by Max Barry
TITLES BY MAX BARRY
Providence
Lexicon
Machine Man
Company
Jennifer Government
Syrup
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
Publishers Since 1838
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Copyright © 2020 by Max Barry
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Barry, Max, author.
Title: Providence / Max Barry.
Description: New York : G. P. Putnam’s Sons, [2020]
Identifiers: LCCN 2019049937 (print) | LCCN 2019049938 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593085172 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593085189 (ebook)
Subjects: GSAFD: Science fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3552.A7424 P76 2020 (print) | LCC PS3552.A7424 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019049937
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019049938
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
pid_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0
For Freddy
They use the guns this time
CONTENTS
Titles by Max Barry
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
The Encounter
1. Gilly: The Launch
2. Beanfield: The Distance
3. Gilly: The Puzzle
4. Beanfield: The Ship
5. Gilly: The Attack
6. Beanfield: The Dark
7. Gilly: The Casualty
8. Anders: The Enemy
9. Beanfield: The Jet
10. Jackson: The Crew
11. Anders: The Surface
12. Gilly: The Beneath
13. Jackson: The Hunt
14. Anders: The Hive
15. Gilly: The Source
16. Beanfield: The Survivor
The Return
Acknowledgments
Excerpt from Lexicon
About the Author
Providence is wiser than you, and you may be confident it has suited all things better to your eternal good than you could do had you been left to your own option.
—JOHN FLAVEL
THE ENCOUNTER
At last it’s time and you file in to watch the contact video. You’ve seen it before; everyone has. When you enter, you recognize the bulkheads, the fat tube lighting they used everywhere back then, even the black rubber coffee mug that sits atop a panel near the breach chamber’s exterior door. But it’s different. They said you had to see it for yourself to appreciate it, and they were right. When you turn your head, the picture is all around you. You can walk right into it. You could just about pick up that coffee mug and drink from it. This isn’t like what you’ve seen before. It’s like being there.
Up front are four white-suited figures. Since this is the contact video, you recognize them: Maladanto, White, Esperanza, and Bock. Just standing there, large as life. Someone beside you inhales. A wild compulsion rises in your throat: You should warn them! A man to your right even takes a step and clenches his hands. You knew what you’d be watching today but you weren’t prepared for it to feel like this, like it’s wrong to be here. And wrong not only because you know what’s going to happen, and not even because there are four people who need your help and you can’t give it, but wrong like you’re intruding. They’re about to experience the worst moment of their lives, and you’ve come to watch it.
Fabric suits, plastic helmets. Esperanza is holding a thin stick that functions a little like a cattle prod, and that’s the best weapon they have. They’re scientists, remember. They went into space to study bacterial growth. Then they picked up a hint of controlled propulsion in a place it didn’t belong and there was no one else for millions of miles. They could have turned tail and run—they should have—but here they are. Side by side. With a cattle prod.
Their positioning is terrible. That’s something you didn’t appreciate from the standard video. At first glance, they’re poised and ready. But with this much detail you can see everything that’s waiting to go wrong. Esperanza is a half step back from where he should be, his weight on his right foot; he’s going to get tangled up with Maladanto, it’s as clear as day. Bock is supposed to be stationed by the interior door, but she’s come too far forward. White is a mess of nerves. His eyes roam the chamber and—aha!—alight on that coffee cup. You can see his thought: So that’s where I left it.
“Open it,” says Maladanto.
Coral Beach’s exterior breach door clacks and thumps and splits to reveal a depthless dark. Decompression ripples their suits. White’s coffee mug falls off the shelf and rolls toward the void.
“Steady,” says Maladanto. His voice is deep and rich and more intimate than you’ve heard it before. He’s ex-Service, the only one of the crew with any military background. Used to fly shuttles, back when they needed human pilots. “We’re making history today. Don’t fuck it up.”
Bock lifts a hand to wipe her brow. Actually draws the back of her hand across her faceplate. Then lowers her arm like she didn’t even notice how crazy that was.
The wind dies. The doors open as far as they go and halt with a sound you can feel through your feet. It’s hollow breathing and nothing else. For minutes, everyone holds position. The standard video skips this. You see the doors open, then contact. Because it’s four people just standing there; what’s to see? It turns out that White swallows repeatedly. He closes his eyes for ten seconds at a time. At one point, Bock says, under her breath, “Shit,” so quietly it’s barely a word. A tremor starts in her left leg, enough to wobble the suit fabric. You see these details and they matter.
Maladanto says, “Where are they?”
Up in the command station of this little plastic suitcase is de Veers, watching the monitors. He’s the youngest of the five, and when Maladanto ordered him to take the helm, he protested, because he wanted to be down here in the breach chamber with them. But only briefly, because de Veers is irrepressibly good-natured, with a grin that never goes missing for long. He’s going to die in about four minutes.
“From what I can figure, two starboard, one aft, one port, one below,” says de Veers. “Don’t think they’ve noticed that we opened the front door.”
For three days, they’ve been tracking a half-mile-wide brown rock. All they know about it is it’s full of holes and moving like it has some control over where it’s going. Ten hours ago, it began to angle toward Coral Beach, as if noticing them for the first time. Sixty minutes ago, it exuded five small, dark blobs, which sailed across the darkness and stuck to Coral Beach’s hull. Since then, the crew has been tracking them mostly from the sound, which is a clunk, clunk, clunk like someone’s walking around out there.
To your left, a woman stiff-legs it toward the exit. It’s tempting to join her. But Maladanto, Esperanza, Bock, and White are there with the breach door open and you’re struck by how they didn’t have to do this. At any point, they could have decided to pull out and leave this to someone else. Even now, they could have closed the exterior door and pulled Coral Beach away, and maybe it wouldn’t have made a difference—maybe by this point, their fate was sealed—but even so, they stood together and faced it. So you’re staying, too.
“Okay,” de Veers says in your ear. “Seems like they noticed. All five unknown objects converging on the breach chamber.”
You see their hands tighten, the skin crease around their eyes. Esperanza takes a little step to the left, which gets him out from behind Maladanto, and you think, Yes! as if there’s still a chance. Then he steps right back where he was. You hear someone moan quietly. There’s an urge to blame here, to say, There, that’s what went wrong. That’s why it happened. Esperanza’s positioning. Bock drifting away from the door. There must be something, a mistake without which it would have turned out differently. Surely it didn’t have to be like this.
A vibration. Low impacts coming through the hull.
De Veers’s disembodied voice: “Ten seconds, boss.”
Maladanto says, “We don’t know what we’re going to see. Neither do they. Let’s nobody turn this into something it doesn’t have to be.”
White’s lips move fractionally. You always thought he was chewing the inside of his lip, but he’s actually mouthing words. When you make out a few, you realize he’s praying.
A rough, blocky limb appears against the darkness. It curls inside the bulkhead like a tree root. Then another limb, and more: too many limbs. An irregular shape rises into view. There’s a rough-hewn head and shoulders and a massive torso and it looks like some kind of gnarled wood. It’s actually translucent resin. You can see a hint of movement beneath its surface, threads contracting and expanding, like a bowl of worms. A second shape clambers down from above, senses the gravity, and drops to the floor, landing on six thick limbs. The tremor comes up through your shoes.
“Oh, God,” someone behind you mutters.
Maladanto, Esperanza, Bock, and White don’t move. That’s always seemed remarkable, but now it’s flat-out amazing. They watched two alien nightmares climb on board and they didn’t fall apart and run.
The creatures move tentatively, taking stilted steps. Their heads bob. You know what they are. They have several names, nowadays, but most commonly, people call them salamanders. You know a lot about them that Maladanto and his people don’t.
The salamanders seem to notice them. There are moments of stillness: one, two, three, four. Maladanto raises a hand in greeting.
The salamanders don’t respond right away. It’s not clear whether they understand. Then the first begins to bow. It was standing on four hind legs; now it goes down onto all six. Its head dips.
Maladanto isn’t an expressive guy and even here his face is half-shadowed by his helmet, but you can see what’s blazing in his mind. He didn’t dare hope it would be life, and he didn’t dare hope it would be intelligent, and he didn’t dare hope it could communicate. He begins to lower his own head, mirroring a gesture he’s read all wrong.
The salamander’s face splits open. What you’re seeing is its protective resin breaking apart to reveal its true face for the first time. But to Maladanto, it must appear as if the creature’s head disintegrates. Its jaws crack open. It makes a movement in its throat, which has since been named for the noise it accompanies: huk.
Maladanto’s body jerks. Fluid hits the wall behind him.
You know that salamanders are capable of spitting little quark-gluon slugs, which are essentially tiny black holes. They leave behind a trail of mangled matter, because what happens when that much gravity passes an inch from your heart and five feet from your toes is that different parts of your body experience monumentally different forces. The crew of Coral Beach doesn’t know this. They only see Maladanto’s body implode.
A chunk of what’s left hits Esperanza. He’s the one with the cattle prod, which is actually an emergency ignitor for Coral Beach’s fuel collider and has never been used in practice. It’s capable of putting out a heart-stopping charge, but Esperanza falls and loses his grip on it, because he was standing too close to Maladanto.
White runs. This is the part where Bock should take two steps back and drop the door. But the cattle prod rolls toward her and she hesitates, then runs forward and scoops it up. The salamander advances and she raises the cattle prod above her head. White reaches the door and yells for Bock to come. This is how it happens: Bock won’t leave Esperanza and White won’t leave Bock.
The salamander pauses. Bock could strike at it, but doesn’t. She’s holding a cattle prod in front of an alien and no one would blame her for freezing up in fright, but that’s not what’s happening. Bock is a biologist, and there’s a line of concentration between her eyebrows, and you see her hearing Maladanto’s words: Don’t fuck it up. Before she stabs the first intelligent life ever found beyond Earth’s warm blue bubble, she’s making sure in her own mind that it’s the right thing to do. Maybe she could have killed one. Hurt it, at least. Who knows. She’s still deciding when the two salamanders huk and turn her and White inside out.
Esperanza grunts, the sound loud in your ear. He shoves away the rearranged nightmare that is Maladanto. The door is twenty feet away and he crawls toward it. The salamanders watch him. There’s nothing to read in their faces. They’re both split open now, loose strings of resin dangling obscenely, but what’s underneath—the wide, lipless mouths, the black, orblike eyes—is incapable of expression. Esperanza is a fifty-eight-year-old botanist who made his name in flowering gene strains. The salamanders let him get almost to the door before they turn him into meat.
People around you are crying. Alert lamps are cycling. Those huks passed all the way through Coral Beach, leaving ten-inch-diameter tunnels behind, so air is venting. The salamanders don’t seem bothered. Resin is already threading across their faces, forming a fresh layer. Behind them, more salamanders climb into the breach chamber. They explore slowly, thoroughly. They go through the door that nobody closed. There’s another behind that, which stymies them briefly, but when they can’t force it open, they huk at it until they can. Coral Beach isn’t large. It’s not long until they find de Veers. He’s working the engines, trying to bring the craft around on the alien ball. He has no weapons, so he’s decided to ram it.
The salamanders don’t speak. They don’t try to communicate. They just kill him. You don’t know why. There are a lot of theories. Some people say it wasn’t their fault. We wandered into their territory and they defended it. They’re mindless animals, unaware of what they’re doing. Something Maladanto did registered to them as a threat. There are a lot of opinions. All you know is that when the video finally, mercifully stops, you want to kill salamanders, as many as you can.
SEVEN YEARS AFTER CONTACT
1
[Gilly]
THE LAUNCH
Before he could go before a global audience of two billion, they wanted to fix his eyebrows. He sat before a light-ringed mirror, on a chair that went up and down at the whim of a woman with silver lips, and tried to keep still.
“The left is fine,” she said. “The right concerns me.”
He’d been in the chair for two hours. There had been a makeup person, a hairdresser, a stylist, and now this second makeup person. His face felt like a plaster model, ready to crack and fall to pieces if he smiled.
“Smile,” she said. It did not crack. “Can I get some three-base paste for Gilligan?”
“Gilly,” he said reflexively. He didn’t like Gilligan.
“I’m so nervous, I could barf,” said the person to his left. “That blueberry yogurt is definitely starting to feel like a mistake.”
> Three others were in chairs alongside him; the speaker was Talia Beanfield, the Life Officer. Gilly glanced at her but she was recording herself on her phone. He was supposed to be recording clips, too. Service wanted to stitch them together into a behind-the-scenes feed of the launch ceremony.
She caught his eye and smiled. For most of the last half hour, Beanfield had been immersed in towels and clips. She looked good now, though. Her hair was artful and honey brown and glimmered as she moved. “Did you try the yogurt, Gilly?”
“No.”
“Smart,” she said to her phone. “This is why Gilly’s Intel and I’m Life.”
“I’m sorry,” said the makeup woman. “I need to get in there.” She stood between them and resumed her attack on Gilly’s face.
“Stop giving the makeup people a hard time, Gilly,” Beanfield said. “You and your unruly eyebrows.”
“Eyebrow,” said the woman. “It’s only the right.”
“A deviant,” said Beanfield.
“Len’s here,” called a woman by the door. “Last looks, please!”
Gilly took the opportunity to check out the others. Jackson, the captain, was reclining with a white bib tucked around her neck, eyes closed, possibly asleep. She hadn’t recorded any clips, either, as far as Gilly had noticed. Between her and Beanfield was Anders, the Weapons Officer. He had a shock of dark hair and light stubble and was probably the most handsome man Gilly had ever met. On the occasions Gilly hadn’t been able to avoid seeing his own press, he was always struck by how out of place he looked, like a fan who’d won a contest to meet celebrities. Jackson, the war hero; Anders, the tortured dreamboat; Beanfield, the effortlessly charming social butterfly . . . and Gilly, a permanently startled-looking AI guy who couldn’t find a good place to put his hands.
The door opened. A man in fatigues entered and clapped his hands. This was Len, their handler from Service: thirtyish and upbeat, carrying a little extra weight. “It’s time. How’s everybody feeling?”
