Bright of the Sky (24 page)

Just before they boarded, he had time to hope that when they copied this from the Rose, they’d had the decency to keep a caboose.

CHAPTER TWELVE

The Three Vows are these:

Withhold the knowledge of the Entire from the non-Entire.

Impose the peace of the Entire.

Extend the reach of the Entire.

—from
The Radiant Way

A
LL CHILDREN LEARNED THE VOWS
, as their first chant, first ditty.

It was a sober nursery song, Quinn thought as he memorized the three vows with their stark verbs: Withhold. Impose. Extend. If Suzong was right, among the officials at the Ascendancy there might be some who chafed at withholding, who wanted converse between the worlds. Su Bei knew one person, but would he reveal the name? Yes. Because Quinn wouldn’t leave Bei’s reach without it.

For the train ride, Anzi had booked quarters on top of a passenger car. It had half-wall sides and a small roofed section for sleeping. In the next car forward, a wealthy Hirrin camped atop her own car, and sometimes sat on the roofed section looking around. The Hirrin was a four-legged creature with a long neck and a bald face. She sat on the roof, rear legs splayed forward, her long neck turning 360 degrees as she viewed the scenery.

Anzi said there were no lords on the train, and they could relax for at least a while. He saw Anzi glancing up now and then, watching, and he imagined the crescent shape that defined a brightship—as it must appear from the ground. He had never seen one from below, only from close at hand, when he had ridden them. The memory swam in and out, of his time as a prisoner in the Ascendancy. It was a city in the sky; he remembered that now. But every vision of the time before was hard-won, freed from oblivion only intermittently, and randomly. He felt like a rat, fed tidbits but caged from his own mind. Patience, he thought. It’s coming. It’s all coming to me, now that I’m here.

Quinn sat on a bench that Anzi had coaxed from the floor. Nubs on the car sides responded when she touched them, a slow process, but dependable.

Anzi fretted about the Hirrin. “She is watching us.” But if they moved quarters, that would look suspicious, she concluded.

“Let her watch.” To Quinn, the Hirrin seemed merely curious, and nothing to quash his exhilaration at being on the move.

Anzi said, “It’s no small matter, if she doubts who we are. Since you left, all sentients have been alerted to watch for Titus Quinn. No one knows where you disappeared to, or that you went back to the Rose. It’s not trivial.”

“No, perhaps not. But what can we do? The less we fret, the more natural we look. And if she turns us in, then the next move is ours.”

Absorbing this, Anzi said, “A contradiction. Interesting.”

“What is?”

“So few days, for you of the Rose. And so careless of dying, yes?”

He hadn’t thought he was careless of dying, but it was true he hadn’t given it much thought. People of the Rose didn’t often think of dying. Maybe it was too big to carry around. He said as much to Anzi.

She marveled at the thought. “So big, and yet it remains under cover. Or perhaps it’s bravery. Yes, I think you’re very brave.”

“But Anzi, so are you. Being with me is an indictment all by itself.”

“True. But being with you is my duty.”

“And being here is mine.”

She cut a glance at him. “I thought it was for love.”

He’d never said that. But he liked that she’d said it. No one, not even Caitlin, had ever said outright that it was for love. Most of the time he’d heard
stubborn
,
bitter
, and
inflexible
. He smiled at Anzi and, tentatively, she smiled back.

The wind off the veldt brought a clovelike scent as the two of them watched the plains speed by, one region, or wielding, giving way to the next within the great Chalin sway. Moving without tracks, without wheels, the train hummed quietly. The material it was made of might have been metal, but it had an odd texture. There could hardly be natural deposits of metals in this world. Or petroleum. The materials were likely to be the result of molecular engineering. In a universe without stars, without a geologic history.

The train’s technologies were hidden, and taken for granted by Anzi. The energy source was the bright. What generated the bright? Or the walls, for that matter? These questions were apparently far from Anzi’s mind. Whatever the source, it was colossal. Perhaps infinite.

Anzi managed to convey that for the energy needs of industry, of computer stone wells, of dwellings nothing was burned, not even hydrogen. Modeled on a plant’s photosynthetic reaction centers, plasma cells harvested photons. The longer the train, the more surface room for its molecular arrays, acting like antennae for the energy of the bright—no mere drizzle of photons, but a shower. The Tarig had remade photosynthesis in inorganic form. It made Earth’s fusion technologies seem crass by comparison. In this universe, the likes of Helice and Stefan were not the savvies. The Tarig were.

Eventually, Quinn grew restless, saying, “I’ll go down to the passenger cars, Anzi. It’s a long way to the reach. We can’t just sit here.” There was great variety; enough variety even in Chalin skin tones for him to pass, if he stayed silent.

“No, please, Dai Shen.” Other travelers might engage him in conversation he wasn’t ready for, she said. Hirrin, especially, were meddlers, as proven by their neighbor who had no need to sit on her roof unless she wanted a better view into others’ cars.

Anzi’s caution only emphasized what he already knew, that she thought this whole undertaking one of unconscionable risk. No one had asked her what she thought, and if they had, she could hardly argue that Quinn give up his daughter. On the subject of family, Anzi knew to be quiet.

Still, he argued with her. “It attracts more attention if we never leave the roof of this car. People will wonder about us.”

“Dai Shen, you have an accent. It marks you as from the Ascendancy.”

This spooked him. “Since when?”

“It’s been coming into your speech. People will ask you of the bright city, and you will have nothing to say.”

They worked on ridding him of his accent. The subjects ranged among politics, social customs, religion, and the law. And always, the past, Quinn’s past.

Anzi told how she had brought him into the Entire. Her teacher, Vingde, had been studying a gravitational phenomenon in the Rose. By Anzi’s general descriptions, Quinn thought it might have been black holes. At his reach, at the tip of a minoral, Vingde had been experimenting with forbidden connections to the Rose, and had determined that passages were easier between the Entire and black holes. Vingde planned to exploit this in an experiment, but the Tarig detected his fumblings and swept down on him. Afterward, Anzi worked for a hundred days before she locked on to a Karda-shev tunnel. One day she observed an intense perturbation. This was the explosion and destruction of Quinn’s ship. Anzi saw the capsule and who was in it. A man, a woman, and a child. She had only a moment to decide.

He wondered if, when the time came, Vingde’s reach might be an exit point to get home. Anzi said no. The Tarig had destroyed Vingde’s reach, for one thing. And one reach was as good as another. Just because one entered from a certain reach, this was no reason to believe the site still correlated with home.

As they talked, the bright subsided from lush silver flames to the verge of lavender, glowing with hints of incandescence amid the embers. It was not what one could call night. One could read a book all ebb long, and never need a candle.

He was gazing at his pictures, shading them with his hands so the sky would not fade them. Johanna had been dead a long time. At some level he had known this, but now it was certain. Sydney was blind. But she was alive. It calmed him, knowing what his sorrows were instead of guessing at them.

Next to him, Anzi murmured, “Tell me about your young girl.”

After a pause he said, “She liked to climb trees.”

Johanna stood at the foot of the mountain ashberry tree, looking up at Sydney in
the upper branches. “If you break your neck, you’re grounded for a week.”

Sydney’s face appeared out of a nest of leaves. “It’s a deal.”

He began to improve the placement of his tongue for the glottal sounds.

“What else did she like?”

“Running. The color orange. Riding horses.” The memories, no longer sharp knives, were still little cuts. “She had a train set.”

“Did she look like you?”

“No.” After a time he said in a low voice, “She looked like her mother.”

Quinn tried to imagine what Sydney looked like now as a young woman.

Well, he would soon find out, after Bei’s reach, and after the Ascendancy— when at last he arrived at the Inyx sway at the far end of the universe.
A million
lifetimes away
, Anzi had said,
but close, when we travel the River Nigh.

We are near, Sydney, he thought. Wait for me.

The next day, sitting on his bench at the Prime of Day, Quinn could see hundreds of miles, and within that view were only the sky, the mighty veldt, and in the distance, a pillar that descended from the bright. That slender thread, called an
axis
of the bright, marked a trading center and a communication center, Anzi said. If you wished to transmit messages within the Entire, it was as easy to go there in person as to rely on the axes. And going there in person involved “a thousand days,” which was the Chalin answer to almost all questions of how far things were. This was because the answer was, in terms of travel,
That depends.
The River Nigh rendered distance beside the point.

This river was no natural river, but it was a transport stream. Devised by the Tarig, it made travel possible in the Entire over galactic-scale distances, so Anzi claimed. The River Nigh bound the kingdom together, unifying the sentients and the sways. If you were determined, you could travel anywhere.

“Where is the Nigh?” Quinn asked.

Anzi pointed to the port side of the train, off into the distance. “At the storm wall. The river follows the storm wall. But one side only, and farthest from here.”

“How far does the river go?”

She looked at him in surprise. “That’s hard to say. Forever. It goes forever. And then, into the Sea of Arising, which is the sea above which the Ascendancy floats. And then, down each primacy, a similar river flows. Always called the Nigh. Eventually, the Nigh will bear us on its back, if God does not look on us.”

His scrolls said that the key to the Nigh resided in the binds, the nexus points. But when he asked Anzi about the binds, she said, “Only the navitars understand them. The pilots.” She grew sober, speaking of the navitars, creatures so distorted that they no longer had normal lives, nor allegiance to any sway. The Tarig performed the needed physical alterations at the navitars’ request, granting the pilots sole powers to navigate the dimensional transport stream. From Anzi’s comments, Quinn gathered that she found the navitars both morbid and sublime.

As relief from being cooped up and constantly studying, Anzi continued his fighting instruction. The swaying of the train was just enough to make them both more prone to falling. The Hirrin watched from her rooftop, then disappeared.

They soon knew why. A train magister came knocking at their berth, wondering about the fighting, saying trouble had been reported by concerned parties. Anzi said she was receiving instruction from her servant who had served at Ahnenhoon, which brought from the magister many bows in Quinn’s direction. The magister left, with apologies.

Anzi hid her smile. The Hirrin was truly just a gossip, and no Tarig spy.

It was several days before the Hirrin resumed her perch. When she did, she bowed in their direction with a sweep of her long neck, a nice bow for a quadruped. Anzi bowed back, and peace between neighbors was restored.

On the fifth day out from Yulin’s city of Xi, Quinn gave in to the urge to explore the train. Knowing Anzi would argue against it, he waited until she left to purchase their midday meal. Then he descended into the passenger cars. In the general melee of bodies and activity, hardly a face turned to regard him.

Among the Chalin passengers, he saw other sentient creatures, including Hirrin of lesser means than their wealthy neighbor. It seemed normal to him that these quadrupeds were sentient, because, of course, it was not the first time he’d seen them, and at some level he recognized them. He saw smaller beings he guessed might be pets, but avoided staring, and learned to watch with his peripheral vision.

Pressing on through the cabins, he went through flexible tubes between cars, passing Chalin dressed in loose pants and jackets in colorful varieties of silks. Many Chalin had the aspect of soldiers and bore the scars of battle.

There were games played on raised tables, where fingers inserted into divots created patterns of colors. Continuing through the cars and tubes, Quinn caught glimpses through the windows at the everlasting flat country. It was an oddly peaceful view. He was content to be on the move. It wasn’t happiness, but it was a more solid grounding than he had known in a long while.

He came to a car where one half was crowded and the other half contained only one man in white, surrounded by empty seats.

“You won’t want to go through there,” the man said as Quinn headed for the tube.

Quinn turned to gaze on the plump young man, by his dress a godman. He was intent on rolling a spindle of thread in his lap. “The meat car,” the godman added.

“I see.” Though he didn’t.

“Take my aunt’s chair, if you want to rest.” He nodded at a vacant seat that looked molded for a hugely broad bottom. After a pause, Quinn took the seat. The godman pulled thread from a basket at his feet. “These are the worst seats, of course.” He glanced at the tube to the next car. “Can you smell them?”

“Not so bad,” he said. Although he did smell something strange.

The young man looked at Quinn as though afraid he’d taken offense. “I don’t say it’s wrong. There are many ways within the path, of course. I may wear white, but I’m not as bad as I look. Do you think I’d be a godman if I could help it?”