Линда Нагата - Edges

“I want to see it anyway,” Urban said aloud. “The broken megastructures. The celestial city. The living worlds.”

“You’re not ready,” Lezuri insisted. “If I demonstrate this to you, will you consider another path?”

He did not wait for an answer, but produced an object from his hand.

From his hand.

A ultra-thin silvery needle that flashed with refracted light as it burst out of the skin of his palm, emerging at a low angle, growing and growing in length until it reached a full twelve centimeters.

Urban backed away in alarm. Clemantine rose to her feet.

“Do you recognize it?” Lezuri asked, holding the needle up. Its mirrored surface sliced light into a spray of rainbow glints that danced madly across the walls and ceiling.

“No,” Urban said, his mouth dry, wondering where this was going.

“But you can guess.”

“Is it like that needle you used to penetrate the hull of my ship?”

“Yes, except this one won’t activate. It won’t grow spontaneously. It doesn’t have that capability, but everything else is there. Everything I know. All of it folded into a quantum-scale matrix.” Lezuri held it out. “Take it. It won’t harm you. It’s a gift, from me to you. All my knowledge yours—if you can work out how to access it. If you can do that, then I am wrong, and you are ready to go to Tanjiri.”

“It’s a trick,” Clemantine said.

“Yes,” Lezuri agreed. “The trick is that you are not ready.”

The Scholar said, If what he just told you about that needle is true, then he’s right. You won’t be able to access it .

Urban reached for the needle. Subminds synced him with his ghost on the high bridge. He sent a message to be sure: *If something happens to me…

*Sooth. I’ll end it.

A shiver on the back of his neck as he took the needle.

He held it gingerly, pinched between thumb and forefinger. It felt light, delicate. He feared he would snap it with the least pressure. Nevertheless, he slid his other forefinger along its length.

Cold . Utterly smooth to his touch but not frictionless or he would not be able to hold it at all. Fine points on both ends. He touched one.

The needle pierced the pad of his finger, went straight through bone and emerged through the nail on the other side. Rainbow glints. No blood. No pain either. Still, his chest rose and fell as he strove to contain his revulsion.

Moving with great care, he pulled his finger free.

Still no blood.

He looked at Lezuri. “You don’t believe I can do this—access the information inside.”

“It’s beyond you,” Lezuri assured him.

“Let me guess again. The mechanism to open it is sealed on the inside.”

Lezuri smiled. “Ah, you’re doing better than I thought. You’ve already solved half the puzzle. Now, all that’s left is to work out how to get inside so that you can trigger the mechanism. I will leave you to consider that. This avatar is running out of energy. I must go.”

He did not dispose of himself against the generative wall as Urban half expected, but left instead through the door.

Clemantine came to get a closer look at the needle. “It’s a pretty thing. Doesn’t look real, though. Like it’s only partly in this world.”

“Hmm,” he said, remembering how it had passed bloodlessly through his finger.

He sent the Scholar to the library, to share what he’d seen with the other Apparatchiks. Then he messaged the Engineer and the Bio-mechanic: *I’ve given you access to this location. I want you to analyze this.

Immediately, a smooth white column rose a meter high from the floor. A voice said, “Put the needle on it.”

“The Engineer?” Clemantine asked.

“Yes.”

Gingerly, he set the needle down. It started to roll, but a shallow channel formed in the top of the column, catching it, and then closing over it.

“I’m mapping the surface of the device now,” the Engineer reported. “So far, it contains no active nanotech.”

“Show us what it looks like,” Clemantine said.

The generative wall converted to a video screen. It showed a precisely engineered surface composed of a repeating pattern of pits and knobs.

“The tips of the needle are smooth,” the Engineer reported. “The rest of its surface is tiled in this pattern, presumably to add a slight measure of friction.”

“No seams?” Urban asked. “No lock?”

“Nothing like that,” the Engineer said. “It doesn’t react chemically and our assault Makers cannot interact with it.”

“Like the containment capsule?” Clemantine asked.

“It’s as impervious as the containment capsule,” another voice said. Urban recognized the jaundiced tone of the Bio-mechanic. “But this is a different kind of material. It refracts light differently.”

“Let me see the needle again,” Urban said.

The needle emerged from the top of the column, still cradled in a shallow channel. He picked it up. It felt so fragile in his fingers, as if the pressure of his pulse might break it. Then he tried to snap it in half, and all sense of fragility vanished.

Clemantine gasped when she saw what he was doing, but the needle didn’t even bend.

“You can’t break it,” the Engineer said. “And if you keep trying, it’s going to slip and pierce your hand or disappear into a generative wall.”

Urban held it up, admiring the rainbow glints.

Clemantine hissed softly. “This is a distraction. There’s no way to get inside, is there?”

“Probably not,” the Engineer agreed.

“Then why did Lezuri give it to me?” Urban asked.

“To drive you mad with frustration?” the Bio-mechanic suggested.

“No, there’s a riddle here we’re not getting.”

“Put it back on the column,” the Engineer said. “I’ll take it and run additional tests of its surface—but I think we’ll find the only way into it is to go back in time and be present in the moments before it was sealed.”

“Did you just make a joke?” Urban asked—because that never happened.

“No,” the Engineer said in the same even tone. “I’m serious.”

“Oh.” He laid the needle on the top of the column and watched it disappear. “No problem then. We just have to learn to manipulate time, and the riddle is solved.”

He checked Lezuri’s status and found that the avatar had returned to the warren and from there to the cocoon from which he’d emerged.

“Maybe it’s not a matter of going back in time,” Clemantine mused. “Maybe you have to go forward.”

Urban turned to her. “What?”

She shrugged. “What if you have to… I don’t know… catch the needle in a bubble of time and run it on fast forward until it reaches a point in the future when it was programmed to open?”

“You think Lezuri can do that?”

“No. But maybe he remembers a time when he could?”

The Bio-mechanic warned, *Our nemesis returns.

Urban looked up from the novel he’d been reading, disturbed by the bitter cynicism in the Bio-mechanic’s voice. More disturbed, when he did a quick lookup of ‘nemesis,’ a word he’d never heard before.

*The agent of our downfall? he asked.

*Desperate times, desperate measures , the Bio-mechanic replied. *You need to recognize that.

*You’ve changed. You’re not the same.

*We all change—to meet our circumstances or be defeated by them.

*You believe we’ll be defeated.