A Prison Unsought (26 page)

Anaris picked up his dirazh’u again and toyed with its ends.
“I think that I will enjoy watching to see who is right.”

The flicker of vertigo that presaged a contact from the
Eya’a unsettled Vi’ya. Closing down her console with a quick gesture, she shut
her eyes and put her head in her hands.

The Eya’a’s excitement
seared along her nerves, making the contact almost painful, like a
neural-induction boswell set too high.

Eya’a can hear the
sleeper’s-listenstone, but the walls around admit no passage.

They have been trying
to get at the captured hyperwave,
she thought. Their focus hadn’t been this
consistently intense since the Arkad brought the Heart of Kronos to Dis.

Can you hear
human-words from the sleeper’s-listenstone?

Eya’a hear the current
of words but not the words. Eya’a need touch.

What emotions did
Eya’a hear concerning Eya’a and the sleeper’s-listenstone?

We hear fear, we hear
chaos.
And then a shock ran through them, searing her mind:
We hear the
eye-of-the-distant-sleeper.

Where?

Distant, distant, and
moves . . .
Their anxiety level rose abruptly, and she was aware
of the high, chilling chatter of their speech, used only at times of great
stress, or ceremony.

This was no ceremony.

Bad sign,
Vi’ya
thought, fighting the inevitable pang of headache. To give them another
direction, she formed an inquiry:
Do you hear the ones you call Telvarna-hive?

We hear. We celebrate
recognition of Telvarna-hive ones among the many. We hear one-with-three—

Ivard. Thanks to the mysterious bond between the Kelly and
the Eya’a, Vi’ya also heard Ivard’s thoughts—and she knew he often heard hers,
though he did not seem to identify them as hers yet, except when she
consciously tried to reach him.

The Eya’a described
Ivard’s dreams through their own perception, then went through the rest of her
crew. Except for their calling her Vi’ya, the One-Who-Hears, they did not use
humans’ names, but identified them by description.

We hear the moth-one,
who contemplates cessation-in-hive, in anger . . .

Lokri. Locked away by
the Panarchists in the maximum-security Detention One, under a charge of
murder. So far, only Jaim and Marim had seen him, for very short visits.

We hear the
one-making-music-and-food, who contemplates the danger of cessation of the
one-who-gives-fire-stone. . . .

So Montrose had recognized the new dangers that faced Brandon
Arkad here, eh? She was not surprised.

She hesitated, sensing
the edge of a precipice. But the danger in this method of inquiry about the
Arkad’s mental state was only to herself, so she persisted:

And the
one-who-gives-fire-stone?

The
one-who-gives-fire-stone contemplates the patterns that move the metal hives
between worlds—

And far away, she barely perceived a whisper of thought,
carried over the familiar high-energy emotional signature: she could, if she
concentrated, hear him.

She forced her
attention away.

The one-in-flight
moves in a small metal hive. . . .

The Eya’a abruptly
abandoned Marim.

Comes Nivi’ya.

“Another-One-Who-Hears.”

Vi’ya had only moments to fight off the vertigo of
psi-contact before the annunciator emitted its flat chime. This was the man who
had visited the Eya’a at Eloatri’s request, the first human to communicate with
them other than herself.

That request had been a shock that caused an inward struggle
Vi’ya had had to hide. She had no exclusive claim to the Eya’a, but had become
so used to being the only one to communicate with them that her proprietary
attitude had become unconscious habit.

So she’d listened from a distance until they nearly caused
the new mind to shut down. Glad that they were not present, Vi’ya tabbed the
door open.

It was startling to see another Dol’jharian, even one
wearing the robes of one of the Panarchist Colleges. Tall for one of her
people, the old man ducked his head under the door frame as he entered. He was
broad in shoulders and chest, and dark of hair and face, and his long beard did
not mask the distinctive hawk nose, strong cheekbones, and deep-set eye sockets
common to mainland Dol’jharians. The difference, besides the robes, was the incongruously
gentle expression in his seamed face.

“I was sent by the High Phanist,”
he said in greeting, and then in Dol’jharian, “and I, too, am a descendant of
the Chorei who fled the Children of Dol.”

Meeting another tempath was always difficult, but the
reference to the Chorei, so soon after a contact with the Eya’a, made it
especially so.
Desrien.
Intense
memory flooded her mind, causing a shock of indecipherable reaction from the
Eya’a. She wrenched her focus to the tall Dol’jharian waiting patiently before
her.

She could feel the strength of his own focus, a rarity that
made her hackles stir. Sharp was the instinct to fight or flee, but she forced
herself to use her senses to listen, to evaluate.

The reward was a steadying sense of personal identity. His
emotional signature was powerful—had to be, as she knew her own was—and
baffling in its complexity. But she did not find the skin-crawling twist that
characterized Hreem’s pet tempath Norio Danali, or the invasive caresses given
off by a certain prominent club owner on Rifthaven, whose dedication to the
pleasures of the senses was famed.

In fact, though she could feel the strength of his focus, it
did not trigger her danger sense, any more than she felt danger when the deck
plates beneath her feet vibrated with power during the shift to fiveskip.

The silence had grown protracted. Yet her guest seemed
content to wait for her to finish her assessment.

It was a gesture more potent than mere words. She said, “I
am Vi’ya, in Eya’a-speech One-Who-Hears. Before my escape, I was called
Death-Eyes.” She heard a faint ripple of fear-reaction from the Eya’a,
inevitable when she recollected her childhood.

His head inclined, equal-to-equal. “I was before my own
escape Manderian rahal’Khesteli, of the House of Nojhrian.”

“Nojhrian. Shipbuilders,” she said.

He bowed his head. “I was content enough to work with ship
design, and hide my talents from my mother’s
pesz mas’hadni
, until my sister decided it was time to begin the
war for the succession.” He smiled. “My talents saved me, and my knowledge of
ships bought my freedom from the planet.” He shook his head. “It is a bankrupt
culture, and there are more of us than the overlords realize. Do you know aught
of the history of the Chorei? Not,” he added, “the karra-cursed lies they
taught us as children, but the truth?”

She hesitated. There were histories, untainted by the lies
of the Children of Dol; she’d accessed them here on Ares. But the intent of his
question reached beyond that. The vision from her stay on Desrien loomed again,
with near-paralyzing clarity: the asteroid glow descending so slowly over the
eastern sea, heralding the destruction of the island-dwelling Chorei at the
hands of the mainland Dol’jharians—but that memory would not be spoken.
“Enough,” she said.

Once again he inclined his head. “There will be changes one
day.” The soft-spoken words carried all the resonance of foreknowledge. “For
now time speeds, and we have much to do. You must know that I attempted to establish
communication with the Eya’a, at the request of the High Phanist. I believe I
succeeded, though the attempt nearly killed me.”

And from their distant vantage, they sent the thought:
This one makes hand-before-the-face words
for Eya’a, for the ones-among-many. We celebrate new word-nexi.

“Nivi’ya,” she murmured.

“‘Another who hears.’ Does this mean they accept me as a
kind of pet? Their reactions are difficult to interpret.” He paused, smiling,
as if offering behind the joke a chance for her to elucidate on Eya’a
psychology, but she remained silent. Then he went on, “Based on that encounter,
I am attempting to devise a sign-language to enable them to communicate
necessities to the humans around them as they move about the station.”

He did not ask her why she had not attempted anything of the
sort herself, nor did he query the depth of their communication level. She
sensed that just as she had, he concealed things from her. She could hardly
complain. “I shall do my best,” she said.

“Good.” He switched to Uni. “Let me explain my initial
thoughts, and if you will corroborate or correct, I believe we may have a
measure of success.”

o0o

Eloatri finished her meditation, took three cleansing
breaths, then unfolded her legs with the ease of decades of habit. She rose to
her feet.

She sensed her secretary, Tuan, still deep in meditation.
The pervasive atmosphere of tension throughout Ares had affected them all.

Before her walk in the garden she decided to steel herself
to duty and check her drops. She tabbed the control on her boswell that had
shut off the neuraimai triage dumps, and sorted rapidly through the IDs and
headers of the messages.

She paused at an invitation to a party, at the Ascha
Gardens, from Tate Kaga. What was the old nuller up to now? The image of the
Digrammaton burned into her palm tingled.

Prophetae, shaman, trickster—he was utterly unpredictable.
He’d been a longtime friend to Tomiko. When Eloatri first met him at the
reception celebrating the arrival of the Aerenarch, he’d looked at her in
silence, then said only, “He chose well.”

Eloatri decided that this was one function she wouldn’t miss
for anything. In spite of the disorienting effects of the Gardens’ layout. She
tabbed her acceptance, then forwarded the other messages to Tuan to deal with,
and escaped into the garden.

There she stood for a time listening to the waterfall and
the sweet tang of hidden wind chimes, until her boswell chimed: Manderian had
returned.

Eloatri crossed the tiled courtyard to the reception chamber
to welcome the huge Dol’jharian gnostor from Synchronistic Perceptions and
Practice.

“How did it go?” she asked.

“We have much to discuss,”
Manderian replied.

At her gesture of invitation, he followed her to the garden.

All the way back from Detention Five he had had to resort to
cleansing breathing. His nerves felt unsheathed to the breeze carrying wafts of
coolness from the waterfall, and the busy chitter of unseen creatures. He found
these gentle evidences of life soothing, and finally he could speak.

“I attempted to communicate with
the Eya’a,” Manderian began, “as you requested.”

“And?” she prompted gently,
disturbed by the narrowing of pain in his eyes.

“Forgive me, Numen. It was . . .
almost overwhelming. I was only the second human with whom they have exchanged . . .
concepts.” He shook his head. “It is difficult to describe. They do not, even
now, fully understand that each of us is a monad. I believe that this is the
result of their first peaceful contact being with the Kelly, whose psychic
interconnectedness is comprehensible to their own hive mentality.”

“What did they say?”

“Nothing, and too much.”

He fell silent again, staring at the ground, his hands
pressed palm-to-palm between his knees. Presently he looked up again. “So I
heeded your advice and visited the one they call Vi’ya. With her cooperation, I
have devised some very simple gestural semiotics for them to use with other
humans—you will have found an explanation among your drops.”

Eloatri nodded.

“But for the most part, their
communication was a maelstrom of images and emotions with only the most tenuous
connection to anything I could understand. I wonder, almost fear, what the
years of association with them have done—are doing—to Vi’ya.”

“You think she is in danger?”

“Perhaps. I cannot judge. The woman
and the sophonts are an authentic Primal Contact, a nexus in the collision of
two noospheres. They never had so protracted a contact with the Kelly; that was
just long enough to establish a possible peaceful coexistence. Vi’ya’s and
their extended association is the classic Meeting of the Archetypes being
researched by the Joint Conference of the Colleges of Xenology and Archetype
and Ritual.”

He saw her confusion at his terminology. “I have heard you
speak of a ‘Hinge of Time.’ That is much the same idea. The psychic energies of
human and Eya’a are blending, with an echo of the Kelly, not only from long
ago, but brought to present association via the youth Ivard.”

That was confirmation of the impressions she received when
the Kelly physician-trinity had retrieved their Archon’s genome from Ivard’s
flesh.

“And one more thing,” Manderian
said, “one image that repeated: a small silver sphere, with an impression of
great power.”

Eloatri nodded, unsurprised, but the Dol’jharian’s next
words stunned her. “The Eya’a seem to believe that it, or perhaps more likely,
some component of it, is here, on Ares. They are trying to reach it.”

She swallowed, her mouth suddenly dry. “Then they know about
the captured hyperwave.”

“I believe so. I do not know what
they want with it.”

She took a deep breath. The Dreamtime had bidden her follow
these people, a spiritual quest that was drawing her ever deeper into the
politics of Ares and the prosecution of a desperate war. Nyberg and Omilov
would have to be told.

For now she put the thought aside. She still had her own
concerns, and, in the balance of Telos, the fate of one sentient being weighed
as heavily as that of an entire polity.

“Please tell me more about your
meeting with Vi’ya.”

“Well enough,” he said. “She does
not trust us, as you warned. She has little enough reason to do so, yet she did
help me with the semiotics.”