Sailing Bright Eternity Page 7

  They made the readings with speed. Nikka checked to be sure the scanning patches were flat against the woman’s skull. The moment they were done Benjamin asked with a flat, false calm, “Better get her under the soil, then?”

  “No,” Angelina ventured. It was not like her to challenge her brothers, but she had found this woman and from the set of her chin Nigel knew she felt some sense of odd possession and responsibility. “What if the Old Ones want it?”

  Nigel nodded, obviously to Angelina’s surprise. “Talking to authorities, best to keep things simple. Last time they made Ortega and I do the digging-up.”

  Angelina gasped. “You did?”

  “The Old Ones believe in local responsibility. Or seem to—they make their human agents run things that way. I was a neighbor, so I dug—period.” Nigel shrugged. “Had to do it in skinsuits. It became a trifle hot. Thirsty work.”

  All three Walmsley children looked uneasily at each other. This detail their father had not told before. The set of Benjamin’s chin said that as the younger brother he wanted his fair share of any decision. “Those scientists, they’ll want a full report, do their experiments, take samples. You know how they are.”

  Nikka’s worried frown deepened. “I wouldn’t trust our storage. The rot could get out and—”

  “Let’s put her back into the esty,” Angelina said brightly.

  The idea was simple yet stunning. Buried in soil, the body could be recovered. In esty, never.

  They had all been shaken by the erupting of the esty again, after years of slumbering. The idea of setting foot among the shifting tides of the nonrock, the timestone, was bothersome. Yet, Nigel saw, none of them wished to show such concern to the others. That zone of the esty was the stuff of local legend and the children both feared its promise of mystery and adventure and yearned for it. So they agreed.

  They processed the readings first. That was all custom required: a scan of the neural beds, of memory vaults in the cerebral cortex, an inventory that could at least establish the broad outlines of who this woman had been. Bodies from the future came forth in only a few known spots and it had been Nigel’s intention to live near one.

  The woman’s body had already begun to warp and ooze as they lugged it back into the head-spinning deviations of the rumbling, ozone-sharp wormhole zone. Ito and Angelina carried it with cat-like balance, as though ready to leap. Fast, humming high frequencies ran through their shared sensorium, a kind of warning system that linked them. This eruption was just beginning and promised to be big. An acrid scent cut the air. Zephyrs of bitter heat caught at their nostrils and the footing trembled with expectation and menace. They brought the body back to where they had found it, or tried to, for already a gravitational chasm had opened there. A powdery sapphire cloud hovered above the foaming esty itself. The air torqued them with tugs and pushes.

  They steered well clear of the dancing powder. It shaped into elongated cylinders, tear drops, fluted arabesques—which meant it was another manifestation of the far future. A sharp crack—and the esty flexed and slewed like a raft in a roaring river.

  This threw Ito down and sent the body rolling, arms flapping, legs stiff and waving like sticks. It spun into the air and plunged toward the spatial fissure. The sapphire fog opened and closed like the mouth of a fish underwater, oval and meaningless. Nigel clung to his children and watched. The body seemed to dissolve, then became compacted and firm again, before merging with the stuff that only hours before had been reliable timestone. Then it was gone. Consumed, perhaps transported.

  “Wonder where it went,” Benjamin mused, drawling.

  “It’s slipping through the esty—‘Transiting,’ isn’t that what the Old Ones say?” Angelina asked uneasily, rubbing her gloves on her leggings as if to get clean of the body, its touch and smell. Yet her angular face showed an intrigued, puzzled expectation.

  “Going that way didn’t seem to hurt it,” Benjamin said.

  “Something sure did before,” Ito said. “Killed her.”

  Nigel sniffed and jerked a thumb back toward home. “This place will soften up and spread. Happened that way last time. Let’s go.”

  TWO

  Annihilation Line

  Within a relative hour—though hours could not be meaningfully measured here, and watches were mostly a concession to human habits of mind—the family had gathered around the long polished dining room table, beside the big fireplace where coals flickered and popped. There were no fossil deposits in the esty, because it was not very old, but compacted rock laced with burnable traces gave the same rosy glow.

  The dead woman’s readings appeared as images deep in the surface of the table, constellations of memories played out as fragments and moments: the ruins of a life. Law required that they see if anything warranted an emergency call to the Old Ones. Nobody talked directly to them, of course. They were shadowy, alien minds who had made the esty. Seldom did they intervene in the affairs of the mere humans who clung to the twisty intricacies here.

  When they were through rummaging through shattered memories, curiosity satisfied, only Nigel and Nikka wore grim scowls; the children yawned, bored. He felt more than ever the centuries dividing him and Nikka from their children.

  “Guess the future’s not so great after all,” Benjamin said, sucking meditatively on his teeth.

  “Should we send this stuff?” Angelina asked. She twisted her mouth with a comely lilt, an expression that always touched her father’s heart because she still did not know that she was genuinely beautiful. They lived in comparative isolation here, far down a lightly populated Lane, as he and Nikka had planned. Soon enough their children would come to know the torrent of cultures and technologies elsewhere in the esty.

  “Not right away,” Nikka said, glancing at Nigel.

  Ito caught her meaning. “There’s something in here.”

  Nikka nodded. “Look at these.” She tapped her wrist pad and the tabletop flashed, finding an image: above a black horizon, smudges of rosy light. A sidebar broke this down, displaying bands of spectral light. “See? Pictures made at very high energies. And one strong peak.”

  Ito was unimpressed. “Astro data. So?”

  Nigel said dryly, “That peak is at an energy of point five-one-one million electron volts.”

  Ito shrugged. “Yeah, so?”

  Nigel knew his son’s casual challenge for what it was—energies contained in a young soul, spurting out in moments of arch nonchalance. “Son, that’s a lot of energy to pack into a single photon.”

  “So?”

  “It’s also precisely the sum squeezed out when an electron meets its antiparticle, the positron.”

  “Ummm.” Ito frowned, not ready to give up his bored manner so easily. “Dad, you get interested in just about anything.”

  Angelina blurted out, “You think this is anything? It’s antimatter, silly—dying!”

  Ito said warily, “How do you figure that?”

  “An electron and a positron come together, bang!” She smacked her hands together. “—nothing left but light. This light. The annihilation line. And look—it fills the sky!”

  Nigel smiled, proud of her. To his despair, Nigel’s two sons were fine young men with only passing interest in matters technical.

  Nearly thirty thousand years ago—in strict time as measured by the galactic rest coordinates, not the pliant esty time frame—Nigel himself had been a classic science nerd, addicted to his studies. Only later did his attentions turn to the immensely larger and more varied world of politics, literature, women.

  A classic pattern, in the ancient TwenCen. His sons seemed to be going at it in reverse order. Or so the complaints from their neighbors—a half-day’s walk away, but with winsome daughters—said.

  He studied the pictures. The dead woman had been outside, on a planet, watching—distant galaxies? Forming stars? The patchy clouds might be anything. They spoke of immense energies at work. A whole sky of photons that would fry biological life-forms
. Where? When?

  Nikka said, “The Old Ones will want this—soon.”

  “Ummm.” Nigel gave her a canny glance. “Let’s say, the near soon.”

  Benjamin said earnestly, “But we’re supposed to—”

  “Right.” Nigel grinned, raising eyebrows. “And we always do what we’re supposed to.”

  Nikka looked at him with an expression of tired tolerance. “You wanted to live in a quiet place. It’s a little too late to complain about being bored.”

  “I’m not bored,” Nigel countered. “Just a bit curious.”

  “You wanted to live near that worm thing out there, Dad,” his daughter said. “Why? It’s dangerous.”

  Nigel waved an arm, taking in the rolling hills and long, flat-bottomed canyons. “Pleasant, a fine place to bring up children. That worm doesn’t act up much. We’re pretty safe here, tucked away in a Lane. Hard for the mechs to find. But that doesn’t mean we should stop learning. I’d like to see if something follows the woman. If the Old Ones send a delegation, you can be sure we’ll learn nothing. Strange things come through these esty worms and—”

  “Your father likes to keep his hand in the game.”

  “Sounds more to me like that little disagreement with the rock slide,” Benjamin drawled.

  They all laughed. Nigel had just recovered from a foolhardy skid down a stony creek bed. On a plastic shell he had caromed from one side to the other, unable to stop on the slick runway. When they hauled him out of the pool at the slide’s base he had protested, limping badly, that after all, the children had got through it perfectly well.

  “You’re too old to take risks,” Angelina had said.

  “If you don’t take risks, you’re dead anyway but don’t know it,” Nigel had said sourly, rubbing a pulled muscle and a swelling, bruised knee.

  Worms, though, were a bit more than risky. They were an inevitable flip side of the esty’s flexible stability. At a deep level, space-time itself was like a biological system. Anything that provided a niche eventually acquired parasites.

  Where the esty thinned, wormholes were born—pulled out of the quantum foam that underlay everything. Worms lived on the gravity waves that wrestled through the esty, parasites on space-time itself.

  Worms could link one portion of the esty to another, tapping the energy flow between them. They demanded stupendous tensions and outward pressures to hold open their throats. The pressure sustaining a human-sized worm was like that at the heart of a massive neutron star. But a short walk away from it, the effect was not even noticeable. Fields alone held worms open, both magnetic and subatomic, fed by the smoldering energies of the esty itself.

  Worse, worms could even reproduce. They spawned other snaky scavengers, which flicked and twisted between the layers and Lanes of the esty’s hieroglyphic geometries. So they could give birth, just as they could kill. The lacerated woman had probably died in the worm, sucked in and mutilated.

  Nigel pointed out that worms were an inescapable risk of life here, and Angelina made a face. “Aw, you’re just trying to say you want to go down the rock slide again.”

  “I think not, actually,” Nigel responded with a grimace to her jibe. “But I wonder . . . did this woman know what she was getting into?”

  Nikka arched an eyebrow. “Do we?”

  THREE

  Interfacer

  They were busy with vegetable farming and the long groves of fruit-bearing trees, mostly from old Earth, and so did not get much time to watch the place where the woman had emerged. The spot fumed, a sour smell that wrinkled the nose from a considerable distance.

  Children seldom think of their parents as anything other than fundamental building blocks of their world, unchanging givens, like the postulates that go before a geometric proof. With Nigel and Nikka this was just as well.

  Measured in flatspace time they were older than they liked to talk about in front of the children. In their own local coordinates they were only a few centuries old, thanks to coldsleep and the relativistic effects of the ramscoop starship. Medical science and good luck had left them feeling still rather spry, but experience gave a certain oblique cast to the expressions that passed between them. The children noticed those but shrugged them off as more adult mystery.

  One day—a term they used by convention, for in the esty there were wanings and waxings of light, but no sun or stars, ever—a pet got loose and ventured too close. It was a raccoon named Scooter they kept outside on a high wire leash, the end of it strung on a rope between two trees so the raccoon could run back and forth. The bandit-eyed bundle of energy shredded laundry and stole food at every chance and Nikka, angry, would yank it up in the air by the leash. The raccoon would dance on the air until it got the idea of not doing that anymore. For a while, anyway.

  Nikka would promise to cook it up next meal with the long potato hash she made and the coon would get silent. They knew it could understand. Scooter talked, sometimes. But not well. Nobody thought to warn it about the spot and when it again found a way to untie itself—Benjamin swore the thing was getting smarter—it followed Angelina. The coon ventured too close to the spherical seethe, got singed, and lost a finger’s worth of tail.

  Its squeaky voice complained, “Mad at me. Hurt me.”

  Nikka noticed that the tail was sheared off cleanly. The worm had snapped at it. The raccoon grumbled but held still for a bandage.

  “You ran away,” she scolded it.

  “Need to study.”

  “Looks like the worm took a sample to study you.”

  As they laughed over this at dinner Angelina, who kept track of communications, said, “We got a signal today. Orders, really. Said the Old Ones are interested.”

  Nikka stopped spooning out the tangy long potatoes. “That means some Interfacer will show up in spit and polish.”

  “Really?” Angelina’s mouth formed an O of frozen delight.

  “They’re just human, like us,” Ito said with a sardonic tone just a bit too heavy, to show that he was older and experienced, though he had never seen an Interfacer either.

  “I’ll talk to some old friends at the Node. Perhaps I can keep us out from under their kindly care.” Nigel ate slowly, reflecting, as talk buzzed around their table.

  He did not like the idea of bringing in higher authority, the enigmatic Old Ones. They were impressive, yes. But it was the nature of humanity to not stand in awe of anything for very long. After many years of exposure to them Nigel felt as if the Old Ones were like nosy mountains, certainly majestic but always looking over his shoulder while he was trying to get something done.

  Later he talked on farcomm with a few old friends at the Node. Earthers, but intelligible. He got nowhere. Worms were too important to be left entirely to mere humans. His living legend status made no difference.

  The Interfacer craft arrived during the next waxing. It twisted all over the air like a long mathematical proof the eye could follow only so far, then lost in turning complexity. Air as fluid, craft like an eel. As if Mozart could make his notes visible, lacy in the sky while you listened to them. In the esty’s curved space, travel was never straight-line. It more nearly resembled a slide down unseen ramps of coalesced air.

  Family Walmsley squinted upward at the confusing descent. Loops piled like unrolling a scroll. Lacy vapor trail strips unfurled, making one infinitely recurving utterance, cleaving sky like a prow, tossing time and music to each side like a sheared wake. It made their heads ache.

  The Interfacer woman who brought the Old Ones’ message was not so imposing. Her face was stretched tight, shiny over the bones, so red-faced she reminded Nigel of a boiled ham in a suit. Her collar had popped free of its little pearl clip so that her neck bulged like a swollen snake. Big wrists stuck out of her shirt sleeves and her eyes had the fixed narrow glaze of a woman staring at a match flame.

  Not all Earthers were impressive. Nigel wondered idly if an Earther nerd was something like this. She did not change expression as she studied
the seething spot. “A fresh esty Vor.”

  “Vor?” Nikka asked, her hands in her hip pockets in unconscious imitation of the woman’s stance.

  “Slang for ‘Vortex.’ I’ve only seen two fresh ones in all my years. This data you sent”—the stolid woman waved a disk—“is very important. Very. You should have taken more care with the body.”

  Nigel said evenly, “We had a lot of picking to do in the orchard.”

  “No excuse,” she spat back. “The data is undoubtedly from the far future. It bears on the destiny of the entire esty.”

  “How?” Benjamin asked. Nigel could tell from Benjamin’s face that he was impressed, if not by the woman at least by her aircraft. Well, time would teach him.

  “We know that the mechanicals have been studying antimatter since ancient times. They are constructing elsewhere in the galaxy great laboratories, orbiting the pulsars—all to capture large numbers of positrons. This message, sent in a dying mind”—she waved the disk again as if it were a murder weapon in a trial—“proves that they have designs on the entire galaxy. It shows huge positron swarms. Hostile to life—to our life, anyway.”

  “Uh-huh,” Ito said with a lifted eyebrow.

  “You doubt this?” The woman looked affronted. “I speak for the Old Ones.”

  “They’re speaking through you,” Ito shot back. “You’re just a puppet.”

  Nigel put a restraining hand on his oldest son’s shoulder. Ito did not have the diffidence of Benjamin. “Point is,” Nigel said, “why send a body back?”

  “Let us say that the Old Ones have several theories.” The Interfacer drew herself up with serene disdain. “Quite complex. They are difficult to convey properly to . . .”