by Peter Watts
A grunted staccato from Eulali, with fingertip accompaniment. From any other primate it might have sounded like a laugh. The node spared him a look and returned her attention to the dome.
It wasn’t English. Brüks supposed it wasn’t even language, not the way he’d define it at least. But somehow he knew exactly what Eulali had meant.
You first.
Two hours later four of the Bicamerals and a couple of Valerie’s zombies were on the hull crawling forward along the Crown’s spine with a retinue of maintenance spiders, hauling torches and lasers and wrenches behind them. Two hours to start making half a ship whole again.
Three days to screw up the courage to go anywhere else.
Oh, they laid the groundwork. Sengupta did cam-by-cams of the whole frozen array, hijacked a couple of maintenance bots and sent them through every accessible corner and cranny. Brüks couldn’t make out any angels on the feeds. No asteroids either, for that matter. He was starting to wonder if that code-name hadn’t been a red herring—a phrase set loose across the ether so pursuers wouldn’t think twice when the Crown relit her engines halfway through the innersys and accelerated away to some farther destination.
Squinting as hard as she could, all Sengupta could see was a small dark suspicion that disappeared when you laid an error bar across it: “Station allometry’s off by a few millimeters but it’d be weirder if you didn’t get shrinkage and expansion with all the heat flux.” The hive huddled together and passed occasional instructions through Lianna: Bring the condenser up to twenty atmospheres. Freeze the chamber. Heat the chamber. Turn out the lights. Turn them on again. Vent the condenser back to vacuum. Here, fab this SEM and bot it over.
The elephant in the room refused to rise to any flavor of bait. After three days, Brüks was itching for action.
“They want you to stay here,” Lianna said apologetically. “For your own safety.”
They floated in the attic, the Crown’s viscera hissing and gurgling about them as a procession of Bicamerals climbed into spacesuits at the main airlock. A globe of water, held together by surface tension, wobbled in midair just off the beaten path. The soft light spilling from the lamprey’s mouth washed everything in robin’s egg.
“Now they’re interested in my safety.”
She sighed. “We’ve been over this, Dan.”
Valerie emerged from the Hub and bared her teeth as she sailed past. Her fingers trailed along a bundle of coolant pipes, lightly tapping an arrhythmic tattoo. Brüks glanced at Lianna; Lianna glanced away. Up the attic, Ofoegbu plunged his hands into the water; pulled them out; rubbed them together before donning his gauntlets.
“You’re going, though,” Brüks observed. To work side by side with the creature who had nearly killed her without so much as a glance in her direction. He’d edged around the subject in casual conversation, what little of that there’d been lately. She hadn’t seemed to want to talk about it.
“It’s my job,” she said now. “But you know, we’re even keeping Jim pretty much in the background.”
That surprised him. “Really?”
“We might bring him over once we’re a little more sure of our footing—he was ground control for the Theseus mission, after all—but even then he’ll mostly be remoting in from the Crown. The Bicams don’t want to expose anyone to unnecessary risk. Besides—” She shrugged. “What would you do over there anyway?”
Brüks shrugged. “Watch. Explore.” Farther up the hall, the blob shuddered afresh as the node called Jaingchu washed away her sins. Why do all the bodies do that, he wondered, if there’s only one mind behind them all?
“You’ll get better real-time intel back here.”
“I guess.” He shook his head. “You’re right, of course. They’re right. I’m just—going a bit stir-crazy in here.”
“I’d have thought you’d want less excitement in your life. The way things have been going lately, boredom’s something we should be aspiring to.” She managed a smile, laid a hand on his arm. “You’ll be good as there. Looking right over my shoulder.”
Sengupta grunted from her couch as he drifted back into the Hub. “So they won’t let you out to play.”
“They will not,” he admitted, and settled in beside her.
“Better view from here.” One foot tapped absently against the deck. “Wouldn’t wanna be over there anyway, not with that lot can’t even talk to them they got shitty manners in case you hadn’t noticed. Wouldn’t go over there if you paid me.”
“Thanks,” Brüks said.
“For what?”
For trying. For the comforting scritch between the ears.
Sengupta waved her hand as if spreading a deck of cards: a row of camera windows bloomed left to right across the dome. Gloved hands, visors, the backs of helmets; tactical overlays describing insides and outsides in luminous time-series.
The lamprey opened its mouth. The Bicameral entourage swam innocently down its throat.
Brüks pulled on his hood and booted up the motion sensors.
He wasn’t entirely useless. They set him to work reseeding the astroturf panels; scraping away the dead brittle stuff that had been sacrificed to cold and vacuum on the way down; spraying fresh nutrigel into the bulkhead planters; spraying, in turn, a mist of microscopic seeds into the gel. The treated surfaces began to green up within the hour, but rather than watch the grass grow he looked on from a distance while Bicams and zombies swarmed across Icarus like army ants, carving great cookie-cutter chunks of polytungsten from its flanks and hauling them back to that jagged gaping stump where the Crown had been torn in two. Eventually they let him outside; the array itself was still off-limits but they let him help out closer to home, tutored him in the use of heavy machinery and set him loose on the Crown’s hull. He torched pins and struts on command, helped shear the parasol free from its mooring at the bow and haul it aft; helped cut precise holes in its center for improvised thrusters that could stare down the heat of ten suns.
Other times he sat restlessly in the Hub while Sengupta ran numbers across the wall, this many tonnes and that many kiloNewtons and so much Isp thrust. He’d tap into AUX/RECOMP and watch Valerie and Ofoegbu and Amina at work, scientific and religious paraphernalia floating about their heads as they attempted communion with an impossible slime mold from the stars. He’d capture their movements and their incantations, feed them to a private database he’d been building since before the Crown had docked. Sometimes Jim Moore would be there; other times Brüks would catch him sequestered in some far-off corner of the Crown, adrift on a sea of old telemetry that had nothing to do with his son, nothing at all, just facts on the ground.
The Colonel was always civil, these days. Never more.
When the sight of people in more productive roles failed to satisfy, Brüks abandoned Icarus’s bustling tourist district and went off by himself, cam by cam: stepped through views of empty crawlspaces and frozen habs, an endless dark maze of tunnels connecting the uninhabited and the unexplored. Sometimes there was atmosphere, and frost sparkling on bulkheads. Sometimes there was only vacuum and girders and rails along which prehensile machinery scuttled like platelets in a mechanical bloodstream.
Once there were stars where no stars should have been: a great hole bitten out of Icarus’s carapace where it would do the least damage. Brüks could see incendiary Bicameral teeth through the gap, brilliant blue pinpoints taking another bite farther down the hull. Even filtered by the camera, they made him squint.
Next stop.
Ah. AUX/RECOMP again, more crowded than before: Moore had joined Valerie and the Bicamerals at play.
Just another roach, Brüks thought. Just like me.
But you get a seat at the table just the same.
He watched in silence for a few moments.
Fuck this.
Pale blue light spilled into the attic from the open airlock, limned the edges of pipes and lockers and empty alcoves. Brüks sailed through the hatch, grabbed a strut in passing, s
wung to port and into the glowing mouth of the lamprey itself.
Eyes hypersaccading in an ebony face, snapping instantly into focus. A body rooted to the airlock wall by one arm, fingers clenched around a convenient handhold. Spring-loaded prosthetics below the knees; they extended absurdly and braced against a bulkhead, blocking Brüks’s way.
He braked just in time.
“Restricted access, sir,” the zombie said, eyes dancing once more.
“Holy shit. You talk.”
The zombie said nothing.
“I didn’t think there’d be—anyone in there,” Brüks tried. Nothing. “Are you awake?”
“No, sir.”
“So you’re talking in your sleep.”
Silence. Eyes, jiggling in their sockets.
I wonder if it knows what happened to the other one. I wonder if it was there …
“I want to—”
“You can’t, sir.”
“Will you—”
“Yes, sir.”
—stop me?
“Yes but it won’t be necessary,” the zombie added.
Brüks had been wondering about lethal force. Maybe best not to push that angle.
On the other hand, the thing didn’t seem to mind answering questions …
“Why do your ey—”
“To maximize acquisition of high-res input across the visual field sir.”
“Huh.” Not a trick the conscious mind could use, with its limited bandwidth. A good chunk of so-called vision actually consisted of preconscious filters deciding what not to see, to spare the homunculus upstream from information overload.
“You’re black,” Brüks observed. “Most of you zombies are black.”
No response.
“Does Valerie have a melanin feti—”
“I’ve got this,” Moore said, rising into view through the docking tube. The zombie moved smoothly aside to let him pass.
“They talk,” Brüks said. “I didn’t—”
Moore spared a glance at Brüks’s face as he moved past. Then he was back on board, and heading aft. “Come with me, please.”
“Uh, where?”
“R&M. Freckle on your face I don’t like the look of.” Moore disappeared into the Hub.
Brüks looked back at the airlock. Valerie’s sentry had moved back into place, blocking the way to more exotic locales.
“Thanks for the chat,” Brüks said. “We’ll have to do it again sometime.”
“Close your eyes.”
Brüks obeyed; the insides of his lids glowed brief bloody red as Moore’s diagnostic laser scanned down his face.
“Word of advice,” the Colonel said from the other side. “Don’t tease the zombies.”
“I wasn’t teasing him, I was just chat—”
“Don’t chat with them, either.”
Brüks opened his eyes. Moore was running his eyes down some invisible midair diagnostic. “Remember who they answer to,” he added.
“I can’t imagine that Valerie forgot to swear her minions to secrecy.”
“And I can’t imagine her minions will forget to tell her any secrets you might have asked about. Whether they answered or not.”
Brüks considered that. “You think she might take offense at the melanin-fetish remark?”
“I have no idea,” Moore said quietly. “I sure as hell did.”
Brüks blinked. “I—”
“You look at them.” There was liquid nitrogen in the man’s voice. “You see—zombies. Fast on the draw, good in the field, less than human. Less than animals, maybe; not even conscious. Maybe you don’t even think it’s possible to disrespect something like that. Like disrespecting a lawn mower, right?”
“No, I—”
“Let me tell you what I see. The man you were chatting with was called Azagba. Aza to his buddies. But he gave that up—either for something he believed in, or because it was the best of a bad lot of options, or because it was the only option he had. You look at Valerie’s entourage and you see a cheap joke. I see the seventy-odd percent of military bioauts recruited from places where armed violence runs so rampant that nonexistence as a conscious being is actually something you aspire to. I see people who got mowed down on the battlefield and then rebooted, just long enough to make a choice between going back to the grave or paying off the jump-start with a decade of blackouts and indentured servitude. And that’s pretty close to the best-case scenario.”
“What would be worst case?”
“Some jurisdictions still hold that life ends at death,” Moore told him. “Anything else is an animated corpse. In which case Azagba has exactly as many rights as a cadaver in an anatomy class.” He stabbed the air and nodded: “I was right: it’s precancerous.”
Malawi, Brüks remembered.
“That’s why you took her on,” he realized. “Not for me, not for Sengupta. Not even for the mission. Because she killed one of your own.”
Moore looked right through him. “I would have thought that by now you’d have learned to keep your attempts at psychoanalysis to yourself.” He extracted a tumor pencil from the first-aid kit. “Any nausea? Headaches, dizziness? Loose stools?”
Brüks brought his hand to his face. “Not yet.”
“Probably nothing to worry about, but we’ll run a complete body scan just to be safe. Could be internal lesions as well.” He leaned in, pressed the pencil against Brüks’s face. Something electrical snapped in Brüks’s ear; a sudden tingling warmth spread out across his cheek.
“I’d recommend daily scans from here on in,” Moore said. “Our shielding on approach wasn’t all it could have been.” He gestured for Brüks to move to the right, unfolded the medbed from the wall. “I have to admit I’m a bit surprised this started so soon, though. Maybe you had a preexisting condition.” He stood aside. “Lie back.”
Brüks maneuvered himself over the pallet; Moore strapped him into place against the free fall. A biomedical collage bloomed across the bulkhead.
“Uh, Jim…”
The soldier kept his eyes on the scan.
“Sorry.”
Moore grunted. “Perhaps I shouldn’t have expected you to be so fast on the uptake.” He paused. “It’s not as though you’re some kind of zombie.”
“Roaches, you know—we fuck up,” Brüks admitted.
“Yes. I forget that sometimes.” The Colonel took a breath, let it out softly through clenched teeth. “Before you showed up, I—well…”
Brüks waited in silence, fearful of tipping some scale.
“It’s been a while,” Moore said, “since I’ve had much call to deal with my own kind.”
GOD CREATED THE NATURAL NUMBERS. ALL ELSE IS THE WORK OF MAN.
—LEOPOLD KRONECKER
“GOT SOMETHING FOR you.”
It was a white plastic clamshell, about the size and shape to hold a set of antique eyeglasses. Lianna had fabbed a bright green bow and stuck it to the top.
Brüks eyed it suspiciously. “What is it?”
“The Face of God,” she declared, and then—deflated by the look he shot at her, “That’s kind of what the hive’s calling it, anyway. Piece of your slime mold.” She held it out with a flourish. “If Muhammad can’t come to the sample…”
“Thanks.” He took the offering (try as he might, he couldn’t keep from smiling), and set it on the table next to dessert.
“They thought you’d like to take a shot at, you know. Seeing what makes it tick.”
Brüks glanced at a bulkhead window where three Bicamerals floated at the compiler, their gazes divergent as was their wont. (Not any Senguptoid aversion to eye contact, he’d come to realize; just the default preference for a 360-degree visual field, adopted by a collective with eyes to share.) “Are they throwing me a bone, or do they just want someone expendable doing the dissections?”
“A bone, maybe. But you know, this thing does have certain biological properties. And you are the only biologist on board.”
“Roach biologist. A
nd that slime mold’s got to be postbiological if it’s anything at all. And you know as well as I do that I’ve got better odds of getting a blow job from Valerie than—”
He caught himself, too late. Idiot. Stupid, insensitive—
“Maybe not,” Leona said after a pause so brief it might have been imaginary. “But you’re the only one in the neighborhood with a biologist’s perspective.”
“You—you think that makes a difference?”
“Sure. More to the point, I think they do, too.”
Brüks thought about that. “I’ll try not to let them down, then.” And then: “Lee—”
“So what you doing here, anyway?” She leaned in for a closer look at his display. “You’re running mo-cap.”
He nodded, wary of speech.
“What for? Slimey hasn’t moved since we got here.”
“I’m, uh…” He shrugged and confessed. “I’m watching the Bicams.”
She raised an eyebrow.
“I’ve been trying to figure out their methodology,” he confessed. “Everyone’s got to have one, right? Scientific or superstitious or just some weird gut instinct, there’s at least got to be some kind of pattern…”
“You’re not finding one?”
“Sure I am. They’re rituals. Eulali and Ofoegbu raise their hands just so, Chodorowska howls at the moon for precisely three-point-five seconds, the whole lot of them throw their heads back and gargle, for fucksake. The behaviors are so stereotyped you’d call them neurotic if you saw them in one of those old labs with the real animals in cages. But I can’t correlate them to anything else that happens. You’d think there’d be some kind of sequence, right? Try something, if that doesn’t work try something else. Or just follow some prescribed set of steps to chase away the evil spirits.”
Lianna nodded and said nothing.
“I don’t even know why they bother to make sounds,” he grumbled. “That quantum callosum or whatever they have has got to be faster than any kind of acoustic—”
“Don’t spend too much effort on that,” Lianna told him. “Half those phonemes are just a side effect of booting up the hyperparietals.”