Angel Stations (43 page)

He gave up pondering and decided to retire for the night. Roke had ordered a dozen of the guards to construct a holding pen for the creatures. Perhaps, if he persisted, he might still get to understand the role these three had to play in the Shai Sam’s plans for all of them.

Kim

‘Now might be a good time to try the Books,’ said Elias.

Vincent was showing more signs of life. He’d mumbled a few words, and he’d looked up at her for a few seconds, before seeming to drift into a more natural sleep. It was maybe a good sign, but he wasn’t out of the woods yet.

‘I was thinking that,’ Kim said quietly. It had been awkward, even strangely embarrassing for them, standing there with some kind of eminence amongst the Kaspians attempting to communicate with them.
Hello, take me to your leader
, she imagined his clicks and soft barks might be translated; but they had stood dumbfounded, unable to reply.

‘You understand, though, there are no guarantees,’ she said. ‘I might not be able to get anything out of it. And if anything sudden happens during the night—’

‘I don’t think it will,’ he replied. ‘They sleep at night, just like we do. That’s why they’ve got us in this . . . cage.’ He peered around in disgust.

‘If only we could figure out a way to talk to them, they might even be able to help us.’

Elias looked at her incredulously. ‘Jesus, think about what you’re saying. Imagine if some of them had landed in medieval Europe. How long do you think it’d take before
we’d
stuck them on a bonfire.’

‘They haven’t yet shown any sign of intending us harm,’ she replied tightly.

‘Which makes them rather better than us, I guess, unless they’re thinking of eating us eventually.’ He shrugged away the hard look she gave him. ‘Okay, maybe not that bad, but they’re primitives, and forget that at your peril.’

Kim pulled out the vial, and shook one of the last precious Books into the palm of her hand.

She put it on the tip of her tongue, felt it began to dissolve, soon filling her mouth with that familiar sour taste. As she swallowed, she noticed Elias watching her with a curious expression. His eyes flicked away, and he sat in silence, crouching on the bare earth in a corner of the little wooden box confining them.

Kim closed her eyes, daydreamed . . . daydreamed through another person’s eyes, in another time. She was seeing the world through Susan’s eyes. She was back in the Citadel again, far away. No, not so far away, now.

She concentrated harder, trying to draw the Susan memories away from that time, that place.

Back on Earth now; random, dream-like images flitted before her mind’s eye. She again experienced being Susan, learning about becoming an Observer, about the bioware technology. She sat in a comfortable room with a dozen others, a soft-screen writer by her arm.

‘Let’s be frank,’ the lecturer was saying. ‘There are a lot of ways to describe the process when an Observer consumes a Book, and how their bioware interacts with the complex molecules, and the information encoded on them. But let’s be frank.’

The lecturer – a name came to Kim, but it meant nothing to her – surveyed the men and women seated in front of him. ‘Every such theory amounts to bullshit,’ he continued. ‘But it’s part of the human condition to give even the unknowable a rationale. By quantifying it, we give it the illusion of fitting it into some compartment of human knowledge. Yet nobody really knows how the implants work. And because they shouldn’t work, they are technically,’ he said with a broad grin, ‘an impossibility.’

Kim frowned inwardly. Wherever the knowledge she was looking for was, it wasn’t here. Yet it was proving extraordinarily difficult to extricate herself from this scene. The lecturer was now looking at her directly.

‘The reality of what the Angels were, and what their bioware itself was, or is, lies somewhere with the secret of why the universe seems so silent of communication – of those alien radio signals we once assumed were flying between star systems.’ Kim/Susan stood and walked to the door. As she glanced back at the lecturer, he seemed to be in pain now. She was sure she could see blood staining his shirt and trousers, but his other students appeared to be oblivious to his distress.

‘So why the great silence during those long, pre-Angel years when we searched the skies for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence – while all the time it was right there, beyond the orbits of Pluto and Charon? Perhaps that was because we could not share the aliens’ concept of what it means to really communicate. Kim?’

But before she could react to him addressing her by a name he should not have been using, she was already somewhere else. She was back on Earth in Susan’s private apartment – a place Kim remembered with the fondness of lost love tinged with regret.

She knew instinctively that
now
she was in the right place. She recognized instantly all the printed books, the loosely stacked ream of smartsheets, packed with information about Kasper: information about its flora and fauna; observation and speculation about the Kaspians’ civilization.

Now, crucially, she could taste that knowledge, letting it flood from the Book into her mind. Yet, at the back of her mind, she wondered what had happened earlier: at how she had experienced the illusion that something within the Book itself had spoken directly to her . . .

She looked up and caught sight of herself/Susan in the mirror. Susan’s mouth was moving, speaking silently from the reflection.

But there’s no one else here
, thought Kim, her blood freezing in her veins. She looked around, feeling panicked, then back again to the mirror. To her horror, she now saw another figure reflected in the glass. Lurking in the shadows behind her, it was the same lecturer, but his body was now horribly distorted: his skin blue and waxy, criss-crossed with dozens of scars. All his teeth were blackened and broken, and a wave of nausea flowed over her.

‘But what does it mean to truly communicate?’ the mutilated image continued, as if still addressing his class. ‘Words are not enough, for to truly communicate ideas, you must first remove the barrier of spoken language, the barrier of our different experiences. To truly communicate, you must first become the other person, to gain a full understanding of them. Without that enhancement, communication – as the Angels understood it – is impossible.’

Kim walked towards the door, too terrified to look behind her in case there really was something there. She had been under a lot of stress recently, and maybe hallucinations and make-believe were encroaching on her reality. She stepped out into a busy corridor, feeling lighter and stronger than she remembered experiencing on the homeworld. But then, as a native, Susan had no problem with the gravity.

Then she noticed a mouthful of broken teeth grinning at her from along the corridor, and the lecturer’s monstrous form came loping and dragging itself towards her. She felt nauseous, and in the real world dropped her face against the strange-smelling Kaspian soil. She became distantly aware of Elias watching her, tight-lipped and tense.

Her mind was filled again with the lecturer’s loathsome image. ‘I’ve had centuries now to study what remains in the Citadel,’ it continued unstoppably, ‘and that’s how I uncovered a tragedy. Those Books were a means for the Angels to understand each other – and other species – from a multitude of unique perspectives. The memories are not actually contained within the chemicals themselves. Instead they trigger something – not universal consciousness, not God, not anything that crude, but something for which no words exist.’

She was running now, under the great bright spaces of an arcology’s vast atrium. Arctic sunlight spilled down from above, reflecting brilliantly off distant snowfields. She swallowed her fear.
This is only a Book
, she thought,
not something real
.

She stopped, turned. It came closer. She felt her horror replaced by something more like pity mixed with revulsion. It was a man, but his injuries were so horrific it was like looking at some product of interac-generated imagery rather than anything that could be alive.

She swallowed her panic. ‘Who are you?’

‘My name is Samuel Roy Vaughn. I live in the mountains to the north.’ And suddenly she was there too, in this man’s own memories, piloting a shuttle down from the Station in the hectic weeks after the Hiatus began, filled with a sense of holy purpose, of manifest destiny.

‘We came here because some of us had been created to foresee the course of the future.’ She suddenly remembered a childhood spent with other siblings, the regular tests that were carried out, the feeling of loss when one of them would fail a test and would be gone the next morning from their sunny dormitory, never to be seen again. ‘Like Elias, my genes were altered through experimentation with Angel biotechnology. But I, more than all but one, have seen the path of the future. Please understand.’

Then a sense of desperate terror, the blood flowing in yet another suicide attempt. But the release of death never came. Feeling faint, she swayed in front of the ruined figure crouching before her, its lips obstinately unmoving even as it spoke within her. This experience was like eating a Book, but a thousand times more powerful, more full of sensations and information. How could so much information be contained in one dissolving molecular package? And then she remembered the creature’s words spoken when it had still appeared human.
It can’t, it doesn’t
.

‘I, I don’t . . .’ she faltered. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘You
do
. Accept the information. You
know
now. Before the Book fades, reach into Susan’s memories. All of her is in there. Go to the Citadel.’

I can’t
, she thought.
I won’t go back. There must be other places we could shelter from the radiation. Every nightmare I’ve suffered for ten years is in there
.

The Book was indeed fading. Awareness of the rough soil beneath her hands was becoming more vivid; she could hear the everyday sounds of the camp around her. She gagged as an ocean of knowledge poured into her mind, so vast and so deep she feared she might drown in the flood of memories and accumulated knowledge.

She was back completely in the world again. Dawn light criss-crossed the interior of their cage with stripes of dusty brilliance. It took several moments for her to realize that Elias was not there – simply no longer in the cage with her. She reached out, touched Vincent’s still form, and somehow knew, in that instant, that he was finally, truly dead. His cold skin felt like marble under her fingertips.

Elias had left her a note on a folded smartsheet lying by Vincent’s shoulder, its pixels glowing faintly in the morning light. Desperately, she willed Vincent to wake up, his head hanging loosely in her arms.

She finally let the tears come, because there was no one there to hear her, and for a little while she blamed Elias for Vincent’s death, and wished vengeance upon him.

After a while, she unfolded the smartsheet and smoothed out the creases. The words shone out at her brightly from the sheet’s tiny paper screen.

Vincent died 1 hr after you ate Book. Got him to tell me some things first. Told me more about radiation. All fits together, some, anyway. Sorry about Vincent, was nice guy. We’ll know if we won if we’re all alive next week. Elias.

She let the smartsheet fall to the ground. Vincent had been in a coma the last time she was conscious of him. Had he woken up since? How else could Vincent have told Elias anything? And then he’d died? The horrible thought that Elias had speeded his death occurred to her, and she examined Vincent’s body for any signs of injuries she hadn’t noticed already.

Finding none, she realized he had just got sicker and died. She could now see where Elias had scrabbled into the hard dirt by one corner of the cage, digging with a broken-off section of plank, and somehow doing it all without drawing attention to himself. The cool air beyond beckoned her. She wanted to be out, away from Vincent’s corpse, out amongst the living, whatever kind of creature they were. But what would she do, once she was out there? Follow Elias wherever he had gone? She wouldn’t kid herself that she possessed that kind of resourcefulness.

She wiped Elias’s message from its screen, just in case the Grid was back online. To her delight, on hitting update, she was presented with a packet that had arrived through the singularity within only the past few hours. The smartsheet had automatically updated itself meanwhile, and they had not even realized.

A plan of action began forming in her mind. But, while thinking it through, she noticed a new message alert was flashing in one corner of the smartsheet.

The message was addressed to Vincent. She’d assumed the smartsheet had belonged to Elias, but on closer examination the ’sheet was good quality, not merely designed to be used for five minutes and then thrown away. Vincent had personalized it.

The message itself was from somebody called Eddie Gabarra. The name rang a bell – some friend of Vincent’s?

She read the message, swearing occasionally at what it said. This was a day for revelations. She could hear movement outside, and wondered how long it would take their captors to realize one of them had got away. She decided not to worry about how they might react to that discovery.
Two days
. Elias was right: they only had two days, then half the existing species on Kasper – including the one that had built this cage – would very likely be wiped out.

She ran a Grid search for the information she needed, drawing the locations from Susan’s memories. Normally, the memories gleaned from a Book slipped away within hours, but after eating only the one Book, she experienced an unprecedented clarity of recall, the information it contained taking up residence in her long-term memory with no prompting. That made it hard to dismiss the dialogue she’d experienced with the – whatever it was that called itself Sam Vaughn.

Papers and studies regarding the Kaspians, information derived from those clandestine searches undertaken far from the secluded icefields of the Citadel, researchers and soldiers being dropped down in uninhabited areas under cover of night, to retrieve what they could without danger of accidental intervention. Samples of their language, too. Some of this body of knowledge, she was aware, had come from Susan herself.