by Ken MacLeod
It took her a minute to get her bearings, and then she moved through the tunnels as quickly as a need for quiet could afford. Several turns and intersections later, she found herself at another small hatch, with what appeared to be a small butter knife wedged into the control panel. She touched it gingerly, as if it could shock, but it was inert, a dead relic of another’s past.
At least I know I’m in the right place, she thought. “I’m going in.”
She emerged into a cramped and dusty storeroom filled with boxes, crates, and stacks of miscellaneous junk, the lighting dim. She took several deep, calming breaths as she unloaded from her vest pockets the next set of items she’d anticipated needing. As soon as she felt back under control she reached out an arm and slipped it past the chip reader. The doorlight turned green and admitted her into the main corridors of Aurora’s Outpost One.
The senior staff would be in the situation room, monitoring the fighters as they looked for signs of their enemy, while security spread out throughout the decks, watching the airlocks and the docking rings, watching their own population for any sign of internal insurrection. The Auroran warlord would be doing much the same from his seat back in the central enclave, watching everyone, trusting no one. Out of Bari’s grasp, but not beyond her touch.
A stunner took out the door guard. She shorted out the lock into the situation room the same way she had the hatch’s internal airlock, and stepped inside. The room was dark, wood-paneled at ridiculous expense, displays overheard showing the still-expanding search party in vivid red tracery. Heads turned, hands reached for weapons, but before anyone could draw she was at the chair of the outpost’s commander, her gloved hand lightly laid under his chin, across his neck, above the silver embroidery of a jacket nearly the same as her own. There were three other men in the room, all frozen where they stood, assessing, waiting.
“Who are you?” the commander barked.
“You don’t remember me, Karilene?” she said.
He stared at her face, then at the jacket she wore. “I don’t know you.”
She hesitated, then reached up and peeled off the biomask she’d worn for nearly half a year, nearly coming to accept that face, the face of “Ms. Park,” as her own.
The commander stared, and his gaze lost none of its sharpness, but after a moment the single “Ah” that passed his lips was like the last, faint breath from a dying man. He straightened, his arms folded carefully, fingers entwined, on the console board in front of him. “Bariele. You’ve grown into that jacket at long last, I see. You’ve come for revenge.” It was statement, not question.
“No,” she said. “Business.”
“You’re an assassin, then?”
“A facilitator. In this case, the difference is minor.”
“Who sent you? Not Glaszerstrom, surely?”
“No, not them.”
“Then who?”
“You were in someone’s way, and presented them with a difficulty they wanted resolved.”
He laughed. “My brother and I built Aurora out here in the Sfazili Barrens so that we would not be in anyone’s way, and no one would be in ours. You know that.”
“And yet.”
“The ambush was cleverly done. I hope you got a good price.”
“I did.”
“He’ll rebuild Outpost One, even if it takes years and years. It’s not like him to let anything go. And he’ll hunt you across the entire Multiworlds if he has to.”
“And I expect he’ll find me, sooner and closer than that.”
As if sensing that something was about to happen, the others in the room began to shift and move, but before anyone could act she’d grabbed the short handle protruding from her pack, drawn out the thin, sharp blade that lived there, and moved it down in one swift, graceful motion. The old man jerked twice in his seat and then was still.
A young man toward the back of the room let out a cry, fumbling for his pistol, and abandoning her blade where it was she drew a small, cruel knife from the sleeve of her suit and skewered him through the neck from across the room. “Anyone else?” she asked, unholstering at last her own pistol. The remaining men stared at her angrily but relinquished their weapons. “Neither of you are half the man Karilene was. If you want to live, leave this room now and get off this station.”
She stood, blade in one hand, pistol in the other, as the two men walked carefully around her and out. “When you report what happened here,” she told the second man, “be sure to tell my father I send my regards.” Then she closed and sealed the door.
Removing her jacket, she laid it over the old man’s body like a shroud, or a calling card, or perhaps both. Where she was going she could not take it, and she knew—and he would know—that she left it only because she’d be back for it.
“It’s done,” she said into her suit mic.
[The fighters have turned and are heading back to the outpost at top burn, and there’s activity at the Enclave itself,] Omi said. [Not to rush you, but you need to get out of there.]
“I’m on it.” She sat at Karilene’s console and slid in the small chip. Immediately systems began shutting down and scrapping themselves as the Outpost’s general evacuation alarm sounded. She positioned her last three EMP mines beside the console and set the failsafe to detonate if they were interfered with. In a short while, the entire base would be defenseless, uninhabitable, scrap. It would be abandoned until it could be secured and rebuilt, which wouldn’t happen until Aurora’s warlord had made some determination of who had sent her. And that was something he would never resolve.
The same paranoia that would keep him away from this border until he understood what had happened here was now her own way out. She went to one wooden panel, felt around the trim until her fingers found the tiny catch, and the panel swung open. From there, metal rungs set into the narrow tube led her up and into the very top of the station where a small ship lay cocooned as insurance against the worst.
The escape craft had dust on the console but was fully charged, waiting. She left the outpost in a roar of speed only seconds ahead of the EMP explosion that crippled the station.
Setting the tiny ship on a wide arching course for the far side of Beserai, she engaged the auto-pilot. By the time the Auroran pursuers caught up and blasted the ship to pieces she’d long since abandoned it as well, floating curled in a ball in space, invisible.
Finally, far behind and away from the furious activity, the Rooan herd caught up to her, enveloped her, carried her along.
The Space Turd felt cramped and foreign when she climbed back into it. Cardin was still banging on the hatch at random intervals with little enthusiasm. After checking on the soundly asleep Ceen and Vikka—utterly ambivalent now to them—she sat herself down at the helm, slid the life support controls back up to full, and turned back on the gravity generators. She slowed the ship and changed its course; in a few seconds it would begin to fall behind and away from the herd. Last, she reactivated Cardin’s intercom and sensors, a gesture she could only think of as recompense for the use and misuse of his ship. And because it didn’t matter anymore.
She flipped the hatch bolt with one foot, toed it open; it was still dark in the cabin, dark enough to hide her, but she could see the professor’s face in the dim light of his computer, the lines of fear etched in it rendering him a stranger.
“Ms. Park?”
“Your handheld,” she said, and dropped the unit down to him. “Ceen should wake up and let you out in a few hours, and then you can go home. In the meantime, collect what data you can.”
“But . . . Aurora . . . ”
“You don’t need to worry about Aurora, Professor.” And she closed and locked the hatch again.
She peeled off Ceen’s patch, throwing it in the ship’s flash-recycler. Vikka she left as she was; it was up to Ceen to decide if he wanted to listen to her the entire trip back or leave her asleep.
Her suit was fully re-charged. Time to leave the Turd, pick up Omi, and col
lect payment. She left the airlock one last time; the Turd was still on auto-pilot, but would soon diverge from the herd as the Rooan changed trajectories again for the slingshot pass around Beserai. Her pickup rendezvous was arranged for the far side.
She moved through the herd, jumping from one giant, rough body to another as if she was a stone skipping across a lake, until she found one with a small silver sphere taped to the underside, just under the nose.
Turquoise said.
“Yeah, yeah. Omi, tell him to hang on.”
She peeled off the tape, held the sphere up beside her, and let it go in space. Its single blue lens blinked at her.
[About time.]
Large rippling shades of blue moved up and down the body of the Rooan. [The big guy is happy, too.]
The Rooan flashed another sequence of blue. “I didn’t catch that,” Bari said.
[Oh, sorry, I was looking the wrong way,] Omi said. The sphere turned, flashed a sequence of lights at the Rooan, who flashed back.
“Uh . . . I didn’t catch that.”
[Light-based names. If it helps, you’re 23-17-83RGB Fading Reverse whereas I am 61-40-240RGB Brightening Center.]
“I’m honored,” Bari said, hoping she was.
“Oh, I do.”
“My suit will hold.”
Bari pulled a harness out of her pack, then let the pack float away into space. It would not survive the trip, and she would not need it on the far side, where she had a small ship of her own waiting and ready. It took several long minutes to attach and seal the links across her torso and legs, until she felt almost a prisoner in the tight bindings. Then she looped the remainder around the vent gill. “I’m ready,” she said. “Omi?”
The silver ball drew near, and she plucked it out of space and tucked it down inside a pocket along the front of her suit. [The indignity!] Omi said, his signal weak.
“Oh, shut up,” Bari said. Looking ahead, the bright crescent edge of a blue-white planet loomed near.
The vent gill closed again, holding her fast. She put her hands to her sides and ran through a precise sequence of control gestures with both hands. The straps shrunk, tightening. She took a deep breath, filling her lungs and expanding her chest, then completed the last gesture. The Dzenni suit, technology far beyond human, hardened into an immoveable shell. She could no longer feel the straps, only the unyielding foam that the suit extruded around her. Her faceplate was clear, bright in the light of the planet.
The Rooan herd hit the edges of Beserai’s thermosphere, riding the curve of the planet like surfers riding a wave, seeking the mesopause. She caught her breath as noctilucent clouds spread out in wisps below her, then held it as Turquoise’s entire back half split asunder and a million thin, iridescent threads tumbled and waved behind, tasting and collecting the rare bounty of elements and ice crystals they passed through, saving and storing them for the long cold ahead.
So much beauty and wonder. Tears streamed down her face and were quickly wicked away by the suit, leaving only a tickling hint of their passage across her cheeks. As they picked up speed, stealing velocity from the planet as easily as they swept up elements, the Rooan began to swing out again on a new trajectory, the solar wind from Beserai’s star now full at their backs. And every Rooan began to flash, in sequence with each other, patterns within patterns. They’re singing, she realized.
Bari smiled and wondered what Cardin’s computer would have made of that.
Another Life
Charles Oberndorf
She says, tell me about your first death.
After all these years she should be familiar with its details, but age seems to have erased the particulars that never interested her, so I remind her of the outline of events.
No, she says. I meant what it was like when you woke up?
She’s lying in her bed, and I’ve pulled up a chair to sit by her side. I say something like:
I opened my eyes, and there on the ceiling were shades of blues and yellows. You know how I usually don’t have a good memory for colors, but I took a psych test when I enlisted, and they told me those were the colors that would calm me when I woke up. I do remember lake water lapping the shore, the sounds of the birds I’d grown up with, because it was odd to hear them in this enclosed room. I expected the sound of the water to actually be the reverberation of a ventilation fan.
I sat up, but discovered I couldn’t. There was a nurse beside me, and she was explaining something. I don’t remember what she said. I just knew she wasn’t the same nurse who’d sat me down in the chair and placed gear around my head. I think I liked this one more. Her voice was calm, but it drifted around me along with the sounds of lake water. I was lying down, but I’d just been in a chair. The other nurse, the one I didn’t like, the one who had placed the gear around my head, had told me to relax. I’d closed my eyes. While I was unconscious, they had mapped my neural network. Now, awake, I should get up out of that chair and head over to the next bulkhead to the tavern we liked, to the Wake, where I’d arranged to meet Noriko.
Ah, Noriko, she says. There’s an edge to her voice, though you’d have to know her well to hear it. After all these years, the name Noriko still inspires an edge to her voice.
I say, I can tell another story.
No, she says. You only told me about Noriko when we were first together. And that was a long time ago.
This is also about when I met Amanda Sam.
Don’t be evasive. I’m too old for these games.
So I lay there in this unexpected reality. Of course, someone must have told me if you wake up sitting up, then you’re waking up right after they’ve completed the recording. If you wake up lying down, you died, and they’ve grown a new body and shaped your mind using the patterns of your last recorded neuromap. But I didn’t remember anyone telling me this, and maybe this was what the nurse was whispering to me, but it was my first death, and all I felt was panic and confusion.
I wasn’t in the body that had been sitting in the chair, the body that would wake up, walk down the corridor, cross a bulkhead, and head two levels up to the Wake, where I’d meet Noriko. I wasn’t in the body that was scheduled to spend two more days’ R&R on Haven before it boarded a troop carrier for the war zone.
Worse, if I had died in battle, I should be in a ward with other newborns, the other soldiers who’d died with me. But I was in a private ward with what appeared to be civilian nurses. Had I died so heroically that I had received some special discharge? Or had I made such a fatal mistake that I couldn’t even be reborn among my peers? I asked the nurses all sorts of questions. A nurse on one shift, let’s say the morning shift, said, I can’t talk about the war. It will just upset you. The afternoon-shift nurse said, No one tells us who pays for the treatment or the room. The night-shift nurse said, Maybe the money is coming out of your own account.
Of course, that was impossible. When I enlisted, I had been as poor as a miner without oxygen. The sign-up bonus had gone to pay off family debt.
The nurses taught me to sit up and helped me make my first steps. I learned how to gesture with my hands without knocking over cups of coffee. I imagined what it must be like in the ward among the soldiers, the taunts and the insults at each misstep, all of that making it less frustrating. And at some point, some captain or lieutenant, or maybe even some lowly ser
geant, would come by and update us on the status of the war and announce who would go back and who had died the requisite third time and would be offered the honorable discharge plus bonus.
But one nurse, one day, while helping me sit in a machine that worked my leg muscles, said, mostly in exasperation, “There is no ward of newborns. You’re the only one right now. That’s why you got so many nurses. We’re bored.”
Depression weighed my every thought. I’d imagined that Noriko had died with me, that she would have been among the newborn. I imagined finding her and making sure she understood that whatever I’d done wrong, whatever had caused our deaths, I hadn’t meant it.
What exactly did you two have? she asks. How long had you been together?
I hesitate. I have been with this woman for several lifetimes. In our last lifetime together, I waited until I turned fifty before I decided it was time to start over in the body of a twenty-five-year-old. She said, I’ve lived a few more lives than you. I feel I’ve seen enough. This time I want to see things through to the end. She said she would like to spend those remaining years with me, growing old together, but I did not believe her. Our lives were so fraught with our time together: nouns weighted with multiple meanings, verbs sharpened by the years; we were best off, when the mood was right, with incomplete sentences that the other would finish with an automatic goodwill that was also born of all our time together.
After she left me, I died in an orbital collision, and insurance paid for the rebirth into a twenty-year-old body. My current body is thirty-five; she’s eighty-five. My answer to her question—How long had you been together?—now embarrasses me.
At this distance, it’s so hard to imagine how I felt. It was my first life. It was so new to me. I’d only known Noriko for three, maybe it was four days. Five at the most.
Five days? That’s all? How did you meet?
Two different units had been shipped to Haven. One unit was full of youths fresh out of training; the other unit had seen battle, probably several times. I hadn’t made any close friends during training. Everyone else had been so enthusiastic, and I had just barely made it through. I didn’t know what to do with myself, so I wandered. It’s funny how little of Haven I remember after all the time I spent wandering it. Way Stations are so different and so homogenous—they have the cultural trappings of the locals, but there’s always entertainment after entertainment, gymnasium after gymnasium, tavern after tavern.