Nebula Awards Showcase 2010 (14 page)

Her stomach growled, a reminder she had eaten nothing since last night, when Maximillian shared his trail rations. Taking care to be quiet, she checked the goods crammed tight around her, several sacks and a crate. The sacks held grain. It tasted awful, and she disliked taking supplies from monks, but she liked the prospect of starving even less.

Then she hit gold. Or, more accurately, wine; the crate held ten bottles. It took a while to dig out the cork in one, but she managed. She drank in gulps, soothing her parched throat. By the time she finished half the bottle, she felt amazingly content. She had escaped Max the Nightmare, and she could almost forget she had no refuge.

The pain in her wrists was harder to ignore, and she feared the lacerations would become infected. Then it hit her: she had an antiseptic. Shifting her weight, she poured wine over the cuts. It stung like the blazes, but she was so tipsy it dulled the pain. She opened a second bottle as a reward for her efforts, and soon after she started it, she fell asleep.

 

Fire licked her wrists. Flames, heat, burning, burning,
burning
. . .

Janelle opened her eyes, passing from sleep to waking without the usual moment of pleasant nothing. The agony in her wrists made that impossible. Tears wet her cheeks. Her spy-hole revealed that night folded over the land with only a flickering glow to light the way, probably from a lamp near the driver.

With clumsy hands, she cleaned the cuts on her wrists again. Then she ripped strips of cloth off one of the sacks and bandaged her wounds as well as she could manage. She drank more wine to ease the pain. Eventually she dozed, floating in a sea of flame.

Birdsong woke her. Bleary-eyed and hungover, she peered through her hole and saw dawn lightening the world. The pain had receded, and she dozed more easily this time. Around noon, she roused enough to change her bandages. Dried blood caked the cloth, but the scabs were clean, without infection.

Sometime in the afternoon, the cart rattled up to a building of dark red stone that could be the monastery. Square towers rose at its corners. Voices rumbled nearby, and she glimpsed two men walking from the cart to the building.

With caution, she widened her spy-hole. The cart stood in a yard paved with stones and mud. Mountains rose behind the building, sharp in the sky, rough-hewn sentinels not yet softened by erosion. Moving stiffly from her cramped sleep, she squeezed out of the cart and eased down by its large wheel. Her head swam, but even as she sagged against the side, voices came from the left side of the building.

She took off in a limping run, and dodged onto a narrow path between the right wall of the monastery and a muddy hillside. Her vision blurred, but she kept going, holding her bells against her body and praying no one heard the infernal clinking of those she couldn’t reach.

Janelle wasn’t sure what to do. She could ask for sanctuary, but she questioned whether anyone would honor that request. She doubted they wanted to provoke Maximillian, particularly in the matter of this odious prophecy.

She came out behind the monastery. The roughly mortared wall in the back had two entrances, each a wooden door with iron braces. The first opened on a storeroom stacked with crates, which didn’t bode well if the monks were about to unload the cart. She went back outside and ran to the second door. It opened into a foyer, with a staircase to the right. After easing the door closed, she limped up the stairs. At the landing, they turned right, and sunlight slanted through a round window high on the outer wall. She looked out onto a walled quadrangle in the center of the building, a yard open to the sky. The three men crossing it didn’t fit her image of monks; instead of robes, they wore trousers, work boots, and simple shirts.

She continued up to another landing, this one with a door. When she leaned against the portal, she heard nothing. She edged it open, and a long hall stretched before her. She limped to the first door and listened; voices rumbled in the room beyond. At the next one, silence greeted her. Holding her breath, she opened the door.

A library. An
empty
library

Janelle slipped inside and locked the door with a large key she found on a hook inside. Then she took stock of her refuge. A table occupied the center of the room, old and exquisitely carved with vines. But what compelled her were the
books
. They filled shelves on every wall. The only open space was a panel across the room, where a cushioned banquette stood below a window. She hurried to the window and looked out. The quadrangle lay below, empty now except for vegetable plots and apple trees.

With a sigh, she sank onto the bench. The worn look of this place suggested either the monks had forgone material wealth or else they had poor support. She fingered the coins on her girdle. Would it backfire if she offered them payment to send for Dominick? With all the gems and precious metals she was wearing, she might have some bargaining power. Then again, Maximillian would probably reward anyone who returned his wife, and she doubted her bangles had much value compared to his wealth. Nor were her jewels likely to tempt people if they feared helping her would earn them the type of punishment the emperor had threatened her with in the tower.

Janelle raked her hand through her hair. She needed to know more about this world. She went to a shelf and pulled out a book at random. The text had an odd title:
Elektron Motion: Antique Editions, Monografs of Rekord. Elektronik form: Albambra Grapbiks.

The date was 1546 A.D.

She squinted at the cover. If dates were the same here as in her world, this book was centuries old. Elektronik form? From
1546
A.D.? The title implied it was a collector’s monograph, an “antique” created from an electronic publication. Given everything she had seen, that level of technology five hundred years ago made as much sense as cave men with cell phones.

Then again, these people could step between universes.

She flipped through the book. A preserving finish protected its pages. Reading wasn’t as difficult as she expected, despite the odd spellings; physics was physics regardless of language. The first chapter dealt with electronics and the second with an electron gas. A chapter on electrochemistry followed, then one on quantized energy levels of an atom. Unlike texts in her world, which treated the topics as different subjects, here they were lumped into one text on “elektron motion.”

She replaced the book and took another. Even older than the last, from 1489 A.D., it discussed heat flow. Although the models differed from those in her world, they gave the same results: heat came from molecular motion and was a form of energy.

Eager now, she pulled out a fat tome titled
Dynamical Analysis.
The first half focused on her specialty, differential equations, and the rest applied their solutions to problems in classical motion and semiclassical models of molecular behavior. Other books followed the same form, opening with chapters on theory, followed by applications. A book on genetics described how biaquines had been bioengineered from horses for strength, speed, and the ability to fight.

Then she found a treatise on tensor analysis.

By themselves, tensors were just arrays of numbers. Nothing unusual. But they appeared extensively in certain sciences, including general relativity. Einstein’s bailiwick. Einstein had believed it was impossible to travel faster than light, a result that would limit the ability of humans to leave the solar system. This theory closely resembled his work, with one difference—its author assumed faster-than-light travel existed. A chill ran through Janelle. This read like a historical text, one written
after
the advent of such travel.

She began a methodical search then. And she found what she sought. Titled, simply,
Advanced Formulations,
it covered worm-holes, space warps, and complex speeds that circumvented the singularity at light speed. One chapter presented resolutions to the paradoxes for superluminal travel, including a discussion of alternate spaces and times. It proposed a “Riemann screen” that could offer views of those other continuums. Then she understood; the “Jade Pool” of the prophecy was a viewing portal into alternate universes.

The final chapter detailed the design of a starship drive.

Janelle sat at the table, surrounded by books, too stunned to read any more. If this record was accurate, these people had achieved interstellar travel
five centuries ago.
What the blazes had happened since then?

Footsteps sounded outside.

Janelle froze. A door opened nearby, then closed. She glanced around quickly, but saw nowhere to hide. As the doorknob to the library turned, she jumped to her feet, and her clothes jangled.

The footsteps receded.

Janelle went to the door and leaned against it, straining to hear what was happening outside.

More footsteps.

She backed up until the table stopped her retreat. A key clinked in the lock.
No.
To have come this far, to have made this incredible discovery, only to be caught—
no, not now.

The door opened.

A slender man stood in the archway. Wrinkles surrounded his eyes, and he wore his gray hair long, in a queue. His clothes were simple, brown trousers and an unadorned gray shirt. For a long moment he stared at Janelle. Then he stepped inside and closed the door.

“This is an odd place for a bride,” he said.

She folded her arms over her skimpy clothing. “I need to contact my husband.”

“I’ve seen that girdle,” he said coldly. “The emperor’s aunt wore it at her wedding. So will the bride of the emperor’s brother.”

“Yes, I’m Prince Dominick-Michael’s wife.” In truth, she had no idea who she was married to, but she wasn’t about to tell him that. “I need to send him a message.”

He spoke dryly. “My apology if this is too blunt—but why are you in a monastery, alone, on your wedding day?”

“It’s not my wedding day.”

“Why else would you dress that way?”

“The wedding already took place.”

“Who hurt your wrists?”

Startled, she covered one of the bandages with her hand. “I must go to Dominick.”

He lifted his chin. “This monastery serves the emperor. We will send for him.”

“No! You can’t do that.”

“We are loyal servants to Maximillian.” He made no attempt to hide his suspicion. “If his brother needs to be contacted, the emperor will do so.”

“I can offer you a reward.” Inspiration came to her. “One worth far more to you than jewels or gold.” She indicated the books on the table. “I can tell you what these mean. It could improve your lives beyond imagining.” Whether she could actually do that was debatable, but she had no doubt she could offer him more than he had now, if the level of understanding she had seen accurately portrayed how little the people here retained of their ancient knowledge.

“That is hard to believe,” the monk said.

“But true.”

His voice hardened. “Prince Dominick-Michael would never marry any woman except the one from the prophecy. And Lady Janelle, the emperor would do anything to prevent that marriage.”

She stiffened. “You seem to have decided who I am. You have me at a disadvantage.”

“I am Gregor.”

Her anger surged. “
You
made that ghastly prophecy.” She waved at the library. “You figured out enough here to look across space and time, right? But you don’t really understand it, do you? Otherwise, you could have told them more, like how it works.”

Anger tightened his expression. “I have spent my entire life studying these books. I understand them better than anyone else alive.”

She plunged ahead, ad-libbing. “That’s why I’m the prophecy.” For all she knew, it was true. It was no stranger than anything else that had happened. “I was sent to you, Brother Gregor. Would you like to know more? Give me sanctuary and I’ll tell you.”

“You think I would betray Othman in my own lust for knowledge?”

“A love of knowledge is a gift, not an undesirable lust.”

He scowled at her. “You talk a great deal.”

“Think what you could learn. You’re a brilliant scholar; you must be, to have tamed space and time.” She didn’t know him, but if he understood even a small part of these books with no formal training, it could be true. “I can help unlock these mysteries for you.”

“You speak
blasphemy.
” He cut the air with a sharp wave of his hand. “Such study is for men, and only those who dedicate their lives to the monastery, forgoing riches, prestige,
and
women.”

“A lot of these books have female authors.”

He glared at her. “That may be. But living women aren’t allowed in here.” His gaze traveled over her body, and he made a visible effort to pull his attention back to her face. “You will not seduce me into betraying the emperor.”

“What betrayal?” She clenched her fists, ignoring the pain in her wrists. “You think it’s all right for Maximillian to kidnap his brother’s wife, but heaven forbid she should protect herself ?”

“I don’t claim Maximillian is a gentle man.” He stepped back to the door and pulled a cord hanging there. “But he is my master and I am sworn to obey his word and law.”

Janelle swallowed. “What does the cord do?” When he didn’t answer, her anger surged. “Was it a game, pitting Maximillian and Dominick against each other from the day of their birth?”

“No.” Fatigue showed on his lined face. “It threatens all I value. The well-being of Othman.”

“And you think that depends on me going to Maximillian?”

“He is the emperor.” Gregor pulled himself up straighter. “It is my moral duty to act in his best interest.”

She made an incredulous noise. “How can you talk about moral duty when you intend to send me to be raped and tortured by a monster?”