"Why is it attached to your finger?"
He seemed to only now notice the cryptikon at the tip of his finger. He paused to focus on it. In a moment it detached itself and became fixed in the air between him and Aylis. He continued to point at invisible things in front of him. He appeared fascinated but also disturbed, even alarmed.
"What do you see?" Aylis asked again.
"Many people here!" He gestured at a space in front of him. "They're all staring at me but I don't think they see me. Or do they? It's like a hole I could fall into, where everything is just as real as it is here! A lot of darkness over here. Here some light. Dim. Too close. Pull back. How did I do that? A coffin? A stasis coffin!"
Iggy yanked his hand away. He retreated from his seat by the bay window. The cryptikon remained in the air. He snatched at it. He closed his shaking fist on the artifact. He shut his eyes tightly. He breathed hard, and when he opened his eyes he seemed relieved.
"What's wrong?" Aylis asked. "What happened?" She was concerned enough that she measured his vital signs with her fingertips on his neck. He tried to put the cryptikon into her hands and she resisted. She could see the patterns were changed somehow on the little egg-like piece of magic. "Let me call Direk and Zakiya!" She pushed the cryptikon back into his hands. "Sit down and try to be calm! Your heart is racing!"
Iggy turned to the window and put the cryptikon back in its display cradle. He sat and stared out at the lake and the hospital gardens. In a few minutes Zakiya arrived, followed by Direk. Aylis told them what had happened. They tried to ask questions of Iggy but he didn't want to talk. Zakiya sat with him, her hand on his forearm, until he finally spoke.
"I feel strange!"
"In what way?" Zakiya asked.
"Something in me changed!"
"What changed, Iggy?"
"I don't know! Perhaps it was the universe that changed and I stayed the same!" Iggy spoke quietly yet too intensely, and that disturbed Aylis more than if he raised his voice in his usual impatient shout. Zakiya didn't ask another question but simply sat beside him and held his hand. "I thought I knew how the universe works," Iggy eventually said. "Then Direk tells me he can make holes in my universe. Then I thought I at least knew how my mind works. Now my mind is doing impossible things! I don't know anything anymore!"
"You made the cryptikon work, Iggy," Zakiya said. "That's all. That's all and that's wonderful and I think it's necessary."
"It knew me!" Iggy declared. "All I did was say hello. And it changed everything! When you put a cryptikon in my hand at our first meeting, I felt strange, but there were other stronger emotions at work on me at that time. Then Jamie gave it to me while you were captive to Etrhnk, and I had what could have been a message. I never understood what was happening. I only see it now."
"You saw a person in a stasis coffin," Aylis prompted.
He nodded, then shuddered. "I didn't just see it! It was there, right in front of me!" Iggy spoke in a loud whisper. "It was real!"
After a few moments of respectful silence, waiting for Iggy to recover, Direk chose to speak. "There is a difference," he said, "between knowing something is real and being convinced it is real. Which do you feel it was?"
"How would I know?" Iggy replied intensely. "My senses are dulled by age. I would have to guess that it is tricking me, because it can get into my mind. It makes me assume what is impossible is not impossible. It wants me to believe that what I experienced is not only real but new. New! Current! Happening now! Right now! Thousands of parsecs away!"
"I assumed the cryptikon was a communications device," Zakiya said. "I assumed it was special in some way. But this..."
"How can it show us something that is at least twelve thousand parsecs away?" Iggy asked. "The Essiin Museum, where a cryptikon resides. I'm sure that was what I saw first. I've been in that same room. All the Essiin were staring at me! Even if we could modulate starlight there isn't enough gravitational bandwidth to transmit even the simplest information that distance. And the propagation delay would be forever. The signal would be lost amid the cross currents."
"Would you try it again, Iggy?" Zakiya pleaded.
He struggled to make a decision. He plucked the cryptikon almost angrily from its cradle and squeezed it until he grew calm enough to open his fingers and let the device sit in the air in front of Zakiya and him.
"Please tell me," he said, "if you see the impossible as I see it."
Zakiya inhaled sharply. "Oh, my God!" She grabbed Iggy's arm with her free hand.
"What is it?" Aylis demanded, still denied sight of what Zakiya and Iggy saw.
"You can't see it?" Zakiya asked.
"Privacy mode," Iggy said thoughtfully. "If I change this..." He made a gesture in the air.
"Oh!" Aylis gasped and staggered backward.
The space in front of Iggy became patterns of pure color, a curved field with holes that funneled deeply into other realities, yet could be seen from all angles. Iggy obviously understood what the patterns around the holes did, as though the device coached him by telepathy. Aylis thought there was something wrong about the pattern of holes and curved surfaces, as though it was too real to be real, too solid to be solid. It kept the hairs on her neck sticking up and kept her eyes squinting at something that she could only feel was impossible. As Iggy averred, it commanded Aylis to believe in an addendum to reality that changed her notion of what the universe was.
Iggy touched something - or nothing. Everyone tilted from vertigo as a very real image replaced half of Aylis's hospital office. They became little people staring up at a giant horizontal container. Iggy pushed the image away, bringing an entire room into view, then pulled it forward until they seemed to be in the room. There were now three coffins, dim lights, walls filled with cabinets, tables, medical equipment. Aylis had to keep telling herself it was only an image, not a real thing. Looking over her shoulder she could still see the other half of her office. Then she realized she could feel the reality of what she saw, as if it was wrapping itself around her!
Zakiya rose slowly and walked past Aylis into the zone of impossibility. Aylis followed her and crept with her into the image. Zakiya put her trembling hand out and touched the glass portal of the first coffin.
"Oh, God!" She jerked her hand away. She uttered almost a whimper then put her hand back. Zakiya rubbed the surface of the stasis coffin as she leaned over it to see who was within. She moaned. Aylis put her hand on Zakiya's shoulder, her face next to Zakiya's, and saw what she saw. Alexandros Gerakis! She couldn't imagine what Zakiya felt. If her own shock and dismay and exhilaration was this huge... Zakiya's trembling beneath her hand could only hint at the magnitude of her emotions. Aylis pulled herself out of the fountain of bright memories this moment set loose, pulled herself away from the grim mask of death within the stasis coffin. She coaxed Zakiya away from the coffin. Then she found herself leaning on another coffin, and it supported her as if it was real!
The four of them stood in a cold, dim, low-ceilinged chamber that smelled of spilled substances that were aged into a miasma of unpleasant odors. Quiet noises emanated from indistinct locations, suggesting machinery with ancient moving parts, pipes with not enough fluids in them, thermal chatter of metal expanding and contracting. Shadows draped over the surfaces of this other reality and moved when they moved. All of the light that shone into this place seemed to come from behind them, from the half of Aylis's office with its window overlooking the English garden and the lake beyond: a different universe, a separate reality. Close above them, just below the square white surface of a ceiling light grid that was still dark, a cryptikon hovered, blinking red light from one of its cryptic symbols. Everyone noticed it; no one reached up to try to touch it.
Aylis wanted to scream to release her fear and tension, to shatter the illusion, while Iggy kept muttering, "This is not possible! This is not possible!"
"Koji," Zakiya said, examining the face in the coffin on which Aylis leaned.
Aylis willed herself to turn a
round and look. Her voice shook as she spoke but she had an excuse not to scream. "He doesn't appear as damaged as Alex but he looks much older."
They moved to the third and last coffin. Aylis leaned over it and peered through the clear portal. She crossed her arms and held herself. She could say nothing. Setek-Ren - her ex-husband - was as dead as Alex, and the pain of his death was just as perfectly recorded in his face.
"My father," Direk said, taking his turn to look upon the slack yet tortured face.
"Can we determine their viability?" Zakiya asked.
Aylis made herself function again. She fought down her denial of this impossible reality. She made herself check the operational values of the stasis coffins, daring to touch them and to believe in them. She did it as carefully as she could, repeating steps as many times as she needed. "The boxes are all in good working order," she certified. "If this is real, if I am not dreaming, we can revive them!"
A scream pierced the silence from somewhere in the distance, almost shattering Aylis's nerves. She bumped into Zakiya as she tried to escape toward the half of reality that was her office in the Freedom. Zakiya held her, to keep her from falling.
"Is that here in the hospital?" Zakiya asked. "Or there?"
"There," Iggy said, pointing to a hatch that stood open, showing a dim passageway. He tried to step into the passageway, but for all the