Dreaming in Smoke

by Tricia Sullivan

  Heat became light through biological processes unlike any seen on Earth; living fire rose from the planet’s center. Like an organic version of lava, the Rift spewed teeming colonies of flagrare up through the water, which had itself been granted a kind of structure by luma, the glue of the System.

  The System. That was what all the researchers called it. Take you to court for using the word “organism,” they would.

  “It’s a conceptual relic,” Ganesh would say of the O-word, and then go on to use the example of luma as a refutation of the idea of structure existing only within organisms. Ganesh had explained the phenomenon of the luma in terms Kalypso had never been able to understand: how the “community” of colonial “species” (“But we use that word advisedly,” Ganesh would say, flashing an image of Charles Darwin standing on his head across her visual cortex) all contributed to the construction of this complex gel structure; how as some subspecies respirated oxygen from ferrous compounds, others diverted the iron for use in the structure of luma. Its consequent magnetic properties made luma invaluable for data storage.

  Luma wasn’t an organism. Yet it wasn’t just a substance, either. It couldn’t reproduce; yet it could be grown, not by one strain of v. flagrare, but by a complex of reactions involving many of them, not to mention other colonials as well. To complicate matters still further, luma was itself a means of reproduction, for the System played fast and loose with the genetic material of its members. Intricately folded, heat-resistant packages of RNA migrated through the luma and infected one species with another’s protein-coding information. Sometimes whole genomes were transmitted this way. That was why the word “species” was so misleading: members of the System seemed able to turn into one another via a kind of horizontal evolution never seen on such a scale on Earth.

  People like Marcsson had spent half their lives trying to grab on to the slippery nature of the Rift ecosystem, for it was the most dramatic example of the thermodynamic engine driving the biochemistry of this planet. For humans to survive on T’nane longterm, the atmosphere had to be stabilized. At the time of the initial Probe, the levels of oxygen and carbon monoxide in the atmosphere had been far more favorable to aerobic organisms. The crew of Ganesh had arrived to the unpleasant surprise that, in fifty-odd years’ time, the atmospheric composition had been radically altered. No one knew exactly why or how this had happened: paleontological studies couldn’t determine whether such gas cycles were normal for T’nane since fifty years wasn’t even a twitch in geological time, even if it was millions of generations in the evolution of the micro-organisms that created the atmosphere.

  Efforts to control the System had failed miserably; efforts to understand it were painfully slow. Sieng and her team had made progress in the beginning, but there had been no further breakthroughs on the Oxygen Problem since the outbreak of infection that had killed Sieng.

  It was also the last thing Kalypso wanted to think about. She belonged in the Dreamer. She belonged somewhere safely insulated from the Rational. But there It was ahead of her, boiling up from deep in the planet, epitomized in this conflagration of heat and color and mystery that would never yield to intuition: Science. She shuddered.

  What had she said to Naomi? The Wild itself will test you.

  What a crock of shit.

  The boat was now riding up and then down a series of high waves which cut off all view of First. The air turned grey and yellow with billowing gases released by the thermal that rode behind them. She could feel its sound in the large bones of her body.

  Thermals swept over First often enough, but always Kalypso had been safely enveloped in the solid certainty of her cluster, cocooned away from sensation in a closed, dry cell. She thought of the Gardens and the heat shields and Ganesh and then stopped thinking about all of it because she could not wrap her head around the idea that the world as she’d known it might be so easily destroyed.

  “Look,” she said, forcing herself to turn and face Marcsson. “We have to find a way around the Rift. I’ve got to get you to Oxygen 2, and we can’t get there from here on our current heading without risking a melt in the Rift. I know you know how to do this, so why don’t you just do it and save your life?”

  She tried to sound stern but her voice was shaking.

  He got to his feet; the boat lurched. It was a research vessel recruited for emergency use, and not all of the collection equipment had been removed. Marcsson uncoiled a collection filament and fed it over the side. It would accrue chemical and magnetic signatures in sequence according to time and depth, which could then be rolfed in statistical analysis to yield patterns of System behavior.

  “You can’t go over the Rift,” she bitched. “We have no way of assessing conditions there. We can’t even see where we’re going!”

  He stared into the water.

  She tried to over-ride his course again but couldn’t. This must mean he was still interfaced; if he was interfaced, Ganesh was functioning in some way or other. Kalypso flicked on her face again, hoping to pick up radio from First. She was low on power to transmit at this range. She didn’t know how to feed her face through the boat’s signal amplifier, but if Marcsson was managing to send and receive signals with Ganesh, there had to be a way. She looked for some kind of hardware link, failed to find anything, and then noticed herself beginning to hyperventilate. Marcsson slowly and deliberately drew up the sample fil. He passed his hands across it, holding it up to the wan light like a filmmaker studying a sequence frame by frame. Kalypso tried plugging her interface charge into any aperture that looked like it might fit. Any moment now she could expect electrocution, but hey —

  “The thermal,” he said, “it’s going to cause problems at RV-11.”

  “What? How can you tell?”

  He indicated the fil and opened his mouth to elaborate, but she cut him off, anticipating a long and detailed explanation that she would in no way understand.

  “What does that mean for us?”

  Marcsson looked thoughtful.

  “Marcsson! We don’t have time for this.” Damn, if he were Jianni, the situation would be under control by now. How could she let Jianni die? How could she give his suit to this — this — this —

  Her fingers were shaking as she brought them to her forehead, intending to wipe the sweat away but unable to do so because she was wearing a surface suit. It was hot.

  Suddenly it occurred to her that, if he was talking to her, he was probably no longer interfaced. She should be able to navigate manually. She put her hands on the console and was suddenly at a loss. A thermal map was displayed on the dash, but she didn’t really know how to use it. She had never paid much attention to sticky things like facts.

  “We have to go to RV-11,” he said. “I must pull in my work before it’s destroyed.”

  He nudged her aside and entered a course manually. She watched him, trying to pick up on what he was doing. Some of those controls related to the radio. They had to.

  “I know the signal amp works. If you just show me how to use the radio to transmit, we could call for help. Then you could come out of the face.”

  He held his eyes closed for a moment as if concentrating. “Magnetism is like gravity to us. But it’s so hard to calculate lateral relationships. I, I can’t.”

  “Marcsson!” She put both hands on his forearm and shook it. “Don’t interface that way. Just use the radio. Call for help. Or do something. But don’t keep dozing on me.”

  “It’s much too big,” he said, and crawled onto the deck.

  Rolling her eyes, Kalypso turned her attention to the controls and tried to forget he existed. She craned her head to see where they were going, but it was a complete waste: not only was the surface of T’nane completely featureless except for the occasional volcanic mount, but the fog was all but impenetrable and she couldn’t find the pilot’s goggles that would have let her see outside the spectrum of visible light.

  One of the maps displayed their craft, moving slowly toward
the Rift. There was a smaller craft behind them, gaining steadily. Kalypso shrieked and tried to come about. A wave caught the boat and she stumbled to her knees, gasping with exertion and frustration because she couldn’t get the boat to respond. Whoever was following, they weren’t going to appreciate being led into the Rift.

  Liet’s met expertise was proving to be of no help whatsoever: Kalypso’s subconscious memories contained no references to how to deal with fog. If Xiaxiang were here he would manage nautics; but he wasn’t, so she tuned her inner ear for his voice and habits, trying to coax her subconscious into cuing her into action. Xiaxiang had shared a wealth of knowledge with her, in and out of the Dreamer: if only they could interface, she could tap him.

  For the cluster was a functional unit in many senses. They had all Dreamed together — they’d been cross-referenced by Ganesh early on, so Kalypso knew intuitively that, for example, smell figured significantly in most of Liet’s sexual fantasies and Xiaxiang was afraid of bats although he’d never seen one outside Ganesh. As a result of this long-term psychological intimacy, she could hear each of them talking in her head, could feel their presences as if they were with her. She could lean on them psychologically in very real way.

  And she needed them now. Because now Marcsson was climbing around the boat with a collection filament between his teeth acting like this was playtime in the nursery. Because she hadn’t planned this out. Because the helm disliked her and wouldn’t take her directions. Because she didn’t know what the fuck she was doing and where were the others to laugh at her incompetence and take over?

  The other craft was too small, and moving too fast, to be a boat. Her display indicated that it had passed them, so it had to be an airborne robot probe, presumably sent to lead them out of danger. She strained her eyes for a glimpse of it. Mist poured around the boat. She couldn’t see past the yellow light on the prow.

  “We’re over the Rift,” Marcsson announced, sliding along the hull toward her with what struck her as total disregard for his own safety, given their speed and the force of the wind. She had to repeatedly wipe blackened condensation from her faceplate; only when she looked at the stains on her gloves did she realize how much of the “fog” was sulfurous ash.

  “Approaching well RV-11.”

  He sat down in the cockpit as calmly as if this were a picnic and began fiddling with the magnetic collectors on the hull of the boat, whereas it was all Kalypso could do to hold the safety railings as she was lifted off the deck and then dropped with each surge of fluid as the effects of the thermal began to move up through RV-11. Temperature gauges were starting to peak out. Her suit made noises of protest.

  This was insane. Xiaxiang, how do I break this heading and get us into a cooler zone? If this were the Dreamer, she’d be able to pull on X’s mind; she couldn’t get it through her head that she couldn’t touch X. Her hands on the dash pretending to be X’s; sweat snaking down her body and pooling in her boots. Thirst. Suit screaming that its filters need cleaning. A faint leak of sulfur in her air supply. Nausea.

  Marcsson stood up and the craft yawed and bobbed wildly.

  “Shir!” she hissed. “You’ll go over.”

  They were skirting the edge of RV-11. The waters around were reading barely within temperature tolerances for the hull polymer. According to the boat’s measurements, the thermal wave was still building toward its crest. Marcsson gazed into the water with the air of an artist stepping back from a canvas for perspective.

  “Perfect,” he said. “I’m going to get the whole buildup to the wave on record.”

  He sounded almost mellow, as if he weren’t sitting on a volcanic event that was going to be the end of him in a few more minutes. Direct measurement of the System wasn’t often practiced by researchers, who usually preferred to use probes to gather studies; but Marcsson had been studying phenomena that happened deep, deep in the well. There were no more working robot probes to send down the wells, and the tempflux made it too dangerous to send people. From what she could gather, Marcsson had been using fils to tag pieces of colonies within the luma and track them through their reproductive cycles, studying gas exchanges and looking for the factors that increased oxygen production. Or something like that. All she knew was that he was entirely too calm and she felt the need to be reciprocally anxious.

  Kalypso didn’t know just how deep he’d planted the fils, but prayed the boat’s magnet was strong enough to grab them before the wave hit, so they could get out of here. She tried boosting power to the magnet in an effort to speed things along, but she must have gotten the wrong control because the boat’s radio suddenly came on in a burst of static.

  “Finally!” she cried. “About fucking time.”

  She forgot about Marcsson’s fils and started looking for a functioning channel, but she couldn’t get her interface to mate with the onboard and she needed her hands free to hold on. She knew she was trying to do too much at once and failing to do anything. A channel cleared.

  “—take down the reflex points and get out, Tehar. You’re a bunch of sitting ducks.”

  “You don’t understand. If we take down the reflex points, Ganesh loses all self-control.”

  “Yeah, that’s the whole fucking idea,” shouted Robere, a Grunt. “You’ll still have your Core, your shielded Archives, your hardware—whatever landed here. We can start the AI over, regrow it if necessary. That’s a hell of a lot better than the big puddle you’ll have if the thermal melts down the whole station.”

  Tehar, patiently: “No. You don’t understand. You don’t just regrow an AI. Ganesh is far too sophis—”

  “Look, kid, we’re talking about life and death here. Can you fix it, or not?”

  “Yes,” Tehar said, “but I need time.”

  “SOS!” she shrieked into the pickup. “This is Kalypso Deed. I’ve got Marcsson and I need help!”

  “Well, we don’t have much of that. I say, save the hardware, no matter what,” Robere said. “You witch doctors are going to get yourselves killed.”

  “SOS! Robere, don’t you hear me?”

  “That’s a risk we’ll have to take.”

  She must be out of range. No one was responding to her.

  “SOS!! Help help help. This is Kalypso and Azamat. Our position is—” she began to read it off, horribly aware that she sounded exactly like the people she’d heard panicking while Tehar was dragging her up to Maxwell’s. She hit “record,” looped her message, and let it broadcast.

  “Stop that.” Marcsson’s tone was menacing. She ignored him; she was too busy trying to get the boat away from the well. The current was unbelievable.

  “Stop transmitting,” he said again, and she made a rude gesture. He reached across her and tried to cut the broadcast, but she’d thought to lock it and there was nothing he could do to stop her distress call. Her throat swelled with righteous indignation. What right had he to endanger her by coming here at such a time, all for his stupid information?

  The probe had found them. It hovered a few meters above and behind them. Lassare’s voice issued from it.

  “You can’t solve anything this way. Come back, and talk. We’ll come to terms. We always have before.”

  Before?

  “Lassare, help us! The thermal is coming to this well. How do I steer this thing?”

  But Lassare spoke over her. The probe must not be picking up the sound of Kalypso’s voice — not surprising given the noise of the wind.

  “Kalypso, I’m talking to you. I don’t know how long I can maintain this link. Ganesh has been badly damaged by this act of sabotage. Whatever they’ve said to you, whatever you’ve done—be smart now and stop this before it’s too late. For Ganesh. Kalypso, I know you can hear me. Ganesh is in trouble and we need your help. Don’t listen to them.”

  They? Them?

  She waved at the probe’s sensors, signing frantically: Help help help.

  Marcsson dropped to his knees and began emptying one of the storage lockers beneath t
he dash. His head and shoulders vanished in the empty cavity. She could hear him rummaging around.

  The wind had shifted and blew in eddies from over the well. It was cold now, but wouldn’t be for long. The boat had begun to draw in Marcsson’s collection fils magnetically. They assembled all around the perimeter of the boat, dangling over the sides like cilia.

  “Lassare, he’s still berking. It’s not my fault. Please. The thermal will hit this well, and I don’t know if he understands—”

  What was the use? Her voice wasn’t carrying.

  The probe moved closer, hovering just overhead. If Kalypso could have hitched a ride somehow, she’d have done so in an instant.

  “Kalypso, it’s not too late to change your mind. Get his interface away—”

  Marcsson bumped into her as he rose from the storage locker. He had disassembled the boat’s hardware, and emerged holding a piece of gear whose purpose Kalypso couldn’t begin to guess. He weighed it in his hand. It was still partly wired in. He held it up in the direction of the probe and passed it back and forth in the air. The probe’s position wavered.

  “Don’t. . . interfere. . . .” Static broke Lassare’s voice, “ . . valuable . . . damage . . . stop. . . .”

  “What are you doing?” A headache hit Kalypso, as if she’d just slammed into a wall. “You’re not interfering with its nav systems, are you?”

  He held the unit still, then lowered it in a smooth arc, pointing it at the surface of the liquefied luma of well RV-11. The probe mimicked his action and dove into the well.