Dead Space Martyr

by B. K. Evenson

  6 There was no reason to go, Altman thought. It was silly, probably someone's idea of a joke. You ask enough questions, and it was inevitable that someone would screw with you. The last thing he needed was to start thinking espionage and conspiracy. He needed to figure this out rationally and scientifically. So instead of going to the bar, he just went home. When he arrived, Ada was already there. She was sitting at the table, leaning back in the chair, asleep, her long dark hair tucked behind her ears and cascading over her shoulders. Altman kissed her neck and woke her up. She smiled and her dark eyes flashed. "You're later than normal, Michael," she said. "You haven't been cheating on me, have you?" she teased. "Hey, I'm not the one who's exhausted," he said. "I didn't sleep well last night," she said. "Had the worst dreams." "Me, too," he said. He sat down and took a deep breath. "Something weird is going on," he said. He told her about what he and Field had discovered, the calls he had made, the general sense that he felt, and that others seemed to share, that something was off . "That's funny," said Ada. "And not in a good way. It was the same with me today." "You discovered a gravitational anomaly, did you?" "Kind of," she said. "Or at least the anthropological equivalent. The stories are changing." "What stories?" "The folktales, they're starting to change, and quickly, too. That doesn't happen, Michael. It never happens." Altman was suddenly serious. "Never?" "Never." "Shit." "They keep speaking of the devil's tail," she said, "a kind of twisted pronged thing. When they mention it, they cross their fingers, like this." She raised her middle and index fingers, crossed them. "But when I try to get them to talk about it, they fall silent. They've never been like that with me before. It's like they don't trust me anymore." She brushed the top of the table with her hand. "You want to know what's strangest of all?" "What?" "Do you know how they say `tail of the devil' in Yucatec Maya? Same name as the crater: Chicxulub." Altman felt his throat go dry. He looked at the clock. A quarter to eight. Still time to make it to the bar after all.

  7 For a while, nobody spoke. They just stood there, watching the bruja, who, in her turn, steadying herself on Chava's shoulder, just watched the creature. "You see," she said in a whisper that was nearly drowned out by the creature's wheezing. "It is growing bigger." She reached deep into her pouch and pulled out a handful of something. She began to dance, tracing a slow circle around the creature, just at the edge of the cloud the creature was creating for itself. She dragged Chava along with her, sprinkling something in the sand before her. It was a wandering dance, off-kilter, almost drunken. At first the others just watched; then slowly one or two began to follow, then a few more. Some shook their heads, as if breaking out of a trance. When she stood directly across from the creature's head, she stopped and began turning in place. Soon everyone was doing this, watching the bruja, falling into place, slowly forming a complete circle. They turned around the creature, some of them standing knee deep in the surf. She swung her staff before her, stepped back, and stepped forward again. The others followed. Chava stepped too far and found himself coughing, having breathed some of the gas the creature was emitting. His eyes stung; his throat itched. The bruja lifted her hands, her index and middle fingers crossed. Chicxulub, she murmured, and turned again. The word went up mangled from the mouths of the others, like a groan. The bruja slowly turned and walked away, her back straighter and her stride firmer than on the walk over. She walked a few yards back from the circle and dug into the sand until she unearthed a piece of driftwood, then turned and rejoined the circle again. She nodded and gestured at Chava until he, too, left the circle and came back with driftwood. One by one the others followed, wandering out of the circle and coming slowly back. The skin that formed the gray sacs on the creature's back had thinned and thinned as the sacs grew. Now it was almost transparent. The sacs slowly billowed up until they were taut and then deflated, going about halfway slack before swelling again. It was a terrible thing to watch. Chava kept expecting them to burst. The bruja was dancing again. She lifted her chunk of driftwood high, gave a toothless smile, and threw it at the creature. It struck the creature softly in the face and fell to the sand just below it. The creature didn't react at all. "Now you," said the bruja to Chava. "Higher. And harder." He threw his piece of wood high and hard, at the leftmost sac. It struck the sac near the bottom and tore it just slightly. Air began to hiss out. The bruja raised her hands and brought them down and the others threw their pieces of wood as well. One or two missed, one or two bounced off, but more than a few tore the sacs, some quite deeply. Air rushed out of them; the acrid cloud slowly began to disperse. "Now, go," the bruja said to Chava, her voice hoarse. "You see the nameless man there, stumbling drunk as usual. Run to him and take his bottle and bring it back to me." He ran quickly around the circle and to the small but dignified dark-haired drunk who had gotten too close to the cloud earlier and almost died. The man turned and smiled at him. Before he could react, Chava grabbed the bottle he'd posted between his feet and fled back to the bruja. She took it from him and uncorked it. Behind them the drunk was protesting, some of the others holding him back. "Hold your breath," she said to Chava as she gave him the bottle. "You must pour this on the wood and on the creature itself." His heart pounding, Chava took a deep breath and rushed forward. The torn skin of the sacs had already begun to knit itself back together. The bags were still mostly deflated but were beginning to rise. He upended the bottle, splashing the creature and the wood around it, and then rushed back to the bruja, his eyes swollen and stinging. The bruja lit the top of her staff on fire and carefully moved forward, touching it to the creature's head. Both the creature and the driftwood caught fire immediately. She dropped her staff, letting it burn, too. The creature hissed and thrashed, but never tried to escape from the flames. The gray sacs on its back turned to ash and blew away. Eventually it stopped moving altogether. The bruja, swaying, led them once again in a slow, stuttering dance. Chava found his feet naturally following it, adapting to it, almost as if someone else were moving his legs. He wondered how many of his fellow villagers felt the same way. The village drunk, he saw, wasn't part of the circle; he stayed at a little distance, swaying slightly, staring at the fire, his brow furrowed. They kept on, tracing slow curving motions in the air, until all that was left of the creature was a charred, smoldering skeleton. Stripped of its flesh and burnt to a crisp, it looked almost human.

  8 He ordered a bottled beer and made sure it came with the cap still sealed. As he waited on his change, he scanned the bar, trying to determine who might have telephoned him. The small bar's only inhabitants were half a dozen scientists from the North American sector--it could have been any one of them. He sat down at a table. He'd just opened the beer and taken a sip when a man approached him. The man was pale skinned and thin, wearing a jumpsuit, his hair cropped short. Altman guessed he must be a technician of some sort. "You're Altman," the man said. It wasn't a question. "That's right," said Altman. "And you are . ." "I only give my name out to friends," he said. "Are you a friend?" Altman stared at him. "All right," said the man. "Maybe you don't make friends right off the bat. Okay, whatever you think of what I tell you, if anybody asks, you didn't hear it from me." Altman hesitated only a moment. "All right," he said. "Shake on it?" the man suggested. The man extended a hand. Altman took it, shook. "Hammond," the man said, "Charles Hammond." He pulled out the table's other chair and sat down. "Nice to meet you," said Altman. "Now suppose you tell me what's going on." Hammond leaned in closer. "You've been noticing things," he said. "You're not the only one." "No?" said Altman coolly. "I'm in communications. Freelance, mostly industrial installations." He reached out and poked Altman's chest lightly with a finger. "I've been noticing things, too." "Okay . . ." "There's a pulse," Hammond said. "Slow and irregular, and very weak, but strong enough to fuzz up other signals just a little. I'm a perfectionist. When I set something up, I like it to be crystal clear. Things that don't bother other people bother me. That's why I noticed it." He stopped. Altman waited for him to go on. When he didn't, Altman took a sip of hi
s beer and asked. "Noticed what?" Hammond nodded. "Exactly," he said. "At first I thought it was a problem with the communications terminal I was installing for DredgerCorp." "I didn't know DredgerCorp had a place here," interrupted Altman. That, as much as anything, was an indication to him that something odd was going on. DredgerCorp was one of the shadiest of the resource retrieval corporations, the sort of company willing to swoop quickly into an area under the radar of the local government, strip-mine or bore and take as much as they could before it was noticed, and then swoop quickly away again. "Officially they don't. Just got here. Very hush-hush," said Hammond. "I'm not supposed to know who they are. Anyway, at first I thought it was a loose connection, something off just enough to give a minor electrical discharge that gave the line an occasional slight hiss every so often. So I took the thing apart. Nothing wrong with it. So, I put the thing back together. The hiss still came. Sometimes once or twice a minute, lasting a few seconds, sometimes not even that. Maybe you missed something, I told myself. I was just about to take the fucker apart again when I thought maybe I better check another terminal in the same system. Same problem. I was just about to tear DredgerCorp's whole system apart when something dawned on me: maybe it wasn't just in this system but in other places as well." "And?" Hammond nodded. "Everybody's picking it up, but nobody's noticing. It's not a problem with one system. It's an electromagnetic pulse, weak and irregular, broadcasting from somewhere." "So what is it?" "I did some investigating," said Hammond, ignoring Altman's question. "I set up a few receivers, triangulated the pulse. It's irregular enough that it took me a little while to figure out where it's coming from. And when I did, I decided it couldn't be right. So I moved the receivers, triangulated again, and this time I was sure of where it was coming from." "Where?" Hammond leaned even farther in, putting his arm around Altman's shoulders and bringing his lips close to Altman's ear. "Remember," he whispered. "You didn't hear this from me." Altman nodded. "From the crater," whispered Hammond. "From the exact center of Chicxulub crater, under a kilometer or two of muck and rock. Right where you found your anomaly." "Oh my God," said Altman. He explained to Hammond what Ada had been hearing. "Three different things," he said. "All of them leading back to Chicxulub crater." Hammond leaned back, nodding his head. "My thoughts exactly," he said. "Maybe the pulse has been there all the time and nobody noticed it until now. Maybe we're only hearing it now because our equipment is more sensitive. But I think I would have noticed it before now. That's not the kind of thing I miss. But here's my question to you: Is it a pulse or is it a signal?" "A signal?" "It's a little irregular, but it still has a pattern to it. I can't swear to it, but I think it's something that's being deliberately made. Down there, under millions of tons of water and rock." "That doesn't make any sense," said Altman. "No," agreed Hammond. "And it gets stranger." He came in close again, and this time Altman saw something in his eyes, a haunted look. "I told DredgerCorp about the pulse, figure it's my job to do so. I don't want them blaming me for it, want to make it clear that it's something that everybody is experiencing, even if no one's noticing it. And what do you think they say?" "What?" " `Have you told anybody else?' That's an exact quote. Before I know it, they've got me signing a gag order. In exchange for certain monetary considerations, I can't talk about the pulse, not to anybody. I haven't, until now, with you." "What do you think it means?" asked Altman. "What do you think it means? Let me ask you something. Who is the only person that a secure communications system isn't secure from?" "Who?" "The guy who installs it. From me. If you're putting a system in, you can loop yourself into it in a dozen different ways without anybody being the wiser. I do that from time to time as a matter of course, just to keep my wrist limber. A hobby, really." His voice grew almost inaudible. "I did it with DredgerCorp." "And?" "It didn't last long," he said. "Ten days after I put the system in, they tore it out. Flew someone in from the North American sector to do it, someone in- house this time." "They must have known the system wasn't secure." "No way for them to tell," said Hammond. "They couldn't have known for sure. They're on to something. There's something at the bottom of the crater, something valuable, maybe even something unique. Lots of speculation about it from the communications I was able to intercept. But after about three days, things went cryptic; they started coding everything." He reached into his pocket, took out his holopod. "Take a look at this," he said. "Up close. Don't let anyone else see." "What is it?" asked Altman. "You tell me." Altman shielded the holopod in his hands, watched the image that appeared, rotating slowly between his palms. It was just a digitally imaged representation. It was impossible to know what it was made of or what it looked like exactly, but he could get at least some idea. A shimmering three- dimensional shape, in two parts, thick at the base and coming to two points near the top. It was clearly something man-made rather than a natural formation, no doubt about that. Or was that just the digital model making him think that? It reminded him of something. It looked like two separate strands, joined at the bottom, but twisted around each other, though it might have been a single tapering structure with a perforated center. He stared at it a long time, watching it slowly turn. And then he remembered. It was the shape Ada had made with her fingers, crossing them over each other, the sign she'd said many of the villagers were now making. "Tail of the devil," he whispered, not realizing he'd said anything aloud until he saw Hammond's startled expression. He clicked the holopod off, handed it back to Hammond. "I got that off the com system before they tore it out," Hammond said. "According to the message appended to it, they cross-indexed all the information they had--worked with the pulse and the anomaly and probably some other things that neither you nor I are aware of yet. And this is what they came up with. This is what's at the heart of the crater." They sat in silence awhile, staring at their glasses. "So, a pulse starts up," said Altman finally. "Maybe a signal of some sort. Something at the center of the crater, something that appears to be not a natural geological formation but a man-made one." "Constructed, yes," said Hammond, "but who's to say man-made?" "If not man-made, then . . . ," said Altman. And then suddenly he got it. "Shit," he said, "you think it's something inhuman, something alien?" "I don't know what I think," said Hammond. "But yes, that's what some of the folks at DredgerCorp thought." Altman shook his head. "I don't know," he said. He looked nervously around the bar. "Why are you telling me this?" he asked. "Why me?" Hammond jabbed his chest again with his finger. "Because you were asking. This stuff has been going on for a while," he said. "Others must have noticed it. But you're the only one who contacted everyone you thought might have the answer. You know what that tells me? That you don't work for anyone. That you want to know for yourself." "Surely other people are thinking about it, too." "Let me put it this way," said Hammond. "Someone is trying to suppress this. Maybe DredgerCorp, maybe someone bigger than that. A lot of people know what's happening, but nobody's talking about it. Why? Because they've been bought. Why did I talk to you? Because I don't think you've been bought." He drained his bottle dry, then gave Altman a steady stare. "At least not yet," he said.

  9 It was only once he was walking the bruja back to her shanty that things really stopped making sense. One moment she was there, walking beside him, talking softly to him, and then the next she was gone. Not only was she gone, but as he looked back, the only tracks in the sand were his own. He went on, ahead to her shanty. Perhaps she had left him and gone there. Perhaps he had simply not been paying attention. When he arrived, he rapped lightly on the crumpled sheet of tin that served in lieu of a door. Nobody answered. He knocked again, harder this time. Still no answer. He knocked again. And again. Still no answer. In the end, curiosity won out over fear. He took a deep breath and carefully pulled the sheet of tin aside far enough for him to duck inside. It was dark. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust. At first, he couldn't see anything except the shaft of light entering through the crack of the door. But he smelled something, a rich and pungent smell, almost metallic--he couldn't quite place it. Then slowly
he began to make out dim shapes. A table, scattered with indistinct objects. A basin, turned over on the packed earth floor. There, at the far end of the room, he saw a straw-and-grass pallet, and on it, under a tattered blanket, the shape of a body. He called out to her. "Bruja!" The form in the bed didn't move. He moved slowly across the room until he stood just over the bed. Cautiously he reached out and touched the form through the blanket, shook it slightly. "It's me," he said. "Chava." She was on her side. He tugged her over, flipped her onto her back, and the blanket slipped down to reveal the bruja's wide staring eyes and her slit throat. He found a box of matches and with shaking fingers lit the lamp on the floor beside the bed. He pulled the blanket off, saw the knife she held in her death-clenched fist. The blade was brown with her blood. He carefully tugged the knife free and laid it flat on the bed beside her. Her other hand, he saw, was badly cut, long gashes on each of the fingers. Ixtab, he thought. He picked up the lamp and held it close to her face. The cut was jagged and incomplete, the bluish white of her trachea jutting out. She had been dead for some time, hours at least, maybe days. The smell in the room, he realized, was the smell of her blood. How was this possible? He'd just been with her. Or thought he had. Shaking his head, he turned and made for the door, then suddenly stopped. In the lamplight, he saw something else. The walls were covered with crude symbols, like nothing he'd ever seen, odd twisting shapes, inscribed in blood. Shocked, he stared at them. Slowly voices crept into his head, the bruja's among them. He turned and fled.