“Yes.”
“Glad.”
“But...”
“Ik is in a fragile state. His stones and, I think, Ik himself. I need to be there in case he needs me.”
I need you now, he thought. I love you.
“So—that’s why I have to go.”
/// Tell her what you just thought! ///
/Not right now. She doesn’t need to hear it now./
Antares sat up, pushing back her thick mane of auburn hair. She had never looked more desirable. She got to her feet, slipped her clothes back on. Sighing, she bent and touched her lips to his. He reached up for a moment to caress her cheek. And then she slipped out of the room.
He stared at the closed door for a long time, and then at the ceiling for an even longer time, unsure just exactly what he was feeling.
Chapter 26
Distant Memories
Ik passed the night in a kind of dream state, not quite sleeping and not fully awake. He was aware, but felt unable to influence what was running through his mind, or between his mind and his voice-stones. It was a strange, timeless state; he knew some kind of healing or repair or change was taking place, but it was beyond him to know what kind. He felt occasional flashes of pain. After a while, the pain became less frequent, but in its place came a hollow, ringing sensation, like a reverberation in a large steel chamber. With it came...he wasn’t sure what. A sense of striving, maybe. But striving for what?
As the room lights brightened with ship’s morning, he slowly came to, wondering where he was. He shifted his eyes. He was sitting cross-legged in...sleeping quarters? If so, they no longer looked the same. It looked like a Hraachee’an comfort den, a place where a Hraachee’an on holiday or in transit might rest for a few nights. The smooth walls were curved asymmetrically, like the interior of a natural cave. On one side, however, a wide window appeared to look out over a rugged mountain slope. Rrrm, he thought. Am I hallucinating? Or have the stones gone mad? And then he remembered the lounge last night, transformed into Hraachee’an form.
He heard his name, and turned his head. Antares was sitting up on the padded floor, a long arm’s reach away from him. Had she been here all night?
“Hrah,” he murmured. “Hello.”
“How are you feeling? Can you understand me?”
“Yes, I seem to be able to now.” And he gasped, suddenly realizing what that meant. He placed his fingers to the sides of his head. He could hear and understand Antares’s spoken words; he could also sense her thoughts and feelings, hovering around the edges of his own. /What is our condition?/ he asked his stones.
*Improved. Major traumas appear to have been corrected. Functionality has been restored to the verbal translation module. Linguistic accuracy may now exceed ninety percent.*
/That’s good. Was that the only problem?/
Hesitation. *Still evaluating.*
They hadn’t mentioned what he most worried about. The Mindaru. He felt reluctant to mention it himself. He realized Antares was still gazing at him expectantly. “It seems you have done, hrrl, remarkably well in repairing the damage.”
“And how do you feel?” Antares repeated.
He honestly didn’t know how to answer that question. For a moment, he felt the ringing sensation again. How was he doing? The connection between his inner sensorium and the stones was definitely clearer, as was his thinking. Was this all due to Antares’s efforts? It made him lightheaded just to think of it. For a moment, he was carried back to the undersea world of the Neri, where he’d used his stones with John Bandicut to guide the sick Neri back to health, guided their minds and bodies to heal themselves. Was that what Antares’s stones had done for him?
No. There was more. He had been infected, or his stones had. And Antares’s stones had worked half the night rooting out the infection.
But it wasn’t just his stones that were hurting. What of his heart and soul, where the memories still burned? They had been reawakened by the star earlier, reawakened to a fire he had not been able to put out. In the presence of the stellar inferno, he had been wrenched back to the destruction of his homeworld. For so long, he had managed not to think of it much. But now, it burned and burned in his mind. Hraachee’a.
So many losses. So many people to remember. Onaka, his lifebonder. He missed her desperately. His young heirs, offspring of his egg-brother Aon. He’d cared for Edik and Sar as though they were his own. But they were gone, too. They hadn’t deserved to die. Had Onaka, had Aon, had the young ones gone quickly, quietly? Or had they endured terrible pain in the holocaust of an exploding sun? Why had he been spared?
He and Onaka had planned and hoped for a groupbond one day. During his long, solitary sojourns in space, he had often thought of what such a groupbond might have been like, if he and Onaka had found one. Even after his arrival on Shipworld, he’d wondered if perhaps one day he would find his own kin among the millions of beings in that strange place. But that hope was stretched thin now, very thin.
Somehow entwined with the remnants of that hope was the reality of this company, his new friends, Hraachee’an or no. He felt now just how much a family this company had become. He gazed at Antares and thought of Li-Jared and Bandicut. There was much good they had done together, the four of them. Li-Jared, for all his bluster and excitability, would throw himself in front of a charging bull-mammoth to save any of them. And John Bandicut: as trustworthy and courageous as anyone Ik had ever met. Even his robots had become friends. And Antares. Before, she’d kept herself at a distance. But she had just risked her own stones to help him in his need. They were now joined by their stones—and more, by a personal bond. There was healing in her touch, as there had been healing in his and Bandicut’s touch to the Neri. But Antares’s healing touch seemed a part of her fundamental being, and not just something made possible by her voice-stones.
“Ik?”
He shifted his gaze. Antares had been waiting patiently the whole time he’d been lost in his own thoughts. “Hrah. I am still sorting out...” As he spoke, his head filled again with the hollow ringing. He could feel his face tightening.
“I’m here to help,” said Antares.
“Thank you. Thank you for what you have already done,” he said softly. “I believe...the rest may be up to me.”
*
Jeaves felt that it was up to him to conduct some serious thinking and analysis during this quiet interlude, while The Long View crossed the cavernous hollow at the center of Starmaker. There were some questions that really had to be answered soon. Foremost was, what exactly were the Mindaru doing to bring a star to the brink of violent explosion? And what could they on The Long View do to stop it?
Jeaves, in another time and place, had been present for the triggering of a supernova. That had been a carefully orchestrated event: collectors siphoning mass from a companion sun; satellites within the star’s atmosphere reflecting neutrinos back into the core to make it hotter and hotter; and an n-space connection to a cosmic hyperstring, strengthening the gravity at the heart of the star. Even with all this, it had amounted to little more than an extra push, tipping a star that was already on the cusp over the edge.
Could this be something like that? It felt different, though Jeaves could not pinpoint how. Soon they would arrive at the Trapezium, and try to contact the one of the four called *Thunder*. That was good; but he needed more information, he needed everything the ship’s sensors could give him about *Thunder*, and even more so about the one floating in the mists of the cavern walls beyond, the one called *Nick*. Without knowing why *Nick* was on the verge of exploding, they might as well be flying into a deathtrap.
*
Li-Jared had gotten up early, unable to sleep with Ik murmuring to himself, and Antares coming and going in the middle of the night. She had spent a long time sitting very, very still, and maybe that was what kept him awake. He kept waiting for her to do something. But she didn’t; she just watched Ik, waiting for him to do something.
Li-Ja
red could have asked Copernicus-ship to create a separate sleeping room for him, but instead he went to the common lounge, looking to the robot for company. “Would you like me to change the décor into something from your own world?” Copernicus asked, providing a platter with a good replica of a soma-fruit, a long, slender pod filled with a salty nectar.
Li-Jared bit off the end of the fruit and looked around at the vision of Hraachee’a that Copernicus had created last night. “Why not?”
“Could I ask you to step into the hallway for a moment?”
He complied. As he waited, he peered up and down the glowing red passageway, remembering when he had been lost in these corridors, afraid for his life. He was suddenly aware of how alone he felt, and not just alone but lonely. His friends were in adjacent compartments, and yet, in this weird, weird ship, they could be miles away.
The door opened and Li-Jared gratefully stepped back into the lounge. He stood stock-still, his hearts hammering in sudden wonder. The room was utterly transformed. It was Karellia—home with green, beautiful, perilous sky—almost exactly as he remembered it. Karellia at the onset of night. A grassy sward was surrounded by tall-spire trees and fog-bushes. The sky overhead was light-filled darkness: the green-tinged dark of night, with a blazing star and nebula field splashed across it like luminous paint. The sky was an artist’s playground, a thing of joy and beauty. It was a nightmare of radiation, a thing of deadly peril. Karellia was located in a region of dense stellar activity. Bathed in radiation, it was a wonder the planet managed to support life at all. And yet, thanks to a strong magnetic field, it did. It was fertile with life. It was also fertile with extinctions. Many were the species that had come and gone in the planet’s history. Many were the changes that the years and orbital instabilities had brought to the world.
Li-Jared’s mind exploded with memories. He was, for a few heartbeats, transported back to Karellia, surrounded by ghosts of his own people.
The Karellians had always been vulnerable to mutations from the radiation. Over time, they had learned to protect themselves against climate shifts and stellar fluctuations. They had explored their own planet, but only sporadically gone into space, into the “perilous sky.” Beyond the protection of the atmosphere, the radiation was truly horrific, and even automated probes required heavy shielding. Only in Li-Jared’s time had work begun to find ways of creating energy shields against radiation. Li-Jared, through his mathematical research, had been a part of that effort.
He tipped his head back and gazed at the fiery night sky. Copernicus had done a fine job creating the effect, and Li-Jared was almost convinced. Once he looked for star patterns, of course, he could see the limits of what Copernicus could extract from his stones, which in turn had drawn it from his memories. But as long as he ignored the fine detail, the look of the sky was dead on.
“Would you like to have a proper Karellian breakfast?” Copernicus asked.
Li-Jared turned and saw a holo-image of the robot, standing behind a counter suspended between two trees. On the counter were several plates of food. Bong. “Everything else looks so real. But where’d this counter come from?”
“Ah—I was afraid this wouldn’t match up,” said Copernicus. “I didn’t have any images of food service on your world, so I took this from a human setting.”
“We would never have a long surface like that,” Li-Jared said. “We’d have a lot of small holders sticking out from trees or posts—” he demonstrated, extending a hand palm-up from a half-bent arm, as though he were holding a tray in the air “—and there would be a bowl on each holder. People would walk among them, taking what they liked.”
“Ah. Would you like to step back while I try it?”
Li-Jared backed up.
The countertop blurred, then was gone. Several new trees appeared, and from each tree, several supports arched out, holding small shelves. A moment later, bowls appeared on the shelves. “Is that better?”
“Yes,” said Li-Jared. “Thank you.” He walked among the offerings, selecting a small, round fruit and two bread-fingers. “Very authentic.” He ate slowly, savoring the earnest attempt to duplicate Karellian flavors.
“Li-Jared?”
“Yes?”
“How did you leave your homeworld?”
Li-Jared felt a momentary flash of fire in his throat. How had he left his homeworld? Quite abruptly. The stones had come first...
It had started with the landing of what first seemed to be a meteorite, in the field near his home. It hit with a loud concussion—whoom!—but not the massive explosion that one would have expected. When he got there, he found the site enveloped in a glowing halo of bluish plasma. After waiting for the glow and obvious magnetic effects to subside, he cautiously approached. The cratering was minimal; this was no ordinary meteorite. A haze continued to obscure the immediate surroundings. But he saw—too late to duck—the burst of violet plasma that slammed him in the chest and knocked him flat. When he sat up, he smelled ozone and felt a tingling in his chest. Embedded in his skin were two tiny crystals, flickering with light.
Copernicus stirred almost the way Bandicut might have, his metal arms gesturing. “That must have been very exciting!”
Li-Jared made a rude, rumbling sound. “It was terrifying! And once I knew what they were, it was infuriating!”
“Why?”
“That—” ngngngngng “—aliens took it upon themselves to blast me down and put these stones in me!” He could feel himself growing hot all over again with the remembered emotion.
Copernicus made a ticking sound that was probably intended to be soothing. “What did you do?”
“I tried to get them out!” Li-Jared’s hearts thumped; his hands went to his chest; his thumbs rubbed at the jewels that he had frantically tried to claw out, until it was clear he would only hurt himself. And that was when the voices first spoke in his head. “It was the voices that stopped me. Have you ever heard voices in your head?”
“I always hear voices in my head,” Copernicus said mildly.
Li-Jared jerked his head in surprise, then shrugged with his fingertips. “You wouldn’t know the difference, then. You don’t realize how shocking it is to have someone suddenly talking to you that way. And to know that the speaker is actually inside you.”
Copernicus’s LEDs flickered. “I must try to imagine that.”
“Yes, well, when the voices spoke to me, I wondered if I’d lost my mind. But it did make me stop trying to dig the things out of my chest.”
“What did they say to you?”
“Stop trying to dig us out of your chest.”
“Is that really what they said?”
Li-Jared made a burring sound. “More or less. I think actually they said something like, ‘Please do not injure yourself. We cannot be removed that way.’ After I got over being scared witless, I started talking back to them.” Li-Jared sighed at the memory, and poked at the nearest food bowl with one finger. “We talked quite a long time that night. Of course, we spent a lot of that time just trying to figure out how to talk...”
“You were contacted by an alien race! Weren’t you excited?”
It felt like a million years ago, it felt like yesterday. Li-Jared’s hearts went momentarily out of sync. “Yes, of course! Eventually. But that didn’t mean I wasn’t annoyed at the way they did it.” He didn’t mention that he was also half convinced that he had gone crazy and was hallucinating the whole thing.
Copernicus clicked. “You’re in good company in that.”
Bong. “Yes.” I am in good company, he thought grudgingly.
“Both the captain and Ik have indicated feelings of...would resentment be the right word?”
“Don’t ask me what the right word is,” Li-Jared said. He drew a slow, whistling breath. “Still...I suppose there’s good that’s come out of it. I mean, we’ve helped people. And been given an unusual chance to...serve, I guess.”
“Indeed you have. We have, I suppose.”
Li-Jared looked up. He’d been studying his fingertips, without seeing them. “Yes, I would definitely include you in that.”
“How long was it before you knew the stones’ intentions?”
Li-Jared laughed hollowly. “Before I knew? I still don’t know. I mean, they seem to have taken Bandie as a kind of payment for saving his world. And I think they tried to save Ik’s world, or at least part of the population, even if they failed. But my world? I don’t know. Was it in danger? I suppose so; there was always danger. That’s why we call it the ‘home with a perilous sky.’ But was there a specific danger that we were saved from?” Li-Jared flicked his fingers in bewilderment. He picked up a biscuit-fruit and nibbled at it.
“How did they take you, in the end?” Copernicus asked.
Li-Jared ate half the biscuit-fruit before answering. The memory of the new stones was so vivid it made him shiver. The memory of being taken was just the opposite; it was a ghostly afterimage, a shadow on his brain. “It was the very next night. I’d gone back home.” He could see the clustered compartments of his little house in the woods as clearly now as if it were yesterday. “We’d had a very long conversation, not all of it harmonious. I hadn’t told anyone about the stones. In fact, I never did get a chance to tell anyone.” Li-Jared touched his brow. “Even now, I doubt anyone knows about my contact with an alien life, or where I went. They probably all think I vanished into the air. Which I did, sort of.”
“How did it happen?”
“It was night, but getting close to dawn. I stepped out of my house—I lived at the edge of the clearing. I wanted air; I wanted to look up at the sky; it all seemed so unreal. I hadn’t taken more than five steps, and I looked up, and suddenly realized I had passed through a boundary, because I was looking up through a golden haze. It was all around me, almost like a star-spanner bubble, not that I knew anything about them yet. I had just enough time to be surprised, and then—ffffft-t-t.” He snapped his fingers and made a gesture of shooting off into space. He’d lost consciousness, though he had a strange sense of blazing star-clouds passing by. When he awoke he was in a transparent golden tube arrowing across the stars toward what turned out to be Shipworld, with the galaxy he’d left behind spread out across half the sky.
Sunborn Page 30