Paradox (29 page)

All around, servitors and Lords stand with heads bowed, silent and respectful.

Perceptions, carried back to earlier times.

The final newscast—a memory transmitted to his youth, as entropic time-flows—flickers out.

Boundary condition.

The last moment of awareness, as the old man dies.

The simulated lifetime was complete.

After all this work. So hard—

It was an end, and a beginning.

Tom lay down on the floor of his study, and wept.

The next day, he used a fine glass clamp, extruded from his desktop, to hold the comms-relay crystal. Awkwardly, he pushed the nul-gel coating back into place around it.

He split his talisman and inserted the crystal.

“Fine workmanship, Father.” Tom sealed up the stallion, hung it around his neck. “You did a good job there.”

That night, he donned a jumpsuit, fastened a small pack against his lower back, and tugged a long, black cape around his shoulders.

Stepping quickly from his bedchamber, he almost bumped into Elva, who was performing one of her solitary impromptu patrols of the palace.

“Oops! Sorry, Elva.”

“It's late, my Lord.” She looked at him closely.

“I'm going to my study: it's out of bounds to everybody for two days. I've a long test-run to perform.”

“My Lord.” Elva bowed, used to Tom's locking himself away from the world.

But he only went into the study long enough to crank up holovolumes displaying various corridors within the palace.

Checking that his route was clear, he activated the false-image feeds.

Then he slipped out into the corridor, threw his cape back over his shoulder, and began to run.

His first thought had been to infiltrate the tunnel somewhere in his own realm, cause a temporary stop—a small rock slippage, perhaps, which the automated graser torches could have dealt with—and make his way on board. But it was too risky, in terms of later investigation.

Ideally, this supply run should be, and should be recorded as, an utterly normal affair.

It was not a complete coincidence that Lord Shinkenar's demesne should be the local point of supply for the Oracle: they were all, in some sense, part of the local nobility.

From his palace Tom went down, first of all, as far as the fifth stratum. Then a slow jog to the border, to a well-chosen point where both his demesne and Lord Shinkenar's bordered on unreclaimed caverns.

He slipped past the natural scree which he had surveilled routinely for five tendays, through a twisting narrow tunnel, into a broader thoroughfare which led to a warehousing and distribution district.

There, he became part of a crowd, taking the spiral steps down to the trading district in the stratum below. Late-shift workers, heading homewards.

“Be glad to get to my own crib.”

“Don't blame you,” muttered Tom.

“Soddin' Klinwald gave you a hard time, too?”

“Bastard.” Tom nodded, then turned off from the main group, trailing three men who walked separately, not talking.

As soon as practicable, he sidestepped into a small alcove and willed himself into total stillness.

His thumb ring got him through the loading-dock's scanfield. The tricky part was coding it to backout the log entries in the security journal, so that his ID would not appear.

As scheduled, black rubbery cargo pods were stacked on the dock: two-metre spheres with stubby legs. Tom reached into the pack at the small of his back and drew out his redmetal poignard.

Crouching down by the nearest lone pod, Tom checked the destination—Oracle d'Ovraison's dwelling—then slit open the outer casing. He was in luck: the contents were small, soft packages, dried gripplefruits and wiklanberries.

In the tunnel through which the cargo train would come tomorrow, there was a faint rustling. Smiling grimly, Tom took the food packages into the tunnel—it took twelve trips in all—and left them, opened, for scavenging ciliates.

He could hear the pattering and rustling, the tearing of wrap-fibre, as he sealed himself into the cargo pod, fitted the low-tech resp-mask across his face, and curled up in the darkness.

Movement.

Oscillation from side to side. Then he found himself turned upside down as the cargo pod changed from walking to rolling.

Tom braced himself, still slipping as it rolled up an incline—cargo ramp—and came to a standstill. With a crick in his neck, Tom shifted around to regain some degree of comfort.

A low vibration. Moving off. The huge cylindrical trains—often kilometres long—had no acceleration to speak of. They did, however, keep that acceleration applied for a long time: by the time half an hour had passed, its velocity was huge.

He tried to sleep, but failed.

Instead, his eyes were gritty with tiredness when, hours later, the train came to a stop.

There were no voices to be heard as the cargo pod moved. Insulation again, or just complete automation? There was no way Tom could open the pod wall to check.

Rolling. Finally, a shuffling into place.

Then the inchoate roar of powerful engines. Even inside the cargo pod, Tom's whole body shook.

Finally, the stomach-dropping sensation of vertical acceleration, as he and the cargo pod hurtled upwards.

The ascent seemed to last for ever.

Move it.

He tried the poignard, opening a slit, but the pod was part of a formation, a three-dimensional lattice filling the darkened cargo hold. He could see out, with the help of a tiny glowglimmer, but he could not leave the pod.

The hold's air was cool. The pressure seemed normal.

Tom tried to hold the opening, but there was a sudden shift in attitude, and for a moment Tom floated free, completely weightless—

I'm truly airborne.

—as the cargo shuttle arced into a parabolic trajectory, high above the surface of Nulapeiron.

It fell away beneath him.

Watch it!
Crimping his fingertips against the hold—no more than a tiny bump in the stonelike material—he leaned out against the hold, toes against the slope.

It fluttered, batlike: his discarded cape fell downwards after the departing shuttle, and was gone.

He was clinging to the outside of a horizontal stone ring perhaps ten metres in diameter. Below, the lev-drive's collimating shaft pointed downwards, to the distant landscape.

Landscape!

For a moment the nausea caught him and he clung tightly to the face—
Danger! Don't forget what you've learned!
—almost catapulting himself into space until he forced his breathing under control and—
look at the face
—leaned outwards, so that his fingerhold was an axis, torque jamming his toes against the rock.

Floating, three thousand metres above the surface.

Horizon.

For the first time in his life he could see a true horizon, lemon skies and dark-brown clouds above a variegated landscape: dark, distant purple mountains; here and there, silver-grey lakes flashing in the sun; and, beneath Tom, the rust-and-teal patchwork of moors and fells. The air, even this high up, was heady and pure.

But palpable. Winds buffeted him as he began to climb.

Getting inside with the cargo had never been an option: he would have been sliced apart by the transfer system. Instead, he had exited via the auto-shuttle's maintenance panel, clung to the outside hull,
then shifted onto the ring structure as the shuttle disengaged and fell back in a controlled glide towards the ground.

His breathing was normal. He tossed his unnecessary resp-mask into the void.
I'm ready.
Breath control. Believing in himself.
I've trained for a year just for this.

More than that. His entire life since leaving the market chamber had been a preparation for this moment.

He had the strength, the will, to make it.

Tom began to move.

The ring extended upwards, sheer, just for a few metres. There, it merged into the convex surface of the sphere.

That was the bad news. A huge overhang which bellied outwards like an immense curved cliff—decorated with hundreds of thousands of carvings: gargoyles, labyrinthine knotwork, terracotta-like tableaux—and was going to take hours to climb.

Tom Corcorigan, tiny and insignificant, clung near the lowest point of a vast stone sphere, a kilometre in diameter, which floated above the surface of Nulapeiron. Intricately carved, from a distance it would look like a fuzzy stone ball, from whose apex a stream of creamy clouds endlessly spewed.

It was a terraformer sphere, one of thousands in Nulapeiron's skies, and it had floated here for over six hundred years.

And, two decades before, Oracle Gérard d'Ovraison had made it his home.

Hanging underhand, using both feet in a double toehold around a gargoyle's head, Tom hung: resting briefly.

He was sweating inside his jumpsuit, but not too much. Nicely supple. In the shuttle, trapped within the cargo pod, he had not been able to warm up properly, but no strains had occurred.

He checked the next section, visualizing, then climbed onwards, solving the problems with fluid grace.

His personal climbing-style included techniques all his own—stump-jam and stump-hook often came into play—but sometimes he had to rely on three-limb power moves. Rocking up to a high step, letting go with his one hand, then boosting upwards to find the next handhold, with zero margin for error.

Fist and stallion.

Dervlin's old Zen Neuronal Coding refrain kept him in the groove, flowing with the spatial rhythm determined by the convex rockface.

And stretch
…

Suppleness was a cornerstone of his style, as he moved spiderlike upwards. Belief in himself, and precision of technique, mattered more than strength: no-one could use power alone to climb like this.

In rough terms, a strictly vertical climb would be a quarter of a great circle: say eight hundred metres. His angled route—sometimes backtracking—would be nearer a thousand, to reach the terraformer's equatorial rim.

Long moves, keeping his body close to the overhanging face, dropping one knee inwards to increase his reach—
keep the flow
—working the surface.

Getting tired.

He hung in the frog position, fingers hooked around a small knot pattern. Soon he would need somewhere to take a longer rest.

Below, empty space filled the long three-klick drop to the distant ground.

Not empty.
A tug of wind nearly snatched him from his handhold.
Turbulence
…

A term from ancient philosophy, before Fate became hardwired in men's souls.

Jam and smear
, he told himself, walking his feet across a nearly featureless stretch of grey rock, relying on his climbing-slippers' friction.

Time to rest.

Then he found a wide crack—a chimney formed between two
panels of intricate mazework—jammed himself in using counterpressure, and relaxed as best he could.

Destiny! This is hard.

But he had never thought it was going to be easy.

No attack drones came hovering; no troopers rappelled from above, grasers pointing; no defence fields activated, throwing his lifeless body from the terraformer sphere.

Thank Fate.

But there were more subtle dangers involved in confronting an Oracle who knew his future…or thought he did.

Tom was doing horizontal splits in mid-air, stemming the gap between two encrusted ornamental knots where it widened to over a metre and a half. He was so warm that the stretch came easily; he let go with his hand, to rest it.

Reach and pull.

At the climb's start, Tom had been climbing out under a virtually horizontal overhang. Now, as he proceeded up the bulging rockface, the gradient lessened, but the need for constant counterpressure remained as his fatigue grew. The chances of a fatal slip were increasing.

Halfway to the equatorial rim, where the slope was forty-five degrees, he hit a smooth patch which he could not manage. By the time he made it back to a safe position, all three limbs were trembling.

Fist and stallion.

Pain shot through his fingers as he crimped onto a tiny hold—
Father's knucklebones, falling into the acid vortex
—but he forced himself through it, in too precarious an intermediate position to allow a stop, and continued moving.

Wispy grey clouds floated below him, partially obscuring the distant ground. He shivered, only partly from the lowering temperature.

Drops.

He was climbing quickly now.

Raindrops.

He was almost floating up the rock, a problem-solving machine incapable of feeling. He had been climbing for over three hours.

Nearly there.

And then it hit.

The full blast of the rain hammered against him, and already the rock was becoming smooth and slippery. Above him, just two metres above, the rock jutted out horizontally.

Two metres, that's all.

The equatorial rim.

But it was smooth underneath, with no holds, and Tom was using a one-finger hold with his flexor muscle starting to burn.

Move.

It was a ballistic throw with no possibility of retreat, launching himself into space—
reach!
—and grabbing onto the very rim.

Do it now.

For a few endless seconds he hung there from his handhold, just the strength of his crimped fingers separating life from death, and then he swung his foot up higher than his head, finding purchase and hooking in with his heel.

Now.

Rain in his eyes, and he swung quickly, bringing the other foot up.

He was upside down, feet higher than his hand, but he only had seconds as the rock turned slippery—
pull
—and then he was upright on the rim.

The nearest drop-bug opening was close, and he traversed the gap quickly—
watch it
—slipping once in the driving rain. In a moment his fingers were on the opening and he swung himself inside to safety.

He was in a tunnel three metres wide, arrowing into the terraformer's interior: horizontal exit tube for an emergency drop-bug. But a membrane stretched across the tunnel, a metre inside; he could not enter this way.

He lay down on the hard floor and began to shake.

Shock
, he told himself.

His rational self was disconnected from the physical organism: he could only observe as his body shook, as though in seizure.

He awoke.

It still seemed strange, in retrospect: his inability to control his trembling body. But eventually the tremors had lessened, died away, and he had slipped into anaesthetizing sleep.

Now he undid the compact pack at the small of his back, drank from its flask of electrolyte-replacement fluid, chewed his tasteless hi-carb wafers, and felt his wakefulness and sense of energy return.

Outside, the rain had stopped falling. A fresh breeze wafted around him in the horizontal tunnel; outside the sky was a deeper yellow, tinged with purple at the horizon. Clouds were a murky brown.

Time to get moving.

He did not bother examining the internal membrane which led to the terraformer's core. Had he carried any smart-tech capable of disarming it, sensor webs would have detected his presence before now.

He discarded his pack and all its contents save for the most important item: the long, sheathed redmetal poignard, which he fastened horizontally against the small of his back. Touching his stallion talisman through his jumpsuit as if for luck, he leaned out of the opening, looked down once at the patchwork landscape far below, then swung himself outwards and began to climb once more.

Winds had mostly dried the rock, but tiny cracks and holds remained slippery so he had to be careful. But he was now on the upper hemisphere, travelling easily, and the higher he climbed, the more gently the surface sloped.

Where the face was worn, he traversed easily, almost walking upright across the slope, until he found a tall tableau surrounded by worn gargoyles, and quickly ascended.

As he neared the apex, he could see the creamy gases spewed forth from the top, forming a thick horizontal layer which dispersed far from the terraformer. For a moment he stopped, wondering whether the air would remain breathable, but there was no choice—had been no choice since he entered the cargo shuttle—and he continued up the easing slope until he reached a balustrade.

He hopped over and was on solid, horizontal ground: a ring-shaped balcony which ran all the way around the sphere, close to the top. Above, the ornamented output-stack grew upwards, and emulsion-thick creamy gases belched and poured upwards and streamed away into the atmosphere.

The arched entranceway to the interior was marbled, inlaid with platinum, and the hall inside seemed spacious. There was no membrane. Neither the ozone smell nor the skin-tingling ionization which might denote a sensor field. No troopers on guard.

Moving softly, Tom crept inside.

Gleaming floors. Beyond, shadowed spaces, and the echoes of a conversation, voices raised, which might have been an argument. Even after all these years, Tom recognized the man's distinctive baritone.