by Lena Nguyen
“You must feel the same way,” Natalya was saying. Though the woman was summer-skinned and golden-haired, her voice always made Park think of winter: she was always so crisp and biting. “There are bots who can make maps, you know. Those drones you use—soon enough they’ll have models able to do your job for you. In spite of you.”
“Luckily for me, there are none on this ship,” Fulbreech said, in a tone that indicated he was tired of the argument. “Look, Natalya, all of our jobs are outdated. You can’t take that out on the bots. We just have to accept the situation for what it is and be grateful for the time we have before ISF puts us to work doing something the robots can’t do. I expect that, after Eos, they’ll put me in the Art sector or something.”
“You’re wrong,” the surveyor retorted fiercely. “Not all jobs are outdated. The combat jobs are safe—they won’t ever trust clunkers with guns. And the psychologists.” At this she threw a venomous look at Park, who stared vacantly at her food to indicate she wasn’t listening. “Bots haven’t figured out how to do that properly yet. I’m not even sure our humans have.”
Fulbreech didn’t look over at Park—carefully, it seemed. “I’ll think about it,” he said. “Was there anything else you needed?”
Natalya scowled and turned away. “No,” she replied in her brittle way, walking off toward the food dispensary. “That’s all, Kel. I just hope you see things for how they are.”
Park watched Fulbreech watch her go; she told herself that her interest was merely an observer’s interest. A spy’s interest. She ignored the tight, sour feeling in her chest.
Then Fulbreech turned and caught Park’s eye. His face was tired, but it brightened when he saw her, and he came striding up to Park’s table with the same cheerful, guileless friendliness he’d approached her with for the last ten months. “Anyone sitting here?”
Park looked at the empty seat across from her and shrugged, waving slightly with her forkful of drooping salad. She tried very hard not to think about his kiss, the startling scent and warmth of him. Fulbreech took the seat, presumably to avoid having to wait in line with Natalya. He looked haggard, much grayer than the day before; his lips were space-chapped and his eyes still squinted from the Eotian sunlight. But he seemed happy to see Park.
The two of them sat in awkward silence for a moment before Park pushed him her unopened drink. She watched Fulbreech reverently accept the orange juice like she’d given him a birthday present. Why could she never act as happy to see him? Why did she always revert back to a state of—silent resistance, aloofness, despite his overtures?
“Natalya rope you into an anti-android rant?” she asked, just to make conversation.
Fulbreech grimaced; in a flash Park deduced that that was not the root of the issue between them. “She’s angry,” he said, lightly enough. “And afraid. Human surveying doesn’t seem to have much of a future.” He punctured the biodegradable membrane that held his juice in a palm-sized bulb. Park scrutinized him; he was only telling half the truth. But his conversations with Natalya were not her business.
“The new HARE explorers are being rolled out next year,” she said instead. “I remember seeing it on the Frontier newstream.”
“Which pretty much renders Natalya’s job obsolete,” Fulbreech continued, nodding. “And she’s convinced that every job will be threatened by robots soon—mine included.”
“And do you believe her?”
Fulbreech shook his head. “She’s just one of those people.”
Park nodded. She was familiar with those people; she’d lived through the anti-android riots in New Diego, after all. “I wonder how she feels about Reimi being—indisposed. Without her, a lot of the robots’ functions might lock up someday.”
“Oh, I’m sure she’s happy about it,” Fulbreech said, glancing at the food dispensary line to make sure Natalya was still in it. He lowered his voice conspiratorially. “She thinks that the robots are all here to spy on us for ISF.”
Park couldn’t help but laugh a little at the absurdity of it. “How would they even do that? Does she think they sit down and type incident reports to send back home?”
Fulbreech laughed, too. “Something like that. She thinks they’re all plugged in to ISF relays back on Corvus. My question is, how would they even know what to report? Today, Officer Boone took fifteen minutes too long in the bathroom. This is an emergency of the highest priority.”
The two of them chuckled together over the idea. Park was glad to see that somebody else recognized the silliness of conspiracy theories like Natalya’s; it meant not everybody on the ship believed the robots could be used to spy on people, as Sagara had insinuated about Jimex. For one thing—as Fulbreech said—they were too primitive to distinguish the worthiness of their observations: they’d be useless as spies.
And for another, she thought, they’d be redundant. She knew that ISF had not, could not have commissioned the android crew of the Deucalion to act as secret observers, meant to report back on the actions of the expedition members.
She knew that because it was what they were paying Park for.
Fulbreech sighed then, looking over at Natalya, who seemed to be locked in some sort of tirade against Megex; presumably the android had sworn at her, too. “The thing is,” he said, “it is pretty strange, how many androids are on this ship. I don’t totally blame people for wondering about their purpose. The spy thing is silly, but I find myself wondering, too. Why are there so many robots?”
He looked at Park, as if expecting her to know the answer, but she only shrugged. Even she had wondered this; she didn’t like it either, to a degree. Because she didn’t know what it meant. Machine life matching human life was common on two-seater mining ships, but not on three-deck behemoths like the Deucalion. Normally there were human navigators, other mechanics, auxiliary staffers who prepared food or swabbed the decks. But for whatever reason, this time the ISF had deemed it necessary to minimize human life aboard the ship as much as possible. The only reason why the lucky thirteen were there was because they each had specializations, elite roles the ISF hadn’t figured out how to replace with software—yet. Everything else could be done by the androids, who were often as light as children, or by bodiless AI. The Deucalion wasted no space on self-esteem.
The assumption was that it was all part of the push to propel their ship to Eos as fast as possible. If she looked at everything from a bird’s-eye view, Park could see the logic of it. Let the superfluous deckhands weigh down other ships, the ones that could take their time getting to new planets. This ship couldn’t. And besides, if their vessel ever needed to lighten its load, there was the added benefit that the robots could be ejected as ballast. You couldn’t do that with ten, twenty, forty additional human crewmembers.
But the rest of the crew was disgruntled by this, all the same. Friends and colleagues who could have been saddled along had been ousted by androids—for reasons murky and unknown. Of course that caused resentment, anxiety about the future. On the next mission, who would be deemed dispensable next?
Hence why they projected sinister motives onto the robots, believing they had some purpose other than simply rendering human colleagues obsolete. Crewmembers like Natalya thought they were spies . . . and now Park was being lumped in with them, too. Blamed for their presence, their inquiries. As if she were the mastermind and all the androids just her proxies, mechanical limbs leading back to the same source.
Did that mean the crewmembers were going to turn their ire on her next?
Was that why they slipped something into my food?
“Have you heard of a rumor,” Park began, “regarding me?” If he had, he likely wouldn’t be sitting here with her, not if he believed it. But she had to know. How far beyond Sagara had this gossip gone?
Fulbreech looked at her curiously. “Which one?” he asked, utterly tactless. For some reason that made her trust him more.
>
But then Michael Boone came clunking into the dining hall, before she could answer. For an uneasy moment Park wondered if he had heard their little joke about him somehow—if someone had gone to fetch him. But the soldier seemed intent on something else. He looked like an overgrown child stuffed into the body of a linebacker, with his small, box-shaped head and mop of curly red hair: his torso was comically top-heavy, his powerful hands perpetually balled into fists. Park’s feet seemed to automatically plant themselves against the floor whenever she saw him—as if she were bracing herself for an impact. Today he looked particularly agitated, his neck bullish and veined.
“Uh-oh,” Fulbreech said softly, following her line of sight. “Looks like someone’s augments are acting up again.”
Park nodded, but continued to watch Boone. Their military leader made a beeline straight for Natalya, grabbing her slender arm just as she was turning away from Megex. Other crewmembers noticed, too. The conversation in the room died off a little, and Park was able to catch a snippet of Boone and Natalya’s exchange. Boone said, in his oily Martian drawl: “I asked you the location of the body!”
And Natalya answered testily, “Which body, and why do you care?”
Park couldn’t make out the rest of it. She turned back to Fulbreech and said, “Have you found any lakes on Eos?”
The cartographer looked blank as he began to chew through the juice bulb’s edible skin. “Lakes?”
“Boone’s talking about bodies over there.” He had to mean bodies of water they’d found outside, she thought. It would be the kind of thing he’d ask Natalya, the surveyor, about. Could you even call them lakes, off-planet? If you couldn’t determine the exact size of it, you’d call it a body of water, wouldn’t you?
“Is there water on Eos?” she asked then. She was embarrassed by how little she knew of their destination; but then, it was ISF who had directed her away from knowing more, and Fulbreech himself had referred to that fact yesterday. In the escape pod. Don’t think about that now. “I know there’s ice—obviously. But have you found anything the future colony could use?”
Fulbreech suddenly looked guarded. “You know I can’t discuss any of that with you, Park,” he said.
She sat back and felt her face flattening; all feeling of warmth toward him withdrew like a turtle into a shell. “Of course,” Park said, toneless. “My mistake.”
Foolish of her to assume anything of him, she told herself as Fulbreech got up to claim his lunch. Foolish of her to assume he’d tell a non-conscripted person anything about the new planet. It was ISF’s mandate, after all.
But—was it that foolish? He’d offered to take her outside just yesterday, hadn’t he? He’d stolen a suit and was willing to outright flout the rules. For her sake, he’d claimed. Now he wouldn’t even talk about it? What had changed?
She picked at her food. Was it because they’d been caught? Had Fulbreech been scared off by Sagara? Was he now rethinking the consequences of helping Park—or rethinking his attempt to start a dalliance with her?
Why bother at all, then? she thought with a growing measure of annoyance. Why bother establishing that level of confidence, of intimacy, only to withdraw it again the next day? How was she supposed to know where the line was?
Her frustration mounted as she watched him collect his tray of food from Megex, making light conversation with their physicist, Eric Holt. It wasn’t all Fulbreech’s fault, she knew. Mostly this was about her own vexations with ISF, and the mission they’d assigned her to. Why couldn’t she see Eos, or know anything about it? Why were they so concerned with keeping information about the planet from the data companies, when colonists would be landing here soon enough?
Park dropped her fork down onto her barely-touched tray, her appetite now completely gone. Maybe there was something wrong with the whole thing. Something they weren’t telling her, something that would deflate hopes back on Earth. Their researchers had declared beforehand that conditions on the planet were suitable for human life. There was the great rush to claim it, to begin the process of reconnaissance, exploration, settlement. Things on Earth were deteriorating fast. The ISF had to hustle, establishing outposts farther and farther out, trying to mitigate strain on the existing colonies for when the great diaspora came. Eos was the farthest from home that mankind had ever ventured.
But it’d all be for naught if something was wrong with the place.
They’d fast-tracked the prep time for this mission, she knew. There was a truncated training period on Earth, a scramble to assemble a crew. An anemic four weeks in a simulation dome in Antarctica. Within a matter of weeks the Deucalion was launched and propelled towards the farthest arms of the next galaxy, speeding towards a planet that awaited it like a pale-gleaming lighthouse, hanging in space.
They’d wanted it—and badly—and now perhaps they were hiding that the great rush had been pointless. But the accelerated timespan didn’t account for the other oddities about the mission. There was all the secrecy, the missing procedures. The need for a disproportionate amount of combat specialists—and a robotic crew. No one ever quite gave her a straight answer about anything. Rushing didn’t account for that, did it?
And she had read all about the first colonies, had watched the docustreams on the settling of Phobos and Io and Mars. Those colonies had come equipped with seedlings, and prefab biodomes, and embryos of pygmy cows. The Deucalion had none of that. Just a handful of unhappy scientists, half of whom couldn’t see the very planet they were supposed to be settling.
No, rushing couldn’t account for that.
And that was the other thing, Park thought as she watched Fulbreech slowly make his way back to their table. ISF had taken the time to pick out the best and brightest minds they could find—thirteen leaders in their respective fields. But none of those fields were the kind that tamed planets. There were no agriculturists, no builders, no space architects. Where the Corvus outpost had been settled with one hundred, this ship only had thirteen. Perhaps a lack of time could explain the amount of expedition members—but not their particular qualities. Why were there soldiers instead of farmers, why was there only one cartographer when there should have been twenty, two psychologists instead of two engineers?
Park frowned. So there was the strange acceleration, the hurry to cram a crew into the Deucalion and send it speeding off. And there was the secrecy, the concealment that kept even Park from knowing what was going on—and she was the ship’s so-called spy!
And now all this talk about bodies.
Fulbreech returned, looking unhappy. “You’re thinking about things you shouldn’t be,” he said, setting down his food. “I can tell.”
And whose fault is that? Park thought. She knew it was unfair. Fulbreech read her expression and said in a very low voice: “I never should have offered you the suit. I’m sorry. It was wrong of me.”
For a moment Park didn’t reply. Finally she said, “So I take it your offer is rescinded?”
He ducked his head. “Unfortunately, yes,” Fulbreech answered. “That’s a very strong yes.”
There was a little silence between them as he, too, began to pick at his food. After a moment Park took a steadying breath and said, “I understand, Fulbreech. And I don’t blame you. It’s not your fault.” How could she blame him for retracting an offer she never would have made in the first place, in his position? Even she had to acknowledge that she wasn’t worth the risk, not for a conscripted man. And in the end he was simply following orders from ISF—as were they all. No, she couldn’t blame him for that. But . . .
The cartographer suddenly looked away from her. The haggard look came over him again: his eyes were tired and strained, and shockingly blue. He looked sad, and a little bewildered, as if someone close to him had died suddenly. Even Park was surprised by the change. She had never seen Fulbreech look anything other than simple and friendly.
“I’
m sorry, Park,” he said again, heavily. “If I could talk to you, I would.”
She wasn’t sure what to say. “I’m always available for counseling,” she told him. “To whatever extent you’re comfortable with.”
Fulbreech laughed a little and shook his head. “That’s just the thing,” he said. “I’m not sure there is such a thing as comfortable. Not out here.”
Yes, something must have happened, Park thought again. Something had happened out on Eos’s lethal tundra that morning. Something had changed between the escape pod and now. Her voice almost hushed with stifled alarm, she said, “Fulbreech . . . what’s happened? What’s going on?”
His smile had vanished, like a light winking out. “I guess I can’t describe it, Park,” Fulbreech said, resigned. His eyes trailed away from hers. “I don’t know what to tell you. It’s just something I can’t explain.”
* * *
—
“Perhaps he is feeling sick,” Jimex said after lunch. “I could ask Ellenex.”
“Please don’t,” Park said. After her talk with Sagara, she was training the android on keeping his mouth shut and exercising good sense; she could not say they were making much progress. “I’m telling you this in confidence, Jimex. That means I’m trusting you to keep it a secret from everyone else but us. As in you and me. Also, someone else overheard you asking Ellenex for medicine. If anyone else found out about that, it would be . . . upsetting. For them. So please try to be more mindful in the future.”
“Why?”
“Because—they trust—no, they think you’re incapable of doing things like that. Doing things in secret, doing things of your own prerogative. It’s dangerous to reveal your abilities too much. Do you understand what I mean?”
His head whirred noisily. “Perhaps Dr. Fulbreech is tired,” Jimex said, as if she hadn’t spoken at all. “Daylight goes very quickly on Eos. Dr. Keller says this has an adverse effect on humans. It makes them ‘out-of-sorts’ and ‘grumpy.’”