She caught enough of the exchange to begin to worry.
“I’m almost there. I have processed all the studies. Now I must apply them. She will be the last thing.”
“No. Absolutely not.”
Marcsson outweighed Neko by about forty kilos, Kalypso wagered.
“This is more important than Picasso’s Blue. It’s more important than you or any of your comrades. I’ll have it, Neko.”
He moved fast, and the boat shuddered, unsteady because the magnetism binding the two boats had repelled the luma and left thin water beneath. Kalypso grabbed a piece of Sieng’s equipment for balance as he reached the stern, where Sieng was, and the boat tipped wildly. Neko was rummaging in a storage area.
Marcsson took his u-tool and began degaussing the luma.
“Don’t cross me,” he said. “She belongs to me now.”
Neko had found a navigating pole and now pointed it at Marcsson. He grabbed the tip and shoved it aside, only to be smacked across the shoulders with it as it rebounded. The u-tool fell and skidded along the deck; Neko seized it and came at him, extending the blade. He stepped aside as if holding a door open for her and grabbed her arm to control the weapon, but the u-tool slashed into the luma column. Murky fluid gushed out.
Neko stood still, her hand going to her mouth in shock. The luma stack wavered, its integrity compromised by the combination of disturbed magnetism and the physical cut. Marcsson reached through the slit and a gelatinous mass spilled into his arms. It was still recognizably human, despite the growing things that had made a home of its structure. Sieng’s body was carnival-bright.
When Marcsson turned, his face transfigured by awe, Neko raised the u-tool again. He dropped the corpse, which sprawled gleaming and horrible on the desk. Kalypso couldn’t take her eyes off it.
She felt the boat shift and wobble. When she looked away from Sieng, Marcsson had knocked Neko down. He knelt on her chest, tugged away the air hoses, ripped away the collection bag and filters for good measure, and threw her mask aside. Neko’s bare face met the light, eyes wide with panic.
Marcsson didn’t have to do much. He held her arms down easily. Neko’s twisting grew feebler.
Kalypso did nothing. A little tune ricocheted from one side of her head to the other. After a while she identified it as “Equinox.” She looked at the corpse again.
Marcsson sat back, distracted. He turned and studied the scattered pieces of tubing and hardware from the luma that had held Sieng.
“That’s too bad,” he muttered. “Shouldn’t have done that. Stupid. Stupid.”
He stood up and crossed back to his own boat. Kalypso crawled to Neko and put the mask back on her head. She couldn’t tell whether Neko was still breathing. Her guess would have been no.
Marcsson came back carrying hardware and collection equipment. He set it down, picked up Neko, and conveyed her to the other boat. When he returned, he went to the helm and Sieng’s boat began moving. He then devoted his attention to Sieng’s body, talking to Kalypso without looking at her. He continued to interface.
“Are you all right? I have a great deal of work to do but if you’re injured in any way you must tell me. We have some medical supplies.” He paused for her answer, panting slightly in his efforts to confine the corpse beneath the helm.
She looked at his hands on the brilliantly colored dead forearms, which oozed.
“You seem healthy enough,” he said eventually. “I will have to ration your air. It’s nothing personal. I want you to understand that if you can.”
Kalypso couldn’t respond. Sieng’s intestines were bound in an indigenous daffodil-yellow cobweb; this didn’t prevent them from inching steadily across the bottom of the boat as it vibrated with motion. The keel glided in syrup, penetrating the forms that scrolled and pivoted beneath, the life and death of things without apparent center. Kalypso watched the sky roll into itself behind Marcsson’s head. She could see his mouth but not his eyes. His mouth was slightly open.
She was stuck. There was nothing she could do. She had lost the conviction needed to lift even one finger.
She saw the illuminated helm with its radio. She was probably looking at it the way Neko had looked at her.
The landscape seeps into the mind and makes maps in its own image. Kalypso knows this all too well: in a Dream you project your mind outwardly, but this, now is just the other end of the same process. The world seeps in and tells you what and how to think, to be. Everything you do is a response to it.
But this is a world derived on different principles than anything your body knows. You haven’t evolved with this place. You are not of it, nor it of you. How deep into structure do you have to go to arrive at a common ground? For there is no membrane here keeping you away from It. There is no Ganesh to run interference, no Works, no cluster. There’s only a sculpted curve of plastic sourced deep in Earth’s history and formed by your species’ habits of mind. There’s only this boat, itself partly indigenous and therefore suspect, keeping you from falling far far far from yourself, to a place where nothing understands you and you are so far out of context as not even to qualify as flotsam.
It was possible that she was in a state of shock, Kalypso observed. She was exhausted: that much was certain. Animal instinct must be taking over, because she made no attempt to do anything. She curled up amid the ruined luma, some of which stuck to the outside of her suit, and allowed the hum of the boat’s engines to lull her to sleep.
She woke with a jerk when Marcsson kicked her. Nearby he slouched slack-jawed, his suit barely registering respiration. He was deep in interface, trapped in a fugue of some kind. His body twitched violently.
Kalypso’s skin felt slick, and there was a strange smell. The canopy was up and the bottom of the boat was flooded with spilled luma. Sieng’s body itself had been removed.
She realized she wasn’t wearing her suit. It was nowhere to be seen. Her hand went to her bare throat.
She looked for it everywhere. Twice. It was gone.
The luma disgusted her; she tried to get it off herself, plagued with a sudden bout of psychosomatic itching. She thought about what was touching her and nearly retched.
Marcsson sat up, suddenly alert. Kalypso collected herself, made herself breathe regularly, focused. This was important. She positioned herself across from the Grunt and looked him in the interface.
“Tell me what you did to my suit.” She kept her voice level and reasonable, as if they were sitting over bowls of hot cereal at breakfast in rem2ram after a long night of work, he putting her to sleep with a description of the antics of his subs, she wondering how he could not notice. As if they weren’t sitting on brilliant orange water, dragged by a thermal current, in a boat that muttered and sang with every temperature change as it self-adjusted. The sky moved fast and flat, dark in some places and darker in others.
Marcsson stretched and yawned. She pressed her face against her knees. Her skin was disgusting. Her own smell offended her.
“Please can I have my suit back. There’s nowhere I can go. I can’t breathe on my own. I don’t even really know where we are.”
“I’m sorry. I can’t give it back. I couldn’t have used Neko; she would be a dead end. I need your skin.”
There’s nothing to say to this, is there?
“Sieng is using your suit,” he added after a while. “There isn’t enough room in the cockpit for all three of us, because I’m going to need to spread out my gel sheets to finish compiling. So I had to put her out on deck, and without the suit she’ll become contaminated. I can’t afford that. Besides, I don’t trust you.”
“You don’t trust me?”
“I don’t like the way you’re looking at me. I think the Wild may be getting to you. Possibly you’re a danger to yourself and others. You’ll be perfectly safe as long as you stay under the canopy.”
She couldn’t answer this. It was 90 degrees away from making sense.
“Why can’t we go back to First?” Kalypso
pleaded with him. “All anybody wants is to get Ganesh running again. It can’t work, staying out here. No one will punish you, and sooner or later you’ll have to return, anyway.”
But he paid her no attention, such that she began to wonder if she was there. on a rational level, she knew he was profoundly disturbed—damaged in some way. Yet his will was stronger than hers. He was so forceful, so convinced of himself, that it was easier to go along with him than to maintain a posture of detachment. She began to accept his behavior.
She told herself that although she was physically his captive, her mind was her own. She instructed herself that she could be strong; could retain a sense of herself.
This of course was untrue.
Somebody had changed the rules out from under her. They never warn you when they’re going to do this; it just happens and you have to unravel it for yourself.
Time moved slowly in the wild, she was unable to interface, though she never stopped trying. Marcsson stayed with Kalypso under the canopy for three days while he taught her the procedures she was to use in processing the data he was collecting from Sieng’s body.
“I need you to be my eyes,” he said. “I have a defect in my vision at close range. It’s uncorrectable. You will be doing the fine detail work.”
She became inured to his constant presence. He made her memorize the chemical ratios associated with a whole slew of sub-species. He taught her counting techniques and categorization; he taught her how to plug data into various formulas he’d devised. Sometimes he talked theory, most of which she didn’t understand so she nodded a lot and tried to stay awake. She only remembered the bits that didn’t make sense. They stuck in her mind and chafed like sand in an oyster.
“There’s a language in disease,” he instructed her. “When a bacterial agent infects you, it takes apart your structure and replaces it with its own. To do this successfully, it must understand and be able to exploit your unique features: it must know you. It must know how to speak to you, to give the instructions that will benefit it, and destroy you.”
“Understand? Know? Language?” Indignation roused her from a chronic semistupor. “Azamat, we’re talking about prokaryotes here.”
“That doesn’t mean they can’t have language, which is simply a way of codifying history, recombining and recalling it. You’re thinking in terms of organisms again. You know why I took data from the clayfields? Because there’s fossilized evidence there going back millions of years. Understanding how the System organizes itself can only occur by looking across time. To see how this coevolution developed. We don’t witness this exchange of genetic material in terrestrial ecosystems. We don’t see the blurring of the concept of species, and we need to find out how it could arise. It couldn’t have always been this complex. It must have once been simpler. And I must. . .” He had begun to breathe hard, although as he spoke he was doing nothing more strenuous than administering tiny amounts of tracer to luma cells under the microscope. “I must know my enemy. Here. Look at that and tell me exactly what you see.”
His face was flushed. She thought of Sieng’s corpse, looked into the microscope, and began reading off counts. After a while she tried to communicate again.
“So . . . when you compile all this information. How long will this take?”
“I’ve been working on the problem for twenty years. I’m not close to being finished. But I’m starting to get inklings.”
“What will you do with it all?”
“I’ll be in a position,” Azamat said, “to infect the System. I’m learning its chemical language. So I can instruct it to do as I say.”
“To make oxygen, you mean? To balance the atmosphere?”
“I’ll hunt it down,” he said dreamily. His fingers and legs twitched rhythmically.
“What happened in Alien Life, Azamat? You were in the Core. I remember some of it, but I couldn’t—I couldn’t understand it, I couldn’t stand it, actually. What were you doing?”
“Recite for me the exact sequence of procedures for isolating dipirolinic acid from flagrare sub 19 at a temperature of 113.”
It was as clear a change of subject as could be. Kalypso tried to summon her scattered concentration to answer the question.
“You’re making me into a walking technical manual,” she griped.
“You have a long way to go before that happens,” he said with a faint smile.
She had begun to get the feeling that he liked her.
She found herself trying harder to be smart. This disturbed her, but she couldn’t seem to stop. Without appearing to try, he was crafting her to his will.
When it finally came, the prospect of being left alone in the boat caught her unprepared. Marcsson said, “I am going outside to be with Sieng. Touch my supplies at your own risk. Touch the helm and I’ll know about it. Touch my work and it will mean your life. Understand?”
“I understand.”
“Who owns the air?”
“You do,” she said fervently.
“Good. It’s more true than you know.”
After that, he began spending some time every day on deck. While he was gone, he left work for her to do, recording population statistics. While he was inside, he ordered her around like a galley slave, but the airmix in the canopy kept her alive, and when she did well he sometimes sat and talked to her. When he checked her work, his hands and eyes moved robotically over the studies. He was never out of interface, and he was never farther than six inches from the inert radio. Kalypso kept her eyes averted, but she coveted it.
She learned how to use certain chemicals to attract and repel various strains of v. flagrare; this got to be kind of fun once she had the hang of it, and sometimes when he wasn’t around she played with the colony samples he had collected and was growing in proto-luma. Most of them could be easily differentiated by color and texture, and she learned to make abstract, moving paintings with them, using different additives to move each color where she wanted it. There was a good chance that lightheadedness caused by impure airmix contributed to the amusement factor of this activity. Or maybe it was just a little piece of her old self asserting its survival, reveling in insubordination. Sometimes she couldn’t remember the procedures. Sometimes she made mistakes and fudged the results.
There were also times when Marcsson hovered over her and watched everything she did. She tried hard to draw on her memory of Liet’s subconscious to help her not fuck up. In her mind’s eye she could see Liet bent over a tray of gel, aligning an irregular grid of green light over the fluid. She had the idea that Liet was establishing migration patterns for a helper series, whatever that was exactly. There were some equations vaguely associated with what Liet was doing, but Kalypso hadn’t been able to absorb them at the time of the Dream and certainly couldn’t recall them now. She had a thin sense of Liet’s mental process, though: it was familiar and comforting. Liet could think like a snake: pure economy of movement, devastating simplicity. Speed.
Think like Liet. Think like Liet.
Easier said than done. But either she got this work done right, or she didn’t breathe. She steadied her hand and began to suck up the gel. Very. Very. Carefully.
on this occasion, she got it wrong. Marcsson could get mean at times like this, but never in a straightforward way.
“If I bend your hand back like this”— he demonstrated, and she cried out—“I can discover by your reaction that it wasn’t meant to bend that way. I can try to teach it to bend that way” — he did it again, harder — “by repeating this action—and again— but in the end I’ll, just break the joint.”
She was hissing and sobbing with pain. There was no malice in him, which frightened her.
“Just shut up! Stop talking! Let me go.”
“Yes,” he said. He read her face and nodded thoughtfully. “That’s exactly how it is. Only worse. This is what I go through every moment of every day. Now you understand why I fuck you up, and will continue to fuck you up for as long as you persist
in being unable or unwilling to correctly catalog the diagonal disinfinity loop of the sub 19 v. flagrare. It is very simple. See? Use the Diriangen function, enter the gel sheet readings line by line, plot the time, and store.”
His blue stare raked her to see whether she accepted what he was saying. She learned to nod rapidly and make eye contact. It was easier that way.
During this time she focused all her efforts on getting to the radio. She was able to monitor the channels with her interface, so she knew that the Dead had reached First and were in discussions with the witch doctors; that the Grunts were impatient; and that the Mothers had not gotten their Picasso’s Blue after all. Not yet, anyway. But hearing all this only created frustration when she was unable to transmit: she couldn’t do this via interface, and she was afraid Marcsson would hear her if she used the boat’s radio. The first couple of times he left her alone she didn’t dare do anything other than follow instructions. After all, he was only a few meters away, prone to returning unexpectedly — and she’d seen his easy violence. Eventually, though, the radio grew in her mind until it occupied almost everything and it was all she could see or think about, even when it was behind her back and she was in the middle of some other activity.
It was daylight outside. She could see a reddish color in the water outside, but nothing more definite. She had not been out of the canopy in days. Marcsson left. Kalypso had entered a heightened state of awareness. She felt unbalanced and tingly.
The wavering outline of his figure up above. She inched toward the helm, convinced Marcsson could somehow see and feel her disobedience. He was working away pretending not to notice her, but he knew. He knew. She touched the console, its casing as pristine as if it had just come from the terran factory.
Be rational, she told herself.
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