Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (Volume One) (77 page)

Zoraya laid the Van Gogh book on the floor at her feet and began asking me questions about Piros, about the mines, the derelict alien ships and refineries and abandoned settlements.

“Those things aren’t secrets,” I said. “You can find them in the library. You could read
The Far Red World
by André Tyson, or – ”

“I’ve never cared much for astronomy,” she said.

“But you’re an astrologer,” I replied, and she shrugged.

“There’s a big difference between cosmology and cosmogony.”

“The
Galatea
and
Ivanov
both brought back artifacts,” I said.

“Yes, but they’re all in museums in countries that I’ve never visited, in countries where synths are still considered property.”

“Well, there are plenty of 2-Ds and holovids of them online,” I said and finished my brandy in a slightly larger mouthful than I’d expected. “You could look at those,” I added when the fire in my throat had settled comfortably into my stomach. “I even have an index around here somewhere.”

“Perhaps I will see them someday,” she said, and then Zoraya watched the snow for a bit, and I watched her watching it fall. “Did you know that Umachandra is traditionally a male name?” she asked.

“Yes,” I replied. “I asked her about that once.”

“I think
Uma
is light and
Chandra
is the moon. It all has something to do with various aspects of Parvati, the consort of Shiva in Hindu mythology. Parvati, or Durga, or Shakti – she has a lot of names. Anyway, Umachandra is a boy’s name.
Chandra
and
Uma
are both girl’s names, though.”

“When Umachandra Murdin was born,” I said, “she had ambiguous genitalia. It was probably caused by her parents’ ph activities. The doctors told her mother she was a boy.”

“On the
Montelius
, she was fucking Peter Connor? Did he know?”

“Know what?”

But then Zoraya went back to staring at the snow. “Never mind,” she said. “It really doesn’t matter now, does it?”

“No,” I said uncertainly. “I suppose that it doesn’t.”

“The aliens were humanoid?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said. “The
Galatea
brought a few of their skeletons back. There’s one on display at the New Smithsonian. They must have been an amazing people.”

Zoraya nodded her head, not taking her eyes off the snow falling hard against the permaclear. “There’s a poem I learned,” she said. “An American poet, but I can’t remember his name. He died before I was activated.”

One of my cats, the fat ginger tom, Matthieu, appeared from the kitchen and trotted across the carpet, his belly swaying slightly side-to-side. He meowed loudly before leaping ungracefully into my lap where he lay glaring at Zoraya, who glared back at him. I stroked his head and whispered soothing, silly things, and in a few minutes he was asleep and snoring fitfully.

“I don’t know why cats hate me,” Zoraya said.

“You don’t know that they do.”

“Yes, I do. Cats have
always
hated me.”

“What was the poem?” I asked. “The American poet who died before you were born.”

She frowned and looked back to the window and the storm.

“I wasn’t born,” she said. “That’s such an ugly word.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I don’t remember the whole thing.”

“What do you remember?” and she didn’t answer me immediately. I knew that she was only pretending not to remember, that she was at least a hundred years too young to have begun experiencing any of the neural-net deterioration that passes for senility among the synths. But they like to pretend that they forget things, as though it makes them seem more human. It is beyond me why anything would want to seem
more
human.

Zoraya sighed softly, then shut her eyes and recited for me what she “remembered.”

“‘And still,’” she said, “‘we do not see that we are not gods, The holy fathers and holy mothers and demons of our lost antiquities,
Adoro te devote, latens Deitas, quae sub his figuris vere latitas
. We do not comprehend our insignificance at the feet of eternity.

“‘We have not the time to learn. We have not the courage to admit. We have not the strength to accept, and, accepting, move beyond this grinding infancy. Instead, we bring snow and ice to birthday parties in Hell and congratulate our ignorance.’”

I waited a moment, to be certain that she was finished.

“Is that all you recall?” I asked.

“Yes. I knew it all once, but not now. Did you understand the Latin?”

I told her that I did, which was true, and wished that I had another glass of brandy, but Matthieu looked so content on my lap, and I didn’t want to wake him.

“You should burn it, Audrey,” Zoraya said, looking directly at me now. “Don’t write any more of it. Give it to me, and I’ll destroy it for you. When they come, they won’t find anything – ”

“
Pourquoi ferais-tu cela?
” I asked, and she glanced down at Matthieu.

“
Je ne pense pas que je puisse prendre soin d’eux
,” she said very quietly. “But I could not bear to see them starve.”

I knew what she was trying to say, what she really meant, and for a moment I even considered letting her take the pages, and the pens, and the pencil stub. I allowed myself the fantasy that stopping now would be enough to satisfy the agency, and they’d leave me alone. But it passed, like a snowflake melting against the heated windowpane. They were coming regardless. I couldn’t understand why they were taking so long. And I knew that they would come for Zoraya, as well, that they would erase all knowledge that I’d ever existed from the synth brain hidden where some people might expect to find an artificial heart.

“Thank you,” I said. “Thank you, Zoraya. You’ve been a good friend, but I have to finish. Don’t worry about the cats. They can fend for themselves.”

“Not
that
one,” she said and pointed to Matthieu. “He’s too old and fat to even catch mice.”

“I’m tired,” I replied. “We’ll talk again tomorrow.”

“Will we?”

“Of course we will. Tomorrow’s Thursday.”

And she left, and I sat watching the snow and listening to Matthieu snore, sometimes dozing, half-dreaming of that day, on Piros and my childhood in Vermon, and blue-skinned Hindu gods until the sun was in the sky again.

Zoraya didn’t come for chess tonight. She called and wanted to know if I needed anything, and when I asked her if we’d be playing later, she said that she had a late client, a man from Belgium, a Gemini.

Sometimes she has late clients.

So, maybe I can finish with this, instead.

The shuttle leveled out at about 9,100 meters, and I sat wishing I had more than the grainy images from the vidscreen, wishing that I was getting the same direct and unobstructed view through the vehicle’s windshield that Joakim and Umachandra had from their places in the cockpit. Peter wasn’t interested in the scenery; he’d gotten fallsick during the drop and sat with his eyes shut tightly, beads of sweat dappling his cheeks like dew or a fever. Through the faceplate of his helmet, he looked ready to vomit again, and the suit’s tiny waste-clearance mechs clustered around his cheeks, just in case.

The barren landscape stretched out below us might easily have passed for Afghanistan or southern Arizona or the Daedalia Planum, except for the countless intense hues of red that made Mars seem pale by comparison. Already, journalists and webzats on Earth had seized on this, labeling Piros the “Redder Planet” and the “true God of War.” Some Christian mystics had even cited the moon’s discovery as a sign of the nearness of Armageddon. There was, of course, no need for recourse to portents and prophecies and apocalyptic metaphors. Biochemistry and geophysics were suitable enough alchemies to account for the seemingly endless plains of blood-red stone and sand and dust that had been left behind by the retreat and eventual death of the Pirosan oceans.

I anxiously checked my timepiece. There were hardly 500 kilometers left from our present position to the LZ, ten or twelve minutes’ flight time at the most. I tried not to think about what we were going to find down there, tried not to think about Evelyn, and the boltgun, and the lines of William Blake that Jack Baird had quoted. I busied myself with the topography below us, the few landmarks that I recognized from the charts I’d spent years studying: a deep canyon that had to be the Valles Hela, its narrow floor more than five kilometers below the surrounding plateau of the Mare Malacia; a towering line of cliffs marking the weathered edge of the paleocontinent Niflheim; an unnamed impact crater, less than a million years old, more than two hundred miles across. Some of the oldest macrofossils recovered from – 

Zoraya, I cannot write this
this
way, as some mundane, linear narrative, as though it is hardly more to me than a story or a travelogue.
None
of these things are relevant, what I saw on the screen, the geology of a dead world humans will likely never visit again, the trivial names men had given canyons and mountains orbiting a distant star.

Suddenly, I seem hopelessly lost in this manuscript, fumbling in its dry pages, and I’m afraid that it’s simply because I am coming close to the
end
. And I don’t want to
see
the end again, no, no, not even from the sanctuary of my mind’s eye. I don’t want to make them concrete, those last hours. No one has ever written a more unholy manuscript than this, Zoraya. It’ll be a pointless, blasphemous thing, if I can finish it. Jedda Callahan deserved her death, for leading me to this moment, for making me believe I might find redemption for a wasted, cowardly life by giving her and her compatriots “the truth.”

There is no truth, Zoraya.

There was never any
truth
. Only moments, and what they contained, and the parts of ourselves we lost. Jedda Callahan was an arrogant, dangerous
believer
, and she would never have understood. She wanted facts, as if facts are at the heart of this. I’m making up numbers to fill in the blank spaces in my memory, because I want it all to seem so fucking precise, because – 

STOP.

I’ve just picked up my pen up again, after laying it down and walking away, meaning to
stay
away. After sitting on the toilet for the better part of an hour with a shard of permaclear that I found on the street yesterday pressed to my left wrist, trying to find the courage to finish
me
.

Evidently, I don’t have that strength.

The shuttle landed in the quarry, touching down very near Welles’ ship. Joakim checked through all the instrumentation to be sure our vessel hadn’t been damaged passing through Piros’ turbulent atmosphere or during the landing. He flipped switches and tapped dials, muttered about fuel valves and altimeters, while Umachandra talked with Magellan and the synth pilots drifting somewhere a couple hundred nautical miles overhead. She read our coordinates to the computer and programmed the shuttle to auto-pilot back to the
Monty
. The password and the press of a button would take any of us safely back into orbit if anything happened that prevented Joakim or Umachandra from manually piloting the shuttle.

Peter moaned, and I must have reassured him that he’d feel better soon, once we were outside, standing on solid ground. His suit had already administered a drug to ease his nausea and vertigo.

Joakim was the first one to leave the shuttle, and then Umachandra, and I was third. The iris stayed closed, and we used a simple, retractable ladder instead. Only a few rungs down, a few racing heartbeats, a few seconds, and then I was standing on one of the wide quarry terraces. All the way from Florida to that lifeless patch of rock beneath the moribund light of Gliese 876, all that way to stand in the late afternoon of a day that might as well have been a night. I looked up, towards the opposite rim of the pit a few hundred feet above us, and then walked as near to the edge of the terrace as I dared and stared down at the ebony pool filling the far-away bottom of the quarry. Seeing it, its mirror-flat surface seemingly immune to the wind that howled through that gash in the moon’s crust, I felt dread, and loneliness, and despair. Not emotions that I liked admitting to back then, not mental states that endeared you to ANSA or other crew members, and I kept my thoughts to myself.

“Where do we begin?” Umachandra asked Joakim (or at least I’ll make-believe that’s exactly what she said).

“I’ll take Audrey, and we’ll have a close look at the shuttle,” he replied and motioned towards Welles’ ship. “You and Connor have another look at the tracking units.” Umachandra nodded, though we all knew that the tracking boxes were reading correctly, and I followed Joakim the hundred or so yards south to the
Gilgamesh
shuttle. It was already coated in a thick layer of fine, ruddy dust from its two weeks on Piros.

The shuttle was open, and there was no one inside.

“No surprises here,” Joakim said and sat down in the pilot’s seat. “How you holding up?”

“I’m holding up,” I told him. “I’m just holding up.”

“Well, you keep on doing it,” he said and began examining the controls. The three primary batteries were dead, but back-up was fine, and there was plenty of fuel in the tanks. The yellow-green auto-pilot ready light wasn’t blinking, because power was down, but the system had been set for rendezvous with the mothership. There were no signs of violence or mishap. So far as we could tell, the shuttle had simply been abandoned, or something had happened to the crew that had prevented them from returning.

“It’s creepy,” I said, taking a medpac down from its slot on the cabin wall and opening it.

“Yeah, well, hell. It happens,” Joakim said, his voice crackling through the comms. “You remember that Martian grain freighter, the
Perro Negro
? Went missing and then turned up on the outskirts of the Noctis Labyrinthus, not a scratch on her, all systems operational, but no bloody sign of the crew.”

“Yes, I know it happens,” I replied, shutting the medical kit again and latching it. Everything was in there, every hypo and vial, every laser probe and nanopatch, right where it ought to be on a shuttle full of healthy travelers. “It’s still fucking creepy.”