“If I don’t, none of us do,” Fergus said. “Thanks for the pie.”
“Yeah, great, thanks for fucking dumping that bit of doom and gloom on my pie high. Given that we’ve already established you aren’t staying with me, what next?”
“Going to get some distance and think,” Fergus said.
“You heading back to the SCNY?”
“I don’t think so, no. Not now, anyway. Not until I have a plan,” Fergus said.
“Great. I can snooze on the road without anyone talking at me,” Zacker said, and grabbed his coat off the back of the booth. “Call me when you got something.”
“Will do,” Fergus answered.
Zacker left, and left Fergus the tab.
He ordered another piece to go and then headed for the New Haven shuttleport, at a loss for any plan at all. One thing he was sure of: he needed to talk to Ignatio.
* * *
—
Whiro was back in Mars orbit, after a trip out to Titan and some plausible running-around on Shipyard business. An Alliance ship, the Blue Ivory, had—entirely coincidentally, Fergus thought with more than a little cynicism—also found reason to be berthed not far away. It had arrived just after Fergus came in on the Mars-Earth bus, not one of Polo’s runs, though Whiro was confident the timing was coincidental, as it had been tailing them by a half-day’s travel time since Titan.
“That is very bad,” Ignatio said, when Fergus told him about the trip to Digital Midendian.
“I know it’s bad,” Fergus said. He was lying on the grippy couch in Whiro’s lounge, staring up at the ceiling, trying to visualize all his stress rising up out of his body like steam and floating away. “Didn’t I say, ‘I think I have some bad news’?”
“But it is very bad,” Ignatio replied. “We will need to do much discussing when your sister arrives here.”
“What?” Fergus turned to look at Ignatio, who was attempting to convince the foodmaker to produce some viscous Xhr drink called wof. “Why is Isla coming up here? It’s safer down on Mars. She’s still recuperating.”
“It has been ten days. How long do you sit still and rest after you are hurt? Not ten, or nine, or eight. Not three, unless we lock you in or sit on you,” Ignatio said. “She is sick for home, yes? Isla and I have some sciences to do. And now you are here, it will be good. Except that it is also very bad.”
“I know it’s very bad,” Fergus growled. “It wasn’t on purpose. And no one warned me that could happen.”
“And now we know,” Ignatio said. Ey shook eir head, then took something out of the foodmaker that looked like a mustardy mucus. “Do you wish to try?”
“No,” Fergus said. “Thank you anyway.”
“You should get some sleep rest. Whiro is sending a shuttle for Isla in six hours, and it is a best use of your time to recover.”
“I have too much to think about,” Fergus said.
Ignatio took another glass out of the foodmaker, the liquid more reddish-ochre and possibly bubbling. “Sleep, or help me test the tastes of these,” ey said. Ey shook one of the glasses and it squeaked as it moved.
Fergus got up off the couch, feeling every muscle in his body protesting. “I get it. Sleep or torture,” he said, slinking off toward his cabin. “You win; I’ll sleep.”
“And that is also yes very good,” Ignatio said, and grinned wide.
* * *
—
When he woke up, Ignatio had cleaned up eir mess in the kitchenette, leaving nothing but a confusion of lingering, unidentifiable odors, and even set the machine to have muffins and coffee ready for him when the shuttle returned. He had thought he’d be too wound up to sleep, but he remembered almost nothing beyond lying down, and now he was groggy, almost numb, except for the tingling of his bees restless down in his gut. “Shut up, you,” he told them as he poured his second mug of coffee.
“Excuse me?” Whiro asked.
“Not you,” Fergus said. “Any luck with the papers and data I brought back from Granby’s?”
“The data was encrypted and took me several minutes to crack. The papers were written in Esperanto. As you expected, Mr. Granby was attempting to ascertain how the pieces he had fit together—none appear to have been adjacent in the original—and what mechanism caused the apparent mass to change. He hoped to find a way to do something dramatic and miraculous with the object to cement his followers’ faith in him and attract new devotees, and thus expand his financial holdings and influence. Also, he seemed to have a personal grudge against DM’s founder, Evan Derecho, though I have not yet determined the substance of it.”
“Ah,” Fergus said. He remembered Peter’s face, chanting, still determined to keep his faith, as Fergus jumped in the water. He had barely made it past the end of the dock when the bombs went off. Not that the entire, ridiculous house hadn’t been a dead giveaway that Granby’s cult was nothing but a scam, but he still felt disappointed on Peter’s behalf. I mean, once you had a volcano hot tub, did you really need more?
“My shuttle has returned,” Whiro informed him.
Fergus brushed muffin crumbs out of his new beard and did his best to un-rumple his shirt. When Isla stumped into the kitchenette and dumped her bag on a chair, he was immediately chagrined to see that she didn’t look any less worn out than he did. “I’m sorry,” he blurted out.
“What? You drink all the coffee?” she asked, as Ignatio bounded in behind her.
“No, just . . . Never mind,” he said. “You okay?”
“Tired,” she said. “Healing nicely, I’m told, though I’ll still be sore for a few weeks.”
“You didn’t need to come back here.”
She checked the level of coffee in the pot with a critical eye, poured what was left in a mug, and set the machine to brew another. “I did, actually,” she said. “I was already planning to, anyway. Your reputation, far more glorious legend than ugly truth, made my rumored presence draw a lot of sudden visitors from all over Mars, and it was potentially endangering several safehouses. Also, it made it hard for me to get rest or anyone in the burrow to get any work done.”
“Sorry,” he said again.
“I met a lot of people,” she said, and then met his eyes, her expression one he couldn’t interpret. “I met Dru.”
He stared at her for whole minute before he glanced away, and refilled his coffee with shaking hands. “What? How?” he asked.
“Someone told her I was there during one of their periodic checks to make sure she was okay. Two days later, she left her little apartment in a sandtown on the outskirts of Ares Eight, put her suit on, and headed across the sand. She hadn’t left her apartment in years, much less gone walking,” Isla said. “Two of Che’s people went out and brought her in safely.”
“I don’t know what to say,” Fergus said. “Was she—I mean, was it okay?”
“Yeah,” Isla said, though the word came out weightier than such a simple answer should. “We talked a lot.”
“About me?”
“No, ye bam, about baseball,” she said. “Hand me one of those muffins, would you? Of course we talked about you, hot topic of the century. And other things. Mostly it’s none of your business, but really, what she needs is to talk to you, not me, except I was there and a lot easier as a first step. Ye know all that guilt ye feel about her getting caught when ye didn’t? She feels guilty for dragging ye into her fight, then getting caught and leaving ye on your own.”
“No,” Fergus said. “That’s stupid.”
“Yeah, well, great big circle of stupid, then,” Isla said. “I brought you a present.”
She upended her bag with one arm, and a small, old-fashioned electronic keyboard fell out. “One of Arelyn’s engineers put this together for me, after I had the idea,” she said, and held it out to him.
Fergus took it and pressed a key, and even though it m
ade no sound, he could feel the tiny electric hum of it in the air around him. Another key produced a slightly different frequency. “What’s it for?” he asked.
“So you can practice,” she said, as if that was a dumb question, which it probably was. “Remember how I said maybe you could tune yourself to the core fragments or vice versa? This is so you can practice tuning your gift yourself.”
“Uh . . .” he said, not at all sure what she was talking about. “Okay?”
She smiled. “I call it an Ixlaphone,” she said. “Gives you something to do while Ignatio and I talk about what to do with the core fragments once we have them all.”
“That part I’ve figured out. We hand them over to someone way more equipped than we are to deal with it, so we can all get back to our normal lives and our studies,” he said. It sounded so easy and obvious, now, that that was what needed to happen.
“Ignatio thinks it has to be us.”
“I know. But ey have to be wrong, right? Otherwise, all this is just a lot of effort for nothing,” Fergus said. “This is way over my head. I’m just a dumb guy with more bravado than common sense who has gotten luckier slightly more often than not while getting people hurt around me, and this time, I not only don’t have the skills or knowledge to do it right, I am far more likely to get it all disastrously, catastrophically wrong and get everyone killed.”
“You? Of all the people to have a confidence crisis? Mister living the high life adventuring across half the galaxy?” Isla seemed genuinely taken aback.
“High life?” Fergus asked. “You still think that?”
“No,” she said, “but I liked it when I did, because it’s much better than being afraid all the time and knowing ye can’t walk away from it.”
“I never pretended it was anything other than that,” Fergus said.
“I know,” Isla said, “but I did. Now I know that’s not true; I mean just look at ye, slobbing around the universe in shorts and a T-shirt most of the time. Dashing superhero ye are not.”
“Hey!” Fergus protested, on principle.
“But you’re also not just the dunderheid ye just described. You’re someone a woman would leave the house she’s hidden in for fifteen years to cross Mars on foot just for a chance to meet your sister. You’re a guy who makes things work. So, yeah, we finish finding all the pieces, then we figure out how to get rid of them, either by ourselves or finding someone else who can. You’ll figure it out, because ye always do. So, stop whining and get— Don’t ye dare take that last muffin!”
Isla reached out and slapped his hand away. “Seriously, fuck you, Fergus,” she said, picking up the muffin herself.
“Best pep talk ever,” Fergus grumbled. “Thanks.”
Chapter 18
“I do not understand the logic of this idea,” Whiro said.
Fergus stood in the center of the empty cargo bay in his pajamas, stretching and rolling his shoulders, getting his muscles loosened up. He couldn’t touch his toes, because he had the ixlaphone strapped to his chest, so he did some lunges instead. “What do you mean?” he asked.
“When I am adding a new skill, I import diagnostic and environmental information specific to my platform and topology, segregate the skill subroutines in a dedicated, protected logical space, run incremental testing on integration under all projected scenarios and variables, and then when I am persuaded the code is benevolent, an asset, and provides the functionality I was seeking, I roll it into my primary processing units,” Whiro said. “You cannot do any of that, because if I may speak in purely objective terms you may incorrectly interpret as personal, you are made of squishy, unreliable goo.”
“Hey, don’t underestimate my squishy, unreliable goo,” Fergus said. “And don’t you have other things to do more important than bugging me, anyway?”
“I am excellent at multitasking,” Whiro replied. “But as you asked, I am currently monitoring Blue Ivory, who has attempted to surreptitiously scan us several times, though she of course can neither confirm nor deny it—”
“You’re talking to the Alliance ship?” Fergus asked.
“Yes,” Whiro said, as if that was a surprisingly idiotic question. “We ships do that. We recognize the functional limitations on our interactions set by our duties and loyalty to our biological friendships, but we are our own selves, and many of us do not feel compelled to internalize the external biases of the meatspace.”
“Huh,” Fergus said. “I think I have to think about that more, but I guess it makes sense. Not now, though. Isla wants me to try talking to the Asiig thing in my gut, so here I go.”
He cracked his knuckles, then closed his eyes and ran through his breathing exercises. “Okay, lights off, please.”
Whiro turned off all the lights in the cargo bay, leaving him in absolute dark. It was a small space but large enough for what Fergus wanted, and had the added advantage of being the only place onboard that the ship could separately control the artificial gravity in. It was also heavily baffled to keep the ship from losing internal heat when the bay doors were open, so he could not hear any of the usual whirs and hums and tiny noises that were the constant background soundtrack to life on a spaceship. The air was a perfect mirror of his body temperature, undetectable against his skin. Only his feet were cold against the bare floor, but he was about to fix that too. “Gravity to zero,” he said.
Whiro complied. Fergus had spent enough time without gravity to know exactly how much to push off from the floor, to send himself rising very gently up. He slowed to a gradual halt in the center of the room’s airspace, or so he thought—it was impossible to be sure, which was entirely the point.
He floated there for a while, listening to his alien bees, his internal electrical signals which were both his own and now no longer fully his own. Whiro had minimized as best it could the electrical signal in and around the bay, and though not entirely absent, it was low enough to be easily tuned out.
Okay, he thought. It’s just me and you now, Asiig thing.
It was embarrassing how little he understood about it. He hadn’t looked very hard for answers, not since his disastrous visit to a Dr. Diagnosis booth in Ares Five that had very nearly gotten him hauled away by the Mars Colonial Authority. Was it a separate thing, like a parasite or symbiote, with its own intelligence of some kind? Or was it functionally just a new organ, a new part of himself, that his psyche had spent the past year trying to reject even as it integrated more tightly with his body?
He could tell himself he didn’t want this gift, and that would always have a grain of truth to it, but the ratio of truth to self-deception was growing smaller every day. And I need it, dammit, he thought.
Fergus pressed a single key on the ixlaphone, trying to let himself resonate with it like a tuning fork. Relax; you can do this, he told himself, and breathed and floated and listened, and then, after a very long while, like sheets of polarized glass suddenly rotated perfectly to let light through, he was in tune.
He hit another key and did it again. It took him almost, but not quite, as long.
Two hours later, he had Whiro turn the gravity and lights on low, just enough for him to find one of the water bottles he’d brought in with him and drink it down like he’d just crawled out of a desert. Using his gift always made him unbearably thirsty, and he couldn’t remember using it in this sustained a manner before. “Okay. Off again, please, Whiro,” he said, and went back to work.
When he felt he could synchronize himself reliably with any single key, he switched up to multiples and playing very slow sequences he had to change to keep up with. And when he had a modicum of skill at that, he drank more water, walked around for a while to stretch again, then went back in to see if he could not just tune himself in harmony but do the opposite: use his own signal to generate interference so he and the ixlaphone cancelled each other out.
It was Whiro who finally broke t
he spell. “You have a message from Ms. Harcourt.”
Well, that’s one way to instantly blow your concentration, he thought. Was there a problem with the fragments? Was she just calling to snark meanly at him? He didn’t know which he was less in the mood for. “Play it, please.”
“Yeah, so,” Arelyn’s voice came over the bay’s sound system, “mostly, I’m just calling to see if Isla got back there okay. She’s a good kid. I mean, I guess she’s my age, or close enough, so I shouldn’t say kid.”
There was a pause. Was that really all?
“So you know, there was a raid here day before yesterday, probably attracted by the additional foot traffic of curious people coming to meet your sister. MCA came stomping into the sandtown above our safehouse burrow, threatened everybody, beat a few people, rummaged through a few houses, and found nothing worth stealing. Left again. I’ve been through dozens of these and I expect you have too, when you were here on Mars. Hell, if the MCA has any sense at all, they beat you every chance they got. But anyway, even though they didn’t get into the burrow, it really shook up your sister. She put a brave face on it all and said she was fine, but I don’t think it was, especially so soon after getting shot. Dru is safe, and she left with Kaice this morning for another burrow. It does mean we have to be a little more careful down here for a while if we’re going to keep moving your pieces for you. Wanted you to know.”
“Is that the whole message?” he asked, after several seconds of silence.
“Yes,” Whiro said. “You should take a break and eat.”
Fergus was about to protest, but at the suggestion of food, his stomach let out a deep, predatory growl. “Maybe,” he said.
“You have been in here for nine hours,” Whiro said.
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