by IGMS
Alex had expected the first thing that would come to mind to be Thi Loan, but instead he found himself saying, "Big. Ocean as far as you can see."
"Scary," Pablo said. Pablo, like Alex, was from a race of mountain-dwellers, without Thi Loan's hate-love relationship with the sea: to him, the ocean wasn't a source of subsistence or of pride, but simply the invisible killer, the encroacher irretrievably drowning the lowlands of Earth. "And the tirkas?"
"Scary," Alex said, finally, thinking of the lone figures on the shore. "In a different way."
"That's aliens," Pablo said. "Once you get to know them --"
"That's not going to happen," Alex said. And he wasn't talking about the tirkas' total indifference to humans, but about the fact that they were taking Thi Loan away from him. He was being unfair and he knew it; but he couldn't help himself.
"Give it time."
"Yeah, I don't think we have that. We're looking into Kishore's murder, and --"
"Alex." Pablo's voice was concerned -- yet as unyielding as steel. "I'm not the Federation, remember? I don't care about your excuses."
That was too much, even coming from Pablo. "I don't need excuses," Alex said, his hands clenching into fists. "They're changing her, and there's no coming back. And I'm supposed to watch, damn it! I'm supposed to watch all the while, and do nothing!"
On the other end of the com, Pablo's face had grown unreadable, the hanjiu ears turned towards the ground, the mouth as purplish as burst blood vessels. "That's the way it works. Can't change the nanos, Alex. Can't give them new orders." But his eyes wouldn't quite meet Alex's, and that had always been Pablo's way of lying.
"There is a way," Alex said, trying to contain the hope rising in him -- strong enough to crush his chest. "You know there is --"
Pablo didn't say anything for a while. At length he turned away from the screen -- not letting anything of his gaze betray him. "There might be," he said. "Government hacks. Illegal, of course. And dangerous. You know that as well as I do."
They'd both known a girl when they'd been in uni: Elspeth, a tall, uneasy blonde who had never looked quite right for the xeno program. She'd gotten hold of hacks, God only knew how -- and the janitor had found her in the morning, all twisted out of shape, every organ trying to evolve into something else, something different. Like a puzzle of flesh all askew, and the pictures had gone around -- and everyone had wondered what she'd been trying to do. But of course, they'd never know.
"I know," Alex said. "Believe me. But --" But if he had to go down into Hell to prevent this, he would. He'd had enough of one family member wasting away on his watch. There would not be a second one. "If there's a chance, any chance at all . . ."
"That's how they sell those, you know. Misplaced hopes." Pablo sighed, a sound that Alex's new ears struggled to interpret. "I'll look into it. But I make no promises. No guarantees. You two are on your own."
Alex turned slightly to look at Thi Loan -- and felt the ache in his own throat, the tightening, as if he was going to suffocate at any moment. Nanos, he knew -- nanos, not grief or the sense of loss -- just a new configuration for his vocal tract.
He thought of the last planet they'd been on, of the herd-like garakas and their placid, Zen-like mentality; of Thi Loan, smiling as she recounted a Vietnamese legend to them: something about a girl finding a golden ball among the husked rice kernels and ascending into the stars to speak to the Jade Emperor.
"We've always been on our own," he said.
Meghan showed them the videos, hour upon hour of them, an endless accumulation of frames that didn't make any sense.
Thi Loan sat watching them, her brown eyes wide -- taking in everything, dissecting it, trying to build a coherent system from what she was seeing. Alex had no doubt she'd succeed: Thi Loan had the uncanny ability to make sense of widely different cultures, the same gift that had allowed her to sail through her classes at uni -- the same gift that had gotten her noticed by the Federation, chosen for this job.
Alex, to whom the videos didn't speak, drifted into Meghan's quarters.
"I take it the prodigy is working?" Meghan asked, somewhat sarcastically.
Alex didn't rise to the bait. Theoretically, he should have been out there, gathering the information Thi Loan needed to fit into the tirka frame of mind. He couldn't bring himself to do it though; it felt like aiding and abetting the Change. He just couldn't do that.
"Where did you find Kishore?" he asked.
"Drifting in his boat." Meghan shook her head. "Never found a cause of death, either."
"What was he doing out there?" Alex asked.
"What we all do," Meghan said. "Gathering information on the hatirkas."
"He'd done it often, I take it."
Meghan's gaze was shrewd. "It wasn't unusual, if that's what you mean."
"Apart from the fact that he died."
Meghan shook her head. "Yes," she said, finally. She stared at the Spartan furnishing of her room. "I'll show you what was on the boat, if you want."
"Why not?"
It wasn't terribly interesting, sadly: there was a change of clothes, a neon lantern, and a handful of first-aid nanos. A pile of memory chips, too, which made Alex frown. Meghan slid one of them into a reader, and handed it to him. "He took notes everywhere," she said.
The chips weren't very interesting: mostly fragments of Kishore's magnum opus, a thorough study of tirka and hatirka life that would, theoretically, have propelled him to the firmament of xenobiology. But everything was incomplete, and nothing coherent could be put together. "That's useless," Alex said, finally, and Meghan nodded.
"Nobody said it would be useful," she said. "Or that his death can be solved at all."
"And you can live with that?" Alex asked.
Meghan shrugged. "Do I have a choice?" And, when he remained silent: "Not everything makes sense, Alex. That's the first lesson you learn here on Horizon."
After that, the days seemed to shiver and merge into one another, like a hazy road in the midday sun. Alex got up in the morning and washed, staring at his image in the mirror -- at the alien ruff on his throat. The water cascading over him felt warmer and more reassuring than it should have.
Most mornings he went walking. He tried not to remember the first thing he'd see when opening his eyes -- not to chronicle, day after day, the effect the nanos were having on Thi Loan: how her eyes had turned larger and broke the light into facets, how her arms kept shrinking, tightening around their bones like those of a malnourished child.
Pablo sent regular, terse messages about his progress -- or lack thereof. But Alex didn't say anything. What Pablo had offered, and what he'd accepted, was illegal, and, if they were caught, there would be Hell to pay.
One morning Alex woke up to find that Thi Loan wasn't by his side. His first, panicked thought was that the nanos were faster than he'd thought, and that she'd already shut herself into the bubble for the final transformation. But the bubble was empty, quietly rocking on its pedestal. Then where --?
With his heart tightening, he ran out of the research centre and onto the grey, glistening sands, looking towards the horizon, a wordless, anguished prayer resonating in his thoughts.
There was a group of tirkas talking to each other in staccato gestures, utterly unaware of his presence. The wind carried to his ruff the smell of their conversation -- something about changes and the will of the sea.
And then, as if the world had shifted on its axis, he saw that one of them wasn't a tirka at all, but Thi Loan. He knew from the way she held her head; the calm, measured way her forked hands rose and fell.
He stood for a while, his expanded throat contracting with the rhythm of his breath, tingling with each chemical he received. He thought of the nanos continuing their slow, insidious work inside her. She wasn't looking at him; she hadn't looked at him in a long time, and now she'd changed so much he barely recognized her.
In a heartbeat he was running toward the other side of the small island where they'
d found Kishore's boat.
He ran, his feet sliding on the sand, breathing in the acrid smell of Horizon's brine. The sea by his side wasn't grey or blue or wine-dark -- but the iridescent colour of growing algae; and in the distance were the hatirkas, sinuous shapes limned in refracted light.
Better not think of the hatirkas.
Kishore's boat was still there, half on land, half in the water. Alex slowed down when he got near it: an air of neglect and stillness hung about it, as commanding as the silence of the grave. Oily water lapped at its keel, making a low, gurgling noise that sounded almost happy.
On a whim, Alex hoisted himself inside, wincing as his muscles protested. He wasn't as fit as he had been before the transformation began -- and the nanos would be messing with his metabolism for another few days.
The boat was simple enough: a hull with a hybrid motor, starting on battery and burning the algae for fuel once it got into deep waters. A pair of steel oars hung within the hull -- just in case. They didn't look as though they'd been used at all. A patina of salt and oil covered them, the same patina that covered everything left outdoors on Horizon; but they didn't seem to have algae. Just to be sure, Alex lit his UV lamp and passed it over the whole keel. And, sure enough, nothing shone back.
Except . . .
There was a fluorescent handprint near the back; and when Alex ran his own hand on the steel, something inside the boat clicked -- and a secret panel slid open.
Inside, nothing; just more fluorescent fingerprints. Alex photographed them, not really believing that was a great discovery: the prints probably belonged to Kishore or Meghan, nothing out of the ordinary.
When he pulled himself out of the boat, he found himself staring at a tirka -- and although it was looking at him with what first appeared to be the same bored disinterest that tirkas show toward all humans, there was something else in this one's stance. It was emitting a chemical: the tirka equivalent of a hand wave.
Alex took a deep breath and fumbled with his own, newly-grown glands, trying to imitate it as best as he could.
The tirka cocked its head right, then left, radiating disapproval. Damn the manuals, Alex thought. They always told you that using this stuff was instinctive once you'd studied the language. It only worked if you were Thi Loan -- but then, Thi Loan was quadrilingual in Earth languages, and fluent in God knew how many other alien tongues.
"Apologise/humility," Alex said, hoping he'd put the stresses where they belonged and he hadn't mangled the diphthong past retrieval.
The tirka said nothing for a while, and just when Alex had convinced himself that it was going to leave, it moved its ruff with an audible sigh. "Youth/ignorance. Deep waters/ends."
It barely made any sense -- God, how he wished Thi Loan were here.
"You/other companion Hachand/honoured guest?"
The Hachand. The Changing One. The Dying One. In their language it seemed to be the same. It was talking about Thi Loan. "Yes/emphasis," Alex said.
The tirka gestured towards the boat. "Owner/curious."
It was an odd accent to put on the last word -- in fact, the association of the chemicals and of the high-pitched accent almost made the secondary meaning of curiosity more important than the primary. Why the emphasis?
Alex pointed at the boat again, and at the sea. "Owner/dead?"
The tirka turned its multi-faceted eyes towards the boat. "Deep waters/secrets," it said, with an expansive mandible movement, their equivalent of a shrug. "Sea/depths keeps all/takes all."
"Compartment/secrets," Alex said, gesturing at the boat. His head spun, and he only kept the vocabulary possibilities separate through sheer strength of will. Juggling between the spoken and the modulated meanings was taking a heavy toll. "Stolen/destroyed?"
The tirka shrugged again, and turned away. Clearly, it had said all it had wanted to.
Alex watched it walk to the shore, dipping its forked hands into the sea -- crooning to itself in words he couldn't understand.
Meghan, he knew, would have been overjoyed -- a tirka had taken an interest in a xeno, had spoken without being prompted to. But Alex knew why it had chosen him, and it wasn't because of his own nanos or anything he had done; it was only because of his connection to Thi Loan.
Still . . .
They did, after all, notice more than they let on. Why had they thought Kishore curious -- and not Meghan, for instance?
Alex pulled himself into the boat again, and knelt by the secret compartment. He shone the lamp into it and watched the fluorescent handprints. They were in a sequence, except for one, which dragged across the whole of the compartment: a slow 90-degree rotation while gradually splaying the fingers.
Deep waters/secrets.
He was on Horizon, and there were double meanings within everything.
Carefully, Alex laid his own hand on the steel -- every instinct in him screaming that he was destroying evidence -- and rotated it to match the handprints, slowly extending his fingers.
Nothing.
He hadn't expected it to be that easy; but if life had taught him anything, it was stubbornness. He placed his hand into position again, and tried yet again.
Nothing on the second or the third try. But on the fourth . . . Just as he was about to give up, believing the tirka to have meant nothing more than what it had said, another click resounded through the steel; and the back of the compartment split apart.
Inside were Kishore's true secrets: a thin sheet of paper that was covered with incomprehensible equations; and a memory chip already eaten at by the oil and the salt.
The chip was standard-issue: Alex's personal reader could read it. He had to fight to slide it in because of the layers of foreign materials on the circuits; but the reader powered up, all the same.
Whatever had been on it was badly damaged, plastered over by Horizon's brine, but Alex could get the beginning of it, and enough words scattered throughout to guess at what it was.
It was a report, and it wasn't going to the Federation, but to a researcher at Betelgeuse Point, which hosted the biggest oil refineries in this quadrant. It said something about new processes, and about the low yield of Horizon's algae fields -- it seemed there was barely enough fuel produced to cope with the explosion of spaceship traffic.
It was an old, old dream: being able to put Horizon's algae within tubes, to control their growth from start to finish -- and to increase fuel production by a thousand fold. It was this century's Eldorado -- and like its sixteenth-century equivalent, no one had ever found it. Horizon's algae weren't reproducible with nanos; they withered when taken away from the planet, and the labs had yet to come up with a reason to explain this.
Everything in that report -- whatever it had been before the sea had eaten at it -- that had been Kishore's real reason for coming to Horizon: not helping Meghan, or writing a book, but simply following his dreams of fame and fortune.
It wasn't surprising. Disappointing, perhaps, but Alex had had enough experience to know the depths of human greed -- the same humans who'd send Thi Loan to Horizon to make sure production continued without a hitch, without caring about her past or her future.
Curious/excess.
Was that the reason for Kishore's death: something so brutally simple? Something he could give to Thi Loan, enough that she could get the boats running again, before it was too late to reverse the nanos' work in her body?
Slowly, Alex walked back to the research centre, trying to crush the nascent hope that made his heart beat faster.
He found Meghan in her lab, watching a video of tirkas entering the sea. She was vocalising notes to her e-assistant -- something about the tirka cycle and the rhythm of algae growth.
"Alex?" she said when he closed the door.
He laid the chip in front of her. "You said you'd checked the boat."
Meghan frowned. She turned off her e-assistant with a flick of her head, and took the chip. "I did," she said, curtly. "You found this in the compartment, I presume."
Things were starting to make less sense -- and he wasn't even facing a tirka, or Thi Loan. "You knew about the secret compartment? Then why --?"
Meghan took the chip and slid it into the reader of her e-assistant. Her lips mouthed the words of the report for a while. At length, she raised her eyes. "Kishore was paranoid about backups. He'd had most of his master's work destroyed when his student hall burnt down, and he swore it wouldn't happen again. He kept copies everywhere. I found piles of chips beneath his bed, and another pile on the boat. I gave you every one of those, incidentally. That compartment was full of them." She shrugged. "I must have missed this one when I gathered them."
"You told us --"
"That I gave you everything I found on that boat. Why not? It was the truth." Her voice was defiant, and Alex knew why she'd done this -- the petty need to remain in control of Horizon, to challenge Thi Loan on a ground where she couldn't lose. He'd have liked to shout at her, but he couldn't -- he still needed her goodwill.
"It's a report to Betelgeuse Point," he said, slowly. "About algae yield. You didn't think that might be significant?"
Meghan just stared at him, obviously struck speechless.
Alex went on, relentless, "He mentions tubes and artificial growth."
Gradually, he became aware that Meghan's expression was no longer hostile -- but that she was shaking her head in a slow, sad way. "Oh, Alex. I know what you're thinking, but I've seen the original report. I can show it to you. It's not the reason he died."
"It's not?" His voice was as challenging as hers had been a moment ago.
Meghan went towards the back of the lab and placed the palm of her hand on a cupboard -- which slid open. The shelves were full of chips; and on the right was a small keypad. She typed in some numbers, and the shelves shifted and presented a single chip.
"There," she said, coming back to the table. "You'll see."
Alex slid the chip into his reader -- it went in smoothly, easily, as if eager to disgorge its contents -- and fired up the screen.
