Arsibalt was up, pacing the aisles. He joined me at the window and we began shouting at each other. From our recollected geography we convinced ourselves that we were descending from the pole along a more easterly meridian than the one that passed through Ecba. This was confirmed as we left the ice and the tundra behind and entered into more temperate places: there was a lot of forest down there, but few cities.
No wonder people were slow to get up; we’d jumped forward through more than half a dozen time zones. I’d fooled myself into thinking I’d had a full night’s sleep. In fact, I might not have slept at all.
Lio had been sitting alone in the front row, trying to make friends with a military-style jeejah. I noticed he had set it aside, so I went up and sat next to him. “Jammed,” he announced.
I turned and looked back at Sammann and Jules. They were peeling the phones off their heads. Sammann caught my eye and threw up his hands disgustedly. Jules, on the other hand, seemed relieved to have been cut free of the Ret; he sank back heavily in his seat, closed his eyes, and began to rub his face, then to massage his scalp.
I turned back to Lio. “Such a move must have been anticipated,” I said. But he had got into one of those Lio-trances where he did not respond to words. I grabbed the jeejah, whacked him on the shoulder with it, threw up my hands, tossed it aside. He watched me curiously, then grinned. “The Ita can still make the Reticulum run on land lines and other things,” he said. “When we stop moving, we can get patched in once more.”
“What are your orders?” I asked.
“Go to ground—which we’re doing now. All the other cells are doing it too.”
“Then what?”
“At the place where we’re going, there’ll be equipment prepositioned. We’re supposed to train on it.”
“What kind of equipment?”
“Don’t know, but here’s a hint: Jesry is in charge of training.”
I looked over at Jesry, who had commandeered a row of seats and constructed a sort of amphitheatre of documents all around himself. He was scanning these with an intensity that I had learned, long ago, never to interrupt.
“We’re going into space,” I concluded.
“Well,” Lio said, “that is where the problem is.”
I decided to take advantage of the noise, and of the fact that our wireless link was down. “What news of the Everything Killers?” I asked.
He looked as though in the earliest stages of airsickness. “I think I can tell you how they worked.”
“Okay.”
He pantomimed a punch to my face, pulled it so his knuckles met my cheek and nudged my head. “Violence is mostly about energy delivery. Fists, clubs, swords, bullets, death rays—their purpose is to dump energy into a person’s body.”
“What about poison?”
“I said mostly. Don’t go Kefedokhles. Anyway, what’s the most concentrated source of energy they knew about around the time of the Terrible Events?”
“Nuclear fission.”
He nodded. “And the stupidest way of using it was to split a whole lot of nuclei in the air above a city, just burn everything. It works, but it’s dirty and it destroys a lot of stuff that doesn’t need destroying. Better to nuke the people only.”
“How do you manage that?”
“The amount of fissile material you need to kill a person is microscopic. That’s the easy part. The problem is delivering it to the right people.”
“So, is this a dirty bomb type of scenario?”
“Much more elegant. They designed a reactor the size of a pinhead. It’s a little mechanism, with moving parts, and a few different kinds of nuclear material in it. When it’s turned off, it’s almost totally inert. You could eat these reactors by the spoonful and it would be no worse than eating one of Suur Efemula’s bran muffins. When the reactor goes to the ‘on’ configuration it sprays neutrons in every direction and kills—well—everything that is alive within a radius of—depending on exposure time—up to half a mile.”
“Hence the name,” I said. “What’s the delivery mechanism?”
“Whatever you can dream up,” he said.
“What causes them to turn on?”
He shrugged. “Body heat. Respiration. The sound of human voices. A timer. Certain genetic sequences. A radio transmission. The absence of a radio transmission. Shall I go on?”
“No. But what kinds of delivery mechanisms and triggers is the Sæcular Power looking at now?”
He got a distant look. “Remember, launching mass into space is expensive. With the amount of energy it takes to launch a single human, you could get thousands of Everything Killers into orbit. They’d be too small to show up on most radar. If you could get even a few of them into the vicinity of the Daban Urnud…”
“Yeah, I can see the strategy clearly. Which leads to the profoundly sickening thought—”
“Are we going to be asked to deliver these things?” Lio said. “I think the answer is no. If anything, we are going to be a diversion.”
“We’ll distract them,” I translated, “while some other technique is used to deliver the Everything Killers.”
Lio nodded.
“That’s inspiring,” I said.
He shrugged. “I could be wrong,” he pointed out.
I felt like going outside and getting some fresh air. In lieu of which I walked up and down the aisles for a bit. Jules Verne Durand was asleep. Next to him, Sammann was bent over his jeejah. But I thought it was jammed? Looking over his shoulder, I saw he was making some sort of calculation.
Looking over Jesry’s, I saw that he was, indeed, reading the manual for a space suit. This demanded a double-take. But it was as simple as that. Suur Vay was in an adjoining row, poring over many of the same documents, swapping them with Jesry from time to time. The other Valers were asleep. Fraa Jad was awake and chanting, though my ears were hard put to disentangle his drone from that of the engines. I went back to staring out the window.
We angled across a range of old, worn-down mountains and struck out over an expanse of brown that ran to the eastern horizon: the grass of the steppe, browned by the summer sun. The craft was descending. A river flashed beneath us. Then the industrial skirt of a modestly sized city. We landed at a military airbase that seemed to stretch on forever, since land here was as plentiful as it was flat, and there was no incentive to make things compact.
A canvas-backed military drummon came out to collect us. We had no windows, and could not see out the front, but through the aperture in the back we watched the streets of an ancient, none too prosperous city ramifying in our dust. There were more animals on highways than we were used to, more people carrying things that in other places might have been entrusted to wheels. Of a sudden, things got dense and old, all yellow brick adorned with polychrome tiles. A heavy shadow passed over our heads, as if we were being strafed. But no, we had only passed through an arch in a thick wall. Three successive gates were closed and bolted behind us. The vehicle stopped on a tiled plaza. We clambered out to find ourselves in a courtyard, embraced by an ancient building four stories high: stone, brick, and wrought iron, softened by cascades of flowering vines on trunks as thick as my waist. A fountain in the center supplied water for these and for gnarled fruit trees growing in pots and casting pools of shade on what would otherwise have been an unpleasant place to stand.
“Welcome to the Caravansery of Elkhazg,” said a voice in cultured Orth. We turned to see an old man in the shade of a tree: a man who did not seem to belong here, in the sense that he was of an ethnic group one would expect to find in another part of Arbre. “I am the Heritor. My name is Magnath Foral, and I shall be pleased to serve as your host.”
After introductions, Magnath Foral gave us a quick explanation of the history of Elkhazg. I made no effort to follow most of this, since I only needed a few cues and hints to reconstruct what I had been taught of the place as a fid. It was one of the oldest Cartasian maths, founded by fraas and suurs who had personally witnessed the Fall of Baz, and known Ma Cartas. They had trekked across forests and mountains to build this thing more or less out in the middle of nowhere, on an oxbow lake a few miles from the main course of a river. A trade route from the east crossed the river not far away—close enough to give them access to commerce when they needed it, not so close as to be a distraction or a menace. Centuries later, a rough winter followed by a stormy spring caused some trouble involving ice dams that altered the course of the river and turned the oxbow lake back into an active channel. The trade route adapted, choosing Elkhazg as the best place to make a crossing—since one of the side-effects of the math had been the development of a relatively stable and prosperous Sæcular community around its walls.