Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (Volume One) (69 page)

“I’m sorry I bothered you,” she said, turning to leave, and perhaps I should have stopped her. Perhaps I should have called her back and been patient and understanding, sympathetic, all those simply human attributes I was never any fucking good at being. She would have said more, I think. She might have told me her nightmares, whatever was scaring her so badly that she’d actually come to my room to try and talk, and then, seventeen years later, things might have gone differently. Peter and Umachandra might have made it back to Earth, and Joakim might have made it back with his mind intact. I might have lived a different life.

“Anytime,” I said. “Get some sleep. I bet you’ll feel better in the morning.”

Umachandra Murdin left my room without saying another word. After she’d pulled the door closed, and I was alone again, I removed the I-see and sat smoking, staring at the moonlight reflected in the glittering, polluted waters of the Banana River, trying not to think about Piros and unable to think about anything else.

The lounge doors slid closed behind Umachandra at exactly the same moment the controls on the armrest of Joakim’s chair decided to kick in. The grey wall of the
Montelius
dissolved a second time; I looked quickly down at my feet, those ridiculous woolly white slippers, but not before I’d gotten another glimpse of that darkness spread out before and behind and around us.

“Magellan has an uplink with Piros,” Umachandra said, sounding excited and not the least bit hung over from all her years in stasis. “They’ve been talking for the last three days.”

“Is Peter awake?” I asked.

Joakim snorted. “Those dotty bastards better be preparing the welcoming party to end all goddamned welcoming parties, that’s all I’ve got to say. And there better be beer.
Real
beer.”

“Is Peter awake, Umachandra?” I asked again.

“There’s been an incident,” she said. And I looked up, looking at her but trying not to see the star field behind her, framing her broad shoulders and narrow, boyish hips. Umachandra was standing with her back to us, staring at the screen. She was naked, and I almost turned away again. Her skin glistened faintly in the lounge lights, like plastic or something invertebrate pulled up from the deep ocean.

“What do you mean?” I asked her. “Is he alive?”

“Connor’s fine,” she replied, without turning away from the screen. “He’ll be up soon. There’s been an incident on Piros.” Then she touched the wall, touching the single red eye of Gliese 876, and the plasma field rippled slightly beneath her fingertips.

“What kind of an incident?” Joakim asked, standing up, and the cloth of his jumpsuit rustled like dry leaves.

“Welles’ crew,” she whispered and pulled her hand back from the screen. “They were mapping a new quarry somewhere out past the Tyndareus Ridge.”

“Jesus,” I said, or something to that that effect, and looked down at my feet again. They were freezing despite the thick fleece slippers.

“So, what the bloody hell happened?” Joakim asked.

“They’re not saying much. Maybe there’s not much to say,” Umachandra said and turned to face us. She seemed calmer now than when she’d first entered the lounge, as though her physical contact with the screen had soothed her nerves somehow. “The news has already been sent back to Earth.”

“Well, that’s pretty fucking pointless,” I grumbled, wanting a cigarette so badly now it almost hurt.

“They have us on long-range approach,” Umachandra said. “We’re locked in. Our instructions are to proceed according to flight plan. Magellan says there’ll be no deviation from procedure, regardless of what’s happened on Piros.”

“Fuck Magellan,” I said and chewed at a thumbnail.

“Sam Welles,” Joakim whispered, sitting back down in his chair. “Christ, I don’t even believe it.”

“We don’t know that they’re dead,” Umachandra said. “All we know is that they’ve been missing for six days. That’s all anyone’s saying.”

“No one goes missing on Piros for six days and lives to write home about it,” Joakim replied.

“He was a professor of yours, Dr. Welles?” Umachandra asked, and Joakim grunted some sort of affirmation.

I glanced over at him, and he was slumped back in his chair, rubbing at his eyes. “What were they even doing that far out?” he asked. “That’s almost a hundred kilometers outside the perimeter.”

“Magellan says the perimeter was expanded four and a half years ago,” Umachandra said and turned back to the screen.

“What the hell for?”

“She didn’t say. I didn’t think to ask. I can request a more extensive report.”

“What fucking difference does it make?” I asked. “They’re dead. No matter how much we know or don’t know, they’re still dead.”

“Most likely,” she agreed, and Joakim laughed a sick sort of laugh. 

“There’s more,” Umachandra continued. “Do you want to hear it?” 

“Sure,” Joakim replied. “Why the hell not.”

“Baird and Osmolska have both attempted suicide in the last six months. Baird almost succeeded. I got the feeling the droids are all that’s keeping
Gilgamesh
in the sky.”

“That’s just fucking brilliant,” Joakim muttered and stared up at the low, illuminated ceiling of the lounge compartment. “I don’t even believe this shit.”

“All we can do is stick to procedure,” Umachandra said, staring out at our red dwarf lighthouse, impossibly far away and yet only the tiniest fraction of the distance we’d traveled. “That’s all we
can
do, isn’t it? Our jobs.”

I wanted to tell her to shut up, and I wanted to tell Joakim to switch off the goddamn feed, but I didn’t do either. I sat in my chair, listening to the small, clockwork noises leaking from the starship, waiting for my heart to stop beating so fast, and waiting for Peter Connor to come up from medbay.

It’s not as though Piros is a secret. After centuries of various American government, military, and civilian offices losing control of this or that dirty little complot, the agency knew they’d never manage that, not indefinitely, no matter how much they’d have liked to try. With the constant scrutiny from AllPress, TruLize, and fifteen billion snooping souls plugged directly into the hypernet and subcast, with countless invisible h-and-g progs scouring the world’s data streams a trillion times every second, they did the best they could. Because they couldn’t simply tell the actual truth, they concocted a
better
truth, one that people would want to hear, as much as they would ever want to hear anything, and then went to work selling it. Hundreds of billions were funneled into misinformation and disinformation and
pseudo
information and what the subcast larks – at least the few who still bothered with words – used to call “sidetalk” and “lube.” For the most part, it went down like jells and sugar.

Remember, this was only a couple of decades after the big wars in Brazil and Turkey, after the North Atlantic thermohaline circulation finally went to shit and jiz, after the starving and freezing and dying began in earnest, and everyone and his sister was prowling for Jesus or Allah or Buddha anywhere they could find them. And look here, the agency says, we’re really
not
alone, after all. Maybe it’s not god or divine intervention, not exactly, but we’ve been getting signals from this planet only
fifteen
light-years away, clear evidence of extraterrestrial life, and this time it’s not going to be like Mars and Europa and Titan. This time, there’s more than microbes and sea bugs.
This
time, there’s a technology so advanced that it’ll make things bray again, and the aliens are so goddamned friendly that all we have to do is reach out and
snatch
it.

I was on Europa-Herschel Station, studying fossils from the dredgings near Tectamus Linea. The day the agency announcements were made in Washington and Beijing, Joakim and I were busy with something new from a siltstone wedge near one of the big hydrothermal vent systems, hundreds of tightly-coiled shells about the size of my thumbnail. Back on Earth, I’d have thought they were gastropods. On Europa, they might have been anything. One of the keys to good exopaleontology, I’d learned, is avoiding a reliance on Terran analogies.

Joakim came rushing up from the holding tier with his vidstick, and we plugged in and sat together at my lab pylon for a couple of hours, forgetting our silicified not-snails, listening to the larks and the bureautechs describe an extensive alien mining operation discovered on the largest moon of a gas giant circling a low-mass star somewhere in Aquarius. A PanAmerico-Sino-Brit ship named
Gilgamesh
was already in orbit around the moon, which they’d christened Piros. If the aliens called it something else, the agency wasn’t saying. When the “live” feed from the press conference ended, twenty minutes after it had ended all the way back on Earth, and AllPress Offworld switched over to a team of celeb analysts arguing noisily among themselves about the economic, political, and cultural ramifications of the discovery, Joakim tabbed the vidstick and slipped it into a pocket in his coveralls.

I don’t know what I said next. I was crying. I remember that, and I also remember that suddenly all the thousands of fossils I’d cataloged from Europan sediments and the hundreds of living species collected by the neobiologists from the ice, and from the sea below the ice, seemed rather unimportant.

But I remember exactly what Joakim said.

“How long have they been keeping this shit from us?”

Good question, I suppose, though it wasn’t the first thing that came to
my
mind. But Joakim had grown up in a West End London shitpit that had come up red as cherries when the rioting and the UN and the WHO finally forced inspections of all the old Underground stations. Finding out that you’d spent your childhood parked directly above a few million metric tons of leaking nuclear and toxic waste, and then watching both your parents die of cancer, can make a cynic of anyone.

“Well, start by figuring in the seventeen and a half years it took that ship to reach the Gliese system,” I said, making what I thought were reasonable assumptions about the
Gilgamesh
’s top speed, knowing ANSA still hadn’t managed to move anything faster than ninety-percent light speed. Joakim nodded his head thoughtfully, the way he always did when I could tell he was only half listening to me. But I went on, because I was really talking to myself, anyway. “And it’s been there a little more than fifteen years, so that’s almost thirty-three years total. But setting up a program for such an extended mission, hell, that might have taken decades, right?”

Back then, there’d only been a handful of manned deep-space expeditions: the
Aegis
, which had traveled almost halfway to Proxima Centauri before things went bad, and the
Endurance
, the first coma tube, which had made it all the way, but never made it back. The crew of the
Prometheus
had gone as far as Barnard’s star and held the distinction of being the only successful deep-space team. And now here was ANSA crowing about the
Gilgamesh
, making it all sound like a walk in the park, these travelers who would have left earth orbit long before I was born.

“Not only that,” Joakim had said, and for just a second, I thought he’d been listening after all. “Not only that, Audrey, but you gotta wonder what they’re holding back? Maybe this whole story’s a hoax, you know, a way of getting everyone’s minds off the mess we’ve made of things. Get ‘em all thinking about salvation from the stars and – ”

“But it
could
be true,” I interrupted, still giddy and not at all ready to be brought crashing down by Joakim’s wizened paranoia and nay saying, and he looked at me and frowned, then nodded his head very, very slowly.

“Maybe,” he said.

“Maybe,” I agreed, needing to believe the newscasts as much or more than I’d ever needed to believe anything in my life. Of course, that’s exactly what ANSA had been counting on, the desperation of a whole planet, and never mind how many lies had been told in the past, how many deceptions and covert fuck-ups, because it might be true. It
might
.

Joakim sighed and rubbed his hands together. “I’ve still got to log all that shite came in off the driller last night. I’ll come back later, and we can get drunk and celebrate and count not-snails until we puke.”

“You’ve still got alcohol?” I asked, having finished off the last of my contraband months before.

“A little something I’ve been saving,” he said, “just in case.” He smiled and disappeared through the lab hatchway, leaving me alone with my plastic trays and microscopes and the two droids that had been assigned to assist me. I kept them switched off most of the time, because the 712s were always a little too chatty, and I liked silence when I worked. Even worse, one of the two had a repeating algorithmic interface glitch, which had given it a habit of picking fights with the other. I’d named the glitchy droid Othniel and the other I called Edward Drinker, after a couple of rival Victorian dinosaur hunters. When Joakim had gone, I thought briefly about switching them on. There wasn’t really anything for them to do, but the company wouldn’t have been so bad. Instead, I had the computer call up something by Chopin or Liszt or Czartoryska (my early twenties were marked by an obsession with 17th-Century pianists) and went back to my fossils, measuring height and width and axis, aperture and spire, but my mind was other places, and I kept making silly arithmetical mistakes.

A few months later, I transmitted a short bioregistry report to Earth, the very last that I’d send from Europa orbit, naming the not-snails as a new genus and species of benthic europmolluscans,
Piros piros
. That was my official (and, looking back, childishly sentimental) acknowledgment of the optimism I felt after learning of the
Gilgamesh
. By then, I’d received my orders to return to Mars, and then to Earth, to begin a training program to select the next group of Gliese-bound astronauts. Joakim got the orders, too, the two of us and a few hundred other exos. He almost filed for exemption, but I talked him into going with me. There’s no way we’d ever make it through the program, I argued, no chance we’d make the cut, but hell, wouldn’t completing the program look nice on our résumés. Then we could get ourselves shipped back out to Jupiter, take up our work more or less where we’d left off, and, in our old age, we could be comforted by the knowledge that at least we’d
tried
.