Catch the Lightning (43 page)

Spreading… spreading…

Tina?

I grasped at the thought.
Eldrin?

Another Bessel function appears. Violet and glimmering.

Compact. Secure. He knows this place, has visited often, in mind if not body…

Tiiiina…

I am spreading.

Spreading.

Spreading throughout the stars…

One thought in millions…

Trillions…

Infinity…

I am…?

Swirls of light.

Streamers. Streaks. Swirling. Coalescing.

Around, around, around.

Streaks of light against my consciousness.

Colors resolve into solid streamers.

Smells fade, until only the antiseptic scent of machinery remains.

Universe hard under my body.

Universe arched over my head. Metal/plastic/1 don’t know what.

Around and around.

I was sitting in a chair, in a laboratory. Lights flickered on the cage of equipment over my head.

The chair was turning. Rotating. I strained to see the lab. A panel jumped into focus as I swung past it. I made out a web console. People were here, too, bent over the equipment. When I concentrated, the chair’s rotation slowed; when my mind wandered, it increased.

Around and around.

The lab moved slowly past, its display panels, control banks, and consoles in focus. The upper half of one wall was made of glass. Beyond it, I saw people standing. Watching me. As my chair rotated, they moved past my field of vision.

The glass came into view again. Althor was there, watching. On the next rotation, he was still there.

On the third rotation—or was it the fifth?—there were two of him. After several more rotations, I realized it was Althor and Eldrin.

I lost track of the number of times the chair went around. Althor was always there, sometimes standing, other times slumped in a chair sleeping, other times reading.

People came to watch with him. I recognized Eldrin, but none of the others. Except maybe the woman with black hair and green eyes.

Around and around.

The rotation gradually decreased, until the chair barely turned. I wet my lips, trying to speak. A tube clicked into my mouth and cool water ran down my throat. Patches were attached to my arms, which lay on the chair’s armrests.

I tried to lift one arm. It barely moved, squeaking on the smooth surface.

A voice spoke Skolian. As the chair rotated, a face appeared in front of me. A woman. She caught the armrests, stopping the chair’s motion.

“Can you hear me?” She spoke English with a Skolian accent.

I tried to speak. A croak came out.

“It’s all right,” she said. “Don’t push it. Just relax.”

“I’m… out? Of the net?”

“Not completely,” she said. “We’ve done 85 percent of the inverse transform. You were so spread out, we’ve had to integrate over the full volume of psiberspace.”

Around and around.

I opened my eyes and saw a knee nearby. Gradually I absorbed the fact that I was lying stomach down on a bed. Soft blankets and sheets covered my body.

A snore rumbled and the knee twitched. Looking up, I saw Eldrin slumped in a chair, sleeping, his arms crossed, his feet planted wide. Behind him, someone was sprawled on a cot, also asleep.

“Eldrin?” I said.

He kept sleeping. I tried to push up on my arms, but dizziness hit and I collapsed onto the bed. As I closed my eyes, a blur of movement came from behind Eldrin.

A hand pressed against my forehead. “Tina?” It was Althor.

I opened my eyes and looked up at him. “Hi,” I whispered. His eyes had a funny look, wet and full of water. He squeezed my hand. “Hi.”

“If I had come a minute earlier,” Althor said. “Just one minute.” He was sitting on the divan in the bedroom where I had woken up, in the house his parents kept on the planet Parthonia. “When I saw you disappear, I thought I’d lost everything.”

I finished sealing up the jumpsuit he had brought me, a snug lavender coverall. “We thought you hadn’t made it.” I sat next to him. “What happened after you disappeared?”

“It was eerie.” He shook his head. “I was a wavepacket, similar to the diffraction pattern produced by a circular aperture, but multidimensional. I saw the net as hills and valleys made from a grid. They must have been potentials created by the thoughts of users in the psibernet.”

“I thought it was a lake,” I said. “I kept spreading out.”

“I’m not surprised. I had trouble orienting and I’ve been using the net almost since birth.”

“How did you get out?”

Wonder touched his voice. “I finally realized that when a telepath jacked into the net, I could ‘see’ it as a small hole. The first two I found were together in psiberspace, but linked to consoles fifty light-years apart in spacetime. Eventually I found a psiphon linked to an empty console seat on Assembler, one of the ISC ships Ragnar brought.” He grimaced. “I had to alter the wavefunction of my body so that when I transformed back into spacetime, I ended up localized in that chair. I did finally manage it, but it isn’t something I ever want to try again.” His face relaxed. “It was worth it, though, to see the looks of the crew when I coalesced out of nowhere.”

I smiled. “What did they do?”

“Took me to the captain. Maurisa Mettledawn.” Dryly he said, “It’s a good thing I know her, because I was almost incoherent by then. But when she finally understood what I was telling her, she acted immediately.”

I took a breath. “And Bloodmark?”

, “He escaped.” Softly he said, “A part of me wants him to die. Another part is grateful he didn’t.”

I took his hand. “You can’t just turn off the love you felt for so many years.”

One of his memories from childhood washed over my mind: Ragnar Bloodmark, laughing as he threw Althor a ball. Then the image vanished, like a light turned off. Althor sat staring at his hands as if they still held the ball.

I wanted to offer comfort, but I knew he didn’t want to talk about it. In the years since, he has spoken some about Ragnar, but more often he keeps his thoughts private. Sometimes in the night, I wake to find him staring at the ceiling. He pulls me into his arms and buries his head in my hair, seeking solace even in his silence.

Ragnar Bloodmark lost almost everything: his home, position, wealth. But he’s kept his freedom, remaining a specter in our lives. To me, Althor’s loss seems worse. How do you give back the ability to trust? For the sake of greed, Ragnar threw away Althor’s love and admiration. Now he has nothing. Wherever he is, I hope he suffers for that irony.

All I said then was, “Are you going to be all right? The Jag said you needed a lot of repair.”

“They’ve been working on me since Captain Mettledawn brought us back.” He sounded subdued. “They say it will be a while before I’m whole again.” His face gentled. “The doctors have asked about you, too, Tina.”

“Me? What for?”

“They want to know if you would like to see a therapist.” He paused. “Not just because of Iquar. You had been to hell and back before I even met you.”

Did my life really seem so terrible to him? I couldn’t talk to a stranger about it, or at least that was how I felt then; Perhaps that’s why his moods have always made sense to me; we are alike in the way that such experiences turn us inward.

“I’ve been reading about your century on Earth,” he said. “Trying to understand what this must be like for you; There is a phrase from then.” Sofdy he said, “Healer, heal thyself.” He squeezed my hands. “Let us do something for you.”

I hesitated. “I’d like to go to school. I probably have to start all over. But I want to learn.” After a moment I added, “I’d like to know what happened to my ancestors too.”

“We’ll get you private tutors until you catch up, querida. Then you can choose any school you want.” He drew me to my feet. “Right now I want you to meet someone. She may be able to tell you about the Maya.”

Belatedly, I realized what he said. Querida. Sweetheart. So formal and sweet. I raised his hand and kissed the knuckles.

He led me through a house. Everything in it was soft and airy. Holo-art graced the walls and cloud carpets softened the floors. Arching doorways, arches in the walls, and vaults in the ceilings made elegant open spaces. We ended up in a large atrium. Trees filled it, their feathery branches drifting in the air currents. Flowers bloomed everywhere: rose-colored bells, blue stars dusting the moss, vines with green blossoms that followed our movements. Birds flew among the trees, parrots with red, gold, and green feathers. A woman stood on the far side, looking out at a mountain grotto with a waterfall.

Althor brought me over to the woman. “Mother?”

She turned to face us! In person, she’s even more striking than her holos. Her face is perfect, so classically beautiful it’s hard to believe she is real. Some of that beauty is bio-sculpted, but she comes by most of it naturally. The vivid green of her eyes never ceases to startle me. Although traces of gray show in her hair and faint lines surround her eyes, she doesn’t look much older than her son. But in her presence you feel her age: Dyhianna Selei is more than two centuries old.

She spoke to me in English. “My greetings. I am Dehya.”

I nodded, trying not to look as clumsy as I felt. “Hello.”

As she drew me over to sit on a bench, Althor went off to another part of the atrium—and I nearly panicked when I realized he was leaving me alone with my new mother-in-law. Pale colors swirled around her, pastels my mind created out of her emotions. I know now that she controls those swirls with a finesse no other Kyle operator can match, even among the Rhon. All I knew at the time was that I picked up only a faint sense of her mood, polite curiosity, what she chose to show, no more.

I took a breath. “I want you to know I’ll do my best to make Althor happy.” It seemed the safest opener.

She regarded me coolly. “Your marriage contract with my son is—interesting.”

From what I remembered, the “contract” was no more than a few lines: our names, the date, Althor’s. job as a Jagernaut, mine as a waitress, his parents’ names, my mother’s name, the base where he was stationed, and my address in Los Angeles. We neglected the most intriguing part, which was that my Los Angeles was in another universe.

“Interesting?” I asked.

“These terms Althor worked out with Director Stonehedge.” I tried to recall what Althor told me. “He said he had a little land he wanted me to have if he—if anything happened to him. And something about a minor title.”

She sat with her hands folded in her lap, face composed. “Althor gave you full rights to everything he has. Everything.” Sofdy she said, “My son has made you a spectacularly wealthy and powerful woman, ’Akushtina Pulivok. What do you offer him in return?”

I swallowed. Apparendy Althor’s tide wasn’t so “minor” as he would have me believe. His mother asked a fair question. But how to answer? Although I have come to love Dehya, even now she flusters me. That day, I had no clue what to say.

One thing was clear: she loved her son. It sparkled in the air like white light and lilted in a soft melody. She glanced past me, her face gentiing. I turned and saw Althor across the atrium, grinning at an incensed parrot that glared at him from its perch in a tree. He laughed and the bird squawked, as if outraged that a human found it amusing. Although Althor didn’t seem consciously aware of his mother’s colors and music, I sensed an inner peace in him that I hadn’t felt before.

I looked back at Dehya. She was watching me again, her face unreadable. I wanted her to know I loved him for himself, not for what he could give me. So I said, “I didn’t know anything about Althor when we met.” I smiled. “In fact, at the time I thought he was a fruitcake.” As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I wanted to die. I had meant it as a lighthearted joke, but it bombed like dough thudding on the floor.

Deyha’s face remained cool. “How much do you understand about his position?”

I spoke more carefully this time. “That your family descends from the Ruby Dynasty.”

She nodded. “Your scholars translate my title as pharaoh. However, in this day and age, the title is merely honorary. The Assembly now governs, a council of leaders from our twenty-six strongest planetary governments. The Ruby Dynasty has no power.”

The years since have revealed a far more complex situation than what she claimed that day. Many believe the Rhon rule Imperial Skolia, quietly, behind the scenes; others see them as prisoners of a cynical Assembly that uses them for its own ends. About one thing I have no doubt: Dyhianna Selei controls the psibernet with an unmatched reach and skill—and in Althor’s universe the fluxes of power all tie to that ever-evolving web which has become an entity in and of itself, one that spans the stars and more, dimensions beyond space and time as we know them.

That day all she said was, “Althor is my only living child. My heir.”

I didn’t know how to respond. It was no wonder she was wary of me, given my background, or lack of it.

“I have seen the Jag’s records,” she said. Then she surprised me. She took my hand. “To say my son is a moody, complicated, contradictory man is an understatement. You seem, however, not only to genuinely understand him, but to like him just the way he is.”

“Well, yes. I do.”

‘Althor has high standards.” Dryly she said, “A person might be tempted, in fact, to say no woman could ever meet them. If he has decided that you do, you deserve a medal.”

“But?”

“He is repeating history. My history. And I didn’t do so well with it.” She exhaled. “My ex-husband was far more experienced in the politics of power than you, Tina. William Seth Rockworth was a high-ranking Allied naval officer from an elite Earth family. He was also a strong Kyle operator, though not Rhon. There were no known available Rhon men at that time.” She paused. “When the Assembly arranged the marriage and treaty, they neglected to tell Seth the ‘minor’ detail that I could take more than one husband. He didn’t appreciate it when he learned the truth.”

I thought of Bloodmark’s lack of success with her. “But you wouldn’t have.”

“It isn’t that simple. After the Rhon produced more males, the Assembly wanted me to have their children. If Seth and I had still been together, the Assembly would have chosen a Rhon man to sire my children.”