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Chapter 35

It was not, after all, such a difficult thing to do—a matter of touching in the right places in each consciousness, not reading directly, but coaxing and teasing at loose threads of unguarded memories, gently unraveling the inhibitions. The core did it carefully, without intimidating or frightening, and it worked; even the Ell were willing to let certain kinds of memory go without struggle, and one after another they floated up into the field.

It was a degree of interference with which the core felt uneasy. But in this case, surely, the importance of its purpose outweighed the risk . . .

 

* * *

 

The images flew up from Sage's mind like sparrows from a rooftop:

The last time he saw his brother was on the twenty-seventh of September, 2162, two days before Tony lifted for Earth orbit and the colony fleet. Tony was waiting to board the plane, so nervous and anxious he would hardly look at his mother or at Sage. Mother was weeping in that subdued way of hers, dabbing at her eyelids with a handkerchief and mumbling the occasional suggestion ("Be sure and mingle, now—don't just stay buried in your laboratory"), each remark being met by a nod or sigh from Tony, or a kick at his duffel bag; and it only got worse rather than better until the flight call finally came and Tony hefted his bag, gave his mother an awkward hug and kiss and Sage a handshake, nodded when his mother told him how proud his father would have been, and then trotted down the concourse. He paused once at the vestibule to wave goodbye, and then he was gone.

Sage and his mother rode home in silence. A few weeks later they watched on the vispy as the colony fleet lit up and vanished out of orbit, into the night of interplanetary space. It did not truly vanish, of course; it was followed all the way out by news cameras, until a few weeks later when it shimmered and collapsed and vanished—this time truly—into the nothingness of FTL, from which it would reappear three and a half years hence, if the estimates were correct, and a hundred thirty light-years away.

And it was just a few weeks later that Sage learned that his mother was dying, and he liquidated all that was left of the family's assets to assure her life everlasting, so long as the cyberlife network survived . . .

 

* * *

 

In the halo of the rapture-field, Harybdartt found himself reliving certain images without touching the secrets buried at the center. Images of stalking and of battle:

It was a deadly game, requiring endless patience, a hunt that often came up empty. And yet what else could the (fleet) have done, when its mission was to protect the Hope Star from an enemy that could not be traced, that attacked and vanished, that operated without discernible method or moral purpose?

For space-defenders like Harybdartt, the missions consisted of prolonged confinement, as star systems along the transient lanes near the Hope Star were scanned. At rare intervals, the enemy was engaged. He had lived through three encounters before the last one—each brief, fierce, and nominally won by the Ell. Many of the enemy machines were destroyed, but others escaped, and the victories seemed hollow, winning only empty star systems. Never was a living Outsider found in battle or in the aftermath.

The final time it was different. The enemy were there in greater numbers, and they did not run; they struck and struck and struck, battering the Ell(fleet). By the time his own (ship) died, Harybdartt was practically numb to the death and destruction.

And through it all, he wondered why, what drove the Outsiders to wage this war for a world, one world out of thousands among the stars, one world that to the Ell was nothing less than sacred.

 

* * *

 

Mingling with the others, Lingrhetta's thoughts floated—free, up to a point:

The meditational memory of the cataclysm was something every Ell absorbed in his early years. It remained as vivid now as ever: the two worlds or the Ell swelling with commerce and exchange—until the day it all ended, the worlds torn apart by the passage of something that could not be seen or heard, something that wrenched space itself so violently that two star systems were plunged into transient and back out onto separate courses through the galaxy.

Some thought it to have been the shock wave of an immensely powerful civilization leaping straight across the galaxy, perhaps carrying a world, even a sun, with them. Whatever the cause, the colony world was nearly destroyed and the Ell civilization with it, and it was only through the Change that the Ell survived at all. But the survival bore a price; and what the Ell lost of themselves in the Change they now journeyed among the stars to regain.

In Lingrhetta's mind, images lingered of the Ell(fleet)s outbound on their quest, seeking with such urgency that for generations they were strained to their limit . . .

Another image replaced it: the discovery of the Hope Star and what was believed at last to be the Lost Homeworld . . . and circling it, the automated probes of a race that came to be known as the Outsiders. They too must have followed the same folding and unfolding channels through transient that led inevitably to . . .

That image dissolved, too, and in its place came a confusing montage of memories, the attempted capture of several of the probes, battle erupting for reasons no one quite understood—except that with this discovery, the Ell would brook no interference from the stars . . .

And an image of Lingrhetta himself, studying this most peculiar robot captured under most peculiar circumstances, but offering hints of an enemy the Ell barely knew . . .

 

* * *

 

Pali's thoughts, inexplicably, were aswirl with pain and sadness:

Of all times to recall the death of a child, why now? It was as though it had happened yesterday—the grimness in the doctor's eyes, the resignation. And the infant, so still beneath the shroud . . . the infant who, hours before, had been gurgling and crying, a part of its mother's life. And now gone. It was her child, of course—Gregory, who'd died without ever even knowing his own name. But why remember now?

A rapture connection she didn't understand: two friends, and two enemies from the stars, or at least she'd been told they were enemies . . .

. . . and what she found herself thinking of was not death from across the light-years, but a loss so much simpler, so much closer to her heart, that even now, after years of telling herself that it was not her fault, that there was nothing anyone could have done, it brought up a terrible heartache to think of it, to feel something she'd carefully kept hidden for six years.

And she wondered, as the memories of the others floated by like leaves on the wind, was this why the core had summoned her—to relive the pain of the past? But why?

And what of the others in her life? Faces rose and drifted away—loves won, and always lost. Russell . . . and David, Gregory's father, who within a year of the child's death was gone . . . and before that . . . too many. And did she know any better now why they had all left, or she had left them—why love always fled? Would she find out here? Here, where everyone else was concerned with the life and death of worlds, would she find answers to questions she hadn't even been asking?

 

* * *

 

Ramo's thoughts were puzzled and puzzling, kinesthetic images:

The sculpture and the dance seemed to flow one from another, two halves of his mind funneling the energy back and forth like an alchemist decanting elixirs. What rose to mind was the light-sculpture in Rio, his proudest achievement—and the months he'd spent with it, images in his mind dancing as his body danced in the vispy fields, movements taking on life of their own, independent of the structure and flow of thought.

It started with sheets of light slithering like water down a wall . . . then streams of bubbles rising against the flow, and schools of darting, ethereal fish chasing the bubbles. He did the design work in a gnostic design system; but his best thinking came in the sensoes late at night, when he wasn't working but was instead dancing to shake loose his bones and his brain, moving with the tides of the music and the currents of the crowds, the joys and frustrations, anger and laughter all insinuating themselves into his movements. He swung his cape and swiveled his hips, and leaped and twisted with a laugh and a cry. Around him others did the same, but none were so fine. He strutted and he romanced and he flirted in midair with the winsome ladies, and even then the images were spinning and growing in the back of his thoughts, and more than once a pattern came full-blown into his mind as he danced; and more than once he left the senso clubs, left the winsome ladies and returned to the studio and the design system and worked through the night bringing the vision to life . . .

. . . and the next morning viewed with approval what he had done, even if he could not remember how he had done it.

And then there was the night that he had worked dizzily, almost drunkenly, with Sage, altering the core; and perhaps that was the greater achievement, but that one he could scarcely remember at all.

And what was he supposed to do now? He had the oddest sensation that the core had brought him here to dance.

 

* * *

 

The rapture-field fountained with images and feelings like a vispy brought to a peak of intensity. The core noted the Secretary at the edge of the field, watching and listening in stunned bewilderment.

Ell and Human alike shared the images and the feelings, sometimes with puzzlement and sometimes with understanding, and as the images of one faded away, those of another emerged. The core controlled the feedback, allowing curiosity to reverberate while damping hostility when it appeared. The core provoked and prompted, and kept the level of activity as high as it dared, and noted a flicker of interest in Lingrhetta at Ramo's kinesthetic memories of the dance.

There were fleeting images, too, of the Ell homeworld: nesting units, a structured and determined people, almost a societal organism, but with hints of a declining population. There were images of a holy quest arising in minds that seemed to harbor no recognizably religious thought. The core observed the cool stubbornness of the Ell defense, but wondered at suggestions of (fleet)s being stretched thin. And there was the Ell reaction to the Human connection: if the Humans were awed by the Ell spacefaring capabilities, the Ell were stunned by the Human gnostic machines, and by the core itself.

And as for the Human participants, the core clarified its own perceptions of them and noted new data. Its plans for them were just beginning, and it was imperative that it make its next move with understanding.

 

* * *

 

Images of battle spun out of sync with images of the colony fleet and of the senso and lost loves. The focus blurred. Fatigue radiated through the system.

The core dared hold on no longer. Humans and Ell alike were losing their sharpness. It was time to get them out. Damping the field, the core made ready for an orderly release.

It was too slow. Lingrhetta, with a single abrupt twist of his thoughts, severed the rapture-connection at his end, and when the levitation-field released him, swung out of the sight of the Fox's cameras. The field quaked with the shock of his exit, and the other participants followed suit in annoyed exhaustion, exploding the delicate connection and leaving the core in ringing silence.

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Framed