City Without End (14 page)

Soon the ship keeper came to say they would dock. She went on deck, filling her lungs with cleansing air. There was no sign of Geng De or Helice. In the crowded waters near the port, ships plowed their courses, hulls streaming mercurial spray, shifting to neon greens and watery sapphire, if her eyes saw true.

As she rounded the prow of the ship, she saw a startling view of Rim City. The metropolis lay in a vast arc before her. With ebb-time lights just emerging, the coast bore a necklace of glittering stones, with the nearest node of the metropolis a central diadem.

Glancing up at the pilot house, she saw Geng De looking down at her. Anuve was nowhere in sight. Geng De bowed, and she nodded a little in return. She might not want him for an advisor. But she didn’t need him as an enemy, either.

Then she turned back to the bejeweled city. She had never lived in a city, much less the largest city in the universe, but she wouldn’t let it change her. She was a child of the roamlands. She knew how to ride an Inyx, command the loyalty of the herd, and fly into the mind of the Tarig. Whatever Rim City would bring, it couldn’t be harder than what she’d already done.

Helice joined her at the railing. “What did he want?” she whispered in English.

Sydney realized with surprise that she was going to lie to Helice. “He wanted to sell us more information.”

Helice was watching her with a considering gaze. “I didn’t think navi-tars were so worldly.”

“I didn’t think so either. This one is different.” It was easy to claim to foretell and to boast of having seen things happening far away. Perhaps he knew little, and only shared the navitar propensity for visions. She would have preferred him as a normal pilot. She would have preferred not hearing that a knot bound them together. She chose not to believe it.

But if she didn’t want him for a friend, she was not so sure she wanted Helice, either.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The student asks: If my redstone necklace had every view of every
veil that ever brightened, would I be wise?
      
The master answers: If I had a thousand pieces of a priceless
vase, would I be rich?

—from
The Veil of the Thousand Worlds

S
U BEI WATCHED AS HIS LAST SERVANT LEFT HIM
, riding a beku down the minoral. Zhou had been with him ten thousand days and had begged to stay with his master, but Bei had been firm. My work is coming to an end, he’d said. I’m too old for scholarship. He hoped old Zhou would believe it.

Their farewell had been perfunctory at the end, with Zhou crushed and Bei impatient to get back to his treatise. His treatise on the cosmography of the Rose would be his crowning achievement. Bei rubbed his hands together to fend off the chill of the storm walls. It was a black day, and no mistake. But here at the very tip of the minoral it was always black. The storm walls made it so: one on that side, one on this, converging at the crucial veil of worlds. No other place worth living, even if it meant isolation and talking to stone well machines instead of flesh and blood. Well, goodbye to Zhou. Never say farewell; in a life of one hundred thousand days, they were sure to meet again. Time enough to see one’s friends more than enough and grow tired of them.

Bei raised a hand in blessing, but Zhou was by now well down the minoral, cape billowing in the storm wall turbulence.

He hurried to the lift and closed the doors for the descent into the cavity. There was no sense building the veil above ground. No stability. Further- more, it was hard to keep stone wells functioning what with the dust and the electrical charges. No, deep underground was the place, and Bei now had its warrens to himself and his studies.

Unless you counted Ji Anzi. Well, the girl did not count. Stone well literate, but no scholarly training.

The lift door opened, and Bei hastened down the corridor to the veil of worlds room.

Ji Anzi had promised to stay out of his way while she hid here, though why she came to him, he could not have said. Certainly, his minoral was no haven from the Tarig. Time was when the fiends had watched him closely, coming in their brightships, checking on him, suspicious that since Bei had known Titus in the Ascendancy, he might have seen him again. And so he had; and sent him on his way again, to seek out the correlates.

He’d succeeded in finding them and now had sent them to his old friend. Yes, the dear boy had sent him the great secret of the Entire: the algorithms predicting the specific alignment of the shifting universes, the formulas identifying how and when one might safely travel from here to there and back again. And, if one were not in a traveling mode—as Bei most certainly was not—one could use them for scholarship, to add to his map of the Rose universe. It wasn’t clear the correlates could be used for anything else. Nor that they should be.

Titus was growing in power, just as Bei had predicted; but whether he would ever use his power to make inroads against the Tarig—well, that dream was far beyond the man. Time was that Bei had thought Titus Quinn possessed a high destiny; but he’d yet to prove he had a whisker’s weight of ambition.

He hastened through the great stone well room, empty now except for snaking, disconnected cables. He’d ordered the computational engines moved down the corridor to his sanctuary to concentrate all resources on his great task.

Bei fondled the redstones strung around his neck. The correlates were the very thing Titus Quinn had come seeking in the first place. Given into Titus’s hands in the form of redstone memory nuggets by none other than a Tarig lord, Titus had sent them to Bei for safe keeping—either because he thought he wouldn’t live long or because he feared losing them, Bei didn’t know. So while Bei was curious what the man was up to, he wasn’t going to waste the opportunity of having the stones in his possession.

It was only a few arcs ago that the messenger had arrived with the precious packet, suggesting that a high lord was involved, and the need for utmost secrecy. Of course, Bei well knew which lord was likely to be involved: Lord Oventroe, the very lord that Bei had known so long ago at the Ascendancy. So: Titus had managed to convince Oventroe to help him. Titus could be persuasive, Bei remembered. Obviously, he wasn’t ready to take his daughter and use the correlates to go home. Instead, he’d made sure Bei had them. Should Titus be captured or killed, Bei was to find a way to send them to the Rose woman known as Caitlin, sister-in-law to Titus.

How Bei would be expected to
find
the woman, he had no idea. But Titus wasn’t dead yet.

There was also the question of the ethics of giving up the correlates at all. Bei could well imagine an influx of Roselings into the Entire, a cultural upheaval devoutly to be avoided. No, he’d have to make Titus see the error of that. And meanwhile, the redstones were perfectly safe in this obscure minoral and scholarly reach.

He entered the veil-of-worlds room, noting the quick transitions on the gel surface, flicking past a thousand correlations every increment, casting a strobing light onto the racks of stone wells and discarded drinking cups. He seated himself at the table where his enlivened scrolls lay in piles. No sooner was he settled and organizing his thoughts, than Anzi appeared at his door.

“I thought you might like some company, Su Bei.” She stood in that still and self-possessed way she had—as though she would wait all day for the answer she wanted. She wouldn’t get it this time.

“Company is the last thing I want. Don’t you have the midday meal to make?”

“It’s waiting for you in your quarters.”

As though he had time for meals, now when all of his scholars were gone and only himself for the work. He gave her a quick look. Maybe she could help . . . but no, there was no time to train her. He wanted no students. They couldn’t be trusted with the correlates, couldn’t be trusted to even
know
about the correlates—oh, it was a dangerous knowledge that Bei now had; Lord Oventroe’s messenger had made that clear. No one must know. But Anzi already knew; knew about the lord himself and his fascination with the Rose. There was no good reason to send her away, so here she remained at this scholar’s retreat, as useful as legs on an Adda.

Anzi watched the veil-of-worlds bring its sight to bear on the Rose. The scenes flicked rapidly. “Are these of Earth?”

“Earth? Do they look like Earth? It’s the cosmos, girl, it’s darkling space, have you no wits?” Earth was the least of his concerns. The
Rose
was his field of vision, the
universe
, not just a world. Each flick of the veil registered a place in the Rose cosmos, one rife with relation to every other place. It must all be coordinated into his grand scheme of cosmography. Where was Earth in such a perspective? It was less than a pimple on a flea on a beku’s arse.

He waited for Anzi to leave, but she went on, “How long will it take you to make your map?”

“Longer than it would if I had peace to make it.”

“An arc, a sequent, a phase of time? How long, Master Bei?”

He pulled on his beard, his mood darkening. “A thousand days. Two thousand days. Why should I know or care? I work until I finish. Then it is done.”

“By then we will be at war. No one will finish the map.”

“Not finish? That would be a catastrophe of the highest order. Of course I will finish it. I’ve already written the introduction. Leave me in peace so I can write the rest.”

She began her protests again, but Bei pointed a finger at the girl, silencing her. “Lord Oventroe won’t let them burn the Rose. He is a powerful lord and will arrange it.”

“Easy to say, not so easy to do.”

Bei strove for patience. “These are matters for the Ascendancy, girl. Best to leave politics for those with a stomach for it.”

She continued as though she hadn’t heard him. “But you have the correlates, Master Bei. You have the power to help.”

“Ah, power. It’s what we’re fighting about, isn’t it, young Anzi? And is it your
scholar’s
opinion that the correlates can engender power—matter to burn, fuel to keep the bright bright?” He waited for her to dig herself a scholarly
hole.

“You could forge ties between the worlds. You could find ways for us to have converse.”

He stared at her. “You think conversations will prevent war?”

She shifted her feet, caught without a rebuttal.

He picked up a scroll and activated it, but she blurted out, “There must be a way for people to cross safely back and forth. Bring some people of the Rose here. And let some of us go there. How can we find peace if we know nothing of each other?”

Bei remained silent, staggered by her naiveté. Had this been her philosophy from the start? Get people talking and they’ll love each other? Is this why she had fatefully snatched Titus Quinn from the Rose so long ago, bringing all this danger upon the world?

As though remembering the same thing, Anzi murmured, “It’s worth some risk.”

“It would be worth it indeed, if there was any likelihood of success. Unfortunately, people in the Rose are trying to shatter the storm walls. Do you suggest that I am supposed to bring more of them over?” His voice had risen a little too fast, too sharp. “Anzi,” he said, trying a more reasonable tone, “you must understand, the more we know of each other, the less we’ll like each other.”

“Just the opposite, master. Remember, Titus once hated me. Now I am his wife.”

Oh,
that
. She and Titus had been thrust together, shared dangers, and now they called their feelings of gratitude
love
.

He sighed. Why was he wasting his breath? He had work to do. “I do not have time to try to ferry people back and forth, even if I had a way to do it, which I do not.”

It was true. He hadn’t figured out how to refine his investigations in so narrow a fashion. He was just sketching out the grand structural elements of the Rose, with its clusters of galaxies, its curtains of globular clouds. Chasing after planetoids was outside of strict scholarship. He looked at her obdurate expression. Well, perhaps for Anzi and Titus he might arrange a chapter on Earth correlations, with a few mathematical expressions of affinity. Titus would appreciate a nice chapter.

“He has the war chain, you know.”

This new tactic brought him up short. “The chain, is it? Is he going to kill me with it, then?” He rose from his chair, agitated and aware of the day’s work slipping away. “For not complying with your directives?”

She held her ground. “You should be grateful he didn’t use it to destroy us.”

Bei sighed. “I
am
grateful. My ancestors are grateful. My bekus are grateful. But gratitude can’t shape scholarship, or we would only have scrolls celebrating our mothers.” He fixed her with his most severe look. “No, Ji Anzi. Titus put the correlates into my keeping. He trusted me with them, not you. And it is I who will decide how to use them. Now leave me.”

“I could help you.”

He stared.

“I was a student of Vingde.”

“Yes, a terrible one. He said you were a hopeless scholar, and a thief, besides.”

She had the grace to lower her gaze. “A soldier has to make do.”