Quicksilver

by R. J. Anderson

  “All right then,” I said in a cool, brittle voice that hardly seemed my own. “Alien road trip it is. Let’s go.”

  1 1 1 1 1 0

  We stopped only once after that, for coffee and sandwiches. Sebastian drove fast and decisively, as though he were as impatient to get home as I was—except, I reminded myself, he didn’t really have a home. And the closest thing he had to a family, on this planet anyway, was me.

  Not that we were blood relatives, or at least I hoped not. We certainly looked nothing alike. But then, I had no idea who my biological parents were, except that one of them had been a technician. Or so Faraday thought. But what did that mean?

  “Just what it sounds like,” said Sebastian, when I asked him. He glanced over his shoulder, making sure the eighteen-wheeler lumbering up behind us wasn’t too close, and merged into the fast lane. We were on the 400 now, heading south toward Toronto, and the traffic was flowing smoothly: with luck I’d be home in under two hours. “Technicians are bred to excel at building and repairing equipment. When a scientist or some other senior member of the Meritocracy requires a particular piece of machinery, the engineers design it and the technicians make it to their specifications.”

  Like I’d done for Sebastian, with the transceiver. “What if they decide to build it differently?” I asked. “Or get their own ideas about how to make it run better?”

  “That doesn’t happen,” said Sebastian. “Or if it ever has, the Meritocracy made sure to quash the story—and probably the technicians involved—before anyone else found out. Technicians aren’t bred for initiative. They’re bred for dedication, endurance, and doglike obedience to their superiors. When there’s a crisis, you can always tell who the technicians are, because they’re the ones running toward the danger instead of away from it.”

  That description wasn’t entirely me, thank God. But even so, parts of it hit uncomfortably close to home. “Doglike obedience,” I echoed, making a face. “What a lovely way to describe it. Is that how my birth mother ended up pregnant? Because some engineer slapped his thigh and whistled, and she came running?”

  “Possibly,” said Sebastian. “But it could have been your mother who was the engineer, and it’s also possible that your biological parents’ affair was mutual. I don’t mean that technicians have no will or initiative of their own. Only that they find it difficult to disobey a direct order.”

  One simple phrase, so casually spoken—and yet it hit me with the force of a bullet. No wonder I’d worked so hard to please my parents and do whatever they told me. No wonder I’d needed Milo to carry me into the makerspace that first time and choked up when I’d tried to tell him my secret. I had enough engineer in me to disagree with my parents and even argue with them at times, but when it came down to it I was still a good little technician inside.

  And Sebastian was a scientist, which meant he outranked me. Was that why I’d gone along with his plan so readily? I’d grumbled at him and acted like I was doing him a favor, all the while telling myself I was building the transceiver for my own sake rather than his. But deep down I’d suspected—no, I’d known—that his idea wasn’t going to work. Yet I hadn’t tried to come up with an alternative.

  Was any part of myself my own? Or was I just dancing to the tune of my manipulated DNA , and all the so-called choices I’d made in my life were an illusion?

  “Tori?” said Sebastian. “Are you all right?”

  As though he cared. As though it mattered, now. I thought about Milo, hitchhiking home from the middle of nowhere because he couldn’t stand to be with me one minute longer. I thought about my parents, waiting anxiously for a daughter who was so much more than they’d expected and so much less than they deserved. And when I thought of telling them about the relay, I wanted to fling the door open and hurl myself into the oncoming traffic.

  But I had to tell them something. Rightly or wrongly, they cared about me. And if I vanished again without warning or explanation, it would kill them.

  “The relay,” I said to Sebastian. “Do you think it followed us, after we left the observatory? Could it catch up to us now?”

  Sebastian shifted restlessly, flexing his back and shoulders. “Well, it doesn’t have to follow the road, so it can move faster and more directly than we can. But its scanning range isn’t great enough to detect you at more than twenty kilometers’ distance, which could slow it down considerably.” He checked the rearview mirror and changed lanes again. “On the other hand, it did go into stealth mode after Milo threw it away. So it could be hiding anywhere right now. The back of the truck, for instance.”

  The idea made me shudder, but it only took me a second to dismiss it. Mathis wanted to locate me and beam me back to his lab as soon as possible. So if the relay was following me that closely, I’d be gone already…

  But I wasn’t.

  Hope kindled inside me. Without a quicksilver chip in my arm telling the relay where to find me, it would have to scan in every direction to pick up my trail—and that would take time. Enough time, perhaps, that I could come up with a new and better way to protect myself. My own plan and no one else’s, a plan that would actually work. I took a sip of my tepid coffee and felt the knot in my stomach loosen a little.

  Sebastian hadn’t relaxed, though. If anything he seemed to be getting more uptight with every kilometer. His hands were knotted around the steering wheel, and he kept hunching his shoulders as though they hurt him.

  “Do you want me to drive?” I asked.

  “You have your license?”

  “Not yet, but I know what I’m doing. I won’t tell if you won’t.”

  Sebastian’s mouth twitched. “Thank you. But I’ll be fine.”

  And now he looked even more unhappy than before. Was it the shame of having his plan to stop Mathis fall to pieces? The disappointment of losing Milo? Fear for Alison’s safety, now that the relay was out of his control?

  Or was there something else on his mind that I didn’t know about?

  “Come on, Faraday,” I said. “I know we’re not exactly best friends, but I’m willing to call a truce if you are. What’s going on?”

  I made my voice gentle, even put a hand on his shoulder, but it didn’t help. Sebastian flinched away from my touch as though I’d stung him. “Stop that.”

  So my charms were as wasted on him as his were on me. Well, nobody could say I hadn’t tried. I sat back, folding my arms, and we drove the rest of the way home in cold silence.

  1 1 1 1 1 1

  I’d thought Sebastian was going to drop me off at my house. But when we reached the corner of Ross Street he turned the opposite way, into the graveyard. “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “I think it’ll be better to let you off here. For discretion’s sake.” He drove slowly up the cemetery lane and braked under a spreading maple, then jumped out, leaving the engine running. I was opening the passenger door to get out when he came around the back of the truck to meet me, carrying my bag.

  I took it, ignoring the hand he offered, and climbed down onto the pavement. My legs felt weak from sitting so long, and I flexed them to get the circulation working. “It’s been a trip,” I said dryly. “Thanks.”

  Sebastian stood still, looking down at me. In the moonlight his face looked grey, and his eyes were tired and sad. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I never wanted it to end this way.” And he held his hand out for me to shake.

  I sighed. Swinging the duffel bag to my left hand, I reached out with my right—

  And Sebastian’s fingers clamped around my wrist like a manacle. Before I could even cry out, he whipped his left hand out of his pocket and slapped something onto the inside of my forearm.

  There was no pain. Only a millisecond of cold numbness, and the electric buzz of terror as I realized what it meant. I yanked my hand from Sebastian’s and turned it over—to see the last shining drop of quicksilver, tiny as a pinhead, vanish under the surface of my skin.

  I screamed, clawing at my arm in a desper
ate attempt to dig the stuff out. But my nails were too short, and it was too late. I could feel the liquid metal squirming into its preprogrammed shape, tendrils branching off in every direction as it tapped into nerves and muscles, arteries and veins. Learning my body’s secrets, so it could transmit that information back to the relay—and to Mathis.

  My knees buckled, and I crashed to the pavement. I hunched beneath the maple, sobbing and clutching my right hand to my chest. There was a chip inside me and the relay knew where I was and there was nothing I could do to protect myself now, nowhere in the world where I would be safe—

  “I don’t know how much time you have left,” said Sebastian, so quietly I could barely hear him. “I hope it’s enough. Good-bye, Tori.”

  Then he climbed back into his truck and drove away.

  INTERLUDE: Deterministic Jitter

  (A slight movement of a transmission signal in time or phase that can cause errors and loss of synchronization, and is reproducible under controlled conditions )

  (3.1)

  “So that’s it?” I asked in disbelief, as Sebastian turned off the quantum impulse generator, and its low throb of power died down. “We’re just giving up?”

  We were standing in the main control room of the spacelab, where Sebastian, Alison, and I had first met Mathis nearly five hours ago. Only it was just Sebastian and me at the moment, because Alison was resting in another room, and we’d locked Mathis up in his quarters so he couldn’t interfere with our attempt to escape.

  An attempt which had, apparently, failed.

  Sebastian braced his hands on the console and bowed his head as though it was too heavy for him. “You built that generator perfectly, Tori,” he said. “Thanks to you, we can open a wormhole again. The problem is, there’s no way to tell whether it’s the right wormhole to get you home. I thought I could compensate for the loss of the long-range sensors, but…” His shoulders slumped. “It’s not going to work. I’m sorry.”

  A laugh broke out of me, so sharp it hurt my throat. “Sorry? You think that’s going to make me feel better about being stuck here for the rest of my life?”

  “No.” Sebastian’s long face was sober. “But right now, it’s the only thing I can give you.”

  I couldn’t look at him anymore. Swiping angrily at my eyes, I spun around and walked to the center of the room. Above me the domed viewscreen displayed a dazzling view of the stars, clearer and brighter than I’d ever seen them on Earth, but all the constellations were unfamiliar. Maybe I’d get used to that eventually, but I didn’t want to.

  I wanted to go home.

  “I should talk to Alison,” Sebastian murmured, sounding almost as lost as I felt. Then he walked out.

  I sank onto one of the benches, numb to the core. I knew Sebastian was right about the long-range sensors, but part of me still couldn’t believe it was over. I’d worked so hard to build that wormhole generator, reaching deep into myself to draw on instincts I’d barely known I had, and when it was done, I’d felt like a technological goddess. But it had all been for nothing in the end.

  I stared at the floor for a few seconds, and then I got up again. I’d already had more than my share of emotional outbursts today, and I didn’t have enough energy left for another one. I walked back to the console where Sebastian had been working, and looked at the cluster of touch panels and windows he’d left behind.

  Most of the readouts were impossible for me to decipher, since they were in whatever language people spoke here. But in the top left-hand corner were a couple of tiny, colorful rectangles with moving shapes inside them. I touched the closest one and dragged it, and it expanded to show me a view of the room where Alison had been resting. She wasn’t lying down now, though. She was sitting up, leaning against Sebastian as he sat on the bed beside her and told her the bad news.

  I touched the window again and gave it a flick upward, splashing it onto the viewscreen in front of me. It expanded to fill the whole panel. Now the two of them looked almost as big as I was, the picture so clear and lifelike that I felt like I could have reached right into it and tapped Sebastian’s shoulder or brushed back the tangled strands of Alison’s hair. But if they knew I was watching, they gave no sign of it.

  “… Even if we could rig up a replacement,” Sebastian was saying, his arm around Alison’s waist, “it would take days to calibrate. Days we don’t have. I’m sorry.”

  Alison didn’t say anything. She just gazed at the wall until Sebastian said again, “I’m sorry,” and then she turned to him and hid her face against his chest.

  Well, at least Sebastian had been straight with her, painful as the news must have been for her to hear. But then, she had told me that he’d never lied to her yet—though how he’d managed to pull that one off I couldn’t imagine…

  And now he was kissing Alison, and she was kissing him back. Not a gentle let-me-comfort-you kiss, either. It was the kind of kiss that looked like it was going to end up horizontal, and Sebastian didn’t seem to have any reservations about going there.

  So obviously my apathy toward sex wasn’t an Alien Thing, any more than it had been a Chip-in-the-Arm thing. It was just me.

  Well, if making out made Sebastian and Alison feel better, I wasn’t going to interrupt. But the idea of watching it happen was a definite Do Not Want. I swiped the image back down onto the console and squeezed it as small as it would go. Then I pulled the second window on top of it and opened that one up instead.

  Mathis was sitting on the sofa in his quarters, dabbing dried blood from his nose. He looked disheveled and slightly dazed, as though the sedative had only just worn off. “Serves you right,” I said aloud, knowing he couldn’t hear—

  But as I spoke, he looked around. Apparently he could. And when he touched something on the arm of the sofa and his eyes focused on mine, I realized he could see me too.

  My heart rate jumped twenty beats a minute, but I told myself it didn’t matter. Mathis and I had changed places: now he was the prisoner, while I was the one in control. “Sleep well?” I asked tartly.

  Mathis stood up, smoothing back his brassy hair and tugging his crumpled tunic back into place. “Astin. Where is he?”

  “He’s busy,” I said. “And even if he wasn’t, I don’t think he has anything to say to you at the moment. I, on the other hand, have plenty.” I leaned closer, hoping to intimidate him. “What were you planning to do with me, before Sebastian stopped you?”

  “If you thought he’d really stopped me, little girl,” said Mathis, walking forward until his head and shoulders filled the screen, “you wouldn’t need to ask.”

  Little girl. That was a laugh, coming from someone who looked a lot closer to my age than he did to Sebastian’s. Just a junior scientist with big ambitions, so desperate to make a name for himself that he’d been willing to torture a baby and beam her through a wormhole to get the results he wanted. And so scared of competition, apparently, that he’d faked a relay malfunction and left Sebastian stranded on Earth for fifteen years.

  “I’m asking,” I told him, “because we outnumber you three to one. And if I were you, I’d be rethinking my original plans and trying to negotiate.”

  Mathis twitched a half-smile. “I don’t think so,” he said. “Because if you were me, you’d remember that before long the military will be arriving to take over this station. And if I’m not there to greet their commander and speak up for you and Astin and the Earth girl, you’ll be identified as rebel intruders and shot on sight.”

  With sinking dread, I realized he had a point. I hadn’t thought of that. But I wasn’t ready to give up yet.

  “Sebastian can speak for himself,” I said. “If he was such a brilliant student, I’m sure at least some of your fellow scientists remember his name. And after what you did to him, maybe you should be more worried about whether he’ll speak up for you.”

  Mathis laughed. “You’re a clever one,” he said, but in the same superior tone as a trainer might say good dog. I clenched
my fists behind my back, resisting the urge to reach through the screen and throttle him.

  “You still haven’t answered my question,” I said.

  “That’s because I don’t know all the details myself. My intent was to keep you in isolation until the shuttle arrived, then take you back to the planet and turn you over to the senior scientists. What happens to you after that…” He tipped his head to one side in a shrug-like gesture. “They may decide to question you and keep you for further study. They may want to do their own experiments on you—to see how you react to certain bacteria and toxins unique to our world, for instance.”

  I had a sudden, vivid image of being trapped in a glass cylinder, choking and clawing at my throat as green fumes swirled around me. Of being naked and bound to a table, writhing as red welts and blisters erupted all over my skin. And as I screamed for mercy, men and women in neat grey uniforms watched me from a professional distance and took notes.

  “At the least,” Mathis went on blithely, “they’ll take blood and tissue samples for further study. Likely they’ll do a full brain probe and some stimulus tests as well.”

  I’d thought talking to Mathis might make him reconsider his attitude toward me, especially now that he’d had a literal taste of his own medicine. I’d hoped that my first impression of him had been wrong and that somewhere behind that smug facade he still had some sense of compassion, or at least shame.

  But nothing had changed. In Mathis’s eyes, I was only a worthless half-breed slave, a piece of biological rubbish he’d picked up cheap and had every right to use as he pleased. And now I realized, with sick certainty, that his fellow scientists felt the same way.