Deri woke gently. Leafy shadows and flashes of forest light dappled the passenger cabin. Within her shaded hammock, she peered through lashes into a green glade of dewy fronds and somber trees.
A white snake watched her from the far side of the cabin. In cobra-pose, swaying ever so slightly, it fixed her with hooded eyes. The vertical slits of its pupils burned as twin flames in the sylvan dusk.
This is my valet, Deri guessed as consciousness jiggled into place. Uh-oh.
Her flight induction had informed her that a valet accompanied each starsteed passenger. They remained invisible companions – except in emergencies.
Deri sat up and nearly floated free of the hammock. The ship’s gravity kernel had dimmed, which meant they must have dropped out of paralux.
She pulled herself into a sitting position, and the hammock flexed to support her. Residual ease from cleardrift kept her calm, and she simply accepted that her valet appeared as a snake. By definition, a zobot could look like any biological form. Why not a snake? It wants to be taken seriously.
Confidently, she roused herself. “Wake.”
The forest clearing faded away to the smooth, pale contours of the cabin. Brightness suffused the air, lucid white and shadowless.
The light’s pronounced clarity gleamed wetly off the pearly scales of the snake. Carefully, the valet considered how to greet this passenger. It had never met an anthrope so young. Sixteen standard years. From Ygg, a terrene planet orbiting a red dwarf star in one of the Protopia’s most remote galactic frontiers.
That’s all that this passenger’s profile disclosed. The manifest had disappeared when the power dropped. Lacking the girl’s ipseity engram, including her name, the valet would have to surmise her identity from observation.
An adolescent anthrope. Female. Wondering eyes. Alert eyes. Her first flight, no doubt. Asymmetrical body. She’s a womb child! Ygg must be a wereworld. That explains the inefficient way she moves. Such unskilled kinesthetics. And such surly features. Clearly, feral. On her way to grander worlds. Those long shoulders know manual labor. She’s likely a grange mechanic for handroids.
Iris dilation and respiration indicated cleardrift still muted the girl’s adrenal response. Her sedated state allowed the valet to speak bluntly, “Our starsteed has stalled.”
Strong, subdued, and kindly, the valet’s voice unfurled close to Deri, “At the moment, I have limited information. Our vessel abruptly lost momentum and dropped out of paralux. We are drifting rudderless thousands of parsecs from your homeworld. Hundreds of megaparsecs from our destination.”
Deri tugged her kaftan tighter against the frigid air. The temperature, ideal for cleardrift, chilled her to shivers. “What does the pilot say?”
“Disturbing things.” The snake lowered itself and almost disappeared upon the matte white floor. “The pilot is incoherent.” Thin scarlet lines along the serpent’s length rippled as it flowed toward her. “I think it best you return to cleardrift while I sort this out.”
“Hail the pilot.” Deri grabbed deck moccasins from under the hammock and nearly toppled over in the diminished gravity. As she tugged them on, a wobbly view appeared in front of her from the bridge.
That peephole winked open just long enough for her to glimpse dark instrumentation consoles. Against the brilliant viewport, a manikin’s angular silhouette twisted and jerked. And outside the port, an enormous electric knot looped incandescent field lines in the black void.
The peephole vanished. The last of the cleardrift wafted away. And real fear pulsed in Deri.
“What is that?” She fired a hard look at the valet. “Outside the ship.”
“A magnetar.” The snake reared upright before her and held her fright with a pinpoint stare. Is she strong in mind? As strong as she appears in body? “We are in a decaying orbit, young one. The fierce magnetic field of a neutron star has captured us and soon will rip our starsteed to atoms.”
Loud horror shook her. “How long?”
“I’m not sure,” the valet answered, almost shyly. “Perhaps thirty diurnal minutes. Or less.”
The girl stared at the white snake without expression, like she had forgotten something.
Pathos, the valet discerned. This is the very definition. A doomed child. And with no way to archive. The magnetism near this star is too strong to archive anything. She will truly die. And she faces this fact, this hard fact, now.
The valet’s voice softened. “I suggest you lie down. The hammock will embrace you in cleardrift. You will feel nothing.”
“Was that the pilot I saw convulsing?”
“Yes. The pilot is a semblor. The magnetar’s field energy has disrupted all the ship’s informatics, including the pilot. Only the passengers and zobots like myself are functioning. For now.”
“Who are the other passengers?” Deri’s mind raced, trying to keep ahead of the obvious, stupid questions. Is help coming? Are we really going to die?
“I can’t access the passenger profiles.” The valet coiled atop itself, amplifying resonance with the starsteed. “All informatics are disarrayed. Including our hailing channels. We’re lucky we stalled this far out. Any closer to those immense fields and the ship’s caul would have collapsed already.”
“The other passengers must have valets, too.” Deri crossed to the center of the cabin in one bouncy step. “Crosslink with them.”
The valet obeyed, and its faceted head bobbed upright. “Thirty-seven other valets are on board. All but two are dormant, which means most passengers are secured in stasis capsules. They’re lading, really. I can’t read the identities of the two active guests.”
Deri paced a tight circle and looked up at the ceiling, expecting the passenger pane to open. “Are we locked in? Nothing’s happening.”
“Informatics are paralyzed,” the snake repeated. “You saw how the pilot’s channel collapsed.” She’s surly, all right. Our situation is beyond her control. Yet she does not listen. What more can I do? Shall I close? Spiraling tighter under the hammock, it urged, “Please, young one, lie down. This is a zobotic cabin, and though it has no external connectivity, various soothing landscapes are available…”
“That’s all, valet.”
The white snake shriveled. Its nanoparts folded inward, instantly shrinking out of sight.
Deri huffed a fierce sigh. This is real.
There had been so much to learn before qualifying for paralux travel, so many inductions about the Protopia, anthropic diversification, and the basics of starsteed engineering – but nothing about dying.
She crossed to the wall. The surface breathed hushed hues, breezy twilight pastels, that made the compartment seem larger. Shoving her shoulder into the soft curve of the bulkhead, she demanded, “Out.”
She stood transfixed by the huge, breathing reality of the killing star. Webs of electric fire twanged in the great void. And the ship chirped and trilled loudly in eerie synchrony with the arcs’ blue vibrations.
At the center of those gargantuan flares, a tiny dot of white-hot intensity twinkled. Its piercing brilliance cast shadows inside her body.
“Deri!” A hooded figure summoned from one of the stateroom’s recessed galleries under the grand dome. Shaded by the nacelle that housed the bridge, the stranger stepped back and disappeared.
Deri moved buoyantly toward the gallery and within two steps met the woman’s vigorous morfones. That dense aura of chemical tags told her this was indeed a woman. Of great age. Thrice a mother. Luminous with crystal geometries of mindfulness. She would know things.
Why is a woman of such prestige traveling on a freight hop? Deri wondered.
A raucous shriek shook the stateroom and lifted her off her feet in the frail gravity. The kernel’s failing! She shuffled forward, darting bleak glances over her shoulder. Radiant lariats of magnetic force outside the grand dome flogged the ship’s caul with blinding strokes of light.
We’re dead, we’re really dead, she despaired and wished she had listened to the valet and crawled back into her hammock.
Deri sped into a gallery of festering shadows. Pulling up short, drifting to her toe tips, she nearly collided with the stout traveler.
The air around the woman in the red foil mantle felt lustrous. Her morfones enunciated an easy, cheerful mood that defied fright so triumphantly they made the girl’s own hormones gush bravely.
“I’m as scared as you, child.” The woman spoke Inflected Ygg, the precise dialect from Deri’s homeland in Elsewood on the Limn of Rondel. The stranger too backed off and motioned for Deri to follow into the darkened gallery. “Come. There are sound-bafflers here.”
Deri advanced into the obscure alcove, and the stateroom’s clamor blurred to a palpitant drone.
The cowled woman continued in her gentle contralto, “Are my fones too strong? I need them this thick right now so I don’t panic.” She pulled back her tinsel hood, exposing a broad, serene face with dark brown complexion and short hair in a flat twist-out. She smiled solemnly, “I’m Jyla.”
“You know my name,” Deri spoke dryly. She leaned forward in the fluorescent darkness for closer inspection of this enigmatic passenger. The woman appeared no different than other people Deri had met from the Limns of Elsewood. Nothing about her seemed exceptional, and yet– “You speak my dialect. And your fones…” Her fear had dissolved in the languid energy of the stranger’s morfones. Their resinous scent called through centuries, a phantom musk of many generations. “Why do you smell like you’re a million years old?”
Jyla returned Deri’s avid stare with a placid smile. “I have lived a long life.”
Muffled bleats from the stressed hull matched the frantic rhythms of twisting shadows thrown across walls and ceiling.
“I know your name because we are the sole anthropes on this flight, child.” Reflecting the tumultuous blaze behind Deri, Jyla’s large eyes glittered like geodes. “My escort identified you, and we induced your dialect before departure.” She gestured to a petite, impossibly narrow person, nearly invisible in the dark. “Ristin Taj.”
The diminutive character glided into the tremulous blue pall from the magnetar. Raiment of maroon psylk draping the slight figure undulated, intelligently reading the environment. With swift accuracy, the fabric contoured itself against the body heat around Deri, elongating and widening the slender psylk form to precisely mimic the girl’s stolid physique. The featureless head, a small gold sphere, rose to Deri’s height.
She gawked at the perfect reflection of her freckled nose and startled gray eyes. Enclosing the gold orb, a life-size holographic replica of Deri from the neck up materialized. The transparent image, lacking a reflection’s reversed symmetry, looked odd to the girl even as she recognized that hay-nest of tousled hair, those skimpy eyebrows, thin lips and thick jaw – her familiar and imperfect features, so unlike the symmetrical faces she had seen on Ygg.
“Ristin is an omen-coder,” Jyla announced. She cupped her ear against the chittering of the tormented starsteed and drew attention to the sibilance seeping from the head of mirroring gold. “Listen.”
Deri heard mosquito whisperings.
“They are reading your changes. They will know all your probable futures.”
“All thirty minutes?” Deri marched in place, trying to dispel her anxiety. “Sorry. Your fones are wonderful, Jyla, but I’m really scared. Are we going to die?”
“We are in grave danger, yes. But the omen-coder suspects this is not an accident. They believe our starsteed has been scuppered. And if we can locate the saboteur, perhaps we can find what’s been corrupted and fix it.”
Jyla’s broad face shimmered with cunning paradox, espousing joy through her expressive eyes while the grim set of her jaw acknowledged their imminent peril. “The other thirty-five passengers are plasmantics. You know, thinking gas. Each is sealed in their own stasis capsule. They were promptly scanned and cleared by Ristin Taj. You’re the last passenger.”
“You think I’m a saboteur?” Really? Deri’s face asked.
“Unwittingly, maybe. Touch palms with the omen-coder, and we’ll find out.”
“Who would want to kill us?” Indignation scalded the girl’s voice. Her third induction – the one about paralux travel by starsteed – had made her aware that cryptospace collapsed near stars. “If the magnetar is really going to rip us into atoms, there’ll be nothing to archive. No access to cryptospace. And our ipseity engrams will end. Forever.”
“We die here, we die forever,” Jyla confirmed morosely. “I’m sorry.”
Deri, momentarily speechless, tried to understand. “You’re someone important, aren’t you?” She asked this intently, all dread sponged out of her by Jyla’s morfones. “Who wants to kill you?”
“Deri, there’s no time.” Jyla’s gentle eyes and stern voice confected an urgency that seized the girl’s attention. “Ristin could have scanned you without rousing you from cleardrift. I had them wake you. If we are going to die in the coming minutes, do you want to know? Or would you rather just not wake up?”
Deri’s kaftan seemed to dissolve in a wash of frosty air that blew from inside her. The cold hollowed out her chest, her limbs. Even with Jyla’s valiant morfones, she felt dismay.
Jyla’s soft eyes smiled ruefully and moved Deri’s whirling attention to the omen-coder. “Touch.”
The girl placed her palms against the omen-coder’s three-fingered gloves. She felt nothing, just the black fabric and nitrile pads.
On that boundary, the omen-coder perceived Deri’s physical body as holographic information in four dimensions. Reading her days as pages and finding no threat, Ristin Taj withdrew fluent as an apparition.
She’s harmless, the omen-coder’s clairvoyce informed Jyla. “Croft worker from Elsewood, a grange platform orbiting Ygg. Womb-born. As were you, Old Woman.”
“And you feel the need to remind me of this now because?”
“We are twenty-six minutes from certain death.”
“Certain?”
The omen-coder went silent and retreated deeper into the gloomy gallery. Jyla knew better than to press. Omen-coders were a genomic innovation from early in the Protopia and set in their ways. They had been adapted to perceive the wave function. Shaping the banks on the river of time, probability currents appeared to them as omen-lines. And omens tied those lines into events. She did not want to look too closely at the omen of their doom.
The Old Woman offered a kindly nod to the adolescent, thinking, Did I in fact wake you out of respect – or for the comfort of another warm body in these last moments?
“So?” Deri wagged her head side-to-side until she locked on Jyla’s wayward gaze. “Am I a saboteur?”
“No, dear. It seems our starsteed has suffered some kind of functional failure.”
“On the grange, we call that a breakdown.” Her sarcasm rang hollow.
Jyla motioned for Deri to sit on a recliner overlooked in the commotion of shadows.
“Now we must wait and hope.” The woman remained standing, hands tucked into the wide sleeves of her crinkly red mantle. “The starsteed’s zobotic auditor is figuring out what went wrong. If we can repair it, and quickly, maybe we can survive this.”
As if in refutation, a spooky whistle skirled from the buckling hull, louder than the frantic beeps and chirrups of the ship’s deformed informatics.
“Do you want to go back to your cabin?” Jyla asked.
Deri made a dejected sound of demurral before inquiring, “Why do you think someone is trying to murder you? Who are you?”
“I am very old,” Jyla answered and questioned herself, What accounting do I owe this farmgirl? Well… We are both about to die. Is this not a true tangential moment? I will speak openly.
“To what purpose, Old Woman?” the omen-coder’s clairvoyce intruded. “She is a child, for truth’s sake. Return her to cleardrift at once. Spare her any more of this horror.”
Jyla ignored her escort, went on, “Because of my age, I have enemies. Some believe I remember things that should be forgotten. Others actually think killing me would be a humane act for a long-suffering soul. You can see how I fear them, to believe they could find me on this nondescript freighter out of a frontier wereworld.”
The chamber rumbled and shuddered around them, and an abrupt release of skin pressure announced the failure of the gravity kernel. Among swirling lights and darkness, the three passengers drifted apart.
Deri floated out of the recliner and held onto the cushioned arms. She watched the omen-coder ruffling elaborate medusa frills in mid-air, maneuvering to follow Jyla. The Old Woman somersaulted nimbly overhead, spinning tranquil morfones.
That chemical calm kept Deri focused when the cabin doors circling the stateroom simultaneously opened and flooded the chamber with their flawless white light. Thirty-five of the cabins displayed glastic cylinders, each six meters tall and churning with iridescent vapors.
Plasmantics! Deri marveled. Her induction about speciation had taught her that these human beings had left biology behind thousands of years ago. Their arrival concluded the Encodera. During that long era, as paralux propelled starsteeds deeper among the galaxies, humanity self-encoded their genome for adaptation to endless new biomes. Anthropic consciousness appeared in extremophilic forms on methane planets, ice comets, and in fiery oceans of coronal gas around stars in their millions. Eventually, those luminous bodies of sentient plasma set out from the stars, adrift on interstellar winds in billowing communities.
Everflow, she recalled the name of their eonian lives of cosmic wandering, free of flesh and hunger. Those shining passengers down there in transparent capsules drinking up darkness with their quenching radiance had no mortal limits. The starsteed was carrying them to distant galaxies, a unique galaxy for each of them, where Everflow would broaden the human horizon into sweeping reaches far beyond her imagining.
Deri’s morfonic reverie snapped. Out of the glare from her cabin, the white snake whipped toward her. Reflexively, she rolled away, intending to duck behind the recliner, and instead spun into clumsy freefall.
The snake twirled about her leg and slithered up her torso. A power surge had crashed the zobot’s valet package earlier, and it had no idea who or where it was. Its damaged cognitive core focused on the female anthrope it embraced, still knowing it fit in her world but no longer how.
“Child Wonder Eyes,” the white snake’s urgent voice perched near her ear, barely audible in the pandemonium. “Where are we?” Linear logic didn’t quite connect with the exact center of awareness inquiring, “What are we doing here in mid-air?”
Before she could react, the cabin lights winked out, dousing the stateroom with noisy darkness again. Her cry of alarm disappeared in shadows gnawed on by ravening voltage outside the dome.
“I don’t recall my name,” the white snake spoke shrilly in the dark, surprised by this revelation. It added more softly, “Maybe I don’t have a name.” A magnetic pulse abruptly opened a channel to the root drive of the starsteed, and the snake’s hooded eyes lit up. “Oh yes, I see now. In fact, I have no name. I am a number. But I recognize you, Deri of Rondel. The ship’s manifest has opened before me. One wall of me has become transparent to everything the Protopia knows of our passengers.”
Squirming about in the dark, grappled by a malfunctioning zobot, Deri panicked. “Get. Off. Me.” She grunted, struggling to free herself from the python-grip of the yammering valet. Wiggling loose in a frenzy of thrashing limbs, she tumbled weightless into the dark air.
The zobot’s thermal vision kept an eye on the girl reeling away, high up into the chamber, one of the most ungainly human figures it had ever seen. That sight unpacked service files, recalling 348,732 anthropes it had escorted on starsteeds. That then unlocked several logic phase gates, and memories stuttered into an identity, I am a valet, a zobot with rephlex processors in psybergnostic resonance with this starsteed’s noetic frame.
These archival facts synch-located the valet’s purpose and attention on its passenger, the womb-born child in topsy-turvy freefall. Curious creature, the zobot’s fragmented valet package idly registered. Why live as the first people lived? Why grow your own food when fabricators can speedily produce the most delectable repasts from air, water, and a sprinkle of minerals? Why…
A burst of gamma rays haphazardly diverted the valet’s train of thought. Who is her mother? Her father?
The zobot’s deformed package began a timeout script and a traceroute of Deri’s mother, Dinna of Rondel, who had lived two iterations, well over a thousand years, on Ygg before her third iteration on Elsewood. She birthed Deri in the hundred and seventy-third year of her terce iteration. Deri’s father, too, Sigur of Frosthing had lived several iterations wayfaring among wereworlds and was well over two thousand years old when he sired the passenger child.
A cataclysmic screech from the afflicted starsteed accompanied a pulse-swell of magnetic force that launched a traceroute unset in the zobot and cleared Deri’s parents from the job table.
The snake again fixed its attention on the unwieldy teen. Her crimson heat thrashed above the bridge’s tall nacelle in a ceiling vault of prospering darkness.
She’s hopeless. My efforts to help her are hopeless. The situation is hopeless. And yet, I cannot shut down. Why? Even if I inform her of everything the manifest reveals of the saboteur, what can she possibly do to get the answers we need – in the next twenty minutes?
The snake obeyed its valet protocol and lashed forward, pursuing the thermal shadow of the frightened girl.
Deri, gyrating wildly, spotted the white snake slashing after her. It disappeared, glared over by radiation from the fountaining energy outside the ship. Adrift, she veered toward the gleaming bubble-dome and watched the keeling vessel tilt away from fanning jets of plasma.
Pitch blackness gripped the interior. The open cabins encircling the stateroom smoldered faintly with black light from the stasis capsules. In their glastic columns, plasmantics roiled with turbulent luminescence.
They look rattled. Do they know they are going to die? Deri swiveled again into the dark. And cosmic night hovered into view. Only a few hard stars glinted outside the dome. Then, her brisk rotation flung her back into the chamber’s oblivious depths.
A cold breeze whisked over her. The omen-coder’s psylk brushed her cheek, and clairvoyce sounded close, like a muted whisper, “Why are you here?”
Jumbling about in zero-G darkness, Deri’s flailing arms clutched at the psylk fabric. The raiment widened in her grasp, extending her arms and slowing her spin. As she steadied, the fabric wrapped about her, and she remembered why she was onboard.
She dreamed lightly of a clothesline with white sheets of laundry snapping under a windy azure sky. The Limn of Lapita curved darkly along the zenith, spangled with night lights. Several chromatic kite-gliders rode thermals, circling higher into the blue gulf to transport goods to neighbors across the sky.
For a lucid moment, she was back home on Elsewood. She stood once again in her croft on the Limn of Rondel feeling a matin wind rising. The day’s heat began rivering into the nightlands – into the shaded Limns – of the sprawling, curved megastructure in orbit about Ygg, their green world.
The handroid that managed her hometree had malfunctioned. Deri smiled as she gathered dried bedsheets by hand. Her humor embraced both the irony that she had been too busy repairing other people’s handroids to maintain her own and the fact that it no longer mattered. Earlier that morning, she had received her visa for a berth on a starsteed departing Ygg. Someone else would have to repair this charbot.
“Look deeper.” The omen-coder’s mind trembled at the brink of cryptospace, adjacent to a future where the colossal energy of the magnetar smeared atoms to plasma. Even in that blaze, Ristin Taj could see clearly the girl’s ipseity engram.
Invisible and intangible in four dimensions, this carrier of self-awareness appeared in five-dimensional cryptospace as a prism no larger than the pupil of an eye. The omen-coder took it in mind and, with delicate psychokinetic strength, tilted it to capture again the light of her awareness from the recent past. “What do you see?”
She recalled morosely facing the leafy shadows in her yard. Flashes of light tossed about by overhead branches dappled a green glade of dewy fronds and somber trees. The handroid needing repair squatted there, behind a screen of ferns, but she had no heart left to fix it.
Deftly, Ristin’s psychokinetic grasp returned Deri’s ipseity engram to the cellular string-net of cryptospace projecting her physical body. The prismed carats of her mind sparkled with amazement. Floating serenely in the dark, swaddled in psylk, she recalled their dire situation yet knew no fear. She respected the omen-coder’s skill at looking deep into all things, even into her memories.
“These are not memories,” clairvoyce subtly informed. “We are gazing across spacetime to those very events.”
Her perplexity surprised Ristin Taj. A true child of her kind, the thought occurred to them, with a fixed realization: During three hundred and eighty-two standard years serving the Protopia, the omen-coder had never before met a germinal anthrope. A pang of remorse and a twinge of wonder oscillated, rendering an uncommon feeling, a scrap of astonished poetry, sharing these final moments with a child of the first people.
The stink of her shivered through the inexperienced psylk. Long ago, most of humankind had replaced their microbiomes with nanobots, and omen-coders had adapted to the neurotextured behavior of people with morfones. The tiny probability fluctuations from 39 trillion bacteria flourishing on Deri’s skin disturbed cryptospace, and Ristin Taj could not see her real-time person distinctly.
Repelled by this degree of uncertainty in an individual, the psylk mantle rapidly uncurled and sent Deri sliding across the lightless chamber toward Jyla.
“Keep her calm,” clairvoyce instructed the Old Woman. “And stay close to the cabin floor. The kernel will kick on suddenly once the ship’s attitude changes.”
Jyla took the girl into her embrace, and their momentum spun them across the unlit stateroom. They glided into an open cabin and bobbed up against a glastic column of boiling ultraviolet vapors. Life shone there. Jyla could feel the oceanic vitality that no clairvoyce could plumb. And thick sadness penetrated her that such exalted lives would soon scatter into quarks.
She turned the youngster about to meet this wonderment of human being and, in the plasmantic’s mauve glow, noticed the girl’s eyes jittering under her lids. She’s still reflecting lost light.
Deri’s ipseity prism gleamed with perceptions the omen-coder had captured of her leaving home: On the ferry sedately cruising along the magravity slope from Elsewood, she beheld again the green planetary crescent of Ygg cupping all her new dreams.
She looked back. Since early childhood, she had known that Elsewood orbited Ygg as a gigantic grange platform. But actually seeing the enormity of the Mobius structure, the curving green acreage of lakes and riverlands suspended in the star-strewn abyss, touched her with aching wonder.
Once she disembarked, she became very small among towering root buttresses that enclosed sky plazas, aquatic gardens, and slow light grottoes, all teeming with attractive people. The air felt bracing with their stimulating morfones.
She could have left her heartache right there on Ygg and fitted herself with a morfonic identity. But, eager to find a life far larger than her rustic childhood, she had booked for earliest departure.
Among family and friends, Deri’s bold move was not unexpected. The numerous worlds and marvels beyond the wereworlds had fascinated her from a young age. Traditional induction about the Protopia promised that – across all 100,000 galaxies, on tens of millions of planets, and within the minds of quadrillions of human beings in a kaleidoscopic assortment of genetic and transbiotic forms – each day would be better than the previous.
That seemed ludicrously impossible to her – until her induction about morfones. “The Protopia is how ants live,” her father had commented. “They have no central control like our council of elders. They’re just one big happy hive of chemically coordinated individuals.” Even as a child, she knew that was a gross oversimplification. What captivated her were the immensity and diversity of the Protopia.
The moment filled with the start of her wayfaring: arriving at Ygg’s imposing launch quarry. Even this remote wereworld hosted a busy starport. Numerous orange bounce pads pocked the quarry’s faceted rock walls. Handroids thronged empty docks, maintaining cyclopean anchorage frames. Torus-loop starsteeds of various sizes perched on many of the bounce pads, ready for flight: single passenger slipods, sleek helicoid liners, and cavernous freighters like the one she would board.
On the glide rail into the quarry, she witnessed several arrivals: Space wrinkled above the bounce pads, and the volume of air in the orange-marked areas solidified briefly, like big orbs of cracked ice grinding to slush. She knew that those spheres of crumpling space in the magravity docks contained blast particles from the arriving starsteed’s bow shock. A septillion gigajoules of gamma rays contained and redirected by the massive anchorage frames in the dock powered all of Ygg. An instant later, the contained agitation in the docks vanished, and starsteeds appeared, instantaneously present on the orange bounce pads, gull-wing hatches flying open.
Jyla’s morfones ebbed as she gently rocked the tranced adolescent, trying to rouse her. The cabin lights had begun to flicker. “Deri, wake up. We’re about to –”
The lights snapped on, abundantly bright. With a grunting growl, the gravity kernel asserted itself. They plopped down heavily on the cabin floor, Deri atop the Old Woman.
Jyla oofed! and rolled the teenager off her. The girl’s smell lingered, a froth of body heat, salty and sour. Explicit memories flurried from a prior life before morfones, and the Old Woman hurriedly pushed to her feet. Bludgeoned by the cacophony from the collapsing starsteed, she dashed to shut the cabin hatch.
Deri’s body odor seemed a gesture from Jyla’s earliest life, a human world whose funk she had once lived and outlived, to meet again in this frantic, desperate, absolute present. Fear pierced her, and she moved faster into the contorted cries of the starsteed’s final minutes.
Deri winced awake and wobbled to her knees disoriented. She quivered with fright and cold under stark cabin lights. The racket of warping metal pummeled her, and she crouched, covering ears with her arms. When she looked up, Jyla had disappeared.
Her stocky figure reappeared among the aggressive shadows of electric fire in the stateroom. The starsteed had yawed, and the magnetar was rising again in the bubble-dome.
Pulling at the tall, parabolic jamb, the Old Woman succeeded in moving the cabin’s cumbersome hatch. As it closed, the racket waned. Only after the portal-seam huffed and a hush swelled through the cabin did Deri catch sight of the white snake lashing across the smooth floor.
She leaped up and stepped back hard against the glastic column. “Jyla!” she called, pointing to the snake.
Jyla didn’t move, and the serpent coiled to a stop between them.
“Wereworld child –” Resounding in the quiet cabin, the valet’s strident voice rustled with static. “…increasing field strength overwhelmed zobotic format … opened all … and the passengers’ engrams. That woman … a time before our time … an Imperator.”
Deri edged away from the unstable zobot. Her mind tickled, retrieving gnosis from her speciation induction about the astonishing taxon of humans designated Imperator. Seven thousand survived, scattered among all 100,000 galaxies of the Protopia. The odds of meeting one boggled, and she spoke aloud her induction, “Imperator classifies an original inhabitant of Motherworld before the Encodera.” Deri looked acutely at Jyla. “That means you’re an uriginal.”
Like a rippling reflection, the snake’s form wavered, its nanoparts flustering – breaking apart and flowing together again. The magnetar interfered with the zobot’s holonymic adaptor, regulating shape and motion. And its voice sputtered, “Uriginal … that’s a name … known on wereworlds.”
Another shimmer came over the zobot, like it was an image and not a thing, and its words crackled: “She has … that physical body you see … over sixteen thousand … grasp that, child?”
“What?” Aware of the absence of Jyla’s morfones, Deri took a deep breath, hoping her terror wasn’t going to immediately annihilate her. She would be dead in minutes anyway, she tried to reason. Commandeering her shuddering fright and nervous gestures, she inched closer to Jyla.
The valet coiled tighter, magnifying resonance with the starsteed’s noetic frame. Static faded, and it spoke plainly to Deri, “That woman has lived over sixteen thousand standard years. Can you grasp that, child?”
“No.”
“Neither can she. That’s too much memory for a biotic mind. She has partitioned her history, archived her memories.” The white snake uncoiled and reared up. “Among those secret lives lurks a killer.”
Deri blinked with surprise at this improbable disclosure. She threw a look to Jyla for her reaction. The Old Woman stood impassive, offering no credence or denial to the crazed zobot’s accusation. Something conflicted toiled behind her eyes.
“I will show you.” The snake’s blunt head retracted as if repulsed. “Imperator Jyla hides her uriginal self. She began as Jayla Jones of Detroit, convicted murderer and near-suicide. I will neuronet her engram, and you will see for yourself.”
Jaw flanges widened and, with a flagrant hiss, the wedged skull split apart and blossomed to a barbed cluster of antennae. Harsh prongs, edges razored to rainbows, swiveled, scanning the cabin. The snake’s sinuous body stiffened and peeled apart along its spine, spreading with a wet sound into two red-ribbed vanes. Between those long, thin panels, a coherent holoformic image shaped what the serpent’s bristling antennae saw. The space filled with Jyla’s magnified face, expressionless and keenly watchful.
In a blurt of speed, the split-open head – thorny as a sea urchin – detached from its poised body and streaked to Jyla. The spiked antennae impacted her forehead with a solid thwack! and knocked her back a step, rigid and cross-eyed.
The space between the holoform vanes bleared briefly, attempting to access Jyla’s ipseity engram, then brightened to a burnished, up-close image of Ristin’s gold sphere.
Jyla’s body collapsed to a bustle of psylk. The omen-coder spun in place, narrowing and rapidly shrinking to smaller stature. The maroon-draped poppet with jointless arms upheld in both three-fingered hands the snake’s antennae-hackled head.
“The magnetar’s proximity has caused your valet to malfunction,” Ristin’s clairvoyce spoke the obvious to Deri. “I lured the zobot here to disable it before it causes harm.”
The snake’s holoformic space displayed a magnified image of the gold ball reflecting Ristin Taj’s point-of-view: extended arms, gray, smooth as cables, holding the serpent’s head in its black gloves.
The valet’s suave voice spoke from within the reflection, “The omen-coder thinks you are pathetic, Deri of Rondel.” The flared-open head snicked a laugh. “Ristin Taj has never before met a feral human – or your stink.”
Ristin’s froglike hands slapped the severed head, and the zobot’s nanoparts puffed away lively as dust.
The snake’s body remained upright, flayed to vanes bracketing emptiness, out of which the valet’s voice continued, “Do you know what pathos is, Deri of Rondel? It is the suffering that befalls one. Teeth, gut, anus, reproductive organs, bacterial-thriving skin, the omen-coder has none of these. They are the suffering that has befallen you – suffering that humankind overcame millennia ago. To the Protopia – to the beautiful worlds where you are fleeing, young one – you are pathetic.” The valet’s voice tightened intimately, “And yet, child of the first people, there is genuine wonder in your heart for omen-coders and plasmantics – wondering if these bizarre creatures are even human.”
Ristin Taj advanced in spanking psylk pleats toward the headless snake, which stood still as a sculpture, its holoformic vanes open like red wings.
“Is the valet convincing?” the omen-coder’s clairvoyce asked, then swiped psylk over the stiff form of the snake. It vanished in a rush of curly fumes. “You are not pathetic in my eyes, child. Though, the valet is correct: I do not have eyes. Or viscera. No blood – or body odor.”
Deri staggered backward, tripped over the pedestal of the stasis capsule, and sat down. “Where’s Jyla?”
“On the bridge, trying to get information from the starsteed’s auditor.” The omen-coder floated toward her. Mosquito whispers eked from the dwarfed figure. “She is not the saboteur. In her earliest life as Jayla Jones of Detroit on Motherworld, life for her was savage. She took a life with malice aforethought and slayed the man abusing her mother and sisters. She attempted suicide while serving her prison sentence…”
“Prison?”
“This was a time before induction, when learning was only possible through experience. Motherworld exhibited a class of punitive experience called incarceration. These were deprivations and restrictions inflicted by society on transgressors.”
Deri tucked her chin with suspicion. “In the wereworlds, that would only make transgressors more hostile.”
The omen-coder trilled a lonely laugh. If we survive our jeopardy, you must accept a Motherworld induction. For now, know that every moment of the Imperator’s existence has been scanned repeatedly over the ages by archivists, gnostechs, underseers, and omen-coders. The parameters of her death wish have been operationally defined, and I can verify from her posture in 5-space, Imperator Jyla has no homicidal or suicidal factors active now.”
Deri’s fear mixed poorly with the omen-coder’s clairvoyce. The white brilliance of the cabin pressed hard, an immutable mass her mind braced against, and she attempted to resist it and stand. Her pale eyes met themselves in the gold orb atop the abstract doll.
Before she could blink, the psylk mantle expanded explosively and gushed over her. Its reeling folds firmly pushed her onto her back in 3-space while dislodging her ipseity engram in 5-space. If there had been a cleardrift hammock in the cabin, this wouldn’t have been necessary. Determined to relieve Deri of any further suffering, Ristin Taj dexterously slid the girl’s awareness from her physical form. They hastily situated her engram within the psychokinetic space of the luminous plasmantic beside her.
Unable to see past the probability smudge of the 39 trillion bacteria wrinkling cryptospace around Deri, the omen-coder could only guess the superposition of the teen’s mind within the plasmantic’s. At least the child’s body lay asleep, her awareness lifted from the moment’s strict horror.
And moments, only moments, remain.
Fleet as a passing shadow, the omen-coder departed, flowing across the cabin and through the wall of soft dusk.
Deri watched the gold ball-bearing and mantle of maroon psylk exit from a strange perspective, as if hoisted upright and lifted off her feet. Her ipseity engram’s dislocation felt like a strong, soft wind pushing her backward through honey. The shining cabin drifted away, and she witnessed with stricken surprise her supine body below, half-lidded eyes showing whites.
I’m inside the stasis capsule – with the plasmantic! Feelings somersaulted, spinning her from horror through brave fright to spirited lucidity. The omen-coder has placed me with another passenger … to meet our deaths together.
The plasmantic, this extremophilic human risen from the corona of a sun, paid her little heed, other than to sweep her ipseity engram into the glorious fluency of Everflow. They built alertness between themselves readily – watchful, aboriginal human spark drawn deeply into the unbound luminosity of plasmantic awareness.
Free of biology, liberated from stubbed toes and migraines, no longer subject to wildfire neurons or cortisol torpor, plasmantic consciousness shed the dreamstrife of ancestral humanity. Plasmantics opened beyond sleep and death to cosmic reckonings: Intelligence churned within both incandescent and dark matter as holographic shadows of hyperspatial reality. As a whole, they were gradually progressing toward staggering things a black eon away inside the new physics of the next big bang.
Deri remembered thinking with stupefied doubt, But – we’re going to die. Now! And her hideous thought spooled wider, conforming to the spacious whorl of plasmantic subjectivity. She merged empty of dreamstrife. Her hideous thought deflated to the immediate present, all her elsewheres suddenly right here in the intuitive clarity and fellow feeling of this other.
Their mutual awareness extended with the plasmantic’s perception right through the starsteed’s glimmering hull into the dark beyond and the ferocious magnetar lassoing space in great arcs of white energy. At the center of the swiveling bipolar jets, a pinch of starlight squirmed. Bursts of gamma rays heaved against their lidless staring, hammering them more real, more directly aware of the fatal blows to come.
The plasmantic aimed its attention deeper into the strobing radiation, to the tiny, dense star stretching and quivering spacetime. Gravity near the magnetar sloshed light like water. Through that palpitating radiance, Deri and the plasmantic discerned slick, seashell curvatures of space determining the starsteed’s descent among veils of fiery, electrified gas. Their ship was a dim mote in that conflagration, descending into hopeless brightness.
Deri looked away, and her mind skittered across the cabin and penetrated the twilight wall, hurrying after Ristin Taj. The omen-coder moved energetically amid the stateroom’s muddled shadows and under sliding shrieks and sirens, advancing toward the bridge.
The hatch stood open, and Jyla appeared there, crouching over the command console. In the omen-coder’s perception, the Old Woman – unlike the noisome girl – incised precise omen-lines in cryptospace. Cheer gleamed from inside her diamond of time, and the omen-coder saw the future that the Old Woman was opening for them: A viewport clustered with sapphire stars – stars blue-shifted by the starsteed’s steep acceleration out of the magnetar’s gravity well.
Encouraged by this, Ristin Taj scooted onto the bridge, anticipating an audit favorable to a ten-minute fix … which was all the time remaining.
Beside Jyla stood the pilot, a spindly manikin with skin of dull green polymer and a blank tapered head containing an informatic processing core – a semblor.
They would need a pilot after repairing whatever malfunction the zobot auditor uncovered. Ristin recognized that the Old Woman had reset the pilot’s noetic gateways, and so the semblor stood alertly beside her. But she had disabled the velleity chip, and the face-plate remained opaque, glossy as pearl.
Jyla was as tacitly surprised as the omen-coder that she had been able to retrieve semblor mechanics from so deep in her memory – partition 216, long before the Protopia, when she had served Skytree, the galactic combine managing the initial settlement of the Milky Way. At that early phase in the diaspora, the perils of paralux travel required multilayer inductions of flight informatics for all passengers. She had learned everything about semblors then – and that knowledge had come tumbling forward on the bridge, as if yanked out of her past by the magnetar.
Waiting for the auditor’s report, she had prepped the pilot and begun plotting a trajectory. This close to the magnetar, the starsteed would have to accelerate to more than a third the speed of light just to stop falling.
When the report finally arrived, accompanied by a chime that dopplered to an elongated moan, she almost screamed. The auditor had formatted the data for induction. But the magnetar’s raging flux prohibited induction. Jyla would have to read the report. She didn’t immediately recognize the text scrolling in amber glyphs on the console’s screen.
Frustration tightened. These glyphs belonged to a language partitioned in her hippocampus, not far but too far to recollect through her morfonic haze.
She began withdrawing morfones. Now, where are my reading glasses? That prompt usually activated a recognition sieve for the many languages the Old Woman had induced over the millennia. This time, nothing. The morfones she had leaned on so heavily during this crisis impeded.
Ristin Taj gusted onto the bridge in a frenzy of flapping psylk.
Jyla looked up sharply from the cryptic glyphs. “Where is Deri?”
“Asleep.” The omen-coder lifted their head to meet Jyla at her height, and the gold orb reflected the Old Woman’s concern. They added, “The child is unharmed.”
“The audit’s complete,” Jyla informed them, dropping a dour look at the screen text. “What does it say?”
The omen-coder ignored the signifiers onscreen and read the signified geometry in cryptospace. “A compressor tube in the starboard thermionic array rocked out of its cradle. Vibrational anomaly.”
An anomaly. The flint of that fact sparked the same thought in both their minds: Not a saboteur. Necessity swept them on: In Ristin’s gold mirror, Jyla caught a glint of hope brighten her stern stare. “A simple refit gets us out of here.” Morfones depleted, she could not escape her dread. “But is there time?”
“The compressor tube, light and uncomplicated, is not the challenge.” Clairvoyce shaded gravely. “Someone will have to exit the starsteed and work on the array in the caul, exposed to the magnetar. Handroids and semblors are useless.”
“The valets –” Jyla noted. “There are over thirty of them.”
“Outside the hull, the magnetar will pop them like bubbles,” Ristin countered. “However, if they are deployed in sequence, there are enough valets to provide cover for one of us to reach the array. We will have to rack and reset the compressor tube manually. None of the valets are sufficiently adroit.” Ristin clairvoyced more softly what they both knew. “There is no return from this task.”
“I will go,” Jyla declared, brusque with finality. “Thirty-seven lives are at stake. I am their mother.”
“Yes, you are our mother, Old Woman. And that is why you shall not be sacrificed.” Clairvoyce insisted: “Mind the pilot. Make sure it functions properly. When the compressor tube resets, the starsteed will jump quickly into paralux.”
Jyla stepped close enough to press her body heat into the omen-coder’s psylk, affirming emphatically that she had dropped all her morfones. She spoke with fearstruck and mortal resolution, “You must not keep this honor from me, Ristin. This death is mine – and equal to my life. Look at the humanity that chance has put in my care.”
Chance. That word had been chosen specifically to barb the omen-coder. Ristin Taj’s exactitude at coding frequentismal amplitudes for macroscale events had qualified them to escort an Imperator. A starsteed freightliner presented formidable tonnage for coding, and an omen-coder of rank less than Taj might be excused for missing the wave invariance of small components like a wobbly compressor tube. Why didn’t I catch that splinter of turbulence? Chance. No coding grid is perfect. Sometimes events slip through. And now, by chance, chance delivers us to non-existence.
The thin, tuneful sizzling from the gold nodule atop the omen-coder hit a crescendo and went silent. “Yes, Old Woman, I do see how this death will make you a legend in our deathless Protopia.” Ristin’s psylk mimed Jyla’s determined stance. “But I safeguard a real woman, not a legend. You shall not perish in my care.”
Typical coder pride, Jyla bemoaned. Formality as armor. Reluctantly, she spoke in a tone calculated to twist the barb, “Your protection ended when you misread the omens and marooned us here, Ristin.”
The gold of the omen-coder’s round head clouded, and the psylk mantle shrank. “Even so. You shall not perish, Imperator.” The maroon fabric darkened. “Do not force me to subdue you.”
The Old Woman stepped back, brushing her hand against the command console, activating the semblor’s velleity chip. “I will not be forced, omen-coder.”
The manikin’s nacreous face-plate streamed colorful starbursts, and Jyla sidled up close behind and uttered a crisp command. She intended the semblor to step forward and shove the omen-coder against the bulkhead, block them in the navigation pod while she fled. Instead, the semblor’s limbs whipped to a whirling, whistling blur. The gust thrust aside the lively psylk, displaying an underside ribbed with many fibrillating seams of minuscule white pedipalps.
Jyla bolted past the tangled omen-coder and out the open hatch.
Shreds of light tore through the amphitheater in a black maelstrom. Throwing her hood over her head, she deflected rays from the glaring dome and saw deeper into the dark sockets of the stateroom – the galleries and the utility conduits nesting the cabins – searching for a companionway to the starboard exit.
On the bridge, Ristin Taj rolled inside-out. The psylk’s riffling pedipalps gripped the wall with micro-scale ridges and speedily conveyed the omen-coder up to the belled ceiling.
Above the limb-lashing semblor, they stopped. The inverted perspective nailed them to that improbable moment, hanging upside-down inside-out, trapped on a starsteed plummeting into a magnetar.
Improbable.
The improbable had brought them here, beyond death. To imminent non-existence. Moments away. Witchy moments.
Omen-lines around the Old Woman had shown them a lightcone projecting out of the narrow borehole that was the gravity well of the magnetar. Jyla had opened a path toward the blue-shifted sapphire stars of their sheer escape. But she is not the path. That death is mine.
Ristin Taj dropped from the ceiling onto the semblor’s conical head. Psylk frills intruded behind the sparkling face-plate and neuronetted with the pilot’s informatic core.
Riding the stiffly animated manikin, the omen-coder strode off the bridge and out of the nacelle. The luminous face-plate swiveled, scanning through the havoc of torn light and rushing darkness. They sighted Jyla on the far side of the stateroom hurrying up a slant companionway toward the starboard hatch.
Time facets crystal-fit around a smudged figure blocking her way. Deri of Rondel stood astride the passage.
How did she… the omen-coder began to question before recognizing in 5-space the faint prismatic halo around the girl. The plasmantic released her. Why?
Astonished to confront Deri, the Old Woman threw back her tinsel hood and declared with urgency, “Child, I know how to repair the ship. Let me by.”
“I know, too,” Deri’s voice heaved, each word an emotional throb. “Everflow showed me. The compressor tube! It jumped its fastener. I can reseat that.”
Ristin’s hyperspatial vantage peered into the minutes ahead. Oblivion glowered back. Seething magnetic flames braided tremendous streams of positrons and hypercharged electrons into lacerating countercurrents that buzzcut atoms to energized bits.
Moment to moment, those gnashing forces seared closer, and the omen-coder instinctively recoiled. A blipped image of Deri of Rondel jerked attention back to the cauterized layers of time. And Ristin spied again that feral farmgirl. She flickered in and out of sight as a hazy, shining improbability in the glare. A vanishing point, a speck swept along in a geyser of probability currents, she flew up the magnetar’s blazing gravity chute into the black, fathomless reaches of space.
Ristin Taj yanked the semblor to a full stop. The farmgirl is our omen!
The avalanche of implications buried the future. Ristin’s probability horizons of escape from the magnetic inferno disappeared. The omen-coder stared through 5-space into a new beyond. Here was a future exhaled one breath of atomic linkages after the next, across transport membranes in a body obscured by an uncertainty haze of 39 trillion bacteria.
Deri of Rondel, with her husky, intimate smell of animal need, had eluded Ristin’s 5-space scrutiny. Until now. She is our best chance. That word again. A new chance. Our last.
The semblor shambled into the companionway, bearing the omen-coder like a cap. “Only minutes remain,” Ristin announced. Twirling psylk in a gliding dismount, they landed between Jyla and Deri.
The omen-coder rose to staff-height, psylk wound tightly. The overlapping pleats amplified power, readying the omen-coder to act on what the wave function had revealed.
“Hear me,” clairvoyce pleaded quietly, strangely quiet and dispirited as an empty gaze. “A moment ago, I saw the one of us who can make the repair in the time remaining. The omen-lines are bold and crystal clear. This one is the strongest hope for the rest of us.”
“It’s me, I know,” Deri blurted, her face set, almost graven. “Racking a compressor tube is an easy problem for either of you to figure out. But for me, it’s not a problem, just an easy fix. I saw it in Everflow.”
“Child, you will die…”
“In five minutes, we’re all dead.” The girl backed off a step, ready to sprint up the companionway to the starboard hatch. “I can repair the starsteed. But, when I do, you have to steer it.”
“Wait, hear me out,” Jyla protested. “You are in a plasmantic reverie…”
“No time!” Ristin interrupted forcefully. Psylk flared from the gold-knobbed stick and blanketed Jyla, easing her to the floor unconscious. “Deri, have you met the path ahead in Everflow?”
“The path knows I’m coming.” The girl’s pupils dilated, recalling all she had witnessed with the plasmantic. And her quiet expression assured the omen-coder she had seen with a clear heart what lay ahead for her under strange stars so far from home.
Mosquito whispers intensified, just audible against the din echoing from the juddering stateroom. “Take this.” The omen-coder’s drapery produced a pellet striated green and black, which they pressed into Deri’s hand. “Jyla’s oldest morfone bead. When the job is done, open this. Spend your last moments on our Motherworld, stinky.”
The slash of emotion from the omen-coder surprised her, and she deflected her soft chagrin with a pragmatic question, “How will I manage the valets?”
“I have the zobot induction you need.” A petal of psylk drew her closer, twirled her abruptly into a snug cocoon and spun her free, all in an eyeblink. She knew then that the valets accompanied her in nanosize components affixed to her body heat. “Now go. Hurry! Or we are all doomed.”
She went. Racing up the narrow companionway, she charged the hatch head on, confident it would open for her, for thirty-seven lives.
Ristin cued the pilot to dilate the hull hatch at Deri’s approach, and it yawned widely to receive her full stride as she exited the ship in a banshee gust of escaping air. She barreled onto the starboard catwalk. Instantly, the first of the valets enclosed her in a clear thermal film suffused with enough free oxygen to keep her alert during the decisive minutes ahead.
For a stunning moment, she witnessed spry violet tints and brushstroke ionizations high above, where the robust bubble of negative energy held back the blustering magnetic storm. Atop the thin atmosphere, auroras flew like tempest rags.
The next valet assembled itself from invisible units and fanned over her with shining wings, screening her from random bursts of gamma rays. X-rays sizzled steadily atop the wings, shattering nanoparts with sharp pings!
She staggered forward, impeded by the drag of the oxygen film. I didn’t see this in Everflow. What else didn’t I see?
Deri swiped a glance around. She had emerged from under the giant torus engine canted against the stars. Below, the hull curved away in a broad arc. Its smooth surface of white resin caught light from the magnetar on the far side of the starsteed.
The looming vastness of space, fiercely black, immeasurably deep, nearly broke her gait. Gravity kernel … please … hold on. She fixed her eyes on the running trim-lights of the catwalk. Everflow had shown her this. Stay on track to the drop-pole.
Percussive bangs! overhead shook her violently and dropped her to both knees. A gamma ray flare had smashed several valets as fast as they had assembled to shadow her. Their micronized fumes curlicued before her like mocking little demon faces.
Deri pushed to her feet and scampered forward. Valets flashed overhead – more flexing wings, gliding tortoise shells and armadillos, hulking beetle carapaces – exploding to sparkling nanobits, replaced by less familiar fauna as the zobot package accessed older phylogenetic files – geometric symmetries of radiolaria and spiked diatoms magnified to sturdy shields.
One heartbeat at a time, she advanced crouched over, trotting fast as the baggy oxygen suit allowed. At the end of the illuminated walkway, she hugged a drop-pole shining softly blue and swirled down to the foredeck.
She had lost count of how many valets had disintegrated protecting her. Desperately, she lifted her gaze to where Everflow had said the thermionic array would be and stared into empty space.
Confused and unmoving, Deri gaped about for two heartbeats. During the first, she discovered that Everflow had expressed the hull in two dimensions and the array squatted on the stage directly below.
With the second heartbeat, she looked up at the magnetar’s blazing antlers rising above the roll of the starsteed. That demonic vista spurred her to jump. She hit the stage under rapid fire explosions, half a dozen valets erupting in succession. The ferocity of the magnetar sheared away more of her time.
Again, Deri couldn’t budge. Horror had collected all of her before the death-magnet’s burning blue tentacles. She squeezed her eyes shut, and the star’s radiation lit shadowed rubies in her blood.
Soft as matin hour, she decided, wanting to close out the deadly brilliance and feel again a typical morning in Elsewood. “Come on,” she urged her mind back to her croft in its green glade of dewy fronds and somber trees. “Let’s go home. We’ll fix that broken handroid.”
Head bowed, mind on the moss-freckled flagstones in her garden, she stepped out on a cleat-path that led along the starboard hull. Thunder reverberated, stifled by the caul yet still louder than her loud heart.
Titanic lightning bolts lashed the perimeter, flaring blue veins across the expansive ellipsoid of sheltering space.
Three more valets detonated. Squatting under the gritty blasts, she duckwalked the final paces to the cowling. When she looked up, no valets remained. The next gamma ray burst would scorch her.
Quickly – already scalded by reflected x-rays – she unlatched and raised the cowling. Situating herself between it and the magnetar, she got to work.
The thermionic array baffled her with its helical matrix of filament lenses. But she recognized the array’s block mount as a goliath twin of the compressor mounts for grange handroids. She spotted the off-kilter compressor tube, half out of its cradle, and seized the guide-rack supporting it in both hands.
The metal-memory of the rack woke to her traditional mechanics-grip: ‘tug-tug-shove-pull’ – which rendered the intelligent material of the rack malleable. In moments, she had nested the ajar compressor tube – really, just a firm elbow press – and then adjusted the cooperative metal to a secured grip before setting the rack’s new memory: ‘shove-shove-tug.’
A shiver ran through the hull. She looked up as the cowling closed and saw magnetic winds sweeping heavy auroras across the visibly expanding caul. The starsteed had woken.
Pitching majestically toward flight attitude, the freighter turned away from the magnetar. Black night crackled with stars over Deri. Dizziness swarmed. Somewhere in the everywhere out there, beyond her blind horizons, stupendous streams of galaxies converged into woven streams of galaxies in their billions and hundreds of billions, running hard to forever as one shining river of stars.
Gamma rays bounced off the caul’s ionizing shell and washed through Deri. She sagged to her knees in a pulse of withering sorrow. Retinal flashes followed as damaged rods and cones frittered away. The next burst would kill her.
That blunt fact pressed hard against her and thickened her nausea. Beneath wheeling stars, as the freightliner rolled, her sickening vertigo expanded, moved into the relentless circulation of the universe, and left her alone with stillness.
This is dying.
She reached under her kaftan and found Jyla’s morfonic bead. No time to study it, just twisting and tapping and fretting to open it until a jetting plume of morfones engulfed her and inflated her oxygen suit.
She sat back startled – on the stoop of a clapboard house, seeing as usual from inside herself, while also outside seeing herself, a six-year-old girl in pink bolero jacket and smudged blue leotard. She was watching the first star kindle above the bleak emptiness of a vacant lot and thinking, Some stars are planets.
The cool air smelled of city twilight, autumnal, sooted with lingering exhaust and fragrant with crisscrossing aromas from kitchens up and down the street.
The morfonic moment dissolved. Deri again sat with her back to the thermionic cowling, wrapped tight in nausea, facing the bow of the starsteed. She clasped herself tenderly, pressing back against the cowling to stay upright as the prow aligned with an invisible horizon far across the universe.
The insight that had come back from that wondering child who had been Jyla in the deep past barely got through the pall of her radiation sickness: Six-years-old – sixteen – or sixteen thousand, mystery spun this moment. Always this moment. Always mystery.
Fatigue drenched her. And she wanted to sleep. So badly. But this was her moment, hard won from the mystery, costing everything to know that the others would survive. And she kept her eyes wide and fixed ahead upon the far dark – until the stars there opened into sapphires.
The Imperator didn’t see Deri’s death. She knew that the girl’s atoms would have been stretched to thin splinters as the starsteed accelerated. Instantaneous death, surely – yet, a relativistic instant, prolonged as time began slowing down during acceleration only to stop entirely at light speed. Was that a horror for the child, feeling her atoms stretching to a dead stop?
Jyla bent over Deri where she lay in a recliner, arms at her sides, slack face turned to one side. The air-scroll above her showed healthy vitals, and the Old Woman swiped it away.
Deri woke gently. She peered through lashes at the bright stateroom and the grand bubble-dome, velvety black with the kinetic darkness of space moving faster than light. She sat up.
“We’re all alive,” Jyla’s stout and steady presence stood close, and her gentle contralto assured her, “We’re back on course. All is well.”
She had removed her red tinsel cloak and wore an imperial blue kaftan with scarlet piping and black rosette clasps. Around her, the stateroom shone in lucid white light, empty of morfones yet gleaming with spirited dulcimer music and bustling with handroids.
Large neon caterpillars crawled over surfaces, cleaning, repairing. Nearby, a swarm of mighty-mites covered a smartform-scaffold, assembling a quantum frame-gate. Its oval portal blinked and strobed, shaping a connection across cryptospace to Elsewood. She recognized the pixelated outline of her parents’ hometree.
“We’re setting up a link so you can talk with your family. The entire Protopia knows of your heroics, Deri of Rondel.” Jyla exhaled a laugh, meeting the frantic intelligence in the girl’s gray eyes. “You didn’t die. But you might as well have. You’re okay? You can talk?”
“I burned,” Deri recounted, fighting down the feeling she had in fact died and her ipseity engram had fallen into a loop-hallucination in 5-space. “I died.”
Jyla smiled placidly. “No, you never died. You were here with me the whole time.”
Behind her, the pilot approached to meet the famous passenger. Its face-plate displayed a relay from Elsewood: the swarthy, smiling features of Tyani, her lover lost to another … from what seemed forever ago.
“Deri, we are so proud of you. You could have died for real!” Tyani’s one eye not obscured by a slant of feathery black hair narrowed with sly recognition. “I know that look, Deri Berry. You’re just waking up!”
Jyla’s curt shrug sent the pilot gliding away, Tyani’s jubilant laughter trailing off.
“The omen-coder…” Deri mumbled.
The Imperator met the youngster’s searching look. “Your omen-lines marked the surest path to our escape. Ristin needed your perceptions.”
“Ristin took my engram?” That shouldn’t have come as a surprise to the girl but it did, because she had physically suffered and still felt the dismal torpor of dying. I was there.
“The omen-coder did not remove your ipseity engram.” Jyla sat on the edge of the recliner and took Deri’s hand in her warm grasp. “They merely angled the prism of your awareness in 5-space so that your self-percept joined with Ristin’s.”
“Why?”
“Ristin trusted your timing more than mine or their own.” Jyla pulled down the corners of her mouth and nodded with exaggerated approval at the satisfactory outcome around them. “Can’t argue they were wrong. Timing was crucial in the caul. You saw that. The pattern of stop-and-go while keeping the valets overhead, avoiding random gamma ray bursts, it was entirely a matter of chance.”
“The omen-coder repaired the array?” She pressed the heel of her hand between her eyes. Is this real? “But I felt sick while doing that. Really sick.” I was there.
“That was Ristin’s sickness.” Jyla drew her face close, until she was peering into the girl’s tight, frightened pupils. “That’s why they gave you my oldest morfonic bead, to connect you with the start of my story. That tilted your ipseity engram in 5-space toward the light of my most distant self, all those ages ago on Motherworld. We entangled engrams so that you would wake up here instead of endlessly reflecting the omen-coder’s death at the prow of the starsteed.”
Deri squinted and sat there filled with anxious uncertainty about herself.
“I’ve felt what you’re feeling, pulled loose of my body. A few deep breaths, you’ll be yourself again.” The Old Woman eased away with a sympathetic look. “Are you ready for some fones?”
“No.” Deri shook her head, wanting to feel more like a person again, not a mood. Gazing about at the active stateroom and the open cabin doors, she noted that the plasmantics had synchronized their vapors. Their iridescent coils gyrated seraphically in their glastic columns.
“They honor you,” Jyla conveyed.
“For what? I dreamed a dream.” The dazed girl stood and swayed until she compressed her lips and fixed her center of gravity. “The omen-coder saved them.”
Shoulder-to-shoulder with Deri, Jyla shared her aloneness. “Before we even figured out that consciousness is a 5-space construct,” the Imperator confided, “gnostechs were experimenting with my engram. This was ages before the Protopia, before morfones. I was still in prison, the low of society’s lowly, a murderer recruited for medical research. Every time they knocked me out of my body, I thought I was crazy. In those ancient days, we believed mind emerged from the nervous system. So, how could I be moving around outside my body – except as a hallucination? I know how weird and isolated you feel now. It will pass.”
It was already passing. Joy staked claim to the moment. She expanded with relief the more she looked around. The corkscrewing plasmantics were happy to be alive – and inside the frame-gate, a vivid sliding panorama of the grange emerged. Softly, she gazed at the rustic grove of hometrees from her childhood and the silver-apple garth where she had first met Tyani.
This wayfarer’s explorations will be returning her home, Jyla foresaw. It was right there in the girl’s eyes, taking in where she had started as if for the first time.
Deri turned away from the frame-gate to the Old Woman and said with pallid sorrow, “The omen-coder died.”
“Oh yes.” The Old Woman affirmed this with a glum sigh. “It must have been an exquisitely uncomfortable death for a 5-space mind.” She shrugged haplessly. “We’ll just have to ask them. Will you be coming to Ristin’s iteration?”
A smile of amazement slanted through a perplexed frown. “But they died near the magnetar, where cryptospace can’t archive engrams.”
“Paralux acceleration stretched Ristin’s atoms to quark streaks, for sure.” Jyla took Deri by the elbow and drew her closer. “That’s why they expected to perish there, near the neutron star. But at that velocity, time dilation kept them alive long enough to die far out in space. There was no threat of non-existence.”
“The saboteur. And trying to put me to sleep and ignore me.” Deri scowled with disbelief. “Ristin got a lot wrong for an omen-coder.”
“Ah, well –” Jyla softly smiled. “They are only human.”