“Are they gone,” one of the boxes cried.
“Down below,” she said. “Nothing bothering them, so far as I can see.”
“You can drop us off somewhere. Go back for them.”
“I’ll do that. Once you’re safe.”
“Safe….” The box made a series of sounds that Fringe only belatedly recognized as sobbing.
“Jordel said safe,” she said. “I know you think it’s the end of the world.” She sounded pompous and patronizing, even to herself. “But …” But what. “Jory may be able to think of something….” Her vision blurred again, and she blinked it clear. She should comfort them! How could she comfort them. She couldn’t hug them, couldn’t hold them. They wouldn’t feel a touch. What words did she have? “Maybe….”
The flier lurched, and she leveled it, taking a deep breath.
“Listen,” she said. “Later on, if you want to … if you don’t want to … I’ll help you. Later on. But just now, you’ve got to be quiet. Quiet … as you can. So I can think. So I can fly. Because …”
Because what?
She couldn’t think what. She had to go upstream, that was it. Upstream where she could drop the two of them off. “There are two of you, aren’t there?” she asked. “Two,” sobbed a voice.
Why had she asked that? She knew there were two. Nela. And Bertran. Was Jordel in there too? He’d been in there. For a little time. Using the voice box to talk to her. She was pretty sure….
She stared at the riverbank moving past, not too fast. Just keep it level, keep it going along the water. Can’t get lost following the water.
Not far to the west was a settlement of some kind. Small dwellings grouped into a village. More of them farther on. Beanfields. Ruled by Mother-dear and all her sister guards. And on the other side of the river—that was Thrasis. What did she know about Thrasis? Nothing. Nothing she could remember. The wall past that. Higher than she’d thought it would be. Who had built that? And when?
Was it possible those weapons had had some kind of drug on them? Some kind of poison?
Her vision blurred and she blinked.
Just keep above the water. Keep moving.
Those who occupied the Core, in addition to creating a network that covered most of Elsewhere, had also duplicated chunks of the Core matrix, a node here, a node there, inhabiting one and then another more or less randomly, as impulse moved them. There was one such node on Panubi, in a vault beneath the coastal mountains west of Deep.
Orimar Breaze, so it seemed to him, came there to find the others. They had been distant; they became adjacent. They had been outside his awareness; they came inside, a clot of roiling egos much occupied in an inquisition of Fringe and the twins. Though Orimar observed what occurred thereafter, he took little part and remained securely in the node while the others seemed to go raging off in pursuit of the escapees.
“Where have you gone?” he asked plaintively and rhetorically, not really expecting an answer. “Where is everybody?”
The voice that answered him was familiar, even after all these years.
“There are only four of you left,” it said. “And three of them are chasing after their prey, Orimar Breaze.”
“Jordel?”
“Yes,” said the voice. “Indeed. Jordel.” “I have this feeling they’ve changed, you know,” said Orimar Breaze, still plaintively.
“You’ve all changed, Orimar. I said you would.”
“I haven’t changed!”
The voice seemed to laugh, chokingly. “Oh, Orimar, if you could see yourself as I do!”
“I’ve grown, perhaps. I’m not merely human now.”
“A god, are you? Like the others?”
The being who called himself Orimar Breaze considered this. “Well, perhaps. Yes. But not like the others. What you have to consider is the others have no … panache. Clore’s a monster and Thob is a swollen udder. Magna Mater indeed. I don’t know what you could call Bland, but Gracious Lady wouldn’t be it. She’s a hag. She’s always been a hag. No style at all.”
“You have style, do you?”
“I will. When I set my mind to it. I had style even as a human! What happened to them? Jordel?”
The voice whispered, almost menacingly, “Do you really want to know?”
“I wouldn’t have asked otherwise.” A hint of the old asperity there, the old dignity, offended.
“What happened was what I told you would happen.”
“All that nonsense about staying asleep when we didn’t want to!”
“All that nonsense, yes. You all went into the Core as dynamic patterns with no sensory feedback to anchor your thoughts, no automatic procedures to correct your patterns. As each of you acquired experiences similar to the others, the edges between you started to blur. Something of Clore lapped over into what had been you, Orimar. Some of you became part of Mintier Thob, some of her became Therabas Bland. Patterns became less individual; personalities became less sure where themselves began and others ended. Attitude and identity scrambled….”
Orimar whined, “Nonsense. All nonsense!” Jordel overrode him. “Part of our patterns were the carefully inculcated civilities our mothers had taught us as children: customs and mores and manners, the behaviors that mask our primitive urges. They’re learned, of course, not instinctive, so they detach easily under stress, or when they’re not reinforced….”
“There was no stress….”
“No reinforcement, either! So civilities detached and were lost, then the old beast urges came surging up. All minds have them, and they amplified one another, they resonated….”
Orimar whined in his throat.
Jordel whispered, “All the minds of all the Great Question Committee, bubbling around in the Core like an ugly stew, bobbing and bumping against one another, getting soggier and less distinguishable the longer they cooked.”
“I don’t believe you,” he cried. “I won’t….”
“Believe or not, I don’t care. Besides, I’m not finished.
“Every personality acquires intellectual fringes: not memory, but opinions, reflexes, and responses. A lot of those bits and fragments also came unglued and went floating around loose. When the matrix came upon these free-floating scraps, it simply eliminated them.
“Aside from faces and
