Tales of the Dissolutionverse Box Set

by William C. Tracy

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  “It’s how portals open,” the majus said. “I am not sure if it’s the height, or the lack of other melodies. I even went out as far as I could on the tree’s trunk. The resistance grew less, but it still will not let me open a portal. We must find a platform away from this crystal surface.”

  Where are we going to find something like that? I looked up the expanse of the wall.

  “Then we keep climbing,” Mom said.

  * * *

  “Can you make out the top yet?” I asked on the third day up from the tree and the Wall’s Nose. We were all still hanging off the beetle’s back while it trundled upward.

  Mom had taken her telescope out, and hooked her harness nearer the beetle’s head as the wall dimmed. She was looking straight up. The waterfall was a curtain of rushing water to our left, and if I looked down, I could see the giant spray where it hit the Nose and turned into the cloud layer. There were still a bunch of rainbows down there.

  “No—” she fell silent.

  “What is it?” I asked. The majus and Wailimani also waited for her to answer. At least he isn’t complaining about his arms since we started riding the beetle. Only that his harness wasn’t comfortable, and that he was cold, and the ride was too bumpy…

  “There’s a big hazy mass of light up there.” Mom panned the telescope left and right. “That might be the top, if it’s made of crystal like the walls, but there are little bits interfering with the light. I can’t make out what they are.”

  “Can I try?” I asked. She handed the telescope down and I was careful not to drop it, with the beetle bumping along.

  I looked up.

  Yep, it’s a bunch of light. I moved the telescope left. And there’s the waterfall. It just keeps going, all the way to the top— I looked closer, trying to adjust the little focus knob on the top of the telescope. There’s something at the very top of the waterfall. I couldn’t figure out what it was, so I moved the telescope around. There are more things like whatever’s at the top of the waterfall.

  “See anything interesting?” the majus asked.

  I lowered the telescope. “Yeah, there’s an object up there, but I don’t know what it is. The same thing is at the top of the waterfall, too.”

  “It is?” Mom took the telescope back. “You’re right, Natina. You have sharp eyes. I missed that.”

  So what is it?

  * * *

  We climbed through the night again, since the beetle had no trouble carrying us, especially with the dwindling weight of our rations. I slept off and on, waking up when my harness swung, each time she hit a section of the wall that curved out. She had to scrabble to get a good toehold in the holes she drilled. When I slept, I dreamed that the light from the top of the Nether had descended and was all around us, leaking out like water, sprouting tendrils that reached for us. The beetle stayed just beyond their reach, but they were coming closer…

  * * *

  “Huhhh! The lights,” I said as I awoke with a start. They were going to get us! Except, I didn’t remember who ‘they’ were. The dream was fading like mist. I rubbed my eyes and looked around.

  Is everyone else still asleep?

  They weren’t asleep, just silent—even Wailimani. The only sound was the hiss of the beetle’s drill and the creak of her jointed legs.

  Part of my dream came true. There were little white lights all around us! The beetle climbed through them.

  “What are they?” I whispered.

  “We don’t know,” Mom said. “Wailimani saw them first, a few minutes ago.”

  I looked to the Kirian, whose crest was wide and flat in astonishment, his mouth hanging open. He must have felt me staring at him, because he turned his head to look at me. “They are to be beneath the surface of the wall.”

  Beneath? That’s impossible.

  I looked over the side of the beetle, careful not to interfere with her steadily churning legs. I was lying along her back as she crept vertically, and the little white lights were all around, right under the reflective surface of the crystal. They were like little worms that had somehow dug into the wall, but none of them were moving.

  “They’re pretty,” I said. I climbed up as close to the front of the beetle as I could, just behind her head, and connected my harness into a hook on her shell.

  “Could you hand me my notebook, please?” I asked mom. She dug around and produced it, then handed it up. “I want to sketch this.”

  * * *

  We watched the little white lights until midday, and as we got higher, they only got bigger.

  By now we had all tired of watching them, though we appreciated the glow they gave. We hung in our harnesses, and I munched through my small lunch of wafers and jerky, almost happy we were running out. I was really starting to hate those things. At least the lights would guide our way at night, so we’d have fewer problems traveling.

  Suddenly Majus E’Flyr jerked upright, grabbing at the beetle’s shell for support. We all looked at her. “I can still see the glow,” she said.

  “Well, yes, if you look close enough,” Mom replied. She looked around the side of the beetle.

  “No, I can see the white glow clearly, even with the wall at full brightness. Even through these.” She took off her purple goggles, her silvery eyes reflecting the wall’s light. “It’s the Symphony. They’re alive.”

  “The Symphony? How is music supposed to be white?” I asked. Majus E’Flyr had told me about the different kinds of music she heard while we climbed, and how she changed it. This was something new. I couldn’t hear anything, of course—I know I’ll never be a majus—but I could still imagine the music she described.

  “The Symphony isn’t white,” the majus explained, “but changes to the notes appear as colors to us maji, one color for each house.”

  “How is that to be helping us?” Wailimani asked.

  “Well, changes made to the notes of the Symphony of Strength—my house—are surrounded by a green aura, to a majus.”

  “And? What about white?” I asked.

  “That’s the House of Healing” Majus E’Flyr said. “It deals with living things, and with biology.”

  “What is that having to do with you seeing white light?” Wailimani waved one hand at the wall. “We are all to be seeing white light.”

  “I’m seeing it all the time, and even through the light of the wall,” Majus E’Flyr said, her head-tentacles twitching in excitement. “I see it in addition to the white light you see. The auras created by changing parts of the Symphony are different colors, but they’re not light, exactly. They don’t illuminate things. We can’t use the auras to see by.” She held up a wrinkled purple hand to stop my question. “So what that means is that these little things are very much in tune with the biological aspect of the Grand Symphony—enough to affect its notes.”

  “Which may be why they can burrow into the wall,” Mom said. The majus nodded.

  * * *

  The majus might have been the one to figure out the little white things were alive, but I figured out what they really were.

  “Roots!” I called out as the walls began to dim for the evening.

  “Root of what?” Wailimani asked.

  “Plants! Up ahead.” I pointed above the beetle. I was strapped in closest to her dark metal head, which dipped down regularly to drill new holes. Am I the only one who can see them? Maybe I do have sharp eyes.

  “They’re growing out of the wall—growing up from the white things,” I said.

  Now Mom came up next to me. “I see them,” she said. “There’s a whole field of stems and buds.”

  Soon the beetle was in among them, brushing through little green and blue and purple shoots growing out from the surface of the Nether crystal like grass. Their leaves were glossy and dark.

  Mom reached over the side. Her arms were just long enough, as she rode on the length of the beetle�
��s back, to touch the wall. She was the tallest of us, now Partino was gone.

  Don’t think about him.

  She brushed her hands along the leaves of the plants, then she leaned even further out, and I caught her harness before she twisted off the beetle’s back.

  Mom came back up and presented a handful of black stuff to us. “Dirt,” she said. “It must collect here, on the top side of the sprouts. That leads to another question though—”

  “Where is the dirt to be coming from?” Wailimani asked.

  * * *

  We kept climbing through the night, and the beetle crept around the small plants, occasionally testing the bushier ones to see if they would hold her weight.

  “Get some sleep,” Mom finally said, when the wall was almost completely dark. I was looking around the side of the beetle, as the white roots of the plants gave off about as much light as the moons did back on Etan.

  “I want to watch,” I said. “How can you think about sleeping, with this forest sticking out of the side of the wall? It’s so…weird.” I’d given up sketching a few lightenings ago, when I could no longer see the lines I put down, but I couldn’t stop peering at the plants.

  ‘Forest’ wasn’t the right word, but there were larger bushes and even a few short trees, their trunks gradually curving up so the tallest ones were vertical. Their roots were a mass of light, reaching out in a great spider web of white beneath the surface of the wall.

  “It will still be here in the morning,” Mom said. She grasped a chink in the beetle’s shell to steady the swing of her harness and peered up ahead of us. “As far as I can tell, the plant life only gets thicker. Now, go to sleep. You’ll need your rest for whatever comes tomorrow.”

  I did eventually sleep, but it took a long time for my mind to quiet down.

  * * *

  The next day, the plant life was even thicker, and the beetle was rarely drilling holes. Instead, she climbed from tree to tree, and her jointed legs held onto bushes and large clumps of grass.

  “Maybe we’ll be able to have something different for breakfast,” Mom said, pointing to a tree that grew right in our path.

  “Are those toka fruit?” I asked. I can’t believe my eyes. The fruit was found only in the Nether, but it was considered one of the best tasting fruits of all ten homeworlds.

  “Looks like it to me,” Majus E’Flyr said. She pointed to the trunk. “See the bark? It’s got to be the same species. And in season, too.”

  I reached up as we passed between the branches and the wall, picking one of the purple globes that hung from the tree. These were some of the biggest toka I’d ever seen. I peeled the rind and bit into the ridged blue fruit inside.

  “Mmmm.” I let my eyes roll up. “Delicious!” And not squid wafers.

  Mom, the majus and I all had plenty of fruit for breakfast, but when we offered one to the Kirian, Wailimani shook his head, crest up and pointy.

  “Fruit is not to be something I like,” he said, then made a quick motion with one hand. “The bugs that are accompanying fruit, however…” he raised a small flailing thing to his pointy teeth. I grimaced and went back to my toka.

  No accounting for taste, at least not in Kirians.

  I think that was the best breakfast I’d had in several ten-days. We all hung, relaxed, in our harnesses after we were done, resting along the black shell of the beetle.

  “I’ll have to pick extras and store them in the nets for later on,” Mom said. “I’m not sure I can move yet.”

  “Better do it before we get out of this grove,” Majus E’Flyr said.

  “Maybe I can be catching extra flies along the way,” Wailimani mused. “I was packing a jar somewhere in here for such an occasion.”

  I pulled myself up, grimacing at how the harness squeezed my full belly, then froze. What is that attached to the trees? Tied into the larger trees were long beams, cut square. I followed them with my eyes, out from the wall, where they met up with other beams in a crisscrossed array. The structure was like a giant treehouse, but on the edge of a forest, the last row of trunks supporting it out in open air.

  “Mom!” I called, and pointed. She followed my finger, and frowned.

  “Trellises,” she said. “Those can’t be natural, and look there! That one’s still green wood—new construction. Someone lives up here.”

  “Uh, you can say that again.”

  I was staring at a face peeking out from behind a toka tree.

  * * *

  Majus E’Flyr climbed up, opened the hatch, and flipped levers to make the beetle stop climbing. I was the first off, making sure my rope was tied to one of her legs.

  “Be careful. We can’t tell for sure if it’s a person or an animal—” Mom had one hand out, but I was already out of her reach, climbing from trunk to trunk. This was easier than climbing with the anchors—the trees grew so close I could step from the branches of one to the next. I swarmed up closer to the face.

  Can’t she see the way they’re looking at us? I took in the big purple eyes that were flicking between me, Mom, Majus E’Flyr, and Wailimani. That’s a person, like us.

  “Hello?” I called. “We won’t hurt you. We want to meet you. Can you tell us where we are?”

  I kept calling out questions as I climbed toward the face. I passed from bush to tree, finding handholds easily. The face had ducked behind the tree, but slowly came back out as I kept talking.

  Only a little bit closer. A little more…

  “Hi there,” I said, as I grabbed the trunk of the toka tree. The face was close now, and I saw the eyes watching me, the mouth working.

  “Uh…hi,” the face said in a low voice. “Who are you? You look…different.”

  I smiled back, thankful the Nether let us all communicate with each other. This would be harder if I had to learn a new language, or was on one of the homeworlds.

  I put a hand on my chest. “I’m Natina Morvu Januti.” I snuck a look down at the beetle. Mom was climbing closer, through the foliage, but the majus and Wailimani still hung from the beetle’s shell. “That’s my mom, Morvu Francita Januti, and on the crystal beetle drill are Majus E’Flyr,” The majus waved a long-fingered hand, “and Surigran Wailimani.” I tried not to scowl as I said his name. Then I looked back at the face, hoping this person would show us more of themself. “What’s your name?”

  “Avi,” the person said. “That’s short for Avi Iva Vana Vinai Aivi.” One hand crept around the trunk of the tree. The fingers were brown, with skin stretched between them, and had green fingernails.

  “Avi,” I said. Hopefully I could learn the rest of their name soon, but it had all come out in a growling rush, the words echoing off the wall and nearby trees. I only caught the first part. “We’re part of the Great Assembly of Species. My mom and I are Etanela, and the majus is a Lobath. Wailimani is a Kirian.” I held my other hand out, showing my bluish skin. “You can see us. Can you come out so we can see you?”

  Avi waggled their head, which I thought meant ‘yes,’ and slowly came out from behind the toka tree. The face was long and pointed, with a beak below large purple eyes. Avi had something not quite like feathers, and not quite hair, that extended backwards from their head. Their body was short, with stumpy legs that gripped grasses and plants. But their arms were longer than mine, and I could see the flaps of skin that connected their hands to their sides. Avi was wearing a white smock that covered their shoulders and legs, but had holes for the excess skin.

  I took in a deep breath. “You can fly, can’t you?”

  Avi nodded. “Can you not?” Their purple eyes shifted behind me. I looked down as Mom’s hand patted my leg. Wailimani was off the beetle now too, his eyes roving over my new friend. Like he’s hungry.

  “No,” I answered. “We all have to climb if we want to go somewhere high up. That’s how we got up here.”

  “What do your people call themselves?” Mom asked quietly.

  “W
e are the Grumv Vugm Mugv,” Avi said. Their language was a growl, deep in their throat, and it echoed. Anyone nearby would be able to hear them clearly. “My family farms the grove for the city. I can take you to meet them, if you want.”

  “We’d like that very much,” Mom said.

  * * *

  Avi’s family lived in the treehouse, supported by wooden beams tied into the strongest toka trees on the farm. As we got closer, we could see there were steps and grooves cut into the top of the beams, so that a person climbing through the trees growing from the wall could step directly onto the trellis.

  Majus E’Flyr led the beetle to the base of the platform and then flipped a bunch of levers that told her to stay put until we got back. The beetle gripped two trees, folding her legs in around them. The trees creaked as she did.

  I helped Mom and Wailimani untie the ropes attaching us to the beetle, while Avi looked on, their head cocked in curiosity.

  “Why do you tie yourself up?” they finally asked.

  “It’s so we don’t fall,” I told the Grumv. I had my legs wrapped around a tree trunk and waved one of my arms in the air to show I didn’t have the same webs of skin Avi did.

  Avi cocked their head the other way. “You mean like this?” They summersaulted backwards, wings unfolding into giant triangles of skin connecting their body and hands.

  “What—” I saw Mom’s eyes widen in surprise even as my heart caught in my throat. I could only see Partino, tumbling end over end, until he disappeared into the clouds.

  Don’t cry. Not in front of Avi. I’m not just a silly girl.