Last Plane to Heaven: The Final Collection

by Jay Lake

  Which meant that until I made orbit again my course of action was my own decision. What a strange feeling, in this woman’s navy.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said. Obedience was an old habit, that and the fact she was my ride home. “All checked out, Captain.”

  “Then I suggest you get on with it.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Pellas had budgeted three ship-days to assess the first indisputable evidence of nonhuman intelligence ever encountered. I’d already used up most of one descending, and doing environmental assays on my immediate surroundings. Time to step outside and play Joan Carter. “Maintaining comm silence during my first recondo, ma’am.”

  “We’ll track you.”

  With three-centimeter software-adjusted optical resolution on Correct Thought’s main sensor suite, they certainly would track me. Combining that with my suit sensors, Pellas would know if I farted when I bent over.

  * * *

  I’d had the choice on descent of landing in the old seabed west of the developed shoreline, or atop the big pavers of the plaza that extended behind the docks into the middle of the city. There was no way to trust the stones of the plaza to take the lander’s eighty-odd tons of mass, even accounting for the slightly sub-Terran gravity and the soft-load plates Engineering had refitted on footpads to reduce ground pressure. On the other hand, the seabed was no more reliable … what showed up on sensors as solid ground could easily be a heavy clay crust over a slurry or a dust bowl.

  I chose the plaza. For one, it captured my imagination. Even better, touching down in the city proper spared me the two-kilometer hike from the nearest sufficiently large and level bit of seabed, along with a three-hundred-meter climb.

  Now I was stepping out to a place where—perhaps—feet had once stepped that belonged to no human being at all.

  First I sealed my helmet and toggled the mike and the cams. Then I locked Sixth Virtue’s boards to Correct Thought’s nav-comm signal in case I didn’t make it back to the lander, recoded the hatch-access password in case someone else made it back instead of me, and slapped the open key.

  A line of shadow slipped by me with the raising of the hatch, and the light of a new world flooded my face.

  Orange. Maybe orange-maroon. Appropriate, somehow.

  Still framed by the thick coaming of the hatch, I looked across the plaza. My breath caught hard in my throat. A new world.

  New, but older than time itself.

  Late afternoon flooded the scene with that oddly colored light, shadows falling at lazy angles. I could see an enormous building almost directly in front of me. Too-tall pillars rose from a curved row of bases to support a high-roofed portico. The front facing of the portico was carved with a dense frieze of figures, crowding in their dozens along each meter. Wide, shallow steps swept from porch to plaza, while the building extended wings to each side. Instead of windows, there were sort of vertical slits, almost the inverse of the pillars, every few meters in the facing. Large buildings of varying but similar architecture loomed to each side.

  We’d mapped this from orbit. I knew to the meter how wide this plaza was. But seeing it …

  I stepped lightly down Sixth Virtue’s three-rung ladder. Set my foot on time itself. For some reason, I wished for a cutlass like Joan’s.

  “I can hear you breathing.” It was the captain, her voice nasty in my ears.

  So much for comm silence. Lot of nerves up there in orbit. It was nice to know someone cared.

  “Yes, ma’am.” I smiled inside my helmet. “The Barsoomian banths ain’t got me yet.”

  “Keep to the mission profile, Ari.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Mission profile said enter one of the buildings without breaching existing barriers. In other words, use an open door or window, nothing that could be shut behind me. Look around for portable artifacts, preferably something representing technology or information storage or, ideally, both. Then capture as many images as I reasonably could in a short amount of time, and head back out to the lander.

  1.3 bars of O2. I could breathe here.

  I pushed the traitor thought aside and concentrated on walking. Malick’s World tugged at me with .91 standard gs. It was just enough to give me a sense of floating with each stride and make me have to watch my step. This was a nickel-iron rockball of a planet amazingly like Earth except for the absent hydrosphere. And how long had those oceans been gone, I wondered? After all, this world boasted the intact ruins of a seaport and a still-breathable atmosphere—even without oceans or jungles to maintain the oxygen cycle.

  What did one do with a few trillion tons of missing seawater, anyway?

  I was a little over two hundred meters from my initial target, the pillared building due north of the lander. As I approached, I looked up at the carvings once more. They were hard to see, dense, complex, fractal even, with enough curves and bends to make my eyes ache, and shadows rendered bloody in the orange-maroon light. The carvings showed something a lot like people fighting something a lot like squid. A giant pelagic wrestling match.

  No, I corrected myself, death match. There were plenty of dismemberings, spearings-through-the-groin (or cephalopodian mantle), berserk necrophagic frenzies and whatnot portrayed up there.

  It seemed a curious choice for public art.

  I slowed my pace and panned my helmet cam back and forth across the frieze. Even if these buildings had been formed by some bizarre geological process—one theory that had made the rounds in force back on Correct Thought—geological process didn’t spontaneously carve woman-eating squid. Squid-eating women?

  Still, astonishing. My heart raced. This was how a species had seen itself, how it had thought about itself. Myth? Legend? History? Oh, Mother Burroughs, if only you were here now to see the Mars of your dreams.

  At that thought, a crackle erupted in my helmet: “Why aren’t you moving?”

  I realized I had stopped. It was the sheer, boggling wonder of it all.

  “It’s a new world, Captain. These carvings are proof of it.”

  “What carvings?”

  Oops.

  “Check my cam feed, ma’am.” I couldn’t take my eyes off them. She couldn’t even see them. Not good, that.

  “I see a lot of rock, Ari.”

  “No … ah … squid?”

  “No. I suggest you return to the lander now.”

  “Ah…” I considered that one, quickly. I didn’t feel delusional. But would I if I was? I was still breathing suit air, so there weren’t environmental pathogens tweaking me. Could it be a virteo resolution problem or something? “Ma’am, I’m just going up on that porch to look through the doors.”

  “Get back to the lander.”

  “In a minute, Captain.”

  “Petty Officer Russdottir … that’s an order.”

  “Detached command, ma’am.” I started walking again.

  “It is my judgment that you are at risk of becoming unfit for command.”

  Eyes on the stone squid, I giggled. “Then Dr. Sheldon can examine me to certify that fact at her next convenience.” Not that I minded being examined by Dr. Sheldon. As often as possible. I giggled some more. “As per procedures, ma’am.”

  The silence that followed told me how much trouble I’d be in once I returned to orbit, but … would I ever have this kind of opportunity again? Not a chance, not by the Great Mother’s shorts. High command would either seal this discovery over or flood it with doctoral nerds from high-credit universities like New Tübingen and Oxford-at-Secundus. Little old industrial-zone girls like me weren’t never coming back here, except maybe as taxi drivers and cooks.

  I didn’t want to think about that anymore, so I turned off my helmet audio. And hey, I was at the steps!

  My helmet crackled back to life. Override from orbit. What the hell happened to my detached command, anyway?

  It was Sheldon. “Ari,” she said. “Sweetie. Please. I know you can hear me. Stop walking and think.”

 
Up the steps. Too low, too long, maybe ten cents a riser but two meters on the tread. Somebody had wanted people to enter this building in an unsettled state of mind. Either that or they had really weird feet.

  Tentacles.

  No … I let that thought bleed from my head like oxygen from a jammed valve.

  “Ari, dear. Listen. Something’s going wrong. I don’t want to lose you like this.” Her breath caught. “Captain is putting together a rescue team, but you don’t want to endanger your friends, do you?”

  “Bullshit,” I sang. Sheldon might be my lover, but she was commissioned and I wasn’t. Her lies were always for the good of the ship. The whole reason for sending me in the number-two lander was because we were both disposable. Gunny Heloise’s expensive string of musclegirls weren’t going to do a combat drop to fish me out of the arms of some fucking stone squid.

  Had I said all that aloud?

  “Ari, please, you’re leaving camera range…”

  “Good!” I took a deep breath and popped my helmet free. There was a slight sucking noise as it came loose. I turned and hurled it back out into the plaza, where it bounced a little too slowly, with an odd ringing echo. Air density and composition a little off, I thought. Sound waves didn’t propagate quite right.

  Time to breathe the air of this world. Joan Carter, I am here. I released my breath, drew in a new one, and let the smells and scents of another civilization flood into me on a river of oxygen.

  Mostly it tasted like a granite plaza at night, though, oddly, there was an after-rain tang to the air.

  Hand on the hilt of my cutlass, I stepped into the shadows looking for traces of the women who ate stone squid.

  * * *

  Inside was tall, horribly tall. The walls and ceiling were proportioned wrong. It was as if the same architect who’d designed those too-shallow steps had turned her plans sideways and stretched the building upward. That same damp granite smell tickled my nose, like must newly released from a long-forgotten freight canister.

  Age and rot, even in this dry place.

  My boots clicked against the worn flagstones as I walked on, accompanied only by echoes.

  Pillars rose around me, covered with the same frantic, disturbing carvings that had decorated the portico outside. I walked toward one, touched the pillar with the point of my cutlass. It rang like honest stone, but when I tried to brush that bit of carving with my gloved hand, somehow it wasn’t exactly where I had thought it should be.

  “Not quite dead, are you?” I shouted.

  They … whoever they were … had looked like me. Human enough for me to care. Like Joan with her Red Woman lovers on old Barsoom. The … squid … were everywhere. Detailed. Frightening. Real. Had it been the squid that drank the oceans dry?

  Had it been the squid who built this city?

  That thought scared me into walking again. This place must have been built by humans. Must have.

  I bent to adjust my greaves, and my thoat-leather fighting harness. Nothing fit me quite right today. Like the very air itself, everything was subtly wrong. And where the hell were the monsters? At least these were squid, not something so seemingly human as the rykor-riding kaldanes that had taken Joan’s daughter from her.

  The injustice of the world boiled within me as I stalked between a pair of the overtall pillars, cutlass trembling in my hand. Something, someone, had consumed the women of this world, sisters to me at least as much as the Red Women had been sisters to Joan Carter. They had been drunk dry, to desiccate along with their oceans.

  Then I found one of my world-sisters, of the stone squid-eating women, curled in a corner. She’d died here long ago. Her body was a husk wrapped in robes crumbling from dry rot. I could not tell what race she had been, she was so decayed, but I preferred to believe her a Red Woman rather than one of the degenerate Therns or First Born.

  She had died here to warn me of the stone squid.

  I heard a squawk: “Ari.”

  I whirled, cutlass ready, wishing I had my radium pistol. Had I left it behind on my airship? Some enemy must be clouding my mind. I was never this slow of thought.

  “Sweetie, can you hear me?” It was a woman’s voice, weak and quavering as women will be when confronted with the sharp end. I circled again, but could not find her. Magic, then, or some ancient machine sparked to life in this temple.

  She went on: “We’ve overridden your implant. Sixth Virtue’s relay is homed in on your carrier. Ari … please … I know you’re alive. You’ve got to come out of that building, right now. Please, sweetie.”

  “No tears, woman,” I shouted. Something was wrong with my voice! It was high and thin, with a reedy quaver. I had indeed been somehow ensorcelled. I knelt to search my dead sister for help, parting her robes with a muttered apology.

  So much hair on that poor dead one’s chest, I thought. She must have struggled with an overactive testosterone level. And her breasts … gone. Cancer?

  Her?

  What would a woman be doing here? He.

  He?

  Where had that word come from?

  “Ari! Captain Pellas is authorizing a retrieval drop. Listen carefully. Can you get a signal out to us?”

  I ignored her.

  Then his robes fell completely open. His clitoris, dry as the rest of him, had grotesquely hypertrophied in life. Inches long, perhaps. And his breasts … the poor dear must have had a radical. Common enough in space.

  Space?

  His clit?

  My free hand strayed to the lower skirt of my fighting harness. Checking.

  “Sweetie. They’re launching immediately. Be down in twenty-five minutes or so. Please, if you can hear me, sit tight.”

  I had an awful moment, my chest seizing cold and tight as my hand groped air between my thighs. Where was my … my …

  Him? What the hell was a him? What the hell was I thinking? Animals were bedeviled with y-chromosome carriers. Humans, blessed by evolution and intelligence, had moved beyond that particular genetic disorder. Everybody knew it. There hadn’t been a natural-born male human since the days of Herad the Great—she’d put the last of the poor, damned mutants mercifully to death back the first of Years Before.

  “I’m … I’m in some kind of trouble,” I said aloud.

  “We’re coming, dear. Fast as we can.”

  A door opened before me. A four-armed warrior in battle harness loomed, cock swinging between his legs like an animal’s. Then he was struck down from behind. A beautiful woman, of the Red race—a true princess of Helium, I realized—peered inward, bloody sword gripped firm. “Come,” she called, extending her free hand, “quickly.”

  “Hold on, sweetheart,” the bodiless voice said within my ear.

  I looked down at the corpse. Who could bear to live in a world of such horrible defectives, mutant in body, mind, and metabolism?

  Thoat harnesses jingled behind the princess. A cold wind chattered. All I had to do was step forward, into every world I’d ever dreamed of. Except for the … men.

  “Come.”

  “Stay with us.”

  The voice of dream called me on, the voice of love bade me stay. The voice of reason screamed somewhere deep inside me. Eyes clouding with tears, I hurled my cutlass at the princess. Somehow both startled and sorrowful, she withdrew, leaving me alone with an ancient male corpse. I huddled next to my dead sister—for even with a cock and a beard, she was still my sister—and waited for my rescue to arrive.

  Far too soon, something slithered wet and huge upon the stone floor behind me, but I had already given away my weapons and returned bare-handed to the world my mothers had made. Instead I took the dead woman’s hand and waited to see who would find me first.

  Looking for Truth in a Wild Blue Yonder

  WITH KEN SCHOLES

  * * *

  This is the other story Ken and I wrote at Borderlands. You guess which one he started, and which one I started.

  * * *

  Ten years after my paren
ts died, my therabot, Bob, informed me that I should seek help elsewhere. I blinked at his suggestion.

  “I’ve already tried chemical intervention,” I told his plastic grin. “It didn’t work.” I scowled, but that did nothing to de-brighten his soothing, chipper voice.

  “Booze doesn’t count, Charlie.”

  “I tried weed, too.”

  Bob shook his head. “Nothing therapeutic there, either, I’m afraid.” He sighed and imitated the movements of pushing himself back from his imitation-wood desk. “You are experiencing what we like to call complicated grief.”

  Complicated grief. As if I hadn’t heard that one before.

  Dad had died badly. He’d been on one of the trains that got swallowed by the Sound back on the day we lost Seattle. He’d called me from his cell phone with his last breath, as the water poured in, to let me know he wasn’t really my father.

  We lost the signal before he could tell me who actually was. Naturally, I called Mom. She answered just before the ceiling of the store she was shopping in collapsed.

  Both parents in one day. Fuck yes, complicated grief.

  And a side helping of unknown paternity.

  Bob continued. “Ten years is a long time, Charlie. I want you to call this number and ask for Pete.” His eyes rolled in their sockets as his internal processors accessed his files. My phone chirped when his text came through. He extended a plastic tentacle tipped with a three-fingered white clown’s glove. “I hope you find your way.”

  I scowled again and shook his offered hand. “So you’re firing me as a patient?”

  “Be well,” he said. His eyes went dead and his hand dropped back to the artificial oak surface of his desk.

  * * *

  I met Pete in an alley on the back of Valencia, behind an old bookstore that still dealt in paper. I transferred funds to an offshore account that then moved it along, scrubbing the transaction as it passed through its various stops along the way before his phone chirped. When it chirped, he extended a smart-lock plastic bag to me. A small, withered blue thing sloshed about in it. At first, I thought it was a severed finger or something far worse. (Or better, depending upon one’s fetishes.) I held the bag up to the flickering light of the dirty streetlamp.