by Julia Keller
At least for the time being. It was the one thing she hadn’t screwed up yet.
But she didn’t want to win the day by pulling rank. She wanted them to understand that certain kinds of knowledge had nothing to do with computers and algorithms, or with telescopes and microscopes. She wanted them to agree, with their own free will and not by being forced into it, that what had truly created New Earth wasn’t just physics and math—as necessary as those things were—but curiosity and imagination. Things that everybody possessed. They had to learn how to access them.
“Hold on,” Violet said. “I’ll be right back.” She moved toward the porthole and, before her friends could react, she’d opened the hatch and dropped out of sight.
No one said a word. They had no idea what she was going to do or where she was going to go. She’d thrown them such a curve by volunteering to go to Zander’s planet herself that they were still in a bit of a daze.
She was back in three minutes. Being a fast runner came in handy at the oddest times.
None of the four of them seemed to have moved while she was gone. They still stood in a half circle: Shura, Rez, Kendall, and Tin Man, looking flummoxed and troubled.
Violet was holding something behind her back.
With a flourish, she pulled out a small, intricate object. It was the orrery from the observatory’s conference room: the carved wooden sun, surrounded by the planets, each painted a beautiful color and attached to a thin, delicate metal rod. The clockwork mechanism concealed in the round base would, when the tiny crank was turned, make the planets revolve around the sun just as they did in the heavens.
“Before anybody had ever heard of computers or spacecraft or any of that,” Violet said, “this is what filled them with wonder. They didn’t know anything about quarks or neutrinos or supernovas or black holes. All they knew was how they felt when they looked up at the sky at night. And they took that emotion and they put it right here.” She lifted the orrery a bit higher. “So it’s not only about what you know. It’s also about what you feel.”
She waited. She couldn’t read their faces anymore. Shura’s frown had gone away, and Tin Man didn’t look quite so concerned. Kendall and Rez, too, seemed a little less aghast. But that might have just been fatigue. They were all tired. She might have made no headway at all.
Shura looked at Rez and Kendall and Tin Man. They gave her a single nod. She nodded back.
At that moment, Violet realized that she’d done it. She had convinced them to let her go.
“Not to get too personal in front of the guys,” Shura said, turning to Violet with a grin, “but if I were you, I’d go pee before we hook you up to the Consciousness Tether. No telling how long you’ll be stuck on that planet—and who knows what kind of bathrooms they’ll have?”
21
Pathways and Banana Peels
Violet took a long look at the chair that Rez and Kendall had rigged up to accommodate the New Earth half of the Consciousness Tether.
And by ‘New Earth half,’ she thought with a flicker of anxiety, I mean, um—me.
When a Tether was used for robots, it was a relatively simple process. The receptors were plugged directly into a CPU. And when the Tether had been employed to channel Sonnet’s emotions into Shura’s paintings, that, too, had not been especially difficult; it was a one-way road, with no necessity to send anything from Shura back to Sonnet.
But to use a human subject for a Tether—much less this totally new kind of Tether—was strange and exhilarating. Violet had read news stories over the years about Tether experiments with dogs and cats and even a parakeet; the parakeet wound up being able to calculate probable trajectories for meteors hailing from the Canis Major constellation, while at the other end, the computer began to tweet a pretty little song.
A human, though, was a very different problem. It was dauntingly complex. So complex, in fact, that Violet could sense the expectancy rippling through the lab as Kendall and Rez settled her into the chair, Kendall on her left side, Rez on her right. Their excitement at the prospect of this new challenge was palpable. Their eyes were wide and bright, and their movements seemed to crackle from an extra energy source. Any animosity that had simmered previously between them had vanished, replaced by the sheer joy of attempting a feat no one had ever tried before:
Using a human at one end of a two-way Tether.
Was she scared?
Shura had asked her that an hour ago as she worked her way through Violet’s pre-mission physical exam, Tin Man reading out the numbers while Shura handled the instruments.
Violet’s reply had been blunt: “Hell, yes, I’m scared!”
Shura had patted her shoulder. “Okay, buddy,” she’d said. “You just passed the psychological portion of today’s exam. Because you damned well should be scared. If you weren’t, I’d recommend that we scrub the mission.”
And they had both laughed.
To make sure they weren’t disturbed by some nosy staffer while they rigged up the Tether, Rez had sent out an observatory-wide console message. He’d explained that he was busy with his own project and was not to be disturbed. His colleagues were so used to his quirky pronouncements that they shrugged and went about their business.
The chair was positioned in the center of Rez’s lab. It was an ordinary kitchen chair, made of dark blond wood with six slats across the back, a square seat, and four sturdy-looking legs. A couple of gouges were visible in the wood. It didn’t have arms.
“You couldn’t maybe have dug up a nicer chair? Like maybe one with arms?” Violet asked. She tried to make her voice sound playful, but she knew her nervousness was showing through.
“It’s only a vessel. It’s totally irrelevant,” Rez answered absentmindedly. He was hunched over his computer as he made some last-minute calculations, his body rooted deep in his red armchair.
“Yeah,” Shura said archly, “but I can’t help but notice that your chair has arms, Rez.”
Violet felt a surge of appreciation; her friend would always have her back.
“Come on, everybody, we’ve got to focus here,” Kendall stated. He concluded his final tests on a snarly nest of routers bubbling out of a portable medical cart that Shura had assembled so that she could monitor Violet’s vital signs during the long journey—even though, on this particular journey, Violet would not be leaving the chair.
“There,” Kendall said. “Ready to go. Is the cart in the right spot, Shura?”
She nudged it a little closer to Violet’s chair. “Perfect.”
Violet sat back in the chair, wiggling her shoulders. “How long will I have to be in this thing? What if I get a cramp or something?”
Rez stood up from his armchair and turned around to face her.
“Your body will feel as if only a few minutes have passed,” he said patiently. “With a human subject, the Tether should last approximately six hours, but it won’t seem like six hours. It will be six hours back here, and six hours will pass, but you won’t experience it that way. So your body won’t cramp from being in one position. Got it?”
Violet appreciated his explanation. She knew that Rez and Kendall were still a little leery of letting her be the one to make the trip.
Someday, she’d find the words to explain to them why it had to be her. She had something very important to tell Zander. Something only she—Violet Crowley, ordinary person, definitely a nongenius—had figured out. A theory that would sound so incredibly wacky and out there to her friends that they’d stare at her and ask if she’d like to lie down for a while.
She felt Tin Man’s hand on her shoulder. It was a good feeling.
“You’re going to be fine, Violet. Piece of cake,” he said.
Looking up at him, Violet realized that she’d completely forgiven him for his earlier slipup. The forgiving had happened while she wasn’t even aware of it. He was a part of the team again.
Shura’s voice was calm. “I’ll be right here the whole time, keeping an eye on your heart
rate and respiration and blood pressure. And besides, if I could let an alien take control of my paintbrush and almost get burned to a cinder from a power surge, then you can travel a few million light-years to have lunch with that same alien, right?”
Violet gave Shura a grateful smile. Her friend could always settle her down.
“Just about ready,” Rez said. He’d gone back to work after his little lecture to Violet. “Kendall?”
“Yeah. All set over here.”
“Tin Man? Make sure the router indicators are all showing green.”
“I’m on it.”
The atmosphere in the lab echoed what they’d gone through when Shura was preparing to paint the alien emotions—with the tension ratcheted up by a factor of at least a thousand, Violet estimated.
Kendall flipped a switch on the tripod. Then he flipped the one right next to it, followed by the one next to that one. And then he flipped them all back again. He was handling his own nerves by testing the system over and over again.
Violet looked down at her trousers. And below that, to her sandals and painted toenails.
“Maybe I should’ve dressed better,” she muttered, half sarcastically, half for real. “I mean, what are you supposed to wear when you’re traveling across space and time? I’m thinking that socks might have been a good fashion choice.”
Rez cleared his throat, which was his signal for everyone to hush up and pay attention. He was ready to initiate the Consciousness Tether, synching it with the signal Zander was sending forth from his own planet.
“Don’t forget, Violet,” he said. “We need to get a complete set of coordinates for the broken star. And when it comes to the emotional stuff, well, go easy on him. Think of your first taste of a new feeling. Or a new anything. Even if it’s great, it can be overwhelming.”
“Will do.”
Kendall gathered the excess cable into a loop. While he wound the cable round and round on the spindle, he talked to Violet, trying to sound casual. But she knew better. “Let’s go over this one more time,” he said. “You don’t have to do this, you know. We can shut the whole thing down right now. Nobody would blame you.”
Violet nodded. Yeah. She knew she could back out. But a wonderful calmness had settled over her in the past few seconds. This was the right thing to do. She knew it. She’d faltered in the time between saying, “I’m going,” and sitting down in this deceptively normal chair, but now she had steadied herself.
She felt centered and resolute. She even felt a kind of golden serenity.
She trusted her friends, even when they argued with each other or got a little full of themselves. She trusted their brains, and she trusted their hearts.
They might accidentally put her in a place of danger, but they would never leave her there. No matter what, they would not abandon her. In a sense, they were going along with her on this fantastic adventure. She was the one on the rickety wooden chair with no arms, the one whose consciousness would soon be pinballing through the galaxy, but they were along for the ride in spirit.
“I’m good,” she said to Kendall.
He gave her a thumbs-up. And then he backed away. He had work to do—technical work, the work that would make this all happen. He and Rez, plus Shura and Tin Man, too, would be gruelingly busy as long as the Consciousness Tether link lasted.
This is their leap of faith as much as mine, Violet thought. She closed her eyes.
Each was giving what they had to give. They were doing it for themselves and for each other, yes, but they were also doing it for New Earth.
For home.
“We’re a go,” Rez said. “Tether initiated. Countdown in progress.”
* * *
Violet felt a weird sensation in the soles of her feet. It was a kind of funny prickling, as if she were walking barefoot on fresh-cut grass. The blades of grass were short and spiky. It was not painful, but it was … interesting.
Yeah. That was exactly the right word.
Interesting.
Voices faded. She heard faint, trailing tendrils of words—words like System calibrated and On my mark and Now!—but the words grew fainter and fainter and fainter. She tried to envision the faces of her friends—Shura and Kendall and Rez and Tin Man—but now the specifics of those faces began to fade, too. They grew smaller, until they were mere dots in her mind.
She was alone. She was leaving them all behind.
And now, ironically—or did she mean impossibly?—she was even leaving herself behind.
It was as if her life were peeling away from her, like the skin of a banana being stripped, off, section by section. You started at the top and you found a seam and …
You peeled …
And peeled …
And your life fell away in these long, identically sized segments, friend by friend, year by year, memory by memory, thought by thought.
All at once, her torso felt tight, as if somebody had tied a rope around her and was yanking on it. She opened her mouth to say, “Hey, that hurts, guys,” but she discovered a peculiar fact about her current state of existence:
She had no mouth.
Furthermore, she had no face.
She did not, it seemed, have a body at all anymore. The peeling was complete.
She was a beam of light, a bundle of particles—or was it waves? Strangely, it was both—surfing a pathway with no beginning and no end. She felt … giddy. She felt drenched in hope. She felt the purest, most sinuous sensation she had ever known. It was like drinking from a clear stream in which the stars were reflected, and when she looked up from the stream into the heavens, she realized that she was actually in the heavens themselves.
It wasn’t a reflection. It was reality.
She’d had it backward her entire life. Everyone had it backward.
It wasn’t the moon’s reflection you saw in the ocean; it was the moon itself.
Everything was the opposite of what she’d thought it was. Up was down, right was left, light was dark, inside was outside. She wasn’t Violet Crowley anymore—Violet who?—but a small chip of infinity.
She was small, yes, but without this specific chip—without her—infinity could not exist. She was the key to everything.
Wait—everyone was the key to everything. It was all part of a vast and beautiful plan.
Wait, that didn’t make sense. How did that make sense?
Suddenly, it didn’t matter that it made no sense. She let go of sense. She said goodbye to gravity and to logic. She opened her mind as wide as it would go, like a window thrown open to catch the morning breeze.
She rose. She dreamed. She soared.
PART THREE
Music from a Broken Star
22
Zander’s Planet
She crashed.
Violet had no body, and so the notion of crashing into solid ground—like a kite when the wind dies down—made zero sense.
But that’s what it felt like: a long fall (Oh nooooooo) and then a jarring thwump.
Or at least that’s what it should have felt like, if she’d had a body.
Which she didn’t.
Or did she?
Because if she didn’t, then why did her butt ache? And why was she dizzy? The word ouch darted around in her head, a link in a chain of unuttered sounds that went something like this:
OuchOuchOuchOuch
She felt the way she’d felt three years ago during her first forbidden trip to Old Earth, when somebody had knocked her down and then punched her in several places.
Except that she couldn’t feel that way, not really, because there was nothing for anybody to knock down, right? And no place for anybody to punch.
“Welcome, Violet.”
Had she dreamed that?
No. Apparently, someone really had spoken to her. She sensed the presence of the words as much as she heard the sounds. When she replied, she found that she didn’t actually need a mouth—or a tongue or a larynx or lungs or the body that commonly went with them�
�in order to speak.
Weird.
But kind of cool, too, if she was honest about it.
“Hey,” she said. She didn’t even bother to ask herself how she could talk without having a mouth. It was what it was.
She was floating in what felt like a warm bath. Her eyes were open, but she couldn’t see anything—no landscape, no colors, no faces—and she found that she didn’t really care.
“How was your trip?”
“Not too bad.” There. She’d done it again. She’d spoken.
The truth was, her trip had been amazing. Extraordinary. It had felt like hours, like days, like seconds, like a lifetime, like a hundred lifetimes, and it felt like all of those things, all at the same time.
“Good,” the voice responded. “I’m Zander. And Sonnet is right here, too.”
Surely he didn’t expect a handshake. Because, inconveniently, she had no hands.
She took a moment to analyze the voice: It was strong and clear. Stilted, a bit formal, with few contractions. Occasionally a nugget of slang would pop up as if his study had revealed that slang tended to put people at ease.
“I don’t want to freak you out,” Zander said, “but it’s probably good that we get one thing out of the way. The trip here is many, many light-years away from your planet. Had you tried to come in a conventional way—in a spacecraft—you would not have survived the journey. Each light-year is 5.9 trillion miles. Not even cryobiotic technology would have worked. It’s far too long for a human body—one of your species—to be suspended while vital functions like heartbeat and breathing are suppressed.”
She nodded. Or she would have nodded if she’d had a head.
Why was he telling her this? She understood. They had gone over all of this back in Rez’s lab, before the first electrode was plugged into Kendall’s tripod and then to the Tether’s uplink.