Quinta Essentia
Bradley P. Beaulieu
On the day they finally came, Sean Brannon tossed and turned in his bed, his ligature exoskeleton whirring while assisting his movements. The sound of the ligature was nearly, though not quite, masking the childlike whine that escaped him with each turn of his broken body. He rolled and lay in a fetal position, and found Therese an arm’s length away—a measure of space that in their early days had always seemed so tenderly close but now felt unbridgeable. He knew she felt his movements, heard every minute manifestation of his pain, no matter how hard he tried to mask it, but she tried to remain asleep while he in turn tried to remain as quiet as he could manage.
Dawn was still a distant dream, but Sean knew he would never get back to sleep now, so he threw off his thin blanket and pivoted himself up, joints howling from the attention the levering of a ninety-pound frame to a semi-upright position required. Placing hands on knees and gritting his teeth, he pushed himself up to a trembling stand. It was worse than normal today. The humidity—he could feel it in the air already—and something else, something more arcane than precipitation.
He was sweating by the time he managed to coax his body into a fully upright position.
“Come back to bed,” Therese said, reaching over the ruffled bedcovers with an arm that was well shaped. A woman that was well shaped. A woman that had helped him every day since this endless nightmare had begun.
“Go back to sleep,” Sean said.
She woke more fully then, raised herself up, arms and shoulders angling unnaturally as she propped herself on one elbow. By the light of gas lamps filtering in through the nearby window, she watched him with pity-filled eyes. This was the worst time of day for both of them. It reminded them how frail he was, and he suspected it reminded Therese how frail she was—how frail they all were in light of the ways the world had changed—and Therese was a woman who had never liked being reminded of her own mortality. She seemed ready to argue with him, to coax him back to bed, but then she relented and lay back, turning over with the leaden movements of the deeply fatigued, and fell back to sleep.
As she lay there, snoring softly, Sean forced the suit to work his body. As much as he’d learned to ignore pain, he couldn’t stand so much of it at once. He started in increments: toes, then feet, then calves and thighs. Sweat gathered on his brow as he continued with his back and stomach and chest. Then neck and jaw and mouth. His arms and hands were the least painful, but he was careful to move them properly—flexing, then releasing, flexing and releasing—lest he strain a something before he’d warmed up.
Every gradient in movement pained him, as if his muscles were being ripped apart. Even his bones felt like millstones, grinding themselves into dust. But he worked through it all. He couldn’t give in to the pain, not even a little. Do that, and he would return to bed. He would lie there, crying as the pain consumed him, and Therese would be forced to take him to the University hospital and they’d work his muscles for him until he’d gotten past it. If that happened, it would be infinitely worse than what he was feeling now.
By the time he pulled his clothes on—clothes made overly large to fit his ligature—the sun was burning blue along the eastern horizon, across the River Wear. In the distance, the towering haulms the Jovians had seeded twelve years before waved gently in the wind. Jovians, they’d been called, even though no one truly believed the haulms had come from Jupiter.
Like candles on a grand cake, the tips of the haulms were lit brilliant orange by the sun. The rest of their length was dark, like mottled ochre earth. Bits of flake fell away from each, twinkling in the light as they were blown by the wind. The skin of the haulms had been doing this ever since they’d emerged from the earth. The flake was like the bark of the eucalyptus, shedding as it grew, but the haulms were so large now that if the wind came from the north, the streets of Durham would be covered with layer upon layer of it—thin, chalky flakes building until the plows came to clear the streets or the rain dissolved it into a thick yellow slurry that eventually washed away.
A hundred men, hands clasped, would be needed to circle the base of one the haulms. Their roots dug deep, some said as deep below the earth as they towered above. Sean doubted this, though. Some few scientists from the British Society of Engineers had commissioned a dig to determine for certain, but gave up after excavating five hundred feet down. They’d run calculations based on how quickly the roots had narrowed, and determined they could go no further than half a mile down.
No one knew why the Jovians had sent the stalks. No person or government had been contacted in any way. The haulms had simply started to grow—all over the Earth—at an unimaginable rate, reaching up and up until they towered over every territory in the world where vegetation grew.
Sean reached the rail yard just as the sun’s first rays were gleaming against the horizon in the east. He headed to a red train that in an hour would carry dozens of workers from Durham up to the fluorite mines, one of the city’s major exports, especially since the discovery of quinta essentia some thirty years ago. Standing next to it on a second set of rails was a new train, or more accurately a train with a new power plant, fueled by an ingenious mix of quinta incendia, terra, and unda. It was shiny and bright and green with red trim, a recent prototype granted to the mining company from Morgan College—the University’s newest college dedicated to the study of elemental science. The gift made sense. The college, after all, benefited greatly from the fluorite mines. It was the primary doping agent in the lenses they made, the ones that focused the five elements into viable and useful applications.
Sean went to the first of the coal cars sitting next to the steam train and, after rolling back the tarpaulin covering the coal, gritted his teeth and began shoveling the coal into the tender. Pain ran through his arms and legs and back, but the truth of it was it felt good, no matter how much pain there was, for it was loosening his muscles even further, the first of many steps in a long and careful process of physical exertion that would, if he was careful, carry him through the entire day. Even his ligature—the exoskeleton drilled into every major bone used in typical human locomotion—whirred more enthusiastically, providing more than half the effort needed.
“Ah, now,” came a voice from behind Sean, “please, Mister Kelly, won’t you let me help?”
Sean turned and found Thomison, the old rail yard foreman, standing some paces away wearing his engineer’s cap and blue denim overalls.
“Good morning, Thomison.”
“I’d say the same to you,” Thomison said, wiping his hands on a greasy rag, “but I can see it’s going poorly enough already.”
“I told you, the activity does me good.”
“As you say, but you also said it would make you healthier. Just looking at you, begging your pardon, sir, but it’s been seven weeks and you’re looking worse’n ever.”
“Why, thank you, Thomison. You’re looking well yourself.”
Thomison bowed his head apologetically. “My father told me never to mince words, not when it might do someone some good. I can’t have the men late for work. I’ll be speaking to Master Hunt later today. I think it might be best if you went to see the doctor, spent a bit of time at home.”
“Thomison, I’ve seen the doctor. I can assure you, there’s no need for it.”
Thomison looked as though he was going to argue with Sean, but just then his eyes went wide, his mouth fell open, and he pulled his cap off and clutched it to his chest.
Sean turned, stared up at the thin layer of clouds high above. They were parting, folding backward as something with a dark, mottled surface drove through from above. It was huge. Massive. Larger than a bloody castle and shaped like an island ripped up from the sea. Its smooth top warred with a ragged underside and the strange tendrils hanging down from below. It floated down, down, down toward Durham, and behind it came more. One, then two, then three, then a dozen.
They lowered themselves, each heading slowly but inexorably toward one of the haulms.
Around him, the city was coming alive, more and more coming out from their homes or stepping away from the day’s early work and staring up at the wonder of it all. Screams came. Children wailed for their mothers. A gun rang out, and then another, rifles and pistols firing up ineffectually at this new menace. But the Jovians cared for them not at all. To them, the humans running about the ground below were little more than a host of teeming insects, a minor annoyance at best.
The first of the lowering shapes was nearing its chosen haulm. Thin tendrils reached up from the massive stalk. More reached down from the underside of the pod. And they intertwined, multiplying, strengthening, drawing one another closer until it had secured itself in place.
“What’s it mean, Mister Kelly?” Thomison asked breathlessly.
“I’ve no idea,” Sean replied, “but I can’t imagine it bodes well, can you?”
“No, sir, I cannot.”
* * *
Several months after the Jovians arrived, the steady rain of flakes dwindled and then stopped altogether, but something new soon took its place: a fecund smell wholly alien to the forests and bogs and marshes Sean had ever been to—a byproduct, the botanists said, of the pods’ tendrils attaching to the tops of the haulms. Sean thought it a poor sign. It meant that the haulms had stopped growing, that the pods were nearing maturity, and that the next steps in whatever plans the Jovians had for Earth were nearing.
Or so it seemed to him.
Winter passed and spring arrived. The pods had been catalogued all over Earth, wherever the haulms grew. In point of fact, as far as anyone knew, not a single haulm had been left untethered, suggesting an intelligence that couldn’t be explained away as simple extraterrestrial plant life. Fear of the pods and the hatred they’d initially generated were starting to soften. The pods simply were—a new feature of the landscape all over the world—and people were starting to say it was a good thing. What they saw floating above over their cities and countrysides was likely the worst of it, they said. The Jovians had come from wherever they’d come, they’d planted their seeds, and they’d grown. Simple as that. Like petunias. And one day, if the science community was right, they’d find something useful from these pods, something revolutionary. They’d come from another world, after all. Who since the days of Ptolemy hadn’t dreamed of this very thing?
Twelve months after the arrival of the pods, there was a breakthrough announcement from the team of botanists who’d convened in Durham. They had been taking weekly samples of the pods using the university’s science platforms—the undersides of which had been infused with quinta aeris—and now claimed the husks were slowly hardening, perhaps in preparation for some transformational event. A regrowth, a seeding. No one knew for certain, but it seemed to make sense. It was a natural organism, and so of course would have some way of reproducing itself.
Sean was pounding out a bar of iron, red and fresh from the forge, a new job after Thomison, the rail yard foreman, had seen to it that Sean had been shown the street. The forge suited him just fine. It let him work his body all he wanted—a thing it needed even more in the colder months—and the owner was rarely around to hear Sean’s groans, which, even Sean had to admit, were difficult to deal with.
Sean was just finishing the forming of the bar he was working on when he heard footsteps, saw the silhouette of a man in a brown suit standing in the entrance to the forge. He blinked against the lowering sun, trying to see who it was.
And then, like a dark dream suddenly returning in the light of day, he recognized him.
“What the bloody hell are you doing here, David?”
David Lock, a scientist Sean had worked with years ago, stepped into the forge. “I’ve come because we need to talk, Sean.”
“Bollocks, we need to talk …” Despite himself, his atrophied muscles began to shake. The ligature was as silent a piece of machinery as there was, but still it betrayed him, its sensors picking up his movements and whirring in response. “I want you to turn around, right now, and leave.”
Instead, David took a step forward. “I didn’t make this journey lightly, Sean. I’ve come bearing news. Critical news. And you’re one of the few people in the world who would have any hope of understanding it.”
“What, some mad new scheme to restore your chair at the University?”
“Nothing of the sort.” David doffed his bowler and gripped its rim tightly. “It’s the Jovians, Sean. I think I know why they’ve come.”
* * *
David led Sean to an abandoned shoe factory that had shut its doors a decade ago, but when David pulled the heavy door aside, rollers squealing in protest, he found a science lab within it—a proper, well equipped, elemental science lab. It smelled of leather, as if nothing save burning the warehouse to the ground would ever rid the place of it, but warring with this, and the other echoes of its sweatshop past, were four precise rows of workbenches with dozens of individual stations, glass beakers and blue flames and fluorite lenses all about, nearly an exact replica of the lab Sean had helped David run over a dozen years ago.
Sean found he could go no further than a few steps inside the doorway, which made David stop and stare.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
Memories of their shared past were flooding over him. “It’s like nothing’s changed …”
David looked chagrined at that. “I work no differently than I did years ago. It makes no sense to alter the configuration.” He motioned to the nearest bench. “Please, it’s right here.”
Still staring in wonder, Sean followed, the sound of his footsteps lost in the vast darkness of the factory’s hollow interior. David motioned to a set of three microscopes, indicating that Sean should look into the first. Sean reluctantly leaned down to the leftmost, putting one eye to the black eyepiece. The view showed a tight pattern of tubular green cells backlit by a disk of quinta incendia. “These look like pollen tubes.”
“They are,” David said. “Can you guess what species they came from?”
Sean stood, his ligature whirring loudly in the relative silence of the place. “I’m not your student anymore. Keep your questions to yourself and tell me why you’ve brought me here.”
David winced, but recovered quickly. “Do you know where I’ve been for the past thirty-eight months, Sean?”
“I’ve no earthly idea.”
“I’ve been in the Amazon, studying the plant life there. Did you know there’s a higher concentration of haulms in the Amazon basin?”
“I’d heard something about it, yes.” In fact, Sean had been reading many of the journals coming out of the university. The pain he experienced day in and day out—not to mention the efforts he went through to keep it in check—prevented him from pursuing the field of botany as he once had, but his love for it was as strong as ever, so he read when he could, keeping up on the field as much as his quiet times allowed him.
“What you’re seeing are the pollen tubes of Victoria amazonica, the water lily. They’re normal, healthy, rapid-growth cells, yes? Now take a look at the second scope.”
“David …”
“Please, Sean. Just take a look.”
The urge in Sean to deny David anything he was looking for was strong, but there was also a fire within him, a strong curiosity for knowledge, especially where it related to the Jovians. He stepped up to the second microscope and bent down, the muscles along his shoulders and spine and hips aching dully from the attention. Within he saw a similar slide of cells. They were shaped the same, but their color was wrong. They were damaged and crumbling, though from what, Sean had no idea.
“What are these?” Sean said as he studied them carefully.
“Those are the same cells exposed to the influence of the haulms’ roots.”
Sean stood. “Their roots?”
David nodded. “At the center of the Amazon basin, we noticed that many of the plants near the haulms looked weakened where they hadn’t been only a month or two before. We took careful samples of dozens of different varieties, studying their growth—or in this case, their decay. In the middle of the rain forest, one of the most fertile places in the world, Sean, we found that these plants were dying.”
“There might be any number of reasons for that.”
“Indeed there might be, but we’d been studying that area for nearly two years already. We know its ecosystem intimately, and there was no reason for them to decay in the manner we saw. Rain was plentiful, as always. The nutrient levels in the soil were all within acceptable ranges. We found no traces of toxins.” David stepped up to the third microscope. “But what we did note was that the phenomenon started a mere few weeks after the arrival of the pods, the rough timeframe we estimate it took the pods to completely fuse with the haulms.”
“You’re suggesting the pods themselves had something to do with this.”
“I am.”
Sean pictured the haulms spread high above the basin, the ponderous pods lowering and attaching. Just how conscious were these inscrutable beings? To date they’d exhibited no form of communication—either with one another or with humanity—that earthly science might detect. “Perhaps it’s a leaching of the soil near the haulms.”
David nodded like a professor to his prized student. “In the early weeks of our detecting the phenomenon, the withering was stronger near the base of the haulms, but since then, the rate of decay in the more remote areas has been strengthening, and now, since that equalization has occurred, the rate of decay has been steadily increasing.”
Sean’s mind was racing. “The roots…They’re forming a colony.”
David’s head jerked back. “Very good…It took us a long while to confirm those very suspicious, but we now believe it to be true. The pods have created a vast network beneath the Amazon Forest and are starting to bleed the life from it.”
“Wait a tick. Bleed? Some undiscovered Jovian byproduct causing decay is one thing, but you’re implying intent.”
“Not intent, exactly. I’ve no idea if there’s true intelligence—or anything we would recognize as intelligence—within those pods, but the beings that have arrived on our planet have to sustain themselves somehow. It’s nature’s most basic law.”
“Yes, but to suggest that they’re bleeding us seems like a bit of a stretch, doesn’t it?”
In answer to this, David stepped up to the third microscope and motioned to it.
Sean stared at it, a feeling of dread blooming within him. He stepped closer, leaned down, and stared into the eyepiece, the aches in his body now all but forgotten. Within he saw a similar slide of pollen tubes, but in the center was a very different cluster of cells. These were unlike anything Sean had ever seen. They were oddly shaped, with a strange ochre color and spicules reaching out from the walls of each cell. This microscope, unlike the other two, clearly had a quinta essentia filter in the lens arrangement. Sean could tell from the bright chromatic aberrations present, in the interior of the cells especially. It was one of David’s greatest contributions to the world of science, made and shared freely twenty years ago, well before Sean had started working with him. But this was very different than the ones Sean was familiar with. When he’d worked with David fifteen years ago, they’d been forced to capture images on daguerrotype plates, a process that—depending on how busy the university’s development labs were—took a day or two from exposure to viewable image.
This was an incredible breakthrough. The lens allowed him to see the fifth element itself with the naked eye as it moved through the aether.
David had proven without a doubt—shortly after the creation of lenses like the one being used here—not merely that quinta essentia could be viewed and measured, but that it pooled within all living things. It did, in fact, run throughout the entire universe, but where there was life, quinta essentia thrived. No one knew if it was created or if—the amount of quinta essentia being constant—it was merely drawn toward life, but experiment after experiment proved that life of any kind would accrete more of the fifth element as it grew.
And here, for the first time known to man, was one form of life drawing quinta essentia from another. The study of the elements was still a relatively new science, but nothing like this had ever been seen before. It had never even been considered.
“This means that,” Sean began. “This means… Does it happen to all life? Animals? Insects? Sea life?”
David nodded soberly. “Lower life forms—less complex life forms—are apparently more susceptible than animals and humans. Bacterial life in the Amazon is being decimated. We have more evidence that worms and other invertebrates are weakening, and that soon they’ll be dying in greater and greater numbers. And after that, it will start to affect us.” He paused for effect. “If it hasn’t already …”
“Why the Amazon?”
“Because life there is so vital. If the Jovians can sense the fifth element, then it stands to reason the haulms would have been drawn there.”
Sean shook his head. This was all so much to digest. “You’re talking about complete destruction, the loss of all life on Earth.”
“I am. It’s coming, Sean, and sooner than we know.”
“Then we go to the Royal Society. We tell them of your findings.”
“I would, but my history with them, Sean… After what happened with the two of us, they wouldn’t trust anything I offered up to them.” Sean opened his mouth to object, but David raised his hand and talked over him. “They’d open up a commission. They’d study the phenomenon.”
“As is proper.”
“Under normal circumstances I’d agree with you, but you know what will happen. They’ll examine every single thing I’ve done. They’ll insist on an expedition of their own making be sent to South America. They’ll demand they be allowed to make their own fluorite lenses, and none of them can make the kind I have here. They’re years behind me. All of them. But that wouldn’t stop them from demanding to know how they’re made, to know the process. They’d make their own, and they’d test those. And even then, even if all their findings were to corroborate what you and I already know to be true, there would be some that would claim that the potential effects aren’t as serious as we imagine, that the pods may, in fact, be benevolent, that they’re transforming the world for the better.”
“We could disprove that easily enough.”
“Yes, given time. But what we’re talking about is years of effort. I fear we have only months to do something about this, perhaps only weeks.”
“Then what are you suggesting?”
“There may be a way to reach them, to speak to them on another level.”
Sean shook his head, completely confused. “How can anyone speak to the pods? We’ve tried everything.”
David frowned. “We’ve hardly scratched the surface. There could be any number of ways to communicate with them.”
“Which would take years on its own.”
“That would be true if we didn’t already have clues.” David seemed to gather himself. “Our experiment, Sean. When we—when you—touched that basic plane of existence, I believe we were completely successful in our goals.”
“Successful?” Sean shook his arms, his muscles aching from the effort now that he’d been relatively idle for so long. “I was ruined, David! My life was ruined! How can you call that successful?”
“Whatever might have happened to you—and know that I will regret that to my dying day—you cannot deny that you were able to submerse yourself in quinta essentia. For a time, as our models predicted, you were quinta essentia.”
Understanding began to dawn on Sean. “You want me to do it again.”
“There’s no one else who can.”
“Then you do it.”
His face turned melancholy at this. “I wish I could. But I can’t. Not yet, in any case. I have to take measurements. I have to refine the process.”
“Then find someone else to volunteer for your bloody mad schemes!”
“I can’t do that, either. For all we know, there’s something specific about you, your makeup, that allowed you to complete the transition.”
Sean stepped up to David until they were almost chest-to-chest. “Do you have any idea the sort of life I’ve had since that day?”
“I can only imagine, Sean, and I’m—”
Sean poked him in the chest. “Truly sorry…Yes, I’ve heard it before. There hasn’t been a single day, not even after the Royal Society built this damned ligature for me, that I haven’t thought about killing myself. The pain is constant, running through every part of me like fire I can never rid myself of, not truly. You can’t know how that scratches away at the mind. It grates constantly, tearing me down until I’m raw from it! Maddened!”
David tried to speak again, but Sean shoved him backward so hard that he fell with a satisfying crash and skidded along the well-worn floorboards.
“You said all would be well, and then the experiment failed. I could have swallowed that. I might have gone on with something approaching a clear conscience, but you abandoned me! You claimed I’d done it on my own, that I’d stolen your research to claim the glory of being the first to touch quinta essentia!”
David looked up at him from the floor, his eyes, his face, filled with shame. It was unlike anything Sean had seen, even in the aftermath of their failed experiment. “Why didn’t you give me up, Sean?”
Sean tightened his hands into fists until they shook from it. “Because you were brilliant! You are brilliant. You have the kind of mind that comes along once a century. Once a millennium. You were going to do so much. So very much. Who was I to deny that to humanity? Who was I to claim that you couldn’t continue your work?”
David shrugged, pushing his spectacles back into place. “They found out anyway.”
They had. Of course they had. David had been stripped of rank and all the credentials granted by the University. Sean had been working toward his degree, using the money David could spare to pay him, hoping to earn his degree, become a Doctor Elementalis like David, but that had all changed after the accident. Afterwards, he could worry only about his body, about keeping it alive until the doctors from the Royal Society came up with something, anything, to help him, and even then, he would have a long way to go to repair the damage he and David had caused to his career. No matter that they’d eventually found David guilty of gross negligence in the pursuit of science. They hadn’t absolved Sean from his part in it.
After standing and adjusting his shirt, David stared Sean in the eye. “This is the world we’re talking about here, Sean. Not you and me. Not the Society. But everyone. Life on Earth.”
Sean felt consumed. He felt betrayed all over again. “I could die, David. Or are you going to give me assurances again?”
“No, you’re all too right. You could die, Sean. And there’s more. In a way, I believe the two of us are responsible for this entire series of events.”
“Responsible?” Sean felt confused. Angry. He wanted to run. He wanted to use his enhanced muscles to punish David for what he’d done, make him feel what he felt every day.
“I’m surprised you haven’t pieced it together yet. Our experiment. Fifteen years ago, we touched the very fabric of quinta essentia.” His eyes seemed to bore into Sean’s. “A mere two years before the haulms arrived.”
“Two years,” Sean said, ready to argue, but his mind was already racing through the calculations. Theories abounded about how quickly one might travel through space using elemental drives, but David himself—shortly before he’d been discredited—had put a new one forth: a way to travel by distorting and drawing upon the warp and woof of quinta essentia. According to David’s calculation, two years and ten days, roughly, was by a strange twist of probability the time it would take to travel from one world to nearly any other. Quinta essentia’s pull, converse to popular opinion in the science community, was stronger as the distance increased, which led to a tethering effect that might allow a starship—or an extraterrestrial being—to draw itself from one planet in the universe to another.
He thought back from the date they’d run the experiment to the first recorded sighting of the haulms. Two years and seventeen days. A mere six days off from David’s calculation. How could he have missed it?
He knew why, of course. He had still been in the thick of his rehabilitation then. The University had been furious, but many were concerned about their liability, so to make things look as though they were being magnanimous, they offered Sean a chance to receive their first set of human ligature. He’d accepted, for it meant a chance at life—some sort of life––however painful it might be. While he’d been there recuperating in the hospital, he’d hardly seen a single haulm—a few from the small window of his room, a few more from the place he was forced to exercise his muscles with the newly installed ligature, so the arrival of the Jovians, and whatever relationship they might have had to his experiment, simply hadn’t been on his mind.
But now the link was undeniable. Six days was certainly a reasonable time for the Jovians to mobilize and launch the haulm seeds toward Earth. They were parasites, then. Creatures poised like spiders on a web, waiting for the telltale signs of planets that were not only capable of storing quinta essentia, but had advanced to the point that there would be an abundance, enough for them to travel there, to revitalize themselves, perhaps reproduce, and then begin the process all over again.
He might have felt burdened by this new information—he should have—but the truth was this was incredibly freeing. To know that he might have the ability to help gave him hope and a sense of purpose that had been nearly snuffed out by their past failure. And David was right. Whatever success they’d achieved last time might have had everything to do with Sean himself. If he denied David’s request, there was no telling whether it would work for anyone else, or, even if it did work, how long it would take to perfect.
He had to do it. Not for David—certainly not for David—but for everyone else. For Therese. For his family. For the world.
“Where do we begin?” Sean asked.
David’s smile was slow in coming. He waved to the corner of the large open space, where a set of stairs led down. “In the basement, Sean. We can begin right now.”
* * *
In the basement of the factory was a set of equipment, clearly well cared for, that warred with the dark wooden rafters and uneven stone walls. Vats of glass containing a glowing amber liquid could have provided much of the light, but there were lamps of quinta incendia placed all around, their shaded points of light burning bright sapphire blue.
Sean stepped into the padded leather seat within a complex set of mechanical arms and lenses and tubes, and when he was comfortable, Vidnas, David’s assistant, secured him into it using triple-thick leather straps. As usual, David had thought well ahead. Sean’s ligature was strong, and they couldn’t risk him ripping his way out of them during the experiment itself.
Vidnas, his brown, almond-shaped turban a match for his expressive eyes, paused near Sean’s side. He smiled, his dark moustache and beard accentuating nearly perfect teeth. “Are you feeling well, sir?”
No. Sean wasn’t feeling well, not now that he was so near a return to the experiment that had devoured his future. He couldn’t keep the strange feelings of emptiness from his mind, the feelings of utter loss and loneliness.
“Feeling as well as I ever will,” Sean replied.
Vidnas patted his shoulder and moved to the set of metal stands nearby. Each stand held an armature with a set of lenses that would, when David gave the signal, be situated in a spherical formation around Sean’s head.
“Ready?” David said.
“Give Therese the letter, won’t you? If anything goes wrong?” He might have told her himself, but she would never have allowed him to come here and submit himself to this. She’d kill him first.
“Of course I will.”
“And tell her I love her?”
“Of course.”
Sean nodded. “Then I’m ready.”
With that, Vidnas and David began moving the lenses into place. They adjusted the clamps and telescoping rods so that the armatures rested at the proper angles and positions. Each of the armatures held twenty five lenses with watertight jars clamped to their backs. The jars were fed by tubes connected to a series of pipes that would be filled from the glowing vats of quinta integra, an extremely difficult-to-stabilize mixture of the four basic elements: incendia, aeris, terra, and unda.
As each set of lenses was moved carefully into place, Sean’s heart began beating harder and harder. His breath came rapid as a frightened hare.
“You’re about to hyperventilate,” David said as he glanced over. “Breathe deeper. From the stomach, remember?”
Sean did, and slowly the entire chromatic apparatus was maneuvered into place around him. Outside the sphere, Sean saw segmented visions of Vidnas and David moving about, making final preparations.
And then, at last, David gripped the valve that would begin the process. “Last chance,” he said with a melancholy smile.
Sean couldn’t help himself. He laughed. It was the exact same thing David had said just before their first experiment.
“Into the great beyond,” Sean replied, an echo of his own reply from fifteen years before.
David gave him a nod and strapped a set of thick, leather-wrapped goggles around his head—another incredible advancement, for surely David had developed them to view some crucial aspect of the experiment as it happened. He nodded to Sean—looking to all the world like some alien insect—and then threw the handle of the valve. The tank levels slowly decreased as the viscous amber liquid inched through transparent pipes. Slowly but surely, the quinta integra crept toward the narrow rubber tubes. The liquid split and split again, surrounding Sean like a hydra, each serpent doubling when its head was severed.
The liquid began filling the glass jars behind the lenses, and as they did, as more and more of the ingenious lenses David and Sean had developed were backed by the quinta integra, Sean’s mind began to expand.
He felt more than his own body. More than this room.
He floated free among the aether.
Became one with quinta essentia.
How beautiful. How utterly, unexplainably beautiful. A vast, endless world of chromatic shapes. He saw this place, this old abandoned shoe factory. He saw Vidnas and David and his own body. He saw the rundown factory streets and the River Wear that wound its way through Durham. He saw the university, the whole of Durham, the whole of England. He could feel Earth itself, the solar system, the Milky Way galaxy. Faster and faster it went, this expansion, until, just like the last time, he felt as though his mind were trying to encompass all of creation.
It was too much.
His mind was drifting from his body, which was exactly what had happened to him the first time they’d tried, exactly how his mind had been irreparably harmed, with its refusal to control his body as it once had.
David had told Sean about the changes he’d made to the elemental serum and the lenses themselves. In all likelihood, he’d said, the unchecked expansion should be limited, which should allow Sean to exert some amount of control.
Sean …
He wasn’t able to, though. He couldn’t. And his mind continued to attenuate as it stretched outward, through and throughout the fabric of the cosmos.
Sean, can you hear me?
By all that was good, he couldn’t do it. He would become lost this time. Lost for sure.
Sean, you must listen. The pods. They should be a sink for quinta essentia. They’re consuming it, Sean. Look for them. Feel for them. They’ll ground you.
Sean felt, only for a moment, his body tightening, heard a primal scream issuing from his throat. But then those sensations were gone, and he was alone once again. Alone with his thoughts in this endless, universal medium.
What David had said, though…The pods.
They were a sink. Consuming quinta essentia.
No other known beings fed on the fifth element. Not directly. That simply wasn’t the way the universe worked. The very fact that this natural law had once seemed so immutable, and now seemed every bit as implausible as a geocentric universe, grounded Sean. It drew him back toward his physical form and nearer to that very phenomenon.
And that’s when he felt them.
The pods. The pooling of intent near him, around him, surrounding, essentially, all life on Earth. Like a subtle adjustment of a lens bringing a landscape into focus, he could sense every part of them, and now that he could, he realized how very familiar they were. He’d felt them before, in that event fifteen years ago when he’d first entered the quintessence.
How could he have forgotten it?
They had called to him then, and they were calling to him now. He felt from them a yearning, a primal urge that spanned millennia. It wasn’t malicious, as his memory had somehow made it seem, but benign. He’d been so fearful of it years ago. He was still fearful, but not for his own sake, not any longer. He was fearful the Jovians wouldn’t understand humanity, that in their curiosity they’d trample the minds they’d come to examine, or they’d decimate life on Earth even as they studied it.
His heart, David. He’s going into tachycardia.
The pods were reaching in the only way they knew how. They were holding their hands out to him, ready to take him should he wish to come.
Should we continue?
A pause, and then, Just a moment longer.
Unlike the last time, the urge to accept their call was strong and growing stronger. He flung his mind outward, wondering what grand thing would happen.
Now, Vidnas. Shut it down.
And suddenly the feelings diminished.
He grasped for them, but they became dimmer and dimmer until—like a mote of light that had finally burned itself out—they winked from existence.
* * *
When Sean woke, it was to the sounds of clinking, like crystal goblets at a party. Had he come home? Was Therese readying for a party?
And then it all came back in a rush. David. The lab. The pods, and the way they’d called to him.
He forced his eyes to open and thought he was still in the basement of the warehouse, but when his mind cleared, he realized it wasn’t Vidnas before him, but a nurse in a white hospital gown, and she wasn’t cleaning the bell jars and the lenses that had surrounded him, but the set of vials the University required to refresh the liquid stored within the core of his ligature.
He felt so very weak. And his muscles, his joints, his skin, felt as though they’d been reforged improperly, leaving him more broken than before. Though he tried to stifle it, the pain brought on a weak groan that nevertheless attracted the nurse’s attention.
“Are you feeling very well?”
“I’m—” Sean could barely speak, so slurred were his words. “Where’s David?”
She continued about her work. “David who, sir?”
“David Lock.”
She shook her head. “Never heard of him.”
He stared at her. Surely David had brought him here. “How did I arrive?”
“You were found on Stockton Road, unconscious. Constable Adams found you and brought you in, and a good thing he did. Your fluid had nearly turned. Haven’t you been keeping an eye on it?”
“Of course he has.” Sean turned his head to find Therese standing in the doorway. She strode in to stand by the bedside. “Each morning. You can set your watch by it.”
The nurse gave Therese an icy stare. “Then I’m sure I don’t know why his fluid had degraded so.” And with that she topped the vials and left.
As the heels of her white leather shoes clicked away, more and more of the puzzle fell into place. He’d asked David why he didn’t perform the experiment on himself. I can’t, he’d said. Not yet, in any case. I have to take measurements. I have to refine the process.
He had to refine the process, which implied there would be another run of the experiment. He had needed Sean. He’d said so himself—Sean was the only one who’d entered quinta essentia so far—but he’d done it so that he could perfect the parameters surrounding the experiment. Which meant that he’d planned all along to do it himself afterward. That was the only explanation for leaving Sean as he had—so that he could remain anonymous in Durham until it was too late.
Therese stared down at Sean. Her hand lifted, but then she lowered it again. She knew from experience that even holding his hand at a time like this would cause him discomfort, but Sean reached out and took her hand, squeezed it, oblivious to the pain. “We have to talk.”
* * *
As Therese sat by his bedside, her eyes stared through him. Her hands were shaking. She glanced toward the cluster of clear vials hanging above Sean, the vials that had allowed him to retain some sense of normalcy in his tortured existence. The tears gathered in her eyes finally fell down along her cheeks. “I can’t do it, Sean.”
“Therese, I can’t go on like this.” He lifted his arms, the whirring of his ligature emphasized his point much more eloquently than he could with words alone. “It’s worse than before.”
Therese was crying freely now. “I’ll help more. We’ll hire a man to come to the house a few days a week. It won’t be so bad after a while.”
Sean took her hands in his. “I’m going to a better place.”
“I can’t…I can’t just let you go. I don’t know what I’ll do without you.”
“You’ll go on. You’ll be free.” Before she could speak again, he squeezed her fingers gently. “Now, Therese. There’s so little time left.”
She stared into his eyes for a handful of heartbeats, then another handful more. After wiping her tears away, and a short but powerful nod, she went to work. More quickly than any of the nurses could manage, she disconnected each of the feed and return tubes from his ligature. She helped him up in his bed, a veritable angel for how strong she was being, how little of his own power he needed to exert, lest he moan and the two of them were caught. She disrobed him and helped to pull on his clothes. After giving him a familiar look, asking him if he were ready to be on his own, he nodded, and then she leaned in and gave him a deep kiss.
Bliss, he thought. A more tender thing he had never felt.
She left the room, leaving the door open a crack. “Who’s been tending to Sean Brannon?” Her voice was so loud the entire ward must have heard her. Some unintelligible reply came, but Therese talked over the woman. “While you’ve been ensuring the levels were correct, he was dry as a bone. Did you even see the color of his urine?” A soft reply came. “No, I’ve given him water. He’s hydrated. What I want to ensure is that he manages to remain that way while I’m gone.” Another mumbled reply, also cut off. “No, I’ll be speaking to the attending physician, thank you very much!”
“Bless you,” Sean said, as he slipped from the room and limped toward the stairs at the end of the hall.
* * *
Sean reached the warehouse at the end of an excruciating walk. He would normally have loosened up by now, but things were worse than ever. His knees kept wanting to lock up, and his hips and ankles burned so badly he collapsed several times. But he got up, fixated on the siren call of the pods—in some ways a distant memory, but in others the entirety of his being.
The massive, rolling door into the factory was closed but not locked. He pulled it aside and made his way down the stairs to the darkness, staggered to the doorway where the brightness of David’s lab was revealed.
David was sitting where Sean had sat less than a day before, and Vidnas was putting the last of the armatures into place around his head.
“Stop!” Sean called.
“Sean?” David said, his head moving back and forth to get a clear view of him.
“You can’t do this, Vidnas.”
Vidnas stared between David within the sphere of chromatic lenses and Sean, clearly startled, but more than this, with a glimmer of embarrassment.
“You can’t let him go,” Sean went on. “You need him. The world needs him.”
“Sean, stop it,” David said. “This needs to be done.”
“And I’m the one to do it.” Sean kept his focus squarely on Vidnas. He spread his arms wide and strode forward. “I’m ruined, Vidnas. I am ruined, and David is whole, in mind as well as in body. Can you even conceive of what the world might lose today were he suddenly gone from it?”
Vidnas stared deeply into Sean’s eyes, but before he could say anything, David began pushing apart the stands that held the lenses, at least enough that he could extricate himself from them. “Get him out, Vidnas! We have to get him out!”
“Don’t listen to him,” Sean said, wincing as he took a step forward, his arms still outstretched. “You cannot.”
It was clear from the expression on Vidnas’ face that he was considering Sean’s words, but he stepped back when David strode to a nearby workbench and picked up a syringe. He filled it with a clear liquid and then began walking toward Sean.
“Don’t do this, David. Let me go. Please. You owe me this much.”
David’s face was red, and the expression was more intense than Sean had ever seen. “I was the one that brought them here, Sean. Not you.”
“I’m as much to blame.”
“You aren’t!” David’s face was red. Blue veins pulsed on his forehead and along his neck. “I practically forced you into that chair. I ran that experiment and then watched you suffer and tried to pretend it was all your idea! The Jovians are here because of my actions, and I cannot, I will not, allow you to take my place. They’re my responsibility.”
“Responsible or not, I’m not going to let you do it.”
“That, my dear friend, is no longer up to you.” He strode forward, holding the syringe high, out of Sean’s grasp, while using his other hand to grab the ligature rods connected along Sean’s collar bones. “I’m deeply sorry for everything that’s happened to you. I was a fool, then—young and worried for my career. I should never have betrayed you.”
He tried wrestling Sean to the ground, but Sean was not powerless. It caused pain, but his ligature was a beautifully designed machine. He grabbed David’s shirt with one hand, grabbed the arm holding the syringe with the other. He squeezed David’s arm until he cried out from the pain and dropped the syringe.
David, knowing the tide was turning, grabbed him about the waist and pushed him, knocking him off balance and sending him crashing to the ground. But this was ineffectual, too. It was only a matter of time before Sean got the upper hand. He wrestled David down to the cold floor, began crawling on top of him, all while David scrabbled uselessly at Sean’s back.
Then, suddenly, he was no longer able to hold David down.
Sean’s mind raced. He didn’t understand until his time in the hospital came rushing back to him. How could he have been so foolish? David had reached the cluster of controls—the mind of the ligature, in essence—at the center of Sean’s back. The hospital would have removed the panel that normally protected it. He hadn’t thought to have Therese put it back on before leaving.
The ligature was losing strength quickly, forcing his own muscles to do more of the work, which was causing more and more pain.
David tried to rise. Sean grabbed his shirt, to hold him in place, but it was a simple matter for David to wrest his shirt free of Sean’s weakened grip. He stared down at Sean with sympathetic eyes, his gaze full of regret. “I’m truly sorry, Sean.”
But before he could do anything else, his eyes went wide.
Then they went cloudy, and his body fell limp.
Into the waiting arms of Vidnas.
Sean could only stare as Vidnas laid David gently down and moved to Sean’s side. He rolled Sean over and did something at the open panel, and the strength to Sean’s ligature suddenly returned.
“Thank you,” Sean said as Vidnas helped him to his feet.
Vidnas said nothing as he helped Sean hobble his way toward the padded seat David had so recently occupied.
* * *
Sean stared up at the lenses, watched the amber liquid flow through the tubes and bifurcate over and over again until all the lenses around him were aglow.
As before, his mind began to expand, slowly at first, but then in wider and grander increments until it felt as though he’d swallowed the cosmos.
He’d come to understand quinta essentia in a way he’d never expected. It shouldn’t be so surprising; he was a part of it, after all. All life was, from microbial life all the way up to advanced life forms—mammals, humans, the Jovians—and it made him wonder whether quinta essentia itself weren’t some form of life. A grand, enigmatic system not understandable by him—not yet, at least—but perhaps by the Jovians. He hoped he might one day share in such knowledge. Perhaps add to it.
For that was why the pods had come. They had come to find the beings that had reached out to them. They had come to fold those into their greater consciousness. And when that was done, they would move on. There were other worlds, other forms of life they hoped to commune with, which meant they would eventually uproot; they would travel to another world, and find more. And more after that. He could feel them already, places where haulms had seeded other worlds, which were now waiting to be visited.
Like all life, the pods were evolving, slowly accreting knowledge and wonder and experience to … to do who knew what? Sean certainly had no idea, but he hoped one day he might.
With care, he drew his attention inward, back toward Earth. The collective minds of the pods became more and more clear. In fact, so did all life on Earth. It felt like a thing he’d always been in touch with at some level, but now, as if a light had been shone on it at last, he could sense it separate from himself.
He recognized he was merely delaying now. The pods were calling to him. And for his part—though he was not without regrets—he knew he was ready.
And so, after one last longing glance to the world around him, he reached out.
And allowed them to lift him up.