The Infinity Concerto

by Greg Bear

  She wasn’t what Michael would have called pretty, but she was extraordinarily exotic.

  “Hello,” she said. Michael felt his aura being delicately feathered, with nothing of Alyons’ bluntness or the Crane Women’s forthright probing. The sensation was pleasant.

  “Sana rega Ban,” Nikolai said. “I introduce my friend, Michael Perrin. He wanders as I—”

  She ignored both of them now, looking at the horse. She smiled and turned back to Michael, then reached out and gripped his upper arm in warm, gentle fingers. “I am Ulath,” she said. “Of the line of Wis. Your friend is most unusual, Nikolai. The Ban of Hours will enjoy him, don’t you think?”

  “I certainly hope so,” Nikolai said.

  “This is your horse?” Ulath asked Michael.

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve never seen a blue horse, even in the Realm.”

  “There’s a story behind that, rega Ban,” Nikolai said. “I’m sure he’ll tell it again, when the time is proper.”

  “Come,” Ulath said, “and be welcome to Inyas Trai.”

  “That.” Nikolai said, “is the name of this city, and I advise you not to say it aloud, even when you are alone.”

  “A superstition, Nikolai,” the Sidhe woman said, her voice deepening.

  “My lady,” Nikolai said, bowing again. “We are but poor—”

  “None of your humility. It doesn’t belong here.”

  “No, indeed,” Nikolai said, straightening and smiling at Michael. “There is nothing humble about the city of the Sidhe.”

  The tunnel branched in two in the depths of the wall, one branch leading off into reddish darkness, the other toward a half-circle of daylight. To Michael’s relief, they walked toward the daylight.

  They emerged onto a narrow street which wound between walls of tan and white buildings. The street was profoundly quiet. Michael felt as if he were at the bottom of a deep river gorge. Crystalline circular mirrors set in the walls reflected daylight all around, throwing luminous patches onto the streets at intervals of a few yards. As the sun passed overhead, new networks of reflection shifted into being, and new patches appeared as the old faded.

  Ulath walked a steady two paces ahead of Nikolai and Michael, her robes rustling richly and her thick dark red hair swaying back and forth, a seductive pendulum counterbalancing the roll of her hips.

  Nikolai looked around with bright interest, smiling now and then at Michael and silently pointing out one or another feature of Inyas Trai. After a few minutes, having passed only three other Sidhe—all female, and all dressed in some variation of Ulath’s garb—they arrived at a broad rugged stone laid into a high-walled, shadowy alcove. Two natural steps provided easy access to the stone’s flat surface. Ulath climbed the steps and looked back at them. “Does he know of stepping stones?” she asked. Nikolai shrugged.

  “Do you?”

  “No,” Michael said. Ulath then faced him fully and by the most marvelous kind of out-seeing Michael had experienced, filled his head with the most important particulars of Inyas Trai.

  To get from place to place in the huge city, stepping stones simply and directly took one from here, to there. Each stone had seven correlates. A passenger had only to think of the desired correlate, and he was whisked away. Inyas Trai had no vehicle transportation. One either walked, rode a horse (of which there were few in the city) or used the stones.

  They stepped. The alcove brightened and faded and they stood in the middle of another stone, at the edge of the roof of a very tall building. Wind whipped Michael’s hair. They were nearly level with the peak of the mountain and the air was quite cool. A sweet, spicy odor met them, wafting from slender bamboo-like stalks on one side of the stone. Michael was the last to step down; he was still “seeing” and absorbing the information Ulath had provided.

  The city was populated almost entirely by females. Males didn’t appreciate urban life; centuries ago, they had retreated to the woods around the Irall, rarely if ever returning. Females ran the city; the Ban of Hours, Ulath’s mistress, was the equivalent of a counselor in the city hierarchy.

  Michael blinked. He had suddenly become aware that in out-seeing, Ulath had deftly avoided his aura’s barriers and plucked out a substantial chunk of personal information. She smiled at him apologetically and walked on, robes and hair swinging.

  “Where are we going?” he asked Nikolai in a whisper.

  “To the house of the Ban of Hours,” Nikolai said, “She keeps the Sidhe records of the city. I will introduce you to Emma, and then I will go on my pilgrimage.”

  “You didn’t mention a pilgrimage.”

  “You’re welcome to come,” Nikolai said. “I go to the mountains to witness the Snow Faces. The season approaches.”

  Michael followed them through an orderly grove of small, thick-trunked trees. They kept to a brick pathway with low railings on each side. “Who is Emma?” he asked.

  “You’ll see,” Nikolai said, his face expressing the tenderest sentiment. He touched his cheek with his fingers and shook his head. “You must promise…”

  “Promise what?”

  Nikolai shook his head violently. “Never mind,” he said, whirling and pointing his finger. “Did you see?” Ulath walked on, ignoring them.

  “See what?”

  “One of the Ban’s Arborals. They tend her library.”

  “The trees?”

  Nikolai nodded gravely. “Come. We mustn’t lag.”

  The house of the Ban of Hours was made of wood, magnificently carved and fitted. The roof was high and conical, eight-sided for the first half of its height, then broken into three progressively narrower sections with fewer sides, the highest having three. A tower at the apex was made of brass and carried a silver crescent moon. Two wings protruded from beneath the central structure’s conical roof at a forty-five degree angle, flanking a triangular courtyard. Flowers grew in disorganized profusion in the courtyard; roses of all colors, including blue, scented the air and also seemed to warm it. Ulath glanced back at Michael.

  “The Ban of Hours has lived here for ages,” she said. “Since long before the city was built.”

  “They moved the house here,” Nikolai said.

  They took a path beside the flowers and entered the Ban’s house through a tall, narrow black door at the apex of the triangle. The interior of the rotunda was surrounded by slabs of black marble veined with green. These blocked direct light from windows set in alcoves in the outer wall. Soft, whispering voices issued from behind the slabs. Michael felt dozens of feathery touches on his aura. He gently rebuffed them and the voices stilled. Nikolai stood by Ulath in the center of the room. Both seemed to be waiting.

  “The Ban of Hours is very powerful,” Nikolai said. “There is confusion in her presence, and time is not the same. Do not be afraid. She will not harm us.”

  After a few minutes, Ulath shuddered and bowed her head. A tall female dressed in white entered from an adjacent hallway and approached them across the smooth stone floor, seeming to glide more than walk. From high in the tower’s interior came a buzzing. Michael turned away from the glare of the Ban’s presence and looked up. The lines of the tower spun, filled with golden bees. His thoughts became smooth as he watched the insects. The Ban took his hand and led him behind a marble slab and up a spiral staircase to the second floor. At the end of a hall lined with brilliantly illuminated windows, they came to a wood-paneled room with a floor cut from the single bole of some huge tree. At the center of the floor’s concentric graining was a wide, low basin of water. The basin was attended, but Michael could not see by whom or what. The Ban asked him to wash his hands, and when he did so, an incredible perfume filled the room.

  “We are in the presence of a poet,” she said, taking his wet hands and leading him into another adjacent room.

  The walls of this room were draped with fine white linen and the floor was covered with woven reed matting. The Ban of Hours held her arms out to him, her hands glowing with warmth
and magic. Michael went to her and she folded him to her breasts. “Yes, there has been pain,” she said, “and error. It is the way of both our homes. But you know me, do you not?”

  He did, and softly, he began to weep.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Hours later, fed and left alone in a comfortable sleeping chamber at the end of the southern wing, Michael removed his book from its pocket and hefted it in one hand, frowning.

  He had met the Ban of Hours—but he did not remember what she looked like. Ulath he remembered clearly enough, and all the other details prior to the meeting. But he recalled neither the ban’s appearance nor the sound of her voice. He had an impression of a tall Sidhe female dressed in white, but what sort of dress—long, flowing, pale or diaphanous?

  No matter how hard he tried to recall, his memory was no more specific than that. Probing Nikolai’s aura had proven fruitless; such probes were not very good at eliciting information from recent events, and Nikolai had evidently not been in on much of the meeting to begin with.

  Michael’s room held a brass bed with a quilted comforter, a bowl of water on a marble stand and several framed paintings of scenes from Earth. It took him some minutes to realize that the paintings were genuine Corots, with one Turner. So the Ban of Hours was a connoisseur of things Earthly—including, it seemed, himself.

  He undressed and washed himself with water from the basin. Again, the rich, heady smell filled the room—

  And like a catalyst, the smell opened his gates of memory sufficiently wide to release one segment.

  The Ban raised her eyes and regarded Michael with a warm smile, dimples forming just beneath her prominent cheekbones. Her eyes were inclined slightly upward, almond-shaped and deep-set, sapphire blue flecked with silver. “You are determined to go to the Isomage, no matter what the cost?”

  Michael nodded.

  “No matter that it makes you the pawn of those you know nothing about?”

  He nodded again, less certain. The Ban sighed and leaned forward across the inlaid vine patterns of a table top. Between them was a bowl of sliced prepared fruits.

  The segment ended. He dried himself with a linen towel and crawled under the soft bedclothes. The sheets were cool at first, gradually warming against his bare skin.

  Tomorrow, he thought. Nikolai would introduce him to Emma—whoever that was—and they would prepare for the trip.

  The Ban had approved the trip. That much he also remembered. As for the horse—Ulath had said it was being well taken care of by Sidhe grooms. It was, she had hinted, in sore need of good currying and having its hooves trimmed.

  “No Sidhe would ever have history in a book,” Nikolai said at breakfast. “Written words bind. Long memory is best. The past stays alive then; it can change like any living thing.”

  “So the trees remember?”

  Ulath, bringing a bowl of prepared fruits—

  The Ban had told him about Emma Livry… What about her, though?

  —smiled at him and laid the bowl on the table. “The impressed ones remember,” she said. “Sidhe such as myself, who have served the Ban. When we have outlived our usefulness in her service, we have ourselves impressed in the wood. It is pleasant, so I’m told, to be released from all the cares of the Realm, and to have only the past to guard, to cherish.”

  Sun lay bright in the crystal window of the refectory. All around, Sidhe females in a bewildering variety of clothing and skin colors ate decorously while lying on their stomachs, as Michael had heard the Romans once dined. Nikolai lay next to Michael, peeling a blue apple and nodding. “I have often wondered what the pure life of the mind would be like,” he said. “Halls of memory, corridors of thought.”

  Ulath lay beside them and rolled on her side to look at Michael directly. Michael felt a flush of embarrassment. He dropped his piece of bread and reached to pick it up. Ulath stopped his hand with her own.

  “The Ban is very impressed,” she said. “She wonders about you. You come to us, trained like a Sidhe, riding a Sidhe horse. No human has ever done these things in the Realm. The Ban is curious, as are we all.” She pointed to the other females in the refectory.

  “I’m most jealous,” Nikolai said, eating a candied peach.

  “You are recently from Earth,” Ulath continued. “What is it like there?”

  Michael glanced around the room and realized everyone was listening. “Lots of machines now,” he said. That hardly seemed enough. “We’ve been to the moon.”

  “I was on the moon once,” Ulath said. “Lovely gardens there.”

  “Pardon?” Michael wiped fruit juice from his hands on a white linen napkin. The walls of the Ban’s room—

  Emma Livry, yet another pawn—

  “That doesn’t sound like our moon,” he said, recovering quickly. “It’s dead, no air, no water.”

  “There are gardens for those who see,” Ulath said.

  “Ulath has been around,” Nikolai confided to Michael. “She knew King Arthur personally.”

  Ulath regarded Nikolai with mild disapproval, then returned her attention to Michael. “None of us has been very successful at reading you,” she said.

  “Oh?” Michael thought he had been read very thoroughly by Ulath.

  “Not where your motivations and plans are concerned. In Inyas Trai, it is polite to be open. Nikolai is very open.”

  “Nothing to hide,” Nikolai said. “Unless some of the males are around.”

  “There are no males here now,” Ulath said. “We are curious about Michael…”

  He didn’t feel it was wise to open up completely. He told them he had come to the Realm by accident. He mentioned Arno Waltiri’s music, skipping a great deal after that—touching only briefly on the Crane Women—and told them about Lin Piao Tai, without mentioning the book. Ulath listened intently, and when Michael was done, stroked his arm. Her touch was cool and electric, quite different from Eleuth’s.

  And from the touch of the Ban of Hours. “No matter that it makes you a pawn of those whose wishes you know nothing about?”

  “Come on,” Nikolai said somewhat gruffly, standing and rearranging his city clothes. “Let’s go find Emma.”

  Away from the Ban’s house, beyond the groves of trees they came upon a small stone château. The château was surrounded by poplars and larches. On one side, a mirror-smooth lake diffused the morning sun with a glazed sheen. Swans crossed the lake like small carnival rides, their expanding wakes troubling the rafts of water lilies.

  The heavy wooden door of the château was set into an archway carved with foot-high saints. Michael had never gone to church and didn’t recognize them. Nikolai crossed himself before one, set at eye level, and murmured, “St. Peter.” He took the heavy iron dragon’s head knocker in hand and pounded the door twice. “She is quite charming,” he said while they waited.

  The door opened. A small thin face framed by lank black hair poked out and regarded them with sharp, narrow brown eyes. “Nikolai,” the face croaked, and the door opened wide.

  It was a woman—of sorts. She was barely four feet tall, thin as a stalk of grass, wearing a black shift with long sleeves. Her skeletal hands were gloved in white. The corners of her mouth seemed turned down by nature, and her high quizzical eyebrows carried a message: I’m easily hurt, don’t mess with me, I bite instinctively.

  “Is Emma available?” Nikolai asked.

  “For you, always,” the woman said. “But who’s this?” She looked at Michael as though he were some garden slug brought in by the cat.

  “An acquaintance,” Nikolai said. “From Earth, Marie.”

  Marie’s face softened ever so slightly. “Recently?”

  Michael nodded.

  “Come with me,” she said. “She’s upstairs, dancing.”

  They followed Marie up the stairs to the second floor. Down a short hallway with powder-blue walls, they found a half-open double door. Marie pushed through. “Emma,” she sang out harshly, “we have visitors. Nikolai… and
a friend.”

  The room was very like Lamia’s dance studio on the upper level of the Isomage’s house; smaller, however, and filled with sun from a broad skylight.

  Standing to one side, dressed in a calf-length dancing outfit, was a girl not much older than Michael. Her black hair was drawn back and tied into a bun. Her long graceful neck and arms were as expressive as the swans in the lake outside. She descended from her point and rushed to hug Nikolai. “Mon cher ami!” she cried. “I am very, very glad to see you!”

  She pulled back a step and twirled him around once, then turned to Michael.

  “Pay no mind to him, he is a heartbreaker,” Nikolai said. “I know.”

  “He is human!” Emma said, delighted. She held out her hand and Michael took it. It was flushed, warm, delicate as a flower. Slightly paler than the fingers, however, was the back of the hand, where the skin puckered faintly as if from a long-healed burn.

  “From Earth,” Marie husked. “Recently.”

  “Oh! C’est merveilleux!” She clapped her hands with childlike delight. “Nikolai, you found him and brought him here, so he could speak with us, tell us about home?”

  “Partly,” Nikolai said. He confided to Michael, “I would do anything to make Emma happy.”

  Marie brought in a small table and they pulled wooden chairs away from the wall and sat. “Marie,” Emma said, “bring wine and some of those delightful cakes the Ban gave us.”

  She turned to Michael and smiled dazzlingly, then closed her eyes and positively wriggled with delight. “Where are you from?”