Backflow Boxed Set

by F P Adriani

  Apparently, Geena could see the Rintu people better now, too. “Jim!” she said in a sharp happy voice as she stepped forward on my left. “I can’t believe it—you made it here!”

  One of the people—Jim—nodded slowly now. He was really tall and quite slim, with very short dark hair, and he didn’t look too friendly. Or maybe he was just very distracted by whatever he was doing with the silver device in his hands.

  We had all closed most of the gap between us, and just about everyone in the Rintu group remained in a line parallel to me and my crew, except Kostas.

  She stepped closer now and said right to me, “Show us the stone.”

  “You’re not very polite, are you?” I replied on a slight sneer, but my fingers did reach down for my belt and open the pocket with the stone inside. I removed it and held it out toward Kostas.

  She stared back at it. Then she said in a flat voice, “You have indeed used the stone,” her dark eyes finally traveling up to mine. I couldn’t read what was buried in her gaze, but I could see some of the others behind her frowning as they used their devices.

  I glanced between them and Kostas, my eyes finally remaining on her dark ones. “So is that a problem? I didn’t intend to use the stone. It was an accident. Frankly, I wish I’d never found the goddamn thing.”

  “You have used it and handled it a lot. It is coded to you now because you are an organic lifeform, and it is intended for organic lifeforms to control it. Though, of course, you don’t have the right ship to make use of the form of energy it leads to.”

  “No kidding,” I said. “So take it back already.” I pushed the firestone forward more.

  But Kostas only slowly shook her head from side-to-side. “We can’t do that. It would be meaningless.”

  “Would you please stop talking in cryptic sentences and just tell me what the fuck is going on—what am I supposed to do to get my normal life back? I came all this way—now you tell me I can’t give you the stone—so then it seems I’m stuck with it!”

  Kostas’ head shook again and her voice was quicker this time, like a normal human’s voice: “I didn’t say that. But only you should handle the stone now.”

  Based on every part of her face and body I could see, Kostas was human. And yet, there seemed to be something else going on with her—or maybe she was somehow taking orders; I got the feeling that she was taking them from the robed person behind her. The person’s bright orange robe almost completely covered her. I could only see a hint of slightly golden chin-skin beneath the hem of her big floppy hood….

  “Who are you there in the robe?” I asked baldly now.

  Kostas looked over her own shoulder, paused a moment, then nodded at the person in the robe, before turning back around. “Thura is a Keeper.”

  “Why is she covered so much? I can’t see her face.”

  A few of the workers glanced up from their devices and looked right at me. Then Kostas spoke again: “The Keepers are humanoid in shape, but they aren’t exactly like us humans. We always think it best to just communicate for them with other humans.”

  I frowned at her and Thura, and though Thura’s face was covered, I had a feeling she saw every single thing happening, and every single person standing before her. “How are you communicating with The Keepers?” I asked Kostas.

  “We human workers have a neural link with them, and they have another kind of neural link with each other.” One of the workers moved closer to Kostas to speak near her ear, which words of his I couldn’t hear.

  Kostas finally straightened up more and looked at me and my crew. “We suggest you rest for an hour or two now. Soon it will be time for us all to make the journey.”

  “What? What ‘journey’?” I asked fast, frowning still, a little heavier than last time. “I don’t have a neural link with you. Could you clue me in, please?”

  Kostas raised a straight, imperious, orange-covered arm and pointed it to over the edge of the platform, toward the planet’s horizon. My eyes and my crew’s eyes all followed her hand, which appeared to be pointed at a single, enormous brown mountain that towered over everything around it.

  Kostas lowered her arm and finally explained, “The Tasui is the cumulative history of technological inventions. We Keepers are particularly interested in the technologies of one particular species who no longer exists. The stone, as you and other humans have guessed, is one of their mechanisms. It was used to power their ships; they would use a stone to pull a ship into a corresponding energy well and charge up automatically from an infinite supply of a pure type of energy.

  “Even the most powerful lifeforms can make mistakes, but not all of them learn from their mistakes. This particular lifeform—instead of learning, it tends to physically evolve from its mistakes, and sometimes into a being with even more power, rendering its prior lifestyle obsolete. The Keepers are dismantlers of that lifestyle, as well as the lifestyles of many other species. The Keepers record, remove and recycle remnants of civilizations, to protect lifeforms from any unused but possibly dangerous inventions; we log the history of the many technologies that have existed, both the bad and the good. The Keepers have been doing this for millions of years.”

  “Millions?” Gary said in an astonished tone from beside me. “Then why are the stones still around—and especially the wells?”

  Kostas frowned a bit, her eyes shifting away from me and my crew, and into the distance, toward that big mountain. “The wells are a more complicated problem. They probably can’t be dismantled—at least we haven’t figured out a permanent way to do that. But since they can only be accessed via the stones, since the wells are technologically inert to other known inventions, our focus has always been on collecting all of the stones.

  “We estimate that there were about 70,000 stones loose in the universe; about 200,000 years ago, they were ejected from an explosion at the space-facility where the species made them. We’ve recovered all but a few hundred of the stones.

  “The problem is: this universe is a vast one, and it contains many different kinds of energy, matter and forces. The presence of the stones can be masked by an enormous number of combinations of materials and scenarios, some of which we probably haven’t even discovered yet. And cleaning up the stones is also only a tiny part of our tasks. There are many more things to be done.”

  “You keep saying ‘our’ and ‘we’ a lot,” May pointed out now.

  Kostas slowly turned to her. “In scenarios like this, I don’t feel separate from The Keepers.”

  My head shifted toward my left, and I saw a look pass between Geena and Jim—an awareness from her but more a lethargic consideration from him.

  Now she spoke to him, in slightly tremulous words: “Is it still you, Jim? Do you remember—me?” I had a feeling she had almost said “us.”

  Once again though, Jim didn’t say anything. He just slowly nodded.

  I let out a hard breath, my head whipping back to Kostas. “This is a lot to take in. How the hell am I supposed to go on a trek now? And, by the way, I’m not going alone. I want to take some of my crew.”

  A casual shrug from Kostas, as if I’d just ask her what brand of coffee she liked best. “Whoever of you wants to go may go, but it’s best to keep the number of you small. I approve of everyone standing here right now.”

  “Well, that’s good to know,” I said, pulling a sour face at her, which she didn’t seem to notice. “So how does this supposed journey work?”

  Her tone was matter-of-fact now: “The others you choose to bring with you and those of us who come too, we are largely irrelevant. You, Lydia Zarro, have handled the stone so much that you’ve become its temporary keeper. You must decommission the stone. That requires a trip to The Hall Of Devices. It will take at least a day. We must go on foot up that very tall mountain beyond; it is a trek through a series of various fields that will make the inner workings of the stone accessible while it’s outside its corresponding well.”

  Breathing hard now, I jerked an
arm toward that mountain. “But I don’t want to go traipsing up a mountain. I want to drop off the stone and go back to my work. I don’t understand why you can’t just decommission the wells.”

  Kostas shook her head from side-to-side very fast, in a very human way. “As I’ve said, that’s not possible, partly because the consciousness of the creators is no longer within our reach, and they might not even remember how to dismantle the wells anymore, assuming we could make them aware of us and the wells again.

  “But, even if we were able to figure out a way to remove or turn off the wells, we are quite sure each of those absent-of-energy spaces would cause a singularity to develop. Then there would be a cluster of new, massive singularities in this universe, the results of which we could not predict.”

  My voice was louder now: “Maybe the creators should have thought of that before they built the wells!”

  “Technology is a double-edged sword,” Kostas said, “as human civilization has learned.”

  “Only some of us have learned it. Really, my being here has shown that we haven’t learned much at all. Certainly, if we had stayed on Earth, we would have never found any of the stones.” I looked at Kostas more directly; then I looked at Thura behind her. “I know many other animals use technologies. I think the kinds and the amounts are the biggest problem with humans. Thankfully, we’re much more careful about it now. But, there are pockets of people left who just don’t give a shit about what they use up and what they damage—” I thought of Claudius again; then I felt my face turn red, which made me instantly shut up. Out of the corner of my right eye, I saw Gary’s head whip toward me. But I only shook my head back at him, letting out a sharp breath.

  I turned to Kostas again. “Can we please just get on with this now? What do we do next?”

  *

  What my crew and I had to do next was change into other clothes—Rintu work-clothes.

  “At least we don’t have to go up the damn mountain while wearing robes,” I said to Gary as I adjusted my red captain’s belt over my new, orange, Rintu worksuit.

  Gary and I were in my cabin, and he was dressed in the same orange get-up, which at first sight looked odd on him; I couldn’t recall ever having seen him in that bold color.

  However, upon further head-to-toe inspection, I realized the suit made his skin look warmer-colored and his eyes deepen into a smokier brown.

  “You look hot,” I said suddenly.

  And he laughed. “I was thinking the same about you.”

  I rolled my eyes. “I don’t know. I don’t think my yellowy skin looks good against pumpkin hues.” I glanced at the time on my wall intercom panel. “Shit—we’re supposed to go out there soon. Is all of this a mistake?” My head slowly turned Gary’s way.

  With his warm eyes right on mine now, he walked closer to me. “I don’t think it’s a mistake. …I love you.”

  “What—what?” I stared up at his face; he’d never said those three words to me before this moment, and he sure picked an odd moment to finally say them.

  His mouth twisted a little now, in a naive way. “Like you didn’t know?”

  “I thought…well, I don’t know. I guess I thought this was still pretty casual.”

  Now his mouth straightened, and the warm shine that had been in his eyes a moment before quickly dulled. “Is that what you want?”

  “I don’t know—I mean…I mean, oh, I’m just so confused by so many events lately.”

  “I can see that,” Gary said.

  I couldn’t quite verbally respond with what he wanted me to say, but I did reach forward to kiss him softly on the mouth. When I pulled back, I said, “It’s hard sometimes—trying to maintain my captain’s status, but being a human being at the same time. When I was in training in that private academy years ago, they didn’t discuss the psychological side much. But, I do love being with you….”

  Gary grabbed my right hand now, his warmth completely covering me there as he smiled.

  *

  While Gary, Shirley, May, Chen, and Steve and I would be scaling the Rintu mountain, the rest of my crew would either be remaining on the Demeter, or going on a brief, invited tour of Rintu’s Towers Of Technology, which was what The Keepers called the black buildings in Pruveria. At first, Geena had said that she was interested in going on the trek, but right before I left the ship, she told me she wanted to take the Towers-tour instead; I suspected the tour wasn’t the real reason she was staying behind….

  My five crewmembers and I were finally standing outside the Demeter; I looked over that side edge of the platform, toward where the immense brown mountain waited. During past jobs on different planetary landscapes, I’d occasionally had to walk over small hills. But I was no athlete. And the orange worksuit I was wearing wasn’t exactly comfortable because it was too stiff. Fortunately, the workers had given us the special clear sunglasses, which I and my crew put on now; the Rintu people were supposed to supply us with whatever we would need to make the day-long climb, so I hadn’t brought anything other than my belt.

  I pushed the button on there that would connect me with my ship. “Karen, remember: Kostas promised the line will be open the whole time. You’re in charge. You need or notice anything you don’t like or you think I should know, contact me right away.”

  “You got it, Captain,” Karen said. “I’ll do my best.”

  “I know you will,” I said, before closing the line.

  I turned to Gary, then to that same black building from earlier, where no one was waiting. “I guess we should go knock on the door now. We’re on time; they’re not. This isn’t promising….”

  As if the Rintu people had heard my statement, the big black door opened and a dozen workers walked out. They were still in orange and they were still holding devices in their hands, but this time they were carrying black packs on their backs.

  I walked in their direction, pointing my right thumb toward the mountain. “How will we get over to there?”

  “We will fly,” said one of the workers, in a very deep, very resonant voice. He was short and broad, and his dark hands were busy punching the buttons on a small gray box.

  I heard the soft whir of something, as if the wind had gently shifted, and when I looked to the left of the platform, I saw a large red disk floating in the orange sky. The disk glided toward the platform as if it had all the time in the universe to get here.

  I heard Kostas’ voice coming from somewhere: “We are ready to make the journey.”

  …The next thing I knew, I was inside a very streamlined space, with my crew around me looking as dumbfounded as I felt.

  “What—what just happened?” May asked, staring toward a wide, clear window, where there was a lone red chair, which Kostas was filling.

  She adjusted a lever on the black, electronic control-panel before her. “I moved you inside this ship.”

  May frowned at her. “But I don’t remember that happening.”

  “It happened so fast, you can’t remember it, at least consciously,” Kostas said.

  That same short worker from before walked up to her and mumbled something; apparently, he and the other workers had been transported to here too.

  Kostas’ long left forefinger pushed a button on her controls as she said, “You and your crew may remove your glasses now, Captain Zarro. Everyone, please be seated.”

  The workers sat down in the line of white chairs along the wall opposite to me and my crew, and I fell back into one of the white chairs behind us, along the right side of the bridge. Chen took the seat to my right, and May took the one beside him, near the front window. Two straps automatically closed over their torsos, and another did the same on my torso.

  “If we’re going to fly, why can’t we just fly up the mountain?” Chen asked then, his head turning toward Kostas.

  Her slender hands moved deftly over her electronic panel. “This ship is not equipped with the proper staging technology to deactivate the stone. The stone is a nested structure the
way an onion is nested, except the number of layers in the stone are the number of layers inside a typical onion raised to the fifteenth power.”

  “Christ,” I said, glancing at my crew. Gary was seated on my left; beyond him, Steve’s straight, waiting face indicated he seemed to be carefully taking in the whole experience; Shirley, however, was frowning in the seat beside him, which made me frown too, in worry.

  “What is it, Shirley?” I asked now.

  “I’m just wondering if I should have stayed on the Demeter.” Her eyes were on the front window, where the view rapidly changed from the red platform and black buildings to a superfast whir of orange.

  I felt my stomach lurch. For years I’d been living most of my life on a spaceship, but there was something particularly unnatural about the way this Keeper ship was flying; my face began to sweat.

  “With the high speed we seem to be going, why aren’t we at the mountain yet?” Chen demanded, his voice sounding strained, which was an unusual sound for him. I knew he had been flying in ships since he could walk: his parents had been in the Space Force; he’d lived a good deal of his life on ships with them. But I’d never seen him looking as uncomfortable as the way he looked now; he had just removed his glasses, and his mouth was trembling as if he felt very nauseous. When he finally pressed his face into his hands, I laid a hand on top of his head, trying to comfort him. He was my friend and I hated seeing him like this. I was about to yell at Kostas—

  But then she glanced over her right shoulder, at Chen. “Where the mountain appeared to be while we were on the platform is not where the mountain actually is. When The Keepers found Rintu near the small gravity cloud, they expanded the cloud and terraformed the planet into different dimensions. Rintu is not the barren normal planet it used to be before The Keepers began using it as a base in this universe.”