“So much,” Mouth said, “for the invasion.”
“We were always going to be outnumbered,” Alyssa said. “All the more reason to hit them before they see us coming. Just as long as the Command Vehicle survived.”
“There they are.” Winston pointed at the screen. “Damn, I didn’t think we’d make it.”
The Command Vehicle sat alone and motionless, but its lights still blazed, and the external shell appeared intact.
“Damn,” Alyssa said. “Damn. What are they—damn damn damn.”
As they approached, they could see a dozen huge, prayerful shapes in the darkness, clustered around the Command Vehicle: a congregation of Gelet. The scene looked utterly still, as if everyone had paused to reflect on their situation. Mouth let out a deep breath and tried to pull herself deeper into the frozen crevice of her passenger seat.
SOPHIE
I ignore the buzzing from my right wrist, and I take Bianca’s chin in my other hand, gentle as picking a pocket. I look down at her, bathed in the cockpit lights: wide perfect face suffused with bitterness and anger and, yes, love, but mostly just weariness. I stare, as if I had the power to preserve this sight in my memory forever. There are so many things I want to ask, in this final moment, but I don’t know if I would believe any of her answers.
“I have to go,” I whisper, and Bianca’s eyes widen. “I have to leave right now. They’re waiting for me. The Gelet. I think they want to take me to their city.”
“Sophie, listen to yourself. This is delirium. We’ve all got it, after so long in this nothing wasteland.” She grabs my arm, but I shake her off. “There’s no crocodile city. There’s nothing out there but frostbite and monsters. I get that you have a … a bond with these creatures, but don’t delude yourself. You can’t leave me now, in my literal darkest moment.”
“You can come with me.” I’m still close enough to murmur in Xiosphanti. I allow myself to believe for a moment that it’s not too late, that Bianca and I could still leave everyone else behind. “There is a city. I’ve seen it.”
I try to explain, so she’ll at least understand after I’m gone: “I can’t do this thing anymore, where we live in a tiny space and pretend it’s the whole world. People always have brand-new reasons for doing the same thing over and over. I need to see something new.”
The bracelet tugs my wrist again.
All through this conversation, I pretend Bianca and I are alone together—when we’re in a severely damaged all-terrain cruiser, soaked with the funk of despair, crammed with every last surviving member of our invasion force. Maybe twenty-five of us, including Mouth and Alyssa, who somehow found us after we gave them up for dead. Their friend, Winston, has removed his environment suit, and I start putting it on.
“We’re not going to let you just leave,” Dash says, and I ignore him, because this vehicle won’t go anywhere unless the Gelet allow it. They appear on the night vision: a dozen, on all sides, with their front legs bent and their pincers bowed in greeting.
“We’re almost home,” Bianca says. “Don’t do something stupid.”
I finish putting on everything but the helmet, which I hold in one glove, and I look into Bianca’s eyes one last time. All my rage has petered out, and instead I just feel a sadness so violent it’s like wings beating inside me, harder and harder, until they snap. I already told Bianca that our friendship belonged to the past, but now it’s really true. That’s the only way to explain why I’m leaving her like this.
Lucy keeps trying to use the flamethrower on the Gelet, until Dash has to pull her away and push her into the seat I’ve vacated.
“If you stay, you’ll die,” I whisper.
“I guess we’ll see.” Bianca actually smiles, as if she welcomes the challenge.
Just as I put my helmet on, Mouth says, “Can I come?”
I hesitate, and Mouth’s expression turns bleak. At some point, she lost any ability to hide what she’s feeling. She starts to say something else, about her senselessly dead nomads, and all the other deaths that make less and less sense. I wave for her to shut up and come with me, now or never.
Mouth turns to Alyssa, who says, “Fuck no. Not going to the giant frozen insect hive. I’m sticking with these assholes, because at least I understand them. And I still think we could win this. We were always going to be outnumbered.”
“Alyssa,” Mouth says. “I know I’ve let you down before, and you think these people are your crew now. But please, just trust me one last time. Don’t throw your life away. Please.”
“Just fucking go. Don’t give me a whole dance routine.”
I tug at Mouth’s arm. She aims one last gaze at Alyssa, like a lost child.
Alyssa scoots closer to Bianca, and the two of them exchange little nods—like, they’re in this together now. Mouth puts her helmet back on and turns to pull the tiny lever that opens the interior hatch, squaring her shoulders as if she’s going to lift something enormous instead of two centimeters of metal.
Dash makes one last lunge to hold me back, and I brush him aside. Mouth and I pass into the outer chamber, and then step out into the sleet-freighted wind.
The Gelet see us coming, and wrap our environment suits with sheets of moss, and a mesh of tentacles. We move away, and the transport growls to life with the hiss of a damaged motor. I shut my eyes for a moment, and then Bianca is gone, vanished into the white wind. The Gelet cradle Mouth and me, leading us into an underground tunnel.
PART
SIX
SOPHIE
I can’t stop crying for Bianca, the whole way down. Even with the environment suits, the blankets, and the shelter of the Gelet’s tunnels, thick gusts chill my bones, and I picture Bianca surrounded by murderers and thieves, in a failing vehicle. The tunnels lead deeper and deeper under the ice, until we emerge into a cavern where steam rises from hot springs, and I remember promising to hold on to Bianca as long as I have arms. A faint light, pale green in my night vision, comes out of the hot pools, from bacteria or algae, and reveals the sawtooth shape of the walls. Bianca probably hates me now. In her mind, this is just the latest betrayal in a chain that started with me hiding from her after my execution. The Gelet urge us to move faster, into the depths, and I hear the growl of some ancient mechanism.
One of the Gelet seems to feel my agitation, and brushes my arm with one tentacle as we return to a darkness that even my visor can do almost nothing with. I stumble and reel, even with the Gelet guiding me.
My feet throb. Mouth keeps grunting, too. Steam bursts out of the ground and startles me, followed by more intense chills. My legs want to give out, but we keep moving. My disorientation is the size of a million cities, and if the Gelet let go of me for an instant, I’ll be lost forever. I can’t even tell the size of the space we’re moving in, and have to close my eyes and breathe to fight off claustrophobia.
My breath is a piston that drowns out the Gelet’s buried engines, and then I let out a wail, which gets louder until it scathes my throat.
I can’t stop screaming, after holding it in so long. I scream into my helmet, so deep inside darkness that I have no sense of direction or escape route. I scream myself hoarse, remembering how I put my heart and sinews and guts into saving Bianca from herself, and only became her fool. Mouth says something that I can’t hear. My knees fail.
On my knees, a ragged sound tearing from deep inside me, I can’t bear this cold.
One of the Gelet pulls me upright, and gently peels the neckpiece off my survival suit. I feel the warm, wet feelers on my skin, and I get a series of impressions—
—a harpoon pierces my side, my own blood slick against my tentacles, fleeing for my life. I limp back home, with the last of my strength, and then I hang in a healing cocoon for an endless, itchy spell. My muscles cramp, and I think about the dream we all crafted among us, here in the city: bringing home our friend from the dusk, leading her down here with us. Finally living together, sharing all our stories with her, maybe even learnin
g her stories, too. We shaped that vision together, and when I leave the husk of my convalescence, all my other friends keep reminding me of the dream we all had. Do I still believe, or did the spear poison my faith as it went into me? I’m not sure. The moment when I laid out that idea before our friend from the dusk, like a whole root system of possibility, is clouded by pain now. I struggle to hold on to that dream, but my memory itself feels wounded, deep in my core between my stomachs, maybe past healing. And then our friend from the dusk is back, and she brings other humans who want to communicate, and I can sense her hope, her courage, like a hot geyser from the deepest permafrost … and it’s okay. Even when another harpoon cuts through the snowy wind, even when I lose more blood, lose my balance, chip away part of my carapace as a tiny boot comes down, I remember the pure hope that I sensed, bursting out of her. Our friend from the dusk, she carried the other humans to us on the back of that hope. One Gelet falls dead, alongside the three dead humans, but I know her now, our human friend. When I get back to the city, I tell the others that I believe once more—
—Still on my knees, my throat still hot, I gaze up at this Gelet. I notice the hole in her carapace, and I gaze up at her round, sharp-toothed mouth, and the forest of tendrils undulating inside her pincer. Maybe I haven’t ruined everything after all. Her story settles into me, and I know I’m in the right place. I just hope Bianca is too.
I take a breath, replace my neck strap, and walk forward.
* * *
More and more Gelet cluster around us, and the air gets warmer, and that’s how I know we’ve reached the city. Even with the night vision, I only glimpse pieces of the architecture here and there. In the glow from a furnace, I see a chamber stretching over my head, dotted with openings that Gelet climb through, and filled with alien machinery: sharp teeth, curved fulcrums, and blobs of living matter. I feel my way along the curved walls, with Gelet guiding me.
At last we reach a room, shaped like the inside of a bottle, where the light blinds me. I risk taking off my helmet, and I see some writing, in Noölang. Next to me, Mouth hesitates, then removes her helmet too. We’re looking at a computer, Khartoum-built like all the computers on the Mothership, and it still works. The Gelet have reverse-engineered its solar cells to use power from the hot springs. The holographic display shivers, but stays readable.
“The Gelet are talking to the Mothership,” Mouth says. “But that’s … I mean, nobody talks to the Mothership, not for twenty generations. We don’t even have the protocols anymore.”
“Poor Pedro and Susana,” I say. “And Reynold. They would have died of happiness if they could see this.”
I try to get the computer to give me a real-time view of Xiosphant, so I can zoom in enough to see if Bianca somehow arrived safely. I could at least try to locate the Command Vehicle. The interface is pretty easy to understand. But whatever I do, I only see Xiosphant at some point in the past. Maybe the Mothership is flying over somewhere else now.
Instead, I find a schematic that says something in ancient script like, “Climate Projections: Original and Revised.” The original climate projection, from when we arrived here, looks like a steady line, with some increase in temperature due to human industry but a corresponding increase in stabilizing factors. The revised version looks like a tantrum: the lines start out straight, then jerk up and down.
“Well, shit,” Mouth said. “Even I can tell that’s not good.”
“There’s going to be more storms, and more disruptions in the water table for both cities. And there’s a seventeen percent chance of … I can’t read this.” I squint and try to remember my Noölang class. “Seventeen percent chance of catastrophic atmosphere loss.”
“As in, what? Like, we can’t breathe anymore?”
I toss my head.
The Gelet have reorganized the file systems, as if they want us to see certain things. The bottom of the display has a row of numbers: “07/20/3207 17:49.” I poke at random, and a holographic video appears in the middle of the jumble. A woman wearing some kind of uniform, with features somewhat like Bianca’s, looks right at us, and speaks in Noölang.
“My name is Olivia. I don’t know if anybody will ever see this. I’ve been inside this alien city for twenty-nine Earth rotations, according to this computer. When we detected this place with our orbital scans, we couldn’t have known how deep it goes, and most of the teams concluded it was either a natural ice formation or some sort of burrow system. I remember Richardson and Mbatha suggested it could be a built structure, but everyone else regarded this as a fringe theory at best, based on flimsy data. If only the rest of the science teams could see the interior structures and the complexity of these systems. These creatures are so much more advanced than we could have guessed, and they make me want to redefine all my ideas of technological and societal development.”
She looks in all directions, as if she’s scared that she’ll be caught. “These natives seem to regard geoengineering and bioengineering as two branches of the same discipline. They’ve rebuilt both themselves and their environment to cope with this planet’s unique challenges. Back on Earth, people theorized that a tidally locked planet would need some kind of ‘air-conditioning’ system, circulating hot air from the near side to the far side, to avoid weather instability and atmospheric disruption. And these creatures seem to have created something even better, using networked chains of flora to sequester and redistribute heat energy. They cultivate them inside dormant volcanoes and lava vents. It’s incredible.”
I’m not sure how much Mouth understands, but the word “flora,” combined with “volcanoes,” makes her stare.
“They use a form of touch telepathy, via this bodily secretion that’s somewhere between a neurotransmitter and a pheromone,” Olivia says. “They touch you, and you can share their memories, and the memories they’ve taken from others. There appears to be an olfactory component. Except that I can’t always tell if they’re showing me the past or their ideas for the future.”
She shudders without any warning, weeping into her sleeve. “They want to … they want to make me the same as them. They have a surgery, or some kind of procedure, that will change me, so I can communicate the way they do. They’ve shown me what they’re planning, and I won’t let them. I still have the medi-kit, and I can take all my palliatives at once. I won’t let go of my humanity. If anybody ever finds this video, please know, these creatures are not our friends. They want to remake us, the same way they’ve changed their environment and themselves. If you see this, fight them, fight them with your last—”
The video cuts out. I’m left staring at an empty space, feeling sorrow for a woman who died a long time ago, one way or another.
Then the meaning of her words starts to sink in, and I feel so light my whole body might be made out of billowing silk. Oh, of course. I want to laugh, and then I do laugh, and I keep laughing, harder and more raucous, until I realize Mouth is staring.
I start to explain what Olivia said, but Mouth understood most of it. Her nomads used Noölang for everything sacred.
“Why would they let us watch that?” Mouth says.
“Because they wanted to make sure we understood what they plan to do with us: give us their gift of communication.”
“Okay, so how do we defend ourselves … I mean, I told you, I can’t fight anymore. And even if I could—”
“I want this.” I take Mouth’s shoulders and look into her wide-open eyes. “I’m going to say yes. I need to talk to the Gelet as an equal. And I am so tired of using this clumsy human voice. I never even liked talking. People lie every time they speak. I can finally understand, and be understood, and oh, of course I am going to do this! I have never wanted anything half as much.”
“But your humanity!” Mouth grips the side of the computer table with both hands. “I mean, you can’t let go of—”
“Did you actually read any of Mayhew’s writing? Back when you were pretending to be a young radical?” I ignore Mouth’
s squirming, because we’re past that now. “He talked a lot about human nature. We can’t stay the same forever. New world, new people.”
Mouth startles me by quoting from Mayhew’s Treatise on Inhumanity, almost verbatim: “‘We measure the freedom of human beings by their ability to change with their environment. The only truly alien influence is the dead grasping fingers of our own past.’ But still, stop and think. You’ll be throwing away everything…” She pauses and looks down at her boots. “You know what? I’m the worst person to give anybody advice. Do what you want.”
“Thank you.”
All this hope catches me off-balance. I’m scared, too—what if they kill me by accident? What if I look hideous to other humans? But this is worth any risk. Everything I’ve lost and suffered, all of it will be a cheap price if this works.
“But there’s no way I’m letting them do that to me,” Mouth says.
“I don’t think you should. The one time you tried to communicate with them, you couldn’t handle it. Any more than the others.” I flinch at the memory of the scavengers, arguing about whether there should be a Spoon to go with the Knife. I’ll never stop blaming myself for that bloodbath, even if the Gelet have forgiven me. I need to do better. And now, maybe I can.
* * *
I sit in three-quarter darkness, holding conversations with Bianca in my head. “Don’t go,” I tell her. “You don’t want to go home. You want to go back to being the person you used to be. Even if you succeed in conquering Xiosphant with a handful of foreigners, you’ll only be killing what’s left of your old self. Come with me to the Gelet city. We’ll sit in the dark and ask each other stupid questions, and keep each other warm.” But even an imaginary Bianca won’t listen to me. She’s probably dead by now.
I’m not ready for how much I miss people, after always wishing I could escape from them. I hear Mouth grumbling in the opposite corner, but I’ve never been this far from a crowd before. Their loud voices, the inadvertent touches, and the scraps of personal information that people always give in passing. All the tiny ways that people help each other to exist.
The City in the Middle of the Night Page 30
