One To The Left by Isaac Teile
This story originally appeared in Alien Dimensions #13
It was a duck.
An earth duck. Had it been some sort of biomechanical space duck, she would have been more at ease. But a duck had flown into the second engine, dismembering itself and leaving the spaceship adrift, according to the computer.
When Anna was a kid, a good AI could make deductive leaps by the thousandfold in seconds based on less information than bloody duck pulp, but since the AI Regulatory Acts, the ship was too stupid to attempt the next obvious question: How was a duck flying along a trans-galactic mineral shipping route?
She stood from the computer console, a task which grew harder every day between a bum ankle and an old back injury and simple age.
“Where’s the gnemron?” she asked as she readjusted her uniform.
“The bilges, ma’am.”
“Still?” She wasn’t surprised.
“Still, ma’am.”
“What’s it doing?” she asked as she walked for the elevator.
“I cannot say,” the AI said. Of course not. No deductions.
“Is it moving?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Why isn’t it answering my texts?”
“I cannot say.”
“Of course not,” she said. Anna called the captain and said, “Captain Heesh, your favorite weirdo isn’t answering again.”
“Can you go down there?” Heesh asked.
“Already on it.” She switched off her wrist unit, then walked to the edge of the elevator tube and looked down.
When she had been younger, tubes had always had metal platforms, to give the illusion, she supposed, of being on solid ground. But the new generation didn’t mind standing on air.
From the edge, she could see down past the lights of the crew cabins and stores, into the hazy dark of the bilges.
“Hello?” she called out. Gnemron didn’t have names; the idea seemed to disgust them. But she always struggled to get its attention.
She stepped out into the emptiness of the elevator shaft and got goosebumps as energy coursed through her.
“Bilges,” she mumbled. She went down.
The gnemron had gone to the bilges shortly after the impact. It had acted intensely and without orders, but no one had stopped it. Heesh was busy blotting blood from his head wound, and Peters and Todorov were either securing the air locks or plucking duck feathers from the mangled hull by the second engine.
The smell of her nose hairs sizzling hit before she reached the bilges. All the Leo-grade worksuits and deionized bulkheads couldn’t keep the potent brew of conduit sludge running through the engine from frying her nose.
The elevator reached the floor. There were no lights; only a long finger of blue, glowing sludge illuminated the long corridor in front of her. She blinked and the glossy sheen of her artificial tapeta lucida swam over her eyes.
“Anyone here?” No answer. “Computer, where’s the gnemron?”
“Branch four, corridor sixteen, ma’am.
To generate enough energy to warp, the sludge needed an enormous track. The bilges had more curves than a human intestine, but she activated her navigator and a red dot appeared in her field of vision toward the left. So guided, she set off along the catwalk searching for the first turn.
When she reached the fourth set of corridors, the gnemron was nowhere around.
“Lifeforms detected, ma’am,” the ship said.
“The gnemron?”
“No, ma’am.”
“What? What is it?”
“I cannot say.”
“You stupid—” she started, but grew silent. She swore she had heard a screech. “How many lifeforms?” she whispered. “Text replies.”
“One, ma’am,” was the reply on her wrist unit’s screen.
“You said plural. Where?”
“Overlaying your present space, ma’am.”
“What?” she asked louder than she meant to. Her breath was rapid. She spun in a circle, feeling eyes upon her.
But there was nothing.
Then, slowly, she looked up. Four black shapes clung to the ceiling, each extending a thin proboscis, their flexing wings clear with a network of dark red veins running throughout. At her gaze, they hissed.
“Dear God,” she mumbled.
They dropped, spiraling toward her together. She fell backward onto the catwalk, a sharp pain radiating up her body. The spiraling creatures got closer. She put her arm up to protect her face. But only one impacted. She had no time to reflect on where the others had gone; the proboscis opened like a flower and the hissing creature lurched toward her neck. When she jerked her arm away from her body, the flailing proboscis shifted and drove into her wrist at the ulnar artery.
Anna screamed, but there was no pain at the bite, only where the creature’s claws dug into her arm.
“Box cutter,” she shouted, and a laser shot from her wrist unit, severing the creature’s proboscis.
It hissed again and pulled its head back, waving the remnants of its proboscis around. She jerked her arm out, and the creature fell. As it did, it and the proboscis attached to her arm faded. She touched the ground where it had been, but there was no trace.
“Do you need medical attention, ma’am?” the computer asked through her wrist unit. She read the message, then lay back on the floor and stared at the ceiling where the creatures had been.
“Probably,” she mumbled. The bite on her arm was swelling, but the pain in her lower back was worse. “But let’s find the gnemron first.”
Standing was difficult. Years of nano repairs didn’t change the fact that her body was 138 years old, not counting decades in suspended animation.
As she pulled herself up using the railing and wobbled forward, the soft blue glow of electricity faded. When she turned the corner to the sixteenth corridor in the fourth branch, it disappeared altogether.
In the dark, she saw the gnemron. It was hanging from the ceiling, its feet dangling over the dark water. No. Not hanging. Floating.
“Are—” she started. The gnemron was limp, head down, its thin silver arms and legs swaying as though it were a scarecrow in the breeze.
Gnemron only wore bodies to make humans comfortable, she’d heard. They were energy beings. But the bodies seemed to have presence. They seemed to be alive.
“It’s dead,” she whispered.
“Life signs slowed but present, ma’am,” the computer reported.
“But it’s not breathing,” she said. The computer repeated the message, so she walked around the body as best she could with the railing between them and the pain in her back. Nothing held it. It just floated.
Suddenly, its fingers tensed. The smooth, tear-drop-shaped head, which had been dangling loosely forward, jerked up.
“Are you okay?” Anna shouted.
The gnemron turned until it faced her.
“I can’t walk forward,” it said.
“What?”
“Beyond five hours, there is nothing. I can’t walk there.”
“You can see the future?”
“I can drop this body and move through the past and the future,” it said, floating to the catwalk. She jerked back instinctively when it touched solid ground, though she couldn’t say why. It just unsettled her. “You see the liquid here?”
“Yes,” she said.
“It’s not conduit sludge,” it said. “It’s mercury. And it’s headed for the fuel processor in engine one.”
“Dear God,” Anna said. “Where did it come from?”
“It’s a temporal anomaly,” it said. “Like the duck. Like the things that bit you.”
“How do you know about that?”
“I’ll be with you when we tell Captain Heesh. Before the mercury hits the engine. Before the explosion.”
She closed her eyes, trying not to think about death but thinking about it anyway.
“How long do we have?” she asked as she texted, “Emergency meeting observation deck ASAP.”
“Long enough,” the gnemron said.
“That’s reassuring,” she said. “Will we die?”
When it didn’t answer, she set her navigator to the elevator and turned to follow the red dot. But she collapsed and grabbed the railing again. The gnemron slipped its arm around her waist. It was smooth like metal but warm like flesh.
“I’m alright,” she said, shrugging its hand away.
“I’m not,” it said. “To be blinded is impossible. It’s normal for my kind to see our own deaths. To be blind means time itself . . . time itself stops.”
“In five hours?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, I guess I’ll take your help. Let’s move.”
#
Captain Heesh stared out at the stars. A gnarly old bureaucrat, the captain was less capable of original thought than the ship’s computer. Heesh had been a field promotion; thirty years earlier, the previous captain got his skull crushed in a cargo release. She had liked the old captain. The Jaguar, they used to call him. Though Anna was the only crew member besides Heesh to remember the Jaguar, the newer folks had taken to the nickname she and her shipmates had invented for Heesh: The Little Kitty.
“There’s no policy for this,” Heesh said finally, turning from the window.
“No, I suspect not,” the gnemron said. “Where’s Peters?”
“He’s outside working on one of our many problems,” Heesh said.
“May I summon him?”
“Why?”
“Because he will come up with a last-ditch plan to save us.”
Slowly, Anna, the captain, and the security officer, Todorov, looked at the gnemron, disgust and confusion on their faces.
“Damn time travelers,” Heesh said, turning back to his stars. “Why can’t you tell us?”
“Because I like Peters,” the gnemron said. “Besides, he’s convincing. You don’t believe me.”
“It doesn’t take a time traveler to guess that,” Heesh said, snapping around to stare at the place on the gnemron’s face where eyes might have been. “How can time stop? How can things appear out of nowhere? How can creatures appear in the bilges? How can mercury appear in the conduit sludge?”
“So, you don’t believe me, either?” Anna shouted from her chair. She hadn’t noticed her jaw tense, but it had some time during the captain’s barrage of uncertainty. “I know what I saw.”
“Mercury could only get into the bilges if someone put it there.”
“And stuffed an animal into our engine, too?”
The captain paused.
“A unique sabotage, I admit,” he stammered.
“Captain,” Todorov said. “Before the explosion, I was off duty in bed. And I awoke, because I swore I’d touched something.” He paused. “There were shadows around the bed. A big group, not moving. I closed my eyes, telling myself I was dreaming. When I opened them, they were gone. Ten minutes later, we were space debris.”
Heesh looked at the normally-stoic security officer and shook his head. Then he spoke into his wrist unit, “Text Peters come inside. Brief him on mercury situation.” As he lowered his arm, he asked again, but this time in a softer, more reverential tone, “How can time just stop? I don’t understand.”
“Neither do I,” said the gnemron.
“Oh.”
“Perhaps the easiest way for humans to imagine time is like DNA in a double helix, but the action happens along the backbones instead of the covalent bonds. The backbones are like alternate universes. The bonds between them repair paradoxes. Of course, timelines aren’t molecules, or even matter, nor are they energy, though they function like waves. I can travel either direction along our timeline.
“But if you turn off a microwave, the waves don’t cease to exist. They flow away, dissipating. Time is doing the opposite. The waves are growing faster. But somehow, in a few hours, the waves cease.”
“What’s a microwave?” Peters asked as he stepped through the door onto the observation deck.
“Anna, tell him,” the gnemron said.
“How old do you think I am?” she asked, folding her arms over her chest. “We didn’t have microwaves when I was a kid.”
“So, what’s your plan, Peters?” Heesh asked.
Peters’ cheeks flushed red and he chewed his lip.
“There’s no plan. No way of stopping it. The problem isn’t the initial exposure; that’ll just halt the engine. But it’ll leave mercury gas in the chambers. When the mercury clears and we’re running sludge again, the extra connectivity will blow us into such an intense warp we’ll end up half a parsec from here. Assuming we don’t evaporate.”
“We won’t,” the gnemron said. “Not with just one engine.”
“So, we’ll float in space off our nav path, lost to Imperium rescue ships, until we suffocate. We can put up a relay, but without a fixed reference, rescue ships’ll never find us.”
For a moment, Anna wanted to cry. Not because death was so close, but because life had been so useless. More than a hundred years moving boxes around. They could have been the same boxes for all she knew. A hundred years of hearing friends had been mashed by cylinders or electrocuted or blown up on ratty death ships by companies looking for the insurance.
“And the planet?” the gnemron asked.
“What planet?” the captain and Peters asked at the same time. But Peters continued, “You mean that rock in the 10-b system?”
“Yes, that rock. That’s half a parsec, isn’t it?”
“Well, it’s theoretically possible to hit orbit and be slowed by the gravitational pull. Then we can take the drop ship,” Peters said. “From there we can establish a fixed relay. Computer, how is guidance?”
“Seventy-six percent, sir,” the computer said.
“Not great. At our speed, we might overshoot and end up lost after all. Or impact the surface with enough force to drill halfway through it. Computer, is 10-b-4 an inhabited world?”
“No registered inhabitants, sir.”
“Good,” Peters said. “Just in case.”
“Fine,” Heesh said. “Computer, set for orbit of 10-b-4 but hold power on life support mode. How long until the explosion?”
“I cannot say,” the computer said.
“Okay, let’s try this: How long until the mercury reaches the engine?”
“Fifteen minutes, sir,” the computer said.
“And until time stops?”
“I cannot say,” the computer said.
“We have perhaps four and a half hours,” the gnemron said. Anna wondered if she detected melancholy in the words. It was so hard to read emotions without a face.
“Well,” Heesh said. “Anything anyone wants to do before time ends?”
Everyone was silent. Peters put his hands in his pockets, and Todorov cleared his throat.
“Personally,” Anna said, pushing herself to her feet. “I’m going to get some nanobots for this pain in my ass.”
#
Her breath caught in her throat and her stomach seemed to twirl as the thud of the engine going offline shook the ship. For thirty slow seconds, the ship wasn’t generating oxygen. Then the emergency power kicked on and illuminated the medlab in blue light.
Anna lay belly-down on the table. A white tube ran from a steel box mounted to the ceiling and punctured the skin of her hip over the ilium. As the nano dispenser burrowed into her, she clutched the pillow and took a deep breath.
“Computer, secure patient for warp,” she said. Restraints emerged from the table around her like tendrils. They snaked through the air before locking her down and drawing tight. She gripped the pillow again and said, “And get this tube out—”
And the engine exploded. She felt the choking pressure of the warp, growing, growing, growing, and she went limp upon the operating table.
#
The next few moments of her life were no more than a catalog of images, fuzzy and splashed with blurry colors like the two-dimensional paintings of the retro artists. There were orange streaks and gray arabesques. There were cafe and black hands reaching for her, fingers intertwining with her own dark hands, which were dripping scarlet. There was the silver, smooth face of the gnemron. Then there were roiling clouds, pink and white, and the next thing she knew, Peters’ voice echoed in her brain, saying, “Put in your code, Anna. Your code.”
“One hundred and . . .” she said, then sighed. “Forty . . . uh . . . hundred . . .”
“You need to type it,” Peters said, “or the tube won’t disengage.”
She turned and saw the feeder for the nano dispenser lying among the rose-colored rocks around her. He pushed a keypad toward her. She took it and held it in her shaking hands, doing nothing with it.
“Type,” he said.
Finally, the command forced its way through the fuzz in her mind and she typed her password, 144.100.64.36. The nano dispenser fell away like an old scab.
“What happened?” she asked. She rubbed her eyes, then realized there was blood all over her hands.
“You were lucky,” Peters said. “A piece of equipment fell and shattered your skull. If you hadn’t been hooked up to that dispenser, you’d be dead.”
“Am I okay?”
“You’ll survive,” Peters said, then looked toward the gnemron, who was exploring a nearby rock pile. “At least until time stops.”
“What happened?” she asked.
Peters bit his lip.
“There was—”
“Never mind. Sorry. I know. Where are we?”
“We’re on 10-b-4,” Todorov said as the gnemron returned from its explorations.
“Everything is pink,” she said.
“Yes. Lots of rhodochrosite.”
“I can breathe,” she said, still staring at the blood on her hands.
“It’s not completely natural,” Todorov said. “Peters gave us respiration pills when you woke up in the drop ship. Still, it’s pretty tasty air for a random rock, don’t you think?”
“Where’s . . .?” she started, but trailed off, having trouble gripping her thoughts. “Where’s Heesh?”
The three souls around her were silent, so silent she knew their answer before Peters finally said, “The drop ship got stuck. He saved us.”
“Guess you’re up to bat,” Todorov said to her.
“Dear God,” she said. The last step. A ship with a dead captain was 60 percent more likely to net insurance money; maybe it was sympathy for the dead, and maybe there would be no one to testify how run-down the vessel was. She wanted to point to Todorov and scream, ‘No, it’s on you!’ Instead, she said, “The company’s not going to like this.”
She tried to stand, expecting the pain of her recent fall or inflamed joints or anything, but she felt nothing. Until she stood. Then, she felt a sweeping nausea. She stumbled forward, grasping the gnemron’s arm. There was a cold feeling in her throat, and she retched.
A streak of orange goo shot out of her mouth and hit the pink stones at her feet.
“Are those nanos?” she asked. “I’ve never had a dose that big.” She snorted, still tasting the sugary residue of nanos on her tongue. Then she shook her head. “Okay. Are we wrecked?”
“Drop ship’s intact, but the mother ship is wasted,” Peters said. He pointed to the sharp mountain jutting up in front of them. Though it was rosy pink at the base, its peak was black with old lava. “If we can climb that mountain, we can send up the fixed relay.”
“How long until . . .”
“I don’t know,” the gnemron said. “I can’t move outside of this body. The waves of the timeline are too fast. Could be two hours. Could be any second.”
Anna found a large rock, its pink and red layers like strawberry cake. She sat on it.
“What’s the point?” she mumbled, digging her toe around in the loose earth. She touched her face and realized there was a film on it. Blood. The nanos didn’t clean the outside. She couldn’t imagine what she must look like, hair and skin caked with blood.
“Captain, we need orders,” Todorov said.
“Climb that mountain and wait for the universe to end,” Anna muttered. Todorov cursed. Peters shook his head. But the gnemron sat down beside her, its stick-thin legs akimbo like a bent paperclip.
“I found it interesting how, when faced with the ship’s explosion, you chose to seek medical treatment. That showed hope for survival.”
“I did that because I was sick of my ass hurting,” she said. Then, she cocked her head and said, “What will the end of time be like?”
“For you, painless.”
“But not for you?”
“Have you ever touched a flame and recoiled instinctively?”
“Of course.”
“We react that way to paradoxes. My energy will pull backward, away from the paradox, away from the heat, but since there is no ‘away,’ I’ll be burned alive.”
“Dear—”
“Don’t say ‘God,’ Anna, or I swear—” Todorov started.
But Peters slapped him in the arm and said, “Shh, I’m getting life readings.”
“Let’s get up that mountain,” Anna said. “Todorov, do you have pistols for us all, should we need them?”
“Pistols yeah, but let’s not talk about ammo,” Todorov said as he jogged to the drop ship.
“You’re sounding like a leader now,” the gnemron told her.
“Thanks,” she said. “But I don’t want to.”
Todorov returned and passed out pistols and sprinter units. Wordlessly, they strapped the sprinters to their ankles, then stood in a semicircle. And she thought, if they’re waiting for orders, they aren’t getting them from me.
The propulsion from the sprinters made climbing the mountain as easy as climbing a ladder in a spacesuit. She expected her typical ankle pain, but felt nothing. Too bad time was about to stop. Even if it didn’t, she was a captain and a liability.
“Explain the duck,” Anna said to the gnemron.
“I suspect the anomalies are from our experiences,” it said.
“So, I summoned it?”
“You or Todorov,” the gnemron said. “Someone from earth.”
“And the thing that bit me?”
Peters bounced closer to them and said, “Where I grew up, we call them gloss bats.”
“But what about the shapes in my bedroom?” Todorov asked.
The others grew quiet, the only sound their soft thuds against the black rocks of the top of the mountain.
They reached the top after five minutes of scaling, and Anna saw the world: a thousand snaking valleys and gorges all pink as the clouds they’d fallen through, rivers of silvery liquid running through some of them. Mercury.
Besides the silver, the only things which broke the pink landscape were massive monolithic crystals springing up like ancient trees. They were smooth and twisted from centuries of wind, some collapsed into shattered fragments. And in the valley directly below them, too, there were fallen crystals. But there was nothing random about their placement. Sixteen pillars had been arranged in a hexadecagon.
“Look,” she said, pointing down to it.
“What if that’s what . . . stops time?” Todorov asked.
Peters swallowed and unfolded the fixed relay. As soon as its wings were out, they began spinning and it hovered in the air.
Anna turned from the crystals below and shouted, “System aware?”
“Yes ma’am,” the computer said from the fixed relay.
“System accepts ID 144.100.64.36. as captain?”
“Yes, ma’am,” the computer said.
“Okay,” she said. “Send a distress signal.”
Without another word, the transmitter shot up into the air, where it stayed, invisible to the eyes until it projected a beam of yellow light that seemed to pierce the sky. Confident it was working, she looked back down at the crystals below her.
“Still,” Anna said. “Maybe we should go down there. What do you think, gnemron?”
“Maybe,” the gnemron said.
And the crew began their descent.
#
The sound of the compression unit blowing on the sprinter was a soft, short click, but Peters’scream as he lost control and tumbled down the mountain was long and sustained.
All three crew members chased after him, but even with sprinters, Anna had to find footing along the slippery lava rock. By the time she caught up to him, he was on the ground moaning, his leg twisted and blood-soaked.
She kneeled at his side and said, “Todorov, did you grab a repair kit?” He didn’t answer, so she turned to see him and the gnemron standing ten feet away, their bodies below the waist refracted through a massive quartz. Peters had fallen inside the hexadecagon.
“Get in here and help,” Anna shouted.
“I’m not sure we should,” the gnemron said.
“That wasn’t a question.”
Todorov nodded and climbed over the crystal. Once he was inside, he rushed to Peters and threw his backpack down.
“I’ve got a repair kit, but no nanos. Still, at least we can set it.”
Anna nodded before realizing the gnemron still stood outside the crystals.
“Come on,” she said. “I know you can set bones.”
The gnemron looked to either side, then climbed over the quartz. It was barely to Peters when the hissing began. At each of the sixteen corners, a shape materialized. They were nothing but black forms at first, flickering like the shadows cast by fire. But they resolved quickly enough, sixteen figures surrounding them in black robes.
“The witnesses have arrived,” a hissing voice said. She couldn’t tell who had spoken. As one, the creatures threw off their robes, revealing tall, porous bodies and an asymmetrical arrangement of six arms or feelers on their left sides. Like Earth sea sponges, they had no definable heads.
“Naidyalal,” the gnemron whispered.
“Are they dangerous?”
“Everything is dangerous to something,” the gnemron said.
Anna frowned and whispered, “Thanks.”
“Begin the sacrifice,” the voice said.
“Sacrifice?” Todorov shouted, standing. “No!” He lifted his pistol and fired before Anna could finish shouting, “Wait!”
But the bullet obeyed. It hung in the air inches from the barrel before exploding into shrapnel. Anna screamed and put her arm in front of her face. When she looked again, the shrapnel hung in an invisible sphere in the air, then clattered to the ground like hail.
“Begin the sacrifice,” the voice said again.
The hissing sound intensified.
“What’s that noise?” Anna whispered.
“Their larvae,” the gnemron said.
The naidyalal untwisted their top feelers and revealed small, round jars full of greenish liquid, curling, tadpole-like shapes swimming within.
“I won’t let you kill us,” Todorov said.
There was a sound like crackling electricity.
“What’s that?” Anna asked.
“They’re laughing at us,” the gnemron said. Then, to the sentries around them, “You don’t have to do this.”
“Yes, little gnemron, we do,” the voice said. Before it finished, another, or the same voice somehow layered over itself, said, “It is ordained.”
“The cessation of time?” the gnemron asked. The crackling increased in pitch and volume.
“Time doesn’t stop,” the voice said. “It forks. Naidyalal, lift.”
The sixteen figures lifted their jars above their heads.
“What are in those jars?” Peters asked the gnemron, his voice a soft moan.
“It’s their larval form. They’re not going to kill us. It’s an autosacrifice.”
“Those are their children?” Todorov asked, raising his gun again.
“No, Todorov, those larvae are earlier versions of themselves. They’re about to cause a paradox. Or, rather, sixteen major paradoxes at once.”
“Dear God,” Anna said. And the Naidyalal threw the spherical jars into the air. The gnemron leaped forward to try to catch one, but the hexadecagon was too wide. The jars rained onto the ground, exploding in a spray of liquid and glass. As soon as they hit, the figures at each of the corners and the jars themselves disappeared. There was nothing else—no crackling laughter, no hissing tears. 10-b-4 was a silent planet.
“Is that it?” Todorov asked as the gnemron stood.
“I feel sick,” Peters mumbled. Anna turned to him, but her vision streaked, rainbows chasing everything she saw. She, too, felt nauseated with an intensity she’d only previously felt as a teenager doing weightlessness training. She felt as though she were spinning. She lifted her hand, and for a moment saw four hands, twenty fingers. Beyond her hands, the night on 10-b-4 was black and starless. She tried to remember when the sun had set.
“What’s happening?” she yelled to anyone.
“Time isn’t stopping,” the gnemron said. “It’s splitting. The two universes are becoming four.”
Anna wasn’t sure if she was standing or lying down, but she turned, or rolled, to face the gnemron. But instead of one, she saw four, each with the same thin limbs and small torsos, all of them turning back to her slowly, impossibly slowly, leaving streaks of silver as they turned.
“My head,” she mumbled while rubbing her eyes.
Then, the universe tore open.
In front of her was an opening, a jagged portal. The world on the other side looked identical to 10-b-4 before the sun had disappeared. She turned again to the gnemron and again she saw four, each with a different opening in front of it, each facing a different universe. From the side, the openings were thin lines of wavering energy. All gnemron stepped forward, and the portals behind them faded.
She twisted again and saw Peters, his arm around Todorov for support. Four times, Todorov was carrying Peters.
“Come on,” Peters said, his voice echoing from four mouths.
Then she looked to her left. And saw herself looking to her left two times over. Saw the back of her own head. But the very last Anna looked her right in the eyes. Already the universes were deviating; already Anna’s four sets of memories of this event would be different. She turned back to Todorov and Peters, but they were already gone. Everything was gone. It wasn’t night; things were just gone—the spinning transmitter, the mountain, the sky of pink and white clouds. Everything outside the crystals was gone. The only way back to her universe was to step through.
She took a deep breath and braced herself.
“No,” she said, surprised with herself.
She turned, expecting to find the other Annas staring at her again, but they had left after she’d taken her deep breath. The portals to their worlds hung open as hers did. Anna looked at the other openings, where there already was an Anna. Where she could be something else. Not a captain. Not a company lifer. She moved through the portal. But not the portal to her universe. She picked the universe to her left. And the portals closed behind her.