“Sir?”
“Do I have to repeat myself?”
Jorl shook his head and followed orders. He pressed a palm flat against the glass surface of the cube. Another set of swirls began dancing. Before the captain could tell him not to he began following after them with the tips of his fingers, tracing their movement on the glass. Hrum grabbed him by the shoulder, yanking him backwards. Too late.
Lights came on, deep inside, shining through the smoky glass in more complicated patterns.
“I’m measuring an increase in power,” said Kengi.
“Dangerous?”
“No, Captain, not at these levels. More like a system coming online. Whatever it is, we’ve woken it up.”
The swirls rushed together behind the glass, forming a rough, humanoid shape, losing color until they were a dull black, like the shadow of someone of indeterminate race leaned against the glass on the inside regarding them.
“Gilgamesh,” said the shadow or the wall, or maybe the cube.
“What?” said Hrum.
“I’m recording,” affirmed Kengi.
“The Pendragon.”
Jorl stared at the silhouette, mouthing the unfamiliar syllables.
“Kal-El.”
The thing had a rich and resonant voice. Something in the rhythm or timbre of it suggested that Jorl and the others should recognize the words. He didn’t.
“Boxes do not talk!” said Hrum, and Jorl saw her shiver. “Kengi, abort recording. Back to the shuttle, both of you. Double time!”
The first lesson Jorl had learned in the Patrol was about following orders. He fled. Kengi, despite the weight of her communications gear, outraced him. The cube continued to speak.
“I am these and more. I am the Archetype of Man and from slumber such as you have never known have I awoken. Speak, friend, and I shall hear you.”
Bradys never hurry. Jorl saw panic in Hrum’s eyes as she shouted commands through her comm unit. “Max us out the instant we’re aboard! Full power to the beamers. Fire once we’re clear. I want nothing but vapor where this cave is.” Somehow, she ran past him.
The voice echoed after them. “I am the hero. I am the young warrior, the dreamer, the quest taker. I am the sum of mankind’s symbol of this aspect of himself. I am the past sent forward.”
The trio tumbled through the open portal of the waiting shuttle. Hrum slapped the control for an emergency close of the airlock and shouted to the pilot. “Fly!”
Jorl clutched at the portal latch for stability as the ship accelerated. He slammed against a bulkhead, banging an elbow hard. Hrum and Kengi both lost their footing and piled up against the closed portal. Kengi let out a squeak of pain as the captain’s boot caught her in the back.
Morth’s voice echoed through the shuttle as Jorl and the others righted themselves and settled into their seats. “Powering beamers, sir.”
A flash of brilliance and the dream shifted forward several days.
Jorl stood at attention in Brady-Captain Hrum’s ready room, eyes focused on the wall behind her head.
“Say what you have to say, Ensign. I have real work to do.”
“Sir, it was my understanding that, among the missions of the Patrol, was the recovery of artifacts from the ancient times Before.”
“And?”
“Surely the object we encountered qualifies.”
Hrum paused, as was her way. She picked up a stylus nib from her desk and affixed it to the tip of one claw. She didn’t bother to look up as she answered. “What object are you referring to?”
Jorl’s ears fanned with anxious dread. “The object you ordered destroyed. Sir.”
“That incident is behind us, Ensign. I suggest you let it go.”
“I can’t do that, sir.”
“Ah? And what will you do instead then?”
“I’ve written up a report. My personal observations of the mission. I intend to send it in to HQ.”
That made Hrum look up. A slow smile spread across her face, an expression Jorl had not thought his captain capable of. Another wonder followed. She laughed; long and slow, like only a Sloth can laugh. To his horror, she kept on laughing for several minutes, finally raising a hand to her face to wipe at her eyes.
As quickly as it had come, all amusement fled her face. Her brows dropped and her jaw tightened, and Jorl found himself facing anger like he’d never experienced from his captain before. She rose from behind her desk, rumbling upward like an earthquake and advanced on him. He knew it was a dream, that the violence surfacing in the Brady couldn’t actually harm him, but as he had in life and in every previous version of the nightmare he backpedaled until the office’s wall stopped him. Despite her shorter stature, she pressed herself against the Fant, craning to shove her face up against his.
“We were never there, Dicknose, we were never there.”
The dream shifted again, a flickering of scenes. Every other member of the crew coming forward with affidavits supporting Hrum’s version of events. Hrum’s report of a routine stop at an unmapped moon. Jorl’s report coming back with a stamp of unverifiable and a black mark in his personnel file. And speaking faintly in the background of it all, its powerful voice sounding now like a helpless wail, the cube from Before, the past sent forward, lost to them now forever.
Somehow that loss was his fault. He could hear it in the ache of that thing’s voice.
With a cry, Jorl struggled with his sheets and blankets to sit up in bed. He half expected to see the tiny cabin from his Patrol vessel. A hand went to his chest, the pounding of his heart threatening to burst through. The nightmare, again. Real as the waking world. It always filled him with a sense of his own limitations. Would the loss of the artifact seem so vast if he weren’t a historian? Would the helplessness haunt him?
He hadn’t caused the thing’s destruction, and short of mutinying how could he have saved it? Should he, a mere ensign, have countered his superior’s orders? Should he have relieved Brady-Captain Hrum of her command? Was he to blame?
The persistent recurrence of his nightmare suggested that he believed so, at least at some level. It had begun days after his return to Barsk, and his subsequent training as a Speaker had sharpened it. After the fifth repetition he’d sought the assistance of an oneirist, a respected Eleph who never asked him about the specific content of his dream but kept poking at him for what he thought it meant. He’d left her office more frustrated than when he’d entered. How was he supposed to know what any of it meant? It scared him witless, left him flinching for days. Episode by episode it had built an association between helpless and useless in his mind.
After the twentieth repetition he’d found the best solution to be simply getting on with his work, let the sense of helplessness stay behind in the dream by focusing on his real productivity. Today would be no different. He had things to do, and they were too important to let the phantoms of his past delay them.
In short order he left his bedroom and set about pouring a mug of morning beer with koph. The familiar routine of preparing for a summoning calmed him. Finishing the beer, Jorl sat at his work desk, feet planted firmly, his chair turned toward the right where a comfortable guest chair had lived until Pizlo accidentally set it on fire the previous season. No matter, he remembered the chair quite well, and as the morning’s nightmare so amply demonstrated, the strength of his imagination and memory could accomplish what came next.
The koph had begun working its way through his blood and into his brain. He became aware of and banished the golden blanket of his own nefshons. A moment later he imposed his will upon the universe, summoning particles of familiarity. He pictured a face he had known all his life, and softly murmured “Tral ben Yarva.” His father’s nefshons rushed forward faster than when he had summoned them before. Tral had been his test as a Speaker. Dead more than ten years, he had come when called. Even now, Jorl could not say who had found the reunion to be more of a surprise.