“Yes,” Zhao said, firmly. His position was always Work from the facts. “Do you remember anything of dying?”
“White light. Burning. Falling. Drowning. Falling some more. If I believed in hell, I’d think that’s where I was. There’s something I have to show you. It’s important. That’s all I know, that and the feeling that once we’re there, some of the noise in my head will stop.”
And they resumed their journey.
Zhao had not been a popular child, not with his brother or playmates. One of the reasons was the fact that he was a brother: every other boy in the neighborhood (and there were only a few girls) was a single child, an honored son…and saw Zhao as an unfair ally in sports and war games.
The other reason? Zhao never believed any of the stories the other boys told, not about Chang Liu’s father being a taikonaut or Du Jincheng’s DVD of Halo III and especially not Mrs. Yang showing her breasts to Mang Senlin—even once, much less twice.
His constant refrain? “Show me.”
This personality trait—which he defined as healthy skepticism—had served him in his intelligence work.
He wasn’t sure it was serving him on Keanu. Start with the vastly improbable scooping of Bangalore humans by a giant alien space bubble, to use terms that would have come out of Chang Liu’s mouth in 1998.
Then the arrival on the NEO, the discovery of the highly unusual events of the Destiny and Brahma missions (Zhao had known that there had been a Close Encounter, but few of the details), and the astonishing business of Megan Stewart’s resurrection two years after her death, followed by, apparently, astronaut Pogo Downey’s return from a more recent fatal accident.
What had driven Downey, anyway? Some twist in his personality? Zhao’s research pegged the astronaut as extremely religious, suggesting that his death and resurrection might have unhinged him. Or was it a more rational desire to protect Earth from infection by the dangerous entities aboard Keanu—?
Zhao could sympathize with both motives. He was still emotionally numb from the wonders and terrors of his experiences since leaving the habitat, which, looking back, now seemed like a haven of sanity and logic. Being trapped in mysterious tunnels! Swimming in a stream of plasmlike goo!
Then falling to what surely should have been his death, only to survive…and find himself in the company of resurrected astronaut Yvonne Hall!
The only truly logical conclusion was that he had actually been killed when a kinetic-energy weapon struck Bangalore. Perhaps, as Yvonne suggested, this was some kind of hell. Certainly he had been shown a great many things…he just didn’t know what they all meant—
They were skirting another lake, this one filled with churning bluish fluid, when the dog suddenly began barking, and not the friendly sounds even Zhao recognized.
Warning sounds, complete with growls.
With a clap of thunder so loud the sound flattened them, the lake exploded. Thrown flat on his back, Zhao could only watch in amazement as a gusher of blue fluid shot toward the roof of the habitat…to disappear into a rooftop portal.
It was over within seconds, the only evidence of the massive eruption being the empty lake…and a misty rain.
“God, that tastes awful!” Rachel said, wiping her mouth.
“Don’t drink it!” Pav said, but it was difficult, since they had been coated with the fluid.
“Will it hurt us?” Zhao asked Yvonne. “And what was it?”
“Good questions,” she said. “I’m putting them both in the queue. Meanwhile, we’re here.”
Zhao immediately classed the structure—four stories tall, and twice as wide, looking much like the Temple in the human habitat—as a public building of some kind. It just had a more majestic aspect, like British colonial centers in India.
Except that whereas those would face a broad avenue or a public square, or even this bizarre exploding lake, this rested at an odd angle to those next to it. At least two “alleys” simply dead-ended here, as if this building had been dropped into the neighborhood long after the others.
Yvonne stopped in the front, with Pav, Rachel, Zhao, and Cowboy looking the place over…and waiting. “Okay,” Rachel said. “We’re here. Now what?”
“We go in.”
The building not only wasn’t barred or locked…it wasn’t even closed in; an entire side was open to the elements, such as they were. Or visiting strangers, in their case.
Entering its shadowy interior, Zhao was struck by the sheer size, the darkness, and what appeared to be illustrations along the walls.
“It’s like a museum or something,” Rachel said. Actually, to Zhao it was a planetarium; the exhibits were star fields. As they approached the first one, a solar system emerged from the stars…one more step and a giant green planet grew prominent.
There was no actual lighting, but the exhibits—there was no better word—provided their own light. “I count a dozen of them,” Yvonne said.
“You counted, or the voices in your head?” Zhao said.
“The voices are quiet right now, thank God.”
“Whoa!” Pav said. “Check this out!”
He had gone closer to the first planet exhibit. “What happened?” Rachel said.
He simply took her by the hand and pulled her with him. “Oh!” she said.
The planets disappeared, replaced by a landscape—and several alien beings. They were two-legged, but with three appendages. Their world, judging by the illustration, was heavily industrialized and densely populated.
“Okay,” Rachel said, “we’re being shown different worlds, and the beings who live there, right?”
“I have no better suggestion,” Zhao said. He had shifted to the next one, which showed a ringed world and several moons. The landscape on display was mountainous, covered with patchy ice, and drenched in a dark rain. The inhabitants were squat, flat creatures…alien centipedes.
A third world, a banded gas giant like Jupiter, showed no surface landscape at all, but rather a sea of clouds and floating islands of vegetation…and beings that reminded Zhao of jellyfish.
The fourth…brilliantly scarlet desert, and an alien whose head looked like the bleached skull of a long-dead steer, wearing a monk’s habit.
Rachel was already two exhibits ahead of him, in front of the first Earth-like world Zhao had yet seen…though this one looked to be ninety percent ocean. “This creature looks like the Sentry my father talked about.”
Before Zhao could go closer, Pav said, “You know what these guys have in common?” Without waiting for an answer, he said, “Clothing.” It was true; even the alien jellyfish wore delicate armor of some kind.
“What did you expect?” Rachel said. “They’d be naked?”
“In all the sci-fi I used to watch, aliens usually were naked.”
“Maybe they’ve all eaten from the Tree of Knowledge of Life and Death,” Yvonne said. Zhao knew what she meant, but Rachel and Pav looked at her as if she were gibbering. “The Garden of Eden,” she explained. “Adam and Eve were running around, happily naked, until Eve took a bite of the apple and got Adam to do it, too. Next thing you know…loincloths. Don’t know why I remembered that. I haven’t looked at a Bible since I was twelve.”
“Maybe the voices in your head are Christians,” Zhao said. “Speaking of the voices, we’re hungry and thirsty and I think we need to know what’s going on.”
“In a minute,” Yvonne said. “It’s not as though they just shut up…it’s just that the volume dropped. It’s like I have ringing in my ears, only all through my head.”
“Well, what would we be learning?” Rachel said.
“You’re eager for more unfounded speculation?” Zhao said, remembering the talk in the tunnel.
“Sure!”
“I assume,” Zhao said, “that these are races the Architects know.” He waved farther down the row of exhibits. “It may be that we’re looking at the Architects themselves.”
“I don’t think so,” Rachel said. “My dad told me a little about the ones he’d met, and these don’t look right.”