by Robert Reed
“What’s the Few planning?” asked Porsche. When no one answered, she reminded them, “My family is being held hostage.”
Uncle Ka-ceen gave her a warning look, and with a gray worldliness, he said, “The issues are complicated.”
The woman bent low, pretending to examine an obscure detail.
Then something very simple occurred to Porsche. “Wait. Trinidad told me that he had absconded with everything stockpiled by the Few!”
“Obviously not,” was her uncle’s reply.
“A second stockpile,” Porsche answered, for herself. “As a precaution, I suppose. Is that it?”
“We live by our precautions,” he purred.
Again, she looked at the feast room. “We’re here for a reason.”
“Obviously.”
Cornell was waking, eyes forcing themselves open.
Gripping his closer hand with both of hers, Porsche made certain that he could see her face. “How do you feel, love?”
“You are…all right?” Cornell managed.
“I’m fine.”
“You fell…unconscious…and we started to leave you!”
“Be quiet,” the large woman rumbled.
“So I took a swing at the shit…”
A cloying stew of emotions struck Porsche. She was thrilled to have this romantic man defending her, and she was so very sorry for involving him, and there was a slippery anger, part of her wanting to ask, “What the hell good was that supposed to do? Both of us would have been in prison, and doomed!”
Instead, she shook her head, throwing the useless thoughts out of it.
“We kept our secret stockpile here,” Porsche said, giving Uncle Ka-ceen a hard stare. “Before our family left?”
“No,” he replied. “Others did it. After the City had searched this compound thoroughly.”
The woman glanced up at him, for an instant.
“Once searched,” he continued, “it was the perfect place to leave stores.”
“A small stockpile,” the woman informed her. “A fraction of what your cousin can wield, I’m afraid.”
With a firm, reborn voice, Cornell asked, “Why can’t I feel my legs?”
“Give me a moment,” the woman snapped.
Porsche climbed off the table. Her own legs felt numb but strong enough. She walked stiffly to the doorway that led down to the subbasements. A security robot stood guard in the hallway. Larger and more heavily armed than the robots of her youth, it pivoted its head with a slick slow hum, buglike eyes regarding her for an instant before its mangled software decided that she did not exist, or that she was harmless.
The head turned forward again, watching for true enemies.
“Porsche?” she heard.
Cornell was trying to sit upright, finding himself staring at a pair of alien faces.
“This is Uncle Ka-ceen,” she told him. Then gesturing at the woman, she said, “I don’t think we’ve met.”
“We have,” the woman replied. “Once, years ago.”
Suddenly and without doubts, Porsche recognized her.
Cornell spoke first. “I could hear you,” he was telling her uncle. “You were talking about things being complicated.”
“They are,” he responded, with authority.
“What about the hostages?” Cornell asked. Then, “My father’s in the mountains.”
“We know that, yes.”
“How are they?” Cornell snarled. “Do you know what’s happening to them?”
The nameless woman spoke, looking only at Porsche. “We presume that they’re safe. We know that they’ve been moved into the mountains west of the City, but unfortunately, our little stock of eavesdroppers is busy elsewhere.”
“What about New Mexico?” Porsche asked. “Are we watching there?”
The older people traded glances, then Uncle Ka-ceen admitted, “We’ve focused quite a few resources on that intrusion, yes.”
“But we have limits,” the woman added.
“Are you going to help the hostages, or not?” Cornell demanded.
“When they come through the intrusion again,” her uncle replied, “they’ll be released immediately.”
“You know that,” Porsche said doubtfully.
“We’ve been in contact with the agency,” the woman said, her voice carefully reassuring. “They’ve made certain promises, if their mission succeeds…”
“Promises?” Cornell echoed.
“A diplomatic solution,” the woman informed them.
Trinidad was right about one thing: Given proper motivation, the Few would gladly cut a deal.
Trading their own glances, Porsche and Cornell said nothing for a long moment. Then Cornell asked:
“What happens to us?”
“You’ll be moved back along the route we took, eventually reaching the earth again.” Uncle Ka-ceen wanted Porsche to see his smile, his earnest good intentions. “Your families will be waiting for you, hopefully.”
Your families. The words cut into her guts. Weren’t they his nephews, his own brother?
She shook her head, then gestured at the last unconscious figure. “What about Jey-im?”
“I’ll wipe his memories as much as I can,” the woman promised. “We’ll leave him as he is, safe and near his family’s compound.”
And the security forces will question him, Porsche realized. And they’ll eventually torture him, then execute him without a shred of dignity.
But the woman knew that already.
Porsche turned to her uncle, and with a quiet, rock-certain voice, she announced, “There’s someone else that needs to be rescued. Timothy Kleck.”
Both of them were taken by surprise. Uncle Ka-ceen almost shuddered, saying, “We assumed he was in the mountains.”
Cornell explained what had happened.
Then Porsche exclaimed, “I won’t leave him behind!”
There was a long, jagged silence.
“Uncle,” she implored, “we have to rescue him.”
Finally, the woman pushed back the strangers’ chair and stood, stepping closer to Porsche as she asked, “Why would you assume that he is in charge of this operation?”
A sudden bright gloom grabbed hold of Porsche. She remembered when she met this woman in the New Mexican mountains, and how much she had disliked her, that childhood perception reborn in an instant.
With scorn, the nameless woman reminded everyone, “One of us has a son who has turned against us. Why should he hold command here?” She laughed loudly, the whistles rattling off the olivine ceiling. “Address me, Miss Neal. Mr. Novak. Every critical decision is mine.”
Porsche was angry, and there was nowhere to let the anger escape. She held it deep inside, letting it burn, and with a careful and smooth and overly sweetened voice, she asked the nameless woman:
“Can we at least try to rescue our friend? Please?”
She appreciated the tone, but there was a wariness in the wide new eyes. “There is a responsibility here,” she admitted. “We’ll try to determine exactly what’s happened to your friend, then I will decide…”
Careful, Porsche warned herself. Careful.
“And if there is a way,” the woman concluded, “I think we should make the effort.”
With a flat, clean voice, Porsche said, “Thank you.”
Cornell echoed her thanks.
“You’re very welcome,” the woman told them, smug with her power.
Uncle Ka-ceen said nothing, standing apart, motionless, staring at his own long, broad jarrtee feet as if nothing else in the universe mattered.
It was like being a child again, and it wasn’t just the surroundings. Porsche found herself suddenly waiting while older souls did work with which she couldn’t help, and like a fidgety youngster, she needed a distraction. That was her excuse, at least, asking permission to give Cornell a quick tour of her childhood home.
“Avoid the subbasements,” was the woman’s only restriction.
Porsche and Co
rnell strolled along the dimly lit hallways, drawing the occasional glance from a sentry, followed by determined indifference. She was an anomalous signal; she was a ghost. Taking her ghost lover’s hand, she would point in a jarrtee fashion, using their shared hands to guide his eyes, and with whispers and emotion, she would tell little stories about the family that had once lived here.
The Neals’ wing wasn’t being used by the present owners.
Without furniture or mural rugs, the rooms resembled caves carved out of a granite mountain by some rigorous, exacting force of nature. Her own cubicle smelled musty and forlorned. Two adult bodies felt crowded. Twice, she reminded Cornell that she never lived here. Cubicles were intended to be private space and nothing more. The slitlike window was triple-sealed, but through the armor they could hear the muted roar of new rains and a well-rested wind. With a touch, Porsche opened the tiny closet where she had once lovingly stored her toys. The seams of its door were virtually invisible; a tattered piece of mirrored silk hung on its back side. The shelves within were exactly as she remembered; but someone had taken away her puzzles and hero dolls, and for a long moment, she was angry.
“You hid your toys,” Cornell observed, his voice soft and airy, like a ghost’s. “Was that normal?”
“For a jarrtee child,” she replied. “Absolutely.”
He kneeled and peered into the closet, then saw something in the mirror, and froze. A looming figure had appeared suddenly in the hallway. Without a sound, it stuck its head into the room, rip-guns in three hands and the fourth hand calmly grasping the cubicle’s door, pulling it closed with a solid dirk.
Porsche heard the click twice—first in memory, then inside her expectant ears—and she remembered happy nights spent here, playing games with her favorite cousin, in the happy darkness.
Misunderstanding her silence, Cornell assured her, “It was just another sentry.”
Then she was talking, without warning, and she listened to herself with a curious intensity. “I didn’t tell you about this,” she admitted. “Before. At the farm.” She added, “I didn’t think it was important, or necessary,” and then she paused, her unconscious mind framing the next words.
“What is it?” whispered Cornell.
A bolt of lightning struck nearby, followed by an explosive crash. A thin stream of light seeped through a flaw in the window’s armor, illuminating a narrow and very handsome jarrtee face. Porsche reached for the face as the darkness returned, finding the cheeks and eyes by memory.
“I shared a lover with Trinidad.”
The face beneath her hand surprised her, barely flinching at the news.
“I mentioned the world to you. It’s an administrative center for the Few. Abyss. That’s a weak translation of its real name. But it’s accurate enough. The world is an icebound ocean. Intelligence evolved without the help of free oxygen, and its sentient species has never been abundant. There are a few hundred true adults at the most, each huddled next to a different deep-ocean vent. Which is significant.” She paused for a moment. “When the Few first arrived, it was impossible for us to hide among the teeming masses. There were no teeming masses. And better still, the Abyssians welcomed us. Within a short while, their entire population had converted. Within a few centuries, the Abyssian adults—vast and incomprehensibly intelligent organisms—were helping keep careful track of their intrusions and the multitude of local worlds, species, and customs.
“I was a subadult when I visited. Relatively small. Mobile. And compared to the adults, stupid. Which might be why I didn’t understand what my lover told me.”
Cornell waited for a half-moment, then took the bait. “What did he tell you?”
“Everything,” she promised. Then with a whisper almost too soft to be heard over the muted sounds of rain, she told him, “We have only a few minutes. Listen…listen!”
Her lover was a full-grown Abyssian: A vast creature made of cold immobile flesh, intricate tentacles that fashioned machines of every sort, and through every part of his body, delicate networks of rigid, electrically conductive proteins. The proteins created a mind with more neural connections than a million human minds. “He,” Porsche called the adult, but in reality, her lover contained both sexes, in abundance.
As a subadult, Porsche was simply female, and she was extremely small, too. “No bigger than a minke whale.” When she came to Abyss, the adult called to her through the cold, acoustically transparent waters, asking for her name and origin. “For my records,” he explained, sounding like every officious bureaucrat on every other world. But hearing that she was from the earth, he responded, “You possibly know a friend of mine…a certain young human male.” Trinidad, of course. And learning the truth, he staged a quick, relentless courtship that was followed by a brief and staggeringly strange affair.
“I was Trinidad reborn,” she admitted. “The adult kept assuring me that I looked and sounded like my departed cousin, and that I embodied some of his appealing personality. Though I lacked his charm, I was told. Then I was encouraged—ordered—to tell stories about my family, the worlds that I’d seen, and the people whom I’d met along the way.
“Adult Abyssians live through the experiences of others.
“They’re rooted to one piece of ocean crust. They can’t swim in their own seas, and none have ever tried crossing through an intrusion.
“Because there’s no point in trying.”
Porsche paused for a half-moment, then said, “Their souls are huge, and hugely complex. What are the chances that a neighboring world has evolved some sort of analogous mind?”
“Tiny,” Cornell ventured.
“Tiny squared, and there’s nowhere for them to go,” she assured. “But on the other hand, they’re ancient creatures with prodigious memories, plus a kind of godly wisdom, which means that eventually, sure as sure can be, they become boring as hell.
“I grew tired of being Trinidad’s replacement, so I broke it off with the Abyssian.” She shook her head in the darkness, remembering the darkness of that distant sea. “And to the creature’s credit, he was gracious about it. He even said that he wasn’t surprised, which may or may not have been the truth. You know how lovers can be, protecting their pride.” She gave a half-laugh, then said, “He made a final request. ‘Let me show you something wonderful,’ he promised. ‘Something that I’m not supposed to show just anyone.’
“That,” Porsche announced, “is when I was shown the map of the Few’s universe.
“The map was hidden inside the Abyssian, in a secret chamber surrounded by the mind itself. It was carved from light and odors and tactile sensations, and it was far too complicated for me to understand. Which my lover knew. He spoke to me as if I was an infant, telling me that I could, if I wanted, commit the map to memory under forced hypnosis, but I would never, ever comprehend its intricate geometry.
“The Few were spread across a vast area, he assured me.
“And himself too, I think.
“‘Nothing is larger,’ he told me. ‘Except the rest of the universe, of course.’
“There was a long silence, and I broke the spell. I asked, ‘Did you show this map to Trinidad?’
“‘I very rarely show this to my lovers,’ the Abyssian admitted. ‘But he was very charming and very insistent…yes, I brought him here. Yes.’
“What was I to think?” Porsche asked.
Then she told Cornell how she was shown the complex twist of fuzz that contained the earth and Jarrtee and a few hundred thousand neighboring worlds, and beyond that fuzz was something that even a stupid soul could understand. Blackness. Emptiness. The Great Unknown.
“I think what happened,” she told Cornell, and herself, “was that the Abyssian showed the precious map to Trinidad. My cousin used his charms, or maybe his lover’s arrogance, which sounds exactly like Trinidad. Which is why I didn’t think twice about it. He had seen the opportunity to go where he wasn’t permitted, and he took it, and afterwards, he left his lover and Abyss,
returning home again. Which was perfectly normal. And as ex-lovers will, the Abyssian must have thought of him. The sum total of their relationship was stored in that tremendous immobile mind, and he replayed each moment over and over again…”
She paused for an instant, for a breath, then continued.
“I was being warned. Seeing the map was part of it. Words supplied the rest of my warning. But the Abyssian couldn’t just say, ‘This is what happened. This is what it means.’ Because the Abyssian was embarrassed, undoubtedly. And angry in secret ways. And because he really couldn’t claim, ‘This is what it means.’ My ex-lover was simply offering a possibility to me, not hard fact, and he/she dressed that possibility in camouflage that helped protect a colossal pride…
“I glanced at the enormous map one last time, and the Abyssian touched the black unknown with one of his tentacles.
“And in passing—at least at the time I thought it was in passing—he asked a very strange—and when you think about it—a very obvious question.
“‘What if there is someone else?’ he whispered. ‘Someone exactly like the Few, but different?
“‘Expanding from world to world like us, but independent of us?
“‘And what if this is where the Few and the Others meet? At this little twist of worlds. Your earth. Jarrtee. Here. What would it mean, Porsche?’ he asked me. Then with the most benign tone, the Abyssian suggested, ‘Give it some thought. It might become important, someday…’”
There was a pause.
It lasted for an instant, or an hour. Then the silence was broken when Cornell took the skeptic’s pose, remarking, “You know, when people are shown random patterns of dots, their eyes and minds make up coherent pictures.” He took a deep breath, then added, “Illusions. That’s what they are.”
Maybe the old Abyssian had been suffering from paranoid delusions.
Maybe.
Or more likely, Porsche herself was reading too much into a string of words and circumstances that weren’t intended to mean anything at all.
Yet she was ready to counterattack, if only to convince herself that she wasn’t imagining nonsense. If anyone in the Few could detect these mysterious Others, she would argue, why not an Abyssian who knows everything and has the quiet and the patience and the sheer time to contemplate what he knows? And if there were such things as the Others, then wouldn’t they like to acquire an intricate, highly accurate map of the Few’s empire? Forced hypnosis would be the avenue, and the agent would be…well, wouldn’t it make perfect sense to employ a minor renegade like her cousin?