Page 11 of Redstone
Chapter six
Sigurd Liang stood at the base of the four-story pagoda and looked through the open door in front of him. It was a beautiful structure, surprisingly festive with its coruscating red roofs, each one glowing in the sunshine, gold trim beneath them curled into watchful foxes. The walls were white, painted with elegant black kanji that spelled out thousands of prayers for the dead. The room just beyond the threshold where he hesitated beckoned him like a lover while the gentle breeze across his back pressed him forward.
Sigurd sighed. He shouldn’t have put this off for so long, but given the way his week—no, his month—had been going, it felt like a miracle that he could even take the time to be here now. He clapped his hands twice and bowed, then reached out and gripped the heavy cotton rope that hung down from an enormous bronze bell, ten feet above him. He took a deep breath, then swung the bell. The thunderous hum of it was almost enough to take his breath away. He stepped forward intothe vestibule of the temple, and a moment later, a warm hand landed on his shoulder.
“It’s been a while since you’ve visited.”
The voice was perfectly familiar, Sigurd’s constant companion in his current life and the last vestige of his furthest one. He turned and looked at the speaker, a tall, slender man with white-blond hair and a small smile on his beautiful face. “I’ve been busy.”
His companion nodded. “I can see that.” Even now the algorithm in the machine was doing its work, analyzing Sigurd’s brain chemistry and physiology and spinning new threads out from his mind, adding to the tapestries that lined the walls and the frames that filled the room.
After some experimentation, Sigurd had found that cloth was the best representative of memory for him. It had depth and texture, two things that made resurrecting his older memories easier as the pure images faded from his perception. Plus, you could always add onto cloth, which … he stepped up to the nearest frame tapestry and watched it elongate, watched new threads appear and connect.
He stared at the cluster that represented Cody and his friends, all in merry masks as they danced around a distant jewel. A planet far, far away. It was a good place for them, and Sigurd was almost sorry they’d be coming back soon.
The brightest, most chaotic cluster in this particular piece of his mind was Garrett Helms, new threads drawn into his burr-like exterior, others being cut off or sloughed away. Garrett Helms was like a seed that tangled in the coat of an animal and was carried off by it to make a new home in a distant land. Only he had many homes and many threads. Sigurd reached out and plucked one with his finger. For a moment, the room melted away, replaced by the memory of his last conversation with Garrett.
“Hummingbird is already in place,” he had said soothingly. “Wyl and Robbie won’t be alone.”
“We’re not going to have long,” Garrett repeated, his handsome face drawn and exhausted. “Not even the length of the trial, because Alexander is never going to take the chance of Kyle getting on the stand. No more than a few standard months, and the faster we move, the more likely we are to make errors.”
“So, we control for those errors,” Sigurd replied, not changing his tone at all. He needed to be a bulwark for Garrett, a bastion of dependability in the wake of so much chaos and change. “We add people, we improve equipment, we innovate, we engage. We won’t be taken by surprise, Garrett. It’s going to be all right.”
“You sound like my dad,” Garrett said, but he was smiling now.
“Your father is a wise man; you should listen to him. Get some sleep. I’ll check in with my agents and give you an update in thirty-six hours.”
“I’m not going to sleep for that long.”
“I have a few things to attend to myself. None of us can go without taking a moment for self-care forever.”
Garrett chuckled wryly. “I guess not. Sleep well, then.”
“And you.” The call had ended, but even though Sigurd was tired, he hadn’t headed for his bed, he had headed for his …
“And here you are,” his companion said as Sigurd stepped out of the memory, back onto the temple floor. When Sigurd looked at him again, this time he was a shorter, dark-haired man, with light-brown skin and a mischievous look on his face. “But you will take your own advice after this, won’t you?”
“It’s almost time for another visit to Regen,” Sigurd said regrettably as he stepped around the tapestry and moved toward the back of the room. More threads were developing, expanding the tapestries that made up the Academy and his underground network of spies. He had a few new potentials in developmentthat showed promise, glimmering like tiny golden beads. “I’ll have to get through that first.”
“I see. Everything is prepared to guide you through the reconciliation, isn’t it?” his companion asked as they ascended to the second level.
“It always is,” Sigurd said absently. Ancient gods stared placidly at Sigurd as he climbed the narrow stairs. The second level was a purely technical place, the cloth memories harder edged. This level contained his hard-won skill sets, and Sigurd wandered through them and watched the occasional new thread develop here or there. For the most part, though, this place was firmly established, less of a problem than any other level due to its static nature. Many of the tapestries had gone dark, shadowed over with age and obsolescence. Sigurd tapped one thoughtfully, and a moment later he was …
“Woooohooooo!” The radio crackled with static, but a little disruption wasn’t enough to mask the thrill in Navi’s voice as the glider wings suddenly deployed, abruptly slowing their brutally fast descent toward the moon’s surface. Sigurd felt his spine elongate, then snap back into place, and thanked whatever god was listening—for painkillers—as they leveled off several hundred meters over the icy face of the moon.
The glider wings glowed like platinum in the faint reflection of light coming from Jupiter’s surface. They were on the wrong side to get pure sunshine right now, faint as it was this far out, but the glider was a technological wonder when it came to solar-power absorption. Sigurd adjusted for their lift and pulled his instrument panel up on the face of his helmet. “We’re going to need to jog right in a few hundred meters—ice plume.”
“Got it.” Flying through the frozen drops of methane was like flying through a sea of stars, so much more immediate and disorienting than pure space travel. Sigurd extended one thicklygloved hand and watched the tiny droplets bounce off his fingers and grinned to himself.
“Pretty fucking cool, huh, Stevie?” Navi asked smugly.
“Yeah,” he breathed. “Yeah, pretty fucking cool.” He reached a little farther …
And stepped back onto the second level. He almost stumbled, disoriented by the sudden loss of acceleration, but his companion gripped his upper arm and steadied him. Now it was a woman, with kind, almond-shaped eyes and gray hair piled high on her head. The voice was the same, though, a masculine baritone edged with warmth. “Shall we move on, my dear?”
“Is there really anything new to add up there?” Sigurd asked a little bitterly, but he went. This time the stairs were lined with leering demon faces, fanged mouths gaping with glee as they plunged wrongdoers into torment. The third level was smaller and packed with so many tapestries that it was all Sigurd could do not to run into one as he slowly paced the length of the room, circling around and staring at all his emotional detritus.
Many of these tapestries were dusty, and some even bore scorch marks, remnants of his less-sane times, when all he’d wanted to do was to forget. Only a bare few threads wafted out from his mind, small and tentative, and Sigurd ignored them in favor of approaching a long gray cloth that looked like it was draped over a box.
