The dirt came from a hill above Port Au Prince. She was Haitian, from one of the floating city-states on the Caribbean scraped together out of the sea’s plastic waste. Her aptitude scores had made her a desirable target, and she was drafted upstairs to the orbital arcologies.
At the end of three months, we had our good news/bad news: we eventually came across a vein of analogous crystal content in a chunk of silica-heavy granite, but it was crushed to gravel a mere ten or twenty million years ago, which was weird because it was out on a slab of feldspar and basalt that hadn’t known seismic pressure since long before earth had oceans or a stable atmosphere.
The other good-bad news was that we got our instantaneous ping, but it wasn’t from Mars. One of our survey satellites picked it up for about fourteen seconds when it was recalibrating after a breakdown. Liu Wei’s voice was coming back to us a good eight minutes ahead of the light-wave from earth, but the signal was coming from further out.
Europa, Ganymede, and Titan were occupied and Pluto even had an automated staging area for interstellar missions yet to come. But unless Wei was laying down an elaborately simple hoax, something out there was bouncing back the signal.
Wei’s mining interests combed the asteroid belt for a couple weeks before they found the source. It was deep in the belt, more than halfway to Jupiter. Passed over by generations of surveyor drones until suddenly it began speaking with our master’s voice.
In bed, Bedjina wondered if the stones proved anything besides that we should leave them alone. The Martians destroyed theirs millions of years ago. Maybe they destroyed Vulcan, too. The Vulcanic stone was the only artifact from what must have been a planet comparable with Mars, if not a twin, before it was demolished. Was it so much harder to believe that these stones could destroy worlds as well as connect them?
Even we were kept out of the loop, but rumors came back through the shipyard that the asteroid was occupied when they found it. If there were freefall Deaviants living on it, Wei’s prospectors took care of them and spiked the enormous rock with suicide boosters, so it came screaming into Martian orbit in less than three weeks.
Maybe if it had come a little earlier, Bedjina and I might have still been together, and things might be different. Both moody, badly out of sync, we picked on each other. She said I only chased her because she was the most different, the most difficult, and I would never understand her. I told her I hoped I never did because what was love without mystery? Not the right thing to say, and maybe nothing was.
The plan was to examine the asteroid on Deimos, and if it proved to be everything Liu Wei foolishly dreamed it was, he wanted us to set it down on Mars at a corresponding longitude and latitude to Babel Tower on Earth and on a ley line. When Dr. Kubra and I explained that Mars lost its magnetic field a couple hundred million years ago and so had no ley lines, Wei told us the stone would reactivate it if properly placed, and we were directed to a cargo container that contained dowsing rods.
But we believed we had much more than Wei’s subspace talking-rock. The asteroid was similar in composition and nearly identical in crystalline structure to Babel Tower. It was unmistakably a piece of a terrestrial planet that once orbited between Mars and Jupiter, proving any number of tinfoil-hat loonies and amateur astronomers correct. We also had proof that Vulcan—we christened it with a bulb of Dag’s moonshine—was inhabited.
We were already a cult, worshipping Liu Wei’s delusions. Without any significant debate, Strothers and a team of wildcat miners set the thing down on Deimos and domed it.
The stone was similar to Babel Tower in general outline, but a crust of hundreds of spiny crystal growths had accreted up and down its surface. Pits and divots from microasteroid impacts, Pierre insisted, were badly eroded markings not unlike cuneiform. The debate was cut short before it truly got started. It was a moot point.
As soon as the pressure was thick enough to carry a sound wave, the stone began to sing.
Sensors observed nothing beyond some minimal gas exchange and oxidization, but it keened like a tuning fork, rumbled like a stomach. It was Kroll who realized first what the sounds were. Voices. Recorded voices, like ghosts escaping a haunted house ahead of the wrecking ball.
Have you ever been in love? When the sex is no longer conquest but not quite comfort, when the smell of each other has disappeared but still works its magic on the mind, have you ever known that wordless rapport, that feeling of pushing against some barrier, some evolutionary leap that only love could make? I felt it then, looking to Bedjina as she looked at me, smiling shyly as if I’d caught her kissing the medal glued to the inside of her helmet. The ocean in the shell, I thought, and she nodded.
That the crystalline matrix of the stone had stored and was continuously emitting the voices was debatable. What was not was the multitude of burrowed holes in the base of the stone, totally unlike any natural weathering. Packed with much lighter volcanic pumice shot through with obsidian shards and scarlet hematite nodules—it had to be metamorphic rock created in an atmosphere. And there were other objects, cylindrical bubbles with the right angles and contours of manufactured artifacts. Cautiously, wary of interrupting the eerie chorus, we drilled into the newer rock and almost immediately hit a harder metal, which shredded the carbon-steel drill bit.
Inside the handmade crevice in the stone, so like the badger’s burrow of Horton Deaver’s home, we found a gray cylinder that was not just crafted but machined. I extracted one myself and set the spidery diggers to complete the excavation.
Most likely, I thought, it was some kind of fluke, a shucked oxygen bottle or dud demo charge from one of the rogue miners’ colonies, somehow sealed up in a lava tube in an asteroid over two hundred million years old. Stranger things happened every day, sure. Because some strange alien artifact would not have had sockets in it clearly designed for cable connections little different from any uni-coax jacks in our homes. It was simple to scan them and fabricate. One socket was mechanical in nature and frozen solid; the other two begged to be connected to electricity and a computer.
By now, the sound of the stone had become orchestral. It shivered with eons of echoes, with all the sounds of a teeming jungle rife with life, not the sterile silence of the void. We were ecstatic, as the ant must be when it beholds the magnifying glass.
I tried to express my joy, but no words would come. A pure animal roar came from my lips, and the others joined in, howling like apes as the loudest voice of all spoke our names.
The noise was so loud now, it was like a light. I reached out into the white icy migraine glow; I reached out for Bedjina Pierre, for anyone, for a hand—
I was screaming for help, we all were, but none of us heard the others’ words. Alerts flashed across the faceplate of my helmet, but they were blocky hieroglyphs. Kroll held his hands up, choking on something. His face red, he made these sounds …
I’ve heard that you hear completely foreign languages as strings of maybe four or five phonemes, screening any recognizable pattern from the jumble of alien sounds. The Romans coined “barbarus” to depict the guttural barking sound of Germanic tribes. Kroll was Swiss, Vietnamese, and at least two or three other things. The language coming out of his mouth was not German so much as a German in the full grip of glossolalia, speaking in some primal yet utterly private language, like he was striving to remake a whole language from the syllables of his own name.
Strothers and Pierre both screamed back at him. I reached for Bedjina, calling her name, but every time I said it, she looked more alarmed. I tried to reassure her. She cried, shaking her head, and kicked at me when I came too close.
Kroll kicked off from the stone, headed for the exit. Strothers shouted at him in his own new language. He might have concluded that what had happened to us must be contained. Maybe he believed we were possessed, that he alone was still sane, still himself. Maybe he just thought the wiry, retiring systems analyst was going for a weapon. He lunged at Kroll, who grabbed for a welding torch. Strothers dro
ve a pickaxe into Kroll’s chest. With a dying hand on the torch wand, Kroll licked out a blue needle of flame that cut through his own helmet and sheared off the right side of his face.
Bedjina was still backing away from me, eyes wide but unseeing, struggling to speak words. Her speech was a beautiful waterfall of French wreckage, but somehow, it made me crazy to hear it. I tried to say “I love you” in the French she’d taught me, but my attempt sent her fleeing.
I went after her. Strothers came after me. I managed to lock him in the dome with the stone, but he immediately went for the medical chest, and I knew he’d burn his way out with the torch. Bedjina swam up the corridor and locked herself in the common area.
Dr. Kubra came out of her hutch, saw me, and ran toward me with her arms wide, gobbling nonsense. Maybe she thought I’d help her, maybe she thought I was a threat. I could make no sense of her speech, could see only gray empty panic in her eyes. The only thing I could make sense of was the bloody trenching tool in her hand.
I ducked and threw her over my shoulder into the bulkhead and was into my hutch before she recovered. I heard her bash the door with the tool a few times, shrieking and panting.
We had suffered a collective nervous breakdown, some kind of hysterical aphasia. Damage to specific areas of the brain could render one incapable of distinguishing one face from another, and Broca’s area and several other loci were associated with language dissociation. We’d just taken a big hit of something, but nothing said it would last.
“Do not fear,” said the intercom in an utterly flat, monotonous, halting voice, like a robot that had a stroke. “You will defeat the others and father numerous descendants with their females. They shall make a language of your name.”
I looked at the intercom. I wanted to kiss it. I knew I was speaking English—I could hear the words—but the brains of the others had been stirred up with a stick. And yet, the flashing alerts meant nothing beyond their context. I could not make any sense of printed words, so it followed that whatever I was thinking and speaking, it wasn’t English.
But whatever my language was, the intercom spoke it.
“You can beat them all, but you must set yourself free.”
“How’s that?” I asked. Not, who are you? The roaring in my brain would not let me ask for anything but relief.
“You must … punch a hole … trepan yourself. You cannot trust the others to do it for you.”
I made sure the voice meant I should punch a hole in my skull.
“That is the only way to be free of it. Your rival is already making your dead friends into a computer.”
“How can you understand what I’m saying? Are you talking to them, too? Who the fuck are you, anyway?”
“We are not talking,” said the intercom. “I have no body.”
Eater of Shadows was as true a friend as ever I knew.
That was his name; he told me so. He was an astronomer and magus in Atlantis, and he was right. I only had to punch a hole in my head to be free of the pain. Blood jetted out of the wound, like a swarm of red hornets, splashing off the wall and hanging in microgravity. I floated in an asteroid field of my blood—so ecstatic with relief that I almost passed out before cauterizing the hole.
He told me about the ones from beyond Pluto—the mission computer lexicon shit a brick trying to translate before calling them “barnacle geese”—and how they had colonized Earth, as so many other worlds, and experimented upon humans to expand their intellects, but also to make them useful slaves. Vanished civilizations at Sacsayhuaman and Tiahuanaco in the Andes, in the South Pacific, in Central Asia, and in sub-Saharan Africa built pyramids and yielded up mountains of heads and hearts before weird, indifferent gods. The gods who descended performed surgeries on and sometimes mated with them. All of the enslaved and hybrid peoples either rebelled or were abandoned by the ones from outside—the voice went to Spanish, called them amigos—and collapsed utterly into chaos and cannibalism, like domestic pets left to the wolves.
Some shamans and kings left their bodies entirely to fly with their masters into the infinite dark, to behold wonders and learn secrets such as no ordinary human minds could possibly comprehend. This was how Eater of Shadows came to be interred inside the asteroid.
He was a messenger left behind to instruct us when we reached the outer planets. We did not have to be exterminated as a nuisance. We could adapt to the true nature of all creation, open our minds to the unacceptable truth that the universe was alive and consciousness was its preferred diet. We could learn the old ways and sing the old songs and become one with the cosmos, or we could be utterly destroyed.
That was why the stone had fried our speech centers, Eater of Shadows explained, though he clearly knew little more about the motivations of the “amigos” than I did. Such defense measures often stopped upstart subject races from leaving their home worlds, and there were stones such as this one everywhere they had visited in eons of interstellar rape and pillage. Maybe it was a way to keep us down, and maybe it was a way to spur leaps in evolution. Create a catastrophic bottleneck by turning everyone against each other. Whatever emerged was bound to be smarter, tougher, more useful—
The barnacle geese were coming back, and they were closer than we knew. Eater of Shadows showed me the view of the stone chamber, where a spider-drone with one of those ancient cylinders hot-wired to its thorax was plowing the floor. Its scythe-like forelegs gouged the soil of Deimos while its whirring palps sowed the red-black seeds we thought were hematite nodules into the furrows. Not seeds, I was told, but spores.
Other drones patrolled the complex and the shipyard, where most of the 215 workers, staff, and researchers had massacred each other within minutes of our meddling with the stone on the other side of our tiny moon.
Kroll sat in the medical bay, gone from the eyebrows up. A bunch of cables snaked out the holes in his skull to another cylinder. He looked intently at something out of view while joylessly masturbating.
The rest of the cameras were destroyed or showed only blackness and cold.
Strothers was the strongest. Kubra was the smartest. But Bedjina was cleverer, more aggressive than anyone else on the team. I wondered—I still do—if we had still been together, if she still felt about me as I did about her, if we might not be closer than ever. A culture, a species of two. Maybe we could still overcome the alien meddling, and we didn’t need to speak. By now, the smell of the others made me sick to my stomach. I didn’t realize how angry I was until I packed a bag with medical supplies and water. The bulbs burst in my fists, and I wrenched the door off the cooler. My helmet wouldn’t pressurize; Kubra had cracked the visor.
I must have destroyed the whole room in a red fury. I was still swinging at nothing when the hatch popped open.
Strothers sprang into the room and flew into the arc of my helmet. I cracked his jaw and sent him corkscrewing into the bubble wall overlooking the convex lunar horizon. I kicked him, clawed at him and painted the walls with his blood. I backed away, horrified at myself, but he kept dying. I seethed with such rage that I couldn’t stop until I’d crushed him like the water bulbs.
He was blind. His eyes were gone, sockets packed with red, soggy gauze held on with surgical tape. He had a choke-chain on. He’d tried to trepan his skull and failed, or someone had done it for him.
I could feel her behind me.
The choke chain jerked taut, and Strothers rose up to trip me. I turned, resisting the urge to lash out with my fists or my mind, wanting only to look into her eyes, to make her look into mine, and see what no language barrier could hide.
She stopped. She didn’t let me touch her. The migraine came back harder than ever when I came closer. She’d drilled herself smoothly and sealed the hole with meat-glue several shades lighter than her complexion, which was the color of a sunset through volcanic ash.
We could communicate mind to mind, but she wouldn’t let me in. I saw the grim outlines of fortress walls, electric chairs, bear traps, and bar
bed wire when I pried behind her eyes. She was repulsed by me, but we would have to work together. Bedjina Pierre, Khadijatul Kubra, and I were the only survivors. Kubra had killed Leitner in what looked like self-defense, but then she harvested his and Kroll’s skulls and plugged them into some kind of daisy chain with the terminal at the end. She wouldn’t, or couldn’t, explain what she’d been doing.
Eater of Shadows told me we had to leave before the barnacle geese came back. He was insane even for a disembodied brain in a jar, but he wanted us to survive.
The stone chamber and the airlock were controlled by the others—Kukulkan, a deranged high priest of Tikal; Commander Fiolkov, a Cosmonaut thought to have burned up on re-entry in the ’60s; and another who refused to identify herself but emitted bloodcurdling paeans to the Outer Gods until I snipped her speech cable.
The brain cylinders sabotaged the communications network. Without Kroll, without manuals we could read, we could only hack security cams to monitor the rest of the moon, which was again uninhabited, and the surface of Mars.
They were already building pyramids.
Many, if not most of the interlocked Venn-style geodesic domes that made up the bubble-bath skyline of Mariner City were popped and trailing debris on the ghost of a frigid wind. Gangs of eyeless slaves fumbled in quarries and loaded rust-red stones into ore carts under the glare of similarly eyeless but trepanned elites.
Headless, frozen bodies were strewn everywhere and failed to decay, awaiting the collapse of the hydroponic farms and storage. They ran amok inside, naked or clad in each other’s skins, conducting endless human sacrifices and building the heads into an aggregate mind big enough to incarnate their god.
When we turned to the stone, the only voice was that of Liu Wei. He must have drilled his own head and begun collecting others long before we found the stone in the asteroid field, and he’d mastered it, coming through so clearly that we could almost see him in burning purple phosgenes on our retinas, staring fixedly ahead in his pleasure dome, wired into a network of hundreds of severed heads. Impossible to tell if he was still reading from his book or giving orders because his speech sounded like stuttering variations on his own name, over and over and over …
Tomorrow's Cthulhu: Stories at the Dawn of Posthumanity Page 31
