Fassin watched the Dweller go, then turned back to the ocean. He was here to meet with a Sceuri who had seen the Dweller Leisicrofe, who had been here until, they’d been told, twelve years ago.
They hadn’t met a Sceuri yet. The Velpin had been challenged by the planet’s orbital traffic control and targeted by several military units and so had had to reveal something of its reasons for being there.
“Looking for some Dweller geezer called Leisicrofe,” had been Quercer Janath’s exact words.
They’d been told to go into orbit and stay there. Targeting beams never left them. They were regarded as suspicious because their ship looked “hole-capable and they hadn’t come through the local portal.
“Sceuri,” Quercer Janath had told Fassin and Y’sul. “Suspicious.”
“Paranoid.”
They’d spent three days watching the planet revolve beneath them. Y’sul had muttered about how flat and boring the storms looked, Fassin had found endless fascination in the great snowflake city-structures spread across water and land, and the truetwin passed the time inventorying ship-stuff they’d forgotten about and playing noisy image-leaf games. They answered questions from planetary traffic control about where they’d come from -Nhouaste, the largest of the system’s four gas-giant planets, was the answer given — and then a signal had come through. A scholar named Aumapile of Aumapile had had the honour of playing host to the Dweller scholar Leisicrofe and would be flattered to be allowed to extend the same courtesies to these new arrivals.
Another step along the way, another step closer, perhaps, to finding the wandering Dweller and the data he carried. If he still lived, if he still had the data, if the data was what it was supposed to be, if Valseir had been telling the truth, if it was not all utterly out of date, without point, overtaken by the seeming certainty that there was a network of secret wormholes accessible only to Dwellers, but they weren’t sharing it and it might have nothing to do with the Dweller List.
Fassin was looking for something that might lead him to what he had already used, twice. He had already been through at least two wormholes, travelled across half the galaxy, and yet he wasn’t really any closer to finding the key to this system of trapdoors and secret passages. He could be carried unconscious through them like a fey maiden under the influence of a sleeping draught in some Gothic romance, but he wasn’t allowed to know the secret behind it all.
He was still trying to think of ways to commandeer the Velpin, but with no real hope of success. There would still be the problem of accessing the hidden wormholes. Just thinking of a way to stay awake while they made these wild transitions would be a start, but he had no idea how to do that either.
If he could go back in time to Apsile and the Shared Facility in Third Fury and ask him to build some subset of systems into the gascraft that would keep working when the main ones were shut down, making it look like the machine had entirely stopped functioning when in fact he was still sense-connected and aware, maybe it would be possible. But even the Dwellers didn’t claim to have time machines, and Fassin didn’t have the expertise to undertake such an amendment to the gascraft’s systems himself, even if he had had the time and the facilities to do it, neither of which he did have.
Maybe he should have gone back to the Mercatoria, acted as a real major in the Ocula would have done and retreated, reported to his superiors, told them what had happened and awaited new or renewed orders. But the Ocula meant nothing to him and never had, and most of what had mattered before to him was also gone now.
He might even have tried to get in touch with the Beyonders, but until he had the key to the Dweller List, what was the point in that? And anyway — what if they had been behind the Sept’s destruction, even at a remove? Just how magnanimous was he prepared to be?
What point, indeed, was there in going back at all, perhaps. Seventy days standard had elapsed since Fassin had first gone tumbling into the atmosphere of Nasqueron. It was over two old Earth months since the battle in the storm. Who knew how much longer he’d have to keep looking for Leisicrofe, chasing him round the galaxy, perhaps ever coming closer to him, maybe never quite catching up with him? Maybe he’d get his precious data and return to find it was all over, the system taken, or utterly laid waste to, every surface like the surface of Third Fury, just slag and heat, destroyed by one side or another or by both, fighting for something that wasn’t even there any more.
It should still, in theory, be the most important piece of information that a human had ever carried. But somehow, even if the key to the Dweller List did exist, the fact that Dwellers could use this secret network under the noses of the rest of the galaxy — and had been so doing for who alone knew how many billions of years — made it seem much less likely that any scrap of data, any proof-size patch of algebra was going to make that much of a difference.
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.