Stars Beneath My Feet

by D L Frizzell

  Having nailed that one, I moved on to the next display case.

  This was the one Seku had shown me earlier. I paused briefly at the picture, held up my hand long enough for the wisps to dart out and swirl around my hand, and then winked at Seku. She smiled back, and I moved to the last display.

  This one was the hardest to comprehend. I didn’t hear or see anything. I held my hand out and moved it slowly back and forth, waiting to see what else the T’Neth considered art.

  “What’s Marshal Vonn doing?” Mayford asked.

  Loro turned from her discussion with Kate and her eyes went wide. Covering the distance between us in a hurry, she exchanged a look with Seku and waved everybody else back. “Give him space,” she said in a hushed tone.

  I frowned at the attention everybody suddenly gave me, but Loro urged me to continue what I was doing. “Please, Alex, do not talk. Return your gaze to the box.”

  “Okay,” I said slowly, wondering why my impression of T’Neth artwork should be so important. Whatever, I was curious anyway.

  As I leaned in closer to the last display, I didn’t see or hear anything like the other pictures. All I felt was a sense of a growing need, like a mental version of hunger. Maybe I felt self-conscious about being watched. That had never been a problem before, but today was different. Trying to forget that everybody was staring at me, I refocused on the picture.

  The feeling of a need lingered, or that maybe a task needed to be done. Nothing was definitive; it was just a sense of…unspoken possibilities. That sounded vague. I hate vague. Vague is like an itch I can’t scratch. I stared at the display, somehow knowing it created this gnawing sensation. Unlike the other displays, however, it did nothing to clue me in. That bugged me, and I almost gave up. I’m not big on guessing games.

  Puzzles, on the other hand, are made to be solved.

  I considered that the other display cases were all part of a mural. They all had built-in clues, though each one was different. There was no mental image in this one, no sound, not even blue wisps to give me a visual clue.

  A thought germinated in the back of my mind. It was slippery at first, elusive. It moved like a wandering speck in my eye, easy to see but impossible to focus on. I covered my face with my hands and listened. Nothing. I moved both hands close to the box. Nothing. This fourth case didn’t focus on any aspect of mental powers like the other displays seemed to, it was the absence of mental powers. Was Loro testing me with some kind of calming device? I didn’t think so. Of all the people on my team, I was the only one who hadn’t been affected by the calming field when we arrived at the station. There had to be something here, because Loro seemed very interested in my reaction to a complete lack of input.

  A wandering thought came into focus just long enough for me to glimpse its silhouette. The answer was there, despite the fact that the display case was essentially devoid of substance. Unless, I thought, this puzzle was more like a jigsaw puzzle, where the final piece’s outline can be inferred from the way the other pieces fit together. It was a question of negative space. Could I tell what the fourth piece looked like by knowing the other three?

  I walked around the station, peering at the artwork, and at the other people around me. If the missing piece were to be found in the negative space, in the vacuum between the others, would it be found in a different dimension? I sensed I was close to the answer, but it eluded me.

  The answer wasn’t in a different dimension, but it was in a different perspective, one that stood apart from telekinetic powers, or telepathic thought, or even the ability to facilitate communication between those distinct mind-types. I was looking for a fourth ability that was contrary, yet complementary. I began pacing back and forth, suspecting that the answer would not be in the display case, but that I was on the right track.

  “Alex?” Norio said. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said. Not having the patience to explain, or even the words, I ignored the questions that inevitably followed.

  I looked at the museum artifacts on the tables. What were they, really? I ran my hand along the loom, and then the vase – though Mayford shuffled uncomfortably when I picked it up, though I handled it with the kind of care that such artifacts deserved. Somehow, the last object seemed more significant than the others. It was an ornate ball of stone with a hand-sized hole at each end, made of granite, bulky but not hard to lift. The center of the ball was hollowed out, and another ball occupied the cavity. It wasn’t a tight fit, and I found that I could rotate it with my fingers. The second ball was made of a different substance than the outer ball. It was a red stone, smooth and glossy with symbols carved into it. I dismissed the thought that there could have been no way to get the red ball into the larger one – the hole was far too small - so I focused on turning the inner ball until I found another set of holes that lined up perfectly with the first set.

  Inside the second ball, I saw a third one, made of another kind of stone. Jade maybe. I reached in and rotated that one into alignment also. A fourth ball, made of blue metal, was little more than a ring. I turned it so that all the holes were lined up and I could reach through it with my arm.

  What now? I wondered.

  “Maybe it isn’t a geometry thing,” I said aloud, more to myself than the other. “Maybe it’s…” I threw my hands up in surrender. “I give up.”

  “Wait,” the ambassador said, suddenly raising both her hands and cocking her head to one side.

  “What?” I said, thinking I’d disappointed her yet again. As I tuned in to her thoughts, I knew that wasn’t the case.

  “There is an emergency in Dolina,” Loro said. “You must go back!”

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  There are times when pleasantries and goodbyes are not necessary. This was one of those times. Without asking the Ambassador how she could have known there was trouble, I turned without hesitation and ran toward the train. Redland, Hathan-Fen, Mayford, and Norio followed closely on my heels. Seku beat us inside, taking her seat with such speed that I could almost have thought she were a blue wisp herself, unburdened by physical laws that would otherwise slow her down.

  “Seku,” I asked as the others dropped into seats that had formed in the blink of an eye. These weren’t the fancy couches we’d had earlier, but large, smooth buckets with the same plain white coloring as the train’s walls. It struck me that these could be the default seats that the T’Neth normally used while traveling. “How fast can you get us to Dolina?”

  She gave no indication that she comprehended my words, but obviously knew what was needed. The space inside the train had already been filled with a frenzy of blue wisps.

  Kate and Loro moved to board the train as well, but I stopped them.

  “You two need to stay here,” I insisted.

  “Alex,” Kate pleaded. “I want to be with you.”

  “No,” I told her. “Stay here with Ambassador Loro.” Without waiting for an argument, I pulled back into the cabin and nodded to Seku. The door reformed with an ear-popping thud, and I took a moment to place my palm against the now-sealed wall. “I’ll be back,” I whispered under my breath. “I promise.”

  Seku focused her mental energies on the equations and formulations that would get the train moving again. Her efforts were so concentrated that she glowed within a cocoon of radiant calculations. Wisps swarmed, filling the space inside the train as well. As I reached blindly through the glare toward an open seat, I stumbled.

  “You okay, kid?” Redland asked.

  “Fine,” I said. “It’s just a little bright in here.”

  He frowned, clearly not seeing the bursts of mathematical fireworks surrounding us. “If you say so.”

  Seku drew upon all her skill as an engineer to accelerate the train toward Dolina. I closed my eyes, but that only filtered out what my eyes could see. Wisps and feverous calculations buzzed around me, seeming almost like a fevered hallucination. It was as if Seku’s imagination had taken solid form.
Or perhaps it was more real to her than we were, I thought. In a blur of mental acuity, she continually adjusted the train’s shape to accommodate the forces of friction and air compression within the tunnel, while accelerating the whole time. Eavesdropping through her heightened telekinetic senses, I perceived the temperature rising to dangerous levels around the train’s nose cone. She was pushing the T’Neth technology to its limits. In my mind, I saw a number that indicated our velocity, plus some warning indicators, but even those figures altered so quickly that I couldn’t distinguish the details. This was Seku’s world, and it bent to her expert will. I could only observe in amazement.

  My head started to hurt. Somewhere nearby, I heard voices, but they were far too muffled to understand. Had I gone deaf? Blind? Even my body was numb.

  An eternity later, the calculations vanished. Seku sat in her seat, hands crossed on her lap, mind emptied of thought, with beads of sweat running down her forehead. I felt a sort of whiplash as my normal senses washed over me, and nausea joined the parade of sensations. I opened my eyes, retched, and discovered I was sprawled on the floor.

  “Alex, what’s wrong?” Hathan-Fen asked, near panic in her voice.

  I swallowed hard to keep the bile in my throat, waving her off. “I’m fine,” I muttered, squinting like a man seeing daylight for the first time in years. “We’ve stopped, by the way.”

  The door liquefied and became stairs again. Heat shimmers radiated around the doorway and washed into the cabin as if somebody had opened a cookstove. The edges of the doorway glowed red hot. Those edges curled outward, either because they were melting or because Seku was trying to shield us from the hull’s glowing exterior. Redland and Norio dragged me out of the train, keeping me away from the hot edges. I heard the tips of my boots juddering over the concrete floor, though I could not feel the bouncing motion in my legs. They got me to the station’s far wall where the heat was tolerable and sat me on one of the cushioned benches.

  Seku joined us and knelt down to examine me. She held a hand out before my face, which I assumed meant she was asking how many fingers I saw. When a pair of blue wisps formed next to each other between us, I drew a little infinity symbol around them.

  Her expression was one of pure relief. She wrapped my hand in a cloud of wisps, which I interpreted as an apologetic embrace, and then let them disappear.

  “Go ahead,” I smiled weakly. “Get out of here.”

  Seku nodded. After a quick inspection of the hull, she re-boarded the train. The door closed behind her and the train whisked into the tunnel.

  “You wanna explain what happened just now?” Redland asked.

  “Hard to explain,” I said. “Let’s talk about it later.” I still felt a little wobbly, but much better without all the blue geometries throwing off my equilibrium. “I’m fine. I really am.”

  We hurried through the hallway to the heavy door that opened to Dolina. It seemed like years since we came through there the first time, but it had been less than a day. My headache disappeared, and my senses recovered enough that I only had a few leftover spots swimming in the corners of my vision.

  Mayford palmed the touch screen, letting it read the biometric scan of his hand. Instead of opening the door, he tapped a command on the screen and watched as it became a picture window. We saw a view of the tunnel in full color, though the image was warped as if looking through a glass ball. The tunnel was empty.

  “Can you tell us what’s going on?” Hathan-Fen asked Mayford.

  Mayford tapped the screen again and read a column of green text that replaced the image of the tunnel. “It appears there is a fire on the drilling rig,” he said. “They are still investigating the cause.”

  “What are the chances this emergency is a coincidence?” Hathan-Fen asked, her tone suggesting that it wasn’t a coincidence at all.

  “We are always prepared for fires,” Mayford replied. “This is the first time I have heard of one.”

  “We’ll need our weapons, then,” Redland said. He didn’t need to elaborate. We were all thinking the same thing.

  Mayford nodded and tapped the screen a few more times. The door clicked open.

  We hurried through the door and made sure it locked behind us. Sirens blared down the tunnel from the left. Proceeding cautiously to the railway platform, we heard the rumble of metal wheels down the tunnel, punctuated by the squeals of suspension springs. A haze drifted around us, making the electric lights look dimmer while providing them smoky halos. Shouts echoed from deep within the tunnel. They were urgent, to be sure, but didn’t strike me as the kind of yelling that would suggest a psychopath had engaged in a murderous killing spree. Back the direction we had come, the waterfall was hundreds of meters away, too bright to make out any details other than the silhouettes of men standing around.

  “Did he find us?” Hathan-Fen asked doubtfully, referring to the man we were all thinking about.

  “He sure did,” Redland stated. “He wanted us to know he’s here. He’s always been a bit of a fire bug. It’s kind of his calling card.”

  “Is he saying, ‘boss, I’m here’?” I asked, my words dripping with insinuation.

  “He’s announcin’ himself to all of us,” Redland countered, his words even and forceful.

  “You led him here,” I said accusingly.

  “I did not,” Redland said stiffly. “Alex, you seem to enjoy accusing me of things that are literally impossible.”

  Norio drew in close to us, his face a mask of irritation. “Fight each other later. Fight Jarnum now.”

  “Where is he?” I asked, looking straight at Redland.

  “I don’t know!” Redland shot back. “You can bet your last slim he ain’t down by the fire, though.”

  “The main cavern is locked down,” Mayford noted, pointing to the men at the waterfall. “I doubt your escapee could have made it past them.”

  “Where there’s smoke, there’s arson,” I said, turning toward the cavern where the town stood. “Let’s check it out. Our guns are at your home anyway, Mister Mayford.” I leered at Redland. “You…lead the way.”

  Redland opened his mouth to speak but stopped himself. Instead, he nodded and ran toward the smoke. I ran after him, determined not to lose him in the haze.

  Mayford recognized a lone man with a conventional six-shooter standing at a makeshift barricade. “Charles,” he shouted over the sirens, “can you tell us what’s going on?”

  The man jumped in fear and swung his pistol around at us. His hands were shaky, and he had that panicked look of someone who never dealt with an emergency before. He wasn’t guarding anything. He was hiding.

  Charles stared wildly at Mayford for several seconds until a wave of recognition crossed his face. With a quick glance at the rest of us, he aimed his pistol back into the cavern. “That intruder shot up the cave,” he explained as he squinted through the smoke. “He killed one man and injured another.” He nodded towards us. “One of yours, maybe.”

  “Have we positively identified him yet?” I asked, keeping a careful eye on Redland.

  “One of your people identified him by the shackle on his arm,” Charles replied, his eyes darting to my badge, and then Redland’s. “Said his name is Jarnum, and that he must’ve followed you from Sunlo. How could anybody do that?”

  “We’re working on a theory,” I said, keeping my tone as flat as possible. It was a pretty damn good theory, too. It involved a crooked marshal and a criminal he helped to escape.

  “He knows how to track T’Neth,” Redland said, his shameless attempt at misdirection only making me angrier.

  I snatched the pistol from Charles’ hand before he could react and pointed it at Redland’s face. “That’s the story you told us before, Marshal. Seems more likely you left a trail of crumbs for him to follow.”

  “Dammit, you…” Charles said.

  “Relax,” I warned him off, and handed the pistol to Hathan-Fen. “Keep Redland here. Shoot him if he tries anything funny.”
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  Hathan-Fen raised the pistol halfway but wouldn’t point it directly at Redland. “This is what I meant when I said you two needed to get along,” she said. Despite her admonishment to me, she took a half-step away from Redland.

  Charles had his hands up, looking fearfully at us. He backed away and stumbled over the barricade.

  “Relax, Charles. We’re on your side,” I said. “This one,” I gestured at Redland, “is not to be trusted.”

  “If you say so,” Charles stammered, looking at Mayford for an explanation.

  “I’m so sorry,” Mayford said.

  Redland fumed, but wisely stayed quiet as he eyed the pistol in Hathan-Fen’s hand.

  “I’m going after the rest of our gear,” I said, climbing onto the garbage pile. “Mayford, you’d better stay here.”

  Mayford nodded.

  “Jarnum won’t be in there,” Redland reiterated. “He probably flanked these fools before they knew he was here.” He pointed back into the tunnel toward the waterfall.

  “How do you know?” Hathan-Fen asked.

  “Because I know how the cunning little shit thinks,” Redland shot back. “It’s more likely he’s already deeper in the cave, looking for Alex’s girlfriend.”

  Rounding the barricade, I ignored the frightened man. “I guess we’ll find out.”

  I hustled behind the nearest building, sticking to the rock ledges along the edge of the cavern so my footsteps didn’t make any noise. People were lined up, passing buckets from a water tower to the mouth of a tunnel where smoke poured out. A few men with rifles had taken cover in the vendor kiosks at the end of Market Street, keeping their weapons trained on the cave where we had first entered Dolina. Knowing that most of these people wouldn’t recognize me, I stayed out of sight while I circled around to Mayford’s place.