Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (Volume One) (74 page)

“I already know your name,” I said, glancing up and down the long hall twice to be sure that all the other doors were shut, to be sure no one was listening. And no one was, at least no one I could
see
. 

“I have to talk with you,” she said. “It’s important.”

“You made yellow,” I replied, which, I thought, was almost as direct as simply saying no, fuck off, leave me alone, go haunt someone else.

“Please,” she said and stepped between me and my front door. “You were there. I know that you were. The people I work with – ”

“ – are none of my concern. Now, I need you to get out of my way.”

“Dr. Hamilton contacted us. Before he died, he told us things about Gliese, about what happened on Piros, and he said that we should find you.”

“Get out of my way, Miss Callahan,” I said, reaching into a coat pocket for the red buzzrip dispenser I’d been carrying since coming to Paris from Miami. I had never needed it before. I’d never really thought that I would.

“He said we could trust you. He said you were apple.”

“Dr. Hamilton wasn’t well,” I replied, my hand closing around the plastic dispenser. I took it out of my pocket, and she stared at it a moment and then looked at me again.

“He said you were his lover.”

“I am an old woman. That’s
all
that I am anymore. And I won’t lose my pension and risk confinement because you want to play dissident or terrorist or whatever the hell it is you’re doing.”

“I’m looking for the truth,” she said, and I laughed at her. It was a hard, sick laugh that I think I must have been saving up in some lightless corner of my soul for a very, very long time. It spilled out of me like vomit or diarrhea, like some illness I’d been hoarding.

“Jesus, I should rip your ass just for saying something that stupid,” I told her, wiping at my eyes, realizing that I’d started crying. “I should call the police. Or haven’t you had enough of them?”

Jedda took a step backwards and bumped into the door of my apartment. Her eyes were on the dispenser.

“You are an old woman,” she said. “And I can’t offer you any sort of protection, and I can’t offer you money – ”

“I’m not telling you anything.”

“He said you wouldn’t. He said we could trust you, but that you’d be too afraid to talk.”

“Then why the hell are you here, child?” I raised the buzzrip, pointing it directly at her face the way that the instructions show.

“Because he thought he might be wrong about you. He said we should at least try. He said you saw more, that you could fill in the – ”

“If I have to use this shit,” I said and flipped the safety cap off the dispenser, “if you
make
me use this, it’s unlikely you’ll ever see again. And there’s a fifty-fifty chance you’ll be deaf.”

“I know that,” she said. “I’ve seen people – ”

“Well, I haven’t, and I don’t want to.”

“A cop ripped my brother two years ago, during an interrogation,” Jedda Callahan said. “He lost both his eyes.”

“I can’t help you. Let’s be honest No, I
won’t
help you.”

It was icy cold in the hallway, because no one on this block can afford more than a few hours of thermal a day, and none of it gets wasted on hallways or lobbies or lifts. Our breath fogged in the air, smoke from our lips to hang a moment in the glow from the dim, unsteady lamps, and I realized that she wasn’t wearing a coat.

“You saw a lot more than he did,” she said again. “That’s what Dr. Hamilton told us. You and Dr. Murdin, he said you saw the most.”

“Are you brave, child, or are you just an idiot?”

“Either way, I’m not a coward. I don’t hide behind the cops and fucking buzzrip.”

“I can’t tell you, or anyone else, what I don’t remember,” I said, speaking slowly, deliberately, looking her directly in the eyes, the index finger of my right hand covering the dispenser’s hit button.

“No,” she said. “No, you can’t.”

“Whatever I saw or didn’t see on Piros, Jedda, I forgot all about it long ago. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”

She took a deep, hitching breath and stepped quickly to one side, no longer blocking the door. At that moment, I think I saw many things in her eyes. Fear and anger, confusion, a terrible resolve that I can only vaguely recall ever having felt myself (if, indeed, I ever truly felt anything half so pure). There was blood flecking her chapped lips, and she licked at it and watched me.

“The people I work with,” she whispered, “we’re preparing to release what we have on Piros. But, you know how it is, Dr. Cather. You’re a scientist, so I
know
you know how it is. Every time someone answers one question, we have ten new ones to take its place.”

“That’s the way it works,” I replied, and she nodded her head.

“What if it followed you back?” she asked and hugged herself, trying not to shiver. “You
must
wonder about that, Dr. Cather. You must wonder about that a lot. What if it’s here
now
?”

I flipped the safety cap back into place and stepped past her, reaching for the doorknob. Down the hall, Zoraya opened her door and peered out at us.

“
Est-ce qu’il y a quelque chose que ne va pas
?” she called out, and I knew that she probably had her hand on the security ringer mounted by her door. “
Y a-t-il un problème
, Dr. Cather?”

“I’m leaving,” Jedda Callahan said and forced a smile. “It was my mistake. I’m sorry to have bothered you. I promise it won’t happen again.”

“
Tout va bien
,” I called back to Zoraya. “
Elle est une étudiante
.”

“Should you change your mind – ” Jedda Callahan began.

“I won’t,” I told her.

“We’re not as hard to find as you might think. Not if we want to be found.
Bonsoir,
Dr. Cather.
Je ne vous dérangerai plus
.”

And she left me standing there, my hand sweating on the doorknob, breathless and my heart pounding, my mouth gone dry as ashes. When the lift doors had closed, I told Zoraya that I was fine, really, not to worry, and she said to call her if I needed anything, anything at all, if I wanted to talk or play chess, and then she shut her door again.

If you’re reading this, Jedda, then I hope that there are more answers in the pages that follow than there are questions. I doubt it, as surely as I’ve ever doubted anything, but I
do
hope, for all our sakes.

Considering she’d been the one responsible for locking us out of Evelyn’s memories, it didn’t seem there was much to be gained by trying to talk with Anastazja Osmolska. Besides, she’d asked to be heavily sedated, hourly doses of Trioxysephrine and Relar, which made her unwillingness to speak to us a moot point. Umachandra and Peter went down to the labs on tier two, following a talkative synth geophysicist named Bellerophon. Umachandra wanted to get a look at whatever was left of the field and prep logs, and we all felt it was best to keep Peter where his outbursts could do the least damage.

The
Gilgamesh
hummed indifferently around us, and our footsteps echoed loudly in the long corridors.

As commanding officer, Evelyn asked to be present, and Joakim reluctantly agreed. I think he would have preferred to speak with Jack Baird alone.

We found him sitting in the dark. Evelyn’s retinal scan opened his hatch, and there was nothing in there but black – a blackness that seemed, for an instant, as cold and absolute and infinite as space. I imagined that part of the ship had been torn away, and we would be sucked out into the vacuum, the brief moment of horror and pain as explosive decompression ended any concerns we might have about the fate of Sam Welles and his crew or the mysteries of Piros. And then I heard music, twentieth-century rock and roll, something from the Beatles that I only recognized because I took “History of Pop Music” as an elective at university.

“Dr. Baird, we have guests,” Evelyn said, not unpleasantly, standing there in the hatchway, filling the gap between us and the blackness. “The
Montelius
has docked. Commander Hamilton and Dr. Cather would like to talk with you, if you have a moment.”

I wake up to the sound of music, 

Mother Mary comes to me…

“Dr. Baird,” Evelyn said, taking a tentative step into the darkness, “may I please bring up the lights?”

“You allowed them to dock?” he asked. “You let them come aboard?” And something in his voice, something that had gone irrevocably beyond hope and sanity and consolation, made me want to turn and run all the way back to the transfer bay, all the way back to
Monty
. Let Joakim and the others deal with this, whatever
this
was.

“I could have done nothing else,” Evelyn replied. “You should know that.”

“You still think there’s a way back? You think they’ve come to rescue you?”

“The lights?” she asked again.

“The lights,” he replied wearily, and the room began to brighten. In a few seconds, the darkness had melted away to thin, half-hearted shadows crouching beneath the furniture.

Jack Baird was sitting on his bunk, naked except for a pair of dirty undershorts. I’d seen a few recorded lectures he’d given at Harvard, and at a conference in Maastricht, and I remembered him as a lean and fastidious sort of man. But the man on the bunk was four or five decades older, at least twenty pounds overweight and obviously hadn’t shaved or cleaned himself in days; his eyes were bloodshot and rimmed with a sleepless red that was almost shades of purple.

“Jack,” Joakim said, pushing past Evelyn. “What the hell’s going on here?”

“What the hell,” he chuckled. “What the hell, indeed.”

“Will you talk to us?” Joakim asked, and Jack Baird squinted at him with those bruised, sleepless eyes.

“Go home, man,” he said. “Get back on your rocket ship, and go back to sleep, and when you awaken, you can pretend this was all just a nightmare.”

“I can’t do that. We’ve come too far to – ”

“Bullshit. Go home,
now
, while you still
can
, and let the droids clean up our mess. They seem to be handling everything just fine,” and he glared up at Evelyn until she looked down at the floor.

“Do you really believe that you can’t go home?” I asked, and Jack Baird looked at me, instead.

“I have to know what’s happening here,” Joakim said and crossed the small room to stand directly in front of Baird. “I have to make a call, Jack, whether it’s time to abort, and I can’t do that if I have no idea what’s happening.”

“Welles is still missing?” Baird asked him, and Joakim nodded. “I
tried
to stop him, and the rest of them, from going back down there. Didn’t I, Evelyn?” and the synth nodded confirmation without looking up from the floor. “I
told
them,
all
of them, that they wouldn’t be coming back, but I think they already knew that. They’d already seen enough.”

“Enough of what?” Joakim prodded.

Jack Baird laughed again and reached for an aluminum bottle on the floor near his bed. “You ever read Blake?”

“William Blake?”

“Yeah, William Blake.”

“No,” Joakim replied.

“Too bad, that. It might have helped you, though god knows it hasn’t helped me.” Baird took a drink from the bottle, then put it back on the floor.

“You’re not making sense,” Joakim said, and he sat down in a chair near the bunk.

Jack Baird closed his eyes. ‘“Dark revolving in silent activity, unseen in tormenting passions,’” he said, reciting lines of poetry that I’d never read nor heard. “‘An activity unknown and horrible; a self-contemplating shadow, in enormous labors occupied.’”

“What did you find down there?” Joakim asked, and Baird opened his eyes again and shrugged.

“I promised Anastazja,” he said. “I promised her I would never tell anyone. You see, she thinks that’s exactly what it wants from us, communication. She believes that it propagates like a virus, like a virus of the conscious mind.”

Joakim looked at me, and then he looked at Evelyn.

“There’s been absolutely no evidence of biological contagion,” the synth said. “I can tell you that much.”

“Go home, Commander Hamilton,” Baird whispered, and then he lay down in his bunk with his back to Joakim, covering himself in sheets that looked as though they’d not been changed in weeks or months. “There’s nothing you can do here. Nothing but die.”

“I tried to tell you,” Evelyn said.

“Could there have been a malfunction in stasis?” Joakim asked her, staring at Baird and the rumpled, dirty sheets. “Something that resulted in psychosis, any sort of delayed neurological breakdown?”

“That was a very long time ago.” 

“Right. But could it have
happened
?”

The synth shook her head. “It was one of the first possibilities that Dr. Osmolska eliminated. There’s no evidence of irregularities in the stasis logs, and the hardware is fine. She also found no sign of neurological abnormalities in either herself or Dr. Baird. They do not appear to be insane, at least not in any accepted medical sense of the word.”

“What about life support?” I suggested. “Or possible toxins from Piros, or the samples that have been brought up? Radiation from – ”

“I’ve been over everything dozens of times, Dr. Cather,” Evelyn interrupted, also watching Baird now. “There’s no sign whatsoever of contamination from the moon’s surface, and all our life-support systems have come up clean. There’s nothing wrong with
Gilgamesh
’s habitat.”

“Nothing that you could find,” I said. “What about the ship’s AI?”

“Doctor, I assure you, if there’d been a malfunction or a variance or anything of the sort, anywhere on this vessel, I’d have discovered it by now.”

“Unless you’re
also
malfunctioning,” I replied, and Joakim turned towards me, his eyes filled with suspicions I knew he’d never put into words as long as the synth was present.

“We all ran multiple self-diagnostics, at Dr. Osmolska’s request, and she repeated them herself,” Evelyn said, beginning to sound defensive. I suppose anyone would have. “It isn’t us.”