And yet, still, despite everything, all he could do, all that he could even think of doing, was to press on and try to find what everybody wanted him to find, and hope that it might do some good somehow.
Fassin breathed in, tasting salt.
He no longer doubted that this was real, or a virtual environment there was no disgrace in being fooled by. There wasn’t even anywhere like this — this coarse, storm-sundered coast -anywhere in Ulubis system. And the stars were completely different, again.
Something caught Fassin’s attention. A few kilometres out into the ocean, the water was rising in a great shallow dome, flowing everywhere down from a huge flattened hemisphere of foam-streaked darkness rising like a never-breaking explosion from the depths, still spreading and still rising and causing a great slow swell of disturbed waves to come pulsing forward, towards the cliffs as the apparition — a double saucer-shape two kilometres wide — finally broke free of the sea entirely and came slowly towards the shore, sheets and veils of salt rain falling from beneath it, flattening the shadow-bruised surface of the waters.
Y’sul floated up, nodding forward. “Ride’s here, then.”
They floated, stood and hovered in a half-drained crystal hall within the great saucer ship. Aumapile of Aumapile floated in the water, a fat eel the size of an orca with a great folded fan of sail ridging its back. Fassin stood on a broad ledge, still slick with salty water, while Y’sul and the truetwin Quercer Janath -cajoled down eventually, bulked out with a twin-skin overall of extreme shininess that doubled as an esuit — hovered in the air above the great pool of water. Fassin found himself thinking about the Autumn House again, and Slovius in his pool.
Aumapile of Aumapile — The Aumapile of Aumapile, apparently, according to the servant who had escorted them down a broad water-filled tube to the audience chamber, the human and the Dwellers in a bubble of air enclosed by a sphere of diamond — was not merely a justly famous scholar of the Cincturia, it was a vastly rich justly famous scholar of the Cincturia.
A high, warbling, seemingly interminable song sounded from an underwater sound system. “A Song of Welcoming For Those From Afar’, apparently.
“Song for making you want to go straight back there again,” Y’sul had asided to Fassin, as they’d accepted reasonable impersonations of something to drink and\or inhale.
They talked of Leisicrofe. Their host, speaking through a small hovering speaker sphere, said they had missed him by some years and then Y’sul mentioned following him.
“Oh,” the Sceuri said, “but you must take me with you.”
“Must?”
“Must?”
“But I know where he went,” the Sceuri said, as though this explained everything.
“Couldn’t you just tell us?” Y’sul asked plaintively.
“Just point us in the right direction.”
“And we’ll be on our way”
The Sceuri wriggled in the great pool, sending water sloshing. It laughed. A soft, tinkling sound from the hovering speaker. “Oh, I could, but I always had the feeling my friend Leisicrofe had travelled even more widely than I have, especially into the gases of Nhouaste. I think you may be heading there, as you did not come through the wormhole portal, and he did not depart through it. You see? I have my sources. I know what goes on. You can’t fool me. I am not so stupid. You and your little Squanderer friend will be heading back to Nhouaste.”
“Doubt it,” the Dweller travelcaptain said, snorting.
Fassin was the little Squanderer friend. The Sceuri took great pride in having become a technological, space-faring species, given the obstacles they’d had to overcome. A classic water-world environment had almost no easily available metals. Any metal-bearing ores that a waterworld possessed tended to be locked away under all that ice, deep in the planet’s inaccessible rocky core. Waterworlders had to do what they could with what fell from the sky in the shape of meteorites, and in this shared a developmental background with gas-giant Dwellers.
To get into space in the face of such a paucity of readily available raw materials was not easy, and the Sceuri regarded themselves as deserving considerable recognition and respect for such a triumph of intellect over scarcity. Accomplishing the same feat when you came from a rock-surface planet was a relatively trivial, expectable, even dismissible trick. The Sceuri called people from such planets Squanderers as a result, though not usually to their face or other appropriate feature.
“Please make clear, oh great A of A,” the other half of Quercer Janath said.
Fassin suspected that he already knew what the Sceuri was thinking. The local gas-giant, Nhouaste — inhabited by Dwellers, of course — was, like the vast majority of Dweller gas-giants, not a world that welcomed Seers or anybody else apart from other Dwellers. Aumapile of Aumapile had probably been told where Leisicrofe was heading next and assumed that as the Dweller had not gone through the Mercatorial wormhole — and assuming he hadn’t headed into deep space at STL speeds — he must have gone to look for whatever it was he was looking for in the one place that even being fabulously rich and corruptly well-connected couldn’t gain you access to, in this system or any other: a Dweller-inhabited gas-giant.
“I think the Toilers our mutual friend sought have found a new niche, no longer in space, but in gas, you see?” the Sceuri said. Even through the speaker sphere, the creature’s voice sounded pleased with itself.
“Toilers?” Y’sul said.
“Known.”
“Benign semi-swarm devices,” the other half of Quercer Janath announced. “Infra-sentient. Known for randomly building inscrutable space structures, best guess for purpose of which being as preparatory infrastructure for an invasion that never took place on behalf of a race long gone and thoroughly forgotten. Distribution very wide but very sparse. Numbers fluctuate. Rarely dangerous, sometimes hunted, no bounty.”
“So there.”
Y’sul looked surprised. “Really?” he asked,
“Oh, stop being so coy!” their host chided, creating sinuous splashing patterns in the water, as though tickled. “Of course! As though you didn’t know.” The Aumapile of Aumapile blew jets of water from each end. A scent of something vaguely rotten filled Fassin’s nose. “But I know where our friend was going to next, and you don’t. However, I shall be willing to tell you if you take me along, once I am aboard your ship. Such large places, gas-giants! And of course we have four. One thinks, Oh, who can say, where would one’s quarry be?” The Sceuri flicked its tail. Fassin got splashed. “And what do you say, sirs?”
Y’sul looked at Fassin and quietly rippled his mantle, the Dweller equivalent of a head-shake.
The travelcaptain was silent for a moment or two, then said,
“If we do take you with us…”
“Ah! But I have my own ship! Indeed, you are in it!”
“Won’t work.”
“Have to come with us in ours.”
“I have smaller ships! Many of them! A choice!”
“Makes no difference. Has to be ours.”
“Conditions of Passage.”
“Well…’ the Sceuri said.
“Passengers travel unconditionally.”
“Unconditionally.”
“What does that mean?”
“Trust us.”
“Yes. No matter what.”