Day Two

The bartender clapped his hands twice and the woman vanished, her last vitriolic outburst ringing in the air. Bala stared blatantly at the bartender, interest sparkling on the edges of her attitude.

"I suppose you'll find out for all of us. Have you ever seen him do that before?"

"But what happens when my purpose is taken away even for a short while?"

Bala shifted in her seat, wanted to levitate, to think comfortably. She'd raged and fought and thought the question for years at a time. It confronted you when the tide of battle turned, when the cold overwhelmed and all you had to tie the pale thread of your life to was the theory of a crackpot scientist who vanished eight thousand years ago.

Planet stood, brushed the resin dust from the seat of her pants. Unlike most, she ran a credit at the bar, making sure deposits found their way from one of her myriad accounts across the star systems. She tipped so excessively, drank so little, Bala was almost certain she'd paid for the bar a dozen times over at this point. The idea would've amused the storyteller, who owned nothing but her ship and used a bunk at the College when she wasn't on assignment. The goddess recalled a lecture of Planet's at a far seminary in the Naron system that took place six hundred years previous. It bothered her that she couldn't remember why she had been there at the time.

"Owning things creates affiliations that weaken mystique; even a garden in a far corner of nowhere will raise questions at the places you visit. Your objects solidify part of yourself, make it fully visible, destructible and definable. No longer will people say 'She cannot own anything for her possession is the entire Universe.' So despite the fact that my wealth exceeds the GNP of several galaxies and I do nothing to hide this information, I'm seen as an otherworldly wanderer, a holy mystic who abstains from the trap of naming things as mine." She paused. Her white hair was kept long then, in a twisted braid looped around her neck and she picked at the tail of it where she had tied silver rings than chimed sweetly against each other.

"It also helps to be perceived as that eccentric...a person who owns nothing might do *anything*. The princes and presidents and creche unions know that I can out-wait their morals and judgements. It doesn't even matter if what I do is wrong as long as I stick by it. If I'm willing to walk on my hand for two hundred years, people will let me do as I please. Hell, they might build a religion around it."

The crowd murmured with an appreciative laugh.

"If something doesn't make sense to someone, they usually chalk it up to religion. Faith as a shield, their faith, not yours, is the natural course of those completely comfortable with themselves. Keep in mind that the perception of faith as trial will often save your hide when you wear out your welcome. To appear to suffer is entertainment almost no ruler can abstain from enjoying. Keep your wealth fluid, your path trackless, and amuse yourself with other people's things."

Planet-now interrupted Planet-memory.

"The Heir Presumptive of Regulskek awaits," she said, wrinkling her nose, "I haven't been in a caul tank since his great-grandfather declared Narrators anathema. I did a good job with that old king, but this one's been raised pampered and spineless, in a metaphorical sense, and his advisors have turned against him and he's getting nervous. Violence is being considered but invoked by either party would involve excessive black market growth. The Council line is that the Majordomo's ban on intra-system trade needs to stay in place until their brother planet reaches at least Second World progression. Not likely when an ethnic war seems eminent..."

Bala stared moodily at the tiny forest. Life continued in a squeaking, stinking pantomime, the diminuitive beasts and chopstick thick trees growing, breeding, dying. Her perfect face reflected in the glass and she saw it as a ghostly sun, wondered what these creatures would ask of her as a deity.

"Sounds excessively complicated," she murmured.

"Easy job. Then I'll meet with the Council."

Bala looked up at her friend, saw the set of her jaw, the usual iron resolve to do what needs to be done overlaid with thick weariness.

"Not that the Council knows," the goddess said, "where will you go?"

"They'll find out when I get there."

Planet waved a brief good-bye and moved briskly through the bar, out the door. Bala felt deflated, somnambulant, pondered asking the bartender if he wouldn't mind sharing his port trick, watched him question the angry woman's companion, who was visibly shaken.

"No, no more trouble. I swear I didn't know she would get so upset and if there's any reparations I can make, please let me know. What? No... all I wanted was to listen with her."

Betaine's eyes snapped open and he rocked himself forward on his feet, then stumbled towards the port.

"NO...no, no, no...no no no...damn her, damn Archivists..." he cursed and Bala watched him vanish with a faint pop through the door. She felt a twinge of curiosity but rolled over and commanded the orbs to dim. Visions always depressed her and she watched the glowing red compression streaks like pillars of flame left by the passenger ship as it spun away from the surface with the grace and surety of an experienced controller. Her gaze followed the sleek ring until it reached the edge of her perception and she drifted to sleep.

Betaine's cursing followed him in a gray cloud all the way down to the Archives. Bala's library was astonishingly well-stocked with upwards of a billion volumes, data cubes, crylon projectors, imprint registers and theurge thrums, as well as the largest collection of Archivists outside the College Narrate. Golden leaf doors engraved with images of the miracles performed by Bala stood over 80 feet tall, the carvings done by the greatest master woodworkers and goldsmiths spanning six millennia.

The goddess, her eyes represented by smooth onyx cabochons, riding a six-legged Thrassian elephant, flying tassels and palanquin stained russet with the blood of half-of-a-million warriors of the god Neume, descending upon his city with the great lightning spear Oalo, the Bringer of Madness, clutched in her long, golden claws.

The exceedingly explicit sexual conversion of the 724 virgin guardian women of the moon goddess, Arishvana. Bala, strands of her glittering black hair wrapped around the hearts of the statuesque guardians with their ivory swords laid at their feet as she beckoned them forward into her clouds of red silk.

Destruction of the Fourth Temple of Salumat. The slaves who laboured in the labyrinthian salt mines below the scorched earth, their skin crusted and pale, hands and feet twisted, eyes gouged and mouths sewn shut to keep the silence their horned, vengeful god demanded of the weak...fleeing with the assistance of the great wind spirits summoned by Bala, clothed in white with wide angelic wings that cried healing tears upon their wounds, their sightless eyes turned to her. This scene occurred near the middle of the door, marking it as an early triumph of Bala as her aspect of benevolence was abandoned soon after Salumat's downfall.

A new visitor to the library often spent hours wandering, no matter how urgent his academic pursuit. The doors were considered a trial, an imposing demand on the viewer to prove his worth to come within and deface the silence. The floor, walls, pillars seemed one solid piece of warm, amethyst stone, carved, covered with shifting tapestries, murals, encrusted with gems beyond worth. Entering the main hall itself, the Fountain of Birth rose hundreds of feet beneath the first of many violet domes that radiated down impossibly long corridors.

The Fountain showed the souls of the faithful, naked in physical perfection, contorted and struggling in impossible configurations, every face sweet with lust and terrible with anger, all reaching towards the summit where a resplendent figure of Bala awaited, a sword in one hand, a rose in the other. The colours shifted as the water poured from her feet and made the ascendants writhe as if almost real. Drinking the water was said to bring visions and good fortune but Betaine hurried past to a seemingly empty room where heavy curtains fell from ceiling to floor, muffling the sharp clicking of his shoes. He paused and held out a slender hand. A faint breeze on his palm announced the Catalog, a device used to guide users through the library.

The Catalog, at its simplest, was nothing more than a floating light projector with access to the massive database below the library. It displayed possible suggestions for reference material, kept track of previous searches and confirmed the user's species in the event that one of the more esoteric forms of data storage needed to be accessed. Some owners gave them AI, voices, user recognition and a plethora of creative and bizarre shapes. Bala had kept hers simple, a gleaming bronze sphere carved into the shape of a vasayan, a short, fat humanoid spirit said to guide the dead who revered knowledge to Paradise. The expression on its wide, lipless mouth was one of gleeful subservience and 'What do you seek, wanderer?' was displayed on the air in ornate, calligraphic Standard six inches from the needle point projector located between its squinting eyes.

"Archive access for Saul Betaine. Get me the Farshi, Rubyat, or whatever the other one is specializing in College Narrate history....Vermilli, he'll do if Rubyat is off on one of his waker drug fugues again. I'll need Planet's speech to the seminary on Naron...should be reference number seven two two two four one."

The Catalog chirruped twice.

'Rubyat is awake and available. Currently accessing story records. Vermilli queries if you ever sleep or simply stay awake from spite. Please proceed to the Archives.'

Despite the treasure of knowledge housed within the library, the true worth was held in the Archivists, mnemonic impressionists raised in controlled environments of alternating sensory deprivation and overload, training their considerable psionic abilities as complete recorders. Most had no parents, birthdays, memories beyond the moment their purpose was realized. Less than a hundred thousand existed according to the current census and most, if not all, utilized their exquisite nerve control over other sentient beings to form a network where important impressions were backed up over multiple Archivists. They shared a bitterly comedic view of Life, spread thinly enough to be considered personality as opposed to a preconception, which ruined the Archivist's ability to record consistently and objectively. Knowing full well there was no such thing as objectivity but enjoying the job security and schadenfreude of their duties, the black-humoured librarians continued to curse the scientists, professors, philosophers and the just plain curious with an as untainted view of what really happened that they could provide.

How the data requested was played was not via a remote feed, but plugged or strapped directly into the Archivist, who used the inquirer as a full immersion playback machine, dumping the experience directly into the seeker's brain via muscle memory. In the event of violent or strongly emotional recordings, ghost injuries or feelings sometimes lingered for months. Accessing the wrong source recording or simply browsing could be quite damaging. This was an endless source of amusement to the Archivists.

Betaine, with his eidetic memory and considerable impressionist training paired with the generally peaceful nature of Planet's sessions, had earned the simultaneous ire and respect of the dozen or so Archivists in Bala's library, who considered the young man to be a brilliant analyst and an insufferable, pompous twat.

The on-duty Archivists, three old men, bony, wrinkled, walnut-coloured, resembling a cat's asshole and smelling like one on a hot day, lounged in a low, soft pit of carefully treated furs and snowy white pillows. A cloud of pale yellow smoke hung over the room, evidence of a recent memory drug binge, likely tsoma, where the user assumed control of a fellow user's memories, racing through experiences at a break-neck speed before dumping the collected impressions in a giant burst of sensation that left all involved a shaky wreak for several days.