After Mind (36 page)

Robin injected the anti-venom pen into Ceeborn’s sting, and then finished his neck with a light gauze pad. “It’s bad. But it should heal,” she said as she reached back for the box.

“Going around a star is what’s going to make a year now instead of timing the ship travelling straight,” Meg said with her hand over her pounding heart. “We learned that in class.”

Robin took a cinch sack from the box and pulled out a wrinkled, forest green Windbreaker. She covered it over Ceeborn’s shoulders.

“I know, honey, I know,” Robin said with a steady hand on Meg’s cheek. She quieted them both for their arrival, and then buckled herself into her seat.

Old codes and images on Daniel’s forward display finally aligned to his control. The gully was a vision of hell, but the ship’s external camera to the atmosphere was better, and Daniel switched the visuals of his screen to show it. The arch of a planet, enormous and rotating, finally came into frame.

It was beautifully blue. It had marbled white clouds. It had continents and whole oceans of water. It had perfect seascapes waiting for a swimmer like Ceeborn.

It was the blue crest of Earth.

Their whole terraced building was itself a massive descent craft and it fought to separate from what was left of the gyrating ship, smashing into its berth in the gully. In one jolting wave, the Earthscape was lost on their screen, but then returned with a spark.

On the screen, they saw escape pods and crafts ejecting out of the bays of the long, forced-back arms of the greater ship. Not orderly, but wildly shot. Some propelled hopelessly, streaking into unrecoverable space. Others burned on entry. They fell unsheathed through the rising friction of the atmosphere with ablative shields depleted. Then hundreds released en masse, spitting out from the tentacle doors of the seven other arms in a burning mist of hope. Only a few would survive.

Pace choked up a cough as he climbed into the seat by Robin. He drew in a deep breath to bulk up his chest. They all fought to hold their own fear.

The ship buffeted in a dead fall from orbit, careening in the worst possible turbulence. The entire dying ship corkscrewed with its arms split forward and flung back through the atmosphere. The outer mantle of the ship flared into a disintegrating sail and burned off in the hellish, sky-streaking inferno. Being eaten alive by the savagery of flames called for the pull of a trigger, but the ship was already in its dead fall.

Their descent craft could not break free from the enormous forces of the fall and was trapped within the gully of the ship. Meg cried out in horror, “We’re not supposed to be falling. The practice didn’t say we’d be falling!”

Life with water was gone; only fire remained. Ceeborn and Meg were trapped in their corner of the craft. Together, they would burn alive.

North America passed, then the Pacific Ocean below. Daniel ripped a circuit panel from his wall. He looked back at Ceeborn, all of their fright, then he hammer-fisted an
Emergency Explosives Trigger
.

A pressure wave blew the gully wide open. Thrusters exploded from the top of the craft. White-hot plasma swept the gully grounds, vaporizing remnant pools of water, and splitting the ship in two at its neckline. Their craft was freed.

They ejected, slotted out from between the gully bulkhead and the flaming, barrel-chested ship. The windows of their craft faced away from the atmospheric fire. They fell over the ocean, blind to their fate, as landing skids on the bottom of their craft extended and—

A
whoomp
was all they heard before a flash of light engulfed their screen. They felt the punch of a shock wave and passed to black. Away in the greater ship, the gully bulkhead had finally given way, and dust-thickened water was ignited by a boost of the accelerator module. An electromagnetic aurora encircled and dissipated upon the whole of the Earth.

Escape pods streaked in, some gained control, many not.

Their automated descent craft slowed over the ocean. It passed a continental landfall and descended toward the southeastern coastline of an island.

Pods continued to crash down all along the beach and coastline. Some landed safely, others scorched through the sky as uncontrolled meteors upon a quiet city.

Their landing descent craft moored in the River Derwent, just off the eastern shore of the Lower Sandy Bay on the outskirts of Hobart. Its pressurized release valves opened. Splashes of filtered, thickened water burst from the craft’s circulatory system into the river below.

Ceeborn awoke in his seat, as did Meg, Daniel, Robin, and Pace. The windows of Daniel’s screens looked down over the beach and out along the shoreline. Water flushed from beneath the craft’s hull. The craft’s airlock doors opened into the gentle lapping waves on the beach.

Ceeborn stepped out with a squint. He rubbed his hand over the gauze on his neck. He paused at the doorway, seduced by a first, deep breath of fresh, natural air. It was a pristine stretch of beach.

There were no people to greet him as he moved onto the shore. All modern buildings existed in the city beyond the sand, but no faces filled their empty streets.

Logistic officers disembarked from their own battered crafts for an impending exodus from ships to a beachhead. Larger and disparate crafts and their respective hangar doors opened as rows of 3D printed vehicles prepared to roll off and make their way onto land.

Meg exited after Ceeborn, then Daniel at his own distance. Daniel seemed content and looked around from the inland mountain peak and back to the deep-blue waterway behind them. Their recovery craft was settled and safe beneath a rolling cloud sky. They had made it by air to their distant shore, together.

*

Ceeborn and Meg stood close together on a far and secluded part of the beach. They were confident yet wary, in a new and exciting place. Ceeborn had on the green Windbreaker, but left it unfastened. A crisp breeze kept the air cool and the clouds at bay.

“How’s your neck?” Meg asked with a gentle reach. He flinched from her touch. It hurt. It had festered anew and leaked a dark spot of black through his bandage.

“It’s good,” he said. “I feel fine.” He looked over the big divide of the bay. On the other side, there was a jut of tree-covered land that looked peaceful and calm. “I’m not sure what to do. I’m not used to sleeping on dry land. I don’t know how to live in this world,” he said, looking to the far shore.

She looked, too, and smiled. “It kind of feels like there’s a thousand more places to go, doesn’t it?”

“There’s a lot of water here for me to explore,” he said as his eyes misted and he took a step back. “And I’m a really good swimmer. You know?”

“You think this is some kind of heaven, or what?” she asked.

“It can’t be heaven. There aren’t any people,” he said. He had the whole ocean and beach almost all to himself, but unlike some hapless rivulus in a tank, he didn’t want it to be so. He hated being alone. “Maybe you couldn’t have stopped me from running,” he said, “or from hurting so many people. Or, maybe if you did, none of this would have happened. Nobody would have died.” But, he didn’t want to bury her heart any further in his guilt, so he said the only thing he could. “But, you know what? It’s a good thing you’re here.”

He grasped his neck with his hand. His pain was intolerable. “Maybe we can go to all those thousand places together someday?” he said with a failing smile, then turned away, his eyes filling with tears.

“Where are you going?” she asked. “Please don’t. You know you’ll miss me if you go.”

He tried to come back to her, but couldn’t untangle the swirls in his mind. “You know if I was a bio-machine with a brain a thousand times more powerful than my own, maybe I could figure all this out,” he said, “but I’m not that machine. I’m me. I’m the me that you used to watch from up in the morgue.” He turned and left her once more. “But now that we’ve arrived, I need to figure out for myself . . . who that me really is.” He tipped back on his heels, turned in the sand, and hurried away down the shore.

“So then what?” she asked, lifting up to her toes. “What do we do once you’re you?”

“We stay here and settle the planet,” he said, turning back with the bravest of grins. “What else? You’ve captured my soul, what can I say?”

Far behind her, piles of supplies were unloaded onto the beach for the rows of vehicles to haul inland. Shoreline camps were being constructed from tilt-up panels. Wrecked craft were being cleared from the shore.

“Meg?” Robin called. She heard her mother and turned.

Robin was back at the doors of their craft. She was helping Pace step out onto the beach. He wavered for balance at the hatch and wiped an embarrassing black run from his nose. He found his step and recovered in Robin’s hold. His posture improved with Meg’s approach.

But Meg didn’t get far. She heard a cry. She turned back and looked. Ceeborn was also stopped in his tracks as was everyone else emerging from their downed crafts along the beach. Everyone looked up toward the sky.

A seagull flew overhead.

It rose up free in the gentle thermals of a warming breeze.

Ceeborn glanced at Meg beneath the gull’s swirl. She saw it, too. But then they both saw something else. Something moved between them on the beach. It was small and dark, and it moved away from the tide. From a distance, it looked like a fish, but then it couldn’t be, not so far from the curl of the waves.

Meg started to run toward the moving creature on the sand. The seagull circled around and dove. Its wings spiked as it dropped, having zeroed in on the dark spot on the sand.

It was the rivulus, scurrying. It dashed on its fins back for the safety of the water.

Ceeborn closed in as he ran for it too. The seagull swooped with a caw and Meg ducked the flap of its wings. But with the seagull’s hop from the sand back up to flight, the spot on the beach was gone. Ceeborn watched the seagull soar. He stood on the sand in wonderment, then looked down at the edge of a wave on the beach. “It made it in a craft,” he said of the rivulus. “It lived.”

Meg stopped for a breath before him. Then she turned and looked wistfully up the long shore, at the crashed crafts, and their fewer people emerging. Then she knew. “My father,” she said as she held her hand over her pounding heart.

More pods streaked across the distant sky as they found their way in.

Ceeborn counted them in and knew what it meant, too.

“He got the doors opened,” Meg said, and cried. “My father got them all open.”

TWENTY-TWO

I FOUND SOMETHING

C
EEBORN SWAM THROUGH the clear earthen water of the bay with a trailing mist of red seeping from his neck. He tucked his head into his shoulder as he swam to relieve his sores and stiffness.

He opened his eyes in a haze, a waking confusion. He had lain down on the beach and dreamed. Meg was kneeling over him. She spoke as he woke, continuing as though he hadn’t gotten far, or had never left. “I found something,” she said.

“Your father?” he asked.

“No, not yet,” she said. “But I’ll keep looking. Come on. I found something you ought to see.”

Pace had recovered a healthier complexion and was riding in circles on a bicycle in the street. There was no moving traffic on the roads, no people to be found. Pace had no problem balancing, as his red and blue stripes on his suit attested.

Meg led Ceeborn into a bicycle shop on a corner of a street. He marveled at the selection of equipment hanging from the racks. One suspended bike in particular caught his attention. The knobs of its back wheel gave it a nice deep traction and a free-sounding spin. The colors and lettering on its frame suited his taste. It was a graphite-and-white Rockhopper XPS bicycle.

They emerged from the shop together, pushing two bikes toward Pace in his circles. They tried and tried again to ride their new and strange two-wheeled apparatus through the streets of an abandoned town.

“A bike without a rider falls down,” Meg said and laughed as Ceeborn got back up.

Yellow wattlebirds in trees whistled in a loud harmony of mockery,
“LookatCee. LookatCee. LookatCee.”

“We should go,” Meg said as she dismounted from her white Trailhead bike to give him a hand. “People say it’s safe to go up to the mountain and look around. We should go, too.”

The grid of the city’s empty towers gave way to single homes that were aligned like fingers up the mountain’s foothills.

Meg pushed her bike alongside Ceeborn’s up the hill of a drive.

“Where are all the people who built these buildings? Who lives in them?” he asked.

She smiled. It was easy. “Maps don’t have people.”

“We’re not in a map.”

“Maybe they all ran away.”

“Maybe they all died?”

“You think they’re all in cabinets in the sky?”

“No, not here,” he said as he glanced up to see. “This is a real sky.”

She stopped to rest before the end of the tree-lined neighborhood turned to forest, and lay her bike on the front yard of a home. He did the same with his, and then pushed open the home’s gate with its scripted numerals of 448.

He walked through the small, wood-paneled home. There was a boy’s bedroom that was simple and nice. It had a few interesting toys, though its shelves were mostly bare. Meg called from the living room.

“They look like us,” she said, standing at the fireplace. She was hunched over a device. It was a clear piece of tablet screen that she held up to a window’s light. The sun gave it power. “There’s a show on here. It’s us,” she said as Ceeborn looked through its flexible pane.

It was an image of the two of them together in a craft. They were sitting, she was in his embrace, and a window of a sky with clouds was behind them. Meg touched her finger across her smile within the frame. Their screen image shifted away, and a single word remained:
“Passcode.”

“Put it down,” he said. “It’s a Chokebot’s screen. It must have seen us when we came in. Put it down.” He felt dizzy, confused. She reached for his arm.

“Let’s go,” she said.

He stumbled backward over a stack of boxes and fell to the floor. “Those boxes weren’t here when we came in,” he said.