“What?” I asked.
“…I think he might be correct about Paradise Lost.”
“Read it again,” I said. “You really expect me to believe that—in a story with people named Beelzebub and Moloch who live in Pandæmonium—the author wanted us to root for someone named Eve?”
Some things are obvious. Unless you’re a robot, I guess.
“Do you want me to do what I did last time?” the robot asked me more softly. “Just in case?”
I nodded, then lay back, contemplating the day we’d had. I couldn’t remember another day in my recent life that had been so thoroughly enjoyable. That made me feel guilty though. Jorgen and the others were fighting for their lives, and I was investigating swamps and playing explorer?
I would have to stay focused. Tomorrow we started the Path of Elders, and hopefully I’d finally have some answers. Or at the very least I’d learn the right questions.
Chapter 11
M-Bot woke me the next “morning,” and I stretched, finding the garden fragment hovering an easy step from our own. My memories of the “night” contained only ordinary dreams. I wished I’d been able to find Jorgen and at least deliver a report, but I was so exhausted that my attempt didn’t get far.
Chet got up when M-Bot tapped him, and at his suggestion I searched out a nearby spring. I took a drink—one of the last ones I’d need in here—and washed my face and hands. Fortunately, I didn’t stink as much as it seemed I should have, considering all the effort of the day before.
As I washed, I glanced at M-Bot, who quietly whispered, “He didn’t get up. Slept until I woke both of you.”
I nodded, then joined Chet at the edge of the fragment. “Ready?” I asked him.
“Forward!” he said.
We stepped across. And I realized this was my first time walking on grass. It felt so strange underfoot. Springy, like I was walking on a pillow.
This fragment turned out to be relatively small. All green grass and hills, with a lake in the center. Near that was a hillside with a hole cut into it—like a doorway into a mine.
The tunnels beyond weren’t extensive: a little entryway followed by three small rooms with earthen walls. But walking through them, I felt an eerily familiar sensation. Scud. I’d been in places that felt like this before.
We found the portal at the rear of the largest room. It was much like the one I’d come out of in the jungle—a glistening surface of rock, slate grey, but carved with lines. Hundreds of them this time, in an intricate pattern.
M-Bot flew up to the wall, and the lights on his drone lit up the markings. “Hmm,” he said. “I kept a database of all known scripts cataloged by the Superiority. This appears to be none of them.”
I nodded absently, tracing a curving line with my finger. “They aren’t a language, not really. I think I know what the lines mean though.”
“How can you?” M-Bot said. “You just said the markings aren’t a language!”
“They aren’t.”
“But they mean something?”
“Yes.”
“Well then, what?”
My finger reached the end of the line. “Memory.”
M-Bot hovered beside me. “Hmmm. Yes, I find this curious. I’m feeling a new emotion. It’s like anger and frustration mixed! How interesting.” With that, he hovered up, then came down directly on my head, whacking me.
“Ow!” I said, more surprised than in pain.
Chet immediately cursed, reaching to grab M-Bot, but I held up a hand to stop him. “M-Bot,” I said, “what is wrong with you?”
“That is what my emotions said I should do,” he explained. “Wow. I feel better! Curious, curious…”
“You can’t just hit people.”
“Didn’t you hit Jorgen basically all the time?”
“That was different,” I said. “First I hated him, then I liked him. So I had good reasons.”
“Ah!” M-Bot said. “You say things like that, and I want to hit you again! Would you stand still so I can smack you with a grabber arm? That sounds fun.”
“Abomination,” Chet said, “you should—”
“It’s all right, Chet,” I said. “He’s just having trouble dealing with emotions. They’re new to him.”
“I think I’m doing well, all things considered,” M-Bot said to Chet. “I bet the first time you had emotions, you babbled a lot and soiled your clothing.” He hovered back around to look at me. “Would you please explain what you meant by telling me this wasn’t a language, then immediately interpreting it?”
“These are the memories of the people who used this portal, M-Bot,” I said, kneeling and feeling at the grooves cut into the stone. “It makes a curious kind of sense. Cytonics are like…biological means of communication and travel. Hyperjumping replaces starships, and mind-to-mind contact replaces radios. So it feels right to me that there would be a way to store thoughts. A cytonic book, or recording.”
“Yes,” Chet said, kneeling beside me. “That is what I’ve heard. The Path of Elders involves a sequence of these portals—four or five total, from what I’ve been able to learn. Each is among the most ancient of ways into the nowhere, etched with the experiences of the first cytonics.”
Yes, I’d seen these patterns in the tunnels of Detritus. I’d also seen them in a large space station—the shipbuilding facility in orbit around Detritus. And I’d seen them inside the delver maze, a place I was increasingly convinced was the corpse of a long-dead delver.
“What do we do?” I asked. “How do we begin?”
“I’m not certain,” Chet said. “Admittedly, I thought we’d experience the memories as soon as we entered.” He placed his own hand on the markings. “I…can feel something.”
“So,” M-Bot said, “these things are both memories and portals between dimensions?”
“Yes,” I said, closing my eyes. The boundary was weaker than usual in this room. My pocket started to grow warm—my father’s pin.
Time for a test. The somewhere, home, was on the other side of this wall. Could I open the way? I engaged my cytonic senses. With my hands on the wall here…yes, I could feel the somewhere—my reality—pulling on me, trying to suck me through. The rock became as if liquid, and I began to sink into it.
Strangely, I could again feel a presence near me. Like I had when I’d used my powers in the jungle. The one that…that I wanted to believe might be my father. Was it guiding me? Leading me to freedom?
I stopped with a thump. Like the sound your boots made on the floor when you kicked them off at night. I tried again.
Thump.
“What do you feel?” Chet asked me.
“The portal is locked on the other side,” I said. “As you warned.”
“I hoped I was wrong about that,” he said. “And that your hyperjumping powers would let you use these portals to access the somewhere. Alas! Fortunately, that is not our primary endeavor here. There has to be a way to see the memories left for us. Can you…listen to the rock? Spy on it, as you say you can do to the delvers?”
I tried that, closing my eyes and listening. Opening my mind. Yes, there was something here. How did I access it? I asked the rock, pled with it, to open to me. But I failed. With a sigh, I opened my eyes.
To find that the cavern had changed around me.
I could make out the vague outlines of the rooms here, but they were ethereal, insubstantial. It was as if that world had faded, and another had sprung up in its place. In this one I felt like I was floating in darkness.