Drift pattern, p.10
Drift Pattern, page 10
Royse lowers his head. “Of course, Chancellor.”
~ Thirteen ~
Luci follows her guides into the same compartment that Cavazos retreated into moments before. It’s the size of a freight elevator, and Luci takes her place beside Macer. Royse positions himself in front, facing the door as it closes. As the lift ascends, she adjusts her headpiece. “Royse said we’re going to some monasteries in Spain?”
“Yes. Actually, just one. We call it the Grange. It’s where all of our food is grown and harvested. If that interval were to ever close—”
He doesn’t finish the sentence, interrupted by the opening of the elevator door.
Before she’s able to ask how all their food is supplied from a monastery farm, Royse steps through onto the platform outside and presses his index finger against his lips. The sharp smell of saltwater fills Luci’s nostrils as she and Macer remain in the elevator compartment. She wills herself to stop fidgeting, realizing the nervous act is compounding her stress.
After a few tense seconds, Royse gestures the “all clear” for them to join him. The trio moves outside, down a curved white platform as long as the corridor they were in before. It’s like the pier of a boardwalk constructed from a type of plastic instead of wooden boards. Luci thinks of the boardwalk in Atlantic City back home, where she was supposed to be at today—a place long in the past from here. Normally, the sound of water gently lapping against the support beams thirty or so feet below would be soothing to her, but not today.
Even the warmth of the midday sun on her face and ocean breeze blowing through her dark hair cannot ease her growing tension; there is someone, somewhere intent on taking her life. It’s obvious to her that Royse is anxious too. Like an ever-vigilant guard dog, he alternates scanning from left to right, up and down with every other step.
At the end of the curved walkway, the top of a stationary dome peeks above the crest of the water. Luci suspects that, like the domicile they’ve just left, the main part of the structure is submerged. She glances back to the one behind them. If the outer dome is any indicator, the one they’re headed to is triple in size.
Macer declares, “That one is my home.” They take a few more steps before he adds, “Though I haven’t seen very much of it lately—I’ve spent most of my time in my office the last few weeks, what with this Gicul crisis and diplomatic problems with New Australia.”
“Are you at war with New Australia?” she asks.
The answer comes slowly. “Technically, no. We have a treaty.”
“But Australia? How far away are they from here?”
Royse motions to speed up the pace.
Macer gestures to the water. “Relicus city, where we are, is in the Pacific Ocean near the equator, approximately fifty-three hundred miles from them.”
The dress she’s wearing wasn’t designed for haste. Luci concentrates on keeping the pace without stumbling and falling flat on her face.
Macer says, “Essentially, it’s only us and New Australia that have managed to restore any semblance of society, and yet we fight. Despite everything that’s gone before, our two nations stand against one another.”
“Come on,” Royse commands from the front.
Luci lifts the hem of her skirt a few inches for more mobility. “How many of them are there, and why would they be your adversary?”
“Best estimate is there’s a million or two of them out there,” he explains. “It’s strategic for them to withhold their exact numbers from us. We don’t tell them, but our census numbers of citizens in Relicus City tops the six million mark. There’s a peace agreement in place between us, but I find it absurd how we’re like conjoined twins fighting over who gets to eat the last piece of Jehasi bread.” Feeling the need to explain, Macer adds, “It’s a bread that’s like a thick paste . . . not very good.”
The population number catches Luci’s attention and forces her to slow. “Wait—so you farm food for six million people at a monastery in eleventh-century Spain? How’s that even possible, time travel or not?”
The question peps Macer up. “You’ll see soon enough.”
Though she knows it’s in vain, Luci protests, “I’m so sick of everyone telling me that.”
As they make their way along the outermost part of the curve, a glint of sunlight catches Luci’s eye. To the side of Macer’s quarters is a platform supporting a hefty machine. As they approach, Luci realizes it’s a vehicle of some sort easily as large as a helicopter.
Luci points. “What is that?”
Royse speaks above the battering wind noise off the sea. “It’s a drobine, the chancellor’s personal transport.” He continues scanning for any signs of danger.
Increasing his pace even more, Macer says, “Royse will fly us to the longchair hangar a few kilometers from here.”
Luci nods her head in acknowledgement, but she’s looking beyond the dome of Macer’s house at other bubble structures in the distance; thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of them, lay across the water like floating pearls. Though it’s difficult to make out through the soft haze, a vertical building of some sort defiantly dwarfs them all in the distance.
Royse rattles off some technical jargon as he leans against the strange-looking bladeless chopper. He pinches the Viatorio on his ear, communicating to some type of flight command somewhere. The craft is an elongated bubble held in the middle of a perfectly round upturned horseshoe. A series of crisscrossing cables suspends the passenger compartment in place like a spider’s web that’s snagged a clear pebble in the center.
Royse ends his transmission and touches a panel on the side of the four-person craft. The left side of the shell folds down, transforming into steps. Macer and Luci enter first, and then Royse finds his place behind a virtual console. As Luci sits, the bucket seat startles her by wrapping a mesh harness around the top half of her body.
Macer’s seat does the same for him as he informs her, “You may adjust that if it’s too tight.”
Slightly embarrassed, Luci brushes off her surprise, saying, “I have an aversion to being strapped into things.”
“Trust me, you’ll be grateful for the harness soon enough,” Royse says as the virtual panel before him comes to life. The steps return to a translucent state as they retract with a pressurized hiss and fold back into the craft to form the side.
The drobine lifts in silence. It effortlessly shoots upward from the platform, and Luci feels her stomach left behind. She glances through the glass roof enclosure as the giant horseshoe apparatus shifts its angle slightly, affecting the pitch of the pod. It propels them through the sky without any visible moving parts.
Macer taps the window on his right to get her attention. He proudly announces, “You’re getting a view of Relicus City that most people never see this far out.”
From the air, a pattern to the city forms that wasn’t visible below. If the intricate hexagonal grids were a net gently floating atop the brilliant blue green shimmering water, Macer’s place would be a node on its outermost strand.
“This is amazing,” Luci says. “How did you all do this?”
“Through an act of sheer will,” Macer responds without missing a beat.
She pulls her gaze away to meet his eyes. “No, I mean where did you get all of the materials . . . all the construction?” She points through the glass. “I mean, how did you build all of this on the ocean in the middle of nowhere?”
Macer’s thick eyebrows rise. “Oh, yes,” Macer says dismissively. “About that.” He pauses, rubbing his forehead as if to jumpstart a memory. “I believe your interval called them the Arab United Emirates, or something like that. Shortly before Hi No Kawa, investors from there endeavored to build a floating resort with a nearby amusement park.”
She nods. “So you built on top of it?”
“No, the construction site was many kilometers from here, too far from the vortex. We moved the materials here. The Emirates even had constructed a small airport for all the guests they expected to peddle their services to.”
“It’s incredible, really,” Luci says, “all that you’ve done here.”
“I and those with me have nearly fulfilled the legacy began many years ago.”
Luci nods. “Started by your father, Waleen, right?”
The mention of the name disrupts his oration, but he quickly recovers. “Yes, my father, Waleen and his contemporaries . . . and now the torch of that leadership has been passed to us.”
The magnificence of the city zipping by hundreds of feet below them takes Luci’s breath away.
As the drobine effortlessly glides in the direction of the center of the city, the hexagon frameworks bunch up in smaller groupings. The bubble domiciles, all relatively the same size, form tighter clusters as they close in on the city’s middle. Every so often, the craft zips over a more conventional structure, a building like from Luci’s time period, but none exceed a height of three or four stories tall.
Macer explains, “This . . . all of this is why you’re here. This is what you’re saving.”
Situated in the center hub of the city, one structure towers high above the rest. The impossibly tall, gleaming building casts a long shadow like a sundial across the dome clusters below. The base of the structure is unique from anything Luci’s ever seen, like giant tree roots stretching out in every direction.
Macer points. “That’s where we’re headed.”
“Here we go,” Royse announces from the cockpit. “Making our ascent to the tower now.”
The craft angles sharply upward. Even in the pressurized cabin, Luci’s ears pop. “How tall is it?”
Macer is pleased by her astonishment. “The top of the spire is nine hundred forty meters. It had to be.” Macer corrects himself, “Well . . . the portal threshold is located nine hundred fifteen meters in the sky, but there are two office levels above that.”
“The time door is just floating up there?” Luci asks, grateful for the chair harness that’s securing her in place as Royse said she would be.
Like a patient teacher, he explains, “We don’t choose their placement, in the same way someone doesn’t get to choose where Mount Everest is located. In fact, quite a number of the interval junctures are unreachable because they’re thousands of feet below the earth or sea way up in the thermosphere. Minister Cavazos has said he’d even heard of one in the belly of an active volcano.”
“But how do you know that the portals are there?” Luci asks.
“Drift pattern mathematics identify not only when but where they’re located, like an astrophysicist of your day finding black holes in space without ever actually seeing one through a telescope.”
She resists reminding him of Dr. Katie Bouman’s shot during the second decade of her century.
Macer gestures to the handhold lowering beside her. “You’re gonna want to grab that.”
“What, huh? Oh . . .” she replies, taking his meaning. She clutches it just as the drobine turns at a sharp angle and sails vertically upward parallel to the building.
The g-force prohibits any further conversation from her as she’s pressed into her seat by an unseen pressure. It feels like an elephant is sitting on her chest, forcing her heart to the bottom of her medieval costume footwear.
Eventually, the craft returns horizontal. Royse guides the hovering vessel as gently as a butterfly into one of four open bays.
~ Fourteen ~
“Wow, that was intense!” Luci exclaims, gasping as the drobine hatch retracts with a pressurized hiss. A uniformed man and slender woman wearing similarly designed outfits to Macer’s approach from a distance. They cross the cavernous landing bay to the craft. Macer exits first down the steps while Royse completes the vessel’s shutdown protocols. The woman’s greeting echoes throughout the area as she rushes up to him. “Good afternoon, Your Excellency.”
Luci hikes her long dress up to her shins and cautiously descends behind Macer.
His tone is all business, devoid of any warmth toward the woman. “We have three for the Grange today.”
She offers a submissive nod. “Yes, sir. Mr. Timmons alerted us. Two longchairs are being prepped.”
Luci feels a slight unease that the uniformed man standing at attention has the same type of churka weapon that the cybo held outside of the guesthouse doorway. She’s never liked guns, and though this future weapon is radically different in design from the rifles back home, she suspects its purpose is the same: to end life. Luci looks past him to the massive opening in the side of the building Royse flew them through. The city is even more breathtaking from this dizzying height. The bubble structures shine like little iridescent dots on the sparkling blue water below. The sight of it reminds Luci of looking out from the observation deck of the 108–story Willis Tower back home in Chicago and makes her feel homesick.
Gazing upon the glittering city below, she’s reminded of Macer’s statement that there’s some six million or so lives down there whose fates rest on her ability to solve an elusive math problem. What if her DPM discovery was a fluke, something that she stumbled across?
And what of the “victims” of DPM, her mathematical principle? What does she owe them? Briefly, she contemplates lifting the long hem of her skirt to her knees and making a mad dash for the bay opening. Surely her suicide would prevent Hi no Kawa from ever happening. What did Royse mean earlier about taking measures in her interval? Were her friends and colleagues at risk if she forfeited her life? Could Macer simply send a crew back to her lecture and snatch her all over again? The memory of Shar’s final admonition to her that she “must keep herself alive” pops into her mind.
The time to act passes.
Royse rejoins them, and the party briskly walks across the area. To Luci, the combination of the row of small glass offices and the highly-polished tile floor looks like a car dealer’s showroom, minus any vehicles on display.
To her relief, the man with the churka doesn’t follow them through the large door at the end of the area but rather stands at attention outside.
“This is one of the things that I wanted you to see,” Macer says as the four of them step onto an extended escalator that stretches farther upward than modern engineering of her time could fathom.
She cautiously peers over the side of the handrail. A hundred feet or so down is a busy canyon maze of conveyor belts shuffling containers the size of tall minivans in every direction. Scattered workers in white jumpsuits and head coverings move throughout various station points, but the operation is almost entirely automated. A dull churning sound drones on as the containers push through the intricate labyrinth to their destinations.
“All of that is food?” Luci asks, noticing for the first time the cybos perched on various planks extending from the walls.
“Forty-nine metric tons a day,” Macer says. “It all comes through here and is distributed throughout the city. Remarkable, isn’t it?”
Luci doesn’t look up to where he’s standing, her eyes fixed on the production below. “And all this . . . it feeds a city of six million?”
Macer descends the wide escalator steps until he’s on the one Luci occupies. “Every gram of it.”
After a couple of minutes of the steady climb, Luci says, “I have to admit, I’m impressed.”
Macer smiles. “I knew you would be, and this is only the distribution processing plant. This is how we get the food to the city. The true magic happens in the other interval. Wait until we go to the Grange interval and you meet Bru.”
She looks up at him. “This is amazing, but . . .” Luci hesitates, feeling a lump form in her throat.
“What? What is it, my dear?” Macer asks as his bushy eyebrows climb upward.
Tears well in her eyes. “We don’t even have everyone fed in my time. Scores of people go hungry. It’s just that I still can’t get it out of my mind that this . . . all of this is because of me . . . because of something that I had a hand in creating. Ten billion people, Chancellor . . . a ten followed by nine zeros. All those people dead because of something I did.”
Macer sighs and puts his hand on her shoulder. Luci resists the urge to pull away from his touch. The escalator continues to carry them upward in silence for another minute or so.
As they reach the apex of the climb, Luci says, “I just wish there was another way . . . a chance to avoid the Hi no Kawa war that causes all of this.”
“Well . . .” Macer begins as the four of them take turns emptying onto the platform, “there’s not.”
The response is so unexpectedly curt and unflinching that Luci is taken aback.
Before she can respond, the attendant announces, “Sir, they’re almost ready for you inside.”
“Very good,” he replies, moving to the door the woman ushers him to.
As Luci falls in behind Royse, her mind wanders to Macer’s motive for bringing her here. Why risk exposing three of them to an attack by Gicul just to give her a tour of the city and show off the Grange? It makes no sense until she remembers that while he’s a leader of a city of six million, he’s a politician first. Politicians—the good ones at least—always had an innate sense of what a person wanted at their core. They were masters at sniffing this out and then finding a way to deliver whatever it was to them in order to get them to align with their goals.
Luci rebukes her transparency to him, but a part of her—a large part—is unashamedly thrilled to receive new information to process, taking to it like a cat to catnip.
As did the man with the churka, the attendant waits at the door and doesn’t enter with them. The ceiling of the medium-sized area stops about twenty feet up, considerably lower than the areas they’ve been through since their arrival to the station. Four cybo sentries stand with backs to the entrance, two positioned on the left and the right. They remain motionless and at the ready, each behind separate hinged glass cases that look a little like dunking booths. It takes a moment to register the absence of the foul smell that she’s come to associate with these pitiful creatures, and she is grateful for whatever marvel technology contained in the enclosures has filtered out their stench.
