Angel Stations (17 page)

There was no sign of Turthe.

As he scuttled around the corner and out of sight of the square, he looked up to find three soldiers walking towards him from the far end of the street. One of them had clearly spotted him, his mouth opening wide when he saw the effigy clutched in Ursu’s arms.

Go to the well
, spoke the voice of Shecumpeh, in words like thick-flowing liquid. Ursu’s limbs seemed to swivel without his volition, and he fled back into the square.

Time seemed to slow to the point of stopping. A thought raced through Ursu’s mind, for the smallest fraction of a second. It hadn’t been a voice he had heard, really; more like the wind shivering through the trees, or rain tapping against cobblestones. Shecumpeh was speaking to him again. And with that same deep-seated knowledge he had felt that previous time, a lifetime ago in a warm and smoky cellar, Ursu knew the god was urging him to jump into the well.

No
, a part of him screamed.

Despite this, his feet carried him towards the well – the worst place imaginable. He was going to die.

At a shout from behind him, the soldiers standing in the square turned, bleary-eyed, and stared as he ran past them with the effigy clutched tightly in his arms.

Even as the soldiers nearby started moving towards him, his feet left the ground and he hurled himself over the lip of the well, his arms still clutching the god of Nubala. He felt their fingers snatch at his leg, even as he fell into darkness.

He plummeted headlong into blackness, felt bones shatter as he hit the bottom, then the torrent tugging at his broken body, freezing water filling his lungs. There were no pockets of air now to give him a brief respite. The intense blackness swallowed him whole, like a great dark serpent coiling around him, squeezing the life out of him.

His grasp on the god loosened, as his lifeless body was swept towards the distant sea.

Seven

Kim

One afternoon, not long after she’d spoken to Bill, Kim noticed a ghost staring at her from a distance.

More of a glance really, enough for a sudden frown to form before she ducked out of sight and down a busy corridor, past people pushing and pulling in every direction. She still carried the Books in a little plastic capsule in her pocket.

She half walked, half flew back to her tiny quarters, almost floating in the Station’s minuscule gravity, not looking back to see if he was still there, following her. Back inside her home, she hooked one foot in a wall-strap to stop herself floating away, and took out the capsule filled with the Books given her by Bill. Perhaps a dozen: enough memories to drown in, after a fashion.

A ghost, she thought. His name floated to the surface of her memory, but she pushed it down. She still had some of the other Books left: the Books with Susan in them. She had been rationing them out, like someone lost in the desert taking measured sips from the last of their water supply. Until she could get someone to replicate the Susan Books with the distillery in Central Command, that was all she had.

Her bioware had not come cheap. Despite the terrible things that had happened in the Citadel, the expedition had reaped lucrative rewards, and she had subsequently become moderately wealthy. Most of the fees for installing the bioware had gone on locating the specialists prepared to put it in her skull while sidetracking the usual legal and medical permissions.

There were a lot of different theories about the purpose of the Angels’ bioware. The standard texts claimed the bioware had been intended to record the memories and experiences of the widest possible variety of different species. An entire branch of human experiential art and even diplomacy had grown around the bioware, including practitioners who referred to themselves as ‘Observers’: those who went to places and recorded what they saw, what they felt. Which had the advantage that it couldn’t be altered, couldn’t be misinterpreted, so long as you took into account that the emotional responses of any one Observer would inevitably be tied to their own long-ingrained tendencies and belief system.

She met . . . then the thoughts stalled. She blinked. She was an Observer, trained on Earth. The memories were now there: a life spent growing up under clear blue skies in Canada (growing up in a cramped corridor deep under the surface of an ice moon), her graduation (first trip to Earth). She . . .

(confusion)

Kim gripped her skull, filled with Susan’s conflicting memories and thoughts. She thought of the alien Books she was carrying, of what might be in them. Another way to lose yourself. She had told Bill she was interested in no other memories but Susan’s.

She remembered Bill’s admonition. With enough will and determination you could
lose
yourself in other people’s memories. She’d even heard that it was a recognized psychological condition, designated by a long string of Latin vowels and consonants.

She sighed.

She could look for Bill now and return the new Books to him, tell him the deal was off.

Instead, she sat down on the edge of her narrow bunk, opened the capsule and shook out one of the new supply of Books. She ate it, thinking, it’d probably be nothing, that probably whoever supplied the original distillate to Bill had lied or been misled. The Book broke into dry flakes on her tongue, dissolving rapidly as she chewed it. Within seconds it was into her bloodstream, swarming up towards her brain and towards the bioware that interpreted it, translated it into something her mind could understand and interact with. Made it real.

She let herself drift over to a small fold-down table and tapped into a smartsheet lying there, looking for something to distract her until the Book had fully taken hold.

It only took her a minute to realize something was wrong.

She wondered if the light was burning brighter. She looked up, saw it was.
This shouldn’t be happening
, she thought with dismay.
Ride it through, then find Bill
.

She dropped off for a moment, fatigue and tiredness taking their toll. That was twice within a few days, so she’d have to be careful. Pull that trick next time she took the Goblin out, even Pierce wouldn’t be able to save her skin.

To Kim’s surprise, the whole universe appeared to rip open.

It was as if her room, the Station, simply peeled away. She found herself falling into an abyss, and a deep certainty filled her that she was going to fall forever and ever and ever. A billion years passed then, at a crawl, and still she fell. She pictured the universe tumbling away somewhere far behind her, forever out of reach.

After several more eternities, her own life, her memories, were stripped away. There was someone else underneath.

She was still distantly aware that none of this was real, and it was this knowledge that allowed her to maintain her sanity. Now in another world, her fingers sought out, and found, felt the edge of the table. Breaking the spell of the Books was not easy, but it could be done. It was so much easier to completely subsume yourself in the thoughts and actions the Book recorded, an activity Kim normally pursued with a single-minded devotion bordering on the fanatical. Pain, though – pain could break the spell.

Then they came.

They fell towards her like stars glowing in the eternal stygian night, and in her mind she could hear them calling to her. They tasted her thoughts, her feelings, memories and emotions, and she found herself like a passenger in her own life. She remembered her mother’s womb, then being born, lying screaming and puking in her cot as a tiny baby. It all unravelled in real time – the great darkness was now long gone. She lived again through those years spent growing up in the confined, leafy corridors of the Hellas C Ice Station. She stared up in wonder at the striped outline of the gas giant her home orbited, then looked across to the ancient alien ruins towering on the horizon. She had been Sol-standard thirteen when she had first stood on that same hill, the heavy environment suit feeling light as a feather in the low gravity.

She lived through her studies again, that moment of learning that she was to travel via the Hellas Angel Station to study xenoarchaeology on Earth. She relived her late twenties for the first time, seeing a
blue
sky with her own eyes, staring up now at the moon, her freshly re-engineered bones flexing under the unaccustomed weight of Terran gravity.

Then her first trip to the Kasper Angel Station, working amid the abandoned Angel ruins in the isolated, unpopulated northern wastes of the planet Kasper. Kim tried to scream, to break the grip the Book exerted on her, but it was like nothing she had ever previously experienced. She was going to live through it all over again, in intricate, painstaking detail.

She was now back in the tunnel, deep within the Citadel. She sobbed, feeling for the edge of the table in her quarters with a ghost-hand, then slid her fingers under, seeking out the hard steel edge of the bracket on which the tabletop pivoted. She smashed her fist against it, trying to use pain to snap herself out of it.

She could feel the pain, but it was only a distant thing. She managed to hit the bracket again, harder, and something wet and warm trickled down her wrist and arm. It wasn’t working.

Susan – whose hair smelled like mint.
A better person than I ever could be
, thought Kim, thinking how strange it was that they seemed to share some of the same memories, as if they were almost the same person . . .

Susan.

It all came back then in a rush, memory after memory. She would relive every moment with the added torture of foreknowledge – of what would happen to them all, and how horribly some of them would die.

Kim woke, suddenly, a feeling of deep anxiety lurking inside her, as if she were about to be attacked. She looked up at the thick plastic walls of the sleeping bubble she shared with Susan. Kim was expedition leader, in charge of three others: Susan, Fitz and Odell. Kim had meant to rise early today, to get the imaging equipment set up for their morning’s work.

She pulled herself out of her sleeping bag with the minimum of grace. That was one of the first differences Kim had ever noticed between them: Susan was a morning person, Kim most definitely was not. For Kim, mornings were something to be endured, rarely enjoyed. She wondered what had woken her so suddenly, what had made her feel so frightened. She was still fuzzy with sleep, but when it repeated a few minutes later, she knew what it had been.

A tremor – definitely a tremor. Not a good sign. It could mean their expedition being pulled out.

Still, she was head of the expedition, a considerable honour. Susan, however, had been her equal at university, and although it was in Kim’s nature to look for some tiny sign in Susan that might betray resentment that Kim was expedition leader here, she found none. In fact, Susan showed every sign of being glad of Kim’s career success, an unconditional pleasure for her lover that Kim sometimes found hard to accept.

‘Of course I mean it,’ Susan had said, once Kim brought herself to ask.

‘You’re the better at the job,’ Kim had argued, staring at the blonde woman through her fringe of dark hair. ‘Everyone knows it. They knew it, back on Earth.’

‘I did well, but that’s not what I am first and foremost.’

‘Yeah, right.’ An Observer. Kim hadn’t really met many other Observers, but apart from Susan, she’d come away with an impression that they tended to be portentous and not especially well endowed in the humour department. Susan had gone through all the psych tests, the evaluations and the training, and finally the surgery.

Kim didn’t like the thought of that: something alien and slimy stuck inside your head like some kind of passenger in your brain.
Nasty
. Still, Susan also had training in anthropology, and knew more about the Kaspians and their culture than anyone else Kim had ever met.

Kim had made the inevitable joke about the sex lives of Observers when they first met, a crude attempt at breaking the ice. Susan had just sailed over this faux pas.

‘I’ve made Books of it, sure,’ Susan said, her voice matter-of-fact. Despite herself, Kim felt shocked. Susan was attractive, no doubt about it, with that strangely compact shape as against the tall and gangly Kim, a loose-limbed product of a lower-gravity environment.

Life on her native Hellas was more conservative, with old-fashioned ideas of propriety and public behaviour that had come with the first, primarily Quaker settlers arriving in that system. And, although she hadn’t brought herself to admit it at the time, Kim had found this other woman both unsettling and exciting from the moment they first met. That didn’t take long to turn into strong mutual attraction, the discovery that Susan, in turn, found Kim exotic, alien, different too. It was on that first get to know you meeting – it was only later Kim had come to think of it as their first date – that Susan had explained her Books.

‘It’s not just being inside someone’s head. It’s
getting
them.’

Kim shook her head. ‘You’ve lost me.’

‘Everyone has a different way of looking at the world, different ways of interpreting it. If you eat enough Books that carry the thoughts and memories of one particular person, to a certain extent you sort of become that person.’ Susan had a faraway look as she spoke, and Kim could see she was searching carefully for the right words. ‘You come to understand them, appreciate their reasons for being the way they are, because you also experience their emotional reactions to the world around them, and you can learn to at least understand how someone else might come to hold different views from you – even quite radically different views.’

Kim frowned. ‘Sounds horrible. I can think of some people whose viewpoint I don’t want to understand. Murderers, people like that. I’d feel’ – she waved her hand in the air – ‘tainted. Marked.’

‘Not just anyone can do it, you know,’ Susan said. ‘Takes training, a lot of psychology before they let you acquire the bioware. You have to be pretty strongly committed.’

Maybe I should have listened harder to her
, thought the part of Kim still aware that this was all a kind of dream.