Forgotten Worlds

by D. Nolan Clark

  He looked at it through their eyes, tried to understand what they were feeling.

  He imagined what Archie’s final depression, his final desperation, was doing to them. The castaway’s last thoughts would still be echoing around their networked minds, his sorrow and his homesickness and, probably the hardest to bear, his utter despair must still be bouncing around the city, getting picked up and rebroadcast and endlessly analyzed.

  They couldn’t get away from Archie’s last moment. The final thought of a man who had taken his own life.

  Lanoe saw a black helmet rise over the side of the hull. Saw Valk coming toward him, moving slowly. Maybe Valk was giving him a chance to say that he wanted to be alone, or maybe Valk was just sad. As Establishmentarians, he and Archie had shared a vision, the vision of planets free of poly domination. They’d both believed in that strongly enough to fight for it. Maybe Valk was just in mourning, in his own, artificial way.

  “This is bad,” Lanoe said, as Valk came close.

  The AI didn’t respond. He came to stand next to Lanoe. To watch, together, as the city screamed.

  After a while, Valk stirred. “They must have some way to get past this, right?”

  “The Choir?” Lanoe said. “Sure. Or … I don’t know.” He shook his head. “Grief isn’t something that you can just put away. There’s no cure.”

  Valk reached over and put a hand on Lanoe’s shoulder. “I guess you know all about that,” he said.

  He was talking about Zhang. Lanoe tried to harden himself, to force himself to talk about something else, but there were words in his throat and they just came out. “I’ve been dreaming about her. Pretty much every time I close my eyes. She’s there, she’s … right there, and then, I wake up and she’s gone again. It’s like losing her all over again. It’s … It’s just wrong, Valk. It’s not right that she isn’t there. Do you understand? She’s supposed to be there, and so I dream about her, but she’s not there.”

  “Hellfire,” Valk said. “Lanoe, I didn’t know—”

  Lanoe took a deep breath. Enough. He hadn’t meant to say all that. To put his burden on Valk. And anyway, none of it mattered. Not just then.

  “The Choir,” he said. “That’s what they’re feeling. All of them—they’re grieving for Archie. They’re mourning, and they can’t let it go.”

  “So we give them time, I guess,” Valk said. “Let them find peace again.”

  “Time,” Lanoe told him, “isn’t something we have. This is bad. This is very, very bad.”

  “I feel it, too.”

  Lanoe shook his head. “Without Archie we have no way to talk to them. We can’t negotiate.”

  The weight of Valk’s hand wasn’t on his shoulder anymore. “Wait,” the AI said. “Wait.”

  “I can’t get what I need, if I can’t talk to them.”

  “Lanoe—hold on,” Valk said. “You can’t seriously be thinking about that right now. This is not the time!”

  Lanoe turned to face him. “I told you, time isn’t something—”

  “A man is dead!” Valk lifted his arms. Let them fall again. “He’s dead! And all you can think about is how that inconveniences you?”

  “I’m sorry that he thought he didn’t have any options. I kind of liked him, frankly, and I’m sad to see him go. But I have a responsibility to this mission, to all the species the Blue-Blue-White wiped out, to—”

  “Damn you.”

  Lanoe reeled. Coming from Valk—coming from the only real friend he had left—that stung.

  “Damn your eyes. You have a responsibility all right,” Valk said. “Unless you’re going to tell me that you don’t see it.”

  “See what?”

  “That we drove him to this. That we all but murdered Archie.”

  Lanoe shook his head. “That’s bosh. The Choir did this to him. We tried to help him. We tried to get him out of here, to take him home.”

  “Home? Where exactly would that be, for someone like him? He lost his war, Lanoe. We lost our war. I guess you don’t know what that feels like.”

  Lanoe’s eyes narrowed. “I guess I don’t.”

  “Everything we had faith in is gone. As long as he was out here, waiting to be rescued, he still had hope. Then we arrived and showed him there was nothing for him to go back to.”

  “Valk—”

  But the AI was already walking away. Headed back inside.

  Lanoe watched the city below, watched the Choir wail in grief, for a while longer, before he followed.

  “Come on. Shoo!” Lieutenant Ehta said, waving a minder at one of the choristers that had wandered into the ship’s axial corridor. “Move it!”

  The alien lifted all four of its arms and waved them back and forth. And refused to move. Ginger pointed down the corridor, stabbing her finger in the air. They’d been tasked with herding the choristers down to the vehicle bay, in the hope that the Choir would send aircars up to retrieve them. A vain hope, so far, but nobody wanted the aliens in the ship anymore.

  The chirping was bad enough—earsplitting was the best word Ginger had for the arrhythmic noise they made. The smell was even worse. The choristers were giving off a chemical reek that made human heads spin. Whether it was just body odor from aliens who had stopped grooming themselves or some kind of sorrow pheromone, nobody could say. They certainly couldn’t ask the choristers.

  Ginger couldn’t stand it—the noise and the smell, but especially the fact that they were so clearly suffering, and couldn’t tell her why. Ginger had never been able to feel comfortable around people who were upset. She always felt a desperate need to make them feel better, to calm them down, to tell them everything would be okay. Maybe, she thought, that was why she’d latched on to Bury, even back at the flight school. His flashes of indignation, his petty little rages gave her something to soothe, some way to make herself feel like she was being helpful. But she could hardly do that for the aliens, not when she couldn’t talk to them.

  “Move,” Lieutenant Ehta roared. The chorister only redoubled her keening, screeching song. “I said move, you bastard!” she shouted, and then she rushed at the alien, her shoulder down as if she would bowl the chorister over. She collided with the armor-plated side with an audible crunch, but didn’t succeed in moving the alien so much as a centimeter.

  “Don’t hurt it!” Ginger shouted.

  “Yeah, good luck with that,” Lieutenant Ehta huffed. “They’re just a bundle of sticks under those dresses, but devil take me if they can’t take a hit. It must be a low center of gravity thing, or maybe it’s all those legs. Heavy as sin, too. C’mon, kid. Help me.”

  Ginger didn’t want to touch the alien. She was worried its stink would get all over her. But she stepped in under its flailing arms—her arms, she thought, they were all supposed to be female—and put her back into it. The chorister was nearly twice her height but she felt right away what Lieutenant Ehta had described. The black dresses were like sacks full of broken branches. She felt a leg curl against her arm and she lurched backward, horrified by the sheer alienness of the chorister. Unfortunately she jumped right into the path of one of those waving arms, and she went down in a heap.

  “Here,” Lieutenant Ehta said, and reached out a hand to help Ginger up. Only to yank it away again as Ginger reached for it.

  “Ha ha, very funny,” Ginger said, thinking this was some kind of rough PBM humor. But the look on Lieutenant Ehta’s face told her otherwise. The big woman looked like all the blood had rushed out of her face.

  “One of the—the little bug things,” Lieutenant Ehta said, pointing down at the front of Ginger’s suit. “It’s on you!”

  Ginger looked down and nearly screamed. She’d never had a problem with insects, not really, but this thing had ten legs, at least ten, each of them furry and barbed and its head was all eyes and and and—

  “It’s going for your collar ring!” Lieutenant Ehta shouted. “It’s going to try to climb inside your suit!”

  Ginger brought
her hand down fast, thinking she would crush the thing, keep it out of her suit. But the chorister shrieked so plaintively, with such recognizable mute horror that at the last second Ginger cupped her hand around the little male. Even when she felt its hairy legs tickle her palm.

  Except—she’d thought it would be prickly. That maybe it would even sting her. Instead its fur felt soft and downy. More like a mouse’s than a tarantula’s. She moved her hands carefully until she had both of them cupped around the wriggling thing. “I think it was just trying to get somewhere warm,” she said. Then a shadow passed over her and she looked up to see the chorister.

  It—she—was leaning over Ginger, two of her claws held out in front of her in exactly the same way Ginger held her hands. Copying her. Ginger lifted the cage of her hands up and the claws closed around her fingers.

  “It’s going to cut your hands off,” Lieutenant Ehta said, but quieter than she could have, and Ginger got the sense that the marine understood something of what was happening. Maybe just a little. Enough that she didn’t interfere.

  Ginger opened her fingers and pulled her hands back, gently, to keep the little bug from escaping. The claws closed little by little. When Ginger’s hands were completely free, the chorister carefully, ever so delicately, tucked the bug into one of her lacy sleeve cuffs, where it disappeared.

  Ginger got to her feet. Then she reached up and touched one of the chorister’s claws. It closed around her fingers, not in an enveloping way, but as if the alien wanted to hold her hand. She felt how soft the claws were on the inside, lined with round, furry pads. The fur was just as soft as what she’d felt on the legs of the little bug.

  “Can you, um, follow me?” Ginger asked.

  The chorister rolled her head around in a wide circle. Ginger had no idea whether that meant yes or no or some alien concept she could never hope to understand. But she had to try. She started walking down the corridor, still holding the chorister’s hand.

  And after a second where she thought the alien might pull her off her feet, the chorister started to follow. “This way,” Ginger said, and the chorister kept up with her, matching her steady walking pace. Lieutenant Ehta jogged up beside her.

  “Hellfire, kid, what did you say to it? I thought they couldn’t understand us.”

  Ginger shook her head. “I don’t know, I think—maybe it just took a little kindness? I know that sounds dumb.”

  “Yeah, it does,” Lieutenant Ehta said, but then she laughed.

  Together they brought the chorister through the hatch and into the vehicle bay, where two others of her kind were already waiting. They looked up and gestured for the newcomer to join them. At least, that was what Ginger thought their gesture meant. They warbled crazily, but for a second the two of them warbled crazily in the same key, and their voices joined together in harmony.

  The third, Ginger’s chorister, raised her own voice, trying to match the pitch. She lurched forward toward the others, then stopped and tilted her head down toward Ginger, perhaps remembering that she was still holding Ginger’s hand.

  Then she reached out with three arms and wrapped them around Ginger’s head and shoulders, pulling her into a tight hug. Ginger’s face was smashed against armor plates that stank of iodine and something else equally unpleasant.

  She wrapped her arms around the chorister’s body, feeling how terribly thin she was. She felt something wet touch her hair and she realized the chorister was crying, big wet, sobbing tears. Positively weeping all over her.

  Ginger reached up and gathered some of the tears on her fingertips. She had expected them to come away silvered, wet with mercury—the color of the chorister’s eyes. Instead the tears were transparent. Just salt water.

  The chorister released her and ran off to join the others. They made a triangle out on the floor of the vehicle bay, claws clattering together, and sang a rising cadence so loud it hurt Ginger’s ears.

  Lieutenant Ehta pulled her back out into the corridor. “They like you,” she said, sounding mystified.

  “I guess they do,” Ginger said.

  Lanoe studied the machine in his hands. He’d never used one before—had never bothered learning much about medical technology. This thing seemed relatively simple. There was a sort of wand you ran over the thing you wanted to scan, and a pad you placed under it. The imaging was all done on a minder no bigger than the palm of his hand. “Help me with this,” he said.

  Candless frowned, but at least she didn’t refuse. The mood on the ship was so strained that he half-expected his people to mutiny on the spot. Though he supposed they were all too tired, too irritable, to actually organize.

  She lifted Archie’s head and gently placed the pad underneath, as if she were giving him a pillow to make him more comfortable. “I fail to see how this is helping us, in any way,” she said, but she left it at that.

  The temperature in the brig had been reduced until they could see their breath. Lanoe didn’t want to take his gloves off—the memory of the cold wormhole was still in the bones of his fingers—but he needed the fine motor control. He switched on the wand and made a few exploratory passes over Archie’s pale, slack face.

  “This thing in his head is alien technology. The Admiralty will want us to bring back anything we can, anything that might give us a sense of the Choir’s capabilities.”

  Candless folded her arms. “You make it sound like you’re gathering intelligence in advance of an invasion.”

  “Oh, I’m just hedging my bets. Don’t want to go home empty-handed.”

  On the minder’s display, the bones of Archie’s skull were pale shadows in a dark cloud. Lanoe adjusted a virtual control and the muscles of the man’s face came into relief, bands of long, straight fibers. The eyeballs appeared out of nowhere, round and only slightly shriveled. Lanoe cursed—he’d adjusted the setting in the wrong direction. He tapped in a series of commands, then waved the wand over the scar in Archie’s temple.

  “I admit that I’m glad,” Candless said.

  Lanoe looked up at her.

  “I’m glad you seem to have accepted that this mission is over. There’s nothing left to be done here, clearly, as we can no longer converse with the aliens. Even the repairs the Choir began on the ship have been abandoned. It’s time to go home.”

  “Sure,” Lanoe said. The minder’s display showed Archie’s brain. It looked like a wrinkled mass of inert putty. Lanoe couldn’t see any gross damage to the brain’s structure. He had expected that the antenna the Choir put in Archie’s head would look like, well, an antenna. A long piece of metal. Fitting such a thing inside his skull would have meant moving whole lobes of the brain out of the way. Nothing like that showed itself on the scan, however. He adjusted the controls again.

  “There are logistical concerns that we should discuss. Getting out of the bubble will prove difficult, of course—”

  “I can’t make this out. Can you see what this shadow is?” he asked her.

  Candless pointed at the minder and tapped her fingernail along the edge of the display, indicating a fine-tuning control he hadn’t noticed before. “Then there’s the fact that there’s only one wormhole out of this system, which Centrocor currently has in their possession. We can’t just sneak past them through the wormhole throat. Even assuming they don’t attack us the moment we emerge from the bubble—and I know if I were in command of that carrier, that is exactly what I would do—we will need to evade them in a ship that can’t withstand any more drastic maneuvers. Then we’ll need to re-transverse the lightless wormhole. Just making it to Avernus, where we can make proper repairs, will take a long string of miracles.”

  “Sure,” Lanoe said. He touched a key to reveal different layers of brain tissue, feathering it as gently as he would the positioning jets of a fighter during a tricky docking sequence. “Miracles,” he said. “My specialty.” He thought he saw a shadow in one of the tomographic views and he backed up, just a little.

  There.

  “Oh. Hel
l, I had no idea,” he said.

  “If you think I’m missing some crucial detail in my analysis of our situation, I do hope you’ll share it with me.”

  “No, no, look,” he said.

  The antenna didn’t look anything like he’d expected. It didn’t even look like a solid object. The minder’s display showed parts of Archie’s parietal and occipital lobes—the parts of the human brain most heavily involved with language and vision. It looked like they’d been brushed very gently with a stripe of silver paint. Lanoe adjusted the scanner’s controls back and forth, but he couldn’t find anything that looked like a microchip or even a wire. This had to be it.

  “It doesn’t look like an implant. More like it grew in place. I don’t think we can even take it out,” he said.

  Candless looked down at the bone saw she’d been holding. “Perhaps that’s just as well,” she said, and gently put it down.

  Ginger was in her bunk, trying to finally get some sleep, when the call came. Of course, she thought, as she opened her eyes and looked at the display mounted in the ceiling above her. Of course they want us to assemble right now.

  The screaming hadn’t stopped. The choristers were still lost in their grief and their chirping still echoed through the ship. But now that they were corralled in the vehicle bay—one of the most heavily armored parts of the cruiser, with blast plating lining it inside and out—the noise had dropped to a sort of distant keening. Everyone, all the marines, all the officers, had turned in to try to rest. To try to get over the stress of the very long day.

  And now Commander Lanoe wanted to address them in the wardroom.

  Ginger put a hydration tab under her tongue, if only to freshen her breath, and rubbed at her eyes. Then she slapped the release key on her bunk’s hatch and slipped out into the corridor. Lieutenant Ehta was out there. She was smiling. Ginger shot her a quizzical look.