The Secret of the Dark Galaxy Stone

by Pam Stucky

  Except for Aly and Bek, the others nodded.

  “I stepped into the portal, and the door shut behind me. I stood there a good long time, not knowing what to do next. My heart was beating in double time. I was both frightened near to death and thrilled beyond comprehension. At one point, the door into my Hub opened up, but of course there was nothing there yet, so it was just a vast, dark expanse of emptiness. That got my heart going into triple speed. Sheer fear. I backed away and that door closed again, much to my relief.”

  “Your Hub?” Charlie started to say, but Emma slapped a hand across his mouth to keep him from interrupting again.

  Gesil ignored him this time. “Eventually, I noticed a panel on the wall. I’m sure you’ve seen the same. I pushed some buttons, not knowing what to do at all, not knowing the consequences, but at that point, I was curiosity personified. I pressed buttons, and after I’d put in a good number of numbers, the room started to shift. That feeling of the world falling out from underneath you, that queasiness.”

  “We know that feeling,” Ben confirmed.

  “When the door opened, I didn’t know where I was, but I knew I wasn’t on Jovo anymore,” said Gesil. “My park was lush and green, with a little lake near where I’d been walking. The door opened, and I was on top of a mountain, the cold air and snow blasting into my tiny sanctuary. I was terrified. What had I done? What had happened? How would I get back? I cowered into the corner, not knowing what to do. The door closed, and I was in the room again, alone, but I hadn’t any idea how to get home. I sat in there a very long time. I couldn’t say how long but it felt like half a day. Eventually, the portal took pity on me and returned me to Jovo. The door opened, and before me was my beautiful park, the crystal clear pond. I walked out of the portal back into my home. As far as I could tell, it was only a short time after I’d left. I don’t know if I time traveled that day or if I merely lost track of time, but I was home, and that was all that mattered.”

  Gesil swallowed what was left of her drink, and poured herself another glass. “Walking away from the portal, I told myself I wouldn’t go back there,” she laughed. “But even as I thought that, I knew I was fooling myself. Dangerous as it might be, I couldn’t stay away. I managed to keep my promise to myself for a short time, very short, but two or three days later, I returned. I didn’t know how I’d gotten to the mountain top the first time, so I didn’t know how to replicate it. I suppose I thought I’d always end up at the mountain top, but on my second excursion, I realized that wasn’t the case. On the second trip, I ended up in a dry, uninhabitable desert. Once again, not knowing how to get back, I simply sat in the portal, looking out, and then waited for the room to bring me home.”

  “I didn’t know the elevators would do that?” said Ben, looking at Eve. “I thought you had to enter the home coordinates?”

  Eve shrugged. “There’s lots we don’t know about the elevators yet,” she said. “Maybe this one wanted to make sure Gesil always got home safe.”

  “Whatever the reason, the portal did always seem to protect me, somehow,” Gesil said. “I started experimenting. I had a little notebook I kept with me, and I wrote down the numbers I entered into the panel, just so I’d know how I got to any place, in case I wanted to go back. Eventually I found a combination that seemed to bring me home. Either that, or the portal was playing with me and wanted me to think I was in control. I would talk to it, you see, telling it what I wanted. Occasionally I would get what I wanted—a forest, an ocean, whatever—but I suspect that was just pure chance. Still, I grew to think of the portal as almost a being. Like it was communicating with me somehow. I imagined that it knew me, and knew what I wanted, and took care of me. Maybe I just wanted a friend.

  “At first,” she continued, “I wouldn’t step out of the room. I’d just sit inside, mouth open, gawking in awe at whatever world I’d landed on, peering around the doorway as far as I could. I was afraid. I didn’t know whether I could get the portal to open up from the other side again, or if I’d be able to find it if I wandered off.” She took another sip of her juice. “And, as you probably know, the vast majority of planets in the universes are uninhabited. I saw planet after planet but never any life, not even animals. Plants, occasionally, but even that is rare. Slowly, I grew a little more bold, taking a step or two out of the portal and gazing around me in astonished, disbelieving wonder. I’d take my notebook with me and write and write and write. Every new place sparked my imagination more than the last. And somehow, I was always gone for less time than I thought I’d been gone. If I wrote on other planets, I could get books done in half the time I usually did. I can’t really explain it. Whether it was time travel or inspiration, I don’t know, but it was incredible.

  “But my curiosity overtook me the day we met,” Gesil said. Emma’s ears perked up. “I popped some coordinates into the panel, lay down on the floor to travel—I normally do, it’s just more comfortable for me—and then waited for the door to open. When it did, this time, for the first time ever, I saw people. Chaos. People running by, screaming.” She paused. “This is probably where I can’t tell you much right now.” She pursed her lips and sat thinking for a few moments, deciding what parts of her story to share. “Well, this is what I’ll tell you. I stepped out of the portal. You weren’t near, but you weren’t far, either. You, and Ben, and some others.”

  “Me?” said Eve. “Was I there?”

  “Or one of us?” asked Chuck, indicating himself and Charlie.

  Gesil shook her head. “Like I said, you might have been there, but I didn’t see you. It was pandemonium. Or it seemed so to me, anyway. I saw Emma and Ben, and later, Dr. Waldo, but none of the rest of you.” She paused again, editing her tale in her head. “I stepped too far away from the portal, and … well, you had to save me, let’s say that. The Great Battle of The Void, that’s what you told me was happening.”

  “That’s it!” Bek cried out. “Now I remember! That’s where I’ve heard of The Void before! You wrote about it in your latest book, The Layers of Time!” He grinned from ear to ear, pleased with himself for solving the mystery.

  The dark forest hue of Gesil’s skin grew darker, a Ka’Jovo blush. “Hmm,” she said. “Yes, you’re right. It never occurred to me anyone would figure that out.”

  Bek continued to beam, doing a little dance in his chair, all his arms waving. “That’s right, Bek, master investigator, figured it out. Who figured it out?” He pointed to Chuck and Charlie.

  “Bek figured it out!” Charlie cheered.

  “Bek’s the man!” Chuck said, mimicking Bek’s chair dance with his mere two arms.

  “Settle, settle!” laughed Aly. “Our guest isn’t finished!” But she flashed a special smile at her husband, shaking her head but clearly amused.

  But Emma, having nearly been killed in her battle with The Void before, was less thrilled. “We were fighting The Void?”

  Charlie suddenly remembered holding Emma in his arms on the steps of the lighthouse, not sure whether she would live or die. His demeanor quickly changed to concern. “Why were they fighting The Void? And why weren’t we all helping them? And did they …” He didn’t finish. He wanted to know how it ended, but, he thought, maybe he didn’t.

  “I can’t say more,” Gesil said. “Dr. Waldo warned me. But yes, a fight against The Void. And that’s where Emma saved me. And,” she said, pulling back one of her left sleeves, “where she gave me a bracelet of my own.”

  The bracelet Gesil revealed was similar to the ones all the space travelers were wearing, but Emma looked more closely. “There are more stones,” she said with awe. “This is … is this one more advanced than ours?” Subconsciously, she rubbed the bracelet on her own wrist.

  “It’s from eleven years in the future,” said Ben, “so it probably is much more advanced. Dr. Waldo is always fiddling with technology and gadgets. I can’t imagine he wouldn’t have made improvements to the bracelets in that time.”

  Gesil pulled her arm away
from the inspection. “I’m not sure you should see it,” she said. “I don’t want to do harm to time. ‘Time is tricky,’ Dr. Waldo always said. Who knows what might happen if we tried to change things.”

  “Time is tricky,” said Emma softly, repeating Gesil and repeating the words she, too, had heard so many times from the old scientist she’d started thinking of as a mentor.

  “There’s a dead universe,” said Gesil, “somewhere. I don’t know where. I haven’t been there. Dr. Waldo knows of it though, or he knows of it in the future, at least. He has a hypothesis that it could have been created when someone tried to change time. He says the whole universe has collapsed in on itself, and the universe’s time is inconsistent with anywhere else, and even within the universe itself time has no meaning. There’s no reliable measure of time there, he says. He hasn’t yet figured out a safe way to test his hypothesis, but that’s what he thinks.”

  Kata’s ears perked up. “A dead universe? I was in a dead universe recently, before I came here. I wonder …” She trailed off, lost in thought.

  “Anyway,” said Gesil to Emma, “when we had a few moments, you gave me the bracelet—it was an extra you were carrying—and you told me a few things about how to use it and the elevator, how to get home. And you told me about the Hub,” she said, a look of joy spreading over her face. “I know you use yours as a science lab, but I’ve created a writer’s sanctuary in mine. It took me a while to learn how to build things just using my intention, not having anyone to show me, but I’m rather pleased with how it looks now,” she said.

  Gesil let out a deep sigh. “I can’t tell you. I can’t tell you what a relief it is to talk about these things. I never told a soul because I didn’t want someone bad to discover the portal and use it for evil. I didn’t want to be responsible for unleashing some great plague on our world. I can’t say my motives were purely unselfish. Of course I liked having a portal to the multiverse all to myself.” Her eyes welled up with tears. “But I believe keeping that secret has isolated me. I don’t go anywhere because I’m afraid I might say something. I spill it all into my stories, and people rave, and I want to tell them, ‘If you only knew.’ But you all, you know.” She sighed again, a sigh filled with both pain and deep relief.

  “It’s a big responsibility,” said Emma. “It’s hard to know what you can and can’t say. It was hard at school for Charlie and me, not being able to say much about our summer.”

  Gesil nodded. “Well, then. Like I said, we didn’t have much time to talk last time I met you. I don’t actually know why you’ve brought me here today.”

  “I really want to see your Hub,” said Ben. “And it might be what we need, anyway. We’re stuck here and can’t get home.”

  “Don’t you have your—” Gesil started, then stopped herself mid-sentence.

  “Our what?” asked Eve. “What were you going to say?”

  “We lost our pigeons and Dark MATTER spheres,” said Emma, watching Gesil’s reaction carefully. “Is that what you mean?”

  Gesil shook her head and smiled. “That is exactly what I was going to say.”

  But Emma wasn’t convinced. “Do we have different ways of traveling in the future? What were you going to say, really?” she asked.

  “All I’ll say is this: knowing Dr. Waldo as you do, do you think he’d really not invent something new between now and then?”

  Emma let out a throaty grunt. “Ugh!” she said. “Can’t you just tell us?”

  Gesil laughed. “Time is tricky, my new old friend. I, for one, am not going to be responsible for the collapse of another universe. But yes. We need to get you home, so you can fight The Void in the future and come save me in my past.”

  “To the Hub!” said Ben. “Let’s go to the Hub!”

  “But first, to the surface!” said Charlie. “Finally!”

  chapter fifteen

  Emma stood at the tall ocean windows in the living room, gazing out into the alien world unlike any she’d imagined, the bag Aly had given her to replace the one she’d lost slung over her shoulder. They’d all gathered up their few remaining belongings, and Kata and Aly were making a final check of the house to make sure nothing was left behind.

  Seeing his sister lost in thought, Charlie came over and put an arm around her. “Water,” he said.

  “Water, magnet, dark galaxy,” she replied, and smiled to herself. What would I do without Charlie? she thought. Then she frowned. Why had Charlie not been with her in the future battle against The Void?

  “It’s okay, Em,” said Charlie, instinctively knowing what was on her mind. “I won’t ever leave you intentionally.” He gave her shoulder a squeeze and joined her in one last look at the strange underwater world of the oo’broo.

  “That’s just it, Charlie,” said Emma, her brow furrowed. “You wouldn’t. So why aren’t you there in eleven years? What happened? Or, what happens?”

  “Probably I was off chasing some intergalactic monster, saving the rest of you,” said Charlie, humbly. “Or maybe I’m married in eleven years and my wife’s about to have a baby, and I can’t come fight The Void. Or maybe Dr. Waldo left me in charge of the Hub and I am conducting important Hub business.” Emma laughed lightly at this last idea. Charlie continued. “Or maybe, Em, don’t forget, Gesil wasn’t sure I wasn’t there. I might have been just around the next hill. One valley over. Hiding in a cave with Chuck.” He squeezed Emma to his side. “Don’t worry about it. We can’t do anything about it now, anyway.”

  Emma sighed.

  “Do you think we’ll ever come back here?” she said, still staring out at the deep dark sea. “All these places we visit, and the people we’re meeting now, it’s worse than just having friends in another state. We may never see them again. And I really like Bek and Aly. And Gesil.”

  “Well, we know you’ll see Gesil again, so there’s that,” said Charlie. He gently turned her away from the underwater view. “Come on. It’s time to go.” He led his sister to the hallway where the others were all waiting: Aly and Bek, Eve and Kata, Chuck, Ben, and Gesil.

  “Ready?” said Aly, looking at Emma.

  “I guess so,” Emma said. She looked back over her shoulder at the place they’d called home for the past week. “I’ll miss you guys,” she said.

  “This isn’t goodbye, Emma!” laughed Bek. “Not even for now! We still have to see if we can get you home!”

  “Yeah, it might not work!” said Chuck. “In which case, if we’re stuck here forever, I’d like to request my own room? Charlie snores.”

  “So do you!” said Charlie. He and Chuck high-fived.

  “Let’s go!” said Eve. “I am ready to see the sun again!”

  “You do have a sun, don’t you?” asked Ben.

  “We do have a sun,” said Aly. “Just the one. All right, let’s go.” She tapped a code into the panel by the door. It slid open with a mechanical whoosh, revealing the long hallway.

  “What all is down here?” asked Ben as they walked down the hall. On either side of the hallway were various doors, all of them shut tight, containing potential mysteries they’d never discover.

  Aly gestured toward the room she’d taken Eve and Emma to the day before. “That’s the conference room over there, where we meet with the Klyvnini.” She pointed at another door. “This one leads to our housekeeper’s quarters. She’s the one who kept you fed.”

  “We should thank her,” said Emma, as they passed the door.

  “She’s a little shy,” said Bek. “And a lot afraid of you all. We’ll tell her for you, how’s that?”

  Emma nodded her agreement.

  Aly continued the hallway tour. “Down there is a storage area. And off to the right, that’s an emergency area, in case there’s a threat.”

  “What kind of threat?” asked Chuck.

  “Any kind of threat,” said Aly. “The worst threats are the ones you can’t predict, you know.”

  Like the future, thought Emma.

  The group reache
d a larger doorway at the end of the hall. Aly stopped before it and turned to the group. “Ready to go up?”

  “Seriously? Beyond ready!” said Charlie. “Let’s go!”

  Aly tapped yet more buttons on yet another panel. The door slipped open, this one revealing a spacious elevator room. “Everybody in!” she said.

  The large group piled in, filling the room to capacity, and the door slid shut behind them. Bek punched the top button on the panel, and the elevator started to move.

  “Odd,” said Emma, “all these elevators, yet I haven’t been in an actual elevator for a while.”

  “A lot less nauseating,” said Charlie.

  The elevator reached its destination and the door opened again into another hallway.

  “More hallways!” moaned Chuck. “I’m starting to believe we’ll never see daylight again!”

  Bek laughed. “We are almost there, young Chuck!” he said. “Do you think we can’t hear you snore, too? We are quite ready for you to go home!”

  Momentarily taken aback, Chuck’s jaw dropped open slightly before he realized Bek was joking. He punched Bek on the shoulder. “You’ve been good to us, old man. You’re welcome on my Earth any time!”

  This time, Bek led the way. They walked down another short, undecorated hallway, its white walls stretching up to high ceilings, and veered left. When they turned the corner, they saw before them their journey’s end—or its beginning: glass doors, leading to the outside. Sunlight streamed through the thick window panes, throwing patterns of mottled light onto the floor.

  “Sun!” cried Charlie, running forward to a sunbeam. “Beautiful sunlight!” He stood in the beam, eyes closed, soaking in its warmth.

  “It’s so bright!” said Eve, squinting. Having spent years traveling to distant worlds, she had developed a keen eye for subtle details. “I think maybe your sun is closer to your planet than ours. Or it’s bigger.”