A World Too Near (3 page)

“Kids! Over here now. I want you over here.” Quinn walked up to the intruder. “So who the hell are you?”

The man sported a day’s growth of beard and piercing blue eyes—but watery, as though unused to salt air. The breeze rustled graying hair. He made no move to respond.

“Pissing me off,” Quinn growled at him. “This is my property.”

A reaction finally, a sour face. “Property. Like that other place? You know. That belongs to everybody. Not just you, Quinn.”

This stranger knew his name. Quinn was suddenly conscious that he hadn’t come armed on this excursion. Usually, outdoors, he carried a knife, an artifact of another place. But not today.

“That’s fine,” Quinn shot back. “But you’re on my property, fellow. You’ll leave now. Might try calling for an appointment.” Quinn looked down the beach. The kids were walking back toward him.

“Property,” the man said. He looked beyond Quinn, to the surf, the horizon. “Who do you think owns the water out there? The damn ocean.” He came closer, and his breath smelled of whiskey. “Everybody owns it. Same as the other place.”

“Other place?”

An unpleasant smile. “Yes. The Entire, isn’t it?”

Quinn hoped he’d heard wrong.

“The Entire,” the man repeated. “What you call it, right? Doesn’t belong to you or your damn company. Belongs to damn everyone. Think you’re the only one wants to have that nice
big life?” Spoken with righteous contempt.

“Get out of here. I’m calling my security. You better be gone.”

“Okay, sure. We’ll talk later, when you’re in a better frame of mind.” He emphasized
frame of mind
viciously. “Just want you to remember me, Quinn. And that I know. There’s lots of people who know. Keep it in mind.” He started to back off.

Mateo appeared out of the fog, coming to Quinn’s side. Quinn put his arm around Mateo’s shoulders.

“Where’s your sister?” Quinn murmured to him.

The figure in the parka moved off toward the dunes. He climbed the first dune and stood for a moment, a shadow against the glowering sky.

“A little warning,” the man shouted at Quinn, his voice tinny. He disappeared down the other side of the dune, leaving Quinn unsettled and nervous.

The fog blew in wisps, and the waves crashed again in normal cadence. “Where’s your sister?” Quinn asked.

“I don’t know.”

That jerked Quinn to attention. “She’s not with you?”

“I thought she was here with you.”

Then, Mateo in hand, Quinn ran down the beach. She was up ahead. Surely just up ahead. Quinn ran until Mateo cried out, and then Quinn stopped, knowing he had run farther than Emily could have gone in a couple of minutes.

Shouting her name, he raced for the dunes. He didn’t look at the surf. She hadn’t gone near the water; she was smarter than that. In the dunes, his instinct told him. He raced to the edge of the dunes, and crested the first one, looking wildly at the grasses and gullies. Seeing no one, he charged over the next ridge, and the next, calling. But she was gone. Gone with the man in the parka. Kidnapped.

The enormity of this thought tightened his innards.
Emily
, he said, barely breathing. Grabbing Mateo by the hand, he raced down the beach toward the cottage. There was only one road in and out of here. Sometime in the past few minutes he’d heard a car engine. Whoever it was had come by car.

Quinn stormed into the cottage to grab his keys, yelling for Mateo to go to the car. They met there and piled in. Quinn gunned the sports car out of the garage, yanking it around to climb up the driveway, and careened out onto the road. Choosing the direction toward the highway, he voiced a security alert and saw by the light on his dashCom that it had gone out. He drove fast, straining to see ahead in the fog.

“Did that guy take Emily?” Mateo asked, looking miserable.

“I don’t know.” He tried to wrap his mind around the situation. The word was out; people knew about things Minerva had hoped to keep to themselves— things too big to keep to themselves, too big to patent. And now people were using Emily to be sure they got a piece of paradise. They might be surprised to learn what paradise had in store for them. . . .

An incoming voice message from his security backup brought his attention back to the moment. He answered.
Come by air. Come now.

He jammed around a curve, all the while drenched in a sense of the unreal.

How could this be happening? How could he have let her out of his sight?

“Uncle Titus, slow down.” Hunkered down, Mateo held on to the edge of the bucket seat.

Yes, going too fast. Too fast in the fog, with bad traction, and reinforcements coming anyway. It would all be over soon. It would—

Something in the road. Steering to avoid collision, Quinn slammed on the brakes, jolting the two of them forward, into the dashboard. A few picoseconds before impact of head to steering wheel, the vehicle’s interior phased into a yielding matrix, softening the crash impact. The rear end skidded to the side, sending the car nose first into a ditch and knocking Quinn’s breath out of him.

Quiet settled around him. “Mateo?”

A shaky voice. “I’m okay.”

Quinn hauled himself from the car and ran down the road to the place where he’d seen a streak of bright yellow. He cried out, “Emily? Emily?”

A high-pitched voice threaded to him; perhaps Mateo—Mateo, whom he’d left in the car, maybe hurt. God, the world was a jumble. He whirled around. Standing at the side of the road a short distance away was Emily.

Her jacket was still buttoned all the way to the top, and she stood just as she had on the porch. Racing to her, he scooped her up, hugging her fiercely. Her arms went around his neck, bringing the smell of wet wool to his nostrils.

At last he released her. “Where’ve you been, honey?” His voice, shaky.

“Went for a ride.” She looked worried.

“A ride?”

Then Mateo joined them, looking tussled but not bruised.

“Those people,” Emily said, looking down the road. “I didn’t want to go, but . . .” She took one look at her uncle’s face and started to fall apart.

“No, honey,” he said quickly, relief washing over him in progressive waves. “I’m not mad at you. It’s fine. You’re fine, sweetheart. I just love you, that’s all.”

Mateo looked at his sister and shook his head slowly. “Screwed up again, Em.”

Clutching Emily to his chest, Quinn looked down the dirt road, where the would-be kidnappers had fled. If they’d meant to keep her, they could have. This was just a little shot over the bow from the man in the parka.

He took Emily and Mateo to the side of road and sat down, an arm around each of them. He’d known, he’d always known, that the larger world mingled with the personal. Great events corkscrewed into small ones, leaving holes, sometimes eternal ones. His life had been like that lately.

Fortune hunters could break into his own backyard and demand that he change his
frame of mind
. They could demand answers to a few questions, questions new in the history of the world. Questions such as, Who does the universe next door belong to?

And who gets to decide?

Stefan Polich kept well back from the edge of the sixty-story drop, high railing or not. The item he held in his hand was too precious to risk a slip.

On the outside, it was merely a gray velvet case the size of a dollar bill, but it held a costly payload.

Stefan turned the box over in his hand, hearing the soft clunk inside, a reassuringly heavy clunk, and an expensive one. The contents represented thousands of person-hours, crammed into the short period of time that Titus Quinn had been back.

A security guard came to the edge of the patio, nodding to signify that Helice Maki was here.

“A moment,” Stefan muttered. Let her wait. The woman plagued him— newest, youngest, and oddly, most dangerous member of the board. It rubbed the wound raw to remember that he was the one who’d put her name forward in the first place.

His glance came back to the gray velvet case. Calibrated to maim, not to kill. All the scientific resources and capability of the fifth-largest ultratech company in the world assured him that this thing was calibrated precisely. Local effects, devastating ones, with an internalized mortality sequence to ensure containment. He believed his people when they told him this. He prayed they were right. Prayer sat uneasily on him, but to lead you needed a little faith. That was something Stefan had recently decided, now that he was dealing with the most startling turn of events: contact with a stage-four civilization, one that had created, or at least enlivened, a separate but proximate universe. These beings might normally have little reason to regard the Earth, Minerva, and its CEO except for one inescapable fact: Their universe was porous. One could enter. Cause trouble. The two universes were linked, like conjoined twins. Unfortunately these twins shared only one heart.

Slipping the gray box into his jacket pocket, he nodded at the guard, dreading the confrontation with Helice. Small of stature, large of ambition. Helice came in, surrounded
by three of the tallest security staff Stefan had ever seen. He thought that she looked like a human among Tarig— beings Quinn described as unnervingly tall and steely. But as to predators, in this case it was the short one.

Had he erred terribly when he refused to let her go to the other place? Denied her ambition, she had undermined him at every turn.

He waved her in. “Helice, good. Have a seat.”

She pulled up a chair by the door, leaving her bodyguards at their posts.

Stefan glanced at them. “Privacy, Helice.”

“These are dreds,” she said, using the pejorative term. “Harmless.” She meant they were stupid. A dred had an average IQ—by definition around one hundred. But stupid or not, they understood they’d just been insulted.

Seeing Stefan’s discomfort, she waved the guards away. The brutes went through to Stefan’s drawing room, lurking just beyond hearing range. Since the world had cracked open, Minerva board members went under guard, a caution against competitor firms sniffing around the edges of the secret of the Entire. They’d come to the brink in a damn hurry, since that innocent day when a postdoc student discovered right-turning neutrinos and the other place had announced itself with particles of impossible angular momentum.

“Nice view,” she said. “You can see forever.” The city sparkled in the night glow of lit skyscrapers, gilded by rain.

“Wish I could. Wish I could damn well see tomorrow.” When the board would vote on whether to send Quinn now, rather than later. Perhaps, if Helice had any clout, they’d also vote on whether to send the man at all. Someone had to go, and soon—now that the secret was out, proven by the man who had trespassed on Quinn’s property yesterday.

Stefan poured two glasses of wine, noting how young Helice looked. She
was
young. Twenty years old, the youngest quantum sapient engineering graduate in Stanford’s history. Helice had surrounded herself with prodigies like herself so long she had little tolerance for people of average—or even above-average—intelligence. Stefan, on the other hand, had attended enough diversity training to understand that simple folk had their place, and it wasn’t a bad one.

Helice broke into his thoughts. “When we first found it, we thought it would save us.” She referred, of course, to the realm next door. Its inhabitants called it the Entire, without regard for the fact that it was not all there was.

“Yes. We thought so.”

“Now it’s going to kill us.” Helice looked wistful, rather than afraid. Perhaps one so young could not imagine her own death, much less the death of everything.

Stefan still had trouble grasping the news that Titus Quinn had brought home. That to preserve their unnatural environment, the lords of the Entire would burn a natural one. It would be no act of malice or even ill will; they needed this universe to sustain themselves. Once Tarig engines were up to speed, the combustion would be instantaneous, forming a concentrated heart of fire that would last the Entire billions of years. It was a loathsome act, like dining on a child.

It was shock enough to discover an alien civilization. That it far surpassed human achievements staggered him. The Tarig had, Quinn said, found a barren universe and shaped it to their own desires. With powers like this, what chance did the Rose, as they called our cosmos, have?

Stefan put his hand on the gray box, taking comfort from it.

“Sending Quinn is a mistake,” Helice said.

“Maybe. But there’s no time to train someone new.” Ever since Emily Quinn’s brief abduction, they’d been racing to advance the schedule. Competing factions had now come into view. “We have to move quickly.”

Helice shrugged. “We’ll let the board decide if that’s so.”

“Perhaps the board will be persuaded by this.” He pulled out the velvet case, setting it on the table between them.

Her eyes flicked to it, then narrowed. “Oh. You
are
ready, aren’t you.” Her forehead wrinkled to indicate she was thinking—thinking faster and better than most.

Opening the box, Stefan exposed the bracelet. Noting her expression, he said, “Don’t worry; it’s empty. The nan won’t be ready for a few days. But this chain is what Quinn will carry with him when he goes. It’ll create a limited but effective local collapse. Everything in a mile-wide circle will fall into nanoscale chaos. Hard, built structures will fall to sludge.”

“And people.”

“Yes, if in the vicinity.”

Helice picked up the six-inch length of it. Heavy, it draped against her hand.

“We call it a cirque,” he said. “He’ll wear it on his ankle.” He took it from her. “It’s hollow, although to the naked eye it doesn’t have much thickness. When live, it’ll be molecularly dense, loaded with nan.” He indicated three indentations in the length of it. “Quinn will press these links in a certain sequence, and that will bring the nan together in a stream, to share information. From there it’ll build a surge momentum capable of mutating the environs where it’s released.”

“Surge momentum. You mean a nanoscale changeover.”

“We don’t like to use that term.” Ever since nan technology became practical, alarmists had warned that the molecular process could get out of hand. Go uncontrolled, in a chain reaction. “We’ll be under control,” he said. “There’s a phage system that shuts the whole sequence down after an hour.”