“Yes,” Atasha said. The lip trembled again, and Sarnai reached out her hand and took the girl’s right one, and squeezed it hard, the way that Khulan would have.
“Good, then,” Sarnai said. “Let’s tell a story about the world we’ll make together.”
WARPED PASSAGES
MY MOTHER LEFT ME for the anomaly when I was too young to see over the railing into the tangled gardens at the center of the ship, but not yet old enough to climb up onto it and jump into the lake at the gardens’ heart. The people of the Legion had stopped counting time back in my mother’s day, when the anomaly ripped through the fleet and halted us on our two-generation journey to a world that our prophets said would lead to our salvation. Now we were a static fleet, stuck in darkness, drifting nowhere, with uncertainty as to when and how our resources would run out. Would we starve in a generation? Two? Or would we asphyxiate first?
No one was quite certain. It had driven some people mad.
But for those of us who knew nothing else, it just made life that much more worth living. Living is a gift, when you’re sure it could end at any minute. And life ended often, in the Legion. Accidents, plague, bad air, support system failures, insurrection, collisions . . . one by one the ships of the Legion would go dark, and those of us left would cannibalize whatever remained of them.
I suppose that would drive my mother’s generation more mad than it did me, because I had no expectations, not like she did. In school, aboard ship, they were told they would arrive in some brave new world God had chosen for them, and the prophets of New Morokov had charted. They were God’s chosen people, with a real purpose, a plan. I was just a kid with an uncertain future, drifting through the detritus of the dying.
Everything had gone wrong just halfway into the trip.
The anomaly appeared and passed through the whole fleet, like a great, many-tentacled wave of glutinous energy. It split our ship in two, cutting right through the center of the lake, slicing open the hull in every direction. That should have been the end of us and every ship in the Legion, which were all halted in the same way. We should have been jettisoned into deep space. But though the anomaly breached the hull, the anomaly itself acted as a sort of sealant. There was no breach. But the engines could no longer power us forward. We were stuck in place, rooted to whatever these waves of foreign matter were.
From outside the ship, when I take the long trading walks between our home and those ships aligned with ours, the anomalies look like massive, irregular shimmering discs splitting through all five hundred ships of the Legion. They reflect light, and the ships, and each other, and our tools and clothing, but not our faces. You stare into the flat plane of an anomaly and it’s like watching a ghost wearing your clothes. It’s like they’re eating our souls, my mother used to say, which made her choice to throw herself into one that much stranger. Why would you feed your soul to some alien thing?
My sister Malati says the anomaly is a great manifestation of our own consciousness. Everyone has theories about what they are. All we know is that they don’t see our reflections, and that whatever steps into them never comes back out again. The scientists don’t think the anomalies are alive, and prophets agree, but the way they act, sometimes, the way they ripple when you talk to them, makes me think otherwise. I spent my childhood throwing junk into those things until my mother caught me and slapped me for being wasteful.
“We need every piece of this ship to survive,” she had said. “You don’t recycle something, and it’s lost forever. Do you understand? You risk your children’s lives. You risk our future. Waste is a terrible crime.”
I started crying when she yelled at me, because I didn’t want to be wasteful. Losing or breaking something was the worst thing anyone could do, out here. It meant you would have to trade with another ship, or go on a dangerous scavenging mission to one of the derelicts at the edge of the Legion’s gravity well.
When I was old enough to stand up on the rail and jump into the lake with my friends, during the very darkest of the ship’s sleeping cycle, I was fascinated by the number of things captured in the shimmering face of the anomaly that bisected the lake. Ropes and chains and plastic tethers that had held instruments and small animals that my grandmother’s generation had cast into the thing lay scattered on the banks of the far side of the lake, or tied off to metal balustrades, a record of two generations who had tried and failed to understand the anomaly. It was why jumping into the lake was considered so dangerous. It was easy to float into the anomaly if you weren’t careful. And once you threw something in, you couldn’t pull it back out. Not the tethers, or anything attached to them. No people, either.
There were many theories about the anomaly. Some said it was an inter-dimensional body, perhaps one that lived in five or six dimensions, and the half-circles of nothingness that split through our ships were simply the manifestation of it that we could perceive in our dimensions. Others thought it was a sentient thing, an unknown being. Some said it was the tears of God, who had wept when we left our home planet, and now punished our arrogance by keeping us here, bound by Her tears.
Me, I had grown up with the anomaly. It was just a part of life. It didn’t scare me until my generation hit puberty, and some of us started giving birth to strange things.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
I don’t know whose idea it was, first, to sever a ship from the anomaly and retrofit it to fly again. It was an old plan, something from my mother’s generation, before people gave up hope. Half a dozen ships tried it, cobbling together parts, selecting crews, but they failed every time. I learned about some of those attempts in school, and maybe that’s when I came up with my own plan. Maybe that’s when I realized what the problem was.
All of these people, they were trying to repair a ship and take other people with them. It was at least another generation more to the planet. Even if they got there and could mount a rescue, it would be another generation back to get us. That’s two generations more we’d have to survive out here, and the reality is, we probably weren’t going to make it that long. They’d return to a dead husk of ships, all spinning black around the great artificial sun and gravity well that held us together.
It was never the engineers who failed, in retrofitting ships to break free of the anomaly, or at least I didn’t think so then. It was the people they involved. People fought about who was going to go, who was going to come back, and the ships were sabotaged long before they could break free. The one to reach as far as the edge of the Legion, the one that got as far as the outer rim of ships, was piloted by a woman named Pavitra Narn and carried just a dozen people. They had kept the whole thing secret right up until the time they opened the fuel tanks to feed the engine.
But Pavitra and her crew were still sabotaged. Probably by one of their own crewmates, or by a lover or a family member left behind.
The remains of that ship still circle the outer rim of the Legion, along with the escape pods.
It was after Pavitra’s failure that people started using the escape pods. They thought they could escape the gravity well, I guess, though where they thought they’d go after that, I don’t know. Maybe they just hoped to cling to a few more cycles of life, to gain themselves more time for a rescue. Maybe the clutch of years they could survive in a pod was more than they expected to live inside the ships.
When my mother had me, after her mother died, there was still some hope in her generation. But that’s been gone a long time, now. Most old people sit in their quarters waiting for the end.
I knew, reading about Pavitra, that I was going to learn how to fix ships, and I was going to figure out how to get one out of the Legion. But I was going to do it right. I wouldn’t tell anyone but my sister Malati, because though I was becoming a good engineer by then, she was a lot older than me, and already an ace pilot. She was allowed to drive our ship’s only functioning transport on ship-to-ship runs and salvage missions, one of just a dozen people qualified for it.
Malati
and I could do it. If I involved more people than that, it would never work. Someone would get angry. Someone would try and stop us.
Maybe even the anomaly itself.
So I stopped staying up late jumping into the lake. I didn’t go out huffing chemicals with the other kids. I didn’t screw around very much, which was a shame, looking back. Maybe I missed out on some things.
But I intended to build something better.
It was out on my third spacewalk, helping a team to gather salvage around a nearby ship now only half-populated, that I saw the ship that I would retrofit.
Pavitra’s wreck had collided with another derelict floating at the edge of the Legion. If I told people I was studying systems on the derelict, I could easily get access to Pavitra’s old ship and work to retrofit it.
From the derelict I’d also have a long view into the center of the Legion, and the two dozen ships already in the process of being devoured.
We didn’t know for sure what had happened on those ships. Rumor had it that the people of our generation were giving birth to strange growing things, like tumors, and they were spreading fast, engulfing ship after ship. But none of those ships it happened to were allied with us, so we had only rumors. We did no trade with them, and many were openly hostile. We offered no aid. The ships that carried the people of the new prophets were only a fraction of the people who made up the Legion. Many followed other gods, or no god at all.
We simply sat in our sector of the Legion, staring at those transforming ships, as I did from the rim of the derelict, wondering when whatever fate had befallen them would reach us.
The engines that powered the ships were all closed organic systems, meant to exist in symbiosis with the rest of the ship. It was a concept that worked well as long as nothing happened to any other part of the ship, and maybe that was part of what was wrong with the ships being eaten. That’s the theory I had, back then. The closed system made the ships harder to retrofit, but I knew Pavitra had already started that process. Though there was little enough left of her ship, getting out there to work on it every day would be easy. I could cover what I was doing by saying I was just studying it and applying what I learned somewhere else, on some other ship—ours.
It was a tricky, two-faced balance. I didn’t know if I could pull it off.
I pitched the idea to my engineering instructor not long after puberty, and though much of the class scoffed at the idea of studying another derelict, the professor did not. I spent long cycles in meetings with engineers and scientists and then I was given permission to go out on my spacewalk. But I wasn’t to do it alone, they said. They wanted me to take another student. I convinced them Malati was the best person to accompany me.
And so it started—my attempt to free us all from the death of the Legion.
The various systems of the ship were never meant to work independently, as I said, which was what made it so miraculous that the anomaly hadn’t stopped the core life support functions of the ships. Their influence kept us rooted in space—no matter how much fuel we gave the engines, the ships of the Legions never moved. It was another bit of evidence in support of the inter-dimensional idea—if the bulk of the anomaly existed in some other dimension, then that was what rooted us here. It was as if some giant beast had thrown out its fingers or tentacles wide, snarled us in them, and fallen back to sleep while we writhed in its grasp.
The stuff that fueled the engines was a complex brew of engineered organisms that excreted a combustible compound. It was pumped into yet another engineered organism at the center of the ship, an organ we simply called the “engine,” though it did not at all resemble anything like the early machines that bore that name in my History of Engineering classes. The engine powered all of the ship’s systems, not just propulsion; it pumped vital heating and cooling fluid to various parts of the ship, and kept the complex algae bath that provided our oxygen at the correct temperature. Ours was not a fully sentient ship, but a hybrid of living and dead tissue. When I was younger, I had asked if the ships were alive, but the elders all said the ships were no more alive than an organ grown in a vat, like the time my aunt’s heart was replaced by one grown in the medical bay.
“Is your liver a sentient thing?” my teacher asked when I protested. But when you worked on the ships you couldn’t help but think of it like a living thing; a tethered animal.
I spent many cycles working to retrofit Pavitra’s ship. Malati thought I was odd, at first. She laughed when I told her my idea. But as the artificial sun went up and down and progress on the engine took shape, she stopped laughing, and started helping on our long forays across the tethers that we’d set up between our ship and the derelict.
Finally the day came when I had the last bit of retrofitted printed parts I needed to fire up Pavitra’s old ship.
I sweated heavily in the suit I wore as I went hand over hand out on the tether to the derelict. Malati was already far ahead of me. We’d argued about something petty back on the ship, and she was ignoring me. She seemed much more graceful outside the ship than in it, but I was the opposite. The blackness beyond terrified me. I did every walk like this far too fast, to the point that my instructors often chided me about the need for caution over speed.
So I don’t know why I hesitated, that day. You get used to junk flying around the Legion. Our gravity well was still active; it was all that held us together, and we thanked God for that afterward, but it also meant it was difficult for anything to escape the core. Things could be cast out, but never truly discarded.
I saw the piece of junk catch the light from the heart of the Legion before it struck. A sharp glint, nothing more. It zipped by so fast I barely had time to register it. You forget how fast things are moving around you when you’re making the slow, arduous crawl between ships.
The aged piece of dead tech hurdled past me. It snapped the tether. The frayed end of the tether hit me in the face. I let go, grabbing at my face, fearful of a suit breach. I didn’t realize I’d slid off the tether until I pulled my hands away, and by then I was already a hundred yards away from Malati, pinwheeling away from her at a constant speed. She had wrapped her hands around the broken tether. I could not see the expression on her face so far away.
I flailed, trying to see where I was headed. A knife of fear cut through my heart. I realized I wasn’t spinning toward the Legion, but away from it. Reason told me I hadn’t been thrown with enough force to escape the Legion’s gravity, but reason did not quell my quaking fear as I tumbled between two great ships, signing for help as I careened past them.
They might not get to me in time, but Malati could send a shuttle out after me. If my air didn’t run out, if I didn’t careen into one of the ships, if . . .
And that’s when I realized that there was no safe passage between those ships.
Both ships were cut through by the anomaly. It was a broad, disc-shaped plane here, like a bladed saw that split both ships—and I was headed toward the center of it.
I cried out. I came closer and closer, powerless to stop myself. I saw the distorted reflection of my suit in the anomaly’s shimmering face. A ghost suit without a body in it. To the anomaly, I was already dead.
Where did we go when we went through the anomaly? Where had my mother gone? Where had all the instruments gone? Where would I go?
“Please help me,” I said aloud, and I must have been saying it to God, or maybe the anomaly itself, or maybe both, if they were indeed one and the same. “Please,” I said.
I kicked and waved my arms, instinctive, knowing it wasn’t going to help, knowing movement meant little in a vacuum.
I collided with the anomaly.
Bright white light burst across my vision.
I screamed. I remember screaming.
I wondered if my mother had screamed.
I woke in a warm, pale blue room.
Our medical officer, Jandai, stared down at me from within a heavy medical-grade suit.
“Do you know where
you are?” she asked.
“. . . Jagvani Station?” I said.
“And who are you?” she asked.
“I’m Kariz Bhavaja,” I said.
She nodded ever so slightly, lips pressed firm. I tried to figure out what that meant.
“What happened to me?” I said.
“To hear the witnesses on the Goravna and Arashakti tell it, you passed through the anomaly,” she said.
“I’m not . . . this isn’t the other side?”
She raised her brows. “It’s not the afterlife, if that’s what you’re asking. But you’ll see that soon enough when you’re pissing through your catheter,” she said.
“But . . . no one comes out the other side of the anomaly alive,” I said.
“Some do,” she said. “But they . . . bring things with them.”
“Is there something wrong with me?”
The pursing of the lips again. Then, “You’re under medical watch for a few days.”
“Quarantine?”
She nodded.
Quarantine lasted for ten sleep cycles. I asked about Malati, and Jandai said she was shaken, but fine. Malati came to visit me early in the quarantine, and we spoke softly through the protective film around my quarters.
“I think we should stop,” she said.
“You want to die here, in the Legion?” I said.
She could not answer that.
So I counted my days in quarantine, which nobody in my generation likes to do, but sometimes you can’t help it.
On the tenth one, I already knew something was wrong long before Jandai came back. At night, I had felt something stirring in my chest. And on the tenth morning, when I woke, I had a lump in my chest where one had not been before.
“We’ve detected something,” Jandai said, and I did not let her finish.
“Get it out,” I said.
“It’s a living thing,” she said. “Protocol is not to remove it until we understand what it is.”
“Are you insane?” I said. “You know what it is! It’s one of those things, it’s—”
Meet Me in the Future Page 23
