by V. M. Law
“Corbin? What’s he doing out here, on the Age?”
“He’ll tell you.” And the boy kept walking.
“If Corbin is in space, how are you so young?”
“He’ll tell you,” the boy repeated.
She followed him. After some time, they came upon a nexus, a lynch pin of the ship’s access points and avenues. Her neck craned back and she let out a sigh of surprise, a gasp that vocalized the speechlessness with which she greeted the sight before her eyes. A tree. Giant and encompassing, its branches reaching out to the sky with such a wide span that they seemed to cradle the air that passed through its openings. And grass around the base of the tree, with a garden radiating from there—rows of vegetables and crops that she had never seen, that must have been farmed from foreign, alien worlds—and above it all blazed an artificial sun, a gigantic flame in the sky of the vault that emanated both heat and light until Kasey felt for a moment that she walked on the surface of the Earth again, in the days of the refugee camps and even earlier, when Corbin would allow her to drive his farm equipment in the swirling eddies of dust that the wind kicked up.
She saw him there, in the shade beneath the arms of the tree, floating above the ground in a grav-chair and contemplating the curvature of the veins on the underside of the leaves. “Kasey,” he said, not turning to greet her. “It’s been so long.”
“Corbin?” she muttered, unable to believe her eyes. “Corbin, what are you doing here? How did you—”
“I am here because you are here. The same reason Lew is here, and why this tree is here.” He turned now in his chair and his face seemed so much more fragile than it did when she boarded her shuttle to Mars. His wrinkles had grown into canyons, his hair thin, like spider webs.
“But where am I?”
“You are here, quite obviously.” He floated over to where she stood, and a smile reached from one side of his face to the other. “Precisely at the right time. You see, the Ides are coming, and this tree is precious.”
“But where is here?”
“Here is the Age of Discovery, the atmosphere of Neptune. Here is where you are. And there is nothing else. Now, you must listen.”
It all seemed so familiar to her, as if she had dreamed this all long ago, but she could not quite remember where the memories came from. She had never seen a maple tree. She had never seen any trees at all.
But then what is this object, this tree I am staring at, came a voice from the back of her mind, and she could not answer it. She turned to Llewellyn to ask him frantically when this would end, what it all meant, but when her gaze fell upon the boy, she could not recognize his face and had to stifle a scream of terror that bubbled in her throat. He stared back at her, though one side of his face had been burnt to cinders and his eyelid on that side—the right side—had been scorched off completely. His scalp was completely bald, his hair replaced by a layer of burnt and boiling scar tissue, yellow and pussing and the most disturbing part of her vision was the disregard the boy showed for his terrible disfigurement as he looked at her and told her that she needed to listen well, for the words that were to come would have a bearing on her future.
She blinked, and rubbed her eyes, and blinked again, hoping that the boy’s face would regain its youthful innocence, that the scarred and burnt black flesh would be restored, but when her eyes fell on the boy again, his face still bore the signs of his terrible misfortune. She turned to Corbin, who still floated, and considered her carefully.
“Are you the granddaughter that left me? Are you the adventurer?”
“I—I’m sorry, Corbin. I needed to—”
“No time. It’s in the past. And you will be to if you don’t listen up.”
“Okay,” she said, forfeiting herself to whatever he would say and trying not to look back at the boy who no longer bore any resemblance to her friend of the past.
“You see, Kasey, my father picked up on something, and he went with it. An entrepreneur, you might say. He figured out how to break through the confines of the laws of physics. Typical Lee.” The old man in the grav-chair laughed, the ragged breaths a perfect example of his age and the wreckage of his physical body. His laughter became a fit of coughing that sent mucus flying from his mouth into a kerchief that she produced from a pocket on the side of his chair. He pulled it away from his mouth and shrugged, not wanting to show its contents. Kasey wondered.
“But he didn’t understand what he did, when he did it. It was a fluke. He thought that he was merely—what’s the word?—reaching out? Grasping? He thought that he was responding to the Signal, but he was really beckoning its creators. And they answered.
“Brysen had his reign as a hero. Everybody loved him, thought him responsible for changing the course of humanity forever. When the Emissaries came, they turned on him. His blessing became a curse. He was ostracized, cast out. And he fled, taking to the stars.”
Kasey stared at her grandfather and wondered if he conveyed a coherent thought, or if his mind had advanced in age at the same pace as his decrepit, broken body. “I know all of this. I met him. He funneled Vitrol with two others—I can’t remember, but I know I knew them—they lived in the Neptune station.”
“Yes, the Neptune station.” Corbin spoke in a low voice and cast his gaze down at the grass beneath his floating chair. Kasey turned to the boy, and saw him also holding his head down. From the angle she watched him at, she could not see his scarred face, and he seemed to her in that light like a boy looking for his dog and finally giving up. She felt tears welling in her eyes and she turned away.
“But what are you saying, Corbin?”
“I am saying that the Ides are not the same as the Emissaries. They are different entirely, and the scourge you face now is nothing compared to the might of the Emissaries and the Center. They will end you.” He sounded grave, so grave that the wind ceased blowing and the grass sat limp in the artificial field that spread itself around the maple tree. In the distance she heard the cry of the Ides coming for the smell of life emanating from the tree.
“Hurry up, Corbin,” said the boy, growing irate, verging on a tantrum and stomping his feet to the ground. The scowl that spread across his face split the healing flesh of his forehead and sent rivulet of deep red blood coursing down his face, contouring his eyebrows.
“Do not rush me, Lew. She is not ready.”
But Kasey couldn’t bear to see the boy’s face any longer, and she threw herself on her knees at her grandfather’s chair, pleading that she was ready and that there wasn’t any time left anyway, because the sound of the Ides swarming grew louder, mingling with Llewellyn’s chant: “Tell her, Corbin. Tell her. Tell her now!”
He looked away, focusing on the tree and the pollen that fell from it.
“Corbin,” Kasey screamed, “Corbin, tell me what you know!”
“The Emissaries need you, Kasey. They have been seeking you for a millennia or more and they have found you, because of my father.”
“What? Why?” She couldn’t even process the words he spoke, and he said them with such a disregard for the significance of their meaning that she felt as if the entire thing were a joke, and she would wake up from her dream any moment.
“It is in the prophecy,” he said with a laugh, in a tone that implied the last clause of his statement: obviously.
“What fucking prophecy? Why do they need me?” The sound of the Ides crashing toward them still grew louder, impossibly so, until Kasey had to strain her ears to hear the old man’s response.
“The prophecy that they believe in, of course. It may not be true, it may not even exist, but the Emissaries believe in it, and they are coming for you.”
The boy cut in. “They are coming, Corbin. Tell her!” And when Kasey turned her head to look down the corridor from which she had entered the vault, she saw that he did not lie. The Ides approached with indomitable energy and speed and they had a quarter mile, maybe a half, to cover before they would enter this sanctum.
; Corbin turned his grav-chair to face the swarm that approached, and he resigned himself to defeat when he saw how much distance had been gained. “It appears the boy is right. Kasey, I do apologize, but it appears our time together has drawn to an abrupt close.”
And he turned from her, leaving her behind in the whirl of air kicked up by the propulsion of his chair.
“Come back!” she cried, screaming at the sky and staring into the blazing light hanging above, constantly at noon. “Corbin!”
He stopped for a moment, hovering in the maple’s canopy, and said, “Be careful, Kasey. And remember, don’t trust strangers.”
But he was gone. Nowhere to be found, and when she rounded on the boy in fury, to scream at him, to berate him for dragging her along to her death and disillusionment, she found him missing as well. The crops had withered and where grass had grown in a green carpet she saw only the dried brownish gray piles of dirt that kicked up clouds of dust when she fell to her knees. “Lew?”
The Ides drew closer, and she screamed louder, so that the boy would hear her over their racket, but he still didn’t respond. The Ides grew louder and she covered her ears to block out the sound of their wings flapping and she screamed so that maybe if the boy were still around somewhere he would be able to escape.
But she knew she was alone. She had never felt so sure of anything in her life, and at the final moments, the stinging of her throat made her feel as if her death wasn’t robbed of dignity, but that an outnumbered warrior dying, for lack of a better road.
One thousand feet.
She felt the vibration of their legs slamming against the floor and she smelt the odor of their filth as they left trails behind to signify their passage. The temperature rose slightly, or did she imagine that? She felt confident that as the Ides approached, the air grew warmer. Maybe the fake sun, she thought, maybe the Ides’ respiration. It wouldn’t matter shortly. She ran her fingers along the rough bark of the tree and thought about Corbin’s stubbly beard.
Five hundred.
And the vibrations grew stronger, until dead leaves were shaken from their branches and fell about her in a shower of brown, skeletal remains of the objects Corbin had studied so closely upon her arrival. So quickly things change, she thought. It took only a moment.
She couldn’t think of why the though came to her but it stuck in her mind and echoed back as the Ides burst from the tunnel that had brought her here so shortly before.
Chapter 17
“Sir, we’ve made contact with the Vulcan.”
He sat in silence, letting the words wash over him and feeling a great burden lift itself off his shoulders. But he didn’t smile. “Patch me through. Private line.” His voice came terse and neutral, as he intended it to, and the copilot understood from the dryness of his speech that no further communication would be forthcoming. He dismissed himself, leaving Eugene Farrow alone in his cockpit, hunched over his controls and bathing in their multicolored and varied lights. He hadn’t looked in a mirror for a while, and he wondered briefly what he looked like in the man’s eyes, wondered what his breath smelt like. Not good, he imagined.
“Can you hear me?” He spoke gently, trying the communication link, seeing what the voice of the man who responded would sound like when faced with such an innocuous sounding person. “Are you there, Faulk?”
No response came for a moment, and Eugene Farrow was left alone in the dim light of the cockpit’s control panels with nothing but the static of the broken communication. He tried again.
“Yes, sir. I am here.”
“So you have news for me.”
“Yes, sir. I believe I have found something of great importance.”
He waited for the man to continue speaking, but when no words came he hissed for the man to cease wasting time and speak his part.
“Yes sir. I believe I may have found Kasey Lee.”
The words slammed into his chest more than his eardrums, and he expelled a great gasp of surprise despite his attempt to remain calm during the conversations.
“Yes, somewhere beyond Pluto. Beyond the Kuiper Belt, maybe.”
Eugene Farrow slammed his fist on the table.
He saw the man’s looks. His sideways glances as Eugene slipped the tablets into his synthetic coffee—every morning, every night—his derision every time Eugene ignored a call from another craft or bypassed a security checkpoint.
Fuck him, he thought. Archie Fucking Buchanan, Buck for short, fuck him and whatever he calls himself.
He knew he was slipping. He couldn’t do anything else, after the Neptune incident. And with so much work to do keeping it quiet, he felt as if the journey through the solar system were a vacation, a period of mourning. They insisted he stay behind, on Earth. His officers could handle it, they told him, but he couldn’t allow that. He wouldn’t want it. She wouldn’t. But they left without him anyway, and now he was stuck on a personal freighter with one copilot, Archie Buchanan-who-preferred-Buck, following the MarsForm vessel deployed to collect the wreckage of the Age of Discovery, the Morrow, the Neptune station, and the unidentified Ides warship found in the vicinity. A complex clean up job, they said. He should stay behind. Mourn.
He wouldn’t. He couldn’t.
I will have the parcel.
He clung to those words, held them tight and replayed them in his mind until they became a mantra, a chant, repeated indefinitely and growing into a single word.
I have the parcel.
They soothed him, allowed him to breathe more steadily, reassured him that his duties were nearly fulfilled, and he would be released from his bonds before he saw the Earth again. The device. He hated thinking about it, hated seeing it even more. The day on which he would be forced to open his safe and attach that thing to his head and communicate with Emissaries loomed his in mind and inspired in him a sense of dread that towered so high that he at times wished he could throw himself through the airlocks of Archie Buchanan’s tourist trap into the vacuum of space, and the only thing that prevented him from doing so on the worst of days was the steadfast determination to not let Morgyn die in vain. She wouldn’t want that. He wouldn’t have it.
No other way.
But that day had come, and before he realized what he was doing, he stood with the safe on his bunk and his hands hanging numbly before him. Just a roll of his thumb over the scanner, and it will open.
He closed his eyes, raising his thumb and feeling his arm moving through the air with a great sense of doom lingering about his every motion. Letting it hang there, he exhaled, and tried to calm his nerves. The cold glass of the scanner met the pad of his thumb and he heard the whirring of the motor kick on as the scanner laser slid over his thumbprint. The tumblers slid back from the grooves they had been fastened in, and the lid of the safe lifted with an almost audible whoosh of air, like the sighing of an old man.
He sat with his eyes closed tightly together for a moment, and then opened them cautiously. The lid sat open and in the safe, nestled against the plush lining, the strange and outlandish metal of the alien communication tool offended his gaze, the way it was neither dull nor reflexive, possessed of form or amorphous. As he stared at it, he could not make out its color, nor whether it would bend to his touch. He knew only that his ordeal drew to a close, and this, the most reprehensible of his duties, would soon come to pass.
He took another deep breath, and took up the headpiece. He placed it on his head as if it were a crown, gently, with care not to disturb it too much, and as it molded to fit the indentations of his temples, the lump of the back of his skull where a break had healed in his childhood, a great pain shot from the crown of his skull to the soles of his feet. He wanted to scream, but he couldn’t open his mouth, and his shout of terror and pain never reached farther than the wall of his sealed lips.
In his mind, the voice blared, louder than a crashing cargo vessel, louder than a SatCom in the night when you await a lover coming through a storm.
“Farrow, of the Man
kind, You have called upon Ral the Emissary and you will be heard. Speak.”
Eugene Farrow couldn’t imagine how Archie wouldn’t here the noise of the being screaming in his mind, but then he remembered and he became aware of the headset adorning his head. “Yes. Yes. I believe I have found the girl. Or will find her, shortly.”
“You haven’t possession of her?” the voice inquired, warbling like a propulsion engine hovering overhead, like the sound of an Annex water main breaking in the cavernous hollows below the resident units there. It seemed like three voices at once, each in playing out a discordant melody that made Eugene Farrow feel as if his bowel would shift or his stomach would reject whatever substance broiling in its acid. He thought of the foul stench of rotting food and the explosions of mold spores that rise from disturbed and decaying meat. He didn’t know why, but every syllable the voice uttered seemed to grate on his eardrum greater than the last.
“Not yet, Emissary. But I will.” He tried to convey confidence before realizing that the being he communicated silently with had no conception of human confidence, of the anticipation of events. There is only what is, in this being’s mind.
“You are running out of time, Eugene Farrow.”
“I know. I am en route to the girl’s location. I have my best men on it.”
“I care not for your men, nor your promises. Bring me the girl or you will feel the Center’s anger.”
“Yes.”
And the pain dissipated. The headpiece disconnected itself from his temples and fell to the floor with a dull clatter and left behind only the faint echo of the voice that had infected his brain. Already, he could scarcely believe that it was done. He would hear that voice one more time before his bonds were loosened.
But he needed the girl.
He placed the diadem back into his safe and placed the safe into the cubby beside his bunk. As he closed the drawer, Archie Buchanan reentered the cockpit and warned his guest that the tour was almost at an end.
“We’ll slingshot around Saturn. Be back in Terran air space in a week or so.” He tried to remain jovial and Eugene felt the heat of his embarrassment as he attempted cordiality. “How’d you like the trip?”