Foreigner

by Robert J. Sawyer

  The Face of God. The planet around which the Quintaglio moon orbited.

  The lifeboat continued upward. As the sight of the world with a single equatorial landmass diminished, more of the Face of God beyond became visible. Her world looked now like a vast blue-green pupil in the center of a yellow eye. As time went by, she could see the two superimposed spheres—the Face and the Quintaglio moon—waxing and waning through phases in unison. When they were both full, as they were at high noon, the glare from the ring-shaped Face behind was so intense that Novato had trouble looking at it without her inner eyelids involuntarily sliding shut.

  It was spectacular. When seen from the deck of a pilgrimage ship, the sight of the Face, with its roiling bands of cloud, its infinitely complex array of swirls and vortices and colored whirlpools, its vast majestic grandeur, was enough to induce an almost hypnotic state in a Quintaglio. But to see her own world, with its cottony clouds, its shimmering blue waters, and the endlessly convoluted shoreline of Land, and at the same time to also see beyond it the glory of the Face of God—that was almost too much beauty, too much wonder, for the mind to grasp. Novato found herself transfixed, mesmerized. If she hadn’t already been floating on air, she would be now.

  Emperor Dy-Dybo was lying on his dayslab in his ruling room, hearing the appeal of a young Quintaglio who had been accused of theft. He couldn’t deny the crime, of course: his muzzle would betray his lies. Still, he sought clemency on the basis that what he had taken—spikefrill horn cores from the palace butchery, items often used in Lubalite ceremonies—would simply have been thrown out anyway. Penalty for theft was to have one’s hands amputated. This fellow’s lawyer contended that such an act would be cruel punishment, for the youth apparently had a flaw that would prevent the hands from regenerating. As proof, he offered his client’s left foot, which had only two toes; the third had been lost kilodays ago and had never regrown.

  The ruling room’s doors burst open and in ran an elderly female Dybo didn’t recognize. The imperial guards quickly stepped forward, interposing themselves between the emperor and the intruder; there was always the chance that someone mad with dagamant would get into the palace. The stranger was panting hard, but her torso was steady. She held up a hand, showing that her claws were sheathed, and caught her breath. Then: “Your Luminance, forgive me. I’m Pos-Doblan, keeper of the maritime rookery north of the city.”

  “Yes?” said Dybo.

  “A homing wingfinger has just arrived. I wouldn’t have interrupted you, but the message is urgent.” She held up a coil of leather. Dybo was recumbent on the slab, tail sticking up like a rubbery mast. He flicked it, and a guard moved forward, retrieved the leather strip, took it to Dybo, then backed off to a respectful distance. Dybo unwound the strip and read it quickly. “God protect us,” he said softly.

  One of Dybo’s advisors rose from a katadu bench. “Dybo?” she said, the lapse into informality within the throne chamber betraying her concern.

  Dybo’s tone was decisive. “You, page”—he never could remember names—“summon Afsan right away. And send word to Fra’toolar that Novato should return as soon as possible. I’m going to need my best thinkers.” He pushed off the dayslab and began to leave the chamber.

  “Emperor,” called the lawyer for the youth. “What about my client?”

  “No punishment,” snapped Dybo. “We’re going to need all the hands we can get.”

  “I have a feeling we have not gone back far enough,” Mokleb said to Afsan. “What’s the earliest memory you have?”

  Afsan scratched the loose folds of the dewlap hanging from his neck. “I don’t know. I remember, well, let’s see…I remember my vocational exams.”

  “Those would have been when you were ten or eleven. Surely you remember older things.”

  “Oh, sure. There’s that time I got lost in the forest; I’ve mentioned that before. And, let’s see, I remember getting in trouble for biting off the finger of one of my creche mates when I was young.”

  “Did you do it in anger?”

  “No, we were just playing around. It was an accident, and the finger grew back, of course.”

  “What else do you remember?”

  “Learning to cut leather. Catching butterflies. Let’s see…I remember the first time during my life that Pack Carno picked up and moved itself along the shores of the Kreeb River. I remember—what else?—I remember all the commotion when some dignitary came to visit the Pack. I didn’t know who it was at the time, but I later learned that it was Dybo’s—ah, what would the term be? Dybo’s grandmother, the Empress Sar-Sardon.”

  “You remember an imperial visit to Carno?”

  “Vaguely, yes. They took us youngsters down to the Kreeb and washed us off so we’d look clean for her. I remember it because it was the first time they’d actually let us near the river; they were always afraid the current would sweep us away.”

  “What else?”

  “Learning to play lastoontal. God, what a boring process that was: walking up to the game board to make my move, then backing off so the other player could come up and make his or her move.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Oh, many things, I suppose, but they all seem trivial. A great thunderstorm. The first time I experienced a landquake. Finding a dead wingfinger.”

  “A wingfinger? Was it purple?”

  “No, it was white with pale orange stripes. A banded swift, I think.”

  “What else?”

  “Learning to read; memorizing endless series of glyphs and the words associated with them.”

  “And do you remember which of these things came first?”

  “It’s hard to say. They’re jumbled together in my mind.”

  “What about anything that disturbed you, or frightened you, when you were a child?”

  “Well, I mentioned the landquake: that scared me. Of course, one gets used to them. And I was quite frightened when I was lost in the forest. But no, nothing really shocking, if that’s what you’re looking for.”

  “Yes,” said Mokleb. “That’s exactly what I’m looking for.”

  Chapter 21

  Finally, it was about to happen: the moment Novato had been waiting for and dreading. The four blue sides of the ladder were no longer simply fading into nothingness. Instead, she could see where they ended. Far, far above, she could see the actual summit of the tower. Novato’s claws hung half out of their sheaths, and her tail, floating in the air behind her, twitched left and right.

  She thought of Rewdan and the Vine.

  A giant blackdeath.

  A wingfinger that laid eggs of gold.

  Which would it be?

  The four sides of the tower flared into a vast blue bulb at the top. Long panels were extended from the sides of the bulb, panels so dark as to be visible only because they blocked the stars behind them. The whole thing looked like some deathly daisy with black petals and a blue, impossibly long stem.

  The lifeboat began to slow, preparing to stop at the summit. Novato drifted toward the roof.

  Any moment now.

  The lifeboat slid up, farther and farther, past the bottom of the bottom into the cavernous interior. It jerked slightly as it came to rest.

  Novato was breathing rapidly. It took a while to absorb what she was seeing through the transparent walls: a vast chamber with a myriad of levels, all constructed of the blue material.

  She steeled her courage as the lifeboat’s interior walls fogged over. Then the door appeared. The successful return of the test lizards notwithstanding, she’d been terrified that there’d be no air inside the chamber up here. But everything seemed fine. She gave a gentle kick off the lifeboat’s rear wall and floated out the door.

  Ten days had elapsed since she’d first entered the lifeboat. If she was right about its speed—one hundred and thirty kilopaces per daytenth—then she was now some thirteen thousand kilopaces above the surface of her world. Here at last she felt no tendency to drift downward at all; s
he was completely weightless, the centrifugal and gravitational forces in perfect balance.

  She floated along, kicking gently off walls to keep herself moving. At last she entered a massive cubic chamber.

  Her heart pounded.

  Eggs of gold.

  There were nine windows on one wall arranged in three rows of three. Thick black lines connected the eight outlying windows to the one in the center.

  Novato tried to take it all in, but couldn’t. For a time, she simply floated there, numb, the bright colors in the windows hypnotic but devoid of content. Slowly, though, her mind began to make at least a small amount of sense out of what she was seeing.

  Somehow, each window was looking out on a different scene. As if that weren’t strange enough, the scene each window was showing changed every forty beats or so. Some of the scenes at least were partially comprehensible—why, that one showed a grassy plain and cloudy sky, and this one showed water lapping against a shore, and surely those things in that window over there were buildings of some sort. But the views through other windows were so strange, Novato could make nothing of them.

  Each window was numbered in its upper left corner using the six numerals of the ark-makers. But they weren’t numbered one through nine. Rather, the one in the center had the simple horizontal line the ark-makers used for zero, and the other windows had numbers that changed each time the view through them changed.

  She scanned the nine windows, looking for something—anything—she recognized.

  And suddenly she found just that: something familiar in the maelstrom of confusion.

  Emperor Dybo.

  Yes, the right-hand window in the bottom row was looking in on Dybo’s ruling room. The number in the window’s upper left was 27.

  Except—

  There was no window in the ruling room at that point; indeed, there were no windows in the ruling room at all.

  And yet here was a view of that room from above, as if standing on a ladder, looking down on Dybo, who was lying on the marble throne slab. To his left and right were the katadu benches for imperial advisors. Three elderly Quintaglios were sitting on these. Dybo had a long strip of leather in his hands that appeared to have writing on it. The Emperor looked worried.

  Still—Dybo! How good to see him again! But how was this window here, on the top of the space tower, able to look into Dybo’s ruling room? What magic made this possible?

  She stared through the window, trying to make out details. And suddenly she realized that these glass-covered squares were not windows. If they had been windows, the view would shift as she moved her head left and right, but that did not happen. Also, Dybo was in sharp focus, but the background was not. The tapestries on the rear wall were simply a blur. If she’d been looking through a real window, she could have focused on whatever she wanted. An optical process was at work, then, as though—as though she were looking through the eyepiece of a far-seer, perhaps. A far-seer that could see through walls.

  And then her heart soared as someone else walked into the picture.

  Afsan.

  God, it was wonderful to see him again. Novato found herself calling out his name, but he didn’t turn, didn’t react. Dybo was shaking with great agitation, but Novato couldn’t hear the words. And then—

  The view in the window changed. Novato scanned all nine squares, hoping to find Afsan again, but each of them was showed something unfamiliar.

  Her mind was reeling. The cascade of images was incredible, hypnotic. It was all so much to absorb. She decided to concentrate on just one window. She choose the bottom right, the same one that had shown Dybo’s ruling room.

  But what she was seeing now through that window was nothing at all like Capital City. Nothing at all, in fact, like any part of her world.

  There were no familiar objects in the picture—nothing to give any sense of scale. Still, Novato eventually realized she was seeing a portion of a city. But what a bizarre city! Everything seemed to be made of one continuous piece of material, as if the whole thing had been…been grown all at once. The material was pinkish-tan and pockmarked, reminding Novato of the coral reefs she’d seen off Boodskar. But this was no random atoll; if it was coral, it had somehow been made to grow in a specific pattern. At regular intervals, dome-like buildings rose out of the gently undulating surface—they were clearly buildings, for they had windows arranged in neat rows and wide openings for doors. Elsewhere, ornate spires stretched toward the sky, and in some places deep circular pits were sunk into the material, their interior walls also lined with windows. There were no seams anywhere, no dividing lines between where one part ended and another began.

  Suddenly Novato’s claws popped out. A quivering red glob was emerging from one of the doorways. It seemed as if the skin had been flayed from its body: the flesh was completely naked and a reticulum of yellow circulatory channels was visible on or just below the surface. Locomotion was provided by smaller lumps underneath the main body. These lumps had many fine tendrils projecting from them, tendrils that constantly rippled like blades of long grass in the wind. Novato had the feeling that these underbodies weren’t securely attached, and this was confirmed when one of them scampered off on its own into a nearby building. She couldn’t see any sensory organs on the central red glob, but there were things moving over it: hideous leech-like worms with sharp yellow teeth. Other things, like skinless snakes, writhed at the glob’s sides. These, too, were clearly not attached to it, but rather were separate entities, roaming freely over the amorphous red surface.

  Another of the red globs moved into view from the right, the tendrils on its underbodies rippling back and forth. Novato watched, amazed, as one of the naked snakes left the first creature and slithered over to take up residence on the second.

  Suddenly, the view changed again. This time it seemed to be a night scene. Large creatures were moving around in the blackness, but Novato couldn’t make out what they were. She turned her attention to the central window—the one labeled as window zero.

  At least the creatures visible through it had some slight resemblance to Quintaglios. Like Quintaglios, they had a pair of arms ending in five-fingered hands, a pair of legs, and a head with a mouth and two eyes. But that’s where the resemblance ended. They weren’t reptiles, whatever they were. These creatures stood impossibly erect, like the columns used to support buildings. They lacked tails. And their skin seemed to be yellowish-beige. Their heads were round, with only a tiny nose and no muzzle at all. The eyes were slanted. Some of them were wearing headgear, but others apparently were not, although Novato couldn’t be sure. There was a black something crowning each head, a mass of…of fibers, perhaps…that blew around in the wind. There were hints of these same black fibers above the eyes and some of the creatures had traces of the black stuff around their mouths.

  The sky was a bright blue and there was something yellow and huge blazing in it. A sun. But, by the very Egg of God, it was not the sun. If she hadn’t been floating, Novato would have staggered back on her tail.

  The view in the central window changed, but the number in the upper left remained zero. A group of strange quadrupeds were in the middle of the picture. Startling beasts: they were covered with vertical black and white stripes. The view moved, as if whatever eye was capturing these images was scanning, looking for something else. At last it settled on a trio of bipeds. These were like the yellowish ones Novato had already seen, but had skin so dark brown as to be almost black. They also had black fiber on the tops of their heads, but these fibers seemed more coiled than straight. The three of them were wearing pieces of leather cloth around their waists. Obviously they killed animals, then—but how? These brown ones still lacked any sort of muzzle, and—my God!—one had its mouth open now, and Novato could clearly see the yellow-white teeth.

  Flat, square teeth.

  The teeth of a herbivore.

  Novato’s mind reeled. Nothing made any sense. And yet, these creatures were obviously intelligent: in additio
n to the waist cloths, one of the three was wearing some kind of jewelry. The jeweled one was interesting. Its chest was completely different in construction than that of the other two; a pair of large growths hung from it. What could they possibly be for?

  Novato shook her head, then glanced at the window to the left. Ah, at least the creature it was showing was reasonable. A reptilian biped, a bit like a runningbeast, with green and brown skin, two arms, two legs, and a long, drawn-out face. It was much less stocky than a Quintaglio, and its hands had only three fingers. The eyes were huge and silver, and its body was held horizontally, with a thin, stiff tail projecting directly to the rear, like the balancing-bar tail used by terrorclaws. Again, this was an intelligent creature, for in its hand was some sort of complex device. The creature seemed to stare directly at Novato for a moment, blinked its eyes, then turned and walked away, its neck weaving back and forth as it moved.

  The view changed. Novato’s mind reeled again, but eventually images coalesced for her. She was seeing an underwater landscape, but seeing it clearly, without the blurring normally associated with opening one’s eyes while submerged. A herd of creatures was moving by on the bottom. Each had seven pairs of stilt-like legs and seven waving tentacles in a row down its back. The tentacles each ended in little pincers. Novato thought she must be hallucinating, the creatures looked so strange.

  Her head spun, unable to sort out all the images. She fought waves of disorientation and confusion.

  What was she seeing? What did it all mean?

  Chapter 22

  Toroca stood on the Dasheter’s rear diamond-shaped hull, leaning over the gunwale. It was late afternoon. Far astern he could see the strange triangular sails of the Other ships spread out in a line. Behind them was the top of the Face of God, just a sliver of it sticking above the horizon now, a tiny dome of yellow and orange and brown, all but submerged beneath the waves. In front of it, though, the water was stained red, as if slick with blood, reflecting the light of the setting Face.