Airey flourished a data-palette, while Sorrel gripped Klom's arm and leaned in closer. "Your foundling is a twelve-strand, Klom! An incredibly powerful deva, despite his seeming lack of sapience! Perhaps the only one of his kind. But unlike all other devas, he's metastable on our ontological plane! And he might very well be the Book of Forgetting as well!"
"The Book of Forgetting? But—"
Airey gestured dismissively. "I know, I know, everyone has assumed for millennia that the Book was an artifact of some sort. But I've been doing research into the legend, and nothing in the fragments of lore is really inconsistent with the Book being a living creature. And after a little cogitation, I realized how your pet saved your life. He doesn't travel back in time, but crosswise! He forgets one universe while remembering another. And somehow he shunted the essence of your consciousness onto an alternate timetrack along with him. A timetrack that lagged just a little beyond our moment, where your accident never happened. If you wish to quibble, this universe is not the one you were born in."
The hesitant tone of Klom's speech conveyed a slowly dawning understanding. "But then, that means— I guess Tugger is really valuable." Klom looked down at his pet. The being whose inherently recomplicated cellular structure allowed him to transcend limitations of space and time and leap across the multiverse was busy nibbling at his own hide for pests.
Airey laughed cynically. "That's understating the case a million times worse than a Neftali trader misrepresents his wares! With Tugger by your side, you can lay claim to all the riches in the Indrajal."
"I don't want so much though," said Klom. He gathered his friends to his side. "Just enough for the four of us to leave this hard place and retire to Chaulk—"
The next voice, a basso rumble, shocked them all, although only Klom recognized it. "I am afraid no one is going anywhere."
Bright Tide Rising floated above them, clouded by his majestatics. The six-strand owner of the Asperna Yards stayed silent for a long moment—possibly regarding the quartet curiously through his mutable veil, although Klom could not say for sure— before speaking at last.
"A metastable creature with twice my own information density. No wonder I was unable to read it properly. It is hard to credit such a miracle, although I have never known the scientists at Radius Seven to be mistaken before. You will now give me that data-palette."
Airey braced his spine. "Klom paid for these tests, so they belong to him. And so does Tugger."
"Absolutely incorrect. The creature is salvage from a ship owned by me. It is mine by terms of your employment. Your co-worker will be compensated for his find. Perhaps I will give him as much as ten thousand taka."
Sorrel chimed in. "That's an insult! This animal is invaluable!"
"And you three are all too stupid and primitive to properly exploit such a treasure. But I am done arguing. With the creature's entire genome on a palette, it will be simple to rebirth him, this time without any misplaced allegiances. I have no further need of any of you."
Klom felt mentally yanked in a dozen different directions. How had this horrible situation come about, from such simple and innocent impulses? But before he could speak or act, the telecosmic corona of majestatics around Bright Tide Rising seemed to squirt four solid streams of particles, distributed along four vectors.
Klom's watercutter practically leaped into his right hand, even as he hurled himself to one side. He felt a piercing pain in his left shoulder. But the pain did not disturb his aim.
The noise that Bright Tide Rising's legs made in falling to the ground was followed nearly instantaneously by the accompanying mucky splash of his separate upper half. Klom turned to his companions. All three were stretched out unmoving on the filthy ground. One by one, he searched their corpses for wounds. But the lancelike majestatics had pierced so cleanly, yet so fatally, that Klom could detect nothing. At least their deaths had been swift. There was very little blood, and in fact his own shoulder wound was invisible and unleaking.
Klom lifted first Sorrel's head from the muck, and kissed her dirty cheek. He did the same for Tugger and Airey, before turning to their killer.
Bright Tide Rising's myrmidons were attempting to put their master back together. They had already gathered up his spilled entrails and dragged his two halves into contact and were stitching golden sutures inside and out.
Klom carved the six-strand into pieces so small that all the majestics in the Indrajal would not suffice to repair the Horseface. The he kicked shitty, hay-speckled mud atop the carrion.
The long, harsh night was waning, with dawn a distant rumor. Klom stood, half- bewildered, in his twilit shack. In his hand he held the data-palette bearing Tugger's genome. What good was it to him? The money to reincarnate Tugger was a sum far beyond his means. And even if somehow miraculously given the fee, Klom could engineer the conception only of Tugger's mere doppelganger, a blank slate with no familiar consciousness shared with the original who had once saved Klom's life.
And now Klom was in danger of losing his own life once more. His murder of Bright Tide Rising, even in self-defense, would earn him death, under the laws of the Indrajal, which were biased against two-strands.
He knew that he must run. But where?
Klom gathered up a couple of possessions: the picture of his mother, a few deva medals handed out at religious ceremonies. But then he was overwhelmed by fatigue and despair. The lack of a certain destination left him feeling hopeless. With near-suicidal unselfconcern, he dropped into his hammock and fell asleep among his rags.
Sometime in the earliest hours of morning he awoke to a wet tongue rasping his face. He flailed his arms about, confused and slow to emerge from dreams, and encountered a familiar boulder of a head bearing a fleshy protuberance.
"Tugger?" Something hard was spat out onto his chest, bouncing off into the hammock. By the time Klom got his eyes ungummed and open, he was alone again. A data-palette slimed with saliva shared the hammock with him. He dried it off on
his shirt and jacked it into his reader. The palette was a triptix in Klom's name. It registered a spendable value above the
ticket price of several million taka, and listed as the bearer's ultimate destination the fabled world of Mount Sumeru. Mount Sumeru. What would Klom's mother say, when he made his brief farewell to
her, moving quickly before he could be connected to Bright Tide Rising's death? Never had anyone from Chaulk ventured to so fabled a place.
Klom gazed around him at the familiar shabby interior of his crib. Already it looked distant and remote. The picture of his mother on the banks of Lake Zawinul seemed to represent a stranger. Klom knew that he would never return to Chaulk.
A sense of mystery enveloped him. Was Tugger somehow alive? What awaited him on Mount Sumeru? Only travel out among the worlds of the Indrajal held hope of answers. The End