The Space Between

by Scott J Robinson

  Marking the direction in his mind, Tuki slipped the skyglass back into the pouch and started down the trail that led across the face of the cliff to the valley below.

  With moonlight painting the world monochrome, he could concentrate on walking once he reached level ground. He skirted along the side of a gully, dodging between trees. He didn't stop to stare at each wonder the new world had to offer. Still, he looked left and right, and back over his shoulder as he went, watching here as a bird settled down to roost, there as a small furry creature twitched its whiskers at the night air.

  It wasn't long before Tuki found what could only be a road. It was a trail wider than any he had ever seen, and rutted with the passing of many feet. He stopped, looking one way and then the next along this wonder, giving no thought to which direction he might choose, but simply following it with his eyes as it curved through the trees and grass.

  Eventually he chose, following the road in the general direction of the meteor, where it hung over the horizon. He jogged all night and into the day, without growing tired of his surroundings. Each new type of tree was a marvel to him, each lizard, bird, and animal a wonder of creation. He stopped for more than an hour in the morning to watch a family of small animals scampering from tree to tree. When the sun was on high, he paused to listen to a chorus of blue-breasted birds.

  It was not until fifteen days after he had found the skyglass, with the sun starting its slow descent, that he saw another person. The little boy, holding a curved, knobbly stick, stopped his game and stared. His skin was very pale compared to Tuki's, his hair white and straight.

  "Hello," Tuki said.

  The boy stared for a moment longer before turning to flee. His screams could be heard long after he had rounded the next bend in the road and was gone from sight.

  Tuki looked at the place where he had last seen the boy, then shrugged and followed.

  He went slowly along the road, around two bends, and found himself at the edge of a small, rough village. The child was standing in the street waiting for him, surrounded by what must have been every man from the region, or so it seemed to Tuki. The men were holding farming implements or rusting knives as long as their arms.

  "Hello," Tuki said again, smiling at the men and nodding. No individual spoke in reply, but the group rumbled ominously. "My name is Tuki."

  "Get away from here. We don't want no trolls here," a man at the front of the group shouted.

  "Biggest damn troll I've ever seen," another muttered.

  "Trolls?" Tuki looked about. He was right on the edge of the village. Trees crowded in on either side, but he could see no threat there. The town itself was as still as death.

  "Go." The man who spoke waved a rake, jabbing it at the air.

  "What is a troll?" Tuki examined his surroundings again and took a step towards the protection of the buildings. The group of men took a step forward to meet him. Then another.

  Almost too late, Tuki realized that they were threatening him. He stepped back quickly, raising his hands.

  Before he could say anything the villagers surged forward. He turned and fled back the way he had come.

  A kilometer from the village the men had fallen behind and could not be seen. Their shouts were ragged and sparse. Around the next bend, Tuki turned away from the road and jogged along a twisting game trail, calming his racing heart and trying to decide what had happened.

  Why would they threaten me? I did nothing to them.

  Try though he might to find an answer, Tuki was left to wonder. Trolls were not to be trusted, perhaps, but he was not a troll.

  He licked his lips and looked fearfully around. He wiped sweat from his face with a shaking hand and walked quickly up the hill.

  It wasn't long before the path started to curve back towards the desert, and Tuki was forced to abandon it. He rested, leaning against a tall, rough barked tree, ever fearful of being found.

  When darkness descended, he was jogging slowly again, cutting across the slope in a generally northerly direction. He still knew nothing more than he had earlier. The humans had threatened him for no reason.

  "Maybe they were sick!" Tuki had heard of a sickness that made people behave irrationally. Keala said that men often suffered from such an affliction, but he never thought to see such a thing.

  The forest didn't seem as welcoming and wonderful as it had been earlier. Dark shapes loomed, shadows offered hiding places for any number of unknown creatures. And trolls as well, for all Tuki knew. He found himself searching the darkness for wild animals and humans, expecting either one to leap into view with every half-heard sound.

  He slept for a while, but every sound disturbed him. So he was walking again well before the Mother Blower rose. He tracked the position of the meteor in his mind as the trails he followed wandered lazy courses. He counted his steps so he wouldn't think of other things. He passed a cabin after the sun had set once more, creeping around the edge of the clearing it occupied and quickly picking up the trail again on the other side. He was so nervous that he lost his count and had to start again.

  He moved silently among the trees, adjusting his rhythm to the dipping and rising of the trail as he had never had to do in the desert. Counting each step.

  Before the first touch of dawn stained the eastern horizon, Tuki paused, listening to a new sound that had intruded on his thoughts of humans and shooting stars. It was a drumming above his head, as if an army of invisible creatures ran across the tops of the trees. He cocked his head, then jumped slightly as water dripped down from above to land among the tattooed ants on his arm.

  He stood where he was for several moments, listening and watching as more and more drops splashed around him. All those tiny footsteps?

  Is that the sound of water striking the leaves? It can't be!

  Tuki searched the semidarkness for somewhere to hide, somewhere to get away from all of the water. He found nowhere, so he started to run.

  He didn't know where he was running. After he started to move through the trees, with the water falling quicker every moment, he didn't stop to look for shelter. He simply ran, clutching the skyglass sack in his shaking hand.

  After a lifetime of running through the trees, Tuki suddenly broke out into the open and felt the full force of the falling water. The Mother Blower was angry and was wasting all the water the humans would need. It stung his bare skin, pummeling him like pelted stones. Over his head, he could see no stars, nor either of the two brothers who should have been riding high in the sky. The Goddess had closed Her eyes, and now nobody could see.

  Tuki ran again, following the path as it crossed the clearing and plunged back under the trees. The protection of the canopy lessened the force of the blows, but still he could hear the Goddess' footsteps as She chased him onwards. And under the trees he was all but blind.

  He tripped on a protruding root, splashing down into a pile of mud. He was covered in the cool, sodden mess though he scrambled to his feet instantly and was running again. Moments later the path dipped down through a gully, and he was splashing through an ankle-deep torrent. He gasped at the touch of the water and sprang up and out the other side. He tripped again, rounding another bend as he started to climb. Lying on the ground, water running from his dark curly hair, dripping from the end of his nose, leaving cold tracks across his skin, he saw a huge fallen tree with a sheltered space underneath.

  With a sob of despair, he wiped the water from his face and hurried away from the path and into the small dry alcove.

  15: Lessons Learned

  Kim tried to ignore Meledrin but found she was reading the same paragraph over and over again without having any idea what it said.

  "Why will they not tell us the reason for the delay?" Meledrin asked, glaring at the man behind them as if that might make a difference. Kim was pleased to see that the man ignored the elf, not even looking up from the highlighted file he was reading. It was possible he hadn't even heard.

  Kim shook her head. "Does i
t matter?" After spending a couple of years travelling around the world, she was used to all sorts of delays. Normally, when left in peace, the waiting didn't worry her. With Meledrin constantly bringing it to her attention, time seemed to drag.

  They were sitting in the main cabin of the plane with about a dozen serious men in serious suits. There were as many empty seats again, all facing a large, flat screen television hanging on the wall. At the rear of the cabin things were arranged in a less formal manner. A horseshoe of chairs around a low table, a desk, and a small bar stocked with all manner of drinks.

  "Do you think the giant bats are blocking our route?"

  Kim gave up and put the book away. "Maybe." It wouldn't have been surprising.

  They'd been sitting on the US Air Force Boeing for an hour, though they'd been told they'd be taking off immediately. Kim wasn't particularly worried. She knew there were thousands of things that could be affecting their take off without having anything to do with them. Meledrin wouldn't understand the vast number of people, places, and variables involved. And there was a war on, for Christ's sake.

  But in the end, it was about them. Kim was just getting serious about ignoring the elf, having started a conversation with a stony faced man in a grey suit, when someone escorted Keeble into the cabin.

  The dwarf looked around excitedly and seemed to want to go everywhere at once so he wouldn't miss a single detail. It took him a moment to shift his focus from the location to the people in it. He had a sneer for Meledrin and a smile and a wave for Kim.

  "Hello, Keeb'," Kim said. She smiled back.

  "Hello." Keeble looked at the seat his escort motioned him towards, then went and took a different one by a window. He allowed himself to be strapped in. "Plane," he said, nodding.

  They were moving before everyone else was seated, rolling towards the runway. Keeble strained to see out the window, pressing his face against the glass and muttering to himself. Kim divided her gaze between the elf and dwarf as they started to pick up speed and finally left the ground.

  Keeble was smiling like a boy with a new bike, and Kim could almost see the thoughts darting though his head as he tried to see everything at once and work it all out. Meledrin, on the other hand, took one look out the window then stared resolutely forward. Only her hands, gripping the armrests with white-knuckled intensity, showed that she was feeling anything at all.

  When, a short while after takeoff, one of the CIA officers rose to his feet and went to get a drink, Keeble quickly unbuckled his own belt and raced to a window that gave a better view of the wing.

  There were three fighters flying escort not far away.

  "How work?" Keeble asked in horrible English as he grabbed the arm of the closest man. "How work?"

  "How does what work?"

  "Plane? How work?"

  The man glanced at someone else for a moment and received the permission he apparently didn't really want. "Well, the top of a wing is more curved than the bottom, so when air moves past the wing —"

  "You do know," Kim said, interrupting the man, "that he doesn't really speak English."

  "Oh. Then how do I explain?"

  "Try drawing a picture. I think he might understand that better than anything. And Meledrin can translate any bits he doesn't understand."

  "Why don't you explain?" But he rose to his feet and motioned for Keeble to follow him to the other end of the cabin. Keeble sat down near the low table while the man collected paper and pen from the desk.

  "Coffee?" Keeble asked, pointing to a jar on a shelf.

  "You want coffee?"

  "Yes, please." The dwarf licked his lips and stared at the jar.

  The man sighed but made two cups of coffee.

  A few minutes later Keeble and the American were both hunched over the paper as the man drew a rough, profile sketch of a wing. Other men and women wandered over to help or just to watch. The conversation quickly moved from wings to other subjects.

  "What are we going to be doing, exactly?" Kim asked when Special Agent Tim O'Donnell, the baby-faced man in charge, broke away from the group gathered around the table. He got himself a scotch before crossing to sit by her side.

  "Sorry, I don't know."

  "You don't know or you 'don't know'?"

  "I really don't know."

  "Ah."

  "I'm just your escort. And the only reason I have the job is because I happen to be going your way."

  "And everyone else?"

  "We were part of a task force working with the British trying to contact the alien mother ships."

  "There's more than one mother ship?"

  "This is all top secret stuff, you understand. If you tell anyone I'll have to kill you."

  He said it with a smile, but Kim had the horrible suspicion he was serious. "I doubt I'll be left unguarded from now until the war ends, so who would I tell?" Her reply was delivered with a smile as well, but she had the horrible suspicion that she would find that she was telling the truth.

  "Well, there appear to be lots of mother ships, actually." He took a sip of his drink and settled back. "The trouble is, they hardly show up on any of our tracking equipment. There are blobs that may well be one ship or ten."

  "So you don't know how many there are? Or how big they are? Or how many of the black bats they each hold? Or how many of the armored monsters?"

  "No, to all of those. We can see the ships with telescopes — hell you can see them with an ordinary old pair of binoculars — but they move too much and too quick for us get an accurate count, and without knowing exactly how far away they are, we can't tell how big they are. We're pretty sure they're huge. A few hundred meters long, some of them. How about that? And, as I said, they're quick. There are maybe as many as two hundred of them. We do know for sure that there's normally about forty of the aliens on each bat."

  "And how do they get out of orbit? Or back into it, if they even do? The bats are such impossible vehicles."

  O'Donnell laughed. "Tell us about it. It took a long time for us to work them out. They do it with a combination of two things." He loosened his tie. "First, antigravity. The aliens have devised a mechanical means of making the bats lighter. That allows them to fly despite the burden of the life support capsules. It also allows them to fly well into the thermosphere. Up to about 300 kilometers. We aren't sure if it's the temperature, the atmosphere, or gravity that stops them going higher. Or maybe the bats just get tired. Anyway, when they reach their limit the mother ships dip down closer to the planet and grab the bats with long tentacles."

  "Tentacles?"

  "Yes. We think. We think the ships are alive. Creatures that live in space."

  "Is that likely?"

  "Is any of this likely?"

  "Perhaps not."

  "And those laser weapon thingies?"

  "How do you know about those?"

  "I have my sources." Kim smiled. "They haven't told you about how I hooked up with Meledrin and Keeble?"

  "No. And hold back payment to that source. The weapons are more like a combination particle beam and Taser."

  "Uh huh."

  "What they do is align a path of particles in the air then fire a bolt of electricity along the path. I don't understand much more about it than that, but we've had people working on similar stuff for years. Now they're close to getting it figured out."

  "Well, don't talk too loud. Keeble might overhear and go out the back to make one for himself."

  "Yes, he's amazing, really. I think he's already suggested a couple of things to the flyboys that will jump them forward a couple of decades. He seems to see things once someone's given him a push in the right direction."

  The flight from London direct to Washington DC took 10 hours. In that time every one of the CIA men, plus several of the flight crew, were involved in discussions with Keeble. Somewhere along the way, the subjects veered away from aeronautics into magnetics, and construction, and computers, and a dozen other things. Keeble had an insatiable appetite
and seemed to soak up everything, no matter what language it was in. Meledrin did her best to translate, perhaps welcoming the opportunity to think about something other than the distance she was from the ground, but over and over again she was saying that there were no words to say what needed to be said. A computer? Fiber optics? The words were easy to say in most instances, but how do you describe what they mean? A machine that adds. A rope that light travels along.

  Often, the questions Keeble asked had the men scratching their heads, arguing with each other, or looking slightly dazed. Sometimes all three at once. Most of the men were merely dilettantes, and it would take a real expert to keep up.

  * * *

  Arriving in Washington DC, Kim stretched and yawned. She'd finished her book earlier and drifted to sleep with Keeble's excited voice in her head, asking question after question.

  He'd stopped for a few minutes when half a dozen bats attacked their plane. But the three jets escorting them made short work of the slow, ungainly creatures. It had all been over in minutes. Before the remains had splashed into the Atlantic, Keeble had been asking questions again.

  When they started their descent, he'd found a seat by a window and stared out like a little boy. He swung his feet, wound the gears on his hand, and muttered under his breath.

  When the plane taxied slowly to a spot that was almost a kilometer from the terminal, the dwarf was the first out the door and down onto the tarmac. He ran to stand beneath an engine as if he could discover how it worked from that alone. Kim wasn't so thrilled. From the top of the stairs she could see another plane waiting for them, not a limousine, or even a jeep. She grunted in disgust.

  "What's the matter?" O'Donnell asked, straightening his tie as he waited for Kim to continue forward.

  "I was hoping we were here."

  "I'm here." The agent smiled and nudged her forward.

  "Yes, but I'm sure another escort for Keeble, Meledrin, and I will be along in a moment. Or perhaps they're already on the plane."