From Ruins

by M. C. A. Hogarth

  The presence did not answer. Waiting, Jahir sensed its suffering, remote as the dream they inhabited. It smelled like water-dampened stone and blood. At last, words came, perplexed and plaintive. It is not possible to be so many things and remain coherent. One whole.

  It is entirely possible and necessary, Jahir said. As a tree might have a trunk, but many branches, so I am one whole from which many roles spring. And it is the world around me that coaxes those roles into being, as the sun and rain and the air bring forth those branches.

  A sigh, shivering with longing. I miss the sky. I miss coolth. Show me this tree?

  He sketched one of his favorites for her, a willowy white one that grew by a stream near his estate where it bordered Nuera's. Its golden leaves draped on the water, riding its surface, and the wind ruffled its flexible branches, making a gladsome sigh through the uppermost. At the center of the trunk, near the earth where the roots unfurled into the soil, he painted her a warm gold heart, and drew that glow out into all the branches, the leaves, until it implied the sun's light glittering.

  Thus, he said. We are many parts, but only one whole, and that whole is part of everything else.

  There are too many patterns. I don't know who or what I am. I'm lost.

  That is when you need the pattern above patterns, he answered. Look. He reached for a hand and one seemed to slide into his, and he drew his companion up from the ground alongside the tree, up past the sky into the spreading void, and in that void...

  What is it?

  All around them the shimmering web of stars and futures spread, millions of threads proceeding out from them in every direction, filling the vacuum with all the Divine's possibilities.

  This is the Divine Pattern, from which all others spring.

  It is too much!

  He enfolded the presence in his arms. Yes. It is why we are not gods. But it is given to us to know the Pattern exists. That is our comfort in tribulation. We think we are purposeless, and we look higher, and discover otherwise. Reaching that level of enlightenment, again we strike a wall, and again, the answer is a pattern above our pattern. It spreads out, endlessly, perfectly, and the Divine Architect is in it all.

  A pattern above patterns, came the whisper.

  Yes.

  It's beautiful.

  Jahir dipped his head, sensing his own body's pain wrapped like a shell around him. Sometimes I wish I could live here.

  But you do not? Why?

  Those who love me deserve more than my withdrawal, Jahir answered, and felt it as the truth he'd been avoiding, a sun so bright he'd had his face turned from it. It is cruel for me to repay their love with anything less than my best effort to be present for them, for as long as they will have me.

  Oh, the presence whispered. I remember love.

  Then you too have that duty. He smiled. Fortunately, these are glorious duties, and their execution is their own reward.

  I have been asleep too long, came the reply. But I did not know how to wake until now. Until... this. The stars wheeled around them, danced. I am more than a single pattern. I am! Awe then, followed by conviction, unfolding like wings. I am a knower of sacred things. Of secrets. And I also love. I am so many things. How did I ever think I could be encompassed in a single title?

  Sometimes, Jahir said, we accept our cages because we don't know how to live without them.

  I have been caged too long. The presence backed away, falling out of the star-filled void. My birthright is the sky.

  It is all our birthrights. We were born for joy.

  As the presence slipped into the red fever from which it had issued, it whispered, For the Silence Between Stars, you have been very communicative.

  He smiled, feeling his aching cheek shift against the ground. When I rise into the Divine skein, I am silent, because silence is our offering to Them. Hearing the distant drums of war, he finished, less gladly, And the enemies who would slay the innocent and undeserving... silence is all that's left of them after I am quit of them.

  War... A long sigh. Too long burning... Suddenly, clearly, You are not Silence to me. You are a tree of many branches, and my branch I shall call Gentle Guide.

  What shall I call you? he asked. Who are you, now? Do you know?

  I do know, the presence whispered. I am a Breath of the Living Air.

  He gasped in, chest constricting as he found himself ejected into cold reality. He stared at the wall opposite him. For once, it felt more real than any construct of his mind.

  It did not feel more real than the dream he'd left. That one, he knew, had been more real than reality, in the same way that the Pattern surmounted other patterns.

  God and Lady, he prayed, in the silence between breaths, be with her.

  The Surgeon was overseeing the discharge of one of the males from the gel tank when Triage appeared at the door and hovered, which was unlike him. He was an indefatigable male, not given to fluster, which was the foremost quality that had caused the Surgeon to select him for the post. Triage could not be highly-strung.

  "Yes?" The Surgeon asked. "I am busy."

  "It's important," Triage began.

  "It's all right, I'll take it from here," said another voice, and to the Surgeon's everlasting astonishment, Kuuvel strolled in, hands hooked in the pockets of his medical jacket. "Oh, the part where they collapse inside the tank, I'm just in time. That's my favorite bit."

  "They don't collapse in the tank unless you empty it abruptly," the Surgeon said.

  "I know," Kuuvel said. "We both do. Don't we!"

  "Go," the Surgeon said to Triage. "I'll handle this."

  "Are you sure you can?" Kuuvel said with a grin, and Triage fled. "Don't blame him. He expected me to stay corralled in the waiting room like an obedient patient. I doubt he even realized I was following him."

  "He should have," the Surgeon answered dryly. "As long as you're here, help me with this. Then we can talk."

  "I can't wait!" Kuuvel said. "Doing the work usually delegated to assistants... why, I've almost forgotten how!"

  "Then you will follow my instructions exactly, and I'll be watching to make sure you don't knot one of the outtake lines."

  "Still taking the fun out of everything, O Disgruntled One."

  The Surgeon snorted.

  Leaving the male in post-recovery to wake at his own pace, the Surgeon led his colleague to his office, gesturing toward a chair before drawing his from behind the desk. Formality would not protect him from Kuuvel's wit, so there was no point in pretending to it. "Something to drink?"

  "Only if it's likely to get me drunk." When the Surgeon rose again and went to his desk drawer, Kuuvel started laughing. "Dying Air! I didn't think you'd actually have anything."

  "Then you haven't tried imagining what it's like, serving this populace." The Surgeon poured them both a cup of distillate of tea-wine and handed one of them over. "Since you won't tell me until I ask you, I'm asking. What are you doing here?"

  Kuuvel knocked the entire cup back and set it on the desk with a "gack" before shaking his head. "Nasty. I can feel it poisoning my liver as we speak."

  "It'll take more than that cup to even knock on your liver's door," the Surgeon said, wry.

  "All right, maybe not, but after the past few days." Kuuvel shuddered, and surprisingly, the Surgeon thought it genuine and not dramatics. "Things are getting far too hot overhead, my friend." He lifted his cup. "Pour me another."

  The Surgeon obliged. "Did they find out?"

  "No, no." Kuuvel waved a hand. "If they'd found out, I'd be dead, not ‘on leave to search for a female.' It's more that these people... they're on their way, and I don't want to be there when they arrive. We haven't guaranteed the destruction of everything in orbit by any means, but we've left enough holes in the system's defenses that it's going to explode when the fighting starts."

  "Do you regret it?" the Surgeon asked, quieter.

  "Regret... no." A pause, in which his jovial friend's face settled into sober lines
. Kuuvel looked up, grave. "No. Maybe the way we've organized society is wrong. Maybe everyone should be Outside, and violence should be punished no matter who perpetrates it. Or maybe there's some better way and we just don't know it yet. But absent someone to show us that better way... we have to respond to people who want to tear down what protections exist for people who rely on them." He made a face at his cup. "I couldn't see that happen and not do something about it."

  "Me neither," the Surgeon murmured.

  "Which is the strangest thing about all of this," Kuuvel said. "I never would have taken you for an iconoclast."

  "Is it iconoclastic to subvert a system that is subverting a traditional system that benefits you?" the Surgeon wondered.

  "It's at least disobedient, and you were never one for breaking rules."

  "The rules served me," the Surgeon said. "It made me complacent."

  Kuuvel snorted. "You can't sell me on the idea that you were innocent of the ways our system failed others."

  "No," the Surgeon replied, the words slow to leave him. His mind was on the Slave Queen, and her denuded wing-arms. "But I allowed myself the luxury of believing it was someone else's problem."

  "You should have known better. Wounds are everyone's problem. Particularly ours."

  The Surgeon sighed and drank the rest of his cup in one gulp. His guest was right about its nastiness, but it softened the edges of the disappointment he felt at himself. "You are correct. I am attempting to make up for my complacency now."

  "And as usual, overachieving," Kuuvel observed. He looked around. "Nice office. Don't suppose there's room for two in here."

  "That is the least graceful request for help I've heard, and I've worked in the court all my professional life."

  Kuuvel grinned. "I was trying to speak a language you understood."

  "I prefer the one native to you," the Surgeon replied, wry. "So try again."

  "Great. So, Valedictorian, Surgeon to Psychopaths, and Sometime Friend... can you make up a spare bed for me because I need one after helping you foment a rebellion."

  "Yes," the Surgeon said. "I can. On one condition."

  "This should be good." Kuuvel pressed his hand to his brow. "What scutwork are you going to drop on my shoulders as payment for years of teasing you in medical school?"

  "So quick to leap to the worst possible conclusion," the Surgeon said, refilling his own cup.

  "Fine, fine. Hit me with it." Kuuvel pointed between the eyes. "Right there, so I won't remember it in the morning."

  The Surgeon chuckled. "Don't call me Sometime Friend. I'd prefer to be your Constant Friend."

  Kuuvel blinked several times, then clutched at his chest and gasped dramatically. "My heart! It's a myocardial infarction! The shock, it's killing me!"

  "If I break this bottle on your head, you'll have a concussion to go with it, and it'll be real."

  Kuuvel chortled. "So quick to resort to violence. Now I know you've been working here too long." He leaned over, snatched the bottle, splashed its contents into both their cups. "All right, Constant Friend. I'll accept your conditions. Dying Air help us all. But me particularly."

  "Idiot," the Surgeon said, smiling.

  "Stiffneck," Kuuvel answered. "Come on, we've got a bottle to go through, and apparently at least twenty years to catch up on."

  "Before the revolution comes," the Surgeon murmured.

  "All the reason to get it done now, before we die."

  None of the Twelveworld Lord's crewmembers discovered the ship's stowaway, much to Maia's relief. Twenty hours might not be much to a flesh-and-blood person, but for her every microsecond passed too slowly. She crouched in the equivalent of corners, hooking bits of her code across thousands of processes, grateful that Chatcaavan warships were as complex to run as Alliance ones. She read the news as it streamed into the ship in whatever manner was least conspicuous at the time; sometimes it was an onboard sensor pointed over someone's shoulder, sometimes it was gating the raw data as it passed through the comm circuits. It was hard not to be appalled by the damage. The Chatcaava might be their enemies, but pirates were every navy's prey, and these were unusually well organized. Maia hated to admit it, but she gave them a greater than seventy percent chance of breaking free of the Worldlord's efforts to cordon off the area. Some of them would die, of course, but not enough to keep them from recouping their strength and growing again somewhere else. Like a cancer, she thought, longing to go after them herself.

  But she had other goals. Even if she hadn't had any luck yet locating Sediryl.

  To keep busy she maintained her watch on the Twelveworld Lord, who remained tenderly solicitous of his lover, and who also, Maia discovered, had an immense appetite for pornography. Peculiar pornography: her cautious investigations indicated there was more than enough violent pornography to keep anyone with vicious tastes busy, but the Twelveworld Lord invariably liked visuals and stories that emphasized the enthusiastic consent of all the participants. No matter how exotic. It was hard to match this behavior with the rest of what she knew about him: that he was power-hungry, had just betrayed the male he had supported onto the throne, wanted to participate in the war against the Alliance so he could bring home treasure and most probably slaves, so that he could coax them into this eventual consent...?

  People, Maia thought, were complicated.

  The male was also an excellent combat commander, and had dispatched several pirate ships on the voyage back to the Vault. He was in his quarters, reading after-action reports, when they hit the system limit. The male at the con called to notify him; the Twelveworld Lord lifted his head, canted it. "No comm traffic, I am assuming."

  "No, sir."

  "Start seeding the platforms and satellites. By the time we reach orbit, I want to be able to talk to someone."

  "Yes, sir."

  The Twelveworld Lord resumed reading, and Maia spread herself out to watch the crew about the business of resurrecting the broken sensor and communication nets. Each node that came online lit in her senses, promising an escape from her precarious position. She clung to the ship anyway, because its instruments were far more capable than any remote sensor platform's.

  "Lord of the Twelveworld? We have reached orbit."

  The Twelveworld Lord waved his reports out of his way. "Can you open a channel to the surface?"

  "We are attempting to contact someone now."

  Maia expected impatience, because impatience seemed in keeping with the volatility of male Chatcaava with power. But the Twelveworld Lord waited with admirable calm. Maia supposed this was the hunter in him.

  "We've reached the Senior Ranger, sir."

  "Excellent. Put him through."

  Was Senior Ranger a political post? It seemed an unlikely title. The male who answered wore a silver robe that looked more like a religious garment. He was a striking elder with a rain gray hide that mottled into paler spots like altocumulus clouds. His eyes were a delicate rosy peach. Sunrise-colored, Maia thought.

  "Thank you, Twelveworld Lord, for returning."

  "Don't thank me until I've destroyed all the scum that wrought suffering on you. Is it bad?"

  "Most of what we lost was infrastructure, sire. The important things, they missed."

  The Twelveworld Lord sneered. "They are wingless freaks. They are incapable of understanding true value."

  The male hesitated. "Perhaps not all of them, sire. That would be one of the reasons we are particularly grateful you addressed our communications issue."

  The Twelveworld Lord was leaning toward the other male's projection now, talons curled against the table. "What do you mean to suggest?"

  "We think we have found the one," the Senior Ranger said. "Oh my lord, at last. We brought her to the cave."

  "No," the Twelveworld Lord whispered. "After so long? Did she survive?"

  "She hasn't died yet."

  "That is already more than we have hoped for," the Twelveworld Lord said, sitting back. "Dying Air. To see the purpose
of the Vault fulfilled in our lifetimes?"

  "We know, sire," the Senior Ranger replied. "We know. How fortunate we are!"

  "If she survives," the Twelveworld Lord said, but he sounded awed rather than skeptical. His head twitched up suddenly, eyes narrowed. "What has this to do with the aliens knowing true value?"

  "Sire, it was aliens who brought her. They claim to have been fleeing these pirates after rescuing her from them."

  "What?" the Twelveworld Lord said, and Maia was thinking the same.

  "They claim she was taken by them," the Ranger continued, unable to sense the change in the Twelveworld Lord's body temperature, heart rate, and breathing the way Maia could. "And foully used, sire. She was physically insulted. They took her wings-"

  "No," the Twelveworld Lord whispered, shaking.

  "They say she is the Slave Queen, sire."

  "No," the Twelveworld Lord said again, more loudly. "Oh no. What have I done!"

  Maia was already gone.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The tactical situation when the Chatcaavan fleet broke out of Well into the throneworld system was as nearly perfect as possible, given what they were facing. Watching from the bridge of their flagship, Lisinthir blessed all the people who'd made their ambush possible, hoping desperately that the primary one would be waiting for him when they landed. Not that he didn't appreciate the Surgeon, but the Alliance had already sacrificed too many people to this war. He flatly refused to give any more of them.

  "Excellent," the Admiral-Offense said, studying the display in front of the Worldlord's son.

  "I don't believe you've ever called any situation excellent before," the Emperor said. "At least, not in my hearing."

  "It's not flawless." The Admiral-Offense folded his arms, head raised. "But given what we might have walked in on had we not been warned?" He chuckled. "They don't even know we're here, if we did our work right."

  "There's no response yet," the Worldlord's son said. "That bodes well. Exalted? I assume we are staying with plan-prime?"