Dreaming in Smoke Read online

  “I don’t want any part of anything political,” Kalypso said impatiently. “I just want to go ho— what do you mean, when I see Sieng?”

  “Ah—he has not told you about her, then?”

  “But Marcsson called you Sieng!”

  “He was looking at you when he said that.”

  Kalypso shook herself like a dog. That was too swervy to contemplate.

  “Obviously, he was confused. I am Neko. I was her colleague.”

  “I thought you were all Dead. Are you the only one left alive?”

  “There are several of us.”

  “But how can that be? Ganesh. The Mothers. The Grunts. We were always taught. Everybody said. Well, nobody actually said. But. . . no. No. No.”

  Neko raised her hand, held it out toward Kalypso, forefinger extended. Then stopped. Withdrew.

  “I’m not going to touch you. If I start, I won’t stop.”

  Her body was nearly devoid of flesh, the outlines of bones and tendons articulated with textbook clarity beneath her skin.

  “You can’t imagine what it means to me to have you here in my boat.”

  “Look,” Kalypso said. “I just want to get to Oxygen 2. That’s all I want.”

  “You are in no position to want anything. The Earth Archives are hopelessly tangled up and damaged. Azamat says you are a witch doctor. You will interface and repair the damage. When that’s done, you can be returned to your people.”

  Kalypso started to say, “I’m no witch doctor. I’m not even a competent shotgun. I want no part of the Earth Archives since for all I know I’m still being hunted by a four-dimensional snake.”

  But of course, if she said that, Neko might very well throw her overboard or do some other unspeakable thing to her. So instead she said, “Oh, the Earth Archives — who cares about them? Most of them are locked. No one goes there.”

  “Yes, of course they’re locked to you. They have backdoors going into the Core. Besides, they belong to us now, to all of us exiled to the Wild. You have your station and your perfectly ordered, pre-planned world. We have what’s left of Earth.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Neko turned away and engaged with the boat’s nav systems for a minute, allowing Kalypso just enough time to absorb the impact of the idea that, all these years, the Earth Archives had been the province of people she’d thought Dead.

  Neko turned. “I can barely imagine what it must be like to be you. I am Earthborn, but you, you are different.” In the dimness Neko’s striped skin fluoresced. “And yet it is I who look like T’nane. You. You look like Earth to me.”

  “You’re homesick,” Kalypso heard herself say, with a kind of sympathy.

  “Naturally.”

  This open admission shocked Kalypso almost as much as the revelation that the Dead weren’t dead. References to Earth were to be kept to a minimum, as far as the Mothers were concerned. “Then why did you come here to begin with?”

  “That’s a long story. Difficult to remember.”

  Neko did something at the helm again, then turned and sat down near Kalypso, folding her legs into a mirror half-lotus. For a long moment she didn’t move. Then she raised her hands and began to narrate.

  “Fifty of us were chosen to colonize this planet. We all had our different personal reasons, our professional reasons, our ideological reasons. But now when I look back I see the truth. Underlying the mission was an unspoken understanding, an assumption so deep that none of us knew about it. We were fleeing the size of society, of ourselves. It had all become too big on Earth. The world humans had made was too big and complex and chaotic to be understood. We walked around inside our own creation, trumpeting our dominance over nature, but nature extended to us. Our system of commerce, language, war, science — it had all become too big and weird to surf. Just when we thought we had the most control, we had the least.

  “In the subconscious of the social mind you could see this. A fear of loss of control. An inability to make meaning or sense, a collective grasping at straws. A craving for simplicity that could never be satiated, for we had outgrown old modes of living. Everything felt false.

  “Then Earth ceased to be a closed system. Suddenly the ability to have control returned because we could start over. Clean slate. Second virginity. Seed politics. Specifically, speaking of this mission, we were to be a return to tribal society. A tribute to simplicity. We would become small again.

  “We knew it wouldn’t be easy here. Putting our stamp on this ecosystem wouldn’t be easy, but this planet had the basic minimum conditions for life, or we thought it did based on the probe data. What we didn’t know was how susceptible to change this ecosystem would prove to be. The geologic record didn’t tell us about the irregular atmospheric cycles, and we weren’t aware just how much the organic System influences the gas balance in the atmosphere. As it turns out, we don’t know why the oxygen balance changes; we don’t understand what forces drive intraluma selection and result in the dominance of one gas-producer over another.

  “Only over many years of study can we see that the answer lies in the logic of the System. And we can’t unravel that logic, because there doesn’t seem to be any. Not that we can comprehend.”

  Kalypso swallowed. “Does this mean you still work on the Oxygen problem?”

  “No. It does not. The Oxygen problem is too big, and the System is too opaque. We have addressed ourselves to a more immediate concern. Survival.”

  “How did you survive? What happened to Sieng?”

  “Sieng tried to marry Earth biology to the System. She took risks with herself and that’s how she died. That’s how all of us ended up in exile.”

  Kalypso swallowed. She felt blunt beside Neko, who seemed made of air and darkness. “Are you . . . is it contagious?”

  “The agents that have altered me visibly have to be deliberately introduced. They are not a direct result of Sieng’s final experiment.”

  Neko closed her eyes. Kalypso surprised herself by reaching out and touching the Dead woman’s ribs. They were hazarded with raised markings: terrible, indigo scars.

  “Sieng grew these for me. They used to be painful, but not anymore.”

  Sieng. The Dead woman’s name written in the air. Neko’s strange flesh was soft and porous. The skin of the Dead. She drew her hand back.

  “What are they?”

  Neko addressed the helm once more. “Colonies,” she signed tersely. “Colonial outposts.”

  Kalypso couldn’t see her face and wasn’t sure what special irony Neko might be trying to convey. Ribbons of muted color drew maps on the emaciated back.

  “What are they for?”

  “They help protect me. From acids, from heat. They are my carapace. Surface suits” — she had turned, and now pointed to Kalypso’s — “don’t last forever.”

  “You must need some supplies, though. You can’t possibly survive without help. Neko — I don’t understand. Why have you been exiled? Why did they say you were all Dead if it was only Sieng?”

  Neko didn’t answer at first. Kalypso felt the boat turning, and the darkness of the sky outside shifted balance slightly.

  “This is what I was coming to when I began. We don’t fit in with the plan. We are not part of the social order as designed from the beginning of the mission.”

  “Social order?”

  “You know what I mean, of course; or do you take it for granted? Look: think about the practicality of establishing a colony like this. Everything must be thought out in advance. There must be an abstract, objectively constructed schema for the society, based on the problems it’s likely to encounter. You assemble a group of highly able, multitalented women of childbearing age, ones who when given the best medical support their age can offer, will pop out babies like machines. You add some big, strong men with psychological profiles showing just enough leadership to make them reliable to take over in a crisis, but not enough for uncontrollable ambition or destructive rivalry. You ensure that the
first-generation children will be physically and mentally above the common herd by making their parents pass rigorous tests and pay large sums to get their embryos stored on the ship. Then you add an AI which is theoretically capable of getting smarter and smarter over time, which can interface not only with robot systems to provide needed services for the fledgling colony, but which can also interact with the crew both consciously and subconsciously. The humans program the AI, and the AI programs the humans. That’s the beginning of Dreaming.”

  “I never thought of it that way before.”

  “Everything relies on the social balance. You were planned down to every detail. Although, I must say, you don’t come across much like your projections.”

  “Yes, I know—hang on. What do you mean, my projections?”

  “The extrapolations of your personality and behavior based on your fetal DNA,” signed Neko.

  “What?”

  “Of course—how stupid of me. You wouldn’t have ever seen that material unless Ganesh had let you into that node of the Earth Archives.”

  “So . . . is that why Lassare is always going on about my unrealized potential? Shit. What am I supposed to be like?”

  The Dead woman looked amused. “It’s not for me to say. You would have to enter Ganesh for yourself and find out. I don’t know what you will find when you interface. Marcsson has made a real mess of things this time.”

  There was scorn in Neko’s gestures when she spoke of Marcsson.

  “You hate him,” Kalypso said.

  “He was not exiled.”

  “Why not? Why the rest of you, and not him?”

  “Sieng had ideas about finding a common ground between Earth biology and the luma System. She introduced her own tissues to the luma, and introduce indigenous biological agents — subs, I believe you call them now, organisms-but-not- organisms — to her body. The effects to Sieng personally were catastrophic. They ultimately killed her. But she managed to get something right.”

  Neko broke off, laughing silently. Kalypso could see her diaphragm contracting.

  “What do you mean?”

  “She grew in her own body an infectious agent according to T’nane biological paradigms, one which could infect humans.”

  Kalypso nodded, hoping Neko wouldn’t say any more so that she could have a moment to assimilate —

  “It infected all of us,” Neko signed, looking in Kalypso’s eyes.

  “I see.” Kalypso felt herself shrinking. Neko held her eyes.

  “Marcsson was unaffected. Why, Kalypso?”

  Kalypso licked her lips. Her hands trembled. “Because he’s male.”

  “Precisely. All of us lost our reproductive capacities. I don’t mean fertility, because every member of this mission had to agree to sterilization ahead of time. Otherwise we might have been tempted to have our own children, rather than those of our sponsors. No, I meant that we were systemically changed and our hormones were permanently altered. We cannot carry children. Therefore, what purpose could we serve?”

  Kalypso fumbled for expression. “That’s terrible!”

  “That’s reality. Everyone knew it. Resources were scarce in those days. And one thing was very clear to us: if we returned to First, we would be second-class citizens. We were not strong enough to be Grunts, we could not bear children, and our research, our work, had failed to solve the Oxygen Problem, so our scientific contributions would be limited at best. By this time, Sieng’s work on the luma had begun to make sense to Ganesh, and the station had started to grow. The focus turned to getting all of you gestated and growing the colony, within the limitations imposed by the oxygen situation. We didn’t belong.”

  Neko paused, took in Kalypso’s expression, and said, “Don’t pity me.”

  “But why didn’t they tell us?”

  “That is a question you must ask them.”

  “I mean, we would have run into you sooner or later. The tentkit project has been getting started. Did they seriously think they could keep this secret forever?”

  “Secrets are about control,” Neko signed.

  Kalypso wasn’t really watching. Her eyes had turned inward. She was thinking of Jianni, Naomi, Marcsson himself.

  “They made it sound like it was all about safety,” she said aloud.

  “There is no more safety,” Neko’s hands said. “Not in Ganesh, or anywhere.”

  Waking up slightly, Kalypso shook herself. “So that’s why you got Marcsson to sabotage Ganesh. He’s sympathetic to you because he feels guilty. Mari said something about that! You got him to damage the AI so you could have leverage against us! Right? Wow. This is just like a war or something. This is just like Ganesh used to show us.”

  Neko was laughing again. Kalypso wondered why the laughter made her uncomfortable, and decided it had something to do with the notion that someone like Neko might be capable of feeling pleasure.

  “Marcsson is too stupid and cautious to sabotage anything. He has been tiptoeing around the System for years, hoping to finish Sieng’s research. He’s thorough and methodical and he has no business tackling the Oxygen Problem—it only makes him look like a fool. He’s always kissing up to us, hoping we’ll give him a look at Sieng’s stuff. Like just now, offering me your services to fix Earth Archives.”

  “Look, I’ll try, OK? But Ganesh is really messed up. Really dangerous. I can’t promise you anything.” Damn right, she thought privately. What am I agreeing to?

  Neko’s mouth twisted in a parody of a smile. “I can’t promise you anything, either. Certainly I can’t promise you your life.” She stood up. “I’m going now to a place where we can get oxygen. You will need to learn this if you are to live.”

  They were now well away from the clayfields. The luma thinned and gradually became dark yellow, eventually displaying greenish patches moving beneath the surface like huge fish cruising. Kalypso had never seen anything like it; then again, she was no student of the System.

  “If you told me about this subsystem,” she ventured, “would I be able to understand?”

  “It’s not a deep region,” Neko replied, signing easily now that the topic of sabotage had been sidestepped. “And this side of the range is rather stable, so we can easily manipulate this sub because its gas cycles tend to be consistent. This area produces mostly methane and nitrogen at the surface level, and you’ll see in a little while how we’ve exploited that. The thermal layering is very fine. Zones change within less than a vertical meter in some cases. Basically you have a layering of several hundred subspecies on top of one another along this whole shelf. You see those moving green patches?”

  “Yeah, they look like whales.”

  “They’re gas bubbles.”

  “The water seems . . . thinner.”

  “Solidified luma is rare in this region. We think it’s because the sub is relatively stable and the distinct layering shows speciation as we’d expect to find it on Earth. You don’t see a lot of genetic exchange here, presumably because species have found their levels and those don’t change much. What interspecies transport structures there are tend to be filamentous and primitive, more of a proto-luma than a true luma.”

  Neko prepared a collection fil and slipped one end into the water, playing it out slowly. Then she pulled it in and beckoned to Kalypso.

  “Are those terran algae?” she gasped. “How . . . ?”

  “They’re modified terrans. They don’t drift on the surface: it’s too dark here. The light from the v. flagrare goes down very deep. It actually gets brighter the deeper you go, because the concentrations increase with heat. Up to a certain point. These algaics form vertical sheets. You can’t see them from above: they’re too thin. They photosynthesize using the bioluminescence of the v. flagrare. The oxygen can then be filtered out of the water and collected. Those are the green patches you see. They’re air bubbles, bladders for oxygen.”

  “What are they made of?” She was thinking about the colony’s shortage of materials, and how useful su
ch membranes would be.

  “We designed a living filter. Those are a filamentous type of v. dermata, a colonial that forms sheets naturally. The membranes can be permeated by O2 only on one side. So it was simply a matter of altering the topology of the sheets, getting them to form bags, and then sinking them. Gradually the liquid is squeezed out and only the gaseous O2 remains. They begin deep down and then float to the surface. Then we can harvest them.”

  She maneuvered the craft close to one of the bladders. Then she fitted a suction hose to the hook of her pole and used it to pierce the membrane.

  “I am going to have to give you pure oxygen. So you’ll want to be very careful with it. Use your suit’s processors whenever you can, and save this as a supplement and for emergencies.”

  “Why don’t we know about this at First?” Kalypso asked. “Couldn’t this be a way to spread the colony?”

  Neko looked at her with scorn.

  “The amount of oxygen produced this way would have a minimal effect on the atmosphere if we let it loose. It’s a slow, slow process and it can only be set up in places where the thermal conditions are just so.”

  “Still, we ought to know about it. And how did you get the v. dermata to form bladders? Especially if they originate deep in the heat zone? And how do the algaics survive higher temperatures? I mean, we’ve never been able to accomplish anything like this.” She knew she sounded indignant.

  “We’ve done origami to their RNA. I don’t know about the bladders. Teres has a way of inducing them to form macrostructures, using luma signals I think but I don’t really know.”

  “Luma signals?” Kalypso’s ignorance reared its ugly head again.

  “We will need to get you into Ganesh as soon as possible,” Neko indicated suddenly. “Are you ready to interface?”

  Kalypso was startled. She had never been less ready to do anything.

  “I’m very tired,” she demurred.