I heard indistinct shouts behind and sped up. The sight of the brownish ground jumping in front of my eyes suddenly gave way to the bright green of a flat meadow rimmed by the gray cliffs of a mountain range on its far side, with a blue patch of sky above it.
“Kir, adjust my eyes to the masking frequency,” I exhaled in raspy whisper. All shapes immediately lost their sharpness, colors faded, but now I could make out the shimmering frame of my shuttle hovering above the far edge of the clearing. Way too high, I thought, and put all my remaining strength into the last dash across the open space.
The system acknowledged me only when I was several steps away, and the shuttle started slowly descending. Too slowly, I thought. Whoever designed it didn’t think that anyone would be in a bit of a hurry. I glanced back, saw Remir appearing from the forest at the edge of the meadow and put Lita down for a moment. I jumped up, grabbing the bottom edge of the opening hatch and pulled myself inside even before the shuttle settled close to the ground. I tumbled in and was about to unfold the air stair when a shock wave knocked me off my feet and I fell backwards, smashing my head on the wall.
I probably had a mild concussion, because for the next several moments I lay still, staring at the smooth white ceiling with complete tranquility. Then my memory came back. I pulled myself up, clutching at the back of the nearest seat, and stumbled towards the light coming from the open hatch.
My vision was still adapted to the masking mode, and everything outside was fuzzy and colorless, but I recognized the two still shapes on the ground.
“Kir, return the normal frequency,” I mouthed the words without a sound and jumped down. There was an eternity of free-fall until I landed and then three long leaps towards the two bodies. I noted that my senses had been strangely distorted; the red blotches on the grass seemed almost fluorescent despite the gray veil of smoke, and all outside sounds disappeared, drowned by the heavy slow beat of blood in my ears.
I would never know if Remir tried to shield her in the last moment or if he was just thrown in this direction randomly by the strength of the explosion, but his body lay across hers in an awkward pose. I grabbed his shoulders, turned him over, and his head lifelessly rolled backwards, revealing a blank face with open eyes staring into the distance.
“Nick, no sign of brain activity,” I heard Kir’s voice. “His condition is irreversible.”
But I was not even listening to him. I was staring at Lita’s white face her eyes shut by the led-colored lids.
The smoke burned my throat as I finally gasped for air.
“And … is she …?” I stopped as if I could postpone her death by not uttering the words.
“Lita is alive. But you need to stop the artery blood loss from her left arm instantaneously.”
I needed to make a tourniquet, and I grabbed the side of Remir’s shirt. It was very slippery, drenched in his blood. I moaned through clenched teeth, applying so much force that my fingers burned, but eventually ripped the fabric apart. I tied the strip of my makeshift tourniquet around her arm, and just as I finished, figures in gray uniforms started appearing at the edge of the meadow. For a second, I wondered why they were not shooting – I was as good a target as they could get – but then I realized that they couldn’t see the shuttle and assumed that I was safely trapped against the cliff wall.
“Kir, release the air stair, prepare engines for immediate take-off,” I whispered. I stood holding Lita’s limp body in my arms, and slowly backed up until I felt the ladder behind me. Then I twirled around, pushed off the ground and jumped inside, barely touching the steps.
“Kir, go,” I yelled even before I landed inside. The sharp acceleration threw us to the floor as the shuttle shot straight up into the air. I climbed to the pilot seat, not letting go of Lita.
Below, in the crosshairs of my missile lock, people in gray uniforms stood with an expression of pure shock on their faces. Remir’s body was in the same position on the ground.
No, I thought, I was done there. I let go of the gun control and tightly held Lita’s body against my chest.
A distorted perception of time was the first symptom that my emotions were eroding the wall of my professional conditioning and psychological self-defense. It was a short flight, but every minute stretched endlessly as Lita’s blood kept slipping through my fingers. I asked Kir to display the parameters of her brain activity and watched the graphs on the screen become flatter and flatter.
I already felt cracks in my ability to function, but I was still behaving in maximum efficiency mode when the shuttle smoothly inserted itself inside the ship. I carried Lita to the emergency vat, carefully placed her in the inner tube and started the program. I didn’t look at her face as the sides of the lid blended. Based on the state of her vitals, she might be dead or close to it.
I tried to focus on the next step, but apparently I had reached my limit. I held onto the smooth white shell of the vat and slowly slid down, leaving two red smudges on its surface.
I sat on the floor, my forehead pressed against the vat’s curved wall, and my body started shaking.
I don’t know how long it continued and I didn’t check with Kir. I was letting go now, purging the memories of what had just happened – the bitter odor of burning forest, the ease with which Remir’s head rolled backward, the surprised blue eyes of the soldier on the desert road.
“Nick, you need medical assistance,” said Kir.
“What kind,” I pushed the words out between the spasms in my throat.
“Minor cuts and scrapes. Psychological destabilization.”
The body could wait, I thought. As far as my brain … I somehow knew that I shouldn’t interfere with what was going on, that it wasn’t something that I wanted to numb.
I needed time to say goodbye to the person I used to be before I’d landed on Beta Blue.
When I felt that I could move, I pushed myself towards the wall, slumped against it and sat very still for a while. Finally, I managed to get up, holding onto the wall with my hands, still sticky from drying blood. I looked at the vat one more time, walked out of the room and locked the door behind me.
With slow precision, I went through the decontamination process and wound repair. I then stood under a hot shower, changed into light clean clothes and brushed my hair carefully to create as much mental distance as possible between the present and Beta Blue.
I settled into my favorite chair in the main cabin, dimmed the light and with relief noticed that I could think with calm accuracy.
I was faced with a peculiar problem; it didn’t have a solution, but all the steps on the way were obvious.
I had to get Lita to an Earth medical facility as soon as possible. But it had to include a detour to another Mirror World. I had to find another outlier if I was going to be able to pay for medical services, which were prohibitively expensive because of their niche status. And I needed to do it fast, while the biomass could still hold back the deterioration process. I would skip safety stops and pilot the ship manually, but I still wouldn’t know if I could make it home in time.
“Kir, find the closest inhabited sector,” I asked.
“M-847, by a wide margin,” said Kir.
I made a quick calculation. The total time of detour plus the return flight to Earth was roughly equal to the remaining full functional lifespan of the biomass.
I didn’t have clearance for M-847.
I shrugged. I wouldn’t have waited even if communication was theoretically possible. The violation of my professional rules was nothing in comparison to the crime of bringing a Mirror World commoner to Earth.
But my company would pay my commissions before firing me if I delivered an outlier. And Earth would provide Lita with emergency medical assistance if I had the money to pay. They would do it before addressing other issues, whichever way they chose to address them.
What the hell el
se was there to do, push out the vat with Lita’s body into open space?
“Kir, tell me about M-847.”
“Its local name is Y-3,” said Kir. “The population size …”
“Let’s go,” I interrupted. It didn’t matter. I had no other options.
PART III:
THE TASTE
OF
FREEDOM
Y-3
On a cold autumn day Hilgor was, as always, working in his small sparsely furnished study, a pure minimalist’s dream if not for the piles of paper scattered on the floor. A sudden draft of strong wind drove rain in through the open window. Hilgor got up, closed it and lingered for a moment, absent-mindedly staring at the dimly illuminated street outside. Then he took a deep breath, returned to his desk and checked the time indicator at the corner of his computer screen. The clock was counting the last seconds until the vote submission deadline, and his fingers nervously tapped a cheerful rhythm on the edge of the table. Finally, the announcement section moved to the front, and the text with the decision lit up. Hilgor pushed the chair back, got up, turned around and kicked it so hard that it flew into the wall.
A black narrow muzzle appeared from behind the half-open door, and a large dog with long black hair made his way into the room. He looked up at the man with mild concern. Hilgor walked past the dog, grabbed his coat and opened the entrance door. He paused in the doorway and glanced at the leash lying on the floor. “Sorry, Riph,” he said and left the apartment.
It was unfair to go to the park by himself, but Hilgor needed to process the latest event alone.
His eyes glued to the ground, he quickly walked along his usual route, entered the gates of the park and stepped under a sparse canopy of half-naked trees.
He circled the narrow wet paths long enough for water to creep in under his collar and penetrate through the inner layer of his clothes, but a feeling of defeat still sat like a briny lump inside his throat. A gust of cold wind made him shiver, but it was a welcome distraction from the helpless anger. For a moment, he was even able to see the irony – while the result of the vote was deeply insulting, it wasn’t personal.
There was nobody to blame. Two centuries ago a nuclear war almost erased life on Y-3. The fight for survival taught people the value of efficiency; and with time optimization, it became a foundation for all ethical principles.
Unfortunately, its practical applications consistently destroyed Hilgor’s work, and there wasn’t much in his life beyond mathematics. Of course, there was Del, but it was a separate and complicated subject, and it wasn’t something he was thinking about now. At the moment, he was consumed by a helpless rage against the major source of his permanent irritation – mandatory practice for all scientists to collaborate in assigned units and exchange their ideas anonymously. In theory, he agreed that associating personal identity to the research process could lower overall productivity. But that was the theory. In practice, this moronic vote had just crashed a beautiful structure that had already formed in his head. It was the bridge to a solution of a highly prized problem that his unit had been pursuing for almost a year. In the last couple of weeks, Hilgor had suddenly come to see how to assemble the right object from an unexpected combination of several seemingly unrelated branches.
A wave of anger rose again, and, not finding an outlet, almost choked him.
How could he have failed to convince them? It was so obvious that the approach they chose would lead to a dead end. But the unit had discarded Hilgor’s idea, fearing that his construct would lose stability and disintegrate at the critical point. His intuition told him that wouldn’t happen, but he couldn’t translate this intangible feeling into a clear argument as of yet, and his inability to do so had determined the vote.
And the fact that his insights stood behind the most brilliant solutions his unit had ever produced couldn’t even influence the decision. For everyone, except him, they were just anonymous thoughts of the collective mind.
He stopped in the middle of a wet trail, lifted his face to the bleak unfriendly sky and cursed. Even if he gave the slightest damn about offending anyone, there was nobody around. The weather and the late hour had emptied the park.
He resumed his brisk walk, ignoring the increasing rain. He would finish the problem anyway, he thought gloomily, even if nobody ever saw the solution. But then he thought that he would show it to Deait, his secret collaborator, which calmed him. Deait would appreciate it. Turning a sharp corner, Hilgor almost collided with a tall man standing in the middle of the path. Hilgor recoiled sharply, almost falling backwards, but he managed to regain his composure almost instantly. After all, he told himself, there was nothing unusual about this young man, except that he was also drenched; his dark hair stuck to his forehead and raindrops were dripping down his pale face.
“My name is Nick. You’re right,” said the man, “your idea is one of the biggest breakthroughs in several generations.”
“What idea?” asked Hilgor suddenly feeling a tight knot in his stomach.
The stranger was looking at him with a placid encouraging smile. It flashed in Hilgor’s mind that, in fact, there was something unusual in the man’s appearance. He was taller than average, his facial features were impeccably balanced, and his posture was naturally graceful. It wasn’t a common combination on Y-3.
“The one that was just voted down by your unit,” said the stranger.
Hilgor tried to hold onto the shaken reality.
“How do you …” he started, and then interrupted himself quickly, “why do you think so?” He cringed at revealing the degree of his vanity.
“I don’t think. I know.”
For a moment Hilgor thought that this must be a dream, but the cold rain was too real. He looked into the man’s eyes and didn’t find a hint of insanity or mockery. Hilgor instantly felt very uncomfortable in the twilight of the empty park.
The stranger took out a pink plastic envelope from his coat pocket and offered it to Hilgor.
“Take a look at this first. It’ll help.”
Hilgor put it inside his pocket without saying a word. The man turned around and began to walk away, then stopped for a moment before disappearing in the dusk and added, softly, “Hilgor, you’ll be fine. There’s no threat to you in this. You can even forget the whole thing if you choose to.”
By the time Hilgor got home his clothes were as wet as if he had just taken a shower in them. The dog greeted him with a couple of excited barks, but, noticing something unusual, moved aside and settled down in a strategic corner to watch Hilgor’s movements. The man’s behavior was, indeed, a bit strange as far as Riph was concerned. Hilgor sat down on the couch without taking off his drenched coat. He looked at the wall for a while. Then he shook his head, stood up abruptly, threw the raincoat on the floor, turned on the lights and, whistling a cheerful tune, began to look for a dry change of clothes. In a moment, however, he dropped his dry pants back on the shelf, walked back to the raincoat, retrieved the pink envelope from the pocket and went to the study. Riph got up to follow him, looking with interest at the small puddles made by the water dripping from Hilgor’s pants.
The dog pushed the study door open, lay down in the doorway and continued to monitor the proceedings. Hilgor sat in the chair in front of the computer and looked at the thin envelope lying on the desk. He wasn’t whistling anymore. He officially admitted to himself that he was done pretending that the whole incident was a weird, but harmless joke. There wasn’t a single innocent explanation for the stranger knowing about the recent developments in Hilgor’s work.
He opened the envelope and took out an unmarked plastic circular device, a very outdated method of information exchange. He guessed that the stranger was using it to avoid an electronic trace. Hilgor held his breath as he stuck the small opaque circle to the sensor area and watched it melt into the surface. The monitor went black, flashed a couple of times and came
back on. Hilgor stared at the screen in shock. The file must have reprogrammed his entire system to achieve this quality of resolution, subtle color variations and almost tangible textures of images.
And then he realized that a slowly rotating shape in the center of the screen was a representation of his construct. The object that had existed only in his mind was drawn with exact precision, leaving no possibility of a coincidence. It was beautiful, and it was stable at the critical point.
For the next several hours, Riph watched Hilgor’s face lit by the soft glow of the computer screen. At some point, the dog let out a nervous yawn, got up, went closer and gently pushed the man’s knee with his head. He had learned to read the slightest variations in Hilgor’s moods over the years, but at this moment he wasn’t able to tell if the thing that was making his master behave so strangely was threatening or exciting. Hilgor stared at Riph for a few seconds, and then suddenly realized that he had forgotten to walk him. “Sorry Riph. How disgraceful,” he said guiltily as he got up from the chair.
When they went outside, dawn was quickly approaching, and only a faint hint of the rainstorm remained, replaced for the most part by the clarity of a crisp morning. Riph trotted along the familiar road to the park, periodically checking on Hilgor whose expression was still worrisomely enigmatic.
It would be a severe understatement to say that Hilgor was at a loss. The file was a collection of mathematical facts vastly surpassing anything that was known on Y-3. And indeed, just like the stranger said, Hilgor’s construct stood out as one of the most influential results. With an odd feeling, Hilgor recognized his own ideas in somebody’s solution and tried to imagine the unknown mathematician who had solved it years ago. It must have been long ago because there were layers and layers of complexity and abstraction piled on top of the landscape, which Hilgor recognized.
He had been absent-mindedly following Riph’s lead, but then realized that they had come to the very location of the unusual encounter. He halted and froze, watching the dog gallop in the direction of the lonely figure sitting on a nearby bench.
Fire of the Dark Triad Page 13
