/// See them? There. ///
/No./ And then he did. It was two small animal-shapes, the size of large prairie dogs. They had crept up close to the robots, neither of which had stirred. /I will be b'joogered. It's the meerkats./
/// The what? ///
/Meerkats—that's what I called them, after an animal on Earth. Ik and I met them a while back./ Shifting his gaze to Ik, he murmured, "Are these—"
"I believe so," Ik said softly.
I will be God damned, Bandicut thought. The meerkats. Did that mean the company really had been transported back into that same territory? Or did the meerkats travel around Shipworld, too?
The two meerkats crept into the circle, their tufted ears twitching. They had bowling-pin bodies, and gawky heads, and they looked intensely alert. The taller of the two made a chittering sound. It looked from Ik to Bandicut, then to the others. Li-Jared was rubbing his eyes awake, and Antares was staring at the two meerkats as if she had been aware of them all along. Perhaps she had been. The meerkat chittered again, and jerked its head to one side, as if to indicate a direction.
"What is it?" muttered Li-Jared.
"It is a krayket," said Antares, her voice startlingly clear. "They are a reclusive species."
"You know them?" asked Li-Jared.
"Somewhat. They helped me once, a few seasons ago, when I was lost."
Bandicut blinked. "They helped us once, too. Ik and me. And the robots. When we were trying to catch up with you, Li-Jared." In fact, he remembered suddenly, the meerkats had helped them to find their way through a portal.
Antares made a series of warbling sounds, and the meerkats, or kraykets, chittered back to her. The conversation went on for a few moments. Then she said, "They want us to follow them."
"Look," Ik murmured. He pointed into the darkness.
Bandicut rose involuntarily. Not more than twenty meters from their dying fire, a ghostly flicker betrayed a lighted opening in the rock wall behind the trees. "Is that it? The portal?"
"Let us look and see."
The creatures squeaked and started that way. They ducked awkwardly forward and back, twitching their ears at the company, as though to encourage them all to move. Antares was already on her feet, bag swinging from her shoulder. Li-Jared and Ik rose. Bandicut grabbed his backpack. "Coppy! Nappy! Wake up!"
"Ready to move, John Bandicut," said Napoleon.
"Did you see them coming?" Bandicut asked. "Why didn't you say something?"
"They were here to see you, Cap'n," said Copernicus. "But they were reluctant to wake you." The robot lumbered into motion and rolled back and forth over the coals of the fire, until the glowing embers were crushed under a thin curl of smoke.
Bandicut took a deep breath, his thoughts reeling. "Okay, then. Let's go."
Led by the shuffling meerkats, they approached the stone wall. The glow seemed to penetrate into the stone, though there was no clearly defined opening. As they stood contemplating the portal, Antares murmured something to the meerkats, and they chittered back. "They say we have a choice. The portal can take us—" She hesitated as the meerkats chittered again. This time, Bandicut's wrist-stones tingled, perhaps picking up a translation from Antares' stones.
". . . across the continents . . . within the metaship . . . or . . . to a star-spanner . . ."
Bandicut took a sharp breath.
". . . and inward toward the stars of the galaxy . . ."
Chapter 27
Star-spanner
BANDICUT HELD HIS breath. Inward toward the stars of the galaxy? The Milky Way? His heart filled with thoughts of the immensity of space, of the galaxy he had left behind, of the intense loneliness that came over him every time he glimpsed that swirling sea of stars outside Shipworld. And he thought: it would be a totally irrational choice. The meerkat hadn't said home; it had just said into the galaxy. They might be sent anywhere. But in his heart, the decision was already made. "Back into the galaxy," he whispered.
The others too had been struck dumb. But one by one, they answered. "Into the galaxy," murmured Ik. "To the stars," said Li-Jared.
Bandicut looked at Antares. Her gold and black eyes caught his fiercely, and he felt her anguished indecision. "Would you like to come with us?"
"Indeed, you are welcome," said Ik.
Bwang. "Why not?" said Li-Jared.
Antares stared a moment longer, and her gold irises narrowed, as though she had just made a decision—out of what considerations Bandicut could not guess. She uttered a soft hissing sound. "Why not, indeed?" she said at last. She turned to the meerkats. "Back to the stars."
The creatures jumped up, scrambling around the area directly in front of the portal. Ik made a movement toward them, but the meerkats squawked, warning him away. The company stood in a half circle, watching uneasily as the ghostly emanations from the portal slowly changed colors. At last, the portal shone a deep, sparkling sapphire.
The meerkats yipped, ears twitching. "Now," said Antares.
Li-Jared and Ik stepped through the opening almost as one, and vanished. Bandicut hesitated an instant, then urged the robots forward. The light strobed around him, flashing through a dazzling rainbow of colors. He heard the rasping and tapping of the robots, and the voices of Ik and Li-Jared. And Antares—?
The light dropped to near-darkness, a pale golden glow that shone without illuminating. They were in another transition-zone, floating more than standing. He tried to turn his head, and couldn't. But he sensed something forming around them, something more of energy than matter, he thought, an egg-shaped enclosure. The light strobed out again, and he felt a shift that told him they'd been transported out of the holding area, into something different. He could just discern great, pale circles and arches stretching out in a line before him, suggesting a vast, hollow tunnel, dwindling to infinity.
The inside of a star-spanner? he wondered, heart pounding. He waited for someone or something to speak, to ask them where they wanted to go, or at least to offer choices. Surely they would be offered choices.
He felt a gentle bump, then a sharp concussion, and the golden light vanished to darkness. He had a feeling of falling . . . and then not so much falling as speeding through darkness, accelerating at an unthinkable rate. Luminous concentric rings appeared in the distance, growing with alarming speed. They flared around him like hoops, vanishing behind. More circles of light appeared, growing quickly, flashing by.
He tried once more to turn his head, and found that he could do so now, very slowly. He was encapsulated in a transparent amber bubble, and enclosed with him were Ik, Li-Jared, the two metal beings . . . and Antares.
Her eyes met his for an instant.
He could not read her expression. But they had made their choices, all of them. Wherever they were going, they were going together.
*
It became increasingly hard to focus, with the strobelike flashing of the star-spanner around him. He passed into a kind of trance, much like the time following his collision with the comet, as he was hurled out of the galaxy to Shipworld. Were they on their way back into the Milky Way? He wondered fleetingly how much power was at his back, like the wind, and how many light-years lay ahead. After a while, he stopped thinking about it.
The circles stopped coming, and for a time there was a kind of swirling darkness; it was like being inside a thundercloud, with only the most tenuous glimmers of lightning.
Then smaller, dimmer lights began to flash by: sometimes fluttering like butterflies, or falling horizontally like gentle raindrops, or drawn out in long, dazzling streaks. Sometimes it seemed more like darkness painted upon darkness.
He thought he heard voices echoing in the vastness of space, but if it was speech, he couldn't understand a word of it. Charlie was silent. Or if he spoke, his voice was another incomprehensible mutter from the void. Memories rose and floated toward him in spinning pirouettes:
His first flight in Earth orbit, his pilot's certificate fresh in his pocket, the Earth tur
ning below him like a luminous, mystical watercolor painting.
His niece Dakota, begging him to take her into space—and his promise to do so, forever unfulfilled.
The dim blue cavern on Triton, the alien translator drawing him into the soul-wrenching realm of its awareness, while Charlie labored to keep him from dying of the experience.
Silence-fugue, full of dancing aliens, and Charlie pulling him back to reality.
Julie Stone, pulling him into a warm, heady embrace . . . and later crying to him not to do this insane thing, stealing a spaceship from Triton orbit, on a flight he could not possibly return from alive.
And a mad, fugue-punctuated dash across the solar system, threading space, to save an oblivious Earth from a planetkiller comet.
And then . . .
*Translation.*
(???) Was that a memory, or the stones explaining what was happening now?
No answers. He slept, and had no idea for how long. He dreamed that his body was being transformed, a caterpillar turning into a butterfly . . .
*
*Impending arrival . . .*
He dreamed of stars spinning around him like dancers, and a planet, blue and green and white . . . rather like Earth, but not Earth.
He dreamed of translation, transformation . . . of clouds spinning by, just out of reach . . . and a vast blue ocean rising to flank him . . .
*Arrival.*
He awoke to a crashing of waves, a thunder of bubbles, a blazing sun slanting down through crystal blue waters. He sputtered, crying out, then realized that he was surrounded by the water, but not actually touching it.
"Hraah!" "This is not—" Bwang-ng-ng! Tap tap. "John Bandicut—"
His eyes and brain finally starting working together again, and his heart nearly stopped. They were still in the pale golden egg that had carried them among the stars, but they were planetbound now, underwater. They had leapt across light-years, and fallen into a sea. Not Earth's sea, but some sea, somewhere. Were they bobbing back toward the surface? No . . . they were sinking. Far overhead was a dancing silver surface, receding. The sea was darkening perceptibly around them.
"Something's wrong! We have to get out!" he cried, but his voice was lost in the panicky babble of the others' shouts. He threw himself against the bubble, and for a terrifying instant, felt himself stretch out into the sea, as if through an invisible rubber sheet, seawater all but pressing through his pores. Below was a deep cerulean gulf, sunbeams slanting down and vanishing into a bottomless abyss.
He popped back into the bubble, gasping for breath.
As the ocean darkened, he met the terrified glances of his companions. He forced himself to look down again, and in the midnight gloom below, he glimpsed lights—what looked like luminous seaweed bubbles, a lamp-yellow glow deep in the oceanic night.
Or perhaps not seaweed at all. He rubbed his eyes and gazed down again, and realized that if he could trust his eyes, he was looking at bubble-cities, far below in the depths of the sea.
Strange Attractors: Coda
IN THE GLOOM of the cavern, the Triton exoarch team moved with deliberate care. Julie Stone was at the head of the group, but not entirely sure how she had gotten there. She was not the team leader, yet had somehow wound up at the front of the line as the team made its way cautiously along the frozen nitrogen-ice surface of the cavern floor. Helmet-lamp beams flashed in jittery movements over the translucent walls. Julie came to a turn in the passageway, and thought: wait for the others. An instant later, she felt a sudden, almost overwhelming urge to go ahead without waiting. But—
The urge became irresistible. Forgetting caution, she stepped around the bend, the spot of her headlight sweeping before her.
Something flickered and squirmed in the light. She steadied her headlight. There it was! The thing they had come searching for!
Alien artifact.
There was no question of it. It looked like a topheavy array of twirling spheres, iridescent and black, spheres spinning and passing through one another like holo images, not solid at all. Nevertheless, the mass-detectors had established the presence of an extremely dense object here. The whole array appeared to balance on one small, black sphere.
It looked just as John had described it to her in his letter. And yet . . . there was no way his description could have prepared her for this. The artifact appeared new; it appeared ancient. It looked timeless, as timeless as any made object could look. And it seemed . . . alive.
"Julie?" The voice of Kim, the team leader, echoed in her helmet comm. "You're getting too far ahead of us. Do you see anything?"
"Yes!" she whispered. "I have—"
*You have come. Julie Stone.*
She gulped, losing her breath. What was that voice?
*We have a mission yet to fulfill. And we require your assistance.*
And then it filled her head . . . the voice, the presence, of the alien thing . . . and she felt herself falling, falling endlessly, until consciousness abandoned her.
*****
Afterword to Strange Attractors
AS THE SECOND novel in The Chaos Chronicles, this book had a special place in the writing process: It was the blur in the outline, the transition book, the gap in the story arc where I'd noted, Here a miracle occurs. I knew more or less where this piece would end, and thus where the next began. But in the middle . . . I didn't know much more than that Bandicut was stranded at the edge of the galaxy, in a ship so enormous it was effectively a world. So when I actually sat down to write Chaos Book 2 (that was its title at the time), my first thought was, WTF?
I was as lost at sea as Bandicut.
In fiction writing, there are various ways writers have of finding their stories.
Some writers figure the whole thing out ahead of time. They know what each chapter is about, who the characters are, and the precise direction things are going. They do all the conceptual brain work before they write the first line. That degree of confidence probably makes the writing go faster. Or so I've heard.
Some writers start without a clue, or with very few. They maybe have a character or two, and a situation, and they dive in and see where the currents take them. This can be an exhilarating way to work. It can also be terrifying, a leap into the unknown, with no guarantee of a readable book at the end.
Most writers probably operate somewhere in between, most of the time.
Me, I've worked with fairly extensive outlines, and I've worked with almost none. Strange Attractors was "almost none." I dove in and swam in chaos, sometimes with the current and sometimes against it and sometimes across it. In chaos theory, a "strange attractor" represents dynamic systems that evolve according to turbulent or unpredictable patterns. So went the writing of this book.
Another way to describe this kind of writing is to call it an act of faith. Throughout the first draft, my recurring thought was, Dear God, please let this all make sense in the end! Or, in darker moods, Dear God, it's going to be stupid, don't let it turn out to be stupid.
In the end, I thought it worked out pretty well. But I'll leave it to you to decide whether I got my wish.
Looking back on my original notes for the series, I see what I knew going in. Here it is: Bandicut was going to meet Ik and Li-Jared and partner up with them. And they were going to face the boojum. That was pretty much it. I didn't expect Antares to appear until book three, and I had no idea we'd be meeting the shadow-people or the magellan-fish or other fractal beings, and I certainly didn't know that the robots were going to evolve into important characters in their own right. The boojum, and later the tree of ice, were mysteries to me, but I had to get to the bottom of them or the whole thing would come apart in my hands. All that happened on the wing late at night . . . like soaring over flashing thunderclouds, with terrifying turbulence, stars gleaming overhead, and music playing in the background (which is more or less how I do most of my writing). That's not a description so much of any given session of writing as of the total experience of thrashi
ng out the story.
Coming down through the clouds at the end of the storm, I was as surprised as John Bandicut when he found himself climbing into a star-spanner bubble with a four-breasted humanoid woman who wasn't sure who she should trust, and with Ik and Li-Jared, and a pair of robots who seemed to be evolving toward sentience. What in the world was going to be next?
A mystery in the deep ocean abyss, on an alien planet, that's what.
Next up: The Infinite Sea.
BOOK 3: THE INFINITE SEA
*
Jeffrey A. Carver
with a new afterword by the author
*****
Dedication
For Gene, who loves the sea
*****
Prelude
Julie Stone
SHE AWOKE TO the sound of the ventilators in her spacesuit. Where am I? Julie thought. And then she remembered: she was in a cavern on Triton, and she'd just made contact with the alien artifact. But what had she—had she lost consciousness? Distant memories jangled in her mind.
Her thoughts were interrupted by a voice in her ear. The helmet comm: "Julie—can you hear me? Ron, I can't get a reading on her monitors, but I think she's alive."
Kim. Her supervisor.
Of course I'm alive. Why wouldn't I be?
"Her eyes are open!" Someone bending over her, hands shading her faceplate to cut the reflection. "She's breathing, I think. Julie, can you hear me?"
Can you hear me? The words drifted back, voices in her head:
Mission yet to fulfill . . . require your assistance, Julie Stone . . .
Assistance? What kind of—?
And as consciousness had slipped away, the voices simply moved farther inside . . .
. . . John Bandicut sacrificed everything to protect Earth . . . saved his homeworld . . . rogue comet . . .
"Julie!"
She started, flinching where she lay on her side, the hard casing of her suit digging into her shoulder and hip. "Yes. Yes! I'm okay; help me up."
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