The Braided World (43 page)

He grinned, terribly, his teeth browned and sharp. “Thought I was dead, did you?”

Bailey shut her mouth. Yes, she had. By Anton's description, this could only be Homish.

The deposed leader of the Third Power continued to smile, his eyes alight with more life than his body had. “Rumors and lies, old woman, rumors and lies. Thankfully, I still swim every morning, even if someday I sink and drown in a varium.” He took a step forward, looking as though he would pitch forward, but his assistants rushed to help him. He whispered: “You know what happens when an old man dies in a swim? They fill in the pool with dirt. Leave you like a potted plant!” He shook with a silent laugh.

Sobering, he looked Bailey up and down. “I thought you'd be taller.”

Bailey shrugged. “Old people shrink, I guess.”

He threw back his head, cawing with laughter. “Yes, yes, I used to be as tall as Nirimol, the great turd of the Nool!” In a darker voice, he continued, “You can tell him I've never felt better, now his poisons are gone.”

Bailey said, “I don't plan to talk to the traitor.”

Homish danced a little, unless it was palsy. “Good, good. You foreign hoda are catching on.” He waved at her as he turned away, muttering, “Oh yes, we'll stay in the palace a while, until the river spits Nirimol out.” He squinted at her. “How did young Anoon like the cloud country?”

Bailey smiled. “Very well indeed, Homish-rah.” She wondered just how crazy Homish had been that day that he warned Anton against the judipon and urged him to go up-country.

“Eleven! I knew that was his numeration,” the old judipon said. “The climbing number, for someone who will be raised high. Oh yes, I liked Anoon well enough. Too young to be a leader, though.” His judipon closed around him as he turned away.

Bailey answered to his back, “No, Homish-rah, I don't think so. Not at all.”

But Homish and his retinue had moved on. For a moment the plaza was less crowded, and a clear view opened up toward the far side, where a dark-haired man stood on the covered walkway.

He stood alone, but surrounded by an aura of power, by his stance, by his expression.
No, Homish
, Bailey thought as she walked toward Anton,
not too young at all.

As she looked up at him from the plaza level, she said, “Did you find him?”

“No. He's run to Oleel.” Anton's gaze swept over the courtyard, taking in Vidori's mobilization with an unreadable expression.

Bailey looked at him and guessed that he was saying
good-bye to the palace, to an era in his life. His uniform was faded, his hair falling forward over his forehead. He didn't look like Captain Darrow, but there were planes in his face that the weeks here had sculpted, and a new depth around his eyes.

Bailey knew that some of that depth came from sorrow. In time it would become lines, and finally wisdom. She envied him his journey.

“Anton,” she said, and then stopped.

He looked down at her, glancing at her shoulder pack. “What's in the little backpack, Bailey?”

She wanted to climb the stairs, to stand next to him, to be eye to eye. But now that she had started, she had to finish saying what she'd come to say. “The Quadi notes. I thought they should stay here.” And to make it quite clear, she said simply, “I'm not going back, Anton.”

He broke off eye contact, and looked over her head again to the troops, to the covered porches surrounding the plaza.

“Don't do this, Bailey,” he said softly.

She shrugged. “I'm an old woman. I don't like to travel.” It's not what she'd meant to say. She'd meant to talk of Gilar, and her intention to help her. She'd meant to say that she'd give something of herself. But Anton knew that she was settling in to the Olagong. He could fill in the blanks. That's what Anton had done from first setting foot on this planet: fill in the blanks.

He met her eyes again. “You'd be in danger here. It's the worst possible time to be a human in the Olagong.” He crouched down on the porch, coming closer to her level. Leaning against the porch post, he said, ‘And Bailey, I'd miss you on that journey.”

She didn't trust her voice for a moment. Instead, she closed the gap between them, and reached her hand up to his.

“I'll miss you, too,” finally came out. She snapped her eyelids up and down trying to stay firm.

He looked into her face, and he seemed so vulnerable. “Why?” he asked. So he had asked her, after all, to give the reason.

And out spilled, “Because I've been happy here.”

A smile cut into his face then, the kind of smile that would leave lines, eventually “Yes, I know.” He looked past her, into the plaza. “I know what you mean.”

A commotion down the walkway, and both Bailey and Anton looked up. Vidori was approaching. Come to say good-bye.

Bailey said, “The king's given me permission to stay, if you approve.”

Anton stood up to meet the king. He murmured to her, smiling as he said, “Who ever stopped Bailey Shaw from doing exactly what she pleased?”

And then Vidori was standing there, and as Anton greeted him, Bailey stepped back among the milling Dassa and, rather than say good-bye and ruin an exit with smeared makeup, disappeared into the milling crowd.

Coda Nine. The High Work.

As we conceive it, in the tenure of our species, the high work is to preserve and reanimate the creations of the civilized worlds. Our reasons are recorded in Coda One. We were the first species to attain civilization. Three others coexisted with us for a time, but fell into senility before making contributions to the high work. Because the galaxy grows old, you who come after will not have time to naturally accumulate profoundly useful knowledge. Thus stored here is all that we know and all that others know. This is the nexus point for knowledge. If we are able, there will be other repository worlds, but this is the first successful one. It may be the only one, due to unavoidable failures. The cycle of our existence comes to the end, but overlaps with the intervals of existence of other sentient species who may carryforward the custodial work. Though assimilation of the nexus world knowledge may take many generations, there may be time to forward the work. What else is the reason for all we have done?

The river was a moving battlefield. Amid the twisting smoke of the fires, Anton could see the armed boats scattered
on the Puldar, filled with Dassa fighting under the silver standard of Oleel or the black of Vidori. Some, not bothering with standards, simply wore shreds of dyed cloth as headbands.

Anton's two war canoes flew the black banner, but the soldiers on board made no challenges to the silver, only powering the canoes onward with hard, steady strokes. Vidori had put his guards under Anton, and they knew their mission: Bring the humans safely to the islet of Huvai, the resting place of the shuttle. Bring both canoes, if possible, but bring one of them at least, the one with Anton or the one with Zhen. Each canoe had half the botanical cargo. All that was needed. With painful exceptions: Bailey. Nick. Maypong.

Anton sat in the second canoe, his gun resting on his knees, as he peered through the smoke, watchful for attacks from Oleel's supporters, whether uldia, judipon, or common Dassa. Ash particles, bits of the Olagong, were born aloft by each new breeze, creating a boiling smoke.

The king's officer, Moshani, deftly commanded the first canoe, where Zhen rode. Fires from burning huts and docks brightened the shores, jumping out of the murk of drifting smoke. Oleel had begun by burning the fields, but there was no stopping the fire once it got a taste of thatch and timber. Anton had given Zhen a gun, and also Moshani, taking three minutes to teach the Dassa how to shoot a pistol with underbarrel laser sight and thermal imaging. Zhen didn't need the lesson, and clutched her weapon with something like devotion. Anton thought she would single-handedly mow down Oleel and the judipon to get her langva samples to that shuttle.

He would have liked to have had Nick by his side. The old Nick. Anton had failed to make him his confidant and right-hand man, and Nick hated him for it. But even before that, Nick had wanted him to fail. It was an intuition, and Anton had acted on it, driving a wedge between them, a wedge that became sharp-edged and fatal.

Still, Anton kept a watch, peering through every tear in the curtain of smoke, hoping to see lost things come back to him. The fire was making such retrievals doubtful. They were just passing Samwan's islet, where outbuildings were engulfed in flames. Worse yet, the fields were smoldering.

On the islets, householders like Samwan cultivated several varieties of langva. Folded within some of these was a world. It was ambiguous as to whether alien beings’ DNA was truly preserved there. The codas said the varieties contained information, cultural narrative, which Nick and Oleel saw, or pretended to see, as a threat. Though alien creatures wouldn't spring from the forest, they might come in search of what they had lost. If these events had played out on Earth, the reaction might not be so very different.
Cultural dread
, as the Quadi termed it.

Their canoes swept into the confluence with the Sodesh, the sterns sweeping awry in the crosscurrents. Paddling with strength and skill, Moshani's soldiers brought the canoes into the center of the great river. They maneuvered the craft among smaller skiffs, beating a swift path upriver. Some of the Dassa hailed the sight of them.

Moshani brought the canoes nearer the shoreline, where he judged they could only be set upon from one side. This course was taking them past the wetland grasses with the network of canals, the swamp where Vidori had hunted that day when the woman had fled with her outlaw child in her womb. The woman's bones had been left in the stand of trees where she died, with no burial given, and no respect to her unborn child. Killed by Maypong's knife, at Vidori's order, for Anton's sake. All his purposes that were so right, all the outcomes that were so wrong. It was a gray landscape, truly Except that now they were bringing the Quadi's legacy to Earth, bearing it up the Sodesh, bearing it home.

They were leaving the sounds of battle behind them. Shouts still came to them, but fewer and dimmer. Now, as they moved through the heavy smoke, the sound of the soldiers’ paddles was all that anchored them to the world.

It was in that momentary peace that the barge came down on them from the confluence of the Amalang, where it had been waiting. They heard it before they saw it. The sound of splashing poles, in unison, setting up a rhythm that could not be natural eddies. It was only a dark blur, still a hundred meters off, when Anton hissed to the paddlers,
They're coming.

He didn't know who was moving in on them, but he quietly urged the soldiers to redouble their pace, and as they passed Moshani in Zhen's canoe, he signed the warning to him.

Anton turned to face what was coming.

It was an uldia barge. Anton could see that it was moving in front to cut them off. The uldia had exchanged their robes for wide trousers and vests crossed with weapons. There were many of them on the platform. But the barge would be slow, for all its firepower, and Moshani directed the canoes close to the bank, forcing them all to duck under the overhanging branches.

Roots slapped Anton's face as he took his first shots, toppling a few uldia holding poles. He heard Moshani firing as well, and it had an effect: The barge poled off farther into the Sodesh. Anton's canoe crept slowly through the roots along the bank, but it was only a temporary respite, and only effective as long as the fog kept them hidden. Just ahead, Zhen had grabbed a paddle, and was stroking like a madwoman.

Both canoes broke free of the overhang then and churned upriver. “Watch for their canoes,” Anton shouted to Moshani and Zhen.

Next to Anton, one of the soldiers rose up for a better aim, and paid for this by taking a shot full in the chest. Without a moment's hesitation the paddlers threw him over, lightening their load. Then they began paddling fiercely again.

The barge fell farther behind. Then a war canoe came out of the haze. It was fast, using most of its space for
paddlers, but in the prow were two uldia with rifles. Lying athwart the gunwales, Zhen picked off one while the second uldia took clear aim at Moshani. But the king's man sent a knife into her.

Anton took aim and picked off two more, but still the canoe rushed toward them, and in the next instant Anton's canoe shook from the impact of the enemy prow.

Now, knives drawn, Anton's men turned to face the uldia canoe. He found himself facing an uldia with slaughter in her eyes. He blocked the first thrust, as the canoes rocked and the two sides clashed.

Meanwhile, Zhen's boat was grappling with an uldia canoe as well, and both Moshani and Zhen were firing point blank into their attackers.

In the midst of this carnage, the river brightened behind Anton's canoe, leaving a hole in the smoke. There, the uldia barge was in full view, some fifty meters downriver. They weren't firing, being out of range of Dassa weapons.

A woman stood on the forward end. She wore robes, and stood taller than her entourage. By her build, and the stance, it was the stone woman herself. Her gaze might have locked with Anton's; it was too far to tell. But when he saw her through his gun's scope, her square face looked directly into his.