The Man in the Tree

by Sage Walker

  It was really dark up there.

  “We’ll have to put usage monitors on these trapdoors,” Doughan said.

  “I’m afraid you’re right. Are there any big torches on that shelf over there? Work lights?”

  Doughan rummaged. “Not tonight. They’ve probably all migrated down to the new tunnels.”

  “It shouldn’t matter.”

  Nothing mattered but getting this done, not now. Helt climbed until his headlamp cleared the top of the stairs and gave the surrounding area a close look. To do this right, he would have to check one side of a ceiling beam along its entire length and then come back along the other. “This is going to be easier with two people,” he said, and got out of the way so Doughan could join him.

  “My money’s on that it’s close to the wall. Signal strength is going to count,” Doughan said.

  “Start with the wall closest to the tunnel, sure. If it’s here at all, it’s close to a trapdoor. This one, or a different one, or the one over Mission Control. You take the right side, I’ll stay on the left.” Ryan was about Helt’s height; Helt stretched his arm up to gauge how high something should be to put it in easy reach. He looked hard at what was close by. No foreign object was in reach of the trapdoor they’d just come through. The two of them moved toward the wall and stepped from beam to beam, searching, centered in bobbling circles of light that moved farther and farther apart. The wall was bare, black, and unmarred.

  When Helt had been up here with Yves, Yves had led him in pretty much a straight line next to the wall to get to the train access. Doughan’s control room would be somewhere to the left, along the beam his feet were on right now. Mission Control was walled with rock on three sides; it was well protected from the Big Black outside and from the rest of the ship. He’d seen nothing so far but smooth black rock, monotonous, pristine beams, and ceiling viewed from the top side. He didn’t know what the ceiling was made of. “Nothing so far,” Helt said. “I’m moving over to the area above Mission Control. I’m wondering if it would suit Cash Ryan’s sense of fun to plant his little secret right over your head.”

  “Why not?” Doughan said. “This whole exercise is surreal enough that you might be right.”

  Helt was trying not to fall off a beam, and the concentration helped his tension. A little. “I’m assuming I’ve found the right beam.” Helt made a left turn, held out his arms, and walked heel-toe on it. “It feels like about the right distance to me.”

  “Scientific method,” Doughan said. “Aren’t there numbers or signs on top of these trapdoors?”

  “Usually a person would be coming up a ladder from below, not wandering around up here to practice walking a tightrope.”

  “Just walk on the floor—I mean, the ceiling.”

  “I don’t know if it will hold my weight.”

  “I can’t see your light,” Doughan said.

  “I can’t see the trapdoor.” Helt blinked and saw what he was looking for, the access he wanted, nestled between two beams. “Gotcha.” The trapdoor was a nice-sized box shape, easy to see once you saw it.

  “The controller?” Doughan asked. His voice said he was closer than he had been, that he was coming over to join Helt.

  “The trapdoor.” Helt didn’t see anything, no bumps or boxes, not on the beams or the sides of the trapdoor box. Keep a safe perimeter away from it, was the idea. He got his interface out of his pocket, thumbed on the camera, and looked for a likely place to stand while he examined the next side. He wanted to be more than an arm’s length away from the trapdoor, maybe two arm’s lengths, to get a good, detailed view. There was nothing on the next side, either. He went two beams farther to get a good look at side three. It was clean. He looked up at the wall.

  There it was, a black, slim rectangle, not on the stairwell frame but up on the wall, deep in the corner where the walls met, higher than your line of sight would be if you were concentrating on keeping your balance up here. You had to look up to see it and if you were coming up a ladder from below, you’d probably be looking for conduit instead. The thing had a little stubby antenna sticking out of it. The antenna was aligned parallel to the drop tunnel.

  Helt walked the beam beneath him toward it, not too close. The best place to get a good picture of it would be right next to the wall, looking along the wall and up into the corner. Okay. That wasn’t too close to the thing. Really, it wasn’t. He put his hand carefully on the solid stone of the wall, as solid and safe as anything could ever be on Kybele. He braced his shoulder against the wall and lifted his arm to use the viewfinder function on his interface. He brushed away the spider web that floated past his face.

  There were no spiders here.

  The laser caught him in the left eye, a direct, unprotected hit.

  29

  An Eye for Wisdom

  Helt dived for the trapdoor because it was going to be a bitch getting down the stairs with one hand, and his left hand was permanently attached to the white fire and the hot wet he had to keep pressed tight behind his fingers.

  He fell short of the trapdoor. He figured he’d lie here forever. He wished Doughan hadn’t screamed like that. Helt’s ears were still ringing.

  You’re not dead, he told himself.

  * * *

  Someone was grunting and breathing hard right next to Helt’s ear.

  “Don’t move,” Doughan growled.

  No way was he planning on it.

  It occurred to him that if Ryan had set something else to blow up when he tripped the trigger on that laser, then he and Doughan had been utter and complete idiots. Someone should check on that.

  “I said lie still!” Doughan’s voice barked.

  Helt hadn’t known he was moving.

  “The only thing that blew up was you.”

  Doughan’s voice sounded like it was at the end of a tunnel somewhere.

  * * *

  “Roll him on this,” Elena said. “Tie him on.”

  Helt was belly down between two of the beams. The ceiling held his weight just fine. He wanted to see where Elena was but he couldn’t, could not, open his eyes. Doughan grabbed him and rough-rolled him up onto a flat metal surface and Helt felt straps bite into his thighs. Someone had a hand in his armpit.

  “Harness strap,” Elena said. She shoved her hand behind his back and a what felt like a strap tightened across his chest. She snapped the ends of the strap to something behind his head.

  She was supposed to be at home, Helt remembered. Stubborn woman. No way to get here from home that fast. She stayed close. She followed me. She cares. She really cares.

  “You’re a heavy son of a bitch for a skinny guy.”

  That was Severo’s voice. Helt opened his right eye and watched Severo’s hand reach for the end of the stretcher.

  The stretcher tilted. Helt didn’t like that at all. His right eye was closed again but light came through it anyway, too damned bright. He wasn’t in the crawl space anymore. Other arms reached up to help, holding the stretcher steady. Six people, three on a side, eased the tied sausage named Helt onto the wheeled gurney at the foot of the trapdoor ladder in Mission Control.

  * * *

  “You should be glad I got a nap before we started this. I’m rested and fresh,” Calloway said. “Probably my hands won’t even shake. You can relax your hand now.”

  Calloway? Helt risked a quick look through his right eye. He got a view of a belly in a white cotton scrub shirt and looked up to see Calloway’s chin from below. Round light overhead with a handle on it. He was in the clinic and someone had drugged him because he didn’t remember the trip here.

  That was nice. He didn’t think he wanted to remember that trip, but then he almost did and that wasn’t nice at all.

  “You can relax your hand now,” Calloway said again, or maybe for the first time.

  The fuck I can, Helt told him, but he couldn’t manage to say it out loud. Somebody had done something to his muscles and the white fire where his eye had been still burned
his fingers but Calloway was lifting his hand away from his face and that was somehow not a problem.

  “Catch him, Martin.” Elena’s voice was clipped.

  Catch me? I’m right here. Catch who? Helt heard a few scuffling sounds behind his head and down somewhere, so he was still probably on a gurney and the noise was coming from the floor. Helt would have craned his neck to look but he wasn’t going to open his eyes, no matter what Calloway wanted.

  * * *

  Helt hung from the World Tree on a harness so Doughan could make sure they could slide him down easy, but a branch was in his eye and he was bleeding, bleeding fire from his eye and he tried to close it, to block out the light that was black but it stabbed and shrieked; a thousand Norns were cutting threads that should never be cut, never.

  He fought, but someone was holding him down, someone with at least eight strong arms. “Take him deeper,” Calloway’s voice said.

  “What do I tell him, Martin?” Elena asked. She sounded so unhappy, so frightened.

  “Tell him to look …

  at …

  you…”

  “I’m right here,” Elena said, from the mouth of the tunnel where Martin’s voice had chased itself in circles like a falling leaf, but Martin wasn’t hurt; he was going to be okay.

  Helt opened his eyes and saw her, Elena, his only her, her face inches away. So he kissed her with his eyes, his perfect eyes, and brought her with him into the tunnel, the soft, warm tunnel.

  “Nice place, this Deeper,” Helt said.

  TUESDAY 0533

  “Catch him, Martin.” Elena’s voice was harsh. When she gave an order, she gave an order.

  Catch me? I’m right here. Catch who? Helt heard a few scuffling sounds behind his head and down somewhere, so he was still probably on a gurney and the noise was coming from the floor. Helt would have craned his neck to look but he wasn’t going to open his eyes, no matter what Calloway wanted.

  The focus jerked and Helt looked down from inside the monitor in the clinic lobby, the one he’d watched when Elena and Calloway were doing the autopsy. Doughan lay flat on the floor. Martin had grabbed Doughan’s ankles and was holding them up in the air, about the height of Martin’s knees.

  “Did I faint?” Doughan asked.

  Martin nodded.

  That was a recording, from a past he wouldn’t mind forgetting. That was before, when Doughan came to the clinic, not now. An assault of camera views fractured into a kaleidoscope, a stodgy robot plow making black furrows in a farm under Center, a view from a spybot that showed Doughan pacing back and forth in the bedroom of his townhouse, naked and muttering, The Frontier full of empty tables with a soundtrack of dishes clattering, too loud, too loud.

  Kybele’s hide loomed in front of him, her black, pitted bulk growing by the minute. It was a view that had to be from the control room of the incoming shuttle but he wasn’t there. He was flat on his back and no matter how hard he shut his eyes the cascade of images wouldn’t stop. Kybele spun like a top and Helt reached out to try to grab her because she was going to spin him off and he would fall forever.

  He tried to scream.

  “Shh,” Elena’s voice said. Her head was on his chest, and she had her arms tight around him.

  “It’s your new eye. That’s all. I’m here. Shh.”

  The views changed to scrolling columns of code, and somehow that was better. Someone’s in Mission Control and they’re playing the shuttle feeds, Helt decided. That’s what I saw.

  “Don’t be afraid,” Elena said.

  The room was dark.

  “It’s just your eye. Rest.”

  * * *

  He had been asleep but he was waking up now. Elena was beside him. He didn’t want to wake her. It felt like early morning, really early morning. The curtains hanging on her bedroom window didn’t look quite right.

  Helt closed his eyes. Binocular vision was neat. He’d missed it when it wasn’t there.

  TUESDAY 1313

  “Today? Today is Tuesday.” Mena kissed him on the cheek. “Tuesday afternoon.”

  That’s what it said in the upper left. Helt wondered where the time and date tag came from, but it wasn’t particularly bothersome.

  “Are you hungry yet?” Mena asked.

  Helt tried to shake his head in a no, but there was a strap across his forehead and soft bars on either side of his head.

  “A few more hours and that can come off.”

  “How long did the surgery take?” Helt asked.

  “Four hours,” Mena said.

  Why had Archer blacked out the feeds about the World Tree? They were here, right here, stills and videos, arranged in order from the first gouge Yves’s chisel had made to the perfection that loomed in Petra now, posted by different people at different times, but Archer had walled them away.

  TUESDAY 1528

  “How is he?”

  That was Martin Kumar’s voice.

  “Better,” Elena said. “He hasn’t been as agitated. I think those image commands you told him to use helped.”

  1529 TUESDAY, OCTOBER 14, 2209

  Yeah, it was the same week he’d lost a couple of days of. I know how to turn off the lights, Helt remembered, so he did.

  TUESDAY 2312

  There was something he wanted to see in the Murder Mess Huerfano. He couldn’t see it from here unless Jerry let him in.

  He typed the letters on the interface he didn’t have and wondered where it was, really.

  Helt. Jerry?

  “I am so fucking glad to see you, boss!” Audio. Helt was afraid he would wake Elena. She was asleep in the chair, curled up with her head on the arm of it. She didn’t stir.

  Helt. Shhh. Elena’s asleep. Show me the Huerfano?

  Jerry. Can’t. You’re on remote and your locks are too good on it.

  Helt. State of Kybele, then.

  “You don’t need Jerry for that,” Helt’s voice told Helt. That was confusing. Helt turned off the lights again.

  WEDNESDAY 0014

  Helt had it all in order, a fix that would serve, and he’d scanned a thousand sources to do it, pulled premises and positions from think tanks, documents, philosophies, rants. He could do that now. He could have done it before, in weeks. This new eye was more than an eye, so he’d done it in hours.

  Some of the people who had thought about governance and power were hidebound, hobbled into service of old traditions, and some were bright spirits who had looked hard at traditions, new or old, and gone on to things that were new in their antiquity.

  He had reviewed them all even though he was tired, so tired, because the structure of governance that was needed to hold Kybele together shouldn’t topple; it was stable at its heart. What the execs had done could never be undone, but if Giliam could put the patch into formal words and charges, it might serve.

  “A tripod is stable on uneven ground if you just adjust the legs,” Helt said. He knew where he was and when it was but he wanted to hear Elena’s voice. “When is it?”

  “Wednesday morning, just after midnight,” Elena said.

  Helt yawned.

  * * *

  “I’m right here,” Elena said.

  WEDNESDAY 0630, Helt read in the left upper corner of the world.

  Cool sheets over temperfoam beneath him, not the aluminum stretcher. Elena was looking down at him, calm and matter-of-fact, and her hand was on his left forearm.

  His arm rested on a bedspread he knew very well, gold brocade on black, some of the gold threads a little shaggy because Mena was fond of the pattern and she said it got softer as it aged.

  Mena’s bedroom wasn’t exactly the same as he remembered it.

  Elena had moved a chair close to the bed; playback showed her getting up to look down at him, and on the other side of the bed IV stands and monitors stood near the headboard. Elena focused on something in the array of readouts. Helt viewed her from a spybot over the bedroom door. She stood silhouetted against the curtains, and as she bent her
head to check a monitor, he watched himself lying on Mena’s bed looking at nothing. That made him a little dizzy. A close-up view of the monitors showed him that his pulse and blood pressure were normal. That was nice.

  Elena sat down again and rested her cheek on his arm. There were so many things to play with inside his head but he knew they were outside, in files and records and in every sensor on the ship.

  “Is this love?” Helt asked. “Is this how it feels?”

  Elena lifted her head. Her smile was La Giaconda’s. No, better than that.

  “I can’t know, for you. I think it is, for me. But we have…”

  “Time to find out.”

  Helt stroked her hair with his free hand and closed his eyes. All of them.

  WEDNESDAY 1312

  Jim Tulloch was in the chair, not Elena. Helt had slept, deep morning sleep, and then he’d called a startled Giliam and told him what was needed. Giliam was working his ass off and that was good. Helt had gone back to sleep again, apparently.

  “You presented Elena and Calloway with quite a challenge,” Jim said. “The structures of the eye were completely coagulated; no surprise there. Replacement was going to be tricky anyway because of the amount of optic nerve that was fried. They were going to give you a standard eye and let the microbots do what they could with quite a lot more splicing than is routine. But you heard Martin’s voice and insisted, in a definitive fashion, that you wanted infrared, at least, and anything else he had been working on with Nadia and Jerry.”

  “I did?” Helt asked.

  “And you insisted that they call Archer in so they could get his input, too. You don’t want to review the audio right now.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  Helt damped his internal review function after he heard a word or two of what he’d said. Jim grinned.

  “I signed up to be a test subject,” Helt said.

  “All of us are.” Jim wasn’t smiling. He looked as sad, as serious, as Helt had ever seen him look.

  “Give me a second or two,” Helt said.

  WEDNESDAY 1205

  “If his vision is as augmented as Martin says it will be, he’s going to be a magnificent tool.” Giliam Obrecht’s interface had recorded this an hour ago; Jim Tulloch had been in Giliam’s office.