Solaris Rising 2

by Ian Whates

  I had never planned, I’m sure, to make them available again to anyone else.

  “Just because I brought you this far doesn’t mean I won’t call it off,” I said.

  Her faceted eyes turned down, sullen, a childish gesture from someone so deadly.

  I again held out the hand I’d offered her. “Take this and dive.”

  Finally, the ornery thing followed instructions. She took my arm, which I’d detached at the shoulder, and dove in. I had explained to her that she had precisely ten seconds to find the ID pad at the bottom and press my palm against it; otherwise valves would offer their opinion with jets of a corrosive and flammable chemical, followed by an inconvenient ignition. Ah, the elegant glare when I concluded, “Someone like you should have no difficulty.”

  Just enough time went by to make me wonder if Procne had botched the task. Then drains opened with a throaty gurgle as she bobbed back up. She held up my arm for me to reclaim, saying nothing as the fluid around her ebbed away. As I attached my limb to the facet where it belonged, all the nervesockets and vesselvalves reconnecting, she floated in the pool until her feet touched bottom. Her expression told me she didn’t want to help me down, so I insisted she do so. It was the least she could do, as I’d be rebuilding the ruins of my life long after she was gone.

  As the last of the liquid sluiced off, the floor of the pit shuddered, then lowered; a platform lift that descended as a new fake floor slid into place over our heads. For the first time Procne appeared impressed. “With all this, why did you even need a modshop?”

  “It’s not my wealth that built this,” I replied. “Just a favor owed. Nothing here belongs to me.”

  Which wasn’t completely true.

  The lift carried us down into another hidden chamber much larger than the one we’d left.

  The room didn’t need to be so cavernous. I’d requested it be filled with decoys. I’d imagined three or four. My former client had outdone hirself.

  Each machine in this cavernous vault hulked large as a garrison hovertransport; at least three dozen of the special cryogenic units with their corrugated skeletons of coolant piping wound through with webs of insulating fiber, muttering with off-the-grid power. I wondered what my former client was thinking, taking my requested ruse this far, but it would be too dangerous to attempt to revive hir memories so se could be asked.

  “When were these built?” Procne asked. “They’re ancient.”

  “Maybe as you perceive time they are.” If she was to be believed, she’d just given away that she genuinely was young, not simply adjusted to appear so. Yet there was good reason for these units to be so cumbersome and chaotic in their design. Each held hundreds of redundant systems. They were intended to serve their purpose even if languishing for centuries, forgotten.

  Yet only one held what I’d come to collect. And if anyone, including me, attempted to activate the wrong unit, they’d all shut down and destroy the hidden treasure. I hoped my client and I both remembered rightly about the pattern and the sign that would tell which machine was the correct one.

  I shared none of this anxiety with Procne. Instead I walked between the right and center row of machines, keeping an eye toward the crowning configurations of pipes. Each machine was different. I paused by one crowned by a duct that contained a curve and bend reminiscent of the crest of an ancient Greek helmet. Only an expert would know that no functional reason existed for this, and that expert would perhaps be thrown by the many useless design flourishes repeated above the other machines. But only this machine featured smaller pipes radiating out from the helmet like Shiva’s undulating arms.

  My hands hadn’t touched the ID pads on its surface in twenty years. The configuration requires four hands, all of them mine. “This will take a few minutes,” I said, as the sophisticated machinery inside came alive with a sigh.

  “What’s in there?” she asked. For the first time I noticed a tremolo in her voice.

  “What I need to do what you need,” I said. “I could try to explain, but you’ll see for yourself before I’m finished.”

  The machine opened a tray the size of an antique file cabinet drawer to disgorge its treasure, which stared up at me in wide-eyed surprise. I picked up the end, which contained all my knowledge of the forbidden art of unmaking. The head I already wore partitioned like a tulip bulb to allow this second braincasing to slide into place within it like an egg in a cup.

  My old self reconnected and took in what the rest of me knew and remembered. I recall my lips shaping the question, “What do you want to be?” She answered, and I asked, “What can you pay?”

  There’s really only one thing she could have paid: my pick, before I changed her, of what she had already, her body and its augments, the sum of her memories. But I can’t tell you precisely what she offered or what I took.

  And you won’t find her. Nor will you find, in my memories, any trace of where she is now. See, just as I knew that my survival for all those years depended on hiding as much of my former life away as I possibly could, what I learned from her, both things she knew and things she did not, told me that I would end up here. My old self left me with this sickening news, and what I needed to consider about it, and no more than that.

  Surprised that I can do this? Shut off the autonomous flow of my memory into your recorder and address you directly? My old self prepared me well. Let me guide you to what’s left for you to find.

  You see, Procne made confessions to me before and during her unmaking. Some she intended, some she didn’t. No process exists that’s more invasive.

  What I learned from her took me to Philomela’s lair, sixty stories deep into the belowground, right under the community of Hivetowers that adjoin the Hierophant’s fortress. The hall that led to Philomela’s dwelling, painted yellow in warning, simply dead-ended. I crossed into the yellow and waited.

  The pair of creatures that came to greet me in the tunnel was each formed of five different people engineered to interlock, though one skin covered them all. Both were terrifying masterpieces, even more brutal that the thug that trashed my shop, each with five pairs of ropy limbs terminating in prehensile claws. They emerged from the door that irised open at the hall’s far end and crawled along the ceiling ducts. Each dangled three of those massive arms, all the better to tear me to pieces with. I wondered if either of them incorporated the remnants of Hundig.

  I had no weapons, just a vague hope that I wouldn’t need to resort right away to my defensive plan, which would do little more in that space than postpone my death by a couple of minutes.

  The hall echoed with a feminine voice. “One of my brothers is going to present you with a sensory block. Crawl your head inside it. When it opens, we’ll talk.” Indeed, the nearest of the ceiling thugs used its free limbs to lower a gray sphere toward me.

  I did not anticipate or desire this. How did Philomela know I could detach my head? “I can’t stay separate from my body longer than three minutes.” I hated how my voice quavered.

  “This is your problem but not mine. Do as I ask or die where you stand.”

  The box opened, a hungry shellfish. I detached my chains from the corners of my shoulders, extended my neck into the case, which enveloped me like a helmet, and released my cervosocket. The clamshell sealed around me and the cramped space inside filled quickly with preserfluid. Nothing I could do but float and count seconds.

  At one hundred sixty-four seconds the fluid drained. At one hundred seventy-one seconds the case opened and I scrambled to reattach my swooning head to my body, which had been sunk to just below its square shoulders in a pit full of a polymer that had already hardened. My head remained the only part of me that could still move.

  Under other circumstances I’d have found Philomela a delightful creation, her lower half recognizably female if sexless, her upper half a carefully sculpted bonsai tree. A mechabird of paradise rested in her branches, and when its beak moved the voice that emerged was the one I’d heard in the hall.r />
  I notice your interest perked up as I described her. Perhaps she means something to you. I don’t suppose you’ll tell me, will you?

  Philomela said, “Conditions will improve for you once I’m sure your priorities match mine.”

  Radically as I’d altered my body, using my lungs for speech still proved difficult. “You want me... to take up... my old trade... for you?”

  It’s hard to read the expression of a mechanical bird of paradise. “Do you not recognize me, Athiva?”

  Had I given further offense? “I’m sorry if I’m supposed to, but I don’t.”

  I wondered if she and her monsters were attuned to a mutual telepathic feed, because both of the ten-limbed creatures surrounding me shifted in unison, altering their stance so each loomed a little bit closer.

  It wasn’t wise for me to utter another word, but I needed to buy time, somehow. “Did you do this to Sieglinda? Seal her in this pit with these wonderful creatures surrounding her? Is this how you got her to cough up the code phrase?”

  Silence.

  “Is she still alive?”

  “Perhaps she is.” And I wondered, for a moment, if maybe Sieglinda wasn’t missing at all. This creation looked like nothing out of my memory, but in this mutable world, memory’s value is suspect.

  I knew of no reason Sieglinda would seek to harm me. And yet I’d deliberately severed most of my knowledge of unmaking. What else might I have sliced away? What might I have done?

  Philomela continued with a question of her own. “What did you do to Procne, to get her to reveal this place?”

  “I gave her what she wanted. I unmade her. Surely you know unmaking peels away secrets. It’s part of the process. And she really did want to be free of you. It wasn’t an act.”

  “Too bad for her. Where is she?”

  All of my hearts beat fast. She wouldn’t like the answer. “Procne’s gone. I unmade her, I told you. That one is out of your reach. You’ll never find her.”

  “But you know where she is.”

  The thugs inched closer.

  I tried to sidestep, so to speak. “You have me, though. I’m what you want, correct? I will be happy to unmake whoever you need unmaking, whether it’s you, whether it’s someone you need to hide. My skills are yours.”

  “And your machines?”

  “Destroyed. I’ll need new ones.”

  “Maybe we can salvage. Where are they?”

  I bit my lip. She waited until I finally said, “I can’t tell you.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The monsters raised their front limbs like spiders threatening attack.

  “How could you not know?”

  “Because this version of me, the one you’re talking to now, isn’t the one who knows how to unmake. I unmade myself before I went legit. But the me who existed before didn’t want to leave the world forever, like your Procne did. She kept herself hidden away and left me with knowledge of her. In hindsight I wish she hadn’t, but there’s nothing I can do about that now.”

  “A second cortex?”

  I wobbled my head. “Mine is the second cortex.”

  “Where’s the first?”

  I could only hope then that I’d stalled long enough. The gambit was at its end. “She didn’t let me keep that memory. She’s gone, just like your girl.”

  She gave no command. The monsters lunged. Sheer luck they didn’t catch me.

  Funny as it sounds, my neck doesn’t just telescope out and detach. It also contracts. I retracted my head into my body’s fleshy cube and disconnected.

  What I told Philomela isn’t quite true. I can stay unattached longer, though after three minutes lobes of my cortex will start shutting down to conserve oxygen. By eight minutes I’m down to the essentials and after ten I’m in real trouble.

  I’ve heard that if you’re unfortunate enough to attract the Hierophant’s focus, to cause hir scattered consciousness to actually zero in, it takes about fifteen minutes for hir gendarmes to reach you, wherever you are. I hoped, this close to hir fortress, they’d come much quicker.

  My self-engineering spared me the pain of the monsters’ assault as they tore into my body. I confess, I had not ever planned to be lost inside myself, but it was a good thing I’d unhooked from my neck, as one of the thugs plunged a limb into that gullet, seized the coil of my neck and ripped it out.

  I crawled away blind through my own blubber and organs, safe only for that moment. Once they gutted me deep enough, they’d inevitably find me if I didn’t suffocate first. Sealing me in the floor at least made it a little bit harder to scoop me out.

  Of all the people I thought I might see if I survived, I didn’t expect you, Encolpio.

  Yes, I see you, peering through the translucent curve of the jar. My eyes aren’t as sharp as Procne’s were, but I didn’t leave them unaugmented like yours. If anything you told me about yourself is actually true.

  Why do the neuroleads from my jar lead to your temples?Are you a prisoner, like me?

  I see you shake your head no.

  Then you belong to hir. A servant of the Hierophant? My jailor?

  What a strange expression. You’re hir creature, yes?

  I see.

  Here’s a stray scrap of memory, it must fall somewhere in between taking my leave of Procne and paying my visit to Philomela. Perhaps you’ve puzzled over it. Wondered why I strolled right up to the Hierophant’s Node in the Biomass Gardens and started chittering about how anyone could have been unmade and might not even know it. I’ll spell it out. I’d hoped se might set some of hir Ears crawling on me and that they’d still be with me when I at last admitted what I was.

  Obviously my ploy worked.

  If you saw me go through the motions of sighing in relief when I regained consciousness and found myself wired up inside your little tank – well, that’s why.

  I still don’t know what Philomela did to Sieglinda to make her reveal me – in my heart, I know that’s what happened. I will not let myself succumb to doubts.

  Did the Hierophant’s forces capture Philomela when they swarmed in? Can you tell me?

  Can you at least look my way, you dreg?

  The Hierophant must have already suspected something, for you to spend so much time in my shop. And here I thought you stood out too boldly to ever suspect you of having any other agenda. No need to look so sheepish. I just wish I had any hope of ever learning your story.

  What I told Philomela was true. I really don’t know where Procne went or where my old self has gone. I made sure of that. And though I can’t tell you what they were, I can only assume that purging those memories were just fractions of the precautions I took once Procne revealed how thoroughly I’d been had.

  So what happens now? Am I dissected? Unmade in the Hierophant’s special way? Perhaps the things I can’t remember can still be found, the way I found all sorts of information in Procne’s mind that she didn’t know consciously.

  If your body is as retro as you claim, maybe you really feel as sad as you look. Is that supposed to comfort me, that you’ve unfolded your easel?

  This calming warmth, that can’t be a true warmth, that’s the polar opposition of how I feel. This comes from you. Why should I trust it, Encolpio?

  I can do many things, but I can’t read lips.

  You’re pressing your mouth to the glass. What a surprise, this fluid carries sound.

  I’m safe from the Hierophant. Se thinks I’m dead. So you say. How kind. But am I safe from you, and will you be safe from me if you ever let me out?

  How long do you plan to keep me here?

  Encolpio?

  Yes, look at me.

  If you won’t answer now, at least show me the painting when it’s done.

  WITH FATE CONSPIRE

  VANDANA SINGH

  Vandana Singh is an Indian speculative fiction writer who finds herself continually surprised by the universe, to the point that she acquired a Ph.D. in physic
s and now teaches at a state university near Boston. Her short stories have been published in various magazines and anthologies, such as Strange Horizons, TRSF, Lightspeed and Other Worlds than These (ed. John Joseph Adams) and some have been reprinted in Year’s Best volumes. Her novella “Distances” (Aqueduct Press) won the 2008 Carl Brandon Parallax award. In 2011-2012 she was a science and environment columnist for Strange Horizons. For more, please visit users.rcn.com/singhvan.

  I SAW HIM in a dream, the dead man. He was dreaming too, and I couldn’t tell if I was in his dream or he in mine. He was floating over a delta, watching a web of rivulets running this way and that, the whole stream rushing to a destination I couldn’t see.

  I woke up with the haunted feeling that I had been used to in my youth. I haven’t felt like that in a long time. The feeling of being possessed, inhabited, although lightly, as though a homeless person was sleeping in the courtyard of my consciousness. The dead man wasn’t any trouble; he was just sharing the space in my mind, not really caring who I was. But this returning of my old ability, as unexpected as it was, startled me out of the apathy in which I had been living my life. I wanted to find him, this dead man.

  I THINK IT is because of the Machine that these old feelings are being resurrected. It takes up an entire room, although the only part of it I see is the thing that looks like a durbeen, a telescope. The Machine looks into the past, which is why I’ve been thinking about my own girlhood. If I could spy on myself as I ran up and down the crowded streets and alleys of Park Circus! But the scientists who work the Machine tell me that the scope can’t look into the recent past. They never tell me the why of anything, even when I ask – they smile and say, “Don’t bother about things like that, Gargi-di! What you are doing is great, a great contribution.” To my captors – they think they are my benefactors but truly, they are my captors – to them, I am something very special, because of my ability with the scope; but because I am not like them, they don’t really see me as I am. An illiterate woman, bred in the back streets and alleyways of Old Kolkata, of no more importance than a cockroach – what saved me from being stamped out by the great, indifferent foot of the mighty is this... ability. The Machine gives sight to a select few, and it doesn’t care if you are rich or poor, man or woman.