Broken: A Plague Journal (8 page)

“Okay. Tell me if I’m reading this right.”

“Sure.”

“Either the libraries are fucked, or it’s telling us that this vessel has been sitting in the Drift since the machines appeared, and before that it traveled forward in time from a place on the other side of Black Space?”

“Um... Sounds about right.”

“How’s that possible?”

“It isn’t. It’s bent physics, time travel, deep space travel wrapped in one. This thing is ancient, but it’s from the future. Not even our future.”

“That explains the genetic patterns.”

“We’re looking at the machines’ creator. It has to be. There was nothing else in Seychelles that long ago.”

“If it’s true, this rewrites everything. We’ll finally know where the machines came from. We’ll finally be able to—”

Movement.

The solar sail retracted.

“Neuter?”

“Yeah?”

“What did threat science say about this thing?”

“No known weapons present. No toxins, minimal radiation, no—”

The phase shielding bubble around the vessel gave a last static burst and shattered to the floor, splashing across the expanse in a small wave. Maire’s boots and the neuter’s bare feet stood submerged in an inch of crystal sludge.

“Don’t move.”

Can one forget war? A succession of brittle images: a knife cutting through the flesh of a sister, calf muscle, open fire, black streaks in the sky and the scent of burning plastic. Can one forget war? Those humans, non-humans, eyeless, faceless, hordes falling, following, flying, the way she hid in the rubble, grew in the rubble, became an adult under the bloody rule of those who were not flesh, were not calf muscle, but who more resembled open fire, black streaks in the sky, the scent of burning plastic.

Maire screamed as the vessel opened, as the field of silver tore through her body, as the neuter beside her was stripped from the room, skin flayed, muscles and bone ground to dust against the wall, as she felt the same process begin within her, as silver, as silver, and then nothing.

The vessel closed.

Frozen in place, she hung next to the neuter inside the nothing. Dream, fog, without reason or movement. Her chest couldn’t move; she couldn’t inhale, but her lung bladder didn’t burn.

And where did the light come from?

All she could see, if it really was seeing and not a nameless sense, that ineffable crawl behind eyes and between times, was the neuter, its arms held before its face, mouth agape in horror of an end, frozen. Waves of

And she considered how horribly they’d always treated the slave class, the third sex (gender? or the precipitous lack thereof?). They weren’t even given clothing to hide that place between their legs where phallus or cleft appeared in the rest of the species. Realization: here in this dark, Maire was without clothing, uncovered, vulnerable, the only movement of her form her raven hair, swimming about in the nothing as if there were wind, a current, a prehensile ability to abandon her paralyzed form. It was cold, but she couldn’t feel it. Gooseflesh. Her nipples were erect on either side of the retracted cardiac shield cage, usually open to permit the free-flow of nitrogen into the inhale areas on the underside of her external ribbing, but now closed tightly around her hearts, making her chest a ridged plain crevassed by cleavage.

She thought the nameless neuter was trying to look at her, but its eyes remained clouded, fixed elsewhere.

Hundred of thousands of years of star travel and all her species had to show for it was a third division of the race, sexless, and enslavement at the silver hands of faceless machines from worlds buried deep in the Drift. The neuters weren’t treated as a part of the species. They were a workforce valuable only for their ability to withstand long flights without sterility and the occasional act of kink between non-breed partners in more-progressive joining communes.

She’d never fucked a neuter. The idea disgusted her.

But to treat them as a subspecies, to treat them as the machines treated the dominant groups of the race, to marginalize and persecute them for being breed-null... She wished she could have changed it.

With a wave of light, a tracing projection, the neuter was released from its motionless state for an instant filled with screaming, thrashing agony, and then it was gone. Maire was left alone in the nothing.

A tickle, an itching, a biting instant of pain between her eyes, and

the acrid sting of toxic oxygen, but she wasn’t choking yet, wasn’t feeling nauseous or dizzy. She reached for her cardiac plate to test the temperature of her inhale slits, but gasped and looked down: there was no plate. Her chest was smooth, unbroken by even the ridges of retracted secondary ribs.

More than just the atmosphere was wrong.

Rain outside, its tattoo on the rooftop of the building. People sitting at tables, drinking from white cups, steaming, and the scent of smoke: a person sitting at the counter inhaled a smoker, exhaled.

“Who are you?”

She started at the voice, from a young man sitting across the table from her. A sip of black liquid, napkin to the corner of lips. She reeled from the flood of new senses, alien experiences all around her, the physical changes that her body itself had gone through.

“I—” And she heard, felt the difference of her voice. She attempted to modulate the sound with her ancillary vocal cords, but she had none.

“Hmm?” He looked at her with kind, gray eyes. “Cat got your tongue? Who are you?”

“Maire.” She sat up in her chair, eyes wide, surveying the people around her. “Who are you?”

He chuckled. “The name’s Michael Balfour. I bet you’re wondering where you are.”

She nodded.

He took another sip, swallowed. Napkin. “I’ll let you in on a little secret. See all these people?”

At tables, in twos and threes: a young couple, hands held, the woman’s now displaying a silver ring on one, a black glove on the other, another at a table of books and laughter, red curls and sighs, the two at the counter talking so closely they could have been one, muddy brown and blonde intersecting in gray streaks, a white dot, a single dimple. A spattering of others, reading, watching the moving images projected on the wall, sipping, sipping.

“This is heaven.”

The word meant nothing to her.

“Heaven. Dig?”

She shrugged her shoulders, and Michael wondered exactly how a species could have no concept of heaven but could still exhibit the same mannerism denoting confusion as his once had.

“We’ve been watching you for a long time, Maire. Coffee?”

She looked down at the steaming cup he held between mocha fingers, the nails bitten in true Delany fashion to the quick. Her new fingers were tipped by the same translucent (chitin? protein?) shields, each with a setting moon crescent at its base. “No. Thanks.”

He sipped. “Took us a while to make contact. We’ve been waiting out there, dabbling here and there. You’re an interesting species.”

Cup to tabletop. She was trying not to breathe too much, breathe too quickly. Her chest hitched under her blouse as she attempted to spread her gills plate, but it was no longer there.

“I myself only arrived in-system about forty-thousand solar cycles ago. I wanted to check to see what my kids had made. I must say, you’re among the most interesting pattern variants yet.”

“You’re a god?”

Michael smiled. “Not quite.” His smile opened to a grin. “I know what you’ve done to your gods before, and I wouldn’t want that to happen to me. Just consider me a neighbor. A cousin, sort of.”

“What are you? What is this place?”

Hands folded on the table. “You have no concept of virtual worlds; I’ve done my homework. Guess I’d better start by telling you of a

sky blackened by war and disease and centuries of gaiacide. The only lights studded the rim of the launch tunnel, and even they were murky in the dead air of the dying world.

“Almost time, Michael.”

“Yes.”

“There’s still time to change your mind, you know.”

He shook his head across his pause. “I can’t go.”

The earth shuddered beneath them almost imperceptibly. Men in clean suits ran to the vehicles and sped away from the edge of the launch tunnel, forty miles away. Michael took the binoculars from his eyes and wiped away the stale sweat that had collected on his eyebrows and in the hollows of his eyes.

“Starting final countdown sequence. Any more to board?”

Expectant eyes regarded him with almost pity. He shook his head.

“Shut down the upload link. Irrigate the lines and initiate primary engine test sequence.”

The earth began to resonate with the power of the massive engines that lay hundreds of miles beneath the surface. There could be no turning back now.

“Test shows positive across the board. Waiting for coordinate lock.”

The binoculars went back to his eyes. The edge of the launch tunnel looked deceptively calm, bereft of the hundreds of clean-suited workers that had toiled over every inch of its interior for decades.

“Coordinate lock achieved. Planetary position is a go. Launch window open. Launch on your order, sir.”

Michael nodded his understanding. All hope for the continuation of the human species lay in the precious golden machine bundled safely within the launch vehicle. Millions of emulated humans living emulated lives in emulated worlds where the emulated sun still shined and the emulated water was still pure. Someday they would come home. They were the ark. When the planet had finally healed, they could come home and live again.

“Engage Gauss cycle in launch tower.”

“Gauss engaged.”

“Engage primary thrusters.”

“Primary thrusters engaged.”

With this machine, all hope lay.

“Launch.”

“Launching vehicle.”

The binoculars revealed a tunnel entrance that flickered with the Gauss cycle. Michael held on to the bunker wall with one hand to steady himself; the ground beneath them shook noticeably and fiercely. Never before had a vessel of such size or power been launched from the planet surface.

Where is it?

“Gauss cycle at max. Vehicle launched.”

Michael took the binoculars from his eyes and replaced them with blackened blast goggles. The vehicle emerged from the launch tunnel with a stark white ferocity that painfully illuminated the bunker interior and flash-reddened Michael’s face immediately. The sound and heat and light were unbearable even from forty miles out, but then it was gone, and the vehicle was out of the atmosphere.

“Launch successful. Vehicle has broken orbit.”

Goodbye, my child. Goodbye, my children.

“All right. Good.” Michael regarded his launch crew. “Start the disassembly process. Everything has to be taken apart before we abandon the city. There’s sure to be a resistance attack now that they know we’ve