Ten Directions

by Samuel Winburn

  She glanced at the man she had just alternately beaten and rescued. He smiled back at her like nothing had happened. Like getting pummelled and blasted was just one of those things. It was weird, but what was weirder was that August Bridges look alike? Some actor brought in for the re-enactment? Maybe, but that actor was very good because she knew that face. How could she forget it? And why would ComSec be chasing after an actor?

  Could it all just be some kind of set-up, even the whole drama on Tsuchinshan and her fight to the finish that hadn’t stopped anything? Was it all some elaborate scene in some Campaign between the Coms and the Revs that she had gotten herself mixed up in? Her head spun. Francesca generally reserved contempt for conspiracy theories as being the ramblings of old men trying to stay relevant. Well, she decided, conspiracy or no, the clone had to pay and as someone still on the ComSec payroll, nailing a traitor was something still in her job description.

  The man next to her eased into another position. He was definitely in pain. She opened a link to his mind through their neuroviews.

  “You okay mister?”

  “Not so good not so bad. Are you okay?”

  No, Francesca wanted to say, not okay for a million reasons, but what was it to this guy anyway?

  “Why not?” she shrugged, “except for your friend trying to kill us.”

  “Yes,” he answered calmly, “what to do?” As if someone trying to kill him was one of those things that just happened in life that you had to get over, like storm damage to his house or something.

  This confused Francesca way more that it should have. Someone trying to dust her was not someone who was going to get off lightly. She cut the conversation to focus better on vengeance.

  The flaring nozzles of the two landing disks in front of her wove back and forth before the rising slopes of an upcoming lunar mountain range. They dipped down over the lip of a large crater, and Francesca followed, cursing as she swerved to miss a larger moving conveyor feeding into some kind of rock crusher. Huge robotic tractors underneath them raked the surface of the crater, feeding the recovered ore into even larger automated haul trucks travelling in tandem with the tractors. She soared over their silent continuous labors and turned parallel to the helium 3 processing plant kiln, a long glowing tube. More robots, with spinning weather vane hooks locked arms around the recently filled red gas tanks filled by the processing plant and trundled off down a train track towards a long ramp dug down into the lunar surface.

  Woom! A large cone faced container shot up and off of the ramp into the sky, until it was lost in the light of the Earth rising up over the horizon. Woom! Another one lifted off and slid on by. Bang. The anvil of insight collided with her numbskull brain. Of course, the ramp was a mass driver, a great magnetic catapult that slung the processed helium-3, and anything else that could fit in a cargo container, back off to Earth. It would be one hell of a gee hit to start with, but then you would just sail down. No need to get a ticket for the Lunar Transport.

  Francesca tipped over the top edge of the ramp in time to see the two parked landing disks. Standing outside one of the open containers, two were confronting the one. No doubt they wanted to know where their friend was. The distraction gave her a cover to sneak her disk over the edge and touchdown on the track blocking the container’s exit. The fugitives had just boarded the container when she broadcasted over a closed ComSec channel.

  “We have them now C30, all three of them. They are in a container on a mass driver by the processing area. We have landed on the tracks in front of them.”

  An angry voiced shouted back. “Are you mad! They don’t have a link for you to talk to them. They will crash into you and you will all die.”

  There was some logic there so Francesca bluffed back. “Roger. We have cleared off of the skip and have set the engines to leak fuel, so the thing will explode.”

  “Idiots. Orders are to capture not kill. Gudanko will crack your heads.”

  Francesca smiled at upsetting the wise guys rhyme. She must have really gotten under his skin.

  “We thought...”

  “Wait a second. How did you? There hasn’t been time. Who’s on the line?” It was clear he had seen through her ruse.

  Why lie. “Francesca Salvador, ComSec level 9 reporting.”

  There was a pause. “Well Francesca, your penchant for popping up in inopportune places improves your probability of rapid expiry. Thus, to bypass any superfluous corporeal compromise of your position, I propose you should forthwith fly!”

  The lights up the ramp began to pulse. Francesca couldn’t believe it. At the last moment before there wouldn’t be another, Francesca tugged hard on the controls and banked their disc into a ramp walls as the container shot forward. The landing disc bounced back upside down and skidded to a halt next to the next freight container being mounted on the tracks.

  She was trapped, pinned down by the caved-in dome and pinched by her seat up around the steering column. The hiss of oxygen leaving her suit from a rip told her that she had only minutes to live. Then she felt hands working her body loose from the wreckage, steadily and without panic, until she was loose and being pulled from the wreckage by her passenger. Her mysterious companion helped her into another container, which had apparently also been kitted out for people. But why?

  Her breath returned to her as the cabin pressurized. Another minute might have been too late. The black spots dissolving from her eyes, she accessed the container’s computer through her neurovisor and found a way to have the container loaded for launch on the last heading. Then Francesca removed her helmet. Her companion also removed his. He was young, about her age, with a shaved head. It was probably the exhilaration of barely surviving, but the fact was he looked beautiful. He stood there looking straight into her black soul without flinching.

  She turned away and shook her ratty hair. Just what she needed today of all days. The container jolted as it moved onto the launch ramp, and the man nearly fell into her. Francesca caught herself on his arm and steadied them both.

  “We should get into the webbing?” he suggested.

  “Yes. Right now.”

  Just as they strapped themselves the sirens began to shriek. The man reached over to pat her arm and Francesca pulled away.

  The g-forces came crushing down on them as the container launched. They almost knocked her out. They stopped as suddenly as they had started, and the absence of gravity filled her frame. Her eyes in contrast felt like they were weighed down by lead. She fought the desire to sleep. What if this guy was a murderer or something, like the clone?

  “What is your name?” he asked.

  “Francesca,” she mouthed.

  “Tashi Deleg Francesca, I am Kalsang.”

  He smiled kindly at her. Francesca decided for no good reason that she could trust him, and she let herself fall asleep.

  She was safe.

  THE CRY OF WILD GEESE

  Lakes and pools adorned with lotuses and the beautiful cry of wild geese, Everything unowned within the limitless spheres of space.

  Taking these with my mind, I offer them

  ~Shantideva, 8th Century India

  Chapter 35 - Francesca

  The days travelling from the Moon tiptoed by softly. It was strange and wonderful to take a break from her usual place on the pointy end of the arrow of time. It was a luxury to breathe without purpose, to feel removed from grit, grief, and guilt. And Kalsang, the name of her strange new companion, had somehow set this up.

  “Was that really August Bridges with you guys?”

  It was the first thing she’d asked him, even though part of her didn’t want to know. If he was it was wonderful, a reprieve for her soul from a dark fate that she’d sealed by abandoning him. If he was it was terrible, because one person in the universe knew exactly what a self-serving callous bitch she’d been. That recognition and accusing finger he’d levelled at her in the airlock. Who else could it be?

  “Isn’t it?” Kalsang answered noddi
ng his head affirmatively before answering her second question with his name.

  That was as much as she could get out of him. He’d silenced her with a finger and a confidence that unsettled her. And then he’d insisted on silence while she unwound through all the possibilities. That they’d patched up the wormhole and somehow brought him back. It wasn’t impossible. But so many things didn’t line up, such as the terrorist attack and why Gudanko would want him captured. It could have gone on and on but Kalsang stopped her.

  “We need time to heal now Francesca.” He had tears in his eyes as he spoke, and in them she saw a pool of pain. And that was that. She felt compelled to do as he said and tried to give herself space to do something she had never let herself do before. Heal.

  For his part, Kalsang spent most of his time silently in meditation. He seemed so strong in his quiet spirituality. This became enormously attractive to her. So deep that Raoul’s deceitful similitude of peace would have only covered the surface molecules of where this man must go. So deep that Francesca forgave Raoul and quickly had difficulty remembering even his name.

  It seemed strange that in this cramped space with Kalsang she would find the breathing space that had eluded her all her life. It felt so wonderful she wanted to dissolve into it. There was something about this man that was so right, in the way everything about men before had been so wrong. She felt herself falling for him.

  But even in this peaceful place of refuge she was still pulled all over by her thoughts.

  Wasn’t this the story of her life? Flying on a magic carpet made of toothpicks bound together by fishing line and fantasy - just another balseros trusting unpredictable currents to carry her makeshift raft to a place where she might stick her toe into the golden sand of the promised land. The search for True Love was the only quest she would never grew weary of because it was blended into her genetic fibres.

  The Earth, projected from the forward cams, hung in her neuroview like a pinata promise. If one were handy, she might catch hold of a passing comet and break the big blue bubble open to spill out any sweet things inside. The inside of the Earth seemed a proper place for True Love to hide, at the heart of things. Searching on the outside had been futile from the beginning. Perhaps she might see a future with her beloved divined in there. Francesca looked longingly down through the thin layers of cloud and soil separating her from her goal. The distance seemed only as short as the distance between two hands.

  The Earth, a tiny island of blue in an ocean of black. The whole thing probably contained only a few spoonfuls worth of True Love. Still it was there, she knew, because maybe she, Francesca Xavier Salvador, had actually found a piece of it.

  Chapter 36 - Kalsang

  “Is this your Ocean now, Melded One? It is so beautiful.”

  Taking d'Song’s lead, Kalsang looked out over the heads of the other aliens crowding around the portal. He could make out oceans and continents, which slowly appeared like a reunion of long forgotten friends. There was North America and Africa and Antarctica and Australia and all the brilliantly translucent blue oceans in between and China advancing over the horizon out of darkness. They passed over great drowned cities and endless patchwork fields. Kalsang held his breath as the mountains began to grow. Spilling out from them the thin glimmering line of the Tsangpo, the Brahmaputra. Lhasa was down there in its folds and the great resurgent monastery of Ganden and somewhere, in the east, in Golak, in small yak hair tents and stone houses were his mother and uncles and their families lived. He could almost breathe the sweet mountain air. Slowly it rolled into the distance as they advanced over the blank steppes of Kazakhstan and the fairy lights of what must be Western Russia. The call of the land was so intense that he felt like bursting from the capsule like a dandelion seed and floating down of his own accord.

  He turned his head down and looked at his new friend.

  “She likes you, you know?” teased d'Song.

  “I am a monk,” Kalsang responded, making it clear that that was as far as that thought would go. He watched it almost dissolve and directed his mind to the broader predicament. His neurovisor lay somewhere behind them on the Moon. He was unable to go back to it. By some unlikely coincidence, he had survived and was returning to warn humanity of their great peril. Would people believe him without the evidence? His thoughts clung to his neurovisor, wondering what would become of it. To be as effective as his situation demanded he had to let go of that, to concentrate on the present moment. To be aware.

  Francesca was resting which was good. He sensed in her an enormous potential for joyful freedom, but a deep burden of pain could drown her instead. She would go either way. He prayed for her and, from her, out to everyone else living in the world below.

  What a pity they could not see their home the way he did. They all couldn’t share his immense sense of relief from returning to their own mother after such long periods of absence. He could see vividly how lovely, how irreplaceable, their magnificent world really was. It was their true refuge amidst the unimaginable and unendurable sterility of the stars. The knowledge of its potential destruction made its awesome fragility even more manifest. Kalsang shivered.

  A song rose from his heart:

  Infinity of fortunate moments delicately balanced in this perfect sapphire blossom

  Winds carry the fragrance of memory up to me

  Scent of fire, air, earth, and water

  Yesterday I looked up through the clear skies of awakening

  Today I look down towards the solid ground of realisation

  Holy naked jewel realm

  I prostrate before the throne of 1000 Buddhas

  My friends don't you recognise

  the single face of all our mothers?

  Chapter 37 - Aurora

  Wheatbelt Wallaby came blazing down into the open sky as the world swelled up before her. The great Waugal, the rainbow serpent, was alive and well down there, writhing and playing, sending waves dancing throughout the great sea on the top of the globe. The whole Dreaming of Yulbrada, the Earth, rang out with a billion songs calling her home. She wanted to add her own lines, to sing herself back into joyous existence, but her mouth opened, and nothing came out.

  Every cell in Aurora’s body opened to the healing before her, but her mind remained closed to it. It was stunning to be so close to home after so long an absence. She looked over at August who was looking back at her. In the rush of life returning to them he turned to embrace her with an incredulous laugh.

  She wanted to. Her body wanted to. Her heart maybe even. But how? The loss of Kalsang to their pursuers was the only thing in her mind, the loss of Kalsang and the impossible mission that it was now solely her responsibility. Because they had melded, she knew Kalsang couldn’t have died as the clone had tearfully informed them. That was an odd way to think, but it made sense somehow. That fact didn’t change anything.

  The whole situation was impossible from the beginning. The evidence was still back at Luna City in Kalsang’s neurovisor. The only chance of getting it back seemed to be to stick with August and his creepy lackey. Of course, without Kalsang could they even get it open?

  Perhaps she could somehow win August over to her mission for when he regained his place in the order of things, as was inevitable. Perhaps the good in August, the vulnerable lonely person who had been laid bare before her in their long journey home might somehow be reachable and be open to her influence. Perhaps. The truth was she was starved for choice.

  She questioned her spurning of the honest reflex of August’s hug. There was something obviously still left in them for her, as inexplicable as that was. Anyway, he needed her.

  Thinking this way left an opening for Aurora to roll with the momentum of the moment in a completely unexpected direction. As August turned away she reached for him, pulling him back and kissing him with a passion that surprised her. As he reciprocated she fell back before the fierceness of his lips. When he was finished, she let go and looked out through the remainder of the
flames as their re-entry completed.

  Chapter 38 - August

  He had been so tired – so tired that there had seemed to be no point in continuing. His constant efforts to survive had depleted him and, as they left the Moon, he had been ready to give up. Surrender. Let it all get away from him and try to find some small place to repair. Now life flowed back into August’s veins as the parachutes deployed and he fell away from Aurora’s embrace back into his webbing.

  The force of gravity returned, straightening his body into alignment and returning his sense of direction. Everything was clear to him now. He had survived the great trial and returned from utter defeat and certain death. He would once again stand tall on solid ground and return to battle as a wizened warrior should.

  He gazed forward as the clouds welcomed them and the landscape unveiled below them. Only possibility spread before him in all its varied richness.

  Most importantly he felt Aurora by his side. It was her kiss that had awakened him from his slumber and he intended not to disappoint her. Anya’s curse had finally failed and now he had found a way to replace her in his mind. Aurora was different. There was a clarity in her and he felt no need on her part to mold him into being different that he was. Her honesty would support him, allowing him to not make the same mistakes by isolating himself again. He had a new chance to prove himself, to become truly great.

  Gudanko had done him a favor. He would have created many enemies in the way he would be pushing the new technology, and these enemies would be potential allies. There was a chance of re-aligning himself with old friends and making amends. He promised himself that he would cultivate these relationships this time and not simply use them as stepping-stones. He would make everything right by promoting the responsible use of this new power.