Paradox (4 page)

She walks.

Once, she thinks she hears a grinding sound in the distance, and she freezes in momentary panic. She thinks again of that roaring mouth, the horrible flash of brown lumpy body.
No. It wasn’t real
. She settles the pack more firmly on her shoulders and walks on—

and on—

and on.

Minutes and hours fly away, but the crater’s edge seems no nearer; only the constantly changing numbers on her circlet give her any sense of time and progress. And the lonely rocket, shrinking away behind her. Ana keeps her eyes on the distant crop of boulders, like her feet are on the imaginary dotted line, and trudges on.

Then, up ahead, something catches her eye. It’s a sort of twinkling,
like speckled sunlight on a waterfall
, she thinks.
Like hundreds of tiny liquid mirrors
. Whatever it is, it’s long and thin like a sheer scarf suspended in the air and carried along by the wind. Ana tries to go around it, but the backpack makes her clumsy, and for a second it’s all she can do to keep her balance, and then—

Sssssssssss

The glittering strand of light slides over her body and covers her like the spray of a hot shower, like comfort, like coming home. She falls over some invisible edge and—

What a crazy, crazy day … it’s gone by in a flash and my to-do list is longer than it was this morning. I’m bone-weary. Pushing up the white sleeve of my lab coat, I check my watch. Five forty-five! Already?

I can’t wait to head home. Tonight is the last game of the playoffs, and Brian will be waiting. We said six o’clock for pizza, but I’ll have to put him off until seven. At the earliest
.

My eyes drift from my watch to my wedding ring—it still looks weird to see it there. I wonder if one day I’ll be so used to it that I won’t even notice. No way. It’s too perfect. Like my life. Except for all this prion madness, of course; but we’re so close now to figuring it out, and even if the worst happens … No. I won’t let myself think of that. I just need to finish up here and get home
.

The phone rings, and I snap back into work mode. I’ll call Brian later, just as soon as I get a second to catch my breath. Scribbling a reminder on a yellow sticky note with my right hand, I grab the phone with my left
.

“Yeah?”

“Bailey, what’s keeping you?” It’s Jackson, of course. “We haven’t gotten the readouts yet. Are we getting any insight from the PX37 trials? Talk to me!”

Talk to him? Right, if he’d just shut up for a second. “Listen, Jackson, it’s next on my list. I’m working on all cylinders here, but Tang is out with the flu and it’s just me.”

Jackson is silent for a moment
.

“The flu?”

“That’s all it is,” I say. “Doctor’s sworn statement. Tang will be back in tomorrow.”

“Forget it,” Jackson says. “Let him go. It’s not worth the risk.”

“But—”

“Damn it, Bailey, you of all people know what’s at stake here! You wrote the report! Get rid of Tang and get me the information. I’m sending over some new tests that need to be run, too. Anticipation sensors and modulation adjustments. We have to figure out what’s out of place.”

“But I—”

“Readouts, on my desk. I need you on this for as long as it takes.”

And he’s gone, leaving me glaring down at the receiver like I could vaporize it with a look. I groan, lean my head forward, and hide behind my hair for just a second. So much for the playoffs and pizza with Brian. I reach over to hang up the phone—

Gasping, Ana finds herself facedown on the ground, her cheek pressing against the hard-packed dirt, pinned by her backpack’s heavy weight. She struggles to a sitting position, rubbing her cheek and feeling the fine imprint of the rocky soil on her skin.

What just happened?

Wincing at a throbbing pain in her temples, she turns and looks behind her. The gossamer strand of light is twisting away, but it seems smaller now, and fainter. As she watches, one little mirror at a time blows away like dandelion puffs on the wind until soon there’s nothing left.

Nothing but the memory of what she saw.

Ana looks at her hands, the sleeve of her coarse gray jumpsuit, and her tan fingers, plain and unadorned, and sees again the creamy skin from the vision and the shimmer of the diamond ring as she turned it from side to side. There were yellow curls tumbling over her shoulders … Ana reaches up and touches short-cropped hair along her scalp, shorter than the length of her fingers, so short she doesn’t even know what color it is.

But she’s almost sure it’s not blond.

The experience she just dropped into, or lived, or whatever that was—it felt as real to her as everything she’s felt since leaving the rocket. It’s rock solid. And yet …

That wasn’t me. I could swear to it
.

But then who was it?

Maybe there is a settlement somewhere on this planet, and some trick of the atmosphere is projecting these strands out into space. But strands of what … experience? Memory? Mental projection?

Or maybe the real Bailey lived somewhere millions of light-years away; maybe that strand came the way of the stars, toppling head over tail to land on her through some quirk of time and space.

Ana has no way of knowing. And somehow, she is not entirely sure that she
wants
to know. For now, this experience is hers, and she hangs it in the empty closet of her mind like a memory of her very own, like the first fancy dress in a wardrobe she thought might be empty forever.

As she gets to her feet and walks on, she thinks about how
real those moments felt—even more real, somehow, than her present. There’s an ache inside her, a longing for the fullness of Bailey’s world, however briefly visited.

Jackson
, she thinks, scowling. And
Brian
, with a smile for her own bare fingers. She replays the scenario over and over, the thoughts keeping her company in the emptiness of her own mind as the minutes tick away.

At long last she approaches the crater wall. Looking at her circlet, she sees it’s been two hours since she left the rocket. The overhead sun is pretty much in the same position as when she first started out, while the brighter sun has fully risen and is inching upward into the sky.

Inside her jumpsuit, Ana’s body is slippery with sweat. She pauses to let the wind cool her down as she considers the cliff wall. It towers above her, at least twenty-five feet high. She notices herself gauging the crevices and footholds scattered across the rock face—apparently, she has some familiarity with rock climbing—but those spots are few and far between. The thought doesn’t trouble her; instead she feels a quickening of excitement in her chest at the prospect of the climb.

Interesting.

Ana shrugs off her pack and lays it flat on the ground. The pack has a wide buckle on the front, and when she unlatches it, the whole thing unfolds into a T-shape, the heavy nylon frame bulging with pockets. Each compartment is labeled:
CLIMBING GEAR. BEDROLL. INFLATABLE RAFT. FIRST AID. VITALS
.

She opens
VITALS
to find packets upon packets of food:
macaroni-and-cheese; butter wafers; desiccated goat cheese; dried tropical fruit mix. There’s a large squishy tube that must be a collapsed water bottle. But where will she find water to fill it?

The thought makes her throat burn. Then she sees a pocket labeled
WATER
. Inside are hundreds of pill packets. She pulls out a handful. The packaging is plain silver, unlabeled except for a small ID number in the corner of each packet. She juggles the packets in her hand for a moment and then thinks,
Why not?
If she doesn’t have water, she’s dead anyway. It’s worth a try.

She punches out a tablet no bigger than her thumbnail and pops it into her mouth.

At first there’s nothing. Then she feels a fizzing on her tongue, then
—ooooh
, it’s like a fountain opens inside her mouth … a fountain of stale, artificial water, true, but for this second it’s the best thing she’s ever tasted. And it’s just enough; it fills her mouth but doesn’t overflow. She puffs her cheeks a little to hold it all in, swirls it around inside her mouth, and then swallows.

Dried water
, she muses. Maybe the Ana she can’t remember would see this as an everyday occurrence. Maybe that Ana turned on a faucet and little white pills came tumbling out into her cup. Somehow, she doesn’t think so. But right now they are just what she needs, and that’s more than good enough.

She sits and leans back against the crater wall, thinking it’s probably a good idea to rest a moment, countdown or not.
She could use some time to really study the map, figure out how she’s going to travel all that distance, think through a better plan than the slapdash thrown-together one she has now, which is nothing more than:
Don’t think. Keep moving!

Make a plan, then follow it through. In some deep core of herself, Ana knows that’s how she works best. She can even see the quick flash of a ballpoint pen scribbling
Things to Do
on a fresh sheet of lined paper, another non-memory gusting around in her sinkhole of a mind. So, planning. And recharging.

Then she hears it.

The sound is faint at first, like something on the edge of her imagination, but that
MRRROOOOAR
is not something that can be mistaken for anything else. In a second Ana is on her feet, hand over her eyes to block the glare.

If the sound is real, then the mouth was real, and the whole brown monster-body-creature along with it.

This time, the noise doesn’t dissipate when she stops to listen. It gets louder. At first she can’t tell where it’s coming from, but then she sees a cloud of dust in the distance, puffing and rolling along the ground.

It’s headed in her direction.

Reassembling her pack and hoisting it onto her back, Ana spins around to face the crater wall. There’s a crack in the rock face just out of reach, and farther up she can see a few workable handholds. It will have to be good enough.

A quick glance over her shoulder shows that the thing is
nearer already, like a storm cloud closing in, loud and growing louder. How does it cover ground so fast? At this rate, it’ll be on her in fifteen or twenty minutes. Maybe less.

Ana turns back to the wall. With some kind of practiced motion she gives a little jump and just reaches the crack, jamming her fingers into place and bracing her toes against the rock face. She pulls up hard, stretches her right leg up to reach the next crevice, shifts, and climbs again. The rock is solid for the most part, but little cascades of pebbles skitter down in her wake, and the higher she goes, the more precarious her position feels. Any exhilaration she might have felt at the climb is canceled out by the beast behind her. The minutes slip away to the pounding beat of her heart as she scales the sheer rock face, another leg up, another too-small hole to stuff her fingers into. Just barely making it. Just barely is enough. Until finally, she’s nearly to the top.

Behind her, the roar is now deafening. How close is that thing? How long since she started her climb? She doesn’t want to look, but she can’t help it. Just a quick glance over her shoulder—

Long white teeth raging out of a cloud of reddish-brown dust.

Swallowing a shriek, Ana turns back to the wall and sees a root hanging over the top of the cliff face. With no time to test its strength, she grabs hold of it, shifting all her weight onto the growth in one desperate tug.

In a shower of dirt and pebbles, the root slowly loosens,
pulling away from the rock wall.
No!
The dust cloud gusts behind her, buffeting her and coating her like sea spray—like a giant’s breath.

Her feet are still jammed into the wall, but both hands are around the unstable root and she’s tilting backward, rapidly losing her balance.

Ana feels herself begin to slip.

Then a sharp sound cuts through the roar: “Here! Grab this!”

What?
Ana looks up, squinting straight into the overhead sun. There’s something right above her head. A hand?