Resolution (7 page)

You’re all right.

Tom looked up.

‘Easy for you to—’

But her disembodied head was dry and scaly, and Tom knew he could never appreciate the effort behind her abilities.

‘Interesting present, Eemur ... Are you all right? Do you need anything?’

I’ll
be fine.

Nodding, Tom dragged himself to his feet. ‘We need to talk ... in a while.’ He staggered from the lounge, through to the bath chamber. There, he gestured for the aerogel bath to activate itself in full medical mode - his cuts would need cleansing - and pulled his clothes off, dropping them into a reclamation bin.

Tom winced as he climbed down into the bath. He held his breath, slid under, until he was completely submerged. His skin tingled; the burning in his wounds began to fade. Inside the gel, he started taking shallow breaths.

Then incredibly - in reaction to the trauma and the knowledge that he was safe - Tom drifted into sleep.

~ * ~

5

NULAPEIRON AD 3423

The arachnargos which took them to Realm Vilshan was long and streamlined, its upper carapace coloured a deep metallic violet, melding into chocolate-brown and grey at the sides, becoming shell-white across its underbelly. The violet-and-grey tendrils were long and strong; they whipped outwards with a speed and manoeuvrability Tom had never seen with a vehicle of this size.

As they travelled, Elva sat up front in the control cabin, while Tom went back into the thoracic hold. There, he sat on the deck near an upended case, atop which Eemur’s Head stood on a tray. He took out his crystal, pressed it into his holopad, and flicked on the image of Ro McNamara and her sons.

‘A link,’ he said, ‘between me and Pilots.’

That’s right.

‘Perhaps the captive was a descendant of this family.’

It could be. When the link was forged, or
will
be forged, I can’t tell.

Tom stared at her flensed head.

‘
Will
be forged? What do you mean?’

What I said. The linking event may not have occurred yet.

For all that he had grown up with the notion of Oracles, the idea of backward causality made Tom shudder. The future should not affect the past; that was not the way things ought to work. Even the Oracles saw only their own future memories, their own perceptions untied from the arrow of time. Yet when ruling Lords acted now on information perceived from the future, wasn’t that a form of reverse cause-and-effect?

Tom let out a long breath.

‘I haven’t told Elva ... We need to equip a rescue party for Siganth.’ It was another debt of honour, though harder to explain. ‘How we’ll afford it, I don’t know. Perhaps I can persuade Corduven to mount a commando operation.’

I don’t think so.

‘Why not? What’s the maximum number of people you can send through to a hellworld in one go?’

It’s not exactly ‘sending’. In one sense, you remained in Nulapeiron the entire time.

Tell that to my cuts,
Tom thought.
Elva hasn‘t seen them yet.

Still, Tom knew that existing logosophical theories could not adequately describe a Seer’s abilities. Pilots travelled by inserting their vessels into another universe: the fractal mu-space which underlay all continua. Seers had no access to mu-space, but they could perceive and use the hidden dimensions of realspace, unknown to most human beings (who have evolved to act within three spatial dimensions, not the full complement of ten: time is the
eleventh
dimension).

The Blight had been able to manifest its once-human components, tele-porting them into place using powers which were surely similar to Eemur’s.

The way is blocked. I cannot reach Siganth again.

‘Fate.’ Tom stared into Eemur’s bulbous eyeballs.
Blocked by the Anomaly? Because it knows I was there?

It knows
somebody
traversed the Calabi-Yau geodesies.

Fear accelerated Tom’s pulse. He had worried about the Blight, that it might have contacted the Anomaly, albeit briefly. What if he himself had compounded the disaster, by making the entity aware of Nulapeiron’s existence?

Does it know which world I come from?

A pause.

I don’t know.

Tom turned away. Ignorance could bring no comfort.

Two days later, with a border checkpoint in sight up ahead, their hired arachnargos entered a great cavern, passing beneath a huge holobanner which read:

*** COLLEGIUM PERPETUUM DELPHINORUM ***

*** where Oracles are created ***

*** not born ***

For a motto (or a sales slogan) it seemed obscurely threatening. From the forward cabin, Tom stared at the ornate triconic symbols as they slid past overhead. Then the arachnargos was at the checkpoint, and the pilots were bringing it to rest on a vast polished platform of blue stone. Down below, guards in matched black-and-yellow capes stood to attention.

An exit hatch puckered and opened, then fine tendrils lowered Tom and Elva to ground level. A mesodrone drifted down alongside them, containing Eemur’s Head along with all their luggage.

Just how the authorities would react if their scanfields detected a severed Seer’s head inside the drone’s shielded carapace, none of them knew. Eemur had insisted that they not leave her behind someplace; and neither Tom nor Elva had been able to think of an adequate reason to overrule her wishes.

Tom’s skin tingled. They
were
being scanned.

Above them, the arachnargos, its commission completed, was already turning away. As Tom watched, a lead tendril whipped out with a
thwap,
its gekkomere pads fastening onto a broad stone pillar. Then the arachnargos was in motion, tendrils flicking out faster and faster, accelerating along the broad natural caverns until it reached the arching exit, accelerated even more ... and was gone.

Tom turned to look at the Collegiate guards.

‘Nice to be back,’ he murmured.

The last time he and Elva had been here, the entire realm was under the control of Blight forces, and they were fighting for their lives. Now, less than a hectoday later, they had little idea what to expect.

It’s a debt of honour,
he reminded himself.

What if he was risking Elva’s life in trying to repay the near-dead cyborg, the Jack which had helped him to rescue her? But Tom had talked it over with Elva, and she had been firm:
‘At the least, I had extra days of life, and the chance to marry you, my Lord.’

There had been nothing Tom could say to argue against that.

Now an officer in a black-and-yellow cape was marching forward. As he drew close, the troopers behind him raised their weapons to port-arms. The officer halted, and stamped to attention, then bowed deeply.

‘My Lord and Lady Corcorigan. I bid you welcome here.’

The troopers quick-marched to fall in all around them, forming an escort.

‘The guest quarters,’ the officer added, ‘have been made ready. I hope you’ll find them adequate.’

Then they moved off along the broad stone platform on foot, followed by the floating drone.

Farsight Broadway was long and richly furnished with velvet hangings, and with morphglass sculptures dancing in its marble alcoves. The central carpeted strip slid into laminar flow, carrying Tom and Elva and their armed escort. Collegiate scholars and other noble visitors were walking among the cloisters and colonnades which stretched off to either side. Everything, it seemed, had been restored to its accustomed glory ... except that, looking carefully down side-corridors, Tom glimpsed the occasional burn-mark, or channels carved in stone by wild graser fire. Collegiate forces had fought hard before falling to the Blight.

Elva looked up at a decorative bronze ceiling-sculpture.

‘Milligrasers,’ she murmured. ‘In gatling arrays.’

Tom raised an eyebrow. He had not noticed.