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

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “Have I?” I asked him. “Have I earned this?” But then the lounge doors slid open again, and Murdin stepped into the room, and I went back to sipping my coffee.

  I should pause to wonder how much of what I’m writing here is pure fiction. After all, I have only my faded memories, more than fifty years old at this point, to draw upon. My duty log and personal journal, along with all my files, field and lab notes, were retained by the agency immediately after Piros, before our long sleep back to Jupiter. Same with Joakim and Umachandra Murdin and Peter Connor, everything the four of us had recorded during those eight months. Connor’s neural implants were wiped raw of everything pertaining in any way to the expedition. Joakim always said the post-wipe amnesia was as much to blame for Connor’s eventual suicide as the events themselves. He’d show me studies on memory trauma and cerebral degradation, and always I’d listen, because he was scared and angry, and I didn’t know what else to do. I have no idea whether or not he was right about ANSA’s role in Connor’s death, though I was grateful that I’d never been one for cybernetic upgrades and augmentation.

  In my room in Paris, a third-floor flat in an overcrowded 19th-Century hovel located at the north end of what’s left of the Rue Linné, I sit at my desk and write these things on yellowed, antique paper with a temperamental ballpoint pen. It took me a month to find three reconditioned ballpoint pens, and then the paper cost me a week’s pay. The public lectures I give three times a month at the Jardin des Plantes never mention what we saw (or didn’t see) on Piros. I talk about Europan paleontology and marine diversity, hydrothermal vents or the extinction of the dinosaurs, or the month I spent on Titan. I stick to my notes, which have all been approved by the natsci PTB. I stick to my notes and wonder what would happen if I ever did otherwise.

  The ink from this pen is almost the same shade of blue as the blood beneath the thin skin of my wrists. The paper is the color of my teeth.

  Anyway, I was saying, this is only what I can piece together, relying on an old woman’s wasted memories. I know that I’m making a lot of it up to fill in the empty spaces. I don’t remember what the violet-eyed droid said to me that morning in medbay, for instance, or much of what Joakim said later on, as we sat together in the lounge. So, yes, it is a fiction, but I know that there are truths in here.

  Or I am only a madwoman raving to herself, and no harm’s done.

  I’m not sure that it matters any longer, whichever is the case. The sun is setting, and it’s time to feed the cats. I do that myself, because the cats hate bots.

  Umachandra Murdin’s parents had both been involved in the posthumanist secession back in the late twenties, and spent years capping retroviral genshots to dilute their chromosomes with whatever exotics they could scrounge on the ph black market. And when, inevitably, they finally started to get sick, when their bodies began to manifest the tumors, the lesions, the rare blood and autoimmune diseases that made the secession so extremely short-lived, Umachandra’s mother dutifully got pregnant, as advised by the writings of the zoophilic Berkeley bioengineer who’d started the whole mess. Her husband died before the child was born, the child who would find herself among the “lucky” twenty or thirty percent of ph babies that survived to adulthood. Devakali Murdin died of pneumonia and kidney failure only a few days after giving birth.

  The first time I met Umachandra, we were both natsci recruits at the agency’s North American training facility just outside Houston. Almost twenty years had passed since the first tube had reached the Gliese system, and those few higher-ups who were privy to the contents of the communications racing back towards Earth from the Gilgamesh were tripping over themselves putting together the next outward bound team, and the next after that, and so on.

  I was stuck in one of those endless pre-briefings we all endured before the PTB finally started rationing the details regarding a large red moon that the Gilgamesh team had named Piros. It was mid-July in Wharton County, Texas, and the drywall-and-linoleum closet that we’d been herded into that afternoon didn’t even have an air conditioner. I was having a lot of trouble following what the speaker was saying. And then it was time for questions, and Umachandra stood up. I have no idea what she asked whichever scientist or politician or agency monkey they’d sent out to entertain us that day.

  But I have never forgotten that first glimpse of her. No one sees Umachandra Murdin and forgets her. From where I was sitting, near the back of the room, I could tell that she was an extraordinarily tall woman, well over seven feet, with long jet-black hair and skin that flashed bands of a faint iridescent blue-green in the sunlight coming in through the narrow windows of the meeting room. Later on I’d learn that was the chromatophores and photophores in her skin, inherited from the squid DNA her parents had capped. It didn’t take people long to learn how to read Umachandra’s moods, simply by noting the shifting colors and patterns of her skin. That day, her hands seemed extremely long and slender, though I couldn’t tell from where I was sitting that she had no fingernails. She had a pronounced mid-Atlantic accent and a slight lisp, as though her tongue didn’t quite fit inside her narrow jaws.

  The cover story was that she’d been recruited as a biostratigrapher and flight tech, but we’d all learn later on that the agency was wild to learn how ph mutants would perform under the stresses of interstellar travel. They had their own eugenics programs, of course, even if the world was busy pretending that they didn’t, and the children of the secessionists were a windfall, white mice for the taking. Add to Umachandra’s unique physiology an IQ that would have made Einstein, Hawking and Wilcox blush, and she was a prize, indeed. Most of the ph kids suffered severe mental retardation and psychoses, but Umachandra was a shining supernova exception. And I suspect that was one of the pearls in the long string leading to her damnation.

  After the meeting, I tried to get a better look at her, shoving and squeezing my way through the crowd towards the front of the room, but she was surrounded by instructors and other recruits. I did get a glimpse of her eyes. Pythons have eyes almost exactly like that.

  When the Montelius team was finalized in August 2234, almost thirteen months later, I was bray surprised that I’d made the cut. But the fact that Umachandra would be going was, I thought then and still believe now, a foregone conclusion. The four of us – Umachandra, Peter Connor, Joakim, and I – were immediately shipped off to the old Sagan-Mars II complex in Florida to finish out our training, and to impatiently endure the long year until the ship would be ready. Then we’d all be ferried up to the orbital station where the tubes were being assembled by a cabal of now mostly-extinct multinational megacorps that had been awarded ANSA contracts to handle the Gliese program.

  One evening in May, I was alone in my room, the lights off, sweating and smoking in the cracker box of a house they’d stuck us all in on Cape Canaveral. I was sipping a Coke and watching the Banana River from my bedroom window, the lights strung out along Merritt Island to the west, out beyond the flat black water. I remember all that. I really do. I was supposed to be reading, one of the dozens of advance geological reports from the Gilgamesh team. I expect it was right there in the left lens of my I-see unit, unnoticed, forgotten as I stared through the data stream at the world outside my window.

  There was a small noise behind me, and I blinked off the computer as I turned to find Umachandra Murdin standing there in my open doorway (we weren’t allowed locks), silhouetted by the bright fluorescent lights from the corridor. In the months we’d spent together in the house, she’d hardly spoken to me, or to Joakim or Peter, for that matter, and we’d all come to accept her taciturn habits. I squinted into the light and motioned for her to come in.

  She hesitated a moment or two, glancing over her shoulder as if she were afraid she might have been followed, then quickly stepped into the room and shut the door behind her.

  “You can switch on the lights,” I said.

  “No, I can see,” she replied in that accent that could have been Baltimore or Philad
elphia and the same faint lisp I’d heard the day I first saw her. “I can see you well enough.”

  “So, what’s ticking?” I asked, trying diligently not to sound surprised that she was there in my room, trying even harder not to show my discomfort at being alone with her for the first time.

  “Are you busy?” she replied, still standing with the closed door at her back.

  “No, I was only reading,” I lied, stubbing out my cigarette in an ashtray on my cluttered desk. “‘Baird’s third sedimentological report on Quarry 9.’”

  “Are you afraid, Audrey?” she interrupted and took one cautious step away from the door.

  “Afraid of what?”

  Umachandra was silent a moment then, and I got the impression she was trying to decide if she’d made a mistake coming to talk to me. Past the smells of my untidy room and my cigarette smoke, I caught the rose oil she wore in a vain attempt to mask the faintly fishy, faintly musky odor of her body. It was always worse whenever she was excited or nervous.

  “It’s silly,” she whispered. “I shouldn’t have bothered you.”

  “No, it’s okay. We’ve never talked, not really. And I’m sick of these damned reports.”

  “They’re important,” she said. “Especially Quarry 9, if Baird and Welles are right, if they’re interpreting – ”

  “Afraid of what, Umachandra?” I asked her again, and she stood there in the gloom, staring down at me with her unreadable python eyes flicking back the light of Merritt Island. The bare skin on her arms and shoulders and throat rippled suddenly to life with its own light, unsteady shades of crimson and pink and violet.

  “The mission,” she said. “No, no, not the mission. That’s not exactly what I mean. I mean the distance.”

  “I’m afraid,” I admitted, reaching for another cigarette and my lighter, wishing Joakim were there with me. “I think we’d have to be fools not to be scared.”

  “I know I have the least to lose. I have no family. I have no friends. Only my work. Only the agency.”

  “I don’t think that matters, what we do or don’t have to lose. I don’t think that has anything to do with being afraid.”

  “I’ve been having bad dreams,” she said, and a vivid cascade of reds washed across her flesh.

  “We have our psych evaluations next week. You should mention them then, if it’s really bothering you.”

  “They’re not telling us something.”

  I laughed, though I knew at once that I shouldn’t have, that she would think I was laughing at her, though I wasn’t. “They’re not telling us a lot of things,” I said and lit my cigarette.

  “Audrey, I don’t think they’ve even told us why we’re going to Piros. I don’t think we have any idea what this is really about.”

  “Then we’ll find out when we get there,” I said. “If you’re right, it’s nothing we can do anything about. We can only do our jobs.”

  “I know I have the least to lose,” she said again, and her skin faded to a pale, unwavering orange.

  “Well, then, maybe you also have the most to gain,” I suggested. She wasn’t saying anything that I hadn’t thought of already, nothing Joakim and I hadn’t discussed, and that night, with the Atlantic wind pressing at the walls and windows of our little house by the sea, I didn’t welcome anyone else’s paranoia.

  “I’m sorry I bothered you,” she said, turning to leave, and perhaps I should have stopped her. Perhaps I should have called her back and been patient and understanding, sympathetic, all those simply human attributes I was never any fucking good at being. She would have said more, I think. She might have told me her nightmares, whatever was scaring her so badly that she’d actually come to my room to try and talk, and then, seventeen years later, things might have gone differently. Peter and Umachandra might have made it back to Earth, and Joakim might have made it back with his mind intact. I might have lived a different life.

  “Anytime,” I said. “Get some sleep. I bet you’ll feel better in the morning.”

  Umachandra Murdin left my room without saying another word. After she’d pulled the door closed, and I was alone again, I removed the I-see and sat smoking, staring at the moonlight reflected in the glittering, polluted waters of the Banana River, trying not to think about Piros and unable to think about anything else.

  The lounge doors slid closed behind Umachandra at exactly the same moment the controls on the armrest of Joakim’s chair decided to kick in. The grey wall of the Montelius dissolved a second time; I looked quickly down at my feet, those ridiculous woolly white slippers, but not before I’d gotten another glimpse of that darkness spread out before and behind and around us.

  “Magellan has an uplink with Piros,” Umachandra said, sounding excited and not the least bit hung over from all her years in stasis. “They’ve been talking for the last three days.”

  “Is Peter awake?” I asked.

  Joakim snorted. “Those dotty bastards better be preparing the welcoming party to end all goddamned welcoming parties, that’s all I’ve got to say. And there better be beer. Real beer.”

  “Is Peter awake, Umachandra?” I asked again.

  “There’s been an incident,” she said. And I looked up, looking at her but trying not to see the star field behind her, framing her broad shoulders and narrow, boyish hips. Umachandra was standing with her back to us, staring at the screen. She was naked, and I almost turned away again. Her skin glistened faintly in the lounge lights, like plastic or something invertebrate pulled up from the deep ocean.

  “What do you mean?” I asked her. “Is he alive?”

  “Connor’s fine,” she replied, without turning away from the screen. “He’ll be up soon. There’s been an incident on Piros.” Then she touched the wall, touching the single red eye of Gliese 876, and the plasma field rippled slightly beneath her fingertips.

  “What kind of an incident?” Joakim asked, standing up, and the cloth of his jumpsuit rustled like dry leaves.

  “Welles’ crew,” she whispered and pulled her hand back from the screen. “They were mapping a new quarry somewhere out past the Tyndareus Ridge.”

  “Jesus,” I said, or something to that that effect, and looked down at my feet again. They were freezing despite the thick fleece slippers.

  “So, what the bloody hell happened?” Joakim asked.

  “They’re not saying much. Maybe there’s not much to say,” Umachandra said and turned to face us. She seemed calmer now than when she’d first entered the lounge, as though her physical contact with the screen had soothed her nerves somehow. “The news has already been sent back to Earth.”

  “Well, that’s pretty fucking pointless,” I grumbled, wanting a cigarette so badly now it almost hurt.

  “They have us on long-range approach,” Umachandra said. “We’re locked in. Our instructions are to proceed according to flight plan. Magellan says there’ll be no deviation from procedure, regardless of what’s happened on Piros.”

  “Fuck Magellan,” I said and chewed at a thumbnail.

  “Sam Welles,” Joakim whispered, sitting back down in his chair. “Christ, I don’t even believe it.”

  “We don’t know that they’re dead,” Umachandra said. “All we know is that they’ve been missing for six days. That’s all anyone’s saying.”

  “No one goes missing on Piros for six days and lives to write home about it,” Joakim replied.

  “He was a professor of yours, Dr. Welles?” Umachandra asked, and Joakim grunted some sort of affirmation.

  I glanced over at him, and he was slumped back in his chair, rubbing at his eyes. “What were they even doing that far out?” he asked. “That’s almost a hundred kilometers outside the perimeter.”

  “Magellan says the perimeter was expanded four and a half years ago,” Umachandra said and turned back to the screen.

  “What the hell for?”

  “She didn’t say. I didn’t think to ask. I can request a more extensive report.”

  “What
fucking difference does it make?” I asked. “They’re dead. No matter how much we know or don’t know, they’re still dead.”

  “Most likely,” she agreed, and Joakim laughed a sick sort of laugh.

  “There’s more,” Umachandra continued. “Do you want to hear it?”

  “Sure,” Joakim replied. “Why the hell not.”

  “Baird and Osmolska have both attempted suicide in the last six months. Baird almost succeeded. I got the feeling the droids are all that’s keeping Gilgamesh in the sky.”

  “That’s just fucking brilliant,” Joakim muttered and stared up at the low, illuminated ceiling of the lounge compartment. “I don’t even believe this shit.”

  “All we can do is stick to procedure,” Umachandra said, staring out at our red dwarf lighthouse, impossibly far away and yet only the tiniest fraction of the distance we’d traveled. “That’s all we can do, isn’t it? Our jobs.”

  I wanted to tell her to shut up, and I wanted to tell Joakim to switch off the goddamn feed, but I didn’t do either. I sat in my chair, listening to the small, clockwork noises leaking from the starship, waiting for my heart to stop beating so fast, and waiting for Peter Connor to come up from medbay.

  It’s not as though Piros is a secret. After centuries of various American government, military, and civilian offices losing control of this or that dirty little complot, the agency knew they’d never manage that, not indefinitely, no matter how much they’d have liked to try. With the constant scrutiny from AllPress, TruLize, and fifteen billion snooping souls plugged directly into the hypernet and subcast, with countless invisible h-and-g progs scouring the world’s data streams a trillion times every second, they did the best they could. Because they couldn’t simply tell the actual truth, they concocted a better truth, one that people would want to hear, as much as they would ever want to hear anything, and then went to work selling it. Hundreds of billions were funneled into misinformation and disinformation and pseudoinformation and what the subcast larks – at least the few who still bothered with words – used to call “sidetalk” and “lube.” For the most part, it went down like jells and sugar.