Neptune Crossing (The Chaos Chronicles) (29 page)

/// I'm glad you're pleased.

But now, my friend, comes the time for us

to earn our keep. ///

Bandicut started to give a jaunty reply, but swallowed it when he realized exactly what the quarx meant. He'd met the translator once before, and he hadn't liked the experience, not at all.

Chapter 21

Translator Dreams

The deep blue Neptune was a comforting companion in the midnight sky, as he drove toward navpoint Wendy. In the week since he'd last been out in a buggy, Triton had completed slightly more than one tidal-locked orbit of Neptune, and the mother planet was once again in crescent phase, a slender scythe in the sky. Whatever misgivings he had about the surreptitious mission he was about to undertake for Charlie, he could not resist the pleasure of the solitude, and the view. He knew there were not too many other people who would have considered this a scenic drive, but he loved the rugged desolation under Neptune's regal presence. He sometimes wondered if there was something wrong with him, that he didn't become as jaded by it as everyone else.

/// Do you ever get this sort of feeling

for your homeworld? ///

Charlie asked, as they bobbed and bumped over the landscape.

Bandicut squinted, picking out a course through the hilly nitrogen ices. /I dunno. Sometimes, I guess. Why?/

/// You don't seem to think of Earth that often.

Or of people you left behind. ///

Bandicut shrugged. /Didn't really leave a whole lot of people behind. My family's gone—you already know that. Except my niece, of course. And a few friends. But not really any close friends, I guess./

/// Is that hard for you to accept? ///

/What are you, a damn shrink? I'm alone. So what? Lots of people are alone./

For a few moments, the quarx didn't reply. Bandicut tried to concentrate on his driving. He glanced off to his left and watched Napoleon galloping over the dunes, paralleling his route. It was about time for the robot to check in with them.

/// What about Dakota? ///

Charlie asked suddenly.

Bandicut growled in annoyance. /What about her?/ He waggled the control stick, making the buggy veer left, then right. He was annoyed because he was feeling distracted and guilty; he'd gotten a message from Julie, saying that exoarch seemed to be onto something exciting, but they couldn't send out a team until more orbital scans had been done. He felt as if he were lying to her.

/// I'm trying to understand, that's all.

Dakota's your niece, right?

So you don't have a relationship with her

the way you would, say, with Julie. ///

/Obviously./

/// Therefore,

this thing that you're doing,

putting your earnings in trust for her,

is something that you're doing

for no other reason than that you care for her? ///

/Yeah, so? What's your point?/ Bandicut braked suddenly, realizing that he was veering from his plotted course. He sighed, noting that Napoleon was heading his way, probably to check on him. He flashed a signal to Napoleon that everything was all right. They were getting close now.

/// We're just under a kilometer from the cavern.

I'm skirting the point, I know.

But here it is:

Would you miss Earth, John,

if you were never able to return? ///

Bandicut felt a sudden chill. He instinctively pulled back on the power. /What the hell is that supposed to mean, Charlie? Yeah, I'd miss it. I'd miss it a lot. Why?/

Charlie stirred with an unusual restlessness.

/// Nothing...exactly.

Let's hope the question never comes up. ///

/Then why'd you bring it up?/

/// Just...trying to understand your emotions. ///

Bandicut grunted suspiciously and gunned the motor. The buggy crested a rise with a dim puff of snow, and on his console, two arrows converged. Time to get started. He keyed the comm. "EXO-OP CONTROL, UNIT ECHO. APPROACHING NAVPOINT WENDY. BEGINNING SURVEY RECORDINGS." He touched several switches on the console, turning on the mapping-sensor recorders.

/I hope you've got this figured out. If I cross the STOP HERE line again—even Stelnik and Jackson will be smart enough to figure out that something is going on./

/// Time to ask Napoleon to help us, ///

the quarx said, as they began their sweep over the assigned territory.

/// When you reach your turn up ahead,

could you ask it to come alongside? ///

/You're the boss. Let's just do it right./

*

Bandicut stood with his hand tingling on the robot's outer case. He wanted to ask Charlie exactly what he was doing to Napoleon's programming, but he sensed that the quarx was too deep in his work to answer. He only knew that fairly complex instructions were passing through his skin and glove into the robot's central processor. The tingling fluctuated for a moment, then faded.

/// Okay. You can take your hand away. ///

Napoleon made a creaking sound over the comm and stared with its black holocam eyes. "Of course, John Bandicut, I will assist as requested."

"Yes, good," Bandicut said, clearing his throat. Charlie had apparently just instructed the robot to carry on with the survey in his stead while they set out on foot to the cavern. /What now?/

/// Starting in nineteen minutes,

we will have a forty-nine-minute period

in which there will be no spacecraft or satellites

overhead. ///

Bandicut took a slow, deep breath. /All right. Hey, Charlie—if we do pull this off? You'll tell me everything the translator says, right? No secrets?/

/// No secrets, John.

We're in this together. ///

Bandicut set the rover into motion. Napoleon bounded alongside on its gangly grasshopper legs. When they reached the easternmost corner of the assigned sector, fifteen minutes later, he brought the buggy to a halt. They had four minutes to kill before the last of the overhead satellite eyes dropped below the horizon. Bandicut opened his visor and ate a chocolate bar. He tried to ignore the butterflies in his stomach. He knew it had to be done, but he was starting to feel like a criminal.

/// Time. Let's go. ///

Bandicut opened the bubble canopy and climbed out. Napoleon had already clambered up onto the side of the rover and plugged in its probe. As soon as Bandicut stepped clear, the robot drove off, hanging from the rover like a monkey. /That thing better be back here on time,/ Bandicut said uneasily.

/// It will. Let's go.

Bearing zero-five-four. ///

Bandicut sprang ahead in the one-thirteenth gravity and loped across the uneven icy surface, across the invisible STOP HERE line, into the unauthorized sector where he and Charlie had first met.

*

/// Right here. ///

Panting, he came to a stop. He had been jogging for ten minutes at the most, but it felt more like an hour. It wasn't easy, stumping across that distance with a cast inside his left suit leg; it would have been impossible in Earth gravity. He peered around over the frozen nitrogen and methane surface. /Is this it?/ It looked vaguely familiar; but a lot of places out here looked like a lot of other places. And the last time he was here, the translator had been busy rearranging the landscape.

The quarx didn't answer. But an instant later, he felt his feet sinking slowly into the ice. Then he was falling, and he was suddenly aware of sparkles of light whirling around him, and his vision and the rest of his consciousness went cottony and vague...

*

He blinked in darkness, and found just enough light to see that he was standing directly in front of the translator—the same machine, with its pulsing, squirming, not-quite-solid black and iridescent spheres, which had started him on this crazy path. He felt that he was dreaming, but knew he wasn't. The translator looked even more alive than before—this
thing
that belonged, not to the alien Rohengen who had occupied Triton millions of years before humanity, but to some other race lost even deeper in time and space. Bandicut felt that he was underground in the ice cavern, but saw nothing to confirm it; his vision was completely dominated by the spinning globes moving around each other and through each other.

He felt a palpable and urgent sense of
purpose
in the translator. He also saw something now that he had not before, a curious point of darkness floating inside one of the iridescent spheres, like a tiny shadow in the light. It caught his attention, because it did not seem to be just a fleck of physical matter, but more like a pure geometric point. The word
singularity
flickered in his mind, and he had no idea if that was what it was; but even as he was wondering, it caught his gaze with a wrench. He felt his vision telescoping down into that point of blackness. His breath escaped with an explosive rush.

He was falling into a microscopic universe of darkness, and deep within that universe, he saw dancing fire—and found it disturbing to look at. These were not chemical flames, but something far more fundamental, something burning and fusing deep in the uttermost building blocks of space-time...and whatever it was, it was bright, painfully so. And yet it was not the brightness so much as the
strangeness
that tore at his eyes. He wanted to call out to Charlie, but could not. It felt as though he were peering into the heart of a quantum black hole; nothing here quite fit anything that he knew or understood. It was almost as if he were being pulled into some tightly compacted dimension of reality, a corner of the universe that the human eye was never intended to see.

—It wasn't—

whispered a voice, which might have been the quarx's, or his own imagination. It was suddenly lost in a rising babble of voices, chaotic voices, speaking no language he knew, but reverberating in his mind, coming from within, coming from the fire, coming from God knew what source within this quarxian madness.

He was suddenly feverish with a rush of knowledge flowing into his mind, carried on the tide of voices. He was faint with it, he was dizzy and bewildered; he didn't know if he could hold or comprehend it all, and he could only hope that the quarx could. Charlie...was Charlie still here?

Images were building within him, images formed by knowledge gathering like atoms around a nucleating body, and soon they would crystalize abruptly into a vast clarity of—

—(what?)—

—you will see—

—the chaotic movement, the danger—

—a ticking molecular pendulum, marking time—

—a glimpse of tumbling rock and ice, perturbed from its orbit, far from the sun—

—falling inward, across endless space; hurtling close to the sun and then away—

—(is this?)—

—yes—

—a glimpse of a blue-and-white planet, floating serene in the darkness, a living world—

—the comet rising like a tremendous curving fastball, streaking toward the planet; and striking like a cosmic hammer, and erupting with—

—fire—

—fire!—

The fire seemed to spin around him, or he was spinning, and he felt himself caught in a transformation of time and space, and for a terrifying moment he thought this was nothing but silence-fugue, not alien wisdom or knowledge at all...except that now the previous images vanished and he saw a figure of coruscating fire, alive and aware, in the heart of the darkness, and he could not tell if it was the quarx or the translator, or both. Before he could ask, three blazing points of light erupted from the figure of fire and spun toward him, circling into tight orbits around his head, and then dropping into his pockets.

—these you will need—

He tried to focus on the points of light, but could not. Something new was building around him like a pressure wave, and with it was a growing sensation of unreality, and he felt himself wanting to scream, but he could not. He opened his mouth and darkness billowed out, and it was filled with a lance of fire—

—and he glimpsed cavern walls flashing and shimmering—

—and he heard a quarx crying out—

—and the darkness shrank down to a penetrating point—

—and spun away—

—and everything blurred—

*

He thought he heard a deep gong ringing in the darkness, but this darkness was of a different sort. It was the darkness of space, and there was a blue planet arching over his head. He blinked dizzily, trying to stand. He saw ice under his feet, and realized that he was standing on the surface right where he had begun this madness...

/// Don't faint! ///  

the quarx barked.

He caught himself stumbling. Whatever he had just been through, he felt as drained as he had this morning, after his healing.

/// Start walking—to your left!

Breathe, John—breathe! ///

He gulped air and shuddered, chilled to the bone. He had the presence of mind to call out to his suit for a system-check, and was reassured to hear that his life support was fine.

/// You've got to keep moving.

We meet Napoleon in nine minutes. ///

Napoleon...yes. He rasped in a lungful of air, trying to remember.

/// Do you understand what just happened? ///

/Not...no./ He started to stumble and caught himself before pitching over onto the cryogenic surface.

/// Keep walking.

It'll help you recover.

You did well. ///

/I did?/ he whispered, moving his feet like lead weights, one after the other. Slowly, mindlessly, he pushed himself to a cautious jogging speed. He thought he remembered visions of...it was so hard to remember, like a dream, dancing tantalizingly at the edge of his memory. He knew it would come back, if only he could...focus. But he couldn't focus while running.