Drift pattern, p.48
Drift Pattern, page 48
The prospect of some new revelation regarding drift pattern mathematics is distracting. Luci’s attention wavers, and that’s all it takes. The older lunges at her, shoving the butt of weapon back hard into Luci’s chest. The pain shooting through her hand from the shaft sliding across the injured tissue causes Luci to drop it. There’s a metal clank as the churka strikes the floor. Luci steps back, clinging to her wound as she screams.
The elder clamps onto Luci’s wrist like a vise. “I can’t believe that I was ever so dense,” she says aloud to herself. Then to Luci, “I swear on Mama and Papa’s graves that I’m not going to kill you. I’m showing you why. Hold these.”
As the grip eases on her wrist, Luci accepts the two items in her good hand. She winces and bites her lip as her older version unwraps and tugs at the soaked cloth from the wound. Forcing her eyes away from the gore, she looks over at Ish, unconscious in the distance. ““How are you here and where is Cyphor Gicul?”
“Shut up and keep your hand completely still.”
Luci feels lightheaded but presses through the pain, refusing to allow the spots before her eyes to distract her. Her heart races beyond any effort to self-soothe with numbers; they won’t clot a wound anyway. “What are you going—”
“Old Luci G., always with the questions,” the older woman says mockingly. “Well, I’ll tell you then.” She allows the blood-soaked cloth to fall to the floor as she grabs the metal instrument from Luci’s other hand. “This is a heal kit.”
There’s a click, and the wand hums as the woman traces Luci’s wound up and down. There’s a warm, tingling sensation as a faint violet beam of light from the device mends the damaged skin.
Older Luci informs her, “A device like this would’ve put plastic surgeons out of business back in our interval. It’s really that good at syntha-skin replication.”
To Luci’s astonishment, the pain becomes more bearable.
“Drink the solution in the pouch and be quick about it.”
Luci does what she’s told, but the gritty, warm, malt-like solution is what she imagines an ashtray must taste like.
“There are nanobots in there. Drink it all,” she orders, making an adjustment to the wand before repeating the back-and-forth motion.
Luci forces down the substance, trying not to think of its contents. As she wipes some of the stray strands of liquid from her chin, she exclaims, “That’s amazing!” She opens and closes her hand in wonder. Her palm is still sticky from the blood, but the pain is only a phantom memory.
“Yeah, well, don’t get too excited just yet,” older Luci replies. She clicks the device off and returns it to one of the hidden pockets within her cloak. “The heal kit has a variety of settings. Depending on the severity of the injury, internal damage, etcetera,” the woman says sounding like a product spokesperson, “it also has a cosmetic and non-cosmetic mode, mainly used for emergency situations on a battlefield or something. The cosmetic setting, which naturally takes a little longer, also has multiple modes. When set to the optimum mending selection, it’s hard to tell without a microscope that an incision or tear to the flesh was ever made.”
Luci traces two fingers over her newly formed scar, looking for any traces of a change in its size. Not certain where the conversation is headed, she asks, “Yeah, so?”
“To illustrate a point, I’ve left off all of the cosmetic features, disabling the tissue reconstruction application that prevents scaring.”
Luci looks up at her, perplexed. “But you said all of that stuff about it being better than plastic surgery of our day.”
She raises a hand to silence Luci. “Any moment now, I’m certain to experience a memory overlay of these deliciously traumatic things that you’ve just encountered, and then you’ll—” She stops short, taking in a deep breath with her eyes closed. She stumbles forward and braces her body against the high table. “There it is. Give . . . just give me . . . a minute.”
Luci’s witnessed this behavior before. It mirrors the seizure that Macer had in front of the Michelangelo statue of David. For the first time, Luci steals a glance at their surroundings. They’re in a massive geodesic dome, the sides caked over with snow greying out the walls. Only the top, which Luci originally believed was a skylight, is free from patches of snowfall. That space has a faint pulsating aura that reminds her of the chronal ring ripples back at the Grange. The air shares the same artificial, recycled, too-sweet quality. She bites her lip, remembering the future image of a slain Bru Mandal.
“There’s no door out of here,” the woman says, coming back from her trance-like state, “if that’s what you’re looking for. The only way in or out is by skip transport, but no door. Even if you did somehow miraculously puncture your way through the reinforced glass and ice, the outside is untold kilometers of frozen wasteland in a post-Hi no Kawa world.”
Luci chides herself for not making a break for one of the two churkas during the short pause. “Why did you—”
She holds her hand up again. At first, Luci believes she’s indicating for her to be silent once more until a faint, jagged pink line appears on the skin’s surface. Luci is mesmerized like a kid attending a magic show as the scar takes on more definition. As it grows, turning a deeper shade of pinkish purple, the older nods. “So you see, Luci G., whatever you physically commit to ripples across time to me. If I kill you, I kill me.” An unsettling smile appears on her face like that of a gargoyle statue as she adds, “And I plan on sticking around for a long, long time.”
“You disabled the non-scarring function just to show me that?” Luci hisses. “And now we’re both permanently scarred?” An unexpected burp escapes, forcing her to relive the foul taste of the nanobot carrier solution. Turning her head to the side to spit, she exclaims, “That stuff’s worse coming back up!”
“I know you well enough to know that you have to have things proven out. You’d never believe something just because someone told you.” The woman slowly traces her index finger over the aged scar tissue of her own palm. “Not even if the someone telling you was me.”
Luci closes the fingers of her right hand, concealing her own scar. She can’t dispute this fact. “Why did you stun Ish, and what did Malom want to do to me?”
The older version slaps her own side and points at Luci with a crazed smile. “That’s right, Luci G., always so many questions! Ish has had a pretty rough day with all that almost being turned into a cybo stuff and then the red out. I figured he could use a little rest.”
Luci’s other hand curls into a fist to match the one with the fresh scar. “Why did you stun him?” she demands between gritted teeth.
“I wanted some . . . girl time with you first. He’ll wake up soon enough. As for Malom, I’ll admit that he was a good man . . . some even may say a hero. But hero or not, we reached an impasse: two diametrically opposed solutions about what to do with the past and ergo the future.”
“No, you said the disagreement was about me.”
“Your naïveté is a lot less charming than you imagine. Of course it’s about you. You and I are the supposed godmother to Hi no Kawa.” She sighs. “I’ll fill you in on all of that in a bit. For right now, don’t you want to know about DPM?” She extends her hands like a carnival barker. “Aren’t you curious to know about what you and Ish nicknamed ‘Porous compounds or Limber DPM numbers’?” She lowers her arms and presses an index finger against her temple. “I know what they are.”
With a jolt, the older Luci springs across the area to what looks like an inverted steel pinecone that’s as tall as a bookcase. A disappointed expression forms when she turns to look back at Luci, who hasn’t moved. “Get over here.” She motions enthusiastically. “I promise I’ll explain it all.” She holds up the first three fingers of her left hand. “Scout’s honor.”
“You were never a girl scout,” Luci rebuts.
She nods. “You’re right, but come look.” She holds up a curved piece of gunmetal grey material larger than a computer tablet but smaller than a miniature boogie board. “This is an ESTA damper panel. Come see.”
Still sensing something to be off kilter about the woman, Luci looks for a reason to delay and keep her distance. She holds up her left hand with the healed cut. “I’m sticky. I want to rinse all of this dried blood off first.” She looks across the open area to a freestanding lavatory near a hovering concierge bot that’s easily the size of a refrigerator. Beside the bot is a futuristic hospital bed with a complex web of weights, pulleys, and arm and leg cuffs.
“What’s all that?” Luci asks.
With the older woman’s face buried in a logbook of sorts, she turns a page and answers disinterestedly, “Exercise bed.” Marking something on the page, she turns to the large, inverted metal pinecone-looking machine hovering to the side of her. “Ever want to skip the gym or track and exercise in your sleep? That’s what that does for you. Now stop stalling and get over here. We’ll clean you up after I show this to you. I promise you’ll be amazed.”
Out of excuses, Luci reluctantly complies and makes her way across the vast area. As she passes the bot halfway between them, she notes the number of additional components and extensions from the small one at Macer’s guesthouse.
“Macer kidnapping you from my past proves that Malom was right,” older Luci announces in a loud voice. “Malom was convinced how desperate Waleen was to safeguard his perverse version of the future.” She inserts a curved metal object in the place of one of the missing scale extenders. The mechanism receives the component with a soft chime of acknowledgement. She taps the machine hovering in the air with the tool a few times to punctuate her words. “I gathered 2068 ESTA components from pre-Hi no Kawa satellites and made this here, a machine that can sustain an artificial interval oscillator.”
Luci halts a safe distance from her, saying, “The ESTA tech from the old twenty-first-century leap-skipping weather drones, huh? That’s why this place is seventy-two hours out from Relicus City’s timeline, because the original satellites were sent that duration of time in the future to relay data to the past.”
Older Luci gives a nod of satisfaction. “But this baby does more.” She slowly spins the large steel mechanism around, revealing a plain-looking seat and harness rig mounted in a cutaway section of the metal. “Much, much more.”
Luci can’t hold her curiosity back. “A passenger? You’ve converted these old satellite components into a transport vehicle?”
“The greatest ever conceived.” She takes a few steps back as if presenting it on a stage. “It is my magnum opus. I have defied space-time with this creation and brought the impossible down to its knees, because this can perform leap skips not restricted to merely skip nodes along the timeline.” She pauses, studying Luci’s reaction.
Nervous laughter erupts from Luci. “Are you saying that you think that you’ve actually found a way to slingshot to any moment in time—past or future—and anywhere around the globe?”
She beams with satisfaction. “Ah, there’s the Luci Gaudiano that I know.”
Luci’s head is swimming again, causing her to look down at her feet. This is the answer to the “limber DPM numbers” that eluded her and Ish. “But how do you avoid rupturing organic space-time flow? Doing a leap skip to seventy-two hours in the future to a nonexistent node, while very impressive, doesn’t cause the ramifications that would occur for greater skips of a month or more, and the further out you’d go from the origin point, the more unstable the cycle ring becomes until you could potentially fracture the architecture of what holds time together for all of us.”
Older Luci smiles. “Not true. That’s where the theorists got it wrong. Time is a lot more resilient than that. Einstein was wrong. J.M. Keebler was wrong. They’d have you believe that doing so would be like crumpling a sheet of notebook paper up on itself like a waded ball that would never stop compressing. In truth, it doesn’t affect linear chronologies at all, not in the least.”
Luci looks back up and wants to rush over and touch the cool metal of the transport, but she doesn’t dare move closer to the woman. “How, then, do you avoid temporal disruptions if you—”
She cuts Luci off, “Like I said, time is remarkably resilient.”
An orgasmic wave of enlightenment rushes over Luci. “This . . .” She points at the machine. “This serves as both the repository and the chronal trigger? You intend to store the energy from the shrunken skip point portals that you’ve collected and then ‘slingshot,’ to use your term, into anywhere that you wish to puncture in time.”
“Well, it’s a little more elegant than that, but in principle, yes.”
Luci rubs her temple excitedly. “But how do you get back?”
“You don’t; it’s a one-way trip,” her older self explains in a matter-of-fact tone. “In order to launch, the amount of CE confined in the receptacle cells must be tremendous, but the energy can’t be compressed without a relay, and the rider—”
It’s Luci’s turn to butt in. “The passenger can’t take it with them and can’t be followed by a longchair to a node that technically doesn’t exist.”
She smiles greedily at Luci’s unreserved wonder. “Exactly.”
Luci approaches the hovering machine and slowly circles it in reverent astonishment. “How did you ever figure out how to do this? Did you have help from Cyphor Gicul?”
An unexpected laugh explodes from the older Luci. “You might say that,” she answers, fighting a losing battle to restrain a wave of belly laughs.
Not getting the joke, Luci studies the ornately stitched clothing that drapes her other self, waiting for whatever this is to subside. After it’s taken longer than the woman’s memory overlay from a few minutes ago to dissipate, Luci scathingly asks, “Why is the mention of Cyphor Gicul so funny to you? What did you do to him? Did you kill him too?”
This sets off another round from her, this time including a few snorts. Finally, she says, drying tears of laughter from her eyes, “That’s rich. I haven’t laughed like that since before I was brought to Relicus.” She sniffs, shaking her head. “You still haven’t figured it out yet? As smart as you are, Luci G., you still haven’t connected the dots?”
Luci gnaws her lip. “Haven’t figured out what?”
“Gicul.” The woman in the cloak shakes her head and begins spelling her name, “L-U-C—”
Even before she gets to the “G,” Luci understands that Gicul backward is an inversion of Luci G. The revelation sends her reeling making her legs feel like they’re made of yarn. She collapses to her knees.
~ Two ~
Luci feels faint. How can this be, and how could she have ever suspected Ish? She speaks aloud—not to her other self, not to Cyphor Gicul—but she speaks, attempting to examine the truth of this woman’s claim. Luci stammers, “That’s why Malom mentioned my cat when he was in Carcerium, Newt. We thought the cat was male right up until . . . until she delivered kittens in the backyard.” Her throat feels like it has a marble in it that won’t go down no matter how many times Luci swallows. “That’s what he meant by being hidden in plain sight the entire time. It was me—or rather us—all along. I am Cyphor Gicul.”
“Well, not exactly. I am Gicul. You . . . let’s just say that you’re the raw materials, the ingredients, if you will, for what I will become.”
“Did Malom Roderick know this or did you kill him when he found out?”
The amusement leaves her face. “No, he knew from the start. Malom even said it was foolhardy to call myself something so blatantly obvious when dealing with L’inversione, but no one got it.” As if clarifying a punchline, she adds, “I even put the word ‘cypher’ at the beginning of it as a ‘screw you’ to Macer after what he did to me, but he never got it. Apparently, no one did.” She shrugs. “Not even my younger self.”
She returns to the metal machine and turns a handle a quarter of the way clockwise. “One of the only benefits of a patriarchal society, even in this interval, is that everyone’s eager to assume Gicul is a man. I mean, after all, how could a woman pose the biggest threat to someone like Macer’s ‘Relicus the Great’? Nope, gotta be a man for something like that.”
She pauses as she inhales a sharp breath and her eyes roll back. Gicul stumbles, barely catching herself by grabbing onto one of the metal protrusions of the pinecone-like machine. “Give . . . just give me . . . a minute,” she says.
Luci looks across the way at Ish, who’s still unconscious near the skip barge, wondering what he’ll think of her when he learns that she was Gicul all along and what that will change between them.
“Whew! That was the biggest one yet,” Gicul exclaims with a soft chuckle. “I guess the shock of learning you’ve been hunting your future self would create a pretty impactful memory.”
“Do the memory overlays hurt when they come?” Luci asks.
“Well, that was more than just one, but no, it doesn’t hurt. It’s just something like extreme déjà vu on LSD. They’ve become more frequent since you’ve arrived at Relicus City, I guess because of the strain and intensity of your encounters here.”
Before she can ask, Gicul explains, “Don’t worry, I can’t read your mind or anything like that, but thoughts become memories . . . at least the major emotional concepts, decisions, or discoveries, and those ripple through time and eventually settle up here.” She taps her temple.
“Does it erase your past?” Luci asks, still fighting down a wave of nausea at the revelation that she is the one they’ve been looking for all along.
“No, nothing like that; it just very disorienting as the memories merge and are combined with what I already know.”
