Authors: Gavin Smith
I knew what was wrong. We’d talked about it when we’d finally had the chance to in the Dog’s Teeth. When we’d finally had the chance to do the talking bit that normally comes first with people in a relationship. Talking was difficult when people are trying to kill you all the time.
I think she liked sex. I think she liked me enough to want to have sex with me, for whatever that was worth, but she’d spent so much of her life being used. She said at times that she’d felt little more than an appliance, the cheap alternative to sense booths. That made sex complicated for her. She wanted it; she liked it; but then doing it made her feel cheap. Doing it reminded her of so much bad stuff. What could you say to that? All I could do was hold her.
It didn’t help that when we had been really intimate, when we’d shared a sense link, felt what the other felt, I’d fucked it up by getting scared and acting like a prick. In my defence it was because the alien essence that lived in Morag’s headware had taken that moment to enter my head and change my dreams. That still didn’t help Morag or excuse my behaviour.
I held her until she stopped crying. I guess I was surprised that she was still able to be this vulnerable with me after all the bad things I’d said to her in the past. Then it occurred to me – if not me then who? Then we made love again. This time more tenderly. This time she didn’t cry. Afterwards she fell asleep. I resisted sleep for as long as I could. I wanted to watch her, and sometimes sleep wasn’t so good for me. Eventually I drifted off.
Morag had been training with Rannu. Mainly physical training but some hand-to-hand stuff, the kind the Regiment taught us as well as the Muay Thai that he excelled at. She was still hot and sweaty, my arms wrapped around her as we looked out over Maw City. It was like a bioluminescent termite mound but somehow beautiful at the same time. It was difficult to explain. Their industry was somehow hypnotic. The others were further back in the cave
.
Pagan and Rannu were discreetly keeping their distance and Mudge was too ill to be obnoxious. Actually that wasn’t true. He was too ill to move; he was never too ill to be obnoxious. This was as close to privacy as we were going to get. I was frustrated because this was the first time in a long time we weren’t in immediate danger
.
Morag took the metal of my right hand in her much smaller one. The tactile sensors in the hand sent messages to my brain, a simulation of touch. With my real hand, albeit a hand that had armour and enhanced muscle under the skin, I stroked her hair
.
‘Why don’t you train me?’ she asked
.
‘Laziness, and Rannu’s better than me,’ I told her
.
‘Not because you don’t want me to know this stuff?’
‘You need to know this stuff, I guess, but I’m not keen for you to be in harm’s way, if that’s what you mean.’
‘You don’t have to be protective all the time,’ she said, but there was no sharpness in her tone
.
Eventually I think I worked out what she was getting at
.
‘I have faith in your abilities, if that’s what you mean,’ I told her
.
She smiled. See? Given time I could think of things to say that weren’t just going to upset her
.
We sat there for a while watching the industry of the alien habitat. All the zero-G manoeuvring looked so graceful, much more so than the clumsy machines we utilised. I guessed that’s what came of evolving in vacuum
.
‘What are They like?’ I asked after we’d sat in silence for a while. Morag gave this some thought
.
‘Very different. They think as one and They just haven’t developed certain things that we take for granted.’
‘Like what?’
‘They don’t understand that we don’t think as one like Them. They can’t see how some of us would act against others of us. The biggest problem I had was trying to explain what happened with Crom. Even the concept of the Cabal is beyond Them. They just don’t get duplicity at all.’
‘That would explain their tactics during the war.’
‘There’s something very soothing about communication with Them. Something warm. Like this place.’
‘Womb-like?’ I wasn’t sure where that had come from. Again she gave it some thought before answering
.
‘I wouldn’t know.’ She sounded distant
.
She was quiet for a while
.
‘I can trance in, you know,’ she said. I looked down at her and found her looking back at me, searching for my response
.
‘Yeah?’ I managed. I wasn’t sure what to say
.
‘I mean, I haven’t but I know I can.’ She looked away from me
.
‘Have you heard of Project Spiral?’ I asked
.
She nodded. ‘Vicar worked on it. It was the American and British governments’ attempt to hack what they thought was Their comms net,’ she said
.
‘But it wasn’t, was it? It’s Them, Their minds.’
‘Yes, but it’s Their comms net as well. They have the equivalent of biotechnological telepathy.’
‘Maybe, maybe not. You could argue we have that with integral comms links,’ I said
.
‘I don’t think it’s the same. I’m going to trance in. With my own systems and Ambassador’s help I should be able to do it.’
‘You know what happened in Operation Spiral?’ I asked, sounding calmer than I felt
.
‘No, do you? I’d be interested, but God’s so far away. I know the results of what happened. Everyone brain-burned or mad. Vicar—’
‘Was the best of them,’ I finished for her
.
‘But they didn’t know that it was Their mind and they hadn’t been allowed in.’
I wanted to talk her out of it or at least tell her to be careful. I didn’t. I was sort of sure she knew what she was doing though this was uncharted territory for all of us. How did an ex-Rigs hooker end up on Earth’s first contact team? Okay, not first contact, but still
.
‘You can come. I can piggyback you.’ She seemed to be serious. She looked cross when I started laughing. I wasn’t laughing at her; I was laughing at the ridiculous, mind-blowing scope of the thing
.
‘Me in an alien mind? I think Mudge would be a better person for the job.’
‘I don’t want Mudge with me.’ She sounded a little put out
.
‘I just …’ I struggled for the words to try and say what I meant. ‘All I’ve ever really wanted is to not be hungry, or in pain or frightened, or so tired all the time. I don’t think I want much – to make a living in a way where I don’t have to get shot at or kill other people, like my dad did after he was discharged.’ Before some rich bastard killed him because he could. ‘Then a good book, some Miles Davis in the background and a dram.’ Morag was watching me intently but also smiling. ‘Now you’re talking about going surfing in the mind of an alien race who I’ve spent all my adult life trying to kill, and they’ve been doing likewise to me. I’ve no frame of reference for this.’
‘Are you frightened of it?’ she asked. This I had to think about. I should be, I really should be
.
‘No,’ I finally said
.
‘Isn’t this how it’s done?’
‘What?’
‘Peace. You try to understand the other guy.’ It was quite a naive thing to say. It helped remind me of our age difference. Something I tried not to think too much about in case I didn’t like the answers I came up with
.
‘I don’t think so. I think powerful people make deals. Your way would be better but difficult to do after a war because we’re so used to thinking of the other guys as less than human.’
‘My way would be better if we had done it before the war.’
‘So they’ll just let you in for the asking?’ I said, changing the subject
.
‘I won’t be the first.’
I looked down at her to see her grinning mischievously at me. It was a hint of the childhood she’d never had
.
‘What do you mean?’
Her expression changed. ‘Are you all right with this now? With what they did to you?’
Another complicated question. I stroked her hair and looked down into her eyes. They were like mirror images of her real eyes. Now she would only ever see me through a machine, they same way I could see her. It had been so long that I couldn’t remember what it was like to see with real eyes
.
‘When you first get augmented it’s really cool. All your new capabilities are exhilarating, I guess. You’re stronger, much faster, see and hear further, all that. But a horrible amount of my body is machinery.’ I felt her running her fingers up the scarred skin of my chest. She would feel the hardness of the armour under the skin. ‘You start to feel like part of you is missing, dislocated somehow. It’s like you know something is wrong but you don’t know what. I’ve heard people say that they feel like they’re haunting themselves. It’s the sort of thing that people say just before they go psycho.’ I played the tips of my fingers over the plugs in the back of her neck. ‘I’m just eager to hold on to what I’ve got left, I mean really eager.’ She pulled her hair down over the plugs in the back of her neck
.
‘How do you feel?’
‘Really good,’ I answered straight away and then found myself surprised by the answer
.
‘Everyone thought you were going to freak out.’
‘I did, didn’t I?’
‘Not as much as we thought you would. Mudge said you’d either try and throw yourself through the membrane –’ fat chance, I didn’t like vacuum ‘– or feed yourself into the toilet creature.’ She shivered as she said this. I don’t think she liked the toilet creature much
.
‘Yeah, well, nobody else is an alien.’
‘You said I was.’
‘How many times do I have to apologise for that? Look, I saw what happened to Crom.’ Don’t call it Gregor. ‘And I don’t want to be like Rolleston.’
‘You don’t want to walk through railgun fire?’
I gave that some thought
.
‘Depends on the cost.’ I wondered if I did have any extraordinary capabilities. I guess there was no real way to find out until something really bad happened to me. Well either that or I started self-harming
.
‘Do you feel human?’ she asked
.
I had to laugh at this
.
‘What?’
‘The weird thing is, I feel more human than I have in a long time.’
‘So you’re going to accept it and, you know …’
‘What?’
‘Not be a difficult tosser about it?’
I started laughing as she smiled again. We lapsed into silence, enjoying each other’s company. Watching the industrious aliens, trying to ignore the sound of Mudge retching. It was romantic
.
‘What are They going to do?’ I asked. The intelligence we had on Crom was sketchy at best, but the Cabal probably still had the ability to manufacture more. They could either destroy or control Them if they wanted
.
‘They’re leaving,’ Morag said. She sounded so very sad. Like crying sad. ‘We’re too chaotic, too dangerous, too … too hateful, and duplicitous and greedy and violent.’ Now she sounded angry. ‘Even though we have enough of everything.’
I wondered how she could even imagine that after growing up in Fintry and the Rigs, where everything you needed just to live had to be fought for in one way or another. I held her close to me. Again she was being naive, but I couldn’t fault her logic. We as a race did have enough. I didn’t really have anything I could say to her
.
‘They’re going far, far away, all of Them. As far as They can get, and when They see us coming in the future, if we have one, They’ll go further still because we can’t be trusted. It was what I told them to do.’
I wasn’t sure she quite understood the significance of what she had said. Here was an eighteen-year-old girl from what middle-class corporate wage slaves would describe as the dregs of society – though those dregs seemed to get larger and larger every day – advising an entire alien race on its foreign policy
.
‘And They’re going to do that?’ I asked
.
She nodded. ‘Our loss.’
She was right. This was a race that had gone from inert singing space coral to the technological equivalent of humanity in just a few years after the Cabal had provided the correct stimulus. Had we managed to communicate with Them peacefully the advances we could have made in biotechnology would have been staggering. Also I had heard Them sing
.
Morag stood up and took me by the arm, pulling me after her. I stood and allowed myself to be dragged along
.