Molly Fyde and the Blood of Billions tbs-3 Page 15

  Her captor released her mouth and reached down to grab one of her knees. He squeezed it painfully. Molly screamed as loud as she could as he picked her up and lifted her to the cold, metal surface. She continued screaming as he held her down with one hand. There was a busy street nearby; she just needed someone to hear her.

  “Shut up!” the man said through clenched teeth. He struggled to hold her down as she squirmed and continued yelling. As he leaned over to grab a set of restraints, she got her first look at the brute. Human, with a head as big as a bull’s. He chewed on his lower lip as he tried to work one of the straps together with a single hand.

  Molly yanked one of her arms free and swung at his blocky, stubbled face. The man blocked the blow, and she got a slap across her own cheek for the effort, hard enough to see spots of light. While she was stunned, her cheek on fire, the brute corralled both of her hands together and held her wrists in one of his fists. He pinned them against her stomach while he leaned across her legs with his torso.

  Molly resumed screaming bloody murder, as high-pitched and piercing as she could. She twisted her torso back and forth, trying to break his grasp.

  “Okay! A little help!” the man yelled.

  The other guy lumbered over and held her legs with both hands while the first guy got a strap across her arms.

  “You got this one, huh?” the second man asked, laughing.

  “Let me go!” Molly yelled. She screamed at the top of her lungs.

  The first guy reached to the small table nearby and grabbed a rag, covered in blood. He forced it into Molly’s mouth. She gagged immediately, her head convulsing, her throat seized by spasms as it tried to eject the foul thing. She couldn’t help but taste the coppery bitterness, feel the wetness of someone else’s blood on her tongue. One corner of the rag fell back on her gag reflex, triggering it over and over.

  Coughing into her own mouth caused a corner to flap loose. It wiggled against the deep reaches of her tongue, partway down her throat. As she gagged and sucked air through her nose, she began to panic with the possibility of breathing the thing in deeper, sucking it down where the choking would become total.

  Molly quickly found herself as close to death as she had ever been. She couldn’t get enough air into her lungs. She forgot about the men and the restraints and the other bodies, and just concentrated on the obstruction in her mouth. She forced her tongue over—it wouldn’t obey—she finally got an edge, curled her tongue around it—that nasty taste—and pushed the rag forward just a little bit.

  Again. Concentrating, working her tongue, forgetting the slick and wet, ignoring the rank on her tastebuds, wrapping her tongue around the back side, collecting the drooping piece that threatened to kill her, the raw taste of it making her gag over and over—

  There.

  She had the offending piece corralled, but the abhorrent taste made her feel like vomiting; her mouth was full of foul saliva, too much to swallow. She very nearly worked the entire rag out of her mouth, almost had it past her teeth—her entire being had become mouth and tongue and cheek, working them all with the force of several limbs—

  A strip of adhesive went across the rag, holding it in place. Molly flexed her arms and legs and found she’d been locked down tight, several straps cinched across her body. She strained, arching her back, grunting and moaning with frustration, but she couldn’t move. And somehow, having been in that exact position before, the depressing familiarity of it all—it made the terror and panic and unfairness even worse.

  “Thanks,” one of the guys said, punching the other one playfully. Molly lifted her head and watched the two men as the panicked fog from the rag ordeal melted away. She tried to give them her widest, most beseeching eyes, but they weren’t paying her any attention. The second guy, who also wore a smattered apron but over a jumpsuit, lumbered back to his work. The man from the alley stood by her side. He crisscrossed the sash of his own apron around his back before knotting it right in the middle of an old, dull stain.

  “You’ve been a busy voter,” the man said, looking down at her scabbed and raw hands. He pulled something from the table. Molly tried to get a glimpse of it before he slid it over her finger. She couldn’t see it, but she knew what it was as soon as the padded clamps gripped her knuckles.

  Molly moaned into the blood-soaked rag, anticipating the pain before the needle hit. It felt like a rod the size of a coin shooting through the raw pad of her index finger. She felt herself grow dizzy, then gag again, nearly vomiting in the back of her throat. She started coughing, the useless reflex muffled and hollow. The bloody rag fluttered inside her cheeks, touching her tongue and the roof of her mouth, dabbing them with metallic nastiness.

  “Okay, now, let’s see where you’re from,” the man said, studying a small screen as if routinely taking her temperature.

  ••••

  Walter pressed his ear to the door and looked down the length of the dark alley. He’d heard a scream as he rounded the corner, but couldn’t tell where it had come from. The Wadi stood on his shoulder, scratching at the metal door with its claws.

  Walter stood back and pounded on the door again, but the slab of metal sounded like it was a foot thick; his fist hardly made a noise. He turned to the other side of the alley and scrambled for the Wadi as it tried to jump off his shoulder.

  “Sstay put,” he told it. He shoved it into one of the hidden pockets he’d sewn into his flightsuit—the one right across his belly big enough to steal most anything worth having.

  The other door, the one on the opposite side of the alley, made a normal sound as he pounded it with his small fist. Surely Molly would’ve had the good sense to go through this one. He continued knocking until the door cracked, letting out a wedge of light framing someone’s head.

  “The flank you want?” the person asked.

  “Hi. I’m Walter. I’m looking for—”

  “Entrance is in the front, you freak!”

  The door slammed shut, startling Walter.

  He frowned and looked down the dark alley, toward the glow of civilization at the far end where fast, moving things zipped past. There were only two doors, and he had knocked on them both. He pressed a hand against his stomach to stop the Wadi from squirming and set off toward the bluster of happening things. If the entrance was in the front, he’d have to look for Molly there.

  18

  “This is the story of our universe,” Byrne said.

  “Your universe?” It was the second time Byrne had referred to it like that.

  Byrne nodded. He glanced over at Cole, then out at the white lines created by the hyper-fast snow as it streaked across the dark ships beyond. “Not by conquest or fiat, mind you. I’m not being lordly, just stating a fact. It’s ours because we made it.”

  “You mean hyperspace? Is that what you made?”

  Byrne laughed. “No,” he said. “I wish we had, but this is the first time around we’ve even discovered it.” He gazed toward the bow of the large, moving village. “Everything will be so much easier from now on,” he said quietly. He shook his head and looked at Cole, who could feel the muscles in his forehead ache from keeping them furrowed in constant confusion.

  “No, when I say we made the universe, I mean the one you are familiar with. We made the last several thousand of them—”

  Byrne paused and frowned at the blank stare Cole must’ve been giving him. “I apologize,” he said. “I forget how limited your cosmological theories are. When I look at you, at any of you Humans, it’s like looking at a mirror. So few differences…” Byrne crossed his legs and seemed to settle back in his strange, metal throne. “Why don’t I start by explaining how the universe works, how it moves and operates. Let’s imagine for a moment that we’re on your home planet—”

  “Gladly,” Cole interrupted.

  Byrne smiled. “If you don’t get this lesson, my friend, the rest of the story will be lost. Now, imagine yourself on Earth, anywhere you like. Pretend you can walk across w
ater and over any mountain. If you were to set off in a straight line in any direction, where would you end up?”

  “On the other side,” Cole answered quickly, hoping to move the story along. “No—” With his index finger extended, he drew a circle in the air in front of him and focused on it through his goggles. “You’d end up where you started. Right?”

  “Only if you stopped there.” Byrne had taken the tone of a teacher guiding along a favored student. He smiled at Cole, and for the first time, Cole realized Byrne didn’t have on goggles and didn’t seem to need them.

  “You could keep going forever, if you liked,” Byrne said. “And that’s how the universe is shaped, only one dimension higher—”

  “Well, you’re wrong about our cosmology, then. We’ve known this for a long time. If you travel in a straight line anywhere in the universe, you’ll end up where you started. It curves around on itself.”

  “Oh, you’ve got the shape right,” Byrne agreed. “You’ve had that nailed for hundreds of years. However, your cosmologists don’t seem to appreciate the consequences, even though it’s completely obvious.”

  “Consequences?” Cole asked.

  “Everything in the universe is indeed traveling in a straight line. Which means—” He frowned, pursing his thin lips as if formulating a dumbed-down version for a child. “Imagine we’re sitting on the North Pole of your planet.”

  Cole looked up at the snow flurries, at the large spire behind him. His imagination hardly needed to exert itself. “Done,” he said.

  “Now picture the matter of the universe spreading out from here, all of it heading in every direction possible around your planet. Where is it going?”

  “Back to where it started, just like when I go walking in a straight line.”

  “Except you were traveling alone,” Byrne pointed out. Cole could almost imagine the armless man wagging his finger like Professor Phister used to. “Don’t forget,” Byrne said, “that there’s a lot of stuff in this example. If it’s all moving roughly the same speed—”

  “The South Pole!” As soon as Cole uttered the answer, a lot more fell into place; he could almost hear his brain click audibly. The leading theory of their day, hundreds of years old and mostly unchanged, remained the Big Bang theory. Even with the problems of inflationary theory and dark energy, it was still the best they had, as messy and patchwork as it had become.

  Cole thought about all that matter spreading out across the surface of a sphere, all heading away from the North Pole. He could see it traveling through the dips and rises, thinning out as it moved away. And then he could see it starting to come back together. All of it—all of everything—meeting in a big crunch at the South Pole. He considered the expanding universe and pictured for the very first time where it was expanding to!

  “That’s why the expansion is speeding up,” Cole murmured. It was one of the mysteries of cosmology, the odd fact that expansion was accelerating when gravity should be slowing it down. Now he knew why. He turned to Byrne. “We’re halfway there, aren’t we? The matter is no longer flying away from itself, it’s now coming closer together! Gravity is working the other way, speeding it along.”

  Byrne nodded. “Precisely how we like to put it. We are ‘past the universal equator.’ Well past, in fact.”

  Cole forgot where he was, all the trouble he’d seen, all the matters relatively inconsequential. His brain went giddy with the possibilities, scrambling to assemble them into a coherent whole.

  “That also explains hyperinflation,” he said. “It explains why things are going so quick in the beginning. All that matter just finished its downward swoop, so it would be absolutely flying as it came together!” He paused, finding a problem with the theory. “But why don’t we see it coming if we’re getting closer?” he asked. “Where’s all the other stuff?”

  “All that stuff is over the horizon, to extend the metaphor.”

  Cole pictured that. “But not because the light fails to bend, right? Is it because of the speed everything’s traveling?” Cole held up his finger, seeing it clearly. “It’s because of the direction it’s traveling through this fourth dimension.”

  Byrne smiled broadly at Cole. “You are the one, aren’t you? I can see it, now. I never could in Mollie.”

  Hearing her name elicited a shiver from Cole, snapping the descent into philosophy and cosmology. He remembered where he was, felt it like an icicle stabbing through his chest. He pictured Molly strapped to the gurney in Byrne’s ship, and the vision angered him, breaking the physics lesson. It helped him see another flaw in Byrne’s theory.

  “That can’t be right,” he said. “The Big Bang didn’t happen in a place, it happened everywhere. It created space. Hell, the Big Bang happened just as much in my Portugal as it did in the Andromeda galaxy!”

  Byrne laughed at this, bending at the waist and uncrossing his legs. It was a jolly laugh, very Human-like. When he settled down, he turned to Cole: “Son, we aren’t talking about hypotheticals, here. I’m not discussing theory. This is what we know, what we’ve known for a very long time. We’ve observed it.”

  “That’s impossible,” Cole spat. “How can you observe something that destroys everything?”

  “Oh, but it doesn’t. Very nearly but not quite. Not everything arrives at the same time, and some of it gets deflected. Besides, the South Pole of the universe, if you like to consider it that, is a very big place. As hot as it gets—and it gets hot enough to melt down nature’s laws—there are ways to get information through. Just as a particle can escape a black hole now and then, we can make sure data survives the Great Passing.”

  Cole’s jaw dropped. “You’ve done this? This isn’t the first time we’ve been here?”

  “Literally? You and I?” Byrne looked at the world zipping around them. “Of course it is.” He laughed. “There’s nothing mystical here, none of that repeating-our-actions nonsense. No, no, in fact, each universe is vastly different. That’s our job. That’s why I say this is our universe.”

  Cole shook his head. “I don’t understand.”

  “What is life but information, my young friend? We are just—well you are just chemical programs and mindless routines. Ahh, you frown, and you are right to do so. Sentient things cannot grasp the accidental nature of their existence, and they are correct to feel this way. Tell me, do you know why Humans and the Bern look so similar?”

  Cole looked at his hands and considered the question. “Convergent evolution?” he guessed. “The simplest solutions predominate?” But he knew that wasn’t right. Hadn’t Dani given him clues in the hallway of that Drenard prison?

  “Nonsense. The odds are prohibitive. Look at the diversity of life on any one planet. An honest account of them is more bizarre than the differences between you and a filthy Bel Tra. No, my little Chosen One, the reason the Bern look alike all across the universe, the way they are able to rule all of creation with an iron and beneficent embrace, is simple: we set everything up in advance.”

  Cole continued to stare at his palms; he peered at the lines in them. “You made us?”

  “Almost,” Byrne said. “There are problems now and then. We just get the—to use a Terran expression—the ball rolling. And most times, the ball is kind enough to go downhill, following the route we set up in advance. It’s all about rules, you see. If the laws of nature are within certain parameters, you get a universe conducive to life. And when you can rig impervious seeds full of genetic information, seeds that can only be blown apart by the forces present at the end of the universe, seeds that ablate just right during the creation process, then you achieve what all life seeks.”

  “Which is?” Cole asked.

  “Immortality, of course.”

  Byrne smiled. “And not the temporary sort. We’re not talking organ transplants, or colonies on a different egg but still in the same solar basket. We’re talking about real descendants surviving the end of time and making it through to the next beginning.”

 
“But it’s all your life, right? Only what you decide lives and ever gets that chance.”

  “Most of it. But then, we’re setting up our universes to be warm and wet, which is a habitat conducive to other sorts of breeding, mutating brands of scum. The problem for these life forms is that we’ve given ourselves a head start. And the… unique method we use to communicate with the next generation is tied to our DNA, so we know what’s going on first. Of course, there have been mutations in the past that outpaced our local representatives, but since intergalactic spaceflight is—or has been thought to be—impossible, these were just pockets of annoyance scrubbed away every twenty billion years or so, motes that contaminated a mere galaxy or two, but what are a few galaxies in the grand scheme of things? Practically nothing.”

  “So why are you flanking with us now?” Cole asked. “Give us our twenty billion years and leave our galaxy alone.”

  Byrne shook his head. “No can do, Chosen One. Everything is different now. Past mutations were a mere bump in the road compared to what happened in your Milky Way. The rules have been rewritten. Our entire empire has been thrown into discord. This isn’t one of those changes we log in the master program and tweak our next go-around.”

  “I don’t understand. What’s different? And why do you keep calling me the Chosen One?”

  “Hyperspace is what’s different. We never knew it was there. A twenty-fifth dimension? It made no sense. Twenty-four is such a perfect number. Now, keep in mind, my ancestors were just like you thousands of iterations ago. They were a single species trapped inside the gravity well of their home galaxy with no chance of escape. When they realized the end of the universe was approaching, they could watch the Big Crunch coming—mathematically, of course, not visibly—but they were powerless to stop it. But then the seeds were invented, and the first program was written.