Mistworld

by Nina M. Osier

  Are we malefactors, then? Romanova felt a twinge of fear, because part of her mind knew that her body was sleeping. In other words, that she was about as helpless and vulnerable as an adult Human could get. Yet she sensed no menace from the unknown thinker. She sensed no feelings from it at all, actually.

  Which realization scared hell out of Linc. She could feel his body responding to that terror, and her physical self reacted by holding him and snuggling close.

  No. You're merely in the company of those who were malefactors when my makers sent them away. Your mate's supposition is correct; I'm a created consciousness. An artificial, I believe you'd call it? No, not exactly a computer. More than that. Which doesn't matter ... because I've done what I was made to do. I've waited out the required term of the exiled ones’ punishment, and brought them home at the time appointed.

  Home? Home, as in where? Romanova was fascinated now.

  How long did you wait? Linc wanted to know that, as he fought to conquer his instinctive and utter revulsion at the idea of communicating telepathically with a machine. A revulsion, Katy realized, that had something to do with the Morthan elements of his ancestry—the same elements that gave him the gift of being able to converse this way in the first place.

  One hundred thousand of your “years,” expresses the time span with reasonable accuracy. Long enough, my makers hoped, for this misbehaving species to grow up! While placing them, and their planet, far enough away from civilized folk so that they could cause no further trouble in the meantime. I've activated the beacon that will call their return to the Rulers’ attention. Now all they have to do is wait, and learn whether or not their progress justifies letting them remain here.

  So will they be sent back into exile, if these, um, “Rulers” don't think they've made that kind of progress? And might I ask what they did, to earn them their sentence in the first place? Romanova asked the latter question only half expecting to get an answer that could make sense to her. Yet the Warden took it, she thought, as a matter of course; as something that any reasonable creature might wish to know.

  The Warden's reply unfolded as if it were being projected into a holo-screen—one located inside Katy Romanova's unconscious head. While her body went on sleeping, a scene from the far past of the species she and her fellow Humans now called “Misties” took shape before her.

  * * * *

  Bodies much like her own. Minds like those of Morthans. Not just first-wave hybrids, but before the mixing of Morthan blood with that of non-telepathic species began. Only these beings, the watching and listening (but unobserved) Human woman realized, didn't share the classic Morthan compulsion to avoid violence against their fellow sapient creatures. They stood before a judgment bar, and listened to others (whom she couldn't see) pronouncing sentence.

  Were the thought-voices she heard those of the Rulers, as described to her by the Warden? She supposed they must be, and so—since she realized now that he was beside her, as always—did Linc. She knew without being told that the Rulers, too, “spoke” mind to mind. Naturally, as if the need to use a physical voice—to encode sound waves, and send them out through the air to be caught and decoded by those with whom one wished to communicate—were at best a shortcoming, and at worst a defect that some unlucky species must endure. But not the Rulers, and not the still unnamed species whose representatives the Rulers were about to judge.

  XXXXX (that species’ name was even harder to translate, from pure thought to something an air-speaker's mind might comprehend, than were those of Mistworld's SHIPs!), you came late to join the rest of Civilization. And yet, it's our determination that your actions since you attained star travel indicate beyond doubt that you also came too early. You've violated trade regions long reserved for others, and you've usurped—or at least tried to usurp, by landing on them and planting crops and building dwelling-houses where some of you took up residence—worlds reserved as park land. Worlds designated by treaty to be kept “forever wild,” pristine and sacred because no others like them remain, you had the temerity to try to convert into ordinary living space! You say in your defense that you didn't know about the treaty, or about the trade agreements. You say that you are new to Civilization, and had no idea there were protocols to follow and statutes to observe. But ignorance like yours is a crime in and of itself, and it must be punished. For all of Civilization's benefit, and your own protection, you must be isolated from the rest of us until your species has had more time to mature.

  Romanova and Casey both knew what must come next. Unlike the several “Misties” (for it simply had to be them) standing before the unseen judges and refusing to shudder in anticipation of the unknown, they clung together in the shadows and waited to hear pronounced a sentence whose outcome they already knew.

  You'll be returned to your home-world, you and all others of your kind. Together with all of your technology and other possessions. Your entire star system will be sent far away, and left there for a thousand generations. And then, you'll be brought back to where you were before.

  A thousand generations? For the corporeal beings the Misties had been, a “generation” was equivalent to a Human-reckoned century? Romanova was just trying to get her mind around that concept when the scene before her changed. She was no longer in the shadows of what had to be a courtroom. Instead, she hovered—with Linc still beside her—over a steppe on Mistworld, where orange grass-blades rippled and an ice-cliff glinted in the sunlight on the far horizon.

  This place they both knew. Of course. But now they watch as the SHIPs, all of them—those that more than six months ago reached Narsai, in company with Human-built Rebel vessels—sank toward the steppe, and then vanished beneath it. They watched as the people who'd been on board emerged, and were carried away to other parts of the planet's woefully crowded surface. Industrialized, polluted, and overpopulated, so that Katy could all too easily understand why the ancient Misties so desperately wanted to find usable land on other M-Class worlds. Her ancestors had hit that point, too, on ancient Terra. But when they made their way out into their own galaxy and started exploring its other star systems, they found plenty of worlds vacant and ripe for settlement. Worlds that didn't already belong to someone else.

  The returning Mistie colonists didn't board flitters to travel from their planet's one remaining open area, this southern continent steppe, to the homes they'd left behind in order to settle elsewhere. They ‘ported, Mistie-fashion. And after that, the whole planet's population seemed to hold its collective breath.

  They were waiting, of course, for the Rulers (or rather the Warden, the Rulers’ technological creation—newly installed at the heart of the planet's moon) to carry out their sentence. To move Mistworld's star, and all that went with it, an unimaginable distance away from the Civilization whose rules they'd unwittingly violated.

  What happened next made Katy catch her breath and then choke on a soundless scream, one she thought might never end. Because for all but a fraction of the beings living on Mistworld of long ago, screams exactly like hers never did end—except, of course, when death stilled the sounds forever.

  * * * *

  So that's how it happened? That's why, after they arrived in our galaxy, the beings we refer to now as “Misties” no longer had bodies? And that's why there are so few of them now, compared to their numbers before?

  The enormity of that was harder for their minds to grasp, the Human woman and Morthan man, than the shifting of an entire star system from one galaxy to another. All of a world's people, simultaneously experiencing an instantaneous physical death ... after which a comparative few, those who could somehow surmount unimaginable panic and adapt to the state in which they found themselves, went on living. But in a profoundly and fundamentally altered state.

  Yes, the Warden answered, without the slightest hint of guilt (or distress, or even surprise) at the carnage its actions had wrought. The Rulers didn't intend that to happen as it did, of course. But afterward there was nothing I could d
o to change it; and I observed, during the short time I remained active before entering the period of dormancy from which I've recently emerged, that the survivors seemed content in their noncorporeal form. They seemed, from the thoughts I heard passing between and among them, to have little or no memory of what used to be before. And the years that have passed since then have removed from the planet's surface nearly every sign of the way they and their ancestors lived before.

  * * * *

  So the “Misties” are natives to this world, after all! We thought, the Humans and Morthans who've joined them here, that finding those ancient SHIPs meant they must have been colonists, too, originally. Romanova came back from long ago, but stayed lost in her dream-state. Physically asleep, yet mentally in tune with the ancient, alien-built machine. So what happens now? If the Misties have made the kind of progress your Rulers think they ought to, will they finally be admitted to, um, “Civilization"? And if so, what's going to happen to us?

  The machine still felt nothing, because it couldn't. But the two mortals communicating with it could, and did, cling together as uncertainty about their future built with every passing moment. Ever since it woke, the Warden had been reaching out into the cosmos—broadcasting its restored presence in this part of space, and calling for the Rulers to respond. And, the two mortals realized with quietly escalating horror, it still wasn't getting an answer.

  What if Civilization, as you call it, isn't even out there anymore? What if a hundred thousand years was long enough for it to disappear? Or for some other civilization to attack and destroy it? Romanova shuddered, because she had no idea how this powerful entity would react if what she'd just suggested turned out to be the truth.

  Then all of you finite creatures on this planet will live out your lives in this galaxy, because I can't send you back to the one you left. I was given the means to return this star system to its original place in the universe, and enough time afterward to summon the Rulers. Having done so, whether or not the Rulers respond, I'll soon cease operating. There's no way you, or those you call “Misties,” can stop that from happening.

  It couldn't feel fear of its own demise, either. For that Romanova was grateful beyond measure. She almost—but not quite—envied it.

  She asked, Warden, can you communicate all that you've told us to the rest of the people on this planet? I know you said you couldn't get their attention, or at least that you couldn't speak to them as plainly as you've just been speaking to us. But now that Linc and I have the story in our memories, can you use him to—well—disseminate it? Because if we try to tell the others verbally, they just aren't going to believe it. And they've got to!

  * * *

  Chapter 25

  This was how Romanova thought a public address system for telepaths ought to work. She and Linc were in the cottage's common room now, with sunrise not far off. Both of them fully dressed, and fed (because Human and part-Human, part-Morthan bodies required fuel in order to do their best work—and the same thing had always been true, the Warden said, of any flesh-bound species). Ready now to reach out to all the rest of Mistworld ... starting how?

  “With the minds I've touched before, Katy. That's the easiest way, and in this case I do think easiest is the same thing as best.” Her husband grinned at her from his side of the dining table, and then reached across it for her hands. “We do seem to be making a habit of this, don't we? Joining our thoughts, and then talking to Misties, while we both feel scared half to death of what we know they're capable of doing?"

  “I guess we are. But this time, love, I'm not scared of being like this with you. And I can remember when I was!” She smiled back. And their thoughts, never far separated anyway after years of sharing a Morthan mating's intense intimacy, came together one more time.

  Yes, she'd been terrified of doing this on that long-ago day when it was their only possible means of finding out whether or not what they both suspected about the “energy flashes” in Mistworld's outer atmosphere was true. The alternative to learning that truth, they both knew, was to remove (by force, more than likely) every Human colonist from the planet's surface, because its skies would never give safe passage to visitors otherwise—and leaving the colonists already there stranded, cut off from the rest of their kind, was unthinkable.

  She'd been so very new to Linc's mental touch, then. With no more than a few hours separating her from the awful moment when she stood on the heavy cruiser Firestorm's bridge, and watched—helpless, for all her status as the battle group's commodore—as the smaller ships carrying her sons vanished, obscured by fountains of flame, in Mistworld's danger zone. He'd reached out to hold her then without touching her physically at all. And because she wasn't expecting it, didn't even know it to be possible, she not only accepted his embrace; she reached back. Clung to him, to warmth and strength and comfort, in the moment after the three dearest beings in her universe died not just before her eyes, but under her command.

  She was someone else's wife back then. With unborn Maddy inside her, and Kesra listed as her “home world of record” despite retaining her Narsatian citizenship. So much had been altered during the years since then, but the loving welcome from her partner's mind hadn't changed. And she knew now that it never would.

  That's right, Katy. That's a good thing to think about right now. About how you, we, helped Mistworld's people before—its Humans, and its Cloud-Folk, too. Linc used the older term in his thoughts, as their united selves reached out to the others. With the Warden's power (what remained of it—because that power was fading already, Katy realized) behind the effort, starting with those whose minds Lincoln Casey already knew.

  Kerle Marin. Astin Fort. And then others, all of them minds that Linc's second-wave Morthan abilities couldn't have enabled him to touch without help.

  Young Casey, who woke up on his temporary bed in Dan and Rachel's new cottage (the first home they'd had that was theirs, and not a room in someone else's residence)—wondered which baby he'd heard—and then realized something else had roused him. Dan himself, of course, and Rachel. Ewan. Bryce. Marcus. Ishi Sanibello ... Chad Thorne ... Dram Andersen. Nadja Nah Trang.

  Outward from there, leaping from settlement to settlement. Finding one mind after another (because one at a time was the only way to do this), and gaining and holding its attention. Because all must “hear” this announcement at once.

  Funny how slow this feels. I know it's not; I know only a nanosecond or two has passed. But it seems as if we've spent halfway to eternity just setting this up!

  Had her stray, very Human thought leaked out to anyone else? Or could only Linc “hear” her? Katy didn't know, and decided she might as well not care. Because if it had done that, she couldn't help it now.

  When the Warden “spoke,” it didn't continue the leisurely, interactive manner in which it communicated its identity and Mistworld's history to the first two beings it contacted. It downloaded the whole story, dumping it into the minds of those now joined by the planet-girdling link. Which included everyone, except children too small to comprehend.

  That wasn't what I, um, had in mind. Linc characteristically didn't recognize his own pun until the thought containing it had already passed from his consciousness to Katy's. I wonder why the Warden did it that way?

  “Because it took all the power the Warden had left?” She used her voice again, now. She needed the reassurance of doing that. The sense of reconnecting, with both her physical self and wider reality.

  “Sounds about right. Damn, I hope I didn't just make the biggest mistake of my life!” The Warden's presence was missing for them both, now. She would have known that from Linc's tone, even if she hadn't been aware of his thoughts. “Katy, it's been a long time since I wished I could turn into a first-wave Morthan. But right now I'd give almost anything to know what everyone else on this planet is thinking! Damn, I've got a bad feeling about this."

  “It happened too fast, didn't it? Too much for most of them to take in. Maybe for all of t
hem.” Yes, she understood his meaning. She understood it far too well. “I didn't realize he, it, would do it like that either, Linc. What do you think we ought to do now?"

  They sat staring at each other, until they both heard a familiar whining sound from outside.

  “The flitter? What in the universe is that doing down here, on the Arm?” For so this point of land was called, on which the Nah Trang/Fort cottage stood. Katy asked the question of no one in particular, because she certainly had no reason to think her husband could answer it. By then they were both on their feet, scrambling away from the table and out through the door with a lack of ceremony born from their shared certainty that haste mattered now. Although haste to do what, or go where, neither of them knew.

  * * * *

  “Mum, Linc! Get in! Quick!” The flitter had Ishi Sanibello at its controls. But no one needed to tell Katy that she was hearing from Ewan, as the young man called to her in low-voiced urgency.

  She hadn't vaulted aboard a hovering flitter in years, but she did it now as if she'd been practicing every day. Desperation was a grand motivator, more than capable of making her muscles remember the split-second accuracy that the task required. She gasped as she dropped into a seat, “What's going on?"

  “The Misties got laid out again. And their host-bodies with them this time. Damn good thing, too, because I don't think they liked what you and Linc just told ‘em!” Bryce, riding shotgun beside his older brother, answered their mother's question grimly. “We're heading for the SHIP, Mum. The one we came in. With any luck we've got enough of a head start to get aboard it, and get it off-world, before anyone beats us to it. Or gets one of the other SHIPs out of its berth."

  “Why do we want to get off-world?” She looked at the people already aboard, now that Linc was beside her. Most of them, being Mistie-inhabited, were slumped unconscious in or on their seats. “And what's going to happen when our friends here wake up?"