Beyond the Veil of Stars

by Robert Reed

  She could be describing a walk to the moon, as preposterous as it sounded. The canyon wall had to be a mile high, probably higher. But he was too tired to doubt, much less argue; never in his life had he wanted to believe in someone so much.

  Back to work.

  The rain lashed at them. Cornell took a load of boards from the man above, and that man’s body turned and stepped badly, into the air and gone without sound, without fuss. Then it seemed to take the man forever to realize what had happened, a second body walking down as if hunting for the missing one. Peering over the edge, it sniffed at the air.

  “Go rest,” Cornell advised. “I’ll cover for you.”

  By the next morning, they’d dismantled the last of the old ramp; their steep, treacherous ramp was within throwing distance of its target. Porsche met Cornell at the midway point, with one body, telling him, “Great news.” Her voice was flat and tired. “It looks like a giant greasewood covered with nuts. I’ve got a body down there now, trying to cut to the meat…”

  Cornell couldn’t walk his bodies far from their mind anymore. It was a symptom of fatigue, not too different from being too stiff and sore to touch the top of your own head.

  “One last push,” she told him.

  He said, “We need to talk.”

  The eyes closed, opened. Then she said, “Soon.”

  “Soon,” he echoed.

  A weak smile, and a wink. “Do something for me?” The body breathed, words forming in the belly. “Get Logan. He’s supposed to be waiting in the cave.”

  “You think he’ll come with me?”

  “Give him the chance. Use your discretion.”

  He looked past the body, watching tiny dark figures work on the last stretch of the ramp, pounding with worn stone hammers. He couldn’t hear them and could barely see them—motions puny against the greater motions of wind and rain and the river—but as he stood watching, one of Porsche’s arms began to swing for no reason.

  “What are you hammering?” he asked.

  And she looked at the arm, astonished and then amused. And she broke into a soft dead little laugh.

  Logan was waiting in the cave, huddling behind rancid skins.

  “Are you here to rescue me?” he asked Cornell with a bright, sloppy voice. “Are you with the rescue team?”

  It made everything simpler. “Yeah, that’s me.”

  “Don’t listen to the others.” Logan’s eyes were huge, sleepless and somehow dead in appearance. “They’ve stolen my authority. Even my best people are poisoned.”

  Cornell stopped, watching Logan’s bodies shuffle forward. “Do you recognize me?”

  Logan squinted. “Should I?” Faces tried a different angle. “No, I’m sorry. I don’t know you.”

  Cornell waited.

  “Have we met?” The voice was icy calm, utterly reasonable. “Are you high up in the agency?”

  “Very high.”

  “Oh, good. I’m glad you’ve come. You have to see these things for yourself.” A pause. A collective shake of the heads. “They’ve all turned on me.”

  “We know.” Cornell thought for a moment, then said, “That’s why we’ve replaced them. It’s all new people now.”

  “Wonderful!”

  Cornell grabbed Logan’s mind and dragged it to the cave’s mouth, then began fixing its harnesses to the ropes and pulleys. Logan’s bodies stood about passively, one and then others leaning out over the edge.

  “We don’t have far to go,” said the madman.

  Ignore him, thought Cornell. He concentrated on his knots.

  “It’s a golden city, the one at the river’s mouth. I’m eager to get there. I wish I was there now.”

  What else did he need to do?

  “Can you see the city?” asked Logan.

  “Not now, no.”

  “Have you?”

  “A couple times, yes.” Cornell paused, then asked, “Can you see it right now?”

  “Clearly.”

  Could he? Or was he suffering a hallucination?

  “It loves us.”

  “What does?”

  “The City.” Logan’s faces smiled without smiling, eyes wrong and every needly tooth showing. Then the expressions changed, and he asked, “What did you do with them?”

  “With whom?”

  “The mutineers.” A quick pause, then he asked, “Are you keeping watch over them?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Particularly that bitch Neal. Watch her!”

  “Think so?”

  The man giggled suddenly, with force. Then he said, “Just take care of her. Like you did with that one woman—”

  “Which woman?”

  “That Mayfly. Remember? She went off to CNN during her off shift, slipped her tail and spilled everything—”

  “I remember.” Cornell felt very cold, completely awake now.

  “You sure fucked her over, didn’t you? Not that it’s hard. Crazy aliens and worlds and new bodies…but that business with those medical files, giving her a mental history. That was a sweet way of handling it.”

  Cornell pushed the mind into the open air and rain, Logan’s bodies showing only a vague interest.

  “Neal is dangerous,” Logan muttered.

  Cornell said nothing, holding the ropes as the mind dangled in space.

  “Maybe you should do what you did to that one jerk.”

  “Which jerk?”

  “Mine. From HD. I’m sorry, I can’t remember names just now.” He shook his heads. “Threatening to go to the U.N. and report us. Thought he could slip past Security with proof…but you stopped him first, didn’t you?”

  “We did,” Cornell replied.

  A laugh, almost soft. “Where do we find these unbalanced types?”

  “Was that jerk unbalanced?”

  A thin, piercing whistle, and Logan said, “You are when you jump from a big fucking building, you are.”

  “Did he jump?”

  “Did he jump?” Another giggle. “You tell me.”

  Cornell waited, then made one mouth ask, “What about Novak?”

  “Who?”

  “Cornell Novak. Is he much of a risk?”

  That brought an enormous laugh, hands swiping at the air. “With his father? That shit even steps toward the media, and we’ll make him look like the craziest fucked up shit ever born!”

  Cornell was aware of his hearts beating, synchronized, and the feel of ropes in his hands. He thought how he could release the ropes, the mind falling and probably punching its way through the ramp, spinning blind into the maelstrom—

  “Porsche the Bitch,” said Logan. Scornfully. “A gold-plated cunt, and a natural. Not fair, is it?”

  Cornell began lowering the mind, hands over hands, using excessive caution because he wasn’t a murderer. This man was in his care, and ill, and he wouldn’t let any harm come to him.

  “Know what we should do?” asked the madman. “Ship that cunt through the worst intrusions. The ones nobody ever comes back from.”

  “How many are there? Like that?”

  “You know how many. Most.” He watched his own hands close into fists, then open again. “Maybe we should ship every sick shit and danger into those intrusions. Empty our jails? Empty our world?”

  Cornell said nothing.

  “We could pour Chinese babies into the intrusions. Think about it!”

  The mind touched the ramp, wet boards creaking.

  Logan peered down, faces quizzical. “Whose mind is that? Do I know him?”

  “Does he look familiar?”

  Eyes blinked and blinked, the question already forgotten.

  Then Logan gave a start and said, “Look! The ramp goes down all the way, doesn’t it?”

  “To the river,” Cornell promised.

  And the dead eyes turned to him, trying to focus on him. “That’s going to be far enough.”

  “Far enough? Why?”

  “The City will find us there,” Logan assured him.


  Cornell stood motionless, trying to think.

  “The City loves us,” Logan told him.

  “But why does it love us?”

  Faces turned together, as if hearing the same distant sound. Then the mouths were smiling, showing teeth, and an odd slow voice said, “Because it knows we’re such good people…”

  3

  The river was days old and thoroughly amoral, charging down the arroyo and the canyons, gaining speed and depth as it uprooted forests and gnawed at the canyon walls. It collected trophies—tree trunks and stones and drowned bodies—and the bodies would bloat, bobbing to the surface, legs stiff and extended with a strange deathly vigor. Cornell would watch the bodies sliding past, small against the churning gray-black waters, and he felt compassion mixed with cold amusement and a genuine sense of relief. They weren’t his bodies. But sometimes, for brief moments, the dead eyes seemed to gaze up at him, outraged yet confident, and Cornell could hear ghosts whispering:

  “Very soon, you. Very soon, you.”

  They had rested on the rock shelf for more than a day, sleeping for most of that time and eating the sweet fatty nuts while awake. Cornell felt new bulk on his bodies, his strength returning. He seemed to adapt to the thick air and dampness. People began to feel good enough to complain among themselves, a couple of near-fights brought on by a collective rage. Logan was cursed openly, without pause or effect. The one-time leader just stared off into random directions, intent on something, and he muttered to himself, the words incomprehensible.

  The river kept rising, but maybe it wouldn’t reach them. Maybe. The old tree must have weathered these floods, Porsche argued. But just in case, she told them to pick limbs where they could lash their minds, putting themselves a little closer to the sky.

  She made plans for good weather. One of Cornell’s bodies found one of hers sitting at the shelf’s edge, using a stick to draw the canyon wall and an enormous ramp zigzagging to the top. She was deciding on angles and likely distances. “Guesses, guesses,” she said, offering a smile. Nobody else was in earshot. She put down her stick, and the smile dissolved into a sudden little bitterness, and she said, “All right, I give up. What’s happened to you? Why not just tell me?”

  “What? Tell you what?”

  “Ever since you’ve come back,” she began, “you’ve been strange. If I didn’t know that pretty face, I’d say it wasn’t you.”

  She touched him, cool hard fingers across his mouth.

  And he said, “I found my mother.”

  Her outer lids closed tight. “Tell me.”

  Cornell didn’t think he wanted to tell it, but once started, the story had its own life, its own rhythm. He told about the man he had hired, about the biography that was compiled, and the actual meeting, including his ugly trick about the insurance money. He began to quietly cry, tears impossible but the rest of it the same. He shuddered, aching within. He had a sudden premonition of death, not wanting to die now. Not here. Looking at those crude diagrams on the ground, he knew it would take months for them to manage such a ramp—if they ever could—and his body shivered, holding itself while saying:

  “It’s funny. Funny-strange. I’ve been angry at my father forever, and because he lied about Mom. And now all I want is to believe that lie again. I might do anything to convince myself—”

  “But you can’t,” Porsche said, her voice sharp. Certain.

  He breathed and nodded, and he smiled with resignation.

  “And that’s not the problem,” she continued. “Not the problem I mean. That comes when you look at me, love.”

  They weren’t lovers. He resented her little endearment, then realized he wasn’t being fair. Porsche deserved fairness. Trying for it, he talked about going home, going back through his father’s extensive records about black glass disks…and how Dad had invested half of his life into trying to understand them, striving to give the disks some clear meaning, glorious and perfect.

  Porsche listened, waited. Scarcely breathed.

  “Anyway,” he said, “I had an idea. Or maybe I adapted an old idea that comes in all kinds of flavors.”

  “What idea?”

  “The disks are markers.” He swallowed. “Their meaning is simply to say, Here. This spot. Here.”

  She said nothing.

  “But for whom?” He swallowed again. “Did you know there’s a disk on the agency’s grounds? It appeared when it was a weapons lab, and it’s in line with the other intrusions. I checked. There’s a big building around it now, and it’s under guard. But nobody seems to use it, which makes me wonder if our bosses tried their fancy equipment on it, and they failed.”

  “Failed?” she said with a quiet voice.

  “How many intrusions are there? I mean on the earth. Millions? Billions?”

  A vague shrug of the shoulders, then she asked, “Why?”

  “At New Reno, we mark the intrusion with flags and stones.” He waited for a moment, then added, “Glass makes a good, long-lasting signpost.”

  She bent lower and gave him a little smile.

  “If the agency’s equipment worked on the disks, then we would be sent around the country to the ripe ones. But you see, the worlds we’re visiting have old-fashioned skies and no great technologies. High Desert and the rest are backwoods places. Intelligence is new, or it’s at a dead end.”

  “Perhaps,” she allowed.

  “Moving through a disk might take a different set of keys.”

  “Maybe so.”

  “I’m guessing, I know.” He offered an embarrassed shrug. “But I can make assumptions from what I do know. For instance, there were a lot of strange lights seen before the Change. Yet not anymore. You told me that we’re trespassing in other people’s yards, but what if they came to visit us? Like kids exploring an unfinished house?”

  She picked up her stick, using just her fingertips, eyes focused on Cornell. “What else?”

  “The lights were some kind of general evacuation. Hidden bases were being torn down, moved out. Humans were going to become aware soon. At least more aware. Maybe they didn’t want confrontations, or maybe…I don’t know…maybe leaving is the mannerly thing to do.”

  “What about the disks?”

  He looked past her, across the river, trying to choose his words, saying just what he needed to say.

  “The disks are markers, you claimed.” She set the stick aside, then asked, “Why leave markers when you leave the earth? If you wished to avoid confrontations, why show the way?”

  He could think of reasons, and he could stop the conversation now, giving whatever explanation would suit the sketchy data.

  But he didn’t. Instead he asked, “What happens to us if we stay here? By accident, or by choice. Suppose we reproduce and leave descendants, and a thousand years from now High Desert everts its sky and discovers the intrusions. Who is picked for the first missions? Our distant descendants would have inherited some of our talents. They would go. And maybe on a second world, by accident or choice, they would stay and mix our same talents into the genetic pool.” A pause. “Can you accept that, Porsche?”

  She said, “Maybe.”

  “Now imagine millions of years, thousands of worlds, and a kind of natural selection.” A wave of one hand. “Imagine the earth over the last million years. Creatures come to visit through our intrusions, and the human species gets the occasional useful gene. Genes that translate through and make us ready for our own Change. The genes that make me talented enough for the agency to hire me—”

  “And me,” she interrupted.

  Cornell gave a very slight nod of the head. “My mother and my father gave me double doses of whatever this talent is. Like it or not, I was born to trespass.”

  “And not just you,” she whispered.

  Then he said, “No,” and waited for her eyes to look at him. “With you, I think, there’s more. I don’t think you’ve ever needed a vacation day. I think you’d be comfortable as a fish or a Mayfly or any
other creature that could be wrapped around your intellect.”

  Her eyes shone like obsidian, and she held her breath, mouth closed and hands at her sides.

  Now Cornell touched her, at last. Fingers on the face. And he told her, “There are thirty-two disks in northern Texas,” before asking, “Which one is yours?”

  “None of them.”

  For a slippery instant, he was terrified that he was completely wrong.

  Then she said, “It’s in New Mexico, up in the Gila wilderness.” Her hand rose and grabbed his hand, squeezing as she said, “Besides a few backpackers and hunters, nobody’s found it yet. Which is fine by me, love. Which is perfect.”

  Now it was Cornell’s turn to listen, the stories incredible and reasonable, and after a while, almost routine. Porsche’s family came from an everted world, and the glass disks marked the proper intrusions. They were permanent gateways, sophisticated and much tougher than the crude intrusions that the agency used. “Which are more like knotholes in the fence than gates,” she claimed. Several thousand families were scattered over North America, assimilated by almost every measure. The products of eons of selection, they had their own society, their own tried and true means of keeping in touch with each other. “I don’t even know where most of my family began,” she admitted, whispering it, looking about to make sure they were alone. “My mother’s mother is first generation. She lived on a cold planet with ammonia seas and a weak red sun, and its sky everted when she was a little girl. A strange man saw something in her and brought her parents gifts, honoring them and her.” A pause. “Did I mention? Her species were giants, and they live in floating seaweed forests. Very lovely, really.”

  “You’ve been there?”

  “Once. Just once.” A wistful smile.

  “What do I call you?” he asked.

  “Why not Porsche? That’s my name.”

  He squinted, watching a single tree trunk racing past, worn slick by the abrasive waters. “What’s your species’ name?”

  “Homo sapiens.”

  He must have looked surprised.

  “We become whatever species we become. A perfect translation.” She sighed, then asked, “If we took some all-encompassing name, how could we assimilate, love?”