by Grant Fausey
Crowds of philanthropists numbered in the hundreds, if not thousands. Brought forth in contact only millimeters from his body, their skin brushing against his garments, even his head seemed a potential target as a young street urchin leaped over him, her arms waling. A noisy shopkeeper, a half man, half beast sort of a thing with blemished eyes, long tainted fingernails and a beak like that of a parrot, barreled out from under a hanging blanket clearly marked for the shopkeeper’s wears. He was in the midst of a chase, a free-for-all along the streets of a treetop metropolis pedestaled among the tall timber of a rooftop community.
Magnificent, thought the hauler captain, a haven for ill-fated patronage. There was a sense of danger. The treetop city was as grand a civilization as any he had voyaged to in a hundred lifetimes. Shops of every kind, filled with vibrant and colorful eating establishments, and a host of otherworldly souvenir properties made a rich marketplace consumed with keepsakes. A young thief tracked from the entrance of a makeshift shake; a loaf of bread in hand, sweat driven from the fiery thread of his brow in the other. Jake held his station; glared up at the lad on his way by; even caught a glimpse of the grocer as he emerged from the bakery in pursuit of the thief. The robber wasn’t overly tall, or too short, but rather, in between like the middle son of a trio of brothers. Yet, nothing of the youth’s intended years were revealed by his apparent lack of stature. The curve of his face, however, blended with the shades of blue in his eyes, adding a sense of beauty to the dirty mug of a street urchin. The length of his dreadlocks, unmanageable as they were, gave way to his true identity. For he wasn’t a male, even though he ran like a linebacker, only to be collared by his shoulder.
The lad stumbled, leaping over Jake to land under a sort of four-legged walking contraption. The pilot covered his face, protected his vision from the flying debris of an argument that didn’t last. The mechanical beast reared up in surging anguish; screeched like an elephant with all the earmarks of a Kalamarian walker. It was nothing short of magic; a construction conjured up with the use of technology … the inanimate, given life.
He wasn’t taking the blame. Jake had the good sense to let the whole thing collapse in the middle of the street without getting involved. The young street urchin yelped, looking for sympathy but there was none to be found. The shopkeeper wasn’t in the mood for negotiating with the young thief. Obviously, he was a she: A Kelfin woman, agile but deadly, especially during breeding season. Obviously, the shopkeeper new his wears; it wasn’t her first time in the establishment. There was a sexual tension between them, something more at stake than a loaf of pepper stick bread and an apple blossom. He was the catch hereabouts. The vender dropped on her in a ritual of body language, catching a petty thief. She had conveniently carved out the middle of the bread roll with her razor sharp front teeth in a Kelfin mating ritual. The shopkeeper apparently valued his life more than the baked bundle of flour and Chicaroo eggs. The Kelfin woman fancied the consequences. The retailer was the target. She had gotten him to chase her, apparently for a lifetime. Kelfin women didn’t take “NO” for an answer. The alternative was a slow and painful death.
Jake considered his options, the clerk’s sneer signaled the end of an opportunity. Better to skip a domestic squabble then have his adventure unravel. He had an entirely new world to explore. Yet, there he was, in the arms of a remarkable, bright-eyed young woman who was holding him up. “Gamy,” said the pilot, salivating. “You’re gorgeous.”
The young woman stumbled, embarrassed. “Sorry Sir, I didn’t see you there,” she said, melting his heart. Jake was captivated by her stunning eyes, long blonde hair and perfect body, which he could only catch a brief glimpse of beneath her loose-fitting clothes.
“Please, sir,” she said. “Take no offence.” Apparently, she found his antics quite amusing.
“Thanks,” he said, repaying the complement a little glassy-eyed. Jake took one look at her and stepped off the wild side.
“There you go,” she said with a smile. Her hands brushed across the tops of his shoulders. “You okay?”
“Yeah, I think so,” answered the pilot. “Just a little disoriented I guess.”
“Nilana …” The young woman reached out with her hand in a ritualistic greeting. “That’s my name.”
“Jake Ramious,” answered the pilot, wondering if he was married yet. He knew better than to get involved with the locals. Customs were without meaning. Nevertheless, there was a spark between them; a glint in her eye, like the morning dew on a crisp green leaf renewed to the world for the first time.
She examined the wayward traveler further. “Where am I?” Jake tilted his head. “It’s like something out of a dream.”
“Or a memory?” Nilana glanced up at the pilot fond of her new playmate. There was something about her voice that seemed familiar, as if he had heard it before. The green-eyed beauty ran her fingers across his chin, leading him to his own damnation.
“It’s probably this thing in my hand,” he told her.
“You mean me?”
Jake looked at her curiously, mesmerized, but hoping she couldn’t read his thoughts. She was heading for the entrance of a makeshift shop.
“Ah––” he stammered. She pulled back the canvas tarp and stepped inside, leaving him in a stooper at the edge of the doorway. The hauler jockey stepped inside like an inquisitive child looking for a piece of stick candy. “I don’t think so,” answered the pilot. She did have her hand in his. “Who are you, anyway?”
“I told you,” she said playfully, “I’m Nilana. You’ll remember!”
“God, I hope so,” squirmed Jake, her voice intoxicating. He was helpless, a victim of his own unwitting charm. There was no choice but to follow her. The tarp fell by the wayside behind him. The young woman skirted a row of half empty boxes, disappearing between reams of cloth, several with odd-shaped symbols woven into the fabric. There was nothing visible beyond where he stood except the back of the room.
“Where’d you go?” asked Jake. The hauler captain pushed aside the rustic designed curtain and stepped inside. But there was no answer, so he released the canvas and entered the temptresses lair. The room fell dark. Silent. Nilana was nowhere in sight. Only a flicker of light penetrated the darkness from the glow of a surface illuminator at the back of the store. However, she was there, hidden in plain sight, amidst the stacks of crates. He couldn’t see her, but felt her presence, as if she was somehow a part of him.
“Sorry to do this to you, old man,” she said in a whisper. “But there isn’t much time.”
“Time for what?” asked Jake. He was on the offensive. “What are you talking about?”
“The future,” said Nilana; her voice resonating in his head with such pain, he could feel his temples throbbing. A flicker of movement caught Jake’s eye indiscriminately, visible between the varieties of fashions draped upon one another like animal skins over a stack of clothing.
The hauler captain lurched forward, ending up pressed hard against a stack of boxes crippled by empathy; her energy pulsing through his body, surging through his muscles. The pilot fell forward against a tower of crates, only to have the boxes topple against his weight. The pilot collapsed to the floor in a rhythmic pulse of memories. His fingers pressed firmly against his skull, a single memory drawn to him with the force of immeasurable lifetimes represented. It was more than a mere parlor trick. The fluidity of his attacker’s own essence coursed his veins; his mind gleaming with the radiance of the young apparition, nothing else was real.
“How do you know my name?” he demanded. Jake’s blood pressure dropped matching the vibration of his companion, his new heart rising with arrhythmia; no longer able to see her.
“I’m a symbiont,” she said coldly. “Your symbiont. We’ve traveled the eons of time together warrior of the light. I am all that you have been … all that you must be … join with me so that we may become one.”
Jake heard the calling of the sonance, but didn’t understand the significance
of her words. The pain in his head was overwhelming, the room spinning, the ground swirling beneath his feet until the makeshift shack fell away into a whirlpool of colored light, emanating between shades of blue and gray from within the confines of his brain. His body lifted from the ground, his spirit suspended in mid-air, a centimeter from the floor in the threshold of an event horizon. For a millisecond, he existed in two places at the same time: incoherent and afraid; apprehensive of whatever torture she had in store for him. The winds of time echoed within the memory of countless lifetimes, each etching its way into the temple of his mind, until his subconscious stripped away every inhibition.
“Arise Knight of the Ronna Kaa …” said the symbiont. “Awaken, and remember.”
TWENTY-SIX: Life Changes in Reality
• • •
“The future is being erased,” said the pilot, gasping for air. It was a moment of clarity that struck Krydal in the heart. For an instant, she was completely unaware of her surroundings. The universe had renewed his spirit, only to deposit him at the gates of Hell. He remembered nothing of his encounter with Nilana, or that his future never existed. He was simply a changed man. Dilated to the flare of initiation, his memories of the events held within the silence of subconscious thought. He mumbled inaudibly in a stream of consciousness, serene as it was before, two young lovers in each other’s arms. A memory refreshed with life, only to be dismissed in a picturesque milieu of dwindling light set against the familiar rumble of crashing waves. It all vanished in a heartbeat; erased in-lieu-of a new existence. He was different because of it.
The pilot’s arm rested on the ground next to the polished aluminum container housing a package capable of reassembling the face of an entire planet. The idea was fascinating, the reality of the endeavor, nothing less than apocalyptic. The arrogance behind such a device was lunacy. The thought of planets made-to-order was pure imagination made real. “It won’t work, you know?” he said in a whisper, drawing the attention of the corporate liaison. Brenda Hutton looked him in the eyes, hovering over his face. Krydal’s response was little more than a raised eyebrow. Jake didn’t know what he was talking about … or did he?
“What do you mean? Asked the corporate liaison. The hauler pilot took her hand, disoriented like a napping child. The thought of being involved with such a dastardly undertaking was more than he could possibly hope to forgive. There wasn’t a way he could sanctify such a blatant disregard for existing life.
“It won’t work,” he repeated, as if she had ignored his previous comment.
“The technology is perfectly sound …” lanced Krydal, walking on ahead of him.
“Not that…”said the starship captain; he was trying not to be condescending. The corporate liaison glared back at him. He grabbed her by the arm, tipped her heels into the dusty gravel and pulled her to him, staring her straight in the eye. “You and me,” he said casually. The corporate liaison recoiled. “We’re too much alike,” he insisted. “We’d end up adversaries, or worse.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about!” Krydal huffed, annoyed. There wasn’t much point in arguing. The face off was a lover’s quarrel, nothing more. Neither of them wanted to face the practicalities of their involvement. It was merely foreplay. Jake had to let her know how he felt, before Rooka took matters into his own hands and bit off her nose, despite her face. There was no way of enduring the consequences of his actions.
The young woman glimpsed the cylinder sitting on the ground adjacent to where Brenda Hutton and Jason Maccon assembled the housing. It was taking much longer than anticipated, but the work was delicate. The object had to be buried knee deep in the debris field. The pilot’s interpretation of the situation was correct. The thought of any involvement other than business was a folly, at least for the moment. Anything between them would have to be waylaid and quickly, until some future time for the sake of the mission. Nevertheless, there was that spark between the two of them.
“Who’s to say I’m interested in you anyway?” she asked, bluntly. “You take too much for granted.”
“No, I don’t!” Jake drew back a little huff. The fact that he was interested in someone so susceptible to such barbarous outside influences bothered him. The possibility of being involved with a woman so callus, regardless of how distasteful the overture was, he couldn’t help but be doomed from the start. She peeled back the flutter of his heart with no more effort than a word. There was something about her that mattered, even though the future was at stake. Krydal knew he was right, it didn’t matter what she felt. The truth was disturbing, their relationship a lie. Jake was angry, but there was no need to point out the obvious. Even when he tried, he failed. Jake pulled her close, embraced her in a passionate kiss, her lips mysteriously against his; her heart pounding, set ablaze with the warmth of his touch, the rhythm of her heart merging with his.
Jake stepped away, leaving her in plain sight. He snatched his wide-brim hat from the front seat of the Chariot and sported it atop his head, tapping it down as he rolled his fingers across the front of the hat straightening the brim ad he nodded to her with a tip of his head. He slipped a piece of sagebrush between his teeth, rocking the twig back and forth between his fingers.
Rooka shuddered. Jake was back, corrupted by her charm. Rooka sensed it. There was a feeling of love and competition in the air.
He watched the freighter pilot gripped the metallic case, held on tight allowing Jason Maccon and Brenda Hutton to lower the device into the plastic housing. It was bigger than he expected, irregular in shape. The context baffled him. The device was tapered to meet the edge of a flange, forming a square at the other end of the opening in order to match the shape of the base. Perhaps, it was the mounting bracket for coupling the apparatus to a bigger bomb. Rooka figured he couldn’t disable it, so why should he even try.
The Industrials were responsible for a great many enterprises on both sides of the abyss, but this he couldn’t fathom the truth of; his little rat brain had a hard enough time deciphering the reality that caused its existence, let alone how to stop the bond forming between Jake and Krydal. There were bigger issues to contend with than their little shipboard romance. The rodent suspected that she had a more delicate side to her than the coldhearted bitch her appearance led everyone to believe. Besides, he trusted Jake’s judgment. He was up to something. He knew how to handle her. It was obvious things were working out differently than she expected; events were unfolding in a different way than she planned. But most important, Jake wasn’t as gullible as she anticipated. He was charming, a bit of a red-faced rogue. Angry perhaps, considering he was exploring every possible reason for her demise. The circumstances warranted a reason for him to go to her rescue. He loved her, obviously, but he didn’t know why. He couldn’t see the change in her; there were too many subtle differences between them: A ripple here; a ripple there; even the planet altered with the wind of a stormy night, enveloping in world with cloud cover to cradling the celestial body. The future changed, with only the screech of their reality to back it up.
Jake heard Krydal scream and looked behind him. She was in trouble. He pressed down hard against the twig between his teeth, and spit the stem from his mouth. It had to be a dream, one with terrifying nightmarish consequences.
• • •
The spybot was translucent, but solid matter. Small electrical discharges raced through its body, sending impulses across the tiniest of synapses – each a terabyte of information – every byte on a single subject. Its four short legs scrambled backwards startled into action by the prying eyes of the corporate liaison. Krydal tripped over the spidery thing, landing facedown in the rubble; a dusting of dirty fog covering her head. Fear fired across the bug’s neurotransmitters as the damn thing hissed at her. The young woman’s first instinct was to squash the giant insect; rid herself of the confrontation; however, the insect had other plans and the corporate liaison found herself at the mercy of a nearly invisible assailant, outflanked at every move
. It was a miracle Jake heard her scream at all, involuntary as it was over the roar of the wind.
“Gamy,” said the pilot weighing his options, the terrain was uneven, hard to track across. The ground rippled with movement under some sort of transparent waves of energy. The spidery things were everywhere, hundreds of them, if not thousands. There was no way to make it to Krydal, not where she surrendered herself to the surface. The number of insects was growing on all sides and she’d have to come to him in a roundabout way.
“C’mon––” she shouted. “These freak’n things are everywhere.”
The pilot let out a primordial scream, running across the open terrain like a superhero on steroids. The insect machines scattered, leaving only a narrow pathway against the broken stone and slippery rock. Jake plotted the points between them and gestured in the direction of the Chariot. Krydal nodded. She understood the plan. The ground hauler was between her and the makeshift base camp. It was a long shot, but one she had to take.
Jake made a run for the hover truck, in the wake of his movement. But the valley floor separated. There was a sudden sense of real danger. The thin crust splintered in multiple directions, but he made it to the Chariot and scrambled aboard. The pilot reached for the corporate liaison, immediately launching her into the rear of the ground hauler. Krydal caught the side handrail, and pulled herself aboard, only to stumble backwards as she tried to steady her balance before slamming against the controls. The hover truck rocked back and forth like a boat, as Jake caught his footing. Krydal glared at him with one of those doomed if you do, damned if you don’t looks that didn’t require an answer. “I’m going,” he told her. “Hang on to something!”