“You did not harm her, abomination,” Chet said. “I saw the vision too.”
“Did you feel that last part?” I asked. “Like a voice…helping guide me…”
“I didn’t feel anything like that,” he said. “I saw the first fragments, the first portals, and the first cytonics…then a hint of the next place to go?”
“Yeah, I saw that,” I said. “Another fragment with ruins.”
“Yes,” Chet said. “That’s a fragment deep inside Broadsider territory, I’m afraid. But…I know that we must go there. I feel…overwhelmed.”
I felt elated.
Yes, elated. I realized that ever since I’d discovered my powers—what my people called “the defect”—I’d been worried they were something nefarious. I’d thought that maybe I was something terrible. A delver in embryo, or something monstrous.
But I wasn’t. Cytonic powers were just a mutation. Granted, a bizarre one caused by my ancestors being exposed to the nowhere’s leakage into the somewhere. But nothing terrible grew within me. I was just…well, me.
Saints. I’d needed to see that. A simple revelation, yes, but it changed everything. I knew what I was. I knew how I had come to be. And it was no wonder that powers manifested in our people—Detritus had one of these portals, perhaps helping activate the latent talent from our bloodlines.
This was part of the information the elder cytonics had left, the thing they’d wanted me to know. You are not a monster, the impression lingered. You are one of us. You are wonderful. You are natural. You are loved.
And along with that, a nudge to help me develop further in my talents. A push, and some understanding. I had the sense that if my talents had been different, I would have been nudged a different way, to develop those abilities instead.
I glanced at Chet, who was grinning practically ear to ear.
“I feel left out,” M-Bot said. “You’re both experiencing different emotions from the ones I am. And…this is all very confusing. What is one supposed to do with all of these emotions? What are they for? What’s the purpose?”
“I don’t think they have any specific purposes,” I said.
“Of course they do. Otherwise they wouldn’t have evolved in you and then been programmed into me. But…I suppose there are things that are evolutionarily neutral, and perhaps saying ‘purpose’ implies too much volition behind the process. Unless you believe in God, which I’m not sure that I do. I mean, I was created by someone. Hummmm…”
I took a few deep breaths, trying to digest what I’d seen. “Chet,” I said. “Did you see those varvax on the nearby fragment?”
“I did indeed, and I find it curious. The two fragments were relatively near to one another. Diones and varvax.”
“Well,” M-Bot said. “I don’t know what exactly you saw, but histories show that those two peoples traveled between worlds cytonically before they did it with starships.”
“Yeah,” I said. “The same thing happened to humans and the kitsen, and maybe other species. I never realized the hole in that. A cytonic usually needs a direction to go, instructions, to hyperjump—at least very far. But this explains how; they met in the nowhere before hyperjumping between worlds.”
“Abomination,” Chet said, “do you have a record on when the delvers first appeared in the somewhere?”
“The initial records of the delvers occur after the First Human War began,” M-Bot said. “That was when the Phone Company—a human organization—gave hyperdrives to the people of Earth. Humans then spread throughout the galaxy. War began, and near its end the first delvers appeared. Before that time there were no reports of delvers, or even the eyes.”
I looked to Chet. He’d sensed it too—no delvers had existed at the time of this vision. So how had they appeared? What were the delvers?
My contemplations were interrupted as an enormous jolt shook our fragment, accompanied by an overpowering crash.
Chapter 12
I grabbed my makeshift club, which I’d dropped near the front of the cavern, and stumbled out onto the loamy ground. Chet joined me, unsteady on his feet, holding on to the wooden supports at the mouth of the cavern.
Another fragment had collided with the one we were on. It looked smaller than ours, but thicker and more dense. Like a battleship made of stone.
“How did you miss that?” I demanded of Chet, pointing across the green field to the place where the two fragments were mashed together.
“I have no idea!” he said. “Nothing like this has ever happened to me before!”
The ground shifted again as the “battleship” fragment shoved farther into ours, causing dirt to roll and stone to crunch. Our fragment was pushed along with it, like an old ship being pushed by a tug—a really aggressive tug with its boosters on overburn.
The chaos sent me to my knees. Scud, the entire fragment was shaking terribly. On Detritus I would have thought a thousand meteors were striking at once.
Chet grabbed me by the arm and helped me to my feet.
“How do we get off!” I shouted at him over the noise of rock crushing.
“I don’t know!” he yelled back. “There aren’t any nearby fragments!”
I struggled for balance but pointed at the “battleship” fragment. “There is one other place to go!”
“It’s trying right now to destroy us,” Chet yelled. “I don’t know that I consider it an option!”
“I’m very angry too!” M-Bot shouted from behind me. “I thought you should know, since it seems like we’re sharing!”
“Options?” I shouted at him.
“For being angry? I’ve always liked raw fury, but indignation has a certain bold flavor too, don’t you think?”
“M-Bot!”
“Sorry!” he shouted. “My databases say the proper behavior during an earthquake is to either get outside—which we’ve obviously scored good marks on, since we’re literally outside our own universe—or get to a place where nothing can fall on us. This seems to work. Yay us. Oh! And I’m not mad any longer. Wow. Do emotions always pass this quickly?”
Well, maybe the collision would subside now that we’d survived the initial impact. I looked up across the grass. The ground continued to tremble, and something else bothered me. Something I couldn’t immediately define. It was…
“The water,” I said, pointing. “The lake is empty. What happened to the water?”
“It must have drained out the bottom!” Chet said. “The fragments aren’t made entirely from acclivity stone—some have more, others less. I have hypothesized that it influences how fast they move.”
“The one crashing into us is more solid then?” I said. “It must have come up quickly, if you didn’t spot it.”
“Precisely!” Chet said. “Our current one looks to be mostly soil, so the bottom of the lake must have given out.”
That bothered me. I mean, these fragments were already playing with my brain. I perpetually felt like I was walking across unstable footing. As I scanned the fragment, my fears became manifest.
Rifts appeared in the soil. Widening cracks like bolts of lightning moved across the once-tranquil prairie. In these lines the soil and grass vanished, sinking out of sight.
“It’s breaking apart,” I said, forcing myself to keep my feet despite the shaking.
“Scrud!” Chet said. Ahead of us an entire section of the grassland fell away, leaving a gaping hole. “I suggest a hasty actualization of your earlier plan. We must get onto that more solid fragment!”