by John Daulton
“More slack on your side, Rabin, damn it,” he called up to one of the brothers as he descended. He started to say something that might have been further chastisement, but he cut himself off and let out a long, low “whoa!” instead. It was more an audible and awestruck breath than a spoken word, but the effect was obvious. “You getting this, Stace?” he asked.
“I am,” said his lab assistant, Doctor Stacy Walters. She was brand new to her PhD, and she wore an expression of absolute delight for having a part in the work, her eagerness visible upon her features, if barely so given that the colorful motions from her tablet were reflecting from her helmet glass and obscuring the evidence of her joy. “I’ve never seen anything like this. Look at the color signatures. Wow. And I think I’m detecting that light-eating thing in it, too, lost wave patterns. That is weird. There may be some traces of the effect still in the gray ones around it too, now that I know what I’m looking at. But that’s not the strangest thing. Have you seen the density readings on this glowing stuff? This is insane. Where’s it getting all that mass?”
Doctor Bryant read the data her computer was sending back and shook his head. “No clue. But if it’s that massive, we’re going to need a lot bigger power plant to lift it out than we brought. Don’t want to be in here when that thing topples into the hole.”
“I’m not even sure why it isn’t falling straight through the rest of this,” she said. “Those other crystals should crumble under that.” There followed some technical conversation back and forth.
Altin, like the others, heard everything being said, but he could make no sense of most of it. He glanced to Orli, who was too busy listening to look back. When he looked to Roberto, the captain of the Glistening Lady had little to add beyond “Must be heavy, I guess.” And so they had to stand patiently and wait, letting the geologists do their work.
A little more than an hour later, and several failed attempts at levity from Roberto later, the twins hauled the professor up out of the hole. Without even looking any of them in the eye, he went straight to Stacy’s computer and turned it round in her hands so that he could operate it himself. He spent another twenty minutes muttering to himself and finally looked up with a white-toothed grin.
“I believe I can get it out. We’re going to need one of the big power plants and some digging equipment, big digging equipment, and, well, then there’s the hard part. We have to cut it with a water saw.”
“A what?” both Orli and Altin asked.
“A water saw,” he repeated. “It’s a stonecutter that works with a high-powered, very fine jet of water to cut through stone. We can’t use lasers because, well, whatever the heart stone is doing to light could draw the beam and kill him. And if we try a conventional saw, we risk killing him. If this really is his brain—or his soul, as Miss Pewter’s portion of the file you people sent me suggests it might be—then there’s no telling what damaging any of this might do anyway. A water saw is the best bet.”
“So why is that the hard part? Are they super expensive or something?” Roberto cringed inside his helmet and looked like he was preparing for an electric shock or a slap in the face.
“Yes, actually, it’s going to cost a fortune to put one in here. We’re going to have to have one made because the one I need is going to be a lot bigger than anything we might find lying around somewhere back on Earth. And it has to be capable of extreme delicacy too, like laser-scalpel delicacy, because the scariest part of this is going to have to be done by hand. There won’t be any templates for this.”
“Why not?” Orli asked.
“Because all these crystals are eating all my light. For the same reason we can’t cut with a laser—even if that seemed like a good idea and didn’t run the risk of overloading him or melting him or something worse, since we don’t know anything about this life form—I can’t get readings off of it at all. I can see what’s coming out of it fine as you please. I can even see the gray ones too, at least until I get close to the heart itself. But look.” He pulled out the device that emitted the green beam of light and brought it to where Altin and Orli stood. He directed it downward, centered a patch where the gray crystals met the purple heart stone in the view finder, and switched on the green beam. A line appeared on the little square screen moving straight across, and along the left edge symbols appeared. But nothing else was happening. “You see?”
“I’m not quite sure what I’m looking at,” Altin confessed. “It is not doing anything.”
“Exactly,” said the professor. “Which is entirely my point.” He paused, looking to Orli, then got a strange expression on his face, as if he’d just noticed her for the first time. He flashed a winning smile at her and winked before turning away and returning to Stacy and the computer that she held. “There’s no reading. And there’s a haze where the gray crystals butt up against it, some kind of overlap, making a murky boundary. So if we can’t see where he ends and the gray crystal begins, then we can’t trace it to set a template. Without a template, the computer can’t guide the scalpel jet. Which means it has to be done by hand. As in, it’s going to have to be one of us.”
Orli gasped. “But what if we hurt him somehow? You just said we might kill him by accident.”
“Exactly.”
Altin seemed far less perturbed than the rest. “But it does sound to me like you think success is possible. That is a good thing. Can you do it?”
“I can get it all set up with absolute certainty. But I’d be terrified to be the one to make the fatal mistake. We’ll need someone else. Someone with a steady hand. Maybe a high-end sculptor, someone used to working with stone.”
Stacy shook her head, looking at data on her tablet. “Nobody is used to working with this stone.”
“Doctor Singh!” Orli exclaimed. “He’s used to doing surgery. And after all, isn’t that essentially what you are talking about? You called it a scalpel, after all.”
The professor nodded inside his helmet dome. “As long as he’s willing to live with the guilt of killing an entire world, I’m happy to turn it over to him.”
Orli looked pleased, but when she turned to Altin, he did not. Her delicate blonde brows drooped.
“What is it?” she asked.
“I don’t think he’ll do it.”
“Why wouldn’t he?”
“Because he hates me,” Altin replied. “He hates me, and he blames Blue Fire for all those deaths. I’m not sure he’s the right man to ask.”
“Well, he doesn’t hate me,” she said. “So let’s just go tell him what we are trying to do. Maybe he’ll be happy about the whole thing.”
Altin’s expression suggested he thought the odds long, but he let it pass. “Speaking of being happy about the whole thing,” he said instead, “I suppose I should tell Blue Fire that it does seem to be possible. The last time I communicated with her, she seemed beyond the capacity for hope. This might lift her spirits considerably.”
“Yes,” Orli said, clapping, though the sound could not be heard. “She will be excited to hear such optimistic news. We should tell her. If you don’t want to—I know she depresses you—I’ll tell her in my dreams.”
Chapter 17
Altin had decided it would be best to give Blue Fire the good news in person—or at least, he hoped she would see it that way—so he teleported to her world straightaway. The moment he arrived on the ledge in her great cavernous body, her womb really, she found him there and knew in that instant what was in his heart and mind.
She felt his dread for being there.
“Orli Love hate speak with Blue Fire,” she said, using the rumbling of the stone all around him to make words for him to hear. She’d gotten better at speaking with sounds over the last several months, the time since she’d learned to think of humanity as a race rather than a disease. Still, she struggled with language. It was one thing to have access to all the words in Altin’s memory, all those in Orli’s too; it was another thing altogether to assemble those random sequences
of sound, those symbols made of noise, into her own feelings and ideas. And her words were so vast they were hard to hear, for her voice was the temblor of her body, of the very stone all around.
As soon as the quaking had passed, passed beneath his feet and then beneath his knees after he had been knocked down, he pulled a pair of tiny hummingbird feathers out of a small pouch tucked away in his robes. He’d brought them just for this, for the new spell he’d taught himself to prevent these sorts of rumbling, bouncing injuries. He cast the spell quickly, the feathers vanishing, consumed and converted for their part of shaping the magic, and right after, Altin gently floated up off the ground.
Blue Fire interpreted his lifting away from the ledge, from her body, poorly.
Orli Love hate touch Blue Fire. She sent this thought straight into his mind, reverting in her humiliation to telepathy. She filled him with the ever-present sadness that filled her, grown worse in the days after the war. The great tide of her sorrow washed into his mind and soul like a wave. She added to its familiar brutality a sense of rejection as well, of repulsion. His repulsion toward her. She thought that she disgusted him.
“Oh, stop,” he said aloud, trying to encourage her to use her new human words. “I am not repulsed by you at all. I find you beautiful, and I care very deeply for your happiness. But look at my poor, soft human knees.” He lifted up his robes so she could see the small red puncture wounds where he’d fallen amongst the crystals, which always happened when she spoke as movingly as she did. “We humans are delicate creatures, and you are very strong. But I will touch you if you like.” With barely the flick of a thought, he let the levitation spell go and settled back to the ground. “There, you see? It’s not serious injury. I can have it healed the moment I get home.”
His hands and knees tingled. He checked his palms and then his kneecaps and saw that the wounds were gone.
Blue Fire no hurt Orli Love. Blue Fire die.
“Oh, please, stop,” he said, growing annoyed. “You’re so dramatic sometimes. They are silly little wounds. I’m sorry I even brought it up. I’ve come to give you wonderful news.”
Suddenly, he was suspended just above the floor again, as if he’d recast the spell. The cavern rumbled all around him. “Orli Love no anger for Blue Fire.”
Altin rolled his eyes. This was why, without really thinking about it, he had begun to avoid seeing her sometimes. Emotionally, she was a wreck. She had become this dried-up tuft of the great, powerful being he’d once known. But he knew it didn’t have to last, even if she could not believe there was any help for her.
“Orli and I,” he began, but then cut himself off. She did not know them by their names. She knew them by who loved them instead. That was the measure of one’s worth. Such was the way of her kind. And so to her, Altin was Orli Love and, of course, Orli was Altin Love. He began again. “Altin Love and I have found a great doctor of her people. He is very knowledgeable about planetary things.” He paused and sent images of the crystals in her womb and in her heart chamber to her telepathically. He followed those images with others of the crystals inside of Yellow Fire as well. “We believe we’ve found him.”
Upon seeing the images in Altin’s mind, upon linking those images with the words he spoke and the thoughts behind them that he hadn’t spoken yet, she recognized him, Yellow Fire. She knew in that instant that the purplish pulse she saw in Altin’s memory was her long-dead lover, her husband, gone forever, as she had so agonizingly and endlessly believed. She knew it, and then the whole cavern filled with a great quaking roar to match the torrential wail of her telepathic grief.
Altin had to summon all his magical strength to block the press of her misery against his mind, and for a time, he hung there in the air defending his sanity in a way that wasn’t so much different than he had when he was fighting off the great hatred of Red Fire. He opened his mind to the mana all around him and pulled it in, using it to enforce the blockade around his thoughts. Had he not had the ring, and in it the stone Blue Fire had given him, he could not have staved off the onslaught at all. He would likely be lying there weeping and gasping for air for as long as it took her to stop. Or he would have been dead.
But he had the ring, and so he rode the storm out, becoming more exasperated all the time. But in time, it was done. When she was calm again, he apologized for showing her the thought. But still he pressed on with his point because he was sure it mattered. He and Orli both hoped that understanding what was happening might bring her cheer, lift her out of all this abject misery.
“The reason I showed you that,” Altin went on, “is because this great man from Altin Love’s world is going to try to bring Yellow Fire back, just like we said we would. I promised you and Orli—you and Altin Love—that we would try, and now it seems that it truly is possible. It’s only a matter of a little more time. A few months while they build a machine to get him out. And then the two of you might finally be able to be together again.”
There was a long quiet after that. No quakes, no images stampeding through his mind, put there by the violence of the cosmic-sized emotions that ran through her large and ever-sentimental heart.
And then one came. One small emotion, very small, hardly visible were such things to have physicality. She offered it up to him meekly, the barest mote upon an upturned hand, raised up for him to see, tentative, terrified, but for the first time, something new. It was hope.
He saw it there in his mind, felt it, the quavering fragility. She showed it to him, then gave it a gossamer sort of mass with which she shaped a ring around the image of Yellow Fire’s glowing purple heart. She held that in her mind and in his, as if cupped in tremulous, loving hands. Together, they stared at it for a time.
It was the first time she’d seen Yellow Fire since his death all those thousands and thousands, even millions, of years before. He’d been gone so long, silent and dead so long, that she was afraid to look at him now. Altin saw the image change a little, as if they were now seeing it through a haze of smoke. But still, all around the heart stone flickered that delicate ring of hope.
Altin smiled, upon his face and inwardly with his heart and mind. At last. At least one moment of happiness for her. Now if it would truly work as they said it would, if Doctor Singh and the professor truly could cut it out without hurting it, then perhaps her happiness could become as permanent as her misery had been. Then there would be justice.
He couldn’t even help those last thoughts. They just came. All of them in his memories, to be read all at once.
Once again the entire chamber rumbled and rocked. Bits of dark stone fell down from temporary fissures that opened in the ceiling above. “Yellow Fire live. Altin Love new human make water. Yellow Fire die?” She sent along with the thunderous boom of her words the reflected image of Doctor Marks Bryant back at him. She’d pulled that right out of his memories along with all the rest. “Not make Yellow Fire die.”
There came after that a series of ideas, and by the end of it, Altin realized that Blue Fire had already turned hope into a somewhat perverted form of quasi-misery. In seeing that there was a chance that Yellow Fire might be killed, it seemed she’d rather live knowing that he was marginally alive, lying as he was in a perpetual state of dormancy, than return to the knowledge that he was actually dead. She’d found hope, and now she was going to cling to it forever, even if it was hope in an emaciated state.
Altin groaned aloud, and he felt her withdraw some from his thoughts after reading them. Orli Love hate Blue Fire. Blue Fire alone. These came straight into his mind again, and he had to fight to not let even more exasperation through.
“By the gods, creature! Orli Love does not hate you. I will never hate you. And you have to let us try. For all we know, he’s in there hoping we’ll hurry up so he can come back to you. Love is a hopeful thing, my friend. Love requires faith.”
“Yellow Fire no die. Blue Fire love.” She rumbled the words through her colossal stone body.
“But you don�
��t have him now. He isn’t really yours. Not yet. It’s just as Altin Love was once lost to me too. Do you remember? Remember the poison that took her love away?”
Blue Fire projected back an image of Thadius Thoroughgood. It was the human face of poison to her. The symbol of it. The cavern rumbled violently, but shaped no words.
“Yes,” Altin went on. “Exactly. I hated losing the love of Altin Love. Thadius’ poison stole her love away, even while she lived. And that’s what the flare of that sun did too. The star called Fruitfall flared, and its fire took your Yellow Fire’s love away. But he too still lives. And maybe we can bring him back. Like I got Altin Love back. You must at least let us try.”
His mind filled with unspoken fear, terror that showed him the gray, smoky image of the pulsing heart of Yellow Fire, and slowly the gray smoke grew thick and the purple light went out, replaced by the face of Marks Bryant with water running down his face. Then he saw Orli weeping, and then himself as the image of Orli went away, obscured like the heart of Yellow Fire by graying smoke.
Altin sighed. “Yes, it’s true,” he replied. “We might end up killing him. It is possible. You saw that in my head. But how long do you want to remain alone?” He paused, frustrated. Floating above the ground with a spell that wasn’t his added to his sense of helplessness. “This is what I know, the one thing I can tell you for certain: as long as there was any possibility that I might get my Orli, my Altin Love, back, I never gave up on her. I never would have. I never will. No matter what happens. In the end, she is all that matters to me. But, in the end, it is up to you to decide what you want to do about Yellow Fire now. I won’t let them touch him if you say not to. The choice is yours.”
Again there was a long and cavernous silence. He waited so long that he wondered if she had forgotten he was there. But finally she spoke again.
“Water cut. Heart stone kill.” It came with the image once again of Professor Bryant sitting there, tears pouring down his face.