THIRTY-EIGHT

Nen Yim bathed in a sea of knowledge. Protocols glistened and swirled in the depths, revealing the foundations and endless permutations of life in intimate and splendid detail. Beneath the cognition hood her expression was one of awe and wonder, and for the moment she was the eager, maze-eyed young woman she had been only a few cycles before, loving and in love with the art of shaping, with knowledge itself.

She had long since passed the fifth cortex into the realm of the masters. Here were the living designs for the dovin basals, the thought-seeds of yorik coral, and yes, the protocols governing the creation of master hands. These she passed, navigating the shoals and depths with her questions, steering with her determination.

She found the germ of the worldships and swam through its thick skin. Parts she had seen before, of course—the outline of the recham forteps, the pattern of the osmotic membranes of the endocrine cloisters—but these were only components. She had never seen the profound logic of the vessels laid out holistically. Her grasp of the organic relationships between organs had been based mostly on deduction, and she found it instructive to observe where she had been right and where wrong.

At the center of it, at the outer limits of the seventh and final cortex, she found, at last, the brain. Its making uncoiled for her. She opened herself in turn and absorbed the information, let it fill the places her vaa-tumor had burned a place for. Strands of amino acid sequences flowed by like twisting rivers, pooling in her enhanced memory. Neurons divided, splitting and scrolling into million-branched ganglia that further folded into cortical coils. Subsystems nomic and autonomic explained themselves as the developmental process continued, finally settling into stability, maintenance, reorganization, stasis.

And in the end, when it had all come and gone, when her own brain strained at the rush of knowing, she understood at last.

The ship was doomed. The rikyam would die, and there was no protocol to stop it. Wonder dimmed in her, and the vast living library around her suddenly stood revealed to her not so much as a storehouse, but as a prison. Or a mausoleum, for though it created the impression of being alive, everything in the great Qang qahsa was desiccated, sterile, unchanging. There was nothing new here. If the protocols truly came from the gods, the gods had not seen fit to add anything to the sum of Yuuzhan Vong knowledge in a thousand years.

But that was impossible. Since the invasion of the infidel galaxy, new protocols had been handed down from the gods to Supreme Overlord Shimrra and thence to the shapers. The gods had been generous, especially in doling out weapons. Where had that knowledge gone?

That thought stirred something in the Qang qahsa, as if it had been waiting for someone to think it. The seventh cortex faded from her consciousness, leaving her adrift in peace and dark, more confused than ever.

There is nothing beyond the seventh cortex, she thought. I have moved to a place the gods have not yet filled.

If there were gods. Mezhan Kwaad had denied them. Perhaps …

But even as she renewed her doubt, something changed in the void. Like a light in the distance, or a tunnel opening.

And then she beheld something that could not be there.

An eighth cortex.

With renewed hope she moved toward it.

The membrane resisted her, filling her with pain that etched along her every nerve ending.

This place is forbidden, even to masters, the qahsa told her. It was the first time it had spoken to her in something resembling language, the first time she felt its ancient sentience notice her. She recoiled. Who may come here if not master shapers?

Return, the voice said.

I cannot, she answered. Breathing hard, Nen Yim ignored the voice of the qahsa and pushed forward with her mind, accepting the pain, making it a part of herself. The agony grew, burning away her thought, but she held to her purpose, made it an animal thing that pain only fed and could never quiet.

Her heart beat unevenly, and her breath chopped. She tasted blood. Beyond the cognition hood, she was distantly aware that her body was arching in tendon-ripping spasms.

Open! she shrieked. Open to me, Nen Yim! Open or kill me!

And suddenly, like waters parting before swimming hands, the eighth cortex opened.

She looked within, and all hope vanished. She collapsed into her grief and was lost.

   Light filtering through her open eyes woke her. A sour smell cloyed in her nostrils, and she realized that it was her own congealed blood. She tried to move and found her body almost paralyzed with pain.

Standing over her, grinning, was Kae Kwaad.

“What did you see, little Nen Tsup?” he asked gently. “Did you see it all? Are you satisfied, now?”

“You knew,” she said.

“Of course I knew.”

She looked groggily around. They were in the shaper laboratory.

“Mezhan,” she said.

Nothing happened, except that Kae Kwaad grinned more broadly. “I suspect that word was supposed to trigger something. The grutchin you altered, perhaps? I took the precaution of destroying it.”

Something about Master Kwaad’s speech seemed very different. Wrong.

“Clean yourself up, Adept,” the master said softly. “We have a journey before us, you and I.”

“Where?” she managed to ask, through lips her own teeth must have gnashed and torn.

“Why to see him, of course. Supreme Overlord Shimrra. He is waiting for you.”