by F P Adriani
I couldn’t help the sourness in my tone now. “You keep saying ‘this universe,’ as if there’s more than one.”
“There is. The creators of the stone now live in another universe, which we will not be going to, at least not exactly.”
“I wish your words came with a decoder,” I snapped. “Dealing with all of this is exhausting. We shouldn’t have to squeeze every bit of information from you as if we’re squeezing hard dry lemons.”
Shockingly, Kostas belted out a laugh. “It’s been years since we allowed anyone new into Rintu, and once they remain permanently, they change. I’ve forgotten how entertaining being around normal humans can be.”
“I’m glad you’re having a good time at my expense…not,” I said now, my eyes shifting to out the window. But they didn’t remain on the view for long because it still gave me such a discomforting feeling.
I looked to my left, at Gary. He had been very silent for a while, and now I realized why: he’d fallen asleep. As I watched his head lolling backwards against the top of the white seat and his mustache and bottom lip fluttering with his breaths, I couldn’t help laughing a little. Then I felt bad about laughing: all of us on the Demeter hadn’t been getting enough sleep; nor had we been working normally spaced shifts. This had clearly taken a toll….
I turned back to Chen—May had taken over there; her left arm was wrapped around his shoulders now. Her usually warm-toned skin was tinged with a pale gray—apparently, she wasn’t exactly well enough to comfort Chen, but she was doing it anyway.
“Why the hell is this happening?” I asked. “This flight doesn’t feel right to our bodies.”
“This universe is a lot more vast than humanity believes,” Kostas said. “The history of the many species in the beyond, of their cultures and technologies—this is an enormous amount of data of numerous kinds. It cannot be housed in normal spacetime. The Keepers are their own separate species too, and they’re the perfect ones to know how to house the data for maximum efficiency. The Keepers don’t completely exist in any one position at any one moment. They’re used to variations in that, and their technology on this planet, like this ship—it’s not meant for normal spacetime.”
“Well,” I said, “that definitely explains why we’re feeling so disoriented here.” My gaze now passed over the other Rintu people seated on the ship; they were all wearing orange worksuits, and, as far as I could tell, they were all human. “How come there are no Keepers with us?”
“The necessary Keepers are already at the mountain,” Kostas said.
“I’ve been wanting to ask you something,” I said in a low voice, sitting forward in my seat more. “Have The Keepers logged the history of humanity’s inventions—our technology and technological behavior?”
An obvious hesitation, which was punctuated by a brusque, “Yes,” from Kostas.
“So what did they have to say about us…actually, scratch that. I probably don’t want to know. It’s probably nothing too good.”
Kostas didn’t reply, but I had a feeling her silence was an agreement with my last statement.
I sighed now. “So, where do you come from—I’m assuming you’re from Earth? Though you do have an accent I can’t place.”
“Yes, I was born on Earth. My name there was Ilona Kostas. I’m from Greece.”
“I’ve never been there. Do you miss it?”
Another silence, longer than the last one. “Sometimes,” she finally said. “We should reach the mountain in a few hours. I suggest you and your crew take a nap—it will make it easier to deal with any dimensional sickness.”
“Yeah, whatever you say—you try to sleep when it feels like you’re being smushed around with a rolling pin….”
“You forget that I was once in the same position as you.”
My eyes jerked toward her. “You used a firestone and had to decommission it here?”
Her head shook from side-to-side, her dark hair shifting across her profile. “No. My ship had an accident while inside a curon bubble—and I wound up stranded in the Rintu gravity cloud, luckily. When The Keepers rescued me, I found a new home. I’d been working for the Galactic Exploration Service for years. I was tired of roaming. I always loved history, so this seemed a perfect match for me.”
“What about everyone else here?” I said, looking around at the workers again, most of whom were either busy with their little devices or sleeping, which sleeping all of my crewmembers were now doing, including May.
“I think you should sleep,” Kostas said to me.
I exhaled a hard breath because she and the other workers had ignored my question, but then I found that my eyelids did feel so damn droopy….
When I woke up later, the ride in the disk-ship didn’t seem as sickening to my body, maybe because the view out the front window had slowed. I could now see vertical forms inside the blurry orange atmosphere; apparently, the ship was flying quite low.
I had scrunched back in my chair while I slept, but now I sat up straighter. “Are we almost there?”
Kostas’ gaze slid my way as she nodded.
My crew began waking up—Gary first. “Where are we?” His eyes shifted between me and Kostas, but I only jerked a hand at her.
She went back to looking out the front window and manipulating the ship’s controls. “We’re approaching the spatial fields of The Hall. We should land in about four minutes.”
“What time is it?” Gary asked, looking at me again.
I glanced down at my belt’s time-readout. “We’ve been on here a few hours, Sleepyhead.” I smiled at him, and his right hand slid over my left thigh—first to squeeze there, then to rest there. My other crewmembers were awake now, but I suddenly didn’t care about Gary’s familiarity with my thigh in front of them….
“We will be landing in 90 seconds,” Kostas said now.
Feeling my pulse speed up, I jerked forward in my chair, and Gary removed his hand, to run his fingers through his sleep-mussed hair.
I looked around the ship. I looked at Shirley and Steve first, found them talking quietly to each other. Then I looked at the workers and realized that most of them had been on the platform earlier. “How many humans are living on Rintu?” I asked no one in particular.
“There are sixty-six of us,” that same short guy from before said, his dark eyes shifting up to my face, then over to the front window, where the view had really slowed, but which “view” mostly consisted of the one brown mountain.
“That looks massive!” I said, my mouth remaining open afterward in awe. Now that I was closer to the mountain, the unusual “earth” it was made of actually looked multicolored and quite smooth, as if someone had dropped an enormous hunk of granite onto Rintu’s surface.
The ship slowed down even more till it began kicking up the ground; red dust flowed upward in powdery streams out the front window. Our descent onto the planet’s surface seemed effortless, though, and Kostas was soon telling me and my crew to unstrap and put on our glasses again.
I quickly did both things and stood. “Let’s get this show on the road—or, I guess I should say, on the mountain.”
Someone had opened a big hatch on the back end of the ship. I moved closer to there, but Kostas suddenly walked around me and down the black ramp connected to the hatch.
I followed her—only to stop short when I reached the red ground.
Kostas had parked the ship quite close to the mountain, and now that it was looming over us, I realized that the hunk of speckled earth or stone—whatever it was, it now looked much higher than from on the platform earlier. I couldn’t even see the top of the mountain; it was an almost completely vertical rise toward the orange sky. “Oh my god, how the hell will we scale that?”
Kostas lifted her head toward where I was staring. “We will be walking up trails on the other side. They are carved into the fixture—”
“Fixture—that’s a good description of it! It looks like someone moved it here.”
Kostas di
dn’t reply to me. She turned to the other workers as they and my crew disembarked from the red disk-ship. “Have you finished with the calibration?” Kostas asked the workers. “Upal is awake and waiting for us on the first level with the scale. He was having some trouble with the attached specimen plate.”
Three of the workers nodded at Kostas’ words; apparently, they had been working on their calibration together because they now had their devices pointed toward each other in what looked like an equilateral-triangle shape.
“We’re getting a bit of interference,” one of the workers suddenly said, and her green eyes looked right at me when she spoke.
I glared back-and-forth between her and Kostas as I said, “What—what?”
“You are wearing an electronic device with a scandium core that’s turned on,” the green-eyed worker said to me.
“Yeah,” I replied. “That’s my belt. My link to my ship, where I’m the, uh, captain, you know?” I turned to Kostas. “You told me it would be fine if I kept in contact with my ship.”
Kostas’ lips pursed, apparently at my statement. “That isn’t entirely accurate. If you want to send one last quick message now, that will be fine. But we must be here overnight, when Rintu’s two moon-engines will help fire up our power. And no other technology can be on around here then.” She shook a careless hand at one of the dark buildings in the distance; there were no structures anywhere near the mountain, which, again, was contrary to how this space looked from on that red platform. Now Kostas said, “Even all of the buildings in a particular zone in this area will have to stop the work they do. All power will have to be diverted to this mountain.”
“So much rigmarole for a damn stone!” I said, punching at my belt communicator. “Karen, there’s a problem. I won’t be able to contact you till….” My hard eyes turned to Kostas.
“In the morning should be okay,” she said.
“Till the morning,” I said to Karen. “Is everything all right there?”
“So far,” Karen said. “A few of the crew are on that tour; they’re supposed to be gone two hours. But do you want me to call them back sooner?”
“No.”
“Lydia and Steve—I’ve been working on the zenite engine more—trying to find where that mass-flow problem developed. I know you made progress there, Steve, but now it got cut short by your trip.”
“So did a lot of things,” I said in a dry voice. “Well, I think you can handle things there for one day, Karen. But if you all find that you can’t, maybe you can ask for help from this crowd on the planet.” Now I raised a sharp eyebrow at Kostas.
She nodded my way. “Yes, that would be fine.”
“Just contact the Rintu people if necessary, Karen. And make sure you switch off with Sam when you need it and get some rest.”
“I will, Lydia—thanks!”
I smiled a little. “Well, this is good-day then—and good-night. Take care.” I clicked off with Karen, disabled the link and everything else on my belt, and looked up at the sky, trying to determine how much longer the daytime would last. I finally asked Kostas about it.
“Most of the time, it probably won’t seem like any specific time when we’re on the mountain,” Kostas said, her eyes up on the sky now. She pointed upward, both to the left and to the right of where we were standing. “The String moon will be there, and Bracken moon will be over there. They and the mountain will make a perfect triangle, which will illuminate this place, which is a convenience too, so we don’t fall off the mountain.”
“Great. That sounds promising. So now you’re saying it will be dangerous on there?” I glanced around at my crew and their suddenly-wary faces.
“We’re saying to just follow our instructions,” the short male worker said, and then he nodded at Kostas fast.
“Yes,” Kostas said, “Devin is right: you must follow whatever we say. And, now, we must start.” She turned around and began walking over the red earth.
The orange worksuits we were all wearing had orange boots attached, but, as I followed Kostas over the bumpy earth, it became very obvious that there wasn’t enough flexibility in the suits or the boots.
“These boots and suits seem kind of stiff,” I mumbled.
Devin threw me a dark-eyed glance. “They are equipped with the necessary technology to keep us connected to the various spaces we go through on a daily basis, and that you will go through today.”
I glanced at him now. “Does any of this technology and the dimensions here do anything to our bodies? I’m starting to feel like the olden days of space travel without gravitational support—the health effects then—”
Devin shook his head fast, but Kostas spoke now: “Don’t worry about any of that. The Keepers will take care of everything. I’ve been living and working on here for decades, and I’m healthier than ever.”
“That’s good to know…I think.” The right side of my mouth curled.
Kostas pointed toward the base of the mountain, where there was a sharp, dark curve in the structure. “We will ascend those black stairs.” She glanced over her shoulder at me and my crew. “If you can’t keep up with the pace of us workers, let us know, and we’ll pause. Though we shouldn’t pause for too long ever.”
I groaned a bit, but I kept walking. I had never gotten an explanation from the workers on how the sun could be shining in the sky when the planet was surrounded by an enormous “cloud” structure, but however the sun was here, I began feeling sorry it was here; it beat down hard on our bodies, and to me it felt hotter than any other sun I’d met up with in my lifetime.
When we finally reached the mountain’s wide black steps, I wasn’t walking up them for even a minute before sweat began making my worksuit’s underwear and bra-panel stick to my body, and I had to wipe my right hand across my forehead to pull away the wet there; it had started dripping beneath my glasses. “Whew—I hope you crowd brought water!”
Kostas looked over her shoulder at me, then said, “Devin.” He slid his black backpack off his shoulders and removed a perfectly cylindrical white bottle.
I stared down at it as he handed it to me. “You all can’t have enough water in there for everyone for the whole trip.”
“Don’t worry,” Kostas said.
“You keep saying that, but it doesn’t make me feel any better.”
“I’m dying of thirst here too,” Shirley said.
And then I heard Kostas sigh, which surprised me because her face was glistening with sweat too. Maybe she had been around The Keeper crowd too long and was now out of touch with humans and her own humanity….
I decided to say that to her, and she quickly flashed me wide dark eyes. But she did finally say, “We’ll take a ten-minute break before we really begin our ascent. You may all sit on the stairs and have water.”
“Very magnanimous of you,” Chen snapped, which was unlike him. I turned my head toward behind me and saw that, beside him, May looked even more uncomfortable in the heat than the rest of us.
My head whipped back to Kostas. “You could have at least given us short-sleeved orange suits!”
Kostas flashed me those wide eyes again. “All of the worker suits are long-sleeved.”
I flung a hand at the general area of the planet. “You’ve got all this advanced technology and knowledge, but you can’t make a worksuit more thermodynamically comfortable? You don’t seem to notice your surroundings as an animal anymore.” I opened the cap on the white bottle and chugged at the liquid inside. When a little spilled onto my hand, I realized that the liquid wasn’t normal water; it was a weird bright blue, but, thankfully, it was also cold and very refreshing. I plopped my ass down on one of the steps, and Gary moved to sit beside me.
We shared my bottle of blue water, and he said near my ear, “You’re right about them—they are out of touch. Maybe it’s necessary for them to do their work. I know you hate that Babs left, but I don’t often miss being in engineering: sometimes working down there, having to be ‘on’ all the tim
e then, I would forget how to not be on.”
I nodded at him and drank more of the water, staring out at the land around us. It looked different from this angle; the atmosphere wasn’t as hazy. But I was still getting that weird, disoriented feeling inside my mind and inside my vision, as if I were looking through a scope, and there were things out there that I couldn’t quite locate in my field of view but knew were there anyway….
The stairs weren’t covered overhead; I continued baking in the sun. I started to get up and Gary helped pull me to my feet. I smiled up at his face then, wanting to kiss him, but our sweatiness….
I glanced up the steps, at where Kostas was seated alone on one of them. Then I said, “Let’s just get going again now. Is there an indoor part of this trek soon?”
Kostas rose. “Yes. You’ll have to remove the stone then.”
“Gladly,” I said as I began walking up the steps again, handing Devin the empty water bottle as I passed him.
The mountain turned out to be not as straight up as I’d thought when I’d viewed it from on the ground. Apparently, that view had either been a distortion, or the mountain’s overall shape wasn’t symmetrical; we now had to wind around the mountain, in a curving arch of stairs; then we had to wind at an angle away from that curve.
We did this same motion for what seemed like hours, and, as we went farther up, so, of course, did the ground seem to go farther down. I began avoiding looking over the edge of the stairs, but I still felt so lightheaded.
Just when I was about to say that, Kostas said over her shoulder, “We’re almost at the first level.”
“Only the first—and this high up!” May said in a frustrated voice.
She was behind me, and when I turned my head toward her now, I made sure to do that inward, toward the mountain; otherwise, I would have seen how high up we were….
“How are you doing?” I asked May.
“My feet are starting to hurt. These boots are about as comfortable as the rest of the suit.”
“May’s right,” Steve said. “Have your feet changed shape on this planet? I’ve been in much better designed spacesuits, and I was fully covered then. You said to me before that this is a smart-suit, a machine, so where are the controls? I’m an engineer and I feel like I should be able to engineer my own frigging suit.”
