“Let’s go before he decides whose fault that was,” said Jory.
The girl child lay behind Fringe where she had fallen, unmoving, her eyes rolled up into her head. Fringe snatched her up, wrapped her in a fold of the oracle’s cloak, and carried her along, shrugging aside Danivon’s clutching remonstrance.
“Get off me!” she growled at him. “Get off!”
“She belongs here,” he whispered, running at her side. “For the love of diversity, Fringe. She’s not yours to take!”
“Someone took you!” she snarled in return. “Someone took you. Kept you from ending up on the skull rack in Molock. Kept them from killing you, beating your bones to powder. Zasper Ertigon took you, Danivon! Now I’m taking her. Get out of my way.”
And there was no time for argument, for the city came awake like a hive disturbed, with riot and burning and screaming in all directions, for there seemed to be dragons everywhere, pursuing the populace wherever it would run.
• • •
In City Fifteen, Sepel and his colleagues set aside the sensory recordings left by Clore and Thob and Breaze and Bland. Those left, only a few, are by Jordel of Hemerlane.
“Join me?” Sepel invites his colleagues.
Tentacles are joined. They are conscious of being Sepel794DZ and colleagues….
Then, in an instant, they are Jordel of Hemerlane.
Jordel of Hemerlane, unconscious of any being save himself, seeing what Jordel saw, knowing what Jordel knew. Being where Jordel had been….
High in the tower room. Such heights usually give him a feeling of exhilaration, an appreciation of the forces supporting such great structures in their skyward reach. Today he feels only depression, frustration, anger. Across from him, outside the windows, clouds scud by on a summer wind. At a distance is a glimmer of banners on pinnacles, a shiver of windblown flags. This is Brannigan Galaxity, heartbeat of humanity.
Before the windows, silhouetted against the racing clouds, stands Orimar Breaze, handsome and silver-haired, his head like that of a prophet. The group is assembled in his place, his important place, this apartment at the top of the highest tower, this apartment that is above even the Pinnacle Study where the meetings of the Great Question Committee are held. And handsome Orimar Breaze is making a scornful shape with his lips as he hears what Jordel has to say.
Jordel feels his tongue flap between dry lips as he pleads with them. “… must protest this unwillingness to accept our specifications! We can’t risk this!” He swallows, trying to mitigate the panic he feels in the presence of these uncomprehending, unscientific … idiots!
No understanding on the face of Orimar Breaze, nor on the faces of Mintier Thob or Therabas Bland, who already have their mouths open in incipient argument.
“Dear boy …”
So speaks Mintier Thob as she smiles that patronizingly maternal smile. Though it convinces many people she is sensible and honest, it no longer convinces Jordel of anything:
“When we go into the Core on Elsewhere, you want our patterns to remain in stasis except for fully automated annual updatings. Believe me, dear boy, we understand what you’re saying. However, we prefer that our patterns shall not remain in stasis and they shall be updated and corrected on a discretionary basis rather than automatically.”
She smiles, she speaks: calmly, briefly, seeming to cleave to the point while actually grazing it only slightly. So she has enlightened many desperate issues with ignorant complacency. So she does now. Secure in her comfortable, motherly tone, she solicits approval from the others.
And receives it. Yes, say Breaze and Bland and Clore. We prefer our own discretion to your automatics, dear boy. Yes, we do.
“Then you don’t understand the implications,” he cries, stung into undiplomatic truth.
“Oh, my boy, indeed!” squawks Therabas Bland, a stringy old hen who eschews body sculpting and syntheskin to sag unappealingly in the dangling beads and flowing draperies of her girlhood. Beauty and grace are nothing to her, she often says, nothing to one to whom the secrets of the universe have been disclosed. She is a mathematician and proud of her mind. She will not believe it might fail her. Her own thoughts must be correct, else she would find them unthinkable. So she waggles a finger at him, cackling, “My boy, indeed, let us say it simply. We prefer to stay awake. We prefer not to emulate some fairy-tale heroine and sleep for a few hundred years. Surely you can understand that!”
What can Jordel say he has not said a thousand times before? He nods, he holds out his hand placatingly. “It is instinctive to respond as you are doing. My gut response is the same as yours. It is not, however, the correct thing to do, and the implications of it are very grave.”
“In what way?” Orimar’s left nostril lifts only a little; Orimar who never pays attention to the sense of any argument, but only to his own place in it, his own allegiances. His place in this one is beside Thob, beside Bland.
“Error,” Jordel hears himself cry, doing his best to make a tocsin of it. “Error will creep in. If the matter of update and correction is left to the discretion of individual minds, we will be wide open to error.”
And from across the room sounds a rasping snort as the cadaverous form of Subble Clore rises from a half-hidden chair, wearing an unpleasantly predatory smile that makes Jordel shudder. Clore has made a life-long study of organisms exposed to negative stimulation, of survival or mortality under stress, of the evolutionary response to agony. Clore is a scholar of pain. His place at the Galaxity has been challenged from time to time, but it is whispered he has a hold upon the almighty Chancellors. There are tales of unspeakable agreements made in the pursuit of power, but despite all the tittle-tattle he is here, one of the elect of Brannigan.
“You are saying we are untrustworthy.” He lifts his
