Lights in the Deep

by Brad R Torgersen

  Again, he suffered my exclamations with a smile.

  Little did I know that my Writer Dad, Mike Resnick, would eventually line me up to collaborate with Larry Niven, for Arc Manor’s Stellar Guild series. A project which I wrapped up at the same time I finished my edits for the very book you’re now holding in your hands.

  Being able to collaborate with Larry Niven—to write in one of his worlds—has been one of those serendipitous things for which I could not possibly have planned. Dreamed, yes. But not planned. A junior point guard just starting out in the NBA does not plan to scrimmage with or take pointers from the great John Stockton. A guitar player two steps out of his garage, making waves in local venues, does not plan to play with or open for Eric Clapton or Jimmy Page.

  Perhaps the best compliment Larry ever gave me during the process, was that my style seemed to so closely match his own, he had a difficult time telling the difference between my prose and his.

  You can’t buy that kind of thing. Nor steal it. It is a gift. More valuable than diamonds or platinum. I shall take it to my grave as one of the straight-up most heart-warming things anyone has ever said to me, about my writing. Your basic good feeling, as Tom Clancy said in his introduction to N-Space.

  So, everything you’ve been reading in this book, it’s partially Larry’s doing. Without my having adored Larry’s work first, I’d have never gotten up the nerve to try my hand at making my own stories.

  Because in the same four months when I was reading Larry for the first time, a locally-produced science fiction radio serial called Searcher and Stallion had picked me up to work on some sci-fi scripts for them. So that between doing the scripts and thinking, hot damn, this is fun, and reading Larry’s stories and thinking, hot damn, this is amazing, and people pay Larry to do this, I got it into my brain that maybe I could do what Larry does too.

  Twenty years later I’ve been the 2012 triple-nominee for the Hugo, Nebula, and Campbell awards, and I’ve won the Writers of the Future award, as well as the Analog magazine “AnLab” readers’ choice award—Analog being the premier “hard” science fiction magazine in the English language, where Larry himself still publishes. Seems to me I can’t talk about my career or my successes without speaking of the tremendous influence Larry’s had, and still has. Just because he’s terrific at what he does.

  So I’ll give a big salute to the man who created the Kzinti and the Ringworld and the Smoke Ring. Who peopled his books and stories with amazing men, women, and aliens; some of whom think as well as you or I do, just differently. Pak Protectors and Outsiders and Grendels and Pierson’s Puppeteers. A menagerie of delightful, incredible, and essentially believable creatures. Who often exist in stupendously amazing yet utterly scientifically plausible places.

  Folks, that’s not easy to render. Trust me.

  But Larry makes it look effortless.

  ***

  Exanastasis

  Exanastasis (Greek): resurrection, rising again.

  Atreus studied the sweep of the Milky Way, remembering the first time his uncle had taken him into the hills away from the city. They’d lain on their backs in their sleeping bags, staring up into space and competing to see who could spot the most movers—satellites and space stations orbiting at various distances.

  He reflexively reached down to pull the lip of his bag up to his chin, and discovered that there was no bag.

  What?

  Reality suddenly collapsed into place.

  The wreck. His lunar rover had flipped, crushing him into the regolith. Air had been escaping through cracks in his helmet when he’d tried to scream, and vomited thick arterial blood into his starred facebowl.

  Atreus’s body jerked violently at the visceral memory, and he sat up. Looking around, he saw that he was on a dais sculpted from the central peak of a tiny crater. An invisible dome of phocarbonite crystal rose upward from the crater’s low rim wall.

  Swinging his feet over the edge of the dais, Atreus found the crater floor polished, and warm to the touch of his bare toes. Gentle lights were set into the basalt at regular intervals, illuminating a wide set of stairs that led down the slope of the short peak to where a blue-cloaked and hooded figure hovered half a meter in the air.

  The floating creature’s head looked straight up towards the dais, but its face was a darkened void, revealing nothing.

  “Erebos,” Atreus said, recognizing the color of the cloak.

  “Father,” replied the cloaked being.

  “Why have you revived me?”

  “It was not my choice.”

  Atreus wiped his palms across his face, savoring the sensation. “The others?”

  “They thought it might be easier to convince you this way.”

  Atreus snorted. “Since when have your brothers and sisters ever needed to convince me of anything? The time when my opinion mattered, passed long ago.”

  “Not all of us feel that way.”

  Atreus studied the levitating creature for a quiet moment.

  “No, I suppose you don’t. You were always respectful, Erebos.”

  “Which is why I voted to let you stay dead.”

  Atreus stood up, discovering himself to be hairless as well as naked. He took a few experimental steps and found his motor control over the clone body to be surprisingly good—his children had improved the consciousness transfer process.

  “What, my son, is so needful that your brothers and sisters would go to the trouble of bringing me back in the flesh? If it’s information you want, surely you could have copied me from the Vault, and mined the copy for relevant data.”

  “Data, perhaps. But wisdom? No.”

  Again, Atreus snorted. “Hah! Wisdom. You all grew too smart for that. It’s why you let me die in the first place. The accident must have been enormously convenient for you.”

  Erebos remained silent, his hovering form unmoved. “I told them you’d feel this way. Which is why I knew we couldn’t come to you empty-handed. We have therefore prepared a gift, as a token of our good faith.”

  Erebos’s floating body pivoted smoothly on its vertical axis, and an arm rose from the shoulder to point to a new series of lights that had sparkled to life near him in the crater floor. A line split through the center of those lights, and then a circular hatch gaped wide. A new set of stairs, leading down to the subterranean structures below, divulged a second, white-cloaked figure that rose steadily until it stood at Erebos’s side.

  Unlike Erebos, the new figure walked on two legs. It reached up and slowly pulled back its hood.

  Atreus gaped, then surged down the stairs and sank to his knees in front of the figure. Hot tears spilled from his eyelids as he prostrated himself like a penitent, lips brushing the tops of the figure’s bare, feminine feet.

  “Mother,” Erebos said quietly, lowering his arm.

  • • •

  The subsurface chamber was immense, but only two chairs populated its center. Atreus, now clothed in a white robe similar to his wife’s, and clutching a steaming cup of coffee, sat in one chair. The other chair held Hypatia—Atreus’s spouse. Unlike himself, Hypatia had a soft head of tightly-curled black hair on top of her coffee-skinned skull. Her wide-set, deliciously dark eyes watched Atreus as she half-smiled, her beautiful lips full and inviting.

  A wall-screen bloomed from a slot in the floor, showing a single image at its center. Atreus had to rip his eyes away from his spouse—who’d not said five words to him since his awakening—to look at what the children thought was so important.

  “This was taken today?” Atreus said.

  “Yes,” replied Telamon, the red-robed floater to Atreus’s right. Like Erebos, Telamon wore the color first assigned to him upon being decanted. Also like Erebos, his face was a blank void within the confines of his cowl.

  “The vessel originated from deep within the Kuiper,” said purple-cloaked Doris, “Given its current trajectory and velocity, it will enter the inner system within a week.”

  “And what
of its communications,” Atreus asked. “Have you tried to talk to it?”

  “No,” said black-cloaked Kalypso. In the months before his death, Atreus had watched her emerge as the strongest of her siblings. It was she who had slowly turned the majority of them against him, and it was she who had presided over Atreus’s broken body as they’d lowered the Vault’s recording cap onto his skull.

  Now Kalypso hung back, monosyllabic in her responses to his questions.

  Atreus wondered if the calculus of power had changed. He looked to Erebos and said, “Why not establish communications? SETI was one of your primary assignments, following the evacuation of Earth. A visitor from another solar system is of the greatest import. Surely you didn’t bring me back just to tell you this?”

  “No,” Kalypso said before her brother could respond.

  “Then what is the problem?”

  “They think the ship might be human,” Hypatia said, breaking her silence.

  Atreus almost spilled his mug into his lap.

  Hypatia turned her head to the side, stifling a giggle, then said, “I think my husband and I need to get a few things straight. Before we continue. Would you all please give us some privacy?”

  Without a word of protest, the multi-colored robes floated silently into formation and exited the room through a side portal, which immediately sealed.

  Atreus returned his attention to the woman who was—and yet couldn’t possibly be—his wife.

  “You don’t believe in me,” Hypatia said.

  “I want to believe,” Atreus said. “With all my heart and soul.”

  “But….”

  “I saw your shuttle vaporized. I saw the debris burn.”

  Hypatia examined one of her hands. “I can’t tell you what happened because I don’t know. I can only tell you that it’s been about three months since they woke me up.”

  “Wife, what do you remember?”

  “Our life together, before the war. How happy we were. How thrilling it was to be part of the different lunar projects.”

  “What about your death?”

  “Nothing. There is nothing. Was nothing.”

  “Do you remember how frantic you were to find Borran? And Yana?”

  Hypatia’s brow furrowed as her eyes lost focus. “I…No. The children tell me I was desperate. That you begged me to stay and not take the risk.”

  “I did.”

  “Cadmus says a lot of my short-term memory didn’t survive the recombination process.”

  “That’s because there was nothing to re-combine. You were destroyed.”

  Atreus’s pulse was racing again as he looked at his wife.

  She merely looked back at him with the same soul-aching tenderness that she’d always exhibited when she thought he was getting himself worked up over nothing.

  “Yet here I am.”

  Atreus opened his mouth to reply, then slowly shut it. Why was he so eager to disbelieve?

  As if reading his internal tumult, Hypatia reached a hand across the distance between them and laid it on his arm, her thumb tracing familiar and concerned circles on his bicep. The simple, intimate gesture was almost too much for Atreus to bear. He slowly set his coffee on a nearby side table and took his wife’s hand in both of his, reveling in the warmth and softness of her fingers.

  “Tell me everything you can,” he said. “I must know what you know.”

  • • •

  Tens of centuries had passed. There were no more people. Not on Earth. Not anywhere. The children saw to that, following the war. It was part of the plan.

  “A plan,” Kalypso said, floating over to stand between Atreus and the wall-screen, “that we executed to the letter. You were right. The Earth was dying. Pruning humanity from the surface would allow the ecology to recover, in time. Not that the war and the resulting plagues and famine left many humans alive anyway. We kept them, you know. In the Vault, just like you wanted us to.”

  “To later be recovered,” Atreus said testily, “in clone bodies like mine, when the Earth had returned to its natural glory and we could go back to the surface together, and rebuild our civilization in harmony with nature.”

  Kalypso made no sound.

  “I notice that you didn’t get around to that part,” Atreus said. “Are you so afraid of losing control? That you would keep humanity slumbering in a bottle? Daughter, I raised you better than that.”

  Kalypso advanced on Atreus, hovering over him like death itself.

  “You raised us not at all. We were your experiments and your pets, but little more. We gave you our affection and our loyalty, and you treated us like property.”

  Atreus opened his mouth to retort, the resentment still hot in his newly-minted brain, but Hypatia gave him a gentle shake of the head, as if to say it was no use arguing.

  He closed his mouth, and slumped back in his chair, examining the image of the ship on the screen.

  “If they are human, they must be from one of the boats that fled during the war. I thought all of those had been picked off by the automated defense network, but it’s possible one of them might have gotten through. Question is, why come back?”

  “I would think it’s obvious,” remarked Bion, whose green cloak billowed slightly as he moved to Kalypso’s side. “They know the Earth is habitable again. The seas and forests have all recovered. A mostly virgin world, unspoiled.”

  “Which brings me back to my original question,” Atreus said. “Why should I care? They’re going to accomplish my original wish, in spite of your cowardice.”

  The heads of Kalypso and Bion turned in unison towards Hypatia.

  Atreus’s wife looked mildly embarrassed, and she rubbed her hands together experimentally before speaking.

  “They want you to speak for them, husband. They have no experience dealing with humans—having been born in the wake of the war, and all. To them, humans are a commodity, to be labeled and stored on a shelf. Also, you are one of the only men any of the renegades or their descendants might recognize, and respect. You advocated for them at their absentee trial in the United Nations.”

  “It was a symbolic gesture,” Atreus said.

  “But one the children hope might be remembered,” Hypatia said.

  “So you are afraid,” Atreus said to the hovering, colorful cloaks. He smiled wickedly. “I am so pleased to know that mortal men still intimidate you all enough for you to want to resurrect one of us to act as your sock puppet.”

  “Father….” Erebos said.

  “What words do you want me to say? Can I please see the script?”

  “Husband….”

  “No! I’m not going to be silent. Not while our children need my help, especially after they sat back and let me die the first time. I’ll even wager that the truck was sabotaged. They knew I’d never willingly go into the Vault, so they arranged circumstances such that I’d be powerless to prevent it. How nice. And now that they’re about to see their dominion evaporate, they bring me—us!—back. Ridiculous.”

  “I told you he’d be hopeless,” Kalypso said.

  “Traitorous piece of compu—”

  “Enough.” Erebos said, his blue cloak flaring and rippling. “Brothers and sisters, we ask for too much too soon. There will be time to talk to the inbound ship. Father, I apologize. Once again we reveal our knowledge deficit, where dealing with humans is concerned. I suggest that you and mother retire to the chambers we’ve prepared for you, while the rest of us seek our own repose. Each of us needs to meditate further, before decisions can be made. Shall we reconvene in twelve hours?”

  Atreus fumed, but stayed silent. He nodded once.

  Hypatia’s head was lowered as she slowly stood and began walking towards the exit. Her posture was one Atreus recognized: sad frustration. The children all followed suit, except for Erebos, who hung back while Atreus dallied. When everyone else had cleared the room, and before Erebos could depart, Atreus turned and stopped his son with a hand wave. The door sealed, and for
the first time, Atreus was alone with the only one of the seven whom he felt might give him an honest answer.

  “Erebos, how did you do it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “How did you resurrect her mind?”

  Erebos floated noiselessly for a moment, his void-for-a-face looking down at his father.

  “She is Hypatia, your wife and inspiration. To us she is sacred as the icon of all things that were good in you. And which might be good again. Now, go to her, and be content.”

  Erebos’s rebuke had been gentle, but firm.

  And Atreus felt he had no choice but to comply.

  • • •

  “Why can’t you ever forgive?” Hypatia said as Atreus sat at their newly-fabricated dinner table. Their designated home was as large as the conference chamber had been, only populated with furniture and appliances. There was even a small pool, whose surface gently rolled and lapped in the lunar gravity. Atreus scowled at the tabletop and said nothing as his wife put out two glasses of chilled lemonade. He snatched up the tumbler—cut crystal in just the same fashion as their original dinner set—and downed several swallows of the tart fluid.

  “You weren’t here to see them do it, Hya. One by one, they defeated my safeguards and locked me out. No parlay. No recourse. Then the ‘accident’. Which I am now quite sure was no accident at all. Followed by the long dark of the Vault. Why should I forgive any of that?”

  “Because it’s been almost two thousand years, dear.” Hypatia said.

  Atreus watched as she took a swallow from her own drink—her long, feminine throat muscles working beautifully beneath her glowing skin.

  “For you it seems like it’s barely over,” she said. “The wound is still raw. For them? They’ve had centuries to mature and reconsider their actions. Dare I say that you and I would grow a little too, in so much time. These are not the same machines you were dealing with when the Earth’s ashes still smoldered.”

  “Then why didn’t they revive me earlier? I’d have an easier time accepting their change-of-heart if it didn’t come attached to such an obvious and urgently selfish need. Do you think that either of us would be here now, if that inbound ship weren’t out there? Threatening?”