CHAPTER TWO
Jei
Like I said, that was four months ago.
Now, I sat on the tank tread of a Bradley 9000 on Lem’s jungle-ridden home planet, leaning back against the warm, warped metal of the wall that shielded the soft whispers of the vibrating engine inside. A wrapper crackled as I drew a protein bar from my uniform’s chest pocket and ripped it open with my teeth.
“Why won’t they tell me what happened to her?” I asked.
The oblong jade leaves of the nearest bush shook, but I heard no answer.
“You’ve been quiet lately,” I said, ripping a chunk of hard goo off the bar. It squished as I chewed.
The leaves rustled again, and now I felt, rather than smelled, an earthy perfume floating from the ground up toward the stars that struggled to peep through the thick jungle canopy. The stars winked at me, like he knew something, but didn’t want to tell me yet.
“Do you like her better than me,” I said, rather than asked. “You talk more when she’s around.”
The branches bristled in the canopy above me; wet droplets shimmered as they fell from the shadowed coin-shaped leaves to trickle over the rough cloth on my shoulders. I looked up. A message? Perhaps. For my energy-being friend outside of time, every moment, past or future, was now. He could indeed flick a planet in the past to butterfly-effect a breeze right where I needed to see it in the present.
But not everything was about me. I knew that. She never did. She saw a message in every weird pattern in the tree bark, and every lumpy rock in a creek bed.
“Did you send her something she thought was a mission, Njandejara?” I nodded his name into the evening. “Is that why Lem left?”
My commanding officers had told me she had gone on extended leave, but I’d never heard of anyone taking four months of leave in the middle of essential wartime operations. Her parents thought she was going somewhere with me. I didn’t know what to tell them.
Must be on some mission only upper command knows, I told myself again, again insecure, wondering why they would assign her alone, without me.
A cold voice—high like the cry of a feathered cat and fluttery like the wings of the flying lizards it hunts—interrupted my thoughts. I groaned but didn’t turn around.
The tinny heels of a female soldier’s boots clicked against the tank tread as the unwanted voice jumped down behind me and repeated her question.
“Who are you talking to?” she asked.
I’d already told Lt. Seria to leave me alone. I’d only requested the post near her tank tonight because I thought Lem was coming home here.
“Don’t you have the gunner position,” I said, rather than asked. I wanted Seria to get back into the tank and let me be.
“It’s standard to take a breath outside for ten minutes every hour, for our health,” she said. “You forget protocol.”
“Mm.” Somebody had forgotten protocol, but it sure wasn’t me. Platoon romance was against regs, and ever since I’d become a star Paradox Warrior, platoon romance seemed to be Seria’s one and only goal. The slim muscular figure didn’t burn my eyes or anything, but I didn’t like the idea of any figure climbing me to success like a disposable ladder.
“I thought maybe you could show me how your mace works,” she said. I didn’t bother to ask whether or not that was innuendo. She hopped down from the tank into the mossy dirt around it and paced into my line of sight. Some kind of seed had made its way into the fruity center of my protein bar, and I spat it out as Seria walked by me.
“I was talking to an interdimensional,” I said.
Theeere we go.
Seria’s horrified face brought a smile to mine. She coughed, and brushed a strand of blonde back into her helmet. “Well—ah—why do you think you’re doing that?”
Overall, an attempt at tolerance. Annoyingly enough, now she’d earned an answer. “Because he’s my friend,” I said.
“He? It has a … gender?”
“Yeah. I guess, if I have to think about it, he’s the Yang, and our dimension, and all of us, are Yin, so he’s the he and we’re a she.”
“You’re—a she?”
“Bloodseas, no, just in comparison with him, our universe is a dark emptiness, a soft warm holding, and he’s an entering li—you know what, that sounds stupid.” I clenched my jaw and tore a loose string off my uniform, avoiding eye contact. “It’s hard to explain if you haven’t met him yourself.” My embarrassment made me grumpier, but now he decided to let me hear him, loud and clear, as he asked for an introduction.
No way.
He nudged at my elbow.
Ugh, okay, fine. “Would you like to meet him,” I grumbled.
“Ah, no, I’m good, thanks.” She rocked on her toes and twiddled her fingers through each other, coughing again. Good, she was embarrassed, too. Maybe the weirdness of my invisible friend would turn her off. Maybe I should say something weirder.
“Lem thinks the universe is about to go into thermodynamic collapse, and our interdimensional—his name is Njandejara—is the key to saving it,” I said.
She flinched. “Yes I—I figured she might have something to do with it.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You’re not like her. You’re a rational guy, and a model soldier, so …”
“So I don’t talk to invisible people?”
Seria backed up, palms raised. “Look, I don’t get it. But I’ll always defend your right to speak to whatever ectoplasms you choose.” She raised her wrist and pulled back her sleeve to reveal a fraying twine bracelet. “We all have our oddities.”
Ah. The bracelet meant she hailed from a pale-skinned tribe of humans who lived on my homeworld, Alpino, on the opposite pole from where I grew up. They wore dragon-skin there, and ate only vegetables and reptiles, and the Growen took issue with the low safety standards and deregulated environment of their creature-centered lifestyle. Her people sent a yearly contingent to the Frelsi Coalition, but most of them stayed on Alpino to defend their tribal grounds. Seria was clearly on the fast-track for promotion if she took deployments this far from home.
I nodded to her, understanding. We all believed in this diversity, in our own way—heck, we had to.
But before she could speak again I turned my back, tapping my wristband to scroll through my messages. She hesitated once, as if to apologize once more, and then her tin-tinny boots finally left me in peace.
I never felt awkward, or had to hide my interdimensional, around Lem. He stayed with us like a silent third friend; moved, through us, like a bonded force. I could still hear a comforting echo of his breath in that last mission, four months ago, in the crispy crunch-crunch of underfoot snow …
Four months ago
Lem marched beside me across the snowy plain, hunching her shoulders against the cold with her hands tucked inside her puffy cold-weather suit. The bristles of her face seemed to twitch in the breeze. Presently, she turned to me.
“Ghosts make me sad,” she said. “They’ve got some kind of a brain, you know. We’re all programming after all, biological or not. Can you imagine being alone out there, forever, in the big … forever …”
The big forever.
Her eyes widened suddenly. My lips froze. “Oh shyte, not again.”
We looked around, our eyes scrambling for cover like rodents for burrows; we’d left the clump of trees behind to cross the open plains, and it had only just hit our minds that we stood now in the midst of a blank whiteness that expanded in all directions, forever. Above us shimmered a reflective, onyx sky, opaque and harsh, measuring infinite, and I could rationalize it—say the black sheen here in the northern continent came from the magnetic field playing with the light from this planet’s rare-earth metal moons—but it seemed so much more true to say the void of space had swallowed all its stars, and now opened its maw to consume us, too.
Lem and I gripped hands. We stood for a moment both keenly aware of the panic attack about to ensue. Here it came … here it …
My chest ached and thumped; I could feel my lungs squeezing in on themselves, pulverizing and choking me because the sky, the wide sky over us, around us, was eating us. My temples pulsed with fire. My face seemed to freeze, and my vision blurred as the sky chewed my eyes and a fuzzy sheen overtook all things …
“Breathe,” I coughed, both to Lem and myself.
And it passed. We coughed, like every time before, and brushed our sweaty hands off on our uniforms without a word as we trudged on.
This was the most important thing Command didn’t know. The kinds of mind-torture that produce fear of open spaces aren’t kinds of torture you talk about with anyone but the battle-buddy who went through it with you.
“Ghosts make me sad,” Lem repeated, like nothing had happened. “I’m sad I killed it. It’s not like it’s free to choose who it attacks.”
I was more bummed about the loss of our ship, but hey. To each his own.
We found a slave caravan without a problem using the known trade routes. Escaped slaves and the helpful Growen “do-gooders” who caught them were a common sight in this sector, so no one questioned me when I loaded Lem and her spider-face into the fur-covered wagon and insisted on sitting next to her. The reward for her capture was mine, after all.
Lem kept her eyes downturned like a good captive might, but I still caught the smile that twitched at the corners of her mouth with the first beat of the wings of the pegasi pulling the caravan. The creatures’ shoulder muscles writhed before us like engine turbines as their wool rippled in the wind, and with each massive flap a gust of cool air blew back into the covered wagon. I missed this. Living on Lem’s home planet I never got to see snow anymore. I wished I could take off the helmet now and feel the winter’s breath on my face.
We smelled the industrial complex before we saw it. Oil, aluminum dust, and feces. When we saw it, it was a black blotch sending blue smears into the sky.
At the steel checkpoint gates Lem had no problems—slaves didn’t need names and numbers—but they couldn’t find my made-up ID number in the system for some reason, and to my surprise they “detained” me and sent me to wait for “the magistrate” in a dingy fenced-in courtyard around a hut made of fur.
“I told you you should’ve stolen your identity from one of the prisoners back home,” Lem whispered as she waited with me.
“I didn’t have time to interview some Growen murderer.”
“Growen are people, too.”
I laughed, but the joke didn’t seem like her, and now it sounds ominous to my memory.