Beyond the Horizon

Chapter 4-2

Jack took a practice breath, and then put his lips to the stem. The young waiter held up the burner. Jack bade him to wait and drew a lungful.

Heavenly scents filled his lungs and euphoria settled upon him. And the stuff wasn"t even lit!

Jack signaled and exhaled, and the waiter applied the burner. All it took was a half a breath. Jack capped the glowing bowl and waved to the waiter, who left the burner.

The smoke expanded, sending its soothing tendrils out to his fingers and toes. His scalp began to tingle, and the surroundings began to glitter. The ceiling peeled away to show him each successive floor above him, until they too rolled aside to reveal the sky, the blue-white pinprick of Denebi like a brilliant diamond so pure that its light washed the universe clean.

The booth disappeared from around him, and he floated, the distant Imperial Capital on Torgas Prime beckoning him oddly.

Below him, the palace sprawled across a picturesque valley on the lush, semi-tropical world. Palms sprouted in small courtyards located in unlikely places, buildings of fabulous façade interconnected with colonnaded walkways and soaring fountains. Rooftops glittered with crushed crystal, walls were inlaid with intricate mosaics, and walks were paved with marble flagstone.

The sight of the palace shook Jack, as though physically. He"d never yearned for the sedentary, leisure life of a prince, only for the power of one, with which he might make the lives of others better. Why am I seeing this? he wondered, little interested in the trappings of royalty.

Again the sensation of shaking, and Jack realized that someone was physically shaking him.

The bowl of smoke, a blue glasma tulip with gently arcing petals, wobbled dangerously on the table.

“Where"s it at, Carson?”

He put out his hand to steady the bowl. Somewhere, his brain was saying danger was imminent, but Jack just laughed.

“I should have known. Wake him up.”

A galaxy exploded on one side of his head, and his face spun the other. A curious thing seemed to be happening; he was feeling what could only be described in conversational terms as pain, but it had no relation to any event immediately preceding it that Jack had recognized as painful.

A galaxy exploded on the other side of his face and his head spun back the other way.

This was getting annoying. A person"s d**g-induced euphoria was sacred. Didn"t they know it was extremely bad manners to interrupt such euphoria? And what person in his or her right mind would attempt to engage in a sensible discussion with someone who was by definition insensate?

He tried to focus on the three, six, or nine faces in front of him. He couldn"t tell how many there were. One was familiar in that didn"t-I-just-see-you-not-long-ago type familiarity. The other two faces weren"t familiar at all, but the fact that both faces sat atop bodies whose physical proportion far exceeded the human norm—and were at least double Jack"s own mass—lent credence to the message his brain had been trying to deliver for at least a minute or two.

“Where"s the blasted cube, Carson?”

His eyes focused on the middle figure, the familiar one. His brain supplied him a name: Delphin. “I left it with you,” he said—or tried to say. He was sure it was unintelligible. He was sure his brain was unintelligible.

“What"d he say?”

Jack tried to repeat it, his lips too loosened with drugs to form proper words. A fourth blow to his head finally penetrated to his limbic cortex, and the trickle down his cheek was sure to be blood. “I left it with you, Delphin,” he growled, giving the apes on either side of the smaller man a nasty look.

The oculus focused on Jack"s face. “It"s gone, disappeared as I was examining it. I don"t know what sleight of hand you performed, and I don"t care. Hand me that bag.”

One of the beef balls laid himself half across the table to grab the satchel containing the five million galacti.

Jack wished it gone, and it was.

“Where"d it go?!” muscle man asked.

“The cube or the money, Carson,” Delphin said. “You don"t want to know the third option. Choose!”

“Shove a quasar up your black hole, Delphin. If you can"t hold onto a cube, it"s time they put you in a nursing home.” Jack realized he was furious.

“Third option it is, then, Jack. Sorry, I can"t stay to watch the show, but I don"t want to lose my plausible deniability.” He turned to the muscle man to the left, the one with a brain cell. “Wait till I"ve left the building.” He spun and walked off.

Jack eyed the two lumps. And the distance between them.

“Don"t even think about it,” the brain-cell said.

“Think about what? Have a puff on me, boys,” Jack said.

“I"m workin",” one said, “but I"ll be off in about five minutes. Can I—”

The other shoved an elbow in his gut. “That"s consorting. You know what the boss says.”

“He does it all the time.”

“He"s the boss.” The brainy one turned to Jack. “I"ll put it bluntly, Cockroach—the cube, the bag, or your life. Which is it?”

“You can put the first two into your black hole, buzzbrain, and I"ll keep the third. Now, get out of my way.” Jack stood, the satchel in his hand, and took a step toward the door.

A hand landed on his shoulder. It might have been a side of pork ribs. It spun Jack around.

A fist the size of a comet careened toward his face.

He pulled to one side, and the fist sailed wide.

Another plunged for his gut.

He turned sideways, and it whistled past.

Quadruple cannons launched a fusillade of blows, which Jack nimbly avoided. Even as he pulled away from one, he saw the next coming, each blow close enough he felt its wind, none able to make contact.

He wondered what he looked like to a bystander—some puppet being jerked around by its strings, he was sure. The spasm dance left him against a wall with nowhere to go. Somewhere, his brain was telling him he"d never had reflexes that good before.

Two panting, sweating lumps of lard looked at him against the wall. If they saw the satchel in his hand, they gave no indication of it. They each threw a glance at the other and charged him.

Jack was on the other side of them as they crashed into the wall and crumpled into a heap.

That"s one heap of flesh, Jack thought, striding out the door.

The crowded street held no danger for him, not a single passerby seeing him. Hovercraft hummed past, and a few ground vehicles crunched across the perpetual frost. The shuffling masses somehow parted to let him by, as Jack strode, mystified, toward the spaceport.

The commotion behind him didn"t alarm him. He knew they"d probably come after him, but he was oddly convinced they"d never find him.

He couldn"t say exactly what had just happened. Rolling events through his mind, each moment after he emerged from his d**g-induced stupor as clear as a glasma pane, Jack found that even he could not believe that he"d moved that fast.

Satchel in hand, five million galacti richer, Jack strode resolutely toward the spaceport, convinced that whatever had happened, he"d somehow acquired a new destiny.

Perpetual loser, orphan, salvage collector, thrice divorced and quadruple bankrupt, perennially getting tangled up with the authorities, and always saturated with smoke, Jack felt that somehow his life had changed.

Maybe he"d even turned it around.

The future opened to Jack like the spaceport between skyscrapers. Ships lifted off and dropped between multistory buildings on either side. The bright glare of engines reflected off building windows, some of them evidencing the blackening of carbon burn.

He"d always wondered why they"d put such tall buildings around the spaceport.

Port security didn"t look up when he strode through the checkpoint. No buzzer went off when he waltzed through the scanners. No one asked for his ID or did a biometric, genescan, iris scan, retina type, bone image, E. coli match, or mitochondria sample.

As if he didn"t exist.

“I was wondering why you were taking so long,” Misty said as he came through the hatch. “Ran into some trouble, eh?” She touched the now scabbed-over split to his cheek.

He winced as she dressed the wound.

“I don"t know why I"m doing this,” she said, “You could just use the cube.”

He raised an eyebrow at her. “I sold it for five million galacti.”

The bewildered look on her face turned to amusement. “You"re so funny, Jack. You know, the way you tell jokes without any change in expression, you ought to consider comedy.”

He stared at her. “Actually, I sold it for fifty million galacti, but all I could get was ten percent in cash. It"s in the satchel.” He gestured at it. “Go on, look.”

Doubt working its way across her face, Misty knelt. “Where did you get this, Jack?” She held up a bundle of thousand galacti chits.

“I told you, I sold the cube.”

She giggled at him, her green eyes mischievous above her girlish grin. “Stop, Jack. You"re incorrigible. You did no such thing.”

“Yeah, I did. Why would I lie to you about something so important?” He wondered where she"d learned a word like that. Probably the ship"s teacher machine, something he"d never had the discipline to use on long flights.

She giggled again. “No, you didn"t. It"s in your pocket.”

He felt the lump before his hand got there. The cube felt inert—body temperature—and swirled placidly in his hand as he brought it out.

He stared at it, stunned.

* * *

“You"re sure?” Emperor Phaeton Torgas stared at his prime Minister, stunned.

“I alerted you as soon as I could, your August Highness,” Custos Messium said, dropping his forehead to the floor.

It was the fastest Torgas has seen him bow.

The Emperor held up his scepter.

Cradled in a circlet of platinum was a plain silver cube. If he stared at it, its sides became translucent and iridescent, as though secrets within bubbled to get out. It was a literal source of Torgassan power. With the Cube, his family had ruled half the galaxy for fifteen hundred years.

Half ruled the galaxy, or ruled half the galaxy.

“You"re sure?” the Emperor asked, realizing he"d repeated himself.

“I am, your August Highness.”

Whenever they"d attempted to extend their dominion to the far side of the galactic bar, an insurrection had erupted on this side. On one occasion, during the reign of Letus XI, the Empire had given a rebellion little attention while pursuing its expansion across the bar, and very nearly had lost Torgas Prime to the rebels.

The literal source of the Emperor"s power, the cube facilitated their exercise of near-absolute dominion—to an extent.

How the Circians had ruled the entire galaxy with the cube was a mystery, unless there was another cube or a series of cubes, as several historians had speculated.

Rumors flared from time to time of another such cube, but none of the rumors had been substantiated.

Phaeton stared at the cube, its mysteries predominantly hidden, like a dormant plague awaiting the right conditions before spreading its contagion through a vulnerable populace. It allowed him to delve into others" minds, no matter what their distance. To see what they saw, hear what they heard, feel what they felt, taste what they tasted, and smell what they smelt. More importantly, it allowed him to become them, to take over their minds and direct their actions, a phenomenon called ghosting.

With ghosting, rebellions might be averted and sometimes subverted.

“Where?”

“Denebi III, your August Highness. An antiquities dealer of high repute, a Richard Delphin, was approached by a salvager of ill repute, a Jack Carson, who said he"d recovered it on Canis Dogma Five.”

Emperor Phaeton went white.

The former Capital of the Circian Empire, Canis Dogma Five was a derelict world, its surface laced with the crumbling infrastructure of a once-thriving civilization. Nearly two millennium had passed since the Circian Empire"s fall, and still the successor Empire, the Torgassan, kept the Circian homeworld under close surveillance.

For precisely this reason.

“And the Dogma Five patrols?” the Emperor asked.

“A curious thing, your August Highness. Not a single report of anomalous movements, unless one reviews the sensor recordings oneself. The sensors clearly indicate the descent, landing, two-day stay, and departure of this very same scavenger, but all the reports indicate only his arrival. They are glaringly mute regarding his departure. The sector commander is investigating the discrepancies. When asked, patrols and monitoring-station crews exhibit remarkable similar responses.”

“That must be hundreds of personnel.”

“Precisely, your August Highness.”

“What are the responses?”

“They mumble, "I didn"t see anything, Sir —even from those crew members with female commanders. Their eyes lose focus, their voices become flat and emotionless, and their faces lose all expression.”

“As though they"re hypnotized.”

“Precisely, your August Highness.”

Ten years before, just after Phaeton assumed the throne from his just-deceased father, Tilbury II, the subsector adjacent to Canes Venatici had erupted in rebellion, and in the first major test of his power, the new Emperor had ruthlessly subjugated its peoples.

With the cube.

He had ghosted the planet with the compulsion to bow to the least sign of Imperial rule, including the Imperial banner, a stylized depiction of the scepter in his hand.

In the first few months after the ghosting, the populace of Venatici the Outer had spent so much time genuflecting to ubiquitous symbols of Torgassan power that their economy had ground to a halt, crops went to seed for lack of anyone to harvest them, assembly lines stood idle, transport ground to a halt, and the rebellion fizzled. Everyone spent so much time on their knees that nothing got done. The people had nearly starved.

Served them right, too, the Emperor thought. We should have let them starve. Young and inexperienced, he"d let his ministers overrule his decision to extend them no help. Reports from the planet surface had consistently reflected the same perception: “They all look hypnotized.”

Emperor Phaeton frowned, the Prime Minister forgotten. “Eh? What"d you say?”

Custos Messium, a tall man who"d served Phaeton"s father before him, bowed in slight apology. “Pardon, your August Highness, I meant not to disturb your thoughts,” he said, a slight smile upon his slight face above a slight form, “but this scavenger, Carson, appears to have retained the cube after purportedly selling it to the antiquities dealer. It disappeared as the dealer was examining it, and his efforts to recover it were met with an unusual level of evasion. It seems Carson made off with both the cube and the five million galacti that the dealer paid for it.”

“You said this Carson appears to be held in low esteem. Why would a reputable antiquities dealer even entertain such a scoundrel?”

“Why indeed, your August Highness?”

Unless the scavenger had ghosted the dealer.

“Where did he go?”

“No one knows, your August Highness. Spaceport personnel are being remarkably mute on…”

“Yes, Prime Minister?”

“Pardon, your August Highness. Clearly the sensor data needs to be examined, as it appears the salvager hypnotized his way off planet.”

“Clearly.” The dolt!

“Pardon, your August Highness, if I may be excused…?”

“Certainly.” Phaeton watched with increasing impatience as his usually sharp-witted Prime Minister removed his dull-witted self from the Imperial presence, bowing three times as he backed from the throne room.

The scepter beckoning, Emperor Phaeton quickly forgot the man. He looked deeply at the cube"s swirling sides, as though a storm brewed beneath the smooth surface. Held immobile by a platinum ring, the cube was rarely touched by human hands.

Carefully, Phaeton released the catch and pulled aside the hinged, platinum circlet. Four of eight mounts came away.

“Grasp it by the edges if you must handle it at all,” he remembered his father saying.

Nearly three inches from corner to corner, the cube would easily fit between the thumb and forefinger of a normal adult human hand. What purpose or intent there"d been in its alien manufacture had long since been lost when the aliens themselves had departed from this universe.

He placed his thumb and forefinger at those opposite corners. “The cube root of the sum of the cube of its sides is the length between the corners,” he"d been told. The slight beveling of its edges made the corners comfortable in his grip.

He lifted it out of its mounts.

The universe inverted, and the fabric of time warped and skewed. The weft stretched and yawed but did not break or rend. And then all of it snapped back into place.

Where is this scavenger Carson? he asked the cube.

Unresponsive silence was his only answer.