The Sovereign Road

by Aaron Calhoun

  A soft bell announced that someone was outside his door.

  Garin sighed. He has wanted to be alone.

  “Come in,” he said finally, hoping to sound irritable enough to drive whoever it was away.

  The door slid open and Trielle entered.

  “Garin,” she said, “I need to talk to you.”

  Garin motioned silently and she sat down. She had a pressured look on her face, as if too many thoughts had built up within, all jostling for release.

  “I… I don’t know what to make of all this,” she blurted. “I’ve lived all my life knowing that our civilization is doomed, but also knowing that I, personally, would never face it. I thought that we at least knew what was going on, how much time we had left.”

  “I know,” he said quietly.

  “I’d like to believe that this is a temporary setback, that Father can somehow restart Vai as he said,” she continued, “After all, he did sound hopeful…”

  “Yes he did,” agreed Garin, and then paused, a frown on his face. Within his mind a battle raged.

  The internal pressure to share the dreams with someone, anyone, had been building for the past week, and the encounter with the old man had only strengthened this urge. But still, he hesitated. The words the old man has spoken were tantamount to heresy. Worse, they were an accusation of treason against the universe itself. After all, if the world told its own story then the citizens of the Conclave, in their ongoing attempts to impress the stamp of their own meaning onto a meaningless world, had placed themselves at fundamental odds with that world. But such concerns were abstract, ethereal. Just yesterday he had decided again not to share them, his reservations winning out over the desire to let Trielle in. But that was before Vai had burned out, and suddenly those reservations seemed a small thing.

  He had to trust someone, and Trielle had always listened to him.

  “I think…” he began, “I don’t know, Trielle, but I think…” He hesitated for a moment before starting to speak. “I think there is far more going on here and around us than we have been lead to believe. I’ve been having dreams, dreams of a planet on the edge of the Conclave, about to be consumed by the entropy clouds. There is a road there, Trielle, a road that in my dreams seems to lead… out…”

  “Out, what do you mean, out,” said Trielle, a frown crossing her face.

  “Out of this world, out of time itself,” said Garin carefully. “I don’t know where it goes, but near the end of the dream the same thing happens. I can see a room ahead of me, there is a map in the room that seems to show how to follow the road, but I can’t see it clearly. Then a man calls my voice, asking if I will go. I always hesitate though, and that’s when I wake up.”

  “Garin,” said Trielle, her face puzzled, “I’ve had hundreds of strange dreams. Even a few that reoccurred. But you seem to be putting this… dream… on par with Vai’s failure.” She paused in thought a moment before adding, “I’m trying to see the connection but I can’t.”

  “I barely know what I’m implying here myself,” said Garin. “A few days ago I was still trying to dismiss the dream, but then I met that old man.”

  “Yes, who was he?” Trielle interrupted.

  “Honestly, I have no idea,” admitted Garin, “but what he said seemed to confirm that my dream meant something real. He told me to seek the road at the dying of the light.”

  “At the dying of the…” murmured Trielle, them her eyes widened and the color drained from her face. “How could he have known about Vai?”

  “Exactly,” said Garin. “In my dream, right after the road appears, there are three stars left in the sky, then each burns out, one by one. I almost feel crazy for saying this, but I think those stars are Vasya, Vai and Verduun.”

  Trielle’s face paled as she pondered the implications of this.

  “I’m not saying I believe you yet,” she said.

  “That’s good,” said Garin. “Right now I’m not sure that I believe myself.”

  “But,” she continued, “If there is any truth to it, this could be the beginning of something much worse. If all three stars fail…”

  Trielle’s voice trailed off. As they sat in silence, Garin’s mind wandered back to the images of the entropy storms they had both watched in the central infochryst. Then a troubling thought entered Garin’s mind.

  “Trielle,” he said, “what did father say was the cause of Vai’s death?”

  “A radiative-core layer inversion,” said Trielle. “Why?”

  “Because,” Garin said, “it that makes no sense. The density of a star increases exponentially the closer you get to the core. By the time you get even halfway there all convection has ceased, the plasma is almost locked in place. Near the core boundary the density is even higher than gold. All the motions here are subatomic, there is no bulk flow of matter. And you need the ability to flow, Trielle, for any type of massive layer inversion to form.”

  Garin could see Trielle’s mind race as the import of his last words settled within her mind, but he did not pause. The words were welling up within him now like a fountain, and he feared that if he stopped them he would never again gain the courage to speak.

  “There’s more, Trielle, the old man told me something else. Well, he asked me a question really. He said ‘For aeons, men have told themselves stories about the World, but what is the Story that the World tells itself?’”

  Trielle thought for a moment about the cryptic phrase. “It sounds like he is trying to make you question the Axioms and Corollaries,” she finally said.

  “Well, I would say he succeeded,” added Garin. He paused for a moment. “In truth,” he said carefully, “I think there are many falsehoods about at present.”

  “What are you saying,” whispered Trielle slowly.

  Garin paused for a moment. Until now he had been afraid to make the leap from his questions to the inevitable answers, but now he saw no choice, no way to be true to himself and remain unchanged. And if his suspicions about the official explanation for Vai’s demise were true…

  “I’m saying,” he began deliberately, “that we have have been taught deliberate faleshoods about the nature of reality since birth. Whether inadvertent or deliberate I do not yet know. I am also saying that stellar radiative-core inversions do not, cannot happen, and that Father, given his training in stellar and gravitic science must know this. I am saying that Father, for whatever reason, is lying.”

  The silence that descended on the room was almost palpable, as somehow the air had been evacuated from the space between them, leaving only a vacuum incapable of carrying sound.

  “What do we do?” asked Trielle quietly.

  “I’m not sure,” said Garin with a sigh, “but I think it needs to start with me, tonight…”

  Chapter 4: A Vision in the Night

  Garin stood again in the ruined city of his dreams, the fractured buildings rising from the ground like the fragmented bones of a long-dead beast. Again he walked down cramped, shadowed alleys he reached the vast plaza overshadowed by the impossible vision of a starry night.

  Although he could not say exactly what, something seemed different this time. He looked around, trying to identify the source of this feeling, but the plaza looked exacly the same as it had countless time before. Then he turned his scrutiny inward and understood. It was he who had changed.

  Again the stars fell and gathered into the road of light and shadow, the last three flaring and dying in the empty sky above. Again the substance of the road surged upward as Garin approached, forming the curtain of starlight that guarded the way to the map room. Again the voice sounded, its deep tones echoing through the desolate city.

  “Will you go?”

  “Yes, I will go!” replied Garin firmly.

  “Then come forward my child, Come and see…”

  Abruptly the curtain of light parted, the innumerable stars that burned within it shifting and reshaping into a glittering archway. Taking a deep breath, Garin boldly st
rode through.

  The crystalline walls of the chamber beyond were stained with ages of dust and grime, yet still they managed to catch enough of the light cast forth by the starry arch to fill the chamber with soft rainbow gleams. In the center of the chamber, upon a crystal dais, lay the map. Garin’s eyes narrowed as he studied the convoluted symbols and diagrams that covered the ancient piece of parchment.

  What is this? What am I looking at?

  Then a troubling thought occurred to him.

  How can I take this with me?

  ***

  The next morning’s trip to the Arx Scientia was pervaded by a quiet, desperate tension. Trielle’s long-awaited conversation with Garin had failed to bring her the closure she had hoped for and left her with more questions instead. And behind them all, drifting around the edge of her thoughts like wisps of dank fog, was the unshakeable sense of a universe spinning out of control. As the Ether Chariot phased into the Kinetorium, she found herself desperately hoping that somehow during their transit Vai had reignited and all would be as it was. But a swift glance skyward as they exited the structure only reconfirmed the harsh truth.

  As they walked toward the soaring crystalline mass of the Arx, Trielle tried to engage Garin in conversation. But he remained silent despite her prodding, and after a few attempts she lost the will to continue. A few moments later they parted ways.

  Trielle began her day trying to pretend that all was well, but soon could barely muster the energy to go through the motions. As she sat through lecture after lecture a cold sense apathy swelled within her like an abscess, an inescapable sense that the entire edifice of Conclave thought was built on a foundation of sand.

  Eventually her classes ended and Trielle walked to the balcony, grateful for a chance to finally be alone. Instead she found Garin waiting for her with an exultant look on his face.

  “Garin,” she called out in surprise, “I thought you would still be in class.”

  “I didn’t go today,” he said, “there was something I had to do.”

  “What?” she asked with a puzzled tone. She had never known him to skip classes.

  “Not here,” he said, “Come on, I’ll tell you later.”

  Trielle and Garin quickly descended the crystalline tower and made their way to the Kinetorium. A few moments later they were skimming toward their home on the far side of Latis.

  “Garin…” began Trielle.

  “Not yet,” said Garin. “We need to find someplace isolated.”

  Garin abruptly twisted the Ether Chariot’s control rod and the craft dove, dropping swiftly into a nearby canyon. After descending several hundred feet, he brought the craft to rest on a cracked ledge of reddish stone that jutted from the canyon wall and powered it down.

  “Garin, why did you bring us here?”

  Garin walked to the edge of the ledge and motioned for Trielle to follow. Together they gazed downward at the perpetual shroud of violet mist that filled the depths. Suddenly a cold wind swept through the canyon, stirring the surface of the mists into strange, fantastic shapes. Trielle shivered.

  “You’re starting to worry me Garin. Please tell me whats going on.”

  Garin did not reply, but instead reached into a pocket within his tunic and removed something, holding it with cupped hands. Trielle leaned forward and peered at the object. Within the hollow of Garin’s palms lay a small diamond-shaped amethyst that pulsed and shimmered with barely trapped light, filling his hands with an unearthly glow.

  “Is that an Oneirograph? Is that where you were today during class? The Oneirographicon?”

  Over the past centuries, the noeticists of Latis had developed increasingly elaborate methods for reproducing intelligence and thought. Beginning with the same bioelectric crystal life forms used to grow the buildings of Scintillus, the noeticists had imbued a scion of these organisms with basic neural data processing templates. By applying a firm but gentle selection pressure, their subsequent evolution had been directed toward forms more and more capable of generating the psychophysical energy patterns underlying rational thought. One result of this process was the development of the infochrysts, living crystals capable of analyzing data at almost any level of complexity. Within a century of their creation almost all the worlds of the Conclave had embraced the infochrysts as their primary computing technology. But the noeticists had not stopped with these devices. Instead they continued to relentlessly push the organism’s evolutionary development until at last they had gained sufficient complexity to extract, shape, display, and alter the thoughts and dreams of living beings, and the psychochrysts and oneirochrysts were born.

  Unlike the compact, solid neuroarchitecture of the infochrysts, both psychchrysts and oneirochrysts were composed of cloudlike arrays of microscopic crystalline filaments with a complexity exceeding that of a mammalian brain. When activated, rapidly shifting currents within these filaments generated a linked series of submicroscopic electromagnetic fields that permeate the surrounding space. These ever-shifting fields, once focused on a living bioelectricity-based brain, created a reactive electromagnetic link between each neuron and corresponding fiber in the filament array, allowing for easy mirroring and extraction of the brain’s contents. This information could then be interpreted, condensed and altered, used to reshape the subject’s thoughts, or recorded for future consideration. Similar in overall structure, the only difference between psychchrysts and oneirochrysts was the type of mental activity they were intended to interact with; psychochrysts with conscious thoughts and emotions, and oneirochrysts with subconscious thoughts and dreamstates.

  Trielle frowned. The power of oneirographic technology to reshape mind and thought had always disturbed her. Most justified its use by pointing to its obvious compatibility with the Axioms and Corollaries. After all, if the meaning of the universe depended solely on the thoughts of the conscious being within it, then technology able to record and shape thought could be used to clarify or even alter than meaning at a subject’s whim. Still, Trielle had never been able to convince herself that the technology was entirely safe, and not without reason. Early in the history of psychographic technology a group of Gothrans had been rendered permanently vegetative by an oneirochryst. Relying as they did on quantum-entangled beta decay in biologically encapsulated actinide elements for their information processing, the highly correlated magnetic fields had induced a spontaneous, irreversible waveform collapse in their brains.

  Sensing her misgivings, Garin sighed.

  “I couldn’t think of any other way to view the map,” he explained. “And it’s not as if I went to one of the cut-rate ones offworld, I used the one in the Arx Memoria.”

  Trielle paused. “What was it like Garin?” she asked finally.

  Garin shuddered. “Like nothing I’ve ever experienced before. Imagine feeling as if there were two of you, but you didn’t know which one was real. And then… Imagine someone, or something, literally pulling a thought out of your mind. At one level you know it is alright, that you had gone there for that purpose, but on another level there’s this instinct to rebel against the machine, this reflexive mental grip that makes it almost impossible to let go of the thought.”

  Trielle’s face blanched. “Well,” she ventured, “I hope it was worth it.”

  “It was,” said Garin. “This oneirograph contains the extracted dream information. Look…”

  As he spoke Garin held out the oneirograph, gesturing over it with his free hand. At once its glow increased, shifted, and finally leapt from the surface of the crystal in a perfect holographic representation of his dream.

  Trielle was immediately enraptured as the dream’s strange vistas, her breath catching in her throat when she saw the glittering sky, the road leading out of the doomed cosmos, and the shimmering archway leading to the chamber of the map.

  Now I understand, she thought.

  The dream was mesmerizing in its message, compelling in a way that, until this moment, she had not thought possible.
And standing there beside Garin, sharing in his visions, Trielle felt the stirring of something new within her, the hope that things could be different. As the recording concluded Garin paused the display, lingering over the image of a worn and faded map.

  “This is where I need your help,” said Garin. “I tried to study the map as long as possible, to make sure that I had seen every detail. And believe me,” he added, “there is more detail than might initially be apparent. Because of that I made sure that the oneirographer focused on this part of the dream.”

  Garin gestured to the device and the hologram expanded and grew, the image slowly rotating in the twilight air. The ragged edges of the map framed a rectangular space filled with the image of a vast mountain, its surface composed not of rock but of scattered points of brilliant light strewn through a velvet blackness. The lights twinkled, seeming almost to flow through the substance of the peak. Trielle frowned. Like the star-filled sky of the dream city, the substance of the mountain matched descriptions of the ancient cosmos from her paleoastronomy class. Yet this realization only added to her confusion.

  What am I looking at? A mountain made of the ancient sky? It makes no sense…

  Puzzled, Trielle took a closer look at the map. Five crystalline spheres, each filled with peculiar designs, were scattered across the mountain’s slopes. The bottommost sphere contained a cross-shaped scattering of dark points surrounding a trio of bright spheres, framed on the top and left side by indistinct clouds of pale green. Trielle recognized it immediately as a planetary map of the Conclave itself and the nearest entropy clouds, shown from above the orbital axis of the three suns. The contents of the remaining spheres, however, were far more perplexing: a polyhedral construct of sharp crystal, a series of multicolored concentric circles crisscrossed with looping spirals, a geometric structure of spheres and multicolored lines arranged in concentric hexagons, an ivory city crowned by a crystal rose. The spheres were connected by a path of brilliant blue and red stars that ascended the mountain in a serpentine switchback, ending in a cube-shaped structure at the summit that surrounded by a nimbus of golden light.