The shuttle was ready to depart, and my companion-guard was waiting, but I had one last thing to arrange. I said to Sara, “Listen for me at night, and in solitude. Be prepared for me to come.” She understood, and hugged me in her warm, demonstrative way.
And now I return to darkness. I know I must, because it was the weeks I spent learning to sense the world without light that primed me to touch the Ground. I need to reenter that transformed reality.
* * *
It was a normal shuttle flight until we had descended to about fifteen thousand feet, and I was busy dictating into my diary, when I heard a curse of disbelief from the pilot, and looked up to the monitor that showed what he saw. The ground below us was the same sea of glitter I had seen before; then I noticed the disturbance. A field of distortion was sweeping across the land toward us, as if a powerful lens were passing through the air. In its wake, everything was disrupted. On the plains, it left behind a linear path of shining rubble—an outcropping like crumpled tinfoil, jumbled cubes of polished metal. In the hills where it had passed, brown rock now showed, as if relocated from far underground to the surface. The pilot banked and accelerated to avoid the phenomenon, but as it passed, a gravity shift pulled us sideways with a sickening sensation of dropping.
“Keep away!” the copilot shouted, and I was tossed roughly to one side, then almost lifted from my seat. Then, suddenly, everything was quiet, and we were flying as normal. But the place where we had intended to land, the entrance to the cavern of Torobe, was no longer visible. I could hear the pilot asking the ship for coordinates as he brought the shuttle to a hover over the spot where we should have landed. It was unrecognizable. I was not even sure that what I saw below was solid ground. Occasionally, a complex surface below us would pop out of existence, like a bubble bursting, and return to a simpler configuration.
We returned to the questship shaken and anxious. This time the Escher had escaped. They had witnessed the phenomenon—we automatically called it fold rain, though it had looked more like a fold tornado—and even gathered some useful data. The sensors Touli had left in Torobe had transmitted readings right up to the end, then fallen silent.
I was frantic with worry about my friends in Torobe. I could not stop thinking about Hanna and her baby, Moth, Dagget, and even the pompous old ladies. If the village had been in the path of the fold rain, all of them had surely perished. As I returned to the Embassy, my thoughts became insistent, and I had an irrational premonition that Moth would be waiting in her room. She was not there, of course. So I turned off the lights, closed my eyes, and waited.
Almost as soon as my jangled thoughts cleared, I felt a sensation that I was not alone. It was similar to seeing a flash of movement from the corner of your eye that disappears when you look, or feeling a tickle on your skin when nothing is touching it. I did not look, but the thought of Moth came to me, so I visualized her standing there just as I had last seen her, all adolescent bravado and moodiness. The sensation became ever more vivid, and presently I heard someone move.
“Moth?” I said, my eyes still closed.
“Aye,” she answered. “Thora, I beseech thee, come to our aid. We are sore afflicted.”
I rose and turned on the lights. She was there, but her expression was more serious than I had ever seen before; in fact, she was desperate. “Moth, what happened?” I said.
“The fold rain came,” she said. “Torobe is no more.”
“No more?” I said. “What do you mean? How did you escape?”
“The world is topsy-turvy,” she said. “Houses, paths, people—all are jumbled and upturned. We cannot find each other. The town is gone.”
“But the people? Are they all right?”
“I know not how many are left. Hanna is all right, and her babe, for we were holding fast to one another. Please, can we come to Escher? It is our only hope.”
I took her hand. “Moth, I was trying to return to Torobe when the fold rain struck. We can’t land the shuttle anymore; there is no way to get to you.”
Impatiently, she said, “We need not thy box! Just permit me to bemind Hanna, and she will bemind her friends, and they will bemind all they know, and soon we will all be here.”
My mind was racing. Five hundred refugees, on a ship built for half that and already fully staffed. Could it be done? What choice did we have?
“I need to speak with someone in authority,” I said. “Wait—no, come with me.” I took her hand and headed out into the hall.
I did not bother with any pretense of going to the Director’s office. I headed straight for the real leader of our expedition now, Dagan Atlabatlow.
He was in a meeting, but I pulled rank and demanded to interrupt him. He came out looking grave and said, “Emissary, what can I do for you?”
I pulled Moth forward. “Moth has come to let us know that Torobe was directly in the path of the fold rain, and they are in need of emergency assistance. They have made a request for humanitarian aid. They wish to evacuate temporarily to the Escher until we can resettle them in another place.”
I had chosen my words carefully. If Atlabatlow had been captain of a ship, he would have been bound by interplanetary law to render assistance. Of course, he was nothing of the kind, but I was gambling that he would rise above his station.
He gestured us into the nearest office and ordered its occupant out. “You saw the situation down there,” he said. “We can’t reach them anymore.”
“They will get here on their own,” I said, “the same way Moth did. Don’t ask me to explain; it sounds mad even to me. What they need from us is a space to assemble, where they can be isolated from the rest of the ship. No observers, no surveillance cameras, no light. We must completely ignore them, even the ship’s AI.”
“How many?” he said.
“We’re not sure. The upper limit would be five hundred.”
“Five—! We can’t feed them, or fit them in. It would overwhelm our sanitary systems, our water, our medical … And the wayport—”
“They would leave the same way they came, unobserved.”
His face was stern. “You realize, don’t you, that you are asking me to endanger the lives of everyone on board? The people whose safety is my primary responsibility?”
“It is temporary,” I said.
“How temporary?”
I didn’t dare let him know I hadn’t the faintest idea. I was going on faith that we would be able to improvise something. “Give me four days,” I said with serene, but false, confidence.
He looked grim. “I can give you two,” he said. “That meeting you just took me out of—the scientists have revised their estimate of when we will encounter the area of spatial instability. Now they think we will hit it in three days.”
Has there ever been an expedition so cursed? “Can we get the engines started in time?” I asked.
“That’s what we were discussing. Five hundred refugees do not simplify the situation.”
“Colonel, if anyone can handle it, you can,” I said with confidence. I was deliberately beminding him as the hero we need. I knew I would not be the only one.
His lips were pressed together into a tense line. “We’ll have to clear half the residential rings of the ship,” he said. “I’ll get Lieutenant Devaux on it. You will have to be in charge of refugees.”
“I am afraid I will need to delegate that to Sara Callicot. I am hoping to be gone for a while.” He shot me a glance like a man too overloaded with emergencies to even consider what I had just said.
Lieutenant Devaux turned out to be a very junior officer, but he embraced his new assignment with the earnestness of someone eager to succeed. Once he had worked out which areas would be easiest to isolate, he showed me the plan and I immediately approved it, impressing on him the need to work swiftly. Moth was getting frantic at all the delays, so I led her to a vacant room and left her alone with instructions to start beminding people at once. Then I went back to the Embassy to consider my next step.
Moth’s description of the Torobes’ daisy-chain method of transport gave me an idea. Moth can wend from here, and I cannot, but she cannot reach the Twenty Planets because no one there can bemind her. Somehow, she needs to piggyback me into the Ground, and I need to carry her on from there. I need to ride her consciousness over the threshold that is standing in my way.
There is a way that may work, but it is unethical. Even Sara would disapprove, though she is Balavati and they think all rules exist to be broken. I cannot implicate her, but I need her help. So I will have to deceive her.
* * *
I told Sara that I had to become blind again, and would need her help. She readily agreed. She was very good at it. I blindfolded myself, and she spun me around, then led me on such a circuitous path that I was soon disoriented. She brought me to a place where the gravity was less than usual, my only clue as to where I was on the ship, then she went to fetch Moth. When they returned, I said to Sara, “You are sure there are no cameras here? No light?”
“No cameras,” she said. “There will be no light as soon as I leave.”
“Now forget about us,” I instructed her. “Don’t check on us. I will come to you. If this works, I will not come in the usual way.”
She left. I grasped Moth’s hand. “Is Hanna safe on board?” I asked.
“Aye,” she said. “Breel, too, and the babe. They are seeking the others.”
She sounded very serious and adult. Gravely, I said, “It all depends on you now, Moth. I will need your help to touch the Ground. When we did it before, down in the still place outside Torobe, I could do it myself, but not here.”
“It is easier for everyone there,” she said. “It was our great treasure, and we have lost it.”
She seemed about to cry, so I said, “Who knows, there may be other places like it. But that’s for later. Now we must save my people and yours. I want to link to you by headnet. It will allow me to share what you—” I almost said “see,” since that is what headnets normally do, but I corrected myself—“feel and hear and experience. I won’t know your thoughts or memories, just your sensory perceptions. My people would say it is wrong for me to ask you this, so I need you to consent.”
“Of course,” she said. “Why would it be wrong?”
“It’s an invasion of privacy.”
“Huh,” she said, mystified at our inhibitions. “Thy privacy is of no account to me. Let us proceed.”
I draped one headnet over her hair, and then another over my own, linked to hers through a recorder. They are designed to prevent mind-sharing, but nearly every college student learns to disable the safeguards, and I had already done so.
When I switched it on, I did not experience the usual disorienting moment of double vision, but there was a far subtler feeling of double existence. I was standing both where I was and where she was, feeling her on my left and myself on my right. I needed to erase as much as possible of my own consciousness, and inhabit only hers. I used a meditation technique, but instead of concentrating on my own dova, I sought out hers.
She had no extra senses; I was certain of that now. But she did have a heightened sensitivity to echoes, air currents, and temperature, which her visual cortex assembled into a kind of picture of the room around us. I had experienced something similar in the Echo Sculpture, when I had “seen” the shape of the cavern through music. To her, everyday life was like that concert. She could tell, as I could not, that the room we were in was square and boxlike, with some irregular shapes along the wall, possibly storage shelves.
When I said “go ahead,” I was pleased to hear the voice coming from outside my body.
Her attention switched, and I now became aware of a kind of subliminal noise—a fizzing, vibrating sensation of everywhere-energy. It was inside me, around me, but infinitesimally small and quiet. I saw that I would have to dive down into it, turning my outside in. She was listening for something—a rhythm, I realized, then heard it, like waves, but not waves on a surface, like water; that was something she had never seen. They were dimensionless waves of something she interpreted as sound. Like a surfer, she waited for a moment in the pattern, and then dived, and I dived with her.
I was dissolving in a sea of immanence, losing particularity. I remembered Dagget’s warning to stay aware of my body—but which body, mine or hers? As I struggled to differentiate, she pushed me away, and the connection was severed. I could feel myself again, but far away. Around me was a fog of prickling particles with beacons of consciousness forming condensations in it. I could clearly sense an urgent call from Orem. They wanted me, yearned for me, and I wanted to go back to them, but not now. I was seeking a quieter call—more intimate, more familiar, more conflicted. It would be a call full of guilt and grief, disappointment and longing. Searching, I found myself mirrored in half a dozen other minds that were thinking of me. I was surprised that I had left a trace in so many lives. But the one I wanted was not there. Could he have ignored my instructions, failed me once again? I cursed my cowardice for not having spoken to him.
I called out with all my energy, and then he was there, close to me, but confused. He had been asleep, I realized. Now I was his dream. I touched him to wake him up, to make me real. His consciousness clarified, focused, and with it I condensed as well, out of that fog of potential existence, into a particular time, a particular place.
The room was dark. He sat up in bed. “Thora?” he said softly, barely a whisper.
“Père,” I said.
He turned on a light, and I realized he had beminded me without the blindfold. In fact, I could see in the mirror beside his dressing stand that he had beminded me younger and better-looking than I really am—his image of the ideal daughter, not me. I felt a stab of irritation that he did not know me better. But then, he never had.
“Are you really here, or am I dreaming?” he asked.
“I am really here. And you are dreaming.”
“How are you?” he said.
I was grateful that he asked. “I am good,” I said. “No longer mad. In fact, I think I never was.”
He was silent with disagreement. “You are in trouble again.”
“Yes.”
“I am sorry I have done nothing. I could not. Circumstances—”
“I understand,” I said. “The Great Design must be maintained.”
The Great Design of the Vind Expatria, that centuries-long strategy for the betterment of humankind, did not include my existence. I had been an accident, a violation. It was why he had not acknowledged me. And now he never could acknowledge me, after what they had had to cover up.
He heard bitterness in my tone, even though it was not there. “It was not that,” he said. “Your name has been in the news recently. Because of the new events on Orem.”
“What has happened on Orem?” I asked.
“You haven’t heard? A movement of women has risen up, rebelled. It is a religious revival that the men have been afraid to put down. The women invoke your name. They say you came in the guise of a goddess and commanded them.”
“So I did,” I said, knowing he would think me mad.
“I am glad this is a dream,” he said.
“Did you get my message?”
“Yes. It was very odd, but I obeyed. The item you wanted is there, by the mirror.”
I went to pick it up. The imbricator looked exactly as I expected, but my own false face in the mirror did not. My reflection was his expectations made real, the ones I had always rejected. I sensed that if I were to stay in this guise, as he had re-created me, I would come to be ever more the perfect china-figurine daughter he wanted, and not the cracked and stained one I was. The thought of living such a falsehood was unbearable. I had to get away.
“Thank you,” I said. “Now you may return to sleep. This has merely been a dream.”
“And yet,” he said, “I think when I wake the imbricator will be gone.”
I smiled. Accustomed to enigma, he turned off the light
and lay down again. I waited for his breathing to become even, then listened within me for the waves of the vacuum sea. When they lifted me I fell backward into them.
Returning was much easier than going, as I had found before. I searched for that bright, irrepressible consciousness that was Sara Callicot, tugging at it till she did my bidding. As I felt myself emerging into darkness, I concentrated on the imbricator in my hand—its power, its hidden complexity, its purpose. I hoped my beminding would be enough.
I was wearing the blindfold again. I tore it off and ordered the lights on. Sara blinked in surprise. “Where is a mirror?” I demanded. She is not a vain person, and didn’t have one, but there was one in the adjoining bathroom. I was back in my old shape, my real one. I was so grateful that I embraced Sara for knowing me as I am. She was very startled.
“How much time has passed?” I asked.
“A day,” she said.
It had seemed mere moments to me. We had no time to waste now. I showed her what was in my hand.
“What’s that?” she said.
“A quantum imbricator. For the wayport.”
“I’ll get it to them,” she said, taking it.
While she was gone I checked my messages for a response from the refugee relocation program. They were still negotiating with potential sponsors. It was taking too long; the Torobes couldn’t wait anymore. I had to think of something else.
When Sara returned, I asked, “How many refugees do we have?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “You told us not to disturb them, so we haven’t. Lieutenant Devaux is obeying your orders to the letter. He is nothing if not conscientious.”
“Good,” I said, “but now I need to speak to them. Has Moth returned?”
Dark Orbit Page 28
