Hearts of Oak
Page 16
In the middle of the craft was a mess area with toilets, a machine that recycled water, and another that force-grew a protein-rich foodstuff that looked like tofu but was (as far as Iona could make out) made from something like plankton. The use of this should also be largely unnecessary, as the suspension system would keep them all alive without needing to eat for most of the journey to Earth.
“Just as well,” Iona said to Steve. “I couldn’t bear eating that stuff for decades on end.”
“Ugh, no,” Steve replied. They had both eaten a good deal of the protein while they were here. “It’s not the taste, is it—”
“No, it doesn’t really have a taste. It’s the texture.”
“Yeah, sort of . . . oily.” Steve stuck his tongue out.
“I didn’t want to say anything earlier,” Iona laughed, “because I was worried about offending them.” She indicated the figures who continued with the conversion work, paying them no attention at all.
Steve also laughed. “Don’t be daft. They don’t care, they’re not like us.”
“They don’t seem like us. That doesn’t necessarily mean—”
“They’re just looking for someone to give them orders. They’d do anything if that decider told them to.”
Iona was only half-listening by this point. She was thinking about the journey and what she’d said about “decades on end.” During her time in the city she had forgotten how old she was, both in linear terms and physically. The figures’ medical assessment had informed her that, physically, she was sixty-four years old. She wasn’t sure how long humans usually lived but she knew she was not young. While she was in the city she’d frequently thought of her impending retirement that never arrived, and had been perfectly happy in that situation, doing something she enjoyed with nothing much left to prove. She’d given no thought to her time being limited because it wasn’t. Things were different now. It was good to be free, but thinking of the future gave her a cold, anxious dread she’d never felt in the cage.
Steve was still talking about the figures in the same dismissive terms when Iona turned to him and said, “How long’s the journey again?”
“What?” said Steve.
“The journey back to Earth.”
“Dunno—sixty years, something like that?”
“That’s not what you said the other day.”
“Oh,” said Steve, rubbing his eyes, “yeah—”
“It was more than that.”
“Yeah, I think I might have gotten it wrong. I need to work it out again.”
Iona nodded. “It could be fairly crucial,” she said with a small laugh. “Make sure you get it right.”
They stayed out there for a couple more hours, talking over the events of the last few days. Iona guided the conversation with care and listened to Steve’s answers with keen interest.
* * *
By the evening the craft was ready and one of the figures invited Steve to come aboard and learn how to fly it. Iona decided to join him: “I mean, god forbid anything should happen to you,” she said, “but if it does—”
“If it does you’ll probably be best off trusting the autopilot to get you home,” Steve said as they walked over to the craft. “I’m not even sure how much use I’ll be—I can’t even remember flying a ship.”
“Muscle memory might come back.”
“Let’s hope so.”
For over an hour Iona sat behind Steve and a figure, watching them go over the controls and everything that might go wrong. The controls were a mixture of slick touch panels and clunky tactile levers and switches—the more basic they were the less there was to malfunction.
Finally it was time for a test flight.
Steve turned to Iona. “I think you should disembark.”
“Why?”
“Because this crate might easily blow up three seconds after we leave the ground.” He turned and addressed the figure. “No disrespect to your workmanship, mate.”
“I’m sure it won’t blow up,” said Iona when the figure failed to mount a defense of the craft it had helped to make.
“Even if it doesn’t,” said Steve, “I might crash it, or the atmospheric pressure system might fail . . . Look, this is the whole point of doing a test flight.”
“I’ll take the risk.”
“Yeah, well, I won’t.” Steve folded his arms and sat back. “I’m not taking off until you get off the ship.”
The figure looked at Steve, then at Iona. It seemed a little distressed, unable to navigate the conflicting desires of two humans it had been instructed to serve. “It seems . . . you must disembark?”
Iona sighed, stood up, and walked toward the door of the craft. “Yes, alright. I’m perfectly confident it won’t blow up, though.”
When the craft took off Iona didn’t turn to look at it. She was walking across the plain, back to the valley, and she had other things on her mind. As she’d predicted the craft did not blow up. She’d watched the figures put the thing together for the past two days and they struck her as a diligent bunch. She needed to go back to the medical facility and prepare for their departure.
* * *
It was late when the craft returned from its test flight.
Steve and the figure who’d instructed him disembarked. They agreed some tests would be run on the craft overnight, just to make sure no flaws had developed during the flight, and then the humans would leave tomorrow morning when it was light. Steve thanked the figure for its help and then walked down the steps that led to the valley and the medical facility.
He sensed something was wrong as he approached. The sun was setting but the lights inside the facility weren’t on. Perhaps the other humans were all elsewhere? Some kind of farewell party thrown by the figures? He couldn’t quite picture them doing that, but then who knew how they might have interpreted the new protocols that had been laid down.
He quietly opened the door to the facility and lingered on the threshold. The entranceway was dark and silent. He wished the figure had come down to the facility with him. He wanted someone else to go inside first. But there was no one else around, not anywhere.
“Steve?” came a voice from within—Iona’s voice. “Is that you?”
“Is everything alright, Iona?” he said. He couldn’t see her. It sounded like she was in the communal area.
“Is anyone with you?”
“No.”
Sounds of movement from inside. Iona appeared in the entranceway, her expression grim, and marched toward Steve. Before he could speak she strode past him and grabbed his wrist. “We need to go.”
“Where?” said Steve as Iona pulled him back the way he’d just come, toward the steps. He pulled his arm away: her grip was hurting him.
“In the ship. We’ve got to get out of here.”
“Now?”
“Yep.”
“What about the others?”
Iona turned and faced Steve, a haunted, panicked look in her eyes. “Dead. Both of them. It’s got out.”
“What’s got—You mean the Poramutantur?”
Iona nodded. “I don’t know how—”
“But . . .” Steve swallowed. “Who—”
“Saori.” Iona kept walking, urgently. “I don’t know when it happened—”
“Shit. She has been acting a bit—”
“Maybe it happened when we were escaping from the tower; she was the last one out through the window, wasn’t she? Maybe it got free from that oven—”
“But how do you know it’s her?”
“She killed Victor. I saw her out behind one of the domes, burying the body—”
“But are you sure that means she’s the Poramutantur?”
“Why else would she kill him? After all that’s happened—”
“Maybe she just flipped.”
“In that case she’s a murderer and I’m still not traveling across space with her.”
“What did you do when you saw this?”
“She hadn’t s
een me so I came back to the facility to wait for you.” By now they had reached the steps leading out of the valley. On the way up Iona asked how the test flight had gone, if there were any issues.
“No,” said Steve.
“Good, because if there were we’d be done for.”
They reached the plain, and after Iona had looked back down the canyon to see if anyone was following them, they entered the craft. The figure who’d accompanied Steve on the test flight was still inside, ensuring everything was prepared for the journey. Iona told it to get out and it did so without question.
“Close the door behind yourself,” Iona added as she and Steve took their seats.
As soon as the figure was a safe distance away the craft took off.
* * *
Once they’d left the atmosphere neither of them wanted to talk about what they’d done. They watched as the planet receded from view, the place they’d both spent the last few centuries. The place where they were supposed to have built a new life, and in fact had built a new life, but not the one they were supposed to build, and which was gone now anyway. They didn’t even know what the planet was called.
They went to the mess area and ate a meal, discussing what they would tell everyone when they got back to Earth. If nothing else the people there would want to know what had happened to Alyssa.
“I don’t think we need to tell them about your part in it,” Iona said with a heavy sigh, stirring her bowl of protein.
“I’d be very grateful,” Steve replied. “I mean, it’s up to you—”
“You weren’t really in control, Steve. And we want them to focus on the important thing, which is coming back here and destroying that creature.”
“You want to come back?”
Iona shook her head. “Not me, no. I just want them to send someone to deal with it. Of course, if it’s in human form the figures will obey it, and it’ll use that to its advantage . . . it’s not going to be easy.”
Steve nodded. “At least it’s not our problem anymore.”
* * *
The suspension system’s default programming was to wake its inhabitants once a year. This was a sensible precaution both for health reasons and to enable them to check the craft was running as it should. Of course, if there was an emergency the systems would wake them sooner.
Steve’s suspension system woke him after two days. He rushed from the bay and into the empty cockpit.
The monitor was alive with what looked like analog static. In the midst of the static a cone seemed to be pointing directly at the viewer. In fact this was an illusion: the center of the image seemed to be the nearest point, when in fact it was the farthest away. It was a side effect of traveling through the wormhole.
But they weren’t supposed to be in the wormhole at all. After their previous journey the humans had accepted they couldn’t travel through the wormhole again. Accordingly the craft was not designed to be able to travel this way. This was what had generated the emergency.
Steve went to turn off the autopilot, only to find it was turned off already. The nature of the wormhole was that you didn’t need to steer—it was like being on rails. But it also meant you couldn’t turn around: once you started a journey you had to finish it. He investigated whether there was any way of minimizing the damage the wormhole was doing to the craft, enough for it to survive until the other end. But he could already feel a tremor rising from the floor.
That was when he started to panic.
“I tried to stop it from waking you up,” said Iona’s voice from behind him.
He turned to see her leaning against the frame of the door to her suspension bay. She looked very calm, and that told him everything he needed to know.
“I was just going to let you sleep through the whole thing,” she went on, “it seemed easier.”
He strode over to Iona, grasped her around the throat with one hand, and pinned her to the wall. “Get the ship out of this or—”
“Or what?” She still seemed calm. “You’ll steal my body like you stole Steve’s? It’s not going to be much good to either of us in a few minutes.”
He glared back at her. He started to tell her she’d gotten it wrong, but she seemed to anticipate it and spoke over him.
“You didn’t know the journey time to Earth. Steve wouldn’t make a mistake about that.”
He laughed. “What, that’s all you’re basing this on?”
“Oh no, that was just the start. We talked for a long time after that. You made a lot of mistakes.”
He took his hand away. “So what you said about Saori killing Victor—”
“—was a lie, yes. Saori’s just been in a funny sort of mood, culture shock probably, she’s still herself. I told one of the figures to tell Saori and Victor I’d gone missing and take them on a wild-goose chase looking for me. Just needed them out of the way—the figure will have told them the truth by now. Useful how the figures do anything humans tell them to without question—I’ve got you to thank for that, haven’t I? I mean you were the decider, weren’t you?”
Steve remained silent.
“I reckon when the interior of the dome got reset,” Iona went on, “you were still in there, because you can survive anything, can’t you, and you took over one of the figures. You took DNA from the dead decider and used the figures’ medical tech to grow a new body. The crashed ship where they found you was actually Alyssa’s, maybe? Then you pretended to set off for some other part of the colony. But actually you stayed, and you took Steve.” Her voice became unsteady with those last few words. “Did you choose him just because he was the one who shut you in the oven? Getting your own back, were you?” She looked up at him, waiting for confirmation.
He rushed at her and punched her in the chest. As she dropped to the floor of the craft she knew that if she’d gotten the story wrong he’d have taken pleasure in telling her so. But she was right so he was going to take pleasure in killing her instead. The shaking of the craft was getting more and more violent, its metal frame buckling under the pressure: there was little time left anyway. This small dark box would never reach Earth, and no one would ever know why she had left in it without Saori or Victor. No one would know what she’d died for. But that didn’t matter. Everything got forgotten eventually anyway.
Iona barely felt the blows as they rained down on her. She’d already let go of everything. After all those long and meandering years in the city she was finally doing something meaningful.
She was still alive when the craft finally broke up. Her last thought was that the creature hadn’t managed to kill her like it had killed Hanna. She’d chosen her own way out.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Alan Barnes—this book started life as a pitch for something else a long time ago, and without him the idea would never have taken shape. It’s changed a lot over the years and I’m surprised it’s happened at all, but I’m very glad it has. Thanks to Mark Clapham, Lance Parkin, and James Cooray Smith for support and feedback, and thanks to Paul Cornell for his enthusiasm and inspiration.
Special thanks to Adam Christopher and to my editor, Lee Harris, and the biggest thanks of all to Catherine Spooner, without whom none of this would be possible.
About the Author
© Sami Kelsh
EDDIE ROBSON is a novelist, scriptwriter, and journalist. His first novel, Tomorrow Never Knows, was published in 2015. His other credits include the BBC Radio sitcom Welcome To Our Village, Please Invade Carefully; Adulting, the Guardian’s first original drama podcast; The Space Programme, the first radio soap opera for children; episodes of the Chinese adaptation of Humans; and animated shows including The Amazing World of Gumball and Sarah & Duck. He has also written numerous spin-offs from Doctor Who and comic strips for 2000 AD. He lives in Lancaster with his wife and two children.
You can sign up for email updates here.
Also by Eddie Robson
Tomorrow Never Knows
NONFICTION
Coen Brothers
Who’s Next (with Mark Clapham and Jim Smith)
Film Noir
Dracula (with Nicola L. Robinson)
The Art of Sean Phillips (with Sean Phillips)
Thank you for buying this Tor.com ebook.
To receive special offers, bonus content, and info on new releases and other great reads, sign up for our newsletters.
For email updates on the author, click here.
TOR•COM
Science fiction. Fantasy. The universe. And related subjects.
*
More than just a publisher's website, Tor.com is a venue for original fiction, comics, and discussion of the entire field of SF and fantasy, in all media and from all sources. Visit our site today—and join the conversation yourself.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Eddie Robson
Copyright Page
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novella are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
HEARTS OF OAK
Copyright © 2020 by Edward David Robson
All rights reserved.
Cover art by Armando Veve
Cover design by Christine Foltzer
Edited by Lee Harris
A Tor.com Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates
120 Broadway
New York, NY 10271
www.tor.com