“My husband was Jack Long’s son,” Janecia’s great-grandmother, Layla, told them. “We would always come together to listen to the stories of the voyage here, and Jack would always say it with such creativity and passion. He would go over every person in this picture by name and tell us every detail of their lives as if he knew their personal record backward and forward. And then he would come to these three people, who he called the most interesting of all.”
Layla closed her eyes for a moment as if summoning the memories of those days. Perry and Michelle had been introduced to Layla as well as Janecia’s grandparents, Horace and Peyton, while the picture was being taken from the wall to allow them all a closer look at it. That Perry and Michelle were there with Blake was unmistakable by anyone’s reckoning leaving them with the conclusion that either they were the best lookalikes in creation or they were who they said.
“Those three had no history at all with the ship,” Layla continued. “While this confused him greatly in every telling, and he always commented on the curiosity of their presence, he assured us that they existed. ‘They came from nowhere,’ he told us, ‘and they disappeared to nowhere.’ And yet, in the midst of a voyage that had gone from routine into disaster, these people stepped in and managed to save us all. Somehow, our very existence is attributed, by my grandfather, to your goodness and ingenuity. Answers they gave for their presence never made sense. They were not part of the ship’s crew or passengers lists when it set off, and the ship traveled for almost ten years before they ever showed up, so they could not logically be stowaways. In addition, once the crash was over, and we were able to pick up the pieces during the time in which the Terraformer was doing its work on the planet, they disappeared. No one ever saw them again. They did not die because there were no bodies. My father-in-law said that they bid him farewell rather unexpectedly at one point and were never seen again.”
“That does sound a bit like us,” Perry said. Listening to the tale of something they had not done was a little surreal to them, and they worried that these people who were so enthusiastically aware of their history might want to ask some questions, but the best they had would be general things about them since they knew nothing about that experience. Blake had even forbidden them to read the book. Perry even commented on it at one point, so Blake deliberately hid it in his room.
“I suppose the question that has always stuck with us,” Layla said, “is where you came from. Jack said at one point you referred to a Maze, but that isn’t really an answer that makes sense to us.”
“I imagine it goes without saying that we’re time travelers,” Perry said.
“I believe it does,” Horace agreed. “I can’t see any other way for you to have shown up here looking no different than you do in that picture.”
“And that you just showed up out of nowhere, just like in the stories,” Janecia said. “You should have seen it. The third one? Blake? He strolled right out there and gave them a piece of his mind on that arrest. He took one in the gut for it and got dragged off.”
“If anything, we’re younger now than we were...are...will be?” Michelle began but stumbled at exactly which tense would fit for describing the past existence of an item and will occur in her future. “Anyway, that hasn’t happened to us yet, so we don’t know much about it except what we’ve heard.”
“In these events, we’re kind of going backward,” Perry said. “We come to Keersh again in about 1400 years long after the Mirificus and everything associated with it are a legend, and the people don’t even believe in Earth.”
“What is Keersh?” Janecia said.
“Oh, I was afraid it might have changed,” Perry mumbled. “Well, Keersh is the name we have for your planet. Apparently, it also becomes the world’s permanent name at some point in the future. What do you call it?”
“Mirificus,” Janecia said. “We just named it after the ship.”
“I wonder where Keersh came from,” Michelle said.
“I thought it sounded a little odd,” Perry said, “but we run into a lot of weird things.”
“My father-in-law noted your penchant for dancing around topics as well,” Layla commented with a smile. “He said that when asked about your origins, you would often change the subject or give half-answers before letting the question hang out there to die slowly. It is amusing to me to experience this first hand, but at my age, I’ve learned to ensure I get the answers I need because doctors do much the same thing to the elderly when we ask them about our health.”
“All right,” Perry said. “The Maze is the answer to the question. I don’t know how much we told Lieutenant Long when we were, or will be, there, but here’s the short version…”
“We don’t need the short version,” Layla said. “I’ve waited a lifetime for this answer. You have all the time you need.”
“We’re actually very interested in seeing what we can do for Blake,” Michelle said.
“And there will be time for that as well, unless you feel like this would take weeks to explain,” Layla said. “Your friend is being held at our central courthouse in the detention room. It was salvaged from the Mirificus and initially placed in there as a tribute to the ship, but we found over time that it served well to hold prisoners for a short period before their trial. If the Voraster crash landed, they'd be in there as well under heavy guard. Any hope of your getting any of them out of there won’t happen until nightfall which won’t be for another ten hours, I believe. As you won’t be able to do much until then, you can indulge me.”
Perry smiled and nodded. The old woman was incredibly sharp, and since she had asked a question, she wanted to know the answer. There was really no reason not to tell since they knew this planet’s future, and none of this conversation would be remembered by that point in time. He considered that they had explained the Maze to many people over his time within it, and there had been no galactic repercussions to it. It was akin to telling yet another story.
“The Maze is a strange name for the machine where we live that takes us through time and space,” Perry said. “The best we can figure, the word describes two things: the mission on the worlds where we land and the journey we take within us. All of us who travel have experienced pain or loss to the point that entering into this life felt better than what we had. We were basically popped out of our own times to be dropped down in places that need a helping hand. By doing this, we are supposed to achieve a deeper appreciation of our lives and the universe around us. At some point, it takes us home. We are expected to live our lives from that point onwards knowing more about everything than we ever could have known otherwise.”
“The way we get from place to place,” Michelle said, picking up the explanation, “is kind of weird. We have a home place somewhere in the future. We don’t know when or where it is. It won’t tell us. But there is an elevator in our main living area that opens when it is time to go. We step in, and the doors open somewhere else. Today, it opened behind some buildings near your town square, and we emerged at the back of the crowd right before that ship came down. Once we finish here, those doors will open again. We will see them, but no one else will. They are only visible to those who are part of the Maze. When we step in, we return to the place we call home until we are allowed to leave.”
“Are you slaves to this thing?” Peyton asked. Perry and Michelle looked at each other. Perry shifted his eyes in thought and then looked at the room again.
“When it comes to where my life was before the Maze opened its doors to me,” Perry said, “it was over. I was basically finished, so I had nothing to lose. The Maze taking me from my life allowed me to survive. If it hadn’t, I would be either in a lot of trouble or dead. The Maze gave me something to do and appreciate. It showed me so much that I don’t care if I get forced into that elevator a hundred times or if I am considered a slave to it, I will keep doing it. Someday, I’ll be back home, and I will live a far better life having experienced what I have.”
“I h
aven’t been around as long as Perry,” Michelle said, “but this has been the singular greatest experience of my life. No one else does what we do, and it is wonderful. To be fair, I was a slave to an employer before I nearly drank myself to death in my living room. They told me when to come and go and held my entire livelihood over my head to do it. Hardly any different. Sure, I can ‘make my own choices,’ but let’s be real. When it comes to most employment, the way it is run bears little difference to whip-cracking slave masters. They just have to give us a paycheck for the privilege of cracking those whips.”
“I hope that answers your question,” Perry said to Layla.
“It does, very well,” Layla smiled. “I believe at this point it is your turn for information and assistance. The third member of your party is incarcerated for daring to say that the Voraster may not be as bad as they seem.”
“This is a problem we’ve had ever since the invasion,” Horace said. “Some called it a war, but it really wasn’t. Some of us prefer to think of it how it was. It was awful, make no mistake. We lost probably a third of our people in that week of terror, but that’s all it was. A single week. They came out of the sky and started destroying everything in sight, No mercy. No announcement. Nothing.”
“I was twenty-one at the time,” Layla said, “and engaged to Nathan Long. We were lucky when it all started. Fortunately, the attack never hit the Terraformer, or they might have inadvertently wiped us all out and ended up with a dead planet again. That’s where we all were when it started. Jack was telling us about the systems, and we were watching one of the Terraformer scientists train their next generation on the operation of the device. We only heard what was going on, and when we looked out, we saw the ships overhead.”
Layla closed her eyes and appeared to be reliving the moment in her head.
“We had built the settlement at that time not too far from where Domus now sits,” she continued. “It wasn’t too big, of course. There weren’t a lot of us, and the planet had only been viable for about five years. It takes about twenty for the Terraformer to make a world. Normally, a ship settles into orbit during that time and lets the machine do its work below. Well, we sat in the middle of it and watched it out our windows every day. If Noah felt good leaving the ark after a few months, imagine how we felt after twenty years, thirty for those who had come from Earth. Five years of freedom, and we get attacked from above. After that, we saw four armed creatures walking around firing at anyone that moved. There was power in the ship to erect a shield that would well enough to keep them out. Jack went to the only communication system still functional on the ship and sent a distress call. We were surprised that it was answered by the race that was trying to kill us. We thought we were done for, but it turned out that their people were as good as any other, and we were simply hit by some bad seeds.”
“But we never forgot,” Horace said. “Some didn’t anyway. The Voraster tried talking to us, but those in charge refused to listen. You see, Jack Long was just an official on the ship, and even though he spoke in favor of the Voraster people, our leadership was a different group entirely. Some of them had been killed in the attacks, and they were not happy. They refused any further contact with the Voraster, and we were effectively cut off from the universe. This was a race advanced enough to have translator technology that learned our language quickly enough to communicate effectively, and one willing to leave us alone because we asked them to. We could have allied with them to help us contact home, but our stubbornness refused to allow it.”
“There are many people on Mirificus that still favor reaching back out to the Voraster,” Peyton said. “An organization that has lived for many years dedicated to the idea of working with our nearest neighbors if they’re willing. But our leadership and our people won’t hear of it. They would rather be isolated than collaborate with the Voraster. I feel like it’s our loss.”
“I wish we could help with that,” Perry said, “ but changing minds is a hard thing to do, especially those that have been ingrained a certain way for so long. We’ve changed singular minds before, but this is different. This is a society. This is buried within your very culture. That’s not something that can change overnight.”
“We know,” Peyton said. “We’ve been trying for decades to change it, and it won’t.”
“I think our best hope of even moving in the right direction is helping the Vorasters that got captured,” Perry said.
“They don’t call themselves Vorasters,” Layla suddenly said, correcting him. “Their race is Voraster. That’s it. They actually have different terms to refer to one and more than one Voraster. I don’t remember them off-hand since we’ve never had to use them.”
“How do you know that?” Michelle asked.
“Negotiation of a peace takes time,” Layla said, “and there were apologies to be made. During that time, Jack talked to some of them and learned a bit about their culture. He was one of the few who thought dealing with them would be to our benefit, but he was overruled.”
“Very well,” Perry said, “so helping the Voraster that got captured.”
“The hard part will be making them not seem like the criminals in all this,” Michelle said.
“Well, that Terraformer is very precious to us,” Janecia said. “It keeps us alive. That’s the main reason for the uproar against them. The leadership thinks they were aiming for the Terraformer when they went down. They didn’t miss it by much.”
“I helped move that room into the town hall, so I have some insights about it that would be useful,” Horace said. “As mom said, you’ll want to wait till after dark, but once we have nightfall, it will be relatively easy to get in there. Easier than most people think. Sure, a metal room looks intimidating, but I know its secrets.”
“Please be careful,” Peyton urged.
“Oh, I will,” Horace said. “I’m going on an actual adventure with the legendary Perry and Michelle.”
“It might be better if I went on the adventure,” Janecia said.
“I won’t be climbing any walls, but you’re not leaving me at home,” Horace insisted.
“Climbing walls?” Michelle asked, worried about what he had in mind.
CHAPTER SIX
During the remainder of their day locked up in town hall, Blake and the Voraster spoke at length about the information he was able to gather with his scanner regarding the construction of the room where they were kept as well as the security complement outside the door and around the building. He wondered how Perry and Michelle were getting along in the world out there without him, and he hoped they had found something useful. Since the initial conversation with the Voraster had included a long wait, they all finally decided to rest until it was time to move. Since they had all just survived a crash, Blake encouraged them to get what sleep they could before it was time to go since there was plenty of time. He assured them he was well rested and would remain awake the entire time.
They all fell asleep quickly leaving him to his own thoughts for hours which passed slowly. The plans had been made. They had considered testing how well the door was watched by having Blake open it to see what would happen, but they feared this might result in a heavier watch which was something that would work against them. It boiled down to trying to remove one of the wall panels and crawling up the outside of the room to the roof. While the interior of the building had been finished around the room, there was space both behind and above it that led to roof access, presumably to allow maintenance to occur in this area. The building was two story, but the detention room was tall enough to prevent a second story from extending above it.
Blake looked at his scanner and about ten hours had passed. The number of guards in the hall had dropped considerably, though there were still several out there. The temperature outside had also dropped indicating that the sun had gone down, and there were fewer people directly outside the building.
“Vrasten,” Blake said softly, “It’s time to wake up.”
&nb
sp; Three of them were clearly sleeping very lightly as their eyes snapped open immediately, and they groggily rose to their feet. Drizdal was a bit slower at opening his eyes though he did so, and Rallafin needed a tap (or more like a punch) from Faraliv to get him going. Even then, he rolled over onto all four arms and had to force himself to his feet stumbling a step before he got his balance.
“I was not ready to wake up,” Rallafin said holding two of his hands to his head while stifling a yawn with his other two. “Everything is sore.”
“First crash landing?” Faraliv asked.
“It was,” Rallafin said.
“Then be ready for everything to be sore for several days yet,” Drizdal said. “The tension of the crash permeates your entire body when it happens both mentally and physically. You will hurt for days. This is why our space corps allows a week of leave following any crash. It takes about that long to fully recover.”
“Well, we will get a week of leave,” Tarlen said, “but it will not be in paradise.”
“Let us concentrate on leaving here before we make any plans,” Orest said.
“Plan number one is to remove one of these panels,” Blake said. “We need to get to the space behind it.”
They looked over a panel in the corner furthest from the door. They wanted to be sure that if it made any noise, it would be as far away as they could make it from the guards in the hall. The panel was completely smooth. They started by trying to grip it with their fingertips and pushing it up, but it would not move. Blake looked through the tiny gap between the floor and the wall. When he pushed on the panel, it gave just a little bit, and he could see the bottom of it below. When he had scanned it, it appeared to have little teeth that rested in holes all along its edge, but the bottom was open.
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