Kirinya, page 13
Janis Ormand, my counterpart in Green 2, passes on a rumor that confirms my suspicions of systematic militarization. Word from the Hub is that the multi-national security force is gradually being replaced by US Army and Marines, and that six new tug-loads of soldiers are already in transit between Unity and High Steel. More worrying, Janis heard from her sources on Unity that US orbital weapons are being redeployed. That was five days ago, she hasn’t heard anything from Unity since. She suspects the information blackout has reached there. I can almost believe her theory that the United States is preparing to pull a Grenada on the BDO. The EU is in no position to face down a de facto annexation; the Chinese aren’t afraid of brinkmanship but without an effective space program, they’re paper tigers.
This is paranoia, Shepard.
And we’ve lost Team Yellow 4. Joey Piacek’s group was due in at fifteen hundred; when they went five hours overdue, we called Hub to hunt for them on the scopes. No joy; a rain front moved in over north-9. Our own equipment is watching ’Pithecenes watching the sky and fretting over the air pressure shifts. I’ve sent Abigail’s hunters out to look for them—it’s extremely unlikely that Joey’s people have run into something catastrophic, but as those little brown pseudo-men up there on the red rocks prove, the BDO is full of surprises.
(supplemental: 23:00)
Very full of surprises. They are not alone. The ’Pithecenes, that is. Joey’s absence is due to them running, about twenty kays north-11 of us, into another group of hominids. These were not foraging in hippy-shit. These had sticks and shaped pseudo-corals. These were hunting. They were not Australopithecenes. They were Homo habilis.
We’ve been upstaged.
October 25: 11:23
Well, we aren’t getting our engineers. However, it seems that proto-humans are more noteworthy than terrestrially extinct hominids, so Janis is on the march again, our resources have been reallocated and Joey will get our daily airdrop of reconstituted shit. I should be piqued about this—you never get cured of Researcher’s Blues—but perversely, I’m glad. The big light from the Hub is off me. We can run around our trenches and dug-outs and do what the hell we like.
This is paranoia, but I’ve just noticed that I’ve started to capitalize that word, ‘Hub’.
(supplemental: 13:31)
No, this is not paranoia. This is worrying. I’ve just been recalled to the Hub. They won’t say why, but they’re sending a microlyte. It will be landing at twenty-two hundred.
I’m going to add a second capital. From now on it’s The Hub.
(supplemental)
They’re all over the goddam place. Team Red 12 has reported a primitive hominid society living in cloud-Chaga at the base of the Shield Wall. The Hub has tentatively identified them as Pre-Australopithecus afarensis, a semi-arboreal hominid species that died out in the early Pleistocene on Earth. There’s a theory—they’re almost as infectious as rumors, up here—that we’ll find every human and prehuman-variant from the past eight million years up here, somewhere. With the exception of Homo sapiens. The Chaga-makers didn’t need to Disneyfy them. They came of their own accord.
There’s a lesson in this tin can, if we can just monkey it out.
(supplemental: 20:15)
I was wrong. You have to be human to say that. Gods and apes never apologize.
Jose’s group brought him in. They found him under an Acalypha tree. He’d sustained a compound fracture of the left femur; a long stick, one end daubed in honey, told the story. He’d been there a considerable time; he was in deep shock and badly dehydrated. Flies had infested the wound; his colleagues had recognized a death sentence when they saw it and abandoned him. Jose’s group had to drive off a troop of baboons closing in on easy meat.
They call him Sonny.
Our medical facilities are rudimentary, but we’ve cleaned up the infection, compressed the wound and restored his electrolytes. Without knowing the effects of anaesthesia on hominid neurology, we can’t reset the leg. Untranquillized, the shock could kill him in his weakened condition. He’s already feverish. I’ve informed The Hub. They’re putting an army medic in the microlyte coming down for me, but I don’t reckon he’ll do any good.
I’m writing this by Sonny’s bedside.
What do I see? It’s a question of light and shadow. It’s dim in this canvas-roofed circular earth dug-out; I look at the small figure on the bed and the biolantern highlights the ape-jaw, the animal slope of the forehead and the eyes are dull as stones. But I move the lantern a shade and the shadows shift and I see a child, a man in waiting.
Sonny fluctuates between shallow sleep and twitching, painful wakefulness. There’s no need to restrain him, he’s very weak, very afraid. You can see it in his eyes, the fear, and the knowledge. He knows he is going to die. He knows what death is. He knows it and he hates it, and that makes him human. No animal ever raged against the dying of the light. I am awed. I am humbled.
(final entry)
Sonny died at 21:15. Just before the end, he made a small noise and reached out his hand, looking for someone to cling to. I offered him my hand. After a moment’s hesitation, he took it. His skin was dry and very warm. After a few seconds he exhaled and stopped breathing.
I know death. I’ve seen its many tricks and surprises. I’ve seen it take far too many people; far too many of whom I’ve cared about. Maybe that’s why it no longer touches me as it once did.
They die and I’m shaken, but not moved. But the death of this foreshadow of a man has moved me like no other since that night the slip of paper slid out of the fax machine and told me my son had been killed.
The microlyte is on final approach. Its gossamer wing catches the light from the windows as it banks. It’s flown a big slow helix down seventy-five kilometers of air. Now I can hear the bee drone of the engine. Just time to complete this entry, pack the book in my bag and go to meet the plane. And whatever it’s taking me to.
23
(clandestine audio recording: UNECTASpace
BDO Mission Executive, October 26 2014)
‘You’re looking, ah, attenuated, Shaw.’
‘Tell me about it. Zero-gee. We’re all on daily calcium supplements. They give me the shits. It’s you guys down on the ground get the healthy exercise. So, did you do it with that Moracevik woman?’
‘Jesus, Shaw, are you sure it’s calcium they’re feeding you?’
(Laughter)
‘You’re a fool if you didn’t, Shepard. That’s a hell of a flight, up from the floor.’
‘You’re telling me. Seventy-five kays of thin air and not a lot holding you up. So what’ve they hauled me up for?’
‘I can tell you this, things are in, ah, a state of transition up here. They’ve recalled all division heads. They sent a tug to pull Chun Lizhi in off the outer shell. Cap’n on bridge.’
‘Shepard.’
‘Jimmy.’
‘Okay, could we all try and float the same way up? Thanks. Okay, a few introductions. Some of you won’t know my colleague here, Colonel Alice McKittrick. She’s our new Joint Chief. Alice, I don’t think you’ve met Dr Evan Springer, Dr Jean Maturin, Dr M. Shepard.’
‘Ah, the australopithecus man. What’s the M for?’
‘Mystery. Old joke. So, Colonel McKittrick, research is now a division of the military.’
‘You’re very direct, Dr Shepard.’
‘Shepard, this is purely an administrational thing. I’m still running the research program. Alice represents Ground Control’
‘Okay. Okay, okay.’
‘Thank you, now, can we get on? I’ll not beat about the bush. We’ve found a way into the second chamber.’
(Background murmurings of surprise.)
‘Here, have a look at these.’
‘Jimmy, flip one up here, would you? Thanks.’
(Flap of floating paper.)
‘Okay, this actually was Colonel McKittrick men’s call, so by rights she should tell you what you’re seeing. Alice.’
‘Thanks Dr Iovine. As you can see, the survey team is rapelled into a crash web drilled into the face of the northern face. Observe the highlighted area, and the deformation.’
(Laughter.)
‘Have you a comment, Dr Allenby?’
‘Ah, no, I was just making a, ah, sexist comment. About it looking like, um, a woman’s genitalia.’
‘I think your expression was ‘beaver’? This, ah, ‘beaver’, as Dr Allenby so colourfully describes it, expands markedly over the period of fifteen hours, as you can see in this sequence. Has everyone access to a photograph? Good. The portal, as we are now terming it, stabilized at eight hundred metres some six hours ago. We believe this to be the maximum diameter of the aperture. Our team has succeeded in penetrating the portal—Dr Allenby, your analogy was not at all helpful—and behind it is a spherical antechamber two kilometres in diameter, supporting a standard BDO atmospheric mix.’
‘The same as the antechambers in the south cap.’
‘We believe they are identical. Photoreconnaissance has identified a similar portal diametrically opposite the entry point.’
‘You’re sending an exploration party into the second chamber.’
‘That is correct, Dr Shepard. On the basis of your experience we want you to head up Team Red.’
‘First in.’
‘That’s correct.’
‘Who do you need, Shepard?’
(pause)
‘Jesus, Jimmy, you really are expecting me to give you answer right now.’
‘We don’t know how long the portal will remain navigable.’
‘Okay; well, Evan, Jean here; Janis Ormand’s good, if you can spare her. Shem Arne over at Dawkins—has Juliette Montalbani been cycled back to Unity yet? No? Good, her. Get Christo; and Hideoshi. Hector Moraes, Sylvie Moracevik, of course; Rick Poborsky is the best logistician I know.’
‘If I could just stop you there, Dr Shepard. We have a logistician.’
‘An army man?’
‘An army woman. Lieutenant Sophie Bell. She is a highly experienced logistician and engineer.’
(pause)
‘Is someone giving you orders, Jimmy?’
‘Leave it, Shepard.’
‘Jimmy, who is in control here?’
‘Ground is, Shepard. Like it always was.’
‘Jesus. How many soldiers, Colonel McKittrick?’
‘The transfer pod holds twenty. We have eight UNECTASpace security personnel assigned to the first wave of the expeditionary force.’
‘Security? What the hell from? Okay okay. But I have full command of this expedition.’
‘Of course, Dr Shepard.’
24
Shepard’s private diary
We were waiting in absolute darkness, and Dil was whispering the mantra of light. We seemed to have been waiting days, hovering at the exit vulva like a pollinating wasp inside a fig. In the darkness, it might have been. The pilot had shut off the floods to conserve battery power for the thrusters. Thirty cubic kilometers of air-space imploded around us: the skin of the antechamber enfolded the shell. We were a dragonfly fossilized in coal. All the sound in the world seemed to be Dil’s murmur, and the creak of the pod shell as the air pressure outside increased. The antechamber was contracting, equalizing the pressure to the chamber beyond. Despite a swarm of insect analogies, my strongest sense was of being expelled from a dark, spasming womb.
If I’d known any mantras, I’d’ve chanted them.
The dragonfly simile is apt: the ‘Inter-Chamber Transport Vehicle’—their name, my quotes—is a hair-raisingly rickety contraption; ducted fans, power cells, Canada Arms clasping our personnel pallet and the hardware pod. Two-man crew in a control bubble up front. Pure zero-gee engineering: a big diaphanous crazy bug, to which we are entrusting our lives over seventy-five kays of Big Drop.
The external pressure was up to one point two five atmospheres. High pressure, low gravity. We might have been in the dark, but we weren’t going into this blind. Chun’s wall-crawlers on the outer hull have been mapping the inner surface of Chamber Two through the slit windows. What surface there is to map. The interior is a continuous blanket of impenetrable Chaga. I mean, nothing moves down there. Chun’s close-ups indicate at least eight different ecological tiers piled on top of and around each other. Seventy per cent of the surface is covered by tethered balloons floating three thousand meters above the next highest canopy layer. We’re definitely not in Kansas any more. Or Kenya.
But what we were not prepared for, was the sound.
Chamber Two is an aviary for airborne species. And each of them sounds its own chime or flute or rattle or yawp. None is anything that we recognize, but is this another world, or Earth as it might become—or even might have been, down a different evolutionary branch? New riddles here.
It’s now four hours since our emergence into Chamber Two. We cling to the edge, afraid of the big blue yonder. They would swat us like a fly. The engineers are roped to the end-cap, inflating habitation bubbles. There’s a problem; we hadn’t thought the pressure would be so high, up here on the spin axis; the pressure inside the bubbles has to be a couple of per cent over even that to get the things to stay inflated. We’re already feeling lethargic and headachy. Long-term, I don’t know. The first people ever to suffer the bends at an altitude of seventy-five kilometers. There’s another problem. The south wall drops sheer to the Chaga. Not even a helpful little ledge, as there was in Chamber One. You’re absolutely not exploring this place on foot, bi-peds. The engineers are fixing the cluster of bubbles to the wall with a web of cables. Sweet home Chamber Two hangs immediately above the head of the portal. We’ve already christened the place ‘Clit City’. I think the safest mental orientation is that you’re lying with your back against good solid bedrock looking up at an immense, dark ceiling. The walls of the world are decorated in Heironymous Bosch wallpaper. Watching the engineers drill and plug and inflate, a different sexual metaphor suggests itself: gluey translucent eggs squeezing from the oviposter of some frail insect. The military engineers move with the hard-wired efficiency of constructor ants; beautiful, yet disturbing because I know the orders they are obeying are not mine. And I can’t trust that, in a crisis, they ever would obey mine.
They’ve laid cable through the antechamber to a transmitter on the north face of Chamber One: I got a call back from The Hub: e-mail from Shaw. Chun is gone. An order from Ground pulled him off the wall-crawler team. He’s in an air-bag back to Unity, booked on the next HOTOL down. A Lieutenant Gary Hohrbach, of USAF Aerial Reconnaissance, now commands external mapping. Colonel Alice is flexing her biceps. Those faces looking in at us from the outside now belong to her. How soon before Indians, Indonesians, Europeans, French-Canadians, for Christ’s sake, are as suspect as the Chinese?
I wish those fucking fliers out there would shut the hell up.
Chamber Two Team Red 1:
Exo-zoological video clips
The creature has the broken-backed profile of a whale, or a Portuguese Man-o’-war. Like that jellyfish, it is translucent; through its pale yellow skin great gas cells and compressor muscles can be seen pulsing and clenching. Tentacles hang forward of the mid-point of the belly, some almost the length of the animal itself. The zeppelin is four hundred metres long. Its tail flares into a rudder, though the creature prefers to sail on the strong winds beneath the fifty kilometre aerocline. The rudder is bright orange reticulated with green. Gill-slits in the rear pulse: manoeuvring jets. The front of the creature is an open maw, gulping in tons of plankton-loaded air.
The camera follows a single zeppelin as it moves from an aero-plankton-rich current of strato-cirrus towards a group of seven holding station above a clump of cumulus twenty kilometres below. Its translucent skin ripples as the gas cells contract like a fish’s swim bladder, changing its relative density. The creature is attended by a number of much smaller objects that cluster around its rudder flukes and tentacle. The lens is not powerful enough to resolve detail of them. It is debatable whether they are parasites or offspring. The zeppelin turns into an air-stream; it rapidly descends towards the feeding group. As the newcomer enters the group, it strokes the upper surface of the closest zeppelin with its tentacles. Bands of crimson stripes run down its skin.
The balloon is at forty kilometres now. Its bag, pale green, shaped like a fifty-metre teardrop, strains against the coronet of plastic ribs that maintains its shape. It’s near its ceiling, though some have hit sixty before exploding in a cloud of dusty spores. Long strands of purple hair trail from its lowest point, the dome of the bag is mottled with brown spots like a bald, freckled head. Coriolis force has spun it a full hundred and twenty degrees around the interior of Chamber Two from the point at which it snapped the umbilical that anchored it to the Chaga canopy. The balloon scatters a flock of silvery fluttering creatures. They tuck their wings and dive in an instinctive panic reaction for cloud cover. The balloon billows, a sudden wind-shear catches it and whips it south. It does not resist. It cannot resist. It obeys the currents, without volition or sense. No sensory organs have been observed; the opinion in Clit City is that the things are dumb vegetable, though clusters of two or three, once four, balloons have been observed rising together, umbilical hair intertwined.
Forty-five kays now. The bag is painfully distended. An eddy: and it’s gone; a cloud of dark pollen drifting like smoke, scraps of skin tumbling on the wind. Money changes hands in Clit City. There is a book on how high the balloons will go. This one was disappointingly average. Out in the air, predators slim and fast and brilliant as rapiers dive to seize the scraps of dead bag.
