Кейт Форсит - Relics, Wrecks and Ruins - Anthology of Speculative Fiction Short Works

And because you and I share that context, I can give you a sense of the frustration of working with the Carrath stones.

It was strange to have a lover who was not Nadima. Sexually, he was awkward at first. Yva was forthright in what she wanted and guided him clearly to her own satisfaction. Peros was surprised to find that, outside the bedroom, he didn’t know what he wanted from her or else did not have a vocabulary to ask for it.

The journey to Ouroboros was uneventful, though the sense of displacement and disorientation that came with the slip was perhaps a bit more pronounced for Peros than usual. Touchdown on the fourth planet was on a calm day, atmospherically speaking, and crew and passengers alike walked into the local sunlight with the air of going to a new park on a picnic. The Forger into Darkness ceased for a time to be a ship and became instead a village. For the months of the expedition, it would act as base camp for the scientists, and then become a ship again, riding the slip to Bercale-3. And, Yva made gently clear, after that she and he would not know each other.

“You should stay here,” he said one evening after they had fucked and eaten dinner. “It’s not good to be alone so much.”

“I’m not alone,” she said. “My work is very good company.”

“Maybe I wasn’t talking about you.”

If she had been Nadima, she would have heard the hurt in his voice. She would have bent a little. If not enough to change her plan, at least enough to offer him some little reassurance. Yva laughed.

“You should come to the site.”

“I’m a pilot. What would I do there?”

“See it. Look. We came all this way. Seems like a shame not to take in the sights.”

“I will if you want me to.”

She laughed again and shook her head. “Oh, bunny.” Bunny was not her pet name for him. It was what she called anyone she liked but was presently annoyed by. He had come to understand her that well, at least.

The site was a series of sandstone caves at the side of a wide, green-gray sea. Yva drove a cart there with two of the other science team members and Peros. They talked about superimposed magnetostatic potentials and diagrammatic quantum analysis. He watched the local sun setting over the water, the clouds going pink and gold as the sky slid to indigo.

In the caves, a truckback reactor fed electricity through a snakepit of conduit and wires to assaying equipment and sensor arrays, work lights and climate-controlled habs. A dozen or more people worked there at any given time in rolling ten-hour shifts like they were running a ship. Peros walked through the place with his hands in his pockets. The smell of saltwater and local algae equivalents was rich and pungent.

Yva took his hand, pulling him toward the central chamber. “Come on. Big show is this way.” He pretended to be reluctant, but in truth his curiosity was piqued.

The stone was as tall as a man, striped gray and white with tiny flecks of red unlike the sandstone walls around it. The surface was covered in complex lines that reminded him equally of wiring diagrams and calligraphy. The lines glowed, and though they were silent, he had the sense of hearing someone speaking too softly to make out the words. Yva stood before it, her hand in his. Her eyes had hunger and excitement in them, and for a moment she reminded him of a cat he and Nadima had kept in the common house on Molos, the way the little beast would stare at a mouse hole.

“This is impressive,” he said, knowing the words were too small.

“It is,” Yva said, and then the shared moment was over.

He stayed for an hour, watching and staying out of the way. When he told Yva he was going back to the ship, she answered with a grunt, not looking up from the screens. As he rode back to the ship, the stars had come out. The galactic disk glowed, its contours slightly different as they were on every world. Peros felt a thickness in his throat and chest and wondered if he might be growing ill or having some allergic reaction to the local air.

When he got back to the ship, he took a long shower which did not relax him, drank a glass of wine that the ship generated, and put in a connection request to Nadima, expecting it to go unanswered as his previous attempts had done. This time, however, the homunculus shifted and changed. Between one moment and the next, it developed long white hair with just a bit of yellow to it as if it had once been blonde, though it had not. Her face, tiny now to fit the homunculus’s thumb-sized skull, was pale, deeply lined, and serene. She wore a dress of purple tapestry, wrapped around her shoulders, and a necklace of silver set with huge turquoise stones. Nadima had still not gone for regeneration, and the annoyance he felt at that was like hearing the name of an old friend he had almost forgotten.

She didn’t speak, and—caught between What were you thinking to do this to us? and I have taken a new lover and I miss you —he didn’t either. The homunculus tilted her head. The tiny smile seemed amused by him.

“I didn’t think you would answer,” he said.

“I almost didn’t. But you keep trying, and I thought maybe if I did this once, it would help you be free.”

“I don’t want to be free. What were you thinking, Nadi? Why are you doing this?”

She shook her head. “I had my time with you. It was good, when it was good. It was less good when it was bad. And then I was finished.”

“Oh, please. Marriage isn’t a meal. You don’t take your fill and then push your plate away. You and I are two parts of the same thing. We belong together.”

“We did,” she agreed. “But the woman you’re thinking of doesn’t exist anymore. She hasn’t for years, really. There’s only me now, and I don’t fit the same way that she did.”

He leaned over his desk, towering over the homunculus, scowling at it. “This is ridiculous. You’re not talking sense. You are going to come home when I am finished with this contract. You and I are going to counseling or something. We’ll work this out.”

Her sigh was soft and gentle, and it made him realize that wherever she was, she was not being towered over. For her, there was a homunculus that looked like him, only tiny, on her own desk. It made him feel small here as well.

“You can call back if you like,” she said. “I don’t believe I will answer, but I didn’t think I would answer this time either. Maybe I’ll surprise us both.”

Her image dissolved as he snapped “I’m seeing another woman.” He didn’t think she’d heard him. When he tried the connection again, it failed. He sat alone for a time, growing more aware of the depths to which he had just humiliated himself. He didn’t weep, but he permitted himself to feel the sadness that had been his silent companion since the day she’d left.

Later, he made a cup of smoky tea, and set it across the table from him, watching the steam rise from it as if it might tell him something.

A mystery that cannot be solved and one that simply hasn’t been solved yet are difficult, if not impossible, to tell apart. We have learned a great deal from the Carrath stones, and this new one has yielded another dataset that may hold the key to deciphering all of them. Or it may not. If not, the next one—assuming there is another one found—may. Or there may be no key. The secret of the stones and their creation may require contextual knowledge we don’t have and never will.

It is possible that I have spent decades of my life on a problem I lack the ability to resolve. Even if I remain dedicated to this study—and I expect I will—I may die with a deep knowledge of trivia about the Carrath stones and no insight into the issues that brought me here. Or, maybe next time it will all line up, we will find the thing that puts all the unknowns into a formula, and I will be able to write an equation that lays bare the mysteries. Maybe I already have the information, but haven’t developed the wisdom yet to see the critical connection.