Брендон Сандерсон - Cytonic

“How can you?” M-Bot said. “You just said the markings aren’t a language!”

“They aren’t.”

“But they mean something?”

“Yes.”

“Well then, what?”

My finger reached the end of the line. “Memory.”

M-Bot hovered beside me. “Hmmm. Yes, I find this curious. I’m feeling a new emotion. It’s like anger and frustration mixed! How interesting.” With that, he hovered up, then came down directly on my head, whacking me.

“Ow!” I said, more surprised than in pain.

Chet immediately cursed, reaching to grab M-Bot, but I held up a hand to stop him. “M-Bot,” I said, “what is wrong with you?”

“That is what my emotions said I should do,” he explained. “Wow. I feel better! Curious, curious…”

“You can’t just hit people.”

“Didn’t you hit Jorgen basically all the time?”

“That was different,” I said. “First I hated him, then I liked him. So I had good reasons.”

“Ah!” M-Bot said. “You say things like that, and I want to hit you again! Would you stand still so I can smack you with a grabber arm? That sounds fun.”

“Abomination,” Chet said, “you should—”

“It’s all right, Chet,” I said. “He’s just having trouble dealing with emotions. They’re new to him.”

“I think I’m doing well, all things considered,” M-Bot said to Chet. “I bet the first time you had emotions, you babbled a lot and soiled your clothing.” He hovered back around to look at me. “Would you please explain what you meant by telling me this wasn’t a language, then immediately interpreting it?”

“These are the memories of the people who used this portal, M-Bot,” I said, kneeling and feeling at the grooves cut into the stone. “It makes a curious kind of sense. Cytonics are like…biological means of communication and travel. Hyperjumping replaces starships, and mind-to-mind contact replaces radios. So it feels right to me that there would be a way to store thoughts. A cytonic book, or recording.”

“Yes,” Chet said, kneeling beside me. “That is what I’ve heard. The Path of Elders involves a sequence of these portals—four or five total, from what I’ve been able to learn. Each is among the most ancient of ways into the nowhere, etched with the experiences of the first cytonics.”

Yes, I’d seen these patterns in the tunnels of Detritus. I’d also seen them in a large space station—the shipbuilding facility in orbit around Detritus. And I’d seen them inside the delver maze, a place I was increasingly convinced was the corpse of a long-dead delver.

“What do we do?” I asked. “How do we begin?”

“I’m not certain,” Chet said. “Admittedly, I thought we’d experience the memories as soon as we entered.” He placed his own hand on the markings. “I…can feel something.”

“So,” M-Bot said, “these things are both memories and portals between dimensions?”

“Yes,” I said, closing my eyes. The boundary was weaker than usual in this room. My pocket started to grow warm—my father’s pin.

Time for a test. The somewhere, home, was on the other side of this wall. Could I open the way? I engaged my cytonic senses. With my hands on the wall here…yes, I could feel the somewhere—my reality—pulling on me, trying to suck me through. The rock became as if liquid, and I began to sink into it.

Strangely, I could again feel a presence near me. Like I had when I’d used my powers in the jungle. The one that…that I wanted to believe might be my father. Was it guiding me? Leading me to freedom?

I stopped with a thump. Like the sound your boots made on the floor when you kicked them off at night. I tried again.

Thump.

“What do you feel?” Chet asked me.

“The portal is locked on the other side,” I said. “As you warned.”

“I hoped I was wrong about that,” he said. “And that your hyperjumping powers would let you use these portals to access the somewhere. Alas! Fortunately, that is not our primary endeavor here. There has to be a way to see the memories left for us. Can you…listen to the rock? Spy on it, as you say you can do to the delvers?”

I tried that, closing my eyes and listening. Opening my mind. Yes, there was something here. How did I access it? I asked the rock, pled with it, to open to me. But I failed. With a sigh, I opened my eyes.

To find that the cavern had changed around me.

I could make out the vague outlines of the rooms here, but they were ethereal, insubstantial. It was as if that world had faded, and another had sprung up in its place. In this one I felt like I was floating in darkness.

I stumbled, trying to get my bearings.

“Oh!” M-Bot said. “Spensa? You seem to be experiencing motor control problems. This isn’t related to the rap on the head I gave you, is it? Oh scud, I directly disobeyed my programming mandates by doing harm to—”

“I’m fine,” I said. “I’m seeing something.”

“Well, you’re probably always seeing something. Even when your eyes are closed, technically. Or maybe not because—”

“Hush,” I said, turning around. Chet still knelt beside me, looking about in confusion.

“Do you see what I do?” I asked. “We’re floating in darkness. Like when in the lightburst.”

“Indeed,” Chet said. “Only, look here. Beside me.”

I knelt, unsteady. I could feel the floor, touch it. Yet it was faint, nearly invisible to my eyes. Near our knees was a small pinprick of whiteness. It was part of the vision. “Is this the lightburst?”

Chet shook his head, seeming baffled. But as we watched, something changed. A substance began to grow around the pinprick of light, obscuring it. Growing like a tiny asteroid, then flattening out, and…

“A fragment,” I said, watching as stone grew. “We’re witnessing the birth of a fragment.”

“Yes…” Chet said. “I believe you are correct. We are watching it grow over hundreds of years, I suspect. It’s as if…”

“As if matter is seeping through,” I said. “That’s what this is, Chet. A tiny weakness between the dimensions. The somewhere is leaking in, forming a fragment like a stalactite forms slowly over time in a cavern.”

And I knew this was happening over centuries, as Chet had said. That information appeared in my mind, because…because it had been left intentionally to inform me. These thoughts, they were the thoughts of ancient cytonics.

“Yes!” Chet said. “I believe you’ve done it, Miss Nightshade! This is the past. The Path of Elders. The secrets of the ancient cytonics.”

Scud, it sounded awesome when he said it that way. As we watched, the fragment expanded into a block of stone perhaps twenty meters wide.

“Look,” Chet said, pointing behind me. “Was that there before?”

I turned around. I didn’t see any other fragments, but I did pick out a faraway white spot. It was the lightburst, but it seemed to have appeared as the fragment grew.

“It’s so small,” I said. “And there are no other fragments around. This must be the distant, distant past.”

I got a sense of this place at the time. A kind of silent tranquility. Nothing dangerous. No feelings of anger. No…

No delvers. The delvers either hadn’t existed at that time, or had been somewhere else.

“How can we see this?” I asked. “You said this Path was memories of people who entered the nowhere, but presumably nobody was here to see this part.”

“Time is strange here,” Chet said, still kneeling. “I imagine that cytonics were able to uncover this somehow. Do you see this here? What do you make of it?”

A line had appeared in the ground—the illusory version. It was different from the rest of the fragment, shinier, a different color. As we watched, it grew up into a wall, just a few handbreadths high. But a tiny pattern appeared on it, a little swirl. It felt like some kind of natural occurrence. Like erosion.