Майкл Бишоп - The Final Frontier - Stories of Exploring Space, Colonizing the Universe, and First Contact

“So, no…”

Ceremony? Nothing I need to know? Evidently not. Kiu breathed in, and lowered herself into the chair.

She’d used neural interfaces before. This was a different model, but… compatible enough , Tarsul had said. She leaned her head back, reached a hand up to take hold of the interface wires, and felt them coiling, responsive, toward the ports on her scalp. A moment of cool intrusion, warming into connection—and then, abruptly, Kiu wasn’t herself any more.

She was—

Much older, hands on the smooth black composite, not for any interface, just to feel the substance of the accelerator. A cold, clear purpose underlaid with urgent anger. Turning her head, a jangle ofstrange senses moving within her, seeing Tarsul standing beside her, expression sad. Seeing—

Someplace different. Long corridors, not as winding as the accelerator’s. No windows; what few windows graced the arcology’s walls faced the sweep of the Milky Way’s arms edge-on, not the much sparser starfields orthogonal. The space filled with voices. Footsteps. The scent of green growing things. The sound of—

Someplace different. The accelerator, but not a part she’d ever seen. Argumentative tones, not in a language Kiu had ever learned. Her voice—not her own—responding in kind. Kiu—

Kiu snapped her head back.

The accelerator—

—flooded her.

Remembered .

And through it all, existing in clear pinpoint precision, knowledge without history or context, a location —nothing more than the endpoint of vectors and accelerations, no fixed point because it had no fixed referent, or possibly the one fixed point in a universe where everything else, including the engine, was moving in the ordered cacophonic chaos of orbital motion, stellar drift, universal expansion.

As soon as that hit her, she was rolled over into a flood of need —not desire, not yearning, but a compulsion as inexorable as every indrawn breath, as unconsidered as a heartbeat. That was where she needed to go. Somewhere in that was home . Home for this engine rig which had burrowed into the side of a planetoid; home for Tarsul, for some pilot who had come before. Kiu reached , and the whole of space seemed to shudder around her. The accelerator snapped into motion.

And then Kiu came dislocated, like a joint wrenched out of socket, and shoved herself away from the interface. She flew in the low gravity; hit both knees and her forehead and palms on the cold composite of the hall, and then twisted, snarling, her entire sense of self ricocheting against the walls of her skull.

Tarsul was there. His hands hot on her arms, and she twisted in the microgravity, lashing out.

“Calm,” he urged her.

She snarled. Tried to shake him off.

Everything felt wrong in the low gravity. Kiu had lived her entire life in the real gravity of a planet, or the centrifugal gravity of a station—out here, she felt dislodged, disconnected, like her entire life had become illusory when she had become weightless. That only made her angrier.

They have gravity on the arcology , some fragment of memory—not her own—reminded her. Minded her? Could it be a re minder, happening for the first time? Not centrifugal. Experimental?

Like the planetary accelerator she’d just plugged into? Like—

Tarsul’s gloved hands, curling against her sleeves, colder and more rigid than they should have been. A soporific calm beginning to infiltrate her consciousness .

She kicked out, and Tarsul let her go. He floated back toward the opposite wall, head canted.

He wasn’t wearing gloves.

“What,” she pronounced, “the fuck?”

“You’re more equipped to answer that question,” he said. “Did something go wrong?”

Kiu spluttered. She dragged the back of her hand across her mouth, glaring murder at Tarsul. Her hands itched for violence. Worthless drifting piece of debris—dragged me out here to make a fool of me—

“Who were those people? Where was that—those weren’t my memories!”

Tarsul considered that. Then he said, “Ah.”

“Ah?”

“The accelerator gleans memories from each of its pilots,” he said. “I believe it was also intended as some form of… archival device, perhaps? As an ancillary function. I was told it was quite pleasant. Reassuring, in a way.”

Kiu spat. “Reassuring?”

“Especially for a history as contentious as ours.”

Kiu didn’t know enough to unpack that. Didn’t know Tarsul enough to interpret it. Still, she could have sworn he looked amused .

And that—

That was too much. The rage closed over her like a fist, like plunging into the water by a sulfur geyser, noxious and hot and filling her lungs. She lunged.

Tarsul’s amusement vanished in an instant. And, fast —too fast, with the kind of rapid-twitch motion that spoke to muscular augments, reflex enhancements, he sidestepped her attack, and put his hand out to catch the back of her neck. In another second he had her forehead against a wall, one of her wrists caught and pressed against the small of her back.

“It’s adaptive to fight when one’s life is at risk,” he said. “You are not under threat. Despite what you may feel. This, particularly, is maladaptive action.”

Humiliation coiled at the pit of her gut. Tarsul was treating her like a child, or like some kind of a toy—pick her up from the cell because she was convenient , right, bring her here and plug her into the engine like she was a spare part, lecture her like she was some idiot. “Let me go,” she warned.

To her surprise, he did. “I like you,” he said. Then, an incredulous noise from Kiu: “My policy is to like all people until I have a reason to dislike them. Because I asked you to join me, I have a duty to… situate you. I’d ask you, as a kindness, not to make this job more difficult.”

Kiu spluttered.

“Of course, I knew I took a risk when I found you.” Tarsul turned his back to her, which only made the rage spike higher. “But people with artificial neural networks as advanced as yours tend not to be the kind of people who would leave their homes forever, with very little explanation. You were the culmination of seven years of searching.” He turned his ear back toward her. “I’m curious how you came to be where you were.”

Yeah; most of the people with her kind of augments weren’t sad-sack drifters, weren’t murderous detriments to society. She got that; she was special . “I don’t want to talk about my past,” she growled.

“Of course not. But our pasts influence our futures.” Tarsul rolled one shoulder. “I also have a duty to the arcology. Bringing this planetoid to them ensures their resource security for another thousand years, perhaps. But you , Kiu Alee—”

He turned his whole body back to her, head canted, as though he could pin her with his listening the way someone else might pin her with a gaze.

“I also want to know that I ensure their security by bringing them you.”

Kiu avoided Tarsul as much as she could, given the confines of the ship. It wasn’t as difficult as she’d feared; the accelerator sprawled, replete with odd closets and rooms which had been mostly, but not entirely, cleared of detritus. Kiu made a room for herself out of the provisions that Tarsul had, apparently, bought on Erhat: a sleeping cocoon, listening materials on a tablet, a selection of meals, all with their own containment and heating units, so she didn’t have to run the risk of encountering him whenever she wanted food.

She’d refused suspended animation. After the interface, she didn’t relish the thought of going back down into her brain, even if she wouldn’t be conscious to experience it.