Sunborn (43 page)

*

   
Li-Jared had gotten up early, unable to sleep with Ik murmuring to himself, and Antares coming and going in the middle of the night. She had spent a long time sitting very, very still, and maybe that was what kept him awake. He kept waiting for her to do something. But she didn’t; she just watched Ik, waiting for
him
 to do something.

    Li-Jared could have asked Copernicus-ship to create a separate sleeping room for him, but instead he went to the common lounge, looking to the robot for company. “Would you like me to change the décor into something from your own world?” Copernicus asked, providing a platter with a good replica of a soma-fruit, a long, slender pod filled with a salty nectar.

    Li-Jared bit off the end of the fruit and looked around at the vision of Hraachee’a that Copernicus had created last night. “Why not?”

    “Could I ask you to step into the hallway for a moment?”

    He complied. As he waited, he peered up and down the glowing red passageway, remembering when he had been lost in these corridors, afraid for his life. He was suddenly aware of how alone he felt, and not just alone but lonely. His friends were in adjacent compartments, and yet, in this weird, weird ship, they could be miles away.

    The door opened and Li-Jared gratefully stepped back into the lounge. He stood stock-still, his hearts hammering in sudden wonder. The room was utterly transformed. It was Karellia—
home with green, beautiful, perilous sky
—almost exactly as he remembered it. Karellia at the onset of night. A grassy sward was surrounded by tall-spire trees and fog-bushes. The sky overhead was light-filled darkness: the green-tinged dark of night, with a blazing star and nebula field splashed across it like luminous paint. The sky was an artist’s playground, a thing of joy and beauty. It was a nightmare of radiation, a thing of deadly peril. Karellia was located in a region of dense stellar activity. Bathed in radiation, it was a wonder the planet managed to support life at all. And yet, thanks to a strong magnetic field, it did. It was fertile with life. It was also fertile with extinctions. Many were the species that had come and gone in the planet’s history. Many were the changes that the years and orbital instabilities had brought to the world.

    Li-Jared’s mind exploded with memories. He was, for a few heartbeats, transported back to Karellia, surrounded by ghosts of his own people.

    The Karellians had always been vulnerable to mutations from the radiation. Over time, they had learned to protect themselves against climate shifts and stellar fluctuations. They had explored their own planet, but only sporadically gone into space, into the “perilous sky.” Beyond the protection of the atmosphere, the radiation was truly horrific, and even automated probes required heavy shielding. Only in Li-Jared’s time had work begun to find ways of creating energy shields against radiation. Li-Jared, through his mathematical research, had been a part of that effort.

    He tipped his head back and gazed at the fiery night sky. Copernicus had done a fine job creating the effect, and Li-Jared was almost convinced. Once he looked for star patterns, of course, he could see the limits of what Copernicus could extract from his stones, which in turn had drawn it from his memories. But as long as he ignored the fine detail, the look of the sky was dead on.

    “Would you like to have a proper Karellian breakfast?” Copernicus asked.

    Li-Jared turned and saw a holo-image of the robot, standing behind a counter suspended between two trees. On the counter were several plates of food.
Bong.
 “Everything else looks so real. But where’d this counter come from?”

    “Ah—I was afraid this wouldn’t match up,” said Copernicus. “I didn’t have any images of food service on your world, so I took this from a human setting.”

    “We would never have a long surface like that,” Li-Jared said. “We’d have a lot of small holders sticking out from trees or posts—” he demonstrated, extending a hand palm-up from a half-bent arm, as though he were holding a tray in the air “—and there would be a bowl on each holder. People would walk among them, taking what they liked.”

    “Ah. Would you like to step back while I try it?”

    Li-Jared backed up.

    The countertop blurred, then was gone. Several new trees appeared, and from each tree, several supports arched out, holding small shelves. A moment later, bowls appeared on the shelves. “Is that better?”

    “Yes,” said Li-Jared. “Thank you.” He walked among the offerings, selecting a small, round fruit and two bread-fingers. “Very authentic.” He ate slowly, savoring the earnest attempt to duplicate Karellian flavors.

    “Li-Jared?”

    “Yes?”

    “How did you leave your homeworld?”

    Li-Jared felt a momentary flash of fire in his throat. How had he left his homeworld? Quite abruptly. The stones had come first...

    It had started with the landing of what first seemed to be a meteorite, in the field near his home. It hit with a loud concussion—
whoom!
—but not the massive explosion that one would have expected. When he got there, he found the site enveloped in a glowing halo of bluish plasma. After waiting for the glow and obvious magnetic effects to subside, he cautiously approached. The cratering was minimal; this was no ordinary meteorite. A haze continued to obscure the immediate surroundings. But he saw—too late to duck—the burst of violet plasma that slammed him in the chest and knocked him flat. When he sat up, he smelled ozone and felt a tingling in his chest. Embedded in his skin were two tiny crystals, flickering with light.

   
Copernicus stirred almost the way Bandicut might have, his metal arms gesturing. “That must have been very exciting!”

    Li-Jared made a rude, rumbling sound. “It was
terrifying!
 And once I knew what they were, it was infuriating!”

    “Why?”

    “That—”
ngngngngng
 “—aliens took it upon themselves to blast me down and put these stones in me!” He could feel himself growing hot all over again with the remembered emotion.

    Copernicus made a ticking sound that was probably intended to be soothing. “What did you do?”

    “I tried to get them out!” Li-Jared’s hearts thumped; his hands went to his chest; his thumbs rubbed at the jewels that he had frantically tried to claw out, until it was clear he would only hurt himself. And that was when the voices first spoke in his head. “It was the voices that stopped me. Have you ever heard voices in your head?”

    “I
always
 hear voices in my head,” Copernicus said mildly.

    Li-Jared jerked his head in surprise, then shrugged with his fingertips. “You wouldn’t know the difference, then. You don’t realize how shocking it is to have someone suddenly talking to you that way. And to know that the speaker is actually inside you.”

    Copernicus’s LEDs flickered. “I must try to imagine that.”

    “Yes, well, when the voices spoke to me, I wondered if I’d lost my mind. But it did make me stop trying to dig the things out of my chest.”

    “What did they say to you?”

    “Stop trying to dig us out of your chest.”

    “Is that really what they said?”

    Li-Jared made a burring sound. “More or less. I think actually they said something like, ‘Please do not injure yourself. We cannot be removed that way.’ After I got over being scared witless, I started talking back to them.” Li-Jared sighed at the memory, and poked at the nearest food bowl with one finger. “We talked quite a long time that night. Of course, we spent a lot of that time just trying to figure out
how
to talk...”

    “You were contacted by an alien race! Weren’t you excited?”

    It felt like a million years ago, it felt like yesterday. Li-Jared’s hearts went momentarily out of sync. “Yes, of course! Eventually. But that didn’t mean I wasn’t annoyed at the way they did it.” He didn’t mention that he was also half convinced that he had gone crazy and was hallucinating the whole thing.

    Copernicus clicked. “You’re in good company in that.”

   
Bong.
“Yes.” I
am
 in good company, he thought grudgingly.

    “Both the captain and Ik have indicated feelings of...would
resentment
 be the right word?”

    “Don’t ask me what the right word is,” Li-Jared said. He drew a slow, whistling breath. “Still...I suppose there’s good that’s come out of it. I mean, we’ve helped people. And been given an unusual chance to...serve, I guess.”

    “Indeed you have.
We
 have, I suppose.”

    Li-Jared looked up. He’d been studying his fingertips, without seeing them. “Yes, I would definitely include you in that.”

    “How long was it before you knew the stones’ intentions?”

    Li-Jared laughed hollowly. “Before I
knew
? I still don’t know. I mean, they seem to have taken Bandie as a kind of payment for saving his world. And I think they
tried
to save Ik’s world, or at least part of the population, even if they failed. But
my
world? I don’t know. Was it in danger? I suppose so; there was always danger. That’s why we call it the ‘home with a perilous sky.’ But was there a
specific
 danger that we were saved from?” Li-Jared flicked his fingers in bewilderment. He picked up a biscuit-fruit and nibbled at it.

    “How did they take you, in the end?” Copernicus asked.

    Li-Jared ate half the biscuit-fruit before answering. The memory of the new stones was so vivid it made him shiver. The memory of being taken was just the opposite; it was a ghostly afterimage, a shadow on his brain. “It was the very next night. I’d gone back home.” He could see the clustered compartments of his little house in the woods as clearly now as if it were yesterday. “We’d had a very long conversation, not all of it harmonious. I hadn’t told anyone about the stones. In fact, I never did get a chance to tell anyone.” Li-Jared touched his brow. “Even now, I doubt anyone knows about my contact with an alien life, or where I went. They probably all think I vanished into the air. Which I did, sort of.”

    “How did it happen?”

    “It was night, but getting close to dawn. I stepped out of my house—I lived at the edge of the clearing. I wanted air; I wanted to look up at the sky; it all seemed so unreal. I hadn’t taken more than five steps, and I looked up, and suddenly realized I had passed through a
boundary,
because I was looking up through a
golden haze.
It was all around me, almost like a star-spanner bubble, not that I knew anything about
them
yet. I had just enough time to be surprised, and then—
ffffft-t-t.
” He snapped his fingers and made a gesture of shooting off into space. He’d lost consciousness, though he had a strange sense of blazing star-clouds passing by. When he awoke he was in a transparent golden tube arrowing across the stars toward what turned out to be Shipworld, with the galaxy he’d left behind spread out across half the sky.

   
“Reminds me of John Bandicut’s and my arrival at Shipworld,” Copernicus said. “Do you know why they picked you?”

    Li-Jared uttered a low growl. “I know they waited to make sure they had good communications before they grabbed me.”

    “But why
you?
”

    “Do you think I didn’t ask that question? Sometimes I think it’s because of what I knew, or knew how to do. But really, you know...mostly I think it was just because they knew I was alone. I guess they knew I wouldn’t really be leaving anyone behind.” His voice dropped slightly. It was an old wound, one that was likely never to heal.

    The robot hummed in thought. Finally he said, “I guess, in truth...the same thing could be said about me. And about Napoleon. And I wonder...John Bandicut?”

    Li-Jared took another bite and stared at the metal robot, thinking, Is that why we’re all so expendable? Is that why we’ve just been tossed toward an exploding sun?

Chapter 27

*Thunder*

    Over the next several days,
The Long View
crossed the eerily glowing void and drew steadily closer to the Trapezium, the blazing diamond-shaped cluster of stars that marked, as much as anything could, the heart of Starmaker. Copernicus was growing into his position as shipboard AI, and Napoleon and Jeaves continued to work tirelessly, and futilely, to determine what the Mindaru were doing to
*
Nick
*
and the spacetime continuum. Twice, the ship passed through hypergrav shock waves, and during the second event they finally managed to get a fix on the point of origin of the disturbance. It was indeed the star behind the Trapezium, the one they were calling
*
Nick
*
.
    As for the crew, Ik’s stones seemed to be working, and everyone at last had a chance to rest and regain their equilibrium. In Bandicut’s case, the time was not altogether restful. The dreams had started up again—the visions of the wheat field and the towering thunderstorms and the combines bearing down on him—and he still didn’t understand them. He was increasingly unsure whether they were wholly dream or partly memory; but their persistence was getting on his nerves. Charli had started having her own dreamlike experiences: memories surfacing inexplicably, quarxian memories linked somehow to her longstanding questions about the fate, ages ago, of her race. Charli was sure there was something important in those memories, but she had no more idea what it was than Bandicut did about his dreams.

    On the fourth day of their crossing of the central cavern of the nebula, Ik announced on the bridge that he was sensing the mind of the nearest Trapezium star,
*
Thunder
*
. Shortly afterward, Charli informed Bandicut that Deep was beginning to make contact with the star.

   
/// I’m feeling something around the edges myself.