by F P Adriani
Before I’d gone to sleep, I made sure that Chen was getting his arm treated. And now Gary told me that Chen was doing better, so Kostas had brought him and May back to the Demeter.
I was very glad about Chen’s improvement, but, upon hearing Gary say my ship’s name, I felt worry pinching at the back of my mind. I had to continue the journey up the mountain. When would I see my ship again….
I said this to Gary now. I had just used that sluice-like mechanism and the attached sprayer to take a drink and to wet my still-too-tired face; the water was trickling over my eyes, obstructing my view of Gary’s face.
But I heard worry touching his voice when he spoke: “Lydia, I didn’t want to say anything about it before because it would have been too much right when you got back. But, Geena’s saying she wants to leave the Demeter and stay here on Rintu.”
Blood shot into my face as my mouth dropped open. “What? Not again!” I said, immediately thinking of Babs. “And now I can’t go talk to her! By the time I get back there again, who knows what a mess everything will be? Everything I’ve worked for…. Every time I turn around now, it’s like everyone wants to leave.”
“That’s not true,” Gary said. “Look at Shirley—she says she isn’t going anywhere. Even through the problems, she still finds it ‘exhilarating’—her exact words. And what about the temporary people who asked to be permanent? They’ve been working out well, by the way—and, the Rintu workers helped us with the zenite engine. Steve and Karen have got it working perfectly again.”
My mouth twisted a little. “Well, at least that’s something—but, no offense, I’m not on there now, and it’s not good for a crew when the captain’s been gone a long while. It’s not that I don’t trust them, especially you, but I wish I could go back now before I go up.” I rubbed at my forehead and pushed a strand of wet hair from my eyes. “And what you said about the temporary crew—they only just got here. Apparently, my real trouble is retaining people over the long term.”
Gary grabbed one of my hands. “No. These things happen. You’ve just got to accept that people will come and go sometimes.”
My eyes shot up to his and my lips shook when I said, “What about you? Will you be leaving next?”
“No way,” he said fast, his brown eyes firm, his hand tightening on mine. “In fact, I told Kostas I’m going back up the mountain with you, and I want a tether attached between the two of us.”
I couldn’t help laughing. I watched a warm grin spread over Gary’s face now—and I realized anew that it was a face I’d been missing oh-so-very much.
*
Although telling me bad news about the Demeter was the right thing for Gary to do, I continued to feel upset over that bad news as a worker helped me adjust a clean worksuit on my body. Another worker had taken Gary to get some food for me, but my mind wasn’t focused on food or getting dressed.
The worker with me looked young, and he had a soft, almost whispering voice; you really had to pay attention to hear what he was saying. And I really wasn’t paying attention. I kept thinking that I had to go up the dangerous mountain again—what if it took longer than The Keepers thought—and what if I fell again? I knew I didn’t die the last time, but I still didn’t trust Kostas’ reassurances that I wouldn’t die this time….
The young worker had been saying something and gesturing toward the right sleeve of my suit.
“What?” I asked him on a frown.
And in his whisperish voice, he replied, “Kostas told me to teach you how to turn on and adjust the emergency life-support controls. Each sleeve has the same controls. And I was explaining to you the sequence to press—can you feel the slight ridges in the material here?”
“Oh—yeah.” My left hand was rubbing over the fabric—on a spot I’d noticed before, but I had no idea then that the spot had a purpose. “In all the moving around, I must have touched these spots on my other suit and that never did anything.”
“You must push one of the bumps on the shoulders first—over here,” the whisperer said, his fingers pointing toward where a damp lock of my hair had fallen.
I sighed hard. “I really wish someone had told me this sooner.”
His head lowered in a shy way, which made him look even younger. “There’s a lot to do here, and things get missed. Your arrival was not expected.”
“Dropping Into Places Uninvited seems to be my middle name lately,” I said, my eyes rolling toward the dark ceiling.
And I could have sworn I heard the worker whisper a laugh.
*
When I was done getting dressed and testing out my minimal knowledge of the orange suit, I found Gary in one of the other segments of Upal’s space. The tall, bronze stone walls in this huge hexagonal area looked perfectly flat, and as Gary and I sat on cushions on the floor and ate oddly salty but juicy yellow fruits, Gary told me that Upal had shown him what the walls contain.
Chewing now, I raised my eyebrows at Gary.
“They let me come onto this level every day for any first-hand news about you,” Gary said. “Kostas flew me here and we took an internal elevator up. This room’s a kind of live-library. I watched Upal while he searched for you and Chen—of course so much information came up and in languages I couldn’t understand. One of the workers was here and he explained a little of the science. But, watching Upal work with the information was fascinating. There were maps—I think I started getting a feel for them, their overall organization. Then yesterday Upal suddenly linked up with my mind, to tell me you’d finally been found in another dimension.”
Swallowing the salty juice in my mouth, I wiped my hands on my suit as I glanced at Gary’s suit. “Gary, did they show you how to use the suit-controls today?”
He nodded fast. “Some of them. The rest they said would take too long to understand.”
Silently at first, I stared into his brown eyes. “You don’t have to do this, you know. A part of me doesn’t want you to. What if you fall?”
“Then I’m taking you with me. Kostas is literally bringing me a tether.”
As if she’d heard us talking about her, she appeared in the doorway to the big room; she held a small, square mechanism with a white rope coiled around it. “Please finish your meal. We will need to get started within half an hour.”
I unfolded my legs and stood up, adjusting my red belt around my middle. “How long will this take—can’t you at least give us a timetable?”
“It will probably take about eight hours. We will ride the internal elevator to three levels before The Hall Of Devices. Here is the tether. Put both rope-hooks onto the torso tabs of your suits. I’ll make adjustments to your suit-fields to hold the tether better.”
She came toward me, but I shook a hand at her. “Show me how to do it on my suit. I’m tired of the loss of control here.”
“All right.” She came closer and motioned with her fingers for where Gary and I needed to work the shoulder and arm controls. Then Gary hooked up the ends of the tether. I felt dubious that we’d be able to do anything with the suits, and my feelings must have been visible on my face.
Kostas’ eyes were on mine now, and her mouth looked softer than normal. “I do understand everything you’ve been through is hard. I don’t think we’ve ever thanked you, which was a bad oversight. I’m thanking you now.”
“Well, that certainly helps,” I said, offering her a smile, though a slightly lopsided one. “I just wish Chen didn’t have to break an arm—”
“It was only a single fracture, and it should be healed within two weeks. The medicine The Keepers have is just as much a physics as it is a biology as it is a chemistry. There is no separation. It is all one science.”
Gary’s brown eyes seemed to light up in her direction now, and he snapped his fingers. “That was the feeling I got in here.” He turned to me. “A worker—he mentioned that thermal vibrations would look different from different reference frames, so Upal was looking for evidence of the pattern of your DNA vibrating, but
he had to check a high number of different speeds. He said that was why the search was taking so long. He seemed to be searching for you in such a fundamental way; I wondered how the hell he would ever find you. For example, at the tiniest of subatomic measures, there are often no clear tags making distinctions between ‘boundaries’. And at extremely high speeds, the same thing probably happens: the organizational structure of DNA wouldn’t be easily observable. The error’s so great that your DNA could be anyone’s DNA then. Everything bleeds together then.
“But, I get the feeling that when I say ‘DNA,’ that’s not the same way Upal looks at DNA. Is that true?” Gary frowned a question at Kostas.
And she nodded when she replied, “Everything in this universe is really the science of velocity, energy, time and pieces—this is the way The Keepers manipulate the universes. Similar to a computer with bits and bytes, all things can come down to ones and zeros. Certain pieces are on or off, and extremely high numbers are added together from those ons and offs to create the larger picture that you perceive.” She looked at her orange sleeves, as if she was looking at a readout, but I saw no readout there, and there wasn’t any on my suit-sleeves either. But maybe readouts actually were there; I just wasn’t intimately linked with Keeper minds so couldn’t see the readouts. For the first time, I saw how interesting Kostas’ job and her very existence might be….
“I don’t have time to explain anymore than that,” she said now, “and we aren’t allowed to share everything. Just like with the stone, some things are better off only being in a limited number of hands and minds. Now, it is really past time for us to go.”
*
This time up the mountain, my mood wasn’t the same—and not just because of the disaster last time, but also because of what Kostas had said: something had shifted inside me toward this place and toward what I was doing. Clearly, an intimate connection with this planet wasn’t something The Keepers normally allowed. But, they had allowed it with me, and with some of my crew….
I turned to Gary beside me; we were inside a round, golden elevator with Kostas, Devin and two more workers.
Gary and I were wearing the special sunglasses again, and he smiled at me a little beneath his. “You okay?”
I nodded, but a little too slowly, and his smile turned into a frown. “I want to do this,” I said then, “but my heart’s still going a mile a minute. I feel like my feet will slip as soon as I get out there.”
“It was wet last time,” Kostas said.
And Gary curled a hand tightly around my left hand. “I’ll hold onto you as we walk out.”
The wide gold doors opened, and an orange-ish sky filled the space between. Kostas and two of the workers stepped out into the orange.
I had trouble moving my legs at first, but Gary’s warm hand lifted my left hand toward outside. The tether gave us a maximum of about ten feet between us. I kind of wished that length was shorter….
Taking a deep breath, I carefully shuffled my booted feet toward the opening; then I finally lifted them a bit higher and stepped out onto a small stone platform. Up here, the platforms and steps were lighter colored, which made them easier to see, which I was thankful for. There was also a brown railing attached to the wall to our left. “Why didn’t you have this farther down?” I asked Kostas as I grabbed onto the railing.
“There are controls on the railing,” Kostas said. “It is not meant as a safety rail only.”
“Oh!” I almost whipped my hand from it, but then the solid feeling of the brown metal beneath my hand was helping to center me….
“Do not worry,” Devin said from behind me, “you are free to use the rail for leverage. You don’t know how to work the controls.”
“What else is new,” I said.
Just like last time, I avoided looking over the edge as we ascended the stairs now. Strangely, breathing the air up here seemed to be easier than breathing the air down below, which was usually the opposite case for an atmosphere. The Keepers must have increased the density of the air around the mountain up here, but I didn’t ask Kostas to confirm that. This time going up, I wanted to pay attention more and talk less—not just for my and Gary’s safety, but also because I’d never get to do this again.
The sun shined down on us as we slowly but steadily climbed the stairs. I made some adjustments to my suit using my sleeves, and my efforts worked; my boots seemed more responsive to my feet this time. I could see now that our first time up, we really had rushed into doing this. But I could also see that this wasn’t something you wanted to put off for too long.
My having gotten lost in the Lamren dimension really had made everything clearer. Who knew if there might be unintended consequences because of the existence of the firestones? They were something that probably should have never existed, but, the fact was, they had been made. And the remaining ones needed to be unmade.
We kept rising for hours; we took two breaks so the workers and Kostas could manipulate the railing, and so we all could sit on the stairs and drink and eat. We also took two longer breaks when we went inside again, where we met with Keepers who had to manipulate the stone further.
When we finally walked outside again for the last time, I looked down at the stone in my hand: the closer we had gotten to the mountain’s top, the more I noticed changes in the stone. By this point in the journey, the reddish fire had died quite a bit, and though the stone was still beautiful, it looked more like a normal gemstone.
I didn’t know how to feel about the firestone’s new inertness; I was, after all, watching the death of something extremely powerful.
I sighed as the six of us began the final part of the trek upward. We were so high now and visually the atmosphere had grown so dense that I couldn’t see the surface of the planet when I dared to look to the right or the left of me: a few hours ago, the stairs had changed; they sometimes backtracked into zigzagging and crossing over other sets of stairs. The mountain was maze-like now, and I felt sure that if Gary and I hadn’t had the workers showing us the way, we would have gotten lost up here….
Kostas finally slowed down in front of me and Gary; we were holding hands at that point, and he squeezed my hand tighter. We both could feel it: we had reached where we needed to reach. The mountain still kept going above us, and now that I was up here, I could see that it apparently had no end. But, our end was here.
“It is time to enter The Hall,” Kostas said. Her eyes fell right on my face. “We are in a protective field here. Remove your glasses and follow my instructions when we get inside.”
I nodded fast as I took off my glasses and stuck them into one of my suit’s pockets. I watched the workers manipulate the railing to my left; we were facing in our original direction now. An opening suddenly appeared in the stone wall beside the railing, and I took two steps in, following Kostas.
At this point, I had no expectations, except that I would see something that looked like Upal’s space and the mountain’s other indoor levels. However, that wasn’t anywhere near what I now saw: what was before me defied explanation, because, inside this area, there were no walls; there was no floor.
Gary and I had stepped into a space that apparently had no boundaries.
“Omigod!” I said, feeling my head spinning, as if I were falling or would be falling at any moment. Gary and I clung onto each other, neither of our brains understanding the area. There were pinpoints of colorful light around us, almost as if we were among the stars. But the areas around the lights were full of strange floating shapes that appeared then disappeared and appeared again, just like the bodies of The Keepers.
“What the hell is this—we’re going to fall!” Gary said.
The workers rushed over to the two of us and manipulated our sleeves. But Gary and I had to close our eyes. Though we were used to being in space, we were usually inside a ship then. The area around us now was supposed to be inside a mountain; my knees were shaking, yet I couldn’t feel my feet slipping along anything. I was floating in a
bottomless, unknown ocean….
I felt Gary’s hand trembling on mine. Then I heard Kostas say, “I can’t entirely explain where we are to you, but you will not fall. There is nowhere to fall. There is nowhere. This is only a repository for devices. They are in separate areas so the ones that can’t be completely deactivated won’t somehow activate each other. You must move to where you need to place the stone. If you feel you won’t be able to navigate here, we might be able to use a control to pull you along using the tether. But we would have to disconnect the two of you for that.”
My eyes were still closed, but I risked opening them when I said to her, “No! I’m not leaving Gary. He goes where I go.”
A worker was on my left side, touching my sleeve; Gary was on my right, and I watched his eyes finally open again. His skin was too pale, and I could hear how hard he was breathing. “This is so dizzying,” he said then. “It’s worse than being in space. How the hell can we even move to navigate?”
“We are making adjustments to your suits,” Kostas said. “You’ll be able to glide as if you’re skating along a surface.”
“What surface?” I said. “There’s nothing here.”
“There are discrete, fixed levels of energy, similar to the way atomic orbitals are structured. You will need to stay at a specific level and not jump to any higher or lower ones. If you do, it won’t hurt you, but it will take time to come back down or go up, and then move to the proper section where the stone must be placed. I and the other workers trained for a long time to be able to work in here when necessary. You have had no training. I’m sorry for the physical discomfort.”
“I’ve connected them to Level 124960adx,” Devin said now in a sharp voice.