She stopped by the flower store and chatted with the young man who ran it, selecting a bouquet of purple and yellow ring flowers for her office. At the Spacer’s Rest hotel where she’d stayed on her first visit to Lym, she leaned across the wooden concierge’s desk and asked the owner about business. They spent a few minutes commiserating about how all of the tourist traffic went to Hope now, and how the twins’ tight security made it hard for visitors to stay in town.
Three streets over, she stopped in at the school and dropped off two bags of art supplies she’d ordered from the Deep after she’d heard the school was running short. She bent into a surprise cold wind, shivering and keeping her head down.
The Springs Cafe felt as warm as it smelled when she ducked in the door. A wall-length counter offered the most varieties of stims, teas, and sweets in town. Between the counter and the door, a patchwork of a dozen or so handmade tables brightened the room. The proprietor, Penny, had painted them herself in a myriad of colors and styles. Amanda Night looked up as Nona walked in and waved her over to a table in the far back.
In spite of the fact that it probably fooled no one, they always played their meetings as casual surprise encounters. It had been a surprise the first time they shared tea, at least as far as Nona knew. The second and third meetings had been awkward, but Nona had stayed away from diplomatic topics and let the relationship build slowly.
This was their fifth meeting. Amanda looked more upset than Nona had ever seen her. Her eyes were puffy and her cheeks red from tears.
They weren’t close enough for Nona feel comfortable giving Amanda the big hug she clearly needed, but Nona offered a sympathetic smile as she put her things down and went to the counter to order.
Five minutes later, she curled her hands around a warm cup of stim flavored with thick, red berries from the high mountains of Goland. She sat down quietly and watched Amanda, hoping she’d offer to share her pain. Nona lifted her cup and sipped. The stim tasted too sweet, but good enough that she’d get through it. Maybe it would grow on her.
Amanda fiddled with her own half-empty cup for a good five minutes before she looked up and blurted out, “Do you have children?”
What a surprising question. “No.” It took a moment for Nona to respond with the obvious. “Do you?”
“Yes. One. A girl. She’s with my husband, Ted.”
So many things she hadn’t known: a marriage, a child. Amanda and her brother Jules had come in from a farm to rule Manna Springs after the uprising, and Nona had just assumed they were single. “Is she okay? Did something happen?”
“Ted called last night.” She hesitated, wrung her hands, set the cup down. She lowered her voice. “He said she’s run off with the Shining Revolution.”
Nona leaned in and whispered back. “I thought they were wiped out after the attack?”
“More are landing.”
“I’m so sorry!” Possible implications spun through Nona’s head.
“Amy’s not the only one who’s gone off to join them. Ted told me there are more.”
“Where are they?”
“Where did Amy go? Or where are they landing their ships?”
Either answer interested Nona. She sipped at her stim. “Surely there are satellites to track them with.”
“Of course there are.” She held up her slate. “I’ve been searching. We’ll find them. But we haven’t yet. Maybe they’re camouflaged somehow, or our systems are compromised.”
Nona leaned toward her. “Has that happened before?”
“I think so. We’re farmers, not rangers. They’d know. We’ve heard rumors that the revolution is collecting on Entare.”
“So far? Isn’t Entare a continent? Like Goland but a long ways away?” Charlie and Jean Paul lived on Wilding Station on Goland. She’d been there, seen the ruined city of Neville. Ice Fall Valley was on Goland. “I studied a map on my way down. Isn’t Entare a big place?”
“It is. It takes half a day to get there, even in our faster skimmers. It’s the third place the Next are building a city.”
“Maybe that’s why I remember the name. Do you think the Revolution is going there to attack the new city?”
Amanda’s voice shook slightly, like she barely had control. “How do I know? All Ted told me was that she’d gone, that she left a note. He found it just this morning, so she can’t have gotten far yet. But it’s not a good time for me to leave. I mean, I can’t, not immediately. But I need to. Damn it. Damn Ted for not keeping her safe, and me for coming here.”
“Why can’t you go?” Nona asked as gently as she could.
“The Port Authority is coming in this afternoon to brief us about the ships that keep showing up in our space. There isn’t room for them at all, no place they can dock. Space is filling up around us.”
“I know.” Nona’s own ship, the Star Ghost, had a berth in one of the orbiting stations, and she’d been offered more for the berth than the ship itself was worth. More than once. But this wasn’t the place to talk about politics or the spaceport. “How old is Amy?”
“Twenty. Just a month ago.”
Young. Nona remembered the tone in the Jhailing’s voice when it spoke of having no mercy if and when the Next were attacked. “I’m sorry. I’m sure it’s scary. Do you have a picture of her?”
Amanda turned her slate around. A bright young girl with Amanda’s dark blue eyes and hair that she’d clearly dyed a bright pink stared out of the screen. She looked defiant and pissed off, a bit like any teen. “That’s from last year. Now she’s cut her hair short and dyes it black, and she’s lost thirty pounds, so she looks like a stick. But you’d recognize her from this. She still looks like me.” Amanda looked away, blinking back tears.
Nona reached out a put her hand on Amanda’s. She’d never touched her except for formal handshakes and she half expected the woman to pull away.
Amanda didn’t. At least not before she squeezed Nona’s hand in thanks. She said, “Jules says we have to stay here and do our jobs. But he doesn’t really understand. He can’t. He hasn’t had any kids.”
“Do you need his permission to leave?”
Amanda sniffed and blew her nose, but smiled, if only for a second. “Someone needs to find her.” She got up and used a faucet at the end of the bar to refill her cup with hot water. When she sat back down, she asked, “Do you have any better surveillance equipment than we do? The Port controls all of our good stuff, and I can’t ask them.”
If only she did. “All I have is my embassy and my shipments. I can ask the Deep for something, but it would take time.”
“No,” Amanda said. “I suppose you shouldn’t.”
Nona choked down the last of her stim. “I was hoping to go on a tour of some of the rest of the planet. I could visit some of the farms, ask around, see if I can learn anything. I was planning to ask you officially soon.”
Amanda fiddled. “You’re not allowed on Entare. Not unescorted.”
“What about just the closest farms? A woman from Earl’s invited me once. I could just say I was taking up the invitation.”
“I’ll talk to Jules. Don’t report this, okay?”
“Nothing that happens in a stim house is official business,” Nona said. “I promise.”
A few hours later, Nona sat alone at her big embassy desk, staring at catalogs and thinking about what to order. She needed small things that people here would appreciate, like the art supplies for the school. Anything big would be rejected as coming with strings, but so far most people in the community had been grateful for small kindnesses, like a pouch of chocolate to shave into stim or nice lotions that couldn’t be—or weren’t—made on Lym. Manna Springs was more self-sufficient than most small stations. But they had always traded for the small brilliances of life, and the current disruption of regular traffic in favor of hopeful would-be Next and Next ships had stopped the usual tourist and academic trips.
She looked up at a tentative knock on the door. Amanda stepped in, shut
ting the door behind her. “I can go with you. I’ll be your escort. That way I’ll be working, and Jules is okay with that. Not just to Earl’s. On a grand tour.”
Nona was willing to bet Jules was more than okay with that. He could make all of the decisions for a while. Too bad he wasn’t better at it. “That’s great,” she told Amanda. “Should we leave tonight?”
Amanda gave a quick shake of her head. “I wish. I still have to meet the Port, and there are things I couldn’t move for tomorrow.” She hesitated a moment, looking uncertain. “Is that all right with you? We’ll take something that can get to Entare. I can’t go straight there, but we’ll have enough flight power to make it.”
Too bad they couldn’t leave earlier. “So, dawn of the day after tomorrow?”
“Yes. I’ll be here then.” Amanda held her hand out.
Nona took it. “I’m looking forward to it. I hope we find Amy.”
“Me, too.” She shook Nona’s hand and left, the whole exchange taking no more than a minute or two. Still, there had been a brief flash of genuine gratitude in Amanda’s eyes right before she left.
Nona went back to her slate to find a fresh message.
She had to read it three times before she felt certain she understood it. And then she sat and stared at it for a long time, deep sadness sticking her to her chair.
Dr. Neil Nevening, the Historian of the Diamond Deep, had resigned his post. He was already on his way to Lym, where he planned to request to become one of the Next. He would arrive in three days.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
YI
Yi jogged through what they had started calling the cave of machines. He started just outside of the gleaner’s quarters and paid careful attention to each step on the wide, slick pathway. It must be meant to take the ships out of the cave. He expected to eventually find some kind of train or dolly or tug, but so far it had eluded them.
The dry air smelled of oils and electricity and of scrubbers. It resembled the air on a space ship. He found it amazing that it didn’t simply smell of age and broken things, and even more amazing that most systems they knew how to access seemed fine. Of course, not everything they had found worked. Some screens and information systems and lights were dark and dead. All around him, he felt the presence of technology that he didn’t know how to access.
Each alcove had yellowish lighting, although only a little over half of the lights worked and he had to tune his vision to see in the dark and then the light and back again. The first ships were about twice the size of the skimmer they’d flown partway here in, so just right to use on a planet. They didn’t look like either the Next skimmers or the bulkier human versions. These were hard of line, small, and dark.
He took memory shots of them as he went, saving them for later. He hadn’t decided whether or not to delete the shots before he returned to Nexity. Even though the Jhailing had said the Next knew about this, and that it wasn’t what they sent him looking for, he felt like it mattered. Everything here seemed full of secrets and puzzles.
He felt dwarfed by vehicles they’d decided to classify as medium sized. Some looked like projectiles, and probably were. The information that the original cave owners left behind with each piece of equipment didn’t specify whether they were meant as ground-to-air, or ground-to-space, or even ground-to-ground missiles.
There was probably an obvious answer he, Chrystal, and Jason couldn’t see.
Sharp edges defined many of the most evil-looking possible weapons, and three had cones that looked like missile payloads designed to rip through the outer hull of a starship and then detonate.
His footsteps echoed in the chamber, the exact sounds affected by the shape and type of machines he passed. He occupied a part of his stunned brain with working out the mathematics of the echoes in order to guess at the mass of each ship.
Some could be shuttles to ferry cargo from the ground to orbit and back again.
Deeper, other machines loomed larger than the biggest buildings in Manna Springs. They might be big, slow cargo ships or maybe even interstellar ships, although they did look sleeker than the pictures he’d seen of The Creative Fire. Mystery on mystery, and while they had bits of information that served as detail, there was no introductory statement or executive summary. He wanted something that said, “This place was created by X in order to do Y,” but they had found nothing so simple.
Near the end of the corridor, past the largest machines, a new set of smaller devices lined the walls. He slowed to a walk.
Chrystal and Jason stepped out from behind a squat machine of uncertain use. What’s that one for? he asked.
Jason pointed up at the top of the nose, which looked like a shallow spiral with wickedly sharp edges. The specs suggest it’s a drill.
A drill?
For mountains, Chrystal said. I suspect its bigger cousin made this corridor.
Probably. Something made it. The rest of the machine looked silky smooth except for great paddles at the bottom. Let’s take a break from cataloguing. We’ve been at this for eighteen hours and twenty-seven minutes. There’s at least three more days of work just to record what’s in this corridor.
Chrystal looked relieved. Works for me.
There were more doors, which he supposed led to more places. Explore? Or go outside and take a break?
Jason didn’t hesitate. Outside.
The caves were new to Chrystal. Explore.
That left him to decide. Explore.
Periodically, doors punctuated the walls. They went through two. One led to a workshop full of tools, printers, and molds, most of which were unfamiliar in the exact forms they took in that room but could be puzzled out. Fabricators for parts, test benches. The Next would never need this, not with the magic they could do with programmable matter, although the humans might be able to make some use of them.
Another door they’d gone through led to an empty room.
They left the rest of the myriad doors for later. In spite of the eerie silence and the strange half-working state of the materials, the whole setup worried Yi. What if they went through a door and couldn’t get back? What if some critical part of the place died because they were disturbing it? What if one of them got hurt? They’d left the little repairbot back in the skimmer so they could run here naked and fast.
Beside him, Chrystal didn’t seem to suffer from nearly as many worries. She bounced on her feet. Pick a door, he told her.
She smiled widely. I’ve had my eye on the big one.
He wasn’t surprised. Near the absolute far end of this corridor, two doors led in opposing directions. The caverns crawled through the heart of the mountain, and the large door could lead outside. The biggest machine they had seen could fit through it. Maybe we’ll find the way to get these things out of here.
I don’t want to, Jason said.
Of course not. Yi didn’t want to show anyone what was here. It felt too . . . weighty. But aren’t you curious?
I’m frightened.
Chrystal took Jason’s hand. Me too. And curious.
Five minutes later, they stood small in front of the big door. There was no handle, of course. The other doors had been operated by foot clicks, but there weren’t any visible latches like that here. They felt around the walls for hidden places.
Nothing.
Jason gave up first. Maybe we should try the small door.
Chrystal kept searching for ten more minutes before she answered him. Maybe the secret’s inside of the smaller door.
Yi agreed. A logical conclusion given that’s it not out here.
They searched the whole floor. Chrystal ran her fingers around the edge of the door. Jason pounded on the wall next to the door. One spot sounded hollow. Then, without Jason doing anything else, a door that had been entirely invisible sprang open. Jason looked startled, and Chrystal burst out in good-natured laughter.
Jason bowed exaggeratedly and held it open for them.
Yi expected a rocky corridor and ano
ther exit, but instead the inside was a smooth, neat hallway wide enough for all of them to walk down side by side. Lights winked on. Around a corner they found another door, and another set of lights that shone on what was essentially a box.
An elevator.
Chrystal. Can we trust it?
Of course not! Yi responded.
She suggested, One at a time?
Jason said, Maybe we’ll learn more about whoever created this place.
Yi hesitated. They both looked at him.
Chrystal stuck her robotic tongue out at him. Don’t be such a supreme worrier.
Even if you have a backup, I value your life.
That’s sweet, Chrystal said.
Jason stepped in front of both of them. I will go first.
We send it down empty first.
How do you know it will come back? Chrystal asked.
Jason One and I braided right before I left. I won’t really die!
Don’t you see this memory is only a pale form of immortality? No matter how alike they were, he wasn’t Yi Two. The Jhailing’s weren’t all one being either. Yi wanted to live. But he let it go. All right. We won’t throw a funeral for you if you die.
He and Chrystal had to wait a full thirty minutes for Jason to return. It’s eerie down there. You need to see it.
Tell us! Chrystal begged.
I’ll show you.
Jason took Chrystal first. Yi waited a long time for the empty car to come back, and then, since it had taken so long, he expected the elevator to be slow, but it felt smooth and fast. So, deep, then.
The door opened into what he could only describe as a lobby for a larger enterprise. He couldn’t see either Chrystal or Jason, although their steps had left a clear trail in a thick layer of reddish dust. The air smelled stale, and he was glad he didn’t really have to breathe it.
They walked through three sets of double doors. After the third set, the floors were completely clean. The air smelled of disinfectant and, ever so slightly, of decay. He nearly jumped when he noticed a simple scrubberbot go by on the floor.
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