by Simon Kewin
She struggled against his monstrous strength, but her muscles were limp tissue and she couldn't fight. He brought a vial of some sickly yellow liquid into view, attaching it to one of the tubes feeding into her body. Some toxic concoction. She writhed in useless panic, but couldn't resist.
Ondo and the whole of the universe faded away.
He told her later what had happened, earnest words whispered to her as she lay like a helpless child, barely moving, barely conscious. “There was substantial tissue rejection of your new organs, your lung and gut. Necrosis set in and that triggered sepsis. You must have been in great pain for some time.”
She didn't reply, ignoring the accusation in his voice. Ondo and the hard realities of the external world seemed so distant, so unimportant.
“Your body reacted to the infection by upping its core temperature, desperately trying to eliminate the infection overwhelming you,” he continued. “Even as I brought that under control, your heart stopped. The machines have been keeping you alive for three days now.”
Her voice was a whisper once again. “Will I live?”
The light from the machines gleamed on the tears in his eyes. “I think so. If you wish it.”
By way of a reply to his implied question, she closed her eyes and said nothing. After a moment, no more words spoken, he rose to leave her to her thoughts.
Two days later, she awoke to find herself alone in the hushed calm of her room. Freeing herself from the battery of sensors and tubes and catheters that he had her tangled up in, she forced herself to a sitting position, and then to her feet. Time to take matters into her own hands. Once again, the room lurched around her. She ignored it with a snarl, and, fighting the dizziness, set about struggling her way to the observation deck that Ondo had led her to that first day. At some point during her death and her recovery, she'd come to a clear decision, prompted by the repeating nightmare of hands clutching at her from beneath the dust of Maes Far. She knew what she had to do. Now she simply needed to tell Ondo.
Three times on the journey she had to stop and lean on the hard wall to let the shapes swimming in front of her eyes fade. She was as weak as a new-born, the flesh of her body feverish and useless. Her senses were glitching, overloaded; the whiteness gleamed so brightly around her that she couldn't tell where floor ended and walls began.
A utility droid, seeing her toiling up the corridor, shimmied out of the way and regarded her mournfully through its optical sensors.
“Stop staring at me,” she shouted at it. “I'm doing my fucking best.”
The droid, for its part, didn't reply.
Once, she found herself on the cold floor, with no idea how she'd got there. She crawled until her head cleared. Her biomechanical augmentations, at least, still functioned, and it was they, rather than her own weakened biology, that allowed her to drag herself asymmetrically along corridors and up spiral ramps to reach her destination.
Finally, she made it. Through the transparent bulkhead, the galaxy hung unmoved by her recent death. She slumped against the opposite wall to consider it. Her cracked lips stung to the touch of her tongue. The swirling stars filling her eyes were a vast brain; once it had been active, functioning, creative. The trajectories of starships flashing across it were the pathways of the neurons: ideas and emotions streaming around the mind, spreading, growing. Now that mind was crippled, a few neurons firing occasionally, but only enough to convey a twisted, broken echo of all there had once been. An invading parasite sat spiderlike across the galactic mind, stunting all normal activity.
“Ondo.”
She spoke out loud, although thanks to the comms implants he'd given her, she really had only to think his name in the right way, imagine herself calling for him, and he would hear. They could communicate brain-to-brain over a limited range, their bodies' electrical fields powering flecks to transmit encrypted radio waves. Within the Refuge or on the Radiant Dragon, the effect was amplified, hardware systems routing their communications, allowing them to converse remotely with no effort. She wasn't sure she welcomed the technology, but it was powerful, something they hadn't had on Maes Far. Whether it simply hadn't been developed, or had been actively suppressed by Concordance, she didn't know, although the danger of tech that allowed people to spread ideas without an eavesdropper overhearing was obvious.
“Selene.” It was clear from the surprise in Ondo's voice that he hadn't known she was conscious. “Why are you in the observation room?”
“I need to talk to you.”
“I'll be right there.” She could hear the foreboding in his words. She knew why. He didn't know what she'd decided to do, but he suspected: she was going to demand the final release she craved. He couldn't deny her any longer; he'd given her his word. She sat and waited for him, lacking the energy to do anything else.
The haunted look on his face as he entered confirmed what she'd thought. Ondo said nothing, but crossed the room to sit beside her on the hard floor.
He spoke out loud. “Are you in pain?”
“It's fine.” Her voice was a rasp. Strange how the act of physically talking, of persuading jaw and throat muscles to act together, was such an effort. Nevertheless, she preferred to speak out loud. It helped her to pick through what she wanted to say. The thoughts in her mind floated free, weightless, flighty, but speaking them out loud pinned them down, gave them the weight of gravity.
He wasn't looking at her. He was looking at anything but her. His gaze was on the whole of the galaxy, laid out before them. He said, “I sometimes think of it, of my journey over the years, as something like a pilgrimage among the stars, that I'm following the twisting paths of a labyrinth. Do you know the concept?”
“A maze.”
He shook-nodded his head in his yes and no way. “Something similar. A labyrinth has only one way through it, with no forking paths. In that sense it's impossible to get lost, but the way is tortuous, and you often appear to be heading in the wrong direction completely. The journey itself is the meaning; the fact that you follow the road. All you have to do is keep on and reach the centre, the heart, where the answers you seek lie. You have to keep moving forwards even when it appears you are going nowhere.”
“Or there is no path and you're wasting your life.”
“That is a possibility. Or perhaps thinking like that is simply one more obstacle in the road to the truth. That's something I learned when I spent a couple of years on the planet of Teremoniat, after I left Sintorus. Are you familiar with the world?”
“No.”
“I realise this is an odd thing for a scientist to say, but my time there among their mystics helped to clarify my thinking. The labyrinth is a core cultural concept in their civilisation. The idea informs everything upon Teremoniat: they never build straight transportation links that connect two points by the shortest distance; to them that would miss what could be learned on a long and circuitous route. The books they write and the paintings they paint: they're all about negotiating some knotty or hidden trail and the growth you can achieve by simply not giving up. When I was there, I began to see that there was a trail among the stars for me to follow, if only I accepted it.”
“It sounds like crazy shit to me,” said Selene. “Our brains look for patterns and see meaning in randomness. A trail is wishful thinking.”
The twinkle in Ondo's eye as he glanced at her suggested that he was, partly at least, playing devil's advocate. “Yes, of course, but what if the pattern we see is really there? What if the face in the shadows really is the predator stalking us? I began to pull together what scraps of information I had and make connections. I'm convinced the path is there: subtle, weak, largely obliterated, but real, and I'm determined to follow it.”
“If you see a trail, then you must believe someone is leaving you a trail,” said Selene.
“Honestly, I think that might be the case. It's subtle and elusive, but I believe it's there.”
“Who would do that? Why would they do that?”
“I assume I'll find out at the end.”
“I want to join you,” she said. “I don't know about any labyrinth, and I don't care what searing insights I gain along the way, but I do know I want to fight them. The only meaning and purpose I can see is to obliterate them, or at least be able to say I tried. What they've done, I don't even know what you'd call it. It's a crime so large there's no simple word for it.”
It took him a moment to adjust to what she was saying. “Obliterating Concordance is not really what I'm doing. I'm simply trying to understand how and why they became what they did.”
“What is the use of such knowledge if you don't use it? This isn't some interesting academic investigation you're carrying out, it's people's lives. And their deaths. Didn't you set out to destroy them? Didn't my father?”
Now he seemed to be staring into a distance of time, not space. “Perhaps we talked like that when we were young.”
“Then you should talk like that again. There must never be another Maes Far.”
“Perhaps I will be able to learn enough to make such a thing possible, but I'm nowhere near doing so yet. So much is hidden or destroyed. You know how powerful they are.”
“Between us we can get somewhere. You can guide, and I can act.”
His mouth opened and closed as he tried to decide how to reply. “No. I don't want your death on my conscience. I didn't put all that effort into keeping you alive so you could go and get yourself killed.”
It was, perhaps, an attempt at humour. She ignored it. “This isn't your choice, it's mine. This is what I want to do.”
“It is a dangerous life. Dangerous and lonely. As you say, there may be no answers at the end of it all, just our own deaths.”
“My old life is over; I can't settle down and live out a normal existence on some other world.”
“You are sure of this?”
“Yes.”
“I would have conditions.”
“If this is where you tell me to always follow your orders, think again.”
“Not that. First, you need to get well, get strong. You're in no condition to travel the galaxy fighting Concordance; you've nearly killed yourself crawling a few hundred metres along a corridor. I won't give you orders, but I also won't let you leave until you're well enough to do so.”
He was right; she needed to be strong. “Agreed.”
“Also, you need to know to tell me if you're ill or in pain. I could have stopped the infection cascading to the point it did. You didn't need to go through this last death. The medical sensors and flecks in your body: I'd like to enhance them so they tell me about the state you're in, alert me if you're in trouble. I'll respect your privacy but your life is more important.”
At her request he had hobbled the devices so he couldn't intrude upon her. It suddenly seemed a ridiculous and petty restriction. “Very well.”
“And I'd like to make one more addition to your brain.”
Despite his protestations, it seemed he'd thought about this. “What addition?”
“You're clever and resourceful, but you don't know much about the workings of the galaxy. I can give you that: a copy of my engrams embedded within your brain for you to call upon whenever you need it. I've seen a lot of Concordance, and I know how they operate.”
“You want to put a copy of yourself inside me?” The thought repelled her.
He held up his hand as if to deflect her objections. “The flecks will be dormant unless you activate them. They won't be able to intrude on your thoughts, and they won't know anything you're perceiving unless you allow them to. The flow of data will be strictly one-way: I won't get to hear anything my avatar learns; you have my word. I'll be a last resort if you're without any other weapons or options. I'll give you a keyword or a phrase to think or speak to trigger me, but otherwise you won't know I'm there. I can twine the flecks throughout your neurons so someone scanning your brain won't know I'm there, either.”
She could see the wisdom of it; she needed weapons if she was going to fight Concordance. Right now, she had nothing.
“One more fleck,” she said.
“But be absolutely sure this is what you want. You could live out that life of quiet happiness on just about any world you could name.”
She shook her head. “No, I really couldn't.”
She thought he'd laugh, smile sadly at her endearing boldness. He did neither. Instead, he nodded slowly, accepting her words, seeing something of what they might entail, perhaps.
He said, “Revenge might be a long way off. It might take generations of patient detective work before we understand the truth.”
“Then, I shall die knowing I've played my part.”
He rose to stand before her, considering her as a father might a daughter. “I shall have to work hard to curb your impetuous impulses, stop you leaping to attack any Cathedral ships you encounter single-handedly. But I'm very glad. I would have missed you more than I would have thought possible.”
She nearly smiled at him. “Good. Now help me back to bed. I'm fucking exhausted.”
He hauled her to her feet and hooked a shoulder beneath her right arm to support her on the journey back.
She leaned on him, letting him take her weight. “You thought I was going to ask for death, didn't you?”
“Partly, yes, but I also know you're not one to give in. Your father was the same. I've watched you for too long, your tissues and organs refusing to give up when they really should have. There should have been many more than twenty-three deaths.”
“I did give in, more than once.”
“That's allowed. The important thing is that you're here now.”
Alone again in her room, she studied her naked body in the mirror. Half of her, the natural flesh, was a ghostly white, almost translucent in its thinness. She'd been out of the light of suns for too long, buried away in the Refuge. The other half of her, the part Ondo had added, was purple black, space black, the substrate upon which he planned to seed the growth of her skin. Except, it wasn't pure black. If you looked into it closely, there were tiny flecks of silver shimmering deep in there, like half of her body was wrapped in the night-sky.
She held up her hand, masking the artificial half of her face so that she could imagine, almost, that she was still the young woman who'd lived on Maes Far. Her features were gaunt, her cheekbone prominent, but she could glimpse herself as she had been: the familiar smile, the faint constellation of freckles.
With an effort, she pulled her hand away to take in her full appearance. More than once the sight of what she'd become had choked her with tears of rage. Ondo had sculpted her artificial half to match her natural in shape, but it was a hideous parody of her true self. Except, except: now, studying herself, she began to see herself differently. The artificial epidermis was purely functional, not intended to look appealing, but it was more than that. The shiny, almost liquid flesh was beautiful. She turned from side to side, considering herself from all angles as she might if she were trying on new clothes. She touched the point between her breasts where the natural and artificial met. It was completely seamless, but her fingers registered the change in texture, the change from mammalian skin to biomechanical substitute. Her new skin was incredibly durable, but also more sensitive by far than her natural.
Both were smooth and hairless. Her artificial dermis contained the normal number of analogue hair follicles but she was able to switch their production on and off at will, just as she had executive control over the functioning of much of her biomechanical systems. She had instructed her finger and toe-nails to begin growing, but it would be months before they reached the length of her natural ones and required cutting. She could let her artificial hair grow in all the normal places across her body, but she'd chosen to deactivate that completely. People from her culture on Maes Far had habitually flaunted their body hair, emphasising underarm or pelvic wisps as a display of sexual maturity. She'd still had half a head of long hair when she arrived on the Refuge,
the black locks she'd inherited from her father that her mother had loved to brush. Rather than look like a hideously burned doll while her new hair caught up, she'd chosen to shave it all off. She was glad she had, now. Her new appearance suited her, emphasised her. Half had survived, but in a sense everything was new. This was her, now. A different person.
That evening, when he knocked gently and came in to check on her and administer fresh pharmaceuticals, she said, “I've also decided I don't want the artificial skin. I wish to remain as I am, half and half.”
He didn't look at her as he studied the readouts attached to her battery of sensors. “You'd be marked out as a renegade on every Concordance world you showed up on. You know they consider artificial augmentation deeply offensive, an insult to Omn's perfection. A convenient way of suppressing enhancement technology, in my view.”
“I don't care,” she said. “This is me, now. If absolutely necessary, I'll wear a temporary skin to hide my true appearance, but only on occasions when I have no choice.”
“You have more chance of surviving if you fit in.”
“I don't want to fit in; I'll live my life as I choose to live it. Give me the extra augmentations, but not your idea of how I'm supposed to look.”
He was going to reply, to object, but she saw the moment when he decided not to.
Four months later, the two of them stood beside the pyramid of the Radiant Dragon in the Refuge's space dock. The apex of the tetrahedral craft was some one hundred metres above her, its four triangular walls unblemished by any flaw or marking. She had little to compare the ship to, but the sight of low-atmosphere vessels had been common enough on Maes Far: whining, roaring machines with reaction drives of one sort or another, blasting out superheated exhaust in their wake. The Dragon appeared to need none of that.