Mortal Remains

by Christopher Evans

  When he had finished talking, Marea and Vargo exchanged incredulous glances. Then the ship began a high-pitched warbling, and I saw that some of the status displays were flashing alarms.

  “Ship,” I said, “what’s happening?”

  “Vent strunt treckle,” the ship responded. “Central rampt tessiflera. Ick.”

  “What?”

  More gibberish followed. Vargo scrutinized the sensitories on the flight ridge.

  “We’re drifting back towards Io,” he announced. “There’s cortical interruptions, short-circuiting by the look of it. Most likely ash blockages in the central controlling system from the plume.”

  I sought Chloe and Lucian’s guidance. They could do nothing except confirm what Vargo had said.

  Vargo himself was waiting. “Well?”

  “What do you suggest?” I asked.

  He could not believe that the answer wasn’t obvious to me. “You’ll have to override the ship’s neural network and fly it yourself.”

  He said it as a statement, but neither Tunde nor I had ever piloted a ship. Neither had Chloe and Lucian.

  “You do know how to fly it?” Vargo said.

  I shook my head.

  Vargo made a contemptuous noise. He sat down in the pilot’s seat and reached for navigation sensitory.

  “Pleag releag,” said the ship. “Nip spung.”

  Marea stood there in silence, gazing at Tunde with a strange expression while Tunde watched Vargo wrestle for control of the ship. Once again, the sight of empty space—the thought that we were marooned in it—was beginning to make a cold panic trickle through him.

  Then the star-field swayed and shifted. Presently Vargo said: “We’re getting there.”

  The ship was pulling out of Io’s gravitational field and resuming its outward-bound course.

  “I think this is in all our best interests,” the ship announced at great volume. “Whenfh mimm undranglar—”

  Vargo shut down its vocals.

  “Is this true?” Marea said. “Is that really how it happened?”

  She was addressing Tunde. It was hard for him to look at her without feeling uncomfortable.

  “It’s quite true,” Cori said; she spoke with Nina’s intonation. “We were revived on the Noosphere, and we can gain access to certain minds through the shrines.”

  Marea’s eyes did not move from Tunde.

  “Let me get this clear,” she said. “You sold the womb on, then went into hiding before finally this Nathan person came into your head and helped you fly the scuttle to Io?”

  “I know it’s hard to credit, but it’s true.” He essayed a grin, realizing he had every reason to feel delighted since we had actually pulled it off.

  “You bastard!” she said, and slapped him hard across the face.

  Nine

  I was in darkness again. I could feel Tunde’s cheek tingling, see the rage on Marea’s face, but the pain was receding, the scuttle gone, leaving me adrift in a featureless blackness.

  “Nina?”

  A silence. Then: “Nathan?”

  I felt her approach—or rather it was as if her mind swam closer to me.

  “I thought you might have stayed with Cori,” I said.

  “We withdrew you both,” came the voice of Chloe. “It seemed prudent.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Nina. “Weren’t we in real time with them?”

  “Of course,” said Chloe.

  “And now we’re back—where?”

  “In the Noosphere. Or rather its Noospace.”

  “How is this possible?”

  It was Lucian who spoke: “Once you’re embedded in a mind through a prayer terminal, a permanent link is forged through the Noosphere. We can return you here at any time, and you’ll also be able to revisit Tunde or Cori because an imprint of your consciousness remains with them.”

  “We can go back to them at any time?”

  “With our help, yes.”

  “We could return right now?”

  “If it was necessary.”

  This only served to deepen my suspicion. The darkness, the bodilessness, was infuriating. I wanted to be able to see them, to make my presence felt in every way I could.

  “You didn’t tell us this before,” I said.

  “We explained the necessity of proceeding slowly,” Chloe replied. “Isn’t it better that you gradually discover these capacities for yourself?”

  “Why did you withdraw us?” Nina asked.

  “Tunde and the others are safe for the time—”

  “What about Vargo?” I interrupted. “You didn’t tell me he would be coming along with us until the last moment.”

  Part of my anger rose from the feeling that we were being manipulated, part of it from the abrupt withdrawal. I had enjoyed participating in Tunde’s adventure; I had enjoyed my capacity to influence it.

  Lucian said, “We only learned at the last moment that Marea had requested he be her mentor at the end. It would have been difficult to refuse her this final consolation. And, as it turned out, his presence is invaluable. The others will need his piloting skills now that the ship is crippled.”

  “I don’t like this. How’s Tunde going to explain our sudden disappearance?”

  “Tunde must wait. There have been new developments.”

  Nina was close to me; had we been physical we would have held one another.

  “Where are our bodies?” I demanded.

  “They remain where they are,” said Chloe. “On the Noosphere. With us.”

  It was hard to retain a proper sense of orientation, to decide where Nina and I truly “were”. This was not made any easier by Chloe and Lucian’s constant talk of “the Noosphere” and “Noospace” in different contexts. Sometimes they seemed to mean actual physical locations—the Moon and all the Settled Worlds—sometimes they obviously meant the transubstantial realm through which communions were conducted with ancestors, the dark void which we presently inhabited. It was empty to us, I assumed, because our ancestors had died long before the Noosphere was established.

  “Can we return to them?” Nina was asking.

  “If you wish,” said Chloe. “But we’d prefer it if you would allow us to let you dream again.”

  “Bezile?” said Nina.

  “She’s just left communion. The Advocates have held a council, and there were many revelations. It’s vital to us that you experience what she did. There’s little time.”

  For once I could sense their urgency beneath the measured tones. Whatever else was going on, they were definitely eager for us to cooperate.

  “Are we going to be inhabiting her?” I asked.

  “Not as with Tunde,” Lucian answered. “You’ll be a spectator only. Bezile is no longer in the shrine, but her communion has been recorded and you’ll experience what she did. As if it were happening for the first time.”

  I let a silence extend, wondering if Nina would speak. She was a calmer presence than I, more accepting of our situation yet far from passive. I knew she was intrigued and wanted to experience the dream.

  “You’d see the Advocates in the flesh,” said Chloe. “You must be curious about them.”

  “We urge you to help us,” added Lucian.

  “We’d go together?” I said. “Nina and I?”

  “You would dream the same reality,” Chloe said.

  • • •

  “We’re late. We’ll be lucky if we arrive on time.”

  Even by his usual nervy standards, Luis was fretful. He kept fussing with Bezile’s robes, primping and smoothing and straightening folds as her processional wound its way along the sinuous gravity trail of the twilight zone towards Icarus.

  “For heaven’s sake,” Bezile said, slapping his hands away. “Do calm down! We haven’t been summoned to an execution.”

  “You have the text of your deliverance fully memorized?”

  “Every single word,” Bezile told him with great forbearance. “Every pause, emphasis, every me
taphor and oxymoron. It is burned into my brain as if it had been branded there with microsurgery. You’re acting as if this is our first time.”

  “It’s twelve years since the Advocates last summoned us all. And these are difficult days. Much is afoot, and the stakes are high.”

  She gave a patient sigh. “Do you intend to assail me with platitudes, Luis? Fetch some ice delights. I’m in need of a little refreshment.”

  Grateful to have something practical to do, Luis scuttled away down the long coiling corridor of their train, rocked and swayed by the weaving lateral movements of the beast, bumping blithely as he passed into the sub-arbiters, intercessors, mediators, the household stewards and the other members of the office who sat demurely in their narrow seats. The younger members of Bezile’s retinue in particular would be thinking themselves fortunate to accompany her: it was not often that one got an invitation to the presence of the Advocates, rarer still that one attended in a council at their “summer house”, as they so coyly termed it.

  Absently gnawing her thumbnail, Bezile gazed out through the wide-angle orb as her train began to climb the crater wall. Little did Luis know that there was a very real reason to be concerned: she might well be in disgrace following the debacle with the womb. Nothing official had been said ever since Shivaun’s escape a year ago, but the announcement of the council on Mercury had been abrupt, her summons peremptory.

  Well, she would bluff it out. If she couldn’t trust one of her own daughters, then who could she trust? Still, it was disappointing: all those years of having your scions trained to be the perfect expressions of your wishes. And Shivaun had been the best of them, the one that had risen furthest. Bezile had even contemplated revealing her true maternity to her had the womb been successfully delivered and the Advocates suitably gratified; instead Shivaun had gone scurrying off to the ends of the Solar System, vanishing among the corpses on that tomb moon. The very thought of it was enough to make her shudder, especially since the place was crawling with Augmenters.

  The processional sidewinded higher towards the crater lip. Bezile gazed back along the gravity trail with its ragged canyons dropping on either side where the bedrock had been quarried to provide landmasses for the Outer Worlds. It was almost twenty years since her last visit to Mercury, and its surface looked as bleak as ever, the riven heat-blasted rock, the inordinately long shadows at this latitude, the sheer apparent absence of life on its gouged surface. In fact several million lived here, snugly hidden away on fertile canyon faces and clustered around the polar regions, but it always seemed unutterably bleak to her eyes, cratered dust and crags, the sun, that ultimate swallower, a bloated arc looming over the ragged horizon, too fierce to acknowledge with the eye.

  Luis returned with her ice delights, frozen creamed juices in pretzel wafers. Her mood mellowed when the first one she tried proved to be an astringent limecurrant. Luis sat down beside the driver, anxiously awaiting the moment when they crested the ridge so that he could convey their greetings to the palace. At fifty-two he was a stripling really, but he fussed like a dodderer in his death throes.

  Peppermeat next. Then pearnut fudge. A little too bland for her tastes, but she had no intention of wasting it. The crater lip loomed, and as the train surmounted it even she could not resist a certain feeling of … well, perhaps awe was not quite the right word.

  She’d heard that the Advocates had had their palace redesigned; in fact, it must have been reduced to protoplasm and entirely regrown. In place of the old and rather stately quincunx of tessellated domes, there rose a tower that had obviously been modelled after a strand of DNA, a double helix of constantly shifting rainbow colours, topped by a blob of flashing golden light that might have been contrived by putting a hyperactive photoplasm in a transparent bowl.

  “Magnificent,” Luis began to burble. “Wondrous.”

  They were not words she herself would have chosen, but she kept her counsel. As the train began to descend into the crater, the rest of her retinue peered eagerly from their portholes and made obeisances to the sight. The craterscape had also been extensively remodelled: gone were the sleeping willows, the tranquil grassy spaces where one could rest while the trees wafted fragrant nepenthe; in their place were angular pools sporting corkscrew fountains and chevroned flamingoes, geometrees with foliage like green ice crystals. Apparently artificiality was the latest vogue in architecture and landscape design, and this was as blatant an expression of it as any.

  The processional was forced to straighten down the linear road leading to the palace gates; it was the beast’s least favourite mode of motion, and the least comfortable for its passengers with its jerky compression and expansion of musculature. Its hood parted, admitting the garden air. There were more murmurs of delight at the scents, but to Bezile it was redolent of nothing more than a sanitized latheratory.

  Finally they docked at the palace gate. Bezile stood stately and ample in front of the gilded portal while everyone around her scurried and arranged themselves into ceremonial order. She stifled a yawn; she had found the flight from Venus tiresome and did not travel well these days.

  Palace functionaries ushered them inside while Luis jabbered apologies for their lateness. Did she wish to go to her rooms and refresh herself beforehand? This was quite permissible, though time was pressing and the Advocates were eager for the council to commence. No, she told them with weary politeness, she was at their disposal—a phrase she considered rather unfortunate as soon as it was out.

  An ectoplasmic levelator spiralled them up and up before finally depositing them at the mouth of a large glistening chamber full of ruddy arching surfaces and pendulous lights. It was rather like being inside the belly of a behemoth. Other parties were arranged around the chamber: she nodded to Lasantha of Terremon on Callisto, acknowledged Geordano of Titania Prime, pointedly ignored Bettwys, her sometime rival from Ishtar, a poisonous woman with a devious nature and the personal morals of the most unprincipled whore.

  Her retinue spread itself around the alcove which had been set aside for them. It was close to the sweeping platform of the oratory from where she and her peers would give their deliverances, and from where Julius and Orela would in turn address them all. She chose to see this as a sign of status. Close by was the alcove reserved for Venzano’s party. It had not yet arrived.

  “You see?” she said to Luis. “We’re not the last.”

  Luis merely became even more anxious. “Perhaps something’s happened. He’s due to give the first address.”

  “What is the matter with you?” Bezile said irritably.

  “It’s not like him to be late.”

  “As you well know, he was on a courtesy visit to Despina when the summons went out. He has further to come than the rest of us.”

  “Depton’s here, all the way from Pluto.”

  “Depton’s probably been here for days. You know how punctilious he is.”

  “I don’t like it. There’s been no news from Venzano’s office in the last twenty-four hours.”

  She sighed. “How many years have we been doing this, Luis? Security is always tight when there’s an attendance council. Should we advertise our travelling arrangements on public channels so that every lunatic in the Noospace has a chance to sabotage our flights?”

  Luis was not mollified; he kept pursing his lips, a mannerism she had always found extremely irritating.

  “Do calm down. You’re already on your second heart, at your age! You overwork and worry too much.” She reached across to one of the laden dispensaries on the table. “Here, have a tranquince.”

  Luis declined the fruit. Bezile was tempted to take a bite herself, but she needed to keep her wits sharp. She and the Prime Arbiter had done as much as possible to try to track down the womb over the past year. Agents of the Noocracy had been infiltrating Charon, but so far they had no leads. Charon was a tight, enclosed community, suspicious of outsiders, a den of Augmenter sympathizers. It didn’t help that not even Venzano had been a
ble to ascertain precisely what the womb contained and what its value to the Noosphere was: every enquiry in that direction had drawn a blank. There were obviously things that even a Prime Arbiter was not meant to know. If she allowed herself to think about it, this was worrying; but it was better not to dwell on such matters. Confidence was everything; confidence from without and within.

  Really, what more could she have done? She had been diligent in communing with the Noosphere, spending at least an hour a day in her private shrine doing her utmost to purify her thoughts and give a sympathetic response to the mood of her ancestors, whom she often found trite and over-excitable. And, to be fair, there had been no comeback, neither praise nor criticism, from the living or the departed. If Julius and Orela had intended to censure her for handing over the womb to a daughter who had proved to be a traitor, then surely they would have done so by now?

  The disembodied voice of the Advocates, speaking as one, filled the chamber, welcoming them and requesting their attentiveness during the introductory display; they were free to help themselves to the food and drink on their tables; the Advocates would join them in person a little later.

  Lids parted on the chamber wall behind the oratory, revealing a large optic. For the next hour they were treated to displays and commentaries on the current status of the worlds of the Noosphere. Much of it was bland in the extreme, mere public fodder—the council proceedings would be transmitted live throughout the Noospace—and most of those assembled in the chamber were more interested in eating their way through the positively delicious selection of comestibles that had been provided: everything from Martian candysteaks to ripplerunners, a new concoction from Oberon which left explosions of fragrant sweetness as they wriggled down your throat. Bezile tried everything, listening all the while to the talk of improving percentages in interworld votes, the crucial role of mediators in consoling relatives of Dementia victims, a claim that the Augmenter presence had now been effectively stamped out as far as the Neptunian moons.

  This last one she severely doubted. No doubt officially it was the case, but she was certain pockets of Augmenters still existed in murky corners everywhere. The attractions of physicality—of constantly ongoing physicality, no matter how warped—would always outweigh the slightly more nebulous consolations of the Noosphere for a small minority. Weren’t Julius and Orela themselves living proof of that fact?