“Yeah,” said Wallace.
CHAPTER 29
They came out of another forced sleep, and the ship droned on.
At the rate they were going it would be thirty years to the known populated frontier. They’d only been traveling a year, and boredom had set in with a vengeance. Here they were again, backtracking a course to the portal after a break of only months for arrest and imprisonment to conclude a lifetime of travel. “There has to be a faster way to do this,” said Leonid, and Tatjana agreed. Both hoped their only son had made progress in this direction, but as yet they’d been unable to contact him.
For Grandma Nat it was all a grand adventure. She’d read everything in Leonid’s histories of Elderon, Galena and Gan, and was reading them again. She spent hours in the observation bubble, looking at the stars, and more time talking to the medical archivists who were on board another ship in the fleet. Already she was planning her new body, her new life. She wanted it completed and tested before they reached the frontier. She’d had minor medical problems in her current life: asthma, and a touch of arthritis. That would be corrected at the molecular level. There was also a lengthening of her face she desired, and a somewhat enhanced musculature. The doctors explained the difficulties in identifying and changing the combinations of base pairs and sequences responsible for these traits, but she assured them of her faith in their abilities, and ordered them to do what she wanted.
One did not say no to Grandma Nat. Strangely, one did not mind doing what she wanted, even when she was aggressively demanding about it, for the next moment she was totally charming and caring, and you were in love with her again.
Such were the ways of the family matriarch.
Much of their planning depended on contact with Trae, and indirectly the people he was working with. If the Bishops really intended to launch their invasion fleet the first line of defense was the Grand Portal, and that meant a minimum of ten thousand jumps from Elderon. Fifty total years of travel time, and that was pushing the limits of a modern ship. With the new technology potential, only forty jumps were needed, a mission of months to the portal. And if the ships themselves could produce minor branegates they would not just be defenders, but formidable aggressors in a fight with anyone.
They had to contact Trae, and he wasn’t answering, and they worried, first because they needed to know what was going on, and second because he seemed to have disappeared.
The strange field binding them together was not understood. It was just there. It was as if all space were filled with a matrix of threads to be plucked by a thought, a vision, a contemplation within the mind, producing a musical note everywhere in space simultaneously and heard only by a select few connected by birth or life histories. The resonances were always there within close family members, but the rest seemed random, and were unexplained. Leonid and Tatjana had always had immediate contact with their son in both of his lives, and they agonized for many months when he didn’t answer them. They went individually and together to that special place constructed from memories of their first days on Gan and along the coasts with the crashing seas, the cliffs, the rolling fields covered with wild flowers and gnarled, wind-beaten trees. The place where they’d made love and produced a child, and preached a doctrine of freedom to people who’d never known it.
Over a year out from the branegate guarding the other side, both of them began to despair. “He just isn’t there. Something has happened to him. Our son no longer exists in this universe,” said Tatjana.
“We’ll keep trying. He has to be here,” said Leonid, but he doubted it. Masking himself from his wife, he thought that Trae had somehow been found and destroyed forever by the Emperor of Gan.
And then suddenly, at the end of a ship’s cycle, while they drowsed in each other’s arms—they found him.
They’d gone to their cabin early, after a long session taking Grandma Nat through the details of their holdings on Elderon. Nat had already decided Elderon was the best place for her to settle, for it was the stronghold of her own kind and isolated from the political and religious squabbles of ordinary humans. She was determined to consolidate power on arrival. After her experience with The Council of Bishops, she would never again trust another government, even one appearing to be a democracy.
They were exhausted from the long discussions, and it was the tenth time they’d been over the same material and answered the same questions. By the time they were finished, the mess hall buffet had closed down and they ate sandwiches with the maintenance crew just going on red shift. The shift was named for red lights that went on in the ship during what passed for night in interstellar space.
Two jumps were scheduled for that night, and they wanted to be asleep for both of them. They undressed and zipped themselves into their bed. The bed fit them like the gentle squeeze of a gloved hand, but allowed them wiggle room. Indeed they wiggled playfully against each other before falling into a doze in each other’s arms.
In the twilight of sleep, Leonid went to their flowery place on Gan, and Tatjana with him. Conditions varied with their moods. The sun was shining, and there was no breeze. The perfume of the flowers filled them. They lay next to each other, propped up on their elbows. They looked up the hill over the carpet of purple and red flowers towards a beautiful, old tree at the summit.
“If you’re there, Trae, we’d sure like to have you with us,” said Leonid. He knew it was all just a wonderful hope in their minds, but he wanted it to be real.
“He’ll always be Anton to me. I want to hold him in my arms just one more time,” said Tatjana. She had said it many times, but Leonid never reminded her of that. He would not allow himself to disturb the feeling behind it.
As she said it, there was movement at the top of the hill. A figure appeared, as if it had just stepped out from behind the tree. A man. He looked around, then right at them and began walking down the hill in their direction. Leonid’s heart leapt; at first look he’d thought it was Trae, but Trae had dark hair and this man was blond. As he drew closer, they could see a strong resemblance, but he seemed a stranger.
The man was young, about the same age Trae would be now. He was beautiful: familiar, delicate features but deepest, blue eyes, and waves of golden hair draped across his forehead. His clothes were gray; pants and long-sleeved shirt, tailored to fit like a uniform. Something about the focus of the eyes struck Leonid as familiar, and Tatjana was giving the lad a huge smile.
He stopped a few feet away from them and shoved his hands deep into his pants’ pockets. He looked embarrassed, seemed unwilling or afraid to meet their gaze. Finally his forehead wrinkled, and he asked rather forcefully, “Can you tell me how I got here?”
“We were calling for our son,” said Tatjana.
“This isn’t a real place, it’s a memory,” said Leonid. “Where do you come from?”
“I was asleep,” said the young man. “I’m sure of it. I’m supposed to be released tomorrow.”
He looked at Tatjana, now, his gaze fierce. “I know you -- I know both of you—you’re—you’re my Mother.”
“Oh,” said Tatjana, and choked back a cry.
“We don’t recognize you,” said Leonid, “but we were waiting to see our son. What’s your name?”
“I want to say Anton, but it doesn’t seem right,” said the man.
Tatjana’s image flickered, faded to near nothingness, and then came back again.
“The last time we saw our son he was called Trae. Do you know him?” asked Leonid.
“Oh, yes, he’s here—I mean, I’m Trae—or I was—but now I’m Anton. I remember being here once before. You said I was conceived here, but—we were up there, nearer to the top, by those trees.”
The man looked at Leonid, now. “You’re my father. You gave me a list of things to do. I’m not finished, yet. Somebody killed me. They had to bring me back. They killed you, too -- my other father, I mean. It’s so new; I’m trying to sort everything out.”
“Petyr is dead?”
asked Leonid.
“Yes, Petyr—that’s his name. They shot him. I remember blood flying from his head. I—I don’t know where he is, now. Dead, I guess.”
“They’ll restore him like they’ve restored you. They’ve followed my instructions; that’s why you’re called Anton, now.”
“The way you’d be if you’d lived past childhood,” said Tatjana, and she was still flickering in and out with surges of emotion. “Who did this awful thing?”
“I don’t know,” said Trae—now Anton. “Three men with guns—Petyr fired back—I was getting into a car. Going home. Is this place real? It feels so real. There’s a breeze.” Anton held out a hand to feel it.
“As real as we can imagine it,” said Leonid.
Anton cocked his head, as if listening to someone else.
“Someone is with me. A woman. She’s talking; a mumble, and I can’t understand the words. I must still be asleep.”
“You probably are,” said Leonid, “but you heard us anyway. You said you were to be released tomorrow. Do you know what you’ll do then?”
“I’ll go back to work. The work you gave me to do. We were close to testing when I—when I went away. I’m sorry. I feel awake and asleep at the same time. At least I remember you.” Now he smiled, and Tatjana was on her feet and hugging him, then Leonid, an arm around both of them with an imagined sense of touch and warmth not real but there.
“I can feel you,” said Anton, surprised.
“Soon it’ll be real, darling,” said Tatjana. “We’re headed towards you in a small fleet of ships right now.”
“Well, maybe not so soon. Thirty or forty years,” said Leonid. “I’m hoping you’ve made progress on that problem to make much longer jumps and more often in a small ship, maybe even open small branegates. You said you were ready to test.”
They sat down in grass and flowers. Anton, or Trae, seemed more aware, now. His eyes sparkled with enthusiasm as he told them what he’d done: the new ideas, the simulations, fabrication of the new coils and the strange looking ship they were building, all of which Leonid was certain had been recently downloaded from memory cubes. The boy talked quickly, gesturing with his hands, the rapid-fire chatter of a brilliant mind just awakening. Tatjana smiled, and looked at him as if in worship.
Suddenly Anton sat up straight and alert, looked over their heads into the distance. “Myra,” he said in wonderment. “Myra’s with me. She touched me. She—”
He blinked hard, stared at nothing, then softly said, “She’s crying. Don’t cry, Myra.”
“A friend?” asked Leonid.
“Yes—no—more than that. I didn’t have the nerve to tell her how I feel before—before I was gone.”
“Tell her when you wake up,” said Tatjana.
“I will. We worked together. She’s smart, pretty, and a little shy, like me. She can do geometrical modeling in her head. She was doing the sims for the testing models when I left. I wish you could see her; she’s one of us, too.”
Anton smiled at a memory. “She plays mind-games, pretending to be someone else, but I knew.”
“Oh, my,” said Tatjana. “You’re smitten.”
“We can see her another time,” said Leonid. “Even if you’re partially asleep it’ll be difficult to channel her through to us, and we don’t have the time. We’ve been trying to reach you for months, son. Some bad things have happened to us since we left Gan, and everything has changed. The work you’ve been doing isn’t just business anymore, or a speed-up of travel between two universes. It could be our only defense against a force that will undo everything I worked for in this universe. It has to be done soon.”
Anton sat back, and was focused again. “I don’t understand. What’s being threatened?”
Leonid told him everything: the Council of Bishops, their arrest and imprisonment, the invasion fleet hovering near the Grand Portal between the universes. “They could be in transit right now.”
Anton sat still for a moment. His image seemed to blur.
“There are several ways to stop them, but we’ll have to go to higher energies to get down to the pore-size of the brane. How do I communicate with you at such a large distance?”
“Just think of this place, and call us from here,” said Leonid.
Anton smiled again, reached over to touch both of them on the hand. “I will. I remember everything, now, all the way back to the fire, and I remember you, both of you. I remember Petyr, my father always with me. I hope he’ll come back, too. I know who I am. My name is new, but I’m still Trae. It’s really good to be alive again.”
His image blinked out, and he was gone.
Tatjana gasped, and took her husband’s hand. The flowers and trees and rolling hills faded, and disappeared. They opened their eyes, faces close, their arms locked around each other. Their cabin walls shuddered with the drone of the ship. Leonid touched her face, felt wetness there. “Very soon, now,” he said, “we’ll all be back together again.”
CHAPTER 30
She hadn’t slept a wink, and it was all Meza’s fault. He was the one who’d encouraged her to continue seeing Trae, clear up to the night before his official reincarnation. Three nights a week she’d watched him grow from fetus to man. At first it had only been a comfort to talk to him, knowing he couldn’t hear her, but was there, alive, coming back however slowly as someone new. The first cubes were downloaded after only six weeks. The last six weeks it was a continuous process, the memories and experiences of two lifetimes building the neural net of a now developed brain, and in the last cube was Myra, the work she’d done with him, and any feelings he might have had for her.
The final four weeks, he’d been out of the tanks, unconscious on a hard bed, sprouting connective cables left and right to machines feeding him his past and scanning for accuracy. Others fed him nanomachines, and stimulated his muscles rhythmically with low voltage, high current pulses, a procedure she quickly learned to avoid observing. At those moments he was like a dancing doll, and she felt humiliated for him.
He was beautiful. Asleep, he looked so much like Trae, with high, prominent cheekbones, generous mouth, and a nicely arched nose. Slender, but well muscled. His hair was so light blond it seemed white at times. His eyes were always closed, but she knew they were blue; she’d been there when physicians had examined them. Trae’s eyes had been brown, his hair dark. Sometimes she would just sit and watch him breathe, thinking he was another person. This was Anton, who had been Trae, now in his original form, she was told. How much more than memories would survive reincarnation? Would the personality, the sweet shyness and subtle sense of humor still be there?
She sat at his bedside and talked to him softly and watched his chest rise and fall. Mostly she talked to herself, bouncing ideas off his inanimate self the way she’d done when they’d worked together. She’d throw out an idea, and Trae would come back with one of his insightful questions, over and over again. The advantage he’d had was an enhanced neural net capable of access, analysis and recall of over three hundred years of research dating back to the other side. In frustration she’d asked him why she, or any of their kind, couldn’t have such abilities. He’d said that she could have them, but the enhancements with nanomachines would take years before all that information could be downloaded to her. One person was enough, at least for now. That had satisfied her. If Trae had an ego, he’d never shown it, never given her any reason to think he felt superior in any way.
She’d gone to him the night before the day of his debriefing and release. She’d had dinner at the cafeteria, planned to stay only a few minutes. She hoped to see him walking the following day. It was later than usual when she got to his room. A physician was leaving as she arrived, and he smiled, knowing why she was there. She stood by Trae’s bed and started talking, telling him about her day while reviewing it for herself, as was her habit. But when she looked down at him, something was different. His eyelids seemed to ripple, and she realized his eyes were moving beneath them. He
was dreaming, following the course of some action in his sleep.
“Trae, it’s Myra. Can you hear me? I’m right here beside you.” She reached out and touched his shoulder softly.
His eyes stopped moving for just an instant, and then began again. Myra went back to a near whisper and talked about the strange new ship nearing completion in orbit, the ship that might carry them quickly to the center of the galaxy. And in the middle of her description she got the shock of her life.
Quite suddenly, Trae’s eyes opened wide, and he said in a hoarse voice, “The work has to be done soon.”
He closed his eyes and was deep asleep again, eyelids rippling.
Myra jumped back when he spoke, and her heart was thumping hard from the shock. The voice had been Trae’s. For one horrible second she thought she might lose her dinner, but then the feeling passed.
She waited for Trae to say something else, but he didn’t, and so she left the room shaken and went home to bed. She didn’t sleep a wink that night.
In the morning she felt wasted and didn’t eat anything. She got to work midmorning, went straight to her cubicle and closed the door behind her. Two cups of strong, black tea brought her closer to consciousness, but by noon she’d done nothing but stare at the screen, a slowly rotating galaxy and two globular clusters flickering there.
Midafternoon she dared lunch in the cafeteria, but the small soup and salad she ate only seemed to aggravate the jiggling in her stomach. All she could think about was Trae. What was he doing? What was it like to discover yourself in a new body different from the previous one? Myra could barely remember her own reincarnation. She’d lived to old age as a spinster, and come back an exact duplicate of that person to complete the work she’d begun, nothing more. But now there was something more, and it frightened her.
Late afternoon she actually called up the model she was working on, if for no other reason than to put some order into the chaos of her thinking. An hour passed, and she was warming to the task when there was a knocking on her door.
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