This Alien Shore

by C. S. Friedman

  Phoenix could feel his mouth drop open. It was the kind of expression he thought only appeared in books. But there it was, on his own face. He couldn’t close his mouth either.

  “Phoenix?”

  The girl had heard enough to come up beside him, not close enough to the vidcam for Nuke to see her, but close enough for Phoenix to be aware of her physical presence. Finally he managed, “You’re kidding me.”

  “No, man, I swear it. Came in today on a public transport, under—get this—fake ID. If I hadn’t been trolling for data, I’d never have caught the scam. As it is right now, I think you and I are the only ones who know he’s here, but it ain’t gonna stay that way. Jesus Christ, what do you think he’s here for? And in secret? I figured I’d tell the whole crew, but I’m a little worried they’d mob him. Not sure whether they’d fall down and worship him, or tear him to pieces to get a look at his wiring, but definitely they’d do something.

  I know why he’s here, Phoenix thought. He couldn’t quite believe it, but he knew.

  “Probably the latter,” he said. He managed to smile. “Rumors have it he’s mod, you know.”

  “Yeah, like I believe that. Guerans don’t fuck with their own heads, remember? I thought this guy never left his planet, didn’t I see that on the news once? What do you suppose he’s doing here?”

  “Can’t say,” Phoenix managed. “What do you think?”

  LIVE ONLY, the hacker had flashed. BY YOUR OWN CHOICE. YOU WILL KNOW WHEN.

  He’d traveled here incognito. False ID, imperfectly protected. Only moddies would know he was here. And moddies would know he was here.

  Shit. Shit!

  Somewhere in his brain he realized he had missed Nuke’s last statement. He wasn’t really sure that a repeat would help, either, given the weight of data he had just inloaded. “Um, Nuke... listen, thanks for this... I’ve got something I have to do. . . .”

  The holo cocked its head to one side, studying him. “You gonna head out there?”

  It took him a second to decide if he was going to lie about it. It didn’t really matter much, since Nuke could always tell when he was lying, but there were things it would communicate. Like how much of this he was willing to discuss at this time. “No.”

  The figure stared at him for a minute, then nodded. One thing about Nuke, he knew when to back off. “Okay. That’s good. ’Cause if you were going to do something stupid like bother him, you’d have a long trip. He’s staying at the Waterfall in red sector, room 1214. Not under his own name. But of course you’re not going there.”

  “No, of course not. I ... that would be bad.” He wiped his forehead, amazed to find that he was sweating. “Thanks, Nuke. I, um ... I owe you.”

  “Big time, my boy. And I’ll take it in data, as always.”

  The holo winked out. The vidcam hummed for a moment longer, then returned to its usual quiescent state.

  Masada. Here.

  Jesus

  “Michal?”

  LIVE ONLY

  He shook his head and managed to glance at Jamisia. She had clothes of her own but had chosen to wear one of his shirts.

  “What is it?” she asked him.

  LIVE ONLY

  “The guy I contacted the other night. The one I said it couldn’t be.” He shook his head, as if trying to loosen up the tangle of thoughts inside. “It’s him, all right. And he wants to meet me. Live.”

  There was a flicker of fear in her eyes at that word, and he reached out instinctively to comfort her. “Hey, shh, it’s okay, nothing to do with you.” How did she manage it, going from self-assurance to pure vulnerability to ... well, to what happened last night... all in the blink of an eye, as if a different woman was suddenly standing there? She was a weird one, that was for sure.

  Not that he was complaining. She was cute, she liked him, and there were all kinds of high tech secrets tucked inside her head. It was hard to say which part of that made her the most appealing.

  Nah. Not hard at all.

  He put a comforting arm around her waist and said, “You’ll be all right here. I won’t be long.”

  The blue eyes were fixed on him, a flicker of accusation in their depths. “He said it was a long trip.”

  Oops. Damn. He did at that.

  She said, “I don’t want to be left here alone.”

  “I think it’s a bad idea for you to go out.”

  “Why? You said you got the sniffers.”

  “I got the ones I found,” he told her. “God alone knows how many more are out there.”

  “And I would rather be out there with you taking that risk than sitting here alone hoping something nasty doesn’t find me while you’re gone. Think about that, Michal. What it’s like. Hours and hours of sitting with nothing to do, because if I go online to do anything, even order fast food, something can trace my signal back to here. Don’t you think I’m safer with you, so that if, God forbid, something happens, at least you know how to do something? And just because ... you know this place better than I do.” Her passionate tone had become exchanged for something softer, that plucked at his heartstrings against all defensive masculine instinct. Damn, she was good at it. He could see it happening and still couldn’t put up a good defense. “I just don’t want to be alone here. What happens if something goes wrong? You wouldn’t even know. You’d just come back and I’d be ... gone.”

  She was going to win. He pretty much knew that. He wasn’t too strong with women at the best of times, and this one definitely had his number. Jesus, when had it happened? He’d only known her for a couple of days. He’d like to think that not all of his brain cells were located below the waist.

  “All right,” he said quietly. “But this meeting is really sensitive stuff, you need to—”

  She kissed him. His train of thought got lost somewhere.

  Ah, what the hell....

  She didn’t know why she wanted to go with him.

  Yes, she was safer in his apartment. Any sane person would know that. And she wasn’t yet so senseless that she’d go running out of a safe place just out of fear of being left alone. That was the stuff of which bad viddies were made, not real life. Not her real life, anyway.

  Which is all a kind of bad viddie now, isn’t it?

  Maybe it was the dreams she’d been having lately. Not dreamscapes really, nothing so precise or preprogrammed. But in some indefinable way they had the flavor of her tutor’s old programs, and each time she woke up from one, she had the distinct feeling that she needed to figure it out somehow, that its meaning would really matter in the coming days.

  The problem was that they were mostly chaotic, and defied all her attempts at waking analysis. One was just a random pastiche of natural images from some planet, ice and water and strange swimming creatures that looked somewhat like fish but were covered with fur. The animals were vaguely familiar, as if she had seen them in a book or a vid at some point, but she couldn’t come up with a name for them, or any reason why they would be significant to her life. Then there were several dreams filled with images of Guerans: face-painted, black-robed, fearsome in their power. Strangely, they didn’t frighten her in her dreams, but rather she felt drawn to them, as if they had something she wanted. In one dream a man with fierce black face-painting tried to tell her something, but she couldn’t make out the words. In another everything looked normal, but there was a high-pitched screaming in the background, as if someone were keening in terror over and over and over again. She ran to one of the Guerans—his uniform proclaimed him to be a Guild officer of some kind—and begged him to make it stop. “It never stops,” he said, and then added, “we don’t want it to stop. Do we?”

  And then there were the dreams of the crying one. Always the same image, of a naked and forlorn figure curled up in terror on the ground, surrounded by the figures she now recognized as her Others. The most frightening part of that dream was that each time it recurred she began it by hurrying to the spot where she knew he would be lying, terrified t
hat he might not be there. Why did she want him there? What would it mean, if he was gone? Try as she might, she couldn’t weave the images into anything akin to a meaningful message. Maybe they weren’t. Maybe the fear was just starting to get to her, and her brain was being flooded with random data bits, hopes and fears and distorted memories jostling for space in her processing center.

  God. Processing center. She sounded like Michal now. What was his hacking nomen, Phoenix? How ironic, that she should wind up in the care of a man with two identities. How completely appropriate.

  He had tried to draw her out about herself, there as she lay in his arms that night, and she had ached to have some facts to give him, or even a wild theory he might dissect. She suspected he might be the one person who could actually help her understand what was in her head. But she had been keeping secrets for too long and the habit was too strongly ingrained. Even the little she did know—what her tutor had told her about her brainware’s capacity—froze on her lips as the words were formed, and she could not force them out.

  Poor, poor little hacker. He lay there curled up next to the woman of his dreams and didn’t even know it. What was her processing capacity, ten times that of the next best brainware model, a hundred, a thousand? She could no longer remember exactly what her tutor had told her. But she understood the cause of it now. Oh, yes. Your average run-of-the-mill brainware couldn’t service a dozen independent personalities with simultaneous and often conflicting agendas. They had wired her for her condition. They had intended it.

  If only she knew why.

  At least we’re safe now, Zusu crooned. Even Derik seemed much pacified, which was nothing short of amazing when you considered what Katlyn had been doing with their body. And Verina, always practical, said, Look, at least we have a few days to collect ourselves, and someone to help us cover our tracks, and a little while to think. That’s all we can ask at this point.

  Was it? Would her life never be more than this, a few stolen hours of safety?

  There had to be more. There had to be a reason for all this. The dreams were the key. Dreams full of Guild symbols, peopled with Guerans.

  Of course she had to go with Michal. Not until she met a Gueran face-to-face was she going to be able to confront the secrets that were tucked inside her... and this was as safe a chance as she was ever going to get.

  She just wished, as they left the cluttered apartment, that she didn’t have the gut feeling she was never coming back to it.

  Red sector was far, far away, but they took a flyway across the inside of the ring for much of the trip and had a spectacular view to distract them. Phoenix watched as Jamisia drank in each new sight as though hungry for the sensation of it all. Golden rings swept overhead, lit by docking lights in a variety of surreal patterns, all against a backdrop of stars that was richer here than in most other nodes. She’d never seen anything like it on Earth, of course; the motherworld was much farther out in the galaxy than most of the populated nodes, and its sky was sparse and dreary compared to this display. And of course, the sheer artificiality of it must disturb her. Here there was no planet. There was no sun. There were a lot of artificial things that orbited or swooped or just hung in the darkness, but except for a few fake moons that orbited the tourist ring, none of it looked even remotely like anything from a natural environment. That was the price of the ainniq, which had offered humankind the freedom of the stars at the cost of its native soil.

  He wondered if Jamisia would miss the feel of a planet beneath her feet, and the pull of gravity coming from pure mass, instead of a generator. The sensation was said to be quite different, though the degree to which it kept your feet on the ground was pretty much the same. He knew that in the early generations of the second stellar age humans had gotten terribly homesick for the dirtworlds, which seemed to him nothing short of incredible. Even if you figured that 99% of the popular viddies that focused on dirtworld disasters were exaggerated, that still left an awful lot of nasty stuff going on. Floods, earthquakes, volcanoes, hurricanes, droughts, dust storms ... shit, how did humans have any time to get any work done, in the midst of all that? And of course you couldn’t adjust the atmosphere at all, or control oxygen content, or do much of anything that civilized life required. It was amazing humankind had developed the technology needed to get to the stars, in such an environment.

  Red sector was a posh stretch on the inner tourist ring, and the Waterfall was a state-of-the-art hotel awash in gimmicks. The main entrance was through a vast tube of spinning water, kept aloft by air flow and a grav net and God alone knew what else. It looked rather like pictures he’d seen of the inside of a hurricane’s eye, walls of water spinning about him in a frothing cylinder. In another time and place he might have been impressed by it, but here and now he could think of nothing but Masada and the virus. Jamisia seemed taken by it, and he offered to let her stay in the lobby and look around while he had his meeting... but that clearly wasn’t going to fly with her. “You’re going to be lost in this,” he warned her. “It’s all tech stuff.” She insisted she’d be okay. She just wanted to be there with him, she said.

  He wished something better than fear was the motivator.

  When they got to the room at last, he hesitated. He felt strangely nervous about putting his hand to the door, as though somehow it might decide that his prints were unworthy. Ah, come on, Phoenix, don’t be an ass. He’s just a human being, you know that. He touched the lock plate and a mechanical voice chirped for him to give his name. He hesitated, then said, very quietly, “Phoenix.” And it opened.

  Inside was a spacious suite already filled with stacks of paper, racks of chips, and what looked to be the most expensive portable computer setup he’d ever seen. Jealousy nipped at his heart for a moment, then was forgotten as a figure at the back of the room stood up and approached.

  Masada.

  He was like and unlike his pictures. Darker skinned than Phoenix had pictured, and not quite as tall. The kaja pattern on his face was fierce, made up mostly of angular lines that gave his visage a markedly threatening quality. He sensed rather than saw Jamisia step back a few inches as he approached; no doubt this was the first time she’d been up close with a Gueran. The faces took some getting used to, that was for sure.

  “Dr. Masada?” He hesitated, then offered his hand. The man was close enough to take it but he didn’t, which resulted in a remarkably uncomfortable moment. “I, um ... that is, I...”

  “I’ve been expecting you,” the professor said. His eyes alighted on Jamisia then and Phoenix quickly said, “She’s with me. It’s okay.”

  Dark eyes glanced at him, assessed him, and judged. “It’s not ‘okay,’ given our business, but for the moment I’ll accept it. You speak for her security?”

  He wasn’t quite sure exactly what that meant, but he nodded.

  “Very well, then. For now.”

  He gestured for them to come over to the conference table that was across the room. Jamisia shot a questioning look at Phoenix which he didn’t know how to interpret, but she came up with an answer on her own and went off in another direction, to settle on a small couch by the bedroom door. Still present but discreetly out of immediate sensory range; it was a good move, and for the first time since Nuke had dropped his bombshell, Phoenix found himself relaxing a bit.

  He took a seat opposite Masada, studying the man, drinking him in. It was not a move that was reciprocated; the professor’s eyes rarely fixed on him, or on Jamisia either. The lack of eye contact was disconcerting.

  “I’m glad you could come,” Masada said, without warmth or smile. “I’ll make this short and as productive as I can. I’m hunting Lucifer. Those who employ me mean for its creator—”

  “Lucifer?”

  Masada blinked heavily, as though having trouble processing the interruption. At last he said, “The name of the virus is Lucifer.”

  “Ah. I see.” He smiled somewhat sheepishly. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know it had a real name. In my cro
wd it’s just that evil son of a bitch. Or maybe sometimes motherfucker, just for short.”

  A flicker of a smile ghosted across Masada’s face. It was a reassuringly human expression. “Apt names, I agree. At any rate, let me continue.” He paused for a second, as if consulting some internal log. “I hunt for Lucifer. Those who employ me mean for its creator to be discovered, arrested, and punished on a scale suitable for internodal terrorism.” He looked directly at Phoenix. “Do you have a problem with that?”

  Was he asking him as a hacker? Shit, the thing was killing hackers. “Sounds good to me.” Real good.

  “I’ve had several incidents lately in which I’ve been tracking one data trail or another, only to discover your signature along the line. Very dangerous, Phoenix. Another man might mistake it for a sign that you were involved with Lucifer yourself.”

  He could feel the anger rise up in him like bile, could taste it in his voice. “Look, this thing has killed my friends. If you think I’m involved with it somehow, then you can just—” And then something else hit him, stopping him cold. “You found my signature? Where? I erased every trail except for that one time at Northstar.”

  “Yes,” Masada said. “I know you think that.”

  That’s when it hit him just who he was talking to. That’s when he remembered that this man wasn’t just some net theorist with a PhD, but a guy whose brain was running on a whole different standard than the rest of the outworlds. A guy most moddies would kill to be sitting across the table from, and never mind that they were discussing the most advanced piece of viral programming ever seen in the outworlds.

  Anger gave way to awe, and to speechlessness.

  “It is my impression,” Masada said quietly, “or perhaps simply my guess, that you and your people have been tracking this thing as well.”

  “Been trying to,” he managed to get out.

  “It is my guess that, given the nature of your investigative network, you may well have uncovered information my lone efforts would not.”