Solaris Rising (42 page)

Control, this is the last message you’ll get from me. Don’t bother to reply.

We shouldn’t be here. I know that now. This city – what we perceive as a city – is not somewhere we are ever meant to see. Not while we’re alive, anyway. That makes it sound like heaven, but that’s not it. This isn’t hell either. More like a dimension of the spirit. No, still too mystical. Though I keep thinking of that biblical quote: ‘In my Father’s house there are many mansions.’

Part of us lives here. Part of all of us. All humans. And I think it manifests, possibly in response to our physical presence, possibly spontaneously. It’s about archetypes, you see. The five of us who came through were each the epitome of a given archetype. That didn’t make us extraordinary people, just the ideal representative of a particular personality.

And sometimes those archetypes manifest here, in a reduced, symbolic form. I found some of those representations. I… took them on myself. The archetypes they corresponded to didn’t survive. Just gave up life. I do wonder if those statuettes represented actual people, back on Earth, and whether those individuals died too. I think they probably did, in which case, I’m sorry.

The last statuette I found, I think that was ‘mine’. My archetype, anyway. Certainly I’ve experienced an exponential increase in my mental capacity. I’m definitely more-than-human now. Food, sleep, bodily functions, these are no longer relevant. I dream all the time now. And the towers aren’t silent anymore.

For the record, I did want to get back to Earth, at least before that final statuette. I had such wisdom to impart. But that’s changed. We weren’t meant to come here, but we did. And what I’ve –
we’ve
– become isn’t something that should ever be allowed to return.

None of this is testable, of course. But I’m going to ask Rory, if I find him. He’s been here far longer than me; he’ll have taken more statuettes. Of course, if this city really is infinite, I’m unlikely to run across him. But I’ll keep looking. After all, I’ve got all the time in the world.

ETERNITY’S CHILDREN

KEITH BROOKE AND ERIC BROWN

Keith Brooke is the author of a dozen novels, including
The Accord
(Solaris),
The Unlikely World of Faraway Frankie
(NewCon Press) and
alt.human
(due from Solaris in 2012). He lives in Essex, but please don’t hold that against him. Eric Brown has published forty books which have been translated into sixteen languages, and more than a hundred short stories. He is a two-time winner of the BSFA Award for short fiction. Eric also writes a monthly SF review column for the Guardian. ‘Eternity’s Children’ is the latest of several collaborations between Eric and Keith, and a collection of their co-written work,
Parallax View
, is available from Immanion Press.

Loftus sank into the body-couch as the shuttle began the spiraldown towards the surface of Karenia, 31 Cygni VII. Far below, the colony world was a vast dappled meniscus arcing across the void; above, the supergiant binary system burned bright, 31 Cygni A and B almost joined in a single fiery mass.

Loftus had made the journey to Karenia three times over the past hundred and fifty years – visits always hedged with trepidation – but this trip would be the last.

“Ed? You ‘kay?” Softly, the question came from the woman at his side.

He turned from the viewscreens.

The body-couch swaddled all but her tanned face, making Elana look like a baby in a papoose.

“I’m fine.” He tried to keep the weariness from his tone and returned his contemplation to the view below. Seen from this altitude, as the shuttle sliced through the troposphere, the planet appeared wrapped in chiffon clouds of mauve, with glimpses of purple and blue land between the strands.

Minutes later, he glanced at Elana and saw that her eyes were closed, her face serene. She was one hundred and seventy years his junior. Sometimes this charmed him, her youthful enthusiasm, her often startling naiveté, spilling over, filling him with a renewed zest for life; sometimes it irked.

Now, he looked at his lover’s peaceful, innocent features and he felt physically sick, assailed by guilt again.

Why had he asked her to accompany him to Karenia? Simply because it was easier to have her here, an emotional crutch, a distraction from other, more intense guilt?

One hour later they made touchdown.

“This might be a little uncomfortable,” Loftus murmured.

Elana nodded, her dark eyes tracking the movements of the medic in the sealed terminal obelisk as he withdrew the slug from its wrap and approached her.

“Open up.”

She opened her mouth and accepted the clear bolus of gel. She swallowed hard, and pulled a face. “God…” she gagged. “It tastes awful. And…” She shook her head as the bolus coated her trachea and climbed her nasal passages, creating a seal which would act as a barrier against the poisonous spores of Karenia.

Loftus swallowed his own slug and closed his eyes. He would never get used to the sensation of the bolus at work in his head. It felt as if a mouthful of food had come to life and was trying to escape through his nostrils. He felt the membrane coating his eyeballs, and his vision temporarily blurred.

The medic passed them each a blister-pack containing two small pills. “Take the first when you’re safely back aboard the shuttle, the second an hour later. They’ll have dissolved the membrane by the time you reach the ship.” Finally, the medic added, “And remember: the barrier will only last for four weeks max; after that it becomes too loaded with spore debris and you...”

“We suffocate,” Loftus finished for him. He slipped the pills into his breast pocket. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s get out there.”

The airlock doors hissed open and Loftus heard Elana gasp.

“It’s beautiful,” she said.

Loftus nodded, and blamed the lump in his throat on the protective membrane.

The landing strip was a gash carved through jungle that twisted and tangled in gaudy purple knots as high as a Tokyo skyscraper. Whistles and buzzes filled the air, shifting in pitch and volume so that Loftus felt as if his ears were continually blocking and clearing. Looking to his right along the landing strip, he could see through the jungle to rolling hills, cultivated land, fields with grooved rows of kreen, all of it shading from blue-green through blue to purple.

A fine haze overlay everything, like gauze held up before the eyes. The pale lavender mist was the effect of the ubiquitous spores, a constant reminder that this planet, despite its idyllic first impression, was deadly.

It was, as Elana had said, quite beautiful, and Loftus was here to destroy the place.

He rolled his aching shoulders. Karenia was a planet like a dozen others, just another backwater colony world. He was here to do a job, no more.

His musing was disturbed by a gentle touch on his arm. “Can I go first?” asked Elana. “I need an establishing shot.”

She stepped from the airlock and walked across the apron. At its lip she stood and swung her head in a wide arc, sweeping from the tangled wall of jungle to the nicely framed view of fields at the far end of the landing strip, the first buildings of Turballe.

Loftus left the airlock and came up behind her, listening to her commentary.

“Karenia, the world to which everyone in the Expansion owes so much. For it was here, three hundred years ago, that Omega-Gen researchers made the discovery that would change the destiny of our species...”

He wandered out of earshot of her clichés. Three other shuttles were parked to one side of the landing strip. Their cargo bays gaped wide as workers transferred hessian-swaddled bales of processed kreen from drays pulled by native draft animals resembling eight-legged rhinoceroses.

Work paused as the men and women caught sight of him. They stared, with something like wonder in their eyes. Even here at the port, off-worlders were an infrequent sight; despite Karenia’s inherent beauty and historic significance, not many were willing to endure the protective bolus in order to visit. Everything about him, he knew, would appear strange to these workers, from his tight, bright apparel to his attenuated thinness. The colonists were short, dumpy, and garbed in loose dun jackets and pantaloons. Like something from Brueghel, he thought.

He raised a hand in a brief salute, and they smiled and waved in return, then resumed their work.

“Ed?” Elana called.

He turned. She was striding towards him, beaming. This was the start of an adventure, to her. She could think no further than her reports. Footage from this visit would be netted widely, used and re-used by anyone with an interest in the reclusive world that had allowed humankind to battle the tyranny of time. This trip would make her name.

“You’re not still...?” he began.

“No. I caught you here, silhouetted against the sky. I’m glad you waved. It was a gesture both of greeting and almost of farewell.” He stared at her and wondered if her radiant youth and beauty disguised an insight he had failed to apprehend, or if, perhaps, he was finally succumbing to her banalities.

Just then, a wheeled vehicle drew up in a cloud of dust. A short figure jumped out, flustered by his late arrival. He was grey-haired, rubicund in healthy old age.

“Mr Loftus!” the man called, approaching with his hands spread wide. “Mr Loftus, Ms Kryadies... Welcome to Karenia. We’re honoured. I’m sorry I wasn’t here to greet you…” The man gestured at his vehicle. “I had a breakdown.” He spoke a formal bureaucrat’s English and his accent was muddy, words running together in a thick rush of consonants. Loftus managed to follow, but he could see that Elana was struggling.

The man held out a stubby hand. “I’m Christopher. Christopher Dupré.”

Loftus accepted the archaic gesture of the handshake, anticipating Christopher’s grip and trying not to wince.

“Christopher.” Loftus smiled. “You were...”

“I was five,” Christopher said. “But I remember you. I still have the plastic horse you gave me back then.”

Loftus recalled the tubby, red-faced boy from his last visit, and fought back the sadness that welled within him.

Christopher smiled. “Sixty years ago… who would believe it?” He looked Loftus up and down, taking in the visitor’s unchanged appearance. “Come, I’ll show you to the manse. I’ve already picked up your luggage.”

“Everything is in place for the board meeting?” Loftus asked.

Christopher paused, and Loftus felt a moment’s guilt for steering his host back to the business of his visit. The man nodded, said, “Yes, Mr Loftus, it’s all prepared. We meet tomorrow.”

They descended the steps and eased themselves into the car in testy silence.

Sixty years ago Loftus had been greeted by Alain Dupré, Christopher’s father, then in his late thirties... He had last heard from Alain eighteen years ago, a brief message to say that his sister Helen had passed away. It would be too much to hope that the wry, philosophically-minded patriarch would still be alive.

“Alain...?” said Loftus, cursing Karenia’s inwardness, the lack of information at his disposal.

Christopher smiled over his shoulder as he took a track through abruptly thinning jungle. “My father is looking forward to meeting you again,” he said.

His initial surprise and delight that Alain was alive was soon followed, inevitably, by despair. What he had to tell the people of Karenia would be hard enough, but he had assumed he would be telling it to a world of strangers... In the few days he had spent on Karenia sixty years ago, Alain had become a friend.

“He’s one hundred in a month,” Christopher continued. “He wasn’t up to making the journey, though he wanted to. He’s been wheelchair-bound for a few years now. But,” Christopher tapped his head, “he still has it up here.”

They passed through fields of native herbs. Loftus stared at the tangled rows of kreen, the turquoise vegetation towering metres high.

To Elana, Christopher said, “We’re honoured to have you here, Ms Kryadies. I hope you appreciate that you will have unprecedented access to Karenia. We are an insular people... We do not welcome the scrutiny of others. If it were not for Mr Loftus...” He paused, then went on, “We would hope that you do not take this access lightly, and that you will ask at all times before recording. My people are not all as outward-looking as I am.”

“Of course,” said Elana disingenuously. Loftus knew she would be filming this exchange already. “I am honoured by your welcome.”

Loftus turned away and stared through the side window. He just wanted this to be over.

“Wood...” Elana said, in awe. She fingered the warped timbers of the balcony as if they were gold. To her future audience, she said, “Far from being proscribed as it is on Earth, here on Karenia timber is the staple building material. The manse is almost three hundred years old.”

Loftus watched her. So young, with hundreds of years ahead of her. Could she truly apprehend the fact that she would still be alive, barring accidents, in a thousand years? What did that mean to her?