by M. R. Carey
“Your authority ends at my skin,” she reminds him.
“But the risks, Rina. The risks associated with the birth itself, and then the difficulty of keeping a baby alive out here. Having to take you out of the roster …”
She waits him out. But he started that sentence without knowing how to finish it, and now he’s all out of ideas. If he tells her it’s just a little prick with a needle, she’ll probably have to brain him with the table.
Fournier shoots a haunted look at the recorder, capturing every word for posterity. It seems to have a chilling effect on his eloquence. About time!
Finally he gives in and dismisses her. “I’ll refer this to Beacon as soon as comms are up again,” he warns. “Obviously I’ll protect you as far as I can, but the ultimate decision is in their hands. There will be consequences for this.”
“Yeah, I’m sure,” Khan says. “Thanks for your support.”
“You’ll get no exemption from your duties. And when the baby is born, you will continue to receive a single ration. I can’t make exceptions for you because of these unwarranted circumstances.”
She makes her exit without another word, because she really can’t think of any. Her sense of relief at getting out of the sweat box is tempered by a very strong urge to go take a shower so she can wash this whole conversation off her skin. But the roster puts her next turn in the shower at 4.00 p.m.
In the lab, Akimwe and Penny and John Sealey are prepping the tissue samples and keeping up a determined pretence that they weren’t trying to eavesdrop through the closed door. Khan closes the engine-room door, but then runs out of steam. Out of volition. She rests her body, which is feeling heavy and awkward and bloated, against the cold steel of Rosie’s bulkhead.
John finds a way to get in close to her, pretending to stack some petri dishes in the steriliser. “Hey,” he murmurs, letting his forearm rub up against hers. “You okay?”
“Leave it,” she tells him tersely. “I’m fine.” And she is. Fournier can go screw himself. If they get Beacon up on the radio again … well, then that will be a different situation and she’ll deal with it when it comes.
They’re all of them waiting for that moment. The lab and the crew space and the cockpit all one big pent-up breath waiting to be breathed out. All of them separately asking themselves whether no news is—
Wait. All of them?
With a sudden sense of vertigo Khan realises what’s wrong with this scene. What’s missing.
“Where’s Stephen?” she demands. “John, where the hell is Stephen?”
7
Stephen Greaves stands stock still, frozen in a posture he has held without a break for most of the afternoon. He is simply and perfectly happy: a happiness made of observations and inferences. His brain is a computer. Nothing perturbs its dispassionate calculations.
He is in the water-testing station at the eastern end of the loch, in the main pump room. He is not alone there. Hungries surround him, and will attack and devour him if they notice he is there—that is, if he moves too suddenly or makes any loud noise. They will not detect him by scent: the chemical gel smeared over his body protects him, makes him smell like nothing much at all instead of like a meal.
The discomfort of standing so still for so long doesn’t trouble Greaves over-much. He has refined the skill over a long time. He started practising the day after his thirteenth birthday, two years ago, when Dr. Khan first told him that his name was on the longlist for the Rosalind Franklin’s crew. Close observation of the hungries was clearly something that would be highly desirable, so he trained himself in the necessary skills. He feels the strain, of course, but he lets it lie at the outer limits of his perceptions, all but ignored. This is not so bad. He has chosen a position that puts minimal strain on his arms and legs, braced in an angle of a wall so that he can even lean back and relax a little if he gets tired.
Also on those perceptual outskirts, consulted from time to time without undue urgency, is an estimate of passing time. He is counting off the seconds in a kind of mental sub-routine, a discipline he taught himself when he was ten.
He knows he will have to leave soon, that he is close to his limit. He has set an alarm. When his internal counter reaches 108,000, corresponding to an elapsed duration of approximately three hours, it will signal to him that it is time to leave. There are two reasons why he has to do this. The first is temperature. As the air around Greaves cools, the hungries will become aware of him as an anomalous hot spot in the early evening chill. They will be able to track him by his body heat.
The other reason is that the longer he stays here, the more likely it is that his absence will be noticed. That would be unpleasant. Greaves does not enjoy talking to other people, except for Dr. Khan and (sometimes) Colonel Carlisle. He likes it even less when the other people are angry or upset.
He wishes he could just be allowed to assume the risk without argument, without having to justify himself. He has come here to observe the hungries in their quiet, dormant state, and there is so much to observe. Their stillness, their silence is full of meaning.
Greaves visited the water-testing station for the first time the day before and was pleased with what he found there. The station offered a large concentration of hungries in a single enclosed space: very dangerous, but (from the point of view of information-gathering) fabulously rich pickings. He was able to stand and watch for an hour, stealing the time from a soil-acidity sweep that he had officially logged in the day-book. As far as the other crew members knew, Greaves was safely within Rosie’s defensive perimeter.
He is taking a bigger risk today. He has gone AWOL from a major sampling expedition, slipping away from Rosie as soon as the science team and its military escort were out of sight. Dr. Fournier was still on board and might have spotted him, but Greaves judged that contingency unlikely. For the most part, Dr. Fournier (like the colonel) prefers to keep to his own company and has found ways to do so even within the mobile lab’s very tight confines.
It took Greaves twenty minutes to reach the station. He could have got there more quickly by running, but running would have entailed two unwelcome risks. One: any hungry that saw him would almost certainly transition into the active pursuit state. Two: the e-blocker gel that disguises his scent—the gel that he invented and gave to the Beacon authorities to copy and mass produce—would be weakened and eventually deactivated by excessive sweating.
So he walked to the station, eased his way into the huge, central pump room at a speed slower than a snail ambling across a cabbage leaf, and this is where he is standing now. The pump room is a natural amphitheatre, shelving steeply down to a central reservoir where in former times water drawn off from the loch would have been held while it was tested for alkalinity and contaminants. The roof has fallen in at some point, so the room is open to the sky.
It’s also crowded: full of still and silent people with their heads bowed or tilted to the side and their arms dangling. They look as though their internal clockwork has run down for ever, but that’s a dangerous illusion. Greaves knows the hungries are tightly wound, hair-triggered. He was careful not to touch them as he slid like treacle into his place. He is careful, now, not to meet their cloudy gaze.
The hungries seem as motionless as statues. But if you spend long enough in their company you come to realise that their stillness is not absolute. Their responses to sound and movement and smells are well known, but Greaves has discovered other stimuli to which they will sometimes react. A strong wind makes them turn, angling their faces to take advantage of the flood of olfactory information. Excessive heat causes them to open their mouths, possibly as a means of temperature regulation. And—a recent discovery which Greaves has spent the afternoon confirming—they have heliotropism. They follow the movement of the sun across the sky, the same way plants do.
This is what he is pondering as he watches them now. Is the pathogen that has saturated the nervous system of these unfortunates trying to photosynthesise? No, t
hat’s very close to impossible. Cordyceps is not a plant but a fungus. Its cells, in all the specimens he has examined, contain no chloroplasts. Moreover, it feeds through its host and doesn’t need to exert itself on its own account.
So it must be the warmth that the hungries are responding to, rather than the light. Greaves thinks what he is seeing is a side effect of the mechanism that lets them hunt down living prey at night by body heat alone. They are tracking the sun as though it might be something good to eat.
It’s a fascinating prospect, but there is no time to interrogate it further. His mental alarm goes off. He has reached his pre-arranged limit and he has to leave.
Has to begin to leave. The manoeuvre will take time. He needs to make his movements so gradual that the hungries won’t notice him. He turns around, very slowly, to face the door he entered by. He takes a step towards it, and then another. Tiny steps, barely lifting his feet off the ground. He is an untethered balloon, drifting in a non-existent breeze.
But just before he reaches the door, just before he drifts through it onto the stairwell beyond, he sees something that stops him in his tracks.
Movement.
It’s off to his left, at the periphery of his vision and down below his natural eye level. He almost turns. He almost looks.
Nothing should be moving here—or at least, not quickly or suddenly enough to draw his gaze. Greaves barely checks himself in time, keeps his eyes determinedly on the ground. A shudder goes through the hungries anyway as the movement impinges on their sensoria, too.
His heart pounding, Greaves begins a slow turn. It takes most of a minute.
He sees immediately what has changed in the room. There is one more person present. A child. Female, and aged (he estimates) somewhere between nine and ten years.
She is not moving now, or looking at him. She is as still as any of the adult hungries, and she wears the same vacant expression. Pale grey eyes cast down, mouth half-open. Her red hair hangs lank over her face, half-hiding a puckered scar that runs from her hairline across one eye and cheek, terminating in the fold of her neck.
Her immobility is perfectly convincing, but she wasn’t there before and therefore it must have been her that moved. It seems most likely that she has emerged from the pump room’s central well, which is now dry, but she could simply have stepped out from behind one of the other hungries. She is small enough to have been completely hidden by an adult body.
Is it possible that she has been here all along, and that Greaves has simply overlooked her? He thinks it unlikely. She is the only child present, which makes her an anomaly. The other hungries in the room, all wearing the same overalls with the same logo over the breast pocket, were employees of this facility until they became infected. She would have stood out from the start.
The girl is dressed oddly too, given that hungries always wear the increasingly ragged and filthy remnants of what they were wearing at the moment when they were bitten and took the infection. If she is a hungry, then at the moment of infection she must have been in some kind of fancy dress. Twin lines of blue and yellow paint have been daubed roughly and unevenly across her brows, two more down the mid-line of her nose. A man’s shirt in a narrow pinstripe hangs loosely on her skinny frame all the way down to her knees, cinched at her waist with a brown belt made of plaited leather strings. Dozens of what look to be ornamental key rings are attached to the belt, all of them different. Greaves sees a skull, a smiley face, a rabbit’s foot, a tiny shoe. Underneath the shirt, the girl is wearing what looks like the vest from a wetsuit. Her feet are bare.
Is she a hungry? If she is, then her stepping into view and then halting again defies explanation. The hungries toggle between two states: they are either stock still or running headlong after food. They don’t make concerted movements and then stop. Only humans do that.
Conversely, if the girl is human why don’t the hungries smell her humanity and respond to her? Turn on her and eat their fill? She can’t be wearing e-blocker. Beacon is the only place in the whole of mainland Britain where the protective gel is manufactured, and she is not from Beacon.
Uncertainty frightens Greaves. Even a small amount of unresolvable ambiguity makes him unhappy at a very deep level, makes his brain itch and tears start in his eyes.
His hand begins a super-slow glide across his chest, into the pocket of his flak jacket. He keeps a relic there, whose touch comforts him. He finds it now and turns it in his fingers. A small, angular shape. A flat rectangle, but slightly convex on one side. With the tip of his index finger, Greaves traces the vertical bars of a tiny speaker grille.
Activate jump gate, captain, he mouths silently.
Neutron star at your six o’clock.
We come in peace from Planet Earth.
The plastic lozenge is the voice box from a child’s toy. There are twenty-four phrases in its inventory. Five of them never play any more but Greaves knows them all. Every quirk of intonation and every hiss or crackle that the little speaker adds on its own account. In moments of personal crisis, he recites them like a catechism and it calms him.
It calms him now, but still he has to know. He needs to resolve the ambiguity before it topples his reason and makes him panic. Panicking here would be very bad.
He applies the only test he can think of. “I see you,” he says. He keeps his voice to a murmur, doesn’t move his lips even a fraction. In this pregnant silence, the sound should be loud enough to reach her without standing out in the hungries’ perceptions as purposive and worth investigating.
But the girl doesn’t move. Her eyes don’t flick in his direction. Is their grey tone natural or is it the grey that comes with infection? He’s too far away from her to tell for sure.
“My name is Stephen,” he says, trying again. Again she makes no response.
Greaves takes a slow, sidling step towards her, but then immediately stops. He is stymied. If he advances on her and she runs away, he will have killed her by drawing down the hungries’ attentions on her. While if she is a hungry herself, she will almost certainly register his movement any second now and attack him. He is taking a risk even in looking at her for so long.
The only safe thing to do is to withdraw. But if he withdraws he may never have an answer. Not having an answer is unacceptable. Impossible.
He does it without even thinking. His hand, inside his pocket, is already folded around the voice box. He brings it out, very slowly.
His intention is only half-formed but on some level he is already committed. His hands move of their own accord: he parses the decision after it has already happened. He displays the little plastic box, which is bright red and no more than an inch in diameter. He holds it up so the girl can see it, turns it this way and that in his hand.
He is essaying a magic trick that Private Phillips taught him. Normally he is proficient, but normally his movements are much quicker than this. Misdirection is harder at glacial speeds.
In fact, it’s impossible. Greaves performs the pass, and the re-pass, but nobody watching would be in any doubt that the voice box is now in the palm of his left hand.
He tries again, elaborately (and very gradually) waving the fingers of his left hand in sequence to disguise the moment when he slides the box across to the right. The hungries stir a little. In spite of the care Greaves is taking with his gestures, he is close to triggering them into wakefulness. The girl is still not looking in his direction but something about her stance, too, suggests a heightened alertness. She is interested, but whether in the trick or in the imminent possibility of a meal Greaves can’t tell.
And he can’t go any further. He has to abandon the trick before it kills him.
Again, his body is quicker than his mind. His finger and thumb find the string that is the voice box’s only control, and draw it out to a six-inch length.
As the string ravels back, a voice speaks into the utter stillness of the room. The voice of Captain Power, the galactic engineer. It is muted by Greaves’ enclosi
ng hand, and it seems to come from nowhere.
“We need to go to light speed.”
The girl’s face flickers, just for a moment, lit up from the inside by a spark of surprise she can’t suppress in time.
Greaves has his answer. Sheer amazement punches him in the heart and compresses his diaphragm tight enough so that his next breath hurts.
What now? What should he do? He has to get himself and the girl out of this room. He has to talk to her (he hates talking to anyone, but children are not as scary as adults) and find out who she is. How she came to be here. What she is using to keep the hungries from scenting her out.
He has to take her back to the safety of Rosie.
Even as he thinks these thoughts, the still life moves.
A pigeon flies down through the gaping hole in the roof. All the hungries raise their heads in a simultaneous jerking shudder, like cars cold-starting on a frosty winter morning. Their heads turn and their eyes range.
The pigeon settles on a rusted steel railing (stainless steel, it used to be called, but you can’t keep out oxygen for ever) and looks around the room with its black-bead eyes. Its blue-grey head ducks and darts. Looking for food, most likely, and completely unaware that it’s the best thing on the menu.
By this time, the hungries have found the bird and locked their gaze onto it. They surge forward as one. Greaves has to do the same. If you don’t keep to the moves in this dance, you will pretty soon wish you had.
They’re very fast, the walking dead, the ontologically departed. But the pigeon is fast, too. As the room erupts all around it, it takes wing again, heading back the way it came.