyes came around the corner ten meters from the path's dead end, saw us, and stopped. He glanced to his right down the path and made a small gesture with his half-raised hand, as if he had come upon wild beasts and whoever followed must be as quiet as he.
The stately, somber woman with auburn hair, Hyssha Chung, walked around him without hesitating and approached us, or rather, approached Brion, for she did not pay any attention at all to Frick or Salap or myself.
“You shouldn't be here,” she admonished. “Damn your breath, you should not be here, and certainly not now!”
Brion raised his hands as if in defense. “There's nothing happening back there,” he said.
“What is more necessary and immediate here?” she asked. For an instant, she seemed to acknowledge that I at least existed, with a flicker of her eye in my direction, but then her scowl deepened and she leaned toward Brion, whose hands rose higher. “Lenk is packing up his people and preparing to return to their boats. Fassid says your absence leaves them no choice.”
“They won't talk with Beys?”
“What made you think they would?”
“Beys handles all that. What difference does it make where I am?” Brion asked. “And what can Lenk do, anyway?” Before this resolute woman, his voice took on the tone of a defensive child.
“How do yo
u know what Lenk can or can't do?” Chung pursued, pushing her nose almost into Brion's face. “There's more than this monstrous silva at stake.”
“Look how it's changed,” Brion said, holding his ground against the taller woman, but hoping to persuade, not chastise.
Frick looked on this exchange with something like boredom. Chung did not overawe him—at least not when she had her attention on Brion.
“I don't give a damn how it's changed.” Her voice broke and she took his hands in hers. “What can you do here?”
“Our legacy is here,” Brion said. His face creased like soft leather and he shook his wrists gently, not to break her grip on them, but to make some obscure point physical. “She is here. I hoped to convince the Hexamon—”
Now Chung rounded on me, with utter disdain and contempt. “Fassid told me about this pretender,” she said. “They've been embarrassed by him and by this foolish man's gullibility.” She pointed to Salap. “Even Lenk couldn't think of a way to use him against us. But you believe!”
“He has no proof,” Frick said in a mild conversational voice, “but he is very convincing. I think Ser Brion is justified—”
She threw her hand out and nearly struck him in the face. “Who or what he is doesn't matter. Where are the armies, the forces that would pull us out of here?”
“They haven't come,” Brion said, as if that were a trifle.
Her brown eyes narrowed and her lip curled again. She regarded me from the corner of her eyes. I could not help my reaction. I had never been the most gentlemanly when faced with rampant female anger. In truth, histrionics of any kind had not been a regular part of my life on Thistledown.
I laughed. Chung did not move or change her expression.
“You are dead men,” she said quietly to Salap and me. “You will not carry any of our words back to Lenk.”
“Hyssha,” Brion said, pulling her hand from his wrist, “None of that means anything. What Lenk does means nothing, and what I do ... Nothing. Look at the green. I've given her the tools. The advantage. I made my request clear.”
“Caitla is dead,” Chung said. “My sister won't come back.”
The wall of green at the end of the path trembled violently, a cleft forming in the middle and deepening, while the edges pushed to either side. In this parting green sea, our biological Moses seemed as surprised as any of us. A haze of red dust lingered in the air, drifting slowly back to the ground. The path soon extended a hundred meters beyond where we stood, to the inner edge of the new silva, and the beginning of the grounds whose boundary posts were the pillars.
“It wouldn't open for me,” Brion said to Chung. “It's opening for you. She smells you. You smell like Caitla.”
Chung stared down the trail, far less contemptuous and angry than a moment before. Her dignity broke and her arms shook, and she looked to Salap. “That's ridiculous,” she said.
“Let's go and see,” Salap said, following Brion, who had already resumed his walk.
“She is dead,” Chung said to Frick and me, with no certainty. “Nothing can bring her back.”
23
At the end of the trail lay a desolate stretch of broken lava chunks no bigger than my hand, as regular as gravel in the bed of an ancient river. This field of broken lava stretched across several kilometers, interrupted by six squat dark reddish-brown mounds, each fifty or sixty meters high, capped with craters rimmed with pale yellow, like miniature mountains tipped with impure snow. Hot springs flowed from the center of these mounds and made irregular darker slicks down their sides, pooling around the bases.
Spaced around the perimeter of the lava field, the vine-covered purple and black pillars cast long late-morning shadows over the gravel and two of the mounds. Surrounding the field, the new green silva contrasted sharply with the flat dark colors of lava and the brilliant yellow-white caps of rime on the mounds.
In the sky over the field, their numbers increasing with the warming rays of the noonday sun, hundreds of balloons lifted their cargoes of larval scions, cables dropping straight to the lava plain, only their tips moving, touching delicately on the inhospitable gravel and jerking back like the weary ends of octopus tentacles, pulled from a familiar sea. The balloons rose from the center of the field, hidden from our view by the nearest mound.
Salap could not conceal his enchantment. “We have seen a great many things and survived, Ser Olmy,” he whispered to me. “But we have never seen anything like this.”
Directly in front of us, a pool of steaming reddish-brown liquid—not lava, but supersaturated, mineral-rich hot water, the consistency of molten glass—rose between the chunks of lava and solidified with small crackling sounds, its smooth surface darkening and fogging. Beyond that pool, a number of pools had already hardened, making a series of smooth trails across the rugged gravel. Brion stood on the fogged brownish surface, then walked lightly to the next.
The vitrified pools led us around the nearest mound. Sulfurous water, steaming, bubbling, slipped down the side of the mound barely ten meters from us. On the other side, we had a clear view of the center of the field. A dark red hemisphere as large as a stadium lay at the end of the trail like an immense bubble of blood, but solid and glistening in the sun.
Around the hemisphere, the laden balloons rose slowly, doggedly, from red-rimmed craters, and began their aerial crawl to the greening silva and beyond.
“It's no different. Except for the balloons, this hasn't changed,” Brion called over his shoulder, jumping from step to step.
All of our faces took on a bloodred tinge as we approached the dome. Chung's earlier bravado had subsided; she watched everything with quiet, nervous alertness. Brion, on the other hand, had become manic, darting back and forth in the red glow of the hemisphere, eyes flashing with tears, as if he had finally come home.
Salap walked apart from all of us, lost in his own contemplations, planting his feet carefully, as if the brownish steps of the trail might crack and suck us all down. Frick stayed close to me.
The trail ended at a puckered line like a scar drawn in the dome. Brion touched the long scar in the dome's side, but by himself could not get it to expand.
Salap took Chung's elbow, pushing her to stand beside Brion. “Your place,” he murmured as she resisted.
“She smells you. She believes in you,” Brion told her. “She believes in us.”
With Chung by his side, the scar parted with a tiny sucking noise, and the edges withdrew like a curtain to form a smooth round orifice in the side of the hemisphere.
We walked through. Inside, our eyes adjusted to a blood-colored shadowy interior. Translucent arches lifted from the floor on our left, supporting the dome's perfect exterior. A few dozen meters to our right, another set of arches rose. Between the arches, suspended on thick knotted slings, or depending directly from the inner curves of the arches, enormous sacs like deflated balloons hung, their lower extremities bulging round with deposits of dark fluid.
To left and right, translucent blisters interrupted the resilient floor, each three to four meters broad and rising above the level of our waists. Within the blisters, coiled tubes and flattened oblongs pressed together against the membrane, pale in themselves, but surrounded by a dark, thick fluid like petroleum.
A dozen steps ahead, the arches met at an inner chamber, its walls curved inward, like the cubic intersection between six enormous bubbles. All the surfaces within the hemisphere were sections of large bubbles, expertly fashioned and cut or intersected by other bubble surfaces of varying diameters. We might have entered the interior of a vast radiolarian, one of the silicate-skeletoned microscopic sea creatures of Earth's oceans.
We walked slowly between these mingled wonders. A new odor filled the air, sweet as perfume, musky.
“The outer veil. Smell it,” Brion said, waving his hand. “There are eight veils, eight airborne layers of scent. I carried a small scion here once, six months ago. It struggled in my arms, and when it passed through the third sce
nted veil, it collapsed in a thick liquid and fell through my fingers. What lies within tolerates none of its children ... unless they have permission. And the only scions who have permission are the spies, the samplers and gatherers that bring information. What lies within is always hungry for patterns, blueprints, diagrams ... information.”
Halfway across the interior, we saw a storage area for slabs and chunks of rock—slates, sandstones, conglomerates, flints, and other varieties, arranged in piles with little apparent sense of order, covering perhaps a hundred square meters in the overhang of a main supporting arch. The piles rose over our heads in the center, and just to one side, an elephant-sized, many-clawed scion stood unmoving except for a slight trembling of its forward limbs: many-spiked-gripping claws as long as my legs, some with sharp chisel-shaped tips. At its base lay split sections of stone, revealing beautiful impressed fossils. Brion stepped between two stacks and pulled out a shallow slab of limestone about thirty centimeters on a side. “She had these rocks collected and brought here. She uses them as a kind of library.”
He held the twenty-kilogram slab out to us. Embedded in the limestone was a black outline, a many-legged arthropod surrounded by broad feather-shaped feelers. “When my wife and I first came here, she couldn't see. She stored these fossils and studied them without eyes, tasting and feeling them.”
Salap stood beside Brion, hands held out, fingers greedily spread. He took the fossil, eyes nearly starting from their sockets. “Was this a scion?” he asked.