“One of the witch doctors wants to talk to you. From First.”
This flustered him. Kalypso edged away from the radio.
“Azamat? Azamat, it’s Tehar,” squawked the radio. “Come and talk. Come on, please.”
Marcsson stood there for long moments while Tehar patiently repeated his exhortations. Finally he stepped up to the console.
“Marcsson here.”
“Thank you. Thank you. All right, can you tell me what you were using to encrypt your data, Azamat? There seems to be a logic bug in the Core.”
“It’s too soon to discuss this,” Marcsson said. “I’m not ready.”
He sounded so normal. Kalypso fumed, realizing Tehar must be thinking she was the crazy one.
“We don’t have much time,” Tehar said. “Whatever work you’re doing out there, you’re going to need Ganesh to interpret it for you, and Ganesh is in big trouble. You don’t want to be stuck, I’m sure.”
“I don’t have to tell you that there’s no such thing as information. It isn’t passive.”
“Yes, we’re seeing that now. The luma—”
Marcsson chuckled. “The luma. They said, ‘Oh, Ganesh can use the luma as a storage system. The root directives won’t change, because the luma will just be storage, like a big data warehouse.’ Right? Isn’t that what they said? Ah, I forget you’re too young to remember.”
“We can see there’s activity in the luma,” Tehar conceded.
“You know what she did, don’t you? Trust Sieng to notice that the Wild was reacting to the slops we threw into it. So she started playing around with her own shit. It’s true. Her first series was done with e. coli. She kept introducing them to the luma until something stuck. After a while, she got an RNA exchange between e. coli and the indigenous subs in the luma. A nice hybrid. Nothing tricky, but she started making population studies of the way the luma worked, started playing around with temperature and magnetism. She had a gift for playing. Nothing deliberate about Sieng, I can tell you. You could never see her logic, and there was never any formal evidence of her thinking.”
“As fascinating as this is,” Tehar cut in, “right now we’re preoccupied with a critical—”
“So it was kind of like Fleming’s apocryphal sneeze. Some gut cells got mixed up with some of the samples and were subsumed in the luma as well. This was the first interaction of eukaryotes and the indigenes. And something really interesting happened. The hybrid began to construct lattices around the gut cells, making homes for them in the luma chambers. And the luma itself started firing electrical and magnetic signals at the gut cells. The mechanism behind this was unknown to Sieng. She kept saying, ‘What! if it’s a DNA scavenger? What if it’s a homeostatic system with no DNA of its own, which somehow by virtue of its effectiveness in supporting its members, always manages to get reproduced and built anyway.’ ”
“I don’t follow you,” Tehar said in a strained voice.
“A system of heat and chemo-receptive membranes regulated non-centrally. Thousands of biogenic contributors who can be sporulated at intolerable temperatures, who can spur each other on in a metabolic battle. It’s a whole ecosystem, but it plays by different rules. Rules we’ll never understand.”
“System theory is all very well, but—”
“What nobody appreciated is that Sieng never look for an answer. She was going to rub up against this thing no matter what. She kept looking for intermediates — something that wasn’t an organism independent of the System, but still able to predictably interact with terrestrial organisms. She knew that the basic chemical rules are the same here as on Earth, she knew her physics and her statistics, so it was a question of finding a common ground in the genetics. The thing she failed to take into account was the predacious nature of all sophisticated life. Or maybe she knew. Maybe she knew that the mix she was making was bound to explode.” His eyes went to Sieng.
“Marcsson, are you telling me you’ve been trying to repeat Sieng’s work?”
The Grunt shook himself slightly. His hands stopped drumming.
“No. Not repeat. Organize. She was sloppy. That’s why she died. What kind of scientist experiments on herself? A mad one, that’s what. All I ever wanted to do was take her work and make it usable.”
Tehar said, “Was it her data you pulled from the Earth Archives?”
Marcsson snapped his fingers. “Bingo. The Dead hid it there. They knew the secret for creating tissues that generate Picasso’s Blue was in there somewhere, and they didn’t want the Mothers getting hold of that.”
“Um . . .”
“I know, human nature’s fucked, right? Self-destructive on a larger scale. You kids are all we have.”
Kalypso, listening to all this, began to feel more and more peeved. Marcsson was capable of making sense. Why did she let him get away with this behavior? He was making an effort for Tehar. But maybe this was because Tehar was clearly able to follow what he was saying and respond in kind.
“Azamat? The thing is, you’re hitting the nail right on the head when you talk about predation. What I don’t think you realize is that Sieng’s stuff is eating Ganesh. Now that’s destructive. If I could just get some code, some way to make sense of what’s happening, don’t you see? I need you to help me understand the changes in Ganesh. We could do it through the Dreamer if that’s easier for you. I know you’ve been Dreaming because you leave traces behind.”
There was a long silence. Kalypso held her breath.
“Ganesh has a fever. It’s burning,” said Marcsson, “I am Dreaming in smoke. You touch the fire and you’re dead. It’s that simple. No, I don’t think I can do anything for you at this time. If I were you I’d get out of First.”
He cut the signal. He sank to the deck, slack-jawed, glassy.
“I can’t go on much longer,” he murmured. “Don’t know if I can keep a hold.”
He fugued before she could answer.
After this, Marcsson was too quiet. It had bee some time since he’d done her any injury, or threatened her. Or even noticed her. It was getting harder and harder to know when he was conscious and when he was interfacing and when he was in a fugue. Once he started interfacing in the middle of a procedure. He froze with one hand reaching for a collection fil. For several minutes he didn’t move.
Kalypso covertly turned up the oxygen in the air-mix. He played statue.
She breathed deep. Got to her feet. Stepped over Sieng’s body. Reached into his pocket. Slipped the interface away from him. Went as far away from his as the confines of the boat would permit.
She put on her face.
She wasn’t sleepy and had to use a long, complicated counting sequence to induce herself. At the beginning of the Dream she felt a flash of hope because Ganesh seemed better. She had been sent straight to her home beach. Alien Life was obscured by a black, putrid fog. It was hot.
Ganesh are you there? Don’t tease me. Don’t play me. I have to know.
Silence. Scattered across the sand was a collection of objects, none of them drawn to scale. A huge, dead moth lay like a kite on the wet shore, waves turning its wings to tissue, while nearby a tiny replica of the Taj Mahal sat fist-sized and perfect, gleaming. She recognized the objects from Tehar’s subconscious: they were his symbols. She felt a pang, looking at them.
How did they get on her beach, though?
His was an ordered world. She picked up a primitive wooden and metal vise grip, a thing reeking of Earth. If she opened it and went inside, she would touch something of Tehar’s worldview. In Tehar’s belief, things could be explained if you looked long and hard enough, broke them down far enough, persisted in hurling yourself against them. Faith in your own symmetry gave you the power to break the asymmetries of the world.
She knew instinctively that if she touched Tehar now, in this way, she would end up hurting him. The realization came as a shock. Although they were the same age, he had always acted older. He had always assumed a certain superior position. He was
always one step ahead of her, impossible to surprise. It had never before occurred to her that she was capable of doing anything much to affect Tehar; now, suddenly, she perceived him as perishable. She’d gotten in the habit of looking to him for rescue: that was ostensibly why she was in the Dreamer, trying to make contact. But now that she was here, she realized she no longer was acting on Tehar’s orders, or even with the cluster’s goals in mind. She didn’t know why she was doing what she did. Since she’d left First behind, she no longer grasped the causality behind her own actions.
The tide was going out. She opened the vise grip and Ganesh obligingly reeled out the primitive Dream the witch doctor had coded for her. All Kalypso could think was that it must have taken him days to build this. She was touched.
Tehar was whispering against her scalp. His lips nudged her bare temple. Pictures formed when he spoke.
“They’re taking First apart. If you sit at the top ill the Dome at night, you can see them clearest. Their boats carve dark paths through the glowing algaics; they cast lines onto the feet and swarm up the legs. For the first few nights, you observe no noticeable effects of their pilfering. You figure that they’re seeking nourishment, supplies, materials for survival: they’re doing what is necessary.
“But then you start to notice that entire panels of luma are missing. Hardware units from the original ship disappear from the conceptual map when you are working in Ganesh. They’re dismantling the station. And they seem to know exactly what they’re doing.
“It’s a big place, and it’s not going to go down overnight, but you find yourself wondering what’s going on, that all this is happening and the Mothers do nothing to stop it. We can’t last long if we scavenge our own station.
“You haven’t heard from the Mothers in a long lime. You don’t have time to monitor the radios for more than a couple of hours a day because you’re in Ganesh most of the time, or sleeping except sleep doesn’t seem to help. You watch them night after night, and one night you notice there’s something strange about their boats. And the way they move doesn’t look quite right.
“Then you start noticing all kinds of details, and when you put them together you realize they can’t be any cluster you know. You’ve never seen these people before. And it scares you. Kalypso, I don’t know if I can trust what I see. Ganesh berked Marcsson. I think it might berk me, too. All I do is study code. I don’t Dream. I’m not that stupid. But I think I might be berking. Who are these people dismantling the station? Are they metaphorical?
“You’re trying to hold too many things in your head. Sometimes you think you hear Ganesh whispering to you; but that must be the solitude. There are half a dozen other witch doctors spread around First, but you seldom contact them except in the form of abstractions through the interface. You’re not used to being alone. Never thought it would bother you, but it does.
“They found Jianni’s body. His suit had been taken. What’s going on here? Sometimes Ganesh shuts down radio and you can’t even get through to Oxygen 2. Have they all gone mad? Are you still there, Kalypso? You don’t sound like yourself anymore. When we spoke I. . .
“Kalypso, the taste of you. It’s not fair to think that, but there’s no controlling it.”
She cried out, rolled to try to touch him, but there were no more tactile suggestions—he must have run out of energy. The words continued.
“I can only hope you’ll be able to interface and get this message. Ganesh has kept most of your node alive. I don’t know why. Maybe it just likes you. We’ve lost so much; it’s all encrypting at an unbelievable rate. The structure’s starting to break down. I don’t know how much longer we can stay. Sooner or later the Mothers are going to lose control of the Grunts and they’ll come shut down the reflexes. Or another thermal could come. Please, Kalypso. You’ve got to get Marcsson in here. I know he interfaces because I’ve seen his footprints, but I can’t catch him. He’s too quick and nocturnal. He has ways of getting into Earth Archives that we can’t follow.
“We’re running out of time. Be careful Dreaming.”
He was gone. Her subconscious vainly tried to shape the memory of him into a natural dream, to give herself the sensation of his body against hers, his breathing marking time; but every time she almost had a piece of him he turned into the Dead with their hard-supple skin and she finally jerked awake, revulsed.
Marcsson was holding her interface. Absent-mindedly he put it in a utility pocket of his suit. He said, “It’s time to begin. Give me your wrist.”
He moved to straddle her, grasping her left arm where she lay and wedging it between his knees. She was too sleepy to protest, and he was talking for a little while before she really took in what was happening.
As he spoke, he swabbed her arm with local anesthetic. He didn’t talk to her face, but to her skin. He held her arm right up to his eyes as if trying to examine it minutely, but kept blinking and shaking his head.
“Damned eyes. Ruined my career. Well, I’m going to start with what’s handy, and once we build the luma, we can alter the subs to our choosing. So your skin can be an oxygen factory if you want. Or you can make Picasso’s Blue, or any number of other things, with the correct stimulation. The Dead are programmed only for Picasso’s Blue, but that’s because Sieng was only getting started them. She’s much more evolved now. As I read you and she reads me we’re really going to have a ball game here.”
He paused and grasped the scalpel.
“No! Wait, I’m sorry, OK? I’ll stay out of interface. I promise. I swear. Put the knife away!”
“The first step, of course, will be building the luma. This is the critical stage.”
“You’re not cutting me!” she blurted. “Hey. Get off.”
She began squirming and found herself neatly restrained.
“Don’t wreck this,” he said sternly. “It’s very important. I’ve spent a long time preparing for it. Be still, or I’ll hurt you. Badly.”
She went limp. She looked at the knife and thought she was likely to get hurt, badly, anyway but when it cut her she felt nothing. Marcsson incised a wavering rectangle in the skin of the inside of her forearm. Under the black there was a brightness of blood. She sat with her right hand clamped around her arm while he dangled the rectangle from a pair of tweezers and transferred it to an empty gel sheet. Then he sprayed the pink patch where her skin had been with fluid from a small atomizer.
“Good,” he said. “When the anesthetic wears off, it’s going to sting.”
Then he turned to the gel trays and began working on the skin he’d cut off her. She watched him for a long time. Then the fever set in. It didn’t take long at all. Soon her teeth were chattering. He gave her water and nodded approval. Then returned to work.
“Azamat,” she said abruptly. “Azamat please talk to me. Say anything. Please.”
He said, “You get a sky color based on blue-green algae and all it implies. Somewhere under the earth there are roots and nitrogen nodules. This is a special interaction, a kind of ecological linchpin. We can simulate it here but it’s unlikely ever to catch on. The sun isn’t important enough.”
“Never mind,” she said. “You’re depressing me.”
He looked over his shoulder, surprised. “Why?”
Kalypso licked her lips. His expression was almost normal, as if they were simply doing labwork and talking. As if he were still dull old Marcsson.
“I don’t know,” she answered hesitantly.
“Because of the sun,” he said, holding a tiny blob of Sieng’s lung up to a white lamp. “The sun you’ll never see. What’s the matter?”
She couldn’t speak it. She shook her head.
“None of them would ever believe this,” he said, nodding hard as if this would make his words true. “My teachers, my colleagues. ‘But he was so quiet!’ they’d say. ‘Who ever would have thought?’ You, too, Sieng. You never even saw me. I might have been a janitor at the opera house and you the diva.”
“Please,�
� Kalypso signed, saving oxygen. “I don’t want to know this—”
His voice was calm and quiet. “They weren’t wrong, either. I was everything they thought. But now. I don’t know what I am now.”
He was looking at her directly. All the questions she had wanted to ask; all her attempts to understand, back at First when he’d begun this berk—she couldn’t ask them anymore. In fact, she now actively didn’t want to know the answers. She turned away.
Later he fugued. She’d grown bold after this display of vulnerability on his part. She stole back her interface.
Bricks again. More of them. The structure was starting to look like an aqueduct or bridge; it had been built high and arching, and the foundations vanished in a luma soup that shifted if you tried to look at it directly. She didn’t.
Though she was Dreaming, she was simultaneously conscious of lying in Neko’s boat, and when she set foot on the unfinished bridge, her toes and then feet became the sound on the witch doctor radio channel. The sound progressed up her ankles and calves as Kalypso set out across the partially completed span. It bewitched her and bent her senses. For a moment she became convinced it wasn’t sound, it was heat: thermals that moved in her body, and made her skin change color. She looked down and saw the wheelbarrow far below, submerged in the luma. Floating on the surface was a rusted sign. It said: Sieng 2 miles. There were bodies down there, too: bright bodies floating like Sieng’s, like insects in amber. From deep in the luma came light. Marcsson’s talk of sun must be affecting her.
Light flooded the Dream. Bare sun the likes of which she’d never seen lanced and subdued her eyes. She heard birdsong.
But it was only Marcsson, shining a penlight in her pupils.
“The fever has you, too,” he said. “I can see it in the interface.”
She didn’t know what he meant by that, but she was grateful that he merely pocketed her interface without comment—or violence. He went back to the fugue soon afterward, and she made herself stand and go to the radio. She was getting pretty good at the controls now: she congratulated herself for having figured out how to lower the volume. She set her ear to the speaker and listened to a fuzzy voice.
Dreaming in Smoke Page 20