They hopped down from the perch and she followed him out into the corridor. “Why did I have to wait until now? Why not absorb it after I hatched? And now that I think of it, what is it about now that makes it the right time for me to finally remember my past?”
He did not slow down to answer. “Everyone needs to know their past,” he said. “But some of it is superfluous. Forcing the memories of an old body on a young one would interfere with your maturation. You would remember doing things that young ones are not yet ready for. As for your other question, now is the time because you have learned enough now to begin service. We do not expect anyone to do that without knowing as much about themselves as they have decided to archive.”
“But I could have remembered my training from past lives! It would have saved thousands of spins.”
“Most elect not to save that part of their memories,” he said. “It was decided long ago that going through the training of the Ability freshly in each new body would be better than simply remembering it."
This sounded like only part of an answer. “And Captain? Does she feel it better to have to go through her entire training every time she cycles?”
“She's a special case,” he said.
“Special in what way?”
He didn't answer her question. “Here we are,” he said, pulling open one of the sliding panels.
The room seemed like any other. Have I been here before, a thousand times? “Is this the only room used for completions?”
“The only one in Nav Section,” he said, opening the sleep-learn pod for her. He went over to one wall, where a small far-seer hung. The face of another of the People appeared in it.
“We need the personal for Rainsong,” he said.
Holding onto the edge of the sleep-learn hatch, she saw that the wall next to him was crisscrossed with a rectilinear grid of fine lines that divided it into numerous square sections. As she watched, one of these sections extruded from the wall, and Mentor reached into the top of it to withdraw a blue metal sphere.
“How do you know it's mine?” she asked, as he approached the sleep-learn pod. She felt a sudden terror at the thought that she could wake up with a stranger's memories.
“The Monitors oversee the storage and retrieval,” he told her. “From the moment you made your last recording until now, it has been waiting for you to reclaim it. The atoms in your body recycle in the Ship's ecosystem, you know. We do not even own the matter our bodies are made of. But this,” he said, holding up the little blue sphere, “is yours, always.”
Part of her wanted the memories in that metal ball, her own little planet of memory. But part of her wondered if it might not be better to let the past go and form new memories. “Are you sure I'm ready for this? Maybe I should train some more first.”
Once again his eyes rolled in opposite directions. “It is time, he said, thrusting the sphere into an aperture in the pod and letting it roll down to near where her head would rest. Then he grasped the door and began lowering it closed, giving her only a moment to let go of the rim.
Rainsong tried to relax, but could not. If I stay awake, she thought, nothing will happen. She knew enough by now to realize that the memsphere could not force information on her conscious mind. Even her own memories could only be processed and absorbed during sleep. I'll just stay awake. They can't make me do this until I feel ready.
But what was that smell? There were no flowers in the pod. So where was that smell coming from?
* * *
She blinked when the pod hatch opened and light from the light-makers overhead flooded the interior.
A grasper reached in and helped her out of the pod. “You're always the same. You never relax for a completion without the rest-pollen. Careful there, it always makes your muscles a little sluggish at first when you awaken.”
The cadence of his voice seemed familiar. “Treedancer? Is that you, old friend?”
“I'm just another Mentor now,” he said, as she climbed out of the pod. “No one calls me that anymore.”
She looked around and realized where she was. Finally his remark about her completion anxiety and rest-pollen came into clarity. She blinked. I am Rainsong. I am not the atoms in my physical body, that will sometimes be trees, sometimes be soil, and sometimes be one of the People. I am a set of memories that goes back a billions spins, that began on Homeworld.
He let her think in silence for a few spins, reorienting herself in the body while the universe swung around the Ship.
“How long has it been?” she asked.
“You were in there for only a few hundred spins."
“No,” she said. “How long since I was in Nav Section the last time?” She remembered now that everyone took their turns in the aft section. It was important, Captain had said, to reconnect with the rest of the People.
He lifted his right front grasper and spread the four fingers wide in a People shrug. “I believe it was during our approach of the binary system, the one we stopped at on our way here.”
“Are you saying I'm usually in Nav Section during a system approach, and back aft with the others in between stars, usually? Is that common?”
“You know the answer to that as well as I do,” he said. “I think Captain likes to have you in Nav during an approach."
“Why?” But suddenly she knew. The certainty blossomed in her awareness, as old memories rose from the cloud of the past. It's because I'm a friend of Carver, isn't it? She's always afraid he'll try something when we get near a habitable planet.
Chapter 79
Lobsang: Escort Service
“Those who know contentment are wealthy
Those who proceed vigorously have willpower”
– The Tao Te Ching by Lao Tse
He crossed over in Cali driven by sheer emotional momentum. He still realized that he might be hurrying to his death, but unless his family had already been murdered he could not make himself slow down, stop, or turn around. Yes, they might already be dead. But he would never know unless he pressed on.
Careening down the highway in his spinspace powered car, he found, required more attention than sitting in one of Trent's caravan wagons. For one thing, he could not take his eyes off the road.
One of the things he noticed had to do with cities. In places like southern Deseret and Nevada where moisture seemed almost nonexistent, where incoming cloud water had been squeezed out and precipitated passing eastwards over the Cali mountains, it seldom rained and rainwater-induced corrosion and erosion had done less damage to Ancient artifacts like signs. Sometimes the road seemed to vanish, but that was merely because windblown shifting sands had covered it.
He could easily tell where old city jurisdictions began and ended as he drove through them. Only by seeing the signs, however, for these cities had died when the Gift-dependent technologies of the Ancients like irrigation and electricity had failed. There might be some life even in a desert, but not in quantities sufficient to feed cities of thousands of people or more. He wondered what Vegas had looked like back when the currents had flowed through the now-dead streetlights and electric signs.
As he approached the coast, however, moving through layers of old mountain ranges, moving into more humidity, more rainfall, and more earthquake activity, the damage to the roadway and to signage had been more extreme, more relentless.
The finny thing was, it was even easier than ever to see where cities were...because of the people. If you defined a city as a region of land enclosed by boundary lines, the extent and location of it was hard to pin down unless it had 'scrapers. But if you defined a city as a group of people that tended to reside in a common location, then when the people began to appear by the road you would know you were entering it.
What determined where significant numbers of people would choose to live? The answer appeared to be the availability of fresh water. Barstow and Victorville seemed good examples of this. In some places buildings had collapsed or burned. New settlers had shored up some wa
lls and built others with brick. But one cannot make bricks without water. Without it, clay is dust.
Leaving Victorville he became puzzled when highway 15 seemed to be splitting into two parts that were both 15, just before more mountains. He took the right branch which curved north and then south again before it rejoined the other branch and cut south-by-southeast through the mountains.
At the next divide he swung right to stay on 15, rather than continuing on 215 toward San Bernadino, and soon was heading to the southwest again.
Finally he turned right onto 210 which, as he recalled, headed west straight over the northern edge of the city, becoming 134 on the way. When he hit 101 he would turn onto it going southeast toward the city center. In a few miles he would reach Grauman's Chinese Theater. It had held several names in the past, but he still preferred the original he'd found in the history books.
Back when he'd been the Queen's librarian, Lobsang had often asked himself why Rochelle Wu Peña had chosen the ancient theater for her favorite palace. Was it because she had roots in China as well as Spain? Both were old empires out of legend, but he had never heard of a Grauman's Spanish Theater.
The further west he went the more dense the old and newer houses got. Another way to know how near you were to a city of the Ancients was to look at building height. For some reason, the tallest buildings, the 'scrapers, seemed to always be at the center of a large city. Seen from a distance, large cities were like crude approximations of the bell-shaped curve he'd seen in old statistics and physics textbooks.
It had always puzzled him. What was the point of living or working in a tall building, if all you could see out your window were other tall buildings? It was as if the 'scrapers had formed at a distance and then migrated and huddled together for warmth. But that's a stupid thought. Angeles is never cold.
Nearly there now. He could see the battered city. He should have arrived by now, but he no longer had the road to himself. Earlier, he had begun to weave around carts laden with produce bound for the city. They were still in evidence, but now that noon had passed many of them were outward bound again, less heavily laden, some carrying tools forged or repaired by blacksmiths, some with the fancier clothes tailored in the city to spice up their farmer's wardrobes. And all of them tended to rein in their horses and gape at the spectacle of a horseless vehicle rolling along by itself.
Lately the forward traffic had slowed nearly to a standstill, while the outward became a thin but accelerating trickle. He soon learned the answer when he saw the guard station and the tollgate.
A few of the farmers ahead of him had coins to pay their way, but most of them, he saw, were paying in produce. He reached out mentally to the rear axle and brought the car to a halt.
They'd caught sight of his car. In moments more guards filed out of the guardhouse with crossbows and surrounded his vehicle.
He doubted that the crossbows could penetrate the metal body, but they might damage the windows. If he just torqued up the everwheel spell and pushed forward, though, he might run over one or more of them.
One of them who looked as if he might be in charge of the detail tapped on the driver-side window. Having no way to lower the window (the Governor's artisans had assured him that the glass could retract, but that this was done by electric motors no longer usable) he opened the door. “I'm on my way to the Queen,” he said. “Please let me pass.”
The man rubbed his chin as he stared at him. “I've never seen a cart with no horses,” he said. “But my orders are my orders. No passage without a toll.”
“I have no money nor produce to give you, sir. All I am bringing is a precious gift that cannot be touched, merely felt.”
The man frowned. “What, are you a musician, then?”
“No,” said Lobsang. “I am a wizard, and what I am bringing is freedom from oppression.”
The man's brows knit an expression of bafflement. “What, you're a revolutionary, then? Like those workers in Wyoming? Money talks here, not propaganda. And I have to tell you, the Queen is not fond of magic-workers. We're supposed to arrest any we find on sight.”
“Then I shall consider myself arrested,” said Lobsang. “But this car won't move without me, and I'm sure you'll agree she'll want it, too. So I suggest you have your men surround me and accompany me into the city.”
The man regarded him. “I'm no fool. I'll bet you can make your metal cart go faster than a walking horse or man. You'll just run us over.”
“If I wanted to do that,” Lobsang pointed out, “I would have done it already.” He nodded to the wooden tollgate. “Don't you think I could smash my way through that? But I'll tell you what,” he continued, reaching over to open the passenger-side door. “Climb in beside me with a crossbow and you can leave your men here and say you captured me yourself.”
The man's eyebrows rose. “You'd drive with a weapon pointed at you? Why would you want to do that?”
Lobsang just grinned at him. “Your men have weapons. But as I've told you, I'm a wizard. We could fight it out here and now, but I've no quarrel with you or your men. I'm sure neither of us wants to roll the dice over a tollgate. My quarrel is with the Queen. If you take me to her, what will happen? Either she captures or kills me, and you get rewarded for bringing me to her...or I defeat her. Either way, no punishment for you. You have nothing to lose.”
He could see the man mulling this over and he marched around to the other door. The guard held out his hand and someone placed a loaded crossbow in it, then he climbed into the seat next to Lobsang.
“You seem, mighty confident, for someone who's never faced the Queen before,” he said, holding the crossbow in his lap, the point of its arrow aimed at Lobsang's side.
“Oh, I've faced her before,” said Lobsang, “but not as a wizard. I used to be her librarian.”
Chapter 80
Xander: Plowshares Into Swords
“We sleep soundly in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.”
– Winston Churchill
Once again he slipped the boy's memsphere under his pillow. Would he have the same dream as before? Did each memsphere only store one experience?
Somehow, he doubted it. While it was amazing that experiences could be recorded at all, he could not make himself believe that the Ancients has had thousands of spheres per person. For one thing, the searchers would have found a lot more of them if there were that many.
He shifted to another position, pondering the past. With all the Gifts they'd received from the Tourists, why hadn't the Ancients developed their own wizards, their own psionic engineers, centuries ago? Had they given up trying to understand the alien technology, figuring only aliens could make it?
Or was there another reason? Maybe they never understood how the artifacts were made.
Up to now he had assumed that the aliens came down and stood at assembly lines, working their magic on pipes and disks trundling down conveyor belts, converting them into swizzles and everflames, and so on. How else could it have happened?
But from the accounts he had pieced together for his own book on the Fall, it appeared that the aliens had lingered here for decades while earth's engineers assimilated the Gifts into existing systems and infrastructures. The change had not been wrought in a day, or even a year.
He had no idea how long it took for sleep to come. That was the thing about sleep: unless it was forced by drugs or a blow to the head, sleep was a curious event. It took forever to be instantly over. You tossed and turned for what seemed like an eternity...and then like the click of a lock it would be morning and suddenly that eternity had collapsed to a moment in the past. The whole night's sleep seemed a blink of God's eye.
Unless you remembered dreams.
...they were approaching the Tourists ship. He remembered asking his father why it was so large and funny looking. “It doesn't look like a rocket. There's no nose cone, and no stabilizer fins.”
“That's bec
ause it's not a rocket,” his father told him, amused. “You only need fins in an atmosphere."
“But space isn't really empty,” he said. “I've read that even out between stars there's always a little gas.”
“Not enough to steer by. You'd need a ship bigger than a planet to hold fins that would work, in gas that thin.”
“Then how do they steer?”
His father had no answer for that. The shuttle swung around in a broad turn and suddenly he found himself looking down the main axis of symmetry of the alien ship. “Look at that! It's empty!” He marveled at what he saw. “See, there's nothing inside it. Where do they live?”
“You're looking at the outside of it,” his father said.
“But I can see right through it.”
“No,” his father said. “You're thinking about it the wrong way. It's kind of like a doughnut. The hole is in the middle, yes, but not actually inside it.”
His confusion must have been plain to see, because his father explained. “You have to remember how big it is. Both the 'outer' surface and the 'inner' surface are on the outside. It's like a pipe. If the ends are open, all that's inside the surface of the pipe is the metal that it's made of. But although the ship of the Tourists is ring-shaped, it's not solid metal. That 'ring' out there, if you rolled it out flat, would be a rectangular thin metal box with air and aliens and probably plants on the inside of the thin box. They're all inside the ring, between the inner and outer curves, like the meat in a sandwich.”
The shuttle flew near part of one end of the ring, and turned over, the floor now furthest from the ring, and something seemed to grab them, although he saw no mechanical arms or docking clamps. He felt a mushy kind of jolt, like a sailboat running into a sand bar, and then down was suddenly toward the floor, instead of toward the back of the shuttle.
Tonespace: The Space of Energy (The Metaspace Chronicles Book 3) Page 32