“They were the first ones here,” said Ariq. He was an engineer. He believed in laws.
“And where are they now?” Captain Kadan hissed. He slid a little on the sludge, only pretending to be looking for a thousand-some-year-old astronaut, because what if something in a vaguely man-sized suit actually shambled forth? “They were stupid enough to land on Elijah while it was swinging out to aphelion. You know they’re all dead. The ICG sees that tunnel, all they’re going to think is ‘better hand it over to Tero, one of their crews made first break.’”
And then Xenia actually saw something behind Captain Kadan—a shadow, a shape, a mountain-sized presence at once there and not there, sitting up under the ice like a—(body). She clapped her hand over her mouth to stop herself from crying out because surely it was just a trick of the unfamiliar terrain? There were crags on Vanyez that looked like saber tooth fangs.
“Captain, there’s something over there,” Ariq said. She almost yelled, Don’t! but Ariq was pointing at something else: a much smaller, coffin-sized lump a few yards away. At first, it looked like tholin heaps that were starting to come uncovered, but when they chipped away the ice, the shape beneath it was too familiar. An astronaut. A Paateni from Tero. Preserved.
That time, Xenia let slip a little whisper to God.
* * *
The last time Elijah passed though habitable space, just a bit closer to Sarai than to Tero, Sarai and Tero were looking elsewhere. The Hammarskjöld asteroid was passing between them, and Tero was illegally flanking it with fighters as they sent an army of miners to the surface. They mined so aggressively that, even though they didn’t have push-missiles back then, the asteroid lost so much mass that it eventually fell into Tero’s orbit. Hammarskjöld was now just a mute little moon that the Tero had renamed Lojala, the Loyal.
It had been a blatantly illegal seizure of a new habitat. Sarai lodged vocal complaints to a sympathetic ICG, but all they could do was voice disapproval. No one wanted to anger everyone’s best trading partner. And while all this unfolded, Elijah sailed through habitable space, noticed primarily by poets and cults and only the most reckless of separatist groups.
* * *
The Paateni astronaut was mummified, her suit melted into her body as if polymers and flesh had been liquefied and re-frozen. Her helmet had collapsed inward, and her eyes, nose, and mouth were pressed outward against a crystal-coated visor that must have half-melted, making a sort of sculptor’s mold. They could feel the curve of her nose and lips and her closed, bulging eyelids but not the flesh or bone or cartilage. She was kissing the veil. She looked like a grotesque, bulbous marble statue that had been painted a sparkly, silvery gray.
Captain Kadan had gone back out to the site of the Paateni break. He had kept his distance from the body after they hauled her in, throwing water sachets and gobbling protein bars in the mess instead. Xenia and Ariq only knew he had left the Remina because they watched him drive the rover out of the hold while they soaked the body in medical fluorescent light.
“He lived for this,” said Ariq, who had served with the captain before on the botched comet capture mission Magical Lasso. “He kept saying, if we don’t stop them from taking Elijah from us, they’re going to take everything. We’re not going to survive. He kept saying they might even take us.” He shook his head. “I told him that was crazy.”
If Xenia had learned anything from the Good Gardeners, it was that there was no such thing as crazy, not where the cosmos was concerned. But she didn’t want to think about everything that the failure of the mission might mean, so she focused on their new charge. “What do you think happened to her?”
“Time,” Ariq suggested, and he was right—time was the enemy of matter.
“But why does she look like she’s been covered in chromium? There isn’t any on Elijah.” She delicately traced the curve of the astronaut’s nose. “What is this stuff?”
And then the mouth parted. Her jaw fell open, like long-clenched masseter muscles had finally relaxed, revealing a cavernous throat clogged with the spacesuit’s cables and coated in silver. It would have been bad enough without the distinct, melancholic sigh that accompanied the event and sent Xenia and Ariq jumping back, Ariq grabbing a scalpel. For what felt like ten minutes but in truth was only one, nothing else happened. “Air escaping the body,” Xenia whispered, but then, there was the sound of inhalation, ragged and weak, but breath all the same.
“My Sarai,” said Ariq, letting the hand that held the scalpel go slightly slack, so the little knife swung back and forth between his fingers like a pendulum. “She’s alive.”
But Xenia could see this was not life. Not the way life had ever been understood anywhere in the solar ring, anyway. Maybe, it wasn’t death either. Nor was it some prehistoric attempt at cryogenic sleep. But maybe things happened differently out there. Her mind’s eye went racing past the planets and moons and asteroids and satellites of the solar ring, past all the libertine space-villages and corporate spacelabs, out of habitable space, into the cold uncharted deep. Racing, racing, racing toward something hidden with a gravitational field more powerful than the sun . . .
Xenia quickly pressed her palms against her eyes. One thousand, two thousand, three thousand. This was how her parents had taught her to spend exploratory science class in primary school, kicking away her nerves, insisting to the teachers, no, no, I don’t want to know. By the time she opened her eyes again, the Paateni astronaut was moving her mouth. Stretching her chrome lips. And Ariq was leaning over her as if to listen, hissing at Xenia to bring the microphone over.
Because she was speaking.
The Paateni’s eyes never opened, thank God. Perhaps, eyes did not survive the transformation into this state of being.
It was hard for the microphone to pick up her words, and it was just gibberish at first—a lot of cold and end and light—so Ariq tried to orient her. He told her the year and the place—“you’re still on Elijah”—and asked her the last thing she remembered, mostly to see if she still had memories.
“We were long-sleeping.”
“Sleep?” Xenia whispered. “They made first break and then went to cryo-sleep?”
Ariq snorted in a derision that wasn’t unearned. Even now, no one had successfully awoken from cryo-sleep past one hundred three years. The hippie space village Mauna Pica had just jettisoned the preserved body of their one-hundred-ten-years-asleep founder to save room and money, saying with a shrug, if it’s meant to be, someone will pick him up, by-and-by. “What kind of cryo-sleep would a separatist colony have had back then? More like permanent suspension hooked up to an ultra-low-power battery.” He shook his head. “This was a suicide mission.”
But Xenia thought it was rather beautiful, if very sad, the amount of trust they had placed in their brethren to not only find a way to claim them but to wake them, one thousand years later. “We’re on a suicide mission,” she noted. When Ariq silently tightened his fist around the scalpel, she wondered, and maybe, so is every human, aimlessly shuttling around the solar ring knowing that they had fought their way out of the primordial soup only to be greeted not by trumpets but silence.
“I woke. Alone. But not alone.”
“What woke you?” Ariq asked into the microphone, which robotically repeated him in archaic Paatenese.
The lips pressed together and opened like a blooming flower. “God.”
Ariq bristled. “Fucking Callers, can’t even think proper—”
But then the words started spilling fast and frantic from the microphone, from the astronaut’s wildly contorting mouth: “God is wrath is God is death is God is hunger is God is chasing me is God is eating everyone . . .”
Tend your own garden. Keep your head down. Xenia glanced at Ariq, and she could tell by the flicker in his eyes, like a frightened prey animal, he was trying not to process this, trying not to come to the same inevitable conclusion that she was spinning toward.
Whatever terrified rapture-dream had overtake
n the Paateni faded, and she tried to orient herself again: “You are not Paateni.”
“No . . . we are from Sarai. The Paaten rebellion . . .” Xenia paused, searching for words that would cause the least hurt, “was ended two hundred years ago.”
And then the mouth stopped moving. Not even a cry.
Ariq muttered that they should have lied because they both knew there was one more question—the most important question.
Xenia quickly leaned down and asked, “Where is God, now?”
It took five heartbeats for the Paateni astronaut to answer, and when she did, it was nothing more than the softest of clicks. “Hiding.”
She was about to turn around, tell Ariq that she understood he didn’t believe in extraterrestrials, let alone space monsters, but to please trust her, just this once, trust that something inhuman had found its way onto Elijah and now they had to go go go—but she heard him loudly say into the comms, “Captain? We think you should head on home. We think Elijah may have run into some weird shit out on the aphelion . . .”
The cottonball haze of relief at having been believed was immediately pounded out by Captain Kadan’s unintelligible voice, thin as a nylon thread beneath the din of an enormous un-living roar. Unintelligible, except that he was screaming.
They rushed to switch his video feed onto the head-up display, bringing it up just in time to see a rush of incomprehensible movement as a distant ice-mountain slid into motion, less like an ice-sheet slipping and more like a blanket being pulled off a bed. Crystal sparks—silver? chrome?—filled the feed, glittering against the endless night as their captain’s garbled yelling turn to static.
Behind them, Xenia thought she could hear the Paateni astronaut laughing, but she was wrong: it was a manic, cable-clattering seizure, as if the gunmetal chrome that now grounded her every cell was trying to dislodge, to spit out what remained of her bones and her plastic suit and run free toward whatever it was that was dancing out there in the dark.
* * *
Calling is a sin, and Callers are tempters. Tend your own garden. Keep your head down. If you’re lucky, the vulture passes you by. Goodness doesn’t need to be invited, but evil does. Good listens, evil answers. Good abides, evil seeks.
The children in the compound instinctively understood the advantages of being small and quiet, of crouching under floorboards and holding their breath—one thousand, two thousand, three . . .
The adults in the compound usually only arrived after the world had shattered them somehow—perhaps a death had left them convinced that any god was a bastard or that the government was hiding an apocalyptic truth. More rarely, they’d encountered something that had shaken everything they thought they understood. An impossible voice on a radio, a cave painting, a hieroglyph, a dimming star. A string inside had been plucked as if to sing, you are not alone, and they had reacted not in jubilation but in fear.
They forgave Xenia for leaving them but not for joining the Sarai Aeronautic Force, even though the government was grounded and their missions looked for minerals, not microbes.
You will be undone, her father said. Go and you will be undone.
Her mother died in the Garden. Xenia didn’t find out for two years.
* * *
At first, Xenia and Ariq just sat on the floor of the Remina, waiting for whatever had reached out from under Elijah’s ice blanket to find them and kill them. The sound of its roar, like a bullet train rushing through a mountain tunnel, had stilled any possibility of rushing to the flight deck and escaping. The thought, better to die, bounced between them, though they could neither speak nor meet each other’s eyes. Better to die than live in a world where this is true. Xenia saw her parents every time she pushed her palms against her eyes, digging in the dirt with their heads down like moles. Hellstar Elijah. Hellstar Elijah is coming back infected. You just wait and see . . .
What finally shook them back to life was the radar’s automated warning of an incoming aircraft. Even before they had visual confirmation, they knew it could only be an envoy of the Great Tero Starfleet, come to collect what they thought was their due.
No questions were asked before the Remina was jammed and crippled and rendered into a heap of trash metal. Their life support systems were put on a thirty-minute clock, to give them time to get into their suits.
“They can fucking have this fucking planet,” Ariq muttered, putting on his helmet.
Xenia briefly considered dragging along the Paateni astronaut—who had twisted in on herself like an action figure thrown by a child and who might, now, actually (hopefully) be dead—but then reasoned that such a fate wouldn’t be fair to the Paateni, to sleep for a thousand years only to be lit on fire by the very people she’d been trying to escape.
The Tero fleet had turned on Elijah’s lights, staking enormous LEDs on poles into the ice sludge. Xenia and Ariq could only see the dimmest outline of the Tero cargo plane, humming contentedly like a well-filtered air conditioner. From the nose alone, they could tell it was enormous. And in front of it, eight astronauts waited in red and white suits, holding sleek black guns with sleek black gloves. One of them barked a command that their microphones near-instantly translated in an androgynous voice as “Stop!”
They stopped, sliding a bit on the ice.
“You don’t have permission to be here. What is your business on Elijah?”
Nothing felt worth explaining, anymore. Ariq mumbled, “Obviously, trying to make first break,” and had to repeat it at gunpoint when they couldn’t quite make it out.
“What do you mean, first break? This planet belongs to Tero. We have listed it within our catalog of territories for almost a thousand years . . .”
Xenia’s eyes drifted toward the darkness where she knew the mountains would be. The mountains and God, hiding in the chrome. She thought of the other children in the compound hiding under the floorboards, mischievously twiddling their fingers against their knees, eyes hidden in shadow but curiously sharp teeth glowing and—(hungry). She thought she was picking up a sound. A tectonic moan. Bones grinding. And a strange, steady hum.
She suddenly realized that Ariq was yelling. “You don’t understand! We have to go, all of us! There’s something here, and it killed our captain . . .”
“I repeat. Please, be quiet.”
“We are all going to die unless—”
Xenia barely even saw him raise his hand. The gesture was so fast, there wasn’t near enough time to understand its intent, though she assumed he was trying to point to the mountains and the hiding god. But it was enough. Two lights zipped from two guns, just two of the briefest flashes in the dark, and converged at the very center of Ariq’s heart. He buckled and fell, the burn in the wound slowly smoking. Something that had been held very taut inside Xenia, some tiny emotional muscle she hadn’t even known was there, snapped and broke.
“Hostile gesture,” said one of the other members of the starfleet. “Judgment call.”
The starfleet officer who’d spoken the most took a long pause to stare at the trigger-happy subordinate, and then nodded toward Xenia and started turning around. No translation was needed. Power is the universal language. Even before the two officers in red-and-white reached her, she felt her arms going slack, her knees unlocking, the decision between resist and obey tipping toward acquiescence.
And then a larger power intervened, as she had known that it would. She had the jump amid the screaming and the chaos, running with big, bounding, half-flying leaps across the ice toward the site of the Paateni break—but this time, Xenia could also look back over her shoulder and see.
When Captain Kadan was killed, it had all happened too quickly and over too much digital interface to register much more than movement: massive displacement of matter that seemed far too large and violent for Elijah—the little prince. But now, only a cloudy visor and the length of a standard space station separated them; now, she could see the spinning, singing, sinning faces in the chrome; now, she could see the arms
like enormous silver lava tongues wrap around this most beloved prodigal planet. Now that she had seen the glory of its victory over (everything)—she could see how the Paateni astronaut could have mistaken this ravenous presence for a god.
* * *
She used to have another dream about Elijah, though this one she never told anyone. There was a hollowness to the vision that used to make her sick to her stomach, sicker even than the dream about Elijah’s eye. Elijah was passing over, nothing more than a small white cable car, and her mother was still alive and speaking to her so quietly that she could not understand the words except that her mother seemed to be speaking about the transience of the flowers at their feet. A kite string floated down from the heavens—from Elijah—and her mother smiled and grabbed hold of it and flew away, one of hundreds, no, thousands of sailing refugees.
Xenia sometimes ran after them but never, ever managed to catch a kite string. The older she got, the harder she tried, not because she wanted to go but because to be abandoned seemed unspeakably worse. Yet she would inevitably be left curled on the now-dead grass, thinking, I wish there was nothing. I wish there was nothing out there.
* * *
All but one of the Teroan officers died during the assault, some bodies sent flying and breaking on impact, some bodies taken up and eaten. The only survivor was the officer who had done most of the talking, who had followed Xenia into the well that the Paateni had dug a millennium ago. Her name turned out to be Bree Bonan, and she had been a captain before all of that became irrelevant. Now that the LED lights had been swatted down and both the Tero craft and the Remina pried apart by eager, searching arms, the two women stood on built-up sludge with their backs against the wall, injured past the point of feeling pain. Xenia saw Bonan whispering to herself—what she assumed to be a prayer to the keepers of that lost empire that Tero was always trying to foolishly call out of the dark—and was struck by a sudden savage thought.
“Did you know?” she spat at Bonan. “Did you know that”—God, God, God—“thing was out there? Did it reply to one of your little SOS calls, say, ready or not, here I come?”
Ride the Star Wind: Cthulhu, Space Opera, and the Cosmic Weird Page 46
