Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea (5 page)

2.

I was having a bowl of sage tea, the strong stuff the airlines serve, when I first noticed the journalist. She was sitting across the aisle from me, a few rows nearer the front of the passenger cabin, and she made no attempt to hide the fact that she was watching me. Her red hair was tied back in the high, braided topknot that has become so fashionable in the eastern cities, held up with an elaborate array of hematite and onyx pins. She was wearing a stiff brown MBS uniform, and when she saw me looking at her, she nodded and stood up.

“Fuck me,” I muttered and then turned to stare out the portal, through thin, hazy clouds at the barren landscape fifteen hundred feet below the zep. We’d already made the stop at the new Keeslar-Nguyen depot near Arsia Mons and, afterwards, the airship had turned east, heading out across the Solis Planum.

“May I sit with you, Councilor?” the journalist asked a few moments later, and when I looked up, she was pointing at the empty seat opposite me. She was smiling, that practiced smile to match the casual tone of her voice, all of it meant to put me at ease and none of it doing anything of the sort.

“Do I really have any say in the matter?”

Her smile almost faded; not quite, but it faltered just enough that I could see she was nervous, her confidence a thin act, and I wondered how long it had been since the net had given this one her implants and press docs and sent her off into the world. I think I was even a little insulted that I didn’t rate someone more seasoned.

“You must have known I was coming,” she said. “You must have known
someone
would come.”

“I know I’m going to die one day, and I’m not so happy about that, either.”

“Why don’t we skip this part, Councilor?” she asked, sitting down. “I’m just doing my job. I only want to ask you a few questions.”

“Even though you know ahead of time that I don’t want to answer them.” I sipped at my tea, which was growing cold, and looked out the portal again.

“Yes. Something like that,” she replied, and I knew that the cameras floating on her corneas, jacked into her forebrain and the MBS satellites, were relaying every word that passed between us, every move I made, to the network’s clearcast facilities in Herschel. The footage would be trawled, filtered, and edited as we spoke and then broadcast seconds after our conversation ended.

“Have you ever been out this far?” I asked.

“No,” she said, and I allowed myself to be impressed that the question hadn’t thrown her. “Before this jaunt, I’ve never been any farther west than the foundries at Ma’adim Vallis.”

“And how are you liking it so far, the frontiers?”

“It’s big,” she said, and cleared her throat. “Too damned big.”

I drank the last of my tea and set the bowl down on the empty seat to my right; one of the attendants would be along soon to take it away.

“You were at that whorehouse in Hope VII,” she said, “looking for your lover, Sailor Li.”

“Is that so? Tell me, whoever the hell you are, is this what’s passing for investigative work at MBS these days?” I asked and laughed. It felt good to laugh, and I tried to remember the last time I’d done it. I couldn’t.

“My name is Ariadne,” she said and sighed. “Ariadne Vaughn. You know, it might be in your best interest to try not to be such an asshole.”

“And why is that, Ariadne?”

She stared at me a long second or two, then rubbed hard at the bridge of her nose like maybe it had started to itch. She sighed again and glanced at the portal. She couldn’t have been much older than thirty, thirty-five at the outside, and I realized I wanted to fuck her. I suppose that should have elicited in me some sort of shame or disgust with myself, but it didn’t.

“I asked you a simple question, Ariadne. Why might it be in my best interest not to be such an asshole.”

“Because I might know where Sailor is,” she said. “All we want is the story. You’re the first council member known to have involvement with the Fenrir. Answer a few questions, and I’ll tell you what I know.”

My mouth had gone dry, and I wished I had another bowl of the hot, too-strong tea. “Sailor’s the pilgrim here,” I told the journalist, “not me. If you think otherwise, you’re sorely mistaken.”

“The way the network sees it, if your lover’s chasing the Wolf and
you’re
chasing your lover, that places you pretty damned close to – ”

“I can have you put off at the next port,” I said, interrupting her. “I still have that much authority.”

“And how’s that going to look, Councilor?” she asked, beginning to sound more confident now, and she leaned towards me and lowered her voice. I caught the sour-sweet scent of slake on her breath and realized why she’d been rubbing her nose. “I mean, unless this little walkabout of yours is some sort of suicide slag,” she said, almost whispering.

“You’re a junkie,” I replied, as indifferently, as matter-of-factly, as I could manage. “Does the network buy it for you, the slake? With that much circuitry in your skull, I know
they
must know you’re dragging.”

Ariadne Vaughn blinked her left eye, shutting down the feed.

“I’m just wondering how it all works out,” I continued. “Does the MBS have a special arrangement with the cops to protect junky remotes from prosecution?”

“They warned me you were a cunt,” she said.

“They did their homework. Good for them.”

Then she didn’t say anything for a minute or two. One of the attendants came by, took my empty bowl, and I ordered another, this time with a shot of brandy.

“Are you lying to me about Sailor?” I asked the journalist, and she narrowed her dark eyes, eyes the color of polished agate, then shook her head and tried to look offended. “Because if you
are,
” I said, “after what I’ve been through and seen the past eight months, you ought to understand that I’d have no problem whatsoever with making a few calls that’ll land you in flush so fast you won’t even have time for one last fix before they plug you into scrub.” I stabbed an index finger at her nostrils, and she flinched.

“That’s a fact, little girl. You fuck me on this, and once the plumbers are finished, there won’t be enough of you left for the network gats to bother salvaging the hardware. Are we absolutely clear?”

“Yes, Councilor,” she said very softly, rubbing at her nose again. “I understand you very well.”

I looked down the long aisle towards the zeppelin’s small kitchen, wishing the attendant would hurry up with my tea and brandy. “Then ask me your questions, Ariadne Vaughn,” and I glanced at my watch. “You have ten minutes.”

“Ten
minutes
?” she balked. “No, Councilor, I’m afraid I’ll need quite a bit more than that if – ”

“Nine minutes and fifty-four seconds,” I replied, and she nodded and blinked her agate-colored camera eyes on again.

Sometimes, in the dreams, I actually reach the floor of the crater. And I see it all with such clarity, a clarity that doesn’t fade upon waking, a clarity such that I have sometimes been tempted to identify the crater as a real place, existing beyond the limits of my recurring nightmares. I take down a chart or my big globe and put a finger
there,
or
there,
or
there.
It might be Lomonosov, far out and alone on the Vastitas Borealis. Or it might be Kunowsky farther to the south, smaller, but just as desolate. I was once almost certain that it was the vast, weathered scar of Huygens. No one ever goes there, that pockmarked wasteland laid out above the dead inland sea of the Hellas Planitia. Not even the prospectors and dirt mags make it that far west, and if they do, they don’t make it back.
Anything
at all might be hiding in a place like that. Anything. But I know that it
isn’t
Huygens, and it isn’t Lomonosov or Kunowsky, either, and, in the end, I always set the globe back in its place on my shelf and return the charts to their drawers.

Sometimes, I make it all the way down to the bottom.

The music rises and swells around me like a dust storm, like all the dust storms that have ever scrubbed the raw face of this god-forsaken planet. I stand there, wrapped in a suffocating melody that is almost cacophony, melody to drown me, trying to remember where I’ve heard this music before, knowing only that I have. I gaze back up at the rim of the crater, so sharp against the star-filled night sky, and trace my footprints and the displaced stones and tiny avalanches that mark the zigzag path of my descent.

I know full well that I’m being watched – some vestigial, primitive lobe of my brain pricked by that needling music, pricked by a thousand alien eyes – and I turn and begin the long march into the crater, towards its distant central peak and the place where the music might be coming from. I know that she’s out there somewhere – Sailor – not waiting for me. I know that she’s already given herself over to the Fenrir, and that means she’s something worse than dead now. But I also know that doesn’t mean I’m not supposed to find her.

The sky is full of demons.

Blood falls from Heaven.

I was sent to the containment facility just north of Apollinaris Patera only three months after my election to the Council. On all the fedstat grids it’s marked as IHF21, a red biohazard symbol at Latitude -9.8, Longitude 174.4E to scar the northern slope of the volcano. But the physicians and epidemiologists, virologists and exobiologists and healers who work and live there call it something else, something I’d rather not write down just now. The patients or detainees or whatever you might choose to call them, if
they
have a name for the place, then I’ve never learned it. I’d never want to.

That was seventeen years ago, not long after a pharmaceutical multinational working with the Asian umbrella came up with the serum, the toxic antiviral cocktail that either kills you or slows down the Fenrir contagion and sometimes even stops it cold, but never reverses the alterations already made to the genome of the infected individual. So, there was something like hope in IHF21 when I arrived. That is, there was hope among the staff, not the inmates, who were each and every one being administered the serum against their will. The scientists reasoned that if a serum that inhibited the contagion had been found, a genuine cure might not be far behind it. But by the time I left, almost four years later, with no cure in sight and a resistance to the serum manifesting in some of the infected, that hope had been replaced by something a lot more like resignation.

The blood from Heaven is black and hisses when it strikes the hard, dusty ground. I step over and around the accumulated carcasses of creatures I know no names for, the hulks of other things I’m not even sure were ever alive. Corpses that might have belonged to organisms or machines or some perverse amalgam of the two. With every step, the plain before me seems ever more littered with these bodies, if they are, indeed, dead things. Some of them are so enormous that I step easily between ebony ribs and follow hallways roofed by fossilized vertebrae and scales like the hull plating of starships. The music is growing louder, yet through it I can hear the whisperers, the mumbling phantoms that I’ve never once glimpsed.

Three days after I arrived at IHF21, a senior physician, an earthborn woman named Zyra McNamara, led me on a tour of the Primary Ward, where the least advanced cases were being tended. The
least
advanced cases. There was hardly anything human left among them. I spent the better part of half an hour in a lavatory, puking up my lunch and breakfast and anything else that would come. Then I sat with Dr. McNamara in a staff lounge, a small room with a view of the mountain, sipping sour, hot coffee and listening to her talk.

“Is it true that they’re not dying?” I asked, and she shrugged her shoulders.

“Yes. Strictly speaking, it’s true that no one’s died of the contagion, so far. But, you have to understand, we’re dealing with such fundamental questions of organismal integrity – ” and then she paused to stare out the window for a moment. There was a strong wind from the east, and it howled around the low plastic tower that held the lounge, rattled the windowpane, roared around the ancient ash and lava dome of Apollinaris Patera rising more than five kilometers above datum.

“It’s now my belief,” she said, “that we have to stop thinking of this thing as a disease. If I’m right, it’s really much more like a parasite. Or rather, it’s a viroid that reduces its victims to obligate parasites.” And she was silent for a moment then, as though giving me a chance to reply or ask a question. When I didn’t, because I was much too busy trying to calm my stomach for questions, she went on.

“On Earth, there are a number of species of fish that live in the deepest parts of the oceans. They’re commonly, collectively, called anglerfish, and in these anglerfish, the males are very much smaller than the females. The males manage to locate the female fish in total darkness by honing in on the light from bioluminescent organs which the females possess.”

“We’re talking about
fish
?” I asked. “After what you just showed me, those things lying in there, we’re sitting here talking about fucking fish?”

Dr. McNamara took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Yes, Councilor. We’re talking about fish. You see, the anglerfish males begin their lives as autonomous organisms, but when they finally locate a female, which must be an almost impossible task given the environmental conditions involved, they attach themselves to her body with their jaws and become parasitic. In time, they completely fuse with the female’s body, losing much of their skeletal structure, sharing a common circulatory system, becoming, in essence, no more than reproductive organs. The question is, do the males, in some sense,
die
? They can no longer live free of the host female. They receive all of their nutrients via her bloodstream and – ”

“I don’t understand what you’re saying,” I told her, and looked down at the floor between my feet, starting to think I was going to vomit again.

“Don’t worry about it, Councilor. We’ll talk again later, when you’re feeling better. There’s no hurry.”

There’s no hurry.

But in my dreams, as I make my way across that corpse-strewn crater, my head and lungs and soul filled to bursting with the Fenrir’s music, I am seized by an urgency beyond anything that I’ve ever known before. My feet cannot move quickly enough, and, after a while, I realize that it’s not even Sailor that I’m looking for, not her that I’m navigating this terrible, impossible graveyard to find.