The darkness swallowed him up. There was a sudden flash, and Will found himself
in a long, narrow, crystalline corridor.
The walls were of the same translucent material as the outside of the
building; within them, colorful electricity sparked, arced, vanished into
nothingness. As best he could tell,
there was no ceiling; the walls stretched up and up, beyond the range of his
vision, into murky infinity.
The rotten-egg smell of the air
outside had been replaced with a faint metallic tang; he could breathe
comfortably again, but his throat was still parched, his eyes still full of
grit. His head was swimming, and there
was a continual low buzz in his ears. Dehydration.
Whatever my task is here, I need to get it done quickly. This body isn’t going to last much longer.
Will. You have come. You have defeated the enemy. This
time the angelic voice wasn’t just in Will’s mind, but was actually
audible. It seemed to come from
everywhere at once, as if every surface in the corridor was a loudspeaker. As always, Will’s soul resonated to it, as if
he himself were a tuning fork.
“Yes,” he responded. “The Rel Dega. You never told me there were two kinds of
Seraphim.”
I
did. They were the enemy of whom I
spoke. The inventors of the STYX, and
the saboteurs of the skein. A criminal
syndicate. The enemies of enlightenment
and union. The foes of all humanity. No one blames you for what they have done,
Will.
“What?” I asked, startled. “Blame me? Why would
they?”
It
is immaterial. Your coming here has
forced the Rel Dega into the open, and they will be dealt with soon
enough. Know merely that you are not to be
held accountable. The council is united
in this. More
questions sprang to Will’s mind, but the voice spoke, and they were somehow
washed away. Proceed,
Will. Your destiny lies just ahead of
you.
He walked the corridor on wobbling
legs, leaving bloody footprints behind him.
Beneath his feet, the floor felt like stone, but each step produced a
hollow, tinny chime, as if against metal.
There was light ahead, and a sense
of space. He walked the last few steps,
and the corridor opened up, and Will felt his mind reel.
The chamber in which he found
himself was―large was not the word. It
was immense, larger by many orders of
magnitude than anything the building should have been able to hold. It seemed to Will, as he looked across the
vast, cavernous expanse at the cliff-like, crystalline edifice of the far wall,
that he was looking at the side of a mountain that was miles, if not hundreds of
miles, away. And yet, as he stepped into
the chamber, space seemed to warp
around him, to change, and it was as
if the distance was, really, only a few steps, if he chose for it to be so…
The walls, however, were the least
remarkable aspect of the expanse in which he found himself. All around him, stretching from wall to wall
and from the impossibly distant ceiling to the floor, from left to right, down
and up and in and out and in other, indescribable directions, were threads.
The threads weren’t any thicker
than a spiderweb; they were perfectly translucent, nearly invisible. Entering the chamber, it seemed to Will that
he walked through hundreds of them, feeling no resistance; yet looking behind
him, he saw them still there, unbroken and apparently undisturbed. Were they formless, then, like a soul? Will reached out to touch one and was able to
grasp it firmly between his finger and thumb, to move it around as he
wished. It was as if the tangibility of
any given thread was a matter of his personal convenience.
Will stood in the center of the
chamber―miles away, it seemed to him, from the corridor through which he had
entered seconds earlier―and surveyed the scene.
The colorful electrical discharges which he’d observed in the corridor
walls also ran up and down the threads; where the threads crossed one another,
the discharges sparked together in a starlike twinkle. How
many threads? Trillions, at least. They all seemed to be taut, stretched at full
tension from surface to surface, yet looking at them, he could plainly see that
some of them bent, curving gently from one anchor point to another.
The
skein. The latticework of reality. There were no walls around him; Refi’s voice
now seemed to emanate from the strands themselves. The greatest
technical achievement of the Seraphim.
“This…is…” Words failed him.
Precisely
correct, Will. This Is. And because This Is, everything else Is as
well.
His head hurt. Will knew that he was looking at a machine
far more complex than the brain with which he was trying to comprehend it. “But…I don’t know what to do…”
The mirth was gone from the voice,
the tone paternal. Of
all the human beings who have ever lived, you are the only one equipped with
the ability to look upon the skein with mortal eyes. You have wondered, Will, at what you
considered to be your extraordinary abilities.
But I assure you, on the grand scale of things, your other skills―flight,
incarnation―are
puny things compared to the ability to perceive the skein. It is a gift beyond compare.
“A gift?” he asked. “A gift assumes a giver.”
Quite
right, Will.
“Then who gave this gift to me?”
I
did.
“The Seraphim, you mean? Or the council?”
No. I myself.
“When? How?
For what purpose?”
So
that you could do what you must do now. The STYX
prevents me from walking where you now walk, Will. But clothed in mortal flesh, you are
impervious to its effects. You can
act. Find the flaw, Will. Find the flaw in the skein.
His mind whirled. “But…it’s too big…it’ll take
years…centuries…”
But it didn’t. Will could see the skein itself, but he could
also see shapes within it, patterns, the ebb and flow of causality that it
channeled. And he could feel, by some
hidden instinct, the spots where the colors were too faint, signaling that the
lifeblood of reality had been dammed somewhere upstream.
The
flaw is right over there… A few yards away, or a few miles. Just a few steps, either way. A vast, jumbled swirl of circulating
charges. In all the immensity of the
chamber, there it was, a tangle of thread no larger than his fist.
So
foolish were we,
the angel spoke. We made our technology
so accessible. We thought our race had
evolved beyond dissent, beyond sabotage.
But we were wrong. We made it so
easy for the Rel Dega to tangle the threads, to bring down the STYX upon
us. To wreck our system beyond the
possibility of repair.
Slowly, things were becoming clear
to him. “But…not beyond the possibility of repair. Not really.
Beyond the capacity of the Seraphim, acting directly, because the STYX
would block them. But…”
To
clothe a soul in flesh, to send a mere human to undo the work of rebel angels… If
he heard anything in the intonations of the voice now, it was pride. The idea was not
mine. But once the tool was before me,
the opportunity was plain.
Mere
human? Tool?
Something in Will screamed a warning.
But the voice was speaking again, washing away doubt. And the opportunity
is yours now, Will. The source of your
deprivation, and that of all humanity, lies before you. To restore your memory, and that of all your
comrades on Elysium―to
bring down the STYX, on Asphodel and Earth―you
need merely untangle the skein.
Will hesitated for just the
slightest moment, and then his fingers went to work.
As the threads parted from one
another, as the knot slowly unraveled, the strands of the skein snapped back
into place around him, as if once again under tension.
Good,
Will. You can feel it, can’t you?
And Will could. A fog was lifting inside his mind. He could feel something surfacing inside him. Something coming back. Something important.
But…is
that all there is? Are those all the
memories I have? I expected more…it
doesn’t seem like sixteen years worth…
Yes…just
a few threads more, now. The STYX is
fading, Will. I will be with you soon.
As his fingers worked at the
tangle, as the threads returned to their place, Will watched the discharges
flow once again, freely, down each line.
And it seemed to him, for a moment, watching the energy flow―the way one
line interacted with another―that he could actually foresee the way a slight
alteration in the web could alter the shape of reality itself. If I
reached out―if I were to move that strand to the left―cross it with that
strand―it might, somehow…
But his sight was blurring. The journey had taken almost everything out
of him; he was on his last legs, and he could not trust his perception; surely the remaking of the skein was too
great a task for the likes of him. Just do the job, Will, he thought. Just
get back what’s yours.
His fingers worked at the
snare. The knot grew smaller in front of
him. The size of a golf ball; then, of a
pea.
The last few threads parted,
snapped back into place. The logjam of
color broke apart, flowed freely through the skein once more.
And Will remembered everything.
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