Sean tightened his hands into fists until they shook from it. “Because you were brilliant! You are brilliant. You have the kind of mind that comes along once a century. Once a millennium. You were going to do so much. So very much. Who was I to deny that to humanity? Who was I to claim that you couldn’t continue your work?”
David shrugged, pushing his spectacles back into place. “They found out anyway.”
They had. Of course they had. David had been stripped of rank and all the credentials granted by the University. Sean had been working toward his degree, using the money David could spare to pay him, hoping to earn his degree, become a Doctor Elementalis like David, but that had all changed after the accident. Afterwards, he could worry only about his body, about keeping it alive until the doctors from the Royal Society came up with something, anything, to help him, and even then, he would have a long way to go to repair the damage he and David had caused to his career. No matter that they’d eventually found David guilty of gross negligence in the pursuit of science. They hadn’t absolved Sean from his part in it.
After standing and adjusting his shirt, David stared Sean in the eye. “This is the world we’re talking about here, Sean. Not you and me. Not the Society. But everyone. Life on Earth.”
Sean felt consumed. He felt betrayed all over again. “I could die, David. Or are you going to give me assurances again?”
“No, you’re all too right. You could die, Sean. And there’s more. In a way, I believe the two of us are responsible for this entire series of events.”
“Responsible?” Sean felt confused. Angry. He wanted to run. He wanted to use his enhanced muscles to punish David for what he’d done, make him feel what he felt every day.
“I’m surprised you haven’t pieced it together yet. Our experiment. Fifteen years ago, we touched the very fabric of quinta essentia.” His eyes seemed to bore into Sean’s. “A mere two years before the haulms arrived.”
“Two years,” Sean said, ready to argue, but his mind was already racing through the calculations. Theories abounded about how quickly one might travel through space using elemental drives, but David himself—shortly before he’d been discredited—had put forth a new theory: a way to travel by distorting and drawing upon the warp and woof of quinta essentia. According to David’s calculation, two years and ten days, roughly, was by a strange twist of probability the time it would take to travel from one world to nearly any other. Quinta essentia’s pull, converse to popular opinion in the science community, was stronger as the distance increased, which led to a tethering effect that might allow a starship—or an extraterrestrial being—to draw itself from one planet in the universe to another.
He thought back from the date they’d run the experiment to the first recorded sighting of the haulms. Two years and seventeen days. A mere six days off from David’s calculation. How could he have missed it?
He knew why, of course. He had still been in the thick of his rehabilitation then. The University had been furious, but many were concerned about their liability, so to make things look as though the University were being magnanimous, and to further a long-running experiment that was just readying for human test trials, they offered Sean a chance to receive their first set of human ligature. He’d accepted, for it meant a chance at life—some sort of life––however painful it might be. While he’d been recuperating in the hospital, he’d hardly seen a single haulm—a few from the small window of his room, a few more from the place he was forced to exercise his muscles with the newly installed ligature, so the arrival of the Jovians, and whatever relationship they might have had to his experiment simply hadn’t been on his mind.
But now the link was undeniable. Six days was certainly a reasonable amount of time for the Jovians to mobilize and launch the haulm seeds toward Earth. The Jovians were parasites, then. Creatures poised like spiders on a web, waiting for the telltale signs of planets that were not only capable of storing quinta essentia, but had advanced to the point that there would be an abundance, enough for them to travel there, to revitalize themselves, perhaps reproduce, and then begin the process all over again.
He might have felt burdened by this new information—he should have—but the truth was this was incredibly freeing. To know that he might have the ability to help gave him hope and a sense of purpose that had been nearly snuffed out by their past failures. And David was right. Whatever success they’d achieved last time might have had everything to do with Sean himself. If he denied David’s request, there was no telling whether it would work for anyone else, or, even if it did work, how long it would take to perfect.
He had to do it. Not for David—certainly not for David—but for everyone else. For Therese. For his family. For the world.
“Where do we begin?” Sean asked.
David’s smile was slow in coming. He waved to the corner of the large open space, where a set of stairs led down. “In the basement, Sean. We can begin right now.”
* * *
In the basement of the factory was a bright set of equipment, clearly well cared for, that warred with the dark wooden rafters and uneven stone walls. Vats of glass containing a glowing amber liquid could have provided much of the light, but there were lamps of quinta incendia placed all around, their shaded points of light burning bright sapphire blue.
Sean stepped into the padded leather seat within a complex set of mechanical arms and lenses and tubes, and when he was comfortable, Vidnas, David’s assistant, secured him into it using triple-thick leather straps. As usual, David had thought well ahead. Sean’s ligature was strong, and they couldn’t risk him ripping his way out of the seat during the experiment itself.
Vidnas, his brown, almond-shaped turban a match for his expressive eyes, paused near Sean’s side. He smiled, his dark moustache and beard accentuating nearly perfect teeth. “Are you feeling well, sir?”
No. Sean wasn’t feeling well, not now that he was so near a return to the experiment that had devoured his future. He couldn’t keep the strange feelings of emptiness from his mind, the feelings of utter loss and loneliness.
“Feeling as well as I ever will,” Sean replied.
Vidnas patted his shoulder and moved to the set of metal stands nearby. Each stand held an armature with a set of lenses that would, when David gave the signal, be situated in a spherical formation around Sean’s head.
“Ready?” David said.
“Give Therese the letter, won’t you? If anything goes wrong?” He might have told her himself, but she would never have allowed him to come here and submit himself to this. She’d kill him first.
“Of course I will.”
“And tell her I love her?”
“Of course.”
Sean nodded. “Then I’m ready.”
With that, Vidnas and David began moving the lenses into place. They adjusted the clamps and telescoping rods so that the armatures rested at the proper angle and position. Each of the armatures held twenty-five lenses with watertight jars clamped to their backs. The jars were fed by tubes connected to a series of pipes that would be filled from the glowing vats of quinta integra, an extremely difficult-to-stabilize mixture of the four basic elements: incendia, aeris, terra, and unda.
As each set of lenses was moved carefully into place, Sean’s heart began beating harder and harder. His breath came rapid as a frightened hare.
“You’re about to hyperventilate,” David said as he glanced over. “Breathe deeper. From the stomach, remember?”
Sean did, and slowly the entire chromatic apparatus was maneuvered into place around him. Outside the sphere, Sean saw segmented visions of Vidnas and David moving about, making final preparations.
And then, at last, David gripped the valve that would begin the process. “Last chance,” he said with a melancholy smile.
Sean couldn’t help himself. He laughed. It was the exact same thing David had said just before their first experiment.
“Into the great beyond,” Sean replied, an echo of his o
wn reply from fifteen years before.
David gave him a nod and strapped a set of thick, leather-wrapped goggles around his head—another incredible advancement, for surely David had developed them to view some crucial aspect of the experiment as it happened. He nodded to Sean—looking to all the world like some strange Jovian insect—and then threw the handle of the valve. The tank levels slowly decreased as the viscous amber liquid inched through transparent pipes. Slowly but surely, the quinta integra crept toward the narrow rubber tubes. The liquid split and split again, surrounding Sean like a hydra, each serpent doubling when its head was severed.
The liquid began filling the glass jars behind the lenses, and as they did, as more and more of the ingenious lenses David and Sean had developed were backed by the quinta integra, Sean’s mind began to expand.
He felt more than his own body. More than this room.
He floated free among the aether.
Became one with quinta essentia.
How beautiful. How utterly, unexplainably beautiful. A vast, endless world of chromatic shapes. He saw this place, this old abandoned shoe factory. He saw Vidnas and David and his own body. He saw the rundown streets near the factory, and the River Wear that wound its way through Durham. He saw the University, the whole of Durham, the whole of England. He could feel Earth itself, the solar system, the Milky Way galaxy. Faster and faster it went, this expansion, until, just like the last time, he felt as though his mind were trying to encompass all of creation.
It was too much.
His mind was drifting from his body, which was exactly what had happened to him the first time they’d tried, exactly how his mind had been irreparably harmed in its refusal to control his body as it once had.
David had told Sean about the changes he’d made to the elemental serum and the lenses themselves. In all likelihood, he’d said, the unchecked expansion should be limited, which should allow Sean to exert some amount of control.
Sean…
He wasn’t able to, though. He couldn’t. And his mind continued to attenuate as it stretched outward, through and throughout the fabric of the cosmos.
Sean, can you hear me?
By all that was good, he couldn’t do it. He would become lost this time. Lost for sure.
Sean, you must listen. The pods. They should be a sink for quinta essentia. They’re consuming it, Sean. Look for them. Feel for them. They’ll ground you.
Sean felt, only for a moment, his body tightening, heard a primal scream issuing from his throat. But then those sensations were gone, and he was alone once again. Alone with his thoughts in this endless, universal medium.
What David had said, though… The pods.
They were a sink. Consuming quinta essentia.
No other known beings fed on the fifth element. Not directly. That simply wasn’t the way the universe worked. The very fact that this natural law had once seemed so immutable and now seemed every bit as implausible as a geocentric universe grounded Sean. It drew him back toward his physical form and nearer to that very phenomenon.
And that’s when he felt them.
The pods. The pooling of intent near him, around him, surrounding, essentially, all life on Earth. Like a subtle adjustment of a lens bringing a landscape into focus, he could sense every part of them, and now that he could, he realized how very familiar they were. He’d felt them before, in that event fifteen years ago when he’d first entered the quintessence.
How could he have forgotten it?
They had called to him then, and they were calling to him now. He felt from them a yearning, a primal urge that spanned millennia. It wasn’t malicious, as his memory had somehow made it seem, but benign. He’d been so fearful of it years ago. He was still fearful, but not for his own sake, not any longer. He was fearful the Jovians wouldn’t understand humanity, that in their curiosity they’d trample the minds they’d come to examine, or they’d decimate life on Earth even as they studied it.
His heart, David. He’s going into tachycardia.
The pods were reaching in the only way they knew how. They were holding their hands out to him, ready to take him should he wish to come.
Should we continue?
A pause, and then, Just a moment longer.
Unlike the last time, the urge to accept their call was strong and growing stronger. He flung his mind outward, wondering what grand thing would happen.
Now, Vidnas. Shut it down.
And suddenly the feelings diminished.
He grasped for them, but they became dimmer and dimmer until—like a mote of light that had finally burned itself out—they winked from existence.
* * *
When Sean woke, it was to the sounds of clinking, like crystal goblets at a party. Had he come home? Was Therese readying for a party?
And then it all came back in a rush. David. The lab. The pods, and the way they’d called to him.
He forced his eyes to open and thought he was still in the basement of the warehouse, but when his mind cleared, he realized it wasn’t Vidnas before him, but a nurse in a white hospital gown, and she wasn’t cleaning the bell jars and the lenses that had surrounded him, but the set of vials the University required to refresh the liquid stored within the core of his ligature.
He felt so very weak. And his muscles, his joints, his skin felt as though they’d been reforged improperly, leaving him more broken than before. Though he tried to stifle it, the pain brought on a weak groan that nevertheless attracted the nurse’s attention.
“Are you feeling very well?”
“I’m—” Sean could barely speak, so slurred were his words. “Where’s David?”
She continued about her work. “David who, sir?”
“David Lock.”
She shook her head. “Never heard of him.”
He stared at her. Surely David had brought him here. “How did I arrive?”
“You were found on Stockton Road, unconscious. Constable Adams found you and brought you in, and a good thing he did. Your fluid had nearly turned. Haven’t you been keeping an eye on it?”
“Of course he has.” Sean turned his head to find Therese standing in the doorway. She strode in to stand by the bedside. “Each morning. You can set your watch by it.”
The nurse gave Therese an icy stare. “Then I’m sure I don’t know why his fluid had degraded so.” And with that she topped the vials and left.
As the heels of her white leather shoes clicked away, more and more of the puzzle fell into place. He’d asked David why he didn’t perform the experiment on himself. I can’t, he’d said. Not yet, in any case. I have to take measurements. I have to refine the process.
He had to refine the process, which implied there would be another run of the experiment. He had needed Sean. He’d said so himself—Sean was the only one who’d entered quinta essentia so far—but he’d used Sean so that he could perfect the parameters surrounding the experiment. Which meant that he’d planned all along to do it himself afterward. That was the only explanation for leaving Sean as he had—so that he could remain anonymous in Durham until it was too late.
Therese stared down at Sean. Her hand lifted, but then she lowered it again. She knew from experience that even holding his hand at a time like this would cause him discomfort, but Sean reached out and took her hand, squeezed it, oblivious to the pain. “We have to talk.”
* * *
As Therese sat by his bedside, her eyes stared through him. Her hands were shaking. She glanced toward the cluster of clear vials hanging above Sean, the vials that had allowed him to retain some sense of normalcy in his tortured existence. The tears gathered in her eyes finally fell down along her cheeks. “I can’t do it, Sean.”
“Therese, I can’t go on like this.” He lifted his arms, the whirring of his ligature emphasized his point much more eloquently than he could with words alone. “It’s worse than before.”
Therese was crying freely now. “I’ll help more. We’ll hire a man to come to the hou
se a few days a week. It won’t be so bad after a while.”
Sean took her hands in his. “I’m going to a better place.”
“I can’t… I can’t just let you go. I don’t know what I’ll do without you.”
“You’ll go on. You’ll be free.” Before she could speak again, he squeezed her fingers gently. “Now, Therese. There’s so little time left.”
She stared into his eyes for a handful of heartbeats, then another handful more. After wiping her tears away, and a short but powerful nod, she went to work. More quickly than any of the nurses could manage, she disconnected each of the feed and return tubes from his ligature. She helped him up in his bed, a veritable angel for how strong she was being, how little of his own power he needed to exert, lest he moan and the two of them were caught. She disrobed him and helped to pull on his clothes. After giving him a familiar look, asking him if he were ready to be on his own, he nodded, and then she leaned in and gave him a deep kiss.
Bliss, he thought. A more tender thing he had never felt.
She left the room, leaving the door open a crack. “Who’s been tending to Sean Brannon?” Her voice was so loud the entire ward must have heard her. Some unintelligible reply came, but Therese talked over the woman. “While you’ve been ensuring the levels were correct, he was dry as a bone. Did you even see the color of his urine?” A soft reply came. “No, I’ve given him water. He’s hydrated. What I want to ensure is that he manages to remain that way while I’m gone.” Another mumbled reply, also cut off. “No, I’ll be speaking to the attending physician, thank you very much!”
“Bless you,” Sean said, as he slipped from the room and limped toward the stairs at the end of the hall.
* * *
Sean reached the warehouse at the end of an excruciating walk. He would normally have loosened up by now, but things were worse than ever. His knees kept wanting to lock up, and his hips and ankles burned so badly he collapsed several times. But he got up, fixated on the siren call of the pods—in some ways a distant memory, but in others the entirety of his being.
In the Stars I'll Find You Page 3