by Lena Nguyen
“Sagara just stopped in, looking for you,” he said in response.
Park couldn’t help but glance around, imagining the sensors in the walls. “He’ll find me eventually,” she said. “If he really needs me.”
“What’s he want you for?”
“Hunter, of course. I suppose he won’t be happy that I left my post.”
Fulbreech shook his head. “How could he know so quickly that you left?”
“. . . He has eyes everywhere.” Sagara would hang her for that one.
But Fulbreech only smiled, thinking it a light-hearted joke. “I’ve begun to assume that at all times. Hello, Captain.”
She nearly smiled, too; it felt good to joke again, to pretend at normalcy. Fulbreech, looking at her almost-smile, said, “You couldn’t have come just to talk to me. Or could you?”
“I did want to thank you,” Park told him, trying not to rush the words, so that he knew she meant them. “For last night. And to tell you something else that we didn’t have time for—”
“I love you, too, Park.”
“—Wick told me,” she finished, resisting the urge to roll her eyes. “About the Fold. I know what you know.”
She watched a shadow pass over Fulbreech’s eyes; wordlessly, he went to the door of his workspace and palmed it shut. He couldn’t know the futility of the action. “Wick told you?” he asked then, turning. “About all of it?”
“He told me enough,” Park replied. “About why we’re really here, about what you’re studying. The . . . quantum effects. And how the conscripted couldn’t tell anyone. Well—you told me that last part. But he told me the rest of it. The gist.”
“I see,” Fulbreech said. He coughed into his shoulder. “Then—you know pretty much everything, I suppose. So what did you want to talk to me about?”
“Have you found any plant life out there?” Park asked. “Any fungi? You don’t have to tell me any details: just confirm or deny.”
Spores, she was thinking. Maybe the side effect of some alien plant. If they’d brought it aboard the ship, it could have contaminated the air, affecting some of the crewmembers. Unbalancing the chemicals in their brains. Maybe it disturbed their sleep cycles, or emitted hallucinogens. But Fulbreech was shaking his head.
“I don’t know if you’ve noticed,” he said, “but it’s all ice out there. If there’s any possibility for plant life to grow, we haven’t found it, and probably won’t for a long time.”
Damn, Park thought. “What about ice samples? Or air canisters?”
“Why are you asking about all of this?” Fulbreech asked in turn. He moved away from the door and took a closer look at her. Instinctively, Park took a step back. “Because you think some material is causing Hunter to sleepwalk?”
“We have to examine all possibilities,” she said, “when dealing with alien worlds. I’m just going through the process of elimination.”
“You don’t think her having too much coffee is a more probable cause? Or doing drugs? Maybe sharing them with Holt and Ma, to relieve stress, and it having a bad effect on all three of them?”
“What about Keller?” Park challenged. “Or Reimi?”
Fulbreech shrugged. “I’m not saying it’s the answer, Park, just something like it.”
She pressed her lips together. She couldn’t tell him anything more: she’d promised Sagara she wouldn’t, and they’d all agreed not to speak of the nightmares, the contagious nature of them, the strange and spreading symptoms—lest they implant themselves in others. That he knew about the sleepwalking was already dangerous enough: the rest of it was anathema, at least for now. Fulbreech looked into her face and said, “You look white as a sheet. You haven’t slept or eaten, have you?”
She was almost charmed by his old-fashioned Earth talk. She did feel like a sheet: white and flat and thin. As if she were stretched out, translucent—parts of her wearing away and fraying, like old thread. No, she could tell him nothing, she decided. In a circuitous way it felt like her way of protecting him. From Sagara, from the nightmares. From knowledge that could only stand to harm him. Now she knew a little of what he’d felt, when she’d stormed in asking what was in the utility rooms.
In another way it also felt like her method of getting payback—of leveling the field between them. He’d kept things from her, so it was all right if she did the same to him. Why did she feel that way—that she had to have some advantage over him, hidden knowledge, as he’d had over her? It couldn’t be healthy, thinking always in those terms: advantages, leverages, trump cards. Getting even. But she couldn’t help it. She had to guard herself. As much as she wanted to rely on him, on his warm solidity, she still felt that puckering of strange and breathless danger whenever she was with him.
Park shook her head. Fulbreech peered at her closely and said, “Let’s eat, then. You look like you could do with some sustenance.”
“It will have to be fast,” she found herself saying. But she smiled, despite herself, and even took his proffered arm. METIS slid the door shut behind them as they walked away.
“How do you sleep at night?” Park asked as they headed up the tunnel to Deck A. She found herself thinking that Fulbreech could have been the perfect control experiment, if only he hadn’t been exposed to any strange, exotic samples. Because if he hadn’t experienced any nightmares, then . . .
Fulbreech looked perturbed by the question. “Pardon?”
Park broke out of her thoughts. “Sleeping,” she repeated. “Are you finding it difficult to adjust to the schedule on Eos? Have you experienced any irregularities in your sleep patterns?”
“Oh,” Fulbreech said. He scratched his neck. “No, I’m sleeping fine, I suppose. Sometimes I get nosebleeds, but that’s common for me with changes in the atmosphere.”
A mundane answer, but Park thought she sensed a little nervousness in his posture, although not an outright lie. What was Fulbreech hiding now?
“How are you sleeping?” he asked then.
Park blinked. “Not at all, it feels like. Things have been . . . busy.”
Fulbreech almost snorted. “That’s an understatement. Ever since we landed, things have gone from zero to one hundred, fast. In the old days we would have called it a PFS.”
“PFS?”
“Pretty Fucky Situation. It’s old netspeak.”
“I never heard it,” Park said dryly, “and I spent a lot of time on the cyberstream.”
“See, that’s how I know you didn’t,” Fulbreech said, his mouth quirking. “The real denizens still called it the net.”
“You’re not older than me, Fulbreech.”
He laughed. “No, but I learned everything from my older brother, and he insisted on doing things the old-school way. So the ’stream was still called the ‘net,’ and ‘crash’ was actually ‘cool,’ and so on and so forth.”
She remembered that he’d mentioned his brother before, in her office. The one who’d had a baby recently. “You’re close to your family,” she found herself saying. She said it musingly, as if it were an interesting trivia fact. Some impersonal little statistic, something someone might say to impress others—to provoke exclamations of amazement. She couldn’t imagine what it was like, having the ISF dictate whether you could see or speak to someone you loved. She didn’t have an analogous relation in her own life. Couldn’t make a comparison in terms of the pain, or the gratitude, or the fear that came with such an arrangement.
Fulbreech looked at her sidelong, as if he knew her thoughts. “Who isn’t?” he asked.
“People who have no family, for one thing.” It was a naïve statement on his part, she thought without emotion. It showed that he took his situation for granted.
Fulbreech grimaced, registering his misstep—but he forged onward. “You adopt the androids as your family, in a way. I saw how they rallied around you last night.”
> For a moment Park wanted to confess to him the strangeness of the androids’ behavior the night before; their “assimilation,” their odd decision-making. The signs of them . . . going strange. But Jimex had reverted back to mostly normal in the morning, it seemed; and she was afraid that things could get misinterpreted, propagandized. She didn’t need to spark yet another panic on the ship. Mass hysteria. So she decided against it.
“I didn’t ask them to do that,” Park told him. “They just—did it. They tend to like me, in the way that dogs tend to gravitate toward certain people.”
“But robots are not dogs,” he said. “You can’t tell me we program that instinct into them.”
“We give them the protocol to self-preserve. Barring certain circumstances. And all self-preserving beings will prefer people who hold goodwill toward them over people who do not. Jimex knows I look out for him, and because he’s connected to the rest of the crew, they share that sense, too.”
“And why do you look out for him? He’s an idiot.”
“He’s not,” she said, though she had often thought the same thing herself. “He’s just—learning. And he does try to make me proud.”
Fulbreech gave her an assessing look. She suddenly realized that she was still holding his arm, and she released it. “You talk about him as if he were a child,” he said.
Park made a face. “Isn’t he one?”
“There are some who would say they’re more like monsters.”
Children can be monsters, Park thought. But she could only think to answer: “They’ll only be what you want them to be.”
Fulbreech had nothing to say to that.
They entered the mess hall and collected their trays of ham sandwiches, with little curls of moon cheese on the side. Megex and Philex smiled at them, giving no acknowledgement of what had happened the night before. They apologized for the inconvenience and said the expedition had officially run out of breakfast foods. Fulbreech groaned, but Park could not bring herself to care.
She was in sorry physical condition, she thought as she sat and pushed the food into her mouth. One night with three hours of sleep had her feeling like warmed-up death. She had not prepared herself, physically or mentally, for the strains of this mission. But then again, she’d been sent on the mission under false pretenses. She hadn’t realized the danger she’d be placed in.
Or maybe she simply hadn’t cared about it, at the time. But she did now; she lived with the awareness of it hanging over her at all times. What had changed?
She watched as Fulbreech carefully cut the crusts off his sandwich, the tough synthetic bread resisting his knife. His hands were large and square but very careful: he needed them for map-making.
“One day,” Fulbreech said, keeping his voice light, “they’ll figure out how to give us real wheat in space.”
“They don’t grow it in the colonies?”
“It grows red,” Fulbreech told her, smiling. “Which is pretty off-putting. And a large portion of the population seems to be developing gluten intolerance. At least on Mars. ISF says we won’t need bread in a few years.”
“I wonder what else ISF thinks we don’t need,” Park muttered.
“You’d be surprised,” Fulbreech muttered back. He gave her a lopsided grin, the earlier awkwardness between them passing for the moment. Then his eyes flicked up past Park’s shoulder—and widened.
As if on cue, there was a sudden clamor behind her. Sharp, shrill yelling. The clattering of trays. Park’s shoulders jumped from the violence of the noise.
She looked. There was a woman with a shock of red hair in the room—Hunter—Hunter was in the room! And she and Natalya were facing each other a few tables down, both of them red-eyed, shaking. They both looked pale and exhausted. Natalya said audibly, with bite, “If you don’t tell them, I will.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Hunter snapped. “Just sit down.”
Park stood up and thought, What the fuck is she doing out here? And where the hell was Jimex? Ellenex? Why hadn’t they kept her hidden away?
“Oh, shit,” Fulbreech said from behind her.
The cafeteria had quieted. All eyes were on the two women now, and Natalya knew it. “You tampered with the controls,” she hissed at Hunter, loud enough to be heard from across the room. “Admit it!”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” Hunter said again, wild-eyed. She looked around at the room, eyes roving—looking for help, backup. Someone who believed her. Her gaze did not land on Park. Park suddenly realized that Boone was not in the mess hall; neither were Wick or Sagara. Then, with a terrible shock, she realized that there was not even a true crowd for Hunter to appeal to: it was just her, Fulbreech, Wan Xu, and Chanur, along with the androids. Three of their leaders were not in the room. The other four had been frozen.
We’ve dwindled so much, Park thought with cold, acidic horror. It was a literal skeleton crew. How had they not noticed? Why had no one panicked more? Who would even be left to complete this mission—or ferry them all safely home?
And only she could step forward and refute Natalya’s claim that Hunter had done something to the controls. But she found herself oddly still. She wanted to wait and see what Natalya was playing at.
“Own up,” the surveyor spat. “We don’t need any more trouble on this ship than we’ve already had!”
“I don’t know what you’re fucking talking about!” Hunter shouted again.
They glared at each other; there was a kind of silent mudwrestling in the air between them.
Fulbreech was on his feet now, too. No one was moving forward to intercept the conflict, which promised to turn into a fight. Instead, the others seemed arrested, confused—almost fascinated. Park felt it, too. There had never been violence of any kind between crewmembers on the ship, or even heated arguments beyond academic debates; there was a morbid curiosity, that question of what would happen next. Almost an excitement in seeing something as real and vivid as violence, here in their sterile bubble in space. She only broke out of it when Fulbreech said under his breath: “What the hell is Hunter doing out here? And what is Natalya doing?” He looked at Park. “Did she tamper with the controls?”
“No,” Park said, trying to shake off her sudden stupor. “The androids said she didn’t. They were sure. I don’t know what Natalya’s talking about.” She took a step. “But I should intervene now.” Infighting was the biggest thing to avoid on a long space voyage—it could permanently alter the working atmosphere of the ship—and it was her duty as the resident psychologist to take the conflict out of sight. Resolve it as best she could. This was how closed groups fell apart: the marooned, the shipwrecked, the besieged and the trapped. The groups that required close coordination to operate and survive. Resentment crept in, then anger, dissension. Teams splintered; grudges formed. Park had even heard about one stranded unit of soldiers resorting to cannibalism among their ranks—even though they’d been found with some of their regular rations still intact.
But suddenly she felt an immense weariness. Couldn’t she have one day, one lunch with Fulbreech, where things didn’t fall apart?
“Where are the robots?” Fulbreech asked, his voice dim and very far away.
“I don’t know,” Park answered. “I told three of them to—”
Then she saw it. At first she thought it was a trick of her peripheral, an illusion due to not focusing clearly on anything but Natalya and Hunter’s bodies, which seemed poised to collide together like two cannonballs in the air. But when she turned to look properly, to assure herself she was imagining things, Park’s gut tensed. A kind of coldness radiated upwards from her lungs.
There was a man standing in the doorway of the mess hall, watching the fight. He was tall, with white-blond hair; when he saw Park looking at him, he turned on his heel and walked away, briskly but unconcernedly, with his fists in
his pockets. Park felt the blood leaving her hands. She had never seen the man before. She who had personally examined each of the other twelve crewmembers aboard the Deucalion. She had never seen him in her life. He was a stranger.
There was a stranger on the ship.
Impossible, she thought. But then, what was impossible anymore? Here they were, in the farthest reaches of the next galaxy, studying an alien planet that crinkled space and time together like an accordion. People were becoming infected with nightmares left and right—or they were being frozen, their cells suspended, static in time, while the ISF watched coldly from afar. While Park stayed rooted in place, subatomic radiation and confusion shrinking her cortical cells like flowers shriveling in heat. And there was a stranger walking around, unnoticed and sinister and free.
Beyond her line of sight, there was a scream. Natalya had hit Valentina and drawn blood.
Wan Xu was right, Park thought, feeling a sea-change in her own blood as the others began to run forward, shouting. This was a closed system. There were no more known variables.
Everything was different here.
14.
[Hi:
Have you reached your destination yet? Or if you haven’t, can you say how much longer? I don’t know if you ever said. I want all of this to be over already. I don’t know if I can take the waiting.
Some bad news. Nicky’s lungs are acting up again. You won’t know how scary such a thing is until you have a child. Whatever ISF’s problems, at least medical care is free. What will happen when things like this happen in the future? You have a doctor on board, don’t you? She can treat such things?
But what will happen when she dies, someday? Have we really thought this through?]
VIDEO LOG #54—Ship Designation CS Wyvern 7079
Day 10: 09:02 UTO
[Inside the ship. Taban is tinkering with a device in the corner of the cockpit with the HARE watching on from a perch to his right. The HARE switches between looking at Taban and Daley, who is in the hallway beyond the cockpit, climbing once more into his exo-armor suit.]