Beyond the Veil of Stars

by Robert Reed

  The Breaks began as bare rock and a nameless dip in the ground.

  It was a day and a half from the grove when Porsche had them turn downstream. The dip became a shallow, broad gully that someone had marked with stones. 15SW, he read. There was a master map somewhere, she claimed. This was the fifteenth arroyo in the southwest quadrant. From here, she explained, it didn’t matter if they kept track of directions. “Just follow the invisible water downhill, and we’ll get there.”

  The gully was deeper than it looked, filled partway with drifted dust. When did it rain? Cornell wondered aloud. “Not in our memory,” Porsche admitted. Was anyone working on the meteorology? “Science gets the short stick,” she warned him. “You should know it by now.”

  The world tilted, their gully becoming a deep stony cut spilling into a snow-white chute. The air filled with a succession of solid thuds as Porsche showed him how to let the steep parts take the trees for him. As Cornell prepared to lower his mind down the same chute, she warned him, “It’s your head. Don’t treat it like a lump of stone.”

  He was careful, probably overly careful. So with the next chute, after letting the tree lead the way, he got sloppy, hands only half-holding the braided harnesses and his bare feet sliding. It was just a few yards of smooth rock—earth-scale—but one body slipped and fell hard, cutting the legs out from under another one. And his mind slid faster, twisting and clipping a boulder, all of him going numb. It was like a blow to the head, and he was in agony. Blood-warm tar swallowed him, black and bottomless, and his bodies kicked and pulled, trying to reach the surface—

  —and then he was awake again, whole again. Porsche was standing over his limp bodies, conspicuously saying nothing. Like any good coach, she knew when a lesson was obvious enough even for a fool to learn from it.

  They found other people at dusk. Their arroyo had fed into a larger one, broad and dry save for a weak spring seeping cool water. Algae or something akin grew on the dampened rocks. Someone had hammered out a shallow pool where the moisture could collect. It was the first standing water he had seen in months, it seemed. His thirst felt genuine, bodies kneeling and drinking, and Porsche told him, “Fill their mouths and spit into your mind’s mouth. First. That’s done first.”

  It seemed natural when he tried it, as proper as the salad fork being set outside the dinner fork.

  Below the spring was a sloppy campground, and he counted half a dozen people. Three of them were upbound. Homeward bound. They acted happy in a cautious way, thinking of the desert to come. The others were permanently stationed here, in charge of whatever supplies came to them. They were officious little bureaucrats, one woman making notes about the fresh nuts and lumber. “Put them at the edge,” she told them. Edge? Cornell followed his partner’s lead, around a mild bend, and found himself at the brink of an enormous cliff. In some long-ago age, an entire river had shot down this arroyo, tumbling into the canyon below. The canyon was rough and barren, half-hidden by shadow. Some kind of wooden ramp had been fixed to their wall. The narrow thing looked slippery and worn, greasewood boards bound together with bark ropes and braided fur. It was a great and crude and clumsy structure, and it seemed wondrously brave, if something inanimate could be brave…

  “They’ll take it down for us,” Porsche explained.

  “How far down?” He couldn’t see any end to the ramp, losing it in the shadow. “Miles down?”

  “Remember our scale. We’re tiny.”

  He could be six foot two, and this place would feel enormous. “The ramp reaches the bottom?”

  “Eventually.”

  “Then what?”

  “Another trail, down and down.” She nodded, equally impressed with the vista. “I’ve heard there’s a second hanging road, then more canyons.”

  The western sky was orange flame centered on the burnished sun.

  “So what’s at the bottom?”

  “Who knows?”

  “But there’s something we can feel, right?”

  One body shrugged, then another. “Sometimes, yes.”

  “What kind of something?”

  “Think how you can feel other people. The ones nearby.”

  Like now. He knew the telltale sensation, as if he was in tune with the energies holding each person together.

  “It’s similar,” said Porsche. “But staggering. A million times more powerful, at least.”

  “You’ve felt it?”

  “A few times.” Eyes closed their outer lids, then opened again. “Not now. I can’t now.”

  “But what’s it feel like? Why’s it worth all this hard work?”

  “Sometimes,” she said, “it seems to feel us. And call to us. ‘Come here,’ it whispers. In a roar.”

  But not tonight, thought Cornell, gazing into the open air and reddening sun, the brightest stars winking into view…and he could feel nothing but a few feeble souls…

  They started back to the greasewood, and Porsche—again picking an out-of-the-blue moment—asked him, “Do you believe in the Architects?” Then she answered her own question. “I don’t. Not as one godlike species, I don’t.”

  “No?”

  “Do you think about them much, Novak?”

  It was a jolly challenge and a way of teasing. He thought how being with another person was like visiting another world; both had their rules, their personalities, and you adapted every day.

  “Never,” he reported. “I never think about Architects.”

  She didn’t seem to hear him. “We imagine them as some kind of first intelligence. First in the universe; first in our galaxy. They rebuilt everything, and we hope that we can find them somewhere.”

  “Is that unreasonable?”

  “But what if? What if life’s common? What if intelligence is easy? We’ve seen a handful of worlds so far, and they have smart beetles and fish and so on. It just seems that good minds are cheap. Nature seems to evolve all kinds of them. See what I mean?”

  He nodded. “I guess.”

  “But now suppose technology converges. Like water always runs downhill, let’s say that science and machinery move in the same inevitable direction.”

  Mixing fact with fancy, she sounded like someone else he knew.

  “When we first met” he remarked, “you called the universe one big suburb—”

  “Exactly.” One of her bodies adjusted its harness; the rest smiled and nodded. “Think of houses. Think of homes. By definition, they’ve got certain common features. Walls, a roof. Some sense of property, or at least personal space. That’s what a home is.”

  He said, “The universe. As tract housing.”

  “A magnificent kind.” A hunting body waved its spear. “Imagine millions of worlds spawning intelligence. Each house gets too full, too small, and that’s why they rebuilt their surroundings. The earth is a natural world caught up in the remodeling. Or maybe it’s something built from scratch, from spare dust, then tied up with everything else through the quantum intrusions…”

  Cornell listened, quietly absorbing her images.

  “Suburbia gets such a bad reputation. Boring and stark, and so on.” Hands gestured; mouths whistled little abuses. “I don’t agree. Sure, all the houses look the same when they’re built. Tidy and boring. But come back in fifty years, and what’s happened? People have planted every kind of tree, built every sort of fence. One house has cheap plastic siding, and its neighbor is the original wood. And still another is burned down, replaced by something modern and wonderfully out of place.”

  “Maybe so.”

  “No, I don’t believe in Architects. I believe in building codes.” She had a long laugh, then said, “It’s the perfect system.”

  “What is?”

  “The intrusions.” She glanced at him. “You’ve mentioned neighbors? The Petes? What if every time you stepped onto the Petes’ yard, you were transformed into a member of their family.”

  “I sort of was, actually.”

  “Just like we come here, beco
ming this other species. But we’re the only things that can cross the fence. We can’t take anything home with us. Most of us can’t visit for long. That makes invasions hard to manage. And even if we could stay here indefinitely, we just turn native. A couple of generations, and we’d blend into the general population, seamlessly and forever.”

  “You sound like my father,” Cornell said. “The way you talk about big picture stuff—”

  “Your dad sounds like an interesting man.”

  There was a reliable tightness around his chests. Then he made himself laugh, remarking, “You’re not just a dumb jock, are you?”

  She stopped. All of her stopped, gazing at him, her mind making the grit beneath it creak. Then she said, “Deserts are good places for contemplation.”

  He gave a little nod.

  “Try it sometime,” she suggested.

  But all she had were words. A bunch of words strung along some pretty, unproven ideas. The universe as a crowded real estate development; each world as a home with its own special tenants. Cornell didn’t believe it, but he didn’t deny the possibility, either. And sometimes during those next days, at unexpected moments, he found himself gazing at the empty desert, imagining houses and chain-link fences and boys climbing over the fences, their shapes and complexions changing from yard to yard to yard.

  They brought the last of the downed trees into the Breaks, then came upon a man heading for New Reno. The man said, “We found something new.” His whistles bounced off the stone walls, excitement mixed with exhaustion. “There’s a forest. And it’s not a greasewood forest.”

  “Down in the canyons?” Porsche asked.

  He had five bodies, one visibly pregnant and another injured, an arm wrapped in a stiff blackish bandage. “In the canyons, yeah. Real trees, and water.” Water was a sound rather like dripping water. “Trees like skyscrapers, thick air and these batlike things flying.”

  The man wanted to keep moving. His vacation was due, and sleep had become difficult. But before he left, Cornell asked about Jordick. “Black fur. A new recruit. Have you seen him?”

  “No, sorry. I never met him.”

  There was more news when they reached the dried waterfall. The man in charge—someone new, his mind’s fur brushed smooth and glossy—said they didn’t need any more wood or nuts. There was plenty in the new valley, and people were needed to help there. New orders, he said. “Logan wants everyone to join the main effort.”

  A woman overheard him. She had three tiny bodies, none of them visibly pregnant With a cutting voice, she said, “Let Logan do the work himself, as far as I’m concerned.”

  There was a silence, electric and sudden.

  Then the man said, “These are orders. We don’t have a choice.”

  But the woman ran up to Cornell, grabbing his bodies as if to hold him there. “Those trees are full of monsters. Monsters with bodies like shrews, and when they bite you, your body goes rigid with poison. But it’s not dead. It doesn’t die.” Fear sparked from face to face. “The monster drags you away and kills you when it wants.”

  “But we’re killing them, too,” the man interrupted. “More and more.”

  “And we’re moving deeper,” she continued. “We aren’t meant to live in that country.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Everyone knows. Have you been below?”

  He tried to say, “Of course—”

  And she snapped, “You haven’t been. Admit it.”

  Porsche motioned Cornell away from the others. He was imagining himself dying in pieces, consumed by enormous shrews; then Porsche was saying, “No more point in cutting down the greasewoods, is there?”

  “What will you do? Go off shift?”

  “Not yet, no.” She looked at him, and there was something in her faces, a longing strained through alien genetics and fatigue. He felt a desperate fear that something would happen to her. Something was going to go terribly wrong, and what then?

  She was saying, “You’re due to go on vacation, aren’t you?” And then, “The thing is, I know a lot of the people down there. I can help them hunt, making things safer.”

  He didn’t care about nameless people. He’d been with Porsche, without break, for longer than he’d been with almost anyone in his life. The idea of leaving her was a shock, cold and sudden.

  Porsche grasped his hands, her callused palms warm and their fur warmer. “I was thinking…we could schedule our vacations to overlap. You take yours now, then we take the next one together. We’ll get a room in Samoa, then turn vegetable for a few weeks. What do you think?”

  “Soon,” he implored.

  “Absolutely.”

  “And take care of yourself.”

  “Constantly.”

  He felt like a schoolboy. A neutered, multibodied schoolboy.

  “And take care of yourself,” she warned him. “New Reno isn’t an easy trip on the best days.”

  “We’ll both be careful,” he offered.

  “And don’t stay away too long.” A single finger brushed against one face. “All right? Promise me that?”

  Cornell left that next morning, five bodies pulling his mind. He passed the three-bodied woman before midday. Then he was up on the desert, moving as fast as possible. Sometimes in sheltered places he found foot tracks and the broad mark made by a dragged mind. He sniffed at the tracks and realized they were Jordick’s. “I’ll catch him tomorrow,” he promised himself. Except the next day brought strong winds blowing around the distant Rumpleds, lifting dust and the abrasive grit, throwing them into his faces. Cornell half-closed his outer lids, squinting as he moved. An instinct began to emerge, ancient and certain. There was a storm coming, and he needed shelter. A burrow. A ridge of hard white stone seemed to glow in the fading sunlight, and he made for it with six bodies pulling, almost running as the storm swept over him.

  In the darkness, by touch, he found a cave and climbed inside. Then he went into a deep conserving sleep, immune to the roaring wind, constantly dreaming and remembering none of the dreams when he woke two days later.

  The air was bitterly cold. A body slipped from the cave, breathing in sips, looking at a blood-red sun high in a gray sky. A sloppy soft shadow followed it as it explored. The other bodies emerged, pulling the mind into the open. The fur was groomed, then harnesses were lifted; and Cornell moved fast across the hushed landscape, dust falling over him like a fine gray snow.

  That next night he camped in the open, eating the last of the nuts and rat meat. He couldn’t sleep. He worried about Porsche and wondered about Jordick, then thought about other people, too. Solitude was bringing them out of his memories, the wilderness populated with ghosts: The Petes. The Underhills. Even Dad, for a moment. And then Mom. He pictured his mother, spoke with her; but the old game felt false, contrived. He gave it up and ignored the ghosts. Instead he concentrated on where he was, gray air fading to black and the serene desert that asked nothing of him. There was a freedom in having nothing expected from him. For the moment, Cornell was the perfect solitary creature, and he smiled when he thought of it, then succeeded in thinking nothing whatsoever.

  Not far from New Reno, he smelled Jordick again.

  He followed the scent, climbing a gradual slope that ended with a sharp dropoff on the windward side. Jordick must not have seen the dropoff. Judging by the occasional track, the man had moved through the storm, and at this spot, half-blinded, his desperate bodies must have stepped out into the air, pulling his mind after them.

  The mind was below him, black and dusty and eerily inert. Cornell eased himself down to it and saw where a sharp boulder had shattered bone, killing the mind, blood and dust mixed to form a crude cement. There was a slight, almost sweet odor of decay. Standing nearby were five small blackfurred bodies, placid and lost, Jordick’s face showing behind their stupid, dead eyes.

  He blamed Jordick. The man was impatient and weak, full of flaws…then he felt a twinge of personal blame. I could have found him sooner, h
e thought. I could have done a better job of looking after him. But it was Logan who had brought him here, stealing him from a place more suitable. Cornell stared at the bodies, wondering if they’d eventually wander into New Reno, begging for food. What was the decent thing to do? he wondered. His instincts told him nothing. He had to decide for himself, and he did the best he could.

  Three of his bodies picked up the black harnesses, jerking hard and making the dead mind slide. He couldn’t take Jordick across the intrusion—he was empty meat now—but at least he could give him a funeral. There wasn’t any cemetery on the New Reno maps, but somewhere there had to be ground, official or not, where people buried their dead.

  The black bodies watched their mind leave them, and some instinct, some habit, made them follow. Cornell looked back and wondered if he should put them out of their misery. Except, where was their pain? He turned his eyes forward again. After a little while he could feel New Reno. It was that sensation of bodies linked to minds—that’s what Jordick had been chasing through the storm, he reasoned—and he moved faster, dragging two minds up the face of a low gray dune, panting hard and in rhythm, making little dust devils whenever he exhaled.

  9

  F. Smith, reliably robotic and sitting in her usual chair, told him, “You’re near the top in most categories.” She sounded carefully pleased, gazing at scores derived from a couple of days of psychiatric shamanism. Clasping thick hands in front of her, she read, “…few residual reflexes…no phantom bodies…normal use of all fingers…and eating normally, according to room service…”

  “Some people don’t?”

  There was a twinkle, and she confided, “One girl took to eating ants in our yard. Live ants. And we had a man who’d buy mice at a pet store, eating nothing else.”

  “What happened to them?”

  “Oh, they’re fine. Now.” A pause. “Retired, and they’ve recovered.”