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CHAPTER 11

THE REFRACTED MAN


Oberlin made landfall shortly after sundown, and insisted on being given a tour of the ruins. Gaston’s men brought a float-palette, and Oberlin rode upon it as though it were a palanquin. The old spymaster insisted on breathing masks for Lascaris and himself, and Cassandra and I followed suit. Neema remained on the Ascalon, saying that the thought of all that poisoned, alien stone made him cringe.

I have painted something of a picture of the place already: the radiating aisles of stony buildings, low and square. The pillared gates at the foot of the plateau. The mural of the Watcher that Gaston introduced as the Hulle Frieze, in honor of the governor-general. But I shall endeavor to give you a schematic of the site as one of the storm-spotters might have seen it—as I saw it when I went up for the first time in the coming days.

Phanamhara, that is, the core of the ancient city, was nigh on invisible from the air. The bulk of the ruins lay underground, or else were still buried by the sands of the desert. Only the main gates and the mile-long profusions of stone projecting like fingers from it showed beyond the mass of Mount Sark. These extended like the spokes of a wheel, all but the centermost vanishing beneath those dunes which the static-field generators had frozen in place. These profusions alone recalled Akterumu to my mind, and I shuddered, following in Oberlin’s train.

Carter and Valeriev both said that they believed Sabratha to have been a minor outpost of the Vaiartu Kingdom. A military depot, so Valeriev supposed. A pilgrimage site, said Carter—who I was more inclined to trust. As Valeriev had said, Tor Carter was HAPSIS, and had been dispatched by the Magnarch of Perseus on Tiryns in advance of our arrival. Carter believed that both the sites on Sabratha and Nairi were more akin to temples, monasteries constructed by that cruel and ancient empire for the worship of their black gods. I told her that Akterumu upon Eue had been the same, an impossibly vast city alone in the wastes of that wasted world. She would later share with me that there were other planets far up the outer Sagittarius, where such green cities flowered like algal blooms across the entire surface.

And yet was it not possible that they possessed no concept of personal space? Or needed none? I had seen them swarming over one another in the vision Miudanar showed me. Perhaps theirs had been a truly communal existence. The great halls that lined those projecting spokes of stone—which Valeriev called basilicas—might have served as barracks for guards or postulants, or even for slaves.

Within the Mensa itself, there was a chaos of halls and chambers, built without regard for stories or levels. At first I thought there was no plan or symmetry to the place—as was the case in the Quiet’s ruins at Calagah and on Annica—but when Carter showed us a map, I saw I was mistaken. There was a plan, of sorts, a kind of kaleidoscopic repetition, a crystal matrix of room after room whose pattern revealed itself only at long examination.

Valeriev talked long of his efforts to excavate the deeper chambers, to reinforce those that needed it, to buttress those that had already caved in. They had begun excavations on the northern face of the plateau, some ten miles distant, where a kind of postern gate stood. The winds were fiercer on that side, facing the equator, and arresting the flow of the desert was hard. When the tour was finished, he brought us back to the camp and—after the medically advised scrub down—we were shown a series of artifacts taken from the ruins. There were shards of stamped metal—corroded almost to naught—that might have been the hafts or rotten blades of weapons, or of remotes or terminals or of some subtler machinery whose functions were lost to time.

The camp itself was simple. Phanamhara extended from the western face of the Mensa, with the road between it and the camp running almost straight from it. The barracks of the workers and guards—prefabricated longhouses all—were massed along the southern bank of the road, with the actual working buildings arrayed along the north. The greatest of these was the motor pool that housed the excavation equipment, a vast, white canvas tent held up by a geodesic structure of black carbon, giving it the look of some pocked mushroom. About its domed sides were massed the laboratories and storehouses, the garrison’s armory, and the medica. Not far off, the stack of the fusion reactor rose above all, white steam venting to the sky. Power lines snaked across the surface or under the ground, connecting the various pods and longhouses, ensuring them a steady supply of electricity. Likewise the cistern—a blue-and-white drum designed to house tens of thousands of gallons of water—stood away south below the level of the longhouses it supplied, connected by water lines.

The camp was made not only to weather the dry thunderstorms that boiled down from the equator, but to last for decades.

When we had lingered over the potsherds and other artifacts of empire long enough, Carter escorted us to the medica, where Valeriev left us. Sir Friedrich leaned on Priscian Lascaris, Tor Rassam and young Albé close behind, following Carter through the reception area where a nurse in white and green sat to hear the complaints of the guards and workers that might walk in. Carter led us through a backroom and along a short hallway, an umbilical connecting one pod to another, and into a vestibule where a pair of guards stood. Seeing the lot of us, they stood a little straighter and keyed the doors for us to pass within.

It grew noticeably colder, and Cassandra—well used to the tropics of Jadd—shivered and chafed her arms beneath her swordmaster’s mandyas. Tor Carter had to key the inner doors of what seemed an airlock to permit us into the morgue. Like every pod in the camp, the chamber was low ceilinged and gray, about thirty feet wide and perhaps forty deep. Seen from outside, the building was a box of windowless white, rounded like so many of the camp’s buildings along the longer side so that a cross section of it resembled a pill.

We had come into a long, narrow chamber that ran the width of the morgue. Hazard suits hung in lockers to our left, along with showers and a sink and various storage cabinets and the other effluvia of the medical trade. To the right, the wall was all of alumglass, and the doors of a decontamination chamber stood shut, permitting the appropriately garbed technician to enter and exit in relative safety. A console sat beneath the glass in the center of the room. From it, the coroner could control the arms and tools of the surgical suite embedded in tracks that ran along the ceiling of the chamber beyond.

“We’ve kept the bodies on ice for the last thirty-four years,” Carter said, moving to stand near her reflection in the glass.

I moved to join her, peering in at the frigid morgue and the trio of strange corpses lying within, remembering the reports on the crystal wafer Oberlin had given me.

Michael Mann had been one of the geological survey team that had overseen the excavations before Valeriev had been brought in, a patrician attracted from offworld by Sabratha’s yawning frontier. He’d been born on Tiryns, attended an Imperial academy there, and turned his talents to the task of civilizing Sabratha, and so struck out for the frontier.

The frontier had struck back.

It had been his death that brought Carter to Phanamhara with all due speed, his death that prompted Oberlin to galvanize Operation Gnomon and crew the Troglita for this venture.

“Which is the original body?” Cassandra asked, close behind me.

“They’re all the same body,” Carter replied.

The others—Oberlin and Lascaris, Albé and Rassam, Carter and Cassandra—stood behind me, their ghosts reflected in the frosty glass. Cassandra had been told about poor Mann’s fate, but the strangeness of it defied education.

“Can we go in?” I asked. “Are we still concerned about contaminants? Viruses?”

Carter shook her head. “There’s been no sign of biological agents, and the men who found the bodies have shown no signs of infection.”

“They’re here on site?” Oberlin inquired in his quavering way.

“Yes, Director,” Carter said. “I interviewed them when I arrived—you’ve seen the records?”

“I have.”

“I had them put in fugue shortly afterwards. We sent word to Williamtown—to their families—that they died in a mining accident. I can have them revived.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Oberlin said. “I’ll want them remanded to the Troglita. They cannot remain on Sabratha.”

But I spoke over him. “I’d like to speak with them before they go.”

Oberlin’s ghost frowned at me from the foggy window. “That may not be wise, my lord. The men of Atropos were much addled by their exposure to the Monumental on Nairi. It may be these men are dangerous.”

“If madness is catching, Director,” I said, looking round at him, “then I am in the least danger of any of you.” I smiled to soften the drama of my words and reassure Cassandra, whose face darkened. “How many are there?”

“Six,” came Carter’s reply.

“I’d like to see them,” I said. “Tomorrow or the day after.” I nodded through the glass. “Can we go in?”

The scholiast turned aside, gesturing for the door.

“I will stay here,” Oberlin said, eying the bodies through the window. He coughed then, drawing the eyes of all present. Lascaris patted him on the back gently, a look of concern on his gaunt features as he produced a kerchief for the old spymaster.

“What did you mean?” Cassandra had stopped. “That they’re all the same body?”

“Better to show you,” Carter said, keying the door.

I was acutely conscious of my every footfall as I passed through the door. Rassam, Cassandra, and Albé followed, breath misting the air. It was not nearly so cold as a starship’s cubiculum in the morgue, but the air was staler and more bitter by far.

“Where did you find him?” I asked, moving to stand by the nearest bench.

There were five steel slabs in the morgue, three of which were occupied and spread with white plastic. The far wall was filled with the faces of drawers, each marked by a display panel gleaming faintly in that way all viewscreens do when they are only sleeping.

“In the ruins,” Carter said. She had produced a pair of black gloves from a dispenser on the wall and snapped them over her hands. “Valeriev’s predecessor kept supplies in a few of the more secure chambers. Easier than running all the way back out here every time they need a new spade.”

I knew as much, having read Oberlin’s files. “But how far from camp?”

The scholiast frowned, paused a moment to calculate. “One-point-two miles? One-point-three? It was not in the city proper, but in one of the outbuildings along the avenues.”

I nodded, accepting the gloves she offered me.

The bodies of poor Mann had desiccated after so many years on ice. The skin had acquired a leathered, waxen quality, like the hide of some antique book. They looked precisely as they had in the holographs, save that they were leaner, drier.

“I had them pulled out of storage earlier today,” Carter said.

I was standing at the side of the nearest slab by then, peering down with head cocked to study the face of the dead man. The hair on his head was matted with old blood where the skull had been flattened, and the remains of a curling beard—neither yellow nor brown—hung on what remained of his chin and cheeks. His chest was an utter ruin: his ribs staved in, his organs smashed to pulp. But it was his eyes that most disturbed me. They were black and shriveled, apertures opening on nothing.

The twinned body was worse, and I found I could only glance at it, at the bodies entwined, overlapping like reflections in prismed glass. The smallest body lay on the farthest slab, like a child’s form.

As I watched, Carter rotated the left arm of the man between us, raising it to show the palm. There came a rustling then, and the creaking of dried flesh, and looking past Carter, I saw the arms of the other bodies raised, palms turned out.

“Deu di Foti!” Cassandra hissed, stepping back.

I brushed past Carter, bent to study the arm of the twinned man. Raising my own hand, I traced the skin of the upraised arm, saw all too clearly the places where Carter’s fingers dimpled the flesh. Taking the hand by the wrist, I gently bent one of the fingers, saw the finger in the hand of the other corpse Carter held bend in tandem.

“Does it matter how far apart they are?” I asked.

“No,” Carter said. “I took one to Markov Station shortly after I arrived. The bodies respond to any stimulus simultaneously.” She checked herself, returning the arm to rest upon the slab. “Rather, I should say, they experience the same stimulus simultaneously.”

Oberlin’s voice crackled over the comm. “But you can transport one without moving the others?”

I had an absurd image of the other two bodies pressed against the wall as Carter transported the third by flier, like magnets straining against the walls of some toy labyrinth.

“Yes,” she said. “The bodies will consent to being manipulated in concert, but . . . can be moved independently. Lord Marlowe, if you will.” She led me to the last slab, the one bearing the miniaturized body. Showing me where the rail was hidden under the plastic sheeting, she took the cot on which the body lay by one end and I the other. It was the size of a child, but weighed as heavily as the body of any grown man. Together, we moved it to the next slab, jostling it in the process. The bodies of the twinned man and the ordinary corpse jostled where they lay, but did not rise or move in concert with the first. Her point demonstrated, Carter said, “It’s possible to restrain one and move the others.” Only slowly did I realize she was staring at me. “Have you ever seen anything like this?”

I shook my head, and the scholiast seemed to deflate.

“We removed some of the tissue from the chest. Fragments of bone. Care to guess what happened?”

I knew the answer from the file, and so waited for Cassandra, who ventured, “You have three of each fragment?”

“No,” said Tor Carter. “That was how we realized what had happened here. We only have one.” She turned and found a small sample jar on a counter to one side. It held a sliver of bone. “The fragment disappeared from the other bodies.”

“You said there were no other bodies,” Cassandra said.

“Precisely!” Carter said, eyes widening. “Two of these are images of the first!”

“It’s incredible,” Oberlin said, voice cracking. “Truly incredible . . . ”

“I don’t understand,” Cassandra said, looking to me. “I am not a scholiast.”

“Have you ever used a three-mirror vanity?” Carter asked. Cassandra allowed that she had. “When you adjust the angle of the side mirrors, your reflection changes shape and size, does it not? And were you to alter the mirror—make it convex or concave, say—you could distort your reflections even more.”

While the scholiast spoke, I studied the ruin of Mann’s chest. It was as if the fist of some mighty giant had taken him under the arms and squeezed. Though the body before me then was no larger than that of a child, it resembled in perfect proportion the body of a man. Even the tattered uniform it wore was smaller. A flap over what had been Mann’s heart still bore his name in looping Galstani letters, tightly embroidered, a tear above the diacritic that formed the vowel A. I looked at the torso of the twinned body behind me. The same embroidery was there to be seen, the same tear above the same diacritic, writ larger on the body of the twinned man.

Everything about the smaller body—its features, its clothing, its belt, even the ruined boots—was rendered in perfect miniature.

“Your reflection in those mirrors are two-dimensional images cast by your three-dimensional self,” Carter said. “These bodies are three-dimensional images of Mann’s body cast by the higher dimensional reality.”

“But we only have three dimensions,” Cassandra objected.

“Not so,” said Tor Rassam. “We know there are at least ten.”

“Everything in the universe exists across all these dimensions,” Carter explained. “In the same way that your reflection cannot leave the surface of the glass, you and I cannot leave the three-dimensional surface we call ordinary space. Something disrupted Mann’s relationship to that ordinary space. What you’re seeing here is him reflected across that surface. Do you see?”

Steadily, Cassandra nodded.

“Ordinarily, these dimensions are only really apprehensible to us by virtue of mathematics, or by the properties of certain machines,” Rassam said, crossing his arms against the chill of the air. “Warp drives, for instance.”

I hardly heard Rassam as he explained the way in which warp drives folded a three-dimensional envelope of space across those higher-order dimensions.

I had seen something.

“What say you, Lord Marlowe?”

“What?” I looked round, found Carter and Rassam alike staring at me.

Have you ever seen a sun fret the edges of a cloud with silver fire? So Mann’s body was fretted, such that his edges seemed blurred to me, as though he were an oil painting smeared by the arm of some sloppy artist. Still, they gleamed, and stretched along some direction I had not seen until that moment. Consciously or otherwise, I had begun to look at the bodies with my full vision, and saw that it was precisely as Carter and Rassam had said. The potential states of the universe lay stacked upon one another like books on the shelf of some infinite library, each a subtle variation on the last—most of them so unlikely they would never occur though the gods roll their dice an almost infinite number of times.

The body lay across those stacked potentials, at right angles—as it were—to what you and I perceive as ordinary space. I could see it, as a blurring, a blending of light and color that bound the three bodies one to another.

Carter had said the other bodies were like the images in a mirror. She was almost right. Rather it was like looking through a prism. Mann’s corpse was not reflected by our reality, the same atoms appearing in the same configuration.

He was refracted, his particles splashing against the membrane of ordinary space, creating ripples so that he seemed to be many places at once.

Transfixed, I moved toward the twinned man.

“Lord Marlowe?” Now it was Oberlin’s voice.

“Quiet!” I said, tilting my head.

The vision tilted with it.

If you have drunk of too much wine, Reader, you will perhaps have seen one man become two. I have seen such many a time myself. Know then, that the body of the twinned man—which moments before held so much horror for me—appeared to me as nothing more than the body of an ordinary man, half-mummified and cold, seen with double vision.

I laid my hands upon either side of the doubled head, and gently pressed the two together. Four eyes became three. Became two. Two heads became one.

Cassandra gasped.

“Mon Dieu!” exclaimed young Albé.

Even Rassam and Carter recoiled.

I ignored them, and carefully composed the body’s limbs, crossing the arms upon the ruined breast in posture of death. When I had finished, I pulled the white plastic of the shroud across Mann’s ruined corpse.

The other slabs were empty, with only the brown stains of blood and grime left as testament to the bodies that had laid upon them.

“Abba?” Cassandra spoke first, voice trembling. “Quen tuo phael?”

I could only shake my head. A terrible pressure had risen behind my eyes, and for a moment I thought I must fall. It had been so long since I used the power for anything so great, and I had never used it thus.

“What happened?” asked Tor Carter, peering at me with eyes clear and sharp as ice.

I could feel every eye on me, and turning, I found Lascaris and Oberlin watching through the glass from the morgue’s observation chamber, and from the look in both their faces I knew that I had done precisely what they had brought me here to do.

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“You have your foxhound, it seems,” I said, speaking to Oberlin on the flats beyond the makeshift landing field. The days on Sabratha were short—around eighteen standard hours—and the sun had long since set. The old man leaned upon my arm, abandoning Lascaris at the ramp to his shuttle. We had dismissed the scholiasts, and I’d sent Cassandra back to the Ascalon. “Did you know?”

Sir Friedrich’s laugh turned swiftly to coughing, and I shied away from him, though he turned his head and covered his mouth with a kerchief. “Did I know you could perform such miracles? Of course, I knew,” he said. “I saw the suit recordings from Perfugium and Berenike, or had you forgotten?”

I confessed I had. “Even before then . . . I believed.” He smiled weakly, and pocketed his kerchief, his smile transformed to a grimace. “What is it like?”

“Like walking through mirrors,” I said, refusing to elaborate.

That seemed sufficient for the old spy. “Mirrors indeed,” he said. “I want you to keep a sharp eye out, Marlowe. Valeriev and Carter will oversee the dig with Rassam’s help. I simply want you to observe.”

He stopped walking then, and we stood facing the empty desert. The storm had blown away westward, leaving the night sky clear and so full of stars that one could be forgiven for thinking there was no air between us and them. Sabratha had no moon, and we had left the floodlights of the camp some way behind. All was silent, and—but for the wind—utterly still. The ribs of one of the long-dead leviathans rose from the dunes ahead like the pillars of some annihilated temple. Almost I fancied I could hear the wind whistling between them, carrying the nigh-forgotten echoes of some alien song.

We are gone, they seemed to sing. We are gone.

“You’ve brought the weapon down?” I asked.

“Aboard the Rhea,” Oberlin said. “Vedi has orders to deploy it on the edge of the camp, as far from the workers as may be. Our Irchtani friends will be providing the bulk of security here on the ground, supporting Gaston’s men.” He coughed again, less violently. “I understand you’ve already made friends with Chiliarch Annaz.”

I adjusted my collar against the gritty wind. “We’ve spoken.”

“You know, it was the Emperor’s suggestion we recruit the Irchtani for Gnomon,” he murmured, struggling to master his breathing. “He said they believe you to be some kind of prophet.”

“Like Dorayaica,” I said acidly. After an uneasy silence, I continued, “They think this because their ancestors fought with me. Because of those ancestors, they now travel the stars. Fight for the Imperium. Die for it. They see it as a gift.”

“They see it as an adventure, my lord!” said the old man who was much younger than I. “And it is!”

“It’s not an adventure, Friedrich,” I said. “It’s a burden.”

The old man coughed again, and when he had finished, said, “It is that, too.”

“Are you dying?” I asked.

“Death comes to all!” he exclaimed, almost brightly. “Yes, I am dying. Cancer. Not Lethe’s Sickness, of course! The ordinary kind. The doctors give me fewer than five years.”

“I am sorry,” I said, regretting the question.

“I am not!” he said. “I am two hundred forty-seven years old, by my cells. I’ll only be sorry if I don’t see the thing to its end.” He fell silent himself, and we stood a long moment with the whispering sands. “I will return to the Troglita on the morrow. I am too far from my physicians, and the thought of all that arsenic . . . ” He shuddered. “Mother Earth, but it’s quiet here. It’s never quiet aboard ship.”

High above, the light of a satellite blinked green against the unfixed stars where it passed in its slavish orbit. I watched it go. When it went below the horizon, I said, “The first spacefarers confused the Quiet and the Vaiartu, you said. The Emperor said the same.” I peered sidelong at the old spymaster. “Is there something you’re not telling me, Friedrich?”

The old man had been bobbing his head in time with my words, but said nothing.

“Did you notice the eyes? In the mural in the hypostyle hall?” When Oberlin did not reply, I pressed, turning fully to face the ancient patrician. “They were human eyes.”

Blank silence.

“I want answers, sirrah,” I said, reminding him of the vast gulf of years between us, of the class divide and all the powers it entailed.

“I don’t have any, truly,” Oberlin replied.

“Is the Quiet one of them?” I asked through gritted teeth. “The writing is the same. The markings on the mural. The anaglyphs!”

Oberlin coughed before he could produce his kerchief. “I honestly don’t know, Lord Marlowe.”

Growling, I seized the old man by his lapels. Oberlin squawked, then coughed more violently still. I felt his spittle fleck my face. I might have lifted him bodily from the sand, but I stooped instead, saying nothing.

“That’s why you’re here,” Oberlin said, voice very small. “That’s why we need you. You’re the only one who could know.”

A red light, hard and grainy, shimmered below my eyes. I recognized the sight of some gunner, a sniper doubtless with some stunner or dart-thrower. Snarling, I released the old man, let him stagger under his own power.

“Your abilities. Your . . . relationship with this . . . thing,” Oberlin said, “you’re a part of the puzzle, don’t you know?”


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