The Path of the Four

At last (although the fighting duo had come out of the tavern door less than minute ago) a Human Security officer came out of the passing crowd. The H.S. man’s brown and gray hair was fringe around his baldhead, and his sideburns were so big, and so bushy, they almost joined in the middle of his chin.

“OK,” he said. “I got these two.”

He took nerve cuffs (another Akira Yamato invention) out of a pocket in his blue uniform. He crouched and put one loop around the wrist of the broken nose human sprawled on the street, the passing crowds of Humans and Zah-Gre walking around the whole scene, with almost no stop-and-gawk types.

The H.S. man with the big sideburns put the other hoop of the nerve cuffs around the shaved eyebrows Human, the H.S. man having to grab a hand this time to get an available wrist.

While all this was going on, Ariana had a chance to get a better look at the Inner Clan Zah-Gre.

In contrast to Ab-Druh, the Side Clan member was a more typical height for a Zah-Gre, about five feet. He had a short forehead, maybe two inches lying between the eyes and the flat head. The black glassy eyes seemed a little smaller than usual.

The H.S. man spoke into a ring around his index finger, one of several rings he wore on both hands.

“One four nine three to H.Q. Walking in two packages. Code Beta four six.”

A voice buzzed out of the ring he spoke into.

“Acknowledged. It was a slow day in here anyway.”

The H.S. man touched another ring on his other hand.

“Come along, you two.”

The Human with the shaved eyebrows winced and stood.

“Like we have a choice.”

Grimacing as well from the effects of the nerve cuffs, the Human with the broken nose got to his feet.

He looked at Ab-Druh, the Side Clan Zah-Gre and Ariana. Ariana felt herself trembling. Ab-Druh wore a small smile. The Side Clan Zah-Gre glared.

“We’ll remember you three,” the broken nose Human said. “Won’t we, Mac?”

“Sure as shootin’, Bud,” said Mac, the shaved eyebrows companion.

The H.S. officer with the big sideburns led Mac and Bud away.

Ab-Druh and the Side Clan Zah-Gre spoke to each other for a moment in what Ariana assumed, from the sound of it, was North Zah-Gre. After a moment of singsong chirping, Ab-Druh spoke again in English.

“Ariana, I’d like to introduce you to Voh-Heem of the Side Clan. Voh-Heem, this is Ariana Orlando, from the Human space station.”

“Good Turning to you, Voh-Heem,” Ariana said.

“Good Turning to you, Ariana Orlando.”

Voh-Heem of the Side Clan had a dry and raspy voice, sort of, she thought, like the late twentieth century film and TV actor Lance Henriksen. Voh-Heem didn’t indulge in either the Human custom of a bow or an extended hand.

“Ariana, Voh-Heem here is one of the few Zah-Gre who speaks all five of our languages.”

“You honor me, Ab-Druh of the Inner Clan.”

Voh-Heem’s voice seemed, somehow, to bow when he addressed Ab-Druh.

“Voh-Heem has been my attendant for two Lesser Turnings, or about a year, as you Humans would say.”

Voh-Heem’s persistent stare at Ariana was a clear message to her: Go away, Human.

Ariana suppressed more trembling.

“So, Voh-Heem,” she said. “What Morg-Zah are you from?”

“I am from the Al-Crow Ro-Wil Am-Kay Morg-Zah.”

“Ariana has had considerable experience with many of Earth’s -- You know their word, ‘religions’?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve decided to offer her, if she would like, a series of conversations with her, to see what she would like to know about the One, and the Turning.”

Voh-Heem glared again.

Ariana realized her mouth hung open in surprise. She closed it, and felt herself blush.

“Would you like that, Ariana?”

“Well, I -- Well, yes, of course, Ab-Druh -- But if don’t you mind me asking, why?”

“I’ve been meaning for a long time to have a series of conversations with a single Human. I think it might be a good way to learn important things about all of you, things I cannot learn from the Friendship Bureau.”

Ariana thought for a moment.

“I’d like to ask a question,” Ariana said. She paused. “What do the Zah-Gre say about dreams?”

Later, someone said to her, “I hear they talk with the dead.”

Ariana, wearing pink overalls, rolled out from under the machine and looked up at Billy, a redheaded member of the Vertex crew.

Billy wore a large, loose white shirt with a large ruffled collar, and gray tights, an outfit currently popular with college students back on Earth.

“Where did you hear that? And hand me the number seventeen robotic wrench.”

Billy plucked the desired tool from the clear, plastic bag he wore. The tool was a gray plastic tube with a red arrow painted on it, pointing to one end.

Billy handed the tool to Ariana.

“Around. Just a rumor about the Inner Clan Zah-Gre.”

Ariana crawled back under the ice cream maker.

She worked the recessed controls at the base of the tool. Tiny mechanical arms came out of the other end of the tool and those arms manipulated the tiny, bubble memory circuits above her.

She half-listened to Billy as he went on.

In the past week, she had been down to the planet to have several lengthy conversations with the Inner Clan Zah-Gre Ab-Druh. The Zah-Gre, as it turned out, didn’t seem to have any special insight into the nature of dreams. Much of what Ab-Druh said cloaked the planet’s religious culture in enigmas and paradoxes. The engineer part of Ab-Druh found that annoying, but the religious part of her found the general tenor of Zah-Gre spiritual wisdom comforting. It spoke, despite its often cryptic quality, of harmony and balance, without sounding Pollyanna-ish. Furthermore, while much of Earth’s religious communities were still, all these years after Corridor One, still in turmoil over their being another planet of sentient beings in the Universe, learning the existence of Earth and the Humans hadn’t even been a bump in the road to Zah-Gre spiritual life.

“Some tourists say they’ve seen the Inner Clan talking with their dead relatives,” Billy went on. “In those long stretches of empty land, you know, that the Zah-Gre have between their villages. That’s why, also, there’s always some Human Security in those same places. The dead relatives of the Human tourists from Earth, I mean.”

“Yeah. I got that, Billy.”

“Do you think it’s true?”

“I guess, Billy, that an engineer is supposed to say no, of course it’s not true. But honestly--I don’t know. Did you see that, back on Earth, Drayton thinks she’s close to proving her ideas?”

Drayton was an Earth scientist convinced all psychic phenomena had a materialistic basis, that telepathy, for example, operated in a part of the electromagnetic spectrum that no one had charted yet.

“Yeah,” Billy said. “But hasn’t she been saying that for a while, now?”

“Uh-huh. But I think Drayton might be close, from what I’ve seen of her work. I’m just saying we live in interesting times, on both side of the Yamato Corridors.”

“Station Manager to Chief Engineer.”

It was Joe Whitney’s voice, over the public address system.

“Chief Engineer. Please report to the Security Chief’s office.”

Ariana finished her work, and slid out from under the ice cream machine, and stood, Billy stepping out of his way, his ruffled collar flapping with the sudden motion.

She looked at the ice cream maker, a long machine with a cartoon Eskimo on it, dancing and holding an ice cream cone. Next to the cartoon was a sliding window the ice cream was supposed to come out of.

She looked around at the rest of the space station’s recreation room--the virtual reality booths, the card game tables with the robot players for the moment inactive and dead, and the shelf of five blank books, memory paper inside, any of them capable of being over a thousand different words of classic literature, pop fiction, or pornography.

And the room was empty except for her and Billy. Most of the crew when they had free time spent it down on the planet.

“I need the Chief Engineer in the security office now,” Joe’s voice said over the P.A. System.

Ariana walked into Jafari’s office.

“OK. So what do you need an engineer for?”

Jafari and Joe stood on either side of the desk.

And on the desk was – it.

It was so odd, so familiar, so fantastic, and so mundane, Ariana stopped by the door when she saw it, and then eased a little closer to it, understanding now Joe and Jafari’s serious expressions that she first saw when she walked in.

It was a kind of chess set. But the black and white squares formed a kind of ragged image of the face of Brother Chaos, masked, half black, half white, and hooded.

The sort of chess set had, of course, chess pieces.

They were wooden, carved, but they each bore a distinct resemblance to a specific Human or Zah-Gre, sometimes repeating the face:

The inventive genius Akira Yamato, the CEO of Carne-Tischler Roger Brantley, Joe Whitney, Ab-Druh, Voh-Heem, even those two goons, Mac and Bud --

-- And Ariana Orlando.

The real Ariana looked from the chess piece carved to look like her, to Jafari.

Jafari sat in the chair behind his desk.

“Eight hours ago I left this office to go to the bathroom. When I came back, this was here.”

He made a stiff gesture at the chess set.

“I informed Joe via the station’s com system. I spent hours going over the surveillance recordings, and using every scanning device we have on this thing -- this ’gift.’” He paused, and took a deep breath. “We have no evidence of anyone putting this thing here. It just showed up. And there’s not a fingerprint, or anything else, not a trace of unknown DNA to tell me, tell us who did this.”

Joe crossed his arms on top of his fat belly. “This Brother Chaos character. That’s his stupid masked face on that board, isn’t it--right, Jafari?”

“Still doesn’t tell us who he is, Joe.”

“Ariana, one of those pieces looks like but I wanted you to know about this because one of those chess pieces looks like your native friend,” Joe said.

“She might as well know all of it,” Jafari said. “Ariana, step over here.”

She did, and from where she had been standing, she had been able to see all the chess pieces--except one, which now came into view.

The ninth piece was a generic male figure with a smooth, featureless face.

“What do we do about this, Joe? Tell Human Security, the Friendship Bureau, what?”

“I don’t know, Jafari.”

“He operates like a ghost, but he seems only interested in these goofy games.”

Ariana cleared her throat.

“Guys? Did you notice?”

Joe looked at her again.

“What?”

“Do you notice something about this?”

She pointed at the chess set.

Jafari put both hands on the edge of his desk, leaned across the chess set, and looked down at it, then up at Ariana.

“Tell me.”

“Tell us,” Joe said.

Ariana nodded.

“The way he positioned these pieces it’s impossible to tell who is what -- Who is the king, queen, who are the rooks, knights, bishops -- And who are the pawns.”

Later that day, an unscheduled Yamato Corridor opened far above the planet of Zah-Gre.

Ariana Orlando saw it while supervising the crewmembers building the TV news studio in Vertex’s Sphere “A.” The man who would, in a few weeks, host the program made in the studio was there as well, a man with swept back white hair, and an elegant striped blue suit, and a family tree that included, two generations back, the first gay U.S. President. Knowing that the swept back white hair man was a formal sort, Ariana had dressed in a formal sort of way: beige slacks, a white turtleneck shirt, and a brown leather jacket (the jacket had been a gift from an old boyfriend).

She dashed over to the window, dodging crewmembers carrying paint cans, lights, and other equipment. A few members glanced at the sight of the opening Corridor and shrugged. In that room, only Ariana knew the Yamato Corridor was something that wasn’t supposed to be happening, not now, not yet.

Ariana pushed the button on the nearest com-panel.

“Joe Whitney,” she said.

A second later, a green light glowed on the com-panel.

“Joe,” she said, knowing the com-system had established the link, but then not knowing what else to say. She thought, Yamato Corridors are supposed to show up when we mean them to, and that is all.

“Yeah,” came Joe’s voice. “I see it. The next one isn’t due for another forty-two minutes.”

Out of the Yamato Corridor came a yellow beam.

“Christ,” Joe said. “Damn Yamato Beam. Someone on the other side is throwing a rock at our upstairs bedroom window.”

As Ariana watched, the Yamato Beam split in two, one half heading down to Zah-Gre, and the other to Vertex.

The beam heading to the planet, Ariana knew, would activate the ground relay station, half-completed, and send audio and visual information to every video panel on Zah-Gre.

A video panel, leaning up against the wall in the TV studio, glowed to life.

Roger Brantley appeared on the video panel, and everyone in the studio gathered around the image of Carne-Tischler’s CEO. The gray and white stripes of his hair glowed with the backlight that also illuminated the words SPECIAL EMERGENCY BULLETIN FROM EARTH.

In the Yamato Beam transmission’s image, Brantley was on some sort of stage, and the five words about an emergency were to his left and a little bit upstage from him.

Brantley dressed in a black and gray suit, complete with a buttoned up gray silk vest. His eyes were downcast.

After a moment, he looked at the camera.

“Gentlemen and ladies, on Golden Horizon, Vertex, and the planet Zah-Gre.”

As he started to speak, words streamed on three sides of the image, and translated his speech into Spanish, Japanese, German, Italian, Russian, and French. The engineering part of Ariana suffered a flicker of annoyance. In a symmetrical Universe, translations into Zah-Gre would be appearing as well, but the Zah-Gre had no written alphabet.

“And our Zah-Gre friends. I am Roger Brantley, chief executive officer of the Carne-Tischler Corporation. I have news regarding Akira Yamato, the young man whose inventive genius has been so crucial in leading Earth out of the devastation and wreckage of the Pan-Asian War and the American domestic terrorist campaigns of the same time.”

Ariana leaned closer into the video panel.

Roger Brantley said, “Akira Yamato has vanished.”

Therefore, so now, everything was different and that was bad.

Yamato, Ariana thought, was the one fact, the one certainty, which held together -- everything, all the endeavors of Humanity. Not in a literal sense. But what Humans called “the Time of the Two Wars,” had destroyed bodies, lives, nations, and plans. The Better World Foundation had spent years engaged in the slow process of helping to put back together Earth’s nations, civilizations, and cultures. Yamato, and his genius, was their enchanted act. Yamato had opened a magic door marked “To The Future” and ushered every Human through, giving everyone an age better, sounder, saner than the way things were before “the Time of Two Wars.”

Now he was gone. And all the sights and sounds and smells, in a direct or roundabout way, came back to that underlying fact.

For example, she was wearing her hair loose today, not in its usual pony tail and, in the way she knew women do, had kept brushing the hair out of her face with her hand, and had been using that gesture to flirt with the mostly male crew.

When she heard what Brantley had just said about Akira Yamato, she let her hair fall into her face, and let it stay there, and clutched her cross and pentagram that dangled around her neck, and she felt the floor of her emotions fall away.

Yamato -- Gone? Just disappeared? This was like being on Earth and someone telling her, sorry, the sun is gone now. No, don’t know where it went to. Sorry. We’re looking into it.

Brantley, in the Yamato Beam transmission, had video-cube recordings that he played: a press conference, police officials, and government officials, video shots of Yamato’s apartment, nothing disturbed, no forced entry, and no ransom note. “The Father of the New Universal Age” had just come into his apartment and never come out. The building had security people working around the clock and surveillance cameras in the hallways. There was no evidence of anybody coming or going between when Yamato had gone into his apartment, and his chauffeur and the building superintendent going into the apartment, late the next morning, because the young genius had been two hours late for an appointment.

There was nothing like a clue, except a note, in Yamato’s handwriting:

“Before, during, and after everything else, it is all a question of scale.”

Joe Whitney canceled all work assignments for the next twenty-four hours.

Ariana, her emotions in free fall, could have accepted half a dozen invitations from crewmembers that planned to go back to their quarters to drink, to cry, and to talk. Some had blunt sexual needs, reflected in their eyes, including the two other female crewmembers.

Feeling the nearness of death did that to some people and according to the report from Earth, nobody had any idea if Yamato was dead or alive.

Only a little while ago, Ariana needed to know what the dream with her brother Michael meant. Now she had the same need as billions of other Humans. She wanted a question answered. What had happened to Akira Yamato?

Jason, at the docking bay, sat staring at a corner, and pointed at the number four shuttle, and said, “Take that one,” without looking at it.

In the shuttle, on her way down to the planet, she figured, at last, she was on her way to find Ab-Druh. All the Zah-Gre knew of Akira Yamato, but there was no way for them to understand what his disappearance meant to every Human. However, she had to talk to someone about Yamato being gone, and every Human would have the same pain she had about “the Father of the New Universal Age” gone missing. So it would have to be Ab-Druh she talked to, the only Zah-Gre she might, perhaps, be able to call a friend.

Snug in the shuttle, she looked at the green navigation screen, its beige plastic frame, the black control keyboard, and the three-dimensional animation of the shuttle, Vertex, the planet, the animation in yellow outline --

-- And the image of Brother Chaos that faded in on the shuttle’s navigation screen.