The Sound of Seas (15 page)

“I do not know him,” Vilu replied. “He scares me. He is confused.”

Zell walked back and selected another bottle. He ran the stopper under the boy's nose. This time Vilu relaxed.

“I would like to talk to the
jatma
,” Zell said.

There was a long pause, the quiet broken only by shouts of the crew from outside the thick walls, and the groaning of the balloon overhead.

“I . . . am . . . here,” the boy finally said in a different voice. “I do not want to be.”

“How did you get here?”

“I do not know. I just went to sleep.”

“Where?”

“In my room, in my bed. I was drawing . . . a . . . comic.”

The boy's small hands moved tentatively, trying to find counterparts in the Galderkhaani vernacular for what he was trying to say. Suddenly, Vilu's body became agitated. The
Standor
started toward him but Zell held up a hand.

“What is happening?” Zell asked.

“Someone else—hello?”

“Is it your mother?”

“No,” the boy said. “
Hello?
Can you help me?”

The little body began to tremble as if it were cold. Zell pulled a blanket from a rack, threw it over him, shook his head at Qala when she tried to approach again.

“Describe what you're seeing,” Zell said.

“A circle . . . of . . . light. A ring. There are things moving in it.” The boy began to wince. His eyes narrowed, fluttered. “Blinding—”

“What kinds of things are in the ring?”

“Things!
Creatures!
Get me away from here!” the boy yelled. “Please! Mother, please!”

“Why are you afraid of the things? Is your mother there?”

“I don't know! Get me
out
of here! Get me someplace! I don't know where I am . . . the way out!
Please!
”

“Zell, please—” Qala said.

“Boy, I must know if it is the ring or the . . . or being
lost
that frightens you?”

“Lost!” he cried.

Vilu started to sob.

“Stop this,” Qala said. “At once, Zell.”

Zell returned at once to the first bottle and brought Vilu out of the trancelike state. The boy blinked several times. A few lingering tears rolled from his eyes. He used the edge of the blanket to wipe them away.

“I can see now,” the boy said, blinking hard and looking around. “But I am still here . . . in Galderkhaan.”

“You are not Vilu, then?” Zell asked.

“I told you who I am!” the boy protested.

“So you did,” the physician said, smiling. “But you are safe now,” he said. He was still holding the vials so he touched the young boy's cheek with his own, then stood facing Bayarma. He did not say anything. He just watched her.

“What is it?” Qala asked.

“Hold her,” Zell said.

The woman was just standing there, regarding Zell with a strange, vacant expression. She did not react when Qala put strong fingers around her upper arms.

“What is it?” the
Standor
asked Zell.

“The open vials,” Zell answered.

“You did this on purpose?”

“Of course. I did not want her to suspect.”

“Will she be all right?”

“She is not all right
now
,” Zell pointed out. “And we can't help either of them without an examination.”

“But you'll stop it if—”

“Yes, yes,” Zell said, mildly annoyed. “All I have to do is replace the stoppers and she'll come back.”

“You're sure.”

“Remove the flame and water ceases to boil,” Zell said. “Nature is constant.”

Qala knew Zell well enough to know that he liked to push his patients, but it was always with a goal of healing, and then learning how to heal others, so the
Standor
didn't protest. Bayarma continued to look at him without seeing him. Then her brows lowered as if she were concentrating. Her breath came more quickly.

Zell came a little closer, leaned toward her ear. “What are you feeling?” he asked her.

“There . . . is something . . . still within my . . . my . . .” she said.

“Your what?” Zell said.

“My soul,” she replied.

“Zell, what's happening?” the
Standor
asked.

“A miracle,” Zell told his superior. “These two unrelated Galder­khaani somehow have the same—it isn't a delusion,
Standor.
They share some kind of alien energy, the same internal entanglement, though the power in Bayarma is extremely faint.” Zell switched the vials to one hand and put his other arm around Bayarma's waist. “Take the boy, please,
Standor
.”

Carefully releasing Bayarma to Zell, Qala walked to the hammock and opened her arms to Vilu. The boy hesitated, then went willingly and held her tight. Zell led Bayarma to the hammock and lay her down. He took the second vial and moved it closer.

Almost at once, Bayarma tensed and a sense of unrest filled the room. It was nothing that Qala could isolate, no physical change in her ship, no sudden movement by the two visitors. But it was there.

“You feel it too?” Zell asked the
Standor.

“It's like a storm coming toward us,” Qala said softly.

“Exactly what I was thinking,” the physician remarked. “Out at sea and moving toward land, causing unrest in the air.”

“But there are no warning horns,” Qala said.

“Not as such, no,” Zell agreed.

Shouldering Vilu, the
Standor
went to the door and looked out, over the outer wall of the airship. She squinted toward the sea, past the great flutes suspended parallel to the bottom of the airbag, tubes that whistled loudly when storm winds blew through them. She did not see what she expected. Seabirds were clustering in a linear formation toward the vessel.
Thyodularasi
were breaking the surface in an increasingly synchronous movement from the shore toward the horizon. Farther out, the fish had stopped leaping.

When she looked back in the cabin, Qala saw Bayarma breathing more heavily and beginning to perspire. The physician was watching her.

“The
jatma
is not present in this one, not anymore,” Zell said. “Just a shadow, some kind of tenuous fiber triggered by the compounds.”

“I don't understand,” Qala said.

“As we watch the alien energies, they are watching us.”

That sent a fresh chill through the
Standor
.

He used the first vial to restore Bayarma to equilibrium. At once, her breath came more naturally and she began to relax. Then he took both vials away and stood back.

“Are you all right?” Zell asked her.

The young woman blinked. “I think so . . . now,” she replied. He handed her a vial from the shelf and instructed her to drink it.

“What is it?” she asked.

“A sleep agent,” he said. “You have been through a small ordeal. You should recuperate.”

She obliged and lay back. He took the vial from her and walked over to Qala.

“The future,” he said in an almost reverent voice.

“What about it?” Qala asked.

Zell looked from Vilu to Bayarma. “Is it . . .
possible
? There is only one power that can erase time, and not all of us believe in it.”

“
Standor
Qala!”

Qala ducked her head back out the door. It was her second-in-command,
Femora
Loi. The man, whose calm demeanor was an anchor for the crew, seemed uncharacteristically agitated.

“Yes,
Femora
?” Qala said.

“Please come at once,” he said. “You have to see.”

Qala glanced back at the room. The physician nodded briskly and Qala left. She strode along the side of the ship, following the man toward the plank that led to the column. The hoses lay across the deck and were inflated, carrying hot air into the bags. But there were no rippling stretches of air to suggest a leak, no pockets of heat. That wasn't what was creating the warmth.

The
Standor
saw what was happening even before she reached the plank. The top of the column was a few heads higher, but she could see a very faint nimbus around the rim. Her chest tightened.

Qala was not a deeply devotional soul. She had no interest in the squabbles between the Priests and Technologists as long as they remained philosophical debates. She had no strong opinion about the Candescents, the race of gods that were said to have created the Galderkhaani. She certainly did not believe that their spirits resided in the tiles that were a part of every grounded structure in Galderkhaan. Those tiles, ribboned with metals that somehow formed in veins underground, had strange magnetic properties, properties that captured and replayed images and sounds—but those were naturally explained, like the reflections in water or the reverberations of bells. As Zell had said, nature is constant.

But to Qala's knowledge, the strange, powerful tiles had never done this.

Reaching the top of the ramp, followed by Loi and the eyes of those working on the hoses, Qala saw a misty glow just within the top of the column. It reminded her of the kind of halo that formed around the sun before a rainstorm—diaphanous, elusive, slightly prismatic. She came closer, looked at the tiles on the opposite side of the column. Through the haze she could see they were dull but uniformly lit.

“A reflection of fires from below?” Loi speculated.

“The illumination is too consistent,” Qala said. “Double the loading crew,
Femora
. I want to be away from here as soon as possible.”

“Are you afraid for the column,
Standor
?” Loi asked with concern. “I have lovers and children here—”

“No,” she replied with a reassuring smile. “I want to see if this is happening in other columns along the route.”

CHAPTER 12

I
t was a small library, unassuming as libraries went in Galderkhaan. There were a few more olivine tiles, but not so many that anyone would suspect their true nature.

These tiles, built in the Technologist complex beside the
motu-varka
s
, were designed to control the winds that were not only generated by the magma deep below Galderkhaan: forced through tunnels constructed by the Technologists, the same winds held the magma down and back, one elemental force controlling the other. The heat of the lava actually strengthened the ferocity and power of the winds that contained it.

The Source was corrupt. The Source drew on energies that caused mountains to rumble and flame. It caused the ground to split and consume villages whole. It created great waves that smashed the coastline, killing the creatures of the sea and the citizens who lived there. Freed, it would not allow Galderkhaani to contain it.

The Council did not want to hear that. The Council was comprised of aged men and women who were eager to achieve immortality. There was evidence for an existence after this one, and they wanted to access it
now.
If the Technologists were wrong, then there was still time to support the approach of the Priests, the
cazh
. They did not understand why both methods should not be explored.

“The Candescents found merit in the fires beneath the land,” the Chief Councilor had said, reciting the decision of her fellow members. “Why should we, then, shun these forces?”

Most of the seven Councilors were Azha's lovers. The Source hearings that preceded and followed the trial of
Femora
Azha lacked the objectivity of that grim matter. It was incomprehensible that the social issue of “violence” should receive a fairer, saner hearing than the potentially catastrophic matter of tapping and unleashing the flames and heat from below. Even the ice engineers, who cleared swaths of terrain for settlement, were afraid to use heat from the towers. The risen pools of magma were used solely to warm water through careful release of heat, great stone doors and vents, operated by pulleys, being employed to control the wind.

The monstrosity beyond the library? It had been expanded and enlarged without sufficient study. Models suggested this and drawings suggested that. Nothing had been proven. Technologists
thought
the olivine tiles would allow them to control the various mechanisms they were constructing.

That was not only dangerous, it was lunatic.

Which was why Vol had made love to a clutch of Technologists, one of whom had allowed him to come to this chamber just “to see” the refurbished
motu-varkas.
The Priest had no interest in the man who had given him access or the détente he said interested him.

The Priest felt extremely guilty having used love and lovemaking, and his sacred poetry, to seduce his way into the library. He felt far worse about that than he did about the necessary deaths that were liable to result from this.

Vol was consumed with just one idea, an idea that
Femora
Azha had gotten right. Before the networks were connected, Vol wanted to turn on the Source at its very core. He was willing to sacrifice himself and the others in the tower to prove that such containment was not possible.

He had already shut the library tiles so his actions would not be
recorded; it was an easy matter to clandestinely replace his own tile for one of those crafted by the Technologists. He had simply gone to one wall, replaced a Technologist tile with one to which he had transferred his own thoughts and plans, and no one would notice that a massive trapdoor would not shut until it was too late. The magma would be agitated by the opening of other lava tubes and the
motu-varkas
would spit death into the immediate vicinity.

Vol did not want this to reflect badly on any fellow Priests, like his beloved Rensat, or even the moderate Pao. What happened here would look like an accident. The power to destroy Galderkhaan—by accident or, more dangerously, by power-hungry Technologists—would be eliminated. And the true course of Ascension, Transcendence, and Candescence would be pursued by the Priests.

Already, the attention of the Technologists in the library was drawn to odd stirrings from below the ground. They would check the olivine tiles inside the tower first. That would take them quite some time. They would not find his tile in the library, they would fail to remove it in time; it was outwardly benign and too well integrated into the system. If necessary, he would prevent them from doing so by releasing its latent energy.

Vol had full control of a system that, once tripped, had no other way of being shut down. Henceforth, the Night of Miracles would be remembered for much more than the folklorish creation of the Galderkhaani. By tonight, the Source and its Technologist acolytes would be a memory. And instead of being slaves of the towers, the olivine tiles would finally be turned over for study by those who wanted to release, not control, their ancient, dormant energies—the Priests of Galderkhaan.