Echopraxia

  All those years we took to convince ourselves she didn’t really exist after all, and all that time she was sleeping right under our feet. Right up until the time she got hungry again, and dug herself out of the dirt like some monstrous godforsaken cicada, and went hunting while we put ourselves to sleep in our own graves and called it Heaven …

  Valerie twisted and squirmed and emerged naked from her silvery cocoon: white as a grub, lean as a mantis. She grinned needles and clambered across the web toward him.

  Like we’re sleeping now, Brüks thought, fading. While she smiles at me.

  I AM LARGE, I CONTAIN MULTITUDES.

  —WALT WHITMAN

  HE DESCENDED INTO Heaven’s dungeon, but the shackles were empty and his wife was nowhere to be seen.

  He lay on his back in the desert, looked down and saw that he’d been gutted, crotch to throat. Spectral snakes surged eagerly from the gash, fled the confines of his body for the endless baked mud of a fossil seabed, free at last, free at last …

  He soared through an ocean of stars, dimensionless pinpoints: abstract, unchanging, unreal. One of them broke the rules as he watched, a pixel unfolding into higher dimensions like some quantum flower blooming in time-lapse. Angles emerged from outlines; shadows stretched across surfaces turning on some axis Brüks couldn’t quite make out. Bones spun majestically at its midsection.

  Monsters in there, waiting for him.

  He tried to veer off, to brake. He pulled all those temporoparietal strings that turned dreams lucid. The Crown of Thorns continued to swell in his sights, serenely untroubled by his pitiful attempts to rewrite the script. A hab swept toward him like the head of a mace; he flailed and thrashed and closed his eyes but felt no impact. When he looked again he was inside, and Valerie was staring back.

  Welcome to Heaven, Cold Cut.

  Her monster eyes were fully dilated; like headlights, like balls of bright bloody glass lit from within. The mouth beneath split open like a fresh grinning wound.

  Go back to sleep, she told him. Forget all your worries. Sleep forever.

  Her voice was suddenly, strangely androgynous.

  It’s your call.

  He cried out—

  —and opened his eyes.

  Lianna leaned over him. Brüks raised his head, glanced frantically in all directions.

  Nothing. No one but Lianna. They were back in Repair and Maintenance.

  Better than Storage.

  He settled back on the pallet. “I guess we made it?”

  “Probably.”

  “Probably?” His throat was parched.

  She handed him a squeezebulb. “We’re where we’re supposed to be,” she said as he sucked like a starving newborn. “No obvious signs of pursuit. It’ll take a while before we can be sure but it’s looking good. The drive blew up a few hours after we separated, so as far as we know they know, they got us.”

  “Whoever they are.”

  “Whoever they were.”

  “So. Next stop, Icarus?”

  “Depends on you.”

  Brüks raised his eyebrows.

  “I mean yes, we’re going to Icarus. But you don’t have to be up for it if you’re not, you know, up for it. We could put you back under, next thing you know you’re back on Earth safe and sound. Since you’re not officially part of the expedition.”

  One mission-critical. One ballast.

  “Or you put me back under and I die in my sleep when your expedition goes pear-shaped,” he said after a moment.

  She didn’t deny it. “You can die in your sleep anywhere. Besides, the Bicams would know better than any of us, and they’re pretty sure you’ll make it back.”

  “They told you that, did they?”

  “Not explicitly, but—yeah. I got that sense from them.”

  “If they really knew what they were going to find down there,” Brüks mused, “they wouldn’t have to go in the first place.”

  “There is that,” she said. And then, more cheerfully: “But if the mission does go pear-shaped, wouldn’t you rather die in your sleep than be wide awake and screaming when you get sucked into space?”

  “You are the Queen of the Silver Lining,” Brüks told her.

  She bowed, and waited.

  A trip to the sun. A chance to glimpse the traces of an alien intelligence—whatever alien meant in a world where members of his own species stitched themselves together into colony minds, or summoned their own worst nightmares back from the Pleistocene to run the stock market. The face of the unknown. What scientist would choose to sleep through that?

  As if they’d ever let you get close to their precious Angel of the Asteroids, his inner companion sneered. As if you’d be able to make any sense of it if they did. Better to sit it out, better to let them carry you back home so you can pick up your life where you dropped it. You don’t belong out here anyway. You’re a roach on a battlefield.

  Who could easily get squashed in his sleep. What soldier in combat, no matter how benign, ever gave a thought to the vermin underfoot?

  Awake, at least, he might be able to scuttle clear of descending boots.

  “You think I’d pass up the chance to do this kind of field work?” he said at last.

  Lianna grinned. “Okay then. You know the drill, I’ll let you get yourself together.” She took a bouncing step toward the ladder.

  “Valerie,” Brüks blurted out behind her.

  She didn’t turn. “In her hab. With her entourage.”

  “When the ship was breaking—I saw—”

  She tilted her head, lowered her gaze to some point on the far bulkhead. “You see weird things when you go under, sometimes. Near-death experiences, you know?”

  Too near. “This was no Tunnel of Light.”

  “Hardly ever is.” Lianna reached for the railing. “Brain plays tricks when you turn it on and off. Can’t trust your own perceptions.”

  She paused and turned, one hand on the ladder.

  “Then again, when can you?”

  Moore dropped unsmiling onto the deck as Brüks finished pulling on his jumpsuit. He held a personal tent in one hand, a rolled-up cylinder the size of his forearm. “I hear you’ll be joining us.”

  “Try to control your enthusiasm.”

  “You’re an extra variable,” the Colonel told him. “I have a great deal of work to do. And we may not have the luxury of keeping an eye on you if things get sticky. On the other hand—” He shrugged. “I can’t imagine deciding any differently, in your shoes.”

  Brüks raised his left foot, balanced on his right to scratch at his freshly pinkened ankle (someone had removed the cast during his latest coma). “Believe me, getting in the way’s the last thing I want to do, but this isn’t exactly familiar territory for me. I don’t really know the rules.”

  “Just—stay out of the way, basically.” He tossed the tent to Brüks. “You can set up your rack pretty much anywhere you want. The habs are a bit messy—we had to relocate a lot of inventory when they converted the hold—but we’ve also got fewer people living in them for the time being. So find a spot, set up your tent, buckle down. If you need something and the interface can’t help you, ask Lianna. Or me, if I’m not too busy. The Bicamerals will be coming out of decompression in a few days; try to keep out from underfoot. Needless to say that goes double for the vampire.”

  “What if the vampire wants me underfoot?”

  Moore shook his head. “That’s not likely.”

  “She already went out of her way to—to provoke me…”

  “How, exactly?”

  “You see her arm, after the spoke broke?”

  “I did not.”

  “She broke it. She broke her own fucking arm. Repeatedly. Said I wasn’t setting it right.”

  “But she didn’t attack you. Or threaten you.”

  “Not physically. She really seemed to get off on scaring the shit out of me, though.”

  The Colonel grunted. “In my experience, those things don’t have
to try to scare the shit out of anyone. If she wanted you dead or broken, you would be. Vampires have—idiomatic speech patterns. You may have simply misunderstood her.”

  “She called me a cold cut.”

  “And Rakshi Sengupta called you a roach. Unless I miss my guess you took that as an insult too.”

  “Wasn’t it?”

  “Common Tran term. Means so primitive you’re unkillable.”

  “I’m plenty killable,” Brüks said.

  “Sure, if someone drops a piano on your head. But you’re also field-tested. We’ve had millions of years to get things right; some of those folks in the Hold are packing augments that didn’t even exist a few months ago. First releases can be buggy, and it takes time for the bugs to shake out—and by then, there’s probably another upgrade they can’t afford to pass up if they want to stay current. So they suffer—glitches, sometimes. If anything, roach connotes a bit of envy.”

  Brüks digested that. “Well, if it was supposed to be some kind of compliment, her delivery needs work. You’d think someone with all that brainpower would be able to cobble together a few social skills.”

  “Funny thing”—Moore’s voice was expressionless—“Sengupta couldn’t figure out how someone with all your interpersonal skills could be so shitty at math.”

  Brüks said nothing.

  “Don’t take this personally,” the Colonel told him, “but try to keep in mind that we’re guests on this ship and your personal standards—whatever they might be—do not reign supreme here. Dogs are always going to come up short if you insist on defining them as a weird kind of cat. These people are not baselines with a tweak here and there. They’re closer to, to separate cognitive subspecies. As far as Valerie goes, she and her—bodyguards—have pretty much stayed in their hab since the trip began. I expect that to continue. She finds the ambient lighting too bright, for one thing. I doubt you’ll have trouble as long as you don’t go looking for any.”

  Brüks felt his mouth tighten at the corners. “So”—remembering the briefing in the Hub, in the company of the envious Rakshi Sengupta—“a week to Icarus?”

  “Closer to twelve days,” Moore told him.

  “Why so long?”

  Moore looked grim. “That fiasco at the monastery. The Crown had to launch prematurely. The sep maneuver was always part of the plan—doesn’t take a hive to know a trip like this is going to draw attention—but the replacement drive’s still in pieces. They’re putting it together as we speak.”

  Brüks blinked. “We’ve got no engines at all?”

  “Maneuvering thrusters. Can’t use them yet, not without risking detection.” Moore saw the look on Brüks’s face, added: “Not that I expect we’ll need them in any event. The hive’s ballistic calculations are very accurate. And it’s just as well we’re taking the long way, given the medical situation. The bug was easy enough to fix once they nailed down its specs, but healing takes time and hibernation’s not the same thing as a medical coma. Last thing we want is to hit the zone with our core personnel compromised.” Moore’s face hardened at some grim insight, relaxed again. “My advice? Look on this as an extended sabbatical. Maybe you get a ringside seat to some amazing discoveries; maybe it’s a dead end and you’ll be bored out of your skull. Either way, you can weigh it against a painful death in the Oregon desert and call it a win on points.” He spread his hands. “Here endeth the lesson.”

  The lights had been dimmed in the northern hemisphere. Climbing into the Hub Brüks could see a wash of arcane tacticals through the equatorial grille, a chromatic mishmash he knew would make no sense even with an unobstructed view.

  “Wrong way,” said a familiar voice as he headed for the next spoke.

  Sengupta.

  “What?” He couldn’t see her, even through the grille; the mirrorball eclipsed the view. But her voice carried clearly around the chamber: “You visiting the vampire?”

  “Uh, no.” God no.

  “Then you’re going the wrong way.”

  “Thanks.” He second-guessed himself, decided to risk it (hey, she’d started the conversation), swam through the air and bull’s-eyed the moving target of the doorway more through luck than skill.

  She was still embedded in her acceleration couch. Her face turned away as soon as he came into view.

  She kept up her end, though. “Where you going?”

  I don’t know. I don’t have a clue. “Commons. Galley.”

  “Other way. Two spokes over.”

  “Thanks.”

  She said nothing. Her eyes jiggled in their sockets. Every now and then a ruby highlight winked off her cornea as some unseen laser read commands there.

  “Meatspace display,” Brüks tried after a moment.

  “What about it?”

  “I thought everyone here used ConSensus.”

  “This is ConSensus.”

  He tapped his temple. “I mean, you know. Cortical.”

  “Wireless can bite my clit anyone can peek.”

  The fruit of her labor sprawled across a good twenty degrees of the dome, a light storm of numbers and images and—over on the far left side—a stack of something that looked like voiceprints. It didn’t look like any kind of astrogation display Brüks had ever seen.

  She was spelunking the cache.

  “I can peek,” he said. “I’m peeking right now.”

  “Why should I care about you?” Sengupta snorted.

  Cats and dogs, he thought, and held his tongue.

  He tried again. “So I guess I’ve got you to thank for that?”

  “Thank for what?”

  He gestured at weeks-old echoes plastered across the sky. “Grabbing that snapshot on the way out. Don’t know what I’d do for the next twelve days if I didn’t have some kind of Quinternet access.”

  “Sure why not. You’re eating our food you’re huffing our O2 why not suck our data while you’re at it.”

  I give up.

  He turned and headed back to the exit. He felt Sengupta shift in the couch behind him.

  “I hate that fucking vampire she moves all wrong.”

  It was nice to know that basic predator-aversion subroutines survived the augments, Brüks reflected.

  “And I wouldn’t trust Colonel Carnage, either,” Sengupta added. “No matter how much he cozies up to you.”

  He looked back. The pilot floated against the loose restraints of her couch, unmoving, staring straight ahead.

  “Why’s that?” Brüks asked.

  “Trust him then do what you want. I don’t give a shit.”

  He waited a moment longer. Sengupta sat as still as a stick insect.

  “Thanks,” he said at last, and dropped through the floor.

  So that’s what I am then. A parasite.

  He descended into the Lab.

  Some half-dead fossil, scooped up in passing from the battlefield. Patched together for no better reason than the firing of a few mirror neurons, some vestigial itch we might have once called pity.

  The equipment wasn’t his, but the workbench provided some degree of plastic comfort: a bit of surrogate familiarity in a ship too full of long bones and strange creatures.

  Worse than ballast: I suck their O2 and eat their supplies and take up precious airspace millions of klicks from the nearest real atmosphere. Less than a pet: they don’t want my company, feel no urge to scritch my ears, aren’t interested in any tricks I might know except staying invisible and playing dead.

  Sequence/splicer, universal incubator, optoelectron nanoscope with a respectable thirty-picometer threshold. All reassuringly familiar in a world where he’d half expected the very dust to be built out of miracles and magic crystals. Maybe that was deliberate: a security blanket for strays who’d missed the Singularity.

  Okay, then. I’m a parasite. Parasites are not destroyed by the powerful: parasites feed on them. Parasites use the powerful to their own ends.

  The lower level was empty except for a short stack of folded chairs and
half-dozen cargo cubes (fab-matter stockpiles, according to the manifest). Brüks unslung the tent and spread it across the deck against a curve of bulkhead.

  A tapeworm may not be as smart as its host but that doesn’t stop it from scamming shelter and nourishment and a place to breed. Good parasites are invisible; the best are indispensable. Gut bacteria, chloroplasts, mitochondria: all parasites, once. All invisible in the shadow of vaster beings. Now their hosts can’t live without them.

  The structure inflated into a kind of bulbous lozenge. It swelled igloolike toward the center of the compartment, molded itself against the walls and flooring behind. It wasn’t too different from his abandoned tent back in the desert; the piezoelectricity that buttressed the structure also powered the GUI sheathing its inner surface. Brüks ran an index finger down the center of the door. Its membranous halves snapped gently apart like a sheet of mesentery split down the middle.

  Some go even farther. Some get the upper hand, dig down and change the wiring right at the synapse. Dicrocoelium, Sacculina, Toxoplasma. Brainless things, all of them. Mindless creatures that turn inconceivably greater intellects into puppets.

  He dropped to his knees and crawled inside. The built-in hammock clung to the inner surface of the tent, ready to peel free and inflate at a touch. The default config only provided enough headroom for a crouch but Brüks couldn’t be bothered to dial up the headroom. Besides, the tight confines were strangely comforting down here at the very bottom of the spoke, just a few layers of alloy and insulation from the whole starry drum of the heavens rolling past beneath his feet.

  So I’m a parasite? Fine. It is an honorable title.

  Down here, nestled in this warm and self-regulating little structure, he was as heavy as the Crown would let him be. He felt almost stable, almost rooted. And while he wouldn’t quite call it safety, he almost managed not to notice how like a burrow his quarters were: how deep in the earth, how far removed from other inhabitants of this pocket ecosystem. And how Daniel Brüks huddled against the deck like a mouse squeezed into the farthest corner of a great glass terrarium full of cobras, the lights turned up as bright as they would go.