Noumenon Infinity
Page 32
The force of her orders struck Anatoly like they never had before. She’d been placed in command for a reason, and this was it.
She did deserve to wear the marks of a Revealer. Perhaps more than he did. He’d spent his entire life using the thrust of their line to create a monster. She would use it to put down the creature and save stars—and perhaps countless fledgling life forms with them.
The others vacated the room, leaving the two of them alone. She grabbed for his hand before he could exit.
“You know this isn’t your—”
“My fault? Oh, but it is. I failed to reach beyond myself, to understand that I don’t understand. I can’t think of a more damning action. What’s that old saying? A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. I knew just enough to resurrect the monster, and now my punishment is a lifetime watching you try to undo my work. I’m sorry, Joanna. My arrogance forced this mess on you. On everyone.”
“We’re all to blame.” She touched her collar, where the points lay. “But blame isn’t what we need to focus on, now or ever. what matters is that we’ll make it right. Horrible things happen in the pursuit of knowledge, but we only fail if we don’t seek to correct them. We’ll catch it,” she assured him.
“If only we didn’t have to,” he said, giving her hand a squeeze. And when he said we he didn’t mean the convoy, he meant her and him. Why had he spent all the good times avoiding her, and only now in a time of crisis come to understand what she meant in his life? They were family, and no amount of pride should have ever gotten in the way of that.
“But we do,” she said firmly. “The responsibility is ours. And we will succeed.” She let his hand go, gave him a strong, reassuring smile that held determination and respect, but no mirth.
And now we cross the cold expanse in pursuit of the life which we should not have given, he thought. All these millennia later, Dr. Frankenstein still hadn’t learned that the secrets of the universe were not his to control.
Chapter Seven
Justice and Carmen: Sasquatch, Cinderella, and the Enigmatic Kali
Convoy Twelve
One Year Since First Contact
Four Hundred and Twenty-Two Days Since the Accident
It’s been a year since everything went down. First contact. I’ve never been big on questioning the universe, wondering about grand schemes and gods and whatnot. But life’s been . . . surreal this past year. Horrifying and wondrous. Almost magical, mystical. And what is magic but science unexplained? What is the “great beyond” other than a magnificent construct designed by an intricate consciousness and its desire to go on and on forever?
Justice reread the paragraph half a dozen times. The words didn’t feel like hers, even though they stuck out in her bold flourishes with loops on the T’s and everything.
She dropped the pen to the page, rocking absently in the old-fashioned wooden rocking chair. There were five of them set around the medical bay’s receiving room. Only one other was occupied, by Mrs. Tan. Enfolded in her arms was her tiny sleeping daughter.
Justice glanced at the diary entry once more. These weren’t her words. She was direct, crass, grounded. Whoever’d penned these remarks was some kind of pseudo-philosopher, trying to put a spin on their reality. Make it pretty, poetic. Make it mean something.
But it didn’t. That wasn’t how science worked. There was cause and effect but no narrative niceties.
There’s no rhyme or reason to being flung thousands of years into the future, right into a nest of aliens. There just isn’t.
Coincidence was built into the system. Physics needed chance encounters—chemistry did, too. Without chance encounters there would be no life.
She looked to where Mrs. Tan sat, her baby wrapped in a yellow blanket and now hefted onto her mother’s shoulder. The captain’s wife appeared uncomfortable in the rocking chair, but held on to her daughter like the unconscious child was a stuffed animal.
Mrs. Tan caught her looking and said, “It’s her birthday today.”
“I know,” Justice said warmly, softly. There was something about the waiting room that made her pitch her voice low and quiet. “Happy birthday.”
Mrs. Tan smiled in acknowledgment, then turned her face into her daughter’s warmth and closed her eyes.
Baby Tan was like their own little celebrity, both a spot of joy and utter tragedy. She was a healthy baby, physically. All her fingers and toes, strong heart, steady lungs. She was growing slowly, though, the doctors said. But that didn’t trouble them so much as her mind, where there was nothing. No consciousness. Her brainstem worked as it should, but the rest not so much. There was no sign of damage, her brain was fully developed and intact, but she just wasn’t there. It wasn’t like a coma, and she wasn’t vegetative. It was . . . different. The medics couldn’t explain it, had marked it off as a cruel accident, just like the one that had gotten them tossed through time.
“Are you waiting for someone?” Mrs. Tan asked.
“My friend, McKayla Johnson,” Justice said, her tongue tying itself in a proverbial knot right after.
It was no secret—at least, not in Justice’s circles—that McKayla wanted to have a baby. McKayla herself was fond of telling everyone within hearing distance that she and Samir were trying to get pregnant. Usually her proclamation was met with one of two reactions: joy or confusion. But Justice suspected it would only hurt Mrs. Tan to hear.
Justice herself had been in Camp Confusion: why on Earth would McKayla—or anyone—want to have a baby now? Here? But then she’d realized that people historically had conceived babies in all kinds of uncertain nows and heres.
When McKayla and Samir had settled on expanding their family, their whole demeanor had changed. They no longer seemed downtrodden victims of circumstance. They were making a happy decision, a hopeful decision, and it wasn’t Justice’s place to be anything but supportive.
After all, the convoy had a steady supply of food now. It wasn’t like they were rationing bites. One more mouth to feed wasn’t going to put a strain on their supplies like it would have nine months ago.
Utilizing her molecule chain builder and a sugar-protein bath, Justice had initially been able to clone potatoes and yucca from mess hall scraps. While she’d never gotten the resulting yucca to seed, and the adult plants were smaller and less hardy than they should be, the potatoes had produced viable tubers, and both plants had held everyone over until the aliens had stepped in and given them a boost.
Of course, even though they were no longer on Famine’s doorstep that didn’t mean the crew was healthy.
Justice’s own body felt bony, angular—a far cry from the roundness she found comforting. With her big frame, she was starting to look like the old her in the mirror, the one from years ago. It was disconcerting. She’d done so much work just to feel normal, it disturbed her to see it slipping away.
But at least her hormone supplements were on lock. She could replicate those forever, easily, as long as they convinced the aliens to help them keep supply stocks high.
That was a whole ’nother ball of wax she didn’t want to think about right now. The aliens were why Yolanda’s office was booked solid this week. Anniversaries of life-changing events tend to send people reeling.
Instead of a psychiatrist, McKayla had wanted to visit the doctors for a physical. She and Samir had been trying for six months with no results, and McKayla was getting anxious.
It was no surprise to Justice, though. Everyone had been under so much stress, she would have been shocked if anyone’s body was in well enough condition to support zygote implantation, let alone fetal development.
Hell, even back on Earth, most fertility doctors weren’t concerned about infertility until someone had been trying for a year—and that was under normal circumstances.
Still, she’d come to support her friend, and to take advantage of the waiting room. She knew it would be quiet. She could think here, center herself. Focus on the science, on the emerging puzzle whose piece
s were just now begging to resolve into firm shapes.
Because though McKayla’s inability to conceive thus far wasn’t strange . . .
There weren’t any flies aboard.
Those two thoughts might seem totally unconnected to anyone else, but throw in the fact that none of the cloned yucca had produced viable seeds, and Justice saw the beginnings of a pattern.
Flies were one of those things humans couldn’t get away from. No matter how well you tried to regulate what went on a ship of Pulse’s size, you’d inevitably end up with insects. Mostly flies, definitely mites, sometimes beetles. Ants once in a while. If everything and everyone didn’t go through the strictest of decontamination processes, you’d get bugs . . . and sometimes even then.
Convoy Twelve regularly received visitors and shipments prior to their accident, and while basic precautions had been taken not to spread illness aboard, there’d been no reason to bleach and scrub and sanitize.
Hell, open one hatch Earth-side for thirty seconds in the middle of a clear day, and bam, flies. It didn’t take much.
But now, Justice couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen a fly. Had they all died off?
With the yucca, she’d thought perhaps she’d failed at manual pollination. That maybe the reason the few seeds she’d gotten hadn’t sprouted was because she didn’t make a very good moth substitute.
But what if it wasn’t just Dr. Kapoor and Baby Tan who’d been affected by the accident? What if there was more to it?
She realized her wrist was turning, and she looked down. She’d drawn loops upon loops on the page below her last paragraph, her mind turning over and her hand absently echoing.
Maybe she was wrong. Maybe the flies and the yucca and McKayla were all unrelated. But what if they weren’t? Either way, Justice was determined to find out.
When she’d signed up for this job, she never imagined that her expertise could be so critical. She was a genetic engineer, sure, but her role in the experiments was purely as a technician. Dr. Kapoor put together the outlines for the pods, decided what types of organic compounds or molecule chains she wanted included, and Justice simply built them.
But now, the entire crew depended on her to feed them. They didn’t know it yet, but they might also depend on her for perpetuation.
If, indeed, perpetuation was ultimately a goal.
That would depend on what they could learn from the aliens, if they could communicate their plight properly, get the creatures to listen, to help them find their way home.
I don’t want to think about the Lùhng, she said to herself, poising her pen once more over the diary.
That was what the captain had decided to name the aliens: Lùhng. Dragons. He thought the name auspicious. Many Eastern dragons were good, bringing luck and fair seasons.
He hadn’t been thinking about Western dragons, who were almost entirely malevolent across the board. They tormented villagers, breathed fire, and devoured virgins.
The aliens weren’t a puzzle to Justice. They were a plight. Things would be simple without them, in a way. They would need to focus on survival, on finding a way back to familiar space. That’s it. But now they had to contend with the will of something else. And she was so far removed from that question, from communication with the creatures, that to consider all the possibilities threw her thoughts into chaos.
Her heart rate had jumped and her blood pressure increased, just letting her mind drift to them for a moment. It was better to shut them out of her considerations completely.
Just think about McKayla, she told herself, breathing steadily in through her nose. It smelled so clean in the receiving room—a soft, powdery sort of clean. Maybe even buttery. Like a newborn’s skin, even though there weren’t any newly borns in the room.
Once more, she looked to Mrs. Tan, who’d settled more comfortably into her chair and was now rocking her daughter, muttering sweet nothings against the one-year-old’s black hair.
Her mumbles became hums, sweet notes, then words. She was singing, a Chinese lullaby Justice had never heard.
“Yut gwong gwong ziu dei tong
Haa zai nei gwaai gwaai fan lok cong
Teng ciu aa maa yiu gon caap yeong lo . . .”
After a few moments, in which Justice had been transfixed, Mrs. Tan caught her eye and said in English, “Bright Moonlight, Shining on the Ground. I sing it with the hope that my little shrimpling will grow up fast. She sleeps now, but . . . But we would all like to meet her.”
Justice drew in a shaky breath. She felt incredibly privileged. Mrs. Tan was usually very private, and yet she’d shared this with her. “Your—your voice is beautiful,” she stuttered, hers coming out in a harsh croak.
“I hope she likes it,” Mrs. Tan said sadly, kissing the top of her little girl’s head.
Her makeshift lab on Pulse was cramped. It used to be a bathroom, and it was the only area of appropriate volume that they could manage to turn into a proper clean room for molecule construction. The single-person quarters beyond had been transformed into the gowning room and fiber checkpoint. A white adhesive strip outside the door replaced the ratty welcome mat the previous occupant—who was either killed during the accident or left behind in the twenty-second century (either way, they were dead)—had thrown in front of it.
She stepped on the adhesive, sure to rock back and forth to make sure the bottom of her shoes were freed of loose debris. The door automatically opened at her behest, and a blast of air washed over her, blowing bits of hair and dust away into the hall. Inside, she put any loose items from her pockets into a locker—today she slipped her diary and pen into the small space—then pushed through the newly inserted wall of draped plastic (like the tongues in a car wash) to where the white clean suits and pale blue booties awaited. She’d been suiting up and stripping down her entire career, and it took no time making sure her clothes and shoes were sufficiently covered.
Drawing the string of the hood tight around her face, knotting it beneath her chin, she placed a pair of goggles on her nose and slipped in the second and third interior doors to her UV-protected lab.
The tiled walls and floors were still disconcerting, and she wondered if the grout would have been an approved clean room material under different circumstances. It hadn’t been a problem thus far, but still . . . it irked her.
Her centrifuge and electron microscope took up the area where the sink used to be. The shower stall was now an incubation tank, where the molecules were tested for strength via subatomic particle bombardment. The toilet had undergone the largest transformation, now a fixed desk bearing her chain builder.
She’d just about settled into her routine of checking on the previous day’s work (to make sure none of the new DNA strands she’d put together from scratch had fallen apart or tried to self-replicate overnight), when the comm unit outside in the gowning room cackled to life.
“Justice Jax? Bridge calling for Justice Jax.”
She stilled, unsure if she’d heard correctly over the constant hum of the clean room’s air unit. No one on the bridge had ever called her before. There wasn’t any reason they should.
“Bridge calling for Justice Jax.”
Scratching the back of her ear absently—the confines of the hood always made her hair bunch up oddly against her skin—she exited the clean room. She approached the comm unit like one might approach a wound-up jack-in-the-box.
Carefully, she depressed the answer key. “Uh, yeah?”
“Doctor Justice Jax?”
“That’d be me.”
“Captain Tan requests your presence on the bridge.”
Her eyebrows did a skeptical dance. “Can I ask why?”
“That’s currently classified, but you will be fully briefed as soon as you arrive.”
“Er—”
“Now, Jax.”
“Yeah, okay, I’m on my way.”
She reversed the process she had just gone through and made her way to the principal’s office.
It was smaller than she thought it would be. And somehow, not as shiny. She’d pictured it as an amalgamation of a plethora of bridges she’d seen in sci-fi flicks, but it looked more like the bridge of a boat. Orderly, utilitarian, with a wide range of screens acting as windows to the outside world.
Captain Tan’s aide met her just outside, where the doors were flanked by security guards, then led her in.
She might not have had occasion to be on the bridge before, but she’d met with the captain several times in the situation room, both before and after the convoy’s cosmic positioning had been verified.
“Jax,” he acknowledged, nodding firmly when she entered. The aide bid her stand beside Dr. Kabir Ratha, a medic, and Carmen Sotomayor, the navigator in charge of the positioning team.
She gave them each a brief hello, signing it in American Sign Language for Carmen. She knew Ratha as well—had spoken with him on several occasions. Everyone aboard knew everyone—that was just how it was when your world was reduced to seven hundred people.
But, what she had in common with these two, under the circumstances, she couldn’t say. Their new jobs had nothing to do with one another. Why had Tan summoned them?
“Three hours ago,” Tan began, facing Carmen squarely and annunciating so she could read his lips, “we noticed a change in one of the Lùhng ships.”
The primary display screen changed from pure black to a close-up of one of the remaining alien craft. Most of the alien ships left within a few days of their first encounter. What remained, the crew assumed, were those who had been assigned to babysit their new discoveries. Over the past three hundred and sixty-five days, the six remaining alien craft had been slowly guiding the two human ships back in the direction they’d come; they were a small fleet lumbering toward the field of massive constructs.