Planetfall (23 page)

“Ren!” His voice booms down at me as I drop to my knees and frantically look through the objects. I can see models, cutlery, an old-fashioned stylus to use with some of the early interfaces we had here. When his hands reach down I slap them away.

“This is mine!” I yell at him.

He picks up a tangled mess of cutlery, his fingers like the claws of some gigantic eagle from a children's story come to carry off poor adventurers. I grab his wrist but he shrugs me off and then I'm on my feet, my hand is a fist, and then there's
pain in my knuckles and a clattering of stainless steel. Pasha is staggering backward, reaching for his cheek, and I know then that I hit him.

The background din of the crowd disappears and an awful silence descends. I don't care if they're staring or what they think. I scrape the fallen items closer together, so no one can grab anything from the edges of the collection. When I hear footsteps behind me, I pick up one of the knives, a bent and blunt thing but the first to come to hand, and round on the one behind me.

“Put it down,” Mack says.

“I just want to be left alone,” I say. It's a perfectly reasonable request. I didn't ask any of them to come here. I didn't want any of them to go in my house and I don't want any of them to come near me.

“She's gone mad.” The wind carries the whisper from the crowd. It ignites a new fire of speculation and judgment.

Others close in and I throw the knife down. What am I doing?

“I'm sorry, Pasha,” I say, but he just stares at me. “I just . . . I just want to . . .” I look around me. All of them want to take my things and I can see there's nothing I can do to stop them. I have to find a way to do it on my terms. “Just let me look through the stuff so I know what's going to the Masher.”

With the scrutiny of the crowd pressing in on me, I try to sort through the cutlery, but I can't tell which is still good and which can be thrown away. It's all good. It's all mine and I can't look at it properly with them all staring at me.

“Just go home, for fuck's sake!” I scream at them. “I'm not your fucking entertainment! Leave me alone! Go on! Fuck off!”

None of them are paying attention, so I shout louder. I get on my feet and lean forward and my hands are fists again and my throat is getting raw but they still just stand there,
watching. A dialog box flashes up from MyPhys, with some sort of warning in it, but I don't pay attention. I have to make them go away. I pick up the nearest thing to me, something hard that fits in my fist and is light enough to throw, just as the dialog box turns red and starts to flash. “Emergency intervention,” the software says and then my vision tunnels as the chip in my brain is used to shut me down.

I WAKE ON
Mack's bed. I've often wondered what it would be like, not because I envied those he took to his bed, but rather out of a morbid curiosity. I'm fully clothed and lying on top of the sheets with a blanket draped over me, the same one that covered Sung-Soo when Mack drugged him.

I sweep it off me as I remember what happened before I lost consciousness. As soon as I move, MyPhys gives me a verbal report, reassuring me that I am physically unharmed and there is no cause for alarm. Straight afterward, a compulsory notice opens in a text box, detailing how Dr. Kay Reed deemed it necessary to stage a full intervention due to violent behavior and obtained the necessary second electronic signature from Dr. Lincoln to force a neural shutdown against my will. I scan the rest of the notice, absorbing its true message: my violence contravened colony rules and I gave the colony physicians the right to direct chip access when I signed up for the trip, so there is no right to complain either. When that box closes, another
appears, containing a notice of potential criminal prosecution for assault, theft and contravention of domestic environmental policy. The assault charge has been automatically logged by Pasha's chip; the rest has been reported by Nick, Carmen and at least twenty others.

I close the box and cover my face with my hands, pressing my head into the pillow beneath it. Everything is falling apart.

There's a single knock on the door and Mack comes in. I drag my hands down my face, pulling at my skin, and look at him in silence. He looks haggard and hesitant, pausing in the doorway as if checking whether I'm going to leap up and attack him too. When he sees that I'm keeping still he closes the door behind him and comes to sit next to me on the bed.

“How are you feeling?” His voice is low.

I look at the closed door. “Who else is here?”

“Kay. She had to—”

“I know. I got the message. Is Pasha all right?”

He nods. “He's fine, and he's not going to press charges. He wanted you to know that.”

“It's still in the colony record.” I feel sick at the thought of it. On Earth, that would follow me around forever, altering my chances of getting a job, seriously curtailing opportunities to work for any gov-corps or subsidiary organization, and all but ending any chance of romantic liaisons with any employees with high enough clearance to access my files. Not that I'd want to shag any of them anyway, but still, I'm tainted now. Seventy years of working hard to keep my file clean and now it's stained forever.

“It's automated.”

“Not the other charges.”

His lips press tight together, making the hairs growing beneath them shift orientation. They remind me of the cilia outside that room, but right now I don't care about any of that.

“Carmen shouldn't have done that,” Mack says.

“It wasn't just her.”

“The rest followed her suggestion. Interfering bitch.” He sounds genuinely angry. “I doubt the council will take it any further. Dr. Lincoln will explain it's . . .” He trails off, uncertain of what to say. It's so unlike him. He always has an answer, a way to twist any conversation into whatever he wants. But he's just looking at me and no words are being spun into their usual silver strands. He sucks in a breath. “Don't worry. I'll handle all of it.”

“And my house? My stuff? Did you stop them?” He shakes his head and I sit up. He puts a hand on my shoulder as I start to swing my legs off the bed. “They're not going to recycle anything yet; they're just emptying the house.”

“So everyone can have a good look?”

He doesn't answer. I can't stand these little silences from him. They're too loud.

“It wasn't a problem until Sung-Soo decided it was. I have a right to privacy and to live the way I want and—”

“No, Ren, not like that. I've talked to Kay and Lincoln and I've read up on it. You're ill. And the illness won't let you realize that and it won't want us to help you.”

He's one of them. There's no one here who will help me. I realize that now. I look to his throat, expecting to see a thong of leather there, but no pendant hangs from his neck. Perhaps Sung-Soo is still carving his.

All this stems from him. I should have been stronger. I should have been more careful, but I let him in and everything I feared the most is happening. Because I know what they're like. They don't understand.

There's always been a distance between Mack and me, a chasm filled with wreckage and memories and bizarre trees of loyalty and mutual dependency that have grown out of the
stinking filth at the bottom. But that distance has widened and now he's on another emotional continent, not even a tiny speck on the horizon, even though he is sitting there, trying so hard to be present and probably silently congratulating himself for being such a good friend in these difficult circumstances.

He probably thinks he's always been a good friend and can't understand why this is happening.

I can't bear the sight of his face anymore. I'm torn between two impulses impossible to fight: to hide here or to go back to my house and . . . and what? I can't stop them. Not even Lincoln could do that. I can't stand the thought of them all looking at me again. I can't just let them take everything out of there and . . .

Muscles contract in my stomach and there's a cold ball of fear in my chest. I look at the window and see the darkness on the other side of the aquarium. A flush rises up my throat and I can feel sweat beading on my forehead.

“How long was I out?”

“A few hours.”

I stand and wobble briefly. “I have to go home.”

“I don't think that's a good idea,” Mack says but I'm through the door before he can stop me, driven forward by the terror blooming through my body. I can't let them pull
everything
out.

Then Kay is between me and the outer door. Her face is puffy and her eyes are reddened, but I don't want to think about that, so I look at the pendant hanging at her throat. I have to remember to keep my guard up with her because she is one of his now. Carmen and Nick too. Sung-Soo has spent time with all the ones who are now against me.

“Dr. Lincoln is there, making sure nothing is disposed of.” She thinks that fear is the only one motivating my flight from the house. “It might be best to—”

I step to one side, aiming to go around her, and she matches my movement. I can hear Mack following me out of the bedroom, so I turn to face him. “Am I under house arrest?”

“No,” he says with the voice of an exhausted old man.

I move to go around Kay again and this time she doesn't try to get in my way. Instead she falls into step alongside me saying something about wanting to help and the usual bullshit they've all been trotting out since Sung-Soo betrayed me. I slap my hand against the sensor and the valve opens. Kay follows me out of the house but hangs back to conspire with Mack. I don't care what they're saying. All that matters is putting a stop to it all.

The paths are empty as I march across the colony and the Dome is dark. Perhaps the party has moved to my house now, one that has spectacle and schadenfreude instead of drink and drugs. I try to think of ways to halt the excavation as I half walk and half jog. I can't raise my voice or they'll think I'm being violent again and shut me down. Dr. Lincoln doesn't have the presence to stop them, but if I could get Mack to snap out of being so bloody flaccid, then he could stop them. I have to pretend to want to be part of the process Lincoln spoke about. I have to convince them that I've come around to seeing it their way and that I want to work with them instead of being obstructive. If I can convince them of that, they may force everyone else to work to my pace and I'll get them out of the house before they find the door down to the—

The crowd is huge. I reach the back of it several houses away from my own and have no desire to push my way through people desperate to see something to gossip about. I cut across the back edge of the human mass until I reach the colony boundary. I strike out into the grasses to go around them all and get to my house from the opposite direction.

“Ren,” Mack calls from behind me. I don't reply. There isn't time to get sucked into his crap now.

There are so many people that their collective chatter sounds like the hum of machinery and air-conditioning at the old lab in Paris. I'd do anything to go back there now and find that younger self and tell her to split off from Suh and leave the city before it was too late. But then I hear my name bobbing up to the surface of the noise and the spell is broken.

“They've found another door!” someone calls back to the people behind them and the news ripples through the crowd in the opposite direction from the one I'm hurrying in, much faster than I can move.

“In the floor?” someone asks.

“No, at the end of the steps down from that one,” the answer flies back and I sprint, ignoring the pain from my shoulder.

The crowd is thinner on the boundary side, unable to see into the drama from this side of the house. I shove my way through them and the crowd starts to open ahead of me as people hear that it's me. They're all too happy to make way for the crazy woman who's bound to do something more thrilling than anything they've experienced in the last ten years.

A cordon has been set up to keep the crowd back and I dive under the barrier closest to me. It was last used to keep people away from the foundation work we did on the Dome. Floodlights, used for that same activity, are now illuminating the small mountains of belongings taken from my house. I see my knitted doll on top of the one nearest to me and grab her, stuffing her into my sling to rest protected in the crook of my elbow.

There's no one outside the door, so I step inside. The sight of the empty hallway with its dead floor and grimy walls makes me hesitate, as if I've dashed into the wrong house. What used
to be moss is now just a brown powder with footprints tracked through it. The lower parts of the walls I haven't seen for years are cracked and bruised with mold. Have I been breathing in its spores all this time? Is it native or something we brought with us? Is that possible considering all the—

I can hear voices up ahead. They must be in the room on the other side of the kitchen. As I pass that room I can't help but peer inside. I haven't used it for over ten years, thanks to the portable food printer in the bedroom. There's a sink, dark green with filth and a stench that makes me cover my face like so many people I've seen today.

This isn't my house. I drift through the hallway, leaving the ex-kitchen behind, feeling unanchored here. It's almost as if I can't feel the edges of myself with nothing to squeeze through or push past. I fancy that I'm turning into mist as I walk, just a cloud of diffuse misery haunting this broken place.

“We just focus on clearing the tunnel right now. We'll shift it all outside later. We need to know the scale of this.” That's Pasha. He's in the room ahead of me.

“Is it safe down there?” Carmen asks.

“Ren's an engineer,” Pasha replies. “She wouldn't create something structurally unsound underneath her own house.”

“A sane engineer wouldn't,” Carmen replies as I reach the door.

They're both wearing coveralls and masks to keep the dust and spores out of their lungs. It makes me feel like one of the contaminants.

Carmen's cheeks blush over the top edge of hers. “Ren. We've almost done it. Once this is all cleared out, we can clean and repair the—”

I ignore her and walk past her and Pasha as calmly as I can, aware, so painfully, of having to keep up the act. I wait for one
of them to comment on how the underground excavation is illegal as it's not registered on the colony records, but neither of them say anything. It's beyond that now.

Crates of my belongings have been carried up to this room. I see the book my father wrote for me and brush the edge of the pages. I don't trust them to not throw it out, so I take it and tuck it in my sling with the doll. I would sit and leaf through it if there wasn't something more pressing to deal with. I promise myself that I'll look at it later, once I've stopped them going into the last room.

The door in the floor is smaller than I remember. It was white when I fitted it; now it is various shades of brown and black with occasional streaks of green. It looks like it's been camouflaged for a woodland environment. It's propped open and as I get to the edge with the steps leading down I can see the other side of the door is now gray.

They've taken portable lights down there that cast shadows across the steps. I carved them from the dirt with tools my great-grandfather would have recognized. I have to go down there, and fast, but the thought of it roots my feet to the top step. I'm trapped between the fear of going down there and the fear of them opening the door I made over twenty years ago.

“I can nearly reach the handle!” Sung-Soo's voice is like a cattle prod in my back. I'm down the steps in seconds and can see him at the far end of the corridor. It's less than five meters long and standing close behind him are Dr. Lincoln and Nabiha. There is a crate at Sung-Soo's feet. I can't see what's in it from here. As I watch he scoops up more of the things between him and the door to dump them in the crate with no care at all. He shifts the crate a couple of centimeters closer and dumps another armful into it.

I almost scream, “Get away from that door!” but I check
myself. It's as if someone had dropped me in a room full of snakes; I want to run and shout and be violent, but all that will achieve is them attacking me. I force a breath down my throat, breathing in the scent of their sweat. “I . . . I'm here to work with you,” I say to Dr. Lincoln.

“Good.” He smiles. “That's good.”

“I can see you all want to help me.” I wonder if that is too much but he just smiles again. “And I'm sorry about what happened before.”