The New Space Opera 2 (39 page)

Only when they reached the first of the transcendent shafts did she realize that they hadn't actually entered the Structure proper. At a sliding, airtight portal, Kindred entered a complex code into an alphanumeric
keypad. The portal slid aside, revealing an elevator carriage large enough for thirty people.

“After you,” Kindred said, waving her inside. “From here on, we'll make good time, better than that ship of yours. In fact, we'll arrive before we left. If that doesn't make you curious, nothing will.”

He pushed the carriage's only button, and they stood at opposite sides of the carriage as it began to descend.

“Descent,” however, wasn't the right word for what she felt in her gut. They were undeniably moving, but she couldn't accurately pin down in which direction. Guild training had given her many ways to assess acceleration without instruments. Something about the shaft confounded all of them.

A wave of dizziness passed through her. With no other warning than that, the carriage came to a halt. When the portal opened and she stepped through, she noticed immediately that the ambient gravity had changed.

 

At a five-level stack three transcendent jumps away from Oza, Kindred called the first halt on their journey. He had never been to Shosori before, but he remembered the name from the charts he had memorized and knew some of its basic geography. It was harmless enough, except for newbies.

“Are you okay?” he asked Bannerman.

“Of course. Why wouldn't I be?”

He knew she was lying. Her expression was too blank. Her eyes and hands moved abruptly and too quickly at the slightest stimulus. Maybe she thought her self-control was impeccable, but he could tell. He'd seen this kind of reaction before.

“Let's stop here for a bit.”

They were in an observation deck that clung to the underside of ceiling made of roughly carved, reddish stone. Below them, visible through a bulging transparent blister, was the surface of a solid world, its gray features obscured by drifts of frozen atmosphere except where deep fissures had been carved by mineral-seeking engines, each as large as a Great Ship. They watched it for five minutes. In that time, the world within the Structure rotated thirty degrees.

“What do you think?” he asked her.

“You want me to say that it's impossible.”

“That word comes to mind, you have to admit. Something like this, inside a mine—”

“Is not beyond an engineering solution, however extreme. The Guild of the Great Ships could accomplish it, given the need.”

“What if I told you that this lump of rock didn't come from your universe, the one containing the Guild of the Great Ships? Could you manage that as well?”

She looked at him through eyes wakened from their numb sightseeing. “You say ‘your universe' as though you are not part of it.”

“I'm not. My birthplace wouldn't appear on your maps no matter how far you explored.”

She waved that away with some of her old fire. “The multiverse is no mystery to us. Cross-continuum jumps will be within our grasp, one day.”

“Engineering again, huh?”

“I stake my life on it every time I board the Great Ship.”

“You're not on the Great Ship anymore, Master Bannerman.”

 

She found his attempts at repartee clumsy but distracting. The ponderous rotations of the captured world below no longer seemed so threatening. This was the Structure, exactly where she had wanted to be for so long. Each “stack,” as Kindred called the named locations they passed through, had a unique character. Some were close and utilitarian, while others were more like giant shopping malls. Occasionally, she detected evidence of earthworks, as would be expected of a mine. Diligently and thoroughly, she recorded every detail for her avatar back at the Great Ship.

“Shall we get moving again?” she asked.

“Of course. Adrigon's next, then Malmelia—and then Estes, where they suck minerals out of the bottom of a planet-wide ocean…”

The names meant nothing to her, his attempt to awe likewise.

Between transcendent shafts, they moved invisibly among the crowds. The strangest thing she had seen so far wasn't the evidence of science far in advance of the Guild's—for all that she bluffed regarding the architects' ability to mimic it—but the people who inhabited the Structure. They had passed hundreds of all ages, living and working under artificial lights in halls large enough to hold thousands. They grew flowers. They raised children. If they cared at all about the universe beyond, it didn't show.

 

“This is it.”

Kindred pressed his palm against the portal ahead of them and spread
his fingers wide. The white plastic was inert against his skin. If anything was active on the far side, it neither vibrated nor radiated any heat.

All the times he could have died meant nothing, now. He had had only to count them down until he reached the loop's end—which was, of course, its beginning. And then, once he blew the charges and the loop closed, he would be mortal like anyone else, but safely rid of Hakham and the Guild of the Great Ships, for now.

“What are you waiting for?”

He didn't know.

The strange thing was that his return to the Structure hadn't touched him as deeply as he had thought it would. The tunnels seemed cramped and crowded to him now; there were no distant horizons, no far vistas. Although every level was different, there was a homogeneity to it all that he could swear hadn't been there before.

He couldn't tell Bannerman. She would think that she was responsible, and he couldn't have that.

“Nothing.”

He keyed in his access code. The doors slid open.

They stepped inside. The doors slid closed.

With a hint of movement, they were on their way.

“Well?” Her silence irked him. “This shaft is supposed to be destroyed, isn't it?”

“You don't understand the technology, Kindred. We might be going somewhere else, or nowhere at all.”

He nodded and settled back to wait. Words would not convince her. Only the cold, hard evidence of her senses.

 

Bannerman's insides shifted as the carriage came to a halt. Not nerves, she told herself; surely just a side effect of the Structure's arcane technologies.

The portal opened. Kindred waved her ahead of him. She stepped into a boxy antechamber with gray walls, floors, and ceiling. A functional space that smelled of abandonment. The air was still and quiet. Kindred's footsteps as he came up behind her were the only sounds.

He radiated satisfaction. “Now what do you say?”

“This proves only that your demolition charges failed to do their job down here,” she said. “Assuming this
is
Hakham.”

“Of course it is. If we can get to the surface, you'd see your Great Ship in orbit above. Hell, you could try to talk to yourself, if you wanted to.”

“Is that possible?”

“No—unless you remember such a conversation taking place, in which case it's not only possible; it's compulsory.”

A yearning to try filled her, regardless of the apparent absurdity of the notion. To reconnect with her avatar, to see the Great Ship again, both were possibilities she had been preparing to abandon on the other side of the galaxy. She could do more than just say hello, too. She could stop Kindred from setting off the charges and prevent herself from going with Kindred on a crazy odyssey across the stars. She knew the location of Oza now, so there was no need to go through that charade anymore. She had everything the Guild needed right here in her head.

But she didn't remember having such a conversation with herself before she left the Great Ship, and the charges
had
gone off. Those were facts. If Kindred were right and it was truly impossible to change history, what consequences might she inadvertently provoke by trying? The knowledge she had earned might disappear completely, leaving the Guild back where it started and her avatars doomed to an ignominious fate.

“Take me up,” she said. “I need proof, not suggestion.”

He shrugged and obeyed, apparently unconcerned that—if he was right—the area they were walking into was full of deadly explosives.

 

They took a rattling elevator cage up to the next level. He experienced a powerful sense of déjà vu as they went. It seemed a lifetime since he had followed this very path on his mission to blow Hakham topside to pieces. It seemed like yesterday.

He looked for evidence of the charges, and found them exactly as he remembered them, anchored to stress points and beams where they would cause the most damage. His plan had been to blow the upper layers first, then the shaft itself on a timer, once he had gotten away.

They stepped carefully through an unlit area, heading for the next elevator. This location rang a definite bell. Something had happened in this place the first time around—but what?

Bannerman grabbed his arm and hissed into his ear.

“There's someone ahead.”

A figure moved at the far end of the passage, deep in the shadows.

Acting instinctively, Kindred took Bannerman by the shoulder and put himself in front of her.

Coherent light flashed once, twice.

The first shot missed them both. The second caught him low on the left shoulder, just above his heart.

He fell, remembering too late the two intruders he had surprised in Hakham's lower levels. Enemy agents, he had assumed, since they had both been wearing Guild uniforms.

Remotely, as though through a thick glass window, he heard footsteps receding into the distance.

PARADOX

Master Bannerman stared after the fleeing figure, shocked into immobility. The man who had shot Kindred was moving quickly through shadows, but she recognized his profile, the planes of his all-too-human face. It was undoubtedly, impossibly, Kindred himself.

For an instant, she could not move. Everything he had told her was true. They had crossed from one side of the galaxy to the other and returned before they left. Her prisoner had looped back along his own time line, protected from her, from the Decretians, and from the crash-landing on Oza…but not from this.

Kindred gasped. The shot had made a ruin of his chest. Each breath caused him agony. It was amazing his heart was beating at all.

His right hand came up, reaching for her.

 

“Didn't—” he tried to say, “—get to—”

Bannerman leaned over him, blurry but real.

He clung to the sight of her even as the rest of his world unraveled.

“—finish—”

“Quiet. You're only hurting yourself more.”

Kindred shook all over. He was afraid for an instant that this was his body's last gasp, that death was upon him, too soon by far.

She put a firm hand on his forehead and the pain went away. He was dying: that certainty remained, but all fear evaporated. In its place, a new understanding grew. He had crossed his own path again and closed the loop earlier than he had expected—and how fitting to signal the end of his indestructibility by mistakenly shooting himself! His journey was over.

Bannerman's journey, on the other hand, still had some way left to run. In her own way, she was as trapped as he was. She just didn't know it yet.

“Do it for me,” he said quickly, while he had the strength. “Two levels up. Wait until he's inputted the codes, then—don't kill him. Put him—the Guildsmen—need him afterward. Get back here—now, later.”

“I don't understand.”

“The script,” he said. “The charges. Only you can do it.”

The reassurance of her warm palm disappeared, and he knew that at last he had gotten through to her. Causality was tangled in a knot. If he died before he could enact her past—their immediate future—then she would have to do it herself.

They hadn't betrayed each other as they had originally intended to. Time and the Structure did it for them.

“You expect me to blow the charges?”

“Yes. Record me. I—I strike—” He broke into a fit of bloody coughing. When it subsided, he tried again. In the recording she had played him, he had sounded strained but hadn't stumbled. “I strike this blow against the Guild of the Great Ships in the name of Terminus and all the free people of the Structure.”
For Huw
, he added silently to himself.
And now for me, too
. “Got it?”

She nodded, and he let his head fall back. He had no strength left. The pain had started to return. His lungs couldn't seem to get enough air, no matter how he strained.

“And then what?” he thought she asked, leaning low over him with anxious eyes. “Kindred, and then what?”

Whatever you want, he wanted to say. You're free now, or soon will be. Close the loop and decide for yourself. It'll be easier now I'm out of the equation.

But all he could manage was one word.

 

Kindred stiffened and died, leaving Bannerman alone in the basements of Hakham.

“Why should I?” she had asked. “Kindred, why should I?”

The answer he had given her made no sense at all.

She crouched over him, spattered with his blood, too stunned by the sudden turn of events to think. He who had claimed invulnerability was now dead, and she was trapped in a paradox of her own making. Why had she thought to test his bizarre theory? Hadn't she ever wondered what it would mean if it turned out to be true?

A cold fatality swept through her. She could either die trying to change history or do exactly as Kindred had said. What other choices did she have? Perhaps he had faced just such a dismal dilemma on realizing that he had to help the Guild in order to see his own mission through. She vowed not to die as he had, bleeding in the dirt, knowing that she, his
enemy, possessed the only opportunity to finish the job for him, the last thing she wanted to do.

The other Kindred was still loose, heading off to blow the charges.