Sunborn (51 page)

   
I’ll get you out of there...///

   
/Wait, no...I think it’s—/

    Before he could complete the thought, Charli’s grip was on him like a hand on his collar, yanking him back from the precipice. The world rotated around him, and his own mental space hardened again into something that felt like frozen space. He was back in his own mind again.
Damn.

   
/// I wanted to get you out before anything

   
else could go wrong. ///

   
/Uhhhh...no...no, Charli, I.../ Bandicut was struggling with chaotic thoughts. There had been something he was on the verge of recognizing. /Charli, I—was almost—/ He tried to clear his head, blinking and shaking. /Charli, there was something I was seeing, that I can’t see now—/

   
/// Li-Jared and Jeaves are yelling for you. ///

   
There were voices in his ear, agitated voices. Li-Jared, frantic.
“John Bandicut, you’ve got to get out of there!”

    “Why?” He couldn’t remember what was happening outside.

   
“There’s a Mindaru sentinel craft coming down on us! We’re going to be its lunch meat!”

   
Oh. Yes.

   
“Are you almost done? I’m hanging on as long as I can. But we need to move!”

    Bandicut squeezed his eyes shut. Earth was going to be lunch meat. Not to mention
*
Nick
*
and
*
Thunder
*
. And Ed’s world, wherever it was.

   
Ed!

   
He shook himself suddenly like a dog coming in from the rain.
Ed!
 /Charli, it was Ed I saw in there! In the silence-fugue. I was on the verge of something when you pulled me out. Can you send me back in? Right now?/

   
/// What do you mean?

   
How could you see Ed in the silence-fugue? ///

   
/I don’t know, I know it sounds crazy, but I did. Maybe the fugue lets me see across dimensions, I don’t know. But send me
back,
Charli! Send me
now!
/

   
/// I don’t understand— ///

   
/But I do!/ And to the robot: “Napoleon, I’ve got to go into silence-fugue! Watch my back.”

    “Cap’n?”

    “Trust me. Li-Jared—hang on! I’m trying to get Ed to help us!” As he spoke, Bandicut felt Charli reaching into his mind-space and undoing the work he had just done. He felt his mental control slipping away, as far in the distance, Li-Jared twanged in protest; he felt the wild yawing sensation of veering into perilous inner territories, and the looming presence of the Mindaru. He felt simultaneously a thrill of excitement and a wrench of fear...

    It wasn’t quite the same as the fugue of a few moments ago. The intelligence of the machine-world was whipping around him like glowing strands; but other things were stirring, too, in this altered world. There was a big oval of light—faint, transparent, but enormous—vibrating like the head of a drum. And through it, like a cascade of mirror images within mirror images, other disks of light just like it. They were all calling, calling to him, calling to anybody, to stop the shaking. Their calls were haunting him; it was hard to think in the din.

    One other thing came into focus, though, a whirling shape like a tornado of fire, emerging from some deeper dimension. Familiar, it was familiar. But he was dizzy in the midst of all this, and he couldn’t place it...

    It seemed to be calling to him.

   
/// John, that’s Ed—and he is calling to you! ///

   
Who? Ed? Oh yes, he remembered someone named Ed. But that person was a fried egg. /Why would I want to talk to a fried egg, Charli?/

   
/// That’s why we’re here, John.

   
Can you hear his voice?

   
Can you? ///

   
Voice...yes...he thought he could hear a voice...

    Dreamily.

   
/// Focus, John! ///

   
Calling to him for help?

    No.
He
wanted to ask
Ed
 for help. /What did I want to ask him?/

   
/// The dark matter flow.

   
We need to change its course. ///

   
/Of course I.../ But his thoughts were still reeling, he couldn’t help thinking of someone charging on a horse across a plain, lance leveled, assaulting a distant windmill.

   
No,
he realized with a start. His vision began to turn clear as crystal: dimensions opening up in space before him, square turning into cube, cube into tesseract, and tesseract into an n-dimensional jewel of light. And he began to glimpse the depths of Ed’s reach. In these dimensions, Ed was no longer a mere column or circle of fire, but a starfish radiating into a thousand dimensions with long, luminous arms; and his reach was long indeed.

    But Ed couldn’t see what Bandicut was seeing. He didn’t know what to do.

   
“Great pain here...great peril. What can I...?”

   
Bandicut felt a sudden jolt as he realized Ed could reach into places he, Bandicut, could not reach, and perhaps even place one of his long arms along the edge of a flow...

   
/// Yes! That’s it!

   
Even a subtle shift might be enough...///

   
“Ed!” Bandicut cried. “Do you see a glowing river?”

   
“Yes...”

   
“Can you stop it, or deflect it?”

   
“Don’t know...can try...will it stop the pain...?”

   
“Maybe...maybe.” Bandicut was speaking not out of any certainty, but out of faith and hope.
Looming storm clouds and the giant mechanized combine, bearing down on him; a dog darted across its path, triggering the collision-avoidance, and it veered, just enough to steer it past the boy hidden in the tall field.
 A tiny change, in this version; but it was enough. “Yes. Yes, I think so. Can you do it?”

    From the shimmering circle, a sighing voice.
“I will try.”

    Bandicut nodded. Yes. Yes. They would try, they would do it, they would rule the stars.

   
“What...should I do?”

   
Think. Think. “Can you...somehow stretch across the stream and—” he windmilled his hands in the air, groping “—do anything to the space, change the flow of it—change its direction?”

    The Ed creature made a low humming sound. Bandicut grimaced, trying to focus; he was on a carousel, turning without moving, disoriented. He was trying to think how to explain the concept of
bending space
...

    There was a flash of light and a shudder in the continuum. Bandicut furiously tried to see what had just happened. Had the multidimensional creature simply
placed a foot in the stream of dark matter?

    The stream shifted slowly as he watched; it was rechanneling itself.

   
/// The stream is changing course, John. ///

   
/Away from the other star?/ He could feel his thoughts unwinding and coming back together. The fugue was lifting.

   
/// I can’t tell. ///

   
“Napoleon?”

    The robot appeared confused. “John Bandicut, I don’t know what is happening, but I believe you have either diverted or blocked the stream.”

    “Good. Very good. Ed did it, you know.”

    The robot barely missed a beat. “Ed? Well, it looks as if he’s significantly altered the flow, Cap’n. Significantly.”

    Bandicut’s head was clear; the fugue was over. “Good. Then let’s get the hell out of here.”

Chapter 31

A Visit to a Star

    On the bridge, Li-Jared frantically wished for a clearer image of the black object that was coming toward them in the glow of
*
Thunder
*
’s atmosphere. Jeaves and Copernicus were certain it must be a sentry of some kind—but what would it do when it reached them? Did it carry weapons to vaporize them? Would it assimilate them, as that Mindaru graveyard had tried to do? Did they have
any
 defense? Could they at least outrun it?
    He had a strong feeling that the answer to all of those was:
Whatever’s bad for us.

    “Copernicus, anything from Bandicut or Napoleon?”

    “According to their last transmission, they were having difficulty finding the exit.”

   
Bwang.
 “Damn!”

    “Li-Jared.”

    “What, Jeaves? Or do I already know?”

    “I think you do. Have you decided at what point you will leave them, if necessary—to save the ship, and the mission?”

    “I have not. I am going to play it by ear, as Bandie would say.”

    “Play it by ear?” Jeaves said. “Does that mean you are intending to make a snap decision? I appreciate your loyalty, but is that the best way to make a decision that affects the whole mission?”

    Li-Jared rubbed his chest with his fingers. “You don’t think so?”

    “It’s for you to decide, not me.”

    Li-Jared breathed deliberately several times before answering. “Well, Jeaves, that’s what I’m going to do. And if you think it’s wrong—tough shit, as Bandie would also say.”

    The robot was silent, but Li-Jared continued to fume to himself. He knew the robot was right. But he’d be damned if he’d decide right here and now that when
x
became
y
, he’d up and abandon his friends.

    He turned his scowl to Ik and Antares, still huddled unmoving off to one side. What was he going to do about
them
? They were almost certainly unaware of the situation. He closed his eyes for a moment to resynch his heartbeats. Then he strode over to crouch in front of them. “Ik! Can you hear me?”

    Ik’s only response was an incomprehensible mutter. He seemed to have heard, but his eyes were angled away from each other and up, as though he were looking deep into space at something no one else could see. Beside him, with one hand on Ik’s arm, Antares was rocking forward and backward, her eyes tightly closed. She looked as if she were in pain. Li-Jared spoke to Ik twice more, then Antares: “Can
you
hear me?
Antares?
”

    Her murmur was almost inaudible. “...In contact with the star...”
Do not interrupt,
 her impassive expression said.

    Li-Jared paced back to Jeaves. “How far away is that thing?”

    “One light-hour and closing fast. I believe we have at most twenty minutes to initiate action.”

    “And have you come up with a recommended action?”

    “Getting out of its way would be my recommendation.”

    Li-Jared rubbed his fingers together rapidly, in frustration. “Are you working on an escape route?”

    “We are,” said Copernicus. “But I just received another transmission from Napoleon. They have encountered something unexpected...”

*

   
Getting out had turned out to be as hard as Bandicut had feared. Napoleon came to a stop and turned to face him. “Cap’n, something’s wrong. I’m not seeing the same landscape we passed on the way in, and I can’t find any of the bread crumbs I left for us. I’m not sure we’re on the correct n-space level.”

    Bandicut kept his voice neutral, ignoring the chill in the back of his neck. “Are you saying you can’t find the way back?”

    “I can’t retrace our steps exactly, no. But I think we’re...” Napoleon’s voice trailed off as he floated a little ahead of Bandicut. “Cap’n, you’d better have a look at this.”

    That didn’t sound good. Bandicut caught up with the robot. “Oh, jeez.”

    “Yes.”

    Bandicut groped for something to hang on to. “What
is
this?” He was poised in an opening in another parapetlike wall. Beyond the opening was a sheer drop-off into the darkness of space. It looked like a wide loading bay high on the side of a vast skyscraper. Beyond it was space—but impossibly close by, a great orb floating in the void. It looked like a planet. Or no—it was glowing a sullen crimson, and there was a granularity in the fire. It was a
star,
alarmingly close up, viewed through a powerful filter. “Nappy? What
is
 this?”

    “I think...that may be our hypernova star. I think it’s
*
Nick
*
.”

    Bandicut blinked hard. “I thought we were half a light-year away.”

    “We are, in normal space. But we’re embedded in n-space inside this thing, with all those channels. Distances may be very different.
Look at those inflowing streams.
” Napoleon pointed with a metal hand, first to one part of the dark sky, then to another.

    Bandicut squinted, at first seeing nothing. Then, gradually, he began to make out what Napoleon was talking about: a few thin, ghostly streaks of deep blue and violet, originating from somewhere out in deep space and converging on the star like threads of a tattered spider’s web. He thought he could guess what they were. As his eyes grew more accustomed to the lighting, however, his heart began to sink. There were not just a few, but
dozens
 of the streams, and they all looped in from somewhere in the starry darkness to plunge into the great sullen orb. All except one, fainter than the others. That one originated in a vague and almost indefinable haze from the very structure upon which he and Napoleon were standing.