Continued from yesterday ... Click the thumbnails to view Craig's art in its original large format. He does amazing work, and it's totally worth the trip! Shadows Part Three As soon as Margaret realized that she was in a containment field that was preventing her from shifting into quick time, she knew that her captor was Opae, not human. Why? she thought. The Opae did not concern themselves with human conflicts, and there were no recorded instances of Opae taking human prisoners - the two clans had always simply occupied energy resources to the exclusion of the other. As Margaret turned around to face her captor, she thought she saw a flash of surprise (frustration? recognition?) register in the Opae's face. She had of course seen Opae in hundreds of holosims, but had never seen one in person. The alien was the same height and build as Margaret, and apart from having a bigger mouth, the Opae's facial features bore a striking resemblance to her own. Everything else about her was, however, extraordinary - the textured skin made up of microcircuits generating piezoelectricity with every slight movement, the glowing amber eyes, the cortical cap with electrodes extending into her brain and strangely primitive-looking analog external wiring, the appendage extending out of the back of her skull like a pony-tail, containing integrated neural and silicon circuitry. A faint shimmer surrounded the Opae's entire body as she appeared to shift in and out of focus, in and out of phase. Margaret stood her ground and waited for her captor to speak, to explain why she had been abducted. Macali's eyes narrowed. She had studied many humans, including the two others of their warrior class still caught in the temporal entanglement vortex in another section of the laboratory complex, but this one was different. Not only was she impervious to the vortex, but she had a commanding presence and unfathomable depth that Macali had never encountered before in a human. She sensed that her captive's presence had to do with far more than just leading warriors in battle - she had the qualities of a powerful sovereign. Feeling slightly unnerved at her conclusion, made before the woman had said a word, Macali decided that she needed to observe her captive very closely for as long as it took to understand why she exuded such poise and authority. Augidarr turned to the other members of the council. "The elements are now in place," she said. "Macali and Margaret will feed off each other's energy without knowing that they do so, and will eventually understand the nature of their own and each other's being. Keep Macali occupied with other targets from time to time to prevent her from becoming obsessed with Margaret, and to allow them both time to assimilate their experiences and data. We must be patient. With their help, we will soon be free of the humans and Opae, and will once more have space to ourselves." Macali's plan had been for Margaret to be transported directly into the temporal entanglement vortex. The fact that she was here ... HERE! ... in the lab was an unforeseen outcome. Macali did not like unforeseen outcomes. They were unsettling. She accessed her files, checked the trans-dimensional parameters she had set up for the transfer, checked them again. A small green light glowed faintly. Her plan was solid. All right then. Macali made an adjustment to the transport parameters for Margaret. She increased one of the settings of the nine-fold matrix, decreased another, re-balanced the program, checked and double-checked her calculations. Engaged the vortex. Nothing. Macali stared at Margaret, who stood silently inspecting Macali in return. Margaret was staring at Macali's skin, external circuitry, face, and apparently had no awareness of what she had just done. What she had not done. She was not in the vortex. There was something about Margaret's energy that was unexpected. Macali increased the rate at which she phased through the nine-dimensional matrix. The fact that Margaret was not already in the vortex meant there was part of her that was phase shifted elsewhere. How could that be? As far as Macali knew, Margaret was fully human. Checking the vibrational strings of each dimension, Macali began scanning Margaret from her core outward. It took only a millisecond. Margaret had not gone far. Her physical body was clearly here in the lab inspecting Macali with her vision, but every part of Margaret's non-physical being, her full attention, was absolutely focused on something just slightly outside herself. It had the effect of a phase shift. As long as Margaret was in this state, Macali would not be able to transport her into an entanglement vortex. Margaret continued to stare at the Opae, but the books she had read in the library were already consuming her conscious mind. It was as if she had never stopped reading, never been transported to this place. She had absorbed the information in quick time, but it took slow time to make sense of it all. Her life in ForceOps was the most real to her in this moment. She remembered strategy meetings, briefings, simulations, killing, all in aid of waging war more efficiently. It was her job, and she was the best. Suddenly she was overcome with a feeling of loss, of grief so strong it nearly doubled her over. At a different time in history, in a different part of her past, she had received word that her love, her partner of nearly twenty years, had been killed on the battlefield. In that moment she was both warrior and widow, torn apart by the contrast of her lives. Macali watched as Margaret walked slowly to a corner of the lab as if she were disoriented, and sat with her back against the wall. Macali monitored Margaret for a moment. No change. Margaret was still elsewhere, and unavailable for entrapment. Did all humans have this ability? Macali had never heard of it before. It was something she would have to look for in her new files. Perhaps the Beridae had recorded such a thing before. Macali was in no hurry. She turned her attention to the data sectors where she had stored the information gained from the kalilja. There was work to be done. Margaret was overwhelmed by the sheer volume of material she had absorbed in such a short period of time. It was going to take time to go through it all, but there MUST be a purpose to the task. Something told her that sorting through the stories was work of the utmost importance. She considered the project before her from several angles and decided upon a course of action. Since she had written the books herself, there would be no outside help in sorting and sifting through the contents. Finding the single story line, the condensation of all her lifetimes into one plot, as it were, was her highest priority. It took a while, but Macali was nearly finished sorting the information from the kalilja. It had come to her as a river, and she had let it flow. The raw material was all there, but in order for the data to be useful, it needed to be organized. She was pleased to discover very few ragged-edged data files. That meant she had been able to capture and retain an extremely high percentage of what had been available from the Beridae source material. There were a few incomplete sections, corrupted files, and remnants and shreds left over from the data worm. She felt impatient to get to work on the files wiped by the worm, but they would have to wait for another time. It was more important to access her new files and start making what sense she could of the human race. There was so much to learn about humans! It would take her a while to go through everything and assimilate the new information, but she was looking forward to the challenge. Once Margaret had decided on a course of action, she set about her task in earnest. It was like solving a giant jigsaw puzzle, and she was the puzzle. Her time as a professional athlete paired up against another where she was left alone at home while her father went on the road for his business, which matched up against one where she was a groupie following a band from city to city. A lifetime of being powerless and at the mercy of another fit against ... where was the match? Oh yes ... here it was. A time when she had misused her high-ranking position, and another when she had used her power to help those for whom she was responsible. That fit up against a time when she had been in a mentorship program led by a professional athlete, and ... oh! Yes. Those two sections fit together just there. As she moved along, the connections became easier to differentiate. She was starting to see many stories from different angles. Some realizations were painful, others joyous, still others only mildly interesting, but all the work was important. The puzzle continued to come together. Macali listened to music. Assimilated data about wars and political marriages, new countries arising out of old ones. Looked at maps showing the changes. Population graphs. Religious texts. Stories about individual people. Cultural customs, from foot binding to dancing in the streets to games. Texts on mathematics, psychology, alchemy, astronomy, physics, history. Literature. Novels. She learned the difference between fiction and non-fiction, and guessed that humans made up stories to compensate for lack of hard data. She stopped. What? She had guessed? Macali realized that she had just made the same mistake that she was criticizing humans for. Guessing was inexcusable. It showed a disturbing laziness of mind. One either knows or doesn't know. If you know, act with certainty. If you don't know, research the question until you know. How could it be that her thinking was becoming sloppy? She turned and stared at Margaret for a long moment, and then phase shifted out to the dunes beyond the walls of her lab in order to make sense of this new information. Margaret felt Macali transport out of the lab and took a minute to catch her breath, emotionally speaking. As long as Macali was in the room, Margaret felt compelled to continue her work without a break, to be as distant from the Opae as possible. She took a minute to look around the lab. The room she was in appeared to be a command centre with banks of computers lining the walls, some with very similar design to human technology but with subtle differences in keyboard layout and touch-screen input arrays. She could understand the outputs on the displays of a few of the computers, but most were completely incomprehensible -- schematics, continuously updated data readouts, what seemed to be flowcharts using completely foreign symbols and ideograms. All the computers were phase-locked. The room itself was hexagonal, with doors leading off in each direction. Three of the doors had reinforced viewing windows and peering though, Margaret recognized specialized physics, chemistry and biomedical laboratories. Two of the other doors were locked, but the last door opened onto a compact but serviceable living area with a bed, familiar human-style food dispenser and a field lav. Margaret narrowed her eyes. A trap? Well, if it was a trap, it would eventually work. She would need food. Her ForceOps training kicked in, and she punched up and consumed a meal even though she wasn't quite hungry. Eat when you can. She was a captive, and her duty was to stay alive and escape. Sitting back down in the command centre with her back to a corner, Margaret resumed her work. There was something about Macali's presence that required that her mind be elsewhere. When the Opae returned, Margaret would be fully engaged in her own process. She had much to do. With as many books as there had been in the library, putting it all together in slow time would take her several months. Macali sat on the sand, looking out at what she thought of as the Shadow Ship. The Beridae were a cipher. Where was their main ship? What was their interest in Human/Opae relations? What was their involvement in the conflict? The fact of the data worms, no matter what they had devoured, was fascinating. The Beridae had something to hide. The human woman she had pulled from the library was certainly different from the two trackers Macali had captured earlier. The trackers had slipped into the temporal entanglement vortex easily, just as she had expected. When the Beridae had pointed out Macali's next target, she had no reason to believe anything would be different. Well ... there had been one difference. The Beridae instructions for collecting this woman had included her name: Margaret. Margaret. How in the world had this woman been able to split a part of herself off to such a degree that she could not be contained in a vortex? There was another, even more disturbing aspect to this turn of events. Macali's thought patterns were becoming lazy -- she was resorting to guessing rather than acting on adequately researched information. Was this woman affecting Macali's sub-processor routines in some way? Margaret fascinated her, and Macali was determined to learn as much about the human as she possibly could. One of her cats appeared by her side, and Macali modulated her flow through the matrix to match that of the trans-dimensional feline, stroking its beautiful fur with her fingers, allowing her forward processors to rest. Margaret had taken a basic course in Opae physiology, of course. It was a standard class in every curriculum. There wasn't much to what was known, but she could at least use her neural implants to fashion an alarm that would alert her to the opening of a trans-dimensional portal. Once the alarm was set, Margaret performed a meditation exercise she had learned in two or three of her lifetimes. A light trance that allowed for deep rest, but that the portal alarm would immediately penetrate. When the alarm sounded, she tapped it off and began working on her puzzle. The instant Macali returned to the lab, Margaret was once again consumed by the task of assimilating her previous lives. Without knowing it, fully experiencing her emotions and making peace with the disparate parts of herself was what kept Margaret safe from being imprisoned in a vortex. Macali could not fathom emotion no matter how many files she looked at, and while Margaret integrated her experiences in slow time, she was at her strongest. Fear, anger, grief, joy -- they didn't make one weak -- when they were friends rather than something to guard against, they provided a touchstone. With every dichotomy resolved, Margaret claimed and reclaimed a part of herself that had been lost. Macali had several things she could be doing, but she spent much of her time out on the dunes. She would have been surprised to know how much alike her process was to what Margaret had recently been experiencing. Data coming together, pieces starting to hook up and form patterns. Her understanding of humans was growing all the time, but by her very nature that understanding was only intellectual. She had reports to prepare for her Opae collective, but she still had questions about Margaret. The Beridae had kept her busy with one small task after another, but on an irregular basis. Their overall plan was still a mystery to her. Some of the things they had asked her to do seemed so insignificant as to be wasteful, but it didn't matter. Her work went on, her observation of Margaret continued, and she was completing the work she needed to do in order to bring an end to the conflict between Opae and Human. The two other humans Macali thought of as "The Trackers" were still of little interest to her. Not like Margaret, who returned to her thoughts again and again. Macali would wait. She could afford to wait. While she had the ability to come and go at will, even though Margaret was not in a vortex, she could not leave the lab on her own. Margaret lived her days and nights in the lab, working through the library, doing what she could to keep herself fed and relatively clean during Macali's frequent absences. Integration was hard work. There were times she wished she could sleep for a week, but that was not an option. She was driven to complete her task, to become something that was whole and no longer fragmented. The work was rewarding, but exhausting. She worked systematically through all of the information she had absorbed, and realized she only had a few more pieces of the puzzle to put together. She could see where they all went. Some of the lessons were ones she had been avoiding, and she knew she would need rest before she tackled them. "Go away," she thought hard at Macali. "Just go away and leave me alone for a while. Is that too much to ask? Do you always have to be here? Get out of here and leave me in peace." Macali looked at Margaret sitting in the corner. Margaret appeared to be exhausted. Macali had no idea what Margaret was actually doing over there, but whatever it was seemed to be taking its toll. For days now Macali had been noticing that the trans-dimensional field around Margaret was beginning to thin. It had been more than two months since that day in the library, and Margaret's reserves were failing her. If Macali tried initiating the vortex again now, she had little doubt that it would be effective. Despite the opportunity, something made her wait. Should she leave Margaret alone and let her gain strength again, or let her collapse? It didn't matter in the long run. The vortex would hold Margaret in stasis for as long as Macali was functional, so her health was not an issue. Margaret's energy field was destabilizing. She seemed to be losing her concentration. Since they were no risk to each other physically, Macali decided to leave Margaret to her own devices. There was an almost pleading look on Margaret's face that Macali could not fathom, but did not like. Macali turned to face Margaret and said, "I have things to attend to elsewhere and will be gone for several days." Having read and listened to much of what humans thought of as humor, she added, "Don't go anywhere." The minute Macali was gone, Margaret collapsed. She was exhausted. Days? Oh please let that be true. Macali had not misled her yet, had not sprung any traps, and Margaret doubted she would start now. First a meal, something balanced and hot. She had been eating catch-as-catch-can for weeks, and wanted real food. It took time for the food dispenser to fill an order like that, but Margaret figured she had the time now. While the dispenser was working (and it started to smell like food ... oh! ... real food!) Margaret made full use of the field lav. A sonic shower and clean clothes, and she felt almost human again. After cleaning up and enjoying the best the dispenser had to offer (which wasn't great, but certainly made her feel better), Margaret stretched out on the bed and allowed herself to fall into a deep, healing sleep for the first time since she had been brought here. The familiar sensation of a trans-dimensional portal opening alerted Macali to the inevitability of arriving on the Beridae ship. If she could find a way to keep Augidarr from snatching her away without notice, she would do so in a heartbeat. On the space station beyond the Oort cloud, Augidarr was alone. She was making a hand gesture similar to that made by Azinorc to make the kalilja appear, but this time the space between her hands remained empty. Augidarr looked up at Macali with a slightly whimsical expression on her face. "You know more about humans than anyone of your clan ever has," she said. "But how much do you know of the Opae?" Macali knew that Augidarr was not talking about her knowledge of her internal files, or even the database files on the Solar DataWeb. Could it be that Augidarr had guessed that Macali was aware of the existence of the files wiped by the data worm? When Macali did not answer immediately, Augidarr smiled. "I have prepared another kalilja for you. Show me that you can fold the local space-time continuum to access it. If you manage that, the kalilja will answer all of your remaining questions and unlock your full potential." "Why are you giving us -- me -- all this information?" Macali asked. "I'm not giving it to you," said Augidarr with a smile. "It will cost you." "Me personally, or the Opae? What are you giving the humans?" For the first time, Macali saw a flash of irritation cross Augidarr's face. "Do you want to end the centuries of conflict with the humans or not?" "Of course I do, but what's in it for you? Why don't you just get rid of them? Why are you getting me to do your dirty work? And what exactly will it cost me, or us?" "Trust me, there will be a cost to you, and probably to all Opae, but it will be worth it. Now please, indulge me and see if you can access the kalilja." Macali stared at Augidarr for a long moment, then made up her mind. She replicated Augidarr's gesture and the kalilja phase shifted and appeared in her hands. This time the data transfer was quite beyond her control as trillions of cubits squirted down almost instantaneously, entangled and linked via quantum logic gates. She knew that she would be unable to comprehend more than a tiny fraction of the information without interfacing with her quantum mainframe computer in the lab. Augidarr looked at Macali with satisfaction. "You are a remarkable individual and a remarkable race. Go back to your planet and peel away the layers of the onion, and you will eventually appreciate what I have done for you. The instructions for accessing the deeper layers of the information are encoded in the sequence of trans-dimensional steps in the top layer. You will have to engage all nine levels of the matrix simultaneously, but you've done that before. Oh, and I know that you don't need my help to get back to Urth," she said with a smile. Margaret awoke feeling groggy. She checked the chron on the food dispenser and was amazed to discover that she had been asleep for more than 50 hours. But oh, she felt so much better! A liquid synth-stim to wake her up a bit, another hot meal, and she was feeling like she'd been through the wars, but was on the mend. Another brief trip to the field lav, and she was ready to tackle those last books. Her long sleep had produced dreams, but none of them impinged upon her consciousness now that she was awake. She had a sense of completion, of healing, but the details were lost. No matter. Only a little left to do. Without the worry of time, knowing Macali would not be back for several days, Margaret sat down to tackle the last few books in the library. The integration was difficult. Some of the hardest lessons had come near the end of the process. With each insight, Margaret cried, or laughed, shivered or grinned. She did not worry about how much time she had. She knew it would be enough. The last piece in place, Margaret breathed a sigh of relief. She knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, who she was. Over so many lifetimes, so much experience, she understood the human condition from all sides. There was nothing alien to her about those of her own clan. She had completed this part of her journey, and was ready to move on. There had been times when she had been a leader in the past, but had led imperfectly. Whatever was in her future, she knew she was meant to lead by word, by example, by consensus, by order. That wouldn't happen immediately ... there was still something left to do ... but she knew she was done with living one small life after another. The book had been written. .................... Parts Four and Five tomorrow ...