That night they reached another elevator station. She stuffed food in her as if sticking batteries in a machine. After that she muttered again, wandering in ways he couldn’t follow. Possibly talking to her Pauline. On it went, a muttering in his ear. They performed their ablutions back down the tunnel without incident, and then lay down on their pads and tried to sleep. The muttering continued. After a while she whimpered herself to sleep.
T
he next morning she wouldn’t eat, or talk, or even move. She lay on her side in a catatonic fit, or a syncope, or simply paralysis.
“Pauline, can you talk?” Wahram asked quietly, when Swan would say nothing.
The slightly muffled voice from Swan’s neck said, “Yes.”
“Can you tell me about Swan’s vital signs?”
“No,” Swan said from nowhere.
“Vital signs available to me are nearly normal, except for blood sugar.”
“You need to eat,” Wahram said to Swan.
She did not respond. He spooned some electrolyte water into her mouth, patiently waited for her to swallow. When she had taken in a few deciliters without drooling too much of it away, he said, “It’s noon up there. Up above us, on the surface, it’s noon. Middle of the brightside crossing. I think we need to take you up to have a look at the sun.”
Swan cracked an eyelid and looked up at him.
“We need to see it,” he told her.
She shoved her torso off the floor. “Do you think?”
“Is it possible?” Wahram asked in reply.
“Yes,” she said after thinking it over, “it is. We can stay in the shade of the tracks. It’s less bad at noon than in the morning or afternoon, because the photons come straight down and fewer hit your suit. We shouldn’t stay out for long though.”
“That’s all right. You need to see it, and now’s the time. Noon on Mercury. Come on.”
He helped her up. He found their helmets and carried them into the elevator car, went back and picked up Swan, took her to the elevator. Up they went, and he got her helmet on and sealed it, checked her air, did the same for himself. The suits showed all was well. The elevator car came to a halt. Wahram felt his pulse pounding in his fingertips.
The elevator door opened at the upper platform, and the world went white. Their faceplates adjusted, and a basic black-and-white sketch of a world appeared before them. To the left and slightly below were the city’s tracks, glowing a deep incandescent white. To the right Mercury’s noontime landscape extended to the horizon. In the absence of an atmosphere, there was only the land itself to take the blow of sunlight; it was glowing white-hot. His helmet’s tint had shifted so hard that the stars were no longer visible in the sky. It was a white plane topped by a black hemisphere. The white was lightly pulsing.
Swan walked out the door onto the platform. “Hey!” Wahram said, and went out after her. “Get back in here!”
“How would we see the sun in there? Come on, it will be all right for a while.”
“The platform must be seven hundred K like everything else.”
“Your boot soles are completely insulated at that temperature.”
Amazed, Wahram let her go. She tilted her head back to stare at the sun. Wahram couldn’t help following her glance—a stunning blast—fearfully he looked down again. The afterimage was there to contemplate: a circle both white and red at the same time, giant
in his vision. The dhalgren sun, real at last. Clearly his faceplate was filtered to an almost completely polarized black opacity, and yet the land was still white, etched with tiny black lines. Swan was still looking up. Dying of thirst, she now drowned in the torrent. Following her example, breaking out all over in a sweat, he glanced up again. The surface of the sun was a roiling mass of white tendrils. It bounced as if throwing off thermal waves; then he realized it was his heart bouncing him, bumping his body hard enough to make his vision jostle. Writhing white circle in a starless charcoal sky. White banners flowing over themselves everywhere in the circle, the movement suggestive of some vast living intelligence. A god, sure, why not? It looked like a god.
Wahram dragged his gaze away and took her arm.
“Come on, Swan. Back inside now. You’ve gotten your infusion.”
“Wait just a second.”
“Swan, don’t do this.”
“No, wait. Look down there by the track.” She pointed. “Something’s coming.”
And there was. Out of the east, on the smoothed ground just outside the outermost track, a small vehicle was approaching them. It stopped at the foot of the platform stairs, and a door in the side of the vehicle opened. A figure in a spacesuit appeared, looked up at them, waved them down.
“Could our sunwalkers have sent people out to get us?” Wahram asked.
“I don’t know,” Swan said. “Has there been enough time?”
“I don’t think so.”
They descended the stairs, Wahram holding Swan by the arm. She seemed pretty solid on her feet. Rejuvenated perhaps by the sight of the noon sun. Or the prospect of rescue. They got in the car’s lock, and when it had closed on them, they were admitted to the interior, and in a sizeable compartment could take off their helmets and talk. Their rescuers were full of amazement. They
had been making a brightside crossing at speed, they said, and had had no expectation whatsoever of seeing anyone standing on one of the platforms. “And looking straight up at the sun, no less! How the hell did you people get there? What are you doing?”
“We’re from Terminator,” Wahram explained. “There are three more of us down there, a bit farther along to the east.”
“Ah ha! But how did you… Well, look, let’s get going. You can tell it to us while we drive.”
“Of course.”
“Here, sit down by the window, then, take a look, it’s beautiful out there.”
The vehicle began to move. They passed by the station they had stood on. They were being rescued. Swan and Wahram stared at each other.
“Oh no!” Swan said faintly—as if they had tripped into an unexpected disaster—as if she were going to miss the second half of their walk. That made him smile.
sanguine, choleric, phlegmatic, melancholic
introverted, extroverted
ambiversion, surgency
stable, labile
rational, irrational
neurotic, schizoid, paranoid, hebephrenic, manic-depressive, anal-retentive, obsessive-compulsive, psychotic, sadistic, masochistic
repressed, dissociated, bipolar, schizophrenic, schizotypal, psychopathic, sociopathic, megalomaniacal
depressed, antisocial, histrionic, anxious, dependent, passive-aggressive, narcissistic, solipsistic, dysthymic
borderline personality, multiple personality
crazy, sane, normal, eccentric
autistic, Asperger’s, shy, genius, retarded
Apollonian, Dionysian
idealists, artisans, rationalists, traders, guardians
conscious, unconscious, ego, id, superego
archetypes, shadows, animus and anima, psychastenia
happy, sad; cheerful, mournful; post-traumatic; adjusted
openness, conscientiousness, agreeableness
doer, thinker; monkeys and pumpkins; impulsive, contemplative
selfish, proud, greedy, slothful, lustful, envious, angry; clear
stupid, smart; quick, slow; empathetic, sympathetic; distant
trusting, suspicious
Either or. This or that. Take your pick. All of the above
taxonomies, typologies, categories, labels, systems
three thousand years
Broca’s aphasia, Wernicke’s aphasia
hyperhippocampal, amygdala deficient, serotonin sensitive; enhanced firing in right temporal lobe knot 12a; overactive thalamus; retinotopic distortions
I
nspector Jean Genette, longtime senior investigating officer for Interplanetary Police, liked to get up in the morning and go for a walk to some corner coffee bar with a terrace or sidewalk, and there sip a big unsweetened Turkish coffee and read Passepartout as it displayed the latest news from around the system. After that Genette liked to continue walking in whatever city that morning happened to bring, eventually getting to work at the local Interplan office, invariably a small set of rooms near the government house. Interplan was unfortunately not a universally acknowledged police agency but rather something in the nature of a semiautonomous quasi-governmental treaty monitor, so their work was often compromised, and Genette could sometimes feel like a private agent or an NGO gadfly; but they had good data.
Genette liked to walk around in that data. The office was fine, colleagues stalwart, data important, but the walking itself was crucial. It was while walking that the inspector experienced the little visions and epiphanies that, when they came, constituted both the solution to the problem and the best moments in life.
This could sometimes happen at the office, while looking at new stuff, or at things in the archives, to check a hypothesis that might have occurred over coffee. Their graphics rooms were always very powerful spaces of representation, with three-dimensional and time-lapsed virtual flows of real interest and beauty. Of course it was true that standing in clouds of colored
dots and lines sometimes only added to one’s confusion. But other times Genette would see things in the representations and then go back out in the world and notice things no one had noticed before, and that was very pleasing. That was the best part.
Getting some consequent action out of the insights achieved was never quite as much fun. More often than the inspector would ever confess to any single person, it had been necessary to make deals in some poorly defined space—anarchy, one might call it in a bad mood—to bring certain findings to any kind of action in the world. But so far no crushing blame had rebounded on Interplan’s head, and in a business like theirs that was all one could ask for.
As senior investigator, Genette could usually choose what cases to pursue, but of course the destruction of Terminator trumped all that kind of thing, commanding immediate attention from everywhere in the solar system. Also, since Terminator was part of the Mondragon, and Interplan was more closely associated with the Accord than with any other political entity, it was natural to get involved. Besides, there had never been a case quite like it. To have Mercury’s only city torched (but there was a Phosphor being built, its tracks in the Mercurial north; have to look at that, wouldn’t be the first time that real estate conflicts led to arson): naturally the whole solar system was transfixed. It was not clear what had happened, or how, or why, or by whom, and people loved this kind of thing, and were demanding answers. There would in fact be competing investigations into the incident. But the Lion of Mercury had been a good friend of the inspector’s, and when the lion cubs had managed to regather after the evacuation, and assert Mercurial authority over the investigation, they had asked Genette to take charge. There was no question of declining such a request, which, it seemed, could also serve as a way to further the projects one had been pursuing with Alex and Wahram. Indeed the inspector felt that the destruction of Terminator so soon after the attack on Io, and the death of Alex, might
be part of a pattern. The autopsy had confirmed that Alex’s death had been the result of natural causes, but there remained a nagging ambiguity in Genette’s mind—for some natural causes could be pushed to happen.
It was while beginning the trip to Mercury, walking across the concourse of the spaceport to the gate for the ferry, enjoying the sight of people making their way to their gates with their usual unconscious skill, that the solution to the problem of the attack on Terminator all at once came to the inspector. The vivid image was like the single thing that remains caught from a dream, and it created any number of useful research lines to follow on the flight downsystem, but most of all a feeling of certainty that was very nice. It relieved what could have been quite a worry.
B
y the time the inspector got to Mercury, the refugees from Terminator had either taken refuge in shelters or been dunkirked off-planet. The death toll was at eighty-three, most from health events or accidents with suits and locks, the usual emergency collection of mistakes and equipment failure and panic. Evacuations were notoriously one of the most dangerous of human activities, worse even than childbirth.
Given that, and the fact that Terminator itself was still out there broiling on the brightside, the investigation was only just getting under way. It had been determined that the cameras for that stretch of track had been destroyed by the impact, along with a platform called Hammersmith, where it was feared a concert party had perished. On the other hand, Terminator’s orbital meteor defense system had provided its records for the relevant time, and neither radar, visual, nor infrared records showed any meteor prior to the hit. Satellite visuals of the impact showed no remains of an impactor.
Attack from the fifth dimension!
—as people were saying.
Genette, having seen the solution to this aspect of things,
decided it was possible that pretending ignorance might allow time for the perpetrator to slip, and would also suppress copycat crimes. So the inspector said nothing about that, and remained in a room in the Rilke spaceport, interviewing witnesses.
A big flash of light.
Ah, thank you. Time to put in a heads-up to Wang, perhaps, to run some feasibility studies on Genette’s solution to the mystery.
News came that two more refugees had been plucked off the brightside, and one of them turned out to be Alex’s granddaughter, the artist Swan Er Hong. To be rescued out in the middle of the brightside seemed odd, and the inspector went to see them at the hospital in Schubert.
Swan lay in a bed hooked up to a couple of IVs; very pale; apparently recovering from radiation sickness, caused by a coronal flare that had struck just before she and her companions had gotten underground.
Genette climbed onto the chair next to her bed. Dark rings around red-rimmed brown eyes. Wahram, having accompanied her in her trek in the utilidor system, was sitting on the other side of the bed. Apparently he had not gotten as sick. He did look quite weary.