“I bet two of my pet spiners,” Dag said, “on the hairy one.” He was referring to Crumley. And the pets he was referring to, tugging on their chains, looked like giant centipedes.
Cronos grimaced at the sight before him. “What are these things?”
“They attach themselves while you sleep to your spine, suck your blood, but they’re wonderful for backaches,” Dag explained.
“Huh.” Cronos’ face grew pensive. He was no doubt thinking about his backaches. “Yeah, I’ll take some of that action.”
“What do you have that I could possibly want?” Dag balked, waving Cronos off dismissively, hoping for a better suitor for his bet.
“My pet anaconda I picked up in the Amazon. It’ll try and eat you whole while you sleep,” he said, “and while you’re awake, for that matter. But it gives one hell of a muscle massage as it tries to strangle you to death.”
“Prove it!” Dag’s eyes were wide, his expression hopeful, but also cynical.
Cronos tapped the Nautilus insignia on his chest and the anaconda leaped out of the void, forcing Dag to grab it by the neck as it went to unhinge its jaws. As the twenty-four foot snake—now scaled up to Nouveau Viking size—tried to strangle him and keep him from breathing, Dag managed, “It’s a bet!”
The spectators erupted in laughter, some from watching the wrestling match, some from picking up on Dag’s little drama on the sidelines with the snake.
The laughs were quickly followed by boos directed Ajax’s way. He’d been attempting to get under Freja’s skirt since he got here, and had managed finally to provoke her with remarks like, “How did the medical community come up with the term ‘PMS’? Because ‘Mad Cow Disease’ was already taken.”
Needless to say it took the Nautilus intervening to translate the subtleties of the joke to Freja, but Ajax had snuck enough of his nanites into her via his stolen kisses to hack her mind without her realizing. That was the one joke in fact that got her laughing and fighting angry at the same time, explaining how their wrestling match was cutting into Crumley’s as Ajax and Freja rolled into the center of the ring.
They were both summarily kicked back to the sidelines where they could continue their unique blend of roughhousing and lovemaking.
“The old man is tiring. He can’t go the distance,” Hertha said. “I bet a night’s sex with me.”
That got the men seated at the edge of the wrestling ring to ante up finally. They’d been biding their time until they heard a wager high enough to garner their interest, and possibly to wait until the wrestling match was far enough along for them to pick a sure winner.
“I’ll get in on that,” Canute said.
“Why waste your valuables, old man? You haven’t been able to get hard in five hundred years,” Hertha teased.
“It’s a triple full moon tonight. I feel the omens are good.” He threw his chips into the pot. “I bet my prize snail.” He reached beyond the perimeter of the circle of spectators to hoist it into view. The snail’s shell was the size of a Thanksgiving turkey for a family of twenty. “It’s slime trail is the best hallucinogenic in the land.”
“Accepted,” Hertha said. “If you are to crawl over me tonight, perhaps I can start licking it from now.”
The other men and women in the circle laughed at Canute’s expense.
***
Crumley’s wrestling with Asger was shaking ancestral memories loose he was having trouble dealing with. Each time he got his head slammed against the ground, another one shook free. But the sight of the creatures being betted on the sidelines each time his head was pinned on its side caused the most disturbing flashbacks of all.
He was caught up in one of them now.
***
ERESDRA, OVER A HUNDRED THOUSAND YEARS PRIOR
The war had been waging for years.
Eresdra was all but decimated now.
Asger’s people, his ancestors, scattered over the land, numbered at best in the hundreds.
They had fought valiantly and unwaveringly up until the end. What had finally broken their backs was not their dwindling numbers, it was the technology the enemy waged that put an end to the summonings.
The weapons Asger’s ancestors employed conjured creatures out of the air, the wind, the soil, out of the very fires that burned across the land, even out of the nothing—their term for the tears in space-time, which had nothing to do with the elemental magic of their wands that blended their high-tech society with their ancestral magic forged by elemental wizards long since gone.
The creatures the elemental techno-wizards could summon with their modern day wands were massive. They feasted on dragons, they tore star ships out of the sky with crews of thousands inside. They were unstoppable, their bodies ethereal and simply immune to any weapons.
But their techno-wizards were too few, and the creatures they could conjure best wielded against large armaments and forces. They could do little about the minions, the robot soldiers swarming over the ground like ants. The Nouveau Vikings, as Crumley and his people referred to them, killed hundreds of the robots for each one of them that fell, but still the robots kept coming. Their numbers were inexhaustible, manufactured by a race that didn’t need to resupply; they could convert raw energy into solid form, and that energy source they referred to as zero-point energy, was pulled from the vacuum of space itself. Asger had no vocabulary to describe what he was seeing in his mind’s eye, but his ancestors did, and their words and their understanding percolated into his brain now.
Finally, the actual enemy, who after hundreds of years the Nouveau Vikings had yet to see—for they remained cloaked in their starships which never landed, sending only emissary ships—released their ultimate weapon. It had been designed to frustrate the magic of the techno-wizards. It emitted pulses that disintegrated the energy beings the instant they took form out of the air, water, earth, or fire.
And so it was over. The seemingly unending war finally lost.
His people turned to making sacrifices of their dearest possessions, like the ones his people were setting before themselves in an effort to guess the outcome of the fight between Asger and Crumley.
Among Asger’s ancestors, the women gave of their fertility magic, ripping their wombs right out of themselves with the slit of a knife, and stitching themselves back up, only to stagger forward with the offering.
Asger understood now why there were so few women who could give birth in their time. Though they had been born of uteruses, many women to this day were born without them. Some psychic scar had been carried down from generations past that prevented more women from being born with wombs. They would never reverse the cycle of things if that psychic wound was not healed.
Asger suddenly understood Crumley’s beseeching to embrace their past in order to make themselves whole.
In his mind’s eye, from the ancient past, Asger saw children offered up by parents, not just one child, but all of the family’s children. The parents slit their own children’s throats in front of the enemy so they could see. Asger understood that this was a mock gesture of surrender, unlike the womb offerings. For his people were culling the numbers of the weak, saving only the strongest, thereby biding their time to repopulate their numbers and come at the enemy from a position of renewed strength.
The offerings were accepted.
The enemy combatants from another world left as mysteriously as they’d come. No one had ever ascertained their true reason for being here in the first place. If genocide had been their goal, they would not have left anyone behind.
As the last memory from the distant past to rise to the surface dissipated, something in Asger broke. The wrestling match he was engaged in wasn’t just play anymore. In a rage he rose up off the ground and held Crumley overhead.
***
ERESDRA, PRESENT TIME
“Oh shit!” Cronos said, seeing what was going on between Asger and Crumley—the look on Asger’s face.
“Ajax!” Ajax must have respond
ed to the tone of Cronos’s voice because the next thing Cronos knew they were both tackling Asger before he could break Crumley’s back against his knee. The trained soldiers didn’t need to be told what was coming next; they just knew.
“Asger wins!” Ajax said, pulling him off the ground, tapping Asger’s chest and holding his hand up. Ajax was getting laughs and wasn’t sure why. Then he glanced down at his exposed dick, as hard as ever, and said for the second time in as many moments, “Oh, shit.” He rushed to get his pants back on.
Cronos was still holding the other hand up, playing referee, calling the fight, ostensibly. He was really keeping that one hand out of action like Ajax was supposed to keep the other hand out of action, until Asger settled down.
“I’m sorry, my friend,” Asger said, regarding Crumley, who had just peeled himself off the ground amidst groans and signs of growing stiffness.
Crumley gave him a playful hug and slipped him into a headlock just as playfully. “Not at all, my friend. I was inside your head the whole time. I saw what you saw. And the knowledge we both gleaned will stand both of us in good stead for a long time to come.”
Crumley released his hold on Asger. Asger nodded, looked relieved, but still clearly feeling guilty as hell. “But how?” Asger asked.
Cronos had since returned to the circle to sort out the winners and the losers among the betters to keep another fight from erupting. Ajax had since forgotten about putting his pants back on and returned to his amorousness.
“The little robots I told you about earlier,” Crumley explained to Asger. “They’re in my sweat, which is all over you. Once inside you, they link your mind and mine. I knew this would happen. I hope you’ll forgive me for playing my little trick on you.”
Asger smiled, and roared in mock anger, and attacked his friend again, no less playfully. Cronos turned to see the two going at it again. “I see round two has started. Place your bets!”
***
Later that night Crumley opened another COMM link to Leon aboard the Nautilus. He played for him the footage of the incident, everything he’d seen inside Asger’s head, the nanites recording Asger’s ancient history as faithfully as the best hi-def cameras. At the end Crumley asked, “What do you make of it? Why do you think they came? Why did they leave?”
Leon pondered the point. Before he could answer, Crumley said, “You think they were like this nanite avatar Cassandra encountered at the gate? Another warrior species interested only in the contests of war?”
“Maybe,” Leon replied. “Perhaps they came seeking passage through the portal, then when it wouldn’t let them pass, they took out their frustrations on the locals.”
“But how did the star gate allow such lifeforms to advance so far in the first place, if it is keyed, like you say, to all worlds in the vicinity, if it’s job is to ensure only souls fit to inhabit the heavens live to enjoy it? And why would the Nouveau Vikings not benefit from the same uplifting we benefitted from—even after a hundred thousand years? There was certainly plenty of chance to rebuild.”
Leon took a deep breath, stewing on the issue. As always, he was pulling this stuff out of his ass. He wasn’t really sure what the answers were to those questions. At times like this, his gut spoke for him while his mind remained silent, the former possessing a far bigger brain. Scientists on earth had long speculated that our “gut checks” were in fact due to the trillions of bacteria lining our gut—greater in number than all the cells in the body—and collectively forming a much larger brain than the body could host over its entire surface, far less up in the head. “It’s possible these star gates act like acupuncture needles in the human body. Placed in the ‘God-body’ as they are, if you will, along the main energy meridians, it’s possible it ensures maximum circulation of chi through the body and that the body as a whole remains healthy.
“That said…” Leon paused to consider where the momentum of his thoughts was taking him. “It’s possible if you live outside of the range of influence of the star gates, or, in biblical terms, if you choose the dark side, having been given a choice, then… I guess what I’m saying is the system isn’t foolproof, whether or not I truly understand how it works.”
Crumley grunted. “Tonight I have played the part of Socrates and you the part of Plato, my student. The void where my understanding should be has summoned forth the genie of understanding in you.”
Leon laughed half-heartedly, still chewing on the implications, not so much of his own words, which he didn’t yet know if to take all that seriously or not, as the implications of the revelations arising from Asger’s memories. “Keep at it, Crumley, you and the rest of the guys. I’m not sure there’s any more of value to be learned from our nouveau Viking friends, but something’s still eating at me. And that more than anything suggests it’s too soon to beam you and the rest of the party up.”
Crumley nodded. “Copy.” He cut the transmission by tapping his chest insignia.
TWENTY-FIVE
ABOARD THE NAUTILUS
Satellite thrummed his electric guitar with all the bashing-gusto of a head banger. He fretted the neck of his instrument better than he fingered… They get the idea, Satellite. The wire from the guitar trailed to the amp and the amp trailed to a number of speakers—all had been tweaked to the nth degree, needless to say.
The speakers broadcast across an ice field that extended as far as he could see in all directions. By every report, he was standing in the courtyard of the Nautilus, possibly on the lowermost deck. But with the dearth of landmarks, he’d have to take their word for it; hopefully the rest of Alpha Unit wasn’t having a big joke at his expense.
Not all of the wires, of course, led to above-ground speakers; some trailed beneath the floating ice barge.
His audience was arriving.
Only they could hear his music, really. To everyone else, he appeared a mad man without the sense of how to plug in his guitar properly; even the sounds of the strumming against the streel strings without any amp was being absorbed by the winds.
The higher registers which only animals could hear, however, played a symphony that he had composed just for them, in acoustic languages only they could understand. His keyboard synthesizer beside him was doing most of the heavy lifting. Originally designed to mimic hundreds of different instruments, he’d tuned each of those in turn to help facilitate his special broadcast, and of course, had added instruments no one would have thought to add at the time.
Soon he would abandon his guitar, and jump to another instrument laid out behind him—there were scores of them—to continue to lay down accents to the principal sound tracks already composed and set into his synthesizer. His relishes were jazz-like riffs to make the music more alive and in the moment and never the same twice, no matter how many times his original compositions looped on the synthesizer.
The polar bears were descending into the valley, coming out from behind the mounds and the mountains in the distance—it was a fair bet the mountains were some kind of visual hocus pocus, an augmented reality effect created by the Nautilus supersentience—but that was beside the point. The point was the polar bears were coming—and so were the seals and sea lions, skating and sliding across the ice rather comically. The penguins were marching in numbers in no less a laughter-promoting manner.
Regrettably the entire circus on the move had to contend with the whales now coming up from beneath the giant barge of ice, puncturing it like straws through the plastic lid of a Styrofoam cup. If the killer whales putting on their aerial show wasn’t enough, by the time the blue whales and sperm whales got into the act, Satellite was left with just enough ice to support his instruments—a round disk the size of a large family living room. And everyone else was playing “dance on ice cubes” in some wild cocktail-shaking bartender’s hands. The polar bears jumped from “ice cube” to ice cube to get closer to him; though some settled for whatever row they found themselves in. The seals and sea lions had no trouble diving into the water to surface on
an ice floe a bit closer to the music.
The number of whales shooting through the water crescendoed and subsided in turn as the music below water got too good to miss a beat for all the excitement by jumping through the water.
All in all, his concert was shaping up to be a smash success.
“Is it me,” a polar bear said from the front row, “or are these humans a lot more interesting when they set aside the deep and meaningful stuff?”
Hours later, when it was all over, Satellite took a bow to his jubilant fans, the whales making some final spinning belly flops and fin wags before disappearing back into the deeps. The bears roared with a gusto and the seals, well, they made seal sounds, barking madly.
In short order, Satellite was left all alone again to ponder the error of his ways. He had no idea how he was going to get from his floating island cut off from the rest of the ship back to his quarters.
One lone seal seemed to take pity on him and surfaced up through the water to jump up on his floe of ice. “Not bad, maestro.”
“Thanks.”
The seal must have picked up on his deflated tone. “Let me guess, you’re one of those artists who works off their creative lows. I’d tell you to open a vein already, but you strike me as the type not to take that as a joke.”
Buried under a growing mound of silence that just refused to finish the job, Satellite admitted finally, “You know why I got so good at communicating with every other form of life in the cosmos?”
“You’re a total loser who couldn’t connect with another human being if you tried?”
Satellite sighed. “Is it that obvious?”
“Hate to break it to you, pal, but the Nautilus is nothing but one-of-a-kinds. So no one gets to feel special in quite that way. You can relax. If you can communicate across lifeforms better than anyone else on the ship, I’d say you are now a true rock star.”
The Star Gate Page 23
