Брендон Сандерсон - Cytonic

I was changing though. It had begun on Starsight, as I met so many who were technically my enemies—but also just ordinary people. I wanted a way out of all of this now, more than I wanted to end the “Krell.” Was there a way we could stop this war without destroying them or them destroying us?

Chet kept us to the valleys between the dunes. I watched the sand carefully as we walked.

“Um…” M-Bot hovered out in front of me. “Spensa? I had to leave behind some of my information databases, but I kept the fauna surveys for all known worlds in the Superiority and…I don’t want to be a downer…”

“No sand worms?” I asked.

“Afraid not.”

“Scud,” I said. “What about giant scorpions? Orion totally killed one of those on Old Earth, so they’ve got to be real.”

“There are several low-gravity planets with arthropod-like creatures that would probably fit that definition. Oooh… One has a poison stinger that, if it hits you, you grow fungus on your tongue. And in your blood. Basically, it kills you. But mushroom tongues!”

“Wow,” I said. “That really exists?”

“Spensa?” M-Bot said. “Are you…crying?”

“No, of course not,” I said, wiping my eye. “It’s just…I’m glad something that awesome exists, you know? Like in the stories. Maybe when this is all done, we can visit that place. You think maybe I could train one up from a baby to let me ride it?”

Chet chuckled from up ahead, leading us farther into the desert—and I allowed myself to grow excited. The next fragment would be the one with our destination, my chance—finally—to see what the delver had sent me to experience.

I should have been exhausted. And to an extent I was. It had been a difficult day of travel. It felt good though; there was something healthy and satisfying about being this type of worn out. It was odd that I wasn’t hungry. And I’d been hiking all this way and was only mildly thirsty.

But…well, I was walking across a literal flying desert and had passed infinite waterfalls that were fed by no tributary. I doubted lack of hunger would be the oddest thing I experienced in here. I hurried up, joining Chet as we were forced to climb a dune—a difficult process, though he showed me how to do it at an angle, and while keeping somewhat solid footing by not walking in his footsteps.

“In snow,” he explained, “step where the person in front of you did. That will save energy. Sand dunes, however, settle. And so the person in front of you will disturb that, which actually makes it harder if you step right where they did.”

At the top, I picked out the proper fragment. “That one?” I asked. “The green one?”

“That’s it,” Chet said.

There was so much life on these. Plant life, at least. Even the desert had scrub stubbornly breaking from the sand and growing defiantly. Was this what it was like on most worlds? Plants just kind of grew, without anyone to cultivate them?

“Are you nervous?” I asked Chet. “About what we’ll find?”

He thought for a moment, smoothing his mustache. “I feel…like it’s inevitable. I knew I’d make my way to the Path eventually. To the point that when you mentioned it to me, I felt like I’d been drawn to you. Pulled onto this course.”

“That…sounds kind of unnerving, honestly.”

“My apologies; that was not my intent.” He glanced toward the distant lightburst. “Still, I worry about the delvers’ hand in this place. I never can quite trust that my will is my own…”

“Do you know anything about them?”

“They’re not a group mind,” Chet said. “People get that wrong about them. The delvers are all separate beings—but they’re also identical. They live in a place where nothing ever changes, and where time doesn’t exist. They exist in one moment, in one place, indistinguishable—and terrified of anything that isn’t exactly as they are.”

“Okay…” I said. “A lot of that doesn’t make sense to me, Chet. But I’ll try to pretend otherwise.”

“Thank you,” he replied. “All I know is that the not-making-sense part is why individuals like you can hyperjump through the nowhere! Time and space are irrelevant, and after slipping into the nowhere you can come out anywhere else. I worry, however. Every time we puncture the barrier between the nowhere and the somewhere, we corrupt the nowhere a little. Like how you can’t walk through clean fresh snow without leaving tracks.”

“Do you think…there is snow in here somewhere?” I asked. “I’d like to see it sometime.”

“It exists, but is rare,” he said. “Tell me, Miss Nightshade. Did you actually live your entire life on that barren planet? How did you survive?”

I shrugged. “We have algae vats and artificial light underground. And there is some life. Rats live in the caverns, eating fungi and algae that transfer heat into biological energy. It isn’t much, but we make it work.”

“You sound like an exceptionally courageous group,” Chet said. “It is my honor to travel with you—though I must admit I find your home a strange place to have a society!”

“Oh!” M-Bot said, flying up beside him. “It is a very strange place, with a fascinating mix of technological advancements and backward ignorance. They have spaceflight, but not automatic soap dispensers, for example. So you could say their culture has had its ups and downs.”

“It indeed sounds interesting, abomination,” Chet said. “Come, Miss Nightshade and companion. We should hurry—there is a point of interest on this fragment I would like to show you before we leave it, but we will need to rush. It wouldn’t do to miss the next fragment because we dallied!”

We continued on, Chet picking up our pace. A half hour later, we crested another dune and I got a better glimpse of our target fragment. It was covered with shimmering grass—it looked so soft, like the fur of a good blanket—and idyllic streams that dropped off the side, sparkling like drops of sunlight. It looked like paradise as described in the stories. Green, alive—there were even butterflies.

However, something felt odd to me. Chet had rushed us to get here in time, but that fragment appeared to be hours away. At the rim, Chet waved me along to the right. The dunes tapered off here, and in a few moments we found what he’d wanted to show me: a pit. The sand had blown away, exposing brown rock—and a vast chunk had been dug out of the fragment, going down at least thirty meters. The sides were tiered, like a reverse pyramid, paths running along them in a spiral.

“A quarry,” I said. “For acclivity stone?”

“Precisely,” Chet said. “This one is ancient, but I thought you might appreciate seeing an example of a quarry. The ones the Superiority runs farther inward at Surehold are much more massive affairs, but it’s the same general principle.”

“Too bad they didn’t leave any acclivity stone,” I said, searching the quarry. M-Bot zipped past me and went soaring down to look at the bottom. “Maybe we could have fashioned some kind of floating device for ourselves.”

Chet shook his head, smiling.

“What?” I said.

“They left plenty of acclivity stone, Miss Nightshade,” he said, gesturing. “What is it you think we’re standing upon?”

“Rock,” I said.

“Rock,” he said, “that floats through the sky? These fragments all have acclivity stone in them. Unfortunately, it takes refinement and energy to make it work on a scale that’s usable, so I doubt we’ll be able to make any kind of device. Still, it is all right here.”

I blushed at the realization. Of course the fragments floated on acclivity stone. It made perfect sense, now that I thought about it. I guess the blue coloring, like the light glowing underneath M-Bot’s wings, came from the refinement process.