“A narcissist,” he says skeptically.
“Right. The old cigarette lighter bit. Smoke and mirrors. Watch us cower! And oh, look at the little cargo cult we’ve started—isn’t that adorable?”
“Sang, I don’t think that you’re—”
WITHDRAW
Lukas jolts and curses as the word rumbles through our skulls.
Envoy.
I jump to my feet and reactivate the windshield, getting a dazzling blast of full sunlight before the glare correction kicks in.
“Don’t be stupid—it didn’t hear what you were saying,” Lukas says impatiently, getting to his feet beside me.
“I didn’t say—”
“You were thinking it.”
Outside, Envoy is changing.
Its brilliance is fading. It’s gathering light toward itself, a rich admiral blue emerging as it begins to absorb rather than reflect. I put the parking brake on to allow the windshield to magnify.
“WARNING: VEHICLE WILL NOT START UNTIL OPTICAL ZOOM HAS BEEN DISABLED—”
I dismiss the computerized message with practiced ease and magnify Envoy with the next, until the entity fills the screen. I gawp absently, mind reeling at what I’m seeing.
Lukas crowds around the dash controls, his gaze darting across the window. “Where are they?” he mutters.
They?
Oh.
I’ve gotten so preoccupied with what Envoy is doing that I’ve forgotten the ambassadors. But Odon and Jarosława are nowhere to be seen.
“Hold on,” Lukas says, reaching for my dash controls and then pulling back, pointing instead. “Focus on the … oh, never mind.” He runs to the door and opens it to the cold air, throwing on his boots and running out into the just-below-freezing air of the Eye.
“My ship isn’t seeing them,” he says over the comm. “Nothing on thermal, either. There’s still enough reflection left to check the far side of Envoy for any figure shadows, but I’m just not picking up any. Sang, it’s taken them somewhere. Almost certainly inside.”
“Inside,” I repeat, the word thick in my throat.
“Sang, has this ever happened before?”
Still reeling, I shake my head, then realize that the camera feed isn’t on so he can’t see me. “No. Definitely not.”
A long pause. “Sang, I think it’s important for us to recognize that Envoy has asked us to leave. Which means that it’s probably not planning on returning our people.”
What does one say to that? I settle for “Agreed.”
“Let me bottom-line this: We come back without Odon and Jarosława—worldwide incident. And the longer we wait, the greater the chance of losing them, wherever they’ve gone.”
I manage a vague sound of acknowledgment.
“And if we anger Envoy in some way by disobeying its directive to leave—bigger worldwide incident. But say we recover the ambassadors, and nobody’s harmed … that’s nothing that can’t boil over within a few years, right?”
As if this is any other everyday decision—just put our pros on one side of the page and our cons on the other. Playing the odds in a game we don’t even understand. “Right.”
“So what do I think? I think that whatever it may wish, it’s time that we visit Envoy.”
This is no decision to be made lightly, and so we give all of this a chance to resolve itself, to make sense. We wait out the longest hour of my life. But nothing changes, and at the sixty-minute mark we layer up, step outside to the cold and meet between the two quadcopters.
“Ready to go?” Lukas asks, a tiny catch in his voice, trying not to look at the behemoth before us. Even in the cold, I can see that his forehead is sweating. I can’t blame him.
Any response I have is pushed back by the weight in my chest. I want to do anything but take even a single step toward towering Envoy, unreadable Envoy. I want to shrink away to nothing. Or curl up, shield my sensitive underside, make no noise. But instead I try to take a step forward and—incredibly—my legs obey.
After a few minutes of walking, we again reach the dividing line where the snow ends and Envoy begins. I can see our footprints from earlier; the point where the four pairs of snowshoes become two, where we sent the ambassadors on alone. Passing my final shoeprint feels like an irretrievable act. I can only eye the alien terrain which awaits ahead.
I need to say something, anything to own what I’m about to do as something other than a lemming’s march into oblivion.
“All right, Luk,” I review lamely, “the goal here is to recover our people, or failing that to confirm their safety and leave with apologies to Envoy.”
Lukas opens his mouth to respond, then closes it and nods instead. We take our first step up onto Envoy’s substructure, barely an ankle-height up from the snow around it.
I wince inwardly, fully expecting for a moment some awful retaliation. But Envoy does nothing—it doesn’t even speak. Envoy, both the “ground” beneath us and the enormous orb which rises at its center, is now a lifeless dull blue; almost gray, necrotic. It gives very slightly, as if it were hollow inside, with each step.
Walking on this surface—on Envoy—feels perverse in a way that I can’t describe. Like a man of faith somehow stumbling onto the tomb of Christ or happening to visit the Kaaba when nobody else is around. Yes, I gave up the Messengers of Envoy thing and subscribed to the extraterrestrial angle almost as soon as I reached adulthood, but some things you can’t cast away so easily. Some things stick around. And right now, I’m disturbing the hallowed ground of my religious upbringing. I fight the urge to remove a glove and feel the substructure with my bare fingers. Touch the being for whom I’d once called myself Messenger.
Reflexively I begin humming a song I know well, one I sang often as a child:
Envoy, who communed above
Born of stars, now dwells in snow
Faceless form but endless love
And because of Him we know
The song—or hymn, really—feels either too confident or too insubstantial for what I’m witnessing now, but I can’t decide which. Still, I keep humming as we walk toward the bulb.
Lukas gives me a queer look, shaking his head. But even without the same childhood baggage, he seems no less unnerved than I am. He takes each step as if he’s trying to avoid the creak of a floorboard.
“Do we … announce our intentions?” I say.
My partner nods, not in agreement but in acknowledgment that he’s been wondering the same thing. “Wave the proverbial white flag, you mean?” A pause, and he shrugs. “Like you said earlier—either it already knows why we’re knocking at its door, or we’ll never be able to reason with it anyway.” He pulls a pair of goggles from an outer pocket and puts them on, powering them up with a quiet vocal command.
“You brought those here?” I ask incredulously.
“The way I’m thinking, we’re already failing to respect Envoy’s demand to leave. The best thing we can do now is do it quickly, even if that means breaking other rules.”
Lukas studies the ground. The scanner in his goggles alerts him to anything which doesn’t fit the general pattern of the terrain: little bits of debris, snow which might have been tracked earlier from a boot, tiny threads of fabric. When we’ve nearly reached the bulb at the center, he stops. He crouches, picks up a tiny object, and curses, sitting down heavily with his other hand over his mouth.
“Jarosława,” he finally says, voice strained. “I’m sure of it. She was taking antibiotic eye drops, and I asked her about them. She told me she’d had preventative corneal surgery.”
“I don’t understand.”
He stands and places a tiny device in my hand. It looks like a smaller version of the little wire chairs I used as a kid to dip Easter eggs—but soft, with a flexible membrane hanging from the ring end.
“It’s a peeper, S
ang—an ocular camera. My kid brother has one of these for medical reasons. His eye didn’t develop right, and so they put the camera in to play retina and pass the image down the optic nerve. But there’s only one reason why Jarosława would have one implanted now, so close to Poland’s selection a few weeks back. She was trying to record Envoy on the down-low.”
Well, damn.
Realizing what I’m holding, and where it must have come from, I shudder, sucking the cold air in through my teeth. “But she must be nearing retirement. Why would a state official go through surgery just to get some footage?”
“Why would anyone else?” Lukas asks, taking the peeper. “It’s not as if the rank-and-file get to meet Envoy. Besides, the footage stored in this little ring could be worth billions—there’s something to retire on.”
“Or civic duty.” I imagine Jarosława being pressured into this by some nationalistic appeal, and a fresh wave of revulsion sweeps over me. “How was this removed?”
“It’s clean, Sang. We don’t know enough about this thing’s methods to assume the grisliest.” Lukas hands the peeper back to me, much to my chagrin. I leave it in my snowsuit pocket, resisting the urge to drop it instead onto the hard Envoy substructure below.
Envoy who communed above …
I shake my head to clear it.
Sometimes I forget why I value Lukas. True, he often strikes me as flip, detached. Maybe even uncaring. But behind the mask, he’s taking in more than he lets on, ready to release the “Lukas” the situation calls for—the one who’s more suited to ambiguity, to otherworldliness, than I am. The one I need now. I manage—only just—to enact a counterfeit version of the same maneuver, to push panicky Sang downward. Like some childhood dream of holding a closet door shut with a monster on the other side.
“All right, Luk. We’ll circle the bulb, and if we don’t find anything, we’ll take the substructure in a widening pattern—”
The ground shifts beneath our feet. No, that isn’t quite right—it feels as if I’m standing in a very shallow but fast-moving stream. The surface beneath my feet no longer has a steady texture—it’s taken on a grain of sorts, with tiny rivulets moving quickly through the mix, like drops on a window. My half-baked plan is instantly wiped from my mind as I see movement in the corner of my vision and turn toward the bulb. It’s expanding, inflating, gathering the ground toward it.
Without thinking, we run, managing only just to hold our footing.
“Sang?” Lukas says, “The edge is coming toward us!”
So it is, and quickly—the snowy terrain is opening in our direction like a curtain, the ground pulling us with more and more urgency toward the bulb. I can no longer tell the faster-moving rivulets beneath our feet apart from the calmer bits; they’re one and the same. It looks as if Envoy is boiling.
When we reach the edge, we jump, landing hard in the snow a meter or more below us. The ground layer is dense, packed down by the otherworldly terrain that was sitting upon it. We’re standing in Envoy’s enormous footprints.
Rising, I dust the thick powder from my suit, and turn. The bulb is still now, mere meters from us, inert as if nothing’s even happened. We approach it.
I peer one way, then the other, each direction revealing little more than an enormous pale wall circling away into the distance. “Is Envoy always this large? Or does it always look this way from here?”
“No sign of Jarosława or Odon,” Lukas says, ignoring my question. He kicks away some of the snow at the bottom of the bulb to reveal more of Envoy’s inexplicable flesh beneath. “No entrance either, that I can see, even underneath. Must be hollow.”
We meet each other’s eyes and wordlessly begin circling the bulb. We don’t have to confer about the direction—in my Canada and Lukas’s Ukraine, clockwise is familiar. Clockwise means comfort.
I don’t know what we expect to find as we explore the perimeter, tentative satellites orbiting the impossible. After all, the next move is clearly Envoy’s to make, and it’s said nothing since asking us to leave. We might now, I think, be treated as enemies and face some inscrutable reprisal. Or perhaps regarded as clumsy, overambitious besiegers and merely ignored. The possibility of being welcomed with open arms—for lack of an even roughly appropriate word—is, if anything, a distant third. But one, in all honesty, which holds its own set of fears.
Our quadcopters in the distance are eclipsed as we circle the bulb, leaving us with no reference point with which to regain our bearings in the endless white. After the ships disappear around Envoy’s massive wall, we continue, Lukas’s eyes fixed downward, parsing the input from his goggles. He finds nothing. After what feels like an eternity, the ships come back into view, and we arrive at our starting point.
An aperture is now open before us. A wide mouth into the blackness, a maw into the unknown. Of course. An invitation, then. Dread option number three.
I know why I feel as I do now: Homo sapiens have never had the luxury of being apex predator. We don’t have the claws, the teeth for it. We can cover our shivering pink or brown and set forth with sharpened sticks or machine-rounded ammunition, but ours is a counterfeit domination and we know it. We only survived because we know to fear the unknown, the bestial cry in the night. And that programming remains within us. Here, now, my amygdala boils with formless dread, warring with my conscious mind and demanding flight or, failing that, fight.
“Is that just my imagination?” Lukas says, staring.
“No. I can see it too.”
The air inside Envoy has a texture to it—a strong fog which permeates what little I can see. But that fog appears perfectly still. I can focus on bits of it, and it holds its shape; it doesn’t circulate or reform as I’d expect. I’m unsure what this means.
“ ‘Will you walk into my parlor?’ ” There is no whimsy to Lukas’s voice.
… said the Spider to the Fly, I finish silently, wishing that Lukas had said nothing instead. If I don’t enter now, I know, I might never again find the nerve. Holding my breath, I step forward into the dark, with Lukas in tow.
The ground inside is dry and flat—no more crunch of snow beneath my boots. The air is cool, but musty and wet—like a rainy day in the Northwestern United States, if that rainy day smelled of copper and was utterly windless. I turn on my jumpsuit’s chest light, and it follows my eyes as I scan the room. Around us hang wispy sheets the color of vellum which terminate at head or chest level, resolving into long, thin strands dangling like tiny tassels. They’re nearly transparent.
“Should we have respirators for this?” I whisper, testing one of the sheets with a gloved finger. It billows only slightly, surprisingly cohesive for something which looks so much like a cobweb.
My partner rolls his eyes. “Not exactly the first thing on my mind right now, Sang.”
Instantly, the sheets on the walls around us dissipate in place from the roof downward and disappear from view. It happens so quickly that I don’t even have time to be startled.
But Lukas jumps back, eyes wide. “I’ve changed my mind. We should have respirators.”
It’s nearly impossible to find our bearings in the dark. The space inside hardly seems to match the perimeter we circled earlier. More than once we follow what seems to be the outer wall, only to find that wall evaporate to reveal more darkness, and always those forming, evaporating sheets and threads of … whatever they may be.
“Nanites,” Lukas mutters to himself.
It’s an old pet theory of his, but I have to admit: It’s finally got some credence. Tiny machines—strands and clouds and sheets and maybe even walls and floors and ceilings of them. Sure, we’ve combed every previous Envoy site and found no trace of such a thing. But it’s hard for me to ignore what I’m seeing: walls dissolving and reforming about us, blocking our path and creating new paths.
We find that by forcing the thinner walls with all our weight, we c
an make them bend and split just enough to crawl through—whether of their own accord, or because we’ve broken through the material’s tensile strength, we don’t know. It’s exhausting work.
“We can’t keep going like this,” I say after we’ve stopped once again to catch our bearings—and our breath. “We’ve gone through a dozen of these things at least.”
Lukas shrugs, staring down the long corridor perpendicular to our path—the one made of the wall we’ve just broken through and the one to follow. “What other choice do we have?” Then his eyes widen. “I don’t believe it.”
“What?”
He points. “Look down that way. Do the walls seem to be narrowing to you?”
Squinting, I shake my head. “I don’t know. Maybe. So what?”
He stands, excited. “They are narrowing. Not just narrowing—converging! Right on that spot, along with all of the other corridors we’ve already passed through. Like a pinwheel!”
Comprehension dawns. “Which means …” I trail off. Who would want to be first to say such a thing?
“Which means that he’s herding us,” Lukas finally says, the way you spit out an unwanted but inescapable thought.
“You said he.”
Lukas waves his hand through the air in front of him as if combating a housefly, eyes exploring the murky recesses above his head. “Look at where we are. We’ll talk about pronouns on the way home.”
“All right. So we’re being herded. But we’re not under any illusions about what Envoy could do to us if it wanted us dead.” I finger Jarosława’s ocular camera nervously in my snowsuit’s outer pocket. “I’m calling this a good sign. Let’s see where we’re being led.”
Once we resolve to stop fighting the terrain and take the path of least resistance, the way opens before us. We reach the center of the “pinwheel” to find a circular hub of sorts, with only one other path opening on the opposite side. Passing through, we follow Envoy’s lead as the trail curves or diverts, continuing on for what I know to be minutes but which feels like hours. I still long for anything but the endless darkness on each side and the gently golden, filamentous sheets I see in my light’s beam. Still, at least the choice of path has been made for me. I push through the dark, my hand over my neck as if defending myself from some assailant.