CROWELL

26 I woke.

The smell of something burning. The air heavy with the feeling of wrongness. There was light. But only a little, tinted sky blue, and ghostly, with no visible source. I lay flat on my back, and the surface pressed hard against me. My hands were at my sides, and through them I felt the coolness of the surface. It reminded me of concrete. Like I didn’t have enough back problems without having to put up with unforgiving concrete.

Where was I? Where was Parr? And was Dad . . . here? Were the Ultras—or the essence of them—here too, wherever this was? Parr had glowed me out of the Exeter, I assumed, initiating quantum sleep, and drawing on the power of the last Tarot card. At the same time, he’d managed to keep my matter away from antimatter.

The Ten of Swords. An unwelcome surprise. Something bad has already happened.

The burnt smell from the singed edges of the card had stayed with me through whatever dark passage had deposited me here to—well, wherever I was now. I couldn’t comprehend how I could be in a place inhabited by Ultras—in an antimatter universe—and still be in one piece.

But here I was.

Either that, or the process had failed, and I was dead. I convinced myself that wasn’t true, although it seemed likely I hadn’t ended up where Parr assumed I would. I still couldn’t see a thing, save for the blue tinted light that revealed—

Well . . . something.

For a second I was back with Terree, when he’d first explained to me the idea of the Memory—back before morphing male—and how I accessed, through the memories of Greist Sahlkla, all that transpired at the Chicago conference a long time ago. Then I’d remerged from the Memory and realized I was still in my office. Terree had sent me back through these layers of sleep to learn the truth.

I had awoken now, and what I saw emerged from the blue light as if I were returning from the Memory. A figure, long and lanky, like a Memor, stood rigidly in front of me.

Terree?

No. The figure coalesced, swam in my vision, and solidified as awareness caught up to me. The room came into focus too. Empty of everything but a few crude pieces of furniture, cobbled together inexpertly with wood and metal, and the persistent blue light emanated from the walls themselves.

The figure slumped, as if he’d suddenly became aware of something terrible and unexpected.

The Ten of Swords.

It was human. He was male. He was middle-aged—but how could I not recognize him? How many years had passed? Many. How well did I know him? Not at all.

But it was him. I remembered.

Though younger than me, I recognized him because I recognized myself in his gentle face. Recognized the kindness my memory of him dredged up. As my eyes continued to adjust to the low light, I saw the subtle characteristics of a man who’d lived the recent years of life in the worst of conditions, in a place utterly foreign to him.

He was lucky to be here. Lucky to be alive. But then again, wasn’t that who he was?

Lucky Lawrence.

“Dad?” The word barely audible, as if the light itself absorbed sound.

Lawrence Crowell regained his composure and stood tall. Tears were in his eyes the same moment I felt my own tears well up. “David,” he said. “Is . . . is it you? Really you?”

I nodded, and we continued to stare at each other, as if waiting for someone to make the first move. How did I explain this moment? Explain the years of loneliness I’d felt—sometimes without really knowing I was lonely—that now lifted and escaped from me like a prayer. I couldn’t. It was all too surreal, too difficult to grasp.

I’d aged far past him, grandfather-like, but he was still my dad.

Finally, the moment of sheer astonishment broke, and we closed the distance and wrapped our arms around each other. I held on a long time, and didn’t want to let go. Maybe because I was afraid I might fall when he released me. I was an old man whose aches and pains of the past day had been debilitating and frustrating, and now I held on for dear life. The strong arms of my dad’s embrace comforted me.

I didn’t know what to say. After all this time, what to say?

I missed you. I love you. I wish Mom could’ve—

I was saved from the decision, for my dad spoke, and his voice was his voice. The voice I remembered from my slumbers in the Memory last year. The same calmness, the same timbre, the same—peace.

“I was told you’d be coming,” he said. “I didn’t know when, but—I’ve been waiting.”

We finally parted from one another. I had to look up at him, just like I did when I was a young boy. Seemed I’d developed a hunch and shrunk a little because of the aging process.

“The Ultras told you?” I asked.

“Yes.”

I shuddered at the thought that the strange, bodiless, dying, antimatter Ultras had known about my journey and that they let my dad in on it. Did they tell him recently, when I came into their universe, or did they tell him back when they first stole him from my mom and me? Was he, or was he not, their prisoner?

Prisoner or not, he’s here, and that’s what you wanted.

I wanted to know what happened, but I didn’t want to just blurt it out. Sure, it was one of the biggest questions of my life. I needed to know how it all went down, that day at the conference in Chicago. The one I witnessed in the Memory.

Get away from here! Stay away from us.

He saved my life. Saved my existence in our own universe.

Run!

“They took me,” my dad said, filling the silence, “but you know that now. They had no reason to, at first, other than the fact someone referred to me as being lucky, and the Ultras love the idea of luck. It’s a concept new to them. They stole me, at first, because they wanted to understand what luck was. It wasn’t for insurance. It wasn’t so they could glean whatever scientific knowledge I might have that would help them. They wanted to understand luck. They wanted my luck.”

Hearing my dad explain the Ultras like they were newfound, ignorant friends was chilling. “I assume you explained to them the irony of your luck running out when they took you.”

“I did, but they didn’t see it that way. I was alive. I missed both Ultra scares. I arrived here in one piece—not a small feat considering this universe’s antimatter existence—and I learned what I could of them. I learned they were dying, and because they had secured luck for themselves, they might have a chance to survive.”

“But they were wrong,” I said. My voice rose, and heat rose to my face. “The answer to their problems was to invade our universe, and it didn’t work.”

“No, it didn’t.”

“And they used you, their lucky charm, to create a human who could live in an antimatter world. Dad, you were an experiment.”

He shook his head. “No.”

“They did it because they wanted to find a way to exist as hybrids in our world. It was the only way they could live.”

“No.”

My dad strode away from me until he came to one of the crude pieces of furniture. He sat down and the chair creaked noisily.

“Don’t you see, David? What luck really means? To you and me, to your mom, to humans? What it means to the Ultras?”

I just stared. My knees were shaking, and my dad noticed.

“Come sit down,” he said. “Before you fall over.”

In that moment, I didn’t trust what he said. I wanted to. He was my dad. Stubbornly, I held firm. “Your leaving wasn’t lucky for me. For Mom. For the Union. The Ultras tried to wipe us out so they could live.”

“They didn’t succeed.”

“No. But they caused a lot of pain. And death. Destruction.”

“Bad luck.”

I started. “What?”

“Why do you assume when I talk about luck that it’s a good thing?” He motioned to the other chair again. “Please, sit.”

This time I relented and gingerly folded myself into the chair closest to him.

“The Ultras found out about luck.” He leaned toward me, eagerly. “They found out about bad luck, too. There were a few others the Ultras took that day to bring here—Envoys, mostly—but none of them made the passage successfully. I was the only one. I was lucky. And that got them wondering.”

“Their invasion was a failure because of bad luck?”

“Their attempt to use me in their plan failed, and that was lucky for you.”

“For the Union.”

“Yes, of course.”

“So what are you saying? You were not lucky for them, because they couldn’t engineer you into an Ultra hybrid to help them learn how to do it in our own universe?”

He nodded.

“Vanderberg Parr. He’s a hybrid. He was my partner. My friend. A copy of him, anyway. You know him, right? Know about him? He lived on Earth, and then he ended up on Rook.”

He nodded again.

“A special creature, he calls himself.” My partner. My friend. A copy of him anyway. An Ultra.

“He brought you here in the Exeter. One of the ships put in the jump slots for you.”

“You know about that?”

“Sure. And about the card that brought you here. The Ten of Swords. Plenko told me.”

“He told you—” I paused, confused, as if I’d just been sucker punched. A strong left uppercut. “How could he have done that? The Ultras stole you. You were gone long before the Ultras made copies of him. Before the real Plenko did his thing. Before they used him to—”

“You know this. Parr. He’s able to survive in both worlds and access eons’ worth of knowledge of the Ultra group consciousness. But also human consciousness. Helk and Memor consciousness.”

“Then that’s how Plenko told you. Through Parr. He’s a copy of Plenko and Brindos.”

He smiled. “Talk about your special hybrids.”

“The Ultras were successful.” I stated it with a mixture of awe and revulsion. “They had their prototype. They could—” I broke off, not knowing how to finish, not wanting to say it out loud.

“They could’ve won.” Lucky Lawrence nodded wisely, acknowledging my conclusion.

“But they didn’t because Parr betrayed them,” I said. “He let us go, and the tether to our universe was destroyed.”

“That was lucky.”

“But how are you involved? You say you taught the Ultras bad luck instead of good.”

He nodded. “I wasn’t needed. They had Parr. I’m certainly no hybrid, and I can’t survive in an antimatter universe any better than you could.”

“And yet here we are, on Pawn.”

“On what?”

“This Ultra world. I named it Pawn.”

“Because you thought I was a Pawn.”

“Parr too.”

“Parr’s the only non-Ultra who can survive in either universe.” My dad swept his hand to indicate the room. He pointed to the walls that shimmered with blue. “This is just a buffer. A construct allowing my survival the same way Rook guaranteed your own. The same way the Exeter kept you alive on your way here.”

“That’s how you helped them. You figured out the science to create Rook. To create a place for you to exist here on their world.”

“I already knew the science surrounding matter and antimatter, and I’d taken it further than anyone before. I’d done talks on it around the Union as part of my Envoy work. I was going to speak at the Chicago conference about it. This is the luck the Ultras thought I had. What I could give them.”

“But all you could do was create those bubbles. You couldn’t make it work on people like you and me. So you’ve been here all this time, a failed experiment?”

“Well, it’s been a long time, but not as long as you might think.”

I nodded knowingly. “Very little time had passed for Parr, stranded on Rook, while I was gone.”

“I’m guessing it’s been a handful of years for me, subjectively. Time dilation. And some tricks the Ultras have up their sleeves.”

I shivered at the thought. I’d been without my dad for—how long? And it’d only been a short time for him. It explained how, though he looked middle-aged, I had recognized him for who he was in this room. He’s almost exactly the way I remember him from my youth, before he disappeared.

“It’s obvious the Ultras let me come here to see you,” I said. “And although Parr betrayed them, the Ultras don’t seem to care that he’s alive and helping me. Why? What can the Ultras do now?”

“Nothing.”

“It’s true then? They will really die out?”

He nodded. “There’s something eternal in the idea of light and energy and a relativistic existence without physical form, but consciousness can’t handle that kind of phenomena for long. They had no foresight of that, and now, only hindsight about the neural basis of immortality.”

“Neural basis—”

“They’re dark matter and antimatter and light and kinetic energy and—well. For a long time they were physical beings like us. Wait until you see the kind of civilization they built! Many of the structures on their worlds seem as fresh and new as they did when the Ultras entered their advanced, ultra-evolved state of being.”

“You’ve seen them?”

“I’ve not even been outside this building. But I’ve been shown some digital representations.”

“Do they still talk to you?”

“Sometimes. They use the nodes built into the buffer patterns in here to communicate digitally, even though they aren’t digital themselves.”

“So what do they say to you?”

He shrugged nonchalantly. “They don’t say much or ask much these days. They’ve accepted their fate. They still study me, but mostly I’m a curiosity. I’m stuck here, so what can I do?”

“And now I’m stuck here.” I slumped in the chair and felt the heaviness of age weigh me down.

Lucky Lawrence turned his hands over, palms up, and spread his arms wide, a gesture that communicated something other than agreement.

“I’m not?”

He brought his hands together into a faint clap. “So. Let’s wait for Parr.”

“He’s coming? But the card only transported me.”

“Yeah, well, he doesn’t need it to move around the Ultra world, does he? He just needed to dock the ship and make his way here.”

Over the next hour, my dad and I talked. We ignored the world of the Ultras—and the reality of the buffer prison—and reminisced about those early years when he was still a part of the family. I told him about Mom passing away peacefully, about all the memories and good times from years at the lake. About her long-time guardian Tilson Hammond that Greist had put in place.

It was clear he missed Mom dreadfully, his eyes misting up when I told him about her death. He talked a long time about her. He filled in the gaps about the reality of our lives when we were all together, about his career as an Envoy, and everything that the removal of the memory block had not quite answered.

We eventually came back to the Ultras. Like all of us, he’d never “seen” an Ultra. There was no way to describe them other than how he’d experienced them. What did he do all day, in this buffer zone? Listening and learning about the Ultra culture. Devouring books and entertainment—flash or otherwise—that the aliens had “downloaded” during their time in the Union of Worlds. Exercise on a matter-bubble that paired to his own steps to give the illusion of motion, the boundaries of which bloomed with images of this alien world—Pawn—as well as others where the Ultras had lived their physical lives. Eating processed food he didn’t know the name of, where it came from, or—if it was safe enough for him to eat—how it made its way through antimatter space. And sleep. Lots of sleep, though he was never allowed quantum sleep.

We always came back to the Union. Earth. The lake, the marina. The places he visited as an Envoy. We laughed and cried, we celebrated and consoled one another, and I felt certain, even though I’d grown tired and my lower back had begun to rebel sitting so long in the Ultra furniture, we could’ve talked for hours more. At some point however—and I don’t know how long he’d stood there—Vanderberg Parr caught our attention.

“Glad to see you made it here okay,” he said to me. He nodded at my father. “A pleasure, sir.”

My dad nodded in return.

“Your trip here was a safe way to travel actually,” Parr said to me, “if you have the means. You’re more likely to have a fatal accident crossing a busy Helk thoroughfare. Those blackrock roads soak up so much heat and play tricks on the eyes.”

The Helk part of Parr related that bit of knowledge. He didn’t even have to do his little eye movement and pause for data retrieval to put that out there.

“It looks like you have a ship now,” I said to Parr.

“Excuse me?”

“The Exeter. It’s yours. Explore the Ultra universe. Meet new people.”

“What people are you referring to? I’m alone no matter what universe I’m in.”

“You have us,” I said.

“Comforting,” he said. “Not quite true, though.”

A tremor ran up my back when he said it, and I anticipated some strange interpretation of our predicament. Not true? I squinted, trying to guess the intent of his message. My dad spoke, making me jump a little, and I thought I might’ve tweaked a muscle.

“Did you bring it?” my dad asked.

“Of course,” Parr said. He looked at me as if I’d missed the punchline of the best joke ever told.

But I understood. “You mean the other Tarot card.” I found it in my pocket and held it up.

The unexpected. I knew it meant more than that. Much, much more.

“You can travel home with that,” my dad said. “To our universe.”

The news gripped me like hands around my waist holding me back from doing something stupid. The feeling of helplessness dug deep. It was just too much to deal with. Things had dug so hard and for so long that I thought it might weigh me down more than this newly decrepit body. “Look,” I said. “To get to Rook I needed an entire set of cards with an intricate pattern that lined up perfectly. How is one card going to get me home?”

“I’ve learned the details now, from the Ultra mind,” Par said. “The card’s charged with extra nano ink and three times the power of RuBy.”

I balanced the card in my hand as if it were a comm card. “That’s enough?”

“How did Baren Reiser go back and forth?” Parr asked.

“His tattoos. The infused ink.”

“And RuBy, don’t forget.”

I rubbed the card carefully, tracing the swords: Down the first sword, up the second, then down again. The smoothness reminded me of my dad’s nearly unlined face, and was a reminder of my own marked, wrinkled one.

“No,” I said.

“No?” Parr asked.

“I can’t.”

“You can,” my dad said.

“I won’t.”

I knew the truth. The Three of Swords. Three men stuck in a universe not meant for any of them. But only one sword pointed in a different direction.

“The card’s only good for one trip, and for one person,” I said finally. “You would both be left behind.”