The Final Key: Part Two of Triad by Catherine Asaro

Author:Catherine Asaro [Asaro, Catherine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: TOR
Published: 2011-09-27T18:11:57+00:00

STRANGER.

Yes. He adjusted his spectacles and entered the chamber, a room with eight walls, an octagonal prism saturated with light.

Time slowed.

In the center of the chamber, a column of light rose up, radiant. It came out of an octagonal depression and vanished overhead in a haze of blurred reality.

The Lock. A Kyle singularity.

Eldrinson understood nothing of this column. He knew only that a Lock offered a portal into another reality. Only here did it exist in his universe. It rose out of a universe where space and time had no meaning. Overhead, it pierced the fabric of spacetime and vanished back into another reality. Yes, he had heard the words. They made no sense to him.

None of that mattered.

He had expected to feel pressure from the power coursing through this chamber. He had been certain it would overcome his weakened body and limited mind. He had lived with his flaws and lacks for so long, all these years, knowing how little he had to offer Roca. His inherent weakness would crush him.

Instead his mind soared.

Finally he knew the reason for the anomalies on Lyshriol, the differences in the people, world, and stars—the binary and octal forms of their existence, their Memories, their need to identify symbols by exact location and details. Their designers hadn't intended them to be illiterate; it was an unplanned side effect caused by millennia of undirected genetic

drift. Here he felt the truth: their ancestors had designed them for Kyle space. And he was, in many ways, the ultimate result of that ancient experiment by a long dead people. He had been created for this.

The Bard limped to the column, his motions slowed in the turgid time of the chamber. He stared into its depths, enthralled by its terrible beauty.

Then he stepped into the singularity.

15

Key to toe Web

the planters jumped high, jumped high, so high.

they sang their news,

sang their news.

sang so high.

they sang high.

they sang low.

they sang forever.

they sang of endless seas.

the endless seas of trance.

forever beautiful.

forever blue.

forever.

The endless blue stretched forever, as natural to the Bard as breath in his lungs, as thoughts in his mind, as natural as the love for his family, or the legendary music of the Blue Dale Archers that had almost vanished from the world. The forever blue. He had come home.

16

le Ocean of Elsewhere

The withdrawal was killing his patient. Doctor Lane Kay wood had worked most of his career in rural areas surrounding Selei City. He had never encountered anything like this. The youth writhed in agonized seizures. He clutched Kaywood's arm, his four-fingered hands hinged like claws, his gaze lost to whatever hallucinations haunted him. Caught in his private hell, he had gone beyond any treatment they could give him here.

Suddenly the man gasped and his spasms released. He collapsed onto the deck, shaking. Kneeling at his side, Kaywood murmured comfort and brushed hair out of his patient's eyes. He felt so damn helpless. When the youth had been coherent, he had described a medicine dispensed to his wife, one he had taken without permission.

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