Planetfall (19 page)

“So when you lived on the ship and on Earth, you lived like everyone else?”

I nod.

“Did something happen? What made you change?”

I laugh. I don't know where it comes from but it sounds horrible. I smack my lips shut and avoid looking at him for fear of what else would slip from them.

“I'm just trying to understand.” His voice is gentle and he looks like Suh again, more than his father. “I can't just ignore it.”

“Why not? It's not your house.”

He's close enough to touch me but he doesn't, thank God. “What if it was where I lived?” he begins. “What if we were the other way around and you saw me living that way. Would you be happy?”

“I'd leave you to it. It wouldn't be any of my business.”

“When you came home and sat here, would you be able to enjoy it, knowing that I was crammed in between piles of garbage? Wouldn't you worry about whether I was safe?”

I go to fold my arms and the movement makes my shoulder twinge. Instead, my right hand goes to my throat and I cover the skin there, feeling my pulse beneath the skin. “I know what you're trying to do. You're trying to make me see how I live differently.”

His laugh fades quickly. “You're too clever for me, Ren. You're so clever you'll die in that place.”

There's a bitterness in his voice. I focus on the fire, trapped, wanting to get away from him but unable to run to my usual hideout. I can't look after myself. I would have been fine if my house was like his. I'm stuck here, under scrutiny and unable to review that footage of the room past the cilia, just because I'm untidy.

“You must hate yourself,” he says. “To live like that. You must think you're garbage too.”

“Don't tell me what I think I am!” The shriek rings off one of Neela's sculptures and I'm amazed at how loud I was.

It doesn't seem to bother him. “But it must be true,” he says with the same maddeningly gentle voice. “Otherwise you would do something about it. The house is dying, Ren. The moss I saw, the plants on the outside . . . there's no way you
can look after it. It can't be working properly. How can you teach me all these things about efficiency and ‘environmentally responsible' living when you have the most broken house on this planet! It's all backward!”

The crack in my bedroom ceiling floats up out of my memory.

“It can't go on forever,” he presses. “Other people are going to notice soon enough. Why don't we fix it now, together, before it turns into something worse?”

The simple truth emerges like a bubble of swamp gas and just as foul. I can't live like that forever. It's a wonder I've managed to keep it secret for so long. But just the thought of pulling things out and throwing them down the chute makes my palms sweat. There are things in there I might not want to see again. The mud has settled at the bottom of my lake. I don't want to churn it all back up again.

“We'll do it slowly,” he says. “We won't get rid of anything you want to keep.”

“I want to keep all of it.”

There's a flash of exasperation . . . impatience? Or pity? I can't tell. “Some of it needs to go down the chute. You said today that you'd show me how that all works and where the garbage goes. Maybe . . . maybe it could be part of a lesson. I want to understand it, and if it helps you at the same time, even better.”

“We could learn with
your
stuff that
you
want to throw away.” I sound like a grumpy child.

He waves his hands at the room. “There's nothing to get rid of here! And anyway, people are saying we need to clear out things we don't need anymore, because they made all this stuff for me. There's so much in your house, Ren. Other people shouldn't have to worry when you've got all that—”

“All right! All right, for God's sake we'll start tomorrow, okay? If you'll just shut up about it!”

“Okay.” He leans back, satisfied now. “Want to watch something on the projector?”

It seems absurd to say yes, but I do. Anything to take his attention away from me.

ONCE I'M IN
bed with some privacy at last, I call up the footage I took from inside God's city. It's easy enough to increase the definition of the shapes inside that room with some simple adjustments. There's only a few seconds' worth that's any use, but it's enough to be able to define particular objects, separate them out from the others in the room and then use my visengineering program to help me extrapolate three-dimensional models of them.

It's slower work with only one hand, but after an hour or so I have wire-framed models of six objects, three of which are just different-sized canisters that appear to be made of metal. The smallest is the size of a toothbrush and the largest is closer to an old-fashioned oxygen tank they used to have in the university labs. There's a crumpled sheet of plastic about the size of a double bed, a small oval pebble of plastic with something sticking out the end of it that looks very similar to one of the probes we took into the city, and something that looks like it's part of a wing.

I run a match on the pebble probe against the equipment manifest for our team, and sure enough it belonged to Winston. It wasn't checked back in after our trip down and was listed as lost.

There are three other items listed as missing and two of them match more models I've made from the objects in that room. On one of the many occasions we fell or were thrown about, we must have dropped them and then they must have fallen down that tunnel. That was why we couldn't find them; the city had swept them away into that room.

I go back to the object that looks like it's part of a wing. It would be for a very small craft but still too big to fly inside the tunnels of the city. There's a chance it isn't part of a wing, of course, but the fact that it's an airfoil shape in cross section and has all the hallmarks of something designed to be aerodynamic makes the theory too compelling to discard immediately.

There are markings on it that seemed random at first glance but now that I'm examining it I can't help but think there's more to them. The edges of the shapes are too crisp to have been made by scratches and there are a couple of symbols that are repeated.

I sit up, the fatigue that had been creeping up on me shrugged off in an instant. I connect to the Atlas AI and request an analysis of the shapes using any linguistic programs it has on file.

“No known matches,” the AI reports after a couple of seconds.

“Could it be a language?”

“Define parameters of language for comparison.”

I tut. I'm not a linguist. “Did Hak-Kun Lee have definitions of language in the program he designed for Planetfall?”

“Yes. Would you like me to import those parameters for this analysis?”

“Yes.”

“Likelihood of language: ninety-five percent.”

Oh. Fuck. I rub my hand over my face as I try to process that. “But . . . you said it didn't match . . . Which language is it derived from?”

“No known matches.”

“Check against . . . fictional languages . . . ancient dialects.”

“Sample has been compared to all known languages. No matches.”

“So where the fuck does it come from?”

“Unknown origin.”

I lie back down. My poor heart doesn't know what it is to beat a normal rhythm anymore. My thoughts are a tumbling landslide of questions as my curiosity surges. Who made that and painted their words onto it? Where did that person come from?

Not from Earth.

The sight of God's city and what we saw in the topmost room ended any vestiges of mankind's childish belief that we were the only intelligent species in existence. But to think there were other civilizations with their own Pathfinders who had been led here too . . .

But where are they now?

And where are the ships they landed in? Did they need ships? Did they teleport down here with vastly advanced technology?

There's too much in my head. I need to talk to someone about this. It has to be Mack—he's the only one who won't freak out about my excursions and he'll know the best way to tell everyone.

I look up his status. It's set as “busy.” He's either working
or shagging someone. I ping him. Neither could be more important than this.

A standard “Sorry, I'm busy, I'll get back to you as soon as I can” message comes back instantly. I open the v-keyboard.

Mack, I need to talk to you.
I send it with an “urgent” tag and in less than a minute I receive a text back.

Is it really urgent or can it wait till after the ceremony? I've got a to-do list the length of Italy here.

I've got evidence of people visiting God's city before us.

Aliens?

Well, they weren't from Earth.

Bloody hell. Okay, come over for lunch tomorrow. No, scratch that—the ceremony is the day after. Come for lunch on Friday, when it's all over.

I'm astounded. If our places were reversed, I'd be asking for the evidence, demanding to meet right away, desperate to know more.
You don't want me to send you some stuff over now?

Talk me through it on Friday. I've got too much to do. Carmen's paying too much attention, I have to be extra careful. I just don't have the head space for anything else.

You're seriously telling me that your sideshow is more important than this? There's a room in God's city full of stuff swept out of the tunnels that other people have left behind. We have to work out why!

Give me three days. You can work on it in the meantime. Don't talk to anyone about it.

Obviously.

I heard you were hurt. You OK?

I'm fine. Good night, Mack.

I lie in the dark for a while, churning through the possibilities. Of course, the AI could be wrong about the language, but there's no refuting those things in that room, swept in there by the cilia. Our party's lost instruments are in there, so it's not a huge leap to hypothesize that the other objects belonged to other expeditions.

Am I getting carried away? Could those things just have been thrown away by the city's former inhabitants?

There's not enough data to work with and the only way to get more is to go back. But the memory of the cilia brings back the thought that I'd crush them if I stomped across to the room. And even if I decided not to care about that and went inside it, what if there was no way to reopen the valve from the other side?

The solution presents itself in a flash, fully formed, like a firework being set off in my head. A CrawlerCam! I've got one at home, somewhere in my bedroom; I'm sure of it. Or maybe the hallway. I last used it a couple of years ago to clear a blocked chute, so it has to be relatively easy to find.

I built several of them on Atlas to help service the miles of ventilation ducts and pipework in the habitable areas. A camera, light and robotic legs with little retractable hooks at the ends for crawling in difficult spaces. All the legs can be
retracted too, making it into a ball shape that can be rolled into a pipe or used by the device itself to return faster.

When I started to explore the city again, once I could bear the thought of going back in there, I did consider using the cams then. But something about that seemed disrespectful. Suh wouldn't let us use them, saying it should be seen only with human eyes and shouting down arguments we all had when planning the first expedition into the city. I couldn't bear to go against her wishes, even though she'd never know I had. I shake my head at myself. If I hadn't been so sentimental, I might have found that room sooner; I might have understood the city by now. But I used it as my private escape, a source for secret trophies to take home and make me feel better. What kind of scientist am I?

But my find has changed everything. I have to understand its function now and I'll use every tool available. I could put a CrawlerCam in through the valve I usually enter to explore and then leave it recording. If it is swept into that room, as I think it will be, I'll be able to look at everything in there and map out all the objects without damaging anything.

Once I've run them by Mack, I'll share my findings with the colony. They need to stop seeing it as something so holy it can't be understood. They are not incompatible.

The solution gives me a brief respite, but the endless speculation about what the CrawlerCam will find in there is as loud in my head as a crowd outside my window, and just as effective at keeping me awake. It's so late and I'm so tired. I'm going to be useless tomorrow if I don't get some rest.

Then I remember Sung-Soo talking me into starting on my house tomorrow and dread creeps in, spreading its cold fingers through my chest. Will I be able to find the cam and hide it in a pocket without him noticing?

I can't handle all this at once. I just want some stillness, some time alone with normal daily tasks. The way it was before he came. But he's here now, and there's no way he's going to let this go. Perhaps if we clear the doorway a bit he'll be satisfied.

A message arrives from Kay and I open it.

You're welcome back anytime, if you need time away from Sung-Soo. And if you can't sleep, there's a sedative in the medkit I left in his kitchen for you. It's a safe one and you can take them for a few days if you need to, just until the discomfort eases in your shoulder. I'm here if you need me and I'll pop back tomorrow evening. Kay x

I send back my thanks, fetch the sedative and some water, and take the pill. There has to be some peace soon. Surely.

•   •   •

DESPITE
my best efforts to delay and distract him the following morning, Sung-Soo is at the door and ready to go to my house before eight. Even though I slept heavily, I'm exhausted already. I've spent the last hour imagining him inside my house and a hundred different ways that he'll react. None of them are good.

My body feels like a wrung-out rag. It's taking everything in me just to hold it together enough to get dressed and eat breakfast. I have to force the food down, not wanting him to see how much this is upsetting me. If he notices, he'll only use it as evidence of my having a problem and I simply don't have the resources to argue with him today.

At least he wants to go early. Used to waking with the dawn, he's been up long enough to do a tiny carving and practice a
few designs using the printer. I can see from the way he moves that he needs to get out there and do something.

He bounces on his tiptoes as he waits for me to finish my coffee. “Perhaps you should take up running,” I suggest.

“Where?”

“Outside. Or in the gym. There's one under the Dome.”

“What would I chase?”

“No, I mean run for the sake of running.” He looks at me like I'm an idiot. “Actually, maybe you should get Nick to teach you how to play squash. I think you'd like that.”

“What do you squash?”

“Look it up,” I say, too tense to explain it to him. “There's all sorts of stuff on the cloud.”

“Let's go,” he says, evidently disinterested in anything other than tormenting me.

The walk seems both epically long and far too short and we're back in front of the door into my house again.

“I'll follow you in,” he says, looking at me expectantly.

“I could just pass—”

“Ren.” He takes a step closer and lowers his voice further. “I need to come inside. We need to face this.”

I press my palm to the sensor, trying to manage the swarm in my chest with a few breaths in and out. I glance back at him and he gives what he must think is a reassuring smile. It does nothing to help. He has no idea how this feels. No one here does. No one on this planet does!

I crawl in, one hand on the ground, the other pressed against my body, held by the sling. It's much harder than usual and the movement makes my shoulder complain, but I press on.

Some part of myself is surprised this is happening. Is that the real me? I feel like I'm watching my actions through gaps
in my skull, like I'm trapped inside my body and things are unfolding around me that I can't quite hold together in my mind. Why did I give in to him last night? Am I weak? Or does another part of me agree with him? Where am I among all these parts? Am I just a mosaic of myself, held in the shape of a whole person? Perhaps the cracks are too tiny for people to notice. Perhaps I only let them see the mosaic from a distance, still looking Ren-like.

He's following me and the thought of someone else coming into my house crushes me with shame and embarrassment. He's making me feel this. I would be fine if I were by myself.

The door closes behind us as I emerge into the hallway. The sides of the valley are as I remember them, the route between them the same as ever.

“Be careful where you stand when you come out,” I say, moving back to make way for him.

He straightens as soon as he emerges, wiping his hands on his clothes swiftly. He covers his nose and mouth with the back of his hand, then looks at me, dropping the hand away. Perhaps he doesn't want to hurt my feelings.

“Can we open a window?”

“They're all covered up,” I say, looking up at the lights in the ceiling, which have come on now that we've entered. I can't remember the last time there was natural light in here.

His eyes are darting around, flitting from one object to the next, getting wider as they go. “There's so . . . much,” he whispers. Then, a bit louder, he says, “Where do you sleep?”

“In there.”

He starts to walk toward the doorway and I hear something crunch beneath his shoes. The panic spikes again. “Watch where you're stepping! You're breaking my things!”

Sung-Soo freezes and looks down. “Where can I walk? There's stuff everywhere!”

“Just stay still, then.”

His face is pure disbelief. “I'm not going to just stand here.”

“You could go and I'll pick some things off the floor.”