by John Grant
He permitted himself a moan.
"That's better," said the invisible woman. "Keep it at that level."
"Who are you?" he said.
"Qinefer."
For a few moments the name made no sense. Then he put it together with an image. He was conscious of the fact that his mind was working very slowly. The trouble was that she didn't look much like Qinefers usually did. Qinefer – she was the woman whom somehow no one ever looked at all that often. She had a habit, when crossing a room, of following the line of the walls, as if afraid to expose herself to the open space in the middle. She had mid-length, curly black hair – that was the first thing he remembered. Yes, and a broad face that managed, despite its breadth, to convey the impression of delicate construction. The only thing that distinguished her was that, anachronistically, she wore spectacles; these intensified the darkness and depth of her eyes while at the same time drawing attention to the prim nakedness of the folds at the outer corners. Small breasts, hardly discernible under her blue uniform shirt; you tended to notice things like breasts on a long flight. Some of the other men on the mission had called her Mouse, because of the way she was so quiet. So self-deprecating. That was probably why he'd hardly registered her presence except for the one time he'd thought about her breasts. Just the one time, which said a lot in itself.
"Mouse," he said, then wished he hadn't.
"Yes."
She was a biochemist; the information popped into his mind. More came. The earlier expedition to the star called Embrace-of-the-Forest had reported that, astonishingly, there was a deal of evidence indicating that, millennia before, the planet closest to the dim red dwarf had given birth to what had become an advanced civilization. That life could emerge at all on a world where the surface temperature was so low had been something of a surprise; that the miserly radiation from its star, so sluggishly devoid of high-energy particles, could have caused sufficient genetic mutation to create a sophisticated lifeform within the known lifetime of the universe was so startling that the exobiologists were still revising their theories. Meanwhile, the rest of the scientists were trying to puzzle out why the creatures of Starveling, as the world had been named, had disappeared, because now the planet was manifestly barren of all but the most primitive forms of animal life. What people tried not to speculate about too publicly for fear of a blasphemy charge was the possibility that this might have been the home of the Forgotten, the vanished race whose technological feats were evidenced throughout the Galaxy by constructions great and small, from hand-sized gadgets whose purposes were too often inscrutable up to the artificial worlds that floated between the suns.
But, if this were indeed the Forgotten's home world, perhaps a clue to that race's extinction might be found here. Hence the presence of a couple of hundred scientists and their inevitable hangers-on. Among the key members of the team was a pair of biochemists: Mouse and a big blonde woman called Claire whom Makreed now recalled vaguely as having been curiously uninteresting in bed but attractively vivacious out of it. If Qinefer had had any diurnal presence in his mind at all it had been as the other biochemist.
"What about the people who were ahead of us?" he said weakly, his lips feeling rubbery, like the fat leaves of a succulent plant. "And the others behind us?"
"Don't think about them. For the moment the only people we've got room to think about is us."
There was a spark of coldness in the small of his back and almost immediately the pain began to recede. In the lucidity which came into his mind like a wash of clean water he realized Mouse had finally gotten around to giving him a shot of painkiller from the medikit at her belt. He wondered why she hadn't done that before.
He thanked her politely for her attentions and then drifted off into an untroubled sleep.
~
"You're a shit, you know?" Qinefer said quietly, clutching a towel to her chest as if to conceal the newly discovered slightness of her bosom. The taut vehemence with which she'd said the words made the tip of her tongue hurt; an isolated part of her was trying to tell her that the pain was merely psychosomatic, but she didn't want to listen to it. "You really are."
"What do you mean?" said Daan. He was standing looking out of the picture-window at the city two hundred meters below. The sun was bright and the sky a yellow-blue haze, as they always were on The World. He saw distant patterns of traffic moving like midges. She saw his tight buttocks and the tapestry of curly soft hair around the sharp bulges of his shoulderblades, and rubbed her fingertips together, as if trying to brush away all the times she'd touched him.
"What do you think I mean?" she said, her words like arrows at his back. "She could have given you dead-eyes or limpets, you clown. And that would've meant you gave them on to me. Not exactly the loving touch."
At last Daan turned to look at her. The sunshine drenching him made the hairs of his body seem to glow from their own light. He was smiling.
"I tested myself, you know," he said. Smiling.
"And the tests are only ninety-nine per cent reliable."
"That's a good level of risk."
"Not good enough. You want to spend the rest of forever wandering around with your eyes like marbles? Or limping – hobbledy hobbledy hobbledy – because your ankle-tendons have calced?"
"No. I'd euth rather than that." His grin broadened. "Yup, guess've always wanted to find out what it's like to be dead. Better than living – must be."
"And me?"
He shrugged. "We could've had fun in the afterlife together."
"I might have had an opinion on the matter. Did you ever think about that, huh? I mightn't have wanted to euth. But I wouldn't have wanted to keep on living with dead-eyes or limpets – or you – any longer, either."
"Hey, darling ..."
"Just fuck off, you moron. You've blown it this time. Go and redesign your life."
His smile faded. "I think it's you who should be the one to go. If you want to."
Qinefer dressed herself, gathered together as many of her possessions as would fit into a backpack, and left. She never saw Daan again, and never allowed herself again to become that close to another human being. Instead she became a biochemist.
~
The chamber in which they were trapped was about five meters long and about three meters wide and about two meters high. One of a chain of fifty or more built here underground for reasons that had yet to be ascertained, if ever, it had been constructed with geometrical precision. The height dimension had led the social anthropologists on the expedition to speculate that the original inhabitants of Starveling must have been shorter in stature than human beings, but not by all that much. Around the walls of the chamber, featureless metal boxes were placed in a neat row. Everything was covered in a layer of dust.
Makreed was cold. The pain from his foot was now tolerable, thanks to the painkiller Mouse had administered before he'd fallen asleep, but it constantly reminded him of his own potential for mortality, that it was possible for him not to live forever if he did too much irreversible damage to his body, something he normally never thought about. But at least the bleeding had stopped.
He sat with his knees drawn up, his arms around them and his back against one of the walls. He could see the chamber only in fleeting highlights as the beam of Mouse's torch swept around it. She was slowly working her way across one of the blank doors, hoping to find some pressure-sensitive patch that might open it. Makreed had little faith in her quest: she'd already searched the other of the two doors without success.
He wondered for the millionth time why he was here in the complex. He was a botanist, not a physicist. But someone among the expedition's loosely defined Powers That Be had decreed that, before they left Starveling, there should be one last prowl through the subterranean maze by all the scientists who'd been brought along. Maybe a botanist might spot something that a physicist or a biochemist wouldn't? Makreed had protested at the implausibility of the reasoning; now he wished he'd protested louder.
<
br /> He found his own torch, carefully stowed in the breast pocket of his uniform, exactly where it was supposed to be, and began to flash it around him. The little metal boxes the ETs had constructed and left around the walls so many millennia ago seemed all to be much of a size; through the dust they showed a matte surface of dark green. Presumably they had had some purpose, but so far the expedition had been unable even to guess at what that purpose might have been. One popular theory was that the whole complex had been some sort of library, the metal boxes being the ET equivalent of books – but it was just a theory. Someone else had suggested it was a mausoleum. If they'd been able to get the boxes open they might have found out.
"Any luck?" he said listlessly. The darkness quenched all sparks of optimism.
"I'd tell you if there were," said Mouse.
A stupid question.
"Can I help?"
"I don't think so. On second thoughts, yes. You can help by not helping. Don't speak, and try to relax. Thirty cubic meters of air isn't going to keep us going forever. And don't even think of lighting a smokette, if you have the habit."
He swung his torch round to watch her. The air was dead down here, and it made her aliveness incongruous. Patiently, patiently, she was moving her right hand over the surface of the door, letting the fingers push against it gently every centimeter or so. The thinness of her wrists seemed somehow incompatible with the competence of her movements.
She turned and looked back at him, not moving her feet, the plastiglass of her spectacles flashing in the torchlight.
"I'd rather you didn't watch me," she said.
"Why not?"
"Let's not discuss it. The air – remember?"
~
Daan had been great that summer. Ever since she'd known him he'd been broke – or as broke as the Incarnate One ever permitted his children to be on The World – but now one of Daan's mind-songs had been bought as the theme for some afternoon series on the psychoholo that no one ever admitted they watched. It wasn't exactly the kind of fame he'd been thinking of during the past two or three decades when he'd been slaving away at the psychosynth, but the first royalty cheque had been large enough to cover comfortably any sense of outraged artistic integrity. He'd banked half the money and told her the best way of spending the other half was for them both to go south, to the Anonymous City – which he'd always dreamed of seeing – and bum around until there was nothing left but their fares home.
Qinefer had given up her job reluctantly. Well, only in some ways reluctantly. She'd liked the job but it hadn't seemed to be leading anywhere and, even if it had been going to, she hadn't been sure that was anywhere she particularly wanted to go. The Anonymous City, where the air was sullen with the redolence of glamorously unknown sins, had been a much more appealing destination. A neighbor had been willing to look after the lizards in their absence, and so they'd gone ...
And come back again. It was after they'd got home, having made love in an apartment that breathed the passage of time, that Daan had confessed to her about the "little accident" that had befallen him in one of the sun-battered parks of the Anonymous City. In the normal way it mightn't have worried her too vastly, but like all Daans he was in some ways an honest man, some of the time, and felt he had to explain himself.
"It wasn't exactly her in any way," he'd said, standing at the window, "and it's not that I don't love you very much. It was just she'd got these really big boobs. Monsters. Like in the holos. I've always wanted to know what it was like getting laid by somebody like that, and she was sort of ultra-available. It was just, you know, the spirit of scientific inquiry."
Qinefer had never thought too much about her breasts before: like the rest of her body, they'd just been there. Now she wanted to laugh derisively at him – or maybe herself – but found she couldn't muster the necessary derision. Instead she'd discovered to her astonishment that for the first time in her life she felt ashamed of the shape of her body. She'd known the embarrassment was ridiculous, based on a farcical perception of someone else's perception of herself, but she'd anyway grabbed a towel to cover up the suddenly offensively small curves. They'd always been average-sized curves before ...
After she left Daan that day, Qinefer erected a transparent wall around herself and watched the world through it. Visitors were allowed inside the wall only very occasionally, and never for very long. Her near-celibacy was all the stranger in an age that was so promiscuous. In the century and a half before she discovered she'd qualified to go on the scientific expedition to Embrace-of-the-Forest and its enigmatic dead planet, she'd slept with, all told, two men and one woman, one night apiece, no interesting conversation in the morning, not much interest in the event; the operation had in each case been a clinical one, designed purely to release a sexual tension which would not succumb to masturbation. The wall had been kept essentially intact.
And now she was on Starveling, sent here to examine the biochemistry of the planet's rudimentary lifeforms and, if the expedition was lucky and found some remains, to make guesses about what the workings of the bodies of the long-ago ETs might have been. She was also trapped in a dark, smallish chamber with a man she didn't much like. He was a nuisance: a complicating factor in what would otherwise have been an engrossing intellectual puzzle. That it had been by accident that he had breached her wall ameliorated his crime somewhat, but only somewhat. She'd bandaged his fearful wound automatically, more because she'd known it would look bad to her rescuers if she hadn't than for any other reason; but, as she recognized, the fact that she'd forgotten about the painkiller for so long was symptomatic of her sense that he'd forced himself on her.
~
Wincing histrionically as he moved his right leg, making sure Mouse heard the way he silenced the whistle of his indrawn breath, Makreed shifted himself over to one of the metal boxes. He brushed away the superficial dust and looked at the artefact in the rather too white light from his torch. The drab green metal looked back at him with little friendliness. For the first time since they'd landed on Starveling it became a part of his consciousness that they really were on an unknown planet – not just in some mysteriously hitherto-unexplored tract on one of the Authority's worlds. The box seemed more alien to him than any luridly tentacled monster.
It looked utterly inert. He pushed it, knowing as he did so that the thing was fixed immovably to the smoothly tiled floor.
During the earlier forays into the complex, no one had discovered a single marking on any of the boxes: they were just featureless metal cuboids. And yet obviously they must be something more than that – they had to have been put here for some purpose. The long-gone race that had come of age under the light of Embrace-of-the-Forest must have constructed them with some useful function in mind. Surely they couldn't be books: if they'd been books there'd have been some simple way of opening them. It crossed his mind whimsically that maybe the boxes hadn't been built by the ETs at all: maybe they actually were the ETs.
He smiled at the thought. Anything was possible in the universe, as people were constantly discovering. The whole structure of reality was a never-ending conundrum, with observed fact frequently at fundamental variance with the predictions of theory. The age of the universe was known from isotope-dating to be only about five million years – far too short a time for all the rich diversity of sophisticated lifeforms it contained to have evolved at the rates that could currently be observed. One or the other calculation must be wrong, and so physicists on one side and biologists on the other produced ever more unconvincing hypotheses as to how the rate of radioactive decay and/or mutations might have wildly fluctuated in past eras. And then there were the calculations that showed beyond all possible shadow of doubt that the speed of light should be some kind of limiting velocity in a universe that was curved as the universe was indeed curved, yet the transition from sublight normspace into supralight flashspace was an easy one, as any space-traveler could tell you, only the changed images on the telltales giving any sign tha
t a barrier had been crossed. Mathematicians had teased for centuries at the paradox, but as yet they had found no flaws in the theory.
Rather like there were no flaws to be found in the impossibly stolid boxes ...
Wasn't it a bit presumptuous of the expedition to have assumed the boxes had any function? Half the gadgets on which the Authority had founded a technological civilization shouldn't in theory have worked, yet they obviously did. The only conceivable explanation was that they were made to do so by the existence of each new Incarnate One, who through the donation of his or her blessings could tailor the laws of the universe such that they conformed to human requirements. But presumably the boxes, which must have been constructed by the ETs long before the election of the first Incarnate One, were without such blessing. Perhaps the ETs, too, had had a spiritual magic which could empower the otherwise useless, and that magic had died with them ...
"I've finished doing this door," said Mouse.
Makreed swivelled where he half-lay. In the poor light of their torches he could see her taking the few steps needed to join him next to the box. He admired the precision and economy of her movements, was surprised to discover that he found them attractive.
She squatted down beside him. He noticed that for some reason she'd kicked her boots off.
"Any luck?" she said, nodding unnecessarily towards the box.
"What would you expect?" he replied sourly.
"You never know." Her voice was as soft as she could make it while still being audible to him.
