Sunborn (17 page)

    His heart was pounding as he called out again to Blackie. The sky was darkening rapidly, the roar of the combines building in his ears. The great machines loomed...he heard a piercing howl...

   
“BLACKIE!”
 he screamed, and with that, silence-fugue swept over him. The terror of the dream rose up like a gargoyle face, leering at him, eyes grinning with hideous laughter, mouth agape echoing his scream and amplifying it until the sound reverberated around him.

    He was no longer asleep, but he was as helpless before the silence-fugue as he’d been before the dream.
Blackie! Blackie! Don’t let yourself be run over by the machines! You did, didn’t you? You’re gone now!
He was trying to scream out loud, but if anything escaped his lips, it was tortured and incomprehensible. He was being swept away on the winds of silence-fugue...

*

   
Antares awoke with a riveting stab of night terror. She rocked up to a sitting position in bed, breathing hard, peering around in the gloom. She heard a muffled, distorted moan from John Bandicut, and only then did she realize that the stab of fear was his. “John!” she cried, reaching out.

    His eyes were wide open, and he was turning left and right, not quite thrashing. He was trying to speak—but he seemed unable to get words out. He needed help, and quickly. She shook him; then, gripping his arm tightly, she bowed her head and closed her eyes. (John?
John?
 Can you feel me here?)

    She felt wave after wave of pain and fear. Churning beneath it all was grief over Charlene. What was happening to him? Was this one of his hallucinatory silence-fugue episodes?
Please no.
The fugues had something to do with the loss of his neurolink connectors in an accident long before she knew him. As a pilot, he had flown by direct mind-computer link, until a malfunction destroyed his connections, leaving him vulnerable to a strange kind of mental dissociation. Silence-fugue, he called it. It still came over him at times—especially during periods of emotional stress. Charlie’s death must have triggered it this time.

    Once before, in a crisis, she had managed to help him; she would have to do it again. (You aren’t alone. I am with you. I am here with you.) She didn’t expect him to understand her words, but hoped the emotions would get through.

    It wasn’t enough; it wasn’t working. She had to dampen the emotional waves somehow. Step into them and deflect them. It was going to be like stepping into an ocean breaker and trying to change its course.

   
You can do it. You have to.

*

   
Bandicut was dimly aware of Antares trying to help.
No use, no use! Blackie has gotten himself run over, and I can’t do anything to stop the machines! He’s gone, he’s gone!
 Bandicut fought to cast off the terrors, but he couldn’t. He felt someone shaking him.

   
No use.

   
He was alone against the terror, alone. Alone on a sea of fear, drowning. He had to claw...fight...stay on the surface.

    A wave of fear rose and washed over him, choking him, pulling him down. Then another. But something seemed to catch this last wave and turn it a little, deflecting its power. He gasped and caught half a breath, enough to carry him a few more seconds. He was sinking, but he’d snatched a gasp of hope. He clung to it, clung for his life.

   
The next wave came, not quite as large, not quite as terrible. He caught another breath, a bigger one this time. He felt something touching him, buoying him up in the waves. What was it? When the next wave hit, he managed to rise up over it, still choking but breathing. He felt her touch now, Antares’s presence. There was an opening in the madness. He felt Antares touch him in places he had forgotten; and some of the waves passed him by, and overhead in the sky, the black clouds began to disperse.

   
He caught a deeper breath, slower. He no longer quite needed to scream. (John,) he heard somewhere.

    But he heard something else, too, another voice altogether, struggling to be heard. What was this?

   
“Hell-lo...hear-r m-me?”

   
Still panting, not fully out of the fugue yet, he swung around, trying to locate the source. A familiar voice.
Charlie?
 No—no Charlie. Then who?

    Something was moving on the wall, something shadowy. It reminded him of the hyperdimensional creature they’d met back on the waystation.
“Ed?”
 he whispered. “Is that you?”

   
“Can-n you...?”

   
He saw a glimmer of light. “Ed? Is that you?” His head was buzzing, trying to sort out real from the imagined.

    He felt a movement beside him and turned his head. Antares was gripping his arm, her thoughts somehow intertwining with his, interceding in the fugue. He felt the bands of fear loosen, and finally fall away.

    He drew a deep breath and collected himself. He was sitting on the bed with Antares. His chest was thumping. He thought...I can think and reason. I am no longer in silence-fugue. But his mind was flooded with memories. A dream, a terrifying onslaught of machines. Was it a dream—or a real memory?

    He gazed at Antares and remembered their urgent lovemaking. It had been intense, driven by profound grief for Charlene, and a need to connect with Antares. The memory dizzied him, the feel of her body against his, her open rushing emotions flowing over him.

    But it was not just Antares with him now. “Ed!” he whispered. “Ed was here!”

    “He’s here now. I can feel him.” Antares closed her eyes and pointed. “There.”

    “I don’t—wait, yes I do.” Bandicut rose unsteadily and approached the wall. He felt vulnerable without clothes on, but dared not take his eyes off the spot. “A little shimmer, right here. Ed?”

    The shimmer turned into a lozenge-shaped outline of watery light.
“T-trying-ng...”
 The light suddenly gave way to a three-dimensional distortion of the wall itself, a sharply layered bas-relief. It was hard to look at; the individual layers seemed to curl away into eye-twisting dimensions. He blinked and looked away.

   
“Bet-t-ter,”
Ed managed.
“It has been hard-d to reach you...since you s-sealed yourselves into
—rasp—
bubbles of
—rasp—
multispace.”

    “We need this bubble to live,” Antares said.

   
“Yes-sssss. But hard to reach through. Just-t now it-t was easier-r.”

   
Easier? Because of the silence-fugue?

    Ed’s voice grew a little stronger.
“I came to warn-n you...adversaries-ss ahead-d.”

    Bandicut felt a chill run down his bare back. “Jeaves!” he hollered. “Are you listening to this?” He glanced at Antares, who was wrapping herself in a blanket, then back at Ed. “Do you mean, like that thing we just encountered, Ed? You don’t mean
Deep,
 do you?”

   
“No, n-no. Not-t the strange, quavering-ng one. But the other-r, the one it destroyed-d. Know its kind-d, be war-r-ry. There are others-ss.”

   
Bandicut pressed his lips together. “We really...don’t know what we’re facing, you know. If there’s anything you can tell us—”

   
“Ssss, you must find...a great fire...sss-sun-n. Must find it...speak-k with it...learn from it.”

   
“A sun? You mean
your
 sun? Speak with your sun? Or one of the other stars?”

   
“Man-ny ss-suns. S-sun called N-n-ck-k-k-k...in grave peril...mussst save N-n-ck-k-k-k...”

   
“But we don’t—how can we—?”

   
“All connected-d. The worldssss, breaking up-p-p...”
As Ed spoke, the bas-relief protrusion on the wall slowly changed shape, as though he were struggling physically with the walls to get the words out.
“There is a-nother...ss-sun...who knowsss. *Brightburn-n*. Speak to *Brightburn*.”

    Bandicut leaned forward, trying to follow Ed’s words. “How do we speak...to a star?”

   
“Must...listen-n...carefully. May need help-p.”

   
May need help? There was an understatement. Bandicut glanced around, feeling eyes behind him. Ik and Li-Jared were standing in the doorway, staring at the Ed manifestation. Bandicut suddenly felt a lot more naked. He grabbed his shorts and pulled them on. “Jeaves called us,” Ik said.

    Bandicut nodded and turned back to the hypercone. “Ed—your world. Is it getting worse?”

   
“Sss...yes...breaking up-p...may be too late.”

   
“We’ll do what we can,” Bandicut said. But his words felt hollow.

    Antares spoke. “Ed? The one John spoke of, the one called Deep, the, uhhll,
cloud?
” She hesitated. “Can you speak to it? It helped us, we think.”

    Ed squirmed, seemed to be struggling.
“Ssss...very difficult-t for me...”

    “We may need to work with Deep. Can you help us communicate?”

    The bas-relief Ed suddenly collapsed into the wall, and turned into a series of glowing concentric ellipses, extending out into space in an infinite regression.
“Ssss...difficult...out of phase...”

    “Please try.”

   
“Trying, but...I doubt-t...”
 The regression of ellipses irised down to a point, then vanished.

    “Uhhll,” said Antares, “he is gone.”

*

   
Though day and night were purely arbitrary aboard
The Long View,
 it felt to Bandicut like a predawn meeting when Jeaves and Delilah joined them all in the dining lounge. Antares called for hot water for tea, and Bandicut called for coffee.

    “All that stuff you told us about these weapons we might be facing?” he said to Jeaves, once he had a steaming cup in his hands. “Ed didn’t say weapons, but he said there were adversaries ahead. He said we needed to know about them. How are we going to do that?”

   
“Hrrm. Ed said we must speak to stars,” Ik said gravely.

    “Yes, that too. Speak to stars.” Bandicut took a deep breath and exhaled noisily. “So something I’m wondering is, if we’re going to be facing some kind of ancient, planet-killer weapons, do we have any
modern
 weapons to fight them with?”

    Li-Jared flicked his fingers in vigorous agreement.

    Jeaves took a few moments before answering. “We are not going in unprepared. We have powerful n-space field generators, which offer both protection and—”

    “
Weapons,
Jeaves. I asked if we have
weapons
.”

    “I understand your question. Our n-space fields really are both our first line of defense and our first line of offense.”

    “Are you saying we
don’t
 have weapons?”

    “If you mean missiles or ship-to-ship energy beams, or devices of mass destruction, no. We do have some smaller, hand-carried devices.” Jeaves rotated to look at each of them. “This is not a military ship, and it is not our intent to go into battle. We hope to find other ways of dealing with the adversaries.”

    Li-Jared made a strangled sound. Bandicut massaged his temples. Ancient killing machines. No weapons.

    “By the way, in case you’re wondering,” Jeaves continued, “we are drawing nearer to our general destination. We are now in the outermost fringes of the gas envelope surrounding the Starmaker Nebula.” The wall of the lounge collapsed into a holo. “This is a condensed view of our progress.”

    The ship was plowing through palely glowing nebular veils like an airplane through cirrus clouds. Here and there, small nubs shone through the veils—eggs, or Bok globules, where star formation was in its early stages even as they watched. “Understand,” Jeaves said, “this is a highly processed image. We’re still in n-space, moving fast, and if you
could
 look out the window, what you’d see would be very different.” As the image zoomed in and panned, it revealed more and more detail of dust and gas clouds, and here and there the fiery cauldron of a mini star-factory.

   
“So,” Bandicut said, noting how adroitly Jeaves had moved the subject away from their lack of weapons, “we’re closing in on this nebula where ancient weapons are lurking. And meanwhile, there’s a star in particular danger, which we need to somehow save and maybe even
speak to,
 and it’s even got a name. What was it?”

   
“N-k-k-k-k,” Antares said, struggling to mimic the sound of the hypercone.

    “I may have picked up a more detailed reading of Ed’s vocalization,” Jeaves said. “It sounded like ‘Nikk-kehh-keh-keh’ and something I couldn’t quite hear after that. I surmise that it is an attempt to reproduce or signify certain distinctive vibrations within the star. I have heard of stars being named in such a fashion.”

    “Distinctive vibrations?” Bandicut asked.

    “Yes. Stars, you know, ring like bells from internal shock waves. Including your own sun.”

    “Yes, yes,” said Li-Jared impatiently. “We all know that, I’m sure.”

    Bandicut glanced at him in annoyance.

    “But,” continued the Karellian, “since we can barely pronounce the name Ed gave us, let’s call it—what?—
*
Nick
*
?” Imitating Ed in his own way, he pronounced the name as if biting something off.

    “Okay,” Bandicut said, with a sudden pang from an old memory. “Yes. We’ll call it
*
Nick
*
.” It was the first time in a long while that he had thought of his school friend Nick, who had died as a teenager. The memory came with a stab of regret, which caused Antares to turn her head to gaze at him. He didn’t meet her eyes. Nick’s death in a fire, now that he was reminded of it, was still very much with him. Probably always would be.