Less than three minutes to ignition. I see light at the end of the tunnel. Eri’s incidental time machine barely looks into the past any more, I could almost hold my breath across the whole span of seconds that then needs to overtake now. Still on target, according to all sources.
Tactical beeps at us. “Getting a signal,” Dix reports, and yes: in the heart of the tank, the sun is flickering again. My heart leaps: Does the angel speak to us after all? A thank you, perhaps? A cure for heat death? But—
“It’s ahead of us,” Dix murmurs, as sudden realization catches in my throat.
Two minutes.
“Miscalculated somehow,” Dix whispers. “Didn’t move the gate far enough.”
“We did,” I say. We moved it exactly as far as the Island told us to.
“Still in front of us! Look at the sun!”
“Look at the signal,” I tell him.
Because it’s nothing like the painstaking traffic signs we’ve followed over the past three trillion kilometers. It’s almost—random, somehow. It’s spur-of-the-moment, it’s panicky. It’s the sudden, startled cry of something caught utterly by surprise with mere seconds left to act. And even though I have never seen this pattern of dots and swirls before, I know exactly what it must be saying.
Stop. Stop. Stop. Stop.
We do not stop. There is no force in the universe that can even slow us down. Past equals present; Eriophora dives through the center of the gate in a nanosecond. The unimaginable mass of her cold black heart snags some distant dimension, drags it screaming to the here and now. The booted portal erupts behind us, blossoms into a great blinding corona, every wavelength lethal to every living thing. Our aft filters clamp down tight.
The scorching wavefront chases us into the darkness as it has a thousand times before. In time, as always, the birth pangs will subside. The wormhole will settle in its collar. And just maybe, we will still be close enough to glimpse some new transcendent monstrosity emerging from that magic doorway.
I wonder if you’ll notice the corpse we left behind.
“Maybe we’re missing something,” Dix says.
“We miss almost everything,” I tell him.
DHF428 shifts red behind us. Lensing artefacts wink in our rearview; the gate has stabilized and the wormhole’s online, blowing light and space and time in an iridescent bubble from its great metal mouth. We’ll keep looking over our shoulders right up until we pass the Rayleigh limit, far past the point it’ll do any good.
So far, though, nothing’s come out.
“Maybe our numbers were wrong,” he says. “Maybe we made a mistake.”
Our numbers were right. An hour doesn’t pass when I don’t check them again. The Island just had—enemies, I guess. Victims, anyway.
I was right about one thing, though. That fucker was smart. To see us coming, to figure out how to talk to us; to use us as a weapon, to turn a threat to its very existence into a, a…
I guess flyswatter is as good a word as any.
“Maybe there was a war,” I mumble. “Maybe it wanted the real estate. Or maybe it was just some—family squabble.”
“Maybe didn’t know,” Dix suggests. “Maybe thought those coordinates were empty.”
Why would you think that, I wonder. Why would you even care? And then it dawns on me: he doesn’t, not about the Island, anyway. No more than he ever did. He’s not inventing these rosy alternatives for himself.
My son is trying to comfort me.
I don’t need to be coddled, though. I was a fooclass="underline" I let myself believe in life without conflict, in sentience without sin. For a little while I dwelt in a dream world where life was unselfish and unmanipulative, where every living thing did not struggle to exist at the expense of other life. I deified that which I could not understand, when in the end it was all too easily understood.
But I’m better now.
It’s over: another build, another benchmark, another irreplaceable slice of life that brings our task no closer to completion. It doesn’t matter how successful we are. It doesn’t matter how well we do our job. Mission accomplished is a meaningless phrase on Eriophora, an ironic oxymoron at best. There may one day be failure, but there is no finish line. We go on forever, crawling across the universe like ants, dragging our goddamned superhighway behind us.
I still have so much to learn.
At least my son is here to teach me.
THE SECOND COMING OF JASMINE FITZGERALD
What’s wrong with this picture? Not much, at first glance. Blood pools in a pattern entirely consistent with the location of the victim. No conspicuous arterial spray; the butchery’s all abdominal, more spilled than spurted. No slogans either. Nobody’s scrawled Helter Skelter or Satan is Lord or even Elvis Lives on any of the walls. It’s just another mess in another kitchen in another one-bedroom apartment, already overcrowded with the piecemeal accumulation of two lives. One life’s all that’s left now, a thrashing gory creature screaming her mantra over and over as the police wrestle her away— “I have to save him I have to save him I have to save him—” —more evidence, not that the assembled cops need it, of why domestic calls absolutely suck.
She hasn’t saved him. By now it’s obvious that no one can. He lies in a pool of his own insides, blood and lymph spreading along the cracks between the linoleum tiles, crossing, criss-crossing, a convenient clotting grid drawing itself across the crime scene. Every now and then a red bubble grows and breaks on his lips. Anyone who happens to notice this, pretends not to.
The weapon? Right here: run-of-the-mill steak knife, slick with blood and coagulating fingerprints, lying exactly where she dropped it.
The only thing that’s missing is a motive. They were a quiet couple, the neighbours say. He was sick, he’d been sick for months. They never went out much. There was no history of violence. They loved each other deeply.
Maybe she was sick too. Maybe she was following orders from some tumour in her brain. Or maybe it was a botched alien abduction, gray-skinned creatures from Zeta II Reticuli framing an innocent bystander for their own incompetence. Maybe it’s a mass hallucination, maybe it isn’t really happening at all.
Maybe it’s an act of God.
They got to her early. This is one of the advantages of killing someone during office hours. They’ve taken samples, scraped residue from clothes and skin on the off chance that anyone might question whose blood she was wearing. They’ve searched the apartment, questioned neighbours and relatives, established the superficial details of identity: Jasmine Fitzgerald, 24-year-old Caucasian brunette, doctoral candidate. In Global General Relativity, whatever the fuck that is. They’ve stripped her down, cleaned her up, bounced her off a judge into Interview Room 1, Forensic Psychiatric Support Services.
They’ve put someone in there with her.
“Hello, Ms. Fitzgerald. I’m Dr. Thomas. My first name’s Myles, if you prefer.”