Finally he turned to his son and said, “You weren’t at the dream inquisition.”
Hobi looked surprised. This wasn’t normally something his father would care about, certainly not enough to send him reaching for the Amity and sitting in the dark. “No. I’m sorry, I just—”
“There was a gynander there. A new one, someone from the lower levels. She served Âziz’s dream—”
He hesitated and stared at his son. Hobi suddenly felt cold. He had the terrible feeling that his father was going to announce, “—And I know where you went with Nasrani Orsina.”
Instead his father said, “And she said it was the dream of the Green Country.” He paused and turned again to gaze at the flowing interior of the mercury lamp. “Âziz Orsina: she said Âziz dreamed of the Green Country.”
Hobi swallowed his kehveh. Despite the sweetener it tasted bitter and he pushed the cup away. “The Green Country,” he repeated uneasily. “But— Âziz? The gynander must have been drunk.”
Sajur spread his hands as though warming them. Now it almost seemed that he was trying not to smile. “They had her imprisoned, of course. The morphodite. I wish they hadn’t, at least not yet. I—”
He looked up at his son. The lines around his eyes looked as though they had grown less taut since yesterday. “I would have liked to have spoken to her first. It’s—rather an unusual thing for a margravine to dream of, just days before Æstival Tide. Don’t you think?”
Now he really was smiling. Hobi looked away hastily and gulped his kehveh. The Green Country. He stared down at his demitasse, so that his father wouldn’t see his face. “How could she? Âziz, I mean—how could she have dreamed it? And—well, what happens now?”
“Now?” Sajur shrugged and held his empty cup up to the mercury lamp. The silvery light made the porcelain glow like melting ice. “I guess we wait and see if the story gets out to the ’files. There’ll be riots, if it does. The entire city is at fever pitch already, anticipating the festival. I’ve never seen anything like it, in other years. You’ve heard the rumors, of course.”
Hobi’s stomach knotted. “Rumors?”
“Yes. Some sort of tremors shaking the lower levels. One supposedly caused a refinery explosion on Archangels. I’ve heard they’ve even been reported up here.”
His father smiled, so unexpectedly that Hobi shivered. His father took no notice. With both hands he removed his turban, pausing to glance critically at the artificial tourmaline nearly buried within the folds of black silk. He removed the stone, dropping the turban, then carefully placed the tourmaline on the floor. Hobi watched him, too stunned to do more than stammer.
“The Green Country—that’s supposed to be a prophesy, right, a storm or something. The domes—the domes failing. Are we—are we safe here?” he babbled as his father stared ruminatively at the tourmaline.
Sajur shook his head. “Safe?” he repeated. “ Safe? ” He lifted his foot, then very slowly crushed the tourmaline beneath the sole of his boot. It made a grinding noise, then suddenly exploded into gray powder and flying chips of glass. The Architect Imperator raised his head.
“Of course we’re safe. The Architects monitor everything, and I monitor the Architects, and the Orsinate monitors me. How could anything possibly go wrong?”
He turned, reaching for the little gold crucifix that hung against the mercury glass lantern.
“Father—” Hobi choked; but Sajur ignored him. He smiled, wider and wider, tapping the crucifix against the glass until suddenly it shattered. Volatile spirits flamed up in a flash of silver and blue, and just as suddenly were gone. The crucifix lay in a hissing pool of liquid on the marquetry table.
Hobi stared at him, his heart throbbing so painfully that he thought he would faint, but his father did not look up or even move his hand from the caustic mess, only continued to smile and stare, until at last he said, “One trembles to think…”
From the room down the hall came the click and whir of the Architects where they had been left to their mœbius loops, abandoned to their terrible employment.
The Architect Imperator had gone quite mad.
In the vivarium Zalophus dreams. It is a dream of open seas, of waters full of leaping fish and creatures with claws strong enough to rip through the wings of any animal foolish enough to let its flight bring it within inches of the roiling surface. There are many of these animals in Zalophus’s dream, just as there are more fish here than he has ever glimpsed in all the centuries he has been imprisoned in the vivarium. The fish and the flying creatures spin and toss, and when Zalophus heaves himself through the air they fall into his gaping mouth. Then he smacks back into the ocean, and feels himself sink down, down, through the blue and churning water until it grows cooler around his huge body and he feels the current that will lead him back to them, back to those others like himself, his dark and massive sisters. He has lost them, the pod left behind as he chased a great eel through the arctic night. He has lost them and now, five hundred thousand years later, he is still searching for them.
But he has never really seen the open sea. Not this sea, at least; not this Zalophus. Through his dreams he sounds and bellows, and sometimes through his waking days as well, calling through the watergate to where the Gulf pounds against the silent shore that encircles Araboth. Come back, come back, he thunders; but his sisters do not hear him. It is as the gynander told him: they are millennia dead, and there are no others of their kin left to answer him.
Now something else shakes his sleeping as well, though this is harder for the zeuglodon to comprehend. Not the smell or taste or rush of water along his sides and fins but another thing, a smaller thing that is more frightening, because it has nothing to do with water at all.
It is a sound. It is a voice: a human voice. The great carnivore cannot understand what it is saying, but he knows it is speaking to him. It reminds him of the voice of the gynander who lured the siren into his tank one evening; or rather, the gynander’s voice reminds him of this other dream-voice, high and fluting and plaintive. It is a voice beseeching him. He understands that it is desperate, it is pleading, but he cannot understand what it is saying or what it wants. He cannot really understand its desperation, except insofar that it is a kind of hunger, a yearning akin to his own awful dreaming of the open sea. It cries and begs beneath the waves of that other, larger and less complicated mass of memory; it weeps and pleads without ceasing.
The voice maddens Zalophus. In his sleep he turns, scraping his head against the side of the tank, and moans so loudly that the walls of the vivarium shudder. But the voice does not sleep. It cannot sleep, because it is part of the oldest geneslave. It is the sliver of consciousness of the other thing that went into the creation of the sentient zeuglodon, the thing that had been a man before some researcher centuries before decided to make of it a new thing, a new creature. It moans and pummels inside of Zalophus as the whale moans and thrashes inside its prison; and like Zalophus it will never be free.
But now the dream of Zalophus changes. The sea falls away and suddenly there is another element all around him, the terrible air that he feels so briefly when he throws himself from the water and for a few seconds is surrounded by a vast glittering desert. Only now this other element is everywhere; and the whale moans in terror, because while the sea is still there it has changed. It is not the smooth unwavering field he flows through but something new, something brilliant that hurts him, slashes against his brain and stabs his puny eyes.