He ignored this offer, returning his attention to Urban. “Tanjiri is not for you. You are not ready to encounter what exists there.”
This could be true, the Scholar said, speaking from within Urban’s atrium where no one else could hear.
“I want to see it anyway,” Urban said aloud. “The broken megastructures. The celestial city. The living worlds.”
“You’re not ready,” Lezuri insisted. “If I demonstrate this to you, will you consider another path?”
He did not wait for an answer, but produced an object from his hand.
From his hand.
A ultra-thin silvery needle that flashed with refracted light as it burst out of the skin of his palm, emerging at a low angle, growing and growing in length until it reached a full twelve centimeters.
Urban backed away in alarm. Clemantine rose to her feet.
“Do you recognize it?” Lezuri asked, holding the needle up. Its mirrored surface sliced light into a spray of rainbow glints that danced madly across the walls and ceiling.
“No,” Urban said, his mouth dry, wondering where this was going.
“But you can guess.”
“Is it like that needle you used to penetrate the hull of my ship?”
“Yes, except this one won’t activate. It won’t grow spontaneously. It doesn’t have that capability, but everything else is there. Everything I know. All of it folded into a quantum-scale matrix.” Lezuri held it out. “Take it. It won’t harm you. It’s a gift, from me to you. All my knowledge yours—if you can work out how to access it. If you can do that, then I am wrong, and you are ready to go to Tanjiri.”
“It’s a trick,” Clemantine said.
“Yes,” Lezuri agreed. “The trick is that you are not ready.”
The Scholar said, If what he just told you about that needle is true, then he’s right. You won’t be able to access it.
Urban reached for the needle. Subminds synced him with his ghost on the high bridge. He sent a message to be sure: *If something happens to me…
*Sooth. I’ll end it.
A shiver on the back of his neck as he took the needle.
He held it gingerly, pinched between thumb and forefinger. It felt light, delicate. He feared he would snap it with the least pressure. Nevertheless, he slid his other forefinger along its length.
Cold. Utterly smooth to his touch but not frictionless or he would not be able to hold it at all. Fine points on both ends. He touched one.
The needle pierced the pad of his finger, went straight through bone and emerged through the nail on the other side. Rainbow glints. No blood. No pain either. Still, his chest rose and fell as he strove to contain his revulsion.
Moving with great care, he pulled his finger free.
Still no blood.
He looked at Lezuri. “You don’t believe I can do this—access the information inside.”
“It’s beyond you,” Lezuri assured him.
“Let me guess again. The mechanism to open it is sealed on the inside.”
Lezuri smiled. “Ah, you’re doing better than I thought. You’ve already solved half the puzzle. Now, all that’s left is to work out how to get inside so that you can trigger the mechanism. I will leave you to consider that. This avatar is running out of energy. I must go.”
He did not dispose of himself against the generative wall as Urban half expected, but left instead through the door.
Clemantine came to get a closer look at the needle. “It’s a pretty thing. Doesn’t look real, though. Like it’s only partly in this world.”
“Hmm,” he said, remembering how it had passed bloodlessly through his finger.
He sent the Scholar to the library, to share what he’d seen with the other Apparatchiks. Then he messaged the Engineer and the Bio-mechanic: *I’ve given you access to this location. I want you to analyze this.
Immediately, a smooth white column rose a meter high from the floor. A voice said, “Put the needle on it.”
“The Engineer?” Clemantine asked.
“Yes.”
Gingerly, he set the needle down. It started to roll, but a shallow channel formed in the top of the column, catching it, and then closing over it.
“I’m mapping the surface of the device now,” the Engineer reported. “So far, it contains no active nanotech.”
“Show us what it looks like,” Clemantine said.
The generative wall converted to a video screen. It showed a precisely engineered surface composed of a repeating pattern of pits and knobs.
“The tips of the needle are smooth,” the Engineer reported. “The rest of its surface is tiled in this pattern, presumably to add a slight measure of friction.”
“No seams?” Urban asked. “No lock?”
“Nothing like that,” the Engineer said. “It doesn’t react chemically and our assault Makers cannot interact with it.”
“Like the containment capsule?” Clemantine asked.
“It’s as impervious as the containment capsule,” another voice said. Urban recognized the jaundiced tone of the Bio-mechanic. “But this is a different kind of material. It refracts light differently.”
“Let me see the needle again,” Urban said.
The needle emerged from the top of the column, still cradled in a shallow channel. He picked it up. It felt so fragile in his fingers, as if the pressure of his pulse might break it. Then he tried to snap it in half, and all sense of fragility vanished.
Clemantine gasped when she saw what he was doing, but the needle didn’t even bend.
“You can’t break it,” the Engineer said. “And if you keep trying, it’s going to slip and pierce your hand or disappear into a generative wall.”
Urban held it up, admiring the rainbow glints.
Clemantine hissed softly. “This is a distraction. There’s no way to get inside, is there?”
“Probably not,” the Engineer agreed.
“Then why did Lezuri give it to me?” Urban asked.
“To drive you mad with frustration?” the Bio-mechanic suggested.
“No, there’s a riddle here we’re not getting.”
“Put it back on the column,” the Engineer said. “I’ll take it and run additional tests of its surface—but I think we’ll find the only way into it is to go back in time and be present in the moments before it was sealed.”
“Did you just make a joke?” Urban asked—because that never happened.
“No,” the Engineer said in the same even tone. “I’m serious.”
“Oh.” He laid the needle on the top of the column and watched it disappear. “No problem then. We just have to learn to manipulate time, and the riddle is solved.”
He checked Lezuri’s status and found that the avatar had returned to the warren and from there to the cocoon from which he’d emerged.
“Maybe it’s not a matter of going back in time,” Clemantine mused. “Maybe you have to go forward.”
Urban turned to her. “What?”
She shrugged. “What if you have to… I don’t know… catch the needle in a bubble of time and run it on fast forward until it reaches a point in the future when it was programmed to open?”
“You think Lezuri can do that?”
“No. But maybe he remembers a time when he could?”
Chapter
35
The Bio-mechanic warned, *Our nemesis returns.
Urban looked up from the novel he’d been reading, disturbed by the bitter cynicism in the Bio-mechanic’s voice. More disturbed, when he did a quick lookup of ‘nemesis,’ a word he’d never heard before.
*The agent of our downfall? he asked.
*Desperate times, desperate measures, the Bio-mechanic replied. *You need to recognize that.
*You’ve changed. You’re not the same.
*We all change—to meet our circumstances or be defeated by them.
*You believe we’ll be defeated.
*No. I won’t let that happen.
Urban did not miss the harsh promise behind those words.
He sat up on the sofa, looked around the pleasant little room: Leaf-filtered sunlight patterning the white carpet, a painting depicting mountains in the path of a planetary storm, the dish of irises in full bloom on the side table.
Clemantine was gone somewhere with Pasha. He messaged her: *I’m worried the Bio-mechanic is unstable.
Several seconds passed before she sent a cryptic reply: *I trust him.
He frowned down at the tablet he’d been reading. On its screen, text from a novel purportedly written by one of the Founders at Tanjiri and recently translated by Dalisay, a linguist in the ship’s company. Glimpse of a lost past.
Reluctantly, he instructed the tablet to display the personnel map instead. It showed Lezuri still in the warren.
Urban traded subminds with his ghost on the high bridge and then reviewed his memories of the ship’s status. Nothing out of the ordinary, given that alien infestation had become ordinary.
He watched as Lezuri progressed to the transit gate. The personnel map showed Naresh, waiting to meet him, just like yesterday. The two points drew together, but after a few seconds they separated again. Naresh stayed, while Lezuri crossed the pavilion alone, taking a fast, determined pace to the pathway that was the shortest route to Urban’s cottage.
Hard not to think some momentous decision had been made.
Did Lezuri regret the game he’d played with the needle? He’d held out the lure of knowledge to win Urban over, but the impenetrability, the uselessness of that thing, had only hardened Urban’s resolve to reach Tanjiri. He would rather creep among the shadowed ruins of the megastructures, hunting for the remnants of libraries, then to rely on Lezuri to teach him what the people of the Hallowed Vasties had once known.
The map showed Lezuri on the patio. Urban set the tablet aside and stood up. The gel door retracted and Lezuri came in.
Subminds shunted through the network, keeping him synced with his ghost on the high bridge.
“I know the trick to the needle,” he told Lezuri. “It requires me to reach back in time to before it was sealed, and then set the mechanism that will open it from the inside.”
Lezuri looked at him, considering this for a long moment. Then he said, “I have something else to show you. I have ascertained the position of a star system that will interest you. Grant me the use of the array of telescopes and it will please me to show it to you.”
At these words, Urban felt he’d won a kind of victory. Lezuri had talked about his past, but never in any specific way. Now he seemed ready to reveal his origin. The offer triggered acute curiosity, but also suspicion. Everything Lezuri did made him suspicious. But what was the downside? Lezuri meant to persuade him to take Dragon somewhere other than Tanjiri. Urban was sure of that.
He wanted to know: Can I be persuaded?
He sent a DI to check the observational schedule. Nothing critical was underway, but that’s not what he told Lezuri. “The scopes are busy with a survey of the Near Vicinity. It’d be a risk to interrupt that. It might lead us to overlook some imminent hazard.”
The risk was minuscule. Urban mentioned it only because he wanted to see Lezuri’s reaction to a delay.
“We’re scheduled for an interim update on Tanjiri in another hundred sixty days or so,” he continued as if this news could serve as consolation. “But if it’s another star you want to see, you’ll have to wait for the annual imaging.”
Judging by the cynical amusement in his gaze, Lezuri recognized the act. In the condescending tone that came so naturally to him, he said, “Your annual survey is useful but limited. It only looks at those stars that once hosted a Swarm, ignoring other interesting systems within this region you call the Hallowed Vasties.”
“Are you saying there are inhabited star systems here that escaped the Communion?”
“There are places that were never touched by it,” Lezuri assured him.
This was a new concept. Historical observations affirmed that all inhabited star systems in the Hallowed Vasties had evolved into Dyson swarms. But maybe other systems had been settled later, after those records were made?
Urban wanted to know. Curiosity was his engine. And what harm could come from turning the telescopes in a new direction? He was more than willing to trade a delay in the ongoing survey to gain insight into Lezuri’s goals.
“Give me the coordinates. We’ll take a look.”