Edge of the Wire, page 12
“I think whatever infected you through the Goo is still inside you,” he said. “Listen to yourself. You want to murder everyone on the planet?”
“No one is ever going to know,” Cortez insisted. “It won’t impact your ARK Score, because the Goo will never see it.”
“The Goo is standing right there, looking at me, dressed like a clergyman,” Rowe said.
“Something is doing that,” said Cortez. “Some version of the Goo . . . But it’s not the real Goo. It’s not the one you know. This place is wrong. Off. Fake somehow. Listen to me! We need to turn Tendus-13 into an X-Class, and we need to do it immediately.”
“I’m not going to kill people,” Rowe declared.
“It may save countless lives if you do,” said Cortez. “It may save the very Goo itself. Don’t you see that? If we do this right, the real Goo will never come here and become infected. We are beyond outside of the Goo. This conversation you and I are having right now won’t be searchable by future generations. It doesn’t count. The Goo can’t hear us.”
“Um, respectfully . . .” Noyes interjected.
“Whatever that is, it’s not the Goo as you know it!” Cortez said frantically, pointing hard at Noyes. “Think about what I’m saying. Really think about it. You know I’m right.”
Rowe considered the situation for a few instants. Then he turned to face the hologram.
“Noyes, I’ve been wondering, does Cortez have a weapon on her? Maybe something that I can’t see?”
“I seem to be without my normal scanning capabilities,” Noyes responded. “But from here I’d say it’s a strong bet she doesn’t.”
“Yeah, that’s what I thought too,” Rowe said.
Cortez began to furrow her brow, wondering where this was going. In the same instant, Rowe swept her leg and pushed her violently into the pool of sand.
Then he took off running down the side of the mesa.
CHAPTER TEN
ROWE HAD NEVER LIVED IN A WORLD WITHOUT NAVIGATION ASSISTANCE.
Full stop.
Such a thing had always been there, as long as he could remember, omnipresent and omniscient. Whenever you needed to know how to get somewhere, you simply asked the Goo. A panoply of maps, visual aids, and spoken directions were then instantly available to you.
After undergoing the Briefing, Rowe had been given access to works of ancient literature that sometimes featured characters “losing their way” or “getting lost” while headed for a destination. Travelers took wrong turns down foggy roads in the middle of the night and soon had no clue where they were. Fictional seafarers who lost their sextants had to drift aimlessly, with only the crudest ideas about their location. These kinds of tales, however, had never been truly relatable to Rowe.
Except now, quite abruptly, they were.
Rowe headed in the general direction from which he estimated he and Cortez had come. Rowe did not trust himself to find his way directly back to the Marie Curie or the lander, but had a feeling he could do it if he started from the cave. He imagined his subconscious might be able to conjure up the route along which he’d been dragged.
At least he hoped it would.
Rowe backtracked at full gallop. He found himself noticing familiar natural waypoints, and took this as a good sign. He hazarded several glances back as he traveled. For the first few, Cortez did not appear. But when he’d made his way completely down the mesa and put a good hundred yards between it and himself, he saw Cortez standing perfectly still atop the outcropping, silhouetted starkly against the lightning and clouds. She did not move at all, but only watched him go.
Then the hillside loomed ahead, and Rowe located the cave more quickly than he’d expected to. Time seemed to be passing strangely. He took several additional glances back, but did not see Cortez following him across the plain.
From the cave, Rowe turned and jogged across the bleak horrid landscape in the direction that something in him—something deep, ancient and innate—said was the right way to go. He encountered fresh marks in the silt underfoot that he guessed had been created when Cortez had dragged or carried his unconscious body. He felt guardedly encouraged by these, and pressed on.
Then—after passing several shallow dales and a couple of clusters of familiar-feeling rocks—he saw ahead of him the great valley containing the massive bulk of the Marie Curie.
He had done it. He had found his way back.
An unaccustomed sense of accomplishment washed over Rowe. He had performed this navigation automatically, without his enviro-suit. Without the Goo. It was reassuring . . . but more than that, it was a new feeling, something that the Goo had never given him. Immediately, he wondered if such thoughts would be bad for his ARK Score. Then he remembered that he wasn’t being observed by the Goo. When he returned to the lander and was fitted with a new enviro-suit, that suit would have no certain memory of what he had done out here. It would make guesses and inferences, but it would never know for sure.
The feeling was liberating and terrifying, in equal parts.
Rowe looked behind himself again. Once more, there was no sign of Cortez. Nearly out of breath, he allowed himself to slow to a lope.
The wind picked up. The flying silt made it slightly harder to see. It was nothing like the storm that had concealed Cortez, but it still hampered visibility. For this reason, Rowe was practically upon the lip of the valley before he saw that the drillwork on the ship’s dorsal fin had been stopped, and that the scaffolding had partially collapsed.
Had it been that raging wind?
No. It seemed very doubtful that any wind would be powerful enough to upset the kind of scaffolds Silkworms used.
Moving down the side of the crater, Rowe saw that the drill had fallen halfway down the disarranged scaffolding, and been left on its side. Silkworms would only have abandoned it for some urgent reason. Injuries or a serious threat to safety.
Rowe reached the crater floor and approached the ship, never taking his eyes off the scaffolding. When he drew near, a ghastly smear of red became visible down the side of the ship. What could it be . . . if not fresh blood?
There was no one around.
“Hello!” Rowe called.
He cupped his hands and shouted several times, not quite knowing in which direction to point his cries.
Then suddenly, and quite unexpectedly, he heard a very distant: “ . . . hello?” in response.
Rowe looked all around. The sound had come from the valley’s far lip, somewhere back in the direction of the lander. And it had sounded a whole lot like Waverly.
Moments later, the outline of his friend became visible on the far side of the crater.
His energy restored as if by magic, Rowe bounded across to meet him.
Waverly’s expression showed that he was surprised but also deeply gratified to discover his friend. When the men drew within easier shouting distance, Waverly stopped and looked Rowe up and down.
“I was about to head out to look for you again!” Waverly called. “Where did you go?”
“I was in a cave off in that direction,” Rowe said, gesturing. “I’ll show you.”
The two men reached one another, and Rowe caught his breath.
“What happened?” Waverly asked. “You ran into that dust storm, and when it cleared, you were just gone. I was trying to track you, but then an emergency call came in from the drill. One of the operators went mad. Pushed another operator into the drill, then tried to drill away the scaffolds underneath himself. Suicidal, we think. Undiagnosed predisposition to space madness. He passed away right when we got him back to the lander.”
“Was he talking . . . talking to himself, I mean? Like Davidson?” Rowe asked.
“Yeah, that was the strange thing. The whole time we’re doing the evac, he won’t stop talking about monsters. About how we’re the monsters. The man had most of the bones in his body broken from the fall, but he was still trying to get up and run away. It was unreal.”
“Believe it or not, I can top that,” Rowe said. “Because I just met Martha Cortez. Out there.”
Rowe pointed off toward the horizon.
“It was her or I’ll be damned,” he continued, “and she gave me this.”
Rowe leaned forward so Waverly could see the wound on his head.
Waverly’s expression told Rowe that his injury was not so very dire, which felt good. One relied on the diagnoses of friends when there was no Goo.
“So she’s alive?” Waverly asked.
“Living in a cave out across the plain, if you can believe it,” Rowe confirmed. “I’m still puzzling over the details, but she’s convinced that there’s a Goo on this planet and it’s somehow . . . infected. She thinks that Tendus-13 needs to be declared an X-Class, and to make that happen she wants to kill everyone in our landing party. Dragging me out there was her way of recruiting me for the job.”
“Did she kill the people aboard the Marie Curie?” Waverly asked.
“She killed some of them, I think,” Rowe said. “According to her, mostly they killed each other. But she’s the one who tried to cover it up.”
“Where is she now?” Waverly asked.
“Still somewhere back there, I assume,” Rowe said, motioning off to the distance. “We were on top of a tall, flat hill. I pushed her and ran away, and she didn’t follow. I’ll tell you more on the way back to the lander. But before we do anything else, I need a new enviro-suit.”
Rowe’s head wound required several stitches.
“You also have a concussion,” the medic told him. “Lucky thing it didn’t trigger your aneurysms.”
“You can see them on the scanner? They’re okay?”
“Yes,” said the medic, lowering a handheld device from beside Rowe’s head. “They appear undisturbed by your adventure, if that’s what you mean. Would you like to see?”
“No,” said Rowe.
He had seen scans of his aneurysms hundreds of times, and did not feel any need to view the harbingers of his death once more.
“Any reason I can’t get into a new enviro-suit now?”
“No,” said the medic. “Frankly, we all might be more comfortable if you did. Seeing you out on the planet without one . . . it was like a man walking around naked.”
Rowe eased off the examining table and headed for the wall of the lander where several replacements were arrayed. Waverly—who had never left his side—smiled as his friend suited back up.
A few paces off from the lander door, a group of Silkworms were conferring over the body of the drill operator. Some of them looked over at Rowe as they whispered or gestured.
“Should we tell them what happened to you?” Waverly asked. “Who you just met?”
“Not yet,” said Rowe, activating the new suit. “I want to test something first. C’mon, let’s go outside.”
Rowe and Waverly walked to the edge of the camp that had grown around the lander.
“Noyes?” Rowe said softly. “Care to join us?”
Noyes misted alive on the shoulder of the new suit.
“Good to be with you, boy-o,” Noyes said, a broad smile on his face. “You’ll be wanting to ask me a very important question, I expect.”
“You expect right,” Rowe said. “When was the last time you saw me?”
“Up on a high plateau, alongside the captain of the Marie Curie,” the hologram said confidently. “And you were a bit of a cad, if you don’t mind me saying so—pushing her down in the dirt the way you did.”
Rowe looked at Waverly—who was clearly struggling to process this—then back at Noyes.
“Can you go there now, if you want to?” Rowe asked. “Like, can you see what’s happening on that hilltop—using the Goo—and tell me? Or show me?”
Noyes looked straight ahead. His eyes blinked rapidly, like a man ambushed by an exam question he’d not been expecting. Then the hologram looked back at Rowe and shook its head.
“No luck,” Noyes said. “That way is sort of . . . turned off for me. Closed. That’s the best way I can explain it.”
Waverly leaned in closer to the small, floating priest.
“What the fuck is going on, Encarta?” he asked. “How did you get from my man’s enviro-suit to a hill with Martha Cortez? This planet’s not even wired yet.”
“Oh, but it is wired,” Noyes said mysteriously. “At least, that’s the thing I’m forced to conclude. You may want to conclude that too, if you know what’s good for you.”
“What do you mean?” Waverly said, putting his fist up as if to threaten the little man.
“No,” Rowe said to his friend. “I think Noyes is right. It . . . It would make sense.”
“What would make sense?” Waverly asked. “Cause right now neither of you are making any sense at all!”
“It would make sense that there is wire on Tendus-13,” Rowe said. “Someone else wired it already. The tubes that Glazer found? At this point, we have to assume that’s a wire job. Maybe not the kind that we’d do—maybe not a human wire job—but still a wire job.”
“But if the planet is wired, then why can’t Noyes ride the wire to wherever he pleases?” Waverly asked, looking hard at the floating clergyman. “He just said that he couldn’t go back to the hill where you saw Cortez. How is that a wired planet?”
“It’s not a normal wire,” said Rowe. “I’ll give you that. Not ‘normal’ to us, at least. Suppose someone wired it, but their version of a wire has limitations. Or it has on and off switches. Or it’s like a tide that comes in and out.”
“Why would anyone make a wire that comes and goes?” Waverly asked.
“We don’t know their motivations or their capabilities,” Rowe replied. “Maybe it’s not on purpose. Maybe their wiring isn’t as good as ours.”
For a moment, both men sat on the ground. Noyes continued to hover nearby. The expression on the hologram’s face said it hoped it could be helpful, but it did not know quite what to say.
Thunder rumbled overhead and powerful lightning flashed.
“You were joking about it before—at least I think you were joking—but what if the Marie Curie wasn’t the first ESA ship to come here?” Rowe asked. “What if it thought it was, but it wasn’t. I mean, we have been wiring planets for Goo knows how long. Maybe this one got lost in the shuffle. Forgotten. Or maybe there’s a reason we were told otherwise.”
The men looked out upon the grim horizon, considering.
“If we were lied to, it’d have to be one of those lies where the Goo goes along with it, because the ends justify the means,” Waverly said. “Tricky-tricky, such things . . . They make me damn uncomfortable.”
“Yeah,” said Rowe. “I don’t like them either.”
“Our mission briefings were very clear that the Marie Curie had been the only ESA ship to touch down on this planet,” Waverly reminded him.
“But right now, it’s that or alien intelligent life,” Rowe said. “And the chances of it being the latter . . . I know that someday, statistically, it’s got to happen. Everyone knows that. But the odds are so low. It’s like winning the lottery. You know someone, somewhere wins . . . but the chances it’s you? In all the cosmos, we’ve not yet found any intelligence that could formulate Goo, much less wire a planet. You learn about human history, and you get the idea every century had different ideas about what the criteria should be for ‘intelligent life.’ Can they make fire? Have they developed the internal combustion engine? Do they understand that they are evolving? Do they understand black holes and white holes . . .”
For a moment, Rowe trailed off.
“But no,” he resumed. “We now understand that those were small-time questions. Amateur-hour questions. The only real one is: Have they developed Goo?”
“Seeing aliens with a combustion engine would still be neat,” Waverly mused. “What were those things the Silkworms found on Cronos-17 . . . ?”
“Dogables,” Noyes reminded him.
“Yeah!” said Waverly. “Dogables. Big friendly dog-like creatures with giant flat feet and they kind of surf along the sulfur lakes. Imagine one of those with an engine strapped to its back. I’d pay money to put a saddle on one and ride it.”
Rowe knew his friend was only trying to lighten the mood, but his own mind kept heading down darker pathways.
“I want to figure out if this planet has already been wired—or if parts of it have—and I want to know who did it,” Rowe said. “Officially, my mission is to verify that the planet is secure, and I think getting that sort of information is a legitimate component of that mission. I’m also concerned about what is happening to the men here. Our men. We’ve got three dead from our crew already? If Cortez is telling the truth, something could be using our own Goo to try to kill us, just like it did to her people. She made it sound like the crew of the Marie Curie killed each other all at once—one big Ragnarok inside the ship. If there’s a pathway for Goo all over the planet, presumably it could be doing that to us too. But it’s not. Okay. But at the same time, we can’t assume that means we’re safe. What if, this time around, it’s experimenting; this time, it wants to pick us off one by one, say? Could be, that’s what it was doing with Davidson. Maybe it told him opening a depth gauge was safe when, really, it knew it was going to be fatal.”
“If we got inside the Marie Curie’s black box and saw what happened, then we would know if Cortez was telling you the truth,” Waverly said. “Our drill made some good progress before the operator went space-happy. It might not take much longer to wrap up the job.”
Something occurred to Rowe.
“You do believe that I met Cortez, right?” Rowe asked. “That Noyes and I aren’t lying about it? And that I didn’t give this head wound to myself?”
“Yeah, I believe you,” Waverly said, as if the question were ludicrous. “It’s just that I don’t know if it’s safe for you to believe her.”
Rowe ran his fingers through his hair, careful to avoid his new stitches.
“So . . . do we talk to the other Silkworms about this?” Rowe asked. “I think it might make them unnecessarily nervous. This is a whole bunch of un-knowns. Enough to make anybody anxious.”
