The ruling room’s doors burst open and in ran an elderly female Dybo didn’t recognize. The imperial guards quickly stepped forward, interposing themselves between the emperor and the intruder; there was always the chance that someone mad with dagamant would get into the palace. The stranger was panting hard, but her torso was steady. She held up a hand, showing that her claws were sheathed, and caught her breath. Then: “Your Luminance, forgive me. I’m Pos-Doblan, keeper of the maritime rookery north of the city.”
“Yes?” said Dybo.
“A homing wingfinger has just arrived. I wouldn’t have interrupted you, but the message is urgent.” She held up a coil of leather. Dybo was recumbent on the slab, tail sticking up like a rubbery mast. He flicked it, and a guard moved forward, retrieved the leather strip, took it to Dybo, then backed off to a respectful distance. Dybo unwound the strip and read it quickly. “God protect us,” he said softly.
One of Dybo’s advisors rose from a katadu bench. “Dybo?” she said, the lapse into informality within the throne chamber betraying her concern.
Dybo’s tone was decisive. “You, page“—he never could remember names—”summon Afsan right away. And send word to Fra’toolar that Novato should return as soon as possible. I’m going to need my best thinkers.” He pushed off the dayslab and began to leave the chamber.
“Emperor,” called the lawyer for the youth. “What about my client?”
“No punishment,” snapped Dybo. “We’re going to need all the hands we can get.”
“I have a feeling we have not gone back far enough,” Mokleb said to Afsan. “What’s the earliest memory you have?”
Afsan scratched the loose folds of the dewlap hanging from his aeck. “I don’t know. I remember, well, let’s see… I remember my vocational exams.”
“Those would have been when you were ten or eleven. Surely you remember older things.”
“Oh, sure. There’s that time I got lost in the forest; I’ve mentioned that before. And, let’s see, I remember getting in trouble for biting off the finger of one of my creche mates when I was young.”
“Did you do it in anger?”
“No, we were just playing around. It was an accident, and the finger grew back, of course.”
“What else do you remember?”
“Learning to cut leather. Catching butterflies. Let’s see… I remember the first time during my life that Pack Carno picked up and moved itself along the shores of the Kreeb River. I remember—what else?—I remember all the commotion when some dignitary came to visit the Pack. I didn’t know who it was at the time, but I later learned that it was Dybo’s—ah, what would the term be? Dybo’s grandmother, the Empress Sar-Sardon.”
“You remember an imperial visit to Carno?”
“Vaguely, yes. They took us youngsters down to the Kreeb and -washed us off so we’d look clean for her. I remember it because it was the first time they’d actually let us near the river; they were always afraid the current would sweep us away.”
“What else?”
“Learning to play lastoontal. God, what a boring process that was: walking up to the game board to make my move, then backing off so the other player could come up and make his or her move.”
“Anything else?”
“Oh, many things, I suppose, but they all seem trivial. A great thunderstorm. The first time I experienced a landquake. Finding a dead wingfinger.”
“A wingfinger? Was it purple?”
“No, it was white with pale orange stripes. A banded swift, I think.”
“What else?”
“Learning to read; memorizing endless series of glyphs and the words associated with them.”
“And do you remember which of these things came first?”
“It’s hard to say. They’re jumbled together in my mind.”
“What about anything that disturbed you, or frightened you, when you were a child?”
“Well, I mentioned the landquake: that scared me. Of course, one gets used to them. And I was quite frightened when I was lost in the forest. But no, nothing really shocking, if that’s what you’re looking for.”
“Yes,” said Mokleb. “That’s exactly what I’m looking for.”
*21*
Finally, it was about to happen: the moment Novato had been waiting for and dreading. The four blue sides of the ladder were no longer simply fading into nothingness. Instead, she could see where they ended. Far, far above, she could see the actual summit of the tower. Novato’s claws hung half out of their sheaths, and her tail, floating in the air behind her, twitched left and right.
She thought of Rewdan and the Vine.
A giant blackdeath.
A wingfinger that laid eggs of gold.
Which would it be?
The four sides of the tower flared into a vast blue bulb at the top. Long panels were extended from the sides of the bulb, panels so dark as to be visible only because they blocked the stars behind them. The whole thing looked like some deathly daisy with black petals and a blue, impossibly long stem.
The lifeboat began to slow, preparing to stop at the summit. Novato drifted toward the roof.
Any moment now.
The lifeboat slid up, farther and farther, past the bottom of the bottom into the cavernous interior. It jerked slightly as it came to rest.
Novato was breathing rapidly. It took a while to absorb what she was seeing through the transparent walls: a vast chamber with a myriad of levels, all constructed of the blue material.
She steeled her courage as the lifeboat’s interior walls fogged over. Then the door appeared. The successful return of the test lizards notwithstanding, she’d been terrified that there’d be no air inside the chamber up here. But everything seemed fine. She gave a gentle kick off the lifeboat’s rear wall and floated out the door.
Ten days had elapsed since she’d first entered the lifeboat. If she was right about its speed—one hundred and thirty kilopaces per daytenth—then she was now some thirteen thousand kilopaces above the surface of her world. Here at last she felt no tendency to drift downward at all; she was completely weightless, the centrifugal and gravitational forces in perfect balance.
She floated along, kicking gently off walls to keep herself moving. At last she entered a massive cubic chamber.
Her heart pounded.
Eggs of gold.
There were nine windows on one wall arranged in three rows of three. Thick black lines connected the eight outlying windows to the one in the center.
Novato tried to take it all in, but couldn’t. For a time, she simply floated there, numb, the bright colors in the windows hypnotic but devoid of content. Slowly, though, her mind began to make at least a small amount of sense out of what she was seeing.
Somehow, each window was looking out on a different scene. As if that weren’t strange enough, the scene each window was showing changed every forty beats or so. Some of the scenes at least were partially comprehensible—why, that one showed a grassy plain and cloudy sky, and this one showed water lapping against a shore, and surely those things in that window over there were buildings of some sort. But the views through other windows were so strange, Novato could make nothing of them.
Each window was numbered in its upper left corner using the six numerals of the ark-makers. But they weren’t numbered one through nine. Rather, the one in the center had the simple horizontal line the ark-makers used for zero, and the other windows had numbers that changed each time the view through them changed.
She scanned the nine windows, looking for something—anything—she recognized.
And suddenly she found just that: something familiar in the maelstrom of confusion.