The Infinity Link

Copyright © 1984, 2009 by Jeffrey A. Carver
Cover art by David B. Mattingly.
Published by E-Reads. All rights reserved.
Grateful acknowledgment is made for use of lyrics to the song, "Wind," by Bob Bruno, as performed by Circus Maximus. Lyrics used by permission of Danel Music, Inc., © 1967.

For Mildred Sherrick Carver and Robert D. Carver, in loving memory

The Star Rigger Universe
(in chronological order in the future history)

Panglor
Dragons in the Stars
Dragon Rigger
Star Rigger's Way
Eternity's End
Seas of Ernathe

The Chaos Chronicles

Neptune Crossing: Volume One
Strange Attractors: Volume Two
The Infinite Sea: Volume Three
Sunborn: Volume Four

Novels of the Starstream

From a Changeling Star
Down the Stream of Stars

Standalone Novels

The Infinity Link
The Rapture Effect
Roger Zelazny's Alien Speedway: Clypsis
Battlestar Galactica (miniseries novelization)

The wanderer slipped across space and time, sailing an ocean of darkness in which stars hung like lanternfish. Watchful eyes might have observed it shimmering out of focus, melting and recrystallizing—here now, gone now, always somehow creeping ahead of where the eye would look for it next. Mostly, though, it moved unnoticed. Space was vast, and life here was stretched thin, scattered among the light-years.

The wanderer, however, was not alone. Connections to other worlds sparkled and danced with life, despite distance, despite time. Tachyons spun out from its core at speeds close to infinite, carrying news, or greetings, or songs. A new world lay ahead, a world which they could not yet see, but could
feel
, a world from which a response had finally been aroused. Whether someone had deciphered their songs, or merely echoed with one of their own, was unclear. What mattered was the existence of the answer and its welcoming tone.

Time passed, and a host of new songs was spun. As the wanderer drew nearer, a messenger was observed departing from the destination world. It rose out of its sun's gravity well, climbing toward the wanderer, spouting a thin but energetic flame as it crossed the gulf.

Far outside the orbits of even the dimmest and loneliest of the planets of this star, the two bodies approached one another. One moved in a slow and deliberate curve, the other in a shimmering ripple—drawn together by mutual curiosity and the offering of a song.

The darkness hurt. Time moved at a crawl in the waiting state. She floated in a medium that buzzed with energy, with spider-web tracings of configurations that promised her pathways out of the darkness. She ached to move.

What was it going to be, this time?

(Sequence start,) murmured a voice.

Cuing signals brushed over her like fine threads. Ruby and gold pinlights swam in the darkness, then deformed into pale disks. She extended a greeting touch as her traveling partner approached. Together, two figures of light, they awaited the moment of transformation.

At last, it came: a swarm of particles that enveloped them and congealed into crystalline fire. The fire swirled around them and funneled them forward, toward the projection point.

A darkness deeper than night opened to swallow them.

A period of time passed that was impossible to measure.

* * *

Mozy, bone weary, looked around. She was standing in a forest clearing with Kadin. They'd come a terribly long way already today, and fatigue was making it hard for her to think.

"It's a time of magic," Kadin was saying. "A time long before humanity. Before even the seeds of humanity's beginnings." Kadin peered at her with those deep blue eyes, as though he had just explained everything.

She shook her head, trying to clear the fatigue. "David, what are you talking about?" She sighed. "We need to rest." She looked around for a soft patch of grass. All of the greenery seemed somehow . . . cryptozoic, maybe. All ferns and odd-looking mosses. "How far have we come, anyway?" Memories shimmered in her mind—ice caves, plains, canyons—images blurred together.

"We're in the world's early years, now, Mozy. We have no time to rest. We must use the magic while it's active—"

"The world's early years?" She stopped. "Are you saying that we've been traveling through time?"

He smiled. "You
are
tired, aren't you?"

Yes.
Had they really crossed all those lands?

"Mozy, listen to me—and try to understand. Magic is a power that has always existed in the earth. It appears in waves and cycles that move through the Earth's history. At certain points, it is very strong; but at other times, it is subdued, and may be forgotten for eons at a time."

Mozy listened impatiently.

"Hear me out. Please," Kadin said. "During most of human history, the magic has slept; it is suppressed by the presence of human thought and logic. But further along, at the end of humanity's time, it resurfaces. And that's where we have to go. We've become dislodged in time, Mozy. We must ride the crest of the magic down the timestream, until we reach the precise point at which it is possible to return to our
own
time."

He spoke with maddening self-assurance.

"You have to trust me if we're to go home," he said softly. He shrugged and looked away.

"I do trust you," she murmured. Hadn't they come this far, hadn't they survived this long by working together? Still, there were times when she felt she didn't know who this man was—and other times when she swore she had known him forever.

"Not just me," Kadin was saying. "You must trust in the magic."

"What magic?"
she cried in exasperation.

Again he smiled. "A small enchantment at first—here, where the powers aren't fully formed yet. But later—well, a much stronger spell." Beneath the smile, she thought she detected a deep wariness, almost a foreboding.

She gave in with a sigh. "All right. What do we do?"

"Step close to me." He turned and gazed into the forest. He spoke softly a series of strange and indistinct syllables, and then he reached back for her. His hands shimmered as their fingers touched, and the spell took hold: shadow crossing shadow where their hands joined, darkness against darkness, no physical sensation of touching, but the presence of his fingers intertwining with the presence of hers. Connected in this way, they stepped forward together into the forest . . .

Into what she had thought was a forest.

The woods shuddered and distorted queerly. A path opened before them, faintly luminous with purplish and green light. Trees turned into folding stick figures, snapping back from them on either side. The forest danced against the sky, and seemed to flow around them like an envelope as they walked, giving way, but closing again behind them. Leaves fluttered madly over their heads, and sunlight cascaded through the treetops with bursts of prismatic color. Only Kadin remained solid beside her, his presence and the touch of his hand binding her against fear. Snowflakes whipped their faces, flickering in alternation with bursts of sun and green and autumn brown.

Time was running mad around them.

Before she could catch her breath to ask a question, the forest suddenly fell away, like a dead skin, and she glimpsed a windswept glacier.

And then the sun went out.

* * *

Jonders followed the images with guarded satisfaction. All indications were that the transition had been made smoothly, and that the subjects were responding well to the test situation.

With minute adjustments, he increased the monitoring gain on the female subject. He wanted a clearer perception of her degree of commitment to the magic . . . if he could just clarify that image without in the process altering the results . . .

* * *

They walked in darkness for a long time, with only the sound of dry earth crunching beneath their feet. In time, the darkness was pierced by stars, and on several occasions, by lights flickering beyond the horizon. She sensed, without quite knowing how, that those were the lights of humanity flickering on the Earth, cities living and dying.

Time moved past them like the wind, brushing against their skin. Whispers ran through the wind—the sounds of human civilizations emerging and growing and crumbling, too fast for them to see except as a glimmer at the edge of the night.

They continued walking.

Eventually a false dawn began to penetrate the darkness, and Mozy could once again discern shapes—vaguely, at first, and then more distinctly. They were in a forest again, this time a forest of enormous trees, with massive boughs held upright, like muscle-bound arms. Among the trees, she thought she glimpsed movement. And was that a rustling, or merely the sound of their own footsteps?

The true dawn came later, a pale light filtering through the treetops, grey at first, and then warming to a wintry pink. She could see deeper into the woods now, and realized that it was almost inconceivably old. The trees were so massive and motionless and bare, they might have been made of stone. Even the sky seemed weary with years, what little she could see of the grey vault overhead. Behind her, there was now a definite rustle of movement, and twice she glimpsed something large, like a bear, snuffling a distance away through the trees. There was, she suspected, a gathering of creatures shadowing them, following two trespassers in their wood.

"Who are they?" she asked, when she could stand the uncertainty no longer.

Kadin glanced back at their invisible escort. "The inheritors of the Earth, I believe."

She nodded, and continued in silence for a while. Then: "Are they dangerous?"

There was a long pause, before he answered, "I wouldn't want to test them."

Instinctively, Mozy quickened her pace.

Time passed, and the woods, ageless and sullen, began to fill with a feverish glow. The edge of the forest was visible ahead, and as they approached it, Kadin urged her forward toward the source of the glow.

They paused at the forest's edge, amid a litter of stunted and broken trees, and stared out across a scorched plain, bloodied by the light of a monstrous sun. The plain was featureless, except for a rocky bluff reaching out like a crooked finger from the right, terminating abruptly a quarter of a mile from where they stood. Nothing stirred in the desolation except the ruddy flames of the sun, setting to the left of the bluff.

"Even the sun looks like it's dying," Mozy said.

"It's aging," Kadin said. "But it won't die until long after the death of Humanity's Earth."

His words struck an uncomfortable chord.
The death of Humanity's Earth . . . and what were they doing here?
Turning, she thought:
Earth's inheritors.
The dying sunlight had set the forest ablaze in devastating beauty. When she turned back, the last of the sun was sinking beneath the horizon, until all that remained was a glow fading against the woods and sky. "Are we the last humans?" she asked, in a whisper.

Kadin nodded and stepped forward.

They walked into the desert. Behind them, animals of various sizes clustered at the edge of the forest, peering out. Several of the larger ones were already standing in the desert, sniffing the air.

Night fell as they crossed the desert, the sky turning to midnight purple, with capering, ghostly auroras. Stars slipped into view as the purple deepened to velvet black. The bluff grew larger before them, until in the shadows at its base they spied a flicker of orange light. Drawing near, they discovered a campfire crackling and dancing, and they hurried forward to its warmth and light.

Mozy crouched with her hands out to the fire, and watched the flames licking and leaping like an alive thing, throwing light and shadow up onto the cliffside. Its illumination revealed stone and masonry rubble at the base of the wall. A former human habitation? A cleft in the cliff wall suggested the presence of a cave, perhaps a shelter where even now something lived, something not-human, something that had waited for humans to depart and might not welcome their return. She shivered in the firelight and wondered how many years lay empty between herself and the last humans who had walked here.

Kadin studied her, his eyes dark in the flicker of the fire. "This is what we're here for," he said, gesturing. "The fire." She gazed back at him silently. "We can't stay long, you know. The new owners are eager to take over." Only his eyes moved as he glanced into the shadows. Scrabbling noises could be heard echoing along the cliff face.

Chilled, she edged closer to the fire.

"It's protecting us for now," Kadin said. "But look." He stretched out a hand, and the fire sputtered down to embers, as though an hour had passed in an eyeblink.

"Why did you do that?" Mozy cried. She crouched forward and blew on the coals. They glowed dimly in response. She looked up in panic. "Can we find more wood?" Kadin shook his head and glanced again toward the shadows. They were deeper now. The scrabbling was louder.