“Kadie!”
I whirled around, kind of jumpy, to hear my name shouted like that. And I broke out into a giant smile. Sita and her mother, Rada, walked across the lobby, smiling right back at me themselves.
“Hey,” I said. “What you all doing here?”
“We came to see if you were okay,” Sita said. “And to meet the talking cat! You hid that from us.”
“I didn’t know until tonight,” I said. And even though the day had fallen into crazy, and weird, I felt relieved and relaxed to see Sita and Rada here.
It was nice to know I had some friends.
Mayor Hughes interrupted. “Kadie, will you be okay here? I have to get back to Riverbend. We have to figure out what to do next, and I have to tell everyone what the dryads say is going to happen.”
I felt like he’d tossed a bucked of cold water on me. “Yeah,” I said. “You go do that. I’m fine here.”
Rada moved closer. “And what do the dryads say is going to happen?” she asked in her precise accent.
I told the both of them everything, from the virus to the fate we were all about to share, as we walked toward Mimir’s room. Rada looked just as shocked and worried as I was. She briefly looked down at Sita. “That can’t all be right, Kadie. Are you sure?”
“Oh,” said Mimir’s voice from in the room. “He’s got it right.”
On a bed far too large for just him, Mimir crouched over a plate that he finished licking clean as we walked in. He groaned in a long, satisfied way and pushed the plate aside. “Oh, you would not believe the horrible food I’ve been forced to eat of late. Dehydrated foil packets…” the cat-form shuddered.
“Hi,” Sita said, suddenly all shy.
Mimir sat on his haunches and licked a paw. “After weeks of dining at some of the finest establishments on your planet, I can’t believe I had to end up in that camp.”
I remembered I had seen Mimir down in Ecuador, wandering about. “You were on Earth. I saw you in line.”
“Yes. I’ve been all over your planet in this form for the All Tree. A delightful place. Oh, I’ve had some marvelous foods these last few weeks.” Mimir sounded thoughtful as the cat seemed to recall those memories. “I think my favorites are beef tartar and fresh tuna just lightly grilled with lots of real butter. But I’d hate to never have caviar again. Or pate. Foie gras. Well. You’d be shocked what a great restaurant is willing to serve a cat that has an unlimited line of credit and a note on its back that it should be served the finest dish that establishment has to offer.”
“You didn’t talk to them?”
“I was undercover,” Mimir said. “Learning about your world. Learning about you.”
“Me?” I squeaked.
Mimir sighed. “Not you in particular.” The cat waved a paw. “You as a species.”
“That’s why you were down in Ecuador?”
“And the rest of South America. I spent some time in California, too. Very good restaurants all around. I rather like tapas bars, I think. Have you ever had Spanish anchovies?”
I hadn’t, didn’t, and wasn’t ever going to. And it was all beside the point. “Mimir…”
“I know, it’s all a mess now, isn’t it?” The cat stood, then winced. There were pink scars all over him where his fur had been shaved back and the skin fixed somehow. I didn’t see stitches, but this was the All Tree, and the technology here was different.
Mimir leapt to the floor, fluid and lean, and grunted as he landed.
“Is it safe for you to leave? Are you okay?” I asked.
“I’m fine,” Mimir said. “But we need to walk and talk. We don’t have a lot of time.”
He walked out into the corridor, and we all followed.
“You were spying on the camp, right?” I asked. “Because you’re, like a robot for the All Tree, right?”
Mimir seemed to draw himself up a little higher as he looked back and up at me. “More than just a robot,” he huffed. “I’m a fragment, a slice of the All Tree, squeezed into a highly adaptive independent and autonomous form.”
Mimir paused in front of a door and scratched at it. I pushed it open. We were in a stairwell. Our voices echoed up and off the walls.
“A robot cat with a ‘lite’ version of the All Tree’s mind installed,” Sita said. “How does the All Tree get intelligence into a cat? I was reading about artificial intelligence…”
“There’s a reason I weigh almost a hundred pounds,” Mimir interrupted. “There’s a lot of machinery crammed into me.”
We followed Mimir up the stairs. “Machinery that Yggdrasil used to get to the All Tree?”
Mimir’s blue eyes flashed as he looked back at me, several stairs higher, and face to face with me. “This is not your fault, Kadie. But yes. I was not vigilant enough, I let myself get caught. Yggdrasil was able to use my link to the All Tree to try and piggyback into the ship’s systems. So now, I need your help to fix it.”
“My help?” What could I do?
“I heard you tell Rada and Sita what comes next, and you’re right. Since my other self has been attacked, it will seek to withdraw, eject the clades, and it will then choose a random location to head to while it fixes itself.”
“That sounds like a good thing. Let it heal, then come back,” Rada said.
Mimir shook his head and turned back to the stairs. We walked out onto the grass around the lake the hospital was under. All around it, dryads were walking through the forest towards the edge of the clade where the ground swelled up into the air like a wall.
They were leaving. Hundreds of the aliens, just walking out in a great exodus.
It was really happening. They were following the All Tree’s emergency orders. Which meant it was all real, those things said to us under the ground. The All Tree was getting ready to jettison us.
I could hear Rada and Sita suck their breath in as they saw the crowd of tree-like aliens weaving slowly between the forest beyond the lake– a river of green moving away from us.
Mimir started to walk toward them. “The All Tree’s emergency system is to drop the clades, kill all communications, and head out at a high fraction of light speed and not use the faster than light drive. It could take three days, or a week, to fix itself and get the artificial intelligence systems back in synch. But for anyone here in a clade, time dilation will make it seem like the All Tree took months, years, decades, or centuries.”
Time dilation, I thought as I moved to keep up with him. Crap. Again, it was messing with our lives. The first time, as we were briefly at 99.9 or whatever, percent of light speed, and a whole bunch of time passed on Earth in what was hours to us. All thanks to the fact that the faster something goes in this universe, the more time slows for it.
In orbit, your watch slows a microsecond every day. I remember reading about how some astronaut with super-sensitive equipment proved that. And satellites have to account for it every day.
But with the All Tree, it was a strong effect before it went faster than light.
And now, if the All Tree really did dump us, the effect would mean we’d be trapped floating around Ehalla for the rest of our lives, most likely.
At this point a needle jab of hatred for my fake parents hit. Mimir was right. They’d done this. They’d put us in this situation.
“So what can we do?” I asked. I wanted to fight back. To help. To do anything.
“I need you to go down to the surface of Ehalla, Kadie, and meet an ally of the All Tree: Kyros. Tell him we need backup. The backup. He’ll know what to do.”
Rada frowned now. “Now hold on, why can’t I go down to Ehalla for you and deliver this message? And what are you doing during all this?”
Mimir looked her slowly up and down. “I will be taking a trip into the core, to try and deliver a message to the All Tree on a secure node, asking it to not jettison the clades. You can’t deliver the message on Ehalla because you weigh too much.”
Now, through all this Rada was always cool and calm. How many people would pay me much attention or believe my crazy story on the way to the All Tree? Not many. But Rada always listened first, then helped.
But now she spluttered, red-faced, looking all offended at Mimir. “I what?”
“The bridge to Kryos’s workshop will only accept someone of a hundred pounds or less. Sita and Kadie can walk across it; you would die. So don’t try it. But you should go down to Ehalla with Kadie, if you can. Getting trapped in Ehalla is probably safer than being in this clade if everyone is gearing up for some fight.
“Kryos doesn’t like offworld visitors and all other sentient species from the All Tree have adult weights of more than a hundred pounds. So only avatars cross Kyros’s bridge from the Visitor’s Center to his workshop, and we don’t send non-adults down.”
“Sounds like a lonely creature,” Sita said.
“Oh no,” Mimir said. “He’s very social with his own kind. He just doesn’t talk to aliens like you. You’ll understand when you get down to the visitor’s center platform.”
“But what about the clades getting jettisoned?” Rada asked. “Could we get trapped down there if it happens before we can return?”
“Well yes,” Mimir said. “There is a danger you’ll get trapped down there if I can’t get a report to my other self.”
That left us all swallowing and avoiding each others’ eyes, standing at the edge of the forest, the lake behind us.
“Oh don’t be so glum,” Mimir said. “Get down to Ehalla, talk to Kyros. He’ll give you what I need to help fight this. If I can get the All Tree to come out of emergency mode, we have a chance.”
“But the virus…” I said. “How are you going to fight it.”
“Like this,” Mimir said. “Hurr…. Hurr….” His hackles raised, his eyes widened, and his back arched up high.
“Is something wrong?” Sita asked.
I screwed my face up and bit my lip. “I think I know what this is.”
“Hurr…” Mimir grunted, and then another loud, liquid ‘bleargh’ sound wrapped up the convulsions. He spit out a large wad of undigested tuna, and a gleaming, wet, black thumbdrive onto the grass.
“Oh, that’s so gross,” Sita said.
Mimir pretended that nothing had happened. “I stole the thumbdrive. It has a copy of the virus on it. If you can contact Kryos, and I can get my other self to hold off on drastic actions, I think things may be okay.”
I looked at the mess. “I’ll go down to Ehalla. But I just want to say, when I was little we had a cat, and I’m glad you waited until we were outside. Because I wasn’t going be cleaning that up.”
Everyone turned and stared at me.
Mimir pointed a paw in the direction of the disappearing dryad migration. “This clade will close down when the last dryad over there walks through. I need to be outside of it, so we need to be quick.”
“Yes, but Mimir, how go we get down to Ehalla?” I started to say, realizing one small, unexplained part of his plan.
But he had that figured out. “As we walked out, I sent instructions to the elevator at the tip. It’s waiting for you. Get in it now, we’re almost to Ehalla. It will take you down, and wait for you to come back up. If you see it leave while you’re still on Ehalla, then you know I failed, and I apologize. If that happens, stay with Kryos, he will look after you.”
And I’d be trapped on another planet, far from home.
“Why me?” I asked. I’d been dragged through enough already. Now I had to risk getting marooned on some strange Jupiter-like planet I knew nothing about?
I wanted to protest, to feel sorry for myself. But Mimir walked back to sit in front of me and look up. “Kadie, you’re the only person I know and trust here, who can help me quickly. If I leave, and look for someone else, it’ll take time. Time we don’t have.”
“Okay,” I said in a small voice.
And then Mimir grabbed the thumbdrive between his teeth and sprinted off.
Rada put an arm on my shoulder.
Then Sita said, “We’re definitely coming with you.”
“I can’t cross that bridge, apparently,” Rada said, still sounding annoyed. “But I’ll go as far as I can. Besides, who else will be able to say they’re the first humans to set foot on another planet?”