by Peter Watts
“They’re killing us.”
“You’re just going to have to trust me on this. Or”—Moore cocked his head, evidently amused—“we could leave you behind to hash it out with them personally.”
“Leave me—?”
“We’re getting out of here. Why do you think they’re warming up the engine?”
Someone had rolled a giant soccer ball into the compound. A dozen fallen monks twitched wide-eyed and tetanic around a geodesic sphere of interlocking padded pentagons, maybe four meters across at the equator. A door-size polygon bent back from that surface like a snapped fingernail.
Some kind of escape pod. No obvious means of propulsion. No onboard propulsion, anyway; but rising high above the walls of the enclosure, the funnel spun and roared like an angry jet engine. Brüks craned his neck in search of the top of the thing, and swallowed, and—
And looked again. Something was scratching an arc across the sky.
“Get in,” Moore said at his elbow. “We don’t have much time.”
Of course they know. They’ve got satellites, they’ve got microdrones, they can look right past these walls and see what we’re doing and just blow it all to shit...
“Missile...,” he croaked.
The sky shattered where he was pointing.
The contrail just stopped high overhead, its descending arc amputated halfway to the jet stream; a new sun bloomed at its terminus, a blinding pinpoint, impossibly small and impossibly bright. Brüks wasn’t sure what he really saw in the flash-blinded split second that followed. A great flickering hole opening in the morning sky, a massive piece of that dome peeled back as though God Itself had popped the lid off Its terrarium. The sky crinkled: wisps of high-flying cirrus cracking into myriad shards; expanses of deep and endless blue collapsing into sharp-edged facets; half of heaven folded into lunatic origami. The sky imploded and left another sky behind, serene and unscarred.
A thunderclap split Brüks’s skull like an ice pick. The force of it lifted him off his feet, dangled him for an endless moment before dropping him back onto the grass. Something pushed him from behind. He turned; Moore’s mouth was moving, but the only sound Brüks could hear was a high-pitched ringing that filled the world. Past Moore’s shoulder, above the ramparts of the monastery, dark smoldering wreckage fell from the sky like the charred bones of some giant stick man. Its empty skin fled sideways across the sky in ragged pieces, great streamers of tinsel drawn toward the shackled tornado. The vortex engine seemed to draw strength from the meal: it grew thicker, somehow. Faster. Darker.
Valerie’s invisible airship. He’d forgotten. A hundred thousand cubic meters of hard vacuum directly in the path of the incoming missile: broken on impact, sucking cascades of desert air into the void.
Moore pushed him toward the sphere. Brüks climbed unsteadily into darkness and the web of some monstrous spider. It was already full of victims, tangled half-seen silhouettes. All hung cocooned in a mesh of broad flat fibers stretching chaotically across the structure’s interior.
“Move.” A tiny, tinny voice growling through a chorus of tuning forks. Brüks grabbed a convenient band of webbing, gripped as tightly as the sparks in his hand would allow, pulled himself up. Something bumped the side of his head. He turned and recoiled at the face of one of Valerie’s zombies, upside-down, eyes jittering, hanging in the mesh like an entangled bat. Brüks yanked back his hand; the webbing stuck as though he were a gecko. He pulled free, clambered up and away from those frantic eyes, that lifeless face.
Another face, not so dead, hung in the gloom behind its bodyguard. Brüks—irises still clenched against the morning sun—couldn’t make out details. But he could feel it watching him, could feel the predator grin behind the eyes. He kept moving. Sticky bands embraced at his touch, peeled gently free as he pulled away.
“Any empty spot,” Moore said, climbing up in his wake. The ringing in Brüks’s ears was fading at last, as if somehow absorbed by this obscene womb and its litter of freaks and monsters. “Try to keep away from the walls; they’re padded, but it’s going to be a rough ride.”
The hatch swung into place like the last piece of a jigsaw, sealed them in and cut off the meager light filtering from outside; instantly the air grew dense and close, a small stagnant bubble at the bottom of the sea. Brüks swallowed. The darkness breathed around him with unseen mouths, a quiet claustrophobic chorus muffled by air heavy as cement.
Vision and ventilation returned within a breath of each other: a stale breeze across his cheek, a dim red glow from the padded facets of the wall itself. Bicamerals blocked the light on all sides: some spread-eagled, some balled up, a couple of pretzel silhouettes that spoke either of superhuman flexibility or broken bones. Maybe a dozen all told.
A dozen monks. A prehistoric psychopath with an entourage of brain-dead killing machines. Two baseline humans. All hanging together in a giant cobwebbed uterus, waiting for some unseen army to squash them flat.
All part of the plan.
Brüks tried to move, found that the webbing had tightened around him once he’d stopped climbing. He could wriggle like a hooked fish, bring his hand up far enough to scratch his nose. Beyond that he wasn’t going anywhere.
His eyes were adapting to the longwave, at least. A face overhead resolved into welcome familiarity: “Lianna? Lianna, are you...”
Only her body was here. Its fingers tapped the side of its head with the telltale rhythm of someone tuned to a more distant reality.
“It’s okay.” Moore spoke quietly from somewhere nearby. “She’s talking to our ride.”
“This is it? Twenty people?” He gulped air, still strangely stale for all the efforts of the local life-support system.
“It’s enough.”
Brüks could barely catch his breath. The whole compartment hissed with the sound of forced ventilation, air washed across his face and still he couldn’t seem to fill his lungs.
He fought rising panic. “I think—there’s something wrong with the air conditioner...”
“The air’s fine. Relax.”
“No, it—”
Something kicked them, hard in the side. Suddenly up was sideways; suddenly sideways was down. Blood rushed to Brüks’s head. A giant stood on his chest. The air, already unbearably close, got closer: the stench of rotten eggs flooded Brüks’s sinuses like a tsunami.
Jesus Christ, he thought. He couldn’t imagine a worse time or place for a fart. Under other circumstances it might have been funny. Now it only made him gag, stole whatever meager oxygen had remained.
“Here we go,” Moore murmured from behind. From below. From overhead.
He sounded almost sleepy.
The web slewed. Bodies jerked in unison one way, slung like pendulums back the other, flipped around some arbitrary unknowable center of gravity. They seemed to be accelerating in ten directions at once. Niagara roared in Brüks’s head.
“Can’t—breathe...”
“You’re not supposed to. Go with it.”
“What—”
“Isoflurane. Hydrogen sulfide.”
Whirling static engulfed the world from the outside in. Twenty bodies—barely visible through the maelstrom—threw themselves as one toward some unremarkable point on the far side of the compartment. They strained toward that point like iron filings drawn to a cyclotron, their elastic shackles strained almost to the breaking point.
So, Brüks mused as his vision failed. This is it. The final conscious experience.
Enjoy it while it lasts.
The essential wickedness of this approach is perhaps best exemplified by the so-called Moksha Mind engineered by the Eastern Dharmic Alliance. Their attempts to “modernize” their faith—through the embrace of technology that has been (rightly) banned in the West—resulted in a literally soul-destroying hive that has plunged millions into what we can only assume to be a state of deep catatonia. (The fact that this is exactly what the Dharmic faiths have aspired to for millennia does not render their fate any les
s tragic.) The misguided use of brain interface technology to “commune” with the minds of such alien creatures as cats and octopi—a practice by no means limited to the East—has also resulted in untold psychological damage.
At the opposite extreme, in the face of modern challenges we may find ourselves tempted to simply turn our backs on the wider world. Such a retreat would not only go against the Scriptural admonition to “go and make disciples of all nations,” but also risks dire consequences in its own right. The Redeemer gyland offers a stark case in point. It has been almost a year since the alliance between the Southern and Central Baptists broke down, and three months since we have been able to establish contact with anyone from either side of that conflict. (It is no longer practical to board the gyland directly—any craft approaching within two kilometers is fired upon—but remote surveillance has yielded no evidence of human activity since March 28. The UN believes that the weapons fire is automated, and has declared Redeemer off-limits until those defenses exhaust their ammunition.)
—An Enemy Within: The Bicameral Threat to
Institutional Religion in the Twenty-First Century
(An Internal Report to the Holy See by
the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, 2093)
HE AWOKE TO screams and gray blurry light, a kick in the side, a bolt of pain spiking up his left leg like an electric javelin. He cried out but his voice was lost in some greater cacophony: the sound of torquing metal, vast alloy bones shearing across unaccustomed stress lines. Gravity was all wrong. He was on his back but it tugged him sideways, pulled him feetfirst through some translucent rubbery amnion that enveloped his body. Vague shapes loomed and shifted beyond. Down near the subsonic the world groaned like a humpback whale, wounded, spiraling toward a distant seabed. Alarms shrieked on higher frequencies.
I’m in a body bag, he thought, panicking. They think I’m dead...
Maybe I am...
The pain settled excruciatingly in his ankle. Brüks brought up his hands; weak elastic forces resisted the motion. His veins and arteries were all on the outside, clinging to his skin. No, not arteries. Myoelectric tensors—
The world jerked down and sideways. Exhausted metal fell silent; the alarm seemed to bleat all the louder in the absence of competition. Something stabbed Brüks through the body bag, just below the knee. The pain vanished.
A blurry shadow leaned down. “Easy, soldier. I’ve got you.”
Moore.
The membrane split like an opening eye. The Colonel stood over him, leaning thirty degrees off true in a world sliding downhill. The world itself was tiny, a cylindrical bubble five meters across and maybe half that high, floor and walls and roof crazily askew. Something ran through its center like a wire-frame spinal cord (Access ladder, Brüks realized dimly: this world had an attic, a basement). Towers of plastic cubes, a meter on a side—some white, some gunmetal, some darkly transparent (the blurry things inside glistened like internal organs)—loomed on all sides like standing stones, geckoed one to another. A few had come loose and settled in an uneven pile at the downhill end of the chamber. Gravity urged Brüks to join them there; if his bag hadn’t been fastened to its pallet he would have slid right off the end.
Moore reached out and touched some control past Brüks’s line of sight; the alarms fell mercifully silent. “How you holding up?” the soldier asked.
“I’m—” Brüks shook his head, tried to clear it. “What’s happening?”
“Spoke must have torqued.” Moore reached down/across and peeled something off Brüks’s head: a second membranous scalp, a skullcap studded with a grid of tiny nubs. “Loose cube got you. Your ankle’s broken. Nothing we can’t fix once we get you out of here.”
There was grass on the walls—meter-wide strips of blue-green grass running from floor to ceiling, alternating with the pipes and grills and concave service panels that disfigured the rest of the bulkhead. (Amped phycocyanin, he remembered from somewhere.) Smart paint glowed serenely from any surface that wasn’t given over to photosynthesis. His pallet folded down from an indentation in the wall; a little stack of time-series graphs flickered there, reporting on the state of his insides.
“We’re in orbit,” he realized.
Moore nodded.
“We’re—they hit us—”
Moore smiled faintly. “Who, exactly?”
“We were under attack...”
“That was a while ago. On the ground.”
“Then—” Brüks swallowed. His ears popped. He’d never been to space before, but he recognized the layout: off-the-shelf hab module, two levels, common as dead satellites from LEO to geosync. You’d sling them around a centrifugal hub to fake gravity. Which would normally be vectored perpendicular to the deck, not—
He tried to keep his voice steady. “What’s going on?”
“Meteorite strike, maybe. Bad structural component.” Moore shrugged. “Alien abduction, for all I know. Anything’s possible when you don’t have any hard intel to go on.”
“You don’t—”
“I’m as blind as you are right now, Dr. Brüks. No ConSensus, no intercom. The line must’ve broken when the spoke torqued. I’ll be able to reconnect as soon as someone boosts the signal on the upstream node, but I imagine they have more important things on their minds right now.” He laid a hand on Brüks’s shoulder. “Relax, Doctor. Help is on the way. Can’t you feel it?”
“I—” Brüks hesitated, lifted one rubbery arm, let it drop down/sideways; it seemed to weigh a bit less than it had before.
“They’ve shut off the centrifuge,” Moore confirmed. “We’re spinning down smoothly. That suggests the rest of the ship is more or less okay.”
Brüks’s ears popped again. “We’re not. I think—I think there’s an air leak somewhere.”
“You noticed.”
“Shouldn’t we be patching it?”
“Have to find it first. Tell you what: I’ll move the cargo, you tear apart all these bulkheads.”
“But—”
“Or we can go downstairs, suit up, and get out of here.” He split Brüks’s cocoon open the rest of the way, helped steady him as he sat up. “Can you walk?”
Brüks swung his legs over the edge of the pallet, trying to ignore the subtle sense of pressure building behind his eyes. He gripped its edge to keep from staggering down the skewed deck. Myoelectric tattoos ran the length of his naked body like an impoverished exoskeleton. They traced the bones of his arms and legs, forked out along his toes and—(he flexed his right foot; the left hung insensate at the end of his ankle like a lump of clay)—over his heels and across his soles as well. Every movement met with rubber resistance. Every gesture was a small exercise.
Isometric muscle toner. They used them in Heaven sometimes, to keep the Ascended from curling into flabby fetuses. They still used them on those rare deep-space missions where the crew hadn’t been preseasoned with vampire genes, to help in the rearguard fight against the shortening of tendons, the wasting of muscles during hibernation.
Moore helped him stand, offered his body as a crutch. Brüks bounced uncertainly on his good foot, his arm around the other man’s shoulders. It wasn’t as bad as he’d feared. Pseudograv pulled everything in the wrong direction but it was weak, and getting weaker.
“What am I doing here?” Hop-step-lean. Soft crimson light pulsed from the hole in the ceiling where the ladder emerged, staining the adjacent bulkhead.
“Getting to safety.”
“No, I mean—” He gestured with his free arm, took in the containers stacked on all sides. “Why am I in the Hold?”
“The Hold’s aft. We’re using this for the overflow.”
The rails of the ladder were the color of rawhide and smooth as plastic; some elastic polymer that stayed taut along a range of lengths. Brüks reached out and grabbed a rung, looked up through the ceiling and discovered the source of that bloody glow: an emergency hatch sealed tight, flashing a warning to any who might be contemplatin
g passage: UNPRESSURIZED.
“My point is—” He looked through the hole in the floor: more metacubes down there, assemblages of smaller units stuck together. “Why did you wake me up in the basement?”
“You weren’t supposed to wake up at all; we had you in a therapeutic coma.” Brüks remembered being scalped: that skullcap, stippled with electrodes. “You’re lucky I happened to be in the neighborhood when things went south.”
“Are you saying you stored me with—”
The hab lurched, jumped in some sideways direction Brüks’s inner ears couldn’t parse; suddenly the ladder was slipping diagonally past, suddenly he was falling through the floor (the edge of the hatch bit his ribs in passing). A giant’s building blocks, stacked together, would have snapped his spine under Earth gravity; here they merely bent it and bounced him back into the air.
Moore caught him on the rebound: “Well, that’s one way of making the trip...”
Brüks thrashed in his arms, pushed him away: “Get the fuck off me!”
“Calm down, sol—”
“I’m not your fucking soldier!” Brüks tried to stand in the crowded space; his wounded ankle twisted under him as though attached by rubber bands. “I’m a parasitologist, I was down in the goddamn desert minding my own business. I didn’t ask to get caught up in your gang war, I didn’t ask to get my ass shot into fucking orbit, and I sure as shit didn’t ask to get stored down in your basement like a box of Christmas ornaments!”
Moore waited until he’d run out of words. “Are you finished?”
Brüks fumed and glared. Moore took his silence for a yes. “I apologize for the inconvenience,” he said drily. “Once things have calmed down a bit, maybe we can check in with your wife. Tell her you’re working late.”
Brüks closed his eyes. “I haven’t checked in with my wife,” he said through gritted teeth, “in years.” My real wife, anyway.
“Really.” Moore refused to take the hint. “Why not?”
“She’s in Heaven.”
“Huh.” Moore grunted. Then, more softly: “So’s mine.”