Transcendence (27 page)

A gang of young boys began to mock him. “
Ryukure, ryukure, ryukure
,” they chanted: “Retro, retro, retro.”

He simply looked at them, puzzled. Why were they so bothered by his watching for whales? Surely, they must be interested in whales, as well. One had been sighted nearby only a month ago, surely they had heard that. Nothing could possibly compare to seeing a whale. That would be real magic.

“
Do you want to swim,
ryukure
?” the oldest boy asked. Young Miru wasn’t interested in the boy, so he didn’t splice in to the island’s net and find out his name; he’d had the misfortune to encounter these boys often enough to recognize them without names.

“
He’s a dumbcard,” one of the others said. They laughed. Didn’t they have school to occupy them?

“
Teach him to swim!” another shouted. They laughed harder.

Miru stared at them; no one looked into his eyes. They were like his father: They were elsewhere. So why did they pay him so much attention? He had grown to like being alone, and any attention he might desire would certainly not be this.

“
I’ll grab him!”

The largest boy—the one who spoke first—approached Miru.

Miru looked down at the waves slapping against the sides of the island and rising partway up. Far below, perhaps eighty meters beneath the beneathline, the bottom of the island would be bobbing slightly. Fish swam down there, and maybe whales.

Miru turned back to his assailants. He was tired of their inane games. He would not let them stir up his mind again, as they had so often in so many minute ways that haunted and heated him for days afterward.

He clenched his little fist and swung it as hard as he could against the cheek of the big boy. Without hesitation, he faced the water again, crawled atop the cool, slick railing, and jumped.

Whoosh, the water slapped his feet and, a moment later, rushed in over his head. It felt cool against his skin, not cold. He heard muted sounds like the recordings of whales, and also mechanical noises. Down here all was peaceful. He had not known any place could be so peaceful. So much space surrounded him, and nowhere could he see a person. He couldn’t decide if it was worse when his fellow humans ignored him or when they paid him stupid attention, like the gang.

He thought how nice it would be to breathe water; maybe he could be like the mythical creatures who were half-man and half fish. He never again wanted to be among people. He didn’t like them a bit. Perhaps, someday, they would realize how stupid they were. But, until then, he would be alone beneath the waves where they couldn’t come. This would be his private world.

Of course, not much time passed before suffocation forced him to resurface and re-enter the island by one of the platform locks that constantly rose above and fell below the waves. He stumbled there for a moment, skinning his shins and forearms against the plastic gratings, but managed to get into the waterlock.

Two years later, he took his schooling underwater. His father had given him for his thirteenth birthday the osmosuit that allowed him to breathe oxygen taken from the water. He became the mythical fish-man. This was his magic.

Soon these childhood memories gathered so thickly before Miru that swimming through them was like swimming through molten metal. He turned away from the memory of when Seeli laughed at his feeble attempt to court her. He struggled to avoid seeing the bloated, floating body of his father on the foamy waves or the sunken face of his mother. But he couldn’t help seeing her. She looked like that for years, an everpresent countenance in the channel of his life. She looked as if hers had been the face in the war scene.

He earned his youth diploma and began taking professional training feed. The swimming grew easier, as if here was little to remember.
Odd
, he thought, since he had learned so much about so many things during this time. Miru had been unable to specialize, unlike most people in his society, because so much interested him. He earned partial certificates in physics, astronomy, geology, paleobiology, and cosmology.

After years of this, NKK’s Hososuru put a stop to this behavior by granting his certificate in General Science and Physics, Extraterrestrial. So NKK Mikazuki—the corp’s main Lunar facility—hired him and booked him passage to the Moon aboard a cargo vessel.

During the two years he worked at NKK Mikazuki, the only projects he refused to work on were those directly related to the military. He thought,
If I am to dedicate myself to any one thing, that will be peace among all people, NKK and EarthCo alike
. Gradually, even that dream faded as he watched his superiors purge troublemakers out of airlocks onto the harsh surface of the Moon—without suits. No, these people would never be capable of creating lasting peace or performing worthwhile work.

His dream shifted: Only the future held any worth, because there lay hope for changed men. He would do everything in his power to advance knowledge so the people who lived in tomorrow could build a worthwhile life.

When the newly formed TritonCo Division’s recruiters showed up in his section’s meeting hall, he signed on immediately. He and Jon Pang met in that hall, two young men from different sections, but both men who held a similar vision for the future. Miru was struck with the man’s calmness and warm smile. He seemed to be the only real person in the underground vessels.

The following years of hard labor on Triton—assembling Jiru City and establishing a mining and research community—were the best years of Miru’s life. Out on the unforgiving Tritonian frontier, he ran servines from a seat cased in frigid metal mesh, working 3VRD controls to lift and move environmental pressure-vessels and seal units; he pumped thousands of liters of sealant into leaks by hand using spray-units that froze up half the time in the icy moon’s near-absolute-zero weather; he slept thousands of Earth-days in sweaty pressure suits because the environmental vessels were untrustworthy. . . . But he had discovered a kindred soul, and he had found work that helped build the future of his vision.

He swam languidly through these years, taking great pleasure in their rewards as well as their trials. In the Labor Uprising of 2190, Earth contract-workers—convicts reducing their stasis-time in hopes of coming out of their feed sane or at least not highly neurotic—assaulted TritonCo’s ganglia; even these dark days held a touch of nostalgia. When he saw the laborers afterward, their scalps ruptured when President Dorei had regained control of the computers, Miru hurried along. He had seen enough damaged faces in his life.

The apex of this high-water mark in his life was the discovery of the object. He had begun to dream dreams once only reserved for the future. He realized that the magic of wonder could belong to today, as long as it was connected to the future, that dreams could be more than abstract goals—they could be realized.

Then the EarthCo warship
Bounty
entered his memories. And then his existence went dark again.

“
Director Miru?” Janus asked again, using the pod’s transmitter. “Do you feed?”

She, Jackson, and Eyes were strapped in their acceleration couches aboard
Bounty
’s cramped escape pod. It enclosed them like a clamshell, low and curved and windowless. Its unused air scrubbers still smelled of new rubber and fresh oil. An inset ring of soft white light encircled the two-meter-diameter cabin, casting shadowless illumination at eye-level.

Janus had first canceled the spin, and now the main ship’s aft retros all fired simultaneously, emptying the tanks in deceleration, using up the wreck before discarding it. They produced a thrust of less than 0.2
g
, but every bit of energy she could squeeze out of the
Bounty
meant that much less would be required of the pod. This way, they just might be able to shed enough speed to land.

“
TritonCo, this is Janus Librarse of the EarthCo
Bounty
. We have placed the errant bombardier of our ship under custody for his malicious act against you. He acted against our orders, repeat, against our orders. We surrender our craft and ourselves to your mercy. Do you feed?”

The retros shook the ship with their fluttering howls. The comm line in Janus’ splice showed nothing. Again she saw images of murder, as she did every second she had free to think about Eyes: the trap he laid for her, the bomb he dropped on the artifact.

“
I promise,” she commed direct to Eyes only, “if that bomb of yours destroyed the alien artifact, you will die as slowly and as creatively as I can manage.”

As vulgar a place as it was, his headcard seemed to beckon her. If only I can get in there and scramble things a bit. . . .

She finally overcame her revulsion—hate and revenge overpowering queasiness—and pried open the virtual vault into his card.

A circus. He had planted a circus as gatekeeper to his mind. Mutants and clowns took notice across a dusty path and began crossing toward her. Canvas tents in every color of the spectrum rose behind them, screams and laughter, noises of machinery and people, all behind a wood-plank wall plastered with posters she couldn’t quite read from this distance. Something seemed wrong about the circus. She realized what it was: The clowns and mutants all wore masks of evil, and the voices from behind the wall were not those of people having fun. Rather, they sounded as if they were hysterical with fear; perhaps they were mere lunatics. The sky flickered electric blue.

She pulled out before the clowns reached her. For a moment, Janus’ hatred of Eyes changed to loathing and terror, and maybe something akin to pity. Then she hardened herself. Here was a man—a thing—unfit to live among humans. It had done the unforgivable. It could not be human. It was an incarnation of evil.

The retros began to shudder and pop. One after one, they burned out as the last whiffs from the oxygen tanks were sucked through the pulsepumps.

“
Prepare to disengage,” she said, purpose reassuring her. When all was quiet, the computer blew twelve connectors between the vessels and ignited the pod’s main rocket.

Now the globe of the
Bounty
split into two hemispheres as first red and then blue fire pried them apart. A small saucer-shaped section that had been the ship’s fore dome fell farther and farther back from the battered hulk hurtling toward the little moon.

“
I’ve programmed the burn for four minutes at 1
g
,” she said, unstrapping and rising from her couch. She had to bend her neck to stand.

“
That’s when we should reach Triton’s atmosphere. The air’s pretty tenuous, but it ought to help slow us down.” She turned from Jackson, who sat silent with a pained, unreadable expression on his face, and looked down at Eyes on his couch beside hers.

“
We take three passes through the atmosphere,” Janus continued, stretching her shoulders, “firing the rocket again between each pass.”

A brief pulse of adrenaline rushed into her bloodstream and she brought down her right fist as hard as she could against the cyborg’s mechanical eye. The eyelid closed automatically just before impact.

“
Janus,” Jackson scolded softly, “don’t make yourself like him.”

She looked at Jackson again, and all her hatred dissipated. He showed more pain now than ever. It hurt her to see him like that. She realized fully, for the first time in all these months, that she had grown to truly care about him.

“
Oh, Jack,” she said, sitting back down and rubbing her sore knuckles, “what are we going to do?”

You bitch, you chant inside over and over so you don’t give away that you can hear and see every fucking thing. You fatherfucking bitch. Just wait.

Once she lands you safely, you’ll show her a thing or two. You’ll take her into your cerebral circus. You’ll see just how much she can take before she shatters.

And she will shatter. You’ve seen it happen before. You’ve done it before.

But you must wait, must. Don’t let the quiet emptiness start to run you down. Don’t let them know. Go back to the circus and wait. Make some preparations. She’ll come back.

You’ll be there to greet her.

The needleship
Sigwa
, an A-class destroyer fitted with battle-coordination equipment, hung far above the stations and shadow-shrouded cloud-tops of Neptune. It stretched nearly 280 meters from pointed prow to gaping nozzle stern, yet the hull was at no point wider than ten meters. Dozens of oval-shaped plates circumfering amidships lay flush with the destroyer’s skin, ready to surge outward on hydraulic stalks and fire forward or aftward their cartridges of missiles and torpedoes. No view- or cannon ports showed, for it had none. From a station’s pov, the hull facing Neptune looked as black and starry as space, and the other side of the hull mimicked the world’s nighttime coloration. No visible and very few high-wavelength BWs could be used to detect it, because its smartcamo made it “look” like whatever lay beyond; for all practical purposes, the
Sigwa
was invisible. In addition, the bulk of the world hid it from view of the inner planets.