Carandra settled her Razor down with space for Vince to park next to her; Evel and Antine and I settled in a ragged circle facing her. We threw up the airdome and set our ships to building a consensus atmosphere, which for six humans was straightforward. Carandra’s Razor was growing, building a private space large enough for her and Vince and possibly a third, if they felt like inviting anyone to join them. Which so far they hadn’t, and I didn’t expect them to on our last night before heading home.
I was mounting the fireplace on its tripod when Vince vanished from our sensorium. “Vince? Vanessa, what –”
The sensorium itself flattened in the next instant. A purple-blue energy bolt three meters wide flared into existence just over the airdome, sent it into coruscating failure. I had enough time to see that it ran north-south before the failure of the airdome’s field blew me off my feet.
I AM A well designed system, for a human, and I still don’t remember the next few seconds well. I came back to myself in my ship, aware, I can’t tell you how, of an enemy to my south.
“Vince! Vanessa!”
I sent radio – not even sensorium, just their names sent at lightspeed. A moment later I was lifting, getting my ship off the ground, vaguely aware that the others were doing the same. The energy bolt came a second time, and this time my Razor’s systems caught the point of origin: south to north it ran. Had it shot down Vince and Vanessa?
Vanessa’s sensorium formed around me. It felt odd, not like anything I’d experienced with her before – stress, she was talking fast. “Vince is down. I didn’t see him hit. Two energy bolts from canyon south struck a hillside less than a kilometer away from me.” She paused and said flatly, “The hill is glowing where it’s not lava.”
“Get something between you and the source of those bolts.”
“Heading to the other side of the hill now,” she said.
Now the others popped up in my sensorium. They were behind me, all of us flying north to our last point of contact with Vince. I told my Razor to grow weapons though I knew we’d be there before the systems were mature, and anyway I was skeptical that anything on our Razors was going to be effective against whatever it was that had fired that bolt.
Each second with air beneath us the odds of survival improved. Thirty seconds since the second shot, thirty-five – too many targets in the air now? Power source blown? Tracking the bolts back to source, the ship cameras produced an image of a blurry black structure, just a box, nestled in the foothills of the south canyon.
I couldn’t remember at that moment where the researchers were supposed to be. I consulted the archive and it told me – the nearest group of Platformers, my first mother among them, was over a light hour away. With part of my attention I composed and fired off a summary of what we knew, first toward Mother’s presumed position, and second toward the Caravan, and then put it out of my mind. Whatever was happening here would be over before help could arrive.
Most of me was negotiating Vanessa’s sensorium, which was decidedly spiky. “Calm down and show me what you’ve seen.”
“I’m calm.” I half believed her, her affect was very flat though I could feel how fast she was processing. She slowed down. “Here.”
She was the other side of the hill now, possibly safe; I saw the recording of what she’d seen – with a clarity that surprised me, even with what the archives said about about Kabhyr eyes. Hovering in her Razor, a hundred meters above and four hundred meters off the glowing hill, I could resolve features only a few centimeters across. I saw a part of Vince’s Razor, its mirrored exterior reflecting the lava that flowed around it. There was no point in trying to recover Vince’s body – he hadn’t quite been vaporized, but his Razor had been blown apart and there was nothing left of Vince himself above his hips. The shiplog was toward the front of his Razor – the half of the Razor that was missing. Half the Razor, half of Vince. Front and top. For some reason the combination was funny to me.
The instruments reported enough vaporized metal in the air for there to be no doubt about what had happened to the rest of Vince’s ship, and the rest of Vince.
“JUST LIKE THAT,” Vince said.
I nodded. “Just like.”
“No one at fault?” He brightened a bit. “Not even me?”
“Someone competent and quick witted – me, for example – might not have survived those beams.”
“Two of them. Which one got me?”
“We don’t know. Your sensorium vanished just before the first shot blew our airdome.”
Vince nodded, accepting it.
WE MADE IT safely to the other side of the hill that had taken the brunt of the blasts, and there we found the ruins of a Zaradin temple.
We hovered over it, comforted by our relative safety from whatever had fired on Vince. “Is this what Vince saw?”
Vanessa indicated uncertainty. “Maybe. I don’t know if he could have seen this, with his trajectory.”
“He was here before you –”
“Let me examine his shiplog,” she said, and I could feel the first emotion in her sensorium since the event. Dark amusement, plausibly. Who was I to judge? I’d nearly burst into laughter over the way Vince and his Razor had mirrored one another in their destruction. “I could tell you for sure, then.”
“Zaradin?” It was Evel, saying what everyone was thinking about the structure beneath us.
“Probably,” Vanessa agreed. “Open to the air. Ten sided altar, ten panels facing it. Two of those panels will have humans on them.” Humans, on an unattended altar on a world that had been dying for a billion years, in a system cut off from the spacelace tunnels for six million?
I hate living in a universe where time travel was once possible. “I’m going to go down and look at it,” Vanessa said finally.
“Everyone’s snapshots up to date?”
“I’m four months off schedule,” Antine Marienchild admitted. “I’ve been living in logs.”
“Head home,” I told her. “Evel and Carandra, go with her. You’ve grown weapons?”
Carandra indicated a shrug; less rattled by Vince’s death than I’d have expected. “For what it’s worth.”
“Follow the curve of the planet a bit before lifting – don’t get within line of sight of that beam. Good luck.”
It left me with Vanessa, who so far had been brighter and faster than everyone else, including probably me. I composed and fired off updates to Mother and the Caravan, and Vanessa and I put down.
We landed fifty meters from the temple. It was dark, in the shadow of the hill near sunset, so we lit up the temple with searchlights from our Razors. I was reluctant to leave my Razor – not that it was going to be of any use if something like that beam hit me. I forced myself to dissolve the airdome and climb out.
Vanessa was already halfway to the temple, her shadow, from the searchlights, wavering huge ahead of her. I followed, my shadow chasing hers.
She was walking around the panels when I got there, looking closely at them with her Kabhyr eyes, recording their images to log. She’d lit the lamps on her helmet and hands to go along with the reflected light of the searchlights, plus what little light still came from the sky.
I’d never seen a Zaradin temple in real life – the Church and the Caravans aren’t at war, aren’t even really in conflict – but neither could you call the relationship cordial. There are no temples on Caravans of any size, and S’Pollant is one of the largest. Still, I had the local archive in my head, a bigger archive in my Razor, and most of the knowledge of the Continuing Time back in the archive on Rose from Earth. I could have named the Powers on the ten panels as easily as any of the Church’s Factual.
As I stepped through the outer ring of the panels, all ten came to life, lit up along with
the altar with a light so bright that it turned the landscape around us to a harsh mockery of daytime. My helmet darkened almost as fast as my eyes, blinding me in practice so that the light could not blind me in reality –
There you are, said the voice. At last.
I WAS UNCONSCIOUS three minutes and twelve seconds by the clock. In that time Vanessa dragged me back to our ships, slaved mine to hers, and took off after the others. Too many things she didn’t understand, she said later.
When I came to, our ships had merged and my helmet was off. We had a cozy room together, with the airdome darkened so that I couldn’t see the stars.
I’m stupid, what can I tell you? Things I should see, I don’t. That others should have seen them as well was cold comfort – and then I wondered if they had seen them, and had waited for me to clue in....
“Is your name really Vanessa?”
She laughed. “What an odd question. As if that’s what matters. Yes, though. I’m a partially female human being named Vanessa Ma, born on Earth. I think I’m a bit more advanced than you.”
I thought so too. “Are you a night face?”
“Better,” she said approvingly. “Studying to be. But no, there’s an artifact – an abomination of the Faithful – on that world, something from the Time Wars. The Factual set that temple to watch it, I suspect. An actual night face could have been aboard Rose from Earth long before I arrived – but night faces are Factual partisans, as far as the Time War is concerned. The presence of one might have wakened the abomination the moment the Caravan left the Gate.” She studied me, her sensorium gently probing mine. I didn’t like it – she wasn’t pushing, but her sensorium touched mine along its entire interface: it made my immune system flare up and I didn’t like it at all.
“What happened back there?”
She indicated uncertainty. “The light show went off. You fell. I picked you up, carried you to our Razors, and followed off the way we sent the others. They’re in sight up ahead of us. Close enough to talk, too far for sensorium.”
I knew what she was thinking. “Let’s not mention this to anyone.”
She shook her head. “I’ll tell my mother, of course.”
I had to consult archive, I was so rattled. Xander Ma. “Is Xander really your mother?”
She smiled. “No. She’s an operative of the Face of Night, same as me. And for the same reasons, also not a night face.”
“How old are you?”
Vanessa laughed. “Older than you, Erin Rose. Like you, though, never been in love. You can think of me as being your age, if you like. It’s true on some levels.”
“What will Xander do with the information?”
Indicating shrug. “I don’t know. She’s my superior, in most use cases.”
“You knew the abomination was here. It’s why they sent you.”
“We had records that suggested it might be,” Vanessa said. “But we didn’t know there was an Avatar aboard S’Pollant. That is ... quite striking news. Do you know whose Avatar you are?”
I all but snarled at her. “I’m not.”
“That temple lit up around you as you entered it,” she said patiently. “There’s only one thing causes that.”
“You’ve seen a six-million-year-old temple before, then.”
“No.”
“And most Avatars don’t fall over entering church.”
She indicated a nod. “So. I’m going to separate our ships to give you some privacy. We’ll talk back at the Caravan.”
That was useful – I’d expected to have to ask her to break our ships off each other. The ship hull curved down, separated us, and reformed until I was in my ship, and she in hers, and we were running separately again.
First things first. The ship still had the weapons grown at my request; I took the largest of the energy weapons, dismounted it, and cut my shiplog free of its mounting. It got hot inside the cabin while I did that. Once I had the shiplog free, I extruded both the energy cannon and the shiplog through the hull, and vaporized the shiplog.
Now I only had to deal with the Black King, the two from Earth, and whatever had fired on us back there. And Him. Easy.
I’d lied, when Vanessa asked me whose Avatar I was. I knew who it was – Kayell’no, the bastard human wearing the white shadow cloak of a night face.
I could feel Him, riding behind my eyes.
YOU CAN CALL them gods, if you like; the Church does. But the transcendent minds depicted on the panels in Zaradin temples make the gods of human history look unambitious. Their Avatars are not normally secretive about what they are, and I’d never heard of an Avatar who hadn’t known what it was.
I’VE SAID THAT S’Pollant is large. Well known, too – you’ve probably heard of it, but still you may not realize what large means, in a Platformer Caravan.
A Platform is a square, a bit over two kilometers on a side, a quarter kilometer deep. The very largest Caravans make their own Platforms, but most Platforms are built at the Old High Shipyards at the Core. Not even the sleem, when their Empire stretched across most of the galaxy, ever interfered with the Old High.
S’Pollant builds our own. Not often – about once a century we build new Platforms and sell them at good prices to promising immigrants. That had been Rose from Earth, 842 years ago.
The atmospheres vary by the needs of the species that take the Platforms over. The airdomes vary in color, by atmosphere or by lighting effects. The Rose has a blue sky, if you look up at the airdome from inside, but from the outside it’s the color of a red rose, if you know what a rose is or what shade of red they are.
We roll up. A small Caravan might look like a bracelet, or necklace – anywhere from a dozen to a hundred glowing multicolored jewels, every shade of white and gray, brown and red and green and blue, orange and violet and ultraviolet, strung together in a circular chain. (There are even black Platforms, though there is only one Black Platform at S’Pollant.) Larger Caravans reach about a hundred ships, and then divide to add another band – two chains of jewels now, side by side, fifty per strand.
S’Pollant Caravan is a cylinder slightly over forty bands long, two thousand and twelve Platforms, each Platform powerful enough to destroy a Jupiter sized planet without too much difficulty. (I said planets were hard to defend; I’m still surprised the Source and Face of Night haven’t yet abandoned Earth.)
I’d hate to go to war with the Zaradin Church. They’re ancient and powerful, the degenerate heirs of those who waged the Time Wars, and there is no single mobile structure in the Continuing Time larger than a Zaradin Cathedral.
But I’m not sure we’d lose.
THE TEN FIGURES at the altar were Rho Haristi, Eldone Ra, Lesu Orodan, Siva Elherrod, and Kayell’no – the tove in my head, that one. Then Ran Rikhall, Erisha Sum, Bri Erathrin, Nik Shibukai, and the Nameless – also a human, facing Kayell’no from across the altar.
Did these beings wage the Time Wars? Or was it merely their partisans? No archive I could reach knew. What we know is that the Faithful built eight-sided altars, without the human Powers; and the Factual built ten-sided altars, with – and that the Faithful and Factual fought until someone altered the laws of reality, changed physics so that time travel became impossible.
That was sixty-five thousand years ago, when the Continuing Time began.
THE BLACK KING came wearing four bodies.
I knew what it looked like from archive; I’d never seen one in person before. The King’s bodies don’t really resemble chessboard Kings: that cross is just an antenna with a coincidental shape. But they are black and roughly cylindrical, until you get down to their legs, which humans thought looked like those of ostriches, when they first met the Black Kings. Their grasping appendages are thick tentacles, five o
f them.
Father insisted upon attending the meeting; he’s Romando Rose and an important person on Rose from Earth. To the Black King, he was doubtless notable mostly as the person who was responsible for the Rose’s mortgage.
We ended up with twenty-two persons, five of them human. My first mother made it in on the basis of her supervision of her research team. I didn’t have to ask why I was there, or why the two from Earth were attending or who they represented.
Beyond that we had the usual suspects, representatives of the Caravan’s principal species. K’Aillae, Tangletrees, slissi, Encherido – oxygen breathers all, able to operate in our consensus atmosphere, came in person. Sleem and Hotfers and Tixe and a dozen other species were represented in sensorium.
A Tamranni attended in person. This shocked me. Not that it came in body; Tamrann are equally at home in almost any atmosphere. But they are a rare and almost universally unsociable species: the principal servants of the Zaradin during the Time Wars. Those Tamrann who were left after the Zaradin vanished didn’t get along at all with the Church that used their masters’ name. I knew there were Tamrann aboard a few small Caravans, but I’d have wagered my Razor there wasn’t one aboard ours.
We met aboard Rose from Earth at City Hall’s outdoor pavilion. The location would not have unduly stressed a pre-technical human; the sky was blue and cloudy, and the faint breeze smelled of the pine trees growing along the Eastern Edge. A group of kids, my younger brother Elden among them, played football a hundred meters away from us. We baffled the sound to prevent it from intruding upon the meeting’s sensorium.
The King wasted no time. “We will examine the human boy,” the Black King nearest us said – it used Tierra rather than sensorium.
“Meaning what?” Father asked, bravely enough when you consider he was faced with the beings who held our mortgage and could, until it was paid off in another eleven hundred years, leave Rose from Earth behind at any port of call they chose. As important as I was to him, I knew he wouldn’t trade the entire population of the Rose, twenty thousand persons, for me.
Tales of the Continuing Time and Other Stories Page 11