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deuceoftears) wrote2023-04-20 12:42 am
deuceoftears) wrote2023-04-20 12:42 am
Entry tags:
Memento Youri - you wondered what planets were like
After an abbreviated breakfast, you set out for the conference. “Try to keep up,” Kujen said, “since you’re not used to variable layout.”
“Variable what?”
“It’ll make more sense when you experience it.”
You weren’t sure what you had expected the halls of a Nirai station to look like. Gray and sterile, perhaps. You should have figured that a Nirai station hosting the Nirai hexarch himself would pay tribute to Kujen’s love of fine things. Ink paintings on heavy silk depicted birds in migration, only when you looked more closely, the black strokes that formed the birds’ wings were composed of tiny, impressionistic moths. The halls abounded with displays of orreries and astrolabes, abacuses with beads of jade and obsidian. And they were walking on carpet, iridescent gray with patterns on it in paler pearly gray, with pile so deep that if you lost a toe in it you’d never see it again.
More alarming was the fact that they were walking down an infinite corridor, which had no apparent end or, when you glanced back, beginning either. You couldn’t see far into the distance, as though moisture hazed the air. The others’ unconcern told You this was nothing new, but you didn’t like it.
That wasn’t all. You had a sudden sense of the whereness of the station and everything in it, based not in vision but on concentrations of mass. Kujen and Dhanneth appeared in this othersense just as they did in your ordinary sight. Their surroundings, though, were confusingly knotted, as though spacetime itself was warped between two disparate points.
As a test, you slowed and closed your eyes. The othersense didn’t go away. In fact, now that you knew you had it, you couldn’t make it go away. Kujen and Dhanneth continued forward. You examined the rest of your surroundings—he could sense in all directions, a handy trick—and began detecting other moving masses that you suspected were either people or, for the smaller, denser ones, servitors.
Better not reveal this to anyone else until you knew more about where it had come from. you were pretty sure standard-issue humans didn’t randomly sense mass. You hurried to rejoin the other two.
At last they arrived at an enormous pair of doors. You could have sworn that they materialized between one step and the next. The doors sheened black with a faint silver scatter as of stars, marked with the Nirai voidmoth emblem in brighter silver. They slid open at Kujen’s approach, unnervingly noiseless.
You didn’t pause or look left or right, up or down, as you followed Kujen across the threshold, despite the way your back prickled. You had to get this right. There was no other option. Behind you, you heard Dhanneth’s ragged breathing, but you didn’t dare look around to see what the matter was.
Kujen had led them into a hall with a high arched ceiling and pillars of black veined with gold. More than the lanterns with their trapped, frantic moth-shapes throwing irregular shadows across the dark walls, you noticed the Kel commanders, a row about ten across and ten deep.
The Kel commanders had, almost as one, knelt before Kujen.
...
The first surprise, once you exited not-Medical, was the view. Someone had set up the hallway so the walls imaged what you guessed was Isteia 3 and its moons. You couldn’t help slowing to gawk at it, your first good view of a planet with its marbled swirls of cloud and ocean and dark land masses. Clusters of lights shone faintly from the moons, which must be cities.
Even more impressive, and not in a good way, were the ruins of a station: Isteia Mothyard. You knew from the intel reports what it had once looked like, an immense cylinder sporting numerous blisters for the young voidmoth hatcheries. Your people had reduced it to a shatter-scatter of metal fragments and scorched shards. You had the awful suspicion that whoever had decided to image this particular spectacle had done so the way you might put up a trophy.
“Variable what?”
“It’ll make more sense when you experience it.”
You weren’t sure what you had expected the halls of a Nirai station to look like. Gray and sterile, perhaps. You should have figured that a Nirai station hosting the Nirai hexarch himself would pay tribute to Kujen’s love of fine things. Ink paintings on heavy silk depicted birds in migration, only when you looked more closely, the black strokes that formed the birds’ wings were composed of tiny, impressionistic moths. The halls abounded with displays of orreries and astrolabes, abacuses with beads of jade and obsidian. And they were walking on carpet, iridescent gray with patterns on it in paler pearly gray, with pile so deep that if you lost a toe in it you’d never see it again.
More alarming was the fact that they were walking down an infinite corridor, which had no apparent end or, when you glanced back, beginning either. You couldn’t see far into the distance, as though moisture hazed the air. The others’ unconcern told You this was nothing new, but you didn’t like it.
That wasn’t all. You had a sudden sense of the whereness of the station and everything in it, based not in vision but on concentrations of mass. Kujen and Dhanneth appeared in this othersense just as they did in your ordinary sight. Their surroundings, though, were confusingly knotted, as though spacetime itself was warped between two disparate points.
As a test, you slowed and closed your eyes. The othersense didn’t go away. In fact, now that you knew you had it, you couldn’t make it go away. Kujen and Dhanneth continued forward. You examined the rest of your surroundings—he could sense in all directions, a handy trick—and began detecting other moving masses that you suspected were either people or, for the smaller, denser ones, servitors.
Better not reveal this to anyone else until you knew more about where it had come from. you were pretty sure standard-issue humans didn’t randomly sense mass. You hurried to rejoin the other two.
At last they arrived at an enormous pair of doors. You could have sworn that they materialized between one step and the next. The doors sheened black with a faint silver scatter as of stars, marked with the Nirai voidmoth emblem in brighter silver. They slid open at Kujen’s approach, unnervingly noiseless.
You didn’t pause or look left or right, up or down, as you followed Kujen across the threshold, despite the way your back prickled. You had to get this right. There was no other option. Behind you, you heard Dhanneth’s ragged breathing, but you didn’t dare look around to see what the matter was.
Kujen had led them into a hall with a high arched ceiling and pillars of black veined with gold. More than the lanterns with their trapped, frantic moth-shapes throwing irregular shadows across the dark walls, you noticed the Kel commanders, a row about ten across and ten deep.
The Kel commanders had, almost as one, knelt before Kujen.
...
The first surprise, once you exited not-Medical, was the view. Someone had set up the hallway so the walls imaged what you guessed was Isteia 3 and its moons. You couldn’t help slowing to gawk at it, your first good view of a planet with its marbled swirls of cloud and ocean and dark land masses. Clusters of lights shone faintly from the moons, which must be cities.
Even more impressive, and not in a good way, were the ruins of a station: Isteia Mothyard. You knew from the intel reports what it had once looked like, an immense cylinder sporting numerous blisters for the young voidmoth hatcheries. Your people had reduced it to a shatter-scatter of metal fragments and scorched shards. You had the awful suspicion that whoever had decided to image this particular spectacle had done so the way you might put up a trophy.