Neptune Crossing

by Jeffrey A. Carver

  *

  He blinked in darkness, and found just enough light to see that he was standing directly in front of the translator—the same machine, with its pulsing, squirming, not-quite-solid black and iridescent spheres, which had started him on this crazy path. He felt that he was dreaming, but knew he wasn’t. The translator looked even more alive than before—this thing that belonged, not to the alien Rohengen who had occupied Triton millions of years before humanity, but to some other race lost even deeper in time and space. Bandicut felt that he was underground in the ice cavern, but saw nothing to confirm it; his vision was completely dominated by the spinning globes moving around each other and through each other.

  He felt a palpable and urgent sense of purpose in the translator. He also saw something now that he had not before, a curious point of darkness floating inside one of the iridescent spheres, like a tiny shadow in the light. It caught his attention, because it did not seem to be just a fleck of physical matter, but more like a pure geometric point. The word singularity flickered in his mind, and he had no idea if that was what it was; but even as he was wondering, it caught his gaze with a wrench. He felt his vision telescoping down into that point of blackness. His breath escaped with an explosive rush.

  He was falling into a microscopic universe of darkness, and deep within that universe, he saw dancing fire—and found it disturbing to look at. These were not chemical flames, but something far more fundamental, something burning and fusing deep in the uttermost building blocks of space-time . . . and whatever it was, it was bright, painfully so. And yet it was not the brightness so much as the strangeness that tore at his eyes. He wanted to call out to Charlie, but could not. It felt as though he were peering into the heart of a quantum black hole; nothing here quite fit anything that he knew or understood. It was almost as if he were being pulled into some tightly compacted dimension of reality, a corner of the universe that the human eye was never intended to see.

  —It wasn’t—

  whispered a voice, which might have been the quarx’s, or his own imagination. It was suddenly lost in a rising babble of voices, chaotic voices, speaking no language he knew, but reverberating in his mind, coming from within, coming from the fire, coming from God knew what source within this quarxian madness.

  He was suddenly feverish with a rush of knowledge flowing into his mind, carried on the tide of voices. He was faint with it, he was dizzy and bewildered; he didn’t know if he could hold or comprehend it all, and he could only hope that the quarx could. Charlie . . . was Charlie still here?

  Images were building within him, images formed by knowledge gathering like atoms around a nucleating body, and soon they would crystalize abruptly into a vast clarity of—

  —(what?)—

  —you will see—

  —the chaotic movement, the danger—

  —a ticking molecular pendulum, marking time—

  —a glimpse of tumbling rock and ice, perturbed from its orbit, far from the sun—

  —falling inward, across endless space; hurtling close to the sun and then away—

  —(is this?)—

  —yes—

  —a glimpse of a blue-and-white planet, floating serene in the darkness, a living world—

  —the comet rising like a tremendous curving fastball, streaking toward the planet; and striking like a cosmic hammer, and erupting with—

  —fire—

  —fire!—

  The fire seemed to spin around him, or he was spinning, and he felt himself caught in a transformation of time and space, and for a terrifying moment he thought this was nothing but silence-fugue, not alien wisdom or knowledge at all . . . except that now the previous images vanished and he saw a figure of coruscating fire, alive and aware, in the heart of the darkness, and he could not tell if it was the quarx or the translator, or both. Before he could ask, three blazing points of light erupted from the figure of fire and spun toward him, circling into tight orbits around his head, and then dropping into his pockets.

  —these you will need—

  He tried to focus on the points of light, but could not. Something new was building around him like a pressure wave, and with it was a growing sensation of unreality, and he felt himself wanting to scream, but he could not. He opened his mouth and darkness billowed out, and it was filled with a lance of fire—

  —and he glimpsed cavern walls flashing and shimmering—

  —and he heard a quarx crying out—

  —and the darkness shrank down to a penetrating point—

  —and spun away—

  —and everything blurred—