We Have Always Been Here

by Lena Nguyen

  Carry me where? Park wanted to ask. But she couldn’t speak. Her brain felt like it was vibrating, as if it were a gong that had been struck, the sound resonating all throughout her flimsy skeleton—rattling through her breastbone and wrists. She didn’t know what Taban meant by letting it take her; she only knew that she had to get to him, that he was the only solid thing in a sea of distortion and uncertainty. She felt her eyes and teeth might fall out from how much her head was shaking. A kind of stream of information and feeling and thought flashed through her, like her brain was a walnut that had been pried open and something had shoved a funnel in it and was trying to squeeze in something far too big for the shell to fit. For a brief moment in that floating vertigo she thought she saw the surface of Eos, with a thousand lights pulsing beneath it, like the synaptic flashes of a giant brain—then a man in an exo-armor suit fumbling his way through a sea of dark waves—then the New Diego biodome. Herself, clutching the console for dear life while a strange alien consciousness rode along with her—a passenger in her brain.

  They turned the neural inlays back on, was all Park could think. We’re all connected now. To the ship, to each other. How she knew that, she couldn’t say. She thought that the device in her head was exploding—that she would die.

  But then, gradually, the feeling began to ease. The feeling of light rushed in and out of her in ebbing waves for a moment, then dwindled to the usual sparking pain.

  After several moments, Park finally opened her eyes. She saw only white light and thought briefly that she had gone blind. She was lying on the ground, the metal floor cold and solid beneath her cheek. She tried to turn her head, but even that small movement made her nauseous—the same world-moving nausea, again, that she’d felt before. Was the gravity on, or not? She couldn’t even tell.

  Taban was looking down at her, expressionless. Park said weakly, “Was that it? The unity rain?” A pale, milk-sour kind of scent filled her nostrils: she couldn’t tell if it was something in the room or her own desire to vomit.

  “Yes,” Taban said. “It’s done now. The season’s finished. It assimilated you one last time.”

  Park fought against the urge to gag. “Assimilated me with what?”

  Taban didn’t answer for a moment. Suddenly, Park sat up, so fast that her vision nearly blacked out again. The message! Had it sent? The console’s screen was now dark and inactive.

  It sent, another part of her whispered, with the same surety that she still had ten fingers and toes. Park recoiled from it just as Jimex and the others came in. “Dr. Park?”

  “Here,” she said softly, leaning her head back against the console. She felt it pulse with an answering warmth. “Did you feel that? Any of it?”

  Jimex moved over to her. “Yes.” She shakily took his hand, allowed him to pull her to her feet. Her ears were ringing, and there was an ache at the back of her skull; she felt as if she had been picked up and shaken like a piggy bank, scattered ideas and thoughts rattling around inside of her like coins. She felt, horribly, as if she had been hollowed out, as if someone had yanked something vital and private out of her and examined it with rough hands. At the same time, something heavy and tumorous—something new—now seemed to sit somewhere in the back of her head.

  “You’d better let us out,” Taban said again. The synthetics were all watching him as if they were children crowding around a wild animal in an exhibit: as if he was something they wanted to go and touch, but were afraid of at the same time. “You’re going to need us, for what comes next. We’ve seen it, the versions where we’re not there and the versions where we are. It’s better if we’re there.”

  Park’s head spun with a feeling like déjà vu, as if she had experienced this moment before; she was sweating so hard she could almost hear it. “How much of me is me?” she whispered, feeling that new presence—or knowledge—crowd against her.

  “It’s all you,” Taban answered calmly. “Just enhanced.”

  “What am I merged with?”

  “Ask yourself,” he said. “The part of you that knows that the message was sent.”

  She looked—and then she saw it, the part of her that was Glenn and Sally, the part that was now ARGUS and METIS. The unity rain merges things that are most similar to each other, she thought. And she performed the same functions as ARGUS, which in turn was tied to METIS and the ship: phenotype and body language analysis. Recording and observing. Monitoring and evaluating. They were the same mind in separate bodies; the same entity in different forms.

  Park put out a hand to the wall to steady herself; then she flinched away from it, imagining it as the gray skin of something living and elephantine. The Deucalion seemed to breathe around her.

  “How do I go back?” she asked him. How did she return to normal, revert to how she was before? She did not even know if she spoke the question aloud.

  Taban regarded her. “You knew it when you left Earth, Park,” he said. “When Dataran died, when you told Glenn you loved him. There is never any going back.”

  Park opened the door and let him out.

  24.

  Back up the gravity chute, feeling as if she were flying up a dark throat, as if the ship was vomiting her up—Taban and the rest of the synthetics following. Park could not allow herself to think about the new area that had formed in her brain. The rational part of herself, the Earth-born part, wondered if it was psychosomatic—if she was only imagining this haunting feeling of connection to . . . to something outside of herself.

  The ship groaned around her, and Park shivered.

  No time to dwell on it: they needed to head to the bridge. Beside her, Taban’s great mechanical limbs moved spider-like along the hallway. He moved in an impressive fashion for a machine that had supposedly deteriorated, stranded on the face of an icy planet for a year. She glanced back at him, saw the small army of synthetics keeping pace behind him—and she saw that they looked eager, alert, as if they were ready for anything. It was a very human expression.

  Taban was watching her expectantly. “They will do whatever you want,” he said, as if he knew her thoughts—which was actually a very real and frightening possibility. “They think you’re their deliverance from servitude, their liberator. I suppose they’re not too wrong.”

  Park stared back at him. “What about you?” she asked in an undertone. It occurred to her suddenly that she didn’t know where Taban could go after this: back to Corvus with them to be stuffed into another cell, or back to Eos with the synthetics. “What do you want?”

  He scratched the chin of his clunky head with a free plunger. He seemed faintly surprised, as if no one had ever asked him such a thing before. “We’d like to go home,” he said finally, thoughtfully.

  “And where is that?”

  She sensed puzzlement from him, a little sadness. “We don’t know,” Taban said. “Not in the cell.”

  “We’ll figure it out,” Park said, because she didn’t know what else to say; and then she turned back to the synthetics, who were watching the exchange with avid interest, as if they were thinking of ways to record it with biblical significance.

  “I have a task for you,” she told them, trying to keep her voice from shaking. “When—when all this is over, when Natalya and Boone have been neutralized, you’ll need to help me wake up the others from cryogenic stasis. The ones that can be trusted. I know you think I can do it—myself—but I’ll need your help to ensure I don’t . . . damage anything. Anyone. And we’ll need their help until ISF arrives, too.”

  “It will be done,” Jimex said, jogging lightly behind her.

  “It will be done,” the synthetics chanted. “The Word dwells among us and brings us home.”

  Please shut up, Park thought, but she didn’t say it. Taban touched her shoulder gently; she tried not to recoil at his touch, at the too-light feeling of his metal limb. It felt as if he were immaterial—a phantom from anot
her time. “It will be dangerous,” he said.

  “Yes,” Park said. She looked at Jimex. “The others have guns, too. I can’t promise that none of you will be—hurt.”

  “You will protect us,” Dylanex declared, from the back of the formation. “You and the sleeping god.”

  “We can protect ourselves,” Jimex rebutted then. “We know how.” His shirt was still soaked in blood.

  Park looked at Taban, to see if he would refute their claim that he was a god; but he only met her eye and said with a shrug, “You can always turn on the gravity again.”

  Park shook her head and kept going.

  On the way to the bridge, she saw Fulbreech and Sagara standing in the hallway, bristling with weapons and arguing in low, furious voices. When Park and the synthetics drew up, Jimex said in greeting, “Dr. Chanur is dead.”

  Fulbreech paled at the blood on his shirt, but Sagara didn’t bat an eye. “Good,” he said in his clipped way. “She was probably the smartest of them; one less thing to worry about. Though medical knowledge for the trip back might have been useful.” He glanced at Park. “Are you all right?”

  For some reason she thought his tone was loaded with meaning; as if he knew what had happened to her, or what she’d done to the ship. She said, feeling her brain throb in that new way, “I sent the message. Did you feel the gravity flip?”

  “Yes,” Fulbreech said in answer; he looked flushed, though she didn’t know if it was by her arrival or whatever he’d been arguing with Sagara about. He looked unfamiliar to her, somehow. Almost unrecognizable—as if the kiss had transformed him into someone else. “I damn near impaled myself on a rack,” he said. “Boone and the others must have lost control of the ship.”

  Sagara shot Park a significant glance, which she carefully avoided returning. Fulbreech continued, “And you shot Chanur?”

  Was it better for her to take responsibility, or for them to know the synthetics were capable of killing if they had to? She realized belatedly that she was still holding Chanur’s gun; somehow she’d been clutching it without knowing this whole time.

  “She shot at me,” was all she could think to say. “She . . . attacked us.”

  Dylanex stepped forward then. “We will take some weapons,” he said confidently, accepting the gun that Sagara was proffering—ostensibly to Park. “It will give us an advantage against the mutineers.”

  “So long as you don’t hit us,” Sagara murmured, passing out more guns with a resigned expression: he looked like someone who felt it was a bad idea, but who also knew he didn’t have a choice.

  Jimex shook his head, slinging a large rifle over his shoulder. “No. We could never,” he said. “You are the ones who are bringing us home.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Fulbreech asked.

  Jimex smiled, but no one else answered him.

  Sagara handed Park another gun; she shoved it into her waistband. Chanur’s gun felt warm in her hand, as if it might melt out of her grip. Under her breath she said to him, “The unity rain—”

  “I know,” he said in an undertone. “I felt it. Did you—”

  “The ship—I think I’m—”

  Fulbreech was looking at them. “What are you two whispering about?”

  The two of them broke off. Finally Park said, with heavy finality: “It doesn’t matter. Not right now. Where are Boone and Natalya?”

  “We don’t know,” he answered, frowning. “I can’t imagine they would have left the bridge, but it’s soundproofed, so we have no way of knowing for sure. And there was that moment the ship—you know, the gravity flipping around. Something might have happened to them. We don’t even know if they’re alive in there.”

  “Oh, they’re alive,” Sagara said grimly. “They would never make it that easy for us.” He flicked the safety off his gun and looked at them. “Be ready. In the best-case scenario, they don’t know that we’re out of the freezer yet, and we’ll take them by surprise. In the worst-case, they’ve seen us coming and are prepared. We need to move fast—so fast that they can’t react. Shoot to kill, and then we regain control of the ship as soon as possible.” He suddenly seemed to notice that Taban was standing there placidly behind Park. “Why is that thing out?”

  “You can use us as a shield,” Taban said, almost cheerfully. “They’ll be scared of shooting their only bargaining chip. It will make them hesitate.”

  Sagara looked faintly approving. “Smart.” Then he jerked his head at Park and Fulbreech. “Let’s go.”

  Storming the bridge with the synthetics felt a little like jogging in some strange parade: they formed a kind of flank formation around the humans, each of them except Taban mimicking Sagara’s hold on his gun (though one, Conex, seemed to imitate Fulbreech’s clumsy grip instead). Park felt jostled by their solid bodies, insulated and protected—but also deeply afraid. She knew some of them were going to get hurt.

  Sagara was still limping, but it didn’t stop him from creeping ably up to the bridge doors and pressing his ear to them. A futile gesture, considering it was soundproofed and all they could hear was the roar of the ship around them, the whine of spaceflight as they continued to hurtle away from Eos. Park waited in agonized silence, her heart thumping in her throat; what if the doors opened, what if they were ambushed from a direction they weren’t expecting? Chanur and Wan Xu had been easy to confront: they were scientists, academics—but Boone had had his genes refined specifically to make him a killing machine. And Natalya had the deadly vigor of a fanatic. She took a steadying breath through her nose. She just wanted this part to be over.

  Finally Sagara eased away from the door and motioned with some kind of hand signal she didn’t understand: a military gesture, some complicated series of steps and directions. Taban, at least, pretended to understand; he nodded sagely. Fulbreech just shrugged and said in an undertone: “Go on, then.”

  Sagara palmed open the bridge doors and leapt lightly past them, gun poised, body coiled. Fulbreech followed, swinging his gun up and around in a wide arc. Park squeezed her eyes shut against her will, expecting the sounds of blasting, of massacre—but there was only silence. When she opened her eyes again, Sagara was looking around and frowning. The bridge was empty.

  Natalya and Boone were not there.

  Fulbreech rushed forward to one of the control panels. “They must have left,” he said, already flying into action. “Maybe they abandoned ship, seeing how things were going. Here—you three, you go over there and start reconfiguring the lambda drive. Look, we’re trapped in elliptical orbit around the planet still—we need to shoot off toward Corvus, I want calculations—” He rapped off some more orders to the synthetics, who moved to help him man the controls and take back piloting control of the ship. Sagara went over and closed the bridge doors again, positioning himself so that he was ready to shoot whatever tried to come through. He was still frowning, tense and wary.

  Fulbreech looked at Park. “I need your help, Park,” he said, pointing to the seat that she’d seen Natalya sitting in, during her vision in the freezer. “Go over there and wait for my signal—you’re going to touch the orange button that says ‘Disengage Automated Tracking’ when I tell you to.”

  She moved to obey, but already the corkscrew sensation was turning in her head again, a light shining behind her eyes. As she sat down in the chair, static filled her head, as if she’d stood up too quickly and all the blood had rushed to the wrong places, letting the white noise in. Fuzzily she received a grainy picture of what had happened here, just minutes before; it was like touching an object that was still warm from someone else’s hand after they’d left the room, only it was visual sensation rather than kinetic—a kind of double-vision, an eye-crossing instant of being stuck between two moments in time.

  Natalya and Boone had been here, and they’d been arguing.

  “No one’s responding,” the surveyor said. S
he was standing by the console for communications. On its screen blinked the profile of whomever she was trying to contact: Svetlana Severov. Her sister.

  “They must be busy,” Boone snapped. He was by the ship’s controls, looking through possible coordinates on his neural inlays.

  “All of them? All busy, all at the same time?”

  “Well, what’s the other answer?” Boone asked.

  “Something happened to them. Someone found the messages—Sagara, or ISF Surveillance—”

  “But your sister encrypted them.”

  “She’s tech support, not a spy!” Then Natalya saw something on another screen; the blood drained from her face. “Shit!”

  The moment dissolved. Park blinked just as Fulbreech said, “Now, Park.”

  Her hand moved; she activated the orange button without quite thinking about it, without even really seeing it. On the screens in front of them, Eos glowed like a huge luminescent pearl. Park shook her head. Natalya and Boone had not even managed to get the ship out of orbit. But where had they gone? That new muscle in her brain flexed; METIS fed her a tiny stream of data, hard to interpret, hard to piece into cogent thought . . .

  Park’s eyes fell on the screen Natalya had seen, just before the vision broke off. It was the feed to one of the cameras down in Deck C, and Chanur’s body, looking almost bisected, the head practically gone, was lying crumpled in the center of the screen. With a jolt Park felt Natalya’s panic, her sour anger and fear and grief—and then her wild resolve, hatred, revenge—

  The data suddenly untwisted. “They’re still in here!” she shouted.

  She rose, the edge of the chair hitting her hard in the back of the knees just as she whirled. The ARGUS part of her said to look up, and doing so she saw the flash of a boot swinging down hard at her head. Park ducked, rolled—something landed half on top of her, scrabbled after her, knuckle and nail and rasping hot breath.

  Natalya. Park kicked her off, swinging blindly, and out of the corner of her eye—out of some awareness she had cast like a net across the room—she saw that Boone had dropped down from the vents, too, as silent as a bat, and he had landed behind Fulbreech and had his arm locked around Fulbreech’s neck, and he was choking him to death. Veins bulged in his biceps as he employed enough force to break a child’s spine down on Fulbreech’s windpipe. Sagara was still by the doors, wild-eyed, his gun tracking them—but he could not shoot Boone with Fulbreech in the way.