Memory's Exile

by Anna Gaffey

  I mustn’t let him throw me. I will go to Carmichael in private and make him support me, that’s all there is to it. And I must not lose my cool again, I must not. I wish I could analyze Griffin. Perhaps he could give me some fodder, something surprising.

  And I suppose I could always transfer back to Earth, or to another station. I’m not tied to Selas against my will. Mother would be most pleased. But just the thought of waking up in a Dome instead of the station windows and Selas…it would be a Dome, too. I don’t have the contacts yet for a station contract elsewhere. The dismal claustrophobia of a Dome, no clear green, no dewy green, dark heavy dark dark dark –”

  [She breaks off the sentence, looking discomfited. Then she laughs.]

  “Hm. Quite absurd, that. I should examine it during my next meditation cycle. In any case, it’s after oh-seven and I’m due for the infirmary after my workout session. Heart, make a note for me to contact Director Osakwe again for specific transfer information regarding –”

  [Door chime. She checks her commbud and frowns.]

  “My commbud’s out of juice. One moment.”

  [Pause. Log cut, time counter jump]

  “I’ll have to make a stop on the Control Level. Apparently Mei Chen has a problem with the duty shift she’s been assigned. She’s waiting in the corridor. No exercise time for Nat this morning.”

  [She rolls her eyes. Behind her, the dark silhouette of a person steps into the frame. She does not notice as the figure moves closer, and closer, until Mei Chen’s face is visible in the dim light.]

  “I don’t know what she thinks I can do. Why can’t she take it up directly with Carmichael…”

  [A small, red-streaked hand clamps down on Nat’s shoulder. She starts, and turns her head.]

  “What are you doing in here?”

  Excerpt: personal station vidlog

  1 November 2242

  Dr. Natalia Ticonti, Ph.D., M.D.

  Doctor of Psychiatric Evaluation

  United Worlds DS 2075-5 [Selas Station]

  Satellite 1H-24HM, 24HM System [updated: Eos]

  [Archived: United Governance Board tri-system mission records, Earth]

  1 November 2242 AEC

  07:32

  This time, Jake knew he was dreaming, or hallucinating or astral-projecting or whatever psycho-historical tripe Nat tossed around. It couldn’t be real. No matter that he could smell the heavy green damp of the air. Dreams shouldn’t be this tangible, but it was one. It had to be.

  The shuttlepod was nowhere to be seen, nor was the Selas landing site visible. He was deep in some part of the forest amidst the dark whispering trees. He reached automatically for his science pack, but his back was empty. All right, fine, he could do without equipment. It was a dream. Piece of freeze-dried cake.

  The breeze was coming downwind. He could see the direction the tree roots grew and the patches of yellow moss creeping along the ground. And the exposed soil was a sour greenish-brown. That meant he was somewhere in the northwest forests of Octant One in Sector A-West, where they’d found the largest mineral deposits. How he’d gotten there was another matter, but…well, this was a dream. No big deal. Why was a more important question. Nat would ask why. Why trees? Why no pack? Why won’t you cry on my comforting shoulder about your dead sister?

  Needles and dry leaves crunched under his boots, and Jake smiled. At least his mind had allowed him boots this time. He thought back to his quarters and his bed and what had gone on there earlier, and wondered why the hell his subconscious wasn’t more devoted to gratification. If this was his hallucination, he should get to choose the locale and, more importantly, the participants. Con could keep his starring role. Like in the lab. No, delete that. Jake didn’t want to think about the lab.

  “Come on, then,” Con said. He stood off to the side, his back to Jake. Had Jake dreamed him up that second? Or had he always been there, lurking in the sheltering dark of the canopy? Jake stretched out a hand and touched his shoulder.

  “You’re okay? You’re okay. You look okay, but what am I saying, this is a dream, my dream, and I’m seeing you healthy because of course I want to see you hale and healthy. How do I know you’re really all right?” A thought occurred to him. “Shit. Are we—is this—are we dead? You can tell me, Con.”

  Con shrugged, and then he sidled into the dim green shadows between the trees.

  “Where are you going?”

  Con’s voice floated back to him. “To bring you in. Just ask the others.”

  “Bring me where? What—who are you talking about? Wait.”

  Con didn’t answer, and didn’t wait. Jake tramped after him. He pushed aside branches and leaves and shoved deeper into the woods, and he couldn’t see Con anymore, could only hear him crashing through the underbrush somewhere up ahead. Dream, dream, dream, he chanted to himself. Just a stupid dream. “Con?”

  The deep gloom of the trees enveloped him, oppressive, suffocating, as if he’d stepped into water. But he could see light in the distance; pale rays slivered through the clog of branches far up ahead. He pressed onward through an interminable mess of trailing leaves and sharp bramble. Dreams, he admonished the clinging branches, should not be prickly. As if in response, the bramble released him, and Jake thrust out of the wilderness into a clearing. He stopped dead.

  Not dead, he told himself. Dreaming.

  It was the spot where they had discovered the possible foundation. Amazing that the first station dwellers—particularly Chubaryan, the rabid scanner—had missed it, since their primary goal had been to build the station and the Selas habitat and take prelim planetary scans. Jake hadn’t spent much time with their findings, but parts of them had been available on integrated Dome records for years.

  The shadows of the trees rippled and shuddered across the grass and the moss-encrusted fragments of exposed stone. The stone resembled a wide, square jaw with teeth missing, the remaining sharp remnants crumbling and crooked. Rushes of leafy vines crawled between the stone, familiar leaves that Jake couldn’t quite place.

  “It’s here.” Con’s voice came from behind him. “Open it.”

  Jake was bemused. “Open what? I don’t see anything.”

  “Open it,” Santos said, and where had she come from? She stood beside Con, who was now studying his feet. Her throat was gone. Where it should have been was a horrible gash, a raw, meaty stretch of muscle, soft tissue, and bits of frothy white. Dry blood crusted the collar of her station uniform. Her eyes were as flat and expressionless.

  Nat hovered beside her, and where the hell had she come from? She beamed at Jake with red teeth. He shrank from her.

  “Yes,” Nat whispered, and stretched a hand after him. “Please open it. It’s quite serendipitous. Don’t leave us down here. Let us in.”

  “Um.” Jake reached for his belt knife. His fingers clutched at empty space. Dreaming. Dead. The dreaming dead. He didn’t believe in afterlives. He didn’t. He believed in dust and earth and decomposition. They were all decomposing before his eyes. “I don’t know what you mean.” He backed away and into the sizeable, solid brick wall of a chest.

  The brick wall belonged to Carmichael. He loomed over Jake.

  “You’re okay,” Jake told him. He strove to drive the shake from his voice. “You’re fine. You have to be fine. Who’ll file my reqs and tell me my ideas are impractical? You’re a Selas lifer even more than I am. You have to be. You know what’s out here, and you handle it.”

  Carmichael’s gaze was cold and assessing and unfamiliar. It was funny how little it took to deaden a face, a smoothing of wrinkles here, a snuffing of eye-spark there. Funny. Right. Jake swallowed. He was not going to be sick.

  “Men bring their demons with them, Jake.” Unsmiling, Carmichael tilted his head, and a thread of blood tracked over his neck, slipping down beneath his shirt. “We certainly aren’t demons.”

  A contradictory image struck Jake: Carmichael lying still and remote on an operating table, face blank, eyes staring at n
othing. Someone slid an injector needle into his arm port.

  Then the ground lurched under Jake’s feet, and the vision faded, and he was back on Selas amidst his friends, his crewmates, or the lifeless things wearing their faces. Even Mei was there, crouched on the ground at his feet like an animal. They surrounded him now so closely he could hardly differentiate between them. It was dizzying, nauseating, infuriating. Mick Boxhill stepped out from behind Carmichael, and he steadied Jake with both hands.

  “They’re in the station,” Mick said. He smiled with tremulous sympathy. The dusk tarnished his orange hair to amber and his skin to a sickly yellowish gray. “Imposters. Things are looking kind of shivery, y’know?”

  “No, I don’t know, you crazy asshole.”

  Mick lost his smile. “Just ask the builders.”

  And now he saw shadows beyond the silent countenances of his friends, unfamiliar faces, men and women dressed in old-time clothing, their faces gaunt and blue and lifeless.

  “Okay, I need to wake up now.” He felt a hideous, unaccountable wetness in his head, dribbling down his spine. “Enough dreaming. Don’t get me wrong, it’s been great. But I’m gonna wake up now. Wake up, Jake, wake up, wake up, wake up—”

  Con looked at him, his green eyes gone, replaced by blood-streaked globes of glass. They glistened in the dying light. He thumped Jake’s shoulder with a heavy hand, and the sensation made Jake’s head blaze raw and burning. “Just come down now. All of them. All of you. Come.”

  Jake pushed away and tripped over something: a body, the curled corpse of a Defense soldier—no, it was a lip of exposed rock. Nothing like a body, nothing at all. The real bodies littered the ground, people dressed in lab coats or fatigues that did little to hide their jaundiced flesh, their empty, open mouths crusted with bilious yellow, their limbs twisted and jerky in death. They covered the grass and stone, and everywhere he looked he saw more of them.

  “Gives the term “fresh meat” new meaning, doesn’t it?” he’d said to someone else he didn’t remember now, some lab toady, probably. Illegal kidding, Oh, he’d said worse, but he was sorry, he had been sorry before the implant, before Rebecca and the others. His bodies, his collected corpses. He was afraid to look too closely.

  Mei wrapped her hands over his boot. Nat danced over a crumpled dark woman in lab clothes. Santos didn’t pay attention to the limbs and faces beneath her boots. Carmichael squatted down to assess the dead. But Con was still looking at him with eyes that gave nothing back.

  His legs gave out and he tumbled over backwards, but Jake didn’t hit the ground. Instead he fell into dark watery warmth, and he was afraid to breathe again, because this felt so much more enclosing than the smothering embrace of Selas’ wooded dark, and Lindy, who wasn’t there, said, “Not much loss.”

  He opened his eyes.

  For a long frightening moment, he couldn’t see anything. Jake blinked and tried to focus. There was something in front of his face. Whatever it was, it was so close that it blurred into unfamiliar textures and colors. Bright orange. Grey—station uniform grey. The fogginess retreated, and Jake looked into a pair of dark eyes.

  “Con?” He tried, but it came out mangled.

  “Who?” The eyes withdrew, and the textures and shapes clarified themselves into familiar goofy features and dark brown eyes, Mick Boxhill’s.

  “Oh. Hey, Mick. ‘S just dreaming about you.” His voice sounded slurry. Jake licked his lips, but it didn’t help. Mick glowered at him.

  “Uh huh. That sounds nice and romantic for you, but listen—”

  Jake batted at him. “Shuddup. Sleeping. Help Mei, okay? She’s—something’s wrong with her.” He didn’t mind anymore. As long as he didn’t dream, he was golden, moonbeams and starshine. No woods, no blood, no glass eyes. No lab or frygun, no shitty aim, no murderous friends, no inexplicable sentient murk. No screaming, absolutely none. Not too tall an order.

  The loose spring to his hand suggested that someone had kindly shot him full of painkillers. He looked down at his arm and saw a tiny aqua-colored vial emptying slowly into his port: a Vidernaphol cocktail, probably half-and-half with some of Lindy’s special KO mixture. Good stuff. Great stuff. If he’d been doing the mixing, he’d probably have put in a milligram of hydrosecon to heighten motor control recovery. Maybe. He didn’t really know painkillers anymore.

  “Stellar, you’re all high. Jake. Jake. Listen, you got to get out of here. I don’t know how much longer—” Boxhill let out a sobbing breath. “I need help and I can’t trust me, and I can’t trust anyone else. Or maybe I can’t trust you either, man. I dunno yet. Stupid, so damn stupid.”

  The infirmary slowly swam into view beyond Boxhill’s bright hair: the dark blue walls, the splashes of yellow hazmat suits in their coffin containers, the beeping and hissing of machines. “Mick, what’s going on?”

  “Oh, you know.” Mick dutifully stretched his lips, showing off the odd unexpected spaces between his teeth. He looked worse than he had the last time Jake had seen him. His eyes were bloodshot and shadowed by puffy dark circles, his face drawn tight with exhaustion and misery. And contrary to form, his wild carroty hair lay flat and subdued in disheveled tangles of grease. “Danger and death and no one to trust. The usual.” He looked around, and then reached under the bed. “I needed to get this to you. Carmichael said, before he took off. He said you’d know what it was.”

  He pressed something hard and round into Jake’s hand. Jake rolled it around and nearly dropped it. It felt faceted… “A memory gem?”

  “No sheeeit,” Boxhill groaned. “Look at the documents, man.” He looked around again, and his entire body tensed in one quivering stroke. “Oh holy superstar, okay, I gotta get out of here. Just. Read it. Carmichael wanted you to read it. Ah. Okay? Come find me when you’ve read it, and we can figure out what to do next.” He slunk down and out of Jake’s sight.

  “Mick?” Jake reached for him, but Mick was gone. Instead, a fog of greyish yellow pressed down on him. Jake blinked, and the blur shrank back and became ceiling tiles. That was better.

  A beam of light needled into his skull. “Ow.”

  The light snapped off. Jake saw nothing but iridescent spots, but the pain ceased. Mostly. “Ow?”

  “Good to have you back.” Lindy’s voice was dry and familiar as a pile of leaves. Jake closed his eyes again, and drifted off.

  When he woke again, he was greeted by blessed silence. No one shone lasers in his eyes, no one babbled frightening gibberish, and most important, no one was around to stop him from moving. Still, it took a moment to identify the bony feel of the mattress under him, and the emptiness around his cot, and the muffled commotion coming from the other side of the infirmary. Jake tossed back the hospital sheet and sat up.

  His ears unstopped themselves, and a nightmare of noise descended: an earsplitting alarm jangled, Lindy shouted something, trays rattled, and the swinging double doors that separated the operating room from the main infirmary banged open and shut.

  Jake hobbled out of bed. Something tugged painfully at the crook of his arm. A new vial and fluid feed line sprouted from his arm port, and he plucked them and let them fall before stumbling forward again. Sleep had stiffened his legs, and the floor was icy under his bare feet. Someone had managed to finagle him into a pair of hospital pajama pants, so big they threatened to slip off his hips.

  Kicking his legs to bring some of the life back, he staggered the few steps toward the OR and smacked to a halt at the doors. They were curiously unyielding. Jake pushed against them for a few moments before he understood: Lindy had locked them. He blundered away from the door and over to the OR’s observation window, where he pressed his face against the warm glass.

  Carmichael lay sprawled over the operating table. It was as if Jake hadn’t woken up. He tried to focus on the tactility of things, but everything was horrible and hazy around the edges. Maybe he was still asleep. How to tell for sure?

  “Carmichael? Doc. Lindy?” Jake pounded on th
e glass. “Lindy!”

  With scissors, Lindy carefully slit Carmichael’s undershirt to expose his dark chest. His face was as smooth and uncomprehending as a stone, his throat purple-black with bruises and dark smears of blood.

  Her expression grim, Lindy cut away the rest of Carmichael’s clothes and crawled over him to apply feed pads and sensors. She slapped on the OR’s overhead scanner. The heart monitor, a holographic representation, shimmered into view above Carmichael’s torso, the bluish image of the big heart still and silent as his body on the table.

  Lindy said something inaudible, and then Santos stepped forward with an adreno-serum vial and an injector needle. It was as if Jake’s deathly dream was happening right in front of him. He tottered and caught himself against the window, his fingers leaving sweaty smears. The women turned as one and stared at Jake.

  Santos’ neck was intact. Lindy looked like a corpse. Her narrow face was gaunt with exhaustion, her clothes mismatched under her lab coat. She snarled something at Santos. Then she snatched the injector and serum away from Santos, snicked them together, and slid the needle into Carmichael’s arm port.

  “Jake, you need to lie down.”

  Santos had materialized beside him. She led him back to the bed. Then she must have pulled some tricky Defense maneuver, because, between breaths, Jake found himself sitting on the mattress.

  “No,” he protested as she shifted him onto his back. “I can’t. Not until I…there was something.”

  He was supposed to do something. His neck brushed something hard under the pillow. He strained and caught a glimpse of a dark faceted ovoid—Mick’s gem, Toby’s gem for him, for Jake—but before he could reach for it, Santos’ fingers locked hard around his wrist. In the crook of his arm port, he felt the cold liquid push of a needle and KO. She’d drugged him, the tricky bitch.

  “Damn it, Santos, no. This is…you can’t drug a colleague without written or verbal consent of the station…master…”

  The medication worked quickly. His thoughts slowed in the cold wake spreading out from his arm, and his anger began to scatter. She’d done him a favor. She’d dragged him into space so that they could both watch the meteoroids. Space wasn’t so cold.