Branegate (12 page)

“Alive where?” asked Trae. “You ran away, and I only see you in dreams. Is that the reality you mean?”

“I didn’t run away. I’ve always been with you, son; you just didn’t know it.”

“Not when I’m conscious, no,” said Trae sarcastically.

“I don’t think that’ll be a problem from now on. Here, try one of these.” Petyr stacked pieces of something on a plate and brought it over to the table. He put it in front of Trae along with an empty plate, knife and fork. Gobs of burned flesh, it looked like. Petyr served himself, motioned to Trae. “Dig in.”

“What is it?” Trae found the faint odor of the food somewhat nauseating.

“Cowry. It’s a flightless bird native to Tabor.”

“It smells awful. It isn’t real, anyway.”

Petyr cut off a piece, shoved it into his own mouth, and chewed vigorously. “You’re missing something, son, and you need your protein. What kind of meat will you eat?”

“We had fish in the caverns,” said Trae.

Petyr waved his fork over the serving plate like it was a magic wand. “Then let it be fish.”

The plate blurred, shimmered, cleared again. Where there had been two lumps of blackened flesh were now two slices of golden brown fish, flaky at the touch of a fork.

“Like you said, it isn’t real, but eat it anyway,” said Petyr.

Trae tried one slice, then the other. It was delicious.

“Of course this is all illusion, manufactured in my own mind and shared only with you this time. No watchers here, except your mother, bless her. She was willing to be a tree just so she could watch over you while we talked, but there are things I cannot allow her to know in the event she’s stolen from me by people who’d like to see me dead. There are many such people, Trae, and they’ll try to get to me through you if they have the chance. Your life isn’t safe.”

“The Emperor’s police have already tried to kill me,” said Trae. “It’ll go on until the Emperor is thrown out, but so far I’m getting little help from other worlds, only words of sympathy. The Church of Gan isn’t respected; the believers elsewhere consider them extremists.”

“Indeed they are,” said Petyr, “but they’re no longer your problem. There are far greater dangers than the Emperor’s police. You’ve now reached a stage where Immortals scattered across the galaxy might become aware of you. You might have experienced signs of that.”

“I’ve heard voices calling my name. I thought my mission was to find you and save our people on Gan.”

“The voices were your mother and I when you came of age. The mental ties are within the family; it’s part of our genetics. And you’ve accomplished your immediate mission well enough.”

Petyr swallowed the last of his meat. “Oh, that was good. How was the fish?”

Trae ignored the question and pushed his empty plate away from him. “I’ve accomplished nothing,” he grumbled, “except to nearly get myself killed.”

“You’ve pulled a trigger that will rid Gan of its Emperor. The Church has its own problems to solve if it expects to reintegrate into society there. The Church was not my doing, Trae. All I brought to Gan, all I bring to any planet, is a philosophy. It’s not a religion. What the priests call The Source is in all of us; it’s a part of us that gives us wisdom and creativity. Our people, yours and mine, learned how to tap its energies fully a long time ago in a place far from here.”

“The Immortals,” said Trae.

“Not really,” said Petyr, speaking for another. “We live a very long time with perfect health, but even so our bodies don’t last forever. There is a reincarnation process, but it’s artificial. Your mother and I have lived several lifetimes, half of them spent in ships making the transit across this galaxy. You’re already in your second life, Trae. You were Anton, our first-born, and your mother died with you in a fire started by the Emperor’s troops. I wasn’t there, but I experienced it with you. Your death agonies were probably experienced by every Immortal within light years of Gan. Those last moments were lost to you, but not to me, and I’ve returned them to you. They’ve been in your dreams since you’ve been reborn. And our technology has given you and your mother back to me.”

“In new bodies.”

“Yes.”

“My earliest memories of the caverns are from when I was only two years old.”

“Physically you were a year old at reincarnation, but only a few memories were introduced then. The process was accelerated after you were six.”

Petyr paused, and a frown creased his forehead. “There were not a lot of memories to reintroduce. You were so little when they murdered you.”

“What about my mother?”

Now Petyr smiled. “We chose the age of twenty-five. It was a very good year.”

“We all have spare bodies lying around, just waiting to be used for reincarnation?”

“Not exactly,” said Petyr, and he chuckled. “I’ll tell you more later. Total reintegration is complex, and more than a bit traumatic. It’s not to be taken lightly. Have you finished eating?”

Trae laughed. “If you say so.”

Petyr smiled again. “Doesn’t have to be real to be tasty. I want to show you something, and we have to fly there to see it.”

“So now you’ll conjure up an aircraft for us,” said Trae, getting into the spirit of the moment.

Petyr stood up, and Trae with him. “No, just hold out your arms, and follow me.”

Petyr held his arms out from his sides at shoulder height, and Trae did the same. There was an awkward pause, Trae feeling silly, then Petyr rose slowly from the ground, straight up, and Trae, without thinking, was following, and the ground was rushing away beneath him. The rolling hills and fields of flowers extended to each horizon and became a patch of purple as the sky turned to dark, dark blue, then black. The purple patch shrank to a dot, then vanished on the surface of a ball colored in swirls of blue, green and tan and then the ball was a point in a field of black as they rushed higher and higher. Points of blue light appeared in the blackness and then fuzzy wisps in red and green, rushing past them. Trae was exhilarated yet frightened at the same time. All an illusion, he thought. A dream-state, and none of it is really happening.

Petyr seemed to sense his mood. “Relax!” he shouted clearly in the blackness of space. “You’ve had flying dreams before. Anyone with imagination has had them. Come on, faster. We have a long way to go!”

Stars and nebulae raced by, and ahead the density of stars was increasing, a great ovoid cloud of stars. Lanes of dark dust were like spider web and there was an intensely bright spot in the center of the cloud. They were no longer rising, but descending, and the bright spot grew quickly. Stars and luminous gas flowed past them like mist, and suddenly they were in a clear space and ahead not one, but four points of bright light, close together, and positioned as if on the corners of a square.

Getting closer, Trae saw swirls of stars and dusty gas in tight spirals around each bright point, and in the center of the square another light appeared, glowing green. Petyr pointed at it, looking back at Trae. “The local gate; you can just barely see it now.”

The thing was indeed green, an oval shape, pulsing in intensity at a regular rate. Wisps of dust and gas laced its edges, feelers extended to the array of bright points surrounding it.

They slowed and came to a stop in front of the thing. Petyr moved up alongside Trae, put an arm around his shoulders. Trae felt nothing, and Petyr made a grand gesture towards the object in front of them.

“This is where we came from,” he said dramatically.

Trae looked at shimmering green, then Petyr. “What?”

“It’s a gate, a portal to our universe, son, the universe our people came here from. What the priests call The Immortals didn’t originate in this universe, but came through this gate from another one. Your great grandfather came through here, and never had a life outside the ship he was traveling on, even though he lived nearly a dozen normal lifetimes before he chose to end it.”

“I don’t understand,” said Trae. “We’re not human?”

“Must be. We can breed with the normal lifetime folks. Nobody knows when the first gates were formed, but the one you’re looking at came from your great grandfather’s generation once they’d learned to tap vacuum energy.

Trae frowned at him.

“Sorry. It’s all part of your education, and it comes soon. The family fortune depends on our knowledge of vacuum-state energy and how to manipulate it. The power is unlimited. Any energy, any mass you want, you can have it. You know what black holes are?”

“Yes.”

“There’s a really big one on the other side of the gate, in our home universe. It has a mass of a billion stars. Spacetime is highly stressed and we’ve engineered worm-holes into it, spacetime tunnels so small they penetrate through what’s called a brane. It’s a boundary between the two universes. Once on this side, four more black holes are arranged to stabilize the exit.” Petyr pointed to the four bright points of light nearby. “Black holes evaporate slowly, but the system is dynamic; we have to continually funnel vacuum energy in to keep things stable. Even the spatial arrangement has to be changed, and it’s no small chore to move black holes around.”

Trae was staring at him, a slight grin on his face.

“What is it?”

Trae smiled. “I think my own imagination is running wild. I’m somehow making it all up in this dream I’m having.”

Petyr nodded. “I can understand that. Not a dream, son. You’re in my mind right now, seeing what I remember, and we’re talking as sure as if we’re standing next to each other. Our connection is outside of spacetime. Here’s something else for you to disbelieve, but I was there to see it when it happened, and it happens every day we’re alive.”

Their motion was instantaneous, and away from the yawning, green chasm Petyr called a portal. They rushed in towards one of the bright points of light surrounding it. Details were suddenly there. It was not a single point of light, but a tight vortex of stars, dust and gas, an intense glow at its center. They moved in even closer, and chaos surrounded them, and ahead was a dark spot, then a speck of black near it that seemed to be their target. The speck resolved itself into a sphere, not black but dark brown, connected to a monstrous funnel-shaped thing spewing forth something that blurred the space before it far into the distance.

They drew close. The thing was not small; it was easily the size of a planet, and Petyr sensed Trae’s wonderment.

“It’s the size of a typical gas giant, around twenty standard-terra masses. It’s a ship, Trae. Has a crew of fifty people, and it’s only one of ten ships that police the gate and make the necessary adjustments to keep it stable. When I saw it I was a small boy, and it was pushing on that black hole ahead of us, a minor correction, by the looks of it. With a major push the space around us would be so blurred you wouldn’t be able to see the ship. It doesn’t actually push on the black hole; it produces a localized distortion in spacetime with bursts of vacuum state energy, and the mass sort of rolls along with the distortion. The required power, of course, is incredible. Ninety-eight percent of the ship is field generator to suck up vacuum state energy and redirect it. Impressed?”

“Still hard to believe,” said Trae, “but I’m seeing it.”

“The technology came from our universe, not this one, son. Your world is even larger than you see here. And there are four gates in this galaxy, not one, all of them near the core center. Even with a vacuum field drive it’s typically a fifty-year trip to any of the planetary systems we’ve occupied here. We’re working on that. You’ll be working on it, too. The travel time has to be shortened for reasons I’ll explain to you. The family fortune is also involved, but mainly we need to be able to respond quickly to whatever comes through the gate, and right now we can’t do that.”

“Are we in some kind of danger?” asked Trae.

“We could be. Our people have enemies other than the Emperor of Gan, people more powerful than him. I left Gan for a reason. My mission is yet to be accomplished. As we speak I’m on a ship nearing the gate you see before you. Within a year I’ll pass through that gate and return to our home universe. There’s a political crisis, a bad one, and I’m considered to be the leader of our people in this universe we’ve migrated to. Some would have it otherwise. They might already have sent agents through the gate to terminate me. That means you could also be in danger. Your mother is with me, and you’re the only family member left in this universe. I’ll tell you where to go and what to do, and the knowledge you have to have will be fed to you in an unconscious state. The problem you left Gan for is about to be solved. You’ll be leaving the local system, and beyond it only a few of our own people will know you’re my son. You’ll be in charge of the empire I’ve built there, Trae, even though you’re so young. You’ll know what to do, and I’ll be in constant touch. Other Immortals might contact you from a distance. Be wary of such contacts. Do not let such people know where you are or what you’re doing, and right now you’re wide open to them. You’ll have to learn to mask yourself, and I’ll show you how. Oh, this is enough for now. You’re stunned; you’re not getting all of this.”

“I hear you,” said Trae, but his mind was whirling.

“Another time. I have less than a year to do all of this. I’m going to let you sleep a deeper sleep so I can start feeding you data on our companies. The tech stuff can come later. Time to go back, and—oh, oh, your mother is here.”

The universe was suddenly black, gate, black holes, the great ship and swirling gases all disappearing, and then Trae was back again on a bench looking out on rolling hills and fields of flowers beneath an azure sky. Petyr was sitting across from him, looking sheepish. “I thought she’d be content to just watch this time. Sorry, dear, I wasn’t thinking of you.”

Petyr disappeared in a blink, and a cool wind brushed Trae’s face. The light seemed to dim, and when Trae looked up he saw the sky was darker than before, a hint of purple mixed in with the blue. The fields of flowers were still there, but more mixed now, not just lavender, but splotches of deep red, white, and there were more trees with purple tops.

Out in the fields of flowers someone was standing. She wore a long, white dress, sleeveless, and was waving to him. Even at this distance he could see her hair was blond. He waved back, stood up and went to her through the flowers, feeling his feet pushing aside their stalks, their scent enveloping him. And when he drew near he saw her face, and recognized it.