End of the Circle

by Jack McKinney

  The fiery stream of starfire stopped, dissipating, as Haydon IV moved away from Laskar again. As it went, Haydon had word from the Awareness of troubling findings.

  At the edge of perceptible space there were aberrations and anomalies. The fabric of the continuum was losing integrity, and whole regions seemed to be disappearing.

  Time was growing short, very short. Haydon IV’s drive activated, its course charted for Optera. It went superluminal and vanished.

  Still Rem drifted; still the nucleic dreams showed him the past.

  Not even Haydon could predict how things would develop, while he slept, on the worlds he had touched personally.

  Therefore, he left instructions with the Awareness that if any arrived with enlightenment, or even some portion of it, the Awareness would recognize that by certain signs.

  And Zor had manifested such a sign; much (though not all) of the Awareness’s data revealed itself. Zor mentioned the Texts of Haydon, of which he had learned, and they were opened to him. But not translated for him. He had to demonstrate certain aptitudes or begone.

  The Texts of Haydon resembled no book or archive before them. They were a cyclorama of thought images and psimemes. But Zor, with his Flower-altered mind, found them intelligible—barely. Had he not, the Awareness would have known and slain him on the spot.

  He forgot about food and sleep, laboring to receive the disembodied knowledge until it seemed his brain would burst like a lightning-struck tree. But stopping was unthinkable, and he persisted, pausing only to ingest another petal or two of his shrinking Flower supply or, when he remembered to, drinking water from a font the Awareness had set by him.

  In that manner Zor came to know the story of Haydon, first and greatest of the intellects spawned by the galaxy (the Texts had a bewildering way of referring to Haydon in the plural one minute and in the singular the next). In exploring and mastering the universe around Him, Haydon had gained immortality and probed the essential secrets of Creation.

  But when His exploration of the universe seemed to hold no further mysteries, no further challenges, Haydon still had not found the answers that He longed for, the destiny for which, He was sure, He had been called into being.

  Some of His investigations indicated to Him the existence of a level of being beyond those that could be seen or touched. Of a place outside His continuum where Haydon could at last find fulfillment, achieve a level of being that had become an undeniable need.

  And Haydon found that He could not reach that other side. Every approach failed, every assay fell short, until at last Haydon faced the fact that He could not attain transcendence.

  But that did not mean some other life-form could not.

  And so began an age of grand experimentation, epic journeys, profound contemplation, and unprecedented megaprojects. The Garudans were endowed with their expanded senses and their psychotropic biosphere. On Spheris, crystal life-forms were given an evolutionary helping hand. An investigation into thought control went awry on Peryton, leading to the holocaust Moebius in which the planet became trapped.

  Not least importantly, Haydon IV was given form, and its Awareness was brought to life.

  Zor read on, feverish with the need to know. At last he came to the mention of Optera and the Invid. A curious race, Haydon found, with some promising characteristics, but apparently at an evolutionary dead end unless something new were added. And Haydon had that something in mind, an intriguing plant He had encountered.

  The organisms on the plant’s planet of origin did not seem to be exploiting the plant’s potential, and so Haydon transplanted the entire species to Optera—leaving none behind. Zor stared long and hard at the image of the Flower’s original home, such an unremarkable little place …

  The introduction of Flower of Life to the Invid was like the recombining of long-sundered halves. Almost overnight the Invid’s entire existence came to revolve around the Flower and something they seemed to perceive in it.

  (A lab mutation of the plant, the ur-form called Sekiton, was introduced to Karbarra. But while the ursinoids there found many uses and demonstrated a peculiar affinity for it, the experiment was essentially a failure.)

  The star-spanning experiments Haydon had begun were set in place, and Haydon began to prepare for His long sleep, weary of the tedium of immortality. The event of transubstantiation would cause His artificial world to awaken Him—more accurately, to return him from mere stored information to physical form.

  The ticking off of the centuries began.

  Zor lashed out, stopping the parade of thought records as a seething rage took hold of him. It had been bad enough to know that the Robotech Masters had perverted his discoveries and the Protoculture to evil ends—that the Zentraedi had laid waste to Optera.

  Now, in addition, Zor understood that his meddling and the Masters’ fiendishness had derailed a bold and unique attempt to push living intelligence through into an entirely new realm.

  Zor threw back his head and roared up into the echoing spaces of Haydon IV’s inner reaches, fists raised high, for the sheer iniquity of it all. The waste and suffering and loss, the death and devastation.

  His fury combined with his contact with the Awareness gave Zor a moment of lucidity unlike any other he was ever to have. He suddenly had a vision, a Grand Design, of his own. He would atone for what had happened.

  It was all there before him: a reseeding program; a mighty new starship incorporating everything he had learned about Protoculture with which to execute his plan; a renewal, especially of Optera and its idyllic way of life; and eventually, a return of the galaxy to the way it had been before the rise of the Robotech Masters.

  And lastly, he thought, he would return the Flower to the world on which it had originated, for who could tell what role it had yet to play there? Yes, even Haydon had been shortsighted in that instance; the Flower deserved to grow once more in its appointed place, the unremarkable little blue-white world called Earth.

  His exhaustion, his hyperstimulation through mental contact with the Awareness, his ingestion of the petals—perhaps it was just a combination of these. But the fact was, it was the image of Earth, the invocation of it, that brought on his seizure.

  Zor cried out, thinking himself blinded, hands clamped to a skull that threatened to fly apart.

  He saw a column of pure mind energy rising from the Earth, a pillar of dazzling force a hundred miles in diameter, crackling and swaying, swirling like a whirlwind, throwing out sheets of shimmering brilliance. It climbed higher and higher into space, all in a matter of moments.

  Zor knew what the mind cyclone was, recognized it as the racial transmutation of the Invid. The pinnacle of the cyclone abruptly gave shape to a monumental bird, a phoenix of mental essence. The firebird of transfiguration spread wings wider than the planet and soared away, bound for another plane of existence, with a cry so magnificent and sad that his heart was wrenched by it and he was changed forever.

  Zor shuddered, sobbed, and fell to the floor weeping, then lost consciousness.

  In the sphere ship, Louie Nichols gathered the survivors of his team. Other personnel were distracted by the strange, swirling limbo through which the craft was passing on its way between continua; it was the cybernauts’ chance to regroup.

  They set up a prefab secure cubicle high up on an unoccupied platform. Louie was helped onto a robot med diagnostic table that deployed itself from a compact shipping case.

  There were some gasps when he removed his tunic and they saw the marks the cyber-burn had left on his body.

  He gritted his teeth. “All right, quit gawking. You know what we have to do.”

  They did. The headlockers began unpacking machines and remotes, fitting them together, and patching into power sources with protech proficiency.

  Louie’s mouth felt very dry, and when he tried to lick his lips, he could not work up any saliva.

  Several remotes floated in at him. Behind them were the surgical waldos loaded with the i
mplants and bionics he needed and wanted to receive.

  Louie drew a deep breath and lay back down on the table.

  Rem awoke. His head was still in Minmei’s lap, but her tears had long since dried. His face was slick with moisture, however; he was crying as Zor had.

  Minmei sang softly, sadly.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-SIX

  When Nichols emerged from that lockbox cubicle his disciples had set up, he was the same studiously irreverent young pain in the neck who’d gone in—with some noticeable increase in vigor and agility. But there was also an undertone of indefinable strain to him.

  I resolved to keep an eye on him; he played his part well except for one occasion during transit, the one slip that hinted at the change in him: He leaned to a scope that was controlled by a sensor and of course accepted it matter-of-factly when the scope swiveled to him and adjusted height, focus, etc.

  What he didn’t know was that the auto-adjust mechanism wasn’t working—had developed a glitch and been switched off. But the scope’s servos had obeyed his silent will, anyway.

  It was no time to confront Nichols and his familiars, but thereafter I kept an even closer watch on them.

  Dr. Harold Penn,

  The Brief but Timeless Voyage of the Peter Pan

  For her the tribulations of the passage were a multiple torment, because she was not One but Two.

  Marlene had heard the humans refer to the ghosts and visions, memories, and chimeras as space lace. She had heard them talk of out-of-body episodes and afterlife experiences. They were all but unintelligible concepts to her; being in her present body was phantasmagoria enough, her life a nightmare almost beyond coping.

  By the time the hijacked sphere ship plunged into the gravitational abyss of Ranaath’s Star, she seemed a ghost, a semitransparent thing of ectoplasm fading fast. In a kind of terminal sleep, she was unaware that Scott Bernard kept a bedside vigil, though it made him nearly insane with guilt and heartache.

  Marlene/Ariel’s fold-jump dreams were a kind of mental multiscreen image deluge. She, too, experienced the birth/death trauma, understanding it in a way she never otherwise would have because in that moment the nucleic memories and perspectives of the original Marlene Rush resurfaced.

  But, as well, she felt the cellular tide of the Invid like a moon-drawn ocean within her, swelling and falling. Ariel knew the all-encompassing sadness of the great Invid downfall and the loss of their paradise, recalled the unity of plasm that the Invid shared and what it was to be a race literally sprung from one flesh.

  Marlene saw once again her youth, her coming of age on the REF expedition.

  Ariel went through her strange birth, a shivering, naked simulagent delivered by a Protoculture-spawned egg.

  Marlene: falling in love with the taciturn but idealistic Scott Bernard.

  Ariel; the bewildering travels across a blasted Earth with the last Robotech fighters.

  Marlene relived the moment, on the deck of a starship racing to do battle with the Invid conquerors, when Scott asked her to marry him and she said yes. Ariel witnessed the defeat of her race and the transfiguration of the Invid into a phoenix of psiessence—and saw, too, where the phoenix flew.

  Both were also silent watchers of each other’s memories, like visitors to alien screening rooms. Their/her consciousness was wrenched this way and that by the unimaginable forces grappling at the sphere ship; between torment and joy they attenuated her …

  Until there came a moment of profound trauma, the cessation of external influences—the ship’s emergence into newspace. With an almost physical jolt, the two halves of her were snapped together, fully integrated for the first time.

  She opened her eyes and saw Scott gaping at her. She looked down and saw that her body was completely materialized once more. She felt a tranquillity and quiet triumph. She was healed and whole.

  He breathed, “Marlene.”

  Marlene. Yes, that was the name that fit her best, even though Marlene’s memories and identity were only a component of what she was now. Ariel was a name the Regess had given her capriciously, and she was not Invid anymore.

  She lay on a pallet spread directly on the ship’s deck. Scott came to her side on one knee, hesitating to take her hand but wanting to. “You’re alive. Thank God.”

  He was haggard and drawn, not from the passage to newspace, she knew, but from self-torture over what he’d done to her. With the disparate parts of her mind and psyche integrated, she understood what he had done and what external pressures it must have taken for him to do it.

  His sense of duty, his fealty to his oath of service, his feelings of obligation to those on the SDF-3: those were human things, and Marlene understood them now.

  “Yes, Scott. Alive.” Her hand covered the last bit of distance to grasp his. His expression swung from astonishment and doubt to relief and the beginnings of rapture.

  Before he could answer, though, a face appeared over his shoulder, long and pale with insect goggles, wearing an irrepressible smirk. “Back in action, huh, Marlene? Aces! Scott, didn’t I tell ya this little jaunt would give her a new lease on life?”

  There stood one of the main pressures that had forced Scott to treat Marlene as he had back on Ark Angel. Scott didn’t know if Louie Nichols realized how lucky he was that all this had worked; had Marlene been put through all her anguish for nothing and perished, somebody would’ve paid.

  Scott only grunted in answer to Louie’s promptings and put his other hand on Marlene’s. “Lie back, now; you’ve been through a rough time.”

  “Scott, I know what I’m saying. I’ve made a full recovery. Besides, I presume Doctor Nichols has some more questions forme.”

  She looked at Louie slyly. She still had that otherworldly strangeness to her, but there was a certain human knowledge behind it now. Louie found himself realizing what a dish she was. “You said it, gorgeous!”

  Scott shot him a jealous glance, and Louie reined in a bit. Marlene rose to her feet without any difficulty, shaking back the waves of crimson hair.

  “Um.” Scott smiled awkwardly. “Welcome aboard the REF prize-of-war vessel Peter Pan.” He shrugged.

  Marlene stepped forward to look out over the inner globe of the ship. There was no shortage of space; a fairly healthy piece of legendary Macross could have been rebuilt inside the yawning sphere.

  Improvised bridges, ladders, and catwalks connected the various levels and platforms, and human furnishings had been fastened to its decks with adhesives and strapping; the techs and engineers could find no way to drill or bend the stuff of the ship. “ ‘Peter Pan?’ ”

  “Yeah. ‘Second star from the right, then straight on till morning’, and all that,” Louie supplied with one of his quirky shrugs.

  Marlene watched people laboring over the interface equipment required to run the ship or setting up living facilities on unused platforms. It was odd to see portable sanitary booths side by side with modules of Haydonite technology and to smell heated rations there where Protoculture had been intended as the only sustenance.

  There were parked mecha, too, and piles of weapons, ammunition, and ordnance; but no weapons had been mounted on the ship itself, since it was impossible to penetrate its hull for firing ports and anything mounted externally would have been annihilated in the passage.

  “We’re sure bombin’ along now.” Louie scratched his hennaed hedgehog of hair. “Thing is, we’re not all that sure where we are. I hoped you could give us a clue, Marlene.”

  As she stood there gazing out, she wore the expression Scott had seen that day when she had first cast eyes on a mountain lake, not long after his team of irregulars had found her. Her beauty and her delight in nature’s beauty had simply taken hold of him and never let go.

  She smiled faintly, “What’s the matter, Doctor? Afraid the others will think you’re crazy if you tell them yourself?” She turned to Louie, who was for once speechless. Scott had the feeling that behind the goggles, byte buckar
oo’s eyes were starting from his head.

  “You’re in what some call newspace,” she told them.

  “Is the SDF-3 here?” Louie’s levity had left him. “Is the Regess?”

  Marlene turned to see what effect it would have on them both. “Newspace is the Regess—is the entire Invid race, in a way. We’re outside the province of spacetime. You might say we’ve entered the mind of the transubstantiated Regess herself.”

  Louie was quick to get in the next remark while Scott was still making choking noises and trying to shift mental gears. “Marl! Babe! Hey! Work with me, here! How do we talk to her?”

  The corners of her mouth turned up ever so slightly. “I think you’re about to learn.”

  The two men followed her gaze and saw what others were becoming aware of. On a platform near the center of the ship’s interior, Aurora stood, a blue glimmer growing up around her. Max Sterling, standing near, had started toward his daughter, but Miriya was holding him back. As they watched, Jean Grant, too, put a restraining hand on him.

  All through the ship people stopped working and turned to watch Aurora as they became aware of a chant impinging on the very fringes of their perception.

  Au-ro-ra, Au-ro-ra, Au-ro-ra …

  The rest of the ship’s complement seemed to freeze, as if they were playing statues, listening to the cadence. Vince Grant, listening to some report; Shi-Ling, at the interface helm; Dana, poised on a maintenance job on her hovertank—all eyes went to Aurora.

  All at once Aurora was not alone. Seated in a ring around her were what looked like transparent holograms of children large and small. They sat repeating their mantra, eyes lambent with eldritch fire.

  Jean Grant breathed, “Roy!”

  “Drannin!” Miriya added.

  But neither they nor the others in their circle gave any sign of having heard. They were focused on Aurora, and she on them.

  Louie, hypnotized by it, too, almost jumped in the air when Marlene spoke at his shoulder. “ ‘Straight on till morning,’ Doctor.”

  Kazianna landed on streamers of fire, her weapons ready, as mecha and running ground troops closed in on the open field from every side.