She couldn’t move, or he would tie her and she couldn’t stand that. She didn’t know what to do other than survive. All that was ever needed was more. More. More. Because it’s never going to be enough. You catch yourself up every so often, thinking, surely I can’t go any further. It’s crazy to press on.
But where are you? In a grayness that will have you, make you become like it, if you stay too long in one place. So you draw on the dregs of yourself, resigned to disappointment as you are constantly reminded of how fucking little you’ve really got going for yourself. How limited are your resources.
But they never seem to quite run out, either, which prevents you from giving up. You scrape along, teeth clenched, devoid of finesse, but alive.
Things too small to see eat your cells. You accomplish nothing, but refuse to die.
And the pain, at last, begins to abate.
Marcsson says, “The next stage. Good. We’re making progress.” He opens Sieng’s bag and reverently touches a dead hand. “Sieng. Sieng. If only you knew what you are.”
That’s when you decide: if you’re dying anyway, you might as well kill him.
The logic’s slightly dodgy, but under the cirx you can’t really be blamed for that, can you?
ESKIMO FOR SNOW
“WHY WON’T YOU GIVE MY INTERFACE back?”
She said it for the hundredth time, no longer expecting a response.
It was just another moment in a rotting pile of moments, none of them offering any hope of relief. For twenty minutes, through a gap in the cloud cover, the night was clear. Stars arrived. They were sitting back-to-back in the cockpit, the canopy lowered to reveal a view of the sky; he passed her his mask every so often so she could breathe. Parts of her body had become windows that let in bright color, but she just pretended she was wearing clothes.
She felt his voice rumbling through her ribs. She was no longer perturbed when his responses failed to relate to anything she’d said.
“Language determines the size and shape of reality. We have words for the things we consider important. The case could be made that if there’s no word for it, it doesn’t exist for us.”
Pedantic, pedantic, pedantic. With the stars in the sky, even. Still, better that than the scalpel.
“The Inuit have dozens of words for snow. We have only one for love.”
Not so pedantic. She made herself smaller.
After a while he said, “Kalypso.”
The stars receded. She couldn’t sleep.
I’LL BE YOUR KRYPTONITE
MARCSSON HAD STOPPED CUTTING HER body open. He’d made her into a sampler of geometric shapes: parallelograms across her thighs, a triangle on her belly, and a couple of diamonds on her back. Some of these flaps of skin floated in luma, still dark but beginning to be luminous. Others had been reintroduced to their former locations.
She had survived the fever and the wounds didn’t hurt anymore, but they itched. They were growing over with something that was not skin. It didn’t resemble Neko’s carapace, nor anything she’d seen among the Dead. The colors were the same colors that dominated Sieng’s corpse; it wasn’t difficult to conclude that Marcsson was trying to “cross” her in some weird way with Sieng. She wondered if this meant she was going to die. But Sieng couldn’t be infectious, or Marcsson wouldn’t handle her so casually. Would he? Anyway, the infection that had killed Sieng was not the same as the agent that had been used to produced Picasso’s Blue.
Would she, too, become a farm for some agent? Marcsson studied her under the microscope for hours on end. He was still processing data.
“It’s a microcosm,” he said. “We have a match. We’re really getting somewhere at last.”
He didn’t actually seem malevolent at this point. In fact, life in the Wild had actually begun to get better. He treated her as a plant or other valuable, nonsentient resource. So she couldn’t say he drove her to it in any of the obvious ways.
Most likely the loss of her interface was at the root of her violence. She had been afraid of it while she had it, but it was an escape of sorts, as well as a link to something other than Marcsson. She stayed awake waiting for an opportunity to overcome him; this wakefulness in turn translated into an increase hatred and irrationality, an increased determination to destroy. She had nothing else to focus on, so she trained herself to remain awake deep in the night, and to listen for his breathing. In this way she learned to tell the difference between his fugue state and real, organic sleep. She knew that disturbing him from the fugue state was dangerous, but if she tried to kill him in his sleep and he woke up, she might be able to make some excuse that would placate him.
There were times when she passed into a haze of thought that resembled sleep but provided none of its restorative properties. At least Kalypso could detect none. She emerged from one such interlude with the apricot dawn light smiling all over the tentkit, the stones, the boat. The dull fire of it, defining Marcsson and the edges of her own skin, seemed macabre, or was that just her intention speaking to her eyes? He lay there like a human being, breathing as if he had a right to. She hated him. It would not be sufficient to disable him, or even to kill him. It would be necessary to annihilate him utterly.
She checked met. The temperatures outside were low enough to let her exit the boat without a suit. They were in almost neutral pH, with little current; the water itself was even within human tolerances. Perfect.
She had given much thought to weapons. There were none. The air itself was all she had. She let it out of the seals slowly, admitting airmix from the surface. There was a small store of oxygen in an emergency bladder — enough for several minutes’ careful use. She rigged this around her neck, sipping from it sparingly, and set about the task of getting her suit back.
Sieng was heavy, and hot, and repulsive to all sensibilities. The inside of the suit was stained with her and her limbs sprawled over Marcsson where he slept.
But Marcsson kept breathing, and breathing. Maybe he would stay this way forever; maybe he wouldn’t die at all. The air indicators outside showed lethal levels of CO. How could he not be succumbing?
Paranoia crammed itself upside down and sideways into every second until she was bursting with it. She had to do something. She sealed the slime-coated suit around herself and began setting it to process oxygen, still breathing from the emergency bladder Halfway through this process she became urgently convinced that Sieng had to go. Now.
She grasped the transformed tissues as best she could and dragged the corpse to the side of the boat heaving it up and over the edge. It did not go easily. The boat shifted as Sieng’s body slipped into the luma.
Azamat jerked and sat up.
“Something’s wrong,” he said. He wavered to his feet and fell against the console. “A leak . . .” He reached for his suit, saw it wasn’t where he’d left it and then turned numbing eyes on Kalypso. “Where’s Sieng?”
Kalypso pointed to the open seal. She wanted to see his face. She wanted him to suffer, and know she had done this to him. And then die. Nothing could ever give her pleasure, but this.
He reeled and caught the rim of the canopy as the edges of her vision started shrinking and she felt weak. She was running out of oxygen. Her suit has been reprogrammed.
With a resiliency he had no business having, Marcsson pulled himself against the console and powered the boat. It turned slowly and began going back the way it had come. He put a hand to his eyes.
“My suit.”
He’d never find it in time. They looked at each other. She could almost read his mind: he was rapidly weighing possible actions, seeking the economy of decision that would save his life.
Only it wouldn’t save his life.
“You want contact?” she taunted, taking another breath of the planet’s naked air. It smelled slightly odd but not deadly. “You want the big love? Yeah. OK, I’ll do that for you. I’ll be your finale. I’ll be your kryptonite.”
She shouldn’t have spoken; now she ha
d to reach for the oxygen bladder to draw a breath and he saw her do it. In a second he would take it from her and the tables would be turned—all because she had to gloat.
The boat accelerated. Act first—
Kalypso sprang up and threw herself at his knees. He fell back into the aperture of the seal, caught her hand and pulled her to the edge. She bit him. He let go and she slithered backward into the cockpit. The boat, which had been plowing through developing luma, now reached clear water, jerked, and surged ahead. Marcsson, half outside and half in, scrambled for a grip on the hull, failed. As he went down there was no emotion on his face — just a sharp, farouche concentration. Luma closed around him.
She could hear his screams dopplering into the distance as the moving vessel left him behind.
She reassembled the canopy with numb fingers. Monkey voices chattered in her head. She was not all right. Everything seemed dark, as if the day wouldn’t get any brighter no matter how much time passed. She got the suit working and lay still, utterly absorbed in the act of breathing. When at last her vision cleared, the sky was full of rare yellow light; like a van Gogh.
He had left the helm open. She changed course to retrace her route. She opened the canopy a crack and looked out.
It was a long time before she spotted the body. He was floating on his back like a seal. He had barely drifted. Sieng was only a few meters away.
She waited a long time. It was not as satisfying as she thought. How would she know when he was dead? And would the bodies sink?
She went back inside and pulled off the hood, shuddering. She could still smell him inside the boat. The air had been completely drained and replaced and she could still smell him, as if his essence permeated the very substance of the boat and now oozed out again to fill it, just as if he remained.
There was a pain in her side. Her eyes stung. She couldn’t see Marcsson through the canopy, but she knew he was still there. He was watching, with dead eyes, dead breath.
Noises. A high-pitched squeaking, like a rabbit being tortured by a cat. It was coming from her diaphragm and throat.
The boat barely drifted. The colonial organisms in the water shifted and turned. Clouds moved. His body floated into view, slowly coming closer to the boat.
She opened the canopy again to look more closely. His face was blue. Violet algaics had attached themselves to his hair. She touched him. The suit told her his skin was hot, but she couldn’t feel for herself.
How much time? She had lost all sense of this, not even thought to check. By now she was crying so hard the hood fogged. She grabbed his foot and pulled. He bumped against the hull.
What are you doing. What. Don’t.
She attached a line to his foot, and then to a collection winch. She began turning the winch.
Don’t do this. Let it go. Let it
Marcsson came back over the side. The boat yawed and bobbed. She had to fold his body with her bare hands to get him through the seal. He lay in a pool of viscous fluid at the bottom of the cockpit.
She sat down and put the breathing mask over his face.
She couldn’t tell whether or not he was dead. She couldn’t know whether or not she wanted him to be. Her throat ached with sobbing. Objects around her began to move and stretch. Her hands and feet pulsed. She put the mask over her nose again and panted into it.
Radio sounded on her interface. A minute voice said, “This is Nocturne. We’re picking up your SOS. If there’s anybody out there, please identify yourselves.”
This meant something. She wasn’t sure quite what, but decided to stay still.
She was still crouching and sucking at the mask when her boat was boarded. People she once had known wrapped her up and carried her to another boat. She didn’t remember their names at first, and when they tried to feed her she was sick.
“Marcsson’s in respiratory failure,” she heard one of them say. “Get him oxygen immediately. Start resuscitation. Looks like atmosphere poisoning.”
“Kalypso? Can you hear me? We’ll call your cluster immediately. They’ve been insane with worry over you.”
She couldn’t speak.
“Her affect is very flat,” one of them said to the other. She remembered his name now. Van. Medical specialist.
“What happened to her? And where did that body come from?”
“Shh.”
They turned away and spoke in whispers. As if what they said could upset her.
DEEP-FRIED CALAMARI
“I’M AFRAID.”
“You’re safe now. You’re with us.”
Words: but they didn’t mean anything, not the way words could when they rose out of what was truly happening. Not the way the sky had meaning, or the sweep of the endless sea, or Marcsson’s stilled hands after he had been rendered unconscious and lost the ability to move them. She should do something. Speak. Move. Bring herself around.
“I can’t move.”
“You don’t have to do anything.” Sharia was holding Kalypso’s head in her lap. Kalypso’s eyes were closed but her body had made itself rigid and would not soften. As a result, the motion of the boat jolted her. She felt inanimate.
“You don’t have to do anything at all,” Sharia repeated. “We’ll take care of everything.”
Sharia loved this. Kalypso didn’t mind if her misery was the source of Sharia’s fulfillment: Sharia couldn’t help it if she needed to feel important. If she was in her glory, then more power to her, Kalypso thought.
They had bandaged her damaged skin. It struck her as a stupid gesture on their part and she wondered if they were afraid of contamination. Sharia had not hesitated to touch her. Sharia, in fact, was doing all she could to put her at ease. But Kalypso was beginning to feel that this paralysis wasn’t temporary. What if she could never move again? What if she could never ever bring herself to do anything? It was a possibility. She might rest, and lie still, and later continue to be unable to act. It could go on theoretically forever.
She pulled away from Sharia and stood up, bleary, uncertain. Clutching the frame of the canopy, she looked out across the Wild. She wasn’t being rescued at all. It was simply that Sharia and X had been teleported into her nightmare and now they, too, were doomed. She started to say something to them about this, to apologize, when she saw something that was not Wild. She saw something made by humans.
Oxygen 2 was several kilometers from First, removed from the worst turbulence of the Rift but still within the major current of heat that wound away from the volcanoes. It had been constructed out of an engine of Ganesh, a tall shell standing on end with its base submerged and a scribble of glowing Works enveloping its exterior as if the red ink of T’nane’s waters had reached up and tried to cross it out.
An agro baffle surrounded the factory at a radius of about 100 meters, acting as an effective thermal shield from the rocks below and a gas barrier from the air and water. Closer to the volcanoes than First, Oxygen 2 was in a more stable temperature zone than the station, and consequently the waters beneath the shield were green with life. Outside the baffle, though, the luma was highly developed: its pull on the hull of the boat was like the grip of a hand. As he steered toward the oxygen plant, Xiaxiang consulted a multitude of charts showing distribution of solidified luma, which had been known to damage boats on collision. It was rare for solid luma to push its way to the surface, but in shallower areas like this one, it sometimes actually formed structures reaching above the water. Kalypso saw the first of these in the gloaming of early morning: a translucent, amorphous mass rising from the glossy sea. It looked like a tumor. It looked like it might begin crawling around at any moment. It looked — in a diseased way — like a piece of First.
The waters around the factory were crowded with moored boats strung in a line outside the gate in the agro baffle.
“We have to go in by ferry,” Sharia said. “There isn’t room inside for so many boats; it’s all used for intensive farming.”
Kalypso nodded, which was all she
had been able to do, other than sit still, since Nocturne had transferred her to the boat of her own cluster. Instinctively, even Sharia knew it was best to talk simply, and of pragmatic things.
“We’ve been really lucky with thermals so far, being away from the Rift.”
“That’s why we’ve been low on power,” X offered. “We’ve had enough tempflux to get by, but we’ve needed to run the Works on maximum to get enough air and since all the adjustments have to be made by hand, nothing’s very efficient.”
Kalypso tried to picture this: human beings sitting in stations in the Works of Oxygen 2, talking to each other and looking at dials, throwing switches, spinning valve-wheels — clumsily trying to imitate the coordinated homeostatic response Ganesh’s demons could effect so easily.
“Remember Maxwell’s?” X said wryly, reading her mind. “Looks like we’re the demons now. What a joke. Although . . . the good news is, not all Ganesh’s higher functions are down. Yet.”
Sharia amended hastily, “Look, the higher functions aren’t really higher. We just call them that because of the way our cognition’s structured. Ganesh isn’t layered hierarchically that way.”
“Yeah, fair enough. But the point is, the witch doctors can talk to it, a little.”
Sharia shot X an admonitory look. “Don’t get your hopes up, Kalypso. They still have no control over environmental, but the last we heard from him, Tehar seemed to be getting some contact linguistically.”
“Tehar? When?”
“We haven’t actually had contact for a few days. But I’m sure he’s OK. He’s probably interfacing with the code.”
Marcsson was not on board. He must be dead. She shied away from thinking about him.
“The Dead,” Kalypso said. “Have you seen them? Tehar said they were looting the station.”
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