Universe Between Read online

  They weren’t laughing anymore.

  Not like they did at first, when she told Gregor she wanted to visit the ancient site called Chaco Canyon. One little drop of Native American blood in her came from the people who once populated that area.

  Nobody cared, he argued, once he’d stopped laughing.

  She figured she couldn’t go forward, so to speak, without understanding where she was coming from. That meant finding out who she really was under all those names.

  She told Daddy the trip would be research for her thesis. He always approved of research trips, and so he hadn’t minded loaning her his new little starhopper.

  What Daddy hadn’t known, and what PAM promised not to report, was that Gregor would come along with her.

  And now he was going to spread his DNA all over the interior of Daddy’s sporty new flyabout. It would never come clean again, not in a hundred thousand years of sterilization.

  He moaned again and added a gurgle of sound, as if he wanted to say something but could only hiccup.

  She pointed out the puke green handle in front of Gregor. “Just pull it out and hold the cup to your mouth and nose,” she said. “The vacuum and PAM will take care of everything else. Right, PAM?”

  Gregor groaned. “I have to be home by seven.”

  “We’ll get you back in time, won’t we, PAM?”

  But PAM didn’t answer. Now Mila wondered if maybe, just maybe, it was a possibility that Daddy’s computer had gone Hal.

  Oh, shit.

  Well, that wasn’t such a big problem, now was it? After all, Mila had taken basic starhopper flying. She just hadn’t passed. Never mind that she’d never fallen into a wormhole before.

  How tough could it be?

  She reached for the emergency controls. She stabbed in the necessary sequence to override PAM.

  “Mi, what the hell are you doing?”

  “Getting you home by seven. Relax.”

  It was already working. His flesh tone warmed a degree or two, and the flashes of light streaming past them suddenly disappeared. He sighed and straightened.

  The starhopper smoothed out, coming out of its rolls and thundering bounces. She crashed back into herself, floating against the straps that held her in place. No heaviness. No lights. No vomit.

  Gregor sighed. “What the hell was that?”

  Mila ignored him. “Hmmm, I don’t recognize where we are, not exactly.”

  “We’re lost? Lost?”

  “Well, no, not exactly. I just don’t know where we are.”

  “Quadrant four near space,” said the computer.

  Someone finally spoke through Daddy’s computer, even though PAM should’ve been disabled by now. Obviously, that hadn’t happened. Mila had maybe missed a stroke or two of the sequence. But in any case, it wasn’t PAM speaking, or certainly not the PAM whom Mila had always known.

  It was a deep, husky, MALE voice. And sexy. VERY sexy. It was a voice Mila had never heard before. With just a hint of suave.

  She was certain that Daddy had not programmed in a male to his personal manager system.

  And the new voice couldn’t be Gregor trying to tease her. She’d never heard the fun guy speak suave like that, not even when he was play-acting.

  Now Mila sighed. Daddy must’ve installed a default to override her override. Oh hell. Back to the problem of their location.

  She hadn’t studied astronomy yet, and she didn’t understand the naming system that the Worlds Federation had come up with after the Reorganization. “In English, what does ‘quadrant four near space’ mean?”

  “Otherwise known as Alpha Centauri,” the new PAM said breathlessly.

  She couldn’t think of him as PAM. What would she call him? PIM?

  “Holy crap, Mi,” Gregor said. “That wormhole dumped us out at the nearest extrasolar system to Earth!”

  Did he think she was stupid? She studied the star map that PIM displayed in the holo cube. Dead ahead lay a type M starlet the size of a bean. Proxima Centauri, the third and most remote of the trio of stars known together as Alpha Centauri. And beyond Proxima was a dancing pair of yellow stars known creatively as A and B.

  She didn’t make it up.

  Through the spacescreen, she caught sight of the bean amidst a myriad of stars, and she watched it grow, swelling to the size of a gourd. A and B brightened in space, dominating the surrounding stars. That’s when she noticed a speck hanging close—well, relatively close—to the reddish gourd that was Proxima.

  “Take us closer, PIM.”

  It was a world.

  “The place looks dead to me,” Gregor said with a frown. “I think we should turn around now.”

  “What’s your rush? It’s not seven yet. PIM, can you magnify the surface?”

  It always made her dizzy when the spacescreen zoomed in like it did just now. Gregor reached for the green handle, but Mila leaned closer to the screen. Red plains swept past the screen. Littered with rocks. Scored by canyons and backdropped by mountain ranges. An occasional butte or two or three stuck up like cut off fingers.

  “PIM, did you double back and take us to Earth when we weren’t looking?”

  She hoped.

  In that sexy voice, Daddy’s computer gave Mila more precise coordinates. Clearly, they weren’t Earth’s.

  “What the heck is that?” Gregor said, pointing to a shape on the screen.

  A circle.

  A perfect circle.

  “Okay, put us down there, PIM.” And then to Gregor, “We’re going for a little walk.”

  2

  PIM landed the starhopper smack in the center of the circle. Sexy Voice refused to open the doors until after going through the standard procedure, which in this case was a boring list of atmospheric readings and consequent warnings. Going without a suit on the surface of Proxima a was definitely not advised.

  Well, duh.

  PIM finally let them out. Mila’s skin prickled inside her suit. The sound of her own deep breathing rubbed her raw. She felt giddy. Intoxicated. Just wait until she told her classmates about this.

  What, exactly, was this?

  She spun in a slow, dizzying circle, taking it all in. If she didn’t know better, she’d have sworn she was still in Chaco Canyon. There was that smooth wall encircling her. Missing notches at precise intervals. Above and beyond the wall, a jagged horizon loomed in the distance, meeting a violet sky. Three suns hung low to the mountain peaks, casting shadows and spots of light to dance across the diameter of the surface where she and Gregor and the starhopper stood. The suns played light tricks with their feet.

  “Holy crap!” Gregor said. “Aliens had to have built this!”

  For once, Mila couldn’t think of a damned thing to retort.

  This place was a Chaco Canyon look-alike. Native Americans—the people who owned the one drop of her blood—had built the original. She didn’t think they’d had space flight. So who had built this place? Native Centaurians?

  Or someone else.

  Who? Where were they?

  Someone else had built both places, twins to each other. In neighboring star systems.

  She felt cold. Chilled to her core. Numb from the ices of the universe. But it wasn’t cold inside her suit.

  “Okay, PIM,” she said, mumbling through gnashing teeth. “I get the point.”

  Maybe, just maybe, if she was lucky, she hadn’t really seen anything more than a fancy simulation. Wouldn’t that be just like Daddy? A wake-up call, reminding her to get on with the program.

  Later, Daddy. Just let me have a little fun first.

  She turned back to the starhopper with Gregor in tow. “We’ve seen enough.”

  “Your journey has just begun,” PIM said.

  They climbed back into their seats, sealed up the doors, and unsealed their suits. “Take us home, PIM.” Mila crossed her fingers. She really, REALLY didn’t want to have to override the computer again.

  PIM lifted them off from Proxima a and dropped them ba
ck into the wormhole for the return trip to their comfy quarters on L5. So much for Chaco Canyon, Mila thought, grinding her teeth through the riptide of the flashing wormhole. Gregor’s face went pasty again. She suspected that once she got Gregor back by seven, that would be the last she would ever see of him.

  Fine. Just, fine.

  But she had to confess that she could easily become addicted to the thrilling high of this wormhole ride. She didn’t need Gregor to hold her back.

  3

  “Oh, shit,” Gregor said when they fell out of the wormhole. He reached for the green handle.

  Filling two thirds of the spacescreen before them, a planet traced a curving line. The starhopper seemed to be orbiting this world. Whatever world it was. It didn’t look like Earth, not with all that water down there.

  Mila groaned. “You must’ve put us into the wrong wormhole, PIM.”

  “I don’t think so,” he said in his sexy male voice.

  “Then where are we? This isn’t Earth.”

  “Quadrant 16, mid-space,” PIM said.

  “But you were supposed to take us home. Daddy’s going to kill us all.”

  “We are following the trail to home. To your home.”

  Something in the sound of his gargled r’s tickled her bones. “Trail? What trail?”

  “I have to be home by seven,” Gregor said. “I need a full night’s sleep before my show tomorrow.”

  Mila nearly exploded, but not with laughter. Why had she ever thought he was fun? “Can’t you see? That doesn’t matter anymore.”

  She wondered. What did matter? Going home.

  “Look, PIM,” she said. “This is cute, but we’re getting tired. We’ve had enough already.”

  “We are almost there. We must stop and ask for directions.”

  “What directions?”

  “The signposts that our people left behind. A trail of sun dials leads through the vastness of the universe, pointing the way home.”

  “Our people?” Mila eyed the green handle. Just to make sure it was still there. Not because she needed to use it. That was so un-fun.

  “Our people have charged me with seeing you home safely,” he said breathily.

  The spacescreen zoomed in, showing a ruffled sea. Whitecaps broke around an island in the center of the ocean that covered this world. In the center of the island was a circle. PIM landed the starhopper in the center of the circle and once again scrolled through the boring list of atmospheric readings.

  This time they didn’t need their suits. Mila thought she would drown, breathing in the muggy air. She turned in a slow circle, feeling attached by an invisible leash to the wall that surrounded them. This time all she saw beyond the wall was a flat, watery horizon. A single sun hung low in the pale sky. Instead of the criss-cross of shadows and light beams from the Centaurian circle, a single beam of light pointed the way.

  “Ah-ha,” said PIM. “Now we can move on.”

  4

  The trail of sun dials led home.

  Mila’s one drop of Native American blood recognized those giant circles as sun dials. But her two parts human couldn’t overrule her three parts alien. And she’d screwed up.

  Screwed up by fighting the call to go home. She was in season now, ready to spawn. That’s why the call felt so strong. That’s why her people had sent PIM to fetch her.

  Too bad about Gregor, though. He could navigate home using the sun dial trail, but he wouldn’t make it by seven. Wormholes were too much fun!

  Introduction to “The Mooring Buoy”

  This story marks Jamie McNabb's first appearance in Fiction River, but not his last. He also has stories upcoming in our Past Crimes and Pulse Pounders issues. His books are available online courtesy of Soapbox Rising Press.

  Jamie writes that this story came from a workshop exercise.

  “The instructor gave each of the participants a toy and told us to use it as a springboard…. I received a top that reminded me of a mushroom anchor. Mushroom anchors are often used to secure mooring buoys in marine parks and other anchorages. What if the management of a marine park wanted to enforce, with prejudice, the use of the park’s mooring buoys, as opposed to allowing boaters to anchor anywhere they pleased?”

  The answer to that question takes us to a very original universe between.

  The Mooring Buoy

  Jamie McNabb

  Charles De Courcy, Ph.D., looked at the holograms of the mushroom-shaped object, and concluded that he might, just might get his old job back. The thought made him very happy.

  His current job did not make him very happy. For one thing, his job was aboard the planetary survey ship Plumper, and for another, although he loved ships and boats in general, he had always despised survey ships, especially those of the maritime variety, of which Plumper was one. It was an inexplicable quirk, irrational, but there it was.

  Plumper was currently plying the oceans and charting the islands of Barkley IV, an indisputably quasi-earthlike planet, currently under intense colonization. As for the Plumper, she and her two sister ships had been coaxed down from their construction orbit in pieces and assembled, hastily and not very expertly, on a patch of dry ground near the water’s edge.

  To put it mildly, there had been several such patches “up for grabs,” as the captain had phrased it.

  From there, the colonial authorities on-planet had completed and dispatched the ships.

  De Courcy’s office, where he was poring over the image of the mushroom-shaped object, was a cold, damp, poorly lit cubbyhole down in the bowels of the ship. It smelled of curing paint and lubricating oil. The room’s one bright spot was a holograph of his beloved sailboat, Minerva, an eleven-meter-long sloop. She was light, narrow, and fast.

  Things didn’t get any better when he wasn’t working. His sleeping cabin, although located in “officer’s country,” was worse than his office. It was cold, damp, and poorly lit, too; however, there was no Minerva and thanks to the ship’s atrocious ventilation system, the space reeked of tobacco smoke from the officer’s lounge, cooking grease from the galley, and rancid garbage from countless places from the wardroom pantry to the crew’s mess. The taste, as it were, of these delightful elements permeated everything: the food, the drinking water, and the air itself. Nothing was immune.

  The ship’s engines, generators, and pumps kept up a constant rumble and whine that rendered ordinary conversation a thing of the past. To make matters worse, the incessant vibration rattled the whole structure—the decks, the bulkheads, the doors, the hatches, the latches, the dogs, and even the lighting fixtures. It jostled coffee cups off of tables, and hurled them down onto steel decks, where, inevitably, they shattered. Miniature whitecaps blanketed the water standing in the toilet bowls.

  In short, Plumper was an affront to the disciplines of naval architecture and marine engineering, not to mention esthetics and the creature comforts. She was not, as the saying goes, “a home and a feeder.”

  Moreover, the never-ending vibration, never mind the actual motion of the ship, played havoc with the fluid in De Courcy’s inner ears—or so he maintained. The ship’s surgeon said otherwise and suggested a mild antidepressant, which De Courcy refused to take.

  No, it could not be said that the good ship Plumper made Charles De Courcy, Ph.D. feel one damn bit happy, and yet, apparently, she was destined to be the instrument by which he would drag his life back from the brink of professional oblivion.

  Among the members of Plumper’s crew, De Courcy had the distinction of being the only exoarchaeologist. He also had the distinction of being the only member of the crew who had been, first, summarily removed from his tenured position at New Chicago University and, second, offered a survey job as a way of “possibly” worming his way back into academia and polite society.

  De Courcy didn’t give a shit about polite society, except to ridicule it, but he was, quite inexplicably, fond of the academic life. It had less than nothing to recommend it, was deadly dull, had all the char
m of a cobra, and wasn’t the least bit civilized, but he did love it so.

  At the moment, as far as he was concerned, by official pronouncement, that life was a fond memory, light years away, but now, quite unexpectedly, it was within reach again, even, possibly, from a faraway mud ball like Barkley IV. No, that was unfair. It was within reach precisely because of Barkley IV.

  Among the habited worlds of the Stuart Sector, Barkley IV had the distinction of being the only one covered with more water than solid ground. In fact, it was eighty percent covered with water. The water was deep in places, but for the most part, it was no more than five hundred meters deep. Most of it was less than a hundred meters deep. Thirty and seventy-five meter readings were common.

  The twenty percent of the planet that was land, or what passed for land, was grouped into several low-lying archipelagos: rocks, islets, and islands. There was nothing the size of a continent anywhere on the planet. The highest elevation was 237.56 meters.

  There was no evidence of sentient life, that is to say, life that was as sentient as human beings, if one could, in all candor, call human beings sentient, in the first place. De Courcy doubted it. That was what made universities such enjoyable places—all that intellectual might with nothing to do but envy and scheme.

  Speaking of which . . .

  De Courcy commed the bridge. He made his report to the officer of the watch, repeated it to the first officer, repeated it again to the captain, repeated it yet again to the colonial authorities on-planet, who told them to stand by.

  The engine note dropped and the ship slowed to a stop. She fell off broadside to the wind, and rolled on the swell. The vibration did not stop, but now the rhythmic clink and thunk of loose objects, shifting as the ship rolled sickeningly, was added as an undernote to the general din.