RYNE stepped from the elevator into the Shadow Dwell. Turning and looking up, he saw what he hadn’t noticed on the day of his arrival: an artificial enclosure grafted to the side of a meta-tree, providing a shaft for the spacious car that had just delivered him from this final Civilized Wood. Bernath waited for him a few steps away.
“I’ve been reading your reports with great interest,” she said, stepping forward and linking her arm in his, much as she’d done that first time on the beach. “In hindsight, the applications are obvious, but impossible to generate without the precepts you’ve discovered.”
He shrugged off her praise with a flap of his ears. “There’s no such thing as discovery. That word makes it sound like the thing didn’t exist before someone wrapped it in language and math. That’s not how science works. We’re talking about fundamental laws of energy and properties of matter. Gravity existed before someone spilled a sack of berries and saw them fall and bounce. Nefshons existed before the Matriarch first ingested a drug that let her perceive them.”
Bernath laughed. “Fine, I take your point. But until people—philosophers and physicists—generated models to describe these things, we didn’t have the language, or the math, to talk about them.”
“That’s fair,” said Ryne.
“Well then, the models you’ve crafted have sparked others to think about nefshons in fresh ways. That’s all the more remarkable because the Caudex began that way, eschewing the limitations Margda imposed on Speakers and pushing beyond them. They’ve been at it for centuries and here you come along and show them something new.”
Arm in arm they walked a slow path through the gloom of the Shadow Dwell. The quiet burble of streams and the rich smell of mud and muck gradually gave way to the murmur of waves and the scent of the ocean.
“Everyone keeps saying things like that to me, and I keep telling them that I don’t know anything about Speakers or how they use nefshons. My work is on the properties they display, how that can be manipulated with respect to space-time.”
“Which is precisely why I asked you to join me here today. I appreciate you breaking with your normal schedule to do so.”
He shrugged. “I don’t mind.” And he didn’t. This was the time of day when he might otherwise have walked the boardways of the Civilized Wood, wandering aimlessly as he mulled over his thoughts. He could do so well enough accompanying Bernath to the beach. So far, her conversation was only a minor distraction to the math that ran through his mind.
“You’ve never asked about my work,” said Bernath. “Which neither surprises nor offends me. I’m one of three people who are generally responsible for meeting Dying scientists when they arrive, and in my experience fully half of you are so focused on your ideas that it doesn’t occur to you to wonder about other people.”
Ryne stumbled, the remark like a stone he’d tripped over. “I—huh. You’re right. I hadn’t looked at it that way. Uh … sorry?”
“Don’t be. We need you for who you are, and as I said the behavior doesn’t offend me. But I wanted to share the observation with you because I think we are engaged in similar tasks.”
This time he came to a complete stop. Bernath continued a few steps ahead, her arm leaving his. She turned to face him, smiling and laughing softly. Was she laughing in general or laughing at him?
“Explain that to me, if you would.”
“Happy to, but first, tell me how you would describe your work.”
He frowned, ears flapping forward. “As I said, I’m studying the relationships between nefshon particles and how they manipulate—and can be manipulated by—space-time. It’s a poly-dimensional model that holds up well through six dimensions and makes predictions through eight. Most of the work with nefshons never gets beyond three or four.”
“You realize there are only twenty-seven people in the entire world who could even begin to follow the math that has led you to that description, and we have five of them here, and that’s counting you and me.”
She wasn’t laughing at him then. Good. “You understand the math?”
“Not exactly. I said I can follow it. I can see when you point something out, some piece where you’ve already been. I can’t run with it. But I understand enough to direct some of the engineers to create applications. And that’s because I’d describe what you’re doing very differently than you do.”
Maybe it was the drug that Lolte had been giving him, maybe just the pleasure that this woman had been making the effort to read his work. He wanted to see what she thought of it, understand it through her eyes. “And what is that, exactly?”
“You’re collecting the dead.”
Ryne frowned. That wasn’t anything like he expected. And surely wasn’t true. He shook his head. “I don’t follow.”
“Speakers use nefshons to re-create enough of a person to in effect summon the dead. To … well, to speak to them. And when they’re done, or when the drug that allows them to interact with nefshons is exhausted, that recovered decedent discorporates again and is lost.”
He nodded. “That’s a good choice of words,” he said. “Like other forms of matter, albeit at a much more fundamental level, in the absence of an organizational focus nefshons will disperse.”
“Well, to use your words, the Speakers are what supply that organizational focus. As far as anyone’s been able to determine, they’re the only thing that can.”
“That’s a fair description.”
“It was, prior to your work. Your theories describe the underlying mechanism. But what Speakers do by imposing their will, working at cross purposes to the natural tendency of dispersion, from your work we now have a model that allows that organization to continue more or less indefinitely.”
“I wouldn’t go that far,” Ryne protested. “Even at the subatomic level, you don’t get perpetual motion.”
“True, but from the time scale we’re talking, little enough energy needs to be put into the system to keep it running. And so instead of a Speaker summoning the dead and then having to let them go in short order, we’ll soon be able to capture and maintain that nefshon construct.”
He was nodding now. “That’s what you meant by ‘collecting the dead’ then? That’s metaphorically true, but it doesn’t begin to describe the math.”
“No, but as most people aren’t equipped to understand the math but can embrace the metaphor, it has more utility. Which brings us back to how we’re similar.”
They’d reached the edge of the Shadow Dwell. Bernath led him out from between the trees, but stopped short of taking him down onto the beach and into the rain. Through the downpour he could just make out a boat approaching the shore. It clicked.
“I collect the dead, and you collect the Dying?”
“And like with your models, it’s not a permanent collection.”
“Nothing’s permanent,” he said, and knew he was saying much more than words alone could convey.
“Indeed not. But for a time we put off the natural flow of things. Your constructs will be able to linger beyond the usual duration of a Speaker’s session, and the men and women I bring in from this shore will enjoy more time and in some cases renewed life.”
Ryne rolled the metaphor around. He could almost taste it, touch it. He’d often thought of the math that way, as something to be grappled with using all the senses and not just as thought experiments. He found himself looking at Bernath with renewed appreciation and made a mental note to seek her out for subsequent walks and conversations, assuming her own schedule allowed.
“You may not have the Speakers’ gift, Ryne, but between us we make possible so much more than the world ever dared imagine. Our contributions are helping the Caudex to define the future.”