by Peter Watts
Why are you telling me this? What does it matter, now that you’ve thrown the world’s lifeline into the sun?
“What I’m saying is, I was there. The whole time. Only as a passenger—I wasn’t running anything—but I didn’t go away. I’m not like Valerie’s mercenaries, I was—watching, at least. If that makes you feel any better. Just wanted you to know that.”
It wasn’t you. That’s what you’re saying. It’s not your fault.
“Get some rest.” The blur stretched at his side; the Colonel’s face resolved briefly in Brüks’s field of focus, faded again to the sound of receding footsteps.
Which paused.
“Don’t worry,” Moore said. “You won’t be seeing it again.”
The next time he woke up Sengupta was leaning over him.
“How long?” Brüks tried, and was relieved to hear the words come out.
She said: “Can you move yet try to move.”
He sent commands down his legs, felt his toes respond. Tried wiggling his fingers: his knuckles were rusted solid.
“Not eashily,” he said.
“It’ll come back it’s just temporary.”
“Wha’ she do to me?”
“I’m working on that listen—”
“It’s like some kind of ass-fac—ass-backwards Crucifix Glitch.” His tongue fought its way around the words. “How the hell did she—baysh—baselines don’t glitch, we don’t have the shircuits—”
“I said I’m working on it. Look we got other things to worry about right now.”
You’ve got other things, maybe—“Whersh Jim?”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you he’s up there in the attic he’s up there with Portia I think—”
“Whah!”
“Well how do we know how far that shit spread huh it coulda coated the whole inside of the array and we never woulda known. Coulda grown all the way up to our front door and got inside.”
His sympathetic motor nerves were still working at least: Brüks could feel the hairs rising along his forearms.
“Anybody take sh—take samples?”
“That’s not what I do I’m a math maid not a bucket boy I don’t even know the protocols.”
“You couldn’t look them up?”
“It’s not what I do.”
Brüks sighed. “What about Jim?”
Sengupta stared past him. “No help he just keeps reading those letters from home over and over. I told him but I don’t think he even cares.” She shook her head (she did it so effortlessly), added: “He comes down here sometimes checks up on you. He’s been shooting you up with all sorts of GABA and spasmolytics he says you should be good to go by now.”
He flexed his fingers; not too bad, this time. “It’s coming back, I guess. Body’s just out of practice.”
“Yah it’s been a while. Anyway I gotta get back.” She stepped across the hab, turned back at the base of the ladder. “You gotta get back in the game Dan things are getting weird.”
They were, too.
She’d never called him by name before.
He’d stopped slurring his words by the time Sengupta had departed; five minutes later he could roll from side to side without too much discomfort. He bent knees and arms in small hard-won increments, ratcheting each joint against the brittle resistance of his own flesh. At some critical angle his right elbow cracked and pain splintered down his arm like an electrical shock: but the limb worked afterward, bent and straightened at his command with nothing but a dull arthritic aching in the joint. Encouraged, he forced his other limbs past their breaking points and reclaimed them for his own.
Reclaimed from what? he wondered.
The medical archives reenacted the corruption of his flesh in fast-forward: a body flooded with acetylcholine, Renshaw cells compromised, ATP drawn down to the fumes by fibrils that just wouldn’t stop clenching. No ATP to cut in and ask myosin for this dance; nothing to break the actin-myosin bond. Gridlock. Tetany. A charley horse that froze the whole damn body.
The mechanism was simple enough: once the action potentials started hammering that fast it could only end one way. But this didn’t seem to be drug induced. Valerie hadn’t spiked his coffee or slipped anything into his food. His medical telemetry hadn’t picked up the trail until long minutes after Brüks had been hit, but as far as he could tell those signals had come from his own brain: CNS to alpha-motor to synaptic cleft, boom boom boom.
Whatever this was, he’d inflicted it on himself.
He took his time in checking out. Time to extract the catheters and stretch his limbs; time to boot his defossilized corpus back into some semblance of an active state. Time to refuel: his convalescence had left him ravenous. Almost an hour had passed by the time he climbed out of M&R in search of whatever the galley might serve up.
He was halfway across the Hub before he noticed the light bleeding from the spoke.
A snapshot of the past: a corpse, laid out on the lawn. Brüks didn’t know which element was the more incongruous.
The lawn, he supposed. At least that was unexpected: not so much a lawn as a patchy threadbare rug of blue-green grass—rusty in the dim longwave vampires preferred—ripped from the walls of the hab and strewn haphazardly across the deck. Vampires had OCD, Brüks remembered vaguely. The mythical ones at least, not the ancient flesh-and-blood predators that had inspired them. Seventeenth-century folk legends had it that you could drive a vampire to distraction by the simple act of throwing salt in its path; some supernatural brain circuit would compel it to drop everything and count the grains. Brüks thought he’d read that somewhere. Probably not peer reviewed.
For all he knew, that ridiculous superstition might have at least a rootlet in neurological reality. It certainly wasn’t any more absurd than the Crucifix Glitch; maybe some pattern-matching hiccup in those omnisavant brains, some feedback loop gone over the top. Maybe Valerie had fallen victim to the same subroutine, seen all those thousands of epiphytic blades and torn them from their bulkhead beds with her bare fingernails, counting each leaf as it fluttered to the deck in a halfhearted chlorophyllous blizzard.
Of course, the catch was that vampires didn’t have to count: they would simply see the precise number of salt grains or grass leaves in an instant, know that grand seven-digit total without ever going through the conscious process of adding it up. Any village peasant who sacrificed two seconds scattering salt in his path would buy himself a tenth-of-a-second’s grace, tops. Not a great rate of exchange.
Maybe the zombie hadn’t known that, though. Maybe the homunculus behind the eyes had rebooted just in time to see what was coming, maybe it somehow wrested control back from all those shortcuts and back alleys and tried one last-ditch Hail Mary with nothing left to lose. Maybe Valerie had let it, watching, amused; maybe even played along, pretended to count each falling blade while her dinner turned the deck into a haphazard shag rug.
Maybe the zombie hadn’t even cared. Maybe it had just lain down on command and waited to be eaten. Maybe Valerie had just wanted a tablecloth.
The zombie’s throat had been slashed. It lay spread-eagled on its stomach, naked, face turned to the side. The right buttock had been carved away; the quads; one long strip of calf muscle. There was flesh above and flesh below: in between, a flensed femur connected the lower leg to the torso, socketed into the broad scraped spatula of the pelvic girdle.
There was very little blood. Everything had been cauterized.
“You never checked it out,” Brüks said.
Sengupta zoomed the view: the gory table setting expanded across the window. Blades of grass grew to the size of bamboo shoots; tooth marks resolved like jagged furrows on bared bloody bone.
Some kind of wire snaked through the grass—barely visible even at this magnification—and disappeared beneath the half-eaten corpse.
“Found eight wires don’t know what for exactly but that thing wasn’t exactly Secret Santa you know? Carnage said probably booby traps and Carnage i
s probably right for once. She wanted us to see this.”
“How do you know?”
“This is the only feed she didn’t break.” Sengupta waved the recording off the bulkhead.
“So you jettisoned the habs.”
She nodded. “Too risky to go in too risky to leave ’em there.”
Another feed abutted the first, a view down the truncated spoke that had once led to Valerie’s lair. It ended after only twenty meters now, in a pulsing orange disk flashing UNPRESSURIZED back up the tunnel at two-second intervals. Just like the Commons spoke opposite, cut loose in turn to keep the vectors balanced.
He remembered downhill conversations, the sound of glasses clinking together. “Shit,” he said.
“It’s not like they’re not all the same you know they all got the same plumbing and life support.”
“I know.”
“And it’s not like we’re gonna run out of food or air what with everybody being dead and—”
“I fucking know,” Brüks snapped, and was surprised when Sengupta fell immediately silent.
He sighed. “It’s just, the only half-decent moments I’ve had on this whole bloody trip were in Commons, you know?”
She didn’t speak for a moment; and when she did, Brüks couldn’t make out the words.
“What did you say?”
“You talked to him down there,” she mumbled. “I know that but it doesn’t matter even if it was still here he’s not. He just sits up in the attic and runs those signals over and over like he never even left Icarus…”
“He lost his son,” Brüks said. “It changed him. Of course it changed him.”
“Oh yah.” She barely spoke above a whisper. Something in that voice made Brüks long for the trademark hyena laugh. “It changed him all right.”
No excuses left. Nothing else to do.
He ascended into the Hub, breached its sky into the guts beyond: hissing bronchioles, cross-hatched vertebrae, straight-edged intestines. He moved like an old man, free fall and residual paralysis and the spacesuit he’d scavenged from the cargo-bay airlock all conspiring to take him to new depths of clumsiness. Up ahead, the paint around the docking hatch splashed the surrounding topography with the usual diffuse glow.
This is where the shadows come, Brüks realized. Every other corner of the Crown is bright as a swimming pool now that the Hold’s off-limits, now that Valerie’s cave has been cut loose. Shadows don’t have a chance back there.
They’ve got nowhere else to go …
“Welcome back to the land of the living.”
Jim Moore turned slowly in the rafters, just past the airlock. The lines of his face, the edges of limbs moved in and out of eclipse.
“This is living?” Brüks tried.
“This is the waiting list.”
He thought he might have seen a smile. Brüks pushed himself across the attic and pulled a welding torch from the tool rack: checked the charge, hefted the mass. Jim Moore watched from a distance, his face full of shadow.
“Uh, Jim. About—”
“Enemy territory,” Moore said. “Couldn’t be helped.”
“Yeah.” A fifth of the world’s energy supply, in the hands of an intelligent slime mold from outer space. Not a cost-benefit decision Brüks envied. “The collateral, though…”
Moore looked away. “They’ll make do.”
Maybe he was right. Firefall had slowed Earth’s headlong rush to offworld antimatter; a power cord stretched across a hundred fifty million kilometers was far too vulnerable for a universe in which godlike extraterrestrials appeared and vanished at will. There were backups in place, fusion and forced photosynthesis, geothermal spikes driven deep into the earth’s crust to tap the leftover heat of creation. Belts would be tightened, lives might be lost, but the world would make do. It always had: the beggars and the choosers and the spoiled insatiable generations with their toys and their power-hungry virtual worlds. They would not run out of air, at least. They would not freeze to death in the endless arid wastes between the stars.
For Moore so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son. Twice.
“Anyway,” Moore added, “we’ll know soon enough.”
Brüks chewed his lip. “How long, exactly?”
“Could be home in a couple of weeks,” Moore said indifferently. “You’d have to ask Sengupta.”
“A couple—but the trip down took—”
“Using an I-CAN running on half a tank, and keeping our burns to an absolute minimum. We’re on purebred beamed-core antimatter now. We could make it to Earth in a few days if we opened the throttle. We’d just be going too fast to stop when we got there. End up braking halfway to Centauri.”
Or somewhere in between, Brüks thought.
He looked across the compartment. Moore pinwheeled slowly through light and shadow and looked back. This time the smile was as unmistakable as it was cryptic.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said.
“About…?”
“We’re not headed for the Oort. I’m not taking you away on some misguided desperate search for my dead son.”
“I—Jim, I didn’t—”
“There’s no need. My son is alive.”
Maybe six months ago. Maybe even now. I supposed it’s possible. Not in six months, though. Not after the telematter stream winks out and leaves Theseus to freeze in the dark.
Not after you cut him adrift …
“Jim…”
“My son is alive,” Moore said again. “And he’s coming home.”
Brüks didn’t say anything for a while. Finally: “How do you know?”
“I know.”
Brüks pushed the torch with one hand into the other, felt the solid reality of mass and inertia without: the fragility of aching body parts within. “Okay. I, um, I should take some samples—”
“Of course. Sengupta and her invading slime mold.”
“Doesn’t cost anything to check it out.”
“’Course not.” Moore reached out a casual hand, anchored himself to an off-duty ladder. “I take it the suit’s a condom.”
“No point in taking chances.” Watching Moore in his yellow paper jumpsuit, the Colonel’s naked hand clenched on untested territory.
“No helmet,” Moore observed.
“No point in going overboard, either.” If Portia ran on ambient thermal, it wouldn’t be getting enough joules from the bulkhead to sprout any pseudopods on short notice. Besides, Brüks felt stupid enough as it was.
Under Moore’s bemused gaze he positioned himself to one side of the hatch and dialed the beam down to short focus. Smart paint sparked and blistered along the lip of the hatch. Nothing screamed or recoiled. No tentacles extruded from the metal in frantic acts of self-defense. Brüks scraped a sample from the scored periphery of the burn. Another from the untouched surface a few centimeters further out. He moved systematically around the edge of the hatch, taking a sample every forty centimeters or so.
“Will you be using that on me?” Moore wondered behind him.
I should. “I don’t think that’s necessary just yet.”
Moore nodded, his face impassive. “Well. Change your mind, you know where I am.”
Brüks smiled.
I wish I did, my friend. I really wish I did.
But I don’t have a fucking clue.
Out of the attic into the Hub.
Looks like the Hub, anyway. Could be a lining. Could be a skin.
Through the equator, from frozen north to pirouetting south. Try not the touch the grate on your way through.
Could be watching me right now. I could be swimming through an eyeball.
Don’t be an idiot, Brüks. Portia had years in Icarus; you were there for three weeks. Not nearly enough time to grow enough new skin to—
Unless it didn’t grow new lining, unless it just redistributed the old. Unless it spent all those years building up extra postbiomass as an investment against future expansion.
It
couldn’t just ooze through the front door and down the throat without anyone noticing. (Coasting between an eyeball and an iris, now: one open, one shut, both silver. Both blind.) No kinetic waste heat, no mass alarms—
Unless it moved slowly enough to blend in with the noise. Unless it happens to know a little more about the laws of thermodynamics than we do …
Down the spoke, putting on weight, staring hard at the gloved fingers clenched around their handhold. Alert for subtle mycelia threading between suit and stirrup. Eyes open for any bead of moisture there, some meniscus of surface tension that might belie a film in motion.
You’re being paranoid. You’re being an idiot. This is just a precaution against a remote possibility. That’s all this is.
Don’t go off the deep end. You’re Dan Brüks.
You’re not Rakshi Sengupta.
You only made her.
He heard her moving in the basement as he fed samples into the holding tray. He tried to ignore her foot taps and mutterings as the scrapings cycled through quarantine, as he gave in to reawakened hunger and wolfed down whatever the lab hab’s bare-bones galley disgorged, swallowing not quite fast enough to stay ahead of the Spirulina aftertaste.
Finally, though, he gave in: pushed from above by Moore’s matter-of-fact dissonance, pulled from below by Sengupta’s compulsive scuttling. He climbed down out of the lab, maneuvered around the giant seedpod obstruction of Sengupta’s tent beside his own. The pilot was running ConSensus on the naked bulkhead between two impoverished bands of astroturf. The Crown of Thorns rotated there in animatic real time, two of her limbs amputated at the elbow. We keep going at this rate and we’re going to be three spacesuits and a tank of O2 by the time we get home, Brüks mused.