I tried calling Shoko back, but now I was getting NO SERVICE advisories for the entire island and even parts of the mainland. Weather services in Esseka’s port city Kassavara reported extensive EM interference in the upper atmosphere, courtesy of an extreme solar flare that was interfering with communications to the surface.
What now? What now?
For a while I thought about alternate ways to establish communication with the island. Maybe I could call some other place, perhaps on the mainland, where they weren’t getting all this interference, and get my call transferred across land-based connections and then by some sort of EM transmitter? That didn’t sound viable. I wondered if New Norway used undersea cables. A quick search through the paper showed that they didn’t. Media, phone, even power was all transmitted via powerful EM links.
Increasingly, it looked like the best option would be to go down there personally and have a sniff about. Particularly if there was someone down there, right now, who might know something useful about the Fallow business. Which I did not know for sure, it must be admitted. All I knew was that the previous Police Chief, Timms, had been looking into the Fallow case at the time of his death.
It was so bloody frustrating!
Can’t leave Gideon. Can’t leave Gideon.
Gideon would want me to go, with or without him.
Yes, and no doubt feel very hurt if you did actually go without him.
No. You don’t piss off one of your only friends. You have to find another way.
The only thing I could think of was to get a disposable agent to go down there for me, get whatever info was available, and come back.
I knew just the guy.
With the help of one of the nurses I got into a hov chair and headed towards Gideon’s room. When I got there, he looked a little more rested, but otherwise still terribly weak.
“Up to no good, McGee?” he said, managing a bit of a smile.
“I’d like to send Simon down to the surface,” I said. “Do you mind?”
“Not at all. How are things progressing?”
“Things are progressing rather too quickly, actually,” I said, and dwelt for a moment on the question.
“Indeed.” He lifted his eyebrows in a certain way. It looked very like the expression he wore when someone, usually me, was not seeing the bloody obvious.
I woke Simon from stasis in his storage pod on the Good Idea, and gave him the details of his assignment.
The cost of the shuttle flight was catastrophic, but it meant getting down to the surface fast, or at least faster than taking the space elevator. Simon said he’d report in once he landed and was processed through Customs, which would be in about two hours.
Two hours. What the hell was I going to do for two bloody hours? I needed to know what was going on now!
We sat and said nothing for a long while. Gideon gazed at the window. It looked like a perfect day outside.
“I wonder how my garden’s going,” he said.
“I suppose it’s looking after itself, as usual.” It was good, the way you could get plants to eliminate weeds around themselves and to send “water me now” signals to the local HouseMind.
“Rather takes the point out of gardening, though, don’t you think? Garden plants minding themselves and all that? Surely the point of gardening is imposing control over the chaos of nature, and finding beauty in order, and all that nonsense.”
He was baiting me, taking a controversial position to get a rise out of me. “I’m thinking that when my house is rebuilt I might just pave over the whole garden,” I said. “No muss, no fuss.” I had no such plans, of course, but I could give as well as I got.
“You know, McGee, this being old business is not at all something I would recommend to others.”
This was a new development. I’d never known Gideon to remark on such things. He always looked like he was too busy having a very suave time to be old.
“No?”
He looked at me. “There’s no dignity in it. You’re weak and you’re in pain. There’s no privacy. Pretty nurses in hospitals don’t listen to you or do what you say.”
“As near as I can tell, all the nurses here are disposables.”
“All the more frustrating, then. You can’t reason with them.”
“Meaning you can’t boss them about to take care of your every little whim.” I allowed a little smile.
“That’s right. That’s exactly right. They’re impervious to sensible argument. Indeed, they’re even impervious to outright browbeating!”
“I suspect,” I said, “that this might be why they use them as nurses.”
“And they take all this unseemly interest in my bowel movements and my urine production. No dignity, McGee! No dignity at all!”
“They’re just doing their job, Smith. It’s nothing personal.”
“It couldn’t be more personal!” He started coughing, very hard. Soon it progressed into painful, racking convulsions. I remembered what a nurse had told me yesterday: that it was miraculous Gideon and I hadn’t succumbed to infection while trapped in the tube. What if Gideon had been infected with something, and it was only now appearing? I watched him fearfully, wondering what I could do.
A nurse appeared, inspected the situation, and asked, “Do you need a bowl, Mr. Smith?”
He managed a nod.
She produced a bowl from a nearby supply cupboard and gave it to him.
Some minutes later, Gideon was finished. He laid back, a man made of twigs and paper, breathing very hard and sweating.
More upset than I would have let on, I made my excuses and said I’d be back later when I had some news.
He didn’t have the strength even to wave his hand a bit.
Simon contacted my Paper’s phone on time. He was at the Kassavara aerospaceport, and had been cleared through Customs with only minor delay. I imagined they’d be very used to disposables traveling on business. He said he was just waiting for a connecting flight to take him out to Narwhal Island, which would be in about another hour. It turned out there were only two flights out there per day.
“Right. When you get there see if you can find Constable Shoko. If he’s not available for any reason, see if you can find someone in charge. And try the local hospital, see what they know about Chief Sacks.” My information on the island said they had a small clinic with a handful of beds. Would they also have a pathology unit for doing forensic examinations? My information didn’t say. It wouldn’t have surprised me to learn that all such matters were handled on the mainland.
“Yes, ma’am!” Simon said. “Will do, ma’am! This is Simon, signing off!”
I shook my head, listening to him. I imagined if Gideon told him to go and get recycled, he’d be just as enthusiastic about the assignment, even as the deconstruction bots went about their vicious business.
Simon would be an hour or so waiting for his flight, plus another ten or fifteen minutes actually in flight. It gave me some time to go over everything again and look for possible problems. I set the Paper to alert me if there were any calls from Narwhal Island, just in case. Who knew how long one of these EM storms might last? It crossed my mind that I could probably find a report on local stellar weather patterns, which no doubt would give me an embarrassing amount of information about every damn thing the star was doing, and probably how long these extreme solar flares could interfere with communications. It was too tiring to think about it. There’s something very wearying about sitting in bed all day, to say nothing of the stress of phone calls where people you’re talking to suddenly drop dead!
I wondered what the hell was going on down there. And wondered, too, if Gideon would be all right.
Forcing myself back to business, I started thinking: What if Kell Fallow had a history of violence? Was there a way I could find o
ut about that?
I also kept coming back to the other germane question: Who was Airlie Fallow? What kind of woman was she? How did she and Kell meet? More importantly, did she know he was a disposable? Then I thought, What if she was a disposable, too? It was all on my mind, a constant, noisy racket of questions without answers and ideas for further inquiries.
At some point I started to feel cold. Getting the bed to heat up didn’t help, and I thought that was strange. I rolled over, so that I was looking at the ceiling, and noticed there was a slight, chill breeze in the room. The air grew much colder very quickly. I was shivering; my teeth were starting to chatter.
Looking around, I noticed that the light in the room looked odd. It had taken on a different aspect; the room was lost in strange, angular shadows. “This isn’t right…”
I called out for a nurse. Usually they turned up almost immediately.
Not this time.
My voice didn’t sound right, either. It sounded like something heard underwater.
God, it was cold.
I called for a nurse again. When nothing happened, I went to climb out of bed, and immediately felt dizzy and sick, and lost my balance.
I dragged myself up, my body burning with pain, barely able to open my eyes…
Suspended in the air in the center of the room is a gigantic glass-like Cube. It looks two meters on a side and seems solid all the way through. As much as I am in shocking pain already, it hurts even more to look at it; my gaze keeps sliding away. My head screams when I try to focus on it for any length of time.
I swear, confused, and frightened now, and call out again for a nurse.
Feeling colder than ever, I am sure I am going to die of exposure like this. I lean on the bed frame to help me stand but my legs won’t support my weight. I slump across the bed, and pull the covers over me, desperate for warmth.
There is no warmth, not now. The cold is so bad it starts to burn.
Again and again, I call for the nurses, Gideon, anybody. When nobody comes, I start to lose my grip — or, rather, I begin to admit that my grip is gone, long gone, and I am a whimpering ball of terror pressed against the bed, as far from the Cube as I can get. I feel my bladder go. The heat is good, but my urine quickly freezes.
I think my eyes will freeze too.
The surrounding room still looks wrong. Straight lines are no longer straight; right-angles no longer true. And yet, as near as I can tell, the lines and angles of the Cube are straight.
Deep behind my petrified conscious awareness, in a place where I have only the vaguest hunches, a weird sense tells me that there is more to this thing than I can see with the sensory equipment I have; a sense that this is merely a suggestion of something much larger, much more complex; that it is only a faint shadow of its true, terrifying form. If God Himself had appeared before me, I would not be more terrified, or less prepared.
Only barely conscious, I feel the room spin, but the Cube stays, fixed impossibly in the frozen air. Reality has come unglued.
This is how true madness feels, I think.
It stays there, poised above the floor, twisting reality around it, for I don’t know how long. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry or scream. I have the feeling that if I start screaming I might never, ever stop.
I do all I can. I hide from it, even knowing how futile it is to hide from such a thing, the way hiding from God is futile.
And suddenly, it is gone…
…as inexplicably and as silently as it had first appeared. The air in the room started to warm up; the icy breeze dropping away. Terrified, shivering, keening with agony, I looked up from my tight little ball, and see that edges and angles and even the light all looked the way they should. Outside the windows, it looks like a normal day.
A nurse stopped by, looking unconcerned, smiling brightly. “Everything all right?”
I huddled in bed, shivering, speechless.
The nurse saw there was something very wrong. She touched my head in several places with the cool palm of her hand. “What’s wrong?” she kept asking me. When she saw that for some reason I couldn’t answer, and that I had bits of melting ice around my face, she shifted gears. “It’s all right, Ms. McGee. It’s all right…”
It wasn’t all right. My life had just intersected with something of profound power. With its sheer effortless supremacy it had pulverized, even violated me. I could only barely think, and all that I could think of was the memory of the Cube’s presence not simply in the room, but in every corner of my mind, squeezing out everything else.
The nurse said, looking concerned, “Your brain activity’s spiking and your vital signs are a bit of a mess. I think we might get the doctor in to see you. How would that be?” She gently stroked my forehead, brushing sweat-damp hair out of my glassy eyes.
Again, there was nothing I could say.
Abruptly, though, everything got much worse.
CHAPTER 16
Even as the nurse stood there looking down at me with a tremendously realistic version of a concerned and reassuring smile, I felt an immense wave of knowledge burst in my head, spreading quickly. It hit me with a cold shock, and I gasped out loud, clutching at my head.
“Ms. McGee? Ms. McGee?” She was holding me firmly in bed to keep me from thrashing too much. More nurses appeared. One began applying drug patches to my head while another applied patches to my chest.
I began to feel a little bit calmer, but not much. In my mind I was just beginning to survey the far edges and corners of this new edifice of knowledge the Cube had imparted to me. It was like something remembered from a strange childhood dream and only now, decades later, was it making sense.
I had just met something called Hydrogen Steel. Or a piece of it, a shard, a shadow, perhaps. It said it was a firemind.
My mind was barely skimming the surface of understanding. The drugs started to act. My body subsided. I started to feel warm again. My heart returned to something like a healthy rhythm.
I could see in my mind’s eye terrifying vistas of pain, suffering and death; of knowledge, images that I would never, in a million years, even begin to grasp.
The nurses continued their scanning. There was a lot of very intense but silent communication among them as they scanned me with their nano-enhanced hands and ran tests through their fingertips. I was only barely aware of them.
A short while later, Dr. Panassos appeared with his floating carousel headware pods, and he examined me, too. I remember him asking me a lot of questions.
But what could I say? Even if I could have spoken, and even if I wasn’t full of enough tranquilizers to put down an elephant, I don’t know what I could have told him. His own scans and studies of my head caused him a lot of concern, I could see that. He kept frowning, and his modules kept revolving, stopping here and there, as he stared, mumbling, into interface-space.
He asked me, again and again, if I could tell him anything, anything at all, about what had just happened to me. He kept using the word “event” to talk about it. But they had no idea. Only I had seen it; it had taken place entirely within the cold depths of my mind. It was too soon even to begin to put into words what had happened. Between the Cube’s appearance and the endless unfolding of all that information in my head, all I could do was shrug helplessly.
Dr. Panassos decided to station a nurse in the room to keep an eye on me, in case of further “events”. I felt numb. The effects of my experience would turn up in their own time. And probably keep turning up for the rest of my life. In my head it felt like the parts of my mind that were me had been squeezed down into a tiny compartment in the back. Everything else was occupied by Hydrogen Steel’s massive “gift”.
I lay in bed, still trying to get warm, kicking my feet back and forth to build up friction in the sheets. I did, at last, fall asleep, but there was no
rest for me that night, and maybe never again.
My Paper chimed, waking me up to announce an incoming call. It was Simon, reporting in after landing on Narwhal Island.
I stared at the display window, which showed Simon’s bright-eyed and determined face. He was at a public dataport. Behind him I could see a bleak, rocky landscape; it looked like it was windy. There were no mountains and the few visible trees were all bent in one direction. It was early morning, the sun rising, painting the overcast sky a pinkish-gold color. There was a loud bird somewhere in the background, too, making a vehement and guttural call that sounded suspiciously like swear-words in a foreign language.
My head still pounding, I rubbed my eyes and tried to focus on Simon.
“I have completed my task as ordered Ms. McGee,” Simon said enthusiastically. “Constable Shoko met me at the aerodrome, and filled me in on developments. Item: Constable Akara is in the local hospital, unconscious, after emergency surgery. Item: The on-call doctor who went with her out to Chief Sacks’ house last night was murdered, probably by the same person who killed Chief Sacks. Item: Shoko has applied to the mainland to send urgent backup. Item: To the extent that they can monitor inbound and outgoing traffic, they haven’t seen anything suspicious.”
The more Simon went on in his report about the case, the more I was stricken with fear all over again.
Hydrogen Steel’s gift, while not exactly speaking to me, was nevertheless filling me in on a few things. It was showing me things — people dying, dozens of them, at the hands of attackers made of greasy black smoke; then there were other images I understood even less, suggesting an entire world’s destruction, the loss of billions of lives. All of their terror, confusion and pain was funnelling straight into my mind. I couldn’t stop it. And suddenly, I knew what had happened to the Fallows that night.
I saw from what I guessed was Kell Fallow’s perspective how he woke suddenly in the middle of the night, having heard something. And I saw how — as his eyes adjusted to the weak moonlight streaming through the closed windows — he saw a man-like figure who looked like he was made of what I can only describe as pure night. It looked like a man-shaped hole in reality. It cast no shadow; it was shadow.
Hydrogen Steel Page 15
