Authors: Christopher McKitterick
But he had to concentrate on the task. When they had gained sufficient speed and altitude, he shut down the propulsion systems. Little more than 10% fuel and oxygen remained.
The roaring ceased, the pump turbines mewled quieter and quieter, and then silence, silence broken only by distant pings and whirrs. A light breeze wafted across his cheek from a series of vent holes near the canopy base. The boy’s breathing was rough and fast.
“
You okay, Jonathan?” he asked.
“
Great,” said the boy through his teeth.
The kid had obviously never been in a weightless environment; his eyes wouldn’t stay put for long, his skin looked pale, he swallowed a lot.
Let him suffer a little
, Pehr decided.
He’ll be fine
.
Pehr looked out first at Earth—
How lovely she appears from high above, blue and white and solemn, so unlike the face she presents upon close inspection. Or maybe we’re just a skin infection that’s invisible from space
. He turned his eyes up away from the broad curve to the stars raging in the silent beyond, not quite perfect pinpricks through the weathered ultraglas. He remembered how Janus loved the stars. . . .
Absurd,
he told himself: Janus.
Yet maybe, maybe
.
That maybe grew and grew, and soon Pehr found himself breathing quickly and his face heating. At last he turned to Jonathan and demanded—
“
Who put you up to this?”
“
I told you,” the boy said, slowly, swallowing between each word.
“‘
The Brain,’ you said. Humph.” He turned to the pixie standing on the cockpit’s fivesen transmitter. “You. What’s going on? No bullshit.” She enlarged but thinned as she grew so that she appeared as a ghost between the two seats.
“
Jonathan chose to test you—”
“
No, I mean who’s behind all this? Who are you?”
“
You already ran an ID. My name is Nooa. I’m a construct—”
“
Shut up!” Pehr’s words rang like hollow gunshots for a moment afterward. “So maybe you are the Brain. What the hell. Maybe I’m Captain Pehr Jackson. Maybe this is all a feedrapture dream. . .”
He clenched his jaw. “To hell with that. You’ve got to believe in something. Ah, shit. Shit!”
“
Captain?” Jonathan asked, his face a little swirly. “Please tell me you’re my Captain Jackson.” He said it like a question.
Pehr stared at the boy.
What’s this?
he wondered. He looked away after what felt like a too-long intheflesh stare; he didn’t want to be rude, not even here, not even under these crazy circumstances.
“
You know,” Pehr began, “I feel as if I’ve come to understand myself and so much about the world—what’s wrong, what desperately needs to be changed. But then I realize I have no idea who I am to be thinking these things. It’s nuts, absolute lunacy. I can’t stand it anymore! And now you call me ‘your’ Captain Jackson.
“
Shit. Jonathan,” he glanced again at the boy and noticed lines on the young face, the kind of lines that should only crease a middle-aged man’s. He looked away. “I want to be Captain Jackson. But that path leads back to pain just as much as any other path in my mind. It’s lunatic. The artifact, everything.”
“
Tell me about the artifact, please,” Nooa asked. For an AI construct, her face held an awful lot of emotion. “This information is very important.”
Pehr closed his eyes tight against the silent roar of stars, the boy’s pleading and pained face, the girl’s blatant desire.
“
Artifact, ha! Why didn’t you just leave me be?” he demanded, feeling as if he was one of those stars—a red one, all soft and hot and sparking like the images he saw behind his eyelids.
“
Miru, crash you! Where are you when I need you?”
And, just as Pehr said the man’s name, just as he recalled a lifetime of memories that seemed like his own but couldn’t possibly be—no matter who he really turned out to be, Captain Pehr Jackson of
Lone Ship Bounty
or Captain Downward of
Dreadnought
—just as Pehr thought of the man by body-image and an infinite series of incidents that occurred all across the solar system, he heard a reply:
*Pehr?*
Pehr was so shocked that his eyes flipped open like a windowshade wound too tight. He breathed deeply, looked out at the stars and at Earth, the view rotating ever so slightly as the Stratofighter sailed the sky in a decaying orbit. He turned his eyes to Jonathan, who was staring wide-eyed.
“
How’d you do that?” the boy asked. “I know you’re here intheflesh, but. . .”
“
But what?”
The girl answered. “Your ID trace vanished for .01 seconds.”
“
You sort of
. . .
got like colored glass,” Jonathan added.
“
What?”
“
Citizen Jackson,” Nooa said, “you said ‘Miru.’ Did Project Hikosen Director Miru just attempt to
. . .
transport you back to Triton?”
“
Crash this, crash it all out—” But Jackson’s tirade was cut short by a quiet voice in his head:
*Pehr, is that you?* It sounded like the voice Miru had used when they spoke in the artifact’s vast, spaceless space. It held a calming, somber tone, a specific personality, though Pehr could not hear anything. He couldn’t even gauge the language.
“
I want to believe this,” Pehr replied. “Oh, I can’t tell you how much.” His head filled and grew light with awe and wonder as he recalled the transformation he had undergone—or had been tricked into believing he had undergone—in the artifact. “Learning tool,” Miru had called it.
*Now I understand!* The Miru-ghost was intruding again. *The artifact is not a thing outside of us, at least not after we have been inside. It’s in us now, Pehr. We have cast off the shell—remember?—and internalized all that comprised the artifact and ourselves. We have stretched the boundaries of the artifact and have become the artifact. I can bring you here to me, right now, if you wish. My friend Pehr, imagine what this means to the exploration of the universe and of our minds!
Imagine!
*
As Pehr listened to the quiet but hypnotizing voice, he grew more and more anxious. He could stand no more.
“
That’s it. Nooa—I mean Brain—now it’s time for
me
to test
you
. If you really are the Brain, you can take over this craft if I leave.”
“
Tell me what has happened,” Nooa demanded. Her face showed none of the threat a human’s would have upon this kind of frustration, which affirmed one of Pehr’s guesses.
“
Miru just
. . .
talked to me,” Pehr said. “I have to go back to Triton to find Janus and make sure she’s all right.”
He turned away from the ghost-image of Nooa—
Strange form for the Brain to assume
, he thought—and faced Jonathan.
“
Sorry, kid, but if I’m really Captain Jackson, I’ve got some responsibilities.” His stomach clenched as his worry about Janus escalated. At the same time, he felt elated and powerful and—he cringed but chuckled inside as he thought of it—a little godlike. If all the amazing things Miru was talking about were true, the universe was his oyster.
What to do with it?
—he had no idea—
but I’ve got to start somewhere
.
“
Hope you enjoyed the ride,” he told the boy. “Make sure the Brain fuels this can before trying to land. Ha! Good to meet you. Real good.”
He extended his hand and engulfed the boy’s. Jonathan looked dazed again, yet the lines around his eyes and mouth seemed to have softened a little.
“
How?” the boy asked.
“
Yes, how?” Nooa echoed.
“
Miru says whoever goes inside the artifact takes it with them when they leave. That doesn’t sound right; I have to talk with him a little longer to understand what he means. It’s more complicated than a transportation device, you see.” He looked into Jonathan’s eyes now, but the boy only held his gaze for a second.
“
We sort of exchanged lives.” That didn’t sound right, either. “I can’t really describe it. The artifact blasts you into atoms or something and all that’s left is who you are, you know, inside your mind. Not your brain, your
mind
. Your thoughts, memories, feelings—all the things that make you who you are. And you sort of mingle those things with whoever else is inside with you, so when you come out, you remember two—or even more—lives as if they were your own. Every little memory is as clear as anything you can imagine, better than usual, as good as fivesen feed. When you’re done sharing all this, you sort of wake up in a place
. . .
a place that feels like home, or maybe with someone you have unresolved feelings about.”
Pehr grew wistful a moment, thinking of Megan. But she had become a different person over the years, assuming he had ever known her at all; perhaps she had been consumed by the shell, as Miru would put it. She seemed to have grown very thick.
Janus
. He had to go to her.
“
How can you go back?” Nooa asked. Pehr noticed that Jonathan’s mouth hung a little loose and the lines had grown deep again. Pehr wished he could reach out and smooth away the boy’s fears or whatever made him look like that, but he understood that age of boy too well.
“
That’s a damned good question,” Pehr said, and laughed. “I’ll let Miru take care of the logistics. Bye.”
Bam
—as suddenly as when he had stepped into the entrance of the wall surrounding Triton’s St. Paul’s Cathedral, Pehr shattered.
Bam
—just as suddenly, he stood facing Liu Miru in a cool, humid room filled with plants and smelling vaguely like urine. He felt the weight of his body again, but it wasn’t anywhere near as heavy as it felt on Earth. He looked up and saw a familiar blue world hanging in the sky. It had replaced Earth below the Stratofighter, about the same relative size—and the same colors, blues and whites—but so, so alien. Having had half a lifetime experience in space, he only felt disoriented for a moment.
He smiled and looked down at Miru. The man seemed shorter here, intheflesh. Miru smiled back. No, he
beamed
; Miru beamed at Pehr.
“
Pang, we did it!” the man cried.
Pehr just now noticed a second man standing in the greenhouse. A number of faces peered into the domeroom from lower chambers connected at four points by sealed airlocks. They all shared the same expression.
“
Hello, Liu,” Pehr said. He reached out and embraced the man. It didn’t feel wrong in any way. In fact, it felt like the most natural thing in the universe to do. He nearly wept with joy. When he backed out of the embrace, he regained the old single mindedness he only occasionally found in himself—the kind of single-mindedness that defined the role of Captain Jackson.
“
Where’s Janus? You know who I mean, don’t you?”
“
Of course,” Miru answered.
“
She’s doing very well now, but she’s not here anymore,” the second man said. “We have a lot to tell you. Very much, friend Pehr.”
Miru sat down and crossed his legs on the gravelly path, wide green leaves brushing his grey jumpsuit. The second man followed, then Pehr did so, as well. He felt like a child about to learn a lesson.
But for the first time in his life, being like a child held no negative feelings, no fear or emptiness. He smiled, and remarked to himself how strange it felt to smile so much in one day.
Man, and what a day!
he thought.
Jonathan Sombrio had grown fatigued by trying so hard to fight down the elation and wonderment he felt as the man calling himself Pehr Jackson took him aboard a real spaceship and launched them into orbit.
Captain Jackson! Space adventures!
So worn down was he that, by the time motion- and space-sickness began to thrust their wiggly fists through his insides, he no longer needed to keep up the facade of boredom in order to hide the naked emotions he wasn’t yet prepared to share.
Then Captain Jackson—he is sure now that the man who just disappeared was his hero—then the Captain vanished, as if he’d never been here at all, as if he were nothing more than a 3VRD. Except Jonathan knows better. His amp—
And the Brain, for fuck’s sake!
he thought—proved the Captain really was here. That far outweighs, far outweighs, the discomfort. But he left, just as Jonathan was beginning to welcome him.