by M. R. Carey
Fastest of all is the girl. She runs right under the bird, gathers herself and jumps. She hits Greaves full in the chest and scales him in an instant. One foot goes into the crook of his arm, the other onto his shoulder.
He clamps down a yell. It’s not that she has hurt him. She is so light it seems she must be hollow-boned, like the bird. But he has a strong aversion to being touched, especially with no warning. He feels, for a second, as though some bubble that enclosed him has burst. As though he is naked to hostile space.
The girl pushes off, vaulting and turning in the air.
Catches the bird in flight with one outstretched hand.
She lands, somehow, at the top of a wall with nothing but open sky above her. Her feet are braced against smooth concrete. Her free hand snags a steel stanchion that was left exposed when the roof fell in.
She pivots on that hand and she’s over.
She’s gone.
The wild, vain clapping of the pigeon’s wings reaches Greaves a second later, is stilled again a second after that. For a moment or two, his mind performs a weird synthesis. It’s as though he just saw her fly, and the wings he heard were hers.
The hungries’ reaction is more dramatic than Greaves’. It’s also quicker, since it’s not mediated by any conscious thought. They throw themselves against the base of the wall the girl leapt over. The first ones to reach it claw at the damp cement as though they could rip their way through, until the ones coming up behind press them against it, crushing and breaking them.
Greaves takes the opportunity, with all eyes turned away from him, to extract himself from the room a little more quickly than he would otherwise have dared. A flight of steel steps takes him up onto what used to be a car park. Now it’s a jungle of head-high weeds with a single path trampled through it.
All this while he is thinking: What is she? How did she move among the hungries without eliciting any response from them? And how did she move so fast, faster even than those flesh-and-blood machines? In the filing cabinet of his mind he puts her—unwillingly, but with quickening excitement—into a category of one. She is an anomaly. Anomalies explode old theories and engender new ones. They are dangerous and glorious.
Greaves can’t help himself. Despite the risk, he runs to the end of the path, onto a wide apron of asphalt that seems to have been more resistant to the encroaching wilderness. An old security post stands here, with all its windows broken. A traffic barrier that wasn’t up to the job it was made for lies in pieces on the ground.
There is no sign of the girl. But if she ran in this direction there is only one place she could have been heading for. At the bottom of the valley, a mile and a half away and two hundred feet below him, is the town of Invercrae. It’s the next place on Dr. Fournier’s itinerary, and the science team will be heading there tomorrow.
Greaves can’t wait that long. Not with a question as big as this pressing on his mind.
He will go tonight.
8
Greaves returns to the Rosalind Franklin by the exact same path he took when he left, apart from a careful detour around a pack of wild dogs feeding on the carcase of a squirrel. The expedition has seen packs like this everywhere they have visited, and though they almost never attack humans Greaves doesn’t like them or trust them at all.
Once he gets close to Rosie, he is careful to follow his outward route step for step. He carries a map of the traps and movement sensors in his head and has chosen his angle of approach accordingly.
He comes in from the front. He sees Colonel Carlisle sitting in the cockpit, reading a book (Greaves has seen the book before: it is R. T. Mulholland’s biography of Napoleon Bonaparte in a thoroughly used Wordsworth Classics edition). Carlisle glances up as Greaves passes and they exchange a nod of greeting. Though he is punctilious about regulations on his own account, the colonel has no desire to be anyone else’s conscience. It might be different if he were in overall command, Greaves surmises. But this expedition has two commanders. They embody the current uneasy status quo in Beacon, where the civilian government pretends to be in absolute control but depends for its continuing existence on the actions and interventions of the Military Muster. Carlisle is the military commander; Fournier the civilian one—deliberate obfuscation, twisting the loose ends of their mission statement to make a Möbius strip.
Greaves walks on around the side of the massive vehicle to the central airlock. There is no way of getting in here without being seen: the airlock is almost always guarded, and even when it isn’t the act of cycling it from outside will activate telltales and alarms all over the lab and crew spaces.
The airlock is open. Dr. Khan stands just inside, her restless gaze scanning the trees to left and right. When she sees Greaves, she steps aside and lets him enter. There is a rigidity in her posture that he sees at once: she is tense, afraid. She puts out her hand to touch the back of his wrist, but only with her index finger. She is allowed to touch him; he has made a special and complex accommodation in his mind for her and her alone, but she knows him and the tip of one finger is as far as she ever takes that liberty. Small though the point of contact is, a tremor in her arm communicates itself to him. Dr. Khan is perturbed.
“I’m fine, Rina,” Greaves assures her. He is so contrite about having worried her that he almost reaches up and touches her fingertip with his own. But his hand hovers, unable to complete the gesture.
“I can see that,” she says. “Thank God. But where were you, Stephen? Were you making observations again? Close up?”
She has him. Knowing that a yes will make her unhappy Greaves tries to say no. He starts to stammer, locks his jaws on the word he is physically unable to speak.
His discomfort with deliberate falsehood is like his discomfort with uncertainty raised to its own power. If he says something that isn’t true, he is bringing uncertainty into the world. He is blinding the people around him to a small part of the truth—and every part of the truth is important. You can’t complete a jigsaw if one of its pieces has been swapped out for a piece of a different jigsaw.
“I knew it,” Dr. Khan exclaims. “Stephen, you can’t keep doing this!” He darts a glance at her face. Her eyes, which are looking directly at him, are full and glistening. She told him a while ago (five weeks, two days, seven hours and some minutes and seconds that he could calculate but chooses not to) that the baby she is carrying will make her less in control of her emotions than she usually is. There will be a soup of hormones sloshing around inside her, and it will show itself in her reactions. Perhaps this is why she forgets that he finds sustained gaze uncomfortable. “Whatever you’re trying to find, it’s not worth dying for.”
Which is true, of course—but trivially true. If he dies, he won’t be able to finish his work, and it’s only his work and its outcomes that will vindicate the risks he takes. Or fail to.
But they all take risks. And they have all accepted the implied logic. Without a cure for the hungry plague, or a work-around, they will all die, one by one. The great spreading tree of humanity will be hewn away at its base until it falls. Until the number of survivors is so small that congenital abnormalities multiply and intensify and viable births fall off to nothing. This is why the risks they take are worth taking. This is why Rosie was sent.
Rosie and Charlie. But their sister vessel, the Charles Darwin, never came home. The prevailing theory is that Charlie fell into an ambush set by junkers—roving, outlaw bands of survivalists—who then dismantled the vehicle, pillaged its tech and slaughtered its crew. But nobody knows, and most likely nobody will ever know. The most they will be able to tell—when they get to a spot where there should be a specimen cache and find nothing there—is how far the Charles Darwin got before misfortune overtook it.
So now it’s the turn of Dr. Fournier’s team. And they will either find what they came here to find or else they will fail and the extinction event will continue at its present pace (which for extinctions is very rapid indeed). There is no contingency plan, no backup. It
’s hard to quantify risk when they’re already way up on the high wire without a safety net. But that seems to be what Dr. Khan is asking Stephen to do.
“Promise me,” she says now. “Promise me you won’t do this again.”
He meets her gaze. This is hard for him. Like pulling something heavy up out of a well and holding it, at arm’s length, in front of his face. A part of himself that he offers up to her, effortfully.
“No,” he says. “No, Rina.”
And he walks on past her into the lab.
9
In Rosie’s cramped interior, there is no such thing as privacy. Over the months that they have lived here, the various members of her crew have adapted to this, each in their own way.
Most have not been able, as Dr. Fournier and the colonel have done, to stake out a specific territory for themselves. With all other spaces owned in common, the bunks have become inviolate. Dr. Khan and Dr. Sealey, most evenings, eat their meal with everyone else in the kitchen area and then retire to their beds with the curtains drawn across. They are not disturbed: that tiny space is sacrosanct.
The soldiers—grunts and sniper elite alike—devote the lion’s share of their down-time to a single unending game of poker. No actual money changes hands, but Private Phillips keeps score in a kids’ notebook decorated with Pokémon stickers to a depth of half an inch. It is not clear to anyone where this notebook came from.
On most evenings, after the game winds up, Lieutenant McQueen goes up into the turret and cleans his rifle, whether he has used it that day or not.
Dr. Akimwe and Dr. Penny work late, unless there is no work at all to be done. They sing show tunes, very softly, working their way amicably through the oeuvres of Stephen Sondheim and Jerry Herman. They have agreed to draw the line at Andrew Lloyd Webber.
This uses up all of Rosie’s available space, but Stephen Greaves has found another space that no one wants. He sits in the airlock and is completely undisturbed. There is no light there, apart from the dim glow from the keypad that controls the airlock’s cycling mechanism. More to the point, it feels to the rest of the crew like a negotiated space, a halfway house between the safe (if claustrophobic) interior and the hostile outside. To try to relax there would be futile.
But Greaves isn’t relaxing. Like Penny and Akimwe, he is still working—by natural light until there is none left, and after that by the narrow, focused beam of a portable reading lamp clamped to the top of the repurposed page-a-day diary in which he writes. He would prefer to be in the lab, of course, but Dr. Fournier has placed tight restrictions on Greaves’ use of lab time. He has to file requests, which will be considered only after everyone else’s needs have been met. “He’s just a child,” Fournier has said on many occasions. “A bright child, but a child nonetheless. And we have a tight remit. He can’t be allowed to impede that.”
In practice, Greaves is usually able to get around these strictures, but it’s by a precarious route that makes him deeply uncomfortable. He works when Dr. Khan is in the lab, and if Dr. Fournier asks what he is doing there Dr. Khan answers for him. “He’s assisting me.” Greaves himself says nothing, and keeps his eyes on the bench, but the lie (even though it’s someone else’s, not his) twists in his stomach and in his throat, makes him feel as though he is going to have to vomit to get it out of him. Officially, therefore, he has no research of his own. Don’t-ask-don’t-tell, with all its attendant difficulties, is the best compromise he has been able to find.
When Dr. Khan isn’t in the lab, Greaves mostly uses the airlock—a lab for thought experiments only. On such occasions, he has a set routine that makes the most productive use of his time. He compartmentalises his brain in order to maintain a through-line for clear, undistracted thoughts. The distractions are simply sent away into sub-routines where they can be indulged without any harm to his reasoning.
He is doing this now. Cross-legged, head down, as motionless as a hungry: but vaulting on mental swing-bars.
On the top level—the most important—he is tabulating his observations from the day. Below that, he is considering the problem of the anomalous girl. And below that, on a more emotionally compromised level Greaves thinks of as the tumble-drier, he is thinking about his altercation with Dr. Khan.
Greaves sees nothing remarkable in this split-level reasoning. He is not really thinking simultaneously on all three levels; he is simply swapping between them and letting each one claim his attention when he reaches an impasse on one of the others. While his conscious mind is focused on level one, say, his unconscious hovers over levels two and three—so usually, the next time one of those levels comes to the top of the stack he will have had some new insight.
Actually there is a fourth level, but he has ceased to annotate it. What has happened to Beacon, to stop them from talking to us? is an urgent question with very wide-ranging implications but it can’t be addressed until he has some data, and currently he has none at all.
All three active levels are represented in the notes he writes in the diary, in a code of his own making that reduces words and phrases to single strokes of the pencil. He uses superscript and subscript to carry the chatter alongside the capitalised font that represents the main topic. He is aware that other people don’t do this; that when they take notes they try to filter out the things they think of as extraneous to the subject. Greaves finds that digressions and distractions are usually there for a reason, and can yield unexpected insights. So he writes down everything that crosses his mind, as it comes. To save time, he is cavalier with punctuation and sometimes with syntax.
Top level:
Hungries’ heliotropism appears side effect of heat-seeking behaviour used for hunting at night. Could be hijacked? Used against them? But how determine level of radiant heat that will activate tropic behaviour? Contrast with background ambient temperature probably crucial. Hence no heat-seeking by day. Higher overall temperatures degrade contrast.
Middle level:
Fact: she cannot be human.
Fact: she cannot be hungry.
Define anomalies. Strength and speed clearly outside human range, but within observed parameters for hungries. Also, hungries did not respond to her. Did not identify her as prey.
But she showed volition. Reacted to non-food stimulus. Made conscious, creative use of environment (me).
Is she new?
Determine ontological status. Priority: urgent.
Lowest level:
Dr. Khan Dr. Khan Dr. Khan Dr. Khan Dr. Khan Dr. Khan
Rina Rina Rina Rina Rina Rina Rina Rina Rina Rina Rina
Dr. Khan Dr. Khan Dr. Khan Dr. Khan Dr. Khan Dr. Khan
This is shorthand for a great many things: thoughts he does not wish at the moment to examine too closely. It hurts him to make Rina unhappy. She is important, in a way that other people are not important. She is an exception to every rule. She can look at him, and even touch him. He is able to listen to her voice without counting the syllables of her words or breaking them down by grammatical and instrumental function.
He supposes he loves her. Love is a word that people use about other people all the time, and Greaves has assembled a reason-ably clear idea of its many contradictory referents. For more than half of these referents, he can place a positive mark against Dr. Khan’s name in a polydimensional matrix that he has imagined.
He knows, though, that the matrix does not accurately model what he feels for her. It only defines a logical space that she partially inhabits.
After he came to Beacon, after he went to dormitory twelve, Rina came and found him. “We refugees have got to stick together,” she said. And she held something out for him to take. Two somethings.
Captain Power. And Captain Power’s voice box.
The captain had fallen from Greaves’ hand when he was carried from the transport into the orphanage. Greaves had heard the crack when he hit the concrete. Dr. Khan must have found the toy, broken, and she evidently remembered how determinedly Greaves had held on to it as t
hey marched out of London. Remembering, she took the trouble to come and bring the two pieces to him when she found them.
And as he took the captain back, with an interior lurch of relief and wonder, she sang to him. In a soft murmur that none of the other children or adults in the crowded room could hear. “He’s the hero of the spaceways, the galactic engineer …” She stopped at that. Most likely she didn’t remember the rest of the words, about the Terran Code and the Planetary League and how the captain fights for truth.
Greaves thinks of that day as the start of their relationship. On the journey from London he had been aware of her, but only in the same way that he was aware of all the other people in the refugee column.
At that moment, she became Dr. Khan—and later still, Rina. Like the girl at the water-testing plant, she sits in a category of one. An anomaly.
For Greaves, growing up in Beacon was like a years-long walk across a minefield, very lonely and very arduous. Except that the errors were marked not by explosions but by humiliations, so there wasn’t even the hope that a final, fatal misstep would make it all go away. The teachers at the school and the wardens at the orphanage tried to protect him when they noticed him at all, but Beacon was a refugee camp with a million people trying to find a place to stand, in a space too small for half that number. People fought to the death in the streets for frost-gnawed carrots and wire-trapped rats. The laws were just the same brawl being fought in a wider theatre.
And Greaves found that every act of kindness brought, reliably, its own reprisal. If a teacher gave him a book to read, an older child would take it from him—to trade it away for food, or just to enjoy the experience of power—and beat him for the sin of having it in the first place. The key to survival was not being noticed at all.
Until suddenly the key was Rina. She took him out of school for weeks at a time to teach him herself, in her canvas-walled lab—to teach him science mostly, but other things, too. She reasoned that if he loved the captain, he would have a taste for science fiction and fantasy in general, so she introduced him to Asimov and Clarke, then Miéville and Gaiman and Le Guin. He had already learned to read, but now he learned the pleasure of stories which is like no other pleasure—the experience of slipping sideways into another world and living there for as long as you want to.
