Bright of the Sky (15 page)

“I had a translator. He spoke my language. Yulin drowned him.”

Anzi bowed her head. “Unfortunate.”

At this breezy comment, Quinn snapped. “Now your master will have to wait for his slow student.” He was depressed by the death in this place. He’d only been here a short while, but already, there were three deaths, and one was Johanna.

“You not wanting your life, Dai Shen?”

He paused. That depended. Today, he was not so sure. “Why are you calling me that name?”

She continued deeper into the woods. Her voice trailed back as he reluctantly followed. “You can have new name. We conceal you from bright lords. Dai Shen is name for you, so saying Master Yulin.”

He thought that he’d found a crack in Yulin’s armor. If he was hiding Quinn from the Tarig, Yulin was no doubt straying from the Radiant Path. Maybe the crack could be widened.

They came to a tall cage within which birds, some furred, some bald, flew to perches in treetops.

“We climb,” Anzi said, jumping up to the first strut where she could gain a foothold. Without waiting for him, she began to climb up the cage, using the cross-pieces where the birds roosted. He followed her.

“Keep fingers away,” came her voice.

Too late. A ochre-colored bird dove at his hand, narrowly missing it with its spiky teeth. After that, Quinn paid more attention, finally emerging on the lid of the aviary, above the treetops.

Here was a view of the limitless plain that Quinn had seen before. In the foreground, on every side, stretched a city, grand and dense, one that might house a million people. Above, the unending bright threw its blanket across the sky. The smell of the lavender grasses of the great plain came to his senses in a rush of clove-tinged perfume. The expanse lay devoid of any geological feature, or tree, or settlement besides the immense city beneath him. Whatever the towering gray walls had been that he’d seen before, they were invisible from here. The staggering emptiness of this land conveyed less a sense of isolation than of power. There was land enough to squander.

Anzi gestured. “Great city of Chalin sway,” she said. “Yulin’s city of Xi.” She crouched in the center, where a top mast formed a pinnacle. Quinn crept closer to her, stepping carefully on the struts, below which lay a hundred-foot fall. “Chalin, that is people here. Outside”—she gestured to the plains—“is many sways, not all Chalin.”

She pointed to a palatial building layered into a hillside. “Master Yulin house.”

Yulin’s dwelling was a sprawling palace, hewn from the same golden-black material as Quinn’s own hut. Its architecture was one of rounded forms: domed roofs and half-circle porticos. The master’s fine black stone gave way, in the rest of the city, to deep browns and golds, sparkling under the bright. “Yulin rules here?” Quinn asked.

“Master care for sway as please the Tarig to do so.”

The noises of the city came easily to this perch, and Quinn heard the music that had caught his attention earlier. Anzi pointed to a plaza, where a line of people wound through in a bedecked procession. The bright gleamed in raised cymbals and polished horns.

“This day of sadness, for Caiji, she dead. This her . . .” she search for a word. “Her funeral line.”

They watched the procession thread through an open space crowded with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people.

“Who is Caiji?”

“Caiji of master’s many wife. Very near oldest of all wife.”

“Are you also the master’s wife?”

Anzi looked startled at this. “No, you would say, niece to master. One of many nieces. Smallest niece.”

Quinn had not had time to wonder who Anzi was. Now he thought he knew why Yulin had sent him one who couldn’t speak his language well. Because he trusted her, being a relative. He didn’t trust his interpreter. Not with the news that Quinn had brought.

She sat with ease, perched on the aviary. Her jacket sleeve fell back from her wrist as she held onto the center plinth, showing her muscular forearm. In profile, Anzi looked to be about twenty years old. But her poise was of one older.

“Tarig come to Xi, sometime. They roam here, sometime there. Looking.”

“Looking for me?”

Anzi’s eyes grew wide. “No. Lord of heaven give us not looking!”

“What do they look for?”

“Tarig do what they do.”

“When I was a prisoner among them, why did they send my wife and daughter away?”

Her face fell into sadness, as it had once before when he spoke of his imprisonment. “For controlling you better, we hearing. Separation was a grief. They use such grief. We hearing.” She thought for a moment. Then: “Also, girl and woman great gifts for those they wishing to please. And girl and woman, not being scholars, tell little that can be interesting to lords.”

So the lords wanted scholarship. . . . Despite Quinn’s distinct impression of their great power, the Tarig did lack some things. “Do the Tarig know about Earth?”

Far below his perch on the aviary, he noticed that people in the funeral procession threw things to the crowds. A few children dashed forward to snatch these offerings.

He continued, “You know about Earth, Anzi. Does Master Yulin? Do the Tarig?”

Watching the procession, Anzi said, “Everyone know of Rose. But we vow that Rose not know us. This why Tarig kill you.” She looked pointedly at him. “Unless Master Yulin hide you well, which you learn to speak also.”

“Rose? You call it Rose?”

“Yes, long time call so. On Earth there is a plant call rose?” When he nodded, she said, “We have no plants shaped thus here. Nothing like such a creation as rose.”

A breeze lifted Quinn’s hair, bringing to his nostrils the smell of dust and cooking and a tangle of chemicals that might be natural or manufactured. Anzi herself smelled like a human woman. And, if copied,
was
she human? He ran his hand through his hair, now growing beyond its usual cropped cut. It was, he knew, the same color as Anzi’s: a hot white. Surely the sky didn’t bleach all hair this color. Someone altered him to look like one of the Chalin people. Perhaps even the first visit here, he had to hide.

“Tell me my story, Anzi.”

She turned to look at him. Her face was sad. “Better if I speak better. When that story is said.”

“Say the story, now, Anzi. I’m ready.”

She crouched silently, looking over the city to the plain beyond.

He hated to wait on her whims, and he hated the constant effort of trying to remember. A lid pressed down on his past. He wondered who had clamped it there.

After a long while Anzi began to speak. “You came here,” she said. In her voice was an overlay of regret. “You came from the Rose, behind the veil. Long time we always know of Rose, the place of young death, and many wars. At the . . . reaches . . . our scholars study Rose. Long time. But never touched Rose, nor Rose touch us.”

The music of the procession still came to their high perch, but more faintly now, as the mourners wound from sight. He already had questions, but he feared interrupting her.

Anzi went on: “Then you come. In ship. Very confused time. Tarig want you, and keep you. Does Rose know about Entire? This Tarig ask. What powers dwell in Rose? Difficult to know what Rose understands. Our views of you are small, visions in a shattered glass. Tarig hope that you do not know us, but how to be sure? They wish to know enemy, and so keep you and asking questions. Send wife and daughter away, to keep you to please them. You please them if you think someday wife and daughter give back to you.” She shook her head, over and over. “Never give back to you.”

He listened to her words, memorizing them.

“Tarig are pleased. Learn that Rose is ignorant. Not fear so much Rose, since Rose not understand there is the All. Entire of all things. You please them. They keep you.”

“How long?” He couldn’t help but ask.

She flattened her mouth, thinking. “Four thousand days, is possible.”

Four thousand days, that was almost eleven years, close to what he’d always thought.

Anzi went on: “Then one time you strike Hadenth, the high lord. We hearing this, but hard believe to strike a Tarig. So Tarig hunt you. But you go back? You gone back?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know what I did. I think I went back then. I can’t remember.” He glanced at her. “How would I have gone back?”

“This we wondered. How can Titus Quinn disappear among us? If gone back, how go back and not die in the black space? So I thought—we all thought—that you have died.” She seemed sad, recounting this, and Quinn thought perhaps he had not just made enemies in this place. She continued, “We hear that to not submit to high lords, you ended your days.” She smiled tentatively. “Not true, I see.”

Unexpectedly, she seemed genuinely glad, and he was touched. Perhaps the story of his capture was known, and some people rooted for him. He would ask later.

“So I was here four thousand days. And then disappeared . . . How long have I been gone?”

Anzi frowned, considering. “One hundred days. Not long. But long enough for us to wonder where Titus Quinn is.”

This proved it then, that there was no constant relation of time between here and there, between Anzi’s land and his own. Back on Earth he’d languished two years without his family. Here only a few months had elapsed. A ratio of seven to one. Far different from the time when Earth registered his absence from the K-tunnel as a half year, and he’d experienced Entire time as ten years. A ratio of one to twenty.

He finished the most important computation: His daughter would be nineteen or twenty years old. Her childhood gone. He had been among the Tarig for her whole childhood.

“Why can’t I remember, Anzi?”

“This we wonder also.” She smiled again, a very pleasant expression on her usually stern face. “But you will remember. No one can have your past, take same from you. You will recover it, yes.” The smile faded. “When you do, you must remember to forgive.”

“First, justice.”

“Entire justice is thing to learn. You are here now, so learn our justice. It begins with vow to keep invisible to our enemies, of which you, I am sorry, are one. In view of Tarig. Some of us not sure to see you as enemy. I am one of these, you must know.”

He would not argue this just now. There was too much to digest.
Ten
years . . .

“Dai Shen,” Anzi said, turning toward him to regain his attention, which was wandering to Johanna and the time before. “Here is thing to learn. It is most big thing, I believe. Caiji, who now dead, took her life on one hundred thousandth day of life. She lived long, and wishes to have remembering as Caiji of one hundred thousand days. You understand how long is one hundred thousand days?”

After a quick calculation, Quinn said, “About three hundred of Earth years.” He added, “The time it takes Earth to travel around its sun.”

“Yes. Suns.” She paused, as though considering this odd word. “We have no years, yet days we have, and count thus. Caiji lived as long as I may live, but you will not see one hundred thousand days, Dai Shen. This is thing to know. Your life is not so long. Yet all peoples in Rose would live long. Yes? So to come here, they are pleased to have one hundred thousand days or more. That is why the Tarig fear you. To take our All. To be longer than you are.”

“Are your lives truly so long, Anzi? Time might flow differently here, making it only seem that way.”

She seemed unperturbed. “No. The lords say your world has only short lives: thirty thousand days, not many more, of health and strength. But the lords extend our lives, by their grace. Some say that the night kills you, but believing thus is hard. It is more likely, and the lords say it, that the bright sustains us.”

The bright. If it was some function of the bright, then that was why, if humans came, they might be recipients of the long life Anzi claimed could be found here.

She began to climb down then, and he followed her. At the foot of the aviary, she turned to him. “Because of such long life, you perceive why you must never be here. First vow, which breaking is to die, we must withhold knowing of Entire from Rose.”

“Too late now, I expect.”

She closed her eyes. “I fear so.”

“Master Yulin won’t want humans here.”

“To come with your many people? Your wars? No.”

“Or to pass through? To shorten Rose travel?”

She frowned. “Such travel is not possible, we are thinking. I am sorry.”

“I traveled here. The first time by accident, the second time deliberately. And back again. So it
is
possible.”

“No, it is a game of chance, especially going to the dark universe, your universe. You cross over to the Rose, but likely into black space. Most of the Rose is empty . . . you say,
vacuum
? No one knows how to pick place of arrival. Not even Master Yulin, nor all the Chalin scholars know this.”

Easy to claim that safe travel wasn’t possible, but this was a matter to discuss with Yulin, not Yulin’s niece.

She resumed leading him through the garden, naming things, drilling him in the Lucent tongue. “You learn more words,” she said. “So please Master Yulin.”

She was relentless. But he was also grateful for her. He did need to learn the Lucent tongue, and quickly. For Sydney’s sake. For when he took her home.

CHAPTER NINE

This is how All began.

    
Once the Tarig lived in a realm outside. It was the first created
realm, the Heart. No one but lords could live there, and they
dwelt alone in their magnificence. After many archons, they saw
that a realm was forming in a new place. They watched as the
realm grew and formed a vast land of dwelling. Thus the Entire
was born, but in barrenness, with no wonders of life.

    
The Tarig sent simulacra, automatons with no need for food
or air, to explore. The simulacra reported on all that they had
seen. The Entire was barren, they said. But outside the Entire
could be seen another place, where many round worlds existed in
black air warmed by balls of fire. This was the Rose. Living
there were many sentient creatures and wondrous animals, all
living their brief and sorrowful lives.