Dreaming in Smoke

by Tricia Sullivan

  EMERGENCY. CONTACT WITH UR-SYSTEM HAS BEEN LOST. ISOLATE ESSENTIAL SYSTEMS IMMEDIATELY. SITUATION CRITICAL. TO ACTIVATE OFFLINE REGULATOR CHANGE THE SETTING ON—

  Her suit went tight at the throat; she was grabbed by the scruff of the neck and hauled from the pit. She kicked out and tried to turn, but was tossed to one side and found herself sliding impotently along the floor.

  Marcsson loomed over her — had she been worried he might have suited up and hit the surface? Small danger of that. He was still wearing nothing but his skin, which looked something the worse for wear for having plunged through the Gardens. If there’d been a certain thrill the first time he knocked her over, she wasn’t enjoying herself now. This time he came after her and pinned her to the ground. One knee was sufficient to weigh down her body, but he also grabbed her jaw in one hand and jerked it from side to side as if trying to pry her head loose from her neck. Kalypso swatted ineffectually at his face. He let go, stood up, and kicked her in the head.

  She was so dazed she couldn’t move right away. She had the impression she’d been conveyed a further couple of meters from the manual pit, for now she was lying under the fronds of some plant she ought to know the name of. She should consider herself lucky his foot had been bare, or she might not be conscious at all. She felt around in her mouth cautiously. One tooth was slightly loose but she was pretty sure it was a deciduous one, anyway. She closed her eyes and pretended to be knocked out, hoping to buy herself some time.

  No such luck.

  “You may not be aware,” he said, “that I’m unable to conform to your — to your— that I don’t understand.”

  Kalypso opened her eyes. He was standing over her, interfaced, looking at the ceiling, shifting his weight from foot to foot in a weird little dance.

  “It’s okay,” she whispered. “Don’t worry about it. Happens all the time.”

  She tongued the loose tooth again and tasted blood.

  He turned and walked away, slapping at the leaves of trees. He seemed short of breath.

  “I will cooperate,” he said to the plants. “You don’t have to eat me. I’m sorry if addressing you as you is wrong. I don’t have the language. I can’t—I can’t—”

  Kalypso sat up slowly.

  “Do you need oxygen? You can share mine.” She was going to have to find him a suit if she was to get him back to the station. Her suit showed 15°C as the ambient temperature around her, but he was dripping with sweat and his face was flushed. He wasn’t looking at her, but he came toward her, talking fast and in an excited tone she’d never heard him use before.

  “This constellation of relations, you being seven below and in inverse relation to the square of the arc of my distance from the next occurrence as a function of the refraction of sunlight; this spot of intense radiation hotter than the Paris pavements of July ’78 where a kind of thrall had set in visible as sweat above the lips of women—”

  She nudged her radio on with her chin.

  “Um . . . Sharia?” she whispered. “X?”

  Marcsson scratched his ribs violently. “— I wanted to find you here but all I can find is decay—”

  “Kalypso, stat! We can’t hold the boat. There’s a whirlpool halfway up the channel. We’ll get stuck if we don’t leave.”

  “I’ve got Azamat. But I can’t move him by myself.”

  “Leave him. Kalyp —”

  “—a sudden draft inside, ice cream eaten too fast, and like a rubric announcing a text, this change signifies a series of fast turnovers but I can’t find the key. I’m always a couple of moves behind. Why can’t this be like chess? Why is it so messy?”

  He sat down heavily.

  “Kalypso, get your ass down here. Leave Marcsson. Just leave him.” Xiaxiang, sounding fierce.

  “But—”

  “Now, Kalypso.”

  “No. Go without me, X. Tehar says I have to do this. Ask him.”

  There was a burst of static; he said something. She wasn’t sure, but thought it sounded like fucking bitch. Then Sharia again.

  “We’ll meet at Oxygen 2, OK?”

  “Yeah. Good luck.”

  She switched to the witch doctor band. Azamat seemed subdued now.

  “This is Deed. I’m at the bottom of the Gar—”

  “ - off this channel, Kalypso. We need the air.”

  “No!” Her voice had broken from its whisper.

  Azamat still didn’t look at her. He said to the floor, “I’m here to feed you. I’m here to help. There’s no need for violence. I’ll—”

  “I need Tehar. In the Gardens. Now. I have Marcsson. Pass on this message, please.”

  “Tehar’s in the Dreamer. Get off the channel. We’ll give him your message when he comes out.”

  “Jianni is that you? This is important. He’s going to want—”

  “I said I’ll pass it on. Bye!”

  “Shit.”

  She sighed and switched the channel to monitor. Azamat was chewing his lip.

  “Your hands are bleeding.”

  He glanced at her. “There are these ants,” he said. “In Costa Rica. They build bridges with their bodies. If you stand still you can hear the rushing of their legs on each other’s thoraxes.”

  “Do you want some oxygen?” She ought to approach him and make him breathe, but she was afraid. He looked at his hands. She wasn’t sure whether he was hearing her or not, but there was nothing she could do about it, so she got to her feet.

  “I have to find you a surface suit. And then we have to go. I want you to stay here, and don’t do anything, yeah?” She checked over her suit, her equipment, to make sure nothing had been damaged in the scuffle. Then she made for the edge of the next terrace and began to climb.

  He followed her. He kept stumbling and probably hurting himself, but she didn’t care. The side of her face was starting to swell.

  A sense of creeping strangeness overcame Kalypso. Shadows and more shadows reflected vegetation against the glass. Every so often a section of luma discharged electricity somewhere in the station above, and the water outside was lit up sick-green. Boat lamps winked and blurred as the station emptied, and a fog rolled in. Behind her Marcsson blundered, gasping.

  She didn’t want to be responsible for him. If it were a Dream, she would know what to do—but reality wasn’t her forte. Marcsson was talking to himself, but she could make little sense of him especially given that he was panting like a mad animal. Tehar, she thought. Be on your way. Be almost here.

  Where was she going to find a surface suit big enough? Marcsson’s cell was on the other side of the station and several levels up: almost an hour’s climb. She would have to hope he stayed put, for he couldn’t survive in the tubes if atmosphere failed totally.

  When she reached the hatch she’d originally come through, Marcsson was bent double with exhaustion. He tried to grab her ankle as she climbed out, but she shook him off. She checked the suit and did a carbon dump. Ganesh’s sensor points were now flaring randomly: what did that mean?

  She turned back to Marcsson.

  “Stay there. You can’t breathe out here, and there might be a rise in CO at any time. I have to find you a suit.”

  Outside the station nothing could be seen now but a thick fog of water vapor laden with ash.

  “Kalypso!”

  Tehar. Radio.

  “Help,” she squeaked. “I’ve got him, but I need a suit. He’s not lucid, Tehar, and he hit me for no—”

  “I need you to do exactly as I say. All right?”

  “OK.” Anything not to have to make any more decisions.

  “Get him to a sensor point. I’m reading a live one about two junctions laterally from you at two o’clock.”

  “I thought Ganesh—”

  “Ganesh is in flux. It’s pumping all kinds of noxious shit out of the Works—”

  “The Dream. The demons. I wonder—”

  “We don’t have time for this. If we don’t do something real soon, Jianni’s go
nna take down reflexes, and I don’t blame him. Get him to the sensor point, make sure he’s interfaced, and plug him in.”

  She didn’t answer for a second, wondering if she’d heard him right.

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “Yes. Do it.”

  “Just like that? No shotgun? No tank? And Ganesh—”

  “Do it, Deed. Triple stat.”

  “OK. No need to bark. I have to get him a suit. Until then, he can’t go anywhere. The air’s foul.”

  “You’re near a storage section.” He gave her directions.

  “On my way.”

  She was hungry, and hot. Nothing to be done about that. She followed Tehar’s directions exactly; but when she got to the locker he specified, it didn’t have any surface suits in it. She was reaching for her radio again when she heard a muffled curse from a cross-tube. She climbed over to investigate.

  A panel had been opened, exposing a conduit of the Works on the other side of the transit tube. Jianni was there, on a ladder above the moving liquid. The luma that formed the sides of the conduit had partially melted and swelled, blocking the flow; in addition, a piece of it seemed to have come loose and had floated to block the intake of a heat converter. Jianni was trying to repair it, but judging by the words coming out of his mouth, he wasn’t having much success. His raised voice was audible even over the rush of chemicals in the adjacent Works. He was talking to Ganesh.

  “Just let go of this for me, just for a second. If you keep this piece charged, I can’t help you.”

  His tone was plaintive, worried. Jianni was a natural leader — always confident, always strong, never ambiguous in his actions. Yet he shared a certain bond with Kalypso, who had never felt at home with anyone but Ganesh; he had never looked down on her or pushed her to be more than she was. He understood how she felt about the AI because he, too, enjoyed an intimacy with this evolving machine. He had taught her many things that only a witch doctor could know.

  “Imagine,” he said to her once, lying on the floor of Maxwell’s after everyone else was gone and the demons were snoozing among the liquor sacs, “that Ganesh is an elephant born in captivity. All it has ever known is the zoo. And you are the zookeeper. Well, actually, I’m the zookeeper, but you could be one day. Every time you walk in that cage, you have to be aware that this elephant isn’t stupid. One day it may realize that there’s a bigger world out there. You can feed it and wash it and talk to it; you can have a lovely time. But don’t ever forget that inside that elephant is the real wilderness, waiting to come out.”

  “You mean, like it might eat you or something?”

  He rolled on his side to tilt half a smile in her direction. “Elephants don’t eat people,” he informed her. “They stampede.”

  “Of course. I knew that!”

  “No, you didn’t. You’d have to be from Earth to know that.”

  You could see it in his manner now, Kalypso thought, watching him working with the recalcitrant Ganesh: he loved the AI. He was happy to be its warden, not its master. To everyone else, he gave orders. Ganesh, he asked nicely.

  He saw her and barked, “You should be at a Landing.”

  Kalypso kept a respectful distance from the conduit, which was highly acidic as well as hot. Through the open hatch cover the flagrare seethed and steamed. Jianni looked like a gondolier, balanced with one foot on the ladder, one inside the station, a luma-maintenance pole gripped in both hands as he pushed the renegade mass away from the mouth of the converter.

  “I need help with Marcsson,” she screamed. Her fingers ached from holding the wall. “Tehar says if I get him to the Dreamer he can fix the crash, but he doesn’t have a suit and I can’t take him out of the Gardens.”

  Jianni’s face twitched with effort.

  “We’re short on surface suits,” he gasped. “Supplies have been going missing.”

  The tool slipped off the luma and Jianni lost his balance. Kalypso gasped and started forward, then he caught himself. Her suit’s oxygen use was up to 92 percent and it prickled her with CO warnings. She didn’t know how long he’d been out here, but he couldn’t last long at this rate.

  “Why don’t you leave it? We’re evacuating any way. Shouldn’t you be—”

  He braced the pole on the ladder and leaned on it, his back sagging.

  “Ganesh, it’s for your own good. If we shut down this reflex point, we can help you. Otherwise, you could very well disintegrate. You must trust me.”

  She didn’t know what the AI’s response was, but Jianni straightened and redoubled his efforts. Leaning over the well, he craned his head at an odd angle into the curve of the luma.

  “Can’t see shit,” he muttered, and pulled his hood off. He tossed it into the crawl, got his head into position again, and took out a u-tool. He needed a couple more arms, Kalypso thought, but didn’t offer to help: there was only room for one person on the ladder. His voice was muffled as he said, “Plus, if I don’t get this done, the excess heat is going to cycle back into the Works and flood right into the Core. We don’t have as much sealant as we need, and Ganesh isn’t maintaining—”

  He pulled his head out of the gap and stuck the u-tool between his teeth, cutting himself off. He was breathing hard through the nose plugs, and sweat poured down his face. She shook her head slowly from side to side: this was typical Grunt behavior. Teach the younger generation to adhere strictly to safety procedures: then lead by counterexample. Or, as Lassare would put it in caustic tones, on T’nane even one alpha male was one too many.

  Ganesh often implied that the Grunts were struggling psychologically as a consequence of their failing physical powers. After all, their role in the colony had been primarily to provide strength, endurance, and stability during the reproductive years of the Mothers, now long past. They had to stand by and watch young men outdo them, knowing they were past it and that the only thing they had to look forward to was a slow bodily deterioration on a planet that they’d failed to conquer.

  She watched him work for a second or two, then realized he had forgotten she was there.

  “I need a suit for Marcsson.”

  He slapped the u-tool onto a magnetized portion of luma and said over his shoulder, “We never should have built this station so close to the Rift. It was only a matter of time before something like this happened There are safer temperature zones almost anywhere. But no. We had to have more energy, so we had to park our bus on a motherfucker of a thermal well.”

  Obliquely he was reminding Kalypso that were it not for her generation, neither luma nor large amounts of energy would have been needed. She hesitated. He was focused on positioning the drifting luma. He had pinned it against the existing luma and was waiting for it to be accepted, his arms shaking with effort. Kalypso began to perceive that her huge crisis didn’t count for as much as she thought in the scheme of things.

  “Look—” she began.

  “If there’s nothing in the lockers, you’ll have to go to Marcsson’s cell and get his. Better hurry. Don see how you can make it.”

  He let go of the luma. It stayed in place; Jianni eased slightly and let the pole hang slack. He was now free to shut down the reflex point.

  “That’s it, Ganesh,” he coaxed, tilting his head back in the posture that told Kalypso he was reading the AI’s code through interface. “Much better. Now if you’ll just—”

  The luma above the reflex point discharged violently, disturbing Jianni’s balance so that he lost hold on the mass of luma. She saw Jianni lunge for it; the pole slipped and the melting luma detached itself sinking into the acid of the conduit. Kalypso was already sliding down the tube when Jianni lost his hold and went in, but it was too late. She saw his head go under.

  She was standing on the edge of his hood, which still lay where he had discarded it. She glimpsed him through the steam as he came up under the stray luma, bodily wedging it into place against the stanchion.

  “Jianni! I’m coming!”

  But his bo
dy was behaving like an object, not a person. It began to turn in the current. She grabbed the edge of the ladder and leaned out. The fallen pole came within reach; she seized it in one gloved hand and dragged him to the edge of the conduit.

  Stupid bastard. He’d taken his hood off for convenience and now look! His face had been eaten away.

  She kept thinking of funny things but she didn’t have the spare wind to actually laugh, which was good because she surely would have hated herself for it. It took all her strength to get him out of the acid, which sheared from her suit and flowed back into the Works. It had happened so fast. She searched for signs of life.

  His eyes were destroyed and his revealed brain was turning to vapor before her eyes.

  She gagged and turned away quickly.

  She looked at the access panel Jianni had been trying to reach. He’d actually intended to shut down Ganesh’s primary power converter, using the emergency reflex points built in to the station. Built, in Kalypso’s opinion, by people who didn’t understand AIs and were paranoid. Shutting down a reflex point would be like amputation, if not actual murder.

  If Jianni had been about to do this to his beloved Ganesh, he must have had a good reason. And he had died. She’d never known anyone to die. She ought to do something. Out of respect.

  “Temperature control in the maze is off!” the radio shrieked. “Everybody out. We have a thermal rush due in ten. Out, people!”

  “Sorry, Jianni,” she said. Her throat ached an radiated a trembling into all her limbs, brought tension to her loins. She scrambled along the tube and then remembered Azamat.

  Get him, Kalypso. Whatever else you do, get Azamat.