“Not that we don’t share it, Ian and I. We’ve agreed to be down here. We’ve agreed not to leave this place, ever. That’s no small thing.”
“Down here. Where is here?”
“On this world, so to speak. This earth. This patch of land. You’re on a round world circling a star, Marak Trin Tain. That’s knowledge she took from your grandfather’s grandfathers.”
“Does it matter?” He disbelieved anything she offered. “Does it matter, except that I get out of here with the people I walked in with?”
“Direct and to the point. I know your reputation. I can see why you got here. Dare I believe you’re one who might get back?”
“I’m supposed to tell the Ila what I find here.”
“Tell her. Perhaps she’ll want to come here.”
The Ila, travel across the desert? Join madmen?
“She won’t.”
“Don’t be so sure. I’ll send you with a message. She may hear it.”
“What message?”
“The same she sent to me.”
Therewas a flaw in the woman’s omniscience. Slight as it seemed, he leapt on it, took perverse satisfaction in that flaw. “She sent you nothing. She doesn’t even know you exist.”
“Oh, but she did send, all the same. She doesn’t know whatI am, but she sent you to find that out. Her message is that she understands what we’ve done, she understands it’s challenged her creation, she understands her makers have failed against ours, and take it for granted that she’s tried to cure the mad. But she can’t. She’s gathered all the visions. She knows their meaning. She knows someone is here, and by the fact we’ve beaten her makers, she has an idea who we are. But she wants to know what we mean to do, and why, and that’s what you’re to tell her.”
“What do you mean to do?”
“Gather survivors. Keep them alive. And when the ondatchange this world so that nothing she’s loosed will survive, we’ll set new makers loose, ones the ondatwill approve.”
“The ondat.”
“Her enemies.”
“And our lives?”
Luz was silent a breath or two, then: “I regret risking them again. But if there’s one power that can call the rest to shelter, it won’t be a handful of madmen urging the village lord to come here. She can call them. Her priests can. We couldn’t make war on her: her hold is too secure. But we can use her influence over her own creation. The god of this world can bring us the people and save their lives. But you’re almost too late… if you’re not too late already. I can direct you. I can talk to you and I can talk to the ondatand I may secure you a safe course, but not if they know I’m bringing the Ila herself to safety. It’s a risk.“
“Then why do you take such a risk?”
“She’s not as innocent as the rest of you—she wasn’t the one who poured out makers on an ondatworld, not one of that company, but she was part of it. Her worst sin was to save lives… your lives. She took this place for a refuge. But politics—” Luz shook her head. “Five hundred years of argument about your fate, and you’ve threatened no one. She’s threatened no one. She can’t leave. We’ve persuaded the ondatto this compromise: that they may change this world so the makers are forced to change, but we may moderate that change: we can remove the threat and assure the ondatwe can stop it. Her cooperation would make our work easier. Say that. Tell her I’ll make her welcome. Tell her there is an escape, a narrow one, and the window may close before she can take it, even as it is. We were given thirty years, and those years were up when the Ila sent us this unexpected gift. She knows that we’ve loosed new makers. Tell her to listen to you, and listen to me, and come to the tower while there’s still time.”
“With the mad? The Ila of Oburan, to live with the mad?”
“Oh, very much so,” Luz said. “One needs not erase history. One needs only fail to teach one generation of children. Fail with two, and the destruction widens. She may deserve her damnation for what she has done, but it was done, perhaps, to keep you content with what limited things she could give. To make you her good servants. And keep you alive, for company.”
The land circling a star and wars with some tribe named the ondat, and dots and creatures let loose in their very blood. He had had nature to explain the world that was, but he had never understood why nature was what it was, either. He had never understood the vermin, or where men came from, except what the priests said, that the First Descended dropped down from the heavens and divided beasts from vermin.
“Where are the ondat?” he asked.
“Up above, where you can’t reach them. Believe this: that you threaten the peace. It’s not the land you have. The enemy doesn’t care about that. It’s that youexist according to the Ila’s plan, and that the Mercy of the Ila continues to pour out makers; useless, we say, since you’ve overburdened the land as it is, and never will be more than you are, but it’s your existence, all the same, that prolongs the war. You loosed makers on theirworld. They don’t forget that. They wish you dead.”
He understood everything down to their world. He had no idea where that was. But he understood revenge. He understood it was useless to plead against it, and he knew that survival required allies.
“They gave us thirty years,” Luz said, “to loose our own makers, and to gather our people and our goods and our records, before this world changes into what it will be. Thirty years ago we set to work. Thirty years ago we went out across the Lakht and into the villages, such as we could reach. We loosed new makers, in your blood, and they set to work, and enabled you to hear us, and brought a great many to us. Then the Ila, as you call her, gave us this final gift, in you. So we send you back to her with a message. A last chance. That’s all you need to know.”
“To come here. Because you ask her to.”
“I’ll give you a word: nanocele. There. Does that tell you all you need?”
He was stung. He knew when he was being mocked. And when someone he could not fight was waiting for that admission. “It tells me nothing.”
“So I can’t tell you more than that, can I? I don’t force you to go back. But if you do go, tell her the answers are all here, and refuge is here, for anyone she can bring. We never planned for her to come. But if we had her records, her knowledge, her memory, we could do very much more.”
As if the Ila should come here, and lift one manicured finger to bargain. Norit had put her arms about him. He put his about her.
“You made us mad,” he said to Luz. “You did this. Why should we believe anything? What do we care about nanoceles?”
Darkness flooded his sight, and an object spinning out of darkness toward a shining distant globe. That object went falling, and falling, in fire, and suddenly he was looking up at that fall, across the blue heavens, and toward the Qarain. Norit cried out. He flinched.
A star. Was that a falling star?
“Say that I give you a new vision,” Luz said. “And there will be more. The thirty years are up. I would have said there was no hope. That we had gathered all who could survive to reach us. But since you were ours, and since at the last moment we knew you had gone to the Ila, we had far more hope.”
“Who told you?”
“Your own voice. The things you heard. Oh, we didn’t know who Marak Trin was, not until you made war on the Ila. We doubted from the beginning you would succeed. We feared on the other hand you might disrupt everything. We lent you our advantages, still; the makers assured you would heal, and live. We can call in those who hear our voice: but you refused to hear us. So we thought we wouldn’t have you, after all. Thanks to her, we do, and we have all of those you brought. But shecan send out messengers to the tribes and the villages. She can bring all of Oburan with her, if you can persuade her and bring her here—her, and her records. Bring those.”