“To cross the border of the real, you need training and equipment,” Tiadba said. “Clothing, machines, things we’ve never seen before. You can’t just go out on your own, or you’ll die.”
“Who gives the clothes and machines?”
“I don’t know.”
“How many marches has the sama put together?”
“I don’t know that, either.”
“Is she working with the Tall Ones?”
Tiadba shook her head again.
“Who gets to lead and get all the glory?”
“None of us knows.”
Jebrassy sucked in a deep breath. It was not nearly as simple and direct as he had hoped. Finally, he squeezed down beside her. “All right,” he said. “I’m ignorant. I admit it. What’s this sama’s name?”
Tiadba pretended to concentrate on the lenses. “This must have been a kind of celebration,” she murmured. “Maybe they’re getting ready to send out their own marchers. It’s so different now. But you can tell—they’re going down into the flood channels…The channels are clean, there’s no debris—all the walls are covered with dwellings. So many people living in the Tiers! Why did it change?”
Grudgingly, Jebrassy looked again.
“There’s a door, opening to a lift—a working lift,” Tiadba said. “Maybe they’re getting ready to send a gift to the Tall Ones—you know, to speed the marchers along.”
Jebrassy saw all this. Crowds carrying on their shoulders platforms loaded with food, cages full of letterbugs—no different from the ones breeds still kept as pets. And books. He awkwardly zoomed in closer, to see the titles on the spines, but could not read them—the symbols were old, like those on the backs of the oldest letterbugs, and the words they formed made little sense.
“There are still books like that in the walls—on the upper levels,” he said. “Can’t pull them out.”
“I know,” Tiadba said with a lift of her brow, an air of mystery.
The procession crossed the channel and stood before the far wall of the channel, where a large door opened, otherwise invisible. They passed the goods through, the gifts—and the books. Tiadba flicked her cheek and the scene pulled back to a diagram, a three-dimensional drawing or map. Their impossible point of view now soared high above the flood channel, passed through the wall, then the ceil, following a glowing dot on a vertical red line—the lift—higher and higher through constructions of dazzling complexity, presumably the upper parts of the Kalpa, now as transparent as glass, far above the three isles of the Tiers.
Jebrassy saw for the first time their place in things. Three large rounded structures, like great smooth humps, placed side by side—the central hump pushed forward into a walled enclave, open to the…But from this perspective, he could not see the ceil. Maybe this new perspective put them outsidethe Kalpa. Maybe outside there wasn’ta ceil.
Their view drew back even farther, and swooped up. The dot traveled along the red line through the rounded top of the middle hump—was that the Kalpa, or were all three humps called the Kalpa? He realized then how huge the whole must be—hundreds of times larger than the Tiers themselves, with the Tiers at the very bottom. Now his head truly hurt.
The dot slowed and stopped at the base of a tower. The viewpoint continued up the tower’s length, but the dot signifying the gifts from the Tiers remained at the base.
The tower stood as far above the limits of the Kalpa as they had already traveled from the basement level of the Tiers. And at the top: the tower ended in an abrupt, ragged peak, as if something had snapped it in half.
“The sama calls this Malregard,” Tiadba said. “Have you ever heard of the Broken Tower?”
“In children’s stories,” Jebrassy said, his breath coming hard, tears in his eyes. He had just passed above and beyond the knowledge of anyone he had ever met, of his sponsors and of their sponsors…as far back as he could imagine. “Malregard,” he repeated. He tried to swing his point of view to see what surrounded the Kalpa—the Chaos, presumably—but there was only a misty blueness.
“The sama says that means ‘Evil View,’” Tiadba said. “Makes you wonder what’s out there.” She watched his face.
“If you get to go on the next march…Would I go with you?”
“I don’t choose who goes or doesn’t go.”
“This sama…she decides?”
“She tells us the decisions.”
He rubbed his face with his hands and shook his head, overwhelmed. “We’re being played with. No Tall One would ever trust breeds with so much. I need to think,” Jebrassy said. “You can go back to your niche.”
“I can’t leave you here. They’re waiting on the causeway.”
“Who?”
“Some of the team. Now that you know, you can’t just go back and tell others. We couldn’t risk that.”
Jebrassy was beginning to experience the same panic he had felt in the narrow shaft of spiraling steps.
“You’re the bait. I’m the fool. They’ll kill me if I don’t go along.”
Tiadba looked genuinely shocked. “Breeds don’t killeach other.”
“Except by accident—in a little war, maybe. How unfortunate. That’s why your sama selected me—because I’m bold, reckless, likely to die or go missing—like that poor fool down there. Was heyour last candidate? What did he do wrong?”
“You’re being dreadful,” she said.
“I’m thinking out loud.”
“We’ll be spending a lot of time together,” Tiadba said quietly. “The teams require each participant to have a partner. Don’t you feel it? We’re already partners.”
“What I’m feeling isn’t that clear-cut. Something goes wrong, that’s what I’m feeling.”
Tiadba swung her arm out to the Diurns. “Who can be sure about anything? What if an intrusion takes us? What if time stops?”
“I don’t think…I don’t think we would even feel it,” Jebrassy said, but his hair crawled at the possibility—and whatever it was that lay just on the edge of his memory. The things that could—that wouldgo wrong, even if they never ventured into the Chaos.
TEN ZEROS
CHAPTER 24
Every day, Daniel’s memory lost a little color and depth, until thinking about what had gone before became like looking at a faded negative or an impression in wet sand. Charles Granger—all his ingrained habits and instincts, and the ever-present pain—was gaining strength, a steady tide lapping up over a beached intruder.
Daniel opened Granger’s carton and lifted out the marker, the blunted pencil, and several sheets of paper. He spread the sheets over the warped wooden floor, avoiding the damp spots, and examined them critically. They were covered with writing—crazy writing mostly, symbols arranged without apparent meaning, rows of repeating words with one letter changed in each word—and numbers, lots of numbers.
Charles Granger had been an occasional poet, but he had also been a thinker and logician—possibly even a mathematician. There was strange order to his scratchings, though Daniel could not reconstruct that order.
The stones knew how to pick them. And when to demand a change—perhaps. Daniel flipped the sheets over. Some were blank. The time had come to reconstruct his life and thoughts before the last jaunt. He could record this in the blank spaces that remained between Charles Granger’s own ramblings. How appropriate.
But making this brain, this body, lift the pencil and work with him was far more difficult than finding room between Granger’s lines. Whatever Granger had been trying for, the task—the problem—had overwhelmed him. He had been ripe to be replaced, yet already too ripe to be worth replacing. Daniel smiled grimly, but did not show his teeth.
Still, in the wet darkness, with the candle gleaming on the fireplace mantel and another candle on the floor in a jelly glass, illuminating a fanned circle of pages…