The New Space Opera 2

by Gardner Dozois

  It was a mysterious animal tang that reminded him of the hot hides of horses, a drooling, dozing camel he had once attempted to ride, and, on top of that, the ocean. Bishop gripped on tight, knowing that all his juvenile, ancient spine-root superstitions had caught up with him. His interviewee had come to meet him in an act of unwanted courtesy. He would have to greet and speak to it…why had he forgotten its name suddenly? Why did it have to smell like that? But he was now holding up the queue. The stewardess mistook his hesitation for ignorance and started talking about freefall walking. All that remained was to turn himself toward the smooth, white-lit exit chute that led to the Offworld Destinations Lounge, and follow that telltale scent of primeval beast.

  The other passengers sniffed curiously as they passed him, “so-sor-rying” their way around his stalled self. He fiddled with his recorder, checking his microphone and switching everything on. It made him feel secure in the same way he imagined Old World spies had once felt secure because of their illicit link to someone, somewhere, who would at least hear their final moments. It wasn’t exactly like being accompanied, but it was enough of a shield to let the prickling under his arms stop and for his headache to recede.

  The thought came to him that he hadn’t been himself lately. It was only natural after the conclusion of the inquiry and its open verdict. Too much stress. He ought to stop, beg off, take a holiday. Nobody would be surprised. But the thought of not having his job, the idea of having nothing to do but walk the familiar coast near Pismo Beach or under the tall silence of the redwoods—that made him pull himself along all the faster to escape the hum, the static darkness, the horror that was waiting there for him, that was already here in the notion of that place. He gritted his teeth and pushed that aside. The scotch made it easy. Why the hell hadn’t he thought to bring some more?

  He pulled himself forward into the glide that felt graceful even when it wasn’t, and swallowed with difficulty. That smell! It was so curious here, where all the smells were ground out of existence quickly in the filtration of the dry air so that humans and their descendants, the Forged, could meet without the animal startle reflexes scent caused by the humans. But the grace would only last a minute or two here, in the neutral zone of the Lift Center. And why could he smell this one so clearly? It must reek—and as he thought this, he saw it/him, a tall, gangling, ugly creature that resembled a gargoyle from some mighty gothic cathedral whose creator had been keen on all the Old Testament virtues. It could easily have featured in his nightmares. He wouldn’t have been surprised to discover that it had been modeled with an artistic eye to that effect. The Pangenesis Tupac, brooder, sculptor, creator in flesh and metal, enjoyed her humor at all levels of creation. The word anathema sat in his head, alone, as he bravely put on a smile of greeting.

  “Mark Bishop?” said the gargoyle in an old English gentleman’s voice, as fitting and unexpected as rain in Death Valley.

  “I am.” He found conviction, was so glad the other didn’t offer his hand, and glanced down and saw it was a fistful of claws.

  “My name is Hyperion. I am pleased to meet you. I have read many of your articles in the more popular academic journals and the ordinary press. Your reputation is well-founded.” It made a slight bow and the harsh interior lights shone off its bony eyelids.

  It was shamefully difficult not to marvel at the sight and sound of a talking gryphon-thing, or want to see if those yellow eyes were real. Hyperion’s voice seemed to indicate enjoyment, but who knew, with the Forged? Mark, ashamed of his hatred, gushed, “Forgive me, I’m having a lot of trouble with this assignment. I don’t believe in the supernatural and…”

  “…and you are nervous around the Forged. Most humans are, and pretend not to be. You have always been clear about your limitations, in your previous work. I am not deterred. You have come this far. Let us complete the journey.” Feathers rustled on it. Its face was scaled, beaked. How it managed speech was beyond him, and yet it spoke remarkably well. But parrots did too, Bishop reasoned, so why not this?

  It took him almost a minute to understand what it’d said, not because it was unclear, but because he was so confused by the storm of feeling inside himself. Repulsion, aggression, fear. The stink, he realized at last with a shock of guilt, was himself.

  Hyperion took hold of the guide rails delicately and spun itself away, tail trailing like a kite’s. Its comfort with weightlessness spoke of many years spent there, in the cramped airlocks and crabbed tunnels of the old stations. In its wake, Bishop followed, slipping, and after a too-brief eternity found himself at the entrance hatch that looked entirely machine, though there was no disguising the chitinous interior into which he was able to peer and see seats of the strange kind made for space travel—ball-like concoctions of soft stuff that moved against tethers and into which one had to crawl like a mouse into a nest. He made himself concentrate only on mechanics, move a hand, a foot, that’s all—it was the only thing that kept his control of himself intact.

  Of course, it was Forged. The only machines that traveled the length of the system were robotically controlled cargo carriers whose glacial pace was utterly unsuitable for this trip or most any other if you didn’t have half a lifetime to spare. For local traffic to the moon and the various towed-in asteroids that had been clustered nearby to form the awkward mineral suburb of Rolling Rock, all travel was undertaken in the purpose-built, ur-human creatures of the Flight. Every last one of them was a speed freak.

  “Ironhorse Alacrity Valhalla has agreed to take us to our location.” Hyperion made the introduction as it waited for Bishop to precede him into the dimly lit interior chitoblast and become a helpless parasite inside a being he couldn’t even see or identify, but which had a mind, apparently rather like his own, only connected by the telepathy of contemporary electronic signaling to every other Forged mind—whereas he was quite alone. He checked his mike and gave Hyperion a sickly smile that he had intended to be professional and cheering. The creature blinked at him slowly, quite relaxed, and he saw that it had extraordinary eyes. They were large, as large as his fist, in its big head, but beyond the clear, wet sclera lay an iris so complex and dazzling…another blink brought him to his senses. Yellow eyes. It was demonic. What idiot had made them that color?

  He was able to manage quite well, and put himself into the seat sack without any foolish struggling or tangles, even though now he was feeling slightly drunk. Cocooned next to each other, they were able to see one another’s heads easily. Stuck to the side of each sack, a refreshment package waited. Within the slings, toilet apparatus was easy to find. There was a screen in the ceiling, if it was the ceiling—without gravity it hardly mattered—showing some pleasant views of pastoral Earth scenes, like a holiday brochure. Bishop figured it was for his benefit and tried to be comforted as a Hawaiian beach glowed azure at him, surrounded by thick, fleshy webbing that pulsed slightly in erratic measure.

  Common lore said it was all right for old humans not to attempt talking to their host carrier at this point. The gargoyle could have been babbling on to the ship all the time, of course, there was no knowing. His mind fussed around what they might say. It blurred hopelessly as he attempted to drag up anything about the task at hand. He couldn’t bring any thought into focus long enough to articulate it.

  The door sealed up behind them and was immediately lost in the strange texture of the wall. There were no ports. He wouldn’t be seeing the stars unless the Alacrity wanted to show him images from outside on the holiday channel.

  “Where are we going?” he asked, though it had been in the damn notes.

  “To the spot you requested,” Hyperion said with some puzzlement. “Don’t you recall?” Bishop flushed hot with embarrassment, started sweating all over again. He didn’t remember. Then there was a vague hint that he might have made a call, no, written a request, a secret note…had he? He checked the screen inventory of his mail. Nothing. Inside the cocoon of the webbing, he experienced a stab of shocking acuteness in the
region of his guts and heart. He felt that he was losing his mind and that it was paying him back with this lance, this polearm of pure fear. What had he requested?

  “No.” He wanted to lie but his mouth wouldn’t do it.

  The Greenjack was quiet for a moment. “I think that we should talk a little on the way there, Mr. Bishop, if you don’t mind.” Its voice was gentle now, and had a rounded richness that reminded Bishop of leather chairs, wood paneling, pipe tobacco, twilight, and cognac. Above the line of the cocoon, he could see its feet twitching gently, flexing their strangely padded digits. Dark claws, blunted from walking, were just visible. “I am well aware of the way my claims must appear to scientists such as yourself. Energies beyond human perception existing within our own spacetime perhaps is not too outlandish in itself. But my observations of their behavior, and what it seems to mean for their interactions with us, that is the stuff of late-night stories. Believe me, Mr. Bishop, I have studied them for many years before making these statements. And I would welcome any remarks.”

  Charlatan, Bishop thought. Must be. He’d thought it from the get-go, when he first read about it.

  Bishop had been in doubt on other assignments, though none of them like this one. Mostly, he wrote for journals about science or current affairs based on Earth. He was one of the more popular and able writers who could turn complicated and difficult notions into the kind of thing that most well-educated people could digest with breakfast. Normally, he avoided all discussions about the Forged and their politics, but, of course, it had caught up with him as it must with everyone in the end, he reasoned. And his expertise had led to him being selected by the government to come and make a judgment out here about this odd person and its extraordinary claims, its illegal and incomprehensible existence. The Greenjack Cylenchar Hyperion was a member of a class created by the Forged themselves, by the motherfather, Tupac, whose vast body had bred all the spacefarers and most of the Gravity Bound. It was a class she claimed was scientifically essential, though he had serious doubts. The Greenjacks were there to confront the boundaries of the perceivable universe, and to try to apprehend what, to ordinary human eyes, was beyond sight. Hyperion, in particular, was said to be able to perceive every frequency there was, and had been given adaptations to allow its mind to be able to cope with the information. Hyperion didn’t just see, it watched. Recently, it’d been making dramatic claims about its visions, which had been in all the papers.

  Bishop struggled, but the panic was choking, he wasn’t able to say the sensible thing he had in mind—namely, “Yes, but just because you can detect these things, why aren’t they verified by machines?”

  The Greenjack paused, just the length of time it would have taken him to make this reply, and added, “Machine verification has confirmed erratic frequency fluctuations in localized areas, but, obviously, they can’t put an interpretation on these anomalies. We have successfully managed to get some mappings of areas and frequency variations that confirm my own sensory perceptions are accurate.”

  This was news. Bishop jerked as his screen recovered the files being zapped across to it and vibrated to alert him—all the data was there, already witnessed and verified by independent bodies…He felt himself breathing steadily. The scotch seemed to have made it out of his stomach. The pills he’d taken still worked hard on fooling his head into thinking that it knew which way was up. Better, that was better. Statistics. Facts. Good.

  “But if you are too distressed we can delay this,” the Cylenchar said suddenly. “Mr. Bishop?”

  “No, we have to go.” He didn’t know where they had to go, though apparently he was determined. His panic returned.

  “May I speak frankly?”

  Into Bishop’s agonized silence, Hyperion said clearly, “I think you have asked me to go to Mars because of your daughter. You are hoping that I will be able to find her where the inquest has failed. Is that right?”

  A cold drench of sweat covered him from head to foot, as memory returned, cold, clear. He couldn’t breathe. He was drowning. Mars. Tabitha. The unsolved mystery of the routine survey expedition vanishing without a trace. Oh a sandstorm, a dust ocean, a flood of sand, a mighty sirocco that blew them away…what had it been and where was she? Nobody could answer. Not even the equipment returned a ping. But how? And when the months dragged on and the company pulled out and sent its condolences and added their names to the long list of people who’d gone missing on Mars during the fierce years of its terraforming, and then this assignment came, what else to do? Bring the creature who, above all, had been made to see. No frequency, no signal, no energy that the Greenjacks can’t decipher, right? Of course, if she’s there…and if she’s dead, then this one will say so. It claims that some of the things it can sense aren’t people but are what people leave or make somehow in the unseen fields they move in: trails and marks. It says some are like the wizards of story, able to make things with shape, with form, with intent that is almost conscious. Some can leave memories like prints on the empty air. Oh. But a man of strict science does not believe in that.

  “Yes,” Bishop said. He was small then, in his mouse nest, hanging, damp and suddenly getting the chills. He was afraid that the ’jack would say no.

  “I will be glad to look,” it said instead, and Mark Bishop fell into a deep sleep on the spot.

  Sleep was one of the many skills the ’jack had learned in its long years of waiting for things that might not appear. It closed its eyes and shared a warm goodnight with the Valhalla, who was more than curious to know the outcome now, and sang toward the red world with fire and all the winds of the sun.

  They joined each other in a shared interior space, a private dreamtime. It was cozy. The Valhalla whispered, “Sometimes I am flying in the sunlight, and there is nothing there, but I feel a cold, a call, a kind of falling. Is that real? Are the monsters from under the bed out at sea too?”

  “Wake me if it happens,” Hyperion said. “And we’ll see.”

  It cocreated a kind romance with the Valhalla, in which they saw huge floating algal swarms of deep color and shadow populate the fathoms beyond the stars. They named them in whispers, and with childish fingers measured their shapes in the sky, and then pinched them out of existence, snuff, snuff, snuff.

  “There,” Hyperion said, “they may be here, but they have no power. They can only hurt you if you let them. They live in the holes of the mind, and eat the spirit. Cracklegrackle. Just pinch them out.” They got back into bed and closed the window, drew the shades. The Valhalla was happy again and drove on all the faster in his sleep.

  Bishop was woken by the Valhalla’s cheerful cry, “Mars!” The Ironhorse made orbit and scanned the surface to find the small outpost where the Gaiaform Nikkal Raven, chief developer of Mars, had built human-scale shelter with its Hands in the lee of a high cliff. “Nobody’s there now. If it’s a graveyard or a ghost town, it’s empty for sure, but with a bit of effort there’s probably power and some basics that you could get going.” As a courtesy, they contacted the Gaiaform.

  “That’s funny,” the Valhalla said, as Bishop struggled to change his clothes. “She sounds annoyed, or, at least, she doesn’t want to discuss the place.”

  The Nikkal’s voice was grumpy on the intercom. It grated on Bishop’s exposed nerves and wore out his fragile strip of patience almost at once. “My Hands got lost there too. Given up sending more. Thought I’d get to it later, after the planting on the south faces was finished. Just a minor space really, full of gullies.”

  They all recognized the feeling this rationale covered. “We don’t need your help,” Bishop grated. “Just want to get there and look around. That’s all.”

  “But if anything happens it’s on my watch,” the Nikkal countered.

  “Tupac knows we’re here,” Hyperion suggested. “We won’t stay long. A day at most.”

  “…as long as it takes…” Bishop said. He was in clean clothes. His panics were gone. He felt old and thin and shelterless, and lo
oked around for something he could hold. He found only his small bag and his recorder, and filled his hands with them. A panic would have been welcome. Their fury was better than this deadly flat feeling that had taken their place. It was clear now. He was here, Thorson’s Gullies, the last known location. Every step was a puppet step his body took at the behest of some will named Mark that wouldn’t let it rest, but there was no more struggle between them. He felt that he did not inhabit these arms, these legs. They were his waldos, his servos, they were his method. Only his guts were still his own, a liquid concentration waiting for a mold.

  “Come on, Mark,” Hyperion called from the drop capsule.

  Since when had they become friends? Bishop didn’t know how, but he climbed inside the small fruit shape of the vehicle. Mars had lift cable, but no system in place. Cargo was simply clipped on and set going under whatever power it was able to muster. They were attached to the line and given a good shove by the Valhalla. The new atmosphere buffeted them, warmed them, cooked them almost, and then they were down, Bishop still surprised, still too frozen to even be sick with either motion nausea or relief at their arrival. The capsule detached, put out its six wheeled legs like a bored insect, and began to trundle the prescribed steady course toward the gullies. Hyperion opened the ventilation system and they sniffed the Martian air. It was thin, and even though it had been filtered a million ways, somehow gritty.

  “It’s the names that are part of the trouble,” Bishop said, staring out at the peculiar sight of Mars’s tundra, red ochre studded with the teal-green puffs of growing things in regular patterns. “Good and Evil. Why did you call them that?”

  “There are more,” Hyperion said. “There is Eater and Biter and Poison and Power and Luck and Fortune and Beneficence, and the Cracklegrackle. I expect there are many more. But these are the commonest major sorts.”