Beyond the Rift (11 page)

Stop. Stop. Stop. Stop.

We do not stop. There is no force in the universe that can even slow us down. Past equals present;
Eriophora
dives through the center of the gate in a nanosecond. The unimaginable mass of her cold black heart snags some distant dimension, drags it screaming to the here and now. The booted portal erupts behind us, blossoms into a great blinding corona, every wavelength lethal to every living thing. Our aft filters clamp down tight.

The scorching wavefront chases us into the darkness as it has a thousand times before. In time, as always, the birth pangs will subside. The wormhole will settle in its collar. And just maybe, we will still be close enough to glimpse some new transcendent monstrosity emerging from that magic doorway.

I wonder if you’ll notice the corpse we left behind.

“Maybe we’re missing something,” Dix says.

“We miss almost everything,” I tell him.

DHF428 shifts red behind us. Lensing artefacts wink in our rearview; the gate has stabilized and the wormhole’s online, blowing light and space and time in an iridescent bubble from its great metal mouth. We’ll keep looking over our shoulders right up until we pass the Rayleigh limit, far past the point it’ll do any good.

So far, though, nothing’s come out.

“Maybe our numbers were wrong,” he says. “Maybe we made a mistake.”

Our numbers were right. An hour doesn’t pass when I don’t check them again. The Island just had—enemies, I guess. Victims, anyway.

I was right about one thing, though. That fucker was
smart
. To see us coming, to figure out how to talk to us; to use us as a
weapon
, to turn a threat to its very existence into a, a...

I guess
flyswatter
is as good a word as any.

“Maybe there was a war,” I mumble. “Maybe it wanted the real estate. Or maybe it was just some—family squabble.”

“Maybe didn’t
know
,” Dix suggests. “Maybe thought those coordinates were empty.”

Why would you think that
, I wonder.
Why would you even care?
And then it dawns on me: he doesn’t, not about the Island, anyway. No more than he ever did. He’s not inventing these rosy alternatives for himself.

My son is trying to comfort me.

I don’t need to be coddled, though. I was a fool: I let myself believe in life without conflict, in sentience without sin. For a little while I dwelt in a dream world where life was unselfish and unmanipulative, where every living thing did not struggle to exist at the expense of other life. I deified that which I could not understand, when in the end it was all too easily understood.

But I’m better now.

It’s over: another build, another benchmark, another irreplaceable slice of life that brings our task no closer to completion. It doesn’t matter how successful we are. It doesn’t matter how well we do our job.
Mission accomplished
is a meaningless phrase on
Eriophora
, an ironic oxymoron at best. There may one day be failure, but there is no finish line. We go on forever, crawling across the universe like ants, dragging our goddamned superhighway behind us.

I still have so much to learn.

At least my son is here to teach me.

THE SECOND COMING OF JASMINE FITZGERALD

W
hat’s wrong with this picture? Not much, at first glance. Blood pools in a pattern entirely consistent with the location of the victim. No conspicuous arterial spray; the butchery’s all abdominal, more spilled than spurted. No slogans either. Nobody’s scrawled
Helter Skelter
or
Satan is Lord
or even
Elvis Lives
on any of the walls. It’s just another mess in another kitchen in another one-bedroom apartment, already overcrowded with the piecemeal accumulation of two lives. One life’s all that’s left now, a thrashing gory creature screaming her mantra over and over as the police wrestle her away— “I have to
save
him I have to
save
him I have to
save
him—” —more evidence, not that the assembled cops need it, of why domestic calls absolutely
suck
.

She hasn’t saved him. By now it’s obvious that no one can. He lies in a pool of his own insides, blood and lymph spreading along the cracks between the linoleum tiles, crossing, criss-crossing, a convenient clotting grid drawing itself across the crime scene. Every now and then a red bubble grows and breaks on his lips. Anyone who happens to notice this, pretends not to.

The weapon? Right here: run-of-the-mill steak knife, slick with blood and coagulating fingerprints, lying exactly where she dropped it.

The only thing that’s missing is a motive. They were a quiet couple, the neighbours say. He was sick, he’d been sick for months. They never went out much. There was no history of violence. They loved each other deeply.

Maybe she was sick too. Maybe she was following orders from some tumour in her brain. Or maybe it was a botched alien abduction, gray-skinned creatures from Zeta II Reticuli framing an innocent bystander for their own incompetence. Maybe it’s a mass hallucination, maybe it isn’t really happening at all.

Maybe it’s an act of God.

They got to her early. This is one of the advantages of killing someone during office hours. They’ve taken samples, scraped residue from clothes and skin on the off chance that anyone might question whose blood she was wearing. They’ve searched the apartment, questioned neighbours and relatives, established the superficial details of identity: Jasmine Fitzgerald, 24-year-old Caucasian brunette, doctoral candidate. In Global General Relativity, whatever the fuck
that
is. They’ve stripped her down, cleaned her up, bounced her off a judge into Interview Room 1, Forensic Psychiatric Support Services.

They’ve put someone in there with her.

“Hello, Ms. Fitzgerald. I’m Dr. Thomas. My first name’s Myles, if you prefer.”

She stares at him. “Myles it is.” She seems calm, but the tracks of recent tears still show on her face. “I guess you’re supposed to decide whether I’m crazy.”

“Whether you’re fit to stand trial, yes. I should tell you right off that nothing you say to me is necessarily confidential. Do you understand?” She nods. Thomas sits down across from her. “What would you like me to call you?”

“Napoleon. Mohammed. Jesus Christ.” Her lips twitch, the faintest smile, gone in an instant. “Sorry. Just kidding. Jaz’s fine.”

“Are you doing okay in here? Are they treating you all right?”

She snorts. “They’re treating me pretty damn well, considering the kind of monster they think I am.” A pause, then, “I’m not, you know.”

“A monster?”

“Crazy. I’ve—I’ve just recently undergone a paradigm shift, you know? The whole world looks different, and my head’s there but sometimes my gut—I mean, it’s so hard to
feel
differently about things...”

“Tell me about this paradigm shift,” Thomas suggests. He makes it a point not to take notes. He doesn’t even have a notepad. Not that it matters. The microcassette recorder in his blazer has very sensitive ears.

“Things make sense now,” she says. “They never did before. I think, for the first time in my life, I’m actually happy.” She smiles again, for longer this time. Long enough for Thomas to marvel at how genuine it seems.

“You weren’t very happy when you first came here,” he says gently. “They say you were very upset.”

“Yeah.” She nods, seriously. “It’s tough enough to do that shit to yourself, you know, but to risk someone else, someone you really care about—” She wipes at one eye. “He was dying for over a year, did you know that? Each day he’d hurt a little more. You could almost see it spreading through him, like some sort of—leaf, going brown. Or maybe that was the chemo. Never could decide which was worse.” She shakes her head. “Heh. At least
that’s
over now.”

“Is that why you did it? To end his suffering?” Thomas doubts it. Mercy killers don’t generally disembowel their beneficiaries. Still, he asks.

She answers. “Of course I fucked up, I only ended up making things worse.” She clasps her hands in front of her. “I miss him already. Isn’t that crazy? It only happened a few hours ago, and I know it’s no big deal, but I still miss him. That head-heart thing again.”

“You say you fucked up,” Thomas says.

She takes a deep breath, nods. “Big time.”

“Tell me about that.”

“I don’t know shit about debugging. I thought I did, but when you’re dealing with organics—all I really did was go in and mess randomly with the code. You make a mess of everything, unless you know exactly what you’re doing. That’s what I’m working on now.”

“Debugging?”

“That’s what I call it. There’s no real word for it yet.”

Oh yes there is.
Aloud: “Go on.”

Jasmine Fitzgerald sighs, her eyes closed. “I don’t expect you to believe this under the circumstances, but I really loved him. No: I
love
him.” Her breath comes out in a soft snort, a whispered laugh. “There I go again. That bloody past tense.”

“Tell me about debugging.”

“I don’t think you’re up for it, Myles. I don’t even think you’re all that interested.” Her eyes open, point directly at him. “But for the record, Stu was dying. I tried to save him. I failed. Next time I’ll do better, and better still the time after that, and eventually I’ll get it right.”

“And what happens then?” Thomas says.

“Through your eyes or mine?”

“Yours.”

“I repair the glitches in the string. Or if it’s easier, I replicate an undamaged version of the subroutine and insert it back into the main loop. Same difference.”

“Uh huh. And what would
I
see?”

She shrugs. “Stu rising from the dead.”

What’s wrong with this picture?

Spread out across the table, the mind of Jasmine Fitzgerald winks back from pages of standardised questions. Somewhere in here, presumably, is a monster.

These are the tools used to dissect human psyches. The WAIS. The MMPI. The PDI. Hammers, all of them. Blunt chisels posing as microtomes. A copy of the DSM-IV sits off to one side, a fat paperback volume of symptoms and pathologies. A matrix of pigeonholes. Perhaps Fitzgerald fits into one of them. Intermittent Explosive, maybe? Battered Woman? Garden-variety Sociopath?

The test results are inconclusive. It’s as though she’s laughing up from the page at him.
True or false: I sometimes hear voices that no one else hears.
False, she’s checked.
I have been feeling unusually depressed lately.
False.
Sometimes I get so angry I feel like hitting something.
True, and a hand-written note in the margin: Hey, doesn’t everyone
?

There are snares sprinkled throughout these tests, linked questions designed to catch liars in subtle traps of self-contradiction. Jasmine Fitzgerald has avoided them all. Is she unusually honest? Is she too smart for the tests? There doesn’t seem to be anything here that—

Wait a second.

Who was Louis Pasteur?
asks the WAIS, trying to get a handle on educational background.

A virus, Fitzgerald said.

Back up the list. Here’s another one, on the previous page:
Who was Winston Churchill?
And again: a virus.

And fifteen questions before
that
:
Who was Florence Nightingale?

A famous nurse, Fitzgerald responded to that one. And her responses to all previous questions on historical personalities are unremarkably correct. But everyone after Nightingale is a virus.

Killing a virus is no sin. You can do it with an utterly clear conscience. Maybe she’s redefining the nature of her act. Maybe that’s how she manages to live with herself these days.

Just as well. That raising-the-dead shtick didn’t cut any ice at all.

She’s slumped across the table when he enters, her head resting on folded arms. Thomas clears his throat. “Jasmine.”

No response. He reaches out, touches her lightly on the shoulder. Her head comes up, a fluid motion containing no hint of grogginess. She settles back into her chair and smiles. “Welcome back. So, am I crazy or what?”

Thomas smiles back and sits down across from her. “We try to avoid prejudicial terms.”

“Hey, I can take it. I’m not prone to tantrums.”

A picture flashes across the front of his mind: beloved husband, entrails spread-eagled like butterfly wings against a linoleum grid.
Of course not. No tantrums for you. We need a whole new word to describe what it is you do.