by F P Adriani
“What—” Shirley yelled.
I yanked one of my hands from my ears and hit my belt communicator as I rushed out of the room and onto the bridge. “What’s going on!” I shouted, over the piercing sound, which now turned into a drum-like loud beat. “Did we hit some saavin—is this an alarm?”
In front of me, Babs and Chen had their hands over their ears, and Gary was pressing one of the ship’s general communicator-buttons and yelling for Kostas.
I heard Karen’s shout over the line in reply to me: “Devin said it’s a communication—”
“What?” I said, just as Kostas rushed onto the bridge. She ran over to where Gary was, and he stepped aside so she could get to the Monument’s controls faster.
“What the hell is all that noise?” Gary said to her. The sounds had intensified into clanging and buzzing, and what sounded like an occasional bizarre moan.
“This should not be happening,” Kostas said as her fingers flew over an electronic panel. “It is too soon.”
“Too soon for what?” Shirley asked as she came up behind me.
Kostas glanced at us. “This is the Krin—the warring species. But we are too far away; they should not have contacted us yet. Things must be escalating even faster than we feared.”
Around me, my crewmembers rushed back to behind the consoles they usually worked, but my eyes were locked on Kostas’ profile. Her eyes remained on her wildly moving fingers on the ship’s controls; then her eyes shifted up to the front viewscreen. The image there was still the pixelated, multicolored view a more perpetual state of omnivelocities tended to produce. But then that view rapidly cleared to what looked like a normal view of space—deep black and sparkling stars.
“Why did you pull us out of the path now?” Chen asked in a perplexed voice.
“We have to change our path to get there faster. Unfortunately, we will use up more energy this way and will have to collect more at some point. But, it’s become clear that we cannot afford to take anymore time for anything other than the Krin.”
Another rush of clanging noises followed Kostas’ words—then the clangs gave way to more moaning and then to what sounded like a long wheeeeeze. A rush of dizziness filled my head, and I had to grab onto the panel in front of me.
“Babs!” Chen said, and then I heard him fumble over toward her. I whipped my head their way, which didn’t do much for my dizzy state. Chen wrapped his arms around Babs, but she struggled to stand up against him.
“She’s fainting—help her!” I said to Kostas, pressing my palms to my pained ears.
“Unfortunately,” Kostas said in a loud voice over the noise, “the Krin communicate at many frequencies and states of vibration. The sounds in their language can interfere with nervous systems, especially when they’re dropping bombs of communication during their warring. I’m trying to start the translator, which has a mitigating function that will help lower the sounds, but the Krin are so extremely agitated now, and there is a problem with the translator’s power supply. I’ve alerted other workers to fix it. I can’t even talk back to the Krin till we get this fixed. The Keepers will take over for now.” Kostas’ head jerked my way. “I’m sorry for all the noise. This ship is set up to be highly aware of its surroundings, to be sensitive to certain incoming communications. Maybe the Demeter closed up to space-flight settings would provide some protection from the sounds.”
My eyes had been on her, but I whipped them away as I ran over to Babs, who was able to stand up straight again with Chen’s help and mine.
My crew and I now sprinted down the forward bridge—but we had barely stepped off it when the Krin noises intensified yet again. I had to grab at a projection on one of the clear walls beneath the upper bridges. Babs fell against the same wall. And Shirley bent over in front of us and began puking.
“Omigod,” I said, “how long can we all tolerate being pounded like this?”
*
Shirley’s insides continued decorating the Monument’s gray floor while the rest of us struggled to remain upright and conscious.
Kostas finally rushed up to me. My head was tilted down toward the floor. I felt Kostas’ hard quick fingers grab my left arm. “Captain Zarro, come back onto the bridge! The translator’s finally working right. It’s mitigating the intensity of the sounds, and I’ve set it to English. I told Devin to reroute it to the engineering and cargo areas too, for your other crew.”
“But I…I want to go back to my ship,” I said, my voice weak now, because my stomach had begun moving in the direction of what Shirley’s stomach had been doing. I had to bite my bottom lip, close my eyes….
…I was being pulled to the left—the pressure of Kostas’ hand against my arm, my feet in my suit-boots moving, slowly sliding farther up the Monument’s bridge.
When I finally opened my eyes, I was back by my usual front-panel. Both of Kostas’ hands were on my forearms now, as her dark eyes peered into my face. “Lydia, I’ve set your suit to repair any damage your body has suffered from the sounds. I told your crew to do the same with theirs. Babs and Shirley have gone to the rest-room to clean themselves up.” Babs had thrown up too—I’d noticed her upchucking out of the corner of my right eye….
“What a mess this is,” I mumbled now, but then, an instant later, I began feeling a bit better. I still heard clanging noises and what sounded like barks of words—but they were lower than before…well, they had been lower than before. Now there were sudden increases in the intensity of the sounds.
“What good is your translator?” I heard Gary ask Kostas as he came near me. “The noises are still shocking.”
Kostas sighed as her hands let go of my arms. “This is the best we can do. The Krin sounds and language will unexpectedly rise and sink. The translator can only be so instantaneous to mitigate. I’ve also finally set us on a more direct path to the Krin.”
“Great,” I said as I felt the ship shift into a new velocity profile. “I really want to get to that species faster. They’ve only blown out one of my eardrums. I’ve got one more they can work on.” I heard a shaky little laugh behind me. When I turned my head, Shirley was back on the bridge. Her face was a sickly pale color, but her eyes looked quite bright as she smiled my way. Babs was beside her, plopping down into one of the console chairs.
I smiled at the two of them then turned back to the front of the bridge, my eyes falling on Kostas again, whom I somehow heard mind-talking with Thura: I know you’ve been sleeping, Thura, but I think you should—yes. Kostas glanced my way—very briefly. Then she moved to the special, neon-tubed Keeper-transporter, and then an instant later a robed Thura materialized on the bridge.
The Krin sounds almost instantly died down now. I sighed in relief. But, a part of me felt bad that Thura had to deal with the situation. It couldn’t have been easy. She clearly still hadn’t recovered from getting zapped by the gluon stream; her fingers were sticking out of her orange robe’s sleeves, and her normally clear-ish skin was a dull reddish color now. She walked over to beside Kostas, and they both looked up at the viewscreen. I wondered what they were looking at; I could only see the black of space.
Thura’s duller-than-normal Keeper voice came into the room as she lowered the hood of her robe: “We were simply unable to reach near your sphere sooner. We had not known there was a major event…You should have contacted us then. We cannot be everywhere at all times, just many places at one time. We struggle to get other species to understand this…I cannot hear you if you will all be shouting at once. You may be two sides, but I still have only one mind—”
A loud screeeech now. I jumped backwards and crashed into Gary. His arms went around me, but then he had to remove them to cover his ears with his palms. My crew and I were in pain again. I saw the side of Thura’s semi-transparent face begin to flicker faster.
“I’m doing it!” Kostas said out loud, to Thura apparently. Kostas’ fingers had begun flying over the bridge controls—near where the translator seemed to be—
—but wh
atever that mechanism was supposedly doing, it just wasn’t enough. A loud booming voice sounded on the bridge, and each of the words seemed to pierce my skull like a dagger: “WE ARE NOT HAPPY. THEY WILL NOT TALK, ONLY SHOUT.”
“AS USUAL, KRIN-FREK LIE. IT IS ONLY WEEEE, KRIN-BROK, WHO ARE REASONABLE.”
“WE WILL TAKE THE EAST SIDE OF THE FORMIN BASIN NOW.”
“OVER OUR DEAD MINDS.”
“AS YOU WISH—”
“Enough, please,” Thura said. “We are on our way and will get there within a Krin-day. We will all discuss this then.”
“NO, WE WILL NOT ALL DISCUSS THIS. KRIN-BROK WILL DO A FANCY DANCE OF EVASION AND WEAR YOU AND YOUR PATIENCE OUT, AND THEN YOU WILL HAVE TO LEAVE TO RECHARGE YOUR ENERGY, AND NOTHING WILL BE SOLVED ONCE AGAIN.”
“Maybe you should solve your own goddamn problems!” I blurted out, my fingertips massaging my throbbing temples. However, at this point, I had become so used to the Keeper mind-links that I barely registered when they happened now, and, unbeknownst to me, Thura had mind-linked with me and my crew, apparently to help us with the still-extreme noise pollution—and it seemed that the mind-linking had allowed the Krin to hear the full force of my statement: in my mind, I was really fucking pissed.
“WHO HAVE YOU BROUGHT INTO OUR WAR, KEEPERS? WE ARE PICKING UP ERRANT MINDS—SMALL, SLIMY MINDS.”
“Who are you calling slimy?” Gary growled from beside me.
But Kostas shook a desperate hand our way, and, going on her wide eyes, she looked like she was on the verge of having a massive heart attack. “Don’t talk to them directly!” she hissed at me and Gary.
Thura’s head briefly turned my way, and the twitching of her flickering mouth looked so humanly familiar that it stopped me from opening my mouth again: apparently, she really disapproved of what I’d done.
I flushed, badly, and out of the corner of my right eye, I saw Gary’s shoulders jerk downward.
“I’m sorry!” I said fast, to Thura.
She didn’t respond.
But Kostas sighed loudly now. “With the Krin, we must always try to lower tensions and never contribute to them. They feed off that, which makes things escalate further.”
“Well, you should have told us that sooner,” Chen said, almost a snap. He was standing beside Gary now, but Chen’s angry dark eyes were on Kostas. “All this noise is harming us and we can’t think straight. How much longer will this go on? My wife just contacted me over my Demeter-communicator. She’s stuck in the cargo area here, and she’s in pain. We want to go back to the Demeter.”
“Unfortunately,” Kostas said now, “I made a mistake before: Purn has now informed me that he has done some testing on your ship, and it will not protect you much from the sounds. I am turning translator-access to the Krin on-and-off directly and frequently now, so we can talk in private sometimes. Thura is doing the same with the mind-linking. It will not be a perfect system of communication, though.”
“Look,” I said fast, “I’m very sorry I screwed up before, but this is totally out of our league. And I still don’t know what you were thinking when you thought we could help with this mess! My crew and I need to leave the bridge now.”
I would have done just that leaving, but Thura turned around to me, quite fast. I felt her touch my mind, yet her thoughts came out loud again, to the room. “You must not leave now, Lydia. In the duality of the Omniverse, sometimes an anti-error comes out of an error: when you engaged with the Krin directly, they noticed you and your physiology, and have now scanned it. They—”
“PRAISE THE LIGHT OF THON! WE KRIN-FREK WILL ENGAGE WITH THE LIGHT.”
“NO. WE KRIN-BROK WILL ENGAGE WITH THE LIGHT.”
“Both Krin-Brok and Krin-Frek will engage with The Light Of Thon on neutral territory when we reach Krin-space,” Thura said. “But only if you agree to a cease-fire of words till then.”
There was a long, blissfully silent pause now, while my crew and I stared with dumbfounded eyes at each other, and at Thura and Kostas.
Then there was a final loud screeeech—as if someone had let the air out of a balloon the size of a moon. I wedged my fingertips in my ears, but I still clearly heard the Krin speak:
“KRIN-BROK AGREE TO KEEPER TERMS.”
“KRIN-FREK AGREE TO KEEPER TERMS.”
And now Thura said, “We will contact you when we are close enough to transport.”
“Transport what?” I asked.
Then Kostas turned to me and said, “You.”
*
“I think I see it all very clearly now: you people are fucking nuts,” I said as I rushed off the forward bridge. Kostas had just informed me that I had to directly mediate this crazy goddamn war of crazy goddamn minds.
My crew were right beside me now, and I thought we would get away, all the way to the Demeter, but Kostas followed us, and then Thura came off the bridge, too.
“Why on earth do they think Lydia is this Thon thing?” Gary asked, glancing over his shoulder at Kostas.
“Please stop moving and let us go to the rest-room to discuss this,” Kostas said, and before I could refuse, I felt a dimensional shift, and then we were all in the rest-room.
“Damn you,” I said to Kostas, breathing hard now, both because my noise-damaged brain was trying to recover from the sudden transporting and because I was angry that she had completely controlled where I and my crew had been going.
“You are being too argumentative,” Kostas said now. “You have been interacting with us for months. You have engaged with things no normal human should have engaged with. In our rush to deal with the stone on Rintu, you accidentally touched something in The Hall Of Devices—do you remember? The silver sphere?”
I did remember. I had crashed into the damn thing.
“The Keepers had been unable to confirm this till now,” Kostas continued, “but the spheres apparently originally come from the Thon dimension. It is not somewhere Keepers have ever been, but the Krin had been there long ago. The beings from that dimension disappeared before the Krin-minds reached there. The beings became like gods to the Krin—and in their mythos, the gods disappeared into The Light Of Thon, through the sphere-portals.”
“Portals!” I said, pressing a hand to my chest. “But I touched them—did I go somewhere I didn’t even know then—”
Kostas’ head shook fast. “The portals are inactive, as the devices in The Hall usually are. But, the spheres are not entirely inert as material, and the one you touched apparently left some kind of residue on you, which the Krin have sensed. They think you’ve been enlightened by Thon gods now. They will listen to what you have to say, which is great if you say the right thing.”
“And if I say the wrong thing?” I asked fast.
One side of Kostas’ mouth rose up.
Now, Thura spoke: “Lydia, you are ultimately human. We ask for no more and no less than that from you. However, you—and your crew—keep converging with events that are out of the bounds of what humans should be doing. It makes a difficult situation even more difficult.”
My face was red. “I’m sorry for before, Thura. I feel like you’re mad at me now.”
Thura’s face suddenly seemed to flicker faster than ever—one instant her gold chin was here; the next it was gone; and then the next instant, part of her reddish ‘skin’ was back and twitching in a jerky way. “In certain situations, we Keepers can become a little agitated or annoyed, but we do not get mad in the way humans think of as anger. So, no, I am not ‘mad’ at you, Lydia. I am perplexed that you still resist the obvious of the situation.”
“Well,” Gary said, “Lydia is a very resistive kind of person—sorry, Lydia, but it’s the truth. You’re definitely a challenge and a challenging person.” He turned to me and smiled a little. Then his gaze went back to Thura. “But she’s not the only one averse to what’s going on.”
“Yeah,” Babs said, moving to beside me. “We’ve been through a lot in a short period of time—I don’t even understand a sm
all fraction of it. No one should expect us to be flexible when we’re frightened.”
Thura’s head dipped, as if she was nodding in agreement with Babs, and I couldn’t recall a Keeper’s head ever having done that motion. “Are you unhappy here?” Thura asked Babs.
I watched Babs’ lips twitch and her eyes flick over to Kostas for an instant, then back to Thura. “N—no,” Babs finally said. “I’m just confused—I’ve only just met you people—I’m sorry, you Keepers.”
“You may think of us as people, if that would help you,” Thura said.
Babs only nodded now.
“I want to go see May,” Chen cut in.
Kostas looked at him. “May is fine now. The Keepers have examined all of us physically using a scanner of theirs. Our worker suits had to make a few tissue repairs, but we haven’t been permanently injured by the sounds, and Purn has just let me know the status of the rest of the Demeter crew, who are fine, too. A few of them are just complaining about headaches.”
“I’m feeling one coming on myself,” Gary said on a sigh.
“We will provide stronger medication for that. We have much work to do over the next several Earth-long days.”
“You mean I’ll have much work to do,” I said. Then I watched Kostas nod.
*
Not long after that conversation, I finally accepted that I had no choice but to act as a mediator. Wasn’t that what I effectively agreed to when I combined my ship’s crew with the crew of the Monument? I knew then that this combination probably wouldn’t mean a simple life for any of us. Now I would be living that not-simple life for real.
I couldn’t say I liked the little I knew of and had experienced with the Krin. But it seemed I was supposed to stop them from destroying the universe, which now necessitated hours-long talks with Kostas, while Thura and Purn spoke to us from another room, so I wouldn’t get sick from their presence for long stretches at a time.
“And what about when I go to the Krin?” I said to Kostas at one point. “I demand that you give me some earplugs!”
