The Summer Queen

TIAMAT: Carbuncle

Sparks Dawntreader pushed up from the bench as his wife appeared suddenly in the doorway to the back room. He had been waiting with the patience of the damned there in the crowded, noisy, lower-city tavern for her to emerge from her latest in an endless round of meetings with Summers who had knowledge about the mers.

She stopped in the doorway, wearing the sea and earth colors, the rough handspun and knitted clothing of the fisherfolk, as if she had just come off a ship. She stared at him for a moment as if she had completely forgotten his existence, even though he had come here with her, and she had known that he would be waiting, no matter how long it took her to grant him his due share of her time. “Moon, we need to talk.”

“Yes, of course,” she murmured, with the cautious reserve he heard in her voice when she answered strangers. Jerusha PalaThion, who had been sitting with him, looked up at Moon, over at him, and away again uncomfortably.

Because, damn it all, that was what they had become since she had had a vision, heard a voice—the voice of her old lover—speaking to her in Transfer, telling her the world as they knew it was coming to an end. The offworlders were coming back, and BZ Gundhalinu was coming back with them, if what she believed was really true, if it had really even happened. Sometimes he wondered whether she had only dreamed it … or wished she had. She had sworn to him that nothing would change between them if it all came to pass; that he was still her husband and she was still his wife. That BZ Gundhalinu was the man who had made it possible for them to be reunited; that he was coming here only to help them, not to steal their world, or her heart… .

And then she had turned her back on everything they had worked to achieve, all these years; buried herself in this sudden obsession with the mers. He had long since reached the conclusion that without the use of a computer network at least as sophisticated as the one the offworlders had had in Carbuncle during their time here, it would be virtually impossible to integrate all the diverse data they had collected, or to reconstruct what he was sure were critical missing segments of the mersong. Without a complex analysis program, it would take far more time than they had left, if what Moon believed about the offworlders’ return was true.

The sibyl net should have been able to give them the data—even manipulate it for them. But it seemed … incapable … of helping them. He would almost have said “unwilling,” because of its eerie, utter absence of any response. Jerusha had told him the system had been notoriously eccentric for as long as she could remember. She had heard claims that it had grown worse over time, although she said no one was really sure that it had. But even she shook her head in exasperation lately at the number of incoherencies it generated. And for all the precise guidance it had given them, he had still seen enough examples of its flaws to feel both confounded by and suspicious of its function. Only last week a sibyl at the College had been seized by a fit as he attempted to go into Transfer; he still was not fully himself. Ngenet had said it was a coincidence, but the evidence suggested otherwise.

He had pushed the whole subject of the mers to the back of his mind as futile, even as Moon had made it the center of her ambitions. He had done what he could to continue the progress of their technological development, working with the others at the College and on the Council who felt the same way, because whether the Hegemony came back in a matter of years, or never in his lifetime, he could not see any point in giving up now on what they had begun. The further they progressed, the harder it would be for the Hegemony to dismantle and dismiss their work, if that was what it intended. And if not—if the gods, or the Goddess, chose to smile on this benighted world for once—then all the better.

But recently, even the slow-but-steady progress they had been making in their production and manufacturing had hit a snag. They had tapped into Carbuncle’s independent power supply early on in their development. The city’s self perpetuating, seemingly endless supply of power came from a system of immense turbines located in caves cut from the rock below the city, that turned the massive, relentless energy of the tides into light and warmth, into survival for Carbuncle’s systems and its inhabitants. By their own estimates there should have been power to spare for the new needs they were generating locally.

And yet they had been experiencing power outages, brownouts, lapses and lags that were causing critical complications in their productivity. And he had been able to think of only one possible way to determine where the problem lay in that ancient, unexplored system.

“What is it?” Moon said, with a flicker of impatience. “What is it we need to discuss so badly that it can’t wait until—” She broke off, as if she had realized that whatever she had been going to say was meaningless. He wondered what nonexistent moment in the day she had been thinking of; what time they had once reliably shared, and no longer did. There was none that he could think of. “What is it?”

“It’s about the Pit,” he said. She looked at him uncomprehendingly. “I want to go down into it—to explore it. If there’s any way to work around the power problems we’ve been having lately, the key has to be there.”

Moon put her hand up to her face, blinking, as if what he had just said was somehow appalling, or terrifying, to her. Her hand dropped away, as coherence came back into her eyes. She touched the sibyl pendant hanging against the drab cloth of her shirt. “No,” she murmured. “I don’t think that would be a good idea.”

“Why not?” he snapped, in reflexive anger; unable to stop it, because his angei had so little to do with what she had just said, and so much to do with something that ran much deeper. “The Pit is the access shaft to Carbuncle’s operating system— there’s no other way to affect or change it. That’s what the Pit is there for—to give access for repairs and adjustments.” While he had been at the palace with Arienrhod, researchers from offworld had come there many times; they had gone down into the access well to study its function, apparently without any noticeable success. The system had never required any adjustment that he knew of—until now. But while the offworlders had been here the storm walls had still stood open in the Hall of the Winds, causing tremendous updrafts to form inside the shaft. Anyone who descended into the Pit would have had to stay sealed in the system’s elevator capsules or be swept to their deaths. Maybe that had even been the reason for the whole bizarre setup—a kind of perpetual security, to protect the system from tampering.

But Moon had sealed the Hall of the Winds. The Pit was still the Pit, a green-lit well dropping down and down until it met the sea. But without the treacherous winds, it should be possible to actually explore the catwalks and ledges, the outcroppings of display and hardware visible down there.

”But you don’t know anything about how the Old Empire’s technology functions,” Moon said.

He shrugged, an abrupt, barely controlled gesture. “And how will we ever ^learn, unless we study it? There are certain basic rules which everything that I functions obeys, on one level or another. But until we can get a closer look at the system, we can’t even begin to study it.”

She shook her head, and he saw something unnamable come into her eyes. “It’s too dangerous. I don’t want you to try it. I don’t want you to go down there. I don’t want it to … want you to get hurt.”

“It’s not dangerous, without the wind. Nothing will happen to me. It’s an access well—”

“You don’t know how dangerous it is.”

He frowned, his exasperation growing. “Do you know something about this you en’t telling me?” He remembered again how she had stopped the winds.

She looked at him with anguish and frustration, but she only shook her head

“Even Ngenet agrees with me about this. He wants to go down with me.”

Moon turned in surprise to Jerusha. Jerusha nodded her confirmation. “And do you agree too?” Moon asked.

Jerusha shrugged. “I think Miroe’s too old for this kind of thing,” she said. “But I expect I’d let him break his neck before I’d say that to his face.” A weary half smile of resignation showed on her own face. “As to whether I actually believe that what they want to do is necessary and useful … yes, I do.” She glanced down, looked up again. “Protecting the mers has become more important to me than anything else, too, Moon. But everything else hasn’t ceased to be as important as it ever was. We need to do more than we’ve been doing for the people who’ve followed you this far. The problems they’ve been experiencing are too important to ignore.”

“Yes. Yes, I suppose … I …” Moon lifted her hands in a gesture that looked almost helpless, hopeless. She glanced back at him, her face pinched as if she were in pain; but her eyes showed him something like understanding at last.

“Danaquil Lu Wayaways said he would go too; we can ask questions—”

“No!” Moon caught his arm, suddenly white-faced with anger, or terror. “With his back—?”

His frown deepened. “Well, someone else then, another sibyl—”

“No.” She stood face to face with him, clutching her elbows. “No sibyls are to try a descent into the Pit.”

He stared at her. “By’r Lady, why not?”

“It isn’t safe. There are … I’ve felt … there’s something there. …” She looked away, her lips pressed together. “Not a sibyl. No sibyls. I forbid it.”

“All right. Then we’ll map it with recordings and instruments,” he said, hearing the coldness in his own voice. He folded his arms, echoing her unconscious gesture of self-defense. “If you have no objection to that.”

She looked at him for a long moment, still holding herself tightly, and he saw—thought he saw—a tremor pass through her. “Do what you must,” she said faintly.

His anger turned to ashes, as he saw what filled her eyes. She stepped back as he reached out; eluding him when he would have touched her, when he wanted suddenly to take her in his arms. “But it won’t do you any good,” she said, turning away. “You won’t learn anything. It’s impossible.” She went on across the room, moving toward the light, the doorway; escaping, leaving him there to meet Jerusha’s uncomprehending gaze with his own

“Da—?”

Sparks looked up, surprised by the sound of his son’s voice calling his name. He straightened, looking past Ngenet’s shoulder, to see Tammis coming toward them across the Hall of Winds. “What is it?”

Tammis stopped a short way from the two men, staring at the small pile of equipment they had been going over. He glanced at the half-dozen assistants, including Danaquil Lu Way away s, who waited nearby to monitor their descent.

“You’re really going to explore the Pit?” Tammis asked.

“What does it look like?” Sparks jerked his head at their preparation. The words sounded harsher than he had intended, and he felt Ngenet glance up at him. He told himself that his nerves were simply on edge.

“You didn’t tell me—” Tammis’s own voice took on an accusing tone; but Sparks saw him swallow his anger, as if he were afraid of it, or of the worse response it would bring down on him. “Nobody told me. I overheard Aunt Jerusha talking about it. Did you tell Ariele?” He tried to disguise the jealousy in his voice, with less success.

“No,” Sparks said, truthfully, realizing why his son had asked the question.

“Why didn’t you tell anyone?”

Sparks sighed. “We did.” He nodded toward the small gathering near the edge of the Pit, where the access to the elevator modules lay.

“It wasn’t a secret,” Ngenet said, fastening his equipment belt, lifting a pack. “But an experiment like this is not something that you want a big crowd for, either.” He shrugged. “Probably just be a bloody anticlimax, anyway.”

“Are you going to repair the city’s power system?”

“We’re only going to look at it,” Ngenet said patiently. “This is our first try. The gods only know if we’ll be able to make any sense out of it. If we can we’ll decide from there what our next move will be.”

Tammis looked away, toward the rim of the Pit, and the span that bridged it. He had been crossing that bridge all his life, but Sparks knew he had always been afraid of it. Even now, he could see the shadow of fear in his son’s eyes. Sparks looked away from it, picking up his own pack.

Tammis turned back to him. “I want to come with you.”

Sparks looked at him incredulously. “Why?”

“I know I’ve always been afraid to look over the edge,” Tammis murmured. “But I’ve always wanted to know what was down there.” The only fear in his eyes now was the fear of rejection.

Sparks reached out, feeling an odd surprise, and put his hand on his son’s shoulder. “Maybe next time,” he said. “It could be dangerous; we just don’t know enough about it.”

“You’re not worried about getting hurt,” Tammis protested.

Sparks laughed. “On the contrary. I don’t want to have to worry about you too. That would cause me twice the pain of something happening to myself.”

Tammis blinked as the words registered, and then he smiled. It was not an expression Sparks saw on his face often. “I’m seventeen, Da,” he said softly. “Can’t we watch out for each other?”

Sparks began to shake his head, but Ngenet said, “Let him come. Originally we’d planned on taking a third person. He’ll be safe enough, between the two of us.”

Sparks glanced toward the rim of the Pit, remembering how it had been before … remembering the moaning of the winds, the way he had always heard them long before he reached this place. Then, this had been a place hungry for death. He had a sudden strobing vision of himself at seventeen, standing alone on that bridge facing Herne, the Snow Queen’s Starbuck, in a duel to the death over Anenrhod… .

“All right,” he said at last, aware again of where he was now, of when, and with whom… “All right, he can come.” He looked back at his son; telling himself that perhaps at least Tammis might not walk like a condemned man every time he crossed the bridge if he saw what was really down there. That maybe after a willing descent into that green-lit darkness, neither of them would have to feel that way ever again He met Tammis’s half-eager, half-uncertain stare. “You stay between us,” he said, “or you stay in the car, if it makes you dizzy to step out.”

Tammis nodded, his face resolute. “I will.”

Sparks looked into his son’s eyes for a long moment—eyes that were the clear windows to a soul untouched by bitterness and disillusionment; as clear as his own eyes must have been, when Arienrhod had first looked into them. He turned away, not saying anything. He led Ngenet and Tammis toward the waiting car, toward the people waiting beside it. The one person he had needed to see was not there: Moon.

He wondered what it was that made her avoid this place. Was it her own memory of the things that had happened here? Or was there something else, something more, some secret hidden in the way those windows high overhead had closed miraculously at her command?

But he didn’t believe in miracles, any more than he still believed in the Sea Mother. It was easier to believe that something had gone wrong with his wife’s mind, as Kirard Set had muttered at the last Council meeting; that the sibyl net had done something to her on the night he had seen her seized by the Transfer. He thought of the sibyl he had seen stricken by a fit. He looked up at the wind-curtains where they hung still and dust-softened in the space where they had once held clangorous sway. They reminded him of corpses.

He looked down again, hastily, as the morbid image formed in his brain. He searched the stairway leading up to the palace, finding it still empty; tried not to follow the other images that spread like ripple-rings deeper into his mind, of other kinds of death, the death of innocence, of love and trust between two people, all rippling outward from this haunted place, from that long-ago time. Moon, where are you? I can’t reach you anymore.

He looked back again, at the expectant faces waiting for him. He saw the others move aside to reveal the open hatch that gave access to the car.

Jerusha PalaThion glanced past him at Tammis, and looked a question at her husband, who shrugged and nodded. “Does Moon know about this?” She turned, inflicting a look full of official scrutiny on Tammis. He shook his head, and her mouth pulled down. “Be careful,” she murmured, looking at no one in particular.

“We’ll keep the comm link open all the time we’re down there,” Ngenet said, touching her shoulder briefly, reassuringly.

“You’re sure the link will work down there, in all that EM noise?” She frowned; lines of concern deepened around her eyes.

“It did when we sent equipment down in the capsule yesterday as a test,” he said. “No reason why it shouldn’t today.” No one said anything more, but Sparks knew every one of them felt the need for that fragile link between the capsule and the people waiting above; the need to preserve that tenuous psychological bond, even though there was no way anyone could help them if they ran into a problem. Ngenet looked toward Danaquil Lu. “I wish I could say the same for the visuals. It just isn’t sophisticated enough.”

Danaquil Lu nodded. “We’ll work with whatever data you manage to bring up, and your observations. It will be a start.” He smiled; Sparks felt some of his own anticipation come back as he saw the hunger for new knowledge fill the other man’s eyes.

Ngenet pulled Jerusha into his arms and kissed her with sudden, unexpected passion, before he moved to the hatchway, the first one to enter. Jerusha smiled crookedly, smoothing the collar of her shirt.

Sparks gestured Tammis ahead of him, watched the boy climb down after Ngenet and disappear. He glanced again at the empty stairway; looked down, avoiding Jerusha’s gaze. He went to the hatch and started down the ladder, seeing the faces of Ngenet and his son look up at him expectantly.

Hesitating in that last moment, he could not help looking up, one last time. And he saw her appear suddenly at the limit of his sight, at the far side of the hall, looking on. He lifted his hand; thought she raised hers in response. He went on down the ladder, heard the door seal shut above him. He glanced up. It had merged so perfectly into the ceiling that he could no longer see it.

There was standing room only inside the car. The surfaces around them were smooth and deceptively simple, almost austere. The proportions felt right to his senses, reminding him that this space had been designed by and for human beings, even while the subtle alienness of its forms nagged at his brain. He moved to the control panel below the wide window, glancing out at the Pit’s darkly gleaming walls.

He looked down again at the arrays of symbols before him—ideographic illustrations of available functions, intended to be clear enough in form so that anyone could operate this car, no matter what language they spoke. He had questioned the occasional offworld research teams that had been sent by Arienrhod to study the city’s operating system during her reign; learning from them how to operate the access car. He touched a symbol on the board, and another; a new sequence lit up, and he made more choices, aware of Tammis and Ngenet watching intently over his shoulder. Ngenet made no comments or suggestions. Even though they had agreed about the need for this experiment, the best thing he could call their working relationship was a truce. There was no room in it for small talk.

The car began to move downward. The knowledge that they were actually descending filled him with a giddy vertigo that was equal parts elation and fear. “We’re underway,” he murmured into the speaker of his headset. “Are you receiving us all right?”

“We hear you fine.” Jerusha’s voice answered him, abruptly and clearly. “Take it easy down there. The first step is a long one.”

“Right,” he said, seeing his ghostly image in the darklit glass smile faintly. He looked through himself, gazing out in fascination as they descended into the ancient, human-made neverland, the axis of Carbuncle, the access to unimaginable secrets of Old Empire technology. The car circled the inner wall of the Pit, spiraling slowly downward, just as somewhere outside the Street spiraled down through Carbuncle’s shellform city, the real-world avatar of this inner mystery. Tammis and Ngenet stood beside him now, their hands clutching the shining rail at the edge of the control panel, their own eyes mirroring the wonder of their descent.

After a time that seemed measureless to him—although it registered with meticulous precision on the ancient instruments before him—the car whispered softly to a stop, at the first checkpoint on its programmed rounds.

The rear wall of the car opened almost silently behind them this time, giving them access to what lay outside. They turned, all of them staring in wonder at the sudden opening. Sparks had the uneasy thought that the entire car might somehow be malleable, an artifice; that it might open wherever it chose, wherever was required. It occurred to him that this entire capsule had been extraneous, even an afterthought, to the original builders of this place; put here for the benefit of their less-blessed descendants, intended for times like these….

“We’ve made our first stop.” Ngenet spoke into his headset, reporting to Jerusha and the others up above as he started toward the open door. Sparks glanced at Tammis, who still stood at the window, gaping as if he were hypnotized. Sparks left him standing there, and followed Ngenet out.

A narrow catwalk waited for them, curving away from the car in either direction, rimmed by a low rail of what appeared to be pure light. He touched it—tried to—as he moved away from the capsule’s protective solidness. There was nothing, under his touch … and yet his hand would not move through or past that point. He tried the pressure of his body against the barrier, holding his breath—to find that it held him.

“Gods, this is incredible,” Ngenet murmured, looking up and up along the wall’s impassive, glowing face. He turned, looking down over the rail of light with casual unconcern, as if the vertiginous drop did not affect him at all. “Come on, Dawntreader,” he said, half eager and half impatient. “It doesn’t bite.” He went back to his murmured commentary over the comm link, describing his view to the listeners at the other end of their lifeline.

Sparks let himself become preoccupied with adjusting the jury-rigged recording equipment he carried slung over his shoulder, granting himself a few more stolen moments to get his vertigo under control. They both earned monitors that recorded not just video images but also as much of the EM spectrum as they could capture, stretching their erratic technological expertise to its limits. What they would actually get, and what they would be able to make of it, remained to be seen.

He looked up, as Ngenet had, seeing the lip of the Pit limned by the cold glow of lights, his view of its perfect silhouette broken by dark outcroppings of unidentifiable machinery. It was one of those outcroppings that had broken the fall of Arienrhod’s lover Herne, in their combat on the bridge—and broken Herne’s back.

And yet in the end, at the Change, Herne had reclaimed his place by her side; had willingly put on the black executioner’s mask of Starbuck one final time and gone to his death with Arienrhod, in the ultimate act of love and revenge. Arienrhod had that effect on people … and so did Moon. It had been Moon’s idea, her own revenge of a kind to save him from Arienrhod by using Herne … Moon had convinced Herne to do it.

Sparks looked down, feeling dizziness overwhelm him again as the past and the present collided inside his memory. He stared at the incomprehensible instrumentation before him, forcing himself to concentrate … noting that here the lights were not actually green, as they appeared from above, but various colors and shades, making him think of star maps; the sum total of their spectra only struck the eyes from a distance as green.

He looked cautiously over the rail. The dizzying whorls of light spiraled downward toward a point of blackness at the bottom of the shaft: the dark eye of the Sea observing their intrusion, coronaed in unnatural light. He could smell the sea here, much more strongly that he could up above. He thought he could even hear it; or maybe it was only his imagination, or the rush of blood inside his head.

Sparks glanced back at the car. Tammis was still inside. Both disappointed and relieved that he had only himself to look out for, Sparks went on along the catwalk, following Ngenet, who had stopped up ahead to study a portion of the wall.

“Gods, where do you begin?” Ngenet murmured, muscles in his face twitching with frustration and incredulity. There were symbols on a smooth, narrow stretch of the wall, among sinuous tendrils of equipment, none of it resembling anything that he remotely knew the function of, any more than he could be sure the symbols actually stood for something in an Old Empire language. He reached out toward the shining, inviting surface, wondering what would happen if he touched this the way he had touched the instrument panel in the car; if one sequence would lead to another—

“Don’t touch that!” Ngenet snapped. “We agreed we wouldn’t try to activate anything. You could send the car on without us, and strand us here—”

Sparks lowered his hand, frowning. He looked at Ngenet. “This has nothing to do with the car.”

“You can’t know that.” Ngenet waved his own hand.

“There are controls for the car back there where we stopped.”

Ngenet stared at him. “How do you know that?”

“I was told about it by the ones who used to come down here for Arienrhod. And I saw the display; the symbols match the ones used in the car.”

Ngenet’s frown eased slightly. He looked away, as if he couldn’t bring himself to apologize.

Sparks made no response, either, to Ngenet’s turned back. They had no idea what this display did control, if anything. He admitted to himself that they had agreed only to gather information this time; that a sibyl could translate symbols like these, if they were in some Old Empire tongue. He rubbed his neck, controlling his impatience with an effort as they started on along the catwalk.

Moving along this precarious pathway, with the sheer wall on one side, the sheer drop on the other, the presence of the sea far below, reminded him of something. Another place, another time … half a lifetime ago, when he and Moon had made their journey across the sea to the sibyl choosing place.

He wondered what would have happened if Moon had turned back, and never became a sibyl; if they had never gone to the choosing place at all. If Moon had never seen Clavally Bluestone on the beach one day when they were still children, and fallen in love with the mystery and power of sibylhood. If she had been the child that Gran and everyone on the island had always believed she was: the child of her mother’s blood. If Arienrhod had never had herself cloned, never become Queen, never existed …

They were almost halfway around the circumference of the Pit. He looked back across its empty expanse at the car. Tammis’s face was barely visible inside it, dimly lit by the glow of the instrument displays where he stood watching them. His son…. Sparks looked down at his feet again, watching his step. Wondering whether if one link in that long chain could have been broken, it might all have been different—whether he and Moon might have shared the peaceful, unremarkable life together that they had always imagined they would have, secure in tradition and their love. Or whether the course of his life and hers had really been as inevitable as the long, circular track he followed now, like an orbit, with only room for one step and then another, no turning aside … and never any turning back.

They completed the long circuit of the well’s inner surface, returning at last to their starting point, to the waiting car. Sparks stepped inside first, with a sigh of relief. Tammis stood waiting for him, still clinging to the edge of the instrument panel as if he had lost gravity and was afraid of drifting away. There was something more uncanny than simple wonder in the boy’s eyes; something that was somehow familiar… .

“Are you all right?” Sparks asked, half concerned and half uncertain.

Tammis nodded vaguely. “It’s more beautiful down here than I ever imagined. The light—” He half turned, gesturing at the window behind him.

Sparks nodded, glancing out at the subtly changing jewel patterns in the darkness, unable to disagree, unable to put a name to the echo of something else that he heard in his son’s voice.

Ngenet reentered the car, and Sparks listened to Jerusha’s response over his headset as she answered what Ngenet had been reporting to her. Sparks knew that Ngenet had studied the display on the wall behind the cab, reaffirming for himself what Sparks had told him. Sparks smiled, a brief, tight smile that did not touch his eyes, as Ngenet’s head bobbed once in acknowledgment.

Sparks passed his hands over the touchboards on the instrument panel and the car resealed, becoming whole around them again. They went down, describing as they went all that they had seen and experienced to the listeners who were growing more distant with every heartbeat. Questions came back at them from Jerusha and Danaquil Lu, and occasionally from someone else, but never the one voice he listened for. He wondered whether Moon had joined the others at the Pit’s edge; or whether she was still standing apart, keeping her distance from him and everything about this expedition.

They made another programmed stop, another circumnavigation on foot of the wall; recording every aspect of their environment, the visible and the invisible, because they had no way of knowing what had been important to the human gods of the Old Empire, or what might give them the key to their own unlocking of its potential. Tammis stayed in the car, and Sparks was relieved that he did, still not sure whether it was fear or fascination that held his son immobilized.

The third stop occurred at nearly half the well’s depth. There were no units of measurement that he recognized on the panel before him, to tell him exactly how deep they were.

He followed Ngenet out onto the catwalk, this one exactly like the others. The process was beginning to seem almost ritual-like. Looking up, he could barely make out the Pit’s rim through the glare, past the outcroppings of machinery; but he could see the bottom of the well clearly now. He realized that the well must widen gradually as it deepened.

The light seemed brighter here, perhaps because they were inside a greater concentration of it. It made him think of the Black Gates, with their flaming halos of light, waiting to suck the unwary down into a place where space and time changed partners, and changed partners again. Moon had seen that vision, as she passed through the Black Gate to another world; seen it again when she returned, armed with the sword of knowledge. He wondered if she had felt equally mesmerized, equally terrified, falling toward the heart of the unknown….

Ngenet’s hand was suddenly on his arm, putting painful pressure on it, pulling him back from the rail, and around. “Be careful. Don’t look down too long.”

Sparks stepped back into the narrow alcove between outcroppings of machinery, reassuring himself of the solid reality of the wall, the forms of alien equipment behind him. “Doesn’t this bother you at all?” he asked, a little more sharply than he had intended.

Ngenet shrugged. “Things don’t get on my nerves. People do.”

Sparks felt his hand tighten. He bit his tongue and managed to keep from making it personal, whether it was meant to be or not. He pushed past Ngenet heedlessly, feeling his throat close with fear as his hip brushed the light-rail, and he swayed out over the abyss momentarily. He went on, forcing himself to walk with a confidence he did not feel.

He did not look back to see whether Ngenet had followed until he was nearly halfway around the circuit. He slowed, seeing Ngenet about midway between his position and the car. Ngenet was studying some exposed infrastructure they had not seen before. And beyond him, Sparks saw another figure. The tentative silhouette of Tammis moved slowly along the catwalk in their direction. Sparks frowned, wishing that the boy had had the Mother-wit to stay inside where he was safe, and not come out here. “Ngenet!” he called, and pointed as the other man glanced toward him. Ngenet looked back, following his gesture toward Tammis.

Sparks stood watching a moment longer, almost but not quite confident enough to continue on his way. And then, not sure why, he started back the way he had come.

He watched Tammis stop, staring up along the glowing wall just as they both had done. And then he turned, leaning against the rail of light, looking down; leaning out over it in a way that made Sparks’s heart stop. “Tammis!” he shouted. Ngenet broke into a run. Sparks began to run too, heading back around the rim.

Ngenet reached Tammis’s side first, pulling the boy back, holding on to him. Sparks heard their mingled voices, made unintelligible by distance and echoes. He pushed himself, not thinking now about the narrow track or his own precarious progress along it. As he closed with them, he heard Ngenet’s voice asking Tammis questions, saw Tammis’s eyes, the dazed look he had seen there before grown nearly opaque, as if the boy were in a trance.

He pulled up short as he reached them, because there was no room to maneuver on the narrow walkway. “Tammis,” he said, the concern in his voice hardening into imtation. “Get back in the car. I don’t want you out here.”

Tammis looked at him. “But I had to come out. I have to be here. …”

“You don’t have to be anywhere, but safe,” Ngenet said, with surprising gentleness, his hands still firmly on Tammis’s shoulders. “It’s all right; you’re just a little shaken up. It’s too much for anybody out here—”

“But it’s so beautiful here,” Tammis murmured, and there was something eerily like the manner of a sleepwalker about him. His eyes drifted away from them as he spoke; he strained toward the rail again. “The light—it keeps getting brighter. And there’s a kind of music here, do you hear it? I had to come out.”

“What are you talking about?” Sparks snapped. “Tammis! Damn it, look at me—”

But Tammis turned toward the void again, staring down into it as if he were looking for the sea, his straining body silhouetted by whorls of light.

“What’s happening down there?” Jerusha PalaThion’s voice interrupted suddenly, through the earjack of Sparks’s headset. “Is everything all right?”

“No problem,” Ngenet grunted, pulling the boy back again. “He’s all right; I think maybe there’s a kind of effect the light down here has, a kind of rapture… .”

“Sparks—”

Sparks started, as Moon’s voice suddenly filled his ears. “Sparks, I don’t like this. Bring him up, it isn’t safe. Bring him up now!”

“He’ll be all right. He’s just got a case of vertigo.” Sparks felt himself frown again. “We’re not finished here.”

“I can’t leave,” Tammis echoed, not looking at them. “I have to get down there—”

“Come on, Tammis,” Ngenet said, more insistent, trying to pry him away from the rail, pulling him around. “Come on, boy, let’s get back.”

“No, I don’t want to get back in the car. I have to be near it; I have to go to it—”

“Tammis—!” Moon’s shrill, panic-stricken voice made Sparks wince; he jerked the jack out of his ear. He pushed forward, his exasperation giving his movements too much force as he caught his son’s shoulder, trying to propel him in the direction of the car.

Tammis twisted, resisting as he was caught between the movements of the two men, trying to break free. He lost his balance, and stumbled into Ngenet. His hands flailed wildly as he began to fall outward; as behind him Ngenet lost his own footing in the middle of a move to stop the boy from pitching over the rail. Tammis’s cry of surprise was drowned in Ngenet’s sudden, louder cry, in Sparks’s shout of warning as he lunged forward—colliding with Tammis, knocking him down, as Ngenet struck the rail and went over the edge.

“No—!” Sparks’s scream filled his own ears, as his frantic lunge grasped nothing but air, too late. “Ngenet!” He hung against the rail, his body strengthless as he looked over and down, at the tiny speck of black falling downward through the pinwheeling light, still falling and falling toward the black depths. Voices clamored in his head, through the headset, out of the mouth of the pathetic figure clinging to his feet, beside him on the catwalk. But he had only eyes, no other senses; only eyes to watch that spot of black growing smaller and smaller, until it was lost at last in the utter blackness below.