Bright of the Sky Read Online Free

Titus was still talking: “You mean you think you’ve found the other universe, and that I wasn’t lying and crazy after all? You mean you think you’ve found Johanna?” He slammed the locomotive down on the table.
    Lamar winced. Eleven thousand dollars . . .
    “And Sydney,” Titus whispered.
    Sydney had been nine at the time of the ship disaster. She was their only child.
    Titus stood near his chair, body tensed, but with nothing to hit. Except maybe Lamar, and Lamar was practically his only friend.
    “I’m telling you that they’ve found what may be the other place. Nobody knows what it is, much less who might be there.” He hated to bring up Stefan Polich’s name, but he couldn’t tiptoe around forever, and it was, after all, Minerva’s CEO who’d sent Lamar here in the first place. “Stefan thinks we know the way in.”
    From another room came the faint rumble of an electric train looping through the cottage. Lamar wondered just how extensive this hobby had gotten.
    Finally, Titus blinked. “Would you like a cheese sandwich?”
    Lamar closed his mouth. Then nodded. “That would be fine. Thank you.” He followed Titus into the kitchen, ducking under a two-track bridge overpass supported by pillars made of door moldings.
    Titus leaned into the refrigerator, pulling out plastic containers with strange colors inside, and finally found a hunk of cheese to his liking. Lamar shook his head. Here was the man who once commanded colony ships through the stabilized Kardashev tunnels, who could run navigational equations in his head and repair cranky lithium heat exchangers at the same time. Living off moldy food. Playing with train sets.
    He’d been a family man once. No one had ever thought Titus Quinn would settle down, but when he met Johanna Arlis, she’d tamed him before the colony ship that he’d met her on reached its destination. Well, neither of them were what you might call tame . Johanna was dark, flamboyant, passionate, and irreverent. Only Johanna had ever matched Titus’s appetites, and he’d not looked at another woman for the nine years they’d been married. Still didn’t, though Johanna was dead, tragically dead, and her daughter with her. On Titus’s ship, the Vesta , along with every other passenger. All dead, except Titus. For which Minerva had fired him, and for which Titus had never forgiven himself.
    The sandwich sat in front of Lamar, remarkably appealing. And Titus tucked into his own sandwich with gusto, despite just having been told that the human race had discovered a parallel universe. One that, a couple of years ago, to the general derision of the civilized world, Titus had claimed existed.
    Titus swallowed another mouthful of sandwich. “Why should I believe any of this?”
    “Because one of Minerva’s favorite sapients believed it, that’s why. Killed off an entire orbiting space platform to prove it.”
    “Oh. A crazy mSap thought it found another universe.” He shrugged.
    “Stupid machines with quantum foam for brains. I’ve had collies that were smarter.”
    “They’re as smart as they’re supposed to be, without taking over the world.” After the Jakarta Event, the World Alliance had developed firewalls to forestall runaway machine intelligence. To forestall a posthuman world. Those firewalls apparently needed some rethinking.
    Titus muttered, “So Minerva’s taken over the world instead. You and all the half-assed geniuses. Gee, why don’t I feel all proud and happy?”
    Lamar glanced away. He himself was one of those geniuses, a savvy , in the vernacular. Able to outthink a computing savant. That fact conferred on him status and privilege beyond the dreams of the average smart—and far beyond all the rest. Titus had scored at the right level, of course, but had squandered his opportunity for the life of a pilot.
    “I thought you’d be more interested,” Lamar said. He took a bite of his sandwich.
    Across the kitchen table Titus eyed him with a hot,