CHAPTER
ONE
Gunther Mueller strained to see past the white light that blinded him. He tried moving, but he couldn’t feel his arms or legs. It was as if he were a consciousness suspended in a pool of pure light. Sensing movement around him, just beyond his perception, Gunther was suddenly jolted by a booming voice echoing in his head, fragments of words crashing against his consciousness.
“. . . can show . . . to control . . . it’s merely a . . . of . . .”
The world exploded in a scintillating storm of infinite colors and Gunther fell forward onto a sand-covered beach. Waves of nausea washed over him as the world tilted. Gasping for breath, he inhaled deeply of the salty sea air.
Amidst the chaos, Gunther detected a whisper in his mind, though its message remained incomprehensible. The voice faded, yet the fragments of its words bounced around in his head. Had he imagined them?
He couldn’t shake the feeling that someone—or something—was desperately trying to communicate with him, albeit unsuccessfully.
A shiver raced down his spine as he surveyed the rest of the team, each member collapsed onto the damp sand. With his chest constricting, Gunther fought to draw in a breath. The increasing pressure was akin to being squeezed by a giant boa constrictor.
As he felt the crushing pressure outside his chest, something bloomed within him, as if it was trying to push its way out. “Calm yourself,” he muttered in his native German. A bright glow emanated from his fingertips, spreading up his arms, and Gunther was again blinded by a flash of light. He gasped as a wave of exhaustion washed over him, the competing pressures suddenly melting away.
Gasps erupted from various team members as they, too, pulled in deep breaths. Marty Cohen staggered over to Gunther, collapsed onto his knees, and patted him on the shoulder. “Thanks . . . Whatever you did . . . that helped.”
Gunther clambered to his feet, unsure that he’d done anything other than have what felt like a panic attack. As the rest of the team rose, one thing became clear: they weren’t in Egypt anymore.
“Welcome, seer. It is time.”
Marty’s ears popped and he fell forward onto all fours as an intense bout of dizziness struck him. He clenched fistfuls of wet sand and held on as the world spun around him.
He smelled smoke and looked up, his eyes opening to a vast river just ten feet away.
Thousands of floating flower petals drifted by.
Surjan Singh staggered to his feet and walked to the shoreline. He breathed in deeply and panned his gaze all around them. “I can’t believe it!”
“What?” Marty asked.
The large man pointed upriver. In the distance, a crowd gathered around a fire near the shore. They wore white tunics. And then Marty shifted his gaze downriver and saw the same image repeated. Another gathering of people. Another fire.
Marty climbed up to his feet and felt a wave of nausea.
“We’re in India.” Surjan said it with a note of certainty. “And this is the Ganges River.”
“Yeah, but when?” Gunther asked.
The team looked to Marty.
He was the so-called seer, expected to have a vision of their next destination. But this time, Marty’s heart thudded loudly as he realized his vision was mostly blurred. The images he’d witnessed as they’d crossed from one place and time to another were all a smudged mess in his mind’s eye.
François patted Marty on the shoulder. “Well, Dr. Cohen, it looks like we’re embarking on a new adventure. Where to now?”
Marty scanned the expectant faces before him and, for a moment considered just walking away—he’d volunteered to help translate some ancient texts at a dig site south of Cairo. This wasn’t Cairo. Yet here he was, somehow the de facto leader of a dig team turned group of reluctant adventurers: François, the eclectic Frenchman who had bankrolled the dig; Lowanna, the occasionally moody Aboriginal anthropologist; Gunther, the fellow archaeologist who’d dragged Marty into this mess; Surjan, the bearded ex-military head of security with his long hair wrapped in his turban; and Kareem, the teenage digger from the streets of Cairo. They were all looking to him for guidance. Marty could only shake his head. “To be honest, I have no idea. The images I saw weren’t very clear.”
Even though the team looked a bit unsteady on their feet, they were all accounted for. “Is everyone alright?”
The team responded with affirmative responses, except Lowanna Lancaster, who wore a stunned expression. Marty approached her. “Are you okay?”
“I’m not sure.” Lowanna’s voice wavered, a stark contrast to her usually assertive tone. “I really thought we might be heading home. This feels like we’re starting over again, doesn’t it? Back to square one.”
“It’s hard to tell,” Marty said as he breathed in the fresh air, detecting the unmistakable scent of the nearby ocean. “I can say this much, it sure doesn’t smell like Upper Egypt.” He took a deep breath, noticing something distinctly different about the aromas carried by the breeze. Despite the warm weather, there was a familiarity to the scent, reminiscent of opening his kitchen freezer.
The air smelled of ice.
He pressed his lips into a thin line as a million thoughts raced through his head.
About a month ago, Marty and the rest of the archaeological dig team had somehow found themselves transported to the ancient past. Since then, they had journeyed across North Africa in hopes of returning to the modern world they had left behind. However, walking back into the chamber that had initiated their unfortunate adventure had not given them the results they’d hoped for.
Now, Marty and the team faced a new dilemma: Where and when had that mysterious chamber sent them?
The warmth of the sun did little to lessen the unease that clung to Marty and the rest of the team. On the far side of the river, palm trees swayed gently in the breeze, yet the air carried an unfamiliar scent—a hint of snow, an anomaly in this climate. Turning to Surjan, a towering figure with a turban expertly wrapped around his head, Marty voiced his uncertainty. “Are you sure this is the Ganges?”
The normally placid man held a troubled expression, raking his fingers through his long beard as he scanned the water. “A moment . . .” With purposeful strides, Surjan approached the shoreline, cupped his hand into the river, and took a sip. Immediately, he spat the water out, grimacing. “No. This is all wrong.”
“What’s wrong?” Marty asked.
“This is ocean water. It’s full of salt.”
“I thought the Ganges originated in the Himalayas,” François noted. “Water from melting glaciers should make it a source of fresh water.”
Surjan frowned. “I apologize for jumping to conclusions. I think I’m mistaken about this being the Ganges. Maybe a bit of wishful thinking on my part.”
François patted the large man on the shoulder and chuckled. “No need for apologies, my good man. We’re immersed in the unexpected and the mostly unexplainable. Wasn’t it Ursula Le Guin who said that the only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty? Having our preconceived notions proven incorrect seems to be par for the course, I’d say. At least on this adventure.” The Frenchman turned to Marty. “Any thoughts or guidance, grand seer?”
Grand seer. Marty wasn’t sure if François was poking fun at him or just being friendly. The man was often moody and hard to read.
Marty hitched his thumb at the forest of pine trees behind them and asked, “Are there pine trees in India?” He turned to the rest of the team. “On the other side of the river, we have palm trees, while on this side, we seem to be standing on the edge of a dense pine forest. Obviously, we’re nowhere near North Africa anymore; that much I’m certain of. Anyone have any idea where we’d find these trees growing side by side?”
“There are pine trees in northern India,” Surjan replied, scanning the horizon. “But from our current vantage point, I don’t see any mountains. Closer to the Himalayas, there are a lot of pine trees—”
“But they wouldn’t typically be growing right next to palm trees,” François interjected, “would they?”
“Southern California,” Gunther murmured.
“Forbidden!” A woman’s voice echoed from a distance.
Marty turned toward the voice, his eyes widening at the impossible sight of a copper-skinned woman with graying hair standing on the water’s surface, midway between the shores, gesticulating and yelling in their direction.
“How is she standing on the water, by God?” Kareem stared at the woman with his mouth agape.
As the woman jogged toward them, still shouting, “Forbidden!” Marty and the others walked closer to the shore.
“That’s not a language I recognize,” Surjan remarked with surprise, “yet I understand her.”
“Just like before,” Gunther added. “We’ve had the local language downloaded into our brains. Why is she yelling ‘forbidden’ at us?”
The woman appeared visibly agitated, her emotions unmistakable in her voice. Marty had no explanation for his ability to understand her words. Here was a woman speaking in a language that sounded like gibberish, yet he and the team understood her perfectly. The same thing had happened when they’d arrived in ancient North Africa. He didn’t like Gunther’s choice of the word “downloaded,” but he didn’t have a better one, and that made him uneasy.
“The tonal qualities . . . there’s a musicality to it,” Lowanna noted, her head tilted as she focused on the shouting woman running toward them. “But it’s not like Mandarin or Vietnamese. It’s more subtle, with a lot of shifts in pitch. There are ejectives, sharp and precise, punctuating the flow of speech like exclamation points. And then, those lateral fricatives, almost like a soft rustling of leaves. It’s actually a beautiful-sounding language, whatever it is.”
“But how is she walking on water?” Kareem asked again.
“It’s forbidden to be in the Sacred Grove!” the woman yelled. Her eyes were wide with fear.
Lowanna stepped forward as the woman reached the shoreline. “I’m sorry, we didn’t realize—”
The woman grabbed Lowanna’s hand and motioned to the other side of the river. “Come. Before you attract the spirits!”
Marty was about to intervene when Lowanna waved him away. “We’ll follow you, but how did you walk across the water?”
“You must follow me.” The woman nodded vigorously, turned and jogged across the water for a couple of seconds. She turned and urgently motioned for them to follow. “Come!”
Unsure why the woman wasn’t sinking, Marty walked up to the shore, looked down into the river, and let out a nervous laugh.
He stepped into the water and his foot landed solidly on the beginning of a stone pathway just inches below the water’s surface. He turned to the team and said, “Come on, there’s a path.”
The team advanced slowly, and as François took his first few steps across the water, he laughed and patted Kareem on the shoulder. “See, not everything is a bunch of hocus-pocus.”
Marty and Lowanna fast-walked right behind the middle-aged native, who occasionally paused to make sure everyone was still following.
As they reached the other shore, Marty skirted past a large fire being manned by several men who stared wide-eyed at him. One of the men, clad in a roughly hewn white toga, held a basket to his chest filled with white flower petals and tossed some in his direction. The man’s motions reminded Marty of a scene from The Exorcist when the priest was flinging holy water at a possessed person.
The woman, whose reddish skin gleamed in the fading sunlight, turned and motioned frantically at the others who were still on the water-covered path. She cupped her hands and yelled, “It’s perilous to tempt the spirits, hurry!”
Marty turned to the woman and asked, “What is the name of this place?”
“We’re outside the Sacred Grove,” the woman replied, her tone grave. She took a step toward Marty and stared at him with a puzzled expression. “Why are you so—” The woman paused, turning to Lowanna. “Why is he the color of sand? What happened to him and those others?”
Marty barely suppressed a smile as the woman looked to Lowanna, whose aboriginal complexion was even darker than her own.
Lowanna glanced at Marty and turned back to the woman. “We are from far away, and some people have a lighter skin color than us.”
Marty nodded, realizing that these people had likely never seen someone as fair as, say, Gunther.
The woman stepped within arm’s reach of Marty, ran her callused thumb across his cheek, and examined her thumb. “The color does not come off.” She looked at the gathering team and held a puzzled expression. “Half of your people are bleached by the spirits.” She glared at Lowanna. “Are you responsible for them being in the Sacred Grove?”
“She’s not,” Marty responded. “We all appeared on . . . er, came to the island by accident. None of us remember how or why. We are trying to understand where we are.”
The woman’s eyes widened, and she nodded. “The spirits must have bleached your skin and clouded your minds. It makes sense.”
“It doesn’t make sense,” one of the men near the fire blurted out with a hostile tone. “How did we not see them cross onto the island?”
Marty exchanged a worried glance with Lowanna. These men didn’t seem to be armed, but were clearly agitated by their presence. Especially their presence on the “sacred” island.
“We are too close to powers of the spirits.” The native woman waved dismissively at the question. “Your eyes have obviously been affected by their magics, as have the minds of these strangers.”
The guard’s eyes narrowed, but before he could respond, another guard stepped forward, his expression troubled. “Not all of us were blinded. I saw these outsiders stumble out of the Sacred Grove. They looked . . . confused. It is why I called for your guidance.”
A tense silence descended, broken only by the crackling of the bonfire as the shadows lengthened around them. The guards exchanged uneasy glances.
Marty watched as several of the men put their open palms on their chests, as if feeling their own heartbeat. They all held concerned expressions.
The guard who’d previously spoken with a hostile tone bowed his head and said with a trembling voice, “It’s as if the spirits themselves had expelled them from the Sacred Grove.”
The woman turned to Lowanna and then shifted her gaze to Marty and the others on the team. For a moment, the stiffness in which she held herself relaxed, but when the hooting of an owl erupted from a nearby tree, the woman’s expression hardened. “Until the king regains his magic from the spirits,” the woman declared, her voice stern, “the island is forbidden to outsiders. Leave this area, and do not return to it, for fear of the Hungry Dead if nothing else.” The woman pointed north, away from the water.
Marty motioned for the team to gather, and they walked far enough north to be out of earshot of the natives, who continued staring in their direction even as the sun set. He turned to Surjan and said in a low voice, “Can you scout ahead and see if there are any obvious places we can take shelter?”
Surjan nodded, retrieved his sharpened ankh from within his tunic, and jogged north.
Noticing Lowanna’s troubled expression, Marty leaned closer and whispered, “Are you sensing anything?”
For a long moment, Lowanna was silent as she stared into the ever-darkening horizon. Her eyes darted back and forth as if seeing things that nobody else could see. The woman took in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I can hear whispers of things in the night. They’re talking to each other.”
“They?” Marty asked.
“The animals.” Her voice carried an uncharacteristic level of emotion, almost as if she were about to cry. “I can still hear them.”
Marty lowered his head, gave her a one-armed hug, and whispered, “That’s a good thing, Lowanna. We need to take advantage of any of the little gifts we find at our disposal.”
He turned to the rest of the team and said, “Surjan’s out scouting for a safe spot to camp for the night. In the meantime, keep watch for anything out of the ordinary. Anyone have any questions or issues?”
Kareem stepped noiselessly forward and nodded. “I have one. Do you know where we are?”
“Not yet.” Marty shook his head. “Obviously we need to come up with a plan. As soon as we settle for the night, the stars will come out and we’ll hopefully be able to get a better idea of roughly where we might be. That’s step one. We’ll have to come up with the next steps once we have a little more information about our situation.”
Lowanna was surprised at how calm the team was with their new situation. Inside she was freaking out, both disappointed with the idea that they were clearly nowhere near getting back to where things seemed familiar, and a bit afraid of what was to come.
This wasn’t exactly the life she’d expected for herself—popping in and out of chaotic situations that none of them were trained to handle. Nobody was trained for this kind of crap. Not knowing where they were was one thing, but having to determine when they were was still something that was hard to reconcile.
The sun had set quite a while ago, and with the last vestiges of its light fading on the horizon, darkness lay across the grasslands like a shroud.
They were all waiting for Surjan to return, and even though she was a bundle of nerves, she tried to maintain a calm exterior.
Marty was only about a dozen feet or so away, sitting cross-legged and staring in the direction Surjan had gone.
The others were scattered around, all within a fifty-foot radius, and for whatever reason, they all maintained a silent posture.
“What’s taking Surjan so long?” she whispered to herself.
Psst . . . hey, you.
Lowanna jerked her head in the direction of the sound.
It wasn’t a human’s voice.
For some reason, she could hear the mutterings and whispers of creatures large and small, and just like with the foreign language spoken by the native woman, she could understand it. Marty could, too, though he seemed to be too far away to hear the voice that was speaking now. It was just one of the many strange and disparate gifts the team had developed since leaving their natural time.
Hey, you. Can you hear me? The barely audible squeak was coming from somewhere in the grasses ahead.
“I can hear you,” Lowanna whispered. “Who are you?”
Most animals weren’t up to talking in the sense that they formed sentences. It was usually one-word utterances that came across, so hearing an actual question from the whispers in the night set her on edge. What was this thing talking to her?
Are you human or gray?
Gray? What did that mean? “I’m human,” she whispered in response. “Who are you?”
I am Shushiyumastra, but you can call me Shush. That’s what my human calls me. Why are you humans out here? You’re scaring the nighttime bugs and I wanted a snack.
Lowanna had wondered why the night was so quiet. Normally, once darkness set in, crickets and other nocturnal creatures would be having a party of sorts.
“Sorry about that. We’re waiting for a team member to return.”
The grasses moved slightly and a nose poked out from within the dense undergrowth. Slowly, a ratlike face emerged and Lowanna smiled as she recognized the species of creature she’d been talking with.
It was a weasel, and he was busily sniffing the air. Why don’t you come with me? My person, he calls himself Muwat. He always has fish at the hut.
Lowanna’s eyes widened at the unexpected invitation. She’d never had an actual conversation with a creature like this. “I have others with me. Do you think we’d all be welcome? How far is it from here?”
Not far. The weasel walked across the dozen or so feet separating them and looked up at her. His chittering language grew louder and more emphatic. He’s an old fisherman, lonely. Could use the company.
“Welcome back!” Marty’s voice echoed loudly in the night as a tall figure appeared, coppery in the light of the fire. “Did you find anything?”
Before Surjan could even respond, Lowanna volunteered, “I just learned of an option we could pursue.”
In the dimly lit confines of his solitude, Gunther sat in quiet contemplation, his eyelids closed as he delved deep into the recesses of his mind. With each breath, he sought to forge a connection, a fragile tether reaching out into the infinite expanse of the unknown, yearning to touch the elusive presence that had once attempted to breach the barriers of his consciousness.
With every ounce of his being, he pushed against the boundaries of his own perception, visualizing the intangible rope extending farther and farther into the unfathomable depths. In the silence of his mind, he strained to catch even the faintest whisper, the echo of a voice that had tantalizingly teased his senses before.
And then, for a fleeting moment, amidst the infinite expanse, he felt it—a distant echo, a mere whisper carried on the winds of his thoughts. The voice, though distant and ethereal, resonated within him, offering cryptic fragments of its message.
“. . . can show . . . to control . . .”
But as swiftly as it had come, the ephemeral connection slipped through his grasp, leaving him grasping at shadows in the recesses of his mind. With a heavy exhalation, Gunther collapsed, drained by the effort, the echoes of the elusive voice fading into the ether.
“Okay, let’s gather up and move.” Marty’s voice barely penetrated Gunther’s consciousness and it took everything he had to gather enough energy to stand, even unsteadily.
“Gunther, are you okay?” Marty asked as he walked over to him.
Gunther nodded. “I’m fine, just a little tired. Lead the way.”
As the team followed Lowanna toward an unknown destination, Gunther’s mind kept drifting back to the voice.
The voice was trying to tell him something important, that much he knew.
He staggered forward as the team moved, and Gunther knew that even though he lacked the strength to communicate with whatever it was that was out there, he couldn’t stop trying.
Gunther wasn’t sure why he believed it, but he was certain that the message would make all the difference in the world for the team.
The hive mind sensed the exception triggered by an anomaly in the test matrix, and immediately launched a thread to analyze the issue.
“Probe-mode activated for a test anomaly out of the Orion arm of the Milky Way galaxy. Planet Earth, local relative year is 252 B.C.E.
“The Interrupt Service Routine has generated a fatal exception in a previous test and pushed the prior test subjects into a new location in Brane sigma+654PWJZBE.”
The Administrator shifted a part of his attention to the anomaly and asked, “What caused the error?”
“An unknown surge of energy shifted the landing parameters.”
“I presume the test subjects have been erased. Earth’s fate is thus sealed.”
“The test subjects remain operational. A previously idle thread picked up the exception and serviced it. The test subjects somehow survived the shifting context. All six have been deposited at another test node. Local relative year is 9104 B.C.E.”
The hive mind triggered a priority alert. “Detected another unexplained surge at the aforementioned test node.”
The Administrator shifted more of his consciousness to the alert. “Give me the ID of the event.”
The hive mind sent the ID packet and the Administrator focused on the precise location and time of the event.
He sensed a high-frequency signal penetrating one of the test subjects.
As the Administrator tracked the origin of the signal he sent a command to the hive mind: “Decode the signal being received by test subject Gunther.”
His consciousness followed the signal from the event, up through the planet’s atmosphere. The gossamer-thin signal was barely detectable as the Administrator followed it through the interstellar medium, boring through the Milky Way, past the local group, and beyond the Virgo Supercluster to the edge of Brane sigma+654PWJZBE.
The Administrator applied all of his focus on the signal’s exit point.
It was a very rare situation when a signal crossed from one universe into another . . . but this wasn’t what had happened.
The hive mind alerted, “The signal carries patterned content, yet after applying all known resources, we cannot decipher its meaning.”
The Administrator paused for a few Planck cycles and contemplated the hive mind’s message. It shouldn’t be possible to not decipher a coded message. At least not for them.
Yet it also shouldn’t be possible for a signal to vanish at the edge of a universe.
The focus being applied on this issue was not making progress.
“Alert me if another such signal appears.”
The Administrator shifted his attention back to the rest of the multiverse.