The silence was broken by Sarcodan’s brass-cannon voice. “Does this mean that we will all be answering to … this man?” He couldn’t even say Atlabatlow’s name.
“Not in the design of your research and so on,” Gavere said. “He will be handling all ship operations—supplies, logistics, transport and communications, office assignments, mechanical systems, and so on.”
“So we don’t answer to him unless we want to do something?” Sarcodan said sarcastically.
There was an outburst of argument around the table then. Overlapping voices jumbled together.
Sara watched Atlabatlow watching them, noting down each insubordination, each disloyalty, cataloging the untrustworthy ones, the actual enemies. They were academics, used to expressing their independence; they didn’t know how his mind worked. His eyes came to her last, saw she was watching him, narrowed with … what? Not simple hostility. It had grown more complex than that. He dragged his eyes away.
Sarcodan was still leading the opposition. “Unless we’re abandoning our mission, this is still more than a security operation,” he said loudly. “If you want to step down, Director, why don’t you give your responsibilities to someone with experience directing research?”
“I am not stepping down,” Gavere said, weakly. Atlabatlow cast an imperious frown at him, and he said, more firmly, “I am fully in charge.”
The colonel was operating the Director like a puppet, Sara thought. Atlabatlow was performing a coup without ever uttering a word.
The department heads were peppering the Director with questions about how to get authorization for various activities. Impatiently, he broke in, “This is not a discussion! I’ve told you the situation. Please inform your staffs about the administrative change and the search. That is all.”
They still sat there, turbulent with dissention, and he had to say, “Go back to your jobs.”
* * *
When Sara stepped into the clinic, Sarcodan, Prem, and David were waiting for her. As unlikely a cell of revolutionaries as was ever assembled.
For once, Sarcodan’s voice was hushed. “The Magisterium needs to know what’s going on, Callicot. You’ve got to contact them.”
“I bet a cookie they already know,” Sara said. “Atlabatlow’s not stupid or suicidal. He would have gotten them to authorize this.”
“Then they’ve only heard his side of the story, whatever that is. Tell them the truth.”
“What makes you think they’d believe me over him?”
“Because you’re working for them, right? You have a pipeline to them. None of the rest of us does.”
So much for her cover story. There was no point pretending; she was useless at subterfuge. “I’m also Atlabatlow’s number one suspect,” she said. “He’ll never let me talk to them alone.” She looked around at their expectant faces, wondering how she had gotten elected ringleader. This wasn’t even her battle. “Listen,” she said, “let’s wait till Moth decides to show up again. Then he’ll look silly for having turned the ship upside down.”
“If she is able to show up,” Sandhya Prem said softly. “How do we know he didn’t make her disappear in the first place?”
Sara was chilled by the thought. She had been sleeping in the next room; was it possible she hadn’t noticed a stealth abduction? For once, her conspiracy detectors had failed her. “Do you really think he’d…?”
“To seize power?” Sarcodan said. “What do you think?”
Moth’s disappearance had allowed him to get an unruly crowd of scientists under his control, while simultaneously casting suspicion on the one person with Magisterium connections. If he was capable of it, he was more dangerous than she had reckoned with.
“All right,” she said, “I’ll try to get a message to the Magisterium.”
The promise seemed to have an irrationally uplifting effect on their spirits. But Sara wasn’t doing it for them; she was doing it for Moth.
* * *
“No way,” Ashok answered when Sara messaged him to see if she could get a little private time with the pepci.
“Goon alert?” she messaged back.
“Around the clock,” he replied.
She sat thinking. She needed to create a diversion, something to distract the guards long enough for Ashok to get out an SOS for her. It didn’t need to communicate much; it just needed to draw attention. She was trying to compose a short message in her head when there was a knock on her door. One of Atlabatlow’s gray-clad automatons was standing in the hall.
“You’re needed in the pepci room,” he said.
Ashok was a genius. How had he engineered this so fast? “What for?” she asked with a show of stupidity.
“Incoming call for you,” he said.
She followed him down the hallways, feverishly trying to prepare her message as she walked.
When she arrived in the pepci room, she was flummoxed to find that it wasn’t a ruse; there really was an incoming call for her, from Delegate Gossup. As she settled down before the terminal, she glanced at Ashok; his raised eyebrow told her he was innocent of manipulation.
“Could I have a little privacy?” she said, ostensibly to Ashok, but really to get rid of the guard. “This is Magisterium business.”
Ashok’s expression told her that true privacy was not an option, but he rose to leave and held the door open for the guard. Once alone, Sara turned to the screen and hit the Accept button.
They had improved the transmission quality enough that a visual image soon appeared on the screen. Gossup looked older, though not by the full fifty-eight years that had passed. If anything, his aura of equanimity had deepened. “Sara,” he said, “it is good to see you.”
“Magister,” she said. “You don’t look a day older.”
“You are learning diplomacy.”
“Me? You must be kidding.”
“Yes,” he admitted, “I am.” His expression changed. “I apologize for interrupting you. I know from the reports that you are unexpectedly busy conducting a First Contact mission. You will be pleased to know that we are assembling a team of exoethnologists to back you up.”
To arrive in half a century, she thought. How helpful.
“However, that is not why I called.” He drew a breath, seemingly searching for the proper words. “You will think I have become a foolish old man, to heed a premonition—but I have become very concerned about Thora. Has there been any recent change in her status?”
Sara felt a twinge of guilt at how completely she had been neglecting her secret assignment. “We haven’t learned anything new,” she said. “She was rescued by the natives, and seemed safe enough with them. But we haven’t launched a rescue expedition because our security chief has declared the planet off-limits. Why, is there something I should know?” The thought that they had learned something alarming about Atlabatlow’s background leaped into her mind.
“No,” he said. “It is just … Well, truth to tell, I had an unusually vivid dream about her last night. It seemed as if she were trying to contact me. I wondered if … there are accounts of such visitations from the recently deceased.”
Sara tried to hide her astonishment at learning that her supremely logical mentor had a superstitious streak. Perhaps he was getting old. “I have no reason to think she is in any more danger than before,” she said carefully, “but unless the security restrictions let up, I can’t do a thing. You know we’re under an enhanced security regime?”
“Yes,” he said, confirming her supposition that Atlabatlow had cleared it. “It seemed prudent.”
“I’m not so sure about that. This colonel has—”
“It must be difficult for the scientific faculty to accept. Please be patient. There are factors you do not know.”
She waited for a moment, but when he didn’t go on, she said, “Are you going to tell me?”
“No.”
“Well, there may be factors you don’t know.”
“Almost certainly. I am sorry, Sara,
but I must be going. This conversation has already been extremely expensive.”
Worried that she hadn’t yet gotten across her warning, Sara said, “Magister, you need to check into what’s going on here.”
Very carefully, he said, “Sara, there are limits to what I can do.”
No, there weren’t—not under normal circumstances. There must be something constraining him. Before she could formulate a probing question, he smiled benignly and said, “It has been pleasant talking to you, Sara. Do your best.” Then his image was replaced by a blank screen.
She sat for a moment wondering what that conversation had really been about. Was there a hidden message she was supposed to have gotten in between the malarkey about dreams and premonitions?
She told the guard she didn’t need an escort back, but he stubbornly stuck with her. They had barely left the communications room when Sara was stopped in mid-stride by a falling sensation in her stomach, similar to being in a too-fast elevator, though her feet were firm on the ground. Unexpectedly, she lurched against the wall. It was as if the hallway had rotated, and what had been the wall was now the floor. She tried to pick herself up, but a sickening sensation passed through her body, as if it were being stretched, then flapped like a piece of fabric being shaken, bones and all. She had a brief impression that the hallway had either become wider, or she had become smaller. As she strained to comprehend, everything snapped back to its original dimensions. The gravity changed again, and she fell onto what had started out as the floor.
The guard was on his knees, vomiting. He fumbled for his radio and an alarm started to sound. “What the hell?” he managed to say into the radio.
“Officer Lamar, please report,” the speaker responded.
“What’s going on?” he said. “Are we under attack?”
The voice on the other end sounded puzzled. “Everything is normal. Do you have a situation?”
“Yes,” he said. “Send backup.”
Sara checked herself for damage. She felt bruised and squeamish, but everything seemed to be functioning. She staggered onto her feet, bracing herself dizzily against the wall, not really trusting it to stay vertical. Two guards were approaching, and she had a strange impression that the corridor was longer than it had been a minute ago.
The new guards were skeptical at the story their colleague told, even though Sara backed him up. “You’d better check the pepci room,” she told them. “I’ll take Officer Lamar to the clinic.”
The guard glared at her for this, but walked alongside her back to the clinic. The two of them had barely told the doctor their shared story of hallucinations and gravity shifts when Bakai came in with the bad news. “They’re calling it a spatial anomaly,” she said. “No one can explain it.”
“Is the pepci all right?” Sara asked.
“The pepci is fine. This time, the trouble is with the wayport. They say the quantum imbricator is breached.”
“What does that mean?”
“The quantum imbricator is what runs the lightbeam assembler,” David said. “No assembler, no wayport.”
So they could talk to Capella Two, but they couldn’t go back. They were trapped, fifty-eight years from home.
chapter nine
from the audio diary of thora lassiter:
Dagget-Min was reluctant to take me on as an apprentice. “Why does thou wish it?” he asked.
I didn’t know what he wanted me to answer. “For a long time I have felt there was more to the universe than we normally see,” I said. “I think I have touched something under the surface in the past. It’s as if reality were a lake, and all we can see is the glare on the surface, not the depths below.” As soon as these words left my mouth, I realized what a visual metaphor it was, and I searched for another way to say it. “Something is distracting us, preventing us from sensing all we are capable of.”
“Aye,” he said, “but why does thou wish it?”
I was unable to answer.
“Thou hath a knack,” he admitted, “and this yearning of thine is a strength, for it may ease the toil. But it also may be a weakness.”
“An nkida,” I said.
“Eh?”
“Nkida. It is a word my people use for a weakness that is also a strength. We teach that those are the traits we must cultivate in ourselves¸ for they are our power.”
“That is true,” he said thoughtfully, “if one may do so with discipline.”
“I can,” I said.
“It is perilous to enter the flow,” he said. “It taketh skill and self-mastery. Moral maturity.”
“Let me prove myself to you,” I said.
He said nothing else then, but when I asked if I could come back, he did not forbid me.
* * *
When I next came to see him, he said nothing, but handed me a long, light cane, slung a pack on his back, and took up a cane himself. “Follow me¸” he said.
“Where are we going?”
“Into the coldlands.”
I was not yet confident of my ability to navigate with a cane, so I asked if I could hold on to his shoulder. It is remarkable how accustomed I have become to touching people here. Somehow, their invisibility makes it seem less intimate.
We left Torobe on a path that soon sloped downward. The smells of life fell away, and cool, dank cave air surrounded us. Our bare feet were silent on the rough stone walkway; the only sound was the tapping of Dagget’s cane and the occasional drip of water. I began to feel apprehensive at how far behind we were leaving Torobe.
“I could never find my way back if you weren’t with me,” I said.
“A wender-wight must have mettle,” he observed.
I kept my anxiety to myself after that, though I think my stiff and sweaty hand may have given me away.
We walked in silence a long time—hours, I think, perhaps most of the day. At one point we rested and ate some bread and bean spread on the shore of a silent, underground lake. I wondered if it were the same lake I had encountered on my way into Torobe. I was growing weary and hungry again when I noticed a change in the air—a wisp of warmth, together with a slight sulfurous smell that signaled geothermal activity ahead.
The volcanic fumes grew stronger, and with them a sense of dread. My exhaustion, my hunger, and the tainted air were making me light-headed and unbalanced. Dagget’s steady pace had slowed, and it became like walking in a dream—an immense time between the raising of my foot and its coming down. My breath was shallow and panting, laboring to get enough oxygen. I had the illusion that the floor had become springy, like rubber.
Ahead of us, I sensed a presence in the darkness—something cold and silent and malevolent. I wanted to stop, for every instinct was warning me of danger, but Dagget continued, so I had to push forward against my fear. Though I was barely moving, my heart was laboring to beat. It was like coming near a field of negative energy that wanted to suck away my life force.
“Do you ken that?” Dagget said in my ear. I could no longer tell where he was; he seemed all around me. I was not even sure he had spoken.
“Yes,” I gasped.
“That is what to shun.”
I nodded, unable to speak.
We retreated—though I had no sense of following a path now, only of two directions, toward danger and away from it. It took all my discipline not to flee in panic. We came to a patch of stillness, where the danger seemed to eddy around us like a whirlpool.
“Is thy body with thee?” Dagget asked.
At first I could not feel my extremities, and I was irrationally concerned that something might be missing. I felt for my toes and fingers. They were numb, but intact.
“Keep thy body in mind at all times,” Dagget instructed me. “The body is our anchor to consequences.”
“What was that?” I said.
“Just one of the perils,” he said.
Whatever it was, my instincts had reacted strongly. That meant humans had evolved to sense it. We needed to avoid it. Had I belon
ged to another culture, I might have called it evil.
“The next peril is subtler,” he said. “Before we attempt it, I must instruct thee.”
I settled down to listen. My hands and feet were not sensing texture or weight properly, so I could not be sure it was rock underneath me.
“There is a flow in the Ground,” Dagget said. “It is everywhere, and most places it is stable. In fact, that is all we are: a stable pattern in the flow. That is all anything is—rocks, water, air. Down deep, in the fundament, all things are like unto a stream where the water changeth ever, but the stream remains.”
“But you can alter a stream,” I said.
“Aye, you can. Shut off the flow, and the shape disappears. Disturb it, and the shape changeth. What we just went nigh was a turbulence. There, all things cease, or so we think.”
I was not eager to test that hypothesis. “Are we safe now?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “This is the still place, and here the test is different, for it giveth all we long for. Here, the Ground is close by, and those who are skilled or bred up to it may sense it and enter the flow. The danger is that thou will forget who thou are and lose thyself in bliss. Does thou remember what I told thee about consciousness?”
I did, because I had repeated it into my recorder. “Consciousness is bounded and particular,” I paraphrased him, “but it reaches out to join awareness, like a grain of salt longs to join the brine.”
“Very good,” he said.
“So the Ground is aware?”
“Aye,” he said.
“How do you know?”
“Do you wish to continue?”
My confidence had been disturbed by the last experience, and by the strangely insubstantial feeling of where we now were. But as I searched my mind, the compulsion to continue was still there. “I want to go on.”
“Very well,” he said. “Pay attention to thy breath.”
This instruction was exactly what the teachers of the mind-body discipline of apathi had taught me, so I took the meditative posture and quickly stilled my mind. For a long time nothing happened, and I wanted to ask Dagget if I were doing it correctly, but I could no longer hear his breathing close by, and wasn’t even sure he was there. I could have reached out to feel for him, but it would have meant breaking the pose and disobeying his instruction, so I focused again on my dova and tried to sink into it.
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