CHAPTER 25

They plotted the course and entered the asteroid field without too much complaining on Drake’s part. “There are some promising chunks of rock here,” he said. “You’d think we’d take some samples and see if this area is worth developing instead of chasing imaginary signals.”

“The signal wasn’t imaginary, Drake. I’m not saying it’s aliens, but there’s something out here–”

The ship jolted hard, and a loud boom reverberated through the cockpit. Janice looked at Drake with widened eyes. They’d both been on ships in battle, and they knew that sound, even before the lights on their board lit up to confirm it. “Explosive decompression,” she said. “Did we hit something? Did something hit us?”

“No, there’s nothing on the proximity alarms, we just… something broke. I don’t know what. Something in the engines, I’d guess, and it tore a hole through the hull.”

Janice unstrapped, went to the cockpit door, and looked through the window. There was just a short corridor from the cockpit to the galley… but there was no galley now. There was just a view of space, and stars, and debris, including bodies… but not whole bodies. Nothing they could try to rescue. “Oh, no. They’re all gone, Drake. All hands. The whole back of the ship tore apart.”

“That explains why I don’t have any engines.” His voice was hoarse.

Janice returned to the front. Drake blinked away tears, then pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes for a moment. Their ship – their part of a ship – was already slowing down, beginning a slow tumble among the asteroids, their thrust gravity giving way to weightlessness. Drake’s tears floated past her. “I’m sorry about Martinique,” she said. “I know you were close.”

Drake nodded stiffly. “All those years in the military… you and I have lost people before.”

“It doesn’t get any easier, though,” Janice said. “At least, not for me.”

“Me either. But we do what we have to do. Do we still have comms?”

Janice strapped herself in and ran her boards. “We do. I’ll light the emergency beacon. Someone will come along. We didn’t stray from our planned route. The company will come looking for their property. How’s life support?”

“For just the two of us? We’ll be fine for days, and it shouldn’t take that long for the company to find us.”

“Good thing we didn’t eat all the emergency rations, huh?” Janice unpeeled a bar and took a bite. “You were talking about the mission in Bondye, chasing one of Martinique’s signals, and you acted like it was a pain in the ass, but I remember how much fun that was – we had that new ship, and you got to really open her up and see what she could do. I might have actually seen you smile that day, though I’d have to check the cockpit recorder to be sure.”

“It was probably an optical illusion.” Drake took one of the bars she offered. “Martinique always wanted to be a captain. I just wanted to fly ships – I never wanted the responsibility of running one. We used to go out to the spaceport in the arcology and watch the ships take off, and talk about how we’d be on board one of them, someday. The military was the path for both of us, of course. Shooting poor people into space to go shoot other poor people since 2125, right? I wish we hadn’t lost her, but she went the way she would have wanted, out on a mission, in search of something greater than herself–”

A proximity alarm started beeping, and Drake and Janice stared at each other. “There’s nothing I can do,” Drake said. “No engines, no reaction wheels… I could vent some gas to send us spinning, but I couldn’t control where we spun very well… just hold on and hope.”

They braced themselves as well as they could. Janice thought a chunk of debris had struck the cockpit, a piece of their own engine flying at them in a random trajectory. The impact wasn’t enough to do any damage, but it sent them spinning away with fresh velocity, and Janice watched the dark, pitted face of an asteroid get bigger every time the cockpit window spun around to face it. She reached out blindly and found Drake’s hand, clutching her as hard as she clutched him.

“I’m glad we’re not alone,” Janice said. “I’m glad we’re here together–”

They struck the asteroid, and that’s when they would have died.

Drake and Janice saw flashes. They could never work out later which one of them saw what, because their memories mingled to an incredible degree, so much so that Drake remembered eating fresh green salads under the domes of Europa, where he’d never been, and Janice remembered playing in the public fountains of the Toronto arcology, though she hadn’t experienced open recreational water until she took her first rest and relaxation leave after joining the Imperative military. They agreed on what they saw, though, and even cobbled together a rough sequence of events, though they couldn’t be entirely sure it was right.

* First a great set of black double doors stood before them, and when the doors opened, blinding white light shone through the long, thin crack. Gradually the doors opened wider, and the light nearly filled the world. The rest of the world, though, was filled with pain; the light was everything the pain was not, and the light filled all gaps left by the pain. They floated toward that light, and passed into it, and the doors closed behind them, but one of them looked back, or perhaps both of them, and saw the shattered cockpit drifting beside the pitted rock, and bits of glass, and metal, and – was that flesh? Was that an arm? Was that a leg? Then the doors closed, and it was only light and pain for a long time.

*They saw a white Liar, but of impossible size, as big as a killer whale (Drake had seen a killer whale at a marine center once – or was it Janice who saw that?). The alien floated above them, its two large eyes somehow doleful, its countless tentacles swaying like kelp in an undersea current. The tentacles reached out for them.

*Scores of tiny Liars, the size of open hands, danced in the air around them. Then two of the Liars stuck together, and then a third, and more. First they formed an unwieldy wriggling ball of tiny bodies and then, somehow, they began moving as one – a conglomerate organism, one created from many, reaching out with tentacles made of small bodies to touch Drake and Janice, and where they touched, the pain went numb. “Stingers,” Drake remembered saying. “Are you stinging us.” He was thinking, or Janice was thinking, of the Portuguese man-o-war, a sea creature composed of many smaller sea creatures, and of its stinging limbs.

The thing spoke, in a voice that was scores of voices, but it didn’t speak in any language they understood, and then it broke apart into a swam of small Liars again, all tumbling off in their own directions.

*They floated in a tank of water, and a huge Liar (not as big as a killer whale, but twice the size of a human) with skin as pure white as snow floated beside them. Its body glittered with silvery augmentations, and its countless limbs worked busily, moving parts of their bodies around, and humming to itself. It patted them – lovingly, Janice thought; like you would pet a hurt dog, Drake contended – and then injected them with something that made them first go blurry and then fade.

*A bed, or at least a pile of cushions, and they were… not comfortable, but less wracked with pain than before. They tried to move and found that they could – their bodies responded to their thoughts, for the first time in a long time. They lifted their hand in front of their face, and then screamed, because it wasn’t their hand – his hand, her hand – it was changed. Their arm was shaped like an uppercase Y now: the bicep was the straight base of the Y, but it bifurcated at the elbow, sprouting two forearms from the single joint. One of the forearms was pale and freckled and had been Janice’s, and the other was dark brown and had belonged to Drake. Each forearm ended in a hand, but the pale one was missing a finger, and the brown one had too many of them. They had been Frankensteined, stitched together, but there were no stitches, and no scars. They’d somehow been… melded. “Drake?” Janice said, and her mouth was all broken. “Janice?” Drake said, and his tongue was thick and all wrong.

The pale white Liar entered the room then, and gestured in what they interpreted as excitement. He held up an oval screen of some kind, or perhaps it was a mirror, and put it up to their faces –

They couldn’t remember seeing their face. Not that time. After the mirror rose, they were blank.

*They were on the edge of a pool, sprawled out on their bellies – no, their belly, they only had one now. The water was dark and still. They looked at their face. Their faces.

They only had one head, an oversized pumpkin-lumpy head, and they shared it now. Drake’s face, with his dark skin, his deep brown eyes, was on the left side. Janice’s face was on the right, and she had only one eye, bright and blue. They had a nose – it had been Drake’s – perched equidistant between the faces, on the place where dark skin met light. They turned their head – somehow, instinctively, sharing control of their mutual neck, and each noted the absence of ears. There was no hair on that head, either, not Janice’s blond waves, not Drake’s tight black curls. They waved at themselves with their bifurcated arm, and then with their right arm – that one looked almost ordinary, though it was mottled dark skin and light, and the hand had six fingers and two thumbs. They tried to move their legs, to push themselves up to their knees, but it seemed their knees were no longer in evidence.

Drake remembered Janice crying, and Janice remembered Drake crying, but they both clearly saw tears drop into the pool and make ripples, and then scores of those tiny Liars broke the surface, like guppies in a fish bowl rising when you sprinkle food on the surface.

*Being fed. Being given water. Learning to swallow again. Drake tasting the food in Janice’s mouth, Janice tasting the food in Drake’s.

*Their first conversation. “Janice. Are you okay?”

“I’m half a monster. I’m horrible.”

“At least we’re alive.”

“We’re like Frankenstein’s monster if he’d had a conjoined twin, Drake. I want to die. Why won’t they let us die?”

“They tried to save us,” Drake soothed. “I think… they don’t speak our language… I think they just don’t know how to fix us. I think they did their best.”

“They’re butchers. Torturers. You saw them, how strange their own bodies are, too big or too small or made of smaller pieces, jammed up with machines – I think body modification is their hobby. They’re having fun. They’re playing with us.”

“They seem… I think they’re kind.” Drake paused. “When you get upset, I can feel my heart rate increase.”

“Our heart rate. I think we’re sharing one.”

“But… shouldn’t I be more upset?” Drake said. “I can feel chemicals, hormones, pumping, and I can… regulate them. I think… oh. I can make happy chemicals release too.”

“What is there to be happy about… oh. Well. That is nice.”

“But I should be complaining,” Drake said. “I don’t feel like complaining.”

“I’ll complain for both of us. This is awful. This is horrible. They’re going to put us in a museum of medical curiosities, in a zoo, on display. Or they’ll recycle us, or stick their own alien parts on me, or… I think the worst, Drake. Why do I think the worst of them? Is this your brain in my head?”

“I think it’s both our brains. We’re thinking each other’s thoughts, a little, we’re all crisscrossed. I think they saved both our brains and put them together.”

“Do you think we could kill ourselves?” Janice said.

“Do you want to? I still… I want to live, Janice. I do.”

“I want to die, I’m pretty sure, but what if I drowned us and they brought us back, gave us gills, what then?”

“I don’t know, Janice. I’m new to this, too. But I think it’s better to be alive than not. For now. I think we’re a miracle. At least it doesn’t hurt so bad anymore. Or not as constantly.”

“Do the thing with the good brain chemicals again. Slowly, so I can see how you do it. If we’re not going to die, I need to learn. I need to learn how to bear this life.”

*They were in a hangar, maybe, and it was full of white light, though not so blinding now – just enough to obscure the walls and ceiling from view. The white Liar zipped them into a suit – made of their own space suits, and other materials, they thought, and helped them into the cockpit of their ship. It wasn’t broken anymore, but it was changed, patched with the same strange variety that Drake and Janice were patched in themselves. There were bits of alien machinery, silver as the white Liar’s implants, attached to the cockpit, including something that must have been an engine on the back. The seat was made to hold them, customized somehow for their new form.

Drake touched the controls, and the panel lit up. Janice reached out with their split arm and touched the navigation board. “The display is different than I’m used to, but I can see where we are – not far from where we crashed, beyond the asteroid field.”

“Do you think these creatures were the source of the transmission Martinique wanted us to track down?” Drake said.

“Ah. I bet they were. It was aliens after all. Just Liars, though. Not anything new.”

“They haven’t told us any lies. Maybe they aren’t exactly Liars, or at least, not like those we’re used to.”

“Maybe they only tell white lies. Ha. They’re all white too. White Liars.”

“Maybe they’re healers.”

“They don’t speak our language, Drake. That’s why they haven’t lied. If they could, they’d spout all sorts of bullshit. They’d say they did this for our own good. They aren’t healers. They’re kids playing with toys. We’re the toys. No, that’s too nice. They’re butchers.”

“We aren’t meat, Janice. We’re alive. We’re still human.”

She held up her Y-shaped arm. “Are we? Are you sure about that? We look pretty inhuman on the outside. I wonder what they did to us on the inside? What they put inside us?”

The door closed, and the white Liar with the silvery augments thumped the window a couple of times, and then appeared to wave. Had it learned that from seeing them wave at their own reflection, they wondered? Was it a gesture that meant something completely different in their culture, whatever that was?

Drake waved back, and Janice scoffed. Then the hangar doors opened and their ship dropped into space, and the doors above them moved together, darkness closing up the light. Then their immense ship receded and Drake and Janice were alone; or as alone as either one of them would ever be again.

“Let’s go home,” Drake said.

“Sure. I’m sure everyone will be really happy to see us. Until they actually see us. Then I predict a lot of screaming.”

“At least we’re together,” Drake said. “I’m glad we’re together.”

“Shut up,” Janice said.