by Ron Collins
“Why am I here?” Baraq asked.
“Why do you think you’re here?”
Baraq thought for a moment. The room hummed with the heavy sound of a floor fan. The lab was empty, he realized. No one was working.
“The thing is obviously a device of some sort.”
“True,” Hateri replied patiently.
“So, somebody had to make it.”
“Again, quite astute.”
“You haven’t been able to figure out how it works,” Baraq said, the truth dawning.
Hateri smiled. “We’ve made progress, of course. Instructor Geldour-enet and his assistant have learned much about its aerodynamics through modeling. The university is working with an advanced heat-bearing composite based on the outer shell’s chemistry. We’ve got a student developing approaches to power generation based on the system’s configuration. None of these teams know the origins of these ideas though.”
Baraq focused his central on the councilor. “What kind of power systems are they creating?”
“I’m just a politician, Baraq. You’ll have to ask someone who understands all that.”
“So, what’s the problem?”
Hateri sighed hollowly. “The problem is the same as it has been since my father’s time, Baraq. The problem is us. Or maybe better stated, the problem is me.”
“You?”
“Because of my edicts, the council limits who can know what,” Hateri said. “And the council can no longer agree what to do. Jie-Kandor O’Lat, who as you surely know is our representative from the Kandar clan, will not accept less than debating where we send each subsystem for study, then he bogs us down with reasons why his sector should do all the examinations. Asha Denari, of the Hlrat, thinks that, as the device came from her region, her scientists should be allowed to discover how it works. We do not tell the aligned churches as much, but they merely wish to bury all such investigations—although the Prime Dias of Eldoro sees the idea of the stone as proof that the creator exists outside the sky, and is petitioning to use it as an icon for his services.”
Baraq clicked his throat as he examined the Taranth Stone again. “And all the while the system sits waiting,” he said.
Hateri nodded. “The sphere of quadars in the know grows, though.”
“You fear its existence will be compromised.”
“Yes. But more important, every moment we lose in determining how it works leaves those who made this that much further ahead of us.”
Baraq gazed at the councilor, sensing something deeper to his comment. “You’re afraid of them?”
“In addition to our examinations, my father also chartered thought studies and other experiments to discover where it might have come from. The council has searched everywhere, Baraq. For nearing two cycles we’ve been thinking of everything we could take in. We thought we knew everything there was to know about the world, right? We thought we had discovered all there is to discover. But then,” he motioned to the device, and shook his head. “We find a device of mysterious power developed by someone we cannot find. And afterward the sky opens and the clouds change. Wouldn’t you be afraid?”
“What do you want me to do about it?” Baraq said.
Hateri’s pupils gleamed blackly in the room’s light. “I can arrange to ship pieces of the device to you. I want you to use whatever contacts you think are best for whatever study you undertake.”
“You want me to…work on it?”
“I want you be the science coordinator. I want you to discover what you can. I want you to expedite the study.”
The device lay on the table before him in a different light now.
Baraq could almost hear it whisper, luring him, seducing him like rock fates tempting Mandrath in tales his mother had once told him. Reason spoke inside him, though. The Waganats did not develop technology for any but themselves. It was more than a policy. It was an oath that ran in his Family’s veins as surely as did their blood. If he took this job, it would cause a rift.
“My Family—”
“Your Family is there, and I expect you will use your connections wisely. But given what I’ve said of the politics regarding the device, you see why they cannot participate.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Your Family would attempt to control its results and would hold its benefits ransom.”
Baraq was taken aback.
“Why me, then?” he asked.
“I’ve been watching you. You’re a good quadar. You care about our society and you respect technology. In that sense you are better than the rest of your Family, you know?”
Hateri’s expression grew serious.
Given the council member’s reputation, Baraq wasn’t sure how to take the compliment.
“But you are a technology person, too,” Hateri said. “You are an inventor at heart. Look at this device. You see what it means, don’t you? You see how much we can gain from it.”
Baraq never cared for politics. What he loved, what kept him rising from his pallet every morning to work in his grungy little shop, was the idea of understanding how things worked. Now Hateri was offering this chance to study what was quite possibly the greatest technological discovery of all history.
A chill crossed Baraq’s skin.
“You’re choosing me because I am invisible, aren’t you?”
“I won’t begin our relationship by lying,” Hateri said. “That you have not risen to the level you deserved is a benefit. But I would also suggest that you have remained of lower stature within your Family because you are more engineer than businessman—and that is a bigger benefit to me.”
Baraq flashed on the image of his father scowling at him.
“What if I turn you down?”
“I’ve spent a very long time on this decision,” Hateri said quietly as he traversed the Taranth Stone. “If you turn me down, I’ll have to find someone else and I’ll have to trust that you won’t give my project away.” He picked up a diagram, then placed it carefully down, crossed his hands in front of himself, and scanned the device laid out on the table. “But I wasn’t lying earlier. I’ve watched you. I’ve assessed who you are. I don’t think you’ll turn me down.”
Baraq pressed his lips together and clicked his throat as he swallowed.
He shouldn’t do this. But the idea of returning to his shop to face the pile of bills fell over him, and he let his gaze fall longingly on the Taranth Stone as it lay before him, making his hearts pump blood chilled with acidic energy.
“I’m sure we can work something out.”
The words slipped from his tongue before he realized he had even thought them.
CHAPTER 22
Hateri left him with the Taranth Stone for the rest of the heat.
Baraq poked and prodded. He studied diagrams and devoured the layout. The device was elegant in its own fashion, beautiful in its own way. He took it in, trying to understand the minds of the creatures who had made it. As Hateri had all but suggested, they were not quadarti. That much was certain.
The way the wiring looped through the device described them as efficient but generous. The way the system’s weight appeared unevenly distributed judged them perhaps a bit hasty in their action. The sharp flavor of knowledge oozed from every component, a taste full of intrigue and fear and flat-out envy.
He considered keeping the study to himself.
He wanted to do it all, of course.
But he knew this was beyond his capabilities, and he already understood that Hateri had chosen him more for his contacts and his sense of the whole than any particular skill he might have—a fact Baraq found he could suddenly live with. The quadars Baraq chose to work on this project would have to be the best in their fields, though, and they would have to operate under the guideline of silence until the entire effort was finished.
By the time Hateri returned for him, he knew what he was going to do.
One of the more interesting pieces of technology here was a series of smooth-wa
lled chambers connected by necked orifices. The assembly filled what he thought of as the rear of the device. This, Baraq would give to Kaatla Regonar. Kaatla was pioneering a flying craft, and he understood engines. He also knew how to be silent when the time came.
A box filled with metallic etchings and multicolored wafers would go to Estaut, a friend from his time at the university who had designed electronic circuits almost from the time he was born.
And finally, Baraq would provide the last item, a package that had been bolted onto a sliding bay door inside the Taranth Stone’s underbelly, to Louratna. Its cylindrical system was made of a white material he had never seen before. Inside were more of what he took to be electronics and a collection of hourglass-shaped components that were linked like wheel spokes. A cracked light bulb sat in the center, and a twisted ring of tarnished metal was wrapped around the wheel’s circumference giving the hourglass components bare clearance.
If anyone could figure out what this was, it would be Louratna, an old quadar who had taught him how to think, and how to see things in places that others would miss. From her he received many of his greatest lessons, and he was certain that she knew far more about things in the world than he could ever truly understand.
CHAPTER 23
Eldoro’s heat was a red blot on the horizon when Baraq finally went home. The clouds had broken on the dark side of the sky.
When he was younger those clouds had been an ever-changing but constant blanket—light tan and gray and orange in the heated hours and an inky brown or red in the darkness. The heats of Eldoro and Katon were thought to be just that, massive blobs of heat energy that flowed through the clouds like a fish swims in the sea. But that changed when the clouds parted.
Eterdane’s appearances still drew crowds, and as Baraq strode home late that night, a gathering formed on a slope of basaltic rock, staring at the smallest heat with slack-jawed wonder.
“Three heats for three hearts,” a female in white robes said from a hastily constructed podium. “It is a new heat, I say. A holy time. Come with us as Eterdane grows to her rightful place and takes her seat with Eldoro. Be blessed in the growing warmth of our goddess as she replaces Katon.”
Rubbish, Baraq thought, scowling.
Such misguided hash had no place in rational thought.
Three heats in the sky had nothing to do with the fact that quadars had three hearts. The world was hot, and a quadar’s blood was used both to pass oxygen to the body as well as to cool it. Each heart absorbed heat and returned it to the atmosphere via plates on the quadar’s shoulder blades. Everyone knew that. If a secondary heart failed, the quadar was more likely to die of heat exposure than of a lack of oxygen.
Still, the quadars who gathered around the priestess nodded at her distortions.
These were strange times.
Change comes hard, and things were changing faster than they had ever changed before. The idea of the Families working together, for example, might never really take. His father railed heavily against such discussion, though he had made inroads in selling the council several technologies for extracting water from the ground to support the three common communities the E’Lars had driven so hard to build outside the ring.
But Baraq couldn’t help being upset at opportunism that sprang up so readily amid both philosophers and church.
Religious portents like this quadar’s preaching made his stomachs clench, and the lack of credibility of the raw environmentalists who warned about their world cooling to ice at the same time as an ocean of burning liquid was falling from the sky gnawed at his sense of dignity. Philosophers extrapolated the existence of other worlds and talked of travel to them. Beleaguered scientists, of course, were just trying to figure everything out.
Baraq liked data.
His money had always been on the scientists.
He glanced at Eterdane, high in the night sky.
It was a small heat, a pinprick of bright light unable to be observed except during brief moments when the clouds parted in just the right way. With a little data, scientists had been able to ascertain Eterdane’s movement was erratic and similar to Katon’s rather than circular about the world as Eldoro’s was. And, the priestess’s ranting prophecies notwithstanding, Eterdane seemed to neither grow nor fade. Her path was predictable.
Yes. Predictable.
That’s what you did with data.
Baraq was too tired to think about it right now, though.
Despite that fatigue, his mind filled with thoughts of the device hidden in the council’s secret network of buildings. He pictured its wires and boxes, asked himself questions about materials of types he had never seen. For the first time in a very long time, Baraq realized he was humming.
He went straight to the kitchen.
“I’m glad you made it home,” Crissandr said. She was seated at their table, reading the news roll delivered earlier.
He smiled. “Me, too.”
No matter what happened throughout the heat, a single word or sometimes merely a glance from Crissandr made things better.
She wore a red haldi, a robelike dress that clasped at the side. It had been a favorite style of her mother’s, a staple of the Festia Family that was her birthright. Her central was flecked with green, and her head and face were rounded and perfectly formed, her lips full and graceful in the manner of females.
“There’s havra and jaran in the box.”
He pulled his dinner from the retainer. “How long ago did you eat?”
“A while. I was hungry. I’m sorry I didn’t wait.”
“I’m glad you didn’t.”
“Working on something important? Or did you just get caught up and lose time?”
He chewed his food, savoring the coarse taste of the havra and ignoring the fact that he knew it was getting to be expensive. There was something about Crissandr tonight. Her face crinkled with an anxiety he could spot from paces away.
“What is it?” he asked.
Crissandr put her book down and took one of his hands. Her eyes softened and her irises dilated.
“We’re going to have a child, Baraq.”
Hara ran toward him, her tiny arms outstretched. She jumped, and he caught her, swinging her in the air as she giggled. She had been only six.
He closed his eyes, surprised at the crispness of his memories. He could still feel his daughter’s tiny body against his chest. She had been dead for over three years.
“You saw her just then, didn’t you?”
Baraq drew a breath. “Yes.”
He didn’t tell her that his next thought was of the Family—his father parading over his child’s jahalarat, overseeing the process of bringing another Waganat into his clutches, looking at the child like the prospective laborer it would certainly be, like another of so many slaves.
“Not a heat goes by that I don’t think of her.”
“Me, too,” Crissandr said, her voice wavering between anxiety and guilt, her central clouding. “I think it’s all right, though, don’t you?”
When he was younger, he would never have understood the power he had at this moment, the ability to crush his pair-mate with a single word or to raise her up with a mere glance. The muscle over her brow was tight, and her lips were now drawn and bloodless. But hope flooded her primaries, and she held her body upright and forward, bold and proud like a warrior marching.
He nodded and smiled warmly. He kissed her lips, tasting her fear as it slipped away.
“It’s better than all right.”
Inside, though, his stomachs twisted and he felt the clutches of his Family name, saw images of Hara, and oddly—so oddly—smelled the arid chill of skies littered with blue-white pinpoints glimmering.
CHAPTER 24
The year moved through Convergence and into Divergence—when Eldoro and Katon ruled opposite sides of morning and night—then to the time of Eldoro Leading, when the heat of that god rose early to be chased through the sky by his smaller sister.
They did the sacrifices to ask aid in preparing their home for the child’s arrival, twelve bows to the greater heat and six to the lesser. They attended a Family outing, Baraq cringing when the topic of the jahalarat was brought up.
Part of his discomfort was the Taranth Stone, of course, which he studied at night when he could slip away.
He decided that the next piece of technology he looked at would be a device that appeared to shoot light into another box of strange components. He wanted to talk to someone about it. He wanted to share the wonder of his findings. But his first three experiments were not complete, and he didn’t want to stretch himself too thin.
So he waited.
He was repairing a wall in his shop when he learned Kaatla Regonar had crashed and died in one of his flying machines.
Kaatla had recently briefed Baraq on his progress. The system, he said, was designed to push the Taranth Stone through the air at great speed. The basic dynamics of the process was similar to those that propelled a bullet from a gun, but different: Fuel burned in a small compartment exhausted through a nozzle, resulting in a force in the opposite direction. Still, the equations that governed the process remained a mystery, as did anything about what kind of fuel the device used. Kaatla had sent a sample of the inner compartment to a cohort for analysis, but had not heard back at the time of their meeting. In the meantime, he was experimenting with his own shaped chambers.
Kaatla’s death was a setback, but Baraq thought nothing strange about it at the time. Kaatla was a risk-taker, a trait that made him the inventor he was. He had been working on his flying machine for years, and quadars had been predicting a broken neck for just as long.
Two heats later, Estaut’s pair-mate found Estaut floating in an underground pool.
He, too, had just briefed Baraq, reporting that the wafers seemed analogous to the quadars’ own component-driven electronics, and that microscopic examinations of each component revealed a vast collection of circuitry. He had been able to excite small pieces of the device, but had no way to probe the wafers themselves and did not understand how such a component might be built. The next step would be running studies of the material to see if something could be learned from it.
