“Where is she now?”
“Hold four, with provisions and a portable toilet. She kicked out the video cameras, but there’s nothing else she can damage.”
“Now you have control of the ship, why haven’t you lit out of there?”
“If you care to check the signal doppler, Captain, you’ll see that I’m on my way. I promise I’ll be back inside twenty days with a rescue party.”
“You’ll probably have to sell shares in the ship to raise funds. Let me give you formal authorization,” Bea said. She set up a camera and did just that.
The ship was a heavy hauler, retrofitted with Mercedes pulse fusion motors, that she’d inherited from her mother and father. She’d grown up in it, and after her parents had died in a stupid accident when a run-about had explosively depressurized, she’d worked it hard for the past ten years. Losing it would be almost as bad as losing her parents—but better that than dying down here on this dusty rock.
When she was finished, Tor asked, “Are you sure you can hold out until I get back?”
“I’m going into hibernation. After I connect my suit to the gig’s power supply, I can sleep out a whole year if I have to.”
Bea talked with Tor while she made her preparations. She stripped off her pressure suit and cleaned herself as best she could with wipes, then climbed back into the suit again. She plugged a line into the gig’s food maker, which would supply her suit with water doped with glucose and essential amino acids, plugged a cord into the ship’s batteries, and powered down the gig’s systems again and said good-bye to Tor.
“Don’t worry, Captain. I’ll be back before you know it. Pleasant dreams.”
Bea called up the headup display and initiated the hibernation mode. A needle stung her neck, and she fell into warm swoony darkness. . . .
And woke, thrashing to escape the embrace of something tight and confining, a cocoon of skin that ripped and fell away. She sat up, tried to breathe and couldn’t, and after a panicky minute discovered that she didn’t need to.
She was sitting naked on a bare hillside. Dust-laden wind carressed her bare skin. The storm was still raging, but it seemed less primordial now, more like weather than a catastrophe. The whine of wind over the rock was as calming as the tinkling of a mountain stream. Great curtains of dust rippled overhead like an aurora, and around her dust parted here and there to reveal low hills saddling away in every direction.
She stood up, kicking away the tattered remnants of her cocoon. Her skin was black, gleaming like oiled leather, cool but supple, and completely hairless. She ran her tongue over her teeth. Her mouth was as dry as the dust that blew over her, and when she touched them she found that her eyes were dry too, as hard as pebbles. She put her hand on her chest, and after half a minute felt her heart beat once. The dull light of the sun fell on her like a blessing, energizing and invigorating her.
She knew what had happened to her and wondered why she felt serene, improbably happy, instead of being angry or in a deadly panic.
People were moving toward her now, through silky skeins of blowing dust. Three, five, six of them. John-Jane Smith, no longer a neuter but the woman she’d been before the operations and gene therapy, reached Bea first, handed her a suit liner. After Bea had climbed into it, the men moved forward.
Linval Palmer’s grin split his gleaming black face. “I bet you’re wondering what the hell happened to you.”
“I know what happened to me. I’m wondering where your brother is.”
The figure Bea had glimpsed in the tunnel before she’d fled had been Isham Palmer. She’d identified him while trudging back to her gig, after she’d enhanced the brief movie taken by her suit’s movement tracker.
“How’s your balance? Can you walk? Let me show you something,” Linval Palmer said, and led her up the hill toward the shallow bowl of the cirque and the entrance to the tunnel system.
The others followed. John-Jane Smith and the xenoarchaeologist and the three mercenaries walking through the dust storm as if strolling through a spring meadow on Earth or First Foot.
“My bodyguard didn’t make it,” Linval Palmer said, when Bea asked about the Mary. “She killed too many of our good friend’s little helpers. It didn’t like that, so instead of remaking her it recycled her, poor thing.”
He explained that the members of Isham’s expedition who had died in the crash or shortly afterward had been recycled too. Their biomass had been used to create the snake-things and hand-crabs, as well as the cocoon that had transformed Isham. He’d lured Linval and his people into a trap, and while they were being remade, he’d spotted the descent of Bea’s gig, smashed up Linval’s lander, and lain in wait for his rescuers. After Bea had escaped and gone into hibernation to await her own rescue, he had tracked her down and brought her here.
Bea absorbed all this as calmly as if it were an old story about someone she knew hardly at all. “Your brother found what he was looking for, didn’t he? He lucked out and found some kind of working alien technology.”
“The dust,” Linval said.
“The dust?”
Linval grinned. “Smart dust, in the tunnel. I think it’s some kind of medical kit.”
“We can’t really be sure what it was originally used for, because its context no longer exists,” the xenoarchaeologist said. He was a short lean man with an eager expression, telling Bea, “As for what it is, it’s almost certainly some kind of nanotechnology. Smart bacteria, or smart machines the size of bacteria. . . . I’d kill for a scanning electron microscope. All I have down here are cameras that don’t have adequate resolution. . . .”
Linval said, ‘We know what it can do. That’s the important thing.”
John-Jane Smith said, “It infected us and it remade us.”
The xenoarchaeologist said, “It’s in our blood, probably in every one of our cells, too. We’re a symbiosis, like the stromatolites.”
“We don’t need to eat or drink or breathe,” Linval said. “If we stay out of sunlight too long, we begin to slow down; there’s some kind of photoelectric or thermoelectric effect recharging us.”
The xenoarchaeologist said, “We’ll probably need to eat sooner or later, if only to replace lost mass. The lander’s medikit suggests that we have a hydrogen to methane respiration cycle based on sulfur-bond chemistry. If I had the right equipment, I could tell you more. I could tell you how long we can expect to live like this.”
“We might live a century, or we might all keel over after a year,” Linval said. “But there’s no point worrying about the unknown.”
“Like what it’s done to our minds,” Bea said.
Linval smiled. “It’s the old paradox. If it has changed who we are, how can we know?’
Bea looked at John-Jane Smith. “You know it changed you. Aren’t you angry at what it did?’
The woman shrugged. “I believe that I am more used to change than you. And if it hadn’t changed me, I would have died.”
The xenoarchaeologist said, “If it can change us so that we can live on Hades without life support, it can adapt us to other environments too. In the right environment, it can change us back to what we were.”
Perhaps they were right. Perhaps the nanotech symbiosis had simply done its best to save Isham Palmer by rebuilding his body, adapting him to Hades. But why had he changed Linval and the others? Why had he dragged Bea from her gig and changed her? Perhaps the symbiosis had turned him into some kind of agent or extension of itself, which meant that she and the others were agents too, with only an illusion of freewill. . . .
Bea gestured at herself and asked, “How long did this take?”
The xenoarchaeologist said, “According to the chip in my pressure suit, the metamorphosis took about ten days.”
Linval said, “We woke up about a day before you did. We’re still finding our feet.”
“And my gig?”
Linval said, “Isham smashed up my lander. I expect he smashed up your gig too.”
John-Jane Smith said, “We’ll go there, of course. In case there is anything you want to take with you.”
Bea said, “Take with me?”
One of the mercenaries said, “This is our home now.” He was a big man with a joyful expression, and there was a murmur of agreement around him.
For the first time, Bea felt a stir of unease. In another ten days or so, Tor would return through the wormhole with a rescue party. It was possible, she thought, that Isham Palmer hadn’t lucked out after all, that the Jackaroo trader had known all along what he would find down here. Isham Palmer had been changed by what he’d found, and then he’d infected Linval and the others. He’d infected Bea. Suppose they were all the first victims of a plague that would utterly transform the human race? Was this how ascension happened, leaving the First Empire empty, ready to be sold by the Jackaroo to its next tenants?
At the junction deep inside the tunnel, Linval put a hand on Bea’s shoulder, guiding her past silky dust heaps, past the tattered remains of six cocoons. She didn’t need any more than the feeble sunlight angled down the length of the tunnel to read the single line scratched into the smooth slick curve of the wall beyond:
Have gone east, brother, to seek wonders.
“Isham,” Linval explained. “We are thinking of following him.”
“There’s a whole world to explore,” one of the mercenaries said.
“Who knows what else we might find,” the xenoarchaeologist said. “If only I had the equipment I left on your ship. . . .”
Linval studied Bea, his expression playful. “Of course you don’t have to come with us.”
“Of course I’ll come,” Bea said.
By the time Tor and the rescue party returned, she would be long gone, walking east toward the spot on the surface of the world where the sun hung directly overhead, walking across dusty plains and lava fields, climbing low mountains carved by millions of years of dust and wind, climbing the cliffs of shield volcanoes. . . .
And with that thought, she realized that she was free. She realized that the symbiosis was not an infection after all, but a gift. That she was on the threshold of a wonderful adventure.
She smiled at her companions and said, “What are we waiting for? Let’s go.”
Tiger, Burning
Alastair Reynolds
I
t was not the first time that Adam Fernando’s investigations had taken him this far from home, but on no previous trip had he ever felt quite so perilously remote, so utterly at the mercy of the machines that had copied him from brane to brane like a slowly randomizing Chinese whisper. The technicians in the Office of Scrutiny had always assured him that the process was infallible, that no essential part of him was being discarded with each duplication, but he only ever had their word on the matter, and they
would
say it was safe, wouldn’t they? Memory, as always, gained foggy holes with each instance of copying. He recalled the precise details of his assignment—the awkward nature of the problem—but he couldn’t for the life of him say why he had chosen, at what must have been the very last minute, to assume the physical embodiment of a man-sized walking cat.
When Fernando had been reconstituted after the final duplication, he came to awareness in a half-open metal egg, its inner surface still slick with the residue of the biochemical products from which he had been quickened. He pawed at his whorled, matted fur, then willed his retractile claws into action. They worked excellently, requiring no special effort on his part. A portion of his brain must have been adapted to deal with them, so that their unsheathing was almost involuntary.
He stood from the egg, taking in his surroundings. His color vision and depth perception appeared reassuringly human-normal. The quickening room was a gray-walled metal space under standard gravity, devoid of ornamentation save that provided by the many scientific tools and instruments that had been stored here. There was no welcoming party, and the air was a touch cooler than conventional taste dictated. Scrutiny had requested that he be allowed embodiment, but that was the only concession his host had made to his arrival. Which could mean one of two things: Doctor Meranda Austvro was doing all that she could to hamper his investigation, without actually breaking the law, or that she was so blissfully innocent of any actual wrongdoing that she had no need to butter him up with formal niceties.
He tested his claws again. They still worked. Behind him, he was vaguely aware of an indolently swishing tail.
He was just sheathing his claws when a door whisked open in one pastel gray wall. An aerial robot emerged swiftly into the room: a collection of dull metal spheres orbiting each other like clockwork planets in some mad, malfunctioning orrery. He bristled at the sudden intrusion, but it seemed unlikely that the host would have gone to the bother of quickening him only to have her aerial murder him immediately afterward.
“Inspector Adam Fernando, Office of Scrutiny,” he said. No need to prove it: The necessary authentication had been embedded in the header of the graviton pulse that had conveyed his resurrection profile from the repeater brane.