Eternity Row (47 page)

“Marel? Marel! Answer me! Marel!”

By the time I heard her little voice call back, I was deep in the forest. I found her sitting at the base of a tree, holding a panting Juliet in her arms.

“Mama, see?” She held up Jenner’s mate, making the two kittens sitting at her feet meow. “I caud her!”

I snatched the cat from her hands. “Don’t you ever run away from me like that again!”

I’d never yelled at Marel before, and she looked as if I’d slapped her. “Mama? You mad ad me?”

“Yes!” I took a breath. “No, no I was just scared.” Then, seeing how upset she was, I caved in. “I’m sorry I shouted at you, baby.”

She flung herself into my arms. At the same time, something hit me in the side of the neck and stung me. I slapped my hand up and came away with a small, green insect squashed over my palm. “Ugh. Let’s go back now, honey.”

Going back proved to be more of a challenge than I thought, as I hadn’t paid attention to landmarks or direction while I’d been chasing down my kid. After a few minutes of yelling for Alunthri and Reever and wandering around, I began to feel a strange, heavy lethargy creep over me.

I reached up and felt the small bite on my neck. It was starting to swell, which meant a reaction. My immune system would respond efficiently, but I might not be able to stay conscious in the interim.

“Marel, listen to me.” I turned her face toward me with my palm. “I’ve been stung by something, and it’s making me sick. We need to find a place to wait for Daddy, and you have to stay by me. Even if I fall asleep, okay?”

“Okay, Mama.” She curled her little hand in mine.

I looked for a relatively safe place, but the forest was thick and my legs weren’t working properly. I staggered over something bumpy and tripped, falling forward into some moss. Under the moss was something hard, cold and smooth, and I tried to roll away.

The ground seemed to open up, and I dropped down six inches. “Marel!”

My daughter leaned over the recess, her small face smiling. “Sleep now, Mama?”

I held up my arms, which felt like lead piping. “Come to me, baby. Take a nap with me.”

She climbed down and curled up at my side, one arm across my stomach. “Daddy come soon?”

“Soon…” I pulled her up on top of me, and wrapped my arms around her. Juliet and the kittens jumped down, and nestled around my legs.

I watched through bleary eyes as Marel fell asleep, all the while trying desperately to stay awake myself. Whatever poison was in me was having a direct effect on my brain, as I began to see a faint, hazy glow creeping up around us. I managed to turn my head, and saw a patch of stone through the moss, also glowing brightly.

Is it some kind of weapon?

Above us, something rustled. I blinked as dozens of the near-cats came to the edge of the recess, and sat down. They were no longer making the funny chittering sound, and seemed to be waiting for something.

Then the glow intensified, and something hurtled me, still clutching my sleeping daughter, into an abyss.

For a time I dreamed of nothing but darkness. Unfamiliar, weighted darkness that seemed to drain the energy out of my entire body, making me a part of it.

Am I dead? Did she lie to me? Is this death?

There was no tunnel of light, no voice to guide me. I fell deeper, growing weaker until I nearly lost all sense of myself. Then an incredible warmth enveloped me, like a heated blanket, and life seeped back into my limbs.

“You’re not dead, Joey. Wake up.”

For once, I almost happy to hear that voice. “Maggie?”

“Come on, baby. Up and at ‘em.” Hands lifted me, touched my face, shook me lightly.

I didn’t regain consciousness so much as I jerked back into it, feeling absolute panic. Light blinded me as I opened my eyes. “Marel!”

“She’s right here.”

As my vision adjusted to the light, I saw I was still holding my daughter’s sleeping body. “Thank God.” I rested my cheek against the top of her head, then looked around. “Maggie?”

“So this is the little demon.”

My former maternal influencer appeared in front of us, in the tailored gray-and-white uniform Joseph Grey Veil had made her wear while she cared for me. It only emphasized the brassy blaze of her red hair and hinted at the voluptuous curves underneath. Whenever we’d gone out in public, men had practically tripped over their tongues, watching her saunter around.

As she stepped forward and reached toward Marel, I stepped back. “Don’t.”

“Jesus Christ, Cherijo, I’m not going to hurt the little rug rat. Wow.” Maggie smiled down at my daughter. “She’s really cute. Much prettier than you were at this age. Must take after Dunkie.”

Everything was different than it had been before. I had no idea or even a sense of where we were. It was just me and Maggie and Marel, hanging in the midst of a glowing, soft white light.

This wasn’t like any of the subliminal, implanted memory-whatevers she’d sprung on me before. “Where are we? What is this?”

“You’re in the planetary repository.” My former companion lifted a hand, and beyond the glow I saw vague outlines of stone walls and huge machinery. “Give it a minute; it’s been quite a while since it started up.”

“Are we really here, or is this inside my head?”

“We’re really not in Kansas anymore, Dorothy.” She looked down at my daughter. “Which reminds me. Much as I would love to hear all your mom war stories, she’s got to go back for a little while.” She snapped her fingers, and my arms jerked as Marel vanished.

“No!” I whirled around, searching the now-solid stone chamber we stood in. I turned and lunged at Maggie. “What did you do to her?”

I hit an invisible wall, and went down, hard. The weakness returned, and for several seconds I thought I’d passed out again.

“Joey, Joey.” Strong arms lifted me up on my feet and held me steady. “She’s perfectly safe. I’ve made sure of it. The repository requires a level of tolerance, and she needs to grow a bit more before she can visit her Grandma Maggie.”

Her voice was louder, stronger. I opened my eyes, and focused on her face. “All right. I’m here. I did what you wanted. Now tell me everything-what you want, why you got me involved, everything.”

“And make it snappy?” Maggie chuckled. “I will, baby. Just let me slip into something more comfortable first.”

She stepped away, leaving me to find my balance. The nearest wall was more than fifty yards away, and covered with intricate panels of alloy and crystal unlike any mechanism or device I’d ever seen. Some parts of the panel seemed to vibrate, operating at a blur, while others gave off varying degrees of the glow. There were no pictographs or alphabet to indicate the language of whoever had built it, but from the shape of some of the parts it would take a wide, dexterous hand to work them.

A hand with five articulated joints.

Maggie’s form changed, blurring from a the voluptuous Terran redhead to another being altogether. One with straight, dark hair streaming from a long, high skull with slits instead of ears. Bejeweled yellow ribbons hung in a diagonal fringe over her slanted, dark eyes. The companion’s uniform lengthened to a strange gown made up of knotted folds. The fabric glowed, then brightened to the same shade as the ribbons.

Unearthly serenity settled over her expression. “Does it disturb you to see this form?”

“I’m not crazy about the screaming-yellow outfit,” I said.

“As Maggie would say, this is the real deal, so get used to it.” The slim, elegant alien moved her hand an inch to the right, and the wall devices seemed to go into a frenzy. “Physical form has its limitations, but my kind have always been enchanted with its possibilities.”

“Who are your kind?”

“Language also has its restrictions. To phrase it at your level of understanding, we were, are, and will be the Jxin.”

“Congratulations.” I made a slow circle. “And this place? You called it a repository. Can you phrase that a little better for the dumb Terran?”

“Wherever the Jxin dwell, we create storage places. That is all this is. Unfortunately, only modified beings such as yourself can access them.” Before I could reply, she smiled. “You want to know what ‘modified’ means and why you would access a place like this and what is stored here. Perhaps it would be better to do this in my Maggie persona.” An instant later, she had returned to the redheaded Terran female form. “Better?”

I had the feeling I was supposed to be in awe of these transformations. I wasn’t. “Nice magic tricks, but could we move along now?”

“Always anxious to cut to the chase, huh?” Maggie laughed. “Okay, baby. Here we go.” She put two fingers in her mouth, and let out a loud whistle.

The repository disappeared, replaced by the forests of Jxinok. Not the Jxinok I had come to, though. Huge trees sprang up around us, growing thick and lush from a primordial black soil. Leafy fernlike bushes as big as star vessels hung in midair. Flowers crowded each other, growing in wild disarray and studding everything from the tree canopy to the moss under our feet.

“This is what Jxinok looked when my kind moved in. Gorgeous, isn’t it?” She took my arm and led me forward, following a natural path through the dense trees. “This is just one of the great spots-you should have seen the valley of waterfalls over on the northeastern continent. We fell in love with this place at first sight.”

“You’re not from this planet?”

“Um, no. We don’t know where we’re from. Actually, we’ve never exactly come from anywhere. Existence is-” She shook her head. “Let’s skip that part for now. It’s one of those concepts that takes a few centuries to figure out.”

We left the tree line and I nearly choked as a huge, towering city of pure crystal pushed up from the earth, as if growing under the yellow sun.

“My place is right over there,” Maggie said, pointing to a particularly beautiful transparent column. Inside, several other elegant aliens were occupied with various domestic chores. “I really miss the view. From there you can see the whole valley.”

Light glittered through the transparent structures, spinning moving rainbows through the air. I could smell flowers and hear laughter drifting on the air. “Must have been a real job, washing windows.”

She laughed. “We had a little help.”

“Those machines I saw in the repository?”

“Something like that, only bigger, and in orbit. We used our… machines… to build a couple of thousand cities here, like this one. The Jxin would have happily stayed here forever.”

“But?”

“Smart girl.” She rubbed a hand over my head. “We found out we couldn’t stay.” She walked over and touched her hand to one outer wall, and an opening appeared. “Come on, you’ll really like this.”

I followed her, gawking at the beautiful people and wondrous sights inside. “Why would you want to leave?”

She nodded toward a couple who were embracing each other. “Watch.”

The same glow that had enveloped me and Marel in the recess formed around the couple. Slowly, their bodies fused together, then dwindled, leaving only a pool of light hanging in the air. A few seconds later, that disappeared.

“It’s what we called transcending, but we only did it when we wanted to before we came here. Something in this reality triggers it. We’re still trying to find out what.”

“What happened to those two people?”

“They’re existing in another dimension. At least, we think they are. We’ve gotten pretty scattered over time, and lost track of each other.”

What could I say? “Oh, not good.”

“Really not good. Despite all our efforts, remaining corporeal became damn near impossible for us. We found a way to control the transcension, but we couldn’t stop it.” She frowned as she paused by a crystalline fountain, and trailed her fingers through the water. “I sure liked being solid, too.”

“You’re not solid after that glow gets you?”

“No, baby. We’ve always moved through different dimensional incarnations, but none of them could be permanent. Not even when we wanted to stay that way.”

I covered my head as something exploded nearby. “What is that? What’s happening?”

“That? Just some raiders.” Maggie made a shoo-shoo gesture toward a group of vicious-looking beings storming the structure. They shot down everyone in sight. “They attacked us after we visited their world and improved their technology. Happens all the time with inferior life-forms-stop by, say hello, give them some presents, and they think they can invade your planet.”