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

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  Remember, this was only a couple of decades after the big wars in Brazil and Turkey, after the North Atlantic thermohaline circulation finally went to shit and jiz, after the starving and freezing and dying began in earnest, and everyone and his sister was prowling for Jesus or Allah or Buddha anywhere they could find them. And look here, the agency says, we’re really not alone, after all. Maybe it’s not god or divine intervention, not exactly, but we’ve been getting signals from this planet only fifteen light-years away, clear evidence of extraterrestrial life, and this time it’s not going to be like Mars and Europa and Titan. This time, there’s more than microbes and sea bugs. This time, there’s a technology so advanced that it’ll make things bray again, and the aliens are so goddamned friendly that all we have to do is reach out and snatch it.

  I was on Europa-Herschel Station, studying fossils from the dredgings near Tectamus Linea. The day the agency announcements were made in Washington and Beijing, Joakim and I were busy with something new from a siltstone wedge near one of the big hydrothermal vent systems, hundreds of tightly-coiled shells about the size of my thumbnail. Back on Earth, I’d have thought they were gastropods. On Europa, they might have been anything. One of the keys to good exopaleontology, I’d learned, is avoiding a reliance on Terran analogies.

  Joakim came rushing up from the holding tier with his vidstick, and we plugged in and sat together at my lab pylon for a couple of hours, forgetting our silicified not-snails, listening to the larks and the bureautechs describe an extensive alien mining operation discovered on the largest moon of a gas giant circling a low-mass star somewhere in Aquarius. A PanAmerico-Sino-Brit ship named Gilgamesh was already in orbit around the moon, which they’d christened Piros. If the aliens called it something else, the agency wasn’t saying. When the “live” feed from the press conference ended, twenty minutes after it had ended all the way back on Earth, and AllPress Offworld switched over to a team of celeb analysts arguing noisily among themselves about the economic, political, and cultural ramifications of the discovery, Joakim tabbed the vidstick and slipped it into a pocket in his coveralls.

  I don’t know what I said next. I was crying. I remember that, and I also remember that suddenly all the thousands of fossils I’d cataloged from Europan sediments and the hundreds of living species collected by the neobiologists from the ice, and from the sea below the ice, seemed rather unimportant.

  But I remember exactly what Joakim said.

  “How long have they been keeping this shit from us?”

  Good question, I suppose, though it wasn’t the first thing that came to my mind. But Joakim had grown up in a West End London shitpit that had come up red as cherries when the rioting and the UN and the WHO finally forced inspections of all the old Underground stations. Finding out that you’d spent your childhood parked directly above a few million metric tons of leaking nuclear and toxic waste, and then watching both your parents die of cancer, can make a cynic of anyone.

  “Well, start by figuring in the seventeen and a half years it took that ship to reach the Gliese system,” I said, making what I thought were reasonable assumptions about the Gilgamesh’s top speed, knowing ANSA still hadn’t managed to move anything faster than ninety-percent light speed. Joakim nodded his head thoughtfully, the way he always did when I could tell he was only half listening to me. But I went on, because I was really talking to myself, anyway. “And it’s been there a little more than fifteen years, so that’s almost thirty-three years total. But setting up a program for such an extended mission, hell, that might have taken decades, right?”

  Back then, there’d only been a handful of manned deep-space expeditions: the Aegis, which had traveled almost halfway to Proxima Centauri before things went bad, and the Endurance, the first coma tube, which had made it all the way, but never made it back. The crew of the Prometheus had gone as far as Barnard’s star and held the distinction of being the only successful deep-space team. And now here was ANSA crowing about the Gilgamesh, making it all sound like a walk in the park, these travelers who would have left earth orbit long before I was born.

  “Not only that,” Joakim had said, and for just a second, I thought he’d been listening after all. “Not only that, Audrey, but you gotta wonder what they’re holding back? Maybe this whole story’s a hoax, you know, a way of getting everyone’s minds off the mess we’ve made of things. Get ‘em all thinking about salvation from the stars and – ”

  “But it could be true,” I interrupted, still giddy and not at all ready to be brought crashing down by Joakim’s wizened paranoia and nay saying, and he looked at me and frowned, then nodded his head very, very slowly.

  “Maybe,” he said.

  “Maybe,” I agreed, needing to believe the newscasts as much or more than I’d ever needed to believe anything in my life. Of course, that’s exactly what ANSA had been counting on, the desperation of a whole planet, and never mind how many lies had been told in the past, how many deceptions and covert fuck-ups, because it might be true. It might.

  Joakim sighed and rubbed his hands together. “I’ve still got to log all that shite came in off the driller last night. I’ll come back later, and we can get drunk and celebrate and count not-snails until we puke.”

  “You’ve still got alcohol?” I asked, having finished off the last of my contraband months before.

  “A little something I’ve been saving,” he said, “just in case.” He smiled and disappeared through the lab hatchway, leaving me alone with my plastic trays and microscopes and the two droids that had been assigned to assist me. I kept them switched off most of the time, because the 712s were always a little too chatty, and I liked silence when I worked. Even worse, one of the two had a repeating algorithmic interface glitch, which had given it a habit of picking fights with the other. I’d named the glitchy droid Othniel and the other I called Edward Drinker, after a couple of rival Victorian dinosaur hunters. When Joakim had gone, I thought briefly about switching them on. There wasn’t really anything for them to do, but the company wouldn’t have been so bad. Instead, I had the computer call up something by Chopin or Liszt or Czartoryska (my early twenties were marked by an obsession with 17th-Century pianists) and went back to my fossils, measuring height and width and axis, aperture and spire, but my mind was other places, and I kept making silly arithmetical mistakes.

  A few months later, I transmitted a short bioregistry report to Earth, the very last that I’d send from Europa orbit, naming the not-snails as a new genus and species of benthic europmolluscans, Piros piros. That was my official (and, looking back, childishly sentimental) acknowledgment of the optimism I felt after learning of the Gilgamesh. By then, I’d received my orders to return to Mars, and then to Earth, to begin a training program to select the next group of Gliese-bound astronauts. Joakim got the orders, too, the two of us and a few hundred other exos. He almost filed for exemption, but I talked him into going with me. There’s no way we’d ever make it through the program, I argued, no chance we’d make the cut, but hell, wouldn’t completing the program look nice on our résumés. Then we could get ourselves shipped back out to Jupiter, take up our work more or less where we’d left off, and, in our old age, we could be comforted by the knowledge that at least we’d tried.

  And now I am an old woman, who once was a young woman who went farther than she’d ever dreamed, and I find no comfort at all.

  I’d trade these memories for a head full of regret in half a heartbeat.

  In a public-pay report on the Piros discovery released a couple of months after my departure from Europa for the agency’s natsci compound near Tharsis, neofuturist Clarke Haley Hernandez wrote, “At long last, humanity is moving from the failures and missteps of our eons-old childhood, and all Heaven lies before us, with all its promises made manifest at last. We will finally shake free the decaying nursery-prison of the planet that birthed us and, in a moment more, sail clear.”

  Reading back over a conceited piece of smeg like that, I almost feel
better about Piros piros.

  Of course, the humanity which Hernandez invited to flee its smothering cradle was not without dissenters. In an address from Vatican City, Pope Pius XIV quoted Anaximenes, who is said to have asked Pythagoras, “To what purpose should I trouble myself in searching out the secrets of the stars, having death or slavery continually before my eyes?”

  It’s time to feed the cats again.

  “Why is she naked?” Peter Connor asked, pointing at Umachandra, and Joakim only shrugged and scratched at his beard. Peter had a beard too, but he’d always had a beard, as long I’d known him. He was the only one of us who’d done most of his work on Earth. After a postdoc at Johns Hopkins, he’d taken a job at the Carnegie and had done a lot with Tertiary mammals in places like Utah and Wyoming and Mexico, collecting samples for biomolecular studies and DNA extraction. Then Carnegie sent him away to Mars, and Peter made a name for himself working the Isidis Basin. All those years in the field had left their mark on his face and hands, and he could have easily been mistaken for a man ten or fifteen years his senior. Sometimes, I fancied that Peter Connor looked the way all paleontologists had looked, once upon a time.

  He was dressed almost the same as Joakim, the same blue ANSA jumpsuit, but was also wearing gloves and a synthwool cap pulled down tight over his curly blond hair.

  “You have noticed that she’s naked?”

  “Why don’t you ask her?” I muttered, realizing that I was getting a headache and wondering if I had the energy to walk all the way back down to medbay. I decided to let it hurt a while. I might get lucky and find clarity buried somewhere in the pain.

  “I was preoccupied,” Umachandra said irritably, still staring at the screen on the wall. “I needed to talk with Magellan as soon as the mechs were done, and I didn’t think to dress first. Does it matter?”

  “Hey, I was only asking. I thought I might be missing something.”

  “I was preoccupied,” she said again, not taking her eyes off Gliese 876. “If it makes you uncomfortable – ”

  “Not in the least,” Peter replied, and sat down across the table from Joakim and me. He smiled and then winked at Joakim. The red and grey 712 buzzed over to serve him coffee and biscuits that he completely ignored. “But you’ve gotta be freezing your tits off, lady. It’s a fucking icebox in here.”

  “I’m warm enough,” she told him, her skin rippling with burgundy light to betray her annoyance, and suddenly I wanted to slap her. Perhaps it was the headache, the dull throb behind my eyes making me anxious, making me worry that the droids might have missed something. But I wanted to slap her and tell her to go to her quarters and put some goddamn clothes on, that maybe the rest of us didn’t want to see her naked. Even after stasis, Umachandra Murdin looked strong and healthy, but her parents’ genetic abuse had left its telltale scars on her body, deformities that would have been hard enough to face without the headache and a coma hangover. The twisted, uneven mass of flesh just above the base of her spine, big around as my wrist and sprouting from her thoracolumbar fascia like a tangle of unfinished tentacles. Or the ugly patches of jet-black ganoid scales dappling her shoulders. Or the dozens of perfectly-formed suction cups scattered across the backs of her legs like some strange rash or malignancy. Joakim once said to me, not long after we were moved from Texas to the Cape Canaveral compound, that he didn’t see the point of traveling almost ninety trillion miles just to find aliens when we had Umachandra right there on Earth.

  “Clean bills of health all round?” Peter asked, and I nodded, and Joakim nodded, too. Umachandra didn’t say anything. “Then I propose a toast,” and Peter lifted his cup. “To us, because we aren’t dead.”

  “Not yet,” Joakim added and half-heartedly clunked his mug against Peter’s. “Magellan says things ain’t so daisy on Gilgamesh. In a few days, we might be docking with a ghost ship.”

  “He’s exaggerating,” I said.

  Joakim glared at me a moment and then told Peter everything we knew, or thought we knew, which really wasn’t all that much: Welles’ missing team, the expanded perimeter, the unsuccessful suicide attempts by Jack Baird and Anastazja Osmolska, the possibility that the droids were all that were holding the ship together.

  “Well, then, there you go,” Peter said when Joakim was done. He laughed grimly and put his feet up on the table. “And what did Magellan have to say about all this?”

  “We’re on approach,” Umachandra said. “They have us locked.”

  “I think I want to go back to sleep now, please,” Peter mumbled and sipped at his coffee.

  “Look, guy. We all knew from the get-go how risky this mission would be,” Joakim said, trying to sound composed, trying to sound stoic. “Whatever’s happening on Gilgamesh, all we can do right now is wait and see. Maybe it’s not as bad as Magellan’s making it out to be. Anyway, regardless, there’s no point panicking.”

  “Magellan said the situation is under control,” Umachandra said, glancing at us over her left shoulder. I could see by her flickering skin that she was a lot more concerned than she was willing to admit. “We have to trust her. She’s gotten us this far.”

  “Umachandra, I don’t think anyone’s saying that the problem’s with Magellan,” Peter said and set his coffee cup down. “I think it’s the rendezvous we have to worry about. Who knows what sort of shape the Gilgamesh’s mainframe is in by now? Osmolska was their chief AI tech.”

  “Magellan says it’s working fine.”

  “Has she scanned for resets? Is there any chance Osmolska might have set up a doppelgänger? Does Magellan have access to the shell?”

  “She’s working on it,” Umachandra Murdin replied, and turned back to the screen.

  “She’d better work fast. We only have ten days – ”

  “Nine,” Joakim corrected. “We only have nine days, Peter.”

  “Two hundred and eight hours,” Umachandra said and touched the screen again. The sound of her fingertips brushing plasma made me think of meat frying.

  Peter Connor shot her an exasperated glare, then leaned forward and picked up one of his biscuits, but set it right back down again. “Osmolska could have done a lot of damage, Joakim. You know that.”

  “Of course I know that, Peter. But there’s nothing we can do, is there? We listen to Magellan. We wait and see and hope that – ”

  “I’m getting a headache,” I cut in. “I think I’m going back down to the mb to take something for it,” and I stood up too quickly, bumping my knee hard against the table. Coffee sloshed from our cups, and the tabletop absorbed it immediately. Joakim asked if I wanted him to walk me to the lift, and I said no. Peter said he was sure it was nothing serious. And Umachandra watched the red dwarf, like a cobra watching its fakir, and said nothing at all.

  I think I’m going to skip some things here. What Joakim said to me and what I said to him after he followed me out into the corridor on my way to medbay. The eight days of physical and mental therapy preparing us for the rigors of Piros. The violent argument that Peter and Umachandra had over nothing much at all the day before we docked. My headache that refused to get better and which the mechs could find no cause for. I’m sure all these things are important, in their own way, maybe even more important than things I’ve written down already. They are all pieces of the puzzle, but the first of my three ballpoints is beginning to run dry, and I’m determined to finish telling this story the way that I started it.

  What I will say is that I was unaccustomed to fear, most especially to a fear of the unknown. Even as a child, I was an eager explorer, always wandering as far, or considerably farther, than my parents allowed, and thoughts of my physical safety rarely crossed my mind. At university, I did field work in the Sahara, Antarctica, and the Australian outback. I’d once spent two weeks as the unwilling “guest” of a group of Sudanese rebels, but returned at once to my work in Bahr El Ghazal when the government coughed up the ransom money that was being asked for my safe return. I’d trained on Mars and spent m
ore than a year working Europa-Herschel. I’d been part of one of the first teams to set foot on Titan. Before the Montelius left for Piros, I’d genuinely believed that I was accustomed to isolation, on earth and in space, to life in remote, uninhabited places, to the demands and stress of living in extremely hostile environments, and to getting along with my colleagues. By the cold red light of Gliese 876, I realized that all of my treasured confidence was only arrogance and ignorance. Nothing could have prepared me, or the others, for that mission. Nothing could have ever made me, or anyone else, strong enough.

  Get on with it, already.

  On December 17th, 2252, six days after we were awakened, at exactly 1800 GMT, we were met by an unmanned escort probe from the Gilgamesh. We’d already passed by the outermost planets in the system – rocky, barren Cronos wrapped in its caul of methane, ethane, and carbon-monoxide ice, only a little larger than Pluto; a wide asteroid belt that was all that remained of a long-lost Earth-sized planet, destroyed in some ancient cataclysm; and the gas giant Procris – and we were still better than twenty-five million kilometers from Piros.

  I sat with Joakim on the observation deck and watched the two tireless droids that had piloted the Monty those last seven and a half ship-years, as they spoke with the probe in their chattery machine languages. Minor course adjustments were made, and the final stage of our deceleration began as the forward thrusters fired three quick bursts, and the droids shut down the hydrogen scoop. For a moment, the ship shuddered around us alarmingly, and my stomach lurched. But then the turbulence passed.

  “Damn,” Joakim said, “I think I might have dropped a kidney back there.”

  “What do you really think we’re going to find?” I asked him, letting my body relax again after the jolt. The somaform padding of my chair molded itself about me and radiated a gentle, reassuring warmth. I didn’t look at him, watched the droid pilots instead, wondering if anyone had ever bothered to name them, and, if not, had they named themselves?