“Well done Composite One,” whispered First-of-the-Bound.
Garin opened his eyes and saw that the once-dim crystal sphere in which he stood was now awash in radiance. He could see shimmering bridges extending in all directions from the curving walls of the sphere like filaments of spun glas, doubtless leading to the domains of the other entities that called this world home. The billowing thunderheads that had surrounded him on his journey were gone as well, replaced by a pellucid brightness stretching from horizon to horizon. Beneath the sphere the cerulean mists still churned, but these were distant now, further away than they had ever been since he had arrived in this world. And all around him, thusting upward from the mists like titanic shards of diamond, stood the mountains.
Each was a sheer pyramid of faceted crystal taller than any peak Garin had seen on Latis. Their summits blazed like miniature suns, showering the slopes beneath with brilliant rays of golden light that caught on the crystalline facets and fractured into a thousand rainbows. One mountain was particularly close to First-Of-The-Bound’s sphere, and the particular hue of the light streaming from its summit caught Garin’s attention. A few moments later he realized that it was the same color as the light he had seen reflected between First-Of-The-Bound and the Perichorr in his mind only a moment before.
Could that be…
“Yes Composite One!” whispered First-of-the-Bound with a note of triumph. “It is the Peak of the Third Glory, source of the symmetry that you have even now comprehended. Come! What bars your passage? You have simply to grab hold of the light.”
Garin understood. After offering a word of thanks, he again closed his eyes and visualized the mirror. This time, however, he imagined his own body as it would look reflected from it. As the symmetry took hold, the image began to shift back and forth between its original configuration and a strange, inverted version. With each reflection the shifting accelerated, until soon neither the image nor its inversion could be seen, only a brilliant blur that grew brighter and brighter with each moment. Suddenly the light seemed to thicken and grab hold of him, and he was soaring through a blinding space on wings of thought. A few moments later the sense of movement diminished, the brilliance subsided, and Garin found himself at the top of a mountain of purest crystal. Before him burned the source of the light he had seen from below, a pulsing swarm of incandescent sparks that blazed like the surface of a star.
“Welcome, Woven One. I am so glad you have found me.”
The words seemed somehow seen and not heard, as if shaped from the effulgence that surrounded him.
Garin bowed his head.
“Great One, what may I call you,” he said.
“You may call me the Chromoclast, but it is of no concern. There is little time left, Woven One, and there is one thing more you must understand before the arrival of the Exofuge. Quickly, even now he comes! Look downward and see that which you must understand.”
Without hesitation Garin stepped to the edge of the peak and looked downward.
Chapter 11: Gnosis and Epignosis
Trielle lowered her arms, her hands cramping from the repeated gestures needed to manipulate the data tree. It was as if a hole had been cut in the central database of the Ionocaric Infochryst, its edges a weave of tangentially connected data threads and sheared nodes. Her frustration was a palpable knot, a stone sitting solidly in the pit of her stomach. It was clear that she could progress no further.
She had initially approached the problem directly, but the infochryst had consistently redirected all attempts to directly ask for more detail about virtual bosons in gravitic theory to a variety of unrelated sources. Failing this, Trielle had instead attempted to trace the development of the first laridian ring prototypes, reasoning that at least some commentary might be present that discussed residual bosonic flux. At first this had looked promising, but as she followed the thread Trielle began to notice subtle breaks in what should have been smoothly flowing descriptions and animations. An elision here, a non-sequitur there, until finally she had hit the same barrier she had before. Once she had found a promising description of the trial and error process the first gravitists had used to determine the correct rotational velocity of the inner neutronium rings, yet the next link had led her to a database containing designs for the atmospheric impellers used to stir the clouds of gas giants. And with each severed link, each redirected query, her initial suspicions had hardened into certainty. There was a secret behind that barrier of misconnected links, and she did not have the key to breach the wall.
Still, she reflected, the exercise had not been totally valueless. By carefully considering the pattern of links, she had been able to make several reasonable inferences about where the missing information might be located. Although she had only been able to access a handful of truly scholarly materials on laridian ring flux, these repeatedly referred to a series of monographs by Anthron Rashavey, a human gravitist who had lived a millennia ago and had extensively studied virtual particle flux. If she could just locate those articles -articles that she could not, might never be able to, access- Trielle was certain that she could found an answer
Trielle let out a loud sigh of frustration.
“Is there something I can help you with miss?”
Trielle quickly raised her hands, thinking that she has enough time to shift the data tree back to the prescribed subject of her inquiry, but a few seconds later the futility of this gesture hit her like a punch in the stomach and she dropped them in defeat. She had been caught. Her time in the Arx Memoria was over, and all she had to show for it was the name of a monograph she would never be able to read. She slowly turned around, expecting to see the gangling form of the Anvardian that had admitted her to the Arx Memoria. Then her eyes widened and she exhaled sharply in relief.
At the edge of the alcove stood a young human no more than two or three years older than her. He was thin, and his eyes occasionally darted about furtively, yet his smile was warm and genuine.
“You look worried miss,” he said. “I only came by to see if I could help.”
“No,” said Trielle, feigning confidence. “I’m all right. Thank you, though.”
The young man stepped forward. His smile broadened.
“Forgive me if I persist, but our record of your activities indicates a persistent though unsuccessful attempt to reach certain data-points, and in such circumstances we are bound to assist.”
Trielle’s skin began to crawl as a new wave of panic swept down her body and a flood of frightened thoughts tumbled through her mind.
They’ve been monitoring! How could I have been so foolish!
Straining to control her emotions, she forced a smile.
“Well she began,” an air of feigned confidence in her voice, “perhaps you can be of assistance. I was attempting to research some specific Ardathan impressionistic case law, but may have gotten far afield.”
“Indeed,” said the boy, “quite far afield. We were notified by the Ionocaric Infochryst that, in fact, your queries had far more to do with gravitics than legal theory.” His smile thinned and vanished as he spoke. Then, abruptly, he leaned toward Trielle, prompting an involuntary cringe.
“If it where any but me,” he whispered, “you would have been ejected from the Arx Memoria hours ago. I hope this tells you that I may be trusted. Now, I ask you again, do you need my help? Or have you found what it is you are looking for.”
Trielle could see no way out. Caught in the act of deception, the possible paths of escape were closing one by one. For one last moment she hesitated. Then her emotional facade crumbled as she saw that there was no way out other than the truth.
“No, I haven’t. I want… I need… to get a better understanding of just how the gravitic ring system works, but I keep running into a blank wall in the system. In particular, there is a series of articles about its basic function that I’ve been trying to locate, but they don’t seem to be in the system.”
The young man’s smile returned. �
��Indeed, that is what I had thought. I can assure you that the articles you seek are in the system, but are accessible only to those with the highest clearance from the Gravitic Council. The contents were deemed too sensitive for public consumption.” His eyes flickered back and forth before he added under his breath, “but there are other ways of obtaining the information you seek. Come with me!”
The young man turned and began to walk away. Trielle paused a moment, then switched off her personal infochryst and rose to follow.
The young man led her swiftly down the series of ramps she had ascended hours prior. Soon they neared the entrance. But instead of taking her toward the towering ruby portal, the young man abruptly turned down a narrow hallway that lead away from the central library. The walls of the hallway were lined with iris doors and, after a few moments, he stopped in front of one of the doors and pressed his hand against it. The portion of the door immediately in front of his palm began to glow and a complex series of lines and shapes appeared in the light, forming an outline of his hand. A high, clear note sounded, and the door silently irised open, allowing them to enter.
Inside was little more than a closet, with rows of multi-hued robes electromagnetically suspended in the air. There was no exit.
Trielle’s eyes widened in fear.
Seeing this, the young man sighed.
“Please relax,” he said. “I really am trying to help. The information you need is in the Cthonic Archives and only those employed by the Arx can enter, so you’ll need a set of official robes. It’s not a perfect solution, but it should give you some time to search.” The young man turned to the robes and studied them for a moment before selecting one. “Here, this should fit you,” he said, handing it to Trielle.
Wordlessly, Trielle accepted the robe and put them on over her clothing.
“Thank you,” she said, then paused for a moment before asking, “what is your name, and why are you helping me?”
The young man smiled. “It’s Anacrysis. As for why… It will hopefully become clear in time. Suffice to say I’ve been waiting for you.”
Before she could speak more Anacrysis held up his hand.
“Not now! There is too much to be done. We will not have much time once we arrive at the Chthonic Archives, so you will have to work fast. They conduct security sweeps every fifteen minutes, and you don’t want to be found near any unauthorized materials when that happens. You won’t have time to read the articles there, so you’ll just have to trust me that we’re in the right section. Right now you are wearing a subaltern’s robe. I’m a library subaltern, so it’s all I have access to. Subalterns are only allowed into the Archives for brief periods, but if we get caught in a sweep near non-classified materials, we’ll at least have a chance of making it out. Now, let’s go!”
Anacrysis led Trielle back out into the hallway and deeper into Arx Memoria. The hallway twisted left and right, frequently intersecting with other corridors, and Trielle quickly lost all sense of direction. Eventually their journey ended at a small blue-lit room containing a single glass cylinder. Anacrysis entered the cylinder and motioned for Trielle to follow. As she did so, a clear crystalline door closed behind her, and the cylinder plunged downward. There was a brief moment of darkness and then the cylinder dropped through a round portal into a cyclopean chamber of dim red crystal.
Trielle gasped as she considered the scope of it. A red-lit domed space, large enough enough to hold an entire building, opened up beneath her. The floor of the room was filled with a maze of ruby spires joined together by a labyrinth of walls that pulsed and glimmered in the half-light. From an aperture in the center of the ceiling, a crystalline column descended a short way before fanning out into a spray of gleaming threads that arced downward, terminating on the spires beneath. The column flashed with brilliant blue-white light, as if filled with captive lightning.
“The core synapsis of the Ionocaric Infochryst,” said Anacrysis, nodding toward the column. He then pointed at a specific thread. “Look closely at where that thread meets one of the spires. You can see the data exchange.”
Trielle watched as a series of quick blue pulses traveled down the length of the thread. When the pulses reached the contact point there was a sharp white flash, and a wave of patterned red light descended the spire. A few moments later an answering pattern surged upward and jumped to the thread in another bright flash, sparking a second sequence of blue pulses that followed the thread into the core of the infochryst.
“Each thread is a hardwired dataport that actively searches for and collates information held in the archive below,” explained Anacrysis. “Well,” he added, “at least that’s what happens most of the time… Look there!”
Trielle again followed his gesture, and noticed a single spire, close to the chamber’s heart, that had no associated threads. Her eyes narrowed. It almost appeared as if the threads had been deliberately positioned to avoid it.
As if there was something there that was not intended to be accessed…
The capsule descended through a clear crystalline tube that guided it to a raised platform at the edge of the chamber. When it reached its destination, the door slid silently open and the pair exited.
Trielle frowned. The archive had appeared difficult to navigate from above, but here on the chamber floor the task seemed impossible. In the half-light, the spires rose about her like watchtowers and the walls like ramparts of darkness, flickering with blood-red light. Between the walls narrow corridors yawned like the alleys of some hellish city. A hot, stale breeze blew past them, carrying with it the acrid, inorganic scent of ozone.
“Follow me,” said Anacrysis sharply, “the clock has already started,” and he plunged headlong into the maze.
Trielle hurried behind him, her sense of time and direction quickly failing as he deftly led her through the corridors. As they ran, she noticed that the walls contained numerous receptacles filled with dully gleaming red datachrysts, the source of the flickering red light. Occasionally the scene would be lit by a white flash as a data request was transmitted from the Core Synapsis far above and she would gain a better sense of her surroundings, only to lose it again as the light faded. After what seemed like an eternity, Anacrysis stopped.
“There,” he said, catching his breath, “the information you need is in that storage wall.”
Trielle examined the wall. There were hundreds of datachrysts.
“Which one is it in?”
“I don’t know, you’ll need to scan all of them and sort the data out later. Please start now, we’ll need most of the time left to us to get back.”
Trielle reached within her robe, pulled out her personal infochryst, and activated the scanning sequence. A bring fan of pulsating bluish light radiated from the device. Carefully she moved it across the wall, each datachryst pulsing in keeping with her device as its contents were copied and verified. When she was finished, Trielle glanced at her infochryst and saw that 4,698 files had been downloaded. Satisfied, she turned to look at Anacrysis.
“Done.”
“Good,” he said, “because our time is almost up. The next security scan is in a few minutes and we don’t want to be found here when it happens.” With that he turned and hurried off the way they came, Trielle following close behind.
A few minutes later, Trielle heard a faint whistling noise. At the same time, Anacrysis abruptly changed directions.
“What’s that?” she asked, a pang of fear in her voice.
“We took too long,” he said with a sigh. “The security drones are coming. Come on, we have to get out of this section.”
The noise continued to build as they hurried on, rising to a constant droning buzz. Then Anacryis stopped near a wall only partway filled with datachrysts.
“Quick,” he whispered, “face the wall and start inspecting the empty datachryst sockets.”
Trielle turned to face the wall and immediately began scrutinizing a hexagonal orifice. The buzzing steadily increased, and a few m
oments later she was bathed in pallid blue light.
“Keep to your work,” Anacrysis said, his voice a slow, confident monotone.
The light played about them for a few moments and then abruptly vanished, coupled with a rapid diminishment in the buzzing. As the sound abated Trielle risked a brief sideways glance, and caught a glimpse of a swarm of amorphous quicksilver droplets gliding around a nearby corner. Trielle turned to Anacrysis, but he was still focused on the wall, so she continued her pretended activities until she felt his hand on her shoulder.
“The sweep is done. Come on, let’s go.”
After another seeming eternity within the labyrinth, the pair emerged near the raised platform. They quickly entered the capsule and soon were ascending back toward the ceiling of the Chthonic Archives. Only then did Trielle realize that she was shaking.
“We’re almost there, it’s alright,” said Anacrysis.
His tone seemed confident, but Trielle thought she detected a slight quaver in his voice. Despite the dim light, she could see the pallor in his face, and she realized that he was as frightened as she was.
“I know,” she said reassuringly. “I gather you haven’t done this before,” she added after a brief pause.
“No,” he admitted carefully, “but I have been planning this for some time. As I said before, I knew you were coming.”
Trielle opened her mouth to ask how, but Anacrysis silenced her with a gesture. A few moments later the capsule arrived back in the blue-lit room. The pair stepped out and silently traversed the web of hallways back to the storage room. They entered the room and, as the iris door slid shut behind them, Anacrysis gave his final instructions.
The Sovereign Road Page 11