“I’m fine,” she assured him. “I was just talking to a friend.”
He nodded although he obviously didn’t understand.
“I’m curious about something,” he said. “It is a question that you may not wish to answer. Yet I must ask.”
“Feel free.”
“Why are you doing this?”
She’d already explained but repeated her rationale.
“The creature can’t be destroyed, not by any known means. This is the only way to ensure the safety of the Corporeal, the survival of our species.”
“Yes, that part I understand. Let me rephrase. My question is, why are you doing this?”
She hesitated. “I guess because I’m the only one who can.”
It was an honest answer yet not the entire truth. Sacrificing herself, retreating from any chance at a real life to become an organic confinement vessel on a bleak world, was a difficult concept for anyone to comprehend. She didn’t fully understand it herself.
Maybe part of the reason was to assuage the guilt she felt over nearly betraying humanity. Maybe another part was realizing that she had so little in common with that humanity. She’d been a freakish outsider for too much of her life, her relationship to the everyday world defined by estrangement. Deep down, she knew that such a status would never entirely leave her.
There was another reason for making such a sacrifice, one that was entirely irrational yet appealing nonetheless. Now that she had full access to neurospace, she sensed it contained far more than just those stars serving as analogues for organic tripartite beings. Perhaps temporal chasms existed within its depths that provided the means to contact those who were no longer alive. Perhaps she could even find her parents and explain to them what had happened and beg forgiveness for their murders.
She sighed, recognizing the idea as little more than a childish desire to rewrite the past. Transhuman or not, she couldn’t truly go back in time and fix a wrong, nor give her parents the opportunity to express regret for transforming her into humanity’s first quadpartite consciousness.
Still, now that she’d awakened as a Quad, there would be much to explore. She could already perceive tantalizing glimpses of something she’d suspected earlier, a method of comprehension that far exceeded the boundaries of cognitive understanding. Intellect and reasoning, the highest manifestations of tripartite consciousness, were mere echoes of a grander way of sensing and interacting with the universe.
Jonomy’s frown returned her attention to the lander. Her response to his question clearly hadn’t satisfied his curiosity. She shrugged, unwilling to offer more.
“Let’s just call it fate.”
CHAPTER 46
Ericho awoke with a mild headache, his typical reaction to a dose of loopy. The bridge looked and felt normal again, but he knew that wasn’t the case. The past was gone, the future was here. The present into which he’d been born, that all-encompassing and nurturing array of familiar comforts, had ceased to exist.
A clock indicated an hour and a half had passed since the chronojacking. That was ship time, of course. According to the Alchemon’s SCO clock, based on Earth time, eight hundred and two years, five months, fourteen days and six-plus hours had gone by. That the SCO clock was functioning meant that they were again within range of a Corporeal com beacon. Still, such beacons were meant to last thousands of years. Whether the Corporeal and humanity still existed was yet to be ascertained.
He checked his wafer for their location. Chronojacking usually caused radical spatial displacement as well. Obviously, they were no longer anywhere near Sycamore or the Lalande 21185 system.
But he couldn’t get any readings from navigation, not from the primary or backup systems. External telemetry, including hull cameras, also was inoperative. The rest of the network seemed functional, which made it even odder that the two systems that could reveal their location, NAV and ETI, weren’t working.
The mystery would have to wait. He had more important considerations. Ignoring the headache, he rose from his command chair and checked on the others. Faye was still asleep and Alexei unconscious on the autobed. Both appeared to have survived the event with no ill effects.
“June, can you hear me?”
There was no response on the intercom. He headed out the airseal at a brisk pace, fearing the worst.
He found June lying face down in the corridor leading to the dreamlounge. She was unmoving. Gripping the side of her shieldsuit, he flipped her over.
Her eyes opened. He let out a sigh of relief.
“Are you OK?”
She managed a nod. “I think so. Did we…”
“Yeah. Eight centuries and some change.”
She motored her shieldsuit upright. He could tell by her vacant face that she was fighting to contain a tempest of emotions. Ericho had left behind parents and siblings, and that would be hard enough to come to terms with. For June, it would be worse. There were children and grandchildren she’d never see again.
“Did you reach Hardy in time?”
She tried maintaining professional calm but couldn’t keep a quiver out of her voice. “I only made it this far. When the transition occurred, I was thrown against the wall and fell over. Everything got weird for a few seconds and then the loopy must have kicked in. How long were we out?”
“About ninety minutes.”
They proceeded to the dreamlounge. Hardy had sequestered himself in the largest of the four pods, the one used for Lieutenant Donner’s funeral service a few days ago.
Ericho corrected himself. Not days ago, centuries ago. It would take a while to make that mental adjustment.
“Be careful,” June warned as they halted at the pod’s entrance. “No telling what state he could be in.”
Whether passing through a Quiets or being chronojacked, a crewmember not inoculated with loopy was likely to be suffering some form of psychological instability. And Hardy Waskov had been half-mad before they’d made the temporal leap.
Ericho opened the door, ready for a violent confrontation. But there was no attack. The room was plain, devoid of holo imagery. A glance at the menu revealed that Hardy’s most recent subcortical fantasy had been deactivated.
The science rep sat in the corner in a pool of blood, unmoving. His head was slumped forward, his hands tucked into the jacket pockets of his formal science uniform. It was the same one he’d worn at Donner’s service.
June knelt beside him, checked for a pulse. She shook her head.
“Looks like he bled out.”
She removed Hardy’s hands from his pockets, revealing the source of the blood. The tips of seven fingers had been gnawed at, some all the way to the bone. More serious damage had been self-inflicted upon the forefingers and right thumb. They’d been bitten off entirely.
She pulled back his head. A ring of dried scarlet made his lips appear obscenely large. A jagged lump protruded from between the teeth. One of Hardy’s own severed fingers.
June’s voice was strained but clinical. “Psychotic autosarcophagy. Had I gotten here sooner, I may have been able to prevent it.”
“No way is this your fault.”
“I know. But I still can’t help feeling–”
She stopped as a voice came over the intercom.
“All survivors please report to the port lander hold. Departure from the Alchemon will commence in fifteen minutes.”
Ericho and June traded stunned looks as the voice continued.
“Bring all personal items and anything else that you might wish to store in the lander. You will not be returning to the ship.”
“That can’t be Jonomy,” June said. “Can it?”
Ericho had no answer.
CHAPTER 47
Sycamore loomed ever larger in the lander’s window. They were close enough now for LeaMarsa to see flashes of light from the energy storms that perpetually ripped through the atmosphere.
Neither she nor Jonomy had uttered a word since he’d questioned her willingnes
s to embrace such an irrational fate. She finally broke the silence.
“What about you?” she asked. “Why are you doing this?”
“It was necessary. You needed a pilot.”
She wasn’t certain of that. Automatic systems on landers were remarkably trustworthy, could enable safe touchdowns even in the most extreme conditions. She pressed on.
“You’re making a big sacrifice too. You’ll be trapped on Sycamore for a long time. There’s no guarantee Pannis will even send a rescue ship.”
“After they receive the Alchemon’s final transmission, they will be too curious not to. The transmission will take approximately eight years to reach the solar system. Therefore, I estimate being picked up within the decade, eleven or twelve years at the outside.”
“And you’re sure you can stay vegetated that long?” He’d explained it to her earlier, but she still had doubts. Being in that form of stasis for such a length of time was known to be risky. A small but significant percentage of those who attempted it never awakened.
“There is enough Loopaline B4 aboard for such a contingency.”
“So, back to my original question. Why are you doing this?”
A sad smile came over him. “Whatever future the ship is destined for, I would be rendered an anachronism. Unmodified humans have a reasonable chance of adapting to a radically transformed society. Lytics, however, are the pinnacle of specialization, designed to function within a particular technological period. Where the Alchemon is going – or more precisely, where it has gone – is likely to be a place and time where I would be an outmoded remnant of an obsolete science.”
“You can’t know that for sure.”
“I ran the projections before leaving the ship. EPS predicts a 99.98 percent probability of such a reality coming to pass.”
“But surely in that future there’d be some sort of upgrades available.”
“Perhaps. But there is another factor. It is a future I no longer desire.”
Jonomy hadn’t volunteered to pilot her back to Sycamore strictly out of a sense of duty. Something within him had changed too.
LeaMarsa gazed out the window at Sycamore. From deep within her, she could feel the creature’s rage increasing as they approached the planet. She wasn’t bothered by it. If she elected, she could sequester herself from its emotions, shut them out of her mind with the same ease that she controlled its physical presence.
She superimposed the view from the lander’s window onto neurospace, melded the two universes into a singular vision instead of concentrating on one or the other. The fusion that resulted – Sycamore blended with those faux-stars – brought insight.
In a flash she grasped the underlying source of the creature’s anger, why it sought to destroy intelligent life.
Nanamistyne and her people, in creating a quadpartite consciousness to access and interact with neurospace, had suffered from a huge blind spot. Despite the awe-inspiring technological achievement of the Avrit-Ah-Tay, they’d overlooked an issue that from LeaMarsa’s unique perspective seemed blatantly apparent.
The creature was lonely.
Nurtured in what the Avrit-Ah-Tay no doubt believed had been a supportive environment that would instill long-term stability, the brilliant civilization of the stick city had nonetheless failed to comprehend that the Diar-Fahn, once dispatched on its mission of discovery in neurospace, would end up inconceivably alone, without peers to relate to. Forcibly separated from all that was familiar, it reacted by lashing out against the tripartites who should have been looking out for its welfare, but who instead had condemned it to an eternity of isolation. Added to that indignity was the fact they’d made it feel like a freak.
“You had better strap in,” Jonomy said. “We are about to enter the atmosphere and begin our descent.”
LeaMarsa reversed the fusion of the two universes, for the moment returning her focus solely to the lander. Tightening her belts, she gazed out the window at Sycamore, looking ahead to a future that surely would bring both solace and storms.
CHAPTER 48
By the time Ericho and June reached the bridge, Faye was up and about. She was pacing nervously but looked relieved to see them.
“Jonomy?” she whispered. “You heard his voice too?”
“We heard someone,” Ericho said.
She looked relieved. “I thought I was going crazy.”
He checked his wafer. NAV and ETI were still down but records indicated that the latter system had functioned momentarily, just long enough to permit a message to be transmitted to the ship.
“Transmitted from where?” June asked, reading the display over his shoulder.
“Source unknown.”
“What do we do?” Faye asked.
Ericho was about to say he had no idea when the Jonomy voice returned. Except for the time element, the new message was identical.
“All survivors please report to the port lander hold. Departure from the Alchemon will commence in twelve minutes. Bring all personal items and anything else that you might wish to store in the lander. You will not be returning to the ship.”
“Did I ever tell you how much I hate countdowns,” Faye muttered.
“Especially from someone who has to have been dead for centuries,” June added.
Ericho checked LIS for the status of the port lander. Rigel had burned out that craft’s NAV sensors. Without them, the lander could do nothing more than drift aimlessly in the void. He wasn’t all that surprised to discover that repairs had been made, and within the last hour.
“The pups installed new sensors,” he said. “The lander is fully functional.”
“Should we do as he says?” June wondered. “Or, as it says?”
“Do we have a choice?” The Jonomy message returned at three-minute intervals as they gathered personal items from their cabins and secured Alexei’s autobed in the lander. By the time the countdown passed the three-minute mark, Ericho was in the pilot’s seat and the others strapped in behind him. They had removed their shieldsuits, conserving what air remained in the mechanical lungs.
Not knowing what was in store for them, they’d packed the lander’s hold with nonperishable food, as much as could be gathered in the time available. June had brought portable MED gear and supplies but had been forced to leave behind her beloved camelback sofa, the family heirloom encompassing her late husband’s remains and memories of her children. She did manage to grab one of the cushions, however, stowing it beneath her seat.
At the one-minute mark in the countdown, the Jonomy voice issued new instructions.
“Your destination is programmed. The flight will take approximately forty minutes. There is no need for pilot intrusion. Relax and enjoy the final stage of transit into your new future.”
The lander’s window shields were down. Ericho tried to raise them but the control wouldn’t respond. Hull cameras were also disabled. As with the Alchemon, they were flying blind.
The countdown was displayed on the flight-control panel. When it reached ten seconds, he started to turn around, intending to offer the others some last words of reassurance. At that moment, he recalled his desert dream. It was coming true.
He was sure that the time jump had returned them to near-Earth orbit and that the lander was bound for Barstow… or at least to where that California city had once stood.
Readouts indicated the lander hold depressurizing and the egress hatch opening. Moments later came a gentle acceleration followed by a familiar transition into weightlessness.
The flight went by quickly. Ericho used the time to read a summary of LeaMarsa’s final transmission to Jonomy. It filled in many gaps in his understanding of what had occurred.
The summary also included Tomer Donner’s private files. LeaMarsa must have accessed them when she took command of the Alchemon’s network. It was sad reading about the lieutenant’s fixation on bringing Renfro Zoobondi to justice for killing his lover. The impact of that one event had ended up creating severe repe
rcussions for all of them as well as invoking deep ironies.
Because a ruthless Pannis VP had arranged for LeaMarsa to be on the Alchemon, the Quad ended up being freed from its prison. Yet LeaMarsa’s presence also had resulted in the creature’s recapture, thus saving humanity. Had she not been aboard, would the creature still have gotten free? Would it have returned to Earth and been unleashed on civilization? Would Tomer Donner, Rigel Shaheed and Hardy Waskov still be alive?
He could probably speculate about those questions for the rest of his life and never come close to definitive answers.
After forty minutes, gravity returned. The lander dropped into what must have been a planetary atmosphere. As the ship headed toward the surface, the remainder of his dream played out in real time. He again started to turn to address the other three but was interrupted by the raising of the window shields.
The lander soared through a patch of clouds into vivid blue skies. Below was the desert. Ahead were the mountain peaks and the horizon in the grip of that beautiful dusk. As in his dream, Barstow’s tallest skyscrapers that should have been visible above the mountains were gone.
Had LeaMarsa failed? Had the creature escaped from Sycamore and, sometime within the last eight hundred years, attacked Earth. Had human cities been destroyed and the species wiped out?
Yet if so, who was guiding them in?
They crossed over the mountains. Below, where Barstow should have been, a wide treeless prairie was covered in sunburnt grass. There was no trace that a city had ever existed here.
A man with long white hair dressed in a gray suit stood in a small clearing. His hands were folded serenely in front of him. The lander touched down five meters away.
The man gazed in at them, his expression unreadable. Ericho, June and Faye stared back. For a long moment, no one said anything.
Ericho broke the silence. “I guess we should get out and say hello.”
Hull sensors indicated a safe atmosphere, slightly more oxygen-rich than when they’d last breathed it, and totally free of pollutants. There was just enough room in the airlock for the three of them and Alexei’s autobed. The outer seal opened, and they stepped into warm sunlight for the first time in months.
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