Panglor by Jeffrey A. Carver

Author:Jeffrey A. Carver [Carver, Jeffrey A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Science Fiction
ISBN: ERBAEN0039
Publisher: EReads
Published: 2009-06-01T04:00:00+00:00

* * *

Once they had gone over both of their stories, it was clear that they were hopelessly inconsistent. Alo's time sense of their separation was far different from Panglor's, and although she reported spending a good deal of time near a gas-pond, watching the singing aerial crystals, she insisted that she had never seen any body of water. And the only time she had seen LePiep was just before her final return to the ship. She had been at the gas-pond then.

Panglor recalled his near-misses with LePiep—the times he had seen her at a distance, emoting joy or distress for no obvious reasons, and the way she had lain in utter despair atop the rock-plant, not seeing him until he was at just the correct angle. Strange images. But some of them tied together, if you didn't mind a few distortions of reality. He could almost discern a kind of logic to what was happening. "I think I see what we've got here." He hoisted LePiep up to gaze at her eyeball to eyeball. The ou-ralot hummed warmly. She made him feel confident; she even almost made him feel warmly toward Alo.

"Sure," Alo said sardonically. "Everything's clear."

"Sure, it's clear," he said. He lowered the ou-ralot and studied Alo thoughtfully. "What we've got here is a kind of system of mirages. You see from one direction, and I see from another—and we don't see the same things at all. I see you, standing by some lake or ocean, and you say you were somewhere else at the time, and anyway you never saw water, you only saw the gas-pond. LePiep is lost, looking for me, and she runs right by me, looking overjoyed. The ship—the ship, for chrissakes, vanishes when we turn our backs on it."

"Wait a minute—"

"Wait what—can't you see it?" he said impatiently. "That's it, it's got to be! Something is distorting time and space—like a continuous mirage, only instead of bending light it bends all of reality." He closed his eyes and envisioned an enormously complex system of refractions, twists in reality, convolutions in the structure of space itself, perhaps. What a thought—but why not? If manmade foreshortening generators could stress space in a single dimension, couldn't natural forces create even stranger and more complex effects?

"Pangly, maybe we hallucinated—"

"Nah," he said, shaking his head. He knew he had seen what he had described. Besides . . .

He remembered something and groped in his pocket. His fingers found a small metal object, and he pulled it out for Alo to see. She squinted. "Valve component from a spaceship," he said. "I picked it up near the place where I saw the brewer."

Alo examined it skeptically, turning it over in her hand; but her eyes were wide. She jumped up, went into the control cabin, and returned a moment later with a sparkling violet crystal the size of an orange. "I picked that off a bush," she said. "No mirage."

Panglor studied it, thinking. "True, mirages can't account for all of it," he admitted.

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