Dreaming in Smoke

by Tricia Sullivan

  “I imported some jazz. That’s all. My head hurts. I have nothing else to say.”

  He glared at her. She could sense the rising tension in his body, a host of anger galloping under the muscles of his chest and shoulders. Tehar had never lost his temper in her presence: this would be fascinating if she didn’t feel so —

  “If you don’t come clean I swear I’ll push you out of the cluster. I’ll tell the others, and we’ll isolate you. You’ll be alone.”

  She had started to cry.

  “Why are you picking on me this way?”

  “Don’t you dare try to manipulate me with your emotions. Tell me what you did to the Dreamer.”

  “Nothing,” she spat. “And I’m tired of being accused. It’s not my fault if you’re too stupid to figure out how to fix Ganesh.”

  “Kalypso Deed,” Tehar said. “It’s a miracle you’ve made it to this advanced age without somebody bludgeoning you to death.”

  She opened her mouth to respond and closed it again.

  “You’re stressed,” she said primly. “I’m not going to take that personally.”

  For some reason, he was looking more angry, not less. She watched him getting a grip; when he spoke, his tone was level and tight.

  “You remember the Core?”

  “Yeah, the suitcase. There was a hole.”

  “And what about the jazz?”

  “You mean that vine, but I don’t—”

  “Kalypso, those jazz recordings you were listening to came from the Core. They must have been used in some way to organize the AI, to form one of its root paradigms. Probably something to do with temporal relationships — I don’t know, I’m only guessing.”

  “Ganesh said the jazz came from Earth Archives.”

  “Probably that’s true. Ganesh has stuff copied all over the place, lots of redundancies. If it had the same stuff stored as Earth Archives and as root programming in the Core and you were tapping Earth Archives, then this could have created the link between the Dreamer and the Core, which you saw metaphorically as a vine.”

  “OK, but what’s so terrible? I was only listening.”

  “Ah, but I think something from Marcsson’s work scampered up the vine and infiltrated the Core, and that’s why we got a Crash. You see? You understand?”

  “Scampered? What do you mean, scampered?”

  “Don’t bog me down with details. I need to think.”

  Tehar’s eyes turned inward, to the radio on his interface.

  “Jianni? We’ve got a big problem here. Some code has come through the luma and punctured the Core. Yeah, that’s what I said. I’m sure.”

  He paused, listening. His face was grave.

  “If that’s what we have to do, that’s what we have to do. If we shut down reflex points, we’ll lose everything in the luma, though.”

  Kalypso grabbed his arm. He peeled her fingers off and turned away, still talking to Jianni. “No one knows where Marcsson is. We’re in the middle of an evacuation. He could be gone already — really? What made you think to put a search order out?” Tehar listened to the response and then laughed humorlessly. “No. No one mistrusts your hunches, Jianni. But if he hasn’t been found yet . . . wait, I have an idea. Look, don’t take down any reflex points just yet. Maybe we can still clear this up. Yeah. You’re a mind reader, Jianni, Let me look through this node and get back to you as soon as we get Marcsson interfaced. Out.”

  Kalypso felt her eyes bulging expectantly. Tehar turned to her.

  “Find Marcsson.”

  “What?”

  “Get him. Bring him here. Don’t screw up this time.”

  “But why? What if I can’t find him before the thermal? What if—”

  “Just do it, Deed. Fuck what if. Find him. I don’t care how. If anything happens to him there might not be a station to come back to.”

  He fixed her with hard eyes.

  “I’ve never seen you like this before, Tehar.” She slammed the tank shut and moved toward the hatch. “You’re scaring me.”

  He turned back toward the open system.

  “Maybe it’s time somebody did.”

  Kalypso found herself in the usual darkness. Outside Unit 5, the crawl was unlit, but through its translucent luma skin the sinuousities of the Works beyond were revealed by their own fires. A sly intimation of sun pressed through T’nane’s cloud cover and vaguely silvered the condensation that studded most of the exterior of the station. There was no other light. This was daytime on T’nane; Kalypso had never known anything to be different. And yet, something had changed.

  It was too quiet.

  She could hear nothing but her own breath: the subliminal hum of atmosphere regulation was gone, as were the soft but audible murmurs of activity on Ganesh’s sensor points extending throughout every crawlway of the station. You didn’t notice Ganesh, until suddenly the AI wasn’t in evidence. It had left the station bare and alone, like an empty chair.

  She was connected to no one now. Where was she supposed to start? Everyone else was on the Landings. Marcsson couldn’t be there, or in any of the main tubes, or he would have been found. That left the Works, the cluster cells — which would have been inhabited until a few hours ago—the Gardens, and the legs.

  Because they were prone to being cut off from heat and atmospheric control, and because they didn’t lead to anything important, the crawlways in the station’s structural support legs weren’t often used by people. If Kalypso had been trying to hide, she would have gone into one of the legs, where even at the best of times, Ganesh was half-blind.

  Not that she should assume Marcsson knew what he was doing, given his berkified condition. For that matter, Kalypso herself was in a fine state following the latest disaster in the Dreamer, especially after the way Tehar had behaved. If she had been thinking, she would have realized that it could take days to fully search all eight legs. She would have considered that she hadn’t fared particularly well from her first encounter with the berking Azamat. Common sense probably would have kicked in and— if she had been thinking—she would have rebelled against Tehar’s command.

  As it was, thinking was not her strong suit. Kalypso wasn’t thinking, she was climbing, beginning to sweat in the confines of the surface suit and breathing hard. She was involved in her own physical actions to the exclusion of all else. This ability to shut off her own head, she’d been told, was both her greatest strength and her worst failing. It could be an effective survival mechanism in a crisis; the only trouble was that Kalypso tended to use this same mechanism any time she might be made uncomfortable by the results of introspection. Like now. She did not want to think about what just happened in the Dreamer; about Ganesh; about her role in this Crash.

  She climbed until she reached a cross-corridor that could take her to the nearest leg. The going was easy here, but when she got to the leg, the enviro indicators were all dead although the automatic seal separating the leg from the main body was operational. This failure wasn’t surprising: Ganesh had always been thinnest in the extremities of the station. At least she could climb down the leg, to her relief. She was getting tired; she hadn’t properly slept since two nights ago. Hadn’t eaten recently either. How did Tehar expect her to find Marcsson? He must be losing his wits.

  She studied the swirling waters to distract herself. Craft of various sizes and types darted back and forth on the surface beneath, and robot activity illuminated the heat-shielded farm cells that sprawled from each of the eight terminal pods. Subsystems of indigenous life moved endlessly in T’nane’s complex thermal currents; if you looked too hard at the surface, it could make you nauseous.

  It was strange to be alone out here. Creeping along the slender, transparent tube was like being in the hollow leg of a dead crab. When she touched its inner surface, trying to speak to it as she might speak to her cell, it didn’t respond.

  Her suit had started to kick in for her; the air wasn’t good. That meant Azamat probably wasn’t here. She should g
o back, but she hesitated. She continued to gaze down into the water. System experts like Liet were supposed to be able to assess the signs of an impending thermal just by studying the color schema of the surface. Kalypso wondered what signs could be read and interpreted from this vantage. The local System fields were moving anticyclonic, reds dissolving into yellow where different strains of aggregate unicellulars crossed over, seeking out their optimal temperatures and chemical conditions. Almost directly below her was the well like an enormous oblong pupil. Sparks of phosphorescence appeared and disappeared in its depths. The effect was hypnotic.

  Luma bestowed a glutinous quality on the water, which meant that despite winds and thermal changes beneath the surface, it remained glassy and unwrinkled. The indigenes cohered. If you jumped in you would find yourself in the midst of a great glom of them, doing whatever it was they did—building luma and producing too much CO for human tolerance was all she knew.

  The basalt supporting First was riddled with wells and tunnels which carried the planet’s searing internal heat to the surface. The aquatic organisms that dominated the planet relied on these thermal currents for energy and motility — most of them cared nothing about the sun. It was the variability of the temperature zones which created life-sustaining energetic conditions. The same variability served as a power source for the station, but it also meant a complex feedback system was needed to maintain homeostasis, i.e., Ganesh.

  The “bottom” at which life functioned had yet to be plumbed. Colonies had been found to extend at least half a mile beneath the surface: there was a lot of fluid down there, and it was impossible to know how much of it was inhabited. The shaft she was looking into right now was incredibly deep: she remembered being made to study the survey results of it when she was very young. It was one of the coolest, stablest wells in the region, but it was far from safe if you happened to be sitting on a structure made of luma, like Kalypso was doing right now. As she watched, the formation that had looked like an eye began to dissolve into a multitude of cloudy fractalline explosions. The well was becoming ever more active.

  Kalypso’s suit advised her that it was now providing 52 percent of her nitrogen-oxygen mix and filtering significant amounts of carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. More alarmingly, ambient external temperature was rising on an accelerating curve. The thermal must be on its way.

  She stared into the well, mesmerized. Her suit began to make noises and nudge her.

  She jerked herself out of a stupor, turned and began scrambling back the way she’d come, recalling Liet’s words, Jianni’s warnings. Ganesh normally regulated the luma’s state through electrical current, which controlled the natural magnetism of the structure. Without Ganesh, there were no guarantees of magnetic — or structural—stability.

  The suit was shrieking at her: it was near its heat-tolerance levels. She increased the oxygen mix and climbed faster. At the top of the crawl, she found the way blocked. Ganesh must have shut off all contact with the legs, for the sealing membrane covered the passage she’d used to enter. She was shaken by the idea that this had been done with no regard for the fact that she was in the crawlway — she hadn’t even been warned. She tried to reverse the seal, but overlapping membranes closed off the passage like a shut flower. Kalypso braced herself against the walls and set her shoulder to the center of the seal. The membranes were supposed to respond to correctly applied force. She heaved mightily; nothing happened. Not even a twitch.

  She wasn’t strong enough.

  But she had to be strong enough, or she was in trouble. The heat was only going to get worse, and she was already starting to feel it. The suit would soon fail.

  She started to reach for her radio and checked herself. Everyone would be at the Landings by now or gone. Tehar could never get here before her suit gave out, assuming he could even be bothered with her at this stage. So there was no point in screaming hysterically. Instead, she opened the suit’s u-tool and set it for knife. Then she began hacking at the sealing membrane.

  The fact that Ganesh didn’t cry out when abused this way told her more than anything that the AI had really gone from the body of the station—or this part of it, anyway. She stabbed the u-tool through the membrane, straining her shoulder as she ripped a gash in the seal, and crawled through. A blast of heat followed her, but she could see no way to repair the leak and decided to get as far away from it as possible.

  The central body of the station would stay safest longest, but if Azamat had been here, he’d have been found hours ago. She was doggedly determined to get him before showing her face at the Landings. If the Mothers had succeeded in inculcating one conviction in the minds of their offspring, it was that responsibility for other people was paramount. Mavericks were not tolerated for long, and Kalypso had already used up about a year’s worth of personal freedoms today alone. She had no choice but to toe the line.

  So where would you go if you were a berking Grunt? The Works were dangerous without a suit at the best of times; the Landings were watched; Marcsson was too heavy to use a glider; and presumably the other legs were all sealed off, just like this one. If he was there, he was doomed, and nothing she might do could save him.

  That left only one place to check, and fortunately it was down from here, which meant a joyride, and she could scarcely object to that. Making her way to an express tube, she delivered herself wholesale to gravity. She whipped down the tube, her suit slithering without friction on the smooth inner skin of luma. For once there was no one to reprimand her for joying, and she did nothing to check her speed until she’d almost reached the entrance to the Gardens. Then at last she hit the friction strips, grimacing with satisfaction as sparks flew from her outstretched limbs. Breathing hard with excitement, she came to a halt; a fast joy was better than sleep for energizing you.

  Emergency lanterns lit the entry hatch, their beams making mirrors of the luma. She saw her reflection approach the hatchway on all fours and wipe condensation off the transparent sealing membrane before she peered down into the dripping green foliage. In the Gardens, darkness was total. The lights of the Works played across the plants only faintly, and the brilliant thermal-powered lamps which ordinarily nourished the Gardens had been cut, bringing premature midnight. Sharp, black-edged, and chaotic, the shadowed flora presented a daunting proposition to anyone trying to find another human being in their midst.

  Kalypso parted the seal and slid through, dangling by her fingers as she tried to decide where she wanted to land. She hung for a moment in a long rhombus of light while a flight of moths percolated up her body like bubbles through champagne. Then the sealing membrane oozed over the aperture and forced her to let go.

  WHEN THE ZOOKEEPER

  GETS EATEN

  SHE LANDED WITH A SOFT RUSTLE IN A BED of peas. The suit was providing her with a small percentage of her oxygen, but the glow of its readouts would give away her presence and she wasn’t sure she wanted to announce herself to Marcsson if he was here, so she shut it off. She even peeled back the hood so she could hear better. The smells of leaves, moisture, fertilizer and flowers bombarded her: she stood breathing for a good minute, getting accustomed to the air.

  There was a trail of damaged foliage leading down. Encouraged, Kalypso began to descend. She didn’t know how to move quietly among plants, and she could barely see where she was going. As she got lower, there was some additional, hazy luminosity generated by the v. flagrare in the water surrounding the base of the station, but such a small amount of light did her more harm than good. When she relied on kinesthetics, her feet seemed to find their places on their own, but as soon as she strained her eyes to see where she was going, she began to make mistakes. Either way, by the time she reached the lowest platform, she was pretty sure she had announced her presence to anything with ears.

  But it didn’t feel as if anyone was here. In fact, the sense of isolation made her skin creep. At the bottom of the Gardens was a small area of Earth-made flooring. She stood there and looked
around: trees, vines, the smell of fruit. Nothing stirred.

  In the floor was a trapdoor. She couldn’t lift it. Silently cursing whatever Grunt had designed the thing—could have been Marcsson himself for all she knew —she repositioned herself, bent, grabbed the handle, and pulled from her legs. The panel lifted a few inches. She wriggled her foot under it. Shifting her weight, she got under the edge of the panel, gasping, and finally lifted it high enough to hurl it over backward. It hinged back and hit the deck with a reverberant bang. So much for stealth.

  Being small really was a drag. Kalypso was so annoyed at expending unnecessary effort that she lost track of the fact that she wasn’t getting adequate oxygen. She began swaying and had to extend her arms for balance. Only when she nearly fell into the pit did she realize what was wrong and put her hood back up. She turned the suit on, breathed deeply, and looked into the pit.

  It was the access panel to a trove of Earthmade equipment. She gazed reverently on the metal and polymers, the sharp lines, the details. Earthmade materials had a distinct—and rare—look. This was one of the station’s many reflex points, basic checks meant to act as a simple autonomic nervous system, outside of Ganesh’s conscious control. They had never been used before in the entire history of the station. Never had Ganesh lost consciousness, not even once. If it did, anything it had stored in the luma would be subject to deterioration or even erasure. And if she didn’t get Marcsson to Tehar in time, Jianni would start shutting the reflexes down to protect the Core, and the Earth Archives, from whatever this “vine” thing was that had infiltrated it. It would be very bad news for Ganesh—worse than a lobotomy, Kalypso thought darkly.

  There was something fascinating about the equipment. She lost track of the fact that she was supposed to be hunting Marcsson and studied it. All of the dials looked familiar, but Kalypso had never been much good with manual apparatus. She was used to functioning organically — under Ganesh’s skin, as it were — where she could do what she needed to do without resorting to mechanistic means. Some of this stuff was computerized, but not sentient: she poked at it but found it had no sense of humor and kept giving her the same responses again and again. She pulled her lip and belatedly noticed that a red light was flashing. She wanted to investigate but was afraid she’d do something terrible. Yet it flashed and flashed, beckoning. She couldn’t resist. She touched the corresponding indicator, and then jumped back with a little electric scream of fear at her own daring.