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

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “It’s gigantic,” Joakim said.

  “How wide?” Umachandra asked.

  “More than seven kilometers at its maximum,” Evelyn replied, and she swept her hand through the air above the conpad again. The image on the screen wavered slightly as the resolution increased. “Now we’re at about three kilometers,” she said. “You can clearly see the lake.”

  Indeed, the floor of the enormous quarry was completely flooded. In the photo, the water was very dark and looked more like oil than liquid water. I could only begin to imagine how deep it might be, how long that vast, still pool had lain in the shadow of Cecrops, how long since the aliens hit some subterranean waterway, how long since they shut off the pumps that would have kept the pit dry and workable.

  Evelyn continued talking, lecturing us now like an excited ANSA lark making a pitch to some tight-fisted finance committee. But she didn’t look at the screen even once, kept her back to the wall, her eyes alternating from our faces to the conpad on the table. “The section here is capped by a thick algal limestone, which grades conformably into the underlying sulfide ores. The copper-bearing horizons – there are at least twelve – are all shales that have suffered low-grade metamorphism. The copper porphyry ore body is both huge and fairly uniform in the distribution of sulfide mineralization, especially chalcopyrite. The probes also found gold-, silver- and molybdenum-in-concentrate. But we suspect, from examinations of the freighters and refinery sites, that the copper was the primary target ore.”

  “That’s fascinating,” Peter said and scratched at his beard. “But I think we ought to be talking about what’s happened to the crew, and save the geology for later.”

  The synth nodded and then folded her hands in front of her again, resting them near the conpad.

  “It’s very complicated,” she said.

  “I appreciate that,” Joakim told her, and I could hear his patience beginning to fray. “But we have to know what’s happened to Commander Welles, and what’s wrong with Baird and Osmolska. We have to know these things now, Evelyn.”

  “I don’t think it will matter very much, not the way that you hope it might.”

  After she said that, I think we were all silent for a moment or two. I couldn’t take my eyes off the screen, that enormous quarry with its flat black lake, the careless scatter of derelict machinery little altered by the better part of a millennium at the mercy of Piros’ elements, the countless shades of red and brown, yellow and orange.

  I think it was Umachandra who spoke first, who spoke next. She might have said, “Have the probes at least managed to locate Dr. Welles’ shuttle?”

  Yes, I’m pretty sure she did. Speak first. That, or something near enough that the differences don’t matter.

  “You’re ph,” the synth replied, and Umachandra said that yes, she was.

  “That makes you a sort of alien, too, doesn’t it?”

  “Just answer the question. Did you find the goddamn shuttle or not?” Peter asked angrily, leaning across the table towards Evelyn.

  “We did,” she said, still calm, but her hands had begun to tremble slightly. “We found it almost immediately,” and she increased the resolution of the photograph again, then toggled the image left. There was no mistaking the D-shaped outline of the shuttle for anything else. I could even read the registration number printed in canary yellow across the fuselage, just behind the cockpit.

  “And you’re telling us it was empty?” Joakim asked.

  “Am I under suspicion, Commander?”

  He glanced at Peter and then at me.

  “If you were in our position – ” I began, and Peter interrupted me.

  “But it isn’t, Audrey. That’s just the problem. It has no fucking idea how to begin to comprehend your position.”

  “I don’t believe that’s true, Dr. Connor,” Evelyn said, her composure beginning to fail, and she raised her head and looked him in the eyes.

  “Right now, I couldn’t care less what you think,” Peter replied. “Or what you think you think. So far as I’m concerned, you’re nothing more than an ambulatory extension of Gilgamesh. And considering the mess we have here, I think suspecting computer malfunction is not terribly fucking unreasonable.”

  “You’re wrong. She’s entirely autonomous,” Umachandra said, turning towards Peter Connor. “The A3s have no more reliance on a mainframe than I have on Magellan,” and she pointed to the link ports at her temples.

  “It isn’t necessary for you to defend me, Dr. Murdin,” Evelyn said and then looked down at the conpad.

  “What did you mean,” Joakim asked her, “when you said that you didn’t think it would matter if we learned what has happened to the crew?”

  “She was fucking around with your head,” Peter said, and Umachandra told him to be quiet.

  “I wish I could answer that question, Commander Hamilton. I sincerely wish that I could.”

  “Why can’t you, Evelyn?” Joakim asked. “Is it because you don’t know the answer or because you won’t tell us the answer?”

  “I know…” she started, and then there was an odd, unexpectedly mechanical hitch in her voice. She shut her eyes for a moment before continuing. “What I know or do not know is irrelevant, Commander.”

  “And why is that?” I asked, and she looked at me with those violet eyes. I think she would have been crying if the A3s had been equipped with tear ducts.

  “As a personal favor to Dr. Osmolska, I allowed her to lock certain files in my memory. She has the password. No one else can open them. It was a favor, the least thing I could do for her.”

  “Because she gave you a name,” Umachandra said.

  “For many reasons, Dr. Murdin.”

  “There’s no override?” Joakim asked.

  “Dr. Osmolska felt that an option to override would have defeated the purpose of locking the files, and I agreed with her.”

  “Screw this,” Peter growled, standing up so quickly that he almost knocked his chair over, and the synth flinched. “Fuck it. Why don’t we find Baird and Osmolska and get all our asses back over to the Monty as fast as we fucking can?”

  “Why don’t you just sit back down and shut up?” Umachandra told him.

  “Dr. Connor may be right,” Evelyn said, speaking hardly louder than a whisper now. “I shouldn’t have brought you over. It was selfish – ”

  “How long are you three going to sit here listening to this crap?” Peter asked, taking a step backwards, towards the closed hatchway. “I’m sorry as hell about whatever’s happened here, but I don’t see a lot we can do, except cut our losses and head back home.”

  “Peter, there won’t be a viable launch window for another two weeks,” I said. “You need – ”

  “So, we let the droids worry about it, or we program Magellan to make the appropriate course corrections automatically.”

  “You don’t even know what you’re talking about,” Umachandra said and shook her head. “You’re behaving like a child.”

  “Please,” Evelyn whispered, shutting her eyes again. “This isn’t helping anything, fighting amongst yourselves. If you wish to leave, do so. Or if you wish to speak with doctors Baird and Osmolska – ”

  “You can’t tell us what Welles found down there?” Joakim asked her and pointed at the screen. “You can’t tell us what he was looking for?”

  “No,” the A3 replied, and then opened her eyes. “I can’t. All those files are locked.”

  “Then we have to try to find the answers ourselves.”

  “What the hell for?” Peter asked Joakim and laughed. I was beginning to wonder how Peter Connor had ever made it through the stress evaluations. “You heard what it fucking said. There’s nothing we can do.”

  “Peter, if you want to go back to Montelius, I’m not going to hold it against you.” Joakim watched Evelyn as he spoke, and now she was watching him.

  “I am telling you the truth, Commander,” Evelyn said. “Everything that I can tell you, everything I still have
access to. Dr. Osmolska is my friend.”

  “And Dr. Welles is mine,” Joakim replied and smiled for her.

  “Yes, I know. He was very excited about your arrival.”

  “Can you tell us if you think there’s any chance that he’s still alive?”

  She hesitated a moment, glanced at Peter pacing about near the doors. “It seems very unlikely,” she replied. “All the shuttle’s survival packs and medical supplies were still on the vessel. Wherever they’ve gone, they went without food and water. If someone was injured…”

  “Was there any evidence of violence aboard the shuttle,” I added and, in response, the A3 only stared at me helplessly.

  “Thank you,” Joakim said to her. “Under the circumstances, I know that you’ve done everything you can.”

  “Commander, there are answers you’re better off not finding. I wish that you could understand that.”

  “I wish that I could, too,” Joakim said, getting to his feet. “I want to speak to Dr. Baird now.”

  “Certainly,” she said and waved her hand over the conpad, dismissing the image of the shuttle and the moon’s surface, making the wall just a wall again. “I’ll take you to his quarters myself.”

  There’s someone at the door. It’s probably only Zoraya. We play chess at seven P.M. on Thursday nights, after she gets home from her job at the library. Perhaps I’ll write a little more after our game, if I’m not too tired. Perhaps I’ll show her what I’ve just written.

  Five weeks ago, the girl from my lecture at the Galerie de paléontologie et d’anatomie comparée came to see me. She was waiting in the hallway outside my flat. It isn’t hard to get into this building, so I wasn’t surprised. Her clothes were dirty, and her hair didn’t appear to have been combed in days. She looked thinner and somewhat older than I remembered, but I’d only seen her across a crowded auditorium, and my eyes aren’t what they once were. She introduced herself, Jedda Callahan, a sociometrics and theology student at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle.

  “I already know your name,” I said, glancing up and down the long hall twice to be sure that all the other doors were shut, to be sure no one was listening. And no one was, at least no one I could see.

  “I have to talk with you,” she said. “It’s important.”

  “You made yellow,” I replied, which, I thought, was almost as direct as simply saying no, fuck off, leave me alone, go haunt someone else.

  “Please,” she said and stepped between me and my front door. “You were there. I know that you were. The people I work with – ”

  “ – are none of my concern. Now, I need you to get out of my way.”

  “Dr. Hamilton contacted us. Before he died, he told us things about Gliese, about what happened on Piros, and he said that we should find you.”

  “Get out of my way, Miss Callahan,” I said, reaching into a coat pocket for the red buzzrip dispenser I’d been carrying since coming to Paris from Miami. I had never needed it before. I’d never really thought that I would.

  “He said we could trust you. He said you were apple.”

  “Dr. Hamilton wasn’t well,” I replied, my hand closing around the plastic dispenser. I took it out of my pocket, and she stared at it a moment and then looked at me again.

  “He said you were his lover.”

  “I am an old woman. That’s all that I am anymore. And I won’t lose my pension and risk confinement because you want to play dissident or terrorist or whatever the hell it is you’re doing.”

  “I’m looking for the truth,” she said, and I laughed at her. It was a hard, sick laugh that I think I must have been saving up in some lightless corner of my soul for a very, very long time. It spilled out of me like vomit or diarrhea, like some illness I’d been hoarding.

  “Jesus, I should rip your ass just for saying something that stupid,” I told her, wiping at my eyes, realizing that I’d started crying. “I should call the police. Or haven’t you had enough of them?”

  Jedda took a step backwards and bumped into the door of my apartment. Her eyes were on the dispenser.

  “You are an old woman,” she said. “And I can’t offer you any sort of protection, and I can’t offer you money – ”

  “I’m not telling you anything.”

  “He said you wouldn’t. He said we could trust you, but that you’d be too afraid to talk.”

  “Then why the hell are you here, child?” I raised the buzzrip, pointing it directly at her face the way that the instructions show.

  “Because he thought he might be wrong about you. He said we should at least try. He said you saw more, that you could fill in the – ”

  “If I have to use this shit,” I said and flipped the safety cap off the dispenser, “if you make me use this, it’s unlikely you’ll ever see again. And there’s a fifty-fifty chance you’ll be deaf.”

  “I know that,” she said. “I’ve seen people – ”

  “Well, I haven’t, and I don’t want to.”

  “A cop ripped my brother two years ago, during an interrogation,” Jedda Callahan said. “He lost both his eyes.”

  “I can’t help you. Let’s be honest No, I won’t help you.”

  It was icy cold in the hallway, because no one on this block can afford more than a few hours of thermal a day, and none of it gets wasted on hallways or lobbies or lifts. Our breath fogged in the air, smoke from our lips to hang a moment in the glow from the dim, unsteady lamps, and I realized that she wasn’t wearing a coat.

  “You saw a lot more than he did,” she said again. “That’s what Dr. Hamilton told us. You and Dr. Murdin, he said you saw the most.”

  “Are you brave, child, or are you just an idiot?”

  “Either way, I’m not a coward. I don’t hide behind the cops and fucking buzzrip.”

  “I can’t tell you, or anyone else, what I don’t remember,” I said, speaking slowly, deliberately, looking her directly in the eyes, the index finger of my right hand covering the dispenser’s hit button.

  “No,” she said. “No, you can’t.”

  “Whatever I saw or didn’t see on Piros, Jedda, I forgot all about it long ago. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”

  She took a deep, hitching breath and stepped quickly to one side, no longer blocking the door. At that moment, I think I saw many things in her eyes. Fear and anger, confusion, a terrible resolve that I can only vaguely recall ever having felt myself (if, indeed, I ever truly felt anything half so pure). There was blood flecking her chapped lips, and she licked at it and watched me.

  “The people I work with,” she whispered, “we’re preparing to release what we have on Piros. But, you know how it is, Dr. Cather. You’re a scientist, so I know you know how it is. Every time someone answers one question, we have ten new ones to take its place.”

  “That’s the way it works,” I replied, and she nodded her head.

  “What if it followed you back?” she asked and hugged herself, trying not to shiver. “You must wonder about that, Dr. Cather. You must wonder about that a lot. What if it’s here now?”

  I flipped the safety cap back into place and stepped past her, reaching for the doorknob. Down the hall, Zoraya opened her door and peered out at us.

  “Est-ce qu’il y a quelque chose que ne va pas?” she called out, and I knew that she probably had her hand on the security ringer mounted by her door. “Y a-t-il un problème, Dr. Cather?”

  “I’m leaving,” Jedda Callahan said and forced a smile. “It was my mistake. I’m sorry to have bothered you. I promise it won’t happen again.”

  “Tout va bien,” I called back to Zoraya. “Elle est une étudiante.”

  “Should you change your mind – ” Jedda Callahan began.

  “I won’t,” I told her.

  “We’re not as hard to find as you might think. Not if we want to be found. Bonsoir, Dr. Cather. Je ne vous dérangerai plus.”

  And she left me standing there, my hand sweating on the doorknob, breathless and my hear
t pounding, my mouth gone dry as ashes. When the lift doors had closed, I told Zoraya that I was fine, really, not to worry, and she said to call her if I needed anything, anything at all, if I wanted to talk or play chess, and then she shut her door again.

  If you’re reading this, Jedda, then I hope that there are more answers in the pages that follow than there are questions. I doubt it, as surely as I’ve ever doubted anything, but I do hope, for all our sakes.

  Considering she’d been the one responsible for locking us out of Evelyn’s memories, it didn’t seem there was much to be gained by trying to talk with Anastazja Osmolska. Besides, she’d asked to be heavily sedated, hourly doses of Trioxysephrine and Relar, which made her unwillingness to speak to us a moot point. Umachandra and Peter went down to the labs on tier two, following a talkative synth geophysicist named Bellerophon. Umachandra wanted to get a look at whatever was left of the field and prep logs, and we all felt it was best to keep Peter where his outbursts could do the least damage.

  The Gilgamesh hummed indifferently around us, and our footsteps echoed loudly in the long corridors.

  As commanding officer, Evelyn asked to be present, and Joakim reluctantly agreed. I think he would have preferred to speak with Jack Baird alone.

  We found him sitting in the dark. Evelyn’s retinal scan opened his hatch, and there was nothing in there but black – a blackness that seemed, for an instant, as cold and absolute and infinite as space. I imagined that part of the ship had been torn away, and we would be sucked out into the vacuum, the brief moment of horror and pain as explosive decompression ended any concerns we might have about the fate of Sam Welles and his crew or the mysteries of Piros. And then I heard music, twentieth-century rock and roll, something from the Beatles that I only recognized because I took “History of Pop Music” as an elective at university.

  “Dr. Baird, we have guests,” Evelyn said, not unpleasantly, standing there in the hatchway, filling the gap between us and the blackness. “The Montelius has docked. Commander Hamilton and Dr. Cather would like to talk with you, if you have a moment.”