The light shifts, and when I look up, Dex is there crouched in front of me, the squashy packet of tissues held out flat on both palms, like an offering of tribute. His expression is grave, and he makes such ahumantableau despite not knowing how to hand someone a tissue.
Another tiny little laugh escapes, like an aftershock reminding me that the tectonic plates of my abused psyche aren’t done shifting around yet. My fingers are shaking as they reach for the tissue packet. Weakly, I smile at Dex. “Thanks.”
He smiles back, and because I’m looking at him, I can see the moment when the strangeness, thefamiliarity, of that human connection hits him. The Undying must have expected us to be as unfeeling and alien as we thought they were. A shadow crosses his features, and he returns to the chair Neal offered him.
“We’re not time travelers,” he says softly as he sits. He looks across at us, and when I nod—I’m okay, go ahead—he takes another of those smooth, bracing breaths. “Though yeh, we have shifted in time. Eight years into the journey to the Alpha Centauri system, something went wrong with the ship. A design flaw during construction. We sent a distress call Earthward, but after waiting weeks for it to reach them, the only reply was that they couldn’t help us. We were abandoned.”
“They didn’t have another ship,” Neal murmurs. “Theycouldn’thave helped. The colonists knew that.”
“Maybe.” Dex’s expression is grave—he obviously has no desire to debate whose fault the failure of the mission was. “But while we were trying to patch the ship, an unidentified anomaly appeared, and caught up the ship, drawing it into uncharted space. We call it the Storm—and that’s the easiest way to compren it. Imagine you’re in a boat on the ocean—” He pauses and looks around. “Does Earth still have boats, do you compren what that is?”
I blink, momentarily meeting Neal’s eyes before looking back. “Um, yes, we know what boats are.”
Dex’s mouth twists, a hint of wry humor there. “It’s not a lixoquestion. For us, everything about Earth is ancient history. I mean, do you people know off the top of your head whether the ancient Egyptians knew about … antibiotics?”
“Um,” I say again, “actually, yeah, pretty much everyone in the world knows ancient Egyptians were way before antibiotics. That’s not the best example you could have picked.”
Jules’s arm around me squeezes, and he whispers in my ear, “The ancient Egyptians actually did know about antibiotics. They, um, used a kind of medicinal beer.” The words are apologetic. The gleam in his eye when I turn to glower at him isn’t.
From the look on Dex’s face, his sharp ears picked up on Jules’s whisper. But when he grins at me, for the first time I feel warmer for seeing him smile, rather than disturbed by how an alien could seem so human. “So yeh. Boats. Imagine a boat on the ocean, and a storm shows up and gives you hassle. Once you’re at the mercy of the weather, you don’t know where you’ll have shifted once the storm passes. You could be kilometers off course.”
“Or centuries,” Jules murmurs.
“Or millennia.” Dex’s grin has vanished again. “Though we didn’t compren at first that we’d been shifted in time as well as space, because nothing around them was familiar. Without any reference points you could be dropped anyways, anywhen, in the universe and have no idea.”
“So it took you fifty thousand years back, the temple’s age on Gaia?” I ask.
“Not that first time, that came much later. After the Storm, the Centauri crew were stranded with no help, and only enough supplies to reach their original destination—so only a few years’ worth of food. This is actually my favorite historical era,” he adds shyly, as if confessing a guilty pleasure, though the pride in his expression says otherwise. “The resilience of our ancestors, their ingenuity, the dozens of ways they worked out to extend, preserve, and sirsly, evengrowtheir own food in those early decades is staggering. There’s a whole trilogy of movies about it.”
“You have movies?” Neal’s eyebrows shoot up.
Dex blinks at him. “Are you fooling? Of course we have movies. It’s not like we can build massive interstellar spaceships but somehow not compren a video camera. Our movies are like your … what’d they call it? Virtual reality? They’re kind of interactive, yeh? You can watch, or you can pick a role in the story and beinthe movie, and the characters are all programmed to react spontaneously according to their personalities.”
Neal’s cheeks flush a little, but he chuckles anyway, looking only mildly embarrassed. “I’d like to see those movies about the crew right after the Storm.”
“They’re beno.” Dex studies Neal out of the corner of his eye, measuring, thoughtful.
Jules clears his throat. “So the Centauri crew figured out how to extend their rations … ?”
Dex blinks, looking back toward us. “Yeh. And they discovered that the Storm was not a unique phenomenon, that there were these anomalies all over the place. That probably, they created the one that pulled them in when they were trying to get their broken ship to shift, trying all kinds of lixo ideas. They shifted through every one they could find, hoping to get lucky and get sent someways Earthward, someways with star patterns they could recognize. But that was when their astronavigators comprenned why all their calculations were giving them so much hassle—that the Storm they were traveling through was shifting them in time as well as space, yeh? The probability of finding a hole in space that justhappensto bring you anywhere Earthward is so tiny that it was actually pretty foolish of them to even try. But when you add in time as a variable … to get close to Earthandcome out at a time when they could actually get help, a time when humans were spacefaring?”
Neal hisses through his teeth. “Yeah, that’s pretty grim, mate.”
“Sirsly grim.”
When Dex falls silent, I realize that my heart’s pounding—in spite of everything, despite the fear and hatred I have for this raceof invaders, I desperately want him to continue the story. Because suddenly, it’s stopped being the story of the Undying—a remote, alien race—and becomeourstory. The story of people just like us, trying to survive. “What did you do when you realized you’d probably never get home?” My voice is hushed.
He glances at me. “We became the Undying,” he replies simply. “We abandoned the idea of returning to Earth—remember these were all still the original colonists, and they’d been beno with never seeing Earth again anyways. We decided to find a new home. We started searching for star systems instead of entry points to the Storm, for habitable planets instead of astronomical reference points.”
“How long did it take you to find someplace?” Jules is as riveted as I am—his arm has gone lax around me, so fixated is he on Dex’s story.
“Well, at first we concentrated on things like asteroids and moons and planetoids with dense mineral deposits, so we could get the materials to build more ships, faster ships. We poured every last resource we had, after what we needed to survive, into scientific research. Every new child born was raised to question, to explore, to try and compren things outside the boundaries of what we believed was possible. Our ancestors knew we could survive—but that we wouldn’t, unless we pushed at the limits of human resilience and creativity.”
A little finger of dread creeps down my spine, and I echo Jules. “How long were you lost in space before you found a place to live?”
Dex’s expression is calm, but there’s an endless depth to his gaze and I already know what he’s going to say. “We didn’t.”
Neal’s breath catches. “What do you mean you didn’t?”
