IGMS Issue 49 (3 page)

I love that place. It's like my spirit-home. I picture it when I sleep, when I need to calm, to breathe. If ever there was somewhere I would go to die, it's there.

I lower myself next to Anna, on the edge of Hades, as the last of the meteors blazes across the horizon.

"They shouldn't be beautiful," she mutters. "They ruined everything, they don't get to be beautiful."

We've had this argument before. The meteors didn't show on the scopes when we entered orbit. They took out our primary oxygen garden and put two dozen holes in the bulkhead before we landed. Our terraforming timeline shrank from six years to one and a half, even with a skeleton crew and the colonists in cryo. Anna can't let it go. She can't let anything go, especially Hades.

I lean over and point to my latest constellation.

"There, like a dancing figure, her left foot just touches that spire. I named her Mytyr, the Mother. She bore all the others from her breath and skin and blood."

Anna sucks in hard, slow breaths. "I don't know why you bother."

"We need to make this
our
world. We make stories in the dark to keep us sane; to tell us who we are, why we're here, where we'll go. We need myth. History is just myth with a calendar; it's the stories that matter."

"We already have myths." She twitches one hand to the chasm before us. "Isn't that why we named Atlas and Pyrrha and Hades and all the others?"

"But myth is tied to place as much as people." My breath grows ragged in my exuberance. "We're a superstitious creature, wearing a blanket of reason over proto-human nightmares. Underneath, we still want our world to have a soul, not an echo."

Anna leans against me. "No engineer should ever talk like that. You sound like a philosophy student."

"Hey, I'm a psychologist too, remember." I try to shape the words for the feeling. "Mytyr and the others, they give me hope. That this place can be ours, that one day we won't be interlopers, we'll be a part of it."

She pulls her feet towards her and eases up into a crouch. "If you're going to keep talking like that, I'm going back inside." Her voice is too weak to deliver the joke, but at least she's moving. I catch her elbow and help her to her feet. We turn back to the colony, but I hesitate.

That canopy - my place - is two klicks west, more walking time than I have oxygen, and Anna won't get back alone. But it whispers to me. I want to brush my ungloved fingers over the lichen, bury it against my skin. Is it hard and crystalline as it looks, or soft like a moss? Anna's right; if it needs the acidic atmosphere, it probably won't survive the terraform. I'll never know.

My O2 monitor hits red.

I breathe a soft farewell to the lichen and the spires and guide Anna back to the colony doors.

We're confined to quarters before the pod's descent under the rock. Seris brooks no argument. I chew through the battery of my console reading and countersigning the fourteen-odd psych reports of our skeleton crew, and eat my dinner meal portion two hours early just for something to do.

With a shriek of metal that rings in my ears, the gears fire up. The pod shudders and groans, drilling down underneath and depositing a crumple zone of rock over the top. I try to drown it out with the sound of my breath. I can see our fragile shell swallowed into the belly of the planet, a speck within its gut, and my own gut churns, shooting sweat to my temples and palms. I override it, calling up Mozart on a disembodied piano, one key at a time.

A buzz of comms interrupts me mid-note. I flip up my wall display. Justin's face stares back, sweating and sickly pale, wide pupils all but hiding the blue of his eyes. Internal comms are restricted while we descend in case of emergencies. He must've hacked the protocols.

"What are you doing?" I use a stage whisper, like it makes any difference.

"I have to get out of here," he whispers back. "We're going to die."

"Breathe, Jus'. Deep breaths. Where would you go?"

"Five years, it's supposed to take. Spread it out, so things don't go critical. You can't change a whole planet in ten months." He grips the screen, pressing his face so close the camera can't focus.

"We've got it covered. We'll be miles underground before it starts."

"Even worse. With the reaction compressed like this, temperatures'll go haywire, you'll get earthquakes, cataclysmic storms. The pod's not built to take it, you know that."

"We can't risk the meteors in orbit, and we don't have the oxygen to wait. We'll sit it out and tunnel back up when the coast is clear. It's out of your control, Jus'." I try to keep my voice even against the image of the planet's maw grinding us to dust.

"I can't breathe in here."

"You have plenty of air. Have you eaten? Food will help."

Justin makes a face. "I hate the hydroponics grain Anna added. It's like eating dust."

"She said there was a fungus, it chews up the cell proteins. Try it as oatmeal."

Justin's face blanches even further. "It's mouldy?" he squeaks.

"It's fine, it doesn't affect people." I aim for soothing sing-song tones. "It's a symbiotic of the apple trees we brought. We just don't know how it's getting into the grain."

"Why don't they just replace the seed stock?"

"They have, twice. And the substrate. It keeps coming back."

I search for another topic to distract him. He chews his lip, peeling off a near-white layer of skin. His lips are cracked and blotchy-red from where he's done it before. He's whirling over something in his head, I can see his breathing quicken.

"I made it part of my myth, you know." My voice is too bright, it sounds false.

"What, the fungus?" He's only half listening.

"In a way." I clear my throat for a storytelling voice. "Mytyr's first son, Yllikos the wolf, still in his mother's womb, wanted all the heavens for himself, to shape as he saw fit.

"He refused to be born and instead, ate his way out from inside her. And once he was out, he kept eating, devouring every bit of her until his own belly was so big and round and heavy that it descended from the heavens and formed our planet, Azure."

Justin shifts back from the screen, his lip forgotten. I keep my relief from showing.

"In the blaze of the sun, Azure woke and rolled and stretched, and breathed Mytyr's soul back up into the sky, where she was reborn. But Yllikos was not so lucky, stuck as he was with his swollen belly. He was trapped on the south horizon, never to touch the heavens, let alone shape them. Mytyr left him there as a warning to her future children."

Justin narrows his eyes. "But why would she let him devour her in the first place? Surely a mother is stronger than her infant."

I'd wondered about that myself when I'd written it. But I have Justin's full attention now. "It's a common thread with myths; being subsumed and reborn. Maybe she wanted to give him the choice."

"And he did it anyway," Justin says with an almost-smile. I nod.

Sometimes I worry if we're a bit too much like Yllikos.

Justin's comm cuts off - Seris must have discovered the breach. I try to get him back, but she's locked it down tight. He doesn't buzz again.

I collapse into sleep before the pod reaches the end of its tunnel, half a kilometre down, and wake to the comm announcement that the terraforming catalysts have been released. Half awake, I shuffle myself to the celebrations in the mess hall, by way of Justin's quarters.

Anna's reporting to us all that she's traced the fungus to the hydroponics water supply when the first tremor crashes through. The walls groan and shudder, the floor tilts crazily. I try to keep my lunch in my stomach as the hydraulics struggle to keep us balanced. In my mind I can see great talons of stone crushing us, spearing in so the acid air can devour our skin. I blot it out, jaw clenched against the spinning in my head, smother it with blue-green twists of rock under burnt-orange, the rasp of the O2 filters, the brush of shimmering lichen.

Anna grasps my hand, her grey eyes flicking over my face, and I force myself away from the wall and nod reassurance. I shove the images down, bury them deep in my bones, and smile. This is my job, to be the calm one.

The quakes come almost every day. Some are merely terrifying, spinning the floor like a gyroscope. Others nearly cripple the colony. People are flung into walls, warps ripple across the skin of the floors. Chomsky starts a book on how big a quake will rupture the bulkheads; I don't have the guts to bet.

When the generator housing cracks, the surge takes the backup system with it. With no power or life support, we huddle in the mess hall with emergency O2 canisters and headlamps while Chomsky and Renna scramble to get us back online before our air runs out. I clutch the thumb-sized drive that holds my constellation stories, running my fingers over the access port until they're numb. There's no talk, people sit and squeeze hands, conserving air.

A shout cuts through the silence.

"You're sick! Why would you do this?" Lights flash as people turn to look. A crowd of four or five are up on their feet near the door, ringed around something on the floor. The lights move again. I glance across to Anna, but she's looking at me. So are others.

I'm supposed to handle this. It's my job. I squeeze the tension back down in my gut and stand.

"Alright, go easy on the air," I call out. I pick my way between people's limbs, and force a smile into my voice. "What's the matter?"

A fist brandishes something in my face - a blue sculpture, a waxy model of a Buddha cradling a child. Or an almost-Buddha. It's the rock formation Justin loves, that he saw six klicks from the colony. It's a perfect copy, near as I can tell. I take it and look down at Justin. His face is pinched, indignant, but he's still crouched on the floor.

"You made this?" I try to make it sound like praise.

Two of the group haul him up off the floor. "Out of the generator sealant," one says.

"While we're gasping in here," the other adds.

"They were scraps. We're not even low, there's plenty," Justin says, hunching his shoulders in. "It matched the blue of the rock."

With a snarl, one of the mob buries his fist in Justin's stomach. They throw him back to the floor and lay in, kicking and yelling and screaming. I scramble at shoulders and arms, trying to pull them off or dig them aside but it's no use. I stand back, hold out my little thumb drive and suck in as much air as I can.

"Stop or I will tase every one of you!" My voice fills the hall.

They actually hesitate, and half-turn toward me.

"Since when do you have a taser?"

"For security." Seris' voice rings out firm, backing me up. "I need people I can depend on. Each of you, separate corners, right now. We don't have the air for this."

There's a pause, a precipice. I swallow and force my hands steady, sure they're going to call my bluff. But it passes, and they skulk away to their corners. I sink down next to Justin, hoping it looks more like I'm concerned for him than that my legs have given out in relief.

He's in bad shape, but he's breathing. We wheel him to the medibay on a food trolley, headlamps cutting through the dark. I prise the model from his broken fingers so we can set them. He must have grabbed it in the fight after I dropped it. The little figure crumbles in my hands.

It takes twelve hours to get the power back.

Anna finds me later, staring at my star charts. She stills my fingers; I hadn't realised they were tracing my constellations.

"What's that?" She points to a blank spot I've ringed in red.

When the sun sets in its blaze of purple, there's a hole in the sky above us where there are no stars. A place of emptiness, a ravenous darkness.

"It's where Yllikos was meant to be, if he hadn't eaten his mother. She left the gap as a reminder."

Anna gives me a chuckle. Anything to break the strain.

I don't think that patch is anything so benign.

I can't tell if it's moving; I need better telescopes than we have, and more time. Maybe it's fleeing our presence, carving a swathe of nothing out from us. Or it might swell up around us, eat everything down to the atoms and scatter them to the wind in a few billion years. When the colony marker for each sunset strikes, I can feel it yawning above, something inside me reaches back, and I close my eyes and count a Fibonacci sequence with my breaths until I can keep my face in check.