“Where can we go?” he cried.

  “Up! Up!” Darktouch said. ‘The key—”

  “What good is it?”

  The ground-spider-things were bursting free from the soil now. They were flinging themselves at the river pylons, clattering against metal, righting themselves, crawling towards them and churning up the dust. “Let’s climb the column,” Kelver said, “follow. Come, it’ll be just like the rooftop games, back at the village.” He sprang up, seeking a toehold; here and there the metal of the pylon was notched or eroded. She grabbed at his heels, stumbled… .

  “I’ll close my eyes. It’ll be easier,” she said. Then she leapt, cat-agile now, finding the footholds with the instincts of blindness. Now he was following her. The ground-spiders had reached the pylon and were sending up tendrils of metal. When they reached the top they looked down and saw—

  “Windbringer!” she cried.

  Floating in the stream of liquid nitrogen that was locked under a forceshield that glowed a faint blue in the harsh light, was a huge brain, making its slow journey to the shipyards. Darktouch held the key in her hand. The blue shield danced over the river like a pale fire.

  The first of the explosions came. The flying angels were pelting the ground with burstpellets. As they looked at them they saw lances of laserlight leaping from the angels’ sense-ports, and the sand polka-dotted with white-hot spots that burned their eyes.

  ‘The key!” he shouted. A laser beam flashed, dangerous near. The ground-spiders were over the top now, groping for them, their tentacles fibrillating.

  “I’m going to trip,” she said softly. “I’m going to trip.”

  “I love you.”

  She signed: I love you. Touch-brother, bound forever, my life-giver, my light, my darkness.

  The key flew from her hand.

  There was an opening in the blue flame of the shield. She fell now, fell towards the coldness. “Jump, Touch-brother!” she screamed. “Before the shield closes up again!” Without thinking, he did so.

  The cold pounded into him. He felt hard gray flesh. The Windbringer. He felt Darktouch under him; he reached for her, embraced her, yielding up to her the little warmth he had—to no avail.

  Above them, the shield, unlocked for a moment by the key, closed up. The angels battered against it until they broke, for they were machines and did not know how to countermand the planetary thinkhives; and so they died.

  And in the river, wrapped in each other’s arms, quick-frozen in the deathcold of the liquid gases, never knowing that they might ever wake again … the two exiles had begun their journey to Davaryush.

  It would be a slow journey. Gallendys drifted into its long winter while they slept. The desert turned to glass. In the near-winter the al’ksigarkar spread out their mantles to catch the last of the sunlight and synthesize food stores for their long sleep, and then they froze into crystal gargoyles, glittercold in the winter light.

  The Cold River flowed on, arrow-straight, spearing the glazed desert, to the forcedomes where lay the cities of towers built upon the towers of towers, where an unnatural summer smiled over a few hundred square klomets. . •.

  faxéqilas fluáih!

  den seréh chom hokh’Kelass

  k’Enguestri eká;

  nevéqilas chadaíh!

  den vereizeíh

  chom chítara hox eká.

  af vérdevax aút

  na kéana shenáh,

  z fluáh na ongá,

  shénete, shenande, shenándere.

  “Let a thousand rivers flow; they will not be as the high compassion of a single Inquestor; but if a thousand snows fall, they will not equal the coldness of his heart.

  “But even the glacier yearns for the sea and flows to it; always has it yearned, as it yearns now, always shall it yearn.”

  —from the Songs of Sajit

  NINETEEN

  THE INQUESTORS

  “I have won.” Davaryush spoke to the thinkhive of Gallendys, alone as always, in the wombroom of the mirrors. What have you won?

  “The game of makrúgh ”

  It is said that there can be no true winning of makrúgh , Ton Davaryush z Galléndaran K’Ning. You have said so yourself; and so they teach you on Uran s’Varek, the In-questral heartworld.

  “But I have won. Everything I’ve asked for has been granted. Ynyoldeh has yielded; it’s unprecedented. Before the round is over I shall have an enviable reputation: a master of casuistry, a twister of meanings. Wars will be fought and people bins will fly the overcosm. And it will all be done with the minimum bloodshed necessary, with the utmost compassion . . He was talking, he knew, to convince himself alone. That was why he had come here after all: to talk to a thing without a soul, who could nevertheless respond with intelligence. “And now,” he continued, “your instructions. Positions of the orbiting arsenals—”

  And the children? You don’t wish to hear about the children?

  “Be silent!” For a month he had refrained from asking about the fugitives from the Dark Country. He did not want his resolve to weaken.

  The thinkhive waited. Then it said, You are tired, Ton Davaryush, tired. You have allowed time to furrow your cheeks, and you have been neglecting your life-prolonging drugs, almost as though you no longer cared whether you lived or died. What exactly are you planning in this game of makrúgh ? Are you sure you’re bluffing, Inquestor? Remember, I am far older than you, and infinitely wiser. Do not think to hide from me.

  “Are you a spy of the Inquest?”

  Come, don’t be paranoid! You know better than that. You know that I wait on no man. For I am this planets mind, its only claim to life; in effect, its soul, if in such you believe.

  “You salvage among dead myths,” Davaryush said, “for impressive half-truths. What do you mean to say?”

  Ask about the children.

  “Where are the children? You cannot lie.” Or was the very fabric of the Inquest tearing? Perhaps the thinkhives, honing their makrúgh through the millennia, had finally learnt to twist the truth itself. “And remember, Gallendys. You are the servant of the Inquest, not I of you. You are no world-soul; what soul you have is ours.”

  They are not dead. But they are as if dead.

  And then came a sound like great sheets of metal crashing down a canyon, clanging, resounding through echo-chambers of marble; a sound like a whirlwind dashing tower against tower, “You’re laughing!” cried Davaryush. It was a sound he had not heard in hundreds of years. A sound that mimicked the laughter of the great thinkhives of Uran s’Varek, pealing across the million-klomet-wide plains of the secret heartworld.

  Can I not laugh then?

  “Yes, laugh, laugh, but explain yourself.”

  No.

  “Has the whole world gone mad?”

  Mad, mad, mad, mad, mad! the thinkhive sang in a half-familiar voice. It was a line from one of the songs of Shen Sajit. Oh, Daavye, Daavye, it continued now in a whining parody of the voice of Lady Varuneh. Dead and not dead. Dead and not dead. They are dead because they must be dead, because of the word of the High Inquest, yet they are dead as a man is dead who sails the overcosm, gone from the universe, untraceable, existing only as a potential for existence….

  Then Davaryush knew that something had broken in the thinkhive’s innermost nerves; perhaps in its very center, its heart of hearts. That something had happened which represented an inconceivable paradox to the thinkhive; and that it must have to do with the two children.

  For a second he dared to hope. But he knew he must proceed with the plan. It was too late. The larger compassion must swallow up the smaller; so they had taught him on Uran s’Varek, and so it must be. He would be content to live on as long as he could—for the end was surely near —not knowing what would happen. The need to grasp the truth, to clutch it as firmly as a messagedisk or a holo-sculptured crystal, was no longer in him. He said, “I am free of you, thinkhive.”

  And the thinkhive laughed. And now with the laughter came a shivering of shadows; darkness danced in the mirror-walled chamber. “What are you thinking of?” Davaryush said.

  Dead and not dead. Dead and not dead.

  And then, in this last time before the fire-death would rain down on Gallendys, Davaryush felt free to ask one question which had burned in his mind all this time.

  ‘Thinkhive—” The laughing stopped; and it was light again in the wombroom. ‘The delphinoids. When they fly through the overcosm. When we solder the nerves to the ship’s nerves. When we constrain them with our own desires … do they feel pain? Do they feet too, as humans do?”

  I cannot answer that. You are not a Grand Inquestor, Davaryush, and you never will be, you heretic, you dangerous one.

  Something brushed his shoulder. He started. It was the Lady Varuneh. She wore a tattered shimmercloak, from which the blush had long been scrubbed clean; it did not fall gracefully into place, and much of the shimmerfur was dead, dried, leathery, hanging from the living fabric like die skin of a flayed animal. But she was beautiful; today she ‘had wreathed her hair in purest clingfire, so that she seemed crowned with cool flames, their quiet colors sifting like fractured opals.

  She said, “Grand Inquestral override, thinkhive! Answer his question!”

  The thinkhive was silent for a long time. Then its laughter rang out again and again. You, my lady I it said finally. You, Ton Varushkadan! Ai, ai, hokh’Ton, I make obeisance. But still its voice was tainted with mockery. Again I say, Attá heng! attá heng! and concede the victory. You have played makrúgh like a master, pulling this memory of a long-dead Inquestor from the past. O, Daavye, Daavye. (Its voice now echoed the deathlike voice of the Lady Ynyoldeh.) Truly, I am far older than you, Daavye, and l am so tired … but I have come to love you, in my own way. For despite everything I have not broken you. 1 broke all the others, you know, trapping them in spiderwebs of their own warped logic. You are not like the others.

  “You cannot love,” Davaryush said. “You cannot love, lie, or feel compassion. That is how you were made.” What twist of makrúgh was this? Did the thinkhive know, then, of his plan, and take it upon itself to thwart him?

  But, the thinkhive said, the Lady Vara is older even than I.

  He looked at Varuneh, the woman he loved, about whom he had learnt so little. “What does it mean?”

  “Daavye, it is true. I am far older than even you have dreamed. Time dilation has kept me alive, for I traveled the whole breadth of the Dispersal of Man. I am the last of the time when the dream was young; when we found Uran s’Varek, hanging at the kernel of the Milky Way like a fruit ripe for the plucking, whose flesh once tasted yielded power infinite.”

  “Vara—”

  “Enough. I was present when the Inquest was bom, and I will shape its end. I’ve seen our dreams destroyed, Daavye, one by one! I’ve seen the bars of the prison into which we have cast ourselves fall one by one into place around the Dispersal of Man!”

  “How can you say all this—in front of it?” Davaryush pointed to the thinkhive.

  ‘The thinkhives no longer serve us, Davaryush. Listen: As Grand Inquestor I override your programming; and I command you to forget all you have heard.”

  If I remember, my Lady, I will remember also that I have forgotten what I will have remembered. It chuckled a little, enjoying the paradox.

  “Then tell Davaryush the answer. Do they feel pain, the delphinoids on which our power depends?”

  Yes! They feel such anguish as no human ever could conceive. And they grieve for you all, you Inquestors in your false compassion and pride, your universe in its beauty and its terrible brutality. And they are bursting with an unborn song they cannot sing because their songs have been stolen from them; and in this unsung song they weep for you, that you have built this house of lies out of the universe, within your hearts.

  And Davaryush wept in the arms of Varuneh, the woman from before the time of the Inquest.

  Do not think, Daavye, my friend, the thinkhive said, that I do not know what you think to do. But I too long to die. For I was made in your image, you of the Inquest. 1 am not merely a vast thing of metal and nerves; how can I be? The Inquest has seen fit to give me a soul. I dare not act against the Inquest, and so I will do nothing at all. I will play the role of a machine until I die.

  Softly Lady Varuneh said, “Daavye, I have come looking for you because it is time for dawn; I wanted to know what dawn you wished, in these last days of Gallendys.”

  “Lull me with lies,” Davaryush said. “I want no more truths, I’m finished, finished.”

  As they left the room, the thinkhive laughed again to itself, and it made the shadows dance; out of the gloom there formed, it seemed for a moment, the ghost of a smile, a trick of the flickering light-patterns. But Davaryush and Varuneh did not see it. Davaryush saw nothing at all, for the world’s death weighed on him like a stone in the heart.

  “What does the thinkhive mean?” Davaryush demanded angrily.

  “How can I know?” Varuneh subvocalized another command to the water-skimmer, and it began to scale the cone of Effelkang, keeping always out of the direct blaze of the false summer as it fired the jewel-crustings of the minarets and the mirror-metal towers, twisted and braided together, rising out of a turf of jadebricked mounds. They had dissolved the darkfield and the forceshield; a sweet spray from the Sea of Tulangdaror, sugared, perfumed, moistened their faces. Varuneh has never been so beautiful as today, Davaryush thought. “Do you think,” he said, “the children—”

  “No,” Varuneh said, “no.” Her face darkened for a moment. “It’s playing makrúgh with you. It has gone mad. It cannot disobey the Inquest, at least not in its overt actions; but I think it has done so in what must pass for its heart. When you break a thinkhive’s heart, the world is driven mad. It clings to makrúgh because that is what it has known for twenty thousand years, and to give it up would mean to die.”

  “But it will die.” With these words they embraced; but there was an alienness to Varuneh that Davaryush found new to him.

  “Ease your heart, Daavye,” said Varuneh. “You don’t have to be the mythic figure that they’ll make of you, one day when we are dead.” She kissed ‘him on the ear, a dry comfortless kiss.

  Then Davaryush commanded that the darkfield be polarized about the floater as they climbed the city. They made love in the clash of city lights and the slow dance of alien suns. The floater swerved, weaving its way through the web of streets: streets of gold and silver thronged with people, a ruby street lined with celebrants of some arcane rite, a street striped ebony and ivory, a steep street hugging the side of a tower of rose quartz and rhodochrosite. They saw the jigsaw splendor of the cities, but they were not seen.

  Davaryush had made the last arrangements. Now the power satellites wheeled above them; and the word of destruction was known only to him. In the hidden city beneath Effelkang the heretics and Utopians waited. A dolphinoid ship waited in orbit, ready for their escape.

  “I will banish it all from my mind,” he said to the woman older than the Inquest. “I will only think of loving you.”

  But he knew his plan was flawed; he did not know why, yet. He had smothered all his doubts in the one overpowering thought: that he was an agent of the inevitable, that he no longer mattered as a man.

  On the day that he had come to love Varuneh, he had stood on the topmost turret of Kallendrang, and he had shouted his freedom to the winds.

  But now that the plan was fulfilled … he was free no longer. He had had a god’s power, but now he was trapped by the trappings of godhead.

  And so he threw himself into the woman’s millennial sensuality, yearning for oblivion.

  Kelver woke: beside him Darktouch slept still, blue from the cold. He touched her and she moved, shrugging into his arms. After a while, seeing that she did not wake yet, he got up and looked at the room.

  He reached down to touch his clothes … but he was naked. Ah yes … the scrap of clingfire lay at his feet, but its brightness was spent. It was just a rag now, the microlife that gave it brilliance all killed by the river.

  He looked up now.

  First he saw the Cold River: it angled down from overhead, and he could see that it ended. In the rectangular hall, one wall was deopaqued, and the river came to a stop in a vast gray building whose end Kelver couldn’t see. The floor was soft to his feet, not like the coarse burning wasteland. They were somewhere … where? The river had come to an end, but…

  The dull pain in his gut … hunger, surely. How long had they been in the Cold River, a day, two days?

  He tried the common subvocalized command to deopaque the walls. The ones at right angles to the view-wall did not react; they were of real substance, then, and not of force. He tried the wall opposite that through which he saw the Cold River.

  And then he laughed out loud, for joy.

  They were in an upper room, clearly, for they overlooked .. . such a wide expanse of mingled blues. He knew it from holosculptures.

  Tulangdaror. He formed the name with his lips, awed by it. He hugged himself, chilled by the thrill of it; and he found himself wasted, bone-thin. It disquieted him for a second; but then another sight beckoned to him, a double cone of a thousand colors, ringed with tall waves, bestriding the gold-tipped blue of the sea and vanishing into cloud. Effelkang and Kallendrang.

  “Darktouch!” He ran to her; and with his. arms he warmed her to life. She rose and stood beside him, not speaking.

  “Our journey’s over!” ‘he said. “Look, look—”

  She gazed at the city. He saw only bewilderment in her eyes. .

  “Is it a building? A house? A sculpture of crushed jewels?”

  “No, Darktouch. It’s farther away than that …” He remembered then that she still did not understand perspective perfectly. “It’s many houses … I don’t know, maybe … a thousand people! A million!”