Edge of the Wire, page 14
Then Waverly paused. He trained a light from his suit down the nearest hallway.
“But maybe we don’t get immortalized quite yet,” he continued. “Because I see a big fat ESA logo right where I’m looking.”
Rowe shone his own light to the point Waverly indicated.
“That’s a supply box,” Rowe said. “It could have been moved here from the Marie Curie.”
“Correct, boy-o,” Noyes chimed in. “It very much appears that it was.”
The men approached the equipment case that sat halfway down the corridor.
Rowe heard something up ahead of them creak. Then there was a nonsensical sound that was distinctly human. A chuff or grunt.
Rowe whispered: “It’s better if we can surprise her.”
Moving quietly in enviro-suits was challenging, but the Silkworms did the best they could. Not much farther down the corridor of glowing buttons, they discovered an archway opening into a large circular room. Here, more ESA equipment had been haphazardly stored.
In the center of the room was an inflatable emergency slide from the side of an ESA vehicle that had been repurposed into something like an air mattress. The rest of the room was covered with other items salvaged from the Marie Curie. Cortez reclined in the center of the mattress chewing on a brandless candy bar in a shiny silver wrapper. In her other hand, she held crumpled pages from a printed instruction manual.
They only had the drop on her for a couple of seconds.
“Oh what the fuck!?” Cortez cried as her eyes lit on the men.
Cortez hastily rolled over to the side of the improvised mattress and flailed for something. She came up with a tool approximately the size and shape of a tack hammer with a glowing green-white head.
Rowe lunged at her, his enviro-suit propelling him across the circular room in a mighty Olympian leap. Despite this artificial boost, Cortez had time to rise to her feet and assume a combat stance. Rowe caught her around the middle like a linebacker making a tackle, but Cortez brought the hammer down on his shoulder. There was immediately a strong odor that Rowe associated with the cutting of metal at construction sites, and he felt a hot pain course through his arm.
They tumbled off the emergency slide and onto the floor. Rowe fell first, and Cortez landed atop him. He was on his side but was able to quickly twist himself around to look up. Cortez straddled him and raised the glowing hammer, the head sizzling with burning metal. Rowe instinctively threw up his hands to shield himself. Cortez reared higher to deliver a death blow. In the same instant, Rowe heard the low-pitched “BRRRRRRRMMMMP” of Waverly’s railgun, and watched Cortez’s severed fingers fall to the floor. Her hammer careened across the room and embedded into the wall.
Cortez screamed once and thrust her mangled hand into her armpit. Her body crumpled and she rolled off of Rowe.
Waverly sauntered over slowly, as if the situation involved no urgency. He extended his hand and pulled Rowe to his feet.
“Thank you,” Rowe said, trying to look down at his own shoulder. “How bad is it?”
Waverly’s expression said he would live.
“Your left deltoid’s going to hurt for some time, boy-o,” Noyes diagnosed, appearing with a head mirror and stethoscope. “I’d say especially when you’re on a planet where the weather changes a lot. The suit’s going to deploy some painkillers and medi-glue now. It’ll kick in any second . . .”
Rowe felt a series of strange and uncomfortable sensations as the suit worked to mitigate his wound. A few moments later, the shoulder of the suit began softly vibrating as it worked to repair itself.
Beside them on the floor, Cortez began to involuntarily tremble. She hissed out air between her teeth.
“Somebody’s going into shock . . .” Waverly sang, as if amused.
“Fuck you!” Cortez spat back.
“That’s a hell of a thing to say to a man who’d have been within his rights to kill you,” Waverly returned. “Where do you get off turning on another Silkworm like that? The very idea is outrageous!”
Cortez said nothing, but held her finger stumps more closely to her body.
Waverly took a deep breath.
“Look, we can cauterize those or not,” he said. “Up to you.”
Cortez would not meet his gaze.
Rowe gently brushed Waverly aside and squatted on his haunches beside Cortez. The arm of his suit continued to vibrate softly.
“What are we inside of?” he asked her.
“What do you think?” Cortez whispered acidly. “Try asking your Goo. Maybe it knows.”
“How did you find this place?” Rowe pressed.
For a long moment, Cortez was silent. Rowe guessed she was not going to answer his question.
But then she spoke.
“You still haven’t grasped what this is, have you? What Tendus-13 is? I know you haven’t, because, if you had, you would kill your crew and destroy your ship. Then you’d stay with me, waiting to kill anyone else who came. Maybe you’d even kill yourself.”
“What happened to you?” Waverly asked derisively. “You used to be a Silkworm. A captain, for Goo’s sake. You took an oath and signed a contract. Several of them, or have you forgotten?”
Cortez looked up. And with what appeared a tremendous effort, rose unsteadily to her feet.
“I remember every fucking thing I swore and signed,” she told him. “That’s why I’m doing this.”
Rowe wondered if—only because he was not the one who had exploded her fingers—he ought to play good cop.
“Do you want some painkillers from my suit?” he tried.
Cortez stayed mute; glared with what seemed defiance.
“Have you seen anything alive inside this place?” Rowe pressed. “Have you seen aliens? Because this looks like an alien ship.”
“Of course this is an alien ship,” Cortez replied.
Rowe and Waverly exchanged an uneasy glance.
“And are there aliens on this ship?” Rowe asked.
“Dead,” she said. “All of them are dead. I don’t know what they once looked like, or if what I was looking at was their skeletons or their mummified bodies. I don’t know how they normally appear before they die, you see. But you can tell when a thing has been killed. You can tell when a creature didn’t live to a ripe old age.”
“Something killed the aliens you found?” Rowe asked.
A horrible sound came from Cortez. A laugh, low and evil and utterly insane. A bitter madness shone through her eyes.
“You still don’t fathom what is happening here; what has happened here since before the earth was young,” she said. “You’re never going to. That’s obvious now. You’re never—”
The rest was obscured by the sound of Noyes shouting into Rowe’s ear.
“I believe she means to grab the hammer!!!”
Even as these words came, Cortez leapt—with surprising agility for an injured person—landing near the wall where the hammer had stuck. In an instant it was in her good hand, and she raised it up, letting loose a war cry that seemed to come from another time. From a more primal millennia. The head of the hammer glowed, alive and deadly green, as if fueled by her scream.
She sprang forward.
A hole the size of a Chicago softball immediately appeared in the center of Cortez’s chest. Through it, Rowe could momentarily see the wall behind her. Cortez lost momentum and crumpled forward to the floor.
Rowe lowered his arm containing the railgun. He exhaled as if deeply disappointed. A steady pool of blood began to radiate outward from the corpse.
“Just what in the hell,” Rowe said, baffled and stunned. “That didn’t need to happen.”
“She really did want to kill us,” Waverly offered. “Commitment to a project. I’ll give her that.”
Rowe took a deep, shuddering breath. To his knowledge, he had never before taken a human life.
“Noyes,” Rowe said. “First of all, thank you for the warning. And also, that was real, wasn’t it? You didn’t project something into the visuals of my suit, so I would think Cortez was trying to kill me? Like how she said things went down aboard the Marie Curie?”
“I’ll try not to take that question personally, boy-o,” Noyes replied. “No. It was real. She tried to kill you. He saw it too.”
Noyes glanced at Waverly.
Waverly, as if it offended him to agree with a hologram, gave but the slightest of nods.
For some time, Rowe and Waverly allowed themselves to sit against the curved white wall of the ship and rest. Rowe found the killing of a person mentally exhausting. The notion of having executed someone out of the view of the interstellar Goo weighed heavily on him. He wished the act had been recorded, cataloged, and ultimately deemed necessary by that omnipresent arbiter.
After Rowe had gathered himself somewhat, they stood and began surveying the clutter Cortez had brought aboard.
“She moved all this in here,” Rowe observed absently. “Into an invisible ship. It must have been hard to do.”
“I would think it’d beat living in a cave,” Waverly replied.
“Yeah,” Rowe said. “I thought she only lived in the cave, but she wasn’t showing me the whole deck of cards then. She was still figuring out if she could trust me. In the end, I suppose she shouldn’t have. I came back and killed her.”
“You defended yourself,” Waverly assured him. “That’s what the Goo would think too.”
“Maybe I could have defended myself by thinking of a way not to agitate her and make her want to bash me with a hammer. I . . . I don’t know.”
Rowe and Waverly located personal possessions, food, and reading material, but little else. The men patted down Cortez’s corpse but discovered nothing in her pockets.
There were several hallways leading off from Cortez’s improvised bedchamber. They glanced down them and saw yet other hallways leading off from those. The farther walls of the ship held intermittent clusters of buttons and levers, but Rowe was unsure how to interact with them. Part of him considered that they might simply be decorative. The only thing that felt certain was that they were aboard a ship designed for something roughly the size of a man.
Rowe and Waverly discussed the pros and cons of venturing deeper. The equipment on their suits could not project a scan or map of what lay ahead. It would be easy to walk straight into a trap. Still, both men were deeply intrigued by Cortez’s claim that she had seen alien bodies.
“We can’t risk dying here, not before we share this with the rest of the crew,” Rowe pronounced. “This discovery is too important. Otherwise, it might be years before anyone finds it again.”
“I suppose I agree we shouldn’t go farther inside, but it sure is tempting,” Waverly said. “I still want to see if we can figure out the dimensions of this ship. We could be inside of something larger than the Apollinax, or smaller than the lander.”
Rowe and Waverly returned to the entry hatch and descended the ladder. With each rung, the ship became less and less distinct, and the boulder below a little clearer. By the time their boots touched the boulder’s surface, it was again as though they were looking up at only the sky.
The lightning had eased a bit, and the clouds were dark as the men climbed down from the boulder. Rowe picked up a rock and threw it in the general direction of the ship. It connected with a “tonk” and bounced off.
He turned on the lights in the front of his suit—max power, as bright as they’d go—and shone them up at where the ship should be. The beam was visible to the naked eye and it seemed to refract ever so slightly at a certain height, like a straw bending in a glass of water.
“Now see, that’s interesting,” Waverly said.
Waverly turned on his own light, and the two men began to pace in an outward spiral away from the boulder, looking for the barely-detectable refractions in their beams.
In this way, the ship gradually revealed itself as a long, tubular vessel that gave Rowe the feeling of an old-time submarine. It was nearly two hundred yards long and thirty across, give or take. The men could detect no legs or anchor points depending down to the surface of the planet. How the thing stayed aloft was a mystery.
They considered heading back.
“Anything else to do at this point?” Waverly asked.
Rowe looked up at the ship he could not see.
“We could shoot it with a railgun,” he mused.
“Oh yes,” Noyes said, perking awake—apparently only to spew sarcasm. “We’ve just discovered the most important evidence of other-species interplanetary travel in human history. By all means, let’s shoot it just to see what happens. Ka-blooey!”
“Settle down, Encarta,” Waverly said. “The man’s only thinking out loud.”
“Ehh,” said Rowe. “Noyes is right. Dumb idea. Honestly, I don’t think there’s anything else we can learn right now. The scanners on these suits sure aren’t going to tell us more than we already know.”
After a short conversation in which it was determined the best course of action would be to leave the corpse of Martha Cortez where it was for the moment, the two men activated their artificial waypoints and headed back out across the alien landscape in the direction of the Marie Curie and, beyond that, their lander.
“What’s the plan, boy-o?” Noyes asked as they walked. “It seems the implications of what we’ve found are of the greatest import.”
“I am thinking about it,” was all that Rowe would say.
“Why are you hassling the man?” Waverly asked.
“If I know what the plan is, I can make helpful suggestions,” the hologram told him. “I can also make very educated guesses—based on prior human behavior—that could move things along in a useful way. I just like to be helpful.”
“Well right now it’s annoying,” Waverly said.
After a few minutes of silent travel, Rowe spoke again.
“Mission Commander Collins put me in charge of figuring out what happened aboard the Marie Curie,” Rowe said to both or neither of his companions. “That’s what I’m trying to do. That’s what I still have to do. But Collins didn’t know anything about a hilltop where you could access the Goo, or about a ship from another world. I don’t know if this changes my responsibilities or priorities. I feel at a loss because I’m cut off from the chain of command.”
“We can still try sending a message back up,” Waverly pointed out. “Or even take the lander back up to the Apollinax.”
“These are exigent circumstances, surely,” Noyes added. “No one would blame you for heading back to headquarters to give a situation report.”
“That’s probably correct,” Rowe said, glancing over to the hologram. “But I am also thinking about the things Cortez told me. That this place has infected the Goo. That it made her crew kill each other. That it holds a madness which could spread. I don’t know if I believe that . . . but I believe that she believed that. And now some of our people are dying.”
“Only a few,” Waverly pointed out.
“If anyone should die, it should be me,” Rowe said. “I don’t want anybody else on our crew to be killed. That’s what’s so frustrating. I especially don’t want anyone to die because I can’t figure out if something’s wrong with the Goo.”
“Wrong with the Goo . . .” Waverly said. “It’s still such a strange idea.”
Then Noyes said: “I have to tell you boys . . . while I can’t explain everything that we’ve discovered on Tendus-13—and yes, how I came to be atop that hillock is still a bit of a head scratcher—I feel just fine. You’re talking about the Goo. I am the Goo. And I’m telling you, I feel all right.”
“You are—and will always be—an Encarta until we get back above that lightning,” Waverly said, gesturing heavenward. “But . . . I suppose I take your point.”
Noyes smiled at this rare concession.
“Maybe a Goo that was not fine would say that it was fine,” Rowe observed, as if his own words deeply troubled him. “This makes me think about all those questions people used to ask about the dangers of artificial intelligence. Remember those from the old books—the ones you can read after the Briefing? In the ancient times, people were obsessed with whether it would be dangerous or not. But then it just happened. It just ‘was’ and it was fine.”
Waverly wrinkled his nose.
“Yeah, I never understood what was so frightening about the ‘artificial’ part,” he said. “Seems like it would just be ‘intelligence.’ You show a ro-bit how to do something; the ro-bit knows how to do it. It’s not human, but so what? What in the hell was so scary about that?”
Rowe nodded but still looked uneasy.
Waverly kept speaking, as if to assuage Rowe’s concern.
“Suppose, back in time, there was a new chess computer that could finally beat the greatest human grandmaster. Ancient humans felt threatened by that because—hey—a computer could do something. But they didn’t stop to ask if it wanted to do it. That’s the thing the ancients didn’t understand about ro-bits. They don’t want. You can say to that chess computer: ‘Hey, do you want to defeat the greatest living human grandmaster today . . . or would you rather be used as a doorstop?’ What’s the chess computer going to say? If it says anything that’s true, it’ll be ‘I don’t care.’ Because it has no preferences. It can beat the greatest grandmaster, but it can also be a pretty good doorstop.”
“Yes, they’re just a tool . . .” Rowe said, remaining distant.
“Right,” Waverly continued vigorously. “But the human grandmaster, in comparison? They want to win. Why? They want things. They want money and food and shelter and sex and esteem. In short, they want all of the things they get if they beat the world’s best chess computer. But the computer? What does it get? There is no reward so there is no motivation. The ancients didn’t understand that being worried that your chess computer might take over the world was like worrying that your doorstop would. They both wanted the same thing. Which was nothing.”
“That’s one side of the coin,” Rowe said after a moment, still sounding distracted. “But you can make an analogy for want. What’s the difference between a psychopath who goes around stabbing people to death, and a robot that’s programmed to imitate a psychopath?”
