CROWELL

32 Vanderberg Parr had been right. I could go home. I said my goodbyes amid tears and laughter, knowing I’d soon be alone on my journey. So fleeting was our small Crowell family reunion that it didn’t seem at all fair to be hurried along. Parr had to step in and physically part us because of the Ultras’ impatience. Now that they’d decided, they wanted me out of their way. In evolutionary terms, their race was on its last legs—their final crawl toward death—and they didn’t need other distractions around them.

It was time to go.

But first, the Ultras digitalized a kind of bubble suit after all—an anti-antimatter one (just my size)—and I made my way to the Exeter. Oh, the Ultra’s buildings and artifacts were magnificent. Even the buildings were artifacts now, irrelevant considering the Ultras had no use for them. I followed Parr, emerging onto a giant terrace that overlooked four other layers of terrace below me, and each one staggered outward, as if they were stairs for giants. Pillars reached even higher. In front of me, a gigantic wall of mountains seemed to cut us off from the rest of the world. The fading sun came from behind me and turned the mountains into a wall of deep color, the surface crawling with dark blues and light-streaked greens. Above them, up toward the large impossible moon, the sky darkened into startling shades of green, then dark blue, until almost black. It took me a few seconds to catch my breath.

Parr led me to a wide plaza, and on one end was a spacious elevator. We stepped inside and some mechanism released it; the elevator followed the contours of the mammoth building, and we descended.

The doors opened to a giant walkway, suspended in the air without any visible means of support other than where it tied off a good distance away to a giant ring that I took to be a staging area for space transport. Other walkways were attached to the circle, spaced evenly from other buildings, and inside the circle, more walkways like spokes of a great wheel. Far in the distance I saw more buildings like the one I’d come from. The sheer immensity of the construction awed me. I stopped and took in the spectacle, and Parr had to remind me to keep moving.

Where each spoke ended was a node or bubble. Attached to our walkway was a ship. The Exeter. There were no protective walls or railings along the walkway, so I kept to the middle, keeping pace behind Parr, trying not to stare at the spectacle before me for fear of veering off the path.

Before long we were on board. The Exeter blasted away from the ring, and I would’ve been afraid for anyone on the ring surface when it did, but of course there would be no one. At one time there must have been, when Ultras had a physical existence. Maybe proper safety measures existed back then.

We left the Ultra world and its moon behind and made our way to Rook. I’d forgotten how boring the trip had been. It seemed like an eternity since I’d crossed the first leg of antimatter space, but eventually we stood on Rook, gazing in at the ruined Pool Room.

Parr left me with the Tarot card—the Three of Swords—then gave explicit instructions how to activate it. I wouldn’t have the Exeter to travel in; Parr needed it to return to the Ultra world, so the Ultras pinpointed a spot in the jump slot where another copy of the Exeter would be. I didn’t ask how they figured that out.

Parr stood nearby as I made myself comfortable in the Pool Room. He would return to the Ultras after I’d left.

Everything else seemed anticlimactic.

Flash. Nausea. Light.

I was soon awake, and it seemed I’d made it through; I was back on the Exeter. It was disconcerting at first seeing the ship that had brought me to Rook, but I knew this was a copy. I’d quantum traveled across the brane, from antimatter universe to matter universe and into the jump slot.

But how old was I? I felt fine. No aches, no pains. I’d not aged. I had to be younger, as Parr had promised. Not by much, he’d said.

I was alone.

Tem Forno was not there. Either he didn’t make it off Meadowlark Station, or he found a ship and headed back to Barnard’s World. Contacted Plenko, let him know what had happened. Maybe he’d decided enough was enough and headed home. To Helkuntannas, that is. He hadn’t expected anyone to return from the Ultraverse, so why go back to Earth when he could stay warm on his home world?

I was suddenly depressed at the thought of being back on Earth without him—or anyone else, really. There was nothing else I could do except re-orient myself to my new surroundings. I fired up the new Exeter’s main drive—I knew how to reconnect the key in the engine hub—and made my way through the jump slot.