Anathem

Part 12

Something was pressing hard against my back-accelerating me forward. That couldn’t be good.

No, it was just gravity, or some reasonable facsimile, pulling me down against some flat firm thing. I was monstrously cold. I started to shiver.

“Pulse and respiration are looking more normal,” said a voice in Orth. “Blood oxygenation coming up.” Jules was translating this into some other language. “Core temp is getting into a range compatible with consciousness.”

That would, perhaps, be my consciousness they were talking about. I opened my eyes. The glare faded. I was in a small but nice enough room. Jules Verne Durand was seated on the edge of my bed, looking clean and sleek. This more than anything else confirmed the vague impression that a lot of time had passed. I was hooked up to a bunch of stuff. A tube was cinched under my nose, blowing something cold, dry, and sweet into my nostrils. A physician-from Arbre! — was glancing back and forth between me and a jeejah. A woman in a white coat-a Laterran-was looking on, running a big piece of equipment that was circulating warm water to-well-you wouldn’t believe me if I told you, and then you’d wish I’d kept such details to myself.

“You have questions, my friend,” Jules said, “but perhaps you should wait until-”

“He’s fine,” said the Arbran. He was dressed in a bolt and chord. He had a tube strapped across his upper lip. He shifted his attention to me. “You’re fine-as far as I can tell. How do you feel?”

“Unbelievably cold.”

“That’ll change. Do you know your name?”

“Fraa Erasmas of Edhar.”

“Do you know where you are?”

“I would guess on one of the orbs on the Daban Urnud. But there are some things I don’t understand.”

“I am Fraa Sildanic of Rambalf,” said the physician, “and I need to tend to your comrades. I need Jules to come with me as interpreter, and Dr. Guo here to supervise the core warming procedure. Speaking of which, we’ll be needing that.”

Dr. Guo now punctuated this statement in the most dramatic way you can possibly imagine by reaching up under my blankets from the foot of the bed and disconnecting me from the core warmer. For the first time in a long time, I uttered a religious oath.

“Sorry,” said Fraa Sildanic.

“I’ll live. So-”

“So we are going to have to leave your questions unanswered,” Fraa Sildanic continued, “but one is waiting outside who will, I think, be happy to lay it all out for you.”

They left. Through the opening door I glimpsed a pleasant view over open water, with green growing things all over the place, soon blocked by a small figure coming in at speed. A moment later, Ala was lying full-length on top of me, sobbing.

She sobbed and I shivered. The opening half-hour was all about raising my core temp and getting her calmed down. We made a great team that way; Ala was just what the doctor ordered as a way to raise my temperature, and using me as a mattress seemed to be good for what ailed her. During the bone-breaking shivering that hit its peak about fifteen minutes in, she clung to me as if I were an amusement park ride, and kept me from vibrating right off the bed. This kind of thing gave way, in due course, to other fascinating biological phenomena, which I can’t set down here without turning this into a different kind of document.

“Okay,” she finally said, “I’ll report to Fraa Sildanic that you have excellent blood flow to all of your extremities.” It was the first complete sentence that had come out of her mouth. We’d been together for an hour and a half.

I laughed. “I was thinking Heaven? But Heaven wouldn’t have these.” I tugged gently at the hissing tube under her nose. She snorted, and batted my hand away. “Oxygen from Arbre?” I asked.

“Obviously.”

“How did it-and you-get here?”

She sighed, seeing that I was determined to ask tedious questions. She pushed herself up, straddled me. I raised my knees and she leaned back against them. Snatched a pillow, propped herself up, got comfortable, fiddled with her oxygen tube. She looked at me, and once again the I’m in Heaven hypothesis floated to the top. But it couldn’t be. You had to deserve Heaven.

“After you went up,” she said, “the Pedestal rodded all of our space launch infrastructure.”

“I’m aware of it.”

“Oh yes. I forgot. You had a vantage point. So, we got the message that they were extremely cross with us over the two-hundred-missile launch. But they had fallen for the decoy-the inflatable thing you launched. They sent us detailed phototypes of the wreckage. Were they ever triumphant!”

“Maybe they were only pretending to fall for it.”

“We considered that. But, remember-a few days later, you guys were able to just walk right in.”

“Well, it was a little more difficult than you make it sound!” I was trying to laugh, but it was hard, with her weight on my tummy.

“I get that,” she said immediately, “but what I’m trying to say is-”

“The Pedestal hadn’t taken any extraordinary precautions,” I agreed, “they were totally surprised.”

“Yes. So, one moment, they are feeling triumphant. The next, out of nowhere, all of a sudden, their World Burner has been wrecked. A bunch of their people are dead. One of the twelve Vertices has been seized by Arbran commandos.”

“Wow! The Valers did all that?”

“They sneaked onto the World Burner and planted three of the four shaped charges they had with them. Then they headed for a certain window-”

“Pardon me, a window?”

“That vertex is a sort of command post and maintenance depot for all things World Burner. There is a conference room with windows that look out over the bomb. Osa and company had a plan, apparently, to rendezvous there. Along the way, they were noticed, and came under assault by the maintenance workers who were out there in space suits. But the workers didn’t have weapons per se.”

“Neither did the Valers,” I said.

She gave me a sort of pitying look. Maybe with a trace of affection. “Okay,” I said, “Valers don’t need weapons.”

“The Geometers’ space suits are soft. Ours are hard. Just imagine.”

“Okay,” I said, “I’d almost rather not. But I can see how it would come out.”

“Suur Vay died. She took on five guys, one of whom happened to be carrying a plasma cutter. Uh, it’s a very unpleasant story. She and the five all ended up dead. But, largely because of her intervention, the other three Valers made it to that window.”

She paused for a moment, letting me absorb that. I had really hated Suur Vay when she had sewn me up after Mahsht, but when I remembered that picnic-table surgery now, it made me want to cry.

Once we’d given Suur Vay a decent moment of silence, Ala went on: “So, imagine this from the point of view of the big bosses inside the conference room. They see a large number of their people converted to floating corpses before their eyes. There’s nothing they can do about it. Fraa Osa trudges right up to the window and slaps on a shaped charge, right up against the glass. They’re not certain what it is. He makes a gesture. The World Burner explodes in three places: the primary detonator, the inertial guidance system, and the propellant tanks. There is a huge secondary detonation as the tanks rupture.”

“That we noticed.”

“Fraa Gratho is killed by a piece of flying debris.”

“Damn it!” My eyes were stinging. “He stood between me and a bullet…”

“I know,” she said softly.

After another silence, she went on, “So, the bosses now understand the nature of the object that’s been slapped on their window. They get the message and open an airlock. Esma comes inside. Osa stays where he is-he’s the gun to their heads. Esma stays in her suit. She herds all the Geometers she can find into the conference room, locks the door, welds it shut with Saunt Loy’s Powder. Now, Osa joins her, bringing the shaped charge with him. They lock the doors into the vertex, sealing it off from the rest of the Daban Urnud, and weld those too. They detonate the fourth charge in such a way that most of the vertex vents its atmosphere to space. Now it can’t be approached except by people in space suits. They hole up in one of the few rooms that still has an atmosphere. Their suits are out of air now, so they climb out of them, and suffer the usual symptoms.”

“What is up with that, by the way?”

She shrugged. “Hemoglobin is a classy molecule. Finely tuned to do what it does-take oxygen from the lungs and get it to every cell in the body. If you give it oxygen that is only a little bit different from what it’s used to, well, it still works-just not as well. It’s like being at high altitude. You get short of breath, woozy, can’t think straight.”

“Hallucinations?”

“Maybe. Why? Did you hallucinate?”

“Never mind…but wait a second, Jules can get along just fine on Arbre air.”

“You acclimatize. Your body responds by generating more red blood cells. After a week or two, you can handle it. So, as an example, some of the people who live on the Daban Urnud rarely leave their home orb. They have trouble going into common areas of the ship, where the air is a mixture. Others are used to it.”

“Like the Fthosian cosmographer who let us in the airlock at the observatory.”

“Exactly. When she saw you guys gasping for breath and starting to lose consciousness, she recognized what was going on. Sounded an alarm.”

“She did?” I said.

She gave me that pitying-but-affectionate look again. “What, you were hoping you’d managed to sneak aboard?”

“I, er, thought we had done exactly that!”

She grabbed my hand and kissed it. “I think your ego can be satisfied by what you did accomplish, which people are going to be celebrating for a long time.”

“Okay,” I said, feeling it was time to change the subject away from my ego. “She sounded an alarm.”

“Yes. Of course, there were lots of other alarms going off at the same time because of the Valers’ mayhem,” Ala said, “but some medics came to the observatory and found you unconscious, but alive. Fortunately for you, the physicians around here are used to dealing with such problems. They put you on oxygen, which seemed to help. But they had no way to be sure; they’d never treated Arbrans, they were worried you were going to suffer brain damage. Better safe than sorry. So they put you on ice in a hyperbaric chamber.”

“On ice?”

“Yeah. Literally. Dropped your body temperature to limit brain damage while oxygenating your blood as best they could with Laterran air. You’ve been unconscious for a week.”

“What about Osa and Esma, holed up in that vertex?”

She let a long moment pass before saying, “Well, Raz, they died. The Urnudans figured out where they were. Blew a hole in the wall. All the air escaped into space.”

I lay there for a minute.

“Well,” I finally said, “I guess they went out like real Valers.”

“Yes.”

I laughed in a not-funny way. “And-like a true non-Valer-I lived.”

“And I’m glad you did.” And here she started crying again. It wasn’t sadness over the dead Valers. Nor joy that the rest of us had lived. It was shame and hurt that she had sent us into a situation where we easily could have died; that the responsibilities placed on her shoulders, and the logic of the situation, had left her no alternative to the Terrible Decision. For the rest of her life-of our life, I hoped-she’d be waking up sweaty in the middle of the night over this. But it was a hurt she’d have to keep to herself, since most people she might share it with would not extend her much sympathy. “You sent your friends to do what!? While you sat on the ground, safe!?” So it was going to be a private thing between us, I knew, forever. I squirmed free and held her for a bit.

Once it felt right to go back to the story, I said, “How long did Osa and Esma remain locked up in that room before-before it happened?”

“Two days.”

“Two days!?”

“The Pedestal assumed that the place was booby-trapped, and/ or that there might be other Valers lurking in it. But they had to do something, since the hostages were running out of air. It was either that, or watch their people die on the speely.”

“So they were scared to death.”

“Yes,” Ala said, “I think so. Maybe shocked is a better word. Because they had thought for a while that they had us locked down in Tredegarh, which they had infiltrated. Then you and your friends unmasked Jules Verne Durand, so they lost their eyes and ears on the ground. At the same moment, the Convox-and all of the other big concents-dispersed into the Antiswarm.”

“That was a great idea! Who dreamed that up?”

She blushed, and fought back a smile, but wasn’t happy with my turning the attention to her, so went on: “They are really afraid of the Thousanders-the Incanters-and must have noticed that all of the Millenarian maths had been emptied out. Where did all of those Thousanders go? What are they cooking up? Then, the two-hundred-missile launch. Very upsetting. A lot of data to process. Zillions of bogeys to track. They think they see a ship-it blows up-they think they’ve dodged a bullet. But a few days after that, out of nowhere, comes this horrifying and devastating attack on their biggest strategic asset. For two days afterwards, it is all that they can think of-they are worried sick about the hostages trapped in that vertex. Not only that, but some other dudes in black suits manage to gain entry to the ship, and are only foiled because they can’t breathe the air-”

“They mistook us for another squad of Valers?”

“What would you think, in their place? And the biggest concern of all in their minds, I believe, was that they couldn’t know how many others were out there. For all they knew, there were a hundred more of you on the way, with more weapons. So, the result of it all was that-”

“They decided to negotiate.”

“Yes. To initiate four-way talks among the Pedestal, the Fulcrum, and the Magisteria.”

“Pardon me, what was that last one?”

“The Magisteria.”

“Meaning-?”

“This happened after you left Arbre. One magisterium is the Sæcular Power. The other is the Mathic world-now the Antiswarm. The two of them together are-well-”

“Running the world?”

“You could say that.” She shrugged. “Until we come up with a better system, anyway.”

“And would you, Ala, be one of those people who is currently running the world?”

“I’m here, aren’t I?” She didn’t appreciate my humor.

“As part of the delegation?”

“A wall-crawler. An aide. And the only reason I made the cut was that the military likes me, they think I’m cool.”

I was about to point out a much better explanation, which was that she had been responsible for sending Cell 317 on a successful mission, but she read it on my face and glanced away. She didn’t want to hear it mentioned. “There are four dozen of us,” she said hurriedly. “We brought doctors. Oxygen.”

“Food?”

“Of course.”

“How did you get here?”

“Geometers came down and picked us up. Once we reached the Daban Urnud, we came straight here, of course.”

“Hmm,” I reflected, “shouldn’t have brought up the subject of food.”

“Are you hungry?” she asked, as if it were astonishing that I would be.

“Obviously.”

“Why didn’t you say so-we brought five hampers of absolutely the best food for you guys!”

“Why five?”

“One for each of you. Not counting Jules, of course-he’s been stuffing his face since he got here.”

“Um. Just to prove I don’t have brain damage, would you name the five, please?”

“You, Lio, Jesry, Arsibalt, and Sammann.”

“And-what of Jad?”

She was so aghast that my social instincts got the better of my brain, and I backed down. “Sorry, Ala, I’ve been through a lot of weird stuff, my memory is a little blurry.”

“No, I’m sorry,” she said, “maybe it is a result of the trauma.” She looked a little quivery, scrunched her face, mastered it.

“Why? What trauma?”

“Of seeing him float away. Knowing what happened to him.”

“When did I see him float away?”

“Well, he never regained consciousness after the two-hundred-missile launch,” Ala said softly. “You saw him collide with a payload. He got stuck to it. You made the decision to go after him-to try to help. But it was tricky. The grapnel missed. You were running out of time. Arsibalt was coming to help. But then you nearly got sideswiped by the nuke. Jad drifted away. Re-entered the atmosphere. And burned up over Arbre.”

“Oh yeah,” I said, “how could I have forgotten?” I said it sarcastically, of course. But I was carefully watching Ala’s face as I did. The circumstances of my recent life were such that I was more exquisitely attuned to Ala’s facial expressions than to anything else in the Five Known Cosmi. She believed-better, she knew-that what she’d just reminded me of was true.

There were, I was sure, records down on Arbre to prove it.