by David Mack
The last piece of advice that Inyx had given to Hernandez and Fletcher was that they should pass the time by taking up art. Hernandez had yet to find a creative outlet that suited her, but Fletcher had submerged herself in her new hobby: writing. Using an ultrathin polymer tablet and a feather-light stylus, she had lately spent most of her waking hours scribbling and revising a novel that she refused to let anyone else read until it was finished. Remembering the often muddled state of Fletcher’s mission reports, Hernandez had decided to keep her expectations low for Fletcher’s prose.
“What’s another word for ‘oozing’?” Fletcher asked, and Hernandez’s hope of reading one more great novel in her lifetime diminished by another degree. Before anyone could answer, Fletcher looked to Valerian, who sat in an arched window portal, staring out at a cityscape surrounded by a star-speckled dome of deep space. “Sidra, you must know a good synonym for ‘oozing.’”
Valerian said nothing. Her face was blank, and she didn’t give any sign of acknowledging Fletcher. The young Scotswoman sat with her knees against her chest, arms wrapped tightly around her legs, face half hidden from view. It had been a long time since she had said anything to anyone. She often had to be coaxed and half-pulled from her residence by Dr. Metzger for regular sessions of solar therapy, which all four women needed in order to stave off the onset of seasonal affective disorder and make at least a passing attempt at preserving some of their bodies’ natural diurnal rhythms.
Metzger, who was meditating in a lotus position an arm’s reach from the younger woman, opened one eye and glared with mild annoyance. She extended her arm and poked Valerian. “Sidra,” she said. “Veronica asked you a question.”
The mentally fragile redhead recoiled from Metzger’s touch. Trembling, she cast fearful looks at her shipmates, and then she bolted from the window and jogged across the courtyard and out an open door, disappearing around a corner into the city beyond.
Fletcher looked mortified. “Should I go after her?”
“I’ll do it,” Metzger said, standing slowly.
“Be careful,” Hernandez said. “If she seems like she might be out of control, ask the Caeliar for help.”
Metzger’s mood darkened. “I don’t need their help,” she said, and then she was out the door, in slow pursuit of the runaway communications officer who didn’t talk anymore.
Silence descended once more on the courtyard.
Hernandez sat on a bench and watched Fletcher tapping at a virtual keyboard on her tablet, committing words to the device’s memory, losing herself in a world of her own making. It was hard for Hernandez not to envy her friend. Whatever aesthetic value her writing might possess or lack, it had one undeniable virtue: it offered Fletcher a means of escape, however temporary or illusory, from the monotony of their imprisonment.
Lucky her, mused Hernandez.
At one end of the courtyard sat a mutilated block of granite and a set of diamond-edged chisels that Hernandez had found too unwieldy for comfort. She had chipped and chopped and hammered at the dark slab, at first without even an image in her mind of what she meant it to become. Choosing a shape—in this case, a spiral—hadn’t helped, even after Fletcher had offered her teasing, inexpert advice, “Just chip away everything that doesn’t look like a spiral.”
Music hadn’t come naturally to Hernandez, either. Inyx had crafted her a Caeliar instrument that seemed reminiscent of an old Earth device known as a theremin, but the only sounds she had been able to elicit from it had sounded like the crystal-shattering whines of feedback or chaotic, bloodcurdling wails.
She had told herself she would keep trying to master the instrument despite her difficulties—and then she’d produced two unnerving pulses of sound in quick succession. The first had been a high-frequency screech that sent torturous vibrations through her teeth; the second was an almost inaudible low-frequency drone that had shaken her from the inside out and left her trembling and terrified, shaken to the very roots of her soul, as if she had discovered the sound of true evil.
Other artistic talents whose total absence Hernandez had confirmed included painting, drawing, and singing.
The fact that Caeliar society had abandoned the theatrical arts more than a thousand years earlier had tempted her to focus on acting. Even if she turned out to be the worst actress in Axion, as the only actress in the city she would also, by default, be its best. As her comrades had pointed out, however, they would likely be her only audience, and they had no desire to suffer through whatever one-woman dramatic atrocity she might be tempted to inflict upon them.
So she passed her days as stagnant as the windless city.
She thought of Fletcher writing, Metzger meditating, and Valerian going mad by leaps and bounds. The future, which she constantly reminded herself was a replay of the past, promised more of the same. Routine without purpose. Night without end.
“I’m taking a walk,” she said.
Fletcher didn’t look up from her tablet as she waved. “Have a nice time. See you at dinner.”
Leaving the blonde to her unfolding fiction, Hernandez left the courtyard through the same door by which Valerian had fled. She walked away into the ashen sprawl of the silent metropolis.
A new understanding came to her as she walked. She’d failed at art not for lack of talent or effort, but because she had a greater need for something else. Not a hobby—a job. She didn’t want to just pass the time anymore; she wanted to contribute. To do something that mattered.
Ordemo Nordal would likely object. So would the Quorum. That left her only one option.
She had to persuade Inyx.
* * *
“I fail to see what meaningful contribution you might make to our efforts,” Inyx said, his ungainly stride swaying his body side to side like a sailing vessel at sea. “You lack the knowledge and technical expertise to assist us.”
“Only because I haven’t been taught,” said Hernandez, who followed him through a glowing, hexagonal tunnel.
The Caeliar scientist made a derisive-sounding bleat of air from the tubules on either side of his bulbous cranium. “Perhaps, if your species was longer-lived, we could impart the fundamentals of our Great Work, but it would be for naught.”
“Why?”
“Our tools,” he said. “They are not operated with buttons and levers and dials, as on your vessel. We direct them with infinitely more subtle measures, by means of the gestalt.”
Unfazed, she insisted, “So? Teach me to do that.”
Near the end of the corridor he paused and looked back at her. “I doubt that your mind would survive the experience.”
He led her out of the passage and into a vast chamber deep inside the city’s foundation. Like the corridor they had traversed, the room was hexagonal in shape, resembling a single cell from a honeycomb laid flat. The walls, ceiling, and floor shimmered with stars. For a moment, Hernandez wondered if the room even had a floor; for all she knew, this was a vantage point on the reaches of space beneath Axion. As she stepped forward, however, her perception of stars passing underfoot was too swift for normal parallax with very distant objects, and she concluded that it was a starmap.
Several clusters of Caeliar huddled in ostensibly arbitrary locations throughout the chamber. Inyx walked toward one trio, who stood in a tight group several dozen meters away.
“Is this where the Great Work gets done?” she asked.
“Its current phase, yes,” Inyx said. “Though a separate inquiry of equal importance is also in progress.”
His choice of terms intrigued her. “Equal importance? What ranked high enough to horn in on the Great Work?”
“I prioritized an investigation into the temporal effects of Erigol’s destruction. One of our other cities traveled to the distant past, and its descendants triggered our cataclysm. Another city might have made a similar though less drastic journey, as we did. If our analysis indicates that the past has been altered, then we might need to risk taking steps to prevent the catastr
ophe, regardless of the paradoxes it might create.”
Stepping over an asymmetrical red nebula, Hernandez said, “How would you be able to tell? If the past changed, wouldn’t we have changed with it?”
“Not necessarily,” Inyx said. “All our cities have long been temporally shielded to guard against potential changes in the timeline. Our data archive contains detailed records of this era’s chroniton signature. By comparing the universe’s current chroniton dispersal pattern to the one we have on record for this period, we can identify any variances that would suggest the timeline has been changed by the passage of our cities into the past. If significant changes are detected, the Quorum might consider initiating corrective measures.”
“Sounds important,” Hernandez said.
“Very much so.”
Looking around at the murmuring groups of Caeliar standing far apart in the massive chamber, she remarked, “Too bad the others don’t seem to share your sense of urgency.”
“By our standards, this is a frantic burst of activity.”
They were a few meters from the trio, which turned to face them in unison, like birds changing direction in flight. The three Caeliar bowed to Inyx, who reciprocated. Then all four of the aliens began making noises that were part groan, part hum. The tonal pitch of the chorus oscillated, and the intensity of the vibrato rose and fell. As quickly as it had started, it stopped, and Inyx said to the others, “Are you certain?”
“Yes,” said the shortest and bulkiest of them.
The tallest, who was nearly three meters in height, added, “I verified the results several times. We await your permission to apprise the gestalt.”
“Proceed,” said Inyx, who turned away from the trio and resumed walking.
Hernandez hurried after him. “What’d they say?”
“They have already concluded the temporal analysis,” he said. “There is no variance in the chroniton signature.”
She didn’t know whether his reluctance to elaborate was evidence of boredom with her questions or a misguided display of faith in her ability to know what the hell he was talking about. “Okay, no variance,” she said. “What does that mean?”
“It means that all is as it was, and is as it should be.” This time he seemed to sense her unspoken desire for clarification. “Because the passage of our cities and the others into the past has resulted in no detectable change of the timeline, we have deduced that these events must have occurred in the timeline that we consider standard. Consequently, the destruction of Erigol and our own exile in the past appear to be part of the natural flow of events. Therefore, no steps will be taken to alter the outcome we have witnessed. Instead, we will move forward with the Great Work from this new vantage point.”
He was still a few steps ahead of her, so she knew he couldn’t see her jaw hanging open in disbelief. “How can you do nothing? You know that a few hundred years from now your world and millions of your people will be destroyed, and you’re just gonna let it happen again? Why?”
“Because that is the shape into which time has unfolded,” Inyx said, as if he was explaining the matter to a child. “Once time has chosen its form, it is not our place to change it.”
“So, you’re saying you won’t save your people because it’s their destiny to get blown up?”
He stopped and turned back to face her. “That is a crude reduction of a complex issue, but in essence … yes.”
She shook her head. “Sorry, but I’ll take free will over fatalism any day.”
“As would we,” Inyx said. “Free will exists in the present moment. But the present is always in flux, slipping on one side into the past while pulling from another on the leading edge of the future. We only accept as predestined the events that we know will transpire between this moment and the last moment before we entered the past. When we return to that moment in our subjective future, we will once again treat time’s shape as a revelation in progress. Until then, our work continues.”
Inyx walked away, and Hernandez stayed close behind him. He stopped in the middle of a broad swath of what seemed to be empty space in the middle of the starmap. When he squatted to study an image on the floor more closely, his long, bony legs folded up on either side of his narrow torso; he reminded Hernandez of a grasshopper perched on a lawn. She watched with great curiosity as he tapped at several points of light on the floor. Ghostly symbols twisted upward from each mote, as if written in curling smoke. They snaked between his tendril-like fingers and were absorbed into his mottled gray-blue skin.
“What are you looking for?” she asked.
He rested his long arms across his knees and gazed at the map of the sky inscribed under his feet. “A new world to call home,” he said. “A system where we can finish the Great Work.”
“Well, there must be plenty to choose from,” she said. “Hell, if the Drake Equation is right, there are millions of Minshara-class planets you can colonize.”
The Caeliar scientist straightened and shuffled his huge, three-toed feet. “It is not so simple,” he said. “We have many criteria for a world on which to settle. Its star must be the right age, neither too young nor too old. Its planets cannot be too recently formed to sustain life, nor must they be past the ability to do so; they cannot be geothermally inert, nor overly volatile. A viable star system will need to be rich in many rare elements and compounds. Most important of all, no part of the star system can be populated by sentient life, indigenous or otherwise, in any form—including cosmozoans.”
“I’m sorry, hang on,” Hernandez said. “Cosmo-what?”
After making a few clicking sounds, Inyx said, “My apologies, I’d forgotten your species hasn’t encountered their kind yet. The galaxy is home to a great variety of spaceborne life-forms, many of which are sentient. They tend to thrive near stellar clusters, so we are focusing our search on star systems that are relatively remote in nature, in order to avoid them.”
Hernandez quipped, “Glad to see you’re not being picky.”
“If we are selective, it is not without reason,” Inyx said. “At this point, our discretion is as much for our privacy as for the safety of the galaxy at large. We must remain unknown.”
“Good thing you’re not doing anything conspicuous, then,” she said. “You know, like moving an entire city through space.”
Inyx regarded her with his pupil-free eyes. “Do you think that because I am physically incapable of what you call laughter, I don’t understand humor? Or sarcasm?”
“I hadn’t given it that much thought,” Hernandez said. “Mostly, I just like ribbing you.”
“I see,” he said. “If I agree to teach you the methods of our search for a new homeworld, and include you in the process, I would appreciate fewer gibes at my expense.”
She nodded. “Sounds fair. When do we start?”
Gesturing at the vast, star-flecked chamber that surrounded them, he said, “We already have.”
* * *
Dinner was finished, and Fletcher, Hernandez, and Metzger sat together at a round table in their courtyard. As usual, Valerian had refused invitations to come out and eat, preferring instead to sequester herself and mumble the story of her-life-that-was at the walls inside her bedroom.
“Your turn,” the captain said to Fletcher, who picked at the remains of yet another bland and texturally unsettling Caeliar interpretation of vegetable lasagna.
Setting down her fork, Fletcher thought for a moment and said, “Meat, to be honest. Tonight, it’s meat.”
The game was called What do you miss most tonight?
Fletcher forced another bite of the slightly soupy casserole into her mouth, swallowed, and looked at Metzger. “You’re up, Jo,” she said.
The doctor, who had already cleared her plate, was sitting with her arms folded behind her head. She leaned back in her chair and stared at the stars that were always overhead. “Constellations I recognize,” she said. “Back to you, Erika.”
Fletcher had lost track of when the
y had all started calling one another by their first names. It had begun not long after they had surrendered to the proposition that the four of them would spend the rest of their lives here, in this alien city roaming deep space, lost in the gray mists of history.
“Wine,” Hernandez said, closing her eyes. “Red or white. Merlot, Chianti, Rioja, Cabernet, Zinfandel, Riesling, Malbec, Pinotage, Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc. All of them. I’d do anything for one glass of good Burgundy right now.” She tilted her head back, closed her eyes, and sighed. “Go, Ronnie.”
Certain subjects had always felt too awkward to broach, given their circumstances, but the truth was straining to be free of Fletcher’s conscience. “I’m sorry, I have to say it. I bloody miss men. The way they look, the way they sound, the way they feel. I’d trade you ten cases of wine for one strappin’ lad willin’ to give his ferret a run, know what I mean?” She felt a bit guilty when Metzger and Hernandez glared at her, but the damage was done. “I know, I know. We’re not supposed to bring it up. I said I was sorry.”
“And then you brought it up anyway,” Metzger said.
Hernandez held up a hand and cut in, “It’s fine. We had to talk about it eventually. We can’t ignore it forever.”
“I can,” Metzger said, rising from the table. “If you two want to negotiate some kind of deviant relationship, that’s your business, but count me out.” The gray-haired physician walked away to go check on Valerian, at whose side Metzger had spent most of her waking hours since the younger woman’s breakdown.
Fletcher rolled her eyes. “Back to the river in Egypt.”
“What’s wrong with you?” Hernandez said. “Couldn’t you just lie and say you missed Vegemite? Or margaritas? Or jazz?”