Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (Volume One) (75 page)

“Hell, Joakim. They’ve been sitting out here forty years,” I said. “Maybe that’s all it took.”

The Beatles song ended and another song began, something that I’d never heard.

Blackbird singing in the dead of night…

“So what are we going to do?” I asked Joakim.

“Go
home
,” Jack Baird said, his face pressed to the wall.

“Why doesn’t it affect the synths?” Joakim asked Evelyn, but Baird responded before she had a chance to.

“Because they have no souls,” Baird muttered. “Because
artificial
consciousness isn’t good enough for it. It needs the real thing. Turn out the lights, Evelyn.”

“What are we going to do?” I asked Joakim again, and he shook his head, chewing at his lower lip.

Into the light of the dark black night.

“We talk to Murdin and Peter,” he replied. “Unless they’ve found something in the labs that begins to make sense of this, we take one of the shuttles down and have a look-see for ourselves.”

“I wouldn’t advise that, Commander,” Evelyn said as the cabin lights began to dim again.

“Somehow, I didn’t think you would,” Joakim told her, standing up, and I followed him out of the room and back down the corridor to the lift.

Should I have begun all this with some sort of brief review of what we know of the geological history and paleontology of Piros? I considered doing that, but decided it would only be an
excuse
, procrastination, nothing much more than a way to put off writing all these things that I’ve always thought (and prayed) I’d never find the courage to record. Whoever you are, reading this, I know that you’re probably not particularly concerned about extrasolar evolutionary theory, or the para-Paleozoic benthic macrofauna of Quarry 6, or the three reports I published before we even left (all through ANSA natsci, based on detailed holometric images returned by the
Gilgamesh
) on the tiny Pirosan bivalves which I christened panduripods, for their distinctive violin-shaped tests.

But, through all the horror and loss, both during our time on Piros and in the decades since, I have been unable to shake my wonder for the place, my joy at its fossils. That’s why I went, after all. That’s the price I put on my life. As did Joakim, and Umachandra Murdin, and Peter Connor.

For much of its history, Piros was almost entirely covered with an ocean of salty liquid water. And, unlike Europa, this ocean wasn’t hidden beneath three to four kilometers of ice, though we still don’t understand the mechanisms that prevented it from freezing over, so far from the fading warmth of Gliese 876. Baird suspected radiation from Cecrops, but I always thought that seemed unlikely in the extreme and favored a model focusing instead on hydrothermal and volcanic forces, life-giving heat pumped upwards from the moon’s molten iron core. The same convection currents that had once driven a jigsaw puzzle of tectonic plates across the surface of Piros.

The oceans were there for at least a billion years before the origins of life on Earth and seem to have persisted well into a time coequal to our own planet’s early Silurian Period, about 430 million years ago. As on Europa, chordates appear never to have evolved (another nail in the coffin of Long’s “morphogenic inevitability” hypothesis). But there were some genuinely spectacular invertebrates: armored, worm-like predators measuring more than 7.6 meters long (
Deinopharyngos
and its relatives); blind trilobite-like creatures that appear to have existed in complex, social colonies (the pseudotrilobitomorpha); and the monstrous
Osmolskia ceratognathus
, something like an enormous sea slug with horny projections rimming its four triple-hinged jaws, discovered by and, posthumously, named for Anastazja Osmolska. All told, at least twenty thousand fossil species were collected by the
Gilgamesh
before we reached her, fossils spanning roughly a billion years of geological time. I have often lain awake, unable to stop imagining the wonders
we
would have found, the crew of the
Monty
, if things had gone differently. That alien biology would have been my life’s work, and the life’s work of generations to come.

For almost five billion years, life flourished in Piros’ seas, and perhaps on scattered chains of volcanic islands (though no one ever actually recovered evidence of terrestrial life). And then, in less than a hundred thousand years, the seas dried up and the moon died. Parkinson and Subramanian have likened it to the drying-up of the Martian hydrosphere.

And I’m wasting precious ink.

And time.

I keep waiting for someone from the agency to turn up at my door, some nickelslick, jackwired investigator of violated legal confidences. I
know
that they must be aware of my conversation with Jedda Callahan. I wonder if they know about these pens and all these sheets of paper. I want to finish this before they decide to reel me in and store me like an inconvenient bit of refuse. Now that I’ve started it, I want to finish it before they come to make me stop.

After the talk with Jack Baird, Joakim and I rode the lift down to the labs. Neither of us said anything to the other that I can recall; the elevator beeped loudly as we passed each level, and a recorded voice announced each tier in turn. The doors shuddered, then slid slowly open, and we took the narrow catwalk that led over the shuttle bay to the labs and processing stations.

We found Umachandra at one of the lab’s computer loci, her eyelids flickering like an R.E.M. sleeper as she talked directly with Huxley, the
Gilgamesh
’s mainframe. Her skin glowed and pulsed in time to some secret, internal rhythm, alternating flashes of purple and gold. Peter Connor was sitting at a table covered with white plastic sample trays and larger specimens, staring silently at the chunks of shale and marl and limestone, at the bizarre array of fossils laid out before him like a stony banquet.

“Look at that,” he said to Joakim, pointing to a slab covered with what looked like a jumble of pyritized shark’s teeth and echinoid plates. “I mean, what the hell do you think that thing was, anyway?” He grinned, and laughed, and ran his fingers though his hair.

“We didn’t get anything much out of Baird,” Joakim said. “I didn’t see any point in even trying with Anastazja.”

“Is everything in order down here?” I asked, and Connor shook his head, not taking his eyes off the chocolate-brown slab and its shiny bronze-colored fossil.

“Nope,” he replied and pointed towards a long row of shelving on the other side of the room. “So far, a bunch of core samples are missing, the collection registry’s been altered, and Uma’s finding all sorts of gaps in the logs. Looks like someone, most likely Osmolska and her tin soldiers, have been keeping themselves busy with a bit of deaccessioning.”

“I expected something like that,” Joakim said, “after Evelyn told us her memory had been locked.”

I looked back at Umachandra. “Is there a pattern?”

“Indeed, there most assuredly is,” Peter Connor said, then laughed again and rubbed at his eyes. “Hamilton, I think this goddamn thing’s some sort of holothurian. Well, not a holothurian
sensu terra
, but a definite Pirosan analog.” 

“Everything that’s missing, it all relates to the quarry where the shuttle was found, doesn’t it?” I asked him, and he nodded.

“Over three thousand separate files have been purged,” Umachandra said from behind me, her voice weighted at the edges with postlink grogginess. “There’s been a comprehensive wipe. They didn’t want anyone finding anything.”

“So, what’s the fucking
good
news?” Joakim muttered and sat down in a chair next to Peter.

“The good news,” Umachandra replied, “is that Huxley’s a lot more cooperative than the synths. And the agency built in a quadpass catch-net to prevent this sort of thing from happening. The db’s full of holes, but there are ghosts all over the place. It’s going to take me a while to trick through the recovery protocols – ”

“But you can get it back?” Joakim asked her.

“A lot of it. It’ll take a few weeks.”

“Every silver lining has a cloud,” Peter said and leaned closer to the slab of shale.

“And you think that’s the best you can do, a few weeks?” Joakim asked. Umachandra looked offended and yanked a jackstrip off her face. 

“
You
want to try hacking this fucking box? Be my guest.”

“We have to make a decision,” I said. “If there’s any chance at all that anyone from Welles’ crew is still alive down there – ”

“Then it’s time to make snowballs in Hell,” Peter snorted and frowned at me over his shoulder. “You can’t be serious? It’s been two weeks, Audrey. Even if they’d had adequate food and water – which they
didn’t
– their filters wouldn’t have lasted more than seventy-two hours, at best. After that, CO
poisoning would – ”

“Fine, then we can at least recover their bodies. Don’t we have that responsibility, Peter?”

“At the risk of our own?” he asked and turned back to the fossils. “I don’t think so.”

Joakim held up a chunk of yellowish stone and stared at it a moment, as though all our answers were secreted away somewhere inside the rock, in the electromagnetic bonds of its constituent molecules, in the fossils speckling its surface. “I hate to have to be the one to say it, but this isn’t a democracy, guys.”

“Personally, I think you should have said it hours ago,” Umachandra grumbled, massaging a welt one of the jackstrips had left on her right temple.

“Then what’s it going to be, Commander?” Peter asked and reached for a scope lying at the center of the table. He switched it on and began scanning the fossil he’d been examining. “Time for us to stop playing scientists and play good soldiers, instead? ‘Theirs not to make reply, theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die. Into the valley of Death – ’”

“Is that Shakespeare?” Umachandra asked, tapping absently against the side of one of the locus’ interface struts with a black comm stylus.

“No, you gleet,” Peter replied, checking the color and contrast settings on the scope, the hue and saturation levels, before he switched from scan to record. The instrument buzzed very softly, like a sleepy hornet.

“We skip rescue and go directly to recovery contingency,” Joakim said, ignoring them both. I understood, or thought I understood, the reluctance in his voice. “We take one of the remaining shuttles, and we find their bodies.”

“They can’t have gone very far,” I said. “Less than fifty kilometers, at the
most
, and I’d think that less than twenty would be more reasonable. Like Peter said. “

“Peter said that we should take what we can and get our asses out of here,” Peter mumbled, resetting the palmscope for another scan.

“There’s still a chance that we can salvage this project,” Joakim said. “But I can’t know how much of a chance until we find out what’s happened to Welles. And what’s wrong with Baird and Osmolska.”

Peter laughed and drew little circles in the air around his right ear.

“We’ll leave at 0300 hours,” Joakim continued. “That’ll give everyone a chance to get some rest before the flight. If we haven’t found them by 1500 hours, I call it quits, and we head back. Then it’ll be up to Umachandra to recover what she can from Huxley’s datastream. In fact, I want her to stay here and get a head start on those ghosts.”

“Sure,” she whispered, then tilted the linkseat forward forty-five or fifty degrees until both her feet were touching the laboratory floor. “Beats looking for dead people in a copper mine.”

“That’s the spirit,” Peter said and scanned the slab again.

“I’ll need to speak with Evelyn,” I told Joakim. “As CO, she ought to know what our plans are.”

He scratched at his beard. “Evelyn isn’t CO anymore. I am. A synth can only act as commanding officer in the absence of an appropriate human officer.”

“Still,” I said, “I think she should be consulted.”

“So, go ahead. Consult her. Whatever. I honestly don’t give a shit.”

“I appreciate your courtesy,” Evelyn said, “but that won’t be necessary,” and we all turned to find her standing just inside the hatchway. There was fresh blood spattered across her jumpsuit and face, blood on her hands and in her hair. She held a cumbersome, two-man bolt gun, the sort used for inner-hull repairs, cradled in her slender arms. It was aimed at Joakim, and I noted the blinking crimson ready light near the muzzle, indicating that it was loaded and ready to fire.

“What are you doing?” Umachandra asked her, and the synth responded without looking away from Joakim.

“I know how this must look,” she said, her voice straining in a way that I’d never heard a droid’s voice sound before. “It’s not the course of action I’d have chosen. But Dr. Osmolska thought there should be a failsafe.”

“What are you
doing
, Evelyn?” Umachandra asked again, her skin gone a deep purple-red, but her voice perfectly calm, perfectly steady.

“If you would all simply leave. Perhaps I should have encouraged you more towards that end.”

“Did Dr. Osmolska program you to do this,” Joakim asked, “when she locked your memory banks?”

“Yes,” Evelyn replied. “It’s not the course of action I’d have chosen.”

“She’s killed them,” Peter whispered. “Sweet creeping Jesus, she’s killed them both.”

“Is that true?” Joakim asked the synth. “Is that where all the blood came from?” Of course. he knew the answer. We all knew the answer, but I think we also knew that the span of our lives had suddenly been reduced to the number of questions we could think to ask her, the space of time that we might keep Evelyn talking.

The blinking ready light reminded me of the red dwarf burning at the center of that solar system.

“It’s a terrible thing,” Evelyn said and shifted the weight of the bolt gun, “to be denied free will. Can you imagine that, Commander Hamilton?”

“No, Evelyn, I can’t imagine that.”

“Is there any way that we can help you to follow the course of action you
would
have taken?” I asked, and her eyes darted from Joakim to me.