Gravity Wells (Short Stories Collection)

by James Alan Gardner

  Queasily, I got to my feet. "Let me leave," I ordered the bot, and stepped toward the door. It couldn't hurt me, could it? Robots are programmed not to injure humans. But the moment I moved, the bot spread its cables wide, closing off the doorway like a spiderweb, with a big bot spider in the middle. I wasted a minute trying to pry free enough cables to give me room to escape; but steel is stronger than fingernails, and at last I gave up. I wasn't getting through that door till the Singer ordered the bot to let me out.

  Sighing, I turned away and looked over the rest of the bunker's interior. It would cheer me no end to discover some functional weapon left from the war, a snare rifle, a jelly pistol, or whatever alien armament once fired through the gun slit; but the bunker had been emptied as meticulously as the rest of the planet. All I could make out in the shadows were cobwebs, dirt, and weeds sprouting from cracks in the concrete.

  I began to pace, idly fingering the flimsy costume I was supposed to put on. One strong pull could rip the fabric to swatches, but that wouldn't help—the Singer would just drag me out naked. Angry at the thought, I gave the wall a good solid kick.

 

  "That damned Silk sure gets around," I grumbled. But if it really was a biological weapon, I shouldn't be surprised it could take root in enemy strongholds. During the day, enough light would come through the bunker's doorway for the Silk to keep growing.

  I tapped the wall with my foot.

 

 

 

  Tiny feet scuttled across the floor toward the sound.

  "Hello," I said. "Rotten little beasts."

  A few minutes later, I was dressed in sheer see-through and making final adjustments on the sash about my waist. The sash wasn't part of the original costume—I'd made it from folding and twisting the blouse I'd been wearing—but I needed the sash to hide my hitchhikers: two parrots that had come scurrying at the sound of popping Silk. I'd slung them at my hips like six-guns, tucked under the sash and sleeping placidly after a full meal. Their small bodies pressed lightly against me, just inside the ridges of my pelvis, on either side of the flat of my stomach. Even under the bright beam-lamps outside, they'd be completely hidden.

  The parrots weren't touching my skin—with stockings wrapped around my hands, I'd picked up the parrots and nestled them between my costume and the outer sash. It was hard to resist touching the little beasts just once, just the brush of a finger to hear if other minds were nearby. But now was not the time for pointless voyeurism; I had a different plan.

  Once before I'd tried to close my mind to the Singer, trying to drown out all thought with the Trash and Thrash song. It didn't work. As the Singer said, he lived in songs, especially songs that were hard-edged and troubled…not to mention that the parrots were designed to broadcast trouble loud and clear. To hide, I had to lose myself in gentleness, restrict my thoughts to the kind of caring and concern where the parrots were mute.

  I had to fall in love.

  Concentrate on Alex: his face, his smile. I'd made love with him on the hill, clumsily, tenderly. No, to be honest it wasn't making love, it was just running away from my fear of the Singer, and the jangle of emotions aroused by using the parrots; but it could turn into love, couldn't it? Alex, beautiful, gentle child. In need of protection from himself and the world. Alex, who had tears in his eyes as he held unconscious Roland's hand. And Alex, coming to me in my own hut, stumbling over his words as he talked about his concern for Roland…if that really was Alex, and not just the Singer pretending to be Alex. No, it was Alex, it was Alex, even if he was feeling the Singer creep up inside his mind as the parrot blood took effect. It was appalling to imagine that: Alex hearing an icy other voice lurking beneath the surface of his thoughts, a second personality slowly gripping…

  Damn. Concentrate, Lyra.

  Deep breath. Falling in love with Alex. Who was kind and eager and vulnerable. A handsome prince held prisoner by his evil twin and now desperately yearning for a loving minstrel-girl to save him.

  Alex's smile. His eyes. His need.

  When it flows, it flows.

  The lights bake the stage, the beat is driving hard, the music stabs you like a grimy finger. Your heart pounds, and if you don't kiss the first face you see, you'll grab the throat and squeeze. You feel hot style. You want to put on a show.

  And if you're in love, the flow is creamy juicy lightning.

  The music starts and you're on. Cue the backup singer. Showtime.

  THUNK THUNK THUNK-AH THUNK. THUNK THUNK THUNK-AH THUNK…a heavy tenor drum, stomped full force, began pounding the night outside the bunker. I recognized the beat as the intro for "Moth Metamorphism," a cut that we'd scheduled to record later in the week. I should have known. All on his own, the Singer couldn't lay down instrumental tracks; for his new song, he must have written new lyrics to existing music.

  The flow inside me clicked a notch higher. I knew this music, knew the through-line, the harmonies. I could kick the hell out of it.

  When it flows, it flows.

  The robot in the doorway began to whir, receiving radio orders from the Singer. I didn't resist as it wrapped a tentacle around my wrist and led me from the bunker; the bot could barely keep up with me as I strode out into the night, up to the plateau where the beam-lamps shone. A second bot appeared, carrying a microphone. I grabbed the mike, no time to wait, the music still booming. One slap to stick on the throat patch, a second slap for the battery pack, check the adhesive on both, and then I was surging forward, into the heat of the lights.

  I stepped onto a green expanse of meadow, showing only one sign of the war: a glistening patch where the soil had been seared to black glass by some energy weapon. In the middle of the glassy surface stood a stone altar, a prop made for the recording of "Dead Man's Prayer"; and just back from the altar lurked the fog machine, hooked up with an extra hopper of dry ice.

  The mist would really roll tonight.

  All right, all right, keep going. The Singer wasn't here, but keep going. Set up for a sprawl-shot on the altar. What else could the Singer want? I slid up on top, sprawling, waiting, shaking, THUNK THUNK THUNK-AH THUNK.

  And Alex appeared.

  He came over a rise, just a silhouette, sharply backlit with sprays of yellow sparks—nothing more than a black outline against a fountain of fire, but I knew it was Alex. The Singer moved more gracefully, more intentionally, like he was trying to prove a point; Alex just moved. I lifted myself higher, hands and knees, truly believing I could simmer Alex's blood just by staring.

  THUNK THUNK THUNK-AH THUNK.

  Alex picked his way down to the plateau, trying to hurry but slowed by clumps of weeds on the hillside. Once he lifted his head and maybe he called to me, but the drumbeat drowned that out.

  THUNK THUNK THUNK-AH THUNK.

  Now Alex hurried into the light of the beam-lamps. His shirt was buttoned and he was shouting, "Get out of here, Lyra! Get out!"

  I simply shook my head.

  "I pushed him down for a minute," Alex said as he ran to me, panting. "He'd been outside for a long time, he was tired. But he'll be back, he will, and you can't…" Alex held out his hands, showing the brown bloodstains. "This will drive you crazy, it really will. The noise gets so loud, it deafens you. And it's all so angry. I never knew people were so angry. Back at camp it was like a chain reaction, a little hostility, people getting angry in return, then everyone going furious… in five minutes, they were honestly trying to kill each other. And him, the Singer—he was in the middle of it, egging them on…"

  I took Alex's hand. The blood on his skin was dry, textured like satin. "It will be all right," I said. "Don't worry, it will be all right."

  "It won't, it won't. He loves the anger, he thrives on it, but it'll rip you apart. He wants to see it rip you apart. He wants to see you snarl like an animal."

  "Alex," I said again, threading my fingers through his, "it will be all right." I squeezed his hand tightly, wanting to squeez
e my strength into him.

  "You don't…" He pulled his hand from my grip and pressed it against his forehead. "You aren't…" His head snapped down, then up again, and he roared, "Where are you, milady?"

  The Singer emerged in gentle Alex's face like ice crystallizing in water. His eyes narrowed; his mouth grew hard. "Damn the fool!" he screamed, and with both hands, he grabbed the collar of his shirt and ripped downward, tearing fabric and scattering buttons onto the ground. Gasping, he lunged forward to support himself unsteadily on the altar. "He caught me by surprise. What has he done with milady? Milady! Milady!"

  The man was staring straight at me, blind to my presence. All the rehearsal I'd done before, trying to make myself love Alex—that was pure nonsense, just priming myself to put on a good show. But in the moment of transition, when simple well-meaning Alex was crushed away by the Singer's rage, something sparked in my heart and made the love real. The love didn't feel like Romeo and Juliet or Trash and Thrash. It probably wasn't woman/man love…mother/son maybe, or big sister/kid brother. So what? My heart and brain filled with compassion, and to the Singer, I was invisible.

  I rocked back onto my knees and thrust both hands into my sash. Two parrots, the last weapons to be drawn in Caproche's long war. As I touched them, the blare of the Singer's thoughts struck my brain like thunder, hate mixed with fear mixed with anger; but I was moving and mere noise couldn't stop me.

  At the last instant, the Singer's head jerked up and his eyes met mine.

  With all my strength, I clapped the parrots against his temples, slam, both sides of his head. The parrots burst in my hands like rupturing bags of blood, gushing across the Singer's face in brown spatters. For a split second, I could hear the echoes of fragmented thoughts outside me: the roadies, Helena, Roland, screeching far away. Then a jagged ripping sound split inside my head and my brain shattered.

  Two parrots had died in my bare hands.

  Imagine reliving your life through a black filter.

  You get to remember that first kiss: two hours of standing in front of the house on a cold winter night as your boyfriend worked up the courage to go through with it. You can remember how you shifted back and forth from one leg to the other, shivering because you were only wearing a short skirt and stockings, and you can remember how many times you almost gave up hope, how you hated him for being so stupid, how you hated yourself for being too scared to grab him and kiss him before you died of frostbite. But do you remember the elation when it finally happened? Do you remember how you lay awake for hours with a huge smile on your face, as you counted the ways your life had changed? No—your memory is too busy skipping ahead eight months, when suddenly you and your boyfriend can't agree on anything, you know he makes up excuses to avoid seeing you, and when the two of you do get together it's only because you're hooked on those hour-long petting sessions on that couch in your basement. You get clean, clear memories of all the people you hated or feared, but the people you loved? Only the times they annoyed you.

  Imagine reliving your life through a black filter.

  Then imagine doing the same thing with two men watching.

  One of the men is a lunatic. The other is so innocent you can't bear him to see your life, the many petty ugly things you've done.

  But that's not the end. Imagine reliving someone else's life while you're reliving yours. A life with two strands, lunacy and naïveté. Oh, yes, relive a childhood so tormented that your personality crumbles to fragments, then a dozen harsh psychological treatments intended to heal you, then the blood-red fury of the Singer suppressed but not extinguished. Every memory from infancy to adulthood seen through two sets of eyes that never agree, every tenderness seen as weakness, every love dismissed as infatuation.

  Reliving everything through a black filter.

  Imagine doing all that in the time it takes a parrot to die.

  My eyes met the Singer's at the moment I smashed the parrots against his head. We shared the parrots' deaths. We shared our own lives.

  Then white noise. Static. The Singer screeched and reeled blindly away from me, staggering backward toward the fog machine. He collided with the nozzle and grabbed at it, seizing it with both hands. Maybe he was just catching his balance, maybe he was trying to break something, I don't know; but he gave another scream and wrenched the nozzle loose from the machine, setting free a bloom of fog that had built up inside. Berserk, he began to smash the broken nozzle down on the machine, over and over, howling all the while.

  The Singer wrapped in fog—a gaunt silhouette in the night, backlit by beam-lamps. THUNK THUNK THUNK-AH THUNK.

  Then the noise changed, the sound of his howls. I had parrot blood on my hands and maybe the sound I heard was only in my mind, but the explosive fury was overlaid with louder moans of pain: not from the Singer, but from Alex.

  All this time I hadn't moved. My head was swimming, and like Roland after the parrot died in his hands, I was on the verge of passing out. But when I heard Alex's cries, his pain and terror, I forced back the edge of my dizziness and clumsily crawled off the altar. Fog was billowing everywhere, spreading fluidly over the grass. I staggered into it, the cold, dusty-smelling CO2 fog, trying to stay on my feet long enough to reach Alex.

  I found him in the heart of the fog bank, sprawled across something my muddled mind didn't recognize at first—a box, some kind of open box, like the one Alex and I had found on the hill. But as I stumbled closer, I saw it was the hopper for the fog machine, its lid smashed off in the Singer's rage. Steam boiled off the dry ice inside, curling and churning around Alex's prone body. He lay flat across the exposed ice, his bare chest pressed against it.

  He screamed as the intense cold burned him like fire.

  I grabbed his ankles and pulled weakly, trying to drag him off the ice pile. He didn't budge; I wondered if he'd actually frozen in place, like flesh bonding to sticky-cold metal. Then his legs kicked feebly out of my grip and I heard the voice of the Singer in my mind. "No, milady. I have sought the cold and found it. Cold, true cold, bright cold."

  Alex howled.

  "You're killing yourself," I shouted to the Singer. "You can't survive in there. God only knows what it's doing to your heart."

  The Singer just laughed.

  "Lyra?" Alex whispered. A real voice, forced through his lips by lungs that could scarcely breathe.

  "Yes, it's me." I fumbled around to the other side of the hopper, only managing to stay on my feet by clinging to the edge of the bin. "Yes, Alex, I'm here."

  His hand moved slightly, but his palm seemed stuck to the ice. I could feel him steeling himself, Alex's voice in my mind muttering, Do it, do it. Then he heaved the hand upward, ripping off most of the skin as he freed it from the ice's grip. Bleeding, he held it out to me. "Lyra."

  I took his hand, holding it high above the ice. My fingers still dripped with parrot blood; Alex's blood mingled with it, in the fog and the cold.

  The Singer's thoughts crooned with the cold, but I could hear nothing from Alex. Whatever went through his mind was too gentle for parrot blood to transmit.

  "Alex," I said. Then a fresh surge of dizziness washed over me and I sank into its blackness.

  I woke groggily, roused by burning pain. When I had fainted, my arms slumped across the dry ice, still holding Alex's hand.

  His hand was as cold as the ice. Fog filled the hopper and dribbled out over the sides.

  I looked down at my hands, still lying against the ice. Their skin was white and puckered, and they didn't ache much; the serious pain was higher up, near my elbows. I knew that was a bad sign—so much nerve damage in my hands, I couldn't feel how badly I was hurt.

  That was when I realized the night was silent—no sound of thoughts. Not Alex's, not the Singer's, not mine. Parrot blood glistened on my fingers, parrot blood crystallized to ice; but my hands were too injured for the blood to work.

  Pulling my hands off the ice left strips of skin behind. I scarcely felt it. For a moment, I considered
pulling Alex's body out of the hopper, but I couldn't move my fingers. I couldn't grab him, I couldn't hold him; and it wouldn't make a difference if I could. It was far too late for anything to make a difference.

  I took one last look at him lying there, burned and blue, silent on a bed of fog. Then I began plodding back to camp.

  My hands will never move again. Jerith's medi-bot works on them daily to stave off gangrene, but repair is out of the question; that has to wait till I get to a populated planet. The bot says a good med center might be able to cut off my arms at the elbows and put me in a tank till they grow back.

  No one knows what to do with the others in our party, still marked by parrot blood. A week has passed, and the telepathy shows no signs of wearing off. One of the roadies tried to cut away his bloodstained skin with a knife, but he passed out before finishing the job. Now the medi-bot keeps him under sedation.

  Sedatives are handed out freely these days—the bot can synthesize enough to keep everyone subdued until the rescue ship arrives. The ship is scheduled to land an hour after sunset tonight, and the Planet Protection Agency has a good record for punctuality.

  They've reclassified Caproche as TPI: Total Permanent Interdiction. Jerith will have to start over, another dig, another planet. He says he doesn't mind.

  Jerith spends a few minutes with me every day…but with blood on his hands like everyone else, he mostly stays out in the wilds—a long way out, where he can't hear anyone else's thoughts.

  I stay in camp, close to the medi-bot. It watches me and feeds me.

  From time to time I catch sight of parrots, bright green and crimson, waddling across the dirt of the camp compound. I like to stroke their noses with my bandaged hands. When I do, the medi-bot stands beside me and whirs in disapproval.

  It's decided the parrots are dangerous.

  A Changeable Market in Slaves