Aestival Tide (26 page)

The Architect Imperator had gone quite mad.

In the vivarium Zalophus dreams. It is a dream of open seas, of waters full of leaping fish and creatures with claws strong enough to rip through the wings of any animal foolish enough to let its flight bring it within inches of the roiling surface. There are many of these animals in Zalophus's dream, just as there are more fish here than he has ever glimpsed in all the centuries he has been imprisoned in the vivarium. The fish and the flying creatures spin and toss, and when Zalophus heaves himself through the air they fall into his gaping mouth. Then he smacks back into the ocean, and feels himself sink down, down, through the blue and churning water until it grows cooler around his huge body and he feels the current that will lead him back to
them,
back to those others like himself, his dark and massive sisters. He has lost them, the pod left behind as he chased a great eel through the arctic night. He has lost them and now, five hundred thousand years later, he is still searching for them.

But he has never really seen the open sea. Not this sea, at least; not this Zalophus. Through his dreams he sounds and bellows, and sometimes through his waking days as well, calling through the watergate to where the Gulf pounds against the silent shore that encircles Araboth.
Come back, come back,
he thunders; but his sisters do not hear him. It is as the gynander told him: they are millennia dead, and there are no others of their kin left to answer him.

Now something else shakes his sleeping as well, though this is harder for the zeuglodon to comprehend. Not the smell or taste or rush of water along his sides and fins but another thing, a smaller thing that is more frightening, because it has nothing to do with water at all.

It is a sound. It is a voice: a human voice. The great carnivore cannot understand what it is saying, but he knows it is speaking to him. It reminds him of the voice of the gynander who lured the siren into his tank one evening; or rather, the gynander's voice reminds him of this other dream-voice, high and fluting and plaintive. It is a voice beseeching him. He understands that it is desperate, it is pleading, but he cannot understand what it is saying or what it wants. He cannot really understand its desperation, except insofar that it is a kind of hunger, a yearning akin to his own awful dreaming of the open sea. It cries and begs beneath the waves of that other, larger and less complicated mass of memory; it weeps and pleads without ceasing.

The voice maddens Zalophus. In his sleep he turns, scraping his head against the side of the tank, and moans so loudly that the walls of the vivarium shudder. But the voice does not sleep. It
cannot
sleep, because it is part of the oldest geneslave. It is the sliver of consciousness of the other thing that went into the creation of the sentient zeuglodon, the thing that had been a man before some researcher centuries before decided to make of it a new thing, a new creature. It moans and pummels inside of Zalophus as the whale moans and thrashes inside its prison; and like Zalophus it will never be free.

But now the dream of Zalophus changes. The sea falls away and suddenly there is another element all around him, the terrible air that he feels so briefly when he throws himself from the water and for a few seconds is surrounded by a vast glittering desert. Only now this other element is everywhere; and the whale moans in terror, because while the sea is still there it has changed. It is not the smooth unwavering field he flows through but something new, something brilliant that hurts him, slashes against his brain and stabs his puny eyes.

But even as Zalophus rolls over and over in his sleep, that other stab of memory, that tiny voice, welcomes this new and hurtful, thing: because what has frightened Zalophus is
color,
a rush of remembered blues and violets and golds and greens that the other thing, the thing that was once a man, recalls.

And the memory of the man rejoices. As suddenly as the terror flooded Zalophus, it is gone. The voice inside him is abruptly silenced. Across the glowing grid of the whale's thoughts there rolls the image of a vast and shining plain, a surface smooth and gleaming and alive even though it is not the sea. It stretches forever, from one horizon to the next, an immensity of hills and fields and prairies and mountains gleaming beneath a sun that is not deadly, a sun that flickers not silver-gray but golden, where rains that are not poisonous sweep the blue-washed sky. Everywhere that plain shines and gleams in a way that baffles the zeuglodon. And if Zalophus had only understood what it was that he glimpsed, the sad monster would have known to name these colors, known to name them
green;
would have seen the silvery rains and known they were the massive storm system whorling above the western ocean, the storm that battered the coast year after year, growing stronger through the decades as the coast fell away like splintered shale; the storm they called Ucalegon.

Zalophus does not know this. But that other thing, that mote of human consciousness trapped within him—
it
sees and understands. Ucalegon the Prince of Storms is coming; Baratdaja the Healing Wind is shrieking northward across the peninsula. Beneath the domes of Araboth the Ascendants dream of blood and steel, the Architects of grids of light; but Outside the Green Country grows nearer. Somewhere within the ancient whale's brain that jot of humanity sees the Green Country, and it understands and remembers. The tiny imprisoned voice exults, to have glimpsed it thus for one last moment; and then is forever silenced.

If Hobi had been a more patient young man, he might have waited for Nasrani Orsina to return. If he hadn't been so frightened by his father's madness, he might have recalled that it was unusual for more than a few days to pass without a visit from the exile. Nasrani and the Architect Imperator were both grand masters at the intricate and ancient word-game
tanka,
which involved creating an image in five words. Not surprisingly, Sajur Panggang was adept at verbal landscaping—

Sanguine tapestry,

moldering leaves:

Autime—

Never mind that he had never seen
real
leaves moldering anywhere, save within the vivarium. Nasrani did not share his friend's sentimental disposition but preferred a type of verbal portraiture, often scabrous. For example,

Drooling imbecile,

his clothes

smell—

An unkind reference to a member of the Reception Committee who had annoyed Nasrani during his brief incarceration. Nothing save an event of truly calamitous proportions—say, the murder of one of Nasrani's sisters—would have canceled the weekly
tanka
game, with its bursts of rude and delighted laughter and the scent of Amity heavy in the air. If Hobi had been a patient and prudent young man, he might have waited—although, as it turned out, he would have waited in vain.

But Hobi was not that sort of young man. In twelve hours Sajur Panggang had not moved from his chair by the ruined mercury lamp. The replicant Khum brought him tea and whiskey and cardamom-flavored cakes, but Sajur only sat, snoring loudly or else waking to finger Prophet Rayburn's crucified image among the slivers of broken glass. He did not hear Hobi when the boy spoke to him; he did not fight when his son and the replicant tried to move him, only let his body grow slack and slumped back grinning in the chair. Hobi finally left him alone, sickened and terrified. He tried to tune into the 'files for news of the inquisition or reports of executions, but the 'files had been locked: the screens showed only the calm eyes of the Architects and the words
Sorry out of service.
Tomorrow it would be Æstival Tide; the 'files should be showing preparations for the Great Fear, the immense Lahatiel Gates being oiled and primed to open, the prostitutes and imperial courtesans and myriad cultists costumed in hideous array for the timoring rites and mad rush into the sea.

But without the 'files Hobi couldn't see any of this. He felt like a prisoner, although he really was not—the doors were not locked, he could come and go as he pleased; but Hobi was afraid to leave. No one called; there were no visitors. Khum brought him lunch and poured endless glasses of brandy; his father snored and grinned, until Hobi thought he might go mad as well. Once the entire chamber trembled. The brandy in Hobi's glass rocked back and forth, and one of Sajur's holographic anaglyphs glittered into view and just as quickly sputtered into black again. Too stunned to move, Hobi waited for nearly an hour, certain that this was it: the breach he had seen on the monitors only a few weeks ago had finally spread to the very domes, and the entire city was going to come crashing down around him.

But nothing happened. Sajur did not speak, or seem to notice. There were no aftershocks, no emergency bulletins on the still-dead 'files. Nothing. Finally the boy got up and stumbled to his room. He reached beneath his bed and withdrew a small silver flask, the last of the Amity he had hidden away. He drank it, sitting on the floor and leaning with eyes closed against the bed.

So. His father had gone mad. Terrifying as the realization was, it was neither unusual nor even unexpected. Each year a score or so of the Orsinate's inner cabal went insane, varying from Musach Alvin's unsuccessful attempt at flying from a third-floor balcony to Shiyung Orsina's increasingly ridiculous involvements with bizarre religious sects. As a blood relation of the Orsinas, Sajur Panggang was practically doomed by birth to some form of mental anomaly. Fortunately Hobi was too young to consider even momentarily the notion that he himself might be similarly affected one day.

What Hobi was more concerned about was the fact that the city was very probably falling into ruin, even as he gulped the last burning mouthful of Amity. In other circumstances he would have gone to his father for help. Now the only person he could think of turning to was Nasrani, but god knew where Nasrani was to be found. If he were to go to the margravines, they would either laugh at him or, worse, believe him; and upon discovering his father's failure to halt the destruction, Hobi would no doubt be imprisoned and executed along with Sajur. One thing Hobi was certain of: the margravines would do nothing to aid the failing city or its people.

That was when he thought again of the Undercity, and Nasrani's hidden children. The exile had said that the nemosynes knew things; that if only they could find a way to wake Nefertity, she might be able to help them relearn all the secrets lost to the centuries of the Long Night.

Hobi stood—unsteadily, the flask falling to the floor with a soft
chink.
He had that terrific clarity that Amity brings to an empty stomach and a head primed for dreaming. He knew what he must do. He had to find the nemosyne again; find Nasrani too, if he could, but Nefertity was most important. Just because Nasrani had never been able to wake her didn't mean that Hobi couldn't try. He was not unlettered in certain kinds of stories that his mother had been fond of, ancient tales that involved quests and tasks and very often the salvation of certain individuals, usually women, who through no fault of their own had come to be imprisoned in cells of glass or stone or even unfamiliar bodies. And while Hobi knew that Nefertity was no such thing, and the near-certain demise of Araboth a matter of considerable gravity, still he was rather a young boy, with a passionate (if shy) nature; and there had been all that Amity.

He dressed, choosing his clothes with care. A white shirt of heavy sueded silk that made his chestnut hair look darker, his fair skin even more pale. Moleskin trousers of a color so deep it could not (and was not) termed evergreen or viridian, even though there were forbidden hints of those shades in its nap. Hobi of course knew that they were
green
trousers, as did the furtive moujik tailor who had designed them for him for a timoring several months ago. He had planned to wear them when he joined his father and the margravines on the viewing platform for the opening of the Lahatiel Gate. Instead he would wear them for this final secret journey.

Because he was leaving; because there was really no reason for him to stay. His father was mad and would surely soon be dead, his mother was dead, indeed it seemed quite evident that soon
everyone
he knew, from that moujik tailor to the margravine Âziz, would be dead. If he could somehow find Nasrani, he would warn him and enlist him in his endeavor. But otherwise he had his mind made up:

He would go back to the Undercity, find the nemosyne, and if he could not wake her, he would carry her with him, until they found some way to escape the coming holocaust.

Some way to get Outside.

It felt strange to be taking the gravator alone. Even though he had been there once before, only days earlier, the trip to the Undercity had grown fixed in Hobi's mind, as though it were a beloved memory from his childhood. The little fountain with its statue of the
timorata
bubbling spearmint water; the heavy crimson drapes; the grinding of its gears as the chamber dropped level after level through Araboth's glowing spectrum—periwinkle, scarlet, violet, every possible shade of purple deepening to the eternal night of the Undercity—all these things had in the last few days knit themselves around the boy's heart, so that now the touch of those drapes against his cheek, the slant of wine-colored light as they passed through Principalities—all had become entwined with the calm and frigid face of Nasrani's sleeping nemosyne. The amorphous terrors that had paralyzed him were gone, now that he had left Cherubim.

The trip to the Undercity could have lasted forever but in fact was over in a very few minutes. He jumped when the gravator announced its arrival on Angels. The doors fanned open, and a rush of fetid air greeted him as he approached them. He waited for a long minute, until the gravator repeated its announcement, somewhat peevishly, and the doors started to creak shut once more. Before they could close on him he jumped outside.

Immediately darkness engulfed him like a freezing wind. Hobi clapped his hands to his pockets and cursed: he had forgotten a lumiere. He started to sprint back into the gravator, but groaning like an old server it already had begun its slow ascent. He swore again, desperately; then heard from somewhere nearby a rustling sound, too loud to be something stirred by one of the ventricles—
were
there vents down here? When he held his breath the noise stopped. Heart pounding he waited to hear it again. But now there was only silence.