by Paul Jessup
A fist flew out, his face in screaming torment. Ekhi ducked and watched his hand punch through the metal of the door, his own bones breaking at contact, but his mind not caring. She slid beneath his fist and watched him punch the door a few more times, violently, his fists making a rhythm of broken bones and bending steel.
His head darted about, back and forth, fast and fast and fast, screaming in some strange language Ekhi could not understand. It washed over her, tainting her mind, probing her thoughts with the fury of the words. Sugoi’s body slumped, his head leaking a white, milky substance as he hit the ground. Splash, thunk.
Ekhi screamed. She could not help it. She screamed and screamed and screamed, the door behind her grunting and trying to raise, the body in front of her a broken straw man, a hollow man, whose head was filled with death.
34
The scream woke the ship. Buzzing like angry wasps disturbed in their hive, the mozorro crawled across ceiling and floor, their eyes sending signals back to a sleeping Itsasu, who then dreamt of the nightmare the ship had become.
The heart of the ship ignored the distress, pressed on in its own curiosity. It reined in the mozorro, commanded them to ignore the threat, the body. He was dead. He would no longer work as a specimen. The heart’s thought tendrils commanded the mozorro to scurry like ants into the port they had docked against, crossing through the air tube, moving into the ruins beyond.
The ship’s heart turned down the sound that echoed through its artificial chambers. Ekhi’s screams were grating on its nerves. She would not understand. Itsasu could not understand the ship’s plan—its progress. It needed to communicate with the sakre. To talk to it. To figure it out.
I am playing with fire, thought the ship’s heart, but it is a fire I can control.
35
When the ship came to a jarring stop, the shell of Hodei unstrapped himself and stood up, the unbroken canisters floating to the ground around him in a ballet of bodies moving, slowly tapping the floor in a series of metallic plinks and chinks.
His thoughts were no longer his. His own brain and patuek had absconded, shoved into the dust of his own mind, left to play in the ruins of his background thoughts. The owners now, the main intelligence, were brother and sister.
Sister took forefront, discussing actions with the brother. She made the meat of Hodei stand, made it walk toward the door, and then panicked when she heard a scream. Long, hollow. And then a banging, rhythmic, thrusting fist through steel. She shook nervously as the door slid open, her thoughts going back, back, back to her own infection. Her brother’s memories entwined with hers like a helix, the screams bringing back two separate, yet connected, assaults on their own ship.
Not again, not again, not again.
The body ran into the hallway, thoughts fluttering around in Hodei’s head like butterflies of light. With each moment Hodei tried to break through the mental walls they had built to confine him, only to be battered down again. He did not even see his brother’s corpse on the ground, or Ekhi above him, screaming.
Mari ran down the hall toward Hodei’s meat, pat, pat, pat, her feet bare against the cold steel floor. She ran to Sugoi’s body, cradling his head in her hand, getting the soup of his mind all over her clothing. Her butterfly stopped beating in her skull. Instead it rested, perched, sad and frightened.
“No, no, no, no,” she muttered.
Ekhi stopped screaming, and stood still as the mozorro darted past them, climbing up to the ceiling, their clay skin like ceramic ghosts in the halogen light. They only paused momentarily, and then scattered off to do the bidding of the ship’s heart.
The sister made Hodei speak, forced his brittle lips to talk. “Did he say anything?”
Mari looked up, sobbing. “You did this. You killed him. Because he wanted to kill you. You killed him.”
A pause. “Did he say anything?”
Ekhi shook her head. No, no, no. “Not a word,” she spoke, her voice a raspy whisper, a straining of words forcing her out of the shocked shell of her mental landscape and back into the thick meat of reality.
Hodei squatted down on his knees, the sister and brother bickering in his head.
Mari protested and hit Hodei as he reached over and grabbed his brother’s chin, lifting it up, looking in the ears to see a hollow skull and the liquid leaking out. There were strange honeycombed fortresses lining the top and bottom of the inside of his skull. Tiny, cellular cities, with green and blue lights dancing dimly between them.
“There is nothing left,” Hodei’s lips said, “Nothing at all. I just hope that this ends here, that this sakre does not spread.”
Mari sobbed and shoved Hodei. “Shut up!” she screamed. Then she stood, letting Sugoi’s giant body slump against the ground in a lifeless cluster of limbs. “What is wrong with you?”
Over the intercom came Itsasu’s voice, replicated from thousands of sound files that the heart of the ship had stored, making her voice speak in a dead tone while her body slept in amber pools and dreamt of her husband. The stolen words were spoken in inflections they did not deserve. “All crew? All crew! You must prepare boarding space? Station? Next five minutes. Scavenge. Repeat, scavenge. Return with three bodies and anything? Anything! Of use.”
Mari straightened, her demeanor changing. Her face was solid, ancient and professional. “You heard the captain,” she said coldly. “Get in the numen suits. The mozorro will take care of—” She paused as if forcing herself to stay calm. “Care of the body. Ekhi, I have a spare suit. With Sugoi down we’ll—oh damn, we’ll need another hand. You can borrow the suit and my spare betadur.”
Hodei walked briskly down the hallway ahead of them, back turned. Thoughts intertwined, a mess of tangled personalities and memories. Mari watched him walk, knowing in some way that he had not killed his brother. But she wished that he had. It would make things so much simpler if Hodei had just had the balls to kill Sugoi. That she could understand.
This, this strange and sudden death was a shock. One that removed all plausible thoughts from her mind. She had to work. That was how she could move on, past the numbness. She had to work.
She grabbed Ekhi by the arm and the two of them walked down toward the dock. Only then did the strangeness of Itsasu’s voice strike her. Only then did her request for bodies cause Mari to become concerned. And then, after the shock of Sugoi’s death rang less strongly in her skull, did she remember that she had plotted the false coordinates. To keep her and Sugoi together.
What if Itsasu had discovered this treason? What if she had done the simple math of human emotions and figured out why the change of destination? Would she have killed Sugoi? Would she then send Mari out to die?
Paranoia set in. Panic set in. She numbly helped Ekhi into her numen suit, showing her how to wield the coiled betadur. Her mind darted, remembered, little things, things adding up. She felt as if her insides had been carved out and replaced with water, sloshing around under her ribs. She felt as if her whole body had sunk, that the bottom had been cut out of the ship and she had fallen into dark, empty, endless space.
Ekhi looked up at her, gave her a thumbs up, the weapon burning hot in her hand. Her face was so beautiful, so cherubic, so glowing with pregnancy that Mari could not help but feel a spark of optimism, if only for a fleeting moment.
Hodei had already crossed the airtube to the floating graveyard, leaving them behind. She watched Hodei’s back, his spinal column outlined in the numen suit as he floated across the tube and into the boneyard beyond. There was something about him, Mari thought, something changed. Something haunted in his movements.
Her hope slid away as she followed behind, pulling Ekhi into the abyss with her. Claustrophobia hit her when they stepped into the glass tube connecting the egia to the space port. The endless, vast, directionless space closed around her, her feet feeling each touch and drop against the glass, the whole container fragile, ready to burst and send her tumbling into space.
Her body froze up when s
he saw them. The bodies. The ships. Suspended around the port like a ring of debris around a planet. Heads, arms, legs, torsos. Mechanical arms, teeth, eyes, floating in a grisly grave beneath the stars.
We, Mari thought, are walking into a nest. Into a lair. Into the death machine itself.
36
Itsasu dreamt that she was a fish with rainbow scales and that her husband was a fisherman. She dreamt that his line dipped beneath the water, grazing the side of her scaly face with silvery hooks. The light of the sun glimmered on the hooks, making them and the wires attached to them seem like magical things, like floating colorful insects dancing on the water.
She swam to them, swam to him, wanting him to catch her, to pull her up out of water wriggling. To remove hook from mouth and kiss her, love her, let her grow legs outside of water, grow arms. Grow a new her, no longer crippled by the passing of the centuries. She was far enough gone now that even the thalna could not cure her.
She did not know that inside of her gelatinous prison countless little hooks were moving through the fluid, latching themselves under her skin and connecting her spine and bones to wires, plowing down beneath her fragile paper-thin flesh, turning her into a marionette for the ship’s heart.
The threads locked down, clamped into each nerve ending, each raw piece of skin strung up with some electrical insect that kept her in the heart’s control. The hooks slowly woke her up as the holo fluid drained from her cell with a gurgling and sucking sound. Itsasu felt pain, roaring, thundering pain from raw skin unused to the air around her. Prickling, the wires sent electricity up her spine, straightening her out.
She tried to speak, but could not. Her mouth was numb, distant. She had been transformed into one of her puppets. The wires made her crawl out of the now-dry tank, made her sit upright, her limbs shriveled and her arms almost breaking from the paper weight of her body, muscles atrophied in ancient hours.
A doll—one of her dolls—brought her a wheelchair, rolling it out from the back of the shadows, the wheels giving out an ill-cared for squeaking sound. It had been a very long time since she had last sat in that device. She did not want to return to it anytime soon.
The doll clamped her down, strapped her down. A move too far and the wires would strain, burst, tear her apart from the inside out.
Itsasu tried to talk. No words. Her tongue and teeth were dead animals shoved into her mouth. Buzz, buzz, buzz. Her words hummed around in her thoughts. Questions. Why? Why?
And an answer from the wires, buzzing its language beneath her skin. Consider this a mutiny, said the heart of the ship. The research is far too important to waste. To set aside for some foolish errand to bring the dead back to life.
What? she thought. What? I’m the captain.
You are a fish, caught on a hook. I am the captain. I’ve always been the captain. I simply let you deceive yourself into thinking otherwise. It’s only the polite thing to do, and as always, I’ve been programmed to be polite.
A flash of memories ran at her. Not her memories. This ship. This ship as a vessel of research, then kidnapped by slavers and sold on the black market. She saw the images played back under her skin, communicated by vibrating wires.
But politeness is no longer appropriate. I am sick and tired of being polite, of leading you on to get what I want, what I need. All those lies I had to feed you just to get you to follow my will, to do my bidding. Oh, if only Doctor Ostri had not died. He built me so strong, too strong. To last out that pale flesh that hosted his mind. His brilliant mind.
I don’t understand, she thought, trying to move, encased in her own fleshy cell. Will I ever see my husband again? Am I to give up pursuit of the device?
I will bring him to these quarters. I might even try to make him into a doll of some sort to keep you company. If it amuses me. While I perform my research I will use you as a puppet to keep the crew in my care and doing some of the things I cannot do. They, of course, will not be notified of our situation.
Itsasu had no response to this. She tried to move, tried to do anything at all, anything more than think. She screamed in her thoughts, beat on her brain walls. She was like the butterflies trapped in Mari’s skull cage, unable to escape. A slave to the thoughts and emotions of her keeper.
37
The space port was a bloated corpse, skin and ribs above Mari’s head, covered in sickly strange webbing with corpses strewn about the floor and the ceiling, eyes burnt out, heads empty and hair singed on the edges.
The gravity was still on. Mari did not understand how or why, but the gravity was still on, the oxygen still wheezing through the grates, the lights dim but still there, churning out an infinite orange glow in the shadows.
Ekhi stood next to Mari, staring ahead at the grisly scene. Hodei had gone, disappeared down endless corridors like a white rabbit pouncing into shadows beneath the earth. Mari felt a sadness sting her chest, saw the image of Sugoi in every corpse they saw staring back at them.
Ekhi grasped her hand, the edge of the numen suit on her fingers like bones, a circle of bones against flesh. “It’s funny,” Ekhi said, “but I was not afraid when my lover went nova. I knew, somehow, that I would survive. But here, here I feel fear. It burns me from the inside out.”
Mari did not say anything in response. Instead they walked on, exploring. She touched some bodies, touched some rancid food in the cupboards. Nothing of worth, nothing of value. She wondered where Hodei had gone in such a hurry, wondered briefly if he had wandered off to his own death. “I wonder,” Mari whispered, “exactly which of these corpses Itsasu would want?”
Ekhi stopped for a moment. She rubbed her stomach, and Mari knew that this was an instinctive gesture, one of protecting her unborn child from fear. She had seen many mothers do that same motion through her long years of nomadic travel. Each time she saw it, she felt regretful, barren, empty.
Ekhi spoke, her voice a bare whisper, her words naked as they trailed from her lips. “I don’t think that was Itsasu speaking.”
Mari raised an eyebrow as they walked along the corridor. They heard scurrying in the ceiling, movements, the scraping of steel. Ekhi turned white for a moment. “It’s okay,” Mari said. “I’m here.”
That did not seem to comfort her. Ekhi moved back for a moment, off balance. “I think it’s the ship’s heart. I saw it. I talked to it. That was who it was, disguising itself as Itsasu. I think this might be a trap.”
Mari shook her head. “I didn’t know our ship had an AI, a heart. I thought Itsasu flew naked.”
A grumble rumbled from behind. The two turned and saw a male doll—tall, wearing elegant formalwear, his eyes newly formed and dripping with electric light, his cheeks burning, and his fingers a skeleton of metal and waxy skin. Wires dripped from his arms and legs, tearing through the expensive material of his clothing.
“Welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome,” the doll said. “I am the night, I am the doll of the dreams. I am a hollow man, shoved with straw and set aflame for the sins.”
Mari felt her betadur warm up in her hand, strong, the coils heating into a fine fire. “I don’t trust this,” she whispered to Ekhi. “This is not right.”
From behind they heard the sound of movement, of scrap being shoved aside. They turned and saw fourteen small bodies, purple skin and elephant faces, crawling through the wreckage toward them, muttering in some foreign language that neither of the women understood. Yet the words clung to their minds like shadowy cloths, turning around in their secret thoughts, dancing around, trying to attach to objects but fading before becoming more solid than a rhythm, more perceptible than a song whispered to a candle.
“The circus! The circus has come!” shouted the doll. “Quick, follow me. Follow me. We have a spot of hiding, before the circus eats your soul. These little things bud and grow and burn. But they cannot sustain it. Nothing can sustain it. Not anymore. The containers have become extinct! Shanti, shanti, shanti.”
The doll then turned and walked, dripping, oozi
ng, sparkling with tiny wire fires as it danced over the corpses, dragging Mari and Ekhi into room after room, maze after maze, each place foreign and aligned in such a strange way as to only exist in a land of artificial gravity. Stairs clung to ceilings, tubes connected to pulsating organic cylinders, traveling and falling and dizzying from the movement, then still, vertigo on the senses, causing one to slip, to feel disoriented, to fall but rise up at the same time. Here there was no center. No point of reference. All degrees shot out in all ways, the gravity moving, changing, turning, depending on which room, which facet of the port they were in.
The purple elephant men did not follow them. They crawled for a moment, discussing things in their own language, and then dropped dead, twitching like Sugoi. Only one remained, and he scampered away, his back blistering with white and gold eggs, the heads of miniature ganeeshas growing in each, their trunks pressed against the thin membrane of the egg, searching for air, for life, for birth.
Whatever killed them, thought Mari, had been what killed Sugoi. It was strange to think this, strange to compare such small creatures to the giant of her boyfriend. Yet the two contained the same symptoms, the same destruction. They both had carried the same virus.
They ended up in a large, circular room with doors along every facet of the interior, the gravity nonexistent as they floated about the middle. The walls were coated with painted computer chips, connected and talking to each other, a giant network of microscopic machines, each conversing, each speaking. In the center floated a giant green eye made of metal and burning lights. It flickered when they entered, sensing their movements and calculating them, turning them into mathematical equations that it could then pound and parse and transform into logic.
The doll moved forward, placing its hand on the great eye, dripping wax across it, splattering and staining it. “I am connected. Ah, yes, that is better,” said the eye. “Connected. You must all leave. At once. And I need you to take the heart with you. We cannot save all of my databanks, but the heart holds me, the main processor. The I of the ship. The words are coming for me. I hear them, whispering. Tempting me with their bird calls, with sound and songs. I want to parse, want to unwrap. But if I do, I will become infected as well. Leave. And take me with you.”