Solaris Rising 3 - The New Solaris Book of Science Fiction

by Ian Whates

  ‘Understand,’ it said. ‘Taste good. Love.’

  For a moment, I didn’t know what it was saying. Linguists had deduced no possessives or plurals, meaning we only had a smattering of nouns, verbs, and adjectives. But then blood rushed in my ears. I dropped my hands. I knew what it was saying.

  I was no psychologist like you. I didn’t know how to deal with something so alien, especially so soon after losing you. It still does not excuse how I acted and what I did.

  I pressed the button on the controls you had told me only to press in emergencies. A low electric shock coursed through the tank. The Nyxi writhed and the water rippled, but the machine could not translate screams.

  ‘Kill,’ it cried. ‘You.’

  ‘You just try,’ I said.

  The Nyxi rammed against the glass, over and over. I zapped it again. It writhed harder, its body contorting like a worm thrown into a fire.

  After a time, it sagged. I should have felt pity, or felt something. I left the Nyxi and ate lunch, more out of habit than actual hunger.

  An alarm sounded, startling me. I dropped an apple, which rolled along the frosted glass of the kitchen floor.

  I ran to the observation room. The Nyxi had launched itself from the tank and was lugging itself across the room, ungainly and horrible. We didn’t know they could leave the water and survive.

  ‘Stop,’ I typed into the translator.

  It ignored me and continued to drag that horrible body methodically towards the door. It was trying to escape.

  I looked about in panic, unsure what to do. How long could they survive out of water?

  The Nyxi lifted itself to the controls of the tank room, its body balancing like a hypnotized snake. Its tongue peeked out from a malformed mouth and lapped at the controls.

  The screens in the observation room flashed, went dark, and went on again. Nothing else seemed amiss. I sat down and breathed a small sigh of relief.

  But then the observation room began to fill with water.

  In seconds I was ankle deep in frigid, yellow-orange liquid. I tried to open the hatch, but it was jammed. I began the sequence of the override, but Eli, I was so scared. You know how often I have nightmares of drowning, of water pouring down my throat and pooling into my lungs. It took four tries before I could even get to the second part of the sequence.

  My teeth chattered in my skull. The water was up to mid-thigh now. My legs felt like ice, then fire, then ice. The translator crackled, but I could not hear what the Nyxi was saying over the rush of water. Perhaps ‘Good-bye.’

  Somehow, I managed to override the hatch and tumbled into the hallway. I dragged my freezing, sodden self upright and pushed the hatch against the water until it closed, twisting the latch. I sagged against the door in a pool of frigid water, shivering from both the cold and from fear, the only sounds my ragged breathing and a slow drip, drip, drip.

  I went to observation room B, leaving the hatch lodged open. The Nyxi had flooded observation room A and the tank room. All controls were waterproof, and so now it had limited access to the station’s functions. The main controls were deep in the belly of the station.

  Flicking through the various control screens, nothing appeared different, but then again technology was little more than magic to me. I knew how to make it do what I wanted, and how to correct rudimentary errors, but I knew nothing about how it actually worked.

  ‘Outgoing transmission: Untranslatable, untranslatable, untranslatable, untranslatable,’ the translator chanted.

  Silence, and then:

  ‘Transmission sent.’

  The Nyxi twirled towards the middle of the flooded room and bobbed in the water, waiting.

  From the station radio came the short, steady beeps that meant only one thing: ‘Transmission received.’

  LORELEI TRIED THE communication dock yet again. No response. There was nothing to do but wander the empty halls and rooms and to write her letter to a dead man.

  On a shelf above the screen was a gift Lorelei had given her husband: an underwater bouquet. In a small tank shaped like a bell jar were her favourite small sea plants – a cluster of anemones that looked like orange, red, yellow, and pink sunflowers, thin strands of beaded red seaweed, and black rocks dotted with sea moss.

  Eli had smiled, cradling the tank gently in his hands, but Lorelei took it from him and told him to look at it under the microscope in the black light of the lab, and the bell jar had come alive, filled with tiny planktonic foraminifera and amoebas. Some looked like clear jellied umbrellas, swirled through with darker colours. Others were thin strands tangled together into spirals. Eli had looked for a long time before he straightened from the microscope and took his wife in his arms.

  Lorelei grabbed the bell jar and smashed it against the floor.

  THE STATION WAS no longer a haven, but a trap waiting to be sprung. The Nyxi was curled up in a corner. It had only figured out how to open the panel of glass between the tank and the observation room, rather than to the ocean and freedom. The water level was low in both rooms.

  The Nyxi appeared to be asleep. I wandered from room to room in the empty station, terrified that if I stayed in one room too long, it would lock me in.

  The Nyxi had done something to the station. The lights were flickering, making my eyes hurt and my temples throb. When I turned on the tap, the water was only a small trickle and had a distinct saffron tinge.

  When I pressed the button for my pre-packaged dinner, it looked fine until I opened it. It smelled sickly-sweet and overly pungent. The next was the same.

  I went to the main access panels and managed to start the water filters working again. But most of the food was still gone, and as soon as I fixed something, the Nyxi would cause something else to malfunction.

  The Nyxi was toying with me.

  THE AIR WAS beginning to grow stale. Lorelei was beyond thirsty. Her mouth and throat were so dry that every time she drew breath her skin seemed to crack a little more, a little deeper. She imagined the cracks running all the way through her, down to the bone. At any moment, she would shatter. She checked the communications room again. No word.

  THE CHILD’S GUARDIANS arrived. I have no idea why they did not come sooner. Why didn’t they spring the child before it killed you? This could have all been avoided, surely?

  One morning they were there, suspended in the vermillion ocean. I counted at least twelve Nyxi, flitting about the dome like ghosts.

  They were so much more hideous than their child. These were as big as great white sharks, their bodies a mass of folds, dips, and crevices. Their wings were larger and glowed with colour.

  I crept to the main control room and managed to turn on the view screens to both the observation room and the cluster of Nyxi floating in the vibrant ocean. The child Nyxi was flitting about in excitement. They had some small device that one clutched in tiny webbed hands as it cut through the glass, and they made their way through. One of the adults took your killer away and they swam through the sunset seas.

  The other adults did not leave. They flitted into the tank room and observation room and began to lap at the controls. Beings far more sentient than we had imagined were coming for me.

  The computer in the control room had a backup generator and was working, aside from the odd flicker. I searched for weapons. There was a harpoon in the tank room. I think I knocked it over as I reached for the net to fish you out.

  There were others in the supply room two floors below. I wedged the door to the control room open with a chair and darted out.

  I no longer knew where the Nyxi were, or how many more rooms they had managed to gain control of. But they were coming closer, filling more rooms with cold, coloured water. I jumped at shadows, and held my breath each time I opened another door.

  You were right, Eli, in that we knew nothing about these Nyxi. I didn’t know where they live, what else they eat, how they give birth, whether they married, divorced, loved, or killed each other.

  I w
ould not let them kill me. I made it to the supply room, grabbed the long, thin case of the harpoon, and scuttled back to the main control room.

  The Nyxi had gained two more rooms. So quick! These could not be oversized worms living in coral caves as we had previously assumed, able to communicate with each other but ultimately barbaric. They possessed technology they had hidden from us successfully for the past one hundred years, even with our scanners and hubris.

  I clutched the harpoon to me, but there were at least eight fully-grown Nyxi snaking their way down the glass corridors. A harpoon was my last, desperate line of defence.

  I flipped through the manual, trying to remember my hours of training, so frantic that my eyes would see the words but not register their meaning. I closed my eyes tightly. For a handful of seconds I let the terror course through me, and then I forced myself to section it away in a dark corner of my mind. I glared at the screen, determined to find something to use against them.

  The Nyxi were only three doors away from me now. I scanned the manual, searching for security overrides, trying to remember how to lock down the hatches despite whatever the Nyxi were doing. Why hadn’t I paid more attention to such things when I knew I would be spending years hundreds of feet below the ocean’s surface? I shouldn’t have relied so much on you.

  Finally, I thought I discovered a code that overrode specific rooms in the station in the event of a systems failure. The Nyxi were only two rooms away. Every time a hatch opened I jumped at the sound of screeching, clanking metal.

  I bashed the code into the keyboard. A map of the station showed up and I pressed the room the Nyxi were in on the screen. The lights flashed and alarms sounded, and the Nyxi were trapped. On the camera screens, they smashed against the walls like the child had. I felt the faint tremors of their struggle for life.

  LORELEI TURNED THE page and stared at the last blank sheet, unsure what to write next. She went to the control room and activated the remote camera screens. Three rooms had Nyxi locked inside them. More rescue parties had come for their brethren, but each time she had managed to trap them. They had stopped trying two days ago, or they were amassing a larger attack.

  The Nyxi were curled in on each other for warmth, looking like smooth fire-coloured crystals upon the floor of the rooms. A pair were in Lorelei and Eli’s old bedroom, intertwined on the bed. Clothes floated in the current, and the few belongings they had brought with them from Earth littered the floor – a mosaic dolphin figurine that had been a gift from Lorelei’s mother, a few books from Eli’s father, their respective degrees and honours in frames. All were sodden and lost.

  Lorelei knew she should let the Nyxi go, but she didn’t know if she could.

  I’M RUNNING OUT of ink and paper. Most was in our bedroom, now an aquarium. The story of my life after your death is coming to a close. The Nyxi are still trapped.

  I have decided that I will let the Nyxi go, Eli, if I can figure out how. For you. And maybe, just a little, for me.

  The rescue ship will not be here for two more days. My food is gone, my water nearly so, the light grows dimmer and the air grows thinner every day. I am hungry, and thirsty, but mainly I am tired of sleeping with one eye open, terrified that they will come for me. I am not going to try and wait any longer. There is no point now. I have sent them my message.

  The sun is setting above the sunset seas of Anthemusa. The oranges and yellows are laced with the purple-red of dusk. The anemones are beginning to droop and close. Most of the animals are either going to rest or awakening.

  All is quiet.

  It is beautiful.

  See you soon, Eli.

  All my love,

  Lorelei

  FAITH WITHOUT TEETH

  IAN WATSON

  (For Bernhard and Barbara)

  Ian Watson’s latest publications are The Best of Ian Watson and The Uncollected Ian Watson (PS Publishing), and his collected poetry Memory Man & Other Poems (Leaky Boot Press), all 2014. Recent, too, is the techno-thriller The Waters of Destiny with Andy West (Palabaristas Press). Ian has won two BSFA Awards, and France’s Prix Apollo for his novel The Embedding. He also invented Warhammer 40,000 fiction and worked for nine months with Stanley Kubrick on the screen story for A.I. Artificial Intelligence. He now lives in Spain with his wife, Cristina.

  AT THE START of each school year, Comrade Teacher Albrecht Grimm addressed the class of pre-teens with a toothless show of enthusiasm.

  “Boys and Girls, Hänsels and Gretels!” This was Grimm’s little joke, but Hans and Gisela, sitting at adjacent desks, were riveted. “As I’m sure you already know, as soon as your thirteenth birthdays arrive, likewise comes the opportunity and privilege to donate your teeth to the Great Patriotic Ivory Wall.”

  Just at that moment, a rumble sounded beneath the building. That was one of the subway trains of the enemy. A line from the wicked west burrowed underneath a Democratic part of the city before curving back to the west, its traffic forbidden by binding agreements to halt at deserted stations, all signs of which had been erased at ground level in the Democracy; grassed or concreted over. A few of the schoolchildren touched their teeth nervously, as if that train on the vanished subway carrying unsocialist strangers was vibrating their jaws. Promptly Grimm led his class in the popular song, We Bare Our Teeth at Fascist Capitalism.

  Then Grimm asked his class, “Why is the Great Patriotic Ivory Wall essential to our survival? You, Hänsel I mean Hans.”

  “Because,” recited Hans, “the fascist puppet-masters of the Capitalist Republic might attack our Democratic Republic and our socialist uncles and friends at any moment, using weapons of mass destruction. Our teeth symbolise our determination to resist by all and every means.”

  “Good. What else does pulling your teeth signify?”

  “Equality!” called out a burly boy, Dietrich.

  “Please explain.”

  “The State guarantees everyone, at very low cost, nourishing pastes, delicious thick soups, crustless breads, hot chocolates, and so on and so forth, which nobody requires teeth to chew.”

  “And what is the consequence of very cheap food, and cheap rents for flats, and guaranteed jobs?”

  “An accumulation of money, sir. The people are rich.”

  “So how can our citizens spend their riches? Yes, Heidi?”

  “In special shops and restaurants, sir. Where special things cost a lot. That’s because those things come a long way from our uncles and friends.”

  “Can anyone give an example of a high-cost item?”

  “A steak, sir!” called out Friedrich, the pub manager’s lad. “And to chew a steak you need teeth! So the special restaurants provide a wide range of dentures, which you leave on your plate after the meal.”

  “To be cleansed then reused by other customers, precisely. In our socialist economy all is mutual and rational. Dentists, for instance, only need to yank milk-teeth, ensure the purity of young adults’ teeth until the age of thirteen, then pull those perfect teeth to add more crust of ivory to the Wall – as well as make lots of dentures for use in the spezial restaurants.”

  Forty years earlier, dentists had been much busier for almost a year. The concrete blocks of the Wall had gone up within a mere three days, a masterwork of planning and co-ordination. Absolutely the Democratic east of the divided city must be protected from political and cultural pollution which might ooze from the enclave of the western half, encysted within otherwise socialist territory like some permanent bridgehead of evil at the end of authorised if resented road, rail, and canal transit routes. Whereupon the call went out to the whole Democratic nation of nineteen million citizens (or at least to all those over sixteen years of age) to donate their ivories to adorn the concrete to make the Wall sharp and slippery and shiny, an ever-ongoing process, or praxis.

  “However, Friedrich, I must correct you – we do produce beef in our own beloved homeland, mostly for export to our uncles and friends. Not to mention lambs and pigs and geese. Lack o
f teeth greatly helps our export economy.”

  Having one’s teeth pulled was an important rite of passage, this socialist society’s equivalent of circumcision delayed until puberty. Grimm squared up to the class.

  “And should any of you young citizens exercise your democratic right not to have your teeth pulled...?”

  Was this a purely theoretical question? Was Comrade Teacher Grimm aiming to winkle out waverers?

  Chubby Heidi shot her hand up. “Sir, sir! If we don’t have our teeth pulled, we’ll only be allowed to study theology, or else ich-theology. That won’t easily lead to a guaranteed job or a subsiding flat.”

  “You mean a subsidised flat. Just so long as you marry – no need to blush – and have a baby or two. Hmm, yes, theology, as you say, Heidi, or else ichthyology, which is the study of fish, not the study of the Ich, the I, the Self...”

  Grimm paused, perhaps reflecting upon the intellectual capacities of his pre-teens.

  “Theology, from the Greek theos, and logein, to speak about, is the study of an imaginary God. Due to most churches being closed, a theological job is unlikely. Ichthyology, from the Greek ichthys, means speaking about fish.”

  “Is God some sort of fish?” asked naïve Magda of the freckles and blonde pigtails.

  “In a curious way, yes,” replied Grimm. “In Greek the word for fish,” and he began to chalk on the blackboard, “iota chi theta ypsilon sigma, spells the initial letters of the phrase in Greek Jesus Christ Son of God Saviour. Consequently early Christians used a fish as a symbol of their prohibited cult, thus.” And he drew a simple two-arc fish-shape.