Gravity is Heartless

by Sarah Lahey

  Hau leaves.

  She doesn’t feel well. Her head’s spinning, and there’s a terrible sense of dread rising in her stomach. She closes her eyes and thinks about titanium, element number twenty-two on the periodic table. Tig is made from titanium, and it’s the loveliest, silver-colored metal—low density but strong, stronger than steel and half the weight. Forged in the depths of collapsing stars, it’s loved by Tech types. Zap it with a high-power laser, and you create small oxygen vacancies of missing molecules; use these to split water by stealing the oxygen, then the hydrogen can be used for fuel. Half of Tig is made from titanium. It’s just the loveliest metal.

  I’m not well.

  ***

  A girl with carbon-colored hair and charcoal eyes enters carrying food and clothes. She’s beautiful, the most beautiful woman Quinn has ever seen. Her complexion is abnormally pale, her skin milky, her pallor emphasized by her dark features. She tells Quinn, in a thick Irish accent, that her name is Geller, and Quinn is besotted. She can’t stop looking at her.

  “’Tis cos of te light,” Geller says, her back to Quinn. “Te blue light, me pigments, they’ll autocorrect when I spend more time on lan’, in te sunlight. I’ve been ’ere too long, but there’s not much for me back ’ome, an’ it’s a job, fast-track promoshun.”

  “Was hoping you were an alien.”

  “Naw, not from te stars.” She smiles. “Just from Galway.”

  “The high part?”

  “Naw, te low part.”

  The underwater part.

  She hands Quinn a fistful of dynamic hydration tablets, “Suppos’ to be two, twice a day, but just take ’em all at once. You’ll be needin ’em.”

  Quinn swallows eight.

  Geller points to the diamond hanging from Quinn’s neck, “If tat’s speshul, maybe take it off. Keep it in your pocket.”

  Quinn changes into a lightweight grey polyester suit and stows the diamond in her pocket. Then she follows Geller though a series of cool sapphire corridors and into a small white room, where Hau and a male companion wait. The door shuts firmly behind her as she enters. Three molded white chairs rise from the floor, and Hau and his companion take seats side by side, leaving the third, directly across from them, for her. Geller stands behind her. An intimidating setup; all eyes are on her.

  “No one survived,” says Hau in a very clear and precise voice. “Nineteen hundred and sixty-two people died. There are no survivors.”

  “Sorry, I don’t understand, there weren’t . . . there weren’t nineteen hundred . . . whatever, people, there weren’t that many people on the Cloud. Most of them got down. I saw them. They got down. There were fourteen Pods, each one holds four hundred kilos, so a maximum of eight in each. Two rounds, they all got down. We did the math.”

  He leans forwards, and she feels his hot breath. “Pay attention. They got off the ship; they went back to the research station. Not long after, the flood hit. The glacier burst, and the river flooded. It washed the town away. No one survived. Except you.”

  “No, no, no.” She covers her face with her hands.

  “Yes, yes, yes. The research center is gone. The village, Grande Terre, washed away.”

  Fuck.

  “The SkyRiver—it filled the glacier, the Cook Glacier, and it burst, flooding the village. Washed it all away.”

  This is a dream, a terrible, terrible dream. “Lise . . . my, my, my mother?”

  “Recovered. Identified. In the morgue.”

  The air is sucked from her; her chest heaves, and she wants to scream. She wants them to leave. She needs to get out of here. She slumps back in her chair and her eyes well with tears.

  “We have some . . . concerns.” Hau’s companion stifles a cough. “Why did you take a wingsuit?”

  “What?”

  “Answer the question.”

  “What was the question?”

  “The wingsuit.”

  “I don’t know. We took everything; we were going to Antarctica.”

  “The G12, where is it?”

  “I don’t know.” I can’t do this.

  “We think you do,” Hau says.

  She locks eyes with him. “I want to go home.”

  A sly smirk. “You won’t be going home.”

  She leans toward him. Her left hand rises, it forms a hard fist, and it punches him, one sharp jab right in the middle of his nose. It really hurts her knuckles, and they sting like they’re on fire. But she didn’t do it. It happened, but she didn’t think it or plan it. It was her left arm, and she’s not left-handed. It moved on its own, an autonomous action. She’s never punched anyone in her life. She doesn’t even know how to punch someone. She looks at her throbbing hand, then looks across at Hau, shocked.

  He is visibly shaken. Dark liquid drips from his nostrils. It runs over his lips and into his mouth, coating his teeth, and it’s surreally beautiful against his pale white skin. He wipes his nose, flicking the blood from the back of his hand, splattering spots across the table and all over her new grey poly suit. She sits back in her chair.

  Without a word, Geller steps forward, hauls her from her seat, and escorts her back to her amoeba-like room, where she lies on the floor, curls into a ball, and cries. She can’t believe they’re dead. Her heart— her poor heart is breaking.

  Eleven

  There is something in the red purse.

  THE CONVEYOR BELTS OF moist air snaking thousands of kilometers around the Arctic and Antarctic circles are known as SkyRivers. If they cease meandering, they become static weather systems; fixed to a single location, they can deliver a deluge in minutes. On that day in the Kerguelen Islands, a SkyRiver halted, and then it released a cataclysmic downpour that fractured the Cook Glacier and flooded the Island. Now, the little town of Grande Terre is no more than a peaceful lake of remembrance. But the SkyRiver was adrift and disoriented; it had wandered too far north. Clouds don’t leave the South Pole, so how did it get there?

  ***

  Every day, Quinn has visions of her mother, like shimmering holograms. They appear with erratic regularity. She glances up and Lise is there, perched on the end of her bed; or she glides through the door, tilts her head toward Quinn, and smiles; or she sits at the table in the room, contemplating an equation. A relentless barrage of apparitions fill Quinn’s dreams and haunt her walking moments: the way Lise laughs, the way she sips her tea, the way she raises her eyebrow when she’s thinking.

  Quinn’s response to all of this is to lie on her bed and cry, unheard; water flows continuously upward through the membrane walls, and the noise deadens her sobs. Inside, she is empty. Inside, there is a void of nothingness—a hollow space that aches and hurts all the time. The days run into each other, and her cycle of memories plays like a show reel, a collection of the best and worst moments, the vignettes of their lives together.

  ***

  It’s grief’s duty to render time illusive, and Quinn is unsure how many days have now passed inside the gurgling monolith; more than four, less than ten. Yesterday, Hau hauled her back into the colorless interview room and threw rounds of questions at her: Who is Ada? She wasn’t on the guest list; why was she at the wedding? Did Quinn know what Lise was working on? What was the subject of her next book? Where did Quinn meet Mori? Why wasn’t he on the platform? What did she know about his business? Why were they going to Antarctica?

  Her mind was vague and misty, and she couldn’t answer any of these questions. But when he asked her about the G12, her senses consolidated and she looked him straight in the eyes. “Honestly, it’s a bit of mystery. If it turns up, I’ll let you know.” Then she gave him a wily smile. When she did, he knew she knew where it was, that she’d hidden it somewhere, but she didn’t care.

  After punching Hau, her left arm shut down. It lay limp and motionless on the bed beside her for hours. Concentrating, she willed it to be active—to brush the hair from her eyes, to scratch her nose, to wiggle its fingers. But it was completely nonresponsive.

&nb
sp; Geller found the affliction fascinating. She took pleasure in placing it in awkward positions, like behind Quinn’s back, or around her neck, just to see what would happen. Nothing happened. Then she picked it up and let it drop over and over, and still no response. When she gave it a Chinese burn, however, it shook itself loose and slapped her.

  After few hours, the arm returned to normal.

  “We’re too intelligent for grief,” Quinn tells Geller. “It’s debilitating. We should have evolved from this stupefied state centuries ago. How can humankind possibly survive if we feel like this? Everything hurts. I have this giant hole in my heart, and it hurts all the fucking time.”

  Geller listens but offers no sympathy. After several days of observing Quinn in her grief-infused malaise, she tells her to stop whining over the past and concentrate on the future.

  The future means tracking Mori down, finding out what he knew, and possibly killing him. The future sounds exhausting.

  “Tell me the truth,” says Quinn, “on a scale of one to ten, how stupid you do think I am? First, I agree to marry a man I don’t love. Then, he doesn’t show at the event, the G12 stops working and he was the last to use it, everyone dies, and, finally, after years of trying to get people interested in the G12, all of a sudden people are very interested in it.”

  “On a scale av one ta ten, you’re a five, typical av ’umankind,” says Geller.

  Quinn makes a formal request to see Lise, to see her body, which is stored in the hull of the Ship, but it’s denied.

  ***

  In the evenings an autonomous drone flits about, sterilizing Quinn’s cell with UV lamps that sanitize the surfaces, clearing up the microbes shed by the Ship’s human residents. The place is a pit of bacteria and mold, hence the pungent smell. It’s a bit hard to open a window underwater. Quinn is familiar with her environment now, and the dull hum of the drone fuses with the gurgling water walls. She finds the sound soporific; often, it lulls her to sleep.

  Today, the drone pauses unexpectedly. She opens her eyes; a pale man is standing next her bed. He’s wearing a grey uniform. He might be a guard.

  He leans toward her and says, “Follow me.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Just get up.”

  Quinn rolls out of bed, still half asleep, and as she pulls up her suit she spies another guard standing at the door. He checks the corridor, a nervous expression on his face, then gives his buddy hurry-up hand signals.

  They’re not supposed to be here. “I’m not going anywhere,” she says.

  The guy closer to her points a small, silver laser at her head. “Move.”

  Her left hand grabs his laser, and then it shoots him in the chest. He drops to the floor. The gun swivels to the open doorway and shoots his friend. He drops to the floor.

  Fuck. She’s horrified. Slowly, very carefully, she takes the laser out of her afflicted appendage and places it at the far end of the bed, out of reach. She’s a Pacifist, a signed-up, taken-the-frigging-pledge, Pacifist for Life.

  The Pacifist for Life Pledge was signed by over a billion people at the end of the RE Wars. They vowed never to pick up a weapon or to hurt anyone or anything. Quinn has never held a laser or a gun and has certainly never shot anyone. Until now. What has she done? Are they dead or stunned? She picks up the small, silver gun. The weapon is double-barreled—one cylinder for kill and one for stun. She jumps off the bed and checks the bodies; they’re breathing. So the weapon was set to stun. She needs to get them out of her cell.

  She drags the guy from inside her cell into the corridor—not an easy task, especially because she has to wiggle him sideways to get him out the door. Inert bodies are heavier than they look. She leaves the weapon on the floor beside the guards, scurries inside, and seals the door. Then, nervous, she waits and listens.

  Nothing happens, no sounds, no alarms, and no one passes. Damn, should have kept the weapon.

  She lies down on the bed and waits and listens. Soon, there is movement. The stunned men are found. The bodies are collected. Then the door opens and Geller enters.

  “’Ad some nocturnal visitors?”

  Quinn nods.

  “It’s sorted. There’s a lot goin’ on. Distracshun. Might be a good time ta go see your ma. I’m a grand believer in seein’ te dead, helps with closure, and you certainly need it. Come wit me.”

  ***

  They take the skylift straight down to a level called the Cellar, an empty area so vast Quinn can barely see the other side. The light down here is not blue; it’s cool and grey. In the far corner are towers of prefabricated shelving.

  “Build ’em as we need ’em,” Geller says. She means the racks of scaffolding, holding two thousand long, rectangular boxes.

  “This is the morgue?”

  “Disaster plannin’. ’Olds fifty tousand. Owned by Shun Mantra.”

  Goose bumps. It’s a distinctive name. “Shun Mantra. It sounds like a cult. Who are they?”

  “Don’t really know, but tink about it: Shun Mantra, Shun Mantra. Ring any bells?”

  Quinn shakes her head.

  “Shun Mantra, Transhuman. Get it?”

  “No.”

  “Te letters, tey’ve reconfigured te letters.”

  “Really, are you sure? Shun Mantra. Transhuman. I don’t think it’s—”

  “Trust me, tey match, ’tis te same letters.”

  “Okay, okay, Shun Mantra, Transhuman. It’s just not very clever for, you know, Tech types.”

  “Tey’re rich. I don’t tink tey care.” Geller checks the information stored in her band. “Tis way.”

  The scaffolding forms a U-shape at the far side of the Cellar. Drones flit between the shelves, and Geller instructs them to move a casket onto a raised platform.

  “We don’t ’ave a world a time.” She points her band at the casket, it releases a digital key, and the seal dissolves. They move forward and peer inside.

  Visually, the corpse is quite acceptable. Quinn expected more deterioration. She’d braced herself for bloating and swelling, but the body is in good condition. They retrieved her early. She’s still wearing her formal clothes. The time between leaving the Cloud Ship and the flood was several hours. There was plenty of time to change, but perhaps the party continued at the Station—maybe they were making the most of the occasion, mingling, finishing the alcohol and food. The jeweled red choker still circles her languid neck, but her shoes are missing. Her hand clutches a small, red purse; the strap is wrapped many times round her wrist. On the day the Cloud Ship came down, Lise wasn’t wearing a red choker, and she wasn’t carrying a red purse.

  “This isn’t her,” says Quinn. “It’s Ada, her partner. Ex-partner.”

  “I’m workin’ wit idiots.”

  ***

  When they return to Quinn’s cell, she confronts Geller.

  “Why am I still here? It’s been two weeks. The interrogation is finished. They don’t need me. Why don’t they send me home?”

  “’Tis been one week, an’ you’re in limbo. No one knows what ta do wit you. Caught between squabblin’ players. Your ma ’ad influential friends, but you also ’ave a wealthy enemy.”

  “Enemy? I don’t have—”

  “Yes, you do. Niels Eco. We’re not dense. Two tousand people don’t just die wit’out warnin’. Not in 2049. Someone knows sometin’. If it wasn’t you, ten who was it? Mori? An’ why? We want ta know what’s goin’ on. An’ everyone wants ta know where te G12 is. Was it workin’, was it not workin’? So, tell me: what te fuck is goin’ on?”

  Geller’s dark eyes stare at Quinn.

  Quinn sighs. “The catastrophe was a natural phenomenon, Mother Nature against humanity, and we lost. But something set it off. I checked the G12. I checked it twice a day, every day. It didn’t show any rain coming, and it’s never wrong. Which means someone set a ghost, a cover, so I couldn’t see the real data. Mori was last person to use it.” She shrugs.

  “We’ve not found ’im. He’s mis
sin’. You know, ’tis a good ting to ’ave enemies. It’ll give your life a purpose. Sometin’ ta focus on, nigh ya ’ave no one, an’ nothin’.” She wiggles a finger at Quinn. “Te records show Ada as officially missin’, while Lise is listed as deceased. Te bodies were collected from te depths of te ocean an’ identified by their Bands, so Lise an’ Ada, tey swapped Bands. Now, why te fuck would they do tat?”

  Quinn shakes her head; she can’t image what went on in the final hours or minutes before the flood hit.

  “If your motor’s not dead, ’ten where is she?”

  Quinn freezes. Does impending death count as an absolute necessity? How long did they have? Minutes? Seconds? How long does it take to activate a time travel portal? She said she’d use it if she absolutely had to. Quinn has a lightning-bolt moment, pins and needles run along her forearm. Good lordt, there is something in the red purse. The way Ada was gripping it. The way the strap was wound around her wrist. She looks at Geller. “I think there’s something in her purse.”

  “Back we go.”

  ***

  The Cellar is now active. The morning shift is busy checking readings and scanning monitors showing the ocean floor. Geller offers her credentials, saying Hau approved Quinn’s request to see the corpse of her mother. The guards comply. They locate the draw, load it onto the platform, and, when Quinn confirms she’s ready to view the corpse, they open the casket.

  She creeps forward and the guards follow. She leans into the casket, and the guards also lean; there’s the purse, right there, but she can’t open it—not like this, they’re too close. This isn’t going to work.

  “Just let it all out. ’Tis perfectly fine ta cry.” Geller slaps Quinn on the back. “Just let it all out.”

  Let what all out?

  “No need ta ’old it all in, if you need time alone . . .”

  Ohhh—let it all out, make a scene. Buy some privacy. Channeling her weepy, emotional self is not difficult for Quinn, she’s a bit soppy these days. Hanging her head, she wrings her hands and emits several long moans, followed by a series of heroic sobs. Geller gestures to the guards that they should back off, give her some privacy. Slinging an arm over their shoulders, she spins them around.