34 Quad 2471 R.E.
Faelyna took only three steps before the corridors beside and overlapping the one that she, Eltyn, and Rhyana had taken began to contract and expand, getting dimmer and then increasingly brighter with each expansion…and each step. After another few yards, the glare was blinding.
Eltyn squinted so that his eyes were barely slits. He had no idea where they were going.
Faelyna slowed and stopped. So did the other two.
The light dimmed, slowly, and until the three stood in a long corridor that stretched ahead of them, disappearing into the distance as a silvered point of light.
Eltyn turned and glanced back over his shoulder, past Rhyana. The hexagonal door through which they had stepped was now open. He blinked, but nothing changed. "Do we go on?"
"Let?s see." Faelyna took another step forward, and the corridor twisted, and light flared. She stopped.
Eltyn turned around and took one step, then another, past Rhyana and toward the still-open doorway. Nothing happened. He looked back at Faelyna. "I think we head back."
"For now," she agreed, turning and joining him.
They retraced their steps and made their way through the hexagonal door. Eltyn shook his head, almost resignedly. He couldn?t help but wonder exactly what had happened and where the corridor led-to the eastern end of the MCC, some two thousand kays away?
The dead riffie was in the same slumped position where they had left him, and the images of equipment on the walls flickered in and out of focus, shifting colors now and again.
Eltyn looked back again. The door to the long corridor was still open. "Let?s go up to the equipment and see if we can figure out what it shows."
Rhyana sniffed. "The air smells different. Sort of damp."
"The ventilators aren?t working," Eltyn said. "The station closed the ducts, or the debris did, and I shut down the system right after the impact."
"It does feel more humid," acknowledged Faelyna. "We?re still seeing equipment around us." She stepped toward the silver-flickering images, then stopped and fumbled in her belt pouch, extending what looked to be a folded scrap of something.
The scrap touched the edge of the image and passed through it, then seemed to double, and the second ghostly folded scrap flared instantly, and dust sifted down toward the stone floor.
Faelyna still held the first scrap. Her brows furrowed.
"Real and not real?" Eltyn?s words sounded inane, at least to him.
"I wonder," replied Faelyna. "We might as well see if our equipment is still there." She started up the ramp.
All three of them stopped at the top of the ramp. Everything had changed. The main chamber was filled with silver light, but dark rust-brown consoles seemed to be everywhere, leaving corridors to the ramps and to where the doors were-or had been.
Yet as he watched, Eltyn could see the consoles shifting, and, abruptly, they were all dark gray, and the intensity of the light increased once more.
Where are we?
That Rhyana?s voice came to Eltyn in the same manner as a private comm pulse stopped him from asking an almost identical question.
It might be when…not where, replied Faelyna. We were just on the main level. That can'thave changed.
Doesn't look the same to me, replied Rhyana.
A swirl of gray and scarlet appeared before them, momentarily coalescing into a figure in a scarlet singlesuit of some sort, only to be replaced by a figure in silver and gray, and then by one in pale ice-blue, before returning to the scarlet-clad figure.
Eltyn swallowed. Who…what…are we seeing…?
The figure?s mouth moved…all event-points…all at once…Then he/she returned to an indistinct blur of fast-shifting shapes.
All event-points at once, mused Faelyna. That sounds like a theory of time.
No sequence or causality? Hasn't that been discredited?
Politically, because the Ruche is founded on certainty and causality. The feeling of a laugh followed Faelyna?s words. There are a few theoreticians who might not think the universeis that certain.
What about universes? asked Eltyn, looking for the smile he knew he wouldn?t see amid the increasing light and shifting images.
That's more likely in a multiverse-
A flare of light brighter than a nova and simultaneously darker than the depths reserved for unbelievers in the Ruche swept over Eltyn…and the chamber…