Heiresses of Russ 2015

by Jean Roberta

  The medic hovered over her with her handheld scanner. Gita barely noticed. Her mind was still spinning with it, with what she’d seen down there, liquid flowing and forming into a god-like thing. No, not liquid exactly, because if she had this right, that azure pool was teeming with the blue algae. Cells, tiny creatures. Millions, maybe billions of them, coming together like the cells that organised to form the pavement mosaic layers of her skin, or that pulsed through those blue veins so fragile along her wrists.

  Gita looked up from where she’d been staring at her own hands.

  “I saw it,” she said slowly. “It was what people saw, what they wrote about. You know, the gods, the ones who cry the blue tears, I saw it…”

  The young medic goggled at her briefly, then frowned, leaned in with the scanner again.

  “Dr G, did you hit your head when you fell?”

  Gita sighed. No one read old electronic media any more, did they? No one cared about the legends. But—if what they had in those little vials was what she thought it was—that was going to change.

  •

  “I don’t want anyone messing around down there,” she said to Min, back at the office. “I don’t want anyone touching the site, or any of those volcanic shafts. I don’t want anyone going near it without my supervision.”

  “Oh?” Min raised an eyebrow, from the other side of her desk. She had one foot drawn up onto her chair, chin resting on her knee—typical Min—and her eyes were keen. “Well, nice to see you taking an interest in something at last. Maybe the near-death experience was just what you needed to snap you out of it. Bit extreme though, don’t you think?”

  “It wasn’t anything like that,” Gita said. “It was just a few bruises. I’ve had worse.” In truth she was stiff and sore all over; walking gingerly as an old woman in the morning and pressing her palms into her back when no one was looking. Now, though, she shrugged off the pain.

  “You know the protocols for dealing with exospecies,” she said.

  “Of course I do,” Min returned. “I wrote half of ’em, didn’t I? But they’re intended for higher species, not slimes and algaes or whatever.”

  “They’re not algae like the stuff you get on a pond back home. They’re protozoa, as far as I can tell from the samples we did get, single-celled organisms. But they’re more than that, they’re self-assembling into something bigger. Into a higher species. Like, you know, how an ant colony or a swarm of bees does. We need to get a linguist in, that’s the protocol. Nothing about them without them, isn’t that how you put it?”

  Min clicked her tongue, frowned at her across the desk. “Bees are pretty amazing things,” she admitted. “But, you know, they don’t actually talk to people.”

  “It wasn’t actually bees, that was a goddamn analogy.” Gita crossed her arms, faced Min down. “We’re doing this properly, or not at all.”

  “Since when were you, of all people, so bothered with protocol?” Min asked. “If this is what you say, there’s going to be some big interest in it, this could be huge for you.”

  Gita just shrugged. She didn’t know herself why she was doing this, didn’t know how to name or define the feelings she had. She just knew that the god-creature she’d seen was something to be protected, guarded. That no one was going to touch it without her saying so, no one was going to take another being she loved from this place where it belonged, where it was supposed to be, where it was supposed to live out its life and pour its dying tears into the dry ground to begin the cycle over again.

  Change, I don’t want anything to change. Not yet. I’m not ready.

  •

  “So, hey,” Min said, as Gita swung by the office on her way to check on her samples. “I got you that linguist you were asking for.”

  “Already?” Gita asked, a little dismayed. She’d hoped for more time—for what, she wasn’t sure. More time to study, to understand. She’d come to like just spending time with the little blue creatures, hoarding them close to herself—these tiny things that migrated and clung to each other in their gel dish like raindrops on a leaf, some innate longing for each other in the very atoms of their chemistry.

  Not like Silv, her cells refusing to cooperate, turning against each other, mutinying against their higher purpose. If only someone had seen it that way at the time. Could they have been persuaded, negotiated with? Could the errant cells have been gathered up and returned prodigal to start over? Gita sighed.

  “You found someone pretty quick,” she said. “For out here, anyway. They are actually qualified, aren’t they?”

  “She, not they,” Min said with one of her wicked winks. “She’s supposed to be pretty good.”

  She, not they. As if you could gather up the pieces of a shattered woman and put them back together with no more than a trick of language. She wasn’t likely to be that good.

  •

  Anne was her name. A spare, scholarly-looking woman with her grey hair close-cropped, she came into Min’s office with a tentative shyness odd for her age.

  “Hi,” Gita said tiredly, making the effort to lift her eyes and look at the newcomer properly. She should at least be polite.

  “Ap se milkar khushi huyee,” Anne said in Hindi, with a quick little smile. Pleased to meet you. Gita blinked. How long had it been, how did the words sound so strange and yet as familiar as the scent of magnolia in a long-ago garden and grazed knees from forbidden climbing.

  Anne’s smile became hesitant.

  “I’m sorry, I thought…”

  “No,” Gita said. She felt a smile start to come to her face as well, the odd stretch of it stranger than the shape of those ancient words in her mouth. “No, it’s all right. I was just surprised.”

  “Told you she was good,” Min said, looking pleased with herself. “Anne worked on the cetacean language project, back in the day. Looking for the next challenge, apparently.”

  Is that what I am?

  “It was a bit like a dolphin,” Gita explained again for Anne’s benefit, a bit tersely this time, fearing mockery or doubt. “The thing I saw. In the shape it made, the way it was using liquid and air to make sounds. And it was like bees, too, that’s what I thought of afterwards. Like a swarm of them, all those little protozoa coming together to make a whole something, and I’d swear it was trying to talk to me. I mean, I know bee swarms don’t talk…”—she trailed off self-consciously, aware of Min’s sceptical gaze.

  “Actually, they do.” Anne flashed her a glance of startling blue eyes. “Split off into groups and communicate with each other, it’s a kind of dance-based language. I mean, obviously we’ve known that for a while, but there’s been some interesting work recently, starting to look like it’s a lot more complicated than we thought. I’d be fascinated to take a look at this discovery of yours.”

  “Well,” Gita said. She refrained from looking around at Min: What did I tell you? “I need to go out there to return the samples,” she said to Anne instead. “You can come along, if you like.”

  “I’ll put a team together,” Min began, swivelling back towards her screen.

  “No.” Gita cut her off before she could get started. “Just the two of us. I don’t want the site disturbed. Protocol, remember?”

  Min quirked an eyebrow.

  “Protocol. Of course.”

  •

  Anne was a quiet companion on the trek, and that was a solace to Gita’s silence-accustomed soul; a relief after Min’s relentless tight-wound energy and a welcome change from boisterous young interns of her last trip. Anne had gazed out of the window of the vehicle as Gita drove, her eyes on the odd-shaped mountain range, alert but contemplative. When they’d gotten out to walk, she’d hefted her pack—heavy with her recording equipment—without complaint, declining Gita’s offer of help.

  “Thank you, it’s fine.” She smiled, self-deprecating. “I’m quite strong, actually.”

  She was, Gita was starting to realise. That fragile-looking build belied a wiry strength, a distance-runne
r’s body. Not like Silv, with her tumbling amber curls and ready laugh and that softness, the generous roundedness of her. Anne couldn’t have been more different. But she had a deep stillness about her that was like cool water in the desert. No rings on any of her fingers.

  As they approached the place, they went quietly, walking with soft steps. No words. Anne watched while Gita anchored the ropes, carefully. A multi-point system based in the hard-packed sand, not the crumble-prone rock. She was taking no chances this time. Someday, if all went according to plan—Min and the Survey’s plans, that was—there’d be permanent steps, safety-approved according to protocol, pulleys for getting equipment up and down. But not today.

  Gita went first, no dramatic falls this time, just her feet touching lightly on the smooth-worn stone of the ledge. Anne followed quietly, competently, following Gita’s instructions to the letter. They stood and contemplated the lagoon for a while, the surface shimmering blue-dark in the light of their torches.

  “This is where the blue rain comes from?” Anne asked at length.

  “Vents like this, yes. This one here’s been dormant ten years, likely will be for a while yet. There was one a few kilometres from here blew the other week though, and we had the rain.” And everything changed. “The volcanic eruptions denature the cell membranes; that’s how I understand it, the copper-bound proteins dissolve into the water that gets forced up into the atmosphere, into the clouds.”

  “Tears of the gods,” Anne said. She extended her hand towards the blue surface as if in sympathy. “I see why now.”

  Gita nodded, surprised, and yet not surprised somehow.

  You understand.

  Anne knelt down to unpack her recording equipment and set it up around the cavern. With respectful care, she slipped the wired probes into the blue water, drawing back gingerly as though she expected it to erupt before her.

  No god rose up out of the depths. The surface breathed though, ripples spreading outwards, in response to the touch. Below there was movement. Low vocalisations echoed in the depths, trilling in and out of audible frequency, bouncing off the rock walls of the pools.

  Anne knelt in rapt silence, glancing from the turbid waters to the screen on her recording device and back again, her gaze intent.

  “That’s amazing,” she whispered at last, looking up at Gita with a grin of genuine delight that it tore at her not to return.

  “You know what they’re saying?”

  “Not yet, there’ll be a lot of analysis to do. But it’s a language for sure. It’s enough. We’ll understand, don’t worry. I can do this. Amazing though, it’s like nothing else we’ve seen.”

  “This could be huge for you, then? Being lead researcher on a project like this?”

  “Well, it’s the same for you, surely, on the biology side? Your manager, Min, she was talking about the applications for cancer models. She said you had some ideas already?”

  “Only tentative ones,” Gita admitted. So tentative she hardly dared voice them. But a flood of ideas all the same, just from looking at the way those cells assembled, cooperated. There was a torrent of questions too: how did they deal with the cells that didn’t cooperate, how could a being split apart and reorganise like that, recovering from the kind of catastrophe that would devastate any other organism? And was it the same being, afterwards, not some randomly composed other thing? Did it remember what it had been before?

  Gita chewed her lip, biting back the longing for knowledge and understanding that used to drive her on. She’d thought that had died inside her ten years ago. That enthusiasm that wanted to rise up and respond to the call of this other woman’s quiet excitement. She barely knew how to let that happen anymore, barely dared to try.

  “That’s far off,” she said.

  “Sure, but we’ll get there.”

  Gita drew a breath, warm air through her mouth filter, spoke slowly.

  “What if that isn’t what they want?”

  Anne turned to look at her through her filter mask, those bluest eyes deep and grave in the flickering blue of the light.

  “If they want to stay hidden, right here, for as long as they live, and never see another soul?”

  Gita nodded, wordlessly.

  “Then we’ll do that. There’s protocol for it, and I’ll back you every step of the way. If they want to be left alone, we’ll make sure they are.”

  But what if they don’t want that, what if this woman’s gentle persistence coaxes words from them, draws them out of their long hiding in their deep safe places and then there’s no going back?

  “Such a huge opportunity, though,” Gita said.

  Anne shrugged, lightly. “There are other worlds than this.”

  “I know.” Gita thought of them. The first long-ago one with the magnolia and the dusty lane behind the house. All the bright new worlds being discovered now, and more of them out there waiting to be found. And all the worlds she’d known over the years, the ones where she’d touched down so lightly she wouldn’t have left footprints even if it hadn’t been all terraformed fake anyway.

  “This one’s different,” she said. She was tired of it now, of the clinging to a ten-year burden, wanting to lay it down at last. “For me, it is.”

  “I know,” Anne said. Gita wondered just how much she did know, how much background Min had seen fit to feed her. It didn’t seem to matter. There was knowing like that, and then there was knowing: one soul open to another, reaching to touch, to understand. And in this place of the gods, they were almost there.

  Gita knelt down, popped open the lids of the vials, and carefully slid the contents into the pool. Letting the cells go, letting them merge into their…what? Mother, progenitor, society—home? The surface rippled again. But not spreading out this time, but drawing in, gathering up: surging.

  The god rose out of the water again, blue and shimmering, vast. Gita heard Anne’s startled gasp, even behind her mask, felt the other woman’s gloved fingertips brush against hers—softly, shyly almost. She understood that need, that reaching for human contact in the face of this wonder, even as she dared to feel the hope of something more, dared to think of the possibilities.

  Then she blinked, looking up at the god-creature as it dived and surged again: not the single cetacean shape she’d seen before, but splitting into two, merging and separating again, mimicking the vision it saw before it. There was a future to be made, Gita knew then: choices to be made in this place by two women and the closest thing to a god they’d likely ever see.

  Tears would come again, blue and otherwise; there was no change for better or worse without them, that was the way of this world and every other. But that was far away. Gita let her fingers twine through Anne’s, and even through the protective fabric she knew the warmth and shape of them.

  This would not be a day for tears.

  •

  Game

  Fae

  Vivien Jackson

  “I hear they let you go home after ten hours if you have kids, or even a pet to feed.”

  “Cinches it. Totally going to the pet store during my smoke break. You want me to pick up a hamster for you, dude?”

  “Fuck no. You heard one of them things screech? Sound like my ex. What’s the going rate on a bird?”

  “Talking or not talking?”

  Kyra listened to her two officemates chat, and her back curled lower and lower over her desk. Her index finger vibrated atop her ergo mouse. She tried not to think of how much she needed to ice down her wrists. Sleep kept pulling her eyelids downward, but she fought that bastard back. No way was she gonna let something as pussy as a need for sleep get in her way. This was her chance, her big opportunity: technical artist, not even contract, on a triple-A game title for a major studio. Her name up near the top of the credits. She had to nail this.

  On the screen, she wrapped a new texture over the wire-frame model of this level’s Big Bad. Pretty. Too pretty? Not edgy enough? In her periphery, Zach knuckled his eyeballs. He hadn’
t shaved in weeks and looked yeti-like. She heard David yawn. Or groan, or something else she knew she didn’t want to see. The guys were probably just as tired as she was, crunching for, what, seven weeks now? Fourteen-hour days, no weekends, bennie-prizes for people who stayed even later, longer, who put the pedal to the metal, put the “we” in “team,” and embodied other lame-sounding corporate speak, all with the goal of getting this game out the door.

  Kyra tried to have sympathy for Zach and David and all the other guys working on Bad Fairy, but really, they were guys. They couldn’t possibly get it. None of them had ever been the only chick in the uni computer science department. The only. None of them had ever deliberately cooled blushes when they rolled in one morning at god o’clock only to find that somebody had left a furry-muff porn screen saver up. On three monitors.

  Nobody else in this whole damn building had to pretend that wasn’t a turn-on. The guys, they just laughed it off, ribbed each other. Great fun, yeah.

  Kyra’s eyes glazed over, and she realized that her cursor had stopped moving. Weird. Her cursor never stopped moving, drawing, creating. It was a digital extension of her finger, of her imagination. It always did what she commanded. How could it be still? From a detached place at the very end of her string, she realized she was falling asleep. Sitting up. In her office chair. Zach and Dave were still talking, but they were no longer making words.

  And then the office door leaned open, letting in a blade of fluorescent light from the hallway…and Lily.

  Kyra woke up. Every fucking cell in Kyra woke up.

  Lily was Kevin-the-producer’s assistant. She topped out at about five feet, had soft-looking, curly black hair and a killer little bod. But the really electric thing about her was her smile. She was always doin’ it, too, grinning, even before the first pot of coffee, even after the last cleaning-crew vacuum sweep. Lily was always here, bubbly, keeping everybody’s spirits up. Fetching things for Kevin, and for everybody, really. Kyra’d wondered more than once if she slept here.