Remembrance

"Do you recognize it?" Lezuri asked.

Pinched between thumb and forefinger, he held up a slender needle for Urban to see. Ultra-thin and a full twelve centimeters long, the needle's silvery surface sliced light into sprays of rainbow glints.

"No," Urban answered, tense, wary, wondering where this was going.

"But you can guess."

"Is it like that needle you used to penetrate the hull of my ship?"

"Yes, except this one won't activate. It won't grow spontaneously. It doesn't have that capability, but everything else is there. Everything I know. All of it folded into a quantum-scale matrix."

Lezuri offered the needle to Urban. "Take it. It won't harm you. It's a gift, from me to you. All my knowledge yours—if you can work out how to access it. If you can do that, then I am wrong, and you are ready to go to Tanjiri."

Chapter 1

Lezuri's needle had remained a mystery for well over a century—a mystery that more than ever, Urban was anxious to solve.

He sat cross-legged at the low table in the front room of the cottage he shared with Clemantine. Holding the needle gently between thumb and forefinger, he turned it back and forth, admiring the way it refracted light.

The needle felt cold, yet when he passed it through a column of steam rising from the brewing teapot, no condensation appeared on it. Other than the slight friction coefficient of its surface—a structural convenience that allowed him to hold on to it—Lezuri's needle had never demonstrated any willingness to interact with the world.

Soft footsteps on the garden path outside the cottage served as an auditory alert—not that Urban needed one. With his expanded senses he had watched Vytet approach.

He reminded himself to look up as Vytet came in. It was important to make eye contact. A smile and a nod of welcome would assure his guest that he was present within this avatar and paying attention—which of course, in some way, he always was.

Vytet paused in the doorway, tall and willowy as ever, her gender lately indistinct. A delicate, feminine face, almost childish—but with the slim, hard, youthful body of a teenage boy. She wore only a long, patterned skirt, leaving her smooth hairless chest bare.

Vytet eyed the needle.

"That thing," she said, coming inside. "Do you still need it?"

His gaze returned to the needle's refracted rainbow glints. "Not so much the knowledge it contains. Still, it's a puzzle I'd like to solve."

"A puzzle Lezuri left for you . . . how to get it to open." She sat down across from him. "So strange that we never found the solution, somewhere in the memory of the silver."

"Sooth."

"Though of course Lezuri's ancient consciousness resided within the Rock, separate from the silver of Verilotus, and perhaps not within its memory."

Urban held the needle out to her. She took it cautiously. Stroked it. Turned it over and squinted at it while Urban poured the tea.

"I want you to work out how to open it," he told her.

A soft, skeptical chuckle as Vytet laid the needle in a padded case, lying open on the table.

"I have looked into it. You know that. And I've concluded this physics, like the physics of the Blade, is beyond us, that our minds are not designed to comprehend such things."

Urban sipped his tea, savoring an awareness of the silver within him. His connection to the silver of Verilotus and the vast living memory it contained had faded to nothing as Dragon departed that system—sixty-four years ago now. Yet some portion of silver remained tangled in his mind, tempting him, always, to immerse himself within its trove of memory—a personal memory of all he'd done and discovered since the silver had augmented his senses.

"Our minds are adaptable, Vytet."

"Yours more than mine."

She said this because she'd rejected a permanent entanglement with the silver. She'd lived with it during the years they'd spent at Verilotus, but in the end she'd discarded her planetary avatar, explaining, I'm losing myself in obsession, endlessly chasing the chains of memory the silver contains.

Vytet had not been alone in that decision. Among those who had continued the voyage, all but Urban had made that same choice.

Still, for all her life, Vytet had trained her mind to see the world in new ways, and in her mind—her brilliant, adaptive mind—she walked paths that Urban had never been able to follow, either as himself or as one of his highly specialized Apparatchiks.

He needed Vytet to reconsider the puzzle of the needle.

Setting his cup down with a soft tap, he said, "There must be another way to approach the problem, one we haven't considered yet. Lezuri created that needle here, aboard Dragon. If he can do it, we can do it. And if you crack this puzzle, my guess is we'll be one step closer to cracking the physics of the Blade."

This last argument did not win her interest as he'd hoped. Instead, she drew back, lips pursed in wariness, eyes narrowed, and her youthful brow drawn down in a worried scowl.

"Why would you want to bring that knowledge back into the world, Urban? A knowledge like that . . . it would let you tear apart worlds."

He did not allow his gaze to waver. Nothing of fear could be heard in his tone as he asked her in a gentle voice, "We need to know, don't we? We're bound for Tanjiri. An entity exists there—Lezuri believed it anyway—and the evidence suggests he's right."

Tanjiri had been a cordoned star of the Hallowed Vasties, cloaked in a swarm of orbiting objects so abundant they'd hidden the star's light. But the cordons had disintegrated all across the Hallowed Vasties. At Tanjiri, as everywhere, starlight shone through.

Nearly two millennia had passed since then—and much of Tanjiri's cordon was simply gone. The Apparatchik known as the Astronomer had mapped a wide, chaotic belt of scattered debris shepherded by rare, broken megastructures. Those remnant ruins constituted only a small fraction of the former cordon. Urban interpreted the missing mass as evidence of brutal warfare. And yet somehow a living world had survived through it all—through the creation of the cordon and its cataclysmic collapse.

Designated Tanjiri-2 in the Master Star Catalog, the planet continued to orbit as it always had, within the star's habitable zone. But in the millennia since the star catalog had been compiled, Tanjiri-2 had acquired a large moon, Tanjiri-2b, miraculously blue-green and alive like its partner, and rotating independently. If it had been a natural moon, formed in the planet's distant past, it would have long since become tidally locked, with one face always turned toward its primary. But Tanjiri-2b enjoyed its own complex cycle of day, night, and a twilight bathed in the varying blue-green glow of the planet.

Something had created that moon.

Thinking about it, a shiver prickled Urban's skin.

Did Vytet see it? Maybe so. Her scowled deepened. She eyed him with a mistrustful gaze.

"Are you saying you've changed your mind?" she asked. "That you won't go to Tanjiri unless you possess this knowledge?"

"That's not what I'm saying."

Even so, Lezuri's remembered warning haunted him: You are not ready to encounter what exists there.

Did that remain true? Despite all he'd learned at Verilotus?

He did not speak of such doubts aloud. Instead, he assured Vytet, "We are going, but I want your help with this, because I want to be as ready as we can be."

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