Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “Did you want to go with her?”

  “Are you fucking cocked? I wouldn’t have gotten on that freighter with her for a million creds, not if she was right about there being a fucking Fenny priest aboard.”

  “So, what did she want you to show me?”

  “Are you going after her?” Mikaela asked, ignoring my question, offering her own instead, and she sat up and turned her face towards the open window.

  “Yes,” I told her. “That’s why I’m here.”

  “Then you must be cocked. You must be mad as a wind shrake.”

  “I’m starting to think so. What did she want you to show me, Mikaela?”

  “Most people call me Mickie,” she said.

  And I thought about paying her the other twenty and letting her go back to Jun’ko’s or wherever it was she slept. There wasn’t much of her street-smart bluster left, and it was easy enough to see that she was scared. It was just as easy to figure out why.

  “My mum, she was a good left-footer,” Mikaela said. “God, Baby Jesus, the Pope and St. Teresa, all that tieg crap. And she used to tell me and my sisters that only the evil people have any cause to fear evil, but what’d she know? She never even left the dome where she was born. She never spent time out on the frontiers, never saw the crazy shit goes off out here. All the evil she ever imagined could be chased away with rosary beads and a few Hail Marys.”

  “Is it something you’re afraid to show me, Mickie?” I asked, and she laughed and quickly hid her face in her hands. I didn’t say anything else for a while, just sat there with my back to the door of the sleeper, watching the world outside the window grow brighter by slow degrees, waiting until she stopped crying.

  I wish I could say that Sailor had lied, or at least exaggerated, when she told Mikaela that I’d beaten her. I wish it with the last, stingy speck of my dignity, the last vestiges of my sense of self-loathing. But if what I’m writing down here is to be the truth, the truth as complete as I might render it, then that’s one of the things I have to admit, to myself, to whoever might someday read this. To God, if I’m so unfortunate and the universe so dicked over that she or he or it actually exists.

  So, yes, I beat Sailor.

  She’d been gone for several days, which wasn’t unusual. She would do that sometimes, if we seemed to be wearing on one another. And it was mid-Pisces, deep into the long season of dust storms and endless wind, and we were both on edge. That time of year, just past the summer solstice, all of Herschel seems set on edge, the air ripe with static and raw nerves. I was busy with my duties at the university and, of course, with council business, and I doubt that I even took particular notice of her absence. I’ve never minded sleeping alone or taking my meals by myself. If I missed her, then I missed the conversation, the sex, the simple contact with another human body.

  She showed up just after dark one evening, and I could tell from the way she was dressed that she hadn’t been at her mothers’ or at the scholars’ hostel near the north gate, the two places she usually went when we needed time apart. She was dirty, her hair coppery and stiff with dust, and she was wearing her long coat and heavy boots. So I guessed she’d been traveling outside the dome; maybe she’d taken the tunnel sled up to Gale or all the way down to Molesworth. I was in my study, going over notes for the next day’s lectures, and she came in and kissed me. Her lips were chapped and rough, faintly gritty, and I told her she needed a shower.

  “Yeah, that’d be nice,” she said. “If you stuck me right now, I think I’d bleed fucking dust.”

  “You were outside?” I asked, turning back to my desk. “That’s very adventuresome of you.”

  “Did you miss me?”

  “They’ve had me so busy, I hardly even noticed you were gone.”

  She laughed, the way she laughed whenever she wasn’t sure that I was joking. Then I heard her unbuckling her boots, and afterwards she was quiet for a bit. Two or three minutes, maybe. When I glanced up, she’d taken off her coat and gloves and rolled her right shirt sleeve up past the elbow.

  “Don’t be angry,” she said. “Please.”

  “What are you on about now?” I asked, and then I saw the fevery red marks on the soft underside of her forearm. It might have only been a rash, except for the almost perfect octagon formed by the intersection of welts or the three violet pustules at the center of it all. I’d seen the mark before, and I knew exactly what it meant.

  “At least hear me out,” she said. “I had to know – ”

  “What?” I demanded, getting to my feet, pushing the chair roughly across the floor. “What precisely did you have to fucking know, Sailor?”

  “If it’s true. If there’s something more – ”

  “More than what? Jesus fucking Christ. You let them touch you. You let those sick fucks inside of you.”

  “More than this,” she said, retreating a step or two towards the doorway and the hall, retreating from me. “More than night and goddamn day. More than getting old and dying and no one even giving a shit that I was ever alive.”

  “How long’s it been?” I asked, and she shook her head and flashed me a look like she didn’t understand what I meant. “Since contact, Sailor. How long has it been since contact?”

  “That doesn’t matter. I wouldn’t take the serum.”

  “We’re not going to fucking argue about this. Yes, you’re going to take the serum. We’re going to the clinic right now, and you’re going to start the serum tonight. If you’re real bloody lucky, it might not be too late – ”

  “Stop it!” she hissed. “This isn’t your decision, Dorry. It’s my body. It’s my goddamn life,” and that’s when she started crying. And that’s when I hit her.

  That’s when I started hitting her.

  There’s no point pretending that I remember how many times I struck her. I only stopped when I saw the blood from her broken nose, splattered on the wall of my study. I like to believe that it wouldn’t have happened if she hadn’t started crying, those tears like a shield, like a weapon she’d fashioned from her weakness. I’ve always loathed the sight of tears, for no sane reason, and I like to think everything would have played out some other way if she just hadn’t started crying. But that’s probably bullshit, and even if it isn’t, it wouldn’t matter, would it? So, whatever I said earlier about not being the sort of woman to interfere in another’s decisions, forget that. Remember this, instead.

  Sailor left that night, and I haven’t seen or heard from her since. I waited for a summons to appear before the quarter magistrate on charges of assault, but the summons never came, and one day I returned home from my morning classes to find that most of her clothes were gone. I never found out if she retrieved them herself or if someone did it for her. A couple of weeks later, I learned that three Fenrir priests had been arrested near Kepler City, and that the district marshals suspected they’d passed near Molesworth and Herschel earlier in Pisces, that they’d been camped outside Mensae sometime back in Capricorn.

  And that morning in Hope VII, all those months later, I sat and listened to Jun’ko’s billygirl sobbing because she was afraid, and I dug my nails into my palms until the pain was all that mattered.

  “I think you must miss her,” Mikaela said, looking back over her left shoulder at me, answering a question I hadn’t asked. “To have left Herschel and come all the way out here, to go poking around Jun’ko’s place. Lady, no one comes to Heaven, not if she can help it.”

  “I’ve been here before,” I said. “When I was young, about your age.”

  “Yeah, that’s what Jun’ko was telling me,” she replied, and I wanted to ask what else the mechanic might have told her, but I didn’t. I was following Mikaela down a street so narrow it might as well have been an alleyway, three or four blocks over from the dome’s main thoroughfare. Far above us, sensors buried in the framework of the central span were busy calibrating the skylights to match the rising sun outside. But some servo or relay-drive bot responsible for this sector of Hop
e VII had been down for the last few months, according to Mikaela. So we walked together in the lingering gloom, the patchy frost crunching softly beneath our feet, while the rest of the dome brightened and warmed. Once or twice, I noticed someone watching us through a smudgy window, suspicious eyes set in wary, indistinct faces, but there was no one on the street yet. The lack of traffic added to my unease and the general sense of desolation and decay; this was hardscrabble, even by the standards of Hope’s Heaven. That far back from town center, almost everything was adobe brick and pressed sand-tile, mostly a jumble of warehouses, garages, and machine shops, with a shabby handful of old-line modular residential structures stacked about here and there. If Mikaela were leading me into an ambush, she couldn’t have chosen a better setting.

  “You hang close to me, Councilor,” she said. “People around here, they don’t care so much for outsiders. It’s a bad part of town.”

  “You mean to say there’s a good part?” I asked, and she laughed, then stopped and peered down a cross street, rubbing her hands together for warmth. Her breath steamed in the morning air.

  “No,” she said. “I sure wouldn’t go so far as to say that. But there’s bad and there’s worse.” She frowned and looked back the way we’d come.

  “Is something wrong?” I asked. She shook her head, then pointed east, towards the cross street.

  “It’s that way, just a little piece farther,” she said, and then she changed the subject. “Is it true you’ve been offworld? That’s what Jun’ko said, that you’ve been up to Eos Station, that you’ve seen men. Men from Earth.”

  I nodded my head, still looking in the direction she’d pointed. “It’s true. But that was a long time ago.”

  “What were they like?” she asked, and I shrugged.

  “Different,” I replied, “but not half so different as most of us think. Two eyes, two hands, one mouth, a dick,” and I jabbed a thumb at her skirt. “More like some of us than others.”

  It was a crude comment, one I never would have made if I hadn’t been so nervous, and I half expected her to get pissed or something. But Mikaela only kicked at a loose paving tile and rubbed her hands together a little harder, a little faster.

  “Yeah, well, that was Jun’ko’s idea,” she said. “She even paid the surgeon. Claimed I wasn’t pretty enough, that I needed something special, you know, something exotic, if I was gonna work out of her place. It’s not so bad. Like I said, I’m a pretty good fuck. Better than I was before.”

  “No regrets, then?”

  She made a half-amused, snorting noise, wiped her nose on the sleeve of her jacket, and stared at her shoes. “I was born here,” she said. “What the hell would I do with a thing like regret?”

  “When are you going to tell me what’s waiting for me down there, Mickie?” I asked, and she almost smiled.

  “Sailor said you’d be like this.”

  “Like what?”

  “She said you weren’t a very trusting person. She said you had a nasty habit of stabbing people in the back before they could beat you to it.”

  I suppose that was payback for the remark about her penis, nothing I didn’t have coming, but it made me want to slap her. Before I could think of a reply, she was moving again, walking quickly away from me down the side street. I thought about turning around and heading straight back to the station. It was still three long hours until the next zep, but I could try to get a secure uplink and see what there was to learn about the Oryoku Maru. Following the whore seemed like a lazy way to commit suicide.

  I followed her, anyway.

  A couple of minutes later, we ducked through a low archway into what appeared to be an abandoned repair shop. It was dark inside, almost too dark to see, and even colder than it had been out on the street. The air stank of spent engine oil and hydrosol, dust and mildew and rat shit, and the place was crowded with the disassembled, rusting skeletons of harvesters and harrow rigs. They loomed around us and hung from ceiling hoists, broken, forgotten beasts with sickle teeth.

  “Watch your step, Councilor,” Mikaela warned, calling back to me after I tripped over some piece of machinery or another and almost stumbled into an open garage pit. I paused long enough to catch my breath, long enough to whisper a thankful prayer and be sure I hadn’t broken my ankle.

  “We need a fucking torch,” I muttered, my voice much louder than I’d expected, magnified and thrown back at me by the darkness pressing in around us.

  “Well, I don’t have one,” she said, “so you’ll just have to be more careful.”

  She took my hand and guided me out of the repair bay, along a pitch-black corridor that turned left, then right, then left again, before finally ending in a dim pool of light spilling in through a number of ragged, fist-sized holes in the roof. I imagined it was sunlight, though it wasn’t, of course, imagined it was warm against my upturned face, though it wasn’t that, either.

  “Down here,” she said, and I turned towards her voice, blinking back orange and violet afterimages. We were standing at the top of a stairwell.

  “I hid it when Sailor left,” Mikaela said. “Jun’ko has our rooms tossed once or twice a month, regular as clockwork, so I couldn’t leave it in the house. But I figured it’d be safe here. When I was a kid, my sister and I used to play hide-and-seek in this place.”

  “You have a sister?” I asked, and she started down the stairs without me, taking them two at a time despite the dark. I hurried to catch up, more afraid of being left alone in this place than wherever she might be leading me.

  “Yeah,” she called back. “I’ve got a little sister. She’s out there somewhere. Sheba’d up with a guild mason down in Arsia Mons, last I heard. But we don’t talk much these days. She got sick on Allah and doesn’t approve of whoring anymore.”

  We reached the bottom of the stairs, and I glanced back up at the patch of imitation daylight we’d left at the top. “How much farther, Mickie?” I asked, trying hard to sound calm, trying to sound confident, trying desperately to bury my anxiety in a pantomime of equipoise. But the darkness was quickly becoming more than I could handle, so much darkness crammed into the gap between the walls and floor and ceiling. It was becoming inconceivable that this place might somehow simultaneously contain so much darkness and ourselves. I’m a little claustrophobic, I pretended to have said, so that the mechanic’s girl would understand and get this the hell over and done with. Past the bottom of the stairs, the air was damp and smelled of mold and stagnant water, mushrooms and rotting cardboard. I was sweating now, despite the cold.

  “She made me promise that I’d keep it safe,” Mikaela said, as if she hadn’t heard my question or had simply chosen to ignore it. “I’m not really used to people trusting me with things. Not with things that matter to – ”

  “How much farther?” I asked again, more insistent than before. “We need to hurry this up, or I’ll miss my flight.”

  “Here,” she said. “Right there, on your left,” and when I turned my head that way, there was the faintest chartreuse glow, like some natural fungal phosphorescence, a glow that I could have sworn hadn’t been there only a few seconds before. “Just inside the doorway, on the table,” Mikaela said.

  I took a deep breath of the fetid air and stepped past her through an opening leading into what might once have been a storeroom or maintenance locker. The glow became much brighter than it had been out in the corridor, illuminating the bare concrete walls, an M5 proctor droid that had been stripped raw and left for dead, and the intestine tangle of sagging pipes above my head. The yellow-green light was coming from a five- or six-liter translucent plastic catch cylinder, something that had probably been manufactured as part of a dew-farm’s cistern. And I stood staring at the pale thing floating inside the cylinder – not precisely dead because it had probably never been precisely alive – a wad of hair and mottled flesh, bone and the scabby shell of a half-formed exoskeleton.

  “She said it was yours, Dorry,” Mikaela whispered from somewhere
behind me. “She said she didn’t know, when she took the mark, didn’t know she was pregnant.”

  I said something. I honestly can’t remember what.

  It hardly matters.

  The thing in the cylinder twitched and opened what I hadn’t realized was an eye. It was all pupil, that eye, and blacker than space.

  “She lost it before she even got here,” the whore said, “when she was working up in Sytinskakya. She couldn’t have taken it with her to the temples, and I promised her that I’d keep it safe. She thought you might want to take it back with you.”

  I turned away from the unborn thing, which might or might not have seen my face, pushing my way roughly past Mikaela and back out into the corridor. The darkness there seemed almost kind after the light from the catch cylinder, and I let it swallow me whole as I ran. I only fell twice or maybe three times, tripping over my own feet and sprawling hard on sand-tile or steel, then right back up in an instant, blindly making my way to the stairwell and the cluttered repair shop above, and, finally, to the perpetually shadowed street. I stopped and looked back then, breathless and faint and sick to my belly, pausing only long enough to see that Jun’ko’s girl hadn’t followed me. By the time I reached the transfer station at the lower end of Avenue South Eight, the morning was fading towards noon, and what I’d seen below Hope’s Heaven seemed hardly as substantial, hardly as thinkable, as any woman’s guilty dreams of Hell.

  I have Sailor’s book of proverbs from the cargo crate open on the table in front of me, the one written by the twentieth-century Tibetan monk. There’s a passage here on dreams, one of the passages I’ve underlined in red, which reads, “The pathway to Nirvana is a road along which the traveler penetrates the countless illusions of his waking mind, his dreams and dreamless sleep. There must be a full and final awakening from all illusion, waking and dreaming. By many forms of meditation a man may at last achieve this necessary process of waking up in his life and in his dreams and nightmares. He may follow Vipassanâ in search of lasting, uninterrupted self-awareness, finally catching himself in the very act of losing himself in the cacophonous labyrinth of his thoughts and fantasies and the obscuring tides of emotion and sexual impulse that work to impede awakening.”