The Path of the Four

The personnel shuttle was about to crash into the space station. The emergency alarm purred and thundered, filling the shuttle with a loud, animal and electronic throbbing. A dozen men and women sat strapped in rows in chairs bolted to the floor. Each wore blue and beige pressure suits, without helmets. On each suit was a “C” and “T,” printed as if they were one-letter, the logo of the communications corporation that employed everyone present.

Ariana Orlando used the utility handles on the wall to make her way to the front of the ship.

This wasn’t becoming a good day.

She had long dark hair, with a few gray strands, and her skinny, short body was getting lost in her pressure suit. Tucked into her suit, currently not visible, was the Wiccan pentagram and Christian cross she always wore around her neck. She had tucked her ponytail down the back of her suit.

At the front of the shuttle, Joe Whitney, strapped into his chair, glared at the monitors, and then at Ariana as she neared.

Forty-two and bald, Joe was heavy and had small blue eyes that seemed ready to disappear into his large and round face. His pressure suit strained to keep his body in it. A “Remember Philadelphia” tattoo, in tiny red letters, sat over the knuckles of his left hand.

Strapping herself into an empty chair, Ariana looked up at the monitors. They showed a three-dimensional animation of the personnel shuttle, shaped like a giant, flying deck of playing cards with skating blades, emerging out of a Yamato Corridor (now vanishing), and two revolving metal spheres, connected by an immobile tube. The tube and the spheres were immense, but not as big as a planet, but big enough to be Vertex, Carne-Tischler’s space station over the alien planet Zah-Gre.

Looking at the monitors, the dials, and the sensor displays, Ariana finally eyed Joe’s angry and worried look.

“I’m looking for an answer,” she said.

“Keep us all from dying. If we all die, I’ll kill you.

Ariana heard the others in the personnel shuttle, the first rotation crew for Vertex, begin to whimper and pray.

“Babe,” Ariana said to the artificial intelligence that helped run Vertex and its shuttles. “I want access to the original master code for this shuttle’s navigation program.”

Joe shook his fat face in disagreement. “Impossible. That carries a triple-delta security rating. No way could anyone have sabotaged it.”

A keyboard and one more monitor slid out of the control panel. The monitor displayed more than a million lines of ones and zeroes. Ariana took a few seconds to study it. She pointed to a line of ones and zeroes in the middle and said, “Somebody did the impossible.”

She used the access keyboard to change the line of ones and zeroes somebody, somehow had made wrong.

The emergency alarm ceased. The three-dimensional animation showed Ariana and the others the shuttle correcting its course, and now again approaching the space station via Vertex’s shuttle bay.

Ariana noticed that the first rotation crew was silent, with stunned looks on their faces.

Joe smiled. “Well, if you don’t like her, she can always go be a Chief Engineer for somebody else.”

The first rotation crew smiled, laughed and clapped.

Then on every monitor appeared the image of Roger Brantley. He was fifty-three years old, and middle age had settled over him like a golden powder. His baldness had moved slowly and elegantly up his forehead. Gray and white had come in on the sides of the hair in classic little stripes. The wrinkles had settled in around the eyes in well-behaved bundles.

“I know you all feel like bowing,” Joe said with a smirk. “That will pass.”

Ariana and the rest of the first rotation crew laughed.

The recording of Roger Brantley then spoke with a smooth and gentle voice. “Greetings, first rotation crew of the space station Vertex over the planet Zah-Gre. Although this is a video-cube recording we’re broadcasting from Vertex, and I’m back on Earth, at the other end of the Yamato Corridors, I’m standing right next to each of you, in spirit. You’ll help set up the nexus for a communications network that’ll extend into Further Space. God gave us the cosmos. But great people will like all of you will turn that cosmos into a Heavenly Universe. This great occasion reminds me of other grand achievements in Humanity’s past, such as--”

The recording of Roger Brantley disappeared. In its place was a black and white mask, the left side black and the white right. Behind the mask were a green left eye and a blue right eye. The masked character also wore a gray hood.

Ariana heard Joe start to say, under his breath, “Now what?”

The figure on the monitors spoke, in a voice filled with electronic distortion.

“Hello, children. My name is Brother Chaos. And I’m not done with you yet. Maybe I can’t leave well enough alone. I’ll do whatever I have to get your attention. What is the magic word of the day? ‘Secrets.’ The secrets Humans are keeping from each other, and the secrets some of you are keeping from yourselves.”

What, Ariana thought, are we looking at here? Forget, for the moment, whom or what, this character was. Was this a recording or a broadcast? Both of them seemed impossible, but so did somebody sabotaging the shuttle’s navigation program.

Brother Chaos asked, “Seems like I’m crashing the party, doesn’t it?”

Ariana tried to decide if the voice was computer-generated or a distortion of the sound of a human talking.

Brother Chaos said, “here you all are, arriving at the new stage of -- what’s the term? ‘The New Universal Age’? A new world filled with weird turquoise-skinned, ear-less, black-eyed, flat-headed, four-fingered, four-toed, barefoot beings. What a wonderful, new, colorful chapter in the great Human adventure that now begins. Right? Well, not exactly. You see, the Zah-Gre are part of the Human story, and the Humans are part of the Zah-Gre story. Goodbye, children, for now.”

Later, after Joe, Ariana, and the rest of the first rotation crew had gotten out of the shuttle, a man in a blue and beige uniform came into the docking bay, showing athletic speed as he used the utility handles to get to his destination. He was brown-skinned, and had dark, slicked-back hair, and a little pencil mustache.

“What the hell happened? I’m not two minutes into the start of this duty, and we can’t get even get the first rotation on board without--”

Joe silenced the uniformed man with a wave of a beefy hand, keeping the other hand on a utility handle. Everybody was still floating in zero-g.

“Nice to see you again also, Jafari.” Joe turned to the first rotation crew. Idle, they milled around, and chatted, floating this way and that. “OK. You all already have your assignments for your quarters. Find your rooms, and I’ll have the first work period briefing in an hour. Meeting Room 3.” A very young, redheaded man started to open his mouth to ask a question. “There are maps posted everywhere,” Joe said.

Using utility handles, the rotation crew started to make their way toward the nearest hatch.

“I think you and me should talk with our excited friend here,” Joe said to Ariana.

Jafari was Vertex’s Security Chief. His office was in one of the station’s rotating spheres. Ariana found it a relief to finally be out of zero-g.

Jafari would have been in Vertex for weeks. The only personal touch he had added to his office was a small, framed photograph on the wall behind his desk. It was small, and sitting in front of the desk, Ariana only ever got close enough to see that it was a family, poised in front of a mosque, probably somewhere on Earth, probably the Middle East.

“So Jafari,” Joe said, after the introductions, settling into his chair next to Ariana. “What did you security monitors pick up about what happened to us out there?”

“Only that the shuttle went on a collision course, headed for Sphere B, and then things were the way they were supposed to be again. When this incident started, I asked Babe to monitor communications on the shuttle and make a recording.”

Ariana crossed her legs. “Have you played the recording yet?”

“No.”

“You’ll find some character calling himself ‘Brother Chaos’ on it,” Ariana said.

“‘Brother Chaos’?” Jafari rubbed his pencil mustache. “What’s that about?”

“I don’t know.” She leaned forward, brushing a few strands of gray and black hair out of her eyes. She felt she was sharing a fascinating technical problem, the type of fascination she lived for. “But he managed to change the navigation program for the shuttle.”

“That’s--”

“--Impossible, we know,” Joe interrupted.

Ariana chewed her lower lip and drummed her fingers on the arm on the chair. “Hmm. Did Babe or your security sensors pick up any type of transmissions to or from the shuttle?”

Jafari leaned back in his chair. “No.”

Ariana looked at Joe. “This is really a great puzzle.”

“That’s swell.” Joe pointed a chubby finger at Jafari. “But it’s his job to solve it. You’ll have plenty else to keep you busy.”

Jafari turned to Ariana. “You know, you have a voice like the Italian mother of an old girlfriend of mine, and like a Hispanic woman who was my captain, when I was a cop.”

Ariana shrugged. “My mother was Italian, and my father Hispanic. I grew up hearing Spanish, Italian and English every day.”

Jafari asked, “Why are you a space jack?”

It almost sounded like a question from an official interrogation, Ariana thought. Jafari, perhaps sensing that, tacked on a smile at the end.

“I played with a doll until I was ten. Then I did I-don’t-know what to get another little girl mad at me. She smashed my doll. My mother and father couldn’t afford a new one, but my brother tried to make things better. He let me play with his telescope. I fell in love with the stars and wanted to do more than just look at them.”

“So now you’ve leaped over them, thanks to Akira Yamato. Good for you.”

“You guys sound like such romantics,” Joe said. “Being a space jack is a job. It’s nothing less, and nothing more. And it can get you hurt if you try to make it something else than a job.”

Joe was a former member of the Universal Resistance League, which some people could have thought of as romantics with guns and bombs. Curry’s blanket pardon was years in the past, but Ariana wondered what that meant to someone like Jafari.

Ariana rubbed a spot on her shoulder. “I know what you mean, Joe, about just sticking to doing my job. I got a scar on my back from when I was in Luna City, helping to set up their factory. I was out at a bar with this holo-recording salesman and tried to stop these two idiots from settling some kind of argument with laser pistols. I got a nasty scar out of the deal.”

“Scar on your back?” Joe rubbed his REMEMBER PHILADELPHIA tattoo. “That’s easy to get rid of.”

Ariana replied, “And lose a souvenir? No thank you.”

Joe got to his feet. “Well, we all have to get back to work.”

Ariana stood. It surprised her to see Jafari not getting up as well. He hardly seemed like the find-your-own-way-out sort of guy, now that this business was, for the moment, concluded.

“There’s something else,” Jafari said.

Joe turned back to Jafari. “What?”

“I haven’t had a chance to bring it up yet, what with the business with the shuttle. But we might be dealing with a war soon.”

The Time of the Two Wars is what Ariana thought of when Jafari brought up war coming to Zah-Gre. The Time of Two Wars was that period not far enough back in Earth’s past, and Ariana felt sure Joe and Jafari were thinking of it as well.

“Babe, model 17, please.”

A hologram model of Zah-Gre appeared in the center of Jafari’s office in response to his command. There was the whole planet in miniature: the great world ocean, the empty western hemisphere, and the five islands crowded around the equator on the eastern hemisphere. Zah-Gre was about as big as Earth, but had less landmass than the continental United States.

“This intelligence concerns the Center Land.”

“Carne-Tischler gives you spies, Jafari?”

“Not exactly, Joe. But I have some tricks I first used working military intelligence in Earth’s Pan-Asian War. Start the second sequence, Babe.”

The center island in the hologram lit up in red.

“My information concerns the Lower Clan of the Center Land,” and after Jafari said that the sign of the Lower Clan appeared a few inches from the hologram/globe: a black dot inside a circle. “They might attempt some kind of invasion, probably to the Northern Land, probably right into the Old City.”

Joe shook his chubby head.

“No. Sorry, but that makes no sense. The Lower Clan has carefully avoided contact with the other Lands, and with Humans, since Corridor One.”

“No official contact,” Jafari corrected.

“I know about the secret visits,” Joe replied. “A few lone members, occasionally penetrating the Old City.” Joe looked at Ariana. “Throw an Upper, Outer, or Side Clan robe over those loincloth getups those savages wear and who is to know, right?”

On the hologram/globe, the red from the Center Land flowed out and engulfed the other Lands, the other four islands. Then the red was suddenly all back in the Center Land, then flowed out again, following a different path. Then the process recycled itself at a faster pace, the red following a different pace next time.

Words flickered across the hologram/globe:

POSSIBLE INVASION SCENARIOS.

Jafari walked to the other side of his desk, joining Ariana and Joe.

“There’s a Center Land legend about something called ’the One Who Will Complete Us,’” Jafari said. “This type of plan is like something a culture waiting around for a quasi-messiah to show up would do, like they want to speed the universe’s, their version of the universe’s time table.”

“I didn’t read the report on that yet.”

“That’s because I haven’t written it yet, Joe.” Jafari shrugged. “I don’t know if I should. I can chat with individual Zah-Gre for information, but approaching any of them officially about the Lower Clan is useless. The official social/political structures of the planet are closed-mouth on the subject.”

Ariana had a question.

“‘The One Who Will Complete Us.’ Isn’t ‘the One’ their name for God?”

“Yeah,” Jafari replied. “That, and ‘the Turning.’ Anyway, that’s the closet we can translate it into English.”

Joe made a dismissive gesture.

“Never mind all that. All we need to know now is that the Lower Clan might be trouble. Stay on top of this, and see if the Side Clan will stay friendly if this trouble starts.”

Ariana looked at the two men. “Can’t we expect some sort of help from Human Security? That’s their job, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, OK,” Joe agreed. “But Jafari, you approach H.S. on this, make it your idea to touch base with them. Leave my name out of it. Captain Roselle is welcome to hating me all he wants for me being ex-Universal Resistance League, but I don’t want him to use that as an excuse for not doing his job.”

Ariana squirmed. She felt like she was listening to two men talk about their favorite sports teams.

“This ‘One Who Will Complete Us’ mystery,” Ariana said. “Could that be what’s in ‘the Fourth Book’ in the Zah-Gre holy ‘text’?”

“I don’t know.” Jafari rubbed his pencil mustache. “The Zah-Gre haven’t told any Human what’s in the Fourth Book, including me.”