Chapter 101: Tale 10, Ch 3: Prosperity 9

“I’m a scientist, Bisha, I study the facts around me. There aren’t any fault lines around Pinnacle. There is no way a meteorite or anything else could have caused a crater like this with a path leading up to it. And it is a strict impossibility to create a piece of metal that allows us to do what we do. I would have to have my head buried in the sand to deny the existence of some sort of intelligent craftsmanship in our universe just by looking at this,” I said. I held up my lens and allowed some of its power to shine.

My Blessed weapon was a white, metal-bordered lens attached to a chain that wrapped around my neck. After showing my white lens I point at Bisha’s red saber, strapped to his belt without a sheath, and said, “Or that.”

Bisha crossed his arms and leaned against the shelf hiding the mural of that first major battle. Smiling, he said to me, “But that’s just what you don’t like. You know Infinity exists, but you can’t understand It. That’s driving you nuts, isn’t it?”

“Not nuts, not really.” Probably not nuts. “I just, well, how do they work?”

“How does the universe work? Infinity made it.” Bisha help up his hands as if the world around him were proof of his point.

“Yes, but Infinity left behind a framework to creation for us to understand and master. I know what makes wind and what makes the binds of this book.” I grabbed a random book off the shelf and presented it to Bisha. Then I grabbed my lens and once again let its power glow. “What I don’t understand is how this works.”

“It’s a tool like everything else,” Bisha said with a shrug.

I shook my head. “What if we could somehow understand it? There’s so much we could learn.”

Bisha bit his lip, thinking. “These weapons are the few pieces of evidence that prove Infinity exists. We can’t comprehend Infinity — we aren’t even meant to. Doesn’t it make sense that we should not try and comprehend Its gift as well?”

I shook my head and threw the book on the floor. “Maybe understanding Its gifts will allow us to understand It!” I stared Bisha straight in the eye, hoping he would become as enthralled by this idea as I was. “We could unlock the secrets of the universe, how it was made, why uniting the planets in peace is a good thing, everything.”

Bisha bent down and picked up the book, examining its cover while I stared at him. There was a crack in the wooden binding, a piece of material that couldn’t withstand the strain of being thrown after hundreds of years of existence.

“You’re playing with fire here, Wurn. Be careful. You might not like what you find,” he said, and handed me the book.

“Ignorance is the only thing I have to fear,” I said as I took the book and replaced it on its shelf. “They want me to stay in this library and study, but there’s nothing in here other than the descriptions of how Infinity placed the three weapons and how the Prophets built Pinnacle. Nothing comes before that, nothing about why the other planets all speak the same way or why only Sevens was given this gift.”

“Sounds like you want Infinity to be more interfering,” Bisha said, sounding exactly like a Red. “I don’t know about you, but I prefer that an all-powerful entity that can create the universe stay as far away as possible.”

I rolled my eyes. “That’s not the point. If we can understand the weapons, we might be able to create new ones.” I stepped close to Bisha, tempted to grab his collar and force him to listen. The fact that I couldn’t lift him if I tried and that he could kill me without trying kept my hands clenched at my sides. “You have to get me in there. I need to test the weapons.”

Bisha pushed me away. “Wurn, calm down. I don’t have that kind of authority.”

“I didn’t say use your authority. I already tried Manessa. I need to try something else. Maybe we could dig a hole or something,” I said and turned away, rubbing the metal edge of my lens as I thought of several dozen elaborate ways of getting into the chamber that held the three weapons. One of them involved the city zoo. I was quite proud of that one. Of course all my ideas would end up with my capture, a problem I wouldn’t be able to deal with.

“You want to steal them?” Bisha actually laughed at the idea. He slapped me on the back and smiled. “My, my, Wurn I never thought you had such a heinous side to you.”

I brushed his arm off and looked around to make sure no one was listening in on us. “I’m not being heinous, I’m being calculating. I need those weapons and if I’m not allowed to get them I’ll get them when I’m not allowed.” Bisha chuckled at the silliness of this phrase. My eloquence did always falter when I was under stress. “Shut up. We need to figure out how to get in there. Now are you with me or not?”

Bisha looked around, seeing if anyone was staring at us. No one but trainees and the Tent Library keeper were present, and all of them were busy with their books. The Red Prophet in front of me turned and smiled my direction, a mischievous grin that made me immediately sure he would help.

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“I’ve fought and killed for causes many people thought were crazy,” Bisha said. “But I’ve never found a reason to do something crazy in opposition to the Prophets. That’s the only reason I’ll help you, Wurn.”

“Good.”

“I’m assuming you have a plan?”

“A few dozen, yes. It involves the consequential collaboration of—”

Bisha put his hands up. “Just tell me the basics. So what, you shift into the chamber and just shift out? Wait, no. I forgot about the blockers.”

“There’s always a White Prophet down there who can prevent other Prophets from using their powers inside the chamber. The only way we can shift in or out is if that White isn’t inside the chamber.”

“So what’s the plan then?”

“Okay,” I said, trying to hide a grin that kept spreading across the left side of my face, “but we’ll have to go to my lab.”

Bisha shrugged. “Okay. To the lab.”

I grabbed the Red’s arm and blinked.

In a white flash, Bisha and I stood on the cold, metallic deck of Prosperity 9. I raised my lens and pushed a little power into to it, lighting up the pitch black room Bisha and I stood in.

“What, Wurn, where are we?” Bisha asked, holding out his saber and mixing red light with the white of my lens. “Is this a cave?”

“No,” I said, tripping across a plastic case. Glass and metal utensils spilled across the floor as I fumbled for a light switch. “Ah, no.” I turned on the lights and looked down at the broken experiment. “There goes an hour’s work. Well, I guess my theories on oxygen as a conductor of electricity were flawed anyway.”

As I picked up the pieces of my experiment, I noticed that Bisha was staring out the small window, his jaw practically on the messy floor.

“Bisha? What is it?” I asked.

Bisha pointed out the window. “Are we…” he stuttered. “Are we in outer space?”

I turned and noticed that the window faced the deep expanse of the universe. Trillions of stars danced in the twinkling distance like diamonds across a veil of black. Millions of kilometers away but burning brilliantly, our sun glared down on the other side of the planet while Sevens’ moon spun just off the horizon. I’d seen it plenty of times; it can get boring.

“Oh yeah, forgot about that. So will you help me with something? I need to find the switch that says escape pod ready and I haven’t…” I trailed off, noticing how Bisha continued to stare out at the planet as Prosperity 9 rotated.

“Is that Sevens?” Bisha slowly walked to the window to peer down at the land below him. “In the middle, right there, that’s where Pinnacle is, right? I think I can see it.”

“On a clear day, Pinnacle is visible. Bisha, get over here I have to tell you what the plan is.”

Bisha was still pinned against the window, putting oil from his skin on the glass I’d cleaned six months ago. When the ship turned back toward outer space, the Red started pounding on the window.

“Hey,” Bisha said. “Hey, bring it back to Sevens. Turn around — go back!” Bisha kept hitting the thick plastic glass with the flat of his hands as if the geosynchronous calculations of a radiation powered thrust amplifier could be altered by hitting the window.

“Stop that,” I said, and pulled Bisha away from the window.

“Turn it back, Wurn. Why are going away from Sevens?”

“We’re not going away from Sevens we’re orbiting it. And we’re spinning to create a Sevens-normal artificial gravity.”

Bisha looked around, suddenly afraid. “We’re spinning?”

I rolled my eyes. “I can’t very well do experiments in a weightless environment now can I?”

Bisha looked at the walls and low ceiling, not sure if he should be holding on to something. “No. I guess not.”

“Stop bothering with the window and help me. I need to get some stuff out of the escape pod,” I said, and walked over to the open hatch that led to the tiny escape pod. Inside were stacks of papers and ink containers all thrown about and spilling over on top of each other. I had to pull out a full arm’s worth of sheets in order to even step inside.

“What is this?” Bisha continued looking around at the spacecraft in amazement.

People did tend to get a little overexcited the first time they saw an interstellar vehicle. “It’s Prosperity 9. Do you like it?”

“Prosperity? Did you build this?” Bisha asked with amazement. “And name it after Prosperity?”

“Build a spacecraft?” I asked, never having given the question legitimate thought. “I guess I could try. But I lack the resources to acquire the materials and I’m sure the Sept would have a few questions on safety. Plus any interstellar craft would lose power in the Sevens’ magnetic field. Why, you should have seen the first time I—”

“You didn’t build this, did you? And it’s named after Prosperity so the Prosperins built it.” Bisha looked at me with sudden realization. “You stole it! You stole this, this…”

“Spaceship?”

“That! You stole this from the people of Prosper!”

“I didn’t steal it. They let me have it. Sort of.”

“Sort of?”

“Its orbit was rapidly decaying. They stripped it down and decided to let it burn up in reentry. It was either I save it or it was destroyed, so it’s not like they missed it or anything.”

Bisha started, blinking very quickly. “You flew this thing all the way from Prosper? I don’t even know how far that is.”

“One quintillion—”

“I didn’t ask for you to tell me.”

“Anyway,” I said, “I didn’t fly it. That was actually the flaw, bad fuel pumps. So I shifted it.”

“You shifted something this big? How?”

I laughed. “Well, it wasn’t easy. I had to sit in here a day and a half training my mind around the idea, nearly a year before that working up from a rock to a boulder. In the end, the only reason I could shift something this big was because I was going to Sevens. I’ve tried shifting it to Mother, they have some very interesting cloud formations during the spring, but I couldn’t. Probably something to do with the fact that the three weapons are on Sevens.”

“So you spent nearly a year in training, hours of strain and concentration, broke many of the Sept’s rules of non-interference on technology, all to get a room to use as a lab,” Bisha said, and started laughing.

I shrugged. “I enjoy the privacy.”

Bisha shook his head, smiling and laughing as he looked back to the window. Sevens was coming into orbit again. “Well, I gotta tell you. You can’t beat it for the view. So. Why are we here?”

“Ah, yes, the plan,” I said, and set the bundle of papers in Bisha’s hands. “First, we must clean out the escape pod.”