Entanglement Bound: An Epic Space Opera Series (Entangled Universe Book 1) Page 12

  The largeness of space, usually flat and expanding outward around her, suddenly felt crenulated and complicated, like the entire universe was a piece of origami folded up so tight and small it could fit in the palm of her hand. The universe was a paper crane on her palm and was also a starwhal surrounding her; a starwhal on her palm that was a paper crane all around her. A castle of folded paper. A fortress of folded velvet, studded with diamonds, crumpled into a discarded evening gown on the floor; but the floor crumpled into a ball of paper, and every careless wrinkle turned out to be a careful fold.

  Clarity was the paper crane was Cassie was the paper crane was Clarity. They were all of space-time altogether. They were each other.

  Clarity woke up shivering, shuddering, disconnected from Cassie. The sucker disks hung flaccid at the ends of their cords, dangling beside her face. The bank of computer screens in front of her showed only images of herself and bunnies. Her body felt small and anchored, rooted to a single spot in space-time. The sensation was odd, like stepping onto solid ground after getting used to the rocking of a boat on the ocean.

  "Where are we?" Clarity asked.

  "I was hoping you knew," Wisper said, gesturing at the bank of computer screens showing only Clarity, dripping with sweat and haggard looking, and rows and rows of adorable bunnies in every shade of white, tawny, and brown. No exterior views. No starscapes. No way to figure out their location.

  Clarity didn't even know if they were in normal space-time again, or lost somewhere in the folds of subspace, adrift in hyperspace.

  Lost.

  14 Secrets of the Past

  Roscoe came up to Clarity, hesitantly, casting wary glances at the metal robot who stood more than twice his height. His long ears slanted down along his back, and his whiskers turned down at a severe angle. His nose twitched very slowly. But he held a paw out to Clarity. When she put her hand in his paw—it was as silky as Cassie imagined; she must be so jealous watching this, disconnected, unable to experience it—he put his other paw on her shoulder. He was smaller than her, so he wasn't really useful at helping her up, but his presence steadied Clarity anyway.

  "Thank you," Clarity said, still shaking. If the deep space dive had left her feeling this shaken and drained, she didn't know what it had done to the eager young starwhal. "I hope Cassie's okay..." She looked up at the screens. Half of them had gone to static. The other half now showed her, with Roscoe's paw on her shoulder. "What happened? Did something go wrong?"

  "Cassie doesn't have much practice with hyperspace flights," Wisper said.

  "Much practice?" Clarity asked. "How little practice does she have?"

  Wisper turned toward the bank of computer screens, turning her back toward Clarity and Roscoe. As soon as her face was hidden—as if she was embarrassed by its lack of ability to convey appropriate emotions—she said, "A few of the older starwhals have practiced flying from one side of Eridani 7 system to the other. A couple dozen flights altogether."

  "A couple dozen flights done by older starwhals?" Clarity was outraged. Though, through her outrage, she noticed Roscoe was now shaking worse than her. His ears and whiskers had drooped even lower. "Are you okay?" Clarity asked, feeling her arms becoming the ones offering support, rather than his.

  "This is wrong," Roscoe said. "You never told me you expected me to fly an enslaved vessel. We should take her back."

  Wisper continued to face away from them. She'd gone up to a control station at the base of the bank of screens and was typing something at a keyboard. A single screen in the corner of the bank of screens responded with strings of text streaming across its glossy surface.

  Clarity said, "Cassie doesn't want to go back. She wasn't happy there."

  Roscoe swore under his whiskers in a language Clarity didn't recognize. Then he said, "Of course she doesn't. The poor child." His voice lowered, as if he were speaking to himself now, "I don't want to do this again."

  Clarity couldn't imagine what about this situation was familiar to Roscoe. There was nothing familiar about it to her. In all of her travels across the universe, all the different planets and space stations she'd visited, she'd never been in a situation even vaguely like this one.

  Wisper turned back to them. The computer screens behind her were now entirely static, except for the one screen in the corner, but it had switched from rows of text to a live recording of Clarity and Roscoe. "I think Cassie tried to dive through too deep of a fold in hyperspace, and she wore herself out. It's hard to get much information from her through the textual interface at the best of times. While she's resting, we should make sure we're ready for the next phase of our mission."

  "You think she's just resting?" Clarity asked. "Not... you know, dying? Right?"

  "She'd better be," Wisper said. "Or none of this will matter."

  Excellent, instead of a snarky robot, now they were being led by a nihilistic robot. That was not a good trade. Wisper stalked out of the cockpit. If the floor, made of Cassie's flesh, weren't so spongey and absorbent, her stomping metal feet would have made a thunderous clanging. Clarity was glad she knew, first hand, that stomping along Cassie's insides didn't seem to hurt the starwhal at all. The surface of her interior flesh was quite tough. It took blades cutting holes for computers and food synthesizers to be hooked up to and powered by her own nerves to really hurt Cassie from the inside.

  "What did you mean," Clarity said to Roscoe, "that you don't want to do this again?"

  The lapine man still looked stricken. His pink nose had turned white around the edges and was barely twitching at all. He looked at her with haunted eyes, as black as deep space and rimmed with pink. "Your species," Roscoe choked out, finally. He gestured at Clarity with the paw that had been holding her hand. His other paw was still on her shoulder, now leaning against her. "You're some kind of primate, right?"

  Clarity nodded.

  "Was your species the first to evolve to sentience on your planet?"

  "I come from a colony world..." Clarity didn't know very much Ancient Earth history. "Humans have hundreds of colony worlds. But you mean, the world we originated on? Where we first evolved?"

  Now Roscoe nodded. His long whiskers brushed lightly against her arm.

  "I think humans are the only sentient species to evolve on Ancient Earth." Clarity tried to remember her classes back in school, decades ago. There had been stories about dolphins doing tricks; apes knowing sign language; parrots who could talk; and maybe there'd been some movement toward uplifting various animal species, before humans had met the wide range of sentient species already filling the universe. But if there were other sentient species from Ancient Earth, certainly she'd know about them. So those centuries-ago attempts at uplift must have failed or been given up.

  "See," Roscoe said, clearly struggling to speak. "My species was not the first to evolve sentience on our homeworld." He looked around the cockpit, at the computer screen bank and the spiraling spikes pointed down from the ceiling like stalactites or snaggly teeth. "Another species evolved sentience first, and they claimed credit for our own. They claimed to have uplifted us. They claimed we owed them."

  The cords hanging down from the tips of the spikes could have been either electrical wires or something more biological, more akin to umbilical cords. Clarity wasn't sure. She didn't know how much of Cassie had evolved and how much had been designed. How much credit did the Wespirtech scientists deserve for her intelligence?

  Did they deserve any at all, no matter what they had done? Either Cassie had been sentient before, and they'd done nothing but enslave her. Or they'd taken a creature who could not consent, and they'd altered her.

  "I'm sorry," Cassie said.

  Roscoe shook his head fiercely. "I don't want sorrow," he said. "I fought my way free of those..." He looked levelly at Clarity, as much as he could while standing at half her height. "They were also primates. I fought my way free of them, and I came back for my family. I don't want to fight for freedom again. I'm an old man." Now he loo
ked down at his big feet, standing on the flesh of another enslaved being. "But injustice never seems to get old. It just keeps happening, in different ways."

  "If you can't pilot Cassie," Clarity said, still feeling a distaste at the word 'pilot' when it came to Cassie, "I understand. But Wisper has convinced me this mission is... life or death. For the entire universe. So, someone needs to... help guide Cassie. I can do that, but to be honest, Cassie would rather have you."

  Roscoe looked confused. His head tilted to the side, and one long ear quirked in the middle. "How do you mean?"

  "Okay, this is weird," Clarity said, but then she glanced at the twisting spires with their sucker disks hanging down from the ceiling. It was all weird. "Cassie has seen pictures and videos of an Earth mammal, a sub-sentient species, with many of the same physical traits as you have—long ears, big feet..." She felt weird describing Roscoe to himself, so she cut the description off. "The resemblance is uncanny, really. And she's really attached to this species, so she... Well, she's kind of infatuated with you. I think the scientists used pictures and videos of rabbits as rewards while training her."

  Roscoe's nose started twitching, and Clarity barely managed to keep herself from laughing. Then she had to keep herself from crying. She'd lost her home, only a few hours ago, and now she was telling a lapine man that a space whale, basically, had a crush on him.

  "It's kind of adorable, really, in a messed up way," Clarity said, feeling the need to defend Cassie. "She's really sweet, and she seems really young."

  Roscoe sighed, a deep breath that blew through his whiskers, making them quiver. "I have several dozen grandbunnies back on Crossroads Station."

  Clarity had seen them. They were adorable too. She wondered if "grandbunny" was a word he'd devised in Solanese because he was already aware of his species' similarity to Ancient Earth rabbits. If so, it was about the cutest thing she'd ever heard.

  "I suppose adopting one more little one can't hurt."

  Clarity stumbled on still-shaky legs to the computer console Wisper had been using. She was able to access some basic databases stored in the computer's memory, but all of the surveillance cameras were offline, including those that would have shown her exterior views. The only way to know where they were at in the universe was to wait for Cassie to wake up or to put on spacesuits and go outside.

  Clarity supposed it might be possible to jolt Cassie into turning the cameras back on, somehow, but it seemed like a bad idea to poke at a sleeping starwhal who was also their entire ecosystem for the moment. Better to let her rest.

  Examining the information available through the computer console, Clarity was able to see a hierarchy to how the systems onboard Cassiopeia would shut down—like on an insensate lump-of-metal spaceship. The Serendipity had had a hierarchy to which systems to cut power to as the ship ran out of energy as well.

  Even so, Clarity wasn't used to having to worry about her transportation tiring itself out. Or overtiring itself.

  Clarity missed The Serendipity. Sure, it was only a spaceship. But it had been her spaceship, and there was something far more natural about an unnatural lump of metal all around her than this organic behemoth trained on videos of bunnies.

  Clarity drew her hands away from the keyboard and wrapped her arms around her middle, hugging herself tightly, trying to hold in all the feelings threatening to overtake her. She needed to shove them down inside and continue on.

  "Roscoe, I need to go... lie down... or something..." Clarity said. "Can you keep an eye on Cassie up here? Come let me know if anything happens? If she starts to wake up?"

  "I'm not sure what that would look like," Roscoe said. Although, he darted a glance at the bank of screens. "I suppose it would involve those flickering back to life?"

  "Images instead of static, yeah." Clarity wanted to put a hand out on the wall to steady herself as she walked toward the far left vein-like hallway, but she also wanted more distance from Cassie right now. An impossibility while living inside of her, and yet, Clarity chose not to lay her hand directly on Cassie's flesh for the moment anyway.

  As she stumbled down the vein-like hall, Clarity shoved her fists against her ears, trying to block out the musical white noise of Cassie. She wanted silence, not phantom orchestras singing to her in their discordant musicality.

  She wanted The Serendipity. She wanted to not fear the universe swallowing itself, and she wanted to not hate her own species for causing it. She wanted to not worry about the ethics of starwhal uplift.

  She wanted to do what she had always done, chase one whimsy after another through this beautiful universe, following Irohann.

  She wanted Irohann. That was something she could actually find. Something that still existed, unlike home and safety and certainty about anything.

  15 Secrets of the Present

  Clarity wound and spiraled and zigged and zagged her way through Cassiopeia's halls, feeling a rising sense of panic.

  Irohann wasn't in the ventricle room where she'd laid out her dolls. When she saw the dolls and toys sitting out on a shelf like they had on The Serendipity, except with so many missing, the partial display felt like a mockery, and she swept the toys angrily back into her duffle bag. She slung the duffle bag over her shoulder, like a child planning to run away, and set out looking for Irohann again.

  Clarity passed another ventricle room where she heard Wisper arguing with Am-lei, humming and fluting, each voice strained and interrupting the other; beneath their voices, the buzzing of Mazillion's many bodies combined with the white noise of Cassiopeia—a veritable cacophony of living sounds. Clarity glanced into the room, just enough to see Irohann wasn't there.

  Jeko stood with her long nose protectively laid across the cylindrical bio-matter cargo crate. Am-lei seemed to be pleading passionately for Jeko and the cargo crate to be dropped off before Cassiopeia proceeded to Merlin. Four of her twiggy limbs gestured dramatically, and the shimmery charcoal-colored clothing she wore bunched up at the bases of her long limbs.

  Wisper stood like a statue; impassive, unsympathetic. Mazillion swarmed in the shape of a tiny tornado, occasionally extruding a limb out toward the cargo crate, seemingly curious. Jeko batted the swarming insects away with her nose.

  Clarity didn't want to get involved and headed back down the hall. But she was involved.

  And hell, she wouldn't mind getting dropped off somewhere safe before Cassiopeia arrived at Merlin too.

  Clarity went back to Jeko and Am-lei's ventricle room and stood in the valve-like entrance. "Why not?" Clarity addressed herself to Wisper. "Why can't we drop Jeko off? You don't need her for this mission."

  "There are no inhabited systems between us and Merlin." If Wisper had teeth, she would have gritted them.

  "Then take us to Leionaia first!" Am-lei fluted in rising, tripping trills. "I didn't agree to take my family into danger when I signed up for this!"

  "Your wife will be in danger, wherever she is." Wisper's hum stayed even and steady, though perhaps a touch slower and deeper. "The unstable entanglement between the particle contained in the Merlin Base and its paired anti-particle inside the Devil's Radio are tearing a hole in the universe."

  "Right," Clarity agreed. "The universe is swallowing itself. But how fast? I mean, this unstable particle has waited more than a week to eat us all; how much danger would an extra few weeks put us all in? I mean, stars take thousands of years to die. Since we're not pretending there are any scientists on the Merlin Base waiting for us, gasping their last breaths as the air runs out, aren't we working on a larger—a more astronomical, shall we say—timescale?"

  Wisper raised a metal claw to the side of her metal head, as if she were suffering from a headache. "I no longer have the numbers," she said. The metal irises over her eyes spiraled closed. "It's so small in here. I had whole rooms, whole buildings full of computers, calculating, processing, letting me be my full self..." She opened her eyes again and looked straight at Clarity. "I cannot calculate how long we have
. I do not have the processing power. But even astronomical processes—events that take thousands of years to unfold—can happen very quickly in the end."

  Wisper turned back toward Am-lei. The insectile woman's long obsidian arms were folded tightly over her thorax now; she reflected inside of Wisper's glassy eyes like a tiny, perfect scarab. "The disaster we are facing," Wisper said. "It is an exponential process. The Merlin Project will swallow up the entire Merlin star system, and then it will begin bending the space around it, as if pulling a sheet laid across a table top through a tiny hole in the middle of the table. By the time we see any effects from the folds out here, anywhere near neighboring star systems, it will be too late. The pace of the disaster will quicken. The universe could blink out of existence during the literal blink of an eye."

  Am-lei's disco ball eyes—multi-faceted, sparkling domes—couldn't blink. But Jeko's eyes—small, dark brown, and heavily lidded with wrinkly skin—blinked rapidly, as if fighting away tears. "We won't be safe anywhere," Jeko told Am-lei. Her voice sounded like a sad bugle. "Let us stay with you."

  Mazillion reformed theirself from a tiny tornado into a buzzing bipedal cloud, vaguely mimicking Jeko's size and shape. Both Jekos—the true one and the swarm version—stood on either side of the cylindrical bio-matter cargo crate.

  The true Jeko responded by coiling her nose more tightly around the curved metal side of the crate, and Clarity thought she could detect a grimace or a sneer under the base of her nose. She apparently did not care for being visually echoed.

  Mazillion reformed again, this time a step farther from the cargo crate and mimicking the skeletal form of Wisper. The swarm creature asked, "What is in your cargo crate?"

  "That is none of your business!" Jeko trumpeted.

  But Am-lei unfolded her long arms while stepping toward Jeko. She laid two left talons gently on Jeko's cotton-covered shoulder, and she placed two right talons on one of the cargo crate handles. "If you think it's safe to bring our daughter into the middle of a star system swallowing itself, then I see no harm in showing her to the robot dragging us there."