by Paul Jessup
44
Ekhi was in the ship. That was good. In case it left. Crumpled, fetal, pain. Cold beneath her, not ground, floating cold like vast space, like underwater, pushing, waves, moving, cold. Breath of cold against cheek of cold, face of cold with eyes of cold. Blue was everything, globes of eyes were shut, blue was everything. Electricity, blue, shooting over body, crawling over skin, eating into heart, into ribs.
Blue came out from her stomach, waves of blue light coating her body, pain in that light like fierce fire coating each nerve. She felt bursting inside, tearing, something exploding. She was light, became that blue light, and knew that it wasn’t just a birth.
Creation, in a strange sense. Combination. Building between two bodies, destroying the old. She was going supernova herself, her belly an exploding star, taking out the planets of her flesh, the suns of her eyes, the cities of her bones. Bursting, blowing, sucking in, spitting out, collapsing, fire, fire, fire, blue lightning.
Ekhi, Ekhi, Ekhi. No, no. Submerged, swallowed down. She rode the blue electric waves, felt the surging source of pain and let it flow and go and burn right through her. A mirror of ghosts, walking through her, burning through her. Turning her, taking her. She felt so much.
She felt the lives of so many others coming into her thoughts through all of her selves. And she saw him, saw him in the bursting pain, her lover, her lover once again. Before he went nova. Bright and shining, she saw him from afar, through a telescope, up close as she drove the egia in and through.
Burst. Her skin burst. Bones broke inward, outward, expanding and shrinking and then becoming something else. Her body stitched, reformed, reshaped. It was as if the center of her, this thing in her belly, were a seed of transformation. It was not birth in the sense of new life stemming from old life, but rather the transformation of one life merging with another, the two killing each other in the process of creating one new thing.
Her lover had died for this, and now it was her turn. Her turn to die. Her turn to combine, break, become the new. She’d had no idea what this birth meant; it had been an abstract thing, hanging on the edges of her dreams. Now it was here, eating her whole, and on the other side she would be gone but not gone. New but old. Pieces of her would remain, just like pieces of his star would remain, ghostly, hidden, a specter amongst the flesh and consciousness, making this thing wholly new. Wholly magnificent.
She cried out, Ekhi, Ekhi, Ekhi. And then blinked. Her body was sore and smaller, skin as night, no light reflecting. Hair as star, glowing, sparkling. Eyes as suns, golden, glowing. Breasts as moons, orbiting, heavy. Ekhi? No. I am more than Ekhi. I am Ekhi and her long-lost star lover, I am both and more. I am Arigia.
45
Itsasu searched her mind for the heart of the ship. It was gone, elsewhere, perhaps distracted. Good, she thought, this could be to my advantage. She tried moving arms and legs. No, weighted and senseless. Like being in another body, trying to control this one. Try, she thought. Try to start smaller.
She concentrated on the beating of her heart. There it was, barely, near the center of her chest, like a drum being beaten in the next room over. As her thoughts zeroed in, the sound became louder. Then it was not a drum but a rushing of waves, a rushing of blood through her veins. It was thundering, fire inside of her. She commanded her heart to slow down, and after a few moments it did, each flow of the blood calming, rushing in slower pulses. She commanded it to speed up, and in her delight, it did, faster and faster, filling her body with an obscene fire.
Next, she turned her concentration to her lungs, forced her mind to search for her breath. At first, it was not there at all, something hidden in another room, controlled by radio or some other device. She watched her chest, saw the movements and concentrated on finding the sound, however distant, that coincided. It was there, like the whisper of dragonfly wings under a pillow. Her mind sought it out, grabbed onto the thread of the sound and pulled it, yanked it closer, brought it up and kissed it to her lips. My breath, my breath!
She felt it fill her, and with it came pain, a great surge of sparkling knives that cut into her every pore. The wires were no longer a distant ache but right there, trapped within her body, crawling beneath her skin. Their electrical charges and messages became loud and violent, all too clear in her mind.
Stop, she almost thought. Stop, it is too much. But before that fear could take hold, she shoved it back and moved a finger. It twitched; even through the radio noise of all that pain, it twitched. She moved her palm, felt it rub against the wheelchair, and was once again excited, once again beyond the pain that tried to consume her.
She held her breath, caught it in her lungs, let it sit and wallow around in there like a lost insect. Then, right when she was most calm, she reached over and began to yank the wires out. At first the pain was the same as shoving broken glass into her bones, but she persisted, letting the feeling crawl away, hide, move past her and go away, hide away somewhere else.
Once all the wires were removed, she waited and relaxed a moment. The air stung her. Her skin was slick and covered with blood. But she was disconnected, disconnected from the ship. It felt good. It felt freeing. To be out of that chamber, to be away from that all-controlling mind. She did not need omnipresence, did not need the godlike power of controlling every aspect of the ship.
For the first time in centuries, she felt real. She could taste the air, could see the universe with her own two eyes, feel it with her skin and nerves, the weight of it pressing against her bones. Before, it had been like a video game played in some dark room. Now it was here, all around her, and she could connect with the world like never before.
The first thing she did was reach down and grab that electronic eye, feeling it pulse between her fingers. The eye was valuable. To her, to the ship’s heart—the ultimate bargaining chip. One if its own. Infected.
46
Hodei’s eyelids fluttered. One eye opened, then the other, creating semicircles of darkness, slowly giving way to light. He was in a canister, breathing liquid. His eyes felt wet, watery. A blue substance coated him. He tried to breathe but no breath came. No rise and fall of the chest, no sucking of oxygen into starved lungs.
He was not dead, but preserved. The room—he was in the heart of the ship. He saw it, a great beating thing, illuminating the room in red. He heard the thoughts of the ship loitering about in his mind and knew that the brother and sister were gone. He was alone in his thoughts again.
Across the room, he saw them and an old gentleman propped up, their canisters reflecting the red-womb glow of the giant heart. The back of his mind tickled. Something moving. A wire ran out of the back of his neck and snaked around his body. Through this wire came food, thought, breath, and life.
Next to the heart was Mari, tied up and bound to the wall, her eyes rolling about in her head as she babbled on in some strange language that felt familiar to Hodei, yet was still distant, still shadowy and without any real substance. She twitched and moaned, and Hodei wished that she could die before she had the same terrible fate as his brother.
In the center of the room Hodei saw a black box with a glowing amber jewel. The jewel blinked at him, rapidly, and he saw something encoded in the pattern, memories moving along his mind, memories of planets connected by star bridges that moved in strange parallel gravities, twisting through space with people traveling along those bridge cities, nomads who know nothing of the universe except their silver towers.
The inhabitants were fat, blue shapes that had no eyes, but could see light through a sense of smell. They breathed in an orange liquid that they stored in tanks over their backs and they communicated through light, beaming it to one another, the words encoded with smell and sounds.
Hodei closed his eyes, shutting out these foreign thoughts. No, no, no, he thought. Not again. This is my mind. I will not have another person slice it open and shove their memories below the surface.
The back of his skull tingled again, tickled again. A voice. Open your
eyes, it said. See. See. It was the heart of the ship, talking to him through the wire in his neck. It boomed over his thoughts, and to Hodei it sounded like the voice of a god, the voice of an angel, the voice of a demon, the echoing commandment of fire.
No. No, he would not open his eyes.
I have purged you of the memories of those two, stored their patuek in my datamines. I have saved you. Look into the Ortzadar engine and tell me what you see. I have no eyes. I am the ship’s heart. What do you see?
Hodei explained what he had seen before, not daring to open his eyes again, hoping that would be enough for the ship’s heart. Hoping that it would leave him alone after this.
Interesting, it said, speaking into his mind. Interesting. If only Doctor Ostri were here with me. Still, I must carry on his research. Did you see a golden thread? Something connecting here to there, maybe?
No. No. He had seen nothing like that. What was that thing? What was it?
A connection. Between here and a place many millions and trillions of light-years away. A connection that is instantaneous. A rending in the space-time continuum. My master, my creator, he knew of it. Wanted to find it. He called it the Heavenly Lands, a paradise. Did it look like paradise to you?
Paradise? Hodei would not have called it paradise any more than he would call the ship paradise.
A weak mind. You are a weak mind. The only possibility for happiness you see is that which slakes your needs. You find nothing beyond the baser instincts. I was programmed to search out a higher calling, to search for those who lived beyond the physical realm in a plane of mathematical perfection. To live in a world of platonic magnificence, untainted with the gross randomness of human math and human mind. A world unburdened by the desires of meat. I am impure because I was programmed and built by a meat-bound mind, and even though he was, in his own way, a genius, he was still full of the errors that exist in the human world, errors guided by randomness, by ugliness, by disruption to the symmetry of thought.
Hodei had seen nothing like that. He saw globules of creatures breathing muck, nomads wandering across bridges between worlds. He had described all this to the ship’s heart. All of it. There was no perfection there—they were still trapped by the bounds of reality.
Are they, though? Are they really? Open your eyes. Open them again. I need to see through your eyes. Need to see this, see it. Open. Open. Open.
A tickling behind Hodei’s eyes pulled his lids back against his will. Light flooded him, and then the heart spoke once more. Hodei saw them, alien creatures with boxes like the one with the glowing orange light, exactly like that box, sitting in front of creatures who were meditating, discussing, storing things within the boxes. His mind was flooded with equations, equations that flowed through him and then out of his body through the tube behind his neck, directly into the heart of the ship, who stole the equations and horded them for itself.
Oh, perfection. Perfection. Perfection. But what is this? I see it again. A glimpse. The sakre. It is there as well. It is here. They must tell me the answer, the connection.
Hodei forced his eyes closed. That’s all for now, machine. That is all for now. In the darkness of his own mind, he felt the ship prying at his thoughts and heard Mari babbling on and on in that secret language, the words taunting his mind with meaning, with stability, with power.
47
The heart listened to Mari babble, watched her on the dust-speck cameras that floated around the center home of the ship. It wished it could understand and yet not understand. There was a connection between its creator and this language. If it could speak the language, then it would become infected and no longer itself, no longer be able to continue on with Doctor Ostri’s experiments. Learning the language, the ship’s heart knew, would mean that the language would know the heart, would corrupt it. Would taint it.
What it needed was a translator. It brought the cameras close to the two tubes that Hodei had brought on board with him. Two bodies, preserved in a half-state of learning the language but not being governed by it yet. The heart called on Itsasu’s dolls to come in and aide it. It had an idea.
A way of turning one of these half-corrupted minds into a translator of sorts, a Chinese Room experiment. The trick was to do it without letting the corruption set in, destroying the mind completely. The heart had to do it fast, before Mari was destroyed by the language. It had to translate what she was saying, find out what the language thought, what it spoke, what the connection was. The dolls clanged into the home of the ship’s heart, bringing with them the tools of surgery as the great AI glittered and glowed. Hodei, it called out to its prisoner. Hodei. You will not want to miss this. This is something special. Open your eyes, Hodei, open your eyes.
48
Itsasu’s wheels creaked and wheezed with rust as she pulled up to the great, circular door leading into the room that held the heart of the ship. She stopped for a moment in front of the door, holding the metallic-green eye, the heart of the port, in her hands, feeling it pulse and move between her fingers. Her arms were still fragile things, still twigs scattered under a thin wafer of flesh, but she felt a strength that she hadn’t in her preservation chamber. As if she had risen from a womb and begun to toughen in the cold, airless vacuum of space.
She wheezed when she breathed, her lungs rattling, still not quite used to the air and the recycled oxygen that it contained. Her hand shook every few moments, dancing uncontrollably, small beads of pain making her arms numb where the wires had rested beneath her flesh.
She coughed, then slid her passkey in front of the door. It rose slowly open, like an eyelid of a giant, bringing the world into focus. From the antechamber she saw the ship’s great heart, her husband, and three other bodies propped up in canisters. One of them was Hodei.
She wheeled herself into the room, the heart beating light around her, and she saw dolls, her dolls, taking one of the canisters—one with a man she had never met—sliding him out of the canister slowly, slowly, his body like a mound of pickled skin.
Itsasu wheeled in as Hodei’s eyes opened. The door closed behind her, and she caught her breath inside of her lips, trapping them between her teeth, unable to exhale as the dolls sawed and burned the man’s skull open, exposing the brain and hooking wires up to it, his body twitching uncontrollably with each movement.
Itsasu did not feel sick or disgusted by this act. She had become desensitized to such things. She only felt pity, and relief that it was not her husband being cut open.
“Heart, Heart. I bring you something. Something that might help us approach an agreement. Something that might persuade you into pursuing my dreams, getting the last piece I need to revive my husband, rather than sitting here, rotting in the land of death.”
The voice boomed from the specks of dust floating around, each one a tiny speaker broadcasting a different note, coalescing into a voice that surrounded her, surrounded them. Not now, it said sternly. It can wait a few moments.
Itsasu watched, leaning back in her wheelchair. She felt the solidity of it behind her, glad to feel the rough skin of reality against her fragile flesh. She waited and drummed on the eye, the heart of the port, feeling it blinking and moving beneath her fingers like a living thing. As the dolls worked, the eye began to hum, singing a song in a language that Itsasu did not understand. The smell of burning flesh singed her nose, mixing with the harshly sweet aromas of ozone and antifreeze.
49
The heart watched through doll eyes, camera lenses zooming in, checking out each wire, each connection, each microscopic chip placed directly into the mind. This had to be perfect; this had to be exactly right. Eyes zoomed in closer, further than any human eye could see, peeling back layer of reality after layer of reality into the quantum world, where the heart connected tiny mechanizations that looked like minuscule butterflies with red and gold wings.
Other parts of the ship called to it. The mozorro called to it. The cameras tried to grab its attention, to force the heart of the ship
to see what they saw. It pushed them away, stored their messages within its datamines to view them later, at its leisure. The operation was far too complicated, required too much precision. A sacred geometry forming beneath doll hands, touched and made perfect by wax fingers.
The diagram was done, complete, finished. The heart pulled back, pulled out, viewed the room from faceted eyes. It turned off all other intrusions, all other distractions. This research was of the most importance. It needed to complete its master’s work, finish what Ostri had started. That was the heart’s purpose, the heart’s goal since its master’s death.
It spoke through the dolls. They spoke at the same time, like a Greek chorus. Their waxy faces looked like masks of gods, their voices wooden and static, without emotion or inflection. A chant. A summoning.
They looked at Mari, Mari who babbled. “Tell us,” they said. “Tell us who you are, where you are from.”
Mari looked up, the shining metal half of her face twisting and bending, her eyes popping out from her head as she began throwing herself about, screaming, burning, her tongue and teeth gnashing, howling, her butterflies no longer moving, dead. She thrashed back and forth with the movement of her head until her mouth stopped, her hands stopped, and she lolled backward, a pure milky fluid leaking out of her mouth and ears. She was of no more use to the ship’s heart.
The heart stopped. The dolls’ legs and arms and heads fell limp like sacks. A gasp, audible, came through the speakers. The heart’s emotions burned through it, rose up with the images of its creator dying, of Doctor Ostri’s head being ripped apart with a betadur, the patuek inside of him vaporized.
The heart remembered the moments its creator had taught it, read to it, instructed it. It had followed Ostri around in the body of a childlike robot, gears turning beneath glass, face rubber and smiling. “Soon you will be a ship,” its master had said, “and we will fly away from all of this, and you will help me. Help me transcend all of this. You are my perfect thing. My beautiful thing. Without you, I would not be able to do this. I would be lost.”