Nona and the local creature remained in their communion. What was happening between them? Would it be dangerous to interrupt? But it might be dangerous not to interrupt, and warn them of the approach of others.
Darius took a step toward them. Colene grabbed his arm, shaking her head no. Then she walked to the horse, reached for his head, and changed her mind. She signaled Darius, making an up motion with her two hands.
What did she have in mind? He went to her, put his hands on her hips, and heaved her up so that her head was the height of the horse’s head. She was a small girl, and carried no excess weight; it was easy to lift her.
She put her face to Seqiro’s left ear. “Seqiro,” she murmured. Then, louder: “Seqiro.” Then she put her mind into it: Seqiro.
The ear twitched. She had gotten his attention. “Danger, maybe,” she said.
This time Darius heard her through his mind, with no effort. The horse had resumed the job.
“Others of this kind are approaching rapidly,” Darius said. “We must alert this one, in case this means trouble.”
Nona looked around. She had heard the warning too. She still had her hand on the knob, but the communion seemed to have ended.
“Seqiro,” Nona said. “Amplify me for one more moment; I must warn him and ask him to follow us through the anchor.”
The other creatures were converging. “Do it!” Colene cried.
The ambience faded again. Then Nona withdrew her hand.
The creature infused air. Its eye stalks sprang out and waved, sweeping the horizon. The air hissed louder. The body lifted from the ground.
“Come on!” Nona cried. She ran for the anchor.
The creature followed.
The other creatures were closing in. The closest one crossed a patch of sandy soil. Its rear trunk dragged down, touching the sand. Then sand blasted out of its front trunk. The sand didn’t travel far ahead, but some of the pebbles in it did. One landed not far from Darius.
“They’re shooting at us!” Colene exclaimed, outraged.
“Get moving!” Darius shouted.
They ran after Nona and the creature. Nona abruptly disappeared, having stepped through the anchor. Then the creature did the same.
“Come on, Seqiro!” Colene cried. Because the horse was waiting for her.
The three of them stepped through the anchor almost together. The scenery hardly changed, but the pursuing creatures vanished. Nona and the first creature were not in view.
We are in the next reality, Nona’s thought came. We passed through two.
“She can mind-talk across Modes?” Darius asked, startled.
“No. Seqiro can transmit across Modes, when he tries,” Colene explained. “Especially when he knows the people. He’s keeping track of Nona.”
They walked three more steps, and there were Nona and the creature, seemingly popping into existence. The Virtual Mode was like that: every ten feet, by Colene’s reckoning, there was the boundary of another reality, or Mode, similar to the last but a completely separate entity. The land and vegetation changed less between Modes than the animals did, so animate creatures seemed to pop in and out against the common background. It was, as Colene also put it, weird—until a person became accustomed to it.
“Okay, Nona, what gives?” Colene inquired. “Did you get its life story?” She gazed without complete trust at the creature, and two of the eye stalks gazed back at her. The third was watching Darius, and he was just as disconcerted as Colene was. The thing was obviously aware, and now that he knew that its trunks could hurl stones, he feared what other threats it could muster.
“No,” Nona said. “We reached only the yes/no not-enemies stage. The rest is too complicated to assimilate immediately. This is a completely alien creature, but he means us no harm. He wants to travel on the Virtual Mode.”
“Look,” Colene said. “This landscape is Earth. Not right around where I live, but somewhere on the continent. I know Earth when I see it. How did such freakish aliens get here? Did they conquer Earth and kill all the people? I mean, how do we know this thing isn’t trying to conquer the larger universe, the way Emperor Ddwng of the DoOon Mode was?”
That was a fair question. They had barely escaped that grasping Emperor, and only by tricking him into vacating his anchor. They did not want to get into such a situation again.
“This is indeed your Earth,” Nona agreed. “But he is not alien. He is native. His species evolved here. And he is not an evil creature.”
“How can you know that?” Colene demanded, “I’m insure that nothing like this has ever existed on Earth. I mean, the eye stalks are possible, and maybe the elephant trunks, and maybe the knobs. But air suspension and propulsion? No way!”
Nona shook her head. “My understanding is as yet imperfect. But there is no untruth when I tame a familiar, and there is no untruth here. To him, we are the alien creatures. He was appalled when he saw us; it was all he could do to remain for my contact. I am the ugliest creature he has seen or imagined, let alone touched.”
Darius laughed, and so did Colene. Anyone in the universe who thought Nona was ugly was crazy.
But she was serious. “Seqiro at least could be mistaken for a large animal, but the three of us are like demonic fantasies. It was some time before he could suppress his revulsion enough to pick up my thoughts, and it remains difficult. But this was the gamble he took when he invoked the Virtual Mode, and he has to live with it. He could not remain with his kind. I don’t understand what is wrong, but he is not a bad person; it is some complex social interaction that caused him to be banished. But he can not live alone, so he had to gamble on alien contact.”
“You say his kind is native to Earth, in this reality?” Colene asked. “Then what about our kind?”
“Our kind does not exist here. We never lived here. None of the kinds of animals we are most familiar with ever existed here.”
“You mean no mammals at all?” Colene asked, daunted, “I know this is a different reality, and a lot of them don’t have any life at all, but—”
“No mammals, reptiles, birds, fish, dragons—no vertebrates,” Nona said. “No—what you call chordates. But there are arthropods, and sponges, and mollusks, and the plants seem similar. I think everything is much the same, except that his kind is here and our kind isn’t.”
“How far back does this go?” Colene asked.
“From the time that many-celled life evolved. He thinks of three great dyings that eliminated many creatures, but his kind managed to survive the last two, and come to dominate the world.”
“From the time of multi-celled creatures?” Colene asked. “That’s the Cambrian explosion! Five or six hundred million years ago!”
“Yes, that seems to be the scale time he is thinking of,” Nona agreed. “In my universe, it isn’t the same, so it’s confusing.”
“The Burgess Shale!” Colene exclaimed.
“The what?” Darius asked.
“This is a world where things changed with the Burgess Shale,” Colene said, awed.
Nona looked blank, and Darius felt the same. “Things are obviously different here,” he said. “But what does shale have to do with it?”
“Well, nothing, really, maybe. But it’s where we discovered all the strange creatures who didn’t make it. The experiments of evolution. It must be that in this reality, our phylum, the chordates, didn’t make it, while his phylum, whatever it is, did. So I guess this is Burgess, and this is the world of Shale.”