Bikes Not Rockets, page 10
At The Crossroads
Elly Bangs
She makes the mistake of glancing up from her handlebars, past towers that loom like perfectly straight teeth around the gaping mouth of the beige sky of Planet One. The split second of lost focus is all it takes for her front wheel to slip and give off a blood-curdling squeal on the surgical surface of the road and send her down in a blur of motion and pain and force. She tumbles over the steel and sees the sky roll end over end. For a moment she lies still, stunned. Finally she hears Diego’s voice cutting through the adrenaline haze.
“Oh shit, Callie! You all right?”
He starts to help her up, but she waves him away. She catches her breath and straightens her eyepatch. She finds herself bruised but mostly unscathed—but now there’s a crowd gathering at the transparent barrier at the edge of the street. There are hundreds of people, all alike: every last one of them bald, male, pasty, six feet tall, dressed in formless white coveralls. All staring down at her with identical blank expressions, through identical gold irises.
It’s in this moment that she fully grasps that this isn’t Earth. Not the Earth she knows.
She twists her right leg a few times to make sure it’s in working order, then rises to her feet.
The man from Planet One (Blask, she remembers) comes back down the road to stare at her through his own golden eyes while his riding partner waits further ahead. The faintest trace of a grin crosses his harsh, angular face.
“Not used to our roads,” he observes.
“How the hell do you ride on this stuff?” Diego asks. As if to punctuate the question, he nearly slips on the polished metal. The sound of his cleats scraping on the surface makes Callie’s skin crawl.
“How do you ride on surfaces with so many imperfections and heterogeneities?” Blask responds, sliding his hand over his hairless, bone-white scalp and that strange metal plate set in it. He turns and rides off again, muttering: “Welcome to Planet One.”
Callie watches him go, nervously. She looks back down the metal road the way they came and sees the two riders from Dynnya, as much aliens as herself in this world, gradually catching up.
“Sure you’re all right?” Diego asks.
“I’m fine. You know me.” She glances up into the beige sky, trying to guess the size and distance of the knifelike, shadowy shapes that loom there. They must be miles long, those machines, and there are hundreds of them. Warships. Each is lined from end to end with guns or cannons or electrodes, like spines on some evil insect. She swallows hard and tries to sound calm when she says: “Come on. The sooner we make it to the next world, the better.”
Diego chuckles. “What if the next world is even weirder than this? You don’t know.”
She takes a look around at the metal street, walled by plate glass or force fields or whatever it is, and feels as if she’s in a zoo. A terrible, ominous feeling comes over her when she sees all those people watching her: it’s as if they’re laughing. Except it’s even worse than that because somehow it’s as if they would laugh, but can’t—as if they lack that ability altogether. She shudders and says “It can’t be weirder than this.”
Diego glances around. “Shit, man. I’ve probably got more melanin in my body than everyone on this whole planet combined. You’ve probably got more in the tip of your toe!” He laughs nervously, then turns serious. “Hey. What did the Major say to you?”
“Huh?”
Diego’s bike starts to shimmy on the metal, but he catches himself. “It looked like you were having a heavy conversation. Right before the starting line. You’ve been kind of tense ever since.”
She knows she can’t merely brush the question off, but the whole truth is more terrifying than she can fully process, let alone find the words to tell Diego. Instead she clears her throat and responds: “We’ve just ridden our bikes through a rip in the fabric of the universe and will have to ride through four more such portals before we reach the finish line. We are racing two teams of alien-people across four different planets in an attempt to somehow avert the apocalyptic interdimensional war we’re all worried is coming. Tense? Yes, I am kind of tense!”
Diego hesitates and then adds: “You’ve got to admit this is pretty badass, though. Right?”
“There’s something you need to understand.”
“Yeah? What’s that?”
Callie stares down the vanishing point of the gleaming metal canyon of Planet One to the two chiseled, pearlescent-plastic-clad backsides of the racers ahead of her, and tells her teammate: “We have to win.”
“That’s the general idea of a race, right?”
She glares at him, hard. “No. Listen to me, Diego. We have to win.”
• • •
Two hours ago, Callie had been sitting in the shadow of a hangar, staring off into the distance and trying to collect her thoughts. Beyond the rusty gray of the hangars stood mesas of pinkish rock dusted with dry shrubs; beyond them, an ocean of flat land spread out to the horizon, baking in the Summer sun outside Gallup, New Mexico, Earth—her Earth. Beyond that was the rip, and somewhere still farther off, unthinkably, was another sky. She knew she wouldn’t be able to see it from here, but she couldn’t stop trying.
She heard an engine rumbling somewhere and turned to see Major Case and his jeep come boiling out of a mirage on the tarmac. He stopped in front of her, waiting. It was time.
“I’m trying to remember how you convinced me to do this,” she said.
“Honestly, I’m not sure. But I’m glad I did.”
She reached for her leg with her good hand, sliding the prosthetic socket over the scar tissue below her right knee and adjusting its position several times before fiddling with the valve.
“Anxiety is natural,” said Major Case, now gazing at a particular part of the horizon himself—he probably knew exactly where the rip was from here. “Only a handful of people have been where you’re going. We don’t know all of what you may find.”
“It’s not the danger that’s got me anxious,” she said, standing and testing her weight on the carbon fiber. “Mainly I just can’t believe I’m working for you again. After all this time.”
“You’re not. Not really. You’re an independent contractor. The Air Force is only here to organize the event and provide security on our side of the rip. This is a diplomatic effort.” He sighed uneasily. “I know you’ll keep that in mind when you speak with the other riders.”
“On second thought, that’s what I’m anxious about.” She was pulling her mesh gloves on, pausing to flex her right hand as far as it would go, and smoothing her dreadlocks down under her helmet. “God, why is this happening? Why did Los Alamos have to go and tear the universe open? Why can’t they just patch it all back up? Seal the breaches? Fix their own damn mistake?”
“They’re trying. Believe me. They’ve been trying since the rips formed.”
“They’re not going to finally work it out while I’m on the other side, are they? I’d hate to be stranded out there.”
“Not likely. They still don’t understand how they caused all this.”
“But you really think this ‘Ride of the Four Worlds’ is going to make a difference? You think all this is going to prevent a war?”
“Sport can bring people together. A little structured, nonviolent competition can allow disparate groups to work out their differences and find common ground.”
At that moment Diego shot out of the hangar and started riding tight circles around the Major’s jeep, whooping excitedly. “Hey, let’s do this! You ready, Cal? Saddle up! Things are about to get inter-dimensional!”
Callie smiled in spite of herself.
“Hey, Major!” Diego made an awkward attempt at a salute and eventually waved instead. “I just want to say what an honor it is to be doing this.”
The Major nodded, stiffly. He’d desperately wanted to set Callie up with some squeaky-clean astronaut as a teammate—someone to present an appropriately dour attitude to the press—but she’d made it clear she wouldn’t ride with anyone but Diego. The same upbeat humor that repelled the Major was something she’d come to rely on. (For his pride’s sake, however, her contract stipulated that no one tell Diego any of this.)
The cyclists rolled after the Major’s jeep, over the hot pavement and weeds, between the weathered concrete buildings of the base and down the tarmac to the starting line. Her heart raced as they approached the other two pairs of riders. She’d seen their photos, but there was something she understood in seeing them with her own eye: their being human didn’t make them any less alien.
The men from Planet One looked like statues carved out of white marble. She knew their names were 059-Blask and 186-Hellgrow, but she couldn’t tell them apart by sight. They both stood six feet tall with startlingly broad shoulders, and Callie thought she could see individual strands of corded pectoral muscle through the glossy white material of their clothes. They had no hair, not even eyebrows, and their irises were a blazing iridescent gold. Each seemed to have a metal plate set into the naked scalp above their right ears. Their bicycles looked more or less ordinary, except that the tubes were as thin and sharp as piano wires.
The other pair were from Dynnya: a tall, portly person named Luminastri and a short, thin one named Water. Callie couldn’t guess at their genders, assuming they had genders. Each was wrapped in an asymmetric patchwork of green and brown material that was baggy in some places and form-fitting in others, seemingly at random. They both had long, braided black hair, full of bits of metal that glinted in the sun. Luminastri’s skin was light-brown with large, darker spots, while Water’s was nearly olive green. Their bicycles were thick and organic-looking. As Callie studied them she was sure she saw one flex very slightly, as if breathing.
• • •
Callie is initially relieved when she looks ahead down the metal-plated road and sees the rip in space that will lead her out of Planet One and into Dynnya, the third of the four worlds on the route—but when it’s looming over her she can’t repress a twinge of fear. Like the rip that took her between her own Earth and Planet One, it’s roughly circular and about a mile in diameter, and it dances with distorted light and ghost images. Diego is right, she thinks, there’s no way to know what waits on the other side. Not until it’s too late.
“Here goes nothing,” she says, and rolls through the rip.
This time she tries to keep her eye open. She sees the twisted mirror of reality slide liquidly around her, and then she’s on the other side.
She feels the traction in the tires before anything else and finds herself on a dirt road stretching over lumpy hills covered in bluish grass. The landscape is peppered with trees and shrubs, but nothing she immediately recognizes as a building. The sky is pregnant with rain. Meanwhile the riders from Planet One are stopped and staring back from a short distance ahead, sticking up out of the sinuous dirt road like white fangs from a giant snake. Cautiously, the two riders from Earth move to catch up with them, just as they hear the Dynnyans rattle through the rip behind them. A vague, tenuous peloton forms—although the riders from Planet One stay at the front, speeding up whenever anyone else gets close enough to draft.
Diego keeps studying the other teams, passing glances ahead and behind. Finally he clears his throat and yells: “Common ground! We come from really different places, but we all ride bicycles! That’s pretty cool, right?”
There is an awkward silence. Then Blask calls back over his shoulder: “The bicycle is simply the most efficient mechanism of individual transport.”
“The bicycle is the last invention that brought nothing but happiness to humankind,” one of the Dynnyans calls forward. Callie can hear the smirk in their voice. She turns and sees Water following close behind her.
“I just think they’re fun,” Diego says.
Blask shakes his head. His teammate glances back only briefly and continues to say nothing.
“Real talk,” Diego says. “What do you all think is the relationship between the four worlds connected by the rips? Like, they’re all the same planet, right? They’re all Earth. But, like, in different dimensions?”
“Wrong,” Blask calls back. He’s looking straight over his shoulder, not apparently looking at the road at all, but his balance is unwavering. “The four worlds are the same planet at different points in time.”
Diego scans the horizon. “So what, this is the distant past? Dynnya is some kind of prehistoric Garden of Eden that invented bicycles ten thousand years early? And my Earth is the present, and Planet One is the future?”
“Wrong,” Blask says. “Planet One is the present. All the other worlds are the past.”
“So if that’s right,” Callie calls out, “I guess what we Earthlings do, the choices we make in our present, decide the future. Our actions could change Planet One.”
“Wrong,” Blask says again. “That would describe a temporal paradox. A logical impossibility. The course of history is predetermined and unchangeable and it trends inexorably toward our world. Planet One is the apex and actualization of humankind.”
“Interesting theory,” says the Dynnyan named Luminastri.
Callie finds herself gnashing her teeth. She wants to ask whether there are any women on Planet One—or really anyone who isn’t apparently an exact facsimile of Blask himself—but she’s afraid to know the answer.
They ride on in a tense silence for a long time. The road takes them down into a valley full of small dry flowers of every shape and color. The air is clean and suffused with petrichor. When they reach the bottom and start climbing again, Callie looks back and sees the Dynnyans close on her tail again. There’s language in their maneuvering, she senses—the way they back off slightly when she turns, seemingly waiting for an invitation to come closer—that seems friendly, almost playful. In the warm sunlight, Water’s greenish skin doesn’t look sickly the way it did under the beige sky of Planet One; here it looks vivid. Beautiful.
“You’re a warrior?” they ask.
The question catches Callie off guard. “A what? I mean… I was. I guess. For a while. Years ago.” She swallows hard.
Water says nothing. They’re studying her, but in a way that seems more curious than judgmental.
“Yes, that is how I got injured,” she volunteers. “If that’s what you’re really asking. I was flying a plane, and it broke down. It crashed.”
“A plane?”
“A flying machine. Like a… a big, fast, screaming metal bird.”
“Your people fight wars with things like that?”
Callie sighs. “What, you don’t have wars on Dynnya?”
“Nope,” Water says.
“Never?”
“Nope.”
“She must really like you,” Diego tells Water, breaking the tense silence that follows. “That’s more than she’s told me about her past in all the years we’ve been racing together.”
“It was a long time ago,” Callie says. “I haven’t been a ‘warrior’ in a long time. Not that kind of warrior anyway.”
“Why not?” Luminastri asks, pulling in closer.
Callie sighs and twists her hands on the bars. “I was a lot younger. Head all full of good versus evil, us versus them bullshit. I really thought if we could just blow up all the evil-doers, the world, my world, would get better. Turns out I didn’t know shit.”
The peloton crosses over the top of a hill and starts down the other side.
“Hey, so, uh—” Diego shouts to the Dynnyans over the wind. “Are you two…? Are you men or women or what?”
The Dynnyans exchange glances with each other, blushing and grinning.
“What?” Diego asks. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
Water says “Where we come from, that question means… That is….”
“You only ask someone that when you want to sleep with them,” Luminastri finishes.
“What? Really?” Diego laughs awkwardly. He hesitates and says “I mean, uh. So what if I am anyway?”
Callie reaches across and smacks him on the shoulder. “No diplomatic incidents, please.”
The Dynnyans laugh louder.
Hearing the commotion behind them, the men from Planet One glance back. It’s almost inaudible over the sound of the wind through the dry flowers, but Callie is sure she hears Blask mutter two words under his breath: Deviants, all.
• • •
“God speed,” the Major had said, back on Earth, just before they parted.
Diego continued on to the starting line, but Callie hesitated. She stopped at the Jeep’s side, studying the Major, certain there was something he wasn’t telling her. Finally she said: “Why me, Case? You know I’m not the fastest rider on the planet.”
“The fastest riders on the planet were too chicken. But even if they’d had the guts, this is no ordinary race. We need someone with an extraordinary ability to handle the unexpected and unknown. Someone who can crash over and over and always get back up again. You might be the best on Earth at that. It’s what you’re famous for.”
“So you hired me because I crash.”
“Because you know how to crash. How not to let it stop you. And because you’ve been trained to survive in extreme environments. And because you’re a medalist. Your speed and endurance are phenomenal.”
“Sure they are, but that’s different from being the best. I’m not. Not by any numerical measure I know, speed or otherwise. But you chose me to go out there and represent the entire world?”
“Representation is exactly the point.” He took off his cap and turned it contemplatively in his lap. “To be honest, I don’t think there’s a cyclist on Earth who could beat Blask and Hellgrow. But the government, all the governments of Earth, recognize that our participation in this event is a statement we’re making to the other worlds, regardless of who wins. Who we choose to ride for us is a statement about who we are. As a species. As peoples.”
