“Yes, read,” Macht said. “Take our minds off that thing out there.”
“I’d prefer softer stories,” Khren said. He’d developed an aversion for these difficult tales and all their odd words.
“This is what I can find,” Tiadba said.
“Just read anything,” Nico said, and closed his eyes, lying back on the dark earth within the protection of the generator.
Tiadba opened the book.
We chose our vessel, the Intensity, from the last great fleets parked in huge yards all through the twelve cities. She was reputedly the fastest of transports, faster even than the cosmos-spanning portals of the middle Trillennium, but in poor repair. She had not flown for a hundred thousand years. During the Reduction, all these ships had ferried refugees to Earth and her sister planets, as well as to the orbiting web planes, spiral ribbons, and shells set twisting and spinning around the renewed sun. They had carried back to Earth survivors of the Chaos’s desolation, a pitiful fraction of our cosmos’s former glory.
Dealings in my youth with a diversity of Mender ship clans and the more rooted portal clans had taught me the ways of all transport, some outmoded and even then becoming impossible as the Chaos altered the fine anatomy of the cosmos—the swifting ways by which travelers flew. I found my crew among young rebels, deviant Shapers and Menders. In contests, I tested and winnowed from the thousands who volunteered.
And chose my twenty-five, about to become philosopher-adventurers all. All past science had to be adapted, or abandoned, to get around the Typhonic perversions. Nearly all hyperdetics and means of communication and transport were blocked. Superluminosity, transfate reassembly, dark-mass portals—the technologies of almost a hundred trillion years no longer carried us across the cosmos. Only one reliable engine of spatial motion remained—bosonic threadfold, itself rumored to be Shen in origin.
We converted the Intensityto threadfold. By itself, the method puts tremendous strain on any crew, for you do not arrive what you started out being—whatever your matter. Fates curl back, traits and lives mix—for a time, the crew becomes the ship, and then the journey, and later, it is difficult to rebuild what once you were.
We would become intimate in ways none could foresee. We accepted this. It was better—to our way of thinking, a unanimity among the perversely disagreeable—than becoming noötic. And so we departed the ports of Earth.
Familiar to all is our passage through the realm of the Spectrals, who first learned to recharge, train, and breed galaxies.
Displayed along the inward-closing membrane of the Chaos, the last of the Spectrals had been enslaved by the Typhon, studied—if that is the correct word—and then vitrified: trapped in a slow, constricted bosonic glaze across millions of light-years while their boundaries were dissolved—an awful end for one-time masters, to whom the Trillennium owes its very existence.
Less familiar because less clearly explainable, even by those of us who were there, were our encounters with the enigmachrons, where fifth-dimensional fates lie spread out like thin bones beneath the rotting flesh of space-time. The Intensityfound itself caught in a swirling storm of dead futures, tiny whirlpools of despair and repetition, and four of our crew lived horrible lives in scant hours before our eyes, aged in misery, mercifully died—and could not be revived by any recourse to ship memory. Some of their names remain forgotten—their fates erased even back to the Earth.
The Shen, it seems, had accepted their destiny with maddening calm. As we were welcomed to the sixty green suns—and as we were shriven of our Chaotic taints, cured and reborn in ways that both agonized and refreshed in the old, simple, cold stone rooms of the Final School, we met with Polybiblios, a simple figure, plainly made, unusually small for a Deva.
Among the Shen he had become known as Curiosity embodied.
The Shen exemplified in all their ways and histories the exalting humility of correcting error, and followed in all their days the smoothly prickled course of knowing one’s blind stupidity. Polybiblios had been among them for a million years, had watched them react—or not react—to the harrowing of the Chaos. When presented with our case, he consulted his Shen teachers, and without ceremony they prepared to cast him out, after a brief, enigmatic explanation. “You will create more error and more confusion,” they told him. “We cannot allow you to remain on the necklace-worlds, beneath the Green Suns. All should end soon, but because of you it will not. Cosmos will follow upon cosmos, challenge upon challenge, out of any thinkable sequence, but forever and ever nonetheless—for you will misuse what we have taught you. And so it must be. For we are again in error. Perfection is death. For us, that is good—but you reject our purity.”
Even so, they allowed Polybiblios to keep what he had sought for so long, their last and greatest discovery: the secrets of budding minicosms from the quantum foam, finite but incomprehensibly vast seed-sets of new universes.
“I can leave now,” Polybiblios said, and briefly bowed his head and laughed in Shen-like acknowledgment of his joyful grief.
Our return took us through regions briefly unveiled by the Chaos’s cruel recession, the Typhon proudly pulling back its cloak, leaving nakedly visible and scattered over the withered geodesics those systems and civilizations that had not retreated eons before. Billions of contorted suns—the great human fields of the Trillennium—lay across the darkness like embers of burning lace. Signals from these regions came to the Intensity, difficult to translate, but when Polybiblios—against our experienced recommendation—analyzed them, we saw once more how deep and perverse the Typhon’s ruin could be. To the poor monstrosities surviving in these corrupted regions, the roots and laws of former nature still seemed consistent. They still believed a future lay before them, and reasoned that we were the monsters to be hunted and destroyed.
Perhaps we were.
We doubted everything.
Our threadfold engines faltered—the Chaos gnawed at the last technique we could use to spend less than eternity on our return to Earth. Polybiblios applied all his Shen learning, and we proceeded in a dreaming bubble squeezed out of the necrotic flesh of the cosmos, defying predatory shreds that whipped out, breeding insanity and mutation even within our isolation—and forcing us to kill nine more of our crew.
The twisting corridor of our passage, the last geodetic of the old cosmos, constricted tight.
We gave up whatever hope remained.
I entered my own darkness, defeated, maimed in my soul.
But Polybiblios, with his quiet, steady way, saved us. His unceasing ministrations to the Intensitypulled us through. We awakened cruising through clean space, alive, saner than we had been for long years—surrounded by our ship’s humming regularities.
We neared Earth’s sun.
Our rescued Deva, who had rescued us in return, celebrated the passing of his masters and teachers, the Shen. We stood with him and listened to his words, though they meant little to us at the time, and even seemed to contradict what we had learned before.
“They will not give in to the Typhon,” he explained. “Nor will they commit suicide. They will reverse their genesis, and return themselves to the libraries from which they were patterned—never to be retrieved by any intelligence, in this or any subsequent cosmos.
“For they have made a pact with the handmaiden of creation, who reconciles all.”
Perhaps he referred to himself more than the Shen. Poor Shen!
After this, Polybiblios retreated into contemplation as we entered the last open gate to our legacy system, returning to the ports of ancient Earth—and mourned our dead, those we could remember. Tiadba closed the book and thrust it back into the bag.
“That’s Sangmer talking again, isn’t it?” Frinna asked. “He doesn’t mention the female, the one on the silvery beach.”
“Maybe she’s part of the secret,” Macht said. “Maybe she’s that handmaiden.”