Mortal Remains

by Christopher Evans

  He frowned, “I don’t get it.”

  Shivaun was slicing open the other sticks in the bag. They were the same. The flakes slowly spiralled down to the ground, little plastic snow flurries.

  “The feed bag’s been doctored,” she said. “They don’t want us to make it.”

  The sled came to a dead stop, its broad back palpitating. Imrani waited for Shivaun to do something. The sled heaved, and a murky detritus gushed out of its snout, instantly crystallizing into a ragged ochre bloom on the ice.

  It was a few moments before the enormity of it dawned on him. Here anything that lived was considered precious because life was so marginal; yet the three of them, sled included, had been set up to die, out where there was no one to help them.

  “Are you carrying any food?” Shivaun asked.

  “Food?”

  “Anything we can feed the sled.”

  Imrani shook his head helplessly.

  She checked the pockets of her suit. He did likewise. There was nothing.

  “We’re going to have to feed it the bagpipes,” Shivaun said.

  “What?”

  “You heard.”

  “It’s my instrument!”

  “Do you want to die, Imrani? Do you?”

  He didn’t know what to say. “But it’s sick. What if it doesn’t want to eat?”

  “You got any better suggestions?”

  He had none.

  “Just stand there,” Shivaun said. “Don’t do anything. Brace yourself. Try not to fall over.”

  He didn’t have a clue what she was talking about. Then she stepped forward and twisted the release dial on his belt.

  The chest plates swung open. A great gout of ice crystals plumed from his belly, but he felt nothing except a void. Shivaun was already reaching inside, rummaging around, then wrenching the pipes out.

  The pipes began a violent twitching while Shivaun reversed his belt dial. Slowly, slowly, his chest plates closed, creaking against the frost that rimed them. Then he felt the searing cold at his belly, radiating up like a wave across his chest so that he gasped with the shock of it. His head and limbs were sealed off from the impact, but this was only small relief. Shivaun dropped the pipes and steadied him with both hands on his arms.

  His suit filled with a rush of warm air as its self-adjusting system compensated. Within thirty seconds the cold was gone and he could breathe normally again.

  “Are you all right?” Shivaun asked.

  “I—I think so.” He felt a warming at his belly, no sense of permanent damage. He told Shivaun as much.

  “Thank hell for that.”

  The pipes lay frozen. Dead. Shivaun raised her booted foot and brought it down on the creature. It shattered as if it were glass, keratin and cartilage skittering across the ice.

  He helped Shivaun retrieve chunks of gristle and snap them into bite-sized pieces. Though the pipes had been nothing special as instruments went, the manner of their dying made him feel like a butcher. He stood squeamishly aside, holding a jagged fragment of leg, while Shivaun stuffed piece after piece of the sac into the sled’s maw. As if she was dumping garbage down a disposall.

  The sled lay slumped on the ice and did not respond. Shivaun stroked its ear slits and pressed her visor against its throat, making soothing noises; but though it swallowed automatically, it did not move to her entreaties. She crammed another frozen fragment into its maw, whispering further entreaties.

  There was no movement, nothing. Above them, Pluto’s upcurving slash was like a grimace, a leer. Imrani felt helpless, doomed. The sled gave a lurch, then another. At the third attempt, it raised itself from the ice.

  “Get on board,” Shivaun yelled to him.

  He was clambering up after her when she suddenly jolted, then pitched backwards into him, sending them both plummeting down on to the ice.

  He rolled over beside her. She was lying face down, but he could see a splatter of darkness inside her visor. It took him a moment to realize that it was blood. She did not move or speak when he shook her. The status panel on the chest of her suit was flashing orange into the ice: life-support was failing.

  He scrambled to his feet in alarm. Something hit him in the shoulder, and he felt a piercing cold pain as he fell.

  A small dark cylinder was sticking out of the skin of his suit. He made to pull it out, then stopped himself. His own suit went to yellow alert, then announced it was sealing the puncture. He saw another dart sticking out of the back of Shivaun’s neck. The flower of blood in her visor had crystallized, entirely blotting out her face.

  They were needle-gun darts. Someone had shot at them.

  Shivaun’s suit light deepened to blood-orange.

  His entire body was palpitating with fear, but he managed to lie without moving, only turning his head inside the hood to scan the ledges of the dead.

  Nothing moved on the ice galleries: the shining corpses stared down at him from both sides, encased in their ice tombs, frozen for ever. It was the perfect hiding place for any assassin.

  He turned his head the other way. Shivaun’s light had gone red. It flashed for a while, then shone steady.

  Life support had failed: it was over for her.

  For a moment he couldn’t accept it. Then he began to blubber. It didn’t seem possible that she was dead. He’d imagined this journey to Pluto as the start of a new life for them, not an end; he’d imagined them spending at least the next twenty years together, having children, travelling. How would he survive without her? He was crying as much from fear as sorrow, he knew. What could he do now? Whoever had shot at them was still out there somewhere. He had to fight down his panic, try to think clearly.

  His shoulder ached badly from the wound, but he was no longer losing heat or air. The pulsing alert light was yellow, meaning that the immediate emergency had passed. He did his best to ignore the possibility that the dart might be poisoned. His chances were slim even if it wasn’t.

  Imrani knew that if he made any obvious movement he would be targeted again. On an inspiration, he surreptitiously used his belt controls to override the automatic alarm, boosting the status light to orange, and then to red. To all appearances, he was also now dead.

  Again he scanned the ledges, looking for a sign of movement, of something living.

  There was nothing.

  The sled had slumped once more, then Imrani saw its long throat ripple as it disgorged another mass of plastic fibre on to the ice. Its hooded eyes opened briefly, nostrils pulsing with distress.

  There was a movement beyond the beast.

  It was the merest glint of light, quickly gone, but as he strained his eyes he saw a dark shape moving down an ice stairway.

  The figure mounted a sled that had been lying dormant at the bottom of the ridge. The sled began to move towards them.

  Imrani watched it from where he lay, suit light shining red on his chest, the only camouflage he had. He felt a mixture of terror and something that might have been relief. When he was sure that no other riders were following, he slipped his hand across the ice to retrieve the fragment of leg from the pipes. He tucked it securely under his glove.

  It seemed an age before the rider finally drew up. Its suit was the steel-grey of the officials at the terminus. Imrani watched the figure dismount and lope forward. It was a woman. The needle-gun was in her hand.

  Imrani had gradually edged his feet around until they were braced against the sled’s flank. He had never done anything violent in his life, and his entire body was trembling with adrenalin. As the woman approached Shivaun, he sprang forward, raising the broken pipe like a dagger.

  She began to turn as he arched towards her like a zeeballer. But it was too late. They collided, and Imrani felt the pipe scrape across her chest plate, then slide under it into the webbing at the armpit.

  They both landed in a tangle on the ice. Imrani managed to roll away, yelling with pain as the dart in his shoulder went in deeper. The suit began a vocal alarm, warning him in a
shrill sexless whisper that he was bleeding and losing air pressure.

  He managed to scramble to his feet, his ears filled with the gasp and rush of his breathing. But the woman was also rising, suit winking orange, the needle-gun gripped in her hand. Imrani had no weapon left, nothing in arm’s reach.

  His attacker began to level the pistol at him, then wavered. Imrani saw something hanging from her armpit—something long and jagged: a frozen stalactite of blood.

  The figure made a half-step, then fell forward as the suit’s light went scarlet. She hit the ice face on, bounced and rolled over once, twice. Then lay still.

  Imrani did not move. His suit had gone quiet, the puncture sealed again. The needle-gun lay on the ice, too close to the gloved hand for him to be incautious. A small plume of pale vapour rose from the helmet, then stopped. Red light pulsed from the suit’s chest, as scarlet as Shivaun’s had been. He waited until the light was steady. Only then did he move forward.

  He kicked the pistol out of reach. Skirting the fallen figure, he reached down carefully and picked it up.

  The visor was frosted over on the inside. Imrani smashed the butt of the pistol again and again against the plass, crying with rage and sorrow. Finally it starred, and he broke the visor open. The whole head was rimed with frost, the eyes open. He recognized the woman as the official at the terminus who had arranged for them to be provided with the sled.

  He went over to Shivaun, knelt beside her. He was trying to think clearly, to fight his grief. His suit began to fret again. He told it to be quiet, then activated Shivaun’s belt dial and his own a second later.

  As her plates opened, he reached inside and grabbed the womb, pulling it out and cramming it into his own abdominal cavity. Again he twisted the dial on his belt. Again the plates slowly closed up and he felt the burning cold. The womb was unlikely to have survived the passage, but it was all he could do. He closed Shivaun up while his temperature returned to normal, feeling as if he had actually cut her open, as if he had committed some grotesque form of disembowelling.

  The assassin’s sled was sitting placidly on the ice close by. In the low gravity it was a simple matter to load Shivaun’s body across its back. Their own sled had revived a little, so Imrani tethered the two together, determined not to abandon either of them, piling the woman’s body into its back seat. Then he led both creatures off.

  The pain from his shoulder wound had returned, and it intensified as he limped along. The valley began to narrow, the massed ranks of corpses crowding in on both sides with their radiant faces and jewel-like eyes. They looked more alive than the living, this one crouching to pat his pet familigator, that one in wedding robes with three holo husbands, another a whole family group clustered around the replic of a shrine. Imrani was light-headed, babbling words of encouragement to the sleds, hoping that soon they would come in sight of some habitation, some real living humans. He began to drift in and out of true awareness, found himself sobbing, jabbering nonsense, pleading with the stars to help him. His strength was ebbing fast, and still the valley went on, its galleries unending. A coldness was spreading down his arm. He thought he saw lights in the distance; they began to waver, then spiralled around as he pitched forward on to the ice.

  Some time later he surfaced briefly and felt himself being lifted up. Something passed in front of his eyes—something big yet stooped, like an animal yet purposeful, almost human. A dull terror seized him at the white flash of its saucerous eyes. Then it was gone, and he sank down into blissful oblivion.

  • • •

  I was sitting at the window, the aftertaste of a warm drink in my mouth. Nina had brought it earlier, I knew, but now she was gone. I had lost not only the last few minutes but also some previous episodes of wakefulness. I was aware I had experienced them, but they were like ghost memories, without detail.

  The inward-curving hills were tree-covered under a blue sky. My window was recessed so I didn’t have a large field of view, but it was a pleasant sight, the lake a perfect blue. A few dark birds were flying across it. I didn’t know what they were. I didn’t know the names of any birds or trees or flowers. I knew nothing except for the fact that I was alive.

  I caught my reflection in the glass. I was a youngish man, dark-haired. The face looked all right as far as I could tell, everything in proportion, nothing out of place. But my cropped hair made me look like a victim of something. Imprisonment or disease.

  The hills outside were a just-minted green. There was no wind, no cloud. No other sign of life apart from the birds. I couldn’t even see the rest of the hospital building.

  I had an urge to smell the air. After some effort, I managed to stand up. It wasn’t easy, but I felt stronger than I’d done before. The thick glass was set into the frame with no obvious mechanism for opening it.

  Very carefully, keeping one hand flat against the wall, I walked to the door. It had no handle, was sealed at its edges. I looked around the room. Everything was white, even the loose gown I was wearing. There was none of the paraphernalia of a hospital room. I didn’t know exactly what I expected to see, but at least I could register absences.

  Already I was tiring. I managed to stumble back to the bed, to sit down on it. I wondered if they were putting something in my food to make me sleep. I wondered if I was a patient or a prisoner.

  Then I was at the window again. I must have suffered another fugue while getting there. I was feeling around the frame, the underside of the sill. My finger touched something, depressed it.

  In an instant the scene beyond the window changed. The sky went from blue to black and the sun went out. The lake waters turned to iron, the hills changed from verdant to bone-white.

  In place of the sun there hung a huge blue moon.

  Part Two

  BEYOND THE PALE

  Six

  “Nathan?”

  I turned from the window. Nina had come into the room. The young man and woman were with her. They wore white as before.

  “Nathan,” she said again, approaching me. “Are you all right?”

  “Is that my name?”

  The word meant nothing. The sound was meaningless to me.

  “It’s the name we gave you,” the young woman said.

  “It was chosen at random,” her companion added. “It has no special significance.”

  They both spoke in soft, measured voices. They were brown-skinned, almond-eyed, both fair-featured, in the prime of late youth. Clearly not twins, but a pair nevertheless.

  I wondered how long I had been standing at the window.

  “Where is this?” I said.

  The view remained as before: ivory hills framing a steel lake. The huge luminous blue disc hung in the black sky, wreathed with white cloud. I could see pale landmasses beneath.

  “It’s the Moon,” Nina said. “We’re on the Moon.”

  I felt completely disorientated. The girl and boy spoke quietly to one another. I stared out again. The view seemed to shimmer, to dissolve, but I blinked and it was back.

  I made to say something, but for a moment my voice wouldn’t work.

  I pointed. “That’s Earth?”

  Nina nodded. I knew only that I should have been there, not here.

  “Who am I?”

  “We don’t know your real name.”

  This was the boy. He spoke offhandedly, as if it were not especially important. I felt another pulse of rage and frustration. It came without conscious thought.

  “What do you mean?”

  My anger must have shown, because Nina laid a hand on my arm. “Perhaps you ought to sit down.”

  “I don’t want to sit down! What’s going on? What am I doing here?”

  They led me back to the bed. I was too weak to argue or resist. When I was settled, Nina said:

  “We—both of us—are reanimates.”

  A tide of weariness was flushing through me. “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “We were dead. More or less, anyway. We’re now
alive again.”

  I couldn’t take this in. “Are these ours? Our children?”

  “Perhaps you’ll allow us to explain.”

  It was the girl. She was elfin-faced, perfectly proportioned. In her blue eyes was a serious adult look.

  “First we should introduce ourselves,” she said brightly. “My name is Chloe.”

  “And I’m Lucian,” the boy added.

  “We don’t know your real name because there are no records of your life. You’re from Earth’s past. A sleeper, reanimated.”

  For a brief moment I seemed to slip away. Then I was back.

  “This is senseless to me,” I said.

  “You must be patient,” said the girl. “There is much to explain. Lucian and I are servants of the Noosphere.”

  The word shocked me. The Noosphere. A word from my strange fevered dreams. It was real? The dreams were real?

  My reaction had a physical effect. I sank back as if drugged, and when I surfaced again I was lying flat, staring vaguely at images that seemed to float in front of me, three-dimensional but insubstantial. It was only through a haze that I could listen and see. Chloe and Lucian talked in turns, one following seamlessly on from the other. They talked in a flat factual way, as if everything they were telling me was commonplace. They talked like adults telling a child an instructive story.

  I saw the view from my window again, then the perspective abruptly tilted and zoomed back, everything dwindling rapidly until an entire world hung in the blackness of space—a bone-white world laced with intricate webs of silver and gold. The Moon was the Noosphere I had seen on Bezile’s desk—a moon transformed, Chloe and Lucian were telling me, by advanced methods into the nerve centre of the human species. Then the scene shifted, and workers in hooded suits were clambering over what looked like a dusty mausoleum carved out of the bedrock, a cavernous vault holding a rank of dark broken coffins. During a recent reconstruction, I was informed, a cryogenic chamber had been unearthed, buried at a site that possibly dated back to the earliest times of planetary colonization. Nina and I had been taken out of our tombs and our bodies subjected to repair and regrowth. The process of revival had been long and complicated, even with the sophisticated techniques of biosynthesis, but now we were both whole again.