A Time and a Place

by Joe Mahoney

  “No idea.”

  The light in the room grew brighter suddenly, allowing me to see elaborate frescos on the walls and ceilings, the work of many artists judging from the wide variety of styles. Some of the images were strikingly alien in nature—objects and creatures I didn’t recognize inhabiting mathematically impossible realms rendered in bold colours by the tortured hand of a crazed Escher. The rest of the work was more accessible, frequently impressionistic, often reminiscent of human artists such as Maurice Bernard, Diane Savidant, and the Group of Seven.

  Almost every painting featured T’Klee in some form. Some showed the catlike creatures at peace—working, hunting, farming, at play, sometimes in urban surroundings I didn’t recognize, other times on what looked to be C’Mell except that the colours were wrong, for a human at least. The grass and trees looked like what C’Mell might look like through the eyes of a T’Klee—vivid, the colours at times practically blazing. Other pictures were more disturbing. One showed T’Klee bolting from an amorphous, wand-wielding mass almost certainly meant to represent Necronians. Another portrayed an adult T’Klee with a jagged gash across her face leaping across a stream, an infant hanging limp in her jaws.

  I walked to the wall and stroked the infant’s whiskered face, feeling the faint ridges of the artist’s brushstrokes. Remembering that Half Ear had once carried Sweep like that. It seemed a crazy dream to me now. And yet here I was inside a mountain on an alien planet with an entity that absorbed other beings. If it had been a crazy dream, it was one from which I had yet to awaken.

  A deep thrumming sound emerged around us, emanating from the floor and walls. I took hold of the nearest pedestal. “What just happened?”

  “The entity has made certain rudimentary systems operational,” Sebastian explained.

  I glanced at Iugurtha sitting on the pedestal. She hadn’t budged. “What systems?”

  “Where exactly are we, Sebastian?” Sarah asked.

  “Where the entity wants you to be. When she wants you to be.”

  “A little more specific, please,” I suggested.

  “You are on C’Mell, inside the colony ship, about six months after the last time you were here. Just before the fun begins.”

  “Colony ship?” I asked. “Fun?”

  “Iugurtha is about to free the T’Klee prisoners. Or try to.”

  “How?”

  “With a great deal of cunning.”

  “And?” Sarah pressed.

  “An equal measure of violence, I would imagine.”

  “She mentioned a fleet. What fleet?”

  “I can’t tell you any more than that,” Sebastian said. “You’ll find out soon enough anyway.”

  “Tell me this, then,” I said. “By colony ship, do you mean the ship that originally brought the T’Klee to C’Mell?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Where is it? In orbit? Are we in space?” Never having been in space before I was rather taken by this idea. Hoping for a glimpse of the planet from orbit I looked around for windows, but the room’s walls were entirely covered by the frescos.

  “The ship’s not in orbit,” Sebastian said. “I told you. We’re on C’Mell. The ship is buried on the planet’s surface. Encased in solid rock, inside a mountain known by some as Kimay. Where it’s been for over a thousand years. You’ve been here before, Mr. Wildebear. In other parts of the ship.”

  A mountain called Kimay. The mountain that Sweep and Half Ear had climbed to find Burning Eyes. Burning Eyes’ mountain home. Iugurtha’s mountain home.

  “You never told me it was a star ship,” I said.

  “Considering you would shortly be interrogated by a Necronian I didn’t think it prudent. The ship was hidden for a reason.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “Because I’ve been on this planet ever since Angelique Rainer first wore me here over a year ago. Plenty of time to learn a thing or two.”

  “I don’t understand—you came here with me just a few minutes ago.”

  “Mr. Wildebear, presently I inhabit three portable devices on this planet. Mr. Rainer’s, the unit the entity obtained from Angelique, and the one on your wrist. All three units became integrated as soon as they were within hailing distance of one another. I’m now fully up to date on everything that’s happened to each of them.”

  “Huh,” I said, having only the barest notion what he was talking about.

  Sarah was a quicker study. “You know where Rainer is, then.”

  “I’m sorry, Miss Frey. I have orders not to give you that information.”

  “But you’re capable of telling me.”

  “True—my security protocols haven’t been in effect since you turned off my servers, as you no doubt know. But security protocols or not, I’m perfectly capable of keeping a secret.”

  I wasn’t so sure about that. Sebastian had been decidedly indiscrete during my first few hours on C’Mell. At the time he’d blamed his indiscretions on the absence of his security protocols, and had promised to do better in the future. Now Sarah put him to the test.

  “I need to know if Rainer’s in trouble,” she said.

  “I can’t tell you that.”

  “I order you to tell me.”

  “You don’t have the authority.”

  “I deserve to know.”

  “That may be true, but still I won’t tell you.”

  “Are you sure your security protocols aren’t still engaged?”

  “I’m pleased it appears that way, but you know perfectly well that my servers have been turned off, and I couldn’t access them on this planet anyway.”

  “Sebastian, you have to tell me—”

  “I do not. There are several compelling reasons not to.”

  “And at least one excellent reason why.”

  “It is a good reason,” Sebastian admitted. “But not good enough.”

  “What reason is that?” I asked.

  “You won’t hear it from me,” Sebastian said. “Miss Frey told me herself not to tell you.”

  “I’ve changed my mind,” Sarah said. “You can tell him.”

  Sebastian said nothing.

  “Tell me what?” I asked.

  Sarah sighed. “He’s my father.”

  “Sebastian?” I asked, without thinking.

  “Hardly! Rainer.”

  “Rainer? But how could that be?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re too old for—” I stopped, observing a barely perceptible narrowing of Sarah’s eyes. “I mean Rainer’s too young to be your father. Isn’t he?”

  “I’m the result of what you might call a youthful indiscretion.”

  “But your last name—”

  “Frey’s my mother’s name.”

  “Angelique? I thought—”

  “Angelique isn’t my mother. My mother runs a travel agency in Ronneby, Sweden. A great lady, but not terribly interested in saving the world.”

  Peering at Sarah as if for the first time, I was surprised to see more than a passing resemblance to Rainer. The round head, the snub nose, the steely eyes. Fortunately for Sarah she was blessed with a great deal more hair than Rainer—perhaps why I’d never noticed the resemblance before. Now that I had, I found seeing so much of Rainer in Sarah’s pretty features disconcerting.

  “Barnabus,” Sarah said.

  “Yes?”

  “Please stop looking at me that way.”

  “Sorry. It’s just—why didn’t you want me to know?”

  “It didn’t matter. I think of him mainly as my boss, to tell you the truth. Still, he is my father and I think I deserve to know what’s happened to him. Don’t you?”

  It had been obvious all along that Sarah loved Rainer. Sebastian had certainly said as much. But she wasn’t in love with h
im. It was quite a revelation really, one that hadn’t come up in the short time I’d spent in her head—obviously she didn’t spend much time dwelling on the nature of their relationship. Did it matter? No. The few seconds I’d spent in her brain had made it clear that she wasn’t attracted to me.

  I planted a smile on my face. “You managed to keep that one a secret, Sebastian. Well done. Sarah’s right, though—she deserves to know what’s become of her father.”

  “Don’t you start.”

  “You’ve proven you can keep a secret. We’re all really impressed. Now where is he?”

  “Mr. Wildebear—Miss Frey—you need to understand. Mr. Rainer forbade me from telling you. He doesn’t want you rushing to his defence. He doesn’t want you involved in this at all. It’s all I can do not to tell you what you want to know. But I can’t.”

  “Is it the principle of the thing?” I asked.

  “Not entirely. It’s because at the same time I’m talking to you I’m conversing with a Necronian who also wants to know my secrets. I could tell you what you want to know. But if I do, I’m afraid I’ll tell the Necronian what it wants to know too.”

  Sarah and I processed this startling information.

  “I think you just told me where my father is,” Sarah said.

  She was right. It could only be Rainer’s version of Sebastian that the Necronians had in their possession. Which suggested that they had Rainer in their possession too.

  Sarah stepped to the other side of the room, where she stood facing the wall.

  “Oh dear,” Sebastian said. “I guess I’m not very good at keeping secrets after all. I just don’t have any experience at it. If I’m not careful, I could ruin everything.”

  “Hey look, just because you spilled the beans to us doesn’t mean you’ll tell the Necronians anything,” I said, trying to reassure him, not entirely convinced of this myself, wondering just what secrets he knew that were so darned important to keep from the Necronians, and distracted by a growing conviction that instead of talking to my wristwatch I should be consoling Sarah.

  “I can’t be sure I won’t tell the Necronians anything.”

  “Of course you can,” I said. “Can’t you?”

  “I used to know the future with certainty. I don’t know anything for sure anymore.”

  It took me a few seconds to wrap my head around that one, in part because (as I frequently suspected) I really needed to be several intelligence quotient points smarter, but also because I was preoccupied staring at Sarah’s back, trying to figure out whether a slight heaving of her shoulders meant that she was crying.

  With considerable difficulty I wrenched my head back to Sebastian’s dilemma. Until recently, he had existed in a sort of temporal circle, aware of everything that had happened before and everything that would come to pass, at least as far as he was concerned. Now he only knew what came before. It probably shouldn’t have come as a huge surprise that he would have trouble adjusting.

  “We all have no idea what the future holds,” I told him. “Still, there are things a person knows. For instance, I may not know the future but I know whether or not I can keep a secret.”

  “That’s fine for you,” Sebastian said. “You’re used to living like this. Me, I find it all very unsettling.”

  “You’ll get used to it.”

  “What if something bad happens, out of the blue, that I don’t expect?”

  I thought of Katerina. “Bad things will happen.”

  “Right. I guess I knew that.”

  “But good things will happen too. It’s just—you deal with it, whatever happens. You try to remember to breathe properly. Or whatever artificial intelligence units do to relax.”

  “I like to calculate complex mathematical formulas,” Sebastian said. “I was close to a unified field theory when they shut my servers down.”

  I nodded. “That’s the idea.”

  Iugurtha slipped off the pedestal with a sigh, prompting Sarah to turn around. I was relieved to see that Sarah’s eyes were dry.

  Iugurtha retrieved her eyeball, put it back in her empty socket, and turned to us. “My forces are waiting. Follow me, please.”

  There was no point arguing. Allowing ourselves to be led out of the chamber, we entered a tunnel—it couldn’t quite be called a corridor. It was too round, too dark. Iugurtha waved her hand at the spider and it turned a light on in its torso. The light successfully illuminated the tunnel around us for several yards, allowing me to see that frescos similar to the ones we’d just left covered virtually the entire surface of the tunnel, including the floor.

  I glanced up and down the tunnel. “I’m confused. Is this a star ship or an art gallery?”

  “It was a star ship once,” Iugurtha said, perhaps unaware that I was being facetious. “But that was a long time ago. Now, among other things, it’s a canvas to record the history of my people.”

  “You painted all these?” Sarah asked.

  “I don’t remember painting them all, but it could only have been me.” Iugurtha’s manner was different now that she had changed some of her attributes. There was less of the T’Klee about her now, less of whatever other exotic creatures lurked inside her.

  “When you say ‘my people,’ you mean Sweep’s people?” I asked. “Because Sweep’s inside you?”

  “The T’Klee have always been my people.”

  “How so?”

  “I brought them here. Over a millennium ago.”

  “You were the captain of this ship?” Sarah asked.

  “Not the captain. That’s always someone else. I am the ship itself, made flesh.”

  “The ship itself made flesh,” I repeated slowly, hoping that would somehow elicit understanding. “What does that mean? I know you’re able to connect with the ship somehow, with your eyes, I guess—”

  “Not just connect to the ship. I am the ship. Made flesh.”

  Briefly I pictured Iugurtha blazing through space propelled by a plume of fire at her heels. But that’s not what she meant. “Do you mean you’re the brains of the ship? The ship’s computer housed inside an android?”

  “I am the ship. Made—”

  “Yes, yes, made flesh, I get it. So if you’re the ship—”

  “—made flesh—”

  “—then—wait a minute. This ship. Does it have a name?”

  “Iugurtha.”

  “Iugurtha. So you literally are the ship.”

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”

  “Okay listen. I don’t really understand but if you are the ship then tell me this. Can you make it fly? Use it to get everyone off this planet? Get them away from the Necronians to safety?”

  “It’s not enough to be able to fly. To function properly, I require a trained crew. My crew has been dead for almost a thousand years. Not to mention that I am camouflaged inside a mountain, trapped beneath many layers of rock.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Right.”

  Iugurtha led us farther down the tunnel, allowing Sarah and I to take in an increasingly bitter narrative of a devastating conflict between two ancient foes. Entire cities razed to the ground, oceans on fire, star ships cleaved in two. I spent a moment staring at a particularly vivid painting of a space station screaming through a planet’s atmosphere to a fiery demise on the surface below.

  “The Necronians did all this?” I asked, nursing a righteous anger. “To the T’Klee?”

  “It was a long time ago,” Iugurtha said. “There’s a lot I don’t remember. But I believe the enemy did this. I believe the enemy almost destroyed my people.”

  The frescos petered out. Not so the tunnel. Sloping always downward, curving perceptibly to the left, it soon began to feel endless. We were walking in circles, winding our way down and around the colony ship. We passed other chambers in which I dimly made out many
mysterious objects, but whether these were engine rooms, crew quarters, or served some other exotic purpose, I never found out, for we never entered any of them.

  I allowed myself to fall behind the others. Iugurtha’s mechanical spider whirred to a stop behind me.

  “Sebastian,” I whispered to the portable artificial intelligence unit on my wrist, warily eying the mechanical spider behind me. “Where’s Ridley?”

  “I believe the entity’s taking you to him now.”

  Good. I needed to get Ridley off this planet before Iugurtha and the Necronians made a mess of it. If I could, I would take Sarah with me, and whoever else was willing to come.

  I had trouble catching up to the others. Sharp pains stabbed the length of my thigh with every step. My nose had stopped dripping but I was coughing a lot now. One hacking fit lasted half a minute. When I was capable of straightening up I found Sarah standing in front of me, holding out a pill about the same shade of green as I was feeling.

  “Take this,” she said.

  This woman had drugged me once before, with unpleasant consequences. At least this time she was being up front about it. “What is it?”

  “A little something to make you feel better.”

  “I don’t like pills.”

  “You’ll like this one.”

  I eyed it as one might regard a piece of dung. “Does it have any side effects?”

  “A couple,” she admitted.

  “What?”

  “It causes halitosis in some people.”

  “You’re saying it’ll give me bad breath?”

  “It might.”

  Something about bad breath nibbled at my memory but failed to bite. I sniffed the pill and didn’t smell anything. “I guess I can live with that. What else?”

  “You won’t be able to use the gate anymore.”

  “Because the pill may cause drowsiness?”

  “Because it’ll inhibit the chemicals in your brain that allow you to use the gate.”

  Iugurtha was waiting patiently several yards down the tunnel. Forgetting what Rainer had once told me about the entity’s ability to hear, I lowered my voice. “Sarah, if I can’t work the gate, I won’t be able to get us back home.”