Weaves of Ashes

Chapter 562: Chapter 557: One Million Eight Hundred and Eight Thousand

Location:Above

Date/Time:3 Ashbloom 9943 AZI, Temperday, morning

Realm:Above the Lower Realm

”How high did it say,” Hulong asked, for the third time, ”in paces?”

”One million, eight hundred and eight thousand,” said Shenxin, immediately.

Jayde put her head back against the seat and closed her eyes for a moment.

This had started in Emberwane. Shenxin had come into the workshop while she was working, aged two years and eleven months, sat down on a crate, and asked what a mile was. She had told him. He had asked what it was in paces. She had said she did not know, because she had never once in her life needed to, and had gone back to what she was doing, and had learned over the following nine days that this is not an answer you may give a slate-gray dragon who thinks in lists.

He had asked Eden. Eden had made the mistake of doing the arithmetic properly — a Doha pace being what it is, and a Federation mile being what it is — and had come out with two thousand and nine paces to the mile, and had written it on the back of a supply docket, and Shenxin had made her write it out again on something that would not tear.

He had carried that docket ever since.

”It also said seventeen thousand four hundred miles in an hour,” Shenxin said, to the cabin at large, ”which is thirty-four million, nine hundred and fifty-six thousand paces in an hour, which is nine thousand, seven hundred and ten paces in the time it takes to say nine thousand, seven hundred and ten paces.”

”Stop,” said Yinglong, weakly.

”Nine,” said Jayde. ”For the rest of this flight, give everything in both.”

”Of course, Commander. One million, eight hundred and eight thousand paces. I should have asked. Thank you, Shenxin.”

Shenxin did not say anything, but he grew about an inch.

***

The sun came round at the twentieth minute.

Jayde had been waiting for it and had told nobody, because there are some things you cannot usefully warn people about, and that is one of them.

There is no dawn up there. There is no gray and then pink and then gold, no horizon doing the work of easing you into it, no air to spread the thing out and make it kind. The world’s edge came round, and the black beside it simply had a sun in it, hard and white and perfectly circular, sitting in absolute dark with nothing around it at all.

No halo. No glare, no rays, none of the softness that every painting on three worlds has ever put on it. A disc. A white disc in a black room, throwing shadows across the deck so sharp that Hulong’s went across Xingteng’s boots like something laid there with a ruler.

”Display layer to forty percent,” said Nine, and dimmed it, and nobody thanked it because nobody could.

Green had her hand up in front of her face and was turning it over, watching the line where the light stopped.

”There is no soft part,” she said.

”No.”

”On the ground there is always a soft part. At the edge of everything. It is the air doing it.” She turned her hand again. ”I have looked at my own hand every day of my life and I have never once seen the edge of it.”

***

And then Eden said, ”Tell them to look away from it,” and Jayde said, ”Everybody look away from the sun. All the way away. Aft, and give it a minute.”

They did, grumbling, and the shadows swung, and the cabin’s eyes let go of the light.

Then the stars came out.

Not came out. They had been there the whole time, and a sun and a lit world had been in the way, and the moment the human eye stops being shouted at it starts doing the thing it was built for, and what it does up there — with no air, no dust, no moisture, nothing whatsoever between the eye and the rest of creation — is entirely unlike anything that happens on the ground.

They do not twinkle. That is the first thing. Every star any of them had ever seen had trembled, because it had been seen through a hundred miles of moving air, and they had all grown up believing that trembling was a property of stars.

These did not move. They sat there, hard and steady and merciless, in numbers that the eye cannot organize and refuses to stop trying to.

Nobody spoke for some time.

”How many?” asked Xingteng eventually, and her voice was not right.

”Nobody knows,” said Jayde.

”Somebody must know.”

”Nobody knows. Not us, not anyone. You can count the ones you can see and get a number, and the number is meaningless, because behind every one you can see there are a thousand you cannot and behind those there are a thousand more, and it goes on doing that further out than anybody has ever been able to look.”

”But what are they?” said Hulong.

Eden answered that one, and she answered it in the voice she uses at the school, which Jayde had never heard her use on an adult.

”They are suns.”

The cabin waited for the rest of it.

”That is the whole answer. They are suns. That one” — she did not point, because you cannot point at a star and be understood — ”the bright one low toward the aft quarter. That is a sun, and it is larger than ours, and it is a very long way away, and that is the only reason it looks like a pinhole instead of the thing we have just been told not to stare at.”

”All of them.”

”All of them.”

Xinglong said, very quietly, ”Then how many worlds?”

And that was the question. Jayde had known it was coming from the moment she decided to bring them, and had rehearsed an answer in Voidmarch and had thrown it away, because there is no version of it that is not enormous.

”Most of them have some,” she said. ”Not all. Ours had eight before it broke, and one of those had people on it, and I was born on a different one, in a different place, so far from here that I cannot show you the direction.”

”And people,” said Xinglong. ”On the others. Not here. Out there.”

”Yes.”

”How many.”

”I do not know. Thousands of worlds that I personally know had people on them. Federation charts ran to six hundred systems and the Federation was not the whole of anything — it was one arrangement, in one region, and there were others it did not talk to and others it had never found.” Jayde let that sit for a moment and then gave them the rest, because they were owed it. ”You have been told your whole lives that there are three worlds and a sky. There are three worlds. The sky is not a sky. It is the rest of everything, and it has always been there, and it has been full the entire time.”

Huaxin, flat on her belly at the forward edge, had rolled over onto her back at some point and was simply looking up with her four feet in the air.

Nobody moved her for that either.

Reiko had not made a sound since the hull cleared.

He was out past the grating with his chin down on nothing and his silver eyes up, at the size he uses when he has forgotten to be a size, and he had been in that position for a little over twenty minutes.

[I have lived in the dark,] he said.

”I know.”

[My whole life. Every part of me is made for it, and I have never once been afraid of it, and I have never once been impressed by it.] The silver eyes did not come down. [I did not know it went on.]

Jayde put her hand on the back of his neck and left it there.

[It goes on,] said Reiko, and that was all he said for the next two days.

***

”Nine,” said Jayde, at the twenty-eighth minute, in a voice that had gone flat and working. ”New task. Priority over everything except attitude.”

”Listening.”

”Take every star you can resolve. Positions, brightness, spectra, the lot. Build me a field and run it against every Federation chart you hold.”

There was a pause of about four seconds, which for Nine is an age.

”You want to know where we are.”

”I want to know where we are.”

”I have been running that since the hull cleared, Commander. I did not mention it because you did not ask and because I have nothing.” The warmth did not go anywhere, which somehow made it worse. ”Would you like to see it?”

”Show me.”

The hologram between the seats let go of the ship and the world and opened out.

It went up through the fore section and out past the seats and kept going, and the cabin got out of its way — a pale volume of light three paces across, hanging in the middle of a ship that could not be seen, with Nine’s harvest of that morning’s sky laid into it star by star, a slow drift of small bright points turning around a common center.

”That is what I can see from here,” said Nine.

Then a second set came up inside the first, in a different color, sparser and older and arranged differently, and the two of them sat inside one another and did not agree about anything.

”That is every catalogued star in the Federation charts I carry. Six hundred systems and their neighbors, out to the survey limit.”

The two fields turned inside each other.

”I have run one hundred and nine million candidate alignments,” Nine said, ”in rotation, in reflection, at every scale and every epoch correction I hold, allowing for proper motion out to forty thousand years in both directions. My best fit is worse than chance.”

”Say the last part in plain language,” said Eden.

”There is no match. Not a poor match. Not a partial. There is not one star in that sky that appears in any chart I hold, and there is not one star in my charts that appears in that sky.” A beat. ”Wherever this is, Commander, it is not somewhere the Federation had ever looked.”

Jayde sat and watched two skies turn inside each other and refuse to be the same sky.

”Keep running it,” she said.

”I will run it until you tell me to stop.”

”Do not tell me when you fail. Only tell me if you stop failing.”

”Of course.”

***

And then Nine said, in exactly the same pleasant tone, ”There is a debris field.”

”Where.”

”Outward. Well outward — beyond the three bodies and beyond anything I would call near. It is a band, it is approximately in the plane of this system, and it is extensive.” The star field folded away and the amber-and-blue schematic came back, and grew, and kept growing until the three worlds were three small marks at the middle of it and a wide dotted ring stood out past them all. ”I am seeing several hundred thousand objects large enough to resolve and I would expect the true count to be higher by some orders.”

”Composition.”

”Rock. Iron. Some water ice. And silicates in proportions I would not expect from a natural body of that size.”

Isha had got up off the deck.

”Say that last part again,” he said.

”Silicates in proportions I would not expect—”

”No. The proportions.” The golden eyes had not left the ring. ”Read them out.”

Nine read them out.

Isha listened to the whole list with his head slightly on one side, the way a man listens to a piece of music he is trying to place, and then stopped listening somewhere in the middle of it and simply stood there, and Jayde watched a ninety-eight-thousand-year-old artifact spirit work something out about a hundred thousand years too late to do anything about it.

”That is the rest of it,” he said.

Nobody understood him.

”There are three,” said Isha. ”Everybody knows there are three. We say it the way we say there are four seasons.” He lifted one hand toward the ring hanging in the light. ”A world that size does not break into three pieces. It breaks into three large pieces, and it also breaks into everything else, and the everything else went outward and has been going round out there ever since with nobody to hold on to it.”

He put his hand down.

”She could not catch it all,” he said.

***

Jayde got out of the seat at the fortieth minute and went forward to the very front of the fore section, where the deck ends, and there is nothing under your boots and nothing above your head and nothing in front of you but the arc of a world and a very great deal of black.

She stood there with her hands behind her back and her feet apart.

She was not aware of having chosen the posture. It had simply arrived, out of a body that had held it on the bridge of six ships across sixty years, and had held it while being told things nobody wants to be told, and had gone on holding it afterward because a commander’s shoulders belong to the room and not to the commander.

Eden came up on her left after a while and stood with her, not in the posture, hands in her pockets.

They looked at it together for a bit.

”How are you doing?” Eden said.

”Fine.”

”Jayde.”

Jayde did not answer immediately. Behind them, somebody was asking Nine something, and Nine was answering at a patient length, and Shenxin was converting it, and Tianxin had discovered she could make her own shadow move on the deck.

”I did not know,” Jayde said.

”Did not know what.”

”How much I have missed it.” She said it in an ordinary voice, which was the only way it was going to get said at all. ”Four years. I have built a corps and a school and four medical stations, and I have been happy, Eden, actually happy, more than I was for most of the other one. And I stepped onto that deck this morning and heard my own boots and found out I have been homesick every single day since I got here and did not have the word for it and would not have used it if I had.”

Eden did not say anything.

”It is not the Federation. I do not want the Federation back, I would not have it back, and there is nobody left in it for me to want.” Jayde looked out at the black. ”It is this. It is being able to see how far away things are. Down there the horizon is nine miles off and everything I need to know is inside it, and I spend my whole life looking at the ground. Up here I can see the actual size of the problem.”

”And it is bigger.”

”It is much bigger.”

”Does that help?”

”Enormously,” said Jayde, and heard herself, and laughed — properly, once, with her shoulders going — and then stopped, and stood there with her eyes stinging in a way she was going to blame on the display layer if anybody asked.

Eden took her hands out of her pockets.

”I was up here twelve years before I ever met you,” she said. ”Research hulls, mostly. Long postings, bad food, a viewport the size of a dinner plate.” She put one hand on Jayde’s back, between the shoulder blades, and left it there. ”I have not said a word about it in four years either. Not to you, not to anybody, because there was no point saying it to somebody who could not have it back.”

”And now?”

”Now I have it back for two days, and I am going to be intolerable about it for the rest of my life.”

They stood there a while longer without saying anything else.

Behind them, Xinglong had come as far forward as the seats and had stopped, and was watching the two of them, and was not looking at the stars.

He had spent every day since the valley being commanded by a woman who carried baskets and argued about carts, and had believed, as everybody in that Pavilion believed, that he had a fair picture of what she was.

He was standing about six feet behind her now with a wholly different one, and he did not say a word about it to anybody, then or afterward.