“Ganesh?”
I AM NOT HERE. I AM STILL SLEEPING.
“I’m talking to you. You’re moving through the station.”
I ALWAYS SLEEP WITH ONE EYE OPEN.
Loud, horrible, overwhelming sound filled the interface. Kalypso ripped off her hardware and clung to the side of the tube, breathing hard. She reeled from the physical blow of the noise. Her ears rang. She saw Liet’s lips move but couldn’t hear her voice. Liet, too, was staring at her interface in shock.
“What was that?” Liet said again.
Tehar took his interface off. He was pale. “Elephants,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”
They gained the caldera and ran slipping along the wet, curving surface, avoiding transit chutes, until they reached the exposed edge of the station. They could see the luma creeping up the nearest leg. Out near the farm cells, vertical stacks of luma were rising from the surface as if conveyed by elevators. First sat in the epicenter of a slow-turning kaleidoscope, with luma in all colors migrating like iron filings, attaching itself to the station. They could see one of the boats of the Dead, trapped by the quickly solidifying luma. As they watched it was raised up and carried along like a stone by a glacier.
“This can’t be happening,” Tehar said. “Set your faces for radio.”
“—you people need help?” It was Lassare at her most cantankerous. “I’m sending out a rescue party.”
“—ck off Lassare, I can handle it!”
“Ahmed, tell Kessel to take his head out of his ass and give me coordinates for a rendezvous. There’s a cool zone 5K west of Landing 6. I don’t think you’ll have sporulation there no matter what. There’s a natural—”
“Come on. Move it. Both of you.” Liet led the way over the side. They watched dumbly while she descended along the skin of the station, toward the moving fire of the well.
“—detouring to the southwest. There’s a pillar here at least ten boat lengths and growing—”
“—medical supplies? Burns among the Grunts.”
“Send Van if you can. Charl bit Kessel and he’s convinced it’s infected with the—”
Tehar pulled Kalypso’s interface off and took it away. Then he pulled her over the edge.
Their boat wasn’t yet trapped, but the channel of navigable fluid leading from the place they’d moored it was narrow and tortuous. Liet was talking on the radio when they arrived; no sooner had Tehar set foot on the deck than she gunned the engine and for the second time in her life, Kalypso found herself fleeing First with only moments to spare.
“We have to pick up Robere and some of his people. They took one of the Dead’s boats and got stranded on the luma. Here, Tehar. You take over. This isn’t my area.”
Liet left Tehar at the nav console and dropped to the back of the cockpit, where Kalypso was sitting with her chin resting on her folded hands, staring flabbergasted at the metamorphosis of the landscape around them. The channel in the luma grew deeper and deeper, so that translucent, glowing walls rose above them to either side. Lucent veils of colonials could be seen lying in planes within. Light also flared below, and streams of orange and yellow subs sledded in streams down the walls of the luma culvert.
“Clearly we need to take control again,” Naomi was saying on the boat’s radio speaker. “Teres, we will only be too happy to come to terms, but after the crisis, so if you could leave the heat converters and get the hell out of there with as many people as you can, I think you’ll be doing everybody a big favor.”
Wind eddied and roared.
“Is it a thermal?” Kalypso asked timidly.
Liet grabbed herself by the shoulders and squeezed as if to hold on to herself. “I . . . don’t think so. I never imagined it could move so much power around in such a coordinated way. . . . I mean, we know the power’s there, with all that heat. But I always figured we were talking about a data storage system, not an engine. . . .”
“What’s an engine?” asked Tehar, turning from the console for a second.
“The System, apparently.”
“Yeah,” Tehar laughed, steering to avoid a moving berg of luma. “No shit. There they are!”
Robere and his team were running along the top of the luma, slipping and sliding. They tumbled into the boat and Liet fell sobbing on Ahmed for a while, which he clearly enjoyed. He grabbed Kalypso by the ear and pulled her against him. Tehar made for clear water, out beyond the agro baffles. There was so much bickering on the radio that he turned it off.
“I guess you missed some of the reflexes,” Tehar said to Robere, who looked shellshocked.
“No,” Ahmed said, his voice vibrating through his ribs and into Kalypso’s skull. “I was there. We looked outside and all this was already starting to happen. Teres had somebody sitting on each reflex point—including Genn and Malik and all that lot. They pulled them all at the same time, and for a minute everything went down. Even radio. Then radio came back up, and the luma just kept moving. The sensor points came up spouting garbage. I opened up an access panel and the Earthmade circuitry had been eaten away. Replaced by luma.”
“I don’t believe you,” Kalypso heard herself saying. She buried her face against his body, wishing she could feel his heat but they were both wearing surface suits.
“You don’t have to believe me. Just open your eyes.”
Kalypso opened one eye. In the spaces between and around her fellow humans, it saw brilliant luma. She closed it again.
HAVE A CIGAR
THE NIGHT WAS LOUD. CLOUDS SKATED across the luma, driven by the screaming storm winds of atmospheric tempflux. Two seasons after the Integration of Ganesh with the System, gales continued to batter the colony as the luma altered its relationship with the planet’s inner fires, changing the gas balance, temperature, and pressure. Thermals continued to happen, but they seemed minor events in comparison with the continual met upsets that tested the colonists to their limits. No one dared complain, however: T’nane’s skies were cooling, and sometimes they even cleared. Tonight, Kalypso counted four stars.
“Put your finger there,” Ahmed instructed. She did, and the substance of the rope felt greasy against her finger as he pulled the knot taut. “There. Nice polymer, eh, Kalypso?”
They were drifting slowly along the edge of the Rift current, surrounded by stacks and arches of displaced luma, which had built themselves into uncanny parodies of Earth architecture. The fluid beneath the boat fizzed with rising oxygen, and migrating colonies of subs snaked across the current in colored bands according to pH. In a gloved hand Ahmed held one end of a purple rope that he had just fastened to the boat. The other end dragged in the luma behind them for fifty meters and counting, its terminus gradually extending itself: it was being synthesized as they traveled, drawn from the luma according to some biological algorithm Ganesh had planted in the System.
Ahmed had Dreamed it into being.
“I want to ask you something,” he said now, and she glanced up at him expectantly. The wind blew his hair into a black V and his exposed face was actually flushed with cold. Hardship over these many weeks had robbed his face of its softer flesh: he didn’t look like the boy she knew. “Is it possible . . . that is, do you think . . . do you think it gets into us. When we Dream.”
A needle and thread of anxiety went to work in Kalypso’s stomach. “I don’t know.”
He frowned. “Tehar thinks it does. He says the translation works both ways. He says we can’t master the System without its also mastering us.”
“I don’t know,” she said again, woodenly. She didn’t want to be reminded of Tehar. For days on end after the initial Integration, they had been in one another’s presence constantly. Once it was possible to return to First, Tehar had insisted on taking her back into the Dreamer to establish a basis of communication with the Integrated Ganesh so that recovery of the scrambled Earth Archives could begin.
The Dead’s plundering of the station had turned out to be fortuitous for everyone: most Earth
made parts present at First during the Integration had been subsumed in the luma and were unrecoverable. When Tehar patched Kalypso a visual link between the Dreamer and Oxygen 2, the latter looked like a wrecking yard, with the Dead and the Grunts haggling over scraps of Earth. Kalypso had watched it all through the Dreamer: she’d had no conversations with Ganesh, no confirmation of its presence; but when she Dreamed, her senses had extended throughout the luma as if she were seeing through Ganesh’s new & improved senses. She watched the first of the deep pockets of buried oxygen as they were released by the luma into the atmosphere. The fact that they must have been present all the time, buried in the depths of the luma, stimulated excited speculation about the events by which the planet’s gas balance had changed so rapidly in the first place. (“We still haven’t solved the Oxygen Problem,” Naomi said darkly. “Now it’s merely solving us.”)
Through the Dreamer Kalypso observed the development of hybrid subs, neither terran nor native T’nane, in the Wild. She listened to the sound on Witchdoctor Radio—to her and no one else, it was beginning to resemble music. Ganesh itself seemed small by comparison to the changes it had unleashed on the planet. It was in keeping with the decentralized nature of the System that the station sometimes seemed to have become not the CNS of the planet, but merely the point from which the human inhabitants were able to communicate with the System: its mouth, perhaps.
But to take such a view might be underestimating Ganesh, Kalypso thought. She missed the old AI. Her Dreams were quiet. Maybe too quiet.
Nothing else was quiet at all. Together Kalypso and Tehar listened to the radio exchanges, the negotiations and squabbles and eventual pulling-together of the Grunts, the Dead, the Mothers and the kids; the luma gave nobody any choice but to cooperate. Physically, all of the factions had become intermingled, with everyone popping in and out of First, Oxygen 2, and the Wild at need: every day there was some kind of emergency, and inevitably the emergencies were not of such a nature as the Earthborn had trained their offspring to deal with, so all the old rules broke down and got reinvented, quick. Philosophically, the colonists were becoming polarized according to those who believed the System had a mind, and those who believed the only mind in question belonged to Ganesh, with everything else being pure data. The social strata separating the factions of T’nane society lost all integrity with respect to this question, so that Tehar and Kalypso found themselves in the disconcerting position of being perched up in rem2ram Unit 4 surrounded by slow-morphing luma transforming the station, while on the radio Robere and Siri and Charl argued fiercely against Sharia and Stash, with Liet putting in her two cents on either side every so often. Their society had become as unrecognizable as their planet.
“It doesn’t matter,” Kalypso muttered one time, bored with the debate. “You’ll never see it. You’ll never touch it.”
Tehar reached over and rested his palm on her leg, which was viridian streaked with purple at the moment.
“No,” she responded to his tacit question. “I haven’t seen it, either. It’s in my body, and I can’t touch it. I can’t know it.”
“There’s something out there,” Sharia railed, and they both smiled. “Look around you. How can this all be Ganesh?”
“How can it be anything other than Ganesh if it’s coming through Ganesh?”
Tehar sighed and switched off his interface. “Why can’t they worry about where their next meal’s coming from? Why do they waste so much energy on this question?”
Kalypso said nothing for a long moment. “Some things are easier to think about than others,” she answered at last. She thought she was saying something profound but Tehar only laughed, so apparently she wasn’t.
They shared food and air and body heat while the planet reconfigured itself around them. At heart they had ceased to know one another, probably because Kalypso was deeply fucked-up and unable to articulate how or why. Tehar didn’t understand why she avoided all but the most superficial contact with him, and with everyone. Maybe he put it down to trauma. He just didn’t get it, and she couldn’t blame him since she didn’t really get it either.
They made love once. Kalypso cried. She let him think this meant she was surrendering her emotions to him at last, but she was only mourning the fact that she couldn’t. She tried to memorize him. His dimensions and movements. And the way he used time in sex. And all of the small imperfections of his skin and frame, and the condensation of his breath on her forehead, and the weight of his thumb on her lower lip and how he wouldn’t look at her when he was going to come: these things somehow accrued into Tehar so that when he rolled away in the end, finished with her, she felt bereft; he said, “I forgot how small you are.”
She could feel it starting already, a slight ripping that would eventually become something else, some cousin of pain. She made herself smile, but his mouth was unexpectedly somber. Maybe he was getting it after all.
“Don’t look so sad,” she said. “Everything’s going to be different now. No more claustrophobia. No more following instructions.”
He seized on this. “You’re happy, then?”
“Yeah. Definitely,” she lied brightly.
Soon afterward, she stole a boat.
She was standing on Landing 2, supposedly helping Ahmed and Kessel maneuver a piece of hardware into a waiting boat. She had her surface suit on, but had pulled the hood down and was taking every other breath through her open mouth. The CO consumers which the System had begun to produce had taken hold quickly in the waters around the station, and her suit informed her that it was safe to breathe. Occasionally.
“It’s just a bunch of engineering problems now,” she heard Kessel say from within the transit tube. There was a sound of bumping and heaving. “It’s concrete. We can work with that.”
Ahmed’s deeper voice reached her even through the seal.
“Can we stop calling it the Oxygen Problem, then?” he said.
“Fuck yeah,” said Kessel, and then got stuck in the hatch seal. His head came through, then one shoulder, and he managed to grab a piece of wall on Kalypso’s side of the seal. He huffed and wriggled, but the hardware was jammed between his body and the edge of the hatch.
Kalypso stifled a giggle.
“Hey, Deed! Give us a hand here.”
More masculine groans and curses. Kalypso started forward to help, but at the last second she burst out laughing, spun on one heel, and threw herself into the boat.
“Don’t be a wiseguy, Deed,” Kessel warned. “I’ll use you for a basketball if you don’t behave.”
Still laughing, she cut the line and gunned the boat away from the dock. When she looked back, Kessel and Ahmed had both gotten through the hatch and were standing on the pier, waving their arms at her. She waved back and fled.
The agro baffles had long since come down. There were only a handful of passable channels in the luma, and it took her half an hour to get past the supersurface luma and into a region that resembled the Wild she had grown to know so well. The storm winds were so strong that she had to crouch behind the dash like a racecar driver, and she was glad she had no hair. Precipitation flew sideways, spattering on the hull of her boat. There were subs in the water, using the weather to seed themselves from one region of the System to another.
It was still a bleak planet. The volcanoes still glowered over the Rift, and the colors of the luma might never be friendly, Earth colors. She would never belong here.
But.
It took over three hours’ journey into the Wild before Kalypso realized she didn’t have to go back. She could become a thief and scavenger, like the Dead. Or, like the Dead, she could learn to live off the luma. At least now she might have a chance of teaching it to grow something compatible with her physiology: terran-type hybrids were cropping up all over the place, lately.
She thought up all kinds of ideas. She cruised through developing luma with the clouds flying past her and the dark sky and bright surface reflecting one another, and she began to fe
el powerful.
Then Teres caught up with her.
This put her in a bad mood. It spoiled her fun.
She tried to outrun the Dead thing, but Teres found a better current and cut her off.
“Leave me alone!” she shouted as soon as Teres got close. “I’m not coming back.”
She sounded like a four-year-old and she knew it. At least this was Teres, not Lassare.
“They want you back.”
“Too damn bad.”
Teres drew her boat alongside and hooked Kalypso’s. Kalypso picked up the hook and tossed it off. Teres signed, “You’re thicker than I thought. “Why do you leave your people? You are no outcast. They love you.”
“I can’t be with them,” Kalypso said. “I don’t know what I am. Look at me!”
As soon as she said it, she knew Teres would laugh. But the Dead woman’s face went still.
“They have told you that you will die of these agents?”
“Well. . . no. Van says I’m still human. He wants to study me, though. He says the work is only beginning. But I don’t care.” She put her hands on her hips the way Sharia would, and tossed her head.
Teres signed, “You are the most important person in the colony. You are in the best possible bargaining position. I am sterile, used-up, unwanted. You have given birth to a world.”
Kalypso stared. She had never thought of it this way.
“Here,” Teres gestured. She turned and rummaged among her supplies. Carelessly, she tossed a rectangular object at Kalypso. When she caught it, Kalypso gasped.
“You won the bet,” Teres said in a hoarse whisper. “They’re yours. Go play.”
And Kalypso, shocked that Teres had handled them so casually, clutched the cigars to her breast. The Dead one powered her boat and left without another word or sign.
After Teres had left her, Kalypso turned her boat about and glided back toward First in a daze. She passed a boat with Naomi and two Grunts and Van, who waved at her shyly. Sober, Naomi looked frail and somber. She was counting collection fils and didn’t see Kalypso.
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