She had begun to avoid Dreaming, but she told Neko that she was making progress.
In the rare intervals of radio contact, she heard much quarreling over boats, heat converters, food, and oxygen. But she never caught the voices of her own cluster.
Every morning, Kalypso would rise to check the cultures. Overnight, the luma bloomed with a colonial prokaryote unrelated to MLB-6. Neko had a method of collecting and storing this, too, which she neither demonstrated to Kalypso nor explained. She merely continued managing the tame chunk of luma and navigating. The latter took up a good deal of her time, for the constant flux of heat from the wells not only created dangerous conditions, but also made for very weird, extremely localized weather.
“It doesn’t help,” Neko remarked several times as they were beset by yellow fogs that clogged their air filters insidiously, “that there are so many airbornes to contend with around here. You probably don’t want to think too much about what you’re breathing.”
Then she sent the terrified Kalypso up above to collect, one irrational hand over her nose and mouth despite the protection of the faceplate, as she contemplated the consequences of inhaling a bunch of airborne subs. It was bad enough that Neko seemed to be able to eat not only the native algaics, but also one or two other subs produced en masse by the Wild luma. Actually, she drank them, in a kind of tea. She didn’t offer Kalypso any. “Your metabolism couldn’t handle it,” she explained.
Kalypso was never sure what else Neko was up to while she was out on the hull collecting minute amounts of MLB-6, but it had something to do with the precious piece of tame luma that Neko kept. Kalypso’s visual examinations of the micro-System never gave her much of a clue as to what was happening inside it, but she was sure Neko was using it as a processing factory, similar to the Works. But the Works were constructed of Earthmade materials and were operated by Ganesh. There was no AI operating Neko’s luma, and in any case the subs involved produced such tiny quantities of chemicals that it was hard to see what value the project could have. Yet it was the primary focus of Neko’s considerable energy.
Days passed. In the seamless cloth of T’nane’s surface, Kalypso began to notice details of design. They passed through a colony of oxygen-producing thermal algaics a mile across. Neko checked the CO counters, found the air safe, and the two of them stood breathing for several minutes until the wind changed. A day later, they came back the other way, and the colony was scored through with faint yellow lines. The algaics were dying: not randomly, but in well-ordered blocks. Looking back into the water cleared by their passage, Kalypso could see the glow of the luma beneath, lit up by various subsystems. Her experience of luma had only been in the transit tubes, where, held rigid by Ganesh’s electromagnetic signals, it had behaved like a passive material, slave to the AI’s instructions. Now, in the Wild, luma began to acquire a personality . . . except Kalypso thought, there was nothing person-like about it at all. It formed architectural shapes at times, glimpsed in the depths or occasionally breaking the surface; at other times it lay inert, a jelly. In places it seemed absent altogether and the boat cut the water cleanly. Yet the luma was always there, a huge, tacit presence.
Two or three nights running she was unable to ’face with Ganesh for even a moment.
“Atmospheric interference,” Neko said when she complained about it, passing her a bowl of food. “This is a problem. We don’t have much time.”
“Time for what?” Kalypso’s eyes stung with weariness. She ate like an animal.
Neko’s hands flashed before her. “Don’t you ever think about where your food comes from?”
Kalypso paused and swallowed, studying the rice as if she’d never seen it before.
“I do think,” she answered slowly. “I wonder about a lot of things. It’s just that nothing makes any sense, so after a while you just stop questioning. You figure you won’t understand the answer anyway.”
“Think about it now.”
“Well, you might have set up a farm out here, I guess. Don’t know where you’d get enough light to grow rice, though, and you’d need some kind of agro baffles. See what I mean? I may be eating it, but I’m damned if I know where it comes from. Unless”— she laughed — “well, obviously unless it comes from First.”
No sooner had the words left her hands than Kalypso remembered Jianni’s complaints of supplies gone missing.
“I see!” she exclaimed. “You’ve been given the spare heat shields, haven’t you? And maybe other things as well. The Mothers haven’t abandoned you.” This cheered her, for some reason. Anything that made her feel she was still connected to First, probably, was a good thing.
“There is trade,” Neko allowed cautiously.
“Trade? For what?”
“Soon,” Neko said. “You’ll see for yourself. I hope for your sake that the Archives are almost ready to be used.”
Once again the fact that Kalypso could willfully ignore the contents of her own head served her well. She closed her eyes, pretended Neko wasn’t signing at her, and chewed her food.
PICASSO’S BLUES
NEKO’S CRAFT SLIT THE WATER, A WEAPON gliding home over glowing skin. It was morning, and Kalypso had been allowed to sleep until she woke on her own. She stood almost straight, maybe not actually revived, but not wasted, either. They had traveled all night, carried by a fortuitous current parallel to the Rift. Ahead she could see other boats, each one illumined as if by flames. The clouds were blacker than ever and the sun somewhere behind them a dim lost seed blown across the sky. It gave just enough light for Kalypso to make out Neko’s profile.
“It’s cold here,” Neko said. “You could take off your suit. If you want.”
Kalypso was sick of wearing the thing and complied, retaining only the hood with its breathing gear.
It was actually very hot by Kalypso’s standards, and she was soon sweating fiercely, but the wind was dry and she didn’t mind. Flecks of pale gray ash lodged in her pores.
“The one in front is the funeral boat,” Neko told her, and for a second Kalypso got the notion that she was inhaling the ashes of the dead instead of volcanic tuff. A cylindrical enclosure, evidently made of luma, rose from the deck. It was from the top of this structure that the fire rose, brilliant and smokeless.
“I don’t understand,” Kalypso signed, “how you can spare a craft for dead bodies. It seems sentimental.”
Neko smiled. “Wait. See.”
The funeral boat was the first to arrive. Its pilot hooked Neko’s boat, pulling it close, and talked with Neko in the Sign dialect Kalypso didn’t understand; then Neko signed to Kalypso, “This is Teres. She will be doing the negotiating with your Mothers.”
“Negotiating?”
Teres showed a huge smile. She reached across the gap between boats and rubbed her hand along Kalypso’s collarbone and down one arm with a familiarity that set Kalypso’s teeth on edge.
“Not plump,” she signed broadly. “But not all dried-out either. I am pleased.”
“Negotiating for what?” Kalypso demanded.
Teres smiled again, looking happier all the time. Something Kalypso couldn’t read passed from her to Neko.
“Quickly,” Neko indicated, holding up a sheath of fluid. Kalypso recognized it as the product culled from Neko’s tame luma. “I have the catalyst. Let’s feed her.”
For a moment Kalypso was afraid they were going to make her ingest the stuff, but despite Neko’s words, Kalypso was ignored. The two Dead went to the stern of the funeral boat, where tame luma formed a wide cylinder about as tall as Neko, resembling a smokestack. The “fire” was actually a mass of steaming phosphorescence within the upper segment of the stack, from which issued sheets of glowing gas that rose and vanished in the atmosphere. Synthetic capillaries clung to the sides of the luma; a braid of them extended along the hull and was lost among Teres’ equipment. And a single line flowed to a tall vial, less than half full with a substance whose color changed slowly but constantly through
a sequence of rich, fluorescent hues.
Neko saw her staring and commented, “That’s precious fluid. The MLB-6 you gathered provided one of the catalytic molecules we’ll introduce to this luma to make the compound that will end up in that vial.”
Kalypso watched Neko climb to the top of the luma stack with their stock of the sub she’d called a catalyst in one hand, which she thrust within the gaseous emission. Teres, below, appeared to be interfaced, yet she signaled rapidly to Neko. Most of her signs were in code; Kalypso didn’t know what she was saying, but clearly she was directing whatever Neko was doing up there. She caught the words “No, the liver will be better” and “Check cerebrospinal field.” At length Neko came down, took a pipette and drew off a small amount of the sparkling fluid from the vial attached to the luma stack. The temperature of the air had risen significantly, and Kalypso began to cast about for her suit.
“So what is that stuff?” she asked, to distract herself.
“This is the substance we use to produce our cash crop.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Picasso’s Blue, of course. You asked what we traded to get our food and supplies. Picasso’s Blue can’t be synthesized in the Works. It’s a biological agent, and we are the only ones who can make it.”
Kalypso shivered. “I thought the Mothers made it. They were looking for a natural resource that they could use to motivate Earth to send ships, but Picasso’s Blue is their only result, and it’s not good enough.”
Teres only laughed. “Even the biggest lies are mostly truth. We were looking for such an agent. Picasso’s Blue was not our only result. These things we have done to our bodies are a continuation of the work Sieng began. We are our own experimental subjects when it comes to infectious agents that can increase our viability in the Wild. This work has proved more fruitful than the mythical Oxygen Problem, and it has created an economic niche for us.”
Relief stole into Kalypso. “They have helped you.”
“Yes, of course: they’ve provided us with supplies. They have to. They need Picasso’s Blue.”
“What do you mean, they need it?”
Neko gave her a piercing look. “Have you never used it?”
Picasso’s Blue was a privilege the Earthborn reserved for themselves; but to Kalypso every restriction constituted a challenge, and the proscription of Picasso’s Blue was no different. She admitted shyly, “When I was very young . . . with someone else.” Tehar. Once. And the feeling ever after of having exchanged jigsaw-puzzle pieces of herself with the fledgling witch doctor, lingering after the effects had subsided. Only she’d never been sure whether he felt it, too. “I’ve always wished I could do it again, but the Mothers are so secretive.”
“Now you know. We make it. We sell it in exchange for everything we have. We have caused them to be addicted to it. This was necessary for our survival.”
Kalypso couldn’t really process this series of cool assertions, which stood too many of her most basic assumptions about the Mothers on their heads. But it was easy to keep asking questions.
“But the stuff in that vial doesn’t look like Picasso’s Blue.”
“It’s not. I told you—we make it. That’s why we need Earth Archives so badly.”
“Picasso’s Blue,” Teres cut in, “contains a viroid which has a treacherous effect on its users. The first time you are infected, your body can’t repel it and you succumb to a gorgeous fever. While you are sick, time and space are re-ordered for you. You become like one of Picasso’s subjects, recomposed according to essence. Your perceptual math is made over from without. Enormous depths open before you. Great heights appear. Unspeakably beautiful connections between things become evident. You transcend yourself and even the world.”
“Yes,” Kalypso breathed, remembering.
“Words,” Neko added, “become real. If someone speaks to you while they paint you with Picasso’s Blue, their words come true for you. It’s very powerful stuff.”
“once you recover, all you want to do is go back. In fact, your body craves a return to the infected state, because certain of your neural tissues have been stimulated by the waste products of the virus and they will tell you, in no uncertain cognitive terms, that you want more. So you take more, if you can. And the effects of language will continue to work for you: you remain suggestible, able to experience the sensations invoked by words. But the time-space shift of Picasso’s Blue is a receding model of the universe. Every time you return, it becomes slightly less vivid, for your body is clever enough to develop immunity. Yet the craving only grows stronger. Eventually, it becomes so that you paint yourself with Picasso’s Blue, and instead of taking itself apart and mixing with the cosmic dance, your body just gives a slight phase-twitch in time and returns to normal. You can remember how it used to be, but you can never get back there. It must be terrible.”
There was no malice in Teres’ manner, but no sympathy either. Looking at her, Kalypso felt even more so than with Neko that Teres was no kindred to her. Ganesh, Kalypso thought, feels more human than this on a good day. This led to an odd thought.
“Wait a sec. What do you mean, you make it?”
“That,” Teres whispered in her ear, “is what you’re about to witness.”
It was the first voice other than her own that she’d heard in days, and stripped of tonality, it made her shiver. Kalypso shrank away.
Other boats were converging on them out of the mist. Kalypso counted five beside Neko and Teres. The Dead were a motley collection. Everything about them looked scavenged. The other pilots were also female, but most of them were slightly less thin than Neko. They all had white hair, but each of their headpieces had a unique design. Most obscured their faces.
There was a period of general confusion while the Dead were reunited with one another. The boat was jammed full: Kalypso had been long accustomed to having people’s hands and bodies pressing against her, but she felt claustrophobic now and on the verge of panicking. She got loose and pushed her way to the stern. Teres was still there.
“You were interfaced,” Kalypso said to her.
“And so will you be, once we get things under way.”
“Are you saying Ganesh knows about this? About Picasso’s Blue?”
“That’s what I’m saying. We keep all our Sieng data in Earth Archives. It’s too complicated for a simple navigation computer to swallow.”
“Sieng data?”
Teres nodded in the direction of the luma, as if it ought to be obvious.
Kalypso inspected the luma more Carefully, and this time noticed a large mass suspended inside the translucent cylinder. “It looks like a cocoon,” she said, taking out her u-tool and switching on the handlight.
What she was looking at had once been a human being, curled in the fetal position. Now the body bloomed with colonial unicellulars.
She staggered back. Hands curled around her, smoothed her skin; she turned in their grasp, shaking them off only to feel them replaced by several other sets of hands. She had suddenly become the focus of attention, and the Dead passed her around among them like a pack of dogs, examining her. Every bit of space in the boat was full: there was nowhere to hide. Finally Kalypso crumpled to the bottom of the boat and huddled there, hiding her face. Then, just as quickly as they’d shown an interest in her, they left her alone. An attitude of ritual had set in. Working with coordination worthy of a well-integrated cluster, the Dead began altering the configuration of the boat. Up went the scaffolding and the weatherstained plastic canopy with its faint growths of luminous indigenes. A mad system of vents and hoses went into operation, drawing out poison and in purified air from each of the tethered boats. The whole structure shook and rattled in the wind, but apparently did not leak.
Kalypso crawled once again to the stern and pressed against the warm luma. It held a static charge and her fingertips sparked when she touched it.
The Dead took off their masks and hoods and other hybrid contraptions and
seated themselves, their mingled bodies fitting together like machinery. The sight and feel of this menage of limbs was not in itself orgiastic. But there was something extraordinary happening to their faces. What had been blank and still as granite now melted to flesh and skin: lips parted, throats exposed themselves and eyelids lay heavy and dark. Each face changed, the staircase of its own history winding down behind it to reveal the complex personality behind the anonymous tough bastard. This wasn’t exactly sexy, but it was something to see.
And it made no sense how — drifting low in this boat with its macabre burden under a black sky on a yellow sea—how they all reeked of Earth.
Tense and slightly sick to her stomach, Kalypso watched Neko draw still more fluid from the vial attached to Sieng’s luma. She poured it carefully onto a thin, concave disk.
“You will have to interface now, Kalypso,” she said. “This is a painful process for us. We need the Earth Archives to hold our awareness.”
Dread-laden anticipation hummed through the funeral boat. Kalypso tried to assimilate the fact that she was expected to be able to dish up Earth Archives as a kind of anesthetic, and couldn’t. But she accepted the sedative Neko gave her, because there was nothing else she could do.
“We know our way around the Archives,” Neko added. “Keep out the noise for us, at least. If there are places we can’t go because of the damage, we can accept that. But we must have a clean immersion in Earth. It’s essential.”
Kalypso felt herself nodding. This was insane. She hadn’t repaired anything. She could shotgun them, of course—but where? They might not even be able to interface. Yet she did nothing to express this.
In the very bottom of the boat Teres sat, head bowed, arms clasped about her knees. Her shoulder blades and spine were sharp with hunger. Neko gave her the fluid-laden disk and a very fine paintbrush. Teres looked at them, slipped a temperature gauge into the fluid, waited.
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