by Al Macy
The next part was out of my hands, too. Elon would paratransit me back to Mount Rainier before the sphere hit Ceres. But it wasn’t—wait. There. The vibration below my sternum signaled the start of the paratransit. Ceres grew in size like a soccer ball kicked at my face. There was no time!
The vibration stopped. No! The paratransit had failed. Things were back in my hands, and we were headed right for Ceres.
I pictured us steering away from the asteroid. The sphere changed course. Only a little, though.
Crushed once more into the couch, I held my head back and pushed my foot against an imaginary brake. No, no, wrong image. Control your thoughts. Instead of stopping, I pictured us veering away.
The sphere pulled up. C’mon! If we hit, I probably wouldn’t feel a thing. Don’t think about hitting. I held my breath.
Next, it seemed as if we were going to land on the dwarf planet. That wouldn’t work; we were traveling too fast. I checked the display. Still around eight hundred kilometers per second.
We continued down until only meters above the surface. It flashed by in a blur. I looked behind us. Despite the lack of an atmosphere, dust and rocks flew up as we passed.
We began rising from the surface. I exhaled. Ceres receded as we headed off into space.
Could I get far enough away to be safe from the explosion? If all went according to plan, DJ1 would overload its power source when it reached the center of the thousand-kilometer-wide asteroid. It had enough energy to zip around between galaxies for millions of years, so, released all at once, the resulting explosion would pack a punch. Apparently, it might also induce some kind of nuclear chain reaction.
The force field! Surely it would dissipate when Ceres exploded, but if I hit it before then, I’d become the squishy carbon-based core of a sphere pancake. If we slowed down, we’d be too close to the explosion.
“Sphere, display two countdowns. One to the explosion and another to our impact with the force field.” A snake ball flashed by to my right. I’d forgotten about those. “Sphere, maybe that snake ball will break open the force shield in front of us and we can slip through.”
“Negative.”
So much for positive thinking.
The countdown to impact was running ten seconds ahead of the explosion countdown. Even if the universes survived, I wouldn’t.
“I’m so sorry, Jake. Goodbye.” The sphere’s voice was soothing, but I didn’t feel soothed.
Ah, jeez. My last thoughts were of Charli and Sophia. Charli’s musical laugh. Sophia’s tears because she’d wanted me to come home and stay there. Maybe Jake from Human-2 could spend some time with Charli. I even pictured hugging Grandma Marie one more time.
I stared at the time-to-impact counter. 4 … 3 … 2 … 1 …
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Marbecka stood perched on the bridge of Raptor along with the humans, Alex, Martin, and Gordon Guccio. She tilted her head, looking up toward the magnified image of Ceres. Stop being silly. You know there’s nothing to see yet.
Along with five other spacecraft, Raptor was scooping up escape pods near the destroyed Ribbon. Much of the recovery was automatic, the ships following the most efficient routes to the pods and snatching them up. Other ships were speeding from Earth to help with the recovery.
Of course, it would all be in vain if Jake’s plan failed.
The Ribbon itself looked like a spacefaring tapeworm, shedding plates and plant matter. It moved slowly toward an unavoidable collision with Phobos.
The countdown to the Ceres explosion dropped to zero.
Guccio scratched his head. “Nothing happened. Does that mean—?”
“No, Sir Guccio. It may have succeeded. That was the countdown to the actual event. But Ceres is six hundred million kilometers distant from us at this time. Light will transit for thirty-three minutes before it arrives here. We are forced to execute patience at this time.”
“Which way is it from here?” he asked.
Marbecka pointed her beak toward the display on the ceiling. “This is the countdown to watch.” She gestured toward a numeric display. “It will reach zero when the light from the explosion, if it happened, reaches us.”
Working at her controls, Marbecka adjusted the hologram in the center of the bridge. She zoomed it out until it displayed the solar system out to Jupiter. Red callouts in English indicated the locations of Raptor and Ceres. Marbecka turned around and around on her perch. When ten seconds remained, everyone, human and celano, held his or her breath.
Finally, the countdown timer reached zero.
Guccio said, “So, now—?”
A new sun appeared above them.
The holographic display of the solar system showed two suns, the normal one and a new one in the asteroid belt. It flared for over a minute, then gradually died away.
* * *
I looked around. Blackness. A blackness that persisted. I turned every which way, but there was no break in the absence of light. Like outer space but without the stars. I held my hand in front of my face but saw nothing.
Was the sphere gone? I wore my clothes. But where the hell was I? It wasn’t death. Or was it? I didn’t feel as if I were floating, but there was nothing supporting me.
I was neither hot nor cold. I pinched the skin between my thumb and forefinger. Ow.
“Hello? Sphere?”
After twenty seconds, I began breathing hard, panicking. Was it longer than that? Minutes? Hours? I lost all concept of time. Maybe this was death. Eternal nothingness. Eternal boredom. What hell!
Then, there was indeed nothing supporting me, and I fell three feet, landing in the bottom shell of a paratransit device.
A cheer went up. Applause. I sat on the floor and looked around. I was in the chamber on the peak of Mount Rainier.
Elon came over and pulled me up from the floor. “Sorry to put you on hold there, Jake. We had an issue with the device. But as you see, we’ve almost perfected instantaneous transport—no more delays. Otherwise, you’d be dead.” He glanced at Charli. “From the data in the straw, we knew when to transport you. We tried to grab you soon after you released DJ1, but there was a glitch we had to fix. We corrected it by transitting only you, without the sphere.”
Charli rushed in and hugged me. I squeezed her hard, not wanting to let go. Ever.
“That’s okay, guys, I didn’t mind being on hold. It was just twenty seconds or so. I just thought I was in Hell, that’s all.”
Charli pulled her head back and looked me in the eyes. “It felt like only twenty seconds? No, Jake, it was five years.”
My jaw dropped. “What? Five years?” I’d missed Sophia growing up? She’d gone five years without seeing her daddy?
Everyone in the room laughed.
Charli smiled. “Got you! Oh, I’m sorry, Jake. You didn’t like that.” She poked me in the chest. “I owed you for that time in the hospital when you pretended not to remember me.”
“Not funny.” I laughed anyway. “We’re even. No more jokes!” I hugged her again, lifting her into the air. “You’ve been around me too long.”
“Yes, and I’m going to keep it that way.”
I turned to Elon. “So, did it work?”
“We don’t know yet. Assuming DJ1 exploded and destroyed the threat, we won’t know for a while. Speed of light, and all. We should see the explosion, even in this universe.”
While waiting, I turned in circles. I guess I’d picked that up from Marbecka.
After twenty minutes, Elon checked a display, “Okay, any time now. Follow me.”
We all stepped out onto the helipad and shivered in the crisp, late-July air.
I frowned. “Will we see anything in the daylight? Can it—”
Elon pointed. A second sun bloomed near the horizon, becoming so bright we couldn’t look directly at it.
A technician opened the door. “Paratransit coming.”
We trooped back in to watch Sphere 2 snap into existence. The door irised open, and out
popped Alex, Martin, and Guccio.
High fives all around.
Guccio reached into his pocket. “This calls for a cigar.”
EPILOGUE
One month later, at the Dark Sands Beach overlook on the Lost Coast, Charli, Marie, and I sat at the weathered picnic table, finishing off a bottle of Ravenswood merlot. Far below us, the Pacific Ocean sparkled. This was the same overlook Boonie and I had visited on our hike down the dinobird coast.
The day was cool, but the sun was warm. A heavy fog bank sat near the horizon. We’d gone for a morning hike along the beach.
Boonie was tired out enough that he was happy to lie on his side soaking up the sun while Sophia played next to him.
“You don’t mind the Marbecka doll walking on you like that, Boonie?”
Whomp, whomp.
Sophia said, “Barbie is jealous of Marbecka because Marbecka can fly.” She folded out the wings on the Marbecka doll and fluttered her over Boonie’s head.
I winked at Marie. “I guess Barbie just has to play the cards she’s been dealt in life.”
The celano scientists assured us the problem was over. Destroying Ceres had fixed things—we didn’t need to construct the universe-saving machine and perform a joint human-celano procedure after all. Working together with the colonists, the celanos had mopped up the AI ships that remained, although no one could be sure they’d gotten all of them.
The confluence rift that had occurred in our universe was permanent. There was no danger it would collapse. It was sad for those who had lost loved ones, but I was happy for those whose cherished friends and spouses had been returned to them. Could we paratransit to the rifted sections? Our scientists and ethicists debated that.
Marbecka received multi-universal praise for her work. She came to visit our universe but was too shocked and afraid of our population densities—imagine if she’d come over when the population had been seven billion. Drenast and Cree handled the shock better.
Besides trade and cultural exchange, the top benefit of the paratransit devices would be faster-than-light travel. By transitting to a neighboring universe, then back to a new location in the original world, I had exceeded the universal speed limit. The ETs would be so proud of us. We accomplished something they had failed to do.
Unfortunately, with DJ1 gone, we had no speedy way to communicate with them. DJ1 had relayed our messages in the past. But the ETs had provided instructions that we could use to create a new faster-than-light comm device. Or maybe we could paratransit-hop to their planet. Surprise!
Boonie raised his head, jumped up, and barked toward the trail. My heart clenched and I whipped my head around.
I smiled as Jake, Mary, and Jake Junior came around a curve in the path. Now that there was no danger the rift would collapse, my alter ego and I were free to hang together.
Jake put a picnic basket on the table. “Sorry we’re late. We didn’t realize how small and windy the roads were.”
Boonie jumped back and forth between Jake and me. Was he confused? More like, well, this is fun. Now there are two Jakes.
Sophia came over but was a little shy.
I squatted down. “Sophia, Jake Junior is your brother from another mother. I know it’s confusing, but he’s nine years old, and—”
“It’s not confusing, Daddy.” She turned to me. “Jake Junior was the son the you from the other universe had. In Human-2.”
I tousled her hair and stood back up, my knees complaining. “And Jake Senior, I’d like to introduce you to a soul mate of ours, my grandmother-in-law, Marie Keller.”
Marie raised a hand. “No group hug, please.”
It was a little confusing, keeping things straight. Jake and Grandma Marie had never met.
Jake and I had decided we could trust each other with the other’s wife. Of course we could. But this was the first time we’d all gotten together.
I hugged Mary, the woman I’d loved and who had been taken from me. My knees became weak. Jake hugged Charli, the woman he’d known but never loved.
Then, the two of us looked at each other and we both said, simultaneously, “Okay, that’s enough hugging, now.”
We were joking, of course. I think.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I’m so grateful for the help I’ve had with this book.
My critique partners are awesome. Many thanks to Allison Maruska, Kistmetw, Pamela Bedore, Trevose, Rxd01, Lauraeve, Ratrilyn, M2Power, Rellrod, Auraxx, Jaramsli, and others.
Many thanks to Sheri Cartwright for her many excellent thoughts. She and her son Wyatt suggested the Angry Birds reference. Maryann Banning-Witters was an incredible beta reader and had great suggestions on wording and plot. Thanks to all my beta readers, especially Todd Wicks, Teri Miller, Gail Summerville, and Lena Macy.
My proofreader, Julie MacKenzie of FreeRangeEditorial.com, did a wonderful job rooting out the errors I missed.
The image on the back of the paperback is a NASA photograph of a portion of the Eagle Nebula.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Al Macy writes because he has stories to tell. In school he was the class clown and always the first volunteer for show and tell. His teachers would say, “Al has a lot of imagination.” Then they'd roll their eyes.
But he put his storytelling on the back burner until he retired and wrote a blog about his efforts to improve his piano sight-reading. That's when his love of storytelling burbled up to the surface, along with quirky words like “burble.”
He had even more fun writing his second book, Drive, Ride, Repeat, but was bummed by non-fiction's need to stick to “the truth” (yucko). From then on it was fiction all the way, with a good dose of his science background burbling to the surface.
Macy's top priority is compelling storylines with satisfying plot twists, but he never neglects character development. No, wait … his top priority is quirkiness, then compelling storylines, then character development. No, wait …
