And off to one side was a wraith-like figure, sharpening in focus - a young woman he did not recognize yet felt he knew - and he spoke without thinking.
‘Have I dreamed of—? This is impossible.’
Beside him, Mum was staring - at him, not the apparition. Could she not see it?
Then the young woman flung her hands out, as if trying to hold on to some support, while an unknown force grabbed her and whisked her out through the bulkhead; and then she was gone.
Mum smiled as the ship slowed, and the forward view filled the cabin.
Home.
Labyrinth, finally.
This was how she appeared from the outside, the fabled Labyrinth: stellate and complex, bristling with shining towers in all directions, fractal and grand, with a core that curved beyond the hyperspherical. It was a cathedral, a sculpture, a maze. It - she - was a living city-world in the ur-continuum of mu-space, a place that grew and evolved in mysterious ways even during the early days, when Pilots were her supposed architects and builders. Now her relationship to the citizens who lived within was more complex but closer than ever.
She was rooted in the spacetime geometry of this continuum, the only universe whose dimensionality was not an integer, the ur-continuum beneath and beyond all others: mu-space.
And she was the Pilots’ home.
No reception committee waited for them.
Dad-and-ship as one threaded their way among the flock of vessels outside the city - all the ships bigger than this, none of them looking half as powerful - and entered a tunnel that was wider than a building, a canyon with sapphire sides sprawling with constructs that might have been architecture or machinery or art: there was no way to tell.
They flew into a huge hollow space where dozens of ships were floating: bronze or silver, decorated with lustrous cobalt, shimmering indigo, deep swirling green.
Roger wondered what Alisha would make of this - if she were able to retain her sanity in this universe.
‘See?’ said Mum. ‘It’s not impossible.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘That’s what you said earlier, as we flew.’
She did not understand, obviously. He was about to ask whether it was normal to see apparitions as one voyaged through mu-space; then he realized the answer was no.
Gavriela.
The mirage had a name. Or was this some delusion created by the shock of entering the continuum after so long away? Yet his body was almost vibrating with energy, filled with a sense of rightness and supreme capability; and this place was the opposite of shocking: it was where he belonged.
Perhaps there were neurocognitive effects all the same, so the rational choice was not between talking and keeping silent, it was between confiding in his parents or in a medic, here in Labyrinth.
=No, that is not necessary.=
He looked all around.
=Only you can hear me at this time.=
About to speak, he closed his mouth, deliberately touching the tip of his tongue to the roof of his mouth, quelling the desire.
=You are most welcome here, Roger Blackstone.=
A powerful sense of humility descended through him. He bowed his head.
Then Dad said something unsettling.
‘On Fulgor, you’re used to keeping everything a secret, son. Realize that it’s not so different here.’
‘Excuse me?’ Roger pointed to his own eyes. ‘Do I usually walk around like this?’
In fact it was refreshing to see his parents with their natural, glittering, obsidian eyes revealed.
‘Your true nature is a matter of course. My job is not.’
‘I . . . understand.’
‘We’re not under surveillance, but this is a complex place and . . . Not all our operations are carried out on human worlds.’
‘You mean, you spy on other Pilots?’
‘Not me personally, and that description is too crude. Think of peacekeeper intelligence officers on Fulgor, how they monitor their own as well as strangers.’
‘All I know is Fighting Shadows.’
He meant the holodrama saga that was as much soap opera as action thriller.
‘Good enough.’ Dad smiled. ‘I find the series quite addictive myself.’
‘So we maintain your cover?’
Mum smiled at the spy jargon.
‘Yes.’ Dad looked at her, but his own smile dissipated. ‘Okay, Roger. I’m still a consultant and trainer on Fulgor, big corporate and political negotiations a speciality. The additional tweak is that I’m a Pilot living incognito because of personal failure. And I don’t have a ship.’
‘But—’
‘We’ll disembark in private. No one will see us.’
They were now gliding into a narrow tunnel, barely wider than the ship, shining blue and purple.
‘And if anyone asks,’ added Dad, ‘we travelled awake in a passenger hold inside a large vessel. You don’t know the Pilot’s name, and you never saw the ship’s exterior.’
‘All right.’
Then they were docking, and as Dad had said, when they left the ship it was via a series of halls, empty apart from the Blackstone family. Finally, they came out into a public place, something that might have been a sweeping mall magnified a hundred times, opening out into a vaster space beyond.
On one of a thousand balconies, they stopped.
‘Will you be all right sightseeing?’ asked Dad.
‘Of course, dear.’ Mum winked at Roger. ‘We’ll go shopping.’
‘She’s joking, son. See you both later.’
At that, Dad turned away, his face hardening in concentration. Then a rectangle of empty air was rotating - somehow - and when Dad stepped inside, his image swirled around an impossible axis, and the enclosing rectangle twisted out of existence.
‘There are different levels of, well, reality,’ said Mum. ‘Including different timeflows, so please don’t try to use this technique without training.’
‘Technique?’
‘Fastpath rotation. Call it a shortcut. A doorway to a tunnel to another doorway.’
Roger looked around. Several hundred people, Pilots all, were going about their unknowable business. Any who knew Dad would consider him a reject from society. How could Dad stand that? How could anyone swallow their pride so much?
But Roger had some education in Pilot history, studies at home - in their Fulgor house - where surveillance could not reach. He had studied the works of Karyn McNamara, the first true Pilot, the first to be born in mu-space. She hadn’t been much for the adulation of others.
‘They say that people lead lives of quiet desperation - but I prefer to live in quiet triumph. The simplicity of shibumi in work and family life, that makes us human.’
He knew the old term for elegant minimalism, an austere aesthetic that he admired but thought he was too weak to follow.
‘So where do you want to go, Mum? Is this one of the major sights?’
‘This?’ Mum looked around the cavernous, vaulted space. ‘It’s just a minor place, tucked out of the way.’
‘Uh . . . Right.’
‘Let’s start with Borges Boulevard,’ she said. ‘But we won’t travel its full length.’
‘Why not? Is it too long?’
‘You could say that. It’s infinite, in fact.’
‘That’s not poss—’
But of course it was possible, in this place.
Finally, they stood at the top of a slender ramp that arced down to a magnificent white gleaming road. It shone and flowed, a white river sparkling as though with diamonds, carrying people and goods on its surface, in a myriad intricate currents. And its length, supported on silver spans, arced across vast spaces whose far ends were misty, sweeping forever through Labyrinthine magnificence.
‘Welcome to your real home, son.’
‘Oh, Mum, Mum. This is so—’
‘I know.’
Then Roger said something that came straight from the subconscious.