Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (Volume One) (79 page)

So, I’ve been sitting at the bay window for the last couple of hours, feeling the sun against my face. Matthieu and Léon are curled up together on the writing desk in front of me. Sabine is missing the show, but then she seems ever lost in her own secret affairs. I believe there’s a lot of ink remaining in this pen. 

Zoraya left just a little while ago.

She came this morning with three grey-suited men from ANSA’s Office of Personnel and Interdepartmental Security. I wasn’t even surprised. I would have liked to have been, but I wasn’t. I might even have been relieved. One of the three men (they each told me their bland, interchangeable names, but I’ve forgotten them all) read the preliminary charges against me while Zoraya held my hand like the friend she’s spent so much time pretending to be.

“You’re an agent?” I asked her, when the men were finished telling me what I’d done wrong, and she said that she was, that she’d been watching me for a long time. I’m not sure I buy that. It would have been easy enough for them to have reprogrammed her after Jedda Callahan came to me, or at any other time. As late as last night maybe, the client that was more important than chess, the Belgian Gemini. It might have happened then. She wouldn’t know. I prefer to believe that this is what has happened, though it seems, somehow, like a selfish conceit.

“You’ll remain under house arrest,” she said, “until such time, if any, as the agency judges you to have ceased to pose a risk to project security. It won’t be so bad, Audrey. You can even keep your cats. And I’ll always be right down the hall. I’ve been assigned to guard you.”

I watched the three men for a few seconds, their faces hidden behind sleek masks of metal and plastic. One of them crossed and then uncrossed his legs, like he was nervous, or bored, or had to take a piss.

“You make a life sentence sound like a holiday,” I said, and Zoraya sighed and glanced down at her hands.

“It may not be life,” she said. “In two years, your case will be filed with the executive court – ”

“ – and,” I interrupted, “in thirty-one months I’ll be eligible for formal charges and a pre-trial hearing, which will be delayed, indefinitely, because the agency can’t risk this going to trial.”

“Audrey, we’ll make the best of it, together.”

“Bray,” I said, and one of the men rose, the one who’d been crossing and uncrossing his legs, and went to my writing desk. He separated the first page of the manuscript from the rest and held his right hand a few inches above the page, the photoset implanted in his palm scanning it from top to bottom.

“Aren’t they going to take it?” I asked.

“For the moment, we think it’s safer here, with you,” she replied. “You can even finish it, if you’d like. I’d be interested to know how it ends.”

“Haven’t they told you?”

“I know what I need to know. But that’s not the same as getting your impressions, in your words, the way you remember what happened.”

“What if I want to destroy it?” I asked, smiling, and Zoraya looked up at one of the two ANSA men, then back at me.

“We’ll have a record of the document. If you want to dispose of the original, you may. But I think it should go to the archives, don’t you? You’ve worked so hard on it.”

Before they left, one of the three men implanted a locater tab in my spine, somewhere between my third and fourth cervical vertebrae. There was hardly any pain at all, and only a few drops of blood.

So. I am writing this last part down for myself, or for no one at all. Maybe I’m writing it for Joakim. I might let you see it, Zoraya. Or whoever you are now. But I’m not writing it
for
you. I suspect you know “the facts” better than I could ever recall them. The eight months that we spent in orbit around Piros, waiting for the
Galatea
. The discovery that Anastazja Osmolska was still alive on
Gilgamesh
, though she’d managed to cut out her own tongue and amputate most of her fingers before blinding herself with a welding torch. You probably have at least limited access to the transcripts of our debriefings before the tube back to Sol. And whatever they finally decided should be recorded about Umachandra’s death during Martian quarantine, you know about that, too. And Peter Connor’s suicide one week later, after they scrubbed his memory. Joakim’s years in and out of psychiatric hospitals. The decision to cancel any further expeditions to Gliese 876 after the
Ivanov
made it back with only half its human crew alive. Etc. & etc.

You know
all
that shit, Zoraya. You don’t need “my impressions” of what did and didn’t happen.

As for the rumors of coded ftl signals emanating from Piros, and the twelve deaths on Ganymede-Kobayashi Station last January, and the stories the pro-earthers have started cuffing all the webzats about alien plagues and cover-ups and sightings of “dark bodies” out beyond the Kuiper Belt, again, you’ll know more about these things than me. And if you don’t, remember, it’s nothing the agency needs you to know.

I’ve written enough now. I don’t want to write any more, ever again.

I only want to sit here in the warm sun with my cats and hope that we get a full sky day.

And I only am escaped…

Addendum:

The Worm in My Mind’s Eye

Excerpt from the medical log of the starship Aegis (ANSA R18.0F65, slip 7, 987.EC1 fell), entered by Jaeng Li Chieu, Ph.D., Mission Specialist.

Entry Voice-Dated 5/2/23; transcript 87-234B12. 

Release Code 5; STATE BLUE EIGHT:

The noises at the door have stopped.

I was having trouble concentrating. The questions they kept asking me through the door. I don’t have answers for them, except the answers they have already found for themselves. The revelations of our solitude. Of the void and the fire speckling the void. I don’t have to repeat those things, do I? It isn’t necessary. The morphine and sendep drips don’t help, either. They dull the pain and dull my mind and I would use less, but can’t seem to override the 712s’ procedure command that regulates minimal dosage.

I’ll bet that Tyler could, but Tyler is only a noise at the door.

We’ve been busy with my left thigh for the last two hours. In the mirrors, I can see the red-grey weave of my flesh, a stark, living sculpture the bots are making of me. They are precise and neat, and this is no ruthless flaying. They don’t make mistakes. They know that it’s important that I see everything. They keep the incisions clean with suction thumbs while burning scalpel fingers uncover the deeper, more profane, most sacred secrets.

Almost all of the quadriceps femoris is now exposed. The bot I call Blink has just finished measuring the anterior surface of the rectus femoris. I know the measurements will be precise. I trust their calculations. Their reliability leaves me free to see past the facts, the facts that are necessary, but which also obscure the truth. I need to be free to see deeper, to find the fire the stars have buried inside me.

The fire that is burning us all alive.

It slipped in through my eyes, the glimmer of slithering furnaces, helium, hydrogen, photons racing effortlessly through pupil and lens and vitreous seas, sizzling down optic nerves to the hemispheres of my brain.

My left lateral circumflex fermoral vein, I think that’s what they’re pointing to now, something pulsing faintly in the red and white and black cavity of me. They know what I need to see, because I told them everything before we began. That was a long time ago. No one was at the door then. That was a long time ago. I’m trying to remember things from books and vids and anatomy lectures, from desiccated cadavers in antiseptic labs. The lcf passes behind both the sartorius and rectus femoris muscles, and there it divides into three branches, the ascending, transverse, and descending branches. The first branch crosses the hip to join a network with the terminal branches of the superior gluteal and deep iliac circumflex arteries. They’re showing all these things to me, not dead, not pickled, not preserved, but alive and fleeting, and somewhere in there I’ll see the fire.

Or I’ll see it somewhere else, instead.

There’s still a lot of me unopened.

The descending branch passes downward behind the rectus femoris with a single long branch descending all the way to the knee to join an aspect of the popliteal artery. 

I sound like a lecture. I am a lecture, Xiao Chen, and you’ll complain because I’m in English, instead of Mandarin.

You’ll never see the fire.

My skin is leaves now. My skin is pages. They are turning me, the robots, and I unfold for them like a book, or a flower, or clean white sheets.

I unfold for me.

Without the noises at the door, there’s only the wet sounds the 712s make as they work, and the mechanical sounds of the life support. The pumps that have taken over for my deflated, absent lungs, the gentle chug of the hemofiltration servos that do what my kidneys did before the droids cut them both out and placed them carefully in separate jars of 24-percent permafix solution. They are yours, Xiao Chen. The display above me hums very faintly, showing stats that seem increasingly unimportant, less vital – blood pressure 95/60, pulse 65 bpm, core body temp 35.8 Celsius – the irrelevant details of my failing biology floating in tangerine light.

The kidneys suspended in their jars, not quite weightless, the half-circle mask that was the right side of my face, thirty-two teeth, the fingernails from my left hand. Add these things and subtract anything that seems misleading. 

I don’t want to die. That’s not what this is about.

Blink is indicating the sartorius now, which I have asked them to try and remove intact. Xiao Chen, do you remember me telling you that the sartorius is the longest single muscle in the human body? Iliac spine to tibia, a span of tissue like roots pushing deep below the earth, squeezing past other roots and soil and flesh and bone.

I am coherent. Don’t let them tell you otherwise.

I know what’s happening to me.

I know why.

They would stop, even now, if I instructed them to stop. They would open the door for Tyler and Peeples and the rest, and the noise would stop. If I let them. But then there would be new noises, wouldn’t there? And those new noises would be worse. I could stop them with the touch on a single key on this pad. It would be that easy. Death is always easy. I almost hit that key twice yesterday, or hours ago, however long, I’m not certain. Is that the proximal gracilis, the adductor longus? I’m not sure. There’s sweat in my eyes. That’s why there are notes.

The lasers part my soft flesh with even less effort than my thoughts part this moment. One key. One key, Xiao Chen, and the crew would be in here, wondering how to stitch me back together again. Pretending the fire isn’t inside me, and inside them, as well.

I believe that they’ll never see it.

Or hear what it whispers in my sleep.

That I am only the beginning of alone, that alone stretches out before me, time’s sartorius muscle, and in a billion lifetimes I would never comprehend the smallest portion of alone. Alone is the black and the stars and the crackle of background radiation and the cold and scorch of vacuum. Alone is everywhere that we have been headed since feeble Devonian footsteps carried us away from murky oxbow heavens. Out here, we are alone. Completely. Absolutely. Stripped of illusions otherwise. No matter how much we talk, or what precautions have been taken, alone out here is God. The fire in me won’t let me do that monkey trick and forget it, not again, not ever again.

We are alone.

In pain. In fear. In the space between stars. In the bright light of a surgical bay. In death.

At the start, and at the end, we are alone.

They have unveiled me for alone. I lie here, honest, baring secrets and trying to find the fire, organs and tissue and memories, my past and future written in the blue-white-red-grey convolutions of my large intestine. 

All I can smell is blood, and the burning pork odor the lasers make as they work. The silver needles and the anesthetic making me much, much more like stone than meat. Already? Wasn’t there an injection – 

Blink is probing my left gluteus medius, and the one I call Yu Jie, because the palms of its three hands are light green, is measuring something. I’m not sure what. Stainless steel slips beneath fibers that extend from the ilium to the femur, and now Yu Jie is pulling back the tensor fasciae latae so that Blink can get a better look. So that I can also get a better look.

Before it started, I asked Blink what it thought about going home, and it didn’t understand my question.

I suspect that’s what has kept the droids safe from the fire. Questions that they don’t understand, concepts mercifully beyond their programming.

If Tyler ever understood the question, he’d shut down life support and blow the hull, leave us drifting dead in the abyss, and no one would ever find us and I wouldn’t have to explain to them about alone. That’s a sort of bargain. Alone would agree to that, I am certain. A sacrifice, because it knows that it’ll win anyway, in the end. Everyone comes here, eventually. You don’t have to have a rocket. You don’t have to be in the employ of the Allied National Space Agency or score so high on the standard that no one wants to talk to you because they know there’s no room in there for a soul, just numbers and facts and consequence. Everyone comes here.

So alone is patient. 

And willing to make deals.

(END slip 7, 987.EC1 fell, mark and file)

(7code21-7)

(KN90*2MA)

(mark)

The Dry Salvages

More often than not, I go away from a story for many years. I write it and set it aside and never read it after publication. Sometimes, I go back and find I no longer love the story, that I can hardly stand the sight of it. That’s usually the way this process plays out. But on other very rare and wonderful occasions, I come back to a story after years of estrangement and discover I’m still pleased with what I’ve done. That’s exactly what happened with
The Dry Salvages
. And, as is the way of sf, we know much more
now
than I could have known
then
about Gliese 876 and the bodies that spin about it. Still, I’ve resisted the urge to update the story to include more recent discoveries.