Sergei Lukyanenko - The Genome

The main thing was not to panic.

Alex quickly went to the shower, turned it on ice-cold, and stood for a few minutes, clenching his teeth. The gnawing anxiety and emptiness seemed to be subsiding, to be washing off.

Hang in there, we’ll make it!

It would be something to remember! What other pilot-spesh could brag about having loved, or having suffered the absence of love?

He turned on hot water for a moment, chasing the chill out of his bones. Rubbed himself dry with a towel, quickly dressed, dried and combed his hair. Looked at himself in the mirror.

Everything seemed normal.

Strong, manly face. Intelligent eyes.

Then something elusive, anxious, made him look away in fear.

Nonsense. Nothing, really. He was panicking—that was perfectly natural. So he was seeing things, stupid stuff.

Alex left his cabin and hurried to the bridge. All he needed now was the confluence with the ship, its rainbow warmth, the true feeling of a pilot-spesh. It wouldn’t let him down, it would save him. So what if it was still Morrison’s bridge time? He had every right to enter the system early. Say he couldn’t sleep, for instance. Or that he personally wanted to conduct the entry into the Zodiac system. He had never been there, and it was a great and magnificent planet.

Alex all but burst onto the bridge. He hurriedly lay down in the captain’s chair, looked over at Morrison. The co-pilot’s face was serenely happy, the way it was supposed to be. A good ship, a long flight, and reliable fellow crewmembers—what else could a pilot need? What sort of love ?

Lowering his head, Alex entered the system. The green spiral quivered, reached toward him uneasily.

“The ship is still in the channel, thirty-four minutes remaining before exit, no accidents, all systems are working well…”

“Thank you, Xang. Never mind me. I just couldn’t sleep. I won’t interfere with the controls.”

The green spiral replied with a wave of emotion—gratitude and sympathy.

“Captain, I used to have trouble sleeping—a problem easily solved by a glass of red wine. I’ve also heard warm milk with linden honey helps. And there’s always sleeping pills…”

“Don’t worry about me, Xang. It’s a rare thing. I’m fine. I won’t… I won’t stay long.”

Morrison’s image faded a little, done with the conversation. Alex remained alone with the ship.

The rainbow. The warm, wonderful rainbow, reaching over through the darkness. The soul of the vessel.

Alex reached toward it, greedily, already feeling his tension ease, the gaping abyss that cut across his soul drawing together and diminishing.

“Touch me!”

“Be one with me!”

“Love me!”

The rainbow flared up around him.

Faithful, selflessly devoted, it took him in gently but firmly, wrapping him in an invisible embrace….

It was like being back in the first or second grade, during the virtual instruction courses… A charming virtual young lady for an instructor, even for the little snots like him. Her joyful voice, “And now we will be introduced to the simplest method of sexual self-stimulation, celebrated as far back as the biblical times. Boys, if you some of you are already familiar with it, please be quiet for a few minutes, do not interrupt…”

It was like being back at a school party, playing spin the bottle, when teenagers would split into couples and bustle into secluded nooks, hoping to find out the difference between virtuality and real sex.

It was like being back at the graduation orgy—with experienced geisha-speshes, who knew every last erotic zone of the human body and were able to give themselves to you with joyful and selfless abandon.

It was everything—and nothing. A forgery. An illusion. A surrogate for love. A cynical fake. A nutrient tablet in a starving man’s hand—something that sustained his body, but didn’t feed his hunger. An inflatable doll-woman in a museum of sexual culture. A sex-partner recommended for procreation, who carefully played out the role she had memorized since childhood.

It was anything—but not love!

Alex screamed, ripping himself out of the colorful rainbow, away from the cloying touch of electronic witchery. The system shivered, letting him out into the real world. He twisted around in the chair, having forgotten to rip off the safety straps, noiselessly yelling something, seeing the uncaring light of the screens and the serene face of Morrison.

He had been robbed blind!

A long, long time ago, before he was born! With the complete assent of his parents, who chose for their future son the secure and gainful specialization of a pilot. He was deprived of… no, he still had no idea exactly what it was… he only knew he wouldn’t be able to live without it anymore.

He had been betrayed.

He was a servant, just like the poor vassals to the aristocrats on Heraldica. Though he wasn’t being raped quite so openly.

What had he been living for?

For the cold contacts with the rainbow light?

For the right to pilot a dozen tons of metal?

For the right to die for the Empire?

Alex wept, shaking in the straps of the chair. He hadn’t cried for a long time… so very long. And he had probably never wept because of emotions before. Pain, or physical discomfort, or a botched-up assignment made him cry many times… but what was it like to weep because of an elusive, intangible feeling, not essential to life?

Thirty-four years he had been a happy pauper. He had been eating the leftover crumbs he was ordered to eat, rejoicing over gifts of cast-off rags, working to fulfill his social duties in good faith.

Now his hour of reckoning had come.

Master-pilot, spesh, captain of a starship, Alex Romanov wept, like an offended child. He wept, looking at the happy smile on the face of his co-pilot, who had no need for strange experiences.

Zodiac glittered like a Christmas-tree decoration. Its insane orbit, which curved like the number 8, now lay beyond a blinding white star that poured oceans of light onto the planet. Any earthly vegetation would not last an hour under this scorching luminary.

But life is a very tenacious thing.

The whole surface of the planet turned towards the white sun now became a carpet of mirrors. “Lotuses,” giant flying plants inhabiting the highest layers of the atmosphere, floated through the air like a many-layered carpet, avidly absorbing torrents of radiation. Somewhere far below, in cool, deep shade, Zodiac’s plants and animals went about their lives… as did its people. Guests of this strange world.

On no other planet in the galaxy were endemic things treated as gently and carefully as they were on Zodiac. Of course, technology would have allowed the construction of an orbital shield to protect the planet for the two months of the year when it passed close to the white star. But the people who had made this world their home decided to take the risk of relying on the natural protection that had been in place for hundreds of thousands of years.

Alex stood in the recreation lounge in front of the switched-on wall-size screen. He was watching a live broadcast from the surface of clouds, and above them, the greenish, off-white underside of the lotuses, drifting to follow the sun. The active part of the lotuses’ life cycle took slightly longer than those two months. The rest of the year, they carpeted the surface of the ocean, turning it into a green, scaly plain, lightly rippling on the waves. The lotuses were home to other plants and animals—little symbiotes that had perfectly adjusted to the cycle. They spent the two sunny months in the oceans, awaiting the lotuses’ return, or inside the flying plants’ thick, meaty tissue, replete with hydrogen cavities, or simply on the leaves’ underside.