Dreaming in Smoke

by Tricia Sullivan

  I can try, but you’re going to have to deliver it physically. Don’t trust the transfers.

  The Mothers must have reached an impasse in their discussion: when she bothered to check in on what they were saying, they had all but fallen silent. Most had that need-another-drink look about them. Naomi was the first to step up to the bar.

  “Now that you’re here, you might as well make yourself useful,” she drawled, and placed her empty glass on the bar. “I hear you have a gift.”

  Kalypso looked at the glass. Her fingers began to twitch.

  “Well . . .”

  Lassare sank into a couch like a collapsed parachute. “Yes. Come on, let’s see what you can do. Don’t worry — we won’t hold you to the demons’ standards.”

  Kalypso contemplated the empty glass. Then she closed her eyes and slowly said, “You understand I don’t bark on command. But you may be in luck. I feel something coming on. It’s a kind of—” she tipped her head back, pursing her lips. They still tingled. “Excuse me. The ethanol muse is speaking to me. I’m getting a color, it’s kind of chartreuse. Yeah, I’m getting a color and the taste, the taste is—” she reached out and started seizing bottles, splashing their contents together as if at random. Her muscles were jerking a bit. “Lassare, this is going to be a custom creation for you, OK? Now — I’m going for a kind of pine-nutty flavor with overtones of—no, no let me just think.”

  She stared at the mixer, pretending to be lost in meditation. Normally she did this purely for effect, but just now it allowed her to tune in to the chatter on the witch doctor channel.

  Tehar, we’ve looked at 80 percent of the Core and all roads seem to lead to Unit 5 of rem2ram. Maybe you should come up here.

  “Did someone say vodka? Yeah, I think vodka. Anybody writing down what I’m doing here?”

  I don’t have time, Boris. What’s the problem?

  You want the short answer or the long answer?

  The short one, of course.

  Kalypso Deed.

  Fuck.

  Naomi was laughing. “Write it down? How archaic. Have you been at the Archives again?”

  “Never mind,” Kalypso sang. “I can remember how I did it. I never forget a drink. Ice. Let’s give this a spin. Here you go, Lassare. Just for you.”

  Lassare was looking seriously unnerved as Naomi passed her the drink. “You could at least taste it first, Kalypso. I mean, I have no idea what’s in this.”

  “Are you a Mother or are you a mouse?” Kalypso taunted.

  Lassare chuckled fiercely. “Is this payback for all those times I cut your Dreamtime when you were being a little shit? No, give it to me. I’ll drink it.”

  She sipped cautiously. Her eyebrows shifted. She sipped again.

  “Mmm . . .” This time it was no sip, but an appreciative swig.

  “Careful,” Kalypso warned. “It has a wee kick. Give it a couple more sec—”

  “Zeee!!”

  Kalypso smiled.

  “I’ll let you name it, Lassare.”

  “Make more, Kalypso,” the others urged. “Let’ see you remember how.”

  While Kalypso was complying, Naomi looked her over carefully. “So what do you have to say for yourself, Kalypso? Why are you such a fuckup? You’ve got the genetic potential: everyone here knows that. You were meant to be more than this.”

  “I hear,” said Mari, placing one booted foot on the bar and stretching, “that you’re beating some of the Grunts senseless at cards.”

  Kalypso poured herself another shot. She was reviving by the minute; in fact, she was now wide enough awake to recognize when she was being corralled.

  “Now why can’t we tap that?” one of the others demanded. “Why can’t we transform these party-girl talents of yours into something useful?”

  Lassare, her eyes already displaying the effects of Kalypso’s cocktail, stood up and replaced her glass on the counter with a thud.

  “Don’t be silly. Kalypso fucks up deliberately. She doesn’t want to be useful—do you, love?”

  Kalypso glanced around helplessly. She was surrounded. Embedded like a thousand mouths and eyes in the walls, all of Maxwell’s demons remained inert. There was nothing to draw off the Mothers’ attention, which now drilled into her. There was no music, no chatter of patrons. There was only the silence of the crash. She couldn’t stand it any more.

  “I didn’t do it!”

  “Do what, angel?”

  “You think it’s my fault, what happened to Marcsson? Talk to him. I don’t know shit.”

  “I think you’re lying,” Lassare drawled.

  Naomi said, “You want to play in our league, kitten? You wouldn’t stand a chance.”

  “Yeah, we were all at the top of our fields when we left Earth. We built this colony. We made you. You’re nothing but an unproven little larva.”

  “I didn’t do anything, I swear,” Kalypso whispered “I swear it by the Dead.”

  They all looked horrified at this; Kalypso began backpedaling, wondering what she had said wrong. To swear by Sieng’s Dead research team was serious; but she’d sincerely meant it. What was going on here? Where was Ganesh? Suddenly she felt like crying. She gestured vaguely at the images of the scientists behind the bar: the photos had been taken long before Kalypso was born, not long before the team’s last journey into the Wild—a mission that was to result both in Sieng’s discovery of the luma interface, and in the infection by the indigenous agent that would kill her.

  “I didn’t mean—I just—look, don’t—”

  “I keep waiting for you to get it together, Kalypso. I’m beginning to think it’s never going to happen. Do you know that out of your entire generation, you were the embryo with the most favorable genetic makeup? And you mix drinks. You have the biggest intellectual potential of them all.”

  “I do not!” Kalypso railed. “It’s bad enough being stupid without you telling me I’m only pretending to be stupid. You’re all so fucking paranoid! I would never do anything to harm Ganesh. And I would never; do anything that might harm my cluster’s chances of getting into the Wild.”

  “You kids have such romantic ideas about the Wild,” Naomi slurred. “You think you can go out there in your boats and tent-kits, play around with the micros, and come up with some magic elixir you can trade for passage back to Earth. You have no idea what Earth is like.”

  “Neither do you,” Kalypso retorted. “Not all these light years away. Not anymore.”

  “Maybe not. I haven’t had the privilege of talking to Earth in years. I do know they aren’t going to send ships light years for any substance, not Picasso’s Blue, not anything we can make here.”

  “How can you know that? My cluster-sister Sharia says if we spent less time on the Oxygen Problem, we might discover something better than Picasso’s Blue. Then at least we could buy passage back to Earth—those of us who wanted to go—or buy materials we could use to live here.”

  “An old argument.” Naomi flicked her fingers dismissively. “As if valuable agents like Picasso’s Blue are just going to leap out of the luma and offer themselves to you.” She pointed to the photos of the Dead behind the bar. “They were a lot smarter than you, and they perished. You don’t know anything about the Wild.”

  “That’s because you—”

  “Shut up, Kalypso.” Naomi’s pasty face flared pink. “You think you can handle the Wild, but you can’t even handle First without Ganesh. The AI crashes and twenty minutes later you kids are in a panic. Ganesh is your real mother — you realize that, don’t you?”

  “No,” Kalypso said belligerently, and knew she was lying because she was feeling more and more insecure about Ganesh’s prolonged silence. “And I don’t think our ideas about the Wild are romantic.”

  “Since when is romance criminal?” Lassare said in an amused tone. “A little romance never killed anyone, Naomi.”

  “This child is basing her ontological beliefs on stolen cinema clips from Earth History Archives
. Ah, you think we don’t know what you kids get up to? Mark my words, Kalypso, one day you’ll nip into those Earth Archives and find that something bites you back.”

  “And your little dog, too!” Rasheeda added in a mocking, high voice. But Naomi was not to be teased.

  “As for you personally? I think you’re unstable, Kalypso. I don’t think you’d last ten minutes in the Wild.”

  “Fine. Let the Wild be the judge of that, though. Not you, Naomi.”

  “You forget that it’s my function to protect you. I’ve been entrusted with that role.”

  “Sure, about a hundred years ago,” Kalypso scoffed. “Listen. In the Wild it isn’t a matter of anybody’s judgment what you are or what you can do. The Wild itself tests you. You can’t argue with that, can you?”

  “You want us to just throw you out there, is that it? Think we might pick your cluster to be a research team, Kalypso?”

  “No,” she answered resentfully.

  “No? Why not?”

  Kalypso glowered. “Because of me.”

  “You mean, you think your attitude is holding your cluster back,” Naomi said. “Isn’t that what you think?”

  “I think that’s what you think.”

  Lassare laughed into her straw; the drink foamed. Kalypso looked away.

  “You remind me of myself when I was young,” Lassare said. Kalypso hated it when they said that. It was so patronizing.

  Naomi saw the look on her face.

  “Is that so hard to believe?” she snapped. “You think we’re just a bunch of old women, right? Too conservative by half. Why don’t you just say it outright, Kalypso?”

  Kalypso took a long breath. “OK. I do. I don’t think you’re trying hard enough to grow this colony. I think you’re too careful. I think you’ve spent too much time pretending to experiment on Picasso’s Blue when everyone knows you aren’t developing anything new because you’re addicted to it. You’re living in a fantasy world if you think we’re going to be able to sit on our asses in First and find a way to terraform this planet. You’re afraid of the Wild. It’s fine to be afraid for yourselves, but it kind of pisses me off when you’re afraid for me.”

  “See?” Naomi said wryly to the others. “The dangers of a prolonged adolescence. All mouth, no brain.”

  “I was just like you,” Lassare said. “Just fucking like you. Now look at me.”

  Kalypso wasn’t feeling particularly empathetic. She mumbled, “So whose fault is that?”

  “Kalypso, think about it for ten seconds. You’ve got us to rebel at. You’ve got our authority to give you shape. We’ve got shit. Who do we turn to when things are going wrong? Our mission statement? Hah! None of us had a clue what we were getting into back then. According to the probes, this planet supposedly had a fucking breathable atmosphere. Earth? Double hah! Not with the timelag we’ve got. Once those bastards found out the atmosphere had changed, they didn’t want to know us. No backup, no reinforcements, no support. All this” — she gestured to the station around her — “all this is improvised. You think it was easy building First? We got on Ganesh with every piece of training and education you can imagine, the hugest of ambitions, and more guts than you’ll ever see the broadside of quite frankly. Now you see us hiding in a bar drunk as Indians. Did it ever occur to you that there might be a reason for this, other than some failure in our characters? Did you ever stop to think that spending twenty something years trying to colonize a resistant planet and raise a bunch of demented children who aren’t even ours could take its toll on us?”

  Kalypso shrugged. “So stand aside and let us take over.”

  “Wouldn’t I love to,” Naomi muttered.

  “Let you take over? Kalypso, you can’t even use a simple zzz stinger without fucking it up. You and your little games have brought the whole station to a crashing halt, and you want to take over?”

  “Hey. Wait. I didn’t, and anyway I didn’t mean me personally—”

  Lassare held up a hand. “You might get your chance sooner than you think. If Ganesh keeps deteriorating, we’ll all be in the Wild soon. How do you like the sound of that, Kalypso? Does that sober you up?”

  There were nervous murmurs of dissent from, among the other Mothers.

  “Ganesh will get itself organized soon.”

  “Let’s not panic over a few glitches.”

  “The witch doctors say—”

  “The witch doctors?” Lassare’s voice leaped the better part of an octave. “What makes you think the witch doctors understand Ganesh? Have you forgotten why we call them witch doctors in the first place? They know jack about how that AI really thinks because it’s outpaced the science we all grew up with. They stand on one foot, cross their fingers and hope.’”

  “You’re undoing all the good of the Blue. We must believe, and then they will follow us.”

  “Down the garden path,” said Lassare.

  “Lassare, really you are exaggerating. . . .”

  Kalypso was watching Lassare with a touch of admiration. The Mothers were all so drunk now they had forgotten about their policy never to disagree in front of the younger generation. Trying to appear inconspicuous, Kalypso refilled drinks and listened to the beginnings of a promising argument.

  “—we should be sending teams to all the manual sites—”

  “—radio contact at least—”

  “—reflex points sooner or later—”

  “—alarmist attitude you’ll have a bunch of spooked neophytes—”

  “—and to reconfirm atmospheric readings—”

  “—Ganesh’s long-term—”

  Kalypso raised her glass, said, “To role models!” and drank.

  “—out in boats should probably stay—”

  “—root programming perfectly safe if—”

  “—totally incompetent witch doctors—”

  The hatch opened and Jianni slid in. The Mothers fell silent at once.

  “The fault’s in the luma interface,” he announced, slightly out of breath. “And the Dreamer units. We haven’t narrowed it down beyond that.”

  No one looked at her, but Kalypso felt a stab of guilt even though she hadn’t done anything wrong this time. There was a general bristling in the room; Jianni was standing very still, making a point of keeping his voice neutral.

  “We need more information,” Naomi said in a clipped tone.

  “You know as well as I do that the luma’s unpredictable,” the chief witch doctor replied. “This is the risk you’ve run by letting Ganesh decentralize.”

  Politics again. Jianni hadn’t supported that decision; his protest had been recorded in the colony annals. Sieng’s discovery that luma’s cellular structure made it ideal for interfacing with Ganesh had been the breakthrough desperately needed by the fledgling colony. Letting the AI spread its memory into the luma infrastructure had enabled the station to be expanded to its present size, increasing Ganesh’s processing power and paving the way for the birth of Kalypso and all her brethren. But it was all an experiment: everyone in the colony knew this, even if they usually didn’t think about it.

  At times like this, life on T’nane could suddenly seem very tenuous indeed. Kalypso put her hands on the bar and the sleeping demons. It was starting to sink in that Ganesh might really be down for the count.

  “We have a number of problems, which I’ll prioritize for you in a second,” Jianni began. Kalypso sensed the tingle of suppressed laughter in the Mothers, but if Jianni felt it, he ignored it. He was the chief witch doctor: Earthborn, a designer of the AI’s current configuration and therefore far more intimate with Ganesh than the average Grunt. Still, the Mothers quashed his ideas as often as they allowed them.

  “Basically, it’s a concatenation of problems, each of which is moderately serious but not cause for panic. Yet when taken all together, these things mean trouble. The Works are being reprogrammed and we’re locked out, so none of our basic substances, including atmosphere, are being supplied. Now, I’v
e got people going in to manually over-ride and get internal atmosphere back to normal, but that’s going to take time. Because the com-nodes are all down, it’s difficult for us to communicate. We can’t use the luma, so we’re dependent on radio which is unwieldy for data transmission. On top of that, we’ve got a thermal system brewing in the rift. It’s going to affect the well and stress our heat tolerances. Ganesh might instinctively protect itself—and us —by keeping the luma stable, but if it doesn’t, we’re going to have heat coming up through the legs like you wouldn’t believe.”

  He paused. The Mothers stared at him dully. Kalypso wondered what they were thinking about this laundry-list of woes.

  “I’m thinking about shutting down some of the reflex points now, before the thermal arrives, in hope that we can get this taken care of.”

  “That’s totally unsafe!” Naomi seemed to come to her senses.

  “Sitting on a thermal well like this does have its drawbacks,” Jianni conceded mildly. “We need massive amounts of kinetic energy to maintain structural integrity in the luma—no way around that. If Ganesh fails to divert that energy and keep us safe, well, that’s the price we pay for living where we do.”

  “Ganesh is fully shielded,” Naomi said. “No thermal is going to wreck the Core. It’s deep in the Works and completely insulated.”

  “Shutting down reflexes is not a good idea,” Lassare added, enunciating carefully in that obviously intoxicated way. “If you decouple the autonomic Core from higher consciousness, Ganesh will lose control of the luma, and the luma is its primary means of data storage.”

  “We think Ganesh may have lost control of the luma already,” Jianni snapped. “I need all the hands I can get. But I guess you’re all too busy making executive decisions to actually pitch in and do anything.”

  Kalypso swallowed. Even if his wrath wasn’t directed at her, she felt it and was cowed.

  “I went for backup heat shields and they’re missing from storage. Anybody got any idea what happened to them?” There was an edge to his voice; more than just anger. Something else. Almost—not quite but almost—fear. No one answered him, so he tried again.

  “Do any of you understand what I’m saying? We have to evacuate to Oxygen 2. It’s not safe here.”