Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (Volume One) (68 page)

“The droid that ran my stats claims we’re about nine days from port,” he said and ate one of the biscuits in a single bite, then sipped at his coffee.

“Careful,” I said, “or you’ll only puke it right back up again.”

“Maybe it would taste better the second time around.”

“Maybe,” I muttered absently and shook my head, staring at the blank wall where the screen had been, the solid, unrevealing hull of the tube to hide the void beyond, to hide the red siren at the heart of this system. “We’re already decelerating?” I asked.

“Yeah. We’ve probably been decelerating for a couple of weeks now,” he replied and then ate his other biscuit. “Murdin will know more after she chats with Magellan.”

“They should have waited a few more days.”

“Too much work to do,” Joakim said, finishing his coffee. “We gotta take these meatsacks back up to spec,” and he poked himself in the belly.

“I need a cigarette,” I said.

“No, you don’t. You want a cigarette.”

“I want to go home.”

“No, you don’t want that, either. You want to see whatever the hell they’ve hauled us all the way out here to see, same as me. It’s just taking you a little longer to get your bearings, that’s all.”

“I’ve got my fucking bearings,” I replied, sounding more bitter than I’d meant to, but beginning to wish Joakim had gone to the cockpit with Murdin.

He set his cup down on the table next to mine, then ran his fingertips across the keypad on his own chair, but the wall of the ship remained a wall. He cursed and tried again, and again the controls failed to respond. “I think this chair’s bloody clapped,” he said and rubbed at his beard.

“There’s nothing out there you want to see,” I told him, grateful to be spared the sight of the red dwarf again. I thought about going back to my quarters to wait for my next turn in medbay, but couldn’t imagine what I’d do once I got there.

“You’ll feel better in a few hours,” he said. “It’s just lag. You know that. This time tomorrow – ”

“ – there will only be eight days left to port.”

“Jesus, Audrey,” and he slumped back in his chair and frowned and stared at me with those intense blue eyes, lazulite and winter skies, eyes that didn’t seem a day older than the night we’d left Ganymede-Kobayashi Station. “You’re one of the first extrasolar exopaleontologists. In a few days, you’re going to see fossils of animals that evolved and became extinct on the moon of a planet revolving around an alien sun. You’re not just going to see them, you’re going to
hold
them in your hands.”

“There was so much work left to do on Europa,” I said.

“And there are plenty of competent people there to do it. You’ve
earned
this.”

“Have I?” I asked him. “Have I earned this?” But then the lounge doors slid open again, and Murdin stepped into the room, and I went back to sipping my coffee.

I should pause to wonder how much of what I’m writing here is pure fiction. After all, I have only my faded memories, more than fifty years old at this point, to draw upon. My duty log and personal journal, along with all my files, field and lab notes, were retained by the agency immediately after Piros, before our long sleep back to Jupiter. Same with Joakim and Umachandra Murdin and Peter Connor, everything the four of us had recorded during those eight months. Connor’s neural implants were wiped raw of everything pertaining in any way to the expedition. Joakim always said the post-wipe amnesia was as much to blame for Connor’s eventual suicide as the events themselves. He’d show me studies on memory trauma and cerebral degradation, and always I’d listen, because he was scared and angry, and I didn’t know what else to do. I have no idea whether or not he was right about ANSA’s role in Connor’s death, though I was grateful that I’d never been one for cybernetic upgrades and augmentation.

In my room in Paris, a third-floor flat in an overcrowded 19th-Century hovel located at the north end of what’s left of the Rue Linné, I sit at my desk and write these things on yellowed, antique paper with a temperamental ballpoint pen. It took me a month to find three reconditioned ballpoint pens, and then the paper cost me a week’s pay. The public lectures I give three times a month at the Jardin des Plantes never mention what we saw (or didn’t see) on Piros. I talk about Europan paleontology and marine diversity, hydrothermal vents or the extinction of the dinosaurs, or the month I spent on Titan. I stick to my notes, which have all been approved by the natsci PTB. I stick to my notes and wonder what would happen if I ever did otherwise.

The ink from this pen is almost the same shade of blue as the blood beneath the thin skin of my wrists. The paper is the color of my teeth.

Anyway, I was saying, this is only what I can piece together, relying on an old woman’s wasted memories. I know that I’m making a lot of it up to fill in the empty spaces. I don’t remember what the violet-eyed droid said to me that morning in medbay, for instance, or much of what Joakim said later on, as we sat together in the lounge. So, yes, it
is
a fiction, but I know that there are truths in here.

Or I am only a madwoman raving to herself, and no harm’s done.

I’m not sure that it matters any longer, whichever is the case. The sun is setting, and it’s time to feed the cats. I do that myself, because the cats hate bots.

Umachandra Murdin’s parents had both been involved in the posthumanist secession back in the late twenties, and spent years capping retroviral genshots to dilute their chromosomes with whatever exotics they could scrounge on the ph black market. And when, inevitably, they finally started to get sick, when their bodies began to manifest the tumors, the lesions, the rare blood and autoimmune diseases that made the secession so extremely short-lived, Umachandra’s mother dutifully got pregnant, as advised by the writings of the zoophilic Berkeley bioengineer who’d started the whole mess. Her husband died before the child was born, the child who would find herself among the “lucky” twenty or thirty percent of ph babies that survived to adulthood. Devakali Murdin died of pneumonia and kidney failure only a few days after giving birth.

The first time I met Umachandra, we were both natsci recruits at the agency’s North American training facility just outside Houston. Almost twenty years had passed since the first tube had reached the Gliese system, and those few higher-ups who were privy to the contents of the communications racing back towards Earth from the
Gilgamesh
were tripping over themselves putting together the next outward bound team, and the next after that, and so on.

I was stuck in one of those endless pre-briefings we all endured before the PTB finally started rationing the details regarding a large red moon that the
Gilgamesh
team had named Piros. It was mid-July in Wharton County, Texas, and the drywall-and-linoleum closet that we’d been herded into that afternoon didn’t even have an air conditioner. I was having a lot of trouble following what the speaker was saying. And then it was time for questions, and Umachandra stood up. I have no idea what she asked whichever scientist or politician or agency monkey they’d sent out to entertain us that day. 

But I have never forgotten that first glimpse of her. No one sees Umachandra Murdin and forgets her. From where I was sitting, near the back of the room, I could tell that she was an extraordinarily tall woman, well over seven feet, with long jet-black hair and skin that flashed bands of a faint iridescent blue-green in the sunlight coming in through the narrow windows of the meeting room. Later on I’d learn that was the chromatophores and photophores in her skin, inherited from the squid DNA her parents had capped. It didn’t take people long to learn how to read Umachandra’s moods, simply by noting the shifting colors and patterns of her skin. That day, her hands seemed extremely long and slender, though I couldn’t tell from where I was sitting that she had no fingernails. She had a pronounced mid-Atlantic accent and a slight lisp, as though her tongue didn’t quite fit inside her narrow jaws.

The cover story was that she’d been recruited as a biostratigrapher and flight tech, but we’d all learn later on that the agency was wild to learn how ph mutants would perform under the stresses of interstellar travel. They had their own eugenics programs, of course, even if the world was busy pretending that they didn’t, and the children of the secessionists were a windfall, white mice for the taking. Add to Umachandra’s unique physiology an IQ that would have made Einstein, Hawking and Wilcox blush, and she was a prize, indeed. Most of the ph kids suffered severe mental retardation and psychoses, but Umachandra was a shining supernova exception. And I suspect that was one of the pearls in the long string leading to her damnation.

After the meeting, I tried to get a better look at her, shoving and squeezing my way through the crowd towards the front of the room, but she was surrounded by instructors and other recruits. I did get a glimpse of her eyes. Pythons have eyes almost exactly like that.

When the
Montelius
team was finalized in August 2234, almost thirteen months later, I was bray surprised that I’d made the cut. But the fact that Umachandra would be going was, I thought then and still believe now, a foregone conclusion. The four of us – Umachandra, Peter Connor, Joakim, and I – were immediately shipped off to the old Sagan-Mars II complex in Florida to finish out our training, and to impatiently endure the long year until the ship would be ready. Then we’d all be ferried up to the orbital station where the tubes were being assembled by a cabal of now mostly-extinct multinational megacorps that had been awarded ANSA contracts to handle the Gliese program.

One evening in May, I was alone in my room, the lights off, sweating and smoking in the cracker box of a house they’d stuck us all in on Cape Canaveral. I was sipping a Coke and watching the Banana River from my bedroom window, the lights strung out along Merritt Island to the west, out beyond the flat black water. I remember
all
that. I really do. I was supposed to be reading, one of the dozens of advance geological reports from the
Gilgamesh
team. I expect it was right there in the left lens of my I-see unit, unnoticed, forgotten as I stared through the data stream at the world outside my window.

There was a small noise behind me, and I blinked off the computer as I turned to find Umachandra Murdin standing there in my open doorway (we weren’t allowed locks), silhouetted by the bright fluorescent lights from the corridor. In the months we’d spent together in the house, she’d hardly spoken to me, or to Joakim or Peter, for that matter, and we’d all come to accept her taciturn habits. I squinted into the light and motioned for her to come in.

She hesitated a moment or two, glancing over her shoulder as if she were afraid she might have been followed, then quickly stepped into the room and shut the door behind her.

“You can switch on the lights,” I said.

“No, I can see,” she replied in that accent that could have been Baltimore or Philadelphia and the same faint lisp I’d heard the day I first saw her. “I can see you well enough.”

“So, what’s ticking?” I asked, trying diligently not to sound surprised that she was there in my room, trying even harder not to show my discomfort at being alone with her for the first time.

“Are you busy?” she replied, still standing with the closed door at her back.

“No, I was only reading,” I lied, stubbing out my cigarette in an ashtray on my cluttered desk. “‘Baird’s third sedimentological report on Quarry 9.’”

“Are you afraid, Audrey?” she interrupted and took one cautious step away from the door.

“Afraid of what?”

Umachandra was silent a moment then, and I got the impression she was trying to decide if she’d made a mistake coming to talk to me. Past the smells of my untidy room and my cigarette smoke, I caught the rose oil she wore in a vain attempt to mask the faintly fishy, faintly musky odor of her body. It was always worse whenever she was excited or nervous.

“It’s silly,” she whispered. “I shouldn’t have bothered you.”

“No, it’s okay. We’ve never talked, not really. And I’m sick of these damned reports.”

“They’re important,” she said. “Especially Quarry 9, if Baird and Welles are right, if they’re interpreting – ”

“Afraid of
what
, Umachandra?” I asked her again, and she stood there in the gloom, staring down at me with her unreadable python eyes flicking back the light of Merritt Island. The bare skin on her arms and shoulders and throat rippled suddenly to life with its own light, unsteady shades of crimson and pink and violet.

“The
mission
,” she said. “No, no, not the mission. That’s not exactly what I mean. I mean the
distance
.”

“I’m afraid,” I admitted, reaching for another cigarette and my lighter, wishing Joakim were there with me. “I think we’d have to be fools not to be scared.”

“I know I have the least to lose. I have no family. I have no friends. Only my work. Only the agency.”

“I don’t think that matters, what we do or don’t have to lose. I don’t think that has anything to do with being afraid.”

“I’ve been having bad dreams,” she said, and a vivid cascade of reds washed across her flesh.

“We have our psych evaluations next week. You should mention them then, if it’s really bothering you.”

“They’re not telling us something.”

I laughed, though I knew at once that I shouldn’t have, that she would think I was laughing at her, though I wasn’t. “They’re not telling us a
lot
of things,” I said and lit my cigarette.

“Audrey, I don’t think they’ve even told us why we’re going to Piros. I don’t think we have any idea what this is really about.”

“Then we’ll find out when we get there,” I said. “If you’re right, it’s nothing we can do anything about. We can only do our jobs.”

“I know I have the least to lose,” she said again, and her skin faded to a pale, unwavering orange.

“Well, then, maybe you also have the most to gain,” I suggested. She wasn’t saying anything that I hadn’t thought of already, nothing Joakim and I hadn’t discussed, and that night, with the Atlantic wind pressing at the walls and windows of our little house by the sea, I didn’t welcome anyone else’s paranoia.