City Without End (30 page)

Jess looked surprised. “Well, all I can say is, you wouldn’t stay
here
, would you?

“Maybe not.”

A long pause. Jess was now looking at her more shrewdly. “Are you kidding me?”

Caitlin acted the distressed mom. “It’s just a tough situation.”

“Look. She’s still young. She won’t test for a few more years. And if she doesn’t have the scores, you’ll get your grandchildren from your boy. Better than nothing.”

Grandchildren?
What was the woman talking about?

Jess sighed. “It’s our chance to get it right this time. Without the dreds pulling us down, diluting the good stock.” She winced. “Sorry. Your daughter. Nothing against her. And she might be fine, she really might. She’s got those good genes.”

It was not as though middie or dred status meant you couldn’t have children. Not yet. But was it coming to that? “Right,” Caitlin responded. “Good genes. I’m counting on those.” She managed a wobbly smile.

“I know you’re anxious. But Emily will be fine. At least she’ll survive.”

Caitlin’s thoughts stopped right there.
Survive?

Jess’s expression turned bleak. “I hate what’s coming. We all hate it. It’s our home.” She snorted. “Gone. Just like that. I hate it.”

Gone?
Caitlin tried to match Jess’s expression. Bleak. Wistful. Guilty. She sensed that they wouldn’t stay on this topic. It was too unpleasant, But Caitlin needed more. “What will it look like, do you think? When it happens?”

The other woman paused. “You can’t think about things like that. It’ll make you crazy.”

“Haven’t you wondered, though?” She was pushing too hard, but she couldn’t let it rest, couldn’t back off. “I guess I’m just the nervous type.”

“But you’re committed.”

Caitlin put starch in her voice. “Jess, we’re all committed to this. You just said, you still hate it.”

The other woman grabbed her purse out of the backseat, then stopped, hand on the car door. “Yes, I hate it. I dream about it. Fire roaring like a hurricane. You don’t suppose they’ll have time to see fire, do you? I imagine the river boiling off . . . I imagine . . . I imagine . . .” Her mouth trembled. “I imagine it. I can’t describe it.” She gathered her purse in her arms like a baby.

“Let’s go in.”

The school had walls. A few tables for desks. Computers. Caitlin didn’t hear a word of what the teachers said.

She was imagining the river boiling off.

When they emerged from the instructional module, the sky was darkening toward evening. Caitlin didn’t dare ask to see the crossover place inside the reactor vault. She’d already gone too far with Jess. But then, as they drove back to the parking lot, Jess brought it up herself. The transition stage, as she called it, was off-limits. No one got in. It was a clean room, techs only.

In the mothballed reactor vault. Well, actually,
under
it. The engine itself was on the ground floor of the old reactor vault.

What engine?

That was a little spooky, Jess admitted. To be so close to the thing. The stage and the engine were sited together so that HTG had no footprint on the land. Nothing an outsider could detect.

Caitlin took a closer stare at the steel-clad structure as they passed it this time. A deep thrumming sound came from it.

“We go in, we don’t come out again,” Jess mused. She crumpled her lips.

“With the engine overhead, I think I’d rather be number sixteen. Get through it in a hurry. Last person out pulls the chain, I guess.”

Caitlin could hardly wait to be rid of Jess. She waved at the woman and fumbled for her car keys. After several tries, she got the door open.

So this was the transform Lamar had been referring to.

Oh, Titus. Oh, brother-in-law, fuck me to hell.
It was the end of the world.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

O, King of Woe, may your war last forever, may my sons be
unworthy to fight, may I die disgraced in my bed.

—a prayer

T
HE HERD GATHERED AT SHADOW EBB
, one by one and in groups, first to graze, and then to dream. They stood, heads held aloft, bearing the full weight of their double row of horns, or hanging low as though drowsing. But inwardly, they raced. Led by Riod, they joined above the roamland plain, circling, calling their herd mates, calling in that silent manner suited to the heart-joined.

Once Riod sensed enough were gathered, he led them in a communal act of will: the penetration of the dreams of the Entire. It was not difficult. All the Entire slept at the same time. All the Entire fell into Shadow Ebb at the same time, and therefore many were likely to be dreaming at once.

After his return from Rim City, Riod leached the poisons from his body by exhausting runs across the steppe. He was recovered, but riderless, a loss he felt acutely. But he was with Sydney in his intention as he led his fellow mounts into dream-space. There they told of the betrayal of the Long War: How for hundreds of thousands of days, the sons and daughters of the Entire had died on the plains of Ahnenhoon for a war that meant nothing. The Paion would have surrendered with a small concession: that the lords join their minoral back to the body of the world. But the gracious lords chose not to.

The Long War suited the lords. It united the primacies against an outside enemy. It deflected attention from the Tarig themselves, who ruled like gods, but who were pitiable, fearful creatures afraid of true life. At will, and over and over again, individual Tarig went home to the comfort of the Heart, a land of fire where all the Tarig melded into a singular consciousness. These were the beings who claimed to be gracious lords, who supposedly shared the life of the Entire. They were nothing but simulacra—a mode of being so removed from the general experience as to be no living thing at all.

Milinard the Jout tossed on his couch in the Magisterium. In his dreams he saw the Paion rap on the door of a Tarig lord. Let me in, for I am dying, the Paion cried. It was a small, weak creature, and a starving one. Though Milinard feared the Paion as much as the next sentient, he had to admit this Paion was to be pitied. The table of the lord was heaped high with food. Share with me but one meal, the Paion cried. But the lord turned away. In fury, the Paion set fire to the house of the Tarig. Out from the fiery house poured the inhabitants, but to Milinard’s surprise, it was not Tarig who ran out, but Jout soldiers, bodies on fire. They died painfully, and their wives wailed at their demise.

Fajan slept on good silk sheets at his mother’s dwelling in Rim City. He was tired from days of street parties, but his sleep alarmed him. He woke, sweating, heart racing. He’d had these dreams last night, too. And what dreams! Too crisp to be normal fugues of the mind, these dreams surely bore a message. The Long War must be resisted. It is not fought to save the Entire, but was needlessly provoked by the Tarig. Most of the morts refused service in the Long War. Now their instincts were proven right. Too agitated to return to bed, Fajan paced. Were the dreams emanations from a navitar? Who else would know such deep secrets? He looked around at his comfortable room in his mother’s house. What was he doing, playing at mort by ebb and the good son by day? Maybe Tai was right, that there were bigger things to do. What had Tai asked him?
What if we had to risk our lives for something worthwhile?

He wondered if the undercity shared this dream. Who could still love the Tarig after a night like this? He hurriedly dressed and slipped into the Way. The dream of the severed minoral lingered in his mind. Had the lords really cut off the sway of the Paion? It might seem unthinkable, except that it was happening again. News had been arriving by pieces every hour from travelers coming to Rim City. There was no proof yet, only rumors—that many minorals of the Arm of Heaven primacy had collapsed in the last arc of days. Things were not what they had been. The All was changing. As disturbing as that might be, it thrilled him.

Zhiya dozed in a chair by Quinn’s bed, keeping near in case his wound woke him. He’d been lucky. The gun pellet entered the right side of his chest just below the pectoral muscle, missing both heart and liver, fortunately for him. The healer had used a chest tube to drain the fluid, but Quinn still slept sitting up. Helice had very nearly killed him, though, and Zhiya dearly wished that her own operatives had earlier managed to assassinate the creature. With such murderous thoughts, it was perhaps no wonder she had violent dreams.

Quinn had told her that the Inyx sent the dreams, though. She watched his troubled sleep, wondering how close his dreams were to her own, and what he made of the current subject matter—nightmare matter. Holding her eyes open for as long as she could, she put off further dreaming, but ultimately sleep crept toward her from the corners of her mind. The dream came, stronger and more clearly, of the falsity of the Long War. One part of her mind evaluated the dream, while another part was swept away by it. Surely even the Tarig couldn’t be so monstrous. Could the Long War be such a lie? And would the Tarig cut off a primacy, set it loose from the All? In her dream she was in her dirigible
outside the Entire
. It moved slowly, trying to catch the severed minoral, a tube of geography rushing ahead of her into the void.