Rasp dropped back a few steps, folded her arms in pique. Karn continued. “When the lesion formed, gate openers felt it in every new gate. Threads trying to get through, like spidersilk. We can see the world-lines being twirled here…But they bunch up and wind around the Way even where we can’t see them. Master Ry Ornis thought—”
“Enough!” Rasp said, rushing to catch up.
Karn stopped with tears in her eyes and glared over the parapet wall.
“I can guess a few things,” Olmy said. “What Deirdre Enoch says leaves little enough to imagine. You aren’t failed apprentices, are you?”
Rasp stared at him defiantly.
“No,” Karn said.
Her twin turned and lifted a hand as if to strike her, then dropped it by her side. She drew a short breath, said, “We act like children because of the mathematical conditioning. Too fast. Ry Ornis told us we were needed. He accelerated training. We were the best, but we are too young. It holds us down.”
A sound like hundreds of voices in a bizarre chorus floated over the Night Land, through the field that protected the Redoubt’s atmosphere. The chorus alternately rose and sank through scales, hooting forlornly like apes in a zoo.
“Ry Ornis thought the lesion was bending world-lines even beyond Thistledown,” Karn said. Rasp nodded and held her sister’s hand. “Climbing back along the Thistledown’s world-line…where all our lives bunch together with the lives of our ancestors. Using us as a ladder.”
“Not just us,” Rasp added. The hooting chorus now came from all around the Redoubt. From this side of the pyramid, they could see a slender obelisk the colors of bright moon on an oil slick rising within an immense scaffold made of parts of bodies, arms and legs strapped together with cords. These limbs were monstrous, however, fully dozens of meters long, and the obelisk had climbed within its scaffolding to at least a kilometer in height, twice as tall as the Redoubt.
The region around the construction crawled with pale tubular bodies, like insect larvae, and Olmy decided it was these bodies that were doing most of the singing and hooting.
“Right,” Karn agreed. “Not just us. Using the branching lines of all the matter, all the particles in Thistledown and the Way.”
“Who knows how far it’s reached?” Rasp asked.
“What can it do?” Olmy asked.
“We don’t know,” Karn said.
“What can we do?”
“Oh, we can close down the lesion, if we act quickly,” Rasp said with a broken smile. “That shouldn’t be too difficult.”
“It’s actually growing smaller,” Karn said. “We can create a ring gate from here…A cirque. Cinch off the Way. The Way will shrink back toward the source, the maintenance machinery in the sixth chamber, very quickly—a million kilometers a day. We might even be able to escape along the flaw, but—”
“The flaw will act weird if we make a cinch,” Rasp finished.
“Very weird,” Karn agreed. “So we probably don’t get home. We knew that. Ry Ornis prepared us. He told us that much.”
“Besides, if we did go back to Thistledown, who would want us now, the way we are?” Rasp asked. “We’re pretty broken inside.”
The twins paused on the parapet. Olmy watched as they clasped hands and began to hum softly to each other. Their clavicles hung from their shoulders, and the cases tapped as they swayed. Rasp glanced at Olmy, primming her lips.
“Enoch spoke of a plan by the Office of Way Maintenance,” Olmy said. “She claims she was sent here secretly.”
“We know nothing about that,” Karn said guilelessly. “But that might not mean much. I don’t think they would have trusted us.”
“She also said that the allthing has some larger purpose in our own universe,” Olmy continued. “Something that has to be completed, or our existence will be impossible.”
Karn considered this quietly, finger to her nostril, then shook her head. “We heard her, but I don’t see it,” she said. “Maybe she’s trying to justify herself.”
“We do that all the time,” Rasp said. “We understand that sort of thing.”
They had reached the bottom of the stairs leading up to the peak and the camera obscura. Karn climbed two steps at a time, her robe swinging around her ankles, and Rasp followed with more dignity. Olmy stayed near the bottom. Rasp turned and looked down on him.
“Come on,” she said, waving.
Olmy shook his head. “I’ve seen enough. I can’t make sense out of anything out there. I think it’s random—just nonsense.”
“Not at all!” Rasp said, and descended a few steps, beseeching him to join her. “We have to see what happened to the openers’ clavicles. What sort of elaboration there might be. It could be very important.”
Olmy hunched his shoulders, shook his head like a bull trying to build courage. He followed her up the steps.
The camera obscura was a spherical all-focal lens, its principle not unlike that of the ray-tracing binoculars. Mounted on a tripod on the flat platform at the peak of the pyramid, it projected and magnified the Night Land for anyone standing on the platform. Approaching the tripod increased magnification in logarithmic steps, with precise quickness; distances of a few tens of a centimeter could make objects zoom to alarming proportions. Monitors on the peripheral circle, small spheres on steel poles, rolled in and out with slow grace, tracking the developments in the Night Land and sending their results down to Enoch and the others inside.
Olmy deftly avoided the monitors and walked slowly, with great concentration, around the circle. Karn and Rasp made their own surveys.
Olmy stopped and drew back to take in the Watcher’s immense eye. The angle of the hairless brow, the droop of the upper lid, gave it a corpselike and sad lassitude, but the eye still moved in small arcs, and from this perspective, there was no doubt it was observing the Redoubt. Olmy felt that it saw him, knew him; had he ever met the opener, before his mission to Lamarckia, perhaps by accident? Was there some residual memory of Olmy in that immense head? Olmy thought such a connection might be very dangerous.
“The Night Land changes every hour, sometimes small changes, sometimes massive,” Enoch said, walking slowly and deliberately up the steps behind them. She stopped outside the camera’s circle. “It tracks our every particle. It’s patient.”
“Does it fear us?” Olmy asked.
“No fear. We haven’t even begun to be played with.”
“That out there is not elaboration—it’s pointless madness.”
“I thought so myself,” Enoch said. “Now I see a pattern. The longer I’m here, the more I sympathize with the allthing. Do you understand what I told you earlier? It recognizes us, Ser Olmy. It sees its own work in us, a cycle waiting to be completed.”
Rasp held a spot within the circle and motioned for Karn to join her. Together, they peered at something in complete absorption, ignoring Enoch.
Olmy could not ignore her, however. He needed to resolve this question. “The Office of Way Maintenance sent you here to confirm that?”
“Not in so many words, but…Yes. We know that our own domain, our home universe outside the Way, should have been born barren, empty. Something quickened it, fed it with the necessary geometric nutrients. Some of us thought that would only be possible if the early universe made a connection with a domain of very different properties. I told Ry Ornis that such a quickening need not have happened at the beginning. We could do it now. We had the Way…We could perform the completion. There was such a feeling of power and justification within the guild. I encouraged it. The connection has been made…And all that, the Night Land, is just a side effect. Pure order flowing back through the Way, through Thistledown, back through time to the beginning. Was it worth it? Did we do what we had planned? I’ll never know conclusively, because we can’t reverse it now…and cease to be.”
“You weren’t sure. You knew this could be dangerous, harm the Way, fatal if the Jarts gained an advantage?”
Enoch stared at h
im for a few seconds, eyes moving from his eyes to his lips, his chest, as if she would measure him. “Yes,” she said. “I knew. Ry Ornis knew. The others did not.”
“They suffered for what you’ve learned,” Olmy said. Enoch’s gaze steadied, and her jaw clenched.
“I’ve suffered, too. I’ve learned very little, Ser Olmy. What I learn repeats itself over and over again, and it has more to do with arrogance than metaphysics.”
“We’ve found one!” Karn shouted. “There’s a clavicle mounted on top of the green castle. We can pinpoint it!”
Olmy stood where Rasp indicated. At the top of the squat, massive green castle stood a cube, half-hidden behind a mass of rootlike growth. On top of the cube, a black pillar about the height of a man supported the unmistakable sphere-and-handles of a clavicle. The sphere was dark, dormant; nothing moved around the pillar or anywhere on the castle roof.
“There’s only one, and it appears to be inactive,” Rasp said. “The lesion is independent.”
Karn spread her arms, wiggling her fingers. A wide smile lit up her face. “We can make a cirque!”
“We can’t do it from here,” Rasp said. “We have to go out there.”
Enoch’s face tensed into a rigid mask. “We haven’t finished,” she said. “The work isn’t done!”
Olmy shook his head. He’d made his decision. “Whoever started this, and for whatever reason, it has to end now. The Nexus orders it.”
“They don’t know!” Enoch cried out.
“We know enough,” Olmy said.
Rasp and Karn held each other’s hands and descended the stairs. Rasp stuck her tongue out at the old woman.
Enoch laughed and lightly slapped her hands on her thighs. “They’re only children! They won’t succeed. What have I to fear from failed apprentices?”
The Night Land’s atmosphere was a thin haze of primordial hydrogen, mixed with carbon dioxide and some small trace of oxygen from the original envelope surrounding the gate. At seven hundred millibars of pressure, and with a temperature just above freezing, they could venture out of the Redoubt in the most basic pressurized worksuits.
Enoch and her remaining, ever-changing people would not help them. Olmy preferred it that way. He walked through the empty corridors of the pyramid’s ground floor and found a small wheeled vehicle that at one time had been used to reach the garden outside the Redoubt—a garden that now lay beyond the demarcation.
Plass showed him how the open vehicle worked. “It has its own pilot, makes a field around the passenger compartment.”
“It looks familiar enough,” Olmy said.
Plass sat next to Olmy and placed her hand on a control bar. “My husband and I used to tend our plot out there…flowers, herbs, vegetables. We’d drive one of these for a few hundred meters, outside the work zone, to where the materials team had spread soil brought through the first gate.”
Olmy sat in the vehicle. It announced it was drawing a charge in case it would be needed. It added, in a thin voice, “Will this journey last more than a few hours? I can arrange with the stationmaster for—”
“No,” Olmy said. “No need.” He turned to Plass. “Time to put on a suit.”
Plass stepped out of the car and nervously smoothed her hands down her hips. “I’m staying here. I can’t bring myself to go out there again.”
“I understand.”
“I don’t see how you’ll survive.”
“It looks very chancy,” Olmy admitted.
“Why can’t they open a ring gate from here?”
“Rasp and Karn say they have to be within five hundred meters of the lesion. About where the other clavicle is now.”
“Do you know what my husband was, professionally? Before we came here?”
“No.”
“A neurologist. He came along to study the effects of our experiment on the researchers. There was some thought our minds would be enhanced by contact with the ordered domain. They were all very optimistic.” She put her hand on Olmy’s shoulder. “We had faith. Enoch still believes what they told her, doesn’t she?”
Olmy nodded. “May I make one last request?”
“Of course,” Plass said.
“Enoch promised us she would open a way through the demarcation and let us through. She claimed we couldn’t do anything out there but be taken in by the allthing, anyway…”
Plass smiled. “I’ll watch her, make sure the fields are open long enough for you to go through. The guild was very clever, sending you and the twins, you know.”
“Why?”
“You’re all very deceptive. You all seem to be failures.” Plass clenched his shoulder.
She turned and left as Rasp and Karn entered the storage chamber. The twins watched her go in silence. They carried their clavicles and had already put on their pressure suits, which had adjusted to their small frames and made a precise fit.
“We’ve always made her uncomfortable,” Rasp said. “Maybe I don’t blame her.”
Karn regarded Olmy with deep black eyes. “You haven’t met a ghost of yourself, have you?”
“I haven’t,” Olmy said.
“Neither have we. And that’s significant. We’re never going to reach the allthing. It’s never going to get us.”
Olmy remembered what Plass had said. She had seen her own ghost…
7
They cursed the opening of the Way and the change of the Thistledown’s mission. They assassinated the Way’s creator, Konrad Korzenowski. For centuries they maintained a fierce opposition, largely underground, but with connections to the Naderites in power. In any given year there might be only four or five active members of this most radical sect, the rest presuming to lead normal lives; but the chain was maintained. All this because their original leader had a vision of the Way as an easy route to infinite hells.
Lives of the Opposition, Anonymous, Journey Year 475
The three rode the tiny wheeled vehicle over a stretch of bare Way floor, a deeply tarnished copper-bronze-colored surface of no substance whatsoever, and no friction at this point. They kept their course with little jets of air expelled from the sides of the car, until they reached a broad low island of glassy materials, just before the boundary markers that warned they were coming to the demarcation.
As agreed, the traction lines switched to low power, and an opening appeared directly ahead of them, a clarified darkness in the pale green field. This relieved Olmy somewhat; he had had some doubts that Enoch would cooperate, or that Plass could compel her. The vehicle rolled through. They crossed the defenses. Behind them, the fields went up again.
Now the floor of the Way was covered with sandy soil. The autopilot switched off the air jets and let the vehicle roll for another twenty meters.
The pressure suits were already becoming uncomfortable; they were old, and while they did their best to fit, their workings were in less than ideal condition. Still, they would last several weeks, recycling gases and liquids and complex molecules, rehydrating the body through arterial inserts and in the same fashion providing a minimal diet.
Olmy doubted the suits would be needed for more than a few more hours.
The twins ignored their discomfort and focused their attention on the lesion. Outside the pyramid, the lesion seemed to fill the sky, and in a few kilometers, it would be almost directly overhead. From this angle, the hairlike swirls of spinning world-lines already took on a shimmering reflective quality, like bands sliced from a wind-ruffled lake; their passage sang in Olmy’s skull, more through his teeth than through his ears.
The full character of the Night Land came on gradually, beginning with a black, gritty, loose scrabble beneath the tires of the vehicle. Olmy’s suit readout, shining directly into his left eye, showed a decrease in air pressure of a few millibars beyond the demarcation. The temperature remained steady, just above zero degrees Celsius.
They turned west, to their left as they faced north down the Way, and came upon the path Olmy had seen from the peak
of the pyramid. Plass had identified it as the road used by vehicles carrying material from the first gate Enoch had opened. It had also been the path to Plass’s garden, the one she had shared with her husband. Within a few minutes, about three kilometers from the Redoubt, passing over the rise that had blocked his view, they came across the garden’s remains.
The relief here was very low, but the rise of some fifty meters had been sufficient to hide what must have been among the earliest attempts at elaboration. Olmy was not yet sure he believed in the allthing, but what had happened in the garden, and in the rest of the Night Land, made any disagreement moot. The trees in the southwest corner of a small rapid-growth orchard had spread out low to the ground, and glowed now like the body of Number 2. Those few trees left standing flickered like frames in a child’s flipbook. The rest of the orchard had simply turned to sparkling ash. In the center, however, rose a mound of gnarled brown shot through with vivid reds and greens, and in the middle of this mound, facing almost due south, not looking at anything in particular, was a face some three meters in height, its skin the color of green wood, cracks running from crown to chin. The face did not move or exhibit any sign of life.
Puffs of dust rose from the ash, tiny little explosions from within this mixture of realities. The ash re-formed to obliterate the newly formed craters. It seemed to have some purpose of its own, as did everything else in the garden but the face.
Ruin and elaboration; one form of life extinguished, another imbued.
“Early,” Karn said, looking to their right at a sprawl of shining dark green leaves, stretched, expanded, and braided into eye-twisting knots. “Didn’t know what it was dealing with.”
“Doesn’t look like it ever did,” Olmy said, realizing she was speaking as if some central director actually did exist.
Rasp set her sister straight. “We’ve seen textbook studies of gates gone wrong. Geometry is the living tissue of reality. Mix constants and you get a—”
“We’ve sworn not to discuss the failures,” Karn said, but without any strength.