The Lowest Heaven

by Alastair Reynolds

  At the airlock, she stopped to bundle up. Stiff boots, gloves, parka, respirator. The air here was breathable, Enyo-Enyo told her, but thin and toxic if exposed for long periods. She queued up the first phase of the release and waited for pressurization.

  The vibrating door became transparent; blistering white light pushed away the darkness of the interior.

  Ahead of her: a snow-swept platform. In the distance, a cavernous ruin of a mountain pockmarked with old munitions scars. A sea of frozen fog stretched from the platform to the mountain. As she watched, a thin, webbed bridge materialized between the mountain and the platform.

  She waited. She had waited a full turn around the galaxy to come back here. She could wait a couple terrestrial turns more.

  The moisture of her breath began to freeze on the outer edges of her respirator. It reminded her of the first time she had come to Eris.

  Bodies littered the field, and Enyo moved among them, cloaked in clouds of blood-rain. The nits she had infected herself with collected the blood spilled around her and created a shimmering vortex of effluvia that, in turn, devoured all it touched.

  “You must not fight her,” the field commander shrieked, and Enyo knew some of the fear came from the waves of methane melting all around them as the frozen surface of Eris convulsed. “You must not stop her. She is small now. You must leave her alone, and she will stay small. If you fight her she will swell in size and grow large. She will be unstoppable.”

  But they fought her. They always fought her.

  When she took the field, she flayed them of their fleshy spray-on suits and left them to freeze solid before they could asphyxiate, flailing in sublime methane.

  There had to be sacrifices.

  As she stood over the field commander, making long rents in her suit, the commander said, “If it’s a war your people want, it’s a war they’ll get.”

  When it was over, Enyo gazed up at the thorny silhouette of the colonial superpod that the squad had tried to protect. Most of the Sol colonists started out here, from Eris. She would need the superpod, later, or she could never be here, now. Sometimes one had to start a war just to survive to the next turn.

  Enyo crawled up into the sickening tissue of the superpod. She found the cortex without much trouble. The complicated bits of genetic code that went into programming the superpod should have been beyond her, but she had ingested coordinates from her squad commander’s jaw, during some long-distant snapshot of her life that the satellite had created. Now the coordinates were a part of her, like her fingernails or eyelashes.

  She kissed the cortex and programmed the ship’s destination.

  Tuatara.

  Reeb worked on one of the harvester ships that circled the Rim every four cycles. Enyo was twenty, and he was eighty two, he said. He said he had met her before. She said she didn’t remember, but that was a lie. What she wanted to say was, “I remember giving birth to you,” but that, too, was a lie. The difference between memory and premonition depended largely on where one was standing. At twenty, on the Mushta Mura Arm, her “memories” were merely ghosts, visions, brain effluvia.

  When she fucked Reeb in her twenty-year-old skin, it was with the urgency of a woman who understood time. Understood that there was never enough of it. Understood that this moment, now, was all of it. The end and the beginning. Distorted.

  She said his name when she came. Said his name and wept for some nameless reason; some premonition, some memory. Wept for what it all had been and would become.

  “The satellite is a prototype,” the recruiter said. The emblem on her uniform looked familiar. A red double circle shot through with a blue dart.

  They walked along a broad, transparent corridor that gave them a sweeping view of the marbled surface of Eris. Centuries of sculpting had done little to improve its features, though the burning brand in the sky that had once been its moon, Dysmonia, made the surface a bearable -20 degrees Celsius during what passed for summer, and unaided breathing was often possible, if not always recommended. The methane seas had long since been tapped, leaving behind a stark, mottled surface of rocky protuberances shot through with the heads of methane wells. Beyond the domed spokes of the research hub’s many arms, the only living thing out there was the hulking mop of the satellite. Enyo thought it looked like a spiky, pulsing crustacean.

  “A prototype of what, exactly?” she asked. Her debriefing on Io had been remarkably brief.

  “There’s much to know about it,” the recruiter said. “We won’t send you out until you’ve bonded with it, of course. That’s our worry. That it won’t take. But… there is an indication that you and the satellite are genetically and temperamentally matched. It’s quite fortunate.”

  Enyo wasn’t sure she believed in fortune or coincidence, but the job paid well, and it was only a matter of time before people found out who she was. The satellite offered escape. Redemption. “Sure, but what is it?”

  “A self-repairing – and self-replicating, if need be – vehicle for exploring the galactic rim. It will take snapshots – exact replicas – of specified quadrants as you pass, and store them aboard for future generations to act out. Most of that is automated, but it will need a companion. We have had some unfortunate incidents of madness, when constructs like these are cast off alone. It’s been grown from… well, from some of the most interesting organic specimens we’ve found in our exploration of the near-systems.”

  “It’s alien, then?”

  “Partially. Some of it’s terrestrial. Just enough of it.”

  “It’s illegal to go mixing alien stuff with ours, isn’t it?”

  The recruiter smiled. “Not on Eris.”

  “Why Eris? Why not Sedna, or a neighboring system?”

  “The concentrated methane that will give you much of your initial inertia comes from Eris. The edge of the Sol system is close enough for us to gain access to local system resources at a low cost, but far enough away to – well, it’s far enough away to keep the rest of the world safe.”

  “Safe from what?”

  “There’s a danger, Enyo. A danger of what you could… bring back. Or perhaps what you could become.”

  Enyo regarded the spiky satellite. “You should have hired some techhead, then.” She was not afraid of the alien thing, not then, but the recruiter made her anxious. There was something very familiar about her teeth.

  “You came highly recommended,” the recruiter said.

  “You mean I’m highly expendable.”

  They came to the end of the long spoke, and stepped into the transparent bubble of the airlock that sat outside the pulsing satellite.

  “The war is over,” the recruiter said, “but there were many casualties. We make do with what we have.”

  “It’s breathing, isn’t it?” Enyo said.

  “Methane, mostly,” the recruiter said.

  “And out there?”

  “It goes into hibernation. It will need less. But our initial probes along the galactic rim have indicated that methane is as abundant there as here. We’ll go into more detail on the mechanics of its care and feeding.”

  “Feeding?” Enyo said.

  “Oh yes,” the recruiter said. She pressed her dark hand to the transparent screen. Her eyes were big, the pupils too large, like all the techs who had grown up on Eris. “You’ll need to feed it. At least a few hundred kilos of organic matter a turn.”

  Enyo gazed up at the hulk of the thing. “And where exactly am I going to get organic matter as we orbit the far arms of the galaxy?”

  “I’m sure you’ll think of something,” the recruiter said. She withdrew her hand, and flashed her teeth again. “We chose you because we knew you could make those kinds of decisions without regret. The way you did during the war. And long before it.”

  Enyo sliced open the slick surface of the superpod with her weapon. There was no rush of Tuataran atmosphere, no crumpling or wrinkling about the wound. No, the peridium had already been breached somewhere else. Ars
o and Dax hung back, bickering over some slight. Enyo wondered if they had known one another before Reeb picked them up. They had, hadn’t they? The way she had known Arso. The snapshot of Arso. Some other life. Some other decision.

  Inside, the superpod’s bioluminescent tubal corridors still glowed a faint blue-green, just enough light for Enyo to avoid stepping on the wizened body of some unfortunate maintenance officer.

  “Don’t you need direction?” Reeb tickled her ear. But she already knew where the colonists were. She knew because she had placed them there herself, turns and turns ago.

  Enyo crawled up through the sticky corridors, cutting through pressurized areas of the superpod, going around others. Finally, she reached the coded spiral of the saferoom that held the colonists. She gestured to Arso.

  “Open it,” she said.

  Arso snorted. “It’s a coded door.”

  “Yes. It’s coded for you. Open it.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “It’s why you’re here. Open it.”

  “I–“

  Enyo lifted her weapon. “Should Enyo make you?”

  Arso held up her hands. “Fine. No harm. Fucking dizzy core you’ve got, woman.”

  Arso placed her hand against the slimy doorway. The coating on the door fused with her spray-on suit. Pressurized. Enyo heard the soft intake of Arso’s breath as the outer seal of the safe room tasted her blood.

  The door went transparent.

  Arso yanked away her hand.

  Enyo walked through the transparent film and into the pressurized safe room. Ring after ring of personal pods lined the room, suffused in a blue glow. Hundreds? Thousands.

  She glanced back at Dax. Both she and Arso were surveying the cargo. Dax’s little mouth was open. Enyo realized who she reminded her of, then. The recruiter. The one with the teeth.

  Enyo shot them both. They died quickly, without comment.

  Then she walked to the first pod she saw. She tore away the head of her own suit and tossed it to the floor. She peered into the colonist’s puckered face, and she thought of the prisoner.

  Enyo bit the umbilicus that linked the pod to the main life system, the same core system responsible for renewing and replenishing the fluids that sustained these hibernating bodies.

  The virus in her saliva infected the umbilicus. In a few hours, everything in here would be liquid jelly. Easily digestible for a satellite seeking to make its last turn.

  As Reeb cursed in her ear, she walked the long line of pods, back and back and back, until she found two familiar names. Arso Tohl. Dax Alhamin. Their pods were side by side. Their faces perfectly pinched. Dax looked younger, and perhaps she was, in this snapshot. Arso was still formidable. Enyo pressed her fingers to the transparent face of the pod. She wanted to kiss them. But they would be dead of her kiss soon enough.

  Dead for a second time. Or perhaps a fifth, a fiftieth, a five hundredth. She didn’t know. She didn’t want to know.

  It’s why she piloted Enyo-Enyo.

  The woman waiting on the other side of the icy bridge was not one Enyo recognized, which did not happen often. As she guided the prisoner’s pod to the woman’s feet, she wondered how long it had been, this turn. How long since the last?

  “What do you have for us?” the woman asked.

  “Eris is very different,” Enyo said.

  The woman turned her long brown face to the sky and frowned. “I suppose it must seem that way to you. It’s been like this for centuries.”

  “No more methane?”

  “Those wells went dry five hundred years ago.” The woman knit her brows. “You were around this way long before that happened. You must remember Eris like this.”

  “Was I? I must have forgotten.”

  “So what is it this time?” the woman said. “We’re siphoning off the satellite’s snapshots now.”

  “I brought you the prisoner,” Enyo said.

  “What prisoner?”

  “The prisoner,” Enyo said, because as she patted the prisoner’s pod something in her memory ruptured. There was something important she knew. “The prisoner who started the war.”

  “What war?” the woman said.

  “The war,” Enyo said.

  The woman wiped away the snow on the face of the pod, and frowned. “Is this some kind of joke?” she said.

  “I brought her back,” Enyo said.

  The woman jabbed Enyo in the chest. “Get back in the fucking satellite,” she said. “And do your fucking job.”

  Back to the beginning. Around and around.

  Enyo wasn’t sure how it happened, the first time. She was standing outside the escape pod, a bulbous, nasty little thing that made up the core of the internode. It seemed an odd place for it. Why put the escape pod at the center of the satellite? But that’s where the thing decided to grow it. And so that’s where it was.

  She stood there as the satellite took its first snapshot of the quadrant they moved through. And something shifted. Some core part of her. That’s when the memories started. The memories of the other pieces. The snapshots.

  That’s when she realized what Enyo-Enyo really was.

  Enyo stepped up into the escape pod. She sealed it shut. Her breathing was heavy. She closed her eyes. She had to go home, now, before it broke her into more pieces. Before it reminded her of what she was. War criminal. Flesh dealer. Monster.

  As she sealed the escape pod and began drowning in life-sustaining fluid, she realized it was not meant for her escape. Enyo-Enyo had placed it there for another purpose.

  The satellite took a snapshot.

  And there, on the other side of the fluid-filled pod, she saw her own face.

  The squalling children were imperfect, like Enyo. She had already sold Reeb to some infertile young diplomatic aid’s broker in the flesh pits for a paltry sum. It was not enough to get her off the shit asteroid at the ass end of the Mushta Mura arm. She would die out here of some green plague, some white dust contagion. The death dealers would string her up and sell her parts. She’d be nothing. All this pain and anguish, for nothing.

  Later, she could not recall how she found the place. Whispered rumors. A mangled transmission. She found herself walking into a chemically scrubbed medical office, like some place you’d go to have an industrial part grafted on for growing. The logo on the spiral of the door, and the coats of the staff, was a double circle shot through with a blue dart.

  “I heard you’re not looking for eggs or embryos,” she said, and set Dysmonia’s swaddled little body on the counter.

  The receptionist smiled. White, white teeth. He blinked, and a woman came up from the back. She was a tall brown-skinned woman with large hands and a grim face.

  “I’m Arso Tohl,” the woman said. “Let’s have a look.”

  They paid Enyo enough to leave not just the asteroid, but the Mushta Mura arm entirely. She fled with a hot bundle of currency instead of a squalling, temperamental child. When she entered the armed forces outside the Sol system, she did so because it was the furthest arm of the galaxy from her own. When a neighboring system paid her to start a war, she did so gladly.

  She did not expect to see or hear from the butchers again.

  Not until she saw the logo on the satellite recruiter’s uniform.

  Enyo ate her fill of the jellified colonists and slogged back to the satellite to feed it, to feed Enyo-Enyo. Reeb’s annoying voice had grown silent. He always stopped protesting after the first dozen.

  She found him sitting in the internode with the prisoner, his hands pressed against the base of the pod. His head was lowered.

  “It was enough to make the next turn,” Enyo said.

  “It always is,” he said.

  “There will be other crews,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “Then why are you melancholy?” If she could see his face, it would be winter.

  He raised his head. Stared at the semblance of a body floating in the viscous fluid. “I’m
not really here, am I?”

  “This turn? I don’t know. Sometimes you are. Sometimes you aren’t. It depends on how many snapshots Enyo-Enyo has taken this turn. And how she wants it all to turn out this time.”

  “When did you put yourself in here?” He patted the prisoner’s pod.

  “When things got too complicated to bear,” she said. “When I realized who Enyo-Enyo was.” She went to the slick feeding console. She vomited the condensed protein stew of the colonists into the receptacle. When it was over, she fell back, exhausted.

  “Let’s play screes,” she said. “Before the next snapshot. We might be different people, then.”

  “We can only hope,” Reeb said, and pulled his hands away from the prisoner.

  THE COMET’S TALE

  MATT JONES

  No one had heard of our dumb ass town before the comet came. Afterwards, the whole world knew the name Meridian. Those of us who called it home would come to wish they hadn’t, and no one more than me.

  They say Meridian is the sixth biggest city in Mississippi, but before you go getting all impressed, take a look at the competition. Exactly. If you ask me, calling Meridian a city is giving it airs and graces it has no business putting on. Main Street may boast a dozen stores, but the smaller streets that run parallel to it and the railway track have never filled all their plots. There’s a movie theater, a library and a lot of bars, none that a woman with half her senses would venture in alone. There’s the stone Municipal Building that must’ve been built in a grander age. Opposite that is a prefab office where Meridian’s six Democrats eat pizza and talk about how they’re gonna bring Reagan down.

  But for a couple of weeks, during an otherwise uneventful spring in ‘86, Meridian was packed with reporters and cameramen, and you couldn’t get a room at the motel or even rent a spare bedroom, not for love nor money. And everyone was talking about the comet and the thirty-six people that lost their lives on account of it. One of the dead was Jordan Danes. I don’t think I’ll ever love anyone as much as I loved him.