Fast Forward

by Lou Anders

  Kath glanced around the empty room. “May we have a tour of the ship?”

  “No.”

  Kath scowled. She could hardly command the HighJin to show themselves, but she had expected to finally see her enigmatic hosts. She looked at the bare floors. “What should we sleep on?”

  Two beds rose out of the floor, dark rectangles with no covers. Kath's cheeks warmed. “We'd prefer one bed.”

  One bed sank again. What else did they need? “Sink, bathing and elimination facilities. Running water.”

  A door dilated, and behind it, a full fresher fitted for humans…but there weren't any angles. It all looked melted. Then the door became wall again, and Kath said, “Show me how to open the wall, or leave the door open.”

  The door opened. Kath frowned. “Will you show me how to do that?”

  “You do not have the necessary circuitry.”

  “Fine. Leave it open.” She wasn't about to have to ask an AI for permission every time she needed to use the fresher.

  Charter spoke. “A table and chairs.”

  Kath smiled at him and squeezed his hand. “Kitchen.”

  A square table and rounded chairs appeared, all black like the beds, greasy looking and smooth like the corridor and the handholds. Klio said, “Your food will be brought to you.”

  “Klio,” Charter asked, “Are you modified to interface with this ship?”

  “I've accepted patch sequences of programming from the HighJin. The result is different from AIs merging here. Separation remains; there is an interface between me and the programming that is HighJin. After all, I am light and they are matter.”

  Kath frowned. “When can I talk to the HighJin?”

  Klio said, “When you talk to me, you are talking to them. Let me order you a meal. We have attempted to improve on Joy Ten's efforts. Joy Ten will stay with you.”

  Charter spoke. “We would rather be alone. Can we call for Joy Ten when we want?”

  “Yes, but let it serve you. That is its chosen task.”

  “We can't leave this room, right?” Kath asked.

  “You do not have the right circuitry to control the ship surfaces. We require a day to bring you to Mercury.”

  “I would like to see the flight.”

  A starfield brightened the screen. “That is Mercury.”

  A point of light glowed above a wall of red-hot fog. Kath swallowed hard, suddenly wishing she hadn't asked. Mercury had been home, and she'd saved it once. Now, she was about to kill it. “Thank you.”

  Joy Ten brought them a tree branch laden with fruit. Kath gaped; Charter laughed. The little red spheres were half-familiar; they might have been purchased from some lunar or asteroidal colony. “Omnivore,” Charter said, grinning.

  They gorged on the fruit.

  The bed conformed perfectly to Kath's hips and shoulders and head. Kath and Charter slept, and stretched, and cuddled, and read.

  In the viewscreen, Mercury didn't move.

  The next morning, the sky hadn't moved. Deep red fringe of sun, black sky, dust of stars and one bright point. Charter asked, “Wasn't this ship supposed to be fast?”

  “I have never seen Thousand Flowers in flight,” Joy Ten said, and returned to its corner.

  Hours later Joy Ten brought them a root vegetable, baked, the size of Charter's forearm. While they were eating it, Mercury exploded in their faces.

  There had been no sense of motion. Suddenly the sky was all glare-pink baked rock. Charter spasmed like a dying man, ears and nose and mouth clenched tight.

  Kath slapped Charter's ridged stomach to get him to breathe again. “They spent all that time gearing up,” she said.

  “We're still in a hurry,” Charter said.

  Mercury was brighter than she remembered, lit by the expanding sun. Dark specks on the surface resolved to leftover habitats and old mining machinery. The hulk of a dead space-barge. Klio's voice interrupted her. “Locking into low Mercury orbit. Three hours to disembarkation.”

  Kath and Charter gathered their things, piling them in a spot Joy Ten pointed out. The room returned to its original blankness. Charter took Kath's hand. “It looks like an empty slate now.”

  She giggled. “Maybe I'll redecorate when we get back.”

  They boarded the mushroom ship, accompanied by Joy Ten. The ship dropped fast, plunged toward the surface of Mercury in a hot red glare. It landed in relative darkness at the edge of the sunward side.

  Mercury had been scoured clean of dust. Rounded rocks and crater walls looked melted. A wistful sadness settled over Kath. Charter had never seen Mercury pristine, Mercury normal, Mercury before the sun scoured it, but she had: sharp jagged rocks and steep crater walls. Edges.

  Klio ordered the transport to transform from ship to habitat. As far as Kath could tell, it didn't grow, or at least it didn't add mass. It changed, became a single thick-walled space, morphing around them until their cargo pallet rested in the center of a large empty room.

  Kath and Charter enlisted Joy Ten's help to unpack the pallet Kath had carefully designed back on Mars. Charter watched Joy Ten fold open the bulky radiation suits Kath had commissioned two days after her original contact with the HighJin. Charter examined them, looking pleased.

  She pulled out a single old-fashioned chess set with real wood pieces. “Yeah, I know. Sentimental. I made room for it.” The feel of something so human in her hand brought tears to her eyes. It had been a gift from Lysle 8951. His yellow-gray eyes sparkled momentarily in her memory.

  Klio spoke up, its voice pouring through Joy Ten. “We've established a tenuous connection with Solnet Three. Your absence is being discussed. What is a ‘terror bard'?”

  Kath bristled. “Not me! Nobody's going to die.”

  Charter said, “Search the net, Klio. You can find records of terror bards. There was a whole religion, the Companions, part of a sect called, um—”

  “Data on the Companions has mostly been erased or classified. I have mention of Jestlyn Ward 006, who directed a meteorite at a city named Los Legiones and rode it down,” Klio said. “I have the Ayatolah Warner, who smuggled a thermonuclear device into Ceres.”

  “Well, you know more than I do. There hasn't been a terror bard in a long time.”

  “But why has there ever been?”

  AIs didn't kill each other. Charter glanced at Kath; he shrugged. “People can live practically forever, with luck. Every so often, one or another decides he's had enough. Most of them don't take anyone else with them, but some do. A terror bard is making a statement. Warner thought the Ceres bureaucracy had robbed him. Jestlyn Ward classed the Los Legiones sensories as demonic. The Companions committed genocide against…well, a forgotten people. Klio, I'm only a hundred and ten thousand years old. I don't empathize with wanting to kill so much that I'm willing to die for it.”

  Klio said, “Good,” in the same silky voice.

  “All right, Klio. When will the rover be ready?”

  “Now.”

  “Thank you.”

  She stood next to Quicksilver's rectangular case. She spoke to the case. “Ready?”

  Klio: “Do you like the rover?”

  She'd given specs for use, not design specs. She nodded, pleased with the machine's simplicity; a heavily shielded small platform with six wheels, and a closed box at the front for two Bear Clade humans.

  Together, they manhandled Quicksilver's radiation-shielded box into the rover and strapped it down. They added shielded cameras and mounting rods, filling almost all the spaces in the rover. They lurched slowly forward as first Kath, then Charter, learned the controls.

  Crossing into the light felt like driving into the sun itself.

  Sol took up a frightening amount of sky, a ball of brightness arching across more than half the heavens. Their helmets blocked the glare; they could look directly at the sun for a few moments at a time. Every kilometer or so, they stopped; one of them crawled out of the cab, worked a camera and mounting stick free from the pile surroundi
ng Quicksilver's box, and with the help of a mechanical arm, planted the stick and decorated it with a tiny camera.

  If Charter was Hansel and Kath Gretel, planting camera crumbs to lead them home, then the sun was the witch and the waiting oven and every other evil thing from every fairy tale that had survived the billions of years. It took six exhausting hours to crawl and stop and crawl their way to Midnight Dome, the only place on Mercury with the right vintage systems in place. During the whole journey, she felt as if the Clade stood in a silent spectral line along the rover's tracks, watching her, nodding when she planted a camera, their ghostly gray eyes filled with hope.

  The Dome sat tilted: land beneath it had wrinkled. Antennas and other external objects had melted into odd-shaped lumps and run down the dome's exterior.

  It recognized Kath as she and Charter drove up. A door rolled open. They drove inside. Darkness surrounded them, except for the elongated rectangle of bright light that spilled into the doorway from the rover.

  “Light,” Kath requested.

  No response. Well, they'd expected problems. “Dome! This is Kathlerian 771. Lights, please!”

  A single tiny light bloomed down a long corridor, then winked out.

  Charter touched her hand, the gesture awkward in his thick suit. “You rest. I'll work on this.”

  She identified Charter to the dome and gave him as many rights as she had. With those, Charter could take more. As soon as he clambered out, she lay across the rover's narrow seat and slept. Once, light bloomed throughout the dome, waking her. She smiled and curled back into sleep. In her dreams, she played chess with Quicksilver, losing again and again.

  When he woke her, Charter's unprotected blue eyes looked dark with exhaustion. “You took your helmet off!” she exclaimed, reaching for the latches of her own.

  He nodded. “Habitat's good. Warning bells will tell us if it goes bad again.”

  She gave him a puzzled look. She was careful; he was more careful.

  He grinned at her and pointed toward the top of the dome. “We're already standing just under death.”

  She tucked her helmet under her arm and shook her head. The air smelled stale and warm, and her forehead broke instantly into a sweat. She reached toward the neck of her suit, then thought better of it. Charter was still suited, and carried his helmet with him.

  Working environmental systems implied working computers. “What do you know about the core computing?” she asked.

  “If you run diagnostics while I sleep, we can load Quicksilver right after.”

  While the diagnostics ran, Kath wandered the silent halls of her old home, half expecting her childhood self to round a corner and greet her.

  She shook Charter awake four hours later. “We're ready.”

  Two more hours passed before Charter grinned at her. “Say hello.”

  Her voice shook. “Quicksilver?”

  Silence.

  Charter whispered. “He'll be disoriented. He won't know how long he's been out.”

  “I know,” Kath hissed back softly. Then, louder. “Quicksilver. It's me, Kathlerian.”

  Charter's voice again. “Mercury is different now, but he'll feel like he left it yesterday. The flux tube is different. Trust me. He'll be all right.”

  Kath grinned. “I trust you.” She took advantage of the free face time and kissed Charter, hard.

  He whispered, “Quicksilver won't remember you as an adult.”

  She kissed him again. “You do.”

  They toured the vast empty dome. Kath stepped over a maintenance robot that whirred up next to her and stopped dead at her feet. “Not exactly mint condition, but not too bad for a place that's older than me.”

  Hours passed before Quicksilver's cheery, childish voice filled her right ear. “Kathlerian 771?”

  “Quicksilver? You okay?”

  “Diagnostic still running. I remember giving Jerian permission to copy me. I was…afraid to die.” Silence. “But we both lived.”

  She finally spoke words there hadn't been time for a quarter million years ago. “Thank you for saving me.”

  “This is Mercury. I'm in the Mercury flux tube. Surely you didn't move us back to the sun?”

  “No, the sun swelled to us.”

  Silence.

  “Tell me what you plan.”

  She sat up, wrinkling her nose. She needed a shower. She said, “Every mind in Sol System wants to watch the sun swallow Venus. An audience of trillions. But there's no way to get close, and too long to wait. We won't wait. We're going to send Mercury smashing into Venus and knock them both into the sun, years early. It'll be spectacular beyond anything the Solnets are expecting, except for Hyunet, because they're working with me. Microcams can't get close enough to the sun, not get in and stay in. Too hot. But a planet has enough mass to dump heat into. I've been scattering cameras over Mercury. Hyunet will have the only close-up view of the whole thing. It will make enough money to save the rest of the Bear Clade.”

  Five heartbeats passed before Quicksilver said, “I hear pain in your voice. Tell me what happened while I lay dormant. It's been thousands of years.”

  She grimaced. “Hundreds of thousands.” She wriggled to find a comfortable place to sit, glanced at Charter, who sat still, listening, and then she started near Quicksilver's last memories. “When we got away from the sun, and you had…been moved into Jerian Wales's data bank and I couldn't talk to you—you didn't finish our last chess game!—I swore I wouldn't abandon family again, that I wouldn't disobey the Clade and wander off. That…that after this whole world was moved to save me…I'd matter.” Her voice held firm, her words coming from her core self. “I'm grateful every day for my life. Grateful to you, grateful for Mercury. You must feel how much mass the planet has lost.”

  “Unevenly mined.”

  “People wanted the metal and minerals as the exodus to Pluto moved in waves from Mercury to Mars.” She shifted again, off-balance in the suit, wishing she trusted the aged dome more. “They're abandoning Mars soon. They wrapped the planet in an envelope to reflect heat and radiation away, and it's almost past working.”

  She told him about the Clade, about Jerian taking half, and leaving some of the best, leaving Lysle. She described Lysle 8951's yellow-gray eyes and the chess set he'd given her. “How can I leave Mars if I have to leave so many behind to die?”

  “And you need me to throw Mercury into Venus? What happens to me then?” Quicksilver sounded like a five-year-old. He always had; that was his voice. It hadn't been as heart-wrenching when she was a child herself. “I died before. The me after the copy.”

  “You don't remember it.”

  “I remember being afraid of it. You want me to commit suicide for you a second time.”

  “For the whole Clade. You did it for just me, once.”

  “I don't know the Clade.”

  She swallowed, her throat suddenly dry.

  Quicksilver was silent for a long time before it asked, “Kathlerian 771, could you hurl yourself into a fire even if you knew you had a copy kept safe somewhere?”

  Her fingernails dug furrows in her palm. The only copy of Quicksilver she was sure of was in her hands, as endangered as herself. “If it would save Lysle 8951.”

  “If it would save someone you didn't know?”

  Nothing mattered as much as saving the Clade. “Yes,” she lied.

  Quicksilver said, “I don't know if I would save who you have become. When you were younger, you cared whether or not I would die.”

  She hung her head. “We'll keep you…we'll keep this copy safe.”

  “If it's your decision for me to die, then you murder me. Go away and let me think.”

  Tears stung the corners of Kath's eyes.

  They took the rover back, driving from the dark of the dome into the impossible bright of the sunward side, and across the ragged landscape until the sun had nearly set.

  The habitat was not there.

  Charter drove them to where it had been,
pointed at the deep lines where the weight of it had landed and, eventually, left, as a mushroom ship. Their belongings were neatly stacked on a rock, tied down. Kathlerian eyed Quicksilver's storage box, strapped to the rover. If the HighJin abandoned them, she had killed —murdered—them all.

  Even through the darkened faceplate of his helmet, Charter's blue eyes narrowed with anger as his voice pinged across the radio in her ear. “I told you they wouldn't care about your plans.”

  “If Quicksilver sends us into Venus, the money will go to the Clade anyway. I didn't set this up so we had to live to succeed. You knew that.”

  “I don't want to die.”

  Quicksilver had said the same thing. “I don't want you to die either. I don't want to die. None of us does.” She scanned the sky. Had the HighJin really left? “Klio?” she asked.

  There was a pause of over a second. Then, “We overheard you,” Klio said. “We are like Quicksilver. There is only one of us, and we could die if you do what you plan and there is…a failure. We will watch what Quicksilver does, and then we will make our own choices.”

  It didn't seem to matter what she did.

  Charter slid away from her, as far from her as he could get on the wide bench. Thinking.

  Kath frowned at him, an expression he couldn't see. She wanted to go back to the dome, but it was sunward, and offered more dangers.

  She'd best let Quicksilver decide for himself. He'd do this. He would.

  Charter's abandonment cut the closest. She slid over near him. He ignored her. She spoke softly, “Love. Charter, my lover.”

  After a while he reached one heavy suited arm out and set it over her shoulder. Clank. She felt its weight through the padding in her suit. The faceplate of his helmet was still turned away from her.

  Finally he whispered, “Are we just waiting to die?”

  “I'm waiting for Quicksilver to start us off.”

  “It doesn't matter what Quicksilver does. It matters what the HighJin do.”

  She didn't tell him he was wrong. She'd handed the ability to save the Clade to Quicksilver.

  “Shall we explore?” he asked.