Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (Volume One) (76 page)

“No, Dr. Cather. I’m afraid there isn’t. But I do thank you for asking. I want you to understand, this isn’t the course of action – ”

“ – you’d have taken,” Peter said. “Yeah, we heard that part already.”

“You can’t be allowed to visit the surface, Dr. Connor. No one else can, not ever again.”

“Hey, that’s fine by me,” he replied, sounding more pissed off than frightened. “Put down that piece of shit, and we’ll be out of here jack-be-nimble, cross my fucking heart – ”

“ – and hope to die?” the synth finished, and then she smiled, the most broken, desperate smile I’ve ever seen. 

What happened next, well, I think it helps if you understand something more of Umachandra’s unique ph physiology. And something about the neurology of the
Loligo
and
Illex
squids that her parents had borrowed DNA from. The largest human axon is a paltry one-one thousandth of an inch in diameter. By comparison, a squid’s axons may be as large as one-tenth of an inch, a hundred times the diameter of a neural axon in
Homo sapiens sapiens
, gifting it with reaction times that make the swiftest humans seem hopelessly sluggish. I never learned just how large Umachandra Murdin’s axons were, but I
do
know it’s one of the traits that made her an ideal human/computer go-between, one of the things I’m sure ANSA was hoping they could duplicate in their own hybridization programs.

None of us even saw her move.

None of us saw anything but the tip of the 18-centimeter polyresin comms stylus jutting from Evelyn’s chest, embedded in the droid’s CPU. There was an instant of startled surprise on her face,
less
than an instant, before her features went slack, and her eyes rolled back, and the boltgun slipped from her hands and crashed to the floor. Evelyn went down on top of it, nothing left of her but a multi-billion-dollar heap of plastic and hydraulics and cooked circuitry.

I’ve just stopped and read back over the last few paragraphs. It reads like something from one of those ridiculous, lurid vaudweb melodramas. But I can’t think of another way to tell it. That’s what happened, no matter how it reads.

Umachandra stood and walked over to Evelyn’s – to her
what
? Zoraya would want me to write “body,” or “corpse,” wouldn’t she? Umachandra stood and walked over to Evelyn, to all that remained of her, and knelt beside her.

“Christ, lady,” Peter Connor gasped. “No wonder you’re such a good screw.”

“We should hurry,” Umachandra said, switching off the boltgun. “She may have sabotaged life support.”

“Or the umbilicus, or the docking array,” Joakim said grimly and stood up. “We go straight back to the
Montelius
and try to figure it out from there.”

“What about Baird and Osmolska?” I asked.

“What
about
them?” he replied. “You want to write eulogies, you can do it from the
Monty
.”

And then we made our way back across the catwalk above the two remaining shuttles, back to the lift, back to
Gilgamesh
’s transfer bay. Umachandra lugged the boltgun along in case any of the other synths had been programmed to try and stop us from leaving. But we met with no resistance, so either they hadn’t, or Evelyn had shut them all down before coming for us. Or Anastazja Osmolska had thought one synth assassin would be enough to get the job done.

The cats want to be fed, and this pen is almost out of ink, and my hand hurts too much to write anything more tonight.

III.

The Third (and Final) Pen

If I have miscalculated and this last ballpoint runs out of ink before I run out of story, I still have the stub of an old graphite pencil that should see me through to the end. I found it a few years ago in a shop on the rue de la Bûcherie, a shop that sells printed books and picture postcards, postal stamps and many other things which people no longer have any use for. There are letters pressed into the wood in gold ink: 77-2 USA HB 2. The second numeral two lies tipped over on its right side, perpendicular to the rest.

Old woman, you are rambling. 

You are forgetting that time may be even more precious than ink and graphite and paper (I may at least have enough of the latter).

Yesterday, at the Jardin des Plantes, I talked to a restless crowd of ten or so about Europa. Afterwards, after the walk home, Zoraya stopped me in the hallway as I was opening my front door. “There were men at your door,” she said, glancing nervously towards the lifts.

“Police?” I asked her, and she shook her head.

“
Non, je ne le pense pas
.”

“Then perhaps we shouldn’t worry about it.”

“
Qui était-ce,
the girl?” Zoraya asked, and I knew at once she meant Jedda Callahan.

“I already told you. Only a student,” I said, sticking with my lie that was not entirely a lie. “No one to worry about.”

“You are writing your story for her,” Zoraya said, not asking, already certain and merely observing.

“I’m cold, and my feet hurt,” I replied. “I need a hot cup of tea. I need to take my shoes off. Come by after dinner, and we’ll talk then.”

“I have a client tonight,” she said. Zoraya reads the Tarot and does a little astrology and palmistry. “That girl,
elle est morte.
Two days ago,” and then she turned, without another word, and left me standing there with my hand on the identipad, a laser determining if I was, in fact, me, and whether or not I should be permitted to enter my flat.

Inside, I locked the door behind me, went to the room with my writing desk, and flipped on the AllPress screen. “France, Paris,” I said. “12 January 2303,” and the screen flickered a few seconds. “Callahan, Jedda, deaths,” I added, and it flickered again. There was a headline, PRO-EARTH TERRORIST DEAD IN APPARENT SUICIDE. There wasn’t much more to it. Jedda Maye Callahan, an Australian national in the EurAsian Union on a student visa, was found dead by a close friend. She’d cut both her wrists with a paring knife. The article mentioned her brother’s arrest record and listed her “confirmed” ties to several illegal political parties and organizations. She was a student at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, third-year sociometrics and theology, just as she’d told me, and, pending closure of the investigation, her body would be returned to her family in Wellington.

So, Jedda, I’m no longer writing this for you.

Perhaps I am only writing it for me.

Perhaps I will be the next one found dead in a tub of cold crimson water.

We returned to the
Montelius
without incident. No one had tampered with either the umbilicus or the docking array. Joakim instructed the pilots to terminate ship-to-ship contact, and soon we were uncoupled and moving swiftly away from the abattoir that Anastazja Osmolska and the synth had made of
Gilgamesh
. We never set foot on her again. That honor would go to a clean-up crew from the next ship barreling down the starry lanes towards Gliese 876, a Sino-Korean star tube called
Galatea
. We ate a cold meal in silence, then spent a few hours pretending to rest before Peter and Umachandra prepped Shuttle One for launch. I attempted to hail
Gilgamesh
several times with no results from its pilots or anyone else. Umachandra tried to open a link between Magellan and Huxley, with no success. So Joakim decided that we would all go down to the surface of Piros together, even though Peter had asked repeatedly to stay behind. They argued about it while we suited up.

“If there’s trouble, the droids can send down another shuttle by remote,” Joakim told him.

“Hey, can we
please
try not to bullshit each other from here on? If there’s trouble, we’re screwed, one and fucking all, just exactly like Welles and the rest. It won’t matter if we’re on the ground or in the air.”

“I’d rather we were all together,” Joakim said for the fourth or fifth time. “We don’t know what we’re going to find down there. We don’t know who we’ll need – ”

“We’ll need fucking undertakers, dearie,” Peter sneered and, at that, Joakim gave him a look that silenced him for a while. I caught Umachandra slipping a rosary into a pocket of her EVA suit. She didn’t seem aware that I’d noticed, and I didn’t ask her about it, though she was almost the last person I’d have suspected of religion. But it made me remember hearing the old Beatles song playing in Jack Baird’s quarters –
I wake up to the sound of music, Mother Mary comforts me…

Into the light of the dark black night. 

Joakim led us from transfer on down to the shuttle bay, and the steel iris in the belly of the lander spiraled slowly open, metal grinding against metal, accepting the tiny el-plat we’d crowded onto. And I thought,
It’s swallowing us. It’s swallowing us alive.

And then we were inside, and the iris closed beneath us.

“You have the quarry coordinates?” Umachandra asked Peter, as nimble robotic fingers buckled her securely into the navigation sink, and the seat conformed to support her body.

“Yeah. Right in here,” he replied and tapped at his helmet, indicating one of the mnemonic implants in his skull. He called out the registration and grid refs Evelyn had given us, and the shuttle’s computers used them to extrapolate the site’s position, latitude and longitude, and to fix a suitable LZ. As the bay depressurized, Joakim settled into the pilot’s seat while Peter and I took our places in the rear of the cockpit. Three or four minutes later, the pilots opened the bay doors from the bridge, and Joakim fired the main engine. The little ship roared the way that lions must have roared.

“S-1 to
Montelius
, are we clear?” Joakim asked the microphone in his helmet.

“Affirmative,” one of the pilot synths replied.

“You have our course?”

“Affirmative.”

Joakim studied the primary flight display and eased the throttle forward a few millimeters, then flipped a toggle switch on the overhead instrument panel, and the engines powered down.

“How do you want this approach?” Umachandra asked him. “Should I go auto?”

“No,” he replied. “Keep us manual.”

I’m only guessing they said these things, these
particular
things, as this is the sort of conversation that routinely passed between shuttle pilots and navigation techs. I don’t remember the precise words. But I
do
remember activating the playing-card sized video monitor set into the back of Joakim’s seat and seeing Piros silhouetted red-orange against the void. I sat there, the somaform holding me safe like all the lovers I’d never have again, watching the largest moon of Cecrops growing larger as Umachandra calculated distances and times, inclination and insertion, and Joakim busied himself with the control panels. I tried to imagine Piros as it must have been half a billion years before, swathed in white clouds and blue waters, something living, instead of that barren, arid corpse of a world. 

“We’re all going to die down there,” Peter Connor said, and I ignored him, keeping my eyes on the monitor.

And we fell.

Zoraya did come by after dinner, and we sat watching the snow fall though the dark Paris night outside the window behind my writing desk. I sipped at a glass of brandy, and she flipped through the tattered, faded pages of a hardcopy book I have on Vincent Van Gogh. Sometimes she would stop and read a few lines aloud, or only the name of a painting, “At the Foot of the Mountains” or “Les Peiroulets Ravine” or “Cypresses.” She asked me if I liked Van Gogh, and I admitted that I’d never thought about him a great deal, one way or the other, that the book had been a gift from a friend in America. She asked me if I was familiar with Rudorfer, a Berlin artist who’d painted pictures of refugees from the early days of the cold, and I confessed that I wasn’t very familiar with him. I could call to mind only a single work,
The Dry Salvages
– a young girl at dawn, half nude, dressed in rags and standing on the frozen River Spree as the sun rises above the smoldering, ruined city.

We talked about other things, too.

“When you came home, it had been more than thirty-four years since you left,” she said, “and yet you’d aged less than sixteen years.”

“Yes,” I replied. “Bray fucked, wouldn’t you say?”

“No. I never use that word,” Zoraya said without looking up from the book of Van Gogh paintings; I needed a couple of seconds to puzzle out which word she meant and to realize that she was having what the AI sykes like to call “a moment of literal incoherence.”

“Which word?” I asked her, because it seemed impolite to make assumptions.

“‘Bray.’ No one talks like that anymore, Audrey. But it’s very nice when you do. It’s very…” and she paused, pretending to need to search for just the right word. “I think it’s very
quaint
.” And then she watched the snow and looked at more Van Gogh paintings.

“My parents were both long dead,” I said. “My sister, Maggie, was an old woman. My brother was dead. The whole stinking world had changed.”

“You were alone.”

“Yes, I was entirely alone.”

She turned another page, and then looked up at me and smiled, her pretty plastic face, her green-brown eyes built by other android hands, and for an instant I wanted to destroy her. I could see myself rising to strike her, to ruin her perfection, my living hands to tear the synthetic flesh from her vacuum-molded skeleton, to rip wires and hydraulic bladders and quartz thread. An animal lunging from the past towards the future, some Pleistocene goddess reincarnate, rising again to take vengeance on this thing that man had fashioned in its own image. In that moment, she was everything that had robbed me of my life: all technology, the
Montelius
, stasis, the agency, that still black pool waiting at the bottom of a Pirosan copper mine.

And then she was only Zoraya again, the girl who lived down the hall and kept me company, and I sipped at my brandy to drive back the guilt and shame and self-loathing.

I don’t fucking care that I’m wasting ink.
This
is my story, as much as the things that happened to us on Piros. And Jedda Callahan is dead now, and soon I think they will come for me, too. So I will say what I want in the time that I have left, just as I will say things I wish I could keep inside me.