by Alex Oliver
He could feel through his hair the curiosity circling through the wall. He wanted to know what was behind here, but it wanted to know what he was made of. Elegant, really. The outer door had tested his body. It only seemed thorough for this one to test his mind.
Okay then. The 'keyhole' to this door was probably somewhere in the room around him. A test he would have to find and then solve. He turned to take stock of the rest of the room, all the things he had passed over without interest when confronted by that locked door.
Another spherical chamber, this one was lined with lumpy bronze hatches, each with a locking wheel in the center. In the place of honor - where the temple was in the city, where the sump-hole was in the model upstairs - all of the tiles came together into a green orchid-like console. The noise of weeping children was faltering into sniffles, as though they knew he was coming for them, as though they were watching.
Warily, he turned the wheel on the closest hatch and opened it. Inside, floating in the pale blue light of a forcefield, was a tiny, pallid alien. Again he didn't know if it was his new biology or just sheer human contrariness, but the thing was cute. Half the size of one of the imps, or the adult corpse from which he had taken DNA, its carapace was a pale, iridescent blue. It had curled itself up in sleep just like a pill-bug, only the curve of the top of its head and the ends of its feelers showing.
He'd thought they were dead. Or gone, at least - long gone into the vastness of the galaxy, never to be met or spoken with. That humanity would remain alone forever, with no other minds to learn from or to teach, no other races to befriend, or to remind them that it could be worse. But they weren't dead.
"Hey!" he said, incredulous and joyful, "hey, Louse baby, wake up."
Nothing. Well, he shook himself, obviously it wasn't a normal sleep. They hadn't been taking a nap for the past millennia. It must be some kind of time interruption field. Perhaps, when whatever disaster it was had overtaken the adults, they had managed at least to put some of their children in stasis.
He opened a line of hatches and found more. Some fully curled into balls, some sleeping with their legs in the air like ridiculous dogs. Orphans of a vanished race. The true heirs of this place.
That thought gave him pause. Here in the center of a nursery of this world's rightful owners, trying not to hear the call of that console, no longer sure which parts of him were human and which were not. Did he really want to revive another set of potential enemies? Aurora was facing battleships; did he want to pit her against aliens too?
They weren't all blue - their colors ranged all over the rainbow, and some were spotted, tawny and green, or scarlet and white. How fine it would be if they were around again, trundling through their own city, helping Bryant understand it all, helping Aurora to save their world. She wanted children. This was not quite how he had pictured giving them to her, but it was weirder and more grandiose, and that was much more him. He liked it.
He wiped the dust from his hands and curled them around one of the console's jade petals. The connection was dimmer here than he had expected, full of echoes and time lags, but he concentrated on two commands. Open the door. Wake the sleepers.
He felt the intent surge through the connection between his hands and the room, and then something went snap at the base of the console and his enhanced sense of smell was overwhelmed with the stink of burning insulation. With a sensation like parting velcro, he peeled his grip off the computer and looked down to where sparks were fountaining up from the crack between two tiles.
What? How? There was nothing inflammable, no moving parts down there. The charge that flowed through the green stones was comparable to the charge that flowed through Bryant's brain - nowhere near enough to set anything alight. And yet the sparks were smoldering on the floor as if they'd dropped on linen, each one of them the center of a glowing rim that ate its way outward. The perfect smooth clarity of the floor was giving way to an ugly enmeshment of ash and fire that seemed to spread like a unicellular organism, growing, reproducing.
The thing he could feel in the walls was disappointed. Bryant had failed, or was failing this test and he still hadn't worked out what it was.
The nosing embers reached one of the piles of dust and there was a floom noise as it burst into a column of spitting flame that lit the tiles above it and threw out new sparks to kindle the centers of running flames all over the floor.
He remembered having to crawl here. Remembered that he was underneath the city, behind an almost airtight door. Remembered that you didn't just stand there and watch while the flames fed. You did something. Drop and roll, wasn't it? But he was certainly not going to roll on the patches of burning floor.
He had no water. No extinguisher. He tried stamping out the closest patch with his shoe, but the sole just bubbled and the heat struck through his foot and made his eyes water. Already an edge of smolder had crept almost to the fan of dust he'd created in front of the doors through which he'd come.
Shit. Belatedly, it dawned on him that this was getting serious, that if he didn't do something he would soon be in the middle of a sphere of fire. And oh shit, the children!
He ran to the most accessible wall of hatches, looking for buttons to press, some way of reviving them and getting them out without having to use the malfunctioning console, but there was nothing. The console itself stood now in a ring of flames. Already the ends of his hair were smoking, and his eyes were raw as the skin of his face and hands tightened and stung.
Okay, okay, calm down. When had he become so terrified he had forgotten how to think? He took three deliberate scorching breaths and drove himself across the barrier of fire that encircled the console. The fucking thing felt indifferent to him now, as if it found his flailing uninspired and had drawn away to save itself disappointment. Let the children out! Open the door!
Yeah, great work. He had apparently just repeated his earlier mistake, as a gust of burning stench puffed from above him, followed by a waterfall of sparks. Heat hit his face like a needle-whip as the smeared charcoal marks on the floor from the outer doors whumped up in flame, the explosive force of it slamming the doors shut between him and the outer world.
No. No fucking way. That - physics didn't work like that. He pulled his hood down over the smoking mess of his hair, trying not to feel how much it hurt, and ran to the door. They had opened inward, but there was no handle on this side. Nothing to grab onto and pull.
Maybe he could wrench a lever off the bank of hatches?
Right, yes. The bank of hatches made of that bronze metal so tough that diamonds couldn't cut it. Of course that would snap just fine.
Shit, shit, shit. It hurt to breathe now, fire down his throat, drying and burning and choking him. He ran to the inner door, the one that looked so appropriately like a cage, in case it might have unlocked to save him.
"No!"
But it hadn't. He tried to shake it by the carvings, but the metal was so hot it took his fingertips off, left him screaming at the mess of charred bone and wire left under his melted skin.
"No, no, no!" he was shouting. Not sure what he was shouting at, all the self-observation and self-control mechanisms overridden by pain and panic. "No, you can't do this to me! You called me. You called me, you want me. Let me in!"
But as he burned to death it let him know that it wanted someone, but he had failed the test. Whoever it was waiting for, it wasn't Bryant Jones.
~
He woke slowly, conscious at first of his breathing--regular, smooth and painless--and then of the scent, again. Aurora, safety, wool and fur and home. This seemed familiar. Had he dreamed of waking up here before? Dreamed of exploration and fire and frozen pill-bug children?
If he had, was it because he could hear them crying? He could hear them crying even now, just as if none of it had happened at all.
He breathed in deeper - no pain in his throat or his lungs, no rattle of blood. Pulling his hands out from beneath the blanket showed the fingers were intact, though
a speckling of gray dots begrimed the fingertips and felt bristly, resistant and sensitive.
The mattress dipped as Aurora sat. "Hey," she said, giving him a vertiginous sense that none of this was real, that he was trapped in a recurring dream. But then she grinned. "We have got to stop meeting like this."
That was different. That possibly implied that his earlier awakening after having passed out from gene fever had actually happened - that time remained sequential at least, thank God.
"We've got to stop parting," he said, because that was true. Overwhelmingly, what he wanted now was to snuggle up close to her and go back to sleep, head pillowed on her breasts, and her unshakable confidence as tight around him as her arms.
"One day," she agreed. "We're going to retire. We're going to live in each other's pockets and raise cattle and beans, and cook for the family in the evenings. And they're going to dig our gardens for us. We're going to plant vines and drink wine."
It sounded a little dull, to be honest. But perhaps when he was old enough, he'd also be tired enough to enjoy that kind of thing. It would be nice to have the chance to try.
"I was thinking," she pushed herself off the bed, began to pace from the spray of light blooms in one corner to the bathing pool in the other. "Can we trick out all the imps for use in battle, the way you did with my score?"
She didn't know that he'd died. At least, he hoped her lack of concern for him was simply that she had no idea he'd been through something as traumatic as being burned alive.
He dropped that thought fast - it blistered him to hold it. "Ah... I... I still don't think the majority of them can hold charge long enough to be of any use. They're intricate to repair, and it would have to be done one by one. I don't know how much time there is, but if it's short then," he shook his head. "I don't think it will make a lot of difference."
She stopped her pacing to try to put a hand in his hair, but he remembered the sensation of being able to feel through it, of his scalp being sensitized, and he was afraid she might find something there, like the wires he had seen beneath his fingers. Refusing her touch made her look puzzled, disappointed, and that was great, wasn't it? Nobody liked him today.
"Well," she shrugged the moment off, "A little difference can be all it takes. I'll put Jenkins on that with his choice of team. I wish I'd thought to give Lali more people to map out the tunnels between here and the launcher and the other cities. Her map's good as far as it goes but we haven't even found a way through to the citadel from here, let alone mapped out any useful defensive points."
She leaned her head into her hands for a moment, looking so burdened and weary that even with the memory of flames in him, he had to shuffle up and curl himself around her back, nose the nape of her neck beneath the rebellious bun of her hair. She snorted, as if in exasperation, but he thought it sounded more like relief.
"A guerrilla campaign is only ever successful if you know your terrain better than your enemies do," she raised her head and looked at him sidelong from a tawny eye. "But we--"
"I can do something about that at least," he offered. "What time is it?"
"Thirty two hundred hours," she said. "Middle of the night-ish."
"Then I can have maps for you by the morning."
"That computer-whispering thing you do?"
He managed a strained smile, despite his recent failure, "Yes. I've been working on getting round the barriers I mentioned. I'm making some progress. I'm more and more convinced there's something behind there that's going to turn the tide for us. It's just that the Lice seem to have protected it well."
She kissed him on the eyes, one and then the other--light, shy kisses, almost apologetic. "Normally I'd say 'don't knock yourself out.’ Maybe you should take tonight to actually sleep--"
"What exactly did happen?" he interrupted. "I mean, how did I end up here again? Is it again? I did get up yesterday and have a conversation with you about this, yes? And then I went to the temple to try something new, and then... then what?"
This time she got to his hair too fast for him to duck away, but just pushed her fingers into it and rested her hand there comfortingly. "I don't know. We found you in your lab, curled up on the floor. If that wasn't where you fell asleep, you must have been sleep walking. You don't remember?"
What he remembered could not have happened, and therefore he must not remember what had. It felt weirdly dishonest not to tell her, and yet what could he say? "I think I got through the door. But then I also think I burned to death."
She hardly needed to deal with his existential crisis at the moment. She had more than enough of her own troubles, and he didn't even know how much of it was real, how much an induced hallucination.
He'd failed the test, and he'd been punished for the hubris of trying. Perhaps waking up here was a sign that everything had now been reset, that it was not futile to try again.
"I was getting somewhere," he concluded, with mingled dread and satisfaction. "I think I was getting somewhere but I must have triggered some kind of trap."
"Sleeping gas or something?"
More like mind control. Bryant always believed that if someone could fuck with your head it was (a) your own fault for not protecting yourself better, and (b) a sign that they were people from whom a lot could be learned, but he knew that for Aurora it was some kind of ultimate sin. He certainly wasn't going to mention it to her lightly. "Something like that."
"Well, normally I'd say 'sleep, rest, get your strength back.' But right now we need every edge you can give us, so..."
"I should get back down there." He swung his feet out of the bed again, meeting the floor with a snap of shock. A tugging sensation through his bare soles seemed to be trying to pull him in the direction of the house's single line of tiles. Even the red rock of the unflagged floor sent up messages through his skin, he could practically taste its chemical composition, density and faint EM radiation.
"Thank you," she said seriously. "For all of this, Bryant. For staying and not running, for not leaving when I brought up marriage, for being everything you are - clever and charming and infuriating and brilliant. Thank you for being you."
The amazing thing was that she obviously meant it - the woman was far too earnest to say such a thing and then pass it off as a joke. He wanted to cherish it, let it fill him with joy, but how could he, when he had already made himself into something else? Would she love him once she knew he was ten percent Louse? Would she love him when the wires he could not account for had finished growing out of his head and hands and feet?
A pang of misery stirred the stew of fear and curiosity inside him, because he didn't really care about staying himself. He'd be interested to find out what he could become, but if he became something Aurora didn't like, he might lose her before he'd even had her. And that...
"You okay?"
He pulled it all back fast to smile at her. "Yeah, sorry. Just tired and a little spaced. Thank you, though. I mean, a lot of what I am now is down to having met you. If there's anything good in me, you probably put it there."
She gave him a look, maybe worrying that he was going somewhere innuendo-like with that, but really he didn't have the heart. She had told him to keep at this, right? So he would keep at it. They could worry about whether they liked it or not when they'd found out what it was.
When she'd gone, he collected a scanner from the lab, and dosed himself up on pain-suppressants preemptively. If a failed test meant the experience of being burned alive again, this time he intended to be so tranqed he could lie down and enjoy it.
A heightened feeling of curiosity flowed towards him down the tunnel as he crawled back to the first set of doors. Something was becoming aware of him, and it felt like a whole planet, like the drowsy, dreaming mind of a world. He wasn't afraid... No, that was wrong. He was bollock-shrinkingly terrified, but his curiosity and wonder was greater than the fear. God, he had to know what was down here, even if it meant being known in return.
This time, when he ent
ered the stasis chamber, he saw immediately that the locked set of further doors had changed. The incised design now spiraled into a center where in a plaque of smooth metal a keyhole gaped. Bryant looked at it with disbelief. "You've got to be kidding me!"
It was the classic keyhole shape, fan shaped at the bottom, circular at the top, as if designed for the massive, crude key of a medieval castle. He took the point - at least some part of whatever he was doing in here was being drawn directly from his own mind. What he was seeing, experiencing, was undoubtedly more symbolic than literal.
Perhaps that was why the console had been so echoey? Because its inputs and outputs had had to be fed across the barrier of reality in both directions.
Fine, so he had to find a key. Maybe behind one of the stasis chamber hatches?
This time, he saw with a sinking disappointment, the thousand hatches had become six. Well that was easier to search, but he had grown rather attached to the idea of reviving the louse children, bringing their race back to life on their own planet. Six was hardly going to be a viable population. Why would they have left only six? Unless these were the planet's geniuses or kings?
He opened the hatch to the chamber that to his best guess should hold the iridescent blue pill-bug infant. A moment for his mind to catch up with what he was seeing, and then he stepped back, frightened, and more than that, offended.
This was not a louse child at all, but a human one. A girl, perhaps five years of age, with hair as explosive as his own, and a sturdy frame like Aurora's. With Bryant's freckles scattered like Jackson-Pollack paintscapes over Aurora's olive skin.
"What the hell are you up to?" he asked the sense of watchful presence behind the door, feeling terrified and personally violated and... and...
And yearning. Because who knew what a child of his would look like? Who knew she would be so beautiful, and so cute, curled up there all chubby and snoozing and innocent? Who knew that he would react by wanting to pick her up and take her to Aurora, so they could hug her between them and keep her safe, shielding her with their own bodies if need be.