Further: Beyond the Threshold (2 page)

LJ turned to us, Dad and me, and said, “Wait, why does he think they could read English?” While I was still chewing that over, he quickly added, “And why are they
speaking
English?”

My father chuckled and said something about suspension of disbelief, but for me, the flaw was unforgivable. My love for
Planet of the Apes
had died. But I think I heaped more scorn upon myself for not realizing the obvious flaw in the plot before my younger brother pointed it out. I felt like I’d been duped, misled.

When I opened my eyes and heard the barking voices of the space-suited dog-men standing over me, it was with considerable suspicion that I realized that they were speaking English. Or a rough approximation of English.

“It is not in agony to dry,” the first dog-man said, sounding like an overexcited terrier. “It spreads out, and if to be living continuously, it is your doubling it wins, and if in long time but it is damaged, the side type chart.”

I tried to swallow, hoping to respond, but my muscles seemed to have lost the trick of it, and a diffuse pain radiated out from my neck, coursing down my chest and up over my chin.

The second dog-man shook his head, something resembling a sad expression on his snout, and said, “Your ship first crooked it did not revive.”

Well, perhaps not even a rough approximation of English, after all. But they
were
recognizable English words, for all of that, which simply
shouldn’t
have been issuing from any alien mouth, however familiarly dog shaped.

The third dog-man drew near and lifted a small object over my head, a silvery lozenge with irregular protrusions from top and bottom.

“It sleeps go,” it barked gently.

My eyelids grew too heavy to keep open, and I slipped away into blackness.

When I woke, I felt like one enormous, dull ache. My eyes still shut, I tried to lift my arms, but my muscles refused to cooperate.

I groaned, the sound of it surprising in my ears.

“The sleep that spreads out it awakes,” barked a gentle voice at my side.

I opened my eyes and looked up into the grinning muzzle of one of the dog-men. The ceiling and wall beyond its head was a smooth, unbroken curve of white, studded here and there with strangely shaped protuberances. It was not a view I recognized from
Wayfarer One
. Had I been moved since last I woke, or had I been too groggy before to realize where I was?

“Wh-where…?” I managed, just barely.

The dog-man paused for a moment, head cocked slightly to one side as though listening to a sound I couldn’t hear.

“In mining boat,” it yapped, at length. “Of the Pethesilean Mining Consortium.”

“Alien…?” I croaked.

The dog-man paused, again cocking his head to the side.

“No. Me it is commander. Executive.”

I struggled to lift my head, but couldn’t. It felt as though I were pinned down by multiple gravities, as though in a ship at high acceleration, but the dog-man stood casually upright, suggesting the problem was instead with me.

“Can’t…move…” I croaked.

Again the pause, the cocked head, and the dog-man answered. “It spread out and it degenerated the inside long sleep. Remainder and to spread out and recuperate.”

I drew a ragged breath, blinking slowly, drained by the exertion of simply filling my lungs.

“How…long…sleep?”

The dog-man listened to the silent voice and nodded. “It is year T8975.” Then it reached out and patted my head, gently, as though soothing an ailing pet. Its other paw held the silver lozenge device over my eyes, and the dog-man added, “It sleeps go.”

I was asleep before I could groan another syllable.

My sleep was dreamless and dark. When next I woke, the ache I’d felt before had subsided somewhat, now concentrated mostly in my joints—knees, elbows, and wrists, particularly.

I lay for a moment in red-lidded darkness, listening close. I could hear soft footsteps some distance to my right, the sound echoing faintly off of a wall nearer to my left. Less than a meter from where I lay, I could hear the rhythm of regular, calm breathing, sounding for all the world like a content puppy at rest.

I tried to lift up on my elbows and surprised myself when I levered into an upright position. Startled, I opened my eyes in a panic, my hands reflexively shooting out to either side to steady me. My muscles seemed to have regained their strength as I slept, and it now felt as if a gravity one-third that of Earth’s was pulling on me. Like that of a large moon or a ship under acceleration.

My head swam as my insides struggled to realign themselves. I hadn’t felt so disoriented since the time on Ceres when Laurentien had insisted I share what she euphemistically called a “peace pipe” to seal our negotiations, but the figure advancing on me now shared little in common with the Dutch queen, so there was no chance this experience would end anything like the same. The dog-man was saying something, speaking a strange, guttural language of growls and barks, and though I had no clue as to his meaning, his agitated manner was plain enough.

“Stay back…” I said, raising my hands in front of me in a defensive posture. But they weren’t my hands, were they?

I flexed, and the fingers moved, slow and tentative. The joints were thick, the fingers gnarled, the backs of the hands covered in liver spots.

These weren’t mine. These were the arthritic hands of an old man.

The dog-man was within arm’s reach now, brandishing the silver lozenge like a weapon. It let out another string of barks and growls, but then paused, seeming to remember something, and in a gentler voice, yapped, “Sleep.”

I felt a faint tickle, somewhere in the back of my mind, and my eyes closed on the world once again.

Another world greeted my eyes when next I woke.

I was in a large room under an enormous, domed ceiling. Lights floated high overhead, like miniature stars, and what appeared to be chairs of various sizes and configurations were scattered irregularly around the reflective floor, surrounding the low table upon which I lay. I sat up, more carefully this time, and felt the reassuring pull of an Earth-standard gravity on my limbs.

I was dressed in some sort of loose-fitting white robe, like a surgical gown, with bare arms and legs. I looked down and saw that the old-man hands were affixed to the ends of equally ancient arms, thin and roped with veins, and that the legs and feet were no better.

A human body in a coffin sleeper ages, but too slowly to be noticeable. On the four-decade journey to Alpha Centauri B, the boffins back in Vienna had estimated that our bodies would experience something like a few minutes of subjective time. I’d been thirty-one years old when I climbed into the sleeper. How long had I been under to have aged so much?

I climbed to my feet, gingerly, the mirror-sheen surface of the floor surprisingly warm against my soles. I held the table’s edge to steady myself, but while my knees creaked and complained, they held my weight, and I remained standing.

There was a sound from behind me, at once familiar and alien—someone clearing their throat to get my attention.

I turned, not sure what to expect, here on the planet of the dog-men.

It was not a dog, and it was not a man. It was the tallest woman I’d ever seen, regarding me coolly.

She stood over two meters tall, dressed in formfitting black, her calves and feet as bare as her forearms and hands. Her skin was alabaster white, her hair a dark shade of blue, and the perfect symmetry of her features was marred only by the sapphire-colored eye patch that covered her left eye.

I straightened, hearing things pop and groan in my spine as I did, and lifted my chin.

“Who are you?” I said, louder than I’d intended.

The woman answered with a string of syllables, all liquid vowels and fricatives, and paused as though expecting me to answer.

“I…I don’t understand,” I said.

The woman shook her head dramatically, a displeased expression spilling across her face. She waved a long-fingered hand toward the table.

She spoke again, more strange sounds, but a split second after she’d begun I heard her voice issuing from the table upon which I leaned, this time using more familiar words.

“The crew of my mining ship reports that they indulged you and instructed their interlinks to feed them words and phrases in your antique tongue—or at least as many as their ship’s intelligence had in its stores—out of contact with the infostructure, but I’ve
no
patience for such foolishness.”

I gaped. Flawless and with a flat accent, it was the voice of the woman speaking English.

“I am Chief Executive Zel i’Cirea, head of the Pethesilean Mining Consortium,” came the voice echoing from the table as the woman continued to speak her strange tongue. “Now, it is my turn to ask a question. Who are you?”

I bit back the questions that jostled behind my teeth and answered.

“Captain Ramachandra Jason Stone, UNSA, commander of
Wayfarer One
—”

The woman waved her hand impatiently, cutting me off.

“Yes, yes, I know who you’re
meant
to be, but who or what are you, really?” She narrowed her eye and approached the table. She leaned against it casually, careful to keep distance between us, just beyond arm’s reach. “You read as fully biological. Were you fabricated? Or grown somewhere? Who sent you?”

I shook my head. “Look, I don’t know where…or
when
…I am, but the one thing I’m sure of—”

The woman slammed a fist onto the tabletop. Flawless teeth bared, she shouted, “Who
are
you?”

“He’s R. J. Stone, of course,” sounded a new voice from the table, “returned to us after all these millennia.”

An undercurrent beneath the words, I could hear the untranslated words echoing somewhere in the room. The woman fumed as I glanced around, seeking out the source of the sound.

I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was. First dog-men, then one-eyed Amazons, and now a meter-tall chimpanzee in a smoking jacket, cravat, and pin-striped trousers, strolling casually toward us.

The chimpanzee spoke again, the sounds issuing from him unfamiliar, the words from the table clear and refined English. The corners of the chimpanzee’s mouth rose in a rough approximation of a smile.