Ehrin’s mind raced. A matter of urgency? Had Cannak learned about Havor and the interworld ship? Kyrik, he thought—the pious geologist. He had seen the ship in the hold, become suspicious and informed Cannak.
“Your father was at the council meeting?”
Sereth nodded. “His attendance, as a bishop, was compulsory.”
“And he told you what Cannak said?”
“He was most upset. Cannak recounted the journey to the western plains, and read verbatim from notes he had taken during the trip. These were to the effect that you, Ehrin, and Kahran had indulged in irreligious dialogue bordering on the sacrilegious. My father admitted that, if Cannak was to be believed, then what you said was beyond the acceptable.”
Ehrin sat back and laughed, much relieved.
Sereth stared at him. “Ehrin, have you taken leave of your reason? Cannak has reported you to the High Council, for mercy’s sake!”
“Is that all?”
“Is that all? Do you realise what punishment the High Council can inflict?”
“Velkor Cannak is an old fool. Even the High Council wouldn’t take his words seriously.”
Sereth was staring at him, shaking her head. “But they have! Cannak laid before them the facts and requested your immediate arrest.”
His initial impulse was to scoff. So what if they arrested him, and charged him with sacrilege? What might be the repercussions?
He said, “And if we are arrested?”
Sereth stared down at her hands, clasped around the glass. “You’ll be questioned by the Inquisitors of the High Council. They will learn the truth.”
“That, Sereth, sounds like a euphemism.”
She looked up at him. “My father has only harsh words for the Inquisitors. He’s a moderate, as you know. He has no time for Hykell’s methods.”
And if the Inquisitors did torture him, might they extract from him more than the mere fact that he was a heathen disbeliever?
“So I will admit, before they bring out the thumbscrews, that I find their cult a farce.”
“Ehrin, you fool! Can’t you see the danger you’re in?”
“What will they do to me, Sereth, if they do learn the truth, that we did indulge in ‘irreligious dialogue’?”
She just stared at him. “Ehrin, you are a public figure. You are respected in the community. If word was to get out that you held sacrilegious beliefs, you’d be shunned, disgraced. And, if Cannak has it his way, then word will get but—he wants it made public record that you are to be arraigned to stand before the High Council.”
Ehrin nodded. “What did the other bishops say?” he asked. “I take it they arrived at a decision?”
She shook her head. “The Council was split. Three for the motion, three against. That means Hykell has the casting vote, and will decide later today.”
“In that case Kahran and I had better prepare ourselves for a grilling.”
She reached out and took his hand. “My father advised me to find you. He gave instructions, which I had to pass on. He says that when you are arrested and questioned, you must admit the offence and claim extenuating circumstances: he said that you are to claim you were drunk at the time of speaking with Cannak. We did drink much summer-fruit wine, Ehrin. As the only other witness, I will be called, and I will testify that this was so.”
“And this will get me off the charge of sacrilege?” Ehrin said sceptically.
“My father thinks that it might be seen as a mitigating factor, and that your punishment might be therefore less severe.”
“Only five hours on the freezing frame instead of ten?”
“Ehrin, how can you joke about something as serious as this! My father said that the Church might satisfy themselves by imposing a heavy fine, and that you might even get away without it being made public.”
“And I should be grateful for the Church’s leniency?”
“You should be grateful that the Church won’t impose a prison sentence—though that isn’t out of the question.”
He closed his eyes and rubbed his temples wearily. He wanted to laugh at the Church and their petty rules, their bigoted perspective on reality. Instead, to appease Sereth, he reached out and squeezed her hand. “Very well, Sereth. I will do as your father suggested. Please thank him for me.”
She looked at him for a long time, something unsettling in her gaze. “What is it?” he asked. “I’ve said I’ll kow-tow, haven’t I?”
She replied evenly, “Ehrin, I sometimes wonder about you. About us. We have everything. We are affluent and privileged; we are at the peaks of our respective careers, and out of pig-headedness you run the risk of ruining both our lives.”
He kept his anger under control. “Sereth, it isn’t pig-headedness. It is a profound hatred of the Church and everything it stands for.”
Her reaction was surprising. He had expected a tirade, a torrent of abuse. Instead, she just bent her head and sobbed. When he attempted to take her shoulder, she batted his hand away and wailed, “Once, not long ago, Ehrin, everything was so certain. I knew what the world was, that the Church was always right, that if we followed the righteous path, then we would be rewarded both materially and spiritually...” She looked up, and her expression was stricken. “And now, now everything is in chaos!”
He had the paradoxical urge to tell her that, just because he disbelieved, it should not necessarily undermine her own system of belief.
She looked up. “What is happening, Ehrin?”
He looked at her. “Happening?”
“I told you that terrible, strange things had happened today.”
“But I thought...” he began.
“My father had some other news. He tried to tell me in such a way as to reassure me that he was not concerned... but I know my father. I know when he is troubled.”
“Sereth, you’re talking in riddles.”
“My father said that there was a rumour going around the penitentiary. He had it from a reliable source that a number of... of strange beings had been captured on the western plains and were now languishing in cells.” She stopped, looked up at him, and went on, “They are unlike any other creature ever seen, according to my father. I could see that he was deeply troubled.”
Ehrin shook his head. Even more aliens? He wondered if other Zorl beside Havor had made the crossing between worlds.
He reached out and took her hand. She said in a small voice, “What’s happening, Ehrin? What is true? The Church says that other worlds do not exist, that this is God’s only world. But I could see in my father’s eyes the light of doubt...”
He held her hand as she wept. “We live in uncertain times, Sereth. But the one thing you can be certain of is that I love you. That might not be much, but it’s the only consolation I can offer.”
She looked up, tears melting her brown eyes, and smiled at him.
“I must go. I told my father that I would stay with him tonight.”
He went with her from the attic and down the stairs to the foundry, quiet now that the shift had finished and the workers had returned to their homes.
He embraced her at the door. Sereth said, “Promise me you won’t be foolish if the High Council comes for you? Promise me, Ehrin.”
He nodded and kissed her. “You have my word,” he said.
He watched her as she fastened her skates, waved forlornly and set off along the ice canal. Soon she was a tiny figure lost in the crowds, and Ehrin felt a strange sadness at her turmoil, and at the same time a curious sense of excitement.
What light might Havor be able to shed on the stories of aliens from another world?
He crossed the empty factory floor and found Kahran buffing the cylinder. “Ready?”
“As ready as it will ever be. Let’s hope that our craftsmanship is sufficient. How’s Sereth?”
Ehrin smiled. “She is disturbed by the fact that Cannak wants us arrested for committing ‘irreligious dialogue’.” He told his friend the gist of her warning.
> Kahran grunted. “Perhaps it would be best to claim we were pissed as zeer.”
“She also told me that there’s a rumour of alien beings discovered on the western plains.”
Kahran looked up. “Has someone found out about Havor?”
Ehrin reassured him. “These are other aliens, if the rumours are to be believed.” He clapped Kahran on the back. “We are experiencing mysterious times, my friend. I only wish that my father could have been around to enjoy them.”
“I’ll raise a drink to that.” He held the cylinder up before his face. “Let’s deliver this to Havor and see if it does the trick.”
They hurried from the foundry and crossed the silent hangar. Ehrin opened the lock on the freighter’s cargo hold and slipped within, closing the door tight after Kahran. In the light from his gas-lamp, the elegant, golden interworld ship glowed like a jewel.
Ehrin rapped on the hatch, which swung slowly open. Havor stood on the threshold, and Ehrin was struck anew at the evidence of the creature’s alienness, his dissimilarity to any living being he had seen before. He tried not to stare at the Zorl’s naked black face, the parallel lines of oversized white teeth, as Havor gave his habitual grimace and said, “You have the part? Come, let us test it.”
Havor led them along the flank of the ship and opened the panel, then took the cylinder and inserted it into the housing. He tampered with it for several minutes, then gave it a look and nodded his satisfaction.
“Will it suffice?” Ehrin asked.
“We will find out shortly,” the alien replied.
They returned to the hatch and climbed inside. In the control room, Havor slipped into the horizontal couch while Ehrin and Kahran stood and watched. The alien was reaching up to a console above his head, tapping at a series of tiny panels, which responded with sharp musical notes. Lights glowed in a sudden array, and Ehrin heard something humming deep within the interworld ship.
Havor looked at them and grimaced. “So far it is functioning as it should.”
He reached up and pulled something from a recess in the ceiling of the cabin, a black frame which he gripped in both hands. The frame was scattered with small lights, and arrays of tiny panels, which Havor tapped quickly with his fingertips.
“Hold on tight, now.”
They did as instructed. The ship rose rapidly and stopped, then seemed to bob in place like a boat on a river.
Havor was staring at a square of glowing material embedded within the frame. Tiny letters and numbers rolled down the flat surface.
“One, check. Two, check...” This went on through to six, at which point Havor turned to them. He was wearing his biggest grimace yet. “Thanks to you, my friends, the ship is airworthy once more.”
Ehrin felt a flood of emotion, and it came to him how proud his father would have been at this moment.
Kahran was saying, “When do you plan to make the strike?”
“Sooner rather than later, my friend. It would be folly to wait even a day or two. Perhaps tonight, in the early hours, when all Agstarn sleeps.”
Kahran turned to Ehrin and said, “The interworld ship leaving from the foundry might give the Church even more evidence against us. I have an idea. We take the freighter out in the dead of night, fly from the city, and only then launch the ship.”
“That makes sense,” Ehrin said.
Havor agreed. “You are already on bad terms with the Church?”
Ehrin laughed. “Well, that’s one way of putting it,” he said, and went on to tell the alien about the High Council’s extraordinary meeting to discuss their fate.
Havor heard him out, then said, “It is always detrimental to society to allow a group of people, who believe in one way and one way only, to come to power. The first casualty of autocracy is the common man, the second is the truth.”
“The truth,” Ehrin echoed. “For so long the truth had been the word of the Church, but perhaps now that is coming to an end.”
Kahran said, “For centuries the Church has taught that there is but one world, one platform in the grey, even though latterly they knew that to be a lie. Then I travelled to your world and discovered to my amazement that other beings beside ourselves existed in the grey.” He looked at Havor. “And how many others might exist out there too?”
The alien grimaced and touched Ehrin on the shoulder. “Did I not promise that I would tell you what I know of the universe, though of course perhaps my understanding is but partial.”
Ehrin shook his head. “So much has happened of late that my head is spinning...”
“Where to begin?” Havor said. “Perhaps I should ask what you know already of your world?”
Ehrin told the alien what his people believed. “Though,” he went on, “I often wondered if there were other platforms out there, despite Church teachings. And then Kahran told me that we were but one of many platforms or worlds, strung out on a chain through the grey.”
Havor grimaced, and Ehrin knew that the alien found his ignorance amusing.
The alien pointed to the lamp that Ehrin still gripped. “Pass me the lamp.”
He handed it over, and Havor settled himself cross-legged on the floor. Ehrin and Kahran hunkered down. Havor set the lamp between them. “Now... may I borrow your beads, Kahran?”
From around his neck Kahran lifted his chain of brown beads and passed it to the alien. Havor unfastened the tiny clasp so that the chain hung straight.
“Kahran was right, in a way,” said Havor. “The worlds we inhabit are strung out on a kind of chain, though the chain does not pass through a sea of limitless grey, but,” he went on, “is wound about a central sun, like so...”
Ehrin watched in amazement as Havor, holding one end of the chain beside the oblate glass cowl of the gas-lamp, proceeded to wind it around the glass so that, by the time it reached the top, the chain with the tiny beads upon it described a helix.
“The flame within the lamp,” Havor said, “is equivalent to the sun, which gives us light. The sun is a star, and far beyond our helical system there are millions of other stars, burning bright...”
Ehrin found his voice. “And they too have helical systems, with other worlds, strung about them too?”
Havor inclined his head in assent. “We have no reason to suspect otherwise, though my kind have not travelled to them.”
Ehrin asked, “And where are we upon the chain? At which level?”
Havor indicated the second level of eight that wound about the lamp. “We are here.”
Ehrin nodded, staring in awe at the model of his solar system.
Kahran pointed to the helix. “There must be hundreds of worlds in existence around the sun!”
Havor made the deep, guttural sound that indicated his amusement. “I am sorry, but this demonstration is not so very accurate. There are many thousands of worlds strung out on the helical chain, my friends.”
Ehrin leaned back against the bulkhead, overcome with dizziness. “Thousands? Thousands of world just like this one?”
Havor lifted a hand. “Not just like this one, Ehrin. They are vastly different. Some are barren, without sentient life. Others bear life in various stages of evolution. My race has explored a handful of neighbouring worlds, and discovered three bipedal peoples, all technologically inferior to the Zorl.”
“With ourselves,” Kahran said, “being one of them.”
Havor inclined his head. “But you, if it is of any satisfaction, possess a greater technology than the other two races we have so far discovered. We have taken it upon ourselves—considering our experience in these matters—to monitor the progress of these races; to act, if you like, as moral guardians. Though I admit that there are dangers in such interventionist tactics.”
Ehrin thought about it, then said, “Havor, if other beings came to our world, then it would suggest a level of sophisticated technology, am I right?”
“To a varying degree, yes. They might possess the equivalent of your flying machines and hale from neighbou
ring worlds on the same level, or interworld vehicles if they came from the levels above or below.”
He told Havor about the rumours of aliens from another world.
“Did Sereth describe them?” Havor asked.
“Her father did not witness them himself. If it is true, then they are held in the Church penitentiary in Agstarn.”
Kahran shook his head and said, more to himself, “We need to overthrow the Church’s despotic regime.”
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