Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine #223 (14 page)

As I spoke, I remembered the rightness of my case, the importance. I was terrified, baring myself to be judged against him, but I think I stood a little straighter and spoke with more vigor. I pressed a button on my lectern and projected my first slide; Trung could open with all the jokes and smiles he liked, but I'd show the Ganeshans data.

"Dr Trung's analysis of Yama's mineral environment suffers from two important mistakes. Most crucially, his scan is a general one; he does not include artificial caches in his—"

"I'm sorry,” Trung interjected, resting his chin in his palm and his elbow on the podium. “I don't mean to be rude, but did you say
artificial caches,
or did I mishear?"

The audience whispered among themselves, apparently as jarred by the interruption as I was. “You heard correctly,” I said. Now I felt hot with anger—that he spoke to me so nonchalantly, that he knocked me out of my stride, that he imposed himself whenever he liked. I wanted to say something cutting and awful, call him out while I had the Ganeshans’ sympathies. Instead, I listened as he spoke again.

"I only ask,” said Trung, now tapping the podium, “because in a year of study I've encountered no evidence whatsoever of artificial caches. No Yama building or accessing caches, no dense concentrations of iron. Nothing. Can you supply us with any such evidence, Dr Desai?"

Now I knew why he'd interrupted, what he was working toward. Behind the lectern, I clenched my fists until the nails cut my palms. “The Yama alluded to the caches in my communications with them,” I said slowly, holding his gaze.

"
Communications.
I see.” He looked down at his podium and shook his head, then pointed his bright eyes back at mine. “Unfortunately, I've had no communications of my own with the Yama. Nor has anyone else, to the best of my knowledge. I understand your, ah, congress with the tribe is
psychic
in nature, is that correct?"

"I don't want to define alien behavior in human terms.” There were scattered chuckles from the crowd, but I was shaking and Trung knew it. My fists rattled on the lectern. Now Trung grinned as widely as I'd yet seen.

"
Touché.
Still, I wonder how to describe your ... palavers. I have here—” He shuffled through papers, probably for dramatic effect. “I have here an article that Dr Desai wrote recently for
The Often Happy Review
. One passage in particular strikes me as both instructive and very puzzling; it sheds some light, I think, on Dr Desai's unorthodox (and independently unreproduced) communications as well as her particular mental state. I quote:

Immersion is a surreal and often terrifying experience, and it is sometimes difficult to persuade myself that I am not alone. The barrier between skin and vacuum is only a sheer film of nanites; I feel nothing, hear nothing. Even the eye is disappointed: the Yama are not outwardly colorful, but resemble great gray trilobites, or thick squids built of blasted rock. They do not flit and fight, but drift and slowly feed. Sometimes my enthusiasm for these miracles is marred by a kind of mad doubt that they live at all: have we, in our loneliness, mistaken a cloud of debris for something incredible?

But then I am moved. It feels like the migration of a dead soul, like a leaving and a coming home ... I enter the Yama and I
feel
the Yama; I remember the nurturing of newborn and the gathering of iron, the slow and sad negotiation of generation-pacts. This communion, this entanglement, is both beautiful and wrenching: beautiful because my soul limns the vast drifting intelligences of an impossible world, and wrenching because I must leave and live alone.

"Unquote,” Trung murmured.

I listened to my words in his mouth and it galled. The audacity of his theft—that theft among the others—tore and scraped and galled, and I must have cried out in frustration. Trung bit his lip and delivered his
coup de grace
.

"These just don't sound like the words of a scholar.” He turned to me, frowning, for all the world like a man making an apology. “I fear Dr Desai is hearing voices in the dark."

Barefoot and affable, Trung offered me a glass of champagne.

"The Ganeshans,” he said, “are dedicated partiers.” He'd obviously waited for me here at the door. I was still tired and jumplagged and didn't know how to respond. The Reception Hall was just as redolent of brilliant excess as the rest of the colony. I would've been speechless even without his attentions.

I took the champagne and smiled.

The Hall was a pentagonal dome, wood-paneled with enormous windows overhead. The entire marble floor was a sort of shallow pool; in the center of the room, an ornate silver fountain sprayed fresh water high into the air. Once the spray reached its zenith, it paused—rather, it fell very, very slowly, as if in low gravity. Outside, snow spun in fierce whorls.

"Isn't it lovely?” said Trung. “You'll have to hear Marius explain the, ah, foot-pool here.” He imitated Pritzhak's soft, halting voice: “
It is, my dear, a public space. We are all mixing our roots
.” He laughed and kicked the water. “It is good fun, I suppose."

Good fun. I felt hot and uneasy; it was a relief to step out of my shoes and into the water. I took a sip of champagne.

"The Pritzhak-Khubchanis seem very kind."

"Gods yes, it's intolerable. Last week they invited me to dinner in their personal suite. Now, I was expecting unreasonable opulence: diamond chandeliers, filet mignon on the bare backs of prostrate servants, all that. What do I find instead? Marius and Parvati, three plates of spaghetti, and a modest studio apartment. I keep hoping I'll turn a corner and find the old farts torturing a puppy, or ... skipping about on a naked mushroom bender. Otherwise I'll have to go on feeling like a ne'er-do-well grandson every time I talk to them."

I laughed and sipped the champagne again.

"Now,” said Trung, pointing to a woman who made her way toward us, “here is a properly debauched aristo.” The stranger strode forward and took my free hand, shaking it firmly.

"Aishwarya,” she said. The only person all day who'd used my first name. “Honored and entranced. My name is Yuen Xi."

"Well met.” I released her hand and she drifted backward, toward Trung. “Our Humanities building at Often Happy is named for a Yuen Xi,” I said. “I wonder if you're related."

"Oh yes.” She linked arms with Trung. “Absolutely. It's named for me.” She spoke in the same lilting, grinning way as Simon—impossible to tell whether she joked or not.

"Yuen is a staunch Desai partisan,” added Trung. “If she tells me true, she's one of your most generous contributors."

"Oh?” I began to flush.

"Simon is a wretched liar. I serve on the advisory councils of several organizations that fund your research. No more or less. That said, I'm an enormous admirer of your work."

"Thank you,” I said. I didn't feel thankful. I felt embarrassed and empty and out of my depth. These people dripped conversation, and I was all monosyllables and awkward smiles.

Yuen Xi nodded, as if in agreement. “You're a very creative thinker, Aishwarya, and that's a fact that recommends you. If the Yama are truly Earthborn, as you say ... well, my hope is that your work may eventually help us find
ourselves
."

Trung laughed. “You mean an inhabited Earth. With another me and another Yuen Xi and another Dr Desai."

She pretended to pout. “I do."

"Not happening, my friend. It's basic deep-q: an Earth so similar to ours is too likely. We can only jump into an improbable universe. Entire deeps department at São Paulo'll tell you that, and they
never
agree."

Yuen turned to me. “See? Some scholars lack imagination."

I wanted to excuse myself and walk away, but my legs felt heavy and bloodless. Suddenly I was light-headed; Yuen and Simon sounded as if they spoke through water, and I drifted in and out of their argument.

"Clusters of probability—"

"
Innovate
, Simon—"

"Like a catapult—"

"You're talking about determinism—"

"Up and out but never nearby—"

My heart beat hard, but in half-time, like the bass cadence of some ominous march. Now I wanted badly to open my mouth, to ask for help, but could not. The sensation of heavy bloodlessness crept up my chest and neck. My gaze settled on a formation of water, falling ever so slowly to the pool below, and I couldn't look away.

How much time passed? I don't know. Did I pass out? I don't know. Yuen Xi was gone and my feet soaked the carpet. Trung's hand was on my waist. “Strong shit,” he murmured in my ear. “These Ganeshans are dedicated partiers."

How much time passed? I was naked, with nothing at all to protect me from the vacuum. Cold and bloodless and dead, ice tile against my back. Forces heaved and shivered inside me. I was falling, or I'd fallen, and I couldn't breathe. My heart beat slow, its own dead rhythm.

I hate it
, I thought quietly.
I'm cold.

And his blue eyes glowed.

I slept after the debate, though it wasn't yet night. When I woke, the light in my suite was dim and it was dark outside the porthole. After staring at the ceiling for some time, I sat up and pressed my hand against the window. I felt a very faint chill, and that was all.

When I'm weightless, out in the waste and nothing of Yama, I want to feel some chill or warmth. I want to feel the nanite film, a crawl of warm machines across my skin. It's too unsettling, too
wrong
to have no stimulus at all, to drift and watch until your soul moves.

I got out of bed and the suite lights brightened. My eyes still stung. I took a long shower and watched myself in the mirror until it was completely fogged over. I didn't want to be here, but neither did I want to jump back home in the morning.
Shit
, I thought.
Shit.

Eventually the hot water dwindled. I turned off the shower, dried, and stepped out of the bathroom. Then my eye fell on a slip of paper beneath the suite's front door.

I thought you won. P.K.

Parvati Khubchani. My eyes watered. Her four words were kinder than any I'd heard all day.

I fished around in the pockets of dirty clothes for my wi-mo and logged on to the colony wireless, thinking I'd thank Parvati. But the wi-mo glowed red: no connection.

No connection. It felt like a punchline without a joke. I made a cup of tea and decided to write a letter: something longer than the two words I would've sent over wireless. I sat cross-legged in bed and composed first lines:
Your kindness is. Thank you for. I am deeply moved. I am indebted.
First lines are always the hardest. Even when you decide on one, you change it a dozen times before you're done. I changed it again—

And the world shook.

There was a low, enormous snap: like the bass string spine of the world plucked too hard. Lights cut off and then returned, dimmer than before. Lamps tumbled from nightstands, books from shelves. I fell on my back, arms open wide, ready to embrace the ceiling.

And it was over. Afterward the compound creaked, sung a long eerie song of stressed metal. I wondered if I was going to die, and opened my wi-mo. Still no connection. Warily, I got up from the bed and walked to the window—really a large, person-sized porthole set into a wood-panel alcove. Outside was mostly accumulated snow, but if I climbed up into the alcove I could see a patch of gray sky. I leaned forward on my knees and the bruises there complained; the window barely, just
barely
, chilled my palm. Over the wall of snow, against gray clouds...

No. Not sky. That gray was too close for clouds, too rough. Something else, something new and enormous was outside. I turned around and slid out of the alcove. Stood dumb and still in the middle of my suite.
Think
, I thought, unable or unwilling to connect the dots, to sling that last neuron across the great cogitative divide.

Was it possible that ... ?

The front door rattled once and then opened. Not violently—covertly, as if someone had coaxed the lock with whispers and soft fingers. The door closed again, and that
someone
materialized in my suite, black-eyed, her lips pressed pale. She wore a white hardsuit now, and her face wasn't half so obscure as the last time I saw her.

"Are you crazy?” she demanded.

I am the light behind my eyes.

Again and again: that thought, a mantra. I was weightless, clenched tight. Anxious and angry and sick of the thought that bobbed constantly to the surface.

I am the light behind my eyes.

I drifted in space, hurt and confused, hurt in a way that I couldn't understand. I struggled through folds of black, wrenched apart the curtains of
here
, until all I felt was the agony of elsewhere, the long fall in every direction, the fall toward myself...

I woke up.

Now a different flavor of pain ran through me. Sore exhaustion, an ache in every joint. I was curled up naked on my couch, my head thick with hangover. Somewhere an alarm clock played ocean sounds. Gulls, the steady sigh of waves. I smelled coffee, heard someone breathe nearby. The realization shouldered its way slowly though my headache:

Oh. Not my couch.

Trung sat in a recliner on the opposite side of the room, watching me and sipping coffee from a wine glass. He'd pulled on a pair of loose silk pajama pants. It hurt to look at him, so I shut my eyes and listened to the gulls on the alarm.

The couch, brown and rough corduroy, reminded me of the furniture in my grandparents’ old house. I squeezed my eyelids tight, willed the headache away, and thought about my dream.

I am the light behind my eyes.

Falling in every direction, toward myself.

My clothes lay in a pile near Trung, halfway between the living area and kitchenette. The thought of moving closer to him made me want to throw up, but I couldn't lay there silent and exposed. I sat up. Stood. My stomach lurched, but I swallowed the bile and took unsteady steps past Trung, to my things. I pulled on my skirt.