Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (Volume One) (73 page)

“We’re an old species,” I told her. “We’re not as adaptable was we like to think. It takes us time to adjust to things that are different from us.”

“Yes, I’ve seen that.”

“We were a long way from home. Everything was fucked. We were scared.”

“Don’t you think those synths on the other ship were frightened, as well?”

“They were,” I admitted.

“Are you going to put that in your story?” she said, and looked away from the bay window, the shifting grey-blue curtain blotting out the city.

“Yes. Of course.”

And that seemed to satisfy her. Zoraya is a very beautiful girl, and it comforts me to know that she’ll never age, that she’ll live out the span of her life with that same perfect face (unless she chooses to do otherwise). Her eyes are hazel green, and a casual inspection would never reveal that they’re synthetic. Most of the time, her long hair is almost white, but some days she wears it a cold lavender, and some days she wears it auburn. If I’d ever had a daughter, I like to think she’d have been as beautiful as Zoraya.

When we were all aboard
Gilgamesh
, we quickly stripped off the EVA suits before leaving the ship’s transfer bay. Umachandra wadded hers into a ball and tossed it into a corner, and Peter laughed at her. We followed a nervous synth man to a lift that carried us up to the conference room on tier three. The synth woman we’d spoken to on the obs deck a few hours before was waiting for us there.

“Welcome,” she said pleasantly, motioning us to be seated at the long oval table that took up most of the small room. “Thank you, Lawrence,” she said to the synth man, and he nodded to her and immediately disappeared back into the corridor, closing the door behind him.

“As I’ve already indicated,” the synth woman said, “we are all extremely relieved by your arrival.”

“Fine,” Joakim said. “Now, when are you going to tell us what’s happening here?” and she glanced down at her hands, folded on the tabletop in front of her. She was a standard Apex3, the violet eyes and black hair, the skin that shimmered very faintly under the cabin lights, the near infinite patience she’d been programmed to exhibit towards human beings.

“My name is Evelyn,” she said.

“Since when do A3s have names?” Peter blurted, and she didn’t look away from her folded hands.

“Dr. Osmolska gave me the name. She named all of us here on the
Gilgamesh
.”

“Well, that was certainly very fucking thoughtful of her,” he said, and Joakim frowned at him.

“Where is she, Evelyn?” Joakim asked. “Where is Dr. Osmolska?”

“She’s in her quarters.”

“And Dr. Baird?”

“In his quarters, as well. It was necessary to sedate them for their own well-being.”

“But you’ll allow us to see them?”

“If that’s what you wish, Commander. But I’m afraid they won’t be very much use to you.”

“And all the others went to the surface with Dr. Welles?” I asked her, and she nodded.

“I think you should know that Dr. Baird tried to dissuade him from expanding the perimeter, and from taking a shuttle down to the site. But he was very excited.”

“Which site?” I asked, and she looked up at me, and that’s when I saw that she was afraid, Zoraya. A tremble at the corners of her full lips, the brittle flash of her eyes. She passed her left hand across the small conpad set into her end of the table, and the wall behind her dissolved into a wide screen.

“Registration Piros 2250-2-987.2,” she said. “Grid reference R9-0P2, longitude – ”

“Jesus Christ,” Peter said, interrupting her. On the screen, photocells in the wall displayed an aerial view of a wide expanse of Pirosan badlands. Of course, we all knew about the alien ships, the digging equipment and refineries, the abandoned settlements, but we’d never seen photographs as clear as the one on the wall behind Evelyn.

“That was taken from about five kilometers up,” she said, still watching me. “Preliminary results show it to be the most recent site we’ve found anywhere on Piros thus far. The advance probes brought back samples that dated at 9,300 years, plus or minus 1,000 years.”

“Jesus,” Peter said again. “Look at that shit.”

I noticed the roads first, lighter strips of brick red and orange-white crisscrossing the ridges and gullies and ravines, leading my eyes to the edge of the great pit. I might easily have been looking at a huge Terran mining operation, the abandoned Bingham Canyon mine in Utah or the Limberg quarry in Finland, one of the old giants from the days before the economics of offworld prospecting and refining closed down most of the open pits on Earth. Even after millennia, the narrow, concentric terraces were still visible.

“It’s gigantic,” Joakim said.

“How wide?” Umachandra asked.

“More than seven kilometers at its maximum,” Evelyn replied, and she swept her hand through the air above the conpad again. The image on the screen wavered slightly as the resolution increased. “Now we’re at about three kilometers,” she said. “You can clearly see the lake.”

Indeed, the floor of the enormous quarry was completely flooded. In the photo, the water was very dark and looked more like oil than liquid water. I could only begin to imagine how deep it might be, how long that vast, still pool had lain in the shadow of Cecrops, how long since the aliens hit some subterranean waterway, how long since they shut off the pumps that would have kept the pit dry and workable.

Evelyn continued talking, lecturing us now like an excited ANSA lark making a pitch to some tight-fisted finance committee. But she didn’t look at the screen even once, kept her back to the wall, her eyes alternating from our faces to the conpad on the table. “The section here is capped by a thick algal limestone, which grades conformably into the underlying sulfide ores. The copper-bearing horizons – there are at least twelve – are all shales that have suffered low-grade metamorphism. The copper porphyry ore body is both huge and fairly uniform in the distribution of sulfide mineralization, especially chalcopyrite. The probes also found gold-, silver- and molybdenum-in-concentrate. But we suspect, from examinations of the freighters and refinery sites, that the copper was the primary target ore.”

“That’s fascinating,” Peter said and scratched at his beard. “But I think we ought to be talking about what’s happened to the
crew
, and save the geology for later.”

The synth nodded and then folded her hands in front of her again, resting them near the conpad.

“It’s very complicated,” she said.

“I appreciate that,” Joakim told her, and I could hear his patience beginning to fray. “But we have to know what’s happened to Commander Welles, and what’s wrong with Baird and Osmolska. We have to know these things
now
, Evelyn.”

“I don’t think it will matter very much, not the way that you hope it might.”

After she said that, I think we were all silent for a moment or two. I couldn’t take my eyes off the screen, that enormous quarry with its flat black lake, the careless scatter of derelict machinery little altered by the better part of a millennium at the mercy of Piros’ elements, the countless shades of red and brown, yellow and orange.

I think it was Umachandra who spoke first, who spoke next. She might have said, “Have the probes at least managed to locate Dr. Welles’ shuttle?”

Yes, I’m pretty sure she did. Speak first. That, or something near enough that the differences don’t matter.

“You’re ph,” the synth replied, and Umachandra said that yes, she was.

“That makes you a sort of alien, too, doesn’t it?”

“Just answer the question. Did you find the goddamn shuttle or not?” Peter asked angrily, leaning across the table towards Evelyn.

“We did,” she said, still calm, but her hands had begun to tremble slightly. “We found it almost immediately,” and she increased the resolution of the photograph again, then toggled the image left. There was no mistaking the D-shaped outline of the shuttle for anything else. I could even read the registration number printed in canary yellow across the fuselage, just behind the cockpit.

“And you’re telling us it was empty?” Joakim asked.

“Am I under suspicion, Commander?”

He glanced at Peter and then at me.

“If you were in our position – ” I began, and Peter interrupted me.

“But it isn’t, Audrey. That’s just the problem. It has no fucking idea how to
begin
to comprehend your position.”

“I don’t believe that’s true, Dr. Connor,” Evelyn said, her composure beginning to fail, and she raised her head and looked him in the eyes.

“Right now, I couldn’t care less what you
think
,” Peter replied. “Or what you
think
you think. So far as I’m concerned, you’re nothing more than an ambulatory extension of
Gilgamesh
. And considering the mess we have here, I think suspecting computer malfunction is not terribly fucking unreasonable.”

“You’re wrong. She’s entirely autonomous,” Umachandra said, turning towards Peter Connor. “The A3s have no more reliance on a mainframe than I have on Magellan,” and she pointed to the link ports at her temples.

“It isn’t necessary for you to defend me, Dr. Murdin,” Evelyn said and then looked down at the conpad.

“What did you mean,” Joakim asked her, “when you said that you didn’t think it would matter if we learned what has happened to the crew?”

“She was fucking around with your head,” Peter said, and Umachandra told him to be quiet.

“I wish I could answer that question, Commander Hamilton. I sincerely wish that I could.”

“Why can’t you, Evelyn?” Joakim asked. “Is it because you don’t
know
the answer or because you won’t
tell
us the answer?”

“I know…” she started, and then there was an odd, unexpectedly mechanical hitch in her voice. She shut her eyes for a moment before continuing. “What I know or do not know is irrelevant, Commander.”

“And why is that?” I asked, and she looked at me with those violet eyes. I think she would have been crying if the A3s had been equipped with tear ducts.

“As a personal favor to Dr. Osmolska, I allowed her to lock certain files in my memory. She has the password. No one else can open them. It was a favor, the least thing I could do for her.”

“Because she gave you a name,” Umachandra said.

“For many reasons, Dr. Murdin.”

“There’s no override?” Joakim asked.

“Dr. Osmolska felt that an option to override would have defeated the purpose of locking the files, and I agreed with her.”

“Screw this,” Peter growled, standing up so quickly that he almost knocked his chair over, and the synth flinched. “Fuck it. Why don’t we find Baird and Osmolska and get all our asses back over to the
Monty
as fast as we fucking can?”

“Why don’t you just sit back down and shut up?” Umachandra told him.

“Dr. Connor may be right,” Evelyn said, speaking hardly louder than a whisper now. “I shouldn’t have brought you over. It was selfish – ”

“How long are you three going to sit here listening to this crap?” Peter asked, taking a step backwards, towards the closed hatchway. “I’m sorry as hell about whatever’s happened here, but I don’t see a lot we can do, except cut our losses and head back home.”

“Peter, there won’t be a viable launch window for another two weeks,” I said. “You need – ”

“So, we let the droids worry about it, or we program Magellan to make the appropriate course corrections automatically.”

“You don’t even know what you’re talking about,” Umachandra said and shook her head. “You’re behaving like a child.”

“
Please
,” Evelyn whispered, shutting her eyes again. “This isn’t helping anything, fighting amongst yourselves. If you wish to leave, do so. Or if you wish to speak with doctors Baird and Osmolska – ”

“You can’t tell us what Welles found down there?” Joakim asked her and pointed at the screen. “You can’t tell us what he was looking for?”

“No,” the A3 replied, and then opened her eyes. “I can’t. All those files are locked.”

“Then we have to try to find the answers ourselves.”

“What the hell for?” Peter asked Joakim and laughed. I was beginning to wonder how Peter Connor had ever made it through the stress evaluations. “You
heard
what it fucking said. There’s nothing we can do.”

“Peter, if you want to go back to
Montelius
, I’m not going to hold it against you.” Joakim watched Evelyn as he spoke, and now she was watching him.

“I
am
telling you the truth, Commander,” Evelyn said. “Everything that I
can
tell you, everything I still have access to. Dr. Osmolska is my friend.”

“And Dr. Welles is mine,” Joakim replied and smiled for her.

“Yes, I know. He was very excited about your arrival.”

“Can you tell us if you think there’s any chance that he’s still alive?”

She hesitated a moment, glanced at Peter pacing about near the doors. “It seems very unlikely,” she replied. “All the shuttle’s survival packs and medical supplies were still on the vessel. Wherever they’ve gone, they went without food and water. If someone was injured…”

“Was there any evidence of violence aboard the shuttle,” I added and, in response, the A3 only stared at me helplessly.

“Thank you,” Joakim said to her. “Under the circumstances, I know that you’ve done everything you can.”

“Commander, there are answers you’re better off not finding. I wish that you could understand that.”

“I wish that I could, too,” Joakim said, getting to his feet. “I want to speak to Dr. Baird now.”

“Certainly,” she said and waved her hand over the conpad, dismissing the image of the shuttle and the moon’s surface, making the wall just a wall again. “I’ll take you to his quarters myself.”

There’s someone at the door. It’s probably only Zoraya. We play chess at seven P.M. on Thursday nights, after she gets home from her job at the library. Perhaps I’ll write a little more after our game, if I’m not too tired. Perhaps I’ll show her what I’ve just written.

Five weeks ago, the girl from my lecture at the Galerie de paléontologie et d’anatomie comparée came to see me. She was waiting in the hallway outside my flat. It isn’t hard to get into this building, so I wasn’t surprised. Her clothes were dirty, and her hair didn’t appear to have been combed in days. She looked thinner and somewhat older than I remembered, but I’d only seen her across a crowded auditorium, and my eyes aren’t what they once were. She introduced herself, Jedda Callahan, a sociometrics and theology student at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle.