by Lou Anders
That was how she got stranded on Mercury the first time, exploring when she should have been readying to leave. When she should have been listening to her elders. She looked at Quicksilver's box again. “No. I need to stay by our copy of my friend.”
He turned toward her, and his eyes were rimmed with red.
They slept. Kath woke to Charter's voice in her head, via the radio. “We're moving.”
She felt a slight change in weight, in balance. A tremor. The old crater must be jetting ionized iron. “Which way?”
“Toward Venus, toward the sun.”
Bless Quicksilver. The Clade would be safe. She'd built enough smarts into the media contract to assure that.
“Klio?” she queried.
Her heart beat slowly into the silence.
“Klio?” Her voice was louder, a little strident.
“We will copy Quicksilver, and he will decide whether or not we take you.”
Kathlerian's eyes widened, but the HighJin would not see that. “You made a deal with me.”
“But you did not make a deal with Quicksilver. He is teaching us more about humans than the AIs have, more than you did.”
What would the old teacher tell the HighJin? Now she realized how little of her life she had known Quicksilver. He had been an icon. She sat close enough to Charter to feel him draw toward her. Humans were used to feeling outnumbered. She made a private channel between them and said, “Love.”
“Love,” he repeated, but the tones she heard were of fear.
She would have preferred defiance to fear, but Charter was who he was. “We are going to the dome,” she told Klio.
There was no response. Kath looked at the pile of their belongings, then at Charter. “We'd better take anything we want.”
“Do you want anything?”
“I have what I wanted most. When Hyunet pays off, the Clade will have enough money to save tens of thousands of them. Now I want to save you.”
“And Quicksilver?”
The question ripped through her. “Of course.”
If the HighJin didn't return, they'd burn. Death was death, for any of the Clade. Quicksilver was not Clade, but she had killed him. Played one life against thousands. Perhaps she should die with Quicksilver. But choosing death wasn't in her. She climbed down from the rover and retrieved the chess set, setting it on the seat beside them. They rode back to the dome. As soon as she stripped off her helmet, Kath called out, “Quicksilver!”
“Yes?”
“I'm sorry.” She shouted it. “I'm sorry, I was wrong!”
Three heartbeats, four.
His high, childish voice said, “You weren't wrong. I am still human enough to save the Clade.”
She licked her lips. “I will save your copy if I can.” Was she pleading for his life or for hers? For Charter's? For all of them? “Quicksilver, what kind of human were you? Like Bear Clade?”
“Not very. Largely cyborg and not so long-lived. Kath, the HighJin transport ship comes. They will copy me out of the flux tube.”
“We brought the copy we restored you from.”
“That copy does not know what you did. Leave it here.”
“You will live.”
“I will not. There will be a copy of me left behind. It is not the same. I will remain here, and keep Mercury on course. Small corrections may be needed to the end.”
Kath raised an eyebrow at Charter.
He shook his head. “A solid trajectory will guarantee a course for Venus. You don't need to stay and burn.”
Quicksilver said, “I should commit suicide first? No, I will live every moment left to me.”
Kath drew in a sharp breath. Quicksilver had been Vance Hordon, a teacher. He was teaching her now. The words tore from her, ripping away a scar built by too many years of life. “I will never leave any being with no choice again.”
Two hours later, the HighJin mushroom ship landed outside the Dome. The light of its engines balled and gathered below it, like a flaming pillow, and the ship settled peacefully onto the surface. The light around it winked out. The lock appeared as if a mouth yawned in the side of the vehicle.
They suited up and left the dome.
A squat black robot emerged from the HighJin ship, trundled past them on six wheeled feet. They followed it inside the dome, and sat by the door, breathing overheated air, waiting for Quicksilver or Klio or the black robot to say if they were needed. No one asked for them. When the robot went back out the dome door, they went out with it.
The rover followed the robot, climbing into a tunnel in the side of the ship. Kath and Charter followed the rover into the tunnel, immediately relieved to be free of the fire above them.
Nothing greeted them. They found the soft acceleration couches and the gossamer restraints and strapped themselves in. The HighJin did not provide them a view of anything, although they had enough light to see each other. The pity in Charter's eyes made her glad of the distance between them.
A viewscreen lit. A tiny dark ball with flames licking its edges, the only resolved hard thing against a background of sunfire. The view zoomed in. “That's from one of the cameras we set up,” Charter whispered.
She nodded. Venus expanded. The second-largest network was undoubtedly busy becoming the largest. No terror bard had ever done anything so big. “Klio,” Kath whispered, “can you show me the Solnet feeds so I can watch them too?”
Venus filled half the screen, wreathed in fire, fire behind it. Dancing fire, a nest of shock waves, as if the edge of the sun reached toward it. The goddess of love prepared to burn in her mother's embrace.
She watched Mercury, blinking. “Can I talk to Quicksilver from here?”
“He asked to die alone.”
Charter reached for her hand.
A new viewscreen popped up, a talking sim. “Reports claim a clandestine force has moved Mercury into a collision path with Venus. Mercury, of course, moved once before. Powerful Bear Clade member Kathlerian 771 is rumored to be on the alien ship near Mercury. Charges have been filed against Kathlerian as a terror bard.”
She frowned. “Terror bards kill people. I killed a rock, and I saved thousands of people.” She'd killed Quicksilver, and saved the Clade. “And one person.” She nearly choked on the words.
The sim continued. “The world court is even now declaring the destruction of Venus a capital crime.”
Kath's ears curled. She pulled them relaxed with her hands. The sun was destroying Venus. Would destroy Mercury, soon. And Quicksilver. The flux tube would be wild with harmonics and shock waves. Did such a being feel pain? She remembered the days just before they'd left Mercury's original orbit, when Quicksilver had been there and gone and there and gone and she'd thought she'd lost him.
Hours passed. Venus filled the whole screen. Flame licked in front of the camera. Details of Venus's surface resolved. Bumps that used to be volcanoes, low valleys that used to be deep rift valleys. Like Mercury, Venus was a partly melted planet. The thick atmosphere was long since boiled away.
Surely Quicksilver was dead, now. The part of him she had killed. The rest slept—a copy that would recall her betrayal. She shivered, guilty and sorry.
Screens darkened one by one as cameras winked out, failing in the heat. Mercury was gone. Quicksilver.
She glanced up at the single camera view remaining, the perspective from Thousand Flowers. Mercury tiny and Venus huge, two bright cores whose edges mingled, then joined. Matter shattered and twisted, blazing balls and strings, a kitten's fire toy, two central cores tumbling, tied together, bright arcs of flame linking the two. Brilliant shards of planet transforming into flame and falling, falling, flaming, through the vaguely defined rim of the flaming sun. Everything fire. A bright spot marked the merged planet's passage for a long time, slowly dissipating into the currents of the red, swollen sun.
Afterimages burned in her retinas.
When the impact began to replay on the communication nets, she closed her eyes and breathed o
ut slowly. Even if she didn't make it back to Mars, she had staff competent enough to get her people off Mars.
Hell with the Solnets. What would the HighJin do with her now?
Another view bloomed. The ship, Thousand Flowers, and Mercury while it still lived. The near recorded past. The mushroom ship detached from Thousand Flowers, and landed sunward on Mercury. Kath saw herself standing by Charter watching the black robot disembark. The cameras did not follow the robot, but stayed on the mushroom ship. Its smooth skin quivered and bunched and turned from dark to darker. Kath had barely noticed. Now she said, “It's burning, isn't it?”
Charter's voice was awed. “More than that, Kath. It's healing itself as it burns.” He took her hand in his before he asked Klio, “Is the ship all right?”
“It will never rebond with Thousand Flowers. It had to separate itself or cause Thousand Flowers to live through its pain. Separate, it cannot rebond. This is how we re-create ourselves. It chose its path, chose to save Quicksilver.”
Kath swallowed. “After I gave Quicksilver no choice.” How much choice had the mushroom ship really had?
Charter's face shown with discovery. “We thought we had never seen you, but we have. We are in you.” His voice quickened, his curiosity overwhelming him. “You are…you must be…a multiple being of some kind? A hive?”
“We are one. We are parts. Parts are less than the one if they are alone.”
On the screen, the mushroom ship, with them inside it, floated free to Thousand Flowers, like a baby whale next to its parent.
“What will happen to it?” Charter asked. “To us?”
“It wants to take you with it.”
“Where?” Kath asked, barely breathing. The alien wanted them?
“Where do you want to go?”
Kath didn't think she could go to Mars. Too many beings would condemn her choices. She had destroyed Mercury. The sun would have done that, but still…emotions might run high, fueled by the media. She had used the media, and they had not hesitated to use her in return. She'd bargained for the life of her Clade, not for her reputation.
The voice of Hyunet said, “No details of Venus and Mercury remain, but the mass still orbits within the sun's outer envelope. In its way, it is beautiful.” It was: a scarlet comet. “The sign of the terror bard will orbit within the red-hot vacuum that is currently the sun's photosphere for decades or centuries.”
Only in the heat of the moment were they calling her a terror bard. In a few hundred years, the Venus fireball would be etched away, the scandal would leak away, and she could win back her citizenship in court.
“Give us a few moments?” she asked.
“Of course.”
Kath turned to Charter. “I can only talk to Quicksilver if he's in a flux tube.”
Charter kissed her, catching on quickly. “You're being audacious again.”
“And you like that?”
He smiled. “Yes.”
Kath leaned into him, reached her face up, and kissed him. “You won't mind not getting to Charon?”
“After that?”
“Klio?” Kath requested the AI's attention. “Klio—we want to go to Jupiter. There is a flux tube between Io and Jupiter. Quicksilver might be able to live in it. I need to talk to him.”
Silence.
“Can your ship live well there? At Jupiter?”
Klio again. “Yes, we can. We thought you'd never ask.”
Kath settled into Charter's arms. “I'm sorry.”
Klio and Charter answered at once. “I know.”
Music often plays a role in Louise Marley's fiction, which is no surprise given that she has a Master of Music degree and has spent over two decades working as a professional singer, appearing with the Seattle Opera and touring internationally. The two taboo topics one should never mention at a dinner party—religion and politics—often figure strongly in her work as well. But it is that soft, sweet touch she employs when crafting her characters that makes all her fiction so compelling.
Frederica Daniels lay on the elaborately appointed hospital bed as if frozen. Her skin was the dull white of the olive blossoms brushing the window above her head. Her eyes did not so much as flicker beneath their shadowed lids. Her brown hair hung in limp strands beneath the cap of sensors, almost indistinguishable from the wires that fell over her shoulders and looped off to the emitter array. Kristian looked down at her, surprised by a feeling of sharp disappointment.
She had been romanticized by the media discussions and net reports. Kristian had expected her to look like the formal, touched-up sort of photos the reporters used, mostly showing her at the piano, her plump figure draped in evening attire. Gazing at her now, Kristian couldn't help thinking how distressingly plain she was. She had a high, rather lumpy forehead, almost nonexistent eyebrows, a thick nose, thin lips. She had been twenty-four at the time of Insertion. She was twenty-five now. Young, brilliant, much-mourned scholar. The lost girl.
The technician stepped behind the emitter array and did something with the dials. Kristian bent closer to the bed, searching for some sign of life. Even her chest barely seemed to move, only an infinitesimal rise and fall as she breathed. Where are you, Frederica?
The technician, a physician's assistant from the Insertion Clinic in Chicago, grimaced at him across the jumble of machinery. “She won't know you're there, I'm afraid. There's been nothing since the beginning. We lost her the very first day.”
“How did you know?”
The PA nodded to the bank of machinery filling one entire wall. The Mediterranean sun glinted on its dials and silver flatscreens. “You know how the Insertion process works?”
“Brain-wave mapping, as I understand it. Codify the consciousness.”
“Right. And copy it into the temporal coordinates you want. Those screens are blank because hers disappeared.”
“What disappeared?”
“Her consciousness. The chart of her brain waves. The doctors have tried everything, but they can't find it. Can't get it back.”
Kristian stared down at the unprepossessing form of Frederica Daniels. Other than the shallow rise and fall of her bosom, she lay utterly, absolutely still upon the hospital bed. Tubes ran from her nose, from her mouth, from the veins in her hands.
The PA went on talking, outlining the prep process, but Kristian tuned him out. He had reviewed it exhaustively on the plane to Pisa.
It could have been himself lying there on the bed. The approval of Frederica Daniels's application to be Inserted meant the denial of Kristian's. Too expensive, the Insertion Clinic said, to fund two musicologists. Kristian's credentials were solid, but Frederica's were blazingly impressive, even without her family connections. She had earned her bachelor's at eighteen, her master's at twenty. Her DMA was pending the very research that had placed her on this bed.
Frederica Daniels had been destined for high scholarship from childhood. She was the only child in a family that boasted more than one well-known musician and academic. Her elite schools had groomed her in every way to become the most impressive Brahms scholar of several generations.
Kristian Nordberg's background could hardly have been more different from Frederica's. Born to working-class parents who would never understand his obsession with a composer dead more than two hundred years, Kristian had worked and struggled his way through school. Frederica and Kristian had both set their sights on the answer to one small question of performance practice, but in the end, it was to have been Frederica who would solve the puzzle. Her dissertation was to have preceded his own, making his work redundant. He had been struggling with acceptance of that when word came that things had gone awry with her Insertion.
It wasn't that the Insertion Clinic cared about what Brahms meant by p dolce, of course. What they cared about was adding another scholar's research to their already impressive list. Having an obscure musicological puzzle solved increased their credibility with their donors, many of whom were art patrons as well as supporters of sc
ientific innovation. But Kristian and Frederica, and performers and musicologists over the centuries, cared passionately about this small, obscure marking in Brahms's work. And Kristian understood why Frederica had won, and he had lost. He had read her master's thesis, but more importantly, he knew her background. He understood her connections.
But now, shockingly, everything had changed. Frederica lay like a corpse on the bed, and the Insertion clinicians had run out of ways to try to recover her. They had no option left but to call in Kristian, the runner-up, the second choice. This failure of Insertion had made headlines around the world in academic and in scientific circles. This failure had stopped their work dead. Kristian was their last hope of finding out what had gone wrong, and he had jumped at the chance.
Kristian kept his eyes closed for a long moment, fighting the vertiginous feeling that came with Insertion. He reminded himself, as he struggled against nausea, that it wasn't physical. Still, he felt rocked by it, as if he were upside down.
He gathered his resolve, swallowed, and opened his eyes.
He found himself standing in a dirt lane, just outside a rock-walled garden. A scrolled cast-iron gate stood slightly open. Climbing roses spilled over the crooked wall and twined through the gate's pattern. Everything seemed to glow with abnormally yellow sunshine, as if some sort of filter had been removed. The air looked so clean he could imagine it tingling in his lungs.
It's all real, he reminded himself. It's completely real. I'm the only thing that's not.
He was, of course, only an observer. He had been told it would be like watching television, seeing and hearing, but unable to touch, taste, or smell. In the actual event, Kristian found the analogy a poor one. The sensation of being present in 1861 Castagno, in the hills of Tuscany, was so vivid that he thought if he were to pinch himself, it would hurt. Ahead he saw the old stone houses, a dozen of them, named for the months of the year, crowding together over narrow cobbled streets. To his left, the lane fell away steeply down the hill to the valley. Three days before, in his own time, he had driven through that valley, past factories and gardens and shops. Now he saw nothing but open ground, scattered olive trees, the twisted balletic forms of grapevines.