The Folded World Read online

  “I am, yes,” Aleshia had replied. Her knees, she remembered, would not stop trembling, threatening to dump her into the dirt outside Margyan’s home. The old woman had invited her in, and made her comfortable in the nicest, softest chair Aleshia had ever felt. She almost sank into it, as if she were sitting on a cloud. Margyan brought her tea, surprisingly sweet and fruity, and made pleasant conversation until she was sitting opposite Aleshia, each with her own simmering mug.

  “Your father,” Margyan said then. Her smile vanished. “He beats you, yes? He’s a worthless lout, that one.”

  “No, he’s—” Something in Margyan’s expression made her halt the lie, untold. “Yes,” she said. “He does beat me. And he won’t do a lick of work.”

  “Worthless,” Margyan said again. “But I’m sorry, you came for something in particular, not just to be enthralled by my insights and worldly ways.”

  Aleshia’s voice seemed to leave her. She opened her mouth and a squeak emerged, a sound a stepped-on baby toad might make. She cleared her throat and tried again. “My friend Gillayne,” she managed. “She says you know about the ones who stay away. She says they’re really the giants, and the ones who sent the burning rains.”

  “Ahh,” Margyan said. She rose from her chair and drew the curtain, plunging the room into twilight. “Are you sure you want to know?”

  “I am,” Aleshia said. “I’m sure. I must know.”

  “Once you’ve learned it, you can’t unlearn it,” Margyan warned. “You won’t be able to forget.”

  Aleshia bunched her skirts in her fists and pounded on her own thighs. “I don’t care! I want to know the truth!”

  “If you insist,” Margyan said. “But always remember that I tried to discourage you. Curiosity is part of life, the sign of a superior intellect. But it has a way of demanding its own price, later on. When the time comes and the payment’s due, I don’t want you thinking ill of poor old Margyan”

  “Never!”

  Margyan chuckled. “That’s as big as lie as I’ve heard all year,” she said. “But no matter. You want the truth, yes? Here it is. . . .”

  • • •

  Aleshia remembered that conversation as she watched the objects hurtling toward them. Kistral was right, they were landing. When they neared the ground, enormous clouds of dust billowed into the air, and when they actually came to rest, the racket was even worse than before. A roar like that of a hundred wagons seemed to emanate from each one, joined by clanking, mechanical sounds almost buried under the roar, and the grinding noise as they scraped over sand and rock and field.

  By that time everyone in the village, or everyone who could walk or hobble or crawl outside, had come to watch. The more people crowded together, the more Aleshia heard theories and rumors about their visitors. “Monsters,” someone said. “They’re not inside those things,” another warned. “They are those things, with skin of steel and sharp-edged wings!” One man started blubbering. “They’ve come for our children,” he said between sobs. “Our livestock’s no longer good enough.”

  Margyan had opened Aleshia’s eyes, though. She looked at the villagers gathered there, fewer than half of what there would have been, not even a year earlier. A third, more like. She gathered her skirts and stepped down the slope to Gillayne’s side. “That’s not them,” she said quietly. “They are inside, and they’re going to come out. And they aren’t here for the children, but for all of us.”

  Gillayne eyed her with surprise. “You’ve been to see Margyan?”

  “I meant to tell you, but I haven’t had the chance. I’ve been so busy.”

  “Some of us have a welcoming gift for them,” Gillayne said. She drew Aleshia’s gaze down with her eyes, until Aleshia saw what she held beneath her own skirts: a hatchet, its edge sharpened until it gleamed with wicked purpose. “Had I known you knew, I’d have told you sooner.”

  “Who else?” Aleshia asked. Her heart had started to flutter; she did not want to believe Margyan’s suspicions, but worse still was the idea that her friends might act upon them.

  Gillayne made a point of not looking at anyone she named. “Kistral, Claen, Nakya, Virong. Some others.”

  Aleshia looked at the number of objects—she didn’t know what to call them; flying wagons?—that had landed, and were even now sitting motionless as the dust clouds settled around them. They were big, she realized, far larger than the biggest wagon she had ever seen. Each could hold dozens of people, easily. Hundreds, perhaps.

  “That’s suicide,” she said. “You can’t fight that.”

  “That’s what they want us to believe,” Gillayne countered. “Suicide or not, I don’t go down without trying.”

  “What about me?” Aleshia asked. “I have no weapon.”

  “It’s not too late. Get an ax or a bow or a knife from your house. A hammer. Anything.”

  Aleshia glanced up the hill. Father stood by the door, hand inside his shirt, scratching his belly. His face was dull and mean. If that was what life had to offer, the chance to marry someone like that, to raise children who would become that in their turn . . .

  “No,” she said aloud.

  “What?”

  “I won’t accept that there’s nothing else, nothing beyond what we’ve got here. I know there’s more this world can offer.”

  “You’d best hurry, if you hope to ever find out.”

  “Right back,” she said. As she started up the hill, the flying wagons opened and people came out. They looked much like the villagers, just people after all, but their clothing was like nothing she had ever seen, and their weapons even less so.

  Sixty or seventy of them emerged from the insides of the flying things, and they came toward the village. As they approached, one of them called out in an accent that was strange but understandable. “We aren’t here to hurt you,” she said. “You must come with us now. It’s time.”

  Yignay strutted to the front of the pack of villagers. “Come with you where? In those things?”

  “Just do as you’re told, old man,” the woman said. “Don’t make trouble.”

  “This place is our home,” Yignay argued.

  “Used to be, you mean.”

  Aleshia reached her house. Her father shot her a vicious glare, as if the whole affair were somehow her fault, but he stepped aside and let her pass. She went to the kitchen and found the biggest knife they owned, with a blade she kept keen by scraping it on the sharpening stone every second new moon. She made no attempt to hide it, but ran from the house with it clutched in her fist.

  She was just in time to see Yignay scoop a stone from the ground. It was smaller than his fist, but not by much. “Always has been, I mean,” he said. “Always will be.”

  The woman had come several steps closer, but she was still well outside the distance that Yignay could hurl a stone. The rest came right behind her, bunched up together, carrying objects Aleshia could no more name than she could the things they wore. “Don’t,” the woman said.

  Yignay threw the rock.

  The woman pressed something on the thing she carried. Purple light burst from the end of it and struck Yignay. He cried out and threw his arms to his side, and Aleshia could see blood spray from his chest and land on the ground around him with a sound like a sudden rain shower. He fell to his knees and kept falling, pitching forward onto his ruined chest.

  The aroma of burned flesh wafted up the hill to Aleshia, and she realized her mouth was watering despite her horror. She had not realized how hungry she was. She swallowed it and clenched her fists until her nails dug into her palms.

  Other villagers were screaming, some weeping. The woman had to raise her voice to be heard. “It doesn’t have to be like that,” she said. “We haven’t come to fight. It’s just time for you to go.”

  “Go where?” someone asked.

  “You’ll be told en route.”

  “We don’t go until we know where, and why, and we’re given time to gather our possessions,” Kistral said.
“What authority have you to demand anything of us?”

  The woman hoisted her purple light machine. “All the authority we need. Come on, we haven’t got all the time in the world.”

  At that, one of the other newcomers broke into laughter. “Or maybe we do,” he said. “Maybe we do, at that.”

  Kistral charged then, lifting a lead pipe from the ground by his feet and waving it menacingly as he ran toward them. Another of the party made a purple ray hit him, and his head exploded in a mist of blood and flesh.

  Tears stung Aleshia’s eyes. She saw Gillayne drop the hatchet, and Nakya toss aside a bow and four arrows. Aleshia’s fingers relaxed on the knife, as if it had become too hot to hold. “Put that down,” her father murmured. “Save yourself, anyway.” He brushed past her and lifted a shovel from behind the house. “It ain’t much, against those,” he said as he started down the hill, shovel held in front of his chest. “But it’s all I got.”

  He was most of the way down the hill before one of the newcomers trained a purple light on him.

  As his body tumbled down the slope, the woman at the front spoke up again. “We don’t want to hurt anybody,” she said. “We’ve just come to collect you. You’re going on a little trip. You might even find it fun.”

  “Fun?” Margyan echoed. “Not likely.”

  “No!” Aleshia cried. “Not you, Margyan!”

  “We’ve little choice, girl,” Margyan replied. “Die now or go along with them. I know my druthers.”

  “But—”

  Margyan couldn’t hear Aleshia’s objection, though; she drowned it out with her own ululating cry as she rushed toward those who had once stayed away, but did no longer, and then her screams as the purple light took her, too, and the handful who tried to join her.

  When that died down, it was quiet. Tears rolled down Aleshia’s cheeks, and most others’ that she saw, as she and the other villagers allowed themselves to be herded, like so much livestock, toward the flying wagons. She took Gillayne’s hand in hers, looked back at her house one last time, realized that although there were many things she would miss, that wasn’t one of them. Could wherever they would be taken be any worse than home? She stepped up a ramp into the flying wagon’s sleek interior.

  It was like nothing she had ever imagined.

  Fourteen

  At the top of the next ladder the Enterprise crew found another, wider corridor, with arched passageways instead of closed doors leading to spaces that contained all manner of instrumentation. The length of the corridor seemed endless; Kirk thought he could see it curving downward, like the curvature of the Earth, then thought briefly that it was an optical illusion, an impossibility. Then he reminded himself where he was, and that what was impossible in other places was commonplace here. So maybe he did see the ship reach a distant horizon and dip away, and maybe it cycled back beyond that point and continued on. The thing seemed to stretch practically forever.

  “Fascinating,” Spock muttered, breaking Kirk’s reverie.

  “What is?”

  “This seems to be the bridge,” Spock said. “We are used to a ship’s bridge being a confined space where the command crew can communicate and access the instrumentation necessary to pilot the vessel.”

  “That is the definition of a bridge, more or less,” Kirk said.

  “And yet, here are instrument clusters that, upon brief inspection, appear to fulfill those functions.”

  “You can tell what these gadgets do?” McCoy asked.

  “Not precisely, no. There is writing on some of them, which I believe to be Ixtoldan.”

  “Ixtoldan?” Kirk echoed. “Really?”

  “Again, I am not certain, but I think it is. I have been studying Ixtoldan culture and history en route. There are other, similar written languages, and I do not read Ixtoldan, but it looks Ixtoldan to me.”

  “Fascinating.”

  “Indeed. Perhaps more so because none of the Ixtoldan histories mention a ship like this. Interstellar travel is relatively new to them, and this ship appears to be ancient.”

  “Excuse me, Mister Spock,” Ensign Bunker said. “Couldn’t that be an effect of what you called the dimensional folding?”

  “It could indeed. But even if the apparent age of the ship were disguised by that, the very existence of such an enormous ship, obviously intended to carry a huge passenger load, considerable cargo, or both, should have been reported somewhere. I have seen no reference to it in any history of their space program.”

  “So we’re on a ship that might be Ixtoldan,” Kirk said, “which we found while traveling to Ixtolde, carrying a delegation of Ixtoldan diplomats, none of whom wanted us to explore this ship. Curiouser and curiouser.”

  “It’s more than just curious,” McCoy said. “It’s damn fishy, if you ask me.”

  “Especially,” Kirk said, “if you add the fact that one of the ships connected to it was carrying our ambassador-to-be to Ixtolde.”

  “What do you make of it, Captain?” a security team member named Aldous Beachwood asked. He had strawberry blond hair, clear gray eyes, and a disarmingly gentle manner. Kirk had seen him in action, and he knew that the gentleness went away fast under the right circumstances.

  “I’m not at all sure yet,” Kirk said. “But I recommend that we maintain our vigilance. Something doesn’t add up about all of this.” He eyed the instruments around them, the control panels that followed no pattern he could discern. “What’s your take on the ship’s controls, Mister Spock? Does the scattered nature of them mean anything to you?”

  “Crew communication was performed in some fashion other than verbal,” Spock said. “Or, if verbal, then through electronic means. Possibly through telepathic means; I see nothing that appears to be a microphone or a speaker, although it is possible that those were attached via cables that have been removed or deteriorated in place.”

  “So you’re just guessing,” McCoy said.

  “I am engaging in informed speculation, yes.” He stepped over to an instrument cluster, studied it up close for a few moments, then turned back toward the others. He took two steps, then seemed to be jostled aside. “Excuse me,” he said. He looked toward where whatever he had bumped into would have been, but there was nothing there. When he faced Kirk again, he looked puzzled.

  “Something wrong?” Kirk asked.

  “I was certain that I ran into someone,” Spock replied. “I saw no one as I approached, but I distinctly felt a solid object touch my shoulder. So I apologized, believing that I had not seen somebody.”

  “There’s nobody there.”

  “Indeed.”

  “You bumped into empty air?” McCoy said. “That’s rich. I could do some informed speculatin’ about that.”

  “No,” Spock corrected. “I did not bump into empty air. I bumped into something presently unseen. I encountered something.”

  “It’s this ship,” Bunker said anxiously. “There’s something wrong with it. Captain, I think we ought to get out of here.”

  “In due time, Mister Bunker.”

  “Yes, sir.” He was gripping his phaser so tightly that his knuckles had gone white.

  Kirk stepped past where Spock had been, bracing himself for a physical encounter with an invisible object. It didn’t happen, and he reached the instrument panel without incident. Above it was a viewport looking out toward the jumble of ships surrounding the possibly Ixtoldan vessel. He was swiveling away from the port when the ship gave a sudden jerk, like an aircraft flying in atmosphere encountering the wake of another, or an air pocket. He caught himself on the instrument console; others threw out their arms to brace themselves or spread their feet wider. A few of the crew members chuckled nervously.

  “That was interesting,” McCoy said. “Felt like we were rammed.”

  Kirk looked out the viewport again, in case any of the ships outside had shifted position and collided with the big one.

  Nothing had changed, that he could determine.

  But refle
cted in the glass—as if standing right behind him—he saw something else that startled him, making him spin around.

  “Jim?” McCoy said. “What is it?”

  Nobody there but the landing party. Kirk shook his head. “Nothing, Bones. My mistake.”

  “You look like you’ve seen a ghost, man. You’re white as a sheet.”

  “Maybe I have.” He looked out the viewport again, only not out, but in: at the reflection of the corridor behind him, which Spock had identified as one large, spread-out bridge.

  And there he was again. Uncle Frank, standing over Kirk’s left shoulder. His cheeks were stubbled with the growth of several days, his eyes half-hooded from a lifetime spent squinting against the sun, his mouth set in a grimly determined line. Just the way Kirk had known him. Even his smell was there, that particular combination of sweat, horse, and campfire that Kirk had always associated with the man. He could almost hear his name, “Jim my-boy,” floating in the air like something somebody had said, realized only in retrospect.

  But that had been decades ago. Uncle Frank had died since then. And during his lifetime, he had never left Earth.

  Another impossibility. Uncle Frank wasn’t here, couldn’t be here. It was nothing but a figment, a hallucination brought on by—what? By the unknown, maybe unknowable nature of the anomaly? Or something else?

  McCoy would press him on it, would ask him what he had seen, try to psychoanalyze him on the spot. He didn’t want that. At this moment, Kirk wanted the same thing Bunker did—to get the hell off this ship and back to the Enterprise. There was nobody left here. The ambassador was dead, as was the McRaven’s crew. He started trying to compose a story for Bones, something that would deter him from pushing for more.