He spoke slowly. “Your husband. Did he leave you to die?”
“No.” I had no doubt about that. Another memory came: Eldrin facing me, pushing me backward. Behind him, armored giants strode toward us down a pillared corridor, nightmare monstrosities of mirrored metal with no faces, human in shape but over two meters tall. Gods only knew what lived under that armor. Manq?
“Husband,” I said. “Take Manq.”
“He took the Manq?”
“No. They took him. My son—” My son what?
“You have a boy?”
“Yes. No. Adult. Grown-up.”
His eyebrows went up. “A young mother you were.”
“No. Old.” I pulled angrily against the roots holding my wrists. “My son. Where?”
“I have seen only you.”
“Cut me free. Please. Help me find my family.”
He made a derisive noise. “Why ****?”
I felt his reaction more than I understood his words. If I was Manq, then as far as he was concerned my family could rot in perdition. If the Manq had captured or killed them and wanted me, it gave him all the more reason to deny them what they sought. They owed him reparations and I had appeared. For him, that was enough.
I blinked …
Night had become day. Only embers remained of the fire.
I groaned. Not again. How long had I lost this time? Unlike before, however, this last transition was softer, filled in with vague memories. I hadn’t become as much of a ghost, at least not enough to work free of my bonds. During that strange, half-real time, the treeman had made soup. I recalled his disquiet as he gave me a bowl. My hands had been translucent. He had hoped the food would make me solid again.
The cavity was empty now. Beyond the entrance, day was darkening into night. Iridescent arthrops flitted around the fire. They must have been coming in for a while, because some hung on my hair, giving it a sheen. The effect created a sense of familiarity—one I hated.
Aversion surged through my mind. Pain. My thoughts recoiled. Frustrated, I turned my concentration to the now absent treeman. What did he want? His mind had roiled with conflicted emotions: the urge for revenge that prodded violence; the compassion that stayed his hand; the desire that urged him on; the kindness that counseled restraint; the fear that gave him pause; the loneliness that sought company; and his growing doubt I was Manq. Unfortunately, no matter which emotions won out, none of the likely results involved him letting me go.
How to leave? Cut the cords? With what? Yell for help? To whom? Those hordes of people I had seen roaming the forest? Even if anyone else lived here, I had no reason to believe they would help. My struggles so far had succeeded only in tightening the cords. I suspected the plant grew these “roots” to feed itself by holding its captured prey until it died, after which the decomposing body provided nutrients. Being plant mulch wasn’t on my list of useful pastimes.
I needed a new approach, an escape too quirky for the tree-man to foresee. It would help if I understood why I had ended up here. But when I concentrated, the memories fled. So I let my mind wander. Math swirled in my thoughts: Fourier sums, Laplace transforms, Bessel integrals, Airy functions, beautiful, fascinating …
Selei transforms.
Selei?
Like my name.
My name.
Dyhianna Selei. That was my name. Hah! I was getting somewhere.
I had invented the Selei transform at age ten. A strange pastime for a child, but I had enjoyed it. It was a game, really, one that interested only a handful of scholars. The transform defined a universe outside our spacetime. That itself wasn’t dramatic; many math theories described spaces that were unusual compared to our own. They weren’t real in a physical sense. You couldn’t visit them. They were just math. But the Selei universe had a difference.
We had found a way to visit.
Academicians had a catchy phrase for it: a Hubert space spanned by an infinite set of orthonormal Selei eigenfunctions. Everyone else just called it psiberspace, or Kyle space. Matter couldn’t move from our universe into Kyle space. Only thoughts. People couldn’t enter that universe any more than they could physically enter their own mind.
Except somehow my son and I had done that. We had become thoughts. I had almost dispersed in psiberspace, my mind spreading like ripples in a pond. Coming back to this universe was difficult. I was doing it now, wave by partial wave, but a void existed where I should have sensed my son. Taquinil. Taquinil Selei.
He was gone.
The treeman left me to brood, alone in the cavity, caught tight by the roots. Or maybe he left me die. I had no intention of doing either.
I practiced shifting reality.
First I relaxed my mind. Drifted. I became an infinite sum of partial waves. Spherical harmonics. Why I had fragmented into spherical harmonics instead of some other functions, I had no idea, but it had a certain poetry. Harmonics of thought.
I focused on a purpose: leave. Could I enter psiberspace and come out in a new place? In math, if you took a function from one “space” to another and then changed its shape, it would also have a new shape when you took it back to the first space. Engineers did it all the time with Fourier transforms, going from a space where time varied to one where energy varied. For Selei transforms, spacetime defined the first “space” and thoughts defined the second. If I went into psiberspace, altered my thoughts, and came back, it ought to change my position and time here.
Closing my eyes, I tried to fade. Except it wouldn’t work. After all the shifting in and out of this universe that had bedeviled me, now I couldn’t do it. If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought Kyle space had vanished, imploded like a contracting universe collapsing at the end of time.
Pah. Psiberspace couldn’t implode. I thought of the Fourier analogy. If time existed, so did energy. You couldn’t have one without the other. The same held true for Kyle space; as long as people could think, it existed.
But that didn’t mean we could reach it. We accessed it through the psiberweb, a network of specialized computers. In Kyle space, a thought could exist everywhere, like a peaked wave. Similar thoughts peaked close together; dissimilar thoughts peaked far apart. As soon as a telop, a telepathic operator, transmitted a thought, it existed throughout the web. Other telops could immediately pick it up whether they were in the next building or across the galaxy. The web gave us instantaneous communication—and so provided the glue that held together interstellar civilization.
If I were a telop, that could explain my military bodyguards. True telepaths were rare; the strongest of us were less common than one in a trillion. You needed telops to use the psiberweb, and the web offered immense strategic advantage to whoever controlled it, so the military recruited many of us.
Had the war torn apart the web? No wonder I had so little control in Kyle space. I needed a new web node. But making such a node required extensive technological support, none of which I had here.
I clasped my bound hands and leaned my head against my knuckles. My arms ached from being in the same position for so long. But I couldn’t let myself become disheartened. Surely if I concentrated enough, I could affect some change in psiberspace. I probably couldn’t do much, which meant I wouldn’t alter my position here more than a small amount. Nor would I have much control. It was a risk, but it was better than waiting for whatever the treeman intended.
A scraping noise broke the quiet. I opened my eyes. Across the cavity, two legs sheathed in boots showed in the entrance. Red light bathed them, the fast changing luminance of either dawn or sunset. The treeman crouched down and ducked through the opening. He carried a cord strung with giant beetles, one iridescent green, one brilliant red, and one vivid blue.
He glanced at me, then looked away as if to avert danger. Settling by the fire pit, he laid down his dead beetles. Then he set about remaking the fire, using plant flags for fuel. To start the flame, he used a flint—and that one object spoke volumes.
I re
cognized the markings on that flint. Its design came from a well-known interstellar merchant who sold through the web marketplace, often called the cyber-nexus. Someone here had access to an off-planet network. It was the only way the treeman could have that flint. Its purchase order had to have gone through the psiberweb. I had often seen such orders flitting along its conduits. Relief trickled over me. Perhaps a safer escape existed than dispersing back into limbo.
The treeman worked on gutting his beetles, never glancing up. But I felt his awareness of my presence. He wanted sex. Why he held back I wasn’t sure, but from his mind I sensed that a gentle person hid behind that implacable exterior. The Manq’s destruction of the forest had scarred his emotions.
It came to me then, crashing like a wave heavy with storm foam.
I spoke softly. “Was she your wife?”
He jerked as if I had hit him, and froze in the process of setting a flag-leaf on the fire. Then he looked at me. “They made me watch.” Even more than the grate of his voice, his grammar told of his agony. My translation nodes didn’t have to alter it. Shay sentence structure changed when the speaker was upset, becoming akin to more widely spoken Skolian languages. It was why many of us sounded distraught to the Shay even when we were perfectly calm.
“They tied me to a tripod,” he said. “Then they made me watch.”
“I’m sorry.” Gods, what had I stumbled into? Had the people he called Manq forced him to watch while they murdered his wife? No wonder rage drove him.
He dropped the flag into the fire. Sparks jumped into the air and floated down, turning into tiny embers. One hit the wet moss and sizzled.
“They were Traders,” I told him. Just saying the name made me queasy. Sweat trickled down my neck.
He poked the flames with a green stick. “Who trades?” Strain crackled in his voice.
“The Manq. We call them Traders. Aristo Traders.” They had red eyes instead of copper, but everything else he had said fit. “Their hair glistens like water.” I sifted through my language modes for a Shay word. “Manq hair glitters.”
His face became more drawn. “Yes.”
I did a search for words that resembled manq and came up with maana. That didn’t help much, given that it meant “with one’s nose cut off.” Then I found mankatuul, for “trades pain.” It derived from the ancient Iotie word ma’tuul, meaning “base” or “vile.”
“Mankatuul,” I said.
Gazing at the fire, he repeated it in his own dialect. “Manqatile.”
“They took my husband” Pain saturated that realization.
“I don’t believe.” He fixed me with a hostile stare. “You are they.”
“I am their enemy.” I understood him now. Dying was a better fate than capture by Aristos.
But my husband? Eldrin? What had happened?
The memory crashed in like mental thunder. Eldrin had pushed me and Taquinil through a “door” from our universe into Kyle space. My last sight had been of Eldrin standing unprotected, in his sleep trousers and robe, his arms outstretched from shoving his wife and son. Our bodyguards lay dead around him. They had striven until the very end to protect us. A Trader warrior had reached Eldrin, eight feet tall in its mirrored body armor. It loomed behind him, its massive arm clamping around his waist.
Nausea swept over me. “They took him.”
“Say again?” the treeman asked.
My voice shook. “My husband. The Manq took him.” And our son? Both Taquinil and I had fallen out of our universe. But he had never come back.
I struggled to stay calm, though I wanted to shout. “Untie me. I must find help.”
He lifted the line of beetles into his lap. “You are lying.”
“No! Is truth.”
He drew a knife out of its sheath on his belt, a blade sharp and modern, with a cyber-nexus trademark on its hilt. It glittered in the red light. Did he intend to cut me free? Or kill me?
“Let me go,” I said. “Please.” I wasn’t used to asking. Usually people asked me to do for them.
“You tell this story to make me feel sorry.” He cut open the red beetle and shook its liquid innards into a clay pot. “It will not work.”
Despite his unyielding pose, I felt his doubts. “Is truth.” I labored with the language. “Much is at stake. Thousands of colonies. Do you want the Manq to control it all?”
“I understand you not.” He opened the green beetle as if he were cracking an egg, then emptied it into the pot and dropped its carapace on the ground. “You talk too fast.” He picked up the blue beetle. “And you say words oddly.”
“Try, I do. But my Shay is small.”
He gave me a startled glance. “Hai! You speak Shay. Not Hajune Shay.”
“What is Hajune Shay?”
“My speak.”
Hajune. It might derive from Ha’te june, which in ancient Iotic meant “the other.” “Hajune is another form of Shay?”
“Shay, city language. Hajune, forest language.”
My hope jumped. “A city is here?”
“Thirty kücks west, in the land under the full coal.”
Klicks. Nowadays that terminology was mostly used by spacers, another indication the treeman didn’t live in isolation. “What is the full coal?”
He motioned upward with the blue beetle. “Slowcoal. The planet.”
I spoke carefully, drawing on language routines that continually updated as we conversed. “If we go to where Slowcoal fills more of the sky, will we find this city?”
“Of course. You know this not? You talk like them.” He studied me. “City Shay are not Manq. City Shay hate Manq.”
“As do I.” We were finally getting somewhere.
“Then you are from the city?”
“Even farther.”
“The starport” He made it a statement.
My hope jumped. “Yes. The port.” It was true in the sense I thought he meant, that I came from beyond Opalite.
He showed me his knife, a diamond-edged steel blade. “At the docks, I traded for this. That docker, he wanted nothing more than a shirt I made. For that nothing shirt, he gave me this.”
“A fine knife,” I agreed. As long as he used it on beetles and not me.
“Where is your home?” he asked.
I started to say I didn’t know. Then I realized I did. It was on a space habitat called the Orbiter. Eldrin and I lived there together. I served as liaison between the Skolian government and psiberweb. Eldrin was a singer, a glorious baritone. He wrote folk ballads. I had always loved his music, fascinated by the mathematical intricacies within its melodies. Our son Taquinil was an economics professor at Imperial University on the planet Parthonia. He had been visiting us when the Traders attacked.
“I live in a space station,” I said.
He gutted the last beetle, dumping its insides into the pot. “A strange place, without trees.”
“Many trees are there.”
“It is hard to imagine.” He set the pot in a tripod of wet green sticks and placed it over the fire.
“Treeman, have you a name?”
He glanced at me. “What say?”
“Your name, I know it not.”
“Why call me ‘treeman’?”
“The first time I saw you, it looked like you came out of a tree.”
His expression lightened, gentling his face. “Tripodman is better, then. I am like that.” Although it was the first time I had seen him smile, he obviously did it often; it creased well-worn lines around his eyes.
Curious now, I asked, “Other names have you, Tripod-man?”
“Hajune Tailor.”
“Tailor? You sew clothes?”
Hajune reddened. “The city Shay trade many fine goods for these nothing clothes I make.” He stirred the liquid in the pot, and an aroma filled the cavity, tangy and rich, like exotic spices mixed with bittersweet fruit. “But I prefer Hajune. It means ‘the Other Man.’ Forest man, not city man.”
I felt his love for the
forest. And he enjoyed his profession. If the clothes he wore were any indication, he undervalued his abilities a great deal. Few people even knew how to tailor anymore, let alone with such finesse. Rich offworlders would pay a fortune for his work. He needed an agent. He could get a lot more for those clothes than a knife, even one as expensive as his diamond-steel blade.
“Impressive they are, your tailor-things,” I said.
“I use only dead plants. Never living.” He swept out his arm. “This forest is home. Here we loved—” He stopped, his animation vanishing like a doused light. He lowered his arm. “Here I prefer to live.”
His loneliness filled the cavity. Tears gathered in my eyes, from both his grief and my response to his pain. His anguish didn’t show on his face, but I absorbed it from his mind. He had cherished his wife, wanting nothing more than to live with her among the trees and lakes.
This time when his memory came, I saw the assault in gruesome detail. The images shattered. His wife’s copper-eyed attackers weren’t Aristos. These were Razers, the secret police created by the Aristos. Half Aristo and half slave, Razers occupied the top level of the Trader slave hierarchies, which meant they had considerable wealth and authority themselves.
Aristo genes dominated their makeup.
Tvyo of them held a woman on the ground, a female version of Hajune, tall and lovely. Hajune’s memory didn’t include a full image of himself, only as much as he could see with his own vision. He fought like a madman, crazed with desperation, while two other Razers bound him to the leg of a giant tripod. His wife’s screams filled the universe. Her terror infused my mind, as it had filled Hajune’s; I experienced it as he had felt it, through her mind.
Here in the cavity, Hajune gave a strangled cry. Leaning over, he wrapped his arms around his body. Then he lurched to his feet and left the cavity. He strode off into the forest.
Gods. How did he live with that emotional earthquake of a memory? Nor could I understand how such an atrocity could have happened here. This was a Skolian world. Razers couldn’t brutalize our citizens. Trader secret police became war criminals the moment they entered Skolian space.
I had to do something. For Hajune. For Eldrin. I couldn’t stay on this far-placed moon while Aristos imprisoned my husband, who had given up his freedom, possibly his life, to prevent my suffering a fate similar to Hajune’s wife’s. This much I knew, at an instinctual level: if the Traders caught Eldrin, Taquinil, or me, they would never let us escape, not even through death.