This Alien Shore

by C. S. Friedman

  Jamisia was miserable, and she was sick, and she was scared. The pod had a lo-G web, but she was afraid to turn it on, afraid that if she used too much power, the pod’s limited batteries might run out and leave her stranded in the middle of nowhere. So she was weightless and she got sick and she threw up, and then she had to turn on the gravity long enough to clean out the tiny space ... and when it was over, she floated in a tiny huddled ball at the end of the curved mattress and shivered, more afraid and more alone than she had ever imagined a person could be.

  She had opened the tiny box her tutor had given her, but nothing in it looked very helpful. There was a debit chip and an ID tag—Jamisia Capra, they both said, with no explanation—and some brainware specs on a card (likewise with no explanation) and half a dozen other small things, including an infochip for the captain of the metroliner, and a similar one for her. The pod’s headset could have translated them for her, but she was afraid to use it, afraid that it would send out some kind of signal so that others could follow her. There was a pendant on a chain with a strange linear design etched into it, and at first she thought it was an icon, so she ran her eyes over it again and again, from one end to the other and then back again, in every direction she could think of. But nothing happened. Maybe it was the key to some program that had never gotten loaded into her brainware, she thought. Or maybe she needed some kind of personal pass-key to make it work, which her tutor had intended to give her, but he’d never had the chance. Or maybe it was just some kind of weird gift, the kind of thing you gave someone you cared about when you weren’t going to see them for a long time. A kind of amulet. She put the thin chain around her neck and pushed the pendant down into her shirt, so that it wouldn’t float up and hit her in the face when she moved.

  She managed to eat something from the pod’s no-G stores, a packet of orange mush “guaranteed to keep forever.” It was tasteless. She managed to urinate into the waste tube properly, and to get it all tucked away without spilling anything, even though her hands were shaking. She wept until there were no tears left inside her, and then she wept dry until her body and soul were so exhausted that she just lay there in the darkness, floating, too tired even to fear any more. Her wellseeker offered to help her out—it practically insisted—but she turned it down. She needed the outlet, the raw outpouring of fear that crying provided. Brainware could dull the edge of that fear, but it couldn’t attack its cause. Only she could do that.

  At last, exhausted, she slept.

  (ICON CONFIRMED)

  DREAMSCAPE 1.000 LOADING

  RUN

  Green grass. Blue skies. Colors brilliant, like crystal. Overhead the sky seems endless, not like the sky in a viddie of Earth, but rich with secret depths, dizzying in its utter vastness. Likewise the clouds are alien things, and she watches in amazement as they morph from one shape to another, ten thousand times more subtle than any mere viddie could render. She looks down at the land—green, so green!—and then sees a stream in the distance. She begins to walk toward it. Its water runs clear, not yet choked with the specially designed algae that crowded Earth relies upon for oxygen. She savors the crisp sound the water makes as it gushes over rocks, the feel of the thick grass and the moist dirt giving way beneath her feet as she walks, even the pressure of the hi-G system pulling her downward. Alien sensations, each and every one. And yet ... there are no smells here, she realizes. How odd. You would expect a place like this to smell clean, or damp, or earthy, or ... something.

  Then she sees the man.

  He is standing by the bank of the stream. At first his back is to her, but as she comes nearer, he turns so that she can see his face. It’s her tutor, she realizes, but he doesn’t look the same as when he put her in the pod. This is a younger version of the same man, a thinner version, tanned as if from some outstation sun.

  He recognizes her, nods her a welcome, and says, in a voice so calm it seems out of place in these fantastic surroundings, “East coast of North America, circa 1940. ”

  She begins to study the details of the place, knowing she’ll be tested later. But rather than going on with the lesson, he walks up to her, very close, and puts his hand beneath her chin to cradle it upward, gently. His eyes are brown and warm and it calms her to look into them. For a moment—one precious second—the fear in her heart subsides. She trusts this man.

  “Jamisia. ” In all their years together he’s rarely used her formal name; that he does so now gives his words special weight. “If you’re running this dreamscape, then the worst has happened. Shido has been destroyed, or else you’ve chosen to flee them. There’ll be people trying to find you soon, and you don’t dare let them get hold of you. No matter what anyone may promise, no matter how frightening the alternatives may seem, once you’ve made the commitment to flight, you’ve got to keep away from them at any cost. ” He pauses. “Do you understand?”

  For a moment she can’t find her voice to respond. She is remembering what her tutor once explained about dream programming, how it’s the kind of thing you use when you’re afraid that your subject will try to escape what you have to say. Brainware won’t accept new input during dreamtime— for its own protection—so a dreaming brain lacks the kind of conscious control system the waking brain is accustomed to. She can’t shut this program down. She can’t run away. If the program was designed well enough, she can’t even wake herself up.

  What kind of information would be so unpleasant that he can only pass it on to her like this? She can’t even imagine. But because it’s a habit to do well in his eyes—even if the “he” is only a dream-image—she draws herself up as bravely as she can and says, with only the faintest tremor in her voice, “Tell me.”

  The tutor-figure nods his approval. “You’ve been. the subject of an experiment, Jamisia, highly unorthodox and hellishly illegal. I’m not going to give you all the details now, because... quite frankly, I hope you won’t ever need them. Right now we need to deal with the more practical aspects of your current dilemma. The fact that you’re running this program means you have the materials I’ve prepared, including a false set of I. D. The last name’s private, not corporate, so it implies no more than a distant relationship to others using it. You’ll have to keep your own first name, I regret; there’s risk in that, but far less than you would take on if you changed it. ” He pauses. “Names have power in your life, Jamisia; don’t change yours unless you absolutely have to. ”

  She breathes: “I won’t.”

  “Your brainware processor is an experimental model and its signature will be unique; anyone who’s searching for you now will know to watch for it. I’ve loaded a masking program which will give it a false signature—that of a Hauck 9200—the specs for which are on the card I gave you. Memorize them. Be aware that your real storage capacity exceeds Hauck’s best by 1000%, your speed is five times that of the current market leader, and your multitasking capability—” He stops suddenly. “Well, that had to be high. Be aware of those differences. Disguise your true capacity. Whoever’s after you will know to look for those signs. ”

  She finds that she is shivering, though the dreamscape feels neither warm nor cold. “Why? Why do they want me so badly?”

  For a moment her tutor hesitates. It isn’t the pause of a man giving thought to her question, but the downtime of a program accessing its data stores. On what will it base its response? What parameters did her tutor design into it, to define the limits of this briefing? “Your brainware alone makes you valuable, ” he says at last. “As for the rest of it ... they hurt you, Jamisia. I know you don’t remember the details, but trust me, they did They wanted to see what would happen to a human brain under certain conditions, and they used you like a guinea pig to find out. Now that you’re away from them, I think there’s a chance that what they did to you will heal over time of its own accord, and you may never require knowledge of what it was. God willing. ”

  “What did they do?” she demands.

  The figure shakes his h
ead. “No, Jamisia. Not now. Once you learn the truth there’ll be no going back, and you have enough to deal with right now. If the time comes when you need to have that information, there are dreams in this program set that will give it to you. For now, study the chip I gave you. It contains details of your new identity, as well as a story to explain your sudden departure from Earth. You may need to alter the latter to suit your current circumstances; I had no way of knowing what the exact conditions of your flight would be when I compiled it. ” The figure pauses. “I tried to anticipate this day as thoroughly as I could, Jamisia, to give you the tools you would need the most. But as I program this dreamscape now, I have no way of knowing how old you’ll be when you trigger it, or how successful Shido will have been in altering the natural patterns of your brain. ”

  “What did Shido do?” she demands. She can hear an edge of hysteria coming into her voice and wonders if the dream-tutor will respond to it. “Tell me!”

  But the figure only shakes his head slowly, sadly. “Trust me, Jamisia. Trust my judgment.”

  And then he’s gone. As suddenly as a viddie image that’s been canceled, terminated in an instant as the channel is changed. The suddenness of it leaves her stunned for a moment, and by the time she can think clearly again, the dreamscape itself is beginning to fade. “No, ” she whispers, and then more loudly: “No!” Clouds bleed into sky, bleed out into nothingness; she struggles to take control of them, to call them back, but they defy her. She tries to awaken her brainware with an icon so that it can help her... but the programs accept no input while the body is in sleep-state. The grass is gone now, the water, too, even the ground that she stands on. Sleep is twining like a serpent through her brain, preparing her for more natural dreams.

  Don’t leave me! she screams silently.

  END PROGRAM

  She was miles away when she first saw the metroliner, and despite the fact that she knew what to expect—or thought she did—still it took her breath away to see it spread out before her like that, not a viddie reproduction but the real thing. It was vast, in the way that the Earth seemed vast when viewed from a habitat window. It was a thing out of fantasy, a creature out of the depths of space that seemed almost alive in its form, so utterly unlike a ship that for a short time her fears were all forgotten, and she pressed her face against the window like a small child seeing Earth for the first time.

  At its head was a vast curved dish, so like the cap of a jellyfish in shape and proportion that she half-expected to see it quiver, gathering up the essence of the surrounding darkness to spurt it out for propulsion. Behind that flowed the body of the ship proper: first the stocky core that housed its command center, then strands of domiciles and storage pods and vast curving boulevards where all manners of human intercourse might take place. They twined about each other in loose spirals, the space about and between them webbed with transport tubes and flyways and delicate crystalline spheres that glittered as her pod flew past them. All in all it seemed more like some vast, eerie creature dredged up from the bottom of Earth’s ocean than a man-made transport vessel, and she found herself holding her breath as her pod drew closer to it, half expecting it to shiver to life as she watched.

  She could see glittering spires now, studding the outer surface of one of the spiraling tendrils. On another were a series of domes, brightly colored, and flyways whose clear walls glittered with light. Closer in to the main body of the ship, where the tendrils merged, was a section of squatter, more prosaic structures, hi-G designs that reminded her of pictures she had seen of Earth’s surface. Was this where passengers stayed who feared the infinite emptiness of space, so that they could barricade themselves in stocky constructions reminiscent of their homeland and ignore the glorious open vista beyond? As a child of the habitats she had no such fear, and for a brief moment she wondered what a person who did was even doing in space. But the lure of Guild space was not to be denied. Once a person had traveled to the nearest ainniq, he would have access to all the stations of the up-and-out, nearly fifty thousand by current count. Factories and habitats and merchant rings and mansion spheres scattered throughout space with neither star nor planet to mark their position, gathered about the nodes where the ainniq intersected so that the outpilots could find them. Who wouldn’t brave their deepest fears to gain access to that universe?

  I’ll be there soon, she thought in wonder. I’ll be part of that system. She pressed her face to the tiny window, trying to see beyond the bulk of the metroliner, to the vast dark reaches beyond. Could she see the ainniq from here, if she tried hard enough? They said it was all but invisible until you were right on top of it, but she tried anyway. She knew where it was from her outspace lessons, and she located the stars that bordered it, but between them all she saw was the endless blackness of normal space. Maybe when they were closer, she thought. Maybe she could see it then, if she looked right.

  With a lurch the pod dropped suddenly downward, a direction that hadn’t even existed mere moments before. She grabbed a restraining strap quickly enough to keep herself from slamming into the padded interior of the pod. She could feel the great ship’s G-field taking hold now, and her stomach lurched as it struggled to adjust. No doubt there would have been a gentler approach available when Earth’s emigrants first came here, a fine gradation of gravities designed to ease the transition for dirt born travelers, but by now the costly docking mechanisms would have been shut down for the journey. She caught sight of a new dome outside the window—this one filled with a vast, madly twisted tree—as she grabbed for the pod’s small headset, which had been knocked from its pad by the jolt. She caught it and stuffed it hurredly into its slideaway. She had finally used it to read her tutor’s chip, memorizing the information it scrolled across her field of vision. Now, as she hurriedly packed away those few items which were still free in the pod, she ran the details of the identity he had created through her head over and over again, trying to become comfortable with them. Her tutor hadn’t warned her about presentation, but she sensed that how she offered up her story would matter every bit as much to these people as what she said. Hopefully if she repeated it often enough it would become second nature to her, and the new family name that he had given her would become so familiar that she would answer to it without hesitation.

  Heart pounding, palms sweating, she settled herself at last into the landing harness and buckled the heavy straps about her body. Symbols were blurring across the holo screen on the cabin wall, but the docking program was fully automatic, so she didn’t bother to read them. If something was wrong, the pod would let her know. Her wellseeker sensed her agitation and once more offered to correct it; after a minute she let it do so, and felt the fevered pounding in her chest slowly calm to a more normal rhythm. It was a superficial correction—the fear inside her was not to be banished so easily—but it was comforting nonetheless.

  Would they accept her story, this metroliner crew, and let her join the wealthy passengers who were sealed within the great ship? Were the funds acknowledged on her chip enough to pay for her passage? And if so ... what then?

  She couldn’t even imagine what kind of future awaited her in this place. As for what lay beyond ... that was too alien to contemplate. One day at a time, she told herself. Her hand closed tightly about the amulet with its dreamscape icon. One day at a time ...

  DATAFILE SUMMARY: JAMISIA CAPRA

  ID# 093-61 -7779-8080-921 F/TERRA

  BIOLOGICAL PARENTS: SEUSE CAPRA, JON STEVAR

  SOCIAL PARENTS: SAME AS ABOVE

  DATE OF BIRTH: 1. 11.37

  PLACE Of BIRTH: SOL CITY, U.S.N.A.

  GENETIC CLASSIFICATION: 18N23/1.004T/XA305/2/3.9/

  40A80759-2

  ACTIVE INFECTIOUS CONDITIONS: NONE

  LATENT INFECTIOUS CONDITIONS: NONE

  EXTERNAL MEDICATION: NONE

  INTERNAL MEDICATION (LATENT): PDS12, PANASOL, ENDOSTIM,

  CONTRA-5

  GENETIC ALTERATION (INDICATE PURPOSE):L190 SEQUEN
CE CORRECTED (INSULIN REGULATOR) AN28 AND 31 CORRECTED (NEURAL DECAY PREDISPOSITION)

  PSYCHOLOGICAL CLASSIFICATION: NORMAL

  BIOLOGICAL, PSYCHOLOGICAL, OR BIOTECH CONDITIONS WHICH WOULD LIMIT OR DELAY ADAPTATION TO A LOG OR NO-G ENVIRONMENT: NONE

  NOTES:

  SELISE CAPRA AND JON STEVAR KILLED IN TRANSPORT ACCIDENT 3.12.53. DAUGHTER JAMISIA CAPRA WITHOUT LIVING RELATIVES ON EARTH. REQUEST TRANSPORT TO AINNIQ SO THAT SHE CAN JOIN REMAINING FAMILY ON HARMONY STATION.

  APOLOGY FOR LACK OF CUSTOMARY PREPARATION. METROLINER IN TRANSIT AT TIME OF ACCIDENT. TRAUMA COUNSELORS CAUTION STRONGLY AGAINST WAITING FOR NEXT PASS, 6 YEARS FUTURE. WE BEG YOUR ACCOMMODATION.

  ARNEL KOHEIN, EXECUTOR

  KOHEIN & SANGH, INC.

  DEBIT CODES FOLLOW

  There were tests, of course. There had to be.

  ... Over one hundred communicative diseases which must be weeded out at this point, so sorry miss, but you wouldn’t want to spend three years traveling to the ainniq only to have the Guild refuse you transport, would you?

  There were questions.

  ... Do your relatives know you’re coming? Will they take responsibility for you? Do you have enough funds/programs/ implants to support yourself while you search for them?

  There were memories.

  ... Must be in here somewhere, keep digging ... sixteen days now ... no, the others are dead, whole weight of the building on ’em, crushed so bad we can’t even I.D. the remains until the DNA comps come in ... not anyone left alive here, I’m sure of that ... sixteen days! ... back up the shovels, boys, we’re calling it a day....

  There were, as always, voices.

  Fucking assholes! one raged.