Radiate

by C. A. Higgins

  “The moment of death is the most intimate moment of anyone’s life,” Ida said. She had something in her mind; Ivan could hear it in her voice, the way she was setting him up for a fall. A dizzy spell struck him, but he fought it off. He couldn’t show weakness, not here with her. He had to stay in control.

  “To witness it—” Ida said. “To cause it—”

  A flash of something, the colors in his sight turning inverse; Ivan knew for a moment that he was on the verge of passing out, but he didn’t. The white room was lit oddly by a light from behind him, and Ida still was pacing but no longer speaking, her dark gaze fixed on him and showing a predator’s hungry heart.

  Ivan turned as much as he could, chained to his chair, and then found that he could stand even though the cuffs remained frigid around his wrists.

  The light was coming from far off in a black nothing like the fabric of space. It was brilliant, blazing, a fire that burned without sound in the emptiness of vacuum. Ivan was too far off to feel its heat, but if he looked closely, he could see what it was.

  Constance Harper was in the inferno, or Constance Harper was the inferno. She blazed with it, her bare skin unburned by the flames.

  Constance, he tried to say, but no sound escaped from his mouth, Constance, and walked toward her, but now that he had come close enough to see that it was she standing in the flames, he could come no closer. He was moving and she was not moving, but somehow with every step he took she remained the same distance away.

  From behind him he still heard those steps, that click-click of heels, that Russian roulette sound. He did not turn to face it but reached toward Constance, burning, sightless. Constance, Constance, Ivan said to try to make her see him, to try to make her hear him, but with no result. How could she see him with all that light in her eyes?

  Constance, he said, Constance, as the flames spread over her skin, but she did not hear him, and he was so cold, he was freezing down to his core, and the chill of the white room had its hand stretched out over his shoulder—

  Ivan woke.

  For a moment he simply lay and breathed, keeping his respiration steady. He did not know where he was. There was a steady click-click-click from some machinery that struck his mind awry. It seemed to have come with him out of his dream. He shook the unease away. The sound was harmless.

  Other than that sound, the space he was in was quiet; he lay on something firm, something covered him to his chest, there was an ache and burn in his leg that was growing in intensity. And underneath it all someone else was breathing. Ivan found that his breath had automatically synced to match that respiration, and when he listened to that steady sound, the last pieces came together in his mind.

  He opened his eyes. Above him was the gray paneled ceiling of the Copenhagen, a familiar sight, though he could hardly remember looking at it. The last thing he recalled with perfect clarity was Althea Bastet lowering her gun and asking him plaintively, “What do I do now?”

  Ivan lifted his head and found the piloting platform, the space ahead of them spotted with distant stars. Mattie was sitting there in the near dark, his back to Ivan. “Mattie.”

  Mattie turned, his eyes wide and dark in the dimness of the cabin. And then Mattie was pushing back his chair and striding over, moving so fast that Ivan had hardly adjusted to the movement before Mattie was crouched down at his side. “Hey,” Mattie said.

  “Hey.” Ivan deliberately untensed all the muscles that had gathered themselves for flight the moment Mattie had moved so suddenly.

  “Do you remember where you are?”

  Not the Ananke, Ivan would have said, but held his tongue. Somehow speaking the name of the Ananke seemed dangerous, like whispering the name of a bloody queen into a darkened mirror.

  “I’m on the Copenhagen.” Ivan chose his words with care and his enunciation with precision. He studied the sealed cabinets that lined the walls. This ship was small: one room for living accommodations and instrumentation. He knew somehow, without remembering having seen it, that there was a bathroom and a storage room beyond the wall behind his head.

  Mattie’s hand was heavy on his chest. “What do you remember?”

  Constance burning, the click of heels on a metal floor, a living ship blazing with light. System ships coming after them and a self-destruct, but perhaps that had been a dream. “Not much,” Ivan said. “How long was I out?”

  “Ivan,” Mattie said with a strain in his voice that made Ivan reevaluate exactly how much stress he had been under for the past however many days, “answer my question.”

  “I remember the Ananke,” said Ivan. “I remember going on board; I remember getting captured. I was interrogated. Constance blew up Earth. You came back. Althea let us go. We are traveling toward Callisto. There were System ships.” He checked Mattie’s expression to be sure that statement was accurate. It seemed to be, so Ivan added firmly, “My memory is fine, Mattie. How long have I been out? Where are we?”

  “How does your leg feel?”

  “I remember getting shot.”

  “I didn’t ask if you remembered; I asked how it felt.”

  His leg was burning, but it was not the terrible wrongness of a sickening wound. “Better than it did,” Ivan said, and remembered something else from the Ananke. “How’s your arm?”

  “It’s fine. Constance got me to a System medical chamber, fixed the break in a few minutes.” Mattie hesitated. “I couldn’t take you to one for your leg, because…”

  “Because there weren’t any you could take me to.” Ivan’s thoughts were settling into an order again, organizing themselves, organizing him. Constance had blown up Earth and begun her revolution; that meant the solar system was in civil war. There wouldn’t be any hospital Mattie could safely take Ivan to, not now. “Help me sit up.”

  Mattie got an arm under his back and helped pull Ivan up until he could lean against the wall. The change in position made Ivan briefly dizzy, but when it passed, he felt more awake than he had for days. His gaze swept automatically over the Copenhagen again, looking for danger or weakness. There were no cameras, of course. The room was cleaner than Ivan was used to seeing in a room maintained by one Matthew Gale.

  Mattie sat against the wall next to him, on the floor beside the mattress, his shoulder leaning into Ivan’s arm. He said, “You were pretty out of it for a while.”

  A thought struck him. “Mattie.”

  “I read something about the truth drugs you were on, something about some psychological effects, flashback hallucinations, which—”

  “Mattie, how long was I out?”

  “A little over a week.”

  “When is the rendezvous with Constance?”

  Mattie spoke flatly, as if by doing so he could escape further discussion. “The rendezvous was two days ago.”

  “Two days?”

  Mattie rose to his feet, evading again, but there was nowhere to run to in the smallness of the Copenhagen’s cabin. Ivan realized, “You missed it on purpose.”

  “You should lie down. You just woke up.”

  “I’ll lie down when we’re done talking. Why did we miss the rendezvous?”

  “You’re un-fucking-believable,” Mattie said. Sometimes when he said that, it was a compliment. Ivan did not think it was in this case. “I don’t want to play this stupid game,” he said, and crouched down very suddenly, right in front of Ivan again. As he looked at the tension that held Mattie’s face, something struck Ivan’s hollow heart, and the reverb of it nearly weakened him into backing down. “I want you to lie down and get some rest, and when you’re better, we’ll figure something out.”

  “I’m not going to rest if I’m sitting here wondering what happened. We missed the rendezvous. Why?”

  “Does it matter?” Mattie snapped.

  “How are we going to find her? Does she know I’m alive? Does she even know you’re alive?”

  “I don’t know what she knows.”

  “We can still go to Callisto,” Ivan sa
id. “Anji will be there.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “That was the plan. Has the plan changed?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Anji will be by Jupiter,” Ivan insisted. His head was pounding, but he felt the better for having a clear plan of action to throw himself toward. “How far are we from Jupiter?”

  “Ivan—” Mattie began.

  Ivan cut him off before he could get too far into convincing himself not to go. “Mattie,” he said. “Please.”

  Mattie stared back at him. For a moment, the twist of his mouth turned bitter, and then he stood up and took his expression out of Ivan’s sight. He walked back over to the piloting terminal and began to put some coordinates into the machine. Ivan watched him and tried to breathe evenly, but an unsteady pull had come to his lungs, a lower drag to his heavy skull.

  Mattie said, “We’re on course for Callisto.”

  “Thank you,” Ivan said, and meant it. He leaned back against the wall but did not lie down and did not sleep. He was watching the stars to see if the Copenhagen really did change its course.

  The stars shifted. They were back on course. Ivan let his eyes slip shut.

  BACKWARD

  When Ivan was nine Terran years of age, back when he was called Leon, his mother took him to see Saturn.

  “That’s Rhea, do you see?” Milla said in her steady voice, quietly enough to be addressing him but clearly enough that the System administrators and the cameras overhead could capture every word. An actress couldn’t project as precisely as she could. Ivan stood at her side and kept himself as carefully still and controlled as she did beside him.

  They stood before a huge window, floor to ceiling, that showed the Saturnian system in all its sepulchral silence. Ivan stared out at the golden planet, at the slicing rings.

  His mother’s hand landed on his elbow, fingers curling around under his arm, hidden beneath his shirt.

  “Do you see it, there?” she asked, and stretched out her free arm to point, like a statue of Diana drawing her bow. Her fingertip landed on the glass just above a spot of moving light.

  Under Ivan’s arm, her fingers began to tap out a message in gentle pressure and release against his skin. You can show a little fear, his mother said.

  He glanced up at her quickly, but she was of course not looking at him. Show a little fear, he thought, and tried to remember what expressions that would entail.

  “I see it,” he told his mother, and she let her finger drift, following Rhea’s slow orbit.

  “Your father took me there once.” Her voice was colored palely with regret, like paint off a brush dipped into water. Her fingers pressed into his arm again. Play the crowd, she warned him. Make them think you’re innocent, not that you’re very good at hiding.

  Ivan said, “Did you and my father meet there?”

  “No.” Milla let her hand fall back to her side. “We met on Titan.” She shifted, tucking Ivan’s arm more securely into her own, her fingers entwining with his, the better to pass on quiet messages. Ivan let the childish contact happen, because he knew the System was watching, and they were waiting for a reason to kill him.

  “I believe we’ll get to see Titan,” said Milla, seemingly to him, but Ivan had grown attuned to the subtle shifts of her voice over the course of surviving his early youth and so he was not surprised when the ship’s captain answered from behind him: “We will, Doctor Ivanov.”

  “Thank you.” Milla continued to gaze out at the planet ahead. Ivan stood very still at her side, trapped in some prey instinct that warned him not to call attention to himself.

  His mother’s fingers pressed a secret message against his hand. I met your father on Titan on a trip for university there he was standing in the square talking about freedom and I was Terran then so I argued with him but when the System police came to stop him talking I helped him get away.

  The spaceship was drawing near to a filmy orange moon while Milla tapped out her truth to Ivan.

  “That’s Titan,” said Milla, as calm as her secret message had not been. Titan’s atmosphere was thick and opaque: a rare moon to hold an atmosphere. The clouds shuddered and flashed with hidden storms.

  “Your father’s reign of terror ended there.” Milla tapped out against his hand, I loved him.

  She paused, the stillness of her fingers against Ivan’s hand as pronounced a silence as the rushing in his ears.

  I should have hidden it better.

  The ship was leaving Titan behind and traveling toward the planet itself, toward those slicing rings.

  Don’t let the System see your heart, she warned him. Don’t let yourself know that it is there.

  Aloud she said, “After your father, the System knew that Saturn wasn’t safe. But they left a monument in the rings so that all would remember what happens to those who threaten the people of the System.”

  She spoke as if reading from a script. Against his hand she said, Your father lost because I wasn’t there to help him control the situation.

  His mother hadn’t been with his father then, Ivan knew, because she had been on Earth to give birth to Ivan.

  The ship was moving rapidly; the rings were growing in size, no longer looking razor-edged and colorful but beginning to appear as they were: widely spaced rocks all in the same orbit together. There was nothing to see yet, but Ivan could feel that his mother was tense.

  You and I survive because we have control of our situation.

  The System ship took them past the sparse rocks of Saturn’s F ring, disrupting their orbits as they passed. Ivan knew that their ship would leave a distinct ripple in the clean-cut shape of Saturn’s rings.

  “It was illegal once to travel through the rings,” his mother said serenely while tapping out, Never lose control of your situation, of yourself, or of the people around you.

  The dusty Roche Division opened up ahead of them, and the ship powered through, heading straight for the crisp shine of the A ring ahead.

  “It took special dispensation from the System for us to travel here to see them.”

  Everyone is controllable. Never get yourself in a situation where you can’t control—

  But Ivan lost track of her message because ahead of him he saw what he had been brought there to see.

  The A ring was very narrow, only about fifteen meters thick, much narrower, in fact, than the ship that Ivan even now was flying in. It was full of stones that ranged in size from dust to boulders that Ivan would have considered hardly midsize on Earth.

  And between the stones, there were bodies. Ivan took in a breath.

  His mother’s fingers tightened on his. At first he thought it was another message, but he realized after a moment of stillness that she had nothing to say.

  Less than a decade old: a short time cosmically, but eternity to him. He’d had for himself the nine years of life denied to the people he saw now, floating between stones with their eyes staring, their limbs torn, exsanguinated, the blood all evaporated by vacuum and heat, mummified by the distant sun.

  And his mother leaned forward at some signal from the System that Ivan did not see and pointed to the nearest corpse, a young man whose skin had been slowly blackened and crisped by the sun’s radiation.

  “Do you see?” Milla asked with calm cruelty and the weight of the System’s attention resting heavily on their backs.

  FORWARD

  The Copenhagen was a fast little ship. It was not long before their changed course took them within sight of Jupiter. Ivan was standing up by then, leaning on the wall. Mattie had helped him up but flatly refused to be an accessory to further movement. Ivan suspected that he intended to wait for him to give up and sit back down, but Ivan remained standing.

  “How close?” Ivan asked. He asked not just because he could not quite see the details on the viewscreen from where he stood but because he did not think Mattie was paying much attention: Mattie had his chair halfway turned so that he could keep a wary eye on Ivan, and bet
ween Ivan and the viewscreen, Ivan seemed to be receiving the greater share of his attention.

  Mattie glanced over at the screen.

  “Not in the Hill sphere yet,” he said. “But it’s visible now.” A few deft movements of his hand brought the screen into closer focus; Jupiter jumped into view, striated, with sparks of the Galilean moons darting around it.

  In the brief moment when Mattie’s attention was taken from him, Ivan let himself shift, keeping his breathing quiet, to ease the pressure on his burning leg.

  “I’m slowing down for the approach,” Mattie said. “How’s your leg?”

  “Fine.”

  “Yeah.” Mattie was looking at Ivan’s leg, not at Ivan himself. Although Ivan no longer was wearing the bloodstained white scrubs he had been shot in, Mattie seemed to know precisely where to look. “If we had a System medical chamber, it’d be better by now. No scar.”

  “It’s starting to close on its own. It’ll be fine.” He wasn’t certain he’d trust a medical chamber in any case. A machine couldn’t be reasoned with or persuaded.

  “Good thing that bitch was a bad shot.”

  “Or a very good one,” Ivan said. It would have been infinitely easier to aim for his torso and leave his internal organs lacerated beyond repair, but Althea Bastet had fired low and to the side, the blow a glancing one.

  “You don’t hate her.”

  “Who?”

  “Althea.” The word came from Mattie’s mouth strangely laden, as if he had simply mispronounced the words “that bitch” and come up with Althea’s true name by accident of vowels.

  “No.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  “She wasn’t a bad person.”

  “What’s that word,” Mattie asked, “the one for when you like the person who hurts you?”

  “Masochism?”

  “No, I mean the one where you like your kidnapper.”

  “It’s ‘Shut up, Matthew,’ ” Ivan said.

  “Stockholm syndrome,” said Mattie. “That’s it. I just think it’s good for us to have a word for it, you know? So we can really communicate.”