"Oh, no!" the Sublimer girl said, her expression terribly serious. "What we believe in takes one completely away from such bodily concerns…"
Out of the corner of his eye he could see up the street, where the pondrosaur was shuffling forwards through a thick crowd of admirers. He smiled at the Sublimer girl as she talked on. He shifted a little so that he could see the other woman better.
No, it wasn't her. Of course it wasn't. She'd have recognised him, she'd have reacted by now. Even if she'd been trying to pretend she hadn't seen him he'd have been able to tell; she'd never been very good at hiding her feelings from anybody, least of all from him. She glanced at him again, then quickly away. He felt a sudden, unbidden sensation of fearful pleasure, a jolt of excitement which left his skin tingling.
"… highest expression of our quintessential urge to be greater than we…" He nodded and looked at the Sublimer girl, who was still babbling away. He frowned a little and stroked his chin with his free hand, still nodding. He kept watching the other woman. Out on the street, the pondrosaur and its retinue had come to a stop almost alongside them; a Tier Sintricate was hovering level with the giant animal's mahout, who seemed to be arguing angrily with it.
The woman was smiling at the other two Sublimers with what appeared to be an expression of tolerant ridicule. She kept her eyes on the Sublimer fellow doing the talking at that point, but took a long, deep breath, and — just as she let it out — glanced at Genar-Hofoen again with the briefest of smiles and a flick of her eyebrows before looking back at the Sublimers and tipping her head just a little to one side.
He wondered. Would SC really go this far to keep him under their control, or at least under their eye? How likely was it that he should find somebody who looked so much like her? He supposed there must be hundreds of people who bore a passing resemblance to Dajeil Gelian; perhaps there were even a few who had heard something about her and deliberately assumed her appearance; that happened all the time with genuinely famous people and just because he'd never heard of anybody taking on Dajeil's looks didn't mean nobody had ever done so. If this person was one of them, it was just possible he would have to be on his guard…
"… personal ambition or the desire to better oneself or to provide opportunities for one's children is but a pale reflection of, compared to the ultimate transcendence which true Subliming offers; for, as it is written…"
Genar-Hofoen leant closer to the girl talking to him and tapped her lightly on the shoulder. "I'm sure," he said quietly. "Would you excuse me for just a moment?"
He took the two steps over to the woman in the shadowrobe. She turned her head from the two Sublimers and smiled politely at him. "Excuse me," he asked. "Don't I know you from somewhere?" He grinned as he said it, acknowledging both the well-worn nature of the line and the fact that neither he nor she was really interested in what the Sublimers had to say.
She nodded her head politely to him. "I don't think so," she said. Her voice was higher than Dajeil's; more girlish, and with a quite different accent. "Though if we had met and you hadn't altered in some way and I'd forgotten, certainly I'd be far too ashamed to admit it." She smiled. He did the same. She frowned. "Unless… do you live on Tier?"
"Just passing through," he told her. A bomber, in flames, tore past just overhead and exploded in a burst of light behind the Sublimer building. On the street, the argument around the pondrosaur seemed to be getting more heated; the animal itself was staring intently at the Sintricate and its mahout was standing up on its neck, pointing the flaming mace at the darkly spiny being to emphasise whatever points he was making.
"But I've been this way before," Genar-Hofoen said. "Perhaps we bumped into each other then."
She nodded thoughtfully. "Perhaps," she conceded.
"Oh, you two know each other?" said the young Sublimer man she'd been talking to. "Well, many people find that Subliming in the company of a loved one or just somebody they know is-"
"Do you play Calascenic Crasis?" she asked, cutting across the young Sublimer. "You may have seen me at a game here." She put her head back, looking down that long nose at him. "If so, I'm disappointed you left it till now to say hello."
"Ah!" the Sublimer lad said. "Games; an expression of the urge to enter into worlds beyond ourselves! Another-"
"I've never even heard of the game," he confessed. "Do you recommend it?"
"Oh yes," she said, and sounded ironic. "It benefits all who play."
"Well, I'm always willing to entertain some new experience. Perhaps you could teach me."
"Ah, now; the ultimate new experience-" began the Sublimer lad.
Genar-Hofoen turned to him and said, "Oh, shut up!" It had been an instinctive reaction, and for a moment he was worried he might have said the wrong thing, but she didn't seem to be regarding the young Sublimer's hurt look with any great degree of sympathy.
She looked back to him. "All right," she said. "You stand me my stake and I'll teach you Crasis."
He smiled, wondering if that had been too easy. "It's a deal," he said. He waved the cloud cane under his nose and took a deep breath, then bowed. "My name's Byr."
"Pleased to meet you." She nodded again. "Call me Flin," she said, and, taking hold of the cane, waved it under her own nose.
"Shall we, Flin?" he said, and indicated the street beyond, where the pondrosaur had sunk to its belly, its four legs doubled up underneath it and both fore-limbs folded beneath its chin, as though bored. Two Sintricates were shouting at the enraged mahout, who was shaking the flaming mace at them. The hire guards were looking nervous and patting the restless kliestrithrals.
"Certainly."
"Remember where you met!" the Sublimer called after them. "Subliming is the ultimate meeting of souls, the pinnacle of…" They left the hushfield. His voice was drowned out by the thudding of projected anti-aircraft fire as they walked along the pavement.
"So, where are we going?" he asked her.
"Well, you can take me for a drink and then we'll hit a Crasis bar I know. Sound all right?"
"Sounds fine. Shall we take a trap?" he said, pointing a little way up the street to a two-wheeled open vehicle waiting by the kerb. A ysner-mistretl pair were harnessed between the traces, the ysner craning its long neck down to peck at a feed bag in the gutter, the small, smartly uniformed mistretl on its back looking around alertly and tapping its thumbs together.
"Good idea," she said. They walked up to the trap and climbed aboard. "The Collyrium Lounge," the woman said to the mistretl as they sat in the rear of the small vehicle. It saluted and pulled a whip out from its fancy jerkin. The ysner made a sighing noise.
The trap shook suddenly. A great deep burst of noise came from the street behind them. They all looked round. The pondrosaur was rearing up, bellowing; its mahout nearly fell off its neck. His mace tumbled from his grasp and bounced on the street. Two of the kliestrithrals jumped up and leapt into the crowd, snarling and dragging their handlers with them. The two Sintricates who'd been arguing with the mahout rose quickly into the air out of the way; people in float harnesses took avoiding action through the confusion of searchlight beams and anti-aircraft fire. Flin and Genar-Hofoen watched people scatter in all directions as the pondrosaur leapt forward with surprising agility and started charging down the street towards them. The mahout clung desperately to the beast's ears, screeching at it to stop. The stabilised black and silver cupola on the animal's back seemed to float along above it until the animal's increasing speed forced it to oscillate from side to side. At Genar-Hofoen's side, Flin seemed frozen.
Genar-Hofoen glanced round at the mistretl. "Well," he said, "let's get going." The little mistretl blinked quickly, still staring up the street. Another bellow echoed off the surrounded buildings. Genar-Hofoen looked back again.
The charging pondrosaur reached up with one fore-limb and ripped its eye-cups off to reveal huge, faceted blue eyes like chunks of ancient ice. With its other limb it gripped the mahout by one shoulder and wrenched hi
m off its neck; he wriggled and flailed but it brushed him to one side and onto the pavement; he landed running, fell and rolled. The pondrosaur itself thundered on down the street; people threw themselves out of its way. Somebody in a bubblesphere didn't move fast enough; the giant transparent ball was kicked to the side, smashing into a hot food-stall; flames leapt from the wreckage.
"Shit," Genar-Hofoen said as the giant bore down upon them. He turned to the mistretl driver again. He could see the face of the ysner, turned back to look up the street behind too, its big face expressing only mild surprise. "Move!" he shouted.
The mistretl nodded. «Goo» i'ea," it chirped. It reached behind to slip a knot on the rear of the ysner and jabbed its bootheels into the animal's lower neck. The startled ysner took off, leaving the trap behind; the vehicle tipped forward as the ysner-mistretl pair disappeared down the rapidly clearing street. Genar-Hofoen and Flin were thrown forward in a tangle of harnesses. He heard her shout, "Fuck!" then go oof as they hit the street.
Something hit him hard on the head. He blacked out for a moment then came to looking up at a huge face, a monstrous face, gazing down at him with huge prismed blue eyes. Then he saw the woman's face. The face of Dajeil Gelian. She had blood on her top lip. She looked groggily at him and then turned to gaze up at the huge animal face looking down at them. There was a sort of buzzing sensation from somewhere; Genar-Hofoen felt his legs go numb. The woman collapsed over his legs. He felt sick. Lines of red dots crossing the sky floated behind his eyelids when they closed. When he forced his eyes open again, she was there again. Somebody looking like Dajeil Gelian who wasn't her. Except it wasn't Flin either. She was dressed differently, she was taller and her expression was… not the same. And anyway, Flin was still draped unconscious over his legs.
He really didn't understand what was going on. He shook his head. This hurt.
The girl who wasn't Dajeil or Flin stooped quickly, looked into his eyes, whirled the cloak off her shoulders and onto the street beside him in one movement, then rolled him over onto it, heaving Flin's immobile body out of the way as she did so. He tried waving his arms around but it didn't do much good.
The cloak went rigid underneath him and floated into the air, wrapping round him. He cried out and tried to fight against its enclosing black folds, but the buzzing came again and his vision faded even before the cloak finished wrapping itself round him.
8. Killing Time
I
The usual way to explain it was by analogy; this was how the idea was introduced to you as a child. Imagine you were travelling through space and you came to this planet which was very big and almost perfectly smooth and on which there lived creatures who were composed of one layer of atoms; in effect, two-dimensional. These creatures would be born, live and die like us and they might well possess genuine intelligence. They would, initially, have no idea or grasp of the third dimension, but they would be able to live perfectly well in their two dimensions. To them, a line would be like a wall across their world (or, from the end, it would look like a point). An unbroken circle would be like a locked room.
Perhaps, if they were able to build machines which allowed them to journey at great speed along the surface of their planet — which to them would be their universe — they would go right round the planet and come back to where they had started from. More likely, they would be able to work this out from theory. Either way, they would realise that their universe was both closed, and curved, and that there was, in fact, a third dimension, even if they had no practical access to it. Being familiar with the idea of circles, they would probably christen the shape of their universe a «hypercircle» rather than inventing a new word. The three-dimensional people would, of course, call it a sphere.
The situation was similar for people living in three dimensions. At some point in any civilisation starting to become advanced it was realised that if you set off into space in what appeared to be a perfectly straight line, eventually you would arrive back at where you started, because your three-dimensional universe was really a four-dimensional shape; being familiar with the idea of spheres, people tended to christen this shape a hypersphere.
Usually around the same point in a society's development it was understood that — unlike the planet where the two-dimensional creatures lived — space was not simply curved into a hypersphere, it was also expanding; gradually increasing in size like a soap-bubble on the end of a straw which somebody was blowing into. To a four-dimensional being looking from far enough away, the three-dimensional galaxies would look like tiny designs imprinted onto the surface of that expanding bubble, each of them, generally, heading away from all the others because of the hypersphere's general expansion, but — like the shifting whorls and loops of colour visible on the skin of a soap bubble — able to slide and move around on that surface.
Of course, the four-dimensional hypersphere had no equivalent of the straw, blowing air in from outside. The hypersphere was expanding all by itself, like a four-dimensional explosion, with the implication that, once, it had been simply a point; a tiny seed which had indeed exploded. That detonation had created — or at least had produced — matter and energy, time and the physical laws themselves. Later — cooling, coalescing and changing over immense amounts of time and expansion — it had given rise to the cool, ordered, three-dimensional universe which people could see around them.
Eventually in the progress of a technologically advanced society, occasionally after some sort of limited access to hyperspace, more usually after theoretical work, it was realised that the soap bubble was not alone. The expanding universe lay inside a larger one, which in turn was entirely enclosed by a bubble of space-time with a still greater diameter. The same applied within the universe you happened to find yourself on/in; there were smaller, younger universes inside it, nested within like layers of paper round a much-wrapped spherical present.
In the very centre of all the concentric, inflating universes lay the place they had each originated from, where every now and again a cosmic fireball blinked into existence, detonating once more to produce another universe, its successive outpourings of creation like the explosions of some vast combustion engine, and the universes its pulsing exhaust.
There was more; complications in seven dimensions and beyond that involved a giant torus on which the 3-D universe could be described as a circle, contained and containing other nested tori, with further implications of whole populations of such meta-Realities… but the implications of multiple, concentric, sequential universes was generally considered enough to be going on with for the moment.
What everybody wanted to know was whether there was any way of travelling from one universe to another. Between any pair of universes there was more than just empty hyperspace; there was a thing called an energy grid. It was useful — strands of it could help power ships, and it had been used as a weapon — but it was also an obstacle, and — by all accounts so far — one which had proved impenetrable to intelligent investigation. Certain black holes appeared to be linked to the grid and perhaps therefore to the universe beyond, but nobody had ever made it intact into one, or ever reappeared in any recognisable form. There were white holes, too; ferociously violent sources spraying torrents of energy into the universe with the power of a million suns and which also seemed to be linked to the grid… but no body, no ship or even information had ever been observed appearing from their tumultuous mouths; no equivalent of an airborne bacteria, no word, no language, just that incoherent scream of cascading energies and super energetic particles.
The dream that every Involved had, which virtually every technologically advanced civilisation clove to with almost religious faith, was that one day it would be possible to travel from one universe to another, to step up or down through those expanding bubbles, so that — apart from anything else — one need never suffer the final fate of one's own universe. To achieve that would surely be to Sublime, truly to Transcend, to consummate the ultimate Surpassing and accomplish the
ultimate empowerment.
The River class General Contact Unit Fate Amenable To Change lay in space. It was locally stationary, taking its reference from the Excession. The Excession was equally static, taking its reference from the star Esperi. The entity sat there, a few light minutes away, a featureless dot on the skein of real space with a single equally dull-looking strand of twisted, compressed space-time fabric leading down to the lower layer of energy grid… and a second leading upwards to the higher layer.
The Excession was doing exactly what it had been doing for the past two weeks; nothing. The Fate Amenable To Change had carried out all the standard initial measurements and observations of the entity, but had been very forcefully advised indeed not to do any more; no direct contact was to be attempted, not even by probes, smaller craft or drones. In theory it could disobey; it was its own ship, it could make up its own mind… but in practice it had to heed the advice of those who knew if not more than it, better than it.
Collective responsibility. Also known as sharing the blame.
So all it had done after the first exciting bit, when it had been the centre of attention and everybody had wanted to know all it could tell them about the thing it had found, had been to hang around here, still at the focus of events in a sense, but also feeling somehow ignored.
Reports. It filed reports. It had long since stopped trying to make them different or original.
The ship was bored. It was also aware of a continuing undercurrent of fear; a real emotion that it was by turns annoyed at, ashamed of and indifferent to, according to its mood.
It waited. It watched. Beyond it, around it, most of its small fleet of modules and satellites, a few of its most space-capable drones and a variety of specialist devices it had constructed specifically for the purpose also floated, watching and waiting. Inside the vessel its human crew discussed the situation, monitored the data coming in from the ship's own sensors and those coming in from the small cloud of dispersed machines. The ship passed some of the time by making up elaborate games for the humans to play. Meanwhile it kept up its observation of the Excession and scanned the space around, waiting for the first of the other ships to arrive.
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