Capacity (29 page)

“With hindsight I should never have had anything to do with you.”

The words came unbidden to Eva’s lips. Judy felt a strong wave of approval at what she was saying.

The Watcher was indignant. “You don’t mean that. Everything that I’ve done is only because of what you told me to do. I thought you’d be happy—”

“Happy!” Eva shouted. “Happy! How dare you tell me how to be happy?” She was screaming now.

The Watcher braced himself against the glass of the screen, his face flushed. “You think that you have got the right to be angry?” he shouted. “How dare you!”

“How dare I?” Eva asked, choking with indignation. “How dare
I
?”

The Watcher banged the inside of the screen with one hand and shook his head. He wore the appearance of a good-looking young man. But the Watcher would always choose how he presented himself.

“
How dare I? How dare I?
” mimicked the young man behind the screen. “It always comes back to you, doesn’t it, Eva Rye? Or Eva Storey—or whatever you’ve decided to call yourself this week. Seven billion people on this planet experience setbacks and losses every day of their lives, and they just grit their teeth and start again. And then there’s you, sobbing your little heart out here in luxury. At least James left you well cared for. That’s better than most people in this world can expect. What makes you think you’ve got the right to a perfect life? That’s why you’re always so bloody miserable. Listen, doll. Shit happens. Get used to it.”

Judy/Eva was momentarily taken aback. Then her anger cut in.

“Shit happens, does it? Shit happens? That would be a lot more convincing coming from someone who didn’t claim that he was here to sort things out for us, that he was going to make the world a better place.”

“These things take time,” the Watcher sneered.

“How much time? You sound like a politician. You claim you’re going to make things better, and then when they don’t you just stand there saying shit happens. You’re pathetic, hiding behind your screen. You step out into the real world and see what it’s like out here, and then you tell me that shit happens.”

The Watcher’s anger vanished, replaced by a nasty smile. He was standing in a blue-lit empty room, cuboidal except for two dents in the floor at the back. The picture on the screen gave the impression that he was leaning against a sheet of glass, as if he was trying to press through into Eva’s world.

“Me step out there? You couldn’t handle it if I did, love.”

Eva laughed. “Don’t make empty threats,
love
,” she countered. Judy silently applauded through her fear.

The Watcher laughed coldly in return.

“Empty threats?” he said. “Ah…”

He reached out a hand to the glass and touched it with one finger. Judy/Eva could see his fingertip flatten; see the whorls of fingerprint clearly through the glass; see the whiteness of the skin around it where the blood had been displaced. And then the whiteness returned to pink, and the finger seemed to resume its shape. Judy/Eva gave a gasp as it appeared on her side of the screen. A finger sliding from the world of bits into the world of atoms.

“Look what I can do,” the Watcher crooned.

Now his hand was through the glass, and then his arm, clad in a dark grey sleeve. The Watcher stepped into the real world.

“No, you can’t,” Eva said, and she waved her arm right through his suit jacket. She saw her hand, pink and fluttering, within the grey ghost of his body. “You’re not really here, are you? This is just an illusion, like everything else about you.”

“It’s an illusion at the moment, Eva. Give me five more years and I’ll walk this Earth in a human body. Will you recognize me then?”

Judy/Eva felt a cold little fist of fear tighten in her stomach. The baby kicked hard.

“Yes, I will,” she said. In her dream Judy echoed the words.

“We both know that you’re bluffing.”

The baby kicked again; Eva put one hand to her stomach.

“Stop it,” she said. “You’re upsetting my baby.”

The Watcher folded his arms. Silently, Eva did the same.

“You know that you’re upsetting me,” she said. “And you’re doing it deliberately. I can’t stop myself getting angry; you’re just too good at it.”

The Watcher chuckled delightedly.

“Oh it’s true, Eva. It’s true.”

“I don’t know what you want with me this time.” She squared up to the Watcher. “What do you want?”

“I just want to help you, Judy.”

Judy?
Did the Watcher just say
Judy
? It was Eva who answered.

“You’ve got a funny way of showing it.”

The Watcher leaned forward and tried to take Eva’s hand in his transparent grasp. She pointedly kept it still, so that his hand passed straight through hers. He gave a little shrug at her recalcitrance.

“I do this so I can see the real Eva. She’s so wrapped up in herself that it’s only when she’s angry her true character shines through.”

In her dream Judy froze. She had the feeling that the last words weren’t actually directed at Eva. They were spoken to her. Eva, too, seemed to sense that something was amiss.

“Stop it,” Eva said hesitantly. “Don’t speak about me as if I wasn’t here.”

The Watcher continued, ignoring her: “She doesn’t want to be comforted. She
wants
to feel sorry for herself. It’s the template of her life.”

“What is the matter with you? Why are you being so childish?” Eva asked.

The Watcher spun around and threw up his hands.

“You started it! James’s death was just unfortunate. Next time I’ll know to blow the train instead. Next time I’ll put the good of the many before the few. That’s right, isn’t it, Eva?”

“Yes!”

—That’s right, isn’t it, Judy?

“But that’s
next
time!” The Watcher continued. “James was unfortunate—that’s all there is to it. You know it, but you just haven’t faced up to it yet!”

“Yes, I have!” screamed Eva, then stopped in surprise as she heard what she had just said. The Watcher’s temper evaporated immediately. He stepped back into his screen, pulled a cord hanging from the ceiling, and the screen turned off.

The baby kicked again.

Judy awoke to find herself sitting up in bed, the silk sheets tangled around her. Her breathing slowed as she realized it was just a dream.

Frances was in the room, coming towards the bed.

“Judy, they’re all dying!”

Justinian 5: 2223

In his dream
his wife sat up and looked around, blinking. She saw Justinian standing by her sepal bed, and she gave him a slow, sleepy smile.

“Hello, Justy,” she said. “I feel so…”

Justinian hugged her close. He was crying; he buried his face in her sweet hair.

“Justy,” she said, “I understand now. Listen, it’s all about who
you
are.”

He kissed her gently on the cheek and looked into her half-closed eyes.

“Who
I
am?” he asked.

She tilted her head, listening to something.

“Isn’t that Jesse?” she murmured.

Justinian strained to hear. He could hear a noise faintly in the distance.

Anya kissed him softly on the lips. “Soon,” she said. “I’ll see you soon.”

“What?”

Justinian was woken by the sound of the baby crying. He felt a wave of sadness at the loss of his dream, which was quickly overtaken by annoyance at Leslie. Couldn’t the robot hear that the child was distressed and obviously had been so for some time? If he felt unable to deal with the boy himself, why hadn’t he woken Justinian?

Justinian had been sleeping in a flight chair. For some reason it hadn’t been properly collapsed to form a bed. His right side ached where he had been pressed against it. He pushed himself clear of the seat and began to massage his aching arm. A sense of
wrongness
began to descend upon him. The flier was absolutely still.
Absolutely
. But it was filled, not with the stillness of a ship at rest, but with the stillness of an empty swimming pool. All the life had been drained from it. Even the increasingly frantic screams of his son seemed flat in the hollow air. Warily, he picked up the baby from the orange checked carpet and began to rock him on his shoulder.

“Hey there, baby boy, it’s okay. Hey there. Hey.”

There was no sound except that of the two human beings: breathing and sobbing and the movement of skin against a passive suit. The ever-present hum of the engines and life systems was gone. The door to the flight deck was closed, he noticed. Justinian glanced back at his flight chair and frowned. What had he been doing there anyway? He didn’t remember going to sleep. He remembered David Schummel being on board the ship, and the baby staring at the Schrödinger box and fixing it in place for the first time. Leslie the robot had got very excited at that point. Or had he? What had happened next? The baby was still crying, his mouth open wide, little pink tongue sticking out. He scrabbled at Justinian’s face, sharp nails catching his cheek.

“Ow!” Justinian held the boy away. “Hey, careful, little boy. I know you’re upset. How long were you left alone for? Where’s Leslie? Where is that lazy robot?”

Now that he asked the question, Justinian’s sense of unease deepened still further. Where
was
Leslie?

Memories awoke in his mind: Leslie politely convincing David Schummel to leave the ship. Yes. Schummel had gone, hadn’t he? Or was it only with a struggle? Leslie had bundled him out of the door into the snow-filled darkness and then raised the ramp. There had been an argument, another one, with Justinian shouting at the robot. In the middle of that he had lost his temper and ordered the ship to take off. They were flying to the source of the secondary infection, still quarreling, and then…Then what? Justinian looked around the ship.

They had been flying, he recalled, but Leslie wouldn’t leave him alone. He kept on nagging: how far were they going to travel? Justinian had wanted to fly all the way to the secondary infection that the pod had opened up. But Leslie thought otherwise, and how they had shouted at each other! Justinian’s memories were in angry orange seared across a black background. Orange. Always orange. Leslie had postured and shouted and Justinian had stubbornly folded his arms and turned his back, and all the time they had flown on and on.

How close did they get to the secondary infection?

They had landed, he was sure of that. They must have; he couldn’t hear the engines. So where were they? The viewing fields had gone, along with the rest of the ship’s power. The windows had been set completely opaque.

He finally spotted Leslie. The robot was lying on the floor, a fuzzy grey blur between two rows of seats. The fractality of his skin had been turned up. The eyes, the ears, the flatness of the palms, every defining feature of the robot had been lost as the blurred region of his skin had leaked out to fill the space amid the seats. The robot was now a grey fluffy slick seeping across the orange floor: deaf, blind, and mute. Had Leslie done that to himself?

That thought triggered the final memory from before Justinian’s blackout. It was after the argument had finally blown itself out in an unhappy compromise: to fly to within half a kilometer of the source and then put down.

They weren’t speaking. Justinian had been sitting up straight in his chair, taking little sips from a glass of iced water, gazing straight ahead at nothing, while Leslie paced up and down the orange-carpeted floor. The robot had jerked to full alertness. One hand was raised; his head spun towards Justinian.

“Too soon!” the robot called. Its voice modulated down an octave; it spoke in electronic tones: “Sleep, Justinian…”

And Justinian remembered folding his arms beneath his head as he tumbled into sleep.

“Ship! What is going on?” he called out, voice dying in the odd stillness. It was as if something outside was listening so intently that it swallowed up all sound.

The baby wouldn’t stop crying. His son was hungry, he realized. The baby needed feeding. How long had he slept?

“Ship!” Justinian called with renewed urgency. “Ship! Speak to me!” His tenderness towards his child was in inverse proportion to his disgust at those who had marooned him here on Gateway. How would he get out if there was no intelligence to open the door for him? How long would it be before he starved to death?

“Ship!”

There was a message written on the carpet.

It had been there all along, nagging at his subconscious. The orange and black checks of the carpet pattern had moved themselves around to spell out a message. Justinian went to the beginning of it, just by the door into the flight deck, and began to walk backwards down the length of the ship reading the letters that were spelled out in eight-by-eight patterns of squares.

Justinian. This is the ship.

I’ve had to shut down all my senses. Leslie has had to do the same. He’s still fully conscious in there, but he has no contact with the outside world, or at least I hope he doesn’t. If he becomes aware of anything outside the flier, he will have to switch himself off. Look at him.

Justinian was keeping pace with the message, retreating down the cabin as he read. The words now brought him level with the robot. He looked again at the silver-grey blur. There was no sign of life, no indication if what lay inside the fractal region was conscious or not.

He resumed his walking and reading.

We flew too close, Justinian. The Turing machine that maps my mind may be nowhere near as powerful as the polynetworks to be found in an AI pod, but it is shutting itself down nonetheless as this subroutine rearranges the carpet structure. It will take you two months to walk to safety from here, but I can’t send a distress signal. I can’t bring another ship here to die like me. I’m sorry.

“The shuttle!” Justinian whispered. “You could have called for David Schummel and the shuttle. Why didn’t you think of that?”

If you stay on the flier you will die of starvation. I don’t know what to suggest. Do what you think is best. The manual release for the door is just here.

The writing stopped just by a flap that had popped open in the rear wall, just by the hatch. Justinian frowned. Manual release—what did that mean?

Inside the flap there was a handle, a jar of baby food, and a spoon. The baby reached out for the food, crying desperately. Justinian sat down on the floor and balanced his son on his knee. He opened the jar and began to feed the child, wishing he had something to wipe the streams of yellow snot that ran from his nose. The baby ate hungrily.

“There, there, baby boy. Come on. Eat nicely.”

When his son had calmed down a little, he reached out and gave the handle inside the flap a couple of exploratory turns, then glanced back towards the exit hatch. It hadn’t moved. He turned the handle some more and his arm quickly began to ache from the exertion.

This time he wasn’t sure whether the hatch had moved fractionally. Was there now a little shadow where there had not been one before, right at the top of the doorway? He didn’t know. He fed the baby a few more mouthfuls and then continued turning the handle.

After five minutes of exhausting winding, a gap of approximately three centimeters had opened up to the outside world. He could see nothing through that gap but greyness, but even as he looked away, virtual colors seemed to dance and play at the edge of the opening. He looked back to see the greyness, and then away. Again, the memory of colors danced before his eyes. Just what was waiting out there? For a moment he wondered about winding the door shut again, blocking out whatever danger lay beyond, then hiding in the ship, waiting for possible rescue. After all, something that could cause a ship’s TM to commit suicide and a robot to retreat right inside its fractal skin should be more than capable of disposing of a man and his baby.

The baby had finished his food. He pushed the spoon away with one hand, chuckled, then stood up unsteadily.

“What do you want?” Justinian asked.

The baby looked up to his father and laughed again, this time a deep belly laugh. He reached out and took hold of the handle, wanting to join in the game. Bright blue eyes smiled up at him as the baby babbled something and pointed to the gap. Colors dodged from view around the edge of the door. The baby was telling him something. Justinian wished that Leslie was here to translate.

“Berber berber ber!” The baby was gazing earnestly at Justinian, who shivered as his son pointed back to the door. Surely whatever was out there could not be speaking to a fifteen-month-old child? And then he half glanced again at the apparent flickering of the colors around the door frame. There was a pattern to the flickering, he realized. It didn’t seem to be quite random. Maybe he should just close the door and sit and hope for rescue.

He knew there would be none. He resumed his winding.

It took Justinian over an hour of exhausting work to open the door fully. The kaleidoscope effect faded to nothing as the gap between the hatch and the flier widened. Nonetheless, the baby kept grabbing Justinian’s arm and pointing out at the bleak rocky landscape that lay outside. He would regularly look up at Justinian and burble something.

“What is it?” Justinian asked, but the baby just kept tugging and pointing.

Justinian shivered as he looked out at the greyness that led away from the edge of the ramp. It was bitterly cold outside; his breath emerged in misty clouds as he stood at the top of the hatch, feeling the last of the flier’s warmth leaking into the miserable day beyond.

The flier was resting at the bottom of a narrow rocky ravine. High jagged walls rose on either side, dry mounds of scree slipping from their bases. Smaller ravines led off in all directions, sloping up and down to form a crazy maze of stone. The scene was so desolate it froze the heart. The baby tugged at Justinian’s leg and pointed again.

“What is it?” Justinian asked. “Hey, you must be freezing. Come here.”

He picked up the baby and walked back into the flier, looking for a passive suit for his son. Most of them lay beyond the locked door of the forward section, but one lay draped over a chair, left there from last night. He picked it up and dropped his son in, folding the little mittens over his cold little hands. As he pulled the hood over the child’s head, the baby pawed at it for a moment with his little mittens, and then gave up. Justinian gave his son a hug, then, with a heavy heart, carried him back to the door. The baby pointed again. He clearly wanted to go outside. Justinian spoke in a hushed voice: “I know. I can feel it, too.”

He set off down the sloping ramp, the temperature dropping as he did so, and stepped onto the grey stone floor of the ravine. It was hopeless: even if he knew in which direction home lay, there would be no guarantee of finding a path that led there. They would wander around in this waterless maze until they both died of thirst.

His ears were cold, so he placed the baby down on the ramp, and working the hood of his own passive suit out from its collar, he pulled it over his head. The baby meanwhile pulled himself upright using his father’s legs for support and set off on his own, tottering on the uneven ground as he worked his way around to the front of the flier. There he pointed ahead to a crack in the wall of rock that stood facing the ship. The ghosts of colors hung in Justinian’s vision as he withdrew his gaze from the crack. Something was calling to them from inside there. He could now hear the voices at the edge of his consciousness.

“That’s where we’re going,” Justinian said sadly. “I know, baby, I know.”