BIG CAT: And Other Stories

by Gwyneth Jones

  “A nightmare, hm? And what if we are dealing with someone whose nightmares can roam around, hunt you down and tear you apart?”

  Boaaz noticed that his pressure suit was hanging on the wall. The slashes and gouges were healing over (a little late for the occupant, had the attacker persisted!). He vaguely remembered them taking it off him, exclaiming in horrified amazement.

  “Tear me apart? Nonsense. I was hysterical, I freely admit. I must have rolled about, over some sharp rocks.”

  The Aleutian’s black eyes were implacable. “I see I’d better start at the beginning… I was intrigued by the scraps you read out from Isabel Jewel’s file. Somebody suspected of insanity… That’s a very grim suspicion, in a certain context. When I saw how changed and disturbed you were, after that parish visit, I instructed my Speranza agent to see what it could dig up about a ‘Jewel, Isabel’, lately settled on Mars.”

  “You had no authority to do that!”

  “Why not? Everything I’m going to tell you is public domain. All my agent had to do was to make the connection – which is buried, but easy to exhume – between ‘Isabel Jewel’, and a human called ‘Ilia Markham’ who was involved in a transit disaster, thirty or so standard years ago. A starship called The Golden Bough, belonging to a company called the World State Line, left Speranza on a scheduled transit to the Blue Torus Port. Her passengers arrived safely. The eight members of the Active Complement, I mean the crew, did not. Five of them had vanished, two were hideously dead. The Navigator, despite horrific injuries, survived long enough to claim they’d been murdered. Someone had smuggled a monster on board, and turned it loose in the AC quarters—”

  There were chairs meant for humans around the walls of the lounge. The Aleutian and the Shet had always preferred a cushioned recess in the floor. Boaaz suddenly noticed that despite the alien furniture, he felt no compulsion to look behind him. That phase was over.

  “There are no ‘black box’ records to consult, after a transit disaster,” the Aleutian went on. “Nothing can be known about the false duration period. The crew construct a pseudo-reality for themselves, as they guide the ship through that ‘interval’ when time does not pass: which vanishes like a dream. But the Navigator’s accusation was taken seriously. There was an inquiry, and suspicion fell on Ilia Markham, a dealer in antiques. Her trip to Speranza had been her first transit. On the return ‘journey’ she had insisted on staying awake, citing a mental allergy to virtual entertainment. A phobia, I think humans call it. As you probably know, this meant that she joined the Active Complement, in their pseudo-reality ‘quarters’. Yet she was unharmed. She remembered nothing, but she was charged with involuntary criminal insanity, on neurological evidence.”

  Transit disasters were rare, since the new Aleutian ships had come into service; but Boaaz knew of their peculiar nature, and had heard that surviving casualties were very cruelly treated on Earth.

  “What a terrible story. Did the inquiry suggest any reason why the poor woman’s mind might have generated something monstrous?”

  “I see you do know what I’m getting at,” remarked Conrad, with a sharp look. The old priest’s head sank obstinately further, and he made no comment. “Yes. There was something. Markham had been an indentured servant in her youth, the concubine of a rich collector with an evil reputation. When he died she inherited his treasures, and there were strong rumours she’d helped him on his way. The prosecution didn’t accuse her of murder, they just held that she’d been carrying a burden of unresolved trauma, and the Active Complement had paid the price.”

  “Eight of them,” muttered Boaaz. “And one more. Yes, yes, I see.”

  “The World State Line was the real guilty party, since they’d allowed her to travel awake. But it was Ilia Markham who was consigned for life, on suspicion, she was never charged, to a Secure Hospital. Just in case she still possessed the powers that had been thrust on her by the terrible energies of the Buonarotti Torus—”

  “Was there a…? Was there, ahaam, an identifying mark of her status?”

  “There would be a tattoo, a string of symbols, on her forearm, Reverend. You told us, in your ‘delirium’, that you’d seen marks of that kind.”

  “Go on,” rumbled Boaaz, shuddering. “Get to the end of it.”

  “Many years later the Blues ran a review of doubtful ‘criminal insanity’ cases. Ilia Markham was one of those released. She was given a new name and shipped off to Mars with all her assets. They were still afraid of her, it seems, although her cognitive scans were normal. They didn’t want her, or anything she possessed. There’s no Buonarotti Torus in the orbit of Mars: I suppose that was the reasoning.”

  The old priest was silent, the folds of hide over his eyes furrowed deep. Then his brow relaxed, and he seemed to give himself a shake.

  “This has been most enlightening, Conrad. I am much relieved.”

  “You no longer believe you’re being pursued by aggressive rocks? Harassed by imaginary Ancient Martians? You understand that, barbaric though it seems, your old mad woman probably should have stayed in that Secure Hospital?”

  “I don’t admit that at all! In my long experience, this is not the first time I’ve met what are known as ‘psychic phenomena’. I have known effective premonitions, warning dreams; instances of telepathy. This ‘haunting’ I’ve suffered, the vivid way I’ve shared ‘Isabel Jewel’s’ mental distress, will be very helpful when I talk to her again…”

  “Talk to her again? I think you’d better not—”

  “I do not believe in the horrible idea of criminal insanity,” continued Boaaz, ignoring the interruption. “The unfortunate few who have been ‘driven insane’ by a transit disaster are a danger only to themselves.”

  “I feel the same, but your experiences have shaken my common sense.” The Aleutian reached to take a snifter, and paused in the act, his nasal flaring in alarm. “Boaaz, dear fellow, stay away from her. You won’t be pursued; the effects will fade, as long as you stay away!”

  Boaaz looked at the ruined pressure suit. “Yet I was not injured,” he murmured. “I was only frightened… Now for my side of the story, Conrad. The woman is dying. It’s her heart, I think, and I don’t think she has long. She is in mental agony, as people sometimes are, quite without need, if they believe they have lived an evil life, and I am a priest. I can help her, and it is my duty. After all, we are nowhere near a Torus.”

  The Aleutian stared at him, no longer seeming at all a mischievous adolescent. The old priest felt buffeted by the immortal’s stronger will: but he held firm. “There are wrongs nobody can put right,” said Conrad, urgently. “The universe is more pitiless than you know. Don’t go back.”

  “I must.” Boaaz rose, ponderously. He patted the Aleutian’s sloping shoulder, with the sensitive tips of his right-hand delicates. “I think I’ll turn in. Goodnight.”

  Ω

  Boaaz had been puzzled by the human woman’s insistence that he should return ‘in ten days, in the evening, at the full moon’. The little moons of Mars zipped around too fast for their cycles to be significant. He had wondered if the related date on Earth had been important to her, in the past, and looked up the Concordance (Earth’s calendar was still important to the colony).

  By the time he left his jitney, in the lonely outskirts of Butterscotch, he’d thought of another explanation. People who are aware that they are dying; closely attuned to their failing bodies, may know better than any doctor when the end will come. She believes she will die tonight, he thought. And she doesn’t want to die alone.

  He quickened his pace, and then turned to look back, not impelled by menace, but to reassure himself that the jitney hadn’t taken itself off. He could no longer see the tiny lights of Butterscotch. The vapours and the swift twilight had caused a strange effect. A mirage of great black hills had risen up along the horizon. Purple woods like storm clouds crowded at their base, and down from the black hills came a pale, winding road. There appeared to be a group o
f figures moving on it, descending swiftly.

  The mirage shifted, the perspective changed, and now Boaz was among the hills, on the grey descending road. The hurrying figures rushed towards him; from a vanishing point; from infinite distance at impossible speed. He tried to count them, but they were moving too fast. He realised, astonished, that he would be trampled, and even as he formulated the thought they were upon him; they rushed over him, and were swallowed in a greater darkness that swallowed Boaaz too. He was buried, engulfed, overwhelmed by a foul stench and a frightful, suffocating pressure—

  He struggled, as if to rise from very deep water: then suddenly the pressure was gone. He had fallen on his face. He righted himself with difficulty, and checked his EVA gear for damage. “The dead do not walk,” he muttered. “Absurd superstition!” But the grumbling became a prayer, and he heard his own voice shake as he recited the Consolation. “There is no punishment, there is only the Void, embracing all, accepting all. The monsters at the gates are illusion. There are no realms beyond death, we shall not be devoured, the Void is gentle…”

  The mirage had dissipated, but the vapours had not. He was positively walking through a fog, and each step was a mysterious struggle, as if he were wading through a fierce running tide. Here I am for the third time, he told himself, encouragingly, and then remembered that the second visit had been in a nightmare. In horror he wondered: am I dreaming now?

  Perhaps the thought should have been comforting, but it was very frightening indeed: and then someone coughed, or choked: not behind him, but close beside him, invisible in the fog.

  Startled, he upped his head and shoulder lights. “Is anybody there?”

  The lights only increased his confusion, making a kind of glory on the mist around him. His own shadow was very close, oversized, an optical illusion giving it strange proportions: a distinct neck, a narrow waist, a skeletal thinness. It turned. He saw the thing he had seen in the desert. A human male, with small eyes close-set, a jutting nose, lined cheeks, and a look of such utter malevolence it stopped Boaaz’s blood. Its lower jaw dropped. It had too many teeth, and a terrible, appallingly wide gape. It raised its jagged claws and reared towards him: Boaaz screamed into his breather. The monster rushed at him, swamped him and was gone.

  It was over. He was alone, shaken in body and soul. The pinprick lights of the town had reappeared behind him, right in front of him was that avenue of teetering stromatolites. “What a horrible mirage!” he announced, to convince himself. But he was breathing in gasps. The outer lock of the old woman’s module stood open, as if she’d seen him coming. The inner lock was shut. He opened it, praying that he would find her still alive. Alive, and sharing with him, by some mystery, the nightmare visions of her needless distress; that he knew he could conquer—

  The chairs had moved from the walls. They were grouped around the stove in the centre of the room. He counted: he’d remembered rightly, there were eight. The ‘old, mad’ human woman sat in her own chair, like a crumpled shell, her features still contorted in pain and terror. He could see that she had been dead for some time. The ninth chair was drawn up close to her. Boaaz saw the impression of a skinny human body, printed in the cushions of the back and seat, and knew it had been here.

  The fallen jaw. Too many teeth. Had it devoured her, was it sated now? And the others, its victims from The Golden Bough, what was their fate? To dwell within that horror, forever? He would never know what was real, and what was not. He only knew that he had come too late for Isabel Jewel (he could not think of her as ‘Ilia Markham’). She had gone to join her company: or they had come to fetch her.

  Ω

  Conrad and the manager of the Old Station arrived about an hour later, summoned by the priest’s suit alarm. Yarol, who doubled as the town’s Community Police Officer, called the ambulance team to take away the woman’s remains, and began to make the forensic record – a formality required after any sudden death. Conrad tried to get Boaaz to tell him what had happened. “I have had a fall,” was all the old priest would say. “I have had a bad fall.”

  Ω

  Boaaz returned to Opportunity, where his Residence had been successfully decoded. He was in poor health for a while. By the time he recovered, Conrad the Aleutian had long moved on to other naughty schemes. Boaaz stayed on Mars, his pleasant retirement on Shet indefinitely postponed; although he had tendered his resignation to the Archbishop as soon as he could rise from his bed. Later, he would tell people that the death of an unfortunate woman, once involved in a transit disaster, had convinced him that there is an afterlife.

  The Martians, being human, were puzzled that the good-hearted old ‘alien’ seemed to find this revelation so distressing.

  Bricks, Sticks, Straw

  But what if there’s nobody out there? No intelligent rocks, no equivocal angels, nobody. Or (more scientifically) there always might be, but we’re just never going to meet. Maybe we’ll have to do our own speciation. I wrote Bricks, Sticks Straw for the Edge volume of the Infinity series, again for Jonathan Strahan. The brief was ‘extrapolation in the strict confines of current science and the solar system’. I decided to tackle Remote Presence, and the bond between human minders and brave little asteroid-catching/planet-faring toasters (like Opportunity), as a route to colonising the moons of Jupiter one day. But I set my first ‘Emergence’ story right at the dawn of that credible future; effectively in the here and now.

  1

  The Medici Remote Presence team came into the lab, Sophie and Josh side by side, Laxmi tigerish and alert close behind; Cha wandering in at the rear, dignified and dreamy as befitted the senior citizen. They took their places, logged on, and each was immediately faced with an unfamiliar legal document. The cool, windowless room, with its stunning, high-definition wall screens displaying vistas of the four outer moons of Jupiter – playgrounds where the remote devices were gambolling and gathering data – remained silent, until the doors bounced open again, admitting Bob Irons, their none-too-beloved Project Line Manager, and a sleekly-suited woman they didn’t know.

  “You’re probably wondering what that thing on your screens is all about,” said Bob, sunnily. “Okay, as you know, we’re expecting a solar storm today—”

  “But why does that mean I have to sign a massive waiver document?” demanded Sophie. “Am I supposed to read all this? What’s the Agency think is going to happen?”

  “Look, don’t worry, don’t worry at all! A Coronal Mass Ejection is not going to leap across the system, climb into our wiring and fry your brains!”

  “I wasn’t worrying,” said Laxmi. “I’m not stupid. I just think e-signatures are stupid and crap, so open to abuse. If you want something as archaic as a handwritten signature, then I want something as archaic as a piece of paper—”

  The sleek-suited stranger beamed, as if the purpose of her life had just been glorified, swept across the room and deposited a paper version of the document on Laxmi’s desk, duly docketed, and bristling with tabs to mark the places where signature or initialling was required—

  “This is Mavra, by the way,” said Bob, airily. “She’s from Legal, she knows her stuff, she’s here to answer any questions. Now the point is that though your brains are not going to get fried, there’s a chance, even a likelihood, that some rover hardware brain-frying will occur today, a long long way from here, and the software agents involved in running the guidance systems housed therein might be argued, in some unlikely dispute, as remaining, despite the standard inclusive term of employment creative rights waivers you’ve all signed, er, as remaining, inextricably, your, er, property.”

  “Like a cell line,” mused Laxmi, leafing pages, and looking to be the only Remote Presence who was going to make any attempt to review the Terms and Conditions.

  “And they might get, hypothetically, irreversibly destroyed this morning!” added Bob.

  Cha nodded to himself, sighed, and embarked on the e-signing.

  “And we could say it was the Agency’s f
ault,” Lax pursued her train of thought, “for not protecting them. And take you to court, separately or collectively, for—”

  “Nothing is going to get destroyed!” exclaimed Bob. “I mean literally nothing, because it’s not going to happen, but even if it were, even if it did, that would be nonsense!”

  “I’m messing with you,” said Lax, kindly, and looked for a pen.

  Their Mission was in grave peril, and there was nothing, not a single solitary thing, that the Combined Global Space Agency could do about it. The Medici itself, and the four Remote Presence devices, should be able to shut down safely, go into hibernation mode and survive. That’s what everybody hoped would happen. But the ominous predictions, unlike most solar-storm panics, had been growing strongly instead of fading away, and it would be far worse, away out there where there was no mitigation. The stars, so to speak, were aligned in the most depressing way possible.

  “That man is such a fool,” remarked Laxmi, when Bob and Marva had departed.

  Sophie nodded. Laxmi could be abrasive, but the four of them were always allies against the idiocies of management. Josh and Cha had already gone to work. The women followed, in their separate ways; with the familiar hesitation, the tingling thrill of uncertainty and excitement. A significant time lag being insurmountable, you never knew quite what you would find when you caught up with the other “you”.

  The loss of signal came at 11.31am, UTC/GMT +1. The Remote Presence team had been joined by that time by a silent crowd – about as many anxious Space Agency workers as could fit into the lab, in fact. They could afford to rubberneck, they didn’t have anything else to do. Everything that could be shut down, had been shut town. Planet Earth was escaping lightly, despite the way things had looked. The lights had not gone out all over Europe, or even all over Canada. For the Medici, it seemed death had been instantaneous. As had been expected.