Frozen silence. Park’s mind was a vast, thundering blankness.
Sagara said, “Communications are down.”
“But not because of a solar storm,” Natalya said, suddenly sickly sweet. She smiled in a catlike way and looked at Park. “A man smiles at you and you’ll believe anything he says.”
Boone grunted at Fulbreech, motioning with the gun he still had pointed to Sagara’s head. “Get your gun out, Kel.”
Fulbreech shook his head, carefully avoiding eye contact with everyone in the room. “I told you I wasn’t going to use that,” he said indistinctly.
Boone snorted. “Give it to me, then. I’ll use it.”
Fulbreech shook his head again, still looking at the floor. “There’s no need for that. No one has to get hurt.”
Natalya curled her lip. “Grow up, Fulbreech,” she said, still with her hand clamped over Park’s mouth. “And grow some balls.”
“Shut up, Natalya.”
Park shut her eyes; the pain in her head was throbbing wildly, distracting her—pulling her away from the moment, from the scene she was part of right now in the bridge. She couldn’t follow what was going on.
Sagara, at least, seemed to know. “So it was you,” he said with a note of disgust. “I suspected someone had tampered with communications on the ship—but I never imagined you’d have the gall, Fulbreech.” He shook his head, despite the gun pointed at it. “And I gave you access to METIS when the blackout happened. I suppose that was when you reprogrammed it to take orders from Boone.”
He wouldn’t, Park thought, opening her eyes again and looking at Fulbreech’s hunched shoulders—like he was a boy being scolded. He didn’t.
But then she could only think about how Fulbreech had come into her office that night, after Holt had gone missing, and told her that radiation storms had fried the communication systems. How effortlessly he’d gotten her into the escape pod for his grand gesture, having stolen a suit without anyone noticing. How he’d come to free her in her bunk, overriding Sagara’s orders and giving himself Reimi’s clearance to access the locks. “I’m good with computers,” he’d said with a smile. “I have to be.”
He’d had the ability all along, she realized. Why wouldn’t it be him?
Because it’s Fulbreech, she told herself, just as Fulbreech looked helplessly at Sagara and said, “You’re not conscripted. You don’t have family in the frontier—”
“Save it,” Natalya said then, in a cold, clipped voice. The hand holding the gun to Park’s neck tightened until the knuckles showed white. “It’s no use trying to explain to people like them. They won’t understand.”
Park finally wrenched her mouth away from Natalya’s other hand, heedless of the danger. “What’s your endgame here?” she demanded. She couldn’t look at Fulbreech at the moment—or perhaps ever again—so she directed her gaze to Boone, who looked back at her without emotion. “What do you plan to do with control of a ship that’s barely working and a crew that’s either frozen or incapacitated?”
“It’s a mutiny,” Sagara answered her, his voice acidic with contempt. “They think they’re being creative, revolutionary. It’s all happened before. They mean to hold us as hostages—the robot, probably, too—until the ISF gives them a ransom.”
“Ransom?” Natalya answered fiercely, taking the bait despite her own instructions not to. “You mean our families? Our freedom?”
Sagara laughed; it was a mocking, bitter sound that made Park shiver. “And where will you go with that freedom?” he asked her. “Back to Earth? It’s not as if they won’t find you there—and ISF owns the rest of inhabited space.”
“Then we’ll go to uninhabited space,” Boone said, with just a little less conviction than Natalya, and Park thought, We can make them doubt themselves. She and Sagara could sow enough conflict and confusion to make them see reason—or make the mutineers unsure enough that they could be thrown off guard.
“You killed Wick,” she said aloud. “You’ve orchestrated a mass conspiracy: mutiny, hacking, the freezing of at least half a dozen people. You don’t think ISF will agree to all of your demands, pretend to release your relatives, and then simply renege once you hand us over? Or board the ship by force as soon as we’re in sight of Corvus? They’ll throw you in Pandora for your crimes—or execute you, if you’re lucky.”
“They’d be too afraid that I’d kill their little specimen,” Natalya answered, her eyes shining now—not with tears, but a kind of fanatic determination. “Which I will, if I have to.”
“It won’t come to that,” Boone snapped over her. He looked at Park. “We’ll demand provisions. The transfer of our families. Then we’ll jettison the freak into the farthest sector past Cambien and take off like bats out of hell. The ISF will be too busy chasing it to worry about following us.”
“And after?” Park demanded. “How long do you think you’ll last in the darkest reaches of space?”
“It’s a big universe,” Boone said. His eyes flicked over her, then back to Sagara, as if he was nervous—and Park realized that he was not nervous about them trying something, but afraid that they would not understand his line of thinking. It seemed important to him that he justified himself—to convey to them that he was still the good guy. The hero of the story. “ISF doesn’t own it all,” he continued. “We’ll find a planet of our own. Secede. We already have a few places in mind. Anyone tries to land on it, we’ll blast ’em.”
“I suppose you’ll set yourself up with a little garden of Eden,” Sagara said sardonically. “As if it’s that easy. You need ISF’s resources to colonize a planet. Or will your families eventually merge together and populate the whole thing? Will a new pocket of the human race form from your descendants alone?”
“We have the skills to make it happen,” Boone said, defensive now. “I’ll handle defense, Natalya can find resources, Wan Xu can build the biodomes, Chanur will take care of our people—”
“And Fulbreech will make maps,” Sagara said, with brutal amusement.
Fulbreech dropped his eyes. “I’m not going,” he said faintly.
Boone wheeled on him. “What is that supposed to mean?” he demanded. “You’re in way too deep to start having second thoughts now—”
“Stop it,” Natalya gritted out. “We can talk about this later.”
“How many ransom situations have worked in favor of the ransomers?” Park cut in then, desperate to keep them arguing. She could not believe they had concocted this ludicrous plan together. How long had they been conspiring? Why hadn’t any of them pointed out the absurdity of it all? “How many of those people ever truly got away?” she asked.
It was when Natalya was rounding to answer her that Sagara suddenly made his move. His hand flashed back and grabbed the muzzle of Boone’s gun, wrenching it away; at the same time, he turned and slammed the heel of his palm into Boone’s sternum with a strange, sickening little crack. Then, viciously, before the military specialist could catch his breath, he stamped his boot down on Boone’s instep—and snapped his leg.
Boone screamed and squeezed off a shot with the electrolaser. At the sound of it everybody ducked: Natalya flinched, her hand jerking, and Park wound her fist back and smashed it into the surveyor’s face, knocking her to the ground. She dove after her, grappling for the gun with slippery hands. Again she felt that same wild, sunlit strength—android strength, she thought in a rush. There was a brief struggle between the two of them—all limbs and punching and hot, furious breath—before Park knocked away the gun and sent it spinning off under a table.
Then Fulbreech was there, trying to separate them; Park hit him in the face, too, and the three of them tumbled around on the floor, scrabbling over each other like animals. Park couldn’t see Boone or Sagara in the red-hazed commotion; she could only think about finding the gun or bashing Natalya’s brains out against the floor.
Then another gunshot, which made them all curl defensively. There was a muffled exclamation, and then silence. When Park looked up, she saw Chanur standing there at the entrance to the bridge, holding her own smoking railgun. She was pointing it at the far corner of the room, where Boone was dragging himself up the wall, his leg dangling horribly, and Sagara was lying on the ground—bleeding.
“You shot him,” Park said out loud, stupidly. Chanur ignored her and motioned to Natalya with her gun, tight-lipped.
“Get up,” she said. “We’re taking them downstairs.”
The surveyor staggered to her feet and wiped her bloodied mouth. “Fulbreech hit me,” she said, spitting.
“It was an accident,” Fulbreech said, slumped down next to Park. He seemed dazed, winded, as if he’d spent the day playing a game he didn’t understand the rules of and was now tired out. “We were never supposed to hurt anybody—let alone kill. You told me that, Natalya.”
“You were a fool to believe her,” Chanur answered, unblinking. Park could barely recognize her; the physician suddenly seemed to stand much taller, straighter. She seemed somehow much more present than she had ever been, as if she had stepped into her body like it was previously an empty suit. She jerked her head at Fulbreech. “You stay here. We’ll talk things out in a moment.”
He lapsed into silence. Park wouldn’t look at him, but she thought, Don’t you dare, you fucking traitor. Don’t side with them. Defend us!
Fulbreech said nothing; out of the corner of her eye she saw him nod. Chanur turned to Park and pointed the gun at her. “Get up.”
Everyone moved in a weird, frozen silence after that, as if they had all been requisitioned to act out parts in a play, against their wills. There was a sullen, awkward tension; Park batted aside Fulbreech’s hand when he went to help her up. Boone hauled Sagara roughly to his feet, despite his broken leg—Park supposed that was the genetic augments at play, pumping abnormal levels of adrenaline through his system, dulling his pain. Park could see that Sagara was tense and silent, and that he had a lot of blood running down his pant leg. She hurried over to brace him up with her shoulders. No one else moved to help him: not even Fulbreech.
“Fucker broke my leg,” Boone growled, not looking at it. Park also didn’t want to look at it: his calf and foot were twisted at an unnatural angle from the rest of his body. She looked instead up into Sagara’s white face and said, “We need to stop the bleeding.”
“It didn’t hit bone,” was all he said in response.
Chanur motioned to them with her gun. “No talking,” she said. To Boone she snapped: “I’ll see to your leg in a moment. Stay here with Fulbreech and make sure we can still get off this goddamned planet.”
Then she turned back to Park and gestured for her to start walking. When Park glanced at her eyes, it felt as if she was peering into the depths of a pool with no bottom.
They were marched down the corridor to Deck B by Natalya and Chanur. The entire time Park’s mind raced with possibilities, looking for escape routes, some moment of distraction she could use to her advantage. But the strange, lightning-quick, nuclear energy had been drained out of her—and now she was saddled with Sagara’s weight as he limped against her, tight-lipped with pain. It seemed to her that he wasn’t even breathing. On the other hand, Natalya made little hissing noises as she walked: either from an injury or a barely stifled fury, a complaining desire to kill them. Park wasn’t sure.
The two women took them to the freezer the crew used to store perishable foods: a tiny, narrow space no bigger than a standard closet. When they reached the door with the little porthole, Park felt a heart-jerking moment of vertigo, a kind of double-vision. She paused, but then Chanur opened the door and shoved her so hard that she buckled under Sagara’s weight. She landed on top of him in a heap, heard him give a strangled yell of pain; he sat up immediately and glared at Chanur. Stone-faced, the doctor fished something out of her pocket and tossed it at his feet.
“We could get hypothermia,” Park said to her, trying to ease her weight off of Sagara—but there wasn’t enough room. “He could die in here.”
“You could both die,” Chanur answered, heavy-lidded and indifferent. “The specimen’s the most important thing. The rest of you are just an afterthought.”
“You trained for this, Park,” Natalya said then, her eyes alight with mockery—that special malice she seemed to have only for Park. “It’s just like Antarctica. Remember?”
Then she slammed the door in Park’s face.
Park turned to Sagara in the dark. “Let me see your leg,” she said to him.
“You should test the door,” the security officer croaked instead. But of course, Chanur was already locking it.
Park only looked up once as she was tending to him, back up at the porthole; and she saw that Natalya was still standing there, staring at her through the window like she was looking into the exhibit of an animal—or the windows of a madhouse. The faint pale light made her look like an inhuman shadow, a ghost haunting the doorway. It occurred to Park that she looked like a distorted reflection of who Park had been, standing and looking in at another cell, another prisoner, just the hour before.
Time is folded together here, Park thought. We are all just reflections of each other.
Images on the surface of a mirror that had been splintered apart.
It turned out that Chanur had been bluffing, after all, perhaps out of spite—she clearly cared about whether Sagara lived or died, because she’d left them with a single injection of Regenext: a kind of medical gel that sped up the body’s regenerative cell process. It wouldn’t knit together all of Sagara’s wound—he would still have to hobble—or even dull the pain, but it would at least stop the bleeding.
Sagara shook his head when Park tried to give it to him. “You should take it,” he said. He jerked his chin toward her head: the wound from Natalya’s blow had congealed into a terrible mess at the back of her skull.
Park shook her head at him in turn. “This is no time to be a martyr,” she said, checking his wound one last time. The railgun’s projectile had cleanly pierced the outer part of his left thigh, missing any major blood vessels. And there was an exit wound, which meant the projectile wouldn’t still be lodged inside of him when the Regenext started regrowing the damaged tissue. She uncapped the injection before Sagara could protest and added, “You’re the better fighter of the two of us—even injured. I need you in good shape if we’re going to get out of here.”
He hissed through his teeth when she plunged the syringe into his thigh. “Give the needle to me afterwards, then,” he said after a moment. Then he glanced up at the door; Natalya had vanished, apparently abandoning her post to tend to her own injuries—or schemes.
Park re-capped the syringe and handed it over. “I’m surprised Chanur left us with a weapon.”
Sagara deftly tucked it up into his sleeve. “She wasn’t thinking,” he answered. “None of them are. Amateurs, all of them—they’re not used to thinking of everyone as a potential enemy.”
She tried to smile at him, but the expression felt ill-fitting on her face, like secondhand makeup. It was the wrong shade, the wrong tone. “Not like you,” she said.
Sagara looked at her, but he didn’t smile back. “No,” he said, with something like sympathy in his tone. “Not like me.”
Park tried not to flinch. She knew he was thinking about her and Fulbreech—about Fulbreech’s betrayal. She couldn’t think about it. Barely believed it, even. How could he—guileless, easy-to-read Fulbreech—have been deceiving her all along? How could he have gotten such a thing past her? She remembered the argument he’d had with Natalya in the cafeteria, back on their first day on the planet: had she and Boone converted him to their cause then? Or had he been in their ranks all this time, since they’d left Earth, directed to befriend and beguile Park and keep her from noticing anything as the ISF’s orbiter?
The thought hurt more than the steady throbbing at the back of her skull, the cuts and bruises scoring her body. That his smiles had been false, his gestures orchestrated for reasons far more political than attraction. She felt as if she had swallowed a cigarette. As if it was traveling somewhere in her body, still alight and burning. As if she’d never be able to cough it out.
Sagara slid back until he could sit against the nearest wall; Park followed suit with the opposite wall, so that only their legs were touching, their boots touching each other’s thighs. Sagara leaned his head back so that his eyes only glinted at Park from under his eyelids, like the dark flashes of iridium satellites in the night sky.
“So,” he said.
She sighed, tucked her hands between her thighs. The freezer was cold, but not as frigid as she’d been expecting. “So.”
He nodded at her. “Why don’t you start?”
He made it sound so easy—as if there were a definitive origin point, one starting domino that had toppled all the others. She’d thought that, even, but Taban had said that was wrong. An ongoing environmental effect, he’d said. And how to describe that environment succinctly? Where could you start? The crew’s arrival to Eos? Taban—the original one—landing on this cursed planet to begin with? The formation of the Fold? The creation of the ISF and the conditions under which it would force people to rebel?
Or the creation of androids and space travel itself—all of it hurtling with terrible inevitability toward this final perilous frontier?
“You start,” Park said wearily, wanting to knead her temples—and then afraid to touch her head, as if it might fall apart like a broken melon. “I need to organize my thoughts. You knew about Taban all this time?”
Sagara looked at her, unembarrassed. “You mean the robot?”
“Of course I mean the robot.”
“I knew about the human,” Sagara said, with a hint of his old sarcasm. “He was the real reason why the crew was gathered to conduct this mission: an ISF merchant vessel received an emergency call from the human, along with some videos of what he had been experiencing. The merchant vessel bounced it back to ISF Corvus, who sent it to Earth, and then we were recruited—to rescue him, and to investigate his claims about the phenomena on the planet.”
Park shook her head. So that was why there had been such a rush to expedite the launch. And why there were no colony tools on the ship, after all. “But why keep that a secret?” she asked. “It’s not as if I would have refused to sign on if I’d known our real purpose—”
“ISF is never concerned about that,” Sagara cut in flatly. “We are replaceable, all of us. But they didn’t want any information leaks. On top of this being an undiscovered planet, there were clearly strange things going on here—even if what we were getting from Taban’s comms was just the ramblings of a madman. He should have died months ago, having run out of food. But he didn’t. We needed to understand how and why before we could unveil his story to the public.”
Park shuddered; at what point had the robot Taban replaced the human? Or had ISF been communicating with the robot the entire time, without realizing it, so deceived by the authenticity of his messages that they had never questioned his humanity? But the thought churned her stomach a little, so she kept silent on that for the moment. Instead she said, “So why did they need me? Why two psychologists?”
“Keller was always meant to examine Taban,” Sagara said calmly. “There was no telling what kind of psychological state he’d be in; what effect his experiences had had on him. She and Chanur were meant to study him, interview him, understand what was happening to him. You—”
“—were meant to monitor the rest of the crewmembers,” Park said heavily. “I see.”
And yet Keller had never even given her a hint, she couldn’t help but think, with something like bitter rage. She had never tried to prepare her. She had always let Park assume her role would be secondary, observational. She’d even smiled and encouraged the belief: You’re the one behind the scenes. I’m just here to coax it all out for you to examine.
Why? Did she feel no mercy toward Park, no pity over her ignorance about what was to come? Or was ISF’s stranglehold on her, too, so powerful that she could look Park in the eyes and lie to her only friend on the ship?
Goddamn her, she thought, balling her fists. Goddamn them all.
Sagara was watching her, his mouth twisted into an expression she couldn’t read. “It wasn’t only that,” he said. He had the tone of someone forging past something unpleasant. “Yes, you were to monitor the rest of the crew for signs of instability or delusion—symptoms of what we thought was happening to Taban. But you were also meant to be something of a control. We knew the effects of the Fold on Taban were at least partially mental—even psychic, if you would believe the theories Keller was spouting. Would awareness of it, then, color your responses, bias your observations, or otherwise affect your psyche? Would you be able to correctly recognize and diagnose any problems that arose from it without knowing what it was? Or was it something that had no effect on someone who had no awareness of it?”
She stared at him, aghast. “So, what,” she said after a moment, dry-mouthed. “I was—what, a guinea pig? Some lab rat who could write reports to them, so they could gauge if I was being influenced or not?” She wanted to pull her legs away from him, but the space in the freezer was too small. “And everyone else knew?”
“Not everyone,” Sagara said. He sighed, and although his expression didn’t change, the sound was somewhat apologetic. “Not the non-conscripted. Reimi Kisaragi, Elly Ma. I was the only one of them who was aware.”
She pressed her lips together and glared at him. Sagara continued, his voice gentler: “Boone and the others must have been planning this little mutiny for a long time. They must have orchestrated it before they even left Earth. They most likely heard the reports coming from Taban and realized how important he was; how excited ISF was about the data on him and Eos. How momentous this expedition was supposed to be.” He fell silent for a moment. “They weren’t expecting to come here and find two dead bodies—and one robot who was claiming to be Taban himself. I’m sure there was chaos when they found out—they must have panicked, thought the whole thing was a wild goose chase. But in the end they decided to follow through with it anyway. They were in too deep—and the HARE was still a witness to all the things that went on here. ISF still wants it. So, human or not, they wanted to capture control of the ship and hold the thing for ransom. In exchange for their families, or supplies, or whatever stupid plan they were spouting up there.”
Park almost didn’t want to speak to him anymore, resentment simmering down in her throat like a fever—but curiosity urged her onward. “Do you think they planned to kill Wick all along?” she asked softly.
Sagara’s face contorted, just briefly. His tone, however, stayed level. “I don’t know,” he said. “Given their attempts to hack the ship first, it was probably a contingency plan at best. They probably planned to take him hostage along with the rest they couldn’t turn—you and me and the others. It was lucky for them the nightmares started, in a way—it meant that many of the people who might have resisted them got frozen, without any of us questioning it. Like Keller and Hunter and Ma. Kisaragi, they froze before any of this happened—they needed her out to take down the comms and cut us off—and it was just lucky for them that the rest followed. Otherwise, I would have been looking into her sudden illness much more closely. Everything happened to align for them.” He fell silent for a moment. “Fulbreech didn’t know about it. Their plans for Wick, I mean.”
I don’t want to talk about him, Park almost said. Instead she shook her head and said, “I still don’t understand what they think they’ll get out of this.”
“I couldn’t tell you,” Sagara answered, with a hint of his old waspishness. “Though I have my theories. My guess is that they originally planned on claiming this planet for themselves: they’d root out the ISF loyalists, freeze or murder them, and colonize the place as a new home—probably using the Fold or Taban as hostages, to keep ISF away. Before we landed, my contacts back in Corvus informed me that ISF had discovered encrypted messages being sent to the ship’s computer, though they hadn’t figured out what they said or who they were being sent to when I last spoke with them. They were tracking down the source as we spoke.” He adjusted his leg; Park resisted the urge to see how it was doing. The regeneration process could sometimes look gruesome. “My guess is that one of our mutineer’s friends or family members was making arrangements, maybe buying passage on an unregistered ship. The plan might have been for the others to claim this place for themselves, and their families would come later.”
Then he looked off to the side and smiled to himself in a crooked way, the expression full of bitter irony. This time Park did read his expression. “But they weren’t expecting the nightmares,” she said.
Sagara chuckled, as if he did find pleasure in their mistake. “No,” he said, “it seems they didn’t. They might have thought this place could support human life, if Taban had survived on his own for so long—but of course, he hadn’t, and it wasn’t the utopia they probably expected. And when the nightmares started, infecting our crew left and right, they knew they couldn’t stay.”
Now Park did knead her temples. “So they decided to take over the ship and take it elsewhere,” she said. “Flee colonized space altogether and find a new home. It makes sense, in theory. But the amount of work it took . . .”
“It’s almost admirable, isn’t it?” Sagara drawled—though his look told her she’d be unwise to agree. “First they had Chanur freeze Reimi, so their tampering with the ship wouldn’t be noticed: no one was around with the knowledge to discover or undo their sabotage. Then they took down communications, using the excuse of the solar storm, so that none of us could tell ISF that something was amiss.”
“You knew it all along,” Park said in dismay. And here she thought he’d been an out-of-touch paranoiac. But it was she who’d been led astray, by her naïveté, by her trust, by . . . .
She wrenched her mind away from the next thought. Fulbreech’s scent of leather in sunlight came to her suddenly, and she had to blink against the sudden smarting in her nose and eyes. Sagara said, “No, I didn’t know the entire time—or not enough. I only really pieced it together when you ran into the bridge, bloodied and screaming. Or perhaps when Hunter manifested her symptoms, and they were all so quick to consign her to the freezer. Before that, I didn’t know who to trust, or even if anything was really going on. I was suspicious when Kisaragi suddenly became ill, with Chanur so vague on the reasons for her freezing, but I was willing to chalk it up to a medical misfortune. Then everything that happened after—it felt wrong, but that could have been the planet, the strangeness of the Fold. You were seeing ghosts of Taban’s dead body, when I knew you could have never seen it in real life. That threw me off. Were all the things I was suspecting of others really due to the supernatural? Quantum physics I didn’t understand?” He shrugged. “I didn’t know how much was . . . human-caused.” Then he shook his head. “For a while I thought it was the non-conscripted I had to keep an eye on, and that distracted me, too. Of course it was the other way around. It’s a mistake I won’t make again.”
Somehow his confidence that he would live to avoid his past mistakes reassured her. “We know Holt and Ma had the nightmares,” she said. “And Hunter. Do you think Keller really had them?”
“I know she had some trouble down below with sleepwalking,” he answered. “But whether she was frozen due to that, or because she found out about what the others were plotting . . .”
“Taban said it was because she tried to let him out,” Park mused. “Maybe it was both?”
Sagara rubbed his jaw. “I don’t know. What we do know is that, shortly after Holt’s nightmares, the others decided it was no longer worth staying on this planet and that they’d be better off looking for a new one. To do that, they had to bypass the protocols on the ship and take control for themselves.”
“So Natalya staged a distraction,” Park said, echoing what he had said in the bridge. “She knew we were concerned about Hunter, waited until no one was watching her, and turned her loose. That was when they were fighting in the cafeteria.”
Sagara nodded. “While the others—meaning Boone—took advantage of the commotion to go for the bridge. Of course, he’s an idiot, so it didn’t work, resulting in the blackout that I had to go and rescue you from.”
She nearly laughed. “No wonder you thought I was one of them,” she said. “How suspicious it must have seemed . . .” Then she paused, feeling something wedge against her chest. “The question is, why wasn’t it Ful—someone more tech-savvy who went? Instead of Boone?”
“It’s possible he backed down at that point,” Sagara said, unblinking. “Perhaps he didn’t want to participate any longer, until they forced his hand by killing Wick. That would have been good ammunition. ‘You see, if you’d just done your part and hacked the ship for us the first time, Wick wouldn’t be dead. You should cooperate with us more if you want to avoid bloodshed for others.’ Or perhaps they’d argued, after the ordeal with Hunter—when he sided with you—and perhaps they just didn’t trust him anymore.”
She refused to feel any sympathy or pity for him. “So after Boone failed and the power went out . . .”
“They went for Wick,” Sagara said grimly. “And he would have refused to hand over power, so Boone killed him—and then conveniently used your vision of ‘the stranger’ to cover his tracks.”
“So you’re saying it’s my fault?” Park felt miserable. “My fault that Wick died?”
Sagara stared at her. “Not at all. They would have killed him no matter what you did—and they would have found some other excuse, if yours wasn’t available. Hunter killed him. He fell and hit his head. I don’t know.” His mouth twisted again. “It was my fault they killed him. I was tasked with keeping everyone on this ship safe. But they outsmarted me. I didn’t know who could be trusted.”
“They outnumbered you,” Park said, and now she did touch ankles with him—it was the only gesture of comfort she could manage. Sagara smiled, only faintly. “And me. It’s not either of our faults.” Again she thought of Fulbreech and felt that twisting, burning sensation inside of her.
Then she remembered what came next and groaned. “And they had me side against you—to look for this man they claimed was the killer, when they knew all along he must be dead! You were right to lock us up.” She shivered suddenly; the cold was starting to get to her. “But why let me out of my room? They could have easily done something nefarious without me around.”
Sagara paused for a moment, as if gauging her potential reaction. Finally he said, “Now that I think about it, it may have been Fulbreech. Likely they realized they needed him, with his proficiency with METIS, since they’d failed to take it over on their own—and perhaps they realized, too, that he couldn’t stomach killing. Maybe I was wrong, and they didn’t hold Wick’s death over him—maybe they didn’t tell him who was responsible at all. Maybe they went along with the ruse that it was someone else who had done it, to make him easier to coax along. If they asked him to do things for their rebellion, he might balk—but if there was a murderer on board, and they needed his access to the system to survive, he’d do it.”
The fool, she thought. “So to keep him happy, they went along with the lie,” she said. “And that meant letting him let me out and go on the hunt for this imaginary person.” Somehow the thought brought her little comfort—though if he hadn’t come to release her, she never would have found Taban and discovered the truth. Where would they be then?
Sagara said, “I suppose that was when they convinced him to fully override the controls and give command to Boone. They never expected it to default to me after Wick’s death; they probably fed him a story about how I couldn’t be trusted if I didn’t believe there was a murderer around. A stranger, I should say: I knew someone on board was a murderer, and it wasn’t Taban.” He looked thoughtful. “Maybe their grand ‘hunt for the killer’ would have ended in my death—or even yours.”
Her spine crawled. “If they meant to kill me, they would have done it by now,” she said. But of course, Natalya had tried to kill her down in the utility rooms. And Boone couldn’t have brought her down to the lower decks to murder her out of sight . . . could he?
Why not? she asked herself. He would have had the perfect excuse to give to Fulbreech: that she’d been attacked by the mysterious stranger. The same one who had killed Wick. And yes, Fulbreech might have grieved—might have—but his sadness would have soon been overtaken by his mission to reclaim his family and freedom. Wouldn’t it?
“They have less to trade if we’re both dead,” Park said.
Sagara lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “Yes, but they have the robot,” he said. “He—it—is what ISF really wants. The two of us are just extra insurance in case something happens to it. We’re afterthoughts.”
She sighed and closed her eyes. The hum of the freezer was somehow deep and comforting, something that vibrated down in her bones, and she was almost lulled. Now the cold was fading again—it was a distant thing, muted, something she was dimly aware of but couldn’t really feel. Had they raised the temperature to prevent hypothermia, after all? Or was this strange disconnectedness a result of something else? Her head injury, a concussion, or even . . . ?
“Now it’s your turn,” Sagara said, breaking through her thoughts. Park lifted her head and blinked. She had almost dozed off, her cheek resting against the icy wall. “What did you learn from Taban? You mentioned the nightmares, that they’re not what they seem. And something called the unity rain.”
“You’ve never spoken to him?” she asked, trying for time to collect her thoughts.
Sagara shook his head. “I’ve never even been down there. I was told it wasn’t necessary.” He looked sardonic. “My mistake, obviously.”
Park took a breath. Her explanation of this was crucial, or else he would think her insane. Though she wasn’t sure he had a choice in sticking with her anyway, even if she was.
“Keep in mind that I’m only relaying what Taban said,” she warned him. “I haven’t had time to parse through the logic of it on my own.”
Sagara inclined his head in assent. “I’m not in a position to pass judgment,” he said. “I just need to understand—or try to, anyway—so we can survive.”
So Park began.
She told him about Taban’s story, what little she could piece together of it: how the human Taban had been stranded on Eos with his partner, how the unity rain had distorted things around them. How they had been looking for the Fold, trying for mountains when they were really forging toward rifts in space. When she hesitantly mentioned it was possible—just possible—that something of his human existence really could be enduring inside the HARE, merged with it, rather than the machine simply imitating him, Sagara made a noise. But he didn’t interrupt her, so she plowed on.
She told him about the other things Taban had said: how the unity rain didn’t affect just space and time, but also consciousness. How the victims of the nightmares had been assimilated with the androids of the ship, suffering hellish experiences where their minds believed their bodies lacked lungs, and tongues, and any semblance of autonomy. How they’d experienced what it was to be, essentially, both living and dead.
And how the androids, in turn, had slowly become more human-like as a result of their exposure, jerking away from their programming and protocols like creatures emerging from chrysalises. Megex swearing, Park remembered then, and Jimex telling her to run from Boone, and all of them learning from each other, exchanging data, knowledge, a kind of accelerated evolution happening right under everyone’s noses . . .
“I think because Taban has been so exposed to the unity rain, they look to him as a sort of leader,” she said. “Part-human, part-machine consciousness. And possibly even the unity rain responds differently to him, merging his ‘intention’ with the minds of others in a way that doesn’t make him—crazy. That might have been what happened to Holt as well as Keller. Taban wanted out, the unity rain merged their thoughts and experiences together, and Holt tried to let him out. And Hunter, too; Taban was controlling her, maybe unconsciously, so that she was trying to figure out a way to let him out from the bridge. She said that someone had told her to do it, but she couldn’t say who or when.”
“And then when the two of you experienced that gravity malfunction,” Sagara said slowly, “that might have been an effect of this . . . unity rain?”
Park nodded. “That, and a few other times I’ve been on the ship and lost my way. Or found that the hallways were rearranged. Like what happened to us during the blackout.”
Sagara regarded her; she couldn’t read his thoughts again. “Why didn’t you tell anybody?”
Park stared at him. “Would you have? I couldn’t even trust that it was really happening, not at first. I thought that I was tired. And with what was happening to everyone else, experiencing delusions didn’t seem like the ideal thing to talk about.”
Sagara snorted, but he made a gesture as if to tell her to proceed.
“It might have happened to Ellenex, too,” Park said. “The androids said, in very cryptic tones, that Ellenex tried to free Taban, and the ‘devil’—meaning Chanur—caught her and destroyed her for it.” She shook her head. “He has some other connection with the androids, too. Taban, I mean. They’ve formed some kind of mythology around him, incorporated his ‘dreams’ into their own databases and knowledge referentials. They call him the sleeping god.” She left out what they called her—and that they had apparently absorbed things from her dreams, too. “They become more sentient the longer this whole thing goes on. Maybe that’s why Natalya’s always wanted to get rid of them. She might have sensed it.”
“Natalya didn’t sense a damn thing,” Sagara answered dryly. “Neither did any of us—except you. She just hates the robots because most people hate them.”
“Why do people hate them, though?” Park asked, feeling stubborn. “What have they ever done to anybody?”
“They’re different,” he said. “That’s enough.”
“Not so different, though,” she insisted. “They’re just like us, in many ways.”
Now Sagara laughed softly. “Just another reason to be afraid,” he remarked.
Then he shook his head. “I’m having trouble wrapping my mind around the concept of all of this. You seem to accept it so readily, but how could consciousness be something that’s affected—let alone merged—by this phenomenon?”
“Perhaps collapsed is a more helpful word,” Park said. At his look she said, “Or compressed. You accept that the Fold—or various forces, really—collapse or compress together space, don’t you? Or gravity?”
“I suppose,” Sagara said reluctantly. “But consciousness isn’t gravity.”
“It depends on how you look at it,” Park said. Her head spun with the effort, but she could feel herself thinking hard, the rotors of her brain working overtime. “If we’re going by Taban’s hypothesis, consciousness, like gravity, is an invisible force that has an influence on the external world. Unlike gravity, we haven’t made the appropriate steps to prove it—but we are aware of its effects. We know that particles on a quantum level change their behavior when being observed—that the very act of observation, by human or machine, changes something fundamental about them. We know that human intention influences how plants and fruit flies in otherwise identical environments grow; that it can affect the molecular vibration or pH of water samples; that it can seemingly cause tumors to shrink, or the bio-photons in leaves to respond and glow. Why has the ‘placebo effect’—in other words, the human power of belief—had such a marked and undeniable impact on all the studies we’ve ever conducted? Why has it cured physical illness, or . . . why can monks make fields of animals simultaneously move around or lie down just by staring at them, thinking at them? Why does the identical clone of a rat, when told it’s stupid, behave so poorly in a maze, when it’s otherwise treated exactly the same as its clone that was told that it’s smart? And panpsychism has existed as a philosophical concept for, what, thousands of years?” She cleared her throat, aware of the thumping in the back of her head. “Looking at all of that, I would say that consciousness could be a force, a field—even a dimension of its own, higher than time and space—”
“—perceiving and defining both,” Sagara echoed along with her.
Park paused and licked her lips. She could not remember ever talking so much without interruption.
He remained silent, utterly still—only the slight tapping of his fingers belied his uneasiness. Park forged on: “It’s a possibility that we’ve been aware of for a long time; but no one’s taken it further. Or others haven’t taken it seriously enough, I suppose. There was an experiment a long time ago, where a group of students shot a wave of electrons at a barrier with little openings in it. When behaving as a wave, the electrons could simultaneously pass through several of the openings in the barrier and then meet again on the other side. But this behavior could only occur when no one was actively watching. When a human observer began to watch the electrons passing through the barrier, suddenly things were drastically different. If one electron passed through one opening, then clearly it didn’t go through another; the electrons now behaved like individual particles, not a wave. In essence, the mere presence of observation—particularly conscious observation, as observation by an electronic detector didn’t produce this effect—forced the electrons to behave like particles, the way a human mind expected them to behave. But when left to their own devices, without the presence of a live observer, the electrons behaved as a wave again. But why? What about observation does that? It’s almost as if we’re defining that particle by observing it, being aware and conscious of it. That is a force that has an observable effect, even if we can’t fully explain it.”
“Then the unity rain—” Sagara began.
“Has been refolding and collapsing consciousness together, just as it has space.”
“And you’re telling me space has been reorganized every time the phenomenon happens?”
“From my understanding, yes,” Park said. “Dimensionality itself undergoes a—a warping, collapsing together, refolding—like an origami—”
“Yes, I understood about the origami crane.”
“Like origami,” she persisted, “it’s rearranged into another shape, using the same continuous material. Only the folds are in different places each time.”
“But why wouldn’t the ship just be folded into outside space, killing us all?”
She had thought of this. “Consciousness,” Park told him. “All the minds aboard, convinced they’re in a ship—a space—that fits together as a whole. They all bend the shape back into existence, or hold it together, each time the unity rain comes. Their utter belief, or intention, or whatever, keeps it all intact—though with some incongruities.”
“I’m not consciously aware of the ship’s geophysical structure at all times, though,” Sagara said. “Are you?”
“No,” Park said, “and in fact I don’t know the ship very well at all, which probably resulted in even more incongruities. But you forget that there are also the androids on board—and the ship’s operating computer. METIS. ARGUS. Their machine consciousnesses may have been enough to supplement ours and buttress the ship’s structural integrity.”
“Machines aren’t conscious.”
These ones are, she thought, and Sagara said, as if she had spoken it: “At best, they’re imitative. But they can’t truly think on their own. It’s why they’re following Taban’s lead: it thinks for them. Implants ideas.”
“Who taught Taban to think, then?”
He was silent at that.
“It depends on how you define consciousness,” Park said, weary now. “At the very least, the androids have a deep awareness and understanding of the ship’s systems, because they’re a part of them: they’re designed to monitor them and know them intimately. That could be enough to count, in terms of the unity rain—or dimensional disintegration, or whichever.”
Sagara remained quiet for a long time after this. Finally he said, very softly, “You don’t really believe we’ve been . . . merging together with the androids, do you? Or that they’ve become more human?”
In truth, she wasn’t sure if she believed any of it at all, or was even capable of processing such things at any logical level anymore. But the explanation fit—it settled in her mind with the smooth perfection of a missing gear. “I don’t know,” Park said after a moment. “I only know it’s the only explanation we have. We might as well work with it.”
“Then going off of that, we need to get off this planet as soon as possible, wouldn’t you say? Lest we suddenly find ourselves shifted into an airless vacuum, or . . .” He paused significantly. “Worse.”
“That’s certainly what Taban implied,” Park murmured. “That things are only going to get worse from here on out. It’s not a place for humans to stay in for any length of time. But what can we do about it from in here?”
Sagara lapsed into silence again, for so long that she thought he might have finally passed out. She wondered again how the Regenext was doing, but was too tired to bend over to check his leg. A kind of cool sleepiness was falling over her: she wondered if this was what it felt like in a cryogenic pod, in those last moments of waking before oblivion crept over you like a funeral shroud. If she let sleep—or hypothermia—take her, what would become of them? Would she meet her end as a frozen, mummified corpse, to be discarded when the mutineers found their new planet—or destroyed when ISF blew the whole ship to pieces?
And what about the androids? Where were they? Would they come to find their home-bringer, light-giver, Word made flesh—or whatever they thought she was? Or had they all been destroyed?
Yawning, she said sleepily, “My last question is how I could have seen Taban alive in the cafeteria, but I suppose I’ve answered my own question. If it’s true that you can see yourself in the Fold, can chase after not a reflection of yourself, but you—then I suppose it’s possible you can see . . . I don’t know, time folded together, too. An echo of time. A ripple of the past or future. It would make sense, if our ship is where Taban’s was. Or . . . maybe I was just seeing an image of him that was in someone else’s mind at that moment. Their consciousness.”
Sagara didn’t answer her. His shape was dark and distant, all the way on the far side of the freezer, and her ankles were now too cold to feel his legs—but somehow she felt his presence crouched warmly against hers. After a moment he said: “I think . . .” He hesitated. “I think I once saw someone, too.”
Park sat up a little. “You did?”
“I think,” Sagara said again. His voice sounded far away, muffled. “A thin man, with dark hair and blue eyes. For a moment I also thought he was a stranger—but then I decided he must have been an android. He was one. But an android I’d never seen before.”
Park’s eyes were fluttering; it was a struggle to keep her head up. “Maybe you just didn’t recognize one of our own.”
She felt the invisible weight of his eyes. “No,” Sagara said softly. “He was different. I knew he was.”
“How?”
Sagara didn’t answer. Park slurred, “You never told me about it. And you accused me of hiding things.”
The security officer made a sound that might have been a chuckle. “I suppose that’s what happens in times like this,” he said. “You’re not insane if you can think to hide your insanity.”
“We’re not insane,” Park said.
Sagara moved his leg away from hers; now he was retreating back into the shadows, the warmth of his presence withdrawing, fleeing from her into the arctic cold. “We’ll see,” was all he said.
Then he said nothing more, and after a long time Park leaned her head back against the wall and finally slept.