Paradox (47 page)

Blue flame.

Shouldn't be happening
.

A distinct barrier, invisible.

Not yet
…

Pushing through.

Burning, against his chest.

I don't have a crystal
.

The people sitting closest to him drew near as though to help, then shrank away, horror written across their faces as blue flames licked along his purple robes.

And he did have a crystal.

But it doesn't work. Does it?

Reaching inside, forming the control gesture with his hand hidden, and pulling out the crystal. It felt warm even through the nul-gel, before he slit the stuff with his thumbnail and pulled the crystal out.

Stallion in two halves: one on its neck cord, the other loose inside his shirt, beneath the priestly robes.

Fire in his hand.

This is it.

He put the crystal back inside the talisman, sealed it in—

“Run, Tom!”

—but without the nul-gel coating, and it burned.

No barrier now so he leaped forwards, freeing the quick-release seals, purple robes falling away—
run
—and as he moved, white beams cracked through the air—
run faster
—and someone screamed.

High above, the judges' lev-spheres were changing shape: splitting into facets, light spilling out. Launching weapons: smart miasmas, seekautomata, neurospindles—but a silvery collimated beam of sparkling motes slid out of nowhere and struck. Femtoweapons annihilated each other in a flash.

Running.

Dozens of beams spat back and forth while the spectators huddled. Some panicked and headed for the spiral ramps, but the first few were cut down and all notions of exodus were stopped dead.

No weapons
, Tom had said, and the others had agreed for one simple reason: they could take the weapons they needed from the revolutionary guards, when the time was right.

Time: now.

Run faster.

He had missed a trick.

“Lay down your weapons!”

Sizzle, crack. A scream.

Both sides were aiming for pinpoint accuracy, not trying to kill innocent civilians—if that's who the spectators were—but there were hundreds against seven men, and by now it should be all—

Foot of the ramp.

Running up the incline, thighs feeling the pump of uphill sprinting.

A glimpse: in the crowd, a young man—Zhongguo Ren—sprang from his seat and took down the nearest guard, disarming her. That was the trick Tom had missed: Corduven had not come here without allies, not at all.

Should have known.

Bitter admiration for Corduven's tactical sense, but no time to dwell on it.

Guards.

There were three guards on the ramp but they hesitated, seeing a one-armed weaponless man fleeing from the fighting, then realized their mistake.

The first pulled a graser pistol from his hip but Tom grabbed the hand, spinning, and the guard rolled into empty air and dropped.

Broken body on the ground, one arm flung out.

Knocking the barrel aside, a low, scything kick that took out both legs, and the second guard went down. The last had time to bring his weapon to bear—
too late
—but a needle-thin beam from below pierced his torso and he fell.

Clatter of graser rifle, but Tom was already swarming up twisted sculptures on black-shadowed walls, leaving the glassine ramp below.

Silence.

No time to look down: the ceiling sloped at forty-five degrees here among the tangled, angular shadows—
foot, foot, reach
—and was getting harder as he rose.

What was happening below?

But there were two reasons for not looking down: time was dwindling, and his face might be noticeable among the shadows.

It should have been easy going—raised, decorated metal plates hooked tangentially to soft, black inner walls, tortured metal sculptures everywhere—but there was the need for haste, and the nature of the tangled shapes. Already he was cut in a dozen places, blood trickling along his forearm.

Not serious, but his hand was slippery and one missed hold would mean Sylvana's death
so move it
, and he was climbing horizontally now,
do not look down
, hundreds of metres above the crystalline floor, all those people,
don't even think of it
, and he climbed to the metallic rim and stopped.

White membrane, glowing.

Damn it!

Stuck.

Wait for the moment of complete frustration
, the Old Terran philosopher Pirsig had said,
and savour it, for it precedes enlightenment.

Tom was waiting, but he didn't have much time.

A hundred metres below, the tangled cruciform hung—movement of blond hair: Sylvana still OK for now—but it was not
directly
below and that was the problem.

What's keeping you, Corduven?

Stand-off.

Tom hooked his feet, wide apart, into good holds and let go with his hand. He dangled from the waist, upside down, shaking his arm to relieve the tension.

Blood pooled into his head as he stared at the distant floor. No movement. Stand-off, or they were all dead.

No-one had made it to the lev-field controls.

The plan had been to raise the cruciform, not lower it, on the assumption that it would take longer for the guards to notice. And it would provide some protection while he worked to get Sylvana loose.

White membrane: eight, maybe ten metres in diameter.

He could not reach the ceiling's exact apex because of the membrane, so Tom's trajectory would have to carry him four or five metres horizontally during the hundred-metre vertical drop.

Planning. He thought he could judge the thrusting effort he would need, pushing off with his feet, but it was
pointless
because he could not hope to survive the impact: impaling himself on the cruciform would do Sylvana no good at all; just a bloody mess.

Intellectual exercise, pure theory.

Keep working on the known possibilities to distract the conscious
mind, while the subconscious does the real work and lets the
unknown
possibilities rise to the surface.

Black movement stirring, and then he got it.

Do you feel pain?

It flowed like black liquid. As he thrust his hand inside, it webbed his forearm, holding strong.

Do you feel pain, my old friend?

“I'm ready.”

Lowering now.

Blue fire.

Tom screamed silently as he burned, but then he was through another barrier and he was descending still, forearm gripped by flowing blackness.

Descent slowing.

The stallion was burning against his chest but cold sweat prickled his back.

What have I awoken?

Because he had been wrong. There was processing power available, sufficient to interface
of its own accord
with his comms-enabled crystal.

The Palace: a hundred cubic kilometres. Within its volume, untold lengths of femtotissue stretched: corridors and tunnels were its arteries; great halls and caverns, the chambers of its heart.

But not aware. Never aware.

Bypassing connection-inhibition protocols, in a structure one hundred billion times the size of a human brain, whose logic-gates were one-million-cubed times smaller than neurons…

“Thank you,” he whispered.

He was addressing a structure with potentially
twenty-nine orders of magnitude
greater power than a human brain.

It released its grip.

Straddle-stance.

Balanced on the cross-member, slipping the mag-clip. Wrist-restraint released, involuntary tension flipped Sylvana's hand forwards and her wrist struck Tom in the groin.

Sorry, Tom.
Silently.

Fluorescent patches in his vision as the sickening sensation swept through him. Funny, under other circumstances. Tom's kind of joke.

No hysteria. She tried to free the other restraints but her hand was shaking too much. No sound, despite the pain of returning circulation.

Tom slipped the other wrist free, then throat and waist.

Looked up. The black tendril had snaked back up into the ceiling and was gone.

Has anyone ever asked if you feel pain?
The metallic plates and twisted sculptures were embedded in the malleable stuff of the inner Palace itself. No-one wondered whether the Palace hurt, but pain is an emergent property of basic neural structures: Tom could write out the metavectors to prove it.

“Now what?” Sylvana, quietly.

Silver motion at the edge of his vision.

One of the judges' lev-spheres ascended to see what was going on—
their weapons are disabled
—then Tom saw the graser pistol swinging up, transmission-end glistening.

For a moment he saw knuckles whitening on the firing-stud—
white explosion tearing apart the world
—but there was a moment of shocked mutual recognition and Arlanna froze.

A sapphire inferno.

He did not know how to achieve the interface, but it had to happen. The Palace was enabling the comms, but there was more than that: it was destined.

Pushing through the barrier.

It was going to happen because these were its effects, pushed backwards in time.
So take action, now.

A prayer, a
kata
without movement: a warrior's dance.

Barrier.

If there had been time, he could have investigated the Palace's capability. Perhaps he did not need to do this…Too late.

Will-power.

It had been years since his last femtocytic infusion but the knowledge was there, and the self-discipline. Forcing it, he fanned the flames of the tiniest spark, achieving logotropic trance.

Pushing through.

To
infinite
levels of processing.

Hard to think, but he remembered: Karyn's emotion, Ro's conviction. His own moment of insight. Desperately, he clasped the memory in his mind.

The crystal was in his hand, like fire, though he did not remember taking it out—
stallion
—and the pain's intensity grew—
my eyes!
—as it stroboscopically pulsed into his optic nerves—
fist and stallion
—and he dug deep, to his spirit's core, crying out with pain beyond belief, and then he was through.