“If it was too strange, we couldn’t read it,” Tiadba said. “And somebody wants us to read. Or, maybe we’ve been held back,” she said. “We’re not natural.” Here, she used a word that usually described a young one’s easy introduction into a sponsoring group. “Let’s read out loud what we’ve got so far. It’s not that hard, actually.”

After a while another doubt struck Jebrassy. “Sangmer’s not a breed,” he said as they fed the bugs from a small bag of dried cutsloop and pars. The bugs sang softly as they chewed. The older bugs apparently did not like pars, for they separated the dried grains and nudged them over the edge of the table.

“So?” Tiadba said. “Maybe he was a Tall One.”

“Some of these new words are strange. I can barely sound them. What’s this one?”

“I think it’s a number. A very big number.”

“And what’s a ‘light-year’?”

“Just read…We’ll figure it out as we go. Read,” she ordered, flicking his small ear with her finger. Jebrassy began again in earnest. Tiadba took up when he faltered, and together they read the preamble—the introductory pages—and assumed, like innocents new from the crèche, that what they read was true, though so much of it was beyond their understanding…mere sounds rising from the pages, but sounds that conveyed a creepy, compelling sort of sense, as if they shared something innately with the author and the people he described.

We traversed a ruined course between broken galaxies in a demented ship—died, revived, and wished to die again—and came home along an even harder track, carrying Earth’s salvation—and when we returned, we found ourselves splintered by our triumph, celebrated in our madness, surrounded and adored by those we had once hated as mortal enemies.

Through this, I achieved power and a small measure of freedom—and then gave it all up for love, and lost that as well. So much for my voyage to the Realm of the Shen, who claimed no human descent, nor any gens relation with the five hundred galaxies.

I tell this now to arouse enthusiasm in a Kalpa that cares little for what lies outside its walls, seeking a second dispensation—permission, if not a commission, to make one last journey, far shorter, far more dangerous, from which little doubt none of us will return.

Jebrassy sucked in his breath. “This is not going to be a happy story,” he said.

“I think you’re right,” Tiadba said.

Jebrassy gently pushed aside a letterbug that had crawled up on the book, and together, fingers intertwined, they turned to the next page.

They found what followed tougher going, especially as the bugs tired of being rearranged and neglected to form useful rows.

Eventually, Jebrassy closed his eyes and napped. Checking to make sure he was asleep, Tiadba jumped ahead through a finger’s width of pages. She thought she could feelthe book—its connections, its shape—and that left to her own devices, she would instinctively open to pages that could almostanswer her questions.

My wife, condensed out of lost principles—

Bright nimbus, eternal shadow—

Ishanaxade—the most willful, intelligent, and powerful female I have ever known—ever reconciled, even made flesh. In our life, she sought perfection through conflict, honing through strife, correction through victory and defeat—Gens Simia’s greatest contribution to the human triumph of the Trillennium, so she claimed, with a strange knowledge I dared not dispute.

And like all Devas, she linked herself to Gens Simia. Even the daughter of a Great Eidolon, unique of her kind, clung to the families of a past—however manufactured they might be, certainly in her case. My parentals, equally irrationally—and like all Menders—claimed descent from Gens Avia, a heritance reaching far back into the Brightness, associations none now understands—but what threads remain are cherished.

In the middle of our wedding, my parentals insisted on collecting the traditional fee for the legendary devouring and swallowing once carried out against us by Gens Simia: the Consumption. Perversely, Ishanaxade reveled in this myth. She paid the fee with enthusiasm, and I soon learned why; when she asserted this dominance in our marital chamber.

This became the cause of our first dispute as bound partners, a foolish argument over the Feast of Parts and Nests. In the midst of all those archaic, ritual distractions, I submitted—and endured, keeping my silence as she nibbled at my “drumstick” and my “wing,” and then began on my “thigh.” I had to subdue all my natural responses to maintain dignity.

When she looked up at me, lips rouged in blood, and while my tissues swiftly regrew, she declared we had a perfect balance—that she would always consume, and I would always provide, and survive to collect my paltry fee.

I think she meant this in jest. However, I soon found it wearisome. Tiadba underlined the last few words with her finger, unsure what any of it meant. She felt an angry unease at things she could not understand. “Did she actually eathim?” she whispered, aghast. She wasn’t sure she wanted Jebrassy to read these parts, and thought about tearing out the page—even gave it a tug, but it was too tough.

Still, something in her stirred. The measured layout of unfamiliar words sank deep, brought up memories she didn’t think she had personally lived to acquire.

Half asleep, before turning another page, she glanced at Jebrassy—so peaceful, lying beside her—and thought of partners, pairs, lovers—across all the incomprehensible words of time.

CHAPTER 41

The Astyanax met Ghentun standing before a transparent rack of glittering noötic instruments, which he was applying meticulously—without touch—to a simulacrum. The subject bore a faint resemblance to one of the ancient breeds, though larger, blockier, less graceful, and with less fur. All around them the chamber shifted at the whims of the Great Eidolon. Several times Ghentun had to move to avoid being burned, frozen, or simply crushed. Out of respect, he had set his cloak to minimum, but now he surreptitiously strengthened its protection.

And this was the Astyanax trying to be polite.

“I wonder,” he began, rotating the simulacrum. “Is this what our terrestrial ancestors once reallylooked like? Not as pretty as your ancient breeds, to be sure…but somehow, in its awkwardness, its crudity, more convincing.”

“Quite convincing,” Ghentun said. “But we’ll never know. Those records are long since lost.”

“Fun to speculate,” the Astyanax mused. “If you don’t mind a little competition.”

The simulacrum blinked at them both with obvious astonishment.

“Do you think if I confirmed its shape and set it loose in the Tiers, that it would dream, Keeper?” the Astyanax asked. “Would it behave as our ancestors once did, shedding their discarded world-lines, their untraveled fates, each time they sleep?”

Eidolons rarely mentioned fates. Their makeup precluded variation along the fifth dimension—all fates were automatically optimized into a single path. That inflexibility made them peculiarly vulnerable to the Chaos.

Ghentun walked around the simulacrum. “It’s a possibility,” he said.

“If we could ever trace back along the combined chord of this creature and its gens,” the Astyanax continued, “linking up such a sensitive animal, made of primordial matter, with its closest ancestors, however far back…could it actually testifyto those lost times? We would have to assume that its world-line would link and match with similar world-lines, retrocausally—like the mating of primitive genetic strands.”

“The experiment has been tried. It’s always failed,” Ghentun said, unsure what the City Prince knew, what the Great Eidolons had told one another across half an eternity of subterfuge.

“Yet that is precisely what you seek—confirmation of something in the remote past. The final destruction, am I right?”