“That’s what the trainer told us,” Macht said, and looked miserable.
“ Mightbe,” Pahtun emphasized. “Use your instincts—they are so much better tuned than those of any Mender or Eidolon. Closer to the primordial Earth, closer to the truth. Am I of the Chaos?”
“No,” Denbord finally said, and Tiadba agreed. The others kept silent.
“Well, some believe, some are suspicious; all good. None of you can be right all the time. Here is what I can tell you. The trods shift and grow. There are any number of them out there, pulling in tighter—most of them pointing to a great crater, cut through by a vale that extends almost halfway around what remains of the Earth. I’ve seen a few strange things gather and grow out there—I don’t know what they are, or what they might do. The Chaos lets them accumulate, for now. I’ve heard Eidolons call them
‘Turvies’—singular, ‘Turvy.’ The angelins in the Broken Tower can sometimes see that far, tricks of Chaos light being in their favor. They surround your goal, Nataraja.”
“Does it still exist?” Nico asked.
“Let’s hope,” Pahtun said. “If it doesn’t, then all our efforts have been wasted. The Great Eidolons, in their wisdom, exiled important persons to that rebel city—and with them, I hear, they carried important tools.”
“What?” Nico asked, eyes bright.
“Only they would know. The Librarian’s tale—have you been told that one, young breeds?”
“No,” they said.
“Not all of it,” Nico added.
Tiadba lifted the books, which she had kept strapped within the leg pouch of her armor. “Maybe we don’t need to know,” she said.
Several times, Pahtun had glanced at the books with something like hunger. “I doubt that your ignorance would help anyone,” he said. “It’s part of the great story, the greatest story of all. But you, young breed—your name is Tiadba, is it not?”
She had not told him. Perhaps he’d learned it from her armor. “Yes,” she said.
“Read for us, why don’t you? We have time, and I haven’t heard a marcher’s story in ever so long.”
She opened her book and found a passage by Sangmer that described his crew, and their journey in the starboat across the last winding reaches of space and time.
THE FIRST OF ISHANAXADE
Even surrounded by the beauty of the Shen necklace-worlds and the clever arts gathered in past times from all the living galaxies, my crew could only feel pity at what we had seen—and dread at the thought of traveling back through those ruined spaces. Whatever we brought back with us—whomever we transported—the return journey would be even more difficult.
While Polybiblios made his preparations—shedding his Shen selves and returning to Deva unity—I walked along the grainy margins of the basin wherein the Shen had stored their discoveries. Here, glistening like a soft jade ocean beneath the banded glow of the greatest ringstar, lay the pooled fate-logs of Shen travels during the Brightness, before the end of creation, their information long since scrambled and irretrievable—but still beautiful.
I sought quiet, a lonely kind of peace, but better than contemplating our almost certain oblivion in the Chaos.
My crew was amusing itself by visiting the shrines of Shen accomplishment—erected by human students from worlds long since eaten by the Chaos. The Shen acknowledged no gifts, accepted no reverence; not even to the extent of refusing or demolishing these tributes. Abandoned in scenic disrepair, the monuments rose or fell at the shivery whim of this huge pseudo-planet. The Shen had been the first to map the five hundred living galaxies, the first to link the ancient barren whorls of dying suns into ringstars, the first to do so many things. And here was that dead, glistening sea of exploration and knowledge, lapping on a beach of whispering grains, a mockery of all who have ever sought glory.
With only my dark thoughts as company, I stripped my garments and walked out onto the vectors, feeling them coil like jelly-crystal, cool and silver around my ankles, seeking the glow of my order—but unable to share or partake. They fell back with lost whispers, a muddle just on the edge of sense, as if they might still be capable of retelling lost tales. Melancholy to match my own—and no one else’s, I thought, until I saw what at first I took to be a small young female, walking toward me from a mile or so farther along the strand.
This was an impossibility: a human-seeming figure on a world where only my crew claimed humanity; my crew, humble Menders all, and of course the Deva Polybiblios.
The girl could have been a young Mender, but none of my kind had been born and raised in such a way, through incarnate infancy and youth, for tens of trillions of years. As she grew close, I waded to the shore, then knelt on the margin to caress the tiny, rounded bits washed up there, glowing with a soft green radiance. I watched this girl-child from the corner of my eye, helpless—feeling that a truly irreversible moment approached.
But there could be no retreat.
“Are you the Pilgrim?” the child asked when her voice could be heard above the whispers.
“Some call me that. Who were you?” I thought she might be a ghost of vector history, brought back by some contribution I had made to the bright-roiled sea—a bit of shed skin, tricked up by forces far beyond Mender understanding.
“I am, not were. I have no finished name. The Shen have bequeathed me to a human I will call Father. He has gathered my parts in this sea, like these pieces on the shore, and helped shape them into what you see now.”
“Are you human?” I asked.
“Mostly,” she said. “My father pledges me to Gens Simia through Deva lineage.”
Close as she was, her features had not yet settled. She showed many graceful possibilities, yet seemed neither hurried nor embarrassed by this multiplicity.
“How are we to be introduced?”
“I have a Shen name, but that is little better than none.”
“What else are you, besides human?” I asked, trying not to sound rude.
“I’m not sure. Polybiblios assures me I contain elements of the forces that once helped shape and resolve creation. The Shen found them, collected them, and deposited them in this sea, for Father to rediscover and shape. How he could fit such large ideas into this small form, I don’t know. Can you see them?”
“I don’t see anyone or anything clearly.”
She assumed a determined face, and her outline sharpened, but then she grew larger, too large, rising above the vector sea many times my height.
I looked up, charmed by this metric naiveté.
“It must feel important to be a vessel of creation’s glory,” I said, shading my eyes against the brilliant light of the ringstar.
“Most of the time, I can’t feel it,” she admitted. “But sometimes I lose control and try to fix things, or bring logic—to correct. As I mature, I’ll control myself and take reliably solid form, like you, I think. Your form is pleasing. That’s what Polybiblios tells me.”
“Are you a reward, then? A gift from Shen masters to Deva student?”
“My father does seem to bear me great affection.” She had fallen in altitude and was now just a little taller than me, and already appeared more mature. “I think he wants to study what I will become.”
She dipped her toe into the vector sea and rose-red waves spread outward, as if by herself she could revive all that had ever been lost.
“If I stay here, the Shen can’t or won’t give me what I need. I will become another abandoned memory, like this sea. And then—what’s left will perish when the Shen succumb to the Chaos.”
My melancholy evaporated. She breathed out newness, freshness—radiated a potential for joy unlike anything I had ever experienced. This glamour had its own adaptive properties, no doubt, but what could she ever be to a Mender?
She drew close and extended a star-bright hand. “Polybiblios says the captain of the twistfold ship must extend an invitation to join the voyage back to Earth. He tells me there are dangers. It is your decision, Pilgrim.”