Far from the Light of Heaven

by Tade Thompson

  Shell’s mouth and throat feel itchy, paper-dry. It is a few seconds before she realises her breath is raspy.

  What the hell, Campion? Contain this.

  She runs her beads, controls her breath, counts. She focuses on the smoothness and the moment, getting from one to the next. She closes her eyes.

  You trained for this.

  Not mass mutilation; not defiled corpses.

  You trained for the unexpected. You trained to be responsible.

  When her body adjusts and her mind stops running in all directions, she speaks.

  “Ragtime, seal bridge.”

  “Yes, Captain.”

  Chapter Five

  Ragtime: Fin, Salvo

  “And that’s when you recorded the message?” asks Fin.

  “Affirmative.”

  Fin can feel her thinking, “these primitive colonials”. Earthfolk often mistakenly see Bloodroot as agrarian because they do not wear their technology on their sleeve. At the edge of his awareness, he is cognisant of his and her IFCs synchronising public data about themselves.

  “That seems like enough for now,” says Fin.

  “I’ll show you to your pods and where you can stash your stuff. Please meet me in the bridge in fifteen minutes.”

  The bridge, if you can call it that, is in Node 1, and Salvo is already there when Fin arrives. Campion is in the cupola watching the sun go down on Bloodroot. Fin wonders why Campion would need to view it right now. The Ragtime literally passes it every ninety minutes. The tugbots stow away gear from the Equivalence, berthed to the Ragtime like a tick. A spherical floatbot trails them – internal comm facilitator. In the bridge, Campion seems calmer, certainly friendlier.

  “Captain, just to summarise what I’ve understood,” says Salvo. “The Ragtime is a passenger ship. You have a standard AI, a software captain, that takes the ship from Earth orbit, through several bridges, to this point in Bloodroot’s orbit. You woke up to find that, for some reason, the AI has gone silent and thirty-one of the passengers are dead, dismembered. Is that about right?”

  “Yes.”

  Fin notices Campion makes a funny hand gesture; must be unconscious, rolling thumb over index finger repetitively.

  “You’ve been running the ship alone?” Fin says.

  “With the bots and the backup basic AI, yes. I’ve been doing the minimum to keep the boat afloat to avoid contamination of the scene.”

  “Will you show us around?” asks Fin.

  “First things first. I need to know that you both understand that I am the captain. For all of our sakes, I need you to do what I say when I say it,” says Campion.

  “Yes, Captain,” says Salvo.

  “Well, hang on a second… Captain. What if you’re the murderer?”

  She thinks for a moment. “Then I’d steal your shuttle and escape to Bloodroot. I’d find a way to disappear.”

  Fin can’t tell if she’s joking. “I’m a repatriator. You wouldn’t get far.”

  “I don’t know what a repatriator is,” says Campion.

  “I find people who don’t want to be found,” says Fin. “Especially aliens.”

  “Fine. How do you propose to vet me?” she asks.

  “We won’t,” says Salvo.

  “You’ll remain a person of interest until we finish the investigation,” says Fin.

  “What does that mean? You’ll lock me up in the brig?”

  “You have a brig?”

  “Figure of speech. Will you lock me up?”

  “No, but we’ll need to know where you’ll be at all times,” says Fin.

  “Where am I going to go?”

  Fin smiles, or at least thinks he is smiling. “Can we get that tour now?”

  “Not yet. We need a schedule,” says Campion.

  “What now?”

  “You haven’t been listening.” She gestures all around her. “Big ship; need maintenance. We all have to chip in or we crash into Bloodroot. I have been running this alone, and there aren’t any extant protocols for the eventuality of mass murder, so I’ve had to improvise. I’m correcting work details, adjusting to your presence.”

  “We will be honoured to help,” says Salvo.

  “Glad to hear it. I’ll get your work plans to you as soon as I can. Let’s go.”

  Fin throws his hands up and mouths “honoured?” to Salvo, mock annoyed.

  This far from the airlock, the sensory texture has returned. Always that smell of rubber and ozone, the sound of humming machinery, the subtle vibrations.

  Service bots scuttle out of the way like small animals in a forest. Campion launches from the grab rail of each node and propels all the way through to the next node. Fin and Salvo follow.

  They emerge in a corridor labelled Node 6, where there is more space and nothing is tethered to the wall for storage. Campion somersaults and faces them, finally. Fin collides with her gently. She does not wear perfume. Fin hates low grav.

  “We are off the main truss in the aft spokes leading into the aft torus, which is a passenger area.”

  After fifteen minutes they open a hatch, which Campion flies through and waves Fin and Salvo into. She seals the hatch and launches to grab rails directly opposite which she signals them to emulate.

  When they are secure, she says, “Ragtime.”

  “Captain,” says the disembodied voice.

  “Spin Torus 2.”

  “Yes, Captain. How fast?”

  Campion looks at Fin with contempt. “Better make it four RPM. We have beginners here.”

  Once the rotation rate is further cut down to two RPM – Fin cannot tolerate any higher because of nausea and dizziness – they have artificial gravity.

  “You can get to either of the toruses from the truss by the spokes; there is no direct route from one torus to another that excludes the truss. This is the passenger area. Each torus has five hundred and fifty pods for them to sleep in.”

  With gravity, there is a better sense of up and down. Walking is welcome, and room is welcome. Trust the company to leave the shittiest areas for crew. They look at an empty pod first. It’s rectangular, maybe five-by-ten feet, white, clinical, dominated by the bed, which Campion calls a cradle, and the inert medbot fixed to the wall. The temperature in the pod is noticeably cooler.

  “Do you freeze them for the trip?” asks Fin.

  “No, that would kill them. We cool them to slow their metabolism. We tube feed, catheterise and wipe them. Or rather, the bots do. We anaesthetise them for the journey and insert them into the Ragtime Dreamstate.”

  Campion takes them to an occupied pod. There are red indicator lights on the outside. The pod has no window, but a large monitor takes up space outside. Campion punches in an override and they look in.

  “Obviously, we lock the pods. Passengers are exposed and vulnerable,” says Campion.

  “Who has authorisation to enter the pods once occupied?” asks Fin.

  “Me. The Captain, the original captain. The rescue robots can override anything in the event of a catastrophic event.”

  “Could I open it from the outside?” asks Fin.

  “Try it.”

  “Salvo’s much stronger.”

  “Salvo can try it.”

  “I’ve seen the specs, Captain. I don’t need to try,” says Salvo.

  “Can we see the ones in which the occupants were killed?” says Fin.

  They look at five. There is nothing remarkable about the pods. Clean. Empty, save inert medbots. The doors have not been damaged.

  “May we see the bodies, Captain?” asks Salvo.

  Like any large spacecraft, the Ragtime has several refrigerators, some truly huge. Campion had ordered a makeshift morgue and, from the looks of it, the bots improvised by merging smaller spaces. The body parts have not been assembled, just stored in the most convenient positions. It seems disrespectful to Fin, but these are not reflective beings. They do as they’re told, to whatever extent subtlety is added to their instructions. Campion
instructs the Ragtime to construct paper-polymer surgical gloves and masks for Salvo and Fin using their observed dimensions. Artificials can’t get diseases, but they can store pathogens like any object, and the protection is for Campion, Fin and the hundreds of sleeping passengers.

  “How do we do this?” asks Fin.

  “Start with the heads,” says Salvo. “Arrange them on the floor tiles. As many as you can find.”

  “You know what you are doing?” asks Campion.

  “This is why I was sent,” says Salvo.

  “All right. I’ll leave you to it. I can spare two mobile med units. Will that suffice?” Campion is on the way out of the door as if she is not really listening for the response.

  “For now,” says Salvo.

  “How will we reach you if we need to?” says Fin.

  Campion points to the floating orb. “Speak to these. The Ragtime will not respond to your voices as it does not know you. The Captain would have learned, but this… anyway. Yes.”

  The work turns bloody quickly as the ice melts from Fin’s and Salvo’s body heat. The bots arrive and station themselves where Campion stood before, and Salvo’s IFC syncs with theirs. His eyes glaze over and Fin looks away. He digs out the head of a green-haired teenager that seems frozen solid, the kid’s mouth open in a silent agony.

  Salvo

  Salvo snaps off his awareness from the task of assembling mutilated bodies. A fraction of him prepares to review his previous contact with Rasheed Fin.

  Six years ago, they met, Salvo a shining new construct off the assembly line, Fin a talented rookie. Five years ago, they worked their first case: Grey haze. Dozens of people reporting a dust storm in the north. Grey dust, as if from a desert, visibility down to two inches or so. The trouble was, none of the cameras or Artificials saw any problem. There was no haze, but the humans were seeing one. They gave the case to Fin not because it was an easy case to cut his teeth on, but because nobody wanted it. Fin had smiled throughout. He had six thousand people tested for infections, especially encephalitis. When that turned up nothing, he interviewed them and gained permission for IFC dives. He perused five and came out prematurely.

  “I know where it is.”

  He led Salvo right to the Lamber and repatriated it without fuss. In two days, the fog had cleared from all but the most chronic associates of the alien. In a year, nobody remembered the incident.

  A year after everyone forgot, there were house fires in Feline Oracle. Nobody thought anything of it – as in, nobody thought they were arson jobs. And they weren’t. Not really. Apathy fires, where the house owners just left stoves and lanterns and electrical appliances on for too long; whenever the owners were found alive, they were always in a catatonic stupor. Most of them choked to death on fumes, their corpses burned. Salvo could not work out Fin’s algorithm. He plotted the fires on a map, stared at it, and said, “Let’s take a ride.” They drove straight to a nest of four Lambers linked to a “queen” and repatriated them all. Fin’s reputation grew.

  Then, the serial killer in Ciscoburg and the choreomania in Dolapo’s Pass. Fin solved them all and made it look easy; he had just enough intuition mixed with his logic. Six years they have known each other, five of those working cases together. Fin’s last case, the one that got him into trouble… Salvo was not involved. He had a human partner.

  Salvo wants to believe that if he had been there, Fin would not have been suspended.

  Looking at him now, Salvo can tell that Fin has lost a softness, a light-heartedness. Time will tell whether this will help or hurt matters… time will tell.

  Salvo replaces a liver…

  Chapter Six

  Space Station Lagos: Lawrence

  Lawrence Biz appends his digital signature to seventeen documents before taking a break by throwing food to carp in the outdoor rock pool from his bench. They slip towards the bits of nourishment lazily, like courtesans unimpressed with a suitor’s gift. He’s overfed them. Lawrence smiles. He’s indulgent to fish like he is to his daughter.

  The simulated sunlight and birdsong are convincing today, especially to someone who has lived with the real thing. It makes him wonder if he’s been away from planets too long. He does nine more documents before dipping into the fish food again. At least the fish are real. The plaque says Cyprinus rubrofuscus, which is Chinese carp, or koi. These ones are first-generation from Earth and twenty-two years old – about as old as Lawrence’s daughter, Joké. He returns to the boring work. Though they are legal documents, amendments to by-laws and eyes-only acknowledgements, he does not read before signing. They can’t change them without his authorisation, although he is never consulted on the actual changes. Ceremonial guy.

  He is meant to be here with Joké, but she doesn’t show. This is not unusual for her, and the reason he brought fish food with him. He finds himself renewed by the carp. Cheaper than a massage, easier than therapy. He gets a notification for a meeting with Beko. Odiferous Beko. The only thing Lawrence finds more boring than a meeting with Beko is document ratification.

  This meeting invitation seems more insistent than others, making Lawrence wonder what the problem is. The sky has not fallen, or he would have heard about it. The integrity is good, the miners aren’t on strike, otherwise, the news feed would have told him. Lagos is not at war with anyone – not that they ever have been, but you never know. So far, war has been restricted to the home planet, Earth. No wars in the Brink, and all the systems would like to keep it that way. No huffing and puffing, no brinksmanship, no posturing; remarkable for Homo sapiens, really. If only they behaved that way on Earth. Lawrence has attended the congresses, and he agrees with their wishes broadly, but he knows that war is one of those inevitabilities like cancer or an asteroid strike. Most Lagosians don’t feel that way, but most Lagosians have never left the space station.

  His IFC pulses with the need to respond, but Lawrence hesitates. He watches the carp and, when the urge comes upon him, feeds them from the bag. Not many people come to this level any more, and the signage is in Yoruba and English. Most of the people on Lagos are spaceborn, Generations of the Brink. The Earth language Yoruba is still prevalent, along with French, Arabic, Cantonese and Mandarin. Lawrence himself speaks Yoruba, pestered by parents who half-remembered and supplemented their knowledge with network feeds. Lawrence is the only one of his family to have visited Lagos – the original Lagos, in Nigeria, on Earth – where they laughed at his space-learned Yoruba and took him to parties and clubs every night of the week he spent there. Lawrence tells people he’s from Earth, but it isn’t true.

  Lawrence grew up in the Waikiki system, on a planet called Skeem.

  As a child, Lawrence flips the pages fast, searching the pictures, not the text. He comes to a diagram of the solar system, with planets diagrammatically circling the sun, full page, in colour. Should be elliptical, but he’s not choosy. He rips the page out and replaces the book on the shelf. He folds the paper carefully and pockets it, then sprints for the back of the library, running his torch beam across the spines of books, hoping that something will catch his eye, though nothing does this time. He kills the torchlight.

  He works his way out of the toilet window and lands on the grass.

  Light returns, and he thinks the impact switched the torch on again, but it’s not his torch.

  “Anything broken?” asks the uniformed guard.

  Lawrence shakes his head.

  “Let’s go ask your parents why they permitted you to be out of the house after dark, shall we?”

  His parents, of course, have no idea that Lawrence has been stealing out at night, breaking into the library and building a personal astronomy resource centre in a derelict car on their street. He has books, journals, hand-written notes and posters ripped from texts.

  Getting caught turns out to be a good thing. The librarian says he ought to be encouraged, not punished. His father, a rickshaw driver, disagrees. They both have their way, and Lawrence fills out application forms whil
e sitting on bruised, welt-covered buttocks.

  He ends up with a special scholarship to a space academy on Earth, and when he graduates he immediately joins NASA after rebuffing three private firms. He’s fast-tracked to interstellar work. This starts his career, which ends in Space Station Lagos in politics.

  Lawrence signals Joké one last time without much hope. The girl is capricious at the best of times, and he has never been able to keep track of her. He waits five minutes, then rises, leaving the fish food for whoever comes to the bench after him. Some kids who are too young to be unsupervised hang out on this segment from time to time. Lawrence does not think they know who he is. He heads for the lift and calls up the IFC to signal his intention to be at the meeting. It promptly informs him that he is five minutes late, and the quorum is waiting for him to arrive before they start. Lawrence does not hurry.

  Things weren’t always thus. He took this post ten years past and he was by inches marginalised, although deep down he wants to step down and retire. Leadership was and is a mistake. He knows it’s something they want, but a stubborn streak makes him refuse to quit until they come out and say it.

  The meeting, the entire government of Lagos. Lawrence, the governor: an entirely ceremonial position for an entirely ceremonial person. Beko, a substantial woman and a woman of substance, the true power, at the head of the table. She calls herself the Secretary, which is vague enough. Lawrence likes her and is especially attentive when she speaks, mindful of the paradox. She is dismissive of him. Everybody is dismissive of him, so he does not take it personal.

  “Good, we can start,” Beko says.

  “Sorry I’m late,” says Lawrence, but he’s not sorry.

  “Lagos, no minutes,” says Beko.

  “Yes, Secretary Beko,” responds the space station.

  Beko clears her throat. “The last ship to traverse the bridge was the Ragtime, bound for Bloodroot. A minor concern around here is that the Captain has not sent confirmation of arrival. Today we intercepted a message from the acting captain, Michelle Campion, to Earth.”