The Timeweb Chronicles: Timeweb Trilogy Omnibus (38 page)

Chapter Seventy-Eight

Life is a sea of darkness, with islands of light.

—From a Sirikan folk tale

The following day, Noah experienced no recurrence of the split visions, the odd straddling of two dimensions, the one physical and the other ethereal. It had all been like a dream, but a tangible souvenir of it remained.

His re-grown foot.

He felt emotionally lifted, and excited. Something truly remarkable had happened to him. He knew this for certain when he confirmed over and over that the body part had in fact regenerated, like the appendage of a reptile. Squeezing the flesh of the new foot and toes with his fingers, he felt the remarkable bone and tissue growth beneath his left ankle. It was almost as if the doctor had never amputated, but the new growth was tender, and he limped when he tried to walk on it. He still had to use the crutches that Subi had improvised for him.

Noah wondered if this miracle was an aspect of his immortality.

Encountering him in the cavern outside the grid-plane, a bewildered Dr. Bichette said, “I want to bring a bone specialist in to look at you.” Eshaz, Tesh, Anton, and Subi were with him. Earlier, he had examined the foot.

“And what would he tell us?” Noah asked, waving one of his alloy crutches around. “That it’s impossible, that it couldn’t possibly have happened? I’d be put under a microscope, asked to go on a medical sideshow tour as a freak.”

Bichette stared at the regenerated foot, which Noah had covered with a sock and a shoe.

“I don’t have time for all that nonsense,” Noah said. “I have more important things to do now; I need to maintain security and lead the resistance movement.” He looked from face to face, and settled on the scaly bronze countenance of Eshaz, whom he had always considered as much a friend as an employee. “You know what happened to me, don’t you?”

“Some will say I should not have done what I did,” Eshaz said, “that it was too dangerous.”

“And what did you do to Noah, exactly?” Tesh asked.

The big Tulyan hung his head. “I’ve said all I can say here. I must report to the Council of Elders, and accept their punishment. You will probably never see me again afterward.”

“Whatever Eshaz did to me,” Noah said to the others, “I’m grateful to him. But I don’t want the rest of you to discuss my medical condition with anyone, not even the robots. Is that understood?”

He waited until he got a nod from each of them, but didn’t notice when Subi shook his head afterward.

“Tell everyone I have a prosthetic foot now,” Noah said. He walked away stiffly, but was beginning to feel a little better with each step.

* * * * *

After the group separated, Tesh switched off her personal magnification system and in her tiny form began to spy on Noah in the cavern and connecting tunnels, scrambling around behind him unseen.

Rounding a corner, she came face to face with a roachrat. The creature, around her height, stared at her with dark, beady eyes. Its antennae twitched, and it bared its sharp teeth. A moment later, the animal squealed and ran away.

* * * * *

Noah slipped into a small side cavern. Then, looking around to make certain no one was watching, he drew a knife from its sheath and slashed his own left wrist. Pointing the wrist away from his clothes, he watched in fascination as the blood flow stopped and the wound healed itself, in a matter of minutes. No sign of the injury remained. He even felt his internal chemistry converting reserves and restoring the lost blood.

Taking a deep breath to summon his courage, Noah then attempted something even more drastic.

Holding the handle of the knife with both hands, he plunged it into his own heart, feeling it crack through bone and cartilage and pierce the organ. He gasped and cried out, then toppled over onto the ground, with gouts of blood spurting from his chest. All bodily functions ceased.

Seconds passed.

Then, like Lazarus, he rose from the dead and stood in his own blood, as his cells regenerated themselves.

* * * * *

In horror and fascination, Tesh watched Noah’s drastic self experimentation and a walking frenzy he went into, hurrying this way and that around the cavern. She saw him throw the crutches away and actually begin to run around the cavern, slowly at first and then faster. Noah looked elated, and this frightened her.

What sort of creature is this?
she wondered.
What has Eshaz done to him?

Unexpected thoughts assailed her. Tesh began to consider ways to destroy Noah, incinerating his body in such a conflagration that he could not possibly regenerate himself. In her lifetime, and from what she had been told by Woldn, there were no immortal creatures in the entire universe. Even those that seemed to be were not. They all had an Achilles heel.

Somehow, Noah had embarked on a dangerous, intrusive course of evolution, a fantastic mutation of the genetic process. If his dangerous bloodline was permitted to continue, there could be others like him, a race of powerful Humans who could commit terrible acts, including taking podships away from the Parviis who had held dominion over them for hundreds of thousands of years. Just as Tesh’s Parviis had once replaced the Tulyans, so too could another race prove itself superior and gain dominion. Woldn, the Eye of the Swarm, had long warned of this. It was the subject of legends.

She just hoped it was not too late to stop the mutant.…

Later that day, she crept away from the tunnel compound, a minuscule form that none of them noticed leaving. Like an insect, Tesh emitted a faint, wingless buzzing noise and flew all the way to the orbital pod station. (In swarms Parviis could fly much farther, even across the galaxy, but not by themselves). The tiny airborne humanoid reached the podship, but found herself unable to gain entrance to the sectoid chamber, unable to make the vessel move at all. The stubborn vessel proved unresponsive to her commands.

In the ancient podship’s passenger compartment and on the walkway of the pod station outside, she scuttled about like a bug, eavesdropping on Red Beret officers, scientists, and others who wondered why the sentient vessel did not depart like a normal podship and resume its route around the galaxy. The investigators were poring over it, trying to discover its secrets. So far they had not found the hidden passageways or the sectoid chamber, and Tesh didn’t think that they could.

But she’d never thought that a full-sized Human could have piloted the spacecraft, either. The Parviis had long known that there was more than one way to control podships. Long ago, Tulyans had their method, and Parviis had their own. Now the likelihood of yet another terrified her.

She envisioned a universe of untapped secrets.

* * * * *

Thinker thought the four Humans and the Tulyan were behaving strangely. That evening he watched as they slipped into a shadowy side tunnel. Moments later he heard them arguing, their voices escaping from the darkness into the dimly lit main cavern. Listening, he picked out their voices—Tesh, Subi, Anton, Dr. Bichette, and Eshaz.

Abruptly, a rotund man emerged from the tunnel and hurried across the cavern with surprising speed, heading for the main entrance. Moving as quietly as he could while maintaining his distance, Thinker followed.

He watched as Subi Danvar used his own code to bypass the security system, then slipped around large rocks and shrubs that the robots had placed over the entrance, and disappeared into the night.

Chapter Seventy-Nine

All of us see life through the lens of personal experience, and how limited those experiences are! The sum total of all Human knowledge is but a pinprick in the universe. So it is with each star system as well, in relation to all other star systems. A universe of pinpricks.

—Master Noah Watanabe

As required under the most ancient procedures of his people, Eshaz prepared to send a message to the Council of Elders, informing them of his unforgivable transgressions, violating the most consecrated of rules. In the transmittal, to be sent by touching the web and sending a telepathic transmission through it, he would not attempt to mitigate what he had done, because that would only make matters worse. It was hard to imagine how he could be in more trouble, considering the risks he had taken to save just one life, and that of a mere Human. The web was the most sacred object in the entire galaxy, and tampering with it was a most grievous offense. Since time immemorial there had been carefully prescribed regulations for its use and maintenance, and he had always followed them.

Until the episode with Noah.

Just before one of the prescribed times for telepathic transmissions, Eshaz prepared to place a scaly bronze finger against a strand of web. He was about to reach out of the commonly perceived physical dimension and touch another that was on a higher, more ethereal level.

Timeweb.

His fingers moved close, but he did not yet make contact.

* * * * *

Subi Danvar knew the back ways well, for he had walked and driven them for years as one of Noah Watanabe’s faithful Guardians. But this evening was like none other. He was alone out here, in a moonlit wilderness of unknown perils, running along a paved road, breathing hard, pushing his physical limits.

Reaching the shuttle landing field at the perimeter of the compound, he saw half a dozen stock groundjets parked behind a storage building, and no visible security. With one of those vehicles he could reach Rainbow City, and obtain a good doctor for Noah. Ever conscious of safety measures, Subi thought it would have been too risky to take Noah’s grid-plane or one of the robot ships on this mission. They were better left where they were, since he had just received an intelligence report that Doge Lorenzo was making improvements to the planet’s surveillance grid system, and he wanted to find out what had been done before going airborne again.

He ran for one of the groundjets, staying low, hugging the shadows.

* * * * *

For moments, Eshaz had been reconsidering, forming all sorts of rationalizations in his mind for delaying his transmission or not making it all, defenses he might use if ever summoned before the Council of Elders on this matter. Of utmost importance, he wanted to protect Noah Watanabe, the remarkable Human who had shown more concern for the interrelationships between planets and star systems than anyone in the history of his people. As only three races knew—the Tulyans, the Parviis, and the Aopoddae—the entire galaxy was connected by a gossamer but strong and essential web that spanned time and space. This made Noah’s own concept of galactic ecology all the more remarkable, though he could not possibly know how right he was. Eshaz wasn’t sure how to tell him, either; Humans were not one of the privy races, so Noah was not supposed to be informed about such secrets.

Still, Eshaz felt Noah had already expanded the knowledge of his race with what he had done, and that he had the potential to do much more. In Eshaz’s mind, this was linked directly to his own primary assignment from the Council of Elders, which was to protect and maintain the web. He felt he had done exactly that by saving Noah’s life, but his bold (the council might say brash) decision would still require considerable explanation on his part.

The prescribed time arrived, and Eshaz placed a quivering fingertip against a slender strand of web, touching it ever so gently. He did not transmit, but felt the coursing energy of the web, the distant podships traveling on their various routes, along with the mental communications of Tulyans who reported to the Elders and received orders from them. He also heard the subtle but disturbing noises of breakage in the web, the disintegration that was continuing, no matter the efforts of the Tulyans to prevent it.

At the very last possible second, a message arrived from the Council of Elders, sent to him personally like a whisper across the cosmos
: Return to the Starcloud immediately
.

His heart sank. They must know, or suspect what he had done, and intended to interrogate him.

In fear, Eshaz removed his finger from the web and hunched over, his entire body trembling. The next transmission time would not take place for seven galactic days, and the Elders wanted him to report sooner than that. He could reach the Tulyan Starcloud today if he made the next podship, and tomorrow at the latest. The pod station here at Canopa was one of the busiest in the galaxy, with ships arriving and departing regularly, connecting the world with all points of the astronomical compass.

Now he would have to confess under less-than-ideal circumstances, enduring the suspicious glares of his superiors. It would have been better if he had volunteered the information.

Eshaz expected the worst, although they probably didn’t have the evidence against him that they needed yet. If they’d had it, they might have dispatched someone to execute him on the spot—a punishment that had been used in the past, on rare occasions. If they did have the proof already, the Elders might still want to conduct a public tribunal and use him as an example, to keep anyone else from tapping into the web improperly. He felt certain that he would be declared one of the worst criminals in the history of his people, and that his name would go down in infamy.

At his trial, he could at least explain why he drained critical nutrients from the web without first asking for permission from the Council, and how he needed to move quickly to save Noah Watanabe’s life, since the Human’s vital signs had declined rapidly and he was on the verge of death. Eshaz doubted if it would do any good to present a defense, but if given the opportunity he would lay it all out, including the full and remarkable story of Noah Watanabe … a man whose life mattered much more than his own.

* * * * *

Schemes flowed through Giovanni Nehr’s mind like the currents of an ocean, deep beneath the surface.

The day before, he had overheard Acey Zelk and Dux Hannah telling Noah how they hid inside the storage compartment of a food delivery robot to escape from a slave crew in the Doge’s Palazzo Magnifico. The story had given Gio an idea.

During the time that he had worked with Thinker’s army of robots, Gio had learned a great deal about machines and their internal operating systems. Moving quickly, under the guise of fine tuning two large robots, he had programmed changes into them. These were unmarked mechanical units, of a type that the Guardians planned to send into nearby towns on reconnaissance missions, in conjunction with Human operatives.

Then, in the shadows of a tunnel, Gio had knocked the teenagers out with drugdarts, using one of the weapons that Thinker had given to him. He then stuffed Acey into a large compartment inside one of the robots, and Dux inside the other robot.

Giovanni Nehr did not dislike the boys, and did not wish them any real harm. But he needed to deal with them for his own survival and advancement, which were his highest priorities. Other stories that he’d heard the boys telling the Guardians would provide him with an excellent cover, in particular their boastful tales of stowing away on ships and vagabonding around the galaxy. People would think they ran off for more adventures.

Gio didn’t have the stomach to kill the teenagers, and hoped they didn’t die because of his actions. But he knew he was putting them in danger, casting them into the perilous ocean of space. Now he watched on a remote camera screen as the robots did their work, and projected images back to him.…

The sentient machines, carrying their unusual cargoes, entered the nearest shuttleport, and studied the electronic labels on space-cargo boxes in a storage yard, showing that they were being shipped to a variety of star systems and planets. As programmed, the robots selected the farthest, most remote destination.

When no one was looking, the sentient machines loaded the motionless bodies into a cargo container filled with crates of computer parts, after removing some of the contents and then making sure there were air holes in the box.

Observing it all on the small screen, Gio thought
, If they’re meant to live, they’ll live. If they’re meant to die, they’ll die.
He had done everything necessary to keep his own conscience clear, taking steps to save their lives by assuring them of air.

As programmed, the robots waited in shadows while a mechanized crew loaded the containers on board a shuttle. Satisfied, Gio watched while the shuttle lifted off. Now he didn’t have to sleep with one eye open. If the boys survived, they had no assets and would have a hard time finding their way back here. He didn’t expect to ever see them again.

* * * * *

Subi slipped into the command chair of the groundjet. Taking a deep breath, he activated the controls and saw the instrument panel light up with shimmering, lambent colors. His fingers moved expertly, and he waited to hear the engines turn over.

But they didn’t start, even though the hydion charges were full.

He cursed, hit the backup button. Nothing happened.

Spotlights lit up the parking area outside. Men shouted, and he heard the sounds of boots running on pavement.

Red Beret soldiers surrounded the vehicle, and took him into custody.