Cosmic Rift

by James Axler

  Chapter 11

  Elsewhere

  Even now, Wertham could see the shapes that hid themselves from human eyes: alien geometry, dazzling in its brilliance.

  Wertham the Strange was in the brightly lit bedchamber of his cell, sitting hunched over on the bed. They called it a cell, but it was more like an apartment, albeit one with no doors. The walls were clear, and highly advanced monitoring systems functioned to keep tabs on his movements even when his guards weren’t watching. It didn’t matter to Wertham. He had had a long time to figure out the angles of the cell, a long time to apply his “strange view” to this tiny corner of the world.

  There were places, even here, that were hidden from view if only one knew how to find them. The shadows in the cup of a man’s hand never went away; they could always be drawn upon to hide small items like the ones Wertham worked with now. There were two items there, each no larger than a penny.

  One was a capsule with a colored strip across its center, one end green and one end white.

  The other was flatter, square in shape with rounded corners and roughly the size of a man’s fingernail. The flat item was colored the dull brown of worn copper and had a streak of bright gold running down its center. This split at one edge to form a fork pattern. This was a miniaturized circuit.

  Wertham manipulated his thumb joint, rolling the circuit over to study its reverse. Ronald had passed this to him in one of his meals some weeks before, and he had searched his stools until he located it, away from the probing eyes of the guards who were understandably repulsed by such behavior. Once he had found it, Wertham had hidden it, sticking the circuit to the flesh of his chest where sweat and a fold of material held it in place until it was required.

  He had always sought knowledge, and as he had matured he had placed fewer restrictions on what that term should encompass. He had been an engineer once, and he had been highly regarded in the court of King Jack. Latterly, he had worked not with physical objects but with the human mind, applying alien substances to alter a man’s perceptions and change his potential.

  There were numerous alien substances out there, foods and drugs and things that had been grown. The Annunaki, for example, employed a kind of organic engineering in much of their technology, which, in the hands of a skilled horticulturalist, could be grown and manipulated to achieve staggering results.

  To many, Wertham’s greatest achievement was his work on the Chalice of Rebirth. Wertham had broken down the formula and figured out a way to reproduce its effects. Furthermore, he had manipulated it for human usage, so that it did not simply repair damage but retarded ageing, the one great battle that, it was thought, no man could avoid losing. The whole of Authentiville relied on that advance now; without his insights they would be a city of old men languishing in the crawl space between worlds.

  But it had just been a task to Wertham, another assignment, a puzzle to solve. In the years after that, with the residents of Authentiville safe in their near-immortal lives, Wertham had looked at what the limits were on the human condition. He had experimented with drugs, alien substances that had acted to expand a man’s primate mind, others that could tap the vestigial reptile responses that still remained hidden in the human soul. At first, Wertham had used the Gene-agers and their ilk for his experiments, but that could only show so much. Ultimately, his thirst for knowledge had driven him further, and he had turned those drugs on himself and seen the world in a whole new way.

  The good people of Authentiville had locked him away for what he saw, unable to share in his colossal vision. Not at first, of course. At first, people had been drawn to him, an innovator, an imaginaut exploring the realms of possibility, just as the city’s founder, King Jack, had explored and created new paths in reality.

  Wertham was second generation. He had been born within the embrace of Authentiville itself, back when it had still been just a village really, a village that popped into and out of phase with reality as the general populace understood it, peeking out from the quantum ether. Jack had discovered the parallax system, utilized it at first to hide his horde of treasure, and later to build his own kingdom, far from the envious eyes of lesser men. Wertham had been born here, long after Jack’s ascension to the throne, long after godhood had been imparted to him in the form of a crown—a crown made of nothing more than ideas. Wertham understood that, saw how ideas flourished here, how the scavenged alien detritus could be retooled into greater and greater shapes. The drugs had shown him shapes that men were never meant to see.

  When Wertham had come out with his ideas, some had believed him to be a visionary. All had believed he was harmless; even Jack and Rosalind had welcomed his ideas in the early days. It was only later, when the fallout from the Titan suit had hit a whole nursery of newborns—only when that the high-ranking officials of King Jack’s court had seen the results, the deaths, the twists—that Wertham had been branded “the Strange.”

  Incarceration followed. Ironically, this was the strangest thing of all that had happened to Wertham the Strange, for Authentiville was a society without prisons. Until that moment, the need had never arisen to lock a man away. King Jack had feared that Wertham’s ideas might seduce the innocent. Perhaps they had already begun to do so. That was why he had to be locked away by a society that had never had a prison.

  On pronouncing sentence, Jack had assured Wertham that no harm would come to him, that he would be treated fairly and well, that he would live in comfort, albeit in solitude. That had been seven hundred years ago.

  * * *

  DOMI GRABBED BRIGID around the shoulders and hugged her close.

  “Brigid! You’re here,” she cried. “You’re all here. You made it.”

  The sentries accompanying Domi into the room hurried to keep pace, discreetly remaining a few steps from the triple table.

  “Domi, it is you,” Brigid replied, emotion welling within her.

  Domi was the most sensitive of the Cerberus team, and she was easily riled by changes in temperature or atmospheric pressure. She was also highly alert to dangers that other people missed, in the same way that animals can sense an eclipse or a storm before it occurs. Many of the more scientifically minded personnel at the Cerberus redoubt considered Domi more animal than human, and they kept their distance unless specifically ordered to work with her.

  Brigid, Kane and Grant didn’t think of Domi that way, although they all knew how uncannily aware of her surroundings she was. In fact, they’d had that alertness to thank on a number of occasions for saving their lives. As such, seeing her so at ease—so downright happy—here in this ville tucked in a quantum pocket both pleased and amazed them.

  “Hey, Domi,” Grant said as the albino woman reached across to hug him. “How have they been treating you here?”

  “Just wonderfully,” Domi sang. “They have so much here you wouldn’t believe. I flew—on my own! In the air! Oh, Grant, it’s so good to see you.”

  They had a history these two. Back when he had been a Magistrate in Cobaltville and Domi had been Guana Teague’s sex slave, Grant was instrumental in securing Domi’s freedom and protecting her life. Domi had nursed an infatuation for Grant for a long time because of that, seeing him as her knight in shining armor, the great hero who had freed her from her life of servitude and misery.

  That had just been one part of the series of events that had led both Grant and Kane, along with Brigid Baptiste, to leave the ville and become outlanders, people with no ville to call home. It had also been the start of their alliance as the organization that had grown into the Cerberus of today, and Domi had joined them, albeit as an outsider.

  As her relationship with Lakesh matured, so had her respect for Grant as a person, rather than some idol to be worshipped. For his part, Grant had taken Domi under his wing a little, looking out for her and doing whatever he could to help her adjust to life in what was,
at heart, a military operation, although one that played by its own rules. While he considered Kane a brother and respected Brigid as a comrade in arms, Domi would always seem the little sister of their strange family, wayward and a little unpredictable, but loyal to a fault.

  Grant smiled, hugging Domi back with just a smidgeon of his exceptional strength. Who, he wondered, would ever have thought I’d be putting my neck on the line and scouring infinity for this girl?

  Kane eyed her for a moment, appreciating the cut of the armor and the way it was molded to her delicate frame. Kane had never seen her look so formal. She looked resplendent. “You look...all right,” was all he could think to say.

  Domi laughed as she hugged him. “Thanks, Kane. I still can’t believe you guys came. Have you seen this place?”

  “Briefly,” Brigid told her.

  The albino woman was so full of life, it had taken everyone aback.

  “We came over here via some kind of...monorail, I guess it was,” Grant explained.

  “Never mind that,” Kane butted in. “What about you? How did you come to be here? Mariah was pretty frantic when you disappeared—what happened?”

  “I was exploring that spaceship,” Domi began. “She tell you that? Well, turned out it was an Annunaki lifeboat—the guys here think it may have jettisoned from Tiamat back when she blew up while in orbit.”

  Kane, Grant and Brigid all remembered the incident well. They had been battling with the deranged dark goddess, Lilitu, aboard the Annunaki mother ship when the self-destruct sequence had been initiated. They had barely escaped the ship in time, and they had watched from Earth orbit as Tiamat exploded in the heavens. Kane could still feel the pinch of Lilitu’s claws on his throat as she had tried to prevent him from leaving the doomed mother ship.

  “They guess it got buried,” Domi continued. “Must have been there quite a while, too. But it turned out the Authentiville scouts had spotted it in one of their sweeps and were set to hoist it up to their storage and analysis facilities when I happened aboard.

  “Basically, your standard case of bad timing on my part,” she concluded, rolling her eyes expressively.

  “So, what do you do once you have this alien tech in your possession?” Brigid asked, addressing the question to King Jack.

  “Our scientists, like Dr. Ronald, whom you’ve met, break it down into its component parts and then they begin to analyze the various applications to which it might be put,” the king explained.

  “You make it sound easy,” Kane said with frank disbelief.

  “My boy,” Jack said, “we have been doing this for a very long time. Far longer than you’ve been on the planet, I assure you.”

  Kane believed him, though he couldn’t say why. There was something in the king’s nature that implied honesty, and while Kane couldn’t put his finger on it, he knew enough to trust his instincts.

  “Once we’ve finished our meal here I’ll show you the Happening,” King Jack concluded. “That will help make everything clearer.”

  As the king spoke, his blue-haired wife beckoned Domi over and insisted that she join them for the rest of their repast, apologizing for not waiting for her arrival. Domi readily accepted. It wasn’t often that she found such welcoming hosts—she could count on the fingers of one chalk-white hand the number of times “normals” had invited her to a meal.

  Elsewhere

  WERTHAM THE STRANGE looked at the items hidden in the shadows of his hand and saw the shapes forming, the ones no one else could see. He had waited seven hundred years in this enclosed apartment space, seven hundred years of never seeing past the walls of his prison. Not, at least, in any conventional sense. The time was now.

  “Guard,” Wertham pronounced, not bothering to even raise his voice. He knew they were monitoring him, knew that they would hear him. “Guard, I feel faint. Dizzy.” He sagged to the bed, palming the twin items away as he listened for the clattering feet of the guards.

  It would not be long now. Placing the capsule on his tongue, Wertham closed his eyes and entered the fight trance, letting the sense of serenity wash over him, the ultimate calmness of the faux death. Hidden in the shadow of his cupped hand, the circuit clicked and shimmered and buzzed and burrowed into Wertham’s palm, disappearing in the folds between the flesh where the drug had made it supple.

  Eyes closed, Wertham listened as his guards hurried to see what had happened. He counted three of them moving, discussing what to do.

  “He’s collapsed,” one was saying, his accent purebred Authentiville.

  “What happened?” said another.

  “Open the door and alert Dr. Ronald,” said the third.

  “We shouldn’t open the door—”

  “That man needs our assistance. I’m not standing here and watching him die.”

  “He won’t...”

  “Open it!”

  There was a sound like a birdsong, a little chirrup of electronics as the lock’s configuration was altered. Then came the abrupt sound of rushing air as the transparent wall was parted, creating a sliver of vacuum that filled in the blink of an eye.

  Footsteps. The guards were in the cell, one leading the charge, the others tentative, following a few steps removed.

  “Hey, Wertham? Wertham. Wake up.”

  A hand touched Wertham’s shoulder then, pushing at him gently, then more firmly as the words came again.

  “Wertham?”

  He felt himself being rolled over and laid out on his back on the cot. Hands touched his body, fingers brushing his face.

  “I don’t think...” the guard just above him said. “I think he’s stopped breathing.”

  “Are you sure? Let me see.”

  Another guard came forward. Wertham heard the boot heels clip-clopping on the floor as he approached, felt a strong grip on his forearm, something press lightly but firmly against his chest.

  “You’re right,” the second guard agreed. “He doesn’t appear to be breathing.”

  He wasn’t. That was a part of the mechanism he had employed. It shut down everything but continued to feed oxygen to his brain, a bubbling super-jet of oxygen that not only prevented any deterioration in brain operation but actually enhanced the functionality of the organ. It would burn fully an hour, if necessary, though with each passing minute the danger of such an input increased tenfold. The body of man was not designed to take such enhancements; Wertham had trained for this moment for fifty years.

  “Did you get hold of the doc?” one of the guards asked, the one who had first come to Wertham’s aid.

  “Ronald’s coming back now,” the guard farthest from Wertham confirmed. “He’ll be here in two minutes.”

  Of course he will, Wertham thought. It’s all a part of the plan.

  “Good. Seal the room.”

  “What? You think Wertham could...?”

  “Doc Ronald’s got a warp key,” the guard assured them. “He’ll unlock the shield wall when he arrives. Better not to take the chance until then.”

  As they spoke, Wertham felt something being pressed against his face, a bulging muzzle of a mask clinched over mouth and nose. The hissing sound of escaping gas came to his ears, distant now as he crouched in his hidden pocket of time, behind the geometric shapes that no other man could ever perceive. They were trying to revive him. Chest compressions. More oxygen. But the body was dead, and it would remain so until he was ready to strike.

  * * *

  AFTER THE MEAL, the Cerberus companions were invited to join King Jack and Queen Rosalind at what they called “the Happening.” With Jack carrying the energy rod lightly in one hand like a walking cane, they strode through the magnificent corridors of the royal residence until they reached one of the upper stories.

  “The palace is the hub of our operation here,” Jack explained. �
�Our citizens would be much impoverished without the work that goes on within these walls.”

  The corridors were wide as highways, and though not busy there seemed to be a steady stream of people going back and forth, hurrying about their palace business. Many of these people looked identical to the hairless servants who had waited on the royal party at the meal, Kane noticed, and he wondered if they were some kind of clones or similarly artificial humans.

  Other people seen in the corridors were wearing grand clothes, cloaks, capes and towering headdresses that loaned their figures sweeping lines as they moved. It gave the whole place the feeling of being inside a painting, each line a graceful sweep of the painter’s brush.

  King Jack stopped before the open doorway to a room, inviting his guests to peek inside. The Cerberus warriors stepped closer. Within was a dark room illuminated only by what appeared to be glowing round portholes set within the walls, and it stretched back close to two hundred feet.

  A figure sat at each of the portholes, peering into it, and all wore dark visors over their eyes. There were a hundred such figures in the room, and above their circular portholes loomed larger oval screens, like eggs resting on their sides. Each figure was dressed in the same black leather tunic and conical helmet, as well as the tinted visors. Kane noticed something else about the figures, too—they had heads and torsos, but no legs. Instead, their bodies seemed to be cut at the waist where they connected to fixed chairs bolted to the floor.

  “What are they doing?” Brigid asked, pitching her voice just above a whisper.

  “This is the tabulation room,” Queen Rosalind said. “The information they receive here comes from the operators of the Happening. It’s here that the data is pulled together and fed through our maps to find specific markers we’ve identified.”

  “Like triangulating a site?” Grant suggested, at which the queen looked confused. “Um...figuring out where a location is based on other known locations,” Grant elaborated.