It’s 20:47. I’ve just taken 500mg of Gyre synthesized from blue apples taken from the Atlas tree.
20:53. I’m experiencing mild euphoria and visual distortions. Similar to the last time I attempted this, there’s no immediate rush of pleasure as one would experience when taking Gyre made from Arya apples.
I close my eyes. I can see a cornfield. Corn, but the color is wrong. Kyanophyll blue.
There are people moving through the cornfield, people the color of wheat sheaves in the sunlight. A band of warriors. They have spears, bows and arrows. I see one stringing his bow. They have six fingers.
Not human.
A female takes a bullet to the head, falls, dies. Her adversary is human, a smaller man wearing a plain gray jumpsuit. I recognize the gun – a CenGov issue firearm. But when her body tumbles into the turquoise grain, her arms and legs extend into roots, and her torso becomes a squat, stumplike trunk.
Now the scene becomes a battle. Humans fighting aliens, aliens massacred by superior technology. The aliens fight bravely, but they don’t really have a chance. They fall in droves. Or maybe I should say they fall in groves, because they all become trees when they die. In the distance, I can see clusters of these trees dotting the horizon of the otherwise flat plain.
It must be a war, then.
I can see that the stumps are deciduous, which means that if conditions are good, they might leaf out again. But when the humans die, they just die. Their comrades take the corpses back to their spacecraft, not even giving their bones to the alien soil. So it is a war of attrition – superior technology against superior numbers.
Reinforcements arrive, more of the golden, six-fingered people. But they’re led by a human, an enormous man of strength and charisma and will, a lion of a man, with strong arms and long fingers and a lion’s mane.
“It’s the wild man!” one of the humans shout.
Suddenly, the humans seem focused entirely on him. And he seems so…familiar. He reminds me of Suibhne, but Suibhne’s movements are whimsical and erratic. This man’s movements are direct, dynamic, focused – like Whirljack.
I can’t take my eyes from him.
I try to look more closely. No, he isn’t Suibhne, nor Whirljack either. A new man. A new emanation? Yes – it’s the eyes. Strong, and yet kind, even in battle. That peculiar opalescent fire tinged with the blue-green of kyanophyll, the iridescent flower-feathers of moth wings. Your eyes, Ash.
How strange to know an eyeless creature by his eyes.
His face shines, his red hair streaming like a flame scorching a path through the turquoise corn. The humans scatter before him. He has no weapon; he charges past their guns, somehow knowing where the bullets will be before they strike. He picks up the gunmen and tosses them lightly back at their companions, knocking them into the grain.
He doesn’t kill. The aliens do, though.
I clutch at my throat, gasping for air. Something is going to happen, something horrible is going to happen, and I want to reach out, to shout to him that it’s a trap, that the Terrans have explosives designed to be difficult for him to detect. But I have no voice.
Nevertheless, he looks at me. Or maybe it’s the illusion of eye contact, a face looking up into a camera. I’m scorched by his grim smile.
Suddenly, the dream shifts. Tommy is singing at a club that that has the layout of Tom O’Bedlam’s, but redone with vinyl, glitter and disco balls. Tommy is a sharp, understated dresser – mostly, he wears black, black jeans, black shirts, a black leather jacket, except when he’s onstage, when he’ll wear an elegant suit. But now he looks like he stepped out of the 22nd century rocketbilly revival – a bowling shirt, jeans with the cuffs rolled, blue suede shoes, one of those silly wrist chronometers with all the old-school scientific equipment built in – everything from a magnetic tweezer to a micro-particle image velocimeter to an ellipsometric contrast microscope. His hair is even slicked back. I can’t imagine Tommy wearing something so tastelessly retro.
It isn’t his usual style of music, either, lovely old torch songs, 15 centuries of culled heartbreak. This is some kind of photon-phunk mashup, like Rick James fired through a particle accelerator. When he finishes the song, I hear Eloise call to him across the room. “Hey, Thomas!” This is weird: Tommy never goes by his full name.
Then he catches sight of me. He looks surprised, no, maybe shocked is more like it. There is something in his expression that I can’t read. I’m disturbed. I can always read Tommy; he’s my closest friend. I want to give him a hug, but he pushes me away. Now it is my turn to be shocked – when would Ash ever push me away?
The look on his face is agonized. “This is so wrong,” he says. “I don’t even know if I’ll be allowed to be born. But I love you so much! I want to live! I want to live so that I can love you.”
And now, the dream is breaking. It’s not so much a crash as an unraveling. I’m grasping at the threads of the dream spiraling out of my hands.
Oh gods, Tommy, don’t go. I need another hit. Fuck fuck fuck, I only made one. All right, where’s the synthesizer? I’ll make another.
Tommy, what the fuck were you wearing?
Ha hahaha. If only Tommy could see himself dressed like that! He’d be mortified.
Shit. I knew this would happen. That’s why I only made one dose. I need to find the real Tommy, not a dream substitute.
OK, get myself together. It’s…21:17.
So what the hell did all that mean?
The Tommy segment is absurd. Sometimes Gyre dreams just don’t make sense. Sometimes, they’re just hallucinations. Or sometimes it takes years before reaching an understanding, like it did with my vision of Ailann.
But the other part of the dream – there might be something there. A new kind of tree people. Davy had put trees on Eden. We knew that sooner or later the nul-energy from the rip Ailann had created would cause the trees to evolve. And something else…the Terrans in the dream weren’t soldiers. I’ve faced CenGov’s military – they’re all modified for battle – Cybrids. Once you’ve fought them, you never forget.
Then who were they, and how did they get to Eden? Actually, Eden is close to Dalgherdia, and moves in an orbit almost synchronized with it. Maybe they came from the science station on Dalgherdia.
Why would scientists from Dalgherdia go to Eden?
Well, it isn’t every day a new asteroid just appears. They might have been curious.
No, it has to be more than that. Davy created Eden to mask another rip into the nul-universe. Ailann created that rip to stop a singularity which had threatened to pull Dalgherdia out of orbit and set it on a collision course for Volparnu. I’d bet my life that CenGov was responsible for the existence of that micro-singularity. It couldn’t occur naturally, and it was far too perfectly positioned to be an experiment gone wrong. Oh no, it was hostile, and CenGov is the only civilization with the technology to do it. They have a history of secretly supplying rebels on Tasea with armaments. They were behind that research lab doing those horrifying experiments on Owen. It isn’t surprising they would try something like the singularity attack. Some allies. They ultimately failed, thanks to Ailann, but we have no solid evidence against CenGov, only suspicions. At the time, I didn’t see the point in making accusations which would only escalate hostilities against a superior force.
All right, here’s what probably happened: the scientists were ordered to find out how the hell we stopped the singularity, and instead found a bunch of trees running around. And what did they do? The same thing CenGov always does to newly discovered alien species – treated them like an innovation in biotech. Of course, they didn’t want to let us know what they’d found. They figured if they were cautious, they could sneak onto Eden without anyone noticing while Dalgherdia was on the other side of the sun from the rest of the inhabited worlds. And then – ah, it’s making sense now – you figured out what was going on, Ash, and went to rescue the people Davy had created.
That’s what the “wild man” was doing.
Thinking of him sends fire through my bones. He does remind me of Jack – reminds me a lot of when I first met him. I had never really allowed myself the luxury of enjoying that instantaneous attraction. At the time, I was involved with Clive. More than that, Jack’s profession was ridiculous. He was a media sensation – obviously he’d have to have an enormous ego, women throwing themselves at him, and a life of constant touring. I didn’t know that he’d positioned himself specifically to get my attention, positioned himself to be able to ignite a grassroots political movement, because I’d left to study on Earth and you needed me to come home. I’d allowed myself the liaison with him at the Nau’gsh Festival, knowing that festival lovers meant nothing, and hoping it would get him out of my system. Of course it didn’t. Nevertheless, I pushed him away. Jack was just not the kind of man I could envision in any sort of normal relationship. It was years before I knew the truth and finally became Jack’s lover for real. By that time, my definition of “normal relationship” had expanded significantly.
There was a time when Whirljack was the strongest of them all, the most dynamic, the most charismatic. He changed the world to bring me back to Dolparessa. And now Ash made another version, Whirljack Mark II, so that I can fall in love with him all over again.
Something terrible is going to happen, and I need to warn him. I need to crawl back into the dream and feel his arms around me.
No. I need to find him, talk to him for real.
If all of this is true, then why the hell didn’t Ash tell me? I’d have taken a fleet in there…of course, that would have provoked an incident, maybe even a war with Earth. Maybe that’s why he felt that he had to handle it himself. But why not tell me that? Why not use alchemy to stop the invaders instead of conducting a guerrilla war with hunter-gatherer technology? Ash stopped the singularity, stopped the General Panic’s fleet from bombarding Dolparessa, stopped an entire alien invasion force from destroying humanity. You mean to tell me he couldn’t stop a bunch of scientists waving some pistols around?
I keep telling myself: I think I understand him, but I don’t. But I’ve never known him not to have his reasons, good ones. I’ll soon find out. I’m going to Eden. I’m going to find the wild man.