For a while she just wandered through the Fortress.
It was still too trying for Nemia to go back to work. She turned toward the labs along Coldfire but instead retreated east to her rooms. When she arrived she didn’t know what to do. In a somber mood, she lingered by the central rosepot in the atrium, not seeing the roses, only images of the grandfather who had adopted her to live the life of a Fortress acolyte. The room was immaculate except for wood-carving tools and chips that hadn’t yet settled in the slow gravity. From the central table she picked up and played with one of Grandfa’s Coron’s Eggs, not activating its stellar show. He was always searching for older versions, unhappy that he’d never found a first edition. Funny man. He was devoted to the past as well as the future.
From above and below, noise she had never noticed before sifted through the walls and ceiling and floor of her embedded apartment, though the doors were sealed, her communer shut down. She needed absolute silence, absolute isolation. Absently she ordered the vestibule closet to deliver an oxy-mask and headbeam and, after arguing with the stowwall to release her tool kit, took that, too. Off she went down the corridors to the nearest pullway. She didn’t bother to ask for a pullcar; she just took one, small and open, requesting the robodispatcher to route her by its most unused paths to the northern barrier. At top speed. It did not accelerate until after she was comfortably clamped.
The wind played with her hair like life played with changes. After a wild flight—zipping images of floors and ceilings and windows and shops and passageway offshoots—the pullcar reversed thrust, nudging her to a stop. Even life had its stops, where one took inventory to claim a new direction. She paused before uncoupling the body clamps—wrapped more in contemplation than in her physical restraints. For the first time in her life she had a restless need for something older than Grandfa to think about.
Nemia shoved off from the pullway with a glide that sent her down a vacant corridor to a landing near one of the border hatches. It was monitored but unguarded. The caves beyond its sealoff were not forbidden territories, just unused. She cracked the seal and muscled the barrier open. The hatch closed behind her of its own will. Thunk! Carefully she checked to make sure that the reseal had passed roboin-spection—otherwise alarms would go off and screaming fire teams would arrive within a few inamins.
And there she was, drifting through the abandoned portions of the Fortress. Silent darkness. She had only her beam to guide her. These older digs, untouched by recent concern, intrigued her the most. She came upon other seals, and other locks, even airlocks. Sometimes one of the internal pressure locks was jammed, but she had her tool kit with her and nothing much could stop a skilled hand that held both tinker-tools and instruments of brute strength. The preservation gas was helium, compliments of the atmosphere of their medium-size mother world who towed them through the sunless void, hydrogen oceans lit only by the stars.
Her beam animated shadow-beings who fled ahead of her down tunnel after tunnel and into rooms of strangely obsolete equipment... late First Empire it looked like. The Hel-marians builders were famless. Amazing what primitive brains could do! It appeared to be an enormous construction effort and yet—seven thousand years of chipping had hardly perforated a worldlet that was big enough to mask the energy output of its small colony but not big enough to field serious gravitic muscle. She did a brief calculation in her fam just to amuse herself: if the whole of this tiny rock were to be carved into catacombs, the Helmarians here would have enough crypt space for the entire hundred quadrillion people of the Second Empire. So much for the illusion of human pretension!
She worked her way deeper and deeper into the abandoned shafts and drifts until she was peeking, mouselike, from the floor of the original command center up at all of its First Empire hardware. How had her ancestors escaped detection with energy-inefficient ultrawave generators of such monstrous size! All of the hokey accessories were perfectly preserved in the helium. Embroidered chairs. Even old strategy maps thousands of years obsolete.
She knelt beneath the main machine and said a prayer to the Old Ones, elders of a culture no empire could crush. Her prayer was the prime cry that every Helmarian knew by heart: “To die once is to live forever!” spoken with arms raised, elbows at her side, palms facing outward. And then she bowed for her beloved grandfather, wistfully recalling that it had been he who crawled with her on their polished stone floor back on Neuhadra before she’d ever learned to walk or glide or build fams. What a way with children he had! He had stolen her from her parents with his Smythosian zeal.
She stayed in that holy place all afternoon, tinkering with the failed electrical shunts until she had the old lights glowing again—so that she could play out, via fam, Hisgoold’s tragic opera against these vast machines so awesomely right for this ancient drama. Her fam created the hallucinatory singers, their voices, their movements. Hisgoold’s Family was magnificent with noble superhumanity. The chorus of the doomed Helmarian army fought its way heroically across a stage more grim and real than any she’d ever seen in live theater.
She wept at the Remonstration. Her arms cheered the Hal-lel. Her lips smiled with the Madrigal as Pani and Laura and their jokers flirted in a coy chase among the ultrawave projectors. She laughed like a child at the pyrotechnics of the Prothalamion, helplessly remembering the emotions of the naive three-year-old whom Grandfa first took to see His-goold. The Battlehymn of the Thousand Suns inspired her as it always did. The Aubade filled her with hope. She hissed when the Splendid Emperor appeared for his Triumph. And the final Lament brought her to tears as Kaggan grieved over the bodies of Pani and Laura.
Sorrow, terrible sorrow. She extinguished the lights so she could cry and cry in the blackness like she had never before bawled in her whole young life. She had to switch on the dry-blow to clear her faceplate. The evaporating wetness on her cheeks was all that her exhausted mind could feel.
When she returned home, a Personal Capsule was waiting for her in the atrium.
It tasted her fingertips while reading her retinal pattern— but instead of delivering an encrypted message to her fam, the Capsule produced a tiny black speaker that began to chat in the voice... of her grandfather. It had two simple toggles: forward/stop and retreat-one-sentence-at-a-time. The voice was, in places, fam-simulated, as if it had been too much effort for Grandfa to record with his vocal chords. The destruct was a manual toggle.
“Nemia, ah, Nemia. When death is on our mind we think only of unfinished business. So. Here I am dead and you haven’t married yet. I’ve been working on it with your mother and father.”
She laughed. He was going to leave her one last nag about that. It was a favorite subject of his that she’d never been able to terminate. She’d bawled him out quite angrily the last time he had mentioned it, hoping to shut him up forever, and henceforth had stuffed her ears at the mere mention of marriage—but he always had to have the last word. Now he was having the last word.
“I know how you feel on the subject so I haven’t kept you apprised of my actions; I’ve just been making all the arrangements behind your back. A surprise party. Now I won’t be able to finish what I’ve started so you’ll have to carry out the last details on your own. Don’t worry about the boy. I haven’t told him, either. Only his parents. They approve of you. It was to be his surprise party, too.”
“Well!” thought Nemia.
“You already know the boy. You constructed the monitor-persona we installed for his last assignment. I believe you liked him. Think back. You met him at that Reaffirmation Gala I arranged for you. The boy with the ears. I’ve never heard you rave so about a boy’s ears. I can’t, for sure, attest that you fell in love with him, but it was certainly infatuation at first sight. I always thought it was a shame that he had to leave so soon—otherwise I might have been more persistent in my meddling, which, up until his assignment, had been one of my better efforts.”