by Audrey Faye
As I approached, she met my eyes for a split second, then her face tightened and she went back to her work.
Good day to you too, sister. I forced myself to keep walking until I could lean on the desk.
“I didn’t think we’d ever see you here again,” she mumbled into her screen.
The light in the room glittered on her tag. Kessler 129. Aphrodite. With her sharp chin and high cheekbones, she looked a bit like me, but that’s where the similarities stopped.
I hadn’t tried using my direct link to her since I left our shared quarters and went to live with Paul.
She snorted. “Hadie, I’m not going to talk to you that way. I can feel your arrogance across the room. Whatever you’re here for, why don’t you go and ask your Pristines to help?”
“I’m here because I need to talk to you about these things.”
I plonked the towel right in front of her on the table where she couldn’t ignore it and unwrapped the glass ball. In the golden light, it looked like a cloud filled the interior. What the. . . ? It had been clear before.
A flicker of interest crossed her face. “Where did you get this?”
“I’ll tell you if you’ll help me.”
“Don’t you dare demand things from me.”
“Hang on—who exactly is demanding what from whom? ‘Leave that man now or we’ll never speak to you again.’ Isn’t that what you said?”
She glared back, but said nothing.
“You’re jealous.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Why should I be jealous of you? The only thing we want is to save you from yourself. Pristines don’t care about us and the sooner you realise that, the better. What do you think we feel about losing you?”
“There would be no need to lose me if you could just accept that I love him.”
“He’s Old Earth. Trouble for you, for us.”
“I’ve noticed the trouble. Short-sighted bigotry, mostly, from his family. Don’t you think he’s suffering for his decision? And why?”
“Yes, Hadie, why?” Her eyes met mine, hard and without compassion. “Why do you need him? Why do you lower yourself to being sneered at by his family?”
“One reason: I love him and he loves me. Apparently, for that, both our societies decide we’re outcasts. Sorry, but I had expected that attitude from Old Earth families at Ganymede-bloody-University, but not from my sisters. For all that we’re constructs, new humans and all that, I’d expected we could put such stupidity behind us.”
She stared at her screen, and swallowed. For some long, heavy moments, neither of us said anything.
“And you’ve come here just to tell me that?”
“No, Aphrodite, I need your help.”
She glared, said nothing for a while, and then sighed. “All right. What’s this about?”
I told her of the flash and Paul’s condition.
“I think this ball has something to do with it. It fell out of his suit.”
“Yes, but we have a lot of those things. They’re just glass balls.”
“Try capturing an image of it.”
She held the glass ball up on the palm of her hand at eye level. Blinked.
“And?” she asked. “I have the image. What am I supposed to see?”
“Didn’t you notice anything?”
“What am I supposed to have noticed?”
I stared at her. Was she bullshitting me?
But no, I didn’t think so. That experience I’d had was so overwhelming, she couldn’t have kept her face emotionless through that.
I picked up the glass ball, heavy and cool in my hand, held it to my eye. This time I captured a clear image of the glass on the palm of my hand.
What the . . .
That meant . . . the glass ball only did this trick once, the first time someone tried it. That meant . . . it had now been spent. I’d seen things when I’d tried to capture the image, a stream of pictures of worlds human and alien. That material had been stored in the ball, or, when I tried to capture it, it had retrieved—
Damn. The outage. The main problem had been in the communication links and satellites.
This was a device of communication. With whom? Someone who now had Paul in their grip. It hadn’t worked on me, because mine was only a residual effect, or maybe because I was a construct. Who knew?
“Come on, Hadie, tell me what I’m supposed to see,” Aphrodite said.
I began, “I saw . . .” But my mind churned and went into different directions. I had to find out what this was about, urgently, before whoever or whatever had sent these images found Paul first. “Tell me, research would have records of anyone who has found one of these balls, wouldn’t they?”
She didn’t reply.
“You have more of these things here, don’t you?”
“We do. They’re made of glass. If this one’s like the others, it has a strong magnetic field, and it absorbs light almost completely. What is it? A mystery.”
Lies showed up green to me, and her aura was about the colour of spring grass. She would know that I saw it, too; she looked away. Her mouth twitched.
“Aphrodite, the fact that you hate me doesn’t mean you can fool me.”
She raised he hands. “Please, Hadie, you don’t realise—”
“Don’t ‘please’ me. I’m desperate. There is something wrong with Paul and it has to do with this thing. I think it’s something alien.”
Her eyes widened.
“That’s impossible,” she said, in a definite tone.
I couldn’t get any more out of her. It was so typical. Someone in her line of authority had told her not to speak of this, because of a reason that could be as stupid as inter-departmental feuds. Because Research was treading on hospital territory, or something equally stupid. But because she was a construct, she obeyed, because she feared emotional repercussions if she didn’t. Anger was yellow, and it could hurt. The pain kept us from fighting, but it also kept us from talking to each other, or questioning unusual behaviour.
So I went back down the elevator platform, vowing to find some sort of way of breaking into her mindbase, never mind that I needed the equipment and her cooperation to do that.
Damn it. She had clammed up on me the way constructs usually do when questioned by Pristines and I was on the wrong side of the equation.
Alone.
I stood there outside the building, while people scuttled past me like insects on a mission. People with food carts from the central canteen, children playing with little cars that contained blocks of hissing-ice that launched the thumb-sized vehicles at the ankles of passersby. Their laughter echoed against the Dome’s curved ceiling.
What would I do if Paul didn’t recover?
“Can I help you?”
I gasped at the strange male voice behind me. The man was grey-haired, about fifty, I guessed, thin, and dressed in a service overall with a Heslop tag. But I knew by the look in his eyes, that Heslop stock—middle management constructs—was about as far removed from this man’s origin as possible. This man was a Pristine.
“Well—um . . .” I shrugged.
His gaze flicked to my tag that said Kessler 129, but he didn’t comment on it.
“You have a problem with your lover?”
“Um—yes.”
Immediately, I wished I could retract my automatic response. Someone asked you a question—you respond. All constructs get that hammered into their brains. It had taken me some time to unlearn, and now I was annoyed that it resurfaced. How the hell did he know about Paul?
“Maybe I can help.”
“I’m all right, really.” Just begone with you, scarecrow.
“He will recover,” the man said into the tense silence.
“What do you know about it?”
“Enough to offer you help. Take it from me, he will be fine, but he will have to leave you.”
They all said that, all of tho
se uppity Old Earth families. “That’s up to him to decide.”
“It isn’t, though.”
“It is. Thank you for offering your help, but I can manage.”
He bowed and backed away. “As you wish. But soon enough, when he recovers, you will want me to come back. I’m staying in the temp accommodation unit.”
And then he was gone.
What the fuck did he mean—want him to come back? Like hell, I did.
But one thing was clear: I was walking away from the Research branch, but all my answers were inside that building. Aphrodite knew something. Never mind that she didn’t want to tell me. I had to find out what it was.
I ran back, used a different elevator platform that took me to the storage rooms of the museum. I stalked past shelves stacked high with samples. A controlled-environment chamber held the remains of the Huygens probe, the very first human artefact that had made it onto the surface of Titan more than a hundred and fifty years ago. Long after it was thought to have been lost in the ice, a team of ice miners had recovered it about a hundred kilometres from where it was supposed to have landed—did that show how the icy surface moved, was it a mistake or was there some other process at play? I stopped for a few seconds to gaze at the corroded shell of the thing, and considered how much we had learned since then and how much there was still to learn.
Further into the corridor, there were glass-fronted cabinets along the walls. Some displayed historic material from the very first crewed trips to Titan almost one hundred and thirty years after the probe’s landing. Half-eroded suits, outdated and probably no longer working equipment. Those bulky air tanks would have been awkward to carry around; we carried catalysers on our belts these days
Further down the hall was a cabinet with glass balls, piled up in crates stacked on top of each other. How many of these balls did they have?
All of them were cloudy. Someone had taped a sheet to the top corner of the glass. It said, Silica balls, origin unknown. Someone else had taped an electron microscope image to the sheet that showed, according to the legend, the surface of the balls, a curious crystalline pattern. There was a handwritten note: Structural formation only possible in zero gravity. Several samples were found to have an electrical charge, possibly because of ions trapped in crystalline structure.
Was I crazy or did the writer of the note suggest that these balls formed somewhere other than the surface of Titan?
I stepped back, and looked from the balls to the ancient lander. It could also be, of course, that worlds with an atmosphere and certain elements in their make-up simply attracted interest from communicating societies, whether human or otherwise.
Surely, some of the scientists must have found out something about these balls? Surely, someone must have found at least one clear one before?
I went into a room that looked like pictures I had seen of old Earth libraries. In reality, all the books on the shelves were made from durable, nondegradable, space-resistant plastic, the only way to ensure that generations hundreds of years in the future would still be able to see the data. I stood there, aimless, letting my gaze roam over the hardbound volumes. There were too many for me to even know where to begin. Printed numbers on the spines meant nothing to me. I didn’t know if I had expected one of the titles to say Mysterious glass balls—in fact, I didn’t know what I expected at all; but if I had to go through all the material in this room, it would take me months to find what I was looking for.
I needed my sister’s help.
So I kept going through the corridor, past the deserted storerooms of the museum, and wondering how she could work in here alone. Sometimes people would come in, but most of the storing and cataloguing processes were automated.
I came out in the reception area behind Aphrodite’s desk. She was working, and only saw me at the last moment.
“Hadie, what—”
I clamped my hand over her mouth.
Her chest heaved. I caught shards of a scene in a dark corridor, a man in dark clothing stabbing a gun into her side. And then she went back into the museum to retrieve a disk from the library. She gave it to him, and he tucked it in his bag. Her fear showed up blue.
I replayed everything I had seen. The bewildering array of images as I had tried to scan the glass ball, the strange man who had accosted me in the street outside.
She nodded.
There was no green in her aura.
I let her go and she slumped behind the desk. “Hadie, you are playing with things you don’t understand.”
“Has that ever stopped me? I have to save Paul.”
“Please, Hadie, let it go.”
“I can’t. Have you ever loved someone? Really, really loved them so much that your insides turn to mush just thinking about seeing this person harmed?”
“Yes.” Her eyes met mine. “And I’m seeing that person suffer every day.”
Do you know that the colour of love is purple?
On the way back, I looked up Thomas Newton in my scientific research module. The text displayed over my real-life vision of the entertainment quarter, families relaxing at the cafes, people going about their business.
Thomas Reed Newton
Alliance: Science Division
Organisation: Luminati.
Residence: Unspecified. That usually meant that the person worked for a classified project. I guessed he was based either on Earth or Ganymede.
He had a frighteningly long list of scientific publications to his name, and a number of major awards.
All right, that solved the problem of the stranger’s identity, but where did he come from and what the fuck did he have to do with alien glass balls we found on the bottom of Kraken Mare? It was not as if he had put the damn things there, was it?
And what was Luminati?
I looked that up, too, but the scientific database returned nothing and the general database brought up only references to some virtual reality game, where, apparently, the Luminati were a secret evil sect that had to be eliminated.
“Paul, I’m back—”
I stopped, my hand still on the door.
Paul was no longer in his passive state. He still sat on the bed, but he had pulled a computer onto his lap. He wore a thought sensor behind his ear—which meant he’d gotten up and gone to look for the thing in the living room—and was muttering words too soft for me to hear.
“What are you doing?”
I crossed the room and looked over his shoulder at his work.
Lines of text scrolled across the screen, full of strange words and long formulae that meant absolutely nothing to me. Paul was an astrobiologist, with degrees in chemistry and physiology. I was his assistant and had none of these degrees, but he had a gift for writing about his work in ways that made the subject sound simple. I had often proofread his papers for him. Kesslers were designed with midrange intelligence, and never before had I completely failed to understand his writing.
“Paul, you scare me. What is all this?” Shit, he was typing nonsense. He’d gone out of his mind.
He didn’t reply, just continued muttering and typing.
“Paul!” I shook his arm, but he completely ignored me. The pupils in his eyes were so wide that the irises had almost disappeared. He was sweating and trembling.
“Paul, listen to me!”
That was it. No matter how horrified doctors would be about this, I was going to try and find the mindbase backup.
I ran to the unit’s command centre in the kitchen and I scoured our databases for a copy of Paul’s mindbase. The only one I found was over a year old—from before we met and got involved, before I moved in.
Oh, damn it. Damn it, Paul, how could you be so sloppy?
I sank at the kitchen table, my face in my hands
.
If the backup worked, what would that mean to our relationship? He’d wake up finding a strange woman in his unit, a construct even. The fact that the old Paul hadn’t minded that I was a constructed human didn’t mean that the new version of him wouldn’t. There were often small discrepancies between different versions. He might reject me. He might accuse me of breaking in.
Oh, Paul, damn it.
Still, that was probably a better situation than the current one, and if it would cure him, if he would look at me again, and smile . . .
I copied the data onto the house system and went into the bedroom.
Paul still sat there exactly as I had left him. Back straight and rigid, like some crash test dummy. Staring ahead, muttering his formulae.
He didn’t react to my touching the base of his scalp and affixing the electrodes. With something as important as this, I didn’t want to use the wireless connection. Like every piece of electronic communication on Titan, it was liable to sudden and unexplained failure.
I also connected a pad to my head—maybe I could steer the recovery, insert recent memories where the older backup left holes. Images of us making love, of the sheer pleasure on his face.
And then I stopped, my finger hovering over the button.
I had no right to do this. Modifying another person’s mind without their consent was a punishable crime.
Paul shivered. He was in pain, screaming without making a sound, without being able to express it.
I pressed copy.
The data scrolled over the screen. Countless images flew past. Starships, diagrams, formulae. He murmured on and on, his words a sibilant whisper.
I could feel his presence. Images flowed through me, forming that spider’s web. For a flash of brilliance, I saw . . . everything. The birth of the universe, the formation of stars and planets, great ships that travelled between them, ancient civilisations, familiar and strange. Faces of strange creatures alternated with those of famous scientists. The Egyptians, Archimedes, Socrates, Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, Stephen Hawking, Elizabeth Hunter.
A black-skinned girl with her hair in beaded braids dug in the sand in a field of maize and picked up a glass ball. As she held it up to study, it flashed in her face. I recognised her, too. Grace Nkwame, astrophysicist and Dean of Ganymede University. She still wore the beads.
