Chapter 17

Something hard, jabbing her in the center of her forehead.

Then the rhythmic sigh of crashing waves and the distant, anxious cries of gulls.

Light, pressing against her eyelids. A warm, generally pleasant sort of light, but nothing special. Not the sort of light you’d want to see upon your death. It was the sort of light that would give you a decent tan but also a nasty sunburn if you stayed in it too long. Dependent on your species, of course. Buuglubians, for example, wouldn’t burn. They’d dry up and get all sticky.

The jab again. Just a jolt of pain that quickly faded away into the dark and was forgotten. Ignored.

That’s right, there were species, weren’t there? Tons of them. Endless forms most beautiful, of intelligences strange and terrible and annoying and lovely, but most of the time simply being, out among the endless glory of the stars. She knew that, somehow. Whoever she was. But there was a time that she hadn’t, a time when the stars had been little more than a painting to her. Pretty to look at, but unreal. Untouchable. Her life had been much less complicated, then. Horrible, yes, full of fear. But less confusing. The memories of that simplicity were growing more distant every day.

Jab. Jab jab. Jab jab JAB.

Pain dragged Olyrean back to higher consciousness in much the same way a cat who’s fallen into a tar pit would be taken for a bath. On some level the cat knows a bath is called for, but that doesn’t stop it from hating everything about it and being very annoyed with the poor sap who’s got to carry them to it.

“Ow! Ow, stop it!” she snapped, sitting up. Immediately she grimaced and shaded her eyes as they adjusted to the light.

A cool breeze tousled her sunflower hair, carrying with it the scent of salt. Stretching out to either side of her was a beach of fine white sand lapped at by a gentle sea, teased by the waters in much the same way an old couple, comfortable with each other, might flirt. This sea and these sands had known each other for a very long time, one felt. Possibly forever.

Also sitting before her was a large, dried-out potato wearing a robe. That was an odd thing for a potato to be doing. But even as she thought this, the potato reached up and jabbed her in the forehead with a knobbly stick.

“Hey!” she cried.

“Awake yet?” it said, with a voice that sounded like its vocal cords had been in a bad car accident and resuscitated against medical advice.

This was also very odd behavior for a potato, so Olyrean decided it probably wasn’t one. “Yes, yes, I am–no, no, stop that,” she said, as the not-potato went to jab her again. “Who are you?”

“Rupert,” said the not-potato simply. He drew back his stick and leaned on it, staring at her.

Olyrean got a good look at him. This…thing…was an extraordinary creature–barely half her height, and so wrinkled and wizened that his species was completely indeterminable. He had small tufts of wispy white hair over what might have once been ears, and the shapeless gray robe he wore looked to be…a bathrobe?

“Rupert,” she said. “Right.”

She looked around. The beach she sat on seemed to go on forever. Behind her, where the sands should have climbed to shore, there was just more beach instead. But it wasn’t as if she was on a small sandbar, no. It was simply that in every direction she looked, there was a beach. The same exact beach, with Rupert standing there, staring up at her. Her head swam.

“Where am I?” she asked.

“You’re on Vacation,” said Rupert.

Slowly, Olyrean stood. Rupert made some curious croaks and grunts, as though he were annoyed that she had the gall to take up more space than she previously had. She wobbled, her legs unsteady beneath her. “Vacation?” she asked.

“Yes,” Rupert snapped irritably. “That’s the name of the island. Didn’t you listen?” No longer able to so easily jab her in the head, he settled for hitting her shin with his stick. Olyrean resisted the urge to punt him into the waves.

“Yes, but where is that?” she asked. She remembered why she was here in the first place. “Is this where the previous liberation team is? Is this where Korak is?”

“Oh, there’s some others here, yes,” Rupert said. “Terrible really. Never meant to be like this, no. Youngsters really mucking up the place with their loud music. Drugs and orgies, too, probably. Not that they’re any good at it. Now back in my day, we knew how to have a proper orgy–”

Olyrean swiftly interrupted him. She didn’t know where this place was, or why, exactly, this octogenarian was here, or even whether these ‘youngsters’ really were who she was looking for, but she was absolutely certain she did not want to hear this little goblin prattle on about orgies.

“Well,” she said, “if you might take me to them, I could get them out of your hair.” She took a good look over his head, barren as the scarred desert surface of a moon, one with lots of seismic activity. “Or, uh, off your hands.”

Rupert snorted at her, eyeing her sideways, or at least she thought that gleaming wrinkle in his face might be an eye. “Doubt it,” he muttered. “Most likely you’ll just join in with them. But fine, fine, I’ll take you.”

He gave a short, sharp whistle, and the sand beneath him rumbled.

Olyrean scrambled backwards, while Rupert himself merely stepped aside calmly, as long, slender limbs clawed their way out from the earth. Clawing seemed like the wrong descriptor, though. It was done with too much grace. The limbs danced up from the earth, they bloomed, pale and hard as stone, first one, then two, then six, weaving amongst each other, many-jointed and yet as familiar and comfortable as the sighing branches of trees.

Next emerged a lithe and beautiful body, and then a completely smooth, blank face. The creature made a small grating sound as it moved, a whisper of stone on stone. Except that wasn’t quite right, either. It was beautiful, the noise it made, as though someone had found a way to make an elegant instrument out of grinding rocks together. Sand ran off the creature in rivulets as it rose above them.

It was one of the dancers, the alien life forms whose statues blocked the door to the hidden tunnels in the Grand Temple. Only as the creature came to stand before Rupert, perfectly still, Olyrean immediately understood. “They never were statues,” she gasped. “They were–they were always these things.”

Though by all rights he should have no idea what she was talking about, Rupert chuckled. “That’s right,” he said. “Though they’re pretty good at being statues too, I think. Poor things are a bit shy. They don’t like to move when people are watching. Not unless you tell them to. Hup!”

He gave the creature a knock on one of its shins with his stick, and it gently picked the shriveled old man up and placed him upon its back. With another tap on its head it began to amble its way down the beach. Olyrean followed after them, watching with awe as the creature delicately danced its way across the sand. “What is it?” she asked.

“An angel. Hah!” Rupert chortled to himself and very nearly toppled off the creature’s back. “So he calls them. A prototype, more like.”

“Who calls them that?”

The old man waved his stick idly. “Oh, he’s got a lot of names. What’s he calling himself these days…? Oh yeah, The Radiant One. I call him Raddy. We’re close like that, you understand.”

“I see…”

Rupert patted the creature beneath him fondly. “Y’see, back before, well, before there was much of anything at all, I suppose…ol’ Raddy was obsessed with coming up with the perfect design for life. This was one of his first tries. Then he went and got totally obsessed with eyes and flaming wheels and wings…really wacko stuff. Bit of an artistic phase, if you ask me. Eventually I says to him, Raddy, I says, you’re going about this all wrong. You gotta look at the diversity of environments you’ve got in this place–”

“I’m sorry, which place?”

“Reality, girl. Try to keep up. Anyway, I says, you’re never going to make something so perfect that it can survive everywhere, and you’ll kill yourself trying to design everything. Look, why not let the universe design them for you? You’ve got all the tools for evolution right here. And he says, Ohhh, Rupert, I dunno, we’ll have to wait a few billion years at least for anything interesting to happen. Like he’s got somewhere to be!”

Olyrean’s poor tortured brain tried to process what this man was saying. He looked old, but not that old. Of course there were a billion other things wrong with what he was saying, but she had been through so many exhausting experiences recently that, quite honestly, she gave up on trying to make sense of everything. She grasped instead at the first question that floated to her mind.

“But…Quizbar’s got so many species that seem completely designed,” she said. “Didn’t he make those?”

“Ah, see! Evolution’s just as good as intentional design at creating a species with a specific purpose, if you give it enough time. All you’ve got to do is fiddle with the fitness function.”

“How do you do that?”

“Kinks!” the old man cackled. “You want a species that makes a good chair? Make them get all hot and bothered by four sturdy legs and lumbar support. One that brews alcohol? Let them get turned on by the smell of fermenting fruit. It gets reinforced over the generations. You’d be amazed what could be done with kinks, given enough time.”

“Oh, come on, though,” Olyrean said. “What sort of species is attracted to lumbar support?”

“You’re right,” Rupert said dryly. “How silly of me. We should stick to the normal sorts of kinks. Such as, to take an example entirely at random, scuba gear.”

Olyrean’s ears burned. “No I don’t!” she shouted. “You can’t prove–”

“Anyway,” Rupert went on over her frantic denials, “Ol’ Raddy, he toyed around with that idea for a while, but I don’t really know what he’s up to anymore. He’s seemed a little out of it for the past few billion years. You ask me, it looks like he’s just letting evolution run its course, but then again, who knows with him. Did you know this place was meant to be his retirement home? But he insists on hanging out with…well, with your sort. Ah, here we are.”

They stamped their way up a small dune and there, stretched out before them, was a small beach party. Two humanoids were playing a game of volleyball against a team consisting of a beetle and a blob of purple slime. They all wore bikinis, including the beetle and the slime, into which the bikini was sinking and slowly dissolving.

A series of reclining chairs were lined up before the waves, and lying on two of them were Korak and a black-and-orange banded snake. They wore bikinis too. Very annoying ukulele music carried to them over the breeze.

Olyrean left Rupert and the angel behind and approached them. If any of them were at all disturbed or surprised by her presence, none of them showed it. The volleyball players spared her a passing glance and then went back to their game. She walked over to the chairs and stood over Korak and the snake. They appeared to be napping. The small radio nearby crackled a bit and then began the same ukulele song over again.

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

“Hello,” she said loudly.

Korak twitched, and then the lizard man pulled down his sunglasses and glared at her. “Oh,” he said, “It’s you. Hi.”

“It’s me,” Olyrean agreed. “Hi.”

The wind blew and the waves sighed.

“What is all this?” Olyrean asked, gesturing wildly.

Korak misunderstood her frantic gesticulations. “Huh? This?” he adjusted his bikini top. It was very frilly and pink. It sparkled a little bit. “Is this not appropriate swimwear? It was all they had.”

“No,” said Olyrean. “I mean…how did you get here…?”

“Oh.” Korak nodded toward Rupert, who was now trotting up to them on the back of the angel. “One of those things grabbed me, and the next thing I know, I was here.”

“Probably sensed you were stressed,” said Rupert, hopping down with surprising deftness for a man who looked like a stiff breeze might break his hip. “The Radiant One doesn’t want you Americans getting stressed.”

“Yes, well, they could have been a little gentler about it,” said Korak. “Popped my tail right off, see?”

He turned around and pointed. His tail was, indeed, gone. Olyrean took a very deep breath and told herself not to scream.

“No,” she screamed, “I mean–what are you doing here?! What are any of you doing here?”

Her shout echoed out over the waves. The volleyball game stopped as its players all paused to stare at her. The snake sitting next to Korak finally awoke. It opened its eyes, all six of them, and slowly uncurled itself. It was as long as she was tall, and the orange stripes mottled across its body were loud enough that they probably signified its fangs packed a particularly unpleasant sort of venom.

It drew itself up, tail rattling, and peered at her.

“Lady,” it said, “Relax. Have a piña colada.”

It nodded toward a nearby plastic table, where a small silver machine chugged away next to some curved glasses.

Dumbfounded, Olyrean stared at the snake. She looked down at herself. Her Quizbarling robes were covered in sand. The music blared about how amazing it was to be drunk on the beach and how everyone should be doing the Rygilian twist, which from the lyrics she could only surmise was either some sort of stimulant, a dance move, or a particularly arcane and dangerous sex position.

“Okay,” she said.

She walked over to the machine, took a glass, and fiddled with the controls. The machine filled her glass with yellow slush and, as an afterthought, spat out a straw and a tiny umbrella.

Olyrean took a sip and coughed. It was very strong.

She went back to the chairs. Rupert was laid out on one, now, and the angel was slowly burying itself in the sand again. She sat down on the chair, lay back, took another sip of her piña colada, and sighed.

“What are any of you doing here?!” she shouted again.

“We’re on Vacation,” the snake said irritably after it had waved at the volleyball players to keep playing. “Look, who are you?”

“She’s Olyrean, another member of my team,” Korak muttered. He sounded like he was drifting back off to sleep. “She’s a bit high-strung.”

“High-strung!” Olyrean shouted, not helping her case. “You’re–you’re the previous liberation team, aren’t you?”

“Right. Name’s Reessa. Nice to meet you,” said the snake. “Now, I am trying to read, so…” It gestured toward a book lying beside it on the chair. It was titled HISS AND HITMEN and there was an illustration of two snakes in business suits pointing guns at each other on the cover. It looked as if it had never been opened.

“You’re not supposed to be reading,” said Olyrean.

“Good,” murmured Rupert, half-snoring, “Because he wasn’t.”

“You’re not supposed to be on vacation at all!” she finished.

But somewhere inside her, a tiny voice whispered, why not? What else would this place be for?

“Why not?” Reessa echoed. “The Veep told us we could.”

Olyrean froze. “The Veep?” she asked suspiciously. “You mean, Vice President Murtlebix?”

“Right,” Reessa said. “Look. We went to the Shrine of Sacred Origin–oh, you’ve heard of that, good–and it made us, well, hallucinate–must have been some vapors in the air, or something–”

Hallucinations? Was that really all it was? It had all felt so real to her. “I did the same thing,” she said. “I mean, what did you see, while you were, uh, hallucinating? I just saw my family.”

“Exactly,” said Reessa.”

“What’s so horrible about that?”

The snake shared a sideways glance with Korak.

“Mammals,” Korak said, waving a dismissive claw.

“So anyway,” Reessa went on, “Very horrible, and then Murtlebix calls us up and says he knows we’ve been very stressed out, so he and The Radiant One have cooked up a little vacation for us where we won’t be disturbed. And yet here you are, disturbing us.”

“Of course I am–nobody knows where you are! The Radiant One and his priests just tell us you’re on vacation–”

“Well, they’re not wrong, are they?”

“That’s not the point. Everyone thinks you’re in danger. If Murtlebix knew you weren’t, he hasn’t told anyone. Korak, didn’t you tell them about all this?”

“I would have, eventually,” Korak yawned. “But what’s the harm in relaxing here for a little while?”

She was about to tell him what an insane thing this was to say, but then that little voice inside her spoke again.

What does it matter? It murmured to her. What does any of this matter, really. It’s all good. It will all work out fine without you. Have another piña colada. Aren’t the waves so relaxing? Why not take the opportunity? You’ve earned this. You’re never going to find another place like this.

Silently, Olyrean looked out over the waves and across the endless white sands. This was, she realized, the perfect beach. The sort of beach one went to when they wanted their life to melt away. She could feel her eyes beginning to droop already. “No!” she muttered to herself. Then something caught the sun and glinted in her eyes. The snake, she noticed, wore a silver band around its tail. Much like the one around her wrist.

“Do you work for SPECTRA?” she asked, trying to keep her mind engaged, clawing her way out of the pit of unworry and contentment she was sinking into.

“Yes. Agent Reessa. And I can see you do, as well.” The snake curled back into a pile of coils. “If they were worried about what happened to our team, then I’m not surprised they sent you after me. They wouldn’t want to lose someone of my prodigious talent.”

“I suppose I work for them,” she said, though she was definitely beginning to think that SPECTRA had a funny definition of work. “I am only a junior operative, though.”

Reessa stared at her, agog. “A junior operative?” he fumed. Olyrean assumed that the snake was a he, despite the bikini it wore, just because that was the way his voice struck her. Or, at least that whatever alien gender it had, she assumed it would map on most closely to the males of her species. “I’ve been with them for twenty years, and they send nothing but a lowly junior operative after me? The gall!”

“Why was a SPECTRA agent on this team?” Olyrean asked him.

“Why was a SPECTRA agent on your team,” Reessa said snidely.

“To find you, I assume,” Olyrean said. This, she thought, was what SPECTRA was really worried about. They hadn’t wanted egg on their faces after it was revealed that one of their agents had gone missing in such a high-profile manner. “But what were you interested in?”

“Supporting my team,” Reessa said, sounding distinctively defensive.

“I don’t believe you,” said Olyrean. “I read your team’s ‘notes’. They said nothing about the…the Shrine of Sacred Origin, or whatever. You really expect me to believe that you just stumbled on it while you were teaching the Quizbarlings to play hexasoccer?”

“Shut up!” Reessa shouted. He slithered off his chair and closer to her. “SPECTRA does secret missions, you realize that? I know you’re a junior operative, but normally protocol is to not talk about them in public. And they’re on strictly a need-to-know basis.”

“Well, I need-to-know,” she said.

“You?” he scoffed. “Why?”

“Because I’m curious!”

Reessa regarded her disbelievingly. Then he glanced at Korak, who had drifted off again, and then at the rest of his team. “Let’s just say,” he said, leaning in for a sibilant whisper, “that there are certain planes of existence that SPECTRA is interested in reaching. Certain planes of existence full of lots of horrible family members that you thought you’d never see again. You catch my meaning? And they’d like to be the first to know about how to get there. They’d rather not risk messages being intercepted or notes being found. You understand?”

Olyrean wasn’t sure that she did, but she could buy SPECTRA pointlessly demanding secrecy. She stood.

“Alright, then,” she said. “Well, now that I’ve found you–”

“Actually, I found them,” said Korak.

Olyrean glanced at the lizard-man. “No,” she said slowly, “I did.”

“I think we’ll both agree that I was here first,” he pointed out.

“It doesn’t count as finding them,” she shouted very patiently, “if you end up just as trapped as they are!”

“I’m not trapped!” Korak snapped back. “I was just going to have a drink or two and then head back with them! What’s wrong with that?”

This was stupid, Olyrean thought. Fighting was stupid. Her glass was empty, and she very badly wanted another drink. Why not let him have this? What did it matter? In fact, why was she bothering about anything? What did any of it matter at all?

Come on, said that tiny voice again. Throw on a bikini, take a dip and then a nap. You’re only going to be hassled if you continue on. You can stay here forever, if you’d like. You never need to go back to America.

And as much as she liked America, the thought was tempting. Wasn’t it always so chaotic and loud on Moody Blue? America was a constant barrage of endless…endless everything. Information, entertainment, arguments, people, aliens, food; frightening, exhilarating and deeply, deeply weird. And exhausting, sometimes. There were worse ways to spend eternity than on a nice, quiet beach.

What of the Quizbarlings, though? They’d be–well, not doomed, but an invasion probably wouldn’t be pleasant. And The Radiant One, she thought, didn’t deserve to die just because Murtlebix had…she wasn’t sure what the Vice President had done, but she was sure it was something.

But in the end, it wasn’t concern for The Radiant One or the Quizbarlings that kept her going. It was that she was right about this, damn it. She was the one who had found them and she should get the credit.

Shaking off the tiny whispering voice and its soothing temptations, she chose work and stress and America over eternal bliss.

Crossing her arms over her chest, Olyrean gave Korak a hard stare. “A drink or two? That’s all you’ve had?”

“Yes,” he said, but suddenly he sounded uncertain. “Um. I think.”

“Korak,” she said, “you’ve been gone for an entire day.”

Korak dropped his piña colada with a very satisfying look of shock.

“What?” he whispered.

“You’ve been gone for a day,” she repeated slowly, “And it’s already a scandal. The whole mission's aborted, and they’re sending in the fleets. It’s liberation by invasion, now.”

“An invasion?” Korak sputtered. “But they can’t–The Radiant One will just–”

“Are you really so certain that they–that we–wouldn’t have found a way to kill even him?”

Korak’s scales took on a distinctly ashen cast. “How, then?”

“Um,” Olyrean said, “Uh. Well, um, so, say you’ve got a tree. And you don’t know how to kill it.”

“What do you mean?” said Korak. “Just chop it down.”

“No, you can’t–and then, uh, there’s boxes, and the roots go in the boxes–look, the point is that it’s done! Libby told me they had a way to kill The Radiant One and I don’t think she was lying.”

Korak and Reessa were silent for a moment. Rupert watched with some interest.

“Uh oh,” said Korak.

“I don’t even know if the invasion can be stopped at this point,” Olyrean said. “But if anything could do it, it would be to see all of you safe and sound.”

“We’d better get back as soon as possible, then,” said Reessa. He waved to the rest of his team and gave a sharp, sibilant whistle. “Come on, boys! Vacation’s over!” The volleyball players groaned among themselves. The ball fell into the pile of slime with a popping glorp.

“Well, first thing is we need to figure out how to get off this island,” said Olyrean. “My ship’s not here.”

“Oh, that’s no problem,” said Rupert. The old man sipped at his drink and waved idly over the waves. “You’re back from Vacation the moment you truly want to be. Just like all vacations, really.”

“What does that mean?” Olyrean snapped at him. But then she noticed that the endless beach was gone. The white sands and the waves were still there, but no longer did they stretch out to infinity in all directions.

No, they stood on a very mundane slice of Quizbar’s coast, and she knew it was Quizbar because there was a hill sloping up behind them, and on the top of it was the distinct silhouette of the Shrine of Sacred Origin and, parked right beside it, the even more distinct and phallic silhouette of her ship.

“How did you do that?” she asked, but it was too late. Rupert was gone too. The wind caught the tiny paper umbrella left behind in his empty drink glass and blew it away into the waves.