Paul McAuley: Residuals

When the process is finished, when there’s nothing more of Earth in the maze, will this thing be able to fly? Will Mitchell carry the war to the enemy?

“Ray,” someone—not Mitchell—shouts, from behind me.

It’s the FBI. I thought I was supposed to haul Mitchell out on my own. Now the pros are here, I wonder why I’ve bothered.

I feel like a sheep driven across a minefield. A Judas goat.

I got into the maze and I’m still alive, so Guerdon Winter and Bissette know it’s safe.

I turn, shading my eyes against the tinted glare that shines up from everything around me. The agents are following my footprints. Bissette doesn’t duck under the crossbar of an arch nailed up of silvery grey scraps of wood, and scrapes his forehead against a Mitchellite-spackled plank.

I know what will happen.

It’s like sandpaper stuck with a million tiny fishhooks and razorblades. The gentlest touch opens deep gashes. Bissette swears, not realizing how badly he’s hurt, and a curtain of blood bursts from the side of his head. A flap of scalp hangs down. Red rain spatters his shades.

Bissette falls to his knees. Guerdon Winter plucks out a handkerchief from the breast pocket of his sweat-stained seersucker jacket. A bedsheet won’t staunch the flow.

“You can’t go on,” Guerdon Winter tells the junior agent, who can’t protest for the pain. “We’ll come back for you.”

Naturally, Guerdon Winter has his gun out. When Mitchell and I went into the mothership, we didn’t even think of guns. I left my shotgun in the pickup, and Nyquist held on to his rifle like it was a comforter blanket and wouldn’t give it up to us. Some heroes, huh? Every single version of the story rectifies the omission, and we go in tooled up fit to face Bonnie and Clyde.

The FBI has made a bad mistake.

They’ve changed the story again. By adding the guns, and maybe themselves, they’ve made me lose my place.

I don’t know which way to go from here.

My feet and my spine and my aching knees were remembering. But the memory’s been wiped.

Bissette is groaning. His wound is tearing worse—there are tiny particles of alien matter in it, ripping his skin apart as they grow—and the whole right side of his head and his suit-shoulder are deep crimson.

“Ray,” prompts Guerdon Winter. There’s a note of pleading in his voice.

I look at the fork ahead of us, marked with a cow’s skull nodding on a pole, and suddenly have no idea which path to take. I look up at the sky. There’s a canopy of polythene up there, scummy with sand-drifts in the folds. I look at the aisles of junk. They mean nothing to me. I’m as blank as the middle of the map Mitchell gave me.

Then Winter does something incredibly stupid. He offers me a hipflask and smiles and says, “Loosen up, Ray. You’ll do fine.”

I knock the flask away, and it hits a concrete pillar laced with Mitchellite and sticks there, leaking amber booze from a dozen puncture points. The smell does something to my hindbrain and I start to run, filled with blind panic just the way I was when I followed behind Mitchell, convinced alien blimps would start nibbling at my feet.

I run and run, turning left, turning right, deeper and deeper into the maze. The body remembers, if it’s allowed. Someone shouts behind me, and then there’s a shot and a bullet spangs off an engine block and whoops away into the air; another turns the windshield of a wheelless truck to lace which holds its shape for a moment before falling away. I leap over a spar of Mitchellite like an antelope and run on, feeling the years fall away. I’ve dropped the map, but it doesn’t matter. The body remembers. Going in, and coming out. Coming out with Susan. That’s the name I yell, but ahead, through a kind of hedge of twisted wire coated with a sheen of Mitchellite, through the purple glare and a singing in my ears, I see Mitchell himself, standing in the doorway of a kind of bunker.

He’s older than I remember or imagined, the Boy Scout look transmuted into a scrawny geezer wearing only ragged oil-stained shorts, desert boots, and wraparound shades, his skin tanned a mahogany brown. I lean on the crowbar, taking great gulps of air as I try and get my breath back, and he looks at me calmly. There’s a pump-action Mossbauer shotgun leaning on the wall beside him.

At last, I can say, “This is some place you got here, Elliot. Where did you get all the stuff?”

“It’s a garden,” Mitchell says, and picks up the shotgun and walks off around the bunker. He has half-healed scars on his back. Maybe he brushed a little too close to something in his maze.

I follow. The bunker is a poured concrete shell, a low round dome like a turtle shell half-buried in the dry desert dirt. There’s a battered Blazer parked at the back, and a little Honda generator and a TV satellite dish. A ramp of earth leads up to the top of the bunker, and we climb up there and stand side by side, looking out over the maze. It extends all around the bunker. The sun is burning over our shoulders, and the concentric spirals of encrusted junk shimmer and glitter, taking the light and making it into something else, a purple haze that glistens in the air, obscuring more than it reveals.

“How long have you been doing this, Elliot? It looks like you’ve been here years.”

Elliot Mitchell says, “You ever been to South America, Ray? You should have. They’re very big on flying saucers in South America. Out in Peru, there are patterns of stones in the deserts that only make sense from the air. Like landing strips, parking aprons.”

A chill grips me. “You’re building a spaceport?”

“We never had any evidence that they came from outer space,” Mitchell says.

“What are you saying, they’re from Peru? There’s some bad shit on Earth, but nothing like those things. What are you doing here, Elliot? Trying to turn yourself into one of them? Listen, if you’ve found anything out, it’ll mean a shitload of attention. That’s what I…”

“More talk shows, Ray? More ten-line fillers in Time ? I had some guy from the National Enquirer come by a month or so ago. He tried to get in. Maybe he’s still in here, somewhere.”

I remember the red marks on Mitchell’s map, in the otherwise blank space of the maze.

I say, “You let me in, Elliot.”

“You understand, Ray. You were there, with me. You know what it was like. Only you and me really know what it was like.”

I see why he wants me here. Mitchell has built this for a purpose, and I’m supposed to tell the world what that is. I say, “What are you planning, Elliot? What are you going to do with all this?”

Mitchell giggles. “I don’t control it, Ray. Not anymore. It’s more and more difficult to get out each time. When we went to get Susan, where did we go?”

He’s setting me up for something. I say dumbly, “Into the ship. That’s how I knew to get to you here. This is like the ship.”

“It’s how I started it out. But it’s been growing. Started with a bare ounce of Mitchellite, grew this garden over the template I made. Now it grows itself. Like the ship. We went in, and we went somewhere else. Not all the way, because it hadn’t finished growing, but a good way. Back toward where they came from. Wherever it was.”

“You’re saying the ship didn’t come from Outer Space?”

“It grew here. Like this.” Mitchell makes a sweeping gesture with the shotgun, including everything around him. He’s King of the Hill. “Once a critical density had been reached, the gateway would have opened, and they would have come through.”

“They did come through. We poisoned them, we shot them, we blew up their fucking ship—”