by Wil McCarthy
The white membrane-wall shimmered, drawing their attention, and Crow oozed through it and stepped up to them, his copper eyes glittering.
“The Queen will see you now,” he said, with an air of simultaneous self-importance, and of genuine allegiance and respect. Not respect for Malye and the others, no, but for this Queen, this “Wende” person Malye had insisted on speaking with. The way the green-haired men spoke of Wende, it was clear they owed her much, or thought they did, and were bonded to her not in love or in fear, but in some other, equally powerful way.
An alien way? Two brains, four sexes... As Malye understood it, the “Queen” was in charge of only five individuals, more a head-of-household than an officer or official of any sort. But the Queen was in charge, no question about that, and the “Workers,” meaning Plate and Crow, were her eyes and ears and hands, and perhaps her brains as well; this much she had gleaned from their words and their behavior, and from their body language, although much of this was strange to her, and disturbing.
Rather than nodding to acknowledge his companion's words, Plate lifted his arms and wiggled the fingers of both hands in a quick gesture, like a kind of salute. How long those fingers seemed, and how flexible! Like worms, almost—boneless. But when he lowered his hands again to his sides, the fingers looked normal and human enough.
“Let us go,” he said to Malye, in a voice that was neither friendly nor menacing, but hard. He expected no question, no reply from her. The Queen had agreed to see her, and so that was exactly what would happen.
Well, okay.
“Are you well enough?” she asked Sasha and Viktor, with gentle sadness born of a sudden and fierce sense of kinship. We three, alone against the future. “I can go by myself if you prefer it.”
“No, I want to see,” Sasha said, his own spirits suddenly deflated, his restless anger gone soft. Viktor Bratsev simply nodded, his jaw set. We shall be together in our aloneness, he seemed to say.
“Well then. Lead the way,” Malye said, turning to face the blankness behind Crow's eyes. She could just hear, at the faint, fuzzy edges of perception, the sound of his colors rising within her.
~~~
Viktor wondered, with a detached, horrifying lack of horror, where the rest of the hospital had got to. Outside the cryostasis ward had been the Exhaustive Care unit, up here in the low-but-not-too-low gravity where the patients had the best chance at recovery. He knew this because it had practically become his career to fix the plumbing and the wiring in this particular part of this particular hospital in this particular rat's nest that was fully eighty minutes from his home warren. Get someone else, he had always meant to tell them; from a plumbing perspective, Exhaustive Care was a damned nightmare.
But there was no EC unit here now, and no trace that there ever had been one. Behind its white membrane, the cryostasis ward lay at one end of a rough cavern, its walls of bubbled rock, like pumice. Absurd, of course, because like all the Lesser Worlds, Pinega was volcanically inert, cold and solid all the way through. He flashed, suddenly, on the thousand-times memory of pipe metal flowing like water in the flame of his welding torch. The smell of it, the metal actually forming a vapor in the air... But that too was ridiculous; this hospital lay well in from the surface, shielded by a good seventy kilometers of high-grade, highly conductive nickel ore. You'd need one hell of a torch for that job. Names, you could probably throw Pinega into one of the suns and never melt it to that depth. Well, into Bee, anyway.
The EC unit was gone. A little while ago it was there, and full of people, but now it had become a cave, a gas bubble in the rock of the world. The hospital was gone. The Thousand Worlds were gone. How did one go about grieving for a thousand worlds? One didn't. That was the whole secret of it, he felt sure; one might as well grieve for all of history, all the billions who had ever lived and died. But wasn't that denial? Wasn't that simply a rationalization for cowardice, for hiding his head from very real and very serious troubles? Laughing in the face of death was one thing, laughing in the face of a billion deaths quite another.
He would find something, then, to mourn. His favorite chair, perhaps. O Ialah, my favorite chair is destroyed! he thought, trying it out. But no, it was false, it was nothing to him. He couldn't even recall what his favorite chair had looked like, nor, on reflection, the name of his best friend. Had he had a best friend? Yes, certainly, he'd had a lot of friends. He'd gone to parties, dances, games.
Looking inward, he found only a black, tarry mass where his grief and his fear should be. And his memories? Well, they bubbled through it, but slowly. His best friend's name was Oleg. His favorite chair was a custom recliner of blue and yellow plastic, soft and comfortable and terribly expensive. He would never see or feel it again. The pang of this thought was in some ways a relief, a confirmation of sanity, a pail of water in the face. But more thoughts crowded behind it, many more, and that black mass couldn't possibly hold them all back...
“Interesting, what they've done with the place,” he said evenly, closing off that line of thought.
The cryo-ward attendant and the police colonel were soberly silent. Sasha and Malye, he reminded himself. The only two people left in all the world; he should have no trouble remembering their names.
The two not-quite-people, “Crow” and “Plate,” led them through the cavern and into a tunnel that was twice his height, hexagonal in cross section, and relentlessly white in color, like the membrane that covered the cryostasis ward's north wall. Very artificial, he thought, and very alien. He preferred the bubbled rock of the cavern over this smoothness, just as he preferred to rest his eyes on Malye than on Crow or Plate.
“What is going on with your hair?” he had demanded of one of these men, as he lay shivering in his coffin. “Chlorophyll,” the answer had been, and that one word was enough to tell him he was not waking up in the time or place where he'd gone to sleep. He'd resolved at that moment to ask no more questions, but of course he had been unable to restrain himself. Even now, the desire to know was far stronger than any of the other feelings kicking around in his skull.
“How many of you are there?” he asked, putting a hand on Plate's white-robed shoulder. There was a brief sensation there of cold muscle, strong and yet boneless, like touching a snake down at the petting zoo. He withdrew the hand instantly.
Plate looked over his shoulder, turned his empty copper eyes on Viktor, and shrugged fluidly. “Of me? One. Of mine? Six. I don't understand your question.”
Viktor took a moment to wonder just what was going on in there, behind those eyes. And then he pressed on: “People like you. Here, in Sirius system, and elsewhere. How many?”
“Ah.” Plate smiled, his eyes still on Viktor. He didn't need to blink much, evidently, nor to look where he was going when he walked. His neck looked like rubber. “Six-cubed of sixes per ring. I'm not sure how many rings, but I think about six-cubed. Certainly, not twice that many. Elsewhere in the Suzerainty, we are fewer.”
Viktor ran some calculations through the black tar of his brain. Six-cubed sixes: about twelve hundred. Times six-cubed again, about forty thousand. No, about fifty thousand. Fifty thousand individuals?
Compared to the number of people who had lived here before, that was a very small colony. Compared to the volume of Sirius system, to the vastness of human-occupied space, it was a negligibly small colony. But looking at Plate, walking there in the hallway with arms relaxed at his sides and his head very nearly on backwards, Viktor thought it seemed like a pretty large number of these people to have around.
“Elsewhere, there are fewer of you?” he asked.
“Correct.”
“In this 'Suzerainty' of yours, there are normal humans, still? People like us?”
“Tens of billions of them, yes. But Gate system is our own colony, and they will not interfere with us here. Their interests lie in the other direction, away from the Waister-controlled spaces. As if a few light years could make a difference to their security.”
&n
bsp; Huh. Viktor didn't know whether to feel distressed or relieved—that there were normal people out there somewhere, or what might pass for normal in this peculiar era, but that they would not... interfere. Ialah. He and the others were, it seemed, rather completely in the hands of these strangers. And of the Waisters as well? He shivered, the tar thickening in his brain. Please Ialah, let these 'Gate' colonists be well armed!
“So, you belong to one of these 'rings?'“ he asked conversationally. “You and twelve hundred others?”
“Correct,” Plate said, giving a nod that should have broken his neck.
“And this Queen of yours is just one of, uh, uh, what, about two hundred other Queens in the ring?”
“She is not mine,” Plate corrected. “I am hers. But your statement is otherwise true.”
Viktor's face was less than two meters from Plate's. He forced himself to smile. “That is a lot of royalty. I bet your town meetings are hell.”
Plate appeared to think about that for a moment, and then he shrugged again, and his head oozed back around to the front in a single smooth motion.
“Is it much farther to go?” the colonel, Malyene Andreivne, asked in a quiet voice.
“No concern of yours,” Crow said without turning, in the sort of tone people use when calling an end to a conversation.
Bastard, Viktor thought. That was a perfectly legitimate question. The hallway, curving very slightly to follow Pinega's shape and centrifugal gravity contours, stretched on featurelessly for at least a kilometer before disappearing behind the curve of its own ceiling. A long way, it looked like, and they had just woken up, damn it. They had just lost their entire civilization. If this was all the sympathy the future had to show them, the future was more than welcome to shit backwards.
“Have you people ever heard of the wheel?” he asked pointedly. And expected no reply, and received none.
But really, on reflection, he felt more relieved than incensed, because one of his burning questions had just been hit with a cooling spray of information—if Crow could be that much of a prick with that little effort, then yeah, probably he was a human being after all.
He glanced at Malyene Andreivne, who looked stiff and out of place, no doubt wishing for jackboots and a nice, high-collared uniform instead of the bathing robe and sandals they had given her. Hard to be dignified and remote when you're practically naked, he thought, but then, she seemed like the sort of person who could wither a man, so to speak, with her gaze, regardless of what or how little she was wearing.
She caught him looking, and turned, and favored him with a gaze. Not withering, not even angry, but simply appraising. After a few moments, she broke it off, and Viktor was left with a vague, curious sensation of having given something up, as if he'd spilled a secret to her. Which was crazy, of course. Probably, she'd practiced that look for years: I've got your code, citizen. You've nowhere to hide. She did it very well, though; he felt he should come clean about whatever it was he had done. Staring at her boobs, maybe.
“You're good at that,” he said to her in a low, approving voice.
Her nod was just barely perceptible. Yes, I am good at that.
Well. It was comforting to know he was not the only one here who wasn't an idiot. He looked to his other side, watched Sasha Topuri stumbling down the hallway like a three-year-old on forced march, his hair and face and robe all in disarray. Viktor had known Sasha slightly, from his many visits to that damn hospital, and had written the man off as useless, a trained monkey with no ability to operate outside his narrow specialty. And little enough ability within it, he'd suspected.
And yet, Viktor would not be alive at this moment if not for Sasha's efforts, and neither would Malyene Andreivne. She'd burst in on them, dragging that rescue ball and jamming the door shut behind her, tearing her mask off and shouting instructions... And Sasha had done what she'd asked. And later, he had somehow managed to freeze himself, without assistance, a deed which must surely have required a measure of cleverness.
“Courage, my friend,” Viktor said to the man now.
Sasha simply looked at him, miserably, his eyes puffy with dried-up tears.
“When you have lost everything,” Viktor suggested gently, “no further harm can befall you. The secret strength of the refugee, eh? It seems like only minutes ago there was a world here, and it should still be here, we think—we should be able to hop in a tube and be home in a few minutes! But reality is not something you can deceive. When a ferry loses pressure, does the crew pine and mourn for the air they've lost? No, they would die, like fools; they would deserve to die, because reality does not care what you think, only what you do. And the reality, Aleksandr Petrovot Topuri, is that our world died a long time ago, and now there is only us, strong because we have nothing else to be.”
That time, the message seemed to get through a little better. Sasha straightened his spine, drew a deep, sighing breath. “Life is an irreversible process,” he quoted, with forced casualness.
Viktor clapped him on the shoulder. Best to reinforce the good behavior. Really, though, it was hard to blame Sasha for his feelings, which were probably a lot healthier than Viktor's own. Even now he could feel the panic inside him, struggling to work its way free of the tar but unable to do so. For good measure he squashed it, stuffed it down even deeper in the mire. He had dealt with emergencies before, gas leaks and fires, a sudden divorce and yes, even a decompression or two. Reality could change on you utterly, instantly, and you had to be ready for it.
He'd never really thought the Waisters came in peace, anyway. Too silent in those early weeks, too creepy, like stealthy animals in an Earth documentary, preparing to pounce on some helpless thing. No surprise that they'd done exactly that. Bastards. No surprise they were getting ready to do it again.
The walk continued for several minutes more, but eventually they came to a hexagonal doorway cut into the corridor's side, sinking in a hairsbreadth or so before terminating in white membrane. More doorways were visible farther on, on both sides of the corridor, but at this first one Plate and Crow stopped, turned, and stepped without ceremony through the membranous covering.
The three refugees exchanged uneasy glances. Malyene Andreivne shrugged then, and followed. Sighing, Viktor went in right behind her. The membrane, just like the one at the cryo ward, felt cool and surprisingly dry, almost like stepping through a cobweb in some long-abandoned maintenance tunnel. But the surface parted without stretching, closed without rippling, touched the skin only in passing, in paper-thin cross section.
The chamber on the other side was large enough to hold a train car comfortably, though instead it held only three gray couches and three seated people, and something that Viktor thought was probably a dog, though he wasn't sure.
As in the ruins of the cryostasis ward, three hazy balls of light hung motionless in the air, providing illumination. He couldn't quite grasp the shape of the chamber at first—the walls were equilateral triangles that came together at ninety-degree angles—but with effort he was able to visualize the space as a cube with the corners entirely blocked out, the blocking surfaces meeting along the diagonals of each wall. An octohedron, then, of the same spotless white as the membrane and the corridor outside it. After all this time, the place still looked like a damn hospital, though an alien one. Or maybe a temple of some sort. The air smelled dry, and faintly sweet.
He touched Malyene's shoulder, to reassure her he was there, but she shrugged him off. Her eyes were on the people who sat upon the gray couches.
On the center one sat a green-haired woman, whom Crow and Plate approached and then turned to stand on either side of, as if at attention. At least, Viktor was pretty sure it was a woman, though a taller and fatter one than any he'd ever seen. Three, maybe four times the mass of a normal human, the skin flabby and wrinkly and loose. And yet, her corpulence seemed to owe at least as much to muscle and sinew as to fat. Like a hulking athlete with pillows beneath her arms, dressed in an ill-fitting coverall
of gray leather and topped off with a white robe the size of a vacuum tent. The expression on her face was sharp, almost angry.
The air immediately surrounding her appeared blurred, hazy, as if she sat in a little fog that hugged her closely. But the fog did not swirl or convect, did not appear, in fact, to move at all. At the fat woman's feet lay the dog-thing—hairless, also unmoving, looking up at Viktor with cold, measuring eyes.
The two couches on either side held men, or at least what looked like men. Again, their bodies were oversized, nearly three meters tall, but though these two bulged with muscle, their gray skins were tight and smooth and lean. Olympian godlings, they seemed, taking rest in their white palace in the sky. No, not resting, he saw; though they seemed to sprawl easily on the couches, their muscles were tense, their postures such that they could roll to their feet and spring directly to action on half a moment's notice.
Viktor felt Malye's shoulder tense beneath his grasp as he tried once more to reassure her, or perhaps himself, with contact. Behind him, he heard Sasha step through the membrane and draw in a sharp breath. For an instant, nothing and nobody moved. It was a frozen moment, cool and tight and palpable, a moment which pressed itself indelibly into Viktor's memory: the white chamber, the couches, the accusing stares of the animal and the five strange people. And most of all that smell, a faint, chemical sort of sweetness he could not identify.
Nobody moved, and nobody moved, and then the fat body of the Queen shifted its weight forward a little, setting ripples down the loose skin, and the stillness was broken.
“This moment culminates long anticipation,” the Queen said, in a deep and musical voice.
“Hi,” Viktor returned, as casually as he could.
What happened next was a blur that Viktor would not reconstruct in his mind until much later. One of the Olympians rolled off his couch, hitting the floor in a crouch and then moving toward him in a boneless, fluid, flailing manner, like a tied bundle of hoses rolling down a steep ramp. In absolutely no time at all the godling brushed Malyene Andreivne aside like a curtain, reached for Viktor with a huge, long-fingered hand, and lifted him.
