Glen Cook - Ceremony

A remarkable vigor and an even more remarkable spirit of cooperation still animated the venture. There had been far fewer conflicts than anticipated. Yet even now Bagnel's best estimate had the leading mirror eight years from completion.

That protracted unity, in part, sprang from the project's single biggest problem, which existed down below-a sabotage campaign by those residual brethren still committed to the cause of the departed villains.

These criminals were more subtle than their predecessors. Marika's old tricks for digging them out did not work nearly as well. But still, enough were taken to keep the mines working at capacity.

Few of the taken had any direct connection with the brethren. More and more disturbing to Marika was the fact that the criminals were able to continue recruiting. And that they now were taking a few females into their ranks. The great hope of the mirror project had not adequately fired the hearts of the mass of bond meth. Marika was distressed, but did not know how to convince ordinary meth that they had as great a stake as the powerful who ruled their lives.

The mines were a problem not yet unraveled. In the past there had been no need for mechanization there. The structure of society had been such that no demand for ores had been so great that plain physical labor could not meet it. Meth did not mechanize simply for the sake of efficiency. They did so only where a task could not be performed by meth alone. But now ...

Bagnel had been correct. The project was restructuring society. Traditionally labor intensive areas like mining and agriculture had to be mechanized either to up volume or release labor for the project. Marika was, she feared, creating the possibility of compelling some of the changes the rogue brethren had aimed toward. Some could not be avoided. There were times when she agonized. She was in the incongruous position of being the principal defender of the silth ideal while not believing in it herself.

Marika's Mistress of the Ship reached the sunward position she desired, just miles from the heart of the expanding framework. The titanium beamwork sparkled, arms radiating from the anchor point. Marika recalled some old steel bridges, brethren-built, that spanned the river at TelleRai. Bridges constructed with incredibly complex girderwork intended to distribute load stresses. Bridges built in later times were much simpler in design. Was there a similar design problem here? Was the framework needlessly complex? Or, like those old bridges, was the design state of the art for the knowledge available, for the metallurgy of the moment?

Rotate your tip so the framework is overhead, Marika sent. Your glow is obscuring my view.

The framework rose, filling the sky.

A tinny voice spoke in Marika's ear, from the tiny radio earplug there. "Hello, the darkship. We will need you to pull back a few miles. We are coming through your space with girderwork."

There was a time when no male would have dared think of speaking so to silth. But in space the laws of physics often overruled tradition. Maybe these brethren would have to be destroyed in the end, lest their easygoing, not so subtly insubordinate ways infect the rest of the meth race.

Marika scanned the night for a brethren workship towing a string of bundles and spotted its flare. She touched her Mistress, relayed instructions. The darkship began to drift backward.

She was pleased with what she saw at that trojan.

She would be remembered. The meth race would recall that Marika the Reugge, wild silth of the Degnan pack of the upper Ponath, had lived. Even if the project failed, if it died in squabbling between the sisterhoods, it was something that would not be forgotten. She, its instigator, would be remembered with it.

Already the mass of materials reflected enough light to be visible from the planet's surface. In a few years it would be the brightest object in the heavens, bar the moons. When it was complete only the sun itself would outshine it.

There was nothing she could contribute here, other than encouragement. She touched several senior sisters who were working the site and sent her wholehearted approval, then touched her Mistress. Proceed to the other site now, please.

The darkship began easing out of the clutter.

It took an hour to reach space where the Mistress dared move swiftly. During the wait Marika ducked through her loophole into the realm of ghosts, through which she worked her silth magic, and continued a long-term effort to further familiarize herself with the odd those-who-dwell of the void.

She was accustomed to them now, and used them as she did the ghosts down below on her homeworld. Their immensity and power no longer disturbed and intimidated her, perhaps because by dealing with them she developed her own strength and power. There were none of them so mighty she could not take them into control and use them to pull her voidship or perform some task ordinary meth would perceive as witchery.

She knew them, and the void, but still she had not realized her dream. Still she had not traveled to an alien star, even as a passenger upon another Mistress's darkship. Still she had not dared breach the Up-and-Over, where light became a lagging pedestrian. For reasons deep within her, reasons she could not fathom herself, she was frightened of what she might encounter there.

Darkfarers told her hers was a problem all voidfaring Mistresses and bath faced before faring the Up-and-Over. They called the fear the Final Test. Those who conquered it joined the most elite sisterhood of all, the few score who flew the darkships to the starworlds. Those who did not conquer it seldom fared past the orbits of the meth homeworld's major moons.

Marika extended her touch, her sensing, farther and farther outward ... There it was, that dark something-remote, lying outside the system itself, vast, colder than the indifferent void. A sense of darkness radiated from it. And it terrified her.

She sensed it every time she passed outside Biter's orbit. Kiljar had told her it was the ultimate in those-who-dwell, more vast and powerful and deadly than anything she had yet experienced. It lurked in the gulf between the stars, and had to be appeased by any voidship that passed out of the system. It had appeared there soon after the first silth had penetrated the deep.

It was the thing that made Bestrei, the Serke champion, the most terrible of living silth. Three living silth could manipulate that great darkness. Bestrei could control it better than any other. She could call it and hurl it against any challenger. None had the strength to steal her control and drive it away.

Kiljar said Bestrei meshed with it so well because inside she was just as cold, deadly, and vacant.

Marika feared it because she sensed it in her future. The script was written. The very nature of meth, silth, and the silth ideal made certain eventualities inevitable.

Someday ...

Unspoken by anyone, tacitly assumed and accepted by every silth, was the fact that one day Marika would have to meet Bestrei in darkwar. The confrontation was fated by the All. There was no escaping it.

When Marika reflected upon that chance she was afraid, for she was unsure of herself with the great black, with Bestrei. Most of her life she had been hearing about Bestrei and how terrible the Serke was. The one time their paths had crossed she had been awed by the raw power in the silth. The Serke and their rogue brethren allies had mounted several incursions into the home system the past few months, attacking the mirror project. Bestrei had not participated. Bestrei would not pariticipate in such trivialities, in the estimation of silth who knew her. She would be contemptuous of such nuisance tactics. She would not be seen till she was offered a traditional challenge with dramatically high stakes.