Leon craned from the shock of the sight of Solo drifting in the tank to the hologram of the dream he’d just had, playing out behind him, projected just a little further away from the tank than where Leon was standing. Leon returned his attention to the “aquarium man.” “I see you’re studying my dreams. You always did have a thing for netherworlds, from the first time I met you.”
“Not your dreams, my thought projections,” Solo said, his voice coming over the speakers in the room. He was evidently mind-linked to the sound system by way of the nanites percolating in his brain. “There was no point in letting your imagination run afield of the truth as it tried to make sense of Natty’s communiqué.”
“You’re saying those things really look like that?” Leon returned his attention to the dramatic replay of the battle he’d fought one too many times in his head already.
“Once upon a time. They’ve evolved since, quite a bit. These are the pawns, by the way. You never got to meet the less disposable pieces. There was no point terrifying you beyond your capacity to recuperate from the trauma.”
The idea of those combatants being mere pawns got Leon’s eyelids to pop, alright. But he’d once again returned his attention to the tank, and to the phosphorescent green-scaled Solo. “Please tell me you’re saying that just to mess with me.”
Solo opened his eyes—those portals to eternity; they were somehow more troubling than the hologram of the battle, which disappeared the moment he peered out into the world.
In the next instant Solo was standing outside the tank, dripping straw-colored liquid on the floor, which the floor lapped up as greedily as it did anything else that fell on it. Solo had teleported out of the tank!
“Another of your abilities? Teleportation?”
“Not needed aboard the Nautilus, which will teleport you anywhere on the vessel, providing you okay the saturation of your body with the requisite nanites,” Solo said. God, he sounded more like Captain Nemo of the Nautilus than Natty did, or at least the actor, Herbert Lom, who played him in Mysterious Island, in a movie so ancient now Leon was afraid to confess he had it committed to memory; he had all noteworthy captains in all movies that featured them committed to memory.
Like Nemo in the film, Solo’s voice smacked of authority, and it carried with it a sense of gravity as well, as one might expect from someone who communed more closely with God than the rest of them; by “God” Leon meant the infinite, the All. Charlton Heston coming off Mt. Sinai in The Ten Commandments had nailed the same quality in the voice.
“You know why I’m here?” Leon asked.
“No, but I can guess. You want me to play intermediary for you with regards to the future.”
Leon sighed, studying Solo’s eyes as he would a crystal ball. “But you can’t, can you? Because according to you, the only way to win the game is to play the game, get our minds trained, conditioned, to handle the real horrors out there. And that it can only do by being gradually exposed to ever-greater trials. I know this to be true because we use the same technique training our special ops guys.”
“I’m sorry, Leon, but it’s the way it is. If it makes you feel any better, something’s blocking my prescience. I’m a long way from having all the answers, but trust me, I’ll be looking into who or what has managed to dampen down my psychic abilities.”
“Maybe they’re trying to protect you from the truth as well. Maybe we have a benefactor out there.”
Solo grunted. The sound came out of tiny vents on either side of his chin and sounded like some signal sent to confederates only his species could decipher. “You’re not yet in the thick of things and already you dream of being rescued. It’s a form of PTSD, and definitely not a good sign.”
Leon grimaced. “Touché. I suppose we should both know better after all we’ve been through.”
Leon turned at the susurrus of sliding doors. Several robots entered looking like walking can openers. They must have been low budget droids the ship used for various tasks. Right now, they appeared to be commandeering Solo’s Samadhi tank. “What the hell?” He had already moved toward the robots to intercede on Solo’s behalf.
“It’s okay, my friend. I’m having the tank moved to your chamber. You’ll get more out of it. As the leader goes, so goes his team. If it helps restore you after each encounter on either side of the star gates faster, better, you may be ordering one for all your people.”
“Not a half bad idea,” Leon mumbled, watching the tank being wheeled out of the room after being lifted by the four droids onto the tray with wheels. He shifted his attention back to Solo.
“You’ll be coming down to the planet with us?” Leon asked.
“No. Smoothing things over with alien lifeforms, making allies, and gathering intel for Natty is your job. I will be of more use interfacing with the star gate from aboard the Nautilus. The ship’s many AIs will not be enough to penetrate its secrets. I suspect it is in part interdimensional in nature, an area in which I have greater expertise.”
“One of these days you’ll have to explain to me how that is and why.”
“One of these days,” Solo replied in his typically evasive manner, dodging questions perhaps for Leon’s good as much as for his own.
“You think there will be artifacts on this world that will help us through the gate?”
“I know there will,” Solo replied. “But I suspect you’ll still need my mind to act as the glue to put the puzzle together with so many missing pieces.”
“I thought for certain that job would fall to Natty.”
“Natty is too much a fan boy of his special ops forces. He won’t let you die out there. You’re by far his favorite toys, even if he refuses to admit it. All of his mind power will always be focused on giving you all an edge. That leaves me to tinker with the gates.”
“And Laney?”
“Laney is in love with her husband even if she eschews the perpetual child in him. And he doesn’t have the expertise in bioengineering she does to keep himself, far less any of you, alive within highly toxic biospheres meant to nurture different lifeforms entirely. It’ll take the two of them working together as they did in the Amazon to keep all the gears moving.”
“So, you really are Captain Nemo of the Nautilus.” Refusing to leave the ship, protecting her above all.
After a short delay—perhaps it had taken him that long to search the appropriate reference via his mind link to the Nautilus—Solo smiled in a friendly manner, as much as those reptilian muscles and razor-sharp teeth would allow. “I’m the Captain Nemo doll in this toy chest of Natty’s, yes.”
They both laughed. Then Solo craned his head as if hearing something with his sensitive ears in the far-off distance. “Seems your people are two steps ahead of both of us. They’re crawling out of their rejuvenation tanks now after mixing it up with the NARs.”
Leon snorted. “Damn nice of the NARs to entertain the boys like that.”
“Yes, they have big hearts. They sensed the guys needed the equivalent of a bar-room brawl to degauss from the tensions of the Amazon. There are limits to the recuperative and restorative workarounds on Earth compared to what we can do up here.”
“I’ll see you for dinner?” Leon asked.
“You realize my kind only eats humans, right?”
Leon glared at him. “I’m busting your balls, Leon. Besides, even if that were true, I’d never be so gauche as to do it in front of the rest of you.”
Leon had relaxed only to tense up again at the last remark. “If interacting with you is any clue of how our first alien encounter is going to go on another world, I fear for interspecies diplomacy.”
“You and I both.”
SEVEN
ABOARD THE NAUTILUS
Laney’s and Natty’s ghostly apparitions met in the hall, clasped hands and walked alongside one another. “This is really pathetic, sending our avatars to make out,” she said.
“You said you wanted us to spend more time together?” Natty sounded inju
red, as if clueless as to what he’d done wrong this time.
She smiled remorsefully.
“You still feel real to my touch, as you did then,” Natty said. “Remember in the Amazon jungle, when this was the only way you could reach me, by thought projection?”
She smiled a little more fondly. “Yes, I do.”
“Think of this as taking it to the next level. Everything we say and do together as avatars will percolate into our minds when we dream at night, will intrude on our waking consciousness as well when we least expect it. It’ll be the tonic it’s meant to be then. And it’s—”
“I know.” She tightened her grip on his hand. “It’s as close as we can get to being in two places at once, at least for now, considering our mutual responsibilities.”
“We’re like Adam and Eve, you and I, and our children, everything we’ve given rise to, need us more than ever.”
She sighed and smiled plastically. Behind his poetically-worded dodge was a measure of truth. The fact was that their scientific work demanded a lot of alone time, and considering what they were up against currently, that work had become all-consuming. All things considered, Natty’s workaround was both thoughtful, romantic, and brilliant. Right or wrong, it didn’t keep her from wanting to strangle him in frustration right now.
He snaked his arm around her shoulders and kissed her at the side of her head. She slipped her hand around his waist and leaned her head against his as they continued to walk.
“Maybe you should program our avatars to intrude on our alone time in the lab, when we’re stuck for ideas, and it’s still not practical to seek one another out.”
“Two steps ahead of you,” he said. “Though my not being a master exactly of what to say or do around you when…”
She winced at the thought that she might be making him walk on egg shells around her, but her husband’s incorrigible inner-child did seem better at setting off the ticking bomb of her personality more days than it was at defusing her.
“I left it to the Nautilus to time these intrusions and inform my avatar on how best to act. Not sure how much mental time she’ll devote to that, so don’t expect my social faux pas to disappear entirely.”
She smiled warmly and with some amusement. “At least if I lob a beaker of acid at you in frustration, your avatar has a better chance of escaping unscathed.”
“Excellent point.”
***
Natty threw up a hologram of the moon artifact in his lab. He traced the perimeter about the obelisk with his naked feet, trying to take it in from all angles. Stepping on the floor without any shoes was an open invitation to the Nautilus to infuse him with whatever mind-body-soul-repairing technology it used throughout the ship on itself as needed; not that he was sure such a ploy would work. Luckily, there was just enough empty space inside his personal work space to accommodate study of a relic as immense as this. But the anvil-like monument seemed as impenetrable now as when he’d first gazed upon it.
The hologram, off at the margins of the monument it was depicting, continued to spit out the results of the latest scans. Any insights gained from the attempts to scratch away at it by the robot excavators that had discovered the artifact well below the surface of the moon—on the far side, facing away from Earth—were recorded as well.
“The power of that thing is so great, the energy field envelops both the moon and the Earth—in its idle state. Why? A protective shield of some kind?”
Laney materialized on the other side of the artifact, or at least her avatar did, looking straight through it at him. “Why does it matter so, Natty? You cloned everyone on this team and left the clones back on Earth to focus on the challenges the artifact poses without distraction. Surely, there’s nothing you can hope to accomplish with the scant amount of time you have to devote to it that they haven’t considered already.”
He couldn’t argue her point, so he wondered about his true motivations. He wondered even more about why the Nautilus had been so quick to act to bring Laney and him together; it was less than an hour ago that he’d proposed to Laney that their avatars intercede on one another’s private time when they were stuck in their thinking. “Sometimes we all need a little diversion from the subject at hand—in my case, that’s the star gate—and sometimes it’s the one you didn’t think to include on the team that comes up with the answer because, if nothing else, he’s less likely to be subject to group think.”
“So, what about the artifact’s radiation then has captured your imagination?” She strolled about the monolith, running her hand over it suggestively, making love to it almost. Natty was jealous. Maybe that was her way of teasing his mind to work along another track, maybe by plugging his seventh chakra—the source of divine wisdom—into his second chakra—the source of sexual and creative energy. Cunning wench.
Conscience compromises cunning. And you have way too much guilt for having left them behind on earth, so she may well be on to something.
He gave her question deeper consideration. “What if it’s bathing the Earth in a radiance that actually accelerates evolution? If it’s on a timeclock, sensing when an invasion is imminent, it’s possible it can’t wait passively any longer and hope humanity will evolve to a point that it needs it to in time.”
She regarded him with a scoffing expression splattered across her face. “Is this like the time when you insisted that nuclear fallout from the melted-down Fukushima nuclear plant site, affecting every living thing on the planet, was a deliberate outcome, and not an accidental one? That they were trying to trigger mutations in the human race that might actually lead to bloodlines that favored immortality, genius, superhuman abilities. And in keeping with nature, the more mutations they created in the least amount of time the better in hopes that the one in a million would amount to something.”
“I get a bit paranoid from time to time, you know that, which makes those digs rather low blows. Still, I could have been right about the Fukushima affair, considering the sick bastards currently in charge of the world.”
She fought back her condescending smile, which he had to agree was not helping. “But you conceded that there are far more efficient ways to take charge of human evolution and spearhead it in the direction you want, like the Chinese are doing with their genius gene banks?”
He gestured toward the monolith. “You’re kind of making my point for me, aren’t you? I mean, what if there was a kind of celestial light that you could bathe us all in, like the one the monks practicing transcendental meditation willingly open their own minds to? Maybe this thing acts like a bypass circuit, getting us around the lack of good sense we all should have to meditate more.”
She smiled patronizingly; the reflex had gotten away from her this time. Her mocking expressions often provoked him to pull even more far-fetched rationalizations out of his ass, and on occasion, just the right answer that had been eluding him all along. Perhaps, in desperation, she’d simply switched tactics; cunning wench.
Like a Pavlovian dog responding to the ringing of a bell, his imagination was off and running again. “Okay, putting aside the whole divine radiance thing—I can always invent devices to scan for that, after all, which’ll settle the matter one way or the other. What about…?”
His mind stalled. He had expected the next revelation to queue itself up as it always did in this situation when sufficiently provoked, but his mouth for once was running ahead of his brain. Perhaps his blood sugar was off. Or maybe he was finally experiencing the effects of age. He was twenty-three now. In the prime of life perhaps for any career besides science, where the younger you were the better; the older you were, the more you tended to know, and the more you knew, the less likely you were to believe any of your cockamamie ideas would actually work.
But then the revelation came.
The flash of awareness. “Duh!” He slapped his forehead with the palm of his hand.
“It’s not like banging a TV to get it to work when the reception is faulty, Natty,” h
is wife said, another of those supercilious smirks erupting on her face mixed with mild amusement.
“I mean, look at the thing!” He gestured toward the hologram. “It’s inert, impenetrable. Maybe it’s not the artifact at all, but the lockbox which holds the artifact—built, you know, like one of those Chinese puzzle boxes.” He was fighting against her scornful expression, but like salmon, he seemed to need the opposing direction of the river of her cynicism to swim upstream of. “Think of where the anvil was buried, in an almost diamond-like encasing of crystalized sand, making it impossible for any panels to be slid willy-nilly, ensuring that not until it was properly excavated could the puzzle box be worked. And hell, simply to find it was another kind of test, right, to ensure the civilization in question might be smart enough to actually open the box. Well, to be certain, this alien race gave us the puzzle of the Chinese box itself.”
“That’s insane, even by your standards. And you have absolutely nothing to base that wild theory on.” She continued to caress the artifact as she strode about it. She was standing beside him now and the fact that she could be this close and chose to run her hands over it and not him was driving him wild. He hated her for the fact that she was playing him like a fiddle; he was seldom as conscious as he was now of just how much the sexual tension between them drove his more creative ideas.
Already his mind was racing for a way to prove his conjecture to her if only to get her hands off the artifact and on to him. “What would it take to slide those panels into their proper alignment to open the box?” Natty mumbled to himself.
“What does it matter, Natty? It’s not your problem anymore; it’s your alter ego’s back on Earth. You ever consider that this is just some elaborate form of OCD? What are you avoiding in this timeline? What brought you out here that you suddenly can’t face?”
He glared at her the way a rat terrier might when thrown into a ring full of rats. Wherefrom this sudden rabid-dog fury? Had she struck a nerve? That was what she was good at. They were both terribly good at pushing one another’s buttons. He never considered that he might provoke her toward insights that she couldn’t otherwise reach in the same way she did him. So maybe his energy would be better spent addressing her question rather than trying to shield himself from it with an ugly look.
The Star Gate Page 6
