“You have not come timely, Boarmus.” Gulp.
Boarmus shrugs elaborately. He calls this voice, one he dislikes, the gulper. Boarmus has studied the biography book, over and over again. He thinks he knows who this voice is, but he dares not address it by name. Perhaps, by now, it has become … someone else. Boarmus shudders inwardly at the thought.
He has made it a matter of pride not to show fear, not before any of them. Chadra Hume had confessed that he sometimes came back from these nightmare forays shaking in his shoes, pale and sweat-beaded. He had puked, he said, puked like a sick dog, heaving dryly as spit ran down his chin. Boarmus has sworn he will not react so.
“There’s still a day or two before the deadline,” he says expressionlessly.
It has not been quite a year yet since his last visit. The rules say annually, when the residents of the Core wake up. A fleeting thought related to this disturbs him, but before he can consider it, the voice goes on.
“We’ve been waiting. We should not have to wait.” The words accuse him, but the tone doesn’t. The machine has only one tone to serve for everything. One tone for anger, joy, hope, pain. Why should there be more? What do dead men know about such things?
As for their having waited … why would a dead man wait for anything? Tomorrow or the next day, that’s when they were supposed to waken. Chadra had spoken of his own lengthy waits as he fidgeted about in this icy room forever until some one of the dead men warmed up enough to receive his annual report.
The voice goes on, still in the same tone. “Files tells us there are people from the past. Files says there are dragons. Explain these things!”
So they’d been awake long enough to go burrowing through Files! Damn!
Boarmus breathes deeply, invoking the deity of deadly boredom. He explains the twins in the dullest possible words, managing to convey a yawn in every sentence. The last thing he wants is for the dead men to become interested. They have rarely been interested up to now. Most often they have merely accepted the annual report that he as Provost has been required to give, and then they have gone away. Less often they have become agitated, like this: demanding and intransigent and threatening. So Boarmus talks of people from the past who had showed up, yes, but dull, dull, nothing to concern yourself with at all. They came through the Arbai Door. Everyone knows about Arbai Doors. Even the dead men know about Arbai Doors, and about this particular Arbai Door, which was found on Panubi when Elsewhere was first settled.
The matter of dragons, however, he is unable to explain to the dead men’s satisfaction, and the voice of the machine sizzles and pops its irritation, like fat bones in a fire. “You aren’t explaining!”
“I’ve sent someone to find out about them,” Boarmus says, keeping his throat quiet to avoid tasting the bile at the back of his tongue. “He’s putting together a team right now. If I could explain it, I wouldn’t need anyone to find out about it! I’m sure it’s nothing very important, but when I get a report about it, I’ll let you know.”
A long, reverberating silence. During such silences, Boarmus imagines the colloquy going on. This dead man talking to that dead man. He hasn’t seen what lies below in the great coiled mass. He doesn’t want to see it. He imagines the insides of those ramified crystalline structures, something far worse than the dinka-jins in City Fifteen, which are quite bad enough. He doesn’t need to see it to know about it. He has read the original specifications several times, specifications informing him that they are down there below, all their fleshy parts severed and cold, white-rimed and asleep; all their mind patterns being awakened once a year to run through the matrix like scurrying pets on an exercise wheel, whirring, whirring as they update themselves and take exercise, prior to going back into unconscious stasis once more. So the specifications say.
And then his former fleeting thought returns, suddenly, all at once to leave him gasping at his own obtuseness! How could they be here now if the specifications were being adhered to? How could they have been disturbing him, making those ghostlike appearances, if things were as they should be? If things were being done in accordance with the specifications, the dead men could not have wakened until tomorrow!
With sick realization he knows the dead men have not been sleeping their year-long sleeps, they have not been waking only annually to update their information as the specifications very clearly spell out. Oh, no. Breaze and Bland and the rest of them have been awake! What had Zasper’s silly song said? “Breaze and Bland and Thob and Clore ran till they could run no more.” And what did the song mean? What had they run from or to? From the specifications, maybe? Could that silly children’s rhyme actually date back to the first days of settlement? Well, what else could their being awake mean? That they’ve recently been awakened by something? Or maybe recently chosen to stay awake? All the time? Or only some of the time? Are they doing it now just to harass him?
The cabinet containing the specifications and the Provosts’ logs and the biography book is outside in the corridor. The biography book has pictures and histories of every person who went into the Core, all one thousand of them. Boarmus knows those faces as he knows his own. In the log each Provost in turn has recorded the substance of his reports to and conversations with
