Bright of the Sky (60 page)

Rob stood. “Let’s go, then.”

“We’re talking
Mars
, Rob. He’s headed to a hospital there.”

“Mars?” Rob had never left the Pacific Northwest, much less the Earth. He shrugged. “Better get started, then.”

Lamar stood, his legs protesting. He looked Rob in the eyes. “Christ, but I’m sorry about Stefan—and Helice—how they’ve handled things.”

Rob’s jaw worked a little before he answered. “How
they’ve
handled things? Minerva’s hiding this huge scientific discovery, and using Titus as a guinea pig. And you’re doing their bidding, Lamar. Even against people that would have called you family.”

“Rob, I’m just—”

“No. See, you’re the messenger, Lamar. You run interference for Stefan and Helice and the gang.” He sneered. “They shoot messengers, you know?”

He walked out, leaving Lamar to hobble after him. Lamar wanted to set the record straight. Wanted to say that he’d talked Quinn into the mission in the first place because he knew the man had to go back. Anybody who knew him knew that much. It was only the naïve who had hoped Titus would get on with his life.

But Rob clung to his opinions. Like most middies, he knew just enough to draw the wrong conclusions.

Muttering, he followed Rob, waiting for the PopUp pill to kick in.

Birdsong and green grass. It seemed wrong.

Five stories underground at the Sinus Meridiani hosplex, Quinn sat on a bench in the park, waiting for Helice Maki. His gaze was stuck on a nearby bed of flowers. Yellow flowers with little ruffs around the collar. Over there, orange exotics, with five petals, like trumpets.

He wondered if he used to know the names. The game of tag he’d played with his memories in the Entire sometimes had the effect of blurring even things he knew he knew. But he was still healing from the brightship crossing, a passage that had nearly killed him, despite the protective measures of the ship-being. The fragmental had encapsulated him as best it knew how before fleeing the limited dimensions of its prison. He hoped it had made it home.

By his feet rested a small leather satchel containing his possessions: some hospital toothpaste, several changes of underwear, and an extra set of eye scrims to cover the Chalin amber. They’d taken his clothes—the Chalin silks—and Ci Dehai’s knife, but he wouldn’t need those things for a while.

He was ready to go home.

He hoped that Helice Maki saw the wisdom in letting him go, now that they’d had him for seven weeks and he’d told them all he knew. Well, not quite all. He left out the mistakes he’d made, his visit to the Ascendancy, and the enemies he’d drawn to himself. The story he stuck by was that his memories of the Entire had returned, and he’d managed by virtue of his deep knowledge of the realm to remain undiscovered by the Tarig while making allies with the Chalin leader Yulin. And the Tarig lord who wanted converse with the Rose.

In all that he’d told his interrogators, Johanna’s story had been the biggest sticking point. Helice and her minions had rejected it at first, but the topic always returned.
Something
had to power the Entire, with its unnatural needs. But how likely was it that Johanna would be privy to such a volatile secret? Very likely, Quinn argued. She lived among the Tarig, and she had reason to seek out such a danger. The debriefing team hammered at the story, at the logic of it, at the ways around it.

For one thing, the timing didn’t work. Johanna had said the Rose had one hundred years left. How could the Rose collapse so quickly, faster than light speed? Unfortunately, they figured out a way. It could be a quantum transition to a lower phase state, they said. Since matter always tries to reach the lowest energy state—much as water always tries to flow downhill—if the Rose was not already at the lowest-energy state possible, it could make a sudden quantum leap, dissolving all matter into a chaotic plasma of subatomic particles. And we’d never know what hit us. A theory only. But could the Tarig do it?

Quinn had not the slightest doubt. The recent collapse of a few star regions that had so perplexed astronomers was a Tarig beta test, of course.

The engines at Ahnenhoon were coming online.

So while Quinn rested and recuperated at home, Minerva would be searching for a way to disable those engines. It was the kind of problem the techs relished: an engineering challenge—unlike the twisted issues of culture and politics of the Entire.

In the midst of Minerva’s endless debriefing, Rob had come to visit, saying all was well with Mateo and Emily and Caitlin. He’d actually cried when he saw Titus. That put a lump in Titus’s throat, and they’d shaken hands.
Get yourself home
, Rob had said.

He wanted to. He was tired of Helice Maki and Booth Waller, and the others who formed the drill team. Drilling for truth, drilling for a better version that wouldn’t muck up their business plan. A route to the stars. Use the River Nigh. Negotiate with the Tarig for the correlates, for travel rights. There must be something the Tarig wanted.

Oh yes.
They wanted the Rose.

There were a few bad days when Helice had insisted that others needed to go over. To confirm his story. To probe for options. But they would never last; they’d be spotted immediately. Language. Even if they learned the Lucent tongue, they’d speak with an accent. They’d make mistakes, and they’d be dead. Eventually Helice gave up. The two of them looked at each other hatefully. Minerva needed him. And, the truth was, he needed Minerva— for the harness, for the way over.

The way over.
Already he was homesick, for all the things he’d left behind in the Entire. For the Entire itself. He sat gazing at the yellow flowers. They made him uneasy. Overembroidered, too fancy.

A noise from behind, and Quinn turned, seeing Helice Maki.

She walked toward him: petite, athletic, cheerful. For a sharp moment he missed Anzi—her directness, her quiet wisdom.

“They said I’d find you here,” she chirped.

“And here I am.”

She sat cross-legged in the grass, to face him.

He gestured at the flowers. “What are those yellow things, do you know?”

“Daffodils.”

“Yes, daffodils.” He thought the name lacked the elegance of
rose
.

He mused: “Ever think how strange flowers are? They go way beyond what’s necessary to attract insects. It’s like someone went on a creative binge.”

“Evolution
did
go on a binge. It’s full of excesses, experiments.”

He thought how it was that the Tarig had usurped evolution in their domain, copying the products of Rose evolution. Among the marvels that Quinn brought home was the tantalizing glimpse of the other self-knowing creatures of the Rose universe: beings like the Hirrin, the Gond, and the Jout. What they called themselves on their own worlds, and where those planets were, the human race had yet to discover. But they waited out there, for contact, if routes could be found.

Helice interrupted his thoughts. “No flowers in the Entire, huh?”

“No.” He gazed past her, past the flowers. “Somehow, you don’t end up missing them.”

She watched him carefully. “You’ve changed.”

“Have I?” His face was that of another man, but he figured she didn’t mean the cheekbones and the golden eyes.

“Yes. You’re not as edgy.”

“No, Helice, I’m real edgy. It’s just that I’m a little tired right now. Tired of talking to you and Booth and the boys. But you still need to be careful around me.” He watched her with a steady gaze until she broke eye contact.

“Quinn, I know we’re putting you through a hell of a debriefing—”

He held up a hand. “Don’t apologize. I’m nowhere near ready to hear an apology from you.” He shrugged. “Maybe when I see Mateo again and count fingers and toes, maybe then I’ll be ready.”

Helice winced inwardly. She was well aware that she hadn’t handled Quinn well. But he
had
come back, even with the daughter still incarcerated among the Inyx. Helice was sure he’d made some sort of bid for Sydney over there, although he wouldn’t admit it.

Envy gnawed at her. He sat there, having been to a place of wonders, a landlocked galaxy of impossible skies and improbable creatures. The things he’d described—the bright, the exotic river, the flying Adda, the Tarig, the sways with their cultures, the city in the sky—these things had flooded her mind for weeks. She dreamed of it. And loathed Titus Quinn for going there first. More, she hated Quinn’s blithe summation of her chances in that place:
You wouldn’t like the Entire, Helice. You wouldn’t be at the top of the feeding chain.
Believe me.

Now, sitting here with him in the garden, she glanced uneasily at the bag near his feet. “Going somewhere?”

“Home. I need to go home.”

“Yes, soon. We’ve got just a few more—”

He was shaking his head. “No. Today. I’m going home today. Ship leaves in three hours. I’ll be needing a seat.”

She stood up. She hadn’t released him yet. How could she? He knew more than he had told, oh, much more. “I’ll make you a deal. Give us one more week, and this time, tell us the rest it. No holding back.”

Slowly, he rose to his feet. “Actually, I
have
told you all the important stuff. The rest is personal.”

They faced off, with Helice trying very hard to control her irritation. That he would consider anything about that universe
personal
. She began with great restraint: “You still belong to Minerva, Quinn. We have the harness, the platform. If you want to go back where your daughter is, you’ll need to prove you’re a good advance man. You’ll need to be, at a minimum, truthful.”

He picked up his satchel and put it gently on the bench, a movement so tight and controlled that she thought he might strike her. “Maybe you haven’t been paying close attention, Helice. We need a reliable way to go to and from.

Your lab module and harness won’t be the doorway. Not even close.”

“Maybe not,” she countered, “but for now, you still need that harness— and us.”

He looked at her like she wasn’t very bright. “I know a Tarig lord who will open a nice, big door. The one we need to send ships through, to find routes that will take us all the places we want to go. Without that door, we’ve got no routes, no converse, no salvation.”

He held up a hand to forestall her response. “And I’m the one who knows this Tarig lord, and the only one who’s got a chance in hell of bringing the correlates home.”

They locked gazes, and by his expression, he knew that he held the upper hand. This has-been pilot with his tattered past and bad manners.

His face was hard and calm. It made her want to see him waver, but, instead, his words came like little cuts: “You see why you’re going to get me on that Earth-bound ship today? You see why I don’t need you?”

He cocked his head in curiosity. “You are following the argument, aren’t you, Helice?”

It made her ill to acknowledge that he held that kind of power over her. Barely audible, she said, “Yes.”

“Well, then.”

She looked into his wrong-looking eyes, falsely blue, tinged at the edges with gold, a little halo that reminded one that he now had Chalin eyes. “I’ll get you on that ship.” The words filled her mouth with a sour taste.

He nodded. “Good. Maybe then we can start to overlook how much we despise each other. Worth a try.” He hoisted the pack.

Blocking his path, she said, “You aren’t ever going to let it go, are you? How I’ve handled things.”

“Did you think the Entire was going to improve my character?” An ironic smile crept across his face.

That caused her to smile a bit in return. He was still a handsome man when he smiled, despite the surgery, and despite that scar down his cheek that he claimed a Tarig child had given him. Another personal matter, he’d said.

They held eye contact for a time, understanding each other. It was all out in the open now, as to who was in charge.

From nearby came the trill of a bird, singing for the pure joy of it, or perhaps locked in a deadly struggle for nesting territory.

The sound made Quinn eager to be back home, far from Helice and Minerva. He badly needed a long walk on the beach.

He looked at Helice with her weird dark hair and gaudy clothes, and felt like a different species from her. He wasn’t a Rose elite. He was once, a long and strangely twisted time ago. But he’d passed by the right education when he became a pilot, passed on membership in the corporations that controlled the knowledge of the world, controlled it because they could bloody well
understand
it.

Well, if he wasn’t in their ranks, so be it. It was the other world where he had to be an expert.

And was.

Later that day he took the last empty berth on a homeward-bound ship. Through the viewing port, he stared out at the black deeps of the Rose and, for the first time in his life, found the sight very strange.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

T
WO SEAGULLS FOUGHT OVER A CLAM IN THE SURF, dropping the trophy in the process, climbing into the sky with angry squawks.

Heading back to his cottage, Quinn followed his outgoing footsteps, now deforming in the wet sand, becoming larger, more misshapen. Above him, a few cirrus clouds rode the blue, like the remnants of a larger blanket. The sky needed a blanket of clouds. It was vastly empty and deep, and it seemed miraculous that its airy substance held in place or did any worldly good.

Except for a steady wind off the ocean, the day was warm, and Quinn carried his shoes, walking barefoot, pleased that he’d kept all ten toes. And this time, kept his memories.

His thoughts kept returning to the tunnel in the adobe wall, the one it must surely have taken him years to carve, to direct the material to conform. He had wondered how he’d spent his time, how he’d conformed to Tarig society—what there was of it—and hated the picture he’d conjured, of indolence and comfort. And since he couldn’t remember much of that sort of life, he’d been left imagining ugly scenes of extravagance and dissolution.

But, in reality, he’d been working in his room.

Chiron had been curious.
What do you do in there, all by yourself?