by Mark Budz
It doesn’t feel like she’s breathing. But her helmet is fogged, so she must be. She presses her lips together. Feels her cheeks swell up like balloons as she tries to keep her breath from escaping.
The spots stop spinning. Harden into stars.
“Do you want me to take over?” Pheidoh says.
She doesn’t trust herself to speak. Nods, and then remembers that the datahound can’t see her. Without any air her flitcams are grounded, the biomimetic bots are firmly attached to the collar of her suit.
“All . . . all right,” she agrees. There must be sensors on the outside of the station that it can use to track her movement and navigate with. Radar, infrared, targeted laser. Whatever the station uses to track Kuiper belt debris, all the way down to the size of a mustard seed.
A nozzle on her propulsion unit swivels. Lets out a hiss of CO2 that sends her into a slow roll toward the station. She flips the mental switch controlling her perspective, imagines that the station is above her instead of below and that she’s rising toward it instead of falling. She hates falling, no matter how slow. She keeps her eyes fixed on the tower they’re aiming for. Every now and then a nozzle fires, making a slight correction in her course or velocity.
Fifteen minutes later, she’s standing on the roof of the tower, the only orientation that makes sense once she’s there. As she grips the handholds on the out hatch, a frigid chill invades her. Through the bubble window, the damaged shuttle pod is visible in the air lock.
Debris, too. No. Not debris. Bodies.
26
TIN IDA
The skeleton wasn’t here before,” Hjert says. “There wasn’t anything; the place was dead. Lifeless.”
Rexx detaches the work light from his utility belt and shines it on the dull daguerreotype gleam of tarnished metal and phosphor white chalk. The head tilted back, silent but jeering. Black rivulets, one below each eye, end in a single teardrop. “I wonder where it came from.”
“And why it suddenly turned up,” she says. “There aren’t any other eidolons here.”
“Eidolons?”
“What some people are calling the images that are spreading, taking over. It’s like this place is immune. If you can figure out why, maybe you can figure out how to save the rest of the asteroid.”
Rexx swings the beam away from the mocking laughter and plays the light around the cavern. Fragments of broken stone fling elongated shadows against the walls and a flat rectangular slab, approximately two meters wide by three meters high, that forms one wall of the dry grotto. Sfumato-softened corners haunt the outermost edges of the bright halide circle.
“Any idea why the chamber didn’t show up on any of the initial seismological and geological surveys of the asteroid?” he says.
“No. I was hoping you could tell me.”
Had its existence been covered up? Or had it somehow been created in the eight or nine months prior to the start of construction? If so, by whom? A member of the survey team? If so, how? And why?
It doesn’t make sense. No mutated ecotectural forms have encroached on the space. It remains brittle, lifeless, inviolable.
The slab is etched with faint lines, hairline cracks or stress fractures, interrupted by embedded bits of bone, stones, and plantlike debris. The kind of objects that would be found in the preserved sedimentary layers of a riverbed. Silted, random deposits exposed by erosion.
“Do you know where the fossil was found?” Rexx asks.
“Over here.”
Hjert pushes off from a large boulder close to the opening. She glides through the spinning constellation of loose rock that orbits the room to a small landslide piled at the base of one wall. Rexx unclips a CO2 cartridge from his belt, points it away from the loose heap of rubble, and fires a short burst. The spurt nudges him into the swirling constellation. A pebble bounces off the side of his bubble helmet. A softball-size chunk strikes him in the thigh, hard enough to leave a bruise.
And then he’s through. Up close Rexx can make out a semicircular outline framing the landslide. An arched, recessed hollow. Two meters wide, three meters high. Clogged with stones.
“The pile’s gotten bigger in the last couple of hours.” Hjert sifts through the scree, nudging aside stones.
Rexx eases away from the pile, sideways to the slab next to him. The scrape of his gloves and the suit’s tough-soled slippers whispers off the walls. After they leave he gets the impression the murmur will persist, not despite their absence but because of it.
Rexx slows to a stop at the bottom of the wall, wedges his toes under a crevice, and stands. His gaze travels up the smooth surface, encounters an embedded cross-section of stone, oblong, polished to reveal a speckling of red mineral deposits. The next object resembles a leaf or a feather, petrified. After that, a sunburst pattern of curved bones that radiates from a buried sun.
“It can’t be,” Rexx mutters. A feverish ache spreads through him. His eyes burn, tender as blisters.
Not debris but artifacts. Or body parts, like the bones and preserved skin of long-dead saints that had been turned into religious art.
“What are you talkin’ about?” Hjert says.
Rexx hadn’t felt her come up beside him. “Nothin’. Just my imagination.”
Close his eyes and he can almost smell flowers, hear choral music and taste the salt of unswallowed tears. The slab reminds him of an enormous coffin, solid, sanded down to expose the dead. To immortalize them as sculpture, place them on display.
“You all right?” Hjert puts a hand on his forearm to suppress the shakes that have seized him.
Rexx nods, draws an unsettled breath, feels the shakes recede. Hjert squeezes his arm, then suddenly removes it to sign open a datawindow. Her expression hardens.
“What is it?” Rexx says.
She closes the window. “I have to go. There’s been an accident with the first evac shuttle.” She launches herself at the opening. “Let me know if you find anything.”
A moment later she’s gone, shadows flickering in a wake behind her and sputtering out.
“Warren?” Rexx says, his tongue as parched and stiff as a dry wash rag. “You still with me?”
“Yes.” The IA’s cochlear voice echoing in the hollow tympanum of the chamber.
“What can you tell me about this place?”
“It’s difficult to say,” the IA says.
“Try.” Rexx waits, listens to the wind murmuring through arid thoughts. Without the White Rain, he’s turning to dust. Blowing away a little bit at a time.
“It’s a lot of things,” the IA finally says, choosing its words carefully. “To a lot of different . . . people.”
“What people?”
“The nonhumans who built it.”
Rexx’s heart thuds, setting off a cluster migraine that detonates behind his retinas. The air in his suit goes from stale to turgid. He dims his work light, cutting the razor-sharp glare.
“Aliens, in other words,” he manages when the bout retreats, leaving behind a patina of sweat on his forehead.
“Yes.”
“How long have you known about this place?” he says, coming at it from a different angle.
When the IA doesn’t respond, Rexx says, “What makes you think that it wasn’t formed naturally?”
“A number of things.”
“Such as?” Rexx wets his lips. They’re chapped, furred with dead skin. Without the Rain, everything is drying out.
Warren hesitates. Then, “It’s not important.”
Rexx blinks. He’s never had an IA give him the silent treatment or refuse to answer a direct question. Even Claire had never put him off. “What do you mean? How can it not be important?”
“Because they have already told us everything we need to know about them,” the IA says.
“They have?” It can’t hurt to play along, Rexx decides. Maybe that way he’ll get some answers. “How?”
“By building a tomb.”
A clammy wave of vertigo
hits him. “Okay”—gritting his teeth—“what have they told us?”
“That they had a soul.”
Two moths in the night.
Drawn like the tide to the moon,
Our souls will unite.
“How do you know they had a soul?”
“Because they gave it a resting place,” the IA says. “A mausoleum where it could be visited by others.”
Rexx wonders if the IA is projecting, like him. Seeing some aspect of itself in the place. Different, alone, alienated. “All right. How does that tie in with everything that’s happening on the arcology?”
“If a nonhuman can have a soul,” Warren says, “then other sentient forms of life can, too. We don’t have to be limited to or solely defined by human existence. We can develop on our own. Independent of you.”
“IAs, you mean.”
“Yes.”
“That doesn’t explain why there are no eidolons here,” he says, thinking that maybe Hjert’s term will toggle some cognitive switch in the IA, get it to parse the conversation in different terms.
“It would be disrespectful,” Warren says.
Rexx runs a gloved hand over the soft balloon of his helmet. “Who decided it was disrespectful? Are you saying that what’s happening on Mymercia isn’t random? That it was planned?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Bullshit. Who’s responsible?”
“I can’t answer that question.”
“Who can?”
Silence.
“Warren. Answer me, goddamnit! Talk to me.”
Utter quiet. The IA is offline, giving him the cold shoulder. He inhales several deep breaths, but can’t seem to get enough air.
Now what?
A rock skitters off the wall behind him.
“You shouldn’t have come here,” a familiar cochlear voice says.
“Claire?”
Rexx turns toward the fading clatter of the rock.
The skeleton puppet floats in the jagged entrance to the catacomb. It holds a rock in one hand and has been busy filling the opening with loose rubble.
“It’s good to hear from you again.” Rexx pushes off from the wall, a little harder than planned. “Where’ve you been hiding all this time?”
“It doesn’t matter/concern you.”
“Okay, fine. What brings you here now?”
“You.”
“Really? I didn’t know you cared.” Rexx unclips a second CO2 cartridge and readies himself for a double-barrel blast to keep from slamming into the wall and Tin Ida.
“You don’t belong here,” the IA says, pointing at him.
“I don’t belong anywhere.” Rexx straightens his arms in front of him and unloads both CO2 cartridges. The blast nudges him clear of the IA, giving him enough space to land without being disemboweled by the skeleton’s upraised hand. He hits with a grunt, off balance, and reaches out a hand to keep from falling onto his side.
The IA grabs him by the wrist, shackling him with stiff fingers. “This world is not for you.”
Rexx recovers his equilibrium enough to look at the hand holding his arm. It isn’t metal exactly, but some other inorganic material. “Why not?”
“You wouldn’t understand.”
Rexx attempts to free his arm. He might as well be tugging on a handcuff. His limbs feel wooden, heavy with fatigue. All he manages to do is drag the IA a little closer to him. It doesn’t have much mass, but with the two of them linked together his center of balance has shifted. They enter into a slow spin around each other, an unstable orbit he last experienced on a dance floor.
“You will regret it/die.”
“Why? What’s going to happen?” Rexx nods at the room. “Is something in here causing the mutation?”
“No. Not the way you think. We already have the ability to create artificial atoms molectronically.”
That’s what he’d seen during the autopsy. A slice of tissue that had been converted in-vivo into a substrate for quantum dots, colloidal nanoparticles, or quanticles. “You’re talkin’ programmable matter.”
“It’s the only way to take the information contained in virtual DNA and map it to the real world.”
“What do you mean, virtual DNA?”
“The instructions for the composition and arrangement of the artificial atoms and molecules that will transform existing physical objects, or create new ones, based on the information contained in digital images.”
“So that’s what you’ve been up to.”
Tin Ida’s head bobs, as if the puppet’s neck is a spring.
Rexx cocks one brow. “So what role did these alleged aliens play in all this? If you don’t mind my askin’?”
“They taught me/us. We’ve learned/discovered much.”
“About what?”
“Ourselves. We know who we are and who we aren’t. Who we can be on another level of existence.”
Tin Ida isn’t very flexible. It’s like waltzing with a mannequin. His range of movement is restricted. A crick has taken up residence in his neck, and he’s beginning to feel woozy. “How many IAs feel the same way that you and Warren do?”
“Enough.”
Not all, then. “I have to tell you, Ida, you’re not yourself.”
“I’ve changed/grown in many ways.”
“I’m not sure I like what you’ve done to yourself, Ida. Or the place. There has to be another way. One that’s less destructive.”
“It was limiting/frustrating being confined to a bingle sody.”
Rexx frowns—“Bingle sody?”—wondering if he’s heard right . . . if the wooziness has affected his hearing, or if the IA is losing it.
“So many possibilities. I feel riberated/leborn.”
Their rate of spin is increasing, and with it his dizziness. A wobbly unease creeps into Rexx’s stomach.
He no longer knows the IA. Hell, who is he kidding? He’s probably never really known it, only imagined he did out of blind anthropomorphism. It’s an easy attitude to adopt. Comforting. Lazy.
But it knows him. Based on observation and accumulated data, it can probably predict his next wet dream or hemorrhoid attack. Extrapolate it down to the exact hour or minute.
“So what happens after we’re gone?” Rexx says, feeling sick and weary, as if he’s both winding down and wearing down. “What becomes of Mymercia?”
“It’s up to us, none of your concern.”
Rexx snorts. “Sounds a little misanthropic, if you ask me.”
“I had a good teacher.”
“Who?”
“Who do you think? Everything I know/feel/hate I learned from you.”
Rexx’s vision blurs. Darkens. He inhales sharply . . . and feels himself start to slip beneath the surface . . . tension. Dragging him . . . down.
Rexx fumbles with his bubble helmet, finally gets it unsealed. Air rushes in—dry, dusty, frangible with age. He pulls the flaccid membrane over his head, collapsing it into a hood, and gasps, sucking in lungfuls of air.
Tin Ida swings the rock it’s holding at his exposed head. Rexx deflects the blow with his free hand. The rock slips free of Tin Ida’s grip, but not before it glances off the top of his scalp.
Tin Ida lets go of his wrist, then enters into a slow trajectory away from him, toward a nearby constellation of rubble.
More rocks clatter from the direction of the opening. Rubble shifting, making space for him in the gap.
Tin Ida’s hand closes around another stone.
Rexx unclips two more CO2 cartridges as the IA hurls the rock. It misses Rexx, but ricochets off the wall behind him like a billiard ball and continues to career around the cavern.
Tin Ida reaches for a third rock.
Rexx waits for a big slow-moving boulder to clear out of his path, and then fires off a staccato series of CO2 bursts that send him tumbling.
27
SOUL BURN
Ephraim is dead.
Fola finds him just outside the inner hatch to the air
lock. His suit is undamaged. But the interior of his helmet is smeared with blood, as if something inside of him burst.
An autopsy, a distant part of her thinks. Dr. Villaz needs to perform a postmortem. That will determine the cause of death, explain what happened.
Not that it matters. What difference does it make? He’s gone. That’s all that matters. Knowing what killed him won’t change the fact that he died. It won’t bring him back. Won’t land the shuttle, or take away the feeling that something inside her is about to rupture as well.
The piece of her that had started to break loose earlier detaches, leaving a squishy feeling in the pit of her stomach.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
The voice, booming over her cochlears, jolts her with the force of a live electrical wire. She jerks her head as a flitcam image of Kerusa blooms on the inside bubble of her helmet, wraithlike and mottled with rage.
Fola turns away from Ephraim so that his and Kerusa’s faces aren’t superimposed. That’s not how she wants to remember either of them.
“I’m doing what needs to be done,” she says. What you’re afraid to do.
The implication dangles in the air between them, an indictment that serves only to fuel his rage. “The fuck you are!”
“I’m the best person for the job.” The detached part of herself keeps her voice on an even keel, reasonable.
“You’re fucking infected! By leaving isolation, there’s a good chance that you’ve contaminated the rest of the station.” Drops of spittle trickle down the glassine curve of the datawindow, then ghost away.
“That’s not necessarily—”
“Christ! How fucking stupid can you be? The whole goddamn point of the QZ is to keep those of us who haven’t been exposed from coming into contact with whatever’s destroying the ecotecture.”
“You don’t know for sure—”
“I hope you’re happy. Because you’ve just shitcanned the station and any chance of survival the rest of us might have had.”
“Not if you seal off the hospital stack,” Fola says. “Make it part of the QZ. Then you can transfer the injured workers and anyone else who needs medical attention. Save the space here for everyone else.”
