The day after they landed on the new planet, Park woke to a pair of strong metal arms pinning her down.
Against all instinct, she ignored her initial sense of terror and automatically relaxed her body; she recognized an android’s grip when she felt it, and her rational mind—the one that overrode the panicky animal one—knew that it was impossible for an android to hurt her.
Still. It wasn’t a comfortable thing to look around and realize she had no idea where she was. She tried to focus her unusually bleary eyesight on whoever was holding her: she’d had her vision genetically corrected a few years ago and had already forgotten what it was like to be poor-sighted, which didn’t help the bubbling panic.
“Where am I?” she croaked. She noticed her lips were cracked and sore, but they’d been like that for months, dry from the endless vacuum of space.
The android above her turned their head, looking off to the side as if asking for permission to speak. She thought she could make out blond hair, twisted in a tourniquet-like braid. Ellenex, then, the ship’s medical android. No other robot on the ship had yellow hair.
“Go away,” commanded another voice, this one sharp and rigid. What she thought was Ellenex moved silently away, leaving Park blinded by the sterile white light the android’s head had been blocking off. Then another person moved into her watery field of vision, and this one she recognized more clearly: Chanur. The ship’s physician.
Park was in the medical bay.
Now she did panic, sitting up and clawing automatically at her arm; she ripped off whatever medical tab had been glued there and said thickly, “Am I sick?”
Sickness should have been impossible on their ship, she knew. All thirteen members of the Deucalion’s human crew had been rigorously examined, scanned, and tested for disease prior to boarding for the ten-month journey to Eos. And with no foreign microbes in space, the chances of incurring infection en route were vanishingly small. But just last night, Park had been informed that the expedition’s roboticist, Reimi Kisaragi, was indisposed and being held in quarantine. And if Park had caught whatever she had . . . well. The last time something like this had happened, an entire fleet of military vessels had been compromised, a foreign virus blazing through their ships like wildfire. Park remembered reading about it in the news before they left Earth: a biological attack by the rebels. No survivors.
Chanur watched her struggle with a thousand grim possibilities like a scientist watching a pinned insect squirm. Finally the doctor said, without warmth: “You’re not sick. Not in the way you’re thinking, anyway.” She sounded genuinely disappointed by that fact.
Park frowned at her. “What do you mean?”
“You spent the entire night throwing up in the waste cubicle,” Chanur answered in clipped tones, folding her arms as if it were Park’s fault; as if she were a child who had misbehaved. The doctor was a native of Phobos, and her voice always had the flat, tight tones of a human whose larynx had shrunk a little in space. Actually, all of Chanur seemed a little shrunken, a little hard: she was a compact woman with iron-colored hair and eyes, and a mouth that was perpetually pursed. Park had always thought that she would be better suited as a roboticist rather than as a physician. Or as a coroner. Despite her reputation in the medical field, Chanur didn’t like people very much. “You essentially passed out from dehydration. The janitor bot found you.”
Something jolted at the back of Park’s neck. “I don’t remember that,” she said automatically, tamping down the bubble of fear in her chest. Then she welded her mouth shut; Chanur was raising her eyebrows at her.
“Are you saying that I’m a liar?”
“No,” Park said. She thought fast. She didn’t remember going to the bathroom at all, let alone spending an entire night in there. But it was true that she had woken up space-sick and nauseous every day since they’d launched out of Baikonur; she had never left Earth before, had never worked with a flight crew of any kind, so was it that much of a stretch that the long journey had finally taken its toll on her?
But all night?
She needed information first, not a fight with the ship’s only physician. “I’m sorry,” Park said, squelching any emotion out of her voice. “It must be the sedatives, fogging my memory. I don’t doubt your word, of course. I just don’t remember.”
Chanur grunted, unimpressed. “Someone put something in your food,” she said, consulting the medical manifest in her hand. She said it in a bored tone, as if she were reporting a change in the weather. “Emesis tabs. Not taken from the stockroom, so it must have been from the culprit’s personal stash.”
Park clenched her jaw to keep it from slackening. “Who? Why?”
Chanur gave her a look. “I don’t know who. As for the why—what do you think?”
Park pressed her lips together. She was not popular with the crew, everyone knew this; and some of the space-born had mocked her ongoing queasiness, going so far as to call her a “garn”—after Senator Andrew Garn, an Earth politician whose intestines had bottomed out during the first lambda space flight. And they hated her for her role on the ship, and for what had happened in Antarctica, and for any number of things—but she’d thought the hazing and pranks had stopped on Earth. To go as far as poisoning her food . . .
She jerked her thoughts away from the topic, despite the heartsick feeling in her chest. She needed time to regroup her thoughts, away from Chanur’s unsympathetic gaze. She needed to talk to Dr. Keller and decide what should be done. There was no doubt in her mind that punishment ought to be meted out. But to whom—and by whom—was something she needed to consider.
“Will there be any long-term effects?” she heard herself ask, as if she was listening to her own voice from another room.
Chanur looked like she wanted to roll her eyes. “Teenagers eat emesis tabs with their meals to lose weight. You’ll be fine.”
She turned away, perhaps to begin the process of discharging her, so Park said, “How’s Reimi?” The abruptness of it was gauche, but she hoped she could surprise Chanur into answering. “Has her condition . . . improved?”
The doctor’s shoulders stiffened, but she didn’t turn around. “Officer Kisaragi is in cryogenic stasis,” she said finally.
Park hissed in a sharp intake of breath, as if Chanur had punched her. “Cryo?” she all but cried. Then she gentled her voice and said in an undertone: “Surely it can’t be that bad?”
The last time she’d seen the roboticist, Reimi had complained of stomach upset, but otherwise she’d seemed fine. How could her sickness have gotten bad enough that the young woman was placed in the “freezer,” as the spacers called it—and what were they going to do without her?
Reimi was the Deucalion’s lone engineer: the only person with the knowledge to service the ship’s vast governing systems and all thirteen of its androids. Park supposed the expedition could muddle through with the robots maintaining the ship—but what would happen when they fell into disrepair? Darkly she imagined an explosion in the ship’s innards, the silent bloom of fire in space. She said aloud, “Ten months out from Earth—no foreign microbes, filtered air. How could she have gotten sick enough to warrant cryo? It couldn’t be latent, could it? Something we missed in the scans?”
A disease, she meant: something that had lain dormant in Reimi’s system all this time, only to surface now. The part of Park that had grown up in a crowded biodome shuddered. Just please tell me it’s not contagious.
The corner of Chanur’s mouth twitched. “It’s confidential medical information, Park,” she answered, looking back at her with disdain. “You know I can’t disclose that to you. Surely things work the same way on Earth?”
Park ignored the jab. “Then why not keep her in quarantine, at least? That way she could work on the ship and the androids in isolation—or at least instruct someone else on how to do it remotely. Why cryo?”
If she’s unconscious, she meant, how can she help us? The ISF was not paying billions of dollars for their mission’s only engineer to be frozen as literal dead weight. But Chanur didn’t answer, and something else occurred then to Park. “How do we know she wasn’t poisoned, her food tampered with—like me?”
From over the top of her manifest, Chanur’s gaze flicked over Park with the hard precision of a scalpel. “I don’t know what it is you want from me,” she said finally, tightly. Her lips barely moved, as if she were practicing ventriloquism. “It’s classified and not under your purview. More than that, I didn’t realize I needed your approval.”
Park tried not to flinch at the obvious hostility of the statement. She was one of the two psychologists on the ship, charged with monitoring the crew’s mental health; Chanur was the physician in charge of their physical wellbeing. That meant they were both medical professionals—Hippocratic sisters, Keller sometimes joked—but Chanur obviously saw their roles as completely separate from one another. Worse, she seemed to perceive Park as some kind of rival, or a threat.
Stop antagonizing her, Park told herself. Stop worsening this divide—she has access to information you’ll need, and making her hate you even more is unwise. But she said instead: “Did ISF authorize the freezing? You don’t need my approval—but did you get ISF’s?”
Something flashed over Chanur’s face, then: a movement of the cheek, a hardening at the corner of her mouth. Park grabbed at the data and tucked it away for future analysis, using her neural inlays. Chanur, seeing what she was doing, turned her back.
“Of course ISF authorized it,” she said, busying herself with the console terminal installed into the medical bay’s left wall. Her shoulders were tight with derision and scorn. “You really think anyone would let me put Kisaragi on ice without their say-so?”
“But no one prepped us beforehand,” Park insisted, still watching the doctor’s back. She was trying to parse through her body language, recording subtly on the inlays installed into her eyes. “I wasn’t informed.”
“That’s not my problem,” Chanur said. She looked back once, her eyes unfocusing slightly as she seemed to contact somebody on her own inlays. “Is it?”
“No,” Park said. Now she backed off, wary of an outright power struggle. “I suppose it isn’t. But what are we going to do about the ship? The androids?”
Chanur made a discourteous noise. “You can take care of them,” she said. It was an insult, not an endorsement of Park’s skills. “You’ve seemed to have made that your priority, anyway.”
Park felt her stomach tighten. But before she could fire back a response, a pair of heavy, regular steps from farther back in the medical bay interrupted them both. The ship’s custodian android, Jimex, rounded the corner, accompanied by Ellenex again. Both had tepidly curious expressions on their faces, and Jimex moved instantly to Park’s side. Ellenex, whose crisp linen uniform and tinny voice reminded Park vaguely of the nanny android who had raised her, said mildly: “Hello. There are elevated stress indicators in your voices.” Her pale eyes turned to Park’s. “Is everything all right?”
“I’m fine, Ellenex,” Park assured her, just as Chanur said with an expression of dislike: “I already told you to go away.”
Ellenex nodded politely and left the room again, her pale hands clasped serenely in front of her like a nun’s. Chanur said with disgust, “Rotten thing is malfunctioning. It doesn’t listen to a word I say.”
Maybe you shouldn’t have frozen Reimi, then, Park wanted to reply, acid frustration simmering in her gut. She’s the only one who can fix them, after all.
But she held her silence, and Jimex, who hadn’t moved, turned to Park and said, “I hope you have recovered from your gastric distress, Dr. Park.”
She couldn’t keep her lips from quirking ruefully, looking at him. Because he looked so human, it was easy to forget that Jimex was a simple custodial android, a janitor robot tasked with sanitizing and organizing things aboard their research vessel. His was a primitive model, far more basic than Ellenex’s nursing AI, and the disparity between even their speech patterns was vast. His was not a product line known for glowing conversation, or even polite conversation: he didn’t know how things sounded.
Still. She found something about him charming, even childlike, even though he was a slim, platinum-haired adult male who towered over her. Looking at him standing beside her cot now, she supposed she could see why the other crewmembers disliked the sight of him: he looked ghostly in the medical bay’s pale light, gaunt of frame and sporting colorless eyes and a stark, rigid face. She’d even heard some of them calling him “Ecto,” after ectoplasm, that trail of ghostly slime. He certainly haunted the dark spaces of the ship like some lost spirit.
“I’ve recovered, thank you,” she told him, almost wanting to pat his hand—though he wouldn’t understand the gesture. “And thank you for bringing me to the medical bay. Dr. Chanur says you were the one who found me.”
He looked at her steadily, not acknowledging her thanks. “Has a reason been determined for your illness?”
She glanced at Chanur. “Someone slipped emesis tabs into my food.”
There was a short pause as the processors in Jimex’s head whirred. He didn’t seem to know how to respond.
“In your opinion,” Park continued, fully aware of Chanur watching her now, “who on the ship do you think is most likely to do that?”
Jimex blinked slowly. The buzzing from his head increased. “I do not understand the question.”
“Who, in your opinion, do you think would try to poison me?”
Chanur wheeled on her then, eyes flashing with disapproval. “It doesn’t have an opinion, Park,” she said tightly. “Being a machine.”
There was a little silent beat as Park waited for Jimex to respond to that. But the custodial android said nothing to dispute the claim; he only stood there, looking at them placidly. Park could suddenly feel the chill emanating from the walls. Finally Chanur turned away again and said, “Now, if you don’t have any questions regarding your own health, I’ll ask you to leave, Park. You’re fine, and some of us have actual work to do.”
And go to hell to you, too, Park thought after, hurrying down the corridor a few minutes later with Jimex trailing her steps. She was eager to get away from the medical bay, eager to be alone with her thoughts—but just a few steps in, she slowed and put a hand out to his sleeve. “Take me to the service tunnel, please,” Park whispered, hunching her shoulders a little in the dark. The tunnel between the medical bay and the ship’s private quarters opened up before her like a throat. Normally she relied on the map in her neural inlays to guide her through the ship, but there was that swaying feeling in her head, a remnant of the tranquilizer tabs and her recent illness. Jimex nodded and began to lead her down the corridor, marching strangely like an executioner leading his victim to the gallows.
Park had to grit her teeth and force herself to forge onward, clinging to his sleeve. The Deucalion was structured like a rabbit’s warren, the ship itself a gray oblong disc whirling through space, its innards three decks’ worth of cramped and crooked passageways that twined around each other in dimly lit confusion. No straight lines here, Park often thought. No straightforward direction, no clear-cut compass. The way the corridors twisted around each other—coupled with the way the ship spun—meant you could never really tell what direction you were moving in. Whether you were going down or up. The reasons for this were backed by physics—streamlined shell for acceleration; spread-out channels to distribute mass; rotating sections of the ship to create gravity—but it didn’t make navigating the damn thing any less unnerving. It was like following the root system of a giant tree, shuffling blindly along in the half-dark. Or climbing through the arteries of a mechanical heart. What would be found, deep down in the core of things? You could never be quite sure.
Park suppressed a shudder. She often felt a feeling of erasure, being trapped aboard the ship: as if everything within the great vessel was bent towards annihilating her presence. Even the state-of-the-art filtration systems eliminated all odor, all animal smell and musk. There was no sense or proof of presence; it was as if the humans on board were being sterilized out of existence. And she could never get used to the way her soft deckboots made no sound on the red-veined tile—a kind of hellish-looking carbon composite meant to protect them from the heat of reentry. The silence of her own footfalls disconcerted her. She felt always as if she might be swallowed whole by the ship.
Finally she found the bright circle in the wall that indicated the service tunnel she wanted and stumbled toward it. The actual everyday sections of the ship were well-lit, but the passageways between them and the storage rooms operated at half-luminescence, to conserve power. She stopped when they were tucked safely away into the bend and turned to Jimex.
“Who works in the cafeteria?”
His head whirred again. After he’d checked his databases he replied: “Philex works in the cafeteria on most days. Megex on others.”
“Speak to them, please, and find out which crewmember could have had access to my food when I wasn’t looking. From last night’s meal as well as lunch. And speak to Ellenex as well—I want to verify Chanur’s story.” For all I know, she could have been the one who poisoned me, she thought but didn’t say.
Jimex cranked his head to the side; in a human it would have been akin to a tilt of curiosity, but in him it simply looked as if his head were askew. “Dr. Chanur’s story,” he repeated.
Park stared at him. “I want to hear from Ellenex what I was sick with, when I was found. Whether the stockroom has really been untouched. Those sorts of things. Chanur won’t allow her to speak to me, but she won’t stop you.” The robots all had a silent way of communicating with each other, though she suspected she was the only one who knew this—besides maybe Reimi. After a moment she added: “And I’d like to hear from her about Reimi—Officer Kisaragi—too. About what really happened with her. If Dr. Chanur’s version of events are true.”
Something wasn’t right, she thought as Jimex nodded and thunked dutifully away. The nearest ISF outpost was five weeks away: it took eighteen hours or more to send a message there, the same amount of time to receive a response back. How had they obtained permission to freeze Reimi so quickly, when she’d fallen sick only yesterday afternoon? And why in such secrecy? For what purpose?
No, something wasn’t right.
Thinking of this, she pulled up her datagrabs of Chanur’s face and examined them, rifling through the snapshots on her neural inlays. Privacy War skirmishes were still erupting on the outer rings of the system, rebels and ISF agents battling it out on colonies like Halla and Blest, and confidentiality was on everyone’s minds. Current privacy laws dictated Park had up to one hour to view any images for “personal use” before they were deleted; she used that opportunity now to scrutinize Chanur’s features. Yes, there was definitely something there: secrecy, annoyance, hidden anger and laughter in turns. But laughter at whom? Park? And anger at what?
No wonder she turned her back, Park thought—even though such a gesture was considered offensive in Chanur’s native Martian system, where face-to-face contact was scarce enough. There was a gamut of feeling roiling beneath the physician’s surface, and she’d hidden her face knowing—as everyone knew—that Park would sniff her out, given long enough. That meant she had something to hide.
She stood there for a while in the dark, trying to puzzle out Chanur’s state of mind. Park had her degrees in phenotypology: the kind of training that asked psychologists to analyze and interpret the feelings of their patients through facial tics, body language, topography. Words could lie, but the body often knew the truth of things, and would broadcast it to the most attentive phenotypologist. Park could deduce emotional stability in conversational pauses, anxiety or calculation in the twitch of a brow. Every look was a data point. It was the kind of skill that androids used to interpret the myriad expressions of human beings, and overall a good niche for Park: it meant she didn’t have to talk much.
“You’re the monitor,” Keller would often say. “The one who’s behind the scenes, watching. Figuring out what’s going on below the surface. I’m just here as the bait, coaxing everything out for you to examine.”
Flattery, Park had decided at the time—or, more uncommonly, genuine kindness. Most in the psych field disregarded phenotype analysis as simple data collation, research: it didn’t help anybody. Apparently Chanur thought so, with her venomous implication that Park had little work to do besides fussing after the robots. Worse, she thought Park’s ability was some kind of probe she had to protect herself from. An intrusion. But an intrusion on what?
She heard a tapping from down the hall, suddenly. Someone with a light tread, moving in soft deckboots—not an android, then, or Jimex coming back already because he’d misunderstood her commands. She half-turned, expecting Keller, who should have come looking for her by now; but instead she was surprised to find the tall, lanky form of Kel Fulbreech looming up out of the dark.
“Fulbreech,” Park said, trying not to sound startled. More likely than not, he was startled to find her lurking alone in a maintenance tunnel.
“Park,” Fulbreech answered, easily enough. “I was just looking for you.”
“For me?” She tried to think of what Fulbreech would want with her. He was the cartographer for the expedition, tasked with mapping out the new planet. She couldn’t imagine he was approaching her for psychological help, down here. In its usual way her mind went to the worst-case scenarios: Had a fight broken out between crewmembers? Was there a malfunction somewhere on the ship, and they were preparing to evacuate?
But Fulbreech said, a little bashfully: “I heard you’d gotten sick and I was coming to visit you. Are you feeling better?”
Park pressed her lips together; so news had already spread around the ship. Did anyone suspect that she’d been slipped something? Were they all in on it? Out loud she said, “I’m fine.”
Then, belatedly: “Thank you.”
If he found her rude, Fulbreech gave her no indication of it. He was one of those people who could hide very little from her, with his friendly, guileless face, his clear blue eyes and strong chin. He began, “Do you—”
Then he seemed to lose his nerve, perhaps sensing she didn’t want to discuss it, and said instead: “I was, ah, wondering if you were free in an hour or so.”
She checked the time on her inlays. “I’m scheduled to have lunch at two.” The ISF kept them on rigid timeslots and rotations, something Park didn’t agree with: their schedule helped to maintain a sense of routine for crewmembers who had no sense of conventional time on Eos, with its two alien suns—but the lack of freedom and community also tended to breed resentment on the ship.
“I am, too,” Fulbreech said, his words a little too quick. As if he was trying to preempt some response from her. “And I was wondering—well. I have a surprise I’d like to show you. To help you feel better. I think you’ll like it. Will you join me after your meal?”
Park’s stomach jerked. She didn’t like that. Didn’t like surprises, not knowing what might be waiting for her. She’d had enough of the unexpected today, anyway. But because she had to know, she said warily: “What is it?”
Even in the dark, she could see Fulbreech’s grin. “It wouldn’t be a surprise if I told you, would it?”
“I still would prefer to know.”
He laughed: the sound was rich and warm, and seemed to reverberate through the tunnel. Park’s stomach squirmed. “Just eat quickly, and come see me on Deck B afterward, all right? I’ll tell you then.”
Then he turned and walked off down the tunnel, back in the direction he came. Fulbreech had the odd habit of whistling while he walked, which often made others stare. Few of the space-born knew how to do that anymore. They didn’t need to; sound carried so differently, away from Earth. Things like a whistle got distorted in the star-screaming void of space.
Park stared after him as he vanished down one of the vertical hatches, which opened like a pit into the floor. What on Earth was the cartographer up to?
And what surprise could he have in store for her?
Apprehension filled her as she turned toward the long dark gullet that lay between her and the office she shared with Keller. In her experience, there was always some kind of underlying motive for gifts, or favors, or surprises. Some sort of price that was expected to be paid. For some reason she found herself thinking of poor Reimi, now stuck in her cryogenic pod. As horrible as it sounded, there was always the chance that being frozen would be a blissful experience for her—like waking up from the longest, most refreshing nap of her life. Maybe she would emerge from her pod feeling younger and stronger than she ever had before. Her skin all taut and dewy. Her eyes cleared by months of sleep. Maybe being frozen was like a rejuvenation—or a much-needed escape into oblivion.
Or maybe it was like waking up in a coffin, Park thought, bleakly. Not quite dead, but wishing that you were. Maybe Reimi was still awake when the freezing began, cognizant enough to feel the agony of her arteries shriveling, her body deflating inch by painful inch. Organs locking up, tissue gluing itself to tissue, the blood turning syrupy and slow with cryoprotectants. Maybe being frozen was its own kind of trauma.
The latter seemed more likely, didn’t it?
Space supported her line of thinking. Space was all about entropy. If a star wanted to grow, it had to feed off the energy of another star. If a ship wanted to propel itself into the next galaxy, it had to sacrifice mass, straight lines. Being frozen or being surprised by a crewmate should be no different. There were no free rides. No spontaneous gifts. Things out here came with a price—whether you asked for them in the first place or not.
“What a cynical way of thinking,” Keller exclaimed when Park brought it up with her later. “I’m sure he’s saved you a cake ration, or something.”
“But why?” Park asked. “What’s the motive?”
“He likes you,” Keller said, rolling her eyes. “It’s a courtship thing.”
“No,” Park said flatly. “That can’t be it. He doesn’t even know me.”
“He’s the only person on the ship who talks to you, other than me and the janitor bot. No offense. You don’t think he’s gotten to know you over these last ten months?”
No, Park thought. ISF had them separated on regimented shifts, some teams taking turns sleeping while others maintained the ship or prepared for planetfall or gathered data; the idea was that they had to be used to operating as independently as possible, in the event that something happened to the other crewmembers. As impossible as it seemed, after nearly a year, she still hadn’t interacted with her own crewmates much—except in patient sessions. And even then, she wasn’t the one who spoke. “I don’t know much about him, other than what’s in his file.”
“That’s not his fault.”
“I didn’t say it was.”
“Then why punish him by denying him the chance to get closer to you?”
“Fraternization is forbidden between crewmembers.”
“My dear . . .”
They were sitting together in their shared office: a grim little space, but one of the few truly private rooms aboard the Deucalion. If Park had had her way, she would have convinced ISF Earth to cough up the bits to convert the office into a more welcoming space: better lighting, warmer colors to the gray walls, maybe a plant to alleviate the ambient chill. Curtains to simulate security, privacy. But Dr. Keller was the primary psychologist, and she was utilitarian, machine-based. She’d brought a MAD—a Mood-Altering Device that shot soothing gamma rays into a patient’s eyes—and told Park that it was enough.
“Can we get back to the topic at hand?” Park asked. “I’m concerned about Reimi’s absence impacting the mission. And as to whoever poisoned me—”
“I wouldn’t call it poison—”
“Legally, it’s poison. I’m aware that the likelihood of anyone confessing to the act to either of us is very small. But if the androids uncover anything—”
“I really wish you hadn’t done that, my dear, you know how the crew distrusts the bots already—”
“—I would like to know our course of action. Shouldn’t we inform Commander Wick?”
She waited, watching her mentor’s face. At fifty-nine, Keller was by far the oldest crewmember on the ship, but the medical reports said she was in better physical condition than even Park herself. Her head was shaven, after the Earth fashion of the elderly, but her blue eyes were bright with genetic augments. She shifted in her seat, frowning to herself, before she said, “I think we should be discreet about this for now. Now that we’ve landed, Commander Wick is preoccupied with many things . . . and if he hands this issue off to someone like Sagara or Boone, word would get out that people are meddling with each other’s food. Paranoia might foment—and that’s the one thing we can’t have, not when they’re scheduled to begin exploring the planet soon.”
Word has probably already spread, Park thought dourly, remembering Chanur’s withering lack of sympathy. It was no secret that she had historically been the target of the crew’s little cruelties and mischiefs: they hated her for being Earth-born, for being ISF’s spy—and especially for her association with the ship’s androids, which others considered freakish. It would not surprise her if multiple people had conspired to cause her discomfort.
But she said: “Fine. But I’ll be making my report to ISF. And if we do learn who the culprit is, I’ll recommend disciplinary measures. Strong ones.”
“As will I,” Keller said agreeably, patting her hand. Then she sighed and continued, “As for the issue of Reimi, there’s not much we can do. The crew’s bodily health is solely within Chanur’s purview, and if ISF agreed with her recommendation to freeze Reimi, we must abide by that decision.”
“But what if she didn’t obtain their permission?” Park asked. “What if she never sent the message?”
Keller waved her hand. “Impossible. There are channels set up to prevent that from happening. Even if she didn’t speak to ISF directly, she’d still have to get Boone’s permission, or Sagara’s, or both.”
Park didn’t relax at that. Vincent Sagara was the ship’s security officer, a dark-eyed and unreadable man with a mercenary air; and Michael Boone was the head of its military team, a great hulking apish soldier whose moods were as volatile as a rioting crowd’s. She trusted neither of them with decision-making, but instead of airing this thought she said: “And what about the androids? What will happen to them? They can’t take care of themselves, or self-maintain to prevent breakdowns. If we don’t have Reimi, we have no way to repair them.”
All thanks to the riots on Earth, she thought with sour impatience. People had felt uneasy about giving androids the ability to sustain themselves—to self-modify. The Accords of Yokohama had decreed that all artificial intelligence had to be built with a dependence on human maintenance, so that units would break down after a long enough period without the presence of organic life. This would prevent a robot uprising, most thought. Ridiculous, in Park’s opinion—and horribly inconvenient, even life-threatening. Especially in situations like this.
“The most sophisticated ones won’t break down for a long time,” Keller mused aloud. “And even if they were to all stop functioning tomorrow, the mission is designed so that all crewmembers can still succeed in their jobs. The robots are only here for support and backup—not as an integral part of the expedition.” She gave Park a smile, and then another motherly, reassuring pat on the hand. “Don’t worry. I’m sure they’ll all be fine.”
Keller thought that she was personally worried about the robots, Park realized. That this wasn’t a matter of survival for her, but one of personal attachment. She supposed it was true in some sense; it was easier for her to talk to the androids, and she dreaded imagining life on the ship without them. There was none of that exhausting analysis with them; no undercurrents for her to guess at and navigate, nothing for them to hide. What you saw was what you got—and Park found that refreshing. She didn’t have to parse through a dozen micro-expressions and facial nuances per minute. She didn’t have to wonder if they were ever lying to her, or concealing hidden barbs in their looks and words. Or putting poison in her food. There was that sense of relief with them, even comfort and familiarity. With androids, everything was simple, open. Pure.
But her concerns were so much larger than that. Why weren’t more people worried about the loss of Reimi? Why was no one panicking, running through the corridors screaming? Reimi was the ship’s only engineer, roboticist, and mechanic; she had the tri-fold job of attending to the Deucalion’s positronic brain, its mechanical heart, and the robotic crew that serviced it. Park felt a hard stone of fear, way down in her gut, when she thought of what could happen to the crew with Reimi out of commission. What if the ship suffered a catastrophic engine failure, a malfunction somewhere in its entrails, and they had no one on board who knew what to do?
The androids knew what to do, she thought then. That was what they were there for—to ensure that the Deucalion, their mothership, didn’t die, and every human passenger along with it. But they still didn’t come with the protocols to maintain themselves. That was what Reimi was for. And she was gone. And now Park was just thinking in circles, nauseating herself.
Suddenly Keller broke into her thoughts. “Lunchtime,” she said, standing decisively and blinking off her inlays, which she’d been using to compose the draft of some message to someone. “Come. Some food will do you good. Clear your mind.”
Somehow Park doubted that—she would not touch the ship’s bland, gluey food in front of others again, if she could help it—but she rose obediently and followed her mentor. She was still brooding when they entered the mess hall together: a strangely warm, salt-and-bleach-smelling room with a dispensary lining one wall and several round tables filling the center. They picked up their trays of rehydrated meatloaf and flash-thawed potatoes from the service android, Megex, then sat, as always, at a table by themselves.
Lunch was usually the time they observed mealtime behaviors together. Animals at the watering hole, Keller often whispered, in a British documentarian’s accent. Eating was a vulnerable activity; people tended to relax their guard. It was why Stalin had invited Churchill to so many dinners. You could tell a lot about personalities and group dynamics at lunch: who was in control, who was deferential. Who occupied the choicest spots and who slunk in alone.
Park was initially too preoccupied to give much thought to who was on display today, but Keller had apparently dismissed the topic of Reimi from her mind and was intent on carrying out her daily observations. She nudged Park with her elbow and said, softly, “Sagara’s sitting alone again.”
Park looked. Keller was right: there he was, sitting alone, a tense and silent presence in his black uniform. He had been the last one to join the crew—the ship had picked him up out of Corvus—and as a result, he had entered the community with its various cliques and groups already formed. Most of the other crewmembers steered well clear of him. Keller sympathized, but Park privately thought that it was Sagara’s severe—almost lethal—personality to blame.
She continued to scan the mess hall as she picked listlessly at the disintegrating meatloaf. Their main concerns were usually the loners, like Sagara. There was always the danger of isolation in space, anxiety and depression breeding in the dark corners of a lonely mind. Sagara himself seemed self-sufficient enough, but it was others, like the exobiologist Wan Xu, who always sat in Park’s crosshairs. Those were the ones who sat by themselves or in silent pairs, bending over their wrist consoles while they ate. Recording expensive video messages to send back home. There was technically no one on the receiving end of their calls, either: messages back to Earth or even Mars took months. The loners were choosing one-sided conversations with blank screens over socializing with their fellow crewmates. That was something to monitor.
“And here comes Boone,” Keller muttered. This time, Park didn’t bother looking; she’d already heard Boone’s entrance to the mess hall without having to turn her head. He always made sure to stomp his heavy combat boots against the tile to announce his presence. Even now, he was scanning the room and letting out an overly loud sigh, as if to inform everyone that he was hungry—as if every person in the room ought to know how he was feeling. He even patted his stomach dramatically, like a gorilla beating its chest. Me want food. Get out me way. Keller had muttered it more than once.
Park had concerns there, too. Boone was a wild card in the power balance on the ship, and he had an ego problem to boot. Why there were so many soldiers on the ship at all—three “security” personnel out of thirteen, nearly a fourth of the crew—Park didn’t know. ISF military was usually colony-based, putting down the odd uprising or terrorist attack, but she hadn’t ever heard of them accompanying an expedition to a new planet. And she privately disliked Boone, with his swaggering, his sneery remarks, the hard dismissive flick of his eyes whenever a woman he considered unattractive spoke up. As with Sagara, none of her strategies so far had worked on him.
Boone automatically moved toward the table with most of the expedition’s leaders, both official and de facto. Daryl Wick was there, the kind, sensible astronaut who was commander of the entire mission. Natalya Severov, the beautiful Russian surveyor, was there too. The only one who seemed missing from that group was . . . Kel Fulbreech.
Park jolted. “He’s waiting for me,” she said, without meaning to speak out loud.
Keller was grinning at her. “Go,” she said. “I’m sure it will be pleasant. Don’t let fear hold you back.”
It wasn’t fear, Park thought as she dumped her tray into the mouth of the waste compressor and hurried up the ladder to Deck B, the navigation level. But if Keller had pressed her on what exactly the feeling was, she wouldn’t have been able to say.
Fulbreech was waiting for her with his hands in his pockets, leaning his rangy body against the wall of another side-tunnel. His face brightened when he saw Park approaching; he said, grinning, “Good. I didn’t think you would come.”
I didn’t think I would, either, Park thought, but instead she looked at his pockets and said, “Where is it?”
Fulbreech looked surprised. “Where is what?”
“The—you know. Whatever it is you have in store.”
“Ah,” he said. He winked. “So you’re excited. Look at you. You’re like a kid on Solstice Morning.”
“I’ll leave,” she warned.
Fulbreech laughed. “Relax. It’s through here.”
He indicated the large hatch behind him, and Park, finally realizing where they were, blanched. They were standing in front of the Deucalion’s escape pod, a little shuttle attached to the underside of the ship. It was the crewmembers’ favorite spot to conduct clandestine sexual liaisons.
“I suppose that makes sense,” Keller had said when Park first told her about it—having heard all about it from Jimex, when she asked him where that particular door led. “It’s the only place where you’re guaranteed not to get walked in on—because what business would someone have in the escape pod, other than that? And it’s the only other place that has a bed, besides the bunks.” She’d grinned at Park. “Too bad you’ll never see the inside of it. Conflicts of interest and all that.”
“Park?” Fulbreech waved a hand in front of her face.
She balked a little from him. “I don’t understand.”
Fulbreech seemed oblivious to her discomfort. “This place doesn’t have a camera on it,” he said, as if that explained anything.
Park shook her head; she could not believe his audacity. “And that’s your . . . surprise? The thing that you said would make me feel better?”
“Well, not all of it,” Fulbreech said. He looked a little sly, a little pleased with himself. She looked up into his open, friendly face and remembered with sudden, painful clarity that he was handsome—suspiciously handsome, she sometimes thought—but also too upright to pull a stunt like this. He was one of those all-American astronauts, blunt-jawed, square-nosed, with a sweet, sheepish, boyish look. Golden hair falling into his eyes. Right now he looked not like a man overcome by lust, but more like a kid on Solstice Morning himself. Full of radiant glee, excitement—maybe even pride.
“All right,” Park said reluctantly, deciding to trust him. But behind her back she was balling her fist: ISF had given her piecemeal self-defense training before departure. “Let me see it.”
Fulbreech palmed open the hatch to the escape pod and, looking around, quickly shut it behind them. Park had to give herself a sweaty moment to let her eyes adjust to the gloom inside—the pod, of course, was inactive—but soon she was able to make out another shape, lying there in front of her in the dark. A body, Park realized. She nearly screamed.
“It’s exo-armor,” Fulbreech whispered conspiratorially, right in her ear. “I snuck it in here a few hours ago. It’s Natalya’s, but she won’t miss it until the expedition team goes out again tomorrow.”
Park couldn’t make sense of it. She stared at the bench with the stiff exo-armor lying on it like a corpse, inert. “What would we need it for?”
Fulbreech bent to pick up the gold-visored helmet that came with the suit. “Well,” he said slowly, “I was thinking. You’re officially barred from going outside—from even seeing Eos, since you’re not part of the expedition crew. But I hardly think that’s fair. If it were me, it’d drive me crazy to land on a virgin planet, but never get to see it. To never touch it—smell it, walk on it . . .” He stared at her. “Don’t you think it’s a little silly of ISF to expect you to be fine with all that?”
There was suddenly a kind of tightness in her throat. “So you’re saying . . .”
“There’s a hatch down in the floor,” Fulbreech explained. “This pod’s terminal is—let’s say tangentially connected to the ship’s system. If I play my cards right, I think I could get it to open the hatch without alerting the Deucalion.” At her stare he gave a kind of grin and a shrug. “I’m good with computers. I have to be, working with METIS to chart everything.”
METIS was the ship’s governing AI, a heuristic brain tasked with managing the Deucalion’s massive nexus of systems, from its navigation to communications to surveillance. It was what their neural inlays were plugged into. “I thought only Reimi had the authorization to manipulate METIS’s protocols,” Park said. She didn’t add: She’s also the only one with the know-how to make sure all of our brains aren’t fried.
Fulbreech shrugged again. “It would be kind of stupid to have only one tech-savvy crewmember on board,” he said lightly. “I have a degree, if you want to look at my credentials. A minor one, mind, way at the bottom of the list—but my point is, I generally know what I’m doing.”
Park had to stand there in the dark and process what was going on; things were moving at a much faster pace than she was used to. She looked at the crumpled suit he’d brought for her and felt her fingertips chill. Eos was out there. Just one hatch away. But did Fulbreech know what he was offering? The implications of such an action? Stealing an exo-armor suit was bad enough, but to exit the ship without permission, to take her out there to explore an alien planet on their own, no supervision, no authority . . .
Her scalp tightened. She turned to him and said, barely hearing herself: “Why would you do such a thing for me?”
Fulbreech turned to look at her, despite the gloom. The look on his face was entirely serious. He said quietly, “You don’t know?”
Park’s pulse quickened; it felt as if someone had plucked her heart like a string. But before she could answer, there was a clanking and whirring from the door of the escape shuttle. Park felt her vision narrow as panic thundered in. Someone was accessing the lock.
In one swift movement, Fulbreech crossed the distance between them and kissed her.
Park jerked back from him as if he’d burned her. But the picture was complete, and when the door opened, whoever stood in the doorway got a good eyeful of Park and Fulbreech standing there, hastily breaking away from each other in the dark.
“Ah,” a voice said. Park could hardly stand to look at the speaker, but she turned when Fulbreech did. Vincent Sagara, their security officer, stood outlined in the threshold of the doorway. His face was entirely in shadow, so that Park couldn’t read his expression.
Fulbreech, on his end, recovered admirably. “Captain Sagara,” he said, clearing his throat a little. “What—ah—what brings you here?”
“I suppose I don’t have to ask you the same question, Fulbreech,” Sagara answered. His voice was perfectly neutral, devoid of embarrassment or ridicule. He clicked on a little utility light and swept the inside of the escape pod with it. Imperceptibly, Fulbreech shifted to block the exo-armor from view.
Sagara’s light landed square on Park’s face. “Park,” he said—and now he did sound a little surprised. Park felt heat swamp her face and croaked, “Captain. We were just leaving.”
He paused, then lowered the light when Park squinted. “So was I,” he said, perfectly brusque. “I was conducting some electrical inspections, after hearing about Kisaragi. But I can return later. Carry on.”
The door shut behind him before either of them could say another word. After a moment Fulbreech turned back to Park and said, his voice low and incredulous: “Do you believe him?”
Park could hardly speak through her humiliation. She said faintly, “What?”
“That he’s looking at—the electronics? Sagara doesn’t know the first thing about the ship’s computers. Or its systems. Does he?”
“I don’t know,” Park said. Then she shook her head and said, “Aren’t you more concerned about what he saw?”
“What, about the kiss? Sagara’s not the type to gossip—”
“The suit,” Park said in a hard, flat voice. “He must have seen it—nothing escapes his notice. You don’t think he won’t wonder why we had it just lying around?”
Fulbreech didn’t say anything for a moment. Finally he said: “The shuttle has exo-armor suits of its own—in case its inhabitants need to go out to make repairs to the exterior. None of them would fit you, but he doesn’t need to know that. He’d think the one on the bench was one of those.”
“He wouldn’t wonder what we were doing with a suit in the first place, whether it came from the pod or not?”
Another pause. Then: “He didn’t see.”
Suddenly the little pod felt too dark, too small, like a cave she had gone into and couldn’t find her way out of. Park felt as if the air had turned hot and close, leaving her short of breath. She said abruptly, “I have to go.”
She spun around and left before Fulbreech could stop her.
Keller was not in their shared office when Park returned, but Jimex was. He had formed a special attachment to her, as androids were wont to do when it came to Park, so he was always finding some excuse or another to be around her. When Park came into the room, the android was busily wiping down the couch that she had been intent on flinging herself down on—so she gritted her teeth and moved to the chair at her workstation instead. When she put her head down on her desk, Jimex looked up and said, “You are experiencing gastric distress?”
“God,” Park said, muffled. “No.”
Her thoughts were whirring. As she had suspected, disaster had struck; this was what happened when you planned surprises. She didn’t know what was worse: that Sagara had caught them illicitly hovering over stolen contraband, plotting to leave the ship, or that he now thought that she—one of the ship’s psychologists—was engaged in some torrid romantic affair. He’d be reporting it back to ISF Corvus, surely, just as she was tasked with reporting the same things back about other people. And Fulbreech, fool that he was, had—
Had—
“I’ve spoken to the other synthetics,” Jimex said. “Megex was not told by any party to put medicine in your food. But you may have left it unattended when you sanitized your hands.”
“Yes,” Park said. She had already thought of this.
Jimex paused for a moment. “Ellenex will prepare medication for you. She says it will nullify the effects of emesis tabs if they are administered without your consent.” At Park’s look, he added, “She will be discreet.”
Park tried not to groan. She was grateful to him—and Ellenex—for doing such a thing, but she did not trust the androids’ abilities to keep a secret. Especially not Jimex; telling him to investigate for her had half been a political maneuver, to let her opponent know she was hunting for them. But to secretly take medication was another thing entirely.
Jimex gave her a rare look of insight. “This upsets you. It was the incorrect action.”
“No,” Park said in a muted way. Then she closed her eyes and said, almost involuntarily, “Kel Fulbreech just kissed me.”
Jimex paused, just for a moment, in his wiping. “Oh,” he said, his voice milk-bland and mild. “I don’t believe Ellenex has medication for that.”
Park felt a laugh bubble up in her chest, but stifled it sharply. How like an android to think of such a thing as needing a prescription—a cure. Maybe he was right. Maybe there ought to be some tonic out there, some injection that would let her forget everything. Something to soothe the sudden turmoil. There was the MAD, but she didn’t dare use it in front of him. Otherwise Jimex would go around telling everyone who asked about that, too.
Park kneaded her knuckles into her forehead. She had always suspected that Fulbreech was attracted to her, of course. She couldn’t have missed the physical signs: she was a phenotypologist, after all. There were the usual quick, darting glances, the “casual” but strained body language. Dilated pupils. Blazing smiles that seemed like the primate baring of teeth. She’d known that he found her, on some level, sexually intriguing. The kiss itself hadn’t surprised her as much as it should have. But it was everything else—the suit, the proposed hacking, the gesture of it all. Was it all just—posturing? An attempt at currying her favor? It was so much trouble to go through. She never would have done the same.
Unless there was something more to it. She touched her lips discreetly, feeling none of the lingering warmth or tingling that she might have expected. And yet, that sudden jolt of rare contact had made her feel something. Something she’d felt just recently. But what?
“A kiss can transfer up to eighty million bacteria at once,” Jimex said, apropos of nothing. He was obsessed with things like that.
“I don’t think people generally care about that kind of thing, Jimex,” Park told him wearily. She flicked her inlays on, groping for some message from Keller or even Commander Wick to distract her from her own thoughts.
The android stared at her. “What do they care about, then?”
She couldn’t answer.
Later, when she was getting dressed for bed, shoved into her tiny room with Natalya, the surveyor, Hunter, Boone’s sergeant, and Elly Ma, the climatologist, Park suddenly remembered what Fulbreech’s kiss had reminded her of.
It had been the previous day, just before they’d landed on Eos. Park had felt the gravity shift back on as they made the approach to the new planet. Her stomach lifted as if pulled by a string; her heart seemed to swell with the sudden change, then deflate. She could feel her cells becoming heavier, like sand settling on the bottom of a lake. There was elation and excitement and a kind of painful terror inside of her, in turns.
She’d run to the bridge. There were no windows to speak of on the ship, besides the ones there on the bridge. There were many reasons for this: radiation shielding, for one. Sanity, for the other. Some crewmembers would be susceptible to the “Earth-out-of-view” phenomenon: seeing their planet as an insignificant dot rapidly vanishing from sight did strange things to the mind of an Earth-born, especially one who had never experienced the vast emptiness of space before. Sometimes there was euphoria, a sense of interconnected bliss. Other times it was madness, frothing terror as everything they knew fell away from them.
But not being able to see an undiscovered planet was a kind of madness, too. A madness of curiosity.
Luckily, everyone else had had the same idea, so no one noticed when Park slipped into the bridge and took up a position at the back of the room. Only Dylanex, the ship’s lone security android, made disconcerted noises about the presence of unauthorized personnel—but everyone ignored him. There was a clamor, shouts of excitement and amazement as Eos swung into view through the shielded windows and onto the large monitors set into the wall.
Park had stared. That was it? That was their new planet, ISF’s proposed “dawn” of the Frontier? It looked like a little white light bulb, hanging there in the darkness of space. Or a perfect snowball, carefully crafted by a meticulous child. There were two suns. Park’s eyes watered, but she told herself that it was a biological reflex; that she would not allow anyone to see her cry.
Jimex came to stand next to her, as usual. Park had turned to him, full of wonder. “We’re here?” There had been no indicator, no progress map to tell her when exactly they would reach their destination. No one had told her they were making their approach.
Jimex had not understood the question. The rotors in his head whirred. “We have always been here,” he had answered, serene.
Preparations began for the ship to make its descent. Crewmembers bustled here and there; orders were given to secure objects and bodies for the entry through Eos’s thin atmosphere. A few auxiliary staffers, Park included, lingered in the bridge for as long as possible. Before they were shooed off, Keller had come over and squeezed Park’s shoulder with one bony hand.
“What do you think?” she asked softly. “This will be your only glimpse of it before we land. It’s like looking at a blank canvas, isn’t it? All that potential, all that space!”
Park had shaken her head. “No,” she said. “It’s not like a canvas. It’s like—”
Keller had looked at her. “It’s like what?”
Then Park had smiled to herself; even she could tell it looked secretive. “It’s like looking into the face of God,” she said.
As they descended, the light wavered, as if to answer her: the pale and colorless suns watching as the ship floated down on the alien wind.