Branegate (28 page)

He looked at Tatjana, now, his gaze fierce. “I know you -- I know both of you—you’re—you’re my Mother.”

“Oh,” said Tatjana, and choked back a cry.

“We don’t recognize you,” said Leonid, “but we were waiting to see our son. What’s your name?”

“I want to say Anton, but it doesn’t seem right,” said the man.

Tatjana’s image flickered, faded to near nothingness, and then came back again.

“The last time we saw our son he was called Trae. Do you know him?” asked Leonid.

“Oh, yes, he’s here—I mean, I’m Trae—or I was—but now I’m Anton. I remember being here once before. You said I was conceived here, but—we were up there, nearer to the top, by those trees.”

The man looked at Leonid, now. “You’re my father. You gave me a list of things to do. I’m not finished, yet. Somebody killed me. They had to bring me back. They killed you, too -- my other father, I mean. It’s so new; I’m trying to sort everything out.”

“Petyr is dead?” asked Leonid.

“Yes, Petyr—that’s his name. They shot him. I remember blood flying from his head. I—I don’t know where he is, now. Dead, I guess.”

“They’ll restore him like they’ve restored you. They’ve followed my instructions; that’s why you’re called Anton, now.”

“The way you’d be if you’d lived past childhood,” said Tatjana, and she was still flickering in and out with surges of emotion. “Who
did
this awful thing?”

“I don’t know,” said Trae—now Anton. “Three men with guns—Petyr fired back—I was getting into a car. Going home. Is this place real? It feels so real. There’s a breeze.” Anton held out a hand to feel it.

“As real as we can imagine it,” said Leonid.

Anton cocked his head, as if listening to someone else.

“Someone is with me. A woman. She’s talking; a mumble, and I can’t understand the words. I must still be asleep.”

“You probably are,” said Leonid, “but you heard us anyway. You said you were to be released tomorrow. Do you know what you’ll do then?”

“I’ll go back to work. The work you gave me to do. We were close to testing when I—when I went away. I’m sorry. I feel awake and asleep at the same time. At least I remember you.” Now he smiled, and Tatjana was on her feet and hugging him, then Leonid, an arm around both of them with an imagined sense of touch and warmth not real but there.

“I can feel you,” said Anton, surprised.

“Soon it’ll be real, darling,” said Tatjana. “We’re headed towards you in a small fleet of ships right now.”

“Well, maybe not so soon. Thirty or forty years,” said Leonid. “I’m hoping you’ve made progress on that problem to make much longer jumps and more often in a small ship, maybe even open small branegates. You said you were ready to test.”

They sat down in grass and flowers. Anton, or Trae, seemed more aware, now. His eyes sparkled with enthusiasm as he told them what he’d done: the new ideas, the simulations, fabrication of the new coils and the strange looking ship they were building, all of which Leonid was certain had been recently downloaded from memory cubes. The boy talked quickly, gesturing with his hands, the rapid-fire chatter of a brilliant mind just awakening. Tatjana smiled, and looked at him as if in worship.

Suddenly Anton sat up straight and alert, looked over their heads into the distance. “Myra,” he said in wonderment. “Myra’s with me. She touched me. She—”

He blinked hard, stared at nothing, then softly said, “She’s crying. Don’t cry, Myra.”

“A friend?” asked Leonid.

“Yes—no—more than that. I didn’t have the nerve to tell her how I feel before—before I was gone.”

“Tell her when you wake up,” said Tatjana.

“I will. We worked together. She’s smart, pretty, and a little shy, like me. She can do geometrical modeling in her head. She was doing the sims for the testing models when I left. I wish you could see her; she’s one of us, too.”

Anton smiled at a memory. “She plays mind-games, pretending to be someone else, but I knew.”

“Oh, my,” said Tatjana. “You’re smitten.”

“We can see her another time,” said Leonid. “Even if you’re partially asleep it’ll be difficult to channel her through to us, and we don’t have the time. We’ve been trying to reach you for months, son. Some bad things have happened to us since we left Gan, and everything has changed. The work you’ve been doing isn’t just business anymore, or a speed-up of travel between two universes. It could be our only defense against a force that will undo everything I worked for in this universe. It has to be done soon.”

Anton sat back, and was focused again. “I don’t understand. What’s being threatened?”

Leonid told him everything: the Council of Bishops, their arrest and imprisonment, the invasion fleet hovering near the Grand Portal between the universes. “They could be in transit right now.”

Anton sat still for a moment. His image seemed to blur.

“There are several ways to stop them, but we’ll have to go to higher energies to get down to the pore-size of the brane. How do I communicate with you at such a large distance?”

“Just think of this place, and call us from here,” said Leonid.

Anton smiled again, reached over to touch both of them on the hand. “I will. I remember everything, now, all the way back to the fire, and I remember you, both of you. I remember Petyr, my father always with me. I hope he’ll come back, too. I know who I am. My name is new, but I’m still Trae. It’s really good to be alive again.”

His image blinked out, and he was gone.

Tatjana gasped, and took her husband’s hand. The flowers and trees and rolling hills faded, and disappeared. They opened their eyes, faces close, their arms locked around each other. Their cabin walls shuddered with the drone of the ship. Leonid touched her face, felt wetness there. “Very soon, now,” he said, “we’ll all be back together again.”

CHAPTER 30

S
he hadn’t slept a wink, and it was all Meza’s fault. He was the one who’d encouraged her to continue seeing Trae, clear up to the night before his official reincarnation. Three nights a week she’d watched him grow from fetus to man. At first it had only been a comfort to talk to him, knowing he couldn’t hear her, but was there, alive, coming back however slowly as someone new. The first cubes were downloaded after only six weeks. The last six weeks it was a continuous process, the memories and experiences of two lifetimes building the neural net of a now developed brain, and in the last cube was Myra, the work she’d done with him, and any feelings he might have had for her.

The final four weeks, he’d been out of the tanks, unconscious on a hard bed, sprouting connective cables left and right to machines feeding him his past and scanning for accuracy. Others fed him nanomachines, and stimulated his muscles rhythmically with low voltage, high current pulses, a procedure she quickly learned to avoid observing. At those moments he was like a dancing doll, and she felt humiliated for him.

He was beautiful. Asleep, he looked so much like Trae, with high, prominent cheekbones, generous mouth, and a nicely arched nose. Slender, but well muscled. His hair was so light blond it seemed white at times. His eyes were always closed, but she knew they were blue; she’d been there when physicians had examined them. Trae’s eyes had been brown, his hair dark. Sometimes she would just sit and watch him breathe, thinking he was another person. This was Anton, who
had
been Trae, now in his original form, she was told. How much more than memories would survive reincarnation? Would the personality, the sweet shyness and subtle sense of humor still be there?

She sat at his bedside and talked to him softly and watched his chest rise and fall. Mostly she talked to herself, bouncing ideas off his inanimate self the way she’d done when they’d worked together. She’d throw out an idea, and Trae would come back with one of his insightful questions, over and over again. The advantage he’d had was an enhanced neural net capable of access, analysis and recall of over three hundred years of research dating back to the other side. In frustration she’d asked him why she, or any of their kind, couldn’t have such abilities. He’d said that she could have them, but the enhancements with nanomachines would take years before all that information could be downloaded to her. One person was enough, at least for now. That had satisfied her. If Trae had an ego, he’d never shown it, never given her any reason to think he felt superior in any way.

She’d gone to him the night before the day of his debriefing and release. She’d had dinner at the cafeteria, planned to stay only a few minutes. She hoped to see him walking the following day. It was later than usual when she got to his room. A physician was leaving as she arrived, and he smiled, knowing why she was there. She stood by Trae’s bed and started talking, telling him about her day while reviewing it for herself, as was her habit. But when she looked down at him, something was different. His eyelids seemed to ripple, and she realized his eyes were moving beneath them. He was dreaming, following the course of some action in his sleep.

“Trae, it’s Myra. Can you hear me? I’m right here beside you.” She reached out and touched his shoulder softly.

His eyes stopped moving for just an instant, and then began again. Myra went back to a near whisper and talked about the strange new ship nearing completion in orbit, the ship that might carry them quickly to the center of the galaxy. And in the middle of her description she got the shock of her life.

Quite suddenly, Trae’s eyes opened wide, and he said in a hoarse voice, “The work has to be done soon.”

He closed his eyes and was deep asleep again, eyelids rippling.

Myra jumped back when he spoke, and her heart was thumping hard from the shock. The voice had been Trae’s. For one horrible second she thought she might lose her dinner, but then the feeling passed.

She waited for Trae to say something else, but he didn’t, and so she left the room shaken and went home to bed. She didn’t sleep a wink that night.

In the morning she felt wasted and didn’t eat anything. She got to work midmorning, went straight to her cubicle and closed the door behind her. Two cups of strong, black tea brought her closer to consciousness, but by noon she’d done nothing but stare at the screen, a slowly rotating galaxy and two globular clusters flickering there.

Midafternoon she dared lunch in the cafeteria, but the small soup and salad she ate only seemed to aggravate the jiggling in her stomach. All she could think about was Trae. What was he doing? What was it like to discover yourself in a new body different from the previous one? Myra could barely remember her own reincarnation. She’d lived to old age as a spinster, and come back an exact duplicate of that person to complete the work she’d begun, nothing more. But now there was something more, and it frightened her.

Late afternoon she actually called up the model she was working on, if for no other reason than to put some order into the chaos of her thinking. An hour passed, and she was warming to the task when there was a knocking on her door.

Her stomach jumped as she opened the door. Meza was standing there, a smile on his face. Wallace was behind him, standing in the doorway of his own office, arms folded, looking serious.

“Myra, I want you to meet your new assistant, just arrived. He’ll be working on the testing models with you, and I’m sure you’ll get along wonderfully.”

He handed her a file. “Here’s his dossier, and now meet Anton Denal.”

Meza stepped aside, and Anton was there, and it was Trae, his hand outstretched. She shook it without thinking. His grip was firm and dry.

“Hello, Myra. Nice to meet you.”

She somehow found her voice. “We’ve been expecting you.” His hand engulfed hers, and lingered a moment before relaxing. Her breathing had become rapid, and shallow.

“I’ll give you two an hour, and then dinner is on me. I need to go over the production timelines with you. Deadlines, deadlines,” said Meza.

“Can you make it two hours?” asked Myra.

“Of course. I’ll tell Wallace. He’ll be joining us.”

“Already heard,” said Wallace from behind him, and now he smiled.

Trae stepped past her into the cubicle. She smelled mint. “Two hours, then,” she said, closed the door before Meza could answer and heard his chuckle from the other side.

They sat down, knees almost touching, and there was a long, awkward silence. An invisible hand seemed to grip Myra by the throat, and her voice fled. Finally it was Trae who broke the silence.

“I’m back,” he said, and the way one side of his mouth curved up in a smile made her heart ache.

He shook his head slowly. “This is all very weird. I’m a new person, but I feel the same. It’s like I went to sleep. I remember the bullets hitting, and blacking out and -- and then dreams—recently—yesterday, maybe. I talked to my parents. I—tried to talk to you . . .”

“Sshhh,” she said, reached over and touched his hand. The face, the hair, eyes, even the hand she touched was new, but it was still Trae: the speech pattern, the mannerisms, smile, all there. “I really missed you, Trae,” she said softly.

“Oh, don’t call me that,” he said, and grasped her hand in both of his on his knees. “Whoever had me killed will expect reincarnation. They’re supposed to think it’ll happen someday on a ship very far from here. I’m Anton, now. It’s who I really am, anyway. That’s the weird part. Trae’s body was slightly modified from the original clone for security. This is mine, the real me, from my first lifetime.”

“I still missed you,” she said, and was startled when he squeezed her hand and leaned close, and all she could see were his sky blue eyes.

“I missed you, too, Myra, as soon as I was conscious again. Everything came back in a rush, and I remembered you right away. You were with me before I woke up, I remember that too.”

“I sat with you a while every week from the time you were inches long,” she said, and smiled.

“Why?” He frowned.

“I wanted you back. It was a way to convince myself it was happening. Meza suggested it. I was having trouble concentrating on my work.”

Trae looked down at her hand in his, and lightly ran a thumb across her palm. She shuddered, and he looked up at her and smiled his wry smile again. “How’s the mysterious lady who used to talk to me in my mind?” he asked.