Elvi forced a little smile, trying to think where she would have been when Cara had run into the wilderness of Laconia for the last time. Who had she been when Cara had been human?
“Long time for me too,” she said, then gathered herself. “Okay, we’re going to try something a little different this time. We need to refine the search. Try to get some specific answers about how the ring gates came to be. We’ll want to shift the BFE from lecture mode into more Q and A. If we can.”
“Because of San Esteban?”
Elvi tried to think of some softer way to say yes, and failed. “Yes.”
“I can try,” Cara said. “I don’t know if it’ll like that, though.”
“If you’re uncomfortable or things feel wrong, say the word, and we will pull you back up. I’ll be watching your stress levels. If they get bad, even if you can’t speak, I’ll call it. Okay?”
“I can take it,” Cara said. “I want this.”
Elvi took the girl’s hand. It felt so thin and fragile. “Me too.”
Interlude: The Dreamer
The dreamer falls purposefully into dream and dream and dream, swimmingly layer on layer on layer on the abyss. She is threefold, and one still missing, and the dream tells her about the unfolding across the emptiness and of the light of stars and cells and minds, the flicker that draws them like songs and kisses because their kisses were all light. The ones that don’t feel the stars calling fall out of the dream, and the rest become wise and broad and fuller than the old ocean, comfortable in the vacuum with only their own slow heat to warm them.
Yes, the dreamer dreams like swimming with the tide, but the gates. How did the gates happen?
Grandmothers whisper in voices that have never known teeth. Look here, I will tell you everything. Look here, to where the light becomes everything, look how the light learns to think.
Yes and yes and yes, but the gates. The darkness. How did the end come?
Light itself fractures like an old woman holding out a glass bead, inviting a child’s marveling eyes. Look what light can do! Look how rich it can be! Isn’t it prettyful and beautisome? And don’t you want to eat it all up so it can eat you and expandingcontracting fullness of the bloom?
But the gates. The gates. And the things at the end.
Grandmothers smile and smilingly nod, noddingly smile and the dream shifts like a kick in the face. The rich light diffracts, and there are holes in the spectrum. Infinite holes of more than darkness between the light that’s more than light. The dreamer chokes. Reality splits her open like vomiting or orgasm or seizure and the grandmothers hold the glass bead that had her head in it and it wants to explode.
Is she okay? Do we pull her out?
Not yet.
A new physics falls into place all through the dream. Yes yes yes, the monkeys began with the parabolic arc of stone through air, and they learned everything in that order that isn’t the dream or the dreamer, that’s the one in blue. The light began swimmingly, with the caress of waters and salts, and its first chapter was different and its second a second difference and its fullness a different fullness, with fingernails in the cracks between this and the permanent outside.
The grandmothers say look look look how it all happened once and all happens again. The cold roof of the world broke open and gave the stars. The vacuum shatters in the same way and shows the outside, the older real, the vaster real.
The body of God. The heaven where the angels all hate us.
The dreamer feels herself shaking, feels herself losing bladder and bowel control. Don’t wake me up don’t wake me don’t wake don’t.
You wanted to know is I did and I do.
A new physics gives new problems and the problems ticklingly new dreams. A second crash outward, a new efflorescence, a vaster self. And the toolbox was the toolbox: co-opting fast life to bring what makes it rich, sending out what will or may one day return with presents for the grandmothers who cast them free, and the vast patience of the ones who are too cold and too slow and too wide to ever die, too sudden for time to touch. A bubble blown into the holes in the spectrum and a thousand thousand thousand seeds sent like kisses to the singing poet stars. And then…
The dreamer flickers. The body someplace starts to fail, and she feels something deeper than dream opening under her. All that begins will end, and the end is clearing its throat in the hallway. Bring me up. Bring me up bring me up bring me up.
What is this? the blue one says, and the dreamer pushes away, but it isn’t her dream anymore. The grandmothers cackle and run, trailing her in their thousand fingers. And the echo says Sorry. Didn’t mean to drag you in here. Just try and relax. But it isn’t speaking to her.
A nucleus in a vast atom, and the burning clockwork at its heart. The power of a million suns harvested from the older universe. Yes yes yes, the blue one says. I see now. Show me how this works, and the grandmothers do.
She’s seizing.
Pull her out.
And the blue one puts a gentle hand on her head and holds her lovingly underwater. A system goes dark, a few voices out of quadrillions go silent. A hundred systems. They go to war, and the war fails, but show me where you buried the guns. And the grandmothers gigglingly do.
Yes, the blue one says. Yes. That’s what I needed.
Thank you.
Chapter Twenty-One: Tanaka
The girl on the screen wore something that was supposed to look like a uniform, held herself in a way that was supposed to look like military crispness, and spoke with a formality that was supposed to sound like authority.
“In accepting Admiral Trejo’s offer, I am willing to permit one envoy from your ship to enter Draper Station to take custody of Teresa Duarte,” Jillian Houston said. “Once this transfer is complete, both the Sparrowhawk and the Derecho are invited to retire from Freehold system until such time as the details of our new situation can be finalized.”
“Oh, goody,” Tanaka said. “We’ll be invited to retire.”
“Yes, sir,” Mugabo said. Then, a moment later, “She does seem a bit green.”
“She’s still licking off the caul. I can’t believe we’ve had this much trouble tracking down someone who’s still sleeping with her teddy bear.”
“I believe a Martian was in command of the Storm until shortly before the attack on the homeworld.”
“And Nagata was in charge during that,” Tanaka said, then tilted her head. “So why isn’t she the one answering now?”
“I don’t have a theory to venture,” Mugabo said, but she hadn’t really been talking to him anyway.
Trejo’s plan was bold, she’d give him that. And, like all the best plans, it was limber. If Nagata accepted the terms, then he’d let her playact at being in charge until he could rebuild the strength they’d lost. And if Duarte proved to be unmanageable, maybe even keep her on as figurehead in perpetuity. It was an elegant way to put an end to the fighting: Give the enemy the raiment of power while keeping the actual power for yourself and then seeing if she ever noticed.
If she didn’t agree, but did reach out to announce her rejection, the door was open for diplomacy. Diplomacy always provided the chance to glean more information from the enemy. Or for them to glean it from you. It wasn’t a form of conflict Tanaka found comfortable, but she understood it.