Colonies of Man, Ust
Terran-Colonial Smithsonian Society Shelter
116.27.119
Jee paced the same width of the portable shelter she'd been pacing for the past twenty minutes. The trip had been mercifully quick, even this far out from civilization. But the closest thing to a city on the planet was the collection of a few shelters like the one in which they waited now.
"At least there's good satellite service." Dane sent off a message to his wife, and put away his handheld. "I don't suppose you'll listen, Jee, but I feel I should warn you."
"Warn me?" She stopped pacing and faced him. "About what?"
"Dr. Post might consider herself to have prior claim on Kaiwulf."
"You make it sound like he's a prize, or a chunk of meat, or something. I'm not a totally sexist pig. I know he has rights and feelings and all that nonsense. I just want to help him get in touch with them, that's all." She jiggled her eyebrows. "You know, explore his inner being."
Dane lifted his gaze to heaven.
"What's the hold up? Can't be traffic. All they have is dirt and trees."
"Anxious?"
"I spent two years ducking blasters, dodging fists and tracking down every kind of crook in the galaxy to afford that vacation Jeff ruined. I want to get this kid so I can get on with my life. If we can pull this off, that vacation may take me years."
Dane linked his hands behind his neck. "Oh, and I suppose my getting home after being gone for three months doesn't count? I had just about convinced Jenny I was going to be home for more than three days in a row when the summons came. Talk about dodging blasters? I had about two seconds to get out of range."
The door opened, and they both turned toward it. The ramp leading up to the shelter rattled, and a moment later a hoverchair floated into the room. Wheels rotated downward as it settled to the floor. The silver-haired woman in it beamed at both of them, stretching out a hand.
"Welcome to Ust, my dears. I'm Dr. Viva Post."
"Prior claim, huh?" Jee whispered, aside. "She could be his granny." Jee shook the woman's hand. "Jee Tonopah, Trace, Rescue, and Identification League. And this is my partner, Dane Raphyel."
"Doctor." Dane accepted her hand. "I read all three of your papers on the Gates of Life on the way here. I used to go on digs in college. I met my wife on one, fifteen years ago. She still teases me about trying to dig up a date."
Dr. Post laughed. "I may put you to work, young man. What do you think of the gates?"
"We haven't seen them yet. We got here at midnight."
"We'll fix that soon enough. They're beautiful in the morning." She gestured. "Please, both of you sit. I'm getting a crick in my neck looking up at you. Especially you, Dane. Are there any doors you don't have to bend over to walk through?"
"Not many." He turned a chair around and sat backwards, arms across the top. "You get used to seeing the tops of things and finding all the dust people don't think anyone will notice. But"-- He grinned --"it comes in handy when your wife needs to hide the cookie jar from the kids."
Jee pulled up a chair. "Since we're working against the threat of military interference, how long do you estimate we have to find him, and where do we look first?"
"Oh, he's never been lost." Dr. Post smoothed the front of her blouse. "We know where he is."
Jee looked from her to Dane and back. "So what is it you want us to do?"
"We need you to bring him back to this dimension."
Sliding to her feet, Jee moved the chair aside, and tucked the tips of her fingers into her back pockets. "We're bounty hunters, Doctor, not exorcists."
"I'm afraid you don't understand. We can't walk up to him and talk. Kaiwulf isn't approachable. You were briefed about his ability on the way here?"
"Phase shifting," Dane answered. "We don't understand it, but the theory makes sense the way you wrote it out. He can control the atoms and molecules of his body and move from one dimension to another."
"That's the most abbreviated definition I've heard as yet, but it will do." She adjusted her chair's angle. "Since we filmed him a month ago, he hasn't returned to the cave. We weren't aware at first that the cave was considered a shrine, and now we're afraid we've desecrated it. Lt. Cmdr. Morris of the Colonial Reserve was ready to set up camp in there until we convinced him his people could be murdered in their sleep. Kaiwulf could be in this room right now for all we know. For all practical purposes, he's invisible."
Jee rubbed her brow as if she had a headache.
"Those wolves of his." Dane scratched his chin. "Are they really telepathic?"
"They communicate through images. I have an example. Two days ago a child went missing. While the tribe searched the forest to find her, a wolf came into our camp and cornered a tech in his lab. The man was terrified, but he suddenly saw an image of an equipment trunk. As soon as he saw it, the wolf fled. When our tech investigated, it turned out the child had fallen into the trunk and the lid had closed on her. That wolf found her by scent and showed our tech."
Jee shrugged. "Why would it show him and not the parents?"
"I'll bet" -- Dane shook one finger -- "it was his trunk."
"Correct, my dear. Three people saw the wolf and followed it. When it entered the lab, one of them fetched Mr. Morris, who showed up, armed and ready to shoot. Our tech had about thirty seconds alone with the animal, but that was all it took for the image to form. It might have taken less time if he hadn't been frightened. It should come as no surprise the native people hold the animals in great honor. Now, we do as well. Under no circumstances are any of these animals to be injured. It's all I can do to talk Mr. Morris out of trapping them."
"Have they attacked humans?"
"No. The people call them cheumia. Friends." She pushed herself up in the chair. "Most of them are brown or gray. I haven't seen any white ones other than Kaiwulf's pair. Wish I knew if they were male or female. So far as we can tell, none of the village people or the dark wolves can phase shift."
"Maybe that's why they threw Kaiwulf out?" Dane suggested.
"Possible. Come over here and look at this."
She rolled her chair toward a large table on the other side of the room. It held several flat trays, subdivided into boxes. Artifacts lay in each. The TRAIL agents stood on either side of her. Dr. Post pulled on gloves and gave a pair to each of them.
She picked up a smooth rod with a hole in the top. The entire thing fit in the palm of her hand. "What does this look like to you?" She offered it to Dane.
He turned it over in his hand. The end opposite the hole had a broken tip. "A shaft of some sort. Part of a gear?"
"It's identical to a device found on New Braeswyck. Let me access this through my neural net."
"What's a neural net?"
Dr. Post looked up at Jee. "It's an implanted neuromorphic device that transfigures brainwaves into knowledge by linking a sophisticated--"
"Doc." Jee held up a hand. "In some language I can understand."
The woman sighed. "Think of a neural net as a fine mesh that integrates with the networks of my brain and allows me to connect to others who have them. I can connect to databases as well."
"So it turns you into a walking encyclopedia."
"Crass, but an effective definition. Now, let me concentrate a moment, please." She closed her eyes briefly. "The key is an interface for a 'functional reciprocal time-phase adjustment source' and the explanation for that is more complicated than you can understand without a neural net of your own. Suffice it to say there are just two of them in the Archives. Jee, dear, would you turn on that holovid player, please?" She pointed. "I've been studying the image of Kaiwulf. I've set it to static view, unmoving."
The youth sprang to holographic life in front of her, and Jee moved to face him.
Dr. Post rolled her chair over to join her. "I feel as if Kaiwulf were right with me in the room. I can sense his presence. When I saw him that first time, I hardly had time to know he was there before he disappeared. The second time, he stood across from me much as he stands now. He seemed as if he were about to speak, but turned and looked over his shoulder as if someone else had come into the cave. He gave me a reluctant smile, and then vanished. That's when I decided to holofilm the cave in case he came back." She handed Jee the small shaft. "Hold this up to that broken piece in the center of his necklace."
Jee positioned it. "Will you look at that? It matches. The break on the end of each piece is the same pattern. What does it do?" She held it up to the light and squinted at it.
"It opens Pandora's box. It was found in the main access panel on a Gate."
"Kaiwulf has the other half?" Jee gave it back to her. "What good is a broken key?"
"This rod fits into a slot with a hole at each end. From what we can see, they're drilled on opposite sides. We think the holes line up inside the panel to access the power source. The people say Kaiwulf's mother used it to open the Gates. Let me link with the story so it's accurate." She paused. "The night his mother died, she gave him the key. The women of the village took it away. He stole it back, and tried to open the Gates. Maybe to show them he could do it as well as his mother could. When they tried to stop him, it broke, and he ran. The Gate hasn't been activated since, and they've sworn to kill him on sight."
"What's the big deal about turning on the Gate?" Jee eyed the image of the young man. "Does it do anything?"
"We don't know, but we do know that to them, the Gate represents their god. A god who comes from the sky wrapped in silver and fire, who burns the ground where his feet touch."
Dane had gone still. "A spacecraft?"
"We think so. These people have a religion based on what we think are dim memories of visits from researchers or field technicians thousands of years ago. Plus, their language is based on our own. When it was first translated, we assumed their history was a contextual error. However, when we finished inputting their language into our translators," she tapped the tiny box on her wrist, "and could question them in their own tongue, we found it wasn't an error at all. The history was real."
"What history?"
"Each member of the village is made to learn his or her ancestry. And they have amazing memories. They can all recite hundreds of generations. We wondered how accurate it was until--"
"Dr. Post," Jee interrupted. "I hate to stop the history lesson, but we have to find Kaiwulf soon don't we?"
"I'm sorry, dear. Of course you don't understand, but some background is essential to understanding the culture." She pushed herself back in the chair and smoothed her clothes. "As I was saying, they can recite eight thousand years of ancestry. Now, this is where we thought the error came in, until we double-checked with outside sources. The village people are descendants of a native of this world and a gen from outside the Colonies of Man."
Jee scoffed. "How's that possible? These people live in huts. Besides, even I know humans have never been found anywhere they weren't planted by Terrans."
"That's true, dear, but in this case, one of the gens who lived here married a gen from off-world. Their history says the tribe began after a female gen from beyond the stars came to live with them. She couldn't phase shift and her husband refused to leave her. Together, he and his wife founded a new race of people who could no longer shift. These are the people living in the village now. Kaiwulf's people are a combination of gens who used to live in another dimension altogether, and a race of people from outside the Colonies, who are now extinct."
Jee set her hands on her hips. "I've never heard of any race being wiped out."
"I have." Dane stuck one foot behind the leg of Jee's abandoned chair, and dragged it over to her. "Sit down, Jee. You're making Dr. Post strain her neck."
"Sorry." She straddled the chair the way Dane had, sitting it in backwards. "So what's with the extinct race?"
"There were two." Dane held up two fingers. "Terra Free blew itself apart after the Second Cycle of Wars. They'd been assigned the job of guarding gens who had been isolated and restricted to their worlds, and no one else knew the locations of the planets the gens were on. When the planet destroyed itself in a civil war, the Colonies erected the Great Barrier to contain the gens."
"But--" Jee frowned. "I thought nobody knew why the Barrier was there."
"I admit, that's a theory." Dane shrugged. "Enough detail's been found in the Aldentian Archives to make it viable, though."
"So what's the other race?"
"Phanes."
"I thought they were myths. People who could create something out of nothing. That's impossible, right?"
"They were real, my dear." Dr. Post smiled at Dane. "You seem know quite a bit. Care to enlighten your partner about the Phanes?"
"They could create tangible phantasms. Items seemingly created from nothing, which is where the word Phane comes from. But as far as anyone knew, the last of them died at the beginning the fortieth century. Did you find any record they were on this planet, Doctor?"
"Yes. During the War of Phantasy, a female Phane served as a healer to Queen Ioca from the planet Faunus, in Realm of the Dark Star." She folded her hands. "My neural net shows that according to legend, Queen Ioca landed on an unexplored world due to a ship malfunction, and while her crew repaired the damage, she scouted the area." She shook her head. "This is ironic, but a male native happened upon her while she was behind a waterfall near a cave. The queen was startled, and screamed. Her men pursued him, injuring him severely. Ioca insisted they search for his people, found no evidence of life, and theorized he had been the victim of a crash landing. They took him with them when they left, and were halfway back to her world before he woke from his coma."
Dane rubbed his jaw. "You think he was from Ust?"
"The people here told us part of the story, which syncs with history in the Realm of the Dark Star."
"Interesting." Dane wrapped his arms around the chairback. "So he wakes up on a ship bound for a planet halfway across the galaxy. One big shock there."
"True." Dr. Post wheeled her chair a little closer. "The people feared the Saint of Silver's return, and her ship might have seemed like that. The people tell stories about the Saint requiring his servants to 'suffer pain' in order to 'serve his knowledge.'"
Jee shuddered. "Sounds like experimentation."
"Yes, dear. It does. Anyway, the story goes that he became the queen's lover, and later, during her terminal illness, he became friends with her Phane healer. When the queen died, she left instructions that her lover was to be returned to his homeworld with anything he requested. The story says he took the woman who had tended the queen. Romantic, isn't it? Now, I ask you, why can't we see Kaiwulf?"
"Duh." Jee answered. "He's in another dimension."
"Yes, but why?"
It was quiet a moment. Jee frowned. "The people in this one kicked him out?"
"Where does a seven year-old go when his mother's people throw him out?"
"Of course." Dane hit his forehead. "His father's people. You already told us. The original gen was able to phase shift, but his wife wasn't. It's her blood that makes it possible for the village people to live in this dimension, right? Therefore, Kaiwulf is with the other people."
"That's right." Dr. Post smiled at Dane. "His father's people. When I heard his father was unknown, I did some checking. Of the three men likely to have fathered him, none laid claim."
"Why would they?" Jee rested her elbows on her knees. "He was an outcast."
"In a culture where great significance is placed on rote memorization of ancestry, Kaiwulf's father's name would be a vital piece of information. Its lack pointed to a father from outside the clan. Hence, one of the natives of this world."
"Dr. Post?" Dane gestured to the image of Kaiwulf. "Where did the wolves get the ability to phase shift?"
"It's not inconceivable that many of the early experiments were carried out on animals. There are records of such things at St. Aldentia. You have to remember the early Terrans may have had exalted means of space travel, but they were not as refined morally as we are today."
"Right." Jee rolled her eyes. "I'll let the 'morally refined' comment pass, okay? But I've listened to all this, and I still don't have a clue how we can help you. If he's in another dimension, how are we supposed to find him?"
She folded her hands. "My dear, as you pointed out, you're bounty hunters. And now that you know where he is," she looked from Jee to Dane, "all you have to do is figure out how to go to the other dimension and bring him back."