Lightless

by C. A. Higgins

  “What? No. My mother doesn’t have any revolutionary—”

  “Is it Alaina Purcell?” Ida had a list of Milla Ivanov’s associates; if she was lucky, one of them would provoke a reaction from Ivan.

  “My mother has no revolutionary contacts.” The polygraph showed that Ivan’s heart was beating fast.

  “Is it Julian Keys?”

  “I don’t—”

  “Jesse Carter?”

  “I don’t know anything about my mother’s affairs,” Ivan shouted, breaking into Ida’s litany of names, “and she doesn’t have any connection to the Mallt-y-Nos!”

  Ida smiled at him.

  “All right,” she said.

  “All right?” Ivan repeated warily, his fingers jittering a patternless beat against the edge of his chair.

  Ida said, “Now I’d like to hear about Constance Harper.”

  —

  Althea woke as suddenly and unexpectedly as if a sound had triggered her waking, but when she opened her eyes to the dimness of her room, it was silent.

  When she looked at her bedside clock, she sat up with a curse.

  Gagnon had been supposed to wake her for her shift; he had, in fact, been supposed to wake her three hours ago. For a moment Althea worried that something had gone wrong before she realized that the far more likely explanation was that Gagnon had decided to let her sleep. It didn’t seem to matter; even with the extra hours, she still felt exhausted.

  Oversleeping at least explained why her dreams had been so strange. When facing a computer problem, she sometimes dreamed in code; she had even solved several tricky problems in REM. The dream she’d been having right before she woke, faded and indistinct as it was becoming, had started off as a dream of code.

  But the code had not been the Ananke’s, as she’d thought, but rather the Annwn’s, and when Althea tried to find where her computer had gone, she had run all the way to the base of the ship, where was the black hole that was her heart, and she had opened the door and looked inside, past the dead man’s switch, but the black hole had swollen in size, and she stared at blackness right before her face. When she reached into the event horizon of the black hole, her hand came up dripping with a dark liquid that was not black but red, and in the black hole’s place was a vast and beating heart.

  Then she had woken.

  Althea walked over to the intercom, took a moment to ensure that her half-sleeping mind would be capable of forming words, and then punched the talk button.

  “Gagnon,” she said.

  There was a pause that probably indicated that he was putting whatever he was doing on hold so that he could come and answer her but that Althea liked to imagine was awkward, Gagnon hesitating with his finger right over the intercom.

  “Althea!” Gagnon said. “You’re awake.”

  “You were supposed to wake me.”

  This time the pause was certainly deliberate. “Oops?” he said. He did not sound particularly repentant.

  “I’m getting dressed,” said Althea. “I’ll be down in a minute.” She tried to make it sound like a threat. She wasn’t certain Gagnon was impressed.

  With a sigh, she pulled off her soft sleeping pants, tossing them on the rumpled covers, following them with her underwear, but swiftly pulling on another pair. She had long grown accustomed to the watching cameras, but the habit of privacy remained, so ingrained that she hardly remembered that the cameras were the reason for it, except at times like this, when the integrity of the cameras was called into question.

  The cameras. She paused. She knew that the camera in her room was not working. Its light was still on as if it were recording, but if it was recording, it was recording somewhere deep in the Ananke’s data banks, not being broadcast to the System, and it was likely—almost certain—that no one except the computer would ever see it.

  Slowly, Althea took off her sleeping shirt, tossing it onto the bed beside the pants. She crossed her arms automatically over her chest, then made herself uncross them. She turned to the mirror mounted on the wall and looked.

  There was more of her own olive-toned skin to be seen than she was used to seeing. Her hair was a tangled mess from sleeping, the curls turned into frizz and twisting out from her heart-shaped face like fraying wires. Without a bra, she was heavy and loose, and her hips were wider than they looked in her baggy uniform. She did not look at all the way she imagined in her head when she thought about herself, and the strange thought occurred to her unbidden that she looked like one of those ancient earthenware figurines of a mother, large-breasted, wide-hipped, with arms outstretched in acceptance.

  The computer interface in the corner of the room turned on.

  She saw the sudden glow out of the corner of her eye and turned sharply away from the mirror. There was no one else in the room. The computer had turned on by itself.

  Althea reached over and grabbed her shirt from the top of the crumpled covers, pulling it over her head and down over her chest while she kicked through the piles of discarded clothes on the floor so that she could stand before the computer.

  The screen before her was flashing between images. At first it was so fast that Althea could not pick out any of them but was left with a strong sense of unease, as if whatever she saw her mind recognized unconsciously without being able to put it into words. After a moment, however, the flashing images slowed down.

  Ancient sailing ships. Althea watched white sails and wooden hulls flicker before her eyes before being replaced by wooden rooms—the inside of the ships, Althea realized after a time. The images were old enough that they were from before photographs; they had been sketched in pen and scanned.

  The images were flashing so quickly that it was some time before she realized that all the wooden rooms had one thing in common: somewhere in the room, crawling inside the walls or poking their heads out through holes in the wall, were black-furred rats.

  A list interrupted the flashing images. At first it was too fast for Althea to read, and then she didn’t know the words; she saw “rabies” and “Yersina pestis,” though, and those she knew. It was a list of diseases, viruses carried by rats.

  There was a scratching sound that took Althea a moment to realize was coming from the computer, growing ever louder, a scratching sound like human nails on rough metal, like the sound of rodents gnawing through wood, like—like—

  The computer shut off again without any warning, leaving afterimages of ancient ships and lists of plagues burned into Althea’s mind.

  When she tried to turn it back on, the computer would not respond no matter what she did. Althea dressed—in her usual manner again, baring her skin for only the briefest of seconds before zipping up her uniform jumpsuit—and left the room to talk to Gagnon, fighting the strange, insistent feeling that there was something important she was failing to understand.

  —

  By the time Althea reached the piloting room, where Gagnon was waiting, she had put thoughts of the strange images on the computer in her room from her mind. As the malfunctions had gone lately, that was a harmless one, and she had more important concerns: today Gagnon would be working on the Ananke while Althea, by decree of Ida Stays, would be working on the Annwn.

  She hated it that an arrogant woman who knew nothing about computers got to dictate who would do what where. It was clear to anyone with sense that the Ananke was more important than the Annwn. Nothing would happen if the Annwn remained unexplored. But the Ananke was what was keeping them all alive.

  Gagnon was waiting for her in the control room for debriefing before they went their separate ways. Because of the cyclic nature of their sleep and work shifts, he had been working on the Ananke for several hours while Althea slept, but she wanted to check in regardless before wasting the rest of her day on an unfamiliar and rebellious machine. He was sitting in the chair before the navigation equipment, dwarfed by the main viewscreen, which was showing a 360-degree view of the space around the Ananke, nothing but black studded with sparks of wh
ite. “Good morning,” he said, swiveling the chair around to face her. His red hair was coming loose from its thong and hung around his face, and his jaw was turning orange with stubble.

  Perhaps her resentment over the Annwn had been the cause of her strange and disturbing dream. “How is she?” Althea asked, and meant the Ananke.

  “The computer? The computer is awful,” said Gagnon. “I can’t run any simulations; I can barely even check to make sure we’re on course. Whenever I try to trace the errors, I get nothing. Have you been having any luck? Because I’ve got all of nothing after five hours of work.”

  “I’ve had some success,” Althea said. It was a lie, but at least she had been able to fix some of the symptoms on the Ananke when they appeared. The Annwn had been a waste of her time. Besides, Gagnon was a theorist. He’d never had any patience for practical minutiae. Although years of collaboration had softened their initial exasperation with each other into agreeable—even fond—mutual incomprehension, Althea was not surprised to hear about his lack of success.

  “Really?”

  “Really,” Althea said. “Let’s talk about what you’re going to do today while I’m out.”

  “I’m going to try to fix the computer,” Gagnon said dutifully. “I’m going to try to track the source of the errors on the list you gave me”—he held up a list, with most of the entries already crossed out—“and keep a log of what I find”—he held up a pad of paper with woefully little in the way of notes on it—“and wonder if it wouldn’t be easier just to take the computer offline.”

  Althea had been in the process of resigning herself emotionally to the fact that whatever Gagnon was doing today she was going to have to do herself on her own time once she was done with the Annwn, when his last words caught her attention. “You want to what?”

  “We can run the ship manually,” Gagnon said. “We’re already running most of the onboard systems manually, with the autonomous drones offline. It wouldn’t be that much of a stretch to take over the navigation and the rest. The part of the computer that’s giving us trouble is the higher-level functioning, after all.”

  “You want to lobotomize her?” Althea demanded.

  Gagnon sighed. “Althea…”

  “You won’t be able to run your experiments if the computer is offline.”

  He raised a finger. “I can run some of them,” he said, “which is better than none.” Althea did not know what he saw in her expression, but it made him throw his hands up defensively. “Look, I’m not going to—I’m not going to do anything to your computer without you telling me,” he said. “I’m just throwing it into consideration, all right?”

  “Consider it considered,” said Althea, and walked out of the room.

  —

  “Tell me about Constance,” Ida said.

  “She’s a pretty woman,” Ivan said, then looked her over and allowed, “You might be prettier.”

  “That’s very kind,” said Ida, allowing the slightest curl of a smile. She leaned one hip up onto the table, on the opposite side of the polygraph, keeping Ivan’s attention on her.

  “I just don’t want you to be jealous,” Ivan explained.

  “I don’t get jealous, Ivan,” Ida said. It was only partly a lie. “It’s been months since you saw Constance last. Why is that?”

  “We had a strong difference of opinion.”

  Ida leaned in.

  “You should know by now,” she said, “that that’s not quite enough detail to satisfy me.”

  He tilted his head up at her, his face angled her way, his eyes unreadable, his lips softened into parting as if he were about to speak. Ida leaned over him, staring at him chained in place beneath her, for a moment too long before he said, “Six months ago Mattie and I took Con on a vacation to the moon.”

  “Why?” Ida asked. The trip to the moon had always troubled her. It gave Ivan and Gale a solid alibi for the riots on Triton despite Ida’s certainty that the Mallt-y-Nos had been involved in the event. The same riots had, conveniently for the two men, distracted the System enough that they were not caught during their vacation on Luna.

  Ivan shrugged. “Because she’d always wanted to go.”

  “What about the surveillance? Weren’t any of you worried about being caught?”

  “Mattie and I assumed we wouldn’t be there long enough to matter. We weren’t very high priority for the System, or at least we didn’t think so.” He gave her a wry look. “And Con thought that we worked odd jobs. Traveling salesmen sometimes, freelance computer repairmen.”

  Ida laughed. Constance Harper must be a delightfully trusting—that is to say, stupid—kind of woman. Perhaps that was why Ivan had liked her. “Did she really?”

  Ivan grinned. “Maybe a part of her suspected something, in the back of her mind, but yeah, she believed it.”

  “But you were wrong, weren’t you?” Ida asked, and enjoyed Ivan’s swift frown, the way the polygraph jumped with brief alarm. She kept her expression smooth as she clarified, “About the surveillance, I mean.”

  “Right,” Ivan said, recovering. The tremble in his hands their discussion of Milla Ivanov had induced was fading away, but he was still drumming that patternless patter against the edge of his chair, apparently on automatic. “Someone saw us with Connie, recognized us, connected us to Con, and interrogated her.”

  “She wasn’t very happy,” Ida said. It was not a question. She had been present at the interrogation, watching from behind the glass. Constance Harper had not seemed trusting and stupid then, only angry.

  “I heard from a mutual friend about it,” said Ivan, and Ida filed away the identity of the mutual friend as an item to be investigated later. “The interrogators told her about what Mattie and I really did, and she was…um, pissed.”

  The word was an understatement.

  “She told some mutual friends about it and expressed some sentiment to the effect that she never wanted to see us again. Something about lying to her. What she was really mad about,” said Ivan, “was that we almost got her arrested.”

  “Is that so?” Ida asked.

  Ivan nearly smiled. It looked like an accident, like an unaffected honest reaction to whatever was going on in his head, but Ida doubted it. “Constance is a good citizen. She was a foster child like Mattie, on the outer planets. It was a huge move for her to open her own business on Mars. She likes the System. She’s comfortable in it. She wants to be good and obey.”

  “And she wants that more than she cares for you?” Ida asked. “Or her little brother?”

  “Foster brother,” Ivan corrected, as if the distinction were important. “And yes, she does. She really would turn us in if we tried to get in contact with her. Constance,” he went on, peculiarly precise, “is a woman of principle, and she values her principles more than her friends.”

  Ida could not tell if he spoke with more bitterness or admiration. Perhaps that was it, why Ivan had been with Constance, that confounding mixture of admiration and dislike.

  When Constance and Ivan were in the same room together, there seemed to be little in the way of affection. From the spotty surveillance of Constance Harper’s bar—the Fox and the Hound was situated atop a scarp in one of the more rural regions of Mars, and surveillance frequently was distorted or disrupted by the fast winds and fine red dust—Ida had seen them almost always shouting at each other. Yet even in a room full of people, each one seemed to have a keen sense for the other, as if each were a magnet and they kept being drawn together. In a crowd, the crowd would look to Constance, who was tall and self-assured, but Constance, it seemed, would look to Ivan.

  She had wondered for a while if Ivan’s attraction to Constance Harper was because Constance Harper was a good woman and perhaps Ivan craved that safe, System-approved life he’d abandoned. Constance wasn’t unattractive, but she wasn’t beautiful: plain brown hair kept long and shoulders damaged by the weak Martian sun into freckling, tall and flat and skinny, with a long face and a wide mouth, always
dressed to work. So that could not be why. But perhaps it was her inflexibility, her rigidity, that kept Ivan bound to her, so that being with her was a punishment because she made it so.

  Or perhaps Constance had just been easy: willing and available, already connected to Ivan through Matthew Gale.

  “She wouldn’t even try to save you, Ivan?” Ida asked. “Turn you from your life of crime?”

  “Certainly not.”

  “Straight to jail, then.”

  “Black and white,” said Ivan. “That’s how Connie thinks.”

  “And there’s no possibility,” said Ida, “that Connie might allow for a little gray area if she thought it was for the best?”

  “Tell me exactly what you’re asking, Ida,” said Ivan.

  “Would Constance,” Ida asked, “support the Mallt-y-Nos?”

  Ivan laughed. It was a curious laugh, tinged—almost—with what Ida thought might be traces of suppressed hysteria.

  “No, she wouldn’t,” he said. “That would be against her principles.”

  —

  Trying to crack the Annwn was more like trying to solve a riddle than trying to hack a computer.

  When Althea turned the Annwn’s computer back on, keeping it disconnected from the rest of the Annwn, the computer went immediately into hysterics.

  WHERE’S MY BODY WHERE’S MY BODY WHERE’S MY BODY WHERE’S MY BODY WHERE’S MY BODY WHERE’S MY—

  “Shut up, calm down,” Althea muttered, but for a long time the computer would not be calmed, would not let her type, only kept up that frantic repetition, as if its simulated fear could affect Althea. She managed to silence it only when she remembered her conversation with Ivanov and typed, “Annie, shut up.”

  The words ceased their scrolling. Althea’s order had terminated them in midsentence.

  WHO ARE YOU? asked the computer while Althea was still trying to decide what to do now that the machine’s resistance had ceased so unexpectedly.

  Althea hesitated, then typed, “Annie, override security measures.”

  NO. The machine let the flat refusal linger before asking again, I CAN’T SEE. WHO ARE YOU?