This Alien Shore

  Then Phoenix muttered, “Shit!”

  “What...”

  “Nuke says they’ve hacked into the system and are doing a heat scan to track us. Damn! Well, at least we know they aren’t Ra’s people, or they wouldn’t have to break into the system like that. She’d have the access codes.” He smiled grimly. “I’d rather it was her, truth be told.”

  “Can you do anything?”

  “Nuke is trying to block it. But he says it looks like a team effort, and it’s going to be hard for him to handle alone.”

  “Can you help him?”

  He looked down at her with something akin to amusement. “Not while I’m running from those guys. Even I have my limits.” He hoisted her arm to a more secure position across his shoulders. “Let’s just hope he remembers everything I taught him.” The emergency lights, dull orange spots set at intervals along the wall, blinked off suddenly. Then on again. Off. On. Then they held.

  “Michal—”

  “System’s confused, that’s all. Too many people fucking with it.” His words were casual, but the tone behind them was anything but. “Come on.”

  He was trying to get her to run, but the best she could manage was a stumble. She could feel nothing on her right side now other than the pounding of her heart, which reverberated with the force of thunder in her flesh. She was going to pass out soon, or maybe die from this poison, and what would he do then? Maybe if he just left her behind, he would be safe. She was pretty sure she was the one they were after, and not him. If he left her behind, would she wake up in some operating theater, being dissected for her wiring? Would she wake up at all?

  Phoenix stiffened suddenly. She looked up, alert for danger, but saw nothing in the passageway which could threaten anyone. Was it some kind of message he was getting? Or had someone hacked into his brain, to attack him directly? She’d read that could happen.

  Then he looked looked down at her and said, “Ra’s people are moving in.”

  “Good or bad?” she managed

  “Good. I think.”

  He hesitated, consulting his inner maps, then chose a new direction for them. “Her people caught the hacking, and they’re tracing it. They know someone is in the tunnels. Nuke thinks they don’t know who we are. She’s just guessing that something is up and getting people into place.” Jamisia stumbled, and he had to shift position to hold her more firmly. “She’s got some of the best hackers in the business on her staff, you know, the elite of the elite... anyway... she won’t take kindly to a hit squad coming into her city, regardless of who and what they’re going after.” He looked down at her. “We might be safe with her people. Unless you have something to hide from them, too.”

  She could feel the tears coming to her eyes, and couldn’t even control her body enough to blink them free. “Don’t know,” she whispered. The words had no volume. “Don’t know why anyone...” It was all she could say. Her legs gave out from under her for the last time, and she sagged against his side. The little orange lights were swimming in her field of vision like little glowing fish, shimmering in the water.

  “Okay, girl. Here we go.” There was a thudding impact in her stomach and she bent over his shoulder; her feet were lifted off the floor and for a moment she thought the resulting vertigo was going to make her sick. Then she just lay limp where he held her, arms and torso hanging down his back, and hoped he had the strength to carry her as far as they needed to go.

  Which was where?

  She could feel him stumbling beneath her weight as he tried to keep up some kind of speed. She wasn’t heavy, but he wasn’t exactly an athlete. Maybe he’d have the intelligence to go down to the lo-G levels, where the burden would be less. Of course their pursuers would expect that, and they’d be waiting down there. She found herself fading in and out of unconsciousness as he ran, her body bouncing rythmically against his back. They’d be waiting for them everywhere....

  And then Phoenix stopped. He put her down gently. She saw through blurry eyes another hatchway, larger than the one they had first come through. A complicated looking control box of some sort was next to it, which Phoenix opened. Poor boy, he was covered with sweat from the strain of carrying her, and his hands were shaking as he worked the controls. “Nuke says they’re here, in this sector. If I can get us to them, maybe we can ask for sanctuary.” It seemed to her that there were footsteps resounding in the hallway behind them. Muffled voices, an occasional clanging. “We’ll be safe then.”

  Safe? But the Guild itself was after her. He didn’t know that. She hadn’t told him about the trace in her arm. She tried to get the words out now, but they just wouldn’t come.

  “If it’s really Nuke telling me this,” he muttered. “Of course, there’s always the chance they hacked that connection, too, and our friends are right out here waiting for us.” He glanced back the way they had come; clearly he could hear the voices as well. “Not like we have much of a choice.”

  The door slid open. He picked her up in his arms and carried her through the hatchway, into a public corridor. Someone came running, apparently alerted by the sound of the door opening, or possibly some distant alarm. Uniformed people. A lot of them. She couldn’t make out the details of their uniforms, but she could see that they all held weapons. And all the weapons were pointed at her and Phoenix.

  This is safe? She wanted to ask. But all that came out of her mouth was a moan.

  She heard Phoenix say something to them, but couldn’t make out his words. No sounds could get past the ringing in her ears, or the poisoned fog inside her brain.

  The weapons weren’t lowered. A harsh command was voiced from somewhere, and they were moving again....

  Fading into darkness. The lights, the sounds, everything. She tried to hold on, to cling to the last bit of light she could see, but the drug was just too strong for her.

  Make us safe, Phoenix. Please.

  How can you speak of the human soul, you who abandoned it long ago? Do you think that when you tweak a gene here or there, or adjust some chemical oh so slightly, you don’t change the sum total of who and what a man is?

  We of Guera relish the soul in its natural state. We draw strength from its weaknesses, wisdom from its faults, and joy from its idiosyncracies. Where you look at us and see only illness, a curse to be corrected, we see the untapped potential of humanity.

  And we revel in our natural state, and make no apologies for it.

  DR. ALEX ROME,

  The Sacred Soul

  PROSPERITY NODE PROSPERITY STATION

  IT HAD BEEN a long day. Ian Kent could feel the weight of it on his shoulders as he reached the main portal of his home. He hated the days when he had to play Governor for his node; it made him feel like a petty bureaucrat, and that in turn reminded him of what he had been before, and how much he had lost.

  Security programs greeted him, scanning his body, his headset, his brain. Apparently he was himself, for the portal opened to admit him.

  He wished he felt as sure.

  With wearied step he walked through the entrance foyer, loosening the clasp at the neck of his long robe. The load of tranquilizers in his bloodstream had become oppressive by midday, dulling his wits, and at last he’d had to adjust the flow so that he could get some work done. He had done it hours ago... and now the pain was seeping through. So much pain. He tightened his hand on the banister as he climbed, trying to focus on the physical sensation instead of his own thoughts. Maybe if he got a neural implant instead ... but no, the mere thought of letting anyone work on his brain, even for such simple surgery, was more than he could bear. Enough damage had been done. He would risk no more. The drugs in his arm were good enough, it was the system all outpilots relied upon. If it wasn’t enough to calm him, then he wouldn’t be calm.

  He would go to his studio tonight.

  He slipped off the long outer robe that was his sign of rank and chuted it for cleaning. Beneath it he had on another layer, close-fitting, not unlike the uniforms that outpi
lots wore when they were working. Some days it hurt unbearably to wear such garments, but he couldn’t bring himself to do otherwise; it was as much a part of him as his skin, a crucial part of his identity. He stopped in the kitchen to pick up some food—gray dough wrapped around colorless meat, he didn’t even care what it was—and ate mechanically as he walked to the portal of his studio, flashing it his entry icon.

  Beyond ... he entered the room and heard the door whisk shut behind him. In the center of the studio was an artist’s console, a semicircular desk with embedded controls and a chair with full headset attached. Surrounding it were pictures. Abstract pictures, all worked in shades of gray. Some were jarring, jagged compositions, broken planes and shattered edges and lines whose beginnings and ends could not be traced. Some were sinuous creations, subtly threatening, coils and loops that seemed to throb against a foggy backdrop. Most were combinations of those elements, shapes and textures mixed with seemingly random purpose, to produce artwork that was strangely ominous, dissasociative ... dare one say insane? Wasn’t that the ancient Earth word for it, a state in which the mind could no longer connect to the reality of one’s fellows? Was he, Ian Alexander Kent, insane?

  With a sigh he regarded the disturbing pictures, shaking his head in frustration. They were failures, every single one of them. That which he sought to express could never be captured in artform. That inner vision which he had lost, which no longer even had a name in his injured brain ... he hungered for the ainniq, he burned to create one little corner of the outpilot’s universe in this world, wherein he might escape for a moment. But it evaded him. Other outpilots had tried, and even with color available to them they failed to capture the terrible, terrifying beauty of the ainniq; how could he succeed, who had only this crippled brain and shades of gray to work with?

  For a moment he thought about killing himself. Only a moment. Words flashed in the comer of his vision, a warning from his wellseeker: SEROTONIN LEVELS DROPPING. CORRECT? He hesitated. Default was yes; if he did nothing, nothing at all, within ten seconds appropriate medication would be released into his bloodstream, to work its healing magic. It was all part of the complex machinery used to keep an outpilot functioning outside of the ainniq.

  We are aliens, he thought. The words had a dark taste, ominous but not unpleasing. We wear human bodies, but it takes drugs and software to make us truly human. Only in the ainniq can we let all that go, and be ourselves.

  He wanted to be himself tonight. Just for a moment.

  Drawing in a deep breath, he visualized his negative icon. NO. The wellseeker subsided; its message faded into blackness. Let his brain do what nature intended, for once. A twinge of fear accompanied that decision, but even that was not unwelcome. Fear was part of the outpilot’s world, a fear so intense that no other men could endure it ... but without that fear, no travel between the stars would be possible, and so it was valued.

  Beware of dragons breathing red.

  He sat down in the smooth sculptured chair before the console, letting his hands rest on the controls before him. In his mind’s eye he flashed the icons that would let him access his medical programs, and at last settled on a chart profiling his medication. There it was: Outpilot’s Syndrome, reduced to a series of prescriptions. Feed this drug into the bloodstream, and the fear would be quelled; stimulate these neurons, and the parts of the brain that might otherwise shut down would be sustained at their normal levels. He scrolled through over a hundred instructions, drugs and programs and monitors and controls, the software and hardware and brainware of sanity.

  There was one procedure that would shut it all down, initiated by an icon never used in safespace. One secret symbol, used only prior to transition. He shut his eyes so that there was only blackness before him, and visualized it in glowing amber.

  A pause, then. ARE YOU SURE? his brainware questioned. Amber words, bright, like his icon.

  He hesitated only an instant. YES, he flashed back. I’M SURE.

  For a few seconds, he knew, he would feel nothing. His long fingers played over the controls of the console, preparing a sheet of plastex for a new composition. His hands, he saw, were trembling. Was it starting now? Could he feel it? The controls under his fingers were like the switches of a transport ship—he had designed them that way, deliberately—and for a moment he forgot just where he was. He looked up and imagined the vast reaches of safespace before him, and the slender fault that was an ainniq ... out here it did not matter if he had no color sense, for the sky surrounding him was black as jet, the stars a shimmering silver, the ainniq a pale strand almost too faint to see; he would have to get closer before its appearance changed, much closer. He would have to maneuver the ship into the crack of light just so, slipping into a wound that was made back when the universe was born, waves of compression from that vast explosion ripping flaws into the very substance of space....

  He gasped, his hands clutching the controls. Random patterns of black and gray splattered across the plastex sheet before him, responding to the emotions welling up in his brain, expressing his fevered grip in patterns of light and dark. He wasn’t controlling the artform program the way he should, he knew that, but his hands seemed strangely divorced from him now, and it was hard for him to control them. In his chest his heart was pounding a feverish rhythm, and his wellseeker was scrolling up warnings in the corner of his vision. The words were gibberish, a language he had never learned; what were they doing in his head? Who had put them there? All that mattered was the ainniq, he had to get to the ainniq ... only there could he be safe.

  Passing his hands across controls that he could sense but not see, he maneuvered his vessel into position. Terror was building inside his head, but it was still confined by the outpilot programs embedded in his brain; not until he passed into the ainniq itself would the full force of his Syndrome be unleashed.

  He hungered for it. He feared it. He knew it for what it was in truth, a disease so devastating that even Gueran society, normally tolerant of any mental variance, beat it down with drugs and programs until it crouched in the brain like a wild beast, subdued but never tamed. And only subdued for a while. There would come a moment when the ainniq gaped wide before him, the vast worldwound that shimmered with unnatural light ... and he would see that secret universe in all its glory, and in response the transition programs would kick in—the Syndrome would roar to life within his brain, swallowing his sanity, filling his veins with its hot red terror....

  He gasped, leaning back in his chair for support. What could they know of that moment, the fools who ran the Guild? What could they know of that primal instant when the Syndrome took hold, when civilized thought gave way to raw survival instinct—when the universe roared with a thousand voices and cymbal-clashes of light, as he slipped into the ainniq itself, like a surgeon slipping laser-scalpel into flesh....

  I need it, he thought. Sweat had broken out on his brow, hot beads that trickled down his face as he trembled.

  I need it so badly.

  It had been years since his last transition ... or had it? Suddenly he wasn’t so sure. Wasn’t there a freight convoy just last E-week that he had outpiloted to safety? The memory was a strange thing, oddly distant; he couldn’t pin it down. And then a string of passenger pods the E-month before that.... Why were his hands shaking? Why did he feel such a terrible need to immerse himself in the Syndrome now, quickly, lest someone or something stop him?

  A roaring had filled his ears, like a thousand voices all screaming at once. He knew the sound well, knew the change that it presaged. Where was the ainniq? He scanned space with a wary eye, anxious to catch sight of the precious conduit. In the distance the artform program caught up his emotions, translated them into digital format, and splattered them across his chosen canvas. Hot gray, ice gray, the gray of flowing blood....

  EMERGENCY—his wellseeker scrolled—SAFESPACE MAINTENANCE PROGRAM COMPROMISED—EMERGENCY—SAFESPACE MAINTENANCE PROGRAM COMPROMISED—

  There it was. Lik
e a flaw in crystal, shattered planes of space meeting with luminous friction. You couldn’t really see it until you were right on top of it, but then suddenly it was spread out before you, a veil of light only visible from one special angle—

  —EMERGENCY—SAFESPACE MAINTENANCE PROGRAM COMPROMISED—

  Suddenly it was hard to breathe. He gasped as his small ship swung into position for entrance into the ainniq. There was a band about his chest, squeezing. Spots before his eyes....

  And safespace cracked open before him. Monsters poured forth with a roar that shook the stars, dragons of the ainniq universe now set free in this world, bellowing their fury and their hunger in colors no human eye could see. He could feel their hunger as the sana raced toward him, as frigid and consuming as space itself. Thousands upon thousands of them, pouring out of the worldwound like demons from hell, their bodies mutating even as they flew toward him, different each moment than the last—

  Suddenly there were no controls under his fingers. There was no headset on his head. He was naked in the darkness, with no air to breathe, and the ice-cold vacuum of space scouring his lungs. In terror he struggled to comprehend what was happening, but his thoughts would not gather into coherent patterns. Crystals were forming on his lips, in his hair, and the moisture of his breath was a rain of stars as it froze. And the sana were gathering about him. Not merely hungry now, but malevolent beyond any human measure; they circled him, taunting him, exacting their vengeance for the years in which he had defied them. Where’s your ship, little human? Go flee to your pods, why don’t you. Flee? How could you flee something you couldn’t see? Without vision one was helpless.

  Then the first one touched him and he felt it tearing into his flesh as he fought to breathe—no, not his flesh, the creature had hold of his very soul—crushing, rending, tearing open the boundaries of his being until the very life within him bled out into the darkness. And they began to feed—