Incandescence (4 page)

She found an empty crevice near the end of the tunnel, and slid into the welcoming fissure. She could still hear the constant susurration of the wind, but the mass of dense rock behind her was strong enough to divert the flow away from her weathered carapace.

With her eyes pressed against the rock, her vision was filled with a shapeless radiance. Everything in the Splinter glowed with the warmth of the Incandescence; sheltered or not, she was always bathed in that same light.

Roi relaxed and let her eyes grow unresponsive. The radiance began to fade, dissolving into a colorless absence. Images of the weeds she'd sought throughout her shift marched across the emptiness. Then her body became numb, and her mind quiet.

Csi had organized the departure, designing a scape to suit the occasion with versions tailor-made for every participant. Rakesh found himself on an ocean-going vessel some fifty meters long, surrounded as far as the eye could see by heavy, gray-green seas. The sky was cloudless, but the sun was low and the wind relentless. There were five other people assembled on the deck: Parantham, Csi, Viya, and two old friends of Parantham, Jafar and Renu.

«We are gathered here to bid farewell to Rakesh and Parantham,» Csi declaimed, «who have heard the song of the sirens, and decided, against all of our wise counsel, to follow it.» Parantham smiled, perhaps at the very same reference; her own cultural background was such a mosaic that the human legend was probably just as meaningful to her as any alternative.

Rakesh tried to stay focused on the details of Csi's parting gift. The timber beneath his feet was warped, as if by decades of humidity. The salt in the air was pungent. The bodily parameters that he'd ceded to his friend's design guaranteed that the relentless swaying of the deck left him mildly queasy. All this theater was not so much a distraction as an adornment, refracting the strange truth of the event without ever trying to conceal it.

Rakesh had not anticipated how hard it would be to cut his ties and move on. When he'd left Shab-e-Noor, his home world, he'd been preparing for a thousand years. Since his youth it had been his plan to remain in the local system for no more than a millennium, and by the time the self-imposed deadline approached all his family and friends were convinced of his sincerity and had worked to make things easier. Even so, the wrenching feeling that came from the realization that one step would separate him from everyone he knew — for at least six times longer than he'd known them — had been almost unbearable. It was like marching into a white-hot furnace and being seared to the bone, losing every nerve ending, every connection, every link to the world outside his skull.

The first node he'd reached had been three thousand light years away. He'd jumped again, twice, almost immediately, after finding that nearly everyone he met had either come directly from his home world, or had visited it not long before. At the third node, in contrast, the intersecting currents of travelers had seemed thoroughly cosmopolitan, rich with complex histories and anecdotes ready to be mined.

So he'd stayed, but he'd kept himself suitably aloof, eschewing all but the most pragmatic associations, priding himself on his readiness to depart in an instant with no goodbyes. If even one in a thousand of the travelers passing through had come from a place worth visiting, he'd reasoned, it would not take long to choose a destination.

In a sense that premise had been true, but many people were returning from ageless spectacles that Rakesh had known of since childhood. Whether it was a million-year-old jungle, the immaculately preserved city of an ancestral civilization, or some delicately beautiful nebula, detailed images had already reached Shab-e-Noor long before his birth. Witnessing such sights firsthand rather than in a scape might merit a local planetary hop, but not the burning of millennia and his alienation from everything and everyone he'd known.

Other travelers took their chances as they searched for less famous, more transient pleasures. By their very nature, though, such destinations could rarely be shared: after five or ten millennia, the most energetic social or artistic renaissance would certainly have faded. Sometimes the insights of these movements could be passed on, but away from the time and place that had given birth to them, most, far from being potent memes ready to spark new revolutions, were uninspiring. Rakesh hadn't traveled thousands of light years to return home with a handful of bland, second-hand slogans.

Eventually, he'd settled into a state somewhere between cynical resignation and injured bemusement. A logical strategy might have been to make the best of the imperfect information flowing through the node to build up a list of promising worlds, and then wait for that list to include a sequence of planets that could be visited efficiently in a single grand tour. Rakesh had known people who'd done just that, and after five or ten years of planning departed happily on a trip that would take them twenty or thirty millennia. He'd toyed with his own lists, and then set them aside. His heart wasn't in it. If he was ever to break free, he needed something more: a penetrating new insight into the intractable theory of travel.

Or, as it turned out, some sheer dumb luck.

«By your own free choice, you are abandoning your loyal companions for this dangerous folly,» Csi announced dryly, «so all we can offer you in return are these talismans to help you on your way.»

From an ornate chest sitting on the deck beside him, Csi extracted two weighty metal chains. With Viya's help, he tied one around Rakesh's upper body, while Jafar and Renu did the same for Parantham.

Two robust, seasoned-looking planks lay on the deck, neatly slotted through a convenient gap below the guard rail to protrude over the edge. Rakesh supposed they might have been carried on ships like this for the sake of repairs. That prospect struck him as somewhat cheerier than if they'd been brought along with only their present purpose in mind.

Parantham shot him an amused look and casually hefted herself over the guard rail. Rakesh clambered over more cautiously, then crouched down to lower his center of mass, wondering at the overpowering need he felt to keep his balance and stay out of the ocean until the very end.

He couldn't turn his head far enough to face the people watching from the deck, but he called back to them, «Don't think we'll never cross paths again. It's a small galaxy, and I plan to be in it for a very long time.»

Viya laughed. «Is that a threat of retribution, from the mouth of Davy Jones's locker?»

Rakesh held up a length of the iron chain to demonstrate how loosely it was tied, and rattled it dismissively. «You think this is enough to hold me down? You should know I studied under Houdini!» The ship lurched abruptly, almost toppling him. He managed to steady himself, but his heart was pounding.

While Rakesh was still inching his way forward, Parantham marched to the end of her plank. Watching her poised swaying at the edge made his stomach clench. Embodied on his home world, he'd dived into water from greater heights than this, but never from such an unsteady platform. Parantham was a native of scapespace; no doubt she was imbued with her own kind of innate prudence against physical damage whenever she was embodied, and no doubt Csi had done his best to make her experience memorably intense, but even if she was perceiving an identical scape, they were not quite together in any of this.

Parantham turned her whole body around to face the deck, but she still had to shout over the wind. «Jafar, Renu, Viya, Csi. I'll never forget your friendship. Be sure that I'm happy and certain in my choice. I hope you all find freedom, and I hope it is as sweet as this.» In one fluid movement she turned back to the ocean, bent her knees, leaned forward, and dived.

Rakesh watched as she disappeared beneath the foaming water. He was shivering now. He lifted himself up to his full height and walked forward unsteadily, as rapidly as he could. Maybe Parantham had felt something close to pure exhilaration at her departure, but he couldn't, and he didn't want it that way.

He stopped a few centimeters short of the edge and turned slightly, spreading his legs to brace himself.

«To travel is to die? I won't argue with that.» The wind seemed to swallow his words, but he didn't really care if he was audible or not. Over the last few days he'd made his peace individually with everyone in the node that he'd been close to. Let them violate the physics of the scape to hear him, if it really mattered. «I've died once before, and I've lived almost a century in this second incarnation. It was a strange, frustrating, maddening existence. You made it bearable, and I'm grateful for that, but don't ever forget why you died the first time. When you get the chance, move on to the next life.»

Rakesh took a step forward and gazed down at the waves. He stretched out his arms and dived.

The fall must have taken at least a couple of seconds, but rather than his mind going into slow motion he hit the water with the sense that he'd had no time to ponder its approach. The impact came as a bracing jolt to his body, but not an unfamiliar one. It took another few seconds for the effect of the chain to penetrate his consciousness; he had certainly slowed down once he entered the water, but he possessed no buoyancy, and he was not showing any sign of coming to a halt.

Snatches of sound that might have been distorted singing flowed into Rakesh's skull through the bones of his clenched jaw. He opened his eyes and saw a dozen luminescent blue shapes in the water below: delicate, veiled forms rising up to meet him. Were there sirens here after all, mythical creatures made real to ease his passage?

He fell past them. They were giant jellyfish, propelling themselves along by squirting water from bladders with a flatulent squeak.

Rakesh wondered bleakly just how far Csi wanted to twist the knife. He contemplated deserting the scape to step across the light years in a manner of his own choosing: something involving a stroll across soft grass on a warm day.

The water was pitch-black now. He had gulped air instinctively before submerging, but just how long that lungful would last was entirely in Csi's hands. A mild unpleasantness at the back of his mind was becoming an insistent choking feeling, and his ears were aching from the pressure. He probably could have untangled himself from the chain and made it back to the surface before losing consciousness, but there was no point remaining in the scape at all unless he played along with the scenario, right to the end.

A smudge of silver light appeared beneath him, and Rakesh used what strength he had to swim, or at least steer his fall, toward it. As it grew closer, he suffered a dizzying shift of scale; what had seemed like a small glowing benthic creature was a patch of sea floor twenty or thirty meters wide, strewn with scores of individual white lights.

He put out his arms as he struck the bottom, jarring his elbows and shoulders, burying his face in sticky mud. He rolled upright, sitting on his haunches, amazed that he still had any strength left. There was a hammering at his throat imploring him to inhale, but he wasn't going to breathe water and pull down the curtain prematurely.

As the silt around him settled Rakesh rose to his feet. The white lights scattered across the sea floor were piles of bones. Some were more or less whole human skeletons, others were jumbled assortments of parts. Some bacterial infestation had rendered them all phosphorescent as they decayed.

He must have begun to vocalize something, because he found salt water suddenly burning his nostrils and palate, as if he'd taken a heedless preparatory breath. He rapidly forgot whatever curse he'd been aiming at Csi, and fought desperately to get the water into his stomach instead of his lungs.

As he forced down the mouthful of brine, he felt something hard and smooth under his tongue. He clamped his hand to his mouth and managed to expel the thing without admitting any more water. He didn't need to hold it up to the ghost light to know what it was; his fingertips told him. It was the glass key that Lahl had given him.

Rakesh crouched down and groped through the mud. What had Csi planted? A treasure chest? That might be worth searching for, so long as it contained an oxygen tank and not a pile of worthless coins.

He rose to his feet again and looked around at the graveyard of failed divers. If there was any logic to this macabre metaphor, surely some of them had come close to the prize, even if they'd been unable to unlock it.

Blood was pounding in his ears. Overlaid on a random scatter of remains, there seemed to be a group concentrated on a spot about fifteen meters away.

Rakesh slogged his way toward the hillock of bones. It would have been nice to have Parantham's help at this point, but she seemed to have landed elsewhere, or been shunted right out of his version of the scenario.

As he waded in among the ribs and tibias, he felt a pang of desolation. What were these corpses to Csi? Hopes? Friendships? After nearly twice as long in the node as Rakesh, Csi was still stranded.

Without leaving the scape, Rakesh spawned an insentient messenger who'd visit Csi after a week had passed and hand him a copy of the key. For all the scorn and derision he'd heaped upon the sirens' call, there was a chance that after a few days' reflection Csi might change his mind and decide to follow them.

His conscience salved, Rakesh put aside his squeamishness and dived into the graveyard of travelers' ambitions. His skull was bursting, but he was determined to find the tin box with the treasure map, or whatever Csi's wry punchline was, before he surrendered consciousness.

His fingers hit metal. Jubilantly, he moved his hands apart to try to span the edges, but the surface just went on and on. The treasure chest was more like a vault, at least a few meters wide.

He probed the metal beneath the mound of bones, scanning back and forth with his fingertips. Streaks of light flashed behind his eyes, followed like thunder by a bludgeoning pain. Finally he held out the key itself and scraped it blindly over the vault's unyielding surface.