Resurrection (20 page)

Eddie slowly released her shoulders. “Not a very good one?”

She shook her head no and buried her face between her knees, which were now drawn up to her chest. “No.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

She did not want to talk about it, but she felt herself running from the dream and did not like that, either. Grief would not decide for her what she would or would not say. “Niks…” She said the name quietly, and he could see how much it cost her. “Niks was someone I…lost along the way.” A new tear rolled down her cheek. “My partner,” she whispered.

The word “partner” carried such weight that Eddie could guess at their relationship. It was obvious she did not want to say anymore, and he had no desire to push her. “I’m very sorry.”

Pruit nodded and took a deep breath. “Yes, me too.” She pulled her sleeping bag up around her legs. Eddie saw a hollowness in her eyes as she looked down the tunnel. “It doesn’t matter,” she said at last.

“It does matter,” he whispered.

Pruit looked at him. “It does matter,” she agreed. “But it doesn’t change why I’m here. It doesn’t…it doesn’t change the Lucien or the bombs or the deadline, or the future of my people.” Her voice was breaking again.

“What are you talking about?” He asked it softly, not sure he was ready for her answer. But her answer came, pouring out of her in a rush, borne on tears that she had never let to the surface until now. She told him of the Lucien and their history with the Kinley. Of the spies and the meteors and the plan to wipe Herrod clean. She told him about the poem in the crystal around her neck, and she told him the Lucien would never win, could never win. She would never let them win.

He was helpless against the avalanche, could do nothing but listen and try to understand the magnitude of what she lived with every day. After long minutes, the tide gradually subsided, and she was left wordless, gasping through the tears.

Gently, he put his arms around her and hugged her. He did not dare say anything. What could he say? Slowly, she began to calm. Her breathing became less ragged. Her muscles relaxed somewhat in his arms, and her chest stopped shaking with grief.

Eddie helped her back into her sleeping bag, pulling it up around her. He slipped into his own bag and put his arm around her again, holding her body to his, his chest on her back.

After a few moments, he felt her take a deep breath, and then her breathing became almost normal again, slow and deep. She took his hand in one of her own and held him to her.

“Thank you for being here with me,” she whispered.

“You’re welcome.”

Then, safe in the warmth of that friendly embrace, the dream of Niks and the horror of the future faded for a moment and she drifted back to sleep.

Adaiz-Ari’s eyes were closed. He was standing on both feet, balanced on his toes, and his arms were held in front of him. Between his human hands was his dirk, a short, straight dagger, still in its sheath. He could not see the knife with his eyes, but he could feel it, its weight, its position, the curves of its handle.

Facing him was Enon, also with eyes closed, also leaning forward to balance on his front toes, both knees of each leg held slightly bent.

They breathed in unison, a short inhale, a long exhale, each feeling the muscles of his body, each slowly gaining awareness.

This was the egani-tah, a form of Opening, an ancient pre-battle ceremony that had been handed down since generations, long before the Plague. The two participants in an egani-tah first became aware of themselves, then aware of their surroundings, then aware of each other; then they confronted each other in a rite of battle.

Adaiz could now feel every muscle. He could feel the blood begin to flow more freely, could feel his heart beating slowly and deeply. He continued the ceremonial breathing, short in, long out. Still holding his position with eyes closed, he moved his awareness to the room. He was now using the fundamental part of himself, the immortal spirit which was him, shorn of all physical trappings. The Lord Omani described the spirit as “that which is”; all else might pass, but the spirit remained.

Adaiz could feel the rug beneath his body, every piece of furniture in this open hotel room, could feel the heat outside, trying to get in through the closed windows and thick curtains. When he had encompassed the whole room within himself, Adaiz let his attention turn to his partner.

There. There was Enon-Amet. He saw his body, silver skin, long legs held perfectly still, eyes closed. Adaiz moved his awareness beyond the physical. He saw Enon-Amet himself, the spirit, and at that precise moment, Enon reached out and found the spirit of Adaiz.

Their awarenesses met and became joined to each other in the common purpose of the egani-tah. Together, they opened their eyes.

They were looking at each other across the room, holding their positions, holding their knives. Each kept his mind empty of thoughts. Together, they were aware only of themselves and of their surroundings. They drew in the final breath of the first position, then released it from their lungs slowly.

Then they pounced. Adaiz leapt forward, his hands gripping the dirk and whipping it from its sheath. Enon leapt at him in precise unison, each acting with full knowledge of the other. Enon’s own dirk was unsheathed in his hand. They closed the distance between them and landed facing each other. Adaiz struck out at Enon with his right hand. Enon-Amet neatly parried the thrust, then returned it and was blocked swiftly and perfectly by Adaiz. Their motions were not choreographed, but they were delivered with full knowledge of both participants. Their minds held each other, and the instincts of the fight passed freely in between. Thus, each was safe from the other’s blows as long as their connection remained perfect. High masters of the egani-tah could perform the ritual fight for hours, each partner working in precise harmony to parry and thrust at the other. Such masters could also, at certain times, achieve the egani-tah in real battles, encompassing their opponent and taking control of the fight.

Enon and Adaiz circled each other, holding their knives ready. Enon passed his knife to his right hand and stabbed forward in a fluid motion, aiming for Adaiz’s stomach. Adaiz jumped back gracefully, turned, and brought his knife down in an arc toward his brother’s neck. Enon brought his left arm up and blocked the motion.

We are perfect
, Adaiz and Enon thought together. It was the first discreet thought they had shared. Until those words ran through their minds, there had been nothing but sense of motion and the half-conscious knowledge of the fight.

This is the beginning of the end
, they thought, and neither knew with which the thought originated.
We are thinking now, instead of being. But thinking is unavoidable.

Adaiz struck out with his leg, and Enon skipped aside. Their motions were still coordinated, but there was already something less graceful in the ceremony.

Are we losing each other?
they thought. And then the thoughts came in a rush, issuing from each of them and both of them, things they had never spoken aloud, things they had hoped were deeply buried.
We may be losing each other. We are not one. We are different. We are here on this strange world, and this has shown us our differences. We are still Lucien. We are brothers…

They struck at each other and parried, and turned and struck again, slightly off, though still managing to work together. And then there was a rending sensation as they felt themselves peel away from each other and become distinct beings again, separate. Their thoughts ran together, but they were out of synch and pulling apart.
We are brothers. But there is a world out there I have never imagined. We are Lucien—am I Lucien? There is confusion—what is this confusion? Is it mine? Is it mine?

Enon kicked out at Adaiz, and he moved aside a moment too late. The foot grazed his thigh. It did not hurt much, but it marked the fading of their union.

Their minds were apart now. They could feel each other’s thoughts, but their origin was clear.
Yes, I am confused, and my mind is loud.
That was Adaiz-Ari.
There are humans here by the millions, and they have mates and children and speak in my range, and their urges and customs are natural…

There was also Enon:
My brother is distant. Can he really hold himself objective in this world? Would it be so wrong for him to long for the society he sees here? I think I would if I were in his place…

Adaiz struck forward with his knife, and Enon did not block the blow in time. The dirk moved forward to the thin seam between the sheaf of bone covering Enon’s chest and the sheaf that protected his lower abdomen and pelvis. Adaiz stopped the knife just as its tip touched Enon-Amet’s skin. It would have been a deadly blow.

The brothers looked at each other, the knife between them. Their breathing was heavy and unsynchronized.

“We have lost it,” Enon said aloud, and with those verbal words, they both felt themselves returning to their separate identities. They were Enon-Amet and Adaiz-Ari, and they were standing together in a hotel room in Heliopolis, a section of the city Cairo on the planet called Earth, years and years from home.

Adaiz tilted his head in agreement and let his knife arm drop back to his side. They held each other’s gaze, both feeling the weight of the separate thoughts that had passed between them, both unsure now how to respond to the other.

At last, Enon said slowly, “I would never doubt you, Younger Brother.”

Enon flexed his antlers in a gesture akin to a human smile. Adaiz pulled on the muscles of his face, making his ears move slightly and his forehead rise, in his human version of the same expression.

“And I would never doubt your trust, Older Brother,” Adaiz replied.

The two stasis tanks began to sound an alert, and a yellow light on each started to blink at regular intervals. The meaning was clear: The occupants of the tanks were about to wake. Pruit and Eddie stood a few feet back, watching as the lights began to blink faster. They were, perhaps, analogous to the rate of bodily functions of the people within.

At last the yellow lights switched to white, and there was a long, soft chime. With the faintest of rumbles, the tops of the two tanks withdrew. Pruit caught her breath, and she could feel Eddie’s anxious excitement as he stood beside her. Instinctively, they took a few more steps back.

Within the tanks, they could see a greenish-brown substance, like thick grease. In a moment, they could smell it as well, organic and a bit unpleasant.

Then there was a hand. It reached up from the congealed substance, wet clumps of the brown stuff stuck to it, and grasped the side of the tank. Then another hand, grasping the other side. The fingers of the hands tightened their grip, and with a pull, a woman’s naked upper body came up from the grease.

The stuff was on her face and plastered in her short hair. Slowly, she used a hand to wipe her eyes. She opened them. Disoriented, she looked around the room, shakily taking in the tanks, the lights, and then Pruit and Eddie. She found the tube in her mouth and pulled it out, gagging as she did so. She let it drop back into the grease.

“Hello?” the woman said in Haight, her voice faint and scratchy. She began to remove the other feeds and tubes attached to her body.

“Hello,” Pruit said gently. She knew firsthand the disorientation that came from stasis. The most she had ever slept at once had been a single year, however. She could not imagine waking to find that millennia had come and gone. She would have to be very careful about the way she informed them.

“Who are you?” the woman asked.

Before Pruit could answer, a man’s form lunged up from the other tank and into a sitting position. His eyes shot open, despite the grease, and he tried to draw in a breath. He gagged on the tube in his mouth. Frantically, his hands came up to his throat, and he tried to breathe again. He could not, and he started to choke.

The woman saw his distress and tore the remaining tubes from herself, then leapt from her tank. Her naked body dripped grease as she stepped across and took hold of the man.

“Darling, darling, relax,” she said. The man continued to convulse, trying to cough out the tube in his throat while simultaneously trying to draw a breath.

Quickly, and with great skill, the woman took hold of the back of his head with one hand, holding him by his hair, and pulled the tube out of his mouth with her other.

The man gasped in great gulps of air. The woman unhooked the remainder of his tubes. After several moments, the man calmed a bit, and she put a steadying hand on his shoulder. He turned to her with an unsettled look.

“Ay-ah-ah…” he said. “Geh-geh-gra…”

The woman stared at him. “Darling, what’s the matter?”

“Ah-ah-ah-ah,” he said again, his mouth and throat clearly straining with effort. “Ay-geh-ge-ah…”

“What’s he saying?” Eddie whispered.

“Nothing,” Pruit replied quietly. “Nonsense words. Something’s wrong.”

“What’s the matter?” the woman asked. “What’s wrong?”

The Engineer turned toward the sound of her voice. She was standing by the side of his tank, and she was naked. He knew her, recognized her, was somehow familiar with every part of her and every gesture of her hands and face, but beyond that, he was sure of nothing. He moved his hands and felt them moving through the gunk.
Gunk
, he thought, not knowing how he knew the word. His eyes flitted around the room. The yellow lights seemed too bright, and he squinted. There were two other people present, standing a few feet off. They were strangers. He was confused.

“Ay…ay…eh-kree…” he said, not knowing what he meant to say, but aware that neither his thoughts nor his body were responding to him.

He felt the touch of her hand on his shoulder. “What is it, darling? What are you trying to say?” His eyes focused on her. She was precious to him, that much he knew. She was his for some reason.

“Kre-guh…” He could not make his vocal chords respond to him. His hands reached for his throat, but there was nothing to feel but his own skin. He wanted to speak, but why? What was the purpose of speech?

“Look at me, darling,” she said slowly. “Look at me.”

The Engineer understood her, though he had no specific knowledge of the words she used. He turned his head to face her.

“Do you know me?” she asked.

He put a hand on her shoulder in an effort to prove to her that he did know her. Then his eyes filled with tears.

“Help me get him out of the tank,” the woman said, turning to Pruit and Eddie.

They moved forward, and under her instruction, took hold of the man and helped him down onto the floor.

“Lie down,” the woman ordered him gently, pushing him to the floor when he didn’t respond to her command. She began to check his body, looking in his eyes, feeling at various pressure points. She was careless of her own lack of clothes.

She turned to Pruit. “There. In that drawer,” she said, pointing. “There is a large medical kit. Bring it to me.”

Pruit complied instantly, finding a large, light kit tucked into one of the wall drawers. The woman unrolled the kit and picked out a V-shaped device. She checked the dials, then began to shake it, apparently recharging it through this motion. After several moments, she adjusted the dials again, then slipped it onto the man’s neck. The device lay along either side of the neck and sat on the man’s breastbone.

“Ay-ah-gre-ga….” the man said, trying to move.

“No, no, darling,” the woman said softly, putting a hand on his forehead. “Lie still for a few moments.”

He was soothed by her and lay back, shutting his eyes. The woman studied the neck device and fiddled with it for several minutes. Then, when it had told her all it could, she sat back onto the ground and swallowed hard.

“What is it?” Pruit asked.

The woman looked up at her. “Massive damage to his brain. He seems to have motor control, but even that has been impaired.”

“I’m very sorry.”

She did not seem to hear Pruit. “I can fix him. Maybe. When we get home.” She ran a hand through the man’s grease-caked hair. He opened his eyes and looked up at her.

Pruit was silent. How could she tell this woman that there was no home, not the one she remembered?

The woman’s mind came back to her present circumstances. She looked around the room, at the other tanks, which stood empty.

“Who are you?” she asked Pruit. “Where are the others? How long have we been sleeping?”

“I think…I think you should get washed up and dressed. Then I’ll tell you what I know.” They should at least be comfortable.

Slowly, the woman nodded. She helped the man to his feet. Pruit gestured to Eddie, and he brought them the light robes and suits of clothing they had found in some of the cave storage drawers.

The woman took the clothes and guided the man to the shower alcove, her arm across his back. His gait was unsteady. He was trying to speak again, but words would not form.

Pruit nodded toward the door of the cave, and she and Eddie slipped outside to give them privacy.

A half an hour later the woman and man were seated on the floor of the cave, dressed in brown suits of work clothes. Pruit sat in front of them. Eddie stood, leaning against the wall.

“First of all, I’m Pruit Pax,” Pruit said.

“I’m the one called the Doctor,” the woman said. “This is my husband, the Engineer.”

“It is a pleasure to meet you.”

The Doctor smiled politely, but it did not look like the moment was particularly pleasurable for her. Now that the woman was clean and dressed, Pruit saw that she was quite pleasant looking. Pruit recalled her genotype—olive skin, brown eyes, and curly dark-brown hair—from an ancient picture book she had had in school. She would have been from the Southern Hemisphere, where now was only radioactive glass, stretching forever. Looking at her, Pruit experienced the uneasy sensation of staring deep into the past.

“Back on my ship, I thought I was communicating with someone inside the cave,” Pruit continued. “But contact ended. I arrived at the cave three days ago. Your tanks were the only ones still occupied. Outside, it looks like someone might have left the cave in recent months, but I don’t know for sure. I do know that there were warning lights on your husband’s tank.”

“It doesn’t make sense,” the Doctor said quietly, trying to think things through. “The computer is programmed to wake one of us up at the first sign of trouble…”

Pruit waited for this thought to run its course and the Doctor’s attention to return to her. Then she continued. “Now, as to who I am, I am Kinley. I’m from Herrod, but it is not the same Herrod you know. You’ve been asleep for five thousand years.”

“What?” The Doctor almost laughed. Then she stopped herself and tried to imagine that unimaginable span of time. “Are…are you sure?”

“Yes, very sure,” Pruit said.

Eddie, who could not understand Haight, could nevertheless clearly follow the gist of the conversation by the woman’s expressions.

“The truth is,” Pruit continued, her voice soft, “I didn’t come here for you at all. We never imagined you’d be alive after so much time.”

“You don’t know the way my husband designs things.” The Doctor tenderly put a hand on the leg of her damaged husband.

“I have to be blunt,” Pruit said. “I’m here because I need the Eschless Funnel.”

The Doctor stared at her for a moment, nonplussed. “The Eschless Funnel? What do you mean? Haven’t you traveled here with it?”

“No, quite the opposite,” Pruit said. Then she gave the woman a history lesson, telling her about the war with the Lucien and briefly outlining the following five millennia and the current threat. The Doctor was very curious about the Lucien. At the time of the survey mission, the Kinley had known that the Lucien existed and had even sent a probe to monitor Rheat, the Lucien home world. But they had decided against contact with the Lucien race, for they were considered extremely volatile. Pruit explained that that very probe had been one of the causes of the war. The Lucien had seen it as a territorial infringement and had been galvanized to strike back at the Kinley.

The Doctor was left in shock by Pruit’s explanations, thinking of her family and friends and the great cities of Herrod. “All gone…” she whispered.

“You can see the urgency for me to get records of the Eschless Funnel.”

“Yes…yes, of course,” the Doctor said, forcing herself to regain composure. “In the closet. Crystals and paper manuals.”

“They’re not there. We’ve checked the closet and the entire cave.”

“But they must be.” The Doctor got up and went to the closet. With a cursory examination of the leather cases of data crystals, she saw that all of the ones relating to the ship itself and physics in general were missing. Then, with Pruit’s help, she went through every paper manual. Again, there was nothing.

“I know they were here,” the Doctor said. “I put them here myself.”

“We did find this.” Pruit handed the Doctor the broken crystal. The woman studied it and pressed at it with her fingers. The crystal disintegrated under her touch, whole chunks of it falling off.

“I’ve seen this before,” the Doctor said. “It’s been destroyed by very heavy electricity. Deliberately, I would imagine.” She surveyed the stasis tanks and the entirety of the cave. “We need to open the computer log and find out what happened to the others.”

She slid onto the stone bench in front of the computer and, with some manipulation of the controls along the edge of the screen, brought up the log of the stasis tanks. There were hundreds of pages of log entries, most of them standard reports of “no change,” which had been taken weekly. Here and there, however, she found anomalies.

“This doesn’t make any sense,” she said, picking out the anomalies and asking the computer for details. “The Engine Supervisor died almost immediately, after only five years. Then the Surveyor died after one hundred years. Then nearly five thousand years passed with no change, no one dying, no problems. Then, three weeks ago, the First Mate died.” Her voice did not betray emotion at the loss of these people. There were too many sudden changes in her awareness for real grief yet. Her attitude was professional. “Their tanks malfunctioned all of a sudden. I know he built safeguards against that.” On reflex, she turned to her husband for confirmation, forgetting already that he would be able to assure her of nothing. “But look! The Mechanic has been waking. Every two hundred years. Look! He woke again.” She queried one of the log entries and brought up a new page. “Several weeks ago. He woke without incident.”

“The Mechanic,” Pruit repeated. “Then I spoke to him. I must have. He told me he was a stasis sleeper. But why would he leave?”

“A better question would be why was he woken by your transmission at all? That job belonged to the Engine Supervisor, and in his…” She didn’t want to say death. “…in his absence should have fallen to the Engineer. There’s no reason for the Mechanic to wake. In fact, we programmed the computer to make sure he didn’t…” She trailed off and fell silent at a sudden thought. Then her face lost color and she seemed paralyzed for a moment.

“What is it?” Pruit asked urgently.

“Oh no,” the woman said softly. She turned to the computer and quickly entered in a series of commands. Pruit watched her navigate several screens of information and begin scrolling through what looked like a long list of programmed instructions. Then the Doctor stopped and stared at the screen.

“What’s wrong?” Pruit asked.

“He changed the program,” the Doctor said quietly, her voice dead. “He changed it so he would be the one to wake.” She stood up from the bench and started to pace, looking at the tanks and her husband. She dug the heels of her hands into her temples.

“Who?” Pruit and Eddie were both staring at her.