Pariah

by W. Michael Gear

“Nine.”

  “Which is the bigger number?”

  “Nine.”

  “Right. Now, multiply that by sixteen, which is the number of possible combinations of adenine, thiamine, guanine, and cytosine.”

  “Um.”

  “One hundred and forty-four. Which is the power per base pair in TriNA. When you do the same math with potential combinations for the DNA from two parents, you only get sixty-four possible combinations per allele. Cubed is always more powerful than squared.”

  “So, what does the TriNA want?”

  “To understand us. That’s the purpose of evolution. To understand.”

  “Your mother and Cheng wonder if a quetzal is just a TriNA molecule’s way of living forever. That the molecules just hop from quetzal to quetzal. It’s complicated. I’m not sure I get it yet, either. So, help me here. If something happens to Flash, do you think Diamond’s going to stand up for you? Or is he going to join Leaper in ripping you in two and making a meal out of you?”

  Kylee’s wistful smile matched her vacant gaze as she said, “Guess it’s kind of a problem, huh?”

  “Your mother’s been torturing herself ever since she left you behind. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Yeah, she left me that radio.”

  “You’ve got an out any time you want to take it.”

  “Can’t.” The desolate look was back, the girl’s gaze going to the dirt at her feet.

  “Why?”

  “’Cause death isn’t the same with humans. Rebecca and Shantaya . . .” Kylee’s face worked, guilt and pain glistening behind her eyes.

  She’d watched Rebecca and Shantaya, people she’d loved and known all of her life, eaten before her eyes. How could she go back to her family, look them in the face, and not be feeling worthless as spit? Like it wasn’t her fault?

  Kylee, like any child, turned guilt into anger, declaring, “I can’t go back to Port Authority. I won’t do it. Those people would have killed Rocket. I want them all dead. Even more than Leaper wants me dead. I hate them, Talina. Really fucking hate them. And if they threw you out, they’d kill me faster than Leaper would.”

  The kid had a point. But damn, what was that like, to only be coming on eleven and realize how precarious your life was?

  “Yeah, well, maybe we’ll figure something out. Flash doesn’t know it, but he’s just picked up another backer. You like doing equations? How’s this grab you? Flash plus Talina and an automatic rifle more than equals Diamond and Leaper.”

  The hallucination took her by surprise: Talina was terrified, her hide reflecting the vegetation, stone, and tumbled soil of the canyon wall. Her hearts were pumping, each intake of breath filtered through her mouth, venting fear along her tail.

  In a moment, it would be morning. The eastern horizon was growing brighter by the moment.

  She could hear the hunter. Feel the vibrations as gravel crunched under the hunter’s feet, sense the nearing presence. Implacable, unreasoning. All of them, empty, devoid of thought. Impossible creatures. Their very existence defied experience.

  She had made her gamble, that she could find a small one. Devour it, learn it, and understand.

  For three days now, she’d run. No rest. Elude them, she might. But each time the flying things would eventually find her. How? And why did they serve the monsters? The things weren’t even alive.

  So they’d chased her here, to this last canyon. Beyond its head lay open ground, devoid of hiding places. Nor could she run. Her body had exhausted its reserves, had started to digest itself for sustenance.

  And the hunter stepped even closer.

  Talina could hear the rasping of the thing’s clothing. Smell the peculiar odor of oils, salts, and fetid breath.

  And then came the chime. Surely the monster, empty as it was, wouldn’t understand the importance of the sound.

  As the harmonic wave passed, she was the center of the dead spot. And yes, the human had stopped. Talina could almost hear the being’s curious, thumping heart.

  She opened her eyes, staring into death. The human had the tube up, was staring through the optic, right into Talina’s soul.

  She leapt, feeling the impact of the bullet as it tore through her flesh . . .

  “Talina?” A hand grabbed her shoulder, shaking her.

  “Fuck!” Talina fought her way through the vision, back to the ramada. She sucked a full breath. Aware that Flash had raised his head, the three eyes fixed on hers.

  “Where where you?”

  “Blood Mountains.” Talina grunted out an uncertain laughter. “I was being hunted. By myself. Reliving it from the quetzal’s perspective.”

  Kylee’s gaze had intensified. “It was just like you were here and then gone.”

  “Yeah.” Talina rubbed the back of her neck, feeling the roots of a blinding headache wind through her brain. “Wish that damned TriNA was out of my system. Wish I could just be me. How do you do it? You and Rocket were bonded for years. But you always stayed you.”

  Kylee pursed her lips, frowned. “I could help you.”

  “Oh? Got a way of washing all these quetzal molecules out of my tissues?”

  “I can give you some of mine. The ones from Rocket.”

  “You mean . . . swap spit?”

  The little girl nodded.

  “I don’t kiss little girls. Reeks of pedophilia.” But she’d done it once in a desperate attempt to bring Kylee back from catatonia. It was different when the girl was awake and in her right mind.

  Kylee’s musical laughter rose on the hot air. “Yeah, but it’s not, silly. I want your molecules. I’ve only got three quetzal molecules in me. You’ve got a whole bunch more.”

  “Why in the hell would you want them? They’re not friendly.”

  “For the same reason you do. I want to understand.”

  And with that, Kylee leaned forward and pressed her lips against Talina’s.

  This isn’t right.

  But the rush of peppermint had already filled her mouth.

  27

  The notion was incredible. Beyond belief. Dortmund sat with his back rigid, arms crossed, as he glared across the conference table at Captain Torgussen and Advisor Benteen. The sober-eyed First Officer Vacquillas might have been carved of stone where she sat on the captain’s right. Engineer Ho hunched at the table’s head, looking like his guts had been kicked out.

  The other members of the scientific team were situated around the table, expressions in various stages from outright disbelief to stunned.

  Fifty years?

  “I really do not understand this,” Dortmund told them. “How could this happen?”

  But nothing else explained Freelander or the colony.

  Ho said glumly, “It’s got to be an error in the math that got us here. Something in the predictive statistics programmed into the n-dimensional qubit matrix of the computers. Some deviation in the statistical package they uploaded from Tempest.

  “Like Freelander, we went into a different universe. At least, that’s the best guess we have. Some part of the multiverse where we didn’t experience time. What passed as an instant in that universe was the equivalent of fifty years in ours.”

  “Why did time stop for us but not the computers? I mean, they should have experienced an instantaneous transition, right? They shouldn’t have had time to work the math, flawed or not.” Torgussen rubbed his temples, as if soothing a headache. “Some unexpected warping of time?”

  “If time even exists,” Vacquillas said wearily. “So much of modern physics is based on the hypothesis that what we perceive as time is an illusion. Nothing more than the changing relationships between particles in an eternal now.”

  “Hey, I’m not a physicist!” Torgussen barked.

  Ho mumbled, “Whatever happened to us, it’s a physics we can’t even conc
eive of. When you force a bubble of our time-space into another dimension, you’d damn well better expect spooky shit to happen.”

  “It’s spooky, all right.” Vacquillas’ eyes had gone dull.

  “Let’s get back to the problem,” Benteen said bitterly. “I’m still not sure that this is everything that woman claiming to be a Supervisor says.”

  “You saw that ship, that temple of bones.” Vacquillas shook her head. “You felt that same creepy sensation. Like Aguila said, it’s dragged a bubble of wherever it was to here. That’s where the energy is going. Leaking away into whatever universe that derelict came from.”

  Ho said shakily, “Symmetry inversion isn’t working like the theoreticians said it would. Given what happened to us? Freelander? Those ships Aguila said were missing? Something’s really wrong.”

  “Enough, already. These are things we can’t answer for the time being,” Dortmund insisted. “Let’s deal with the immediate problem: What the hell has happened to my planet? This is a horrendous disaster. Humans are crawling all over down there. The entire biosphere is contaminated.”

  “Whatever happened, it occurred sometime in the last fifty years, Doctor,” Torgussen said. “Maybe the records are in Port Authority.”

  “We need to get down there.” Dortmund narrowed his eyes, glaring at Benteen. For once he was so enraged he didn’t care that the man scared him.

  “That’s one vote.” Benteen looked around. “What about the rest of you?”

  Shimodi said, “You’re saying that we’ve been gone from home for fifty years? My kid sister is seventy? Mom and Dad, they’d be in their hundreds?”

  “And the chances are almost certain that if we refill the tanks, it’ll be another fifty years back.” Ho was fingering the tabletop as if it were a novel material. “That’s a hundred years. No one we knew will be alive.”

  Vacquillas said, “The only upside—assuming everything happens the same way again—is that we arrive as young as we are now. Like Aguila said, we can be museum pieces. Even the scorpion here.”

  Dortmund perked up as Benteen faced the first officer. “If you ever call me that again, I will gut you and leave you to bleed.”

  Vacquillas turned a terrified shade of pale.

  “Advisor Benteen, I’ve listened to my first officer’s report. What’s your explanation of this scorpion claim?” Torgussen asked.

  “None of your damned business.”

  To Dortmund’s surprise, the captain didn’t back away. “Seesil, could you tell the others what the Supervisor said?”

  Vacquillas bit her lip, looking away.

  “That’s an order, First Officer.” Torgussen pointed at Benteen. “And I don’t give a damn if you’re the Advisor. This ship and her personnel come first. So, what’s the story?”

  It was Benteen who said, “I was appointed to Vixen by Boardmember Shayne at the last minute. Before her arrest by that shit-sucking Radcek. Let’s say that my only concern is the ultimate success of my—”

  Vacquillas blurted, “Supervisor Aguila says he’s under a death sentence back in Solar System for murdering Boardmember Taglioni. That among other things, he’s an assassin, extortion artist, and blackmailer. Aguila says Shayne called him her scorpion.”

  Dortmund leaned forward. “You’re an assassin?”

  Benteen’s lips had pressed into a thin line. Then he said, “Politics at the Board level are played using much more sanguine rules than in your cutthroat university, Doctor. A fact that you might want to commit to that allegedly superior memory of yours.”

  “In addition,” Torgussen said, “Supervisor Aguila was kind enough to provide me with some of her historical files on Shayne and the scorpion. After reviewing them, I have decided to take precautionary action.”

  Dortmund was as surprised as everyone else when Tu and Ali entered, side arms drawn and expressions cowed. How the hell had Torgussen orchestrated it so well?

  They stepped up to either side of and behind Benteen and pressed the muzzles of their guns into the man’s back, Torgussen said, “Officer Ali, you will place the Advisor in bonds and transport him to the holding cell until further notice.”

  Even as he spoke, Torgussen leaned across and slipped a sleek black pistol from a holster inside the Advisor’s jacket.

  Dortmund and his colleagues blinked. The man had a pistol? Here? On this ship? The sudden revelation sent a shiver down Dortmund’s spine.

  Tu clapped binders onto the Advisor’s wrists as the man rose.

  Dortmund thought Benteen’s expression might have been likened to chiseled stone, but the rage burning behind the man’s eyes was a reflection of the fires of Hell.

  Only after the Advisor was marched out did Torgussen sigh and lay the pistol on the table. Dortmund stared at it the way he might have were it a black mamba.

  Torgussen said, “I have to tell you, having that man aboard has kept me awake at nights. Calling him the scorpion isn’t the slightest bit of an understatement.”

  “What are you going to do with him?” Dortmund demanded.

  “Kalico Aguila is a Supervisor. I’ll leave his fate up to her.”

  Shimodi said, “So, the Advisor’s a criminal? We’re fifty years out of our time? There’s a ghost ship in orbit around Cap III? And it could take us another fifty years to get home? How much more bizarre can this get?”

  “It still doesn’t solve our dilemma. What are we going to do?” Dortmund felt as brittle as cracked glass. This was a disaster—a complete and total mess.

  Kobi Sax rubbed the back of her neck. “Fifty years? It’s really 2155? I say we go ahead, adapt the mission to the new realities, and do science.”

  Shanteel Jones said woodenly. “How palatable is it to go back in Vixen? Arrive in Solar System in another fifty years? I mean, doesn’t it make more sense to await the arrival of a ship that makes it in normal time, and when it does, take it back?”

  “What’s normal time?” Ho wondered.

  Dortmund felt his heart hammering against his ribs. A hollow sensation filled his gut. His pristine planet was crawling with filthy humans. Someone did that. Some person during the last fifty years was ultimately responsible for ruining his world. Everything he’d planned . . . gone.

  An entire life’s work!

  The anger and injustice was like a searing in his soul. The emotional impact akin to finding out that one’s fragile and precious virgin daughter had been not only brutally raped, but was now pregnant and oozing syphilis and gonorrhea.

  He snapped, “You all may do what you will. I am going down there. I am going to document everything. The extent of the contamination. How much humans have polluted the planet. Every single ecological crime that has been committed against that world and its organisms.”

  “It could be huge, Dortmund,” Jones told him. “Might take you the rest of your life.”

  “What’s my life worth?” He glared around the table. “Hmm? I had a chance. We all did. Whoever authorized the establishment of those colonies without proper study and guidelines has already taken my life. Destroyed everything I hoped for. Now I am going to accumulate the evidence of his or her crimes. And when I take it back to Solar System, I will use it to gut the Board.”

  “Brave words,” Shimodi told him with an ironic smile. “If what they say is true, it’s fifty years. What if your culprit is dead?”

  “Then I will so damn him in history’s opinion that his name is reviled for the rest of eternity.”

  Shimodi shot back, “But you’re just the voice for one camp, Doctor. You’re a preservationist. Don’t the evolutionists have just as valid a point?”

  “Figures that you, a geologist, would bring that up. Your only goal, Doctor Shimodi, is the mineral exploitation of the planet, and God help whatever poor life-forms happen to get in the way of the excavators and earthmovers.”

 
“Come on,” she goaded. “As you note, the damage is done. For all intent and purposes, the evolutionists have won. Aren’t you the least bit curious as to how biological adaptation is reacting to the admixture of terrestrial life into an entirely new biosphere?”

  “We’ve seen it.” Dortmund rapped the table, surrendering to Shimodi’s baiting. “All over Earth. And that was before the disaster of global warming. What was the culmination, Doctor? Hmm? Nothing but the most massive extinction event since the Permian Extinction two hundred and fifty-two million years ago.”

  “And you think we’re going to see that here?” Sax asked.

  “I think we’re going to find a planet in the first stages of conflagration,” Dortmund told her.

  “So, you’re going to make them pay?” Shimodi was smiling, as if in victory.

  “Watch me, Doctor. Just watch me.”

  28

  The clouds were rolling in from the east. Fluffy white masses of cumulus, they were as good as a promise that it would rain again that evening.

  Kalico stared up at the patches of blue that retreated to the west. Donovan’s sky had that deeper, more turquoise color than Earth’s sky. Or at least Earth’s sky as it currently existed.

  She laced her fingers into the chain-link fence and clung to the wire as she searched the sky and listened for the sound of the shuttle.

  Vixen had taken fifty years to make what seemed an instantaneous transition from Solar System to Donovan. Freelander had taken one hundred and twenty-nine years. Ships were still out there, lost. Or traveling through whatever permutation of time. Was Turalon halfway back to Solar System? Or had she lost herself in some unknowable universe?

  What the hell did it mean in the grand sense of things? For Solar System? For humanity?

  Beside her, Shig Mosadek and Yvette Dushane clung to the wire with equal tenacity. They, too, scanned the skies, as did the crowd of people who’d come for the unexpected excitement of not only new people, but the appearance of a ship thought lost for the last fifty years. That just wasn’t an everyday occurrence in Port Authority.

  Kalico’s pilot had left her shuttle off to the side, closer to the five-high stacks of shipping containers.