After she broke off from Fulbreech, Park received an alert on her inlays: METIS informed her that Commander Wick had summoned her to his quarters. He had tagged the summons as a “mandatory check-up.”
As if he would put a suppressor on her tongue and make her say “ah,” Park thought as she diverted from her route to her own bunk. The term did give her a sense of dread. It was too clinical, too sinister. Had Wick somehow found out what she’d been doing? Had Fulbreech told him?
But Wick is a reasonable man, Park told herself. He was always so patient, so paternally reliable. She didn’t have to worry about him shooting her or freezing her—did she?
Maybe she ought to bring Jimex with her, she thought, thinking of him still standing inert in her office. For insurance. But then again, Wick was commander; his orders took precedence over hers. Jimex would ultimately have to obey him. He would bundle Park into a coffin and nail her inside, if Wick told him to. Her stomach sank. She really had no one to count on in this place.
On her way to see Wick, she ran into Natalya—who was doing lazy cartwheels and somersaults down the corridor to Wick and Boone’s bunk. Park slowed as she approached the surveyor; she could see a little flask glinting at Natalya’s belt.
Although the expedition members could technically do whatever they wanted when they were off duty, getting drunk was still not a common behavior on the ship. For one thing, alcohol took up precious space and mass; for another, it was so easy to dehydrate yourself with it, trapped as they were in a vacuum that wicked moisture from your eyes every time you blinked. It tended to take extreme circumstances to push someone to get drunk, especially openly, in front of the judging eyes of Earth-born academics and spacers who had long had access to faster-burning, trendier drugs. Park wondered what had gotten to Natalya—what had driven her to this state. A little bitterly she thought that it could be any number of things: everything seemed to be going wrong with this mission. Maybe she’d have turned to the bottle by now, too, if alcohol hadn’t been so scarce back on Earth.
Natalya pretended not to notice Park as she walked up. She read agitation in the lines of the surveyor’s shoulders: anger and suspicion and resentment, too. Natalya’s topology reminded Park of Chanur, in a way—but what had soured Natalya’s mood so? Surely it wasn’t because of Holt? They’d once been lovers, yes, but Natalya had long since discarded the physicist in favor of pursuing—who was it, again? Fulbreech? Park had lost track.
“Something bothering you, Severov?” she asked, bracing herself.
The other woman straightened out of her pirouette and turned to look back over her shoulder. Her glance was moody, disdainful. “I thought Sagara told you to stop your patient sessions.”
Had everyone been told that? God damn Sagara—he was undermining her at every turn. “This isn’t an interview,” Park answered, steadily enough. “Or a patient session. I just thought I’d ask.”
“Why?”
“Why are you doing cartwheels in this part of the ship?”
Outside Boone’s room, she thought. And Wick’s. Unkindly she thought to herself—Maybe she’s just working her way up the ladder.
She quashed the idea just as Natalya said frostily, “This is how I unwind after work. Is that a crime?”
“No,” Park answered. “Of course not.”
She thought to give up the gesture entirely and simply walk away, but Natalya had put her leg up against the opposite wall, blocking the narrow corridor with her body. Her body language was languid, nonchalant—as if she hadn’t noticed that Park intended to pass—but Park knew that it was a calculated move, an intimidation tactic. Or even a kind of threat. I’m too tired for this, she thought. She still hadn’t slept yet. Natalya took a drink from her hip flask and smacked her lips.
“How’s your work?” Park asked, to preempt whatever nasty thing the other woman was going to say. She didn’t expect her to answer. As surveyor, Natalya had the most intimate knowledge of Eos and its terrain so far—so of course her work would be very hush-hush. And if Fulbreech wouldn’t confide fully in Park, for fear of breaking protocol, Natalya certainly wasn’t going to.
But to her surprise, Natalya said bluntly: “It’s stressful. ISF is relying on me for a lot of things.”
“I’m sure exploring an alien planet has its difficulties.”
“Yes,” Natalya said with a clenched look, like a purse snapping shut. Park faltered; she’d misstepped, come off unintentionally as sarcastic. Natalya continued, “I’m sure you have your work cut out for you, too. What with Ma going—what’s the old phrase? Bananas. And poor Eric. I wonder how you’ll fix that. Along with everything else that’s going on.”
“What else is going on?” Park asked, with bland innocence.
“What were you doing with Fulbreech?” Natalya asked in turn. And at this Park felt a little jolt of shock: so they’d been noticed, after all.
“Excuse me,” she said, out of habit. On Earth it was considered rude for adult acquaintances to ask such direct, personal questions of each other; one was expected to ask obliquely, using statements that could be ignored or deflected, or to infer from other interfaces like a person’s social feeds and status reports.
But Natalya’s features only hardened. It was clear she had left that etiquette behind on Earth, that she couldn’t be embarrassed into silence. So much aggression there, Park thought. And directness. Keller had always admired it as efficient, but Park thought it prevented Natalya from integrating well into teams.
“Fulbreech,” the surveyor repeated, in a clipped way that said she thought she was speaking to an idiot. “Kel Fulbreech. The cartographer? What were you doing with him, going down to Deck C?”
So Natalya knew they had been down to the utility rooms together—but hadn’t followed to see exactly what had happened. “We were just talking,” Park said.
“You never talk,” Natalya said with contempt. “And he talks too much.” She stopped stretching, let her leg fall back down to the floor. Then continued, her eyes flinty: “What exactly would he talk to you about?”
Why do you care so much? Park wanted to ask. She couldn’t suss out if Natalya was feeling territorial over Fulbreech, or if this was about something else entirely. She noticed for the first time that the surveyor had gray thumbprints under her eyes; her fingers trembled with a kind of suppressed energy. She said, taking a chance: “You said you were stressed, Severov. Has it been interfering with your sleep?”
“No,” Natalya said curtly. Then she shook her head. “God, you ask questions. Even when you’re told not to. Why so many questions? Isn’t the whole point of your specialization that you don’t have to ask, you can just tell?”
The implication being that she expected Park to be psychic, Park thought; Natalya found her to be a disappointment. She answered, “I can tell a lot from topologies, but not everything. Of course I ask questions.”
Natalya grunted. “Why do we need you, then?”
Park wanted to say, I don’t have to explain myself to you. I don’t have to justify my existence on this ship. But she thought this was a good opportunity to shift perceptions about why she was there, so she said instead, “I provide a holistic view on what’s going on in the ship; what state of mind people are operating under. I try to provide the truth of what’s happening, just as any scientist does; and even though I don’t play a role in the decision-making or research, I ask questions about what I’m observing. Like a good scientist.”
“But do you understand the content?” Natalya asked then. “Do you know what it is you’re observing and analyzing? What it all means? Or do you just transmit back what you’ve discovered without understanding it, like a robot?” She shook her head, her scorn palpable. “It’s all meaningless if you don’t get it.”
Park felt a tremor, a little quiver down in the dark meat of her heart. How to answer? To admit weakness or doubt would only incite Natalya further—and not to sympathy. “I get what I need to get,” she said finally. “But thank you for your concern.”
Natalya made a dry clicking sound with her tongue. “Just focus on doing your job, Park,” she said, turning away. “And doing it well. Don’t meddle into all these other things.”
Who’s the one meddling? Park wanted to ask her. Who was the one sticking her nose where it didn’t belong, asking questions, invading privacy? And who was the one who was getting drunk on the job? But she only said, numbly, “If you need to talk, Natalya, my door is always open.”
“Holt talked, didn’t he,” Natalya bit back. She took a swig from her flask. “And look what happened to him.”
Park came to Wick’s door just as her inlays gave the green-gold flash to indicate the time. Nine o’clock at night, by the ship’s clock. Lockdown hours. She stood outside of the bunk, feeling guilty, as if she was doing something illicit when everyone else was going to bed. Answering his call, sneaking to his room. Like a mistress—or a child about to receive a stern talking-to from a parent. What did he need to check up on her about?
She knocked. The door slid open instantly, which meant Wick had been waiting to activate the room controls at the first sign of her arrival. When she came in, she saw that he was standing with his back to the door, his hands crossed squarely behind him. The pose seemed deliberate to Park, affected. For one thing, it prevented her from reading his face. For another, it suggested that Wick was unthreatened by her; that he had nothing to be concerned about, and so neither did she.
Animals in the wild did that, Park thought. To lure their enemies into attacking. Then they whirled and made the kill themselves.
“You wanted to see me,” she said, trying to banish her paranoia.
“Yes,” Wick answered. He didn’t turn around immediately. “I thought we should take some time and—get on the same page. Since your position on the ship has changed.”
“Because Keller’s frozen, and I’m now the primary psychologist?”
“Yes.” Now he glanced back at her. “And because I can’t afford to have you out of the loop. Not with everything that’s been going on.”
On the same page, Park found herself thinking, distracted. Out of the loop. Such strange, outdated terms. What page of what story were they struggling to get on? It felt like they were all parts of different volumes entirely. And did one want to be on the inside of a loop that was closing around the ship, like the knot of a tightening noose?
“Everything that’s going on?” she echoed. She was too tired to berate herself for sounding like a simpleton.
“I heard you and Fulbreech,” Wick said. He sounded almost apologetic. “Down in Deck C. While you were exploring the utility rooms.”
Park blinked. “You were there?”
He shook his head. “No.”
“Then—Natalya told you?”
“No,” Wick said again, chagrined. “I mean—I heard you.”
“I . . . don’t understand.”
He sighed and turned, making a gesture at the wall; his wrist console activated and projected a holographic blueprint of the ship onto the blank gray panel. Park looked at the diagram uncomprehendingly. The only thing she could grasp was that there were flashing red dots in every single room.
“What is that?” she asked.
“Captain Sagara has activated the ARGUS protocol,” Wick said in turn. “Do you know what that is?”
“No,” Park answered blankly. She shook her head. “Should I?”
“I’m not sure,” Wick mused. “I don’t know how much information ISF gave you, as their—orbiter.”
“Nothing about this.” Or anything of importance, she didn’t say.
“The ARGUS protocol is a secondary function of METIS,” Wick said. “While METIS is largely devoted to maintaining the ship’s life support systems and its other prime directives, ARGUS is a way for us to . . . remotely monitor the crew’s activities on the ship.”
Her mind flashed to what Jimex had said about cameras. “I thought there were only cameras in certain areas.”
“That’s true,” he conceded. “In the labs and the bridge and the entryways, mostly. We keep the amount of cameras limited to conserve power, as well as to restrict filming only to the necessities. There are still legal entanglements about using people’s images, ever since”—he grimaced, as people often did when talking about privacy concerns—“Halla.”
He was talking about the revolt, of course: the one that had sparked the Privacy Wars in the first place. It had started on an expedition ship headed to the planet that would later be founded as Haven. Conscripted crewmembers’ images were at that time the property of the ISF—it was in the contracts that they had signed, or their parents had signed, in exchange for passage to the colonies—and the ISF had used those images as part of a successful reality show that was streamed back to Halla. The profits from the show had in turn funded the expedition—but the expedition members themselves didn’t know they were being used as entertainment. And there were non-conscripted members who frequently wandered into the camera’s eye. On the crew’s return, there had been the expected moral outrage, legal battles. Then political conflicts. Then the Privacy Wars. It had taken a long time for the ISF to earn the public’s goodwill back after that one, Park knew. Perhaps they still hadn’t earned it. They wouldn’t risk it so lightly again.
“So if there are only a few cameras on the ship,” she said, “what does ARGUS actually do?”
“It’s a loophole,” Wick admitted. “An emergency measure. Although the ship doesn’t have many cameras, it is fitted with—” Here he hesitated. “Microscopic sensors. And auditory devices. Tools to collect and aggregate . . . data.”
It took Park a moment to understand what he was saying. “You’re saying that the entire ship is bugged?” She looked again at the diagram, appalled. “Even the bathrooms? The sleeping quarters?” Even Wick’s own bunk had a flashing light!
“It’s not what you think,” Wick said; now there was a faint sheen of sweat on his brow, despite the ship’s customary cold. He’d known she wouldn’t be happy about this. “Normally ISF would have no interest in the minutiae of what goes on in the ship. ARGUS can only be activated under dire circumstances, by either me or Captain Sagara. And it’s not as if we’re actively listening to everything that’s going on, everything that everyone says. The amount of data would be overwhelming. And, again—it would be a violation.”
He waved again, and the diagram vanished. “What we can do is let the ship’s computer collect, parse, and filter through everything the ARGUS sensors pick up, without having to review everything ourselves. The sensors throughout the ship record both sound and movement, down to a whisper or a specific twitch. They analyze body language without ever having to record images. Then we give the computer—METIS—patterns and keywords to recognize, let it sift through everything, and have it present us with the salient metadata. But without it—without the computer, I mean—the general ARGUS information means nothing to us. It’s just numbers, data. It anonymizes everyone for us. We can’t tie it to anyone’s identity, single anyone out. We only see the relevant slices if the system flags them and bundles them into a readable package for us: and that’s only if that data meets the criteria we implemented in the first place. You see? So we can’t access your conversations about—your families, or your favorite books, or what have you. The system only gives us that information if it thinks it fits what we’re looking for.” He took a breath, then continued before she could butt in. “That’s how Captain Sagara plans to find patterns in the behavior of the crewmembers if they become—affected. By whatever this affliction is, even if they don’t know it. It’s a measure meant to monitor, recognize, and prevent.”
Park was horrified. “In what other circumstance would this protocol ever be necessary?” she demanded. “Why would such a program exist in the first place, unless ISF was already expecting something like this?”
Wick looked sober. “I’m sure you’ve heard of mutinies happening,” he said quietly. “Crewmembers revolting, taking over ships. That’s what ARGUS is usually for. An ISF captain could activate it as a safety measure, if he suspected his crew of organizing against him.”
That doesn’t justify the breach in privacy, was Park’s first thought. Then she remembered that a captain of an ISF ship had been murdered, a year before they’d launched the Deucalion. The crew had conspired to kill him and tried to steer the ship elsewhere. The ISF hadn’t said why. At the time she had guessed it was stress-related, the kind of contagious mania and mob mentality that sometimes took hold in isolated space—but now she wondered if they simply weren’t happy serving an entity that held their loved ones hostage. A government that used their own images and identities against them.
No one could know for sure, anyway; all of the rebel crewmembers were now dead.
Suddenly her thoughts flew back to that moment she had been talking to Jimex, down in Deck C before the encounter with Holt. The android had said there were cameras in certain parts of the ship, and also something else—before he suddenly cut himself off. He’d been trying to warn her about something. He’d said that Sagara had told him not to say.
He must have noticed the bugs when he was cleaning rooms, Park thought. And Sagara silenced him. Ordered him not to tell me. Because he hopes to use ARGUS to catch me doing whatever he thinks I’m doing.
“Who else knows about this?” she asked.
“Sagara, obviously,” Wick said, oblivious to her thoughts. “Me. Boone. And now you.”
“And why me?” She suddenly felt defensive, almost hostile. Wick said he had heard her and Fulbreech down in the utility rooms. Did that mean ARGUS had flagged their conversation as suspect? That he thought she was some sort of saboteur, as Sagara did?
Wick put out a steadying hand toward her, though he didn’t go so far as to touch; Park still flinched away. “Because I think we need you,” he said gently. And when Park scanned his face, his slate-gray eyes, she saw that he was being sincere. That the skin around his eyes looked puffy, as if he’d been crying.
“You think that?” she asked cautiously, still on her guard.
Wick made a hapless gesture. “Look,” he said. “Kisaragi’s frozen. Keller and Holt and Ma are—sick. I don’t think now is the time to be divisive, to isolate and mistrust each other. And truth be told, I’m not convinced that—even if ARGUS could figure out what behaviors are red flags—it would do us a lot of good. Because we still wouldn’t understand what was causing it all. What the root of the problem was.” He looked into her eyes. “We would need you, Park. Your expertise and insight. We need you to understand what exactly is going on.”
Park felt a crest of emotion rise within her, and couldn’t tell if it was hysteria or sentimentality. She couldn’t help but think again of what Natalya had said, earlier in the corridor: But do you understand the content of what you’re observing? What it all means?
Wick had faith that she could. She wanted to feel touched, grateful. She thought she did. But she could only say, “What’s down in the utility rooms, Wick?”
Her commander paused then. Worked his jaw for a moment; opened his mouth and then shut it again. Finally he said, looking tired: “We never kept things from you, Park, or anyone really, because of anything personal. You know that ISF determines who knows what based on who they think they can control. It’s a matter of conscription. They explicitly told us not to let you—the non-conscripted—know too much, in case of leaks. They don’t want the data getting out to the knowledge companies back home. Or even to the terrorists themselves.”
“Yes,” was all Park could say. She told herself not to tremble.
Wick spread his hands. He broadcasted helplessness, resignation, the idea that these things were out of his hands. “If it were up to me, everyone on the ship would have access to the same amount of information,” he said. Then he looked away. “But it’s not. Up to me, that is. So I have to ask that anything I tell you is kept private and between us. I’m violating my orders by bringing you into the fold. I discussed it with Sagara, and I think—I think he doesn’t mistrust you personally. In fact, I think he respects you, in his own strange way. But he’s an ISF man. By the book, follows his orders. Loyal to ISF to a fault. So he won’t be happy about me telling you. But I think it’s necessary. My call as commander.”
“I understand,” Park said, trying to crank on a soothing smile. “I’ll obey the confidentiality strictures. Of course.”
Wick took a breath.
“We came to Eos for colony reconnaissance, it’s true,” he said. “But we also came for something else. Close to a year ago, ISF received a mayday transmission from a miner who’d gotten stranded here by accident. In viewing the videos he sent, we discovered something about the planet. There’s some sort of phenomenon that goes on here. A—gravitational anomaly.”
Park waited. She expected herself to feel the lancing bolt of shock, maybe even outrage. Wick was telling her that they’d hidden half the damn mission from her. But somehow she felt nothing. It had been distantly obvious to her all along—like a billboard she could only dimly make out. Why else would they forbid her from seeing the planet? Why else would they confine non-essential personnel to the ship, if not because there was something unusual about Eos itself?
“What does that mean?” she asked. “A gravitational anomaly?”
“It’s not far from here,” Wick said. “A few kilometers. We’ve been calling it the Fold, for lack of a better word. It looks like fractal structures from a distance, or giant mirrors towering into the sky—but in fact, they’re not structures or surfaces at all. They’re creases in space. In dimensions.”
Park stared at him. “I’m not following.”
Wick shook his head. “I don’t have a strong grasp of it, myself. To put it simply, space and gravity behave strangely in that area—in the Fold. Holt had some theories about a concentration of dark matter or gravity wells forming, but I lost the thread of it fairly quickly—and now he’s frozen. But we’ve been trying to study the thing.”
“What do you mean, space and gravity behave strangely?”
Wick scratched the back of his neck. “It’s hard to explain it if you haven’t seen it yourself. Essentially, in the Fold, space curves back on itself. It’s as if something folds our four-dimensional space into shapes that intersect with a fifth dimension.”
She gave him a blank stare.
Wick sighed. “Here’s how Fulbreech explained it to me. Imagine you were a two-dimensional being—flat—living on a piece of paper. If something were to fold that piece of paper into, say, a three-dimensional triangle, a pyramid, the shape would be far too complex for you to comprehend. But only because you couldn’t see the true simplicity of the shape from a higher dimension. And then if something were to fold that piece of paper into an origami crane—”
“My entire dimension would be turned topsy-turvy,” Park finished. “Instead of the surface I knew, the whole thing would be bent into something utterly incomprehensible. So this anomaly is like an origami crane?”
“A fifth-dimensional origami crane, yes,” Wick affirmed. “There, space curves around a fifth dimension; gravity and light make a U-turn on themselves. Does that make sense?”
“Not really, to be honest.”
Wick kneaded the skin between his eyes. “I’m making a botched job of this,” he muttered. “Let me speak without theory, then, and tell you my experience with the Fold. From afar and at certain times of day, it looks obvious to the naked eye: it’s a mass of light and reflection, like shards of glass the size of skyscrapers. But as you get close to it, the whole thing seems to vanish, like a mirage—because you’ve entered the dimensional fold itself. And when you’re there, in the midst of it, you realize these fractal structures and shards aren’t solid surfaces, as they seem from a distance—they’re holes or creases in space itself, usually reflecting themselves back onto each other. The dimensions collapse together there, and then reform again into something different. For example, I put my hand through one crease and saw it emerge from another, fifty yards away. I was waving at myself. Very uncanny.”
“And it—doesn’t harm humans? Being in this mass of dimensional folds?”
“It doesn’t seem to,” Wick said. “But it is—disorienting, to say the least. Like being trapped in one of those paintings with the Escher stairs, the ones that twist in impossible ways. At one point Boone wandered off, said he thought he saw somebody running out in front of him. But he was following a reflection of himself—no, Holt said he was actually following himself. Space folded back on itself in such a way that he was going in an endless loop, chasing his own body, just ahead.”
Park put a hand to her temple. “This is giving me a headache.”
Wick smiled slightly. “I know the feeling. Long story short, dimensions are merged together and refolded into different shapes in the Fold. It’s something we’ve never seen before. And if we can understand it—master it—there’s no telling what it could mean. We could utilize it for instantaneous travel—collapsing the distance between two points—or communication. We could use it to terraform new planets. We might even be able to use it to shape space itself, refolding it as we like. Who knows? Maybe we could even restore Earth to what it was like before the Comeback.”
That gave Park a start. She took a long moment to process it. Restore Earth? That was momentous. No wonder the ISF was so eager to keep it a secret, until they could study the anomaly further. She said, “Would it be possible for humans to live permanently in such a place?”
Wick shook his head, rueful. “It’s too soon to say. The air here is partially breathable, and there’s an Earth-like atmosphere in terms of pressure. If your helmet sprang a leak, you wouldn’t die instantly—which is better than most planets. But we know almost nothing about the Fold. It seems contained to that single area now, but what if that changed? And we don’t know what’s causing the folds in the first place. Until we can understand that, we can’t know if it’s safe enough to settle here.”
And let’s not forget the radiation storms, Park thought. Or the nightmares. “So what’s in the utility rooms? Equipment to study the Fold? A lab?”
“Yes,” Wick said heavily. “Which is supposed to be classified, kept secret. Boone was stationed to guard it, when we didn’t know where Holt was; it’s why he was down there this morning, to prevent anyone from jeopardizing the data. He’s supposed to keep away non-ISF personnel.”
“We’re all ISF personnel,” she pointed out, a little stubbornly.
He frowned. “You know what I mean, Park.”
Yes, she supposed she did, Park thought reluctantly. ISF had authorized Boone to use his gun and keep non-conscripted from finding out about all of this. Why? Because if they let the information leak to someone back home, there would be few consequences for them beyond termination, possibly a lawsuit. Conscripted expedition members, on the other hand, were keeping the secret under virtual pain of death. If ISF found out they’d disobeyed their orders, their citizenship in the Frontier could be revoked: they’d have to uproot their families, leave their homes. Exit space forever.
She felt a dim glow of both sympathy and shame. So that was what Fulbreech had risked, tipping her off. He’d given her as much of a clue as he could about what was going on. And yet . . .
“If I’m not authorized, I can’t access the data down there,” Park said. “Can Fulbreech?”
Wick looked uncomfortable. “He’s conscripted,” was all he said.
“So did he run down to the utility rooms to make sure I was safe, or did he go down there to prevent me from finding whatever trick is concealing the research lab?”
Wick barreled forward as if she hadn’t asked the question. “It should be obvious why such a thing needs to stay under wraps,” he said. Park frowned, but he continued: “The implications of it, the consequences, they’re too unpredictable. We don’t know anything about the thing, yet. We can’t have the public finding out about it, the entire galaxy blowing up over something that could turn out to be unusable. So we have to tread very carefully.”
Begrudgingly, she saw the picture he was painting for her. Crewmembers writing home, unable to contain their excitement. Researchers clamoring to make the big discovery that could change the world—making mistakes in their academic fervor. Greed and fear and jealousy setting in. Competitors trying to nose their way into classified business. Or someone getting political, spiteful; destroying the thing before ISF could use it. Yes, the fewer people who knew, the safer. She could see it. But she still didn’t necessarily like it.
“Is that what Keller was working on?” she asked. “Her special project?”
“Yes.”
“But what would you need a psychologist for? It seems like a problem for a quantum physicist.”
Wick shrugged. “She had her orders from ISF.”
There was a little silence between them as Park struggled to absorb all of this. Finally she said, “So Boone’s in charge of guarding this . . . data.”
“Well,” Wick said. “Sagara is, technically. He’s in charge of ensuring the data is safe from sabotage and loss. Boone’s in charge of protecting us from outside threat.”
“But we’re the only ones on Eos,” Park said, surprised. “There’s no one else out here.” She looked into Wick’s eyes, which looked shuttered and wary suddenly. “Right?”
At this, Wick only shrugged. “You never know,” was all he said.
They spent a while debriefing each other, talking rapid-fire in that chilly space. Wick refused to say anything more about the Fold, and Park didn’t press much: now that she knew what the problem was, she found that she didn’t care much about the specifics, the scientific details of the thing. She only had to know that the ISF considered it important enough to hide it from some of its own crew. She found herself wondering exactly who knew what: Had Keller known all along, or had she only been told the day they landed? Did Chanur know? Did Jimex? But she was afraid to ask. Rather than relief, she felt a little afraid of being told that she was the last to know. Even if Wick claimed it wasn’t personal, she felt ISF’s mistrust of her. Felt singled out. Now she knew how the other crewmembers had felt, knowing she was there solely to report back on them.
“So if I’m taking a shower,” she said, “Sagara could be listening to me at any time?”
She hoped, almost viciously, that he was listening now; that he would be embarrassed by the implication, just as Wick was.
“You make it sound perverse,” he said. His skin was ruddy under the tan—he was blushing. “As I said, ARGUS doesn’t differentiate between crewmembers. It only processes their voices and movements blindly, like they’re—nameless entities, or ghosts. And it’s quite finicky as it is, anyway: the proton storm must have affected it. We’d need Reimi to know for sure.” He shook his head. “And like I said, Sagara—or I, for that matter—can’t just tune in and spy at any moment. The computer only detects commonalities between different figures, or keywords they use, and pinpoints them for us after the fact. You understand?”
ISF’s hackneyed attempt at maintaining privacy, Park supposed. It could avoid the sticky issue of identity misuse, having the program collect data on everybody on the ship but rendering that data inaccessible unless the computer aggregated it under specific criteria. Most likely so the people who found out later couldn’t raise a legal fuss. She said, “Is no one exempt? Could Boone or Sagara listen to this conversation later on, if the computer flagged it?”
“Yes,” Wick said. “Though I already told them that I was going to tell you.” His mouth twisted, wry. “We all found out about your little investigation earlier. They were none too happy about it, but I understood. I would have done the same thing, in your shoes. That’s when I decided to let you in on things.”
She did feel a warm wash of gratitude towards him. Finally someone who empathized with her, understood her frustration—understood too that she could do a lot more damage, bumbling blindly around in the dark, than she could with full knowledge of what was going on. But she couldn’t help but say, a little anxiously: “If Holt knew all about this anomaly, and Boone still shot him for potentially compromising the data . . .”
Wick waved his hand. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m commander. And I say we need to trust you. They won’t do anything out of line.”
But she couldn’t tamp down that little bubble of fear. She thought of the hostility that Boone had towards her, the suspicion Sagara held that she had something to do with the nightmares. Then, remembering the nightmares, she said: “This anomaly. Is there any way it could be—affecting people?”
Wick looked surprised. “What do you mean?”
Park clasped her hands together, thinking. “Holt showed signs of disturbance only on the day we landed. Not before. Ma, too. So could the Fold be radioactive? Toxic in some way? Did either of them have contact with it?”
Wick was shaking his head, troubled. Somehow the light in the room had shifted, throwing his eyes and mouth into shadow. He said, “No, neither of them were ever allowed near it. Ma didn’t even know about it, being non-conscripted. Holt did, but he never had contact with it. We wouldn’t let him go out until Natalya and the others had secured the area.”
“Still,” Park persisted. “You said you know next to nothing about it. Could it alter anyone’s mental state?”
“The anomaly doesn’t work like that,” Wick told her flatly. “It affects things, not people. Matter and space, not . . . dreams. It can’t influence anyone the way you’re thinking, no more than a black hole or the sun could.”
Only it could, Park thought later as Wick stood and shook her hand—an outdated Earth custom that gave her the brief silvery flash of pleasure and anxiety that came with unexpected bodily contact. People were things just as much as anything else, in their own way. But she had to take him at his word: Wick wouldn’t allow them to stay there if it could potentially harm his crew. They were safe. She was safe. She had to believe that.
She left his bunk with a head full of static. A headache was beginning to throb behind her eyes, as if a leech had attached itself to the inside of her skull. She lay down on her hard cot—Natalya and Hunter had not returned to the room yet—and drew the flap of her foil thermal blanket up to her chin. So much new information, she thought. She had to take time to process and adjust her frame of reference. Eos was not just a place to live and explore. It was the site of something momentous, like the first flyby of a Planck star. Something that could change their understanding of physics—of the universe—itself. How did she feel about that? She didn’t know. She didn’t know if she’d felt much of anything, even when she still believed it was just the site of a future colony. Had anything changed? Her role was still the same. The job they’d hired her for was still the same. That they’d lied to her—and the non-conscripted others—didn’t play into it. She could understand their reasons, rationally. Couldn’t she?
What would happen if it were all true? she wondered then. If understanding this anomaly really could help things on Earth, if it could make terraforming easier? What if they could “fold” acid oceans, sulfur deserts—the barren traverses of space? Manipulate and merge dimensions, topographies, and reshape them as they pleased?
Dangerous, was her first thought. Dangerous, dangerous. It was the power gods wielded.
And yet . . .
What could never be settled before could be a blank canvas now. Humanity could spread to all corners of the galaxy. And they were due for the next big leap in technological advancement. Since the ISF had invented the lambda engine and faster-than-light travel, decades ago, things had slowed to a technological crawl—except for the increments by which androids and artificial intelligence improved. People on Earth were so preoccupied with coming up with ways to combat the Comeback—with preserving things before they were lost to the plants—that they hadn’t been able to do more than survive for years. This anomaly could be far more important than a single colony mission. She shouldn’t be insulted by the deception. Their discoveries here could change things for the human race on a grand scale.
If it worked the way they hoped it did, she thought. If it wasn’t just another dud, like the Icarus Stargate or the ansible. If they weren’t courting disaster just by being here.
If. If. If.
There was still the question of the nightmares, too. She still didn’t know what could be causing them—what could be causing all the catastrophes that had struck the ship since they’d arrived. But things were a little clearer, now. Maybe it was all a coincidence. Maybe it was the stress of the whole culture, of keeping all these secrets, of knowing there was something hidden down in the belly of the ship. That could affect a person, couldn’t it? Enough to drive them to a breakdown, to parasomnia? Holt’s obsession—or guilt—could have led him down to the utility rooms. The root of his anxieties, she thought. The epicenter of all the fears and hopes on the ship.
She closed her eyes. No. She was still missing something—there were still things afoot aboard the Deucalion. In the shadows. The hard, reptilian part of her brain told her so, and she had learned to trust that intuition.
But at least her view of things had sharpened, even a little. At least she had a fuller picture of what was going on. She lay back and imagined the Deucalion drifting silently through the boundless inkwell of space. Their native sun would be nothing more than a distant white needlepoint in the black alien fabric they’d woven themselves into. They were farther away from the hub of human life than anyone had ever gone. Wick had only shrugged when she’d asked if they were alone. But who would follow them, all the way out here? Who would venture to the icy outer rings of another galaxy, just to find some anomaly—even one as novel as this?
It was paranoia, she thought. On the part of ISF. They were too used to secretiveness, to walling themselves up from within. To protecting their vulnerabilities from the outside. Park would know. It took one to know one.
She sighed. Glenn had told her something once, when she was young. She’d asked him if he ever kept secrets from her.
“Yes,” he’d answered calmly. When she gave him an accusing look, he’d added, “Only when it’s good for you.”
“How do you know when it’s good for me?” she’d demanded.
He’d smiled and allowed her to take his cool, tough hand, letting her wring it as a kind of mock-punishment. “There are some things you don’t need to know,” Glenn said. “Things that could worry you, or frighten you.”
“But it’s good to be frightened, sometimes,” Park had answered, wise even then.
Glenn shook his head, still smiling. “I don’t understand.”
“Fear is what keeps us alive,” she told him. “I have to know what I’m afraid of to avoid it. Fear is what keeps me away from dangerous things.”
“That is why I am with you,” Glenn had answered patiently. “I will keep you away from what you should fear.”
But you’re not here anymore, Park thought. And when they kept their secrets from me, I didn’t know what to fear. I was afraid of everything.
At least it’s over now, she told herself. At least now she knew. No more secrets, no more fear.
What had she said to Glenn then, on that sun-showered day? Had she ignored him, had she thanked him? Had she wondered what her android guardian was keeping from her? She couldn’t remember—the memories felt waxy with disuse and time. A feeling of acceptance washed over her. It didn’t matter. It was over now. Things could proceed as usual.
A gray veil seemed to fall over her eyes. Eventually Park settled into the rattling of the ship’s walls and dreamt of her jettisoned body hurtling through folds in space and time. There was Earth below her, spinning away, blue-blushed and familiar. She didn’t know why, but she turned away from it. Her body aimed instead for cold and distant stars.