"You have unpleasant memories?"
"No bad. Gone."
"You forget?"
"Yes."
"Did the Manq do that to you?"
"Know not."
"Fables you tell." His hand curled into a fist on his knee. "With the Manq, you live."
I had no idea where I lived, when I wasn't dispersing into who-knew-where, but I was almost certain no one I knew called themselves Manq. "No. Not Manq. I am Skolian."
He scowled. " 'Skolia' is many places. Which do you come from?"
"Know not."
"I don't believe you."
I shook my head, too drained for the verbal combat.
"If you are not Manq," he said, "why are you here?"
"Know not."
"Did they leave you to die?"
Had they? It made more sense than I wanted to admit. "Is possible."
The treeman considered me, first my face, then the rest. He folded his large hand around my breast and stroked my nipple with his thumb. "You are pretty. You will be the tithe."
"No touch!" My voice came out clear that time. "You got that? No touch."
Watching my face, he withdrew his hand. I tried to hide my alarm, but I knew he saw. It didn't gratify him, though. The prospect of force held no excitement for him. I tightened my muscles to keep my arms from trembling.
"Are you a priestess?" he asked. "This is why no touching?"
"No priestess. Mathematician." I hadn't recalled that until I said it. But, yes. Like a song with endless variety, its melodies intertwined in exquisite threads, so the equations I solved seemed to me.
"No mathematics here," he pointed out.
"Is true."
"Find you other job."
"I must go home."
He brushed a lock of hair out of my face. "No."
A memory came with ringing clarity:
Eldrin stroked a tendril of hair off my cheek.
For all that many people found his coloring odd, the mis-matched result of genetic drift in altered populations, he looked handsome to me, his hair the hue of burgundy wine, his metallic gold lashes long and thick, his eyes a vivid purple. A sprinkle of freckles scattered across his nose. His coloring bore little resemblance to our son's, who had my darker hues, but their classic features were the same.
"No touch." I pulled my head away from the treeman. "Husband I have." The importance of those words went beyond the relationship. Something had happened to Eldrin, a devastating crime. And I couldn't flaming
remember.
I yanked at my bonds, my eyes burning with tears I refused to shed. Instead I swore.
"****?" the treeman asked.
I clenched my fists. "I don't
understand
you."
He spoke slowly. "Your husband. Did he leave you to die?"
"No." I had no doubt about that. Another memory came: Eldrin facing me, pushing me backward. Behind him, armored giants strode toward us down a pillared corridor, nightmare monstrosities of mirrored metal with no faces, human in shape but over two meters tall. Gods only knew what lived under that armor. Manq?
"Husband," I said. "Take Manq."
"He took the Manq?"
"No. They took him. My son—" My son
what
?
"You have a boy?"
"Yes. No. Adult. Grown-up."
His eyebrows went up. "A young mother you were."
"No. Old." I pulled angrily against the roots holding my wrists. "My
son.
Where?"
"I have seen only you."
"Cut me free. Please. Help me find my family."
He made a derisive noise. "Why ****?"
I felt his reaction more than I understood his words. If I was Manq, then as far as he was concerned my family could rot in perdition. If the Manq had captured or killed them and wanted me, it gave him all the more reason to deny them what they sought. They owed him reparations and I had appeared. For him, that was enough.
I blinked…
* * *
Night had become day. Only embers remained of the fire.
I groaned. Not again. How long had I lost this time? Unlike before, however, this last transition was softer, filled in with vague memories. I hadn't become as much of a ghost, at least not enough to work free of my bonds. During that strange, half-real time, the treeman had made soup. I recalled his disquiet as he gave me a bowl. My hands had been translucent. He had hoped the food would make me solid again.
The cavity was empty now. Beyond the entrance, day was darkening into night. Iridescent arthrops flitted around the fire. They must have been coming in for a while, because some hung on my hair, giving it a sheen. The effect created a sense of familiarity— one I hated.
Aversion surged through my mind.
Pain.
My thoughts recoiled. Frustrated, I turned my concentration to the now absent treeman. What did he want? His mind had roiled with conflicted emotions: the urge for revenge that prodded violence; the compassion that stayed his hand; the desire that urged him on; the kindness that counseled restraint; the fear that gave him pause; the loneliness that sought company; and his growing doubt I was Manq. Unfortunately, no matter which emotions won out, none of the likely results involved him letting me go.
How to leave? Cut the cords? With what? Yell for help? To whom? Those hordes of people I had seen roaming the forest? Even if anyone else lived here, I had no reason to believe they would help. My struggles so far had succeeded only in tightening the cords. I suspected the plant grew these "roots" to feed itself by holding its captured prey until it died, after which the decomposing body provided nutrients. Being plant mulch wasn't on my list of useful pastimes.
I needed a new approach, an escape too quirky for the treeman to foresee. It would help if I understood why I had ended up here. But when I concentrated, the memories fled. So I let my mind wander. Math swirled in my thoughts: Fourier sums, Laplace transforms, Bessel integrals, Airy functions, beautiful, fascinating…
Selei transforms.
Selei?
Like my name.
My name.
Dyhianna Selei. That was my name. Hah! I was getting somewhere.
I had invented the Selei transform at age ten. A strange pastime for a child, but I had enjoyed it. It was a game, really, one that interested only a handful of scholars. The transform defined a universe outside our spacetime. That itself wasn't dramatic; many math theories described
spaces
that were unusual compared to our own. They weren't real in a physical sense. You couldn't visit them. They were just math. But the Selei universe had a difference.
We found a way to visit.
Academicians had a catchy phrase for it:
a Hilbert space spanned by an infinite set of orthonormal Selei eigenfunctions.
Everyone else just called it
psiberspace.
Or
Kyle Space.
Matter couldn't move from our universe into Kyle Space. Only thoughts.
People
couldn't enter that universe any more than they could physically enter their own mind.
Except somehow my son and I had done that. We had become thoughts. I had almost dispersed in psiberspace, my mind spreading like ripples in a pond. Coming back to this universe was difficult. I was doing it now, wave by partial wave, but a void existed where I should have sensed my son. Taquinil. Taquinil Selei.
He was gone.
* * *
The treeman left me to brood, alone in the cavity, caught tight by the roots. Or maybe he left me die. I had no intention of doing either.
I practiced shifting reality.
First I relaxed my mind. Drifted. I became an infinite sum of partial waves. Spherical harmonics. Why I had fragmented into spherical harmonics instead of some other functions, I had no idea, but it had a certain poetry. Harmonics of thought.
I focused on a purpose: leave. Could I enter psiberspace and come out in a new place? In math, if you took a function from one "space" to another and then changed its shape, it would also have a new shape when you took it back to the first space. Engineers did it all the time with Fourier transforms, going from a space where time varied to one where energy varied. For Selei transforms, spacetime defined the first "space" and thoughts defined the second. If I went into psiberspace, altered my thoughts, and came back, it ought to change my position and time here.
Closing my eyes, I tried to fade. Except it wouldn't work. After all the shifting in and out of this universe that had bedeviled me, now I couldn't do it. If I hadn't known better, I would have thought Kyle space had vanished, imploded like a contracting universe collapsing at the end of time.
Pah. Psiberspace couldn't implode. I thought of the Fourier analogy. If time existed, so did energy. You couldn't have one without the other. The same held true for Kyle space; as long as people could think, it existed.
But that didn't mean we could reach it. We accessed it through the psiberweb, a network of specialized computers. In Kyle space, a thought could exist everywhere, like a peaked wave. Similar thoughts peaked close together; dissimilar thoughts peaked far apart. As soon as a telop, a telepathic operator, transmitted a thought, it existed throughout the web. Other telops could immediately pick it up whether they were in the next building or across the galaxy. The web gave us instantaneous communication— and so provided the glue that held together interstellar civilization.
If I were a telop, that could explain my military bodyguards. True telepaths were rare; the strongest of us were less common than one in a trillion. You needed telops to use the psiberweb, and the web offered immense strategic advantage to whoever controlled it, so the military recruited many of us.
Had the war torn apart the web? No wonder I had so little control in Kyle space. I needed a new web node. But making such a node required extensive technological support, none of which I had here.
I clasped my bound hands and leaned my head against my knuckles. My arms ached from being in the same position for so long. But I couldn't let myself become disheartened. Surely if I concentrated enough, I could affect some change in psiberspace. I probably couldn't do much, which meant I wouldn't alter my position here more than a small amount. Nor would I have much control. It was a risk, but it was better than waiting for whatever the treeman intended.
A scraping noise broke the quiet. I opened my eyes. Across the cavity, two legs sheathed in boots showed in the entrance. Red light bathed them, the fast changing luminance of either dawn or sunset. The treeman crouched down and ducked through the opening. He carried a cord strung with giant beetles, one iridescent green, one brilliant red, and one vivid blue.
He glanced at me, then looked away as if to avert danger. Settling by the fire pit, he laid down his dead beetles. Then he set about remaking the fire, using plant flags for fuel. To start the flame, he used a flint— and that one object spoke volumes.
I recognized the markings on that flint. Its design came from a well-known interstellar merchant who sold through the web market-place, often called the cyber-nexus. Someone here had access to an off-planet network. It was the only way the treeman could have that flint. Its purchase order had to have gone through the psiberweb. I had often seen such orders flitting along its conduits. Relief trickled over me. Perhaps a safer escape existed than dispersing back into limbo.
The treeman worked on gutting his beetles, never glancing up. But I felt his awareness of my presence. He wanted sex. Why he held back I wasn't sure, but from his mind I sensed that a gentle person hid behind that implacable exterior. The Manq's destruction of the forest had scarred his emotions.
It came to me then, crashing like a wave heavy with storm foam.
I spoke softly. "Was she your wife?"
He jerked as if I had hit him, and froze in the process of setting a flag-leaf on the fire. Then he looked at me. "They made me watch." Even more than the grate of his voice, his grammar told of his agony. My translation nodes didn't have to alter it. Shay sentence structure changed when the speaker was upset, becoming akin to more widely spoken Skolian languages. It was why many of us sounded distraught to the Shay even when we were perfectly calm.
"They tied me to a tripod," he said. "Then they made me watch."
"I'm sorry." Gods, what had I stumbled into? Had the people he called Manq forced him to watch while they murdered his wife? No wonder rage drove him.
He dropped the flag into the fire. Sparks jumped into the air and floated down, turning into tiny embers. One hit the wet moss and sizzled.
"They were Traders," I told him. Just saying the name made me queasy. Sweat trickled down my neck.
He poked the flames with a green stick. "Who trades?" Strain crackled in his voice.
