We Have Always Been Here

by Lena Nguyen

  “We’re all ISF personnel,” she pointed out, a little stubbornly.

  He frowned. “You know what I mean, Park.”

  Yes, she supposed she did, Park thought reluctantly. ISF had authorized Boone to use his gun and keep non-conscripted from finding out about all of this. Why? Because if they let the information leak to someone back home, there would be few consequences for them beyond termination, possibly a lawsuit. Conscripted expedition members, on the other hand, were keeping the secret under virtual pain of death. If ISF found out they’d disobeyed their orders, their citizenship in the Frontier could be revoked: they’d have to uproot their families, leave their homes. Exit space forever.

  She felt a dim glow of both sympathy and shame. So that was what Fulbreech had risked, tipping her off. He’d given her as much of a clue as he could about what was going on. And yet . . .

  “If I’m not authorized, I can’t access the data down there,” Park said. “Can Fulbreech?”

  Wick looked uncomfortable. “He’s conscripted,” was all he said.

  “So did he run down to the utility rooms to make sure I was safe, or did he go down there to prevent me from finding whatever trick is concealing the research lab?”

  Wick barreled forward as if she hadn’t asked the question. “It should be obvious why such a thing needs to stay under wraps,” he said. Park frowned, but he continued: “The implications of it, the consequences, they’re too unpredictable. We don’t know anything about the thing, yet. We can’t have the public finding out about it, the entire galaxy blowing up over something that could turn out to be unusable. So we have to tread very carefully.”

  Begrudgingly, she saw the picture he was painting for her. Crewmembers writing home, unable to contain their excitement. Researchers clamoring to make the big discovery that could change the world—making mistakes in their academic fervor. Greed and fear and jealousy setting in. Competitors trying to nose their way into classified business. Or someone getting political, spiteful; destroying the thing before ISF could use it. Yes, the fewer people who knew, the safer. She could see it. But she still didn’t necessarily like it.

  “Is that what Keller was working on?” she asked. “Her special project?”

  “Yes.”

  “But what would you need a psychologist for? It seems like a problem for a quantum physicist.”

  Wick shrugged. “She had her orders from ISF.”

  There was a little silence between them as Park struggled to absorb all of this. Finally she said, “So Boone’s in charge of guarding this . . . data.”

  “Well,” Wick said. “Sagara is, technically. He’s in charge of ensuring the data is safe from sabotage and loss. Boone’s in charge of protecting us from outside threat.”

  “But we’re the only ones on Eos,” Park said, surprised. “There’s no one else out here.” She looked into Wick’s eyes, which looked shuttered and wary suddenly. “Right?”

  At this, Wick only shrugged. “You never know,” was all he said.

  They spent a while debriefing each other, talking rapid-fire in that chilly space. Wick refused to say anything more about the Fold, and Park didn’t press much: now that she knew what the problem was, she found that she didn’t care much about the specifics, the scientific details of the thing. She only had to know that the ISF considered it important enough to hide it from some of its own crew. She found herself wondering exactly who knew what: Had Keller known all along, or had she only been told the day they landed? Did Chanur know? Did Jimex? But she was afraid to ask. Rather than relief, she felt a little afraid of being told that she was the last to know. Even if Wick claimed it wasn’t personal, she felt ISF’s mistrust of her. Felt singled out. Now she knew how the other crewmembers had felt, knowing she was there solely to report back on them.

  “So if I’m taking a shower,” she said, “Sagara could be listening to me at any time?”

  She hoped, almost viciously, that he was listening now; that he would be embarrassed by the implication, just as Wick was.

  “You make it sound perverse,” he said. His skin was ruddy under the tan—he was blushing. “As I said, ARGUS doesn’t differentiate between crewmembers. It only processes their voices and movements blindly, like they’re—nameless entities, or ghosts. And it’s quite finicky as it is, anyway: the proton storm must have affected it. We’d need Reimi to know for sure.” He shook his head. “And like I said, Sagara—or I, for that matter—can’t just tune in and spy at any moment. The computer only detects commonalities between different figures, or keywords they use, and pinpoints them for us after the fact. You understand?”

  ISF’s hackneyed attempt at maintaining privacy, Park supposed. It could avoid the sticky issue of identity misuse, having the program collect data on everybody on the ship but rendering that data inaccessible unless the computer aggregated it under specific criteria. Most likely so the people who found out later couldn’t raise a legal fuss. She said, “Is no one exempt? Could Boone or Sagara listen to this conversation later on, if the computer flagged it?”

  “Yes,” Wick said. “Though I already told them that I was going to tell you.” His mouth twisted, wry. “We all found out about your little investigation earlier. They were none too happy about it, but I understood. I would have done the same thing, in your shoes. That’s when I decided to let you in on things.”

  She did feel a warm wash of gratitude towards him. Finally someone who empathized with her, understood her frustration—understood too that she could do a lot more damage, bumbling blindly around in the dark, than she could with full knowledge of what was going on. But she couldn’t help but say, a little anxiously: “If Holt knew all about this anomaly, and Boone still shot him for potentially compromising the data . . .”

  Wick waved his hand. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m commander. And I say we need to trust you. They won’t do anything out of line.”

  But she couldn’t tamp down that little bubble of fear. She thought of the hostility that Boone had towards her, the suspicion Sagara held that she had something to do with the nightmares. Then, remembering the nightmares, she said: “This anomaly. Is there any way it could be—affecting people?”

  Wick looked surprised. “What do you mean?”

  Park clasped her hands together, thinking. “Holt showed signs of disturbance only on the day we landed. Not before. Ma, too. So could the Fold be radioactive? Toxic in some way? Did either of them have contact with it?”

  Wick was shaking his head, troubled. Somehow the light in the room had shifted, throwing his eyes and mouth into shadow. He said, “No, neither of them were ever allowed near it. Ma didn’t even know about it, being non-conscripted. Holt did, but he never had contact with it. We wouldn’t let him go out until Natalya and the others had secured the area.”

  “Still,” Park persisted. “You said you know next to nothing about it. Could it alter anyone’s mental state?”

  “The anomaly doesn’t work like that,” Wick told her flatly. “It affects things, not people. Matter and space, not . . . dreams. It can’t influence anyone the way you’re thinking, no more than a black hole or the sun could.”

  Only it could, Park thought later as Wick stood and shook her hand—an outdated Earth custom that gave her the brief silvery flash of pleasure and anxiety that came with unexpected bodily contact. People were things just as much as anything else, in their own way. But she had to take him at his word: Wick wouldn’t allow them to stay there if it could potentially harm his crew. They were safe. She was safe. She had to believe that.

  She left his bunk with a head full of static. A headache was beginning to throb behind her eyes, as if a leech had attached itself to the inside of her skull. She lay down on her hard cot—Natalya and Hunter had not returned to the room yet—and drew the flap of her foil thermal blanket up to her chin. So much new information, she thought. She had to take time to pro
cess and adjust her frame of reference. Eos was not just a place to live and explore. It was the site of something momentous, like the first flyby of a Planck star. Something that could change their understanding of physics—of the universe—itself. How did she feel about that? She didn’t know. She didn’t know if she’d felt much of anything, even when she still believed it was just the site of a future colony. Had anything changed? Her role was still the same. The job they’d hired her for was still the same. That they’d lied to her—and the non-conscripted others—didn’t play into it. She could understand their reasons, rationally. Couldn’t she?

  What would happen if it were all true? she wondered then. If understanding this anomaly really could help things on Earth, if it could make terraforming easier? What if they could “fold” acid oceans, sulfur deserts—the barren traverses of space? Manipulate and merge dimensions, topographies, and reshape them as they pleased?

  Dangerous, was her first thought. Dangerous, dangerous. It was the power gods wielded.

  And yet . . .

  What could never be settled before could be a blank canvas now. Humanity could spread to all corners of the galaxy. And they were due for the next big leap in technological advancement. Since the ISF had invented the lambda engine and faster-than-light travel, decades ago, things had slowed to a technological crawl—except for the increments by which androids and artificial intelligence improved. People on Earth were so preoccupied with coming up with ways to combat the Comeback—with preserving things before they were lost to the plants—that they hadn’t been able to do more than survive for years. This anomaly could be far more important than a single colony mission. She shouldn’t be insulted by the deception. Their discoveries here could change things for the human race on a grand scale.

  If it worked the way they hoped it did, she thought. If it wasn’t just another dud, like the Icarus Stargate or the ansible. If they weren’t courting disaster just by being here.

  If. If. If.

  There was still the question of the nightmares, too. She still didn’t know what could be causing them—what could be causing all the catastrophes that had struck the ship since they’d arrived. But things were a little clearer, now. Maybe it was all a coincidence. Maybe it was the stress of the whole culture, of keeping all these secrets, of knowing there was something hidden down in the belly of the ship. That could affect a person, couldn’t it? Enough to drive them to a breakdown, to parasomnia? Holt’s obsession—or guilt—could have led him down to the utility rooms. The root of his anxieties, she thought. The epicenter of all the fears and hopes on the ship.

  She closed her eyes. No. She was still missing something—there were still things afoot aboard the Deucalion. In the shadows. The hard, reptilian part of her brain told her so, and she had learned to trust that intuition.

  But at least her view of things had sharpened, even a little. At least she had a fuller picture of what was going on. She lay back and imagined the Deucalion drifting silently through the boundless inkwell of space. Their native sun would be nothing more than a distant white needlepoint in the black alien fabric they’d woven themselves into. They were farther away from the hub of human life than anyone had ever gone. Wick had only shrugged when she’d asked if they were alone. But who would follow them, all the way out here? Who would venture to the icy outer rings of another galaxy, just to find some anomaly—even one as novel as this?

  It was paranoia, she thought. On the part of ISF. They were too used to secretiveness, to walling themselves up from within. To protecting their vulnerabilities from the outside. Park would know. It took one to know one.

  She sighed. Glenn had told her something once, when she was young. She’d asked him if he ever kept secrets from her.

  “Yes,” he’d answered calmly. When she gave him an accusing look, he’d added, “Only when it’s good for you.”

  “How do you know when it’s good for me?” she’d demanded.

  He’d smiled and allowed her to take his cool, tough hand, letting her wring it as a kind of mock-punishment. “There are some things you don’t need to know,” Glenn said. “Things that could worry you, or frighten you.”

  “But it’s good to be frightened, sometimes,” Park had answered, wise even then.

  Glenn shook his head, still smiling. “I don’t understand.”

  “Fear is what keeps us alive,” she told him. “I have to know what I’m afraid of to avoid it. Fear is what keeps me away from dangerous things.”

  “That is why I am with you,” Glenn had answered patiently. “I will keep you away from what you should fear.”

  But you’re not here anymore, Park thought. And when they kept their secrets from me, I didn’t know what to fear. I was afraid of everything.

  At least it’s over now, she told herself. At least now she knew. No more secrets, no more fear.

  What had she said to Glenn then, on that sun-showered day? Had she ignored him, had she thanked him? Had she wondered what her android guardian was keeping from her? She couldn’t remember—the memories felt waxy with disuse and time. A feeling of acceptance washed over her. It didn’t matter. It was over now. Things could proceed as usual.

  A gray veil seemed to fall over her eyes. Eventually Park settled into the rattling of the ship’s walls and dreamt of her jettisoned body hurtling through folds in space and time. There was Earth below her, spinning away, blue-blushed and familiar. She didn’t know why, but she turned away from it. Her body aimed instead for cold and distant stars.

  12.

  Antarctica was good to Park. The training of the Deucalion’s crew took place in a biodome there, and Park had initially resisted going; the biodome was for the sole benefit of those going on expeditions, crewmembers who would have to acclimate to building and dwelling in their own biospheres once they’d surveyed Eos’s terrain and established the beginnings of a settlement. Park herself would be stuck on the ship; she’d never need to live in an artificial habitat, so in her view, she didn’t need the training.

  But Dr. Keller said that she needed to go to Antarctica anyway, to observe the candidates under the peak of their stress. The biodome, for training purposes, was designed to be even worse than the confines of their future ship—and Antarctica’s bleak and lifeless landscape was the closest they could come to simulating Eos’s alien tundras.

  To her surprise, Park loved it. She had never been outside the cities before, but she adjusted well to the blank, razor line of the arctic horizon, the roaring emptiness of the ice. Most candidates, Dr. Keller warned her, would feel claustrophobic: the pressures of their own thoughts would creep up on them. Most of them had never been stranded with themselves for so long before. There had always been diversions to stimulate, occupy, distract—but here, at the bottom of the world, they would feel trapped in the microcosms of their own minds.

  Not Park. To her it simply felt like the environment had finally changed to suit her; as if she had always lived within a bubble of ice, peering calmly out at an empty world. Now there were merely a few more people inside the bubble, and she didn’t mind this—even though they peered at her suspiciously, and conversations died when she entered a room. Once or twice she found that someone had taken the battery-powered lantern from her tent, or filled both of her boots with snow.

  “It’s like frat row around here,” Dr. Keller said.

  “It’s all right,” Park said. “This happened in college, too.”

  “For different reasons, I would hope,” said Keller. Together they hypothesized that their presence was fomenting resentment: the expedition candidates knew that they were being evaluated, dissected, their suitability rigorously commented on by Keller and Park to ISF. While the candidates ran through simulations of the various tasks they’d have to perform on Eos, familiarizing themselves with the equipment as well as with each other—Park and Keller were watching. Always watching.

  And Park was
the more vulnerable target of the two, being younger and more introverted. The Eos team viewed her as an ISF snitch, a ladder-climber, a betrayal to her peer group—and also just plain strange. She was also troublingly unavailable as a sexual partner—none of the expedition members were married—and this isolated her even further. There was no comfortable niche for her in the social structure. No connections to anchor her to the community.

  Once, during a patient session, Valentina Hanover asked to be called “Hunter.”

  “Hunter,” Park repeated, thinking of her file. “That isn’t your middle name.”

  Valentina gave her a look of loathing. “It’s called a nickname, you absolute imbecile.”

  That about summed up everyone else’s apparent impressions of Park. She barely spoke to them, and when she did, it always seemed like she came off as baffling, primitive: some kind of specimen that one examined with half-disgust, like protozoic ooze. No, they acted like she was an alien sightseer, ogling the most basic human interactions, and in turn, they ogled her, too—squinted at her from behind the glass, whispered and smirked to each other.

  “Of course they’ll steal your boots,” Keller said later, running a hand over her stubbled head. “In environments like this, an academic community reverts to a tribe. The biodome becomes a habitat. And tribes will always choose an enemy, arbitrary or not, to unite against, to single out. It helps them bond.” She shook her head. “Be thankful no one’s poisoning your water supply or burning you at the stake.”

  Grim jokes, but then, Keller admitted to succumbing to the dour mood that hung around the biodome like a buildup of stale air. It had only taken a week without sunlight or hot water for the prospective crewmembers to get irritable.