“It’s a ten digit coordinate,” Kempster said. “I can give you a direct translation if you really want. Unfortunately, it’s
total nonsense, because we don’t have the Tyrathca almanac from which it was taken.”
“Oh bollocks!” Liol slumped back into the couch, slapping the cushion fabric in frustration. “You mean we’ve got to go back
into Tanjuntic-RI?”
“Unwise,” Samuel said. “I believe the hornets’ nest analogy applies. We really did stir them up.”
“Can’t the
Oenone
work it out?” Liol asked. “I thought voidhawks have a real good spatial awareness.”
“They do,” Syrinx said. “If we had a Tyrathca almanac, we could take you straight to the star with the Sleeping God. But first
we need that almanac, and there’s only one place to get it from. We have to go back.”
“Not so,” Kempster said cheerily. “There is a second star system where we know it exists: Mastrit-PJ itself. Even better,
they received Swantic-LI’s messages direct; there may be others which were never relayed to Tanjuntic-RI. All we have to do
is fly around the Orion nebula, any red giant star will shine at us like a damn great beacon. As soon as the sensors see it,
we can work out a valid approach vector.”
“More promising, from our point of view, Mastrit-PJ is now uninhabited,” Parker said. “This time we’ll be able to undertake
a more leisurely, and thorough, retrieval of the files we want from the ruins.”
“We don’t know how long this redoubt civilization has been dead for,” Oski said, a note of worry in her voice. “The condition
of the Laymil relics are bad enough, and they’re only two and a half thousand years old. I can’t promise I can recover anything
from electronics that have been exposed to space for twice that long.”
“If necessary, we can just scout round the stars closest to Mastrit-PJ for other Tyrathca colonies. There must be a lot of
them in that area. They won’t have been warned about us devious humans yet. The point is, we can find copies of that almanac
on the other side of the nebula.”
“I wasn’t disputing that,” Oski said. “I’m just saying, for the record, there may be problems.”
“You’re all overlooking one thing,” Joshua said. He almost smiled when he received their indignant looks. “Is there even going
to be a Sleeping God waiting for us if the Kiint get there first? And what the hell do they want with it anyway?”
“We can’t not continue because of the Kiint,” Syrinx said. “In any case, we don’t have real proof that…” she trailed off under
Joshua’s mocking gaze. “All right, they were at Tanjuntic-RI. But we knew they were interested before we set out. It’s because
of them we’re here now. To my mind, this just proves the Sleeping God is a big deal.”
“All right,” Joshua said. “The other side of the nebula, it is.”
Fifty years ago, Sinon had visited the Welsh-ethnic planet Llandilo, where he’d spent a cold three hours straddling sunrise
to watch a clan of New Druids welcome the first day of spring. As pagan ceremonies went, it was a fairly boring affair for
an outsider, with off-key singing and interminable Gaelic invocations to the planet’s mother goddess. Only the setting made
it worthwhile. They’d gathered on the headland of some eastward-facing coastal cliffs, where a line of tremendous granite
pillars marched out to sea. God’s colonnade, the locals called it.
When the sun rose, pink and gold out of the swaddling sea mist, its crescent was aligned perfectly along the line of pillars.
One by one, their tops had blazed with rose-gold coronas as the shadows flowed away. Gladdened by nature’s poignancy, the
congregation of white-clad New Druids had finally managed to achieve a decent harmony and their voices rang out across the
shore.
It was a strange recollection for Sinon to bring to his new serjeant body with its restricted memory capacity. He certainly
couldn’t remember his reason for retaining it. An overdose of sentiment, presumably. Whatever the motive, the Llandilo memory
was currently providing a useful acclimatisation bridge to the present. Nine thousand of the serjeants trapped on Ketton’s
island had gathered together near the edge of the plateau to exert their will, with the remainder joining their endeavours
via affinity as they walked resolutely over the mud towards the rendezvous point. They weren’t praying, exactly, but the visual
similarity with the New Druids was an amusing comfort. The beleaguered Edenists needed whatever solace they could garner from
the dire situation.
Their first, and urgent, priority had been to stem the gush of atmosphere away from the flying island before everybody suffocated.
A simple enough task for their assembled minds now they had acquired some degree of energistic power; the unified wish bent
whatever passed for local reality into obedience. Even Stephanie Ash and her raggedy little group of followers had aided them
in that. Now it was as though the air layer around the outside of the island had become an impregnable vertical shield.
Encouraged and relieved, they stated their second wish loud and clear: to return. In theory, it should have been easy. If
a massive concentration of energistic power had brought them here to this realm, then an equally insistent concentration should
be able to get them back. So far, this argument of logical symmetry had failed them utterly.
“You dudes should give it a rest,” Cochrane said irritably. “It’s real spooky with all of you standing still like some zombie
army.”
Along with the others of Stephanie’s group, the redoubtable hippie had spent a quarter of an hour trying to help the serjeants
open some kind of link back to the old universe. When it became obvious (to them) that such a connection was going to be inordinately
difficult, if not impossible, he’d let his attention drift. They’d ended up sitting in a circle round Tina, giving her what
support and comfort they could.
She was still very weak, sweating and shivering as she lay inside a heavily insulated field sleeping bag. One of the serjeants
with medical knowledge who’d examined her said that loss of blood was the biggest problem. Their direct infusion equipment
didn’t work in this realm, so it had rigged up a primitive intravenous plasma drip feed for her.
Stephanie’s unvoiced worry was that Tina had suffered the kind of internal injuries they could never repair properly with
their energistic power, however much they willed her to be better. As with Moyo’s eyes, the subtleties of the flesh had defeated
them. They needed fully-functional medical nanonic packages. Which wasn’t going to happen here.
Her other concern was exactly what would happen to the souls of anyone whose body died in this realm. Their connection with
the beyond had been irrevocably severed. It wasn’t a prospect she wanted to explore. Though looking at Tina’s poorly acted
cheer, she thought they might all find out before too long.
Sinon broke out of his trance-state, and looked down at Cochrane. “Our attempt to manipulate the energistic power is not a
physically draining exercise. As there is nothing else for us to do here, we consider it appropriate to continue with our
efforts to return home.”
“You do, huh? Yeah, well, I can dig that. I purge myself with yoga. It’s righteous. But, you know, us cats, we’ve got to like
eat
at some time.”
“I’m sorry, you should have said.” Sinon walked over to one of the large piles of backpacks and weapons which the serjeants
had discarded. He found his own and unfastened the top. “We don’t ingest solid food, I’m afraid, but our nutrient soup will
sustain you. It contains all the proteins and vitamins required by a normal human digestion system.” He pulled out several
silvery sachets and distributed them round the dubious group. “You should supplement the meal with water.”
Cochrane flipped the cap off the sachet’s small valve and sniffed suspiciously. With everyone watching intently, he squeezed
a couple of drops of the pale amber liquid onto his finger, and licked at them. “Holy shit! It tastes like seawater. Man,
I can’t eat raw plankton, I’m not a whale.”
“Big enough to qualify,” Rana muttered under her breath.
“We have no other source of nourishment available,” Sinon said in mild rebuke.
“It’s fine, thank you,” Stephanie told the big serjeant. She concentrated for a moment, and her sachet solidified into a bar
of chocolate. “Don’t pay any attention to Cochrane. We can imagine it to be whatever taste we like.”
“Bad karma’ll get you,” the hippie sniffed. “Yo there, Sinon. You got a glass going spare? I figure I can still remember what
a shot of decent bourbon tastes like.”
The serjeant rummaged round in his pack, and found a plastic cup.
“Hey, thanks, man.” Cochrane took it from him, and transformed it into a crystal tumbler. He poured a measure of the nutrient
soup out, watching happily as it thinned into his favourite familiar golden liquor. “More like it.”
Stephanie peeled the wrapper from her chocolate, and bit off a corner. It tasted every bit as good as the imported Swiss-ethnic
delicacy she remembered from her childhood. But then, in this case the memory is the taste, she told herself wryly. “How much
of this nutrient soup have you got left?” she asked.
“We each carry a week’s supply in our pack,” Sinon said. “That period is calculated on the assumption we will be physically
active for most of the time. With careful rationing it should last between two and three weeks.”
Stephanie gazed out across the rumpled grey-brown mud which made up the surface of the flying island. Occasional pools of
water glinted in the uniform blue-tinted glare that surrounded them. A few scattered ferrangs and kolfrans nosed around the
edges of drying mires, nibbling at the fronds of smothered vegetation. Not enough to provide the combined human and serjeant
inhabitants with a single meal. “I guess that’s all the time we’ve got then. Even if we had warehouses full of seed grain,
three weeks isn’t enough time to produce a crop.”
“It is debatable if the air will sustain us for that long anyway,” Sinon said. “Our estimate for the human and serjeant population
on this island is twenty-thousand-plus individuals. We won’t run out of oxygen, but the increase in carbon dioxide caused
by that many people breathing will reach a potentially dangerous level in ten days’ time unless that air is recycled. As you
can see, no vegetation survives to do this. Hence our determination to explore the potential of our energistic power.”
“We really ought to be helping you,” Stephanie said. “Except I don’t see how we can. None of us have affinity.”
“The time might come when we need your instinct,” Sinon said. “Your collective will brought us here. It is possible that you
can find a way back. Part of our problem is that we don’t understand where we are. We have no reference points. If we knew
where we were in relation to our own universe, we might be able to fashion a link back to it. But as we played no part in
bringing the island here, we don’t know how to begin the search.”
“I don’t think we do either,” Moyo said. “This is just a haven for us, a place where the Liberation isn’t.”
“Interesting,” Sinon said. More serjeants started to listen to the conversation, eager for any clue that might be scattered
amid the injured man’s words. “You weren’t aware of this realm before, then?”
“No. Not specifically. Although I suppose we were aware that such a place existed, or could exist. The desire to reach it
is endemic among us—the possessors, that is. We want to live where we don’t have any connection to the beyond, and where there’s
no night to remind us of empty space.”
“And you believe this is it?”
“It would seem to fill the criteria,” Moyo said. “Not that I can vouch for the lack of night,” he added bitterly.
“Are the other planets here?” Sinon asked. “Norfolk and all the others? Were you aware of them at any time?”
“No. I never heard or felt anything like that when we moved here.”
“Thank you.”
Instinct appears to be the governing factor,
he said to the others.
I don’t believe we can rely on it for answers.
I don’t understand why we can’t simply wish ourselves back,
Choma said.
We have a power equal to theirs; we also have a commensurate desire to return.
The united minds in their mini-consensus decided there were two options. That the possessed had spontaneously created a sealed
continuum for themselves. An improbable event. While that would account for several properties of this realm—the failure of
their electronic hardware, the cutting off of the beyond—the creation of an entirely new continuum by manipulating existing
space-time with energy would be an inordinately complex process. Coming here was achieved by sheer fright, which discounted
such a procedure.
More likely, this continuum already existed, secluded among the limitless dimensions of space-time. The beyond was such a
place, though with very different parameters. They must have been thrown deep inside the multitude of parallel realms conjunctive
within the universe. In such circumstances, home would be no distance at all away from where they were now. At the same time,
it was on the other side of infinity.
There was also the failure to open even a microscopic wormhole, despite a formidable concentration of their energistic strength.
That did not bode well at all. Before, ten thousand possessed had opened a portal wide enough to embrace a lump of rock twelve
kilometres in diameter. Now, twelve thousand serjeants couldn’t generate a fissure wide enough to carry a photon out.
The explanation had to be that energy states were different here. And in eleven days’ time, that simple difference was going
to kill them when the clean air ran out.
Stephanie watched Sinon for a couple of minutes, until it became apparent that he wasn’t going to say anything else. She could
sense the minds of the serjeants all around her, just. There was none of the emotional surges which betrayed normal human
thoughts. Just a small, even, glow of rationality, which occasionally fluttered with a hint of passion, a candle flame burning
a speck of dust. She didn’t know if that was indicative of Edenist psyches, or normal serjeant mentality.