RIME (Kindle Single) Page 4

  I tried to shove against the flow, or go with it, but they were pushing both ways.

  “You said they were dead!” I shouted, and as I continued to scream, any reply from Cradle was swallowed away.

  They filled the corridor, movement aimless and blind. If one of them walked into a wall, he or she would slip sideways until some obstruction––a doorway, a control panel of some sort, or another wandering soul––blocked their path or turned them aside. Sometimes that obstruction was me, and I did my best to push them away. I was desperate for them to not come too close. But it was a hopeless task; there were too many, the corridor was jammed full, and soon much of the movement ceased, and I was trapped there with cryo gel-smothered, naked men and women crushed against me. There was no life in their eyes, and no sense that they knew they were there.

  “Help me,” I sobbed.

  “You should have stayed in the rail tube,” Cradle said. “It still wants to talk to you. It’s demanding.”

  “Help me,” I whispered, because I couldn’t think or do anything else. It was rare that I was ever in a room with more than a few people, now I was surrounded by dozens of them. They smothered me. Maybe I would be crushed.

  They’re not dead, I thought, because that made no sense at all. Dead could not move, or think, or instruct muscles to act or lungs to breathe. The dead did nothing.

  “It’s doing something to the ship,” Cradle said. “All drives offline. Environmental systems shutting down.”

  “Drawing energy?” I asked.

  “No. Simply stopping it. The alien has complete control of Cradle and everything in it.”

  “What about you?” I asked.

  Cradle did not reply.

  “It wants me,” I said. I pushed a woman away, searching for any flicker of emotion on her face. Her mouth hung slack, eyes hooded and cold, empty even of dreams.

  “Move along the wall, six metres. There’s an access point to a maintenance port. I can’t open it for you, but––”

  “I’m moving.” I shoved forward, the wall slicked with gel. Reaching the port, I started prising at the fixing anchors, working on two at a time and standing strong as people collided with me. There was little force behind their impacts. They had no drive.

  As the panel cover clanged to the floor, I heard a voice I knew.

  “This way! Come on, hold my hand, stay together, I know it’s terrible but––”

  “Geena!” I stretched up on tiptoes, trying to see past the slowly bobbing heads, and there she was. Emerging from a passageway thirty metres away, her dull green MediTech uniform was obvious against the flow of pale white flesh. I counted three other MediTechs with her, people I recognised but had rarely conversed with, and I knew that the shock in their eyes was reflected in my own.

  Not the blame, though. That was all theirs. Even Geena’s face hardened when she saw me.

  I pushed my way towards them. I was so keen to reach my love that my fear lessened, and I shoved people aside in my eagerness. Some of them fell. A couple did not get up again, and I heard several cracking sounds that might have been breaking bones as others trampled them. No screams, though. No grunts or cries, sighs or moans. No words of warning or fear. I should have been terrified for them, but they displayed no indication that the sounds hurt them, or mattered.

  I reached them finally, Geena and the others huddled and holding hands against the human tide, and I held out my hands for her.

  “You should be on your way to Bridge,” she said. She was cold, angry, but crying at the same time. As if I was already lost to her.

  “I was,” I said. “I am. But I came to find you first.”

  “Isn’t it more important to try and put things right?” She started sobbing properly then, and when I reached for her, she pushed my hands aside and turned away.

  “You idiot,” one of the others said.

  “What’s happening to them?” I asked. Cradle had told me, but I wanted to hear it from a real person.

  “They all died in their cryo pods. Millions of them, instantly, just like that.” The man speaking could barely look at me, but he seemed keen to continue his explanation, as if verbalising it would help him make sense of a terrible truth. “I’m MediTech, have been for seven years, and I know how those things work. Do you know?” He stared at me properly, his glare cutting. I glanced at Geena. There was no help there.

  “They … they’re frozen,” I said, because I thought that was the truth. I had never really considered it too much, and my duties at Edge rarely took me down towards the vast cryo halls. The millions had been in cryo sleep when I was born and were supposed to remain there long after I died, and they had always been an unseen presence, more a story to me than reality. Even Geena had rarely seen any of these people, monitoring their wellbeing from control rooms remote from the halls that were home to countless nests of cryo pods.

  “Frozen in time,” the man said. “And what happened to them after what you did, after their pods were opened? No re-introduction to the time stream. They lived an eternity in the blink of an eye, trapped there in those pods.” He shook his head and looked around at the shambling masses. “It must have felt like forever.”

  “I didn’t know,” I said. “It wasn’t my fault!”

  “No,” Geena said. “You didn’t do this to them. Not directly.”

  I wanted to hold her, be alone with her so that we could talk, or perhaps not talk at all. Sometimes, a comfortable silence was much more calming.

  But Geena was looking at me in a way I had not seen before.

  “You need to go,” she whispered. “Cradle has told everyone what’s happening. It seems you’re the only one who can help.”

  If she intended that comment to pick me up, it didn’t work.

  “The entity is calling for you non-stop now,” Cradle said, voice projected through the corridor so that we all heard. Perhaps everyone on the ship could hear.

  “What does it want?”

  “I don’t know,” Cradle said. “It frightens me.”

  I smiled weakly at Geena, but she did not smile back.

  “I’ll see you soon,” I said. She nodded once, then turned away.

  I pushed my way along the corridor without looking back. Soon I was free of the throng. I made my way to the next station and boarded a rail-tube to Bridge. The tube was deserted. Everyone else seemed to be going in the opposite direction.

  “How can anything frighten you?” I asked Cradle, but the AI didn’t reply. It left me alone in the tube, silently contemplating what might come.

  * * *

  I am a hollow man. It feels as if they rescued me from the escape ship, drew me out of cryo-sleep, then scooped out everything remaining that once made me human––the purpose and hope, the sense of a journey completed and a troubled past laid partly to rest. At least for the past few days I’ve believed that I am at the end of one journey and the beginning of another. Now, with Olivia’s revelations, I am back at the beginning of everything. It feels as if I have a whole lifetime of mistakes to live again.

  I achieved nothing. I went nowhere. All those people lived and died to get me back where Cradle had begun, and the sense of hopelessness is so smothering and extreme that sometimes I can barely breathe.

  The only thing that makes me able to open my eyes and view the warm light of Sol is, ironically, the beauty of Earth.

  Everything I’d been taught about this place had led me to believe that it was a planet of the dead. When Cradle finally blasted away from orbit, much of Earth was gasping beneath the constant assault of airborne pollutants, poisoned oceans, and deadly sun’s rays piercing through the atmosphere’s depleted ozone layer. Adults were starving to death across vast swathes of the equatorial belt, and children were being born with cancer. Wars had erupted, and once the first nuclear weapon was used in anger in over a hundred years, it almost became the norm to deploy such monstrosities in even the smallest of border disputes or religion-inspired skirmishes. I know the nam
es of so many great old cities not because of their histories of art and peace, philosophy and achievement, but because of their obliteration––Jerusalem, San Francisco, Karachi, Moscow, Paris. A litany of war, a relentless history of decline. Those of us born to serve and die on Cradle were taught all the good of Earth, too, but it was the bad that always stuck.

  The bad was the reason we were there.

  The stories we were told turned out to be far from over. The world recovered. Technology and science prevailed, and brave politics strived against the downward spiral to eventually emerge on the other side into the dawning light of a new age. Olivia has told me that there are still places on Earth where people will not live for many centuries. But even these blasted cities and countries have been turned into forces for good, enclosed and isolated reminders of what went wrong in the past.

  I sit on the balcony and look out over the last planet in the galaxy I had ever expected to see. Even though the views are amazing, and the achievements of my race staggering, still there is that hollowness inside. Geena’s final words to me echo within.

  It seems you’re the only one who can help.

  I’ve asked Olivia where we are. For a while I tried to guess from the facts I have learned about Earth––a wide, grassy plain; a snaking river; hills in the distance. I thought perhaps Western Europe, or India, or somewhere in North America.

  “The Amazonian delta,” she told me. She went on to explain how the jungle had given way to desert, and that much of it had been reclaimed into this tamer, calmer landscape.

  All those poor people in cryo sleep––waking into death, walking for a time in that sick semblance of life––came from here, perhaps some close to where I am now. I feel like a cheat. The ultimate traitor. I hate Cradle for sending me back here, and hate that alien being for everything it did.

  I guess it and its companions hate me more.

  The door onto the balcony whispers and Olivia and Luke step out, joining me on the L-shaped seat. They sit close together, thighs touching. Olivia has told me that they’ll be married soon.

  “We’ve been trying to make sense of your story,” Luke says.

  I laugh. “You and me both.”

  “We’ve run it through some programmes we have here. Simulations. They build content and timescale out of limited data from the escape ship and the things you’ve told us, and then––”

  “I doubt I’ll ever understand the technology,” I say, and the ghost of a smile crosses Olivia’s face as I cut off her fiancé. She’s already told me that they hold me in some kind of awe. I’m famous, sure, but it’s not that. It’s where I’ve been and what I’ve seen. I’m the oldest human alive, and I’ve travelled further than any living person in history.

  “Well, of course. So, er, the simulation has come up with some confusing blank spots.”

  “My memory isn’t what it used to be. I’m three thousand years old.”

  Luke frowns at my weak joke. “It troubles me that it might be degenerating more.”

  “I don’t think so,” I say. I surprise myself by being a little putout. What is that? Pride?

  “We need the rest of the story,” he says.

  “To put into your programme?”

  “It’s important. You understand, these aliens you say you encountered are the only sentient extra-terrestrial life forms any human has ever made contact with. We’ve found microbes on Mars and Europa, and detected very basic bacterial life on fourteen planets in neighbouring systems. But nothing remotely like this.”

  Olivia has already told me that. The galaxy glows with life, she’d said. As well as the microbes that had been harvested and witnessed first-hand, and the atmospheric traces in more distant worlds, there were several artificial signals, which were still being gathered and translated.

  “We have yet to actually make contact with anything sentient. As far as we’re still aware, we’re the most advanced species in the galaxy.”

  “No, we’re not,” I say.

  “So tell us more. Help us fill in the blanks.”

  “You know what happens. I’ve already told you in my report. I speak to the thing, everyone dies, Cradle sends me back here.”

  “That’s something of a glossing over, don’t you think?” Luke asks. He uses some words like they’re unfamiliar to him, and I wonder if he’s looked up some old terminology to try and make me feel at home.

  I stare out across the landscape at the distant towers. They stand rigid and aloof while scores of small craft drift around and between them. It makes no difference to the structures whether these craft are there or not. We could all suddenly die and they would stand for a thousand years, or ten thousand more.

  “They weren’t aliens,” I say, and it’s only Olivia I can look at now. Only she will not disregard what I say next with a wry smile or a shake of her head.

  “Then what were they?” Luke asks.

  “I think they were gods.”

  * * *

  In all my thirty years alive on Cradle, I had never been to Bridge. Geena had once gone out of curiosity, but I had never been curious. I knew that Bridge was there, knew that the BridgeTechs ensure that all systems ran well and necessary maintenance and repairs were carried out. But it was the ship’s AI that truly ran Cradle. When Geena returned and I asked her about it, she’d shrugged and said, “It’s at the front of the ship.”

  On my way there, summoned by the massive, mysterious being whose companion I had killed, I wished I’d been more curious. I had to disembark at the final station and walk the rest of the way, following a route suggested by Cradle through my ear bud, and the stillness and silence were haunting.

  That was not a word that had much use to me before then. Not only mostly uncurious, I was also not a superstitious man. Some of the ship’s crew grew up to follow their parents’ religions and beliefs, but my parents had been practical and science-minded. In truth, most of us were brought up that way.

  I can see now that it was more of an existence than a life.

  The places I passed through as I approached Bridge were meant to be alive, but now they were empty and dead. Just like those shambling, wretched people. That was why I felt haunted.

  That, and the realisation that I was being watched.

  I felt attention focussed upon me. Every doorway, duct, pipe, and flashing light seemed to be observing me, falling quiet as I approached and watching as I passed by. I already believed that the whole crew had been told of my actions, and now it felt as if the ship itself was watching me. I wanted to run and hide, but there was nowhere out of sight. So I tried to manage my fear and moved on.

  “You’re close,” Cradle said. “Two hundred metres to Bridge, I’ll have the doors open for you. It’s around you now.”

  “Around me?”

  “Its main body is settled around the very tip of Bridge, but it has limbs. Wings. Tentacles, or something. And they’re touching along the hull of the ship where you are.”

  “Is it sensing me?” I asked, but I already knew the answer. Cradle did not reply. Even the AI realised that it was an obvious question.

  As I closed on Bridge, things began to change. The artificial gravity felt weaker this close to the ship’s northern. I heard sounds––soft clanging, gentle scrapes, noises I would normally associate with human activity. There was no one there but me. It was the being clasped around the ship, touching, probing, testing as I had observed on the viewer. It knew that I was there, and soon I would discover why it had asked for me.

  Revenge? Justice? I knew both concepts, though there had never been anything so serious as a murder on Cradle, and though we had a strict system of laws, it was rare that a full magistrates’ hearing was ever convened. We were born into duty and knew what was required of us from an early age. Revenge and justice were the province of those movies from Old Earth that some of us chose to view when our day’s work was done.

  “I’m here,” I whispered, inviting the thing to state or somehow reveal its intenti
on. “Here I am.” I continued walking until I reached a heavy door across the corridor. I tried to open it, but it remained closed, shut tight against me. My touch did not work. Override codes did not activate the door mechanism.

  This was the first of the main doors leading to Bridge, and it would not let me in.

  “Cradle? Can you open this door or me?” I thought I knew the answer already––if the AI could have opened the door, it would already have done so. It would be tracking my progress.

  What I didn’t expect was no reply at all.

  “Cradle?”

  Nothing.

  “Cradle!” Louder.

  I began to shake. Not having Cradle with me was like not being able to breathe. From the moment I was born Cradle had been there, a soothing voice when I needed it, information when I asked, a presence I never resented and which never felt intrusive. I had never known anything else, and to have it taken away almost drove me to my knees.

  It was just like that time in the plasma cannon enclosure.

  “Cradle. Cradle!”

  The absence was a vast, horrifying fact, and for the first time in my life I truly felt the depths of space around me, the deep infinity in which I had always been adrift. Without Cradle to hold me, I might fall forever in every direction.

  I began to cry. I wanted to turn around and rush back the way I’d come, retrace my steps to the place I had last spoken to Cradle in case it was something to do with my location.

  It’s all around me, I thought. As if in response I heard another series of taps and scrapes, dull sounds almost felt as much as heard, as the alien presence continued its exploration of the hull. As quickly as they’d started, the noises stopped once more.

  The door before me whispered open.

  “I am your Cradle now,” a voice said. It came from without, not inside my head like Cradle had been, but I could not tell from where. There was no one with me.

  “Come forward into my embrace. We need to talk.”

  I stepped through the door without thinking, and as it silently closed behind me and my ears popped from the differing air pressures, I asked, “Are you that thing?”