The Don grunts again, and I don't say anymore. We reach the ladder leading up to the shark arena stands. One of the Don's men shoulders in front of me and starts up it, leaving me with the Don and the other two. One of them pulls his gun and points it at my head.
"Precautions," the Don says.
The guy above reaches the top, and we hear his footsteps thump over the wood. There's silence for a few moments, then he's back leaning over the edge.
"He's here, Don. In the suit, everything."
The Don gestures for me to climb, and I do, and with every rung up a new plan presents itself. I could simply ride it out and hope the Don will let me go, but that seems unlikely. I could try to overpower the one bodyguard at the top, but he'll probably be standing a ways back with his gun on me, ruling it out.
I wonder if I should risk the bullets anyway. I could also wait, until we're all up close and studying Napoleon, then dive into the froth of the arena. If they didn't shoot me mid-dive, escape might be possible, though I'd probably just drown before I made it out from under the skulk, and even if I did manage to swim my way out, I'd only pop up a few feet away by the sunken jetty, where they could pick me off like a fish in a barrel.
There's no good plan.
I reach the top of the ladder, and lift myself over the edge. As I thought the bodyguard is standing a ways off in the shadow of the arena, a stray fleck of sunlight glinting off the barrel of his gun.
"Come on in," he says.
I do, and he shuffles backward carefully, keeping his distance. Everything is as I remember it, Napoleon down by the scummy arena, his bicorne hat slack across his face, his tunic open where I popped out the folder.
I wonder if I am about to go to my death just as he did. Will I perform the pantomime and get into my coffin-suit, on the infinitesimal chance that the Don might let me live?
Out here that's far harder to believe. There's never a cost to killing in the skulks, but in this abandoned arena so far from everything else, that lack of cost is a palpable thickness in the air, pressing in on me like the drink and madness must have pressed in on the arena's suicidal owner.
I walk down the rotten stands and circle the costumed figure. Oddly he doesn't look as fat as he is in my memory. Hardly fat at all.
"Scene of the crime," says the Don, emerging at the top in the door's oblong of daylight. "How do you feel, Ritry Goligh?"
I don't think it's good that he's using my full name. Like an obituary. "Hungover," I say.
He cackles, starts down the stands.
"So this is him," he says, pointing at Napoleon. "I suppose I should be glad it's not in public."
I realize then that I am certainly going to die. I grin. In five seconds I think, I am going to dive for the arena.
Four.
But until then, every outward I give will be normal, a cognitive dissonance between me and them. In T-minus three seconds I'll abruptly become a different person, and they won't have seen it coming. No nervous ticking at the railing, eyeing the pool, licking my lips, egging myself to the decision. It's what kept me alive in the north, and it's what'll give me a chance now.
Two. The Don is opening his mouth to speak again, even better. They'll be distracted. I don't tense a single muscle, make no change in my outward demeanor.
One.
Then something I don't expect at all happens. Napoleon sits up. His hat flies off, and in the second before the air gets thick with confusion, I see that it is not the ugly man it was before. It is Mr. Ruins.
He points one finger of each hand at two of Don Zachary's thugs, and as if on cue they collapse. It is stunning, like their bones have all at once gone to jelly, like they've been Lagged standing up. I feel something rushing beneath the air as it happens, a powerful and throbbing sensation like I'm about to make a dive and the EMR is cycling up around me, only this is like no dive I ever made before. This is destructive, filling my mind with unseen possibilities.
CRACK
CRACK CRACK
I can't focus. Gun smoke clouds the arena. The Don has hunkered behind a line of seating, and along with one of the thugs is shooting at us.
Ruins' white teeth glint in the shadow, and he points at the third thug, dropping him instantly.
I feel it, or some part of it, like a memory snatched up by the Lag. I'm staring, almost frozen, but now Ruins is moving. He leaps up and sprints the stands with preternatural grace, to stand over Don Zachary. He points a finger at the ugly old man's face, and I think in any minute I'm going to feel that strange sense of dislocation again.
But it doesn't come. Instead Mr. Ruins snatches the folder from the Don's hand, runs back down the stands, and sets it down on a mottled red plastic seat. He looks up at me, with eyes so dark I feel like I'm looking into the empty void of space.
"I promised you a reason to live, Ritry," he says, then taps the folder once with his finger. I open my mouth to say something, but then he's gone, like the record on Tofu's turntable has skipped. One instant he's there, the next he's not.
Lagged?
Then Don Zachary is shouting. I start running, snatch up the folder as I pass, but
CRACK
Don Zachary is standing with a gun held in both hands and his bullet grazes my shoulder. A slice of pain, and I'm rolling along the front of the arena, as
CRACK
CRACK
CRACK
Bullets ricochet around me. At one of the fallen thugs, his eyes open and full of tears, I snatch up a gun and return fire. The Don drops, buying me enough time to root in the man's pocket for his node. Up the stands, I circle back around to the exit, shooting at Don Zachary every few steps. I drop out of the door and fall the ladder-length to the jetty below.
My ankle crunches with the landing, but the jetty has some give and the damage can't be too bad. I catch my balance and run on at a hopping limp, along the pier and out down the tilting jetty.
CRACK
The Don is firing at me from the shark arena, and I swivel to fire back. He shouts something, but I barely hear it as I leap clattering into the speedboat. I pull the tether loose, and while the Don shouts something about nails and my manhood, I rev the engine and tear out of there.
The speedboat thumps over the waves, away.
Node to my head, I dial in for Carrolla, but there is no answer. I can only hope he's in surgery, not already twelve foot deep, drifting amongst the velour of a world long gone. Perhaps I'll never know either way.
The ring clicks to message, and I shout into the mouthpiece.
"Get the hell out of the skulks, Carrolla. Don Zachary's going to kill you, me, whoever he can. Don't stop to raid the graysmith, forget your bar, just pay for passage over the wall and start again in Calico. Just get out."
After that I toss the node in the water, and race out over the open ocean, bearing for the last of the godships overturned on a lost reef, the last place anyone could ever hope to find me.
ROTATIONAL MAZE F
We set to making new armor from plastic tree bark. It's hard, but it's a step in a better direction, and far more resistant to the bayonets than our sublavic suits. With every chip fallen at our feet, hacked out by bayonet or shot clear with the muskets that never seem to run out of ammunition, the mood of the chord improves.
Ray begins to joke about setting up a nice life for himself in one of the burning cottages, and Far amuses himself kicking around some of the heads So cut off. Only once does the mood break, when he tries to throw one down the hole toward the Molten Core.
"No!" snaps So, instantly angry.
Far sets it down, but doesn't cry. I feel proud at that. Instead he goes back to gathering all the chips in a cart he found near Doe's cannon.
"I don't want them with La," So explains. "Sorry. I just-"
Ray gives her a hug, squeezing her tight.
"Take a break," I say.
I stroll over to Doe's cannon, where she's squatted down and chewing on a long thread of her rattaned white hair, s
tudying the weapon.
"I think I can carry it," she says, looking up at me. "If I fit a few mag-levs, I can affix it on my suit shoulder, instead of the accelerator. The bonds don't seem to translate to extra weight."
I look over the cannon, a deep gray iron-looking tube, bulbous at the tail end, like a globule of blown glass. There is a tiny speck of fuse jutting from its rear, which I never saw her refill. It simply remained after each of its earlier blasts. At either side near the fat-tapered end there are handles welded in place, for carriage, or to click it into one of the bases.
"Or lead it behind you like a toy cart," I say.
Doe raises one eyebrow. One thing I know about Doe is she doesn't really understand humor. That only makes the image of her walking through a Solid Core corridor with it trailing behind her seem more funny to me.
"I could carry two, maybe," she muses, as my joke rinses right off her.
"What about cannonballs?"
"Don't need them. I never loaded it last time, like you never loaded your muskets. It just fired."
I nod, considering. "But the muskets didn't fire until the soldiers woke up. They still fire now though. Some kind of phase change?" she shrugs. "Alright, rig it. But keep the accelerator. We have to account for the possibility that the phase may change back"
"Roger that."
I head back over to So. She is sitting on a small pallet-box unclipped from La's backpack, studying one of the soldiers' heads. She looks up as I draw near.
"They're not heads in any more than outer form," she says. She pokes a tip of a duct-tape wound bayonet carefully into the white of the soldier's eye, and a chip of plastic exudes. "It's not an eye at all. The noses have no holes, and the mouth is filled-in."
"What about bonds?" I ask.
She looks up at me, sighs, and gives an exhausted smile. "Nonsensical, as we know."
I nod. "Good, good. Well, keep working."
It doesn't get dark, though there is the sense of the Solid Core revolving. I wonder how much time we can remain out here. I don't really feel hungry, but I chew on a grain-bar from my rations. There's enough in our packs for weeks, especially if we supplement with the up-cycled waste products harvested by our suits.
It takes hours to weave the chips of bark into enough armor for all of us. The bigger chips are the best, and we get better at prying them off the trees, drilling holes in them. One by one we peel off the hardest outer layer of our suits, like the sublavic losing its ablative paneling, and replace it with a chain-mail vest and leggings of wood-chips bound with split elasteel wire.
Ray kicks up his legs and dances like a Can-Can girl, flashing his loose armor up and down like a dress, much to everyone's amusement.
"I am so appalled," he says, mimes blushing, then kicks some more, showing his under-armor. "What a disgrace."
Far gets on his feet and imitates him.
"Do it like this," says the boy, and adds flapping arms to the mix. Ray acquiesces, then steps it up to kicking, flapping and spinning, until even Doe is laughing.
I pull So aside. "How are you doing?"
"I'm fine."
"Good. Listen- I want you to stay here. This is base camp, and I need someone to guard it."
I can feel her begin to simmer, get ready to mouth off like she did before, but I can't afford any breach of decorum now.
"Don't say it, So. This is not from pity or concern about your mission-fitness, it's plain sense. We can't carry everything, so we need a base. We can't keep track of ourselves once we get inside without a fixed point, and the only point we can know will be fixed is a person who says they haven't moved."
"I'll rig an automated signal," she protests. "We can just leave the gear, there's nobody here anyway."
I point at the soldiers. "And if one of them wakes up again, decides to pick it up and run around? In what sense are they even dead, anyway? There's holes in them, but no blood. If just one of them did that, it would throw everything off. We need a north star, So, and it's you. You've got to guide us."
She stares a moment longer, then lets it go.
"I still want to fucking kill something, sir," she says.
"As do I. You may get your chance down here. Keep the lights on for when we come back."
She nods.
In all of this, neither of us mentions what will happen when we get back. There is no sublavic anymore. Unless the path through the Solid Core leads to a bridge or a new ship, I don't see any of us getting out of this.
But she doesn't mention that, and I'm grateful.
I try on my new wood-chip armor. It is light and clatters musically as I walk.
"So how are we getting in?" Ray asks, pointing up at the ceiling.
"Like we got in here," I say, patting the candlewax pack on his back. "We blow a bloody great hole."
All of us, even Far, strap on a musket and at least one broken bayonet blade. Doe has three, two down her calf boots and one on her wrist. With the cannon mounted on one shoulder and the accelerator on the other, she looks like some kind of robot sentinel out of a nightmare.
Ray points. "Fire that thing and the recoil will make you do a somersault."
Doe raises one eyebrow at him. "So don't stand behind me."
He laughs, claps her on the shoulder.
We start. I look back at So, as we pass into the nearest rank of plastic trees. She looks forlorn, surrounded by dead bodies, gear, in the middle of the clearing. I nod, and she nods back.
Then we're trekking.
Far skips about like it's a game, darting to the furthest edge of our whitelights before coming running back, like he's playing with an incoming tide. I almost caution him, but hold back. The weight of this place has sloughed off for a time, and I don't want to begrudge him this. Still, I blood-mic Doe to keep an eye on him through ultras, in case any stray soldier escaped the slaughter.
We walk through a forest splintered with clearings that never seems to end. There are more cottages, and clouds of wispy smoke above stalagmites of flame blooming from their hay roofs, static. More brooks, more tumbled cannon, a few more waterwheels all tumbled at the exact same angle as before.
After an hour, So chimes in on blood-mic, and I tune her up.
"I want to talk about the map," she says.
I answer with a tongued confirmation from us all.
"Good," she says. "Well, there are three options for how to read it, I believe. First and most simply, it could be that this actual map is only a single slice, or plane, cut through the inner sphere. In this version the map essentially remains two-dimensional. It would mean everything inside the sphere to either side of the slice is solid, or just a distraction. That kind of map should be easy to run. Is that clear?"
"As lava," says Ray.
"It is," says Doe. "So the second choice is fully three-dimensional."
"That's right," So agrees. "It could be that the actual two-dimensional map somehow stretches to fill the three-dimensions of the inner sphere."
"How would that even work?" asks Ray.
"Have you ever seen a tetragrammaton," So asks.
I tongue no.
"It's a hypercube," she explains, and slings the image of one at us, a kind of cross made out of cubes. "It's what a square with four dimensions might look like, exploded in three dimensions."
I study it for a time. A faint memory of some great man, dead upon a structure just like this, echoes through my mind, then is gone.
"But we're dealing with a circle here, So," I say. "And not four dimensions."
"I know, I just wanted to get you thinking dimensionally. If it's the second way, then we need to think of this map as though it's on his axis. Put it on its edge, then spin it like a globe in those shutter-stop old films, and the concentric walls we see here will make shells, or orbits, in space."
We all think about that for a moment, until So slings over a translucent three-dimensional model of the map doing just that. The flat map stands on its edge in the HUD, then begins to s
lowly spin, with each of the walls leaving glowing bars in the air behind it. When one turn is completed, so is the sphere.
"Like an onion," says Ray.
"Exactly. But here's where it gets tricky. It matters where the axis of spin is. If it was only perfectly concentric circles it wouldn't matter, because the end result would be the same. But it's not, it's overlapping, and we've got all these other shapes mixed up."
The sphere in the HUD un-rotates back to two dimensions, then turns like a wheel, only to rotate back into three on the same up-down axis. One of the triangles within the sphere highlights itself, making a thick triangle-shaped torc around the upper half of the sphere.
"Now look," So says, and adds the original sphere next to it, with the same triangle highlighted. This time it is positioned on the axis of rotation, so when spun it only makes a solid tight triangle hanging in the upper middle.
"They're totally different," I say.
"Bloody hell," says Ray.
"Bloody hell is correct," says So. "It all depends on the axis. Every angle will make a different map, so which map is the right one? Add to that the circle is not symmetrical on any axis, so how will the conflicting bits react with each other when spun?"
My head reels.
"What's the third option?" Doe asks.
"The third option is something more like the tetragrammaton I showed you. It's nothing so simple as a spin, it's an explosion. I can't render it any meaningful way, just like the tetragrammaton is not a meaningful rendering, just a conception. Suffice it to say, it gets very complex, and stops looking like a sphere at all."
I frown within my HUD. "But it is a sphere," I say, looking up through tree branches at the glossy black ceiling far overhead. "We can see that."
"I know. But that doesn't mean it has to be like any sphere we've ever seen before. Remember the bonds? It could be we're just lines walking along a two-dimensional surface, while there's actually a three-dimensional world going on around us."
"Except in three and four dimensions," interrupts Doe.
A long silence.
Mr. Ruins: A Thriller (Ruins Sonata Book 1) Page 11
