Arch/Eternal - Chapter Twenty

Field Trip

First thing, real quick…

For the newcomers: Arch/Eternal is a sprawling novel-in-progress in the genre of philosophical sci-fi. Think Dune meets Harry Potter, and maybe channeling a little Dan Simmons. It’s also an experiment in long-form serialized fiction on Substack.

For the allcomers: If you haven’t read any of the previous chapters, I hereby give you permission to abandon any feeling of obligation to catch up, and instead just start HERE, with this chapter.

After all, that’s what the short summary below is for.

By the end, you’ll know whether you want to keep following along or not. And I promise to always include an updated summary, so you’ll never have to worry about keeping track of the important details.

Two other things (even quicker) —

If you really want to start at the beginning, here’s the Prologue.

I also recommend you check out A Terran’s Guide to the Galaxy at some point, for a good ten thousand foot perspective of the world building behind this story.

OK, now the summary:

Earth is a protected (read: ignorant) planet nested within a galactic community known as the Fellowship. In an effort to help Earth attain full citizenship, and to rescue its people from total self-destruction, historian/researcher and secret ambassador Rita Freeman is recruiting talented young people to build a better society.

One of these is Jackson River, who grew up with his grandmother in a tiny desert town in northern Arizona, and at 11 years old, lost his best friend after an episode of severe bullying. Another is Esther Quinn, who grew up in an idyllic home in Connecticut. When she was 11, her brother Adam was recruited by Rita to become the founder of a new movement called Cubensia. Years later, Esther moved to Boston to join him.

By some stroke of fate or fortune, Esther, Jackson, and their friend Deek are late to a Cubensian launch party that becomes ground zero of an attack that destroys an entire city block. Rita scoops up all three of them into her spaceship, and takes them through an interstellar gate buried on the dark side of the Moon to a planet called Priezh, where they will receive the Fellowship’s version of basic training.

On the way, Rita explains the galactic drama that has been playing out between the Fellowship and the Confederacy, and the Firstborn, a powerful race of beings at the head of each of them — respectively called archs and eternals. Esther grieves the loss of her brother, Adam, and is vocally suspicious of an arch named Morning who was bonded to him, and should have protected him from what Rita claims was an attack by an eternal in Boston.

Meanwhile, a mysterious friend of Rita’s named Callan has been left back on Earth to try to figure out what happened. While visiting a dealer of exotic artifacts, he learns of a shady figure who might have known about the attack in advance. In an effort to track this person down, he decides to enlist the help of an old flame, a woman in New York named Margaret McEvoy, aka “Marvy,” who manages what is basically a secret hotel for people affiliated with the Fellowship on Earth.

Back on Priezh, after undergoing a series of torturous physical augmentations, Esther, Deek, and Jackson wake up to find themselves in the care of three non-terrestrial humans. After a good meal, they are escorted to a ridiculously large obstacle course, and left to themselves. In an act of resentful protest, Esther decides to lay down and rest instead, and they might as well swap some stories — how Esther and Deek met Rita, how Rita sent Deek as a one-man welcoming party when Jackson first landed in Boston.

And now, how Jackson met the mysterious Callan Tate…

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Field Trip

It was one of those moments, all pretense stripped away. A time for sharing. 

So I shared.

“I met Callan the same day I met you,” I started. “After you left — couldn’t have been maybe ten minute later, I decided to take your advice and go check out the student center, maybe see if I could get something to eat.

“But when I leave my room, there’s this man sitting there, on one of the couches. Waiting for me, though he didn’t admit it at the time. He just says, ‘Hi,’ like he’s bored. He didn’t look like a student — something about his posture, or the way he dressed. 

“I ask him who he is, but he doesn’t tell me at first, just says he wants to buy me lunch. And I have this theory, that no matter who you are or where you come from, it’s hard to turn down free lunch.

“In the elevator, he finally tells me his name is Callan, and we get into his self-driving car, and he tells me to tell him a story. I’m like, ‘What?’ and he’s like, ‘a story, from your life.’ And I’m like ‘…Why?’ and he says, ‘Beats talking about the weather.’

“So I say fine, but I want to know why he offered to take me to lunch, because my mom always told me not to get in the car with strangers. And then he gives me this look that I can’t read, and says, ‘Let’s say I like your hair. Do you have a tribe?’

“And of course now I’m starting to really regret ignoring the advice my dead mother never gave me, but what the hell, here I am. So I tell him I’m half Navajo, but I don’t really have a tribe. And then he says something about race being mostly a cosmetic thing, or something, and my hackles go up and I make some comment about how I never had a car pick me up to go to lunch.”

Esther chuckled at that. I tried not to blush.

“Anyway, Callan just smiles and says, ‘What else?’ And I say what else what? And he says, ‘What other differences do you think you see between you and me?’

“I say how much did your shirt cost. And he comes back with, ‘So money is a thing for you.’ And I’m like money is a thing for everybody. The only people who don’t think so are fish in the water, and money is the water.”

“Damn,” Deek said. “Go off.”

“But he doesn’t get offended. He just says I’m right, he’s been lucky. He doesn’t know what it feels like to be poor. And then I wonder if that’s why he invited me to lunch, and he says if he thought I was going to lose my shit at casual displays of wealth, he wouldn’t have invited me.”

“He didn’t mention Rita?” Esther said.

“Nope. He said he likes meeting interesting people, and I said what makes you think I’m interesting, and he says, ‘Well I don’t know yet, do I? So far, we’ve established that I’m some kind of rich, and you’re some kind of poor. That’s not very interesting. Tell me about your family. Tell me about where you grew up. Tell me what a poor American Indian from…’ Arizona, I say.

“‘Great,’ he says. ‘Tell me what a poor American Indian from Arizona is doing here in Cambridge at MIT. Tell me anything, for god’s sake. We’re here.’

“And the car stops, and we get out next to this tiny building with a white-brick facade. There’s a sign on the door saying it’s closed, but Callan pushes right though. Turns out he knows the guy who owns the place, and this guy serves us a couple of sandwiches, and I’m not exaggerating when I tell you it was the best thing I ever ate.”

Deek stopped me — “What was this sandwich?”

“Red onion caramelized in spiced cider, sliced green apple that had been ‘lightly brined,’ and expensive-sounding cheeses and cured meat on sourdough.”

“Good memory,” Esther said.

“You don’t forget a sandwich like that. I remember thinking that if it took being rich to eat like this, I’d probably have to get rich.”

“Or just join the Fellowship,” Deek said.

“Oh my god, right?!” Esther said. 

For the next several minutes, all we could do was gush about the food. We agreed that if they kept feeding us stuff like that, we could maybe forgive the torture. 

“So OK, sorry — you had this great sandwich,” Esther said.

“Please let that be the whole story,” Deek said. “And you’re like so yeah, that’s how I met Callan.”

“Very funny,” Esther said, then nodded at me. “What next?”

“We had dessert.”

“The plot thickens!” Deek shouted.

“Little pieces of art crafted from fruit and cream and sugar. Like what I imagine heaven tastes like. If you could tear little hunks off and put it on a little white plate.”

“Enough about the food!” Esther blurted. “I’m getting hungry again.”

“Me too,” said Deek, then looked up at the ceiling. “Hey! When’s lunch?!”

“Seriously,” Esther said. “Please keep going.”

I told them that after eating, I loosened up and talked about myself. Callan was a good listener. He asked good questions. I did try to get him to talk about himself, too, but I couldn’t get much out of him, except that he was well-traveled, and had been in a war of some kind, which surprised me. He didn’t seem like a soldier. Instead, he carried himself like an aristocrat, or maybe a dancer, with a kind of casual precision. Every movement the result of calculated practice. 

“Eventually he said he had to run, took me back to my dorm, and said, ‘Nice chatting. We should do this again.’ I sincerely doubted I’d ever see him again.”

“I’m guessing you saw him again,” Esther said.

“The next day. And the day after. He just kept showing up. I should have been suspicious, but as a fish-out-of-water kid who had never seen the raw power of money, I was constitutionally incapable of turning down the invitations. Restaurants, bars, clubs, endless conversations about science, ethics, philosophy… It seemed like he was testing me somehow, but I couldn’t divine the nature of the test. 

“Like this one time he said something to a drunk guy that made him come over and take a swing at me. When I wouldn’t fight him, he went after Callan, who put him onto the ground like a bag of rocks. When I confronted him about it he just smiled and said don’t worry about it.”

“Sounds like a great friend,” said Deek.

“That’s the thing,” I said. “He wasn’t. It got so that I dreaded seeing his name pop up in my phone. But my curiosity kept getting the better of me. Every time he showed up, I knew for sure that whatever happened, it wouldn’t be boring.

“And then he stopped calling. For a few days, then a week. I finally started getting to know my flatmates, and taking my coursework more seriously. I realized that if I didn’t let myself get distracted, I could get into a doctorate program in less than two years. I started sending inquiries about testing out of certain classes, and taking on a bigger workload.”

“Overachiever,” Esther said.

“You’re one to talk,” Deek retorted.

“But then I got a text,” I said.

“From Callan,” Esther guessed.

“From Callan,” I confirmed. “It said, ‘Car outside.’”

Deek and Esther were leaning forward.

“I must have paced my tiny room for a solid five minutes before finally going down. The car outside gave a little honk. It was empty. No driver, no Callan.”

“But of course you got inside,” said Deek.

I nodded. “It took me to a private airfield. Drove right onto the tarmac, up to one of those little stairways for the rich and famous. Because of course he had a private jet.”

“Of course he did,” Esther agreed.

“And you got onto that, too,” Deek said.

“It was about what you’d expect — big leather chairs, thick carpet, little tables. Still no Callan. But I did find a little box with a note on it: ‘In case you’re hungry.’ There was wifi on the plane, so I texted Callan, Were am I going? He didn’t respond.

“Of course he didn’t,” Esther said.

“But then the plane started to move.”

“No pilot?” Deek asked.

I shook my head. “For all I knew, I was totally alone in that thing as it left the ground. Eventually, when my heart rate went down, I used the bathroom, and ate the boxed lunch — a sandwich, a pastry, and a bottle of some lightly-sweetened carbonated beverage that I assumed cost forty five dollars. When I finally got up the nerve to knock on the door of the cockpit, no one answered.

“When the plane started to descend, I would have recognized the bleak, brown landscape even if GPS hadn’t confirmed it. It was home.”

“You were back in Arizona?” Deek said. 

I nodded once. “On another private airfield. No one came out of the cockpit after the plane landed, or when the door opened and hot air blasted into the cabin. September is just another scorching summer month in Phoenix, Arizona. Judging by the way the air burned my nostrils, I guessed it was one-ten or one-fifteen as I descended another set of rolling stairs, careful not to touch the railings.”

“I’m gonna guess there was another car waiting outside,” said Esther.

I nodded again. “With tinted windows and very strong AC. As soon as I’d gotten inside, it rolled noiselessly off the tarmac.

“The tiny airfield wasn’t far from the city proper, but the car took me further out. I had gotten so deep into whatever this was that my inner alarm signals were basically nonfunctional. So even when the car pulled up next to an abandoned building in an old industrial park, all I felt was a kind of numbed curiosity.

“I got out of the car next to a steel door under a thin awning. There was an overflowing construction site dumpster on the other side of the lot, and a rusting pile of office chairs nearby. A very good place to do murders, I thought.

“When I stepped inside, I had to wait for my eyes to adjust to see I was in a long hallway with a single light about thirty feet away. The air was hot and stale. I walked past doors hanging open into empty rooms until I reached a closed door underneath that lone light.

“I realized I had not quite crossed the event horizon. I could still go back outside, make a phonecall, get myself out of this situation, whatever it was. But if I turned that handle, that would be it.”

I paused, and only partly for effect. The other part was knowing what came next, and not quite knowing how to tell it. Esther and Deek were silent, waiting.

“Oh who am I kidding,” I said. “You know I opened the door.”

Something in my voice made both of them give a short, nervous chuckle. I went on.

“It was a small room. Mostly empty, no windows, but a portable air conditioner kept the temperature below the threshold of death. Somehow the overhead light was on. 

“And there was also a boy, about our age, tied to a chair, with his mouth taped shut.”

“Oh my god,” Esther said softly.

“When he saw me, his eyes went wide. It took me a second, but then I recognized him. It was one of the kids who had chased me and Andre out into the desert that day seven years ago. The one behind the wheel. The leader. Sean Clawson.

“I hadn’t seen him for a long time. He’d left Wind Valley on a track scholarship to ASU. I shut the door behind me.”

I gave myself a beat to swallow. I wouldn’t have killed him, I thought. 

“Sean kept glancing between me and something to my right. It was a large aquarium. Inside, coiled and motionless, a big diamondback rattler.

“I started to understand what this was. 

“On top of the cage, there was a small recorder, with a note attached. I picked it up. It said, ‘Play me.’ Sean made urgent sounds behind the tape over his mouth. I hit play.

“It wasn’t a confession. It was a brag. Sean was talking about what happened that day, and laughing about it. About a couple of dumb kids running away from bb guns. About one of them getting bit. ‘What do you expect?’ I heard him say. ‘Little shits were asking for it. These stupid rich people are always coming out and talking about how beautiful it is — oh, such beautiful land. And then they go build their big fat houses and do their landscaping and play pretend. Sometimes we get lucky,’ he said, ‘and they go camping.’”

I paused to take a slow breath.

“There was one other chair in the room. I sat down. Part of me knew what was happening — the buried agony testing the integrity of its walls, like water finding a crack in a dam. Callan, like some dark god, had constructed this scene as a way for me to finally stop blaming myself for what had happened to Andre. It wasn’t my fault, it was Sean’s fault. What better way to cast a final vote for that reality than to mete out this poetic justice? Let him die like Andre did. Snake-bit. Alone.

“I wanted it so bad I shook. A thirst for vengeance like life itself. I could see myself pinching the serpent just behind its head, and guiding its ready fangs to a tense, sweaty jugular. I could see myself watching the poison start its ugly work. I could see myself walking away.

“When the vision passed, I lifted my face to see Sean again. A dull ache pitted me. Hollowness like an eternal scream. I was terrified of myself. I hated the world that would bring me to this moment, this gateway to justice and damnation. Were such horrors truly stitched into the fabric of this universe?

“What could I do but stand?

“What could I do but walk to the cage, and lift the lid?

“What could I do but catch the snake at the back of its head, and lift it, as its body whipped against the glass walls.

“Sean shouted over and over through his nose, bucking in the chair, toppling over. 

“I crossed the room, and dropped the snake. 

“If he had held still, the snake might have retreated to the corner. But it’s impossible to hold still when you’re tied up with ropes and terror. The snake bit him on the thigh. His muffled scream almost broke the seal of the tape on his mouth, and then he started crying.

“I sat back down and watched. A great peace came over me. I held Andre’s image in my mind, and forced myself to see that boy lying in the shade of a rock in the desert, hoping for help that would come too late. What I had done, I had done for him.

“But what I did next, I did for myself.

“Next to that aquarium was a vial of antivenin, and a syringe, which I carefully filled. Sean had gone very still on the floor. His face was red and wet, and his eyes bulged at me.

“I’ve been bitten before. The stakes were clear to both of us. I could feel his desperation like invisible hands reaching, clinging. I held the needle up, pressed a single drop to the point, and said, ‘I do not forgive you.’

“Then I plunged it into his leg, right next to the bite. The snake was still in the corner, defensive, threatening. 

“‘Back then,’ I said, ‘it was my word against yours. And your brothers.’ I held up the recorder. ‘But if you ever talk about any of this, it’ll be your own words. Do you understand?’

“He nodded his head against the floor.

“I used the extra chair to pin the snake, and get it back into the aquarium. I thought about untying Sean, but I didn’t trust him, and I didn’t want to fight. And I left the tape on his mouth because I didn’t want to hear what he had to say. 

“Instead, I asked him if he had a phone. He motioned to his pocket, so I fished it out and set it next to his face. I told him I’d take the tape off but that if he made a sound, I’d leave with the phone. He nodded.

“So I dialed 911 and tore off the tape. He hissed at the pain, then shut right up and swallowed. I left the room before the phone stopped ringing. 

“My knees almost buckled with relief when I saw the car still waiting outside. It took me back to the jet, where another boxed meal was waiting. I didn’t bother trying to reach out to Callan again.”

After a few seconds of silence, Deek said, “Wait, what happened next? What did you do?”

I shrugged. “I went back to my dorm and slept for eleven hours. I started going to more classes in person. I went to church. I started making other friends.”

“You didn’t hear from Callan again?”

“Not until yesterday.”

After a minute or so of silence, Esther stood up suddenly, and looked out at the obstacle course.

“What is it?” Deek asked.

Esther looked at me. “You got yours,” she said, then turned to face the three paths branching from our platform. “I want mine. Might as well get on with it.”

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