Aestival Tide (46 page)

Finally he called out, “Why do you want to see her? Why is it so important to you?”

The
rasa
did not slow his steps, but when Nasrani called out again he stopped and turned to him.

“Why?” Nasrani ended, a little brokenly. He looked up at the
rasa,
then shrugged and gave him a hopeless smile. Aqua light washed over them from the tunnel opening, shot with gold and darker green. Without the thrash of the festival drums, the clamor of the gamelan at the Lahatiel Gate to mute it, the sound of the pounding waves was brutally loud. Nasrani's ears hurt and he rubbed them fitfully.

“You told me when you discovered it that the nemosyne had been linked with an archaic religion.”

Nasrani nodded. “Yes, that's right. The American Catholic Church. Mostly women—she had been programmed by a woman, her files are mostly women's histories, mystical nonsense. She would be of no use to you, Margalis.”

The
rasa
shook his head, gazed at where the light streamed onto the sand. “Oh, but she would be,” he said. “You see, I saw something very interesting in the Capital. I saw a new religion being created—or, rather, a very old one being resurrected. It was an—
unusual
—experience. And I also found the ancient weapons storehouses there. Had I not been killed in such an untimely fashion, why I might have resurrected them as well.

“And later, when I found myself back among the Seraphim, well I thought of you, Nasrani, I remembered how excited you were with your metal woman. You invited me, once long ago, to go with you to see her—in a weak moment, of course, you might not even remember. I think we were drinking Amity with your sister Shiyung, and after she had left us you were feeling rather grand. I refused, because I wanted to follow Shiyung—”

A break in his voice. Nasrani flinched and started shuffling forward again, wishing he had said nothing.

“—but now I wish I had accepted your kind invitation. So think of it this way, Nasrani—it is a few years later, but what's a few years between old friends?”

Nasrani tried to twist his grimace into a smile. A moment later he felt the
rasa
beside him again, his heat also seeming to dissipate as they left the Undercity behind them.

“There is another reason,” Tast'annin said after a few minutes. “Manning Tabor at the Academy used to talk about the nemosyne network. He claimed to have deciphered computer programs, records that revealed where the original units had been deployed. I scoffed at him then, but now I realize he must have been right. He said there were military units still active in the United Provinces, and one or two that were rumored to have been captured by the Commonwealth after the Second Ascension. There was a master unit that controlled all of them, or could control them all if it was activated. The Military Tactical Target Retrievals Network. Your sister consulted Tabor at length about it. She thought it might be located in the ancient arsenal in the old capital. That was why she sent me there. I searched for it but I found nothing, there was no indication that it had ever been there.

“But I think that your nemosyne might have knowledge of this unit, if the nemosynes were truly linked at some point. If you could activate your nemosyne to search for them, you could locate the other existing units anywhere in the world. One could control them—control the military forces they control.”

Nasrani's head ached; he scarcely focused on Tast'annin's words. He stared at his feet, shading his streaming eyes with his hand. A few feet in front of them the sand glittered dazzlingly white. Brilliant blue light danced at the edges of his vision.

“What difference does that make, if Araboth is falling around us?” he shouted above the din of the waves. “If you've killed Shiyung, and the rest of us are going to die anyway? What possible difference could it make for you to find this master nemosyne?”

He stopped, swaying, and with one hand clutched his stomach. Nausea gripped him; he hardly had the strength to look at the
rasa
stopped beside him. “Margalis!” he pleaded. “Don't—you can't leave me like this, you can't go—you'll die out there—” He sank to the ground, fingers scrabbling at the sand.

The
rasa
's glittering blue eyes regarded him with utter contempt. “Ah, Nasrani,” the Aviator Imperator pronounced. His voice rang dispassionately as he walked away. “Now I see that you truly are an Orsina: that is, an utter fool.”

He left the exile kneeling in the entrance to the tunnel, and stepped out into the sunlight.

Hobi screamed, his voice torn from him and flung into the wind that came flying across the water. Overhead other things screamed as well, scraps of cloud or perhaps the raging tips of waves thrown against the sky. It was not until Nefertity knelt beside him and laved his forehead with water, until he dared open his eyes again, that he looked up into the sky and recognized those shrieking rags as birds.

“Hobi—Hobi, it's all right, it's only the sea—”

He tried to hear something else; strained to catch beneath the ceaseless chant of the waves another song—the grinding of the Gate as it opened, the screams of the crowd spilling down the steps onto the thirsting sand; the long moaning wail of the Redeemer awakened from its year-long sleep. But there was only this horrible sound, gentler now than it had been when it echoed through the tunnel but no less terrifying, and stabbed with the harsh cries of the gulls.

“Hobi, please. Open your eyes and try to stand—we have to leave this place, we are too near the water. A storm is building, we must go to higher ground.”

He coughed, pushed her hands away, and finally sat up. When he opened his eyes the light was so painful that he cried out again, would have buried his face in his hands except that Nefertity took him and pulled him close to her, until feeling her cold steel enveloping him he took a deep breath and nodded.

“All right—I'm all right,” he whispered. He wanted never to move from her, the chill kiss of smooth metal and glass upon his cheeks and arms. But she pulled away from him. He stared down at the sand beneath him, every shade of brown and white, pinked with broken cowries and wing shells and crescents of green and brown glass. A tiny object like the limb of one of Nasrani's emerald monads glistened beside his ankle. He picked it up and stared at it, still not daring to raise his face to the sun. It was the leg of some small creature, jointed like a server's leg, but hollow and light as a straw and ending in a tiny flattened fin. It came to him suddenly that it was the leg of a crustacean, like one of the crayfish or prawns he had often eaten at banquets on Seraphim. A real animal, one that had never seen the inside of a vivarium tank. Something that swam in the water flowing and receding a few yards from where he crouched, and hunted there for creatures even smaller than itself. Hobi let the leg slip from his fingers to the sand, and leaning forward he vomited upon it.

Afterward he felt better. Nefertity had stood so that her shadow blotted the sun from his face, and waited silently for him to rise. He did so, his arms flailing at the air until the nemosyne caught him.

“I can't—it's too big—”

She waited until he grew calm again. The water pulsed relentlessly against the shoreline, stretched out before them without end: blue, green, white. He did not think he could stand to gaze upon it, it seemed so raw; but he forced himself to look. Just for an instant. Then he turned and stared down the beach, to where the Quincunx Domes rose shimmering above the sea.

“God—look at them!”

He shook his head and took a step away from the nemosyne. During the last Æstival Tide he was always conscious of the city behind him, but then it had seemed more like a solid wall, a buffer between sea and sky, too huge for any detail beyond the black maw of the Redeemer's cage and the lapis-crowned figures of the Orsinate waving from their balcony. From here the domes looked both smaller and more impressive. He could see the two domes nearest him, and rearing above them the central Quincunx Dome, glittering with a dark greenish cast, pocked everywhere with irregular black indentations. A large curved rectangle in the central dome would be one of the skygates. As he stared it began to grow darker at one end, and a minute later a fouga rose from it, small and delicate as a bubble in a water-pipe, and trailing festival pennons like colored threads in the breeze.

“Hobi.”

He looked back, startled. He had forgotten the nemosyne, forgotten where he was. An awful vertigo as he tried to focus on her amid all that gold and blue; then, amazingly, he found that he could do it. He could look at her, he could even walk back, dizzy but no longer nauseated.

“Hobi, look at the horizon.”

He looked behind him. He hadn't noticed before the jagged green shapes spurting everywhere opposite the sea. Trees, he realized, trees and bushes. But then Nefertity took his hand and pulled him, gently, toward her.

“No, not there—the other way, the horizon, see? That line at the end of the ocean.”

He turned obediently and looked where she pointed. At the rim of the world, above the unbroken line of blue and turquoise water, seethed a blurry darkness, immense as the sea itself. The whitish sky ended abruptly where it met this livid wall. He remembered looking through 'files in his father's library, hearing one of his friends describe a trompe l'oeil garden he had once visited on the vivarium level, and what he saw shimmering there.

Mountains,
he thought in amazement. He turned to Nefertity. “Mountains!”

She shook her head. “No.
Clouds,
Hobi, it's a storm—”

“Clouds?”

It was the first time he had ever spoken the word aloud, and he said it again, staring at the line of black and gray advancing steadily above the waves.

Clouds. A storm. Just as the moujiks had always predicted.
Ucalegon, Prince of Storms. The Wave will take you.

Suddenly he laughed, laughed until he had to stoop, holding his ribs as the air swam about him, white and gold and green. He laughed so long and so hard that Nefertity's eyes darkened from jade to emerald, and her body glowed in alarm as she plucked his sleeve and called out to him fruitlessly. Finally she grabbed his arm and started dragging him down the beach, the two of them stumbling through the sand. And still Hobi turned to stare back at the ocean and what loomed above it, that cinereous wall more massive than the domes, more massive than anything he could ever have imagined; he stared at it and laughed on and on and on, and the gulls banked above them, keening in the wind.

When they reached the edge of the beach he finally calmed down. Here trailers of greenery laced the sand, vines overgrown with flat yellow flowers that smelled sweet and whose hearts hid creamy spiders like pearls. Hobi took off his boots and socks, wincing at how hot it was. After a few minutes he pulled them back on again, swearing as he picked sand-spurs from his soles. Nothing grew on the stretch of sand between Araboth and the sea, but where the sand ended the jungle began. He had never before seen anything like this tangle of jade and brown and yellow, moving in the stiff wind, and the bursts of crimson and iridescent blue exploding from it as they approached.

“Those are birds,” Nefertity explained. She sounded rueful. “If I were a zoological unit, I would know their names.”

Hobi nodded. Already he recalled his other self—the self that had nearly been incapable of leaving the tunnel, the self that had crouched retching upon the sand—as he recalled his mother; someone precious but irredeemably lost. The air was so choked with smells that breathing was like eating—great gulps of roses and brine, a scent like carrion that turned out to be the fragrance of trumpet-shaped blossoms twining round a tree; the smell of the tree itself, heady with leaves and the spiciness of its decaying bark. He slashed at a branch with his hand, sending up a cloud of black and golden wings like sparks. Butterflies, he knew that from the vivariums. Birds and butterflies, and a dead crab's leg. He would have rushed headlong into the thicket if Nefertity hadn't stopped him.

“Higher ground, Hobi.”

He turned to her, aggravated. “How do you know all this? ‘Higher ground,' ‘It's a storm'?”

Her wide eyes gazed at him unblinkingly. The soft whir of circuitry echoed the waves behind them. “Loretta. Before our exile I went with her when she traveled, and she always spoke to me. And I know from my programmed histories. If we are where you say we are, that is a part of the country that was plagued with hurricanes long ago. After the Shining of the Second Ascension the weather patterns changed, and it was besieged by tidal waves.”

She pointed, far above them and inland, where a shadow rose in an uneven cusp against the blue sky. “There—that is high ground. We should try to go there. If we walk along the shore we may find a path inland, or running water. The woods here are too overgrown for us to pass through safely.”

Hobi fell silent, nodding, and trudged after her along the strand. His first ecstatic joy was fading. Hunger and thirst made his head ache. The sun beat down on him like a block of stone. Bits of old stories came back to him, of ghouls that lived Outside, the remnants of men who had been stricken by the mutagenic rains. The thought made him hurry behind Nefertity.

Once, he stopped and looked back down the beach. It seemed they had been walking for hours, but the gleaming curves of the domes seemed no more distant than they had before. Only the shape of the shoreline had changed, and the dark silhouette of the storm clouds. They filled most of the sky above the ocean now. The wind blew stiffly in from the sea. Great sheets of sand tore past him, tearing at his mouth and eyes and seeming to burn through his clothes.

He raised his hands to shield his face as he looked out to sea. The waves had grown bigger. They smashed against the beach, sending up plumes of froth and a dark spray of sand and broken shells. The wind had a different smell now, too. Different from the cleansing scent of the ocean, almost stagnant, as though from somewhere far away the clouds had sucked up fetid pools and carried them here. Even the air seemed heavy and moist. Hobi spat to get the taste of salt and grit from his mouth. The sun bulged from the clouds, luminous, faintly green. When he turned back to follow Nefertity he saw that the jungle of trees and cactus growing along the shore glowed with an eerie yellow light. Shells crunched beneath his feet. The bigger conches cast strange shadows across the sand, and his steps disturbed small things that raced to burrow into the scar.