“M,” I said.
“Right, her. The benefits are amazing. And I got a little Enlil chick I’ve been hooking up with. Fine as shit. I told her I was a nature guide back home, so she took me to the wildlife preserve. The animals here are fucking crazy.” He stirred his food. “What if I move to a different galaxy for a woman?”
The Enlil gathered us together for a joint briefing a few days later. We’d progressed well in our training and they were ready to start the mission. Now that it was actually happening, I felt a little nervous, but I was ready too.
Betty was especially anxious about going back, and for good reason. She had no job, nowhere to go, no ID. She couldn’t even use her real name. However, the Enlil had resources to get her a new identity and money was no problem. Plus, they owned land and companies that could employ her, if needed. Losing out on being an actress bothered her at first, but she warmed to the idea of being a special agent for a trans-universal power. I had to admit, it had a certain cachet.
“We have to change your name, though,” I said, talking to Betty Ann about her return to Earth. “People know the name Betty Ann Taylor. And it sounds old. You’re too young to be a Betty Ann.”
I was prepared for her to be offended, but she just looked thoughtful. “It’s not my real name anyway,” she said. “My real name’s Tatiana Tavarez, but they said it sounded ‘too Hispanic’ for movies, so I changed it. Like Raquel Welch.”
“Tatiana Tavarez,” I repeated. “It fits you. Strong…sexy.“
She showed a little half smile. “Quite the smooth talker, aren’t you?”
“I just figure we should have as good a relationship as possible,” I said. “After all, we’re going to be working together a lot, right?”
She smiled. “That’s what they tell me. I guess we’ll find out back on Earth.”
Me, Luis, and Betty Ann / Tatiana were due to go back the next day. We were all going back to Earth the way we came—which for me and Luis was via portal, and for Tatiana was via Enlil ship.
Tashmit came with a couple of other Enlil to escort me and Luis to the facility where the Enlil housed the portal for our return. They’d constructed an enclosed facility around it years ago, which was how they’d found us so quickly when we came through. This was the first time I was seeing the portal from this side.
Tashmit gave us some last minute instructions. “If you step through the portal within the next ten minutes, approximately two hours will have passed on Earth from the time you came through,” she said. “Longer than ten minutes, the time cycle will change and you’ll have to wait for another window to open.”
She handed me a small device that looked like a silver railroad spike, and a number of smaller items of the same material.
“When you get back, plant the spike in the ground to keep the portal hidden. The smaller ones do the same thing for small, stationary objects like cars. Don’t forget.”
Luis and I stood in front of the portal as it activated. The markings on the side looked similar to the ones on the stela in the ruins we’d found. And then the purplish light intensified and reached towards us. We took a step forward.
Unlike the first time, neither one of us blacked out. When we emerged, the lights of the stela were flashing in sequence like a moving marquee in Times Square. I glanced at them and they quieted. The biosim jaguar was gone—back out patrolling the forest, I presumed.
“How you feeling?” I asked Luis.
“I feel great,” he said. “How do I look?”
“Still ugly,” I said. “But no Rip Van Winkle effect. What about me?”
“Same,” he said. “Let’s gather what we can and get out of here. If they were right about the time, we can make it to the river in time for our pickup. This was day two of three for Armando, remember. With no more jaguar, there’s no need to spend another night out here.”
I planted the spike, and we packed our stuff and hustled out. As we hiked away I became especially aware that I could still sense the portal. Even having left it behind in the jungle, I could’ve pointed straight to it as easily as I could point to my nose on my face.
We hadn’t walked for five minutes before I heard a snarling from the brush off to our left. Without warning, a jaguar shot through a gap and leapt onto Luis’s back. I could sense the thing clearly and knew that it was a biosim. The weeks I’d spent training in Enlil let me react without even thinking.
Before the jaguar could bite, I established a neural link and shut it down. It simply stepped aside and sat down where it was.
Luis was hyperventilating, but he was ok. “Fuck!” he sputtered. We hung out for a few minutes to let him get himself together, and then continued on. Armando was there with the boat when we arrived at the rendezvous.
“Just made it,” he said, oblivious to any of the changes in us. As we motored away, the sense of the portal behind me faded rapidly, like the ripples of our wake melted into the river.
7
Miami, Florida, United States
Being back home felt good—it was nice to be back in familiar surroundings, but I found I had a hard time seeing life the way I used to. I tried to regain a sense of normalcy through my old routines, but having learned that there were aliens and alternate universes had completely changed my understanding of the world. A few days after I got back, my phone rang from an unknown number. I usually let those calls go to voicemail, but something told me to pick up.
“Hi,” came a woman’s voice from the other end. “I hope you remember me—we met at that cool intergalactic place last weekend…“
I perked up immediately. “Hmmm,” I said, playing along. “I do think I remember you. You were wearing that skin-tight liquid metal outfit, right?”
She giggled, “Aww, I must’ve made an impression. Those were my work clothes though. I look a lot different outside of my work clothes.”
“Oh yeah?” I said. “I thought you looked pretty damn good in that.”
“Such a flatterer,” she said. “It just so happens that not only am I on your planet, I’m in your city.”
We met at a coffee shop that afternoon. I was uncharacteristically early. Considering she hadn’t been out in society for thirty years, I didn’t want to be late and leave her there by herself.
When she showed up, Tatiana looked even more stunning than she had the last time I’d seen her. We hugged and I bought her a cup of tea and a croissant for myself, then we sat down to talk.
“How long have you been here?” I asked. “In Miami, I mean.”
She took the top off her cup and tore open a packet of honey. “I came back the same day as you. Then I spent a week at some house they own in the boonies in Virginia. They called it The Consulate. They brought Luis too. He came after me, but he was still there when I left. They had a whole new identity for me—driver’s license, birth certificate, background story. They’ve got a whole operation going. They moved me down here a couple of days ago. They were going to move me to Idaho or somewhere like that, but I threw a fit. They already ruined my life, I’m not moving to fucking Idaho too. I told them that if you and me were going to be working together, it made sense that we live near each other. So here I am.”
I watched with amusement as she tried wiping the honey from her fingers and then resorted to just licking it off.
“I’m glad you’re not in Idaho,” I said. “But how does it feel being gone for a couple of weeks and thirty years have passed?”
She paused from blowing on her tea and her eyes went narrow. “I’m really angry, Nathan. They stole my life from me. They say I can go back on my timeline, but I don’t really believe them.” Angry tears welled in her eyes. “I want to, but I just don’t believe them. I don’t know anyone now. No more career.” She sighed heavily and tears painted her cheeks. “My abuela died fifteen years ago. My parents and my brother are still alive, but I can’t contact them. My brother was twenty-five when I left, he’s sixty-four now. And I’m still twenty-nine.”
; She looked so forlorn, just staring blankly into her steaming cup, with her cheeks wet with tears.
I went over and hugged her. She was right. And nothing I could say could be of much comfort, but I tried anyway.
“I can’t even imagine what you’re going through,” I said. “And I don’t want to say anything dumb or insensitive, but you have at least one friend.”
She smiled at that. “Thank you,” she said. “It means a lot.”
Tatiana got an apartment just a couple of miles from mine, and we saw each other almost every day over the next couple of weeks. She caught on quickly to smart phones and social media and pretty much everything else that had changed since she’d left Earth. Living with a super advanced alien species for a few weeks made it pretty hard to be amazed by human technology.
We spent a lot of time practicing together with our chumahai and figuring out how to work best with them. Tashmit had been right: simply wearing it made it much more comfortable. Within a week, it felt like a part of me—a second skin. The amount of sensation that it enabled was amazing, beyond anything I’d ever imagined. I could control the depth of it, but if I wanted, I could feel every little breeze on my skin like a raging storm. It enhanced my hearing and smell and vision. Even more fascinating was playing with the other abilities.
I practiced generating and transmitting electricity by holding the cords of unplugged appliances and turning them on. I fried a couple of lamps and my toaster oven before I learned to modulate the flow, but with each attempt I got better and better. I went for walks outside and used my Electrosense to feel my way along and sense every living thing that was in my range.
Eventually I felt confident enough to try it at night, and went walking along a lake shore on a moonless night. I could sense exactly where I was and what was around me as if it were broad daylight. I sensed an alligator submerged close to the shore and coming nearer as I went to the water’s edge. I considered how risky this was, but decided to try it anyway. I reached down and put my hand in the water. When it got within about ten feet of me, I sent a single, strong jolt straight at it. It convulsed and thrashed in the water, then floated there, unmoving. I could still feel its heart beating, so I knew I hadn’t killed it. After a few minutes, it regained enough strength to move, and it turned around and swam weakly away.
Tatiana practiced her Neuroconceal abilities on me. Even though I knew exactly what she was doing, she could make my brain see something other than what was in front of me, and remain totally at ease.
The Enlil said that Tati’s Neuroconceal wouldn’t let her control what people see, it would just encourage their brain to see something it liked and override the urge to question what it was seeing. But Tati said they were wrong. She was sure that with more practice, she’d be able to control precisely what people saw and heard.
I was at home watching Netflix one night when there was a knock at the door. It was close to midnight, but when I looked out I saw a kangaroo standing on the front steps. It seemed perfectly normal at the time, so I opened the door and the kangaroo hopped in and closed the door. Not until she released the Neuroconceal did I realize it was Tatiana.
“So what did I look like?” she asked, smiling.
I hesitated before answering. “A kangaroo.”
She laughed out loud. “A kangaroo?”
I shrugged my shoulders. It had seemed perfectly normal through the peephole, but with her Neuroconceal off, it was obvious how ridiculous it had been.
Tati couldn’t stop laughing as she followed me into the living room and sat on the couch. Eventually, I was laughing too, and then we were sitting closer together, then we were laying together on the couch.
“Okay,” she said, turning to face me. “I looked like a kangaroo when I showed up. What do I look like now?”
“Honestly?” I said. “Not that much different.”
She barked a laugh and punched my arm. “Jerk.”
“I’m kidding,” I laughed. “You look amazing. You’re a natural beauty.”
“Yeah?” she said, kissing me. She unbuttoned her blouse.
“Yeah. You’re way hotter than the last wallaby I dated.”
“You flatter me,” she teased. She stood and unzipped her jeans.
“Is it working?”
“I think so,” she said, as she led me towards my bedroom door.
The Enlil, through their network of Agents, ran several front companies, and they put Tatiana on the payroll of one. It was like a work-release program for their agents and abductees. Associates, they called them. Luis called the next day with the name of a nearby bar and told me to meet an Associate there. I wasn’t sure who I was looking for, but when I got there, a tall, slightly graying man with a face that looked like he’d seen some shit in life nodded to me. He moved the jacket from the seat next to him and I sat down. He was drinking a beer, so I ordered one too.
“They think they’ve found an Enki portal,” he said when the bartender moved away. “They want you to go through and place a marker. It’ll clarify the portal’s position in Enki land.”
I was immediately skeptical. This sounded too simple. “What kind of marker? Where’s the portal?”
“A positional tracking device. Like I said, it’ll clarify the location of the other side of the portal in Enki land. Here on the Earth side, the entrance is just outside of St. Louis in the Cahokia mounds. They’re not sure if it’s still operable, but if it is and you can activate it, it’ll be an easy way in to Enki land.”
“A dimensional bridge to span the universes is in St. Louis?” I asked. “That doesn’t sound ridiculous to you?”
“You haven’t worked with the Enlil for long enough yet,” he said. “Strange is the name of the game—this is nothing. Cahokia isn’t much now, but 2,000 years ago it was a bigger city than London. 200,000 people lived there from all over the East coast, Gulf coast, all the way up to the Great Lakes. The Midwest is a lot of flat, empty space now but it wasn’t always that way.”
I must have been giving him some kind of look because he shrugged his shoulders and said, “What do you want? I’m an archaeologist.” He took a big gulp of beer. Schooling me about Cahokia was thirsty business, apparently.
“Cahokia is a protected archaeological site now,” he continued. “Cahokia Mounds State Park. To get to the portal, you’ll have to trespass and probably have to dig in a protected area, so be careful not to get caught. Once you find the portal, open it and go through.”
“That’s it?” I asked. “Just go find the portal, go through and put down this tracking device?”
He took another sip and smiled a bit. “No. There’s a little more than that. The thing is, we don’t know exactly where this portal opens in Enki. We think it opens in Jedda—it’s a small city on the edge of a desert—but we’re not sure. But wherever it opens, we need that tracker placed.” He took a big gulp. “And then we need you to find the Enki resistance and make contact.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “That’s a lot bigger than just put down some device and get out.”
He nodded. “It is. Also, you can’t just go back through the portal and come right back to Earth. You need this.” He produced a small device from his pocket and handed it to me. “This shows you the windows to return to Earth. If you want to come back in your own time, you have to enter the portal during one of the windows.”
I took the thing from him and turned it over in my hands. It looked like a miniature version of the Bean in Chicago. “How do I use this?” I asked.
“First let’s talk about finding the resistance. We think it’s led by officers in the Enki inner circle waiting for the right opportunity to overthrow the Emperor.”
He produced from his pocket something that looked like a metallic Post-it. “If we’re right, this electrofilm will help you find them. We think they use them to identity each other and communicate. If you scan someone else with an electrofilm with matching codes, you’ll feel an impedance. I don’t have any electroab
ility—I’m an Agent—so I can’t confirm if what they say is true, but you press it your chumamai and channel electricity into it.” He pressed it into my forearm with the Klingon handshake. The chumahai insulated me, but I could easily feel the electrical pulse.
“If you come out in Jedda, as we expect, you’ll have to make your way to the Grand Ministry. It’s a large building that houses the provincial government. You’ll be able to able to identify it by its electrosignature.”
“How do we know the Enki haven’t found out about the resistance?”
“Kid,” he sighed, “we don’t even know for sure that there is a resistance. Or if there is, if this is their code and how they communicate. It’s what we think from some of the intelligence we’ve gathered. This is definitely a gamble.”
This whole thing sounded crazy to me. “What happens if I scan someone and they’re not resistance? Are they onto me?”
“Electroscanning someone with low power, they won’t even notice. And if they do, no one would care. It’s just like checking out a hot chick on the street: don’t be blatant about it, just get a quick look and keep it moving. Low power scan. The code itself is innocuous, no one would get in trouble for having it. But it’s very distinctive. It’s like wearing a certain kind of hat.”
“Well if that’s the case, how do you know these Enki are resistance? Anyone can wear the hat, right?”
“It’s a lock and key system,” he said. “You won’t even see the hat unless you’re both wearing it. But you’re right. Not everyone wearing the hat is in the resistance. But we’re pretty sure that everyone in the resistance will be wearing the hat.”
I thought about what he was saying as I drank the rest of my beer. “So how do we know the people in charge don’t know about this code? How do we know they’re not just using it as bait to catch all the resisters stupid enough to show up and flash the code?”
Children of the Sky (The Talari Subversion Book 1) Page 7