The Forever Watch (29 page)

A hundred meters away. The tiny, white door I am aiming for grows in size. Now to decelerate. It would be stupid of me to get this far and crack my head open from hitting it too fast and asphyxiating in this ridiculous, skintight, translucent body stocking.

Dizzy. Little globules of blood from my nose and ears are floating around in my helmet. Distracting. Hands are trembling. Forgot how cold it would be. Cold. The blood droplets are freezing into little red crystals. My breath is icy mist, making it hard to see.

I spin in midair and press my feet against the wall, just clear of the data line. I spread my hands, force the triangular doors to slide apart. Air starts rushing out of it. It is not a vacuum in this main shaft, but it is lower pressure, to keep toxic gases from backing up into other systems. Not too hard to fight my way into the tunnel against the current. Gravity reasserts and pushes me to my hands and knees in the much warmer, pearl-gray triangular corridor. Numb now, when I close the doors.

Tear open my helmet. Blessed, warmer air. Oxygen. Not much farther.

Crawling. Cannot stand anymore. Gleaming panel, an Nth Web access terminal right in the wall. It takes a painful, long minute for my twitching fingers to open the panel and touch the conductive access port.

Hey. My guardian. My lion. I need you. I'm here.

I fold the words and the hex label on the terminal into a clear packet of thought. I enclose it in a file with a smattering of keywords and data, send it off to the Monster.

It is a matter of probabilities. The chance that my program has already spread to the closest Analytical Node to find my message. The chance that Barrens will see it before lack of water kills me.

With the last dregs of my power, I cocoon myself into the tunnel wall, with just cracks to breathe through for air, and then I close my eyes and hope I have gone far enough and deep enough. Exhausted, still it takes what feel like hours to fall asleep. I just escaped from a secret prison because the alternative was being lobotomized. Am I a foolish girl looking for the man I love, or, as Karla spoke of, a guided missile streaking toward a target of the Council's choosing?

Barrens would say, “You're badass, baby.”

 

 

Consciousness returns in slow stages.

Awareness. I could wake up immediately. But I do not. I let myself drift. I am in a bed, with blankets. A huge paw is closed around my hand. So warm. Better than the best memories of that stupid cat, that other person's child.

My head aches fiercely. A jagged boulder is bouncing back and forth in my skull.

“You're awake.” His voice is soft. Still a low rumble, a gentle growling.

It hurts too much even to talk. Probably he can see it on my face. Feel it in the pressure of my clutching hands.

“Yeah. If you got a headache, that's from the surgery.”

Fantastic. Yet another person's been in my head, rummaging through it.

Surgery?
Pulling on my psi to message him Implant-to-Implant causes my eyes to feel as if they will burst.

“Yeah. You were hemorrhaging in your head—pushed your talent too far.”

“And we also had to remove the part of the Implant that lets them track us,” added a clear, high, childish voice. “Barrens, we should leave her be. The stimulation will keep the drugs from helping her rest.”

“Yeah, got it. Sorry, Doc.”

Silence then. Chill along the veins of my arms, feeling the drips going into me. Their words are slowing down, slurring. I sleep again.

20

There are plush couches. The floor is functional tile. The lamps are bright over the tables and desks, but outside those pools of light, it is dim, and murky. Cigarette smoke in the air diffuses silhouettes. The walls have been converted into floor-to-ceiling displays.

Barrens sits before me. The table between us has been fabricated to look like wrought iron. The small lamp on it is just bright enough to be functional, but our faces remain in shadow.

A tablet is in his hands. An unlit cigarette dangles between his lips.

Coffee. Hot, scalding. Takes both my hands to hold the mug up to my mouth.

Smell of bacon, frying. Bacon! I only had it once as a child, when Mala rewarded me for one particularly exceptional grading period. As an adult, I could afford it whenever the urge struck, but it was always a little magical to me, that rich fat like little else.

Around us, other men and women eat and chat. They talk about Web streams and movies.

We could have been sitting in a café somewhere.

But too many of the conversations delve into history and philosophy and conspiracy. Everyone is talking about the latest news. They have found a way through toward one of the secret sections of the ship.

And they have found more evidence of the Builders. Joe November still insists on being called Bullet, and for the first three days of my recovery, he has taken every possible opportunity to visit me and offer to show his collection of psychometric impressions of the Builders—mostly from touching the ancient writings on some of the tunnel walls out here in the uninhabited zones. I guess he changed his mind about the aliens not mattering so much. Or maybe it's his newfound popularity.

A number of the men and women in Barrens's group are nearly addicted to the alien sense memories Bullet has shared. They fantasize about finding a hidden cache of Builder artifacts, alien wisdom that can change our society, improve our clumsy understanding of their technologies, a panacea to make everything better in every way. When they touch Bullet to reexperience the memories his talent has extracted firsthand, they sway in place, like maddened fans overwhelmed by the presence of an old-time rock star.

I decline every offer to see them. Just the one memory that the data-miner found was plenty for me. Their minds are too different from ours. When I revisit that memory, it is always deeply disturbing; I imagine it feels like being high. They felt emotions so intensely, yet so differently from us. They had emotions we don't have words for, and without the background cultural concepts and context, they are mind-bending. And can any memory of a Builder walking through a corridor or doing maintenance work or humming match what Barrens and I saw, of that pair of others standing above the Noah as it was being created?

The real excitement in the air is about the expedition into what they call the Unmapped Regions. They talk about who will get to go. They talk about how, soon, everyone will know the Noah's secrets.

They tend to be either very young, just teenagers, swinging their hands about and gesturing with enthusiasm, or very old, gray- and white-bearded men and thin crones with reedy voices. A pair of them stand before one of the large displays, reformulating program code. Blocks of instructions that I recognize. I wrote much of them.

Above what looks like a pool table, a three-dimensional image is projected. A densely packed series of lines and curves and tiny, glowing blips, data labels, tags. It is a schematic of the Noah focusing on one of the abandoned sections, depowered, with no life support or gravity.

A plate is lowered before me. The boy that serves it inclines his head deferentially to Barrens.

“Hi, Bullet.” I hug him and smile and, when he blushes, hug him again. I think it was those weeks in isolation, and having so many strangers around now. The only two people I know here from before are Barrens and Bullet, and I take every opportunity to touch them and feel that I exist.

“Thanks. Grab some for yourself too, huh?”

“Uh. Sure. Haha.” He turns a little pink. “Hey, you know, it's not just Builder memories I've found, so if you want to see anything more, you know I like to feel useful.”

“You're probably the most important guy here, Joe.”

“No way.” He shakes his head. “That's the big guy, because he's the hand that's holding this mess of crazies together. And that's you, for making the Monster. Though, the artsy kids that joined in want to call it Argus instead. I wasn't ever into mythology.”

A number of youths on a couch wave to him.

“Go on, go on,” Barrens says. “You've had more time with Hana than I have, and your groupies are wanting more of you.”

A little twitch around his eyes, as if Bullet wanted to roll them. “It's not me that's got groupies, it's the Builders. Easy for people to fantasize that they were so perfect, seeing as they're all gone and we can't know if they were just as screwed up as us.” But he sighs and goes over to the alien enthusiasts anyway.

Beside me, Barrens sips his coffee.

My fork breaks the yellow yolk of an egg. It is glorious. It trickles onto a thick cut of toast. In my mouth, fat and salt and protein and the complex flavors, and the slight crunch of the crusty bread, and all of it overwhelming, after months in isolation with flavorless goop. Sunlight in my mouth. I eat only a few, tiny bites. It seems like a dream.

Big fingers tug at the skin on my wrist and pinch. Just enough to let me feel it.

“Not gonna wake up back in a cell.”

“When did you learn how to
read,
hmm?”

Not that Barrens needed to pinch me. There are too many aches and pains. And more than just from burning my talent to the point of scraping the inside of my mind. Where my spine meets my skull is a sharp, throbbing ache, where another youth performed psychic surgery on me. He slid needles of incorporeal force into my head and destroyed the collection of nanite threads composing the transponder ganglion, the part of the Implant that constantly transmits location data. Supposedly, the procedure is without side effects. Barrens said they have all gone through it.

I wonder though. The sharp, clear plans that got me out of Information Security have become fuzzy and directionless. If I had the time to scan through my memories one by one, would any be damaged? Are my talents affected? It will take time to test myself. There's so much to catch up on with the jerk. I'm going to let him have it sometime, for leaving me.

Later. Real soon.

Right now I can't stop looking at him when he's around, and I sink into the deep bass of his voice when he talks.

“I
was
a cop. It doesn't take psi talent to know something about body language, facial expressions.” That rough, calloused thumb glides over my cheek. “Like to think I know a lot about you.”

His touch gets a sigh out of me and I lean into his hand, into the heat radiating from the furnace of him. I missed this too much. I missed him. Barrens stares at me hungrily as if he cannot believe I am here, as if he wants to consume me and possess me, that beast of his too, and at the same time there is that tenderness no one else knows. This is real, to me. It has to be. His presence, the gritty roughness of his hands.

Strange, hearing his voice again. His spoken speech is cleaner than before, more like the thoughts in his head. I guess he needed to work on that at last, to be a leader to his flock. Is he the leader? He is boss to this small gathering here, but no one has told me how many other groups there are, how many other bosses there are. How are decisions made? How independent are they?

Then there is what happened with Miyaki. He took an oath to protect life. An oath to defend each individual of humanity left. When we are suitably alone, I will ask, and I will listen.

He is so busy running things, there has not yet been an opportunity.

“You have a lot of friends now, Leon.”

“Yeah. Have to stay in small groups though. Or Enforcers come down on us. We lost a cell in the week before they got you. A lot of people we would have wanted to recruit on the forums too.

“Mostly, they just kill us. I guess we riled up the hornet's nest. Even mission-critical status means nothing, not if someone is a part of what we're doing.”

We
. Lots of
we,
now.

“Don't frown. Good cause.”

I just shake my head. I point to my plate. “Where's all this from?”

“Ah. One of the secrets, Hana. You're in City Planning. You're supposed to know numbers about how many tons of what are produced, how much livestock is butchered and stored and sold and eaten. Well.”

Bullet returns from a minute spent letting the kids “commune” with his psychometric impressions of the Builders. He pulls up a chair, munching noisily on a bacon-lettuce-and-tomato sandwich. He is the same and yet not the same. I guess this movement thing has been good for him.

I am still annoyed that Leon took him along and not me.

“I was telling Hana about where the food is from.”

Bullet exclaims, the hand not on his food sweeping in big, grand arcs. “They're huge—I mean really huge—storerooms, Dempsey. Not accounted for.”

Leon slides a tablet over to me. It is a copy of that much larger map hologram dominating the center of the room. I understand a little more now. Members of his organization make forays into those deep levels of the ship, making their way as they go along physically, linking up chunks and clusters of lost data that the Monster has found.

“There are vertical farms down there more than double the capacity that should be, given our crew population.”

“That can't be right.”

Barrens leans over and taps the screen. Tables of numbers scroll down. Inventories they ripped from the data nodes down there. “What secrets keep two-thirds of the ship's agricultural capacity back from the crew, eh? Why do most of us get just enough to meet the minimum daily requirement of nutrients, with luxuries only for the 'better' ones, the elites? Isn't this made for abuse?”

I want to tell Barrens to stop raising his voice to me. He never used to do that. Then I realize he is not speaking just to me.

They are all listening to him. Nodding. It is stuff they have heard before, but nonetheless, it reassures them. He used the word
cause
before, and now I see why ISec is afraid. Propaganda, Keepers, carefully ingrained cultural ideals, and censored history, to produce a rational, reliable, stable crew—there is no place for Barrens and his true believers.