City Without End (33 page)

Ahead was a faint light. Even if he made it to the end of the tunnel, he would still have to face his pursuers once out of the hole. A freshening of air told him he was close to the end.

Scrambling for the light, he pushed out, finding himself in a narrow alley. Before ejecting from the tunnel, he gave a last kick. A cloud of dust rushed forward to spill from the hole. Part of it, at least, had collapsed.

People were milling around him. Someone supported him, asking if he was all right. Incredibly, the tunnel had caught his pursuers, but not him. He gulped air, reviving slowly.

But there was another survivor of the tunnel. A Tarig appeared in the hole, and stepped out, unfolding his tall body. Quinn drew his knife. The lord, blackened with soil, stalked toward him, claws extruded, reaching.

The crowd bellowed as one. From behind, they swarmed the lord from all sides, raising boards, stones, bare hands to strike at him.

The lord’s first swipe took out two throats, a move that, rather than demoralizing, enraged the young men. Some of them had taken up a chant of
Fajan Fajan
. A large female Jout came into the fray with a shovel, slamming the side of the lord’s head with it. Encouraged, the crowd piled forward to bury the Tarig, who thrashed under their weight. Then, bracing his long legs under him, and in a massive heave, he threw the bodies off.

Quinn tackled the lord at the knees, avoiding the claws, trying to bring him down. The Tarig fell, but nimbly came into a crouch and then stood up. As he came up, someone’s knife impaled an eye, digging deep, sticking solid.

The Tarig howled—a tone to shrivel eardrums. The piercing cry stopped the assault, as the mob backed off, watching the creature standing tall among them, streaming blood. The Tarig grabbed the knife and pulled it out.

Then the Tarig lord went to his knees. But he was already dead. Someone came forward and rammed a foot into the Tarig’s chest. He toppled.

“Fajan!” someone cried.

Quinn turned to the group, taking closer note of its composition: young men, likely morts, each one armed with implements and makeshift weapons.

“Go now, go quickly,” he said. “Before this Tarig’s cousins come. And thank you.”

The one called Fajan turned from the body to look at Quinn. Quinn nodded at Fajan, then spun on his heels and ran to the end of the alley. There, he turned, seeing that a few morts still lingered, staring at the lord’s body.

Whoever that Tarig had been, he could return, presumably—if Mo Ti’s tales of Tarig rejuvenation were accurate. Although the recent memory in this individual would never be recovered, an earlier version of this Tarig could take on a new form. Death, in the world of the Tarig, was complicated.

Quinn walked quickly down the street, wiping himself as clean as was possible. Tarig blood was red, he remembered, but it still wouldn’t do to be drenched in it. He found a public wastery and stripped, rinsing his clothes.

He thought of Gaulter. Zhiya inspired such loyalty, and it was good that she did. But Gaulter was dead, and it angered and saddened him.

Emerging from the wastery, he was wet but clean.

Exhausted, grimacing with the pain of his exertions, he put his mind to walking normally toward the access to the upper city. As he walked, he watched for Helice, knowing he would never again have such luck, to see her on the street. Still, he muttered to whatever god was listening:
Just give me one
chance at her.

From deep in the undercity came the sound of a growing tumult. Maybe the Tarig body had been discovered. Quinn put distance between himself and the scene of the death, climbing the ramp down which he and Gaulter had come just an hour ago.

In the upper city, he made his way home under the lavender ebb. Time enough to consider this bitter failure after he reported to Zhiya that her friend had died. In the midst of these considerations, the thought struck him with special force: he had just witnessed a mob murder a Tarig lord.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The Heart
. Ancestral home of the gracious lords, land of
remembrance of the Sleeping Lord, the heavenly womb of the All.

—from
Hol Fan’s Glossary of Needful Terms

H
ELICE STARED INTO THE DEPTHS OF THE SEA OF ARISING. It was bloody amazing. If she weren’t so intent on practical matters, she would sit here forever and study the foam of the sea. She was a kid in a candy store, an mSap engineer in particle heaven. She was a tad worried about gamma rays, but they didn’t seem to kill anyone in the Entire prematurely.

Tai was nearby, studying. Busy little beaver that he was, he was memorizing a list of English words and phrases Helice had given him against the day he’d need them in the Rose.
Friend; My name is Tai. Where is the bathroom
?

She was happy to help him. Her mood had skyrocketed within an hour of setting up shop in this new location. It was so lovely when mSaps performed their feats. They had a grace, precision, and power she had admired since she was old enough to build her first simple computer. She’d been twelve.

Earlier in the day, Tai had brought her to a mort hangout where, he had assured her, there was a porthole to the sea. Although empty now, the place had once been a favorite of some of Tai’s friends, but these same morts were now afraid of the old haunts. The lords were jumpy after a murder of one of their own.

It wouldn’t be long now before she could send Tai on his new mission: to the Ascendancy. To get things ready.

Outside, voices from the street penetrated. She cut a glance at the door, anxious.

Tai looked up from his tablet, then went back to his memorizing, his lips moving to form the words,
foreigner
;
please
;
pardon me
;
hungry.

For the first time in weeks, Helice felt a surge of hope. The little machine that she had smuggled into the Entire, that she had carried on her back down the torturous descent of the crystal bridge, had just proven itself worthy. By virtue of her move to a new burrow, and concentrating on the search pathway offered by the sea, her machine sapient had found in the Ascendancy a particular and peculiar interface point along two branes. This locus generated a high wind of particles, much more intense than the bright itself, for instance.

She believed this was the Tarig access point. The doorway to their home place. The thing that Sydney and her crew were desperately looking for.

Once in position along the wall of the burrow, it had taken the mSap sixteen seconds to identify the interface site in the Ascendancy. Fourteen of those seconds had been devoted to creating a new reference grid with which to identify a location in the cityscape.

This doorway was not a broad, permeable field. Instead, it was a junction point, a slit through which information passed; through which Tarig passed. In solitary and titanic fashion, the junction leaked its gravitational anxiety, requiring a monumental force to keep it open. It required all the energy represented by, say, a whole galaxy, to maintain itself. The Tarig would not likely produce a lot of them. Helice reasoned, therefore, that the Tarig had only one door. But it was a pipe bigger than any she’d ever heard of.

However, though she had the junction point coordinates, she couldn’t translate them into an understandable location. For one thing, she didn’t know what the Ascendancy looked like, or how it was laid out. But still. She was on the verge of climbing into negotiating position with the CEOs of the universe. After a few guarantees were in place. Such as: I can blow your door to kingdom come if you aren’t nice.

In his corner, Tai formed his English words silently with his mouth, aware that he couldn’t talk while Helice was working:
bed
;
love
;
thank you
;
clothes store.

She smiled at him. So earnest.

One didn’t approach the Tarig and ask permission for a contingent of savvies to come over, not without assurances. Therefore Tai would have to go and set in motion certain assurances. He had an excuse to go to the Ascendancy: a Jout subprefect had ordered him to be on the lookout for Rose fugitives. He’d tell the subprefect that he thought he’d seen the fugitive Rose woman, someone who looked very suspicious on the street. It would be fairly useless information, but it would be Tai’s excuse to be in the Ascendancy and would provide the opportunity for him to put in place her little guarantee.

So much to lose. The stakes had always been great: the survival of humanity, her preferred version of it. The preservation of the Entire as the repository of many far-flung cultures. But there was so much more. The Tarig, never mind their tendency toward domination, had been around for hundreds of thousands of years. They’d had time to master higher-order space-time and create the Entire. Their scientific understanding was of incalculable value.

They’d made some strange choices with their knowledge. They’d created this tunnel world and made it a meeting-ground cosmos for intelligent species. They’d chosen to live in those frightening bodies—tall, thin, metallic-looking—no doubt intended to convey awe and menace, but they’d rather overdone the menace part. Furred or feathered might have been a better start. She missed her pet macaw. Why couldn’t masters of the universe ever look like birds?

Nevertheless she was looking forward to conversations with the Tarig about so many things. For example, their truly ingenious products, such as the sea she was gazing at through the porthole. Structurally, it was indistinguishable from the Nigh. Helice conjectured that these geocosmic structures of the Tarig were all related. Beginning with the storm walls—those were indisputably gravitational turbulence. People even called the walls a
storm
. Then there were the water analogs to the Rose: the Nigh and the Sea. The Nigh, though key to so much of the workings of the Entire, was also merely turbulence, in this case, temporal and spatial. Ditto the Sea of Arising, source of all the Nighs. But the storm walls and the Nigh were secondary constructs.

The primary construct—from a physics standpoint at least—was the bright, the greatest of the Tarig creations. She theorized that the bright was generated by energy sucked from neighboring universes. The most efficient way to accomplish this was along the interface of branes. In whatever way the Tarig drew down that energy, they chose to selectively perturb the interface to give off heat and light only across the vast sky of the Entire. It was a shame the Tarig hadn’t come up with a more sustainable world, but of course, from their standpoint, it
was
sustainable. Supply-side solutions always came to mind first. The very crux of the Rose/Entire geogalactic differences.

Damn, but this was fun. She profoundly wished she had more time to think.

She glanced at Tai. Yes, still studying, now on rising inflection:
lonely?
help me? job?

It was time to redirect her energies. She was programming the assembler module of the mSap to create a cell with a smart detonator. In stage one, the explosive burst would create just enough damage and smoke to get attention.

Can do, Helice thought merrily. She was a sapient engineer. Just the right person for the job, as she’d tried to explain to Stefan not long ago, when he hadn’t listened and had sent the wrong person to do the job she should have had. Well, Stefan’s punishment was that he wasn’t on the
list
.

So Stefan, you see? You aren’t coming along for this jaunt. You aren’t coming along to the future at all.

Tai interrupted her thoughts. “How do you say ‘the Entire’ in English?”

“You might not want to use that word over there.”

“But they’ll figure out I’m a . . .
foreigner
. I’ll be honest.”

“They don’t think of this place as everything that exists.”

He frowned, trying to figure out her point. “Neither do I.”

Well then, you will all get along famously, she thought. She pushed away feelings of guilt. She wasn’t going to admit to an admirer of Titus Quinn that she planned to make short work of the Rose. Tai would go, if she could arrange it. He’d have a short life. Likely it would be quite intense.

She gave him the translation, and he wrote it in his tablet.

The excitement from her day of discoveries was wearing off, and she leaned against the burrow wall, feeling nauseous. Just a little sleep, and she’d be able to work. Her throat felt like she’d swallowed thumbtacks. Best to get to the Tarig soon and have a look in their bag of medical tricks. Closing her eyes, she slept.

Tai woke her up, urgently. She snapped awake, thinking of pursuit, of giant, thin
mantis lords
. . .

“It’s at the porthole!” he whispered.

She turned to look. Something . . . something was out there. She stared at it. Nothing could be in the sea.

“A rivitar,” Tai whispered. At her look of incredulity, he continued, “I don’t know what it really is, but morts call it a rivitar. I’ve seen it once before.”

It was a cube about one foot square. Images flickered on every side of it; faces of the sentients of the Entire. Helice and Tai stared it, transfixed. The sides of the cube appeared to stare back.