Edward willett, p.5
Edward Willett, page 5
“That space station had picked up something, I could tell that right away, but the signal was almost nonexistent. It took several days of tweaking to filter out the noise burying it, but by yesterday, the computer and I agreed: the space station had recorded—and located in space—the electromagnetic footprint of a Cornwall branespace engine spinning up. The Rivers of Babylon must have changed course just before it left the system. Combining the data from the deep-space station with the final observation of the Rivers of Babylon’s position within the system gave me…” He slid his queen forward, on the theory that the best defense was a strong offense. “Check.”
Cheveldeoff blocked with his bishop, without a second’s pause. “A vector!”
“A vector.” Richard shook his head. The queen move had been an act of desperation. He couldn’t sustain the attack. He had to move her back and concentrate on defense again…or resign, and he wasn’t quite ready to do that. He pulled the piece back toward his side of the board. “It’s not enough to tell us where the moddie planet is…if it exists…but at least it narrows the field of search. All we need now is one unexplained burst of electromagnetic energy, one anomaly reported by some fortune-seeking scout ship…”
“And we’ll finally be able to Purify the worst abominations the genesculptors ever created,” Cheveldeoff said. “And just maybe save the human race from the wrath of God. Excellent news, Richard!” His own queen slashed across the board. “Check. Mate in three.”
What? Richard stared at the board. How did I miss that? Well, he could see it now readily enough. He reached out and tipped over his king. “Good game, sir.”
“I eagerly await the next,” Cheveldeoff said, getting to his feet and thus signaling the end of the audience. But he held out his hand, and he’d never done that before. “Good work, Richard,” he said as Richard took it. He held it a moment longer than necessary for a handshake, and looked Richard in the eyes. It wasn’t a comfortable look; Cheveldeoff’s eyes had a way of boring into his head and leaving him with a vague sense of dread, even when he was being congratulated. “If this pans out, the sky’s the limit for you.” He released Richard’s hand. “Now get out of here. Go home. Relax. It’s Salvation Day!”
“Yes, sir.” With relief (not an unusual emotion when leaving Cheveldeoff’s office) and a certain euphoria (which certainly was), Richard made his way up from the bowels of Body Security HQ. He emerged onto the front steps and paused to look back along the boulevard, paved with blue tile, lined with white stone sidewalks and white stone buildings, to the needle-sharp spire of the House of the Body pointing the way to the heavens. It pointed the way to God Itself, but now, Richard thought, maybe it also pointed the way to his future…a future where the Hansen name was no longer anathema, a future where he could finally get everything he deserved.
He shook his head. Well, that was pretentious, he told himself, and headed down the steps toward the undertube station that would take him home. He couldn’t help grinning. But that doesn’t mean it’s not true.
Chapter 3
THE FIRST CHAPTER of The Wisdom of the Avatar of God ended with “Praise God!” and Chris grinned as he always did, remembering an old Selkie joke about the Avatar that ended with the punch line, “Praise God! That’s not a request.” But today, his grin died quickly. I shouldn’t make fun of the Avatar, he thought. Some things are not a laughing matter. And though there was no one on Marseguro to report him to the Purity Watchers—and no Purity Watchers, either—there might be soon enough.
Best to Purify himself before that day arrived.
“Chapter Two,” said the reader. “Why the Body Must Be Purified If Humanity Is to Survive.” Chris kept walking, and kept listening.
Two hours later, well into Chapter Five, “On the Evils of Historical Religion,” he came to a fork in the road. One path was broad and led along the coast to Firstdip, curving out of sight around a hill. The other, though still paved, was narrow and led inland. A small green sign pointed the way: “Landing Valley.”
Chris directed his feet along the narrower path. The symbolism, though rooted in a long-banned religion, was not lost on him: if all went well, this straight and narrow way would indeed lead to life, a new life for him and all the other nonmods—“normals,” as he now dared think of them—being gradually drowned, symbolically and sometimes literally (in the case of his father) by the Selkies.
He spent the night in a gully beneath a rock overhang that provided shelter from the regular-as-clockwork midnight downpour of the Marseguro interior. Very little of the planet’s flora ran to anything tall enough or grand enough to be dubbed a tree, and the species that did—such as the bumbershoots and stickypines—lived only within a kilometer or two of the coast. Nevertheless, even here, certain of the native fernlike bushes grew to almost the height of a smallish man, and enough of those grew thickly enough at the north end of the gully to block the chilly wind that accompanied the rain. With his pocket heater and ultralight sleeping bag, he was comfortable enough.
In the morning, after a quick breakfast of something that was supposed to taste like bacon and eggs but Chris very much doubted really did (because if bacon and eggs had really tasted like that, why would anyone have ever eaten them?) Chris packed up and hit the trail. As the orange rays of the sun cleared the ridges, mist rose from the wet pavement, swirling around him as he walked.
Today he chose to walk in silence. He doubted even an Archdeacon could listen to the Avatar’s book every day. It was too rich, like eating bubblesquid pâté for breakfast, lunch, and supper. And too infuriating.
The last time he had come this way, he had been one of a company of two-dozen ten-year-olds, Emily Wood and John Duval among them. They had been on the traditional field trip to the Landing Site, and they hadn’t been walking. Instead, they’d been riding in big-wheeled electric cars with sealed, humidified interiors designed to keep the Selkies’ skin from drying out, never mind how uncomfortable it made the nonmods. “It’s only for a short time,” the teacher said when he complained. “You’ll live.”
This morning the air held at least as much humidity as those car interiors had, so much he was almost surprised it didn’t trigger his fear of water. Sometimes Chris dreamed about living somewhere dry. The closest thing Marseguro had to a desert was a high plateau in the mountains where it only rained or snowed three or four times a year, but the only way to get there was by air and you had to have a pressing scientific reason to make the trip. Suspecting mold had started growing on your skin didn’t count.
After an hour, the road’s gentle slope steepened, and it began to wind up the side of the ridge between pink boulders and purplish bushes. Chris walked faster. If he remembered right, once he crested the top…
There. Landing Valley, broad and flat as a table: the ideal place to set down a starship.
Very little remained of the Rivers of Babylon after all these years. The settlers had stripped the electronics and most of the metal out of her to build Firstdip which, after decades, Chris had always thought, still looked like a refugees’ shantytown. But the First Landers hadn’t been entirely focused on the immediate needs of survival. They’d left one section of the ship undisturbed, as a kind of monument, and it glinted below him in the afternoon sun, a short, stubby cylinder of silvery metal, ten meters wide and a hundred in diameter, set on its side so that it towered over the site: a cross section of the hull taken from the holds, showing the heavy shielding that had protected the Selkie children in their water-filled tanks from radiation through the long trip to the edge of Earth’s solar system, through branespace (not that radiation was a problem there) and then in from the edges of this system to Marseguro. Years later, a museum and interpretative center had been set up in a low building next to the hull section.
None of that interested Chris. He descended into the valley and strode past both the museum and the hull section without a glance, heading instead for the dark opening in the steep red rock of the far valley wall, maybe three hundred meters farther. He remembered asking the teacher about it during the field trip.
“It’s a cave,” she’d said. “The First Landers lived in there for a while, even dug out some extra rooms. It’s just used for storage now…a lot of mothballed equipment. Stuff the First Landers thought might be needed in the future, or if the microfactories failed.”
“Like what?”
“Spare parts, survival rations, communications equipment, things like that,” she’d said vaguely. “An emergency beacon, I think. Maybe someday we’ll want to talk to the rest of humanity again. After the Body Purified is gone. Now hurry up and catch up with the rest of the group. I think there’s gelato!”
Chris couldn’t remember if he’d had gelato that day, but he’d never forgotten the cave. He’d longed to explore it even then, but of course children weren’t allowed in, and nobody ever came here except on school field trips or for significant Landing Day anniversaries—the next would be the fortieth, still half a year away.
They’re probably planning something really special, Chris thought. Well, it will certainly be special if this works out.
He reached into his pack and pulled out his flashlight and crowbar. He didn’t expect much in the way of security, but surely the entrance would at least be locked: and so it was. The mouth of the cave had been closed off with a wall of cement blocks, which held a metal door, painted in peeling blue. A rusty hasp, secured by an equally rusty padlock, held the door closed. The crowbar made quick work of the hasp, and a moment later Chris flicked on the flashlight and stepped out of the just-starting-to-warm-up day into a dank, dark chill.
He had no idea how far into the hillside the cave and its additional rooms reached, or how long he might have to search, but in fact he found the equipment he wanted in the first natural chamber, just inside the cement-block wall, where it could be easily retrieved if needed. The First Landers had only wanted some place out of the rain; they weren’t trying to hide anything. Why would they? They believed everyone on the Rivers of Babylon was united in purpose, had all thrown in their lot with this do-or-die quest to found a world safe from the Body Purified, a new home for a new, improved breed of human…and their unimproved slaves, Chris thought. Us.
Just the day before, he’d heard once more the Avatar’s unanswerable question: “What good are normal humans to superhuman monsters? They’ll come to despise us, then enslave us, then eradicate us.”
The death of Chris’ father was proof enough the Avatar was right. Chris shook his head. “Not me,” he growled.
He found the equipment he wanted, clearly marked. No inkling that it should be secured or at least left unlabeled had apparently ever crossed anyone’s mind. Some superhumans, Chris thought, pushing the white packing crate toward the door. The scraping of plastic on stone echoed back from the cave walls with the sound of a knife on a grindstone. As Chris pulled the crate into the light, the text that he had previously only seen in the circle of illumination from his flashlight became clear: EMERGENCY INTERSTELLAR NULL-BRANE BEACON, and below that, an identification number, and a small panel of instructions. He read them over carefully. Among other things, they told him to make note of the ID number on the case, as he would need it to activate the beacon. He pulled his clunky old datapad from the backpack and stored the number, then turned his attention to getting the beacon out of the cave.
It weighed too much to lift. That meant he’d have to drag it, and that meant he couldn’t place it where he really wanted to, one valley over. Not that it was all that likely anyone would stumble over it wherever he put it, given how infrequently people came to Landing Valley, but still…
Well, he didn’t have any choice. And he could at least hide it a bit.
He tugged and pushed and pulled the crate away from the cave mouth, downslope but off to one side, away from the hull section and the museum, forcing it through a screen of two-meter-tall needlebushes into an open space on the other side. Sucking the back of his badly scratched left hand, he used his right to press the two green buttons on the front of the case. Something clicked and the crate’s lid sprang open, revealing the top of a silver cylinder about half a meter in diameter, featuring an alphanumeric keypad and, inside a transparent cover, a green-lit switch.
For the first time, Chris hesitated. Are you sure about this? he thought. If this works, it changes everything. All the dreams of the First Landers, overthrown in an instant. Contact with Earth. Marseguro a colony, not an independent world…
…no more Selkies, he reminded himself. No more second-class “landlings,” becoming more second-class every year as the Selkies breed like the animals they are. No more men like my father being murdered by the Selkie masters. A chance to return to Earth, where real humans belong…a chance to find something better to do with my life than cataloging algae samples and scrubbing growth tanks.
He remembered John Duval stealing his trunks, Emily Wood laughing at him, both of them and all their inhuman friends throwing him off the pier just to watch him flounder, just to humiliate him, just to mock him.
He remembered his father, lost at sea.
He remembered his mother, dying in a hospital long cut off from the latest medical advances.
He remembered her words to him, just yesterday morning…
“The Selkies murdered him…and now they’re killing me…they’ll kill you, too, my little boy…”
He blinked hard twice. “Not me,” he said again, and flicked the switch.
The transmitter beeped. “Please enter identification number,” a male voice said. Chris consulted his datapad, and carefully entered the string of digits and letters. “Thank you,” said the voice. “Please step back a minimum of three meters. Transmitter deployment begins in five seconds…” (Chris hastily retreated the suggested distance) “…four…three…two…one.”
The cylinder suddenly got longer, the top rising out of the packing case, which itself sprouted three mechanical spider legs, each of which budded and grew three smaller fingerlike appendages that dug into the ground and gripped. The top of the cylinder, now twice as tall as Chris, split open. A delicate dish-shaped antenna blossomed. The voice spoke again. “This transmitter contains a high-energy battery equivalent in power to a small fission reactor,” it said. “This level of energy is necessary to transmit a null-brane pulse of sufficient strength to be detected by any starships within this transmitter’s range. Diagnostics indicate that this battery is in good operating condition; however, this transmitter’s internal clock indicates that fifty-two Earth years have passed since the last regularly scheduled maintenance of this battery. This increases the possibility of catastrophic battery failure to an estimated one in ten. Such a failure, should it occur, will explosively release energy equivalent in force to two Hiroshima-sized nuclear weapons. Do you wish to proceed with activation?” A panel slid open at the base of the cylinder, revealing a green button and a red button. “Please press the green button, located on the right, if you wish to proceed. Press the red button, located on the left, to cancel.”
This time, Chris didn’t hesitate. If the battery failed, he’d hardly notice, and at least he would have made a statement they couldn’t ignore back in Hansen’s Harbor. He strode forward and pressed the green button.
“Activation complete,” the transmitter said. “Automated distress signal will be transmitted until battery power is exhausted, in approximately five Earth years. Transmission begins in thirty seconds…twenty-nine…twenty-eight…twenty-seven…”
Chris looked up at the sky. He couldn’t be sure anyone would pick up the signal, even in five years…but at least he had done something. At least he wasn’t just a passive victim this time, as he had been on the pier, in the pool, so many other times…
…like his father had been…like his mother…“…ten…nine…eight…seven…six…five…four…three…two…one…transmission begins.”
The transmitter did not blow up. In fact, nothing visible happened at all. Chris stared up at the sky for another long moment, then began packing up for the trip home. He’d clean up as many traces of his visit as he could before he left the site—brush away the scrape marks the crate had left in the dirt leading from the cave, do his best to make the padlock look undisturbed. Then it would be back to Hansen’s Harbor, back to the algae tanks, back to the bedside of the remnant of his mother, back to being alternately ignored and tormented. Everything would seem just the same to everyone else, but not to him.
The thing he had dreamed of doing for years, he had actually done at last.
Now he would wait, and nurse his secret hope.
The meeting with her parents didn’t go at all as Emily had anticipated.
She’d suggested Coriolis for dinner. Since it was a celebration for the end of school, her parents had agreed, even though Coriolis was probably the most expensive restaurant above or below the waves of New Botany Bay. Eating out was one of the activities both Selkies and landlings could enjoy together, since Victor Hansen’s modifications had not extended to making Selkies underwater eaters. Who wanted a belly full of seawater? They might be able to breathe underwater, but Selkies were still humans, not dolphins or seals. As well, even though Selkies could communicate underwater, their language, being so new, lacked the richness of English. Conversation in air was both a pleasure and, sometimes, a necessity.
So Coriolis and similar establishments had air. But they also had water. In fact, Coriolis had just about any combination of the two elements anyone could want. There were submerged-seating areas that looked like pictures Emily had seen of swim-up bars on Earth, rooms that were not only nonsubmerged but dehumidified for the comfort of landlings, other rooms that were nonsubmerged but regularly humidified by a fine mist of water vapor (available in a variety of scents from floral to savory), and two-level rooms that allowed Selkies to sit submerged and landlings to sit high and dry.
