CROWELL

10 To my thinking, it wasn’t Terl Plenko in front of me. It was Alan Brindos. My partner, subjected to a torturous transformation from human to Helk in an Ultra-devised plan to create hybrid bodies so the aliens could live in our matter universe so opposite to their antimatter one. They were dying in their universe.

Brindos’s death seemed a proper symbol of the finality of the Ultras and their universe. He had sacrificed himself for the good of the Union, just as the human copy of him, Vanderberg Parr, had sacrificed himself on Rook to save me and, ultimately, the Union yet again. I rubbed my gray hair, remembering the travel between universes and its effect on me.

Parr, who had essentially become the type of hybrid the Ultras had hoped for, cast us with his nearly pure RuBy essence to the abandoned jump slot station where Greist had long been imprisoned. With Greist’s and Terree’s help, I’d destroyed the tether that anchored their worlds, denying the Ultras and sending their universe, and my dad, hurtling away from us forever.

There’d been way too much death and confusion these last two years.

“Do you want to sit?” Plenko asked as he sat down in his own gigantic chair.

The room looked, in many ways, the same as the main room they’d just come from, but this one, which was smaller, seemed more hospitable to humans. More chairs my size, lower ceilings, and wooden planks peeking through the more decorative blackrock.

I sat across from Plenko in one of the smaller chairs and waited. The two chairs were uncomfortably close to one another, and Plenko’s chair threatened to overwhelm me, like a giant wave about to crash. Plenko still held the Death card, which he passed neatly around and through his fingers, one by one, as if he were a magician.

“You and Dorie,” I said. “Maybe you should—”

“I thought we came in here to talk about your problem,” Plenko said.

“We did, but it seems strange considering the—circumstances. The history between you two. The whole ‘oh-I’m-not-dead’ thing.”

“Let’s talk about the card,” he said, ignoring my efforts to understand his reluctance to talk about Dorie.

At the same time, I was having difficulty seeing Plenko other than the way I remembered him last: as my partner falling when my blaster put him out of his misery and cleared a path to get to the terrorist version of Plenko.

This Helk was Dorie’s Plenko, and yet he wasn’t reacting to Dorie’s presence, and she’d come so far to see him. Why wouldn’t he talk with her first? Why was he so standoffish with her? He was hiding something. Something he didn’t want her to know.

Plenko was waiting for me to say something, so I broke my thoughts and talked about the death card. “That card isn’t for Tarot, is it?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Well it could be. Functional. If you had a full deck, that is. A Tarot deck is a Tarot deck, whether it’s simplistic or insanely, creatively funny, or, in this case, extremely complicated. But this is why you’re here. You don’t have the cards you need, do you?”

“I’ve been collecting them, and you probably know that. I’ve a lot of them now.”

“An impressive feat, considering how they were scattered. You don’t need them all, though. Just the Major Arcana—”

“I know. Both Morgan and Lorway told me.” I pulled the deck from my coat pocket. My blaster was there too, and I felt secure knowing I could draw it quickly if needed. “I’ve a lot of the Minor Arcana, but Morgan said they weren’t worth anything.”

“Except for two.”

“Let me guess. Two that I don’t have.”

Plenko nodded.

“But they’re just cards,” I said. “What’s so special about them? I’ve tried to read significance into their historical meanings, symbols and fortunes and—”

“They’re not just cards. They’re more than you could dream up.”

“I don’t know. I could dream up a hell of a lot.”

Plenko leaned forward a little, his head a mere foot away from mine. He held the card up. The image on it still made me shudder. All those bodies under foot. “Look at the border around it. Hardwired into the partially plasticized card material along the border—though not all four sides, the cards open-ended at different edges—is a thin wire infused with nano ink and encoded with the energy of an Ultra.”

I shuddered at the mention of the thin wire. And Ultra. Old associations died hard.

“Enclosed, controlled antimatter,” he said.

“Shit,” I said, thinking about Alex Richards and his Ultra tattoo. About Baren Rieser and his own inked numbers to quantum travel between worlds. About Vanderberg Parr, who’d become a hybrid, more Ultra than human in his ability to travel or send others traveling, powered by saturated, pure RuBy. Lost on Rook when the House and the portal disintegrated.

“You understand, I see,” Plenko said.

“I’m starting to.”

“Each card’s wire includes DNA strands and profiles specific to the maker of the card, and the card itself has another unique quality. Have you really looked at one close?”

“I thought I had. I’ve studied these things for so damn long, I don’t even know what I’m looking at anymore. We were going to have some of them analyzed but never got the chance.”

I took the top card—it was still the Hermit, the card with Heston Teska’s name scrawled on it—and squinted at it.

“No,” Plenko said. “Really look at it. Deeply into it. Past the image. What do you see?”

I let my eyes relax, unfocused and gazed deeper at the card. At the background. At the material. Partially plasticized, he’d said. If only partially, then what else was it made of? I rubbed my fingers on it at the same time, concentrating on its feel for the first time. Somewhere in the card was the encoded wire. I doubted I could see it, but by zooming in and conceptualizing the texture, I believed I understood. I knew that texture. The unfocused visual of the surface, deconstructed into its colored pixels, or old-fashioned bitmapped colored dots, took on a dominant color.

Red.

On a whim, I put the card against my nose and took a long, deep sniff.

Plenko laughed.

I shook my head. “What?”

“Processing and manufacturing of the cards would’ve completely rendered the drug inert. No cinnamon smell.”

RuBy. The sheer audacity of creating a seemingly simple Tarot card out of a partially illegal alien drug—one that also had roots in the Ultra universe—broke the rules of credibility.

It wasn’t difficult to intuit where this Tarot thing was leading, and Plenko’s expression meant he knew I was coming to an understanding.

“Somehow,” I said, “this card will mimic the effect of quantum sleep. The ability to travel.”

“So goes the theory.”

“Theory?”

Plenko shrugged. “Not like it’s been tested.”

“You’re kidding.”

He waved a hand, a gesture that was part you-take-what-you-can-get and part maybe-I’m-not-kidding. “There might have been some single-card testing, Minor Aracana only, with DNA coded to a test subject or two.”

“Who were all the Major Arcana cards made for?”

“That part should be pretty obvious, Mr. Crowell.”

“You’re going to say they were made for me.”

He nodded.

For me. Why? Who would’ve taken the time to do such a thing? Greist? He’d been instrumental in the memory block, pushing me out of harm’s way after the conference in Chicago. Was it another plan to trick the aliens he’d helped?

“The coding,” I said. “In the wire. Whose DNA?”

“That should also be obvious.”

It was, once he said it was obvious. “DNA of the creator. DNA of the artist. Jesus. You made them.”

He nodded.

“All of them?”

“Except for three Greist made before the conference.” A slight smile crossed his leathery face.

“For me. Why? I mean . . . when?”

Terl Plenko leaned back in his giant chair, eyes up and to the left, as if recalling everything from a far away, barely there memory. Probably a trick of the light, or maybe the angle of his massive body sitting in the chair that gave me that impression. He didn’t need to access any memories. He knew.

“After the conference,” he said.

“You were there in Chicago. You were young. Already on the path to DNA coding. Greist put you up to it. The same way he manipulated me and blocked my memory.”

“Even then,” Plenko said, his voice wistful, “Greist understood how the Ultras thought. He made so many back doors and Plan B’s that no one could keep track of them. You know about most of them.”

Forno and I had always joked about the next plan, Plan B, and how many Plan B’s there could possibly be. “I didn’t know about this one.”

“Not much of a back door if everyone knows about it.”

“You made the deck, altered the Major Arcana and parceled them out to keep them safe. Challenge me, with a little coaxing, to figure it out if things went awry with the Ultras.”

“More or less.”

“All while in hiding.”

“Necessity.”

I recalled my visit to the Emirates Building. “McCarthy at the Emirates said he saw Greist give Morgan a card. That was one that Greist made, then?”

“It was. Designed to be a signal card.”

“To signal me.”

The depth of Greist’s manipulation of the scene and the people at the conference continued to amaze me.

“And so,” I said, playing out the narrative, “you go through your life making these cards—or maybe you made all of them at once—your work in DNA locks proceeds, you meet Dorie, and soon she’s a RuBy addict, and you’re found out in some way by the Ultras, who copy you. You manage to escape them, elude them, and set up the trip to Coral with Dorie to tour the facility. Along the way, with the Science Consortium’s help, you’re snapped up and taken away.”

“Pretty close.”

“Lorway took you.”

He nodded.

“Coral blew, you triggered the signal to initiate the Exeter incident, and while everyone chased the Movement of Worlds Plenko, you were whisked to safety. Here.”

“Good work, detective.”

“I still don’t understand why,” I said.

“Like I said. A back door. Greist’s station that helped tether the universes? The second blackrock house on Rook? The whole fiasco from last year? It was a perfect backup. Except for the fact that we still did not get back everyone lost to the Ultras.”

“Including my dad.”

“Especially him.”

“So this is your motivation with all this? To find my dad? To . . . to bring him back?”

“Him and others who went over there. But mostly him.”

I didn’t know if Plenko had any idea why, but I wasn’t going to find a better time to ask. “What was it the Ultras wanted from him? Why did they find him so special?”

His response was immediate. “He was Lucky Lawrence.”

“Yeah, I know that. He was called that long before the Ultra scare.”

“No, I mean, that’s why. He was the Ultra’s good luck.”

“C’mon,” I scoffed. “This was an advanced race developing ways to hybridize Ultras and humans. Create portals and nano ink. You can’t seriously tell me they decided they needed a good luck charm. What the hell for?”

“You know what I know,” Plenko said. He stood now, towering over me before turning away and heading to the back of the room. He retrieved an ornate box from a hidden receptacle that revealed itself with the touch of his finger.

“And did he survive?” I asked. “Him or the others?” My breath caught a little, hoping for the right answer.

“No way to know. But if he did, we figured one person could get to him and find out what he knew. Understand, we didn’t know much about the Ultras when all this started. But we knew a little about their universe.”

Elbows on my knees, I buried my face in my hands. I rubbed my eyes with the heels of my palms and tried to lessen the tiredness and frustration buried there. The inevitable conclusion of this plan sucked, but it was the most hope I’d felt in a long time. It was a plan designed for me, and I knew what was coming next.

“You want me to find out, don’t you?”

“Whether he’s alive? Yes. This is what you want, isn’t it? You searched and gathered most of a Tarot deck for this without any idea of how it would work. It was just a hunch.”

Plenko sat again, and as soon as he was comfortable, he handed his box to me.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“The next step.”

“Which is what?”

“Travel.”

The box contained a card, I was certain. A card like the others, partially constructed of RuBy with a coded wire running though it with Ultra stuff embedded within. That wasn’t weird at all.

“You understand?” Plenko asked.

“If I’m going to find my dad, I have to quantum travel—sleep travel—to the antimatter universe of the Ultras.”

He simply gestured, indicating the box with an upturned palm.

I opened it and found a new Tarot card.

The Tower.

Talk about a creepy, disconcerting card. A tower struck by lightning, fire coming from its windows, two figures falling, presumably to their deaths. I’d looked into it a little, but mostly, besides the references to the spiritual world and a physical place, I could not help but think of the six towers of the Transcontinental Conduit. Perhaps the eventual downfall of humankind, or maybe the Ultras, who’d strove to build a symbolic antimatter house in our world of matter.

“You kept this one for the end game,” I said. “My reward for getting this far.”

“It’s not the end game, but it will, if all goes well, get you there.”

“How can it? The sleep travel only worked because the universes were tethered. The Ultra universe has moved, theoretically, a great distance. How can that jump work?”

“You mention theory, and you’re right. I can’t guarantee anything, but it should work, with all the cards in combination. There’s enough plasticized RuBy in all the cards, with the entirety of wire within, to do the trick, if it’s the right person traveling.”

“And how does that work? How am I the right person?”

“I made them for you. This one—” He indicated the Tower “—is coded with your own DNA taken in Chicago.”

I felt the weight of all this pressing down like the G-forces from a transport rocketing out toward a jump slot station. Trusting some plastic cards to transport me between universes was an awful risk, and seemed wildly silly, but hell, Plenko was right. Wasn’t this what I’d wanted? A chance to find my dad? Wasn’t this the reason why I’d started the search for the Tarot cards?

“You think you can do it?” Plenko asked.

“If you think there’s a chance, yes. But where will I go? Don’t I need a target? If I’m thrown into the middle of their antimatter universe, I’ll just cause a matter and antimatter explosion that’ll destroy their universe.”

“Or a nice chunk of it.”

“They’re already dying,” I said. “They don’t need me to force the issue because a few humans might be alive over there.”

“You do have a place to go. You’ll be able to visualize it.”

“Where?”

“The Tower,” he said.

Not the Conduit towers then. The only other reference I could think of—

“You mean Rook,” I said, incredulous.

“Not Rook itself. The House.”

“But that’s all gone. Destroyed, by Cara’s own death explosion. After Vanderberg Parr sent us on to Greist, he found some way to use Cara’s impending destruction to torch the whole thing and sever the portal connection.”

“He probably did. But not all of it.”

He didn’t offer more, and I searched my brain, scrambling for an answer. As I did, Plenko leaned back and smoothed the fur on his limbs.

“The one place both human and Ultra,” he said. “The only place you could go and survive—theoretically—and the only place we know of that could withstand a serious antimatter explosion.”

It made perfect sense. The same place I’d sleep traveled to before. “The Pool Room. It’s the damned Pool Room.”

“And from there you’ll find a way to the heart of the Ultra’s worlds.”

That sent a chill up my spine. “And how will that happen?”

He just smiled.

“Another—” I laughed. “I have to find another card. Where now? Orgon? Memory? Because travel around the Union is totally my favorite thing.”

He shook his head. The way he did it, with a look of sympathy and a tightening of his lips, revealed the truth.

“Fuck,” I said. “Find a card in the Ultra universe? Really?”

“Find two of them.” He stood again with a sense of finality. Our talk was nearly over. “Greist made two others besides the one he gave Morgan.”

“What cards?”

“Unknown.”

“So I should talk to him. Find out who he gave them to.”

“No. I know who he gave them to. It was Baren Rieser.”

Baren Rieser, killed by Abby Graff on Rook. I shook my head. “Nothing is ever easy.”

“As you said, that part of Rook was seared by The Landry when her antimatter core blew.”

“Those bodies would’ve vaporized.”

“And the cards wouldn’t have survived either, unless they were in the Pool Room for some reason.”

I raised an eyebrow in question.

“Yes. You’ll be stuck. Even if you figure out a path to your dad, assuming you can survive that, I don’t know how you’re going to get back.”

I took the news fairly well. I had no other choice but to go. If I found my dad, if I couldn’t get back, I’d still call it a success. I was ready for the consequences, just to see him.

“There’s always a chance, of course,” Plenko said.

“Can’t get any worse.”

“Actually?”

Plenko stared at me as if truly seeing me for the first time. No—he was studying me. Studying my face.

“Oh hell,” I murmured.

“It’s about the traveling. It works just like last time, except the distance is greater.”

I saw it coming. I closed my eyes.

“The side effect of quantum travel,” he said. “You’ll be quite an old man when you arrive.”