Summerhill (31 page)

He’d miss Royeyri’s help, that was for sure. Still, the Syorii had done more than enough just bringing him here, and asking him to sign up for a mission to rescue a stranger was too much.

The far-off miniature sun was about the size of Summerhill’s fist in the gas-backdrop sky. Somehow the sight was sad, and it made Summerhill long for the brilliant sun of Rydale and the sweeping expanse of wildflowers or the mountainside vistas of his imagined New Zealand to replace the flat run of rusty, irradiated metal. He’d been left with literally one place in this whole universe to go, and it had to look like this. At least the nebula was pretty?

He approached one of the mooring points that jutted out from edge of the platform, pointing towards the brown dwarf. Imprinted into one of the metal plates, right along the edge, were the words
S.S. Nusquam – Mooring Point #2.

This was definitely it, then. This was, or had been, the
Nusquam
’s home port of call. Here, people had once worked on a ship that could break the barriers between universes and move through time. Now it was a barren hunk of metal orbiting a sad excuse for a star.

The computers aboard Royeyri’s ship had put the estimated age of the universe at somewhere around fourteen billion years. In that time, how many civilizations had risen and fallen? How long could this drydock have conceivably been floating out here without anyone remembering it? Thousands or even millions of years was entirely plausible, which was well before the age of human and even Syorii space travel.

In that case, how had Katherine gotten here?
When
had she gotten here? She’d mentioned selling off the circuit she’d stolen from the Consortium to get passage here, so where and when did Katherine even come from? When it came down to it, Summerhill knew so little about her.

That wasn’t going to stop him from trying to save her, though.

This empty, abandoned place was Summerhill’s only remaining lead. If the
Nusquam
wasn’t here anymore, he’d find out where it went. Or he’d figure out where to find another ship like it. Or he’d learn how to build a reality jump drive himself if he had to.

Summerhill continued his exploration of the spacedock. The doors to the first few buildings he checked were shut fast. There might have been a way for him to force them open, but he didn’t feel like expending that much energy yet. For all he knew, he’d be stuck here for a very long time. Oh, he might be lucky, and the
Nusquam
itself might have temporal scanners or alarms that would detect him here, interloping, out of place and out of time. Or perhaps he’d be waiting centuries for interstellar archaeologists to discover this dilapidated relic of a lost civilization, leaving him to his solitude within the beautiful flower of the Orion Nebula.

Other than tugging on doors and panels that wouldn’t budge, there wasn’t much for Summerhill to do beyond walk back and forth along the length of the dock, looking for any other signs of writing, anything to give more information as to what this place had once been like. He found the occasional logistical label here and there, but not much else. He spent what must have been hours inspecting different nooks and crannies, covering every inch of the platform and the buildings atop it.

The only structure he was able to get inside was an old storage shed that had been thoroughly emptied out. Its walls and floor were caked with dust, and when his passage kicked it up, it was carried away by the thin, circulating atmosphere. Perhaps after he cleaned it out, the shack would make for a place to sleep.

In the meantime, Summerhill was going to have to at least try to get into some of the other buildings. He’d stay here and wait for as long as he had to, but he’d rather find something to speed up that process. If nothing else, these people had built the
Nusquam
, and so maybe they also had ways of preserving food for eons.

First, though, he just wanted to rest. He walked out onto one of the mooring points and sat down with his feet dangling over the edge. He looked down, idly amused by the slow swirling of interstellar gas. It could prove helpfully hypnotic, he decided.

He stretched his arms out behind him, his fingers and palms running along the uneven metal surface. The whorls of the nebula encouraged him to stare and relax. His mind added music in the form of half-remembered tunes he’d heard on various stops along his journey with Royeyri.

The beat in his head fell in time with the swirling of the gases. It was pleasantly natural the way that rhythm emerged, and Summerhill smiled to himself, kicking his feet as he hummed. After a while, the beat became the hauntingly familiar sound of the antique hunter-case pocket watch’s ticking.

And then that ticking stopped.

On some instinct he didn’t fully comprehend, Summerhill whipped his head around. From around the corner of one of the platform’s smaller building stepped a short, slender woman. She looked human, but, like Summerhill, she appeared totally oblivious to the fact that she ought to have needed some kind of environmentally sealed suit and not just the violet (and revealing) cocktail dress she wore. Her hair was straight, and ran all the way down to the middle of her back, jet black except for the fierce and bright cardinal at the ends.

“You’re not supposed to be here,” she said, her voice clear and loud despite the minimal atmosphere.

Slowly, Summerhill got to his feet. “I apologize,” he replied, his own voice carrying just as well. “I was just... waiting.”

“Not for me,” the woman replied. She strode towards him, slowly and purposefully. She wore heels, a vibrant purple to match her dress, and each step clicked and clacked with the intensity of a stabbing dagger as she drew nearer. “I’d know if you were expecting me.”

“I wasn’t expecting anything quite so soon, to be honest. I’m sorry if I’ve disturbed you, but there really isn’t any way for me to—”

The woman chuckled, her laugh sharp, but not quite sinister. “I understand,” she said, and left the matter at that. She stepped right on up to Summerhill and smiled. She was nearly as tall as him, her skin quite fair, her features angular and clipped. “You don’t need to make excuses for me.”

“Er, thanks. Though they’re not really excuses. I’m honestly just kind of stuck here until someone comes to get me.”

The woman reached out and touched him on the shoulder. “No one’s going to be coming to get you, Summerhill,” she said, and the canine’s ears perked straight up at the use of his name. “But that’s okay. Don’t worry.”

With a casual twirl, the woman turned around and walked a few steps away. “Can you feel it, Summerhill?” she asked, motioning with both hands to the empty space platform. “Thousands of people over the ages putting so much of themselves into this place. Can you feel their echoes? Can you smell them in the air, taste the memories on your tongue like I can?”

Summerhill swallowed. “I can’t say that I can. This place just feels empty to me. Dead.” That last word rang and echoed within his own head. As the woman turned to face him again, he looked her in the eye, and understood who and what she was. “The End,” he said softly.

“Arasiel.” The woman bowed her head in confirmation. Then she laughed again, and this time she was definitely amused and not anything close to sinister or menacing. “I’m surprised to see you here, though I suppose in a way, I probably shouldn’t be.”

Just to see if he could, Summerhill tried his hardest to feel the things that Arasiel said she felt about this place, but it remained cold and empty and devoid of anything. In fact, now the deserted platform felt more miserable than ever before. “I shouldn’t have come,” he said. “I made some sort of mistake, didn’t I?”

“I wouldn’t say that,” Arasiel said as she drew closer to him again. “But you can’t stay here much longer, I’m afraid.”

Summerhill felt his throat tighten. “I didn’t figure as much.” His voice dried out as he looked into Arasiel’s face.

“If she finds out I stole you from her,”
Shoön had said,
“she’d be quite cross with me.”

Arasiel touched her hand to Summerhill’s chest, and even through his shirt and his fur, her touch was cold like ice. “That’s not what I mean,” she said. “This isn’t the End—not yours, at any rate. Not yet. I’m not here for you.”

“You’re not?”

“I’m here for this place.” A playful smirk appeared on her ruby red lips. “Though it is so, so tempting to collect you, as well, while I’m here.” Her nostrils flared as if she were a fellow canine trying to drink in his heady scent.

Summerhill’s smile of relief faltered. “Well, I’m glad to hear that you’re not here for me. But why are you here, though? Why now?”

“Because this place’s End is coming,” Arasiel said. “It’s a very old, very powerful place, and I need to see it with my own eyes, to drink it all in with the rest of my being. Its time is marked, as it always has been.”

“What’s going to happen?”

Arasiel strode along the very edge of the platform, with no sign that she was worried about falling off into the endless abyss. “The short version,” she explained, “is that a violent stellar event took place many, many years ago.” She looked up into what was, for lack of a better term, the sky above. “The powerful wave of force and matter it generated has been slowly making its way here ever since, and very soon now it will destroy this little but once very important spacedock.”

“There’s no way to stop it?” Summerhill asked.

“No. But even if there were, why should I want to? The End comes to all things, Summerhill.
All
things.” She eyed the dog playfully and headed back in his direction.

She set a hand on his shoulder and turned him to face the run-down buildings that lined the dock. “Look at this place,” she said. “It was here that a civilization constructed a means of crossing realities—of breaking the rules of reality. It was here that those people forged their dreams. It was here that the lucky few came to board that magical ship that took them to different times, different places. It brought them nothing less than the impossible.”

Her fingers stroked along Summerhill’s upper arm, purple-colored fingernails making furrows in the fur. “And in a matter of hours, it will all be destroyed. All that history, all those memories and dreams, reduced to mere dust on the stellar breeze. And it will be wonderful.”

Summerhill gazed upwards. He could see no sign of any impending catastrophe with his naked and untrained eyes, but had no reason to doubt what Arasiel said was true. “Why will that be wonderful?” he asked.

Arasiel hummed as her cold touch ran back towards Summerhill’s chest. “I would love it if you were capable of experiencing that moment with me, so that you could see the answer to that question yourself.” Then she leaned up onto her toes and whispered into the dog’s ear. “But as powerful a creature as you are, you aren’t powerful enough to survive something like this.” Her lips brushed the short-furred edge of that ear. “Not yet.”

“Well,” Summerhill said, shivering from both the cold and his internalized nervousness, “I’m not sure what I can do, then.”

“All you can do,” Arasiel said, “is not be here when the time comes.” She settled back down on her feet and peered up into Summerhill’s face. “When
your
time comes, I’ll let you know.” Her other hand cupped the side of the canine’s muzzle, and she stroked it with the same sort of loving reassurance that Shoön had shown him before. “You will be quite the splendid prize, but I dare not pluck you from the stream before you wash up on the far shore.”

With that, Arasiel brought her lips to Summerhill’s, and she kissed him. It wasn’t a deep kiss, but there was a subtle passion to it nevertheless as her lips worked against his without any urgency or rushing. Her icy aura spread through Summerhill’s snout, into his head, down through the rest of his body. It was like dying, and it made Summerhill yearn for the comfort that would come with the cessation of his existence, never having to struggle, never having to worry, never having to feel pain or sorrow or despair ever again.

Smiling with satisfaction, Arasiel drew away from the shuddering dog and let her hands slip away from his body. “Goodbye for now, Summerhill. I’ll see you...well, someday. I won’t ruin the surprise.”

While Summerhill was still trying to think of an appropriate response to that, Arasiel struck forward with both arms, her palms flat and outstretched, and shoved him in the chest. He had no chance to regain his balance, despite flailing his arms and lashing his tail, and then he fell backwards, right off the edge of the platform, plummeting downwards.

He was acutely aware of the fact that there shouldn’t be a gravitational force to make him hurtle down away from the drydock. Before the illogic of the situation could override his conscious thought process, the whirling gas of the nebula overwhelmed his vision, and everything starting getting brighter and brighter before a world-shattering boom hit his ears.

Thirty

Freefall

The boom was still echoing through Summerhill’s skull when the rush of air kicked in. It whipped and whistled, like a kettle that was right at the cusp of boiling. The bright swirling of the condensed nebula was now a mere afterimage on his eyes; it lost all color and went pure white, replaced by a much brighter light that came in at the edges of his vision and blinded him.

After several seconds, his eyesight returned. The blinding light was a glorious yellow sun, which was pitching and spinning out of control.

No, it was Summerhill that was pitching and spinning out of control. He tumbled through the air, head over heels, ears over tail, over and over again in a dizzying freefall. Above him was blue sky, the sun, and billowy clouds. Below him was a vast landscape, devoid of buildings and other structures. There was only the light green of fields, the darker green of trees, blue lines as rivers and blue dots as lakes.

Summerhill stuck out his arms, and the wind resistance caught him off guard in the way it made his arms briefly snap up. He untucked his legs next, and tried to tilt and tip himself this way and that to keep from spinning out of control. It was tricky, but manageable, and soon he’d oriented himself so that he was horizontal to the ground, limbs splayed, tail whipping in the wind, eyes fixed straight downward.

There was nothing to give any sense of scale, and so he had no real idea how long it would take for him to hit the ground. Minutes? That was his best guess. Terrain features were slowly yet steadily growing larger and more detailed, and as beautiful as everything was, Summerhill’s sense of wonder was starting to fade, replaced with the very real fear that there was no way that he was going to survive a fall from this height.