Numenera

by Monte Cook

  “Kyre and I go through first,” she said. “We have no idea what’s at the end of that tunnel. It could be Quenn’s temple, or it could be…” She brought her hands together, wiggled her fingers, exploded them out. Bigger danger than we can imagine.

  She glanced at Kyre’s shirtsleeves, took in the blades he always wore. Checked her hip for the small set of razor rings she typically carried.

  “What else?” she said.

  Delgha handed Kyre a glowglobe from her workbench. He palmed it, but didn’t turn it on. Not yet. If there was something in there, he wanted to see it before it saw them.

  “Delgha, how are those talkpieces you’ve been working on?” he asked.

  “Three-quarters, sadly,” she said. “Maybe less. They only work if you’re facing east and I have no idea why. And even if you’re facing east, sometimes they still don’t work.”

  All right. No communication then. Another plan.

  Aviend had a habit of pinching her fingers into the webbing between her opposite thumb when she was thinking deeply. It gave him a sense of calm to watch her doing it, because it meant she was working on something in her head. And that usually meant she was solving a problem he hadn’t noticed yet. Or at the very least, that a crazy idea was bubbling in there.

  This time, it was solving a problem. “We’re not sure yet how the door works,” she said. “Quenn and I were in here before with the pendant, but it didn’t open. It’s possible that we weren’t close enough to the door. Or that it needs to be spun in a certain way. Or worn by a certain type of person. Or a combination of all three.”

  He followed her logic. Not knowing how it worked meant there was a chance that they’d step inside and the door would close behind them. If the tunnel went nowhere, or if they encountered something they couldn’t take on, they’d be unable to get back. It was possible there was another way out – maybe more than one – at the end of the tunnel. But possible, not probable, didn’t make for great odds of survival.

  He would suggest she stay here and keep the door open, but he’d known her long enough that he knew the words would be a waste. She wasn’t an aggressive leader – she stepped back when she needed to – but he didn’t think she was about to let this one go.

  “Delgha?” she asked.

  “My best guess is that once the door is open, it stays open until you ask it not to. But we don’t know how to ask that of it, and I’m not all that sure my best guess is on the mark.”

  “So we’ll want to experiment,” she continued. “Understanding the risk we’re choosing is that the door might shut and we can’t get it to reopen. But at least we’ll be on this side of it, together.”

  Delgha looked at each of them in turn, waiting for them to speak or give agreement in another way.

  When they gave it, she said, “Let’s have you start by stepping toward Kyre. We’ll start with proximity.”

  In the end, the best they could figure was that opening the door was an action, a thing that happened purposefully. It could be undone – they didn’t know how yet, but that could wait – but it wasn’t likely to snap shut on them after Aviend stepped out of range. Or even if she took off the pendant.

  Which she did now. She placed it on the workbench, her fingers grazing it softly for a moment.

  “In case,” she said. “The pendant kind of… wants to be used. It tells you how to move it. Your fingers just want to spin it.”

  She gave a half grin as if she’d just thought of something. “That’s the first time a device has even talked to me,” she said. “Delgha, that’s what it’s like for you all the time? They just tell you what they want you to do? I feel like I finally understand what that means.”

  Delgha’s smile was fleeting, but heartfelt. “Something like that,” she said.

  “Shall we?” Aviend said to Kyre.

  He stepped into the tunnel first. Aviend was the close-range fighter between the two of them, but if he could see a thing before it saw them, he could take it out. And give them time to backtrack.

  He let his senses explore as they moved. Like their entrance tunnel, this one didn’t have light, although it did have whatever it was that made it easier to move through. But all he could hear was his own breath, even with his mouth closed.

  “I expected it to be staler in here,” Aviend said as she followed him through the tunnel. “There must be some connection to the outside.”

  Kyre inhaled, and caught fresh air. Mingled in was a scent he almost recognized, but couldn’t place. Like a sweet spice that was a neighbor to a spice he was familiar with.

  “Wait. Hear that?” she asked.

  He wished he could look back at her, but the tunnel was just tight enough to prevent him from turning around.

  Then, the sound came through. So soft he was surprised that she’d heard it. “Something spinning? But not like the pendant. Bigger.”

  “Maybe. Creature? Machine?”

  “Impossible to know.”

  They continued forward. The tunnel seemed like it was eternal, a long, straight, flat box that they were walking through without end. He knew that wasn’t true; they hadn’t been in here for more than a few minutes, but something about walking forward into the unknown without any light was making him lose track of time and sense.

  When the tunnel ended, it did so so abruptly that he banged his hand into the dark closure. A full heavy sound echoed back through the tunnel. He pushed into the blackness, but it didn’t move. Not a door, but a covering. An end cap.

  He popped the glowglobe on. Whatever the walls were made of seemed to be working hard to dampen the light from the device. If anything, he found it harder to see. He ran his fingers over the material in front of him, the seams and edges, and found nothing that would give.

  “I think it’s the end of the line,” he said.

  “That’s it?” Her voice carried her disappointment, unmasked. “I thought for sure we’d find… Gavani’s temple. Or at least something.”

  “Me too,” he said. “I hoped.”

  “I have no idea how to get out of here,” she said. “I’m not sure it’s possible to turn around. My body’s too big for this space. Who made this?”

  “Wait,” he said.

  His fingers had found an indent in the side of the door. Half hidden, like the one at the outside of the base. “Wait,” he said again in his excitement.

  He passed the glowglobe back to Aviend without turning around. She held it over his shoulder, shifted it until the shadows were minimal.

  He tucked his fingers into the indent and lifted. The material slid down into the space below, creating a perfect door. “Nice,” Aviend whispered. She turned the glowglobe off, putting them back in the dark.

  In silence and shadow, they moved forward out of the tunnel. He took it in bit by bit, first checking for movement, action, creatures. Anything that might come forward and show itself. Beside him, Aviend had turned as he was, doing the same.

  He reached out a finger, met hers. Silent acknowledgment that there was nothing in the shadows.

  And that’s when he really let himself look at where they were.

  The entire ceiling was transparent. Not stronglass or even regular glass but something else. Something he’d never seen before. It seemed almost invisible. More than invisible. It was somehow bringing the sky closer to them. The stars, bright and big as his fist, bigger, were giving the room its light.

  Gavani’s temple. The starroom. This had to be it.

  “How is this not visible from the outside?” Aviend’s voice was breathless. “How can we not see it from the forest? Every time we walk by?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m not even sure where we are. I mean, look at those stars. They don’t look right.”

  “Not right, but beautiful. And so big. I bet if you went outside and looked up, they’d be…” She lifted her fist to the sky. The stars were bigger than it, so much bigger. “A third this size? No, much less. They’d be so small.”

>   “What does that mean?” he mused. “Either the ceiling is making them look closer, or we are closer. I just can’t tell which.”

  He didn’t know much about stars, but he knew they were far away. Too far to increase in size without a huge leap through time and space.

  All around the edges of the large room were devices. Large, larger than he’d ever seen. Even within Rillent’s sphere. Some of them seemed to still be working, their lights or dials lit and moving. Others had gone dark, likely either from the passage of time or equipment failure.

  Even so, everything about it was beautiful.

  “I can’t believe this whole time we’ve been staying in that dark, cramped space,” he said.

  “You told me you loved the pennon.”

  “Well, yes, because I didn’t have anything to compare it to. If I’d known what we could have been having, I wouldn’t have loved it so much.”

  “I don’t know that I like what that says about you.”

  “High standards?”

  “Fickle.”

  They stood in silence for a moment. “This is big,” she said.

  “Huge.”

  “I’m sad Quenn’s not here to see this,” she said. He found that he was too. Maybe someday. If they found a new way to take down Rillent. Maybe this could become something again. A temple for a new world of followers. A school. Something else that no one had thought of yet.

  “We should go back and tell the others,” Aviend said. “Delgha will want to take a look at all of these devices.”

  “We should. Soon,” he said. “But let’s just hold this for one moment.”

  She put her hand inside his. He rubbed his thumb over the angles of her knuckles, across the smooth black ring she always wore.

  Together, in silence, they stood in the center of their discovery, and raised their faces to the stars.

  By the time they get Delgha and Thorme through the tunnel and into the star room, the overhead view has changed. Stars are still alight everywhere above. Now they’re as big as their heads. And softer, a pale golden against a blue and pink background.

  “Is it morning already?” Thorme asks, her voice awed. It’s a tone Aviend has never heard from her before. She’s got her healing kit by two fingers. It dangles and swings in her loose hold. Aviend thinks she doesn’t even remember that she brought it.

  “Your guess is as good as mine,” Kyre says. “Better, likely.”

  “I can’t believe the temple was here all along,” Thorme says. “Right next to us. Poor Quenn, to have missed out.”

  Delgha had barely glanced at the stars. For one second, maybe two. She’s already fully invested in the devices lining the room. She talks without turning away from her inspection of the machines.

  “I’m pretty sure that the Gavanites didn’t build this,” she says. “Unless the Gavanites go back a lot farther than we think. This space is old. Ancient. Whatever is more ancient than ancient.”

  “Can you imagine how it must have felt to be the first people to discover this place?” Aviend asks. Her neck aches from staring upward, but she can’t stop. She wants to take it all in. She feels like she’s had so few things to marvel at since Rillent came. As if he sucked all of the wonder and delight from the world without her realizing it until now. The sheer beauty, the sheer untouchability of what she’s looking at, makes her feel hope. A seed she’d thought was dead… only buried. Only waiting. “It might be enough to get even me to believe in a god.”

  Aviend walks over to Delgha, the Aeon Priest sticking her hand into an opening that looks far too much like a mouth – or something else – for Aviend’s taste. She’ll stick her hand in a lot of things if need be. But whatever that is might be more than she is willing to agree to unless someone’s dying.

  Delgha pulls her hand out. Aviend fully expects it to be covered in goo or missing entirely. But it’s just her hand. The Aeon Priest doesn’t wear rings – too easy to get caught on things and rip a finger clean off, she always says – but she often stains her nails and the tips of her fingers in different colors. Today, they’re the shimmering opalescent of fish splashing in water.

  “What do you think these are… were… for?” Aviend asks.

  “I have no idea yet,” Delgha says. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  The device – can you call it that? She’s not entirely sure – closest to her looks more like a mushroom than any machine she’s ever known. It has a single wide base covered in symbols and levers and panels. Some of them are round, following the curve of the base. Others stick straight out from it, as though someone inserted it in there with nothing more than the shove of a hand. The base of it is as big around as she is.

  The top half is much larger. A larger, softer-looking half globe that overshadows the base. Almost seems like it’s threatening to fall over. It too is covered with myriad etchings and symbols she doesn’t understand.

  “These don’t have the Gavani symbol,” she says. “Or even any words or… well, anything that I recognize. They’re not Gavani-built either, are they?”

  Delgha pushes her finger against a small round bubble on the top of one device. It sinks in under pressure, releasing a soft squishy exhale. When she takes her finger away, it seems to shake itself and then quickly return to its former shape. As it does so, another bubble near the base makes a sudden popping noise.

  “I don’t think so. There’s very little that I recognize, and even less that I understand,” Delgha says. “I would venture to guess that none of this was made by humans. At least not by the humans we share this forest with. This material is… not organic. But it’s emulating something organic.”

  “It could even be that it’s been… well, living and growing here all of this time. Before the Gavanites came, before anyone came.”

  “Evolving machines?” Aviend tries to put those pieces together in her head. Machine and living thing, together. It’s not unheard of. She’s seen it before, but not like this. Nitar has an embedded eye. Rillent has a device implanted in his forehead. Not that she’s even seen that. But she knows it’s there.

  Others that she’s known have had visible cybernetic eyes or limbs, other bits of hardware embedded in their skin. Creatures, too, with machines inside them. Certainly the destriatch must be both organic and machine.

  This, though, is different. Integrated. As if it were both from the beginning. Must be both to survive. It makes sense, she thinks. If you take the best of both to create a thing that is stronger, evolving. Long-lived. Adaptable. It becomes what it needs to become to survive.

  “Something like that,” Delgha echoes her thoughts. “Makes sense from a longevity standpoint. The organic bits are bolstered by the machine bits and vice versa. I get the sense that it’s bigger than it might have been once, based on the way that it no longer fits into the wall space and how it seems to have stretched out the skin that it’s wearing.”

  Delgha points a finger at the lines running between the devices. They are transparent and hollow, filled with a golden yellow liquid. Normally, Aviend would use the word “tubes” but they twist and twine more organically. Roots. No, vines.

  Aviend touches one. It’s warm and pulsing slightly. She shifts her concept again. Not roots or vines. But veins. Arteries.

  So if these are its limbs – or perhaps, better, its blood system – then where is its heart?

  It must be somewhere else. Somewhere they haven’t seen yet. She would say there are no other doors in this room, but the pendant has taught her not to trust her eyes. She walks the perimeter of the room, slowly, twirling the pendant between her fingers. Waiting for something, anything, to happen.

  Nothing does. At least not something that is her doing.

  Against the far wall, Delgha is still puttering with the main bank of devices. The occasional sounds rise from them; soft squeaks or hisses that remind Aviend of creatures. Then again, Delgha makes her own noises. Sighs of frustration, but more often of delight. Her oohs and ahhs make
Aviend smile, even as she walks and spins, walks and spins.

  Kyre joins her on her second lap around the temple. He falls into step beside her. His gait is easy, loose, like it is when he’s happy about something. Or excited maybe. The two are often entwined with him. “This is cool,” he says. “But I’ll admit I was hoping we’d find a hidden city or something. Maybe a luxury home with actual warm water and, I don’t know, an aneen or three. Somewhere with a generous leader who shares his shins and technology with his lowly subjects.”

  “You want to be a farmer now?” she says. She spins the pendant. Looks for movement. “Farmer Kyre? I did not anticipate that desire bubbling out of your black brain.”

  “I don’t know…” he says. “Maybe? There’s something appealing about a life in the light.”

  She knows he’s kidding. She’s pretty sure he’s kidding. But she wonders. What kind of toll is it really taking on all of them? Hiding here in the dark. Outcasts. Spies and near-assassins. The hunted even as they hunt. They’re doing the right thing, the good thing, but to what end on their hearts and minds? Maybe they would be better off just leaving the Stere, going somewhere safe, leaving Rillent behind.

  “No,” he says, and at first she thinks he’s reading her mind this time. She realizes he’s just answering his own questions. “I don’t really want that. I mean, I do. I want a life in the light again. But I want it here, in our home. Because we helped make it happen.”

  “Me too,” she says. It’s true. It’s always been true. Even if it’s tempting sometimes to believe otherwise. It’s out of love, but also out of ferocity. A sense of righteousness. The Stere, Ovinale – they were hers and Kyre’s, her mom’s, Delgha’s and Thorme’s. Quenn’s.

  It is still theirs, even if Rillent pretends that it isn’t. Even if no one but them knows it yet.

  They finish the perimeter walk in silence.