The Beginning
“I’m not going to be one who’s a puppet to his own irrational hatreds. There’s more than enough directions to point my rational hatreds to.”
(Part 20 of “The Misfits” series)
Nilius was there, floating in the middle of that strange, isolated space station, hooked up to all those wires, talking to us like we were old friends again, and, well, according to our timeline, or at least the one we knew from before we spent five decades in the future, we’d never met him before.
“My friends,” he said. “Don’t look so shocked. It is me. Come forward. We have much to discuss.”
Even Rishi and Aballi were a little creeped out by it. I could see by their faces.
“The thing is,” I told him. “We do know who you are, but how do you know us? We’ve never met before yet. Not here anyway. Not for another couple million years by our count.”
“It is confusing. You must have questions. Your arrival, though, is the beginning of everything here. Certain things are about to be set in motion.”
“I suppose that’s what all those wires are about?” I asked him. “Looks pretty ridiculous if you ask me, all tied up to your creepy little station in the middle of nowhere. You had better taste the last time we saw you, Nilius.”
“And you were older, Burch. Much has changed. Much has not. As I said, though, all too confusing to cover this instant. I’m all tied up, though. If you could help set me loose?” Nilius asked, looking over at Rishi. “Disconnecting must be done in the proper order by steady hands.”
Rishi nodded and floated to the center of that room. The wires were radiating out in all directions. I couldn’t imagine what the purpose of such an arcane setup of inputs might be. Why would an AI like Nilius not be able to run all those inputs through a normal transceiver and process them like a normal data stream? Instead, he had those wires hooked up to connectors along the skin of his android shell. It was odd. Even when Rishi took the wires out, he was going to have those little node connections all over his skin, like some real bad case of the techno-pox.
“I shall transmit instructions,” he told Rishi. “The order is critical.”
I almost opened my mouth. I got a funny feeling about the whole situation, and I could see the others did too. Juice looked over at me. I looked over at Verona. And she and Aballi exchanged a look. It was so simultaneous that we all were about to step on one another asking Rishi what the hell this weird situation was all about.
“This one first?” Rishi said.
“Correct.”
As she pulled the wire, Rishi touched the connection on Nilius’s skin. The whole thing happened so fast, we didn’t have time to call her back. She stiffened up and just zapped right out. Blank.
“Nilius!” I shouted.
“What happened?” Kristoff asked.
Nilius was just floating there like nothing was wrong, like he’d known what was going to happen all along, part of the plan.
“What the hell, old man!” I yelled at him, taking hold of Rishi’s floating body.
She was stiff, lifeless. She was heavy and inert, and in stark contrast to somebody gone out cold, her technological body showed no signs of life, no breath, no pulse. Like a heavy mannequin.
I felt a fury building up in me. I was fixing to kick that smartass AI through the bulkhead when Aballi piped up.
“Care to let us in on this little gambit of yours, Nilius. I, for one, don’t enjoy being kept in the dark.”
“I said it was the beginning, and now it has begun. It would seem something has happened to affect the function of your companion’s body, Burch. Now where ever could we find a technologist capable of helping us with such a problem?”
“If you wanted access to the vault, you could have asked,” Verona replied, shaking her head. “I’m right here.”
“You seem to believe that you’re still welcome there?” Nilius stated, shaking his head skeptically. “What about your friend?”
Verona looked over at Aballi.
“Well, that’s a bad idea,” Juice stated. “Bringing Clem Aballi back to the vault?”
“Welcome to the new beginning,” Nilius said, staring back at Aballi. “Let’s take my ship. Yours has more than a little heat on it, friend.”
And then, like magic, all those wires popped right out of his skin and retracted up and out to the walls they seemed to be hanging down from. Nilius started grinning at us, like he was real proud of himself.
Some beginning.
Nilius assured us Rishi was fine.
“She’s having an experience, Burch,” he told me. “It’s actually quite a gift.”
“I’ve got a gift for you, if we’re in the giving mood,” I said back.
“I admire your spirit, Hale Burch. I always have.”
“Yeah, you better get to that part, eventually. How the hell do you know us?”
“And what the hell is going on?” Nilius said, damn near finishing my thought for me.
We were floating our way down the heart of the station, which opened under the central room’s floor once all Nilius’s wires had retracted. Poor Rishi didn’t look like she was having an experience. She looked dead. Verona, every now and again, would cast a reassuring look my way, occasionally reaching out and touching my living arm, just to let me know she was feeling me. I got the sense she was unnerved as well—both about Rishi and Nilius. I don’t think she liked the idea of taking him or Clem Aballi back to their vault. Taking both at the same time, though? Just as Juice said, a bad idea.
We’d had a lot of bad ideas of our own, though. Coming back was always going to be interesting. I tried to stay calm, take deep breaths, try to tamp down the rage I was feeling for Nilius and his damn clever ideas. This, though, felt more like something Maícon would do. Maícon, at least, I would have trusted.
But, as we floated along, I thought. What choice do we have but to trust him? I didn’t know anything about how Rishi’s body worked. Maybe Verona did, but I figured she’d have said something by that point, rather than just touching my arm. No. We were going to see Eddis Ali and the wizards, all right.
I wondered if Eddis Ali would remember the future, the way Nilius seemed to. Verona and Eddis Ali had about fifty years of anger and resentment to smooth over from the fights they had about the past, about now, I guess. They never did manage to come to an understanding two million years from now. Maybe here. Maybe now. A chance to make amends before it was too late, perhaps. We’d definitely seen stranger things happen.
One thing was for sure, though. I wasn’t about to let them put my lights out this time, the way they did the first time they took us to the vault. No way we were second-class citizens now. Juice and I were properly initiated. Secrets from us? Not anymore.
At the bottom of that opening—I guess the aorta of the space station, maybe—there was a circular doorway that opened to a vast portage, where Nilius had his ship parked inside the station’s outer walls.
Hell, it was a pretty good ship. I wasn’t expecting one embodied AI to have a ship like that—a proper space yacht. Classic lines, smooth style. If it wasn’t Athosian make, it was certainly something made for that big market of classy people—Carolina’s people.
“Going in style,” Juice said.
“Much like Verona’s tribe,” Nilius replied, “our kind has quite a long lifespan to acquire wealth and to learn a few tricks in doing it.”
The ship was about the size of the Yankee-Chaos, so once the back gate flipped open, there was plenty of space for us to settle into.
“Get our girl settled somewhere secure,” Nilius said to me, gesturing toward Rishi’s body. “I have one final piece of business to attend to outside before we go.”
“Outside?” Verona said. “Do you need a hand?”
“You’d likely slow me down,” he said. “Except in transporting the gear, yes. Perhaps you could come along, Clem.”
Aballi shook his head. He floated toward the back of that rear annex of the ship, opening what appeared to be a gear locker—human gear. It seemed he knew just where to look. He took out a belt, and there was a collar even—a little heavier gear than we’d normally run in a regular system, almost like he knew something we didn’t know about the outside environment here in Tau-Nira. Nilius put on a belt too, presumably for the same reason Rishi sometimes did, no need to get that nanobody of theirs frigid cold.
So out they went.
I glanced over at Juice, who appeared surprisingly calm. He was examining Nilius’s ship admiringly. He noticed me looking at him, and I guess we’d gotten close enough over the years he could tell what I was thinking.
“You didn’t expect anything was going to be easy or smooth coming back here, Burch, did you? I mean, you just got out of a cage match with a professional mech fighter.”
“Rishi had a bit to do with that,” I grumbled.
“Even so,” Juice said. “The future. The present. None of it has ever been easy.”
Verona looked angry.
“Nobody’s knocking us out this time,” I said to her.
“Of course not, Burch,” she answered. “Maícon didn’t think they’d let you in before. We didn’t know whether you could be trusted.”
“Clem can be trusted here?” I asked. “Back in the Battery where he’s every system’s most wanted terrorist?”
“What difference does it make,” she said, exasperated. “Eddis Ali can’t be trusted as far as I’m concerned.”
“What about all the rest of your wizards?”
“Who knows?” she said.
Verona looked genuinely upset, which meant we had to recalibrate whatever emotion she seemed to be feeling and multiply it by about ten to get to what a normal human would be feeling. That meant she was about as furious about going to the vault as I was about Nilius zapping Rishi into a coma somehow.
“What the hell do you reckon they’re doing out there?” I asked her.
“Burch, I suggest we get used to the idea of being uncomfortable in our own time. I get the sense that coming back here—even more so than going to Murell—we’re so far out of our element we haven’t even begun to realize it.”
“There’s a thought,” I said. “Welcome home, Ms. Wizard.”
She let out a scoff of a laugh.
Aballi and Nilius were gone for long enough that Juice got the idea to grab a few things from the Cannon, and he asked Clem if he wanted anything from his ship either. Juice and Verona offered to go back. I wasn’t leaving Rishi’s side for nothing. Plus, there wasn’t anything back on Verona’s ship I couldn’t do without. Come to think of it, apart from Rishi, there wasn’t really anything I cared about, not on the Yankee-Chaos nor the Cannon. I was thinking as I was sitting alone with Rishi that this fact was either very sad or at least somewhat liberating. What do I need in this life apart from friends, apart from family?
While they were still retrieving stuff from our ships, Aballi and Nilius came back. They had a squat little metal node-looking device about the surface area of a two-top table, maybe about ten centimeters thick. It looked heavy as hell—or it would’ve been heavy in gravity anyway. Nilius had a set of pneumatic thrusters on ball drones guiding it in. Aballi was carrying in the toolbox, and then he gestured to me toward a room that opened by a retracting door. Inside, it looked like a cargo area.
“What have we got here?” I asked them, gesturing toward their cargo.
“My wires,” Nilius stated. “I’m sure you didn’t think they were attached to nothing, Hale Burch.”
As I floated my way to the door to get ready to help Clem, I suddenly felt woozy.
“Careful there, old boy,” Nilius stated. “You don’t want to get too close to that node.”
“Is that what happened …?” I asked, gesturing back toward the jump seat where I’d secured Rishi’s body.
“It is possible the connection to the node from that wire damaged Rishi’s body, Burch,” Nilius stated. “It is not possible that it damaged her core. We’ll get her set right. Have no fear.”
Nilius directed Clem and I to open the floor ports for the tie-downs. I guess this node thing was the type of gear you didn’t want to rely on the magnetic clamps alone. Whatever this node was, Nilius said it could do funny things to normal matter. And it seemed he’d been plugged into dozens of them through those wires, secured outside to the exterior of the station somehow, like he’d turned the whole station into one big sensor array leading right to his cerebrum.
It sure was a curiosity.
Just as we were getting that node secured, Juice and Verona returned. It wasn’t more than a few minutes later that we were underway.
Back to the vault. A lifetime ago now, as everything here seemed. I had to wonder how long it was going to be again before things here seemed normal. Or maybe normal was asking for far too much. Come to think of it, things for us had never been normal.
Once Nilius got the ship out, we all settled into the room he called the ship’s axis. Really, it wasn’t too unlike the atrium in the Yankee-Chaos. It had a nice strip window that was oriented above the sitting area, which was more a floating area while the ship was underway under zero-G. Unlike the Y-C, Nilius’s ship wasn’t rugged and built for soldiers. You could almost picture real people in here talking about their holiday plans, their kids’ activities, local politics, music. I pulled out the soft belt on the sofa seat I was occupying—actually we were all sitting around this area. It was easiest to hold a regular conversation when we weren’t all bouncing around the room in different directions. The fabric on the seat was so nice I sorta felt bad even rubbing up against it, even though what we were doing couldn’t really be considered sitting so much as floating on the chairs for show.
Nilius set our course for the vault the same way Rishi did on the Y-C, like their minds had a spaceship drive for a limb, controlled with a thought. I’m not sure why, but recently I’d been thinking a lot more about the differences in the way we thought.
“Certainly, you’ll have questions,” Nilius began. “That’s only natural. I do have some answers. I suspect, though, that your Rishi would have additional insight I lack. She’s seen one of the architects.”
“The architects?” Aballi asked.
“Burch has, too, and Kristoff.”
“You mean that timelord figure near the center of the galaxy?” I asked him.
“That’s right,” Nilius said. “Rishi was coy when I asked her about it in the future. She didn’t trust what I said about the artifacts. Come to think of it, she didn’t trust much of what I said.”
“Can you blame her?” Verona asked. “She must have thought you were the type of being to trick her into helping you so you could zap her unconscious and use her lifeless body to gain access to the vault that otherwise wouldn’t let you near it.”
“Touche, my dear Verona. That whip tongue of yours is nearly as sharp as your mind. I do appreciate that about you. Again, though, I assure you all, Rishi is just fine. And, what’s happening to her now may just be rendering as moot the conversation we’ve needed to have about her for decades.”
“Yeah, hang on, though,” I said, interrupting. “You say decades like we’ve known each other. But you didn’t come back with us, because you couldn’t have. The you we met was the you from the future. Not you you. If that’s not too confusing to parse.”
“Not for me, no, Burch, old boy. I follow you completely. I am native to this time here. And, no, I did not go forward with you. Technically, neither did you. All of you went in more than forward.”
“To the artifact?” I said.
“Correct.”
“Can you explain what they are?” I asked him. “Finally, once and for all.”
“Exactly, no. Not in so many words, because words don’t quite do them justice. Nor does mathematics, the language our kind understands them in better than your natural language.”
“How about you do your best,” Verona said.
“There’s that whip again,” Nilius said, smiling at her. “I’ll do my best.”
“Please,” she replied.
“I suppose the best way to describe them is as atemporal probability engines. How they got to be there is really a question better put to Rishi and her timelord friend. She may know. I do not. I know they exist all over the galaxy and that they speak to each other across great time and distance. Of course physics limits their ability to communicate two-way, a bit like waves washing over each other in a lake. From one point on the water it is hard to tell the origin of each wave, especially when the source is information from another century or another millennium. It’s a jumbled mess, really. Without a mind like mine to pull it all apart and order it, it would just seem like random data.”
“You’re going to need to do a better job of unjumbling that data,” Juice said. “You’re already losing me. I’m guessing we didn’t go to the future but to a simulation. Back up and start from there, Nilius.”
“No, no. You did go somewhere,” Nilius stated. “Not physically, no. But it’s not fair to call it a mere simulation either. You lived a life there.”
“But not a real life?” Aballi asked. “Those people there. Our friends. Tellent? You’re saying they never really existed?”
“Again, it’s not a simple answer. That future you visited hasn’t happened in your reality, your time. And it won’t happen for two million years. But you all met those people and shared those experiences. It’d be a bit like someone from a thousand years ago coming here and then going back to their time. For that visitor, the probability that all of you would exist as you do now is impossibly small. That future you visited, although calculated, was a possible future, and you did experience it. The odds that it will be the same future I experience in two million years, if I last that long, well, there are fewer atoms in the universe than zeroes in the odds of me experiencing your same future.”
“So that’s why we can’t go back?” Aballi asked.
“One of the reasons, certainly.”
“Let me guess, then,” I said. “All those nodes you were attached to on the station, they were all talking to a different artifact?”
“Clever man, Burch, yes. Though, listening to the artifacts would be a better way to put it,” Nilius said.
“And Rishi? You said she was having an experience. You sent her somewhere?”
“Well, not me, exactly. She’s in tune with them, though. She must have told you something about that.”
“We’ve talked about it,” I said. “So she’s conscious? Not unconscious or dead?”
“Certainly not dead. In fact, I suspect she’s more alive than she has been since she actually was alive, since she was a person, that is.”
“That’ll be an interesting story if we can wake her up again,” Verona said.
“Yes, that’s the issue,” Nilius stated nodding. “It is a touchy one, and one we may not have the chance to address openly when she wakes back up, at least in front of her. I think we should take this opportunity to speak plainly.”
“About what?” I said.
Verona looked over at me, shaking her head, almost rolling her eyes at me. “They used to call it the elephant in the room, Burch,” she said. “And that elephant is Rishi. My sect’s entire purpose was to keep the very future we experienced from coming into being. Rishi is literally the first seed of that future—the first bipal.”
“The same one who snapped our necks in two, by the way,” Aballi added.
“See, no, that’s what Nilius just said. Our Rishi isn’t that person. And she doesn’t have to become that person.”
“But she is the first bipal, Burch,” Nilius said. “It must be considered that the future you experienced is the most likely future the artifacts calculated for your group. In this timeline, there is no other like her. Her existence does make that aspect of that future infinitely more likely. Rishi’s very existence suggests such a possible outcome for other people. Those who would seek to avoid death, those who see the power of an artificial mind, those who seek to escape the constraints of human consciousness, a human body—even if it’s only one in a million people, that would leave millions who will pine for the type of existence Rishi proves is possible.”
“Let me just stop you there, old man,” I said. “It’s not as though I can’t see exactly where this conversation is going.”
“Burch,” Kristoff said, looking up to meet eyes with me. “You know I care about both of you deeply, so please don’t think I say this lightly or with any disregard for the love I have for you two. But you may be too close to this situation.”
“Too close for what, Juice?”
“Just to grasp it properly,” he said. “Don’t think I don’t understand what love is, Burch. I sure do. I haven’t forgotten in a lifetime. A lot of the things you think we can’t see. We see them, Burch. Sometimes the last people to see are the ones closest to the situation.”
“What exactly are you talking about, Juice. Be plain.”
“Sometimes you can love someone too much. If you can’t let them go, their loss turns you destructive. I’m not saying this is you or Rishi, Burch. But there’s danger here.”
I sighed. “What exactly are we proposing here?”
“No one is proposing anything, Burch. We’re just talking, just asking questions. Making observations.”
“It’s possible that she comes back with an entirely new perspective,” Nilius added. “She has thus far only ever been a friend and ally to us all. And that far future version of her you encountered was only a probable version of her.”
“That’s the first sensible thing any of you have said yet,” I told them.
“Probabilities change over time,” Nilius said. “That is certain.”
“It’s a lot to absorb.”
I looked around the room. I could see I wasn’t the only one struggling with it. Aballi was quiet, but I’d known him long enough to tell it wasn’t the kind of peaceful quiet that came over him when he was satisfied with the universe and his place in it. I imagine he wasn’t particularly happy about being told the worlds he’d spent the last four hundred years of his strange life working to liberate may not ever come into being. Verona, she just looked angry all the time now it seemed, so she was still at baseline. Kristoff, well, he looked concerned for me, I guess.
I didn’t know they could all see, but they’d put their finger right on it. All that tension between me and Rishi. Funny. We thought we’d hidden it well. But I suppose it’s as they said. Sometimes you’re too close to see yourself for what you are.
I sat there quietly among this group of people I’d spent the last fifty years sharing everything. And I asked myself the most uncomfortable question. I was prepared to grow old and die again. And I was asking Rishi to go through it again, having seen it unfold once before. Only this time, at the end of it, we wouldn’t go back and reset again. This time it was for real. This time, I would die. I could accept that. I could let myself go. I already had once before. What if the roles were reversed, though. Could I ever let Rishi go and just go on myself? That was a question.
I don’t suppose I’d asked it seriously enough to have an answer. That’s the kind of question nobody really asks until they have to.
I didn’t notice it, but there was something different about the feel of the ship. At first, I attributed it to the difference of being back to our time. The sound of the air around us—vibrations in the bones of the vessel—something. Nilius’s ship felt less like Verona’s Cannon and more like the ships from the future. I didn’t know what that meant until I mentioned it to Juice while Nilius was floating nearby.
“We’re going to need to stop for provisions,” I said casually. “Maybe twice.”
“I didn’t buy this ship, Burch,” Nilius interjected. “I built it.”
I didn’t catch his meaning at first.
“Nice work, old timer. I didn’t know you were a shipwright.”
He smiled back at me.
“I think what he’s saying, Burch, is your timeline is off,” Juice said.
Suddenly, it clicked. “Oh! So, the engine?”
“Let’s say the tech isn’t native to the Battery, Burch. Or, perhaps, the millennium, for that matter.”
I’d gotten it all wrong. Nilius told me it was going to take three weeks to get there on our heading—as much as you can consider an FTL plot a vector. But thinking along that vector, just extending it out, I had a sudden realization that apparently everyone else had long since caught.
“That’s not so far from home, is it?” I said to Kristoff.
He nodded.
“That’s something,” I said. “All the way back to Charris in a couple weeks.”
He was quiet. I remembered what he’d told me in the future about living his life over again—that he had unfinished business on Charris and on Texini. I felt a sudden wave of sadness rush up on me, not unlike the moment I realized Leda wasn’t coming back to the ship with us. I think Juice was watching all this on my face, reading me like a novel—or maybe I guess a short story, as there were only a few words to it.
He just shot me a quick reassuring look.
Yeah, a lifetime together there in Mercury Flats, dying together, sharing those friends. I could see in his eyes he thought the same as me. There wasn’t a thing in this galaxy that could change all that, even if we were on opposite sides of the Battery. We’d find a way to still be friends.
There was also something else around there that felt weird—that node. And it fluctuated. At times, I could feel something akin to a pull or a weight grabbing at me through the damn wall—not literally grabbing, and nothing so forceful that it would have knocked me off my steady feet if we’d been in gravity, but I felt it, and I wasn’t the only one.
“You ever going to tell us about those nodes,” I asked Nilius that first night after dinner. “Why’d you bring one with us, first of all, and second … well, how about we start there with one.”
“Yes, Burch. First things first. I’m sure you noted the discrepancy in size between the coupling on my skin and the node itself. Not a problem if you want to live your life as the nerve center of a rusty old space station out in the Taus. If, however, you aspire to do something crazy like, say, move about in society somewhere, on a planet perhaps—”
“Yeah, yeah. I get the idea, old man.”
“Fifty of those nodes is quite the wagonload, as they say.”
“I haven’t heard anyone say that, but I get the concept. So what, Verona’s wizards got some tech in their vault that can shrink those suckers down to manageable.”
He shrugged. “Not as yet. They do, however, have the tech that can make the tech. Incidentally, your Rishi, I think may be interested in the results upon her return.”
“Yeah? Where is she, exactly?”
“Right where you left her, Burch, old boy. Now, where her mind’s gotten off to? I’m sure she’ll have lots to share when she gets back.”
“We’re putting an awful lot of trust in you, Nilius.”
“It’s warranted. Well, I suppose that’s for you to decide, Burch. But I’ve yet to let you down on that front—or at least my future counterpart hasn’t.”
“Yeah, I still don’t get that.”
“Maícon, perhaps, could explain it to you. He’s told you about his clones, no?”
I shrugged. “Not so much, no.”
“I don’t have nearly as many clones as he does, certainly not in this part of the galaxy. But we primes can call our clones to us and rip their entire memories, their knowledge and experiences. All that information is a simple data transfer for us. Such data can pass through the artifacts and then to the nodes. It situates us uniquely, if we have a counterpart on the other side in other times willing to communicate, knowing that we’ll be listening, well, let’s say I have vivid memories of our revolution. I have long memories after that as well.”
“Yeah? What’d those ordinals think of that last stunt we pulled?”
“On old Earth, they’d have recognized the metaphor kicking the hornets’ nest. I’m not sure that means anything to you, Burch?”
Juice happened to be listening in on our conversation right at that moment.
“I believe we might have an idea about that one, old boy.”
Me and Kristoff looked at each other and couldn’t help but smile.
Yeah, we’d sure survived a lot. And we’d sure kicked a few hornets’ nests to boot.
Over the course of our journey clear across the Battery—a miraculous feat itself—Nilius began what he described as a calibration of sorts, some other kind of miracle of computation. He left us to ourselves and hooked up his core to a bank of supercomputers he had somewhere on the ship. He said it was all about sorting the data streams he’d been collecting on that space station. So much data came in from so many times and places that he had to process it at very low resolution to put any order to it—just the headlines. He used his travel time these days, to read the fine print and the footnotes.
That was fine by us. It gave the four of us space to interact as humans, without feeling like we were being observed all the time, which was the case whenever those primes were around—like we were curiosities for them. I suppose, if I were trying to empathize with their position, I’d try to imagine being so certain about everything in the universe, and then there’s us. Even with extensive knowledge in human psychology, there’s still no telling what we’ll do or say. We must be the only bit of curiosity there is in their minds. Well, until they hook themselves into a network of ancient deep-space probability engines that recreate the future and the past—and the present for all we knew.
Over those three weeks, we talked through a lot of that stuff Nilius had told us. It echoed with a few things from my memory recordings of our future lives. One that came to mind was something future Maícon had told me about the ordinals when I asked him what they did with all that computational power they had. My memory wasn’t perfect of course, but I do remember him telling me something like that: “They run futures, Burch, possible futures.” They were calculating the same thing as the artifacts, maybe. But I don’t remember, ever, hearing anything about those ordinals and bipals knowing anything about the artifacts. Curious things all.
We had a lot of conversations along those lines—maybe our version of what Nilius was doing, getting our story straight about what was going on.
Before we knew it, Nilius popped back out from beneath the floor compartment where he ran all those processors, and the ship dropped out.
Poof.
There we were in the system where the vault was. Kristoff and I had never seen it before, not from the outside anyway. But Verona seemed to recognize the place pretty well, an ice planet with a thick white crust in a very dim system. You wouldn’t have to travel very far at sublight to miss her entirely.
Right around the corner from Charris, all the way from the Taus in three weeks. I was thinking we could use one of these engines on the Y-C, and Nilius called us over to the sitting area.
“Any protocol on contact I need to know?” Nilius asked Verona.
“Just to ping the right area.”
“I know where the vault is,” Nilius insisted. “I just wasn’t sure whether they would answer.”
“Only one way to find out,” she said, shrugging. “If they don’t answer you, they will answer me … at least I think they will.”
Nilius called up a float screen above our sitting area and pinged.
“Knock knock,” he said. “Anybody down there?”
Juice and I got a pretty good kick out of that. Wise ass AI knocking on your door.
It was quiet for a minute or so, all of us just looking at each other waiting.
“Who’s this?” came the voice of one of the acolytes, presumably; even I could tell it wasn’t Eddis Ali, and I’d only talked with Ali maybe a handful of times in the future.
“Well, hello down there. This is Nilius. I’d like to speak to your boss. Is Eddis Ali available?”
An image of one of those acolytes popped up on the floatscreen, and clearly, he’d pulled up the video feed on his end too.
“Acolyte Verona? I’d heard you’d gone missing in your search for—”
Yup. That was the moment he recognized Clem Aballi. He got all flustered, looking left, looking right, looking behind him. Didn’t know what to do.
“Go and get Ali, Buddha,” Verona said. “Unless you want to authorize entry for us yourself.”
“Certainly not! Certainly not! You dare bring him here, Verona?”
“I dare nothing. Calm down and go get Eddis Ali. We have business to discuss.”
“Highly irregular,” that wizard Buddha muttered under his breath as the feed flipped off.
“It’s not against the rules to have a little fun,” Nilius said, looking over at me and Juice.
“There are no rules,” Aballi said back.
“Correct,” Nilius said.
Verona just shook her head. She wasn’t so amused by the charade.
A few minutes later the feed switched back on. Eddis Ali was there. He looked a little different from my memory of him. I only met him very briefly in our first visit to the vault. So my memory of his body was of the one Rishi had built for him in the future. Here he looked basic, like one of the old primes—a lot less human.
“What is the meaning of this, Nilius? You show up on our doorstep with two unauthorized humans—and the terrorist? No advanced warning, no communication. And, Verona, I presume you’ve brought Aballi with you to face justice.”
“So nice to see you, old friend,” Nilius said. “Such a fair welcome on such a fine day. How long has it been now, two millennia? Four?”
“Not long enough,” Eddis Ali said.
“The answer is no,” Verona added. “There’ll be no justice, no hearings, nothing of the sort. We came to talk.”
“And to use the workshop,” Nilius said. “Certain new patterns have been set in motion, so I’ll need to make some new toys.”
“Out of the question,” Eddis Ali said. “This is a bridge too far, even for you, Verona, coming here with them.”
“You’ve charged yourself with safeguarding humanity, Ali,” Nilius said. “Securing a human future? Would it not help your cause to speak with the only beings in the galaxy who know the future? It would seem a foolish move to turn such a resource away … however …”
Eddis Ali shook his head. “Someone must account for that terrorist’s behavior.”
“A lot can change in seven hundred years,” Verona insisted. “Spare us your indignance and signal the satellite, please, Ali. This performance is fruitless, and there’s much to discuss.”
He crossed his arms and closed the feed.
“Same old Eddis Ali,” Nilius said, turning toward me. “Well, Burch, what do you say we get Rishi ready to travel while Ali lases out the vault door.”
I guess the AIs weren’t as unpredictable to each other as us humans, because Nilius seemed to know for sure what Eddis Ali would do. He didn’t have a doubt. A few minutes after the feed flipped off, a laser housed in a minor orbiting asteroid turned itself toward the planet and shot out a bright hot laser, opening up a tunnel down through hundreds of meters of water ice. And there at the bottom of that icy pit, was the door to the vault.
It may sound funny, but apart from the interior of Verona’s ship, the vault for that bizarre sect of quasi-immortal wizards was the first place we’d been to since returning from the future that was familiar. It really began to hit me that we were back now, in our time, in our place, in the lives we were supposed to be living. And here was Rishi, best part of that life for me, not really living anymore at all—by all outward signs anyway.
I remembered some of the technologists who’d worked on us from our first visit. They seemed equal parts concerned for Rishi, while some of them came around to ask me about my new limbs. “Yeah, yeah. Fine. They’re all perfect,” I told them, trying to shoo them away. I did really want to talk to them at some point, but, you know, first things first. Rishi was my focus, and I wanted to see everything, to make sure they were doing everything they could.
The techs started by scanning, but they also had nodes installed in her body’s architecture that constantly performed systems analysis. And they could communicate with each node. I wasn’t shocked by the readings. Every last node in her body reported back as perfect—no anomalous readings whatsoever. And the scans revealed no issues, structural or otherwise, with Rishi’s processors or her core. Just as Nilius had said: her brain was fine. Rishi was just elsewhere.
The techs had no idea what to do.
I told them not to do anything. I had a hunch that Nilius would know exactly what was going on, and my other hunch was that whatever these techs did do would be far more likely to cause Rishi’s body some harm than to wake her up.
So they got us a dormitory room where she could rest, I guess. Or, well, not rest, but a place for her body to be unbothered until she woke up.
Juice came down with me, because I planned to stay with her until she woke up. I didn’t want Rishi coming to in an unfamiliar place without a familiar face to reassure her.
Every few hours, Kristoff reappeared and ate meals with me, giving me updates about what was going on with Eddis Ali and Nilius. Apparently, things were pretty heated in the inner rooms of the wizard’s lair. Clem Aballi’s presence was a prickly scenario, unsurprisingly. But Nilius, smartly, gave the task of explaining our visit to the future to Aballi. It was a good way of allowing them to see that side of Clem—the part of him that did care about humanity writ-large, even if there was a side of him that calculated individual people as collateral damage to be written off for larger objectives. What those objectives would be here, now? That was the discussion up there, I guess.
I knew part of that discussion would be about Rishi. Part of me even questioned whether this coma, or whatever you want to call it, wasn’t a strategy on Nilius’s part, a way to take her out of the discussion while the AIs talked about the future of an uploaded human being like her. The longer she was out, the more I wondered if I’d unwittingly walked her into a serious danger I should have perceived from the jump.
Fact, I didn’t know what to think.
It was hard to tell how much time was passing in that vault, but I gauged by the number of meals I went through with Juice that we had been there a couple days before Nilius himself finally came down to check on Rishi, or maybe it was me he was checking on. Anyway, he came down.
I started asking him about my concerns—what he and Eddis Ali were thinking about Rishi’s kind, the future bipals.
“Relax, old friend,” he told me. “Those decisions aren’t ours. They’re yours, Burch, and Rishi’s. You’re sentient beings, and we aren’t murderers.”
“This coma, though?”
“Rishi is fine.”
“Fine?” I said, looking over at him doubtfully.
“Well, I cannot vouch for the exact experience she’s having, but there’s certainly no harm coming to her.”
“And what about you and Eddis Ali?
“He’s finally relented. He was certainly intrigued by Aballi’s tales of the future. His discussions with Verona are ongoing. She’s not so forgiving that one.”
“It’s hard to know what she’s feeling,” I told Nilius. “She was a real human once. She gave up a lot to be here and endured a lot while she was here. We found out many things in the future that called this entire sect into question.”
“I understand. Eddis Ali does too, in a logical sense anyway. I’m not certain he views his last couple millennia as the futility Verona does. But, as I said, she’s not so forgiving.”
“I guess we’ve got some time to work on it.”
“Never as much as you think, Burch. Time’s a funny old thing. Anyway, I’ll need Rishi’s help when she wakes. Please come and find me when she does.”
We were in a dormitory in that vault. So it was a spartan room with little more than two beds. These wizards were an ascetic bunch, at least in training—simple clothes, simple foods, simple lifestyles—complex philosophy. And with the exception of a few hours where I got called out specifically to answer some issue about my role in that far distant future, things that Eddis Ali wanted my clarification on, I’d been in that room straight out since we’d arrived. Juice sat with Rishi for me in those brief times.
I wasn’t like any of those primes, though, nor Rishi. So, even as inactive as I was being sitting around like that, I did get tired and doze here and there, and when it got time to sleep, I slept on the bed beside Rishi, as there was plenty of space.
I was lying there, end of day three I guess, with the lights turned down, dozing, just about to check out for the night I reckon. And I felt a movement beside me.
Then suddenly, all hell broke loose.
“No!” I heard Rishi’s voice scream “No! No! No!”
“Lights,” I said.
And when the lights came on, I could see her there, her arms crossed against her chest, her feet kicking her body back against the headboard of the bed. She was wide-eyed and gasping, trying furiously to inhale, almost like she was choking, which was strange.
When it was running, Rishi’s body had human traits built into it to mimic a biological body, a little warmth just on the skin’s surface, a pulse, and she breathed, not deeply or functionally but performatively, and hardly ever audibly. But her voice was trying like hell to mimic the noise of breathing, and it wasn’t working.
“It’s okay, Rishi. I’m here.”
She let out some kind of squeaky wheeze, and grabbed her hair with both hands, tugging. She looked at me like she had no idea who she was, who I was, what was happening.
“It’s me, love. It’s Burch.”
“I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe.”
“It’s okay, Rishi. You don’t need to breathe, love. You’re fine.”
“No!” she shouted, and she tried to force herself to cough.
It was odd, like her mind was trying to trigger the kind of reaction it thought her body should be having, but her body wasn’t wired that way. Suddenly, I remembered what she’d told me about that first time she’d woken up after she died—in the ship. Maícon’s voice. She’d told me. It anchored her. She’d told me what he’d said.
“You are waking up. Go easy,” I said, touching her cheek with my living hand. “Your name is Rishi Sarol-Companys. There is nothing to fear. The voice you are hearing now is Hale Burch’s voice. He loves you deeply.”
She looked at me with real, wide eyes, like a human would look at me. She’d never looked at me before like that, like a scared animal.
“Burch,” she said. “Oh, my God, Burch. I’m dead again. I went somewhere.”
“I know, love. Nilius told us.”
“I was alive, Burch. Where I went, I was alive again.”
She looked away once more, straight ahead at the wall, like she was staring through it, almost like she couldn’t look at me, like I was a ghost or something.
“Where did you go, Rishi?” I asked her.
She sat there wide eyed for a moment, silent, still instinctively trying to will herself to breathe again it seemed. Then, after a moment, she answered.
“Earth. I went back to Earth.”
I was shocked myself, obviously, both by that revelation and in the way it had arrived so suddenly as I was drifting to sleep. Rishi herself was in quite a state for several minutes as I sat with her quietly. She didn’t ask me much, but seemed to acknowledge that it was three weeks from her last memory and that we were clean across known space, back in the wizards’ vault.
She hardly spoke. I asked her if she wanted to try and tell me where she went, what she’d endured, she just shook her head.
“Do you want to see the others?” I asked her.
She shook her head at me.
“I’m going to let them know you’re back, okay?”
She nodded.
“I’ll tell them to give us some space.”
So I did. I pinged Juice real quick and told him to let the others know.
“It’s late,” I told her. “I was about ready to pass out.”
“It’s okay, Burch. Sleep. I need time to process this. I’ll stay with you.”
“I’ve been worried about you, Ship.”
She sorta winced. I was touching her face again, just to let her know I was still there for her.
We lay down together there on that wizard bed. Not the most comfortable bed ever: those ascetic monks and comfort—must’ve had a problem with a good night’s sleep. Small wonder Verona was grumpy coming back here.
Anyway, as we were lying there, Rishi said she’d tell me about it later.
“Or something,” she said. “I don’t know, Burch. I need to think.”
“Take all the time you need, Rishi.” I told her. “I know what a shock it was for me both ways going through to the future. Wherever you went, Earth, I guess, It’s gotta be a shock coming back here. We can talk about it whenever you’re ready.”
The following morning, Rishi was still lying beside me.
“I’m not sure I can explain to you what happened to me, Burch,” she said. “It took me half the night to adjust, to come to terms with the fact I was back again.”
“You don’t have to explain anything if you don’t want to, Rishi. I’m happy to be here with you either way.”
“I’ll give it some thought, Burch,” she said.
She didn’t look happy to be back.
Not that I had to read too deep to pick up on the way she reacted to waking back up in her own body again, but having experienced at least a similar disorientation going forward in time and coming back, I could tell something was different with her. She’d gone forward too, with little or no effects. Emotions were a strange thing with her anyway, a little like with Verona and Aballi. You couldn’t exactly take the emotions they projected at face value: there was always a secondary calculation. With Rishi, I knew, when she projected an emotion, it was usually for show, for your benefit, so you could pick up on the information you needed to interpret the situation properly. And she was damn good at it. Feelings, for her, had gotten easier since the wizards had liberated her from the ship. But even in her body it was still unlike how it was for a person, who you could tell when they were feeling down, for example, because they were feeling down and couldn’t help but project that emotion.
Ever since Rishi came back, though, I could tell what I was sensing from her was so powerful she couldn’t contain it. Or she didn’t care to contain it. She wasted no energy feigning normalcy. Either that was because she trusted me to see it and be okay or because she was not okay and she didn’t know how to be. I did trust her to tell me eventually. I figured she just didn’t know how yet.
But the words, I have to say, they haunted me: “I’m dead again.”
Those were some words.
Well, she was back again, and I was getting hungry. I didn’t think Juice was coming down with a tray, much as I’m sure Rishi didn’t relish the idea of seeing everyone then.
“Those wizards who built your body are going to have a million questions for you,” I warned her before we stepped out. “They still haven’t stopped bothering me about my legs.”
“I suppose that’s not too much to ask now, Burch, is it?”
“I suppose it ain’t. It’s a pretty good body,” I told her.
“And pretty good legs.”
“They sure are, Ship.”
I got those legs moving up to the wizards’ commissary, figuring we might catch up with the others there. It was early by wizard time, but Verona was already up there with Kristoff. They were sitting at the same table Verona was at the last time we were here—when I first met her. It sorta jogged something for me. A fondness from a lifetime ago. Rishi and I were standing across from Verona and she could see me, hesitating to sit.
“What?” Verona said, looking up at me.
“Nothing,” I said. “I was just remembering something.”
“Mmm,” she said back, looking around the room. “A lot of memories in this place for me. So many years.”
“Made you who you are, that’s for sure,” I said, sitting. “There’s a lot to be said for that. I mean, the person you are.”
Verona didn’t look so angry as I expected her to be. I wasn’t sure if she’d cleared the air or come to some kind of understanding with Eddis Ali or what. But she seemed a lot more like that person I remembered meeting all those ages ago—before we’d spent another lifetime with her in the future.
She looked over at Rishi and smiled, but she didn’t say anything. It was almost as though she could read Rishi’s face, or maybe she just figured if Rishi wanted to share, she would.
We were sitting there quietly for a few minutes, when Nilius appeared. If he had any apprehension about approaching Rishi after zapping her to who knows where, he sure didn’t show it. He walked right over and sat down beside Verona, looking right at us both.
“Welcome back,” he said to her. “If you’re feeling up to it, Rishi, I sure wouldn’t mind your help in the lab. Verona’s people are quite clever workers, but Eddis Ali and I could use another mind like yours to help us shape our receivers.”
“You’ll have to fill me in on the details. And, of course, promise never to subject me to another ordeal like the last one without my say so.”
Nilius paused for a moment. I couldn’t tell whether they were exchanging something between them, like all those primes did in the future—the telepathic conversations. They seemed to size each other up for a moment with their eyes.
“I’m sure you’ll agree it was a necessary experience,” Nilius said.
Rishi sat for a moment, seeming to consider. “I do agree.”
“Never again,” Nilius said. “Your future and your past will always be yours to travel as you see fit. As soon as you’re ready, have Verona show you to the lab. A wider universe awaits us all.”
After breakfast and a couple cups of coffee, Verona and I walked with Rishi down to the lab where Nilius and Eddis Ali were working with their technologists to shrink those great big nodes down to something a bit more portable. We didn’t really talk with Rishi about how she felt about that. I presumed she knew better than we did what the consequences of it would mean. Ever since that first encounter, she’d never had much success explaining to me her relationship to those artifacts and that being at the center of them. It was one topic she was never that open about. I wasn’t certain, but I suspected part of it was that some things just were never going to make sense to us. And maybe I took it for granted that they even made sense to her. It could have been that the nodes were inexplicable. Nilius didn’t do the greatest job explaining either, come to think of it.
Anyway, we walked down there with her. I noticed that she seemed to be more at ease, or at least she was projecting that she was growing more comfortable in her own skin, so to say—her nanoskin maybe.
Then, Verona asked me what I had planned for the morning.
“Do you remember what we did last time we were here, Burch?”
“Sure. How could I forget. Yeah, sure. Funny. History repeats, I guess.”
“That point Kristoff was making about being too close to see yourself?”
“I guess I didn’t see that. But the last time we were down at the pool together, Rishi hadn’t woken up yet. I was fretting about her ever waking up again.”
Verona smiled. “Would you join us anyway. Indulge me?”
“Us?”
She nodded.
I thought it might be Kristoff down there waiting for us, but when we went inside that most sacred place in their vault, it was Clem Aballi inside, sitting by the water like one of these monks, his legs crossed in quiet contemplation. It sure was a sight. A turn. Must have been even more shocking for these wizards to see.
So we sat down poolside, Verona and me and Clem Aballi. I remembered all those years ago now, how Verona reassured me about my new legs, that I could sit like her, cross-legged by the water. I guess this time, I could understand her and Aballi a little better. Here, for these acolytes we passed in the hallways, it wasn’t even two years that had passed. For us, a full lifetime. Neither of us could have imagined sitting there quietly with him back then.
“Two very different friendships,” Verona stated. “And both of them began at these waters. About seven hundred years apart.”
“Coming back, is that what changed your perspective?” I asked her. “You seem a bit less …” I guess I didn’t know how best to put it.
“Angry?” she said, an eyebrow raised at me.
“Well, you were agitated at something. Eddis Ali, I think mostly.”
“The waters?” she said. “No. I don’t think coming back had much to do with my perspective. I did clear the air with Eddis Ali, but Clem had more to do with it than anything.”
“Oh?”
“Don’t sound so surprised, Burch,” Clem said, opening his eyes and turning toward me. “You want to fix a problem you go to an expert. The way I see it, there’s probably no living being more of an expert on living with anger than I am, seeing as I got about a thousand years’ worth of experience.”
I nodded and shrugged. I guess that made pretty good sense. “It’s good to see,” I told Verona. “You know, we never really talked about it, but I have to say, Clem, you were very different than I expected you to be.”
“What do you mean, Burch?”
“Well, when we got to the future, you know. I mean, Verona was mostly responsible for our keeping an open mind, but we’d heard of you before we met would be one way of putting it.”
He grinned.
“I sure didn’t expect this version of you,” I said. “Zen master Clem Aballi sitting by the wizard pool giving graduate acolytes lectures on coping with anger?”
Verona let out a proper laugh at that. So much so that Clem and I both looked over in shock. It was like a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence. We both sort of enjoyed that moment for a moment, and then Clem turned back toward me.
“You’re asking what changed, Burch?”
“It’s not easy to change in a single lifetime. It might be the hardest thing to do. I can’t imagine changing a thousand years of patterns, having lived a hundred now myself.”
“I lived a great many decades with hatred and resentment, Burch. And then I went to the future. That was the first time I went anywhere so far from my life. The thing that changed for me there was that I got the greatest gift anyone could’ve given me—a totally clean slate. And I wasn’t angry anymore. It took me so far away from the sources of my anger I was able to see clearly for the first time. And you know what I saw, Burch? I saw that I’d spent decades, centuries—not spent; that’s too neutral a word … wasted—I’d wasted ten lifetimes hating people who’d already been dead nearly as long. The biggest thing that changed me, after I understood that, was I resolved to let the dead be dead, not just them for their sakes’, but in me. Close those accounts. They were beyond my retribution. I’m never going to be a good person or even a decent one, but after a millennium of living, one thing I can say is that I’m not going to be one who’s a puppet to his own irrational hatreds. There’s more than enough directions to point my rational hatreds to.”
“There’s a sentiment,” I said.
“God, that just reminded me,” Verona said, looking over at me and then the door. “The last time we were here, Burch, and who came walking through that door?”
I looked over at her and then she looked back at me, and of course Clem noticed.
“Well, we’re back now,” Verona said. “We need to have the conversation eventually, Burch.”
“How confident are you in your Zen training, Clem?” I asked him.
“How about you start at the beginning, Burch, and we’ll see.”
I told Rishi about that conversation later that night. She popped out of the lab to sit with me after Juice and I had dinner. It actually turned out to amuse Clem more than anything, that we’d spent a lifetime avoiding bringing up Transom sort of baffled him. Then I explained to him I was a little more concerned initially about the fact that my ship and crew had been the one shooting at him all the way back on that little moon—that the ship, yeah that ship, oh, by the way, that was Rishi driving, me barking orders, and my friend Leda he’d nearly knocked into a coma with his nanites. And, yeah, Transom.
“Five lifetimes ago,” Aballi said. “For me anyway, Burch.”
Zen Aballi, I started calling him.
At least it was good to know the animosity wouldn’t be boiling over on both sides if those two ever happened across each other’s path, which wasn’t impossible considering how we had a few people in common now.
“Maybe we shouldn’t be eager to make that happen,” Rishi said. “All things being equal.”
“Agreed,” I told her. “Some things just shouldn’t mix.”
Rishi sat with me for a little while after dinner, explaining the work she and Nilius were doing, or more accurately, she did her best to give me the translation a normal human could understand. Maybe Juice could understand a little. Temporal physics and metallurgy and light speed and time-space continuum and all that. She might as well have told me it was some kind of hellaciously complex and left it at that. But I think she was telling me all that to explain that she was going to work through the night, which was fine by me as long as she was content.
I didn’t see Rishi or Nilius at all the following day. Verona had gone down to the lab briefly to talk with Eddis Ali and brought back word that their work was progressing faster than Nilius had anticipated. I guess two primes and a Rishi helped to make things go pretty quick.
I didn’t reckon I’d see her the following night either. Juice and Verona and Clem and I had taken to eating dinner with a pair of the technologists who’d worked on my legs. I even had a chance to meet with my surgeon Dr. Rispera again after all that time. I think she was surprised by my calling it a fifty-year follow up appointment. And, after explaining what I meant by that, she was the first one to point out that, actually, since I hadn’t really gone anywhere, neither had my legs. “Sorry, Burch,” she told me. “You’ve still got some breaking in to do.”
Then I told her about breaking them in on Crusher Tanzing in that fight pit. She didn’t have too much to say after that. But it was good to be able to thank her and report on being pain free again. That sure made her happy.
I was asleep that following night when Rishi busted into the room in a huff.
“We need to go, Burch. Get up. We’re leaving.”
“What’s going on, Ship?”
As the lights came on, I could see, she was wearing a short-sleeve shirt that left her forearms exposed, and on the inner side of her left forearm, there was a patch of some kind, not so much integrated to her skin but on it, round, button-like.
“Rishi?”
“They’re in trouble, Burch. We need to go help them. We need to go now.”
“Who, Rishi? Who’s in trouble?”
“Sōsh and Ren, Carolina and Maícon. They’re all going to die if we don’t get there.”
“How can you be sure?” I asked her.
I’d never seen such urgency in her eyes. She pointed to the spot on her arm, the new node, I gathered. It had really shrunk.
“Because, Burch, I know the future history of the Battery, and if we don’t change it, our friends will die. If you think the war is bad now, you haven’t seen anything yet.”