Dark Currents

by Sulivan, Tricia; Nevill, Adam; Tchaikovsky, Adrian; McDougall, Sophia; Tidhar, Lavie

  “What else?” he said.

  “Hold your horses. There’s only so much you can tell from external scans.”

  If this ship was what Hope claimed… it’d be a goldmine. Danny was already thinking of the deals he could make. Legitimate ones for a change. He might even be able to sell something to GOW instead of sneaking footage from under their noses all the time. He pondered over whether it would be better to sell off the contents individually or hold out for passing them off as a single lot—a living museum. Mel would piss her pants over that.

  “Well?” His voice quavered with impatience. “How do we get aboard?”

  Hope laughed. “We ask the occupants, obviously.”

  The rock was occupied? “You’re seriously telling me that some fluky tomb-raiding bastard stumbled on this before us?”

  “Not exactly, bub. This ain’t no mausoleum. Someone on it just hailed us, and they’re very friendly.” She effected a low whistle. “And you’re not going to believe this. They claim to be the descendants of the original crew. Ship’s called the Saint Rachel Of The Further Fields, a privately funded resettlement venture that left the Sol system on June 18th 2189 OEC. The original heading was one of the Vela worlds, but they never completed their journey.”

  Danny juggled some figures. “2189 by the Old Earth calendar—that was before subspace spin was discovered. They can’t have been travelling linear all that time. That’s hundreds of years.”

  “Thousands.”

  When Danny had absorbed this information, his spirits soared again: not only was the ship a relic but, if it had been travelling the dark reaches between systems all that time, whoever inhabited it was a living link to Old Earth.

  “What are you waiting for?” he yelled. “Get us over there!”

  “No need,” Hope said. “They’re coming to us.”

  This was how it always was. Just when Hope thought Danny Gibbs’s story had run its course and was lumbering towards the inevitable buffers of ignominy and incarceration, something new cropped up. A glimmer of hope. She had been with Danny long enough that she needed no persuasion that her owner was an incorrigible and unrepentant bastard. He sought out novelty not for its own intrinsic value, but for financial gain and for how much it would add to his own notoriety. Just by following his orders she was legally complicit in most of his less savoury activities. But, if there was anything she had learned from her Earthwave dramas, it was that no one was beyond redemption. And if there was one thing she couldn’t resist, it was the possibility, no matter how slim, of a happy ending.

  Danny was examining the unrefined exterior of the asteroid and marvelling that it had once been easier to build a deep-space worthy vessel by modifying a lump of rock rather than simply fabbing it. Wherever the vessel’s travels had taken it, they had not been without incident. The lumpy surface sported craters of various ages as well as black scorch marks, glittering silicate growths, and a field of weird conical structures that scans indicated had once been quasi-organic. This ship had been about. He stared hard, as if the ancient object might vanish the second he took his eyes off it. He hardly dared blink.

  “The Saint Rachel has agreed to provide us with an energy feed,” said Hope. “But they want something in exchange.”

  Aha, there it was. He’d known this was falling too easily into his lap. “Go on, tell me.”

  “They want to meet you.”

  “They want me to come aboard? Straight off, without coercion or anything? What’s the catch?”

  Hope’s reply was pensive. “Why does there always have to be a catch? Apparently you’re the first human they’ve had direct contact with for several generations. Naturally they’re interested in meeting you and hearing your story. Everyone’s got one, ya know. And there are precious few of them out here in dead space.” Her sigh was pitched somewhere between exasperation and disappointment. “Of course, you can always make up a lie. That’s what you’re good at, right? They’ll never know the difference anyway.”

  Danny brayed. He could certainly lie.

  The welcoming committee wasn’t up to much.

  During docking, Danny had spent time concocting a tall tale to impress his hosts with; hopefully enough that they’d be open to the idea of negotiations. He’d even gone to the trouble of getting the look right, dragging out his old uniform and cleaning the boots for the first time since his disastrous visit to that colossal ball of sucking mud known as Banou. That affair had been the last in the string of shitty down-the-pecking-order assignments that had persuaded to leave the family service and go freelance. He’d got himself a ship, some decent clothes and sworn never to don the familial straitjacket again. Ah, well. Screw principles. His story wouldn’t be mentioning any of that. As far as his audience knew, this uniform was that of a military officer, not a corporate lackey. The ribbons spanning the serge told of a much-lauded career in service; the crumples and stains betraying the hard times that had befallen him after being heroically injured and honourably discharged. As far as his story went, he would be making exactly the right impression.

  His hosts could at least have made a similar effort. When he exited the docking chamber he was met by a cluster of crones, peering from behind each other like timid children. On second glance, though, they were not perhaps as old as they seemed. Certainly, they wore unflattering woollen robes, their curly, greasy hair came in various shades of grey or white, and the teeth revealed in their off-putting smiles of welcome were yellowing pegs, but many of their faces were incongruously youthful. If they had been citizens of the Hegemony he would have been surprised only at their aesthetic choice, but he had been expecting people as isolated as this lot to be much more primitive.

  The woman at the front of the cluster stepped forward. “Master Daniel Gibbs. You are welcome aboard the Saint Rachel Of The Further Fields.” Her voice had a soft vibrato to it. “We are simple travellers across God’s far country, but the sisterhood would be honoured if, while we attend to your needs, you would share a meal with us, and perhaps tell us a little of yourself.”

  Sisterhood: collective name for a female-only religious order, Hope supplied over the C-link, helpfully, filling in the gaps in Danny’s knowledge. Saint Rachel: character from prime Christian text known as The Bible. A keeper of sheep who became the wife of someone called Jacob. God: character from The Bible around whom Christianity was—

  I’m aware of who God was, thank you.

  Danny grinned. This was going to be a piece of cake. He stepped forwards but was halted by a polite shake of the spokeswoman’s head.

  “It is our custom to remove our footwear while aboard the Saint Rachel.”

  He looked at his boots. It had taken hours to get anything approaching a shine out of them.

  Just do it, Hope whispered.

  Grumbling, Danny complied. He paired his boots neatly before joining the women in the corridor beyond.

  “Oh…” He looked down, wriggled his toes in the sudden, soft warmth.

  “Carpet making is one of the textile crafts to which our order has dedicated itself.” The leader flexed her own toes. The nails were exceptionally thick. “You may address me as Bell,” she said, walking on.

  Danny lingered, mesmerised by the carpet’s pattern, a race of mathematical and organic geometries that intermingled in beguiling fashion. The other women had to crowd him to drive him on in the wake of their spokeswoman.

  “Bell?” He trotted reluctantly after her. “Captain Bell?”

  The woman’s chocolate eyes regarded him with something like humour. “Simply Bell.”

  The carpeted corridor led to a huge internal space. It was ringed and criss-crossed by gantries, stairs and walkways on many levels both above and below the one on which they entered. Peering over the rail, Danny had a dizzying view of the floors below him falling away towards a flat, green expanse. Looking upwards, he was almost blinded. The interior lighting in here was brighter than the suns on many worlds he had visited. There was warmth too, t
hough not quite enough to take the edge off the circulating air.

  “We will be delighted to conduct a tour later.” Bell had noticed that he was staring. “But the dinner hour is upon us. This way please.”

  The group filtered along the carpeted gantry and down a nearby stair. On the balcony below was an expansive commons. Here the design on the carpet spread out, complexifying to an impressive scale. Danny’s eyes, constantly drawn to the pattern, felt on the verge of making sense out the abstract designs, but there was too much in the way. The floor was obscured by tables, a serving counter, and a sizeable complement of rough-robed crew, ready for their meal. Danny’s group descended the stair and a murmur of expectation rose to greet them.

  When they approached the servery, he realized that one of the women was trying to get his attention. “I’m sorry? What’s happening?”

  The woman’s grey hair stuck out in long tufts. Her close-lipped smile bordered on obsequious, her voice tremulous. “The Bell is selecting what she wishes for her evening meal.”

  Danny watched as the spokeswoman lifted lids on each of a selection of tureens and platters, nodding and conversing with the servers. He couldn’t quite make out what was in the dishes, although there was a worrying amount of greenery on display and the steam that drifted over was only vaguely aromatic. He preferred his food meaty, spicy and mildly hallucinogenic, but he was well practised at gritting his teeth and smiling in the name of a business opportunity.

  Bell finally pointed at a deep pot, and was briskly served from it with a bowlful of stewed vegetable matter. Immediately, the other women lined up and selected the same choice. Danny must have allowed his confusion to show. The sister who had spoken to him before gave him an understanding smile. “We follow the Bell’s lead,” she said. “She’s never wrong.”

  Danny, reminding himself that religious communities could be prone to strangely slavish behaviour, nodded as if he understood, accepted his own bowl of steaming roots and sat with his hosts.

  “All of our food on board the Saint Rachel is grown naturally.” Bell speared a chunk of something fibrous. The fingers that manipulated the fork were tipped by horny nails and when she bit into her forkful Danny got a good look at those teeth. He had thought they were badly kept, but in fact what he saw were strong yellow pegs. They mashed efficiently on the vegetable.

  Danny took a mouthful of his own meal. The taste was actually not too bad, but the vegetables were barely cooked. On his first attempt to crunch into them he feared he might actually have broken his own teeth.

  “Delicious.” He choked, sluiced the mouthful down with a sip of water. When he had recovered he said: “If you don’t mind, me asking, What happened?”

  Took your time, Sherlock.

  Danny ignored Hope. His focus was on Bell. It wasn’t just the teeth, the nails, the hair: it was in those big, placid eyes, that flattened nose; all ubiquitous features among the crew.

  “What happened, Mister Gibbs?”

  “To your people.” He arranged his expression into one that he hoped conveyed compassion. “To your humanity.”

  The steadiness of her gaze was unnerving. “The Saint Rachel Of The Further Fields has been travelling a long time. She set off from Earth with a complement of three thousand, six hundred, backed up by a full genetic database of human, livestock and food crop genomes. The mission, as you would perhaps expect of an order like ours, was a simple one: to find somewhere to settle where the grass was greener – both literally and ideologically – than it had become on Earth.”

  “The grass…?”

  It’s a metaphor. Just go with it, okay?

  Bell ignored his interjection. “The Saint Rachel journeyed successfully for many generations.”

  “How many generations?”

  “Hundreds.” Bell’s dark eyes were unreadable. “And therein lay the problem. Over time our mission was… reinterpreted. Instead of settling, our people chose to continue travelling. We had encounters. They were not always without incident or consequence. At some point on her travels the Saint Rachel’s databases became corrupted and, not long after that, we are told, a contagion was contracted that affected the DNA and threatened to kill off the crew.”

  “You are told?” It was just a hint in the wording.

  Bell did not appear to be insulted that he picked up on it. “It was many generations ago, and records have not always been maintained.”

  “So, what happened?”

  “To save the sisterhood it was decided to introduce genetic material from another species.”

  From the livestock, Hope said on the C-link.

  “Which species?”

  Now Bell smiled, showed her peggy teeth. “The one sacred to Saint Rachel, of course,” she said.

  “The sheep,” he said aloud. To Hope he said, You’re recording all this, right? Even if they got nothing else from this venture this interview would syndicate far and wide.

  Bell smiled. “It proves that we are beloved of Saint Rachel. Had it not been for the sheep our people would not have survived.”

  “Do you still consider yourselves to be human?” Danny asked the question because it would be on the lips of every Hegemony viewer when they saw this. And because he relished the flicker of reaction that, finally, he managed to elicit from the woman’s imperturbable features.

  “We are all God’s creatures,” she replied.

  Danny searched his bowl for edible bits of vegetable. Is she saying what I think she’s saying?

  Hope was guarded. That somewhere along the line their community deliberated decided it would be preferable to make themselves more flock-like? I don’t know, fella, religion’s a funny thing. Especially when left to its own devices for a long time. She might not even know for sure. Doubt you’ll get her to come out and actually say it, though.

  Danny chewed thoughtfully. Doesn’t matter. The melo-historical they make of this will make it pretty obvious…

  Noticing that the sounds of mastication had stilled, he looked up from his bowl. Everyone was staring. Dark eyes, patient gazes, all trained on him. For a second he was seized with an irrational fear that these unnerving people were capable of eavesdropping on the C-link.

  Hope allayed his fears. They’ve told their story. I think they’re waiting for yours.

  Danny was no stranger to having to bluff and brazen – in fact he relished any opportunity to grandstand – but for some reason now the moment had come to deliver his fabricated history he dried up. He scanned the sisters’ flat faces. Their anticipation was palpable, and suddenly the tall tale he had intended to palm off on them seemed silly and obvious. Very little knocked his self-confidence, but this did. It uncapped a well of self-doubt that had been sealed-off since the last time his mother had appraised his commercial performance.

  The Honourable Captain? He was glad to be on the C-link. He feared that if he’d had to speak aloud at that moment, nothing would have come out. They’ll see right through that.

  Hope hesitated before answering, and when she did she had dropped most of the artifice from her tone. Why not tell them your real story then?

  Don’t be ridiculous. I’m trying to get them to trust me. Danny took a deep breath, felt his confidence ebb back. No, the Honourable Captain will work. I’ll make it work. It’s only a story after all. I just need a minute.

  The moment stretched, then Bell pushed aside her bowl. “Perhaps you would enjoy that tour now.”

  When she stood, a loose gaggle of the crew did likewise. They were fewer in number than the welcoming party had been. The rest of the women went back to eating, their stewed roots clearly a bigger attraction than Danny had proved to be. He cursed himself for allowing himself to be so easily thrown. He’d seize the next opportunity, and dazzle them.

  Bell led them a short distance to a bank of elevators. He and the woman who had spoken to him at the servery followed but no one else joined them, the remainder of the women drifting away. It didn’t matter, he told himself. He only
needed to impress their leader.

  “The fields please, Floss,” Bell said, and the remaining acolyte jabbed her thumb at the control button.

  As the elevator descended, Danny’s eyes wandered to the floor. Even here there was a square of carpet. This sample was a little worn but the design was clear enough, and here at last it formed a recognisable picture. The geometries resolved into angular silver shapes, whorls of actinic white and lines of cerulean energy, all against the unmistakable curving sweep of a planetary ring system. Noticing his scrutiny his companions pressed against the walls so he could see the complete picture. Yes, it was a space battle, and the craftsmanship involved in its depiction was exquisite.

  Hey, Hope whispered. That looks like—

  “You might know this scene as the Battle of Harmony’s Shelf,” Bell said.

  Danny’s eyes widened. Harmony’s Shelf, of course. It was an iconic image from the early times of the Hegemony, when cultural rights had been contested by violence instead of bureaucracy. He’d seen it represented in the media hundreds of times. Only never quite like this. It was as if it were drawn from a different perspective, the other side of the battle than the traditional views. He admired the skill and the imagination, but it didn’t change what the image implied.

  “You’ve not been so isolated after all,” he said. “This is a Hegemony classic.”

  Bell shook her head. “We have had no contact with your Hegemony,” she said. “Not directly. We do stumble across your communication broadcasts from time to time, but we prefer real experience to dramas.”

  “I don’t understand you.”

  “This scene was woven as it happened. The Saint Rachel was there.”

  Danny gaped at her. Harmony’s Shelf had been discovered tucked away in a hazardous corner of the galaxy. The landmark conflict over who brought its unlikely cultural riches to the eager eyes of the Hegemony worlds had been titanic and brief. The odds upon randomly stumbling upon that event would have been astronomical. Bell was clearly talking nonsense, but her expression was completely free of guile.