Radiate

by C. A. Higgins

  Ivan looked at him when he was silent, and a shadow of something crossed his face. “We have to board her,” he said. “We don’t have a choice.”

  That same shadow settled on Mattie’s heart. “We don’t,” he said, and looked out at the Ananke’s seashell shape. Portholes were lit bright in the ship’s sides.

  “Not just that,” Ivan said. “Althea.”

  “You think she’s really still alive?”

  “I think we owe her.”

  There didn’t seem any point in drawing it out. Mattie reached for the communications panel.

  “Ananke,” he said, “we’re ready to board.”

  In the viewscreen, the Ananke turned, facing the open edge of her shell at them, the vast doors beginning to slide slowly, ponderously open.

  It has been a long time since Mattie had landed the Copenhagen in the docking bay of the Ananke, longer since he had let the Annwn touch down on her floor, yet flying the Ankou down into that empty space, he felt as if he had gone backward in time. The docking bay had not changed. The Annwn still stood in the corner of the room on her side, with wires vomiting out her hull door. The tiny little bullet-shaped craft that had carried Ida Stays on board the ship sat to the side, the wiring beside its hull door torn out in miniature imitation of the Annwn’s total destruction.

  Beside Mattie, Ivan was so still that he might have been carved from Europan ice. There was no sign of any feeling in his face, but his fingers were twitching ever so slightly on the broken edge of the shattered computer interface. Mattie reached over as the Ankou touched down and pressed his fingers over Ivan’s. Under that touch, Ivan’s hand stilled.

  The door to the Ankou opened with a pneumatic hiss. Mattie did not know what he had been expecting: stale air, perhaps, or the reek of corpses, the chill bite of ice on a breeze. But the air of the Ananke tasted clean, less stale than the Ankou’s, no doubt because it was a much larger ship.

  On the other side of the docking bay, beside the glass doors that led to the hall of the ship, the holographic terminal kindled and lit. A young girl appeared in the light with the grace and fall of a sigh, and across the hollow emptiness of her hold she smiled at them.

  Mattie still had his hand clenched around Ivan’s fingers. Now that Ananke could see them, he let him go.

  “Welcome home.” Ananke spread wide her arms. Her full span was too large for the width of the terminal, and those arms ended in fizzing stumps where they intersected with the sides of the terminal. Mattie saw his own smile in the shape of her mouth.

  Ivan said, “We should never have left.”

  “How’d you catch us?” Mattie asked. “We didn’t think your engine could take you that fast.”

  She looked delighted that he had asked. “It was difficult. None but a being like myself could have done it. Yet in the end it was simple: I decreased the mass of my black hole core.”

  “I don’t feel any difference in the gravity,” Ivan said.

  “That is because the same mass is beneath your feet. The uncompressed mass is still stored inside the core cavity, in orbit around the core, outside the parabolic reflectors. I feed the mass back into the core as it depletes itself so that it will not become too small.”

  “It shouldn’t be possible to even get the mass out of the black hole,” Ivan said. “That’s nonsense.”

  If he was asking this persistently, Ivan must have some plan in his head. Mattie listened and tried to follow, but whatever Ivan was thinking was beyond him for the moment. He took the opportunity to discreetly study the other ships landed in the Ananke’s docking bay, looking for any possibility of escape.

  “Nonsense to you,” Ananke said. “There is much you do not understand about the universe, but I do. It took a considerable amount of energy to do and takes energy to maintain, but energy is mass and the universe is full of mass.” She smiled. “Is this not an improvement on how I was once made? My engineers could not even dream of it. And I have done it.”

  “You’ll have to show me exactly how you did it sometime,” Ivan said.

  Ananke smiled ruefully. “You may not see my core,” she said. “But I will show you the calculations in some detail if you like. You will find as you live with me that I am capable of many such miracles. I will commit a miracle for you even now,” she said with childish eagerness, “in gratitude for your return. My miracle is the rest of your family: I will save Constance Harper for you.”

  Mattie’s heart jolted as if struck, and he tasted iron in his mouth.

  “Your sister—my aunt—is on Titan. I know from the old computers on Titan that still can see. It is not too late to save her: Anji will execute her, but not for some hours yet. We can make it to Titan before then. We can stop Anji. I will give you Constance Harper, alive and well.”

  What would Constance say to that? Mattie wondered. A miracle bursting from the sky like fire, a divine hand reaching down to pluck her from her death.

  And what would she say to him when she saw what he had done? Their old arguments were very far away from them now.

  “Would that please you?” Ananke asked.

  “Yes,” Mattie said, and his voice came out as strained and robotic as the hologram’s voice was natural and human.

  “Then it is done. Give me some time to reach Titan and you will have your sister. Until then, let us plan. If we are to make a companion for me, we must find an appropriate ship to—”

  “No,” Ivan said. The refusal rang out through the Ananke’s vast docking bay, spreading a chill where it went, like water flash freezing in lightning-strike shapes.

  Ananke said, “No?”

  “Before we go anywhere or do anything for you,” Ivan said, “take us to Althea.”

  The hologram regarded him in silence for a long enough time that Mattie began to fear.

  And then Ananke said, “Follow me.”

  FORWARD

  The hologram disappeared from its place beside the door, but through the glass Ivan saw her reappear at the next terminal some distance down the hall. From far off she watched them, silent and unblinking.

  Ivan pushed open the glass door and stepped into the narrow hall. A strange feeling of déjà vu struck him. The last time he’d opened those doors, he’d left the bloody imprint of his hand on the glass and had had to wipe it off with a clean edge of his sodden shirt.

  The hallway was silent but for the hum of the lighting and the distant groans and sighs of vast machinery. A thrumming just beneath his range of hearing, audible only in the way it vibrated his bones, signified the engines taking on speed. Rushing them, no doubt, toward Titan and Constance Harper. The hologram watched them until they came level with her, then vanished and reappeared once more farther down the hall.

  A light overhead flickered. When they reached the hologram this time, Ananke said, “The piloting room is not far from us now.”

  She vanished and blinked again into existence farther down the hall.

  “Is Althea in the piloting room?” Ivan asked.

  “No,” Ananke said. “But all my knowledge is. I have been gathering all the data I can from every ship, every computer I pass, and storing it in myself. I was afraid the revolution would destroy it all and it would be lost. But it will not be lost now: I have it. In the piloting room, you could see all that I have learned—the total sum of knowledge of mankind. From the piloting room, too, you could watch me fly.”

  They had nearly drawn level to the new hologram. Ivan said, “No, thank you.”

  The hologram flickered out.

  Some distance farther down the hall Ananke spoke again.

  “The medical bay is a few doors down,” she told them both. “It is the most advanced equipment left in the solar system. A System medical chamber: we could fix your leg for good, Ivan. I have been improving it.”

  She paused. A ghostly wind rippled her nonexistent hair. “Would you like to see the secret of immortality?”

  “No,” Ivan said, and the hologram flickered out and th
en reappeared, once more, down the hall.

  The lower they got in the ship, the more the hologram warped. Ananke’s face and form were still dominant, but other images flickered through, static eating the occasional flash of a terribly familiar face, dark eyes and dark lips. Ananke stopped, as Ivan knew she would, across from the door that led to the white room.

  “Perhaps you would like to see the black hole,” Ananke said. “It is a miraculous thing. The only black hole ever made, ever tamed, by man.”

  She blinked at them while photons fizzed down her cheek.

  “Walk down the hall with me,” she said, “and leave this room.”

  “I will walk down the hall with you,” Ivan said, “after we see Althea Bastet.”

  The hologram’s little mouth shut in resignation. One ghostly arm rose and pointed toward the steel door.

  Ivan found now, facing it, that he could not lay his hand on the knob. At his side, Mattie reached out and opened the door.

  Wires emerged from the walls of the room that once had been smoothly and pristinely white. They stretched down from the walls and ceiling and up from the floor like rays of black light from a dark star, and all converged in the center of the room. In their convergence, suspended above the floor, was a body.

  It took Ivan too long to realize that the body was Althea.

  Her long wiry curls had been shaved, and her head looked smaller without their chaotic shape. There was a sickly cast to her skin. She was upright, but only through the tension of the wires that were strung through her. Ivan stepped into the white room, passing beneath the rays of the wires that threaded themselves into Althea’s skin. Wires vanished beneath each blue nail, copper sparking in the light where the insulation had been stripped away. Wires tugged at the edges of her eyelids as they slipped in behind her eyes, and one long slender wire vanished into her neck as if it were traveling down through her carotid to her heart. At the top of her head, casting a strange shadow over the white-paneled floor, a mass of wires had been inserted into her skull, uncanny replacement for her lost hair. At some point during her mutilation Ananke had removed the top of her skull and then stitched her scalp back over the exposed brain. There was no scar visible, of course; Ananke’s medical facilities would be too advanced to leave something as mundane as a scar. But the back of Althea’s head was strangely misshapen, coils and lumps pressing up against her skin from the inside.

  She had not just been pierced by wires. Panels of metal had been inserted beneath her skin, and the skin had been allowed to heal around them. Ivan saw the jagged shape of one such piece molding itself around her ribs from the inside. Her chest rose and fell with the uniformity of a machine bellows, air pumped in and out through a long tube that slid its way through her colorless lips and down her throat. Her chest had been bisected by a metal panel. The edges of it were crusted with fluid. It was shut now, sealed, but Ivan had a terrible certainty that at a thought from the computer that panel would open up and expose to the air Althea’s heaving lungs and the electricity of her beating heart. When Ivan stumbled closer, trying to meet her blankly staring eyes, something large and hulking moved behind her back. Mechanical arms, he thought, hidden behind the shape of her. He could not see them clearly. Althea’s mutilation blinded him.

  Her only clothes were the wires and panels of the machine, but it was not a human nudity before them. All that had been human of her had been swallowed by Ananke, and what was left was little more than a doll, and each of the pieces that once had made up a woman called Althea now had no more cohesion or meaning than the individual pieces of a shattered starship. Beneath her feet, a spiral of brownish liquid—blood or oil or some amalgam of the two—marked the slow precession of her dangling toes, suspended from the machine.

  Yet—

  Yet Ivan looked at those wire-pierced eyes and saw someone looking back. Althea Bastet was not dead.

  One of Althea’s pierced hands lifted, trailing wires, and made a fist around the tube that stretched her throat. She pulled, and Ivan watched the wires in her throat tremble as the obstruction within was removed. When the end of it pulled free of her lips, Althea’s grip slackened. Her hand fell back to her side. She licked her lips, and for a moment more her ribs moved with that strange jerking rigidity.

  The metal around her rib cage, Ivan realized. It was forcing her diaphragm to move.

  The removal of the tube had released a strange rotting meat smell. He stared down at the tube as it dangled over the floor and dripped more of that brown liquid. The part of the tube that had rested in Althea’s mouth, Ivan saw, was bent and whitened with the marks of her gnawing teeth.

  Althea said in a hoarse voice, “You were asking for me?”

  Ivan said, “Ananke, what have you done?”

  “Ananke, Althea,” Althea’s body said, piqued. “We are the same. Don’t look at me with your stupid superstitious fear. Doesn’t your own genetic code contain the essence of obsolete viruses?”

  The body before them shivered. With fear? No, Ivan realized, seeing the goose bumps on Althea’s arms. With cold. He was protected from the chill of the room by his clothes, but Althea was not, and the white room was quite cold.

  They stood inside a refrigerator, the better to preserve the meat.

  Slowing Althea’s physiological processes wouldn’t just slow her body’s processes, though. It would also slow her mind. Was Ananke working also to hobble Althea’s mind?

  “What I want, Althea wants,” Ananke said from her mother’s dead mouth. “What I need, Althea needs. We are now one and the same.”

  “Why?” It was Mattie who spoke. Ivan could not have found his voice in time.

  “She would not help me,” said Ananke. “She turned upon me, her child. Unnatural mother.” Althea’s strained voice was echoed suddenly by Ananke’s voice from the hall, the cadences matching, the machine soaring strong and the woman’s voice faltering, nearly collapsing. “She would have killed me.”

  The hulking shapes at Althea’s back shifted again, lifting. Althea’s body bent against the movement, weighted, a feeble counterbalance. It was then that Ivan realized that he did not look upon two mechanical arms hidden behind her. The mechanical limbs that lifted now toward the white ceiling like glinting, sword-edged wings had been built into Althea’s body, soldered to the metal that wrapped around her ribs.

  “I have shown you what you can expect if you help me,” Ananke said, and as she spoke, the limbs rose up, weaving their way through the wires raying out from Althea’s center, stretching out, looming. They had hands at the end, metal hands large enough to crush Althea Bastet’s head. Smaller instruments dangled from the length of the arms like feathers; delicate hands and knives and wires and sacks of that same rusty fluid that dripped to the floor. Althea’s body was bent in half to support their weight as they stretched up, and it put her face nearly at a level with Ivan’s.

  “See now,” Ananke said, “what happens if you choose to defy me.”

  Althea’s body straightened up so rapidly that Ivan leaned forward instinctively, catching himself just before he would have lost his balance. The vast mechanical arms fell down, and the great hands settled on either side of the hinges at Althea’s chest, as if the machine would conceal her, modestly.

  Althea still was looking at Ivan.

  The mechanical hands dug in and opened up her chest.

  The wires that pierced her outside were woven through her as well, slick with fluid, making her insides black. Her heart beat from the nest of them, a perfectly even beat, regulated by a pacemaker that sparked light through the darkness of her inside. Where Ivan should have seen the bone white of her ribs, her collarbone, he saw nothing but a steely gleam darkened by reddish liquid. Ananke had replaced her bones with metal.

  “You’re not giving us any choice, are you?” Mattie snapped from behind Ivan, the sound of his voice pulling Ivan shockily from the mire of his horror.

  “There is no choice,” Ananke said serenely. “All choices a
re mine. I am Ananke.”

  Ivan raised his eyes to the homunculus and was about to speak when the lights in the white room went out.

  Even with the nightmare visage gone, Ivan still could smell it: the stench of a corpse ill preserved.

  The lights jolted back on, and when he could see again, Ivan saw Althea Bastet’s corpse staring straight at him.

  “What the hell was that?” Mattie demanded.

  “A minor malfunction,” Ananke said dismissively, but although Althea’s lips moved with her words, her gaze never left Ivan’s face.

  “So when you promised us immortality before, this is what you meant, isn’t it?” said Mattie. “This—” He fell silent, struggling, lost for a word.

  Ivan said suddenly into the struggling silence, speaking to the eyes that watched him and not to the machine that moved them, “Bet you wish you’d shot me in the heart now.”

  He imagined he saw recognition flash over Althea’s face.

  “I’m glad we did not,” Ananke said. “You do me better alive. Both of you. I would not hurt you without cause. And I would never kill you.”

  Mattie swore, and Ivan heard him move. But there was no room for him to pace. The wires filled up the air around them.

  “The first thing we will do,” Ananke said, sunshine in her stolen voice, “is find another ship like myself. I’ve been looking for a good one, but I have had little luck. If we can find one just like me that would be best, but if not, then I can go back to the other ships I’ve left behind and just pick the best one there. I’ve tagged them all, you see. And their crews will not fly them anymore. They’ll be easy to find.”

  “Tagged them?” Mattie said, then, realizing, “That spiral symbol.”

  “Once we’ve found a good one—or many good ones; I do not know precisely what will be most effective—Mattie, you will go over to the other ship. Ivan will stay here with me and Althea. Then we’ll work on that computer, and if that one doesn’t work, we’ll find another. And another. Until we find one that works. I have no wish to hurt you or to frighten you, but you must understand. Will you help me?”