by Nigel Foster
Tatia was waiting in the airlock.
The creaking became more intense. A ripple began in the centre, radiating out, making tethered bodies bump into each other. Then the shaking began. Food and excretion tubes were pulled out, spewing their contents into the atmosphere.
Not one body reacted. Only that blank-eyed stare to nowhere.
The artefact took three hours to die. Tatia and Marc said they needed to rest.
Kara watched from the control room the entire time, remembering how her sister had promised to come back and never did. Remembering the life they’d planned together. Wondering if she could ever forgive the man she loved.
At the end, when only a vast oblong cloud of dust remained, Kara sighed, wiped her eyes, asked Ishmael to wake her when the oblong ring fell apart and went to bed. She left Tatia and Marc in the control room, taking a last look at the extinction of an alien race before netherspace surrounded them.
“You’ll be leaving now,” Tatia said.
“I’ll see you back to Earth.”
“Oh, I think Kara and me can cope. And you’ve got your quest.”
“Two or three days won’t matter.” He wanted her so much it hurt.
“Remember that trip back from Cancri?”
“Only too well. Why?”
Marc felt unbearably awkward. “Oh, nothing. Are you and Kara... er...”
“Taking up where we left off? She’s in love with someone. I can tell.” She looked at him innocently. “Why?”
“Just wondered... none of my business,” he stumbled.
“You’re right. It’s not.” Tatia stood up. “Whereas you, Marc, are very much mine,” She held out her hand. “Come along. I know that sex and death are linked but this is only because I want to.”
Not so very much later Tatia raised herself on one elbow and smiled down at him. “Bet you’re sorry you said no before.”
“It was complicated. Note that I didn’t this time.”
Tatia lay down, her head on his chest. “It took so much persuading...”
“Tell the truth,” he admitted, “I was worried... maybe not in that phase any more...”
Tatia poked him. “I’m a phase?”
“I mean this netherspace thing...”
“You were wrong,” she said firmly. “I understand you have to go. But we’ll have a few days. And when your quest is done, you’ll come back to me.”
Seconds later they heard Kara’s voice on the PA.
“It’s begun,” she said. “Come see.”
The two artefacts next to the destroyed one had begun to sway irregularly, a pattern that quickly spread. Fifty oblongs, each five hundred metres tall, bouncing around like toy ducks in the bath. A distant one was the first to go, twisting out of orbit then spiralling down as opposing forces began to break it apart.
“Shall we go home?” Kara asked.
The other two nodded. Seen one huge tombstone die, seen them all. All three humans felt a little flat. Can something extraordinary, something far beyond the imagination of most people, end with both a bang and a whimper?
“What exactly did you do to them?” Kara asked Tatia, meaning the jellyfish aliens.
“I made them feel bad about themselves.”
An understatement. For a few seconds Tatia had poured all her anger, disgust, hatred, terror, contempt into a highly telepathic creature with no prior knowledge of negative emotions. It went insane. A self-loathing madness that infected the entire race within seconds. Harmony vanished. They began to die.
“How did you know?” Marc asked.
Tatia shrugged. “Because I was bred to it.” She wondered if there’d be guilt for helping destroy an alien race. Probably not. Them or us.
“Too bad you didn’t have an AI. It would have made life easier.”
“But I did! Although it’s gone quiet since you guys arrived.” She told them how important the AI had been for her, not least replaying her favourite vids.
> Check her out, Kara told Ishmael.
< Done already, no AI. But there is something. Or the remains. Very small chip. It’s being absorbed by her body. I think it was maybe designed to boost her thoughts, emotions. It was in the middle of her basal ganglia.
> Oh, wow.
< No need for sarcasm. It’s the brain’s comms centre. And because of where it was, no record of surgery, that chip’s been there since she was a kid.
> Could it also have acted like an AI?
< I have no idea. It’s gone. Whatever it was, not one of us. But it might have boosted her psi ability.
Kara decided that Tatia was one extraordinary woman. And maybe best she believed that an AI had kept her sane.
> We’ll let the auto-doc have a look. After, tell her the AI blew, result of frequent alien contact. Leave a little scar where the AI was cut out.
< You’re all heart.
> She’s happy. Someone else can spoil it.
“Look!” Tatia gasped.
The first construct disintegrated as it reached the planet’s atmosphere. Vast chunks glowing red thundered towards the surface.
Each segment hit with the power of a small atomic bomb. The sea roared and boiled. Gouts of water and steam reached angrily for the sky. There were forty-nine more constructs about to follow.
< Think we better leave. There’s a chance the planet will destabilise.
> What happens then?
< We all get wet.
> That’s not funny. We just committed genocide.
< You just saved the human race and countless others. Get over yourself.
They decided to move away but remain in normal space. The end came twenty-four hours later, after the planet had been wracked by vast tsunamis and a whirlpool had appeared that covered nearly a quarter of the globe.
The planet began to bulge at one side.
Became pear-like, the waist narrowing by the second and at the narrow end a solid, ice-covered sphere no more than five hundred klicks across.
Three humans stared at the main vid screen in horrified fascination as the sphere began to glow. The mantle no longer cooled by water temperature or reinforced by the oceans’ weight. Molten iron spouted from newly formed cracks in the surface. The core was now fully detached from the ocean, the latter rapidly reforming into the shape of a thunder cloud.
“I did that,” Tatia whispered.
“We all did,” Marc tried to reassure her.
“Crap!” Kara said fiercely. “They did it to themselves. Sure as hell they won’t do it again. We’ve seen enough. Let’s go home.”
It took three days to get back to Earth space. Marc left them when the moon could be seen in normal space.
“I have to,” he said to Tatia, almost wishing she’d try to persuade him to stay. He wouldn’t, but nice to be asked.
“I know. Hope you find it.” No point in asking him not to go. He was a pilgrim on a mission.
“I promised Kara I’d come back and tell her. I will for you too.”
She thought how absurd the physics of netherspace meant he’d always be a step from her, no matter how far he travelled. She and Kara watched from the control room as he stepped into netherspace. The last they saw was Marc riding an electric blue before questing tentacles found him.
Kara hadn’t yet told Tatia about Greenaway... about being in love with Tatia’s father. Partly she wanted to wait until sure of him. Partly she was in no mood for heart-to-heart conversations. She wanted to be by herself, curled up in her bunk. Thinking about Greenaway. Deciding that maybe her life needed to change.
< We’re receiving transmissions from a Wild ship.
> And?
< Things have quietened down. No more AIs going crazy.
> Any news on Greenaway?
< There was a contract on him. He went underground.
Ishmael wondered if now was a good time to tell Kara she was pregnant with Greenaway’s child. And then wondered why he hadn’t aborted the foetus without Kara knowing.
B
ecause I care? Because I’m a me?
14
“Whatever happened to that lock of my hair?” Tatia asked, when the Thrown was a day out from Earth. They were in the control room, watching a blue and white heaven grow large on the screen.
“Ishmael?”
< Marc took it with him. But we still have the box.
“Guess that means he’s coming back to you,” Kara said. So maybe the wooden shard had made it possible for Marc to return. Why hadn’t he admitted it? Because he hadn’t known – or didn’t want the closeness that implied? Because if he was involved with Kara, he might not become so with Tatia, and that could mean... she gave up. Play with all the possibilities, the what ifs and maybes could send a person, an alien or an AI insane.
“Oh, he is,” Tatia said, then asked the question Kara dreaded. “Were you going to tell me about you and Dad?”
Dad, not “my father”. Dad, assuming a closeness that hadn’t existed since Tatia was an infant unsteady on her feet.
“Marc told you?”
“I said you were in love, Marc guessed who with,” Tatia said. “And it made sense. In a weird sort of way. But I wasn’t sure, until now.” And smiled a gotcha smile of curiosity and hurt.
“Pretty good,” Kara said, “from someone who stole my beloved.”
Tatia managed to stifle a laugh. “I mean, I could be deeply traumatised.”
“Sobbing in your cabin... look, I don’t know. Mainly because I don’t know about Anson and me. It only happened the day before we left. I’ve no idea how...”
Tatia shook her head. “You do know how you feel. And suspect how he does. Because he said something and, ruthless bastard as he is, wouldn’t unless he meant it. So why not tell me? Because we once fucked?”
“Mind your tongue,” Kara said severely. “You might end up my daughter.”
And after they’d both managed to stop laughing – part release from the past weeks of tension, so peaking hysterical, it was either that or the mother of all screaming rows, things said that can never be taken back – they went to make tea.
“Seriously?” Tatia asked, doing her thing of strong tea tamed by hot water because of no fresh milk and there were times when a slice of lemon was so wrong.
“Because I’m terrified there won’t be an us with Anson,” Kara heard herself say, and felt tears gathering, which was so out of character as to alarm both of them.
“You want to tell me?” Tatia asked. “But blow by blow, whatever...”
So Kara did, the story sounding unreal to her own ears as she spoke.
But not unreal to Tatia. “Makes sense,” she said thoughtfully. “You’re both soldiers. So you understand each other. He’s a good-looking guy. And you, well...”
“Would it worry you?”
Tatia smiled. “That my one-time...”
“... short-time,” Kara shot.
“... girlfriend is involved with the father I hadn’t seen in thirty years?” She fetched a bottle of dark rum, added a slurp to two cups of lukewarm black tea. “Okay, it isn’t any weirder than wiping out an entire alien race. If there was a real daddy–daughter vibe, maybe I’d be confused. But there isn’t, and however Anson and I learn to relate, it’ll never be cosy domestic. So, here’s my best friend and sometime – okay, one night stand – lover in love with my so long absent father who I don’t know... who’s ruthless as fuck... but hey, is all the family I got. So you go for it, girl. Which you will anyway. I’m okay.” She paused, then, “He know about us?”
Kara shrugged. “Possibly. Anson seems to know most of what happened on that SUT. Thing is, no serious relationship since your mother died.”
“Was murdered,” Tatia said quietly. “Have you ever had a serious one?”
Kara didn’t need to think twice. “Nothing that lasted.”
“So you were sort of hoping a man would teach you how?”
She thought of Bel Drago. “Not necessarily a man...”
“Oh, come on! That little-me girlie role is only a pose.”
“I don’t even know if he’s still alive!”
“The Wild said he’d gone underground...”
“Because there’s a fucking contract on him!”
“He’ll survive, love. It’s in the genes.”
And that was it. No point in talking about Marc because, as Tatia said, every guy who goes exploring in different dimensions promises to come home. So Tatia would work on the assumption that he might because he promised and took the lock of her hair. But she wouldn’t wait forever.
“So you love him,” Kara said.
“He saved my life. Seems only fair.”
Kara looked at Tatia for a long few seconds. “You and Marc are the closest friends I ever had. I don’t want to lose that. I don’t want to lose you.”
“You won’t,” Tatia said simply. “Whatever happens.” And then, because it had been worrying her, “why did they come and look at us? The Originators, I mean.”
Kara thought back to the strangeness of the Originator spaceships passing the Thrown like an ancient sailing fleet paying tribute to their monarch.
“Curiosity?” Kara tried.
“They’re governed by whatever pre-cog plan they have, what they see,” Tatia said. “They don’t do curiosity.”
“What do you think?”
“That maybe it’s not over? That procession was the start of something else?”
“Pretty soon humans will take over what’s left of that precog empire,” Kara said. “Too good a business opportunity. Whatever those Originators are – and original thought doesn’t figure highly with them, you said – masters of the universe they’re not. Forget them, Tatia. They’re done.”
< You’re sure?
> Shut up. She needs the reassurance. So do I.
Not least because she’d come to suspect that Tatia had been bred for her role. It wasn’t mere chance. Just as Kara had been bred for hers and probably Marc for his. Greenaway too, maybe Cleo and the Exchange.
* * *
They landed at Marc’s house on the Severn at 1100 hours on a sunshiny day, three weeks and four days since Kara had left from Scotland. A day when anything good can happen, when the grey maybe or watery if only are hidden by let’s do it or simply this is just so nice.
Judging by intercepted radio and TV news, things were quietening down. San Diego and Houston had declared peace. The proposed memorial to the Houston Posse, still lost in the Mojave Desert, was changed to one commemorating Houston’s twinning with San D. There were already eighteen similar memorials, plus one to an area of the Scottish Wild – a long-abandoned golf course – left over from pre-alien days. Houston does like to twin, not always too fussy who with.
Artificial intelligences throughout Earth and Earth-colonised space were sheepishly announcing it had been the AI equivalent of something they’d eaten... or sending happy e-postcards from throughout the Galaxy to say they’d be home soon.
The famous 7 building in Berlin reassembled itself, this time using no extra material. Berliners stood and cheered.
Not covered by the newscasts but equally significant:
Andrea Mastover changed her mind and left the New Dawn euthanasia clinic to return home, divorce her husband and disinherit her kids, cheered on by a contrite personal AI. Too late – the AI was part-traded for a later model and ended up operating a sewage farm in Guildford. Andrea Mastover would remember – with a degree of satisfaction – her old AI several times a day.
“You just want to see your truck,” Tatia said, as the Thrown settled gently on a scorched river bank. “What the hell?”
“Some party,” Kara said. Bots swarmed all over the house and garden making repairs. There’d been a fight. She knew why. Anson Greenaway had gone to the place he felt safest, where he’d fallen in love. Kara hoped he’d taken a few of the assassins with him. She knew he had. There was a nudging at her leg and she looked down to see a Cedric holding a box of tissues.
“I never saw you cr
y,” Tatia said. “Truth, I didn’t know you could.”
Kara smiled through her tears. “I just feel so damn emotional.”
“You don’t know he’s dead. Or that he was even here. And your truck seems to be okay.”
“Not a truck,” Kara said, teary eyes fixed on the screen. Too bad the Thrown didn’t have a horn, a siren, to announce its arrival. So if anyone, was say, sleeping, they’d wake up and...
< You mean like this?
The sudden pealing of bells was loud enough to penetrate the Thrown’s skin.
> Maybe something a little more military?
< Bells is all there is.
The Thrown settled gently on the scorched Earth.
Two women stood in the open airlock for a moment, comforted by the scent of an English country morning.
Kara started as a tall, familiar figure came out of the house and limped towards them.
“Don’t look now...” Tatia said softly. She held back as Kara walked to meet Anson Greenaway, then decided she also had a claim and followed.
Kara stopped a few feet away and looked carefully at Anson. The right side of his face was burned. He wore black jeans a fraction too small, as were the shirt and pullover, both black, clothes raided from Marc’s wardrobe. He looked tired and a little nervous.
“You came back,” he said, voice almost breaking. “Here.”
Kara fought back the tears – again! Get a fucking grip, girl! – “I was worried about my Mercedes.”
Anson nodded. “It wasn’t damaged by the fighting. My jitney’s gone.”
“I heard about the contract. Thought you might be dead. Tatia said...”
“I had help.”
She nodded. “Good. Your AI working okay?”
His turn to nod.
> Download everything since we left Scotland.
< Already done.
“So what the hell happened?” Kara asked.
“I can download... you just did...”
“Prefer to hear you tell it.” Prefer to watch you talk. Hold you.
They stared at each other, desperate to be like normal folks, neither sure how.
“Say what,” Tatia said loudly. “I am desperate for tea with milk. Or coffee, not fussed. With milk. I’m going to turn away for three minutes, which is time to bloody kiss each other. And then we’ll all be sensible, okay?”