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

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  I’m off on a tangent, aren’t I? When I woke this morning, late for a lecture, I lay in bed a few minutes as the shreds of a dream about Umachandra Murdin faded away. And I thought about ending this here. Just stopping and putting the pages away somewhere, in some desk drawer where no one will look until long after I’m dead. Or I could send them down to the incinerator. Or I could wind it all up with an apple lie. I could say, “And then Joakim decided to override the mission programming and, after an argument with Umachandra, the four of us reentered stasis only a few days after freeing the Monty from the Gilgamesh.” I could be very, very audacious, and I could write, “They all lived happily ever after.” Or simply, “They all lived.”

  I’m wasting ink. I’m aware I’m wasting ink.

  There are wide, north-facing bay windows in front of my writing desk. The original glass was replaced ages ago with thick panes of permaclear that distort everything, but only a little. Sealants keep the wind out and a network of thermal filaments imbedded in the permaclear helps the flat stay warm. On sky days, I have a good view of île-Saint-Louis crouched in the frozen Seine, icebound Paris stretching away to its ancient boundaries and the sprawl beyond. The sky is good to see on those days, the Persian-blue skies that at least look clean, though I draw the curtains on cloudless nights, because I can no longer bear the sight of stars.

  They always seem to be watching, and it doesn’t matter knowing how far away those watchers must be. How long it would take anything from out there to reach here, because I can see them, and I imagine (yes, I imagine) that they can see me. That they’ve been watching me for decades. After Piros, during the long quarantine in Mars orbit, one of the psychiatrists pinned me as astrophobic, suffering from a morbid fear of stars and other celestial bodies, which, of course, ended my career in exo. Well, that and about a dozen other diagnoses, and the fact that I’d have cut my own throat before signing up for another coma tube. But yes, I am afraid of stars.

  I am an old woman with three cats, an apartment filled with petrified bones and moldering books and antique discs and data beads, living on a lecturer’s salary and an agency pension, and I am afraid of stars.

  And I am wasting ink.

  But I cannot sleep, and I’m not quite ready to move on to the next part of the story, that part of my life that has become a story, the passage through the damaged crewlock from Montelius to the Gilgamesh. The first conversation with the synth that had assumed command of the vessel. The conversation with Baird that followed. And so on. Perhaps tomorrow night I can begin to write those things. But not tonight.

  Perhaps I should burn these pages.

  Two months ago, I delivered a lecture on Europan paleoecology at the Galerie de paléontologie et d’anatomie comparée, and, afterwards, when the floor was opened to questions, a student with an Australian accent, a tall blonde girl, asked if I would discuss the Gliese expeditions. I glanced nervously at the monitor standing a few feet to my left, and he shook his head in that slow, serious, not-quite-threatful way that academic monitors shake their heads. I nodded at him and politely told the girl it was a subject I was forbidden to discuss, as I’d signed various confidentiality docs and, besides, it wasn’t the subject of the lecture.

  “But you were part of the Montelius crew, weren’t you?” she asked. “You were there?”

  I looked at the monitor again, a muscular African man, his eyes hidden safely behind a cluster of implants; he was speaking into the microphone in his left palm. Which meant he was hooked and briefing security, and decisions were already being made about how the situation should be dealt with. He shook his head again, more forcefully than before, and I nodded again and smiled for him, then ignored the girl and pointed at the clock on the wall. I thanked them all and made up a lie about needing to examine Argentinean mollusks in the collections before heading home. There was a half-hearted smattering of applause as I exited the auditorium.

  You were there?

  Was I?

  Am I absolutely fucking sure?

  The next day, I heard that the girl, a New Zealander whose name is Jedda Callahan, was detained after the lecture and taken in for questioning. She was released a few hours later, when her scans came up clean, but I knew that she’d be followed for weeks or months, that she’d been classed Yellow-3 or higher. The agency knows well enough that there are plenty of ecoterrorist cells and anti-spacers and religious fundamentalists who’d love to be able to pump their propaganda banks with a clearer picture of what really happened on Piros. ANSA understands the damage that would be done, the possible cost to their extrasolar programs and the industries that rely on them, and they’re careful. They’re watchful, like the stars. I’ve often wondered why they ever allowed Joakim and me to leave quarantine. They certainly didn’t have to. No one who mattered would have doubted whatever cover story they concocted to explain our deaths. But the agency has always been twelve deep into taking calculated risks, and there must have been something more they needed from us.

  I cannot begin to guess what that something was.

  Joakim had his theories, but Joakim is dead now, and I don’t like to think about them.

  There’s the four A.M. aerobus, its red and blue strobes shining faintly through the snow and sleet as it passes slowly above the rue de Rivoli, heading west towards the new Vanves terminal. And I should go to bed. I should feed the cats and then go to bed. I’ve said enough for now, even if all of this has only been a waste of ink.

  Tomorrow night, I’ll do better.

  It took almost five hours to get the umbilicus’ airlock and life-support systems operational again. Umachandra spent most of the time with Magellan’s gateway, setting up extra scarps and counterscarps, resetting passwords and access codes. She even uploaded an old-fashioned firewall in case there were problems with the AI’s native router functions. While Peter and I packed the away-pods, Joakim sat in his cabin, dictating a crisis report to ANSA – everything we knew, and, I suppose, everything he suspected – about the problems aboard Gilgamesh. In fifteen years, his words would finally reach the outer stations, instant history for anyone who might still be around to give a shit. He directed the signal along all the present, and three-projected, tube lanes, knowing it could reach other travelers long before it eventually reached Earth. When Umachandra had finally unplugged and we’d received a green light from the synths aboard Gilgamesh, he ordered us all into our white EVA suits.

  Down in the transfer bay, we checked and double-checked seals and pressure gauges, cooling systems and resp-units. A COmembrane on my breathing scrub was damaged and had to be replaced, and one of Joakim’s oxygen packs was nearly twenty percent suboptimal. He popped it and slipped a full cartridge into the slot on the left leg of his suit, while Umachandra bitched about hers, which was too tight despite modifications for her height. Peter sat on one of the yellow away-pods, his helmet in his lap, staring silently through the crewlock’s porthole.

  “This is ridiculous,” Umachandra muttered, struggling with a sticky seam in her suit. “It’s not even ten meters, and Magellan says – ”

  “It’s just a precaution,” Joakim interrupted and then handed me my helmet.

  “Well, it’s a fucking silly precaution,” Umachandra shot back, and the skin on her face, the only part of her not hidden inside the suit, flushed an annoyed yellow-orange. “You actually think they’re going to get us all in there and then space us?”

  “No, I don’t,” he replied, “because we’re going through one at a time. I’ll be first, then you, then Audrey, and I want Peter to be the last one of us across. If anything goes wrong, whoever’s left on this side is to disengage at once.”

  “We don’t know what’s happened over there,” Peter said. “Hell, for all we know, everyone’s dead.”

  Umachandra sighed loudly and checked the seals on her gloves. “If humans had told you what that synth told you, you wouldn’t be acting like this, Peter.”

  “And your point is?”

  “Tha
t you’re behaving like a bigot.”

  “We’re talking about droids,” Joakim said, sounding almost as annoyed as the flicker of Umachandra’s chromatophores and photophores. “These aren’t Brazilian refugees or ph children, they’re just fucking droids.”

  “No, they’re not droids, Commander Hamilton, they’re synths – ”

  “Same shit, Murdin. They’re machines, and sometimes machines malfunction. All machines malfunction.”

  “Obviously, so do humans,” she replied and slipped her helmet on. There was a faint hiss as the autoseams around her neck melded and a dull click when her resp tanks switched on.

  Neither Joakim nor Peter replied. I put my helmet on, locking myself away in the bubble, entrusting my life to another set of machines. I doubted Joakim would have appreciated the irony, and so I didn’t point it out to him. The inside of the helmet smelled like plastic, and I wished he had put me second in the queue, instead of Umachandra; I wanted to get through the umbilicus and out of the EVA suit as quickly as possible. I don’t think it was the same distrust of the synths that was affecting Joakim and Peter. It was a much larger and less focused dread. I needed to know what the hell had gone wrong over there, so that this unknown could begin to become the known, so that things would start to make sense to me again, and then maybe I’d have a chance against the anxiety and fear that had begun clouding my mind.

  A couple of minutes later and we all had our helmets on. Joakim made us each go through a comms check and a fourth comp systems check. We all came up bray, and he stepped past Peter Connor to the manual controls beside the hatchway.

  “The mercury’s reading 977 millibars,” he said, his voice made thin and tinny by the suit’s speakers. “And the gas mix looks good. A little high on the oxygen, but within limits. Grav readings are normal. The temps about seven-point two, so at least I don’t think we’ll freeze to death.”

  “Clearly, those evil robots want us inside the trap before they spring it,” Umachandra said, sarcasm and contempt fairly dripping from her comms.

  “Shut up, Uma,” Peter said. “You’re not helping.”

  “I wasn’t trying to be helpful. Maybe they’ve rigged the umbilicus with zimax charges.”

  “Please,” I said, “can we just get this over with?”

  Joakim nodded and punched in the new twenty-digit access code that Umachandra had given him only moments before. There was a loud hiss as the air pressure in the transfer bay and the umbilicus began to equalize, and Joakim thumbed back two red safety clips, unlocking the hatchway.

  “When I’m through, I’ll signal for Umachandra to follow,” he said. “Do not start across until I’ve sent the signal.” Then he raised the heavy release lever to the left of the control panel, and the hatchway slid open. “Peter, you’ll close the hatch as soon as I’m through. The SJ4 will shut it after you.”

  “Be careful,” I said, and he nodded and stepped across the threshold, into that hallway the same unrelenting white as our EVA suits. The walls and floor and ceiling were like the inside of a giant’s accordion, and Joakim kept to the narrow aluminum catwalk. There were handgrips overhead, but he wouldn’t need them as long as the gravity held.

  Ten meters, I thought, remembering what Umachandra had said, and I clenched my gloved fists. Not even ten meters from this side to that side. How quickly could I walk ten meters? Thirty seconds, easy, even moving slowly, cautiously, even stuck inside an EVA suit, thirty or forty seconds at the most.

  But how many things can go wrong in only thirty or forty seconds?

  When Peter closed the hatch again, the matching hatchway at the far end of the umbilicus still hadn’t opened. And I counted on my fingers and waited. Peter watched through the porthole, and Umachandra fiddled with the settings on her communication bud.

  “It’s open,” Peter said after what seemed like ten or twenty minutes. “He’s through.”

  “Maybe they want to get us all aboard the Gilgamesh before they kill us,” Umachandra said, and a few seconds later our comms crackled. “I’m fine,” Joakim said. “Red Rover, Red Rover – ”

  “Now, open the fucking hatch, Peter, before I suffocate in this contraption,” Umachandra said, and he raised the lever and lowered it again when she was inside the passageway.

  “She’s terrified,” he said to me, and it was plain to hear that he was worried, and I felt I was being made privy to a confidence I didn’t want. “Shit, she’s probably more afraid than any of us. That’s just her way of showing it, acting like a goddamn cunt.”

  And then the comms crackled to life again.

  And it was my turn.

  Yesterday, Zoraya asked me what I was writing. She’d never seen blank sheets of paper before, or ballpoint pens. I told her a little of it and promised to let her read the whole thing when I was done. When I got to the part about the synths taking control of the Gilgamesh, she grew quiet and stared at the snow outside the window.

  “It was a long time ago,” I said, realizing that I’d upset her.

  “It’s not so different now,” she replied.

  “Now you have rights,” I countered. “You have citizenship and recourse to – ”

  “In France,” she said quietly. “In Sweden and New Zealand. In Russia, I have rights.”

  “We’re an old species,” I told her. “We’re not as adaptable was we like to think. It takes us time to adjust to things that are different from us.”

  “Yes, I’ve seen that.”

  “We were a long way from home. Everything was fucked. We were scared.”

  “Don’t you think those synths on the other ship were frightened, as well?”

  “They were,” I admitted.

  “Are you going to put that in your story?” she said, and looked away from the bay window, the shifting grey-blue curtain blotting out the city.

  “Yes. Of course.”

  And that seemed to satisfy her. Zoraya is a very beautiful girl, and it comforts me to know that she’ll never age, that she’ll live out the span of her life with that same perfect face (unless she chooses to do otherwise). Her eyes are hazel green, and a casual inspection would never reveal that they’re synthetic. Most of the time, her long hair is almost white, but some days she wears it a cold lavender, and some days she wears it auburn. If I’d ever had a daughter, I like to think she’d have been as beautiful as Zoraya.

  When we were all aboard Gilgamesh, we quickly stripped off the EVA suits before leaving the ship’s transfer bay. Umachandra wadded hers into a ball and tossed it into a corner, and Peter laughed at her. We followed a nervous synth man to a lift that carried us up to the conference room on tier three. The synth woman we’d spoken to on the obs deck a few hours before was waiting for us there.

  “Welcome,” she said pleasantly, motioning us to be seated at the long oval table that took up most of the small room. “Thank you, Lawrence,” she said to the synth man, and he nodded to her and immediately disappeared back into the corridor, closing the door behind him.

  “As I’ve already indicated,” the synth woman said, “we are all extremely relieved by your arrival.”

  “Fine,” Joakim said. “Now, when are you going to tell us what’s happening here?” and she glanced down at her hands, folded on the tabletop in front of her. She was a standard Apex3, the violet eyes and black hair, the skin that shimmered very faintly under the cabin lights, the near infinite patience she’d been programmed to exhibit towards human beings.

  “My name is Evelyn,” she said.

  “Since when do A3s have names?” Peter blurted, and she didn’t look away from her folded hands.

  “Dr. Osmolska gave me the name. She named all of us here on the Gilgamesh.”

  “Well, that was certainly very fucking thoughtful of her,” he said, and Joakim frowned at him.

  “Where is she, Evelyn?” Joakim asked. “Where is Dr. Osmolska?”

  “She’s in her quarters.”

  “And Dr. Baird?”

  “In his quart
ers, as well. It was necessary to sedate them for their own well-being.”

  “But you’ll allow us to see them?”

  “If that’s what you wish, Commander. But I’m afraid they won’t be very much use to you.”

  “And all the others went to the surface with Dr. Welles?” I asked her, and she nodded.

  “I think you should know that Dr. Baird tried to dissuade him from expanding the perimeter, and from taking a shuttle down to the site. But he was very excited.”

  “Which site?” I asked, and she looked up at me, and that’s when I saw that she was afraid, Zoraya. A tremble at the corners of her full lips, the brittle flash of her eyes. She passed her left hand across the small conpad set into her end of the table, and the wall behind her dissolved into a wide screen.

  “Registration Piros 2250-2-987.2,” she said. “Grid reference R9-0P2, longitude – ”

  “Jesus Christ,” Peter said, interrupting her. On the screen, photocells in the wall displayed an aerial view of a wide expanse of Pirosan badlands. Of course, we all knew about the alien ships, the digging equipment and refineries, the abandoned settlements, but we’d never seen photographs as clear as the one on the wall behind Evelyn.

  “That was taken from about five kilometers up,” she said, still watching me. “Preliminary results show it to be the most recent site we’ve found anywhere on Piros thus far. The advance probes brought back samples that dated at 9,300 years, plus or minus 1,000 years.”

  “Jesus,” Peter said again. “Look at that shit.”

  I noticed the roads first, lighter strips of brick red and orange-white crisscrossing the ridges and gullies and ravines, leading my eyes to the edge of the great pit. I might easily have been looking at a huge Terran mining operation, the abandoned Bingham Canyon mine in Utah or the Limberg quarry in Finland, one of the old giants from the days before the economics of offworld prospecting and refining closed down most of the open pits on Earth. Even after millennia, the narrow, concentric terraces were still visible.