Breach Part 9

She reached through the enveloping miasmas, and she felt, with certainty, that something, perhaps the Book itself, reached back.  Their fingers met.


It was hard to describe.
It was as if something inside her that had always been there had only just leapt to attention, wide-eyed and…
No.
Like every interest, every curiosity, every care she had felt in her life was merely rain fall over her mind and this was an onslaught…
Not quite.
There weren't words, in her culture.  There were, in her language. But not in the cubicle rooms and sterile, light-flooded work rooms. Not in the darkness of her quarters and the vastness of the Not in the belly of a ship.  
Matter fluttered through her tissue like pages, like book lungs, she could feel it in her skin and her mouth and the chitin of her horns.  She breathed in and it was thick and smoldering and smothering and it charged her with a desperate, delighted energy, an inspiration



Matter fluttered through her tissue like pages, like book lungs, she could feel the corporeity of it engulfing her, passing through the synthetic fabric of her space suit and the hammered resin helmet, snuffing out the visor and saturating into her cells, through the pores of her skin and then the chitin of her horns and the alveoli of her lungs.  It filled the cavities in her abdomen and her chest and lapped over her gulping, esophageal heart, blinding and overwhelming and euphoric with the feeling of sentience and control and purpose; she breathed it in it was thick and smoldering and smothering and it charged her with a desperate, delighted energy, an inspiration…  Her teeth tasted ink and her skin felt of paper and she gasped in the empty, desolate void of creation and a force that tugged through her, mighty and irresistible and speaking in a clear, distant voice, in the tongue of her home world, and telling her to go forth and make.

~~

Where she found herself was not what she would have expected, if Kokoparvests had ever expected this sort of thing.  All around her was the invisible, natural, true wind of outside tossing sand grains at her suit and lifting her hair in its fingers.  The air smelled of rust and dust and tasted like sky; sky and not space, and scattered all about her were forgotten and rejected objects; old artwork, yellowed pages, rotting wooden toys, cracked screens and blown fuses.  14--  2.4.6.1.4.-- Flume-- breathed in the air, and thought how this was not a biodome, or a simulation, or a sporting floor, this was a planet, that spanned the range of her vision with soil and debris.
There was no dirt on the ship she had lived on her entire life.
No sand or stones and dust that came only from the shivered flakes of a population's skins, building and rallying and being swept away.  And this; this was dirt.  This was earth.  She could feel the heat of a far-away sun (a sun now; where it was once but a star) running fingers through her hair.  She could feel particles of dust and water and pollen in her throat.
Flume thought, as she stood and experienced, that she should be terribly afraid.



~~



There was nothing here.

Only that wasn't true; you could have built a hull ship from all the debris scattered about.

(That wasn't true either; hull ships are gargantuan.)

But there was nothing that could have explained why she was here.

Flume perched like an abstracted crane on the highest point of what seemed to be an upturned oil tanker, for those of us who know that shape.  Beneath it there was a tangle of creeping foliage and at the very bottom a stagnant marsh, the buzzing of insects audible even from here.  She pursed her lipless mouth, puzzled by all this newness, all these seemingly unrelated things all tossed gleefully into one big jumble.  Coiled up nearby was the shadow-loathing.  Evidently he had no interest in deserting her.

"There was just that book," she mused as she surveyed the clouds.  "Right there on the floor.  Almost like…"

She was going to say something really cheesy, like how it was meant for her or had come for her or something but that wasn't the sort of thing her kind really thought about.  Equal opportunity and all that.   You couldn't pack millions of people in one ship, treat them like individuals, and have an elite or favored class without sparking dystopia.  

"…Almost like it was trying to steal someone."  This was much more sensible.  Considering her race was infamous for body snatching, anyone with technology that clever would indubitably target a hull ship to plant their little book trap, if only for the beautiful irony.  She looked down at Smarmadine, and felt a reinforcing sense of responsibility.  She might not be especially missed but whoever had done this had stole from her nation when they brought him along.  She was going to make it home just fine.  She had a piece of property to return.

And she did have one clue.  Flume pulled down the zipper enough to reach her right hand into her suit and pull out the neatly folded square of paper.  She opened it, turning it over.  It was as blank as she remembered, and it was also excited; there was no doubt in her mind that this was indeed a scrap of the book that had sent her seeking system into overdrive.  

"The best I can work it out," she told her ward, as she admired the undersides of distant clouds, "is that someone got their hands on an artifact of Handcraft Physics, which is what this came from."  She showed him the page.  "Which means that its function- bringing us here- isn't governed by the known and accepted rules of the universe.  I don't know why it left a piece of itself with us, but…" she looked over the page again.  "It might help us.  I can feel an energy in it.  There's something powerful at work."

Flume's throat tightened a little.  Handcraft Physics did not make sense in the comfortable and familiar universe, like magic in a scientific age.  There were a number of well known and accessible areas one could visit to experience them; places where you could walk on space itself and breathe the atmosphere like oxygen.  Sensible creatures like Kokoparvests and Rugens did not dabble in Handcraft Physics, though many lesser races were known to covet it for its properties, as it meant they wouldn't have to actually invent things for themselves.

Though neither knew this of the other, both of them felt a bitter pang, almost unconsciously, as she spoke of the phenomenon.  A deep, racial memory of betrayal. Of having been cheated.
Gods could be so cruel.