Bright of the Sky (6 page)

Helice peered at the V-sim. “Are you saying that this is a
visual
? Not just a graphic representation?”

Booth coughed. “Yes. It’s the adjoining region. What we’ve seen so far.”

Helice stared, and stared hard. They’d been talking about a mirror universe, a place, and until now—even as intriguing as those words were—it had just been talk. But here was a visual. It staggered her. The board members, silver and real, remained silent for a long while.

Then, from down the table Suzene Gninenko asked, “So what exactly are we looking at?”

Stefan made a sweeping gesture at Booth. “And the answer is?”

Booth’s voice squeaked as he said, “Well, actually, our best guess is . . . that it’s grass.”

It could not have been a more remarkable utterance if Booth had claimed to see angels dancing on the head of a pin.

The board members exchanged glances. Suzene Gninenko peered at the V-sim like she’d never seen a blade of grass before.

“Grass,” Helice said. Now that the suggestion was planted, the picture did look like blades of grass.

Face beaming, Stefan looked at Helice. “Apparently the universe next door is not dark, barren, or chaotic. It has an atmosphere. It possesses life.”

“The blades aren’t green,” Helice murmured, still strangely moved by the presence of those brave shoots of grass.

“We don’t know what light is falling on it, or what the photosynthesis analog might be. Chlorophyll isn’t the only option.”

“What are the chances that grass would look so similar—over there?” She controlled her elation with difficulty. She had believed in it before anyone else. It shouldn’t come as such a surprise. But the implications of grass, of life, were almost beyond comprehension—as few things were to Helice Maki.

Stefan smiled, enjoying her reaction. “Maybe God plays in more than one realm.”

Along with every other member of the board, Helice stared at the bent-over blades of grass. She murmured, “Yes, but which god?”

She intended to find out.

CHAPTER FOUR

T
HEY CALLED SUCH THINGS OUT-OF-BODY EXPERIENCES
. From Quinn’s research, he knew them to be illusions. An OBE was the impression of being detached from one’s body and seeing it from above, now proved—to the scientifically minded, at least—to be the result of body-related processing in the medial temporal lobe of the brain.

His body was giving him such an illusion now.

He lay on his couch, having fallen asleep there well after midnight, and now awoke to the OBE.
A man stood below him, standing on the edge of a platform,
looking down. By scrunching forward a bit, Quinn could look over the man’s
shoulder. His stomach convulsed at the sight of the thirty-thousand-foot plunge to the
planet below. Beyond the man’s shoulders and fluttering hair, Quinn could see a vast
ocean, a gaping maw into which the man might step at any moment. The man was
thinking of jumping; the ocean beckoned with silvery indifference.

It was always the same OBE. Quinn knew the next thing he would do was look up. He fought this inclination.

The man below him was himself. Neither of them spoke, by mutual consent or by
the rules and vows of this illusory place.

Then he did look up.
There, in all its wrongful horror, stretched a river of fire
as broad as the world. It must not be there. It must not be silent and stable. But it
was. It had eaten the Sun. It
was
the Sun.

Quinn turned away, facing down—almost as bad. He descended, becoming one
with the man standing on the platform. No longer the superior, knowing, separate
mind, he now had truly become Titus Quinn, indivisible. And he so wished not to be.

The scene faded, as it always did, leaving him feeling light-headed and disturbed. Was this the phenomenon known as OBE, or had he actually been dreaming? Of far more interest: was this a memory? Two years ago he’d known the answer. He’d been someplace, a place that had kept him a long time. He had snippets of memory that amounted to little more than dream scape images. He didn’t know what happened to his wife and daughter. For a few months after he had regained consciousness on Lyra, a settled planet on the rim of known space, he had strongly believed that he’d been in an alternate world. Gradually he’d come to doubt his experience, his shattered memories, though there was no explanation for how he had come to be on Lyra. Ignoring his claims, Minerva treated him like a disoriented survivor of a terrible event, the ship’s explosion and the death of its passengers and crew.

Thus it was of the utmost importance whether the vision of the man on the platform between bright ocean and flaming sky was a memory or not. Because if it was a memory, then that was
the other place.

He heard noises outside. In an instant he realized it was what had kicked him out of his dream. There were sounds outside, in the yard.

Now fully awake, he sat up, throwing off the coverlet. From the next room, through the kitchen window, he spied one of his defensive lights strobing. Another light caught his eye through the window near the dining room hutch. His feet found his shoes in the dark, a knack carried over from the old days when he had often been summoned to the flight deck in the middle of a sleep shift. He was instantly awake, also a carryover, all senses on alert. As he passed the laser gun propped up against the bookcase, he grabbed it and made for the back door, already fully dressed, having fallen asleep that way.

Outside, the fog dumped a load of moisture onto his warm body, quickly leveling the heat gradient between him and the Pacific Northwest air. He crouched near the door and listened. It was Christmas Eve. A soggy, dangerous one.

The cedar trees dripped rain from limb to limb, a patter so light it might have been the background radiation of the universe. A drift of lavender smoke slid through the woods, like the cremated remains of unwanted visitors. Quinn waited for them to reveal their positions.

It was easier to trespass in a soggy wood than a dry one, since every fallen stick was likely rotted and willing to bend rather than snap. But that very fact would lead people to move too quickly, and sooner or later, Quinn would hear them. A spike of noise off to the left, a chuffing of breath, or the soft scrape of cedar fingers against a wool cap . . . Quinn rose and, avoiding the squeaky middle plank of the deck, crept down the stairs into the woods.

His falling-down cottage by the sea held little worth stealing. Most of what he had, he’d be happy to give any truly needy burglar. But he would die to protect his trains. He’d spent two years of his life assembling the most intricate standard-gauge model railroad in the history of the bungalow hobbyist. The fact that it was probably worth almost $400,000 was not the point. It was the care with which he had hand-selected every piece, maintained the precious antique system with the sweat of his brow, and the fact that his house without it would be intolerably empty. The idea that someone would break in and summarily dump his Lionel 381 Olympian into a duffel bag filled him with a simmering resentment. He’d show them, by God. Clutching his shotgun, with the dual modes of paint spray and hot laser stream, he crept forward, swiveling his head, listening.

He keyed the gun to view his integrated communications environment protecting his five acres. The system had triangulated the intruder’s position through sound patterns. By the graph on his gun’s display, he was fifteen yards to the southeast of Quinn’s position, moving toward the road. He keyed in the scope, looking in the infrared. Yes, a figure moving.

He advanced. He’d give him a dousing of orange paint to brand him for a guaranteed six days, according to the fabber’s warranty.

Carving through the mist came a river of golden smoke, knifing up his nose and tracing a bitter gully down his throat. He couldn’t help it; he coughed.

Now the woods grew unnaturally quiet. Even the perpetual dripping of the trees ceased.

Then a block of shadow emerged from the night, moving fast, some thirty feet away. Having given away his position already, Quinn shouted, “Stop where you are. Or you’re a dead man.”

Someone laughed.

Then he was crashing after the shadow. As it fled toward the road, Quinn hurdled over fallen logs, propelled by adrenaline. As the moon took sudden command of a blank spot in the canopy, he could see a figure trying to make it up the steep embankment by the road.

“Stop!” he yelled again, and then he brought the nozzle of his gun up, determined to paint the fellow before he got to his car. He pulled the trigger, and by sound, he knew he’d sent off a lethal stream of laser instead of paint. The intruder was down, hit by the mistaken blast of laser, lying wounded, possibly dead. Quinn’s heart coiled, and he broke into a sweat that made him simultaneously hot and cold. He saw the end of his life before him: a virtual courtroom, a real-time cell.

Shaking, he came closer to the form, now lying immobile in the rotting leaves. He reached down and flung the body over to face him.

He called for lights, and they bloomed from his hidden illumination network.

Before him lay a girl in city clothes, ripped and dirty. She was staring in consternation at his gun. He’d missed.

“Jesus,” was all he could say. She was young. Maybe fifteen. Lord God, he had almost killed a child. He let the gun fall to forest floor.

“I’m sorry,” she said, and tears were just behind the words.

“Jesus,” he repeated. He was frozen to the spot, unable to move, but not because she looked afraid, but because she looked familiar. Her eyes were dark, with flat slashes of eyebrows pointing to a long straight nose and a wide mouth that looked like it could smile as broad as the world. She looked just like Sydney. Like Sydney would have—if she were still alive. His throat tightened so hard it might strangle him.

He looked down at the shotgun, lying in the rotting leaves. It made him weak to think of it.

The girl stood up, eyeing him warily. Now, as he saw her expression and the blue eyes, she didn’t look like Sydney, except insofar as all young people evoked all young people, for those who loved specifically.

At a movement from the road, Quinn looked up. “Your boyfriend’s a coward,” he said. “Why isn’t he down here helping you?”

She shrugged. “Sorry we bothered you. We just wanted to see . . .” She paused, and now tears did come. “See you for real.”

“Okay,” he said, surprising himself. “Here I am.” He watched her watch him, imagined what she would be seeing. A guy with rumpled clothes, no space hero.

Maybe she did look like Sydney. That dark hair . . . But the terrible truth was, he was having trouble remembering what Sydney looked like, except for her pictures.

“So you wanted to see me for real,” Quinn said.

The girl lay inert on the ground, eyes big.

“Thing is? I’m not real. In a sense, I’m not really here at all.” She was watching him with more intensity now that she had concluded he wasn’t going to shoot her. “I haven’t been here since I got here. Since I got back from that place. And no, I don’t know where it was. I’m not holding back secrets. There are no secrets, no conspiracies. I don’t remember anything. Sorry to disappoint you. I know you want to believe things.” He held up a hand. “Never mind what it is you want to believe; that’s your business. But don’t pin it on me. I’m not really here. Anymore.”

She hadn’t moved from the hillside, nor did she now.

But she was listening.

“Do you understand?” he asked her, knowing she couldn’t have the slightest idea what he was talking about, but needing, suddenly and with a strange intensity, for her to understand.

And then she gave him the gift. She said, “Yes. Yes, I do. I’m terribly sorry, Mr. Quinn.”

He nodded at her, unable to speak. But her words unlocked him. Yes, I understand. The young girl gazed at him with the look of wisdom and blankness that children sometimes had. She knew she was talking to a ghost, a man who had slipped away from himself. Who had almost killed a child.

The girl rose to her feet and, with the swift recovery of the young, scrambled up the embankment.

When the car squealed off down the road, he shouted after her, “And lose that miserable boyfriend of yours, will you? Where was he when you needed him?”

He picked up the gun and trudged back to the house, dousing the tree lights as he went by, feeling dazed by what he’d almost done.

Caitlin, he thought. What’s happening to me?

In his bedroom, he felt under his bed for the duffel bag, hauling it out, still packed from the last trip he’d made.

He didn’t want Rob’s noisy household right now.

But, he was very sure, he needed it.

Past 1:00 AM, Quinn’s car sped along the rutted dirt road, murky with coastal fog. Pebbles and rocks kicked up, denting the paint job. But by the time he reached the first Mesh, the dents would be pearling back smooth. He drove fast, eager to be out of the woods, to separate himself from some darkness he could hardly identify. He swung into a curve, accelerating out of it, driving hard before he changed his mind. He conjured up the expression on Emily and Mateo’s faces when he showed up for Christmas after all. Maybe even Rob would smile, that brother of his who thought Quinn had squandered his future. Even before the star ship disaster.

Quinn and Rob had both tested at the same time, even though, at eight years old, Quinn was taking the test early. They walked into the test as two bright, active young boys. Quinn walked out as a fast-track boy. A
savvy
, as the term went. His brother, as a middle-track child. A
middie
. To his credit, Rob never begrudged his brother’s genius-level score. But to Quinn’s enduring annoyance, Rob had expected Quinn to
do
something with it. Quinn could have made his fortune by now, but all he had wanted was to pilot the K-ships. It was the best job in the universe. Johanna had understood that, and never tried to change him. Went along on his trips.

Went along on his trips. He swerved from those thoughts. Reaching the paved road with its smart surface, he floored the accelerator, an action that the car’s savant overruled, assuming control, establishing an annoyingly safe speed.