Catch the Lightning (41 page)

Althor shrugged. “Of course they traded. The Allieds wouldn’t give up Qox for nothing.”

Eldrin frowned. “I was there, Althor. That trade wasn’t orchestrated by the Allieds. The boy did it himself.”

“The Allieds say otherwise.”

“The officer in charge was protecting himself.” Eldrin snorted. “You think he would admit such an exchange took place under his nose without his knowledge? Of course he claimed credit.” Behind Althor, in the direction of Izu Yaxlan, a spurt of dust showed in the desert. “Someone is coming,” I said.

The red plume neared, resolving into a rider. He reached the ranks of Abaj and jumped off his mount. As several Abaj led him to the fountain, the three of us stood up. The messenger knelt before Althor’s father. When Eldrin touched his shoulder, the man rose and spoke with deep respect, the regard Althor should have been giving his father. Eldrin nodded, then tilted his head in my direction.

The Abaj knelt before me. When I touched his shoulder, copying Eldrin’s gesture, he stood and spoke to me. I glanced at Althor.

“They’ve finished the genetic tests,” Althor said. “This man has the results.”

My pulse leapt. “What does he say?”

As Althor spoke with the Abaj, Eldrin’s incredulity spread out in a glittering mist. Finally Althor took my hands. “You are Raylican. The pure strain. Your father must also have been Maya. Your ancestors were the original seed.” He stopped. “Or not yours, but Maya from a time-shifted universe. It explains why we’ve had so much trouble identifying our ancestors. We’ve looked for a people who lived on Earth six thousand years ago. But the Abaj estimate that only about a thousand years have passed since your DNA branched into a different evolutionary path from that of the first Raylicon settlers.” He took a breath. “And, Tina—you don’t carry the CK complex.”

“That’s good, isn’t it?” I asked.

He squeezed my hands. “It’s a miracle.”

Eldrin spoke, and Althor nodded. After a moment I asked, “What did he say?”

“That the existence of the Maya may be moot if Ragnar kills the Raylicans.”

Eldrin continued. “I doubt the Traders wish to start another war. They would rather recover the two of you according to the Paris Treaty. If it were anyone else, Jaibriol Qox would probably let it go. But any of us could serve as a Key, and both Althor and I have been bred for it. It’s why we exist. That makes recapture more worth the risk.”

The Uzan spoke to Eldrin. He listened, then motioned to his son. Althor just shook his head. It was frustrating not being able to understand them.

“What is it?” I asked.

Althor turned to me. “The Uzan suggests we copy our neural patterns into simulators and load them into the net. That way, if we’re killed here, we might survive in the web. If cloning Rhon psions ever becomes possible, they could create new bodies and transfer our simulations into them.”

“That’s horrible,” I said.

More gently he said, “It wouldn’t work. Even the best neural simulations are less than the human mind they come from.”

“The Jag did it with me.”

Althor nodded. “I’ve a record of it. It was a good simulation. It also included a Kyle transfer of your consciousness. But that was still a poor substitute for your mind. It was already degrading when you downloaded back into your own brain.”

I rubbed my fingers on the hinge in his hand. “Even if they figured out the cloning, wouldn’t it fail for you? Or not fail, but… ?”

“Yes.” Althor pulled away his hand. “They would have to rebuild me. Again.”

When Eldrin spoke, Althor didn’t translate, but I understood anyway: he didn’t want his son to suffer the pain of his childhood a second time. Althor looked at him, love gentling his face. Bloodmark may have injured their bond, but nothing could destroy it.

“Ragnar has cut off our access to the electro-optic webs,” Althor said. “We can’t send out eomail via starship, either. And he has a V-class cruiser sitting in port. From Saint Parval it could destroy this entire region. From space he could slag the planet’s surface. It’s a standoff; his ships are blocking us from sending anything out and the Abaj are blocking them from entering the system.”

“We can’t use the psibernet?” I asked.

He shook his head. “I’ve worked with his covert operations agents. He has high-rated telepaths working as telops. They’re blocking psibernet transmissions. It’s the equivalent of cutting electronic or optical lines in an eoweb.”

“Become a data line yourself,” Eldrin said. “If you are a living part of the web, it makes no difference if someone cuts you off from the system. You simply move elsewhere.”

Althor made an exasperated noise. “Father, what are you talking about?”

“I think he means put your whole body into the psibernet instead of just your mind,” I said. “Then you can go anywhere you want.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Althor said.

I reddened. “Well, it was just a thought.”

Eldrin smiled when Althor translated, as if I had made a joke. I suppose it sounded that way. Either that, or he was giving me the benefit of the doubt.

Eldrin spoke to the Uzan. The Abaj responded at length, and when he finished, he asked a question. This time I guessed the meaning: What do you want us to do?

Eldrin spoke: he wanted them to go ahead.

Althor shook his head, angry. No.

“Althor?” I asked. “What is it?”

Taking my hands, he sat with me on the bench. “My father claims my mother once transferred herself, mind and body, through the net. The Uzan also says it is possible, at least for a Rhon psion. It has to do with this equation my mother has named after her.” He frowned. “They are both crazy. She must have used the net in a manner my father didn’t understand and he interpreted it in this strange way.”

“Why would he do that? And why would the Uzan agree?”

“I don’t know.” Althor hesitated. “As an equation, it works. But that is math. It isn’t a physical process.”

“How does it work?”

“You know quantum theory?” When I shook my head, he said, “It’s all wavefunctions. I have trouble with it myself. In school, I barely passed.”

In truth, he knows theory better than he gives himself credit for. It’s in his genes, after all; his mother is one of the great mathematical geniuses of her time. He described the wave-particle duality: matter sometimes behaves like particles and other times like waves. Macroscopic objects don’t act like waves because their wavelengths are too small to measure, but human beings are still wavepackets propagating through space.

“I can locate a packet by its coordinates,” Althor said. “If I want to describe where you’re sitting, I need three numbers, say your height from the ground, your distance from me, and your distance from the fountain. Your coordinates. Every point has three. It’s the same as saying three mutually perpendicular vectors specify a point in space. Those vectors span our three-dimensional universe.” He paused. “But suppose you exist in a space where it takes an infinite number of vectors to specify ‘location.’”

“Places like that exist?”

He nodded. “Mathematically. They’re called Hilbert spaces, after an Earth mathematician. The ‘vectors’ are wavefunctions.” It sounded crazy. “What do they do?”

Althor snorted. “Torment engineering students who have to take classes in quantum theory.” When I laughed, he smiled and cupped his hands as if he were holding a universe. “The wavefunctions are building blocks. They depend on physical quantities, like position, time, or energy. In other words, Hilbert spaces are built out of blocks from our universe. The math has been known for centuries. Your friends at Caltech probably studied it.” ' “But there’s more?”

“Suppose your blocks don’t depend on physical quantities. Suppose they depend on thought.”

I blinked. “Wouldn’t that mean that your location in that universe depends on what you’re thinking?”

“That’s exactly what it means.”

“Althor, that’s weird.”

He laughed. “This is why I like engineering better than theory. My mother loves this stuff, though.”

“What was the equation she discovered?”

“You know what is a transform?” When I shook my head, he said, “A transform takes a mathematical function from one space to another. You can Fourier transform an energy function into one that depends on time. The reverse transform takes it back to an energy function. You go from energy space to temporal space and back again. Children here learn Fourier and Laplace transforms in school. They study Selei transforms later.”

I had heard Joshua talk about the first two. “What’s a Selei transform?”

“It takes you from our universe to psiberspace. My mother figured it out when she was a teenager.” He exhaled. “The Abaj claim they can transform the wavefunction of our bodies into psiberspace and send us to another node. We would have to reverse the transformation ourselves: with communications blocked, there would be no way to notify anyone we were coming.” He shook his head. “It’s crazy. Suppose they actually turn our bodies into a mathematical function? Suppose it degrades while we’re in the net? What if we can’t transform back? What if we only pardy transform on one end? Or both? What would we be, semi-transparent humans? Missing parts of our body? I Can’t even guess.”

“Althor, it doesn’t sound any crazier than when we went from my universe to yours through that thing—what did you all call it?—a branch cut on a Riemann sheet.”

“That made sense.”

I smiled.. “To you, maybe. Not to me.”

An Abaj out in the desert shouted. Turning, we saw another red plume racing toward us, this one from the direction of Saint Parval, It resolved into four Abaj warriors. They were escorted to the Uzan, who conferred first with them, then with Althor and Eldrin.

Althor translated. “Ragnar has told the Abaj that by refusing to ‘surrender’ us, they are committing treason. He gives them one hour to release us. Then he will begin destroying sites on the planet.”

I tensed. “Are they going to give us up?”

“No.” Althor looked out at the warriors, some astride their ruzik, others tending their mounts or simply standing by them. “Six millennia of fealty do not vanish with one threat.”

“Can’t we take a ship up from another starport?” I asked. “The Jag put us here because Saint Parval has the only functioning starport on the planet.” He shrugged. “We probably don’t need a port to take off. But Ragnar will attack any ship trying to escape. And he has a state-of-the-art V-class cruiser.”

“Which do you think is more likely?” I asked. “We try to escape and are recaptured or destroyed, or we use the psibernet and don’t make it?”

He grimaced. “Both are suicide.”

“We have to do something.” I squeezed his hands. “Your father says his way has been done. Have you ever seen an Abaj-type ship escape a warship like Bloodmark’s?”

“No.”

“Then shouldn’t we try the method that’s worked?”

“I don’t know it’s worked, damn it.”

“Your father—”

He made a frustrated noise. “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

“Did you ever think that maybe your opinion of him has been poisoned by Bloodmark?” More gently I said, “You’re acting just the way Bloodmark would want.”

Althor stared at me, his emotions so intense I felt them despite his barriers: denial, shame, anger, guilt. Underneath all of that he hurt, both from Bloodmark’s betrayal and from the wounds in his relationship with Eldrin. Despite their prickly interactions, he loved his father deeply.

Althor stood and spoke to him. Eldrin nodded, and they walked away, to the other side of the fountain. They spoke quiedy, Althor sometimes dropping his gaze, unable to look at Eldrin. A tear ran down his face and he quickly wiped it away. Eldrin. watched him gendy, with a love nothing could ever wash away, neither the years of struggling to make a child whole nor the years of an interloper poisoning their lives.

Finally they returned to us. Althor said, “We’ll try the psiber-net.”

Tiqual rose out of the desert, a solitary pyramid hundreds of feet tall. The setting sun gave it a luminous bronze glow, accenting the shadow that stretched out from its base into the darkening desert. Its name gave me chills, so like ancient Tikal on Earth, the greatest of the great Maya cities, a metropolis of glorious temples and legendary dynasties.

I rode with Althor this time, Eldrin at our side and the Abaj all around. We approached Tiqual at a stately pace. No city surrounded it, only a courtyard tiled with close-fitting triangular bricks the color of terra-cotta. Wind blew across the courtyard, ruffling sand into the air and letting it down in wings of red dust.

Several hundred yards from the pyramid, an arch glowed in the aged sunlight. Its sides were fluted blocks nearly three meters tall, its top a long stone. The Abaj rode through it two abreast. As we came closer, the sides resolved into statues; each was a woman, a muscled warrior with her arms stretched over her head to support the top stone. Neither wore anything except the Abaj sword hanging from her belt. They showed no shyness, with breasts lifted high and heads thrown back, their faces proud in the bronzed light.

A statue as tall as a man stood near the arch, one of the mythical spirit companions. He had a powerful body similar to a mountain lion, but longer. His head was human, with a hooked nose and heavy-lidded eyes that watched the desert, sensual and forever half-closed. Instead of ears, horns spiraled in his luxuriant hair.

We rode under the arch and across the courtyard to the pyramid. The entrance was a ruzik’s head with its mouth open in a roar. In truth, I’ve never heard a ruzik roar. But it created an impressive doorway, one over ten feet tall.

From far away Tiqual looks like a Maya pyramid. It has the pyramidal base with terraced sides and a steep stairway that climbs the front of the temple. At the top is a chambered sanctuary, and on top of that a roof comb, a high-reaching crown of masonry hollowed out by airy vaults. But up close, its differences show, from the ruzik’s gaping mouth at the base of the pyramid to the intricate designs made from the red, gold, and yellow bricks used in its construction. Yet its differences only accent its haunting similarities.