Outside the shadows had switched direction and evening was falling. The fire continued to smolder. It made me uneasy. A forest fire was unlikely in this wet, low-oxygen climate, but not impossible. Bound as I was, I could do nothing if a spark ignited the moss that carpeted this cavity.
Closing my eyes, I tried to settle my mind. It didn’t work. My thoughts contracted into knots and my concentration broke every time a beetle clacked.
It took a long time to reach a meditative state. But finally I spread into a sea of thoughts, calm and serene. Opening my eyes, I saw the cavity ripple like a viscous sea. It wasn’t truly bending; it took immense energies to curve spacetime, enough to destroy this moon. I was seeing another reality superimposed on this one, as I transformed …
Gradually I became aware again. A tiny pink flower gleamed in the moss near my eyes, a drop of water on one petal. The aroma of bubbling soup filled the air. Heat from the fire warmed the front of my torso, and my limbs ached with returning circulation. Bizarrely, I had on the blue shift again; I must have gathered more of it in psiberspace. It had a hazy translucence, though. Ghost shift.
I sat up stiffly. Gazing across the fire, I saw the tangle of roots where I had been bound. My chronometer said only seconds had passed since Hajune left. Before I made my own escape, I needed food, lest hunger stop me where roots had failed. I used the carapace of a gutted beetle to clacked down half the soup. It was tangy and bitter, with a sweet alternate more palatable than I expected. If I hadn’t seen Hajune make it, I would have never dreamed it came from over bug innards. After I ate, I doused the flames with the last of the water in the pitcher.
Then I left.
Outside, tripod trees loomed in a red night. I smelled water in one direction. The lake? I headed that way. The purported city was only thirty kilometers away, “under” Slowcoal. Normally, I could easily walk that far, but here it would be harder. I paused to fashion rough shoes out of plant flags. They weren’t the most comfortable footwear, but they made it easier to hike.
Then I set off again. As I pushed through the underbrush, I pondered this last time I had faded. An odd sense tugged my mind. What? The memory hovered at the edges of my thoughts. Frustrated, I finally gave up trying to catch it and let my mind wander.
Suddenly the memory jumped into focus. Taquinil! I had sensed him in psiberspace, Perhaps it was wishful thinking, but I felt certain he had been real. A mother’s joy flowed over me, tempered by the knowledge that it had only been a trace, nothing more concrete.
As hope buoyed my thoughts, spherical harmonic wave-functions evolved in my mind. I saw them as shimmering orbs in lavender, rose, and blue. Some resembled symmetrical flowers; others were rings and teardrops. They rotated against a silver atmosphere.
It had always been this way, my mind forming vivid mathematical images to accompany intense emotions. When I was ten, even before I had any neural augmentation, the doctors told my parents that my intellectual potential was beyond what their tests could measure with accuracy. That didn’t stop them from doing test after test, though. I seemed to fascinate them. They ascribed my increased intellect to the extra neural structures that made me a telepath, as well as to genetic and environmental factors. Over the decades, as neural surgeons augmented my brain, its capacity increased.
Eventually, to support it, I created the psiberweb.
It had formed around me in Kyle space, a tangle of threads, gold, silver, palest rose, and vivid blue, all shot through with strands the color of a deep forest, rough here, smooth there, knobbed in places, glossy in others. I untangled the threads, creating pipelines where thoughts flowed, darted, and vibrated. Electric blue light pulsed along the strands, leaving swirls of color in their wake, like the rainbows on an oil slick.
A few decades after I created the web, the evolution of my mind had reached a critical point. Then I changed. I underwent a mental phase transition the way liquid changes to gas. My mind became something else. What? I couldn’t say. But after it happened, Eldrin was my anchor more than ever. Lover and beloved: he kept me at least partway human, where I might otherwise have faded from reality altogether.
Now the Traders had Eldrin. And Taquinil was gone.
More memories: doctors speaking in low voices, unsure how Eldrin and I would take their news. Someday our son would make the same mental transition I had experienced. Taquinil and I had a great deal of use to our people, enough to make the ruling Assembly define us as “invaluable resources.” But we also frightened them, everyone—except Eldrin. Year by year, decade by decade, he had watched our son’s intellect grow, a proud father bemused by the luminous genius he had sired. Only Eldrin truly accepted us as we were. Our intellects neither overawed nor put him off. He simply loved us. And so we loved him back, unconditionally, with all our hearts.
Eldrin, Love, where are you? Now that the memories had begun, I couldn’t stop the harrowing images. Taquinil and I were facing Eldrin inside an octagonal chamber. Behind Eldrin, waroids approached, Trader commandos in body armor. Walking fortresses. Taquinil shouted a warning to his father, but his words stretched out in the slow-time around the singularity.
Singularity?
Yes. It punctured spacetime in an incandescent column, coming out of Kyle space, existing within that octagonal chamber, then returning to the netherworld from whence it came. That last moment seared into my mind: Eldrin staring at us, caught around the waist by the waroid behind him, his left foot lifted, his arms outstretched, his body straining against his captor’s armored limb. Desperation filled his gaze. And love. Terror and love.
A tear ran down my cheek. Had I lost them both? But I had sensed Taquinil in psiberspace. I had to believe we could recover him. All those extra neural structures crammed in my skull had to be worth something. The thought that Eldrin’s sacrifice would be in vain was too painful to endure.
I swept aside more brush and stumbled forward. With no warning, I came out onto the promontory above the lake. I felt as if I were repeating history, like a wave, coming here over and over, ebbing and flowing against the shores of reality. Except now I knew what to do: find the starport in the brooding land beneath Slowcoal.
Dawn reddened the sky and Slowcoal spanned on the horizon. Walking to the edge of the cliff, I looked around for a path down to the lake. My steps knocked chunky rocks off the promontory, and they slowly dropped to the water far below. When they hit, swells rolled across the lake, rising high in the low gravity. Their slow crests caught sparks of red light and glinted like rubies.
A presence stirred in the forest, distant but closing fast. Hajune.
I dove off the promontory. As I sailed away from the cliff, my mind stretched out and beyond, seeing all my surroundings, even myself arching through the air, a translucent figure silhouetted against the scarlet sky and the great disk of Slowcoal.
4
Slowcoal
I broke the surface and gulped in air. Drops of water rained lazily over me in fat spheres. No, not spheres. Spheres ware hollow. These were balls. Elongated balls. They weren’t perfectly round even in this gravity. Another memory came, my father-in-law saying, You spend too much time with your equations. But his tone had been fond.
I swam smoothly to the shore. As I waded onto the pebbly beach, a green bulldozer-bug the size of my foot scuttled into the forest. My shift was plastered to my body, almost transparent, but at least it hadn’t dissolved.
The forest resumed a few steps up the beach. I made my way into that surreal landscape of giant roots and tripods. Nausea plagued me. According to my internal sensors, it came from lack of food and sleep, exposure to the elements, unfriendly bacteria, and impurities in the air. It didn’t bode well: none of that was likely to improve unless I found help. Even if I did locate people, they might not like me any more than Hajune did.
After about an hour, I had to stop. My stomach felt like it was turning inside out. Sitting on a root, I bent over and held my abdomen. Sweat beaded my forehead.
What had gone wrong? I shouldn’t have ended up alone, without recourse, poisoned and hurt. Taquinil and I should have come out in a controlled environment designed to help us recover. We couldn’t have gone into that singularity without preparation. Shoving people into a hole in spacetime wasn’t something you did on the spur of the moment Either our plans hadn’t been complete or we had been too rushed to do it right. But chances were I had come out near my intended target. If a city did exist where Hajune claimed, I might have contacts there. If I could just reach them.
Unfortunately, right now I was going nowhere. I slid off the root and curled up on the moss, too sick to move any farther.
A rustle came from the undergrowth. I groaned, envisioning a beetle-tank bearing down on me. Although none had attacked so far, those lobster claws of theirs deserved respect. I knew I should move, but just the thought made my stomach lurch.
No. Wait! Not a beetle. I rolled onto my back—
—and looked up at four people. They stood over me, dressed in black uniforms with red braid on the cuffs, three men and a woman, their black hair shimmering, their eyes the color of dark, discolored copper.
Manq.
I scrambled to get up, but the Manq dropped into crouches, blocking my escape. The largest one knelt back, sitting on his feet, and hoisted me over his legs, shoving me so I lay across his thighs, facedown.
They were Razers. I had seen them hundreds of times on news holos, the secret police who guarded Trader Aristos and terrorized Trader citizens. It said a lot about my diminished condition that it had taken me so long to sense their approach. But I felt them now. Their minds opened like cavities, hungry for prey. For empaths.
As I struggled, one of the Razers laughed. They didn’t even bother to draw the EM pulse guns they wore in holsters on their hips. My neural nodes helpfully calculated that it was impossible for me to fight four armed and trained guards, each with at least twice my body weight in muscle.
“Someone left us a present,” the woman said in the elegant language of the Highton Aristos. Her throaty burr made the words deceptively beautiful, a jarring contrast to the ugly images that flowed from her mind as she envisioned what they would do with me. They had a new plaything and what they intended wasn’t pretty.
Lights flickered on a gauntlet worn by another of the Razers. With a jolt of memory, I recognized the pattern. He was monitoring the area, probably on guard against discovery. Even with that precaution, it spoke volumes about their arrogance that they so casually attacked a stranger while in hostile territory. Their assumption of superiority scraped against my mind, their conviction that they had every right to indulge their Aristo-bred urge to brutality against an empath.
I tried to flip off the Razer, and surprised myself with my enhanced speed. Apparently I had more augmentation than I had realized. But the Razer moved faster. He held me down with one hand while he pushed up my shift with the other. I rammed my elbow back, aiming for his crotch. It caught his stomach instead, but at least he quit laughing. Anger surged in him, inflaming the urge to violence already in his thoughts. His mental images scared the hell out of me.
The other three Razers pulled away my shift, which fell apart with the least tug. I tried to blanket my memory of Hajune’s wife, but it hunkered in my mind, spurring terror. One of the Razers lifted his hand and pulled off a black leather, glove. He clenched his fist, then flexed his fingers. I wanted to vomit, from both fear and my upset stomach. Well, good. I stuck my finger down my throat. It didn’t take much; I gagged immediately—and upchucked all over them.
The large one gave a disgusted shout and threw me off his lap. I swung my head around, my still-spewing lunch deluging the others with half-digested beetle innards. They reacted like the first, jerking back with revulsion. That slight break in their ranks was all I needed. Energized by adrenalin, I lurched to my feet and RAN.
I plunged through the plants, uncaring that brambles tore my skin or roots gouged my feet. The path I chose cut under the bush-clogged base of a tripod tree. Huge roots blocked either side, extending to the left and right. I barely had room to scrape through, which meant the Razers would have even more trouble. I heard the hum of an EM pulse gun and the crackle of shredded foliage. The shooter may have mistimed the shot due to the low gravity, but I suspected he missed because he fired to frighten rather than kill.
On the other side of the tree, I took off, headed for a city I had never seen, with only Hajune’s sketchy description and my neural compass to set a direction. If the situation became desperate, I could try fading out of reality again. But in my depleted state, I doubted I could achieve even the minimal control I had managed before. I might come back inside a tree, up in the air, under water, or I might never make it back at all.
Time seemed to stretch as I raced in a surreal daze. My steps elongated whenever I had an open area to run in, and I sailed over the ground. Soon I reached a small lake. The sunset caught red sparks on its big, slow swells. I swam hard, relieved as the water cleaned me off. The cold numbed my cuts and scratches; I didn’t realize how much they had hurt until the pain faded. I hoped my nanomeds could deal with the influx of bacteria and who-knew-what-else from the water into my body.
I neither heard nor felt pursuit, but that didn’t mean the Razers had given up. It all depended on how much effort they felt like expending to retrieve their toy. Given my vomiting, they might have lost interest. I hoped so. But I kept up my speed.
Fleeting night swept the moon. I reached the opposite shore and plunged back into the forest. Part of my mind concentrated on finding the best path. The rest of me thought about how much I loathed this place. In my short time here, someone had tried to murder me, threatened violence, and tied me up. Razers intended a gang assault with torture. I could barely eat the food or drink the water. I couldn’t even keep my blasted clothes on.
My being alone this way made no sense. I was never alone. A lack of privacy had plagued my life, constrained it until I wanted to tear away the layers of protection the way a shimmerfly would burst free of its cocoon. But why? For what reason had I lived such a controlled life?
Oh. Yes. I remembered.
I was the Ruby Pharaoh.
Slowcoal dominated the sky, shedding angry light across Opalite. Its clouds boiled in great bands. I staggered beneath the world, holding my side, gasping as I clambered over low roots. They buckled in a twisted landscape, making strange hollows. Mist drifted in streamers, haunting the monstrous tripods. I could only see the giant bases of the trees; the rest stretched up into fog. Who had designed this manic biosphere? I would bet anything that it had gone wrong, that their simulations hadn’t predicted the plants would grow this big.
My thoughts beat in time with my labored pulse, pouring memories into my mind. Ruby Pharaoh. It was a titular position. The Ruby Dynasty no longer ruled. We hadn’t for thousands of years. That honor went to the modern Skolian government, an Assembly of representatives elected from the more powerful worlds of our civilization. But I ran the psiberweb—and the web made interstellar civilization possible. To control the web, the Assembly had to control me; hence, our constant, invisible struggle for power.
We had set that aside, however, for a much bigger struggle, one far beyond those political games.
The Radiance War.
Skolia had gone to war with the Traders. We destroyed their capital. They killed or captured our leaders. We broke their fleet. They crushed our largest military complex. We hurled our desperate armies against each other until the star-spanning battles exploded in a furious climax. It was a war unmatched in human history.
I had no idea who had won.
My neck prickled. Up until now, I hadn’t believed Kyle space could actually have imploded. I had assumed my impression of such a catastrophe was an artifact of my strange condition. Now a growing disquiet ate away at that conviction. What if the implosion had been real? It couldn’t stay that way; as long as human thought existed, Kyle space would recreate itself. But it
would reform as a new universe with no trace of the psiberweb.
The magnitude of it stunned me. The networks that linked into psiberspace also linked to uncounted optical, electronic, biological, quantum, and neural networks. If Kyle space imploded, that would pull down many of the nets linked into it, which would disrupt networks linked to those, which would disrupt others, and so on, the failure spreading like a tidal wave. The nets used by humanity were interwoven, all of them, for all of us, regardless of where our allegiances lay. It could end up in one huge, star-spanning collapse, a disaster of almost unimaginable proportions.
It could never happen. Fine. Why couldn’t I detect a hint of the web?
Then it hit me. The Traders could have precipitated an implosion if they had tried to follow Taquinil and-me into Kyle Space when we escaped. That could have collapsed the singularity. But if psiberspace had collapsed and I hadn’t vanished, I must have recreated a bubble of it, a tiny universe in the birth throes of its metaphysical big bang. Which was impossible. Supposedly. Yet I existed.
As my burst of energy faded, I became aware of my nausea, thirst, and exhaustion. I slowed to a walk, and my hair stopped flying around, hanging instead to my knees. One hundred fifty-eight years is a long time to let the protein on your head grow, even if you remember to cut it every few decades. Many cultures had tales about a person who wore his or her hair as clothes. Well, it didn’t work. Mine wouldn’t cover the front of my body even when I held it in place. It shifted all the time and kept uncovering my backside as well. It was better than nothing, though.
I heard the city before I saw it. It rumbled like a heartbeat. The green-black forest ended abruptly, and I walked out onto another promontory, a giant step in the land. Slowcoal dominated the sky, making the night almost as bright as day. Its red light bathed the scene.