Mass Effect

by Catherynne M. Valente

  Anax Therion’s green browline lifted in amusement. “Well, congratulations, Sleepwalker Team Blue-7! In less than ten minutes, you seem to have ruled out poison, disease, or equipment malfunction, as well as sabotage, and accident. You’re about as helpful as the Si’yah’s scans. It must not have happened, then! What a relief for all those drell. Back to your pod, then, volus. Back to your 100% safe, completely uncompromised, flawlessly functioning pod. We won’t even check it over, since you’re so sure. And obviously, since it’s perfectly capable of adjusting pressurization and gravity, and no harm can come to a person in cryostasis, you won’t need your environmental suit, either. In you go, naked as a newborn yahg.”

  “You do love to hear yourself talk, don’t you?” chuckled the batarian. “If you’re so smart, why don’t you figure it out for us and we’ll see you at the Nexus.”

  Senna could see the drell beginning to lose her patience. “I told you, we need more data.”

  Irit Non wheezed and coughed. She stopped pacing. She curled her chubby shoulders in, as if to defend herself from their reaction before she said whatever was about to come out. “I’m not drell. Or hanar. And nothing can get past my suit’s filters. So it’s… not my problem.”

  Anax Therion and Borbala Ferank stared at the volus with five black reptilian eyes between them.

  “Sorry,” the volus mumbled. “Sorry.”

  “This is what’s going to happen,” Senna announced, a little too loudly. But it did the trick. Not a person on this ship hadn’t served aboard another one at some point. They came to attention eventually, if you sounded like you were giving a command, not asking for an opinion. “Suit up for common environmental conditions. We’re going to split into three teams. Yorrik and Ysses will be Team What. You’ll take three of the corpses into medbay and perform autopsies, figure out a real, solid cause of death we can build a theory on. Anax and Borbala, you’ll be Team Who. Scour the ship for your theoretical stowaway—”

  The volus Irit Non wheezed and sucked at the air through her filter. “You want them to secure the ship on foot? This ship? The Keelah Si’yah? We’re a kilometer and a half long and weigh seventeen million tons. Surely the ship’s computer isn’t a complete paperweight.”

  Senna’Nir was grateful that his helmet made it impossible for anyone else to see the sarcastic curl his lips always took on when someone blathered on at him about a totally simple solution he must not have thought of.

  “K, please run a scan for any life signs on board. Exclude the six of us and all entities currently in cryostasis.”

  The voice of the ship’s interface came back cool and calm as ever.

  No life signs detected, Commander.

  “Any empty pods in the cryobays?” The quarian continued.

  Negative, Commander.

  “See? A lot of work saved,” said Irit with a modest cough. The yellow-green lights of her eyes even seemed to shine a little brighter with self-satisfaction.

  “Yes, and we’ll definitely believe her, because she was so right about everything else. She literally can’t tell the difference between a corpse and a living person at the moment. What makes you think she can see a living person if they don’t want to be seen?”

  The tall, lithe drell blinked both sets of eyelids at him with a slow sensuality he always found unsettling among her kind. They never meant to look at anyone like that. It was just how they were built. “She?” said Anax curiously.

  A helmet covered a multitude of sins, and this time it covered his flush of shame. Shame, and very slight pride. Of course the ship’s computer interface had no gender. The voice he’d selected from the audiobank was slightly more on the female side of the slider than male, but no more than slightly. But he was the quarian he was, and he’d worked so closely with K. He thought of her as her. This is why you’re not Pathfinder, he told himself ruefully. Telem’Yered didn’t teach the ship interface to use the pronoun I because he thought it sounded friendlier. Telem’Yered never installed three separate conversational matrices so that the ship could talk to him at night. Telem’Yered never talked to the ship at all if he could help it. That’s what a real quarian is. You’re just a freak.

  “It. Whatever you like. The point is, Analyst Therion, access the small arms locker on the bridge, and check the Sleepwalker logs for anything unusual that might have fallen through the cracks in the Si’yah’s diagnostics, as they are obviously taking a very long lunch break. And if there’s time, sweep the ship as best you can, at least the cryodecks.”

  “Six hundred years of Sleepwalker logs,” the batarian repeated sourly. “With her. Lieutenant I’m Smarter Than You.”

  “I’ll be gentle,” said Anax Therion.

  Senna ignored them. “Irit Non and I will be Team How. Hardware and software. We’ll take the pods and the scans, pinpoint the blockage, and fix up any damage. With a little luck, we’ll have this locked down within forty-eight hours. Just another Sleepwalker shift. Yorrik, how long will it take to run the autopsies?”

  “Anxious distress: Normally, three autopsies would take no more than an hour, but—”

  “That’s fine, let’s meet in medbay in three hours to report findings,” said Senna, in the tone of voice his mother used to use when she wanted to move to a vote in the Conclave.

  The metal rings on the elcor’s blue-and-purple head covering jangled as the creature shook his head violently. “With stubborn but necessary resistance: It will not take an hour. It will not take three hours. Without medical scans or a diagnostic VI, there is no useable equipment in medbay. All medbay devices are networked with the ship’s computer. If we cannot use the Keelah’s datacore, medbay is functionally empty. What we need is there, but, to use the vernacular, it is all bricked. Resentful rhetorical question: What do you expect me to do an autopsy with, a shotgun and some omni-gel?”

  Silence returned to the Radial. As they all thought it over, several red usharet petals fell from the flower arrangement to the clean floor of the ship.

  The drell leaned carefully against one wall of her alcove. Her pale interior eyelids slid closed. Senna heard her whisper through the glass: “In a steel cavern, a shipment of shadows. Chests of treasure stand everywhere like lonely walls on a battlefield. Like a school of bright fish people move around me: pink, green, brown, yellow, gray, violet. A little bird calls to its mother: a quarian child runs in. Quick, darting. Her suit the color of storms. What does she cry out? ‘Mummy, Mummy, I can’t go to sleep without my friends! They’re stuck in there!’ Mother bird swoops down. Her fingers move like light on water over the surface of one treasure chest among thousands. Its true name graven on its flank: NN1469P/R. Out of the darkness within, the mother plucks two soft dolls, beloved, worn as memory: a plush green keeper with plastic claws. A toy volus with glowing eyes. ‘Pick one, Raya’Zufi vas Keelah Si’yah,’ says the mother bird. ‘Only one.’ Little bird sings, clutches her keeper to her chest. The volus vanishes back into the chest. Curious: Mother bird ignores what lies beneath. But the volus hides the true treasure: a black statue with a heart of silver and glass.”

  Anax Therion’s eyes cleared. She raised her green three-fingered hand. “I think I saw a kid’s toy microscope in the cargo hold when I came on board. Crate NN1469P/R. Does that help?”

  4. SUSCEPTIBILITY

  Yorrik and Ysses stood side by side in the freezing, shadowy medbay. The dead hanar on the slab before them looked almost purple in the steady blue running lights that glowed all along the floor and out of the wall recesses. Scabbed, frosted blisters ringed the upper third of its tentacles, where the arms joined its body. In the cold, the living pink jellyfish hanging in the air next to Yorrik smelled like seawater and ozone with a touch of nervous herbal greenery somewhere deep within the waves of personal scent. The elcor inhaled deeply, trying not to look like he was inhaling deeply, hoping to get a sense of who his new lab partner was beneath all those tentacles and softly shifting lights playing over its slick skin. He had never really kn
own a hanar. Perhaps he was misinterpreting the tense, fearful wafts of astringent plants in its body odor. Perhaps that’s how a hanar smelled when they were fully at peace.

  Senna had promised to bypass the energy-saving protocols as soon as he and the volus could image the ship’s run state at the time of the initial malfunction. Yorrik wasn’t a tech. He didn’t know what that meant, except vaguely that since the lights were out when everything went sour on them, they had to stay off for a while longer. No different than any other autopsy, he supposed. It only did any good if the poor bastard was in more or less the same condition they had been in when they died. Not that it mattered much. An elcor’s sense of smell was far more powerful than all four batarian eyes put together. As for the hanar, they communicated amongst themselves by pulsing with elaborate patterns of bioluminescence. Their entire culture relied on being able to see the slightest flicker in the dark. The lights were not the problem.

  The problem was, Yorrik wasn’t much of a doctor, and this wasn’t much of a medbay. In the end, no matter how prepared the quarians wanted to be, the Keelah Si’yah was never meant to be anything more than an intergalactic tram service. Here to there. Nothing more. Frozen people didn’t need complicated medical procedures. If anything went seriously wrong with a Sleepwalker, standard operating procedure was simply to put them back to sleep and wake them up on the Nexus for a quick patch-and-go. There had simply been no need to waste time, space, and money on very much more than medi-gel, a couple of bandages, and a few vials of vitamin and calcium supplements. After all, the quarians themselves had their suits, which was almost as good as walking around inside of a fashionably cut medbay all your own. And in Yorrik’s experience, the quarians were not a thoughtful people when it came to races other than their own. Except Senna. But then, Senna was an exception to so many things. Nevertheless, Yorrik would probably have agreed with the decision if he were not currently being punished by it. Why splash out for state-of-the-art? The medbays on the Nexus would have every luxury. They’d be able to sort all this out in half a minute, tops. Here… Here it was going to take longer. The lab was spacious enough, but Yorrik had seen better-stocked field hospitals. After the battle. Everything was gleaming and clean and brand new, the hypodermic injectors and readout displays still factory-sealed. But of course, they couldn’t use the readout displays. And without one measly scan online, essentially, this medbay was a very fancy closet with one shoe left inside it. And that shoe was a very poor fit for an elcor allergist.

  Yorrik had never wanted to be a doctor in the first place. His father had been one, and his grandfather. He’d done what was expected, when he was a young elcor. Served honorably in the military as a medic in this war and that. But he’d wanted so much more out of the Milky Way than staring down stuffed-up slats and infected olfactory canals his whole life. He wanted excitement, adventure, artistic fulfillment! He wanted applause. That was why he was here, hurtling toward some absurd unknown galaxy. To escape a tedious lifetime of telling frightened little elcor, “Say ahhhh.” Yet here he was. Back in a medbay looking down another goddamned sore throat.

  These particular sore throats were, admittedly, somewhat more sore, and a lot more interesting than any young calf with a cough.

  Three corpses were laid out neatly and ready to go in the operating area. They were still frozen beneath a hard, clear environmental control hob that would keep them that way. The hob, at least, seemed to be in working order. Frost glittered on the drells’ swollen black tongues. A male, a female, and whichever or both or neither of the two a hanar was. Anax Therion and Borbala Ferank had hauled them up from the cryodeck before heading down into the cargo hold and crate NN1469P/R to retrieve, hopefully, Baby’s First Electron Microscope. Leaving them to wait. Alone. In the dark, with three dead bodies. Yorrik looked out the observation window at the stars beyond, then down at the horrible death popsicles before him and sighed. “Glumly: I was almost Polonius, you know,” he said flatly.

  The hanar hung in the air, shining faintly. After a long, awkward moment, it murmured: “This one cannot formulate a socially appropriate response to that statement.”

  “Melancholy nostalgia: They auditioned hundreds of elcor. I made it all the way through the auditions, callback after callback. Seeking praise: I look the part, don’t I? I’m properly big and imposing, old but not frail, warm and fatherly. I’ve got it all. Mr. Francis Kitt went with a younger actor in the end. Jaded bitterness: Don’t they always? But I was assured by the studio that I was absolutely their second choice. With defiant certainty: He might have been younger, but he didn’t love Hamlet more. No one does. Conspiratorially: I do not believe that Shakespeare wrote it. I do not believe any human wrote it.” Yorrik was not accustomed to speaking or thinking this quickly. An elcor’s life was large and long. They could afford to consider. And reconsider. And reconsider their reconsiderations. They did not share with outsiders. They did not make small talk. But now, fueled by revival drugs, Yorrik’s intellect moved at the speed of an overstimulated salarian. He could not stop himself. “With disdain: I have met many humans. They move fast, shoot quickly, speak carelessly. Withheld revelation: Hamlet has the soul of an elcor. He cannot decide. He must deliberate for a long, long time. With excitement: Do you not think the famous line, ‘Accusatory: Eyes without feeling, feeling without sight, ears without hands or eyes, smelling sans all’ could describe the sensory organs of my people? We have four feet but no hands,” Yorrik lifted one massive foreleg and flexed his long, thick, soft gray three-fingered toes to demonstrate, “and our eyes are weak in comparison to our sense of smell. Why else would Hamlet say, ‘Wry awareness of double meaning: You shall nose him as you go up the stairs?’ Humans cannot even tell their mothers from a batarian war beast with their puny noses. Additionally, Dennmaark sounds far more elcor than human. Some have theorized it is a bastardized form of Dekuuna. Bashful admission: By some, I mean me. I have theorized that. With deep spiritual certainty: There is no possibility that it was written on Earth. Thoughtful speculation: Perhaps, if Hamlet had had an elcor combat VI system, he could have run a simulation, and been more confident of the correct choice. Confidential whisper: Yorrik is not my real name. I was born Naumm, in New Elfaas on the planet of Ekuna, a very respectable, very serviceable, very plain name. I changed it, to honor the greatest play ever written. Quiet desperation: To remind myself of my dream. In Andromeda, there will be no Francis Kitt to cast a younger elcor. There will be Yorrik, and many people thirsty for entertainment. With fierce ambition: I spent my time on Hephaestus Station writing elcor Macbeth, which is not quite as good as Hamlet but has a higher kill count among the dramatis personae. It is sixteen hours long. The Nexus will love it, I am certain.”

  “Yorrik is your soul name,” the hanar agreed musically. It seemed relieved to have understood something in the elcor’s story, anything at all. “This one also possesses a soul name. Ysses is but this one’s face name. But this one strongly suggests that it is unseemly to tell your soul name to a stranger.”

  The elcor snorted. “With great annoyance: It is unseemly to stand around in the dark with corpses with nothing to do and not make conversation.”

  Ysses pointedly said nothing.

  “Regretful addendum: I am sorry. Did you know… that one?”

  Ysses pulsed in time to the low hum of the ship. It stared down, if they could stare, at the dead hanar. Its third longest tentacle twitched. Yorrik noticed and tried not to read anything into it. It was always very hard to remember that other species did not encode their every gesture with vast banks of personal information. On an elcor, that tiny movement would have meant: You’re an idiot, I hate you, and if there were any justice in the universe, I would be in command of this entire vessel. But sometimes a tentacle was just a tentacle.

  “This one accepts the fundamental truth of the universe that all things decay and become corrupted. The ambitions of mortals are especially vulnerable to the forces of chaos in the universe. That one’s f
ace name was Kholai. This one did not know it well, but it is the reason this hanar came to Andromeda. Though of course all save the Enkindlers are as weak and degenerate as insects devouring the remains of a log, Kholai was… a great insect. It would appear that its ambition… was vulnerable. This one cannot believe the death of this particular being among all the hanar on board could be an accident.”

  “Curiosity: Was Kholai a government official? A magnate? An actor?”

  Ysses’s voice grew thick and watery. “It was a priest. This one does not wish to discuss it. This one mourns.” The hanar seemed to compose itself. “This one wonders if an elcor cannot simply smell the cause of death and save a great deal of trouble.”

  “Patiently: It is possible, but we cannot thaw the bodies yet. If an infectious agent is at work, it would be very dangerous to work with chemically live tissue. The volus was correct—cryostasis reduces the body’s temperature far below the lee at which any physical process can take place. When Senna and Irit Non restore full power, we can activate a biostasis shield to protect ourselves. Until then, they must stay cold, and while they stay cold, their scents are stunted. I am limited much as the ship is limited. In hopeful friendship: Do you want to tell me your soul name, since you know mine? Then we will not be strangers, and everything will be seemly.”

  “No,” the hanar said quickly.

  The voice of the batarian woman burst into the room over the comm system, so loud in the large, empty hospital bay that both Yorrik and Ysses jumped.

  “All right, you big dumb peasants, we’ve located crate NNwhotheshitcares and got the damn thing open. In what will be news to no one, quarians really love garbage. Whoever belongs to this crate stuffed it full of junk, most of it not even quarian junk. And, good news! We can all rest easy knowing that the Andromeda galaxy will not have to suffer without little girls’ tea parties, because there’s a whole set of cups and saucers and crap in here, as blue as an Afterlife dancer’s ass. Oh, and a case of Horosk straight out of Palaven’s cellars. Naughty, naughty mummy and daddy!”