The MVP

6





Sanctuary


QUENTIN, BECCA AND CAPTAIN BUMBERPUFF walked onto a thick, black platform that had formed outside the Touchback’s shuttle bay doors. Dense clouds the color of red apples hung against a brownish-yellow sky. The platform looked out over a sprawling cityscape, strange buildings of black spreading as far as the eye could see.

Bumberpuff’s body vibrated. “Welcome to Sanctuary, our home planet.”

Becca slowly shook her head. “I can’t believe I’m seeing this. It’s beautiful.”

Quentin turned to look at the Touchback. It remained mostly wrapped in the Prawatt ship, an orange jewel embedded in a mountain of living black metal. The Prawatt vessel’s size defied imagination. Was it floating, or had it landed? Quentin couldn’t tell.

“Captain, how long until our ship is fixed?”

“It already is,” Bumberpuff said, his voice dots vibrating, his eye-dots reflecting the clouds’ red light. “There are a few systems that we will keep offline for your return home, but the pirate damage is repaired. The damage was significant — if we hadn’t found you when we did, everyone aboard your ship would have perished.”

Bumberpuff had lied about letting them go, so was it telling the truth now? If it was, the Krakens owed the Prawatt an unpayable debt.

“So what now?” Quentin said.

“I will take you to meet the Old Ones,” Bumberpuff said. “You may leave right after that, if you wish, but perhaps you would consider staying. I would be happy to have you on the Harpies as my main chaser.”

Quentin felt a swell of pride in his chest — he wasn’t sure what team meant to this strange-yet-familiar race, but as far as he was concerned, there was no higher compliment than to ask someone to play by your side.

“I can’t stay, but thank you,” Quentin said.

The platform suddenly fell into shadow. From the far side of the Prawatt ship came a floating monstrosity, a huge, black blimp that had to be a hundred feet wide and maybe twice as long. Dozens of smaller black bubbles clung to the downward slope of its curving sides. Longer, sack-like creatures seemed moored to the oblong’s rear. The creatures had wide, circular mouths lined with a dozen webbed limbs, as if they were bony octopus tentacles joined by loose skin. Over and over, the mouths opened like a spreading hand, stretching so far that Quentin could see through the pinkish membrane, then the hand clutched shut in the blink of an eye.

The oblong’s front looked even more disturbing. There Quentin saw clusters of cables that ended in glass spheres, spheres that he knew were looking at him. Behind those clusters swarmed vastly longer, thinner cables that ended in tapered points.

It was a living, moving, floating demon, the kind of thing reserved for tales of hell and the seven levels of endless torture.


If I had dreamed about this as a kid, I would have peed myself.

“Uh, Captain Bumberpuff? Should we be running or something?”

“Don’t be afraid,” Bumberpuff said. “Jenny Twoshoes is harmless. She’s here to take us to the Old Ones. Are you ready?”

That black, tentacled thing had a name? Jenny wasn’t exactly the name you’d expect for a demon. What other surprises were in store?

Quentin looked at Becca. She nodded. She remained wide-eyed and disbelieving, yet her demeanor made her thoughts easy to read — if Quentin was going, she would go with him.

“We’re ready,” Quentin said. “Do we take a grav-lift up or something?”

“Or something,” Bumberpuff said. “I imagine you are not used to what is about to happen. Just try to remember one thing.”

“Which is?”

“Don’t panic.”

The floating ship’s cluster of tentacles fluttered and flexed, then three extended down like long black snakes sliding through the air. Quentin fought the urge to run, mostly because there was nowhere to run; that hexagonal reject from a Dinolition match was still inside the shuttle bay, and the platform on which he stood had to be a thousand feet above the alien city.

The black tentacle’s tapered tip reached him, slid around his waist three times, and then suddenly he was falling up, racing toward the huge black airship. Wind rushed across his face, locking his breath in his chest. The tentacle gently lowered him to a small, flat space lined with black, waist-high, U-shaped bars. He grabbed one of these handholds and held on tight.

Another tentacle lightly put Becca down next to him. She was wide-eyed, her face frozen in a laugh of surprise and amazement.

Bumberpuff landed last. “Did you enjoy the ride?”

Quentin shrugged. “Well, I didn’t puke. In my book, that’s really something.”

The black airship started to move. Quentin looked down at the Touchback. Even from here, he couldn’t see the entire Prawatt warship and his team bus looked like a plastic toy.

They floated above a black city nestled in a black landscape. Like the Sklorno worlds he had visited, civilization covered everything. Strange buildings as far as the eye could see, yet this wasn’t the usual ocean of concrete and crysteel. Something about the city beneath reminded him of a coral reef, countless parts merging together into a unified whole.

It felt alive, and as he stared he understood why — the city was moving. Sanctuary’s surface seemed to pulse, to vibrate. Ripples rolled through the endless city, making the structures move like underwater plants pulled by the slightest of currents.

“It’s amazing,” Quentin said. “This makes our cities look … well, kind of dead.”

“Life covers Sanctuary,” Bumberpuff said. “It is not the life that you know, but life it is.”

A tap on his arm. Becca, directing his attention the other way. There, Quentin saw things flying, flapping. Only the texture and color of their skin identified them as Prawatt. Wide black wings beat at the air, propelling bodies of several shapes. Some looked like streamlined, gleaming animals, others were solid cubes, and still others resembled the black bubbles of Jenny Twoshoes.

Quentin pointed at the fliers. “Are those Prawatt, or something else?”

“They are Prawatt,” Bumberpuff said. “I am an Explorer, our basic adult form. As Explorers join and combine to find the next level of life, they can create new and unique shapes. Some opt to fly.”

Quentin saw a familiar shape streak in from the direction of the Touchback. It was the gray-winged Doc Patah, who flew in a tight loop around the square-shaped Prawatt flier. Behind Doc came Shizzle, his Creterakian body and wings resplendent in glittering silver. The more streamlined Prawatt banked and gave chase. Quentin was worried for a moment, but relaxed when he saw all of the fliers angling and circling each other — they were playing, having fun with the freedom of the open sky.

The wonders continued. He saw a marvel beyond any he’d seen on other planets — a hexagonal building with a flying buttress supporting each corner. Each one of the twisting, gleaming black buttresses was at least a thousand feet high, a skyscraper unto itself. At their tops, they angled toward a central spire, merged into it, supported it, allowing that spire to rise so high its top vanished into the red clouds.

“Amazing,” Quentin said. “That middle part looks like it’s a mile high.”

“A mile?” Bumberpuff said. “How quaint. The building is nine hundred and thirty-one meters tall. Or in your archaic, completely random and utterly nonsensical measuring system, one-point-two miles. It is the tallest construct in the history of universe, taller than anything ever built by Humans or Ki or Quyth or Creterakians. That is where we are going.”

The city passed by beneath Jenny Twoshoes. The closer they got to the massive building, the taller it seemed.

Becca pointed up, to where the building disappeared into the clouds. “Is that where we will meet the Old Ones?”

“In a way,” Bumberpuff said. “In some regards, that is where she lives.”

“She?” Becca said. “That’s singular. Are we meeting just one of the Old Ones?”

“She is many, she is one,” the captain said. “No one knows how many individuals have joined her. The numbers are lost to our history. She is made up of hundreds of thousands of Prawatt, maybe even millions.”

Quentin remembered his lessons with Michael Kimberlin, remembered the chapters of a book called Earth: The Birthplace of Sentients. The Prawatt didn’t mate like other species. When two individuals wanted to join, they literally combined to become a new sentient.

Such a strange way to exist. He might marry someday, might have kids of his own, but doing so wouldn’t end his existence or the existence of his wife. Humans didn’t die to have babies.

The black ship closed in on the building. Structures beneath Jenny had to be huge skyscrapers unto themselves, but they were so far below they looked like a child’s set of blocks. Up above, he finally saw the building’s spire — it looked like a metal statue of some kind, a statue of a Human girl.

Made up of gold, silver and other metals, it had to be a hundred feet tall, at least. Long hair angled down over one eye. Her clothes seemed to be of ancient-Earth style, and a large purse or bag hung over one shoulder.

“Captain, who is that statue supposed to be?”

“Our creator,” Bumberpuff said. “In your culture, in all the cultures but ours, the creators are imaginary, constructs of primitive minds that couldn’t understand the universe around them. Somehow, these gods were carried forward as Humans and other sentients discovered the sciences and developed advanced technologies. Your gods were interpreted in a thousand different ways — and that was easy to do because your gods are made-up stories of something that never existed at all. But our creator? She made us. And she looked exactly like that.”

“Wow,” Quentin said. “She was really tall.”

Bumberpuff’s body rattled with a sudden shivering. “You are making a joke?”

Quentin laughed. “Yeah. Good one, huh?”

“Humor is in the mind of the beholder,” the captain said, then rattle-shook one more time, which Quentin took to mean the captain thought the joke was funny as hell.

Jenny Twoshoes slowed near the statue’s base. Ship-tentacles reached up, slid around Quentin’s and Becca’s waists, lifted them and set them in front of the statue’s huge feet. Another tentacle placed Bumberpuff down next to them.


“Quentin, Rebecca, I can’t properly describe the significance of this honor,” the captain said. “Very few of us actually get to see the Old Ones, and no non-Prawatt ever has.”

Quentin wondered what the Old Ones would look like. “Have you seen her before?”

“Never in person,” Bumberpuff said. “This is the high point of my life. Quentin, I know that we are not friends, and that we have only recently met, but could I please ask a personal favor of you?”

Quentin shrugged. “Sure, why not?”

“Please don’t embarrass me.”

Now, Quentin laughed. Did his reputation precede him into this alien land?

“Sure, Cappy,” he said. “I’ll be a good boy.”

The toe of a ten-foot-high boot rose up on an unseen hinge. Inside, Quentin saw an elevator platform. Bumberpuff walked onto it. Quentin and Becca followed.

“This is so cool,” Becca said. “How far down is the Old One, er, Old Ones?”

“We will take this elevator to the surface,” Bumberpuff said.

“There, we have a short walk to take us below this building.”

“Below?” Quentin said. “That’s kind of weird. Your Old Ones don’t live in this amazing building? They live beneath the city?”

Bumberpuff rattle-shook again, far harder this time.

“She’s not under the city,” the captain said. “The Old Ones is the city.”

? ? ?



A FOREST IS A LIVING THING. At least, that’s what they told Quentin back in grade school, before he didn’t score high enough on his third-grade measurement exams and they sent him to the mines. The teachers told him a forest is an ecosystem, a web of interrelated organisms that are in balance. Even as a kid, he’d known the concept of balance was nonsense — a predator doesn’t think about managing prey population, a predator eats what a predator can catch until that predator is full.

Any state of equilibrium is temporary: predator, prey, disease, parasite, something is already in the process of getting the upper hand, and when that happens, something else gets wiped out. The balance of nature? Quentin had learned all he needed to about that fallacy during the roundbug epidemic of 2675.

And yet on the Prawatt home planet of Sanctuary, Quentin had to wonder if here, at least, balance actually existed.

He walked through a sea of black, along metallic paths that were both street and sidewalk. Buildings grew out of that street the way a tree grows out of the ground. The walls always seemed in motion: wiggling, rattling, trembling as if they waited for the right moment to reach out and grab something. And grab things they did — when something needed to be brought up to a higher level, building walls grew tentacles that reached, grabbed and lifted. There was no need for elevators or possibly even stairs, not when the building could move you from floor to floor as gently as one parent handing a child to another.

And it wasn’t just the buildings that seemed alive — the streets moved, undulating to slide items down the road like waves pushing slow-moving boats. X-Walkers and other, stranger Prawatt were everywhere, sometimes walking, sometimes crawling, sometimes riding in vehicles that moved on their own, sometimes riding in carts pushed along by the waving street. Other times, the individual Prawatt crawled into the street, sliding through the always-solid-yet-always-moving surface into something beneath. Occasionally, Quentin saw them sliding out of the street like a snake slithering from a hole that closed tight behind it.

Wherever he, Becca and Captain Bumberpuff stepped, however, the road seemed flat and still, hard as rock and as unforgiving as the face of a granite mountain.

Becca kept looking from building to building, her eyes as wide as a child’s on the morning of Giving Day. “Quentin, this is so unreal.”

He wished he had something eloquent to say, but eloquence wasn’t his nature. So, he shrugged. “Yeah, I guess. But it won’t be long until we meet these Old Ones, then we can get the hell out of here.”

She looked at him and smiled a smile of wonder and delight so genuine it took his breath away.

“Do you even realize what’s going on here? We might be the only non-Prawatt to set foot on this street. This is like … I don’t know … like Humans landing on Earth’s moon for the first time and finding a whole alien culture there waiting for them.”

“Weren’t there always people on the moon?”

Bumberpuff’s body shook and rattled. Had Quentin said something funny?

Becca laughed. As they walked, she turned in slow circles, staring up at the moving buildings. She didn’t need to look where she was going — the street solidified under her every step.

And then, Quentin saw something that wasn’t black — set into the base of a towering skyscraper was a brown, wooden door with a white frame and a round, burnished silver handle. It looked like an interior door of a government building, or maybe a school. Three burnished silver numbers were screwed into the door at eye level: 931. It was just a regular old door, but in an endless sea of black, the lone bit of color took on an almost religious air.

Bumberpuff stopped in front of it. “We are here.”

Quentin looked up. The building was swaying, waving, perhaps, and he had to look back down before he lost his balance. “Where is here, exactly?”

Bumberpuff’s strange hand reached out gingerly, almost as if he was afraid of what might happen — his long fingers touched the silver numbers.

“The temple,” he said. He paused a moment more, then quickly wrapped his tentacle around the handle. Quentin knew little about the Prawatt — he’d only just encountered the race, after all — but they were so inexplicably Human that he recognized a sigh of relief wash through Bumberpuff’s semi-see-through body.

“Captain, you okay?”

“I’m fine,” Bumberpuff said.

“You were worried about that door handle or something?”

Bumberpuff turned the handle and opened it just a crack. Inside, a white hallway, white light.

“Yes, I was worried,” he said. “This is the entrance to the Old Ones. I have permission to enter, but had that permission been revoked for reasons unknown, I would have been destroyed as soon as I touched the handle.”

Quentin looked around the street. Other than Prawatt pedestrians, the slightly undulating streets and the buildings, he saw nothing — no guns, no cameras, no defenses of any kind. Maybe guns weren’t needed when the buildings themselves could come alive and get you.

Bumberpuff opened the door all the way. Inside, a hallway that looked like anything Quentin might see back on Micovi: white walls, a floor of some kind of polished gray stone.

The captain held the door open for them. “Quentin, Rebecca, if you are ready?”

Quentin again looked at Becca. She again nodded.

This was it.

Together, Quentin Barnes and Rebecca Montagne stepped into the lair of the Old Ones.