Bright of the Sky

by Kay Kenyon

"Against the vows," Bei muttered.

  "But the knowledge must exist. The Gond. We've seen their kind, even on Earth."

  Bei leaned in closer, lowering his voice. "Yes, Gond. Unstable, mentally. You have to be, to want to live there instead of here. A few of them have fled there to die, over the ages. They walk through the veil to vacuum space, and to the hearts of stars, and to frozen asteroids. And some, to worlds of Rose sentients. Your myths of monsters. Most of these are from the All. They were monstrous because they came to you in madness and despair, creating havoc. You killed them, employing your formidable arsenal of murder and mutilation. But they would have died anyway. To cross to the Rose is to become evanescent, just as to cross to the Entire is to be long-lived. That's why your people can never come here, Titus. They would overwhelm us." He pointed a gnarled finger at Quinn. "And war is no answer, for either of us. The Entire is fragile. Some of your weapons would collapse the storm walls. Our world was not built for war, not at the scales you practice it."

  Quinn said, "All my people want is to use the correlates to travel in our own universe, through yours."

  Bei's mouth curled into a sneer. "You're a fool if you believe that."

  Quinn let that lie. Having just arrived, and finding Bei wary, if not hostile, now wasn't the time to push him.

  The ancient assistant came back to collect their tray of cups and leftovers, shuffling out under his burden.

  Watching him leave, Bei continued, "For those of us at this veil, the scholarship is mundane indeed. Most people have limited visions, after all. My dreams when I was called to the Ascendancy were vast and foolish. I would have a Rose sentient to question. I saw my ambitions of cosmography writ large. Now my dreams are small again."

  Bei's voice lowered. "I'm not proud of what I did, Titus. But if I hadn't been your interrogator, it would have been someone else. I taught you how to navigate Ascendancy politics, both high and low, and in the end that might have saved your life. Everyone was vying for a piece of you, the Chalin legates more than anyone else, but also the lords. Everyone took an interest. No one had ever seen a Rose being before. And you had knowledge, in context. For the first time, our bits of knowledge found coherence-for as much as you knew. Not much, it's true, but a stupendous boon nonetheless." He paused, fingering his redstones. "You had power. And I taught you to use it."

  Quinn felt a growing confusion. "Power?"

  "Oh, not enough to bring back Johanna. She was long gone. A trophy for Lord Inweer, as recompense for his dismal posting at Ahnenhoon. They questioned her-that was the job of scholar Kang-but she told me your wife had few notions of politics and the scientific endeavors." He looked away, avoiding Quinn's expression. "As to your daughter, she knew little. They sent her away, to barbarians."

  "Why?"

  "They look for ways to woo the Inyx. The girl was a prize."

  "And her being far away made it easier for them to compel me to speak," Quinn murmured.

  "Yes, to compel you." He paused. "But eventually, you walked freely. You had few enemies and many friends."

  That wasn't true. He had been a prisoner. Bei kept saying things that didn't square with how it was. How it had to have been. "I didn't walk freely."

  Bei stroked his chin. "That was all long ago. You did what you could."

  Quinn had forgotten to breathe.

  The old scholar looked at Anzi, as though she should help him, as though it were her place to say what came next. But Anzi's eyes were as distressed as Quinn's.

  Bei rose and paced away, as far as his little room allowed. He turned back, scowling. "This is why I took your memories. To keep you from all this. This urge to prove something."

  "What do I need to prove?" The foreboding was now full on him.

  "Nothing," Bei snapped. "Prove nothing. You are no better than other men, Titus Quinn."

  But perhaps he was somewhat worse. To have had friends. To have had power. He sat down, staggered. "Give me my own memories," he whispered.

  Bei shook his head. "I don't know how. I suppressed them, with as much knowledge as I had. It was incomplete knowledge. Now that you are back, I think they will come, gradually." His face fell into even deeper lines as his eyes darkened. "You think me your enemy, Titus. Perhaps I was. I told myself you were no worse off because of me, but it excuses nothing.

  "The Tarig kept saying that if you relinquished information, your family might be returned to you. One day led to the next, and the information was never enough. Every day you asked. And every day the lords said, Not yet. The days passed. You had not seen your wife and daughter since the first day of your capture. You did all you could, Titus; content yourself with that. You never forgot them. You told and told." He gestured to his scrolls. "Everything you knew was written down, eventually. Because you persisted. But the Tarig would never have given them back. Why should they, when their absence was so productive?" He paused, looking away. "And then Johanna died. The daughter grew up. The past was over."

  "Never over," Quinn whispered.

  Bei shook his head, muttering. "No. I can see that."

  The awful part was, there was more. Quinn could almost remember, but the memories were withdrawing just in advance of his questing mind.

  "Tell the rest of what I did."

  Returning to his seat, Bei fingered his redstones, collecting his thoughts. "You were part of the life of the court. You were close to the Lady Chiron." Here Bei paused. "You remember the Lady Chiron?"

  Quinn shook his head.

  Bei muttered, "Perhaps that is best." At Quinn's pointed look, Bei said, "The great Tarig lady. You liked each other. It was a dangerous friendship, but you could not be dissuaded."

  "Liked each other?"

  Bei pursed his lips. "So it was said."

  When the old man had to glance away, Quinn took a stab at the truth: "I took a lover?"

  "So it was said." After a pause Bei added, "Even the Tarig lady could not save you when you attacked Lord Hadenth, the day you learned that your daughter was sent blind into slavery." His voice lowered. "I had hoped that an exception had been made for the girl, and for all I knew, perhaps it had. But old Cixi knew the truth, and for some reason, after all those thousands of days, she told you. You appeared in the doorway of the great hall, looking half-crazed. You asked where Hadenth was. I didn't know. But you found him, eventually."

  In the corner, Anzi shuddered. Quinn looked at his fists, big enough to break open a normal person's skull. But to a Tarig, just enough to addle a mind.

  "You remember Cixi? She collects enemies like I do redstones." He sighed. "Your mistake was to expect restraint from a high lord. Your daughter was nothing to them. That is something to learn once and for all, Titus. They're not like us. In any way."

  Bei continued, "I took you to a minoral, an abandoned reach where the veil had been destroyed. Long ago a maddened Gond crossed over to the Rose through that place. The Tarig obliterated it, but they didn't realize there were two access points at this reach. We waited there for many days, halfstarved, while I waited for it to correlate with a life-bearing world. I used the time to change your body. You allowed this, thinking you would come back. I took the liberty of insuring you wouldn't want to, that you would forget everything. Then the veil became productive, and gave us our chance. We took it."

  "Why?" Quinn asked. "Why did you risk helping me?"

  Bei pursed his lips. "I've often wondered. You are impulsive, stubborn, and reckless." He shrugged. "Who knows? It's past, now."

  "The past matters."

  "That is only true if your future is short."

  They faced off, each with his own view of the world. Of course it could not be the same view.

  Bei drew himself up, resigned. "Listen then, Titus Quinn, Dal Shen, prisoner and friend of the Tarig. You will go, I can see, to the bright city. If you're lucky, the Tarig will take little notice and God will not regard you. There you will meet Cixi, the high prefect of the Chalin legates. If your subterfuge fools her, she'l
l send you to a far primacy from which you may never return. But that's beside the point. You'll rescue your child or die trying, the only thing that can satisfy you.

  "Among the Chalin of the Ascendancy you may hear stories of a man of the Rose who once was among them. He began as a slave, and rose to influence, as eager to know the Tarig as they were to know him. It was, as you would say, many years in which you became accustomed to your prison, and in which it gradually became your palace. You found your happiness, because you had no choice. We, who began as interrogators and jailers, became your friends. How long can a man hold onto hate? You tried. I watched you try. Over years, mind you, the hate became despair, became numbness, became reborn as a new life." He sighed. "Time will do that. It's no shame.

  "Now I've told you what you've been digging for. You knew, of course." Bei slumped into a deep chair, muttering, "I shouldn't have told you. But the memories-you were right-belong to you."

  Quinn was standing next to the table, staring at the tapestry, at the several depictions of unicorns. He had been an oddity in the Entire. But a treasured oddity. A pampered one. Here, the hunters advanced on the caged unicorn. Looking pacified and well fed, the unicorn pranced up on its hind legs, its jeweled collar sparkling. It wasn't often you got a bird's-eye view of your soul.

  "A palace," Quinn whispered. "A new life."

  Bei's voice was gentle. "Let it go, Titus."

  "I can't." The past for him was yesterday. Six months ago. Time was twisted out of recognition. If you betrayed your wife, you didn't move past it in a day. If you betrayed your daughter, perhaps you never did.

  Quinn turned and left the room, passing through the veil-of-worlds room, walking like a blind man down the tunnel.

  Bei snorted. "Such a waste of passion."

  "I wonder if it is," Anzi said. Then she followed Quinn.

  Bei watched them as their forms receded down the long tunnel. He trusted that old Zhou would be watching for them in the next chamber, and would lead them to quarters. Meanwhile Bei was left to decide whether to help Titus or not.

  You old fool, he thought. You knew he'd be back. But to be caught so unawares, to be so staggered by the vision of Titus Quinn standing before you in this remote place!

  Truly, he'd been living in a dream world, locked in his studies, thinking Titus Quinn gone for good. Now the man was back, with powerful allies. Yulin and Suzong. He could well imagine that old Suzong was behind this. She would have been whispering in Yulin's hairy ear: Power, my husband.

  With more accuracy, she might have whispered, Ruin.

  Titus's patrons knew the way in. Now indeed ruin waited behind a door, a door no longer locked, nor even latched. Humans would swarm through, and it would never be for travel and commerce. They would come with their hordes and their dark weapons, and the culture of Bei's world would become human culture, because their numbers were endless. There might be war. Yes. A war that even the Tarig must fear. The storm walls. The bright. All so vulnerable. To prevail over the Rose, who knew what the fiends might do?

  And now Bei had botched his one chance to discourage Titus. He could have sent him home with a shrewd and merciful lie, could have told him that Sydney was dead. That would have put an end to it. But, no, he had revealed the whole sordid story, unleashing the demon that would ride Titus's back until the bright burned out.

  Bei swore under his breath. Never a good liar, that's my trouble.

  I knew, he thought. I knew the man would hate what he'd been. To learn it all at once was different than experiencing it day by day: the relentless weight of days, days when the wife and daughter were gone, and never the slightest intimation of where they were. Titus would have gone mad unless he'd been willing to start a new life. But, God's beku, it was hard for the man to hear. And now he'll be out mucking about, proving his devotion. When you were short-lived, things like devotion to a wife, a child, seemed so crushingly important. But over seventy, eighty, ninety thousand days, you learned that there were always more children, more wives, more days, what did it matter?

  Still. The man had a right to know his own history.

  Bei had told most of it, including the worst things-things that a man of the Rose might think the worst-such as his bedding of the Lady Chiron.

  He shuddered. Bei was no prude, but to bed a Tarig female, how was it even done? Well, there were many ways to pleasure one another, and not all of them required compatible anatomy. Besides, the lords had required that Titus stay among them. He had had few Chalin contacts, and no human ones. So when the lady took him, she might have seemed normal to him by then. He shook his head. Not the lad's fault-and who knows, she might have compelled him.

  Bei had kept some details to himself, but soon enough Titus would remember them. It remained to be seen if he could rebound.

  He sat down, worn out by pacing and the shock of the last few hours. When Titus had disappeared through the veil, Bei had hoped to banish thoughts of him and all that had transpired. But memories of Titus had haunted him. His role in Titus's captivity, of course; there was always that stain. But also, the friendship that they'd had-one that evolved from tolerance to admiration so gradually that Bei never noticed when it was that he had decided to help Titus escape. The distress Bei felt in seeing him again arose from knowing that the terrible longing and deprivation of his first sojourn here was now upon Titus again. And Bei would have to watch, and be as helpless as before.

  To collude with him would only worsen, or delay, the man's fate. What, by the bright, did you do if a friend begged you for something that would destroy him?

  Withhold. That's what you did.

  Bei rose, feeling older than when he'd sat down. So, Titus was asking for surgeries. To hide among his enemies, the man wanted to alter his face.

  Better if could alter his heart.

  Bei paced the veil-of-worlds chamber, trying to fortify his decision to tell Titus no. As he paced, the veil lit up with a new view: a star surrounded by a huge shell of gas that glowed in a flood of ultraviolet radiation, its round shape looking like a fence around a lone prisoner. Bei stared at this view.

  God's beku, but he knew what he would decide.

  He'd aided and abetted in the confinement of Titus Quinn once. And that would never happen again. The older he got, the clearer it had become to him that shameful behavior was always on your own shoulders, no matter who ordered it. "God not looking at me," he muttered. His fate was entwined with Titus Quinn's. He'd known that from the day the Tarig first showed up at his door, saying that the lords required him to attend them and asking if his command of English was still perfect.

  It was, by the vows, though he should have lied to them.

  Learn to lie. That would be his advice to his children, if he'd had any.

  Bei performed his transformations on Quinn's face, using needles that stimulated alterations in the cells. The bones in Quinn's face hurt with every vibration of the deep ground, but he refused the pain inhibitors, full of vicious secondary compounds. Perhaps ideal for a Chalin, the medicinals failed the test of his Jacobson's organ. They smelled bad.

  During the days, Anzi sat at his side reading to him from Bei's scrolls. She had a thousand to choose from. He learned things that he had once known, and things that he had never known. He tried to pay attention, to learn, but awash in the pain of his facial bones re-forming, it was difficult to concentrate. Sometimes he took out the photos of Johanna and Sydney, to seek some comfort from them. But they were creased and faded, accusing him by their deterioration. Prince of the Ascendancy, they seemed to say.

  He saw glimpses of the bright city-with its carved halls and wide, curving stairs-and the labyrinth underneath, where labored the legates, consuls, factors, and stewards. He saw himself threading into the city, into its fabulous byways, seeing wonders. He saw the Lady Chiron, almost human, yes, almost.... Lady Chiron lay beside him on a platform of hot light. Her nakedness unnerved him. Some sexual acts were impossible. But one could be creative. She was w
ithout inhibition. Forcing himself to attend to the memory, he recalled: Hadenth appearing in the doorway. Jealous. Chiron driving him away.

  He hardly needed more details to know that what Bel had alluded to was true. He tried to imagine what kind of a man he had been. And then he was left to wonder what kind of a man he was now. His hands moved over his face, failing to find the old geography.

  Seeing him touch his face, Anzi produced a mirror.

  Even under the puffiness and bruises, Quinn could see that the face in the glass was narrow and strange. The blue of his eyes had become a burnished gold. Quinn didn't recognize himself. It was comforting.

  He must have smiled, because Anzi said, "Good?"

  "Yes." He pushed himself up to a sitting position, headache raging.

  "Since you're better"-she glanced at him ironically, knowing he was still shaky-"there is a matter to discuss. You won't like it, though."

  He was sick, dispirited, and confused. Now there was more? Best to have it over with. He sat up fully, giving her his attention. She offered him water, and he took it, while she gathered her thoughts.

  "Master Yulin worries that you'll be captured when taking unwise actions at the Inyx sway." She looked at the floor. "I worry also."

  Quinn's breathing grew shallow. So now Yulin was withdrawing from the venture? Without Yulin's help he couldn't go far-perhaps nowhere. He waited for her to go on.

  "Yet he knows you have this great desire to bring your daughter home. Thus his proposition that he urges you to think about most carefully...."

  "A proposition you've waited so long to tell me?"

  "Yes, forgive me. I thought it would anger you, when you were already displeased with me."

  Quinn took a deep breath. When would she learn that it was best to tell him everything?

  "My uncle says, yes, go to the land of the Inyx, but only to confirm that she's there, and alive. If possible, speak with her and tell her to be patient. Then, when humans come to bargain with the Tarig over routes through our land, demand Sydney's release. This preserves your disguise, and greatly improves the chances that both of you will survive."