Dancing in Dreamtime (32 page)

While Hoagy listened to final instructions from the mission controller, he ran his gaze over the interior of the warp chamber, its rows of gauges and switches, its hard surfaces and warning labels. With a pang, he thought how much of his life he had spent encased in machines. If he survived this trip, maybe he would go outdoors more often. Earth must still have a few wild places. Nothing to rival his vision, of course, but small pockets of beauty here and there.

A faint whine told him the warp projectors were ramping up. Instinctively, he braced himself for super-G acceleration, even though he knew the force he was about to encounter would be nothing like gravity.

“Ready to center. Counting from sixty.”

Hoagy glanced at his partners. Blake squeezed the armrest until his knuckles turned white. Jaffa's fingers spidered in the air, playing among life-fields only she could detect.

“Prepare for T-state,” the controller said.

The projector's whine grew louder, and a shock sizzled along Hoagy's spine as the warp vector strengthened.

“T-state—now!”

Warp chamber, partners, everything vanished as he leapt into trance. Immediately he was buffeted by turbulence more violent than any seizure. Gales ripped at him, twisted and tumbled him. He could feel his center loosening, giving way. It would be so easy to let go, to be torn asunder. But he clung fiercely to the vision of his garden planet, filled his mind with its glory, and at length he passed beyond the turbulence, the winds relented, and he realized the ship had passed through the timeshell. He returned to real time without being summoned.

There on the monitor was a blue planet, which the sensors confirmed as their target. Of course, it wasn't the ancestral world that he and Jaffa and Blake had imagined, but it was lovely enough, marbled with clouds, burnished by light from its orange star. The reward for their ordeal would be to land there and search for life.

Blake's voice came through the earphones. “Are you back?”

“Yes,” Hoagy muttered. “But it was a rough passage.”

“Jaffa hasn't come around yet.”

Hoagy looked in alarm at Jaffa, who twitched in her harness. He laid a hand on her arm and squeezed, absorbing her tremors. Presently she grew still. Her eyes slicked open. At first only the whites were visible, then the green irises. He leaned close. “Are you all right?”

“What?” Her head swiveled, surveying the warp chamber. “Where are we?”

“The other side,” Hoagy said.

Her face lit up with a smile and she grabbed his hand. “We really made it?”

“There's our gem,” Blake said, pointing at the monitor. “Covered in liquid water, as promised. If it isn't brimming with life, then nature missed a good chance.”

Jaffa came fully alert as she gazed at the lovely blue planet. “There's life down there.”

“Let's hope so,” said Blake.

“There is. I can feel it. You'll see when we land.”

Hoagy eased himself away from her. His hand burned where she had touched him. “First,” he said, “we have to persuade the computer we're still sane.”

They took the psychometric exam, to prove they had survived the warp with faculties intact. When each one earned a green light, they cheered.

According to the flight plan, now the engines should ease them down into the atmosphere, with Hoagy piloting them on the final descent. Instead of hearing the sizzle of plasma, however, they heard the start-up whine of the warp projector. An instant later the ship computer buzzed in their headphones: “Five minutes until transfer.”

“Destination?” Hoagy demanded.

“Earth,” the computer answered.

“Why?” said Jaffa. “Is there something wrong with our tests?”

“You have passed the tests. Now you will be returned for study.”

“But we're supposed to land!” Blake roared.

“The bastards,” Jaffa said. “They lied to us.”

Hoagy slammed his fist on the instrument panel, where the clock was ticking down. “They never intended for us to explore. All they wanted was to see if we could pass through the timeshell without going nuts. We're just a source of data.”

“Three minutes,” droned the computer.

“Lab rats,” Blake muttered. He said it again, louder, then he howled and his eyes rolled up and he thrashed in his harness.

Hoagy grabbed him by a shoulder. “Blake, snap out of it. We're going to jump.”

“We can't let him go through warp like this,” said Jaffa.

“I don't know if we can stop it.” Hoagy scoured the instrument panel, but he could find no switch that would override the computer, which had clearly been programmed to carry out an immediate return.

“One minute.”

Between bouts of laughter, Blake muttered in languages they had never heard.

There was no time for coaxing him back.

“Thirty seconds.”

Hoagy and Jaffa exchanged despairing glances. He grasped her hand, curling his own thick fingers around her delicate ones, which could trace life's energy in thin air. Loud enough to be heard above the countdown, he called to her, “I need you to be whole when we get back.”

Her reply was a shout. “And I need you!”

Those words and Blake's gibberish were the last sounds Hoagy heard before leaping into trance.

The agonizing spiral back to real-time was familiar, but instead of emerging in the warp chamber, Hoagy found himself in a blazing white room, strapped to a table, with a scanner swinging back and forth over his skull.

“Tell me your name,” said a voice he recognized as that of the VIVA psychiatrist who was in charge of the timeshell experiment.

With brusque impatience, Hoagy responded to that query and to many more, until the doctor seemed satisfied.

“How are the others?” Hoagy demanded.

“Don't worry about the others.”

“Damn it, tell me. Is Jaffa okay? Is Blake?” A pinprick in the hollow of his elbow soon washed away his questions. This trance was a chemical one, insipid, blank.

When he was allowed to place calls the following day, Hoagy spoke first with his mother, who sobbed when she heard his voice. “I'm fine,” he assured her.

“Oh, honey, I was so worried.”

“Really, Mom. Everything's okay. They checked me out.”

“You sound groggy.”

“They shot me up with drugs when I got back. But my mind's clear.”

“That's what the doctor told me,” she said. “But I needed to hear it from you.”

Unable to bear her crying, he said, “Gotta go, Mom. There's a big meeting.”

“I'm so happy,” she breathed as he ended the call.

There really was a meeting, a debriefing session in a seminar room crammed with a couple of dozen VIVA staffers by the time he arrived. He took a seat near the door. A moment later, Jaffa sidled in and sat next to him. “Zero damage,” she confided.

“Same here,” he answered, noticing her smell, as of mint tea.

Neither mentioned Blake.

The Director, a stern, fast-talking woman, opened the session by apologizing for having deceived the Alpha Trio with the promise of landing. “We were afraid no weaker motive would carry you through, yet we couldn't risk losing you to some mishap on the planet.”

With that formality over, she ignored Hoagy and Jaffa and proceeded to explain what the mission had revealed about the psychology of warp transfer. The lights in the room dimmed. Projected onto a giant wall screen, a graph displayed three data lines, showing changes in brain chemistry and neuronal activity in each of the astronauts as they passed twice through the timeshell, once on the way out and again on the way back. Although the data lines were labeled simply A, B, and C, it was clear which one belonged to Blake, for on the return passage the line spiked chaotically, like the seismic trace of an earthquake and aftershocks.

Using a laser, the Director pointed out that in the two records where no damage occurred, and in the outgoing phase of the third record, the peak moment when mind slipped through the timeshell coincided with a precise mix of catecholamines—principally serotonin, dopamine, and epinephrine—and a corresponding neuronal firing pattern. A murmur spread across the room as the doctors, neuroscientists, and behavioral engineers took this in.

“We should be able to reproduce this effect in any healthy brain,” the Director said, to rousing applause. She then set up two teams, one to work out the chemistry, the other to map and program the neuronal activity. “I want compounds and devices we can test on subjects within six months,” she said. “And I want astronauts prepared for safe warp travel within a year.”

The two teams gathered at opposite corners of the room and began buzzing with plans.

Hoagy leaned close to Jaffa and said, “So much for finding our planet.”

She gave him a surprised look. “You don't think we'll get to go out again?”

“You might, but not me. Now that they've figured out how to send healthy people through warp, why send an epileptic?”

“But your seizures are under control.”

“I've had two since we returned.”

Jaffa laid a hand on his cheek and searched his face with her jade eyes. “If you don't go, I don't go.”

Hoagy returned her gaze, feeling heartache for abandoning his visionary planet and gratitude for what she was offering. “I've been thinking there must be some wild places left here on Earth,” he said.

“There must be,” Jaffa agreed. “Let's go look.”

Keeva heard the eerie, strident hooting and felt the air tingle with their approach moments before she actually spied them. In a straggly V they climbed above the horizon of Aton-17, carving the violet sky, their wings blazing white as they banked over the ocean. Waves of energy rippled before them, like the advance of a storm.

“There,” she whispered, pointing a slender arm.

“I don't see anything,” said LaForest, who crouched beside her in a thicket of reedlike stalks, peering through binoculars. The muck of the shore smelled like a salt marsh on Earth, fecund and sour, as Keeva imagined the original broth of life might have smelled.

“They're headed straight for us,” she told him.

LaForest crouched lower. Though his elbows and knees bent at painful angles, he was so lanky that his coarse brown hair rose above the water plants like an abandoned nest. His gawky height made people stare at him from a distance, but few exchanged looks with him at close quarters, for he had penetrating eyes. Keeva was among those few. She delighted in his searching gaze. It shielded her from the empathic signals that flowed into her from every living thing. Where she pressed against LaForest, there in the shallows, his limbs felt like tensed springs.

Taking his bearded chin in hand, she turned his face toward the approaching V. “See how their wings catch the light?”

Under the binoculars his lips drew tight from concentration, then parted with astonishment. “Yes,” he murmured. “My God, they're like fire. Must be a hundred of them. And hear those high-pitched calls?”

The reeds quaked from his trembling. Keeva circled an arm around his waist, fingering the bones of his hip through the taut fabric of his shimmersuit. “Be still,” she whispered. “I sense they're coming down.”

They did come down, wings tilted, plowing to a stop and floating majestically in the calm waters of the cove, their black-billed heads lifted high on long white necks.

“What in the world
are
they?” Keeva asked. She recognized the bio-fields of thousands of creatures, but these were new to her.

LaForest lowered the binoculars, a flame of excitement in his cheeks. “If we weren't sixty-four light-years from Earth, I'd say they were tundra swans.”

“Which they can't be?”

“Of course not. They aren't even birds, really.”

The improbable creatures were feeding, tipping forward and thrusting their regal necks into the water, then bobbing upright and swallowing captured morsels. Between bites they ran their bills along their wings, preening. Born twenty years too late to have seen any species of living swan, Keeva possessed no feeling-print for them. But she had studied museum specimens and videos of swans, and in these elegant white beauties, afloat on Aton-17 like scraps of sunlight, she could see nothing alien.