And then Darktouch gave a little cry. He thought it was joy, but then she tugged at his hand and he saw, between the water and the house they were in, the shipyards: here a huge brain sprawled in a field of gray metal, being worked on by a team of scaffolds; there the hull of a starship being painted with the ideographs of an alien tongue. He remembered lying in the old house in the village with his quarreling aunt and uncle for background music, closing his eyes and imagining the starships bursting through the overcosm, the place where light goes mad.

  But Darktouch only said, “Windbringers. They are the Windbringers that we’ve murdered. That I myself once hunted….”

  “But if we have no more Windbringers …” Kelver suddenly understood the meaning of what they’d done. “The starships… the human race …”

  “I don’t know,” said Darktouch, “I don’t know!”

  “The Inquestors will tell us. They know all the answers,” Kelver said. And he held the hand of his Touch-sibling tightly as they watched a flock of floaters settling over the city, roosting on the apex of Effelkang like silverdoves.

  * * *

  “Two frozen children,” the messagedisk said. “Found in the tubes that feed the shipyards. Unidentified. …”

  Davaryush watched the message as it dissolved into the transparent crystal.

  “We don’t have time!” Varuneh said. “The power satellites have been moved into place now. It’s too late to play games of conscience, and we can’t go on deceiving the Inquest about the satellites’ true purpose—”

  “I know. Or the bluff-threat in my game of makrúgh will backfire on me.” He threw the disk into the fire-fountain: it flared up for a moment, then wilted and melted into the flames, tinting them mauve for a few minutes. They were in the atrium of Varuneh’s estate; for now that ail Gallendys knew they were lovers, he had made it his home by choice, entering the cities for the duties of governing.

  It was a strange sort of love they shared, he reflected. Inquestors had human love burned out of them, long before they were unleashed on the Dispersal of Man: it had to be so, because of the greater love. In the months he had loved her he had learnt now never to try to grasp at what really counted, deep in Varuneh’s heart; for she was too old, hundreds of years too old in her mind and body, thousands of years in time as the Dispersal measured it….

  “It’s a wonder, Vara, dearest,” he said, soothing her; they were more and more nervous as the crucial time approached. For he had known at once who these children must be. Dead, not dead, the thinkhive had sung to him. So this was what it meant—that the children had been thrust into the void between life and death, their lives dependent on reaching the twin cities. “I know who they are,” he said. “They have a message for us. They insist on seeing us.”

  “You can’t lose your nerve now, Daavyel When you’ve so much to lose! If you see them, you may never bring yourself to—”

  He kissed her then. After all this time the plan still awed him; he could not bring himself to utter what they both knew—that above them, circling the planet, was the death of all that held the Galaxy together.

  “We must see everything,” he said sternly. “We must face everything. We’re Inquestors. And we always will be, until the moment of ending.”

  * * *

  The children lay wrapped in the soft floor of the upper story Of a hut in the shipyards, thawing out. An environment shield protected them.

  The two Inquestors stepped into the room. An attendant made to dissolve the barrier, but Davaryush waved him away. The children could not see out; on their side it had been opaqued and locked.

  “So young,” Varuneh whispered.

  They were fourteen, perhaps fifteen. It was hard for Davaryush to tell sometimes, with the shortlived; they might even have been younger. They had been awake a few days now; and they had seen no one but the attendant, who had listened to them and not said a word in reply, awaiting the Inquestors* pleasure. They were sitting up now, speaking intently to each other. There was no fear in their faces.

  Davaryush saw the boy first: he was a peasant boy, lithe, wiry, browned by the suns’ harshness; unremarkable but for something about the eyes, a fire he had seen in few of the Galaxy’s downtrodden.

  But the girl—what a strange girl she was! She was so pale that it seemed no sun had ever touched her flesh, and her hair was long and black as all space. Their bodies were streaked with scars, old and new. A single cloak of firefur warmed them both; but the flames in it were long quenched by cold.

  Davaryush saw how much they loved each other, as the young always did. His immense age weighed down on him. He was humiliated, shamed by them, because he would never know their kind of love, the wild love that would brave such odds to reach this city….

  He clapped his hands. The barrier dissolved.

  The boy moved to shield the girl, then cried, “Take us to someone in authority! Take us to someone who will give us answers!”

  “Why?” said Davaryush.

  “No one will help us,” said the girl. She spoke hesitantly, as though not used to speech.

  “Where have you come from?” Varuneh asked. Davaryush saw that it was hard for her, too, to restrain her compassion. It was this that made her speak harshly to the children.

  “We are from the Dark Country.”

  And so it was that Davaryush learned of the delphinoids and their songs. It was not the girl’s description that moved him, for she was barely coherent, and often she would weep or become silent in mid-thought, tightening the tension in the room … no. It was that she had encountered something she had not understood; that for that she had risked everything—not just her life, but her culture, her beliefs, her whole world. And the boy, who had not even shared her vision, had come with her out of love alone.

  He turned to Varuneh. “We’ve been wrong, Vara!” he said. “This kind of love has been washed out of us, we’ve been too involved in makrúgh , in the fates of worlds and star systems…He turned his back on them all. His own bitterness surprised him. Even now, makrúgh dictated that he should not let the children see him weep.

  He motioned the others out of the room, into the open.

  Under the artificial warmth, the familiar scene of shipbuilding: nutrient sprays, great brain-hulks with hulls half soldered into them, the bustling of workers and the whistle and roar of machinery….

  Quietly he said to Varuneh: “This revolution that we’ve planned … it’s wrong, Vara, wrong! You must understand! We can’t destroy the Inquest and send everything into chaos, not with an act of violence, of hatred. Or we will become the very thing that we destroy. I think Ynyol-deh saw that when she gave me the weapons, I think that she saw through me in her twisted compassion . . . no, Vara, we should work from within.”

  “How, Daavye, how?”

  “We’ve got to begin as these children did. With love. Please understand—”

  Varuneh made as if to protest. But she said nothing. He knew then that she had seen what he had seen, had seen it even before he had. It was this that had made her seem so remote in the past months, that had driven a wedge of alienation between them.

  He knew nothing anymore about the grand plans. He knew only what he would do next. “You are going back to the Dark Country,” he said. “And so are we. We will all see this truth for ourselves. If it is a truth such as you have described, then we will all be changed by it. Until we have been changed we cannot change the Dispersal of Man. Do you understand this?”

  He looked at the children. Their stares did not waver. He saw that the girl, watching the workmen going at the delphinoid brains, was clenching back a terrible, terrible anger.

  “I don’t know,” said the boy earnestly, “what you mean, sir, by all this ‘change’ and ‘truth.’ All we want is help. From the highest power. From the Inquestors. Please, sir, lead us to the Inquestors—surely they must know everything! Please!”

  “I am the Inquestor,” Davaryush said softly. But he knew he had already lost his right to the title.

  Book Three

  Out of the Shining Cities

  o dhandas! o dhandas!

  tam’planzho. tam’planzho.

  o dhandas! o dhandas!

  You are dead. You are dead.

  I weep for you. I weep for you.

  You are dead. You are dead.

  —Lament for a wasted planet;

  from the Songs of Sajit

  TWENTY

  THE LAUGHING WORLD

  A ghostly holosculpture of the Dispersal of Man filled the whole chamber; Davaryush walked through it with the children, pointing out this star and that. Stars that lay at arm’s length from each other might be a mere hairsbreadth apart in the twisted wormholes of the overcosm, and neighbor systems might be centuries away from one another by the same system. Davaryush took a fleeting pleasure in this instruction; it made ‘him remember Uran s’Varek. In the holosculpture the Inquestral homeworld was concealed in a wrinkle of light; only an Inquestor’s command could unfold the warp at the holosculpture’s center and reveal its location. But the children had never heard of Uran s’Varek —who among the shortlived had?—and they never asked where the Inquestors came from; they were just a part of how the universe had been, would always be.

  With a flick of his mind Davaryush caused the cluster over which they stood to magnify itself. As the children watched, wide-eyed, suns ballooned out of fiery light-motes. Planets wheeled: ringed gas giants and human worlds and toy worlds in whimsical shapes dreamed up by some court artist. They were ghost-worlds all; some had already perished, and were but paths in the memory of the huge panholorama. They felt like ghosts too: Davaryush saw the boy Kelver walk straight through a world that shimmered, cloud-white and cerulean, his face banded with mottled light-swaths. It was good to see their wonder, Davaryush thought. This was how he had passed the last few days; for Varuneh kept to herself now, not seeming to like the turn of events.

  The boy he empathized with strongly. He had never had a chance to be like this child. No—childsoldiery from the age of six, world-burnings, initiation, and finally the words of Ton Alkamathdes: “You have compassion, Davaryush.” He envied Kelver, who had been able to keep his innocence far longer than he….

  The girl, now, though. He could not read her at alL A mystery, an alien almost. But she was the one who had seen the lightsongs. He did not know yet whether her strangeness came from her alienated life, growing up as she did with those who could not possibly understand her seeing and hearing; or whether it was the delphinoids* song that had changed her so. Was this what he would become, when he too saw?

  ‘This one!” Kelver cried. A world had grown from a dot to a meter-broad sphere, and he was pointing to vermilion threads that darted across its surface. “What is its name, what are those beautiful crimson lines?”

  “Ah, that is Shendering. Look, the twin moons, the granite and the garnet. That world has twice approached destruction; for some reason Elloran always plays it in makrúgh”

  The boy’s face fell. And the girl’s, frozen, since seeing the soldering of the delphinoids, in an untouchable anger, did not change.

  He was teaching the boy the subvocalized words to operate the panholorama: they were sharp syllables in the old highspeech. The boy concentrated, and then in a flash he had it Worlds shrank into sparkling buttons of color! Clusters mushroomed! Planetary systems whirled, careened, were hurled about as the boy moved his perspective effortlessly. “You are quick,” Davaryush said.

  “I did this every night, once,” Kelver said, “to shut out the sounds of my uncle and aunt quarreling. The stars were in my mind, though, in the darkness…

  “Do you thirst for them, boy? I mean the big outside. The million worlds of the Inquest.”

  “Oh, Father Davaryush, and more, and more—”

  “Look,” said the girl abruptly. Something had caught her attention. The two went over to her, old man and boy.

  It was an irregular polyhedron of blue fire, expanded now to the size of a small cubicle. Stars were few here; they hung forlornly, specks in the diffuse blue light.

  •That,” said Davaryush, “is a Zone of Interdict.”

  “What does it mean?” Kelver said quickly.

  “It contains a utopia.”

  “What’s a utopia?”

  “There are no utopias, my child. At least, there should not be … there never were … not until Shtoma.”

  ‘Tell us! Tell us!” And the girl’s face too had softened, eager to hear a story.

  And so he forced himself to remember—

  Shtoma! The light!

  First there came the black boxes….

  “But what is in them? I have seen several in my stay here,” he had demanded of the heretic priest on Shtoma.

  The white-bearded old man—a magnificent mottlement of wrinkles and discolorations without the common decency of cosmetics—smiled beneficently at him. “Udara,” he said. “Udara is in them.” And Udara shone through the walls too, harsh-white in the vermilion jungle that luxuriated in every direction. (“This is a temple?” he had asked Ernad, his guide. “Well—you might call it that.” The man had sounded unsure of himself, as though explaining something to a child that was too complicated even for himself to understand fully.)

  “Will you not touch it?” said the priest. “Come. You will feel Udara.”

  Hesitantly he had gone up with his hand outstretched. Gingerly he brushed the cool metal with his fingertips.

  Overwhelming joy, coursing through his thoughts for a moment… homeworld! a fleeting image .. . the ache, the ache of it … the sea-music … the faces of his parents, stranded by time dilation in an unreachable past, and they smiled at him, he was a child half their height, reaching up to touch their faces, laughing….

  And snatched his hand away as though he had been burnt. Clearly, he thought, a powerful hallucinogenic device! Was this the secret of Shtoma’s utopia? He stared at his hand in terror.

  Happiness, echoing in his mind….

  I will not reach out again! I will not! He controlled himself with difficulty, knowing that he had stumbled upon one of the clues to what was wrong with Shtoma.

  They were selfdeluders, obviously, intoxicating themselves with false memories and artificially induced joys.

  Kelver listened gravely to the Inquestor. Around them the starfields still whirled wildly, for Darktouch was entranced with the new toy of subvocalizing, and was causing the heavens to open up, fold themselves inside out, expand, contract, like a child’s holo-lesson-book on the history of the universe.

  “Hokh’Ton,” he said, “I thought you were invincible, omnipotent. Do you doubt then? Like when I didn’t believe that the food we farmed and sent vanishing into the mountain really did anyone any good?”

  “The more I knew,” said Davaryush, “the more I doubted.” He smiled a thin wry smile at the boy; it made him shivery-warm inside, a god’s touch.

  “What did you do then? Was it then that you danced on the face of the sun?” For Kelver -had heard the words of the alien tongue, qithe qithembara; udres a kilima shtoisti, and had been told their meanings, although he couldn’t understand why it was so important.

  “Not yet, son. First they showed me their varigrav coasters.”

  Emad was waiting for him, and the beautiful girl Alykh, and another of his children, Eshly, a little boy of about six, who prattled and asked questions as though he were much younger, and was quite devoid of discipline. They walked onto the next displacement plate.

  “Yes,” said Emad, “we’re a very thinly populated planet, only half a million souls … What do we eat? There are fruit in the forests, small animals, too, Crustacea of fantastical shapes in the rivers; no agriculture. The fruit of the gruyesh ripens and falls of its own will. From it we ferment a sweetish zul and make a delicate dough for the peftifesht pastries you had this morning.”

  “Crime?”

  “Why should anyone commit it?” Emad laughed gently. “We have Udara, you see, so it isn’t necessary.”

  “I don’t understand. My polyglot implant translates that word simply as sun, but I have heard it in at least a dozen meanings since I came to Shtoma. I know semantics isn’t an exact science; but am I missing something? You can’t tell me that your people, in all their evident complexity, attribute all your fortunes to some mythical property of your sun?”

  Davaryush was exasperated now. It was becoming a strain to maintain his investigator’s pose. Clearly the problem on this planet had to do with some fundamental understanding of the workings of the universe.

  For the boy he had compassion: By now, he thought, they should both be warriors, in the real world, the boy-child and the girl. How sad that they were trapped in a permanent preadolescence. They were like retarded children who had nevertheless been blessed with perfect beauty. But Ernad was talking again: “Still you don’t see, you don’t comprehend the elegant simplicity of it!”

  He tried to feel, sensing in the absurdity of the old man’s beliefs some core of faith that he would never be able to alter … soft susurrant rustlings of the red forests sang to him, but in their singing was mingled, chillingly, an image of his homeworld … he tensed instinctively, knowing he was playing with fire. “I don’t see how the feel of your planet can illuminate the state of your society.”

  “Have you ever ridden a varigrav coaster?”

  “No!” Horrible thought! Abandonment to the senses, to utter helplessness!

  “It is a pity. What did you feel, when I asked you to listen to the music of Udara?”