I bring my knee up into his groin; he bellows with pain and drops the knife. I break his grip on me and pull the beamer out of my belt.
He stares at it stupidly, as if I'd done magic like Song.
I am a victim, a slave; he can't believe that I am defying him.
I pick up the knife. "I'm doing you a favor," I say, before he can start to think. "I told you I belong to the
Lake. I could have torn you apart--"
He frowns uncertainly, still hunched over with pain.
"Come after me and I will," I finish, telling him something
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I'm sure he'll understand. I turn my back and walk on, trying to listen through the muttering of my voices for any motion behind me. But he doesn't follow. As I put another block of buildings between us I begin to breathe again. Now I wear the gun and the knife openly, as well as the trefoil, realizing that SB is right--my luck is running out. I walk faster.
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I hide the gun again as I reach Song's tower and see the guards. The avenue of bones and the entrance with its leering skull sicken me. I can't believe that once I walked this path eagerly--and yet the memory lies as deep and perfect as a solii inside of me. I pass the guards.
Their eyes follow me up the steps one more time.
Song has already returned. She stands at the window of the tower, staring out at Fire Lake. She doesn't seem to hear me as I cross the room to her. I touch her arm, say her name softly, trying not to startle her.
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She turns, blinking at me, and her eyes are red with weeping.
"What is it--?" I begin. But I already know: the helplessness, the terrible sense of loss and futility--the Lake, which eats away at our wills, never leaving us alone. I've barely been able to survive it for this long, even with the adhani and Moon's guidance; but she has no control, no protection at all. How long has she endured this torture?
How long has she waited for someone who could end it?
"Song," I say again. "I've found my brothers. We can all leave here now." I realize that she can make it easy for us; no one will touch her, or disobey her.
But her eyes fill with terror. "No! I can't leave the Lake. . . . Why don't you save me?"
"I will--"
"You're lying. You want to leave here."
"And take you with me!"
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"No! You don't understand anything!" She pulls away from me, distracted, and moves across the room. When she looks back again her eyes are smouldering and unreadable.
"Yes, I'll come. But I want you to bring something for me."
I nod encouragingly, and she points through the doorway into the next room. I go to the doorway to see what she wants. "Over there," she says, "the fire globe." I move forward, and she shoves me into the room. The door slams behind me.
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"Song!" The door is locked, of course. I beat on it with my fists. "Don't do this to me! Open the door, goddamn it!" The door is made of metal--Ship-metal, I think irrelevantly --and I bruise my hands. I can see her through the filigree work of an inset panel.
"Stay there!" she cries. "Stay there until you save me or you starve!"
I kick the door and turn away, swearing furiously at her, at my own gullibility. I go to the window and look
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out, and down. The tower sits on a ledge of rock; the fall would kill me. I look up again, and the Lake is watching me, winking its many-faceted eyes at me, eyes that look forward and backward through time. "What are you, you souleater?" I shout. "Are you alive? Are you some kind of alien?" But those are not the right questions, and the voices in my mind scream the gibberish of the ages.
"Then damn you!" People stare up at me. I pull back from the window.
And my father is standing before me in the room, haloed in red.
I gasp and fall back against the sill, wiping my hand across my mouth. His ghost. "F-father?" I ask, and wait for him to tell me what he wants.
"Thou are all I have that makes me proud," he says.
His hands reach out to me. His eyes beg me to understand what he cannot ask, will not say. . . .
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"Say it!" I shout, raw-voiced. "Say it this time, for gods' sakes, you coward! Goddamn you, you coward, you coward--why did you blame me? It was your duty, not mine! Yours, yours, yours. . .
."
I slide down to the floor, into a pile of clutter, hurling things across the room, hearing them shatter. It wasn Y my fault. It wasn't. Feeling the pressure released, the pain ebbing away, the abscess draining in my soul. . . .
"Gods, Father. ..." I murmur at last, slumping back against the cool stone of the wall. "The answer was so easy then." I pull myself up, and take deep breaths, reciting an adhani to focus myself. To find the right answer, you have to ask the right questions. Talking to the Lake is not so different from the Transfer, after all.
Pushing away from the windowsill, I begin to pace off the small clear space at the center of the room. I count my steps, I measure the limits of my prison, I force my mind to grow calm and rational. I've spent my whole life running away from this moment. This time I will face Page 159
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the problem and find the answer, or else this time it really will be the end.
I realize that I need something to help me hold on to my clues if the Lake makes me lose control again. For the first time since I have come here I remember my belt recorder. I switch it on. It still works. I shudder as I hear my own last words. I advance it. I begin to record the data I have gathered, the pieces that almost fit; speaking aloud, afraid to imagine what sort of static it would register if I tried to use thought-record.
What have I seen? I count the anomalies on my fingers:
"Relics of the Old Empire; a ship. Electromagnetic distortion.
Space and time distortion. A river that ties itself in knots; buildings cut in half by pieces of stone; things that defy all reason, and yet must be real. . . ."
What do I feel? Helpless anticipation pours into me; I
slam the floodgates of my concentration with all my will.
"Emotions not my own. Images, ghosts--memories out of the past and the future . . . somehow.
It all seems tied
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to a sibyl's receptivity; only a sibyl experiences these things, this sensitivity to the Lake."
What is the common denominator? I sink my teeth into my fist, holding on to the thought as the Lake's excitement rises. I see a pattern, an undeniable pattern: "The ship!
The ship is the key, the ship that crashed here traveled faster than light. The Old Empire had a stardrive, bioengineered to manipulate space-time ... an artificial intelligence!"
I run back to the door, clinging to the tracery of metal vines. "Song!" I shout.
She turns away from the window, her body taut with anticipation.
"What formed you?" I watch her fall almost eagerly into Transfer. The Lake rushes into my mind; I keep shouting questions. "Was it the stardrive from the ship that crashed here? Is it still alive--?"