The Sundered

by Ruthanne Reid

  “So be it,” Aakesh says, and the words rumble and tickle through my bones like feathers beneath my skin.

  I scream myself awake.

  It's day. The engines rumble and the sun shines, and people move around on deck, staring at me in my little pile of bedding because I screamed like a weirdo.

  Wait. I'm sweating. It's gotten hot. We're north, but it's hot. I'm sweating through my layers.

  Gorish crouches next to me, watching the horizon with that new, eerie stillness. What, no nice master? No petting? Nothing? “Harry.” That's Parnum, his voice thick from the air and from something else.” Come here. Quickly.”

  I scramble up, sore as anything, heart pounding, and join him at the bow.

  We can see what we're heading toward now.

  It's a big black thing. I'd call it phallic, but associating it with anything biological is wrong. It's tall. Rounded. It's huge, bigger than huge, with a slightly pointed top, and black as wet mud.

  “Harry.” Parnum whispers. “I think that's the Hope.”

  That ... thing is the Hope? That wrong thing, jutting from the landfall like some demon's wet dream? No, no, it can't be. What the hell is it supposed to do?

  It's gaining size awfully fast.

  Aakesh has always slowed us right before we reached land. He's not doing it this time. That tiny landfall is approaching too fast to be safe. “Aakesh?”

  He doesn't appear.

  I feel him, still tightly claimed, the weight of him in my head, but he's not here. I call louder. “Aakesh!”

  “Harry,” says Parnum, eyes widening as he grips my arm. “Harry, we need to move.”

  We're going to crash.

  What will this do? Will we go in the water? Why aren't we slowing down? “Aakesh, where are you?”

  He doesn't appear. Neither does Gorish. There are no Sundered Ones in sight at all.

  Parnum drags me back and presses me to the opposite side of the mast, wrapping my arms around it. Maybe so I don't go flying off when we hit.

  Where is Aakesh? What's going on?

  “Look out!” cries a sailor, and the captain tries to slow the ship, but he can't. This isn't his speed. He has no control.

  The black water is doing this.

  “Aakesh!” I scream, my voice cracking, and then we're out of time.

  ● ●

  ● CHAPTER 34 ●

  Jason Iskinder

  It’s a glorious crash.

  The engines grind and the hull cracks, and our ship tilts ass-over-face and sends us all flying through the air.

  I'm thrown clear, hitting the ground with so much force I can't slow. I roll into something hard and solid, and my shoulder shatters like dropped glass.

  I scream.

  The shock is bad. I can't get the air to scream again, not in this foulness, and instead start coughing. Knives of pain race through my arm and back and shoulder, but I can't stop.

  There are screams. Shouts. Weirder sounds as the engines try and fail to continue, and then there's an explosion.

  I can't see. Weird mud, tacky and crumbly and slick at the same time, covers me from my roll. I can't turn easily. Sitting up twists the knife-pain in my shoulder, and I cry out again.

  Parnum? Aakesh? Gorish? My Travelers ... I need Aakesh. “Aak-” Can't. Breathe. Can't. Breathe.

  Then Parnum's there, coughing, but he's there, pulling me out of the mud so suddenly that the knife-pain in my shoulder briefly takes my consciousness.

  I come to being dragged, dragged around the huge, black hideousness of the Hope. I don't see anyone else.

  “Harry,” Parnum gasps.

  Broken bone twists in my shoulder. “Where's they?” I slur, demented.

  “Stay awake, Harry,” Parnum says, my good arm over his shoulder. He's walking somehow, staggering in this foul air around the Hope—so big, I can't believe how big it is—looking for something along its black wall.

  There are so many screams behind us. “Need to help,” I pant.

  “We are helping,” Parnum growls, grips me around the waist, and takes my good arm. He places my palm against a little black square, shiny against the black monstrous flatness of the Hope.

  The square lights up, and a door slides open.

  Bright light and cool, clean air greet us, blinding, wonderful, and we both gasp it in like parched men guzzle water.

  Parnum staggers through, carrying me inside. It's white, so starkly unrelenting it hurts my eyes. There's a sound behind us.

  Aakesh.

  He's dragging himself, yellow mud staining his skin, and that he is filthy tells me more than anything else how unwell he is.

  “Aakesh!” I groan.

  “Be still, my lord,” he says, and his voice is raspy, ruined, like mine. Like Parnum's. He grabs my leg, and. ...

  Oh. The pain is going away. He's healing me.

  I try to pull away, but Parnum holds me where I am. “Stop!” I cry. “Don't do this! You'll die!”

  “This?” Aakesh says, and laughs bitterly. “This will not kill me.” He drops his hand.

  I'm no longer in pain. My nerves go from screams to whimpers.

  Parnum sits on the white floor, breathing hard. “Breathe, Harry.”

  “The others,” I manage.

  Parnum shakes his head. He's recovering faster than I am. “We cannot help them by returning to the outside and dying. We can only help them from here.”

  I lift my head, shivering in all this whiteness. Aakesh sprawls beside me, his blackness almost sallow. The whites of his eyes look yellow. He's getting worse while we're getting better. “Where's Gorish?”

  “Safe as he can be.” Aakesh speaks slowly. His hair splays out on the floor like waves of dark thread, unmoving.

  I look up at Parnum.

  The doctor touches the white wall, looking concerned. “This isn't what I expected.”

  “Your sources became ... corrupted over time,” Aakesh says.

  My Travelers. Did they make it? Did they see what happened? “What do we do now?”

  “We look. Can you stand?” Parnum offers me his hand.

  I take it, grip it hard, and meet his eyes. “Don't destroy this thing. Not yet.”

  He says nothing.

  “Doctor, you just admitted you don't know what this is. We don't know what it does. We don't know anything. We cannot condemn an entire species to death on a freaking maybe.”

  His eyes say that he can.

  I set my jaw.

  Parnum nods slowly, exhales. “You are right. Very well. Not yet.”

  Not yet. It's a ridiculous statement. As if either of us would know how to destroy anything this large.

  “We must not get lost,” Parnum says, heading for the other end of this searingly-white hall.

  Lost in a tube of blindness? I think I'd go crazy.

  Parnum strides forward. There's another door at the end of this hall, and another little black square. “Please, Harry,” he says.

  I'm puzzled until he takes my hand and presses my palm to the square.

  Another door opens, and now there's a sound. I don't know what it is—a smooth hum, like tenor voices out of tune, vibrating behind my eyes. I shake my head.

  He needed my hand.

  Why my hand? Why not his? Why not Aakesh's?

  My ancestors sundered these beings. My ancestors knew about the clues, and the map. My ancestors did something that meant only my hand could open this door.

  Aakesh remains limp in the hall, unmoving.

  I can't leave him there. I go back.

  “I am strong enough. I am fine. Do not touch me!” he suddenly hisses, baring his teeth.

  “I'm on your side, you moron.” I grab his arm, like Parnum grabbed mine, and pull him to his feet. If he wants to bite me, too damn bad.

  He doesn't bite. He leans. And he is hot. Uncomfortable. My neck starts sweating with his arm across it.

  The next room is bigger than any I've ever seen. The ceiling is so high overhead tha
t it peaks in shadow. White boxes rim the perimeter, flashing with tiny squares of colored lights all over, and thick black cables snake from one to another and into the white walls.

  We stare, my mouth open. Aakesh seems less impressed, but then again, he can barely move.

  “Harry!” comes from behind us, and I nearly drop him as I spin.

  Demos stands in the door, muddy, bloodied, alive.

  How did—I don't know and I don't care. “Demos!” I put Aakesh on the ground, I swear not roughly, and run to him. Demos grips me, a real hug, and behind him are all my other Travelers, all the ones I feared dead in the crash, they followed me, they're here, they came.

  “You're alive!” I'm not alone. “You're okay.”

  “Barely,” Demos says with a weird smile, his voice still hoarse. “We followed your first-tier.”

  He has a name, dammit. “Aakesh is dying.”

  They don't care. “What is this place?” Toddy says, turning in a slow circle.

  Colored box-lights flash on and off. That tenor hum continues. I swallow. “I think it's the Hope of Humanity.”

  “Uh.” Demos rubs his shaved head. “What does it do?”

  “I guess we'll find out.”

  “My lord.” Aakesh sounds so weak. “Your Parnum is gone.”

  I am an idiot, and Doctor Parnum is not.

  “What?”

  “Where did he go?”

  “Parnum's gone?”

  Nobody saw. There are nearly a dozen doors around this room, most of which don't have black squares. He could have gone through any of them, and he left no muddy footprints—he took off his boots before sneaking away.

  Quick, smart man. Oh, hell. Oh, hell.

  Demos puts his hand on his knife. “We have to find him. Split up and search.”

  My Travelers partner off and head to different doors, leaving me behind.

  I kneel by Aakesh.

  “Do not waste time with me,” he says.

  “Shut up,” I say again, and pull him up, his arm across my neck. It slips a little, still slick with my sweat.

  I must feel like a corpse to him.

  There's a door with a black square here. I know Parnum isn't in there. But ... for some reason, I pick this one, anyway.

  I want to learn the secrets of this place before he can. It might mean everything.

  We go inside.

  This is a bedroom.

  It's the size of a nice hotel room in Tenisia. A large bed, a fancy toilet, a little sink—and a desk covered with papers.

  Handwritten papers. These are somebody's notes.

  I put Aakesh on the bed.

  The air is artificially cool, clean. Perfect humidity. Maybe that's why this paper didn't fall apart. It's not white anymore, and it's gone kind of crisp, but it doesn't crumble under my fingers.

  The name at the top is Jason Iskinder.

  Chills race up my spine. That same name is neatly written at the top left-hand corner of each page.

  It's all out of order. Pages of calculations I can't interpret, pages of words I don't understand. If there is a dating system, it doesn't make sense to me. “Son of a bitch,” I mutter.

  Pages and pages of quick, neat writing. I'm starting to see a theme. He talks about “insufficient fuel sources,” and “the mass of the propellant has failed to reach required velocity.”

  Something went really wrong here. I don't understand any of this. I flip through to find something else.

  There's a map, a map with strangely smooth lines all over it, but I recognize the position of most of the landmasses. This is my map, printed instead of handwritten. At the very top, in the center, where the Hope would be, is the word prohibited.

  Prohibited.

  The p wasn't for predator. It was prohibited. To keep people from coming to the Hope? Why? Why? I wipe sweat from my face.

  The next words I read make me go numb.

  She is the first child born in the new world, and I couldn't be more pleased, regardless of the fact that she was an accident.

  Wait.

  I sink slowly to the chair, which squeaks under me, creaking like ghosts. First child born in the new world?

  The water was never blue.

  No. No. No.

  Aakesh watches me. On the bed, weak and limp, he watches me see.

  This world is the way it's supposed to be.

  This was never Earth.

  ● ●

  ● CHAPTER 35 ●

  The Hope of the Sundered

  The name of the ship was Hope of Humanity.

  Jason's papers talk of landing here because the planet's atmosphere was hospitable to human life. He talks of fleeing an Earth they killed, leaving Earth a dying planet, little more than a sunbaked clod of mud.

  He talks of being the only humans worthy of survival, with an arrogance that I can barely believe is real.

  There were fifty-three of them on this ship. Fifty-three humans “worthy” to survive. My ancestor boasts they were the best minds, from every country. The best genetic stock to start over.

  To start over from a world they killed.

  I make a sound, keening, panicked, and bite my tongue to keep from making more.

  There's a picture clipped to this page, an actual photograph. A man with my eyes stands next to Aakesh.

  Yes—that is Aakesh without the kilt, unabashedly male. He looks different, just a little, something subtle about the jaw or the eyes, but that's Aakesh. And behind him —

  Are those ... Sundered Ones?

  Hordes of them, flying in the air and crowding on the ground like a curtain of living people, and almost none of them have a gender. They're all smooth, beyond male or female.

  “We found your genitalia fascinating.” Aakesh's voice is so quiet.

  I just look at him, too numb to laugh. “What?”

  “This is what we do, Harold Iskinder. We mimic the shape of things that please us. We enjoyed your genders, and we copied them for our own pleasure.”

  That's why none of them look alike. That's why they can't reproduce, not the way we do. That's why ... “Is this you?”

  “Yes.”

  “That's four hundred years ago. How old are you?”

  “I was nearing three millennia when your people arrived here.”

  I laugh harshly, and it chokes off all on its own. Three millennia? Three thousand years?

  We never had a chance.

  The journal entries go on. Jason bitched a lot about this place. He said entering the atmosphere took a toll on the ship, and nothing here could be used as substitute fuel. He said the reactor core malfunctioned, leaking, and was already damaging the sky and air.

  Making it ashen-yellow, maybe?

  Another thing is clear. Nobody treated him badly. He just hated this place because he'd been Mr. Genius back on Earth, and here he was just ... a guy.

  He took that really personally.

  I have isolated the brain wave which permits their fluency of communication and matter manipulation, and I have named it the Sigma wave.

  Whatever actual mechanism they use to affect the physical world with thought is beyond my measurement, at least without postmortem examination, but at least now I can confirm to that idiot Sykes this is not magic of any kind.

  It's incredible how naive they are. They hear our thoughts, but have no concept of how disparate those thoughts can be. They trust Sykes. Therefore, they trust me, and when I asked for privacy, they granted it.

  I must maintain this privacy at all costs. If my shipmates know what I think, the natives will, too, and our chance to take control of this situation will be gone. For now, all my notes will be handwritten, so no one can stumble across them in the database.

  I have not come this far to let humanity die out on this miserable mud-ball of a world.

  “I pitied them.”

  I look up.” What?”

  Aakesh shifts. His hair dangles off the mattress. “I chose mercy when your people arrived. Mercy for
homeless, sundered beings. I should have slaughtered you all.”

  I stare at him. Sundered?

  Oh, look. Jason used that word, too.

  Their leader had the gall to call us sundered, as if somehow, being a species of individuals is a lesser state. As if our entire culture, with creations and technology they can't begin to grasp, is nothing compared to their utterly primitive simplicity!

  It is fortunate they are not listening to me now. No one knows what I know: between the sentience in the water, the dearth of technological development, and the simple lack of anything we can use as fuel, we will never leave this dismal planet. We must make our home here, where its current denizens have utterly failed to use natural resources to their advantage.

  “You called us sundered.” My voice is thick.

  “You are. Separate from one another, weak. We were whole—you were not. Your clever ancestor named us that once we were broken. He thought it ... very funny.”

  Sundered.

  They're not individuals like us. They never were. They're like one big creature, somehow, feeling each other, aware of each other. Even broken, they're one in a way I can't understand.

  We must have looked so strange to them, so sad and alone.

  I was right: the equipment that places us in stasis for deep-space travel can be adjusted to suppress the Sigma wave. I believe that once I've networked our own Theta and Alpha brainwaves into the system, we should finally have control. The natives shouldn't be able to refuse us anymore than we could tell our hearts to stop beating.

  I drop pages to the floor.

  I can't do anything to erase this. To make these words not real.

  One last page rests on the table, with large words scrawled along the top and underlined.

  READ THIS

  This will be my last entry, which I leave in case someone should come after me and fail to understand what is here. This vessel gives you power over the Sundered. This vessel keeps you in control.

  Should they be free, there will be reprisal. To prevent this, I have programmed a failsafe into this ship. If the vessel is shut down without the proper access codes, it will release one final signal. This signal will turn the Sundered off, for lack of a better word, forcing brain death before they can become dangerous.