RIME (Kindle Single)

by Tim Lebbon

  RIME

  Tim Lebbon

  © 2016 Tim Lebbon

  Tim Lebbon has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 2016 by Venture Press, an imprint of Endeavour Press Ltd.

  I open my eyes and I’m still alive. It comes as a blessed relief and a welcome miracle, as it has every morning since I’ve been here. But then I remember the reason for my survival, and what came before, and guilt lands with the force of unknown gravities. I despair at the awfulness of it all, yet I can’t help but revel in my continued survival. The two emotions form the extremes of every waking hour. I am, as Luke insists on reminding me, a creature of contradictions.

  As if bidden by my thinking his name––and perhaps that’s true, because there are many aspects I have yet to learn about this amazing, almost unfathomable future––Luke walks through the door as if it wasn’t there at all. I have seen this a dozen times since my arrival, and a dozen times I have tried, unsuccessfully, to leave the same way. For me, the door remains solid.

  “Good morning,” Luke says. “Shall we go out onto the balcony?”

  I’ve tried going out there as well, but have found no way to open the wide glass walls. Luke and the woman accompanying him walk straight through. I follow, feeling no hint of resistance at all. Once outside, I glance back briefly and see myself reflected in the glass, a ghost from the past.

  I’ve been avoiding my reflection because it reminds me of what I’ve done. I see the sad, haunted man; the thin, haggard face; the long limbs, tall body, waving hair framing my sadness. Yet it’s the unmistakeable glint in my eyes that troubles me most. The knowledge of a second chance.

  “Shall we sit?” Luke asks, and three comfortable stools rise from the balcony’s floor.

  “Who’s we?” I ask, looking at the woman. Like everyone I’ve seen here, she’s very beautiful, and perhaps one day soon I’ll ask about that. It’s one more question whose answer frightens me.

  “This is Olivia,” Luke says. “She’s going to be your liaison for the case.”

  “I’m being charged, then?”

  Luke’s smile drops. Olivia looks away, out from the balcony and across the staggering view that I usually see only through glass. Now, being out in the open air and involved in the view itself, it almost takes my breath away. The building I’m being kept in must be over a mile high, one of seven set across the wide, flat plain. Silent aircraft drift gracefully between towers on slender wings, and huge airships sometimes cruise in from the distance, emerging from the haze to park high above and disgorge their smaller cousins.

  A river flows across the plain, and the tall towers are built along its winding course. There are boats moving slowly along its length. Settlements speckle its banks, none of them large. Herds of creatures I can’t identify spot the ground, moving like shadows over my eye. Birds flock and swoop, and several times one or more have landed on my balcony, cleaning their feathers or scraping their beaks on the balustrade. None fly close now, not with us sitting there. I’m not surprised. It’s as if they know who I am.

  “I don’t think there was ever any doubt,” Olivia says. “You’re responsible for the deaths of seventeen million people.”

  She has no real expression as she states that stark fact. I can’t read her at all. I already doubt that these two are even human.

  “You can’t kill those that are already dead,” I say.

  Olivia sighs and looks away, as if I’m already a lost cause.

  “That’s not what the ship’s records hint at,” Luke says. He’s only repeating what he’s stated a dozen times before.

  “You told me you’re not sure what they show. That they’re so old, you’re having trouble accessing them.”

  Luke glances at Olivia and shrugs. It makes no difference. I know the truth, however unknowable it is.

  I stand and lean on the balustrade, looking down. The height is dizzying, barely visible vehicles crawling around the base of the tower like ants, wisps of cloud drifting past below. I wonder if there are real ants on this world. Once, several days earlier, I awoke to find a low cloud layer obscuring the entire landscape, only the protruding tower tops visible, sunlight making the cloudscape glow with a gorgeous, unnatural light. It was beautiful, but didn’t make me feel any less lonely.

  I wonder if they’re worried that I’ll throw myself from the balcony. I suspect there are safety measures I can’t see. And even if there aren’t, I would only be ridding them of an awkward, unprecedented problem.

  “It wasn’t my fault,” I say, tears burning my eyes because I know, I know, that all of it was.

  “Tell Olivia what you told me,” Luke says.

  I laugh. “What, so it can become my defence?”

  “Just so that I know,” she says. “Luke thinks…” She glances at Luke, and it’s the first time I’ve seen anything approaching doubt, uncertainty, humanity. It confuses me even more.

  “I’ve told her you have an amazing story,” Luke says.

  I look out over that vast, incredible landscape once more, and wonder if I’ll ever feel that I’ve reached the end of my journey.

  * * *

  That day, like every other day of my life, I rose at dawn. The ship’s Environmentals dictated Dawn, and it hadn’t changed in a long, long time. My father woke at dawn, and his father, and as far as I’m aware my great-great-grandfather was up and about just as Cradle started to slowly turn on the lights. He wrote in his journal that there were ‘things to do’. I always laughed at that. So many things to do.

  Geena had already left. Her side of the bed was cool, and when I felt her coffee cup in our small galley, it was only vaguely warm. The same temperature, perhaps, as our failing relationship. Neither of us could really put a finger on what was going wrong, and we still felt like friends. It was strange. We were ship born, of course. Seventh generation. Geena had read lots about how that might be detrimental to our ability to form relationships. I think perhaps her just reading about relationship difficulties caused them.

  She was six months pregnant by then. Generation eight was already growing throughout Cradle, and our child would form part of that. We had yet to discuss which part––MediTech after Geena; or Edge, following in my footsteps. Our child would have to be allocated soon, but that was a conversation I had no wish to initiate.

  Geena was something of a rebel, and she believed that we were all prisoners.

  She worked in the Nurseries. Geena was one of those whose job it was to ensure they were maintained, and that their contents––those countless people in cryo-sleep––remained fit and healthy. Most days she had to travel to a Nursery where an alert had started pulsing, and on the worst days she had to shut down one, or even two tubes. She hated doing that. Said it was like killing them––though it really wasn’t––and that they should have some sort of funeral. They never did, though. They were left in the tubes until they softened, then jettisoned into recycling.

  Geena believed that we were as much prisoners as them. I never really understood that outlook. They were here voluntarily, and we were simply continuing what our ancestors had been tasked with. None of what we did was about being trapped.

  That day, I washed and dressed and started out towards Edge, and all the time I was wondering what we would say to each other later. I was planning a different evening. A movie, perhaps, or a trip out to Edge to see the stars. I saw them every day, but for Geena it was always a fresh experience.

  Anything, other than what normally happened. Back to our cabin, food, some aimless talk, and then Geena burying herself in history holos. We all knew about Earth, and what had happened, and why we were on Cradle, and most o
f us appreciated that we were pioneers on humanity’s greatest adventure. Geena saw things in a different light. As far as she was concerned, we should have never given up hope.

  I travelled out to Edge in a rail tube with several other crewmembers absorbed in their own thoughts. The trip took twenty minutes, then we went our separate ways. It was all very familiar, very normal, just what I had been doing virtually every day for the past four years. Prior to that I was an Environmental technician for eight years. Career changes kept us fresh. Cradle told us that. Cradle told us everything.

  Edge was a place and profession that some people craved, and some feared with every beat of their heart. I loved it, I think, because it was an extreme in every sense of the word. The edge of our existence, it was also the place where danger pressed in close to the contained environment in which we lived. Cradle was huge––too huge to contemplate other than in the vaguest of terms––but out at Edge, I saw the end of Cradle and the beginning of infinity.

  I stood and looked out at the stars that morning, as I did every morning, and wondered.

  I had a scheduled checklist to go through before I could perform a more random inspection. My portion of Edge covered a very defined extent of Cradle’s outer hull. Eight hundred metres north to south, section seventeen. Six hundred metres east to west, section fourteen. It incorporated three antenna arrays, two external access ports containing emergency escape craft, and several viewing platforms. There was also one plasma cannon enclosure.

  From my section’s dedicated control room I checked a whole range of statuses. Hull integrity, of course, as well as a selection of system readings, anomalies, and other conditions that never, ever changed. That day I was also scheduled to run diagnostics on the two escape craft. Before I got to that I decided to make a coffee and go out onto one of the viewing platforms.

  It protruded from Edge a little, just enough to make me feel like I was above and away from things. The hull disappeared north and south almost as far as I could see, broken at regular intervals by other platforms in different sections. They were too far away to see whether they contained people also watching me. I could have used communicators, but at moments like this I quite liked being alone. If any other Edge techs were out there, I guessed they did too.

  South, thousands of metres away, I could just make out the bulge of Drive. Over ten thousand metres north was Bridge. I’d never been there, though I knew a couple of other Edge techs who’d been Bridge staff in their younger days. They didn’t talk about it much. I guess there wasn’t much for them to do with the whole ship under the control of Cradle’s ever-expanding, ever-learning AI.

  East and west, the ship curved away towards the horizon, and it was only these gradual curves that gave any sense of scale. That, and the stars. I felt that I could sit and stare at them for hours, though I hardly ever did.

  That day, wandering around the viewing platform with coffee going cold in my cup, I looked out at the stars and saw them.

  There were five.

  I couldn’t understand what I was seeing. How could I? They were beyond my experience, and outside of anything anyone had ever encountered before. I stared for a while, then accessed a comm-port and queried Cradle.

  “I’ve been watching them for seven hours,” Cradle said.

  “What are they?” I asked.

  “Unknown.”

  “Ships? Dust clouds? Living organisms?”

  “Composition unknown.”

  “Have they tried to communicate?”

  “Unknown.”

  “Unknown? Surely you’d know if they tried to communicate?”

  “Unknown. Like I said.” Cradle was sometimes as cranky as its three-thousand-strong skeleton crew. I didn’t know whether the AI had been designed that way, or had grown prickly over the several centuries it had already existed, but I’d never liked that aspect of the ship. Its fake humanity. Its alien intelligence. Even though it was all I’d ever known, part of me still understood that it wasn’t right. It was one thing that Geena and I had agreed upon from the start.

  “Distance?”

  “Unknown.”

  “Huh. Right.” I left the comm-port open and walked closer to the observation portal. There was now only half a metre of clear composite between eternity and me – and marring that view were those five strange, graceful, diaphanous shapes. They were amazing, and terrifying. I shivered. They were the first real things I’d ever seen beyond the ship, other than the countless specks of stars and, once, the distant smear of a comet. I understood that there was much more out there than this ship I’d been born into and upon which I was destined to die, but actually seeing more was a profound experience.

  “Suggested action?” I whispered.

  “Caution,” Cradle said. “All eventualities require consideration.”

  “Eventualities?”

  “The shapes have matched our direction and velocity. That suggests sentience.”

  “And you’ve no idea how big they are, or how far away?”

  “Still computing.”

  I had a dozen responses to that, but none felt quite adequate. The last thing I wanted to hear in Cradle’s voice was fear. Could an AI even be afraid? That was not something I had any wish to discover. Cradle had always been there, the ship and its mind, a constant presence containing and nursing me through life. And although the whole crew was required to learn human history and context during their childhood, for many of us the ship remained close to a god.

  “Cannon arrays activated,” Cradle said. Its voice sounded quieter, and not because I was further away from the comm-port.

  “Really?” I asked. The plasma cannon enclosure in my section had not been opened or entered in years. I had never been in there, even though it was my responsibility to check its systems. I did so remotely. Everything was remote, and I only performed visual checks of areas such as this observation platform because it pleased me to do so.

  I had never been drawn to the plasma cannon enclosure. It wasn’t a part of the ship I had ever thought I’d have to use.

  “You should go there,” Cradle said.

  “Me?” It was shock more than surprise. I knew the protocols, even before Cradle reminded me of them.

  I looked north and east across the body of the ship, cold blue hull smooth and virtually featureless between the cannon array and me. It was a half-spherical hump three hundred metres away. It appeared benign, yet I was aware of the power it could unleash.

  “Rail rube seven-A ready,” Cradle said. “I’d advise haste.”

  “Why do you…?” I trailed off.

  I realised that they were coming closer.

  As they moved, their shapes became more apparent. I felt sick with dread and wonder. I backed up to the comm-port and stroked the screen, opening all channels and taking comfort from the flood of excited, terrified chatter.

  “Are you seeing this?” I asked my colleagues across the ship, other Edge-techs on this side who were all now looking in the same direction. Mine was one of a hundred voices filled with wonder, disbelief, and terror.

  I thought of Geena and our unborn child. I reached out to the screen again.

  “Really. It’s time to move.” Cradle sounded insistent.

  “I want to tell––”

  “The situation is known ship-wide.”

  The door behind me whispered open and the viewing windows hazed opaque, all but blocking my view.

  “Do they mean us harm?” I asked.

  “Beats me,” Cradle said. I had never heard it sounding so human.

  I hurried through to the designated rail-tube, and moments later was disgorged close to the cannon array. I entered the code and the door whisked open. It ground on its runners, sealed with dust and time. The interior was stark and functional, even more so than other parts of Cradle’s operational areas, and I took a moment looking around at the place I had never been. I knew how it worked, because we all had to spend time in the sim-pods as children, and again as adu
lts when we were assigned certain posts. But there was a smell to the place, a feel, that no sim-pod could convey, and which I found distasteful.

  “I’ve taken the liberty of firing up all systems,” Cradle said.

  “Good, yeah, thanks.” It was not only talking to me. Across the surface of the massive ship, cannon arrays would be opening like weeping blisters, turning to face the approaching objects, cannons extruding from their protective sheaths and flowing with coolant, starting to pulse with the potential destruction held deep in their individual reactors.

  I sat in the control seat and touched a screen, drawing all the controls in around my body. Everything settled at the optimum distance, moving as I moved, displaying information wherever I looked. It was like wearing a suit without anything actually touching my skin.

  “Visuals,” I said, and several display screens formed in front of me, combining to show one wide, uninterrupted view of space.

  They had come much, much closer. I gasped, then held my breath as the first of the massive objects seemed to drift right over my cannon array and disappear out of sight.

  They had wings.

  “Cradle––” I said, but a loud hissing sound swamped my voice. For a few seconds all systems buzzed and flashed, screens flickering and hissing, my seat vibrating.

  Then everything in the cannon array––and as far as I knew, every system all across the ship––faded away to nothing.

  On a ship containing three hundred crew and many millions of sleeping souls, for the first time ever, I felt alone.

  * * *

  “Would you like to go for a walk?”

  It’s only Olivia with me this time, and her question takes me by surprise. Though they’re being nice to me, it’s never been a secret that I’m a prisoner in these rooms. That rarely concerns me. Now, the idea of getting outside and away from the same four walls is incredibly attractive. Perhaps I might even feel grass beneath my feet.

  Geena always said that experience had been stolen from us.