Empyrion I: The Search for Fierra

by Stephen Lawhead

  So Treet and Pizzle crouched in a cramped cubbyhole for dry stores, waiting—an eternity it seemed to Treet—for the stranger to materialize. The galley lights had been turned off so they could observe the mysterious stranger without themselves being observed, and they had been taking turns watching. It was Treet’s turn to put his eye to the crack in the partition, and he was ready to call it quits.

  “I don’t see why you need me at all,” complained Treet, not for the first time. “This is a big waste of time.”

  “I need you to verify the sighting.”

  “You make it sound like we’re waiting for a UFO.” He craned his neck around and saw the metal rims of Pizzle’s glasses glint in the dim light. “Phew! It’s stuffy in here. I’m getting out before I’m hunchbacked for life.”

  “Shh! Quiet, will you? If anybody was out there, you’d have scared him off by now.”

  “Whoever it is is probably fast asleep in bed, and that’s where we should be. Look, why can’t you rig up a few motion detectors or proximity switches or something. Anyone messing around in the galley would trip the alarm and you could come running with your little Panasonic holocamera and catch them flatfooted in the act.”

  “Yeah, and get nothing for my trouble but pictures of you or Crocker sneaking food from cold service while I’m trying to sleep.”

  “Why is this so important to you, anyway?” Treet asked. “This guy just likes his privacy. So what? I should be so lucky.”

  “It isn’t natural, that’s why. And I’m curious—that in itself is enough reason for me.”

  “Well, I’m not that curious. I don’t know why I agreed to this lunatic scheme of yours anyway. I’d feel silly if I wasn’t so sore.” Treet shifted his weight and banged his head against a shelf. “Ow! That’s it—I’m getting out of here.”

  With that he pushed aside the partition and climbed out. “You coming?”

  Pizzle glanced at his watch. “Might as well. Time’s nearly up anyway.” He crawled out of the cubbyhole on his hands and knees. “If he was coming tonight, he’d have been here by now.”

  Treet walked back to his compartment and Pizzle followed, pausing at the entrance to the stranger’s quarters to press his ear against the door. Treet cast a disparaging look back at him; Pizzle shrugged and shuffled along to his room. “G’night, Treet.”

  Treet stood on the threshold of his compartment with the door open. When he heard Pizzle’s door close, he tiptoed back to the stranger’s compartment and listened. He heard nothing, so pressed his ear against the door. He was about to turn away when, to his surprise, the door folded back and he stood staring into two jet-black eyes. The eyes—set in an exquisite, bronze-colored face which was surrounded by a fall of shining black hair—regarded him coolly. His first impression was that he’d seen that face before, but in a very different context.

  “Miss Talazac!” he said, recovering himself. “I didn’t recognize you without your braid.”

  “Mr. Treet,” she replied crisply, “is this one of your perverse habits—listening outside people’s doors?”

  “Not at all.” Treet received the strong impression that she had expected him to be there. “I was just … well, curious. We wondered about you—I mean, about the person inside. We hadn’t seen anyone, and it’s been several days. We thought something might have happened to you.”

  “You need not have concerned yourself. I am, as you see, quite all right. If you will excuse me—” She made a move to pass by him, and Treet stepped back.

  “I’m sorry if I disturbed you,” he said, more for something to say than from any real regret.

  She turned and faced him, holding his eyes with her own, her face expressionless. Treet felt ridiculous, as if he were floundering in shallow water. He wanted to look away, but her eyes held his and he could only stare back blankly. “I’m sorry,” he murmured and the spell was broken.

  She turned from him without a word and moved silently off along the gangway toward the galley. Treet watched her slender figure glide away. He realized his scalp was tingling all over and his palms were sweating.

  He thought to himself: There goes one weird lady… or a vision.

  Treet did not see her again for five weeks. What she did in her compartment, how and why she avoided all the others, he could but wonder, and did often. Why did she hole up like that? Why did she refuse to join the others? Certainly it was not because she feared them—the only woman on a ship full of men, that sort of nonsense. No, whatever the reason, it wasn’t fear. Treet’s manly intuition told him that Yarden Talazac would be more than a match for any male.

  He did not tell Pizzle about the midnight meeting. Somehow he knew that Talazac would not want him to mention it. At the same time he felt silly carrying around his secret—especially since Pizzle continually nagged him to rejoin his espionage program. Treet refused, knowing somehow that she would not be caught again. Actually, he decided, she had not been caught at all. She had revealed herself to him alone; it was of her choosing.

  But why? Why him? Why in that way?

  Treet wondered about these things in idle moments, and he attempted to fix her face in his mind but could not. Every time he tried to remember what she looked like, he drew a blank. All he saw on his mental screen was a stock representation of a human face—vaguely Asiatic, or perhaps Polynesian, no distinct features, just a sketch. This both puzzled and frustrated him. Why could he not remember what she looked like?

  He told himself that, after all, he’d only met her twice, and then fleetingly. But he also reminded himself that he had no difficulty remembering faces of people he’d met just as briefly: the Cynetics nurse who had helped him up when he awoke from the drug, the elevator attendant, the driver of the cart—all of them he could see in his mind’s eye as clearly as if they stood before him.

  But, Yarden … all he had of her was an impression: smooth, honey-colored skin, a deep darkness that was eyes or hair, slim, molded limbs, and a sense that she floated rather than walked. That was all.

  Trying to remember her became something of an obsession with Treet. And when he wasn’t wracking his brain in the futile attempt to conjure up a picture of the phantom woman, he thought about their meeting and tried to recall every word and nuance that had passed between them that night, to understand the meaning behind it. In this he was largely unsuccessful too. Despite his efforts, and long hours musing on it, he could discover no hidden purpose or explanation. Pure chance, it would seem. And yet, was it?

  Treet was reasonably certain that very few things happened by chance where the mysterious Miss Talazac was concerned.

  Another mystery occupied him as well—the mystery of wormhole travel. In the second week of the flight he had picked up Pizzle’s book and begun reading, tentatively at first because the book began at the seventh chapter—Pizzle hadn’t printed up the whole thing—and much of the terminology was astrophysics jargon. Clearly Belthausen’s Interstellar Travel Theory was a book written for a select group of academics. There were, Treet decided, probably not more than seventy people in the whole world who could fully appreciate what Belthausen was getting at. That Pizzle should apparently be one of them surprised him.

  But with little else to do besides eat and sleep and play Empires with the gnomish Pizzle, Treet made reading Belthausen a religious duty—struggling mightily with the interminable paragraphs made up of awkward sentences running on for pages freighting words whose meanings could only be guessed at or approximated in context and then only on second or third reading.

  Belthausen was no William Shakespeare, but he seemed to know what he was talking about. Treet sensed as he read that the man grasped whole realms of possibility and feasibility that heretofore had been only hinted at, if considered at all. If he labored to bring his ideas into clear focus—and the signs of monumental labor were everywhere visible in his ungainly book, at least to the professional eye of another writer—it indicated that these were fresh ideas, concepts born of deep insight a
nd creativity whose birth had cost the author something. He might not have been the Bard, but he wasn’t chipped beef either.

  So with increasing admiration, Treet slogged along, feeling like a foot soldier trudging under full field pack, following a commander whose orders he could scarcely comprehend. Along the way he also learned something about wormholes—among other things.

  And what he learned disturbed him utterly.

  Treet lay on his couch with the printout of Belthausen’s book propped on his pillow while he sat cross-legged, tearing open rubbery capsules of dermal nutrient he’d found in his sanitary stall and smearing the viscid green emollient into his skin. It wasn’t a proper nutrient bath, but considering he was several million miles from the nearest public spa, the little capsules were the next best thing.

  So, smoothing the sticky substance over his face and chest and arms, he read, for the fourth or fifth time, a passage about time distortion in connection with wormholes—one of the more disturbing sections of the book for Treet—when he became aware that his scalp was tingling again. He stopped reading and tried to think where he had experienced that sensation before. With a start he remembered: Yarden!

  At the same instant he glanced up and there she stood, framed in the open door of his compartment. He jumped up, opened his mouth to speak, but could not. What does one say to a vision?

  “Mr. Treet,” she said, less a greeting than the recitation of a known fact. “May I come in?”

  For a moment Treet could only stare at her. Then he realized he had been addressed and asked a question. “Y-yes! Please come in. I wasn’t expecting anyone. I … would you like to sit down?” He whirled around and picked up the foam chair at the terminal desk.

  “Thank you, no. I sit entirely too much as it is. I imagine we all do.”

  “Yes.” He stared at her, trying to fix her face firmly in his mind this time.

  “Mr. Treet, I won’t keep you from your reading. This will only take a moment.” She glanced around the compartment, which in six weeks Treet had managed to make look like the dayroom of an asylum for the criminally untidy.

  With her standing there, he suddenly became aware of just how shabby the place looked. “I’ve been meaning to do some cleaning.”

  “It doesn’t matter. I wanted to speak to you.”

  He waited. She looked at him curiously, full in the face, expectantly, as if there were some formal response he must make before she could continue. “Yes!” he said at last.

  “Are you a sympath, Mr. Treet?”

  It was a simple question, and Treet had heard the word before, knew what it meant, but her use of it caught him unawares, and for a moment its meaning evaded him. “A sympath?”

  “Remote intelligence receptor. Surely, you are familiar—”

  “Oh, yes! Yes, I know what it means. It’s just that I didn’t expect you to ask me that, of all things.” He made an awkward gesture and realized he still had the foam chair before him. He put it down, saying, “No, I’m not a sympath. I’ve never had the training. Or the inclination for that matter. Why?”

  She went on looking at him in that intense, engaging way and then said finally, “Some people are natural adepts and do not know it, Mr. Treet. You could be one of them.” She said this last as if it were a challenge or an indictment, he couldn’t decide which.

  “I think I’d know, wouldn’t I?” He smiled, trying to break through some of the high seriousness of the young woman. She seemed not to notice, but nodded slightly to herself as she backed away a slow step.

  “Look, don’t go,” he said quickly. “It’s a little … I mean, I’d like to get to know you a little better.”

  But she was already in the gangway. “No, Mr. Treet,” her voice called back as she disappeared again, “perhaps you wouldn’t know.”

  TEN

  Orion Treet now had two things to be deeply disturbed about: wormhole time distortion, and the suggestion—no, the insinuation—that he was a sympath without his knowing it. About the former he had every right to be upset, but why the latter should bother him, he couldn’t say. Except for the simple fact that he was a man who arranged his life like one of his essays: direct, uncluttered, balanced.

  The insane expedition, as he now considered it, removed what little balance he had achieved of late. It had certainly eliminated the delicate equilibrium between penury and pelf. (Although the three million dollars stashed away in his flight kit had theoretically removed penury from the picture, his startling new wealth had yet to produce any tangible effects for him.) Then there was the wormhole: how was it possible to find meaningful direction when at any moment anything might happen? The wormhole loomed as a monstrous, undulating question mark on his personal horizon, throwing unforeseen kinks in his ability to direct his fate. And Yarden Talazac’s strange insinuation that he might be an unknowing Sympath—in fact, her very presence—had cluttered his life with odd, irreconcilable thoughts and emotions, questions without answers, mysteries without clues.

  As before, he said nothing of Yarden’s visit to him. And though he wondered what it meant—as he wondered about what their first midnight meeting meant—he did not let on to Pizzle that he knew anything about the passenger in the adjoining stateroom. This silence had its price, for Pizzle was about to stampede him around the bend with his continual badgering: “Let’s try to sneak into the ventilator shaft,” or “I’ll watch tonight, you watch tomorrow night,” or “We could rig up a camera with a motion detector to photograph the gangway at night.”

  Instead, Treet deflected Pizzle’s obsession toward a subject of more consequence, at least in his own mind.

  “You’ve read Belthausen,” Treet said as they sat knee-to-knee over Pizzle’s Empires console, the flat green grid glowing between them. “What do you think of his time distortion theory?”

  Pizzle’s rims flashed as he glanced up. “It’s a sound theory; no question about it. But then he starts off in pretty safe territory. I mean, distort space and you distort time—that much is elementary.”

  “Fine, it’s elementary. But doesn’t it concern you just a little? We’re blasting away into the unknown, and both you and Crocker act as if we’re on a holiday excursion to Pismo Beach. Doesn’t the prospect of time displacement frighten you at all?”

  Pizzle shook his head slowly. “I can’t say as it does.” He shrugged. “It’s all the same in the end, isn’t it?”

  “What’s all the same?”

  “This—space travel. It’s always into the unknown, right? And as far as time displacement, what difference does it make?”

  “Why, an enormous difference!” Treet exploded in exasperation. “A carking great pile of a difference!”

  “How?” Pizzle blinked mildly back at him.

  “What?”

  “How? How does it make a difference? You can’t tell me that whether I arrive today, tomorrow, or a week ago last Thursday is going to make a molecule of difference—not to me, not to the colonists, not to anybody else, including you.” He jabbed a button on the console. “It’s your move. Careful, I’ve got your coastal lowlands mined.”

  As much as he hated to admit it, there was a microgram of cockeyed logic in what Pizzle said. In essence, it wouldn’t make much difference when they arrived since their arrival had no field of external objectification, to use Belthausen’s unwieldy term—that is, no exact temporal frame of reference.

  Their normal frame of reference. Earth’s time, would have no bearing on Empyrion time, and no real meaning either, since the two were not contiguous. Any problems posed by a time differential were largely illusory—in the sense that any such problems were merely due to the perception of the individual observer.

  Except in the area of communication with Earth. Passing signals back and forth through a space-time displacement tube—another term for wormhole—did complicate matters somewhat, as Cynetics had already discovered. Once into the tube, the signals became subject to whatever quirky laws governed the thing. Time shif
ts could occur, and probably did, although there was also the distinct possibility signals could pass through virtually unaffected, like arrows through a wind tunnel.

  “What about parallel time channels?” asked Treet, intent on pursuing the discussion as far as possible. “Your move.”

  “Boy, you have been reading that book, eh?” Pizzle lowered his head over the grid. “Just captured one of your frontier base camps. Your turn.” He looked up again. “Okay, what about them?”

  “Well, suppose we come out of the wormhole and there’s no colony because we’ve entered a parallel time channel? A channel, let’s say, where a colony ship never arrived. We can’t reach them because they’re on another channel, and there’s no way to change channels. What do we do then?”

  “First of all, parallel time channels are merely an obscure mathematical possibility at this point.” Pizzle held up his hand as Treet started to object. “But let’s say that by some incredible circumstance we did end up in a parallel time channel.”

  Treet nodded. “Let’s say.”

  “I imagine Crocker would simply turn right around and we’d go back the way we came. What’s so terrible about that?”

  Treet hadn’t thought of that. Of course—they could just go back. Whatever happened, they could just turn around and hightail it back to Earth. Here he had been upset about persistent time distortions—static futures, variable pasts, parallel time channels, and all the rest—and Pizzle’s unshakable common sense had cut through all that with the modest wisdom of a weekend traveler: if we don’t like the hotel, we’ll pack up and go home.

  With something approaching admiration, Treet gazed at his partner across the green grid screen. That scruffy, overlarge head had a brain in it, and a good one. What other talents did Pizzle possess?