She got up and examined it. Two walls, each running 360 degrees around the world. “It looks like it could hold thousands.”
“Tens of thousands, comfortably.”
“What’s it called?”
He grinned. “The Eire. After my old Irish roots. And Jackson’s.”
“I like it.” She sat back down at her workstation. “We need to find a way to prevent what happened from ever happening again.”
“How?” He pulled up a chair.
“I don’t know. It could have destroyed the whole world.”
“Or worse.”
She shuddered. “Or worse.”
He put a hand on hers. “We’ll figure it out. We always do.”
She nodded. She had enough data to back that up with him, in both her incarnations. “We always do.”
PART THREE: FLIGHT
2188 AD
Chapter One: It Begins
JAYSON POLED the kayak into the shallows of the Rhyl with one of his oars, sliding it up into the mud along the riverbank.
He closed his eyes, breathing in the fresh air—the humid loamy smell of the earth next to the water, the spicy scent of the alifirs that lined the eastern bank. This far north from Darlith, the land was mostly uninhabited, and Mother Nature, aided by sprayings of the bioagent that broke down the rocky surface of the world, was taking the lead in filling out Forever with fast-growing Forever plants.
Jayson loved floating down the river. It was one of his favorite times—peace and quiet away from the clatter and clamor of humankind. Since Marissa and the others had cleared the storm from his mind, he’d come to appreciate true peace and quiet. Out on the river, it was just himself and his companion, the boat, and the elements.
It also reminded him of the time he used to spend with his father, Jackson, fishing the Red River in Fargo.
He sighed. Those days were long gone.
He clambered out of the boat and into the river with his walking stick, soaking his socks and shoes. They’d dry overnight. “You coming?”
Sean nodded. Andy’s seventeen-year-old brother had opted to come with him to see his sister and Shandra, up at the schoolhouse. They’d made the upriver trip by hot air balloon, with the lightweight kayak strapped to the side of the gondola.
Andy and Shandra were lonely up there now that the Liminal kids—Jayson’s kids—were all gone. They’d received him warmly, as they always did. Part of him still thought he was undeserving of such treatment, after all he’d done.
They hauled the boat up onto the bank where it would be safe for the night. Jayson pulled out his carry sack, full of new purchases from Darlith. The city was bigger every time he visited, with new stories and restaurants. And action.
Jayson was fifty-eight—too old and set in his ways to think about settling down with someone. But a man did have his needs, and Darlith had its share of younger guys who appreciated the whole bear thing he seemed to have going.
Sean had gone off for the night with friends of his own, and Jayson—well, he’d sated his appetite in the meantime.
Jayson chuckled to himself. In many ways, he was still a young man himself, his fifty-eight-year-old body notwithstanding. He’d missed so much, living in the fog as he called it now. He was blessed to have a life at all. He set aside the stick, pulled off his wet shoes and socks, and hung them to dry.
Together they set up camp. Jayson rolled out his sleep sack, and they sat down to enjoy dinner.
“It’s beautiful out here.” Sean looked around appreciatively as he chewed on some dried jerky. “So quiet.”
Jayson nodded. “I was just thinking how much I enjoy these times away from everything.”
“Is that why you came out to the Eire?”
“Kind of? Your father asked me to come. Said he could use my help getting the colony started.” He bit into an apple. The juice was sweet on his tongue. “Truth be told, I think he saw how unhappy I was in Micavery. Too many people there.”
Sean snorted. “Not compared to Earth, from what I’ve heard.”
“You’re right about that.” He closed his eyes and thought about his youth—before he’d been captured by Chinese-African agents. Living on the edge, not a care in the world, a new boy in his bed every night. And the vee worlds he’d explored, full of sex and debauchery the likes of which Forever would never achieve. Not to mention his lost weekend.
“What are you thinking about?”
He opened his eyes. “Oh, just the good old days. Stars. Yeah, looking up at the sky at night and seeing stars. Pass me some water?”
Sean handed over the canteen.
Jayson touched the ground, closing his eyes to sense what was afoot in the world around him.
He could feel the trees growing nearby and sense the flow of waters past the reeds at the bottom of the river. The weather was calm. There would be no rain that night. Jayson looked up into the sky-that-was-not-a-sky. “Here it comes.” He lit the luthiel lantern on the front end of the boat.
Sean looked over his shoulder.
The curved expanse of the world north of them had gone dark, and nighttime was hurtling toward them. Jayson smiled. He loved this time of day. “We should be back home tomorrow afternoon. I’m looking forward to sleeping in a real bed again.”
“Yeah, me too. Though it gets a bit… lonely out there in the Eire.” Jayson’s face was bathed in the luthiel’s golden glow.
“Did you see Cherin in Darlith?”
“Yeah. We had dinner. I think she’s getting tired of seeing me only once a month.”
“You should invite her out to the Eire sometime.”
“You think Mom and Dad would allow it?”
“Yeah.” Jayson grinned slyly. “I can sit them down and tell them how much you need a little more human contact.”
Sean laughed. “That would be great. I could show her the North Pole, and the shuttle, and the new sea….”
The boy’s enthusiasm made Jayson happy. He had become jaded, worn out by life. Sean reminded him of what he’d been like, what Aaron had been like at that age.
This new generation gave him hope.
THE NEXT morning, Santiago woke to first light as it swept through the bedroom. The potted plants Eddy had artfully arranged on a series of shelves framing their second-floor window lit up, bathing their bedroom in light.
Santi was up early almost every day to make his mail runs out to Darlith and back. It was his dream job, letting him be up in the air every day, floating high above the amazing world they found themselves in.
Here on Forever, he was free, unlike the cramped, limited life he’d lived with his mother and three brothers in a squalid flat in the heart of Vancouver’s Little Mexico. Food had been scarce and water scarcer, and he still remembered his mother waiting in line for hours under the hot sun just to bring them something to drink.
Santi closed his eyes, whispering a prayer a Dios for his mother’s soul.
He reached over to find Eddy. His husband usually slept through first light. The poor guy was old… fifty-five this year. Santi laughed at himself. He would be fifty in a few more years—he was no spring chicken himself.
Eddy wasn’t there.
Santi frowned, looking around the room. Maybe Eddy had gotten up to go to the bathroom.
Things were so much better now that the Liminal kids had started working to improve their living situations, plumbing their waste pipes right into the world systems to be recycled, among many other contributions.
Santi got up and pulled on his underwear. He padded over to the bathroom, but Eddy wasn’t there.
Maybe he has an early day. Now that Eddy was the mayor of Micavery—and the city had a functioning government that grew every year—he was in demand all the time.
The city population had swollen to several thousand, many of them children needing an education, clothing, and food. There was a lot for Eddy to administer on a daily basis, even with a city council, a full-time staff, and the world mind’s help.
<
br /> The new jail was usually empty but had seen its share of revelers drunken on home brew.
Thank God they’d started building the Eire to take off some of the pressure. He’d heard Darlith was bursting at the seams as well.
He went to the window to look out at the new day.
The weather in Forever was almost always good. Even the rains were usually light, warm enough to walk around in. It reminded him of winter in Vancouver and his first rainstorm with his brothers. They’d danced in the warm rain until they’d been soaked through, and he’d opened his mouth and laughed as the water fell from the sky in big warm drops on his tongue.
One of his friends from the sheriff’s office was walking by.
He waved. “Hey, Brad… how’s it going?”
The man stopped and looked up at him, stared for a moment, and then went on his way without a word.
That’s weird. Had he said something to piss Brad off? They hadn’t seen each other for a few months, so that seemed unlikely.
He clambered down the wide mallowood stairs to the first floor. The house was officially the mayor’s residence, but as the first mayor of Micavery, Eddy had insisted that it be kept small. So it had two bedrooms upstairs with a living room, kitchen, and an office-library downstairs.
It was funny how quickly the printed word had come back into vogue, even if the printing process was fairly archaic by present-day standards. Someone had figured out how to make a printing press, with a few improvements, and now they cranked out a new book each month, ranging from nonfiction how-to books to sci-fi, fantasy, lit fic, and romance.
He found Eddy in the living room, seated on one of the wooden chairs Andy had made for them.
Something was wrong.
Eddy was naked, and he sat up on the chair with his back straight.
His gaze was vacant, though his head twitched every now and then.
“Hey… you okay?” Santi knelt next to Eddy, putting his hand on Eddy’s knee.
Eddy didn’t respond.
Santi put a hand on Eddy’s forehead in an age-old gesture. It was cool, except for his left temple, which was really hot.
His loop? Eddy had mentioned having trouble with it a few days before—little glitches connecting to the network, bursts of static inside his head. But nothing like this.
Santi’s own loop had burned out seven years before on the Dark Day. Nothing he’d tried had been able to bring it back up, and he’d gotten used to life without it.
He missed being able to query the world mind, or send messages from his head to someone else’s. Hell, the Liminal kids didn’t have loops, but they had their own separate connection to the world mind. What he wouldn’t have given for one or the other.
The hardest part was no longer having his pictures of his mother in his head. Though he could still remember her like it was yesterday, her winsome smile, her ability to make so much out of the little that life had handed her.
It was one of the reasons he liked being a mailman. It was an old-school way of communicating that didn’t rely on networks or electrons or other things that could so easily fail.
“Eddy, look at me.” Santi took Eddy’s chin in his hand, trying to turn his head.
Eddy turned, and his eyes focused on Santi for a moment. His fist came up, hard, and knocked Santi onto the ground.
His head spinning, Santi tried to get up, but Eddy was on top of him in an instant, his hands reaching around Santi’s throat.
“Eddy… whaaaaat the heggggh….” He grabbed Eddy’s arms, trying to pull them away from his neck. What the fuck?
Desperate, he used his body weight to throw Eddy sideways. They tumbled across the living room, slamming into a bookcase that showered them with books, knocking Eddy off him for a second.
Santi struggled to get to his feet and lurched out of the way as Eddy came at him again.
Eddy’s eyes were blank.
Santi shivered.
They circled each other warily, and Santi used his sheriff’s training to size up Eddy’s moves. They’d fought each other years before when Eddy had trained Santi to be a deputy, but it had been a long time ago.
Santi had let himself get rusty.
Yet Eddy wasn’t using any tactics at all, simply attacking him with brute force.
Santi grabbed a ceramic vase off one of the shelves, glancing at it regretfully. It had been a wedding present from Trip, a beautiful blue-glazed piece of art. When in need, anything is a hammer.
Eddy lunged at him, and Santi jumped to the side, smashing him across the back of the head and bringing him down. “Sorry, I had to do it, mi amor.” He knelt to check that Eddy was really out and went to get some clothes and some rope to tie his hands and wrists.
When he had Eddy dressed and secured on the sofa, he threw on some clothes himself and ran outside to find help. Having a working loop would be really helpful.
More people were walking by, all heading in the same direction. No one so much as glanced at him.
Some had children in tow, children who fidgeted and pleaded, but none of the adults were listening.
It was like some shit out of a zombie movie.
Then someone noticed him.
One of the zombies pointed at him and murmured something under her breath.
Then another did, and another, and soon twenty people were standing there, staring at him with vacant gazes, pointing.
This is some seriously fucked-up shit. Santi had to get out of there. He knew when he’d been made.
Santi closed and locked the front door and grabbed a carry sack from the closet. He shoved as much food from the kitchen as he could manage inside—dried meats, bread, cheese, fruit—and threw it over his shoulder. Then he strapped on his throwing knives.
He turned to see three of the zombies at the window, staring at him.
Santi pulled the curtains closed.
After throwing a blanket over an unconscious Eddy and lifting him into his arms, Santi ran out the back door, brushing past three more of the zombies, on his way to the only place he could think of that might be safe.
The post office.
It was a harried slog across the city, carrying Eddy over his shoulder and dodging the seemingly enthralled citizens.
Micavery had grown over the last seven years since the Dark Day, spreading up into the hills. The Mayor’s House was in town, in one of the original dorms that had been rehabbed as individual housing units, but the post office was closer to the edge of town.
As Santi crouched behind a jerrywood bush, out of breath, he peered through its dense branches to see a mother walking by with a crying child. She knelt next to him and put her hands on either side of his head and whispered something to him.
He immediately stopped crying and his arms drooped to his sides, his gaze going vacant like hers. She took his hand and led him onward toward Lake Hammond.
It was the creepiest thing Santi had seen since he’d left Earth.
As he made his way from cover to cover, he got glimpses of the whole town gathering down by the docks of Lake Jackson.
He decided he wanted to be anywhere but there.
As he approached the gate to the post office, he had to break through three men who saw him crossing the street, two blonds and a dark-haired man. They all had the same strange vacant look in their eyes. Santi didn’t recognize any of them.
He didn’t want to fight them. Didn’t want to use his knives. But they were between him and his escape path.
Santi laid Eddy’s bound body down and grabbed a branch to knock them out of the way.
The first blond went down with a grunt. The second evaded his swing but slowly, like he was moving underwater.
Santi took him down on the next pass.
The brunet grabbed the end of the branch as Santi swung it at him.
Santi shoved hard, forcing the man to the ground.
The man let go of the branch.
Santi picked Eddy up in his arms to make a run for it. He knoc
ked the man down again with a sharp elbow on his way past. He got through the gates and made his way around the two-story gray block building to the landing pad behind.
Thank God, he’d left his striker in the balloon basket the night before. Santi set Eddy down inside the gondola and climbed in himself, glancing at the man he’d bowled over. He was standing again and staggering toward the balloon.
Santi got the burner lit and fired it up, and the balloon’s envelope began to lift into the air.
Santi used his stick to keep the man at bay, though it took a few hard pokes to make his point.
There was a groan from the bottom of the basket. Eddy was awake and struggling against his bonds. Santi didn’t dare release him.
The brunet lunged at him in that moment of distraction.
Santi held the stick out in defense.
The blood drained from his face as the man impaled himself on the sharp stick, still clawing at him as blood poured out of his chest. Santi held on firmly until the man’s motions slowed and ceased, his face turning white, and then slumped against the stick.
Santi threw it and the man aside, nausea rising in his stomach. He leaned over the edge of the gondola to vomit his guts out. “Oh God, oh God, oh God.” I killed a man.
When at last he was done, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He stayed there for a moment, panting. He didn’t want to look at Eddy after what he had just done.
Santi glanced up. The envelope was almost full, and the balloon was straining against the rope that held it to the ground.
Santi untied the rope, sickened by the smell of his own breath, and the balloon started to rise above Micavery. The post office roof dropped below the gondola, and soon the whole business district of the city spread out before them.
Santi took out his canteen and swished some water around his mouth, spitting it out over the edge of the basket. Then he looked back toward the lake.
There were thousands of people there, all standing in perfect order, each a couple feet from the next one. All of them were staring out at the lake. Like toy soldiers set out for play. What the hell is happening?
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