iltaiel

[thisvorlunatic]

The monument is huge.

There's no air in here to diffuse or distort the beam of light he shines around in the blackness, but the beam is too narrow to give him more than confused glimpses of the structure. He seems to be standing on a kind of many-petaled flower design, nine-pointed, with a raised center from which successive rings of petals drop off until the last, largest outer ring is just a step away from the floor. Past that, there is... a lot of floor, and past that, some walls he can't get a clear view of with just his handlight.

He turns the light off and stands there in the darkness to think.

His pressure suit and breath craft senses simultaneously report a sudden rise in external air pressure, from vacuum to thin atmosphere up to something respectably breathable in about half a minute. Shortly afterward, a dim and sourceless glow illuminates the room.

Miles feels very small.

The light comes up gradually brighter, and he looks around, not quite yet daring to crack his helmet. The geometric flower on which he stands is echoed above by... a window? Hard to tell when there's nothing out there to see. But the panes are slightly reflective, and their arrangement matches the flower design. The ceiling almost looks like a giant snowflake... nine-pointed, of course, with what he thinks are more windows flaring out in huge diamonds from the points of the central flower, out to the larger points of the building itself, which seems to be built in a nine-pointed star shape. A complex configuration of big, solid-looking stone ramps climb the outer walls in nine-pointed symmetry, and he suspects the thick pillars and walkways of concealing doors somewhere. Probably nine of them. Nine is a definite theme here.

He cannot feasibly spend nine days in his pressure suit. Well, he can, but he'll run out of air. And Esthfora was pretty definite about this place being livable. He sighs, and takes off his helmet.

His first breath of local air tastes just faintly strange, but not at all like he'd expect the conjured air of a dead planet to taste. None of the lively depth of planetary atmosphere, true, nor the flat scrubbed cleanliness of ship or station air, but it doesn't smell thousands of years dead, either. It smells... new.

That's appropriate, he supposes. It has to have been created on the spot. Possibly tailored to his biology directly in some magical way - he forgot to ask if the people in this universe were anything like humans to begin with. The design of this place must be fascinating...

Cautiously, he walks to the edge of the nine-sided central platform and steps off onto a triangular petal. And another step onto another triangle, and another... counting the central platform, he discovers that there are (of course) nine levels to the flower design.

And now he is on the enormous flat floor of the enormous room. He ventures away from the center. Yes, there are the doors, partway up the flat walls between one arm of the star and the next. The ramps go up intimidatingly high, and are intimidatingly without railings - just flat stone, nothing so much as marking the edge. Miles decides not to risk them. It's not like he wants to leave the building anyway. Nothing out there but vacuum and dust, as far as he knows.

He walks a long circle around the room, passing by each door, looking down each arm of the star. Then he returns to the middle and climbs the triangular petal-steps up to the central platform and sits down.

What is he meant to do here for nine days? Admire the architecture? The architecture is bloody intimidating. All that stone - he can't even tell what kind, not that he has an extensive knowledge of types of stone. Mostly smooth, but not polished to reflectiveness; dark grey, paler than black but only just. Maybe it's some sort of magical material invented for this purpose.

Well, that's as much admiring the architecture as he can stand. He leans back on his hands and cranes his neck to look up at the nine-pointed many-petaled window, wondering what the view must have been like when there were stars. Damned lonely, this place.

A flicker of movement in his peripheral vision has him jumping to his feet, heart hammering - what the hell could possibly be moving here - but it's only some sort of display. He casts comprehend language. Nine words, each floating in the air above the point of a petal, each accompanied by an abstract little holovid. They change places with each other as he looks, shuffling their order in seemingly random patterns, so it takes him some turning and counting to be sure he's read them all.

Naharr - 'Chaos' - shows an amorphous multicoloured blob of constantly shifting colours. It hurts his eyes a little to stare at it for long, half-glimpsing patterns in the noise and then seeing them inevitably disappear.

Poai - 'Life' - shows tiny single-celled organisms colonizing an ocean and evolving at blurring speed until their entire planet is covered in plants and birds and beasts. It's fascinating to watch; every time the displays shuffle and he catches this one again, the species that form before his eyes are new, visibly different from previous cycles.

Soryo - he tentatively thinks he might translate this one 'Tide', if called upon to render it as a single word in English - also shows a planet, but here the focus is different. The orbiting moon, shaping the oceans in a regular rhythm; the spinning planet turning its faces towards its sun and away again, over and over; the turning of the seasons, the circuit around its star to make a year; tectonic plates slowly crashing together and pulling away, changing the landscape; the motion of water eroding some places and building up others. Cycles, repetition, gradual change.

Epru - 'Void' - shows a darkness as complete as the dead black sky, never moving, never changing. It's peaceful but mildly unsettling.

Beshenn - 'Ward' - shows something that he guesses to be the exterior of this monument. It's very pretty. And it stands absolutely unchanged while its surroundings shift in a mad blur of accelerated time. He thinks a few of those bright flashes might be explosions, but they don't so much as crack the stone.

Kiina - 'Heart', perhaps, or 'Soul', but 'Heart' seems closer - shows an abstract animation that's hard for him to interpret: shining motes of light in vivid jewel tones that dance in complex patterns, some changing colour gradually over time, some remaining constant.

Tsaer - 'Edge' - shows pairs, opposites, borders, boundaries. The line between day and night on a planet, or between land and water along a beach; the threshold of an open door, the treeline on a mountain. A spinning coin, one side painted black, one white.

Ileyi shows the birth and death of stars, the blaze of thermonuclear fire, the shining light of galaxies.

Rilte shows mirrors. Sometimes a quicksilver pool that reflects his own face back at him in distorted ripples; sometimes silvered glass, reflecting imaginary surroundings; sometimes a moon, reflecting the light of its sun.

He decides the best translation he's going to come up with that reflects the relationship between those last two concepts is probably Sun and Moon respectively. There isn't really a direct English equivalent.

Then, for lack of any better ideas, he climbs down the petal-steps and heads for the closest point. Its display changes a few times along the way, epru to beshenn to tsaer, but ileyi is what it lands on when he gets there. Hesitantly, he reaches up and touches the display.

Comments

[thisvorlunatic]

Nothing.

No sound. No heat. No light.

Total sensory deprivation, the complete absence of any stimulus.

This is epru.

Very useful, he's sure, for deleting things you don't like, for slowing or cooling or dimming something that has had a little too much Sun - but to see the downside he just has to look around him, or more to the point fail to do that because there is nothing to look with and nothing to look at. Oh God get him out of here.

Reality returns. Miles shudders. What a note to end on. Couldn't that have been up front with the scary ones? Although he supposes it is scary in a very different way; he certainly feels no temptation whatsoever to abuse Void. Keep it far away from him, more like.

He shakes his head and climbs back up to sit on the central platform again.

[thisvorlunatic]

His chrono thinks it's been not quite four days since he stepped through the gate. He doesn't feel like someone who has been going four days without food, water, sleep, or for that matter sitting down. He feels fine.

He sits and thinks about everything he's learned.

Those first impressions aren't the whole story, he can tell. The aspects have more depth than he's seen. Thinking about it, he's pretty sure an entire useful application of ileyi passed him by while he was busy getting excited about explosions - it's the element of creation as well as energy; it can be used to, well, make stuff. Not quite as easily or precisely as a daeva-demon - you'd want rilte, to copy things as well as a demon does, and rilte works best with an example in front of it - but that's still plenty useful.

Did this place really need to take ten hours apiece to show him intense visions that don't even cover the entire scope of each element? Then again, here he is thinking about the parts he missed out on, and he certainly doesn't have a textbook in front of him. So maybe his education was more complete than it seemed. That's a little unsettling, but useful, he won't deny.

Now what, though? He's not even halfway through the trip. Is the rest of this process going to involve sitting on a stone floor for five days contemplating the nine - whatever you call them, aspects, branches, elements - of taieli? There has to be more to it than that, right? Why does this magic system want him to devote nine days to it, exactly? It seems to be a mystically significant number, but come on. He has things to do. Worry helplessly about his friends, for example.

The monument does not spontaneously volunteer any answers.

"Ugh," says Miles. It occurs to him that it is unfair to complain on the one hand about it wasting his time showing him unnecessarily lengthy visions and on the other hand about it wasting his time having him sit around doing nothing whatsoever. He decides he doesn't care and will complain anyway.

"This is annoying and tedious," he says, in case the monument can hear him.

If it can, it isn't inclined to respond.

Miles sighs grumpily and gets to his feet. He decides that while he's here without anything else to do, he might as well explore. He heads for a wall at random and walks up the nearest ramp. The ramps turn out to be just as much of a bizarre maze as they looked from the floor; he wonders what the point of them is. Is it just the strange aesthetics of a lost civilization, or do they serve some useful function this way? Maybe he has to walk over all of them in order to accomplish some critical prerequisite. Well, no time like the present. Up he goes.

The lack of railings is highly intimidating. He can vividly imagine how much he'll regret this course of action if he falls off. But it's not like he has anything better to do, and the ramps and walkways aren't narrow, and the smooth stone still has enough texture for his boots to grip. So he ignores his fear of heights and engages his brain with the puzzle of plotting out a course that covers every single walkway and ramp. It's not possible to do it without walking the same path twice, but he should be able to get down to a reasonable minimum of twice-crossed ground...

It turns out to be oddly relaxing. On the highest level of walkways, he discovers, a beautiful window shaped (of course) like a nine-pointed star looks out on the blank black ground, indistinguishable from the blank black sky except very close to the monument where the interior lighting spills from the window and illuminates it a little. There are ramps and walkways climbing the outer walls too, and beyond that, a flat dark landscape with no discernible features. He wonders what the view was like when this place was new.

Up and down and around he climbs, and at each of the nine windows he looks out at the same view. In fact, the view is so entirely identical that he realizes partway through that he's lost count of how many sides he's covered, so he sighs and starts keeping a deliberate count from there. Even on this second round, he can't distinguish any of the windows from any of the rest. For all he can tell, this whole monument could be formed of a single arm-section repeated nine times using some kind of space-warping effect. He's almost sure you could do that with taieli - rilte and tsaer, maybe - but he doesn't want to lose count again, so he doesn't let himself get distracted trying to design a space-folded mini-monument in his head.

On the official and definite ninth window, he stops and looks out again and checks his chrono. Total time spent pointlessly walking up and down ramps: four and a half hours. A mere nibble out of his five remaining days of boredom. Hell.

He follows the ramps carefully back down to ground level and returns to the centerpiece, since it seems to be the building's most interesting feature. He notes yet again that he is experiencing no physical needs to speak of. That doesn't stop him from feeling like he should be tired, though; he lies down on the uncomfortable stone of the central platform and looks up at the ceiling and sighs.

[thisvorlunatic]

This peaceful tableau lasts about four seconds before he starts drumming his fingers on the floor, and soon after that he jumps to his feet and starts pacing up and down the triangular steps. In the spirit of pointless completionism, he spirals around the flower design in a pattern meant to cross every single step; for the sake of his sanity, he doesn't even try to keep count of how many steps he's covered, although he does idly do the math and note that there are seventy-two steps, eight levels of nine each, between the floor and the single central platform.

So how would you build a space-folded nine-way radial mirror of a single segment? His vision-derived knowledge is at least up to the task of speculating, although it's short on precise implementation details. If you wrapped it around and mirrored it like this and smoothed away the edges like that, then... you'd have to add in extra tricks to prevent people from being able to see themselves duplicated in the other sections, and there would be seriously disgusting consequences to walking into the middle and intersecting with yourself. Ick.

He shakes his head and tries again from another angle: instead of wrapping the space itself around so that walking out one side of the slice took you back in from the other side, how about mirroring the structure so that each of the nine arms is physically indistinguishable from the rest? That wouldn't produce the identical views from the windows, but the identical views from the windows probably are in fact fully explained by this being a dead planet in a dead universe and there being nothing out there to see. Miles examines his tentative design in his thoughts, and concludes that it's pretty likely they actually used this trick. He would, if he had taieli and wanted symmetrical architecture very badly.

So his four days of bizarre visions have actually given him a solid foundation of working knowledge, not just a beginner's manual, more like one of those engineering textbooks that all the other students used to dread. Miles likes those engineering textbooks.

He keeps walking, around and around. He wonders if the number nine was widely significant in these people's culture or cultures, or if it's just such a theme here because this monument is about taieli. He wonders what this dark stone stuff actually is and how it was made, whether they created it with magic or synthesized it in a more mundane way or dug it up somewhere. In a world with rilte you're really not limited in principle by the scarcity of any given substance, and although in practice he knows large-scale duplication would be harder than it sounds, they're bound to have pulled out all the stops for this one; it lasted past the end of the bloody universe.

This magic system is going to be so fascinating to play with. Five days from now. When he actually gets to do that.

Ugh.

[thisvorlunatic]

He walks into the next vision before he even knows it's there. One moment he's crossing the central platform, the next he's - nowhere. But not the terrifying kind of nowhere from the epru vision. He just doesn't happen to have a location, because this vision isn't about him.

It's about them. The taieli-mages of the past. Thousands, millions, billions of them. Each with an individual approach, an individual perspective, and an individual - something. There isn't a word for it in English until he thinks about it for a moment and comes up with 'Sense'.

Every single person with taieli has their own unique power - not to use the magic; using the magic is just a matter of skill, and everyone's potential is at least theoretically equal. But to understand, to sense with it. Senses as minor-but-useful as the person who could bend their vision around corners, or as sweeping as the person who could detect mass at any range, or as otherwise-impossible as the person who could tell what kinds of accidents they were about to have with Chaos - what Miles wouldn't give for that power. But it seems this isn't something you get to choose.

Of course, with that many people, there's bound to be some repetition. Not everyone's Sense is perfectly unique. But the exact details of how it appears to them and what it can and cannot do are always just a little different from one person to the next. This mage could tell the distance between any two objects in her field of view; this mage could tell the same thing, but not if he saw them reflected in a mirror or accurate illusion, only if he had a true unobstructed line of sight. Little details like that.

For some reason, Miles finds that this aesthetic really appeals to him. A person's Sense tends to be suited to them somehow, in a way that can be clearly observed but not fully understood. No one ever gets a Sense and feels like it is wrong for them, but it's impossible to predict exactly what they'll get before it happens.

He wonders what his Sense is going to be.

On that note, the vision ends and deposits him back in the monument. He checks his chrono. Some combination of all that pacing and the Sense vision has taken him through the end of the fifth day, at least according to the standard calendar.

"I'd really like to know exactly how long I have left to go, here," he says aloud. "For that matter I'd really like to know how these visions even work."

A panel of unreadable local text appears in front of him. He doesn't catch the names of any elements, and those are the only words of this language he learned when he cast comprehend language back at the start.

He contemplates the illusory panel for a few seconds, and then shrugs and touches it.

[thisvorlunatic]

A vision about visions. How bizarrely recursive.

It shows him the construction of the monument. A breathtaking feat of magical engineering, with unprecedented numbers of mages coordinating on an unprecedented scale. The next biggest project in recorded history was meant to extend the lifespan of a star, and it came out to a tenth the size.

And why exactly did they need such intense effort from such an enormous crowd just to make a widget that gives people magic...?

The vision explains that the population of active mages had been growing more or less steadily for centuries, as people developed safer and more reliable ways to use taieli and organized something resembling a standard curriculum out of the individual instructional techniques of myriad individual teachers. Magical instruction slowly shifted from a master/apprentice paradigm to something more open and structured, where students could apply to schools and be taught in classes by multiple specialized teachers.

In the previous era, magical talent had been primarily genetic - you were either born with taieli potential, or you weren't - but everyone had known a trick or two for awakening magic in an apprentice who wasn't lucky enough to have started out with it. As the population of students grew, their teachers began to rely on these methods more and more. And they were the most poorly understood of all magical techniques, so it wasn't unheard-of for someone to need a few tries before the magic caught. It took them a long time to begin to notice the problem: as techniques for awakening magic proliferated, the failure rate increased. Thousands of educational institutions and research groups threw their best people into trying to find a method that worked reliably, and nobody succeeded. Principles were discovered and then immediately thrown out.

Someone got the clever idea of trying to find the genetic basis for magic, and they looked around for some naturally occurring talents to study, and found that there weren't any. They stubbornly tracked down the descendants of the last people confirmed genetically magical. By known rules of inheritance, several of those descendants - some still alive - should have had taieli. But none of them did. Somehow, the 'be born with it' method of acquiring taieli had stopped working too.

This news caused widespread alarm, but also got them on the right track at last. The problem wasn't in the specific techniques. The problem was in the existence of so many of them. Back when nobody had known how to give taieli to someone who didn't start with it, inheritance had been perfectly reliable. Now that people were inventing methods of passing on magic at a frantic pace, most of them were failing more than they succeeded. Somehow, there seemed to be a limited amount of functional-method-for-acquiring-magic to go around, and the supply was seriously overtaxed.

They needed to get this pinned down to a single reliable method at minimum, and they needed to do it fast, before all the methods became diluted to the point of uselessness.

So they pulled together. All of them. A society spanning dozens of planets, only barely held together by a common official language, and they managed to unite their efforts toward this goal. They designed the monument with exquisite care, taking into account every relevant consideration they could think of. The monument works automatically because they couldn't be sure there would always be a qualified expert around to operate it. It imparts a basic education where necessary because they couldn't be sure there would always be teachers available. Its primary functions don't depend on language, because they couldn't be sure that the languages they knew would survive forever.

It evaluates candidates rather than handing out magic indiscriminately. To acquire taieli from the monument, you have to meet certain minimum standards of ethics and conscientiousness. If you demonstrate that you're the sort of person who will use a supernova where a plasma arc would do, or carelessly play with Chaos, or create autonomous constructs without considering the implications, well, no taieli for you. That is also why it let him wander around in abject boredom for hours; he was demonstrating that being bored won't push him to give up or do something stupid.

And how exactly does it figure all this out? How do the visions manage to pack so much information into so little conscious experience? Is the place reading his mind?

Not quite. Both the visionary instruction and the personality evaluations are based on systems once used for translation and communication. In a sense, this entire nine-day trip is one long conversation between Miles and the monument; besides the aesthetic significance and the display of commitment, part of the reason for the nine-day duration is so the monument can learn how to properly talk to him. One of the first and simplest ways somebody can fail at acquiring taieli is to come in unwilling to share, and thereby prevent the monument from learning enough to do its job.

Incidentally, throughout this history lesson it's been teaching him Aiha, the language of its creators. He is now fluent. No more trouble about 'taieli-mages' and 'aspects, elements, branches'; the words are atailora, atailoran and aineli, ainelin, -n being the plural ending for that noun form.

The vision drops him. Miles sits down. He blinks several times. Total expressive fluency in a language he hadn't heard of last week is a weird feeling. At least comprehend language sort of eases you into it by way of only letting you understand as much of the language as you've actually seen. But he could now hold a conversation in Aiha as easily as English, for all the good this will bloody do him considering he is now its only living speaker. Well, maybe Cam will appreciate the new language when Miles next summons him.

What time is it now?

Halfway through day eight. Well, that vision did feel a little longer than the rest.

[thisvorlunatic]

"But really," he says aloud. "How long do I have left? And are you going to lose atmosphere when my time's up? Because that would be inconvenient."

The monument sweeps him up into another vision, showing its own interior and Miles gating out - interesting, that it was able to learn about gate. Answer: regardless of the outcome of this visit, the monument will hold in its air for approximately another century or until someone opens a door and lets it all out. It will not let him suffocate because he wandered too far from his pressure suit helmet, even once he has been either accepted or rejected and is no longer its problem either way.

And the time...?

That would be up to Miles. He can exit the vision and pass the remainder of his visit wandering the interior of the monument, or stay in the vision until it's time to go.

...Miles wonders if this is a trick question.

The vision assures him that it is not.

Well no shit he'd rather pass the time in a vision than bored. Especially if the vision is going to be educational in some way.

That is another decision for Miles to make, says the monument. He can spend the remaining time learning more about taieli - or sharing more information about his life and personality with the monument, to help it decide what to do with him.

Now that's a tough one. Of course he wants to learn all about taieli, and he's starting to get very fond of the visionary educational system - but he also respects the principles the monument was designed on. He agrees with its decisionmaking priorities. Giving it more information would be the responsible choice.

When he puts it like that, it's obvious. But he indulges in a ceremonial grumble before he thinks: all right, all right, look at whatever you need.

The vision shifts from the interior of the monument to a vista of memory. It's not very much like the kiina vision at all. In fact, at first it just seems to be a relentless parade of his past mistakes. Ill-considered childhood adventures - the reckless leap that cost him his place in the entrance exams for the Imperial Service Academy at seventeen - the pilot that Bothari tortured to death in the Tau Verde system - that mess with Elena Visconti. Not a pleasant recitation.

He is starting to regret agreeing to this, but hell, if this is what the monument thinks it needs to know, he can take it. At least it's only hitting the highlights, and they get less frequent as they go on.

Fresh out of a summary of all his doubts about how he's handled the interdimensional forum, the vision asks him: does he think this is the sort of person who should have access to powerful magic?

Yes! he answers unhesitatingly. Because if making mistakes means you shouldn't be trusted then we are all doomed from the moment we first draw breath. His screwups are not what defines him. Neither are his virtues, to be sure. A complex conscious mind cannot be reduced to a single perspective that way. As a whole person, he is responsible enough to handle taieli. He's made mistakes, done things he deeply regrets, but that's just a part of life. You learn from it and you move on.

And if that was some kind of ploy to humble him, then the monument ought to be ashamed of itself.

The monument declines to comment on its emotional state. Miles isn't even sure it has one to speak of. But he does get a sense of... consideration.

He waits.

First failures, now successes. Moments of personal triumph, times when he has solved puzzles or outwitted opponents. Winning the war on Tau Verde. Convincing Stanis Metzov to back down before he killed half his command. Saving Vervain from a Cetagandan invasion. Saving Cetaganda from a messy civil war. Convincing the Archangel people to lay off the kidnapping. Say what you like about Miles, but there's no denying he gets results.

And then a more complicated path through his life. Events that have taught him something, shaped the person he is today. Giving Elena Bothari and Baz Jesek his blessing to marry. The pointless death of Raina Csurik, and his judgment on her murderer. His successive encounters with Cavilo. Lisbet Serise telling him she would seriously consider running away with him if she didn't have responsibilities to attend to. His kobold friend telling him to think about what he'd want in the best achievable world.

The vision ends, and he has a moment to doubt the monument's decision before his Sense activates and all doubt is irrevocably destroyed. There is nothing else this could be. It's amazing.

The world around him opens like a flower, unfurling intricate beautiful petals of knowledge in every direction; he can directly feel the processes of life in his own body to an uncomfortable level of detail, and on top of that several layers of intangible complexity that must be his permanent QDS spells, haste and so forth - but as fascinating as that magic is, it pales in comparison to the richness and complexity of the monument. The flavours of all nine ainelin combine into a vibrant weave, somehow perfectly harmonious, an immense magical masterpiece.

"Wow," he mutters.

The monument is silent. But he can Sense the activity behind that silence. It is observing him, observing that he has taieli already, and categorizing him as therefore not something it needs to respond to. It has memory, remembers the decision it just made, but he doesn't matter to it anymore except as a past event to learn from - and, of secondary importance by far, a living mind within its walls whose needs should be attended to as long as doing so does not interfere with the monument's primary purpose.

His Sense doesn't come with a handy user manual or a conveniently catchy name; he couldn't describe its scope in precise unambiguous terms. But he can feel it. Not exactly magic, and not exactly living things; those are just the only examples available right now. It would just as readily show him the inner workings of a jumpship or an old mechanical printing press. It's a Sense of functionality, of how the parts of a system work together. If he stands still and concentrates, he can get the same information about his pressure suit, relatively simple though it is.

Speaking of which.

He picks up his helmet from the floor, and puts it on. The monument probably has a subsystem to deal with litter in its interior, and if he sat here for another nine days he could probably trace it down with his Sense and learn what it is and how it works, but he'd rather just not leave anything lying around. He checks his MP and finds it sufficient. And he casts gate to take him back to his mother's demiplane.

His Sense dives into the intricacies of the spell as he steps through, and he keeps it open for a moment just to study it in utter fascination. But there'll be time enough to fiddle with magic once he's caught up with what happened while he was gone. He sighs and closes the portal and heads out of the demiplane into the house.