by Patrick Lee
“They didn’t,” Garner said. “They didn’t create the wormhole. Or the entities passing through it. That stuff is all archaic, even on the timescale of the universe. Whoever created it disappeared long ago. Probably a billion years back. These old transit tunnels full of relics are all that’s left of them. The Deep Sky’s original purpose was simply to study the tunnels—a whole network of them, discovered earlier by the first robotic probes that went out to neighboring stars. The Deep Sky was built from top to bottom as a dedicated research ship, with the means to investigate and even exert some control over wormholes. In the end, the crew used that capability to cause the Breach to open here on Earth, in our time. They rerouted a single tunnel to some degree—enough to make sure that the VLIC’s first shot in 1978 would connect with it, and not to a primordial one teeming with parasite signals. It took an ungodly amount of power to move the tunnel, and as soon as they’d done it, they had to begin generating and storing more power to move it again—this time so they could tap into it on their end. That process—repowering—would require a little over thirty-eight years, and be completed on June 5, 2016, by our calendar. During all the time in between, they had no way of stopping the flow of entities through the system. The most they could do was set up a kind of reverb effect in the tunnel, a very specific disturbance in which they could encode a message.”
“The Breach Voices,” Paige said.
Garner nodded. “Along with the initial impulse that would make a translator of whoever was standing closest when the Breach opened. That was some kind of neurotechnology that’s probably a few centuries ahead of ours—and obviously not perfected, given the damage it did to Ward.”
Travis let all the information settle in his mind, to the extent that it could.
“The tunnels are abandoned?” he said.
Garner nodded again. “Ancient ruins. Though many of the systems engineered into them are still running. Including defensive measures. Safeties.”
“Like what?” Paige said.
“The message covered it all pretty briefly. I got the sense that it would take a textbook to really explain it, but the basics were straightforward enough. One of the safeties is the resistance force inside the Breach, which doesn’t allow you to enter from our end. All the tunnels have that, to protect against the threat of outsiders—like us—tapping in at some random spot and immediately traveling throughout the network. Which makes sense, when you think about it. If you strung the universe with these tunnels, you’d never know when some hostile race might evolve somewhere, punch in and show up in your backyard.”
“So how do you go through it?” Bethany said.
“You need a tumbler,” Garner said.
Everyone waited for him to go on.
“That’s the best stab at translating the word from their language—whoever built the tunnels. Tumbler, as in the mechanism inside a lock. The way it works is, any two points connected by a tunnel need to be authorized before someone can travel between them. Think of it as unlocking them. And the only way to do that is for a single individual—a single conscious mind—to think the same complex thought outside both entry points first. You see how that works? It means at least one person has to make the trip the old-fashioned way—in a ship—before the tunnel lets anyone through. So you’d open one entrance, think a specific thought near it—an exchange from Twelfth Night, say—and then chug across space at ship speed to the other entrance, and think the exchange again. Same mind, same thought—that’s what the tunnel listens for. Until it hears that, it won’t open.”
Travis thought he understood the concept, and the reasoning behind it. “It means no new civilization can come out of the blue and expand their presence in space too quickly, right? They can’t push their boundaries any faster than ships can travel.”
Garner nodded. “And a person stuck with that job, unlocking a tunnel’s two ends, is the tumbler. In this case it’s you. I’m sure you can guess why.”
Travis considered it. He stared at the seatback in front of him, then turned to Garner. “Because I’ve already made the trip. There’s one of me on that end already, and one of me on this end.”
Another nod.
“Will that actually work?” Travis said.
“Same mind, same thought,” Garner said.
“So what is the thought? Did they put it in the message?”
Garner shook his head. “They’ll give it to you in person. After you go through to their end.”
He watched Travis for the confusion he obviously expected. Travis saw Paige’s and Bethany’s eyes narrow too.
“How will you go through the tunnel if you haven’t unlocked it yet?” Garner said. “That’s another safety—one for the tumbler’s own protection. The term for it translates to something like ‘scouting.’ You get to do it just once, back and forth—a single round-trip. The logic of it goes like this: a tumbler usually has to unlock a tunnel’s first end, then travel for a very long time across space to unlock the second end. But before he unlocks the second end, he can choose to enter the tunnel there, just once, and go through it to take a good look at the first end again. To scout it.”
Travis saw the point—was pretty certain he did, anyway. “After all that time had gone by, while you were crossing space in a ship, it’d be risky to reach the far end of the tunnel and just open it blindly. What if things back home had changed by then? What if there was something dangerous waiting to come through?”
Garner managed a smile. “Hell, you might open the tunnel and get a magma flow. Or seawater pressurized at a mile’s depth. A lot can change, given enough time, and it could take thousands of years for a ship to travel the distance required. It could take longer. The Deep Sky’s crew isn’t worried about that in this case, obviously. As far as I can tell, they just want to speak to you before you fully open the tunnel. About what, I have no idea.”
“So the other me,” Travis said, “the one aboard the Deep Sky, will unlock the far end of the tunnel first, and once that’s done, I can make a single trip to their side and back. A scouting trip.”
“That’s the plan, as I understand it.”
Travis stared at him, thinking it all through. Random questions remained. Trailing ends. One in particular.
“Tell us about the filter,” Travis said.
Garner looked surprised. “How can you know about that?”
“Beyond that word, we don’t know about it,” Travis said. “I’ll explain the how later.”
He held Garner’s gaze and waited for him to speak.
“I don’t know much more than you do, I’m afraid,” Garner said. “The filter was always the strangest part, to me. And the scariest, I suppose.”
“Why?” Paige said.
Travis noticed Bethany looking around at everyone like she’d missed something. Which she had; they’d never told her anything about this. Travis caught her glance and said, “I’ll tell you later.”
She nodded, but the confusion stayed in her expression.
“The filter was the one thing Ruben Ward chose to leave out of the written message,” Garner said. “He never dictated it to Nora during his stay at Johns Hopkins, and only spoke briefly of it to the nine of us, later that summer. He was afraid to share the details, he said. He worried that if we knew about that part, we’d back out. He said it was something absolutely necessary, but also terrible, and that it was best if no one but you, Travis, ever learned about it.”
“Do you think it’s something that happens to me when I go through the Breach?” Travis said. “Something that changes me? Am I what gets filtered?”
Again Garner looked surprised, but only mildly so this time. “That’s more or less what I’ve imagined all these years. But it’s no more than a guess—mine is as bad as yours.”
Travis nodded. As he had in the mine shaft, he let the subject slip from his thoughts. There were only so many ways he could hold it up to the light. He looked at Garner again.
“The nine of you were
supposed to get me into Tangent,” Travis said. “Get me in and then, as you said, tell me everything at the last possible moment.”
Garner nodded.
“So what did you think,” Travis said, “when I ended up in Tangent without your help, in the summer of 2009?”
“That very strange things happen in connection with the Breach. And that it couldn’t be a coincidence.”
“It wasn’t. I’ll explain that later too.”
“I’d appreciate it.”
Travis considered something else. “You were prepared to hit Border Town with a nuke, back then, when Aaron Pilgrim took control of the place.”
“The Breach would’ve survived. You can’t imagine the forces that stabilize it. All that stopped me was that you wouldn’t leave the place. I had no choice but to go along with the approach you suggested.”
For a while after that, nobody spoke. The heavy engines droned and the lit-up nightscape slid by, far below.
“Why are they doing this at all?” Paige said. “The crew of that ship. Does the message say why they’re opening the tunnel in the first place?”
Garner nodded slowly, looking down at his hands again. “That part it explains in simple terms.” He grew quiet for a few seconds, then continued. “There was a war. It happened on Earth around 3100, right around the time the Deep Sky arrived at what turned out to be its last destination—61 Cygni. That star is just over eleven light-years from here, which means the ship’s crew, once they were on-site, got all their updates from home with more than a decade’s delay. Correspondence from loved ones, news stories, everything. When the war started, they had to watch their world come apart on that same delay, knowing that whatever they were seeing was already eleven years gone. The crew considered returning, trying to intervene somehow, but gave up the idea without much debate: the Deep Sky doesn’t exactly have a hyperdrive button on its bridge. Its top speed is around twenty percent of the speed of light. It’d taken fifty-five years to get out to that star system, and it would take fifty-five to get back. In any case, it wasn’t long before they saw the final headlines, announcing the all-but-certain deployment of weapon systems more or less guaranteed to end the world. The message doesn’t clarify what exactly those weapons were—only that they worked. All transmissions from Earth ended right after that, and never started up again.”
Garner shut his eyes. “They opened the Breach so they could come through and have a second chance at history. If you think about that, you might begin to appreciate our paranoia in keeping this secret. Think of the power structures in this world. All the horrible things people do just to keep control of their few bars of the jungle gym. Now imagine some of them learning that one day soon a door is going to open, and people will come through it who know the next thousand-plus years of our history. Everything we’re going to invent and discover. Everything we’re going to get right and wrong. People who, just by their arrival, will render all current political power on Earth obsolete. You know who’d be most threatened by that? All the people best positioned to stop it from happening in the first place.” His hands had become fists in his lap. He looked down, noticed, and slowly relaxed them. “To hell with all of them,” he said. “It is going to happen. For better or worse.”
Paige seemed to react to Garner’s final sentence. She turned to Travis, her expression haunted by a fear she didn’t need to voice.
Chapter Forty-Six
Travis took the elevator up to the surface and went running in the desert. The night was cool for early June, the breeze coming in from the Rockies fifty miles away. It was close to midnight, and the stars stood out in vivid contrast on the black sky.
He ran six miles in a loop and then slowed to a walk one mile shy of the elevator housing. He was barely winded. Not bad for forty-eight.
He’d covered half the remaining distance back when he stopped altogether. He turned to face north and tilted his head up and found the familiar shape of Cygnus, the swan, seemingly frozen in its slow rotation around the pole star. His eyes went automatically to the faint speck—nearly invisible to naked eyes—of 61 Cygni.
He stared at it until long after his neck had begun to cramp.
The bedroom was pitch-black except for the soft blue light from the nightstand clock. It showed 3:06 A.M. Travis lay on his side, his chest against Paige’s back. They were both staring at the digital display.
It switched to 3:07.
“Twelve hours,” Paige whispered.
Travis heard the edge of fear she couldn’t quite hide. He held her tighter and kissed the top of her head.
“Save tomorrow for tomorrow,” he said.
“This is tomorrow.”
He insisted on being alone in front of the Breach when it happened. There was no reason to expect any danger to bystanders, but no reason not to expect it either.
There was no formality to the event. No grand send-off before Travis stepped into the elevator to head for B51. The group that gathered to see him go consisted of Paige, Bethany, and Garner. They stood together in the corridor on B18, not far from the residence Travis and Paige had moved into when the complex re-opened. To a passerby—of which there weren’t many in Border Town these days—it would’ve looked like four friends standing there talking.
All three hugged Travis—Paige last, and longest. He held on to her and tried to think of nothing but what she felt like. He shut his eyes and let the moment last as long as he dared.
The elevator doors parted on the concrete hallway. The only hallway down here at the bottom, its far end open to the vast chamber that held the Breach’s protective dome. Travis walked the corridor’s length. He passed the heavy door to the bunker where, more than thirty-eight years earlier, Ruben Ward had lain in his half sleep, listening to the Breach Voices and understanding them.
He passed through the opening at the end. He stared at the dome’s colossal profile, barely a silhouette against the unlit ceiling and walls of the old VLIC shot chamber, which had been used for its intended purpose exactly once.
The dome’s small entry channel, like that of an igloo, lay to the right. Ten feet before it stood a table. Travis crossed to it, removed his phone from his pocket and set it there. He noted the time as he did.
3:06.
He went to the entrance and pushed in through the heavy glass door at its mouth, his eyes already losing everything but the Breach.
Like looking into a depth. Into a furnace.
Those had been his first impressions of the thing, almost seven years ago, echoing the sentiments of one of the first people to see it—and to die because of it.
Travis let the door fall shut behind him and stood staring. The Breach hovered, patient as ever, in its soundproof glass enclosure at the center of the dome. The tunnel and its flared opening looked the same as they always had. Blue and purple. Rippling. Flamelike substance the color of a bruise. Travis went to the glass cage’s door and pulled it open.
The Breach Voices sang. They raked his eardrums, seemingly capable of piercing them. He ignored the pain and stepped across the threshold and stood there, three feet from the opening. There was nothing in the way now except the low-profile receiving platform, like a heavy-duty trampoline that rose eighteen inches from the concrete floor beneath the Breach.
Travis waited.
The Voices keened and sighed, multiple tones rising and falling in what sounded like random pitch fluctuations. They were ascending in a harmonic trill when they simply stopped.
The silence made Travis flinch, but almost before he could react to it, other things began happening. The air pressure in the room changed. He heard the door six inches behind him buffet outward and then immediately suck shut again. The glass walls around him seemed to flex and draw in, the Breach’s reflection warping in every surface.
Then the Breach itself changed. Rapidly. The distinct streams of blue and violet collapsed into each other. The rippling shallowed, the tunnel’s inner surface pressing itself smooth and uniform. The
transformation happened in something like ten seconds, and when it was done Travis might have been staring down the interior of a polished steel tube. Even the flared mouth seemed to have solidified.
He waited.
Nothing else happened.
He stepped closer, resting one foot on the receiving platform. He stared straight down the tunnel and suddenly noticed what else was different about it.
He could see the far end.
It might have been a thousand feet away. Distance was hard to judge. It opened into someplace a little brighter than the tunnel itself.
He leaned closer, extended his hand and passed it through the plane of the Breach’s opening. For maybe a quarter of a second he thought he felt it resist him, and then his hand simply went through unhindered.
Another step—both feet on the trampoline now. He leaned all the way forward, his shoulders and head crossing the plane and his hands falling to the tunnel’s surface just beyond the mouth. He found it to be as solid as it looked—and then found it didn’t matter. He tipped the rest of his upper body into the channel and realized he weighed nothing once inside it. For a few seconds he stayed on the margin, his legs and feet pulled down by gravity on the platform, the rest of him floating suspended in the first three feet of the tunnel. Then he pressed his hands to the sidewalls and shoved himself forward, and a second later he was gliding along the channel’s length, as frictionless as a puck on an air hockey table.
He shoved again, and then again. Each time his speed stepped up and stayed up; only air drag slowed him—and maybe something else. Something he couldn’t quite get a fix on. It felt like the hint of resistance his hand had met briefly at the tunnel’s mouth. He sensed it only occasionally—sliding past one shoulder or the other, or compressing strangely around his feet. That made sense in light of what Garner had described: the idea of a one-time-only scouting trip. The tunnel’s resistance force was still as powerful as ever; it was simply letting him pass now in some active, selective way. A little bubble of nonresistance, following him as he glided along.
