Bright of the Sky (29 page)

Anzi bowed, but Bei’s gaze was on Quinn.

Quinn said, “I think you know me.”

Bei turned away, shaking his head. “A good day turned bad. Visitors, they said. By the bright . . .” He muttered something more, then turned back to them. “All that trouble getting you gone and what good did it do?” He nodded at the assistant, dismissing him back down the long tunnel.

Bei frowned at Quinn. “You’ve aged.”

“Hazards of the Rose.”

The old man snorted. “But they’re your hazards, not mine. Why do you bring me your problems?”

“What makes you think I’ve got a problem?”

“If you’re here,” the old man said, “you have a problem.” He glanced at Anzi. “Where was he found? Who knows about him?”

Anzi stepped forward. “I am Anzi, master.”

“I know who you are.”

She passed by this remark. “Wen An brought him from the Ti Jing reach, injured and stunned. She sent him to my uncle, and all who saw him are now silent, except Wen An, whom we must trust.”

Bei moved to Quinn’s side, studying him from that angle.

Now a gleaming section of wall came into view—a glistening and translucent membrane covering a cleft in the room. Here, the walls of the chamber converged at an acute angle, leaving the membrane to cover a gap of perhaps four feet wide by nine feet high. It was impossible that the transition between worlds was constrained by the thin veil, or was it. The walls receded past the membrane into a long and tapering crevice that appeared to be filled with a viscous solution that pulsed now and then, causing the veil to tremble. Its surface flickered with starscapes.

Noting his gaze, Bei said, “You remember one of these?” He peered closer at Quinn. “You remember me?” Then he answered his question himself: “No, you don’t. Good.”

“What are you afraid I’ll remember?”

“Everything.” He gazed at Quinn a long time, then said, “Why have you come, Titus?”

“For your help.”

Bei grimaced. “No doubt. But why have you come back to the Entire?”

“For my wife and daughter.” And revising, “For Sydney.”

Bei closed his eyes a moment, and then shook his head. “The worst possible reason.” He came closer, examining Quinn’s face. “Are you sure it’s you? Yellow eyes—I don’t remember yellow eyes.”

Anzi said, “Lenses, master.”

“So,” Bei said, “Yulin’s helping him. Got himself an escort and fancy ideas about the daughter.” He turned to Anzi. “Yulin sent him to me?”

She shook her head. “But my uncle knows he came here, master.”

“So the old bear managed to avoid committing himself, eh? Doesn’t surprise me.”

The membrane darkened suddenly, to utter blackness. Bei noted Quinn’s gaze. “If I had my way, I’d send you through here this moment. But as you see, there’s only death on the other side right now. Someday the veil might be productive.” He grimaced. “I’ll have my grave flag by then. Meanwhile, the old and the infirm are welcome to it. And Hirrin royals with fancy ambitions.”

Quinn held his gaze. “I don’t want to go through. When I do, it’ll be with my daughter.”

“Daughter,” Bei muttered. Turning to Anzi, he said, “He’s been addled like this since he arrived?”

Anzi faced him squarely. “He thinks he can save his daughter. Might it be true, master?”

Bei looked at her like she had caught Quinn’s madness. “Might it be true? Of course it isn’t!” He turned to Quinn. “Your daughter is far away. Another primacy away. No one goes there; why should they? The Inyx are good for nothing but running and dying in the Long War. Do you think the Inyx would give up your daughter easily? Alarms would be raised, and before you had gone a day’s journey, the lords would have you. In all that you have forgotten, have you forgotten that they travel on the bright? Have you forgotten how they hate you?” As though in answer, a thrum sounded under their feet, a profoundly bass note like a chthonic god saying
hmmmm
.

Bei waved a dismissive hand. “No, you don’t remember, of course not. You can thank me for that. When I sent you home, I sent you with white hair and drowned memories. The drowned memories were so you would never come back.” In a quieter voice he said, “The white hair was because I thought you might.”

He reached up to pick at Quinn’s silk hat. “Still white? Good. It worked, then. I’m not a magician, you know. I don’t have the power to find your daughter or help you kill yourself. Yes, I once served the Tarig. I lived among them and had every power a Chalin could want. Then Titus Quinn fell into a rage and everything fell apart. You
struck
Lord Hadenth.”

He peered at Quinn, waiting for a reaction. “Yes, struck him, with a lucky—or unlucky—blow that almost killed him. Then you fled Tarig justice, the first ever to do so. All this occurred under my tutelage, my responsibility.” He turned from Quinn and stared into the grotto of light, flickering low. “They let me live, thinking me witless. But my scholarship was over. All my studies. Taken from me. All my scrolls . . .” His voice quavered. “I came here. There is nothing left but scraps. We paste them together. So I have nothing to give you.”

He stood, looking old and defeated. “Go home, Titus. There’s been enough ruin.”

Quinn let that sit for a moment. “The memories you took. I need them.” It was only part of what he needed from Bei, but the old man’s mood was poor for asking favors.

Bei exclaimed, “What good would memories do you? They’re all of the
Ascendancy
. It’s all you knew, back then.” After a moment, understanding dawned. “You’re going
there
?” He looked in astonishment at Anzi, then back at Quinn. “You will lie at their feet. And as well, the girl who helped you, the girl who started the whole disaster. She’ll join you.” He peered at Anzi. “Yulin is allowing this?”

“My uncle says there is no stopping the people of the Rose. Now that Titus Quinn is here.”

Bei turned to Quinn. “Is that right? No stopping the human hordes?”

Quinn said, “No stopping our use of the Entire to travel in the Rose, by a detour through the veils.”

Bei looked from one to the other, running his hands through his hair. “And the daughter? She is relevant how?”

Quinn grew weary of the old man’s hostility, but he kept his own impatience in check. He needed Bei’s goodwill. “She’s only relevant to me.”

Bei sighed. “This will be easy. Snatch your daughter from the Inyx sway. Open the veils to human travel, trusting that they have no interest in staying to live forever.” The old man paced, and as he did, his redstones clacked together, swinging on their strands. “I draw Titus Quinn to me like Paion to Ahnenhoon.” He shook his head. “God has noticed me.”

“You have no children, Su Bei.” Quinn was guessing, but he thought that was right. If he’d had children, he’d know why Quinn couldn’t give up.

“No, no children. But if I did, I wouldn’t let myself be killed for them.”

“I think you would.”

Bei shook his head. “You haven’t changed. You never learned that things pass. She’s lost to you. Best to accept this.”

“I can’t do that.”

Bei eyed him with disgust. “Human, you are human. I keep forgetting that. Even if I sent you home, you’d be back, chasing after life and all the lost things. Why did I ever think otherwise?” He looked at Anzi. “Yulin has set all this in motion. I blame him. And the red crone, who should know better.” He raised an eyebrow at Anzi. “So they succumbed to the Titus Quinn spell, did they?” She didn’t answer, and Bei turned back to Quinn. “You attract fierce attachments; you always did, Titus. Some you had cause to regret.” He slowly shook his head. “You don’t remember that part, do you?”

There was a long pause, filled only by the throbbing rock and its odd harmonics, endlessly repeating. Quinn thought that if he stayed here long, he would have to plug his ears against that music.

A long silence ensued as Bei twitched his mouth in thought. Then he said: “I’ll give you what is yours. Your story. But you won’t thank me for it.”

“I will,” Quinn said.

Bei snorted. “We shall see.”

He walked to a side door and opened it, gesturing them through. As he did so, the veil’s membrane flashed brighter, showing a streak of glowing, interstellar gas. A streak of white formed a finger of hot light, as though pointing the way into the abyss.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The student asks, Master, what is the other realm that we perceive
through the veil?

    The master answers, It is the cosmos of cold and fire and disruption;
it is the place of delusion, thinking itself primary; it is
the ancient sway of all templates, the core designs of all sentients,
perfected in the Bright Realm; its worlds are spheres of war and
misery; its worlds have scattered glories, among them a colorful
sprouting called the rose; it is a domain of striving, and hopes lost
to the decay of days; it is a zone where glorious day holds only
half the sky; it is the kingdom of the evanescent.

    It is what you see through the veil.

—from
The Veil of a Thousand Worlds

T
HE THREE TOOK A MEAL IN BEI’S QUARTERS
adjacent to the veil-of-worlds room. A tottering assistant brought a tray of dumplings and oba, and they ate in silence, chewing on the food and their next moves.

Shelves formed the walls, packed tight with scrolls and bristling with loose papers. Tables bore the familiar boxy stone wells, some of them disassembled. Amid this, Bei’s rumpled bed squeezed into one corner.

Anzi told Bei of Master Yulin’s scheme, that Dai Shen would go as a suppliant and a messenger to the bright city, to secure the blessing of the high prefect for a journey to the Inyx. Bei shook his head, over and over.

“She will remember you,” he said. “She remembers everything.” It presented an opening for them to admit they came for a surgeon’s skills. Bei snorted, looking at Quinn’s face as though it were hopeless.

A tapestry of medieval European design hung over Bei’s bed nook. Noting Quinn’s gaze, Bei said, “A particular interest of mine. That one is based on the Dutch, fourteenth century.” His hawk eyes narrowed. “You don’t remember our discussions of the Middle Ages, I suppose.”

Quinn didn’t.

The scholar rose from his chair and went to the tapestry, which depicted a bearded white unicorn surrounded by a fence. The unicorn wore an elaborate collar and was crouching as though considering a jump from its cage. Bei’s gnarled hands touched the weaving. “You used to admire this tapestry. Saw yourself as the unicorn, no doubt.”

Quinn did remember the tapestry, and for some reason, it filled him with a deep unease.

Bei had taken a scroll from a hook and laid it out on the table. Thumbing the nub at the top, Bei enlivened the surface, showing a written Lucent treatise. On closer inspection, Quinn saw references to rivers and lands of the Earth.

Bei’s gnarled hand fluttered over the text. “The great discipline of geography. Each world has its mountains and valleys. Its face. Before you came, our knowledge of Earth geography was partial and misleading.” He sighed, retracting the scroll and waving it at the stuffed bookcases. “With your help, we secured the missing pieces of your mathematics, history, political economy, chemistry. You were no scholar, but you knew things.”

Quinn began to recall those discussions: long conversations threading deep into the ebb; Bei writing everything on a scroll.

“The Tarig wanted information on the Rose?”

Bei’s eyebrows furrowed down. “What the Tarig wanted was to know why you came here.” He turned to Anzi, who was paying strict attention on the sidelines. “Have you ever wondered why they failed to pursue you?” When Anzi nodded, he answered, “Because they were convinced the Rose
sent
Titus Quinn. They never guessed he was
retrieved
here. They always feared discovery by the Rose. The Tarig reasoned that it was intentional on the part of Rose warlords, to send a scout. It was my job to find out the details of the conspiracy.”

From deep below, a tone vibrated, like a gong buried in wool.

“Even after thousands of days, they still wished me to follow that line of questioning, and this I did. You knew the game, and you answered as best you could, the details of the politics and the power structures. Thanks to you we know about Earth’s hierarchies: the reigns of powerful commercial lords, and the magisterial lackeys that serve them. Minerva, that was one of the powers, wasn’t it? In any case, the Rose seemed an unlikely threat. So the Tarig lords grew more satisfied with you, that there was no conspiracy. After that my questions were only a scholar’s.

“That was when I began my great work. My book of cosmography, to lay out the structure of the Rose universe based upon the millions of views of the galaxies and clusters. There is no way to record a map of the Rose. It must be modeled mathematically based upon universal correlations and their relation to dimensionality.” He shrugged. “It is an old man’s fancy. When I am gone, no one will pursue the work.”

Quinn said, “
Are
there universal correlations?”

Bei eyed him a long moment. “Some say yes. Others . . .”

“Tarig say no.”

“And perhaps they’re right. Mutability is the principle. Mutability of correlates. They change in ways no one knows how to predict. Sometimes the view is steady, and of an inhabited world. The veils are attracted to power sources, and by this accommodation, we sometimes can study a situation, a people, for a hundred days—giving us a data point. Then the membrane blinks, and we see someplace new and unrelated—another data point.” He gestured in the direction of the veil-of-worlds. “Each point can be represented mathematically, even if it is black space. If you map such points, you have a geography of Rose space, a universal cosmography.

“That is my theory, and it has a strong following of one.”

Quinn said, “So your cosmography—it isn’t about correlating the Entire and the Rose.”

“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.”