Heaven's Shadow (39 page)

Zack Stewart felt the double shock moments after he reached the clearing surrounding the Temple. He almost missed the events; the interior environment inside Keanu had gone insane. He had the gusting roar of wind in his ears and the sight of Keanu plant life literally melting, dissolving, then re-forming all around him. It was like being in a carnival house of horrors.

And the air—it smelled like rotting vegetation mixed with burning plastic.

Combine that with the freakish “sky,” which had darkened and was rent with odd flashes that reminded Zack of lightning, but minus the thunder.

The Temple loomed larger with each flash, however. It looked like a haunted house from a black-and-white horror movie, if you allowed for the fact that it was several stories tall and resembled no structure ever seen on Earth.

But that was his goal. That was where the Sentry trail led.

That was where Megan was. Camilla, too, though Zack wondered if he would have been as eager to abandon his crew and slim chance of a flight home just for the strange little girl.

Well, yes. But the issue was irrelevant, anyway. He was here, now, chasing both.

As he stumbled into the clearing, he remembered Taj and Tea’s warnings about some kind of magnetic field . . . perhaps he was hypersensitive because of the alert, or possibly the field’s intensity had increased with the wacky activities in the general environment, but Zack had gone only ten steps toward the Temple when he felt the hair on his neck tingling, lost feeling in his fingers, and generally slowed down. He stood in place as long as he could, feeling like a Van de Graaff generator in some junior high school science experiment.

One further step brought blinding pain. The Architects had erected an electronic fence around the Temple, and they were not going to allow Zack to use this route.

He backed away, then began to work his way around the perimeter of the clearing. He probed again—with the same result. Then a third time. No luck.

With the shifts in lighting, the wind, the unfamiliar lines of the Temple, it was easy to lose track. Where was the front door to this thing?

He calculated that he had been forced to a point completely opposite his entry. This time the “field” either compressed, or opened, to allow him to move forward.

In the shadows in front of him he could see what appeared to be a door, though twice as high and three times as wide as he would require.

When he was still fifty meters away, however, he noticed something unexpected on the ground, which was otherwise rutted and stubbly.

There were two mounds of steaming goo . . . as soon as Zack got close, he recognized them: they were what was left of two Sentries, likely the same ones that had scooped up Megan and Camilla.

It was as comforting to know that he was on the right track as it was disturbing to know that the Architects were still so casually destructive of their servants.

Would he find the masters of Keanu inside this structure?

Well, no matter what lay inside the Temple, Zack would have to confront it—the building was the only shelter he could see. And with the wind continuing to howl, debris filling the air, the temperature dropping, and worst of all, the air getting thin . . . he would require shelter, if nothing else.

Thirty meters, then twenty. Suddenly he was in the shadow of the building, face-to-face with a marker that sat in the center of what could only be a door. Its surface was no smoother than that of the rest of the Temple structure. It seemed to be an assembly of differently colored and textured substances, whether rock or metal or even wood, he couldn’t tell. It was possible that it was more of a sculpture or carved surface. Maybe the shapes and heights of the pieces gave directions.

In any case, Zack searched for a handle and saw none. (Given the size of the thing, a handle would likely be out of his reach, anyway.)

So he began pressing on various parts of the door. He even tried to probe the obvious edges.

Nothing. He shouted “Hello!” and “Hey, I’m here!” and “Please open up!”

Still nothing. The door stayed locked.

He looked at Taj’s Zeiss radio/camera. In frustration, he aimed it at the marker, adding, “This is Zack Stewart, for Bangalore or Houston, transmitting blind.”
And deaf,
he wanted to add.

“If you hear me, you can likely see this . . . it’s what we’re calling the Temple of the Architects. My wife and one other revived person have been brought here. I’m searching for access. Unless I’m missing something very important, I’m locked out.”

He counted to ten, heard nothing. Then, just to be sure, he counted to ten again. He added a third ten.

Still nothing. And his frustration finally reached a boil. He picked up the Zeiss, fully prepared to test its alternate use as a hammer. How long would it last when he slammed it against the marker—?

“Zack, this is Houston, Jasmine Trieu back at you. Do you copy?”

“Houston . . . Zack Stewart here. It’s great to hear your voice, Jasmine!”

The lag might be only seven or eight seconds, but it felt much longer. Then he heard: “We’ve got a lot to catch up on, Zack. Can you talk?”

Zack looked up at the impervious Temple door. “Houston, I’ve got nothing but time.”

This interview is over.

MOST FREQUENTLY USED PHRASE BY MEGAN STEWART INTERVIEW SUBJECTS

Megan Doyle Stewart was not at all sure she approved of her newly reborn state. Yes, she’d been given a second chance at life, but why? What for? She had gone almost directly from car crash in Florida to the Beehive on Keanu.

Yes, something of “Megan Stewart” had existed for those two years in between . . . bodiless, blind, deaf, a state that would have terrified the living Megan, taking her buried-alive fear to a horrific extreme.

Yet she hadn’t felt fear. Instead she had . . . well, soared, flown, skipped from memory to memory. She had become unstuck in time and space, recalling and reliving her first kiss with Sean Peerali and meeting Zack at that party in Berkeley and late nights editing and dragging her tricycle across Main Street. . . .

But whereas dreams were mixed-up, twisted replays of a day’s activities, these moments seemed real, a record of what she had seen and heard and felt at the time.

She had even experienced “memories” from different points of view . . . other people in those same scenes. And in at least one instance—that she could recall now; it might have been a dozen or a hundred—she lived a moment from some other person’s life altogether.

The more she thought about it, the more fascinating it was . . . right up to the inevitable instant when she realized that unless her luck changed radically, and soon, she was going to be right back in that . . . postlife environment, a matrix of memories, a file in some cloud computing system.

In any case, since reawakening, she had not had much time to dwell on the larger eschatological issues, being more concerned with adjusting to the environment, with functioning as an organic being again . . . and with the pain and joy of reconnection with Zack and Rachel.

Who were now, apparently, lost to her again.

No one had told her about the detonation atop Vesuvius Vent. She had actually
felt
it, as a noise combined with a flash combined with a sickening tremor.

Thankfully, it had lasted only a second or two. All of her senses had actually shut down, like filters on a camera turned to the Sun.

Still, it felt as though she had been thrown off the top of a building, only to be grabbed the instant she cleared the ledge, but not before seeing the twenty-story fall that awaited her.

She had been able to tell Zack that she knew, that the event was bad news. Or was it bad? It was . . .
important
. That was what the message from the Architects said.

It was like one of her early news reports, before marrying Zack, covering the collapse of a good chunk of the Antarctic ice shelf.

In some ways, it was bad . . . it was expected to raise global ocean levels by several feet, enough to ruin some coastal cities . . . but not instantly, not so quickly that people couldn’t move out of harm’s way.

And given that she was far inland in Colorado at the time, not of immediate concern to her.

Still . . . it was a Significant Event.

As soon as she had told Zack, however, something had happened to her . . . she had felt herself growing extremely fatigued, almost faint.

She knew that one of the Sentries had grabbed her; she had seen the creature approaching in her peripheral vision but had been powerless to run, scream, or do anything, in fact, but shut down.

(Which made her wonder just what other “improvements” the Architects had made in her resurrected body.)

She awoke in a heap inside the Temple—and alone. Camilla wasn’t with her.

She was in a large room that was so big, shadowy, and empty that it gave her the creeps. It was like being in a monster’s cave. The Evil Ogre’s castle.

With no door or windows.

The floor looked like wood in that it had a grain or cellulose-style pattern. But it was too hard to be wood. There was a trail of some kind that led from Megan’s resting place toward a wall, some kind of nasty spooge that had the apparent texture of a snail trail. Megan had not been able to force herself to touch it.

The ceiling was out of reach; it looked to be the same material, minus the patterning, but with squiggly shapes that let in light.

The walls looked like the exterior of the Temple, varicolored and oddly shaped bricks that, when touched, seemed about to crumble . . . but didn’t. Megan could compare it to something from Zack’s world: the thermal-protection tiles of the old space shuttle. Those silicate cubes were incredibly light and felt like plastic foam . . . yet were such perfect insulators that you could bake one to a thousand degrees in an oven, then pick it up with your bare fingers.

Maybe the Temple needed to be insulated. Megan remembered being jogged several times during her “ride,” prior to being rolled onto this floor. And although the floor felt solid—like the sort of marble you found in Houston mansions—Megan’s bare feet detected a low-frequency vibration, like the drone of a power line.

The room wasn’t empty, either. It was stuffed with furniture. It would have been too much to ask, she guessed, for anything as simple as a table or chair. There were solid, symmetrical platforms at varying heights, but none lower than her eye level. Other objects were spherical, cylindrical, or, to use a word Rachel had loved,
blobular
.

Some were solid colors, though none Megan would have allowed in her home. Others had stripes or patterns. The surface of one particular cubelike object was different every time Megan looked at it.

And several of the objects transmitted the same hum that could be felt in the floor. It reminded Megan of mission control, with all its computers and screens . . . but it looked like a catalog photo for home decorators from Mars.

Oh yeah, there were no sanitary facilities . . . and of more immediate concern, no food or water.

She wondered about Camilla. She knew the girl had been taken . . . even if she was in an apparently benign environment like this, she must be terrified.

Thinking of Camilla reminded Megan of Rachel, and Zack. And the utter futility of her circumstances. She had heard the phrase
better off dead
most of her life . . . for the first time, she believed there might be something to it.

She leaned against one of the flat-surfaced objects and slid to the floor. Barefoot, largely naked, except for the surprisingly durable underlayer of the second skin, she could literally feel the vibrations of the wind against the Temple walls.

Which made her wonder just how durable this imposing-looking structure really was. How durable
could
it be? It had “grown up” in the past two days!

Then she felt something different . . . not a gentle wavelike motion that seemed to be caused by the storm outside. This was a deeper, more powerful vibration. A tremor.

It was coming closer, too. And more frequent.

One entire wall of the room slid open, revealing a dark chamber beyond. She heard more thumps, scrapes, and an awful chittering sound.

In spite of the darkness in the chamber, Megan could see the shadow of something huge and multi-armed.

Megan got to her feet. She knew there was no point in running—

—But she tried.

For Steverino. See attached, which turned everyone’s heads inside out.
Where did you get such freaky freaks? Nathan says it has to be Keanu-
originated, but he would. Where are you? Will we ever find out what
you’re doing with this stuff?

E-MAIL FROM RESEARCHER [email protected] TO STEVEN MATULKA,
WITH EXTREMELY LARGE AUDIO FILE

Before Harley opened the door to the Home Team, he heard what sounded like Britain’s House of Commons in full roar. Then Blaine said, “We need you.”

The immediate image did nothing to cheer him; the tableau reminded Harley of a bar fight paused in midpunch. Wade Williams and his little friend Glenn Creel were, in fact, nose-to-nose with Lily Valdez and some other person Harley couldn’t place.

The heated argument Harley had heard through the door simply stopped. All parties looked at him like guilty schoolchildren when the teacher got back early. “Do you people realize we’re about to try the craziest maneuver in the history of spaceflight?” Harley said.

“We do,” Sasha Blaine said, indicating the big screen behind the potential pugilists.
Destiny
was now so close to Keanu that the NEO landscape filled the screen.

“Then please tell me what the hell is going on?”

Blaine smiled and blushed. “We think we’ve cracked the Architects’ code.”

“What do you mean?”

Wade Williams geared up for a sound bite. “It turns out those markers were transmitting and receiving information—”

“No, Wade, that’s imprecise,” Lily Valdez said. “We managed to isolate what we think are two reciprocal functions.”