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

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  I wake up to the sound of music,

  Mother Mary comes to me…

  “Dr. Baird,” Evelyn said, taking a tentative step into the darkness, “may I please bring up the lights?”

  “You allowed them to dock?” he asked. “You let them come aboard?” And something in his voice, something that had gone irrevocably beyond hope and sanity and consolation, made me want to turn and run all the way back to the transfer bay, all the way back to Monty. Let Joakim and the others deal with this, whatever this was.

  “I could have done nothing else,” Evelyn replied. “You should know that.”

  “You still think there’s a way back? You think they’ve come to rescue you?”

  “The lights?” she asked again.

  “The lights,” he replied wearily, and the room began to brighten. In a few seconds, the darkness had melted away to thin, half-hearted shadows crouching beneath the furniture.

  Jack Baird was sitting on his bunk, naked except for a pair of dirty undershorts. I’d seen a few recorded lectures he’d given at Harvard, and at a conference in Maastricht, and I remembered him as a lean and fastidious sort of man. But the man on the bunk was four or five decades older, at least twenty pounds overweight and obviously hadn’t shaved or cleaned himself in days; his eyes were bloodshot and rimmed with a sleepless red that was almost shades of purple.

  “Jack,” Joakim said, pushing past Evelyn. “What the hell’s going on here?”

  “What the hell,” he chuckled. “What the hell, indeed.”

  “Will you talk to us?” Joakim asked, and Jack Baird squinted at him with those bruised, sleepless eyes.

  “Go home, man,” he said. “Get back on your rocket ship, and go back to sleep, and when you awaken, you can pretend this was all just a nightmare.”

  “I can’t do that. We’ve come too far to – ”

  “Bullshit. Go home, now, while you still can, and let the droids clean up our mess. They seem to be handling everything just fine,” and he glared up at Evelyn until she looked down at the floor.

  “Do you really believe that you can’t go home?” I asked, and Jack Baird looked at me, instead.

  “I have to know what’s happening here,” Joakim said and crossed the small room to stand directly in front of Baird. “I have to make a call, Jack, whether it’s time to abort, and I can’t do that if I have no idea what’s happening.”

  “Welles is still missing?” Baird asked him, and Joakim nodded. “I tried to stop him, and the rest of them, from going back down there. Didn’t I, Evelyn?” and the synth nodded confirmation without looking up from the floor. “I told them, all of them, that they wouldn’t be coming back, but I think they already knew that. They’d already seen enough.”

  “Enough of what?” Joakim prodded.

  Jack Baird laughed again and reached for an aluminum bottle on the floor near his bed. “You ever read Blake?”

  “William Blake?”

  “Yeah, William Blake.”

  “No,” Joakim replied.

  “Too bad, that. It might have helped you, though god knows it hasn’t helped me.” Baird took a drink from the bottle, then put it back on the floor.

  “You’re not making sense,” Joakim said, and he sat down in a chair near the bunk.

  Jack Baird closed his eyes. ‘“Dark revolving in silent activity, unseen in tormenting passions,’” he said, reciting lines of poetry that I’d never read nor heard. “‘An activity unknown and horrible; a self-contemplating shadow, in enormous labors occupied.’”

  “What did you find down there?” Joakim asked, and Baird opened his eyes again and shrugged.

  “I promised Anastazja,” he said. “I promised her I would never tell anyone. You see, she thinks that’s exactly what it wants from us, communication. She believes that it propagates like a virus, like a virus of the conscious mind.”

  Joakim looked at me, and then he looked at Evelyn.

  “There’s been absolutely no evidence of biological contagion,” the synth said. “I can tell you that much.”

  “Go home, Commander Hamilton,” Baird whispered, and then he lay down in his bunk with his back to Joakim, covering himself in sheets that looked as though they’d not been changed in weeks or months. “There’s nothing you can do here. Nothing but die.”

  “I tried to tell you,” Evelyn said.

  “Could there have been a malfunction in stasis?” Joakim asked her, staring at Baird and the rumpled, dirty sheets. “Something that resulted in psychosis, any sort of delayed neurological breakdown?”

  “That was a very long time ago.”

  “Right. But could it have happened?”

  The synth shook her head. “It was one of the first possibilities that Dr. Osmolska eliminated. There’s no evidence of irregularities in the stasis logs, and the hardware is fine. She also found no sign of neurological abnormalities in either herself or Dr. Baird. They do not appear to be insane, at least not in any accepted medical sense of the word.”

  “What about life support?” I suggested. “Or possible toxins from Piros, or the samples that have been brought up? Radiation from – ”

  “I’ve been over everything dozens of times, Dr. Cather,” Evelyn interrupted, also watching Baird now. “There’s no sign whatsoever of contamination from the moon’s surface, and all our life-support systems have come up clean. There’s nothing wrong with Gilgamesh’s habitat.”

  “Nothing that you could find,” I said. “What about the ship’s AI?”

  “Doctor, I assure you, if there’d been a malfunction or a variance or anything of the sort, anywhere on this vessel, I’d have discovered it by now.”

  “Unless you’re also malfunctioning,” I replied, and Joakim turned towards me, his eyes filled with suspicions I knew he’d never put into words as long as the synth was present.

  “We all ran multiple self-diagnostics, at Dr. Osmolska’s request, and she repeated them herself,” Evelyn said, beginning to sound defensive. I suppose anyone would have. “It isn’t us.”

  “Hell, Joakim. They’ve been sitting out here forty years,” I said. “Maybe that’s all it took.”

  The Beatles song ended and another song began, something that I’d never heard.

  Blackbird singing in the dead of night…

  “So what are we going to do?” I asked Joakim.

  “Go home,” Jack Baird said, his face pressed to the wall.

  “Why doesn’t it affect the synths?” Joakim asked Evelyn, but Baird responded before she had a chance to.

  “Because they have no souls,” Baird muttered. “Because artificial consciousness isn’t good enough for it. It needs the real thing. Turn out the lights, Evelyn.”

  “What are we going to do?” I asked Joakim again, and he shook his head, chewing at his lower lip.

  Into the light of the dark black night.

  “We talk to Murdin and Peter,” he replied. “Unless they’ve found something in the labs that begins to make sense of this, we take one of the shuttles down and have a look-see for ourselves.”

  “I wouldn’t advise that, Commander,” Evelyn said as the cabin lights began to dim again.

  “Somehow, I didn’t think you would,” Joakim told her, standing up, and I followed him out of the room and back down the corridor to the lift.

  Should I have begun all this with some sort of brief review of what we know of the geological history and paleontology of Piros? I considered doing that, but decided it would only be an excuse, procrastination, nothing much more than a way to put off writing all these things that I’ve always thought (and prayed) I’d never find the courage to record. Whoever you are, reading this, I know that you’re probably not particularly concerned about extrasolar evolutionary theory, or the para-Paleozoic benthic macrofauna of Quarry 6, or the three reports I published before we even left (all through ANSA natsci, based on detailed holometric images returned by the Gilgamesh) on the tiny Pirosan bivalves which I christened panduripods, for their dist
inctive violin-shaped tests.

  But, through all the horror and loss, both during our time on Piros and in the decades since, I have been unable to shake my wonder for the place, my joy at its fossils. That’s why I went, after all. That’s the price I put on my life. As did Joakim, and Umachandra Murdin, and Peter Connor.

  For much of its history, Piros was almost entirely covered with an ocean of salty liquid water. And, unlike Europa, this ocean wasn’t hidden beneath three to four kilometers of ice, though we still don’t understand the mechanisms that prevented it from freezing over, so far from the fading warmth of Gliese 876. Baird suspected radiation from Cecrops, but I always thought that seemed unlikely in the extreme and favored a model focusing instead on hydrothermal and volcanic forces, life-giving heat pumped upwards from the moon’s molten iron core. The same convection currents that had once driven a jigsaw puzzle of tectonic plates across the surface of Piros.

  The oceans were there for at least a billion years before the origins of life on Earth and seem to have persisted well into a time coequal to our own planet’s early Silurian Period, about 430 million years ago. As on Europa, chordates appear never to have evolved (another nail in the coffin of Long’s “morphogenic inevitability” hypothesis). But there were some genuinely spectacular invertebrates: armored, worm-like predators measuring more than 7.6 meters long (Deinopharyngos and its relatives); blind trilobite-like creatures that appear to have existed in complex, social colonies (the pseudotrilobitomorpha); and the monstrous Osmolskia ceratognathus, something like an enormous sea slug with horny projections rimming its four triple-hinged jaws, discovered by and, posthumously, named for Anastazja Osmolska. All told, at least twenty thousand fossil species were collected by the Gilgamesh before we reached her, fossils spanning roughly a billion years of geological time. I have often lain awake, unable to stop imagining the wonders we would have found, the crew of the Monty, if things had gone differently. That alien biology would have been my life’s work, and the life’s work of generations to come.

  For almost five billion years, life flourished in Piros’ seas, and perhaps on scattered chains of volcanic islands (though no one ever actually recovered evidence of terrestrial life). And then, in less than a hundred thousand years, the seas dried up and the moon died. Parkinson and Subramanian have likened it to the drying-up of the Martian hydrosphere.

  And I’m wasting precious ink.

  And time.

  I keep waiting for someone from the agency to turn up at my door, some nickelslick, jackwired investigator of violated legal confidences. I know that they must be aware of my conversation with Jedda Callahan. I wonder if they know about these pens and all these sheets of paper. I want to finish this before they decide to reel me in and store me like an inconvenient bit of refuse. Now that I’ve started it, I want to finish it before they come to make me stop.

  After the talk with Jack Baird, Joakim and I rode the lift down to the labs. Neither of us said anything to the other that I can recall; the elevator beeped loudly as we passed each level, and a recorded voice announced each tier in turn. The doors shuddered, then slid slowly open, and we took the narrow catwalk that led over the shuttle bay to the labs and processing stations.

  We found Umachandra at one of the lab’s computer loci, her eyelids flickering like an R.E.M. sleeper as she talked directly with Huxley, the Gilgamesh’s mainframe. Her skin glowed and pulsed in time to some secret, internal rhythm, alternating flashes of purple and gold. Peter Connor was sitting at a table covered with white plastic sample trays and larger specimens, staring silently at the chunks of shale and marl and limestone, at the bizarre array of fossils laid out before him like a stony banquet.

  “Look at that,” he said to Joakim, pointing to a slab covered with what looked like a jumble of pyritized shark’s teeth and echinoid plates. “I mean, what the hell do you think that thing was, anyway?” He grinned, and laughed, and ran his fingers though his hair.

  “We didn’t get anything much out of Baird,” Joakim said. “I didn’t see any point in even trying with Anastazja.”

  “Is everything in order down here?” I asked, and Connor shook his head, not taking his eyes off the chocolate-brown slab and its shiny bronze-colored fossil.

  “Nope,” he replied and pointed towards a long row of shelving on the other side of the room. “So far, a bunch of core samples are missing, the collection registry’s been altered, and Uma’s finding all sorts of gaps in the logs. Looks like someone, most likely Osmolska and her tin soldiers, have been keeping themselves busy with a bit of deaccessioning.”

  “I expected something like that,” Joakim said, “after Evelyn told us her memory had been locked.”

  I looked back at Umachandra. “Is there a pattern?”

  “Indeed, there most assuredly is,” Peter Connor said, then laughed again and rubbed at his eyes. “Hamilton, I think this goddamn thing’s some sort of holothurian. Well, not a holothurian sensu terra, but a definite Pirosan analog.”

  “Everything that’s missing, it all relates to the quarry where the shuttle was found, doesn’t it?” I asked him, and he nodded.

  “Over three thousand separate files have been purged,” Umachandra said from behind me, her voice weighted at the edges with postlink grogginess. “There’s been a comprehensive wipe. They didn’t want anyone finding anything.”

  “So, what’s the fucking good news?” Joakim muttered and sat down in a chair next to Peter.

  “The good news,” Umachandra replied, “is that Huxley’s a lot more cooperative than the synths. And the agency built in a quadpass catch-net to prevent this sort of thing from happening. The db’s full of holes, but there are ghosts all over the place. It’s going to take me a while to trick through the recovery protocols – ”

  “But you can get it back?” Joakim asked her.

  “A lot of it. It’ll take a few weeks.”

  “Every silver lining has a cloud,” Peter said and leaned closer to the slab of shale.

  “And you think that’s the best you can do, a few weeks?” Joakim asked. Umachandra looked offended and yanked a jackstrip off her face.

  “You want to try hacking this fucking box? Be my guest.”

  “We have to make a decision,” I said. “If there’s any chance at all that anyone from Welles’ crew is still alive down there – ”

  “Then it’s time to make snowballs in Hell,” Peter snorted and frowned at me over his shoulder. “You can’t be serious? It’s been two weeks, Audrey. Even if they’d had adequate food and water – which they didn’t – their filters wouldn’t have lasted more than seventy-two hours, at best. After that, CO poisoning would – ”

  “Fine, then we can at least recover their bodies. Don’t we have that responsibility, Peter?”

  “At the risk of our own?” he asked and turned back to the fossils. “I don’t think so.”

  Joakim held up a chunk of yellowish stone and stared at it a moment, as though all our answers were secreted away somewhere inside the rock, in the electromagnetic bonds of its constituent molecules, in the fossils speckling its surface. “I hate to have to be the one to say it, but this isn’t a democracy, guys.”

  “Personally, I think you should have said it hours ago,” Umachandra grumbled, massaging a welt one of the jackstrips had left on her right temple.

  “Then what’s it going to be, Commander?” Peter asked and reached for a scope lying at the center of the table. He switched it on and began scanning the fossil he’d been examining. “Time for us to stop playing scientists and play good soldiers, instead? ‘Theirs not to make reply, theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die. Into the valley of Death – ’”

  “Is that Shakespeare?” Umachandra asked, tapping absently against the side of one of the locus’ interface struts with a black comm stylus.

  “No, you gleet,” Peter replied, checking the color and contrast settings on the scope, the hue and saturation levels, before he switched from scan to record. T
he instrument buzzed very softly, like a sleepy hornet.

  “We skip rescue and go directly to recovery contingency,” Joakim said, ignoring them both. I understood, or thought I understood, the reluctance in his voice. “We take one of the remaining shuttles, and we find their bodies.”

  “They can’t have gone very far,” I said. “Less than fifty kilometers, at the most, and I’d think that less than twenty would be more reasonable. Like Peter said. “

  “Peter said that we should take what we can and get our asses out of here,” Peter mumbled, resetting the palmscope for another scan.

  “There’s still a chance that we can salvage this project,” Joakim said. “But I can’t know how much of a chance until we find out what’s happened to Welles. And what’s wrong with Baird and Osmolska.”

  Peter laughed and drew little circles in the air around his right ear.

  “We’ll leave at 0300 hours,” Joakim continued. “That’ll give everyone a chance to get some rest before the flight. If we haven’t found them by 1500 hours, I call it quits, and we head back. Then it’ll be up to Umachandra to recover what she can from Huxley’s datastream. In fact, I want her to stay here and get a head start on those ghosts.”

  “Sure,” she whispered, then tilted the linkseat forward forty-five or fifty degrees until both her feet were touching the laboratory floor. “Beats looking for dead people in a copper mine.”

  “That’s the spirit,” Peter said and scanned the slab again.

  “I’ll need to speak with Evelyn,” I told Joakim. “As CO, she ought to know what our plans are.”

  He scratched at his beard. “Evelyn isn’t CO anymore. I am. A synth can only act as commanding officer in the absence of an appropriate human officer.”

  “Still,” I said, “I think she should be consulted.”

  “So, go ahead. Consult her. Whatever. I honestly don’t give a shit.”