“Um, yeah, I guess. But it wants a radio reply.”
“Leave that to me. I’ll record your message, then convert it for broadcast. Like I said, I don’t think we should miss this opportunity. It could be important.”
“Okay.” No pressure then. “So, should I say my name the way it’s written out there, last name first, or say it properly?”
“Say it the proper way. Teach while we learn. Just keep it nice and simple.”
After clearing my throat, I take a deep breath and let it out slowly, hoping it will relax me. “This is James Trillion. I’ve read your message, and this is my radio show—reply. This is my reply. Sorry. Can we do that again?”
Somebody snickers. No prizes for guessing who. I’ll settle with the big ape later.
“Sure, no problem,” she says. “You started off well. Have another go.”
“This is James Trillion. I’ve read your message, and this is my reply. Who are you? What can I do for you?”
She tells me, “That’s good. But the last part could be even more direct. Try ‘What do you want?’”
I do as she suggests. It sounds a little more confident this time, so that’s the one we go with.
“Should I come with you, O’see—while you’re sending the message?” I ask.
“No, no. You stay in contact, right where you are. Shout out if there’s any change.”
“Okay.”
It takes a few minutes for Hendron to broadcast my message at UHF. The response appears within seconds after that:
WE HAVE NO NAME — WE ARE NOT LIKE YOU — JAMES TRILLION WILL YOU HELP US FREE ONE LIKE YOU
A sharp pang of loneliness hits me. There’s desolation behind those words, as though the chief of a long-lost tribe is speaking them. I imagine his voice as proud, weary and trembling.
But why me?
The O’see returns, having patched me through to the radio transmitter via my omnipod. She uses hers to open and close the channel, so that the mysterious messenger only hears what we want him to hear.
A part of me wants to answer on my own, to follow my instincts, but another part, the more sensible part, doesn’t want that responsibility. I read the messages out for Thorpe-Campbell and the O’see to discuss, and then speak the replies exactly as they give them. All the other buggos crowd round, hanging on every word.
“I will help if I can. Who is trapped? Where are they trapped?”
INGOL IS TRAPPED AT 1.44 Mly RA 01h 51m 06.3s dec -44 26 41 SI 33781.3B — JAMES TRILLION YOU MUST HELP FREE INGOL SOON
Ingol? Who the hell is Ingol?
Thorpe-Campbell mulls over those coordinates, says, “If they’re using Earth measurements, that’s somewhere in the Phoenix Dwarf Galaxy, I think. Farther than any established colony I know of. But the Stellar Index number is kinda familiar.” He runs a hand through his greying hair. “We’d have to feed it into the Alpha computer, check our records, see if any pods were sent there. Ask how long we’ve got?”
Hendron gives that to me as, “How much time do I have to free Ingol?”
INGOL IS DETERIORATING — INGOL IS LOSING STIMULI — DURATION TO EXPIRY IS UNKNOWN — JAMES TRILLION MUST COME AT ONCE
“Why must it be James Trillion? Can another like him help Ingol instead?”
WE HAVE NOT FOUND ANOTHER LIKE JAMES TRILLION — INGOLS STIMULI IS UNIQUE — JAMES TRILLION HAS SIMILAR STIMULI
“What does he mean by that?” I ask the group.
Walpole, who’s been quiet during the entire trip so far, suggests, “Something to do with brain chemistry? Stimuli might refer to neural patterns.”
The O’see says, “Charlie, you look distracted. Anything the matter?”
She’s right, Thorpe-Campbell is chewing his lip as he stares at the floor. He’s one distracted dude.
“Charlie?”
No response.
Lyssa shakes him by the arm. “Dad?”
“Huh? What?” He snaps to, but he’s gone a little pale.
“You okay there?” Hendron asks him.
“I think we should have a word in private,” he says.
“What? Now?”
He ponders that for a moment, gazes at me. “I guess it can wait till we’re done. Carry on for now. Find out what you can.”
“What should I say?” I ask, suddenly feeling vulnerable, unprotected—a five year old on the run, his anchor ripped away. I look for Sergei. He’s there, watching over me, steady as ever. That makes me feel better.
The O’see feeds me another response: “It might take James Trillion months to reach those coordinates. Will Ingol still be alive then?”
JAMES TRILLION WILL REACH COORDINATES IN SEVENTEEN-POINT-EIGHT CORE HOURS UNDER OUR CONTROL — INGOL WILL BE ALIVE THEN
“Impossible!” says Hendron. “Nothing moves that fast. The time dilation effect would be ridiculous—we’d lose thousands of years.”
“You heard what they said, though. Ingol will still be alive,” Thorpe-Campbell reminds her. “Maybe they know something about the Binder that we don’t. Remember Trillion and the dragonfly.”
The others all look at me like I've just grown insect features.
As per Hendron, I ask the mystery messengers: “From the start of our journey to the time we reach Ingol, how much time will have passed on Mars?”
SEVENTEEN-POINT-EIGHT HOURS
“How is that possible? Why is there no time distortion?”
THE GREAT TRANSIT CAN ONLY EXPLAIN IN MATHEMATICAL LANGUAGE — IT WILL TAKE TOO LONG FOR US TO RELAY THAT INFORMATION
“Can you guarantee James Trillion’s safety? Will you allow others to accompany him?”
WE CANNOT GUARANTEE YOUR SAFETY AFTER JOURNEYS END — OTHERS LIKE US WILL NOT LET INGOL GO — INGOL WILL NOT SURVIVE WITHOUT HELP — BRING OTHERS IF YOU MUST
“What exactly will James Trillion have to do to free Ingol?”
TRAVEL TO COORDINATES — FIND A WAY TO COMMUNICATE WITH INGOL
“Communicate with Ingol via UHF radio?”
NO — JAMES TRILLION MUST COMMUNICATE DIRECTLY WITH INGOL — OTHERS LIKE US WILL NOT ALLOW IT
Then another message right away:JAMES TRILLION IS WASTING TIME — WILL YOU SUBMIT TO OUR CONTROL
“Okay, we’re leaving it there,” Thorpe-Campbell says gruffly. “Tell them James Trillion will give his answer shortly.”
I relay the message.
“Now, everyone, back to your seats,” he says. “Show’s over for now. Jim, O’see, come with me.”
“Should I bring my ’pod?” I ask.
“Yes, bring it. They know how to find you.” And with that not-exactly-reassuring reply, he leads us into the forward cabin. It’s also an airlock, undecorated, unfurnished, and filled with thruster rigs and emergency kits fastened inside protective casing. It’s cool in here. It smells, oddly enough, of wood shavings. There’s no windscreen, no forward view except via a single digitab on the bulkhead. He slides out a couple of rock-hard seats for the O’see and me, then crouches in front of us.
“Jim, before we go any further, before this goes any further, there’s something I need to tell you. It’s about your mother.”
A Trillion +1
My mind scrabbles back over the reams of research information I cobbled together during my time alone on the twentieth. What did I miss? What should he have told me before now?
“What about her?”
He gives the O’see a quick glance, as if for permission. “I think the first thing to say, despite what you’ve been led to believe, is that you’re not actually the first Trillion to have left Mars. You’re the second. Your mother didn’t die during a polar accident, Jim. That was her cover story.”
“We all have to have one,” adds Hendron. “Everyone who uses the Binder has to die, officially. Otherwise it would raise too many questions.”
“So...where is she?”
“She was a Priority Pod leader,” says Thorpe-Campbell. “One of the best we’ve ever had. Ingenious, resourceful, and a pain i
n the butt unless she got what she wanted. She wasn’t on our radar at first. Not until she and a bunch of other Initiative scientists went off the reservation. Their research expedition wasn’t supposed to go anywhere near the Hex, but Marina, along with Heidrich Graaf and others, had been monitoring a strange energy anomaly on those coordinates. They knew something wasn’t right when they were told that site was off-limits. A stupid way to phrase it. It made no sense. So they went anyway, as any curious scientist would, hundreds of kilometres off mission. That’s when they discovered us, and we had no choice but to bring them on board. They were Initiative after all, and as smart as they come.
“I hadn’t been back from my Binder journey long when they arrived. My wife and I were still acclimating to the new century. Marina—she was still Villiers back then—and her boyfriend, Sam, who they’d hired as a polar guide, helped me to adjust. They stayed in the Hex for a while. We became good friends. Sam never really bought into the idea of leaving his home to go rock-hopping in distant galaxies, though. If he had, you and Nessie would probably have been Alpha kids—that’s kids born at Checkpoint Alpha. But his bond with his homeworld was too strong. A real Trillion. We knew he’d never leave Mars.
“Marina was a different story. Several of her ancestors had been born nebula, and they’d never tied themselves to any one world or any one system. No real family tradition, career-wise, other than that compulsive rock-hopping. It’s an odd thing that happens out here sometimes, in deep space: people develop a taste for it, a craving for the mystique. They find they’re not happy unless they’re on the way to somewhere new. The ‘where’ doesn’t really matter; it’s the connection they crave, being part of the awesome emptiness that’s out there. We are star-stuff, after all. So it’s a deep-rooted thing. On Earth, they used to say all men were drawn to the sea. That was our origin. But out here, we’re in an even more primal place. That’s why some of us are drawn to what’s been called ‘the dark sea’. It’s our true birthplace...in the stars.
“And that’s what your mother felt, more strongly than anything, once she looked up into the Star Binder. She refused our offer to make her a PriPod leader about twenty times. She married Sam. They bought an expensive home in Bowman’s Reach. We thought she’d made up her mind to settle. And that would have been just fine. She and Sam were happy. They used to help out in the Hex now and then. Sam taught survival craft, Marina advised on the pod selection, assessing the students’ aptitudes for science.
“Things could have stayed that way forever, but your mother had experienced that tidal pull of the dark sea. She’d felt it in her bones. That need to know what’s out there. Not just know it, but be a part of it. I can tell you from personal experience that nothing, no matter how happy it makes you, can get rid of that pull. The more you fight it, the stronger it gets.”
“So she left him?”
“Not permanently,” he explains. “She was hoping a PriPod mission would satisfy that craving. It would finally get it out of her system. If she could travel far into the Binder, see things no one else had ever seen, that would fulfil her ambition and she could get on with her life, with a new identity, of course. So she picked a far-range mission, a six month round trip to one of our unexplored prospect worlds. But something unexpected happened before she reached her destination.”
“She disappeared?” I ask.
“No. She found out she was pregnant. With you.”
I open my mouth to reply but only a hiccup comes out, an embarrassing, high-pitched one. The O'see places a reassuring hand on my shoulder. It only makes me feel more disconnected, like she's touching someone else, someone I don't know, don't recognise. I'm outside myself looking in, holding my breath. I don't hiccup again.
“That's right,” he goes on. “According to the mission log, you were born a little over five months into the mission, on the return journey. Jim, you were born inside the Binder. It's happened before, of course. We are trying to build colonies. But I don't think it's a coincidence that the Binder invited you in that day with the dragonfly. The way it lifted you in, cocooned you inside the skin like that for safety: it's as if you had a VIP pass. Like the Binder knew you personally, remembered you, was a part of you.”
“Bottle the theories, Charlie,” Hendron told him. “Stick to what we know for certain.”
“Okay then. We know for certain that Marina gave birth to you in transit, Jim. Then she stayed on Mars with you for a few more years, where she also had Nessie. But she craved adventure. Like I said, once you get obsessed with the dark sea, with exploring, it's almost impossible to shake it. She and Sam fought over it, but in the end he knew he couldn't stop her. So he asked me to give her the least hazardous mission possible. I told him there was no such thing. She ended up on an eight month round trip to an old system in the Phoenix Dwarf Galaxy. I knew I recognised those coordinates we got just now. You’d have been seven or eight by the time she got home. But she never did. We never heard from her PriPod again. Until now...”
The idea rings dully, as though it’s trapped behind a painless but heavy head-thump. I’m still out of body, but a part of me has shaken loose inside. It dumbly accepts Thorpe-Campbell’s words as fact, like a castaway on an island shrouded in thick fog glimpsing the faintest shape of a sail. I can’t be sure of it, but I need it to be true.
“What do you mean?” Under a dried film of sweat, I can feel the creases of my frown. “She isn’t—”
“I’m not saying it’s definitely her,” he says, “but the odds are stacking pretty high. Think back over everything the messenger said. It can only be you, because Ingol’s stimuli is unique, and yours is similar. That could be neural patterns, it could be DNA. Or the Binder knows you because you were born inside it.”
“You’re saying Ingol is...my mum?”
He nods. “The System Index number is slightly different, but that in itself might be an explanation for why she never made it back. If there was some sort of malfunction on her pod, her crew might not have been able to slow it down. Maybe it kept accelerating until they were able to repair the damage. By that time they had no chance of making it back, so they decided to stay...wherever they ended up.”
“And then they met these entities...the hostile versions,” I suggest.
“Sounds likely.”
The O’see grips each of us by the shoulder, glares at Thorpe-Campbell. “You’re not proposing Jim should actually go, are you?”
“Uh-huh. More than that.” His eyes flash with a secret thrill. “I’m proposing to go with him. After all, I was the idiot who tried to talk her into a PriPod mission. Not that anyone could talk Marina into anything, but I sure greased the rails. So it’s partly my responsibility.”
My responsibility.
“That’s why you chased me down in the desert, why you wanted me for the Hex.” The fog lifts as I revisit the days before I turned buggo. “You knew who I was, but you needed permission first, right?”
“Not permission, no,” he replies. “I already had the authority to recruit—that was why I was out there, scouting talent. I’d more or less filled my quota when the Sheiker raid happened at Cydonia Sights. But they were mostly slam-dunk candidates—kids I knew were going to do well inside the lines. There’s nothing wrong with that. The Initiative needs those kids. But the qualities I was really looking for are harder to gauge. For instance, you can’t tell how someone’s going to fare under pressure unless you see them under it. So when I woke up in your hotel room, and you and Sergei told me what you’d done, what you’d been through to keep me alive, it was a no-brainer.
“That you turned out to be Marina and Sam’s son, who we’d all assumed had been vaporized when the house exploded at Bowman's Reach, well, that clinched it. If you had half the talents they had—you’d clearly inherited their grace under pressure—I knew you had the potential to go all the way. And then there was that moment in the café when you tossed me the robot’s head. Let’s just say it put you at the centre of a hundred
DEMO pow-wows for weeks.”
Someone walks over my grave.
“Rachel Foggerty, too, only appeared on my radar after you described her. How she risked her life to help us escape. The triathlon factor was persuasive. Her Phi background sealed that deal, and her grandparents were not hard to persuade. They're also Phi. They knew which way the wind was blowing, what with the coming invasion. Same for their Highnesses on Rhea; Queen Mircalla helped fund our migration to Alpha in the latter stages, and she approached us about recruiting Lohengrin. Another no-brainer.”
The O’see taps her boot impatiently on the floor. “Charlie, all this can wait. I think we should get back to the problem at hand.”
“Sure, yeah. It’s just that there’s so much to say. Jim must have a million questions. But you’re right, you’re right. We need to think this through carefully, break it down.”
“The Council would never sanction a two-man pod for that distance,” she points out, “and you already know that.”
“Do I look like I care?”
She narrows her eyes. “And you wonder why they won’t give you Omega rank.”
Thorpe-Campbell scoffs. “They forget who discovered all this in the first place. If it weren’t for me, they’d be the highest-ranked urn contents on some Finagler’s mantel.”
“Nice.”
“Screw the Council! Jim, how about it—you and me, two guys together, braving the unknown. Let’s finish what we started, huh? See if we can bring her back. Whaddaya say, kiddo?”
“Charlie—really?” Hendron answers for me. Whatever’s responsible for Thorpe-Campbell’s sudden gung-ho outburst, it isn’t exactly inspiring me with confidence. And I suddenly realise I don’t know him. How could I? He’s from another century, another world. He’s zinged around planets and galaxies all his life, so naturally he’s high on the thrill of it all. Me? I just want to see Mum. I want to know she’s out there somewhere, that I can bring her back. I want to know I’m not alone.
“Perhaps we should find out more about these entities we’re dealing with before you make up your mind,” the O’see says to me. “I’m still not sure if I should veto this or not.”
Star Binder Page 27
