Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (Volume One)

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

“Yeah, I think so,” he says, but winces when he puts his weight on the foot.

  “I’ll go very slowly,” the brown girl says, and she leads him away from the skylight and the orbs and the ring of tall curio cabinets. She carries the oil lantern for him, shining the way back through the gloom and clutter, and he follows a few steps behind, limping and mumbling things to himself that she doesn’t try to overhear. When they finally reach the trapdoor, he doesn’t have as much trouble with the ladder as she’d have thought.

  “If they ever ask me to do this again,” he tells her, when he’s past the loose rung and already halfway to the landing below, “I’ll tell them no way. I’ll tell them to find somebody else.”

  “That’s probably for the best,” she calls down after him, and in a few moments more, Airdrie pulls the attic door shut again. “By the time they get around to sending someone else,” she says, speaking softly because she knows that he won’t hear, “you’ll be a grown man, with better things to do than bring sweets and toys to little girls locked away in attics. By then, you probably won’t even remember me anymore.”

  Then the brown girl sits down next to the milking stool and the mostly purple paisley handkerchief, and she takes her father’s watch from the pocket of her dress. All three of the hands have stopped moving now, frozen at nine twenty-one and seven seconds, the moment when Airdrie pulled the trapdoor closed. I’m exactly that much older, she thinks, though she honestly doesn’t feel any older. The brown girl, whose name is Hester, but who has always thought of herself as Pearl, sets the watch on the floor, then folds the handkerchief open again and breaks a small piece off one of the red and white candy canes. It’s spicy and makes her tongue a little bit numb, and she sits, and waits, and fashions a new game for herself from all the noises that the ancient yellow house makes in its long and fitful sleep.

  * * *

  The Daughter of the Four of Pentacles

  She led me into Daughter of Hounds, did the brown girl in the attic, Pearl and all her missing father’s imprisoned days. Written in an old schoolhouse in Atlanta, while my mind walked the streets of Providence. Hell fits in the palm of your hand.

  The Dry Salvages

  ~ A Short Novel ~

  Lying awake, calculating the future,

  Trying to unweave, unwind, unravel

  And piece together the past and the future,

  Between midnight and dawn, when the past is all deception,

  The future futureless, before the morning watch

  When time stops and time is never ending…

  T. S. Eliot, “The Dry Salvages” (1941)

  I.

  The First Pen

  The Montelius was still more than a week out of port, her golden foil sails skimming the darkness at the edge of the Gliese system, when the med droids decided it was time to start waking us up. That sort of thing used to annoy Joakim so much he’d actually stop talking to me for hours, that I would speak of the agency droids as sentient creatures instead of programmed machines, that I would say something like, “The med droids decided” this or that, as though I somehow knew better than the ANSA AI larks hidden away in their sterile New Kobe and Atlanta and Johannesburg cloisters. The droids assigned to the Montelius were an eccentric, mismatched lot – a few clunky old 712s and SJ4s rubbing shoulders with a handful of the newer Korean synthfolk. They always gave Joakim the twitch, the synths, with their more-human-than-human faces, their lilting, gentle voices, and the way they moved, fluid as water flowing across glass. A poet – I can’t remember which one – called them “angels of plastic and light.” Regardless, they were anything but robots, and I, at least, was glad for their company.

  I opened my dry, gummy eyes, more than seventeen Earth years after I’d shut them – though not quite seven and a half years had passed on the Montelius – and stared up, at, and through the nonreflective dome of my stasis cell. The agency had spent years perfecting a transparent polymer that would eliminate as much reflection as possible, to help offset the cognitive dissonance that usually comes with knowing so much time has passed, out there, while, snug inside your cocoon, you’ve aged hardly at all. And, of course, no one ever looks particularly apple after years of stasis. The life-support systems and the medbots are there to keep you alive and healthy, not pretty. So, they save the mirrors for later, because out on the lanes, it’s all about morale. There were signs posted in every corridor on the Montelius: “Safety first,” they would solemnly, cheerfully intone whenever you approached, “and don’t forget – a happy traveler is a safe traveler.” After the incident with the Aegis, back in 2123, ANSA finally started taking psychometrics a lot more seriously. Ten dead, half the droids gutted beyond repair, and an Explorer-class fleet-tube MIA for half a decade, you better fucking believe it got the attention of the ekzecs and expenditure snipes. The Aegis was the last human crew to make the trip from one star to another awake.

  “Spook stories for travelers,” Joakim once said dismissively when the subject of the Aegis came up during some dinner or breakfast or another, before Piros, when we were both still stationed on Europa. “Bogeymen for a century without bogeymen. Don’t you believe half of what you hear about that tub. On the lanes, you don’t make mistakes, and if you do, kiss your ass farewell. There’s no need to spread ghost stories.”

  But I’d already scanned the ANSA report on the Aegis for myself, both the official draft and an uncensored darkslip I found stashed in some encryption temple nook of the hypernet. Some seriously trag-ugly shit spelled out in that doc, whether Joakim wanted to acknowledge it or not. For example, the first mate, Dr. Jaeng Li Chieu, a Chinese national and two-time Nobel-winning physicist. They found her in the medbay, fully conscious, her body held in quarter-stasis for two years, exquisitely vivisected by three of the 712s. She’d given all the orders to the droids. She’d even made the notes, as long as she had fingers left to operate the keyboard.

  I suppose it makes some kind of sense that I can’t avoid these morbid thoughts of the Aegis – here, now – as I finally begin to set down the events of that long-ago December, my brief and terrible time in the dim red light of an alien star, stranded at the ass-end of my coma, almost five parsecs from the familiar white eye of Sol. And old women can let their thoughts wander where they wish, and they can say what they think, how they wish to say it, especially when they know that it’s unlikely that anyone will believe a word of what’s being said.

  I opened my eyes and the med droid assigned to my cell smiled at me when she saw I was awake. Her violet eyes twinkled artificially in the too-bright glare of the stasis chamber. Back then, with AI hysteria the brayest and most acceptable of racisms, synthfolk were all manufactured with those vivid, unnatural eyes – violet for “females” and crimson for “males.” Sometimes, I miss those pretty, hard-candy eyes. For a few years, teenagers in America and Japan (and other places, I’m sure, but that’s what I remember) wore violet and crimson contacts, until they found some other way of upsetting the cops and their parents and the social engineers.

  I blinked back the glare from the long banks of lights built into the ceiling, trying hard to force the droid and her violet irises into focus, trying to make sense of the cell’s internal display screen embedded at the top of the ultra-transparent plastic dome. Nanites nestled in my lacrimal ducts had begun secreting saline the moment I awoke, but my eyes itched and stung, and the screen refused to resolve into anything more than a blur of green and red and white, like some Christmas spectre hovering only a few inches from my face. Fake tears streamed down my cheeks, and the blurry android smiled and nodded her head for me.

  Beneath my body and the contoured layers of somaform bedding, unseen machineries hummed and clicked, hydraulics whining suddenly, reluctantly to life as the atmospheric and barometric regulators cycled through their release protocols. I shut my eyes again, giving up on clarity, giving up for now, and listened to the grating hiss of seventy-four old-fashioned titanium-steel-resin bolts drawn simultaneously from the
ir strike plates. The pressure seal popped the cell’s hood, and the placental warmth was washed away by the chill of the stasis chamber.

  “Good morning, Dr. Cather,” the droid said and slipped a damp biofeed bracelet snugly around my left wrist.

  “Is it?” I croaked, my mouth so dry I was beginning to wonder if I’d somehow gotten a bad batch of nanites.

  “Is it what, Dr. Cather?” she asked patiently, busy connecting filaments from the bracelet to an oval console in her bare chest.

  “Is it really morning?”

  “6:03 A.M. Eastern Standard,” she replied. “In Miami, the sun will be rising soon.”

  “Have you ever been to Miami?” I asked, trying to work up enough spit to swallow.

  “No. I’ve never been to Earth, doctor. I need you to be still and stop talking while we check out your metabolic and neuro stats.”

  “Are the others okay?”

  “Quiet, please, Dr. Cather,” and then the violet-eyed droid counted aloud to fifty, and the bracelet, one of those soft, pulsing abominations spliced together from sea cucumbers and various species of marine algae, slipped fiber-optic spines a few millimeters beneath my skin and immediately began to relay my vitals to the computer buried in the droid’s naked chest. I knew that it was also administering a mild tranquilizer produced in the walls of its cloaca.

  “I hate those things,” I said and nodded at the bracelet, beginning to relax as the initial shock of waking dissolved under the influence of the drug. “They’re fucking disgusting.”

  “Yes, they are,” she said and shone a penlight into my eyes, the left, then the right, then the left again. “You can talk now, Dr. Cather.”

  I nodded and took a deep breath, filling my lungs with the sterile medbay air. There was no scent or taste in that antiseptic air, at least nothing I wanted to taste or smell after a ninety-month sleep. I licked at my lips and wondered how long it would be until I could have a cup of coffee and a cigarette.

  “The others are fine,” the droid replied and removed the biofeed bracelet. Its bristling ventral spines left behind a couple dozen tiny droplets of blood on my pale skin, which she quickly swabbed away. “All their readouts are looking good, but you’re the first to awaken.”

  “The early bird gets the worm.”

  “What?” she asked and made that face the synthfolk make when they know they ought to understand something, but don’t.

  “Thank you,” I told her. “That’s good to hear,” and then I tried to enjoy the effects of the sea cucumber-algae thing’s sedative while I waited for the examination to end.

  A couple of hours later, when the med droids were done with me and I’d stumbled, groggy and weak, to my quarters and dressed in the simplest things I could find – a white robe and a pair of boxers, the one-hundred-percent natural fleece slippers and toboggan that my brother gave me when ANSA natsci finally cleared me for the exobio corps – I took one of the mini-lifts up and over to the larboard crew lounge. I knew that I’d be the first, that I’d have the little compartment to myself for at least a few minutes before the others began trickling in. A red and grey 712 served me a steaming cup of extremely weak coffee (one part coffee to three parts distilled water) and two pro-carb biscuits. I thanked it, and the old bot bleeped at me politely. My throat ached from the feeding tubes, but the coffee felt good going down, and I even managed to nibble at one of the flat, vaguely citrus-flavored biscuits. I knew it would be days before my body was again ready for decent food, and I tried not to think about the procession of nutra pills and powdered supplements and intravenous fluids that lay between me and a warm tube of soyachick paste.

  “You’re here because this is what you wanted,” I told myself, shivering and pulling the robe more tightly about me. “This is what you wanted more than anything in the world, remember?”

  Yeah, I thought. You just keep right on telling yourself that, recalling my face in the tiny mirror above the dry sink in my quarters. My face, looking like a plague victim or someone who’d punched a lethal rad dose, my skin gaunt and grey and slack. Maybe I’d aged less than eight years since we made speed, and here I was only thirty, but I could have passed for a very sickly forty-five, daijoubu desu.

  I set my empty mug and the uneaten biscuits down on the low table in front of me and reached for the keypad built into the armrest of my chair. In a moment, the wall of the Montelius shimmered and then seemed to melt away, and I was staring instead at blackness dappled with unfamiliar, disorienting constellations. And there was Gliese 876, still so very far away, but close enough to dominate the screen, a faint, red-dwarf beacon calling out across time and the endless night. We’d answered another, very different sort of beacon, of course, but at that moment, it seemed this star was the only voice in the heavens.

  And it hit me then, the homesickness that the skullrooters had spent so much time warning us about back in psyprep. It hit me like nausea and migraines and a ton of rocks tumbling down to bury me forever, and I thought that was surely the most lost, the loneliest that anyone could ever feel. The tears came in an instant, but at least they were my tears, not the unreliable secretions of lacrimal nanites. I switched off the visuals, and the wall was only a wall again, then sat with my face cradled in my hands, sobbing and hating myself for being weak.

  It’s nothing you didn’t know was coming.

  It’s nothing at all. Nothing but time, and distance.

  And then I heard footsteps in the corridor, and the lounge doors slid not-quite-silently open behind me.

  “They say that’s healthy,” Joakim said, and I quickly wiped at my eyes and nose, as if he hadn’t already seen, as if I could ever hide anything from him. “It’s nothing to be ashamed of, Audrey. Hell, I cried the whole time the mechs were picking and prodding at me, and that was without the benefit of visuals.”

  I glanced at him over my shoulder, Joakim dressed in nothing the least bit personal, just a regulation powder-blue ANSA jumpsuit. And never mind what I should have expected, what I knew I’d see. I wasn’t ready to see anything but the healthy, sun-browned face of the man who’d gone to sleep in the stasis cell next to mine. In coma, Joakim had lost thirty pounds, easy, and I’d never seen him with a beard. He looked like an old man.

  “Murdin’s on the way up,” he said, and then kissed me lightly on top of the head before taking the seat next to mine. “She was awake before me, but she wanted to plug up with navigation.”

  “We’re exactly smack-center where we’re supposed to be,” I said and wiped my runny nose on the back of my left hand again. “All you have to do is drag down the screen to see.”

  “Yeah, I know that, and you know that, and every droid on the Monty knows that, but Murdin – ”

  “ – always has to see for herself.”

  Joakim nodded and ran his fingers through his thinning hair, only a few hints of auburn left among the strands of grey and white. The 712 returned from its cubby and gave him his own cup of coffee and his own biscuits. He didn’t say thank you, but the mech bleeped politely, anyway.

  “The droid that ran my stats claims we’re about nine days from port,” he said and ate one of the biscuits in a single bite, then sipped at his coffee.

  “Careful,” I said, “or you’ll only puke it right back up again.”

  “Maybe it would taste better the second time around.”

  “Maybe,” I muttered absently and shook my head, staring at the blank wall where the screen had been, the solid, unrevealing hull of the tube to hide the void beyond, to hide the red siren at the heart of this system. “We’re already decelerating?” I asked.

  “Yeah. We’ve probably been decelerating for a couple of weeks now,” he replied and then ate his other biscuit. “Murdin will know more after she chats with Magellan.”

  “They should have waited a few more days.”

  “Too much work to do,” Joakim said, finishing his coffee. “We gotta take these meatsacks back up to spec,” and he poked himself in the belly.
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br />   “I need a cigarette,” I said.

  “No, you don’t. You want a cigarette.”

  “I want to go home.”

  “No, you don’t want that, either. You want to see whatever the hell they’ve hauled us all the way out here to see, same as me. It’s just taking you a little longer to get your bearings, that’s all.”

  “I’ve got my fucking bearings,” I replied, sounding more bitter than I’d meant to, but beginning to wish Joakim had gone to the cockpit with Murdin.

  He set his cup down on the table next to mine, then ran his fingertips across the keypad on his own chair, but the wall of the ship remained a wall. He cursed and tried again, and again the controls failed to respond. “I think this chair’s bloody clapped,” he said and rubbed at his beard.

  “There’s nothing out there you want to see,” I told him, grateful to be spared the sight of the red dwarf again. I thought about going back to my quarters to wait for my next turn in medbay, but couldn’t imagine what I’d do once I got there.

  “You’ll feel better in a few hours,” he said. “It’s just lag. You know that. This time tomorrow – ”

  “ – there will only be eight days left to port.”

  “Jesus, Audrey,” and he slumped back in his chair and frowned and stared at me with those intense blue eyes, lazulite and winter skies, eyes that didn’t seem a day older than the night we’d left Ganymede-Kobayashi Station. “You’re one of the first extrasolar exopaleontologists. In a few days, you’re going to see fossils of animals that evolved and became extinct on the moon of a planet revolving around an alien sun. You’re not just going to see them, you’re going to hold them in your hands.”

  “There was so much work left to do on Europa,” I said.

  “And there are plenty of competent people there to do it. You’ve earned this.”