Further: Beyond the Threshold (8 page)

The first was an elephant. An elephant with the body of a man, to be more precise. Or a man with the head of an elephant. It hardly mattered which. He loomed over me, easily 2.75 meters tall, his skin gray and wrinkled, his massive tusks tipped with gold ornaments. He was bare to the waist, with billowing yellow trousers, gold bangles on his wrists and ankles, and a string of pearls worn over his shoulder like a sash.

At his side was a woman only a few centimeters taller than me, her skin a bright shade of blue, with an extra pair of arms emerging from her ribcage, with two arms on each side. She wore a skirt of silver and gold, her chest bare, her bright-orange areolas standing in stark contrast to the surrounding blue. Hair the shade of a setting sun hung like a nimbus around her head, and her eyes were flashing yellow.

For a moment, my mind reeled. Before me stood the form of Ganesh and a female Vishnu, as though they’d stepped off a temple painting from my childhood.

The Ganesh began to speak, and I recognized it as an archaic form of Hindi. The syntax was strange, and much of the vocabulary escaped me, and so as the escort provided its translation, I had dual meanings echoing in my ears.

“Sri Rama, your arrow returned at last to Earth, we bear greetings from those who have awaited you. I am Vinayaka, and this”—the Ganesh indicated the blue-skinned woman at his side—“is Sarasvati. We represent the keepers of knowledge, the Veda.”

The elephant pressed his massive hands together, and the woman placed her hands in pairs, one above the other, and they inclined their heads.

“
Namaste
,” each of them said, as their voices echoed in English from the eagle’s mouth, “I bow to the light in you.”

I
namaste
d in response, keeping my eyes on them, confused. “I think there might be some…misunderstanding,” I began uneasily. “I’m not sure who you think I am…”

“You are Captain Ramachandra Jason Stone of the interstellar exploration vehicle
Wayfarer One
, correct?” the woman named Sarasvati asked.

“Yes, but—”

“It is well known to us,” the elephant-headed Vinayaka interrupted, “that Ramachandra is merely another name for Lord Rama, Prince of Ayodhya, an avatar of Vishnu the Preserver.”

I couldn’t help but chuckle, however a bit nervously.

“Ah. You see, my name
is
Ramachandra, but I’m afraid that’s more a function of my mother’s classical taste than anything else. My brother LJ—Lakshman Julian—got off slightly better than I did, I think, but it’s not an accident that both of us ended up using our initials instead of our full names.”

“Lakshman was the brother of Lord Rama, no?” Sarasvati asked, raising a bright-red eyebrow suggestively.

“Yes, I suppose he was.”

“And is it not true,” Vinayaka asked, “that when the great rishi Parasurama presented him with the bow of Vishnu, Lord Rama shot an arrow that flamed into the darkness of the night sky, a shaft of infinite trajectory that arced through the heavens, until it would one day return, and its arrival would mean the end of Earth? And in like manner, did your spear-shaped craft not arrow through the heavens, returning to Earth only once the planet it had been was no more and a new Earth hung in the firmament?”

As a poetic description of the fate of
Wayfarer One
, it wasn’t entirely unapt, and the ship
was
shaped somewhat like an arrow or a spear, with a broad nose faring to deflect dust, micrometeorites, and other particles. But that still didn’t earn me a place in any pantheon, nor suggest that I had any but mundane origins.

“Look,” I said firmly, chin raised, “I know that you mean well, but I’ve got to tell you—”

“Forgive our insouciance,” the blue-skinned woman said, interrupting, her gaze averted. “We have given offense, which was not our intention.”

“Your pardons, Sri Rama.” The Ganesh’s eyes were on the ground, his trunk wrapping around his neck protectively. “So overjoyed are we by your return that we forget our manners.”

I tried to speak up, to let them know that I wasn’t offended, just that they had the wrong guy, but the woman cut in before I could get a word out.

“We were sent to inform you that a place has been prepared for you on the sacred wheel, Thousand-petaled Lotus. Your people await you there, Sri Rama, whenever you choose to join us.”

The elephant-man Vinayaka glanced skyward, and a low sound thrummed from him like a giant clearing his throat. In response, a twinkling light overhead suddenly began to move, growing larger, and in a matter of eyeblinks was revealed as a platform two meters in diameter, with an ornate and bejeweled railing, like a stylized chariot without a team of horses. Speeding toward us, it slowed as it neared, floating down as gracefully as a feather falling to Earth, finally stopping and hovering mere centimeters from the ground.

“Wait, I just want to—”

The blue-skinned woman raised one of her four hands as the Ganesh climbed aboard the chariot. “Please accept our apologies for the rudeness of our approach, Sri Rama.” She vaulted to the elephant-man’s side. “We return to Thousand-petaled Lotus to prepare for your arrival.”

And then the chariot soared off into the blue sky, heading in the direction of Central Axis, and the strange pair was gone.

When they had gone, the escort said that we had nearly reached our destination. As we walked the remaining meters, it explained that Sahasrara Padma, or “Thousand-petaled Lotus,” was a habitat in the shape of an eight-spoked wheel, in orbit around the star known in my day as Zeta Leporis, and that nearly all of its one hundred thousand inhabitants belonged to the Veda, a group of “mythopoeic re-creationists” who chose to literalize figures from Hindu mythology. What he couldn’t tell me was whether they actually believed that I was a figure from ancient Sanskrit epics come to life or whether it suited their conceit merely to pretend as though they did. Either way, their ardor made me uneasy. Still, the notion of visiting their artificial world and seeing what other mythological wonders they’d made real was a tempting one.

“Sir, we have arrived,” the escort said at last, pointing to our right with its beak.

I looked in the direction the eagle’s beak indicated and saw perched among the flowing and organic shapes of the other buildings a structure that would not have seemed out of place in any 22C suburban development. With straight edges, right angles, a peaked roof, and rectangular doorway, complete with beveled glass, hinges, and a doorknob, it was precisely the sort of architecture that had dominated Western culture for centuries—except here, the building appeared to be made out of opaque diamond.

“It’s been designed to aid in your acclimation, Captain Stone. The Plenum hopes that it suits.”

I stepped unsteadily from the moving sidewalk, narrowly managing to remain on my feet, and walked the few steps up to the structure. It loomed overhead, a gem standing some three or four stories tall. I’d seen smaller mansions in the wealthiest areas of India and Europe.

“Yes,” I answered absently, “it suits.”

From the ages of twenty-one to twenty-four, just a bit over three years, I served aboard
Orbital Patrol Cutter 972
, first as an ensign, then a lieutenant. An Aurora ZD-36 manufactured by Winchell-Chung Industries,
Cutter 972
was thirty meters, tip to tail, a small Keeper-class vessel intended for nothing more glamorous than the maintenance of navigational buoys in cislunar space. My “quarters,” which stretched the definition of the word, were a cube approximately 2.5 meters to a side. A bit over 15.5 cubic meters, that small space was home for thirty-eight months.

The finest accommodation I ever enjoyed was the presidential suite at the Starshine, the most expensive room in the most exclusive hotel in Vertical City, the bed in which would not have fit into my room on
Cutter 972
without folding it first in half.

With those experiences at either extreme, I was still ill prepared for what lay inside the residence.

“The Plenum intended it to be a re-creation of a typical Information Age dwelling, sir.”

Typical
. If anything, the interior was even grander than the outside, which had been constructed out of
diamond
.

I was reminded of photos I’d seen of presidential palaces, of the ostentatious homes of celebrity entertainers in the days before all roles went to virtual actors and pop music was recorded by algorithms. The foyer in which I stood, the tiles cold beneath my bare feet, was outfitted with the “typical” furniture of a modest home—chairs, side table, umbrella stand—but at a scale and of such precious materials that no potentate could ever have afforded. A chair’s legs looked to be solid platinum, a mirror’s frame was inlaid with gold and iridium, the floor seemed to be constructed of an enormous sheet of opal. And the ceiling, nine or ten meters overhead, sparkled like a starry night.

I felt dwarfed, a small old man out of his time.

“Captain Stone, is there anything you desire? Would you like to sleep, perhaps?”

I shivered and wrapped my thin arms around me, feeling my ribs through the thin material of the robe.

“I wouldn’t mind sitting down for a while, but I’ve slept enough for a hundred lifetimes. But I don’t suppose there’s any chance of a change of clothing, is there?”

The sleeping quarters were the size of a small hangar, and the closet larger than the cargo hold of the
Cutter 972
.

“The Plenum,” the escort said as I surveyed the options, “took the liberty of fabricating a wardrobe for your disposal.”

I pulled out a suit coat made of something like leather, but as light and supple as silk. The cut was elaborate and baroque, though, the fashion of some other era than mine. “It’s…well, thanks, I suppose.”

“Am I correct in assuming that the choices are not satisfactory? I am still gaining valuable experience, and while I have the data at my disposal, my interpretations may sometimes be in error.”

“No, I’m sorry, I’m sure it’ll be fine. And how old are you, by the way?” I shook out a pair of pants and held them to my waist. Like the rest of the clothing in the wardrobe, it was tailored precisely to my measurements, but these pants had exaggerated flares at the ankles, the waist coming higher than my naval. Many of the options presented to me appeared to have been based on cartoons and caricatures, exaggerations of real-world examples. I could scarcely fault them, though. If historians in my day tried to present a traveler from the tenth millennia BCE with period fashion choices, I doubt they’d have done a fraction as well. “Didn’t you say that you were ‘born’ while I was talking with the man-lion and the Amazon and the chimp?”

“With the Voice of the Plenum, Chief Executive Zel, and Maruti Sun Ghekre the Ninth,” the escort corrected. “Yes. I first gained sentience approximately .0208 standard days ago, or roughly a half hour in your method of timekeeping. My subjective experience has been considerably longer, though, as AI nurseries run at highly accelerated clock speeds, and I share the memories of the intelligence from which I was calved, and so my personal recollections extend back far further than my objective age would suggest.”

I managed to find the simplest and most practical of the options, a featureless and unornamented jumpsuit of dark fabric, similar to the flight suit I’d worn on board
Wayfarer One
, and completed the ensemble with a pair of soft-soled shoes. When I’d dressed, I stepped back out of the closet and regarded myself in a full-length mirror that dominated one corner of the sleeping chamber.

An old man looked back at me: hair white and thin against dark skin, a straggle of beard on my chin, ears and nose larger than I remembered, shoulders slumped and knees slightly bent. I appeared to be a man in his late seventies, if not older. Much older than the thirty-one years of life I remembered living. But then, the years can pile on quickly when you sleep for twelve millennia.

Still, I was the lucky one, wasn’t I? The others had moldered to dust in their sleeper coffins. All but one of the women, the chimpanzee had said, who’d died recently enough to leave a decaying corpse. Who had it been? Beatriz? Eija-Liisa? Amelia?