Part 21 (1/2)

'Not the missing section of the G.o.d-formula,' said Hannah. 'William was a priest of the rational orders; the ritual of coming all the way out here to where his lover had preceded him to burn the last piece of Bel's work wouldn't have appealed to him.'

'Well, Bel Bessant retrieved her fragments of Pericurian scripture from here, but the Circle knows where or how. I've just returned from climbing up to the buildings on the slopes above us this place is an archaeologist's worst nightmare. Just empty rooms, thousands of them, twisted out of shape. Whatever was hot enough to melt stone turned everything to ashes here. No furniture, no bones, no pottery, no doors or windows. Certainly no ma.n.u.scripts.'

'The city beyond the gla.s.s plain might be in better condition.'

'No,' said Nandi. 'I've studied it through my telescope; if anything, it's in a far worse state. It was closer to whatever killed this civilization and there's a whole new ecos clinging to the steam fissures across there. Nothing destroys a good dig site like weeds and creepers.'

There was a distant ringing from camp, a dinner call being sounded.

'Do you want to eat?'

Hannah shook her head in answer.

'Finding your mother's bones makes it real, doesn't it? The fact that she's dead.'

'I don't want to talk about her.'

'When my mother told me my father was dead, I never believed it. It never felt real to me I would always catch myself expecting him to come through the door to our home.'

'How did your father die?' asked Hannah.

'Much as your mother did,' said Nandi. 'About the business of St. Vines' college. He was on an unauthorized dig in Ca.s.sarabia, and when the caliph's soldiers found him there, they shot him as a grave robber.'

'Did you ever stop thinking about him?'

'Never,' said Nandi. 'But when I was older, the head of the school of archaeology took me down into the southern desert to show me where she had buried his body. I still think about him, but now I know he won't be coming through the door.'

'If we find the last piece of the G.o.d-formula here we could use it to bring him back...'

'What would such a thing be but a poorly formed simulacra of how I remembered my father?' Nandi tapped her head. 'And he is already inside my mind like that now, in how I remember and honour him.'

'I think it would be more than that,' said Hannah. 'If you had the powers of a G.o.d.'

'My father had a near-perfect memory, crammed full of stories which I used to love to hear,' said Nandi. 'One of his favourites he would tell me many times. It's from one of the Circlist books of koans: The Koan of the Wondrous Thing The Koan of the Wondrous Thing. Have you heard it?'

Hannah shook her head.

'Then I shall tell it to you,' said Nandi. 'There was a young boy who was said to have been born enlightened, although many did not believe it and continually tested him. They would try to goad him by filling his shoes with crumpled pages torn out of the Book of Common Reflections Book of Common Reflections.'

'There's a few like that in the cathedral school here,' said Hannah.

'Back at St. Vines, also,' said Nandi. 'Anyway, the day came when the boy had to attend the funeral of his grandmother and the Circlist vicar leading the service noticed that of all the mourners there, the boy was the only one not crying. So the vicar approaches the boy after the service and says to him, ”Lad, why do you not cry? Did you not love your grandmother?”'

'And what did the boy say?' asked Hannah.

'He said, ”Of course I loved her, but this is a wondrous thing.” The vicar was naturally very curious about this and asked the boy to explain. The boy gave this explanation: if his grandmother had not died, she would have seen her sons and daughters die before her. If she had not died she would also have had to see her grandchildren die before her and borne the pain of that. She moved along the Circle in harmony with the natural order of the universe and that is a wondrous thing.'

Hannah nodded in understanding. At its core, Circlism was just a humanist way to underscore the mathematical truth that reality's strings were so closely woven together that there was no difference between one person's life and another's. She and Nandi really were the same, both here to find the same thing, their fates intertwined and their future bound up in the same outcome. People are all you have People are all you have, that was another of Alice's favourite sayings. Her mother had come here alone, but Hannah hadn't. She was with a young woman so alike they might have been sisters; there were the trappers and the commodore and Amba.s.sador Ortin to watch over them. Her mother's essence might have been cupped back into the one sea of consciousness, but she lived on in Hannah, and her daughter wasn't done yet. Not by a long chalk.

'I like your father's story. But there is one thing Koans normally make three points,' said Hannah. 'That one only had two. It feels as if there is something missing.'

'Yes,' said Nandi. 'But that's the thing about the death of someone you loved. It always leaves something missing.'

Hannah's lips twisted into a small smile. And that too, perhaps, was a wondrous thing.

Hannah and Nandi left the tunnel chambers and emerged into the open. The expedition had fanned their RAM suits facing outwards towards the island's newly discovered interior. It was the first time since they had left the battlements behind that their trapper guides had felt secure enough to pitch tents and sleep outside of the closed but safe confines of their suit armour. And little wonder. Hannah watched as a red cord was pegged in a wide circle around the camp. Then the trappers uncrated and a.s.sembled a portable transaction engine along with a series of bra.s.s boxes studded with flared trumpets that looked like steammen hearing manifolds, carefully placing the boxes down just inside the perimeter of the red line. Finally, they connected the RAM suits, transaction engine and trumpet boxes together with long black cables.

'You don't move beyond the red cord,' Tobias Raffold instructed Hannah, the commodore, Nandi and the amba.s.sador, 'and here's for why...'

He tossed a rock beyond the line and the trumpet-studded boxes made a series of whistling noise like kettles, the nearest RAM suit swivelling automatically, its magnetic catapult hissing once while the rock the trapper had tossed erupted into a shower of dust mid-air.

'Anything bigger than a gnat comes towards us night or day, and the suits will put a disk right through its bleeding heart.'

Commodore Black stared uncomfortably at the blinking valves on the Jagonese transaction engine controlling their suits' weapon arms. 'You'll be trusting our safety to that blinking box of lights?'

'What am I, new to this?' retorted the trapper. 'We still post manual sentries, two at a time. But when you're sleeping outside your suit, you'll be glad you have old Bessie there as an extra pair of eyes.'

Grumbling, the commodore accepted the presence of the machine picket. Hannah followed the amba.s.sador's gaze out across the gla.s.s plain to the jungle-swallowed city. 'Is that the city of your scriptures?'

Ortin urs Ortin polished his monocle, his eyes glinting sadly. 'I don't think any of us have found what we were expecting here, dear girl.'

'No.'

Hannah ignored the newly turned ground marked with a circle of boulders where her mother's bones lay and went inside her tent to try to puzzle some sense out of the pages of mathematics in the diary.

Her mother's diary and the mind she had left Hannah were all the legacy she needed.

When sleep came for Hannah, it was a hot claustrophobic thing. She was tumbling through waves of alien numbers until Tobias Raffold came into view and started catching the numbers and throwing them beyond the red cord, where rotating shards of deadly steel burst them into black dust.

'What are you doing?' she demanded.

'This is the only thing we're going to trap this trip, girl,' said Raffold. 'And they're no good to me. You can't put an equation in a zoo, or skin it for profit.'

She tried to get him to stop, but he only laughed all the harder, throwing more numbers into the RAM suits' arc of fire. Then the tenor of the dream changed, a bright light expanding from the hail of falling formulae, clearing away the darkness burning and burning and out of the fiery nimbus Hannah saw the shape of a figure resolving, a familiar silhouette.

Hannah held up a hand to protect her eyes from the glare. 'Chalph, is that you?'

'It is,' answered the familiar voice. 'I am in the great forest of Azrar-bur, waiting for Reckin urs Reckin to lead me to his glades.'

'But,' Hannah stumbled over the implication, 'that means you're dead?'

'I found out too much, Hannah, and the knowing of it was not good for me.'

'What was it, Chalph, what did you discover?'

'That history repeats itself, much like the circle of existence your people's strange church puts so much faith in. Going round and round. It spun too fast for me and I fell off.'

Hannah rushed forward as the light began to dwindle.

'Don't leave me, Chalph. My mother's gone now there's just you and me left.'