His bed transformed, too. The bulbs grew and shrank organically and in concert, shifting the patient they bore into a reclined sitting position, his head propped enough to be eye level with Melni. He licked at his lips once again and regarded them both. “Please, sit.”
The frail man raised his left arm. Tendril-like tubes rose with it, dangling from bruised puncture points on the skin that had been in contact with the cushion, to disappear somewhere below him. Medicines, nutrients, Melni guessed. With his gesture two thin, rectangular strips sluiced off the wall and rotated down. In unison and absolute silence they settled into position as benchlike chairs, perfectly positioned behind Caswell’s and Melni’s knees.
Melni sat, wondering how such things were possible. The drink tube, the chairs, it all seemed to happen merely by thought. Though she knew little of Caswell’s world, his reaction, the look of shock and even fear on his face told her that he was as impressed by the display of technology as she. This man was as alien to him as to her. Despite the warmth of the strip lights she felt an unnervingly familiar chill course through her.
“What do I call you?” the man asked.
“I’m Peter Caswell,” Caswell said, “and this is Melni Tavan.”
“I am also known as Meiki Sonbo,” she corrected. Peter raised an eyebrow in response.
The gaunt face had become more alert. Color flowed into the face. The orange eyes, now bright, exuded intelligence. “A Southerner of Gartien, though your features mark you as a desoa,” he said to Melni, then slid his gaze back to Caswell, “and an Earthling. British aristocracy, I think I hear? It’s been a long time and my knowledge of accents has slipped along with everything else.”
Caswell stiffened. “How the hell—”
The man went on as if he hadn’t heard. “Sent by Monivar, then, and not Alice.”
“Who?”
“Monivar Pendo Tonaris?”
Melni glanced at Caswell. His mouth hung agape and then audibly clicked shut. For a moment he sat perched there, grinding his teeth. “Are you…do you mean Monique? Monique Pendleton?”
In answer the man’s gaze shifted to the wall behind Caswell. A screen had simply appeared there as if grown for the specific purpose. It showed the face of an attractive middle-aged woman with ruthless blue eyes and strangely long blond hair. Her features were finely etched, as if sculpted. “This woman?” the man asked.
Caswell twisted to view the image and went still, frozen by what he saw there. The last of his energy seemed to bleed out of him then. He slumped in his chair and folded his arms across his chest.
“Caswell?” Melni asked.
“Impossible,” he whispered. “Impossible.”
Caswell stood and walked like a man asleep to the image. He reached out and traced a finger along the woman’s image. “All this time,” he whispered, just barely audible. “I can’t fucking believe it.”
“So it is her,” the man in the reclined chair said.
“It’s her all right.” Caswell slumped back onto his chair, deflated. He stared at the image for a moment longer and then rested his chin on his chest and began to rub at the back of his neck with one hand. His fingers paused, touching the spot where his artificial gland was. “My whole career…Christ. Everything I’ve done. All of it came through her. All of it fucking taken by her.” His fingers pressed into the skin until the knuckles turned white, as if he intended to tear the device from his spine right then and there.
Silence crept into the room. Melni wanted to say something, to comfort the assassin. But something kept her back. His tone…he sounded as she’d felt upon learning of his origin. The moment when a belief held for all of one’s life is suddenly shattered.
Melni turned back to the alien on the bed, desperate to change the subject. “You have yet to tell us who you are.”
The frail figure managed something resembling a grin. “Lazotel Leffit Delgaris, Warden of Gartien, former Observer of Zero World—er, what you call Earth. Simply ‘Warden’ will work. ‘Laz’ if you like.”
Astonished, confused, Melni turned to Caswell for an anchor in all this. He leaned forward, eyes screwed shut, his fists at his temples and not, Melni thought, to access his implant. “None of that made any goddamn sense at all. I have so many questions I don’t know where to start,” the assassin said.
Laz sipped more fluid from the unnerving automatically retracting tube. “What were Monique’s orders? To bring Alice home?”
“To kill her,” Caswell said. “Because—”
“Unauthorized influence of a pre-Conduit world,” the Warden finished. “They never change.”
Caswell said nothing. Melni groped for meaning in the word conduit and found none.
Laz asked, “And you’ve succeeded? Alice is dead?”
The assassin hedged. Carefully he said, “Not yet.”
“That is good. We knew this would happen someday. That someone would come. Another few years and she would have been ready for you. The fact that you’re here in this room means she was not.”
“She’s damn close. I’ve spent most of my time here running away rather than chasing.”
Melni broke in. “Please. I am confused. Explain to us what is going on. Why are our worlds so similar? How is it that we speak the same language, that we are so physically alike?”
Laz cast a dubious gaze at her and found sincerity in what he saw. His eyes slid over to Caswell. “You really don’t know?”
Caswell shook his head.
“Monique did not explain?”
“No,” Caswell replied. “No she bloody didn’t.”
“Oh.” Laz pondered this. “I begin to understand. You are from Earth. Of Earth. And you thought she was like you.”
“You’re goddamn right I did.”
“So Earth is still in the dark,” he said almost to himself. “Alice’s crossing went unnoticed.”
“Until now. We found her ship. The data it contained, evidence that she’d come here with…knowledge.”
“And Gartien?” His gaze shifted to Melni. “How much do you know?”
Melni spread her hands, unable to comprehend any of it. “Until a few minutes ago we thought he”—she pointed at Caswell—“was some recluse genetic experiment, escaped from a Valix lab.”
“Then there may still be time,” Laz said. Again the tube protruded from beside his head. He gulped something murky and gray, cringed at the taste. He coughed once, a sickening wet sound that came from his lungs—assuming he had them. His whole body shook from the effort, and the invisible field between him and the larger room shimmered briefly with pinpoint flecks of light.
“Time for what, exactly?” Melni asked. “What is this all about?”
“First bring Alice here,” the Warden said. “I must verify she is safe.”
“We can’t,” Caswell said. He explained their flight from the North, and Alia’s subsequent call for a summit between the two sides.
The Warden was nodding. “Your presence here means she needs to accelerate preparations.”
“Preparations for what?”
Laz shifted in his reclined seat. The bulbous cushions jostled about, swarming and growing to support the Warden’s redistributed weight. “I’d better start at the beginning.”
CASWELL LEANED FORWARD in his extruded chair. He saw Melni do the same. The alien’s tone implied exactly what he needed right then: answers.
Laz settled in his bed thing. Another tube, a thin one this time, snaked out from somewhere behind his head. The tip formed into a needle-sharp point and it poked him, just below the Adam’s apple. Fluid pumped out, not in, this time. Melni let out a little gasp, but Caswell motioned her to be calm.
Finally Laz opened his eyes again and spoke. “What I am going to tell you is known to only two people on your worlds. Alice Vale, and Monique Pendleton. And neither is a native of the world they live on.”
Caswell said nothing. A shiver ran up his spine. His eyes met Melni’s, then he focused all of his aug
mented attention on the alien.
Laz fixed his gaze on some imagined point far away. “There exists in the universe a, well, the simplest way to explain it is a linkage based on fractal symmetry. An invisible, underlying chain of places connected due to their similarity.”
“That mouthful is the simple version?” Caswell asked.
Laz didn’t quite smile, but came close. “Similar places, linked together.”
“Like a wormhole?” Caswell asked. “That’s what I went through?”
“The term wormhole is quaint and colloquial to Earth, I suspect. Alas it is unknown to me, but I think you’ve got the idea, yes.”
“So…what…you can pop into this wormhole and it finds a similar place to dump you out?”
“Not exactly,” Laz said. “It’s not dynamic. It’s more like a roller…a train track…linking places not because of their proximity to one another but because of their similarity to one another. We call this series of connections the Conduit. Along its length are entry and exit points that lead from one star system to the next most similar in one direction, the next least in the other, no matter the time or distance involved.”
Melni was looking at Caswell. She seemed to want to draw confidence from his own reaction, to see that at least he understood, but he had nothing to offer her. Not then.
Laz sighed, sensing her confusion without looking at her. “Imagine if in that estew of matter that was the exploding early universe, someone or something was able to analyze that chaos and find the conditions that would lead to life-harboring worlds. Human life, specifically. It is as if something knew that we would all be scattered too far apart to ever meet, and decided to establish a means of travel. These locations within that estew were linked from the earliest possible moment, and have remained so. Over all this time those original similarities—back then simply trajectories of exotica, I imagine—have resulted in the worlds that support our life-form.
“I’d be lying if I said we understood it fully, or indeed if I claimed to possess the proper knowledge to give you a satisfactory explanation. The important thing to know is that the Conduit exists, one can travel it in two directions, and with each jump you find yourself at a life-capable planetary system startlingly similar to the one you left.”
A brief silence followed. Caswell broke it with a whisper. “How many worlds are we talking about here?”
“Unknown. Thousands,” the Warden said. “Travel far enough and you’ll eventually reach places unrecognizable to your home, but the worlds within a few dozen exits of Earth will be habitable to you, if not uncannily familiar.”
“Like Gartien,” Melni said.
He glanced at her, something like a smile playing at the corners of his thin mouth. “Exactly. And also not. I’ll get to that in a moment.”
“So where are you from?” she asked. “Not from here. Not from Earth, either, by the look of you.”
At that he actually did smile, full and bright. “A world called Prime, though it’s not so grand as its name implies. Eight exits negative from Earth.”
“Negative?”
“We call the two directions of the Conduit negative and positive. Chaos and order, if you will. Travel in the positive and the planets look more and more like your Earth. At this end of the Conduit the differences are almost negligible, as you’ve seen. Go the other way, the negative, and within a few hundred exits you’ll find worlds with barely any resemblance. By the thousandth you’ll come to places you could never have imagined. Chaos. Disorder.”
As he took another sip from his feeding tube, Caswell tried to picture this arrangement. “So, traveling toward the positive from here, the variations between worlds eventually become so minor as to be undetectable?”
Laz sighed at that. “No. Earth is the last world on the Conduit. The Zero World, we call it.”
“But you said Gartien—”
“It’s easier if I visualize it for you.” With that his eyelids drooped down and his face contorted in concentration. The light in the room changed. Caswell turned, as did Melni, to the screen where Monique’s image had been.
That picture vanished, replaced by a flat gray across the entire surface. Blurry white circles began to emerge and solidify, aligned in a horizontal row. A line connected them and, at the left side of the screen, it curved into the background where hundreds of similar white circles continued into the distance until they were too small to discern.
“The worlds of the Conduit,” Laz said. “This one is Earth.”
The first circle, farthest to the right, shifted from a simple white disk to the familiar blue marble. Melni stood then, and stepped closer, obviously amazed at the detail within the image. Save for the lack of craters along the Desolation, Earth resembled Gartien in every detail. Caswell saw every emotion he’d experienced while studying the Venturi’s survey data flash across Melni’s features.
One by one the rest of the circles began to fill in with their actual appearance. To the left of Earth the next planet looked very similar, as if someone had been asked to trace the continents by hand through rice paper. Very similar, but not quite exact. Next over from there the differences grew, and so forth. Melni gasped at the fourth world, which was not a world at all, but a cloud of debris. “What happened there?” she asked.
“I’ll get to that in due time,” Laz replied.
New iconography appeared at the top center of the screen, showing positive toward the right and negative to the left. Earth was farthest right, in the positive. The line of the Conduit ended there.
Caswell said, “You said Gartien was last in the chain, then you said Earth. So which is it?”
“As far as Monique and the rest of the Prime Wardens know, Earth is Zero World. The positive termination of the Conduit. The origin you might say, and therefore special. The Master Design, some believe, of all life-harboring worlds. For this reason Prime has taken a very careful approach with your planet.”
The words chilled Caswell to the bone. What the hell did it mean, “a very careful approach”? Approach to what? He was about to demand an explanation when Melni spoke up.
“Where is Gartien on this map?” Melni asked.
“Ah,” Laz said.
Now a new line grew out from Earth. Not to the right for order, or even the left for chaos, but straight up. The white circle it linked to Earth filled in with the familiar landscape of Gartien, craters and all.
“I don’t understand,” Caswell said.
“Neither did we,” Laz replied. “In fact it was a long time before we even discovered that this branching phenomenon exists, and how to traverse it. Observe.”
The image shrank away slightly. The link between Earth and Gartien grew, becoming a central hub with Earth, Gartien, and two more worlds at the points of the compass.
“We call these four worlds the Zero Terminus: Earth, Gartien, Zema, and Ardis. Four hub worlds that link what are in truth four Conduits.”
Caswell sat and stared at the image. Ramifications and questions swirled maddeningly through his mind, slippery, out of reach. For nearly a minute he just looked at it, but his mind fixated on the simplest and most obvious part. So many worlds. Gartien he could handle, only just. But this…Thousands. Thousands of worlds.
Melni’s voice broke the silence. “I remain confused. What’s it all for?”
“No one knows.”
“I find that hard to believe.”
Laz took no offense at the jab. “Believe or not, that is the truth.”
“Hold on,” Caswell said. “You said ‘as far as Monique and the rest of the Prime Wardens know.’ They don’t know about Gartien?”
“We have hidden it from them. At least, until you came here.”
“Why?” he asked. Then he added, “For that matter, why even tell us of this? You have no idea who we are.”
“You’ve told me who you are, and who sent you here. It is enough to deduce the rest, I think, and without this basic information what I have to tell you next wou
ld not make sense.”
Caswell turned from the display and focused on the alien. “Well, go on, then.”
“My people, that is to say those of Prime, were the first to discover the Conduit. This was a very long time ago. Every world we visited was either still in various prehuman eras, or if there were humans they were most often yet to develop language, culture, and all that comes with such events. We mapped the Conduit, we explored some of the worlds, even settled a few. We made contact, and we made plenty of mistakes.”
Caswell thought of Alice Vale. How any plans humanity might have made to handle this first-contact scenario, if such plans even existed, went straight out the fucking window when the situation finally arose.
“This is overwhelming,” Melni said, voice shaky.
“There’s more. Much, much more.”
She made no reply. Instead she just wrestled, those purple eyes darting from side to side. She bit her lower lip. She started to say something, stopped, then finally, feebly, gave a tiny nod to the alien.
Laz went on. “Eventually we found a world on the cusp of discovering the Conduit themselves. We would soon not be the only humans traveling along its length. Our leaders discussed this and decided on a policy of suppression. The worlds along the Conduit would be allowed to develop mostly on their own, but the Conduit would be ours—”
“Mostly on their own?” Melni interrupted.
The Warden nodded at her. “The standard procedure eventually became thus: Prime agents would visit worlds as long as they had not yet developed scientifically sound forensic techniques. I say ‘mostly’ because prior to that particular innovation we would manipulate the development of language—sometimes subtly, sometimes very severely—so that the peoples of these worlds would ultimately communicate in a way we can comprehend without overt contact.”
“English,” Caswell said. “So that’s why…” He trailed off, glancing at Melni. He tried to imagine the challenge of skewing a world’s dominant language and could not.
“English, yes. That’s what you call it on Earth. However I mean this more structurally than any specific lexicon. The net result is a common language structure, written and spoken, for the more advanced worlds. It is the language of Prime.”
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