Planetfall (24 page)

“We understand how hard this is for you.” The patronizing tone makes me want to knee him in the balls. “It's taken a lot of bravery to come back here so soon, and I commend you for that.”

“I want to . . . to get well again.” Mack and Kay have come down the steps behind me. I'm trapped halfway down the corridor now. “But it has to be at my pace.”

“Yes. I'm sorry it's happened this way. I understand.”

“And I want to just slow it down a bit. Get my head around it.”

Sung-Soo kicks the crate. “You're just trying to stop us,” he says.

“It's not unreasonable,” Dr. Lincoln says to him.

“But isn't this what the illness does?” Neela asks. “I'm sorry, Ren, but how do we know you're not just going to derail this?”

“Derail what?” I stop myself, realizing my voice is rising.

Sung-Soo exploits the pause. “What's behind this door, Ren?”

“None of your business.”

“Is it the last room?” Dr. Lincoln asks. I nod, not thinking. “Then I propose we stay here and open it together. This is the last part of the hoard. It's no surprise it's creating resistance within you.”

“I don't want to open it.”

“Why?” Dr. Lincoln asks the question as if it's something simple. As if I'd said I'd rather drink tea instead of coffee.

Sung-Soo starts putting more things in the crate, steadily clearing the last meter before the door, but I still can't think of anything to say.

Lincoln comes closer and Neela steps back, giving us a modicum of privacy. “It's likely that whatever is behind that door has a great deal to do with the onset of your illness,” Lincoln whispers. “It's perfectly natural to be afraid.”

But it isn't just that. I know something terrible is behind it, but when I start to try to remember, there's nothing but slippery darkness. It seems as impossible to remember as trying to look directly at a faint star. When I try to focus on it head-on, there's nothing more than an emotional residue and the lingering knowledge that no one must ever come down here.

I turn to look at Mack. He's only a meter or so away, standing on the bottom step looking ghoulish in the lantern light. His arms are wrapped tight around himself and he seems smaller. “Stop him,” I say.

“I agree with Dr. Lincoln,” he says. “I bet whatever's in there isn't as bad as you think it is, Ren. And best that it's all out in the open now. We've come too far to leave the last part unfinished.”

I can't remember what's behind the door, but something else has remained: a certainty that it will break him. But there's nothing in his face or the way he is standing to suggest he's going to do anything. I look at Lincoln and he meets my stare. He's probably trying to appear open and “there for me.” He is anything but.

Sung-Soo has his back to me; his long hair is tied back and lies down his spine like a black snake. Why does he feel such a compulsion to press this? I want to think it's because he lost
his friend, but something deep in my gut tells me there's another agenda here. Perhaps he's always had one. Perhaps he was always looking for something to get stuck into, a way to truly embed himself in colony life.

Neela slips past me to go to Kay. I can't look at either of them. The way to the door will be cleared in a matter of minutes and I'm just standing here, like someone waiting patiently next to the scaffold where they'll be beheaded. I know this is inevitable. If I try to stop them, they'll stop me. I lost control hours ago.

Sung-Soo grunts as he pulls the crate, now full, away from the door. It's made of a tough composite material, able to withstand all sorts of conditions. It hasn't warped or degraded over the years; it's just acquired a film of dirt. He reaches for the handle and I watch, numbed, as if it's a cut scene in a game I'm bored of. I have to see what happens even though there's no emotional investment here anymore. The flood has seeped away. There's nothing left of my tsunami panic save some mud gunging up my chest, making each breath harder to draw in.

The door isn't locked. There was no need. My entire house was the lock that prevented its opening. Now it opens on squeaking hinges and reveals not a room, rather a rough cube-shaped cubbyhole. It's two meters high, wide and deep. I remember that.

The long black box that lies within is familiar. It is 1.8 meters long, 80 centimeters deep and 1.5 meters high. The numbers are there, crystalline, in my mind. My brain, sculpted by engineering over all these years, is creating a wire frame of it from memory and spinning it around as if I'm working in my visengineering software. But I still can't recall what's inside, and when I try to think about that, the mud in my lungs spreads its cold through my chest, seeping into my throat and clogging that too. I can remember making it. I can remember sobbing over it and the tears running off its near frictionless surface to
make dark splashes in the dirt left by my excavation. I know the top lid is made of plasglass so that I could see into the box, but when I try to do that in my memory, the darkness just folds in on itself.

Sung-Soo can't make out what's inside even though he's standing over it. He picks the lantern up from the floor and raises it. As the light hits the top of the box I know it's a sarcophagus and that Suh's body is inside.

IT WAS THE
only thing Mack couldn't cope with in the days that followed Planetfall: recovering Suh's body from the place we left it in the city. His skin would turn pale and his lips a horrible gray at the mere thought of going back to that place and seeing her again. So I said I would handle it.

That we left her there had tormented me from the moment we returned to Atlas. I hadn't slept properly since; I knew the preservative we'd injected into her—standard practice after a death that would require autopsy—would fail eventually and the protection from her suit and helmet wouldn't last forever. Mack had bought a month at the most before her body would decompose in the normal fashion. The thought of her rotting in that place made me shiver in bed at night, even though I was beyond exhausted.

We left her in the tunnel near the valve hidden by the tendrils. That was how I found it; I was hunting for the corresponding spot on the outside to cut through and retrieve her
body. In the small hours on day twenty planetside, I dragged her body from the city and took her to the newly printed dome of my house.

I decontaminated the suit exterior and her body using the same procedure I did with my own suit before entering my home's protective environment. We still needed those measures back then. I pulled the suit from her and felt how the preservative had made her skin clammy to the touch, as if she were recovering from an illness. I was almost sick and then that feeling passed faster than I expected. I washed her and it felt good. Respectful. I talked to her the whole time, telling her what I was about to do before I did so, as if she were able to hear, like in the coma. I asked her why she did it and of course there was no reply. I slept next to her that night.

When Mack asked, I told him it was all sorted and he didn't press for details. He was soothed and could carry on without it hanging over him anymore. But I couldn't burn her or bury her. I couldn't let her go. Making something to keep her safe was so easy. I had direct access to the biggest printer in the colony, linked by a short tunnel to my home to keep the air inside microbe free. I put a message on the network that something was malfunctioning but I had it under control and that the list of items required for the colony build would be printed as soon as possible. It was the first major lie I told: the first time I actively fabricated something instead of remaining silent. And it was so easy. Taking care of Suh was far more important than anything else.

I made the sarcophagus, placed her in it, disinfected everything and then poured in a resinlike compound, sealing her totally from the air and acting as a secondary preservative. She looked like Sleeping Beauty. I made a lid to protect the resin and make all of it airtight.

Then I slept.

When I woke I realized I couldn't keep the box in the center of my home indefinitely. I hadn't built the internal walls yet and dabbled with the idea of just hiding it in plain sight, boxed in next to a cupboard so no one would notice unless they studied the floor plan. But I'd never rest. I decided to put her underground, in a place of my making, where I knew she would be safe.

How could I have forgotten all that? Somehow I just stopped thinking about it. I stuffed things between her and myself until there wasn't even room for myself anymore.

Perhaps I am broken.

A guttural sound fills the tunnel and breaks the memory like a stone destroying a reflection on the surface of a pond. It sounds like an animal, but it's coming from Sung-Soo's throat as he looks down into the face of his dead grandmother. He drops the lantern and whirls around, his eyes huge and demonic in the shadows. He looks at me with an accusatory glare. Oh Lord. He thinks I killed her!

He launches himself down the tunnel toward me as Lincoln shouts, demanding to know what he saw, but there are no words penetrating the furious haze surrounding Sung-Soo.

“It wasn't me!” That's all I have time to yell before he reaches me. But he doesn't grab me or try to throttle me. He just knocks me aside. He does the same to the others behind me and I hear Mack hit the wall and swear. By the time I've turned around, all I see are Sung-Soo's heels as his feet leave the top step and he heads out of the house.

I lean against the wall, needing something solid to help keep me upright as my legs tremble. All of them—Lincoln first, then Mack, Neela and Kay—rush down the tunnel, ignoring me, desperate to see what would cause such a reaction. “It wasn't me,” I whisper to Kay as she passes me, but she doesn't hear.

Soon after they reach the box, there are screams and cries of despair. Some of them are my own.

Carmen and Pasha race down the steps and Neela runs into his arms, distraught and snaring him in the expectation of comfort, when all he wants to do is find out what's going on. I glance down the tunnel to see Mack backing away from the sarcophagus, shaking his head, as Dr. Lincoln slides down the wall, the color of milk.

“I didn't kill her,” I say, but none of them are listening. Carmen is well on her way to becoming hysterical and starts shouting that I've murdered the Pathfinder. When the notification envelope starts flashing, I realize she's broadcasting on the network, even propping herself up against the door into Suh's tomb to keep her LensCam footage as steady as possible.

“Now everyone knows how evil you are!” she screams at me once she's satisfied she's shown enough of the corpse.

“She killed herself!” I yell back. “I didn't kill her.” My eyes meet Mack's. He looks terrified. “I can prove it.”

This time Mack lunges for me. I don't know what he plans to do, but I doubt he's thinking of anyone but himself. I dart away from his grabbing hands and run up the stairs, my father's book jabbing into my ribs as I sprint. I know he's right behind me, but I don't look back, darting through the empty house to the front door, only to meet a surge of people pushing over the barriers to come in and see it all for themselves. I can't see Sung-Soo anywhere in the chaos up here.

“Stop!” I put all the power of my lungs behind the word and it actually works. People do stop, more easily than I thought they would, their shock working in my favor. “I didn't kill Suh,” I say. “Just . . . just let me show you what happened.”

“No, Ren!” Mack is in the doorway to my house behind
me. He's been hiding this so long he's incapable of seeing when he has to give it up.

“You can all see for yourselves,” I say and call up the file I haven't been able to open since Planetfall. The footage of Suh's death.

•   •   •

I
share the link on the network and almost a thousand people select it, an eerie silence descending over the crowd as their attention shifts inward. I start the playback about three hours in, the point when we're nearing the top of God's city on the outside. By then I'd stopped recording with full immersion, knowing that it would be too traumatic to be useful. But it still contains everything I could see and hear, and as the colonists around me begin to watch, they see and hear it all like I did then.

Hak-Kun and Mack are arguing as we climb, each of them with opposing opinions on how to progress. We were all exhausted by then, having been churned about inside the city for at least two hours by that point. All of us—except Suh—had vomited inside our own suits and felt every scrap of our feeble humanity. She was so distant by that point I wondered whether Suh had shut off the comms in her suit. She just kept her face focused on the topmost pod and pulled herself up, pausing only to fix more hexes for our climbing gear to register and follow.

We reached the second highest pod soon after; the only sound was all of us panting. I sprawled flat on top of it, letting the exhaustion take my body until Suh drove us on again. I was so drained I didn't care about the feeling of bile seeping down my neck as I shifted position. I could have slept there and then.

“We cut in here,” Suh said. “Then we climb up the tunnel.”

“But how do you even know it's where we need to go?”
Hak-Kun sounded like a whining child by then and Suh was losing her patience.

“I just do. You were happy to accept all the other things I've known. Why not this?”

It was enough to shut him up, but Winston wasn't satisfied. “It feels wrong to cut in like that.”

“We can't go up the other way,” Lois said. “Fuck knows we tried. And I'm not going through that again.”

“It's like the city wanted to kill us,” Mack said, sitting next to me.

“It's testing us,” Suh said, pulling the cutting tool from her pack.

“So we're cheating,” Winston said, but she just started to cut in.

She made a vertical slice into the base of the tendril reaching up toward the highest pod, about two meters long, and then put the tool away to reach in and part the fleshy wall.

When she opened it enough to force her way in, there was a puff of something like vapor from the space inside. It misted on the plasglass of her helmet, but it didn't faze her. She went in first and then we followed, like we had from Earth, full of doubts and terrible fears but compelled to see where she would lead us.

By then I was so mired in the physicality of exhaustion that I'd forgotten to be hopeful. We're such base creatures, so easily pulled from higher things by the needs of the body. I followed because everyone else did and as I squeezed into that last tunnel all I wanted was to not be sick again.

That last climb was easier; the tunnel was much narrower than the others, inclined steeply enough to walk up and thankfully not moving like so many of the others had. It almost felt too easy, after all we'd been through. I wondered if the city hadn't realized what we'd done yet.

There was another valve and Suh pressed her gloved hand against it. Everyone reached out and braced themselves against the walls of the tunnel, expecting it to pitch us into the air with a sudden change in orientation, but the only thing that happened was the opening of the door-like valve.

The room beyond was formed by half of the pod, reaching at least four meters into the air at the highest point and twice that across at its widest. It was unlike any other we'd seen so far; the walls were made of something that looked like stone and every spare centimeter of them was decorated elaborately.

“Is it bone?” Winston asked as he drifted to the nearest part of the wall, but no one answered him.

“What does it all mean, Hak-Kun?” Lois asked and I couldn't decide if it was a genuine question or some sort of dig at his self-assigned title.

“Give me a chance to look,” he replied and then all of us went to different parts, marveling at the intricacy of the symbols.

Some looked familiar, undoubtedly because my human brain was desperately trying to form patterns and make me feel rooted in something that could make sense. Some parts seemed like art, perhaps abstract representations of the grasslands and the mountains we'd passed over. Others looked like hundreds of rows of neatly painted symbols that could be letters or numerical representations. Hak-Kun was already working with the Atlas AI, using his program to start digesting and interpreting the data. Mack and Lois were in discussion with Winston about some detail or other. Suh was silent. I turned away from the walls and watched her instead, standing in the center of the room, turning slowly, her eyes scanning the walls in a bizarre, almost mechanical movement. She seemed to see through the others, her eyes still tracking up and down, even when she was facing me.

I said her name, but she didn't acknowledge it. I said it again, louder, now frightened by her odd manner and fearful that something else had taken her over. Perhaps that had already happened, years before in that field in the Alps, but seeing her acting in such an . . . alien way was too much for me.

My concern attracted everyone else's attention and we all stared at her as she completed her sweep of the room. Then she smiled and looked at me and said, “I know what it means.”

“Tell us!” Hak-Kun said but she turned her back and walked to the far side of the room, tracing her hand along a series of grooves incorporated so elegantly in a larger design that I hadn't even noticed them until that moment.

“God is waiting,” she said and the wall she was standing in front of started to look fainter somehow, something more like a gauze with the designs painted on. Then she walked through it.

Hak-Kun shouted for his mother and ran to the place she had been just moments before, his desperate hands slapping stone. He fumbled for the grooves she'd touched, but nothing changed. When he rounded on it and looked at us, panicked, none of us had anything to say to reassure him. Or ourselves.

“Is this it?” Lois whispered eventually. “Is this what we're here for? For her to go and leave us here?”

“Perhaps she's speaking to God,” Winston said. “Perhaps God is on the other side.” He pointed at the wall that Hak-Kun still pawed at.

“Perhaps something else is,” Mack said and looked at me. “What do you think, Ren?”

“I think we have to wait,” I replied. It was the only sensible thing to say.

We drifted around the room like people in an art gallery after closing, waiting for another function to start, our minds
too focused on that to really process anything on the walls. Hak-Kun revisited the footage I'd captured of his mother's behavior and then tried to replicate her movements exactly, over and over again. Winston and Mack both tried to calm him down as each replication became more frantic, but after five attempts he stopped himself and withdrew to a corner as far from everyone else as he could get. I couldn't bring myself to tell him that I believed she was the only person who could go through. She wasn't sick in the city like all of us and she knew exactly where she was heading. She wasn't like us anymore. It seemed absurd, to me at least, to even attempt to follow her. She'd said the city was testing us, but I think she believed she was the only one really being tested and that was why she was happy to cut in. She'd already proven she could cope and the rest of us were just keeping her back. That last bit of the real Suh didn't have the heart to just abandon us outside as she came up here, so she brought us as far as she could.