The Fourth Sage (The Circularity Saga) (7 page)

More out of instinct than anything else, she turns her headlamp off and slides to the floor, her back resting against the door. She closes her eyes. If this is some kind of a game, she can certainly play it. Ty knows where she is. Worst-case scenario would be for him to have to come up here and manually open the door. Aries tries to relax. She sits still for a few minutes, calming her breath. Out of the blackness, an image appears inside her eyelids. It's Kiire's room. There is no sign of him or the hawk. The walls and ceiling show the top of a mountain. The vistas reach far into the distance. A nest is perched on the rock and an eagle is about to land in it. It has something in its beak that it distributes among three young birds. And now it dawns on Aries. Kiire is running a
Bird of Prey
program.

Born-of-Night,
she thinks. "Are you there?" she whispers, while holding the image of the hawk in her mind. Nothing. After a few moments she shakes her head, feeling silly for expecting some kind of an answer.

The hawk's scream cuts into the silence of her mind. She hears it as if it sits right next to her, but on the inside, not outside of her. Aries holds the silence for a minute or so.
Born-of-Night,
she thinks. After a few moments she hears the cry again.

She is communicating with me,
Aries thinks. "Are you talking to me?" she says.

She hears the cry once more. And then she feels it. A presence within her. Very light, like a fine brush on her soul. The touch, as fragile as it seems, lets Aries see the entire hawk at once. She sees her intelligence, her curiosity, her unbound energy and strength, her health, even her hunger. At the same time she realizes that the hawk sees her as well. For an instant, Aries contemplates hiding from her, withdrawing and showing her only aspects that she wants her to see. But then she decides that she doesn't want to do that. So she opens herself up and shows her everything as well: her joys, her fears, her loneliness, and her wish for company—her past and her wish to be free. That most of all she offers her. She tells her of her dream to see the stars one night and to stand under them out in the open.

For a fleeting moment, Aries catches the trace of a memory from the hawk. A moonlit night with the land far below and the stars in the darkened sky above. And then Aries makes the connection. She has dreamed this. For the last few weeks she has dreamed of flying. Now she knows why. She must have communicated with the hawk, then. But how is this even possible? Part of her is not convinced that this isn't a figment of her imagination, created by her strong wish for companionship. And with the doubt, the hawk's presence fades until it is gone. What's left is the darkness around her and the slight sting of loss of something that seemed to have given her comfort for a moment.

Once gone, Aries questions that it was real to begin with. Then, as sudden as they darkened, the lights in the shaft come back on and the door opens. Aries almost falls backward as the door opens outward. She gets up and moves away from the shaft. When she's ten feet away, the door closes. She enters the elevator. Going downward is usually worse than up, but this time her fear is less than before. Not by much, but enough not to feel sick to her stomach. And when she leaves the lift on the 205th floor, she cannot deny the faint yet somehow lasting impression her encounter with Born-of-Night has left her with.

* * *

"This is very odd," Ty says, when Aries shows him the screenshot. "But not only is this odd, it's basically impossible."

"Why is that?" Aries asks, looking over his shoulder. The DIAG sits on the large desk of the command center amid the stacks of blueprints, with Ty hunched over it.

"You see this curve here?" Ty traces the sinus curve on the oscilloscope's image.

"Yes."

"The oscilloscope basically measures electric current over time, usually in milliseconds. The closer the peaks of the curves are together, the higher the frequency of the current. Because it takes time for the current to flow, the sinus wave always goes forward. Always."

"This one doesn't," Aries says.

"Nope. It does not. Which makes me think that this must have been an error in the screen image rather than in the unit itself."

"Why can't it be an odd fluctuation in the electric current?"

Ty looks at her as if considering how much to tell her. "It can't be an odd fluctuation in the electric current because, if this is correct, the current would flow backward. In time."

"What?" Aries sees on Ty's face a reflection of her own puzzlement.

"If current flows from point A to point B in a certain period of time, it flows through point A and then, let's say, one millisecond later, crosses point B, then, again, one millisecond later, point C, and so on. You with me so far?"

"Yes. Kind of."

"In order for this image to appear on the oscilloscope, the current would have had to—for a very short period of time, roughly one hundredth of a millisecond—flow backward in time. As the oscilloscope measures the amount..."

"...of current in a given time going from point A to point B. I got it."

"Good."

"So, the image must be wrong because current can't flow backward in time."

"That is correct."

"Is there anything that could theoretically cause this?"

"Theoretically, yes."

"What is it?"

"The only thing that could theoretically cause this fluctuation in the electric current would be a wormhole."

"A wormhole?"

"Yes. And I said theoretically for there is no proof, only a theoretical concept of a possible theory."

Both look at the image for a while.

"What's next?" Aries asks.

"You tell me."

"I guess we'll go up there again, with another DIAG, and see if this one is broken." Aries says.

"That is exactly what we're going to do. I'll run some self-diagnostics on it in the meantime." Ty looks at his wristwatch. "Your shift is almost over, kiddo. Why don't you get out a little earlier today? For excellent work well done. You'll still have plenty of overtime to use."

When she leaves Electrical and makes her way down the ladder toward the dining room, she formulates a plan in her head: go visit Kiire tonight. Find the marked air vent from inside the ducts and read up on hawks. And if not for the nagging feeling that this wasn't the end of it, that there must be another reason for the fluctuations and the strange behavior of the door, together with the almost twenty-minute-long blackout in shaft number five, she would be content.
 

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egan, aries, d. id#: 4746-poc-201-0017485
0001000 0101 01001
esm [evidence for social misconduct] retrieved
111 1001 0111 00 11 1 0001101 01
evidence object: napkin// partial
1 010100001 1010111
tag 8. contents 100% readable
1 100001 10011
content reads: Like the wind o'er forgotten plains [] When the storm clouds whisper names [] Like the girl that came from light [] Like the bird 'twas Born-of-Night [] 1:38 []
1101011 100 1001 11001100
source: unknown
0011 1001 00101010 000111 001001
further action pending evaluation
1 1 11 0001 10001 1000 11000110 1011010 100011 00 1110100 001001 010101 010111 011000 010 0001101 01011101010
place subject on short list for red surveillance
0101001 01001 0101 010 010 010 010 000010101110 010 0001010 01010000101 111001 001101 010000 101110010100 001 001 001 0101110 0 000 10 011 010 0111 010 010 100010 101 01 1011

Chapter 5 — Complications

"Intricacy holds nothing but the promise

of an intricate solution."

[
Mechanical Engineering Handbook,

3rd Edition/s.2/p.17 (no longer available]

Aries opens the air vent to Kiire's room at 1:41 a.m., after having slept for only an hour before her watch woke her. All night, her thoughts circled around her day on the 282nd floor; she couldn't turn them off. And when she finally fell asleep, she dreamed of running down the dark shaft that extended before her into infinity. There was something behind her, following her, and keeping her speed. She was unable to outrun it and suddenly she had to slow down, as if her legs wouldn't obey her command to run anymore. Whatever followed her came closer and closer until she felt it behind her—a cold presence, half-machine and half-human—and her scream was that of a hawk, and a terrible foreboding grabbed her heart as she awoke clutching her chest and calling out, "Mimosh."

"I think someone has been waiting for you." Kiire's voice comes from the other end of his room as Aries climbs out of the air duct. He sits on his futon, pad on his lap, hood over his head. The hawk sits on top of a makeshift coatrack next to the futon. "We have become acquainted and I think she likes me, but I know that who she really likes is you. I read up on hawks and how to feed them and train them and stuff. And—"

The hawk launches and swoops down toward Aries who, completely out of reflex, stretches out her arm to the side. The bird lands on her forearm, not without digging her small yet already powerful talons into the skin beneath Aries's sweater.

"Wow. Okay. I think we can check off parts one-through-five of the training." Kiire gets up. "That usually doesn't happen unless you have a huge piece of raw meat in your hand, or you have worked with the hawk for a good amount of time."

Born-of-Night lets out a loud scream.

"Yeah. That happens too,
a lot!
Especially when I'm about to fall asleep. First couple of times I jumped up and screamed like a baby. Until I realized that she was just hungry. Here..." Kiire hands Aries a piece of ham. Aries takes it and holds it in her open palm.

"Ehm, I wouldn't hold it—"

The hawk digs her beak into the ham, piercing the skin on Aries hand.

"Ahh,
gentle
," Aries whispers, while trying to swallow her pain.

"—like that. Okay. Too late. Next time hang it from your finger so she can pick it from below. Or you could use these." Kiire pulls out a pair of worn leather gloves from the pocket of his hoodie. "They work really well."

Aries takes the gloves and walks over to the futon. She sits down, Born-of-Night still on her forearm. With one finger she touches the hawk's head, moves gently around to her chest, feeling the soft feathers and stroking her.

"Judging by her size, she must be about three months old," Kiire says, sitting beside Aries. “She has reached about two-thirds of her size by now. She eats quite a lot. And therefore she... ehm... she..."

A smile crosses her face.

"Let's just say she's very... messy," Kiire says. "I've never cleaned my room so much as I have in the last twenty-four hours. I'll be happy to do it, don't get me wrong, it's just that..."

Aries moves her arm so that the hawk is in front of her face.

"How did you find your way in here, hmm? How did you end up so deep inside the building, so close to the core?" The hawk looks at Aries as if trying to understand what she is saying. "And where did you come from?" For an instant, Aries has the fleeting image of the night sky and the desert far below. "She understands me."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean she understands what I'm saying."

"How do you know?"

"Because she just told me that she was flying here."

"She said she was flying?"

"No. She didn't say she was flying. She showed it to me. I saw it in my mind's eye, like an image. I think she's communicating with me somehow."

"That is so interesting. And totally awesome at the same time!"

Aries looks at Kiire. His curly hair sticks out from under the hood of his sweater. "Thank you," she says.

"For what?"

"For being a friend in a place that doesn't allow it."

Kiire looks back at Aries. Their eyes meet. Long enough for both to acknowledge the truth of what Aries said; long enough for both to see in each other the same wish—to not be here, to somehow, hope against hope, change their lives.

"And thank you for your note."

"Which note?"

"Like the wind o'er forgotten plains," Aries exclaims dramatically.

"When the storm clouds whisper names," Kiire replies as dramatically. "Like the girl that came from light..."

"Like the bird 'twas born of night," Aries replies. "A very fine piece of poetry, I must say." She bows her head.

"I must say so myself, I'm afraid. Very fine indeed," Kiire answers.

"There must be more," Aries says.

"More of what?"