by Paul Jessup
She leaned over. The air was so hot, so barely breathable. She was slick and sweaty and vomiting and nothing could keep her thoughts from smashing into one another, disrupting any coherence in her mind.
So, she crawled and crawled and tried to make as little noise as possible. And kept trying on the shape of names, to see if they fit. Each word calmed her a little, while each sound beneath her took her back to that time, that time when Ekhi and her dad had climbed into the back of an egia and stole away aboard a ship to the skysea, leaving the wyrms to eat away at the glowing blue and gold world below and the glass eaters to tear her family to shreds, removing even their patuek so there was nothing left of them to resurrect.
She heard a scraping sound beneath her again. A hot thrust of air hit her and Ekhi felt like her skin would burn right off and leave her ash and bone. She struggled and bit her tongue and climbed through the veins of the ship, through the hot and sweaty veins, moving closer and closer into the heart of the egia.
That is where I will be safe, she thought. The heart. It is safety.
16
Hodei sat on his bed in the dark, hearing the chaos out in the honeycombs of the ship. He had his knife in his hands and his circular door closed, his clothes scattered in a messy pool on the floor.
I should get dressed, he thought. I should go outside, grab a betadur and go fight. Defend the ship. Save Ekhi. Show them what a hero he was, what a savior to mankind.
But he had a dread that swam around in his mind. A dread that he didn’t quite grasp. In some way he knew that they were searching for him. Memories that were not his own bungled around in his mind, searching for shelf space. These memories danced under the surface of his own thoughts, tainting his fear. Birthday parties. Princess dresses. This was not his life, not his past. Yet there they were, taking up space in his mind.
That bothered him. So he cut into his arm. Single rings, not too deep. Enough so the memories of his own life that lay beneath the skin came bubbling up with his blood, to the surface. I am Hodei, he thought. I am Hodei.
He crawled across the floor of his room, his fear still strong as it darted through his thoughts. And one thing came directly to him, one thought forced itself into his mental space: he must go and protect his magazines. There was something to this, something connected to those magazines that he could not quite understand.
His door slid open with the wail of scraping steel. He turned his head, his naked torso behind him, and saw the giant shadow of his brother. It cut the light into random shapes stacked onto one another. The gruff voice came out slow and final. Stone grating against stone. “Brother. Baby boy. I find you. No fairies. No healing. No saving. I hurt. I hurt.”
A tool—a crowbar—sang in Sugoi’s hand. An angry song filled with violence.
Hodei was sick of this. He stood, naked. Like a Spartan. With each stab, with each leap and scream and bite and hit, he remembered the countless beatings, the countless times he had awakened in a bone-broken pain throughout his childhood.
Memory spun around him and through his mind like a thousand limbs, a thousand bodies. All motions echoed across time, rippling through mind and space, warping temporal reality. But the end did not change; the end never changed.
Smack. Crash. Crowbar to his face and him howling and bone-broken on the floor again, and the bar coming down, hitting, hurting. Soon he would be dead. Soon his skull would crack open and spill out his thoughts, his memories, stopping this endless abstract loop of limbs and violence. The only thing preserving his being, his memories, his thoughts, were his patuek.
Sugoi’s shadow. Angry. Covered in scarlet drops and bits of flesh. The crowbar glinting in the light of the hallway. The sounds of wheels turning and brass spinning and gears singing and robotic limbs compressing and decompressing. Clang, clang, clang. Metal feet on floors.
And before the bar could go down again Sugoi was on the floor, his head a messy splash of radiant light, his body a scarecrow skeleton, the architecture collapsing into a pile of unmoving limbs. Three war dolls stood in the hall, betadurs smoking, faces filled with mechanical glee.
Hodei was fuzzy. Drained. He recognized these dolls. Or rather, she recognized these dolls. Other memories tossing around in his head. The ports, the dream, the flying and the materialization. Someone else was in him, not just in his mind, but hidden in his genetic code, waiting to be awakened.
That girl, he thought.
The girl from the magazines.
The dolls motioned for him to come, to follow. And then—
One flew back against the wall, a mess of broken gears and melted wax and untangled wires without any purpose. The other two dolls turned around. More clang-clanging from the hall, more mozorro screams.
And Hodei.
Circles of shadow eclipsing the light.
He fumbled toward thought.
And ended up surrounded by dream.
And the spinning fractal lights of some beautiful girl’s memories.
17
Itsasu saw through the eyes of her dolls, through the eyes of her mozorro, through the many-faceted eyes of the ship. She saw hundreds of images projected into the amber holofluid, saw them all and processed them.
The ship pumped adrenaline-laced chemicals into her body, reacting to her need for combat prowess and sharp, intense thinking. The dolls were in battle formation, her favorite battle dolls, weapons in hand, eyes staring ahead. Her gothic princesses, ready for war.
They would not take the Ortzadar engine from her. She would destroy the ship first. It was far too important—she had spent centuries searching for it, keeping herself preserved through each archaic voyage from planet to planet, skipping amongst the stars like a pebble on a lake.
It was the key to bringing her husband back to life, the key to changing her whole existence for the better. And she had not spent the last 435 years being preserved in fluid, piloting this damn ship, for nothing.
She saw the foreign creatures standing in the hallway, red-haired war dolls. In secret, she sent one of her own dolls around through a different corridor, sneaking on board the intruders’ ship while the other three dolls attacked. Combat ensued. Chemicals churned around her body, relating the war costs to her. Spiky tastes covered her tongue and shocks singed her body each time a war doll was hit and smoked and turned to a molten slab. Euphoric ambrosias of chemicals sang in her veins each time she blew one of the opposing dolls to slag.
She knew that the ship would need repairs. All this damage. All this damage was necessary. Dolls Two and Three blinked out. One left in combat, the other sneaking across the clear tube between ships.
She was not winning. Her combat doll was near dead. She smelled something like burning rubber, tasted foul, dead, things in her mouth as her body roared around her. Her skin roamed with the feeling of spiders underneath it.
The third doll crumpled to the ground. Right before the camera transmissions ceased, she saw Sugoi through the doorway, dead. Dead, dead. And maybe Hodei, too. No mechanics to patch the ship. Fuck, she thought, fuck, fuck.
She sent the mozorro over to watch the invading dolls, to see what they were doing while the heart of the ship churned out another handful of war dolls for her. It would be a moment or two for the assembly, but hopefully it would not be too late.
The mozorro eyes watched while sedatives coated her skin, making Itsasu sleepy and weary. She had to concentrate, to stay sharp, even though the ship wanted her to sleep, to rest. She saw the last war doll, battle-scarred and smoking, walk into the room and grab Hodei, lifting him up with mechanical arms and slinging him over its shoulder like he weighed nothing.
And then, in shock, Itsasu watched the doll storm off, clang, clang, clang, toward the exit. What strategy was this? Were they not after the Ortzadar engine? Had they come for Hodei all along?
She could not believe it.
18
Mari walked unseen, the cameras blind to her, the servants that wandered the strangers’ ship blind to he
r. She clung to the rust-coated walls, weapon pressed against her body, breathing slowly. In. Out. Oxygen trying to rush through her lungs, trying to burst through her veins in a fury of panic.
They can’t see me, they can’t see me. This became her mantra, her solace in this strange place. It was unlike any egia she had ever seen before—five times as large as Itsasu’s ship.
The servants were strange as well. No mozorro on this ship, no dolls, no artificial constructs. No ship avatars either, just tiny elephant-headed humanoids with skin the color of fresh bruises. They wandered, fixing the ship, preparing food, not noticing her. Not seeing her. Are these aliens, Mari wondered, or are they artificial beings, built for the purpose of keeping the ship in order?
She wandered through the maze of the ship, the pathfalls unfamiliar. No sense of direction, no way of knowing where the mess hall was, the captain’s quarters, the human crew. In fact, she noticed uneasily, there did not seem to be a human crew aboard this ship.
She had to be quick. The battery on the suit drained fast. Stealth mode ate away at the energy cells, and even the recharging nanofibers within the clothing could not bring in enough power to keep it going indefinitely. She hurried, controlling her footfalls. She did not want them to hear her empty steps and wonder if anyone was there, hiding.
Why are you here? she wondered. Why are you attacking us? What are you after? She picked up the pace, the corridors empty as she infiltrated further into the egia. The walls were circular, covered in rust and the sparkling light of silver webs that glued the interior of the ship together.
The captain’s quarters must be around here somewhere. Somewhere close by. She paused for a moment, looked around and saw nothing. Nobody in these hallways. Her breathing steadied, slowed even more. She pushed a lever on the side of her suit and felt light wash over her again, no longer an invisible girl. No longer in stealth mode.
She rolled on the tips of her toes, stretching herself up on the balls of her feet, feeling the betadur in her hands. She let the rifle cool, the coils unwrapping their charges, the weapon winding down, growing silent and dead.
I can rest here for a moment, plan ahead, she thought. Figure out where I’m at, where I need to be. She heard a ping, ping, pinging sound come from behind and turned around quickly enough to see a flash of light and then feel the hot sparking coils of a rifle blast burst through her shoulder blade.
She hit the floor and her attacker waddled up, smiling. One of those little purple Ganeshas, carrying a cannon about five times its height. Smoking barrel. Little lips smiling behind twisted tusks.
She tried to move but could not. A cold numbness spread through her body. A paralysis, moving under her skin like a frost creeping through the forest of her nerves. Knees crumpled beneath her. Body glowing, dimming, shadow. She fell, her spine no longer supporting her, like a rag doll.
19
Ekhi was in the beating heart, the trembling centersoul of the ship. She had fallen through rusted ductwork doors, moving past the spinning heat sensors, the blades of the great turbines churning in an ancient dance above her head.
She clanged on the metal floor, looked up at the circular rib ceiling, looked out the window at the vast sea of space, the infinite lights of stars sparkling in the distance. In front of her, the heart.
Trembling, beating. The heart of the ship. Big, bigger than she, four times her size, covered in cobweb-thin wires that crawled over it. Blinking lights, thinking lights. This was the motherbrain, the AI home of the ship.
Its ventricles pumped out commands into everything, controlled loosely by Itsasu in some chamber far away from the center. The red of its light coated everything. Ekhi was in awe. She had never seen an egia heart so close, so near to her. She reached out her hand, felt the muscle tense beneath her fingertips.
The memories of her past slipped away from her, the memories of her dying brother gone. She felt fire amongst her memories, sparking them, consuming them. She pulled her hand back, forcing herself to remember. No, no, she whispered to the heart. I know you want to heal me. But I need those memories. The sorrow hurts, but that is what makes me human.
She looked around the room, eyes tracing the manifold wires connected to the giant beating muscle, wires laced with flickering lights communicating complex ideas and thoughts. A graphic display of AI complexity.
Next to the heart, discarded and dusty against the wall, was a human-sized, blue, egg-shaped tube. Inside of it she saw a face—old, male, standing upright. Eyes closed, hands clenched at his sides. Wrinkles covered his skin like a mess of folded fabric, his hair a clumpy shell of cloud dust. She walked over to him and examined the tube.
She thought he was dead, seeing large holes in his chest that led to a mummified cavity. She glanced at an LCD plaque that read the date of his imprisonment in flashing red and orange pixels. Almost eight hundred years ago. Far before the invention of the patuek and their ability to store a mind in stasis and be transplanted into a healed, cloned body.
Somebody loved you, Ekhi thought. Somebody kept you here, with us. I only wish I could have done the same for my nova, my star, my love. She remembered her dream. Was he still out there? No. No. He couldn’t be.
Next to the tube was a small black box with a single orange jewel on top, flickering with a strange, dying light. This light gave off an amber glow and a silken milky mist that crawled across the top and dissipated, leaving an overpowering scent of apples.
“What are you?” Ekhi asked aloud, putting her hand against the side. Like the heart, it tensed. “What are you?”
20
Hodei’s head bobbed, the mechanical shoulder bruising his ribs, coiled wiry hair brushing harshly against his face. He looked above, tilting his head back, seeing first the ribs of a ship, then iron ducts coated in rust, then bones, then glass above him letting in the light of stars and three blue moons. He didn’t know why they wanted him, what they could ever want to do with him.
His whole body was bruised, tattered, bones smashed by his idiot brother. Fuck, Hodei thought, he’s dead now. The thought stung his mind more than his nerves stung with pain, raising up a curious series of emotions that raced around in his mind.
He would’ve killed me. Yet, he’s my brother. Now Mari is free, and he definitely can’t pursue Ekhi. Yet, he’s my brother.
Other thoughts bubbled up under his skin, hot-blooded thoughts, thoughts of her, that magazine girl. The ship above him—the webs of electrical light that coated it, the strange bruise-colored elephants that swept and cleaned—this was her brother’s ship.
The last time she had been on it was over forty years ago. At least, that was her last memory, when they were around the moons of Titan, still within the solar system of Manhome itself. They had been planning to visit the Oort cloud next, maybe fly down and start a farm on one of the terraformed planets that ringed around the light of a blinking red sun.
Her brother’s wife had died about a week before this memory. Hodei felt the magazine girl’s sadness; the two had been best friends. She had even been the maid of honor at her brother’s wedding. The death had come as a sudden shock to both of them, and she felt such sadness not only for her brother, but for herself.
Her sister-in-law had died quickly, her mind attacked by a linguistic virus known as the sakre. It destroyed her patuek and turned her brain into a puddle of milk in her skull.
The magazine girl had never asked to see the vidding of the incident. She knew of the damage, had witnessed it as a nurse a few years before when she had been an intern on some dust speck of an asteroid floating through the outer rim of the Milky Way. Her brother had told her about the whole thing, the words far worse than any visual recording. He had tried to stop the spread of the virus, tried to save her patuek.
He was too late—he awoke to her body shaking, her body screaming, her body vibrating, eyes rolling around, teeth bursting through gums. He told his sister that he remembered reaching over and holding his wife down, pinning her wrists, scr
eaming for the ship AI to send in help. For anyone to come and help them.
By the time help came, white milk had leaked out of her ears and pooled around her head. Her mind was gone, her patuek, gone. Nothing to revive. He kept her body around, even though the magazine girl had insisted on disposing of it, burning it, getting rid of the sakre that might still be waiting to whisper itself on the corpse’s lips, infecting them all.
Hodei pushed these memories back, away from his mind. He was crying; he couldn’t help himself. She had infected him with her thoughts, with her emotions, and it felt so vaguely alien, so strangely unreal. As if his existence until this moment had been a dream and she was his true thought, his true mind, his true master.
21
Itsasu pushed past the numbness, the floating dreaminess that engulfed her body in her liquid prison. She flapped her arms, called the computers of the ship to come and aid her. Be my eyes, be my eyes, she sang out. She felt fluid beat out from her cage, singing through the ship, carrying chemical messages to the beating heart of the egia.
I need to know, she whispered. Damages. Tally up the damages. She looked through the floating dust camera eyes, through mozorro eyes, through a thousand eyes, seeing all the things that had been damaged. Holes blasted, walls melted, yet nothing too terrible. Nothing that couldn’t be fixed within an hour or so.
The heart of the ship then spoke to her, its voice ancient, filled with a sentience from before her time. She had not heard the ship speak in over a decade and the sound of it placed fear into her frail, paper heart.
This ship can destroy us with a single whisper. I am talking to it right now, intellect to intellect, using our ancient ways of radiospeak. They mean us no harm. They will undock from us when an experiment is finished. If we disconnect or move, or try to send anyone on board to rescue Hodei, the ship will sing to us in a chorus of flames and we will be destroyed in such a way that none will be revived.