The New Space Opera 2 (65 page)

 

Bishop struggled, but the panic was choking, he wasn't able to say the sensible thing he had in mind—namely, “Yes, but just because
you
can detect these things, why aren't they verified by machines?”

The Greenjack paused, just the length of time it would have taken him to make this reply, and added, “Machine verification has confirmed erratic frequency fluctuations in localized areas, but, obviously, they can't put an interpretation on these anomalies. We have successfully managed to get some mappings of areas and frequency variations that confirm my own sensory perceptions are accurate.”

This was news. Bishop jerked as his screen recovered the files being zapped across to it and vibrated to alert him—all the data was there, already witnessed and verified by independent bodies…He felt himself breathing steadily. The scotch seemed to have made it out of his stomach. The pills he'd taken still worked hard on fooling his head into thinking that it knew which way was up. Better, that was better. Statistics. Facts. Good.

“But if you are too distressed we can delay this,” the Cylenchar said suddenly. “Mr. Bishop?”

“No, we have to go.” He didn't know where they had to go, though apparently he was determined. His panic returned.

“May I speak frankly?”

Into Bishop's agonized silence, Hyperion said clearly, “I think you have asked me to go to Mars because of your daughter. You are hoping that I will be able to find her where the inquest has failed. Is that right?”

A cold drench of sweat covered him from head to foot, as memory returned, cold, clear. He couldn't breathe. He was drowning. Mars. Tabitha. The unsolved mystery of the routine survey expedition vanishing without a trace. Oh a sandstorm, a dust ocean, a flood of sand, a mighty sirocco that blew them away…what had it been and where was she? Nobody could answer. Not even the equipment returned a ping. But how? And
when the months dragged on and the company pulled out and sent its condolences and added their names to the long list of people who'd gone missing on Mars during the fierce years of its terraforming, and then this assignment came, what else to do? Bring the creature who, above all, had been
made
to see. No frequency, no signal, no energy that the Greenjacks can't decipher, right? Of course, if she's there…and if she's dead, then this one will say so. It claims that some of the things it can sense aren't people but are what people leave or make somehow in the unseen fields they move in: trails and marks. It says some are like the wizards of story, able to make things with shape, with form, with intent that is almost conscious. Some can leave memories like prints on the empty air. Oh. But a man of strict science does not believe in that.

“Yes,” Bishop said. He was small then, in his mouse nest, hanging, damp and suddenly getting the chills. He was afraid that the 'jack would say no.

“I will be glad to look,” it said instead, and Mark Bishop fell into a deep sleep on the spot.

 

Sleep was one of the many skills the 'jack had learned in its long years of waiting for things that might not appear. It closed its eyes and shared a warm goodnight with the Valhalla, who was more than curious to know the outcome now, and sang toward the red world with fire and all the winds of the sun.

They joined each other in a shared interior space, a private dreamtime. It was cozy. The Valhalla whispered, “Sometimes I am flying in the sunlight, and there is nothing there, but I feel a cold, a call, a kind of falling. Is that real? Are the monsters from under the bed out at sea too?”

“Wake me if it happens,” Hyperion said. “And we'll see.”

It cocreated a kind romance with the Valhalla, in which they saw huge floating algal swarms of deep color and shadow populate the fathoms beyond the stars. They named them in whispers, and with childish fingers measured their shapes in the sky, and then pinched them out of existence, snuff, snuff, snuff.

“There,” Hyperion said, “they may be here, but they have no power. They can only hurt you if you let them. They live in the holes of the mind, and eat the spirit. Cracklegrackle. Just pinch them out.” They got back into bed and closed the window, drew the shades. The Valhalla was happy again and drove on all the faster in his sleep.

 

Bishop was woken by the Valhalla's cheerful cry, “Mars!” The Ironhorse made orbit and scanned the surface to find the small outpost where the Gaiaform Nikkal Raven, chief developer of Mars, had built human-scale shelter with its Hands in the lee of a high cliff. “Nobody's there now. If it's a graveyard or a ghost town, it's empty for sure, but with a bit of effort there's probably power and some basics that you could get going.” As a courtesy, they contacted the Gaiaform.

“That's funny,” the Valhalla said, as Bishop struggled to change his clothes. “She sounds annoyed, or, at least, she doesn't want to discuss the place.”

The Nikkal's voice was grumpy on the intercom. It grated on Bishop's exposed nerves and wore out his fragile strip of patience almost at once. “My Hands got lost there too. Given up sending more. Thought I'd get to it later, after the planting on the south faces was finished. Just a minor space really, full of gullies.”

They all recognized the feeling this rationale covered. “We don't need your help,” Bishop grated. “Just want to get there and look around. That's all.”

“But if anything happens it's on my watch,” the Nikkal countered.

“Tupac knows we're here,” Hyperion suggested. “We won't stay long. A day at most.”

“…as long as it takes…” Bishop said. He was in clean clothes. His panics were gone. He felt old and thin and shelterless, and looked around for something he could hold. He found only his small bag and his recorder, and filled his hands with them. A panic would have been welcome. Their fury was better than this deadly flat feeling that had taken their place. It was clear now. He was here, Thorson's Gullies, the last known location. Every step was a puppet step his body took at the behest of some will named Mark that wouldn't let it rest, but there was no more struggle between them. He felt that he did not inhabit these arms, these legs. They were his waldos, his servos, they were his method. Only his guts were still his own, a liquid concentration waiting for a mold.

“Come on, Mark,” Hyperion called from the drop capsule.

Since when had they become friends? Bishop didn't know how, but he climbed inside the small fruit shape of the vehicle. Mars had lift cable, but no system in place. Cargo was simply clipped on and set going under whatever power it was able to muster. They were attached to the line and given a good shove by the Valhalla. The new atmosphere buffeted them, warmed them, cooked them almost, and then they were down, Bishop
still surprised, still too frozen to even be sick with either motion nausea or relief at their arrival. The capsule detached, put out its six wheeled legs like a bored insect, and began to trundle the prescribed steady course toward the gullies. Hyperion opened the ventilation system and they sniffed the Martian air. It was thin, and even though it had been filtered a million ways, somehow gritty.

“It's the names that are part of the trouble,” Bishop said, staring out at the peculiar sight of Mars's tundra, red ochre studded with the teal-green puffs of growing things in regular patterns. “Good and Evil. Why did you call them that?”

“There are more,” Hyperion said. “There is Eater and Biter and Poison and Power and Luck and Fortune and Beneficence, and the Cracklegrackle. I expect there are many more. But these are the commonest major sorts.”

“But why? Couldn't you name them Energy #1 and so forth?”

“I could, but that wouldn't be accurate. Their names are what they are.”

“How they seem to
you
. The one person who can see them.”

“That's not exactly right. I think we can all perceive them, but only I can see them as easily as I can see you.”

“And you say they are everywhere.”

“Scattered, but everywhere in known space, I think.”

“And some are spontaneous, but others are man-made?”

“Yes. Few of the major arcana are man-made, like those. It takes a very powerful person to create one. Or a large group of people. There are many man-made minor arcana and many naturally occurring ones like that, but they are very short-lived, a day or two at most.”

“You see my problem is that I can believe in this kind of thing at a symbolic level, within the human world, acting at large and small scales. We're creatures of symbolic meaning. But you're saying there's
physical
stuff, and that it has a real, external, distinct existence.”

“Yes. I am saying it exists as patterns within the same energy fields that give rise to matter.”

“Consciousness is material?”

“No. It has a material interaction that is more than simply the building of a house from a plan or the singing of a song, is what I am saying.”

“And these things…patterns…can influence people?”

“Influence them, infect them, live inside them, alter them perhaps. Yes, I think so.” The creature stared at him for the longest time, unblinking. “Yes.”

“And just like that, we are expected to accept this—theory of material mind?”

Hyperion shrugged, as if it didn't much care either way. “I report what I see, but I say what it is for me. Otherwise, I would report nothing more than machines can report. When you look at a landscape, you don't list a bunch of coordinates and say they are mid-green, then another list gray, another list white, and so on. You say, I see a hill with some trees, a river, a house in the distance.”

“But you're making claims about the nature of this stuff, linking it to subjective values. Hills aren't subjective.”

“They are. True, there is some rock that exists independently of you, some sand, some dust, but without
you
, it is no hill, and however the hill seems is how all hills seem to you, large or small—not mountains, not flat, perhaps even with traits that are more personal. If your home is among the hills, then they seem well-known; if not, then they provoke suspicion.”

They were trundling at high speed, balanced in their gyrobody between the capsule's six legs, seeming to float like thistledown between the rocks of this region of Mars; Thorson's Plot. Plot was something of a misnomer, as the area, already claimed by an Earth corporate, was some fifteen thousand square miles. The gullies, which made it a cheaper piece of real estate, and complicated to sow—hence the surveying team—were near the western edge and ran in a broad scar north-south along the lines of the mapping system. Thorson Corporation had hoped to find watery deposits deep in the gullies, or perhaps some useful mineral, or who knows what down in the cracked gulches where twisting runnels of rock hid large areas from the sun and most of the wind that had scoured the planet for millennia. All around them were hills of varying sizes, some no more than dunes, others rising with rugged defiance in scarps and screes. Occasionally, small pieces of metal flashed the sunlight back at them as they moved between light and the shade of the thin, high cloud that now streaked the sky white.

“The remains of Hands,” the Greenjack said with interest, of course able to tell what everything was at any distance. “How interesting. And there is some debris from attempts to seed here, some markers, some water catchers. All wrecked. And…”

“And?” Bishop leaped on the hesitation.

“What I would call distress residue. A taint in the energy, very slight.”

“What energy?”

“The subtle fields. You will find them referenced a great deal in my sub
mitted thesis. Vibrationary levels where human perception is only infrequently possible at all. When trauma occurs, bursts of energy are thrown off the distressed person into these fields, and although they decay quite rapidly, they leave a trace pattern behind, which is very slow to fade.”

“A disturbance in the Force,” Bishop said bitterly. He felt nothing except the dread that had clutched at him in place of his panic.

“It might be only the natural upset of someone experiencing an unlucky accident,” Hyperion said, unruffled. “It's hard to say without extreme observation and immersion on the site. You ought to be glad, Mr. Bishop, rather than contemptuous. Why else are you here?”

Mark gripped the arms of his seat. He was furious and full of nervous agitation. He ought to be civil, but he felt the need to destroy this creature's claims even as he wanted them to be right for his own sake. He didn't want to know about some spiritual plane, not after all the time it had taken to rid the human race of its destructive superstitions. Even if it existed, what difference did it make to those who were unable to interact with it. He could see no good coming of it. But he longed for it to be true. Somewhere in his fevered mind, where fragments of the shaman's testimony had lodged in spite of his allergic reaction to reading them, he recalled there being quite specific traces of people and moments stuck in this peculiar ether like flies in amber. Not always, not everywhere, but sometime and somewhere it acted as a recorder for incidents and individuals. It could. It
might have.

The capsule lurched to a halt. They had arrived at the last known point of the survey team's well-being. A couple of waymarkers and a discarded, empty water canister pegged down beside them were the only visible remnants now. Without further talk, Hyperion and Bishop disembarked.

They fitted their facemasks—the air was still too thin for comfort—and Bishop put on his thin wind jacket and new desert boots. Hyperion sank a little in the fine grit, on its four limbs, but otherwise it went as always, naked save for its fur, feathers, scales, and quills.

Wrestling the faceplate straps to get a good fit, Bishop noticed all the strange little fetishes the creature had attached to itself. Necklaces with bits of twig and bone…it looked like it had come off the set of a voodoo movie. He recalled now that it had labeled its profession on its passport as “shaman.” He was so exhausted by his nervous disorders, however, that he didn't have the energy to muster a really negative response anymore. He was deadened to it. At last, the mask was tested and his spare oxygen packs fitted to the bodysuit that went over his clothes. Hyperion wore goggles
and a kind of nosebag over his beak. He made a desultory symbol in the dust and smoothed it out again with one forepaw. The capsule, obeying commands from its uplink with the Valhalla, folded up its spider legs and nestled down in a small hollow, lights dimming to a gleam as it moved into standby operation. All around, and as far as he could see in any direction, save for the shaman, Bishop was alone.