The three of them walked along the reef as far as they could in the direction of the beach. By the time they reached the end of the coral, the water was up to their waists and they had to be careful to not be carried away with the waves.
It was an incredibly beautiful day. By day, Primus-3 really did look like paradise. The water was like crystal. The sun felt warm and invigorating against their skin. It was nothing like the shores Charlie had known in his previous life. They had been dirty and ugly. The shores of Primus-3 looked like a place you would want to spend the rest of your life relaxing in.
Ahead of them, the ocean floor could be seen maybe forty or fifty feet below. A long green creature, like a sea-anemone and a manta ray had had a baby together, glided peacefully by. Round and multi-colored orbs moved past in v-shaped formation, like birds did in the skies of Earth. There was no way to know which ones might be dangerous, but none of them looked it. All of the diurnal life forms in the ocean looked peaceful and content.
Brightly tied a cord from her waist to Mew Tse’s. Then she took a second one from Charlie’s survival kit and tied him to the aquatic woman. Each line was extremely thin. It may have been meant as fishing line. They were about twenty feet long.
Mew Tse counted down. “One, two, three,” and then all three of them dived into the ocean together and started swimming towards the beach.
Charlie still thought the water tasted like curry.
Once they were in the water, he couldn’t see or even notice the line anymore. Charlie just swam. The water around Mew Tse glowed bright red. It wasn’t just that she glowed, but the water for maybe three or four feet was lit up, like an extension of her video screen.
A long fish, no wider than a trout, but at least forty feet long, swam beneath them. After the first one went by, a half dozen more followed. They were silver. Both the golden sunlight and Mew Tse’s rays reflected off of their skin.
The ocean floor beneath them was fairly shallow at first, but then seemed to drop away into unfathomable darkness. They couldn’t see the rocks or the sand or what monsters might be lying beneath them. The leviathan might have been there. A school of leviathans might have been there.
They had been struggling for more than an hour when Charlie suddenly felt a sharp tug around his waist. It pulled his head down under the waves unexpectedly and filled his mouth with water. He swallowed.
He kicked out and tried to surface, but there was a second tug and he was pulled further down. Mew Tse’s red glow seemed to be coming from somewhere below him.
Unable to get to a tool, Charlie began pulling at the cord around his waist and trying to rip it. He pulled spastically for a while. He cut his thumb, and then the knot gave up and released him. Charlie swam up to the surface as quickly as he could. His lungs were burning and he had swallowed a lot of water.
As he broke the surface he could see the water was red. At first he thought it was Mew Tse’s glow, but then he felt the blood in his eyes and tasted the iron in his mouth. He just about coughed up a lung while fighting as hard as he could to try to tread water.
Was it his own blood? Was it Mew Tse’s? Was it Sally’s?
He finally managed to take a deep breath and was trying to see below him, through the red clouds of death, when a hand took hold of his arm.
The captain turned around and saw Mew Tse. She wasn’t glowing. She wasn’t projecting anything on her skin. She was naked. Her real skin was blue, but otherwise her body was normal and female. The future-woman held the exhausted captain above water and helped him swim the rest of the way to the beach.
When they were in the sand, Charlie just lay there for a while huffing and gasping. His muscles all felt like rubber. The hundreds of cuts and scrapes and bruises all over his body seemed to be singing in pain. His clothes were painted red with blood.
“It was Sally. Teeth rose up.” Mew Tse explained.
The amphibious woman didn’t seem tired at all. She walked erect up onto the beach. Once on land, she reflexively covered her naked body with the image of a new, clean, pressed military uniform. She took a few minutes to look around and then came back and knelt down next to Charlie.
“You need shelter,” she said, and it only then occurred to him that she might not. If she had lived underwater on her own world, she wouldn’t need dry land at all.
When he could, Charlie got up and the two of them began walking along the shore. The beach was actually quite large. There were rocks. There were enormous vegetables which looked almost like trees, but were slimy and soft to the touch. The shining mother-of-pearl shells which he had noticed when they landed with the first load of Mud Men were littered here and there among the rocks.
After they had walked for a few minutes, Mew Tse pointed at a tall rock out-cropping. “We landed over there.”
“Are you okay?” He asked her.
She nodded demurely.
“Sally said you were shy. Did you and I know each other well?”
Her tiny little mouth whispered, “A little.”
“Avraam and Wu will have been back for a while now. Sally should be waking up soon. When the others see them, they’ll know that something has gone wrong. They won’t know the details, but they’ll know that some of us died.”
She didn’t respond.
“How long have you been alive this time?”
“First time.”
“But how long?”
“Five years.”
“Then we must know each other well. Or, you must know me well.”
She nodded.
“What’s it all about? Nothing about us or our mission seems to make sense. You’ve at least had time to think about it.”
She stopped, and then raised a hand to his chest to stop him as well.
She closed her eyes. Her body burst into a kaleidoscope of colors. At first it all seemed random and meaningless to Charlie, but as he watched for a while he began to understand. All of the shapes and movements had been carefully designed and orchestrated. They made him think about Amber. He couldn’t say why. The shapes didn’t really look like anything, and yet every movement brought her to his mind. It was like the gestures of color and shape summoned her. Wu Gwei and Avraam would come back to life. Sally probably didn’t even feel anything more than a pinch when the teeth tore her open and she would be back. But Amber wouldn’t be saved. He would never see her again, never talk to her again. He felt empty and his chest began to shake, despite his best efforts to control himself.
He raised his hand and covered his eyes with it, unable to look any more.
Mew Tse wrapped her arms around him and pulled him against her. With his eyes closed, there could be no illusion. He felt her breasts against his chest. The side of her face was against his mouth. She held him tightly, sympathetically. She understood why he was so upset. The alien girl had known him for five years. She had probably seen him go through all of this before, perhaps many times.
Charlie opened his eyes again and she was crying.
“Why are you crying?” He asked.
But she only replied, “Amber.”
He pulled her back against his chest and they cried together for a while.
9
Mew Tse and Charlie found the spot where their shuttle had dropped off the Mud Men. It was the widest part of the beach, and partially shielded by high rocks on three sides. It was clear why Sally had chosen that spot to land in.
He thought again about the conversation he had had with her in the Genesis Room a couple of nights before. Even if he’d done as she’d asked and agreed to turn over the power, she would still be dead and he would be captain again. Then he stopped and thought again. If she had been captain she would have slaughtered the Mud Men and they would never have been on that world.
He liked her and he didn’t like that she was dead. But he still felt like he had made the right decision.
Charlie recognized the same tidal pools he had seen that first morning, but they were all fuller than he remember
ed. The water was at least three feet higher than it had been the last time. This gave him a clue as to how late in the day it was.
It was getting late.
They didn’t find any caves, but there were a few points at which the rocks above leaned in. they would provide limited protection against rain. It was not going to be as safe a shelter as the one they had on the reef, but at least they were on dry ground. Standing a good distance away, Charlie considered three potential spots. One of which had the most shelter, but seemed like it might be too close to the water. Charlie was worried that it could flood.
The other two were roughly the same distance from the shore and just as likely to be safe. He paused for a moment and considered them.
As he looked at the one farthest away, he found himself thinking about Wagner. It was strange how Die Walkure suddenly and passionately burst into his head so clearly and so distinctly. He had learned how to play an interpretation of it on his guitar. He remembered having a lot of fun with his friends once upon a time figuring out how to transpose the notes, how to reinvent the song.
As he looked out on the rocks, a long thin white cloud ran behind one of them. He imagined a series of lines just like that, and the long tall rocks could be notes against that bar. Could you play a landscape that way? The hills and valleys representing As and Bs and Cs?
And then it struck him, just as hard as when their ship had crashed in the water. The rocks he had been staring at would fit Die Walkure; as if nature or some ancient sculptor made placed them exactly where they needed to be. Not just similar. It was exactly so.
Accepting the impossible omen, Charlie led Mew Tse over to that spot and announced that they would weather the storm there as best they could. From up close, the bar and the notes disappeared and Charlie found himself wondering if he had imagined the whole thing. It just couldn’t be possible. It was too large of a coincidence to find Wagner in the placement of monumental rock.
They began digging in the sand to try to make the shelter better.
Drinking water wasn’t a problem. Wu Gwei’s survival kits included small filtered cups which purified the water. It still didn’t taste right, but it worked. And the cup was much too small, Charlie hated having to drink one sip at a time and then wait for the purification process to complete again, but he figured that the fact that he was able to drink water from an alien world was miracle enough.
Food was a bigger problem. They had no way to know what might be safe or dangerous to eat, and after seeing Avraam’s problems with parasites, they were both afraid to risk it. Charlie’s belly hurt. He knew that soon enough they would have to start taking their chances by eating the creatures around them.
He watched Mew Tse. She was standing in front of a red and orange rock. The rock’s face was mirrored on her front. From behind and the sides, she looked like she was wearing a uniform. He wondered if wearing the image helped her to understand what she was looking at, to feel her way through it. Could his lifetime of experience ever really let him understand what she was doing? How much had humanity changed between his time and hers? Was she really still human the way he was? Maybe he was a homo erectus in her eyes - or maybe just a monkey?
The eye on the back of her head seemed to look at him. It was strange to see an eye without a face. It didn’t feel like a real person was looking at him. She had three eyes, just like he did, but they were very different. Perhaps she could give him some advice on how to use his third eye?
Charlie passed his fingers over his sealed third eye and mumbled to himself, “Maybe I’m a monkey who just got transformed into a man?”
He found a large flat psychedelic green and yellow rock and carried it over to the spot they had chosen for the night. It wasn’t huge, but it would help. He laid it on its side, against the larger rocks and pushed the sand in around it. It occurred to Charlie that the rocks on Primus-3 looked similar to the ones of Earth, just simply more colorful. But how could rocks really be different? Were they the same on all of the billions of worlds in the universe? He didn’t have an alternative in mind, but it struck him as interesting that the rocks might be basically the same no matter where they went.
The colors were different. The animals were different. But the alien planet could almost have just been a far-away country. Alaska was as different from New York as Primus-3 was, maybe more so.
He spent the next two hours digging in the sand and found three more large rocks, which he positioned to protect them as best he could. Mew Tse had made a very small and smoky fire which would not burn all night, but it was a start.
The tide was in and the beach had shrunken dramatically. The shuttle’s landing site was underwater, but there was still a good distance between their shelter and the waves. Charlie hoped that when the storm came, the waves wouldn’t reach up the rest of the way and take them.
They took one last look around them to find what kindling they could. There was a sharp and prickly grass which grew in clumps here and there which could be coaxed slowly into flame. There wasn’t much of it and they both cut their hands repeatedly gathering it.
When they had done all that they could to prepare, the two of them huddled together behind the rocks and the sand. The ground was already getting very cold against Charlie’s legs. Mew Tse climbed on top. She wrapped her body around his, holding him intimately. There was no awkward moment or shyness. No caution. She held onto him with an emphatic grip, like iron; her arms around his shoulders and neck, her long legs around his waist.
Charlie was more than a little startled by her forwardness, practical as it was. They needed the body heat. The previous nights they had been four and five bodies tucked together into a small cave. The rain had begun again and there was the very real possibility that they could freeze if they didn’t hold onto each other, but she held him more intimately than that. And of course, illusions aside, she was actually a naked woman except for a thin belt and the survival kit Wu had provided her.
Charlie held onto her almost as tightly as she held him. Her skin was soft.
The rain was immediately cold and the wind blew roughly through his hair. Every now and then the sand would blow up and try to get into his eyes. He had to hold one palm cupped over his face. She nuzzled her face into his chest, but did not protect the eye in the back of her head. Charlie adjusted their positioning so that he held the back of her head and hid his own eyes behind his arm. He had to reach farther than he realized because her tear-drop shaped head was so long.
“Thank you,” She whispered warmly.
From that position, he could only see her neck, jaw, and shoulder, but she had stopped projecting. The illusions were all gone. Mew Tse’s skin was really darker than he had imagined, a deep blue like an aquatic animal’s. It looked young and smooth. It glistened like a water-creature’s.
“Do you know about my third eye?” Charlie asked, as the rain began to fall harder.
“Yes,” she whispered.
“I don’t know how to use it. I don’t know if your third is the same? When I try to open it I see the colors which aren’t colors. I see things…things like shapes, but they’re not shapes. And my head hurts. Then when I close my eye, I can’t remember it right. I can’t picture the colors and shapes the way I saw them anymore.”
Mew Tse moved her bottom and adjusted the way she was sitting on Charlie. Then the skin on her shoulder transformed. It had been a dark blue-silver, like a dolphin’s, but it burst into light. Even as the rain fell on her, her skin was bright like a monitor screen. Black and crisp words appeared in front of an off-white background.
The words read, “You’ve had the third eye in every incarnation. It’s not new. But we’ve never been able to make it work properly. When the eye is open you can see beyond the human realm. You can see things mortals, or at least humans, were never meant to be able to. But your brain isn’t advanced enough for the information.”
“Is yours?” he asked.
The words continued to appear in front of
his eyes. “I don’t see what you see. I see the world around me in 360°. I can see two colors above the human spectrum of colors and four below. I can see at a detail other people can’t. And I can remember it all. I can remember every detail of everything I’ve seen for at least the last few days. But I can’t see what you see. Your extra eye captures transdimensional information. Maybe energies which are invisible to the rest of us? We really don’t know what some of it is.”
“How do I learn to use it?”
“I don’t know for sure. The previous versions of you never did. I know that the longer you keep that eye open, the more it hurts you. It hurts your brain. I think you could do something terrible to yourself if you kept that eye open too long.”
“Do you think it’s a glitch?”
“You’re not a glitch, Charlie. If anything, it’s a mutation. You’re more than they intended you to be.”
The light went out and she pulled herself against him more tightly. The fire was gone, extinguished by the rain. And the weather had gotten very loud. The wind and the surf were shouting at them. Far away, they could hear a sound like a very large and angry animal was crying in anger. They both imagined it was the leviathan, furious that the last of its meals had escaped and hidden themselves.
She felt nice in his hands and, for a while, he thought about Amber as he held her. They were soaked. The rain washed over them like a river. The storm was rough, and vicious, and it pounded against them all night long. Again and again they thought they were going to die. Charlie and the woman from the future held onto each other with all of their desire to live as the world trembled and quaked and tried to shake them off.
August 2299
Queen Delilliyah stood on the observation deck as the royal cosmobarge descended through the colors of the Venusian atmosphere. The storm outside was a swirling flesh-tone of pink heat. Where the space-craft cut through it, the sky compressed to red and purple.
The Secrets of the Universe (Farther Than We Dreamed Book 1) Page 16