by Al Robertson
She thought about moving, but the wind was strong and she – a memory disc attached to a hollow vacuum suit – was light. Until the storm had blown itself out she decided to stay put, putting events back together in her mind. As she wiggled her feet a little further into the dust, she noticed that any movement sucked power from the disc’s power reserves. Without the light of the sun falling on its solar panels, they could not recharge. She powered down the suit as much as possible, hoping that daylight would bring energy, then fell into the fractured past.
Her memories of the fall were chaotic. She teased out fragments and tried to fit them into sets. It was hard to make them cohere. There were the early ones – the Caretaker saying: ‘One pod each. We’ll be in touch all the way, meet up again down there. You’ll see.’ Her hatch closing, locking out danger. The pod’s intercom buzzing into life. Cassiel and the Caretaker confirmed that they were safe in their own pods, then Leila replied and was heard. A moment of relief, then the hatch’s round window framed an entity that froze Leila’s memory.
The pressure door must have caved in. The nanogel had met the sweatheads. They’d merged as a kind of tentacle, reaching out across the room. Limbs emerged from a pulsing mass, moving in a kind of grotesque, co-ordinated ballet. A dead face, smeared across with purple, pressed itself against the window. It winked at her, then vanished. Fists drummed against the glass, smearing it with nanogel and blood. Leila pushed herself back into the escape pod, ready to go out fighting if this new abomination broke through.
‘All’s good. Just a few seconds to eject. Handing over control to Cassiel.’ The Caretaker’s voice – she knew him so well by that name, it was impossible to think of him as Mandala – was a calm presence on the intercom. A thump, and Leila’s pod shifted a little. ‘Almost,’ said Cassiel. She sounded completely in control. Then the three of them were away. Leila had the satisfaction of seeing nanogel and pale bodies explode out into the vacuum behind them.
The escape pod flew silently, but it had still been full of noise. The suit’s servo motors had a tiny mosquito whine. Something seemed to have come loose inside it, bumping and rattling with every movement. Ancient auditory systems created white noise from nothing. Glitches danced in her vision and crackled through her ears. Leila did her best to ignore it all as she craned towards the pod’s window, watching Station spin away from her. Emotions shook through her. There was awe and fear, excitement and dismay, optimism and despair. Beyond the smeared glass, unreachably far away, her home shrank down to nothing.
Cassiel’s voice remained strong, whispering encouragement into her ear. And there was the knowledge she shared too, flight and systems management instructions that showed her how to assess the progress of her small craft and be confident that all its systems were functioning as they should. Station shrank to a bright pinprick of light, indistinguishable from the unreachable stars. Cassiel helped her fall with confidence through the void. Leila found herself profoundly moved by this sudden, unexpected closeness, this communion in darkness. They stayed in touch through the upper atmosphere, as fire roared around their capsules, light blasting in and nearly blinding both of them. The capsules shook violently – ‘to be expected,’ said Cassiel, no stress in her voice. ‘We’re following our assigned flight path.’ All three capsules’ gravity management systems kicked in at the same moment – ‘moving into a landing programme, heading for the upper cloud layer’ – and the shaking vanished, then the fire.
The capsules decelerated fast. Leila felt the suit’s cameras recalibrate. There was a dark black-blue sky – they were falling on the night side – and beneath it a great, flat expanse of cloud, alive with constant flickers of blue and orange light. ‘Lightning,’ said Cassiel. ‘Other weather effects. Nothing to worry about. We’ll be through it in a second.’ Seconds more and they were within the storm, brilliance dancing all around them. And that brilliance reached out to Leila, and suddenly, cruelly exposed the limits of Cassiel’s control over their fall.
Memory fragmented.
There was a howling at the window, explosions, a sharp burning reek, sudden, random acceleration, and then the pod was throwing Leila around and she was desperately clinging on to whatever she could. At first, Cassiel’s voice was a broken poem running through it all, sometimes appearing to spit out random words, sometimes vanishing entirely. ‘You’re hit,’ Leila made out, then: ‘Hold it together.’ That was the last message she understood. Bursts of static rang out with the rhythms of speech. They too fell away. The capsule plummeted through another cloud layer and the hurricane snatched it, its vast roar stronger and more brutal than any weapon. Emergency systems howled in pain. There was an agony of tumbling. That was when Leila’s consciousness, overwhelmed by the battering roar of it all, shut itself down.
Now the storm howled around her again, but for the moment her grip was holding. There was still no sign of her companions. Their absence was a void, colder and emptier than space. Leila had no idea how long the storm would last. She could accomplish nothing until it had blown itself out. Even when almost dormant, the suit still leeched energy from the disc. She needed to find a way of using less power. She slowed her mind. The storm accelerated around her. The sun came, its light dimmed by cloud layers and the dust of the storm. Visibility was limited to a few hundred metres. Leila realised that there was more to the noise than the wind. When it blew from the south, a long, low moaning joined its roar. Leila isolated the deep, sad sound and played it back, listening to it again and again, baffled as to what it could be. She tried not to think of Cassiel, of the storm tossing her end over end through the air until her nanogel body broke and was lost for ever.
She sent out another call. There was nothing.
‘Perhaps,’ she thought, ‘I’m the one who didn’t make it.’
At last, power reserves almost exhausted, she let herself sleep.
She woke to pale sunlight and silence. She let her mind return to normal speed then stood up, dusty earth falling away from her. A brief systems check revealed no degradation. The sun had partially recharged the disc’s battery. There was still no sign of Cassiel or Mandala. She detached one of the cameras from her shoulder and inspected the suit, checking for any damage. All was intact except for a broken face mask. And where there should be an empty helmet, a blank, white face gazed back at her. Leila gasped. Someone had died in the suit. It still contained their remains. Leila stared at the skull. It was less disturbing than it should have been. She moved the camera around, trying to imagine the face it had once worn. She felt light movements within the suit – other remnants, settling and resettling. She found it in herself to smile. When she’d been alive, her flesh had contained a skeleton. After three years of death she’d found herself another body, and this one too was built around white bone.
For a moment she wished for the purity of virtual presence. Then she forced herself to accept the situation. She wondered whether she should stay with the few fragments of escape pod that remained or set off to find Cassiel and Mandala, or even Deodatus and Dieter. Her senses reached for geolocation data. There was nothing there and that – more than anything – finally drove home to her that she was no longer on Station. There was nothing in the air but the breeze and dust. She suddenly felt desperately alone.
Clouds filled the sky, obscuring the stars that had been her lifetime companions. Faded orange light broke through them in shards, lighting a broad, open plain. To the north, it rose towards hills. To the south, the long S of a dried river bed carved through it. Beyond, distant hills rose up again, vanishing into a dusty haze. There had been a city here once, an accretion filling the whole wide valley. But it was long gone. Only rubble remained, broken by occasional scribbles gesturing towards order – not-quite-shattered walls, stumps that had once been buildings and a few dark, empty lines that might have been roads.
Leila imagined great storms coming again and again, scouring the dead city, leaving only these fra
gments. The landscape read like a corrupted hard drive, terabytes of coherence overwritten by chaos until nothing remained to be read. It was all a dry, sepia brown, reminding Leila of the colour that cheap image print-outs always faded to after a few months. Apart from the clouds, nothing moved. Leila thought of the lessons she’d endured as a child, the nightmares of a broken Earth lost to war machines that – night after night – shook through her mind. There was no trace of that here. She looked around once again, hoping she’d see a rescuer moving in the distance. There was only desolation.
Leila remembered the moaning in the storm and looked south again. Maybe ten kilometres away, beyond the empty river, tumbled rectangular forms lay scattered across the plain. The cameras whirred as she zoomed in on them. They were fallen towers of concrete and steel. Their walls and windows had been ripped away. The howling winds must have played across them, setting the empty structures moaning. They looked newer than the rest of the city, visitors from another, more vital landscape. Perhaps they contained technologies that she could use to find her companions, or even just an energy source that could break her reliance on the cloud-enfeebled sun. Seeing no other options available, she started out across the ruins towards them.
The journey took almost a day. Leila had to stop and let the weak sun recharge her many times. Every so often, the city would throw up some remnant of meaning. A pale green sign half-emerged from the rubble, bleached by time. Unreadable words surrounded a broken circle with pointed lines leaping off it. It looked like a smiling face. A red metal cylinder lay half-collapsed into a broken pavement, a dark slit cut in its face. A dark metal lion snarled at the blank sky, its face half-erased by a millennium of storms. There were remnants of a tumbled column nearby, their broken, dirty stone a sharp contrast with her memories of the Shining City. She passed deep holes, every one an empty pit.
At one point, overwhelmed by loneliness, she talked to the white figure within her. She told it about all she’d found in the pyramid – the fallen minds and the sweatheads, the face of Deodatus, his laser ready to shine out and break Station. She talked about Dieter and realised that she was confused. Even in his altered state, she couldn’t imagine him condoning the kind of destruction the laser would bring. Perhaps the changes in him went deeper than she thought. She sent up a prayer for him. She missed Cassiel deeply. Her passenger smiled mutely back at her. She thought of how Dieter had given her her own skull face and found simulated tears rolling down her face. She would reach her brother again. She would save him. But Dit’s memory block was gone. She told herself she’d find another way of showing Dieter how much Deodatus had taken from him. She thought of the pendant and all it represented. She kept moving.
The breeze sighed around her, gusting with a fresh randomness that was an entirely new experience. The winds of Station were always so precisely timed, so even, so clearly manufactured. For a moment she wished for flesh, wondering at the taste and smell of this new world. The suit provided neither. She crossed the empty river, gazing east and west at the collapsed remnants of melted bridges. The disc chittered about residual radiation – present enough to notice, light enough to safely ignore. Then she was south of the river, in a new wasteland, almost at the fallen blocks. She passed more holes in the ground and realised what surprised her about them. They were all completely empty. None held any remnants of the buildings that must have once rooted themselves in them. It was as if their occupants had all pulled themselves entirely out and marched away, newly born creatures leaving void cocoons behind them.
When at last she reached the fallen buildings, there was only disappointment. The tumbled ruins were indeed much newer than the exhausted, overwritten city, but they held very little of use. Arrays of battered communications dishes spiked out of their fallen peaks. Shattered façades gave on to empty rooms, lying sideways above the stony dirt. Great hinged struts lay scattered around each one’s base. Some were still attached to the building, hanging off dirt-encrusted universal joints. Leila imagined a squashed fly, its legs splaying out from its broken body at crazy, random angles. Perhaps these struts too were legs. Perhaps they’d once walked these buildings across the dead dirt of Earth, pivoting around the great universal joints. Leila shook her head. It seemed too absurd. It was more likely that they’d been deep roots, sunk into the ground to hold down each building as the violent storms that had stripped down the rest of the city raged around it.
Discouraged, she slept again, and woke to a world that had not changed. The slow tick of discharging power sources rolled on in her mind. The skeleton within her whispered of mortality. It was a shock to realise that – in effect – her life could be over, that nothing might remain to her but waking and sleeping in this empty place, purged of any presence but her own. That thought drove her back to the top end of one of the buildings. She would not be left to die invisibly. She pulled herself up through the remnants of communications systems until she found a parabolic antenna that wasn’t too battered. Its servo motors had been torn out and its bearings had seized up. She pushed hard, freeing it up, and then, when she was confident that it would move easily, lashed herself to the framework that supported it. She tied the arm of her suit to the antenna and connected it to the disc’s tiny transmitter. She set the suit’s arm moving automatically, taking the antenna up and down, to left and right, scanning across the blankly clouded sky.
Then she pulled information out of her mind, encoding it as a text message. It included a brief description of all she, Cassiel and the Caretaker had discovered in the pyramid – Deodatus’ laser, the server henge that was really a portal to Earth, the true location of the Shining City and the railway system that implied a far deeper infestation of Station than they’d previously suspected. She described the face of Deodatus. ‘We believe he’s one of the gods of old Earth.’ She described all that he’d done to her brother and ended with: ‘Save Dieter.’ She used her fetchware to encode the message, making it entirely secure. No god could read the language of the dead. It was a closed book to the Totality too. Then she dropped the message into an envelope of self-destruct code, addressed to the Fetch Counsellor and tagged it as maximum urgency.
Then, Leila prepared for sleep. All her systems would shut down, except for the motors that would keep the dish moving across the sky and the transmitter that would blast her heavily encrypted message out and up towards it. The Earth was dead to Station, but the planet was surrounded by innumerable satellites that still lived. Station was only the largest of them. All her text needed to do was reach one of them, and then it would leap through the weave to the Fetch Counsellor’s in-tray. Then – she was sure – the Counsellor would act. She didn’t know if it would be possible to save her, but hopefully he would at least be able to meet with East, and help the god rescue Dieter and move against Deodatus. ‘You’ll get your documentary,’ she muttered to herself, ‘But I won’t be in the bloody thing.’ She smiled at that, obscurely cheered by the thought of disrupting the god’s media production plans.
Perhaps then, Station and the Totality could be rescued. And perhaps her brother could be found and released, stepping back into a world that no longer contained her, but that she had helped to save. She took one last look at the barren landscape that surrounded her. Then she let her consciousness, pulsing with vivid, energy-draining life, slow and fall away. As it flickered out, she imagined the husk she was leaving behind – a skeleton in a pressure suit, sending the most important part of itself upwards to the sky, leaving everything material behind. She imagined a soul leaving a body, leaping away from corporeal death into a virtual eternity. She let herself mourn her digital life one last time, and then filled her mind with images of Dieter, rescued from Deodatus, moving through a world that was entirely purged of his dark, corrupting influence. And that hope for the future was the final thought to pulse through her, and then there was nothing left of her but fabric and bone shooting up into light then darkness then light.
Chapter 35
When Leila woke it felt as if she was rising back up from the deepest sleep imaginable. Her consciousness wasn’t just rebooting – it was reassembling itself, waking dormant memory chains and consciousness processes, then meshing them back together into a coherent self. As she climbed back into wakefulness, she remembered recovering from the Blood and Flesh attack on the Coffin Drives. But this time, rather than being filled with panic and fear, her rebirth was suffused with a sense of peace and satisfaction. She felt absolutely secure.
For a moment, as her core systems carried out their final tests on every part of her, she sat outside herself. The shape of her consciousness, pure and uncorrupted, reminded her of the pendant, of what Dieter had been before Deodatus took him and rewrote him. As she fell back into herself and returned fully to wakefulness she put her hand to her neck and it was there. Touching it, she wondered if Dieter had ever stepped outside his new self and looked at it. She let the last of her systems surge into being and opened her eyes.
Her disc had been detached from the pressure suit. She lay on a couch in a long, low-ceilinged space, a real space with some weave overlay. There was colour everywhere. The walls were hung with tie-dyed drapes. There were hypnotic images of brilliantly coloured faces, of bodies dancing together. Images hung between them. One showed a naked man standing on a dark rock that shone with lichen. His arms were stretched out to welcome the world. A star burst out behind him, orange, blue and yellow shimmering out of it like petals. His eyes were deep blue, his hair was red-gold and his face held a look of sad, welcoming acceptance. Another showed an antlered deer with a woman’s face. Her body was prickled with nine arrows, but she ran undisturbed through the forest and the blood that dropped from each cut was a brilliant, shining red. Lava lamps glowed out soft blue, red and yellow light, shining wax shapes rising and falling in them like little captured universes. Star-shaped lanterns hung from the ceiling. Flowers were everywhere, dense colour clots bursting up from pots filled with moist, dark earth. Their bright scents mixed with its damp, fertile smell, pervading the air. A soft, low droning sound hung over it all. Leila looked round to see where it was coming from. Dark points weaved through the air.