Phoenix Prime

Book 168: Gateway Essentials

by Ted White

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Space Opera

Synopsis

The dream of being a superman came true for Max Quest - and immediately turned into a nightmare. He was not alone. There were Others with extraordinary powers, and the last thing they wanted was another superman on Earth - especially one working for good instead of evil. They couldn''t kill him. But they could send him . . . elsewhere. Elsewhere was the viciously hostile world of Qanar, where Max''s powers didn''t work and sorcery was a more potent weapon than science, where shadows were as menacing as steel. Max Quest still had to save Earth from the corrupt threat of the Others - but he found his destiny intricately linked with that of Qanar as well. And somewhere in space-time was his lost love . . .

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 188

Sample

He lived. He was aware. For the first time he was truly alive and aware. He was everything in his world. He—

He wrapped flames around his body, letting them pour sinuously around and over him. For a second, as he stood in the center of the floor, he writhed. It was pure reflex; then he relaxed and gave himself up to the heady luxury of the roaring fire which clothed his body. He basked in the flames.

His mind was afire, too. It was like—satin ice? No, those were words, and this was different, something new; his senses were still adjusting themselves to the new reality, and his mind contained no images with which to compare it. He didn’t see or hear Fran open the door.

“Max!”

He shook his flaming body, and a few brief cinders ? fell away in sparks. Then, suddenly, he had snuffed out the aura of flames and was standing nude on a smoking carpet, grinning tentatively at the girl. He swallowed and said, “Hell of a time for you to show up, Fran.”

She stared at him without expression, looking up at him with almost unseeing eyes, her face taut, skin unnaturally white.

He blinked, slowly coming down or up to reality again. Good God, yes, she thought he’d been burning up. The odor of the burnt carpet—it smelled like scorching hair.

“I forgot about the carpet.” He watched her glance down at it. Acrid smoke still curled away from two singed-bare and smoldering patches where he’d been standing. Without thinking, he turned his gaze upward. Yes, the paint on the ceiling was blistered, too. He’d have to be more careful with such stunts in the future.

When he looked back down at her, Fran’s eyes were on his. She said, “Max—!”

She took one faltering step toward him; then she crumpled and swayed forward. He caught her in his arms as she fell, straining her close. The physical contact of their bodies brought him completely bade, made him truly aware of Fran’s plight—and, of Fran.

He tried to make his grip as firm, as reassuring as he could—to bring her back to a world in which men were not, one minute, cloaked in streaming flame, and the next minute alive and human and—

“Max!” She straightened with a hysterical giggle. “You don’t have any clothes on!”

“I know. I lose more pajamas that way,” he said, lightly, keeping his voice casual. The light touch, take it easy, he cautioned himself. You’ve given this girl quite a shock. “Can you hold on for a moment, Fran? Sit down and I’ll put on a pair of pants, at least.”

Her face was chalk-white; the color had drained from her mouth, leaving the lipstick like paint on a corpse. She was rigid with shock. She hardly seemed to hear him, and let him lead her, like a child, to the sofa. God in heaven, why did she have to come in just then?

“Lie down here for a minute, Fran. Here, put your feet up on the arm. Fran, it’s all right, I’m all right; take it easy now. I’ll be right back.”

He retreated into the bedroom, quietly closed the door behind him, and leaned against it for a moment. His whole body slumped.

It would be so easy—so easy, just to forget, to forget it all. Two paths branched out before him, and he was at the fork. Which should be his turning? In one direction, normalcy, safety. In the other—what?

But there could be only one answer. His life had changed, had been changed, and now he had changed another’s life. There could be no negating that.

The room was quiet, just a third-floor bedroom in an old house, now a converted rooming house for students presided over by an old spinster for whose long-dead family this had once been a proud town-house. The room was papered with flowers and butterflies, fading in the strong sunlight which now half filled it. Max heard his own breathing loud in the silence, looked down at his naked body, then at his pants, draped over the bed. He stared at them and closed his eyes. His body grew tense and rigid.

Slowly, the pants began to stir as if with a breeze—but all else was still. Sunlight cut across the stationary dust-motes suspended in mid-air, and the warm summer noon seemed to hold its breath. The pants legs flapped.

Then, suddenly, the room was filled with a timeless density. The silence of the moment before thickened into a tangible, measurable dimension, possessing a reality of its own. He could taste it.

He rose three feet into the air, his head clearing the ceiling by inches. As he did so, the tension dissolved from his muscles; he lay loose-flung in the air and watched articles of clothing—first his briefs, then pants, sweat-shirt, socks, and finally shoes—moving to him and draping themselves over, around, up and onto his body, flowing onto him as if themselves fluid.

The door opened before he reached it. He took a deep breath, set his feet on the floor, and walked through the door. Behind him it was as if the sheerest soap bubble had burst.

Fran started upright as he came in, and flinched away.

“Fran, are you afraid of me?”

She nodded, moving her mouth mutely.

Easy, now.

“Afraid of me? Even with my clothes on and no attempt at felonious assault?”

“Don’t laugh,” she said, finding her voice. “Please. I know what you’re trying to do. But—don’t. And don’t try to tell me that I didn’t see—what I saw.” Her eyes moved quickly, a little rabbit movement, to the charred carpet, and away again.

“Fran.” He seated himself beside her and took her face in his hands. “I’m not going to deny anything. I’m not going to try to talk you out of anything. What you saw—it happened, yes. Would you like to know how it happened?”

“Then I’m not crazy? It wasn’t all—an illusion?”

“No. And I’m not a warlock, or a weaver of dark spells, and I haven’t sold my soul to the devil. Okay?” His eyes Twinkled. At least he hoped they did.

She smiled up at him, a faint and tentative smile, but none the less a genuine smile. She raised her hand to his, caught it, and pulled him down until they were lying side by side.

Touch did what words had only attempted; he felt the rigid frozen fright flow out of her as she held him. With a sigh, she snuggled close against his chest, nesting inside the sweep of his reassuring arm.

Affirmation, a reassurance of that which held them, the spirit that existed between them. It was important, he knew, that she understand that nothing had really changed—not between them. This was the best way. It had come to him without words; perhaps there were no words. But what had he done to Fran, to this shy girl who clung to him so tightly? He sensed, through the tension of her terror and its release, that she still loved him—did he still return that love? It was important that she think that—that she know that. But did he? How far had the changes gone? When he asked himself this, he could not answer—yet, now, in his response to her, he sensed his answer.

Words, mere words—what did they mean? Reasoning could be a barrier instead of a path. He had always felt most apart from Fran when he had tried to think out their relationship into words. Better to let the words go, better to react.

They lay together unmoving on the sofa for a moment which was, for them, timeless—perhaps fifteen minutes, perhaps two or three hours. Time was a dimension away from which Max had drifted increasingly. They exchanged no words, no gestures, not even a kiss. They simply were, sharing a moment of that meshed, tangible silence in which there was no Max, no Fran; instead a gestalt, a separate and whole emotional entity.

“Tell me about it,” she said finally.

It was like surfacing after a deep dive. He blinked. “I don’t know what happened.”

“How did it begin?”

He shifted slightly, turning so that he faced her, looking down into her upward-tilted face and searching eyes. He paused, then reached out for words and found them.

“If you want to be rational about it—that is, if we can be rational about it—I guess it’s what they call a wild talent.”

“Wild is right,” she said with a shaky laugh.

“Psi power, I guess you’d call it, then. I can make things—happen.

“I had a dream last night. It was a very strange kind of dream—you know how sometimes you have dreams about flying? Like, you’re running along on the ground, and sometimes you can jump, and pull your feet up, into the air, and then you sort of paddle yourself along with your hands, as though you were swimming—? I dreamed I’d done this and I was floating and weightless, pulling myself around with handholds like an astronaut in a space capsule, only the handholds were the branches of a tree. I was floating and pulling myself into the tree.

“Things began feeling strange. Like two images super-imposed—like things were happening in double. The dream was fading, the way it does when you’re sleep-walking, and you’re aware of both your dream surroundings and your real ones simultaneously.

“Then I woke up.

“Fran, I was holding on to the curtains of the window next to my bed, and I was floating about even with the top of the open window!”

He felt her arms tighten their grasp on him, but she did not interrupt. He went on:

“It scared me silly, but in a very practical sort of way. My first thought was, My god, I nearly went out the window—just as matter of factly as if I’d been sleep-walking and woke up and said, Oh, I almost fell down those stairs. And then I guess I woke up the rest of the way and realized what was really happening, because the next thing I knew, I was lying crossways on the bed with all the breath knocked out of me.”

Her body had tensed again with, the growing excitement of his voice. He felt her shiver. “Fran, don’t worry. I’m not going to do anything now.”

Slowly, under the reassurance of his voice and touch, he felt her spasm dissolve, and he continued, speaking with careful gentleness.

“When I woke up again this morning, I thought it had all been a dream. Or rather, I wanted to believe I’d dreamed it, but I knew better.

“I wandered out here into the living room, and just kind of went through the motions of breakfast, without noticing what I was doing. I remember at one point I looked at my watch and saw that it was already nine-thirty. I thought of calling in and reporting sick, but it didn’t seem important enough to bother.

“After a while I—well, located myself. I was sitting at the table, staring at my coffee and realizing it had gone cold. I wasn’t really thinking about anything. I was just staring at that coffee and wishing it was good and hot again, and—and then it started steaming.

“I didn’t touch it. I just looked at it. It seemed important to me that I really look at it—and then suddenly I wasn’t just looking at a cup of coffee any more. I was seeing it—really seeing it. I stopped looking at it as a familiar object, a sort of stereotyped object which represents a set of symbols neatly filed in my mind with the proper non-thinking associations. People take everything familiar for granted, Fran, and so had I.

“Until then. Then I began discarding all the cardboard facades which spell out cuppacawfee, and I began to see the relationships of each and every component in the cup and the coffee, the chemical and molecular relationships and deeper. I don’t have the words for what I saw, but I could sort of grasp, not really seeing, using my eyes at all—I felt the entire series of relationships between all the overlapping fields of energy, or—” He stopped, uncertainly.

“Damn words, anyway. I’m trying to make sense of it for you, and I’m not even making sense to myself.

“Look. Everything is really motion. I can’t pin it down any better than that, but I could see—sense—the fact that the cup and the coffee were really fields of motion. Sort of webworks, finely woven, very intricate, like twisted paths of light. Like—yeah, like those time exposures of cars and lights on the streets at night; all those lights all woven together to create the whole, the identity which we label ‘coffee’ or ‘cup.’

“I saw that motion, and I knew that I could reach out and—speed it up, or slow it down. I’d done that. I’d heated up the coffee.

“I was fascinated. I started looking around me, looking at everything. First I looked at little things, individual objects. It was like putting them under a microscope and finding out what they were really like. I’d pick something up, and look at it. I spent what must have been an hour at least on my transistor radio. I just couldn’t help admiring it, admiring the lovely intricacy of it all. Those transistors and diodes—just lovely!

“It was like double vision, a second sight. I could turn it on and off. I could make it overlap my normal vision, or supplant it. The funny thing was, I discovered that I could function on my new sense equally well. I could look at the whole room that way, ignoring the minute patterns and seeing the larger ones. In a way, it blended right in with normal sight. I mean, have you ever really just looked at things? If you stop just glancing over all the familiar objects, and look at a room as though you’d never seen it before, it can be fascinating. You can make out all sorts of relationships, the rhythms of color, the ‘ placement of masses and empty areas, the similarities and clashes in the lines of different furniture—this place is a real hodgepodge—and you can see the whole room as a three-dimensional area, an integrated whole.”

She was looking around her at the room, and he smiled to himself. The touch of the strange—that was what frightened her. Seeing the familiar as a shaky bunch of colored wires was a terrifyingly alien concept, but looking at an old furnished room as a problem in design appealed to the interior decorator in her. She was familiar with Zen, she’d read Watts on Tao. This concept of integration, of everything being part of a larger pattern, was something she could grasp and understand.

“I haven’t really tried anything yet. I haven’t even explored much more than that. I’ve been a little afraid to really try much, because it smacks of playing God, so I’ve been piddling with parlor tricks. I’m sorry you had to walk in on one cold like that, Fran. It was such a childish stunt for me to pull.”

“What—what was it like?”

“It was ego-inflating, basically. Very wild and weird, you know. The Human Torch and all that. I turned the air around myself to flames—and burned off my pajamas before I’d thought to protect more than my body. I’ve done some other cute stunts, too. I’ve levitated, and wished my clothes on, and moved things around—but those are such little things. Petty things. Mainly because I haven’t really wanted to face the fact that I could do so much more than that if I wished.”

Fran pulled away from him and pushed herself up to a sitting position. He stood up and stretched. The odor of scorched carpeting was almost gone; a gentle breeze wafted freshly through the windows. The air seemed clean and empty. Fran smiled up at him.

“Thanks, Max.” She took his hand and pulled herself to her feet, standing close by him. “What are you going to do now?”

“I wish I knew,” He answered slowly. “I wish I knew how I’d come by all this, and what I ought to do with it. It—it takes in a lot of territory, you know. I don’t even know how far I can extend it, just how much I can do with it.” He frowned and shook his head, as if to clear it.

“Perhaps I can help,” she said, still holding his hand.

He smiled down at her, now sure in his love for her. “Perhaps you can,” he said.

THEY LAY on their backs in the grass, their fingers intertwined, staring up into the summer sky. Low-hanging clouds were moving majestically out of the west, and the air hung heavily in the warm yellow sunlight.

Nearby a squirrel chattered in annoyance. The focus of its attention, a pigeon, was pecking at an open bag of peanuts at the edge of the grass. A heavy-set woman dressed as a nurse slowly pushed a baby carriage along the paved path, pausing frequently to mop her florid face. In the distance there was the faint but solid sound of a baseball bat cracking out a hit, and, farther away, the muted roar of the city. The air smelled sweetly of freshly mown grass.

The squirrel turned at the sight of the woman with the baby carriage and ran chattering in anger up the nearest tree, then slipped back down again, returning in her wake to the now unguarded peanuts.

Maximillion Quest was a young man, young enough to still sometimes be mis. . .