Backflow Boxed Set

by F P Adriani

  Kostas leaned back in her cushioned chair; we were sitting inside one of the meeting rooms. “We are modifying a translator for you to bring with you on your suit; the translator’s mitigating function will be super-strong, and will filter out extraneous noise and dampen non-extraneous noise.”

  “I really wish you’d tell me exactly where I’ll be going.”

  Kostas frowned now. “I can’t explain that. It’s something that needs to be experienced by the individual. It may be different across individuals. But just know that we will be watching you every step of the way. If there’s any danger, we’ll immediately pull you out.”

  “Um, Kostas, after my taste of the Krin on the bridge, I know you can’t operate your equipment fast enough to guarantee my safety.”

  Kostas only frowned back at me now, which I took as confirmation that I was right.

  *

  “I wish I had crashed into the goddamn sphere too,” Gary said to me when we were lying on my bed together later. “Then I could come with you.”

  I sighed, staring up at the ceiling. “Either way, it seems we’re all in danger. If I don’t go, then we could all die anyway.”

  I felt Gary tense beside me. “Don’t say that—don’t even think it.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s hard not to think of death when you’re in the middle of a war.”

  “But the Keepers have repeatedly said the Krin don’t have conventional bodies.”

  “Yeah, but whatever they do have can affect conventional matter, outer space and animal life—like us.”

  Now Gary exhaled toward the ceiling. “We’ve been to so many places and we’ve seen so much, even really freaky things, but it’s still hard for me to believe a framework on one end of the universe could affect another end. Sometimes I feel like they’re shitting us. And now I feel like they’re drugging us. I’m becoming an addict. First the medicine for my burn; now for this damn intermittent headache.” He was rubbing at his forehead now.

  I sat up a little and slid closer to him, staring down at his face, at his tired eyes, at his brown mustache, which seemed to droop across his face now. “Gary, Kostas told me the pain will go away in a few more days. The headaches are mostly a physiological adjustment to our being in contact with the Krin. Even she’s got one. They were unprepared for how loud the Krin would be this time. Things have come to such a head there…. How is your side? We’ve barely been naked together lately….”

  He sat up a bit and glanced down at where I’d begun poking beneath his white tank-top. I pulled the fabric all the way aside and finally saw that there was only a ghost of a dark scar left from his burn. I sighed hard, in relief. “I can hardly tell anything was there—good!”

  “About getting naked together…” Gary said, one of his warm palms moving down my back over my pink pajama top.

  “I thought you had a headache.”

  “My head’s never aching too much for getting naked.”

  I couldn’t help laughing at that—then Gary grabbed the hem of my pajama top and pulled it up over my head.

  *

  Before I knew it, The Main Moment was here, and my crew and I were on the Monument’s bridge again, with Kostas, Thura, and Purn. The three of them were doing the flying—or, more correctly at the moment, the “stopping”: the Monument dropped out of an omnivelocity profile and into an area of space that looked quite similar to the sparkly, stringy one on the screen when Kostas first told us about the framework, only this time, in real life, in real time, the framework area looked a lot darker—in fact it was so dark, I asked Kostas if I could adjust the front viewscreen to compensate.

  But she only shook her head at me. “I’m afraid we can’t do that around here. We aren’t in control of what it looks like.”

  I didn’t ask who was in control. I was pretty sure I could guess the correct answer. “So now what?” I asked Kostas on a sigh.

  “Now, we wait,” she said.

  I figured we would have to wait quite a while, so I told my crew to go take a break in the rest-room, but they were only in there a few minutes before I had to call them back out again: Thura had just asked me to stand in the center of the bridge and “be ready.”

  “Be ready for what?” I asked her on a frown, my eyes right on her profile.

  “Kostas has been coaching you for days,” Thura said. “I believe you know how to work your emergency suit-controls at this point, and you also know how not to behave around the Krin.”

  “What does ‘around the Krin’ mean when they don’t have bodies?”

  I didn’t get an answer to my question.

  My crew frowned in my direction, then toward the Keepers and Kostas. Gary’s face looked particularly droopy-glum today: I knew he wanted to be right with me while I would be in contact with the Krin, but his accompanying me wouldn’t be possible….

  A sudden piercing sensation in my head. Earlier, the workers had made adjustments to all of their and my crew’s red suits to compensate for the Krin sounds; I was also now wearing a tiny extra-strength translator, but, again, any sound mitigation would only be a partial mitigation. The sounds still gave me an uncomfortable, buzzing feeling in my brain. The headaches my crew had been dealing with had abruptly gone away yesterday, but if these new vibrations continued, it seemed my crew would be dealing with headaches once again.

  Right now, I had to deal with the task at hand: Kostas’ direct gaze was on me. “I believe you’re as ready as ever, Captain Zarro.”

  Before I could get more than an “Um” out in reply and get in a quick, worried glance at Gary, the bridge shifted around me—it brightened, then darkened, and then everyone faded away from the bridge—and then the bridge itself faded away from me, till I was floating in the neverwhere.

  No light, no existence—I was trapped in a falling-free state—blackness crashing around me, sweeping my body through a great big zero of space and time. Nothing had meaning. Did I really exist…

  …I found myself in a white, box-shaped room. Something was tugging at my legs; when I looked down, I saw the fluid-like, blue flow all along the box’s bottom. The waves and tides of blue kept moving around me, the soft sound of them caressing my ears. Compared to being in the line of fire of The War Of Words, this place truly seemed like heaven….

  …Except there was something unnerving about the “water”: when I tried to move my legs, the water didn’t budge, and neither did I. I struggled and struggled and struggled now, but my bottom half couldn’t go anywhere. The blue was really like a glue, keeping me grounded in this strange space, against my will.

  I felt pressure—in my bladder. If I peed, would it turn the water green? I giggled a little wildly; then I remembered Kostas’ saying that the red suits had an internal cleaning function. I tried manipulating my controls—tried and failed. I couldn’t remember what I had to do to clean the piss that began dripping into my suit. My hands banged for my two sleeve-readouts, but the screens kept flashing in and out. Useless.

  I finally tried using my gray device and my suit and belt communicators to contact the Monument, or a Keeper, or even my crew, but nothing I tried yielded anything. I had been under the impression that the Keepers and the workers would remain in contact with me while I dealt with the Krin, but, clearly, I had erred there.

  I remained stuck in that same blue-glue spot, trying to calm my intermittent hyperventilating. I lost track of the time again.

  I kept repeating, “Hello? Is anyone there?”

  Then I lost track of how many times I’d repeated it. I stood there for an eternity, half-immobile….

  Finally, there was a loud, “WE ARE HERE.”

  I almost cried out in relief; then I remembered if I screwed up here, the universe would end. “Uh, Lydia Zarro here.”

  “WE AWAIT YOUR LIGHT.”

  “Um, my—uh—I can’t move my legs. With my personality, I can’t easily talk without moving my arms, but when I move them, it pulls at my legs, and they feel glued to the floor here.”
>
  “WHAT ABOUT THE LIGHT OF THON?” a Krin voice boomed, but at least my translator seemed to be working because the booming didn’t hurt my ears or my head.

  Sweat, nevertheless, dripped down my forehead. “I don’t like deceptions at all…. The truth is: I’ve been working with the Keepers, and what really happened was I accidentally touched a Thon-sphere.”

  “WHAT ABOUT THE LIGHT OF THON?” a Krin said again, but this voice sounded tinnier than the last.

  And then “WHAT ABOUT THE LIGHT OF THON?” kept being repeated by numerous voices throughout the room, echoing and diminishing, and then rising high again like a discordant song.

  My fingers frantically tried to call up a file I had programmed into my readout, which filed contained important things I’d jotted down that Kostas had told me to say. But my fingers were shaking too much now, and my readout was still looking wonky.

  In one frantic moment, I forgot everything Kostas had told me. The weight of the framework and the rest of the universe hovered above my head, and if I said the wrong thing, it would all come crashing down on me and everyone else.

  Maybe nothing I could say now would fix a damn thing—what rotten luck that I’d banged into that damn sphere!

  “K—Krin, would you please think about a truce? Do you know that the universe—the Omniverse and its parts are connected? One part can affect another part.”

  “OF COURSE KRIN KNOW THIS. KRIN USE THIS EVERY DAY.”

  “But that’s what I mean: what you do every day can affect every day that other species live.”

  “KRIN NOT CONCERNED WITH OUTSIDE KRIN AREA.”

  “KRIN-BROK IS NOT CONCERNED. KRIN-FREK IS.”

  “LIES. KRIN-FREK IS CONCERNED WITH NOTHING.”

  I felt my head spin at their noise-voices, which had loudened. And the perpetually moving yet blue-glue water did not help my dizzy state—

  Something Kostas had said to me finally flashed through my brain, and then I said in a louder voice, “An uncountable number of species—all manner of life forms are counting on your resolving the disagreements between your two Krin hemispheres. In the universes, there is the light and the dark, the fast and the slow, the big and the small, the smart and the stupid—”

  “AS IN, THE KRIN-FREK.”

  “THEN THERE IS THE NOT BRAIN-DEAD AND THEN THE BRAIN-DEAD KRIN-BROK.”

  “My point is,” I said in a shaky voice, through a flushed, sweaty face, “two hemispheres make a whole sphere. Without one side of a sphere, there is no other side because there is no longer a sphere. The perfection of the Thon-sphere shows this.”

  Silence.

  I twisted my hands together and fruitlessly tried to shift my legs, which felt as if they’d fallen asleep, but it was probably their unnatural placement in a substance my body didn’t understand….

  “Please talk,” I finally said. “Have you Krin, uh, made a truce—are you still thinking about it—about what I said?”

  “YOU HAVEN’T CONVINCED US TO RECONCILE.”

  My blood was suddenly pounding at my skull. Maybe nothing I or anyone else could say would ever fix this war—did the fucking Keepers realize that maybe some things could not be solved? Some beings were just stubborn—they liked conflict, and they wanted to drag everyone else into their shit.

  I felt so upset and so angry now, which wasn’t exactly the state of mind necessary to stop a goddamn war, especially between Krin. But now, once again, because of the Keepers, it seemed I had been thrust into a situation I couldn’t handle, especially handle well.

  My lips trembled, in anger, in fear. I really couldn’t think of a damn thing to say….

  Loud banging and then a whizzing sound and a heavy wind-like breathing. Shockingly high cries—my palms pressed flat to my ears now.

  But that didn’t prevent my hearing a Krin finally shout, “AHHHHH—YES! IT IS GENIUS—AND IDIOCY THAT WE DID NOT SEE IT. YOUR INSIGHTFUL STATEMENT HAS OPENED OUR MIND-EYES.”

  Confusion swam through my shocked brain; at first my mouth moved and nothing came out. “Um, thanks for the compliment,” I finally said, “but I didn’t say anything—”

  In what I was beginning to sense was their usual way of filtering out what they didn’t like or need, the Krin kept talking as if I hadn’t spoken: “NOT THINKING OF SAYING ANYTHING, NOT SPEAKING, RESTING OUR THOUGHTS AND MIND-MOUTHS, SO WE KRIN-BROK ARE ABLE TO SEE THE FIGHT WITH A CLEARER MIND—IT SOUNDS LIFE-CHANGING, IT SOUNDS MIND-CHANGING.”

  “KRIN-FREK AGREE! LIGHT OF THON BRINGS ILLUMINATION, AND ILLUMINATION LEADS TO CLARITY WHEN VIEWING INSIDE THE OMNIVERSE. THE STEADY-STATE EMPTINESS OF NO THOUGHT IS THE NIRVANA THE THON-GODS ESCAPED TO. WE MUST SEEK THE STEADY-STATE OF CALM MINDS, AND IN THERE WE WILL FINALLY MEET THON-GODS.”

  “IT WILL TAKE MANY YEARS OF PRACTICE. KRIN-BROK AGREE TO EMBARK ON THIS JOURNEY TO THE MENTAL STEADY-STATE, IF KRIN-FREK AGREE TO SHARE ANY SUCCESSES IN MAINTAINING THE CALM.”

  “KRIN-FREK AGREE, IF KRIN-BROK WILL DO THE SAME. SHARE YOUR TECHNIQUES, AND WE WILL SHARE OURS.”

  “KRIN-BROK AGREE TO SHARING TOWARD STEADY-STATE.”

  “Wonderful!” I said, clasping my hands together, my heart pounding faster. There was a smile on my face, but it didn’t last long. “Can I go now—can you release me, please, from this blue matter. I—” —didn’t get to finish my statement. One moment my legs were trapped; the next they were dangling in the neverwhere, stretching out below me, or was it beside me….

  “Captain Zarro” —Kostas’ voice— “we have received word that there is a ‘cease-fire’ among Krin. Congratulations on successfully carrying out this most-important task.”

  “Thanks,” I said, or at least I thought I said it. The neverwhere was doing funny, woozy things to my head…. “I was so scared—I tried to contact you. Why the hell didn’t you tell me I wouldn’t be able to, and that the Krin could read my mind in that box? It would have been nice to know! I could have thought something that would have made the situation much worse!”

  “I—” Kostas said, but then there was an abrupt stop to not only her words, but to my body’s motion too. Something was wrong: the neverwhere was spinning around me—too fast.

  “Kostas—get me out of here!” I screamed, and my frantic words echoed back at me as if a bell containing my voice was ringing. I heard and felt other loud noises zooming around me.

  And then I heard and felt nothing.

  *

  There was a faint buzzing sound finally; it grew louder. I couldn’t see—but that was because my eyes were closed….

  I opened my eyes, with difficulty; they were dry, and my brain felt foggy—the buzzing sound was coming from inside it. I was in darkness, on a floor. My wrists hurt—oh—they were bound behind me.

  “What—” I said as I squirmed to break free of my restraint—

  A light came on—blinding me for a long moment. Then there was the darkening silhouette of a guy—tall, a weapon-shaped large item in his arms.

  The room around us became clearer to me; the space was huge but quite empty: there were several chairs on the other end, electronic panel-tables too, which came on now. Apparently, this area was some kind of bridge. And I was in a dirty corner of it, huddled against a wall.

  “What is this?” I demanded at the guy, using all the energy I had, which wasn’t much—

  “Captain Zarro, we meet again,” someone else said in a smooth voice.

  And when I turned my head to the left, I saw Claudius standing there.

  *

  My jaw gaped down to my chest as I stared at Claudius. He looked taller than last time, meaner, his dark eyes angry pinpoints in his broad face. There was no false politeness in his expression now. He was in complete control—of my life.

  His head suddenly jerked toward his henchman, and the guy came over to me and yanked me from the floor.

  I thought of struggling, but what could I do against armed men, especially when I couldn’t use my hands? Men continued to fill the room now; they were all in
dark uniforms, including Claudius. I thought of my suit-controls—my brain feverishly going over whatever I could remember from Kostas’ lectures about the suits. But I couldn’t recall her ever saying there was a way I could work my suit if I couldn’t manipulate it. My transporter—

  “Captain Zarro, I’m sorry to have to house you in such a substandard area,” Claudius said now in a not-sorry voice. “I’m sure you’re used to better. But, nobody but I and a few of my people ever see my primary bridge. Or maybe that’s just what I want you to think.” He grinned, but there was no humor behind the motion.

  “What—” I finally said “—what is the game you’re playing? How did you get me here?”

  “Wouldn’t you like to know.”

  I was shoved into a quite-hard chair now; then I was strapped into it, including a strap around my ankles. Tears pricked against the back of my eyes, but if it was the last thing I would ever do, I wouldn’t cry in front of these fucking creeps. “Why bother putting me in a chair when I can’t even lean back properly? Can’t you at least tie my arms in front of me?”

  “No,” Claudius growled, all trace of his smooth accent gone. “Do you think I’m stupid? I know your Keeper suit is capable of great things. And the Keeper ships are capable of even greater things. That is why you are here.”

  “How am I here? How did you find me?”

  There was a long pause. Then he said, “I’ve been tracking them—and you.”

  I didn’t believe him. If he’d been tracking us all along, then why hadn’t he snatched me sooner when it would have been under easier circumstances? I knew that he did almost get me after Makron, but then he apparently soon lost me, at least temporarily….

  I saw that the situation I was now in really was inevitable: Claudius would never leave me alone until he got everything he wanted, and the allure of the Keeper ship, the Keeper powers—the pull toward them was strong. To a certain extent, I understood why Claudius wanted what the Keepers possessed. I only hoped he wouldn’t get any of it, even if I wound up having to die in the process.