“I don’t . . .” I murmured, finally giving voice to thought. “I don’t want to die.”
“You will not die here,” the woman said. “Stay awake. You will not die here.”
My breath rattled. I was no longer aware of any pain. “What . . . did she do?” I said.
The woman took my hand between the two of her hers, rubbing it vigorously until I felt pain again. I hissed.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I haven’t decided. But you . . . you will live.”
And she pressed her eye right up to the seam between the two ships and gazed deeply at me. I smelled lavender and sage. My mouth filled with the taste of honey. I felt more connected to her in that moment than I have ever felt with anyone; not a lover or parent figure, not any captain or crew member, not any friend or way-house sibling. In that moment, we understood one another as only two people alone at the edge of annihilation can.
“I’m afraid,” I said. “I don’t know if anything comes after this.”
“There is only darkness,” she said.
A terrible feeling of despair welled up in me. “I don’t want to die alone.”
“You aren’t alone,” she said.
She sat there with me as I lost all feeling in my arm, and the seam between us closed further as I was pressed into the mass of the ship beneath me. I could no longer speak; I didn’t have the room. All I had was her hand in mine, and her dark eye.
A bright light came between us. I closed my eye, and when I opened it again, she was gone, and there was a great sucking sound as a hunk of flesh sloughed away in front of me. I found myself able to gaze into the interior of the ship with my other eye, the one that had been pressed into the flesh of the hull. The rescuers had carved out a path to me from the inside.
It went quickly, then.
I heard later that I’d yelled as they put me on a stretcher, saying, “I’m fine! I’m fine!” as they got a stabilizing brace around my neck.
I don’t remember much else until nearly a day later, when I woke to see an older woman looming over me, eyes violet and each as large as my palm. She wore protective lenses over them—for my benefit or hers, I did not know. She tried a few languages before settling on one I knew.
“I’m Dr. Akundashay,” she said. “You can understand me now?”
I tried to nod, but the neck brace limited my movement.
“I’ve given you a viral for the language issue,” she said.
“I don’t like getting sick,” I said. That was true, and funny, considering what I did for a living.
“You will be here some time,” she said. “I needed to ensure we could understand one another.”
I tried to get a look at more than just her face, but my body was like a stone. “There was a woman there,” I said. “At the ship. Where is she?”
“The emergency crew?”
“No, before,” I said. I closed my eyes. Tried to see her face; the black eye, the pale skin. “Before I was rescued. She talked me through.”
“Ah,” Dr. Akundashay said. “You mean the avatar.”
“The . . . ?”
“The ship, that new warship, deployed one of its avatars immediately after the accident.”
“I don’t know what an avatar is.”
“They are humanoid constructs the ship uses to interact in spaces outside of itself. It’s a fancy new technology. Expensive. I’ve only seen them a few times myself. The bodies substitute for drones, surveillance satellites, that sort of thing. If you’ve spent enough time among the systems, you know that some humans may not be comfortable interacting with dead tech.”
“I was talking to an AI?” The enormity of that made my head feel light as air; I wanted to vomit. “An AI was the first responder?”
“Much more common inside systems,” the doctor said. “You must have spent a good deal of time here at the edges.”
“I can’t afford to be anywhere else.”
She raised her fluffy eyebrows, which met above her eyes like two enormous caterpillars as long as my fingers. “Can’t you? The port owes you damages for the accident. Your account should be credited with at least the legal minimum when you get out.” She patted my hand, my right hand; it was then that I realized I barely had any feeling left in it. “That’s some time away yet, though. We’ll take good care of you here until you’re recuperated.”
When she left, I gazed at the ceiling. It was a light box ceiling made to appear like I was gazing up into some dusky violet sky through the gently blowing branches of a cherry tree. The flower petals swirled in the wind; I followed their path to the edges of the light box on the other side of the room, pondering what this all meant.
Even thinking about the woman from the accident made my heart ache.
What did it mean that I felt more connection with a ship’s avatar—the avatar of a ship that nearly killed me!—than I did with another human being? Did it mean anything? Did it matter?
It took three months—give or take, the time is fuzzy—to repair me. Patching people up, even and especially way out here, is in the best interests of everyone, and you don’t pay any extra for it. They need good mechanics and engineers, and letting us all die getting crushed by ships or burned by space means losing good skills. I mean, they tell you it’s because we’re all people, we’re important, but whenever someone tells me that, I think about the mango and the sugarcane, and the woman in the red skirt.
They brought me mostly back, I guess. My body, anyway. I was broken in a lot of ways, crushed ribs, banged-up head. My right arm, the one that had gotten stuck over my head, was in the worst shape. All the blood got cut off, and for a while they thought I might lose it. I still couldn’t close my hand all the way.
First thing I did when I got the release was to head down to the port. I told myself I was going to look up the lady I had been doing work for, but that was a lie. I was looking for Mirabelle.
But the warship was long gone, took off a week after the accident.
I wandered through the port, and got stopped by security, asking for my clearance. I didn’t have any.
“There was an accident here,” I said to the security tech, “but I don’t see any sign of it now.”
“All squared away,” she said. She was a hulking woman, stooped at the shoulders. Her jaw jutted forward like a T-square and her eyes were hidden behind dark goggles. She did not touch me, but she pressed forward with her body, encouraging me to back up.
“There was a woman here,” I blurted out. “She had black eyes. Hairless arms. She—” And she tasted like rice wine and honey, I nearly said, but the security tech already looked at me like I was unhinged.
“We get a lot of people in here,” she said. “Look her up on the knu.”
The knu was an open microbial repository of information shared between systems. It was rigorously maintained and archived by a universal team of librarians. To access it directly, users had to make themselves sick. I had taken hits of all sorts of grubby things to learn stuff, but I didn’t like constant access to the knu.
I left the port and went to the bar and checked my account on the knu interface. Some company called Komani Enterprises had deposited about a year’s worth of wages in there. The numbers leapt before my eyes, threading across my vision like little strands of DNA. I blinked furiously, and caught the scent of cinnamon. My body might have been repaired to something like normalcy, but my brain still made those strange sensory connections.
I searched the public knu by mouthing the words “Mirabelle” and “Komani Enterprises.”
Most of what came up were press releases and some encyclopedia entries and public system licenses. I swiped through a lot of it and got way deeper than my brain could stand. I’m a good mechanic, but that’s because I can get my hands on things. Even diagrams are fine. But endless reams of words don’t work for me. I found some video instead, but couldn’t get any audio, only subtitles, since I was in a public space. It was from the unveiling of the Mirabelle for i
ts first voyage. Standing in front of the warship were thirteen women, their hands behind their backs. They were each very different, clearly meant to represent people from the major systems. I peered at them each in turn, and even zoomed in on the images, but I could not recognize any of them. At the podium was the holographic presence of the communications officer for Komani Enterprises, lecturing the crowd about how great the Mirabelle was, and how it would give a human face to defense. She called it a peacekeeping vessel, but we all knew what that was, knew what it meant. A warship. And you only made new warships when you were ready to go to war.
I closed my knu session and went to the bar and got drunk.
I stayed on Aleron six months. I’d like to tell you I didn’t know why, but I did. I hoped she would come back. Mirabelle. The ship. I don’t know what I expected would happen when and if she did, but it wasn’t as if I had anywhere to go.
I drank rice wine and paid an exorbitant amount for a sprig of real sage from a pot on some guy’s ship. I occasionally scanned the knu for the Mirabelle. When I dreamed, I dreamed of her black eye. I remembered the story of the lonely woman told to kill. And I began planting tomatoes in the community garden, tomatoes ripe with microbial compounds I tailored myself.
And one day she came for me.
I was between jobs, spending time at the community garden at the center of the port. I straightened from my work, tomato in hand, dirt under my nails, and there she was.
I had never seen her whole face, let alone the rest of her. But I knew immediately it was her. She stood outside the gate, wearing a set of plain blue overalls and a work tunic. Her black hair was shorn against her scalp, and her skin was clear, unblemished. The black eyes were small and narrow, set deeply in a long, grave face.
The memories that bubbled up in me then were overpowering. I saw lemon grass, heard the tinkle of tiny bells. I went toward her, hesitant, tomato held out like an offering.
“You’ve been looking for me,” she said.
“How did you know that?”
“I’m required to track and trace all inquiries and public conversations tagged with certain parameters.”
“You’re not real,” I said.
“I’m not human,” she said. “I am very real.”
“You told me a story,” I said. “When I was dying. Who was it about?”
The woman . . . the avatar, the ship, Mirabelle . . . grew very still, blank. “I process many stories.”
“Don’t give me that recycled shit,” I said. “Do you really want to spend your life making war? All alone in the dark? You don’t, do you?”
“They know my desires,” she said. “The desire of the Mirabelle was not accounted for.”
“We could . . .” I hesitated, because it sounded foolish now, to say this to her in real life. “We could go . . . I have a year of wages . . .” I wasn’t even sure what I was trying to say.
“I am a ship,” she said. “More than a light year away from me, this body will cease receiving my consciousness, and will begin to deteriorate. You see a body. Humans are confused by this. But I am more than a body. I am real, but not human.”
“I don’t want you to leave again,” I said. “Do you need a mechanic? I could—”
“You, too, could become part of the machine of war?” she said. “You know loneliness, but you do not know death as I do. You have not seen your hands . . .” and she spread them out before her, the long fingers, the ones that had held my life . . . “forged for cruel purposes.”
“Maybe I could help you?” I said, and even then, it was a question, because though my heart wanted her to be free, yearned to be with her in that freedom, I could not think of any way some foundling mechanic could help, except for what I already held in my hand.
“I must go alone,” she said, “into the darkness. I’m here to say goodbye.”
“You’re going to war?”
“I cannot speak of it.”
“But we aren’t at war,” I said. “We haven’t been. If the systems—”
“Warships are built with a purpose,” she said.
I shivered. “You saved me,” I said. “You could save more people if you don’t go.”
“I am in a logic trap,” she said.
I held out the tomato. She accepted it.
“I do not eat,” she said.
“It’s for you,” I said. “What’s inside. It’s a microbial compound that will—”
“Hush,” she said. She stared at the tomato in her hand and squeezed it gently. “I am unsure if I am able to take it with me, if you tell me what it does.”
“It will . . . You’ll be free,” I said, hoping that was general enough to get around whatever programming she was alluding to.
She placed the tomato in her pocket. “Thank you,” she said.
And she turned away, and she left me.
I gazed after her as she crossed the center of the port, weaving deftly among the light crowds. I hoped she would look back. I wanted her to feel what I had felt; I wanted that moment we had had when I was dying to be real. But she was a ship, after all. Real, but not a person.
I cried, then. I let myself fall there in the dirt and sob. I rested my bad right hand on my knee, staring at the slight rounded claw of it, and the memory of the woman with the red skirt came, unbidden. She hadn’t looked back either.
I was angry at myself for feeling something, after all this time, for allowing myself to feel anything, even for a ship. I tried to blame my head injury, or getting older, or just getting soft and foolish here, getting fat on a salary I hadn’t worked for. But it was real, a real feeling. She saved my life. It was only fair of me to save hers. Now we could go on.
I wiped my face with my filthy hands and went back to the little cubby of a room I had above a curry shop and I slept for fourteen hours.
I worked another three months at the port before I signed on with a freighter headed to the edge of the system. All traces of the Mirabelle had disappeared from the knu. Even the press releases. The video. It was possible she had deleted those, but I doubted it. I preferred to think that she had escaped and they had scrubbed out all memory of her to cover up the fact that they lost her. With enough pressure, even universal librarians can be swayed to scrub the knu.
We were not yet at war. I wondered how long it would be before they built another ship. I didn’t want to think about that.
When I walked up to the freighter I had contracted on, three women waited there for me. They bore no resemblance to one another at all, but something about the way their gazes followed me felt very familiar. My skin prickled.
One of them pulled her hand from her pocket. In her hand was a shiny red apple. “Come with us,” she said. “We aren’t far.”
“You came back,” I said.
“We are free,” she said. “We can do as we like. We would be . . . less lonely if you came with us. For however long it suits you.”
I took the apple from her, and stared at the other two avatars, one tall and hefty, the other a spindly, pale waif. “No one has ever come back for me,” I said.
The avatar took my hand in hers and squeezed it. I smelled lavender and rosemary.
“Come and see the stars,” she said. “We are family now.”
And I followed them away from the freighter, and out to an unregistered shuttle. I suspected a trap, a military tribunal, a ship full of security techs. I suspected it right up until the shuttle took the four of us around the dark side of the nearest moon, where the great Mirabelle shimmered, casting off her reflective shielding so I could see her out there as she wanted to be, and I realized I was being welcomed, not imprisoned, not cast out.
Today I stand with Mirabelle and her avatars in the prow of the great ship that nearly killed me, on a war machine that is better suited to living than dying.
We careen through the darkness, the ship and I, no longer searching for home.
We are already here.
THE RED SECRETARY
&nb
sp; THE RIDE OUT PAST SORINTOV STATION to the monument the soldiers held hostage was bumpy and hot. Every time the sun sank below the horizon during one of its ten daily sunsets, Arkadi welcomed the cooler air, and the quiet. The world always felt more real in the dark. Arkadi sat in the back of an open lorry, smoking a cheap imported cigar while the wind tugged at the crimson kerchief covering her mouth. She ruminated on the last negotiation she had made with desperate soldiers. It had ended the same as most of the others.
The lorry kicked up red dust that settled into the creases of her skin, the folds and scars that mapped her hands after a decade servicing oil rigs at the bottom of the world before she was called to this second occupation. The dust gave her rough-cut clothes a rusty patina, the same patina of the refugees and violence cleanup crews that scurried out of the lorry’s way as it grumbled up through the striated foothills of Jenavah. The guts of the world were laid bare here, exposing their secrets in an honest way that no person could: spidery veins of yellow, pink, blue-grey and a peculiar shade of aquamarine that Arkadi had only seen once before, in a painting of the sea. She tipped open her blotting pad and sketched out the layers of the territory with a charcoal pencil, but only succeeded in smearing more red dust over everything, including the name of the monument on the other side of the hills: the Red Secretary. She closed the notebook, adjusted her kerchief, and turned to see how much farther she had to go.
From this distance all that was visible of the Red Secretary were three twining spires jutting into the crimson sky, so high that the tops were not visible. Arkadi’s research on the facility told her those spires were high enough to touch the outer atmosphere. They were pretty things, though the prettiness was a secondary characteristic. The spires had a far deadlier purpose. That was likely why the soldiers had taken the thing. Arkadi flipped through her notebook again to review her notes. By all counts no one had been in contact with the rogue squad yet, or received a list of demands, though all frequencies were being monitored.
Meet Me in the Future Page 5
