by Thomas Locke
“Right.”
When Dillon was gone, she asked, “What is your language called?”
“English.”
“Where is this spoken?”
“The United States. Well, a lot of places.” Then he realized what she meant. “Oh. I’m from Earth. It’s an outpost planet.”
“Your world is not joined to the Assembly?”
“Nobody on Earth has any idea that other human civilizations exist. But if they did, it wouldn’t make any difference.”
“Why do you say that, Sean?”
“Can I ask your name?”
“Of course. I am Elenya.”
For some reason, he shivered. “Nice to meet you, Elenya.”
“And you, Sean. Will you answer my question?”
There was a formality to the language that left Sean talking in a manner he never had before, and doing so comfortably. As though he always managed to express himself in chants that shared hints of emotions as well as words. And what he felt just then was shame. “I don’t know exactly what is required to join the Assembly. But if unity and peace are two conditions, Earth doesn’t stand a chance.”
“Don’t be so sure. There are stories of many planets that have struggled and grown despite themselves.”
“Including Serena?”
She smiled a second time. “No. My planet has not known a war in over two thousand years.”
“Wow.”
“Yes. Some might call that boring.”
“Not me. I’d love to see a planet that’s forgotten what war is.”
She made a strange sort of gesture, like she was opening an invisible portal and bowing, all while seated. “Then you should come. Be my guest.”
“Really? We can do that?”
“We must ask Josef. But he says yes. Sometimes.” She smiled a third time. “Perhaps you should let me make the request.”
“Absolutely.”
“I can be very persuasive.”
“If you smile like that, I bet you can wrap Josef around your little finger.”
Elenya laughed, and the room shivered with him. “That is something I would like to see.”
She rose then, and he felt a very deep regret that the moment was over.
They walked down the empty hall toward the transit chamber. When they stepped inside, Elenya said, “Let us meet here tomorrow, yes? Allow me to share with you the reason why all of Lothia is excited.”
Sean wasn’t normally so glib with girls, especially one so lovely. But the words came almost unbidden, as though he had waited all his life to have the chance to tell her, “I don’t know if I can stand much more excitement than being with you again.”
She graced him with the finest smile of all, and was gone.
Sean stood there a long moment, looking around the matte-grey walls with the lone symbol and the narrow bench and the bland lighting. The air held a faint trace of some fragrance, gentle as a summer wind. He wanted to lock everything that had just happened down where he would never forget, not a single fragment. He realized that by switching to Serenese he had caught a glimpse of the woman behind the words. And what defined the emotion carried in her words was warmth. Affection. Invitation.
28
The next morning, Josef heard them out in thoughtful silence. Then he told Sean to describe the process a second time. Josef sat in utter stillness. Gone was the jovial giant, the caring teacher. His intensity was so overpowering Sean was left stammering.
Josef opened a drawer and pulled out two pads and pens, handed one of each to Sean, rose to his feet, and said to Dillon, “Come with me.” A few minutes later he returned and asked, “Can you read Lothian?”
“I’m learning.”
“Then we will use my own home world’s language. Give me your pad.” Josef wrote swiftly, then showed the page to Sean. “Do you know what this means?”
“No, sir.”
“Good. Send it to your brother.”
“We’ve never tried doing an image.”
“Even better. Go ahead. Do it now.”
Josef had not said to try. Do. Sean focused as tight as he knew how. Then he sent.
When he looked up, Josef asked, “Is it finished?”
“I think so.”
He left, moving amazingly fast for such a big man. He was gone long enough for Sean to grow more nervous still. He finally shot off to Dillon, What’s going on?
He’s writing. Hang on. There was a pause, then an image flashed in Sean’s mind, this one of a script he had never seen before. It looked like cursive hieroglyphics. Sean was afraid he’d lose it, so he bent over the pad and got busy. Josef entered and loomed over him as he worked.
When he was done, Josef frowned over the pad and slipped behind his desk. “Tell your brother to come back in.” When Dillon entered, Josef said, “It seems remarkably simple, which some say is the standard for all brilliant ideas. I wish to try this communication. Are you willing?”
“Sure. I mean, yes, sir.”
“All right.” Josef shut his eyes. Then, “Do you hear me?”
“No, sir.” Sean turned to his brother. “Anything?”
“Not a peep.”
“Sorry, Professor.”
“No, no, this is important. There have only been a few other twins who both became recruits. A significant percentage have proven to be what we refer to as adepts.” Josef pondered for a long moment, then sighed and placed his massive hands on the desk. “But that is for later, yes? You did as I asked, and now I must live up to my side of the agreement. Give me a few hours . . . This will be your first Lothian Solstice, yes?”
“We don’t even know what it is.”
“Then you are in for a treat.” Josef tried to offer them an encouraging smile. “Come see me when it is over. I should have made arrangements by then.”
29
The rumbling began as they were walking from Josef’s office back to the seniors’ classroom. It felt like an earthquake that had not quite reached them yet. A student who passed them said to a friend, “Looks like somebody jumped the mark.”
Then the claxon sounded, a blast of noise that Sean felt in his bones. If a car was made as big as a city, its horn would have sounded like that. The claxon gave off a long, low blast then went silent, only it now seemed as though the entire world was mimicking the noise with horns of their own. Even the building holding the classroom gave off a booming roar from somewhere overhead. This was the first real evidence they’d had that the building holding the school was actually surrounded by other structures, that they were actually in a city. There were hundreds of horns. Thousands.
Dillon asked a passing student, “What is going on?”
He asked the worst possible guy, a tall Lothian with hair gelled into angry spikes tipped in silver. Matching black pants and vest with silver spikes up the legs and ringing the shoulders. Eye shadow and rings everywhere—evidently skin art was a galactic event. And the attitude to match. He sneered, “Don’t you know anything?”
The girl walking alongside him would have been called Goth back home. She answered, “Apparently not.”
“I know enough to not look like a pair of dorks,” Dillon said to their backs.
A voice behind them said, “Don’t mind them.”
Sean turned and felt the same swooping dive as the previous day. He switched to Serenese and said, “It sounds like a city on the move.”
“It is, in a way.” She turned to Dillon and gave him a solemn look. “Hello, Sean’s brother. I am Elenya.”
“Dillon. Hi.”
“Dillon. It suits you.” She did not actually dismiss him. More like her intent was to focus on Sean. Exclusively. The thought was good for the day’s first shiver. “I was looking for you. Where have you been?”
“With Josef.”
She nodded and held out her hand. “Come.”
“Where are we going?”
“To witness the most beautiful moment of this planet’s year.”
They joined the stream
of students passing through a door that before had been permanently locked, up three flights of stairs, and into a room the size of the entire school. One giant high-ceilinged chamber, four hundred feet to a side, filling with more people than Sean had seen before, certainly more than just those attending the school. The space was consumed with excited chatter, a huge sense of electric anticipation.
But the most intense sensation for Sean was the warm hand holding his.
The grinding noise continued to grow until it took hold of the building’s foundation. The rumble grew from all sides. The room was rimmed by tall windows. But all they saw beyond the glass was a featureless greyish-black.
Elenya led them over to a spot where they had the railing to themselves. “Yesterday when we spoke. How did you know I was Serenese?”
“Because you look like Tatyana.”
“Who is that?”
“My Counselor.”
She clearly liked that. “Your counselor.”
“It’s a long story.”
“I positively adore long stories. But not now, yes?”
He didn’t care about the dark wall grinding along outside the window. Or how other people crowded in around them. All his being was focused on the long-fingered hand that held his. “Whatever you say.”
“Are you always this agreeable, Sean?”
He thought about that. “Yes.”
“Good. I am glad.”
Sean decided Elenya was fully aware of how he was staring and welcomed his attention. The woman was so controlled, so precise. Her white-blonde hair cascaded in a single perfect line down her back, across the blue of her uniform, which on her actually looked stylish.
He asked, “How old are you?”
“In what planet’s terms? Here on Lothia I would be almost twenty-one.”
He translated that and realized, “We’re the same age, more or less.”
She turned to him, revealing eyes grey and luminescent. “Pay attention, Sean.”
“I am. Believe me.”
“This is important.” She turned to the window, beyond which the first pale wash of light began to grow. “Here it comes.”
The light grew until Sean could see that the building was rising. The entire building was moving up. Up, up, and now he realized they were emerging through . . .
He spoke the word as a question. “Ice?”
“Every Lothian building has a shield generator in its roof. Shields can be made to create massive amounts of heat. For this very purpose.”
Ice. Blue streaked with white. Ice. Hundreds of feet thick.
Ice.
Then the city emerged into daylight. After all this time, waiting to see another world, Sean filtered the entire amazing scene through the sensation of the hand holding his.
Elenya was saying, “Lothia is far from what I would call a beautiful world. But this first sight every summer makes up for everything one must endure here. Almost.”
“You’ve lived on Lothia?”
“Off and on for much of my life. Until last year, my father was the planetary Ambassador assigned to this world. What do you know of Lothia?”
“Nothing at all.”
She cocked her head and the hair cascaded over one shoulder. “How long have you been a recruit?”
“Forty-five days and counting.”
“And yet you are assigned to the senior class. You and your brother must be seen to have the potential of becoming adepts.”
“I have no idea what that means.”
But whatever she was about to say was cut off by all the Lothians who surrounded them, lifting their hands and chanting in unison. Elenya translated, “They speak a traditional saying from what is now called Old Lothian. ‘Another long night has ended. We enter the dawn light with hope for all the new tomorrows.’”
Other buildings continued to sprout slowly from the ice. A dozen, a hundred, a thousand, a vast city rising into the mist and the light. The sky overhead was partly veiled by clouds colored a surreal mix of lavender and grey. Two suns shone through the covering, but light from both was dim enough for Sean to look directly at them. They were joined by a faint ring of pale pink that shimmered like a sunset rainbow.
A ring. Around two suns.
Dillon spoke in English from his other side. “We’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto.”
“That’s for sure.”
Elenya asked, “What did your brother say?”
Sean translated, then explained, “It’s from a story about a girl who is transported to a distant world in a storm.”
“Perhaps the storyteller could transit?”
“Doubtful.”
Dillon leaned far enough over to smirk at their two linked hands. He said in English, “Way to rock and roll, bro.”
“The two of you, pay attention,” Elenya said, punctuating her words by tugging on Sean’s hand.
He huffed a silent laugh. Elenya was already laying claim, at least to the moment. And he was just loving it.
Elenya went on, her words aimed at the glass before her face. “My father studied the planet’s history before taking this assignment. You know of the Serenese Records?”
“A little.”
“There was no mention of Lothia. None. Then the Lothian adept appeared, the first to come from elsewhere, rather than us going first to them.”
“Adept means somebody who can establish new transit points?”
“Correct. Among other abilities.”
“I’m no adept, Elenya.”
She just looked at him. A single glance, one carrying a wealth of the unspoken. Then she turned back to the glass. Sean could feel Dillon close to his other side, wanting to hear. So he pushed down his protests and said, “Tell me what happened.”
“The Lothian adept’s first words were, ‘I bring greetings from the hollow world.’ Lothia held many surprises for the empire of man. Nowhere else have humans been planted underground. But what is more, the Lothians knew of our other worlds.”
“They knew they had been planted?”
“Correct.”
The buildings rose like defiant spears, gleaming symbols of man’s presence. Even here.
Sean said, “But I thought the Serenese Records were the first anybody knew about other worlds.”
“For all worlds except Lothia, that is correct. But Lothia knew it had been created by others. Who had done this planting, they could not say. Only that they were intended to grow to where they could connect with the humans of other realms. They searched for this method for three thousand years. And arrived just eight centuries after the Serenese Records revealed the transit concept to us.”
“Just eight centuries,” Dillon said. “Imagine that.”
As far as Sean could see in every direction stretched nothing but rock and ice. The suns and the cloud veil painted the vista in a thousand hues of rose and white and silver and palest violet, a landscape of mystical wonder. And of death. For nothing grew here. Not now, not ever. This world of rock and ice was consumed by the feel of lifelessness.
Sean asked, almost to himself, “How did the planters ever come up with this place?”
“It is a marvel, is it not? But they came, and in the giant underground caverns that are warmed by this planet’s core, they planted a green realm of animals and plants whose genes come from a dozen worlds. Here too is another wonder. For on no other planet has there been this pollination of beast and plant. Only humans.”
They stood there for over an hour, until most of the others had departed and only the Lothians remained. Sean studied them, wondering what it would be like to live underground for eight months at a stretch.
Dillon said, “We ought to go check in with the professor.”
“Right.” But he was reluctant to let go of Elenya’s hand, and it appeared she felt the same. “Josef wanted to speak with us after we saw this. Thanks for making it so special.”
She rewarded him with another of those rare smiles. “I was the one honored, Sean. Perhaps we c
an meet later and you will share with me tales from your outpost world?”
“I’d like that. A lot. We call it Earth.”
Dillon warned, “Josef may keep us awhile.”
“Tomorrow then.” Her gaze was locked on his, laser intent. “Will you show your home to me?”
“Is that allowed?”
“If Josef agrees.”
“Maybe you better ask him. We’re already pushing the envelope.”
30
When they arrived at Josef’s office, the man wore a different sort of sweats, khaki in color, stiffer, and with a lot more pockets. And the biggest pair of boots Sean had ever seen. There was no insignia anywhere, no sign of a weapon, but Sean was pretty sure this was some version of battle gear. Which prompted the question, what had Josef been doing in his previous life? The change they had noticed earlier, the shift away from gentle encouragement, was magnified. Josef was a giant with a warrior’s gaze.
He led them to the transit room and reached out both arms. “Take hold.”
Sean felt like he had returned to early childhood, when holding an adult’s hand only heightened his sense of smallness. Josef stepped forward and he and Dillon followed suit. There was the familiar tug of forces, and they transited to . . .
The arrival point was so unexpected, the sight so jarring, Sean’s brain refused to compute. He went into a full freeze for a second or two, until his eyes finally locked on the one thing that made any sense. What he had first taken as a weird greyish-green sky overhead was actually the ceiling of a cave. They were inside. But the dimensions were all wrong. And it was cold. There was snow on the ground and ice floes forming weird sculptures and snow falling. And clouds drifting high up, between them and the grey-stone ceiling. The walls were lost to mist. They stood on a hill, he could see the endless snow-and-rock vista in every direction, and there were no walls. The only reason he was certain he stood inside a cave was because of the ceiling, which had to be a mile or so high. Then he fastened on the nearest stalactite, a massive blue-grey icicle that hung way, way down, like a pillar with the bottom hundred feet or so chopped off.
Josef waited while they turned slowly and gaped. When they finally fastened their attention back on him, he said, “Directly beneath the Lothian surface open many such chambers. Thousands of caverns, some far larger than here. This one has been partly humanized. The air is breathable. The temperature has been raised to human levels.”