Nomad (16 page)

“I'm sorry,” Nadia said, and she was. “But it might help us get into the lanes, which might help us talk to Machinae, which might shut down the spreading Outlast completely.”

“That's three
mights
I've counted,” said Rem. “This represents significant levels of uncertainty. Plus I hear they've rearranged your brain shape. Sounds drastic. I'm relieved that you can still walk and talk.”

“Likewise,” Nadia said, her voice dry. “So far it's just given me a foggy headache.”

“You inspire great confidence,” said Rem.

“You don't need confidence,” Nadia told him. “You are the greatest pilot in the galaxy. Confidence is for the self-deluded, or for those who avoid dangers and refuse risks. You're better than that. No other pilot whispered of
in legend or coded into millennia-old bread crumbs has ever accomplished what you're about to do.”

Nadia had met daredevil pilots before. She had met cosmonauts and the adolescent test pilots who wanted to become cosmonauts. She had met Yuri Gagarin and Valentina Tereshkova. Every single one of them loved flattery.

You're a politician
, the Kaen envoy had said, and the word still stung even if it wasn't supposed to. Nadia wanted to argue with that word, but she couldn't.

Rem gave a mocking and affectionate laugh, a Muscovite laugh. Her flattery was obvious. It still worked. “You're full of noxious waste byproducts, human.”

“Thank you,” Nadia said. “Are we ready to launch?”

“Born ready,” he told her. Nadia heard his toes and fingers tap against the floor and wall.

Barnacle
pushed away from
Calendar
, away from Ceres, away from the Kaen fleet. The ship began to spin. The domed ceiling became a curved, concave floor as the spinning
Barnacle
made her own centrifugal gravity.

Nadia had loved their first launch, when they left the Zvezda base. She had been able to see at the time. Drastic shifts of gravity were unsettling to experience blind. She whacked into Rem when she found the new floor, and both of them said untranslatable things. Then
Nadia found somewhere to sit on the curved shell and tried to stay away from the pilot's tapping toes.

“We're clear of the asteroid belt,” he said. “Time to take shortcuts.”

“Try not to lose another forty years,” Nadia suggested.

He didn't answer, which meant he had no attention to spare. Nadia dropped the joke and insult from her own voice.

“Tell me what you see,” she asked. “Tell me what
Barnacle
sees.”

Right at that moment the ship would be sharing an outside view across the curved shell around them. Nadia missed that view.

“She sees the lanes,” Rem whispered back. “She sees a web of darkly shimmering strands. And she can feel gravity leaking into our dimension from other, stranger places.”

Nadia held her breath. She held on to the single, brightly burning hope that she allowed herself to have.
This might work. It might. I left the world and lost the world to try it, and this time it might work.

Barnacle
twisted, flew, and fell into the lanes.

*  *  *  *

Gravity inside
Barnacle
got very weird.

Then it settled.

Nadia and Rem lay sprawled in the domed central chamber.

“Did it work?” Nadia asked. “Where are we?”

“Somewhere else,” said Rem. He sounded more concerned than triumphant. “Somewhere entirely else. The space outside is . . . different. Thicker. More
viscous
than we're used to. It isn't a void, it's a dark and soupy swirl. Weird. I was expecting a network of tunnels burrowing through space-time. This is more like an ocean.” Fingers and toes tapped against shell. “
Barnacle
is trying to get her bearings, but she can't make much sense of her senses yet. She's trying to tell me—”

Rem stopped talking, suddenly, so that he could scream instead.

“What?” Nadia demanded. “What was that? What's wrong?”

“I don't know,” Rem told her. His words tumbled out fast and uncertain of each other. “I don't know what that was. Something just moved outside. Something massive. Something that might swallow us whole and not notice.
Barnacle
would very much like to turn around and bolt, but she hasn't figured out how.” His taps against the shell made a steady, frantic rhythm. “We're caught in tides and currents, but I'm not sure if this is the direction we want to go—or if
direction
even means anything here.”

Nadia wanted to see. She desperately wanted to see, more than she had while walking through the streets of Night, more than she had in the House of Painted Books or the Hall of Murals, and almost as much as she had while confined in the darkness of a kitchen cupboard.

Calm down
, she told herself.
You don't spend most of your time upset that you can't fly or breathe underwater. You also can't see. Doesn't mean you're broken. Everyone just works with what they've got.

Barnacle
shivered and shook. Then she held extremely still.

“Now we're stuck,” Rem reported. “The viscous liquid stuff pulled back to make a bubble around us. Then it solidified. We're stuck at the edge of the bubble as though half-frozen in ice.”

“What should we do?” Nadia asked. “The Outlast can travel through this dimension somehow, so there must be a way.”

“We did bring one with us,” Rem pointed out. “Maybe we should ask how they manage.”

A voice echoed through the ship. Nadia felt it as much as she heard it.

GREETINGS
.

“Rem, did you hear that?” Nadia whispered.

“Hear what?” he asked.

GREETINGS
, the voice repeated.

“Greetings to you,” Nadia answered. “This is Ambassador Emeritus Nadia Antonovna Kollontai of Terra. Whom do I address?”

GREETINGS
, said the voice, as though Nadia hadn't spoken at all.

“I still don't hear anything except you,” said Rem.

“Maybe because you haven't had your brain rearranged the way I have,” Nadia said. “I can hear someone out there, but they don't seem to be able to hear me.”

GREETINGS
.

“Okay,” Nadia said. “Time to suit up. I need to go outside.”

“I'll go with you,” said Rem. “I should investigate our stuckedness and try to get us unstuck. But be careful. We don't know what the rules are here.”

“I'm an ambassador,” Nadia pointed out. “I'm very good at figuring out rules of conduct.”

“I don't mean polite rules of conduct,” said Rem. “I mean rules of
physics
. The Outlast skip over hundreds of thousands of light-years for freebies by moving through this place. So anything could happen. We might disappear, or explode, or turn into an ever-expanding and sentient nebulae stuck in one endless moment of pain. You might age a few million human lifetimes in one moment. Your
feet might get older while your head gets younger. Who knows?”

“Who knows,” Nadia agreed. “Maybe we'll transform into dozens of butterflies and bunny rabbits. Sure. We don't know what will happen. That's always true. We never, ever know what's going to happen next. So let's go find out.”

GREETINGS
.

*  *  *  *

Nadia stepped cautiously across the inside surface of the bubble in a borrowed Kaen suit, one that had never belonged to Valentina Tereshkova.

Her molecules hadn't torn apart in an ever-expanding nebulae of endless pain, or turned into bunnies, or experienced any other sudden consequence of unfamiliar physics.

“Talk to me,” she said to Rem. “Tell me what you see.”

Please, please, please, let the translation matrix still work out here
, she thought.

It did. Rem spoke, and she understood him. “The stuff we're walking on looks like dark stone, semitransparent. Veins of some shimmering stuff run through it. Pale light pulses through those veins.”

Nadia continued to walk across the stone-like surface. She felt gravity, or something similar. She felt as though she should be able to just push off and float, but she
couldn't. Instead she took small and careful hop-steps, just as she had in her very first moonwalk before learning how to run there. She remembered moving across a frozen pond as a very small child, holding hands with Aunt Martina on one side and Uncle Konstantine on the other. She remembered staring down through clear, dark, solid pond water in wintertime, wondering where all the fish had gone, imagining all of them frozen in midswim. She remembered seeing bubbles trapped in the ice, and how they looked like tiny stars. It gave a sense of vast depth to small, frozen ponds.

Rem made a low, slow noise.

“What is it?” Nadia asked.

“Something is pushing its way up through the ground,” he told her. “It looks like . . . it looks like a suit, a bulbous stone suit. It's moving toward us now, roughly you-sized and you-shaped, but . . .”

“But?” Nadia pressed.

“But I think the inside of that stone-suit is much larger than it looks from here. The rough helmet seems like it isn't any bigger than yours, but I can see something moving inside it. Something . . . far away. Now it's moving closer. Much closer. Now it's pressing itself up against the inside of that crystal helmet and opening one eye. That eye is bigger than the helmet itself.”

“Am I facing toward it?” Nadia asked.

“Yes,” Rem told her.

Nadia raised one hand. “Greetings? Hello?”

She heard no answer. She wondered what surrounded them. Air? Vacuum? Some other sort of gas-like stuff? Whatever it was, it didn't seem to carry sound.

“It's coming closer,” said Rem, clearly alarmed, clearly trying not to be. “The eye is staring at you without blinking. Now it stopped. Now it's leaning forward. You should seriously consider backing away.”

Nadia didn't move. “I think I know what it's doing. This is how cosmonauts talk without radio. If you touch visors then sound moves directly from one suit into the other.”

She felt a small thunk against her helmet visor. Then she felt a voice pass through all the small bones of her face.

GREETINGS
.

She blinked, and then grinned, and almost gave a gleeful shout.

“Greetings,” she said. “I am Nadia of Terra. Are you of the Machinae?”

The voice changed and expanded.

What are your origins?

By what expansionist imperative have you spread so far beyond your habitat of origin?

How did you come to be here?

Do you travel here by accident or by deliberate intention?

What are your deliberate intentions?

How well do you treat the machines that you make?

What wavelengths of light are you able to perceive?

Do you strive to increase the number of possible outcomes radiating outward from any given nexus point?

Do you strive to decrease the number of possible outcomes radiating outward from any given nexus point?

What stories do you tell?

What games do you play?

Are you intelligent?

Are you alive?

The sound and the sense it carried overwhelmed her. Nadia felt like she was drowning in that voice, like she couldn't breathe while surrounded by it. Separate threads of meaning pulled her consciousness in every direction at once, and then she lost consciousness entirely.

Gabe found pesos in his emergency backpack. He also found Canadian currency, stashed there just in case the family needed to move even farther north, and he found a small, sealed envelope marked
DO NOT OPEN UNLESS SURROUNDED BY GHOST PIRATES
. Dad liked ghost stories and obsessed over emergency plans. Gabe searched for more envelopes that might prove useful in the event of genocidal alien invasion, but he didn't find any.

He dug out his set of spare clothes and gave them to Kaen. They set aside space suits and clothing woven out of space-grown corn silk, and they pulled on grubby and uncomfortable jean shorts and T-shirts instead.

“Have you visited any actual planets before?” he asked Kaen with his back turned, only slightly nervous about changing clothes in her company.

“Yes,” she said behind him.

“What was that like?” he asked.

“Strange,” she said. “Too big and too small at the same time. I kept looking up and feeling alone without a twin city overhead. But we didn't stay long.”

“Why not?”

“Outlast.”

She didn't elaborate. She didn't need to.

Gabe tried not to remember the clenching pressure of pale Outlast tentacles. He decided to bring the cane sword with him. It didn't look so very fancy while sheathed—just a walking stick with a metal tip.

Gabe stuck the pesos and the address book in his pocket. “Do you have a translator portable enough to bring with us?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Kaen, and tapped her bracelet.

“Good,” said Gabe. “Wait. Hang on. Why didn't you use that when we first met at Zvezda? Why did you force us to rely on our own patched-together translator?”

“I did use it,” Kaen admitted. “I set it to receive, and not to transmit. It only worked for me. I wanted to test the measure of your welcome.”

“Ah,” Gabe said. “Smart.”

“I thought so too.”

They studied street views and bus routes projected onto the floor until Gabe felt like he had a solid sense of
where they were and where they were going. Then Kaen spent some time reassuring the shuttle that they would be fine, and that they didn't need a massive and mechanical jaguar prowling through the city streets along with them.

“I should go with you, at least,” the Envoy said.

“You're heavy,” Gabe said. “I'd rather not lug you around this time. And we'll be fine. We're home!”