On his side of the room, a series of lights came on. He turned. The wall panels were glowing now—perhaps in response to his voice. They looked like video or holo screens. Images came into focus, different images in each one. They were all landscapes: desert, forest, lake, shattered moonscape; and they were changing—blink—every second or so. He scanned the panels in bewilderment. Marsh—blink—glacier—blink—red sun—city structures—vast rooms—blink blink—incomprehensible mechanical structures—blink blink blink—at an accelerating rate.
"What is this?" he whispered.
The robots clicked and whirred, and Napoleon strode toward him. "We are in a flattened oval chamber, approximately twelve meters in diameter, three meters in height—"
"Yes, Nappy, I can see that. I was hoping for more useful insight."
Napoleon fell silent. But Copernicus rolled toward the glass partition. "Cap'n, movement beyond the pane."
Bandicut whirled.
"Your ten o'clock, Cap'n."
Bandicut peered through the glass and finally saw a small machine gliding along the base of the far wall, just coming into the control-room area. It looked like a tiny robot, casting a faint sideways swath of light across the floor. Something looked odd about that light; it was dim, but sparkling. As the little machine passed in front of him, Bandicut realized that within the fan of light, myriad particles were gleaming, rising into the robot.
"It's vacuuming. The damn thing is vacuuming." He glanced at Copernicus. "Isn't that what it looks like to you?"
Copernicus whirred. "Uncertain of the reference, Cap'n."
Bandicut knocked on the partition again, but the little robot ignored him, passed the length of the control area, and disappeared down the hallway to the right. Bandicut pressed his fingers in frustration against the glass, and was startled to realize that it was perfectly smooth: no dirt, no grit, no sensation of it being a material surface. He remembered an impassable barrier that he had encountered once, on Triton, surrounding the alien translator.
He sighed and spoke silently to the translator-stones in his wrists. /What is this place? Does anyone live here? What am I supposed to be doing? Damn it—/
*Step under the lights.*
He blinked. /Lights?/
*Behind you.*
He turned, frowning toward the pool of light in the corner. /And do what?/
*Communicate. We will translate.*
Bandicut stared at the strobing light. Communicate with whom? he wondered. And if someone wanted to communicate with him, why didn't they come out in person?
Copernicus rolled toward the lights, as if it had heard Bandicut's inner dialogue. It paused at the edge of the light, rotating its sensor array. "Electromagnetic fields, Cap'n. Shall I attempt measurements?"
Bandicut was about to reply in the affirmative, when the translator-stones urged him forward with a sharp tingle in both wrists.
*Step under the lights. Without delay, please. Bring your possessions.*
He blinked in confusion, but felt a faint tingle of confirmation as he picked up his bag and stepped forward. "Coppy, would you mind carrying this?" He set the bag on the robot's back, and Copernicus closed a manipulator-arm to secure it. "Thanks. You two keep a sharp eye out, and stay close to me." He felt another tingle of confirmation. But he also recalled his very first encounter with the alien translator— years ago it seemed, in the cavern on Triton—and how useless his suit scanners had been in gathering any real information. "Stay real close," he murmured.
Napoleon stepped beside him with the delicacy of an oversized granddaddy longlegs. Bandicut took a deep breath, comforted by the presence of the robots. As he stepped into the violet pool, a ray of light strobed in his eyes. He flinched. "Hello? Anyone here?"
For an instant, nothing. Then the strobes splintered, and shards of light flashed around him like rain. In an instant, he was enveloped in a coruscating cocoon of light, colors changing at a dizzying speed. He wanted to flee, but the floor had turned to fire beneath him. He could not move.
The light brightened, until it seemed not so much like dazzling rays in his eyes as an inner light . . . and something else, a presence of something vaster and more powerful. Something aware. Something intelligent. It stirred in his mind, just beyond the limits of his own consciousness. It knew he was here; it was interested in him.
And then it blossomed, transforming itself into something that was color and sound and smell, and none of those things . . . and then the bottom fell out of it all, and he felt his consciousness slipping away.
*
To his surprise, he did not actually lose consciousness. With a heartstopping shift, he felt his consciousness expanding . . . not in size or space, but in dimension. He felt his mind unfolding like a vast, convoluted paper fan, his memories separating and opening . . .
The presence moved in silence through his thoughts, exploring memories that were sorting themselves out into the open. It was an oddly familiar sensation. It reminded him of the probing that he had once endured from the translator, but this felt more methodical, in a certain way gentler, yet if anything more powerful than the translator's probe. He felt a useless impulse to guard his memories. He no longer had Charlie here protecting him, or trying to justify what was happening.
/// Charlie . . . ///
sighed a faint voice, and then something folded again, and the memory shifted away. How he wished that voice were more than a memory! If only Charlie hadn't died! The first time it had happened, the quarx had come back to life within hours. But now . . . all Bandicut seemed to have were the memories.
This thing felt quite different from the quarx. Stranger. Potentially more threatening.
/Who . . . are . . . you . . . ?/ His whisper of thought emerged in slow motion.
He sensed a glimmer of awareness in reply.
*** . . . wish to perceive and understand . . . ***
He blinked, inwardly. Then he heard another whisper, in a voice like Charlie's.
/// You must listen . . . ///
He drew a sharp breath. Had he imagined those words? /Charlie?/ he called out.
Instead of Charlie, though, he felt that other presence deepen its touch, scalpel sharp. This time it didn't stop at brushing open the folds of his memories; it began taking them apart, illuminating them with its own darkly flickering inner light, as he remembered . . .
>>>
. . . silence-fugue, as if it had happened just moments ago—the madness that had driven him across the silent emptiness of the Triton landscape, under Neptune's frown, veering his survey rover off the assigned course. The madness that was soon to take him into the presence of the mysterious translator.
>>>
. . . the shocking appearance of the quarx in his mind, placed there by the translator—and the revelation that he had been chosen to sacrifice everything to save the Earth from an invisible danger. Which was harder to accept—the uninvited presence of the alien, or the mission being thrust upon him? Or the quarx's own uncertainty about what, exactly, the mission was?
>>>
. . . the absurd figure of a talking holographic dinosaur, explaining why they were to steal a spaceship, and then cross the solar system in an impossible race to collide headlong with a comet.
>>>
. . . the quick, attractive movements of Julie Stone as she played EineySteiney, knocking planets into the gravity wells of the 3D pool table.
>>>
. . . the warm, whispering movements of Julie as she made love to him; the shudders of pleasure that he would never know again, because he was going to steal a spaceship and fly to his certain death.
>>>
. . . or almost certain death, because when he actually careened into the comet, releasing more energy than a million hydrogen bombs, he was somehow translated across space and perhaps time as well, to a place thousands of light-years from home, on the outside of his own galaxy. And not just marooned, but alone, because the quarx had died, instead of him.
. . . and only a little later, approaching a vast structure floating somewhere above the disk of the Milky Way, until the structure silently drew him and his ship into itself . . .
>>>
Why?
Why?
>>>
And a whispering voice answered:
*** . . . because you are needed . . . ***
>>>
And before he could assimilate that, the memories abruptly shifted and whirled to earlier times, and in a dizzying rush, he saw his childhood replayed, in glimpses too fast to focus upon . . . the loneliness and struggle . . . the family he loved, but always at a strained distance . . . his discovery that his family had been taken from him in a terrible accident . . . his niece Dakota, the only remaining relative he cared for . . .
>>>
Why?
—he murmured, struggling to put meaning to all this.
>>>
And he thought he heard two voices trying to be heard. And then one whispered:
*** . . . because you are needed . . .
that is all . . . ***
>>>
And he wasn't a bit sure that it had answered the same question he had meant to ask.
>>>
The images changed abruptly, and it was no longer anything familiar, but memories of places he had never seen. Alien landscapes. Alien suns. Alien creatures. Tall. Stooping. Billowing. Floating in gaseous seas. Creeping in frozen wastes. Floating in the dark of space. Faster, flickering, the visions came too fast to comprehend . . .
>>>
And then everything changed—and he began spinning, twisting in space and time, turning inside out—and not just twisting, but changing—not his soul or his being, but something in his body being altered profoundly—
>>>
Then light and dark collided, and splinters of light shot through darkness, and he was aware of a dazzlingly bright fire in the middle of it all, and he sensed without understanding that he could not possibly approach that fire without dying . . .
>>>
But then he tumbled—not just toward it, but through it . . .
Chapter 2
Snow and Ice
HE FLAILED, TRYING to gain control. He staggered, and realized that he was neither floating nor falling, but standing—on a hillside. It was cold, and a bright sun blazed in his eyes. The room and the pool of light were gone, and his ears were ringing with the sound of fading voices. In their place, he heard a whistling wind, and a low, continuous thunder. He gasped, trying to focus.
Through a blur, he thought he saw a landscape covered with snow. And ice. Snow and ice? That explained why he felt a brisk chill through his thin jumpsuit.
His thoughts were interrupted by an urgent tapping. Metallic. He looked down. He was on some sort of path, with Copernicus parked beside him. At his glance, Copernicus stopped tapping. Napoleon was on his other flank. He felt an abrupt sense of relief. "Record everything," he whispered. "Everything." He raised his eyes, shading them against the glare. "Where the mokin' foke are we?" They were on the side of an icy hill, under what appeared to be a bright sun, peering out over a slope covered with snow-capped trees. Forest stretched as far as he could see.
Mokin' foke . . .
His head was still ringing, and for an instant, he thought he heard that voice again, like a haunting echo. /Charlie? Is that you?/ He heard nothing except the wind, and the low thunder.
What was this? A bizarre hallucination? He had passed through some sort of transformational process . . . and it was possible that all of this had been implanted in his mind. But he didn't think so. He felt the weight of gravity under him, he was definitely cold, and his head was starting to clear. He rubbed his arms and hugged himself.
No, he was pretty sure that he was really standing on a snow-and-ice covered hillside. He squinted, but couldn't see the sun too clearly. The sky was a pale, featureless blue-grey. Every sense told him that he was standing on the surface of a planet. "But that," he murmured, "is ridiculous."
He was answered by Copernicus's metallic tapping. The two robots looked like a pair of metal dogs at his side. Copernicus's sensor-array was rotating; Napoleon was beeping softly to itself, shifting its head, as though to gain understanding. "What are you two seeing?"
The robots spoke at once: "Ranging exceeds design parameters—" "Loss of continuity—" "—cannot reconcile conflicting input—"
"One at a time! Nappy?"
Copernicus clicked and became still. Napoleon bobbed. "John Bandicut. I experienced a loss of continuity, with conflicting data. I observed a bright influx of visible light, then a period of . . . numerous error interrupts, lasting approximately nine minutes. The time measurement is uncertain."
Bandicut rubbed his arms again, rapidly. "Do you have any idea what happened?" He could see his breath against the wintry landscape. He opened his bag on Copernicus's back and rummaged for a lightweight jacket, the closest thing he had to exposure garb.
"Uncertain," said Napoleon. "I also noted a fluctuation in gravitational readings. Those data may be corrupted. Negative correlation with norms in the Triton database."
Bandicut shrugged into his jacket. "Nappy, we're not on Triton anymore."
"Acknowledged, John Bandicut." The robot's sensor eyes looked almost thoughtful for a moment. "But that is the only database at my disposal."
"You might want to start compiling a new one." Bandicut gazed upslope. Not far above them, overlooking the path, was a smooth stone wall, slick with ice.
"I also detected certain changes in my internal systems," Napoleon continued. "However, I am unable to characterize those changes. My internal perceptions were themselves undergoing alteration."
Bandicut glanced back. "You too, Coppy?
Copernicus drumtapped acknowledgment. "Yes, Cap'n. Cannot elaborate. However, I am now registering a significantly altered environment. I cannot account for its appearance."
"That much we can agree upon. What else about the transition?"
Copernicus ticked softly. "I show a chronology lapse and . . . damaged analysis. Was there a change in programming?
Bandicut blinked out over the snow-covered trees. "Yeah, I guess you could say that. I wonder how the hell far we were transported from—" his voice caught suddenly "—our ship." Their last piece of Earth. The closest thing they had to a home.
Napoleon stretched to its full height of about a meter. "I can provide no information. Inertial alignment was lost during the transition."
Bandicut nodded and squinted at the sky. It looked odd to him, in a way he couldn't put his finger on. "Well, whatever the hell happened, I have a feeling we're still not on a planet." He wondered if he had been transported into something like the Earth-orbiting L5 City, a habitat complete with inner landscaping and active ecologies. But if that were so, this bit of wilderness made L5 look like a backyard garden.
He hoisted his backpack over his shoulders. "Let's see what's along this path. Maybe we can get a better view from up here." He trudged up the path, stepping carefully with his sneakers on the crusted snow. There were no tracks visible; nonetheless, it did look like a path. The view above the ice-glazed wall was blocked by trees. However, just below the wall the path appeared to level off on an open ledge.
He glanced back. Napoleon was following; but Copernicus's wheel base was a little large for the path and it was still trying to get itself turned around, with short back and forth movements. "Coppy!" he shouted. "Why don't you just stay there a minute! We'll be right back." He resumed hiking, with Napoleon close behind. "Can you make anything out up there?" he asked, indicating the wall.
"Rock and ice with uncertain spectrographic signatures," Napoleon rasped.
"Mm." No reason to be surprised by that.
The path petered out, but the ledge afforded a clearer view below. "Take a look here, Nappy." There seemed to be a river. He couldn't see much of it, but here and there through the forest cover, he glimpsed water. Maybe t
hat was what the thundering noise was: rapids in the river. He felt better, having even that bit of knowledge about his surroundings.
"What do you make of these plants?" He puffed through his hands as he bent to examine the underbrush and trees. He resisted an impulse to touch the dark, shiny green leaves of the underbrush. Thoughts of poison ivy, and worse, went through his mind. The plants were totally unfamiliar, which helped dispel any notion that this whole scene had somehow been created out of his own memories and imagination.
*The location is real.*
He started. /You still here? Can you give me some useful information?/ The thought came out with an edge of annoyance; he'd gotten pretty tired of the stones' terse manner.
*We can only provide such information as we have.*
Bandicut grunted. He continued his inspection of the nearby trees. The branch structure was similar to Earth-trees, except that the branches stuck out horizontally, then curved upward like scimitars. The leaves were pointy-clawed, like the outstretched hands of an old crone—purplish on top, and on the underside, like coarse black cloth. "Nappy, what do you get on these leaves?"
The robot waved flickering sensors. "These objects? I detect metallic traces, but less than required to meet current mining criteria."
"Uh-huh. What else? Coppy! What are you doing here? I thought I told you to wait."
The wheeled robot ground to a stop on the ice. "I thought you might need me, Cap'n."
Bandicut squinted at Copernicus. Since when had this machine become such an independent thinker? Between Charlie's reprogramming efforts and whatever they'd just been through, he wondered how much these robots of his had changed. "I see. Well, do you have any data on plant life?"
Copernicus made a buzzing sound like a stalled motor. "Don't think so, Cap'n."
"Nappy?"
"Negative, John Bandicut. Please define plant life."
"You're looking at it. That's a tree. It's a form of plant life. So is this underbrush. And—" he pointed "—the foliage growing on this wall."
The Chaos Chronicles Page 34
