Planetfall (16 page)

ONCE I GET
home I don't even attempt to fall asleep naturally. I'm too wired mentally and too exhausted physically to be able to cope with being curled up, awake and caught between the Scylla and Charybdis of guilt and reminiscence. I choose a drug that Kay would never recommend—one that doesn't just help me to drop off, but will keep me under. I don't want to remember any dreams tonight. I'm still shaking as the tiny pill is printed, even though the job is done and the coveralls and climbing gear are stashed away in my secret nook beneath the tendrils, too filthy to stuff back into my pack without contaminating it. No one saw or heard me. No one knows what I've done. But I won't stop worrying about that until the ceremony is over.

I shift from lying there, worrying the dose wasn't enough, to a sinking blackness. The neural alarm still punches through it though. It takes my body a horribly long time to respond. Groggy and confused, I realize someone is coming toward my
house only when the second band of sensors triggers another neural blast.

Battling heavy eyelids, I call up the camera feed and see Sung-Soo striding toward my front door. It's a little after nine in the morning and I simply cannot handle this shit right now.

My usual panic is dulled by the heavy sedative that hasn't had enough hours to work through my system. I shut my eyes again, thinking with only a fraction of my usual capacity. Hopefully he'll go away if I don't answer the door.

He doesn't.

Sung-Soo resorts to knocking loudly. That is enough to spark a bigger spurt of adrenaline; if other people hear that, they may come over and see what's wrong.

I stagger and then crawl to the door, grateful that it opens automatically when I press my forehead against it.

A combination of the sunlight and Sung-Soo's disgust as I emerge on hands and knees gives me another wretched kick-start and I get to my feet as quick as I can.

“I'd rather you left a message with Mack than come and bang on my door.”

“You'd rather I disturb Mack every time I can't find you?” Now he looks even more unimpressed.

“Has something broken?”

“Yes. You.”

I groan. “This isn't a good time.”

“I have the feeling there won't ever be a good time.” He stares at the door that's closed behind me and hidden the interior. “Let's walk.”

I'm in the grubby, sweat-stained clothes I wore under the coveralls during the climb. I can barely stand up straight, thanks to the muscles I pulled last night, and I need to either sleep this off or take a stimulant to counteract its effects.

“I don't . . .” I manage to stop myself saying something acerbic. “Look, normally I'd be happy to, but I didn't sleep well.”

He shakes his head. “I've been thinking about this. A lot. It's just like what happened to my friend a couple of years ago. It wouldn't be right for me to just ignore it.”

I lean against a patch of dying grass next to the door and hope that if I talk to him for a few minutes, his need to interfere will pass. “Your friend collected things?” It didn't make any sense to me—they would have to travel light. Was this some crap made up to try to get me talking?

“No, he stopped eating properly. He'd only eat one plant after it had been boiled to mush. It wasn't good for him.”

I scratch my head, wondering if I could get my chip to give me a direct adrenal blast without Kay being notified. I have no idea how much stimulation would be safe though.

“We didn't say anything for a while, even though we could see it was making him weak. We were in a good place with fish and stuff and he didn't have to walk much. We thought he was just recovering from a bad stomach or something.”

“Umm, how about we meet later and—”

“The thing is, Ren,” he cuts in, ignoring me, “we should have spoken to him about it right away. By the time we had to move on he could barely handle it. He got sick and it hit him harder. When we did talk to him, we realized it was all in his head. He'd decided that only eating that one thing was safer than eating other stuff we caught. It all got mixed up in his brain or something.”

I fold my arms and look out across the grassland. It's cloudier today and the tops of the mountains are hidden. I think it will rain.

“That's what's happened to you.” Sung-Soo touches my arm and I flinch. He pulls away. “No one's said anything, or
even noticed though. And because you don't move around like we did, it'll probably go on like this until it kills you.”

“Don't be ridiculous.”

“If all that stuff fell on you, it could kill you.”

I haven't got time for this shit and I take a breath to tell him as much, but there's no point. We'd devolve into a childish back-and-forth until one of us lost our temper. He's trying to get me to confess some fictional problem to him and I won't fall for it.

“Sung-Soo, I collect things and I'm a bit untidy. There's nothing—”

“You have to crawl into your own house!”

I hold up my hands, miming for him to keep his voice down. “That's no one's business but mine.”

“If you don't think it's a problem, prove it to me.”

I narrow my eyes, folding my arms again and tucking my hands tight underneath. What do I need to do to get rid of him and go back to sleep?

“I don't need to prove anything to you. That would only be necessary if I cared about your opinion in this, which I don't.”

“Just get one thing from that pile behind the door and give it to me for the Masher. Mack said we were getting low in some metals, so something made of metal would be good.”

Shit. I've been so distracted by the seed debacle I forgot to fiddle the communal feed's stock report.

“There isn't anything I want to recycle.”

“Just one thing, Ren, and then I'll leave you alone.”

We stare at each other, his hands palm up and his face open and expectant. I feel like a child given one of those utterly shit choices parents offer to trick the child into thinking it has a say in anything:
“Do you want to record that thank-you vid for Aunt Jasmine now or after dinner?”

“Just one,” he repeats.

“Oh for fuck's sake!” I say and twist around to slap the door sensor.

Is there something here I can sacrifice in return for sleep and peace?

As always, a couple of items slip down when the door opens. One is a chunk of pink crystal, the other a deformed fork.

“What about that?” Sung-Soo points at the fork and I clench it tighter in my fist.

“I need this.”

“Need it? Don't you have a fork that would actually work? No one would use that.”

It has three prongs and they all point in different directions. The steel is scratched and dull. “I'm going to fix it.”

“When?”

“When I get a minute.”

“But why fix it when you can chuck it in the Masher and print a perfect one?”

“Because it isn't just any old fork. This is the first one that Kay designed and printed herself. I taught her how to do it.”

That evening was full of wine and laughter. She wanted to understand why I loved printers so much and asked for a lesson. By the time she wanted to do it by herself she was too drunk to make a good design. She ignored the software's warning that it wasn't viable and printed anyway. When she pulled it out and held it out to me triumphantly, we laughed so much I fell off the sofa. That was the first night we kissed.

“When was that?”

I shrug. “A few years ago.”

“And all it's done is sit there in your hallway? You couldn't find a minute in all those years?”

“Is there a point to this?”

“What about that?” Now he's pointing at the crystal chunk. “That's not even a thing! It's just junk!”

“It's not! This is a piece of history. This was one of the samples we rejected for the path.”

Sung-Soo's jaw drops open. “But . . . wasn't that made, like, twenty years ago?”

“Yes. And it's just as well I kept it because Pasha deleted the files and I wanted to compare it to the structure we chose a couple of years ago when we were—”

“Ren!” Sung-Soo puts his hands on his head. He looks annoyed. No . . . frustrated? I can't tell. I just want him to go away. “It's trash. And so is the fork.”

“That's not for you to judge.”

“Give me the fork.” When I continue to hold it tight against my chest, he holds his hand out again. “If you can't give it to me, you've got a problem.”

“That's not actually an infallible way to prove that; it's—”

“Give me the fork and I'll leave you alone. I know you hate me right now, but I'm doing this for you, Ren.”

“Like fuck you are,” I mutter. But he's standing there, that palm open, like a gaping yaw waiting to be filled.

I look at the fork. If I give it to him, I might forget that night. He just doesn't understand how important it is. It's not just metal. And it can be fixed.

“No.”

His hand drops to his side. “I'm going to ask you again tomorrow. And then the day after that and the day after if I have to. You have a problem, Ren. Let me help you.”

I turn and drop down to crawl inside, wedging the hunk of crystal into a crevice partway in and instructing the door to close by voice command as I go. One of the fork prongs digs into my chest as I squeeze through at the end but I don't care. I won.

•   •   •

I
wake three hours later, hungry and stiff. The fork is the first thing I see when I open my eyes. It doesn't make me feel triumphant now.

I wash in the usual way, using a cup of water, flannel and powdered soap that I scrub onto my skin and wipe off. It takes too long, this brainless task, and by the time I'm clean and in newly printed clothes I'm tense and desperate to get away from myself.

Fiddling the stock levels doesn't take very long. I've been doing it for years. I doubt many people take any notice of them anyway, but with the demand created by Sung-Soo's arrival the levels are low enough to start triggering warning notices. I can see that someone has been chucking metal down their chute in response, but it's not enough to resolve the problem.

I look at the things in my bedroom, most of it clothing. There are a few things made of metal containing small amounts of the materials that are critically low.

I try to pick one thing that I could return to the communal stock, but every time I pluck something out and think of chucking it down the chute, my chest gets tight and I reconsider. Slowly, I realize that there's nothing here I'm willing to give up. It's all too important.

I make my way through to the un–living room and see more objects that would be fit for purpose. I break into a sweat at the thought of there being a solution to the low levels here, in my own house, coming into direct conflict with my needs. I should recycle some of this; it would solve the problem in a more sustainable way than me having to monitor the levels every hour and certainly preferable to more costly solutions such as a mining expedition or commandeering the molecular printers from
people who'd booked them weeks in advance. Using them to print gold and copper would be insanely inefficient.

I stand in the doorway, chewing my thumbnail for what seems like a horribly long time. Unable to act, I check my in-box and the network, but all the while I know I'm merely trying to divert my attention away from this paralysis.

Snippets of the confrontation with Sung-Soo slither in at the edges of my artificial concentration and not even the latest digest of possible matches for the artifact sent by the Atlas AI is enough to keep them out. None of them look as good as the first suggestion anyway. Even though I'm aware of the inherent bias of getting attached to the first explanation of a mystery, I can't shake it. Just as I can't shake the feeling that Sung-Soo is set on interfering.

It makes sense. He's come from a life with little leisure time. Now he has luxurious comforts, safe food and drink available with no effort twenty-six hours a day, and no fears about his own safety. Of course he needs something to fill his time. I just don't want to be his project.

He said he would come back. I can't bear the thought of it. I need to reassure him there's no problem and then give him something to do. Everyone here has a role, after all.

I send Mack a note saying he needs to think about how Sung-Soo could contribute. There hasn't been any contact between us since he acknowledged my safe return home. I think he's giving me space. Or is too busy setting up the rest of the sideshow. It's only two days until Marco comes out of isolation and takes the seed after all. My stomach clenches at the thought of it.

A reply arrives and I open it.
He's already asked. He wants to learn how to maintain and repair the printers. Looks like you have an apprentice at last ;)

Fuck.

•   •   •

IT
takes over an hour but I finally manage to find something I'm prepared to give up in return for an end to Sung-Soo's ultimatum. It's an aluminum pot with a nice finish to it, banded with copper and gold. It's dented and one of the copper bands is loose as a result. I must have found it in the Masher as I'd never have made something like it. I hate the thought of letting it go, but stocks of all three metals are low and I'm not particularly attached to it.

That's what I keep telling myself as I wait for Sung-Soo to come to the door. I turn the pot over and over in my hands, seeing its potential. It could hold all sorts of things and it would take only two minutes to repair.

The door opens and my grip on the pot tightens so much that the edge of the loose copper band digs into my palm painfully.

He smiles, but the usual warmth and delight is guarded now. I'm not the person he thought I was. I have no idea who that was supposed to be. Now he knows what I'm really like. A sour thought, if there ever was one.