The New Space Opera 2

by Gardner Dozois

  “But why? Couldn’t you name them Energy #1 and so forth?”

  “I could, but that wouldn’t be accurate. Their names are what they are.”

  “How they seem to you. The one person who can see them.”

  “That’s not exactly right. I think we can all perceive them, but only I can see them as easily as I can see you.”

  “And you say they are everywhere.”

  “Scattered, but everywhere in known space, I think.”

  “And some are spontaneous, but others are man-made?”

  “Yes. Few of the major arcana are man-made, like those. It takes a very powerful person to create one. Or a large group of people. There are many man-made minor arcana and many naturally occurring ones like that, but they are very short-lived, a day or two at most.”

  “You see my problem is that I can believe in this kind of thing at a symbolic level, within the human world, acting at large and small scales. We’re creatures of symbolic meaning. But you’re saying there’s physical stuff, and that it has a real, external, distinct existence.”

  “Yes. I am saying it exists as patterns within the same energy fields that give rise to matter.”

  “Consciousness is material?”

  “No. It has a material interaction that is more than simply the building of a house from a plan or the singing of a song, is what I am saying.”

  “And these things…patterns…can influence people?”

  “Influence them, infect them, live inside them, alter them perhaps. Yes, I think so.” The creature stared at him for the longest time, unblinking. “Yes.”

  “And just like that, we are expected to accept this—theory of material mind?”

  Hyperion shrugged, as if it didn’t much care either way. “I report what I see, but I say what it is for me. Otherwise, I would report nothing more than machines can report. When you look at a landscape, you don’t list a bunch of coordinates and say they are mid-green, then another list gray, another list white, and so on. You say, I see a hill with some trees, a river, a house in the distance.”

  “But you’re making claims about the nature of this stuff, linking it to subjective values. Hills aren’t subjective.”

  “They are. True, there is some rock that exists independently of you, some sand, some dust, but without you, it is no hill, and however the hill seems is how all hills seem to you, large or small—not mountains, not flat, perhaps even with traits that are more personal. If your home is among the hills, then they seem well-known; if not, then they provoke suspicion.”

  They were trundling at high speed, balanced in their gyrobody between the capsule’s six legs, seeming to float like thistledown between the rocks of this region of Mars; Thorson’s Plot. Plot was something of a misnomer, as the area, already claimed by an Earth corporate, was some fifteen thousand square miles. The gullies, which made it a cheaper piece of real estate, and complicated to sow—hence the surveying team—were near the western edge and ran in a broad scar north-south along the lines of the mapping system. Thorson Corporation had hoped to find watery deposits deep in the gullies, or perhaps some useful mineral, or who knows what down in the cracked gulches where twisting runnels of rock hid large areas from the sun and most of the wind that had scoured the planet for millennia. All around them were hills of varying sizes, some no more than dunes, others rising with rugged defiance in scarps and screes. Occasionally, small pieces of metal flashed the sunlight back at them as they moved between light and the shade of the thin, high cloud that now streaked the sky white.

  “The remains of Hands,” the Greenjack said with interest, of course able to tell what everything was at any distance. “How interesting. And there is some debris from attempts to seed here, some markers, some water catchers. All wrecked. And…”

  “And?” Bishop leaped on the hesitation.

  “What I would call distress residue. A taint in the energy, very slight.”

  “What energy?”

  “The subtle fields. You will find them referenced a great deal in my submitted thesis. Vibrationary levels where human perception is only infrequently possible at all. When trauma occurs, bursts of energy are thrown off the distressed person into these fields, and although they decay quite rapidly, they leave a trace pattern behind, which is very slow to fade.”

  “A disturbance in the Force,” Bishop said bitterly. He felt nothing except the dread that had clutched at him in place of his panic.

  “It might be only the natural upset of someone experiencing an unlucky accident,” Hyperion said, unruffled. “It’s hard to say without extreme observation and immersion on the site. You ought to be glad, Mr. Bishop, rather than contemptuous. Why else are you here?”

  Mark gripped the arms of his seat. He was furious and full of nervous agitation. He ought to be civil, but he felt the need to destroy this creature’s claims even as he wanted them to be right for his own sake. He didn’t want to know about some spiritual plane, not after all the time it had taken to rid the human race of its destructive superstitions. Even if it existed, what difference did it make to those who were unable to interact with it. He could see no good coming of it. But he longed for it to be true. Somewhere in his fevered mind, where fragments of the shaman’s testimony had lodged in spite of his allergic reaction to reading them, he recalled there being quite specific traces of people and moments stuck in this peculiar ether like flies in amber. Not always, not everywhere, but sometime and somewhere it acted as a recorder for incidents and individuals. It could. It might have.

  The capsule lurched to a halt. They had arrived at the last known point of the survey team’s well-being. A couple of waymarkers and a discarded, empty water canister pegged down beside them were the only visible remnants now. Without further talk, Hyperion and Bishop disembarked.

  They fitted their facemasks—the air was still too thin for comfort—and Bishop put on his thin wind jacket and new desert boots. Hyperion sank a little in the fine grit, on its four limbs, but otherwise it went as always, naked save for its fur, feathers, scales, and quills.

  Wrestling the faceplate straps to get a good fit, Bishop noticed all the strange little fetishes the creature had attached to itself. Necklaces with bits of twig and bone…it looked like it had come off the set of a voodoo movie. He recalled now that it had labeled its profession on its passport as “shaman.” He was so exhausted by his nervous disorders, however, that he didn’t have the energy to muster a really negative response anymore. He was deadened to it. At last, the mask was tested and his spare oxygen packs fitted to the bodysuit that went over his clothes. Hyperion wore goggles and a kind of nosebag over his beak. He made a desultory symbol in the dust and smoothed it out again with one forepaw. The capsule, obeying commands from its uplink with the Valhalla, folded up its spider legs and nestled down in a small hollow, lights dimming to a gleam as it moved into standby operation. All around, and as far as he could see in any direction, save for the shaman, Bishop was alone.

  “There are very few true disappearances in human history, these days,” Hyperion said after a moment when they both cast about in search of a direction. It moved closer to one of the markers and read the tags left there. “And this is not an unusual place, like those twisty spaces close to black holes for example. It is just a planet with a regular geology. The common assumption about this team’s fate is that they absconded with the help of the Nikkal. From there, a number of possible avenues continue, most leading to the far system frontiers, where they were able to drop off the networks.”

  Bishop licked his lips, already starting to crack. The news was full of the asteroid bayous beyond the sphere of Earth’s police influence and the renegade technology that festered there, unregulated. There was a lot of Unity activity. A lot of illegal, unethical, criminal work. “She had no reason to go.”

  “Perhaps not, but if the rest of them wanted to go they could hardly leave her behind. What would be easier for you, Mr. Bishop, to have her forcibly made into one of the Fr
ontiersmen, or to have her dead here somewhere?”

  How odd, he thought, that the ’jack had no trouble voicing what inhabited his own awareness as a black hum beyond reckoning. Hearing the words aloud was startling, but it diminished the power of the awful feelings that gripped him inside.

  “Let’s start looking,” Bishop said, standing still. All around them, their small dip radiated gullies that twisted and wound. The sun was beginning to go down and the high rocky outcrops cast sharp-edged purple shadows.

  Hyperion was exacting, its research both instantaneous and meticulous in a way that made Bishop simply envious. “The marker, as the police report indicates, says they started southwest with a view to making a loop trail back here within a six-hour period, the route is marked in the statutory map.” The shaman sniffed and the nosebag huffed. “All the searches have concentrated on following this route and found a scatter of personal belongings and the remains of a Finger of the Terraform, which was carrying the survey equipment. All of that was recovered intact.” It held the two wind-beaten Tags in its paw and rubbed them for a short time, thoughtfully. “But they did not go that way. Only the Finger took the trail.”

  “How do you know?”

  Hyperion turned. “I can see it. I think it is time I showed you.” It came across to him and held out one large, scaly arm. “Please, your screen viewer. I will adapt it to show some of the details I can see over its normal camera range. This will not be what I see, you understand, as I don’t see it with my eyes. But it is the best I can do for you.”

  Reluctantly, Bishop handed over the precious viewer. It was his recorder too. His everything. “Don’t mess up the record settings. It’s on now.”

  The Greenjack inclined its head politely and slid one of its broad, claw-like nails into one of the old-style input ports. Bishop felt a chill. He’d never get used to how capable the Forged were with technology. They could interface directly with any machine.

  “The signals I use to communicate with the device will cause some interference with my tracking,” Hyperion said calmly. “So I will not use it all the time. If you see nothing, you may assume I am watching and listening. I will also shut the device down if its working interferes with the process, and I may ask you to move away at times.” It handed the screen back, and Bishop checked it, panning it around in front of him. The camera showed whatever he pointed it at, recording diligently; it was really just like holding a picture frame up over the landscape. “I don’t see anything.”

  “Look at the markers and the route.”

  He turned. From the tag line, he could now see a strange kind of coloration in the air, like points of deep shade. They were small. It was really almost like broken pixelization.

  “That is the pattern left by the output of the Finger’s microreactor projecting microbursts of decaying particles into the energy field. Radiation containment is generally good these days, so this is all you can find. It is also in the standard police procedurals. They mistakenly assumed it confirmed that all the travelers took the same path, since the Finger was carrying all the technical equipment and the others had only their masks and gas, their personal refreshments and devices. I would say it is certain that they intended to disappear here, as in fact all their individual communications gear has been accounted for along the Finger’s trail.”

  Like a path cut with three-dimensional leaf shadows, the trail wound into the first gully, followed the obvious way along it, and vanished around the first turn.

  “We can follow that and verify there was no other person with the Finger if you like,” the shaman suggested.

  “Parts of a Forged internal device unit were found,” Bishop said, brain clicking in at last.

  Hyperion shrugged.

  “Or?” Bishop started to pan around. He soon found patches and bursts of odd color washes everywhere, as if his screen were subject to a random painting class.

  “Or we can follow the others and find out what they did, starting here.”

  “What is all this?”

  “This is energy field debris.”

  As he moved around, Bishop could see that there was a huge glut of the stuff where they were, but traces of it were everywhere in fact, even in the distance. “Why so much of it?”

  “There was a lot of activity here. The rest is down to regular cosmic interference, or perhaps…I am not actually sure what all of it is. The energy fields transect time and space, but they are linked to it, so while some of this is attached to the planet’s energy sphere, some of it, as you see, is moving.”

  Streaks shot across the screen. A readout indicated that he was not seeing them in real time, as that would have been too fast for him to notice. The simulation and the reality overlay each other on the image, however, and the difference there was undetectable.

  “I believe that the streaks are bonded to the spatial field, and that they are therefore stationary relative to absolute coordinates in space—thus as Mars traverses, so these things pass through.” The creature cocked its head, a model of intellectual speculation.

  Bishop relaxed his tired arms so that the screen pointed at the ground, saw the streaks shooting through his feet. “Through us?”

  Hyperion nodded. “As with much cosmic ray debris. It moves too fast for me to say anything about it. I would need to move out into deep space and be on a relatively static vessel, in order to discover more about them.”

  “No such ship exists.” Bishop snorted. “Well, only…”

  “Yes, only a Unity ship perhaps,” the shaman said. “I shall ask for one soon.”

  They shared a moment of silence in which the subject of Unity, the newly discovered alien technology, rose and passed without further comment. Bishop would have loved to go into it at any other time. The surge of hysteria it had engendered had almost died down nowadays, with it being limited to off-world use, restricted use, or use far enough away from Earth and her concerns that it wasn’t important to most humans, whatever strange features it possessed. FTL drives, or whatever they were, were only the half of it. It was under review. He’d seen some of the evidence. Now he let it go, and lifted the screen again. If Tabitha had gone on one of those ships, she could be anywhere. It would take years to get into Forged Space by ordinary means. Even an Ironhorse Accelerator couldn’t go faster. She could have been there since the day it happened, almost a year ago. “This is just a mess.”

  “No,” Hyperion said. It lowered his head and sniffed again, a hellish kind of hound. “There were four individuals here, all human, and one Forged, Wayfarer Jackalope McKnight.”

  “Bread Zee Davis, Bancroft Wan, Kialee Yang…” Bishop said, the names so often in his mind that they came off his tongue like an old catechism.

  “…and Tabitha Bishop.”

  “I am sure which is the Forged,” Hyperion said, “but the humans are harder to label. They are distinct, however.”

  “They’d worked together almost a year,” Bishop said, wishing he’d kept his silence, but it was leaking. “No trouble. She sent me a postcard.”

  “May I see it?”

  He hesitated, then fiddled the controls and handed over the screen. It had been shown so often during the inquest that he knew every millimeter of it better than he knew the lines in his own hand.

  The object was small, almost really postcard-size in the Greenjack’s heavy paw. “Kialee is the Han girl, I am guessing.”

  “And Wan is the one with the black Mohawk. Davis is the wannabe soldier in all that ex-military stuff.” He knew every detail of that postcard. What most mystified him about it was how friendly they all seemed, how relaxed, the girls leaning on each other, the guys making silly faces, beer in hand; around them, the dull red of the tenting, and, in the background, a portable generator and a jumble of oxygen tanks. It could have been a snap of two couples on holiday, and not of students on work assignment. He wasn’t sure if they’d been dating, or if dating was a concept that had gone out with dinosaurs like him.

  The
Greenjack was stock-still. It looked intently and then handed back the screen. “Thank you. In that case, I can now say that there was a struggle here. Bishop and Yang are surprised, but Davis and Wan are both agitated throughout. Only McKnight is calm.”

  “He was new. Newish. Their old Wayfarer went to another job.”

  The colors illumined as the shaman talked, showing Bishop warped fields of light that were as abstract as any randomly generated image. “McKnight and the men remain close together. There is a conflict with the women. There is a struggle; I think at this point the women are forced to give up their personal devices to Terraform Raven’s Finger. I believe they are tied, at least at the hands. McKnight is armed with explosive charges for the survey. But he’s also more than big enough to overpower and threaten them. I guess this is what happened. Davis and Wan dislike the events a great deal but they are willing participants. That’s what I see. Then there’s another argument, here, the men and McKnight. It’s brief. Blood and flesh scraps from McKnight are found near here.”

  Bishop saw the oddest nebula of grays, streaked with black and bright red. “There was some kind of struggle…the Wayfarer was defending…” But the gargoyle shaman was shaking its head.

  “He cuts out his own external comms unit,” Hyperion said precisely. “In the Wayfarer, this is located at the back of the skull and embedded in the surface beneath a minor chitinous plate. To remove it would be painful and messy, but it is perfectly possible and certainly not lethal. But all communication is cut before this, so there is no official account of how it was removed. The only person who can account for that is Raven, and she claims that there was a local network dropout. I would have to question her directly to be sure of her account.” The implication was stark.

  The air, already bitter, felt suddenly colder. “So Davis and Wan made him do it?”

  “I cannot say for certain. But he does it. Any other method risks it being hijacked by signals that would give away his position. He’s hidden it somewhere around here, I’d bet. Or given it to the Finger, who lost it in the gullies way before it signaled a breakdown. We should look for it. Then they leave.” Hyperion pointed northwest. “That way.”