A Bitter Shade of Blindsight Page 3

  “Yeah. I’ve seen some of your poetry.”

  “Oh, that.” He looks out across the lawn, at the other resting patients, and his grey eyes are calm. “That was just depression.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’m going to be okay, though.”

  A buzzer sounds, then, and the medics begin to round up patients like sheep and herd them back indoors, and I follow along meekly.

  These femto-med techs are fine people, and if they rework my lungs I’ll be properly grateful. But if they touch my mind, I’ll kill them.

  Another day spent in fitful sleep in the skimmer, its cockpit polarised to black. I powered up the hv and accessed a passive-drama channel. The default choice was Bridget Goes to Mars, an old serial I last saw long before I went into space, and I chose it in a fit of nostalgia.

  Ten minutes into an episode called Sisters Simulacra, I shut it down. The plot resolution depended on not guessing from the start that this week’s doomed heroine was a VR construct. “…And they took their helmets off, and it had all been a simulation.” When I was at school, old Agnes Arrowsmith would have taken the strap to me if I’d turned in a story which ended like that. I wondered what had become of her.

  I depolarised the cockpit. Looking at the desert through gritty eyes, I felt insubstantial as a coded construct myself, some programmer’s reified twisted dream.

  Time to act.

  I checked the pre-programmed course I’d laid in, and it was fine. Awkwardly, I pulled my backpack over from behind my seat, and degaussed one of its handy pockets. I ejected the slim comms module from the dashboard and slipped it into the pocket, and sealed the pocket shut. Then I removed my blaster from the dashboard’s power feed and checked it: fully charged. I liquefied the cockpit membrane and scrambled out, blaster in one hand, dragging the pack behind me. I dropped it onto the rocky ground, and jumped down after it.

  I sprang up, quickly sighting my blaster on a small boulder, and pressed the stud. I ducked back down as the boulder exploded, but something hit my cheek. Fragments of rock rattled against the skimmer’s body, and I laughed.

  My cheek felt warm. I touched it, and my hand came away red with blood. A tiny cut, insignificant.

  I dragged my pack a few metres away then returned to the skimmer. I climbed up and reached inside, activated the drive, and jumped back down as the engines powered up. I backed away quickly as the skimmer rose, turned on the spot, and headed east towards a distant mesa.

  I made sure my blaster was deactivated before I tucked it away inside my pack. Then I shrugged the pack up onto my back, sealed the strap across my front, and bounced a little to settle the weight evenly. Perfect.

  Heat rose from the desert floor, pressed down at me from the endless blue sky, from the white searing sun, as I set off to find the one who had stolen my life from me.

  Night. Clear desert night. I stopped for a rest, still standing, and looked up at the silver stars.

  Phoenixes Two through Six were out there, somewhere, on distant worlds if they’d survived at all. Two sent return missions; one from a lush planet to which SWSA were planning more colonisation trips. Perhaps the others were merely delaying their triumphal returns.

  Of the four Space Agencies with Phoenix-type ships and scull-gate tech, Phoenix has the highest success rate. God help those other crews.

  Day. Searing sun. Step after monotonous step, while the heat burned, my memory drifted free…

  Frank was gentle with me, and always considerate of my low stamina and my smoke-scarred lungs, and he never minded if I had a coughing, wheezing fit at an inopportune intimate moment. He didn’t stay with me for the birth, though, and I never worked out whether he had timed his long rock-hunting field-trip deliberately to avoid the event.

  I pulled the pack’s sip tube round to my mouth, and sucked water sparingly. There’s a non-linear equation governing the relationship between sweat lost and the effort required to bear a given weight of water, and I hoped I’d got the balance right.

  Balance.

  After Ash was born, Frank was around even less. He had a new colleague in Peter, whom I — or rather, whom the entire community acting in unconscious unison — had rescued from the lab explosion. Peter had sworn off research in decompactifying the hidden six dimensions of our ten-dimensional universe, declaring that those twists beyond our perception obviously didn’t want humans blundering around in their domain, not here on Balance anyway, and that the whole idea was way too dangerous. I was relieved, for I’d always feared he would one day raid Phoenix Seven’s remaining hold for the one jump-gate we had and cannibalise it for its scullifier module.

  Frank and Peter spent ever longer away together in the cold blue and violet mountains to the south, or in insulated tents down by the flowing rivers of molten lava in the smoking peaks to the north — Frank, whose parents had been killed in Seattle during the Mt. Rainier eruption, was an authority on vulcanism — and I was content to raise Ash for the most part by myself. I called him Ashkiidlohí, Laughing Boy, as his childhood Navajo name, for though he was a frail and sickly child, he always found joy in the world around him. He wore a microdoc strapped to his arm constantly, never complaining, even when he was too young to understand that it kept him alive, scavenging his system of the LXDS virus’s by-products, keeping the symptoms at bay but lacking the femtotech, even nanotech, which would have hunted down the viral molecules and broken them apart.

  Ash, my son.

  I never thought of what his adult name might someday be. Perhaps I knew, even then, as was the way of things on Balance, that he would never have need of one…

  I stumbled, cursing, kicking a rock, and a small black scorpion scuttled out of sight.

  “I wouldn’t have killed you, little one,” I murmured, though in my youth I would have stamped it into oblivion, not the Navajo way at all.

  Only people can commit evil, and therefore deserve to suffer, to die.

  Not children, though, not like Ash, robbed of his future more cruelly than I was robbed of mine…

  Claire, standing at the doorway to my kitchen, shoos her son Jason outside to play. The sounds of children’s chanting of some playtime rhyme drift through the open exterior door. I don’t need to look out the window to know that Ash is standing off to one side, laughing as the other, fitter, children play skipping games through ribbons of holo light, but not joining in with them, not ever joining in.

  I hand Claire a cup of coffee.

  “Thanks,” she says. “Sorry about Frank.”

  He and Peter, who spend so much time together when they’re off on field trips, have decided to make the arrangement permanent. If I hadn’t cried, I’d have laughed.

  “I know,” I say, and it’s true that I know how she feels at that moment, and that her sympathy is genuine. Yet it wasn’t a surprise about Frank: as with most relationships here, it’s as though we all understand each other…

  Claire and I both gasp, sharing a sudden sensation like a clenched hand inside our guts, and we realise the sing-song rhyme outside has stopped, and then we’re both running out to the yard and I bump into Claire’s back as she stops and I forget about her because that’s Ash lying down there, Ash with his face pale, ashen, yes, eyes closed and lying on the ground with his hands crossed on his chest and the other children are sitting in a tight circle around him, close to him, and they reach forward and I try to scream, do something, but a pale yellow glimmer accompanies that unnatural twisting I have seen before and the children reach inside Ash’s chest, actually

  inside him, somehow, and I see their hands are moving though I don’t know how they’re doing it but that’s my son and they’re killing him and the thought frees me and I’m running forwards and Claire’s with me, screaming too, and we pull them off, pull them away from Ash and their hands are glistening but there’s no blood, no blood at all, and I’d like to believe it’s an hallucination but not this time, this time I know it’s real and Claire knows it too, looking at her son Jason
in horror but the children’s faces are blank, not even annoyed, and I kneel by Ash and feel for a pulse at his neck but I already know there’s none.

  Other colonists run up too, in that way we have of drawing together when danger threatens one of us, that way we’ve never even questioned, let’s be honest, as the manner in which we talk and the way we act has changed since we arrived on Balance, and we’ve pretended somehow that it hasn’t, but all illusions have been stripped away now and there’s no going back to reclaim our innocence.

  I have plenty of helpers to rush with Ash’s limp white form to the medical dome and he’s on the emergency table in seconds and sensor arms swing round and holo displays spring up but every vital display is flatplaned. The only decaying attractors belong to biochemical processes that are still proceeding in cells which don’t yet know the organism is already dead.

  No curse on my lips, nor tears in my eyes — some things are too vast for such petty reactions to count at all, as our remaining dreams and hopes are swept away like a feebly protesting ant tossed upwards by the mighty hurricane, impersonal, remorseless, and utterly implacable.

  Her house was a white and silver dome, like a second miniature sun by daylight, perched atop a dusty flat-topped column of red rock too narrow to be called a mesa. The clear gel coating my eyes extended itself on command; even at max magnification from ground level, the best part of twenty kilometres away, I could see no signs of movement around the house, no IB flyers parked outside on guard, only hers, its licence plate visible. Maybe she wasn’t expecting me. Maybe the IB hadn’t even told her I was coming; the little info I had been able to access on her, my sister and mother, my creatrix and betrayer, indicated her resignation from SWSA five years before.

  A nice isolation. The IB, if they were monitoring at all, were watching the TrafficNet and maybe relying on a rooftop scanner or some similar device, though it would have to be damned small for my enhanced vision not to make it out, and I could see nothing. I blinked three times, rapidly, and the gel slicked back to its normal shape and function, protecting my eyes against the sun.

  Nobody in her right mind would approach any way other than by air. Nobody in her right mind would cross the searing desert in the full heat of day, nor assay the sheer vertical climb in the darkness of night, but I was unbalanced as much as unBalanced, and I knew it. Mortal betrayal tends to do that to a girl.

  The Arizonan sun grew hotter than a lava flow, molten rock turned fiery gold and white, and the children’s bodies falling…

  My mind shut progressively down, as the weight of my pack pulling my shoulders back and the need to keep walking, one step, then another, outweighed all other perceptions and became my universe, a Christian hell.

  For burning hours, I walked.

  The sun was crimson liquid dripping on the horizon when I reached the base of that great column of rock. I slipped my pack off and onto the ground, and sat down beside it, ignoring the burning heat beneath me, and waited for cooling darkness to slip across the sky.

  I slept for a little while, I think, for when I looked up again the sky was pure black, frosted with starlight, and it was cool enough to breathe easily again, though still warmer than a summer’s day back in Hope.

  I slipped a tube of smartgel out of my pack and smeared my hands, and twisted the controls on my boots’ ankles to set the soles’ pores for max adhesion. I took out the handful of infocrystals and slipped them into my shirt pockets, and I took out the blaster — deactivated, good — and slipped it through my belt in the small of my back. I turned to the sheer rock face, and the blaster dug into me painfully. I wriggled my hips to settle its weight better, and it fell to the rocky ground with a clatter. This wasn’t going to work.

  I tipped the contents of my pack out onto the ground: water bottles, insulating sheet, comms module, map crystal, climbing line, light-sticks, protein bars. Then I put my infocrystals and blaster in the pack, squeezed it small and tightened it that way, and settled it on my back. No problem.

  I blinked my eye-gel to night-vision and the night turned sparkling blue. I looked for hand- and foot-holds, jammed my fingers and toes into the first holds, and hauled myself up. First move. Reach up, stretch, and pull again.

  I climbed for twenty minutes before a crack in the face enlarged into a chimney and I squeezed myself inside and forced myself to rest. I thought about the water bottles, lying below at the pillar’s base. Time to move on up again.

  Twice I nearly fell off and died. After the second time, gorge rising, I had to find a small ledge and hug the rock face until the trembling stopped and I could continue.

  Stretch and pull. Stretch and pull. Climb.

  The level top was a shock. I hauled myself over the crumbling lip, wriggled forwards across the flat rock till I was metres away from the edge, then just lay down on my stomach, face against the hard rock, and thought of nothing but breathing calmly and relaxing exhausted muscles.

  When I could, I got to my feet and unslung my pack. Carrying it in one hand, I walked around the dome’s perimeter, past her rather sporty little flyer, to the entranceway. A tiny holo indicated that Nancy Silverthorn was in. Two other names, Adam Craybourne and Samuel Craybourne, were displayed at a lower intensity, indicating their absence.

  She had a family. Of course she had a family. Why hadn’t I thought of that? I was the one who was alone and wretched, not she.

  “Open up,” I said, and my voice was dry and cracked.

  That, and years of different environments including toxic smoke inhalation, had caused divergence in our voice patterns. There was a twinkling red light as the house system scanned my retinal patterns to make sure — they, at least, remained identical — and the door membrane softened and I stepped right through, into her house.

  She was sitting in a soft easy-chair, a hardcopy book open on her lap, a cup of coffee on a small table at her side. I blinked rapidly to readjust my vision: a pale polished wooden floor, clean pastel walls, a Ganado Red rug on one wall… but my eyes returned to her. How strange. It was me sitting there, or almost. She was paler than me, softer and heavier, and she jumped with surprise when I dropped my pack to the floor.

  “Nice room,” I said.

  “Oh, my God. You!”

  “Oh, yes,” I said. “Quite the happy reunion, isn’t it?”

  “Not hardly. I didn’t want to see you when you got back to Earth, and I don’t want to see you now.”

  “Can’t face your own guilt?” I asked, and saw with satisfaction that she flinched.

  She said nothing as I walked around the room, taking in the pottery displayed on pedestals, the still holos of her husband and son. The boy looked pale and sullen, heavy black eyebrows drawn together, nothing at all like Ash.

  “Which one’s Adam and which one’s Samuel?” I asked, but she didn’t answer.

  She moved swiftly, then, out of the chair and heading for the nearest terminal, but I leaped for my pack instead of for her and the blaster came out faster than thought and I squeezed the stud and the terminal exploded with a loud bang.

  She stopped dead, shocked into stillness.

  “You’re crazy,” she whispered.

  “Wouldn’t you be?” I answered, and realised what I had said, and laughed out loud.

  My laughter died at the bitter look in her eyes.

  “Don’t you realise,” she said, “That you’re the lucky one?”

  “Really.” I aimed the blaster at her. “Do you believe I’d use this on you?”

  She nodded. She knew me that well, anyway. It was a start.

  “It’s a lovely night for flying,” I said.

  She backed away slightly, and I knew she thought I meant to take her outside and throw her off the edge.

  “Oh, no,” I said. “That would be far too easy. Let’s go.”

  We went outside, sisters together, and the flat top was pale grey in the moonlight and soft cicada song enriched the night and I held the gun on her as she climbed into her flyer and
slid over to the far side and I climbed in after her.

  “Where are we going?” she asked.

  I said nothing, programmed the course with control gestures from my left hand she could read as well as I, and I settled back, resting my wrist on the armrest but not letting my blaster’s aim waiver from her torso.

  The cabin lights were off, and I blinked my way back to full night-vision. I watched her swallow nervously, looking out into the darkness with unenhanced vision, as the night enveloped our little flyer.

  The Canyon de Chelly rose up on either side of us, breathtaking sandstone cliffs glowing peach in the morning sun, as we trudged along the canyon floor, littered with the stone fragments of erosion and avalanche. Neither of us spoke; her breathing was harsher than mine, though my steps probably wandered more. It had been thirty hours or more since I had last slept.

  The flyer lay abandoned hours ago, far behind us. I carried the blaster in my right hand, and the comms and holoprojector modules from her flyer, taped together, in my left. I would have preferred that she carry the modules, but she might use them as a weapon if my concentration wavered.

  We walked for a long a time. At the foot of the sheer rock wall to our left, a cluster of tiny stone cliff dwellings nestled, abandoned suddenly a thousand years ago by the mysterious Anasazi culture. No knowledge of their passing remains; an object lesson to us all.

  Two centuries ago, eight thousand Navajo — men, women and children, the battered survivors of Kit Carson’s violent campaign of ethnic cleansing — started their Long Walk along this route at gunpoint, a walk that would end at Fort Sumner, and the death of thousands more from exposure and disease. I was sure the significance of this was not lost upon her, the other Nat, my enemy.

  Finally, as we rounded a twist in the canyon’s route, I knew we were at the spot.

  “Stand there,” I said. My voice was rough.