I jogged on, my shoes slapping the deck. I was approaching the nadir of my journey, the part of the ship that until now I had studiously avoided. Sensing my nearing footfalls, cartwheel-shaped airlocks dilated open. I panted through an antechamber, into the vast room where nine hundred slept.
The chamber had the toroidal shape of a tokamak. Nine hundred deep-preservation reefers lined the inner and outer walls, crisscrossed by ladders and catwalks. I set about circumnavigating the chamber, to finally purge my mind of any stray ghosts. Hadn’t that always been my strategy as a child: confront my fears head on? I suspected that the boy in me would have been richly amused by my motives here. Nonetheless I insisted on this one ridiculous circuit, convinced it would leave me eased.
Most of these sleepers would stay aboard when we arrived in the Earth system. They were refugees from the Melding Plague, seeking sanctuary in the future. At the nearlight speeds this vessel attained between suns, large levels of time dilation would be experienced. Our clocks would grind to an imperceptible crawl. After thirty or forty years of shiptime, a mere six or seven hops between systems, more than a century would have elapsed on Yellowstone, enough time for eco-engineers to exorcise the biome of the Melding Plague. The sleepers we carried had elected not to risk spending the time in the planet’s community cryocrypts; in dilation sleep the effective time spent in reefers was less, and therefore their chances of completely safe revival were enormously increased.
I was jogging slowly enough to read the glowing name panels imprinted on each reefer. Men, women, children . . . the rich of my world, able to pay for this exorbitant journey into a brighter future. I thought of the less wealthy, those who could not even afford spaces in the cryocrypts. I thought of the long queues of people waiting to see surgeons, people like Katia, anxious to lose their implants before the disease reached them. They would pay with whatever they could: organs or prosthetics or memories. Or if they chose not to pay they might consider becoming crew. My people made good crew-fodder. It called for a certain degree of yearning desperation to accept direct interfacing with the main-brain. The hard price of our bargain was the simple fact that our reduced state of reefersleep meant we would continue to age as we slept away the years.
That was not a bargain Katia had felt she could make. And I had known that I could not stand to lose my implants. Thus the Melding Plague touched us.
I felt bitterness, and this was welcome to me. I was happy to find familiar anxieties polluting my thoughts. I cast a dismissive glance over my shoulder, back along the curving ranks of sleepers I had already passed.
I was being followed.
The shadow was pounding along the walkway, halfway around the great curve of the chamber. I could barely see it, just a man-shaped black aperture in the distance.
I quickened my pace. Only my feet thudded in the silence. Yet my chaser was also running faster. I felt sick with fright. I summoned Katia, but after alerting her was unable to grasp a sentence, a command, anything. The faceless silhouette seemed to be gaining on me.
Faceless was right. It had no features, no detail. Eventually I reached an exit. The airlock sequence amputated the chamber from me. I did not stop running, even when I realised that the doors behind me were remaining closed. The shadow-man remained with the sleepers.
But I had seen enough. It was not human. Just a man-shaped hole, a spectre.
I found the quickest route back to the command deck of the Wild Pallas. Immediately I ordered Katia to begin a rigorous search for intruders, though I knew of course that no intruder could have escaped her attention thus far. My Katia was omniscient. She would have known the exact location of every rat, every fly, aboard the craft; except that aboard the ship there were no flies, no rats.
I knew that the shadow was not a revived sleeper. None of the reefers had been opened or vacated. A stowaway was out of the question—what was there to eat or drink, apart from the supplies dispensed by the computer?
My mind veered towards the illogical. Could someone have entered the ship during its flight—someone dressed as a chameleon? That imagined intruder would have somehow had to achieve invisibility from Katia’s eyes. Clearly impossible, even disregarding the unlikely manoeuvres required to match our velocity and position undetected.
I chewed on my lip, aware that each second of indecision counted against Janos. For my own defence, Katia would permit me access to a weapon, provided of course that the existence of the intruder was proven. Alternatively, I might best confront the situation by not confronting it. I could perform surgery on Janos without straying into those regions of the ship that the intruder had apparently claimed as its haunt. In a day or so, therefore, this ordeal might be over, and I could re-enter reefersleep. The most faceless, inhuman entities I would have to contend with upon my next revival would be Solpace Axis customs officials. Let them worry about the unseen extra passenger. Hadn’t the shadow permitted me safe slumber so far?
I chuckled, though to my ears it sounded more like a death-rattle. I was still frightened, but for once my hands had stopped playing arpeggios on the keys of an invisible piano.
I absorbed myself in technical eidetics outlining the medical systems Katia and I were about to employ. The gleaming semirobotic tools were the culmination of Yellowstone’s surgical sciences. Even so, they would undoubtedly appear crude by Earthside standards. This dichotomy galled me. Even if Janos would necessarily worsen by the time we arrived, how could we be certain that we were not reducing his chances with our outdated medical intervention? Perhaps Earth would have accelerated so far beyond our capabilities that the equation was no longer balanced in our favour.
Yet Katia would have weighed the issue minutely before selecting the appropriate course of action. Perhaps, then, it was best simply to silence one’s qualms and do whatever was required.
Drones assisted me in carrying the medical machinery into the crew reefer room, where my five colleagues lay in frozen sleep. I wore a facemask and a gloved jumpsuit, inwoven with a heating circuit. Katia would lower the room’s temperature before slightly increasing Janos’s own.
“Ready, Uri?” she asked. “Let’s start.”
So we commenced, my eyes constantly flicking to the open reefer I hoped soon to re-enter. The room rapidly chilled, lights burning frigid blue from the overheads.
Janos’s reefer cracked open with a gasp of release cold. I looked at Janos, still and white and somehow distant. Let that distance remain, I prayed. After all, we were about to open his head.
Katia, in fact, had already performed some preliminary surgery. The skull had been exposed, skin pulled back as if framing the white pistil of a flesh-leaved flower. Slender probes entered the scalp via drilled holes, trailing glowing coloured cables into a matrix of input points in the domed head of the reefer. The work was angstrom-precise, rendered with a robot’s deadening perfection. I had been briefed: those cables were substituting for the cybernetic implants within his brain that had fallen victim to the Melding Plague.
“When you have the top of the skull free you should feed it back along the cables,” Katia told me. “It’s crucial that we don’t lose cyber-interface with Janos.”
I prepped the mechanical bone-saw. “Why? What use is he to us?”
“There are good reasons. If you’re still interested we can discuss it after the operation.”
The saw hummed into life, the rotary tip glinting evilly. Katia vectored the blade down, smoothly gnawing into the pale bone. Little blood oozed free but the sound struck an unpleasant resonance with me. Katia made three expert circumferential passes, then retracted. I took a deep breath, then placed gloved fingers on the top of Janos’s head. The scalp felt loose, like half of a chocolate egg. I eased the section of skull free with a wet sucking slurp, exposing the damp pinkish mass of dura and gyrus, snuggling in the lower bowl of the skull. I took special care to maintain the integrity of the connections as I separated the bonework. For a while, humbled, I could only stand in awe of this
fantastic organ, easily the most complex, alien thing my eyes had ever gazed on. And yet it managed to look so disappointingly vegetable.
“Husband, we must proceed,” warned Katia. “I have warmed Janos to a dangerously high body temperature, whilst not greatly increasing his metabolic rate. We don’t have time to waste.”
I felt sweat beading my forehead. I nodded. Inward, inward. Katia swung a new battery of blades and microlasers into play.
We operated to the music of Sibelius.
It was intriguing and repellent work.
I succeeded in detaching my mind to some extent, so that I was able to regard the parting brain tissue as dead but somehow sacred meat. The micro-implants came out one by one, too small for the naked eye to discern detail, barbed hunks of corroded metal. The corrosion, observable under a microscope, was the external evidence of the cybervirus. I studied it with rank feelings of abstract distaste. The virus behaved like its biological namesake, clamping onto the shell of the nanostructure and pulsing subversive instructions deep into its reproductive heart.
After three hours my back boiled with pain. I leaned away from the reefer, brushing a sleeve against my chilled forehead. I felt the room swimming, clotting with blobs of muggy darkness. For an instant I became disoriented, convinced that left was right and vice versa. I braced myself against the reefer as this dizziness washed over me.
“Not long now,” Katia said. “How do you feel?”
“I’m fine. And you?”
“I’m . . . fine. The op’s proceeding well.” Katia paused, then stiffened her voice with iron resolve, businesslike detachment. “The next implant is the deepest. It lies between the occipital lobe and the cerebellum. We must take care to avoid lesion of the visual centre. This is the primary entoptic infeed node.”
“In we go, then.”
The machinery snicked obediently into place. Our ciliated microprobes slid into the tissue, like flexible syringes slipping into jelly. Despite the cold I found myself hot around the collar, iced sweat prickling my skin. Another hour passed, though time had ceased to have very much meaning.
And I froze, conscious of a presence behind me, in the same room.
Compelled, I turned. The watcher was with me.
I saw now that it could not be a man. Yet it did have a humanoid form, a humanoid of my build and posture.
A sculptor had selected ten thousand raven-black cubes, so dark that they were pure silhouettes, and arranged them as a blocky statue. That was the entirety of the watcher: a mass of black cubes.
As I turned, it swung towards me. None of the cubes from which it was formed actually moved; they simply blipped out and reappeared in an orchestrated wave, whole new strata of cubes forming in thin air. They popped in and out of reality to mould its altering posture. To my eyes the motion had a beguiling, digital beauty. I thought of the coloured patterns that would sweep across a stadium of schoolchildren holding painted mosaic cards to image some great slogan or emblem.
I raised my left arm, and observed the shadow repeat the action from its point of view. We were not mirrors of one another. We were ghosts.
My terror had reached some peak and evaporated. I grasped that the watcher was essentially motiveless, that it had been drawn to me as inevitably as a shrinking noon shadow.
“Continue with the operation,” insisted Katia. I noticed hesitancy in her voice, true to her personality to the end. She liked games, my Katia, but she was never a convincing liar.
“Lesion of the visual centre, you say?”
“That is what we must be careful to avoid.”
I grimaced. I had to know for sure.
I scooped up one of the detached nanoprobes. In reality, the drones mimicked my intentions with their own manipulators, picking up the nanoprobe’s platonic twin . . . Then I jammed it recklessly into Janos’s head, into his occipital lobe.
This reality melted and shattered, as if a stone had fallen into and disturbed the reflections on a crystal-mooth lake.
I knew, then.
My vision slowly unpeeled itself, returning to normality in strips. Katia was doing this, attempting to cancel the damage in my visual centre by sending distorted signals along the optic infeeds. I realised that I no longer had control of the surgical tools.
“I am the patient,” I said. “Not Janos. The surgeon is the one who needs surgery. How ironic.”
“It was best that you not know,” Katia said. And then, very rapidly, she herself flickered and warped, her voice momentarily growing cavernous and slurred. “I’m failing . . . there isn’t much time.”
“And the watcher?”
“A symptom,” she said ruefully. “A symptom of my own illness. A false mapping of your own body image within the simulation.”
“You’re a simulation!” I roared. “I can understand your image being affected . . . but you—yourself—you don’t exist in my head! You’re a program running in the mainbrain! ”
“Yes, darling. But the Melding Plague has also reached the mainbrain.” She paused, and then, withut warning, her voice became robotically flat and autistic. “Much of the computer is damaged. To keep this simulation intact has necessitated sacrifices in tertiary function levels. However, the primary goal is to guarantee that you do not die. The operation-in-progress must be completed. In order to maintain the integrity of the simulation, the tuple-ensemble coded KATIA must be removed from main memory. This operation has now been executed.”
She froze, her last moment locked within my implant, trapped in my eyes like a spot of sun-blindness. It was just me and the computer then, not forgetting the ever-present watcher.
What could I do but continue with the surgery? I had a reason now. I wanted to excise the frozen ghost of Katia from my mind. She was the real lesion.
So I survived.
Many years passed for us. Our ship’s computer was so damaged by the Melding Plague that we could not decelerate in time to reach the Earth system. Our choice was to steer for 61 Cygni-A, around which lay the colony Sky’s Edge. Our dilation sleepers consequently found themselves further from home both in time and space than they had expected. Secretly we cherished the justice in this, we who had sacrificed parts of our lives to crew their dream-voyage. Yet they had not lost so very much, and I suppose I would have been one of their number had I had their power. Concerning Katia . . .
The simulation was never properly reanimated.
The shipboard memory in which it lay fell prey to the Melding Plague, and much of its data was badly corrupted. When I did attempt to recreate her, I found only a crude caricature, all spontaneity sapped away, as lifeless and cruelly predictable as a Babbage engine. In a fit of remorse I destroyed the imago. It helped that I was blind, for even this façade had been programmed to exhibit fear, programmed to plead once it guessed my intentions.
That was years ago. I tell myself that she never lived. And that at least is what the cybertechs would have us believe.
The last information pulse from Yellowstone told me that the real Katia is still alive, of course much older than when I knew her. She has been married twice. To her the days of our union must seem as ancient and fragile as an heirloom. But she does not yet know that I survived. I transmitted to her, but the signal will not reach Epsilon Eridani for a decade. And then I will have to await her reply, more years still.
Perhaps she will reply in person. This is our only hope of meeting, because I . . .
I will not fly again. Nor will I sleep out the decades.
GRAFENWALDER’S BESTIARY
Grafenwalder’s attention is torn between the Ultra captain standing before him and the real-time video feed playing on his monocle. The feed shows the creature being unloaded from the Ultras’ shuttle into the special holding pen Grafenwalder has already prepared. The beetle-like forms of armoured keepers poke and prod the recalcitrant animal with ten-metre stun-rods. The huge serpentine form writhes and bellows, flashing its attack eyes each time it exposes the roof of its mouth.
/> “Must have been a difficult catch, Captain. Locating one is supposed to be difficult enough, let alone trapping and transporting—”
“The capture was handled by a third party,” Shallice informs him, with dry indifference. “I have no knowledge of the procedures involved, or of the particular difficulties encountered. ”
While the keepers pacify the animal, technicians snip tissue samples and hasten them into miniature bio-analysers. So far they’ve seen nothing that suggests it isn’t the real thing.
“I take it there were no problems with the freezing?”
“Freezing always carries a risk, especially when the underlying biology is nonterrestrial. We only guarantee that the animal appears to behave the same way now as when it was captured.”
Shallice is a typical Ultra: a cyborg human adapted for the extreme rigours of prolonged interstellar flight. His sleek red servo-powered exoskeleton is decorated with writhing green neon dragons. Cagelike metal ribs emerge from the Ultra’s waxy white sternum, smeared with vivid blue disinfectant where they puncture the skin. The Ultra’s limbs are blade-thin; his skull a squeezed hatchet capable of only a limited range of expression. He smells faintly of ammonia, breathes like a broken bellows and his voice is a buzzing, waspish approximation of human speech.
“Whoever that third party was, they must have been damned good.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Last I heard, no one has ever captured a live hamadryad. Not for very long, anyway.”
Shallice can’t hide his scorn. “Your news is old. There had been at least three successful captures before we left Sky’s Edge.” He pauses, fearing perhaps that he may have soured the deal. “Of course,” he continues, “this is a far larger hamadryad . . . an adult, almost ready for tree-fusion. The others were juveniles, and they did not continue to grow once they were in captivity.”