Eternity's End

by Jeffrey Carver

  "Oh yeah," said Jamal, scratching his head. "But it's not like we thought anything was wrong, then."

  "Not wrong. But different."

  "Different, how?" Legroeder asked.

  Poppy grimaced, as though trying to recall something from very long ago. "Different, like it was harder to get a grip. A purchase. We were still flying, but there was some slippage, if you know what I mean. Not enough to clue us that something was really wrong. But then, later, when we tried to come out..."

  "What happened then?" Legroeder asked, wondering, was the funnel just another image of the raindrop Phoenix had gone through?

  "Nothing happened!" Poppy and Jamal cried together.

  "Do you mean, there was no response from the net?"

  "It was as if it had gone dead," said Poppy. "I don't mean dead: it still worked. But we couldn't do anything, couldn't change our position or speed... couldn't even change the image much. And that's more or less how it's been ever since."

  "Did you check the reactor? Try increasing the output?"

  "Oh, yeah." Jamal chuckled grimly. "Of course. We gave it a real good goosing."

  "And?"

  Poppy gestured around the room. "That's when this time business started—"

  "That's when people started blinking out." Jamal studied the opposite wall for a moment, rubbing with a thumb and forefinger at his lips. He looked back at Legroeder. "Let me tell you. That scared us real good. Real good." His eyes filled with fear as he spoke.

  Legroeder remembered their effort to increase power when they were trying to grapple Impris with the net. It had only made the problem worse.

  "So do you know how to get us out or not?" Poppy asked.

  Legroeder hesitated, and Deutsch spoke instead. "We have thoughts on the matter," he said.

  Jamal burst into bitter laughter. "You have thoughts? Well, isn't that a relief! Rings, man—we've had thoughts!"

  Legroeder flushed. "He means that the Narseil riggers who got us in also think they can get us out. But—"

  "But they don't know, is that it?" Jamal's laugh gave Legroeder a shiver. "Hell, man, don't tell me you came all this way just to sit and rot with us!"

  "Not that we don't appreciate the company," Poppy added.

  Legroeder exhaled softly. "We hope our situation is somewhat improved from yours. For one thing, we have the benefit of more than a hundred years of rigger science since you flew. Plus, we have a hybrid crew—with and without augmentation."

  "I see you've got some augmentation yourself," Poppy said pointedly, reminding Legroeder that in Impris's time the Kyber were a dreaded enemy, considered barely human.

  Legroeder frowned. "I do have augments, but I don't use them much while rigging—unlike Rigger Deutsch here, who uses them extensively. So we're pairing our skills. Plus, we have two excellent Narseil riggers, who have a good understanding of the latest research."

  "If they understand it so well—"

  "What I'm trying to say is, we have a variety of different viewpoints—"

  Legroeder was interrupted by the movement of a dark shadow over his head. He glanced up in alarm. It looked like a large ocean breaker, rising over him from behind. It was not a shadow on the walls, but a darkness in the air itself. It curled over, well above his head, and came down past the far side of the table, before curling under the table. Then it stopped, hovering, enclosing the conference table in the tube of its curling wave of blackness. "What the hell?" Legroeder whispered.

  Deutsch rose on his levitators and approached the leading edge of the shadow. He rotated in midair, inspecting it from various angles, his regular eyes and his cheekbone eyes swiveling. "I can't tell what it is," he murmured. The augments on the side of his head were afire with activity. Floating forward, he telescoped his left hand out toward the phenomenon.

  "Freem'n, wait—"

  Deutsch reached into the wave until his hand disappeared. Then he pulled it back out. "Seems okay," he said, turning his hand over. "Whatever it is, it didn't hurt me. Let's have a closer look."

  "Freem'n, wait!"

  Deutsch floated forward and leaned into the shadow. " 'S okay..." His voice became muffled, then cut off. Abruptly, as though yanked, he toppled headfirst into the shadow.

  "Freem'n!" Legroeder yelled, jumping up. But his friend was gone, lost in the wall of darkness. Legroeder swung to Captain Friedman and the Impris riggers. "What's going on?"

  Jamal and Poppy were shaking their heads.

  A heartbeat later, the wave of darkness surged forward. Before he could move, it engulfed him, too.

  * * *

  Legroeder blinked, stunned. He was sitting on a cold metal deck, in a very deep gloom. "Captain? Freem'n?" There was no answer. As his eyes slowly adjusted to the darkness, he realized he was no longer in the meeting room. Then where was he? There was some illumination: emergency or night-lighting, emanating from hidden sources spaced along the base of the walls. His eyes adjusted slowly. He was in a corridor. He could hear a distant ticking sound, and a noise like the closing of a door. "Hello?" he called.

  There was no answer.

  (What can you tell me?) he asked the implants.

  // We registered a discontinuity in all readings. Our chronometry is totally desynchronized.//

  (In other words, you don't know much.)

  // Acknowledged.// The implants sounded almost rueful.

  Legroeder groaned to his feet and looked both ways down the corridor. There was nothing to indicate where in the ship he was, so he chose a direction at random and started walking. In due course, he came to a series of doors outlined in a pale luminous blue. A hum was audible behind the wall. He tried two of the doors, but they didn't budge. Probably an engineering area—ventilation or hydroponics or something.

  He continued walking, but his feelings of unease grew steadily. Was anybody here? He felt as if he were on a ghost ship, the only one still alive.

  He drew a breath, cupped his hands, and bellowed down the corridor, "HALLOOO! ANYBODY HER-R-RE?" He turned and called the other way.

  At first there was no answer. Then he heard an amplified voice calling back, "Legroeder? Is that you?"

  His heart quickened. "Yes! This way!"

  Deutsch appeared around a corner, some distance down the corridor. He was an eerie sight, floating toward Legroeder on his base with his augments winking slowly on the sides of his head. "Are you all right?" he called.

  "Yah." Legroeder hurried to meet his friend. "Thank God! I thought I was the only one left." He stopped and turned around. "Do you have any idea what happened? I was—was—" He suddenly stopped, shaking his head. He had completely lost his train of thought.

  "Time," Deutsch said. "That's all I know. There was a time fluctuation. My internal clocks are all scrambled. It's ship's night now." The Kyber's eyes, glowing in the dark, made him seem more robot than human. "Did we just lose a bunch of hours?"

  Legroeder blinked. "Weren't we just—?" He shook his head; he was having trouble remembering where he had been. "We were... talking... in the meeting room."

  "Yes," Deutsch said.

  "And that wave of shadow—"

  "Temporal displacement wave, I think," Deutsch said slowly.

  "It pulled you right out of the meeting room—and then hit the rest of us—"

  "Which, by my reckoning, was about ten minutes ago. I've been wandering the passageways," Deutsch said.

  "Did you see anyone?"

  "A couple of people. When they saw me, they ran the other way. I think they thought I was a ghost." Deutsch scanned the corridor. "Do you know what I'm wondering?"

  "I'm wondering a lot of things."

  "Well, I'm wondering where we were, physically, between the time we were in that meeting room, and now."

  Legroeder cleared his throat uneasily. "You have any thoughts on that?"

  "Yeah, but you won't like it."

  "I already don't like it."

  "Yeah, well, I'm thinking maybe we were far away... espec
ially if this quantum fluctuation that Palagren and Cantha talk about is spread out over a large area. Or maybe we weren't exactly in existence at all." Deutsch's round glass eyes seemed to loom in the near-darkness.

  Legroeder chewed his knuckles for a moment, trying to focus constructively. Before he could come to any conclusions, he was startled by a strange-sounding cry behind him in the corridor. He turned and saw three people walking toward him. Or not so much walking as rippling toward him, stretching through the air like ghostly time-lapse holos, then contracting forward. They were talking, or possibly shouting; their voices were distorted, incomprehensible.

  As they drew close, it became clear they did not see Legroeder and Deutsch before them. "Excuse me!" Legroeder called, stepping out to get their attention. They still appeared not to see him, and he flattened himself to the wall to get out of their way.

  The nearest, a heavyset man, brushed against him; the man passed through him as if he were a ghost. Legroeder turned to gape as the trio receded down the passageway. Their voices dopplered down to a distorted bass rumble.

  "That was very interesting," Deutsch remarked, floating out into the center of the corridor again. "What do you suppose just happened?"

  "I don't know," Legroeder said. "But I hope we can find someone on this ship who can talk to us."

  "Or on Phoenix," Deutsch said. "I'm not getting a com-signal. Are you?"

  Legroeder felt a sudden chill; he'd not thought to check. (Are we?)

  // There is no com-signal.//

  He shook his head. "You don't suppose it could just be our implant function messed up?"

  "Maybe. Or maybe we haven't quite made it all the way back to our own space," Deutsch said softly.

  Legroeder's jaw muscles tightened. If Impris could be trapped in its own space, floating like a specter out of contact with others, what was to prevent individuals from being similarly trapped? He squeezed his hands into fists. Don't jump to conclusions. "Do you know which way to the bridge?"

  "This way, I think."

  They walked awhile, and finally found a directional map showing them to be aft of the passenger's recreational area. Once they located the main corridor, they moved quickly along its deserted length. Were there any real people here?

  The answer came finally when they passed through a large passenger lounge and found a scattering of people, as one might on a large ship, late at night. "I wonder if these folks will see us," Deutsch murmured.

  Seated at a coffee table, two women were playing cards. One, blonde, looked to be in her twenties; the other was a brunette, somewhat older. The brunette sat with her blouse partly open in back—as if she had been interrupted in process of dressing and transported to this spot, with no memory of what she had been doing. The blonde, sitting opposite, was absorbed in her hand of cards. As Deutsch and Legroeder approached, she looked up at them. She seemed to focus on Legroeder's face and started to speak. For a moment he thought she was going to address him; then the older woman said something, and the blonde looked back down at her cards.

  Legroeder frowned, stepping close to the table. He peered at the cards and asked, "What are you playing?"

  The younger woman held out a card, placing it on the center of the coffee table—and as Legroeder bent for a better look, she peered right through him. She spoke again, and her voice was incomprehensibly distorted.

  "They don't see you," Deutsch said. "Let's go."

  Passing along the length of the lounge, they came to a young man absorbed in a stand-up holo-game of twisting lights and strange sounds, all contained within a ghostly shadow-curtain. Was this what the game was supposed to look like? Legroeder wondered—or was it, too, being distorted? He stepped up beside the young man. "Good game?"

  "Mrrrrk-k-k-k-ll..."

  "Can you hear me?"

  The man, reaching out to fiddle with a control on the game board, put his hand through Legroeder's left arm. Legroeder drew a deep breath. If there's a way to get here, there has to be a way to get out, he told himself, as though chanting a mantra. Only half believing it, he followed Deutsch onward.

  At the end of the lounge, an old man was sitting with his feet propped on the table, reading a book. As they went by, the man looked up, arching his eyebrows. "Don't recall seeing you two here before," he said. "You must be off a' that other ship, the one that's knockin' us off kilter—"

  Legroeder could scarcely breathe. "You can see us?"

  "I'm talking to you, aren't I?"

  "Yeah, but... well, you're the first person who's—"

  "Wait a minute," said Deutsch. "You said we're knocking you off kilter?"

  The man chuckled. "Well, begging your pardon—things have gone from bad to worse since you got here, what with the time waves and all." He marked his place in the book and closed it. "Don't get me wrong. But I hear people saying your arrival must have upset something in the continuum. Not that I understand how things could possibly be worse—except if we take you along with us."

  Legroeder stared at him open-mouthed.

  // If we might interject—it could be very important to determine whether or not this is true.//

  (No kidding,) Legroeder thought.

  "We passed through an instability ourselves, not long ago," Deutsch said.

  The man laughed. "You're in good company. Twice now, since I been reading my book here, I found myself having dinner again last night." He grimaced. "The first time was bad enough. They used to have good food on this ship. That was before everything came from the recyclers."

  "Do you have any idea where we might find the captain?" Legroeder asked. "We were meeting with him, and then this wall of darkness—"

  The old man waved him to silence. "If the same thing happened to him, he could be most anywhere. But you're headed in the right direction for the bridge and crew section. Just keep going till you get to the royal blue doors."

  "Thank you," Deutsch said, his face flickering with augment activity. He peered up the corridor with his primary eyes, while his cheekbone eyes remained fixed on the man. "Any chance you might come with us? Help us if we get lost?"

  "Jesus, that's weird. Your eyes, I mean. No offense." The man shook his head. "No, I'd rather just read my book, if that's okay with you. It's a happier way to go."

  "All right," said Legroeder. "Thanks, then."

  They continued quickly on.

  * * *

  It seemed only a dozen heartbeats later when Legroeder suddenly shivered, blinked...

  —wave of shadow passing over—

  ...grabbed for Deutsch, didn't find him, felt a rush of disorientation, his vision swimming...

  He refocused with an effort and found himself in the meeting room with Captain Friedman, Jamal, and Poppy. He struggled for breath as he peered around the room. No Deutsch.

  "What the hell are you doing?" Friedman asked.

  Legroeder couldn't tell if the captain was angry or just surprised. "I'm—not sure—" Legroeder gasped. "I think I just got transported to... tonight. At least... some night. There was a passenger lounge, and hardly any people. Most of them couldn't see me."

  Friedman grunted.

  "A passenger told us that things had grown more unstable since our arrival—"

  "Told us? Who's us?"

  "Rigger Deutsch. I found him back there, and then we got separated again. Have you seen him since—?"

  "I'm right here," said Deutsch, beside him.

  Legroeder jumped, startled.

  "I have not seen Rigger Deutsch since—oh, there he is," Friedman said, squinting. He shook his head. "What were you saying?"

  "That the instabilities may be worse as a result of our presence here. May I take a moment to contact my ship?"

  "Certainly. Do you need a com-unit?"

  Legroeder shook his head. (Connect me to the ship, please?)

  // Trying... connecting... //

  A moment later, Cantha's voice squawked from the collar-com: "Legroeder, this is Phoenix. We've been trying to
reach you for hours. What's wrong? Do you have a report?"

  "Sort of," Legroeder said, and described briefly what had happened. "Have you been observing anything like this?"

  "We certainly have," said Cantha. "Including the fact that you seem completely out of time synch with us. More importantly, we've mapped some movement in the quantum flux, and we have some ideas about what might be causing it."

  "Such as—?"

  "We believe that we may be sitting on top of a very large flaw in the quantum structure of the Deep Flux. We suspect its influence is reverberating upward through the layers of the underflux. And by the way, at least three riggers on this ship have reported having dreams—all with a similar thread. Frightening dreams, mostly."

  "Dreams!" Legroeder barked, suddenly remembering the fears he'd felt trying to sleep the night before.

  "Yes, have you—?"

  "Hold a moment, Cantha." Legroeder realized that Jamal and Poppy had swung to face him, the word dream on both of their lips. "Does this mean something to you?"

  The two Impris riggers looked wide-eyed. Jamal was crouching slightly in his chair, a grimace on his face. "Something coming," Jamal whispered. "I keep dreaming that it's coming. Coming to get me. To get all of us."

  "What is? What's coming to get you?"

  Jamal shook his head. "Don't know. Monstrous thing. It sounds crazy. But it's like there's a big serpent or something in the sky..."

  Legroeder shifted his gaze. "You, too, Poppy?"

  Poppy nodded, biting his lip. "For me, it's like... the Gates of Hell or something," he whispered. "Something real bad. I can't sleep at all when I've been dreaming about it. Sully too. Sully's had it, too."

  "Okay," Legroeder said. "I want to know everything you can tell me about it. Cantha, did you hear that?"

  "Yes, I did," came the Narseil's voice. "Get the details, please. We've got to piece it together quickly. Palagren thinks we need to get out of here before the instability gets uncontrollable."

  "Do you know yet what's causing it?"

  "We think it's an entropic effect of the two overlapping flux-reactor fields, in the presence of the quantum fluctuations. There are signs it's getting progressively worse."