The broken bench had lodged itself against a large piece of the reef. It looked like Charlie was actually a good distance above the water level. He decided he and the wreckage must have been carried up there by a wave.
Looking around, he saw several pieces of the bench nearby, all glowing with little dots in their sides. The reef itself was both slimy and sharp, but it didn’t break off in his hand. It was solid. The captain started to climb down, looking around him.
It was raining hard. Someone was shouting. Charlie fumbled his way down to a larger and flatter spot and could then see a fire burning. The voice was coming from that direction, but under the sound of the waves and the rain he couldn’t tell if it was human or Mud-Man.
Up above he saw what might have just been a trick of the light, or might have been a tentacle as long as a mile swinging across the sky, god-like, thick, purple, and angry.
Charlie climbed up over an out-cropping and the yellow and orange light of the fire grew brighter. He could see two figures standing near the wreckage. One was a Mud-Man, but he thought the second might be human?
And then another wave came and took Charlie away. He hit his head against the coral. It cut his cheek and his hand. Then it dragged him out to sea. Beneath him he saw the largest piece of the shuttle falling away towards the deep. There were two limp bodies tumbling down after it. He saw what might have been an eel or a plesiosaur swimming away.
Then an angel appeared.
She was golden and bright. The whole ocean seemed to suddenly be as bright as daytime. He could see all of the weirds and the strangefish darting here and there and hiding behind their rocks. The angel smiled at him and swam closer. Around her belt she carried a bag shaped like the one Wu Gwei had handed out, but it was gold and brilliant and shining. She wrapped her arms around Charlie and began pulling him up to the surface.
Wu Gwei had tied himself to the reef. He reached out and took the angel’s hand. He lifted her and Charlie up as if they were children. Wu Gwei leaned in towards Charlie and said, “Hold on. Hold on tightly.”
And the next wave hit.
Charlie held onto the angel and he held onto Wu Gwei. The angel seemed to lose her concentration and stopped glowing. As the water hit, Charlie couldn’t stop to get a good look at her, but the woman in his arms seemed nearly human. She wasn’t golden any longer.
His chest felt like it had been kicked by a horse, but Charlie held on. As the wave subsided, Wu Gwei helped the two of them up and into something like a small cave which had been formed in the reef. It was all very slimy and Charlie hoped he wasn’t climbing into anything’s mouth, or ears.
“Mew Tse. 28th century,” The former angel whispered very quietly into his ear.
“Charlie Daemon, 21st,” he replied.
Across her body, the woman projected something like a video of the two of them sitting at a table. He was laughing and she was smiling. They were both drinking. The red skinned woman, Kalligeneia, was with them and it looked like she was holding hands with Charlie, but it was hard to tell. It looked like her silhouette had suddenly become a video monitor. In the second scene the woman and Charlie were hugging each other, not romantically, but like they had known each other for years. Then the movie ended and her face re-appeared. She had two large eyes in the front, with what looked like complex and compound pupils. As if four galaxies were crashing into one another. Her head was elongated and large, coned. She turned to the side and it looked like she might have a third eye on the back of her bald head. Her mouth was exceedingly tiny.
Mew Tse reached into her bag and took out a small cylinder which she began to rub on the scratches on the side of Charlie’s head.
“Heal,” she whispered.
Another wave struck the side of the reef and water leaked in from a dozen small holes, but it didn’t overwhelm or even soak them. Wu Gwei grunted and then thrust a weak and gasping Sally Brightly in through the opening.
The pilot tore open her jacket and began gasping. Her clothes were in tatters and there were scratches on her legs and stomach, but she seemed to be uninjured. Her left hand still held an iron grip around her drive-gun.
The flames from their burning vehicle out on the reef lit their hole as Mew Tse wordlessly reached out for her. She began smearing Sally’s stomach with the same cylinder she had just used on Charlie. Sally was clenching her teeth and fighting the urge to scream from the pain.
She didn’t look human. Even Umbra Farrah with all of her fur had looked like she was from Earth, maybe like a Yeti or a Bigfoot or just a gorilla-woman, but there was nothing on Earth like Mew Tse. Could she be an actual alien? Umbra hadn’t gotten to finish telling him all about the crew and history before Gloryannana had interrupted. She had never mentioned humanity meeting alien races. Was that what Mew Tse represented?
He was a little afraid of her, even as he watched her tending to Sally’s wounds and felt the tingling on the side of his face from the work she had just done to help him.
6
Avraam tumbled into the hole growling and spitting some hours later. His shirt was gone and there were red and green sucker marks across his back and chest. Some were as small as pennies, and two were more than a hand-span across.
“Leviathan threw me – threw me back. I’m too small,” Avraam joked in a strange weak voice.
His left hand had been shattered. Every single bone was broken. There were teeth or horns or tusks sticking through the same arm, which had punctured him and then been broken off. The liquid which poured out from those wounds was yellow, not red. But there was also plenty of red all over his body and continuing to drip from the Russian’s broken body.
One of his boots was gone and the stitching in the seat of his pants had surrendered. Sally pulled a long white needle from his leg. It wasn’t clear to Charlie if it had been embedded in Avraam’s flesh or simply the fabric. She tossed it away into the corner.
“How long will it take them to find us?” Charlie asked.
“I’m not sure how they’ll know there’s anything wrong,” Sally answered. “This is not a normal crew. We don’t have someone stationed at a desk monitoring us.”
“Why not?”
She shrugged her shoulders. “Well, it’s not how I would run things on my ship.”
“Then we’ll fix that when we get back up.”
“If we remember,” Avraam added with a wincing smile.
“Could we send someone? If one of us died, is there a way to send a message back with them to go and get us?” Charlie asked.
“We don’t bring anything with us when we’re reborn. I think our souls travel from the old body and into the new one, but no memories and no possessions,” Sally answered.
“So, there’s no way to send a message with them,” Charlie thought out loud.
“That would be like sending a message with an unborn baby,” Wu Gwei shook his head. “When we’re reborn, we’re new. Just as you remember nothing of the lives you lived on Shamballa before this one, none of us ever remember a single moment before the most recent life began.”
“Alright. You, you’re some kind of cyborg, right? Can you communicate with the ship?”
“No. My enhancements are for battle.”
No one spoke for a moment.
Then Wu Gwei continued. “They won’t notice our absence right away, but they will notice in a day or two. I would expect that within three days they will start looking for us. We can either plan to wait three or four, perhaps five days, or we could all just kill ourselves and start again in the Genesis Chamber. Captain, the choice is yours.”
The waves calmed down. The rain stopped falling, and the sun began to rise. Morning was bright and peaceful. The sky was light pastel blue again. The clouds were white and fluffy once more. Each of the packs which Wu Gwei had handed out contained a long thin line of rope. Charlie tied himself to the coral by the entrance and went outside to have a look. Wu Gwei was already outside.
There was a large melted chunk of th
e shuttle maybe twenty feet away from their coral cave. It wasn’t burning anymore and the seats’ glowing lights weren’t shining anymore. He could see one dead Mud-Man caught in the wreckage. He hoped the rest had managed to swim to safety.
“There’s not much of use,” Wu Gwei reported. “I suggest we take the lines and the sharper pieces of the wreck and use them to catch some breakfast.”
“Do you think it’s safe?”
“I think going four or five days without eating is decidedly unsafe.”
“I spoke to Umbra Farrah on the ship. She was telling me about the crew. Your story was a little scary,” Charlie said cautiously.
“It was a lot worse than she or you will ever know. The ancient Vedas had a name for an age like my time in history. They called it the ‘Kali-Yuga,’ the time when virtue is impossible. You won’t ever understand and I doubt you will ever agree with my decisions, but all light would have been extinguished had I not been the most horrible monster of my time. If the world is a prison, you have to start a fight with the world’s worst monster.” Wu Gwei had a serious look on his face as he spoke. He then paused and a wide smile appeared. “This world is beautiful. I think you and I and our friends will die here soon, and the time it takes will be a treasure if we choose to look at it that way.”
There was something large hiding under the water, not far enough away from where the two men were talking. Charlie pointed at it. Wu Gwei turned, frowning animatedly again. He lifted his arm. There was a clicking sound and the metal arm seemed to grow wider. Charlie then heard a high-pitched electronic sound and watched a long spike launch out of the cyborg’s armor and into the water.
There was a spark of electricity. A fin reached up out of the water and then a puddle of darkness flowed out from it into the clear water.
Wu Gwei walked over to his prey. Small fish-like creatures tried to beat him to it, but he swatted them away before dragging the carcass onto the land. The creature had a series of three fins on its back and four human-like hands under its belly. Its back was almost black and its underbelly was light green. There was no visible face.
“Tell me you’re not going to eat that.”
Wu Gwei smirked and lifted the body higher up. “Either that, or we eat the Russian in a couple days?”
“I’ll cut my way out of all your bellies, no matter how many pieces you cut me into,” Avraam coughed as he emerged from the shelter. He looked terrible.
Sally walked out just behind him. She held her arm against her chest to protect her modesty from her ripped top. She was still holding her drive-gun.
“We need a fire,” Sally said.
“Is there any wood?” Charlie asked, looking around.
There was something which looked like it might be plant matter ten or twenty feet under the water, but no sign of trees or timber. He walked over to their shuttle’s wreckage to see if there might be any part of it which was flammable, but not yet burned up. He didn’t immediately see anything useful.
“If we catch enough fish, we can burn them,” Wu Gwei offered.
“That would mean a lot of fish. How many of those harpoons do you have in your arm?” Charlie asked.
“Not enough.”
“I have sixteen in my gun,” Sally offered.
Mew Tse walked out. She appeared to be wearing a clean and undamaged uniform, but there was something strange about it. The uniform had no depth to it. It was like someone had painted one on her. But it was so well done and so complete Charlie wasn’t sure what he was looking at.
In the daylight she looked as strange as she did the night before. Her eyes were massive and far more complicated than Terran eyes. Her head was long and tall. She couldn’t be human, could she?
Charlie took one last look at the wreckage and then walked over to her.
“You saved me last night. Thank you.”
She nodded.
“You may or may not know. I didn’t get, or don’t remember my briefing, so I don’t know about my crew. Are you… human?”
She looked down at the ground, embarrassed.
Sally answered. “Mew is a post-human. She was designed to live on a water world in the 28th century.”
“A water world? That’s perfect. This is a water world,” Charlie said excitedly.
Mew Tse looked around nervously, and then slowly walked down to the water. As Charlie watched, her uniform disappeared and her body seemed to transform into a woman-shaped container of water. She then jumped into the waves and disappeared below the surface.
“Did she just turn into water?” Charlie asked.
Sally laughed. “No. Mew can project images onto her body. She doesn’t change shape, but her skin is like a computer screen. She can walk around naked but look like she’s wearing clothes, or like she’s invisible, or water, or a different person.”
Avraam added, “Yeah, but the cool part is when she’s in the water. She can use the bath or a pool or part of a lake and project images onto it too. She can play movies or just make things up.”
“That’s amazing,” Charlie said.
Avraam continued. “Yeah, that’s why she doesn’t talk much. She lived her life underwater where opening your mouth and talking didn’t work so well. Instead, they designed her as a visual post-human.”
“She’s also just a shy woman,” Sally added.
Wu Gwei was chopping up the animal already.
“What did she do in life? They didn’t just pick her for her DNA, did they?” Charlie asked.
“She is an artist,” Avraam said, with admiration. “A very important visual artist, like a Michelangelo, or a Schatzberg of her time.”
Something large flew by and covered the four of them in a shadow for a full five seconds before it passed. Charlie tried to look up at it, through the glare, but it seemed formless. Whatever it was was nothing like a bird.
The reefs on Primus-3 were very different from the ones on Earth. Vast spires shot up out of the water to almost touch the clouds. They looked like ribcages to Charlie, as if they were attached to gargantuan dead bodies which were hidden under the waves. The tide was out that morning and they could see far more of the reefs then than when they had first landed the previous afternoon. Great wet bodies lay on the exposed coral, many of them with claws and teeth and one which even seemed to have teeth chomping back and forth inside of its claws. Some of them were uncomfortably close to the humans. One large beast, which was sunning itself maybe thirty feet away, appeared to be covered with spiked armor and it was looking at Charlie with one hot red eye.
“When you were captain, did you ever go to a planet like this one?” Charlie asked Sally.
“Not exactly, but similar. Mine was an age of exploration. We went to worlds like this. We took samples. We fought giant amoebas and chimeras who wanted to eat us. This is like a regular day at work for me.”
“That’s amazing,” Charlie said with sincerity. “I can’t imagine ever seeing another planet. I mean, I couldn’t have imagined. You have to understand, my life has just exploded. This has all happened so quickly.”
Sally sounded empathetic. “Sure, the early days are always hard for you. This is not the first time I’ve seen you as a new-born. You’ve just been through a traumatic experience. You blew up that evil computer which wanted to destroy the world. You were expecting to get to rest.”
“I wasn’t expecting my friends to die.”
“Or Amber,” Sally added.
Charlie looked angry. “You all know so much about me. It feels invasive.”
“I’m sorry, Charlie. You’re a historical figure. They taught your life story when I was in high school. But, more than that, you and I are friends. I’ve had to watch you get over her more than once.”
The captain didn’t answer. He found himself silently staring out into the sea.
“But you do. You always do.”
Charlie’s throat cracked as he replied. “Thank you.” He took a deep breath before continuing, “But it’s not that
easy. The people I’ve lost weren’t fictional. They weren’t historical. If you know me, you know that Amber was the best thing that ever happened to me.”
Sally smirked. “It’s a shame that you don’t remember more of your life. You would know that that won’t always be true. You were married before you became president. You had children.”
Just at that moment it occurred to Charlie that Sally was a natural leader. She knew just what to say to him. He understood that when she had asked for him to hand his job over, it wasn’t because she wanted the power, but because she wanted to help.
“Always the whining!” Avraam groaned. “I like you much better when you’ve been alive for a few months. I feel like I had to get over Amber last time.”
“Shut up, Avraam,” Sally said sharply.
“I’ve died. I’ll die again. It’s not so bad. Maybe next time you’ll be brought back to life in some future museum and they’ll give her back to you. The universe is strange. Everything happens eventually.” Avraam tried to sound carefree, but the pain was in his voice. His wounds were serious.
There was a splash of water, and Mew Tse rose up from the waves again. For the briefest of moments, Charlie thought he saw her naked, but it happened so quickly that he couldn’t be sure if he really saw it at all. As she walked on shore, she appeared to be wearing a clean, dry, and neatly pressed uniform.
“Beautiful,” she said, quietly.
“What did you see?” Wu Gwei asked her.
The post-human woman spread her arms out wide and began to broadcast the images on her body. They were so detailed and clear that Charlie had a hard time believing that this was done with only biology and not some kind of glass screen and computer, but she was from a time seven hundred years after his own.
He watched her descending down through the tide. The number and variety of life-forms was nothing but terrifying. They were so different in shape and color and form that it was simply overwhelming. At first, Charlie found himself wanting to look away, to close his eyes and take the time to process all of the information. But after a while he relaxed and let go. The images kept coming, one after another, as Mew Tse’s movie dropped lower and lower under the surface of the water.
The Secrets of the Universe (Farther Than We Dreamed Book 1) Page 13