She kicked and lashed at him. Creek water churned around them like a crazed audience. Finally, she ceased her struggles and stared straight ahead. Breathing hard, Quinn glanced over his shoulder. Twelve figures on whinnying mounts stood in the swirling stream, rifles pointed at his head.
~
Quinn squeezed his eyes shut and waited for the posse to open fire. When he cracked open his eyes again, they had vanished.
He lay on a hard bed, staring up at a plain white ceiling. He tried to move, but his muscles refused to obey, though he could not feel any restraints. He was like a toy without batteries.
Vyasa’s face swam into view. She wore the same stained white smock as before. Reaching down, she adjusted something at his temple, brushed his cheek, and smiled.
Quinn opened his mouth. His tongue and throat appeared to work, although nothing else did. “What happened?”
“It’s all right,” she said. “One of the Elinare attacked you, but we have the situation under control.”
“What do you mean?”
“The creature has taken refuge in your mind, but we’re about to drive it out. Then we’ll make it tell us what we want to know.”
“I can’t move my limbs.”
“I’m sorry about that,” she said, “but it couldn’t be helped. If the Elinare were to gain control of your body, it might harm you, or use you to harm others. We had to restrict your movements for your own safety. Once we’ve broken its hold on you, we’ll release the graviton field. You’ll be fine, I promise.”
He tried and failed to shake his head. “You don’t understand. The Damise are going to destroy the Elinare, and then there’ll be no one to stop them. You have to free me.”
She smiled and touched his cheek again. “Relax, Quinn. You’ve done your part. Now let us do the rest.”
And with that, she was gone.
Quinn stared at the ceiling, devoid of inspiration. He couldn’t move. He could barely speak. What could he do? He closed his eyes and concentrated. Keiza… Keiza, where are you? Talk to me!
Light patches drifted inside his eyelids, but he felt or heard no response—no inkling that another being shared his consciousness. He was about to give up when his view shifted.
He was alone in the dark. Somewhere far off, he heard music playing. The refrain was unfamiliar, but it sounded like an old-fashioned barrel organ. As his eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, dim shapes asserted themselves.
He spotted a chink of light at the base of a large shadow and started towards it. The shadow grew till it towered over him. A wash of artificial light spilled from an opening. He pulled aside a canvas flap and entered. Partitions lay to his left and right. He picked one at random and slipped inside.
An empty chair was set in front of a table backed by a mirror. The table was a mess of pots, tubes, and spilled powder, and the mirror was edged with coloured light bulbs, though none were lit. He approached and stared.
The image in the mirror was of a whiteface clown. His lips and eyes were lined with black, and he wore the traditional ruffled collar and pointed hat. Shock gradually subsided, and reason reasserted itself. It’s another simulation—a re-creation of some distant part of my memory. Like it or not, this seemed to be the Elinare’s principal method of interaction. But what was Keiza trying to convey this time? Who or what did his clown persona represent?
He left the compartment and headed past the remaining partitions. The structure opened out into a massive big top. The circle and stands lay empty and silent like the hush before a performance. Only Quinn had no idea why he was here or what he was supposed to do.
After several moments, he turned and exited the tent. The distant organ trudged through its jolly refrain, though now slightly off-key. A light wind tickled his ruffles. Off to his left was the outline of what appeared to be an old, round-roofed, gipsy-style caravan. He heard sounds of movement from inside. He strained his ears, but the sound was gone. He shook his head. Maybe my imagination’s playing tricks.
He approached, climbed the three wooden steps, and rapped on the door. No answer. He rapped again. “Hello?” Nothing.
As he turned to go, a muffled female voice sounded through the door. “Go away!”
“Keiza? Is that you?”
“Go away!” the voice said again.
“Keiza, let me in. I need to talk.”
Silence. He hunted for a verbal lock pick. “Look, you dragged me into this scenario. Why bother if you didn’t want to talk to me?”
He heard the grind and click of a bolt being pulled back. Cautiously, he pulled the door handle, and it opened. Lamplight guttered in the draught. The light steadied, revealing a hunched figure with her back to the door. The figure turned.
Keiza’s features were covered in red greasepaint, her eyes and mouth ringed white. Her nose was a white blob, and a painted white tear adorned her left cheek. She wore an unruly blond wig, a wide-collared, polka-dot shirt, and baggy tartan trousers.
A distant memory surfaced—a school project he had once done on traditional circuses. Her make-up identified her as an auguste. He was a whiteface—in clown terms, the Master of Mayhem. She was auguste. Augustes were always the ones who got pies thrown in their faces, sat accidentally in wet paint, or got hosed with water. The symbolism was clear. He was the offender, she the victim. Problem was, he agreed with her assessment.
He dragged a chair across the floor and sat opposite her. “Look, I’m sorry, okay.”
“They used you.”
“Excuse me?”
“The Damise used your relationship with your son and the Harani female to turn you against me, so they could track me down and destroy my people.”
“That’s not true.”
Her face contorted. “It is what they do! Have you not grasped that yet? Those they cannot subjugate, they manipulate. They laid out the play and you performed it, just as they planned.”
Ximun had been similarly convinced Quinn would perform on cue and commit suicide. But he had been wrong. “Tell me what’s going to happen next.”
“The Damise will find me here and extract me from your mind. Then they will force me to reveal the location of my people.”
“But that will take time.”
“Some time, yes.”
“Then we have that long to figure out a defence.”
“You are confined to a bed,” she pointed out, “hooked up to a brainwave monitor and held helpless in a graviton field. You can do nothing.”
“Maybe, maybe not. Still, let’s use the time wisely.”
“And how do we do that?”
He leaned forward and clasped his white-gloved hands. “I want you to tell me everything you know about the Damise.”
“Why? What good will that do?”
He smiled his best clown smile. “Humour me.”
~
Quinn stared at the garish red-and-white face across from him. He had occasionally speculated on what his debriefing would be like when he eventually made it back to human-controlled space. Two clowns seated opposite one another discussing the fate of a race in a different universe—it would surely be one of the more interesting sessions.
“You want me to cover what you already know?” she asked.
“Sure. Don’t leave anything out,” Quinn replied.
A sigh framed her painted-on sadness. “Sentient races pass through a number of stages as their understanding of the universe grows. Eventually they reach a point where, instead of merely reacting to events, they become able to control them. They graduate from being mere tenants of the universe and become, in human terms, its architects, with the ability to shape their own future as well as others’.
“The power to manipulate time and space opens up vast possibilities, but at the same time, leads to difficult choices. To what extent should you interfere in the development of the so-called ‘lower races’? Should you pursue selfish ideals or work for the greater good?
“A little over three thousand years ago, three races in t
his part of the galaxy achieved ‘architect’ level.”
Quinn nodded. “The Japhet, the Damise, and the Elinare.”
“Right. The Japhet were introspective by nature. They looked to inner truths as a way of exploring the universe’s deeper mysteries. They held that bending lower races to the will of highers was wrong. The Elinare shared the same view.”
“You believe order comes from chaos,” Quinn said.
She frowned. “Who told you that? The Damise?”
“In a manner of speaking,” he replied.
She screwed her face up. “The Damise paint us black to deflect the darkness within them. We provided a guiding hand, nothing more: a rogue asteroid redirected, a deadly pathogen resequenced and rendered harmless. On occasion, one of us would enter a gifted individual and fire their latent talents, so that their art, music, or scientific endeavours would inspire others.”
“Even such limited interference must have carried risks,” Quinn pointed out. “You couldn’t predict the results with any certainty.”
“You are right. Quantum modelling helped ensure the results were mostly beneficial. Of course, such a process requires time and a great deal of patience. Some sentient races self-destructed despite our best efforts. The Damise found our results too slow and chaotic. So they adopted a course of direct intervention.
“One by one, they began subjugating the worlds around them, inducting the various races into their vision of a grand universal structure, as if each was nothing more than a cog in a machine.”
“You resented that,” Quinn said.
“We could do little to stop it,” she replied. “For a while, the Damise and the Elinare carved out spheres of influence within their own sectors of space, but a clash was inevitable. There were a number of skirmishes. The Japhet attempted to intervene and were drawn into the conflict. Finally, the opposing fleets met above a world known as Omaka.”
Quinn raised his hand. “Wait, I know that name. It’s in the Maaka nebula, right?”
“That’s right. How did you—”
“I met someone from there, once.” Panea, the Shade with ash-coloured skin, long, lank hair, and lifeless eyes who had perished on Nemazi. He shook his head. “It’s nothing. Carry on, please.”
She stared at him for a few more seconds before resuming. “The fleets deployed weaponry, resulting in massive space-time distortions. The planet below was devastated. Time fractured into fronts, all but destroying the fragile civilisation on the surface.”
Quinn frowned. “Aurek told me that the Nemazi were responsible for the Transformation event that infused the nebula with exotic particles and transformed their people into Shades.”
“That happened some years later,” she replied, “when the Nemazi attempted to create their own space-time weapon.”
Swept up in a time front, Quinn had experienced firsthand the night of the Transformation that had warped the Nemazi’s skin to adamantine black, their digits into claws, and their eyes into glowing coals of hatred.
Keiza’s voice jerked him back to the present. “The Omaka incident proved a turning point. The three races realised that continued conflict would lead to disaster. They came together and reached an accord, and the Consensus was born.”
Quinn’s greasepaint itched. He scratched the side of his face. “The Consensus operates a system of voluntary admission. That doesn’t seem to correspond to any of your preferred choices.”
“You’re right. In retrospect, I think the Damise only agreed so as to buy time. However, one of the first races to join was the Agantzane.”
“You delegated the day-to-day running of the new order to them, and they ended up taking over.”
She nodded. “Call it arrogance or overconfidence, but we underestimated their cleverness and ambition. By the time we realised our mistake, we were helpless. They demanded the secrets of space-time manipulation. When we refused, they imprisoned us on our respective home worlds.”
“What is the Damise home world like?” Quinn asked.
“It is a frozen world beyond its star’s cometary cloud.”
Keiza’s account was fascinating, but not of much help so far. “Conor is somewhere on the ship. If I could contact him, I know he would lower my restraining field.”
“Your son is held within the ship’s detention area.”
“Could we spring him?”
“Spring?”
“Set him free.”
“I do not see how,” she said.
“I’m hooked into the ship’s systems. Can’t we make use of that somehow?”
“The interface allows me only to observe. I cannot affect anything.”
Quinn felt as helpless as a fish on the end of a line. He rattled through what he knew. “There’s one thing I don’t get. Aurek told me the Elinare slipped their captors long since and escaped to the neighbour universe, but Ximun indicated that the Agantzane freed the Damise only a short while ago. So how come they suddenly acquired all of these ships?”
“The Damise’s ships are living entities.”
“What?”
“I have no direct experience, but it is said that their vessels are semi-sentient.”
“So when the Damise were set free, they just summoned their ships and they came?”
“Something like that.”
Sounds of commotion floated in the air. Keiza leaned forward and peeked past a pink sash curtain.
“What’s going on?” Quinn asked.
She pulled back. “See for yourself.”
He peered through the caravan’s tiny window. Masked figures in leotards leapt and tumbled in front of a crowd of brightly clad jugglers, fire twirlers, and hand balancers. At their centre stood a glowing, golden-faced creature dressed in a sliver-rimmed, bright-red tailcoat and black top hat.
“The ringmaster,” Quinn said. “He looks like a Damise.”
She nodded. “They’ve found me.”
“So what happens now?”
“If I don’t surrender to them, they’ll burn this caravan and us along with it.”
Quinn opened his mouth to ask what that meant in real terms, but the question died in his throat. He was not sure he wanted to know the answer.
He took a different tack. “You said the ship is sentient.”
“Semi-sentient, yes. But I already told you, its systems are under Damise control. I have no means of interfering.”
“Could you talk to it?”
She stared past him. “I don’t know. I’m not sure what good it would do. In any case, I have no more time.”
In fact, the Elinare were masters of time, but then so were the Damise. The last time an Elinare had slowed time in order to combat the Damise’s AI, the attempt had ended very badly.
He balked at the suggestion. “Could you let me talk to it?”
She renewed eye contact. “Perhaps. I would have to send you alone down a different memory path, while I kept the Damise occupied here. The attempt could be highly dangerous—for both of us.”
Outside a low chant began. “Out… out… out…” The ringmaster advanced towards the caravan. He held aloft a fiery torch.
Before Quinn could react, Keiza was past him and at the door. With her hand on the latch, she turned. A single tear smudged the painted teardrop on her cheek. “Farewell, Quinn. If you should fail, then I do not think we will meet again.”
With that, she was through the door and gone.
~
Quinn stood alone in darkness. A flaming sconce illuminated a coarse stone wall. The caravan was gone, filed away once more in some distant section of his brain. This was a different memory—from a book, perhaps, or a performance or a fragment of some long-forgotten story someone had once told him. The human mind was a playroom filled with half-remembered recollections and experiences, jumbled together or strewn around like discarded and broken toys. Somehow, he had to make sense of it all.
He grasped the sconce and lifted it from its ironwork holder. Flickering light reflected o
ff a rough-hewn passage that sloped slightly downwards. Shrieking sounded from somewhere far behind, as if something otherworldly was stalking him. He hurried down the passageway.
The path turned tighter and tighter until it became a winding stair. He descended in the flickering light of the sconce. Stone steps entered his pool of illumination before being swallowed in the darkness behind him. After a dizzying number of turns, the stairway bottomed out, and he stepped onto a smooth floor.
Cautiously, he started forwards. His footfalls returned as distant echoes, suggesting a vast cavern. Water dripped, but he could not locate the source.
Something crunched underfoot. He bent down. Pieces of a brittle substance lay scattered over this part of the floor. He picked one up. It was light and rough to the touch like clinker.
He lifted the sconce. A massive pile rose ahead of him. He walked forwards and ran his fingertips over a surface of rounded stones, blackened, vitrified, and fused together as if they had been subjected to intense heat.
He raised the sconce higher and peered upwards, but could not see the top of the pile. Stones clattered down its surface. He took a step back, fearing an avalanche. The clattering grew as a mass of stones slid down and ricocheted off the floor. Something was emerging. He backed away. The side of the pile parted to reveal a grey-green bulge.
The bulge snapped open and a huge yellow eye gazed down at him.
~
Quinn stared at the eye and fought the urge to scream. His legs were like concrete posts. The bulge rose higher, becoming an eye socket at the far end of a long snout. Wisps of smoke wafted from its nostrils.
A dragon. A small voice at the back of Quinn’s head reminded him that this was nothing more than a representation drawn from his memory. Yet the threat seemed all too real. If the posse’s bullets and the ringmaster’s firebrand could inflict harm, what might a dragon do?
Belatedly, he found his voice. “A-Are you the ship?” The question seemed the height of stupidity, but he could think of no other reason why Keiza had directed him here.
The Arc of the Universe Page 14