“Nevertheless,” the voice continued, “it may prove possible to improve our level of mutual confidence. Or even help each other in significant ways.”
Sara
SUPPOSE THE WORLD’S TWO MOST CAREFUL OBSERVERS witnessed the same event. They would never agree precisely on what had happened. Nor could they go back and check. Events may be recorded, but the past can’t be replayed.
And the future is even more nebulous — a territory we make up stories about, mapping strategies that never go as planned.
Sara’s beloved equations, derived from pre-contact works of ancient Earth, depicted time as a dimension, akin to the several axes of space. Galactic experts ridiculed this notion, calling the relativistic models of Einstein and others “naive.” Yet Sara knew the expressions contained truth. They had to. They were too beautiful not to be part of universal design.
That contradiction drew her from mathematics to questions of language — how speech constrains the mind, so that some ideas come easily, while others can’t even be expressed. Earthling tongues — Anglic, Rossic, and Nihanic — seemed especially prone to paradoxes, tautologies, and “proofs” that sound convincing but run counter to the real world.
But chaos had also crept into the Galactic dialects used by Jijo’s other exile races, even before Terran settlers came. To some Biblos linguists, this was evidence of devolution, starfaring sophistication giving way to savagery, and eventually to proto-sapient grunts. But last year another explanation occurred to Sara, based on pre- contact information theory. An insight so intriguing that she left Biblos to work on it.
Or was I just looking for an excuse to stay away?
After Joshu died of the pox — and her mother of a stroke — research in an obscure field seemed the perfect refuge. Perched in a lonely tree house, with just Prity and her books for company, Sara thought herself sealed off from the world’s intrusions.
But the universe has a way of crashing through walls.
Sara glanced at Emerson’s glistening dark skin and robust smile, warmed by feelings of affection and accomplishment. Aside from his muteness, the starman scarcely resembled the shattered wreck she had found in the mulc swamp near Dolo and nursed back from near death.
Maybe I should quit my intellectual pretensions and stick with what I’m good at. If the Six Races fell to fighting among themselves, there would be more need of nurses than theoreticians.
So her thoughts spun on, chaotically orbiting the thin glowing line down the center of the tunnel. A line that never altered as they trudged on. Its changelessness rebuked Sara for her private heresy, the strange, blasphemous belief that she held, perhaps alone among all Jijoans.
The quaint notion of progress.
Out of breath after another run, she climbed back aboard the wagon to find Prity chuffing nervously. Sara reached over to check the little chimp’s wound, but Prity wriggled free, clambering atop the bench seat, hissing through bared teeth as she peered ahead.
The drivers were in commotion, too. Kepha and Nuli inhaled with audible sighs. Sara took a deep breath and found her head awash with contrasts. The bucolic smell of meadows mixed with a sharp metallic tang … something utterly alien. She stood up with the backs of her knees braced against the seat.
Was that a hint of light, where the center stripe met its vanishing point?
Soon a pale glow was evident. Emerson flipped his rewq over his eyes, then off again.
“Uncle, wake up!” Jomah shook Kurt’s shoulder. “I think we’re there!”
But the glow remained vague for a long time. Dedinger muttered impatiently, and for once Sara agreed with him. Expectation of journey’s end made the tunnel’s remnant almost unendurable.
The horses sped without urging, as Kepha and Nuli rummaged beneath their seats and began passing out dark glasses. Only Emerson was exempted, since his rewq made artificial protection unnecessary. Sara turned the urrishmade spectacles in her hand.
I guess daylight will seem unbearably bright for a time, after we leave this hole. Still, any discomfort would be brief until their eyes readapted to the upper world. The precaution seemed excessive.
At last we’ll find out where the horse clan hid all these years. Eagerness blended with sadness, for no reality — not even some god wonder of the Galactics — could compare with the fanciful images found in pre-contact tales.
A mystic portal to some parallel reality? A kingdom floating in the clouds?
She sighed. It’s probably just some out-of-the-way mountain valley where neighboring villagers are too inbred and ignorant to know the difference between a donkey and a horse.
The ancient transitway began to rise. The stripe grew dim as illumination spread along the walls, like liquid trickling from some reservoir, far ahead. Soon the tunnel began taking on texture. Sara made out shapes. Jagged outlines.
Blinking dismay, she realized they were plunging toward sets of triple jaws, like a giant urrish mouth lined with teeth big enough to spear the wagon whole!
Sara took her cue from the Illias. Kepha and Nuli seemed unruffled by the serrated opening. Still, even when she saw the teeth were metal—corroded with flaking rust — Sara could hardly convince herself it was only a dead machine.
A huge Buyur thing.
She had never seen its like. Nearly all the great buildings and devices of the meticulous Buyur had been hauled to sea during their final years on Jijo, peeling whole cities and seeding mulc spiders to eat what remained.
So why didn’t the deconstructors carry this thing away?
Behind the massive jaws lay disks studded with shiny stones that Sara realized were diamonds as big as her head. The wagon track went from smooth to bumpy as Kepha maneuvered the team along a twisty trail through the great machine’s gullet, zigzagging around the huge disks.
At once Sara realized—
This is a deconstructor! It must have been demolishing the tunnel when it broke down.
I wonder why no one ever bothered to repair or haul it away.
Then Sara saw the reason.
Lava.
Tongues and streamlets of congealed basalt protruded through a dozen cracks, where they hardened in place half a million years ago. It was caught by an eruption.
Much later, teams of miners from some of the Six Races must have labored to clear a narrow path through the belly of the dead machine, chiseling out the last stretch separating the tunnel from the surface. Sara saw marks of crude pickaxes. And explosives must have been used, as well. That could explain the guild’s knowledge of this place.
Sara wanted to gauge Kurt’s reaction, but just then the glare brightened as the team rounded a final sharp bend, climbing a steep ramp toward a maelstrom of light.
Sara fumbled for her glasses as the world exploded with color.
Swirling colors that stabbed.
Colors that shrieked.
Colors that sang with melodies so forceful that her ears throbbed.
Colors that made her nose twitch and skin prickle with sensations just short of pain. A gasping moan lifted in unison from the passengers, as the wagon crested a short rise to reveal surroundings more foreign than the landscape of a dream.
Even with the dark glasses in place, each peak and valley shimmered more pigments than Sara could name.
In a daze, she sorted her impressions. To one side protruded the mammoth deconstructor, a snarl of slumped metal, drowned in ripples of frozen magma. Ripples that extended to the far horizon — layer after layer of radiant stone.
