Thirdspace, p.12
Thirdspace, page 12
But she was fortunate in that there were apparently no gremlins mucking up the works. The massive lights on the superstructure switched on, throwing the artifact into harsh relief against the darkness of space.
She let out a breath, having passed one hurdle. She tried not to let the relief sound in her voice, because she didn't want to give anyone listening in on the channel the slightest hint that she'd been at all concerned. Utter confidence all the way, that was what she was shooting for.
"Activating scanner array," she continued. No one who heard her would have suspected that she'd been anything but positive of the results-every step of the way. "We'll begin with metallurgical analysis, then continue with deep-field resonance scans to see what's inside that thing."
Something caught her eye on one of the monitors, the one she'd been having problems with. At first she thought it was the equipment again, but then she realized that, no, it was the lights around the artifact itself. They were flickering on and off.
The thing looked like the Christmas tree from hell. "Probe One, we're losing the light a little. Can you correct?"
"Confirmed," came back Kuehler's voice. "Increasing power to lighting grid." After a long moment, the lights began to come on stronger than before.
The sight took Trent's breath away as she stared at the gleaming blackness of the artifact, now fully illuminated and ready to yield its secrets. "Perfect," said Trent, and she wasn't entirely able to keep the awe out of her voice.
Awe, however, caused her attention to waver, just enough that she missed an important detail. On one section of the artifact, some of the hieroglyphs were starting to glow. Had she managed to see that from her vantage point, her scientific excitement and very Human sense of wonder might well have been replaced by a sense of worry, perhaps even gnawing doubt.
And she would have been well-advised to acknowledge those feelings. For the light, in this case, was indeed beginning to unleash the truth...
The first to fall to the truth was a merchant.
His name was Rogers, a middle-aged black man who'd had a rather slow day. This was something of a disappointment to him, for Rogers was acutely aware of the vast influx of people coming to Babylon 5, and had anticipated a significant jump in the souvenir business. Unfortunately all these IPX people were like single-minded drones. They came in, they did then-work, they slept-it was theorized; no one had actually seen it happening-they ate like locusts, and they went back to work. Not a lot for vendors like Rogers to profit from.
It was past the time when he usually closed up his stand down in the Zocalo, but the day had been so utterly uneventful that he'd started dozing at his display.
Rogers generally had no problem sleeping. Closed his eyes and he was gone, that was ol' Rogers. And once he was out, it was damned near impossible to wake him...
It is there. . . .
He moved fitfully in his sleep...
The Maelstrom is there. Roiling, blue, red, and purple, the colors tumbling over one another, surging and swirling, and you are being drawn into it. . . .
He moaned softly, adjusting his head as if doing so would clear the images from his mind. Strange images, in color. This was odd; usually he dreamt in black and white.
And the world is there, a world racked with lightning, cloudy and terrible-looking. A place you've seen before, in the dimmest and most faint of nightmares, a place that has been part of human consciousness since humanity first staggered from the primordial ooze.
And it is there, the Black Tower, as ancient as death itself. It rises two miles straight up into the sky, looking at once manufactured and organic, as if half of it had been grown, and the other half constructed. Lightning rips through the sky, and you feel cold, so cold. There is a miasma of color burning itself into your soul.
You approach the Tower, and find your gaze, your attention, your very soul, drawn toward one window in particular. You sense that the window is several stories tall, and there's something within, moving so quickly, darting past the opening, pausing now and again to look out at you from within, and then receding once more. But you sense it rather than see it, sense its incredible age, and a smell wafts to you.
Your eyes sting a bit, as if you've entered a smoky room, and you choke on something you can't see, and then the smell is suddenly sweet, the most wonderful thing you've ever experienced, and it pulls you closer to the Tower, closer to the window, closer, and you see flashing tentacles, and scales and mouths and eyes, the eyes, they are looking right at you, they have noticed you, you have drawn its attention and there is terror within you such as you have never known as it reaches out to you, its tentacles whipping through the air to engulf you and you cannot. . .
"Keep it away!" screamed Rogers.
Everyone in the Zocalo was looking, trying to locate the origin of the alarmed shrieks, then looking at each other as if to confirm for themselves that it was, indeed, ol' boring Rogers who had completely lost his mind.
He clawed at the air, battling back something only he could see. One of the other merchants tried to rouse him, to free him from the grip of what was clearly a nightmare, except that Rogers 's eyes were wide open. It was as if he were looking into thin air and responding to some invisible creature.
He could smell it, feel the tentacles wrapping around him, see the eyes searing their gaze into him. "Keep it away!" he shrieked again. "Keep it away! It knows we're here! Don't you hear me? Don't you understand? It knows we yre here! It's looking at us!"
In the room of Leo Rosen, Leo's eyes opened halfway, though he was still deep in his alcoholic haze. He saw something that did not make a lot of sense: it appeared to be Sheila, draped over a couch, sleeping, her bosom rising and falling softly. She was making that soft whistling sound that she always had back when they had slept together.
He was certain he was dreaming.
And as he drifted in a sort of limbo between sleep and wakefulness, he sensed something long and wet, something with sucker cups caressing him like a lover....
... And he did not run screaming from it. Instead, he took comfort in it, and it helped ease him back to sleep.
Chapter 11
The control room was lit by a single light, by which Dr. Trent was reading her reports and analyses. But one of the sheets in particular kept drawing her back, over and over: the sheet with reproductions of the hieroglyphs copied off the artifact.
There had been a while there when she had felt herself starting to drift. The symbols had begun wavering in front of her, and her eyes felt so tired that she could barely keep the lids up. But then she had broken through her own personal wall, had shaken off the fatigue that was threatening to overwhelm her, and had snapped out of it.
She felt as if she were on to something, standing on the precipice of an incredible discovery. It was close to her, so close. It was as if the moment of discovery was just beyond the horizon, calling to her, telling her to make it over just one more mountain, vault one final crevice and she would be there. Understanding would flood over her, suffuse her, and she would practically glow with knowledge.
Different elements were clicking into place. She was pulling up bits of knowledge from her entire career, and she couldn't help but feel that her entire life's work had brought her to this particular point in time. Everything she had done up until now was a prelude.
In a way, it was daunting. This was it, she realized. She was staring at the pinnacle. There was no place to go but down.
Quickly, though, she tried to push such depressing notions aside, away from her. It simply wasn't true. Because it might take years to fully plumb the depths of the artifact. And she would be able to witness the incredible developments and strides for Humanity that would come as a result of her work. Her work.
A cup of coffee sat on the console nearby, and when she reached for it she realized that her hand was trembling. She tried to steady it but was only partly successful, and she withdrew it rather than risk knocking the cup over. She endeavored to steady herself, pull herself together so that she could continue the recording of her findings. She finally reached over and toggled the switch on the recording console.
"Report Seventeen," she said. "A hundred years ago, the Cen-tauri gave us jumpgates and changed the future forever. The artifact may be even more important. Preliminary findings have started coming in. They confirm that the alien artifact is definitely not a ship, but rather a mechanism. We're picking up readings beyond anything we've seen before." She rubbed the bridge of her nose to compose herself, because she felt as if her voice were trembling. She steadied herself and continued, "I think I have an idea what it might be designed for, but as long as it's sitting dead in space I can't be sure. We have to probe further, and we have to do it soon, before anyone else starts poking around."
She paused, then played it back to make sure that her voice sounded steady and authoritative. Approving of what she heard, she decided she needed a concluding thought. "If I'm right, what we're looking at here could make jumpgates look like nothing in comparison. This could be the most significant discovery in Human history. It could change everything..."
She wanted to say more, so much more. But it would have been unprofessional to speculate beyond that. She toggled off the switch, leaned back, and continued to stare at the hieroglyphs.
She stared at them again, because something suddenly seemed ... off....
They were starting to blend together ... and waver ... like a sea of snakes, or tentacles, moving about, whipping around, and it almost seemed like they were starting to come off the page-----
She shut her eyes tightly and then opened them again. The sheet had returned to normal. There was nothing.
Nothing. Nothing but the future of Humanity, she thought with returning excitement.
Not realizing, of course, that in fact what she was holding would guarantee that Humanity would have no future ... nor would any other life-form in the known galaxy...
Zack had found it impossible to go back to sleep after the entire business with Lyta had gone down.
It wasn't as if this hadn't happened to him before. He often would run into a situation where he simply kept himself going the whole night, and at quiet points the next day he'd just catnap and catch up on the sleep. So he'd resigned himself to the notion that that was what tonight was going to be like. He had returned to his office to do paperwork, and to wait for updates from the guards whom he had assigned to keep an eye out for, and on, Lyta Alexander.
That's when the fighting began.
Deuce didn't have quarters, exactly. He had more of an "area" in Down Below, the seedier section of Babylon 5. An area where everyone who wanted to do business with him knew to come. It doubled as his living quarters, and was screened off with makeshift walls that allowed him needed privacy.
At that moment, a Drazi smuggler was standing just outside Deuce's "office." His appointment with Deuce had been set for one in the morning, mostly because the Drazi was not someone who liked to be seen out and about during times when the rest of the station was hopping. Besides, he was planning to get the hell off the station as soon as possible in order to meet a contact. "Deuce!" hissed the smuggler. "Deuce! Hey! You forget our appointment? Wrong night to fall asleep before..."
There was sudden movement, a howl of fear from within, after which Deuce came out swinging, his eyes wild. The Drazi was caught completely flat-footed as a roundhouse from the normally restrained Deuce caught him squarely in the side of the head and dropped him like a busted alibi.
Deuce let out one more outraged yell... and then the pain registered from his fist. Deuce had a fairly low threshold of pain, and it cut through the confusion in his head. He looked down at the insensate Drazi and wondered what in the world the smuggler was doing on the floor.
He stood there, rubbed his fist, and his eyes glazed over again. He whispered in a low voice, "They have to make it work. They have to go faster." And as he said it, a part of him couldn't help but wonder just who "they" were and what "it" was.
He turned around and went back to his bed, in hopes that it all would become clear.
What Zack had been looking forward to as some quiet time, when he could catch up on his paperwork, had developed into a full-blown incident. Sector heads from the various levels had arrived, one after another, and were clustered in his office, all of them wearing identical expressions of grim worry. The only bright spot that Zack could find in the entire mess was that he hadn't been foolish enough to go back to his quarters and try to get some sleep.
"-so far we've had ten outbreaks in the last five hours," said Jankowski. "And that's just in Down Below."
"What kind of outbreaks?" Zack asked.
"Fights, mainly," Jankowski replied. "We've found some people locked in their rooms, just... screaming. Same in the
Zocalo, Green Sector, the casino...We've given the worst cases
to Medlab, to see what they can do with 'em. The rest we've got in lockup, but we're going to run out of room real soon, unless this stops."
Zack scratched his chin thoughtfully. He could already feel morning stubble starting to grow. "And all this started after IPX people lit up the artifact?"
Jankowski said, "Definitely," thinking that Zack was asking merely to establish a time frame. But even as he said it, the light began to dawn. "You think there's a connection?" "I don't know," admitted Zack. And at this point, there was no sense in dwelling on it. He had to deal with one crisis at a time. "Okay, I want write-ups on every incident that happens over the next ten hours. Anything they say, I want it taken down for analysis. Maybe there's a connection, and maybe there's just a whole lot of full moons out there somewhere all lined up beaming bozo rays into everybody's brains ... but either way I want answers." When they continued to stand there, he clapped his hands briskly and said, "That's all. Good work, guys. Get some sleep."
They headed out of his office. Zack yawned once, but that seemed almost out of a sense of obligation, to acknowledge the hour more than anything else. He settled back, looked at the monitors, and drummed his fingers on the table.
He considered for a moment going to Sheridan, but he couldn't figure out what to tell him. Pointless speculation? How could some big, ancient hunk of artifact be affecting the behavior of people on Babylon 5? It might sound as if he was looking for excuses, to explain a rash of violence that his people should really be riding herd on. Might even sound like he didn't know how to do his job. Zack wasn't someone given to simply hoping a problem would solve itself. But in this instance, he found himself praying that somehow this whole thing would be resolved without his having to do anything, because he was damned if he could figure out just what he should do.
"Please, let this go away. That would be beautiful," he said.
"Beautiful..."
Kevin Dorman, a mineral analyst with three degrees and an IQ of 180, was judged to be a madman.
Today that judgment came from the people who were walking past him in a corridor, some of them risking a glance at him before quickly looking away, in that manner that people have when they don't want to be caught looking at something they consider truly pathetic.
They figured that he was just some mental defective, or perhaps some drugged-up resident of Down Below who'd come wandering up from the lower depths. In short, anything except an intelligent and fairly erudite individual who, until yesterday, had been fairly unremarkable.
But now Dorman was looking straight up, as if he could see right through the ceiling. Indeed, Dorman wasn't seeing the ceiling at all. He was seeing ...
. . . the Tower, and it calls to you. It is black and gorgeous, it is the most perfect thing in the entire universe. You have been blind, you have been mindless up until this moment. You thought you knew beauty . . . beauty in the laughter of a child, or a star being born, or the curve of a woman's hip. But that is nothing . . . absolutely nothing, compared to the beauty that is within here. Everything you have perceived as beautiful is merely the palest reflection of the truth which awaits you here. . . .
"God, it's so beautiful...." he whispered.
And you detect a slight recoiling, ever so slight, more from annoyance than true pain. Recoiling from the word you've just spoken, that reflexive acknowledgment of another entity whose light is painful. You apologize, you beg forgiveness, you swear that you will not let such a slip happen again. You stand in silence, in very contrite silence, and you continue to admire its perfect beauty as you gaze upward, up toward the sacred window where He waits. You wait for His eye to turn to you, to look upon you. It may take Him time to get to you, perhaps an eternity, but you don't mind waiting. You have all the time in the world, you see, and in the meantime you can just stand patiently and bask in the perfection. . . .
Susan Ivanova lay in her bed, sleeping peacefully.
She had not had restful slumber for some time, particularly during the heart of the Shadow War. Every night she had lain there, watching the darkness of her room, wondering what lurked in the hidden corners. In some ways, the war had struck to the very core of childhood concerns. How often, after all, did one lie awake in one's childhood bedroom, seeing a pile of clothes being transformed into something strange and frightening by the imagination. But lo and behold, a simple flicking of a light switch always banished the strange dark forms back to the inner recesses of imagination, and the room was safe once more.
Except in her case, of course, in recent days, it took a hell of a lot more than a light switch to destroy that which lurked in the shadows.
But the Shadows were gone now, gone and done with. Oh, sure, there were still all manner of problems to be solved. Earth was out to get them, the future remained uncertain. But somehow struggles with EarthDome were less threatening to her, more manageable. And certainly if, in her imaginings, she mistook a pile of laundry for President Clark, the likelihood of President Clark actually being that pile of laundry was fairly slim.
And so Ivanova slept more peacefully these nights....
