A Time and a Place

by Joe Mahoney

  My heart sank as I realized that it would take days to get everyone off C’Mell, if it was even possible anymore, with Akasha out of my head, and Iugurtha in this state.

  I would simply have to do the best I could. I just couldn’t do it alone. Maybe Doctor Humphrey would know how to help her. Once she was better we could return to C’Mell together and transport everyone else home. One by one if it came to it.

  If we weren’t too late.

  Akasha was no longer a part of me, but I still had access to the gate. I could detect it around the edges of my consciousness. It lurked there like a sentinel, just about the only thing sustaining me now.

  I chose my coordinates with great care. Ansalar, where I’d left Doctor Humphrey.

  Kneeling, I took Iugurtha up in my arms. She was much lighter than I expected. I could feel her flesh writhing beneath my grasp, and I hoped to God that she wouldn’t do to me what she’d done to Sweep.

  I carried her through the gate.

  Of course, the gate didn’t take me anywhere near where I wanted to go. Not even close.

  “Oh, come on,” I said aloud in frustration as I stepped into a nocturnal hell of mud, mist, and rain.

  The words never reached my ears. A blast of wind carried them away and deposited them high among foreboding cliffs that towered above me like castle walls.

  Despite the inclement weather the sky was completely clear, not a cloud in it, permitting me a spectacular view of a night sky thick with stars, a stunning panorama of unfamiliar constellations and colourful rings, like those of Saturn. I could see at least three shepherd moons nestled deep within the rings. This was not Earth, or C’Mell, or any other planet that I knew.

  I was no longer carrying Iugurtha. Wherever she was, she couldn’t have gotten far. There was no sign of the gate. Iugurtha must have taken it with her. That was annoying—maybe even catastrophic. Surprisingly, with the gate gone I still felt fine.

  Despite my predicament—abandoned on yet another alien planet with no way home—the improvement in my health cheered me up. I almost didn’t mind the wind in my face, pushing me belligerently back, and the rain whipping my face like a wet towel.

  I became aware of a peculiar intensity to my perceptions, as though reality was operating at a much higher resolution than usual. And something was wrong with time. It was behaving erratically, lurching forward in jerks and spasms when it bothered to lurch forward at all. Some moments, it seemed to me, were missing altogether.

  I found myself teetering at the edge of a mist-enshrouded pool. Instead of water, the pool was filled with luminescent goo, goo I knew well, having once been incarcerated in a tank of the stuff.

  The mist parted, revealing a woman at least twice as tall as me standing waist deep in the middle of the pool. She had long black hair, blue skin, and wore a necklace of oversized purple flowers. I thought the flowers might be lotuses. A gigantic Necronian shared the pool with her, and they were wrestling, straining against one another with all their might, trying to reach a slender silver wand protruding from the pool at a jaunty angle. So evenly matched were they that neither of them budged, the only tangible evidence of their contest the tension in the woman’s face and an ever-so-slight quivering of the Necronian’s tentacles. I was impressed that the woman could hold her own against such a monster, but chalked it up to her enormous size—that and the fact that she had eight arms, one for each of the Necronian’s tentacles.

  The Necronian did not look surprised to see me. When it spoke, its voice was as strained as its trembling alien muscles. “Hello, Wildebear Barnabus J. So nice to see you again.”

  The giantess never took her eyes off the oversized Necronian wand just beyond her reach. She spoke with my sister’s voice. “Take it, Barnabus. Quickly now.”

  Several facts were immediately apparent.

  The giantess was Akasha.

  The Necronian was Jacques.

  Akasha could not, in fact, handle Jacques.

  It was obvious now why the absence of the gate had not made me sick. Why time was misbehaving, and what was the matter with reality. None of this was real. All of it, from the cliffs to the moons to the pool, was yet another telepathically generated fantasy. But it wasn’t Jacques who had brought me here. This was Akasha’s doing. She needed my help.

  “Take it,” Jacques said, “and I will kill you, everyone you love, and everyone you will ever love.”

  Clearly the wand represented something in the real world important to Jacques.

  “You’ll kill them all anyway,” I said.

  “Not at all. Leave the wand alone and I’ll spare one or two. I promise.”

  “You call that sweetening the pot?”

  “And here I thought I was being magnanimous. Have it your way then.”

  Jacques jerked a tentacle from Akasha’s grasp and coiled it around her neck. Akasha slipped one of her eight arms beneath the tentacle just in time to prevent Jacques from choking her. Using its newfound leverage, Jacques bent Akasha double until her face hovered mere inches above the goo. The goo wasn’t real any more than the Necronian wand they were trying to reach was real, but I knew it was capable of drowning Akasha in some significant way.

  “Barnabus,” Akasha said, her voice severely strained. “Take the wand before Jacques does or—”

  Her words ended in a gurgle as Jacques jerked her violently backward.

  I leapt into the pool and started wading. It got deep quickly. In just a few short steps I was up to my waist. The goo was cool to the touch and every bit as icky as I remembered. It had a pungent odour, like garlic—clearly a much fresher batch than the one I’d been imprisoned in.

  Jacques let go of Akasha and made a desperate leap for the wand, but Akasha held the Necronian back by two of its tentacles. Jacques fell well short of its goal, its massive bulk slapping the goo like a Beluga whale. The entire pool quivered like a plate of jelly. Unbalanced, I lost my footing and gulped air just before going under. Surfacing, I spat goo from my lips and wiped my nose and eyes clean.

  Jacques thrashed wildly about trying to free itself. Goo splattered everywhere. Gobs of it struck me hard in the face. Another few seconds and Jacques would be free. Seconds after that the Necronian would have the wand, and whatever that meant.

  I waded as fast as I could, but the further I went, the deeper it got, and the deeper it got, the slower I went. I was still five or six steps away—too far. Until Akasha caught another one of Jacques’ flailing tentacles with two of her free hands and began pulling the Necronian backward, buying me the time I needed.

  I reached the wand and registered dismay on Jacques’ face as I grasped the device as firmly as I could with both hands. Immediately I was overwhelmed by sights, sounds, and sensations that I could not even begin to make sense of. That threatened to consume me. Disoriented, I let go of the wand and stumbled backwards.

  Akasha was clutching Jacques by a single tentacle now.

  “Hang onto it, Barnabus,” she said, “and don’t let go. Take Jacques. And then do what you have to do.”

  I hesitated. I understood the significance of the wand now. It represented control over Jacques’ consciousness. That’s what Akasha and Jacques were fighting over. If I touched the wand again I would inhabit Jacques just as I had once inhabited Sweep. More than that, I would become the Necronian, as I had once become the seagull Sky.

  I was ashamed of having violated Sky, even if it had been to save Humphrey. I was ashamed of having glimpsed Sarah’s thoughts. I was ashamed of having spied on Sweep during the most intense part of her short, young life. Could I bring myself do the same to Jacques?

  Hell yes.

  Slowly, inexorably, Jacques slipped free of Akasha’s grasp.

  This time when I took hold of the wand, I did not let go.

  XXIV

  Vast, Aquatic, and Utterly Lifeless

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nbsp; I was appallingly attractive, oozing slime of the highest order, and bulging pleasingly in all the right places. My enlarged cranial cavities screamed intellectual superiority, and I took an unseemly delight in the many carbuncles adorning my skin.

  It was, truth be told, all I could do to keep my tentacles off myself.

  All four hundred thousand or so of my tentacles had taste buds, allowing me to taste everything I touched, including the ground over which I slithered. My discriminating palate revealed just how awful everything on this horrid planet tasted.

  I had well over fifty thousand eyes, most of them capable of seeing deep into the ultraviolet, almost all of them possessed of phenomenal peripheral vision. Used collectively, they allowed me to see completely different parts of C’Mell at the same time. My exceptional brains made sense of it all.

  I saw enemy ships attacking mine. Witnessed my largest compound reduced to ashes. Observed the enemy release hundreds of hostages, but it didn’t matter. I didn’t need them anymore. I already had what I’d come for.

  I recognized lifeless fragments everywhere, pieces of the enemy, broken bits of myself. They didn’t matter either. They were insignificant. There were plenty more where they came from.

  I felt minds around me. Frightened, alien minds. I understood them better than they did themselves. I could influence those minds. Heal them, or destroy them.

  Rousing myself, I engaged cloaking mechanisms and readied weapons that my opponent never even suspected existed, prepared to eradicate my enemy.

  All that in an instant.

  Fortunately, an instant after that I remembered who I really was—Barnabus J. Wildebear—and what I needed to do, which did not include helping Jacques defend itself.

  I set the weapons aside and disengaged the cloaking mechanisms. I released all the remaining T’Klee prisoners, and shooed them all to safety. I freed Gordon Rainer. Searching for Sarah, I could not find her, and presumed her safe inside Iugurtha’s mountain. I tried and failed to find the body of Harold Schmitz. I moved Iugurtha and my physical self to a safe place not far from where Rainer had been imprisoned. I located Ridley and moved him as well, setting him back to rights as best I could, ridding him of Jacques’ nightmare, and easing him into a healing slumber. After that, there was only one thing left to do.

  Like a rabid dog, Jacques had to be put down.

  Jacques’ wands were psionic amplifiers, responsible for augmenting the telepathic connection between the Necronians that permitted the collective consciousness calling itself Jacques to exist. Without the wands, most of the collective consciousness would dissolve, and Jacques as I knew it would be reduced to little more than a collection of individual Necronians that Iugurtha’s soldiers would be able to kill with impunity. All I had to do was make Jacques put down its wands.

  Judge, jury, and executioner, I would execute my enemy from within.

  The external slaughter was already well underway. What was left of Iugurtha’s troops had launched another assault. The pain surprised me. Not the physical pain—Jacques was tough. Physical pain I could handle. This was something else. An ancient, inchoate pain that had been there long before I’d stepped into Jacques.

  I tried to ignore it. I wasn’t interested in Jacques’ pain. I sought vengeance, not understanding. I didn’t want to know any more about the Necronian than I absolutely had to.

  Still you judge me.

  But, just as I feared, Jacques’ memories were powerful, the pain too potent to ignore. I could no more shut it out than I could ignore Iugurtha’s soldiers killing Jacques bit by significant bit.

  Jacques’ memories shouldn’t have changed anything.

  In the end they changed everything.

  When I was three I got hit in the face with a hockey puck. A few months after that I got stung by a bee. Sometime later I got lost and a storekeeper found me and brought me back home. All these memories are vague and imprecise. Although based on kernels of truth, the way I remember things almost certainly does not represent exactly what happened.

  Jacques’ memories were nothing like that.

  Everything Jacques remembered, Jacques remembered with absolute clarity.

  Jacques’ first memories, for instance. They were of a spaceship. At the time Jacques didn’t know that it was a spaceship—it only worked that out much later, along with the fact that it was a Necronian spaceship. And that it was under attack.

  The first T’Klee that Jacques ever saw was on board this spaceship, and it wasn’t particularly friendly. It was snarling, its open mouth revealing white teeth filed to sharp points. It wore clothing that looked like leather, and had a cylindrical tube attached to the side of its head. In Jacques’ memory the T’Klee was enormous—probably because back then Jacques wasn’t. The T’Klee was facing off against a Necronian. Compared to Jacques, the Necronian was also enormous. The Necronian resembled Jacques but, like others of its kind, was distinct from Jacques, because this was the beginning, and in the beginning there were no other parts to Jacques. There was only Jacques.

  Jacques’ memory of the T’Klee was accompanied by a tsunami of emotion consisting primarily of loss. The emotion and the T’Klee were where Jacques began—before them there had been no Jacques, at least that Jacques could remember.

  The Necronian insinuated itself between Jacques and the T’Klee while not-so-gently backing Jacques up into a small octagonal chamber. The Necronian did not enter the chamber with Jacques. Restraints appeared around Jacques, restricting Jacques’ movement. The door to the chamber closed. Although Jacques would not realize it until much later, the chamber was an escape pod.

  The door to the escape pod was completely transparent, affording Jacques an excellent view of the beam of red light that sliced the large Necronian neatly in two. Half of the Necronian slumped against the door to the escape pod, which slid open, allowing that portion of the Necronian to fall into the pod with Jacques. This made the pod quite crowded but actually was rather fortuitous, as Jacques would discover later.

  The beam of light, which had come from the tube on the T’Klee’s head, disappeared. The T’Klee pivoted to look at Jacques. Detecting nothing but malice in the T’Klee’s gaze, Jacques braced itself for the light to reappear and slice it in two as well, but instead the door to the pod closed and a powerful motion pushed Jacques forward against the restraints.

  The T’Klee receded rapidly from view. The view through the door became a tunnel of lights. An instant later it became a hole in a white oval object suspended in a sea of black. The oval object—the Necronian ship, Jacques’ birthplace—became progressively smaller until it was no longer possible to distinguish it from a million other pinpricks of dimly flickering light.

  For a long time nothing happened, which was just fine. Jacques was too new to understand the purpose of an escape pod. Even if Jacques had understood it wouldn’t have mattered. Jacques was preoccupied by emotions it didn’t understand. It was overwhelmed by pretty much everything, most of which it didn’t understand. It needed time to come to grips with it all. Considering it had existed as a discrete entity for all of two minutes, this was asking a lot of it. Still, though almost completely devoid of memories, Jacques did possess a fully functioning intellect. It also possessed certain fundamental bits of a priori knowledge, mostly practical in nature, which included an intrinsic understanding of the natural laws of the universe and a rudimentary understanding of applied mathematics, physics, chemistry, engineering, and so forth.

  Jacques focussed on the remains of the Necronian, which rotated slowly in the chamber’s weightless environment about level with what passed for Jacques’ head. From time to time the Necronian’s four remaining tentacles draped themselves across Jacques’ torso, but Jacques barely noticed. It was too busy grappling with questions: chiefly, what did the Necronian have to do with Jacques, why had the T’Klee cut the Necronian in half, and what was going to happ
en next? Unfortunately, without sufficient context, the questions were impossible to answer.

  Much time passed. Jacques began to experience certain urges. In time the urge to eat grew overwhelming. The restraints prevented Jacques from being able to forage in the small chamber, so eventually it was forced to eat the only thing in reach—the remains of the Necronian. The prospect did not particularly bother Jacques. It had never heard of cannibalism. Jacques knew only that it was hungry, and here was something to eat. So, despite the Necronian’s tough, rubbery flesh and its bland, unappealing taste, Jacques ate. Shortly afterward, Jacques took great pleasure excreting various bodily fluids, and before long the chamber was a sticky mess. With each subsequent excretion Jacques found the chamber that much more comfortable.

  Eventually, after a great deal more time, Jacques heard a muted mechanical roar and began to experience a slight pressure. The pressure increased until it became almost unbearable, and just when Jacques thought that it couldn’t stand another second of this torture, the pressure increased. Jacques lost consciousness. When it woke up, the roar had been replaced by a sustained whistling, and the pressure had subsided, and finally the whole awful experience came to an end with a series of muted crashes and much knocking about. After several seconds of silence there was a blast of compressed air and the door to the chamber slid open, revealing a jumble of debris and a patch of night sky full of stars and rings and moons.

  Jacques wanted to leave the chamber but couldn’t because the restraints were still in place. The knowledge required to release itself existed in Jacques’ brain, but Jacques did not think to look there, so it was forced to simply wait, which it did until the patch of sky cycled through light and then dark twice in a row, and it grew faint with hunger, and as it waited it couldn’t help but wonder whether this might constitute the sum total of its existence, and if so, what was the point of such an existence?