Dreaming in Smoke

by Tricia Sullivan

  “I’m taking you to Maxwell’s, by the way. You’re . . . no good to anyone if you can’t move or speak. You took . . . enough zzz for a . . . hundred-kilo man! I’m surprised you’re conscious so . . . soon.”

  She jerked her head as if activating a radio and made an inarticulate noise.

  “Oh, that. There’s an atmospheric problem in the infirmary, and they’ve got six people being treated for burns. Apparently when their boat was in lock Ganesh did something to mess up the safety systems, but they didn’t realize until they were out over a well at a couple hundred degrees. The hull started to melt.’”

  He broke off, panting, and slipped her interface on for her. She was locked out of Ganesh, but receiving audio all the same. The radio link was reserved for emergencies — normally all coms ran through Ganesh. Now the frequency was crowded and full of noise.

  “I can’t see anything in these conditions.”

  “Iaveli, are you at the rocks yet?”

  “I wouldn’t want to be in a boat right now,” Tehar muttered wearily. He had another twenty meters to go; she knew the distance from rem2ram to Maxwell’s by heart, because she was no stranger to the bar and because First simply wasn’t that big, and she’d spent all her life negotiating these crawlways.

  “Yeah, we’re near the old volcano. When is Ganesh coming up?”

  “Breaker! This is Stash. I’m in a leg and Ganesh just cut me off from the body. Can somebody—”

  “Just get out of the boat and bring everything you can carry.”

  “I know there’s a thermal coming. Shit, where’s Ganesh?”

  “Are you crazy, Jianni? We’ll be stranded. The current—”

  “Think of it as a practicum, kids.”

  Climbing was more natural to Kalypso than walking, and large open spaces made her nervous. The only large open spaces to be found were outside in the Wild, whereas First consisted mostly of convolutions, Stacks, and many many walls. She’d spent her whole life in First.

  “Stash, sit tight. We’ll get to you. Thermal’s not coming for a while yet.”

  And if climbing was a way of life, then it seemed only natural that the station should be put together like a spider. Eight “legs” supported the bulk of First, each terminating in a bulbous “foot” planted firmly in basalt beneath the surface of the water.

  “We need more coolant in section 13. If any Grunts are listening, please—”

  “Get off this channel, will you?”

  “Will somebody get Ganesh up again? I can’t get used to this channel system.”

  “Shit, I think we just hit something. Water’s coming in.”

  “Get out of the boat, get out of the boat.”

  The body of the station was suspended in a dense nexus between the legs: this was where the cell clusters, central meeting areas, and most essential functional controls resided. The Works cocooned the bridge hardware of the old ship—including Ganesh’s Core— within a tangle of filaments for processing essential chemicals, including oxygen. They drew their power from the vast, seething heat of the thermal well over which First crouched. Floating on the surface of the well were the main Gardens, supported by scaffolding erected underwater and extending up to create tiers. The Gardens were a source of oxygen as well as food, and Ganesh was heavily interfaced to regulate temperature, pressure, and airmix within what was essentially an enormous greenhouse.

  “Breaker. Breaker. This is Jianni. The heat converters are running at 40 percent, boys and girls. We got a thermal coming, so get to your cells and stay quiet. We can ride this one, just stay away from Ganesh—”

  “—ff this channel! We have two dead in the infirmary. Can someone please get the fuck down here.”

  Upset, Kalypso slipped out of interface. She was beginning to prickle all over as sensation returned. The witch doctor’s face was sweating.

  “Marcsson’s missing,” he told her. “Kalypso, quit looking at me like that. It’s a crash. A real crash We’ve got basic support systems working on crutches but com and everything above it are useless. Everybody’s confined to cells in case we lose oxygen or temperature control. You will be, too, once you’ve been debriefed.”

  Debriefed? They had arrived at the hatchway to Maxwell’s. Tehar let her go and she toppled in, landing facedown on a pink velvet couch. She had been looking forward to a restorative drink or three or four, since alcohol helped reduce the effects of zzz. But “debriefed” wasn’t a fun word, and Tehar had disappeared—all too conveniently, she realized as she rolled over and looked around.

  She was surrounded by Mothers. There were only about seven or eight of them—far from the full complement, but enough of a concentration to alarm Kalypso in her present condition. They reclined on semicircular couches, glassine smoky walls rising above their heads as they clutched pillows and occasionally hit one another with them.

  The Mothers had been drinking again.

  Crisis management, they called it. As in: Let’s go to Maxwell’s and manage the crisis.

  Clearly, this crisis needed more managing than most, because the Mothers were sprawled in attitudes of earthy abandon. Quickdust watercolored the air. A male of her generation (Kalypso couldn’t see who because of the jaguar mask on his face) was stretched unconscious in the middle of the floor, his body bearing residual traces of Picasso’s Blue. And then there were the Mothers themselves, looking a little too interested in Kalypso for her comfort. They were all about the same age: fiftyish in Earth years if you didn’t count the time they’d been tanked in transit. Age and gender were the only thing they had in common; they didn’t look alike, they didn’t act alike, and they certainly didn’t think alike. In Kalypso’s experience, when they got together it was better to be somewhere else.

  The bar was a sunken island in the middle of the room. Standing behind it, vigorously shaking a brownish cocktail, was Lassare, the Mother to end all Mothers. She was wearing some kind of red caftan that made her look like a radioactive strawberry. Her flesh was ample and dimpled. She was a hydro-logic engineer, among other things, and if Kalypso recalled correctly, she’d carried five sets of quadruplets to term. Two and a half clusters could call Lassare their mother, even if none of them bore a genetic relationship to her.

  One other thing: Kalypso was terrified of her. Although Kalypso had been issued from the body of a Mother called Helen, it was Lassare who’d always caught her out in some prank when she was growing up. It was Lassare who always found a way to make her suffer.

  “If necessary, we always have the reflex points,” she was saying. “Its higher functions can be decoupled from life support and the Core. All is well.”

  The boy in the jaguar mask stirred. “All is well,” he murmured into the floor.

  Rasheeda was tracing fine lines of Picasso’s Blue across Mari’s face.

  “These are your lines of conviction,” she said, drawing spirals on Mari’s temples. “Lassare?”

  Almost absentmindedly, Lassare turned to Mari and recited: “Remember the Andes? High-altitude training. Remember that purity. Remember the depth of the landscape, even at great distance. Remember how the shadows stood. Remember the feeling of the world falling away so steeply in every direction.”

  Mari whispered, “Anything is possible.”

  “Sky,” said Lassare. “Limitless sky.”

  Mari’s brows knit. “The hexagons are coming near again. They’re crowding me.”

  Rasheeda picked up one of Mari’s bare feet and touched it with the blue dust.

  “Those silly hexagons,” she murmured dismissively.

  “Go away,” said Mari. “Hexagons, go away.”

  “You control distance,” Rasheeda intoned richly. “You control time. You are in control. Make it the way you want it to be.”

  “Oh—” Mari sighed. “It’s not as good as last time, or the time before. I want—” her back arched, straining.

  “Shh,” Rasheeda soothed again. “It’s still very, very good.”

  “It re
cedes.”

  “The parts you want to recede go to the background. The parts you love come close.”

  “Yes. But. . . it all recedes now.”

  “We will have Earth here.”

  “We will have Earth.” Sweat beaded above Mari’s lip.

  Rasheeda signed to Lassare, “She’s had enough.”

  “You believe,” Lassare commanded. “You are strong.”

  “I’m strong.” Mari’s teeth showed. Lassare and Rasheeda glanced at one another. Lassare nodded and Rasheeda took the brush away.

  Lassare seemed pleased. “Good. Have we all had a turn? No, don’t give any more to the boy. We don’t want him hooked. Ah, Kalypso,” she cooed. “Let me give you something to perk you up.”

  She sailed out from behind the bar, brandishing the drinkee thing. Shoving a straw into it, she passed it to Kalypso, folding Kalypso’s hands around the vessel with the absentminded motherish efficiency that characterized her kind. Then she turned and paced back across the room.

  “The thing about zzz,” she said sweetly, “is that you’re supposed to use it on the other guy, not yourself.”

  There were advantages to having little or no muscle control. Kalypso sipped mutely. Lassare really was no substitute for the demons: the drink was revolting, but contained much alcohol, for there were also advantages to living on a planet rich in anaerobes of every stripe. Namely, the stocks at Maxwell’s were always full.

  Naomi crossed the room, stepping over the comatose male to sit beside Kalypso. She was a gray wraith, slim as a knife.

  “Did Marcsson ask you to change anything in Alien Life? Did he have any special requests?”

  Kalypso slowly shook her head.

  “But you can confirm he was working on the Oxygen Problem,” Naomi said.

  “Who isn’t?” Rasheeda snorted, and Kalypso nodded agreement. Almost every experiment conducted in Alien Life had something to do with the Oxygen Problem: in a sense, it was the only problem. Until it was solved, the colony would remain in a kind of uneasy stasis, functioning but unable to grow. Marcsson, as a specialist in colonial organisms, was in a better position than most to study the ecosystem of the Wild. He understood the interplay of indigenous life in a way most of the Mothers could not, for he had worked on Sieng’s team years ago, even before Sieng had learned to “groom” — or tame—the wild luma so that Ganesh could use it; and before her team of exobiologists had been overcome by the infectious agent they’d grown in an attempted hybridization of Earth and T’nane biology. Marcsson alone had escaped the fate of his colleagues, so he was the last of the Earth-born exobiologists alive on T’nane. Unfortunately, as a Grunt he had also been the least valuable member of the team. It was widely believed that, had Sieng lived, she would have solved the Oxygen Problem within a few years. By contrast, twenty years after her death, Marcsson had some fine studies to show, but no real key to the ecological mechanism behind the carbon monoxide versus oxygen balance in T’nane’s biosphere, much less the ability to permanently alter the atmosphere. No one else had had any great inspiration, either, though not for lack of trying. Many times Kalypso had heard Lassare kvetch about the loss of Sieng’s team. “Why should she have been irreplaceable? We should have our share of genius in the new generation.”

  Kalypso wasn’t sure what Naomi was getting at when she said, “Kalypso, I’ve got a team going over your unit as we speak. If there’s anything you want to tell us, this is the time to speak up.”

  Wide-eyed, Kalypso kept shaking her head. She was getting feeling back in her toes.

  “There’s no point in questioning this one now,” Rasheeda said, reaching for a bottle. “She can’t speak. What else is on the agenda?”

  Naomi continued to watch Kalypso, who felt herself bristling at the Mother’s insinuation. For once she was innocent, yet she couldn’t even defend herself.

  “Azamat Marcsson,” Lassare mused, beginning to pace. “What do we think about him?”

  Someone yawned.

  “Yes, exactly.” She pivoted slowly. Her eyes narrowed to two glittering points. The others began talking.

  “He’s the most boring man alive.”

  “Classic Grunt profile. Stable, subordinate, good at moving heavy objects.”

  “Spends a lot of time in the Wild, though.”

  “That’s only to gather data. He’s totally addicted to his work.”

  “So is Jianni; but Jianni has ambitions.”

  “No, Azamat’s not like Jianni. He’s not really interested in people, or growing the colony, or anything remotely political.”

  “That’s true. Doesn’t have the personality for it.”

  “He’s in love with his micros,” Rasheeda snorted.

  Laughter.

  “He never got over the fact that he survived,” said Mari seriously. “He was always reserved, but since the rest of his team died, he hasn’t known how to forgive himself for living.”

  There was a silence.

  “You don’t think he could be suicidal?” Rasheeda’s face was clouded. “Maybe we should give him some Picasso’s Blue. Something. I don’t like the idea of the poor guy berking.”

  Naomi said, “Marcsson will keep. We should concentrate on resolving the crash. Like I said in the beginning, Ganesh is having growing pains. We’ve seen this before.”

  “Not on this scale,” Lassare contradicted. “Getting back to Azamat for a second: doesn’t anybody know specifically what he was doing?”

  Korynne stood, yawning. “I’ll go to Azamat’s boat and see what I can find. Even with Ganesh down, the onboard node should have records of his last several trips to the Wild.”

  There were undercurrents Kalypso wasn’t getting: lots of them. The Mothers seemed to have focused their attention on her again. She cleared her throat, but didn’t try to speak. Lassare said, “Let’s face it: he’s a Grunt. Not that he hasn’t done some good work with temperature buffers in the clayfields. But those manifestations in Alien Life that popped up before the crash? Jianni says they were rather . . . flamboyant. Can we seriously ascribe them to Azamat?”

  Kalypso: eyes closed, throat burning, motor neurons waking up and tingling agitatedly. They were still looking at her.

  “What?” she said hoarsely.

  Naomi looked at Kalypso, then at Lassare. She said, “Either she’s diabolically clever, or worthlessly naive.”

  “Darling,” Lassare lilted at Kalypso. “It’s a well-known fact that you play footsie with Ganesh. Do you deny this?”

  Kalypso seethed with frustration. It was true that she and the AI possessed a certain . . . understanding . . . but that had nothing to do with Marcsson berking. Probably Marcsson had berked because of the crash.

  “You’ve got Ganesh swearing at you and slipping you treats from the Archives while you’re working.”

  Kalypso looked away. She didn’t think anybody knew about that. Then she realized Lassare was suggesting she had—

  “Need more drink,” she rasped.

  Naomi reached behind the bar and grabbed a liquor sac. She passed it to Kalypso, who sipped tentatively. Better.

  Lassare smacked her lips. “Now. You’ve made it very clear you no longer respect our authority. What was it you said at the last tentkit meeting? Called us names, didn’t she, Naomi?”

  Naomi nodded. “You called us a bunch of fucking sheep, as I recall.”

  Kalypso swallowed and flexed her tongue experimentally, concentrating on her mouth as she spoke. “What are you saying?”

  “There is this propensity in you, Kalypso, that we’ve observed since you were old enough to crawl.”

  “You like to fool around.”

  “Do anything on a dare.”

  “Addicted to pointless challenges.”

  “So if . . . someone — like Azamat Marcsson, to take one example—if Azamat came to you and said, for example, that he needed more space in Ganesh to run his simulation—”

  “No.” Kalypso shook her head.

 
; “Didn’t happen? Are you sure?”

  “No. I barely know him.”

  “Are you saying, categorically, that you didn’t change anything, or ask Ganesh to change anything, for today’s Alien Life run?”

  “Yes. That’s what I’m saying.” The words were coming out almost naturally now. She stood up and brought the half-empty sac to the bar, then lingered there out of habit, stroking its smart surface. The demons didn’t appear in response to her greeting, nor did they produce Night in Tunisia, her favorite cocktail and most inspired creation. She felt depressed. Maxwell’s without the demons meant Ganesh was really, truly down. She missed Ganesh; certainly she liked the AI better than she liked the Mothers, particularly when they were making her the object of such intense scrutiny. Discreetly, she set her interface so radio would trickle into her right ear. She tuned it to the witch doctor channel, hoping to catch a piece of news — or even just Tehar’s voice.

  “It’s silly to accuse the girl,” one of the Mothers said. “We have no reason to believe the problem in Alien Life was caused by anything other than the system crash.”

  “But we don’t know what caused the crash itself.”

  “And where’s Azamat? No one can find him. Why did she let him escape?”

  “Whoa,” slurred Kalypso. “That was sheer incompetence. Honest.”

  No one said anything for a minute. Then the conversation resumed, but Kalypso was remembering the Dream and thinking the inside of Azamat Marcsson’s head could very well be a lot weirder than anybody gave him credit for. Where had all that psychotic math come from? But she couldn’t think of a way to explain: they’d never believe her if she told them the stuff Marcsson’s subconscious had generated. She wouldn’t have believed it herself if she hadn’t so vividly experienced it.

  She could hear Tehar’s voice across the radio; this should comfort her, but what he was saying had the opposite effect. The witch doctors seemed no closer to helping Ganesh get back up.

  This module’s been wholly re-written. The code isn’t a type I’ve seen before. Ganesh must have invented it wholesale.

  Harie, can you cross-reference with this sound sample I just got?