by Peter Watts
In the command center they found the bones.
“Too many bones,” Fox said. Ngọc stared. “To be Sermi. It’s too many bones.”
“Like Psápfa,” Ngọc managed.
Fox drew a blaster from his belt.
Like Psápfa: writing ran around some of the bones, gleaming gold.
“I don’t think you’ll need that,” Ngọc said. “Sermi? Is that you?”
The bones re-configured into a too-large person, held in shape by an array. Vertebrae hung in a pair of long, thin braids: fitting for someone who had mapped Psápfa. The phalang-lips smiled. “Ngọc.” The voice spoke through Ngọc’s array. Fox’s too. He lowered the blaster. Ngọc felt Sermi’s array touching hers, faint as a finger on skin. “Someone who actually understands my maps.”
“They’re too good.”
“Thank you,” bone-Sermi said.
“No. They’re . . . I’ve never felt that way. So . . . ” Words tripped on Ngọc’s tongue: all wrong. So inadequate. How could she describe how perfect it felt to feel her way like that?
“I know,” Sermi said, “oh, I know. Perfect. I mapped other things, in other ways, but after the Ammassalik star maps I felt like I was always circling them, never touching them again. I held the Psápfa bone maps after their completion and the feel of those words under my fingers was finer than the sight, though I liked that too: it reminded me of embroidery.”
Patterns. Textures.
After her grandmother’s death, Ngọc had felt so alone.
“What happened?” she asked.
“I became trapped. The scavengers boarded my craft. I flung myself into my array in fear. They did indeed tear apart my body, but in the array I made a machine to tear them apart in turn. It didn’t make me any less trapped. The Ivuultu trap array is isolated, while my craft’s was destroyed and my own is also isolated. I can’t even comm. I wrote on the bones out of boredom. I played with the traps. I want to go home.” Sermi’s voice sounded as if tears of carpals should be falling from the rib-eyes.
“We’ll help you,” Ngọc said. “What do you want?”
“To talk to Xaliima. To have my body back. To be on Cai Nu.”
“I can comm Xaliima now. I don’t know about bodies, but I can carry you back to Cai Nu.”
“Near there,” Fox said. “I’m not landing on Cai Nu.”
“Near Cai Nu. My array tech is big,” Ngọc said. “I can fit you in.”
Silence.
Sermi said to Ngọc, “Your array tech is fox-shaped.”
“Yes.” Foxes dancing at her hairline. Ngọc grinned, extended an arm. “He’s called Fox.”
Laughing, Sermi slid into Ngọc’s array like a gust from an air vent.
“Are we finished here?” Fox asked.
“Yes.”
At the control of his craft, there was a look on Fox’s face that struck Ngọc like a map in her hands. Excitement? Pleasure? Longing? And more. “Let’s go,” she said, and met smiles with him: shared their joys.
She held her hands at her side and mapped.
At an orbital station above Cai Nu, Ngọc and Fox met Xaliima—who took Sermi into a golden disc pinned to her hijab and transferred the reward money. Tears of happiness calligraphied Xaliima’s cheeks. Sermi would have a new body made on Cai Nu. Sermi would map again.
After Xaliima left them, Fox said, “Do you want to go back to Goldchair? I want a mountain of chwee kueh.”
That sounded good. Ngọc needed the energy: for her array, for her aching stomach. Her head felt full of energy after that mapping. That perfect joy. She wanted to sing or shout her happiness. She wanted to return to Sermi’s maps as soon as she could. Stars and coastlines and whirlpools.
THE NEXT MAPS
I map, I map, yet I never reach a map.
I want to map what it is to be an array, to be thought.
I carve into bone-shaped wood: descriptions; the stories I would tell; a schematic of my craft; a schematic of the traps and the bones and the space crafts-in-pieces; the word ‘loneliness.’ I turn it over and over in my hands and it is beautiful. It is not right, it is not real.
I try again.
Again.
Again.
The Cumulative Effects of Light Over Time
E. Catherine Tobler
Viewed in the right light, everything is a love story.
Viewed in the right light, nothing is a love story.
Down-falling forever into dark.
Endless rain sheets through the broken cathedral of the ship as paracord sings between my metal fingers. Through rusted metal spire and fractured transept the rain runs rivulets down ambulatory arches that once used to segment walkways and rooms with inhabitants, purpose. All rest abandoned now, cloaked in shadow and the fecund stench of muddy earth and the life that scuttles through it. Every place is hollow of what it once was, transformed into a vault of all that came before and all that would never come after. Splintered segments of Arecibo’s reflector dish litter the downward drop, grander swathes slicing through the ship’s cracked and rusted hull to create new arches, convex eruptions upon which bioluminescent lichen and moss bloom.
(Splice: You were here in ’88, before the Nessik rose up against their overlords and sparked an engine overload outside Saturn’s orbit. How long did it take for a twenty-thousand meter prison ship to plummet past Jupiter, through asteroids untold, and smack into Earth? Never as long as one thinks. The wars changed this place forever; when you were here, the jungle was more jungle and less flooded saltwater basin. The jungle stretched from coast to coast, with the city perched on the northernmost edge like a tiny wart. You were here when Puerto Arecibo was still a thing, beach like a crescent of moon fallen from the sky, the lighthouse more than a lens in a rusting cage surrounded by water. Everything drowned, but your memory of how things were cascades across my vision.)
And every day, rain.
Mud that has funneled into the broken ship drips from every available outcrop. I keep my lines clear, wrapped around wrist and waist, the fucking ceph above me in the rusted ship rigging that remains. The ceph pulls its bony, armored form through chains and across fallen beams with dozens of supple arms and tentacles. It moves as if underwater, with the same sucking slurp of the mud, the same drip of rain. We move apart, yet collectively, on the same track for the same reason. Find the hiveling, get it the hell out.
Even in the rain, I can pick out the heat signatures, the fine delineation between the warmth of grouped bodies and the cold of the standing ship. The rain should hinder my vision, but it only pearls off the visor which encloses my skull and optical relays. These costly, compound eyes see straight through the pouring water: five figures rendered in thermal infrared, one smaller and colder than the others, clustered tightly and moving ever down through mud and wreck, into the far-reaching guts of this dead vessel.
Abruptly, all evidence of the warmth encircling the cooler body is obliterated, and so too its own heat signature vanishes. A light switch, on and then off. I draw myself still against the paracord while the Nessik drops to my level with a wet hiss, swaying on the chain as I listen and look. The rain pours in a continuous fury, running rivulets down muddy beams and outcroppings before it tongues lower into slopped mud and splits it further apart. The mud swallows the water until it can swallow no more; the new-made ground belches, breaches, and the water runs where it will, pulling mud with it. Mud cascades off ledges, over my metal-encased shoulder to tip me off balance. The puss coils a tentacle around my arm, as if to keep me from falling.
The ceph, the moll, the puss, the squid. Whatever I call the thing in the rigging across from me, it still doesn’t speak any language native to Earth. The Nessik chitters through its beak in a series of low whirs, clicks, and whistles that also tell it exactly where I am in relation to its position. I speak the Nessik’s tongue as if it is my own; most of we chimera do. At first it was mimicry; now it has become conversation. In the wars, the Nessik wondered how it was possible, that a hu
man could take apart their language—when a human wasn’t exactly human is how it was possible; when they realized there were those of us unlike anything they knew and feared us just a little more than they had before.
The Nessik wants to know why I stopped, and when I explain the readings have vanished, a low twitch rolls through its armored, tentacled body. If I could apply human characteristics to the being beside me, I would say it’s nervous, concerned. Its legs of corded muscle shift restlessly, tentacles tonguing the chain not in an effort to hold on, but seemingly for something to do. Human, that. I have never seen a display of emotion in the Nessik as a whole, but that doesn’t mean they don’t feel, express, emote.
(Splice: You said the same thing of me, my head cradled in your calloused healer’s hands, brown hair spilled between your fingers for a little while longer before even that was shorn away. Could my new eyes actually see you (you, you), or were they too preoccupied with statistical readouts downloaded from skyward drones, distracted by the neon slipstream of multiple HUDs you would never see no matter how deeply you looked into the blue of my irises, the black of my pupil? Couldn’t even see where eye and lens were fused, so much had they become one inseparable thing. This is what you asked them to make of me; this is what they did. I always saw you. My baseline. Those eyes are now gone.)
Locating things, especially members of its own hive, is not typically difficult for the Nessik. They have no evident eyes, but use echolocation as bats do. They maneuver this planet as well as any human, though not as well as we chimera. The sounds of them moving through the streets dwindles to a low hum once one gets used to it; the first time I was in a city with more than one Nessik, the constant whirring couldn’t be ignored: the hum of hot neon under pouring rain, a relentless crackle and hiss, a thing never quite extinguished.
I scan the ship’s skeleton, shifting my display into different wavelengths where I bisect light into wave and particle. The ship blurs into long icicles of no color; no heat, no life, all the nothing that lingers in this wreck. The ground is a cooling haze of sludge, and of the bodies we tracked, there is no sign. The insistent crimson of a warm body in motion is gone. This happened in the wars too; it’s not impossible to hide from IR. It’s not impossible to ambush we chimera and disassemble us piece, by piece, by piece. Nothing is impossible if you apply yourself—isn’t that what they say?
The Nessik doesn’t find it amusing when I ask. If they have a sense of humor, I’ve never seen it on display. Their sense of community cannot be questioned; like bees, termites, and ants, they live in colonies, skeps, cathedral mounds. They live entangled, disliking solitude, because their communication, their sense of location, is stronger when they’re surrounded. This, I realize, may explain why this Nessik (fucking moll) is restless. It’s so quiet here in the dark down-fall but for the rain.
The ceph lets loose a high chirrup which echoes through the ship’s frame. I can’t feel the vibration as it does, but can see the vocalization as it streams outward. As it pulses into the wreck, a spectrogram bursts bright in the corner of my eye. It doesn’t hit anything unexpected; whatever we were following is gone, and if it was the juvenile—this hiveling—we’re no closer to knowing. Nessik young don’t wander; they stay bundled with their birthhive, absorbing the thrum of the hivemind, the sounds that will turn to communication and allow them to eventually go where they will. This hiveling has been gone for a week and in a turn that still makes me laugh, the Nessik needed eyes that could see the silent things they could not detect. They needed what they most despised: something almost human.
Six misaligned miles to bottom-drop.
We swing ourselves through an arch and into a nook that used to be a slaughterhouse that used to be a brood cell. The ceph navigates the mud nearly as well as I do; I am not light, but swift, and make for the stretch of floor that remains free of slop. We crouch and listen: constant rain, the Nessik’s every inhalation, the creak of the ship’s rusting metal frame. Some distant human part of me imagines it can feel the wreck sway though this is impossible; the ship wedged itself six miles into the earth, bulleting like a drill aimed at the core. Six miles in and six miles out so they say; a rain of satellites in its shattering wake, collisional cascade. The first battles were fought here, upon the edge of the crater that used to house Arecibo’s great dish; the first dead fell here, the first dead remain here.
(Splice: Why here? I was here in—No. You were here in ’92 and remember these rooms, how strange they seemed upon first contact because they do not contain a straight edge, and when a world is all straight edges, usually bladed, a cocoon is instantly loathsome. These rooms are more like the cells of some gigantic hive, you think, though not for bees, because even they segment their hives into precise hexagons. These cells have no definition, though many had overflown with Nessik young. No one understood that in the first days; the hivelings swarmed and devoured all in their path, blind with hunger, and humans did what humans do. They refused to be eaten. These cell walls dripped with slop of a different kind then; your memory of this place smells like bile, yellow-brown and cold. It runs through your hands that assemble and disassemble with equal ease.)
Within this room, there rests a Nessik shell. Every soft part of its body has rotted away, leaving only its bony exoskeleton cupping the splatters of rain. The Nessik I travel with lets loose a low series of chitters to sketch out the boundary of the cell we find ourselves in, to understand the placement of every thing therein. Mud, shell, me. The Nessik withdraws from all, perching on the edge of the mud spill. It pulls its tentacles inward until none can be seen and it looks much like the empty shell, but there remains a low vibration emanating from it, a low frequency that feels like the absence of a thing once known.
Neither of us need to eat; neither of us need to be warmed by a fire. Still, the Nessik rests and I move to the edge of the cell, letting my hollowmade wrist swallow excess paracord as I momentarily need less of it. I scan further into the wreck to plot more of our downward course. If the hiveling has come here, it was on paths other than ours, but if there was another means of entry beyond the gaping maw of the shattered ship, the Nessik did not know it and even my eyes could not detect it.
The ceph chitters to ask of the readings. There are none, I say, and I wonder if the ship itself is shielding them. Is that why they have chosen this place? I look down through countless cells filled with debris, mud, the fallen dead, and I wonder. Without looking behind me at the ceph, I leap off the edge, paracord unspooling again from my wrist. I descend past level after level. The ceph will follow when it can and there is no hope it will lose me; every level I pass brings a searching signal from it, a vibration that ricochets down the cord, across my skull, back to it.
Every room here, empty of life.
I open my hand and free-fall.
The ship never slips from my focus. Every level is perfectly clear despite the fall of rain, despite the humidity that builds the lower I go. In the depths, the ship is warmed by the earth itself, and I scan, forever collecting data, routing it upward to my accomplice drone. Fey IV relays a data stream about a book that described Hell as dwindling, concentric circles such as these within the Nessik ship. Here would be the lustful and there would be the gluttonous.
(Splice: Your memories of lust and gluttony are a spear in whatever remains of my flesh, though this body can no longer be penetrated as it wishes. I remember these things through you, but also through myself, the deep and distant human pieces of myself recalling the warmth of a palm in the night, the whisper of breath, the path of nail over skin. I remember the way I tasted on your tongue and the way you could not believe your good fortune when I came back, when I said yes, but why I left and what I assented to are out of reach, lost in the happiness you knew in the resolutions. This should be enough. It is not quite. There is— There is—)
I come to rest on a muddy outcropping and stare downward into dark. In visible light, little is discernible and it suits me to see nothing more t
han the torrent of mud and rain into the dark. The ship exists as a throat, swallowing everything the world vomits into it. Fey IV confirms the distance, point six until we reach the main debris field, the field of dead, the field where they once would have scattered poppies and— Shut up, Fey IV, but the drone relays and confirms and relays again. The ship appears empty but for us, it says; what I cannot see has also been removed from the drone’s reach.
I snap my wrist backward and far above me, the paracord’s claw detaches from its anchor point. The umbilical whickers toward me, wet and dripping, until I can draw the claw into my hands to set a new anchor point. The Nessik slithers past me, off the edge of the outcrop and into the black beneath. With my anchor set, I leap off the edge and follow it down. Black every meter of the way, until Fey IV chirrups in my head and I know we’re there.
It doesn’t matter the wavelength I observe here; we could pass in blackness with only the ceph’s echolocation to guide us, but I would know the bodies that litter this chamber. With a silent command, I bleed clean, bright light into the rooms we sink through, and observe the dead.
(Splice: It’s ritual, you said, and Fey IV has always confirmed, to remember the dead, especially those who have fallen in battle, be it to knife or detached drone. Once, the dead were collected, honored, buried, but this battle saw no such luxury in its wake. In this battle, the dead could only be left where they fell. Those early days were dire, but didn’t exactly improve as they wore on; the starved and terrified hivelings, the humans and chimera who came to rescue and recover, but found themselves in the center of an alien war they did not understand. Nessik prisoner slaves and Nessik captors; what else was there to know?)
Chimera and human alike litter this chamber. Empty Nessik shells are scattered like moss-colored stones. Humans have long since been reduced to skeletons, moss spreading a dense, lumpy carpet over most of them, but here and there, aged and broken bones pierce the green. The metal exoskeletons of chimera gleam in my bleeding light. There are no echoing lights, no sensors that pick up my presence and respond. Only rain and mud move in this chamber, sliding ever-down as I and the Nessik (fucking ceph) do.