City Without End (35 page)

Bei sighed. He was not on the trail of the answer Titus needed. He was striking blindly at minorals, those that possessed developed scholar-reaches. And this minoral, sadly, was not the right one. Well, they could try other minorals in this primacy, or move to the Sheltering Path Primacy . . . Bei rubbed his eyes. Perhaps sleep was best.

Anzi appeared with a candle at the archway leading into the veil-of-worlds room. “Master? Not sleeping?”

“Too much thinking, Anzi, that’s my curse.” Bei pulled on his beard, gazing at the veil, now showing a mountainous region of the same planetoid.

Anzi looked at the scene with him, perhaps fascinated anew.

In the silence Bei said, “What shall we call the hundred realms, Anzi?”

She settled into an agile cross-legged position on the floor. “Perhaps the Great Outside.”

He shook his head. “No, because it’s us, too. It’s everything.”

She seemed to accept his ruminative state and adopted it, gazing into the ancient veil. “Perhaps the Celestial All.”

“Too grandiose.”

She crumpled her mouth, thinking hard. “The foam.”

“Too small.”

They sat amiably for a few moments thinking of names. Bei murmured, “Sometimes I think that it’s all falling into place, Anzi. The correlates are not just about the Rose. This we discovered from the ship keeper. But as we move from primacy to primacy, from minoral to minoral, I see that we are traversing the great scheme of all the cosmos. The Entire, Anzi, has an enviable position in the . . . in
it
. We abut many other pieces of the foam, of the bubbles that represent the hundred realms.”

“I never meant exactly one hundred.”

“I know that, girl. I know that. There’s more than a lifetime of work to know even the smallest part of what can be known. But as for finding the Heart . . . even that is a staggering question. What universes have borders with the Entire? And where can they be seen from?” It was a rhetorical question, and they sat in silence as the scene on the veil moved on to galactic views and dark space. Only a few guttering candles pushed back the dark in this underground place. Above them was nothing but the fractured plains of the Gond homeland sway.

They had traveled by sky bulb from a major docking site on the river Nigh.

The shrewd dock master had bargained an unconscionable price for his sky bulb, one that left Anzi fuming and their expedition impoverished. Using the decrepit airship, they had traveled for days anti-Nigh-ward across the endless forests of the primacy, seeing on their journey not one Gond, with the legless creatures tucked away beneath the tight canopy of the forest’s upper story. Who knew if the famed nests of the Gond were numerous or rare? Few travelers came to this primacy, most never venturing beyond the settlements along the Nigh. Once though, as Bei and Anzi’s airship motored over a rare clearing, the sound of singing came from far below, confirming an ancient story that the Gond had voices that could fill the Empty Lands and knock a Chalin off his feet.

Anzi interrupted his thoughts. “We could call it the Great Sway.”

She was still considering names—and that one. . . . He squinted his eyes.

He mouthed the words,
the Great Sway
. He slowly stood up. “Anzi, by a beku’s balls.” He looked down at her, sitting easily in a position that would stove him up for days. “Anzi, you have come a long way since your days of senselessness.”

“Thank you, Master.”

Snaking a look at her, he realized she was mocking him. Perhaps she had always deflected attention from herself with that calm and pliable act. By the Miserable God, the girl could be sarcastic.

A shower of dust fell from the ceiling.

Anzi jumped up to throw a cover over the stone well machines.

Bei looked up, listening. A shuffle of boot on stone. He shared a look with Anzi. It could not be good that someone had followed them here. Here, on Titus Quinn’s business, he and Anzi could not afford to be captured. But they were trapped. The veil-of-world room in this minoral, like most mino-rals, was a dead end.

Above, more shuffling. Fortunately, in this veil, the lift was no longer in operation, and the stairs were difficult to find. It gave them a few minutes.

Bei fingered the redstones on his necklace. He glanced at the veil of worlds, that film covering the wedge that punctured the next world. They could go through. They would have to. He untied the cord holding his red-stones, sorting them into his hand.

Anzi saw him do so, and her eyes widened. Neither of them had spoken a word, nor did they need to. He was considering sending them through the to-and-from-the-worlds-door.

With a nod at the veil, he indicated silently that Anzi should secure one of their stone wells. When she didn’t understand, he whispered: “We’re taking one. Hurry!”

She shook her head. She looked like a beku balking at a ride.

He hissed at her, “You want to see Titus again? I can’t help you fight them, and we don’t know how many there are. Now remove its conduits and wrap it in a cloth!”

Anzi hurriedly wrapped the stone well, leaving it at Bei’s feet, and rushed to the doorway, piling crates in front of it to slow their pursuers down.

Bei fell to his knees and fumbled his redstones off his necklace. All his insights, all his discoveries. . . . He had to preserve them; the only way was through the veil. He’d seen departures through the veil; by the bright, he’d seen Titus Quinn leave that way, once. A globule would form around them, preserving some air. . . . And that was as much as he knew. About to find out more, by the Woeful God.

Taking one redstone onto which the correlates had been copied, he dropped it into the stone well receiving cup of their second computational device, still connected into the veil with conduits. It was a terrible gamble. Bei couldn’t direct which scene would appear, but starting a new progression might attract something of interest. They had no choice, they had to leave. How would they ever return? But Bei had the correlates, and no one must take them.

He tapped the screen with a formula he had just developed, an outgrowth of the correlates, but more specifically related to mapping. No use, no use, it was untested, foolhardy. But voices outside the room drove him to finish.

Anzi heard them coming. She drew her knife. “You go, Master. You must.”

He finished and stuffed the now loose redstones into his tunic. They were both standing next to the veil. As the boxes crashed under the assault at the door, he grabbed Anzi and shoved her with all his strength into the veil, shattering the outer film and not giving her even a moment to catch her breath.

A Hirrin lurched through the barricade.

Bei said, “Welcome. And what might your name be?” He picked up the stone well computer that Anzi had wrapped.

The Hirrin, momentarily confused by the reception from an old man, turned to look at the Ysli just coming up behind him.

In that moment, Bei threw himself into the veil after Anzi. The Hirrin was fast. He charged across the room and gripped Bei’s trailing elbow in his mouth. Anzi’s globule was close enough that she saw what was happening.

Lunging, she jammed her knife hand through the gel of the veil and slashed at the Hirrin’s mouth.

She overreached, falling into Bei’s globule of air, but she’d managed to gash the Hirrin’s face.

Bei just managed to pull his elbow back in when the transition began.

Now joined in one vacuole, they held each other like twins in a birth canal.

Through the cloudy transitional matrix Bei saw a space-time distortion of a Hirrin’s face: streams of blood twisted about his face like ribbons on a gift.

Stunned and panicked, he and Anzi huddled in the muscular little sac and abandoned themselves to the mercy of the Great Sway.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

I
T WAS FULL DARK AS CAITLIN SPED DOWN THE HIGHWAY
, keeping the Mercedes under manual control, passing meshed transport, passing at eighty, at ninety. To one side, the Columbia River. Instead of seeing its familiar placid waters, she imagined a cloud of vapor flashing into the air.

The river boiling off.

Jess had said,
I dream about it, fire roaring like a hurricane. Our home, gone,
just like that. I imagine the river boiling off.

Lamar had called it the transform. But it was a holocaust.

At least we’ll survive.
But to survive, you have to leave.

A half moon brightened the water, drawing her eyes when she needed to drive fast, drive very fast. Be packed, Lamar had said. Be ready. And when did he plan to end the world? She was losing her mind. Wasn’t she?

Lamar had lied about Titus. Titus hadn’t asked for a few people to join him in that place—the Entire. He had nothing to do with this. Lamar was behind it—with whom else, Caitlin had no idea. But Lamar was high enough in the group that he could change Mateo’s test scores. So Mateo could go over to the Entire, with his sister and mother. So he could stand on—what had Jess called it?—the
transition stage
excavated under the old reactor.

Something terrible was going to happen, and only Lamar’s two thousand were shipping out in time to avoid it. An apocalypse of fire. Our home, gone. Jess has nightmares.

She kept remembering a small, niggling thing, something Jess said about Emily not having children. Lamar’s two thousand savvies were not coming back. The children would grow up and have children in the Entire.

But if they didn’t test well, they wouldn’t be having children. Because the average person was dragging us down, and the
average
was about to become better. It sounded like eugenics. She had no proof, but at the same time she was sure. Ugly as that was, there was more: they weren’t going to leave the Earth intact.

There’d be a good, savvy reason for that. They didn’t want more people coming over to dilute the gene pool. They were creating an uber-colony of smartasses, just like the fanatics who’d threatened for decades to start colonies in South America—or Idaho, for that matter.

She was driving too fast. Slowing, she drew in gulps of air. At a legal speed, she voiced to her dashCom, “Audio contact, Rob.”

She had no fucking idea what she would say.

He answered quickly. “Caitlin? Decided to come home tonight?”

“Yes.”

“How are the roads? Where are you?”

“About an hour out.” She passed a platoon of meshed cars, ambling along at sixty mph. “Rob.”

He waited. “You OK?”

“Of course, OK. I’ve had a thought about that bad software glitch and don’t want to lose it. I’m going to encrypt.”

A pause. “Right. Go ahead.”

She voiced, “Encrypt audio signal.” The light flashed. You didn’t survive in business without keeping your conversations to yourself, and Emergent’s virtual educational modules were constantly poked at by their competitors.

Now encrypted, she started over. “It’s not the software, Rob. Something’s happened. Can you get the kids over to Mother’s?”

A pause for decoding. “What, tonight?”

She really had no idea how to begin. “I need you, Rob.”

A very long pause. “That’s nice to hear.”

Amid her panic a thread of shame corkscrewed in. “I’ll meet you at Emergent, back door. Please don’t ask me anything. Just do it?”
Do we have
enough of a relationship that you’d get the kids out of bed at 10: 00 p.m. and drive
over to Multnomah and wake Mother up, no questions asked?

“You got it,” he said.

Oh, steady Rob.

Rob at her side, Caitlin stranded the door code into the panel of the deserted office. “Lights off,” she voiced, and they slipped inside.

Once the door locked behind them, Caitlin fumbled her way to the bathroom, keeping the light off. Rob followed her, not speaking, blessedly not asking her anything until she could relieve her bladder and wash the misery from her face.

When she joined him, she sank onto the floor, pulling Rob down with her. She rested her back against the wall.

“What, you murdered someone?”

“I wish.”

Rob was so bemused he didn’t even know what his first question was. His silence gave her the room to shape her story.