SIMURIA · TEN MONTHS AFTER LANDFALL
It took nine days to reach the bottom. On the sixth Aizen stopped calling it a mine.
He had come down for the far end of the vein, to learn what fed this world and whether it could be carried off.
For two days it was still a mine. Deskunte workings, cut by local miners a century ago.
At every junction somebody had chiselled a shelf where men stopped to thank the rock for what they took.
A child's handprint sat in the old dust, at a level no child had any business being brought to. Gin looked at that one a while and said nothing, which from Gin was a paragraph.
Okonjo had asked to come, which nobody expected.
For ten months her research material had arrived on a table already dead, the eyes still open. Down here was living tissue nobody had to be killed for.
The veins ran finger-thick through the grey stone.
By the third day they were the thickness of an arm and Gin had stopped sampling them.
On the fourth they walked six hours down a seam a man could have lain across.
On the fifth there was no tool mark anywhere, and never had been.
Sawicki's probe said the rock had held blood heat for twelve hundred metres. He read it out in the flat voice he kept for numbers he disliked.
* * *
What changed on the sixth day was not the size. It was the branching.
Stone cracks. It cracks where the pressure tells it to, in a scatter, with no thought for what a crack might be for.
Nothing they had walked down since the second day scattered. It tapered.
Every junction split one wide passage into two narrower ones at the same angle, and then those split again.
The whole of it had one purpose. It carried something from one large place out to a great many small ones, and wasted none of it.
Aizen stopped in a gallery two hundred metres across, and his lamp went up and found nothing at all.
Then he understood what he had spent six days walking down.
A capillary. The smallest vessel a body has, the one at the far tip of the branching.
Two hundred metres across, and it was the small end.
He gave the thought ninety seconds of doubt, then corrected the heading of the survey.
Sawicki asked to go up that evening. He did it standing, and properly, and offered no reason.
"Of course," Aizen said. "You have done the difficult part, which was coming this far. Gin will walk you to the last ladder."
"I'm sorry."
"Don't be. You are the only one of us behaving reasonably."
He meant it as a courtesy. Two evenings later he found it had been a measurement. Leaving was the reasonable act. Okonjo stayed, and what happened to her proved it.
* * *
Gin was nine hours up the shaft with Sawicki when the wall answered somebody.
Okonjo had been ten hours at the face and would not stop.
The seam floor was wet ore. It went out from under her and she opened her left forearm on a rib, elbow to wrist.
She did not shout. She got a hand over it and it came through her fingers.
Then, for about a second, she wanted it to stop hurting.
That was all she did. She wanted it.
She did not ask for anything. Aizen was certain of that afterwards, and it was the worst line in the finding.
On this world that is the whole of prayer. Nobody kneels and nobody needs the words. The thing in the ground hears wanting, answers wanting, and has never once asked who is doing the wanting.
A want like hers normally has four thousand kilometres to travel. It arrives at a shrine on the surface as a little warmth in somebody's wall.
There were six inches of rock between Halima Okonjo and the source.
So it came at full strength, and it came at once.
The bleeding stopped first. That was the part he kept. The mercy came first, and there was nothing in it that was not kind.
Then it went on giving, because giving was all it had ever learned to do, and nothing in it had been built to stop.
The grey-gold came up under the skin of both wrists in fine threads, the way it had in a soldier out of a ditch eight months ago.
"Oh," said Okonjo. Then, level, the way she read out a number, "I can't tell which of the two things I'm holding."
She had said that same sentence over the soldier on her table. About a sample.
Tessek Ukhan Dral had climbed toward his god for thirty-two years and got two thirds of the way into becoming one. She had been at it ninety seconds.
He could not cut. Finding the joint between two things is Gin's talent and not his, and Gin was nine hours above him with a physicist and a lamp.
So he did not reach for the vein. He did not reach for her wrists.
He went for the wanting.
The god was the size of a continent and nothing could close on it. Her want was four seconds old and the size of one person. It was the only part small enough to hold.
The sphere came out of the air the colour of a gas flame and went into her at the collarbone the way a coin goes into water.
She stopped with her hand open.
Sealed, she could not want anything. No want, no prayer. The line went dead mid-sentence.
Nineteen kilometres down, something enormous was left holding an answer and no address to put it at.
He had known that would happen before he threw. He had priced it and thrown anyway.
The seam went warm. Not the wall beside him. All of it, in the same tick, the way every shrine on that world rises together.
Then the light in the vein overhead did something it had not done in seven days.
It hesitated.
Aizen stood in a living thing with a stopped woman at his feet and waited to learn whether he had woken it.
Two hundred and eleven seconds. He counted them.
Then the light took up its old habit and went on being a thing that had not noticed him.
Gin came down in under three hours, which was not possible.
The timing was the difficulty. The instant the seal lifted she could want again, and the god would resume answering her.
So they agreed on a moment. Aizen let her out of it and Gin cut in the same tick, with no margin in it worth the name.
Most of it went back down the way a guest leaves.
Two threads in the palm of her left hand did not. Gin can only cut a joint, and in those two places there was no joint left to find. They had stopped being the god and started being her.
"That's the lot," Gin said. "I'd like it in the file that I was late."
She went up on the eighth day and did not argue, which was the loudest thing anybody did underground.
* * *
On the eighth day he found the pulse.
It was luck and a long sightline. Their lamps threw an ore rib's shadow onto a wall forty metres off, and the shadow crawled.
The wall was moving. Out, and then back. Aizen watched the shadow travel the breadth of two fingers, and stop, and come back.
He set a mark, sat down on the floor of a living thing, and timed it with a pocket watch made four light-years away.
Eleven minutes and forty seconds. Near enough.
He timed it eleven times, which was nine more than the finding required.
Eleven minutes and forty seconds was also the gap between strokes of every temple bell on the northern continent.
Nobody had ordered that. Two thousand years of ringers had drifted into step with the breathing under their feet, the way a man falls into stride beside a friend without deciding to.
No priest alive knew it. He wrote one line about it and went on down.
* * *
The chamber on the ninth day was not a chamber, because a chamber has a far wall. The lamps went out into it and did not come back with anything.
Gin read it from the lip for four minutes, then said the roof was about nineteen kilometres up. The about was the best anyone would get out of him.
The core hung in the middle of it.
It had no face and nothing about it looked back. It was not an eye or a heart or a seated figure with lamplight on its knees.
It was a thickening. Where the veins arrived they stopped being separate, the way rivers stop being rivers.
What stood there was a brightness that shed no light, and a warmth with nothing doing the warming. It was roughly the size of a small sea.
And it was asleep.
Something came down while they stood there.
Gin saw it first, because Gin sees everything first. He put out a hand to stop Aizen walking. He had not done that in years.
"It's answering someone." His eyes were open. "Right now. While it's asleep."
"Somebody up there wants something and it's just… handing it over. It doesn't even know it's doing it." A pause. "That's the saddest thing I've ever seen, Aizen-san, and I've seen your face in the mornings."
Aizen watched the warmth go up and out.
Four thousand kilometres east and a long way above, somebody had asked for something so small the asking barely made a shape. The answer went to meet it anyway, the way a sleeper's hand finds a blanket.
Neither of them said the other thing. Two days ago that same reflex had reached Okonjo at six inches.
He took the measurement himself. He did not want it from a box.
The scale was his own, built on the Moon off a case of dried fingers.
Sukuna had been the King of Curses, the strongest thing Aizen's world ever grew. All of him, at his height, measured twenty.
Aizen measured thirty-five, and knew what that meant about any room he entered.
The reading settled at fifty and stayed there.
The scripture under Khersa called it Vol Kalyu, the old priestly name for the thing at the bottom. The linguists had never turned it into a phrase they liked.
So Aizen wrote his own word at the head of the page. The Marrow would do.
He stayed on past any reason to. He put his bare palm flat against the rib of the vein and left it there, the way a man warms his hands at a hearth.
It was warm. It had been warm for two thousand years.
The woman on the dry shelf had taught her grandson to say thank you to a wall. This was the wall.
Her mother had thanked it before her, and every frightened farmer back to the first one. Back to whoever first looked at something terrible in the dark and decided, against all available sense, to be grateful to it.
"You told me we had set up house on its ankle," Aizen said.
"I did."
"You were being modest."
Gin gave him the seam before they left. He always found it, and had never once enjoyed saying so.
"There's nothing holding it in. I've hunted for a skin and there isn't one." A shrug. "It isn't sitting down there, Aizen-san. It's being pressed into shape. There's a note inside an organ pipe. There's nothing inside the pipe."
"She was in pain," Aizen said. "That was the whole of it. It heard her being in pain."
"I know."
At the shaft he put his hand on the first rung and did not turn round. "If somebody up there asked it to be rid of us. Would it?"
"Instantly."
"Ah."
"They would have to notice us first."
Gin thought about that for the length of one rung. "That's less comforting than you made it sound," he said, and climbed.
* * *
Ferreira gave him the surface in ninety seconds, having learned he wanted the shape of a thing, not the detail.
"The temple has called the Rite of Accounting," she said. "That is their emergency. Every shrine in the country is being counted and the counts are going onto the travel papers."
"The burnings on the dry shelf have moved two provinces north. They are not stopping."
"The Hundred Mouths have rung for two months without a break, and nobody in Khersa can tell me why."
"And one inquisitor has stopped riding at the Rumelians and gone into the census rooms with a pencil."
Aizen asked for that name twice, which he did not often do.
"Iresh Ukhan Vey."
"Thank you. Now the other thing."
He put the lattice up on the glass, the vein system of the whole planet drawn out flat. The room went quiet the way it did when he became formal.
"Understand what it is first. The rest follows from it."
"There is no organ down there. The core is a shape that pressure makes. Every vein on this world pushes inward, and has done every day for two thousand years."
"Where all of it arrives, the energy has nowhere left to go. So it stands up into a shape."
"It is not a stone in a bag. It is a note in a pipe. Stop the air and there is no note to carry away."
He touched the glass. Lights came up in their thousands, across the northern continent and then the others.
Every one was a terminus, where a vein came near the surface and a person could kneel and be heard. 41,609.
"I want it out of the ground alive. Whole, and still a note."
"Cut one vein and the pressure goes unequal. The note stops. Gin gives me three quarters of a second."
"In that time the whole of it drains back down the lattice. It becomes the pleasant warmth in the wall of a hut on the dry shelf."
"Nothing is destroyed. Nothing is so much as bruised. Gathering it again would take another two thousand years."
Okonjo asked, without looking up, whether it would feel that.
"No," Aizen said.
She wrote the number in her margin, underlined it, and said nothing at all. There was grey-gold in the palm of the hand holding the pen, and she had stopped keeping it under the table.
"Then take the whole system," Ferreira said. "You have put a valley inside a sphere. Put the range inside one."
"The system is the planet."
"Then put the planet inside one."
"There is no quantity of cursed energy," Aizen said, "that is the same as being in two places."
"I have thirty-five. I could have three hundred and five. It would not buy me one second. The difficulty is not how hard I push. It is that all of it must happen at once, and there is one of me."
Ferreira stayed on her feet, which he liked about her. "Then it can't be done."
"It can be done. I simply cannot do it by being strong."
He let that sit. He was enjoying himself and did not think it showed.
"Forty-one thousand six hundred and nine mouths of one body. All of them opened in the same instant. Not within a second of each other. The same instant."
They went out and left him with the map.
Nobody had designed the lattice and nothing had built it. It had assembled itself out of twenty centuries of frightened people being polite to the dark, and had never once been late.
Want goes up. Answer comes down. Everywhere. Together.
Aizen looked at it a long while and did not write anything down.
Later he went out onto the ledge above the valley, inside the barrier. Down in the low pasture the herd sang in their sleep and did not know it.
"You're smiling, Aizen-san." Gin had his head tilted. "You've been smiling for an hour."
"Have I." Aizen looked out into the slow, breathing dark.
Somewhere under it something the size of a continent turned over in its sleep and did not notice him at all.
"Gin. Do you know how long it has been since something told me no and meant it?"