by D L Frizzell
“Well,” Mayford said awkwardly. “Really…they don’t. I’m just trying to…keep things moving, you know.”
“He’s keeping things moving,” Redland mumbled under his breath.
Chapter Thirty-One
We climbed aboard the train and found that the interior was empty, save for a lone bucket seat in the center. There were no lights or windows, though somehow the space was well-lit. Only three meters wide, the cabin wasn’t the regular T’Neth blue like I expected, but a bright, undulating whiteness. Even the seat was the same color as the walls, not washed out, but almost as if it had no color. The door closed in the reverse manner it had opened, without a sound and without any seams when it was finished. I wasn’t too sure how I felt about that, but did my best to look casual.
“Now what?” Hathan-Fen said, eyeing first where the door had been, and then Mayford.
“Engineer Seku will provide seating for us,” Mayford said. “You should find this quite interesting.”
Seku motioned for us to back up. Once we were at the opposite end of the cabin, the blue wisps returned. They didn’t interact with us, but with the train itself. Seku’s chair glided away from us, not as if it were on a track, but like a chair-shaped ripple on water. The wisps ushered the chair to a position by Seku’s side, and then danced away like sparks from a fire. The wisps then re-oriented themselves into a sort of three-dimensional grid that subdivided the cabin into segments – like slices in a loaf of bread. None of my team seemed at all aware of the wisps, despite the fact that the little dots of light rushed back and forth through our bodies as if they were there, but we weren’t.
Redland reached for his face as a wisp zipped right passed his eyes. I thought he might have seen it, but instead he rubbed his forehead where the hangover still garnered most of his attention. The wisps didn’t register to him, but the brightness of the cabin did. “Any chance this light has a dimmer switch?” he complained.
Seku ignored him, as did everybody else.
We all startled when the floor began to move. Thinking it was turning to liquid as the doorway had done, maybe to drop us out of the train as unwelcomed guests. Seku looked up once at us…was that a smile on her face? She moved her hands over the floor as if warming herself by a fire. Instead of dropping out from under us, the floor transformed. Couches formed along the walls, expanding to a width that would accommodate three each. The couches subdivided into what looked like cushions, with dimples indicating where we should sit. The cushions thickened, took on the color of walnut, and then assumed a texture that looked like fabric.
Seku gave a slight bow, sidestepped as her own seat glided to the middle of the cabin next to her, and then sat on it, looking away from us as if the flat, bare wall of the cabin held greater interest for her than we did.
Mayford sat at one end of the couch, his form sinking in as if it were an actual cushion, and then patted the seat next to him for effect. “You almost can’t tell the difference from a real couch,” he said. “Please, everyone, take a seat.”
I shrugged, thinking this would only be the first strange event of a long, strange day, and set on the other end of Mayford’s couch. Redland sat across from me, scowling for what I’m sure were a host of reasons. Norio, always the diplomatic type, sat next to Redland. Kate moved forward and struggled with indecision as she looked at the two remaining spots, one next to Norio, and the other between me and Mayford.
Hathan-Fen huffed impatiently and wormed around Kate to sit next to Norio. She motioned for Kate to sit down.
As Kate sheepishly sat down next to me, the wisps came alive again. Scores of them moved transversely along the outer wall while some formed a three-dimensional axis in the center of the cabin. Dots and dashes circulated, aligned, and moved with a choreography that was so precise it could only be mathematical. Seku remained still through all of this, as though she were sleeping.
No, she wasn’t sleeping, I realized. She was busy. Very busy. I sensed no thoughts that could be put into words, but there was a great deal of focus. The wisps obeyed her commands, responding to her formulas as though they were linked directly to her consciousness. Every few seconds I noticed subtle changes in her posture that sent ripples of activity through the wisps. A shift here, a tick there, all had an effect. I leaned back in my seat to see her better. She curved her hands toward each other, and presently manifested an imaginary ball about the size of a melon. She ran her hands along the surface of the glowing blue sphere, turning it over, making adjustments with delicate swipes of her fingers, and reaching in to adjust other spheres that appeared and disappeared inside. To the others on the train, she was pantomiming. To me, Seku was playing a visual symphony of mathematics.
It was at that moment that I knew two things. First, although I felt no shift in momentum, we had just accelerated to a great speed. Second, the wisps did not obey Seku’s thoughts; they were Seku’s thoughts.
Hash marks, symbols, mathematical differentiations, with values from the microscopic to the near-infinite, danced through the air, with even their orientation having a bearing on their meanings. I couldn’t decipher more than a hundredth of the equations I saw flittering through the mind of Engineer Seku. It made me wonder what kind of chance humanity would have against the T’Neth if they ever decided to truly go to war against us.
“I thought we were in a hurry. We gonna leave any time soon?” Redland asked impatiently, waving a hand at Kate to get her attention. “Hey, Runaway, you want to ask her?”
Kate said, “I don’t hear Engineer Seku. I don’t believe we think the same.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Redland said.
“I don’t know.”
What I didn’t say is that I knew exactly what Kate meant. Engineer Seku operated on a different plane. Mathematics has been called a language of its own over the centuries, which might explain everything I’d seen since she piloted the train to Dolina. I could not explain, however, why I could see all this, while Kate could not.
“My question stands,” Redland said. “Are we waitin’ for the motor to rev up or what?”
“Marshal Redland,” Mayford said, “if you must know, we are already under way.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Redland said. “I’d know if we started movin’.”
“If you say so,” Mayford said, apparently learning the same lesson the rest of us had already learned about Redland; you can’t argue with a clefang.
“Well, how fast would you say we’re goin’ then, Doctor?” Redland asked, not wanting to be dismissed so easily.
“We should arrive soon.”
Redland stared at Mayford, then at me, and then threw up his hands. “Fine.”
Redland sat there brooding, quiet for once. Mayford also stopped speaking, but he had been right. I sensed in the wisps that we were moving a few orders of magnitude faster than the train had traveled from Dogleg.
I took advantage of the lull in the conversation to study the wisps and the mathematical shorthand that hovered around us. The patterns were far too complex to understand in the short time we had, because we started slowing down only ten minutes after getting under way. From what little I did glean from Seku’s visual thought patterns, I calculated that the train was slowing at a rate of hundreds of kilometers per hour per second. I hoped nobody noticed my jaw drop at that realization. How could the T’Neth break the fundamental laws of physics like that? In the world I understood, a change in velocity like that would have instantly converted our bodies into a gooey puddle at one end of the train. Instead, we sat there on our absorbent metallic cushions enjoying a respite from our otherwise bumpy travels. Before I could give it much more thought, the wisps disappeared.
Seku turned around, or rather, her seat morphed in our direction so that she could face us. “Arrival,” she said flatly. Our seats pushed us to a standing position, and then sank back into the floor, disappearing as if they never existed.
“How far did we go?” I asked, suspecting the truth but wanting so
mebody else say it.
Mayford smoothed some ripples from his outfit and said matter-of-factly, “Marshal Vonn, we are at the South Pole.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
“The South Pole?” Hathan-Fen said, disbelievingly. “How do you know?”
“In her reply to my request for a visit,” Mayford said, “she expressed that she wished all of you to understand the full scope of what the T’Neth have accomplished on Arion over the last ten thousand years. Although she will not be able to join us, it will nonetheless be an eye-opening experience.”
We looked around at the still-glowing, now-empty cabin of the train, which looked no different than it had when it picked us up.
“Do we…get a window or something?” Major Hathan-Fen asked. She brushed a stray lock of red hair out of her face, one of her many signs of annoyance.
Mayford pointed behind the major at the rear wall of the cabin. We all turned to follow his gesture and saw that a rack full of shimmering space suits had appeared on the wall. Mayford did not wait for us to respond, nor did he explain. He simply donned one of the suits over the top of his clothes and turned around for us to see how well it conformed to his middle-aged paunch. He grabbed a pair of oversized boots, which had also appeared out of nowhere, and slipped them over his own shoes.
Major Hathan-Fen pulled a helmet off the wall and tested its weight in her hands. “These look like the space suits I’ve seen in old history books,” she said. “Seku just…made them out of thin air?”
Mayford opened his mouth, which to me indicated he was about to explain how Seku had transformed one kind of matter into another. Instead he said, “It’s a molecular thing. You wouldn’t understand.”
Redland chuckled, reaching for a suit to put over his clothes.
Seku’s outfit changed as we suited up, first enclosing her hands with its silky blue material, and then inflating slightly. Her hood grew transparent and likewise filled with air as it encased her head in a transparent bubble. We all stared at her as if she were from another planet, which I supposed might actually be the case.
Once we all figured out how to seal the clasps in our more mundane-looking suits, Mayford raised his gloved hands to get our attention. “It will get cold in here when the engineer opens the door,” he said, his voice not muffled at all by the helmet. You should all make sure you see green lights inside the helmets before that happens.”
We all looked inside our faceplates, saw green indicator lights at the bottom of our faceplates, and told him so.
I recalled the teddy bear suits, which were barely sufficient to protect us in the Colderlands at the equator. Now I was standing – if Mayford was to be believed – at Arion’s southern pole. We were about to put our trust in the objects that Engineer Seku had created by sheer force of will, hoping that they would protect us from temperatures approaching two hundred degrees below freezing. Thinking that the visible similarities to our Founders’ technology were solely for our comfort – just as the couches had been – would we be able to trust that they worked? As amazing as it was, the train had impressed me greatly, but I still had doubts. In the end, I decided the T’Neth could have killed us in much faster and easier ways if they wanted to. For now, they wanted us alive and they wanted us to see something. Therefore, the suits would work. I hoped.
Redland echoed my thoughts. “We ain’t gonna freeze to death in these things?” he asked.
“They provide sufficient warmth, marshal,” Mayford assured him.
The train’s door opened, not where it had been before, but next to Seku at the other end of the cabin. She waited for the liquefied ramp to solidify and then walked outside.
As we shuffled cautiously toward the door, I heard a bending, crackling sound behind me. I turned around to see what it was, afraid one of our suits hadn’t sealed properly after all. Redland’s hat and mine, which didn’t fit inside the helmets, deformed as they shrank from the cold, and finally cracked into pieces.
“Well, shit,” Redland said. “Mayford, you owe me a new hat.”
Mayford looked back apologetically. “Sorry, Marshal. I Should have told you to leave them behind.” He stepped carefully down the stairs to join Seku.
Redland and I stared at each other, then wiggled our fingers to make sure they wouldn’t snap off. Hathan-Fen and Norio did the same thing instinctively, showing that we were all very far out of our element. Kate was being herself. She followed Mayford out the door without recognizing there could even be a danger.
Seku, Mayford, and Kate stood on the powdery white snow outside the door, waiting for the rest of us to join them. I felt like a scared little child, as I’m sure the others did as well. We took a tentative half-dozen steps into the snow after them, and when we still hadn’t been flash-frozen from exposure, I relaxed. Other than some lingering apprehension, I found the suit to be remarkably comfortable. Our feet scrunched loudly in the icy powder, which indicated that the suits did nothing to dampen sound.
We stood in a well-lit cavern, not built from T’Neth-enhanced concrete, but ice. Then I looked up and realized that we weren’t in a cavern at all because there was no ceiling.
Stars. Not just stars - a galaxy. There were more points of light than I ever imagined possible, enough to cumulatively provide as much light as Kithara did on the other side of the world. Twinkling in every color from yellow, to red, to blue, I saw the dim band of stars that first greeted us in the Colderlands grow to an oval that stretched across two thirds of the overhead sky. Clouds – no, I corrected myself, they were nebulae – obscured parts of the galaxy. Even they were breathtaking. My mind filled with the dizzying sensation that infinity loomed over our heads.
“Wow,” I said.
“This,” Mayford beamed, “is what we call summertime in the southern hemisphere. I’m glad you all came here when you did. Soon it won’t be so impressive.”
“How can this ever be less impressive?” Norio said.
“Oh, never, never,” Mayford replied. “But in six months, Arion will have orbited to the other side of Kithara, and the South Pole will be pointed the opposite direction. There are stars in that direction, of course, and even some beautiful globular clusters. Nothing this grand, however,” he said, and gestured at the galactic expanse.
“It is truly inspiring,” Norio said.
“Follow,” Seku said.
“Yes, yes,” Mayford agreed. “You outsiders haven’t seen everything yet. There’s the tunnel,” he said, pointing behind us. The train sat parked above a channel identical to the one at Dolina. “The canyon will lead us out of the mountains to the most astonishing sight you’ll ever see, present view included!”
I ran my space suit’s glove along the ice walls as we navigated the narrow canyon. I could feel every crack and texture in the ice, but none of the cold reached my hands. The T’Neth suits must have been an improvement upon the Founders’ designs, I figured. No human material could ever have been so light and unobtrusive, while still protecting us from such extremes.
Then another thought struck me. “Why aren’t we suffocating?” I asked. “Didn’t space suits need oxygen tanks or something?”
“Excellent question!” Mayford said. “I was hoping somebody would ask that.”
Hathan-Fen and Redland stared at Mayford. The thought of a limited air supply in our suits had not occurred to them, either.
“The suits are permeable,” Mayford explained. “Not much, just enough for respiration. That, plus the obvious heating capability of the suits, are powered by Arion’s magnetic field.”
“I thought we were in a node,” Hathan-Fen said. “Otherwise, wouldn’t the technology fail?”
“The suits operate on magnetic fields,” Mayford explained. “In the moderate climates, there are nodes where hotspots of unbridled magnetism can disrupt technology. Even these suits would have difficulty in those areas. The polar regions are different, though. It may sound frightening, but entire T’Neth planetary infrastructure is powered by mag
netic fields. What you see here at the South Pole is one of the few regions where the magnetic fields are working as they intended.”
Hathan-Fen shook her head. “It wouldn’t matter where we are if the planet’s core is churning out of control. That’s where the magnetic spikes come from, so I don’t see how any place could be safe.”
“I suspect there is a great deal more to be learned on the matter,” Mayford admitted, taking a moment to examine a fissure in the canyon wall, “but keep in mind that the T’Neth have had a very long time to adapt to these extreme conditions.” A moment later he added, “Please keep an open mind, major. You may learn something you didn’t expect.”
If not satisfied with his explanation, we were at least placated enough to continue. We began trudging toward the canyon’s mouth in the distance. The only sound, other than a distant wind howling over our heads, was the snow crunching under our feet. I saw what looked like an ice plain on the horizon ahead. The starlight above created a peculiar prismatic effect on the ice, almost making it look as if it were lit from below.
As we walked toward the canyon’s mouth, Major Hathan-Fen began to explain to Mayford what prompted her mission to Dolina. She talked about how Norio brought Kate to the military garrison at Celestial City when she detected a pair of T’Neth passing by. Colonel Jim Seneca, who had led the Plainsman militia since Alex’s father died, already knew a great deal about T’Neth activities. He also knew about Norio’s past, and the events that transpired in the Jovian Nation that caused him to betray The Guile. While the colonel believed the revelation about Kate’s T’Neth heritage to be an opportunity to learn more about their society, he also knew that her discovery by the T’Neth put a great number of people in danger. It was decided that Kate’s instinct to flee was probably the correct one. His best option in any case would be to get her to Dolina.
I was not especially surprised to hear that Colonel Seneca knew about Dolina, and that he was also the one to devise the plan to get Kate safely out of the city. What shocked me was the fact that he’d also been the one to recommend Redland’s release from prison. Redland shrugged when this came out in the conversation, and Hathan-Fen said there were details about that situation that she still didn’t have knowledge of herself.