The Archive Undying, page 5
The team still leaves with due caution. By this point, the group is easier to manage. With the stubborn persistence of Veyadi’s clothes and vexing absence of his own will to remove them, Sunai occupied his night with the riddle of their collective personality problems. He’s sorted their hungers: vindication for Veyadi, praise for Jin, direction for Dzira. It makes the trip through the remaining temples a cinch.
He starts with Jin as they break camp, when Veyadi is on watch and out of earshot.
“I will give you every cigarette Dzira has if you apologize,” Sunai says, which makes Dzira look hunted and Jin laugh. They say they’ll do it for free. The appeal is often enough for people who need to be wanted.
After, Sunai offers Dzira his last two cigarettes as his own apology. Dzira’s mouth crumples and he takes neither. “It’s okay,” he says. “I get it.”
Dzira thinks himself more a tool than a person, at least when he’s on the job. Sunai itches to shake that out of him. Maybe on the way back to Ghamor.
Veyadi, meanwhile, receives Jin’s sorry with terse bewilderment. Jin assumes themself absolved and behaves like they’re friends for the rest of the tour through Chom Dan.
“Are they planning to kill me?” Veyadi mutters at Sunai as they pass the Emanation of God Diffident.
“They have the subtlety of a drunk frag,” Sunai assures. “You’d notice.”
Veyadi smiles, a conscious easing that soon vanishes. Sunai blames Chom Dan for forcing Veyadi to grieve; the man has become incapable of sustaining cheer. When noon comes and they reunite with the Third Scrap—all limbs present and accounted for, thanks—Veyadi disappears.
Sunai belatedly learns their doctor has gone to tell the captain they’re leaving the second everyone’s aboard. He’s in the middle of bartering curry to replenish his cigarette supply when the Scrap begins to move. At first, he doesn’t have time to dwell; the crew keep offering him more than his increasingly mild meals are worth.
At some point while he led the Chom Dan tour, disconcertion ran through the Scrap like a flu. The ambient anxiety worsens as the day winds on and the rig pushes into the peaks behind the city. The crew is quiet that night. Veyadi holes himself up in his workshop with his notebook. Sunai pauses in the doorway. He has a bounty of bartered treasures to offer, and he’s given Veyadi more than goods in the name of mutual catharsis. The intensity with which the good doctor reviews his notebook belies how hard he’s pretending not to notice Sunai. Whatever crawled inside Veyadi during Chom Dan, he’s afraid to let anyone see it.
Sunai flips a chili candy onto Veyadi’s work desk and disappears into the rig before he can hear any arguments. He can’t let himself stay or he’ll start picking at the doctor’s scabs.
To keep himself properly occupied, Sunai tracks down Jin. They’ve joined Waretu on the lower observation deck, where the widow pores over the nav log in her lap, thick with notes and maps neatly sewn into the spine. She puzzles over the two-page spread detailing the narrow, obscure pass they’re aiming for. Sunai’s never heard of it. Neither has Waretu.
“To tell you the truth, I’ve not been out this way since…” Waretu nods delicately over her shoulder in the direction of Chom Dan, superstitious of naming its fate. “One always needs new paths. Ways to dodge the guardians and such.”
“Just call them ‘frags,’ aunty, you sound decrepit,” says Jin. “Here’s my problem—paths go places. Where’s this one taking us? Doc say anything?”
“No.” Sunai frowns down at the crew doing laps. Veyadi hasn’t joined them. “He’s nervous.”
“Like he’s the only one.”
Jin’s not wrong, not by a long shot. Two days stretch into three, and the Scrap continues to climb into the Dahani peaks. The air grows thin and the tension in the rig congeals. The crew no longer sleeps well. Those who run evening laps either double their regimen or stop running entirely.
On the fourth day, Veyadi takes up residence in the navigator’s coop and hovers over Waretu’s shoulder, his notes overlapping her own. At first, Veyadi’s intrusion annoys Waretu to the point of politely threatening to lock him in his workshop. As the Scrap presses deeper into a certain stretch of gulches, she grows quiet, more focused, and has someone bring Veyadi a folding stool.
“God, he’s annoying,” Jin says over an uninspired lunch of congee and vitamins, indignant on Waretu’s behalf. “Does he micromanage how you fuck?”
“Some of us like it that way,” says Sunai.
He has not seen the interior of Veyadi’s bunk since the night before they entered Chom Dan. Veyadi startles and stares every time someone passes his workshop door. Sunai hasn’t stopped tossing him candy, but they haven’t touched in days, and Veyadi won’t even look at him.
It’s weird. It’s so, so weird. By now, with these vibes, Sunai would usually be gone. He tells himself it’s because they’re in the part of the Dahani peaks where snow never melts, and that even though he could survive a trek out on his own, it would be so miserable that he’d probably hate winter for the rest of his life.
But Sunai is an old hand at choosing misery over a man. Veyadi is something else.
* * *
Eighty-one, thinks Sunai.
Veyadi’s temple is old, weathered, and strikingly obvious. An unlovely, two-story, trapezoidal hub stands alone on a great plateau wide enough to accommodate a whole armada of rigs. Though a few other mounds of eroded once-was architecture dot the plateau, the temple is oddly untouched by the elements, down to the enormous stone face that acts as its door. Eyes half-lidded, mouth curved in a placid smile, the face bears features of all ten divine beasts—salamander eyes, ridged serpent throat, buffalo horns nestled in peacock feathers, so on, so forth. It is exquisitely rendered, astonishingly well-preserved, and impossible to focus on.
That night, Sunai hosts more people at his cook fire than he has shares of curry. The crew starts trading with each other instead: cigarettes, rig-brew, mags, books, and ghost stories. They linger for hours as an informal watch. No one can stare at the temple for long, so they have to remind each other to do so.
The pilot tries to make a game of it, surprising his friends by clapping his hands on their shoulders and spinning them to face the temple. This continues until a startled Dzira blacks his eye. The good-humored pilot nearly responds in kind before the captain wades in to break them up. She takes the pilot away and sends Dzira to Sunai, who sits the boy down in the crook of the Scrap’s foreleg to disinfect his knuckles.
“Sorry,” says Dzira, and he keeps apologizing until he blurts out the problem. “It’s just—this is stupid. It has to be. But I think we’ve been here before.”
Sunai hands Dzira a flask of rig-brew and a slice of dried mango to nurse. He heard the same from the quartermaster, and the engineer, and more than one of the mercs. Those who don’t want to admit this ugly gap in their memory must feel it in their bones. Someone unpacked the tent rolls, which should be a relief for everyone who didn’t get the chance to stretch their legs in Chom Dan, yet no one moves to set them up. No one wants to spend the night without the Scrap’s thick hull between them and the temple’s salamander stare.
“It’s not obscuring our attention, it’s actively repelling it.” Jin glares at the temple from their seat on the Scrap’s folded foreleg, right until they’re sidetracked by a cloud passing over the full, glaring moon. “God’s eternal dick, I didn’t want to be interested.”
It explains the gaps in the Scrap roster. The crew is solid, the jobs are good—it begged the question of why anyone would leave. Now they know: neurotransitive fuckery on the order of radio-play melodrama.
Sunai glances from Dzira to Jin to the temple. He turns away; a mistake. Now he’s facing Veyadi, who approaches them after extracting himself from a tense exchange with the captain. For a man with half a face, it’s oddly unmistakable when the doctor wishes to make eye contact. He nods toward the temple. Sunai automatically goes to join him, Jin’s warning “You sure about that?” nipping at his heels.
They meet up a stone’s throw from the Scrap. Veyadi’s going faster than Sunai’s regular pace, which doesn’t usually annoy him. Sunai lacks the emotional reserves to sustain the irritation, but fear, well, he’s never too hard up for that.
Veyadi glances over his shoulder and slows. “You’re nervous,” he says, like he’s ashamed to have noticed.
Sunai makes a face in the dark. Of course he’s nervous. He’d rather eat his own fist than admit it. “How did you even make it here the first time?”
By way of an answer, Veyadi lifts his hands to his visor. His fingers press to the chitinous temples, rigid at the tips, and he pulls.
The mask comes off tackily. Wisps of a filmy spiderweb substance unspool from where the carapace tethered to his skin, though it dissipates in the shadowed mountain air. His breath, visible in the chill, hangs like an unspoken apology.
What little Sunai can make out of Veyadi’s naked face is unmarked and unremarkable. Thick lashes. Furrowed brow. His black eyes fix hard on Sunai, as if seeing him for the first time.
They are both hideously exposed. That should and does frighten Sunai, but it’s not the only tingle lacing up his spine. All too quickly, he’s fascinated instead. Sunai has started to like being seen by Veyadi.
Better than being stared at by the temple. The awful thing doesn’t have the manners to blink.
“You doing something medically dicey to prove a point?” Sunai asks.
“No. It’s just been a while.” Veyadi rubs his arm across his eyes. It makes him look young. Human. Sunai’s heart aches unwisely.
“The temple emits an NT signal,” Veyadi is saying. “It bombards you with incongruent proximal stimuli—tells you you’re sensing multiple contradictory things. A blank cliff face, a rockslide, a waterfall, a temple. That elicits neural noise, which fools your brain into perceiving nothing. The visor’s material is engineered to compartmentalize neurotransitive data. I hoped it would modulate the relationship between my sensory and perceptive processing of related phenomena. Show me what was really there. It did, kind of. It made me sure we were searching for something, the first time around.”
“It didn’t do what you needed. You still can’t see it. Not consistently.”
“I can’t.”
“Did you think the Chom Dan pilgrimage would help?”
“I hoped. It didn’t.” Veyadi goes quiet. “Not for me, anyway.”
Sunai wants to stop looking at Veyadi, wants to break eye contact with the man who can in all likelihood read him like a book. But if he looks away from Veyadi, he’ll look at the temple. And Sunai can barely stop looking at the temple. That’s the problem. Whatever it does to make people forget it? Doesn’t work on him.
“The others can’t see it either, can they?” asks Veyadi.
Sunai should lie. A lie would be so much safer. But he’s never had much luck lying to archivists. “Why can I?”
“I’m not sure.”
Sunai resists the impulse to laugh. Here he thought they were being horribly honest with each other.
“What are you thinking?” asks Veyadi.
“You tell me, archivist.”
Veyadi looks stung. “I don’t know. I never know.”
Sunai is so baffled by the possibility that Veyadi might not be lying that he says something true: “Leaf 8.”
Veyadi’s brow creases.
Everybody knows Leaf 8: “Unify.” It describes two souls who meet again and again across spatiotemporal instances, two souls who inevitably kill each other. One is a falcon who eats the other as a fish; the fish returns as a king who executes a poet; the poet returns as a novice who treads upon an ant; and so on through the eons. At length they come to a time in which they are both Emanations of God, and so realize the nature of their relationship. They fall into each other’s thousand thousand arms, weeping, laughing, kissing, and at last dying, whereupon they return to an instant in which one stalks the other across dunes, through forests, and into a city, and the Leaf comes to an end.
This Leaf is the origin of divine convergence, the theory that divinity lies in coincidence. Sunai’s old partner was a fan. What would she say, if she could see him now? Probably she’d wonder why she bothered spending all those years saving him from himself, if he was going to end it like this. Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time he’s flirted with outing himself to an archivist with Harbor ties. Divine convergence!
“Sunai…” Veyadi can’t squeeze out the rest, his visor gripped so tight that Sunai fears it will crack in his palms.
Pity surges in Sunai’s chest, flanked by regret. He knows better—he does. Why share something with a man when you know it will end poorly for you both? “Whatever,” he declares. “Whatever! Your creepy shrine got in my head. Who knows why. What the fuck, Adi?”
Veyadi is not relieved. “What makes you think it’s a shrine?”
“What else could it be? It’s old as hell, it’s not nearly as eroded as everything else on this plateau, and only archives can sustain themselves as long as this thing must have. Plus it’s messing with people brains, which means it’s interfacing with them, which means—it’s uncorrupted.”
Otherwise the shrine, and the archive within, wouldn’t be able to reach human gray matter without first shattering the encasing skulls. AIs interface with humans as a matter of possessive obsession. Fragtech don’t, because fragtech are crazy and because they can’t. No AI can manipulate a frag or vice versa—presuming the existence of a frag with enough mind left to make the attempt. The same principle extends to relics; they’re as corrupted as fragtech and just as immune to external NT interference. Ergo, if something has neurotransitively entranced the whole crew except for Sunai the relic, it’s an AI, and it’s whole unto itself. An undiscovered, uncorrupted shrine.
This is the stuff of pulpy comic books and conspiracy theory. It’s infeasible two hundred years after recolonization, when every AI across the known world has either laid claim to a city-state or corrupted the one it had. Yet here they stand, and there it stands, and if this AI has hidden from humans for so long, why can’t it have hidden from corruption too?
“Right. Uncorrupted. It has to be.” Veyadi chuckles; the tension persists. “This is why I needed you.”
“The drunk hermit you peeled off the teahouse floor?”
“Do you have to keep doing that? Pretending you aren’t…” Veyadi squares his jaw against Sunai’s neutral look. Veyadi can either permit the lie or demand the truth, and he’s already established his preference. He sighs and settles on this: “I needed someone with an unusual set of qualifications. Someone who knew AI infrastructure, cognitive principles, history, the Lay, all that … I tried a friend first. An archivist.”
He uses the Mohani word for “archivist.” The implication unsettles.
“Didn’t work out?” asks Sunai.
“He was busy.” Veyadi’s posture is rigid with desperation. He’s afraid to lose Sunai, like he’s losing his crew. That’s why no matter how even his tone, he sounds like he’s begging. “Look, I’m sorry. I did tell you what we were looking for, but after you forgot … I told myself there’d be no point. I should have tried again. I was afraid you’d leave.” He lets out a breath. “I need you, Sunai. I needed you before, but now…”
Sunai’s fists harden against his ribs, his arms thoroughly crossed because otherwise he’ll shiver. Damn archivists and damn their tongues. “Don’t be a tease. Now what?”
“It chose you,” Veyadi says, awed and guilty for it. “The shrine let you in. Which means you can walk inside and tell me what’s in there.”
Sunai laughs the startled, liquid laugh of genuine shock. The shrine didn’t choose Sunai. Quite the opposite. He’s the only one it can’t touch. But if Veyadi hasn’t realized that, then it stands to reason that he has no idea what he picked up in a seedy Ghamori teahouse. He’s also a little thick.
Historically, Sunai makes bad choices, and he stands on the cusp of another. He shouldn’t let his corrupted body anywhere near that uncorrupted shrine. It just doesn’t sound wise. And yet.
“Adi,” he says, “what do you think happens when you bother a thing that clearly doesn’t want to be bothered?”
Veyadi takes a long moment to fit his visor back onto his face. “We’re not going to bother it,” he says at last. “Not really. I just need to know why. Why is it hiding? Why doesn’t it want anything to do with people? If I’m going to find out, I need you. Please, Sunai.”
It doesn’t get less wildly dangerous just because Veyadi’s willing to admit that it is, especially not if he thinks the shrine has hidden for so long in order to protect something. Protect whom from what? Something even more ludicrously eerie? This is not a good reason to concede.
Yet Sunai says, “Fine.” And when Veyadi brushes his forehead and his cheek with the tips of his fingers, he fails to flinch away. Instead, he follows Veyadi back to the Scrap, and he stands at Veyadi’s side through the talks with the captain and the lead merc about check-in schedules and extraction protocols, and he finds himself staring at Veyadi’s face more often than the shrine’s.
He always replaces one problem with another. He’ll just have to avoid adding more problems to the mix. Don’t touch anything, he tells himself again and again, just look, and breathe, and keep your hands to your goddamn self.
Later, in the lightless safety of the empty crew quarters, Sunai forces himself to take the letter from his ruck. Time and travel have changed its texture, worn it smooth and torn a corner. He folds the unopened envelope into a pocket of his jacket. A reminder that his mistakes have consequences.
6
In the morning, Sunai’s still ruminating over divine convergence. If his old partner could see him now, decked in wilds gear and about to lead a team into the eighty-first temple of Chom Dan, she’d be fucking insufferable.
