I was too out of breath to do much anyway. I aimed my fire extinguisher back the way we’d come and pulled the trigger. The recoil forced it back against me; I took the force with my arms and felt myself tumbling backwards. But I was moving. I slammed into the socket-wall at the end, scrabbled for a handhold on the rim of the hole, and pulled myself through. A second later Fraa Jad squirted through on a snowy plume of fire retardant. I grabbed his ankle, which slowed him down quite a bit. We found ourselves adrift and slowly tumbling at the forward extremity of the two-mile-long, hundred-foot-diameter shaft that ran the length of the Orbstack. We had made it to the Core. And if any of those we’d left behind in the bearing chamber had found our behavior suspicious, they had not been adroit enough to follow us through the ball valve. Smaller hatches—airlocks, made for one person at a time—were planted around it so that people could pass between Core and bearing chamber even when the ball valve was closed. I kept a nervous eye on those, half expecting a space cop to fly out and accost us, but then reasoned that it simply wasn’t going to happen. Jules’s words of a few minutes ago came back to me. What the Valers had done—what we had done—had been the worst military embarrassment these people had suffered in a thousand years. The bomb was still on fire, the disaster only getting started. The Valers might still be alive and fighting. So they weren’t going to make a big deal about a couple of firefighters acting weird.
Our panicky flight through the valve had imbued us with momentum that carried us outward toward the wall of the Core, which was rotating about as fast as the second hand on a clock. This meant that when we drifted into the wall, it was moving past us at a brisk walking pace. This part of the Core wall was covered with a grid with convenient hand-sized holes between the bars, so we did what came naturally and grabbed it. The effect was gentle but inexorable acceleration that made our feet spin out to find purchase on the grid. We were now rotating along with everything else. Here our body weight was less than that of a newborn infant. But it was the most “gravity” we had known for a long time, and took a little getting used to.
We clung to it for a couple of minutes, gasping for air, trying not to black out. Then Fraa Jad, never one to discuss his plans and intentions with his traveling companions, pushed off and glided along the Core wall, headed for the first of the four great Nexi that were spaced evenly along its length. Travel was easier in micro-than in zero gravity, because we slowly “fell” to the Core wall where we could always push off and get another dose of momentum. Available was a sort of rapid transit system, consisting of a moving conveyor-belt-cum-ladder that glided up one side of the Core and down the other. Most of the people we could see—perhaps a hundred, heavily skewed toward soldiers and firefighters—were using it. The rungs were elastic, so that when you grabbed one it didn’t simply jerk your arm from its socket. Tired as I was, I was tempted to have a go, but didn’t want to make a spectacle of myself. Fraa Jad showed no interest. We moved more slowly than those who were using it, which worked to our advantage: some of them shouted questions at us as they glided by, but none was inquisitive enough to jump off and pursue the conversation.
In a few minutes we came to the station in the Core where the forward-most Orbs—One, Five, Nine, and Thirteen—were connected. Each of these stood at the head of a stack of four. So, Orbs One through Four were for the Urnudans. Five through Eight were Troän, Nine through Twelve were Laterran, and the rest Fthosian. By convention, the lowest-number Orb in each stack—the ones that connected here, at the heads of the stacks—were for the highest-ranking members of their respective races. So this Nexus was the most convenient place for the Geometers’ VIPs to meet. From where we were, it didn’t look like much: just four cavernous holes in the wall, the termini of perpendicular shafts leading out to the Orbs. According to Jules, though, if we were to look at it from the outside, we would see that this part of the Core was wrapped in a doughnut of offices, meeting-chambers, and ring-corridors where the Command had its offices. Several hatches in the Core wall hinted at this. But conflict between Pedestal and Fulcrum had led to a division of the Command torus into parts of unequal size. Hatches had been locked, partitions welded into place, guards posted, cables severed.
None of which concerned us very much, since the space we were in served only as a service corridor or elevator shaft, rarely visited or thought about by the Command. Of much greater interest to us were the four huge orifices in the Core wall. As we drifted into the Nexus we were able to gaze into these and see tubular shafts, each about twenty feet in diameter, each leading “down” about a quarter of a mile. At the “bottom” of each was another huge ball valve, currently closed. Beyond each such valve was an inhabited Orb a mile wide.
It wasn’t difficult to identify the shaft leading to Orb One. A large numeral was painted on the Core wall next to it. The numeral was Urnudan, but any sentient being from any cosmos could recognize it as the glyph that represented unity, 1, a single copy of something. I, however, did not have time to linger and contemplate its profound meaning, as Fraa Jad had already located a ladder bracketed to the wall of the shaft, and begun to descend it.
I followed him. Gravity slowly came on as we went. It’s hard to describe how terrible this made me feel. The only thing that kept me from passing out was fear I’d let go of the rungs and fall down on top of Fraa Jad. During the worst spell, a voice drilled into my awareness and made my skull buzz. Fraa Jad had begun to sing some Thousander chant like the one that had kept me awake at the Bazian monastery on the night we had been Evoked. It gave my consciousness something to hold on to, like the steel ladder-rung that I was gripping with my hand: my only hard tangible link to the giant complex spinning around me. And in the same way that the rung kept me from falling, the sound of Jad’s voice in my skull kept my mind from floating away to wherever it had gone when I’d passed out in the observatory and awoken on the wrong worldtrack.
I kept descending.
I was crouching atop a giant steel navel with my head between my knees, trying not to pass out.
Fraa Jad was punching numbers into a keypad mounted to the wall.
The sphere began to rotate beneath me.
“How did you know the code?” I asked.
“I selected a number at random,” he said.
I’d heard only four beeps from the keypad. Only a four-digit number. Only ten thousand possible combinations. So if there were ten thousand Jads in ten thousand branches of the worldtrack…and if I were lucky enough to be with the right one…
Sunlight was shining through the bore of the valve. I flattened myself on it and gazed down on open water, vegetation, and buildings from an altitude of half a mile.
This time, the bore of the valve had ladder-rungs on it. We climbed down them even as the valve was snapping to its final position, and exited onto a ring-shaped catwalk hung from the ceiling of the orb, surrounding the aperture—the oculus at the top of a vast spherical dome, a little sky above a little world. A stairway led up to it. Men with weapons were running up the stairway, intent on saying hello to us. Fraa Jad, seeing this, pulled off his respirator. No point in maintaining the disguise now. I did likewise.
Two soldiers, peering down shotgun barrels, reached the catwalk. One of them moved aggressively toward Fraa Jad. I stepped forward, instinctively, holding up my hands. My attention was drawn to a small silver object in Fraa Jad’s hand—like a jeejah, of all things! The other soldier pivoted toward me and swung the butt of his weapon around, catching me in the jaw. I toppled backward over the rail and felt my old friend, zero gravity, taking me back into its embrace as I went into free fall down the middle of the orb. Something went extremely wrong in my guts. A moment later I heard the boom of a shotgun. Had I been shot? Not likely, given my situation. My vision whited out again, and my viscera caught on fire and melted.
They had shot Fraa Jad. The Everything Killers had been turned on. I had become a nuclear weapon, a dark sun spraying fatal radiance onto the dwellings and cultivated terra
ces of the Urnudan community below.
We had accomplished our mission.
* * *
Harbinger: One of a series of three calamities that engulfed most of Arbre during the last decades of the Praxic Age and later came to be seen as precursors or warnings of the Terrible Events. The precise nature of the Harbingers is difficult to sort out because of destruction of records (many of which were stored on syntactic devices that later ceased functioning) but it is generally agreed that the First Harbinger was a worldwide outbreak of violent revolutions, the Second was a world war, and the Third was a genocide.
—THE DICTIONARY, 4th edition, A.R. 3000
“We have come,” said the man in the robes. “We have answered your call.” He was speaking Orth. Not as well as Jules Verne Durand, but well enough to make me think he had been studying it for almost as long. As long as we didn’t snow him with arcane tenses and intricate sentence structures, he would be able to keep up.
I say “we,” but I didn’t expect to do much talking. “Why am I here?” I’d asked Fraa Jad, as we had approached the gate of the building that floated in the center of Orb One.
“To serve as amanuensis,” he had replied.
“These people can build self-sufficient intercosmic starships, but they don’t have recording devices?”
“An amanuensis is more than a recording device. An amanuensis is a consciousness-bearing system, and so what it observes in its cosmos has effects in others, in the manner we spoke of at Avrachon’s Dowment.”
“You’re a consciousness-bearing system. And you seem to be much better at playing this polycosmic chess game than I am. So doesn’t that make me exiguous?”
“Much pruning has taken place in recent weeks. I am now absent in many versions of the cosmos where you are present.”
“You mean, you’re dead and I’m alive.”
“Absent and present express it better, but if you insist on using those terms, I won’t quibble.”
“Fraa Jad?”
“Yes, Fraa Erasmas?”
“What happens to us after we die?”
“You already know as much of it as I do.”
About then the conversation had been interrupted as we had been ushered into the room featuring the man in the robes. Knowing nothing of Urnudan culture put me at a disadvantage in trying to puzzle out who this man was. The room offered no clues. It was a sphere with a flat floor, like a smallish planetarium. I guessed that it was situated near the geometric center of the Orb. The inner surface was matte, and glowed softly with piped-in sunlight. The circular floor had a chair in the middle, surrounded by a ring-shaped bench. A few receptacles, charged with steaming fluids, were arranged on the bench. Otherwise the room was featureless and undecorated. I felt at home here.
“We have answered your call.”
What was Fraa Jad going to say to that? A few possible responses strayed into my head: Well, what took you so long? or What the hell are you talking about? But Fraa Jad answered in a shrewdly noncommittal way by saying, “Then I have come to bid you welcome.”
The man turned sideways and extended an arm toward the circular bench. The robes unfurled and hung from his arm like a banner. They were mostly white, but elaborately decorated. I wanted to say that they were brocade or embroidery, but life among bolt-wearing ascetics had left me with a deeply impoverished vocabulary where the decorative arts were concerned, so I’ll just say that they were fancy. “Please,” the man said, “we have tea. A purely symbolic offering, since your bodies can do nothing with it, but…”
“We shall be pleased to drink your tea,” Fraa Jad said.
So we repaired to the circular bench and took seats. I let Fraa Jad and our host sit relatively close, facing each other, and arranged myself somewhat farther away. Our host picked up his teacup and made what I guessed was some kind of polite ceremonial gesture with it, which Fraa Jad and I tried to copy. Then we all sipped. It was no worse and no better than what “Zh’vaern” used to eat at Messal. I didn’t think I’d be taking any home with me.
The man drew some notes from a pocket in his robe and consulted them from time to time as he delivered the following. “I am called Gan Odru. In the history of the Daban Urnud, I am the forty-third person to bear the title of Gan; Odru is my given name. The closest translation of Gan into Orth is ‘Admiral.’ This only approximates its meaning. In our military system, one class of officers were responsible for the trees, another for the forest.”
“Tactics and strategy respectively,” Fraa Jad said.
“Exactly. ‘Gan’ was the highest-ranking strategic officer, responsible for direction of a whole fleet, and reporting to civilian authorities, when there were any. Command of specific vessels was delegated by the Gan to tactical officers with the rank of Prag, or what you would call a captain. I apologize for perhaps boring you with this, but it is a way to explain the manner in which the Daban Urnud has behaved toward Arbre.”
“It is in no way boring,” said Fraa Jad, and glanced over my way to verify that I was doing my job: which as far as I could tell was merely to remain conscious.
“The first Gan of the Daban Urnud was entrusted with the responsibility to establish a colony on another star system,” Gan Odru continued. “As links to Urnud became more tenuous with distance, his responsibilities grew, and he became the supreme authority, answerable to no one. But he was a strange kind of Gan in that his fleet consisted of but one ship and so his staff consisted of but one Prag, and inasmuch as the Prag had no real tactical decisions to make—as the war had been left far behind—the relationship between Gan and Prag became unstable, and evolved. A simple way to express it is that the Gan became somewhat like your avout, and the Prag like your Saecular Power. This state of affairs came about over the course of but a single generation, but proved extraordinarily stable, and has not changed since. The clothing that I wear is but little changed from the formal dress uniforms worn by the Gans of Urnud’s ocean-going fleets thousands of years ago. Though, of course, they did not wear them aboard ship, since it is difficult to swim in robes.”
Humor was the last thing I was looking for here and so astonishment got the better of mirth and I chuckled too little and too late.
“The second Gan was weakened by illness and served for only six years. The third was a young protégé of the first; he had a long career, and through the force of his personality and his uncommon intelligence, gained back some of the power that his office had ceded to that of the Prags. Late in his career, he became aware of your summons, and made the decision to alter the trajectory of the Daban Urnud so that it would—as he conceived it—fly into the past. For the signals that he and the others heard, they conceived as ancestral voices calling them home to make the Urnud that should have been but that, through its leaders’ follies, it had failed to become.
“I suppose you have already some notion of the wanderings that followed, the Advents at Tro, Earth, and Fthos and their consequences. My purpose is not to rehearse all of that history but to give an account of our actions here.”
“It will be useful,” Fraa Jad said, “to know what occurred with the Warden of Heaven.”
“For a long time,” said Gan Odru, shifting into a lower gear, as he was now making it up as he went along instead of reading from notes, “the relationship between the Gans and the Prags has been poisoned. The Prags have said that the third Gan was simply wrong. That all the wanderings of the Daban Urnud have been without meaning—simply the endless consequence of an ancient mistake. Believing that, they saw their only purpose as self-preservation. Those who think this way want only to settle down somewhere and go on living. And, with each Advent, some do. We have left Urnudans behind on Tro, Troäns behind on Earth, and so on. They find ways to live even though those cosmi are not their own. So, of the cynical ones, the ones who believe it is all a meaningless error, a large fraction are bled off at each Advent. At the same time we are joined by ones from the new cosmos who believe in the quest. So the ship is
rebuilt and departs for the next cosmos. At first the Gans have power and the Prags do their bidding. But the journey is long, the quest is forgotten as generations go by, the Prags gain, the Gans lose, power. The Pedestal and the Fulcrum have long been our names for these two tendencies. And so here you see me, virtually alone in this place of ceremony, doing what my predecessors did, but with little respect and no power.
“Thus came we to Arbre. Prag Eshwar, my counterpart, and her followers saw your planet as just another civilization to be raided for its resources, so that the ship could be rebuilt and the journey extended. Yet Eshwar is an intelligent woman who has read our histories and well knows that, in an Advent, the Pedestal and the Prag tend to lose power to the Fulcrum and the Gan. Already she was choosing tactics to forestall this.
“When the Warden of Heaven came to us, it was obvious that he was a fool, a charlatan. We already knew as much, of course, from our surveillance of Arbre’s popular culture. And the Prag had already devised a plan, to draw comparisons between me and this Warden of Heaven. To make his foolishness, his falseness, rub off on me.
“So the Warden of Heaven was brought here in his spacesuit. He kept wanting to take it off. We advised against it. When he came in to this room, he saw it as a kind of holy place, and insisted that the risk of removing his suit was acceptable. That his god would watch over him and keep him safe. So, off came the suit. He became short of breath. Our physicians tried to reassemble the suit around him but this did not help matters, for he had already suffered the bursting of a major blood vessel. The physicians next tried to put him in a cold hyperbaric chamber, a therapy in which they are well practiced. He was stripped naked and readied for the procedure, but it was too late—he died. A debate followed as to what should be done with the body. While some of us debated, overzealous researchers took samples of his blood and tissues, and commenced an autopsy. So the body had already been desecrated, if you will. Prag Eshwar made the decision that any effort to apologize would be taken as a sign of weakness and that any sharing of information would only benefit Arbre. And too, for internal political reasons, she was inclined to show contempt, or at least disregard, for the body—because she had made it into a symbol for me. Hence the style in which the Warden of Heaven was returned.”
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