Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (Volume One)

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “You’ve read the same reports I have, Audrey.”

  “You think any of that matters anymore? I mean, even if the Gilgamesh isn’t a toss case, you think we’re going to be measuring sections and collecting samples? If we’ve lost – ”

  “We don’t know what we’ve lost.”

  “We know we’ve lost Welles, and three crew members with him. We know Baird and Osmolska probably aren’t doing a lot of science these days.”

  “We pick up the pieces. We do what we can do.”

  “We try to stay alive,” I said, and he sighed and nodded his head.

  “That, too.”

  On the narrow flight deck below us, one of the droids made a sudden noise like an antique teletype, the sort you hear on the old news vids. I flinched, and Joakim put a hand on the left leg on my jumpsuit.

  “Why would the Agency have sent us on a suicide mission?” he asked, but I had no idea how I was supposed to reply to that. I wasn’t even certain what he’d meant.

  “They couldn’t have foreseen any of this,” I said.

  “They lied to the rest of the world. It’s not unreasonable to think they may have lied to us, as well.”

  I shook my head and watched as the pilot that had made the teletype noise opened its chest and began fiddling about with its pale, silicone innards.

  “Why did they waste so much time and energy and money sending out another load of rock hounds?” he asked me. “If the mining operations on Piros really were abandoned five hundred years ago, and if the agency wants the tech, why not send engineers and mechanics?”

  “I’m sure they will. “

  “When, Audrey? When we’ve cleaned up some mess down there that they’re not even willing to tell us about?”

  “I don’t think we’re in much shape to clean up anything.”

  “So maybe they just want us to tell them what the fuck they’re dealing with. I mean, don’t you keep asking yourself why the aliens abandoned Piros in the first place? If the mineral survey reports are anything close to accurate, why aren’t they still there?”

  “I don’t know. Because bad shit happens,” I replied, wishing he hadn’t started this, that he’d waited until we reached the Gilgamesh to begin asking the hard questions, wishing I had one or two of the answers he was looking for. “There could have been a war that ended the operations. Maybe they found a better source closer to home. We’re talking about an entire civilization. And shit happens to civilizations. There’s nothing mysterious about that. Didn’t you ever have an archaeology class?”

  “No,” he said. “But, since you mention it, why didn’t they send archaeologists?”

  “They did. Osmolska has an MA in archaeology.”

  “If the reports are telling us the truth, the aliens seem to have left in one hell of a hurry, at least the ones who could leave.”

  “Shit happens,” I said for a third time, and asked my chair to remove the safety restraints.

  “You’re beginning to sound like a bloody parrot, you know that?”

  “I’ve got hydro in ten,” I said, getting to my feet once the heavy somaform folds had released me. I tapped at the timepiece on my belt. “We can continue this afterwards, if you really think we should. Weren’t you Mr. Wait-and-See? Aren’t you the one always said all that claptrap about the Aegis was only a lot of spook stories?”

  “My sorry ass wasn’t stuck aboard the Aegis, and neither was yours.”

  And then I was thinking about the last time we’d made love, two weeks before we left Canaveral. “It’s all gonna be fine,” I said, whether I believed it or not. “You’ll see. We’ll dock tomorrow, and it’ll all be bray.”

  “Right,” he said unconvincingly, and looked away from me.

  “I don’t know what else to say.”

  “I just need some time to think,” he said very softly.

  And then I went to my hydrotherapy session, leaving Joakim alone on the obs deck, staring intently up at the wavering holovid of the guide probe from Gilgamesh, his blue eyes watching the long banks of monitors mounted above the pilots’ stations. I saw only darkness and stars on those screens. I’ll never be sure what Joakim saw there.

  II.

  The Second Pen

  I’m making mistakes. Read back over all these pages, and you’ll see that I’m making mistakes. For instance, if Umachandra Murdin’s parents had taken part in the posthumanist secession in the “late twenties,” she’d have only been seven or eight years old when the Montelius team was chosen in 2234. When we left for Piros, she was in her early thirties, and, in fact, the secession ended in Manhattan in 2201, with the Chinatown Christmas riots and the subsequent quarantine of Roosevelt Island. There are other things I’ve gotten wrong, I’m sure of it. But I don’t want to waste the ink correcting them all. You can find the inconsistencies, if you’re reading this, if you think they matter. I suspect they don’t. They’re probably only errors of fact, not errors of truth.

  On December 18th, we reached Piros and the Gilgamesh, locked in its geosynchronous orbit above the moon. I’d been in my quarters, feeling better than I’d felt since coma, feeling almost fit again after the daily ministrations of the medtechs. I was lying in my bunk, listening to Chopin (or Listz, or whoever) reading something, most likely re-reading one of Sam Welles’ monographs on Pirosan biogeochronology, or the morphological investigations of the remains of the alien miners that had been recovered; something of the sort. Joakim commed me, and I know I felt dread, but I might also have felt a dim sort of elation. We had come so far, given up so much to see the things that lay ahead of us. I dressed and was on the obs deck in less than ten minutes. Joakim was there, leaning over the railing, watching the screens and the droids, and Umachandra and Peter were there as well. She was plugged in, oblivious to the rest of us and the images on the screens, skizzing along with the navigational subsystems, negotiating the silicon labyrinth of Magellan’s directional relay and triangulation and graviton praps. Peter Connor was sitting, chewing at the stem of one of his pipes and not taking his eyes off the images of the Gilgamesh and the brick-red moon and swirling storm-purple-scarlet-viridian expanse of Cecrops consuming all but an ebony rind of the background. At least Umachandra was dressed.

  “Roll seven point twelve degrees port,” I heard one of the droids call out and then heard positioning jets humming below us, and the images on the screen began to rotate.

  “She looks well,” Joakim said hopefully and pointed at the Gilgamesh.

  “Oh, yeah. Pretty red apple with just a few fat green worms inside,” Peter muttered, and Joakim gave him a dirty look.

  “Do we even have a channel open?” I asked, and Joakim shook his head and frowned.

  “The mechs say we’re acknowledged and cleared,” he told me, “and Murdin says they’re recalibrating their field gennys for the coupling. But so far it’s all just droid-to-droid shite. Baird’s not answering. No one’s answering – ”

  “No one human,” Peter cut in.

  “Same goddamn difference.”

  In January 2001, the discovery of a second planet orbiting Gliese 876 was announced by a team of scientists from NASA’s Ames Research Center, the University of California at Santa Cruz and Berkeley, NASA’s Astrobiology Institute, the Carnegie Institute, and the University of New York at Stony Brook (I have these facts written down in front of me). Of course, back then, every new extrasolar planet was cause for a press conference, and the Gliese bodies even more so, as they marked the first time anyone had detected strong orbital resonance between two extrasolar planets. The outermost of the two was christened GJ876c, a gas giant less than sixty percent the mass of Jupiter. It wouldn’t get the name Cecrops for another seventy-odd years. Cecrops, of course, was the first King of Attica, a half-human, half-dragon hybrid. Cecrops chose Athena over Poseidon to serve as the protector of Athens.

  “Steady,” one of the droids said softly, as external cameras showed us the alignment of the Monty’s umbilicus with the Gilgamesh�
�s starboard docking web.

  “We’re coming in too fast,” Umachandra warned, and I felt the positioning jets fire again. “That’s better,” she said, like a mother encouraging a clumsy child.

  “Extending umbilicus,” a droid said. “Contact in 8, 7, 6,” and “Better hold onto something,” Umachandra said, acknowledging the rest of us for the first time since I’d arrived on the deck. “Something’s not right. I think there’s too much spin.”

  And then the two starships touched, one ramming itself hard into the other, the Montelius playing rapacious male, in flagrante delicto tens of thousands of kilometers above the great red moon of Cecrops. The force of the impact caught me off guard, despite Umachandra’s warning, and I would have fallen if Joakim hadn’t caught me. The lights flashed off, then came back crimson a second or two later, and throughout the Monty, sirens began to wail.

  “Fuck,” Peter growled. “What the hell sort of maneuver do you call that, Magellan?”

  “It wasn’t Magellan,” Umachandra said, and then began unplugging herself from the console. “The Gilgamesh fired its number two jets three seconds before contact. There wasn’t time to compensate.”

  “Did we take damage?” Joakim asked her, releasing me when he saw I had a firm grip on the rail.

  “Nothing very serious. But we’re probably going to have to do a bit of rerouting to get the crewlock to function. Some of the hatch circuitry is fried.”

  Joakim stared at her and spit on the floor at his feet. “We can’t even open the fucking hatch?” he asked, and I saw there was blood in his spittle, coral-pink against the aluminum deck.

  “There’s already a maintenance unit on its way down,” Uma-

  chandra replied.

  Peter stood up and covered his ears. “Can someone please shut those damn things off?”

  “They’re all rigged on the same central tocsin autotimer,” Umachandra said, shaking her head and removing the last black-and-yellow jackstrip from her left temple. “Thirty-five seconds more and they should begin cycling down,” but in the next instant the alarms all fell silent at once, as if to mock her, and Peter Connor laughed and turned towards the monitors.

  “So, just how much shit are we in, Uma?” he asked, and I think that was the first time I’d ever heard anyone call Umachandra Murdin by a diminutive or nickname. I glanced at Joakim, and he shrugged.

  “Get someone on the window,” he called down to the pilots, but they both seemed to ignore him, busy with their intricate, colorful tiers of touchpads and toggles and flickering display screens.

  “The tocsins have stopped,” Joakim said, turning to Umachandra. “Why are the lights still red?”

  “After the impact, Magellan went to auxiliary power,” she replied. “She’ll wait until she’s certain there are no hull breaches or internal malfunctions before switching back to primary.”

  “But the tocsins – ”

  “I don’t know, Joakim. I just don’t know.”

  And I stood there, gripping the railing so hard that my knuckles had gone numb and pale, watching the frenetic movements of the pilots and the images on the vidscreens, everything washed bloody and dark beneath the auxiliary lighting, everything washed unreal.

  On the largest screen, one of the Montelius’ remote cameras, a tethered short drag-module released when our proximity monitors signaled that we’d come within fifty kilometers of the Gilgamesh, painted real-time SROLED images. The Monty and the Gilgamesh fused one to the other like monstrous insects, hanging there above the equator of Piros, and behind it all, the great disk of Cecrops’ northern hemisphere. The brilliant snakeskin bands of the planet’s roiling atmosphere, ammonia and water vapor and phosphine, standing guard more than 1.6 million miles beyond its moon.

  The ancient Greeks believed that Cecrops taught mankind to bury its dead.

  One of the pilots turned and looked up at us, its eyes glowing faintly in the dim red light. “We have a signal coming in on Channel 2,” it said, it or she, whichever Joakim would have had me think. “It’s a synthetic,” the android added.

  “Patch it through,” Joakim replied, and the pilot nodded and moved its hands deftly across the controls. My view of the ships and Piros and Cecrops was abruptly replaced by a shot of the Gilgamesh’s bridge. A smiling, violet-eyed droid stared back at us. She was dressed in blue coveralls with the requisite logo of the agency’s AI-tech division stitched just above her left breast.

  “Greetings, crew of the Montelius,” the droid said in that same comforting, lilting voice I’d awakened to only nine days before.

  “Jesus,” Joakim whispered, and looked back at Peter.

  “We need to speak with Subcommander Baird,” I said, never mind whatever might be left of protocol, that Joakim should have spoken first. “Our docking mechanism – ”

  “I’m sorry, Dr. Cather, but Subcommander Baird is presently unavailable. However, perhaps I can be – ”

  “Is there anyone human that we can speak to?” Joakim asked impatiently, and the droid paused before responding.

  “Not presently,” she said.

  “Where are they, then?”

  “There have been complications, Commander Hamilton.”

  “What exactly do you mean, ‘complications,’” Joakim demanded, and I knew him well enough to see how close he was to dropping any pretext at civility. Again, the droid paused, as if choosing its words very carefully.

  “Regrettably, it has been necessary, Commander, to relieve Gilgamesh’s human crew from active service. Under Section 17-12C, paragraph 6 – ”

  “They fucking took over the goddamn ship,” Peter muttered. “The plastic fucks mutinied.”

  On the screen, the droid blinked once and stared directly at Peter. “No, Dr. Connor. It was not a mutiny. It was a legal action, necessary to insure the safety of the Gilgamesh, and the safety of the Montelius, as well. As I said, there have been complications.”

  “Is Dr. Baird alive?” Joakim asked before Peter could say anything more.

  “Yes sir. He is alive and physically well.”

  “Physically? But not mentally well?”

  “It would be best, Commander, if we discussed this aboard the Gilgamesh. I have reason to believe this channel is no longer secure.”

  “Secure from whom?” Umachandra asked, her voice almost as calm as the android’s. The synth stared silently at her a long moment, then glanced quickly over its shoulder.

  “Secure from whom?” Umachandra asked again.

  “As I have said, there have been complications.”

  “Give it up, folks. We’re not getting anywhere with this bitch,” Peter whispered and sat down again.

  “Our hatch is jammed,” I said. “The airlock may have been damaged.”

  “Yes, Dr. Cather. Gilgamesh also suffered minor damage in the collision. We’ve dispatched a crew to aid in the repair of your airlock. Should that prove impractical, we’ll use one of the shuttles to bring your crew over.”

  “There’s been no word from Welles?” Joakim asked and wiped sweat from his forehead with his hand.

  “No sir, there hasn’t. But we have drones on the surface. We haven’t abandoned hope. I am relieved by your arrival.”

  “Is there anything we can do to help with the airlock?” Umachandra asked. “One of our SJ4s is working on it from this side.”

  “Thank you. We will synchronize our efforts, Dr. Murdin. You should all prepare to leave the Montelius. We’ll be bringing you through as soon as we can.”

  “Yeah,” Joakim said wearily. “You got it,” and the transmission ended, replaced immediately by the previous view of the two starships, the moon, and the gas giant.

  “You think she’s telling us the truth?” I asked Joakim.

  “Of course,” Umachandra answered. “Of course, she’s telling the truth. Her programming won’t permit her to act otherwise.”

  “Horseshit,” Joakim said. “Droids can lie, and we all know that droids can fucking lie. We won’t know
what’s going on over there until we’re aboard.”

  “If then,” Peter added unhelpfully.

  “If then,” Joakim agreed. “Murdin, I want a wrap on Magellan. If the Gilgamesh’s mainframe is contaminated, I don’t want it getting in here.”

  “There’s absolutely no reason to believe – ”

  “Will you just fucking do it, okay? Please? I’ve got to see what that lock looks like.”

  And then the primary lights buzzed loudly and kicked on again; I squinted and blinked and rubbed my eyes while Peter Connor followed Joakim from the obs deck, and Umachandra followed orders and plugged herself back into Magellan.

  Almost a week has passed since I began writing these things down. I usually write late at night, when I can’t sleep. The sound of the wind and the snow at the windows makes me dislike the darkness of my bedroom. I have a writing desk in the front room, and I sit here in my robe and slippers and try to remember what happened next, and next, and next after that. Sometimes the wind is so loud that I listen to music to block out the constant roar and wail, something from one of the NeoModernist composers or, other times, early American folk ballads. I have a nice set of Ito low-immersion tymphonics, so I can play music as loud as I please late at night without bothering the neighbors. The walls of this old place are thin. Sometimes, though, I forget about the cats, because I can’t hear their meowing through Pritchard’s 8th Symphony or “Frankie and Johnny,” and the cats wake up the neighbors. I’d get rid of them if I could, the cats, if I could stand to be alone. I have a couple of old tidybots that keep the dust in check and the toilet clean, and there’s a synth girl, Zoraya, who lives down the hall and looks in on me now and then, but that’s not the same as having something biological for company. Something almost as frail and needy as myself.

  There are three cats sharing the apartment with me now: a fat ginger tom named Matthieu, a skinny, young black and white tom named Léon, and a calico lady that I call Sabine. I suspect she had another name before I found her scrounging for scraps during last June’s blizzards. She had a collar, but no tags or identichips. So now she’s Sabine, and she’ll just have to get used to it, if she hasn’t already.