Dreaming in Smoke

by Tricia Sullivan

  She stripped Jianni of his suit and pushed it ahead of her as she went back down the tube. Sky and water whirled to become a pinwheel of darkness and color as she flipped upside down with every twist of the crawl. Slugs of light dispersed from the still, jeweled station, each one an escape pod in the form of a small boat. On the radio, panic. And that feeling of isolation. Ganesh, to whom you turned for everything you could need, was gone.

  She stopped at the storage locker to vacuum acid out of the suit and try the radio.

  “Tehar? Tehar? Emergency, this is Kalypso to Tehar—”

  Static. Noise. People interrupting each other. Tehar.

  She found Marcsson ten meters above the Gardens, passed out in the compromised atmosphere. Sweating and cursing, she wrenched his body into the suit and sealed it, then pushed him ahead with her feet. Luckily she wasn’t going up. There was a narrow service chute that led to a small oxygen plant that supplemented the station’s main supplies from the Works. If they could make it there, they’d be insulated while they waited. She could call Tehar and they’d get Marcsson interfaced properly, fix the AI. OK, one thing at a time.

  Down the chute, she eschewed the friction strips in order to get speed and instantly regretted it: she felt sick by the time she landed in the service area. She could smell water: salty, slightly foetid with sulfur, laced with decay. The walls were fogged and, like all outer surfaces of the main station, obscured by fungal growth. Marcsson looked feral among all the green, his mouth half-open and lips pulled back from large teeth. He stirred.

  She made another attempt to touch Tehar, but the channel was a maelstrom of voices. The witch doctor line was still clogged with scrambled Ganesh-noise. She glanced around the enclosure, just a hair’s breadth from entering headless-chicken mode. She told herself to concentrate. The oxygen-generating apparatus was housed behind columns of luma. It operated using equipment she was totally unfamiliar with. As she stood there puzzling over the hardware, she began to feel chagrined that she hadn’t paid more attention to this kind of thing while she was growing up. She could almost hear Ganesh’s patronizing tone as it criticized her for failing to develop practical and technical skills. She remembered Ahmed constantly coaching her on matters of physical instrumentation and mechanics. She had managed to pass most of the practica and exams, but none of it had sunk in.

  One thing was certain: this chamber wasn’t being regulated for atmosphere, and when her suit’s supply ran out, she’d be in trouble. She had to find a way to work the manuals; but without Ganesh, she was helpless. None of the symbols made any sense to her; the computer panels were all dead and the mechanical overrides were a mystery to her. What would happen if she just started throwing switches?

  Marcsson pawed at his own head, removed the interface. She shrank against the wall. She was still hurting from before.

  “What’s the matter?” he said. He heaved himself to his feet.

  “Oxygen.” Her voice was thin with fear. “I can’t figure out how to flood this chamber.”

  “Did you check the reserve tanks? See if they’re full?”

  “Um . . .

  “By your left hand.” He started forward, a little off-balance, and she slid out of his reach. “Never mind. I’ll do it.”

  She watched his back as he manipulated the controls.

  “We have to filter out some CO before we’ll be able to take off the suits,” he said calmly. “Take a little while for that.”

  He began to whistle — not very well — “Round Midnight.” It was one of the tunes from her Dreamer node. Kalypso found this unnerving and couldn’t speak, although her continued silence seemed strange and she ought to say something. He didn’t seem to notice.

  “So what’s the scenario?” he asked.

  “Scenario?”

  “Yeah. What’s our objective? Fill me in.”

  She hesitated. He sounded so matter-of-fact; if she hadn’t been so scared, she would have rounded on him for acting crazy and then making as if nothing had happened. As it was, she took a few seconds to clear her throat.

  “We can’t communicate with anyone except by radio, and that’s pretty jammed with everybody panicking. There’s a thermal on the way and Ganesh has lost control of the generators. Everyone’s being evacuated. We need to get you to Unit 5 but we don’t have enough air in our suits to get there. Tehar’s not answering his radio.”

  “The legs are decompressed?”

  “Don’t know. Possibly. We can’t rely on Ganesh for anything.”

  “Anything? That’s pretty extreme.”

  There was an air of detachment in his voice. It wasn’t that he wasn’t serious, just. . . distant.

  Then he said, “I’ve missed you. It’s nice, having this. Even if it isn’t real.”

  “Uh . . . I think it’s real, Azamat.” Did he still think this was a Dream?

  “The housing of this module will protect us from the thermal,” he said. “We could stay here and ride it out.”

  “We’ve been ordered to get to Unit 5.”

  She was expecting him to argue, and braced herself. But he nodded and said, “OK. Give me a few seconds.”

  He apparently meant this literally: he stood thinking in the dead man’s suit for exactly nine seconds. In this interval, Kalypso had time to start feeling really bad about Jianni.

  “There’s a service shaft that can take us to Landing 7 underwater. You won’t know the passage I mean because it was built after your time. There’s a clear run to Unit 5 from there.”

  Actually, she did know the passage he meant, but he’d already turned back to the panels.

  “I’m going to manually flood the shaft with breathable air. Use the suit’s CO filtration system, but otherwise set your outtakes to external. I don’t know about you, but my reserves are low, anyway.”

  He positioned himself in front of a hatch seal and wrenched it open with his bare hands.

  “Shit,” Kalypso said involuntarily. She slid into the crawl and checked her suit’s readings: he’d done something right. The atmosphere was safe. She kept the plugs in but stopped using her reserves. She could feel the wind of intake and winced a little at the uneconomical use of good air, then caught herself. What did it matter at a time like this?

  The crawl plunged down; she slithered on her belly like a seal, slightly claustro as the fluorescent smear of algaics closed around the outside of the tube. She was no student of these things, but even Kalypso could tell there was a thermal coming by the spiral-line formations of v. flagrare 57 peeling free of their usual hosts, v. aa 4-11. The reason for this prescience on the part-of the temperature-sensitive methanogens was a subject of heated debate in circles more cerebral than those Kalypso moved in: she’d overheard the arguments without understanding them at Maxwell’s, deep in the second shift when the demons had let her take over and mix her own combinations of T’nane-distilled substances. The good old days.

  V. a 8 was a particularly good facilitator in the making of the most delicate alcoholic spirits, she recalled as she spotted a thin, pale cloud of them in their watery luma suspension. Most species of micros couldn’t be seen, of course, but colonies of algaics could stretch for miles and showed up fabulously colored, however tiny their individual members.

  The tube began to climb again and her muscles strained with the effort. Lack of food was getting to her, and she wasn’t accustomed to jaunting all over the station this way. Marcsson crowded behind her.

  “The tube is not heat-sealed,” he informed her over the speaker. “By the look of the 57’s the wave’s going to hit soon.”

  Thermals were characterized according to a wide variety of styles, and Kalypso didn’t remember anyone saying what kind this one was going to be. If it came horizontally, there would be indicators on the surface of the water; but if it lashed from below, and if the ascension rate of the event itself was high enough, there would be very little warning of any kind: no slow increase in temperature as the event diffused through the luma
. Just a devastating rush of superheated, acidic water with its payload of luma spores, followed by lava.

  Given that evacuation had been called for, she had no choice but to assume the second possibility. She climbed faster. Marcsson had to open the seal and hold it for her; Kalypso’s shoulders and biceps had all but given out. Landing 7 contained about a dozen people with tentkits and other equipment, all busy loading the last two boats. Steam rose from the water, and the sulfur smell was stronger. Kalypso switched to suit breathing again and let herself rest on the floor, unnoticed for the moment.

  Then Marcsson came through the hatch. He stood frozen, surveying the scene, licking his lips nervously. His interface was active.

  “You should stay off Ganesh,” she advised. “It’s not safe.”

  “You think you’re so smart,” he said. “Not anymore. You’re inanimate now if I say so.”

  She chose to ignore him, staggered to her feet and was offered assistance by a tall young woman called Siri.

  “We need to get to Unit 5,” Kalypso gasped. “I’m exhausted. I don’t know if I can climb that far.”

  “Is that Marcsson? Why is he wearing a witch doctor suit?”

  “Jianni gave him his suit and told me to take care of him.”

  She was lying: why? Because she didn’t have time to explain, she told herself. Siri could be officious and Kalypso didn’t have enough air for the whole story — assuming Siri would even believe her.

  Siri frowned. “Where’s Jianni if Marcsson has his suit?”

  Kalypso began to shake. She couldn’t process this. She heard herself saying plausible things.

  “I don’t know. He was busy working on Ganesh. Looking for emergency overloads. All I know is, Tehar needs Marcsson and I’ve left my cluster to do this, so I could use some cooperation.”

  The rest of Siri’s cluster had heard this and hands were already steering her and Marcsson toward their boat.

  “Don’t worry about it. We wouldn’t leave you here, no matter what the circumstances.”

  “Yann, grab some extra stores.”

  “No,” Kalypso said wearily. “We can’t evacuate yet. We have to get up to rem2ram.”

  Yann took a look at her. “Kalypso, you’re kind of cute but this is no time for insubordination. Get on the boat or I’ll put you there.”

  Marcsson meanwhile had strolled over to the pile of science equipment on the dock. He began handling it affectionately as he loaded it onto the boat. Siri smiled at him.

  “Don’t you just love the Grunts?” she said to Yann.

  Kalypso’d been swept up in the movements of the cluster as they prepared to evacuate.

  “No,” she protested feebly. “Tehar will kill me. Ganesh—”

  “Kalypso, isn’t this great? Finally we can get out, the moment has come. . . .”

  “You’re going to have to sit under the— Hey! What the—” Marcsson had leaped onto the boat, causing it to tilt wildly and dump one of the passengers into the water. The other fell to the bottom of the cockpit. Marcsson picked him up by the scruff of the neck, just as he’d done to Kalypso, and flung him onto the landing. The rest hesitated for a stunned moment: then the man in the water, clearly the cluster’s leader, started shouting for someone to subdue the Grunt.

  Marcsson’s u-tool was out and whipping across the lines that bound the boat to the dock. Siri grabbed the gunwales and held on, but the current was already pulling the craft away, and her body was soon stretched out between boat and dock, with one of her cluster-brothers grabbing her free hand just in time to keep her from plunging in.

  Maybe Kalypso intended some heroics, however out of character that might seem; or maybe it was her loyalty to Tehar and her promise to stay with Marcsson that made her do what she did. Maybe it was because she couldn’t face having to explain to Siri, who was far more superior/organized/sensible/smug than Sharia could ever aspire to being; more likely it was the fact that she was scared and didn’t want to be left on the station. Whatever the case, Kalypso’s actions were now at the vanguard of her reason, and she found herself scrambling over Siri’s straining body, using it as a bridge. She rolled into the boat at Marcsson’s feet without knowing entirely why she had done it.

  She expected to be picked up and chucked overboard, but Marcsson was busy at the controls.

  “You can’t leave,” she objected. “Ganesh needs you. Don’t—”

  It was too late. He’d engaged the engines at full power, and they shot away from the dock.

  He turned and looked at her. Behind the interface his eyes were the blue of dead flesh.

  THE O-WORD

  KALYPSO WAS TREMBLING. THIS WAS beyond any berk she’d ever seen. Marcsson’s head was in deep trouble, and there was nothing she could do about it. As the boat’s drive caught and they headed away from the station, she knew that Marcsson had very possibly doomed an entire cluster to injury or death. She switched on her radio and heard them frantically calling for help.

  It was simply unthinkable. People didn’t do this to each other — not on T’nane. Interdependency was too deeply woven in the fabric of their daily lives for anyone to think of behaving this way. Especially a solid Grunt like Azamat.

  He stepped away from the console and lowered himself to the bottom of the cockpit, where he sat motionless, hands on knees. They picked up speed, the boat ignoring the usual channels and instead cutting a swath through a gelatinous mass of developing luma. Kalypso lunged for the helm and tried to take control, but the boat responded for only a moment, then refused her instructions. Marcsson was interfacing; he must be using Ganesh to control the boat. In the time needed for a radio signal to travel from his face to Ganesh and back to the boat, she could make manual course alterations; but they only lasted an instant before being corrected by Marcsson via Ganesh.

  How was this possible? If the witch doctors couldn’t get Ganesh to behave, if Jianni had been struck down by the AI, how could Marcsson interface with such confidence? Could it be that he had never left the Dream state and was still swimming around in his own math? If so, how could he stand it?

  Well—maybe he couldn’t. No wonder he was berking.

  Already First was looking small against the retreating horizon. She could see other boats jettisoning themselves from the station’s underbelly as the thermal’s accompanying gas cloud bore down on the station.

  It was deceptively windy out here; the fluid surface might not register waves except as huge, slow rollers, but the atmosphere was moving at close to 100 kph. If they’d been on ordinary water, the boat would have been tossed every which way by fierce whitecaps. This wasn’t like being on water, though: she’d been on Earth’s oceans in the Dreamer. Water moved; waves threw you. In the Wild, there were seldom waves, only currents that moved unseen except for the changing colors of the v. flagrare within fluid regions of the luma.

  The boat was long and slender. It lay low like kayak. Its hull was coated with a designer polymer that could slice through colonies cleanly. The agglutinative properties of the surface made it difficult to flood such a boat, and using a filtration system in the bows the vessel could even produce its own oxygen when fitted with a tentkit. Kalypso did not set up the tentkit now, but routed the filtered gas directly to their suits so their reserve tanks would have a chance to recharge. The reassuring sound of pumps working to compress oxygen filled her ears.

  “We have to get to Oxygen 2,” she said to Marcsson, hoping that if she treated him normally, he might start behaving that way. “It’s on the near side of the range but I’m damned if I know where we are now, exactly. I’m afraid we’re going toward the Rift, which is the last place I want to be. I wonder if I can tack across the Rift current and come at Oxygen 2 from upstream.”

  Her voice sounded scuffed and enervated on the suit’s speaker.

  “Any time you feel like jumping in with suggestions, feel free.” She was talking too much — nerves — and when he didn’t respond, she talked even more. “Because I don�
��t read any other craft in the area, and I’m not sure how this radio works. . . .” She fiddled with the elements on the dash. “Damn, you know, I can’t get used to doing this with my hands.”

  If Naomi were here she’d be crowing at Kalypso’s dependency on Ganesh. Kalypso banished the Mothers from her mind and called on her memories of Liet’s subconscious. Liet would know how to avoid the thermal, and how to calculate the gas-producing activity in the Rift that ran along the same fault line that had produced the volcanoes. First had been built safely out of range of the static heat of the Rift, yet within reach of the volcanoes, which provided an emergency refuge in the form of solid land, not to mention mineral resources. But the Rift isolated the far side of the volcanoes from all but the most determined efforts at access. The heat produced unpredictable currents and whirlpools, and fluky air currents in that region had brought down too many gliders to risk crossing as a matter of routine. However, this very same zone was also the repository of some of the most complex of the native ecosubsystems: Marcsson’s data had mostly come from one well or another along the length of the Rift, which meant that he had routinely been across it in the course of setting up collection filaments. If he would only cooperate, they might be able to ride its edge to Oxygen 2 and safety. If he didn’t help, Kalypso feared they’d simply be drawn into a whirlpool and melted down.

  The more she thought about their situation, the more scared she got. She had never been in the Wild. She felt totally unprepared and — without the rest of her cluster — incomplete. Under any other circumstances, a Grunt like Azamat would be the best person to have in a boat with you at a time like this. Yet there he sat, vegetative once removed. This was getting less and less funny by the second. Her thoughts started to race around in pointless circles.

  Fog and darkness conspired to invent shapes in the air ahead of the boat. Ahead, light generated by the Rift spread as a gel across the horizon and rose into the sky like the birth of a cloud from the sea. The v. flagrare subsystem had been so named because some of its members were incandescent, converting extreme heat from undersea thermals to light, which was then exploited by the algaics. On Earth, algae had dominated the ocean ecoscape, reversing the reducing atmosphere of precambrian times to the oxidizing one that had supported Kalypso’s forebears. On T’nane, algaics were small scavengers in an ecosystem powered by anaerobes more effective than anything that had ever lived on Earth: there wasn’t enough sun to permit the algaics to hold the bottom of the food chain, but there was plenty of heat. The foundation of the biomass lay with the flagrare: the eaters-of-fire.