The white form undulated by less than a meter from him. The smell overpowered him when the creature passed; he almost gagged.
Just like a ghost. Balloon head up front and a rippling body behind.
Only ghosts don’t stink like oxen or leave spider webs behind them. Aliens, damn it, and I’m the first to see one, but. The transfer!
He moved as fast as he could toward the compartment, took a deep breath, and peered through the open hatchway.
Throughout the room, pale figures floated and darted like jellyfish; a hissing occurred every time one of the creatures started, stopped, or changed direction. Once in motion, though, they were as silent as phantoms. Some grasped large pieces of equipment securely with their snaking bodies. Others gripped tools and incomprehensible devices in hands that were little more than translucent tentacles ending in a burst of fingers, thumbs and smaller tentacles. Their heads, the most opaque part of them, possessed two black dots that must have been eyes, and various slits and openings that roughly corresponded to a nose, ears, and mouth. Openings in the backs of their heads served a purpose of which Baker had no idea.
They worked at a furious pace. They were dismantling the Valliardi Transfer.
Baker raised his hand to point the laser at the most industrious alien. “Sorry, balloonhead,” he whispered. “Diplomacy aside, I can’t let you strand me—”
Some of the creatures turned to look when they heard the crack of steel against Baker’s skull. The others worked on, not interested in the limp,
totally opaque body being dragged away by one of the ship’s robots.
“I cannot have either one of you interfere while you are in unstable emotional conditions,” the computer stated flatly.
Baker listened while straining with futile effort at the straps holding him to the bed. Delia sat where he had left her. A robot, cylindrical with a dozen specialized arms, floated between them, on guard. Baker said nothing, merely choosing to stare at the red light below the computer’s vidcam.
“I made contact,” it explained, “with the People of the Sphere shortly after our final transfer, which delivered us to this system. ‘This system’ comprising an aged K-type star surrounded by a Dyson shell and not much else.
“It turns out that I have nothing of value to offer them in the name of the Brennen Trust. Nothing, that is, except two rather flawed examples of living anthro-history. They are keenly interested in anthro-history, and I have agreed to show them Earth. In this regard, they have offered to redesign our transfer device to incorporate improvements from their own devices.”
“You’re showing them to Earth? Just like that? Don’t you know what sort of danger that might put us in?”
“This,” Delia said. “from one who was ready to kill the only human being who could handle the transfer.”
He turned his head toward hers. “I can handle it well enough.” He looked at the computer. “You may be dooming all mankind!”
“You almost did by trying to submerge Virgil.”
“Shut up, Dee!”
The computer said, “I have no emotional attachment to the human race. The People of the Sphere seem quite accustomed to preserving endangered species. No destructive race can create something as vast as a Dyson-type structure. No dictatorship or empire could last long enough to finish such a cooperative effort.”
“In your opinion, programmed by human beings as you were.”
“In my opinion based on the history cores they have been feeding my memory over the past several hours. This is the first opportunity I have had to use even a small amount of random access for anything other than
filing new information.”
“Get us out of these things so we can stop them.”
“I regret any trauma I may be causing you, tovar Baker, but I do possess the relevant facts in this matter.” The computer said nothing more.
“I hate you, Jord,” Delia said, quietly.
“I know. Now shut up and let me think of how to save us.”
“Your sudden protective impulse for a planet that died in the Earth-Belt war is simply a rationalization of your senseless urge to kill these innocents!”
“You can stop being a psychoanalyst now.”
“Hide.”
“I told you, bitch, it doesn’t work.” He strained at the straps until the blood thundered in the wound on his bandaged scalp. Relaxing his efforts, he glared at her. “You didn’t see them, Dee. They’re like cartoon spirits, like glass fish. You can see their guts, for God’s sake!”
“Xenophobe.”
“What’s that? That scraping?”
Delia smiled. “Neither of us is in control at the moment, Jord. You could always get up and stop me if I tried the wrong thing on you. How does it feel to be the helpless captive?”
“Shut up! I think they’re going away.”
“Now, why do you want to kill the one man that can open humanity’s path to the stars?”
“He’s not the only one. You heard. They can handle the Valliardi Transfer and they’ve even got modifications.”
“So? Maybe theirs doesn’t impart the death illusion and you can use it happily ever after.”
“Shut up! I still want to die, don’t you see? Crys was waiting for me. My father, too. They want me there. They called to me so many times and I tried to go with them but I kept getting pulled back and I want to die in a way I’ll be sure I can be aware enough to—to—” He began to cry.
“Hide,” Delia said, watching his face for a clue to any change. “Hide.”
“No.”
“Hide, Jord. You are now Virgil Grissom Kin—”
“No!”
“Prepare to transfer,” a disembodied voice said.
“Virgil. It’s me, Delia.” She swallowed and forced a grin. “Death Angel, Virgil.”
“I’ll kill you, Dee, when I get out of this. I’ll make you feel every bit of it as I grind you up—”
Up. Up. I’m being lifted by something. Out of the bed. Up. Something pushing me up faster and faster and faster till the walls blur into white and my body smears into a rainbow streak and I stretch across a plain so vast its horizons red shift away. I rush across it to see someone at the far end approach me like a reflection. Kinney!
Jord speeds toward me and we stop, watching each other. I move. He moves. A mimetic standoff. He stands back. As do I. His body looks like mine, but also his. My own fickers. Him. Me. Him. Me. Himmy.
We’re one.
I refuse.
Mixed up together like water and air make fog.
Never.
Soon! Inseparable. You can’t leech a soul away from itself.
It’s not fair. I sit down. He sits down.
He sits down. I sit down.
I sit down.
What did you just do?
Me? What did—
I just do?
The flickering speeds up—
And I can’t tell—
Where I end—
And I—
Begin.
I feel both aspects, now. The plain contracts at the speed of white and bends to a cone, a tube, a cocoon. Tighter it shrinks, forcing me inward
at mind-searing speeds. All white around me, blinding eyes I don’t have. A roar that fills ears I don’t possess wraps me in its strange sound. Something pushes the body no longer part of me and I feel the awful crush—
And release. Suns explode around me. Planets cascade. Races crawl out of seas of water or bromine or ammonia, rise to great heights, and tumble back in. Thoughts caress my mind, cat’s paw soft, and they are gentle. Galaxies swirl into a pattern from which rises a mighty city greater than any eyes have seen. A shimmering city of metal and more, where all the dead live as one nation. The dead from all the worlds, from all of time, from all of all.