No Life But This (29 page)

‘That’s not fair,’
Dr Zellwegger said. ‘I did have theories of cellular maintenance. I told you it was a long shot when I invited you. I didn’t lie.’

‘You didn’t tell the whole truth, either,’ Quin said. ‘Who told you to invite us up here?’

Ted looked confused. ‘I don’t know. Everyone. No one. It was just … general scientific consensus. Anyone who had ever worked with anyone who’d worked with the EPs said to bring
you here. The entire team down on the
Minos
…’ He stopped, pondering. ‘It’s a protocol,’ he realized. He stood up in a flurry and went to a wall screen by the lift of the hydrobay.

‘What are you …’

‘Shh!’ Ted said, and he started drawing open files, dismissing them, and then drawing others. Then he grunted. ‘Dad, do you still know the old passkeys?’

‘They might have changed,’ Xavier said, and
he stood up to go to the screen. Between the two of them, the next five minutes were hushed and expectant on our side of the bay, and hurried and confused on theirs. ‘There!’ Xavier said suddenly. He stood back and pointed. ‘There it is.’

‘We found it,’ Ted said. ‘Down in the original code for stage seven of the Europa Project. That’s you,’ he added to Quin and I. ‘It would have permeated the
conversation, how every discussion was framed, from the very beginning. By the time I joined this project, it would have just been consensus, no reason or source even needed. I must have picked it up unconsciously. But here it is. Ultimate goal is reunification upon the moon proper. But in the same protocol, it specifically says you are to be raised on Earth.’

I nodded, and told Quin what to
say. ‘Because an ambassador has to know both cultures. Somebody, somewhere, knew something.’

Dr Zellwegger shrugged, looking lost. ‘I’d say that I’m sorry, but I don’t know why I should be. Maybe I did just swallow a conversational undercurrent, but I wasn’t lying. I did think my cellular maintenance might help.’

‘It might have,’ Rose said. ‘Otto is better now because of something similar.’

‘That’s all right, Ted,’ Quin said with jocular familiarity. ‘No one’s going to blame you for jumping on a bandwagon, or being an idiot.’

‘God help the moon if you’re her ambassador, Quin,’ Ted said.

‘He’s not. Otto is,’ Rose said firmly. ‘Otto?’

I looked down, feeling shy, then pointed the proper paragraph out to Quin on his screen.

‘Right,’ Quin said, and he stood up. ‘The moon of Europa
formally requests the cessation of hostilities, and the end of the genocide.’

‘This is ridiculous,’ Captain Jagan snapped. ‘These children are claiming to talk to amoebae!’

‘Billions of amoebae,’ Quin said. ‘Or rather, a single being. Otto was very clear about this. It exists. It’s real.’

‘I refuse to listen to this absurdity.’

I sighed. I’d known it would come to this. I’d already tried it
with Quin and with Rose. It had made Rose cry. It made Quin kneel with his hand in the water as if trying to reach his own mother, until I feared he’d get frostbite in his hand. I took hold of Captain Jagan’s hand with a small smile of reassurance. I no longer feared touching him, or anyone. Everyone was very small now that I knew the
I
. Jagan was very small indeed. He was very like his son –
nothing seemed to really matter, and everything belonged to him. I led him to the water, and reached down to introduce them.

HELLO!!!!!!

That had become the
I
’s favourite word, a grasping, searching call for attention, which hit Captain Jagan as if he’d just been shot. He snatched his hand out of mine as if I’d electrocuted him – which in a way I had.

‘
She’s still learning not to shout
,’ I
signed for Quin to translate. ‘
If anyone else wants proof?’
I offered myself to them, each and every one of them, as ambassador and translator and avatar for the goddess.

It was a long meeting.

I wasn’t the same anymore. It was very clear to everyone. I didn’t notice much difference, personally. The change was too subtle for my consciousness to be affected. My subconscious, however … that had
changed dramatically.

I was more like Rose now. But rather than a hundred years of dreams, I had touched a million years of another consciousness. I kept having insights into how things worked, and what people were thinking – whether I was touching them or not. It wasn’t prophecy or clairvoyance. It was just a million years of deep, strange, thought, revolving around
oneness
. I saw people not
as individuals, now, but as part of a whole, a moving cell inside the single being of a society. People were, on the whole, interchangeable. It didn’t make them any less precious, but it did blur them together in my mind. They were all just people. This made everyone very predictable.

I needed Quin. He was the voice to the people – and I was the voice of the
I
. Xavier instantly called for a moratorium
on all harvesting. The captains were in an uproar – the entire economy of Europa and much of the colonies was based on the harvesting of the Europan plankton. Colonial economics shut down overnight, and for three tense days, everyone wondered if the colonies would slowly starve.

It was true, the
I
was being over-harvested, and dying. But there was no need to stop all harvesting forever. I made
sure that was communicated clearly. The
I
needed time to heal – a year, I thought, should do it, but I would monitor its progress. After that, harvesting could resume, slowly, presuming we paid for and replenished what we took. After all, we, as human beings, would not be opposed to selling cuttings of our hair if someone needed it, and the
I
felt much the same about its surplus cell base. And
we could pay for it – because what the plankton needed to thrive was something we could supply.

The plankton could not survive without heat. This was why it followed the veins of geothermal fissures in the ocean floor. Our ability to create heat through NeoFusion and hydrogen made us, in essence, a plankton farm. If we were to supply extra heat, and thus allow the
I
to breed faster, there would
be ample plankton for our needs, as well as the
I
’s. Between Quin and myself, we managed to negotiate this truce. This pleased the harvesters – though there were more problems on the social structure of the moon than could be solved by fixing this ecological crisis.

Mr Zellwegger was put to work there, and he was busy. I didn’t even understand most of it. Quin gave up after two days and handed
negotiations over to the headmen. He retreated to Crystal Village and helped organize the people and the Plastines into repairs. Sometimes he was called on to explain a compromise to the people. He also translated for me – and there was a lot I had to relay for him to translate. Everyone wanted to understand the
I
, and I couldn’t sacrifice myself twenty-four hours a day for all of them. The
I
was a goddess, and I was the ambassador to a goddess, and Quin was the voice for everyone, myself and the people of Europa and the people of Earth. He made a charismatic and devoted figurehead. Like 42 used to do, he stood for me, and before me. His anger had faded to a mild roar. His sarcasm, much to everyone’s chagrin, had not.

He went with Rose and I to Rahul’s funeral. The less said about
that the better.

Which left only me and Rose to sort out.

Rose seemed different to me after I first woke up from my understanding of the
I
. I loved her just as much, but she had grown small, human. There were things in my mind that she could never understand … and frankly, they hurt her.

No one else would – could – sense it. If I touched someone they noticed no difference in my communication.
Maybe it was a little more clear to some people – like Quin, and the harvesters – but it was basically the same as it had always been.

To Rose, however, I had expanded. She had grown used to sensing just about everything I thought, her intuition and subconscious more powerful than anything I had ever experienced. Now, she was young, and small, and limited. She was sweet and charming and talented
and I adored her. But there was a part of me that was now beyond her … and she found it as frightening as I had at first found the vast, echoing, thorny gardens of her mind.

We couldn’t share our dreams anymore. She would wake up screaming from a sense of falling, or drowning, and there was nothing I could do to prevent it. I could keep secrets from her now. There were places in my mind she couldn’t
reach and couldn’t see, no matter how much she wanted to. There was one secret I kept hidden from her for as long as I could, until a message from Earth finally forced my hand.

We were in her room after dinner. Rose was smiling as she turned the message on. We’d been too busy to really check our messages from Earth, and this was the first time she’d gotten a chance in nearly two weeks on Europa.
I’d been waiting for messages from my sisters – I was hoping Tristan, at least, would be interested in coming to Europa. I was a little afraid that one day she’d need the
I
as much as I did, and frankly I could have used the help, if she could have learned how. It was hard being the only messenger. But this message was from Bren, and Rose opened it first. It was addressed to both of us.

‘I just
got your message this morning,’ Bren said on the screen ‘You can’t believe how glad I am to hear Otto’s going to be okay. It really takes a load off my mind. Which is good, because we have plenty else to deal with down here. Rose? I need to tell you something that I haven’t been telling you for the last three months. I hope you’re sitting down, Rose. They think we’ve found your sister Sarah.’

Rose’s face went white and she gripped the edge of the desk.

‘I didn’t want to say anything, because they weren’t sure at first, and … well. Frankly, she’s not well. They told Dad because you and Granddad were in stasis, and he’s been overseeing the revival. It took them weeks to get her out of stasis. They weren’t sure if there was anything left of her. At first she was just a vegetable, and
Dad decided not to tell you. Now they think her brain might be okay, or at least … well, there’s something there. But she has a hard time staying conscious. It’s not a coma, it’s like … she just goes back into stasis by herself sometimes. Without the tube. She speaks a little, but she doesn’t make much sense, and of course she doesn’t know anyone. But Rose, she’s mentioned you. Her little sister,
she says. They think seeing you, knowing you, would help her stay connected to the world.

‘There’s other things, too. Her revival is messing up UniCorp. Technically, Rose, she’s older than you, so … she owns the company. They’re trying to take it away from you. We’re ending up with factions, it’s brewing into a showdown. The ones who back Sarah mostly want her because she’s helpless. If they
win, she’ll be trapped. Mom and Dad are trying to protect her, but they don’t actually have any legal claim. You do. We need your help.

‘In other words, we need you back here, quick. I didn’t want to tell you until we were sure Otto would be okay. But we need you back as soon as possible.

‘Before you ask, we didn’t find any sign of your brother. There was another stass tube beneath the townhouse
where we found your sister, but it was empty. It was emptied decades ago. We don’t know what happened there.

‘Come back quick, Rose. Sarah needs you, and … well, I actually miss you, which is weird. Mom misses you. And Dizzy – come here, boy!’ Bren patted his lap and Rose’s fluffy Afghan dog poked his nose into view on the screen, licking Bren’s face. Bren pushed him away again, ruffling his
ears. ‘Let us know. Dad sent a message to Granddad this morning, but I asked to be the one to tell you. We all miss you both. Hope to see you as soon as we can.’ Bren opened his mouth to say something else, and then stopped. ‘Take care,’ he said, but I could tell it wasn’t what he’d meant to say.

The message flicked out.

Rose was white and still. But there was nothing odd in that. She had been
growing more habitually still for the last two weeks. She found it hard to coordinate her muscles in the uncertain gravity. Though her rooms had grav-mats, they were never exact, and her body was sensitive enough to feel it.

I sighed. I hadn’t wanted to do this yet. I wanted to draw it out, work on Rose’s mind, make it less of a shock. But maybe a clean break was better, anyway. It would certainly
be easier on Rose – physically, at least.

I put my hand on the back of her neck.
‘You should go.’

Rose started, suddenly becoming animated again. ‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s not important.’

She was lying, and we both knew it.
‘She’s your sister.
’

‘So? Annie will take care of her, Bren’s mom is good at that. I can send her messages, I can …’ Tears were starting in her eyes. ‘It’s not like she’d know
me, anyway. I was only six the last time she saw me.’

I folded her into my arms and kissed her eyes, kissing away the tears. ‘
Rose, you have to go. It wouldn’t have mattered, anyway. This has only hastened the inevitable.’

‘What are you talking about?’ Rose said. She did not want to admit it.

I held her warmly for a moment before I turned her around. With my arms still embracing her I directed
her attention to the full-length mirror on the wall. ‘Look at yourself, my Briar Rose,’ I whispered into her ear. ‘What do you see?’

‘You,’ she said. ‘And me. Together. Like it should be.’

‘Look again,’ I whispered.

She didn’t want to see it, but I quietly directed her attention. She was very, very good at not thinking about things she didn’t want to think about. She had been avoiding this
since the first day she landed on Europa.

Rose looked terrible. I had grown healthier since my introduction to the
I
, and with repeated exposure, daily contact, there were no more symptoms. I had found the cure – or at least continual treatment – for the ‘there shouldn’t be anything wrong’ that had been killing me. Apart from beginning to develop chilblains in my hands from the ice-water – and
Dr Zellwegger was working on a heated tank to prevent that – Europa had made me better.