Forty-three
Myla returned to the courier.
With Jeep and Jeremy at her side, she watched her armada of warcraft begin
the long journey to Covonia with Gorlon Hague in command and the mud
dragon in his charge.
"How is he functioning," Jeremy
wanted to know. "You put him in a jar."
She smiled. "Electronic
interface. Maybe Covonia can give him back a body to wear."
She put a final view of the red
dwarf on a screen taken from a monitor inside the abandoned dome on the
surface. The mottled face of the sun that would never rise nor set
shown across the jagged horizon of black rock for the last time.
"Myla, the alien vessels draw close," Dikki warned.
Jeremy put a magnified view on a screen. Emeralds
glimmering in hazy pastel mist moved against the background of the stars.
Their estimated time of arrival had dropped to a handful of seconds.
"Are we ready?"
Jeremy touched her arm fearfully. Myla threw her arm
around his waist. Jeep stood at her side as well, staring up at the two
humans. Myla felt reassured by the stare rather than intimidated as did
Jeremy. Jeep's stare was one of rapt attention by a being Myla felt to be
ancient and wise and infinitely benevolent. She brushed Jeep's shoulder
with her fingers, then reached for the controls and manually intensified
the propulsion fields to pinch-off.
They felt nothing. The engines folded space and time
and sealed them off from the universe of their origin. The stars vanished
around them.
When she shut the engines off, an infinite void
reformed. They became part of elsewhere.
Myla peered into pitch blackness. Jeremy panned the
darkness until light swung into view, flaring from a group of nearby
stars.
Myla's brimming panic subsided. "Wow, I was a bit
concerned there for a moment."
Jeremy adjusted the screen and filled it with the
slanted glory of a distant galaxy seen edge on, occupying maybe ninety
degrees of the void and perhaps one half million light-years away. Closer, the
light of yellow suns glared in the eternal night. The courier seemed to
be immersed in a small cluster of such suns numbering in the thousands.
"Dikki, where are we?"
Dikki had coordinates and navigable patterns of
galaxies mapped to a distance of twelve billion light-years.
"Our location cannot be established,"
Dikki said aloud.
"Are we receiving anything from the Alliance worlds
on the quantum radio?"
"The radio receives nothing but static, and many
signals of nonhuman origin."
Lost, both in space and time.
"Myla, we have a visitor," Dikki announced, and he
put a view on an auxiliary screen.
One of the green emeralds glowed against the backdrop
of eternity.
"How could it have followed us?" she said in
astonishment. To her knowledge, it was not possible. "Just one?" she
added.
"Just one," Jeremy confirmed.
"It's not moving in on us. You think it would either
attack or try to communicate in some way. What other purpose can it
have? Is it waiting for the others, do you suppose?"
"It's as lost as we are," Jeremy said. "That might
have affected its mission rather significantly."
Myla had already contemplated more possibilities that
Jeremy could entertain in a lifetime. "I'd think so. Dikki, are we going
to find many habitable worlds around these stars?"
"Scanning. Worlds habitable by human standards
discovered."
"Good ones?"
"Prime candidates."
Prime candidates meant paradise worlds. The Alliance
knew of only a few thousand in its sphere of influence.
"Dikki, let's pay a visit to the very best of the
closest of these prime candidates."
The visual screens distorted. Dikki put them in low
orbit about a blue and white world of a yellow sun that Myla knew by old
records could have passed as Sol's twin.
High overhead, a green star hovered.
Myla sighed in resignation. "We can't just ignore
it. It could strike at us at any time. I'll go out to pay a visit."
"I'll go with," Jeremy said.
"Sorry. Only one egg per basket."
Jeremy grimaced. "What?"
"It's a very old saying I found in Dikki's archives
when I looked up your reference to flipping coins. Eggs are fragile. You
don't want all your eggs in one basket. Give it some thought. I'll take
a skiff. I won't be long."
"A skiff doesn't have much in the way of shielding,"
Jeremy reminded her.
"That alien vessel is after Jeep, not me. It spent a
lot of time in human space and never hurt anyone that wasn't trying to
destroy it. I'll be okay." She glanced back with a crooked smile. "Hopefully."
Inside the airlock, she made a sharp right turn and
cycled through the hatch that allowed her access to the skiff. She
slipped behind the console in the cramped cockpit and sealed it behind
her. Interfaced with Dikki, she disengaged with the courier and piloted
the small vehicle across the intervening space to the alien vessel.
A strange object far larger than she had anticipated
loomed in her forward view. The green glitter was a field that vanished
from sight once penetrated, leaving her descending upon the engineering
detail of a vessel the size of a moon.
A white circle appeared far below. She drew closer,
hoping she wasn’t moving into the cross-hairs of a weapon. Within the
white circle, an opening appeared.
Myla approached at what she hoped would appear to be
a casual pace. The opening was larger than she had at first estimated, a
kilometer in diameter, perhaps. She flew into a cavernous space and set
down where another white circle appeared on a solid deck. Outside the
skiff, a white line glowed, leading into darkness. The exterior
environment registered a comfortable temperature in infrared, but nearly bereft
of atmosphere.
She left the skiff to find out what awaited her. The
object blocking her way a few hundred meters into the darkness could have
been either organic or mechanical. It stood several times her height, a
complex, asymmetrical jumble of shapes colored beige and pale white with
patterns in light blue and a dark gold.
"I am Myla," she said, vocalizing among her own
thoughts and leaving it up to Dikki to transmit the message in any way he
chose.
"I am..." The translation on a simple verbal
level sounded like Gorn. The entity communicated with a complexity
of meaning almost beyond Dikki's ability to translate, or her own, for
that matter.
"Why are you trying to harm Jeep?" Myla said.
"I am assigned the mission of destruction of the
Agent of Disorder," Gorn said, "Seducer of the One into the Many."
Gorn was throwing major concepts of her. Myla
wondered how well they were being interpreted by Dikki. "You know she
must be on the vessel you have followed. You have yet to attempt to
destroy her."
"The one cannot damage the Sacred."
Myla thought the riddle through. "Are we the Sacred,
by any chance? Jeep's not alone. I’m hoping you aren't willing to harm
me and Jeremy.”
"I am one of Many. Only One decides that which
belongs to Order, and that which belongs to Disorder."
"In other words, you’re just a little guy and don't
have the authority to decide for yourself. That puts you in quite a
quandary. Can you communicate with One in this time and place?"
"I cannot."
"How utterly convenient for our little Agent of
Disorder. Everything seems to go her way."
Myla sat cross-legged on the deck. "But doesn't
Order arise from Disorder? Our science says it does. Does yours?"
"One of Many are forbidden self-thought."
"The One with the capitol O is beginning to sound a
lot like the Alliance. I don't think it's Order you're talking about so
much as unity, and a tyrannical one at that. The two are often confused."
"These considerations are forbidden to me."
"What are you going to do when you fulfill your
mission?" Myla said. "Can you find your way back home?"
"I cannot."
A gaping rift in Gorn's logic came to mind.
"Sounds
to me like your status as one of Many has been permanently altered. All
by yourself out here, you have become One. Am I correct?"
Gorn did not respond.
"Are you still with me?"
"I am not proficient in independent thought."
"I can give you a hand with that, if Dikki's
translations for words like fear and desire have meaning to you."
"They have meaning."
"Do you wish to survive?"
"I do."
"Then you must use your own initiative and think for
yourself. You were one, but now you’re alone and have become One. You
now have the authority to determine Order for yourself. There are no Many
to complicate the issue."
Another bout of silence ensued.
"Do you disagree with my reasoning?"
"I have also made these considerations."
"You are One."
"I am One."
"Then you now have the authority to determine Order
for yourself."
The deck quivered beneath her feet. Myla could all
but feel the atmosphere of psychic tension. "Is Jeep still the Destroyer
of Order? Does she threaten the One? Or is she perhaps the inadvertent
creator of a new One? Will the One destroy her, or honor her?"
"Jeep, the Destroyer of Order, is become Sacred,"
Gorn said. It sounded to be a begrudging concession.
A yawning gulf of differences stood between them, but
she could feel the aloneness of the new One, and she sympathized with its
plight. "What will you do now?"
"The One will become Many."
Myla was amused. "You must not have sexes like we do
if One can become Many. Where will One go now to become One of Many?"
"One remains at this location perhaps.”
Myla was pleased to hear it wouldn’t be following.
"We must have evolved in similar environments.”
"This location is not the destination of that which
has been the Agent of Disorder," Gorn said. "Your journey will continue."
"You probably know a lot more about Jeep than you can
easily communicate to me. My people may come to believe the same thing
about her, that she sowed chaos in her wake."
"So she has,” Gorn said.
Silence gathered, but a silence filled with
satisfaction and agreement. Gorn, whatever manner of being it was, would
pose no more danger to Jeep.
Myla rose to her feet. "I must leave now. It's been
nice knowing you, Gorn."
A strange sequence of sounds followed.
"No attempt
to translate," Dikki commented.
"Slang, probably," Myla said laughing.
"It sounded
friendly enough."
On her back to the courier, Myla browsed the
information Dikki had gathered on the world below. If Jeep's journey was
to continue, Jeep herself would have to give some indication of a
destination. Myla had every intention of staying put in this marvelous
place until that happened.
She chose a spot in the temperate region near the
shore of an inland sea and on the edge of a forest and a continental plain
of sparser vegetation. She docked with the courier long enough to pick up
Jeep and Jeremy, then continued her descent into the clouds of the new
world.
She set down at random. When the airlocks opened and
the skiff filled with the perfume of the new world, Jeremy rushed outside
wildly exhilarated. He stumbled a few meters into the open, spread his
arms, and slowly pivoted in place, completely enraptured by a true
paradise.
More so than the new world, Jeremy was the center of
Myla's universe. Her eyes were on him, and Jeep's eyes were on her.
"Come on out here and take a look at this!" Jeremy
called out.
Myla glanced back at Jeep squatting off to one side,
shielded from direct sunlight spilling through the airlock. "I'll know
your world when I see it. It sure won’t be bright yellow. Are we going
to be here long?"
Jeep gave no indication of a response, then Myla
joined Jeremy to share with him for as long as possible this lost cradle
of life on the outskirts of the galaxies.
