IGMS Issue 49

by IGMS

  That canopy - my place - is two klicks west, more walking time than I have oxygen, and Anna won't get back alone. But it whispers to me. I want to brush my ungloved fingers over the lichen, bury it against my skin. Is it hard and crystalline as it looks, or soft like a moss? Anna's right; if it needs the acidic atmosphere, it probably won't survive the terraform. I'll never know.

  My O2 monitor hits red.

  I breathe a soft farewell to the lichen and the spires and guide Anna back to the colony doors.

  We're confined to quarters before the pod's descent under the rock. Seris brooks no argument. I chew through the battery of my console reading and countersigning the fourteen-odd psych reports of our skeleton crew, and eat my dinner meal portion two hours early just for something to do.

  With a shriek of metal that rings in my ears, the gears fire up. The pod shudders and groans, drilling down underneath and depositing a crumple zone of rock over the top. I try to drown it out with the sound of my breath. I can see our fragile shell swallowed into the belly of the planet, a speck within its gut, and my own gut churns, shooting sweat to my temples and palms. I override it, calling up Mozart on a disembodied piano, one key at a time.

  A buzz of comms interrupts me mid-note. I flip up my wall display. Justin's face stares back, sweating and sickly pale, wide pupils all but hiding the blue of his eyes. Internal comms are restricted while we descend in case of emergencies. He must've hacked the protocols.

  "What are you doing?" I use a stage whisper, like it makes any difference.

  "I have to get out of here," he whispers back. "We're going to die."

  "Breathe, Jus'. Deep breaths. Where would you go?"

  "Five years, it's supposed to take. Spread it out, so things don't go critical. You can't change a whole planet in ten months." He grips the screen, pressing his face so close the camera can't focus.

  "We've got it covered. We'll be miles underground before it starts."

  "Even worse. With the reaction compressed like this, temperatures'll go haywire, you'll get earthquakes, cataclysmic storms. The pod's not built to take it, you know that."

  "We can't risk the meteors in orbit, and we don't have the oxygen to wait. We'll sit it out and tunnel back up when the coast is clear. It's out of your control, Jus'." I try to keep my voice even against the image of the planet's maw grinding us to dust.

  "I can't breathe in here."

  "You have plenty of air. Have you eaten? Food will help."

  Justin makes a face. "I hate the hydroponics grain Anna added. It's like eating dust."

  "She said there was a fungus, it chews up the cell proteins. Try it as oatmeal."

  Justin's face blanches even further. "It's mouldy?" he squeaks.

  "It's fine, it doesn't affect people." I aim for soothing sing-song tones. "It's a symbiotic of the apple trees we brought. We just don't know how it's getting into the grain."

  "Why don't they just replace the seed stock?"

  "They have, twice. And the substrate. It keeps coming back."

  I search for another topic to distract him. He chews his lip, peeling off a near-white layer of skin. His lips are cracked and blotchy-red from where he's done it before. He's whirling over something in his head, I can see his breathing quicken.

  "I made it part of my myth, you know." My voice is too bright, it sounds false.

  "What, the fungus?" He's only half listening.

  "In a way." I clear my throat for a storytelling voice. "Mytyr's first son, Yllikos the wolf, still in his mother's womb, wanted all the heavens for himself, to shape as he saw fit.

  "He refused to be born and instead, ate his way out from inside her. And once he was out, he kept eating, devouring every bit of her until his own belly was so big and round and heavy that it descended from the heavens and formed our planet, Azure."

  Justin shifts back from the screen, his lip forgotten. I keep my relief from showing.

  "In the blaze of the sun, Azure woke and rolled and stretched, and breathed Mytyr's soul back up into the sky, where she was reborn. But Yllikos was not so lucky, stuck as he was with his swollen belly. He was trapped on the south horizon, never to touch the heavens, let alone shape them. Mytyr left him there as a warning to her future children."

  Justin narrows his eyes. "But why would she let him devour her in the first place? Surely a mother is stronger than her infant."

  I'd wondered about that myself when I'd written it. But I have Justin's full attention now. "It's a common thread with myths; being subsumed and reborn. Maybe she wanted to give him the choice."

  "And he did it anyway," Justin says with an almost-smile. I nod.

  Sometimes I worry if we're a bit too much like Yllikos.

  Justin's comm cuts off - Seris must have discovered the breach. I try to get him back, but she's locked it down tight. He doesn't buzz again.

  I collapse into sleep before the pod reaches the end of its tunnel, half a kilometre down, and wake to the comm announcement that the terraforming catalysts have been released. Half awake, I shuffle myself to the celebrations in the mess hall, by way of Justin's quarters.

  Anna's reporting to us all that she's traced the fungus to the hydroponics water supply when the first tremor crashes through. The walls groan and shudder, the floor tilts crazily. I try to keep my lunch in my stomach as the hydraulics struggle to keep us balanced. In my mind I can see great talons of stone crushing us, spearing in so the acid air can devour our skin. I blot it out, jaw clenched against the spinning in my head, smother it with blue-green twists of rock under burnt-orange, the rasp of the O2 filters, the brush of shimmering lichen.

  Anna grasps my hand, her grey eyes flicking over my face, and I force myself away from the wall and nod reassurance. I shove the images down, bury them deep in my bones, and smile. This is my job, to be the calm one.

  The quakes come almost every day. Some are merely terrifying, spinning the floor like a gyroscope. Others nearly cripple the colony. People are flung into walls, warps ripple across the skin of the floors. Chomsky starts a book on how big a quake will rupture the bulkheads; I don't have the guts to bet.

  When the generator housing cracks, the surge takes the backup system with it. With no power or life support, we huddle in the mess hall with emergency O2 canisters and headlamps while Chomsky and Renna scramble to get us back online before our air runs out. I clutch the thumb-sized drive that holds my constellation stories, running my fingers over the access port until they're numb. There's no talk, people sit and squeeze hands, conserving air.

  A shout cuts through the silence.

  "You're sick! Why would you do this?" Lights flash as people turn to look. A crowd of four or five are up on their feet near the door, ringed around something on the floor. The lights move again. I glance across to Anna, but she's looking at me. So are others.

  I'm supposed to handle this. It's my job. I squeeze the tension back down in my gut and stand.

  "Alright, go easy on the air," I call out. I pick my way between people's limbs, and force a smile into my voice. "What's the matter?"

  A fist brandishes something in my face - a blue sculpture, a waxy model of a Buddha cradling a child. Or an almost-Buddha. It's the rock formation Justin loves, that he saw six klicks from the colony. It's a perfect copy, near as I can tell. I take it and look down at Justin. His face is pinched, indignant, but he's still crouched on the floor.

  "You made this?" I try to make it sound like praise.

  Two of the group haul him up off the floor. "Out of the generator sealant," one says.

  "While we're gasping in here," the other adds.

  "They were scraps. We're not even low, there's plenty," Justin says, hunching his shoulders in. "It matched the blue of the rock."

  With a snarl, one of the mob buries his fist in Justin's stomach. They throw him back to the floor and lay in, kicking and yelling and screaming. I scramble at shoulders and arms, trying to pull them off or dig them aside but it's no use. I stand back, hold out m
y little thumb drive and suck in as much air as I can.

  "Stop or I will tase every one of you!" My voice fills the hall.

  They actually hesitate, and half-turn toward me.

  "Since when do you have a taser?"

  "For security." Seris' voice rings out firm, backing me up. "I need people I can depend on. Each of you, separate corners, right now. We don't have the air for this."

  There's a pause, a precipice. I swallow and force my hands steady, sure they're going to call my bluff. But it passes, and they skulk away to their corners. I sink down next to Justin, hoping it looks more like I'm concerned for him than that my legs have given out in relief.

  He's in bad shape, but he's breathing. We wheel him to the medibay on a food trolley, headlamps cutting through the dark. I prise the model from his broken fingers so we can set them. He must have grabbed it in the fight after I dropped it. The little figure crumbles in my hands.

  It takes twelve hours to get the power back.

  Anna finds me later, staring at my star charts. She stills my fingers; I hadn't realised they were tracing my constellations.

  "What's that?" She points to a blank spot I've ringed in red.

  When the sun sets in its blaze of purple, there's a hole in the sky above us where there are no stars. A place of emptiness, a ravenous darkness.

  "It's where Yllikos was meant to be, if he hadn't eaten his mother. She left the gap as a reminder."

  Anna gives me a chuckle. Anything to break the strain.

  I don't think that patch is anything so benign.

  I can't tell if it's moving; I need better telescopes than we have, and more time. Maybe it's fleeing our presence, carving a swathe of nothing out from us. Or it might swell up around us, eat everything down to the atoms and scatter them to the wind in a few billion years. When the colony marker for each sunset strikes, I can feel it yawning above, something inside me reaches back, and I close my eyes and count a Fibonacci sequence with my breaths until I can keep my face in check.

  Two days later, the tunnel walls above us collapse.

  It's a quake beyond all our measurements; it feels like the whole planet is convulsing in a death spasm. The impact pierces through to the top stasis layers, crushing the pod down so that it bulges at its equator and tears apart at the seams.

  We lose fifty people inside a heartbeat. There's no way to get to them safely. We seal off the top third of the pod and the outer layers near the equator, and hold a day-long memorial for the friends we've lost, and the ones we barely knew. I keep my Fibonacci mask on over the darkness, talking to each of the crew, weekly hour-long sessions about the loss and the dark and the fear, and the beauty above that will make it worthwhile.

  Seris sits straight-backed throughout her sessions, no talk of sculptures or canyons. She never flinches, those gold-green eyes clear and firm. The woman has control like steel. You could bend girders around her will.

  We should have made her the psych.

  The wind unearths us in the final months of the terraform. We've lost all external cameras and sensors from the quakes, so while the rest of the crew slowly revive from cryo, we send drones and probes to sample the air and the soil from the ruined layers of the pod and ascertain if it's safe. Seris orders the doors welded shut to stop anyone leaving prematurely. I catch Justin trying to sneak out through a weakened bulkhead and have to handcuff him to his bed. Seris keeps us blind and waiting three whole days before she lets us out onto our paradise.

  We walk out into a dead sea of rust.

  The rock spires have been scoured down to sand by the storms. The brilliant blues and greens are gone, replaced with a glaring red-orange dust. It washes over the splintered shell of the pod, filling the cracks like water.

  We're meant to be on recovery detail. I go AWOL. From the radio traffic, I'm not the only one - most of the terraform crew disappear. We're all looking for the same thing, I think. Some semblance of the world we loved. Our own secret, sacred places. I go looking for that canopy. I want to touch the minerals that shimmer on the rock surface, brush my fingers over the lichen.

  I walk for two hours across the dead salt desert until the GPS says I've arrived. The spires are gone; nothing can hide on this planet anymore. I can see to the edge of the world; featureless and barren. The same emptiness howls inside. I sink onto my knees in the fine, ruddy dust, bury my hands and my face in what's left of that place and I sob.

  I don't know how long I stay. Hunger comes and goes, and a weakness takes my limbs. But if I close my eyes and breathe the dust deeply enough, I can go back there under the spires. I can go back and wait to die.

  Visions fill my head: the spires and the great storms that destroyed them. I imagine the planet writhing as we wrench her skin away and smother her in foreign air, and I spin back in the whirling darkness as the pod shudders and splits around me again. I brace for the force of the earth to crush us. I almost want it to.

  When they find me, I'm too weak to walk. I wouldn't even if I could. They pull me from the dust and drag me back to the colony and lock me in an observation room.

  Two others join me in that empty whiteness: Justin and Anna. They sit on the floor with the same expressions, the same vacant, shell-shocked faces. Red rivulets run down their cheeks where tears have plastered the dust to their skin. Dried blood clots on their fingers where the sand has shredded them. The whites of their eyes are orange with dust. I can feel the same grit in mine. We are the colour of our world; the only colour in the room.

  We don't talk. I can see myself in them, my loss. I can see the spires and that sky we obliterated, Anna's deep pit of Hades and Justin's Buddha. I will them back again, try to crawl back into memory, force my belief they're still there until my chest aches, but the void in my gut sucks everything away until even the colours hurt.

  Everything we loved of this world, we destroyed by trying to touch.

  It takes them a week to decide Anna and I aren't a danger to ourselves or others. We eat, if tastelessly, and we answer questions. We're released to our assigned tasks on the condition that we check in each evening with the resident psych nurse. Justin is less fortunate. With each day, he withdraws further and further into himself; at first reducing his answers to monosyllabic mumbles, and then to nothing at all. Twice, his apathy snaps into a near-psychotic rage, and he launches himself at the nearest available surface, throwing himself against it until he's restrained.

  I walk out again onto that lifeless dustball, trying to slip back into my engineering role. The glare of the sun in that garish blueness burrows into my brain and sinters my nerves. I want the soft, warm orange, the amber glow. Even the stars, my ridiculous constellations, would be better than that alien blue.

  The wind razors my skin raw with sand. I force myself to remain standing and scoop a handful of the dust. It pours through my fingers, so fine it's almost liquid. A dull throb starts in the base of my brain, reaching around to my temples. I try to ignore it and walk further out into the heat.

  The colony has soldiered on without us, starting the foundations of our new life. Skeletal scaffolds erupt from the sand like desiccated ribcages, the only interruption to that flat, dead horizon, but they splay and twist, slowly sagging instead of bearing true. I'd designed them to be sunk deep into a rocky ground, but now there's only sand and dust.

  Seris will make us relocate, if there's anywhere with rock on this planet. The thought of leaving my canopy, even its remains, hollows me. I shuffle through the sand back toward the engineering labs - there has to be a stable scaffold we could build. The muscles in my thigh spasm, like they're crackling. I ease one hand down each leg as I walk, trying to look inconspicuous. Last thing I want is to end up back in isolation.

  I step over attempts at mud bricks and glass on the way; clearly they've already been trying. In a neat little grid marked with specimen numbers lie two dozen crumbled bricks and slabs and patches of blackened dust. A few paces on, another half-dozen are being baked in a makeshift
oven. Seris eyes the progress critically, her mouth in that steel line, gold-green eyes squinting against the dust. Anna's at her side, talking softly, her once-animated hands reduced to subdued flutters. She looks up as I approach but keeps talking, as if her body is on automatic.

  "... doesn't matter what we add, it's not going to bind. It's slightly alkaline, but not too much; at best, it can act as a substrate like the hydroponics, but the nutrients sink straight through it; it's too fine. I've even found microscopic particles needling their way through cell walls."

  Seris's gaze snaps up from the oven. "It's a contaminant?"

  "No ill-effects that we've observed, but yes. We've already been exposed, Seris. And it's not something we can avoid. It's in the air, even inside. There's no point in a quarantine, and we don't have the oxygen reserves anyway."

  Anna's voice is exhausted. If Seris is irritated at the too-familiar phrasing, she doesn't show it. When I look at Anna more closely, I can see the pinched expression around her eyes, the signs of tension in her jaw. She's as brittle as I am, and Seris knows it.

  Seris answers a buzz on her comms, and waves a dismissal at us as she turns back to the colony pod. I try to muster an appropriately quizzical expression for Anna.

  Anna shrugs. She isn't bothering to maintain the pretence with me. "I have to - " she waves vaguely at the makeshift hydroponics station. "We keep finding drowned bees in the irrigation units." She massages the palm of one hand with her thumb, slowly working her way down to her wrist.

  "Cramps?"

  "All the time. Like I'm being electrocuted."

  "And a headache, like the back of your head's being broiled."

  Anna looks at me, fear replacing the pinched expression for a moment. "Justin," she murmurs.

  I know what she means. "I won't tell them if you won't. It's probably just stress."