Summerhill (30 page)

If anything positive could be said about the dens of ill repute that Royeyri stopped at along the way, it was that the folks there at least seemed to be in better spirits. Much of that, though, was due to their being drunk or having just bilked some sucker out of all his money with some shady deal or rigged card game.

The vast majority of the people Summerhill saw were humans like Katherine. An alien would occasionally be present in some crowd or another, but there was nothing like the menagerie of different beings aboard the
Nusquam
. Summerhill kept his eyes peeled for any otter-like creatures from Rydale, but he never saw any. Only once did he even see another Syorii, and Royeyri had apparently carried out their entire exchange telepathically before Summerhill had a chance to meet the fellow.

For the bulk of the journey, however, Summerhill and Royeyri were alone aboard their little ship. To keep busy, the dog spent much of his overabundant free time on the ship’s computers, mainly reading up on things like the history of both the human and Syorii civilization and cultures. The details of much of the high-level politics were difficult to understand without better context; the Kentaurus-Procyon Hegemony was only one of many human governments that existed now, to say nothing of factions who held allegiances to states or organizations that no longer legally existed.

New Zealand still existed, though, and it seemed much as Katherine had described it so long ago: a tiny little island nation on just one planet (which wasn’t even part of the Hegemony, it turned out), populated by millions of people, adding their own unique speck of color to the mosaic of human history. It was dizzying, really, to see just how much there was to read about even these minute aspects of human culture. Even with weeks spent in the depths of space, Summerhill had barely been able to scratch the surface of all the information at his fingertips.

He thought back to the World of the Pale Gray Sky, though doing so made his heart race and his blood run cold. There was no texture, no cultural context, no anything. It was just a city devoid of life, meaning, and even inspiration. Endless buildings, countless structures to go into and search through, and even so, that whole entire world contained less of interest than the information on one single computer terminal aboard one tiny starship piloted by a lone Syorii amidst a vast, inscrutable universe.

And how insignificant must even this universe be when set alongside the myriad realities represented by the guests aboard the
Nusquam
? Surely it was impossible for any one mind to accept and comprehend all of that, Summerhill thought. When he’d first made his way on board that fantastical cruise ship, he’d been impressed, sure, by how wonderful and diverse things were, but coming from his amnesiac background with so little judge against, he hadn’t been able to appreciate how humbled and amazed he truly ought to have been.

While the encompassing truth of multiple realities were impressive, that didn’t make the comparatively little things any less impressive, as Summerhill was reminded when Royeyri pulled the ship out of FTL and showed him the Orion Nebula itself.

Summerhill was struck wholly by the overpowering beauty of the nebula. It looked not unlike a flower, the swirling gases like petals blossoming outward in a stunning array of green and red and blue-violet. Darker gases formed the shape of a calyx, in the cradle of which blazed young, fierce stars. Summerhill gave himself over to the moment, transfixed by the majesty of the sight. Even the intractable Royeyri seemed impressed, for once.

From the ship’s cockpit, the nebula looked close enough to touch, like something Summerhill could reach out and touch with his mind, to shape and sculpt and control like a flower made of burning fire floating through space. Royeyri then explained that Summerhill was actually looking at a region of space some twenty light-years across.

“Summerhill wants to find a drydock here?” Royeyri asked, as if just wanting to make sure, one last time, that the long trip out here did in fact have a point, even if it was a ridiculous one.

“This is where Katherine said it was. I can’t imagine it’ll be too difficult to find.”

Royeyri just laughed and sauntered off back to the observation lounge. “Come,” he beckoned. “Royeyri will search the nebula. If Summerhill is so smart and sure, maybe he can find some way to help.”

The first several days of searching yielded no results. Royeyri would sit cross-legged in the observation lounge, spread his arms, and then his eyes would flash blue and his entire body would go limp. Summerhill would then spend hours sitting by him, his body unsettlingly cold and still without his mind at the helm. The Syorii assured him more than once that it was okay, and that his body naturally entered a state of drastically reduced metabolism while his mind was off scouring the nebula, but that still didn’t change the fact that Summerhill felt like he was watching over a corpse, meanwhile.

Royeyri did complain that the nebula itself made it harder to search, something about the near absolute zero of empty space being much easier to ‘see’ through while his consciousness was on sojourn. Summerhill had nothing to compare the experience to, and so he just took the Syorii’s complaints at face value, though after a few days of nothing at all turning up in their search, he was starting to get frustrated with the excuses.

The Syorii insisted on a regular, systematic search pattern, but something about that adherence to regularity made Summerhill grow rapidly impatient. The dog pored over the ship’s maps of the nebula and spent hours staring out the different viewing ports. He continued to see the nebula as a flower; the overall shape formed the petals, and inside that would be the stamens growing up from the center. He picked out stars to be the anthers sitting atop those stamens, and he drew up search plans that involved following the trails of gas and dust that made up the filaments. Royeyri protested what he considered a highly unscientific and irrational approach, but Summerhill pointed out that they were looking for a time-traveling cruise ship so that he could rescue a waitress from New Zealand from the interdimensional space police, and taken in that context, further debate just seemed futile and a little silly.

A few days later, at the tip of the third such stamen, Summerhill and Royeyri came across a brown dwarf. After coming back from one of his out-of-body trips, the Syorii finally reported something unusual.

“Quite strange, yes. Like a bubble, but not a real one. More like a sphere of glass. Yes, blown glass, like humans and Syorii make! Except not glass. Something less tangible but more impassible.”

“What is it, then?”

“Familiar,” Royeyri replied. “Like the curtains that separate this place from other places. Other places, like where Royeyri first met Summerhill.”

Summerhill looked out the window; from here, the tiny star wasn’t even visible to the naked eye, but it was out there, somewhere. “Can you take us there?”

“Royeyri can do that, yes.” The Syorii hung his head and cooed to himself. “On one condition, lah.”

“What’s that?”

The mammal-bird turned his large, round eyes back up at Summerhill. “Don’t make Royeyri go with you.”

“You don’t want to come?”

Royeyri shook his head.

“Oh, come on. I thought you had this grand sense of adventure. You know, guiding ships out past the frontier, exploring the unknown, sending your mind to other universes and all that.”

“This time is different. Royeyri very close to retiring, see. Big pension. Probably big hazard pay, too, for having ship overrun and taken over by dangerous Summerhill.” The edges of his beak-like snout curled up.

Summerhill laughed. “You’re going to go back to the Hegemony and tell them I hijacked your ship?”

“Only until Royeyri bravely took it back!” The Syorii clucked his beak and tongue and did a little hop. “Tragically, strange alien dog specimen got away, lah. Royeyri has to return empty-handed, probably discharged from service, forced to retire many months early.”

The dog smirked. “You’re a little sneak.”

Royeyri held up his arms and tapped himself on both sides of the head at the same time with his knuckles. “Genius thinking. Lies and trickery.” He winked. “Royeyri gets by.”

Twenty-Nine

Terminus

Whatever the ‘barrier’ Royeyri had described was, it wasn’t anything visible. What was visible, slowly drifting through the nebula in far orbit of the brown dwarf, was the drydock.

From a distance, it appeared as little more than a rusted-out, floating platform. There was no activity around it. There was no
Nusquam
, nor any other ship. The dock appeared to be abandoned. But Summerhill wasn’t ready to give up hope yet. After all, the technology that had gone into the
Nusquam
was beyond anything that he’d seen on any of his other adventures, and this ‘barrier’ Royeyri insisted was there might have been obscuring the truth.

“Just pull up alongside and let me out,” Summerhill told the Syorii as he looked out the cockpit window. “I’ll take it from there.”

Royeyri shook his head. “Don’t have a vacuum pressure suit that’ll fit Summerhill on board, tut.”

“It’s okay.” Summerhill walked over towards the airlock. “I don’t think I’m going to need one.”

“Royeyri isn’t so sure about that, lah.”

“I’ll be fine.” He opened the outer hatch to the airlock and stepped inside, and the door spun shut automatically behind him. “I didn’t come all this way just to turn back because I didn’t have a pressure suit.”

The world went slow and blue.
“Are you sure?”
Royeyri asked, speaking directly into Summerhill’s mind.

“I’m sure. I’m Summerhill. These things seem to have a way of working out for me.”

Before Royeyri broke off the psychic connection, Summerhill felt the sensation of the Syorii wishing him good luck more than he heard any specific words. The blue faded, the world resumed, and the wheel for the airlock’s outer hatch began to spin.

There was a hiss as the air escaped the airlock, and then the hatch swung open. Summerhill, unperturbed, stepped out onto the dock, heedless of the fact that there might not be any heat or atmosphere, and shut the hatch behind him.

Yes, there was heat and an atmosphere, though not much of either. The air was thin, but breathable, and though it was cold, it was nothing compared to the world of mountains and ice. Summerhill rubbed his hands up and down his arms and sides to fend off the initial chill. So long as this search didn’t take very long, he’d be fine.

The drydock itself was less elaborate than Summerhill had imagined. It really was little more than a metal platform floating in space, several kilometers long. A few small buildings adorned its surface. Piers jutted out from the side of the platform facing the star, spaced at regular intervals, with a large gap where it looked as though one of them had long since broken free and drifted off into space.

Summerhill had hoped that some kind of shield or veil—perhaps the mysterious ‘barrier’ Royeyri had mentioned—had hidden the drydock’s true appearance from sight, but that theory was off the table now. At some point, this place might have been bustling with machinery and personnel, but now it was just an abandoned ruin floating through the Orion Nebula.

If the buildings had ever been labeled, they didn’t bear those labels anymore. Still, something must still be functioning on this relic somewhere. Some kind of technology was giving this decrepit hunk of metal a gravity well and a breathable atmosphere and a radiation shield. Either that, or Summerhill was more immune to the laws of physics than he thought.

As Summerhill walked along the length of the platform, Royeyri’s starship broke away and made a turn towards open space. Before the ship flew out of sight, Summerhill looked up and saw Royeyri through the cockpit’s viewports, along with the astonishment on the Syorii’s face as he looked back at the dog standing on the platform without a spacesuit. All Summerhill could offer him was a smile and a wave.