Pariah

by W. Michael Gear

  “Didn’t know quetzals were so complicated. So, Flash is the leader?”

  “He’s fourth elder.”

  “Age matters, huh?”

  “Among quetzals. Diamond and Leaper will kill him one of these days for his molecules.”

  “Damn, you’d think they were Romans.”

  Again Talina started to bend down for her rifle.

  Again Flash flicked out a claw.

  This time, she held his eyes, reached down, and pushed the deadly claw forcefully back. “The experiment isn’t over. Understand?”

  And with that, she picked up the rifle, saw Diamond tense to spring, but calmly hung the gun over her shoulder. Turning, she stared the younger quetzal in the eyes, her heart still hammering like it was about to burst from her chest. “So, there it is. Now, which one of you is going to tell me what the hell you figured out from those molecules I just brought you?”

  Flash chittered in what she’d come to learn was quetzal laughter. The big quetzal flipped its head, as if indicating for her to precede him.

  “What’s up?” Talina asked Kylee.

  “Breakfast,” Kylee told her. “It’s morning. Everyone’s hungry.”

  “As long as it’s not you or me on the menu, what have they got in mind?”

  “They catch roos, I pick whatever from the garden.”

  Talina gave the old quetzal a grin. The demon quetzal in her belly, clearly upset, was bouncing around like a manic handball. Eat? She’d rather throw up. Then she forced herself to wink at Diamond as she struggled to find even a modicum of courage. “Well, I’m up for raspberries, how about you?”

  Kylee, looking back and forth, said, “Leaper won’t let this go, Talina. He’s really upset.”

  “Yeah, well, we’ll deal with that when we get to it.”

  She glanced at the tree line. Leaper was out there in the forest, carrying a grudge. The last time that had happened, people had died. And the only people here were her and Kylee.

  25

  Kalico followed the familiar way through the transportee section, her light cutting a cone through the blackness. The lights had failed again. Turalon’s technicians had cobbled together wiring for this section of the ship before they spaced for Solar System. Now it was blacker than the sewers of hell. And maybe just as fraught with horrors.

  She could feel things in the air around her. Fart-sucking hell, she hated Freelander.

  “Supervisor?” Bogarten asked through the com. “You need us for anything? Backup? Whatever?”

  “Negative. Keep extruding cable. We don’t want to be here for a second longer than it takes us to load up and beat feet out of here.”

  “A big roger on that!”

  She stopped at the hatch to the crew’s quarters. Glanced back at Benteen and the first officer who had introduced herself as Seesil Vacquillas. “This is where it gets a bit weird.”

  “Define weird,” First Officer Vacquillas muttered from the side of her mouth. The two security guys looked as if they’d already shit themselves. A couple of times.

  “The hypothesis is that Freelander dragged some of the universe she passed through into ours. Sort of like a bubble of unreality. Time’s not right here. It kind of echoes, like waves. You can run into yourself, or at least an image of yourself from the past or the future.”

  “Maybe that’s why our sensors couldn’t get a reading.” Vacquillas kept licking her lips as if she were nervous. Smart woman.

  “Yeah, Freelander sucks energy. Drains it away into somewhere else.”

  Tamarland, however, had a crazy glitter in his dark eyes. The guy was scary. No wonder Artollia Shayne had called him her scorpion.

  “What happened to the people?” Benteen asked.

  “Dead.” Kalico opened the hatch into the crew section. Thank the flipping lucky stars, the lights came on.

  “What’s this?” It was the ship-wise Vacquillas who immediately picked up on the anomaly.

  The first officer was referring to the walls, covered with thousands of lines of script. Lines upon lines of it. Sometimes the flowing loops and letters were so overwritten they obscured the writing beneath. Vacquillas bent close to stare in disbelief.

  Kalico told them, “Mostly they’re odes to the dead. They’d write sayings over and over, like ‘The exhalation of death is the breath of life. Draw it fully into your lungs.’ Always makes me wish I was wearing a mask with a micron filter. Which brings me back to your question, Advisor Benteen.”

  Kalico hooked a thumb back over her shoulder toward the transportees’ deck. “As soon as the crew figured out they were lost, they murdered the transportees. All five hundred of them. Suffocated them. Vacuum froze the bodies and added them to the hydroponics over the years as the chemistry broke down in the tanks.”

  “Jesus.”

  “You a Christian, First Officer?”

  “No, my mother always said it when she was shocked.”

  “Christians, Jews, and Muslims don’t do well in here. The Buddhists and Hindus don’t creep out quite as much, but Freelander still gives them the soul-shakes.”

  Kalico led the way down the corridor with its endless writing. “Shig thinks they began worshipping the dead. They’d murdered them, right? And were living off the corpses. Dropping the bodies, one by one, into the hydroponics. Maybe it was the guilt, but they believed they became the dead.”

  “None of this makes sense,” Benteen growled, his eyes like wary slits. “We’re not even a month out of Solar System.”

  “How long was the transition?” Kalico asked, watching Vacquillas’ expression. It was like the first officer already knew and just wanted to hear it confirmed.

  “Instantaneous,” Benteen told her. “We thought the inversion had failed. One minute we were talking to Neptune Control, the next we were in Capella’s system.”

  “Sorry to piss in your milk, Advisor Benteen, but it really has been a half century since you made your escape from Solar System.”

  “You’re sucking empty vacuum when you say that shit,” Benteen declared. “Hey, Supervisor, or whoever the fuck you are, I was in astrogation. Sitting right there. It was like flipping a switch. One minute we’re there, the next we’re here. Torgussen is still chafing in his shorts. The guy’s desperate to fill the tanks so he can invert back to Solar System and report.”

  He paused, a canny expression building. “But that’s your game, isn’t it? As soon as Vixen spaces back, your operation here will be blown. We’ll report it all. Expose your whole covert organization.”

  Kalico had watched Vacquillas stop short, eyes wide. Yep, she’d definitely figured it out, that it really was 2155.

  Kalico casually asked, “How much fuel did you burn? Maybe eighty percent?”

  The first officer closed her eyes, seemed to sway. “You say it took this ship one hundred and twenty-nine years?”

  “That was what they experienced in whatever universe or dimension the inversion pushed them into. Transition time in our universe? A little more than two and a half years. Freelander left Solar System six months ahead of Turalon. Got here a couple of weeks after we did. And the other thing you probably need to know: Vixen was the first of four exploration and survey ships lost on the transition to Donovan. And after the colony was established, another six of the big cargo ships like Freelander have vanished. After Freelander and now Vixen? Maybe they’ll show up. But God alone knows where they will have gone, or what relative time they will have passed in whatever dimension or universe they went to.”

  She led the way into the crew mess and flicked on the lights.

  An eerie shiver—one not of this existence—rolled through her like a wave. There it stood, looking just as it had that first time she’d seen it.

  “Blessed Allah,” the security officer called Ali said as he realized what he was seeing.

 
The structure was a dome, maybe two-and-one-half meters in diameter and four tall. The Freelander crew had built it in the middle of the large mess hall. In a way it reminded Kalico of the old American capitol dome, its top rounded like a half sphere. What might have been misconstrued for the vertical colonnade upon which the dome rested was actually a support crafted from a thousand and some human femora topped by a ring of human skulls that ran around the circumference. Then another colonnade of as many humeri, or arm bones. Then another ring of skulls upon which the dome itself rested. They’d constructed the dome of tibiae, radii, ulnae, and the flat bones of the pelvis and shoulders. Intricate decorations consisting of flowers composed of vertebrae, curlicues made of clavicles, and chevrons of finger bones covered the entire surface like some mad barococo ornamentation.

  “What the hell?” Vacquillas asked.

  “Their shrine to the dead.” Kalico stepped to the side, watching the newcomers ease closer. “You can see the last skeleton. An old woman. The final survivor, she died right there in the doorway. Wasn’t anyone left to clean her bones and wire them into the temple.”

  Benteen was shaking his head, his hand still on the pistol inside his coat.

  “No need to pull that Talon, mister scorpion. I could give a damn who you were back in the day.”

  He pivoted on his heel, shaken, all the more deadly for it. “No one knows that she calls me her scorpion. Who the fuck are you?”

  “It’s in the history books, Benteen.” She tapped the side of her head. “Implant. Pulled up all the data the moment Ensign Makarov reported that your shuttle came from Vixen. Anyone who plays the game of Corporate politics studies Radcek. Boardmember Shayne came within hours of overthrowing him. She was that close, making her move, when he had her arrested. Had his psychiatric techs cut every last scrap out of her brain. Dismembered her mind the way a butcher does a hog’s carcass; they found out all about you.”

  “Boardmembers do not submit other Boardmembers to that kind of procedure. That’s the unspoken rule, damn it.”

  “Until Radcek.” She crossed her arms, fingers of her left hand tapping suggestively on the grip of her holstered pistol. “Maybe, because it was a first, and maybe it was because she loved you with all of her heart, and maybe because of the number of prominent people the two of you murdered, compromised, and blackmailed. Whatever the reason people still remain preoccupied with your story.”

  “I don’t have to listen to this. What if I just take the shuttle back to Vixen? As soon as Torgussen has enough fuel in the tanks, I can space. We’ve got the secret to instantaneous transition, now. Your whole covert operation here will be blown.”

  Vacquillas was looking at him like he’d lost his mind, but seemed to think better of saying anything.

  Kalico walked up to the structure; her skin crawled like a thousand ants as she ran her fingers over the polished human bones. “Doesn’t matter that it’s been fifty years. You’re still under a death sentence. The Taglionis would insist.” She turned to face him. “If you go back, you’ll die.”

  “Not to mention that it will be another fifty years,” Vacquillas said in a hoarse whisper. “Everyone we knew. Well, most of them, anyway. They’re dead, aren’t they? Brothers and sisters grown to old age? Parents gone?”

  “That’s my guess.”

  Kalico gave the scowling Benteen a deadly smile. “So, Advisor, if you ship back in Vixen, it will be a whole century since you made your escape. Maybe by then you’ll be such an historical oddity, they won’t execute you. Maybe they’ll just put you in a museum.”

  Benteen blinked, his hand finally leaving his pistol to hang limply. “You say Radcek had them dissect her brain?”

  “The bastard was making a point. You and Boardmember Shayne came within a whisker of destroying him. He didn’t want anyone else to try, no matter what kind of precedent mental dissection set.”

  “The tanks on Freelander have any fuel in them?”

  “They do.”

  “So, if we fueled, inverted symmetry, I could get back in time. Maybe figure a way to save her.”

  “You don’t get it!” Vacquillas thrust herself into his face. “She’s been dead for fifty years. As dead as these bones. What seemed instantaneous? It wasn’t. We’re fucked, Advisor. We’ve lost everything.”

  Kalico watched the man’s lips quiver, a glistening in his eyes. And as quickly they were replaced by a deadly calm. “But it wasn’t even a second.”

  “It was fifty years.” Vacquillas kept struggling to get the man to grasp the concept. “Look around. This is why Supervisor Aguila brought us here. This is the lesson. Freelander inverted symmetry and spent one hundred and twenty-nine years in a transition that only took two and a half years in our universe. Vixen just made a transition that seemed instantaneous to us. But it took fifty years in our universe. Something’s wrong with the physics, Advisor.”

  He swallowed hard. “I don’t fucking understand.”

  “Welcome to Donovan,” Kalico told him, and wondered how long it was going to take before she had to murder the scorpion. Or if she should just draw her pistol and shoot him down right there on the spot.

  26

  The awl in Talina’s hands needed sharpening as she punched it through the carbon-fiber cloth. If she had to be exiled anywhere on Donovan, Mundo Base was perfect. The abandoned research base was loaded with usable materials for survival, not to mention the farm.

  She sat in the shade of the ramada that protected the cactus and continued to stitch the carbon cloth together. The material would make a serviceable pair of moccasins for Kylee. Ugly as sin, but no slug could chew its way through and into the girl’s foot. Behind her the wreckage of Mundo’s ruined dome added to the feeling of defeat.

  Worse, images of the ancient Maya bowl she’d broken kept replaying. Especially that moment when it hit the tile floor and exploded. How the shattered fragments bounced and slid across the Saltillos. Felt that gut-numbing sense of horror. Even at six, Talina had known how valuable the bowl was. Had realized the magnitude of what she’d done.

  And there was that damn glyph. It always landed face up and signified Way: the intermixed notion of the animal-possessed spirit dreamer, part human part animal. A Maya concept so fundamental to the notion of becoming more than just mere human.

  Kylee, washed now, her hair shining, her face clean, fiddled with a ratchet, spinning it around and around by an extension and listening to it click.

  Out in the direct sun, Flash slept, his hide a snowy white to reflect Capella’s energy. His mouth gaped, the three vents at the root of the tail wide open and jetting air. Quetzals were incredibly efficient when it came to dissipating heat.

  For once the quetzal in her gut was quiet, somehow pacified by the chaos in Talina’s dreams and visions.

  “You didn’t sleep well,” Kylee told her.

  “Nothing but quetzal dreams.” Talina blinked, the afterimages, even after all the hours she’d been awake, playing through her head. “Stuff I can’t understand. Images, like memories. I swear, this is what dissociative disorder must be like. You know, seeing things, hearing voices? But none of them are human. And, like, they’re all different. More and more it’s Rocket and you when you were little.”

  “What does he say?”

  “Say? Nothing. It’s moments. Like the time you and he stole Rondo’s prize squash. The one he was going to save for New Year’s supper.”

  “Rondo never did figure out who did that,” Kylee said with a grin.

  “Here’s what I don’t get. Rondo was a big man, wasn’t he? Thick black hair, wavy. And he had a little scar by the side of his left eye. The lower incisors were crooked. When he laughed, he always put his hands to his belly.”

  “Yeah. That’s him. So?”

  “So I never met Rondo. He was fourth ship. I came on seventh, and Rondo had been crosswise with Clemenceau
before I set foot on Donovan. Rondo made it a point to be absent from the base the few times I was here with the Supervisor. And he never, ever, came to Port Authority while I was there.” Talina gestured with the awl. “So how can I know what he looked like?”

  “That’s Rocket’s memory.”

  “You’re telling me that Rocket’s TriNA is somehow putting an image of Rondo in my brain.”

  Kylee shrugged. “You once told me that the information only went one way. I told you then that you were wrong.”

  “Do you know how tough it is to get my head around this? I never learned all this RNA stuff. I’m a security officer, damn it. This is all voodoo.”

  “What’s voodoo?”

  “Magic. Spooky weird supernatural spirit stuff.”

  Kylee broke out in laughter, her teeth shining. Flash’s eyes popped open, the one on the right swiveling to take in the scene, and then closing again.

  “Talina, it’s simple. Remember when you told me that quetzal TriNA is like our deoxyribonucleic acid? You said Dya told you, right? That the quetzal molecules were smart? They’re using the imaging parts of your brain.”

  “How?”

  “With transfer RNA. Duh!”

  “How would you know? And what the hell’s transfer RNA?”

  Kylee gave her an exasperated look and whirled the ratchet around a couple of fast turns. “Oh, hey. I’m a microbiologist and psychologist like my mother. I understood metabolic pathways and gene expression when I was four. I was using CRISPR 12 to create organisms when I was six. In terrestrial life, cellular biology is everything. Donovanian life gets a little more complicated because the cells don’t have a nucleus. And we see a lot more variability in the TriNA. Probably because everything’s in threes instead of twos.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Kylee raised her eyebrows as if she were dealing with an idiot. “Two times two is what?”

  “Four.”

  “Three times three is . . . ?”