Medusa in the Graveyard (The Medusa Cycle)

by Devenport, Emily

  I studied the bulkhead from which the thing was hanging. A loop passed through it, but I saw no hole, no soldered spot through which it would have been threaded. It looked as if the very atoms of the loop and the bulkhead had blended together. “If this thing is a model of Time,” I said, “then where are the instruments in this ship?”

  Ahi glanced around, as if my question were a distraction that hardly deserved her attention. “None of the ships in this part of the graveyard have obvious instruments. I think the people who used them operated them with their thoughts.”

  “Are they the ones who made the loops?” said Ashur.

  Everyone looked at him. “What?” said Ahi.

  “Time is hanging, but who made the loops?” he quoted.

  “Who makes the loops,” corrected Dragonette. “So they must still be making them.”

  We watched the loops, which did not appear to be moving. Yet they didn’t seem quite static either. Ashur moved farther up the slope, then pointed. “What’s that planet called?”

  Ahi joined him. “I don’t know. That’s not a planet in our solar system.” She cocked her head, considering the intruder. Then she walked farther up the slope. “Okay—now it looks different again. I see two more worlds that don’t belong in our system, but I don’t see Graveyard anymore, and I don’t see the world Ashur just pointed out.”

  “I’m getting a bad feeling,” said Kitten. “I don’t want you to walk around anymore. Come back.”

  Ahi returned immediately. After all, Kitten had been the one to lead us here in the first place. Ahi knelt next to Kitten, wobbling a little when her backpack pulled her off-balance. “What do you want to do now?” she asked Kitten.

  “I want us to leave,” said Kitten, “together. Right now.”

  “Okay.” Ahi got to her feet again. “Let’s go.”

  We turned our feet around and followed the slope down again, this time with Ahi in the lead. I couldn’t help looking over my shoulder at the model before it disappeared around the bend. It still looked like a model of the Charon system from that perspective. I had to wonder—were those loops just about Time? Could they be about gravity? And Space?

  If I stood there looking long enough, would they take me somewhere?

  If so, I wasn’t ready to go. I followed the others out of the seashell spaceship, whose operators had moved it with their minds. Such beings would not have looked like us. Maybe they were intelligent cephalopods.

  They may have looked something like Medusa.

  We followed a new path, which began to climb again as we wound our way through the ships and the fossilized reef.

  “I think we learned something,” said Ahi.

  “Then how come you’re so puzzled?” said Ashur.

  Ahi frowned. “Because it was so much information. It was just—” She shook her head. “—huge! Like when you ask what time it is, and someone explains the whole physics of time to you. I don’t get why the ships felt they had to tell me so much. I’m hoping they don’t expect me to do something with all that information right away, because I kind of get it, but I kind of don’t.”

  “I mostly don’t,” said Ashur.

  I refrained from telling them that I thought the model was pretty, since that sounded a bit frivolous. I had liked looking at it.

  “I have a theory,” said Dragonette.

  “Me, too!” said Kitten. “But you first, Sister.”

  “I think it may have been a model of the time fractures,” said Dragonette.

  “Me, too,” agreed Kitten.

  Everyone but Kitten and Dragonette took a long moment to digest that idea.

  “So it might be a sort of map?” Ashur said. “That we could use?”

  “If so,” said Ahi, “I don’t trust myself to use it. Not yet.”

  Still, I had a feeling she might figure it out someday. I thought of the way Fire and Queenie worked together to find and target intruders in the Charon system. Could they be using something similar to the model—the map—we had just seen?

  I might never know because that information was proprietary. I have to confess, I wasn’t sorry about that. My brain hurt. As fascinating as the model had been, and as beautiful as these alien ships were, I was ready to be done with the day. My eyes felt sore from the light, and my muscles let me know they had been used enough, thank you very much. My throat was so dry—I pulled out my water bottle and prepared to drink the last drops, trying not to wonder how the hell we were going to get more.

  My bottle was full.

  “Hey,” I said, coming to full stop.

  The others stopped and turned. When they saw me drinking deeply, they pulled out their own bottles.

  “Well,” said Ahi, “that’s nice.”

  She took a long drink, and Ashur did the same.

  With water inside us, we all perked up. When we began to walk again, my spirits lifted. Things seem to be going our way, again, I mused.

  We passed a ship with an open pressure door, and Ahi stopped to look at it. Darkness yawned inside.

  I hope she’s not going to suggest we go in and look for a bathroom, I thought. Our ship was nice, but that one gives me the creeps. Besides, cephalopods would have really weird bathrooms.

  “I think that’s another time fracture,” said Ahi. “Someone is trapped inside.”

  Whoever they were, they weren’t inspiring any sympathy in me. In fact, I kind of got the feeling that the person or people trapped in there should stay there, maybe forever.

  As one, we turned and hurried away, but it felt like trying to run from something in a nightmare. All my good feelings had reversed. The reef canyon was still beautiful; it looked the same. Dazzling light still played on the walls, but I felt like we had to get out.

  “Kitten,” I said, “wrap yourself around my waist.”

  She obeyed. Dragonette curled her tail around Ashur’s pack frame, and we two-legged people ambled along as fast as we could.

  We established another odd cadence as we made our slow escape. It felt like a sort of dance. The idea made me want to giggle—we could be players in one of Kitten’s musicals. I stifled the urge.

  Down the silent path, past empty ships that had once been moved by minds but were now residents in a barrier reef, we labored through the overheated afternoon. Up ahead, we saw another natural bridge, this one eroded into pale red sandstone. Could it be that easy? I wondered. Under one bridge and into fractured time, out through another into normal time?

  Ahi passed under the bridge, Ashur and Dragonette right behind her, and Kitten and I brought up the rear. This time I made sure I was close enough to touch them. Once I had cleared that space, we all turned and looked back. Through the gap, we could see one of the ships.

  You’ll be back, it seemed to say. The thought was wistful rather than threatening.

  “Thank you for letting us visit,” I said aloud. “Thank you for—the information.”

  When I turned back again, Ahi was smiling at me. “You get it,” she said.

  Maybe most of the people she had guided didn’t get it. If so, I was glad to stand out from the crowd.

  Tall fins of sandstone towered on both sides of the path. Ahi scanned the ribbon of sky overhead. “I hate to tell you, but it’s about the same time out here as it was when we went in.”

  “It felt like a million years in there,” said Ashur.

  He wasn’t exaggerating. It really had.

  Ahi fixed him with a solemn stare. “We’re terribly old and wise now.”

  Ashur frowned. “No, we’re not.”

  She laughed. “Will I ever get you to stop being so serious?”

  “We could have been fossilized in there!”

  Dragonette hopped down from his pack frame and onto his shoulder. “I think we would make very attractive fossils.”

  Ashur threw up his hands. “Okay. Hooray. Whatever.”

  Ahi made a visible effort to put away her smile. “Anyway, my point is that we’ve still got a ways to go
before we camp. Let’s walk until we can see the Three again. We’ll get our bearings. Maybe we’ll eat something. For sure, we need to get away from Seaside Canyon. It’s pretty, but I think we tested the limits of our luck in there.”

  No one could argue with that. We sipped some water and started off down the trail. It sloped down again, so we had that going for us. Considering what we had just been through, it wasn’t much comfort. Personally, I was ready for Joe’s Canyon to dump us at the front door of a nice hotel, where we could all have hot showers and order room service.

  Instead, we marched through fine-grained sand while the sun beat down on our hats. We’re not inside a time fracture anymore, I wanted to tell that pitiless orb. It’s okay if you move behind one of these rocks and cast a bit of shade on us.

  However, as slow as that march seemed to be, it wasn’t as slow as the passage of time in Seaside Canyon (nothing is, under normal gravity conditions), and eventually we got a bit of shade for our trouble. I worked out that we must be moving roughly southwest, along the flank of one of the sandstone buttes. We continued to descend, and I began to despair that we would glimpse the Three again. Could we end up too far south? Though at least we were moving sort of west … ish.…

  Our path ended at another flight of stone steps. They weren’t so convenient as the other natural stairs we had encountered—these required some scrambling between some of the steps. Kitten had relaxed enough to unwrap herself from my waist, so she leaped to the top of each step and then encouraged me up, offering plenty of advice, some of which was even helpful. At last I joined my young and energetic friends at the top.

  Together, we gazed at the Three. No longer distant spires, they appeared to be a few kilometers away.

  I knew we hadn’t walked that far, but I didn’t bother asking about it. After all, time could fracture inside the canyon. If that happened, who knew what those fractures could do to space?

  Ashur sounded dazed when he said, “I didn’t know they were so big. Each one of them must be as big as Olympia.”

  “They sure look like it,” I agreed.

  If so, the Gorge must be huge. From our vantage, I could see space between the cliff walls and the foremost of the Three, but I couldn’t calculate how wide the gap was. It might be a few hundred meters. This close, I could see that the ships weren’t standing side by side; they were staggered.

  Ashur asked what I was thinking. “So who put them here? Why would they land in the Gorge? Why would they land anywhere on a planet?”

  Dragonette hopped to the top of Ashur’s pack frame. “Maybe the people who put them in the Gorge are the same people who make the loops.”

  Time is hanging, but who makes the loops?

  “Well,” I said, “I suppose we just hike toward the Gorge?”

  Ashur shaded his eyes and stared intently at something. “What are those things?”

  I looked where he pointed. Something hovered in the air between us and the Three, three things that moved closer, fast.

  “Those are dragonfly units!” said Ahi.

  As they got closer, I could see three things that reminded me of the insects with the iridescent wings that had hovered over Maisy’s Pool, except that they might be as big as we were.

  “I think—” said Ahi. “I hope they’re coming to get us.”

  “Get us?” said Ashur. “You mean they’re going to…”

  “Fly us,” said Ahi. “We’ll strap them on, and they’ll take us to the Three. We won’t be able to bring these packs.” She began to shrug out of hers.

  Ashur frowned. “But all our food—”

  “We can take some of that,” said Ahi, “and the water. Stuff your utility pockets with everything they can hold, and secure the water bottle to that loop on your pants.” She riffled through her bag, extracting necessities. Ashur and I unstrapped our packs and did the same. It felt good to put down the weight.

  I wondered—were we about to leave critical supplies behind? Just because three dragonfly units had shown up out of the blue? Would they really take us to the Three? If they did, would they bring us back again?

  Were we about to get stranded in the middle of that gigantic canyon system without critical supplies?

  I stuffed my pockets until they bulged. I stuffed my face, as well, eating one of the bars I couldn’t fit into my pockets. Those extra calories would do me some good. I just managed to swallow the last of it when the dragonfly units swooped down to us and lighted.

  “Dragonette,” advised Ahi, “I think you should hold on to Ashur’s belt loop. Kitten, will you be secure around Oichi’s waist?”

  “Yes,” said Kitten.

  “Then let’s get going.” Ahi moved to strap herself into the middle dragonfly. “The Three are waiting.”

  20

  Ghosts and Avatars

  I have default “majesty music” that plays in my head when I see something grand, the “Saturn” movement from Gustav Holst’s Planets Suite. Its tempo, created by chord changes between harps and flutes, evokes a grim procession, the relentless march of time. Underneath this, two double basses introduce an ominous current. As more instruments are brought into the march, the sense of despair is washed away by grandeur, by wisdom, and that’s what played inside my head as we flew above that sundered landscape toward the Three, who stood with their titanic feet buried in the Gorge.

  Puzzlement began to erode my sense of grandeur, though. This close, the Three didn’t remind me so much of Olympia. For one thing, they didn’t look like they were made to rotate. They weren’t like giant versions of Merlin, either, or like the Sentinels, or even like Itzpapalotl. I couldn’t see their contact with the ground—it was too deep in the Gorge—but I got the feeling they weren’t sitting on giant fins, maybe just because they didn’t look like rockets. Though they did have an odd sort of symmetry.

  When I focused on parts of them, their geometry looked planned rather than innate—you couldn’t mistake them for giant crystals, though the spots at which they had contact with the spires of rock that surrounded them did exhibit some of those qualities, as if the chemical matrix of the minerals had bonded with their skin.

  Mount Olympus, I thought. Times three. Kilometers wide and many more kilometers tall, few natural mountains could rival the elevation of the Three, at least not on a world with Earth-like gravity. Though they shared some of the qualities of the rocks among which they stood, they were not cold machines. Somewhere, deep inside, they had organic components and minds—and those minds still thought, though they were supposed to be mostly dormant. Even half asleep, the Three were aware of us. I felt their regard.

  They’re waiting for me to do something, I thought. I weighed the risk of trying to talk to them with my implant. The northern gods might consider that an act of hostility. Did the Three have more clout than the northern gods? Even if they did, would they back my play?

  I needn’t have agonized over whether to reach out to them, because they reached out to me.

  Their touch activated my implant. I still saw their physical forms, metric tons implanted in the bedrock of Graveyard, but now I also saw their true forms.

  The Three were energy signatures extending into dimensions beyond those my normal senses could perceive. They were minds that spent much of their time in calculations, measurements, and observations that led to hypotheses, which in turn led to judgments about how to best employ the energies at their disposal. Most of all, they were memories.

  The majority of those memories were still submerged and inaccessible. The store was so vast, it made me feel as if I were suspended over the deepest part of an ocean. What lay beneath the surface was the history of their race. Not everything in the store was obscured; some things could still be glimpsed.

  The contact ended as quickly as it had been initiated, but what I saw in that brief connection made me realize that the Three were not weapons. Their purpose was not that blunt or unimaginative. There was a very good reason why they weren’t shaped like any
other ship I had ever seen. To the Three, any other form of space travel I had seen was primitive. They couldn’t just go anywhere they wanted in the universe.

  In a way, they were already there. They were so much smarter than us, I wasn’t sure we could make the right decisions about how to interface with them—assuming the decision would be ours, once they woke.

  Are we ready for this? I wondered. What have I done?

  If Sheba and Bomarigala hadn’t announced their intention of visiting the graveyard, would I have been this reckless? Up until that point, I had been content to wait for the Three to decide whether they wanted to wake. In fact, if I thought about it at all, I assumed it may take them centuries to decide that. Looking back, I had found that idea comforting. Whatever the consequences, I wouldn’t have to sort them out.

  I marveled at the gall of the schemers who had made us. Now that we were so close to them, I wasn’t sure I had the courage to ask these Three Giants for a drink of water.

  I had asked their avatars plenty of questions. I had liked them, even the one for Lady Sheba, because that one had been the noble personage Lady Sheba only dreamed she was. That one had been wise, and cunning, and full of good suggestions while Medusa and I had plotted and schemed. She and the avatar of my mother had been my allies. This was what I had to reconcile, now that I could see the Three as they really were. I had trusted them. I had wanted to understand them.

  Was that a mistake?

  The agent who stole our DNA from the Three hadn’t made it out of the graveyard alive. Somehow, I hadn’t imagined that I might end up in the same situation as that ill-fated thief, struggling in a maze created by entities who seemed more whimsical than logical.

  How whimsical had the Three been when they chose their avatars to speak to us? Maybe whimsy had nothing to do with it. Maybe I had been playing into their hands all along.

  Ashur and Ahi flew ahead of me—I couldn’t see their faces. Dragonette held tight to Ashur’s belt loop, and her little face also pointed toward the Three, away from me. I felt Kitten’s warmth around my middle, and I thought about the packs we had been forced to leave behind. Are we expendable? I wondered, remembering the dead thief of DNA.