Finder

by Suzanne Palmer

  “Yeah,” Mari said. “I actually saw that part.”

  He looked at her, noticing the redness of her eyes. Had she been crying? “You saved me!” he said.

  “No,” she said. “If you can remember, you should.”

  “I can’t.” His head hurt. He stared around the long, narrow room. It was metal-walled, not rock, and curved slightly over its length. “Where are we?”

  “Inside Sunshield One,” she said. She was hanging back from him. Afraid? Angry? He didn’t know, didn’t understand.

  He couldn’t help himself, and grinned. “I’m so glad you’re alive,” he said.

  She nodded warily. “It was close.”

  “Me too. Graf stabbed me a couple of times. And the Luceatans . . .” The words tumbled out in a rush. He remembered bits of the beating in the bay, the knife against his throat. “Everything’s a jumble. I should be dead. How did you save me?”

  “I said I didn’t,” she snapped. “Think, Fergus. Remember. It’s important.”

  “I ejected us into space. I don’t think Graf got his face shield closed in time. I’d been beaten. Broken ribs—two or three. Collarbone or shoulder, maybe both. One arm. And then Graf stabbed me in the back, and he ripped my leg open, and then he stabbed me in the stomach,” Fergus said. He met Mari’s eyes. “It hurt,” he finished lamely, “but I didn’t give him the ship back.”

  “Getting the ship was that important?”

  “It wasn’t just about the ship,” he said.

  “What was it about?”

  It’s about lost things, he thought. “It doesn’t matter.”

  He broke his gaze away, looked around the room again. Inside a sunshield? There was a place he never expected to be.

  “What happened after you ejected?” Mari asked.

  “Nothing,” he said somewhat angrily. “I woke up here.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Yes,” he said, emphasizing the word. “Yes. I was in space, and Graf was trying to get his shield down, and the knife was shining, and . . .” He trailed off.

  “And?”

  “Fuck you,” he said. “There was a big black triangle, okay? It flew right past me.”

  “No it didn’t, Fergus,” she said. “It stopped. It took you and Graf. It only gave you back.”

  “I don’t understand,” he said. He floated there in silence for several long minutes, trying to absorb it all. He felt fine, looked fine. Normal.

  “They kept you for two days.”

  “What?! No,” he said. “I just—”

  “Two days.”

  “Two days? What’s happened? Where’s the ship?”

  “It’s right where you left it,” she said.

  “No one’s tried to take it?”

  “No.”

  “But the war’s over? Gilger’s on the run, right? People have started cleaning up and fixing things? The Wheels is safe, Arelyn Harcourt is okay—”

  Mari jerked her head back, staring at him sharply. “What?!”

  The last of his strange detachment snapped and was gone. “She’s not . . .?”

  “What happened to Arelyn?!” Mari cried. She grabbed his shirt, shaking him.

  “Gilger. He said he’d sent someone to Mars to grab Arelyn and if Harcourt didn’t back off, he’d have her killed.”

  She punched his shoulder. “Why the fuck wasn’t that the first thing you told me?!”

  “I just woke up, and my head’s been all full of crickets!” Fergus shouted back. “And you said it’s been two days! What have you people been doing?!”

  Mari buried her face in her hands for a few moments, then looked back up at him, no less steel in her eyes than before. “It took me most of that time just to get this far. All the comms were blocked, nothing was moving because of the Asiig, and Harcourt’s people have all disengaged. I couldn’t reach anyone who could help me. I guess now I know why. Shit,” she said. “Shit.”

  “We can still fix this,” Fergus said. Her flystick was tethered in one corner, plugged into a charging outlet. “We go get Venetia’s Sword. We use it to pin down as many of Gilger’s people as we can while the Governor moves in and demand Gilger releases Harcourt’s daughter in exchange for his own life.”

  “You really think it’s all that easy?”

  “No, but also kind of yes,” he said. “Why can’t it be?”

  She grabbed his arm, not hard. “You need to see something,” she said. She pulled him from the room, down a narrow hall, and into a small chamber with a hammock, her pack drifting beside it. On the far side of the room was a tiny portal, and she shoved him toward it.

  He peered out. Venetia’s Sword was a tiny beacon, bright and shining in the sunlight outside the Halo, right where he had left it. Above it and to each side it was dwarfed by three black triangles, unmoving, unfathomable. “I . . .” Fergus started, then realized he had no idea what to say.

  “They’ve been there since they picked up you and Graf,” Mari said. “There’s a fourth making a slow circle around Cernee. No one’s ever seen anything like this, and certainly never more than one ship at a time. No one knows what it means, but I think they’re waiting for you to come back and get the ship.”

  “What? So they can kill me? No way.”

  “They had you for two days. Why not kill you then?”

  “To play with me?”

  “Play with you? Do you have any idea what they did to Graf?”

  “You said they didn’t let him go.” I remember screaming, he thought.

  “Yeah, well, that’s not exactly true.” Mari reached into a pocket, pulled out a small cube, and flicked it across the intervening space to him.

  Fergus picked it out of the air, turned it around in his hand. It was reddish with white streaks, about a centimeter per side, and hard as stone. “What is it?” he asked. “Marble?”

  “No. It’s Graf.”

  He let go of it hastily. “What?”

  “Started drifting into Cernee the day before they popped you out. I hear people are calling them meatcubes,” Mari said. “They’re impervious to any attempt to cut or break them, but if you put two next to each other that were, ah, adjacent in the original, they click together like magnets. You can pull them apart again.”

  “How do you know that’s Graf?”

  “There’s a competition to see who can find and put together the biggest chunk of him. Someone has about a third of his head and got a retina ID match.” She plucked the cube from the air and tucked it back in a pocket. “Word is Gilger has completely dumped his shitpack and he’s taking his anger out on everyone and everything still in his reach, which thanks to the Asiig isn’t much. Everyone’s stuck where they are, terrified of being taken. If we can find you a suit—”

  “Hold on! What happened to my suit?”

  “The Asiig dumped you out in a big clear baggie,” she said. “It disintegrated as soon as we got inside atmo in the sunshield.”

  A voice spoke up from behind them, startling them both. “The Vahn risked her life to reach you. It was foolish.”

  They spun around. A white-suited figure was floating in the doorway, its mirrored face shield a blank, intimidating wall. Fergus stared at the Shielder for a moment, then back at Mari.

  “I was trying to get back to the Wheels—just like some idiot made me promise—by sneaking around the backside of the sunshields when the Asiig appeared out of nowhere and dropped you practically right in front of me,” Mari said. “So I grabbed you and brought you here.”

  “Why not take us back to the Wheels?” Fergus asked Mari.

  “For one thing, we only got here about three hours ago. I’ve been waiting for you to wake the fuck up. And anyway, you think you’d be welcome back at the Wheels? Or anywhere in Cernee? Everyone saw you get sucked up by the Asiig and probably saw you get
squirted out again too. No one is going to trust you because no one knows what the Asiig have done to you.”

  “No one asked us if we minded,” the Shielder interrupted.

  “Well, do you?” Mari demanded.

  “We cannot now know,” the Shielder said. “It has been added to the Narrative, so it must be as it has been.”

  “What—” Fergus started to ask, but the Shielder shrugged, spun in the doorway, and was gone again. He looked to Mari. “What?”

  She glared at him. “Just don’t talk to them. They don’t like it. That’s why they almost never leave the sunshields. And unless you want to spend the rest of your miserable life here having enlightening conversations just like that one, you need to start thinking about how to get to your ship, because there’s nowhere else you can go now.”

  “I’m the same as always.” He held out his arms. “Look at me! It’s just me!”

  “When the Asiig change people, sometimes they add limbs, subtract limbs, change your skin to living stone, stuff like that. And sometimes they change things you can’t see. When they took Mother, back when she was my age, they only had her for two days too. And look what happened to us.”

  “I don’t—” Fergus stared at her, and she stared back with her defiant, green-brown eyes. Not violet. Not like Mother Vahn’s. Why hadn’t that clicked before? “Your eyes,” he said. “They aren’t the same as the other clones’. How is that possible?”

  “We’re not clones, you dumbass. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. They changed Mother, but in ways you can’t see. We just replicate, one way or another. My birth mother was Mother’s eighth gene-identical granddaughter, and she ran away and met a man at Crossroads, and . . . well. Here I am, anyway.”

  So Graf missed some after all, was Fergus’s first thought.

  Mari continued, “That’s why we stay here. Whatever the Asiig wanted Mother and her descendants to inject into the human genome, we decided to keep it to ourselves instead. We assume we’re dangerous. And if people knew, there’d be a lot more of them trying to kill us than just Gilger.”

  “That’s why you didn’t dare go to Mars with Arelyn.”

  “Yeah. And now you’re an alien experiment too, except unlike us, everyone knows it about you. You’re a freak.”

  “Fuck you,” he said.

  “Welcome to my world,” she said. She dangled something out of one hand, let it float toward him. “The key to my ’stick,” she said. “Borrow a suit. Go get your ship.”

  “I can’t,” he said. He tilted his head to one side, let the key sail past him. “I’m scared. I don’t know what to do. Does that make you happy?”

  “No!” she shouted. “No, I’m not happy! Members of my family have been killed, friends have been killed or hurt, my best friend’s been kidnapped in a war you helped start, and you think it’ll make me happy again to see some poor, groveling dirtsider finally admit what everyone already knows, that he’s useless?”

  “Get out,” he said, quietly.

  “What?” Mari said.

  “Go. Get out. Leave me alone,” he said, pointing at the door.

  She pushed past him, grabbed her ’stick key, then did a cannonball for the door. He knew he should apologize but couldn’t, could do nothing but stare at her as all the anger and hurt he had ever felt sat like a lump in his throat.

  “Fine,” she said. “You’re on your own, then. Good luck with that.” She pushed her way out the door without looking back.

  He pulled his knees up to his chest and floated, arms curled around himself, and tried to retreat back into his faded memories of sunlight, grass, water, open sky. Instead, all he had was himself, and failure, and the memory of crickets.

  * * *

  —

  When he opened the door, he half expected Mari to be floating there, waiting with a caustic and well deserved Took you long enough. The hallway was empty.

  Not having any better ideas, he picked a direction and went. The high-ceilinged corridors of the sunshield curved along its exterior lines, slowly narrowing as the giant concave disk thinned towards its edges. The walls were covered intermittently with light etchings, and he slowed down once or twice to look at them. Figures in a sort of endless metal-scratch tapestry.

  “That’s the Narrative,” a voice said, and Fergus looked over to see another Shielder in the hall. Her face shield was open, and her face was painted in an intricate, abstracted floral design of dark reds and purples. “It is our record of everything that is, from when we built the very first shield to when others began to arrive to live in the protection of our shade, and someday it will show our very last day, if it does not happen too quickly.”

  “It’s beautiful,” Fergus said, not quite daring to touch the etchings, though he desperately wanted to. “Although I don’t really understand it.”

  “Much the same could be said of history itself,” she replied. “This is our way of seeing, of being observers without being a part of the observed. Both are imperfect and necessary arts, and depend on others not to drag us into their events. If you understand me?”

  “Yeah, I think I do,” he said. “I’m sorry we ended up here uninvited, but I don’t think there was any other choice. History works that way too sometimes. Do you know where Mari is? Mari Vahn?”

  “She’s in the Sunpoint. Follow me.” The Shielder floated off down the corridor, and he pulled himself along behind.

  At last she stopped and gestured him forward toward a narrow tunnel with a heavy glass airlock. “In,” she said.

  He got in. “When the door seals, press the red button,” she said. “At the other end, press the green.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  The Shielder slammed the hatch shut, leaving him alone in the dark and the faint glow of a red button. He pressed it.

  It was like being sucked down the world’s largest drinking straw. One moment he was floating, claustrophobic, in the tube, and the next he was being pulled down feet-first as if a giant had wrapped one hand around his boots and given an enormous jerk. “Whaaa—!” he started to yell when he suddenly hit thicker, stickier air and began to slow. Slug field, he realized, his heart pounding. She could have warned me.

  Outside the tube was open space, stars, and a tiny silver ship with its three black triangle guards.

  When Fergus’s feet finally touched the far end of the tube, he was moving slowly enough for his knees to absorb the bounce without discomfort. He tapped the green button and exited as quickly as he could through the opening hatch into a small hab.

  It was a circular room, quiescent monitors lining a long console bank in the center and a narrow band of windows running most of its circumference, suspended in space between Sunshields One and Two. A Shielder was working at a side console, and in the center, framed against Cernee itself, Mari sat in a grippy chair with her back to the room. There was a P2P unit in front of her, green light on top.

  “—sorry she yelled at you,” Mari was saying. “She’s probably just worried.”

  Harcourt’s voice rumbled low out of the speaker on the console, but Fergus couldn’t quite hear what he said. When he fell silent, Mari added, “Well, it’s still not your fault. I’d have found another way to escape the farm. It’s just . . . I’m scared. I don’t know what to do.”

  He tried to push off into the room and remembered too late that he was down to socks. Slipping on the floor, he sent himself tumbling head over heels through the empty space. The Shielder turned and watched him for half a minute before going back to his work.

  “Gilger blew a rocket through Ficklecan,” he heard Harcourt say, audible now. “There was an Authority squad stuck there when the Asiig showed up. They’ve been able to redistribute spare air to the residents who were suited up and survived the hull breach, but there are lots of dead. There was a crèche there for the children of gas miners away on the j
ob, and the numbers . . . Everyone is a sitting target, and I’m sitting here unable to do a damned thing. Hell, part of me wants to fire up Gilger’s shuttle and float the entire fucking Wheels to Crossroads, or Mars itself.”

  “Mauda would object.”

  “I’d rather she lived a long life never forgiving me for it than any of the alternatives.”

  “I suppose,” Mari answered.

  “You can’t blame this on Ferguson, you know.”

  Fergus blinked, opened his mouth to speak up; it seemed unfair now that they didn’t know he was there. Before he could, the Shielder turned again, opened his face shield to reveal a face painted with blue and purple swirls, and put a finger to his lips.

  “Gilger and Vinsic must’ve been planning this for a long time,” Harcourt was saying. “If anything, Fergus pushed them into moving sooner. Who knows how much more prepared Gilger might have been if he hadn’t?”

  “Maybe,” Mari said. She didn’t sound convinced.

  “I never thought he’d go after Arelyn,” Harcourt said. “If I did . . . damn, I hate what-ifs. If only Fergus—”

  “If only Fergus what?”

  “He knows Mars, maybe even better than I do. He wouldn’t tell you this, but he was a fucking hero there. If anyone could’ve found Arelyn and brought her back . . . I mean, that’s what he did: the impossible. But he’s not on Mars, and who knows what monstrous things were done to him? It feels like he was my only chance, and now he’s gone.”

  “But he—” Mari started to speak.

  “Oh, your friend has just now this moment arrived!” the Shielder interrupted. He stepped forward, gently grabbed Fergus’s arm, and propelled him toward a bar.

  “Gotta go,” Mari said, and disconnected the P2P.

  “I’m sorry,” Fergus said.

  “Why are you even here? I thought you were going to go sulk in a corner for the rest of your short, crappy life,” she snarled. She looked haggard and, much as he was loath to believe it, fragile. This is her world crumbling, he thought. It doesn’t matter that mine is too.