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

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “The aliens were humanoid?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “The Galatea brought a few of their skeletons back. There’s one on display at the New Smithsonian. They must have been an amazing people.”

  Zoraya nodded her head, not taking her eyes off the snow falling hard against the permaclear. “There’s a poem I learned,” she said. “An American poet, but I can’t remember his name. He died before I was activated.”

  One of my cats, the fat ginger tom, Matthieu, appeared from the kitchen and trotted across the carpet, his belly swaying slightly side-to-side. He meowed loudly before leaping ungracefully into my lap where he lay glaring at Zoraya, who glared back at him. I stroked his head and whispered soothing, silly things, and in a few minutes he was asleep and snoring fitfully.

  “I don’t know why cats hate me,” Zoraya said.

  “You don’t know that they do.”

  “Yes, I do. Cats have always hated me.”

  “What was the poem?” I asked. “The American poet who died before you were born.”

  She frowned and looked back to the window and the storm.

  “I wasn’t born,” she said. “That’s such an ugly word.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I don’t remember the whole thing.”

  “What do you remember?” and she didn’t answer me immediately. I knew that she was only pretending not to remember, that she was at least a hundred years too young to have begun experiencing any of the neural-net deterioration that passes for senility among the synths. But they like to pretend that they forget things, as though it makes them seem more human. It is beyond me why anything would want to seem more human.

  Zoraya sighed softly, then shut her eyes and recited for me what she “remembered.”

  “‘And still,’” she said, “‘we do not see that we are not gods, The holy fathers and holy mothers and demons of our lost antiquities, Adoro te devote, latens Deitas, quae sub his figuris vere latitas. We do not comprehend our insignificance at the feet of eternity.

  “‘We have not the time to learn. We have not the courage to admit. We have not the strength to accept, and, accepting, move beyond this grinding infancy. Instead, we bring snow and ice to birthday parties in Hell and congratulate our ignorance.’”

  I waited a moment, to be certain that she was finished.

  “Is that all you recall?” I asked.

  “Yes. I knew it all once, but not now. Did you understand the Latin?”

  I told her that I did, which was true, and wished that I had another glass of brandy, but Matthieu looked so content on my lap, and I didn’t want to wake him.

  “You should burn it, Audrey,” Zoraya said, looking directly at me now. “Don’t write any more of it. Give it to me, and I’ll destroy it for you. When they come, they won’t find anything – ”

  “Pourquoi ferais-tu cela?” I asked, and she glanced down at Matthieu.

  “Je ne pense pas que je puisse prendre soin d’eux,” she said very quietly. “But I could not bear to see them starve.”

  I knew what she was trying to say, what she really meant, and for a moment I even considered letting her take the pages, and the pens, and the pencil stub. I allowed myself the fantasy that stopping now would be enough to satisfy the agency, and they’d leave me alone. But it passed, like a snowflake melting against the heated windowpane. They were coming regardless. I couldn’t understand why they were taking so long. And I knew that they would come for Zoraya, as well, that they would erase all knowledge that I’d ever existed from the synth brain hidden where some people might expect to find an artificial heart.

  “Thank you,” I said. “Thank you, Zoraya. You’ve been a good friend, but I have to finish. Don’t worry about the cats. They can fend for themselves.”

  “Not that one,” she said and pointed to Matthieu. “He’s too old and fat to even catch mice.”

  “I’m tired,” I replied. “We’ll talk again tomorrow.”

  “Will we?”

  “Of course we will. Tomorrow’s Thursday.”

  And she left, and I sat watching the snow and listening to Matthieu snore, sometimes dozing, half-dreaming of that day, on Piros and my childhood in Vermon, and blue-skinned Hindu gods until the sun was in the sky again.

  Zoraya didn’t come for chess tonight. She called and wanted to know if I needed anything, and when I asked her if we’d be playing later, she said that she had a late client, a man from Belgium, a Gemini.

  Sometimes she has late clients.

  So, maybe I can finish with this, instead.

  The shuttle leveled out at about 9,100 meters, and I sat wishing I had more than the grainy images from the vidscreen, wishing that I was getting the same direct and unobstructed view through the vehicle’s windshield that Joakim and Umachandra had from their places in the cockpit. Peter wasn’t interested in the scenery; he’d gotten fallsick during the drop and sat with his eyes shut tightly, beads of sweat dappling his cheeks like dew or a fever. Through the faceplate of his helmet, he looked ready to vomit again, and the suit’s tiny waste-clearance mechs clustered around his cheeks, just in case.

  The barren landscape stretched out below us might easily have passed for Afghanistan or southern Arizona or the Daedalia Planum, except for the countless intense hues of red that made Mars seem pale by comparison. Already, journalists and webzats on Earth had seized on this, labeling Piros the “Redder Planet” and the “true God of War.” Some Christian mystics had even cited the moon’s discovery as a sign of the nearness of Armageddon. There was, of course, no need for recourse to portents and prophecies and apocalyptic metaphors. Biochemistry and geophysics were suitable enough alchemies to account for the seemingly endless plains of blood-red stone and sand and dust that had been left behind by the retreat and eventual death of the Pirosan oceans.

  I anxiously checked my timepiece. There were hardly 500 kilometers left from our present position to the LZ, ten or twelve minutes’ flight time at the most. I tried not to think about what we were going to find down there, tried not to think about Evelyn, and the boltgun, and the lines of William Blake that Jack Baird had quoted. I busied myself with the topography below us, the few landmarks that I recognized from the charts I’d spent years studying: a deep canyon that had to be the Valles Hela, its narrow floor more than five kilometers below the surrounding plateau of the Mare Malacia; a towering line of cliffs marking the weathered edge of the paleocontinent Niflheim; an unnamed impact crater, less than a million years old, more than two hundred miles across. Some of the oldest macrofossils recovered from –

  Zoraya, I cannot write this this way, as some mundane, linear narrative, as though it is hardly more to me than a story or a travelogue. None of these things are relevant, what I saw on the screen, the geology of a dead world humans will likely never visit again, the trivial names men had given canyons and mountains orbiting a distant star.

  Suddenly, I seem hopelessly lost in this manuscript, fumbling in its dry pages, and I’m afraid that it’s simply because I am coming close to the end. And I don’t want to see the end again, no, no, not even from the sanctuary of my mind’s eye. I don’t want to make them concrete, those last hours. No one has ever written a more unholy manuscript than this, Zoraya. It’ll be a pointless, blasphemous thing, if I can finish it. Jedda Callahan deserved her death, for leading me to this moment, for making me believe I might find redemption for a wasted, cowardly life by giving her and her compatriots “the truth.”

  There is no truth, Zoraya.

  There was never any truth. Only moments, and what they contained, and the parts of ourselves we lost. Jedda Callahan was an arrogant, dangerous believer, and she would never have understood. She wanted facts, as if facts are at the heart of this. I’m making up numbers to fill in the blank spaces in my memory, because I want it all to seem so fucking precise, because –

  STOP.

  I’ve just picked up my pen up again, after laying it down and walking away, meaning
to stay away. After sitting on the toilet for the better part of an hour with a shard of permaclear that I found on the street yesterday pressed to my left wrist, trying to find the courage to finish me.

  Evidently, I don’t have that strength.

  The shuttle landed in the quarry, touching down very near Welles’ ship. Joakim checked through all the instrumentation to be sure our vessel hadn’t been damaged passing through Piros’ turbulent atmosphere or during the landing. He flipped switches and tapped dials, muttered about fuel valves and altimeters, while Umachandra talked with Magellan and the synth pilots drifting somewhere a couple hundred nautical miles overhead. She read our coordinates to the computer and programmed the shuttle to auto-pilot back to the Monty. The password and the press of a button would take any of us safely back into orbit if anything happened that prevented Joakim or Umachandra from manually piloting the shuttle.

  Peter moaned, and I must have reassured him that he’d feel better soon, once we were outside, standing on solid ground. His suit had already administered a drug to ease his nausea and vertigo.

  Joakim was the first one to leave the shuttle, and then Umachandra, and I was third. The iris stayed closed, and we used a simple, retractable ladder instead. Only a few rungs down, a few racing heartbeats, a few seconds, and then I was standing on one of the wide quarry terraces. All the way from Florida to that lifeless patch of rock beneath the moribund light of Gliese 876, all that way to stand in the late afternoon of a day that might as well have been a night. I looked up, towards the opposite rim of the pit a few hundred feet above us, and then walked as near to the edge of the terrace as I dared and stared down at the ebony pool filling the far-away bottom of the quarry. Seeing it, its mirror-flat surface seemingly immune to the wind that howled through that gash in the moon’s crust, I felt dread, and loneliness, and despair. Not emotions that I liked admitting to back then, not mental states that endeared you to ANSA or other crew members, and I kept my thoughts to myself.

  “Where do we begin?” Umachandra asked Joakim (or at least I’ll make-believe that’s exactly what she said).

  “I’ll take Audrey, and we’ll have a close look at the shuttle,” he replied and motioned towards Welles’ ship. “You and Connor have another look at the tracking units.” Umachandra nodded, though we all knew that the tracking boxes were reading correctly, and I followed Joakim the hundred or so yards south to the Gilgamesh shuttle. It was already coated in a thick layer of fine, ruddy dust from its two weeks on Piros.

  The shuttle was open, and there was no one inside.

  “No surprises here,” Joakim said and sat down in the pilot’s seat. “How you holding up?”

  “I’m holding up,” I told him. “I’m just holding up.”

  “Well, you keep on doing it,” he said and began examining the controls. The three primary batteries were dead, but back-up was fine, and there was plenty of fuel in the tanks. The yellow-green auto-pilot ready light wasn’t blinking, because power was down, but the system had been set for rendezvous with the mothership. There were no signs of violence or mishap. So far as we could tell, the shuttle had simply been abandoned, or something had happened to the crew that had prevented them from returning.

  “It’s creepy,” I said, taking a medpac down from its slot on the cabin wall and opening it.

  “Yeah, well, hell. It happens,” Joakim said, his voice crackling through the comms. “You remember that Martian grain freighter, the Perro Negro? Went missing and then turned up on the outskirts of the Noctis Labyrinthus, not a scratch on her, all systems operational, but no bloody sign of the crew.”

  “Yes, I know it happens,” I replied, shutting the medical kit again and latching it. Everything was in there, every hypo and vial, every laser probe and nanopatch, right where it ought to be on a shuttle full of healthy travelers. “It’s still fucking creepy.”

  And there I was, allowing myself to voice at least the smallest fraction of what I’d felt peering down into that abyss only a few minutes before. But I’d opened up to Joakim many times. He’d been a lover, on and off, and we’d once spent two nerve-wracking weeks together in quarantine after a lev4 biocontainment failure on Europa-Herschel. He was the closest thing I had to family.

  “Wait just a sec,” Joakim said and, having returned the medpac to its assigned place on the wall, I turned to see what he was doing. There was a brittle, buzzing sound, a brief crackle of static, and I realized that I was hearing playback from the in-flight voice recorder. Joakim pressed review, and for a moment there was only the wind battering tirelessly at the hull of the shuttle again, and the gentler, mechanical noises coming from my EVA suit. Only the unsteady rhythm of my breath, inhalation and exhalation, made loud and inhuman by the acoustics of my helmet. But I wanted to look behind me, to be absolutely sure that it was my breathing I was hearing, to be sure we were alone in the shuttle.

  “Right there,” he said and pressed play. “Listen to this, Audrey.”

  There was more static, then what seemed to be a man speaking, and I stood over Joakim, wondering what he expected me to listen for, watching the display that turned what I was hearing into craggy red and green lines, making peaks and troughs of human voices and background noise.

  “That’s Welles,” he said, “right there,” adjusting the input volume on his suit’s comm panel and leaning nearer the small speaker above the flap levers.

  I’d never met the man, so I took his word for it. Most of the playback was all but unintelligible, a garbled weave of voices and ambient interference. And then, I clearly heard one voice rise above the din, not the one that Joakim had identified as Sam Welles, but a voice that might have been a woman’s, or a young boy’s.

  “A self-contemplating shadow,” it said, pronouncing each syllable slowly, precisely. Joakim looked up at me, and I could see the confusion in his blue eyes. “Stretch out across the dread world, and the rolling of wheels – ”

  And then there was another burst of static, much louder than the others, but I could hear someone laughing behind it, a high, lunatic sort of laughter, and I reached for the off switch. But Joakim intercepted my gloved hand halfway to the console. “No,” he said firmly, still looking up at me. “I need to hear this, Audrey.”

  “No one needs to hear this shit,” I replied, trying in vain to pull my hand free of his grip.

  The static faded quickly, but the laughter was still there, and now I could hear someone reciting what sounded like grid coordinates in the background.

  “Not here,” I pleaded. “Pull the tab, and we can hear it all back on the ship. But not here.”

  “You shut up,” he growled, squeezing my hand so tightly it hurt, and so I didn’t say anything else and stopped struggling. I stood there, very still, and we listened.

  “I fucking know blood when I see it,” Sam Welles insisted.

  “Is that a shadow?” a frightened, panic-filled voice asked, another man speaking through the maniac laughter. “Is that a shadow, or the shadow of a shadow?”

  “Jesus, look at the sky! Look at the fucking sky!”

  “You will see,” the woman said, or the young boy, her or his voice like honey and sleep and warm sunlight leaking in through the sonic chaos, like rain falling on the roof of a burning house. “We are close now. We are coming across – ”

  “Christ, it’s some sort of weapon,” the panicked man shouted, and the laughter grew louder, and louder, and louder, until I thought the speakers would blow. I shut my eyes and gritted my teeth, trying to remember prayers that I’d known as a child, but there was room for nothing in my head beyond the laughter.

  “No, not thunder,” Sam Welles said. “Look away – ”

  And then there was a loud pop, like the cork on a bottle of champagne, and the recording ended, and the speakers were silent again.

  Slowly, Joakim relaxed his hold on me until I could slip my hand free. He wasn’t staring at me anymore, was staring instead out the windshield at the quarry stretching away in all dir
ections.

  “We’re not going to find anyone alive down here,” I said, and he nodded his head. I reached down, past him, pressing eject, and the VOR deck spat up a tiny platinum microtab. You never see those anymore, but the agency was still using them way back in 2197 when the Gilgamesh left Earth. I slipped it into a pocket and stood there, looking over Joakim’s shoulder at the darkened instrument panel.

  “There’s no electric,” I said. “You told me the batteries are drained.”

  “Yes,” he replied, sounding only half-awake. “There’s no electric. I told you that.”

  “And auxiliary’s still on standby.”

  “Yes,” he said and turned towards me again. He blinked, and I could see that he was crying.

  Eject was manual, but the deck shouldn’t have played anything, not a sound, not a fucking squeak. But I was there, Zoraya, and so was Joakim, and we both heard it.

  “We have to get out of here,” I said, but he shrugged and then looked away from me again, resting a bulky index finger on the recorder. “I’m serious, Joakim. We have to get out of here right now.”

  “If I press this button,” he said sleepily, speaking so softly that his voice was hardly more than a white-noise whisper through the comms. “If I press this button, we’ll hear it again, won’t we? You took the tab out, and the power’s down, but if I press this – ”

  I covered his hand with my own, knowing that it would be useless to try and stop him, knowing how much stronger than me he was.

  “Yes,” I said. “I think we will. But we’ve already heard it, and we have to leave.”

  “We’re inside a ghost story now, aren’t we?” he asked.

  “We need to find Umachandra and Peter,” I replied, because I wouldn’t have answered that question for anything short of a five-second tube back to Sol. “Joakim, you have to take your hand off the recorder and stand up, and we have to find them.”

  Outside, the wind shrieked and buffeted the hull, and I remember wondering how many weeks, or months, or years it would be before a storm pushed the Gilgamesh shuttle over the edge of the terrace, and it tumbled into the black pool.