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She shinnied around the pinnacle, grabbing his hand in both of hers, and tore
him off his perch, sending them both into a swan dive toward the abyss.
Only after it was done did she remember her fear of emptiness. But Grisnilter
taught me about this. It should be easy. She peered with eyes that saw above
her head and below, to left and to right, all at once, Dushau eyes, normal
eyes. She felt with the nap of her skin sensitive to a thousand signals from
her environment. She heard with twice her audible range. She remembered deep
into the past and could see patterns imperceptible from the perspective of an
ephemeral.
//There!// she told Jindigar. //An unSealed Gate!// Gleaming in the darkness,
a tesseract form warped into other dimensions. Faceted sides twirled, showing
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scenes from within, like windows enticing the unwary. To enter by any of those
scenes was certain death, for it would lead them only into the vortex at the
center of the Archive, the point of contact with Infinity, the Gateway to
Dissolution, the Archive's Eye. A Sealed Archive was a self-contained maze
with no exit but no entry, either. A partially unSealed Archive was a deadly
trap for those lacking the key. No key would work on a Tampered, Mai-edited,
or Distorted Archive. Such an Archive was an abomination capable of closing
the Gate to Completion for-an entire generation.
//No!// He pulled away from her grasp, hand trembling with fear. //Takora! No!
We mustn't Tamper //
//Not to Tamper! We can't get out through Frey, because he ended inside. We
have to search for a contact point. There must be several that anchor the
Archive to you.//
The logic was impeccable, but still he resisted with the stubbornness of the
superstitious. A horrifying thought occurred to her. //You haven't dared to
interact with that Archive, have you?//
//No! I swear it, Takora, by my Oaths and Offices!//
She believed him. //Then there's no prob //
They were almost at the unSealed Gate, a black panel amid the brightly colored
ones. At the last minute, before they breasted the Gate, Jindigar screamed,
//No! I swore to Grisnilter I'll take the Archive to Dissolution rather than
risk an alteration!//
He wrenched and twisted, pitching them into a panel -showing a lavishly
appointed, royal sickroom.
An old, old human woman lay shriveled and nearly invisible among sumptuous
covers on a bed sheltered from drafts by a gorgeously embroidered canopy,
Jindigar's crest on the Dushaun colors. The room was close and humid, yet the
old woman complained bitterly of the chill.
Jindigar, trembling visibly, adjusted the thermal currents for her. He still
glowed with the vital luminosity of Renewal, the brimming energy of returning
youth. He had decades yet to go. Grisnilter knew now how integral the human
had become to Jindigar's Renewal. Her death would leave a gaping hole to be
filled by scar, leaving the youth handicapped when he finally came for
Historian's training. A scar acquired mid-Renewal. How will I ever train him
around that? But he's too talented to abandon.
"Ontarrah, you won't suffer long now," said Jindigar.
"You shouldn't have come. I never wanted you to see me like this. You must
remember me forever young as you are."
"Not forever, Ontarrah there's only a minor discrepancy between our
lifespans."
"I believed that once. I was wrong."
Jindigar edged onto the bed and took one wandering, skeletal hand in his.
She smiled up at him, a spark of youth in her eyes, her teeth pearly, her hair
ashen blond, but her skin old beyond numbering the years. "If I hadn't decided
to chase you all the way to Dushaun, I'd have taken my own life long ago.
I know that now, but I also know I'm leaving you to tens of lifetimes longer
than I'd have faced. I was selfish, Jindigar. That's no way to Completion."
Eyes bright, he whispered, "I pay the price of your company these years
gladly." He leaned over and kissed her forehead gently as her eyes closed. He
stayed that way a long moment, waiting for Ontarrah to draw another breath.
Then he sat up, and Grisnilter heard him whisper, "I loved you. I hope you
knew that. I hope it helped."
When at long last he rose and turned, his face showed the unmitigated
desolation possible only in Renewal. His wife was behind him, and both their
children. The moment of payment was upon him, and Grisnilter felt he should
leave, his job as Recorder completed with the death of the first ephemeral to
join a Renewing household.
For the first time Grisnilter noticed the family's obvious pain, betraying how
they'd valued the human too. What has the youth done?
With tender candor Jindigar's wife said, "I envied her what you could never
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give me. Only now, I've realized I loved her as a sister." She collapsed to
the floor at the foot of Ontarrah's bed and commenced a Renewal's kindred
mourning.
It was only then that the children understood. His son said in a voice that
hadn't hardened yet, "Dissolution/death?'
"I think not," Jindigar articulated as if his throat were clogged. "She'll
return. Ephemerals do, you know. But even more changed than a Renewal, and
with total amnesia." He spoke kindly to the older girl. "It doesn't hurt them.
Only we suffer the pain. Don't deny it to yourself it's not healthy. She's
gone from our lives, if not her own. If we see her again, she won't know us,
and we won't know her."
Luminous eyes met his. "I didn't hate her, Father, not really. I came to tell
her that. I was too late."
"Come. Let us mourn together, and I will teach you to grieve. After all,
what's the use of having an Aliom priest in the family, if not to teach the
overcoming of the pain he causes!" Overwhelmed afresh, he went down beside his
wife with his two children and set about the aching business of accepting a
scar that would never heal. For in granting himself a moment of fulfillment he
had brought Ontarrah to a lonely life on Dushaun where no other human ever
came. He had inflicted a searing soul-agony on his new wife. She'd agreed to
have the ephemeral in the house without knowing what it would mean. Ontarrah
wasn't a pet. She was a person. And he had condemned his Historian-talented
children to suffer premature grieving scars that would hamper them all their
lives long.
His integrity, thought Grisnilter, will, one day teach him that what he's done
is worse than Inverting. And on that day I'll be there. He went to tender the
report that eventually became the key argument in pronouncing exile on
Jindigar, until he learned. But as he backed out of the grieving room's door,
he fell, plummeting into nightmare.
She was spinning in space, panels of every shape and color, scenes culled from
the lives of uncounted Historians who'd carried this Archive, closing in on
her to crash her out of existence. All trace of Grisnilter's supreme mastery
of this filing system was gone. The system itself had been scrambled according
to a key well hidden within the Seals by a method only a Senior Historian
could hope to apply. Takora knew there was no way she could stop her mad
plunge into the Eye of the Archive she was not Grisnilter.
She clung to Jindigar's arm, refusing to cry out. They were living the oldest
and most feared Historians' nightmare falling through the Gate to Dissolution
at the Eye of the Archive, with the whole Archive collapsing around them,
squeezing them out into nothingness, imploding to its own destruction. I
gambled and lost.
Then, with the hysterical laughter that only comes in the freedom beyond
death, she shouted to the cosmos, "Ah, Threntisn, were you ever wrong! Now
you've lost the whole Archive, and your chance at Completion, for your
cowardice!" She was not coward enough even to consider grabbing the duad link
and trying to Invert within the Archive. That would surely Distort the
Archive better to ride to Dissolution. At least then they'd still have a
chance at the mythical postcorporeal Completion.
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