"The gold. The gold brings her back to me.” She smiled, shrugging. Then her eyes narrowed. “You look ill.”
“I’m fine,” he said, though he knew he was sweating. He could feel it breaking out on his skin, dampening his shirt. She could see it. But he could feel it, swelling inside him. Insistent and undeniable.
“Your name, who are you?” he demanded. “They’re calling me.”
“The Center?” she stepped forward, grasping for him. “Beware of them. Do not trust them! Any of them!” Then, frantically, “Take me with you!”
“I can’t,” he said, his voice ringing in his ears. He shook his head slowly. “It doesn’t work like that.” Then, before he knew why, he blurted his question out. “What is your name? They just called you Lady.”
A wild rushing in his ears, as she spoke, mouth forming words that crackled and hissed as sound contracted, as everything contracted, and he was gone like smoke from that place.
Chapter Twelve
The Center, Debriefings
Concurrent Present Timeline
Then, here. Not gone. Here. He gasped, reeling. His head swam.
A room, well lit by afternoon sun through high windows. The room was round. He knew it. An audience room, sometimes used for lectures. There were dozens, but this one had blue tile in an abstract pattern on the walls that he recognized. He sagged with relief, the relief of one freshly rescued.
Grandmother sat on a stone bench in an alcove. She looked at him with gray, cataract-fogged eyes.
A noise to his right, and he saw the Boy, perched like a monkey in his alcove. The Boy hopped down. “Report your findings now,” he said, in his high-pitched voice. His eyes were gray, like the ocean under a cloud heavy with rain.
Tarl gaped. He shook his head and tried to compose himself. His mouth felt gummed up with dust, though he knew this was in his mind only. He realized he drank none of the water he had been carrying. What happened to the bag he had slung over his shoulder? It must have dropped to the floor, there in the dark antechamber of the dead god. Left, in the dark, with the woman. Her image burned behind his eyes. Do not trust them. Any of them.
“Is there water?” He said, “I am thirsty. It was very hot and dry there.”
The Boy clapped his hands. “It will come. Tell us what you learned.” He took a stool from against the wall and sat down before Tarl, leaning forward, his hands on his skinny knees. He wore only a clout around his waist. Tarl could see his ribs beneath his skin.
The old woman spoke. “The water is coming. This can wait.”
The Boy raised one finger to silence her objection. “The thirst is in his mind, not his body. Not here. He can speak.” He turned to Tarl. “You can talk, can’t you?”
Tarl nodded, licking his lips. “There were gods there, I think. I saw the chamber of a dead one under a city. Mexico City, they called it. And another name, an older name.”
“What was this older name?” Grandmother said quickly.
Tarl blinked at her. “Tenoch… Tenochtitlan?”
“Tenochtitlan,” the Boy said, looking back at Grandmother. He did not nod or make any sign to her, but Tarl felt something must have passed between them, some indication of mutual understanding.
“Continue,” the Boy said to Tarl, smiling with bright, even teeth. “You have done well.”
“Many cities there had gods, but they are all dead. There was a war or climate crisis. Some calamity. I met a madwoman who shared these tales with me and led me to their dead god.” He looked at the Boy. “I think it was her, but I can’t be sure. She was…changed.”
“God-worship? Religion?” Grandmother suggested.
Tarl nodded. “Perhaps,” he said. “I wasn’t there long enough to learn much of their beliefs.” He raised his hand. “They used the components of the god for their…rituals, though. They scraped the gold and other conductors from what looked like silicon wafers. They collected this dust.”
The old woman nodded, satisfied. “Primitives, then?”
Tarl nodded. “There were few people. All was in ruins. It looked like it had happened long ago. A thousand years? Maybe more.”
The Boy was peering intently at him. “So, a dead end? Any reason to go back?”
Tarl repressed a shudder, but he was sure the Boy noticed. These Select missed little. He shook his head. “A dead end.”
“This madwoman,” the Boy prompted. “Was she their shaman or a priestess?”
“Yes, their queen. Their leader, I think.” He thought back to the woman, her eyes manic. Do not trust them, she had said. But how, or why could she say this? “She was mad. I think they gave her the dust from the dead god to drink, and to wear on her skin.”
A girl entered, barely of age to be a Trainee. She bore a tray of one cup and a fluted pitcher of clear water. At a gesture from the Boy she set it down on the bench next to Tarl.
“Such substances could poison her,” the old woman said. “Industrial elements are toxic. Did she seem poisoned?”
They will see it all eventually, he thought frantically He took one glass and filled it with water. He drank heavily. The water was clear and cold and wonderful.
“She seemed mad, Grandmother,” he said, twitching a brief smile from her at this title. “Perhaps it poisoned her mind. She also claimed to know me.”
“Did she?” the Boy asked, leaning forward, head cocked. “What did she say?”
“She was mad,” Tarl said. “She spoke of many things. Many strange things.”
“Mexico City,” the Boy said. “She spoke Spanish then?”
Tarl nodded. “I could understand her, but perhaps I missed one word in seven? She spoke another tongue, perhaps several. One sounded vaguely familiar, perhaps Germanic.”
“English, probably. It is common on some worlds. The English had a great empire. You say she claimed to know you?” the old woman said. Tarl saw that she was not looking at him, she was looking, if look she did at all with those clouded, fogged over eyes, into the middle distance.
“She did. She was mad,” Tarl said. I should not have told them, he thought, shocking himself that he could even consider this. These were the Select, the shepherds of the great Work. How could he not tell them? They would find out eventually. He glanced from the Boy to Grandmother. Did she not know what the Boy and he had spoken of? Should he reveal that?
Do not trust them, the woman had insisted. Trust her, instead? That was madness, wasn’t it?
“Congruence,” the Boy piped in, standing. He turned to Grandmother. “We've seen similar things before.” She gave the briefest of nods.
The Boy turned back to Tarl, smiling gently. “You have done well. You will rest, and then there will be another task. Bathe, eat, and take what pleasures appeal to you. I will summon you in three days.” He paused. "Murn will be pleased to see you, I think." His little boy eyes glinted in the sunlight. He laughed a little tittering laugh and left, skipping lightly out the door, swinging his skinny body around the doorframe.
Tarl turned to the old woman who hadn’t moved. “Congruence? Can you explain, please?”
She smiled. “By analogy only, the mathematics are advanced,” she said. “You know some of this. We teach that worlds are infinite, as you know, and as you have seen firsthand.”
He nodded. This was something they taught every new Guide, before their first year was over. The universe was worlds upon worlds, many of them reflections of the Center, infinite variations, all moving through time together. The Center could, through application of its power, send Seekers from one world to another. How, he did not know, and perhaps he could not know this.
“The universe is a tapestry of threads. Each thread is a universe unto itself, containing a vast amount of space and time. These threads are what we can sense and model and predict, we of the Select. Well, more specialized aspects of the Select do this, though I know of it. They dream it, kind of. It’s a sort of dream they have. It is hard to explain.” She sighed, glancing at him. “I
magine you passed a hundred threads from one hand to the next. How long before they became knotted or tangled?”
“Not long,” he supplied, though he knew she needed no answer.
“And so, we detect such knots. Clusters of universes that seem unnaturally congruent. You may have encountered such a place, where this woman met another Tarl, a different Tarl. A shadow or repeated element among these nearby worlds. To her, she knows you, but you have never met her.” Grandmother smiled at him. “It is an occupational hazard.”
“How do we detect the worlds we go to?” he asked. He knew the Select could do this, to pick out the one thread among the infinite threads of the tapestry, and send one such as him to explore it.
“These knots of congruence are interesting to us. We’re not sure why they occur. We suspect things. We have theories. Often they cannot ever be proven true or false. Reality is stubborn that way. Also, we can detect information being destroyed by high energies. Only advanced civilizations can harness such energies, so we are interested in those. These places are struggling to pass through a filter and often end before we can inspect them.”
End? He suspected he knew what she meant. He nodded. “Did the Center pass through such a filter?” he asked, surprised at his audacity. She seemed pleased by it, though.
“No one knows,” she said. “No one remembers. Or, none wish to remember.” She stood, smiling gently at him. “You have done well, Tarl. Go and relax. In three days, we will have another task for you. Something in the same knot of threads. This one is promising.”
With that, she left, gliding silently on slippered feet through the door. Tarl stood respectfully. She did not look back. He looked around the room, at the clean, polished stone, the flawless windows, scattering the golden late afternoon sun across the subtly patterned wall. He blinked and imagined this pleasant place, the whole of the Center, ruined and buried in the sands of an ever-encroaching desert. And somewhere, deep in the ground, the corpse of a dead god.
He realized he felt stiff, his muscles sore from sleeping on the rough stone, his stomach sour with the greasy eggs he had eaten that morning. Was it just in his mind? Recently in time, but how far away? Was the woman, still down in the crypt she had led him to? Or was she long dead? Could both things be true, among the tapestry of worlds?
He sighed, taking a deep breath of the clean air of the Center. He resolved to do the things they had trained him to do. Not to care about those people. They weren’t real here. They were somewhere else. In different realities. Not real. He didn’t care about her. She was just a madwoman, that was all. He would, he resolved again, renew his focus on his work, on the great task he was part of. He would ignore her warnings, her last words. She was lost to him. He brushed at his clothes, realizing he was filthy. A few motes of dust leaped up and sparkled, floating lazily in the shafts of sunlight from the high windows. Gold dust, from the belly of a dead god. He shuddered and went to find a bath.
He spent the next day in revelry. Seekers often did this returning from their missions. It was an accepted and even expected thing for a newly returned Seeker to do. He bathed first, relishing the hot and cold plunges of the communal baths. The dust and golden specks floated in the surrounding water at first, but soon they washed away. There were others around him, male and female, but he knew none of them well, and was not in the mood to talk. Perhaps they sensed this and avoided him.
He floated in a large pool, soaking in the sun. The woman burned in his mind; he could not escape her. Her image, when he first saw her, glistening and oiled, breasts flecked with gold, golden bells in her hair. He saw the thin silver gown clinging to her belly and her thighs. He saw her face, placid and lovely one moment, hard and pinched the next. He pushed the thoughts away and stalked out the pool into the cool mists of the showers. It helped, but her image was there, mocking him. Do not trust them.
Afterwards he walked, wrapped in a towel, to his dormitory and found his friends. Sangil and Jin were preparing to go to the dining hall for the evening meal. They cheered when they spotted him.
“You were out, weren’t you?” Sangil asked, grinning. He clapped Tarl on the shoulder. “Glad you’re back! We can celebrate!”
Tarl shook his head. “I’m tired, not really in the mood for a party.” He was tired and wasn’t in the mood for a party, but he would not dissuade them.
“Come on, a small party. You can tell us about it over dinner at least,” Jin chided. He was always the most apt to cheer an impromptu celebration. “One of us might get sent there some day. It’s traditional,” he finished, in a lilting sing-song voice. “Plus, the southern district Guides just rotated in last night, and we were planning on meeting up with some of them that we met last time we crossed. Some of them were quite fetching.”
Jin was always on the lookout for new lovers of either gender. Tarl wavered. He was right, he knew. It was traditional. When a Guide returned from a mission, his friends feasted him, and celebrated his return. It was a chance to unwind, relate the experience to friends and colleagues who were always hungry for tales of the strange worlds the Seekers visited. It was a chance to discuss tactics, theories, and talk shop with others who might help with insights you hadn’t considered. He wondered if he should tell them the full story and of the congruence theory. It was useful information, but…he wasn’t sure. He hadn’t told Grandmother and the Boy his whole story; he’d shaded it to protect himself and to keep the memory of the woman to himself. Do not trust them, the woman’s voice rang in his ears, desperate and despairing.
Tarl relented. He dressed and followed his two friends to the dining rooms. “We’re meeting the southerners at the Fig Tree,” Jin supplied. “Some of them are new, some are ones we met last time we crossed.”
The Fig Tree was a dining establishment set in a hollow with a wide lawn centered on an enormous hollow tree. Tables and platforms for socializing nestled in its many gnarled branches. “How far south are they from?” Tarl asked, idly. He was a bit more relaxed now. The baths had helped.
“From the southern continent and some from the tropics. They’re brown, with big dark eyes that look into your soul. One of them, Mallis, he is enormous and with these shoulders.” Jin made a gesture, hands over his own shoulders, indicating big muscles. Jin mimed, swooning.
Tarl rolled his eyes, and Sangil laughed. “So, how was it? You were gone, what, a week?” Sangil asked.
He shook his head. “Three days, for me,” Tarl said.
“Huh.” Sangil shrugged. “It’s been more than that for us. I spent two days with Murnaballa, and that was three days ago.” He glanced at Tarl. “You don’t mind? She seemed lonely.”
Tarl squeezed his friend’s shoulder. “Murn is her own woman. She does what she likes.”
“Does she ever.” Jin laughed. “You should have heard them.” He mimicked lovers moaning, his tongue lolling out of his mouth, hips thrusting.
“Enough.” Tarl laughed. “I’m glad you had fun. Where is she?”
Sangil frowned. "At the Library, probably. Not going to ditch us, are you?"
"I think I am," Tarl said. The Boy had mentioned Murn. Time to see if his bargain had been worth the price he was paying.
He left them, and walked across the Center's main campus towards the towering dome of the Library. The white stone of the glossy dome glinted pink and orange in the late afternoon sun, and as he neared, he saw a knot of Archivists lounging on a wide lawn. These lawns were well-maintained, perfect for spreading a blanket for a picnic, which looked like what was going on. To his surprise, he saw Murn among them.
She was chatting animatedly with a group of her colleagues, and looked up as he approached. Her face brightened, but he thought he detected a shadow cross it as she rose to greet him. She stepped out of the group, laughing with them as they catcalled her when they also noticed him.
"Ignore then," she said, blushing. "They're jealous they don't have men of their own."
"How could we," one of the older girls sai
d with a laugh. "You're taking them all for yourself."
Murn smirked at her and took his hands in hers. They were warm. He looked into her eyes. Blue as the sky with no clouds. Her face was browned by the sun, he saw. She kissed him on the mouth, her lips parted. The tip of her tongue flicked his for a brief moment, and then she pulled away and looked him in the eye.
"You were gone for a while this time," she said, chiding him with a pout.
"I was," he said. "Not my doing."
"Was it fruitful?" she asked, eying him.
He thought back to the woman in the crypt, and her throne of skulls. He shook his head. "I think, a dead end." He embraced her, wrapping his arms around her sun-warmed shoulders. Her robe was thin, and he could feel her nakedness underneath the fabric. He pulled away, holding her at arm's length.
"You moved up!" he exclaimed, fingering the yellow band at the neck of her gown. "I didn't notice at first." Yellow was only the first rank of Archivists, but it marked her as having been dedicated to the Library. She was no longer a senior Trainee, but part of the Library hierarchy properly.
She smiled, her face reddening. "Come on," she said. "Let's walk." She pulled him away from her friends, who jeered good-naturedly at them. He smiled and bowed to them before allowing Murn to pull him away onto a nearby path into the grove of trees surrounding the Library grounds.
"I'm proud of you," he told her, once they were out of earshot. "I know you have wanted this for a long time."
She nodded, but was quiet. "Yes," she agreed. "It's a step that makes sense. What else am I going to do?" They followed the path through the trees. There were quiet glades interspersed throughout the grove. Maybe, he thought, they would find one.
"You can't be a Seeker's woman forever, you mean?" He said it lightly, but was unable to fully hide the bitter taste the words held for him.
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