“And why did you have to be the expert?”
“I don’t know. It’s in my nature.”
Maren’s worst fears had become fact. There was always a risk with any space mission. Adventure could have exploded on launch. It could have suffered engine underperformance and drifted into a useless orbit, fatal to its crew.
Its thermal protection system could have failed. Even a small navigation failure would have caused them to miss Earth entirely, dooming them.
Then there was the possibility—certainty, it turned out—that they might be fired upon.
The method and likelihood of a return to Keanu remained uncertain.
When Sanjay considered the nature of the Adventure vehicle and mission . . . well, the odds might have actually been weighted in favor of failure and death.
And so far, he had experienced a little of both.
Yet . . . he had made it back. He was in his lover’s arms again.
So why did he feel so guilty?
He realized that Sasha, Harley, Zhao, Jaidev, and several others were nearby, either staring at him with obvious concern or pretending not to. “How long was I out?” he said, loudly enough for everyone to hear.
“Fifteen minutes,” Harley said. “We had to carry you.” A typical Harley comment, which Sanjay appreciated.
“Sorry about that.”
Maren was looking at his face. “How do you feel?”
A good question. He felt fine, except for the lingering pressure in his skull. The voices and other sounds were still present. Images kept flickering through his vision . . . they were less intrusive, but still present. It was as if his brain had learned to manage the flow of extraneous data during the fifteen-minute blackout.
And flow of data was what he had to be experiencing. Sanjay knew that one suspected reason for the Revenants’ existence had been to communicate, to serve as a bridge between humans and alien intelligences who had not only a different language but unusual biologies and, for that matter, wildly unfamiliar frames of reference. He had heard, for example, that the Architect seemed to possess a sense of time that was far slower than that of humans . . . the same way that an insect’s sense of time passing would be far faster.
Sanjay had become a bridge. Fine. His goal was to be a good bridge . . . and to still be standing more than a week hence.
“A little rattled,” he told Maren and the others. “Hungry.”
So they fed him typical Keanu food, which, given that he was ravenous, was the best thing he had ever tasted. (Another list of regrets for dying when he did . . . no chance to eat a proper Earth meal.) As he ate, he made sure to exchange reassuring looks with Maren while trying to answer questions from Jaidev, Harley, Sasha, and Zhao.
There were the expected ones. His last memory. His first sight and sounds upon revival. “Do you remember anything from in between?” Zhao said.
That question was surprising only because it came from pragmatic Zhao, the last human Sanjay would ever have expected to take interest in life after death.
Sanjay would have been the second least likely, and no matter how he replayed his moments of death and new life, he found no interregnum, no region between, no halfway-between-heaven-and-hell moment. “No. As far as I can tell, there was no gap.” He snapped his fingers. “It was that fast.”
Maren seemed upset by the whole notion, not that Sanjay could blame her. “How did this happen?” she was saying.
“Don’t question it,” Harley said. “Gift horses and all that—”
Unsurprisingly, this caused Maren to collapse in sobs.
“Oh, for God’s sake, Harley,” Sasha said.
“I’m a little curious, too,” Sanjay said. “I mean, we knew that Keanu had the ability to . . . find an individual human soul and—”
“Please don’t call it a soul!” Maren said.
“Fine, a human identity, a personality . . .” As he uttered these terms, he noticed changes in the signals inside his head, as if he were taking part in a kind of guessing game.
“A morphogenetic field,” Jaidev offered. Then he smiled. “Whatever the hell that means.”
That term resonated inside Sanjay’s head. “My particular morphogenetic field was apparently tracked and then retrieved for, uh, reuse?” He smiled at Maren as he said that. She shook her head at the wickedness of it all. But she had stopped sobbing. “I don’t think we’re ever going to know how,” he said. “But maybe we can figure out why.”
“Keanu wanted you back. That’s why,” Jaidev said.
“Which is obvious and still tells us nothing,” Zhao snapped.
“Keanu also seems to be monitoring us,” Sasha said. “It’s bad enough if it’s watching or listening. It’s terrifying to think that somewhere inside Keanu is a . . . a computer system that understands English and Hindi. But I can accept that. I can imagine it. What I don’t know is if Keanu is reading our minds.”
“Unlikely,” Jaidev said.
“And manipulating morphogenetic fields is likely?” Harley said.
“We can’t know the answers to those questions,” Zhao said. “Not yet. But add this to our list: Assume Keanu has been monitoring us all along, tracking our movements, growth—”
“Births, deaths,” Sasha said.
Zhao nodded. “Especially deaths. And ask . . . why did the Beehive stop working? We thought it had been damaged in the rebooting of the core. Right now it seems as though Keanu just turned it off.”
“And eventually turned it back on,” Sanjay said. “I can’t say I’m unhappy it did.”
Maren had returned, snuggling up to him and taking his hand.
Now Harley looked at the others, making some nonverbal exchange of information. Then he turned to Sanjay. “Would you be willing to talk to Dale Scott?”
“Why not?”
As Zhao went to retrieve Dale, Sanjay said, “When did he turn up?” Harley and the others briefed him on Dale’s sudden return. “Wait, he knew about our troubles?” Sanjay had to laugh. “He actually knew more than I did!”
“You had an excuse,” Harley said.
“Yeah, I was pretty dead.”
Maren got up. “I don’t like this.”
“You don’t even know Dale Scott,” Sanjay said.
“Why are you doing this?” she said. “Why are you putting yourself through it? You should be resting—”
“I’ve had enough rest,” Sanjay snapped, immediately regretting his sharp tone. He did not want to quarrel with Maren. But he faced challenges that were greater and more important, frankly, than their relationship. “Sorry.”
She looked at him, then shook her head. “Find me when you feel like it.” And walked away.
As Maren left, she passed the arriving scarecrow of Keanu, Dale Scott.
The moment Sanjay saw Dale, the noise inside his head increased. He could feel his heart rate spiking—the imagery was clearer now, the sounds less chaotic.
Something was definitely happening.
Then Dale Scott put his hands to his head.
“Are you feeling that, too?” Sanjay said.
“Probably.”
“What do you see or hear?”
“The vesicle, mostly,” Dale said.
Which confirmed what Sanjay had thought. “We’re on the same wavelength.” He knew all about the vesicle and the plan to use it as a secret strike weapon against the Reivers.
“I can speak for all of us, I think,” Sasha Blaine said, “when I tell you that you two are freaking us out.”
“Sorry,” Dale said. “I’ve spent a lot of time trying to tap into the Keanu system. I don’t think I’ve mastered it.” He pointed at Sanjay. “But you’ve got it.”
Yes, he realized, as images and data seemed to come into focus, arranging themselves in accessible columns. He had glimpses of Keanu, both its interior and exterior. He saw Earthscapes, too . . . not just India and the Pacific, but a desert and a giant structure of some kind.