The Scavenger Door

by Suzanne Palmer

  “Which is where?”

  The man shrugged. “It is all beyond what anyone tells me,” he said. “I am just the messenger. The problem is yours now.”

  He stood, folded the newspaper, and set it beside Fergus. “Enjoy the remainder of your ride home.”

  Fergus jumped to his feet as the man turned and walked down the train car aisle, to the connecting door, and through. Right behind him, Fergus grabbed the door before it could close all the way and threw it open again, reaching out to grab and stop the man from leaving without some genuine explanation.

  The connector was empty, and the car ahead likewise. The agent had vanished.

  “Ye bloody fucking bastard!” he yelled. “Stop playing with me!”

  The stop for Old Kilbride was coming up. He stomped back to his seat, fuming at his impotence against the Asiig, and gathered his things. Last, he picked up the newspaper where the agent had left it. The text was gibberish, almost English characters, almost English words, but not. It made his eyes hurt to look at the text too long.

  He stuffed it in with his other things, shouldered his pack, and got off the train, feeling invisible eyes on him from every direction. If the little humming scrap in his pocket could worry, much less scare, the Asiig, he was pretty sure he wanted nothing to do with it at all.

  Always blundering into something, he thought. Whatever mess it was this time, it was his usual bad luck that it was clearly already too late to return to Duff’s farm and put the piece back where he found it.

  Chapter 2

  The Drowned Lad was an oasis of blinding light and deafening noise as he hauled his stuff the last few meters from another auto-taxi to the curb. Through the front windows he could see Gavin and Ian inside at the bar, and Ian had his fiddle out, which he was much better at attending to than anything in the kitchen. People were gathered around and shouting at each other over the noise, the last few rounds of the night dwindling down to their slow, inevitable end.

  After two days of hiking, and a distinctive odor of sheep about him, Fergus wasn’t willing to subject his cousin’s patrons and friends to his sudden presence, but there was a pull—a need for laughter, camaraderie without obligation—that he found hard to resist.

  Shouldering his pack again, he felt it press the object in his pocket against his hip, and whatever desire he had to step inside and take some good-natured abuse dissipated into the chill winter air. Everyone on Earth in danger, the agent had told him. Was there danger before he found it, or was it only dangerous because he found it? You’d think after sending the agent all that way, he could have revealed at least something more useful, more tangible than oops, you’re doomed.

  Why can’t everything just be fine for once, without any hassles? he thought.

  He touched his hand to the side door plate and went up the narrow back stairs to the apartment without going through the bar, as relieved by the darkness and silence as he had been by the noise below only moments before.

  Putting his gear inside the door, he slipped off his boots and coat and slouched into the apartment, too exhausted to pay attention as his mind whirled in concentric circles around the agent on the train, the thing in his pocket, the feeling like he was being led around by the Asiig by just a more sophisticated version of a carrot in a can.

  “Oy, ye reek terrible!” An indignant voice rose up from the vicinity of the couch, in the dark. “And I passed my exams, thanks for asking.”

  “And I found the lost sheep, thank you for asking,” Fergus grumbled back.

  “That I could tell the minute ye walked in the door,” Isla said. “Smells like ye brought them all home with ye.”

  “Don’t I know it,” Fergus said. “You sleeping on the couch?”

  “No, just thinking,” she answered. “I’m supposed to go back home tomorrow, spend break with my aunt and uncle. And as much as I love Gavin like a brother, he needs some time alone.”

  “Yeah,” Fergus said. “My fault too, for showing up out of the blue and dumping myself on him. And on you.”

  He heard movement, and a moment later a lamp turned on dim. Isla leaned over the back of the couch, her chin on her crossed arms, and regarded him. “If ye were going to go somewhere, where would ye go?” she asked.

  Fergus laughed. “The shower! And very, very soon.”

  “No, I mean . . . like somewhere new.”

  “I dunno. I never made it to any of the Trappists,” Fergus said.

  Isla laughed. “I have two months before I can start my next series of classes, not two years. Somewhere here on Earth.”

  “For all the traveling among the stars I’ve done, I’ve seen less than a quarter of Scotland, and the only other place on Earth I’ve been was an hour or so I spent in the Atlantics in the wee hours of the night, freezing my ass—and damned near everything else—off because I forgot about the existence of weather. I am a terrible person to ask.”

  Isla was silent for a moment. “Maybe,” she said at last, “but no one else I know has ever gone anywhere.”

  “What does Gavin say?”

  “I didn’t ask him. He’ll say if I don’t want to go back to his parents’ house to just stay here, even if he’d rather have his place to himself for a while.”

  “He feels responsible for you,” Fergus said.

  Isla raised one eyebrow. “He feels responsible for you,” she said. “For what happened to ye as a kid and no one paying any attention to how bad it was. Me is how he makes it right again in his heart.”

  “It’s more than that,” Fergus said.

  “Aye, but it’s still that.”

  Fergus was exhausted and didn’t dare sit down on any of the furniture until he’d thoroughly de-sheeped himself. “Well, where do you want go?” he asked. “I hear the south of France is still nice, even though they still haven’t finished rebuilding their beaches yet. It’s warmer than here, anyway. Or Paris; the Nouveau Louvre just expanded their collection of late twenty-first century Morpheist paintings.”

  “I dunno,” she said. She stared at him silently, occasionally wrinkling her nose.

  After a while, he cleared his throat. “Uh, I’m going to go wash up,” he said.

  “You do that.”

  “Okay. We can talk some more if you want, after. If you’re still awake. Or tomorrow morning.”

  “Okay.”

  He grabbed a towel and headed for the shower, and in moments was half-dozing under the hot water until his skin began to turn an unhealthy pinkish red. He turned it off and stood there, leaning his forehead against the cool tile, and breathed in the steam around him as if he could store the comfort of it in every cell of his body.

  Whatever the agent had been warning him against, there was nothing he could do about it until he’d rested. Certainly, the danger couldn’t be imminent, right? Stupid pieces have been on that mountain for a decade.

  Reluctantly, he stepped out of the shower stall and wrapped a towel around his hips, letting himself drip on the small orange bath mat until he could pull a pair of boxers and shorts on, rub his hair and beard dry with the towel, and abandon his brief refuge.

  The lights had timed out and were off again, and the room was silent except for the muffled noise drifting up from the bar below; Isla must’ve given up on him and gone to bed. He should do the same, but his plaintively whining stomach begged otherwise.

  Popping the fridge open, he took out a hunk of cheese and unwrapped it, and then poked around on the dark counter until he found some bread and a knife. He was just slicing off a piece of it when there was a loud bang from downstairs.

  “FERGUS!” Gavin bellowed from below.

  Fergus nicked the end of his finger at the sudden shout, right next to yesterday’s scrape from his hike. What the hell now? he thought, deeply peeved.

  He went to the door, sucking his cut finger, and stared down the
staircase at his cousin, who was at the bottom landing, looking flustered and more than a little upset. The sound of Ian’s violin had ceased, and though he could still hear voices from the bar, they were faint murmurs, as of people talking very quietly amongst themselves. Not, Fergus noted, typical at nearly two a.m. in a bar in Scotland.

  “Fergus!” Gavin shouted again, not quite as loud, staring up at him.

  “What is it? What did I do? I just got home!” Fergus shouted back.

  “You have a visitor,” Gavin said.

  Fergus’s first, terrible thought was that the Alliance had somehow tracked him down after his adventures disrupting their rogue operation on Enceladus. But the Alliance had limited jurisdiction once inside Earth’s atmosphere, where a hundred-plus squabbling terrestrial governments refused to yield a millimeter of sway. And even if they had decided to come for him, they’d have just burst in with weapons and mowed down anyone and everyone that moved until they got what they wanted.

  “Uh . . .” he said.

  Gavin stepped aside and flattened himself against the wall. Up the stairs, ducking to avoid the low ceiling, came a two-meter-tall green ball of fuzz on five gangly, multijointed limbs. The alien blinked four large, emerald-dark eyes at him, and broke into a wide, fanged grin.

  “Ignatio!” Fergus said. “What the bloody hell are you doing here?”

  “Vergus!” the alien exclaimed. “We must talk.”

  Gavin put his hands to either side of his face. “Fergus . . .” he said.

  “Don’t worry, ey’re a friend from Pluto,” Fergus cut in quickly.

  “Pluto? There are aliens on Pluto?!”

  “No, now I am here,” Ignatio explained.

  Gavin pointed one stern but shaky finger at Fergus. “In the morning, you and I are having a conversation about this.”

  “Oh, I don’t doubt it,” Fergus said. He ushered Ignatio past him and into the darkened apartment, and shut the door. After a few moments, he heard Gavin go back into the bar, and voices picked up again, though without the earlier, easy exuberance.

  “Sorry about the dark. My sister’s asleep in the other room,” Fergus said. He went back to the kitchen, turned on the low light over the counter, and finished slicing his bread and cheese. He offered a piece to Ignatio.

  The alien shook eir head, then studied a stool at the counter for a few minutes before draping themself over it. “Please, no,” ey said. “I have had vood—food—recently, during my speedy travels.”

  “Okay, then,” Fergus said, and stuffed a too-large piece of bread in his mouth like a greedy chipmunk. When he managed to swallow, he took a deep, satisfied breath. He hadn’t realized just how hungry he was. “So, why did you come all the way here? Please tell me there isn’t trouble at the Shipyard again!”

  Fergus’s visit to Earth had been preceded by his Shipmaker friends being kidnapped and held prisoner under the ice of Enceladus to work on an illegal killer drone, and he’d barely managed to catch his breath from that adventure, much less feel ready to take on another. Or nothing more challenging than Ozzie the sheep, anyway, he thought.

  “No trouble there. Trouble is here,” Ignatio said. One of eir long, wiggly limbs pointed at him. “Trouble is you.”

  “What? How? What did I do?” Fergus said.

  “Found a thing, yes? I have seen the image you sent for Theo.”

  “Shit, not you, too? What, did you leave the Shipyard the instant the message arrived?”

  “First, I fed my birds, yes? Then I came right away fast,” Ignatio said.

  Fergus stuffed another fat slice of bread in his mouth and grabbed his pack from the door, rummaging through until he unearthed the strange fragment he’d found. “You mean this?”

  Ignatio quivered head to toe, as if something had picked em up by the scruff at the back of eir head and shook em. “. . . Yes,” ey said at last. “You can feel it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then it is a big danger.”

  “So I’ve been told,” Fergus said. “And that’s all I’ve been told.”

  “It is a vrag—fragment of a thing of four dimensions,” Ignatio said. “We—we but you only know I, never you mind the rest—believed it destroyed in jump space, thrown into the Drift, but I see now, yes, it was not. It should not be active, but something has woken it up.”

  Fergus coughed. “That might have been me,” he said. “I swear it’s nothing I did, though. I think we just heard each other.”

  Ignatio wobbled eir head, a sign of regret. “If this piece is here, so are all the pieces. They will each wake up now.”

  “Where’s it from?”

  “I have no answer for that. They have existed since before the history memory of the oldest of all of us.”

  “They?”

  “There are some several tens of them that we have found. Only a very few peoples, of a very few worlds, are trusted to know the way of them. Humanity does not have that trust, no and not likely! But you found it by accident, and you are not so much human anymore, yes? Still, there must now be silence and care, you and I only, zsssshh.”

  “I still don’t understand, though. What does it do?”

  “It is a door. A doorbell. A . . . peephole? A key. A control light. A signal. A stop-and-go sign. A road. A bridge. A beacon. A call. A map. A channel. A way,” Ignatio said. “It is a problem to explain. To say a doorkey is best, and also wrong. If put together, a path may be opened.”

  “And then?”

  “And then the bad things on the other side, who we were trying to lock away, will be free to travel through.”

  “And they’re not friendly?”

  “They are Vraet—scavengers, devourers. They are not friendly, and also not-not friendly. They are mindless, ceaseless eaters. This is why we tried to destroy the doorkey.”

  That definitely didn’t sound good. “Okay. So, then, what can I do to keep this door from opening?” Fergus asked. He turned the piece over again in his hand, more certain now that the mass of it changed as he did so.

  “Find all the fragments, first and fast,” Ignatio said. “Then we destroy it for sure this time.”

  “If it survived the Drift, which I didn’t think anything could, how can we possibly destroy it? Mount Doom?” Fergus asked. Ignatio blinked all four eyes at him, and Fergus shook his head. “Never mind. Let me also guess, because I know how my luck runs, that if I just toss this in a desk drawer somewhere, or throw it down a deep dark hole where no one will ever find it, we’re still not safe.”

  “No. It will still call, has called, is calling and waking up and building connections to the rest of itself. In time, it will not matter if they are not together. Tomorrow? Two thousand years? It cannot be guessed.”

  “And the fragments could be anywhere on Earth?”

  “Oh, no,” Ignatio said. “It is much more easy than that! Only one half of Earth.”

  “. . . Which half?” Fergus asked.

  Ignatio wiggled eir limbs in a gesture Fergus had come to learn was the alien’s equivalent of a shrug. “Whichever half it was facing when it came back into normal space. When we locate more, then we will know that, yes?”

  Fergus ate the last piece of bread and wiped the crumbs from the counter into his cupped hand, and dropped them into the kitchen flash recycler. “So, if I’m understanding you correctly,” he said, “I spend two weeks here in Scotland, actually making the effort to live like a normal, boring person for the first time in my life, and instead, I stumble upon a piece of a multidimensional artifact that if assembled—or eventually even if not—will let evil beings from another galaxy through to wipe out the Earth—”

  “And they will cling to everything and everyone that flees the surface, and that way escape your gravity dimple and spread throughout your solar system,” Ignatio added. “I do not think they could cross through your h
eliosphere on their own? But I am not sure.”

  “Couldn’t just be a doorway to a trio of happy hamsters, could it?” Fergus grumbled. “So, okay, these things will wipe out my whole damned solar system, and in order to stop them, I have to go find all the pieces of this doorkey, which could be anywhere on the planet—excuse me, half the planet—all by myself?”

  “You have this correct but one thing,” Ignatio said. “I will assist.”

  “Great! That’s a quarter of the planet each, with two of us,” Fergus said. “That’s not impossible at all.”

  “Three of us,” piped up a voice from the couch. “Count me in.”

  Fergus flinched in surprise and hit the wall switch as Isla sat up and blinked at them over the back of the sofa in the sudden, harsh light. Her hair was wildly disheveled, as if she’d been asleep there.

  Which she probably was, until we made all that noise, Fergus thought. I’m such an idiot; I didn’t even check.

  “Uh . . .” he said.

  “Is unfortunate,” Ignatio said. “Who is this?”

  “My sister,” Fergus said. “Ignatio, this is Isla. Isla, Ignatio.”

  “So, you’re an alien,” Isla said.

  “Was that guess hard to make?” Ignatio answered.

  Isla scowled at em. “Since you woke me up, I have questions, Mr. Ridiculous Mop-Head,” she said. “First, what kind of alien are you?”

  “I am Xhr,” Ignatio said, the word a rumbling, purring sound that Fergus had never been able to emulate.

  “Zir?” Isla asked, getting it about as right as he ever had. “Outside the Bounds, I’m assuming? Because I had to take two semesters of Advanced Exosentient Forms and Culture, and I’ve never seen even a mention of anything like you.”

  “Very far, yes,” Ignatio said. “I am the only of us to come here. I live in the Shipyard, beside Pluto. We are all friends with Vergus, yes?”

  “I suppose. So, what’s the Drift?”