Chapter 89: In Another World

Lucky accessed the LE around the Garden of Wonders. A labyrinth of trees and pathways, three-dimensional, with its platforms and tunnels-but also, by virtue of the transient technological magic that operated aboard the great vessels, inverted paths where trees grew upside down.

There were also miniature forests, hidden beneath glass domes and magnified a thousandfold through holographic projection, as well as forests of scents or vegetal sounds, recreating-through creaks and fluttering leaves-the illusion of wooded spaces upon slabs that were, in truth, empty. Other places lay fallow, experiments in what the fruit of chance might one day yield.

The LE devoted to control and instruction were numerous, and Lucky jumped from one to another toward one of three structures-not the most imposing, but the most tormented. Beside the embassy of Antioch-a great steel edifice whose diaphragm-like windows opened or closed according to the building’s alignment with the star of Antioch-and beside the headquarters of the Independent League of Xenobiology, an ugly gray concrete rectangle dating from before the Garden, there rose, strange and disturbing, the headquarters of the ESQ.

Upon a basin of liquid metal resembling mercury seemed to float a spherical structure composed of two Gothic domes fused at their middles. Naked, shivering human statues reached out their hands toward winged Xenos standing upon columns encircling the basin. A footbridge, raised at this hour when stars fell upon Alonso, allowed access to it.

Around the sphere, transparent wings let visitors gaze through distorting glass upon altered visions-each stained-glass panel showing a different version of Alonso, a metaphorical recreation of the multitude of parallel worlds.

Lucky fumbled to find a connection to the interior-cameras within a choir of prayer, LE of function within the princely, modern apartments of Tmolos. He descended toward the crypt.

The crypt was accessible through a dimly lit gray corridor. He could even see the door from a camera-a thin black line upon a metal wall. But that was his limit: there were no LE beyond. Or rather, there had to be, since he could see another camera fixed upon the door, but it was on a closed circuit. He searched everywhere, interrogating every LE, in vain. He SCREAMED. But no one understood.

He withdrew his hand and found himself once more in Nemo’s server, in the After, after a long, reverse, passive journey-drifting gently from one planet to another.

-”Nemo?”

-”Well, Lucky, we thought you were fried!” exclaimed Euyin through a communicator reaching up to him. “It’s been an hour since we heard from you!”

-”You’re kidding-an hour? I’ve been in there two days!”

-”Your intuition’s right,” said Nemo. “The speed difference between your shell and what we experience is roughly a ratio of thirty hours. But when you interface with an external output-like with us-it synchronizes with reality. It works, apparently. The tech works. That’s great news. Euyin, we might actually go out-live with the LE...”

-”Nice trip, buddy?” asked Euyin. “I see you went pretty far.”

-”Yeah, it’s fine. But I’ve hit a wall.”

He explained the situation to Nemo and Euyin. The latter suggested:

-”No Androids around?”

-”That wouldn’t work,” said Nemo. “Androids are compatible with a purely neural network, and Lucky here is a shell. Not to mention the governmental ban. But I have an idea.”

“There’s a solid machine, made of metal and silicon, behind what we call the LE,” Nemo explained. “The terms servers and electronics refer to technologies we’ve mastered for nearly a millennium, and which represent physical components. In the past, information traveled through a wire, an optical fiber, or even radio waves. But recent technology uses a ‘light laser’-that is, straight light. A light beam has an interesting property: it can be crossed by another beam without being interrupted. That allowed us to create three-dimensional processors and storage. The famous servers of the After, continents buried beneath the Earth’s crust, are spheres that exchange light within their interiors.”

“Lucky,” Nemo went on, “extend your all-seeing hand toward the light in the corridor where the closed door is. In front of the camera, switch the light off and on, following a code that will enter its circuits. Ask it in return to emit a faint light beam that you’ll interpret ... do you understand?”

No one, standing before the entrance to the crypt, saw the lights flicker, for they blinked so rapidly that one would barely have perceived a drop in brightness. But yes-and Lucky confirmed it to Nemo-he had been able to extend his hand into the crypt. For an instant, as he advanced thus, freed from interfaces and restricted territories, a strange intuition came over him: that the distant stars he had gazed upon as a child, wandering through the marshes of Booz, mud up to his knees-those stars, lightly flickering in the sky-might themselves be the AI terminals of unfathomable intelligences that had, even then, been trying to communicate with him.

A spiral stone staircase. Images of parallel worlds carved along the walls. On a final door, an almost childish warning read:

“You who profane our Naos without the Master’s consent, survival shall be denied to you for all eternity.”