The Stuff of Stars (The Seekers Book 2) Read online

  “It’s Kara, bearing a message. I didn’t want to surprise you.”

  Nathaniel glanced at me and stepped away from the door.

  “Come in,” I said.

  The door creaked open, an inch at a time, and Kara peeked through, her face pale and drawn. She thrust a sealed envelope toward me with both hands. “The mentor asked me to give you this. He said to keep its contents to yourself. Knock when you’re ready. I’ll be waiting outside.”

  Once she closed the door, I broke the seal and unfolded the paper. Unlike the handwritten note from the earth mother, this one was printed in the block lettering I used to call Temple magic before I discovered printing in the keep.

  With Nathaniel looking over my shoulder, I read the message aloud.

  ***

  We are a reasonable people, but we’ve become fearful for our future. Perhaps you are right, that your courage may be of more value than our knowledge. I am alone with what’s left of the dreamers, and I grow old. Perhaps you can help, especially if, as you claim, you are willing to risk your lives.

  Tell Kara nothing. I have instructed her to bring you to me. Come to my chamber, and I’ll reveal to you what I’ve been afraid to tell the children—the truth about the dreamers.

  Chapter 14 –Truth at Last

  After the mentor dismissed a disappointed Kara from his chamber, he wheeled his chair around and regarded us for what seemed like an eternity. At last, the blood drained from his face, and he slouched in his wheeled chair as if the years of supporting the weight of his people had finally worn him down. “Ask me, and I’ll answer as simply as I can. I’ll explain what has brought us to this day.”

  Nathaniel and I glanced at each other. So many questions. A blink of my eye, a tilt of his head—he yielded to me.

  Where should I begin? At the beginning, of course. “A thousand years ago, a cataclysm occurred, what our vicars call the darkness. Both you and the earth mother mentioned it as well. Perhaps you know more about what happened than we do, but on these points we agree: our ancestors overreached, a horrible war ensued, and many died. The few who survived tried to recover in different ways. The Temple of Light dragged us back to a simpler time, banning all technology save what they kept for themselves to control the people. The keepmasters dedicated their lives to preserve their knowledge for the future, hoping a more responsible generation would emerge someday and use it for good. And your forbearers fled to this side of the ocean.”

  I paused, waiting for the mentor to respond.

  He chewed on his lower lip before answering, as if considering his words. “Yes, you’re right, as far as it goes. This ground you stand on had been the epicenter of the destruction. My ancestors fled here to be free from the persecution of the Temple of Light, committed not only to preserving their knowledge but advancing it. They vowed to leave your misguided vicars behind and shun your part of the world until more open minds prevailed. We’ve waited a long time for an expedition to arrive, though I have to admit, I expected a delegation more substantial than the two of you.”

  I sighed. Were we forever fated to underwhelm? I pictured the recording of the keepmasters welcoming us to the keep, greeting us as revolutionaries that had overthrown the Temple, though we’d done no such thing. Yet in the end, we managed to change our world.

  Now, the mentor expected a more substantial delegation. Might we still change his world as well?

  He continued. “When they arrived on these shores, they found an uninhabited wasteland and struggled for decades, but just as the land recovered, so did my people. We rebuilt what we once had and vowed to move beyond it. Over time, we asserted our mastery over nature to provide for all of our needs.

  “Perhaps we succeeded too well. As we mastered our machines, we also became dependent on them, no longer needing to work to survive. Many became too self-absorbed to raise families, and our population diminished. As our technology advanced, the science behind it grew more complex, requiring years of hard work to master. Fewer and fewer tried. For most, the machines became like gods, providing for all their needs but taken on faith, their inner workings akin to magic. Despite the brilliance of our age, we stagnated, all except for the elite.

  “We became a society of classes—those who lived off the fruits of the machines and those who studied the science behind them. The few of us willing to continue the research became revered as high priests, and each new feature was hailed as a revelation. But the worship of everyday people wasn’t enough. Our thirst for knowledge remained unbounded. So we took on a new challenge, what would become the breakthrough of our age.”

  The mentor stared out as if trying to envision both past and future at once.

  I recognized that look, one I’d seen so often in Nathaniel—the gaze of one discontented with the world as it was and yearning to discover what might be. “The dreamers?” I said.

  A laugh rose up from the mentor’s throat, almost a chortle. “Those who the children call dreamers were as mortal as you or I, albeit brilliant, curious, and some might say arrogant. Though the machines they’d invented provided for all their needs, they wanted more—to make their machines not just servants, but partners in their quest for knowledge. They enhanced them to be faster and more capable, but to complete them they had to make them smarter. Yet despite years of research, endowing them with true intelligence remained beyond their grasp. The machines lacked that all-too-human knack for stumbling on serendipity through trial and error, for being able to see the world anew. So the researchers changed their approach. They turned inward to study the untapped potential of their own minds.”

  The mentor paused to take a sip of sweet water from a cup in a holder on the arm of his chair.

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  His eyes bore into mine. “Have you ever awoken from a dream to find you remembered something long forgotten from your childhood? Have you ever been struck by a flash of insight that solved a problem you’d been grappling with for days?”

  I nodded, thinking of the previous night’s dream of my father, or the moment in the keep when I first heard my recorded voice and knew at once how to overthrow the vicars. At the time, I considered such inspirations a gift of the light.

  The mentor rolled his chair closer. “Where do such insights come from? From a place with more power than we know. The brightest among us discovered their minds—what in your world you might call their souls—were nothing but impulses, billions of bits of lightning flashing in their brains. That led to the breakthrough I spoke of. They learned to channel these impulses, to share them beyond their physical bodies with the brains of the machines so they could control them with the power of thought.”

  He must have read my disbelief, because a wry smile spread across his face. “Ah, you need proof, but you’ve already witnessed an example.”

  With no movement on his part, without the twitch of a muscle, his wheeled chair backed up, spun about and returned, as we’d seen before.

  “I also control the food synthesizers, the desals, and the healing machines. I can turn the lights of the city on and off or grant you access past the stone guards with a thought. All these machines are conditioned to respond to my brain waves. I ask in my thoughts, and they comply.”

  “Then why,” Nathaniel said, “do the machines fail.”

  The smile vanished from the mentor’s lips. “Because I am failing, and I’m the only one left who can control them.”

  He went silent.

  I cleared my throat as if afraid my voice had gone silent as well. When I spoke, my words sounded unnaturally loud. “What happened to the others? Where did they go?”

  “After they’d mastered the machines, my curious young colleagues posed the next logical question. Was there a way to move past the limits of our minds? Throughout history, people have tried to preserve their thoughts beyond their physical being, first on the walls of caves, later in paintings, sculpture, and books. We too sought a way to store our thoughts, the impulses that
define who we are, outside of these frail bodies.

  “We built a prototype storage device, and one among us volunteered to be the first. We preserved his body with artificial life support, and then transferred his consciousness to the device, but only for an instant before we transferred him back.

  “When his eyes opened, they shone with an ethereal glow. For that one instant, he’d surpassed the limits of the flesh and accessed the full capacity of his brain. Others followed, carefully at first, and later for longer trials. Of course, we had some failures as all pioneers do—like those brave souls who gave their lives in the early days of space exploration—but we pressed on. After much research and hard work, the technology matured and our doubts vanished. Each time someone went under what we began to call the dream, they awoke with a greater grasp of themselves and the universe.

  “Then came the final step: connected machines, communal consciousness—the minds of more than one, severed from the constraints of our physical selves and joined with the others. With the help of such advanced insight, the pace of the project accelerated. We built a chamber inside the mountain, a protected place where we could maintain our bodies while our minds melded with the infinite.

  “As time went on, the dream came to dominate our waking lives. The more we dreamed, the more we wanted to dream. In ancient times, the time you call the darkness, people took chemicals to alter their consciousness for brief periods, but these chemicals became addictive, often preventing them from living their lives. The dream state became addictive as well.

  “We sensed the danger. Even in its infancy, the technology had been intoxicating. For those brief moments, we became more than mere dreamers. We imagined ourselves as gods. Throughout history, power has always corrupted, so we instituted a strict set of controls. Yes, the dream was good for our people. Out of the collective mind came wonderful innovations, but we limited the event to a single day each year.

  “None wanted to be left out, so we built more machines, enough to meet the needs of all those strong enough to withstand the rigors of the dream. We established a festival to celebrate the wonders of the human mind—the day of ascension. But this festival became an abomination to the greenies, who believed we’d gone too far.”

  “Why?” I said. “What you created benefited them as well.”

  “You’ve missed the point. By storing our thoughts in the machines, we’d opened the possibility of maintaining our consciousness forever.”

  I let out a gasp. “The dreamers became immortal?”

  The mentor smiled, seemingly pleased he impressed me. “Immortal? That depends on your point of view. Had we become immortal men or lifeless machines? Technos and greenies disagreed on the answer. We saw the dream as ascension, aspiring to be more than we are. They viewed it as transgression, why they call what happened the day of reckoning, our punishment for trying to become gods.” He shrugged. “It hardly matters, because all are gone now but me, and the machines built to depend on their masters’ minds are dying too.”

  A weariness overcame him, and he sighed deeply. “As the oldest, I’d been left out of the dream, with a small crew to monitor the event. When the mountain erupted blocking the waterfall, we worked night and day to free up the flow. Eventually, even the greenies felt sorry for us and came to our aid. Backup generators maintained limited power while the rescue went on, keeping those inside the protected fortress alive. Eventually, full power was restored, but my friends had dwelled in the dream longer than ever before. Our emergency measures had preserved their bodies, but when I tried to restore their consciousness, nothing happened. I was unable to awaken them.”

  The mentor took a wheezing breath and paused as if waiting to see if we could surmise on our own.

  “Did they die?” I said at last.

  “There’s the rub,” he said. “I don’t know. All I can be certain of is that they remain in their mountain fortress, still lost in the dream.”

  He spun his chair around and rolled silently toward the entrance of his inner sanctum. “Come, let me show you.”

  Chapter 15 – Images on the Wall

  I shuffled to the back wall, grimacing at the thought of confronting the angry helper again, but this time, after scanning the length of my body and nearly blinding me, he approved. The door slid open, and Nathaniel and I were allowed to enter the chamber where the mentor worked his wonders.

  And what wonders they were.

  No sooner did we pass through the doorway than my eyes were flooded with light. Every wall was a screen, but unlike in the keep, no helpers awaited. Instead, myriad images flickered across too fast to follow—glimpses of diagrams and faces and formulas flashing by faster than I could fathom. My nostrils tingled from a sharp odor, like the smell of air freshly cleansed by lightning in a storm.

  “Are these the dreamers,” I said.

  “Yes... and no. These are the thoughts of the dreamers stored in the machines.”

  “Is this how you speak to them?” I waited breathlessly for his answer, but no answer came.

  He turned away and stared at the images on one wall, then another, anywhere but at me. The hum of the fans that blew air through the commons grew unbearably loud.

  An empty feeling filled the pit of my stomach. “The earth mother was right. You lied to us, and you lie to the children as well. You can’t speak with the dreamers any more than we could speak to the helpers in the keep. These aren’t the dreamers. They’re nothing but recordings.”

  The mentor’s back stiffened. “No, not recordings. What appears on these walls are living thoughts, the impulses flashing through the dreamers’ minds at this instant, images not so different from what our thoughts would look like if we could project them on this wall. For nearly three years, I’ve watched with fascination and horror as their drama unfolded, a community of geniuses trapped outside their bodies, desperately planning, designing, conceiving, but unable to alter the physical world.

  “How was I to explain that to the children? I lied to them to keep up their hope for the future, to encourage them to work hard. Perhaps one day, one of them will succeed where I’ve failed, and find a way to actually speak to the dreamers.”

  Nathaniel had been silent, staring at the four walls. Now he inched forward and brushed the tips of his fingers to the images. Here, a diagram like the ones he’d drawn of our boat in the keep but far more complex. There, a girl twirling in the sunlight, but tinged with the color of sadness, all glimpsed for an instant and then gone.

  “These children,” he said at last. “They’re so young, many younger than any we’ve seen. What we’re watching are their parents’ memories, showing them as they once were, but with no eyes to see the present, these images are frozen in time. Now I understand what Annabel meant—to be alive but not live. “

  My mind raced in a different direction. Before me were the finest minds of the machine masters, enhanced beyond imagining. What might they not accomplish? If we were to find a way out of our dilemma, they were the ones to know how.

  “Is there no hope?” I said. “No way to talk with them, if not to bring them back to life?”

  The mentor’s chair whirred and moved up beside Nathaniel. He scanned the wall as if searching for an answer.

  “From here, I cannot speak with them. I can only monitor their thoughts. Occasionally, as an image flashes by, I make sense of what they’re trying to say. There—” He pointed to an image that flashed briefly in a corner. “That’s an enhancement to a new machine we’d been working on, and here—” He pointed to where Nathaniel had been staring. “Do you recognize that child?”

  I gaped at the image. The girl seemed familiar, but I had trouble placing her. Then I recalled what Nathaniel had said—children frozen in time. I squinted, redrawing the face to add three more years, and gasped when the realization struck.

  The mentor caught my flash of insight. “That’s right. My dearest Kara.” His voice became choked with tears. “You’re watching the thoughts of her father.
.. my son. What I’d give to speak to him now.”

  Nathaniel came up behind me and rested his hands on my shoulders as we viewed the moving images with fresh eyes. I recalled Kara the night I sang Timmy to sleep, how she’d longed to tell her parents goodbye.

  After a while, Nathaniel gave voice to my thoughts. “If their minds are alive, there must be a way to speak with them.”

  The mentor shook his head. “I tried everything I dare. Unless I can restore their consciousness to their bodies, I know of only one way. One of the living must join them in the dream. I would gladly volunteer, but the dream challenges not only the mind but the body. As one enters the dream-like state, the expanded mind needs more blood flowing through it. The breathing quickens and the heart beats faster. The body does not easily let go of the mind. My frail flesh would never survive the rigors of the dream. And what would become of the children if I die?”

  “What of the children?” I said. “You insist they study to make their minds stronger. Are none of them ready?”

  “A few, perhaps, but I’m loath to test them. How can I know what it’s like to be trapped in a machine for all these years? What if I thrust a child into the dream among a group of mad minds, and I’m unable to wake him again.”

  The mentor’s chin slumped to his chest, and he stared at the floor.

  I came closer and knelt before him to regain his attention. “But for a chance to meet the dreamers? Think of the miracles that might await us all.”

  His shoulders heaved in a sigh and his deep blue eyes rose to meet mine. “You don’t understand. In the early days, we had failures, those who returned to the living, but as a shadow of themselves, no longer able to speak or relate to the physical world. These few poor souls stared out through vacant eyes, giving no inkling whether a mind lay behind or not. After several agonizing weeks, we made the painful decision to send them to the disintegration chamber and end their misery, a decision that haunts me to this day. But these were adults, heroic volunteers aware of the risk they took.” He waved at the wall. “Which of the children should I send into the mountain and risk condemning to such a fate? What right do I have to ask? Kara pleads with me to let her go. She’s the best of them, the oldest and the brightest. She begs me as once she begged her parents, but how can I send my only granddaughter into the mountain alone? What if I were to lose her as well, my last link to my family?”