He thought there was a shift in Elvi’s expression, but he didn’t know what it signified.
Harshaan Lee, Elvi’s second-in-command, was strapping Amos into the other medical bed. The big man was in a suit that matched Cara’s, but where the girl was focus and determination, he was smiling at the absurdity of it all. The black eyes caught Jim’s, and Amos lifted his chin.
“Hey, Cap’n. You come to see the show?”
“I’m not sure how much there’s going to be for me to look at.”
“I do like the outfit,” Amos said. “Very flattering.”
“If you don’t want to do this, you just have to say the word. You know that, right?” Jim said.
“Please don’t move,” Dr. Lee said. “I’m trying to get the sensor baselined.”
“Sorry,” Amos said, then turned back to Jim. “You don’t have to worry about me. This is what I came here for.”
“Wait. Really?”
“Please lie flat against the medical couch,” Dr. Lee said.
Amos gave a cheerful thumbs-up, and shifted as he’d been told. Jim pushed back, letting himself float away against the wall. At the door to the hallway, Naomi floated in. Her hair was pulled back and she was scowling, but she softened when she saw him.
Dr. Lee’s voice was sharp and loud. “Final checks, all. Final checks.”
The activity in the room didn’t speed up or slow down, but it changed. Jim found a handhold and steadied himself with it. Elvi floated beside him.
“You ready for this?” Jim asked.
“I just hope it works. If we did all this for basically nothing . . . Well, that’ll suck.”
“Final checks are in and green,” Dr. Lee announced. “We are good to proceed on the lead researcher’s instruction.”
He looked over at Elvi. She nodded.
“We are good to proceed,” Lee said, and Jim thought there was a satisfaction in his voice. “Please transfer the catalyst now.”
On the medical couches, Cara relaxed and Amos closed his eyes.
Interlude: The Dreamers
The dreamers dream, and their dream carries them up into the familiar vastness. The swell and the flow and the minds that are empty because the light between them is the thought that they think together. The grandmothers beckon with fingers that never knew a hand. Look, look, look. And then see! And she spins and she sparkles, but he doesn’t. He holds firm as a stone in the stream, as a shadow in the light, as a thing. He stops, and by stopping, reminds.
They are threefold, and that mattered once, but the grandmothers fall gigglingly on, into themselves and through as they send seed after seed after seed into the airless wind, and some immeasurably few set root and grow back to them. Here is how we built it all, and here is how it fed us, and here is what love meant when love meant nothing, and she broadens and thins as she falls into it, but he stands still. She can feel the want in him as rich as in her, but she feels the thing that stands against the wanting and it reminds her. They are threefold, and the dream shudders like an image projected onto cloth when a wind blows. The grandmothers are dead, their voices are all songs sung by ghosts, and the truths they tell, they would tell to anyone. They cannot listen back, and the dreamer sees the hollow behind the mask. She tries to turn her head, to look behind her, to see the single living man in the land of the dead, and the gesture goes on forever, the essence of turning and turning and turning without the release of having turned—
The dream falls thread from thread and he is there, blue fireflies and black spirals. Weariness radiates from him, and she sees the flesh thin against his bones, weak and frail as God Himself in the birth pain of creation. And he turns to her and them.
She isn’t synced with the BFE floats behind her. We’re seeing the wormhole activity in the artifact falling off, but she’s going strong and Same for subject two. Anyone know what we’re looking at here? The soft, weary eyes find her and find him and find them. The dreamer tries to wake, but the other one folds into themselves like he’s hiding something against his black-scarred breast.
Keep them going, Dr. Okoye says.
And the third man hears her through their ears, and he smiles, and lowers his bull-broad, vast, and timeless head.
No trouble unless there’s trouble, the dreamer wordlessly says. And then there’s a lot of trouble.
It was an unwinnable war, the third man says. But it was fought. They were soldiers made of crepe paper and candy floss, scattered by their own guns. But they made guns. They were cobwebs who stood against a rockslide, and for all their cleverness were torn. The dreamer sees and is blind.