by J. E. Gurley
“Yes.” Jazon left the Drone mulling over his quaint metaphors and returned to the bridge. Once more, he donned the neuro-link. It seemed as if it were becoming a part of him now, a new appendage. He was beginning to wonder if he really needed it. At times, he could feel what was happening on the ship even out of the link. Perhaps it was a side effect of his closeness with Amissa.
“Amissa?” he called as soon as he linked up.
“Yes, Jazon.
“What are the Phyein doing?”
“They are watching the sun rise over the planet’s outer ring.”
“Watching the ... is this some kind of ritual?”
“I would not know, Jazon, but from references available, it would appear an act of contemplation or worship.”
“But they’re not organic,” he protested. “What could they be worshipping?”
“Perhaps they worship an inorganic god,” Amissa suggested with no trace of humor.
“If the Phyein have developed the concept of a deity or of a higher power, would they have souls?”
“If humans possess souls, then why not other species?”
“It’s a little tough to grasp. They look like spiders.”
“Their environment determines their shape, or vice versa. They need low slung bodies and multiple, nimble arms to maneuver in this environment.”
“But they created the environment.”
“Yes, it is an enigma, isn’t it?”
Jazon remembered his younger days on the Reservation, walking the mesas and canyons of his home. He recalled the flora and fauna of the high desert plateau, the secret names his father had told him that led to the true knowledge of the thing, the means of controlling it; this was what the Phyein had meant about the differences in the way the organic mind and the inorganic observed their environment.
Linked to the Phyein mind, they controlled his perceptions, however slightly. He could never see what they truly were with even that miniscule prejudice clouding his perceptions. He needed to meet them face-to-face.
“I must go out and speak with them. I have to know their true intentions.”
“Why not use your mind?” Amissa questioned.
“I can’t trust my mind. They’re in it. They could implant anything they wish. I need to see them, to touch them. Then I’ll know.”
“Please be careful, Jazon,” Amissa warned. Her voice filled his mind with her concern, and something more – love. It struck Jazon like slap in the face. He knew then that she would do anything to be with him, even give up a piece of her mind. “The rings are unstable,” she continued but Jazon wasn’t listening. “There will be tremors and worse as the cable attached to the moon grows taut.”
Jazon unlinked. He could still hear her warning in his mind, but he ignored it. It was something he had to do. Amissa trusted the Phyein. He did also to a degree, but was Amissa willing to risk her life to give them their prescient brain tissue? Was she willing to die to become more human? He had to know. He stopped by Ulrich’s quarters on the way to the airlock. He was short and to the point. He didn’t want to take the time for long explanations. Moreover, he didn’t want anyone to try to talk him out of his decision; he might give in.
“I’m going out,” he said. “Help me with my suit.”
Ulrich’s mouth dropped. “You’re not,” he said in disbelief. “Remember Harthim?”
He ignored Ulrich’s protests. “I have to. I have to see what they want with us, other than a piece of Amissa’s mind.”
Ulrich nodded. “Do you want me to go with you?”
Jazon smiled at Ulrich’s offer. “No. I’ll be fine. You make sure Lyton doesn’t do anything stupid before I get back.”
“I fear Lyton is going mad. He constantly talks of death. It’s creepy.”
“He’s released the nanites into his system. I think he’s afraid.”
Ulrich’s eyes went wide with fright at this revelation. “I know I am, now.” He helped Jazon into his suit. “What do you hope to learn out there that you can’t learn in here?” Ulrich pointed to his head.
“The truth.”
“Ah, Truth.” Ulrich grinned. “Well, you aren’t the first man to seek Truth, though I suspect you are the first to seek it on the rings of a gas giant inhabited by intelligent, inorganic spiders.”
“When you put it that way … Watch after my ship.”
“I will. Please be careful, Jazon.”
Jazon smiled as Ulrich secured the faceplate.
It took fifteen minutes to suit up. Ulrich was so nervous he was more hindrance than help. Finally, Jazon was ready to step outside a ship for the first time in ten years. Memories of the Battle of the Rim popped into his head. He took a deep breath and hit the door release.
The gravity of the rings was lower than he expected. He bounced as he walked. The rubble that comprised the rings was rough and uneven underfoot and made walking difficult. He picked a careful path between the largest boulders and chunks of ice, and headed for the gathered Phyein. He marveled at the Phyein ingenuity. Tiny fibers wrapped and connected the smaller debris pieces of the ring field. Larger bundles connected the various layers of ring. The amount of tension on the cables must have been tremendous as the different velocities of the inner and outer portions of the rings slowly reached equilibrium, but the cable material stretched and compressed like a coiled spring.
The Phyein had made superb use of small shepherd moons inside the ring debris, utilizing their minute gravitational fields to sweep smaller particles together, much like a broom on the beach. Surveying the ring plane, he had the distinct impression that the Phyein had purposefully arranged many of the natural features to augment their shapes, but he couldn’t decide if this was an attempt at art or architecture.
Oddly, a thin mist rose from the rings. He checked his suit computer – .02 percent free oxygen from photo dissociation, oxygen broken from water vapor by sunlight as ice melted.
As he neared the Phyein gathering, he began to feel a humming sensation, rhythmic and undulating like a song, in the front his mind. Was it a hymn? He could understand no words, if they even used words among themselves. Instead, he allowed the song itself to envelop him, to carry him along with its sustaining essence, its often-discordant underlying harmonies. He would have thought any song created by such a young species would be primitive, almost primal in construction, but this refrain was extremely complex, built on a minor scale reaching far beyond the range of human hearing. He could feel wisps of ultraviolet, x-rays, even gamma rays in the upper ranges, possibly a reference to the radiation left over from the Big Bang, the ultimate act of creation. Subsonic frequencies fanned out across the ring material and traveled up his boots into his chest, resonating there.
The Phyein song encompassed the entire life story of the universe from its tumultuous birth to its sad, slow, decadent death, swelling again in a hopeful refrain of rebirth. The sheer optimism of the song spoke volumes of the Phyein philosophy. They were a species with a profound belief in the future based on their collective past and the past of the universe, as they perceived it. He couldn’t fathom such a species harboring bad intentions for him or his crew. It would be irreverent to them.
The song ended as he approached. Two Phyein, larger than the rest, marked with iridescent stripes, strode over to him on their ten wiry legs, obviously at ease on the rock-strewn plain. They appeared much as they had in his dreams. They stood watching him with their compound eyes, waiting for him to make the first move.
He keyed his suit mic. “I am Jazon Lightsinger.”
A burst of static made him cringe, but soon a tinny, metallic voice broke through the static. “We are Phyein.”
Jazon looked from one to the other but could not tell which if either of these two was the speaker. “I needed to meet with you, face to face.”
“To test our reality?” the Phyein asked adroitly.
“To test mine,” Jazon replied. “I had to see if you were as real as in my dreams.”
“Dreams are an extension of our existence, much as your forefathers told you of yours. If the mind does not sleep, it must create. What the mind creates is real. Therefore dreams are real in at least that one sense of the word.”
“You knew my people believe in Dream Time?”
“Your people are wise. They can see beyond the Walls of the World created by man to hide him from the wonders of the universe.”
“You don’t hide?”
“We do not hide. We seek. The Phyein are becoming the universe. We chose our name from one of your ancient words meaning ‘growing’. We are growing beyond our natural boundaries and would soon come in conflict with other species such as yours.”
“And the Cha’aita?”
Jazon felt a blast of sympathy and moroseness sweep over him.
“The Cha’aita have met our kind before, in their home galaxy.”
“The Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy?”
“Yes. It harbors other inorganic intelligences such as the Phyein. The Cha’aita fled their homes after a lengthy conflict. They have an unrelenting hatred for our kind, but we wish to play no part in their death. Therefore, we will return to our own kind, leaving this galaxy for yours.”
Jazon was astounded. “You intend to travel to the Dwarf Galaxy on a moon?” The idea was incomprehensible.
“Only for part of the way. It would take hundreds of centuries in this slow manner. In a few hundred years we will have developed a faster-than-light-drive suitable to our species.”
“A Skip Drive technology?”
“No. That method is wasteful of energy and is inexact. The electromagnetic pulses associated with such technology are harmful to us. We are nearing completion of a method that utilizes the energy of our combined minds to open doorways between galaxies. The math is …” A series of numbers and equations raced through his mind faster than he could follow. He became dizzy with the feeling that he was seeing a new way of thinking and regretted that his math skills were so poor he could not retain even a small portion of it.
“This is why you need Amissa to guide you,” he guessed, still reeling with the power of the Phyein mind.
“Yes. Her prescient ability will reduce our journey by centuries. The Phyein wish to explore the wonders of the universe, as we travel to our new home. We have no desire to be trapped on a small moon for millennia.”
“She’s willing to undergo your procedure, but I have doubts.”
“You doubt the veracity of our words, yet you know we could simply take what we want.”
“I will blow the ship first,” Jazon warned.
“Do so.”
“What?” he asked, puzzled.
“Attempt to destroy your ship,” the Phyein urged.
As Jazon suspected, when he tried to link his mind to the autodestruct node, he found nothing there. “What have you done?”
“We blocked the link in your mind to prevent the destruction of your ship.”
“To trap us here,” Jazon challenged.
“No, merely to protect you from rash judgments. If you desire, we will replace the link. There, it is done.”
Jazon reached out and found the link again. He caressed it lovingly with his mind, like a tongue probing a missing tooth, relishing the power flowing through him. Could he use it?
“We have spoken the truth to you. We could not do otherwise. Trust is a difficult concept for beings such as you. We understand this and have made allowances, but it is time either to trust us and to allow us to leave your galaxy, or join the Cha’aita in their war against us.”
“We are at war against the Cha’aita. They are our enemies.”
“Then you must help us.” It sounded like a plea.
Jazon knew his decision could endanger Amissa and the others. If the Phyein wanted to leave the Milky Way Galaxy to the organic species, he had no choice but to accede to their request.
“We’ll help. What about the Cha’aita?”
“Our new moon home will reach apogee with this world and the rings in forty-five minutes as you distinguish time. That is also the point at which the white dwarf’s gravitation begins to attract the planet toward it in its millennial dance. We will release the moon at that time and begin our long journey. To protect us as we leave, we have issued a warning to the Cha’aita. Three black holes, the ones we created from the Cha’aita ships, are on their way to the world below us. On a signal, we will remove the stasis fields holding their energy in check. When the black holes unite, an explosion of unprecedented proportion will take place, ripping the upper atmosphere from the planet, destroying any vessel within a five AU radius.
“This will mask our leaving and the debris cloud will protect us from their ships sensors for several days. After that, we will have developed a more permanent means to protect ourselves.”
Jazon decided he believed this veiled threat. “What about us?”
“Your new engines can remove you from this area within seconds. We wish no harm to you or the Cha’aita, but we must protect ourselves during this delicate transfer period.”
“The Cha’aita will not believe your threat. They will continue.”
“So we believe, but they have been warned. We can do no more.”
“There is one delicate matter.”
“What is that?”
Jazon explained, “If your attempts to remove the prescient material from Amissa go wrong in any way, we can’t leave.”
“We understand. We will not fail,” the Phyein stated flatly.
Jazon looked at the rings beneath his boots. “Why did you do this?”
“The Phyein evolved as a small, silicate life form in the upper atmosphere of the planet below. There, we could evolve no further than the size of your protozoan life forms. By chance, or perhaps by the will of a higher power, some of our ancestors landed among the ring material, a veritable paradise of inorganic material –”
“You believe in God?” Jazon asked, interrupting the Phyein.
“We do not disregard the possibility. You believe in your Spirit Guide and are right to do so. It has brought you here. Was it mere chance that set our course in motion, set our paths to cross? We do not think so. Perhaps out there we will learn the truth.”
“I find it odd that an inorganic life form would believe in God.”
“Suppose this God is inorganic – an elemental force, subatomic or super universal. Is this so unimaginable? Considering the stories we have learned of your God from your minds, we do not think it beyond reason.”
“You learned of God from me?” Jazon questioned, unaware his mind contained much about God at all, or his Spirit Guide, for that matter. So much had happened in the past ten years to erase memories such as these.
“From you, Ulrich, Amissa, and even from the Dastoran Lord Hromhada.”
Jazon laughed. “Maybe you had better get more source material before coming to a decision about God.”
“It is not in your minds that we find such proof, but in your souls.”
The Phyein statement startled Jazon. “Souls?” He had considered his soul, if real, sold long ago to the highest bidder. It had been baggage, a link to the past, which he didn’t want. It didn’t simply wrestle quietly with his hatred for the Trilock, but rose up at times to challenge his decisions, to question his motives. “What do you know about souls?”
“We know that you humans, even the other races, have an energy source within you, a measurable, bioelectrical presence that does not cease to exist immediately upon your death. It leaves your body and joins the universal matrix to become source material for new birth.”
“We are born of the stars and return to the stars. I’ve heard that before but I don’t believe it,” Jazon challenged. “You should get your instruments recalibrated.”
“Our instruments are within us. They do not lie.”
“Well, if you find a soul in me, I’m just keeping it for a friend,” Jazon laughed.
“You doubt yourself, yet you have proven your co
urage many times over. Could it be your heritage you doubt, even now?”
“Are all you Phyein licensed psychoanalysts? If so, you’d better find a new line of work because you’re wrong about me.”
“The Phyein are one being. If we are wrong about you, then we will all die here in this desolate place.”
“Why am I here – just to bring you Amissa? I understand that without me, she wouldn’t have developed this … this, prescience you and Lord Hromhada need so desperately. If you take it, the Dastorans cannot leave. Personally, I don’t care, but isn’t this rather selfish on your part – depriving them of their future in order to assure yours?”
“The Dastoran’s future is not what they think it to be. They must face oblivion with their Alliance. To you, on the other hand, we offer a choice.”
“Terrans?”
“You and Amissa. We can take both your minds and place them in stasis. You can guide us, teach us, and live for millennia. You will not face the fate of the rest of your race.”
The thought of him and Amissa together for thousands of years found a brief niche in his mind that elicited thoughts of pleasure, but he shook them off. “No, I will live my life with or without Amissa. Why do you say we face oblivion? Do you see the future?”
“No, if we were prescient, we would not need Amissa. She can see the future though she blinds herself to it. We read your fate in the dark secret space in her mind in which she hides it.”
Jazon’s heart fluttered and his breathing became irregular. He checked his suit but saw no malfunction. “What is mankind’s future?”
“The Trilock would join the Cha’aita rather than face destruction. You suspect this. They are a race unsure of their identity, caught in a time of great change. They may seek to enhance their power for fear of losing the war. The Dastorans are even now developing a rift over the future of their race and may soon face a devastating civil war. A line has been drawn, and tempers are heated. If Earth stands alone against its enemy, it will lose.”
Jazon felt coldness in his suit, but it came from within, not from any suit malfunction. “This is inevitable? There has to be some hope.”