by Kate Elliott
She leaned into the cavernous opening. “I promise you, Valentin. When he comes back, I’ll tell Mother and Papa—” Faltered. That was no good. “I’ll talk to Sakhalin himself, really I will. I’ll tell him you need to go, anywhere, to get away.”
His figure shifted in the blackness, but came no nearer. “Will you really? Even after what happened with your flower night?”
Ilyana imagined how utterly awkward and mortifying it would be to approach Sakhalin after what had happened. But no one else could help Valentin. “Yes. Even after that I will. I promise you.”
“Well. All right.”
“All right, then. Come out. I’m not going in there after you. I’ll get all dirty, and so will these dishes, and anyway, there’re spiders in there.”
“I’m not coming out. Just let me stay here, Yana. Don’t make me go back. They won’t care, anyway.”
“I can’t drag you out. Oh, all right, sulk out here if you want to. It’ll be cold at night.”
“It doesn’t matter. Cold doesn’t matter.” His voice sounded eerily disembodied, echoing through the underground vaults. “It’s only the surface world.”
She would have thrown up in her hands in exasperation, but she was still holding the platters. Instead, she left him there.
But in the morning she found time to sneak him out a platter of food, which she left by the empty cistern. That night when she went back, half of it was eaten. She left fresh food and a flask of water. She went again the next morning. The flask was gone, so she left another one, but the food hadn’t been touched.
“Where’s your brother?” David asked when she arrived for her tutorial. “I didn’t notice him around yesterday, and we had a tentative tutorial planned on early computer architecture, but he never showed up.”
“I dunno.” She could hardly face him. Did other adults besides the lighting designer Yassir, someone she had seen around a fair bit but didn’t really know except to say hello to, know all about the awful bargains her father was trying to make? Did everyone know? “He had a—” But if she said that Valentin had had a fight with their dad, then maybe David would blurt out all the horrible secrets that he knew about her and her brother. “He isn’t feeling well.”
David blinked at her, and she got the feeling that she didn’t lie very well. “You’ll let me know if you need any help, won’t you?”
“Uh. Yes.”
He sighed and shook his head. “So. I think we should strike while the iron is hot.”
“What does that mean?”
He grinned. “We’ve had three days to let our—your—encounter with Genji sink in. It’s a big step, but it worked with Sakhalin. I think we should go.”
“Yes,” said Ilyana, who wanted nothing more than to get as far away as possible, even if it was only for a little while.
David borrowed Vasil’s saddle, since Sakhalin had taken his saddle with him, and together they rode out to the rose wall with Gwyn and Hyacinth in attendance. Gwyn had to get back for rehearsal, so Hyacinth agreed to wait with the horses for as long as he could.
Ilyana stood in front of the wall and said, in a trembling voice, “My name is Ilyana Arkhanov, and begging your pardon, I’ve been invited to visit, er, Genji, in the hall of monumental time.”
The wall clouded and vanished and a barge appeared. This one was smaller. Stairs extruded, and David waved at Ilyana to stay back so that he could enter first, but she followed on his heels and found a circular chamber domed by a low, cloudy ceiling and ringed with a bench. She sat. David, after a hesitation, sat. The barge rose, and rose, and rose, and Ilyana realized that they were flying.
“This is interesting,” said David. “The other barge glided. It rested on some kind of cushion of air and never left the ground. Why is this different?”
“Maybe we’re going farther away.” She set a hand on the curve of the dome. “Oooo. It’s gooshy and sort of sticky.”
“Yana! Get your hands off that.”
She giggled. “You sound like Diana. She’s always telling the girls not to touch things, like the things will bite back.”
“Things do bite back sometimes.”
The ship banked and rose higher and Ilyana slipped off the bench and landed on the floor. She laughed, as much out of nervousness as surprise, and hoisted herself back up on the bench.
“My point exactly,” added David, and steadied himself on the bench as the ship banked again. He shoved his heels into the floor but almost slid off, and then did when he started laughing because Ilyana had slipped off again. So they were laughing when the craft came to a halt so abrupt that Ilyana felt like she’d slammed into a wall. The entry-way slid open and Ilyana scrambled for purchase, but there was nothing to hold onto, everything was smooth.
The opening gaped onto a gulf of air. About twenty paces away, if one could walk on air, the tip of a steeple ended in a jeweled peak, like emeralds winking in the sun. Farther, she saw the stubby top of a glass pagoda, and the curling black and red stripes of an onion dome, and nothing beneath. From this height she could not see the ground, and she felt herself slide slowly, inexorably, toward the opening and the inevitable death plunge to the ground. She didn’t grab for David because she didn’t want to drag him with her, didn’t even dare look toward him for fear of losing what little purchase she did have. The craft cycled a quarter turn to the left and suddenly a towering wall of smoky glass blocked out the light.
The floor settled and the door lined up with a two-meter-high arch set into the glass tower. Gingerly, Ilyana stood up and walked over toward the opening.
“Don’t go too near,” whispered David.
“That arch is open, I think,” answered Ilyana in an equally quiet voice, as if loudness might send the craft into a death spin. “But there’s like two meters between it and us. I can’t jump that far. Do you think—”
A sound teased at her ears, the whisper of soft paper being crumpled, the flutter of the leaves of a paperback.
“Come over,” said a voice, hanging on the air like a breath of wind.
Ilyana swallowed. “I would, but I can’t jump that far, and neither can my ke.” She flashed a glance back at David, but like a cornered rat, he had fixed his gaze on the immediate threat: the craft’s open hatch and the empty air beyond.
“Ah.” The sound was more an exhalation than a word. The craft slid in toward the tower. Ilyana felt as if it were pushing against a thickening cushion of air, and it finally came to rest about half a meter from the wall and the open archway.
She did not wait to think. She pushed off and took the step—it took forever and ever hanging above the chasm—and threw herself forward into the round chamber of slick black stone, landing on her knees. The stone was hard and cold. She crawled on her hands and knees into the center and then, remembering, looked back. She was alone. The craft hung outside, swaying slightly as if in a breeze.
“David? David!”
At last he appeared, teeth clenched. He made an ungainly leap, pitched forward and stumbled into her, flung himself down on his rump, and just sat there, panting and laughing weakly.
“What an entrance,” he said finally as he pushed up to his feet. “The Chapalii must not get vertigo.” The little ship backed away as if repulsed, lifted up soundlessly, and vanished from sight. “I’m not sure I can get back the same way I got on.”
Together they looked around the room: A featureless, circular chamber of black stone that looked like obsidian. A single gray disk resembling the color of the tower’s outside walls marked the center of the room. The archway through which they had come was the only outlet.
“We’ll step on that thing together,” said David, and taking Ilyana’s hand he led her over. As soon as they stepped onto the disk it sank down into the floor. Ilyana held her breath, but the rate of descent remained steady, and her stomach didn’t leap up into her throat. It just went down and down and down for what seemed like eternity.
“Sakhalin said he came up a staircase
,” whispered Ilyana.
“But that was in nesh. Your legs could climb this high in nesh, but it might be more difficult in the real world.”
She shivered, thinking of Valentin, who seemed more and more to think that the real world was irrelevant. “Valentin ran away. He’s hiding in the old caravansary.”
“Had a fight with your father?”
She nodded, unable to speak past the sob catching in her throat.
“I’ll see what I can do,” he promised, resting an avuncular hand on her shoulder.
At her feet light exploded. As if they were emerging from a vertical tube, they sank down into empty air and settled onto a floor of granite. Above, in the ceiling, a round shaft bored upward into blackness. They stood in a gray-toned entry hall. Behind them lay a wall of granite. Ahead stood a portico lined with columns.
“Come on,” said Ilyana, wanting to get it over with. She started forward, took the steps with gusto, and halted staring into the next room.
“Well I’ll be damned,” said David. “It’s Karnak.”
It was. An avenue of ram-headed sphinxes dressed out of red-rock sandstone led through a pale stone land that seemed, just barely, to have a roof far far overhead, streaked with a delicate filigree of cirrus clouds. They walked down it. There was no dust, nor did the Nile River flow past behind them.
But as they approached the pylon, the monumental brick wall that marked the entrance to the temple, Ilyana saw a slight shine in the gateway, a whispery gleam. There, waiting for her, was Genji.
David gulped down a sound in his throat. Ilyana just stared, even though she knew it was rude.
Genji looked a little like a Chapalii male who had been shined until he glowed; yet it wasn’t a gaudy kind of light but more the soft richness of a pearl. Her head was narrow, her mouth like the opening of a clamshell, her skull behind the slender face swelling into a very inhuman but subtle bulge to the sides and behind. Her eyes were faceted like crystals. When she spoke, the sound seemed to emanate from her throat, not from her mouth.
“I welcome you, young one. The ke may wait here at the gate.”
She turned. Her robes were like banners of silk swept up by the wind. They murmured with the crackling of a thousand distant campfires or the muted fall of a stream over rocks. Ilyana squeezed David’s hand and bravely walked after Genji.
Massive walls loomed on either side, pierced by a doorway whose lacework trim bled a ghostly light into the passageway. Passing through the door, they came out into a vast hall. It. was so big that the single statue placed in the middle of the hall could have been any size. Ilyana simply could not estimate its dimensions from where she stood now.
“The anteroom to the hall of monumental time,” said Genji.
“Anatoly Sakhalin said there were a lot of statues in here,” said Ilyana, looking around and feeling faintly disappointed. She had thought maybe there would be odd, exotic, alien things, something no human had ever seen before. The distant statue she recognized, even though it was small: It was Shiva. Or maybe, she thought wildly with a half hysterical gasp, it was Kori’s Uncle Gus, frozen in the act of dancing the part. She squelched the thought and concentrated on Genji, who after a pause now began to reply.
“A-na-to-ly Sa-kha-lin.” She pronounced each syllable so distinctly that at first Ilyana didn’t realize that she was repeating the name. “The prince of the Sakhalin, who has now gone to approach the emperor. You know him?”
“Yeah. I’m, uh, sort of related to him.”
“You are his sister.”
“No. More like a cousin.”
“This word, cousin, denotes a genetic relationship?”
“Well, not really. I mean, maybe. I’d have to ask my mother if there was any marriages between the Sakhalins and the Arkhanovs, which there probably was at some time, but it’s more that the Sakhalin tribe is First of the Ten Elder Tribes and the Arkhanovs, and the Veselovs, that’s my father’s people, are two of the younger of the Elder Tribes.” Then she felt like an idiot for babbling on and not making sense. Why would Genji possibly be interested in a bunch of barbarians on a backwater planet?
“Like the ten princely houses recognized by the emperor. Of course, one of the princely houses passed through the rite of extinction just moments ago—or perhaps that was several years by the way you would reckon time. The emperor will no doubt be pleased that another princely house has risen so quickly into the vacuum created by the rite of extinction.”
It took Ilyana some moments to sort this out, because she wasn’t quite sure what a rite of extinction was, except for what she knew about trilobites and dinosaurs. “Don’t you reckon time the same way I do? I mean, isn’t there only one way to reckon time?”
Although she hadn’t really noticed it, they had been walking the entire time, as if with seven league boots covering more ground than they ought to have been able to.
Genji extended an arm. Her sleeves were as much an extension of her robes as discrete sleeves, extending all the way to the floor. Cloth whispered. “Here is Lord Shiva, in his aspect as Nataraja, Lord of Dance. With this dance he can both create and destroy the universe.”
Shiva stood poised before them, his body circled by a mandala-ring of fire. His skin was a lovely burnt golden-brown, except of course it wasn’t really skin. He was a statue cast of bronze. The statue was about two meters high, the same height as a man and the same proportions, except he had four arms.
Ilyana walked a ring around Shiva. The graceful play of his four arms fascinated her. He balanced on his right foot on a dwarf, the demon of forgetfulness, and his left leg swept upward in an elegant line that, frozen, yet suggested the essential dynamism of the dance. “But he’s just a statue,” she said.
“Is that all he is? Language is simply a map by which we make sense of the world. The world exists outside of language, just as the dance of destruction and creation, the great cycles of time, exist outside of the linear time in which the brief flashes of consciousness you call an individual life are measured.”
Ilyana shivered. Genji made her feel so… insignificant. “Do you live a long time?”
“Time is a language by which you measure the world. Even the speech by which you communicate measures space as linear time. You depart. You progress. You arrive. The speech begins and it ends. It unfolds with the expectation that there will be completion.”
“Oh. Right. Are you immortal?”
“Not even the stars are immortal.”
Shiva regarded this exchange with raised brows and a half smile, simultaneously delighted and aloof. But of course, he was just a statue. He was made that way.
“Kori’s Uncle Gus—Augustus Gopal, well, I guess you wouldn’t know him—says that dancing is the oldest form of magic. He said that with enough power he could dance the universe into and out of existence. That’s why he did the Shiva piece. Well, you wouldn’t know about that either.”
“Do you seek to learn this knowledge of the dance? It is not mine to teach.”
“Neh. I mean, when he dances, it’s beautiful, but after it’s over there’s nothing left. It’s like a cloud. It takes shapes, but there’s no solidity to it, it just dissolves. That’s why I like buildings. I’m studying architecture with Dav—with my ke. I guess it always seemed to me that buildings last longer than anything else, even than the civilization that built them.”
Ilyana caught a sense from Genji that she was pleased in some alien fashion: whether for the clever answer or the choice of buildings over dance, Ilyana didn’t know.
“Temporal power is indeed both fleeting and insignificant.” Genji began to walk again, toward the far end of the vast hall, and Ilyana followed her, followed the rustling of her robes, a little sorry to be leaving Shiva behind, with his lithe young body caught in stillness while still in motion.
“But we remember the names of people who lived before, in our history,” Ilyana objected.
“Names are names. Language is a map, and if the map loses mean
ing, or the map is lost, what is left?”
“But people don’t think about what’s going to happen after they die. They live now, while they’re alive. Well, I guess they could hardly live any other way. But I was named after a man who is leading a big really big army to try to conquer the world.” She frowned, a trifle annoyed with the implied suggestion that human pursuits were somehow trivial. “Even in the Empire, don’t the lords and dukes and princes try to, I dunno, try to become more powerful? It must mean something to them, just like it does to humans.”
“To what end? A mighty civilization could flourish for ten million years, as you reckon time, in some far corner of the universe and yet never meet another intelligent species. Did not your philosophers wonder if you were alone in the universe? Is it not mere coincidence that your ten million years have overlapped with ours, and in such close proximity? It would have been far more likely that you grew and flourished and faded into nothing and thought yourselves always alone, while a billion years before another species rose in a distant galaxy, asked the same questions, and died, and a billion years later in another place, the same process occurred. So you might not be alone, but separated by gulfs of time and space that can never be bridged.”
“Then you might just as well be alone, wouldn’t you?”
“The void is like the fathomless waters of a pure ocean, and there universes float, coming and going, a fleet of exquisite but frail boats. Here we pass through into the hall of monumental time.”
Ilyana paused and looked back toward Shiva, who remained, as ever, soaring in perpetual motion and eternal stasis ringed by the fire of cosmic energy. “But I thought Shiva represented time.”
“So he does. But the Nataraja dances death and creation, the eternal recurrence of the rhythm of what you call nature. Pass through.”
Ilyana walked through a low doorway that barely cleared Genji’s head and found herself in an even vaster hall, if that was possible. Beyond, a cliff dominated the chamber. It was so tall that its height was lost in clouds. Cut into the stone, in relief, was a huge image of Shiva, sitting cross-legged, one hand raised, palm out. The great hall smelled dry, almost metallic, and Ilyana realized all at once that the usual spicy scent she associated with Chapalii air was absent.
