Against Gravity

Kendrick had put his head down on the pillow, his mind and emotions still full of the memory of Caroline lying still and lifeless, and now he was here again.

Like he'd always been here, waiting.

The creatures came closer, flitting through the turgid air, their tiny faces ugly and distorted. No wonder it had taken him so long to recognize their origin.

"Robert," Kendrick said at last as a thousand winged shapes hovered in the air around him.

One of them spoke, its voice clear and full, unexpected from something so small.

"You shouldn't be here," the tiny Robert-homunculus said. "We don't want you here."

"I'm coming anyway," said Kendrick. "I'm bringing Peter McCowan with me."

The creature's companions beat chaotic patterns in the air as Kendrick spoke.

"Peter told me you wouldn't let him get free from the Maze," he continued. "You kept him down there, blind and deaf."

The rapid motion of the tiny creatures became even more frenzied as they swirled and dived with renewed vigour. He thought again of shoals of fish darting through deep ocean waters.

"Peter is an abomination," squealed the same creature as before, hovering momentarily in front of Kendrick's face. "You must not bring him here!"

"I need to find something that's on board the Archimedes. I can-"

"You must not bring him here! You must not bring him here!" another of the creatures buzzed angrily – or was it the same one? It was impossible to tell as they darted around him. "I can see him hiding inside you!"

Kendrick's mouth felt dry. What did Buddy or Sabak or any of them see and hear in their visions, to think that this thing was sane?

The creatures all around reminded him of nothing so much as locusts preparing to swarm. He ducked and shielded his face as they buzzed around him in uncountable legions. Their sheer weight of numbers forced him to kneel on the ground, shielding himself with his arms. He spoke again, raising his voice to a yell. "It's you that the Bright use to communicate with us, right? You were the first. You became a part of them. Something went wrong."

They scattered away from him in an instant in a great storm of flapping. The thick, honeyed air felt full of a palpable menace.

They circled him still, their massed voices roaring as one. Kendrick's head filled with so many alien images and thoughts that he crumpled completely to the ground, unable to absorb even a fraction of the information besieging his skull.

But behind the images and sensations he detected something else, something deeper: regular, rhythmic. Almost… like singing.

No, not singing – talking. But nothing like any language he had ever heard… nonetheless, he felt he might be able to understand it if only he listened harder.

Kendrick summoned the energy to stand again, batting at the tiny shapes now darting towards him, shrieking and flapping. However much he might tell himself none of this was real, instinct said differently.

He moved as if in a dream. The singing-but-not-singing began to build, drowning out even the chaotic menace of the buzzing creatures.

The singing became clearer, suddenly perfectly comprehensible. He understood that this was the Bright, rather than Robert, and that they were now speaking to him directly.

Kendrick found himself floating, caught up in the light now flooding around him. He looked down and saw a grassy plain far below. On it, two men wearing Los Muertos insignia were ru

One of them stopped to point a nozzled device at a vast swarm of Robert-homunculi bearing down on him: flames belched out of it. Kendrick noticed the fuel tank slung over his shoulders.

Regardless of his efforts, the soldier was soon engulfed in gossamer wings. They swarmed around both men in great shimmering masses, eventually drowning and crushing them.

And then, without apparent transition, Kendrick found himself outside the Archimedes itself, the surface of the station slipping past beneath him. He recognized there the two shuttles he'd seen taking off from the desert, their hulls jutting out at right angles from a row of docking bays surrounded by an external gantry threaded with access tubes and pressurized pods.

And then even the Archimedes vanished. It came to him now that this was what Buddy, and Sabak, and Caroline, and all the rest of them had been seeing.

Whatever Hardenbrooke had put inside Kendrick, it was no longer blocking the Bright's signal.

He floated far above the curve of the Earth, a great half-crescent lit by the twinkling lights of cities still shrouded in night. He saw clouds lit from underneath by flashes of lightning somewhere over the Bay of Biscay.

He watched as the nightline slid across the face of the Earth, faster and faster, becoming a blue-green blur within what seemed like seconds.

Faster, and yet faster.

The stars began to move in their positions. A sensation of utter cold filled Kendrick as he looked towards the broad sparkling band of the Milky Way and saw that it too was in motion.

The universe aged around him. Thousands upon thousands of stars swept past, time flying by at a rate of tens of millions of years every second. He saw galaxies arranged in patterns too regular to be natural, co

In his mind, Kendrick felt the strengthening heartbeat of vast empires, and of invasive hive-minds absorbing countless helpless worlds before themselves fading back into obscurity, half-forgotten legends in less time than it took for his eyelids to blink.

He spun on and on until any sense of his physical body had vanished, reducing him to a tiny mote of awareness racing at ever greater speed through the lifetime of the universe. He saw the final darkness approaching, became aware of a vast intelligence surrounding him. And then he understood: they were going all the way to the end.

The end of all things.

The galaxies were crashing together now, and Kendrick imagined that he could hear the cries of worlds dying. He witnessed entire constellations surrounded by vast artificial shells of energy that trapped and retained the light of their stars, banishing them from the visible universe. Throughout the mighty expanse of time and space he could sense what the Bright had found when they had first reached out, a hundred billion years into the future.

The intelligence that he had sensed earlier surrounded him totally now, vast and omnipotent, and tens of billions of years old. It permeated to the deepest level of reality, residing in the weak, hidden dimensions below the quantum soup that constituted the most fundamental level of existence.

The cosmos shrank and darkened and Kendrick was hurled ever onward. All around him the universe rushed towards its conclusion, the galaxies colliding in fiery explosions… faster and faster…

… and then it stopped.

Kendrick sensed that he was not alone.

His cheek rested on damp fragrant grass, soft sunlight trickling down from somewhere far above. He raised his head.

"Sleeping on the job, eh?" Peter McCowan gri

Kendrick stared at him, stu

Peter laughed, the sound rumbling from deep in his chest. "Nah, it's Heaven – that's why the cigarettes taste like shit." Again, that deep, rumbling laugh; and it was like all those years since the Maze had never happened.

"Where are we?" Kendrick rose, looking up and around him. He found it impossible to react to what had just happened to him: it was too much, too quickly, on a scale he couldn't even imagine. "It looks like-"

"The Tay Hills is my guess," said Peter. "Fucking hell, a realm of infinite possibility to choose from, and this is what your mind picks?" He shook his head and took a drag on his cigarette. "No imagination, you. But yeah, this is it."