THE LOOM'S ANSWER · WEAVERS

The Elderward's docking ring opens like a flower. Inside, the old warship smells of river water. The elders — there are three, not two as you expected — wait you in the central gallery. The eldest, whose name is never given, speaks first. 'Pilot. You have been a thread we could not predict. We did not weave you. We watched you weave yourself. Today we offer you a truth the Tribunal will deny and the Rift cannot say.' A chime, deep and felt rather than heard, passes through the room. 'The Loom is not what any of us believed. We will show you.'

The eldest unrolls a sheet of woven crystal between her palms. It is not a map. It is a ledger, but older than the Tribunal's, and softer. 'When we say we weave, we do not mean we create threads. We mean we notice them, and we tie them off before they fray. The Loom — the thing your navcomputer calls the substrate — is a creature. A quiet one. It has been dreaming since before your species had eyes. When you rewound your first branch, you did not hurt it. You interested it. It is now looking at you the way a child looks at a lantern bug. The Rift is its yawn. The Tribunal is its bodyguards. We are its midwives. The question you have been asked to answer is whether you will let it wake the rest of the way.'

'Awake, the Loom remembers every branch — yours, ours, the Tribunal's, the ones the Rift ate. No pilot would be alone again. The trade is privacy. Asleep, it keeps us in our own small lives, our own small griefs. The trade is connection. Neither is kindness. Both are a shape of love.' The eldest folds the crystal sheet back into her palm. 'The Tribunal wants it asleep forever — they fear a waking creature too large to be sentenced. The Rift is already its dream. We, Pilot, would rather it wake and then be loved, than sleep and be worshipped.'

The Elderward unseals a second docking ring — one nobody knew it had — and a Tribunal skiff eases into it. Vex-9 steps onto the gallery floor alone, without escort. He bows shallowly to the eldest Guardian. She bows deeper in return. 'Pilot,' Vex-9 says, 'the Guardians and the Tribunal have not sat in the same room in four hundred years. If you have brought us to the same table, I will speak honestly, and I expect the same of them.' The eldest Guardian nods. 'The Loom is awake enough to be asked. The question is who gets to ask it.'

The eldest closes her eyes and sets her palm against your sternum — not over your heart, slightly off-center, over the small hard bone above it. 'You will need to take this promise to the Rift itself. The Rift is where the Loom breathes. Speak there what you have said here. Do not let the Tribunal change your mind unless their argument is better than ours. It very well may be. Honest arguments are what we want from the Loom's advocates.' She withdraws her hand. It is warm for days.

The eldest is not angry. She is sad, which is heavier. 'We would have made it differently, Pilot. But you are the thread the Loom is watching, and a thread's promise is the Loom's promise. We ask only this — when you tell the Rift your choice, do not lie. If it feels you hedge, it will wake anyway, confused, and that is worse than either answer.' She hands you a small braided cord. 'Carry this. It is ours. The Rift will recognize it.'

She considers you for a long moment. 'A pilot who asks for a third option is a pilot who has already thought of one.' She leans in. 'Tell me.' You say it the way you would say something you haven't said yet, which is to say clumsily. It comes out as: don't wake it, don't put it back to sleep, but sit with it — a Loom that is dreaming but knows it is dreaming, the way a pilot on a long watch is half-awake, half-elsewhere. The eldest closes her eyes. The other two elders — you had almost forgotten them — raise their heads at exactly the same beat. 'That,' she says, 'is a third answer. The Rift may not accept it. But you should carry it.'