by Wil McCarthy
Next, a man: Nikolai Ilyovot Kuprin, call-him-Nik. Nik had suffered a stroke deep inside his brain somewhere, and then another one a few days later while he was undergoing treatment, and had been frozen to give the doctors a chance to determine the cause, lest a third stroke come along and strike him dead. He was a construction foreman specializing in indoor zero-gravity structures, which seemed to Viktor like a pretty interesting job. The man was over ninety, though, coming hard on retirement age, and he didn't seem interested just then in talking shop.
And finally there came another woman, one Vere Sergeivne Seydkh'e, who also worked in construction, as an “excavation engineer,” which probably meant “driver of digging machinery” rather than “designer of excavations,” though Viktor wasn't completely sure. She was a little heavy and coarse for his tastes, womenwise, but personwise he took an instant liking to her—she had laughed at one of his jokes, and of all these people, these (he counted) ten human beings who had made it through the Waisters' attack unscathed, she seemed the only one who really appreciated her good fortune. “Goodness” she said sadly, when the situation had been explained to her. “And I thought my lucky bracelet didn't work.”
CHAPTER TEN
214::06
PINEGA, GATE SYSTEM:
CONTINUITY 5218, YEAR OF THE DRAGON
“Mother,” Vadim said to Malye, “what are we going to do when the Waisters come back? Will they destroy everything, like they did before? Is that pretty much what they do?”
Malye put down the muffin she was eating, and motioned for Vadim to sit beside her on the bed. “Baby, I don't know.” She hugged him, kissed his forehead. It was such an intelligent, appropriate question, but really she had not thought about it much, had not wanted to. What was there, really, to be done?
“Can the people here help us?”
“I don't know,” she said, shaking her head, acutely aware that she was speaking for an audience. It was “afternoon” just now—she'd been awake for about eight hours—but really it was a kind of bleak, hopeless morning for the newly revived, so that they all stumbled around like sleepwalkers, unable to operate in this new world. Malye convinced them at least to take turns at the sink and the shitter, cleaning and emptying themselves so that they might feel at least marginally more human. Nobody talked much—not even Viktor—and Vad's words had drawn everyone's attention.
“I don't know, baby, but I hope so. Do you know the one called 'Plate?' He says there may not be any fighting at all. He and his friends know a lot about the Waisters, about how they think and what they do, and he says they can do the right things to avoid a conflict.”
“Because they have funny eyes?” Vadim said, and there was such bitter irony in his voice that Malye wondered if he were simply repeating someone else's words, someone else's opinion. But no, his eyes held the fierce, bright glow of sincerity—he did not trust the Gateans any more than Malye did.
Such a strange, knowing little boy. Do you hear the colors? she wanted to ask him sometimes, but a terrible dread always held her back. That dread sang through her right now, yellow and massless and indestructible. Andrei Brakanov had been a collector of mismatched shoes, many of them quite small. “Look, Malye,” he would say in that same, knowing way as he strode through the doorway, “I've found another!” And she would hear his laughter, clear and joyous. Not a monster's laugh at all, but high and friendly, and therein lay its greatest danger.
“Is there any chance we could run?” one of the new men asked: Konstant, the bureaucrat. His voice was red with stymied anger, his eyes clearly hunting for someone or something at which to direct the emotion. The universe had hurt him, and on some level he wanted to hurt back. But his tone was controlled, his hands folded behind him as he paced, and he at least displayed more energy than any of the others. “Do these Gate people have fast enough ships to get us out of here? We have to get out of here.”
“Not in time,” Viktor said, stepping away from the sink, wiping his hands off on the thin robe he wore. “And not at all if the Waisters chose to pursue. I got the Congress to run an analysis for me: those Waister ships were faster, tougher, many, many times more maneuverable. It was like a joke, like target shooting.”
Pause.
“So what are we supposed to do?” Konstant asked, finally, angrily.
“Nothing,” Malye said to him, not darkly but as a flat statement of fact. Get used to it, citizen.
He favored her with a contemptuous look. “That is quite a fatalistic attitude, miss, and one I don't happen to agree with.”
“Fine. You may agree with whomever you like.”
Konstant frowned, not liking that answer either. “Miss, you don't seem to understand what's happening here. Our world has been destroyed. We can't just sit on our thumbs, and we don't dare cooperate with these people without knowing—”
“I suspect,” Viktor cut in irritatedly, “that the colonel understands our situation a little better than you do. On the one hand, we have the Waisters, and on the other, the Gateans, and in between we have us, dressed up in sandals and bathing robes.”
“We will cooperate with the Gateans,” Malye said quietly, “because we've made a bargain with them, and they have kept their part of it.”
Everyone was silent for a few moments, looking at her, so she continued: “This is difficult for all of us, but for the moment we have no choice but to place ourselves in these alien hands. Do I trust them? No, but they understand far more than we do, or claim to at least. Are we to face the Waisters' wrath without them?” She pointed around her at the white walls, the ruins of Pinega. “We already know how that will turn out.”
She watched all the somber and hopeless and puffy-eyed faces react to her words. The message appeared to strike deep—even Vadim was nodding. But Konstant still glared at her, unsatisfied.
Would you still look at me like that, the monster thought idly, if your eyes were punctured and ran down your cheeks like tears? For a moment, the room took on a reddish tinge that rang in her ears, but then it was gone and oh Ialah, oh Ialah, she thought she had this under control. She thought she'd found productive channels for all this crap, found ways to make it serve the greater good, but here is was flowing back into her again, mental sewage pumped the wrong way through the pipes of her brain.
Damn you, Papa.
At least it did not flow into her hands, at least she had not actually done anything. Yet.
“Don't stare at me like that,” she said, looking away, feeling sick. “Don't you dare.”
At that moment, the white membrane over the doorway rippled, and then the Dog was stepping through, and Plate behind her, and one of the hulking Drones behind him, none of them moving quickly but all managing nonetheless to convey a sense of urgency.
Everyone turned to look.
“Madam,” Plate said, looking directly at Malye, striding about a third of the way into the room before stopping, “you must come with us. You must come with us. All of you must come with us now. Bring whatever you will need, whatever you have, if you have anything, because we must leave now and you will not be returned to this location.”
Malye blinked. “I beg your pardon?”
“No delay!” Plate flared, looking genuinely angry for the first time since Malye had first laid eyes on him.
Back at the entrance, the Dog stiffened, and the Drone raised his head almost to the three-meter height of the doorway, his copper eyes bright with a terrible alertness, his muscles tense and ready. Thick neck twisting and straightening, twisting and straightening in a kind of spasm, or tick, that was more sinister and terrifying than anything Malye had yet seen in this strange, future time.
“What has happened?” She asked Plate with forced calm. She would not show fear to these... creatures, though even at that distance the Drone could race forward and snap her like a wafer before she could so much as breathe. But the children are in the way, she thought, and that fact filled her with cautious dread. No sudden movements.
Plate grimaced. “There is fear that Finders ring may be hoarding information. Not true, not true, not the slightest bit true, but Wende has been summoned to Holders Fastness for an accounting. You are a part of this. You. You are a part of the accounting, and you will not be the cause of the Queen's delay. You will come with us now.”
Malye had acquired a blanket that morning, and cautiously, she now took it up in one hand, and pulled Vadim to her with the other. “We're coming,” she said. Elle was out of reach, staring at the monsters in the doorway and beginning to cry, to wail. “Come to Mother, Elle. Now!” She looked around at the others. “Did you hear him? We must go with the Queen. Get your things, now! On your feet, we're leaving!”
At this, Plate appeared to relax a little, and with him the Drone and the Dog, and Malye finally got her arm around Elle and pulled her out of the line of danger. Why they were so angry she could not imagine. Not anger, even, but some other emotion, some needful urgency that would not be denied. Without understanding, she mimicked the posture, dragging the protesting children forward, half wrapped in the blanket, and glaring at the adults as if she would treat them all in the same manner if she had to.
It appeared to be the correct response; the tension ran right out of Plate and his companions, and after a moment the Dog and Drone turned to vanish once more through the white membrane.
“Forgive me,” Plate said, and smiled wanly.
But he stood there waving his hands, urging them all through the doorway, reminding them with his mere presence that an order had been given, and that disobedience would simply not be an issue they were going to worry about.
Dutifully, Malye made a show of hurrying toward the exit, of shushing Elle's wailing, of making sure that everyone else was following behind her, however reluctantly. But as she brushed past the green-haired, small-mouthed, jelly-boned Worker, she could not resist whispering to him: “Does Wende's surrender mean so little?”
Indeed, it was no wonder the Waisters had returned, if this was their idea of capitulation.
But Plate declined to reply, or in fact to respond in any way. In the parlance of Central Investigators, he had “sealed his locks,” his mouth still smiling mechanically, his eyes simply staring back at her like copper mirrors, reflecting the forced blankness of her own expression, an emotional vacuum which filled the space between them as between distant planets.
But nature abhors a vacuum, she told herself. A simple truth that was nonetheless one of her most powerful interrogation tools, because people were not pressure vessels, were not evolved to hold back against the force of a vacuum for any length of time. Sooner or later, that emptiness would fill itself, would draw an emotion out of Plate again. Or even, Ialah help them all, from Malye herself.
And then the eye contact was broken, and Plate was impatiently shooing her through the exit, and she went without further complaint.
~~~
Viktor didn't much like the direction things were heading, but Malyene Andreivne seemed willing to go along with it, at least for the moment, and so he did so as well, hurrying silently down the long corridor and urging the others ahead of him, like school children in an evac drill. This time, the walk was not so long before they came to...
Well I'll be painted, he thought.
In the old days, twenty-odd hours ago, ferries had docked only at Pinega's equator, where centrifugal force could fling them away if any problems arose, if they were leaky or burning or found to be carrying something dangerous. But here, at forty degrees south latitude and eighty kilometers' inward depth, the Gate colonists had carved and smoothed and polished a cylindrical chamber some fifteen meters across and several hundred high, just barely larger than the dimensions of the ferry that hung stern-down within it.
At least, he assumed it was a ferry. All the ones he'd ever seen had been boxy in shape, lined with windows and covered over in layers of thermal LCD that danced with shifting, deep-contrast patterns of black and white. This one was quite different, long and slender, shaped like a sausage with six longitudinal wires running down it, invisible but pulling tightly against the skin so that it ballooned out between them. And yet, the thing was clearly no balloon, no soft, pliable surface held in by strings. Its windowless hull was the orange color of iron oxide, and looked at least as solid. Indeed, the whole thing gave off an impression of tremendous, unspacecraftlike mass—a pillar of stone, perhaps, carved into some ghastly alien phallic symbol.
But it had big fusion engines projecting down from its stern, and little steering jets visible here and there on the skin, and anyway it smelled like a ferry, that acrid, oily smell that was always the same, wherever you went. The smell of lubricants, he supposed, and coolants, and pure hydrogen leaking slowly from its compression tanks, reacting with everything in sight, one molecule at a time. It was a holiday sort of smell, one that spoke of trips to faraway places, and in spite of himself, Viktor felt a flush of excitement.
Was that so bizarre? He had been to Yercha and Kaman and Tyumen, had once even visited far Vyazma, that mightiest of Lesser Worlds. It amazed him, always, how very different the worlds were on the inside, how people who spoke the same language he did, the language of nearly all humankind, could produce so many things he would never have thought of, never even have imagined. In Yercha they kept it hot and humid and ran around naked or nearly so, and kept the gravity so light you could sleep comfortably on the ceiling, held up only by straps of friction cloth. In Tyumen they built everything fifty times larger than it needed to be, just because they bloody well felt like it, and unlike the naked Yerchans, a smile and a wink would tumble their women into bed with hardly a second thought.
Where would he be going, this time? Holders Fastness? That was no world of the Sirius colony. Some shattered place, then, that the Gate people had claimed for their own? Ah, Yercha. Would he even recognize the place if he saw it? It hit him once again that everything was gone, that the Sirius colony simply didn't exist anymore, nor any appreciable trace of it. He'd asked the Congress about it, and had been shown image after image, world after broken, sterile world, until he exited, unable to stand any more. He would not grieve for a billion souls, snuffed out in vacuum, in fire, in molten rock. He would not.
Already, he had traveled to a new place, called Gate system. A place where the people looked like children's drawings, and behaved like them, too. Well, he thought sourly, what a wonderful adventure it's been so far. The brief elation had turned to ashes in his gut.
The corridor opened out to a wider ledge, from whose center a translucent bridge extended, reaching out to a circular hatchway in the ferry's hull. The bridge, though it had a flat walkway and a handrail on each side, did not appear any more solid than if it were made of cobwebs, or smoke. In fact, it looked like a visual illusion, some trick of refracting light. But the “security fog” and the “surgical fog” had looked a lot like that, too, and the Congress had assured him that despite their vaporous appearance, both were exceedingly tangible, capable in fact of stopping projectiles, or throwing them, or tearing them apart into microscopic pieces. Perhaps this bridge was a structural fog, equally solid, equally malleable.
He was in no hurry to try it, but Plate was urging the refugees forward, out onto the ledge, and the Drone that was with them (wasn't his name 'Line?') went right out onto the bridge, crossing it neither cautiously nor recklessly, but with the quick ease of familiarity. He paused in the hatchway, craning his head inward on the end of that enormous, almost prehensile neck, and then vanished inside the ferry.
And then, Plate was urging Malyene across. “Go on,” he said, “the Queen will be here momentarily. We mustn't delay.”
“I don't understand this sudden urgency,” Malye said back to him.
Plate simply shrugged in his soft, inhuman way. “When you see Holders Fastness, you may understand. Holders ring is... very... influential. Now please, go in the transport without further delay.”
Viktor watched her approach the bridge, a dubiou
s expression on her face. At her sides, the children (Vadim and Elle, he had to remember their names) reached out to touch the railing. Their hands appeared to touch solid matter, and Malye copied them, and once satisfied with the corporeality of the bridge, set out gingerly across it.
Unaccountably, little Elle began to cry again. She'd pretty much been crying all day. But her brother crossed willingly enough, and after tarrying a moment at the ledge, she hurried after him, screeching for him to wait! Their mother disappeared through the hatchway, and a second or so later, so did they.
The bureaucrat, Konstant, went next, trailing his hand along the rail, gaping at it with mingled wonder and disapproval. And then came Sasha, and then the gray-haired Nik and strong, stocky Vere, who still struck Viktor as the two “realest” people among the newly revived. Together the two of them made a point of kicking the bridge and railing struts sharply several times, grimly satisfying themselves that the structure was sound before they would step across. Even so, Viktor saw the woman compulsively fingering her “lucky bracelet.” And when they were across, Sasha followed, and then Svetlane Antoneve and the older Ludmile Viktorovne, looking neither up nor down, but at one another with sad, fearful eyes. There was an edge of indignation there, as well. Oh, this future world is so awful, so frightening, such a terrible burden to us personally. Well, he supposed they were entitled to a bit of selfish emotion.
And that left Viktor himself to bring up the rear, with Plate's wormy fingers and snaky arms practically shoving him out onto the bridge of fog.
“Come on, she will be here in just a moment!”
Viktor snarled: “I'm going, Plate. Take your hands off me.”
The bridge felt solid enough beneath his sandals. Very solid, in fact—almost unyieldingly so, as if it were cast from a single crystal of quartz or diamond. But through it he could see, far below, the cylindrical chamber's floor, a flat and fragile-looking sheet, like the white membrane doors, only scaled up to a much larger size.