“The region is dark!” one of the other military people pointed out. “The beasts will not fly!”
“They will,” Foise said levelly. “I have seen Oramen himself trust his life to them, just a few days ago. Ask the beasts’ handlers. They may need using to it, but it can be done.”
“The winds are too great!”
“They have fallen back lately,” Foise said, “and anyway do not normally persist longer than a short-day without sufficient pause.” Foise looked at tyl Loesp and spread his arms from the elbows, saying simply, “It can be done, sir.”
“We shall see,” tyl Loesp said. “Lemitte, Uliast,” he said, naming two of his most hard-headed generals. “Look into this.”
“Sir.”
“Sir.”
“It takes the name Nameless, then,” Savidius Savide said. “Our dear ancestor, this sanctified remainder, surviving echo of a mighty and glorious chorus from the dawn of all that’s good assumes the burden of this ever-consecrated city as we take on the burden of long absence. Ever-present loss! How cruel! A night has been upon us that’s lasted decieons; the shadow’s back half of for ever. A night now glimmering to dawn, at last! Oh! How long we have waited! All rejoice! Another part of the great community is made whole. Who pitied now may — no, must — with all good reason and bounteous wishes rejoice, rejoice and rejoice again for we who are reunited with our past!”
“It is our parent!” Kiu added. “Producing all, itself produced by this city-wide birthing, dross swept away, the past uncovered, all jibes abandoned, all disbelief extinguished.”
Oramen had never heard the ambassador sound so excited, or even so comprehensible. “Sympathy, again!” Kiu exclaimed. “For those who doubted the Oct, scorned us for our very name, Inheritors. How they will rue their lack of belief in us on this news being carried, in joy, in truth absolute, unshakeable, undeniable, to every star and planet, hab and ship of the great lens! Fall the Falls silent, frozen in tremulous expectation, in calm, in fit and proper pause before the great climactic chords of fulfilment, realisation, celebration!”
“You are so sure it is what it says it is?” Oramen asked. They were still on the platform around the lighter grey patch on the front of the Sarcophagus, which might or might not be a kind of window into the thing. Oramen had wanted to talk further elsewhere, but the two Oct ambassadors would not leave the presence of whatever was in the Sarcophagus. He had had to settle for bringing the two of them to the far edge of the platform — possibly out of range of the window, possibly not — and asking everybody else to leave. Poatas and Leratiy had removed themselves only as far as the next layer of scaffolding down, and that reluctantly. Oramen talked quietly, in the vain hope that this would encourage the two Oct to do the same, but they would not; both seemed enthused, agitated, almost wild.
They had each taken a turn facing that window, experiencing it for themselves. Others had too, including Poatas and Leratiy. They reported that the experience was now one of joy and hope, not loss and yearning. A feeling of euphoric release filled whoever stood or floated there, along with an aching, earnest desire that one might soon be made whole.
“Of course sure it is what it says! Why anything other?” Savidius Savide asked. The alien voice sounded shocked that any doubt might be entertained. “It is what it says that it is. This has been presaged, this is expected. Who doubts such profundity?”
“You were expecting this?” Oramen said, looking from one Oct to the other. “For how long?”
“All our lives before we lived, truly!” Kiu said, waving his upper limbs around.
“As this will resound forever forwards in time, so the expectation has lasted the forever of not just individuals but our selves as one, our self, our species, kind,” Savidius Savide added.
“But for how long have you thought the answer was here, at the Falls specifically?” Oramen asked.
“Unknown time,” Kiu told him.
“Party, we are not,” Savidius Savide agreed. “Who knows what lessons learned, futures foretold, intelligences garnered, down timelines older than ourselves, we are sure, pursued to produce plans, courses, actions? Not I.”
“Nor,” Kiu agreed.
Oramen realised that even if the Oct were trying to give him a direct answer, he’d be unlikely to understand it. He just had to accept this frustration. “The information which you transferred from the Enabler machine into the Nameless,” he said, trying a new tack. “Was it… what one might call neutral regarding whatever you expected to discover here?”
“Better than!” exclaimed Kiu.
“Needless hesitancy,” Savide said. “Cowardice of reproachable lack of will, decisiveness. Expellence upon all such.”
“Gentlemen,” Oramen said, still trying to keep his voice down. “Did you tell the being in here what you were looking for? That you expected it to be an Involucra?”
“How can its true nature be hidden from itself?” Savide said scornfully.
“You ask impossibles,” Kiu added.
“It is as it is. Nothing can alter that,” Savide said. “We would all be advised lessons similar ourselves doubly to learn, taking such, templated.”
Oramen sighed. “A moment, please.”
“Unowned, making unbestowable. All share the one moment of now,” Kiu said.
“Just so,” Oramen said, and stepped away from the two Oct, indicating with one flat hand that he wished them to stay where they were. He stood in front of the pale grey patch, though closer than its focus.
“What are you?” he asked quietly.
“Nameless,” came the equally subdued reply. “I have taken that name. It pleases me, for now, until my own may be returned to me.”
“But what sort of thing are you? Truly.”
“Veil,” the voice whispered back. “I am Veil, I am Involucra. We made that within which you have ever lived, prince.”
“You made Sursamen?”
“Yes, and we made all those that you call Shellworlds.”
“For what reason?”
“To cast a field about the galaxy. To protect. All know this, prince.”
“To protect from what?”
“What is your own guess?”
“I have none. Would you answer my question? What did you seek to protect the galaxy from?”
“You misunderstand.”
“Then tell, so that I understand.”
“I require my other pieces, my scattered shards. I would be whole again, then I might answer your questions. The years have been long, prince, and cruel to me. So much is gone, so much taken away. I am ashamed at how much, blush to report how little I know that did not come out of that device that let me learn how to talk to you.”
“You blush? Do you blush? Can you? What are you, in there?”
“I am less than whole. Of course I blush not. I translate. I speak to you and in your idiom; to the Oct the same, and so quite differently. All is translation. How could it be otherwise?”
Oramen sighed heavily and took his leave of the Sarcophagus. He left the two Oct returning to their positions in front of it again.
On the floor of the chamber, some way beyond the outer circle of the devotional Oct, Oramen talked to Poatas and Leratiy. Another couple of men who were Oct experts had arrived, yawning, too, and some of his new crop of advisers.
“Sir,” Poatas said, leaning forward in his seat, both hands clutching at his stick. “This is a moment of the utmost historicity! We are present at one of the most important discoveries in recent history, anywhere in the galaxy!”
“You think it is a Veil in there?” Oramen asked.