Edge of Dark

by Brenda Cooper

  “Why were you there?” he asked her.

  “Making money. Smuggling. Not my own stuff—I was never a smuggler. I was a poor captain who didn’t always pay close attention to the contents of her cargo hold.”

  “Fine line, that,” he said.

  She smiled. “I was young and very, very stupid. I liked risks. Someone paid me to take cargo out to the Edge and bring back cargo from there. I never saw what was in either shipment, just did what I was told. That happens, you know. They get part of what they need because our own black market feeds them.”

  “Did you meet any?”

  “Some. There are layers to the Edge. But I came away thinking they mostly just want to survive like everyone else.”

  He thought for a moment before he answered. “So how do you explain the High Sweet Home?”

  The two white-clad women came in, took their plates, refilled their water glasses and brought out fresh cookies that smelled of spices and oats. Satyana waited until the door had closed behind them. “The current theory is that they were showing their power, flexing muscle.”

  He took a cookie, still warm from the oven. “But that’s not what you think?”

  She pursed her lips. “That’s part of it. But they didn’t just destroy the station. They took it. They obliterated everything military, but not the High Sweet Home herself, not the habitats and gardens and the like. Maybe they’re examining our technology a little closer before they come in.”

  He ate the cookie in two bites. “They’re coming in?”

  “We always knew they’d want to be closer to the sun someday.”

  A cold settled on him, the cold of all the stories he’d been told as a child. “Do you know if they have any intentions regarding Lym?”

  “Just rumors. Hopefully we’ll learn more when we get to the Deep.”

  “What rumors?”

  She shook her head. A refusal. “Nothing credible.”

  He was careful not to let his anger show. “Will they talk to us?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. But if you do meet them, pay very close attention. They don’t think like we do at all. They’re faster, they think faster. If they care about anything at all, they care about different things than we do.” She paused and leaned in toward him. “I would be very surprised if they have the kind of compassion we need them to have if we’re going to survive our own stupidity. I suspect they don’t care about us at all.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHRYSTAL

  Chrystal could stand up. So she did. Sometimes for hours. She lived in a white box of a room, with a single blue wall. The wall had a mural of stars and nebulae, a thing so precise and fine that she could make out deep star fields and galaxies, even in a square inch. There had been a medical bed with straps, but now there was a single bed with a white bedspread and a blue pillow.

  She had learned to do more than stand and sleep. She could raise her arms and lift her knees and turn her head. She could carry on complex conversations with Jhailing and Devi—the two distinct members of the Edge community she had learned to identify.

  Music played.

  Notes seemed to hang separated in the air in a beautiful dance. She could speed up or slow down her perception of them. She was certain she could hold any drumbeat.

  Colors were brighter. Clearer. Best of all, darks had become penetrable. Nothing looked black any more. Not true black.

  In no other way was she pleased to be in a robotic body. In fact, every time she marveled at some surprise discovery about her enhanced senses, she felt guilty. She should hate everything. She had been kidnapped and killed and her future had been stolen from her. She had been kept separate from her family. She hadn’t felt their kisses or caresses or lovemaking in so long that her specific memories of them were fading. She would never hear their hearts beat.

  Something ineffable had been stolen.

  Jhailing spoke inside her head. That was the only way she could think of it. Let’s go out.

  A slight interest touched her. I’m ready.

  It will test your walking. She had been walking inside of the small square room. But this time Jhailing directed her through the door—unlocked for the very first time of the many times that she had tried the knob. She walked a long time. She took turns as they were given her, practiced moving.

  They passed through a busy part of whatever they lived on. It seemed more like a ship than a station, although she didn’t quite know why she had decided that. They passed robots of all types and sizes.

  She worked so hard that Jhailing called for a break at one point. You still have to think your steps, it said. Rest. Your new mind needs time to synthesize, to make sense of all of the things it is learning to do with your new body.

  She complied, sitting down on the floor in the middle of the corridor.

  I thought maybe you would stop at the next galley or common area.

  This is good enough, she said. After all, she didn’t eat any more.

  To her surprise, Jhailing didn’t protest.

  She lay her head back against the wall and closed her eyes, briefly floating away from the myriad connections to her robotic body, letting all parts of her brain relax.

  She had the sense that a long time passed, that maybe she’d been turned off and left and her brain had stopped thinking as her body stopped moving.

  When they started again it was easier to walk and think about something else. How much further? she asked.

  Not far.

  At one point, Jhailing said, Turn right, and Chrystal did.

  Open the next door on your right.

  She did.

  Go down the corridor and go through the last door on the left.

  Maybe she’d just follow orders until she walked herself to death.

  She opened the door. Jhailing withdrew with no comment, and she felt the connection between them slip away. Inside, two robots sat at a kitchen table playing cards. Her people.

  Jason and Yi.

  Their robotic faces looked like themselves and not like themselves. They were naked, like she was. Other than her breasts, they had all been stripped of genitalia. Their skin looked like human skin, their shapes human down to the distribution of muscles, the differences between Yi’s thin, gawky arms and Jason’s broader biceps captured perfectly.

  They stared at her.

  She stared back. Her new and better vision helped her spot so many differences between what they looked like now and what she remembered that she wished she could cry.

  She stepped toward them and suddenly all three were talking at once.

  “We’re lucky,” Yi said. “No other family is together. None.”

  “What do you mean?” Chrystal asked.

  “Over half of the people they tried this on failed. They couldn’t make the connections that allowed their brains to communicate with robotic bodies.” Yi seemed to know quite a bit, since he went on. “We’ve been out a lot, but we’ve only been awake about three days’ worth of real time. It seemed like months to me. What about you?”

  She tried to count it up. “Weeks. At least weeks.”

  “So maybe the sense of time is different for some of us than others,” Yi mused. “Obviously the same amount of real time has passed. We’re all here now.”

  She could practically see this engineer-brain working. It seemed so familiar. He was odd and wrong, downright creepy. They all were. But Yi was also Yi, and so a small sliver of her world felt right.

  “Where’s Katherine?” Jason asked.

  “Jhailing told me she’d be here soon,” Yi said.

  Chrystal felt a slight surprise. “Jhailing told me Katherine is having some trouble,” she said, “and he didn’t say she was coming here.”

  Jason spoke. “They didn’t tell me anything.” He put a hand out to touch her robotic hand. The first touch between them in this form. The first touch from anybody since she had woken up dead. She turned her hand to grasp his. Her new hand was almost as finely mus
cled as the old one. His touch didn’t feel like she remembered it, but she couldn’t say why.

  Jason’s robotic eyes were almost the right color, except a more uniform split between gray and blue. He sounded tender as he asked her, “How are you?”

  “Pissed off. Mournful.”

  He nodded. “I think we all are.”

  Yi said, “They can probably hear us talk.”

  “No kidding,” she said.

  Yi went on. “We all got torn apart—and reassembled. How do we know we’re ourselves? All of our bodies are gone. Every molecule. We can’t go back to them—they’ve been melted down for water and trace minerals.”

  Chrystal had never doubted she had been murdered. That didn’t keep Yi’s words from bothering her, at least in a vaguely detached way. Intellectual emotion—that’s how she thought of it. Deep. Deeper but not as hot as the real thing. She smiled, certain that if she had a mirror there would be no warmth in the smile. “Anybody have any idea how to commit suicide in a robotic body?”

  “I told you they must be listening,” Yi said.

  “I want them to know how upset I am. This is unfair. It’s illegal. It violates the Deeping Rules.”

  “Those are your rules,” Yi said. “The Deeping Rules don’t even apply to me—I don’t live there. These people have their own rules. I don’t know about all of them—the Edge is vast. A society as strange as ours, with as many differences. But the ones that have been helping us are very intent on a goal. They feel like project managers.”

  “Good analogy,” Chrystal said. “Like they have one goal and they’re more focused on that than anything else. Not like us. We’d stop and talk about the latest concert or a great new pair of boots.”

  “Right now? Would you?” Jason asked.

  “No,” she said. “I’m busy trying to understand what happened to us.”

  Jason stared at the blank wall in front of him. “Are we becoming them? Have we become them?”

  Jason almost never voiced philosophical thoughts. Maybe after you lost everything that was all that was left. Her hand was still in Jason’s hand. She took Yi’s as well, and waited until Yi took Jason’s other hand. “We aren’t them,” she said. “We can never think that. They have a goal for us, and we can’t help them reach it.”

  Yi shook his perfect, robot head. They had his hair almost right, except that it wasn’t tangled. She would be able to feel it if she touched it, but how would she know if it felt like his real hair? “You know what their goal is?”

  “If they destroyed one of our stations, it has to be war. They have to be telling us they’re coming for us,” she said.

  Jason asked, “But why not just kill us? After all, they killed almost everyone else on the station.”

  She tried to think about that. “They told me once. Jhailing did. He said it was to become ambassadors.”

  “It’s more than that,” Yi said. “They took young healthy adults, because no one else could survive the transition. Now they know who we all were, and they’ve sorted us based on who we know. People with no contacts are going into schools or into simple jobs. We’re to help them talk to humans.”

  He didn’t sound like he was guessing.

  “How do you know all this?” she asked.

  “I braided with Jhailing. Just once.”

  “What?”

  The door opened before Yi could answer. Katherine walked in stiffly and closed the door behind her. She looked as changed as the rest of them. The faces they had been given were expressive. Yi and Jason had looked relieved to see Chrystal when she walked in. She was sure she had looked the same.

  Katherine simply looked shocked. Her features were still and almost unmoving, her eyes a little bit wider than Chrystal remembered, but the same beautiful green. Her tattoo was a slightly different shade of red on the robotic skin, brighter. The dragon draped down her chest the same way it always had.

  Chrystal hadn’t looked into a mirror yet. She glanced down to see the tail of her own dragon, a bright blue and green one that matched her old friend Nona’s. Katherine’s had come later.

  Chrystal let go of Yi’s hand, leaving an opening for Katherine to step into.

  Katherine gazed at them, her eyes still wide and her perfectly pink mouth open. She sat down just inside the doorway, very carefully. She barely had enough control of her body to get to the floor without falling.

  Chrystal nearly fell trying to get to her. They surrounded Katherine, all of them touching her. Jason stroked her cheek, Chrystal held her hand. Yi touched her shoulder.

  Katherine screamed, “Get away from me.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHARLIE

  Charlie sat by himself in the conference room off of command. He had learned how to flick the wall displays from view to view. All four forward cams displayed part of the Deep at a slightly different angle and zoom level. It made him feel like he was surrounded by four different space stations rather than like they flew toward one.

  When he had been on Lym he had known what to think about the greedy, rich, indulgent space stations. So many of the truths in his life had been exposed as lies in the face of the reality of these people and this ship and now the station that he felt thin, as if the things that defined him had turned out to be made of air and clouds.

  The center spine of the Deep looked like a river of soap bubbles full of light. A thousand thousand ships were moored to the river. Ships far bigger than the Sultry Savior—ships so big all of the population of Lym might fit in them. As he watched, the bubbles resolved into habitats, farms, and mechanical structures he couldn’t quite attach a purpose to. Some bubbles were connected to one another by tubes. Spaghetti strings of tunnels wove in and out of bubbles and even through of a few of the ships.

  Trains ran inside some of the spaghetti strings.

  Tiny lights buzzed around the station like insects. Small ships, delivery ships, passenger ferries.

  So big.

  Satyana had told him that the Diamond Deep had more living space than the entire surface of Lym.

  He believed.

  The Sultry Savior approached the station somewhere near the aft end. He lost the ability to see it all but gained finer detail. The curve of clear tubes, closed tubes. A flash of green. The arrowhead shape of a small ship and another one like a cylinder with windows. The aft superstructure of a ship far bigger than theirs, looming.

  Nona came and stood beside him. “It’s the first time I’ve seen it this way, too. Flying into it. It looks more friendly when you’re inside.”

  “I hope so.” They headed toward an opening full of blackness and periodic, punctuating colored lights. “How big was the High Sweet Home? Comparatively?”

  She called out to the ship’s AI. “Helix? Can you answer that?”

  A soothing female voice responded. “The Diamond Deep is roughly thirty-seven point five times bigger than the High Sweet Home.”

  Charlie thought through the math. “That’s still really, really big.”

  Helix continued. “The last census counted five thousand seven hundred and four civilians on the High Sweet Home. There may have been as many military staff.”

  Nona added, “The Deep is the biggest by far. Home to tens of millions.”

  “It’s amazing,” he told her. Whether or not he ended up liking the Deep, he was grateful for the chance to see it.

  “It doesn’t look vulnerable,” Nona mused. “The High Sweet Home must not have looked that way either. It would have been bigger than the part of the Deep that we see now.” Her fingers roamed the dragon tattoo on her neck, maybe unconsciously.

  “Everything is vulnerable.” He was thinking of Neville, and how that had once been a thriving city in the middle of a well-peopled continent. “Time kills everything.”

  She moved closer to him, almost touching. Close enough he could smell her soap. “At least Lym isn’t at quite as much risk.”

  “You can’t know that.” He wanted to reach out and
touch her, but he knew better. “Lym almost died at our hands. That’s what we’ve spent so many generations fixing.”

  She nodded, her gaze still turned toward the station and not on him. “We’ll find a way.”

  Resolve in her voice. Good. “We will.”

  Nona was right. The Deep didn’t feel as immense from the inside. It also didn’t feel at all like a planet. It felt more like a massive building, or maybe a maze. The lack of horizons felt like a trap. Even if he looked out a window, the dark of space wasn’t a horizon—it was a field. A field paled by the wash of light coming from inside the station; an unsettling lack of break between up and down that challenged his equilibrium.

  He walked behind Nona, who walked behind Satyana. He flinched as people streamed around them and sometimes cut between them. Jeweled people and extra-tall people and people covered in tattoos. Men and women with colored skin and lights in their hair and lots of clothes or almost no clothes. He’d thought Nona exotic with her jeweled cheek and colorful hair and tattooed neck and wrists, but she looked tame here among the rich and decorative, and Satyana looked positively boring.

  Eventually, they took a ferry to a far bubble and lost some of the crowd. Satyana led them through a corridor that felt so tight he hunched his shoulders and ducked. A woman in a blue uniform stood beside a plain doorway. She smiled at Satyana, obviously expecting her, and let them in.

  They stepped into a single living room built for parties. A long table of inlaid wood occupied the center. It was empty at the moment, but Charlie could imagine it full of food and drink. Comfortable chairs waited in scattered groups for conversation seating. Standing tables had been artfully placed across the floor, all of them in muted colors that screamed taste and credit.

  A very dark-skinned man who must mass twice as much as Charlie came up and folded Satyana in his arms, lifting her and planting a kiss on her forehead. He greeted Nona with a big sloppy grin and a quick, warm hug.

  Charlie recognized the man just as he turned to Charlie and stuck his hand out. “I’m Gunnar. Pleased to meet you.”