Timeweb Trilogy Omnibus (52 page)

Abruptly, he felt something odd where his left foot used to be, a tingling sensation where nothing remained any longer. Noah had heard of that happening to injury victims, in which they seemed to feel missing limbs and appendages. Looking down along his body, he saw a faint illumination around the bottom of his left leg, where he knew the stump was.

He moved his left leg, and to his amazement saw what looked like his missing foot in the soft ambient glow.

Not possible. I’m only imagining this.

The illumination faded, and with it his foot seemed to disappear, and he felt nothing there at all. Darkness enveloped him and he saw nothing, heard nothing and felt nothing, not even the warmth of the cabin or the hard carpet under him. He found himself unable to reach out and check, or move his body at all. With one exception,

His eyes.

Trying to sort it all out, he closed both eyes and sat in the silence of his thoughts. But something interfered, refusing to leave him in serenity. He felt drawn outward, as if by a magnet. Cautiously, he opened his left eye just a little, and peered through the slit between his eyelids.

Noah could not resist the temptation to see more of the bizarre cosmic domain, to
experience
more of it. Once again, his thoughts surged out into the mysterious void of space, along a mystical cosmic webway. Every element of the web surrounded him, enfolded him, welcomed and embraced him. He was part of it, and looking back found that he could observe himself. There was no ground beneath him and no sky overhead, only the gossamer strands connecting him with every other point in the galaxy.

He was a Human inside a navigation chamber; he was a podship itself; he was every member of every galactic race.

By following the curving web, spinning through it, Noah found that he could reach virtually any point in the imagination of the Supreme Being who had created this wondrous kingdom of stars—and that he could move from point to point almost instantaneously. Everything floated around him, as if he was underwater. He did not seem to breathe or to have a heartbeat.

As before, he became aware of other cosmic voyagers spinning along the web—people, podships, and passengers going this way and that, passing over, under and through him, just as he did with them, in a realm that seemed to be non-physical. Who were these web travelers? Were they like him?

During his first paranormal voyage like this, he had wondered if he was dead or dying, and if the others out there were as well. He had been deathly ill then, in a comatose state. His health was much improved now. Or was it? In his sleep, had he again slipped into a coma?

And out in the cosmos, in the non-physical realm, he felt his missing foot again, and knew his body had grown a new one. In an epiphany, he realized that his corporal form had undergone a remarkable transformation. He was not dying at all. It was exactly the opposite. His injury had been healed by the web when Eshaz connected him to it. More than healed. His genetic structure had been altered in the procedure, with the gene that activated the aging process switched off.

I am immortal
.

But how could that have happened? The answer did not come to him, but another did. In its original form it was a wordless answer, but the Human portion of his mind translated it for him, so that he could begin to understand.

The magical realm that saved him was an eternal continuum in which vast distances were covered in infinitesimal fragments of time. Time began billions of years ago, but the complete life of the galaxy might encompass only a few moments. Before him, the webbing expanded, folded, compressed, and took shapes he could barely imagine—while unimagined secrets remained concealed from him.

From somewhere far away Noah heard voices, and almost recognized them. They were calling for him by name, asking if he was all right. He struggled and opened both eyes, lifting the lids with great difficulty as if they were very heavy.

The split images returned, one tableau superimposed over another.

He heard himself cry out again, and saw Dr. Bichette and the robot leader Thinker standing over him, engaged in a worried conversation about his welfare. They seemed to be floating out in space, no longer on the deck of the grid-plane. Like a Human-sized god or an angel, the doctor hovered over Noah, and began checking his vital signs.

As moments passed, the split images ceased, and with both eyes he saw that the doctor and Thinker were standing in the grid-plane cabin again, this time with Tesh, Anton, and Subi.

“Are you all right?” Tesh asked. Noah felt the warmth of her hand in his, and knew he had returned to the living. He was lying on the deck, with his legs under a blanket.

Slowly, deliberately, he moved the blanket and looked at his own left leg, where there had been a stump.

The foot was there, and when he saw the expressions of horrified fascination on the faces of the others, he knew it was no apparition. Even Eshaz, who rarely showed any emotion at all, looked utterly astounded.

Chapter Seventy-Eight

Life is a sea of darkness, with islands of light.

—From a Sirikan folk tale

The following day, Noah experienced no recurrence of the split visions, the odd straddling of two dimensions, the one physical and the other ethereal. It had all been like a dream, but a tangible souvenir of it remained.

His re-grown foot.

He felt emotionally lifted, and excited. Something truly remarkable had happened to him. He knew this for certain when he confirmed over and over that the body part had in fact regenerated, like the appendage of a reptile. Squeezing the flesh of the new foot and toes with his fingers, he felt the remarkable bone and tissue growth beneath his left ankle. It was almost as if the doctor had never amputated, but the new growth was tender, and he limped when he tried to walk on it. He still had to use the crutches that Subi had improvised for him.

Noah wondered if this miracle was an aspect of his immortality.

Encountering him in the cavern outside the grid-plane, a bewildered Dr. Bichette said, “I want to bring a bone specialist in to look at you.” Eshaz, Tesh, Anton, and Subi were with him. Earlier, he had examined the foot.

“And what would he tell us?” Noah asked, waving one of his alloy crutches around. “That it’s impossible, that it couldn’t possibly have happened? I’d be put under a microscope, asked to go on a medical sideshow tour as a freak.”

Bichette stared at the regenerated foot, which Noah had covered with a sock and a shoe.

“I don’t have time for all that nonsense,” Noah said. “I have more important things to do now; I need to maintain security and lead the resistance movement.” He looked from face to face, and settled on the scaly bronze countenance of Eshaz, whom he had always considered as much a friend as an employee. “You know what happened to me, don’t you?”

“Some will say I should not have done what I did,” Eshaz said, “that it was too dangerous.”

“And what did you do to Noah, exactly?” Tesh asked.

The big Tulyan hung his head. “I’ve said all I can say here. I must report to the Council of Elders, and accept their punishment. You will probably never see me again afterward.”

“Whatever Eshaz did to me,” Noah said to the others, “I’m grateful to him. But I don’t want the rest of you to discuss my medical condition with anyone, not even the robots. Is that understood?”

He waited until he got a nod from each of them, but didn’t notice when Subi shook his head afterward.

“Tell everyone I have a prosthetic foot now,” Noah said. He walked away stiffly, but was beginning to feel a little better with each step.

* * * * *

After the group separated, Tesh switched off her personal magnification system and in her tiny form began to spy on Noah in the cavern and connecting tunnels, scrambling around behind him unseen.

Rounding a corner, she came face to face with a roachrat. The creature, around her height, stared at her with dark, beady eyes. Its antennae twitched, and it bared its sharp teeth. A moment later, the animal squealed and ran away.

* * * * *

Noah slipped into a small side cavern. Then, looking around to make certain no one was watching, he drew a knife from its sheath and slashed his own left wrist. Pointing the wrist away from his clothes, he watched in fascination as the blood flow stopped and the wound healed itself, in a matter of minutes. No sign of the injury remained. He even felt his internal chemistry converting reserves and restoring the lost blood.

Taking a deep breath to summon his courage, Noah then attempted something even more drastic.

Holding the handle of the knife with both hands, he plunged it into his own heart, feeling it crack through bone and cartilage and pierce the organ. He gasped and cried out, then toppled over onto the ground, with gouts of blood spurting from his chest. All bodily functions ceased.

Seconds passed.

Then, like Lazarus, he rose from the dead and stood in his own blood, as his cells regenerated themselves.

* * * * *

In horror and fascination, Tesh watched Noah’s drastic self experimentation and a walking frenzy he went into, hurrying this way and that around the cavern. She saw him throw the crutches away and actually begin to run around the cavern, slowly at first and then faster. Noah looked elated, and this frightened her.

What sort of creature is this?
she wondered.
What has Eshaz done to him?

Unexpected thoughts assailed her. Tesh began to consider ways to destroy Noah, incinerating his body in such a conflagration that he could not possibly regenerate himself. In her lifetime, and from what she had been told by Woldn, there were no immortal creatures in the entire universe. Even those that seemed to be were not. They all had an Achilles heel.

Somehow, Noah had embarked on a dangerous, intrusive course of evolution, a fantastic mutation of the genetic process. If his dangerous bloodline was permitted to continue, there could be others like him, a race of powerful Humans who could commit terrible acts, including taking podships away from the Parviis who had held dominion over them for hundreds of thousands of years. Just as Tesh’s Parviis had once replaced the Tulyans, so too could another race prove itself superior and gain dominion. Woldn, the Eye of the Swarm, had long warned of this. It was the subject of legends.

She just hoped it was not too late to stop the mutant.…

Later that day, she crept away from the tunnel compound, a minuscule form that none of them noticed leaving. Like an insect, Tesh emitted a faint, wingless buzzing noise and flew all the way to the orbital pod station. (In swarms Parviis could fly much farther, even across the galaxy, but not by themselves). The tiny airborne humanoid reached the podship, but found herself unable to gain entrance to the sectoid chamber, unable to make the vessel move at all. The stubborn vessel proved unresponsive to her commands.

In the ancient podship’s passenger compartment and on the walkway of the pod station outside, she scuttled about like a bug, eavesdropping on Red Beret officers, scientists, and others who wondered why the sentient vessel did not depart like a normal podship and resume its route around the galaxy. The investigators were poring over it, trying to discover its secrets. So far they had not found the hidden passageways or the sectoid chamber, and Tesh didn’t think that they could.

But she’d never thought that a full-sized Human could have piloted the spacecraft, either. The Parviis had long known that there was more than one way to control podships. Long ago, Tulyans had their method, and Parviis had their own. Now the likelihood of yet another terrified her.

She envisioned a universe of untapped secrets.

* * * * *

Thinker thought the four Humans and the Tulyan were behaving strangely. That evening he watched as they slipped into a shadowy side tunnel. Moments later he heard them arguing, their voices escaping from the darkness into the dimly lit main cavern. Listening, he picked out their voices—Tesh, Subi, Anton, Dr. Bichette, and Eshaz.

Abruptly, a rotund man emerged from the tunnel and hurried across the cavern with surprising speed, heading for the main entrance. Moving as quietly as he could while maintaining his distance, Thinker followed.

He watched as Subi Danvar used his own code to bypass the security system, then slipped around large rocks and shrubs that the robots had placed over the entrance, and disappeared into the night.

Chapter Seventy-Nine

All of us see life through the lens of personal experience, and how limited those experiences are! The sum total of all Human knowledge is but a pinprick in the universe. So it is with each star system as well, in relation to all other star systems. A universe of pinpricks.

—Master Noah Watanabe

As required under the most ancient procedures of his people, Eshaz prepared to send a message to the Council of Elders, informing them of his unforgivable transgressions, violating the most consecrated of rules. In the transmittal, to be sent by touching the web and sending a telepathic transmission through it, he would not attempt to mitigate what he had done, because that would only make matters worse. It was hard to imagine how he could be in more trouble, considering the risks he had taken to save just one life, and that of a mere Human. The web was the most sacred object in the entire galaxy, and tampering with it was a most grievous offense. Since time immemorial there had been carefully prescribed regulations for its use and maintenance, and he had always followed them.

Until the episode with Noah.

Just before one of the prescribed times for telepathic transmissions, Eshaz prepared to place a scaly bronze finger against a strand of web. He was about to reach out of the commonly perceived physical dimension and touch another that was on a higher, more ethereal level.

Timeweb.

His fingers moved close, but he did not yet make contact.

* * * * *

Subi Danvar knew the back ways well, for he had walked and driven them for years as one of Noah Watanabe’s faithful Guardians. But this evening was like none other. He was alone out here, in a moonlit wilderness of unknown perils, running along a paved road, breathing hard, pushing his physical limits.