Timeweb Trilogy Omnibus (45 page)

“Not so,” the Hibbil said. “I checked the glyphreader before we went down to the surface. We’ll have a wait of maybe fifteen minutes after arriving at the station, and then we’re off on our next adventure.”

The furry little Hibbil, who prided himself on keeping track of important matters for the captain, proved to be correct.

* * * * *

When the entire crew was safely in outer space aboard their treasure ship, everyone surrounded Dux and Acey. “What did you do to the Adurians?” Captain Yuell asked. “You guys are on their most wanted list.”

“We didn’t do much,” Acey said.

“Aw, come on,” Yuell said. “They had pictures of both of you.”

“Well,” Dux said, looking at Acey and then the captain, “maybe we should have told you this before, but we didn’t think you would care.”

“This sounds serious,” Mac Golden said, moving close and staring up at Dux.

The teenagers went on to describe how they had destroyed the Mutati manufacturing facility on Dij, and how they had barely escaped with their lives.

“You should have told us that earlier,” Captain Yuell said, scowling. “You put my entire crew at peril.”

“We didn’t think it would hurt going to an Adurian world,” Acey said.

“Oh you didn’t, did you?” Mac Golden said. The little Hibbil stomped his foot angrily. “Don’t you boys know anything about politics?”

“Uh, we grew up in the backwoods of Siriki,” Dux said. “We don’t know much about stuff like that.”

“Don’t you know that the Mutatis and Adurians are allies?” Golden shouted.

Dux felt a flush of hotness in his face, and caught the nervous gaze of Acey. The two of them shrugged.…

Captain Yuell did not kick the boys off the ship. He said that they had learned their lesson, but obtained their promises not to keep any more important secrets from their crewmates. “We’re your family now,” he said. “I’m your Dad and Golden here is your Mom.”

“Hey!” the Hibbil said. “I don’t like the sound of that.” He and the captain sparred playfully with swords, while the boys and the rest of the crew laughed and shouted insults.…

But none of them, with the exception of Mac Golden, knew that the Hibbils and Adurians were secretly allied with each other, and intended to destroy both the Humans and the Mutatis. The HibAdu Coalition had placed sleeper agents all over the galaxy, with standing orders to await further instructions. Golden was one of those agents himself, but he had recently decided not to follow activation orders, if he ever got them.

Like Acey and Dux, the furry little Hibbil had found a new family. He liked these Humans, and would never consider betraying them. But he fell short of revealing what he knew about the HibAdu Coalition’s scheme, and the danger it presented to the entire Human race.

Golden didn’t want to think about all of that, and hoped the whole situation would just go away, without harming any of the people who had grown close to him.

Chapter Sixty-Seven

No one can ever see all of the interesting places in this galaxy. At least, I used to think that way.

—Noah Watanabe

His friends who attended to him would have confirmed that Noah did not leave the deck of the grid-plane, where he lay in deep sleep, not having awakened or even moved for days. Untended, his reddish beard had been growing. But his mind was more active than ever, and—unknown to the Guardians around him—he was about to take a fantastic mental journey.

Sitting on the carpeted deck beside Noah’s supine form, Eshaz talked soothingly to him, massaging the man’s forehead as gently as he could with one scaly hand.

On the surface of his consciousness, Noah was aware of his alien friend, and of a mysterious healing treatment he had administered. But Noah made no effort to respond to the Tulyan, or to communicate with him in any manner. His attentions were focused elsewhere.

He heard Tesh say, excitedly, “Look, his eyelids are fluttering!”

And he heard a murmuring of conversation around him, as the others came over to see if Noah was coming back to consciousness. It almost seemed to him that he could if he really wanted to, but something much more important drew him away from them … and he felt his mind expanding, questing outward.

Noah felt drawn by something momentous he needed to discover. Instinct told him it would most certainly be dangerous, and that if he went too deeply into his subconscious, he might never be able to wake up. The experience might kill him, but he to take it anyway.

He felt a beckoning, something tugging at his mind, teasing it, promising unknown delights. In his mind’s eye, he saw a dark cloud in space, with a faint illumination beyond, delineating the shape of the mass. Every few seconds, something flashed behind the cloud, making its outline sharper. It was like a lightning storm, but that did not seem possible, since he was in deep space, far beyond any atmospheric envelope.

Earlier, Noah had heard Tesh and Eshaz discussing the explosion of Plevin Four, and it occurred to him now that a chunk of atmosphere might have lifted into space, sealed inexplicably, and that it was beyond a cloud of space dust now, flashing. The wild beauty could be like a last hurrah before the pocket of air disappeared forever, along with the planet.

Of course, none of that seemed possible. But still, he wondered. The visual effect was compelling.

As if released from his body, Noah’s mind felt like it was floating in space, similar to the atmosphere that appeared to have broken away from the dead planet. His consciousness drifted on an empyrean current, taking him past blindingly spectacular sights. A massive yellow sun went nova in an awe-inspiring burst of destructive beauty, and in the next star system an even larger sun, a red giant, dropped into a black hole and then faded abruptly, like a dramatic sunset with all of its light suddenly sucked away.

He felt a mental click, and the scene before his inner eye shifted. Noah was no longer floating, no longer just observing. He found himself spread-eagled, connected to an immense gossamer web, but he was not a prisoner of it. It was the most marvelous sensation!

To his astonishment he was able to flip from one section of the pale green web to another—left, right, up, down, forward, and backward. Awkwardly, he went in several directions, one after the other, and then found he could gain better control over his movements. On impulse, he accelerated into deep space and spun into the cosmos, passing by asteroids, worlds, star systems, and even passing completely
through
other ghostly, acrobatic figures like him, of various recognizable races.

But there were other phantom creatures out there as well, some spinning, some darting, and others seeming to run in space, their appendages dancing along the webbing. Some were humanoid, while others looked like mythological animals, such as he had never seen before.

One with a lion head and serpentine body approached and kept pace beside him, staring at him as if trying to decide whether to devour him or not. Concerned, Noah tried to go faster than before, but the ghostly creature stayed with him.

Unable to get away, Noah wanted to cry out in terror, but knew his voice would make no sound in the airless void of space. Like a man in the wilderness facing a ferocious beast, he attempted to show no fear, and made a defiant, aggressive face at the would-be predator, along with wildly dramatic hand gestures.

Finally, apparently bored, the beast drifted off into the tail of a passing comet, and disappeared entirely.

Noah went on to cartwheel across the galaxy, a cosmic voyager in a realm he had never known existed. He was a mote in the heavens. With surprising ease, he gained new skills flying in this realm, and was able to increase his speed and maneuverability. He kept up with other creatures, following them for a while and then breaking off to go his own way. There seemed no limit to the places he could go, but none of them seemed tangible. It was all dreamlike, as if he was peering into a dimension that did not really exist.

And a disturbing thought intruded:
The Doge tried to kill me, and my sister put him up to it. Has she succeeded? Am I dead, or dying? Is that true of the others out here, too?

He thought back on the near-death stories he had heard—of a person’s life flashing in front of his eyes in seconds or fractions of seconds, and of a light at the end of a tunnel, beckoning him to go through and discover the light, beckoning him to.…

For the first time, Noah wasn’t certain if passing through meant dying or living. In the past he’d always thought if he went to the other side of the tunnel he would die, and that the light was heaven, drawing him like a magnet. But now he wasn’t so certain. Couldn’t the light represent life instead, pulling him out of the darkness of death?

He saw no tunnel at all now, though it seemed appropriate to him that he should. After all, wasn’t he on the brink of death? Hadn’t he chosen not to swim to the top of his consciousness where his friends were? Instead, he’d gone in a different, very dangerous direction. But a fascinating direction, where he had so much to learn, so much to experience.

Somehow, through everything, his personal fate seemed of little importance.

He was out in the middle of the vast galaxy where the lifetime of a human being was so infinitesimal in the scale of time that it hardly mattered at all. But could a life form only alive briefly still accomplish something meaningful? The common fruit fly lived but a few hours, and some organisms even less than that. Could the death of that fly affect events on the other side of the universe?

Noah thought it was possible, an extrapolation of a “butterfly flapping its wings” theory his mother had once told him, how that seemingly inconsequential occurrence could affect events on the other side of a planet.

He thought of the theories of relativity, of quantum mechanics, and of macro systems—of worlds orbiting stars, of entire galaxies hurtling through the cosmos, and of the all-encompassing universe expanding, fleeing from the singularity where the Big Bang was supposed to have occurred.

But his lingering physical reality interfered rudely with the serenity of such ruminations.

My sister tried to kill me!

The galactic images faded, and his eyes fluttered open. For an instant, he saw the scaly, reptilian face of Eshaz and his gray-slitted alien eyes, peering hard at him. A universe of caring in those eyes. The Tulyan had always been a giver, quick to do whatever he could for his friends, and for the environment.

But those eyes harbored a universe of secrets.

Abruptly, of his own volition, Noah found himself back in the strange cosmic realm again, spread-eagled on the gossamer web, spinning, cartwheeling across the galaxy. He peered into places where Humans could not look, and not knowing what he saw, he failed to comprehend.

Noah’s mind filled to bursting. He wanted to come back again some other time and re-experience this … if the opportunity ever presented itself to him. Logically, it seemed to him that he must be going stark, raving mad, but he felt the opposite, that he was more focused than ever before in his life. In the spaceship of his mind he journeyed far from anyplace he had ever been before, on an expedition that his physical body, subject to its corporeal limitations, could not possibly undertake.

With his new awareness, he didn’t see how the concept of a physical form fit into a realm that seemed to be constructed of something else entirely, and where the spiritual meant more than anything he could touch. His eyes were transmitting extraordinary images to him.

The faint green webbing curved and stretched off into infinity, surrounding and penetrating him, connecting him with all that had ever been and all that ever would be. He could not comprehend how he knew this, only that he did, and that he had always known it, and always would, since he would never die as long as he remained connected to this marvelous galactic structure. He felt it giving him life, renewed energy, and that this was one of the secrets in Eshaz’s eyes.

But there were more, many more.

As Noah spun away into this alternate dimension, he saw his friend’s eyes superimposed over the cosmic tableau, and felt the Tulyan’s presence with him, sharing the connection the two of them had with the webbing. Eshaz was making this experience available for him; Eshaz was saving his life by showing him … what? Heaven?

Most astonishing. The slenderest threads connected Noah to a hidden network that spanned everything in existence, a godlike web that gave life and took it away. Despite the guidance of his friend, Noah feared that he would lose contact and never find his way back to this realm again. What a tragedy that would be, what a fathomless loss. He realized with a start that he hadn’t been moving at all, that he had been connected to one strand, and that the web had been folding and refolding and unfolding around him, in a magical display of empyrean origami.

Such beauty he had never before beheld or even imagined possible, as he saw sunlight glistening off the green webbing in star system after star system. Exquisitely perfect in its design, this galactic mesh appeared to be an extrapolation of elegant patterns seen on planets … of the designs in spider webs, leaves, and seashells. It all seemed linked to him, and all of it had to be the achievement of a remarkable higher power.

There could be no other possible explanation.

For a moment his vision shifted, and he saw green-and-brown skymining ships floating over the surface of a planet, scooping air and processing important elements out of it. On a plateau below the ships he saw his company’s base of operations for that world, which he recognized as Jaggem. It gave him reassurance to see the important work continuing, despite his own absence. He had left good people in charge.

Then he saw a contingent of red-uniformed men supervising the operations, and his spirits dropped. The Doge’s Red Berets.

Presently the images faded, replaced by the twinkling void of deep space and the pale green filigree. Ahead, he saw chunks of matter hurtling through the cosmos, some pieces without apparent direction, while others …
podships!
… were racing along the gossamer web strands. Appearing Lilliputian in comparison with the immensity of his own form, they sped right through him without apparent harm. Such a peculiar sensation. He felt as if he was stretched across a vast distance. A mental stretch, he believed, and not a physical one, but the mind had brought along an enlarged ghost of its body.