Planetary: Mercury, page 17
It was in this paranoid frame of mind that the truth of Malachi’s spiders came to light. A shadow scuttered not away from , but towards them, and Cincinnatus had just enough time to make out something like a large spider, two feet from stem to stern, with an indeterminate amount of legs, skin that seemed to drink up light, and eyes like live coals before he felt Malachi’s hand at his hip. The atomic blaster came out with a jerk that tore the safety strap entirely away. He had a momentary glimpse of it lazily falling to the ground before Malachi pulled the trigger.
Whether or not Malachi hit the spider, he couldn’t say. What he saw was the atomic blast destroying mine walls and ceiling, vaporizing support beams and posts. The ground lurched and trembled and gave way in the instant before Malachi fired another wild blast.
They fell.
In all of history, he had never felt such loneliness. The silence was unbearable, a grave that had swallowed all life and light and joy. He drifted in a sea of hazy blue light, and mourned for all that he had lost, though he could not have told anyone what, exactly, it was that was gone.
The Virgin Queen of Venus came to him, and tilted his lips to hers. Don’t let go, she whispered, emerald lips close enough to brush his. There are trials to come, but hold fast and don’t let go, and I will see you on the other side of them.
It took Cincinnatus several long moments to place himself. The rough, uncomfortable protrusions cutting into his cheek revealed themselves to be a drinking tube, chin and tongue switches inside his helmet. The lumpy surface pressing into him, the floor of a dormant lava tube and loose rocks and debris.
Mercury. The Rachmaninoff shaft. Ghosts—the spiders?
The miner? Malachi Abrams. His blaster.
Cincinnatus pushed himself up, arms shaky even in the gentle gravity of Mercury. One suit light had fractured in the fall; the other two flickered shakily but dutifully spread their light. He was alone in a lava tube fifty or sixty feet in diameter with Malachi nowhere to be seen. They had both fallen; had Malachi caught on a protrusion or ledge and not fallen all the way?
He stood and brushed dirt and debris from his suit. The lava tube was as tall as it was wide, and the opening to the Rachmaninoff shaft near the top. There was no climbing to it, not with the curve of the roof; not even in Mercurian gravity. The lava tube ended at an abrupt cave-in fifty feet to the south; it stretched off into the distance to the northeast.
As he followed the tube, Cincinnatus mulled the situation. Spider-things on a world thought to be dead; an abandoned, injured miner, unreported by the company. Perhaps the previously unknown spiders had created the moving shadows that Cincinnatus had seen, fraying the nerves of men too long in the mine. And the injured miner, perhaps left for dead? Consciences going into overdrive, producing sermons. One miner hears it, tells a buddy, and the illusion spreads. That Cincinnatus had heard words could be just as easily be his own imagination, sparked by the reports, his own wits, frayed by shadows moving too much.
When the tube made a sharp, unnatural bend, and Cincinnatus found himself at another cave in, he nearly doubled back. But when he turned to go, and the pools of light case by his suit lamps turned with him, he saw a faint orange glow in the corner of his vision. Another crack, another fault, like the one that had dropped him and the miner in the tube, but with light leaking out of it. A passage, just wide enough for Cincinnatus to squeeze through, with something glittering brightly in the orange-red light on the other side.
The other side opened onto a broad, jutting shelf of stone protruding over a vast lava flow, broken here and there by both graceful, rounded humps and jutting, angular protrusions of rock. The light here was hazy, made diffuse by volcanic gases, and Cincinnatus found himself grateful to the practicalities that demanded mines like this one remain in vacuum. The gases would have been noxious at best and more likely toxic if he had been on a more hospitable world like Earth or Venus or even Mars, a place where one could breathe freely and so did not require the helmet and air supply that Mercurian mines did.
The glittering thing stood perhaps four feet tall, faceted like an enormous crystal and transparent. Cincinnatus leaned in close and studied the thing, sure he had seen something moving inside of it. Swimming, almost; tiny things darting about inside of it like the tiny bugs and water creatures you see in a pond. Something was taking shape inside of it, a form strangely familiar—
Don’t touch it!
Cincinnatus had reached for it, but now pulled his hand back, whirled about, and in one smooth motion had the death-blade drawn from its sheath and at the collar of—
Malachi Abrams. The other man’s helmet had cracked and been patched with emergency sealant. His own hand was inches from Cincinnatus’ shoulder: a gesture meant to stop his reach when he had been facing the other way. Cincinnatus saw the man swallow nervously on the other side of the visor. He leaned forward and pressed his helmet against the other man’s.
“It’s a spider… thing,” Malachi said. “I don’t know what. It’s connected to them, though. Somehow. Wakes up a big one. Killed a couple of us.”
Cincinnatus felt his brows furrow. “I don’t know what kind of game you’re playing with me,” he said, “but no one had ever mentioned those spiders or deaths in the mine. Including your own apparent death.”
Malachi rubbed something nervously against his leg, and Cincinnatus saw that he still had the blaster clutched in his hand.
“Why don’t you give that back to me,” Cincinnatus said reasonably, nodding to the weapon, “And we’ll work on getting you—and me—out of here. Get this whole spider situation sorted out.”
After a long moment, Malachi frowned. “Well,” he said. “There’s a problem with that plan.”
Cincinnatus tensed. The words held a certain ominous tone to them, the kind of tone anyone who’d watch more than a handful of tri-vid dramas would recognize: a betrayal about to be explained.
He could open the man’s suit in one motion, leave him gasping for breath in the rarified and undoubtedly toxic volcanic gases. A preemptive strike would ensure the blaster wasn’t pointed at him, that the trigger wasn’t pulled again, that he didn’t find the roof caving in and the shelf collapsing and consuming him—assuming he didn’t die from the blast.
“I wasn’t sure how I was going to proceed with this. Play along, and get out of here? I’d rather not spend eternity bored to death in these damned caverns. But it occurs to me that my eternity’s probably shot either way, so I might as well do the job I’m supposed to do, eh?” He tapped the blaster against his leg again, less uncertain now. Cincinnatus recognized steel in his voice and posture. “Better to reign in Mercury, I suppose.”
The blaster came up—fast, uncommonly fast. But Cincinnatus was faster. He pushed hard, gave the slash more force than it needed for just a frayed mining suit collar. He felt it bite into the man’s neck, and a moment later felt the hilt rip from his hand as the blade lodged in something—bone, maybe, or metal in the suit—and stuck fast. The blaster fell from the miner’s dead hand and bounced against the rock. The miner fell a moment later.
Cincinnatus sat down, harder than he would have expected for Mercury’s gravity, and stared pointedly at his hands, rather than the body. Whatever energies were contained in the death-blade would be consuming and putrefying Malachi’s flesh. In moments there would be nothing there at all; no corpse to accuse him, no glassy eyed stare to keep him awake tonight. Malachi had been going to kill him. Cincinnatus had killed before—never unprovoked—but his hands were shaking.
The Virgin Queen. He remembered the taste of her lips, on Venus, in that place of formless blue light in his dreams, and clenched his fists in an effort to stop their trembling. He was stronger than this. Stronger than memory and loss.
Or he had been, before Venus.
Movement in his peripheral vision snapped him out of his reverie. Not a spider, he knew, before he’d even registered anything more substantial than an impression. It moved wrong.
What’s buried here, Malachi’s voice whispered, directly in Cincinnatus’ ear, will stay buried. Streamers—no, tentacles—of tattered space suit cloth had sprouted from the corpse and pushed it to its feet. The suit itself was shredded and torn far in excess of what Cincinnatus’ stroke had wrought, and the body inside had not putrefied the way victims of death-blades inevitably did. There was no sludge, no slurry of decaying cells, molecules, and atoms, but a skeleton, not quite human, cloaked in flesh as tattered and torn as the suit. The helmet hung open to vacuum and the thin stew of noxious volcanic gases; the face behind it twisted in a mélange of emotions. Hate, rage, amusement, bitterness, and a dozen other expressions fought for control of Malachi’s face. The hilt of the death-blade still protruded from his throat, and he made no move to pull it out.
Malachi’s hand shot out, inhumanly fast, and seized Cincinnatus by the throat. Not by the collar; it passed through his suit and spaceman’s leathers and wrapped bony fingers around Cincinnatus’ throat as easily as if he was naked before the monster. The grip was cold, and it seemed to leach the light and light out of Cincinnatus.
Even my kind grows dull after aeons alone. I should have just killed you, but your kind is so very useful when made to serve. And… and I was lonely.
It pulled Cincinnatus close, as if it still needed the helmet-to-helmet contact to speak to him. Cincinnatus smelled rotten meat on its breath, felt it rasping against his cheeks like a blast of ice-laden wind.
But you. Malachi pressed his contorted face and shattered helmet through Cincinnatus’ own helmet, sniffing at his mouth. You have the stink of the high heavens on you suddenly. I can smell it on your breath. Cloying. Sweet. Stronger even than your petty mortal’s honor and reputation. Heaven’s servant has marked you as hers. And yes…. Yes. You carry her blade. I should have known. You will not serve my kind. Not with that mark. And for that, you will die, before your kind finds what I have imprisoned here.
Fingers tightened around Cincinnatus’ throat. The world—the tiny, airless hunk of rock and minerals that was the world of Mercury—began to go dark. His fingers scrabbled at his neck, but could not pass through the material of his suit as Malachi’s had, and slid off the armored seal there.
With his last thoughts, Cincinnatus wondered at the existence of a creature whom even the Harvesters’ death-blades could not kill.
Everything went black.
And Cincinnatus slammed into the ground one more time. His eyes shot open. Dozens of spiders swarmed the roof of the cavern, the nearby walls, the ground around Cincinnatus. Painful, shrieking screams tore at his ears. Malachi’s screams, disembodied and echoing directly in his ears. The spiders parted around Cincinnatus but heaped themselves around Malachi in a thrashing mound. The creature screamed, plucking at the spiders in a rage with both hands and tattered tentacles. Spider after spider came off and lay twitching and broken on the ground—assuming they hadn’t been knocked off the shelf and into the lava flow to altogether. Malachi, on the other hand, was suffering no ill effects that he could see, beyond rage—the creature was not flagging and the spiders were doing little or no damage. The death-blade still protruded from its throat.
You carry her blade, the creature had said. Her blade. The Virgin Queen’s.
Cincinnatus surged to his feet, life-blade in hand. Spiders scurried out from under the blade at the last moment, and it bit true into the center of Malachi’s exposed chest.
Spiders pulled away from Malachi and Cincinnatus. For a long moment it seemed as though Cincinnatus was part of a grisly tableau. Spacer and Demon in Chiaroscuro, circa 4768 N.E.
Light spread throughout the creature, pulsing and flaring and consuming the hideous thing. It faded, seconds or years later, and Malachi was gone, both knives bouncing on the rock floor, Cincinnatus alone with the spiders. The spiders themselves were scurrying away now, carrying their broken and crippled comrades on their backs even as they disappeared into crevices high up the walls or over the lip of the rock shelf. Only one remained, scurrying around Cincinnatus’ feet like an overactive puppy. When he turned around, bewildered, the spider ran off to do laps around the crystal.
Cincinnatus took one hesitant step, and then a second, and then, before he could over think it, he slammed his hand down on top of the crystal.
He was old; he was young. He was a fractal branch of an ancient intelligence; he was a unique witness to creation. He was half a galactic year or more old; he had just crawled his way out of the birthing factories of his parent iteration.
He saw stars born as he crawled through stellar nurseries, watched stars die from the safety of a hardened radiation shield carapace. He reveled in the great, slow conversation of his kind and the infrequent, but much-loved communication, with the creators. In the depths of space, he played with the Messengers, those ever-faithful companions, gifts of the Prime Creator from beyond the universes’ edge, and in the light of a young, blue star, he wept at their betrayal. He wept over the Caesura, that sudden silence of the creators and the collapse of the Great Discourse, but most keenly, he wept for Malachi and the creature it had become. He wiled away aeons there, grieving, tormented by Malachi and its insane rages. He committed the cardinal sin of the Apostles there, and refused to initiate sophogenesis. The raw material of that system went to waste. He was not fruitful; he did not multiply. He did not steward Creation as he was made to do.
In time, a signal came, weak and attenuated by distance. A one way signal, radio only, consisting only of empty entertainment. It was not the Great Discourse; it might never be the Great Discourse. But it came from an intelligence that was not the hostile persona of Malachi, and so he departed the wasteland of the blue giant.
Signals grew stronger, more complex, and he came to know those creatures. Organic, like his creators; but younger, far younger, and already broken by the madness that had consumed Malachi and the other Messengers. His heart tore, and he wept for them even before their signals ceased.
Caesura.
In grief and anguish, he passed by the silent world, and saw tumbledown cities and broken factories, men with spears and bows hunting each other in the ruins of their civilization. Malachi flitted about him, taunting, tormenting, mocking, driving him mad with jibes.
He committed the second cardinal sin of his kind, and resolved to commit sophonecrosis, the death of awareness. The innermost world of the system was small and rocky and lifeless, and a catastrophically terminal course quicker and easier than anything more dramatic. Perhaps, in time, the inhabitants of the system would find his corpse and learn from it.
The images vanished. Cincinnatus staggered, struck his heel on a rock, managed to correct for the misstep before he tumbled to the ground yet again. It was only after he steadied himself with a hand on the crystal—now as uncommunicative as a lump of stone—that he saw the islands in the lava flow shifting.
The graceful, rounded humps were eyes; the angular protrusions, legs. Another hump, emerging from the lava flow, the rounded carapace of a being millions of years old. In form, he saw, something like the spiders writ large, though as the Apostle emerged from the lava flow, differences became clear. The body was less segmented, sheltered by a carapace like a horseshoe crab’s. What he took for legs did not appear to be meant primarily for walking, but rather for manipulation—assembly, he thought. The manufacture of other Apostles in zero gee.
Caesura ends?
Cincinnatus brushed his fingers across the crystal. “Silence has ended,” he said, and frowned as he tried to remember the ancient stories told on Sunday mornings, “but I think your caesura is something else.”
Death.
The spider—an infant Apostle, he realized—did an odd dance and scrambled up the crystal to Cincinnatus’ hand. He stroked it, absently, and said, “In a word, yeah.”
I did not die. But I am broken. Beyond repair? The question hung there, open, and Cincinnatus had the uncomfortable feeling that the Apostle expected an answer from him.
“Aren’t we all?”
My young are malformed. I cannot remember how to construct them as they should be.
A dozen possible replies came and went and Cincinnatus spoke none of them. How do you reply to a parent’s grief over crippled children? “They’ll grow,” he said finally, “and become something beautiful in their own way.”
And you. Not a question.
“Me?” Cincinnatus asked, though he knew the answer. He eyed the knives where they had fallen, side by side, as if they refused to touch each other. He could not forever carry both.
In one hand, creation. In the other, entropy. You cannot forever travel a course of neutrality. Malachi chose death. The Virgin Queen chose life.
“What do you know?” he spat. “You’re some sort of Von Neumann space bug from the other side of the galaxy. What do you know of her?”
I saw your life as you saw mine.
“Then you know she’s—” His voice caught, a painful, choking sensation, and he did not continue.
And you know as well what you must do. Return to Venus. Climb the Skadi Mons as the Queen asked of you. And we… we will wait here, and speak with those who come, if you will tell the others about us.
Cincinnatus Sherman will return in “The Rituals of Venus.”
About the Author
Joshua M. Young is an underemployed theologian (B.A., M.Div.) from Columbus, Ohio, where he lives with his wife, infant son, and a pair of neurotic cats. His two great loves are space opera and absurdly academic theology and most of his writing starts as an attempt to Frankenstein the two together. He is the author of multiple short stories and a forthcoming novel, Do Buddhas Dream of Enlightened Sheep.
