The Stars Blue Yonder

by Sandra McDonald

  “I know.”

  When they were done they made their way back through the warrens. Myell kept close watch on the Monitors. They didn’t move or make noise in any way. Their only signs of life were the silver beams of light that swept out of their torsos and through the caverns every few minutes, scanning the environment. They didn’t even respond when some of the furry aliens deposited red rocks in piles at their feet.

  “We think the Albasta worship them as gods,” Cappaletto said. “They say prayers to them. Leave them presents. Sometimes leave a dead infant, though I don’t know if they were dead at birth or sacrificed to the cause.”

  Myell swallowed hard. “Do the Monitors ever respond?”

  “Not to human prayers. But you can go talk to them all you like, if it’ll make you feel better. You’re sure you don’t have any people at all here?”

  “No.”

  “And you’re going to remain remarkably closemouthed about how and when you got here?”

  Myell said, “If there’s time, I’ll tell you later.”

  Sleeping arrangements in the workers’ chambers were matters of species, military status, and rank. Cappaletto and Adryn bunked down in an area reserved for Team Space and ACF officers and senior enlisted. Adryn didn’t look pleased when Cappaletto tried to give the empty cot beside him to Myell.

  “That’s Commander Endicott’s,” she said.

  Cappaletto gave her a patient look.

  “He’s coming back,” she added, biting her lower lip. “It’s only been a few days.”

  “Didn’t make the lift,” Cappaletto told Myell. “You’ve always got to make the lift. Those farols come in when the outside world gets dark. Nasty things, like dogs but three times bigger. They won’t leave much behind, if anything. Sometimes a bone or two. Sometimes teeth.”

  “The Roon don’t care about losing people down there?” Myell asked.

  “The Roon don’t care if we get eaten or eat each other,” Cappaletto said. “They don’t even know us by name. There’s no roll call, no tracking, no rosters. Only the Monitors to make sure we don’t try to hijack the lifts or damage their equipment, and to send in other machines that haul out the dead. We work as much as we want to earn our rubies and food; the only rule is survival.”

  Myell was flummoxed. “There are no records of who’s down here?”

  Cappaletto shook his head. “But we try to keep their names in our heads. On pieces of paper, when there is any. If we don’t remember, who will? People who die, people who disappear, people who get taken . . .”

  He trailed off.

  Myell said, “Taken.”

  Cappaletto’s expression darkened. “The Roon come down every now and then and haul people away. Not often. Mostly we never see them again. The ones who come back—well, they don’t live very long, usually. Or they can’t talk. But those who do, they tell stories about a woman. Some horrible woman. Used to be human. Now—not so much.”

  Myell’s throat tightened. “She have a name?”

  “Gayle,” Cappaletto said.

  “Anna Gayle?”

  “Maybe. Can’t say for sure.”

  Adryn sighed impatiently. “We’ve only got a few hours until the next shift begins and I, for one, am going to work it. You two want to gab, gab somewhere else. Otherwise it’s bedtime. And Commander Endicott’s coming back for his cot, so find your own place and people, Mr. Kay.”

  Cappaletto objected. “Lieutenant—”

  “No,” Myell said. “It’s okay. I’ll just stretch out here on the ground.”

  Adryn made a harrumphing noise and curled up with a thin blanket over her shoulders. Cappaletto tossed his blanket down to Myell.

  Cappaletto said, “Ground can be pretty hard. Try to get as much rest as you can.”

  Rest was a nice idea, but instead Myell was thinking about Anna Gayle. Here. Now. He tried to figure out if he could save Cappaletto and Adryn when the ouroboros returned, how he could convince them to hold tight in the flash of light. Despite Cappaletto’s optimism, Myell doubted rescue was ever coming from Team Space or the ACF. If he didn’t take them with him, he was consigning them to a slow and steady death.

  If he did take them with him, they might end up someplace worse. Someplace where they’d soon be dead anyway. Kyle and Twig? Evaporated or trapped when he’d left them in the eddy at the Outpost. Jodenny? The original lived on, but the copy he’d ripped from Providence had either evaporated or died in the Roon ambush at Kultana. And for what? For no good reason at all.

  He swiped angrily at his eyes just as someone stepped over him and peered down anxiously.

  “Gampa!” Homer said. “Finally. I’ve been looking all over the galaxy for you. What are you doing on the floor?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Myell bolted upright. “Where the hell have you been?”

  Adryn asked, “What?” She obviously couldn’t see Homer.

  Neither, could Cappaletto, who said, “Huh?”

  “Nothing.” Myell untangled himself from the blanket, stood up, and gave Homer a pointed look. “I need to go walk around.”

  Homer, who was dressed today in purple trousers and a flowery shirt, spread his arms wide. “It’s not my fault. You know how hard you are to find now that you’ve figured out how to direct yourself?”

  Myell wasn’t going to get into a conversation with an invisible visitor, not in front of Cappaletto and Adryn. He moved off between the cots with the blanket wrapped over his shoulders. Homer followed, as he expected. Talking and talking, which Myell also expected.

  “I know you think I’m not much help,” Homer said. “But I tried to warn you! You wouldn’t listen. Everything I do is for a good reason, Gampa. A million of them. And so it would really help if you gave me the benefit of the doubt once in a while, okay?”

  There was little privacy anywhere to be found, but Myell settled on a narrow alcove. He spun on Homer and tried to wrap his hands around his neck. His fingers passed through Homer’s flickering image without any hindrance at all.

  “Not really here, remember?” Homer waggled his eyebrows. “Student. Concerned observer.”

  “I want the goddamned truth,” Myell said. “For once in your miserable life. What do you mean now that I know how to direct it? I’ve never known how!”

  Homer laughed. Actually laughed, the little bastard. Though it sounded more hysterical than amused.

  “You don’t know?” Homer’s gaze went upward as he struggled for composure. “I didn’t see that coming, not at all. Here I thought you’d figured it out.”

  Myell wanted to kill him all the more. “Tell me.”

  “Don’t you think I want to? All I want is for you to succeed. To get to Kultana.”

  “I was there,” Myell said savagely. “Jodenny died.”

  Homer said, “No. She didn’t.”

  Myell tried to strangle him again. His hands passed through nothingness. He demanded, “What do you mean, no?”

  “I saved her. Her and Sam. You didn’t make it easy for me, Gampa. I had to sneak around, couldn’t do it in front of my advisers. You know those academic types. I was almost too late. But I got them out and to a safe place.”

  “What safe place?”

  Homer looked past Myell’s shoulder. “They’re coming. Gotta go. Get back to Kultana, Gampa! The right way!”

  And then he vanished.

  Myell slapped his hand against the rock face where Homer had been standing. His fingers stung at the sharp bite of stone but he didn’t care. Damn it all. Jodenny’s copy couldn’t be alive. But if she were? Waiting for him somewhere, she and Junior both, who knew where.

  He wanted to kill Homer.

  Myell turned and found Adryn standing an arm’s length away, staring at him.

  “I recognize you now,” she said. “You’re Uncle Terry.”

  Fatigue sluiced through him, turning his legs to jelly. “No. Your uncle died on Burringurrah a long time ago.”

  Her expression didn
’t shift. “You were talking about Jodenny. I remember her from the time you both visited our farm.”

  Myell sat down on the hard ground. “The only Jodenny that I know was stranded on a planet called Providence. She’s still there.”

  “Why are you lying to me?”

  He shook his head. He pulled his knees up and rested his head on them, trying to think through Homer’s game. It wasn’t as if the blue ring followed his orders. Dozens of times he’d tried to verbally or mentally direct it to specific times and places. Sure, he’d been thinking of the Roon this last trip, and the ring had brought him here. But the trip before that, he’d been thinking of Kultana and the ring had brought him to Darling.

  All of the eddies he’d ever visited either revolved around Jodenny or somehow involved the Roon. The armada, the invasion of the mountain, these mines.

  At least two of those places had Anna Gayle in common, and he wasn’t willing to discount her presence at the mountain.

  Myell put his head back, banging it slightly against the wall. “The Monitors,” he asked Adryn, his mouth dry. “Do they understand human speech? Can they be used to communicate with the Roon?”

  Her mouth twisted in disgust. “They don’t want to be communicated with. You can talk to them until you’re blue in the face if you want. They won’t send down more food, any medicine, and doctors. No amount of begging or pleading work.”

  “I don’t want them to send anything down,” Myell said. “I want them to take me up.”

  Adryn said, “You’re crazy.”

  “And I want you and Chief Cappaletto to come with me,” he added.

  It took some time for Myell to convince Adryn and Cappaletto that he was not, in fact, insane. It helped that he remembered many of the details of his trip aboard the Confident and things he couldn’t possibly know otherwise, including specifics about Adryn’s wife and their cabin, and the decorations in the chiefs’ mess.

  “A time-traveling supply chief,” Cappaletto muttered. He was sitting on his cot, his elbows folded on his knees. “Stranger things have happened, I suppose.”

  Adryn said, “You can’t possibly think your life will get better if you make yourself and your situation known to the Roon.”

  “The Roon already know,” Myell said. “Or at least one of them does, I think.”

  Adryn shook her head, her mouth a thin line.

  “I’m game,” Cappaletto said.

  “To throw your life away, Tom?” she asked.

  “It’s not much of a life right now,” Cappaletto said. “And if it’s one step, or a bunch of steps, toward bringing the Roon down? I’m game to try. Lead on.”

  Myell took in a steadying breath. Now that he was really contemplating doing it, he wasn’t sure he had the nerve. “All we need is the nearest Monitor.”

  Cappaletto stood. Adryn remained sitting.

  “I’m not ready to give up,” she said. “Whatever happens is fine for you, Uncle Terry. If they kill you or keep you alive, you get to keep traveling. But who knows what happens to us? You say the timeline reverts, but how do you know from our point of view? Tom could get killed and stay dead. Or he could stay alive, tortured by the Roon because of this fool plan of yours. Whatever copy goes gallivanting off with you will never know.”

  Cappaletto said, “I’m willing to take that chance, Lieutenant. Good scenarios or bad.”

  “I’m not,” Adryn said.

  The shift bell rang. Weary members of several species stumbled to their feet and walked toward the lifts.

  “Please,” Myell said.

  She shook her head.

  Cappaletto steered Myell down a narrow passage to a small, sloped cavern not much bigger than a birdie. The place smelled worse than anywhere else, despite the large ventilation grille ten meters overhead. The Monitor at the back of the cave was surrounded by what looked like small bones and dried, leathery flesh.

  “When we first got here, there were a bunch of little aliens that looked kind of like upright iguanas,” Cappaletto said. “They used to shed their tails and leave them here, sort of a tribute. They all died off in the end.”

  Myell looked up at the ventilation grille. “Anyone ever try to climb up that?”

  A snort was his answer. “Sure. People have tried. There are plenty easier ones to get to than that one. The Monitors shoot them down.”

  “I won’t make any sudden moves,” Myell said.

  He approached the Monitor carefully and slowly. The silver beam that had been sweeping the overhead and cavern came to focus on him exclusively. A cold sensation, like the touch of an ice cube, spiked on his forehead. Myell ignored it. Cappaletto, beside him, didn’t move at all.

  “My name is Robert Gayle,” he said. He’d debated which name to use. Better this lie. Better the memory of a man that Myell had never met, but who’d once been important to Gayle. He continued, “I need to talk to Dr. Anna Gayle. She’s my wife.”

  The Monitor did nothing.

  Myell said it again. “My name is Robert Gayle. We need to talk to Dr. Anna Gayle. She’s my wife.”

  “We don’t know that the Roon speak English, or anything like it,” Cappaletto murmured.

  “One of them does.”

  So he repeated it again: who he was, what he needed. And again. Once a minute for the next several minutes, and for the next several more. Cappaletto stood silently beside him throughout it. Myell thought about the enormous leap of faith Cappaletto was making by being there with him in this small foul prison of rock and rotted flesh. He repeated his statement again, and then once more, and until his voice started to crack.

  Cappaletto handed him the small canteen. Myell took two gulps and wiped his lips with the back of his hand.

  “My name is Robert Gayle—” he started again.

  The rock wall behind the Monitor started to move.

  “Bingo,” Cappaletto said.

  Two Roon emerged from the passage in the rock. They were as large and menacing as Myell had ever seen them, and the weapons they held did nothing to diminish the impression. Myell resisted the impulse to step backward. He raised his hands in surrender, and Cappaletto did, too.

  “I hope you know what you’re doing,” Cappaletto said, and for the first time there was a tremor in his voice.

  Myell looked over his shoulder, hoping Adryn had changed her mind and joined them, but the cavern was empty.

  The hidden space behind the Monitor was a small elevator. It was big enough for two humans and two Roon, but just barely. The walls were smooth gray metal with no sign of a control panel. When the car picked up speed Myell looked in vain for something to hold on to. The dizzying, lurching feeling of swift ascent made him close his eyes. He had no idea of how fast they were traveling but had the impression they were barreling upward in a way that couldn’t end well; they were either going to slam to a bone-crunching stop or continue onward and upward until he blacked out—

  Something popped, like a cork from a bottle of champagne. Cappaletto, who obviously didn’t have his eyes closed, said, “Jesus. Look at that.”

  Myell blinked at the gray sky surrounding them. The car’s walls had turned translucent. Below them, rapidly receding, was a barren landscape of rocks, crags, and craters that looked as inhospitable to human life as Earth’s moon. Smoke plumed out of fissures and large, motionless drills stood in decay and ruins on the tips of mountains.

  “You can’t tell,” Cappaletto said. “Thousands of people down there, and you can’t even tell.”

  Myell forced his gaze upward and regretted it. An enormous city of metal and rock was floating in the sky overhead them, attended to by hosts of flying aircraft. It was larger than any Team Space freighter Myell had ever served on. It spoke to a technology so far in advance of humanity’s achievements that defeat was inevitable. Team Space didn’t have cities that flew, or elevators that doubled as aircraft. The sight of so much metal and engineering and sheer power made Myell want to go back down into the mines and curl up in hi
ding rather than face Whatever was waiting for him above.

  He told himself that nothing they did in the city would matter. The blue ring would come for him no matter what. But he’d dragged Cappaletto into this mess and for that he was sorry.

  Cappaletto didn’t look like he had any regrets, though. He looked scared, and impressed, but not as if he wished Myell had never passed through his life.

  “That’s something I never expected to see in my whole life,” he said, his forehead pressed to the translucent wall.

  They slowed as they got closer to the city. A port opened and the little car sailed into it gracefully. The walls turned gray and opaque again. The doors opened to a long dark passageway with white markings on the walls and deck. They reminded Myell of the Aboriginal cave markings he and Gayle had observed so long ago. Art of some kind, or maybe history lessons, or regulations on how to treat human prisoners; maybe the markings were security notices or safety manuals or the history of the Roon empire, laid out for all to see.

  Cappaletto, though, wasn’t looking at the markings. His head was tilted upward. “Look at that,” he said hoarsely.

  Myell tilted his gaze.

  And gasped.

  A river of beautiful blue-green water rippled over their heads, flowing gracefully down the passage ceiling in total defiance of gravity. A faint mist drifted downward, fresh and dewy against Myell’s skin. Water, water, everywhere and not a drop to drink, he thought. He wanted to laugh at it, but a prod in the back from one of their Roon escorts moved him forward.

  With the markings beneath their feet and river over their heads, they were forced to Whatever fate awaited them.

  There was no opportunity for Myell or Cappaletto to try and seize their weapons to turn the situation around; that had never been the plan, in any case. They passed no one, saw no one. Myell thought that was deliberate. He had the idea this part of the floating city was remote and not used often, though he didn’t see any dust or other signs of neglect.

  He was still shirtless, though he had shoes on and trousers still rimmed with Darling’s blood. He felt grimy and insignificant. Cappaletto looked filthy, his uniform in rags, but his head was high.