by Neil Clarke
Nat grabbed Michael’s hand and pulled him up. He felt dizzy and weak, still drugged.
“What are you doing?” he said.
“Rescuing your ass.” She gave him a little push. “That way to the ship.”
“No,” he said, pointing, “it’s that way.”
“My ship is this way. Your ship sank.”
He scrambled drunkenly ahead of her, stumbling over roots, getting hung up in vines. Though the illusions were displaced he could still hear the Siren wail in his mind and had to fight an impulse to rip the mask from his face. There was movement all around them. More of the things shambled out of the shadows. Natalie blasted away with her weapon, clearing a path.
They broke into the open. The ship gleamed in weak sunlight.
“Get in! I’ll hold them off.”
Michael clambered up the ladder to the cockpit. At the top of the ladder he turned and saw Natalie about to be overwhelmed.
“Nat, come on!”
She dropped her depleted blaster, swung onto the ladder—but it was too late. They had her.
Michael slumped in his theater seat, withdrawn from the Deep Enhancement movie experience he had created. Warm rain fell out of the darkness. The One Who Liked Rain sat beside him with a bowl of soggy popcorn.
It turned to him.
“That was so good, Mike.”
Its lips glistened with butter. Its eyes were dull amber wads. A breathing mask with a torn strap dangled from it’s fingers.
Michael groaned.
Like an insect buzz in his ear: Michael wake up, for God’s sake.
Michael closed his eyes.
On Mars Natalie had said, “I think I’m falling in love with you,” and his defenses had rattled down like iron gates.
“Mike?”
“Not a good idea. In the first place we’ll both soon be Outbound. It might be years before we see each other again. In the second place, my modifications inhibit my ability to achieve human intimacy. I’m a lost cause, Nat.”
Natalie shook her head. “You don’t have to drag out your excuses. I know you. I’m just saying how I feel, not asking for anything. And by the way, your mods have nothing to do with intimacy. I’ve known plenty of Womb Hole pilots and I don’t buy the myth that you’re all emotional cripples.”
Michael smiled. He hadn’t been thinking about the mods he’d volunteered to undergo, the ones necessary for Ship State, the ones that at least allowed him a semblance of intimacy, even if it was with a machine consciousness. He had meant the more visceral mods of his psyche, where blackened timbers had risen like pickets in Hell to form the first rudimentary fence around his heart.
“You don’t really know me,” he said.
“Not at this rate, I don’t.
Then the biological crisis on Meropa IV occurred. Vital vaccines needed. Michael’s Ship Tender came up with Kobory Fever, and Natalie, loose on Mars, got the duty. Like some kind of Fate. Michael experienced a burst of pure joy—which he quickly stomped on.
“I don’t see why I had to die,” Natalie said. Was she the real Natalie?
He was back in the hotel, lying flat on the bed. Natalie, having fitted another breathing mask to his face, sat in a chair near the window. Except it appeared she wasn’t sitting in a chair at all, but on a tangle of thick roots growing out of the floor. He had just told her about the movie.
“You were saving me,” he said.
“I’m saving you now,” she said. “Or trying to. You’ve got to get off your ass and participate.”
Michael felt heavy.
“And in this version I don’t die,” Natalie said.
She led him out of the hotel room, which quickly became something other than an hotel room. As his head cleared the vine-tangle wallpaper popped out in three dimensions, the floor became soft, spongy. The light shifted to heavily screened pink/green. Flying insects buzzed his sweaty face. A locus of pain began rhythmically stabbing behind his right eye.
“The atmosphere is drugged with hallucinogenic vapors from the plants,” Natalie said. “They want you here, but they don’t want you to know where ‘here’ is.”
“Who wants me?”
“They. The jungle. The sentient life on this planet. It’s gynoecious, by the way, and it’s been sweeping open space, seeking first contact. They detected you and Mona and evidently became entranced by the possibilities of companion male energy. Frankly, they have a point.”
“Where the hell do you get all that?”
“I asked. Or Mona did, actually. She’s been frantically investigating language possibilities since you disappeared. They communicate telepathically.”
Natalie led him through a sort of tunnel made from over-arching branches. They had to duck their heads.
“Wait.” He grabbed her arm. She turned, a curl of dark red hair flipping over her eye. “Did you bring a weapon?”
“Of course,” she said.
“Well, where is it?”
“They sort of disarmed me.”
“I see.”
“Don’t worry. We’re getting out of here. As long as you’re not breathing the air they can’t mess you up too much. I think they’ll let us leave. I have a theory. Now let’s keep moving. It isn’t far to the ship.”
They emerged from the tunnel. The ship was there, but they were cut off from it by a wall of the tree-things, the crooked things with hungry amber eyes. They encircled the ship, knobby limbs entwined to form a barrier.
“You were saying?” Michael said, straightening his back. “Anyway, have Mona fly the ship over.”
“I can’t. Mona was hinky about landing after your Drop Ship sank. Also, I think they got into her head and spooked her. I had to engage the emergency override, same as you did.”
“Wonderful.”
“At least the security repulsion field is keeping them away from the ship.”
“At least.”
Hands on her hips, Natalie appraised the situation. After a minute she touched the com button on her wrist and spoke into it.
“Mona, we need help. Send the Proxy to clear a path.”
The aft hatch swung up and the Proxy appeared. It climbed down and disappeared behind the tree-things. A moment later the circle tightened. There was a the flash and pop of a blaster discharge. One of the tree things erupted in flame. It stumped out of the ring and stood apart, burning. The others closed in. A violent disturbance occurred. There were no further blasts. The Proxy’s torso arced high over the line, dull metal skin shining. It clanked once when it hit the ground. The line resumed it’s stillness.
“It’s a female jungle, all right,” Michael said. “Care to reveal your famous theory?”
Natalie held his hand. “We’re walking through,” she said.
“Just like that.”
“Yes. If we’re together they’ll let us. I mean really together.”
“That’s your theory?”
“Basically. Mike, trust me.”
They started walking. When they came to the Proxy’s torso, Michael held her back.
“I’ll go through alone,” he said. “If I make it to the ship I’ll lift off and pick you up in the clear.”
He tried to pull his hand free but she wouldn’t let go.
“No,” she said.
“Nat—”
“No. Don’t you see? If you go alone they’ll take you again. If I go alone they’ll rip me apart like the Proxy.”
“And if we go together?”
“If we go together they . . . will see.”
“See what?”
“That you aren’t solo, that somebody else is already claiming your male companion energy, another of your own species. Unlike Mona, whom they felt justified in severing you from. They know I’m imprinted in your psyche. You said yourself they always used my name. You just have to stop fighting us.”
Michael scratched his cheek, which was whiskered after a few days in the sentient jungle. Natalie squeezed his hand.
“Mike?�
��
“No.”
“We have to move.”
“It’s too risky.”
“Come on. It’s now or never.”
He felt himself collapsing inside, and then the old detachment. The cold, necessary detachment. She saw it in his eyes and let go of his hand.
“I’ll go through myself, then,” she said, and started walking forward.
He grabbed her arm.
“You just said they’d tear you apart.”
“I’m already torn apart,” she said.
“Don’t, Nat. Let’s think about this.”
“Just let me go, okay? You don’t want me. I get it.”
He held on. “There has to be another way to the ship.”
She pulled loose.
“I might get through. Wish me luck.”
“Nat—”
A cringing, huddled piece of him behind the cold wall stood up, trembling.
Natalie again started for the picket line of tree-things, walking quickly, leaving Michael standing where he was.
The tree-things reacted, reaching for her.
Michael got to her first and pulled her back into his arms. “Damn it,” he said. “Damn it, damn it, damn it.”
They lifted out of the jungle, accelerating until they achieved orbit. He sat tandem behind Natalie in the narrow cockpit of the Drop Ship.
“You really like to force the issue,” he said.
“Do I?”
“I’m not saying it’s a bad idea.”
“No.”
“I mean, a little push doesn’t hurt.”
“Hmm.”
A few minutes later they acquired the starship and Natalie resumed manual operation and began docking maneuvers. She worked the controls very competently. Michael watched over her shoulder. But his gaze returned again and again to rest upon the nape of her neck, where a few silken hairs escaped and lay sweetly over her skin.
“The Dorothy thing,” he said, “that was another old movie reference. A child is swept away from family and friends and finds herself estranged in a hostile world.”
“How does she get back home?”
“She discovers a way to trust companions who initially frighten her.”
“I like that one.”
“It works for me.”
Natalie tucked them neatly into Mona’s docking bay.
Nancy Kress is the author of thirty-three books, including twenty-six novels, four collections of short stories, and three books on writing. Her work has won six Nebulas, two Hugos, a Sturgeon, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. Her most recent work is Tomorrow’s Kin (Tor, 2017) which, like much of her work, concerns genetic engineering. Kress’s fiction has been translated into Swedish, Danish, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Polish, Croatian, Chinese, Lithuanian, Romanian, Japanese, Korean, Hebrew, Russian, and Klingon, none of which she can read. In addition to writing, Kress often teaches at various venues around the country and abroad, including a visiting lectureship at the University of Leipzig and a recent writing class in Beijing. Kress lives in Seattle with her husband, writer Jack Skillingstead, and Cosette, the world’s most spoiled toy poodle.
SHIVA IN SHADOW
NANCY KRESS
1. SHIP
I watched the probe launch from the Kepler’s top-deck observatory, where the entire Schaad hull is clear to the stars. I stood between Ajit and Kane. The observatory, which is also the ship’s garden, bloomed wildly with my exotics, bursting into flower in such exuberant profusion that even to see the probe go, we had to squeeze between a seven-foot-high bed of comoralias and the hull.
“God, Tirzah, can’t you prune these things?” Kane said. He pressed his nose to the nearly invisible hull, like a small child. Something streaked briefly across the sky. “There it goes. Not that there’s much to see.
I turned to stare at him. Not much to see! Beyond the Kepler lay the most violent and dramatic part of the galaxy, in all its murderous glory. True, the Kepler had stopped one hundred light-years from the core, for human safety, and dust-and-gas clouds muffled the view somewhat. But, on the other hand, we were far enough away for a panoramic view.
The supermassive black hole Sagittarius A*, the lethal heart of the galaxy, shone gauzily with the heated gases it was sucking downward into oblivion. Around Sag A* circled Sagittarius West, a three-armed spiral of hot plasma ten light-years across, radiating furiously as it cooled. Around that, Sagittarius East, a huge shell left over from some catastrophic explosion within the last hundred thousand years, expanded outward. I saw thousands of stars, including the blazing blue-hot stars of IRS 16, hovering dangerously close to the hole, and giving off a stellar wind fierce enough to blow a long fiery tail off the nearby red giant star. Everything was racing, radiating, colliding, ripping apart, screaming across the entire electromagnetic spectrum. All set against the sweet, light scent of my brief-lived flowers.
Nothing going on. But Kane had never been interested in spectacle.
Ajit said in his musical accent, “No, not much to see. But much to pray for. There go we.”
Kane snapped, “I don’t pray.”
“I did not mean ‘pray’ in the religious sense,” Ajit said calmly. He is always calm. “I mean hope. It is a miraculous thing, yes? There go we.”
He was right, of course. The probe contained the Ajit-analogue, the Kane-analogue, the Tirzah-analogue, all uploaded into a crystal computer no bigger than a comoralia bloom. “We” would go into that stellar violence at the core, where our fragile human bodies could not go. “We” would observe, and measure, and try to find answers to scientific questions in that roiling heart of galactic spacetime. Ninety percent of the probe’s mass was shielding for the computer. Ninety percent of the rest was shielding for the three minicapsules that the probe would fire back to us with recorded and analyzed data. There was no way besides the minicaps to get information out of that bath of frenzied radiation.
Just as there was no way to know exactly what questions Ajit and Kane would need to ask until they were close to Sag A*. The analogues would know. They knew everything Ajit and Kane and I knew, right up until the moment we were uploaded.
“Shiva, dancing,” Ajit said.
“What?” Kane said.
“Nothing. You would not appreciate the reference. Come with me, Tirzah. I want to show you something.”
I stopped straining to see the probe, unzoomed my eyes, and smiled at Ajit. “Of course.”
This is why I am here.
Ajit’s skin is softer than Kane’s, less muscled. Kane works out every day in ship’s gym, scowling like a demon. Ajit rolled off me and laid his hand on my glowing, satisfied crotch.
“You are so beautiful, Tirzah.”
I laughed. “We are all beautiful. Why would anyone effect a genetic alteration that wasn’t?”
“People will do strange things sometimes.”
“So I just noticed,” I teased him.
“Sometimes I think so much of what Kane and I do is strange to you. I see you sitting at the table, listening to us, and I know you cannot follow our physics. It makes me sad for you.”
I laid my hand on top of his, pushing down my irritation with the skill of long practice. It does irritate me, this calm sensitivity of Ajit’s. It’s lovely in bed—he is gentler and more considerate, always, than Kane—but then there comes the other side, this faint condescension. “I feel sad for you.” Sad for me! Because I’m not also a scientist! I am the captain of this expedition, with master status in ship control and a first-class license as a Nurturer. On the Kepler, my word is law, with virtually no limits. I have over fifty standard-years’ experience, specializing in the nurture of scientists. I have never lost an expedition, and I need no one’s pity.
Naturally, I showed none of this to Ajit. I massaged his hand with mine, which meant that his hand massaged my crotch, and purred softly. “I’m glad you decided to show me this.”
“Actually, that is not what I wanted to show you.”
>
“No?”
“No. Wait here, Tirzah.”
He got up and padded, naked, to his personal locker. Beautiful, beautiful body, brown and smooth, like a slim polished tree. I could see him clearly; Ajit always makes love with the bunk lights on full, as if in sunlight. We lay in his bunk, not mine. I never take either him or Kane to my bunk. My bunk contained various concealed items that they don’t, and won’t, know about, from duplicate surveillance equipment to rarely used subdermal trackers. Precautions, only. I am a captain.
From his small storage locker, Ajit pulled a statue and turned shyly, even proudly, to show it to me. I sat up, surprised.
The statue was big, big enough so that it must have taken up practically his entire allotment of personal space. Heavy, too, from the way Ajit balanced it before his naked body. It was some sort of god with four arms, enclosed in a circle of flames, made of what looked like very old bronze.
“This is Nataraja,” Ajit said. “Shiva dancing.”
“Ajit—”
“No, I am not a god worshipper,” he smiled. “You know me better than that, Tirzah. Hinduism has many gods—thousands—but they are, except to the ignorant, no more than embodiments of different aspects of reality. Shiva is the dance of creation and destruction, the constant flow of energy in the cosmos. Birth and death and rebirth. It seemed fitting to bring him to the galactic core, where so much goes on of all three.”
This explanation sounded weak to me—a holo of Shiva would have accomplished the same thing, without using up nearly all of Ajit’s weight allotment. Before I could say this, Ajit said, “This statue has been in my family for four hundred years. I must bring it home, along with the answers to my scientific questions.”
I don’t understand Ajit’s scientific concerns very well—or Kane’s—but I know down to my bones how much they matter to him. It is my job to know. Ajit carries within his beautiful body a terrible coursing ambition, a river fed by the longings of a poor family who have sacrificed what little they had gained on New Bombay for this favored son. Ajit is the receptacle into which they have poured so much hope, so much sacrifice, so much selfishness. The strain on that vessel is what makes Ajit’s lovemaking so gentle. He cannot afford to crack.