Come on, Danae, she scoffed silently. After all this time, you really think the whole marvelous machine would just happen to come apart while you were here to watch? Let's not let egocentrism run away with us, okay?
Nevertheless, she found herself keeping well back from the sky-plane's edge for the rest of the flight... and concentrating on the blue sky overhead instead of the ground far below.
Chapter 9
They'd been flying two more hours when Ravagin called her attention to a dark, irregular mass of buildings spreading across the landscape to the southeast. "Missia City," he identified it. "Probably the largest city in this section of Shamsheer, though genuine population records aren't really kept.
Look straight past it and you'll be able to see Forj Tower."
Danae squinted against the sunlight. Beyond the city was a section of open space—desert, she remembered from the maps—and beyond that a clump of something that could have been the dense forest she knew was also there. And rising out of the center of the forest—
"My God," she murmured. "That thing is big."
"Nearly a kilometer high," Ravagin agreed. "And something like seven hundred meters in circumference at the base."
"I've seen the numbers, thank you," Danae told him shortly. "It just looks bigger than that, somehow."
"Optical illusion, probably—most of the comparable buildings you've seen in the Twenty Worlds are surrounded by other buildings of similar height. Here it's just standing out there on its own."
Danae shaded her eyes. Details were impossible to pick out at this distance, but superimposed in her mind's eye were the drawings she'd seen: the secondary spires poking skyward from halfway up the main tower body; the intricate and unexplained relief patterns climbing like stone ivy from top to bottom; the windows in the upper third through which every bit of portable technology in this part of Shamsheer would eventually make its way. "I used to read fantasy books with Dark Towers in them when I was a girl," she commented, half to herself. "It was always where the chief villain lived."
"Here it's more like where the shoemaker's elves live," Ravagin said dryly. "Anyway, that's where it is. I thought you might like to see it."
She nodded silently, still looking at the dark mass of buildings of the city below. All those people, in Missia and other cities nearby, clustered around the Tower as if around a wizard's abode... "They really don't understand, do they?" she murmured.
Ravagin half turned. "You mean how all this operates? No, of course not. I thought we'd discussed that."
"Well, yes, but... oh, never mind."
"The scientific method isn't a basic component of the human psyche, Danae," Ravagin shrugged.
"It's a relatively recent development, and it only caught on because it happens to work. On Shamsheer, it's not needed."
Danae grimaced. "So in exchange for all their marvelous voodoo technology they get locked into a totally stagnant society."
"Basically. Probably on purpose."
She looked at him sharply. "You're talking Vernescu's theory, aren't you? That Triplet was set up as a deliberate test of whether humans function best with magic, science, or a mixture of the two."
He glanced back at her. "I take it you disagree with him."
"I hate the whole idea," she snorted. "It's internally inconsistent, for one thing. Any beings so advanced they could build two entire worlds and possibly even the dimensions to hold them and the Tunnels to get between them surely would have had enough ethical sense not to play games like this with other sentient beings."
"Why?" Ravagin countered. "What makes you think the Builders even saw us as sentient beings, let alone cared about us? Maybe the human race started its existence as the white rats for their experiments and we just got out of hand after they went off and left us."
"I hate that theory, too."
He shrugged. "You're the one who was grousing about the lack of scientific curiosity on Shamsheer a minute ago. Why are you so upset by the possibility that Triplet itself is a massive monument to scientific curiosity?"
She glared at him for a moment, then turned away and glowered toward the Dark Tower fading into the horizon in their wake. There was no answer for that, unfortunately, which galled her to no end.
She hated Vernescu's theory—hated the way it reduced human beings to pawns on someone else's chessboard—but she had no viable alternative to offer in its place.
Not yet, anyway. But that didn't mean there wasn't one... and if there was, she was damn well going to be the one to find it.
Pursing her lips, she glanced over her shoulder. Ravagin was again sitting facing front, his back to her. Nothing in his stance or posture indicated anger or hostility—almost certainly, the argument had been little more than a game to him. A way to slide salt under her skin without doing anything he could be reprimanded for. Cynical; perhaps more than a little bitter, she decided, playing back that last conversation in her mind. A function of all his years of running people through here? Or is it just the way he's expressing the frustration he said everyone eventually suffers in Shamsheer?
She didn't know. And for the moment, anyway, she didn't really care.
The sun had just passed zenith when they reached the western edge of Darcane Forest.
The forest was huge, and perhaps more than anything else Danae had seen it served to drive home on a viscereal level the strangeness of this world. All other forests she'd ever seen—whether on developed or relatively undeveloped worlds—had somehow carried about them a noticeable and in many ways comfortable aura of civilization. Not here. The trees stretching to the horizon below carpeted the ground completely, with no roadways or monolines cutting artificially straight lines through the greenery. No roadways, no watchtowers, no tethered guidelights; nothing down there but untouched, untamed, uncaring wilderness. Abruptly, she shivered.
"Impressive, isn't it?"
She grimaced, annoyed that Ravagin had noticed her reaction. "It's nice," she told him shortly. "Not a place I'd want to spend the night."
"I don't blame you," he grunted. "There are some particularly nasty animals living down there—most of them, fortunately, nocturnal. Sky-plane: follow my mark." He pointed about forty-five degrees to the right of their current direction. "Mark."
The sky-plane obediently took up the new course, and Ravagin glanced up at the sun. "We'll be at the way house in about an hour. Do you want to wait until we get there, or eat the lunch Essen packed us now?"
Danae hadn't even thought about food. "I'm not really hungry at the moment. As a matter of fact, why do we even have to stop at the way house? I thought you wanted to get us to Karyx as soon as possible."
"Well..." Ravagin scratched thoughtfully at his cheek. "It's occurred to me since we last talked about it that I might be pushing things a bit much." He waved a hand back toward the way they'd come.
"After all, there's been absolutely no indication that your pal Hart has even managed to get through to Shamsheer, let alone that he's right behind us. I think it might be a good idea to spend one more night here before tackling Karyx."
Danae frowned, visualizing the maps of Karyx she'd learned. "I don't see the problem. We wouldn't be able to get to Besak or Torralane Village before nightfall if we went through now, but so what?
There are supposed to be inns along the road, or we could even camp out overnight."
He cocked an eyebrow. "You really are eager to get to Karyx, aren't you? Has it occurred to you that the culture shock you experienced in Shamsheer will be even worse on the far side of this Tunnel?"