“Why can’t they just—talk to us? Say hello now and again? Just once, even?”
“I dunno. You ever hop over to Madagascar before we shipped out, look up any tree shrews, thank them for the helping hand?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing. Just—” I shrugged. “I think they’ve got other priorities by now.”
“It should be over. They were supposed to call us back millions of years ago. No”—she held up a shaky hand—“we were not supposed to go on forever. How many times have we tunneled through this fucking ring already?” She threw an arm wide: Chimp, misreading the gesture, sprinkled the local starfield across the backs of our brains. “We could be the only ones left. And we still could’ve gated the whole disk ourselves by now.”
I tried for a chuckle. “It’s a big galaxy. We’ll have to go a few more circuits before there’s much chance of that.”
“And we will. You can count on it. Until the drive evaporates and the Chimp runs out of juice and the last of us rots away in the crypt like a piece of moldy fruit.” She glanced back at the tac tank, though its vistas floated in our heads as well. “We’ve done the job, Sunday. We’re way past mission expiration. Eri was never supposed to last this long. We weren’t.” She took a breath, let it out. “Surely we’ve done enough.”
“Are you talking about killing yourself?” Because I honestly didn’t know.
“No.” She shook her head. “No, of course not.”
“Then what do you want? I mean, here we are; where else can we be?”
“Maybe Madagascar?” She smiled then, absurdly. “Maybe they left us a spot. Next to the tree shrews.”
“I’m sure they did. Judging by that last one we saw.”
“Oh Jesus, Sun.” Her face collapsed in on itself. “I just want to go home.”
I gave physical contact another shot. “Lian—this is—”
“Is it really.” But at least she didn’t shake me off this time.
“There’s nowhere else. Earth, if it even still exists—it’s not ours any more. We’re—”
“Tree shrews,” she whispered.
“Yeah. Kind of.”
“Well then, maybe there’s still a warm wet forest somewhere for us to hole up in.”
“That’s you. Ever the fucking optimist.” And when she didn’t respond: “Build’s over, Lian. Time to stand down.
“I promise: Things’ll look brighter in a couple thousand years.”
Park and Viktor, jaded by builds beyond number, had sat out the boot in favor of a little cubby time. We reconvened afterward in a cerulean sky, to unwind before heading back to the crypts.
Three of us did, anyway. Lian, as usual, preferred her own setting: a sun-dappled glade in an old-growth forest generated from some long-dead South American archive. The system was smart enough to reconcile incompatible realities, strategically placed each of us in the other’s scenario without any awkward overlaps. So we sat there—sprawled on pseudopods in the stratosphere or arrayed around some grassy forest floor—sipping drugs and toasting another successful build. Park and Viktor—still gripped by the post-coital fuzzies—lay with their legs draped over each other, Park absently finger-painting onto his scroll. Lian sat cross-legged on her own ’pod (in this world, anyway; for all I knew she was squatting on a lily pad in her own).
Kallie was nowhere to be seen: “Turned in early,” Viktor said when I asked.
I tipped my glass at Park’s scroll. “New piece?”
“Clockwork in D Minor.”
“It’s pretty good,” Viktor said.
“It’s crap,” Park grunted. “But it’s getting there.”
“It is not crap.” Viktor glanced over at Lian. “Lian, you’ve heard…”
She just sat there, folded into herself, staring at the flagstones.
“Li?”
“We, um, had a bit of a moment,” I explained. “After the boot.” I squirted footage of the gremlin.
Park looked up. “Huh.”
“Are those jaws?” Viktor wondered.
“Maybe some kind of waldo,” I suggested.
Viktor tapped his thumb and fingers together, claw-like. “Maybe that’s just how we say Hello these days.” And after a moment: “I don’t suppose it actually did say anything…?”
“Not on any wavelength we could hear.”
“Posthuman mating ritual,” Park suggested.
“No dumber than anything else I’ve heard.” I shrugged. “If they were trying to kick our asses you’d think they’d have figured out particle beams or missiles by now. Make more sense than running after us with their mouths hanging open.”
For Lian, of course. But still she said nothing, her eyes fixed on the ground. Or maybe some nightmare she could see beneath it.
Suddenly no one else was saying anything, either.
Half-memory clicked, solidified. “You know what that really looks like? That tarantula whatsisname snuck on board.”
Blank looks.
“The front end, I mean. With the, the—fangs. And those little globule things look like eyes.”
“There’s a tarantula on board?” Park asked, after just long enough to have pinged the archive for a definition of tarantula.
“Not a regular one. Engineered. Takes it into his coffin with him between shifts. Says it’ll live a good two hundred active years if no one steps on it.”
Viktor: “Who says?”
“The guy. Tarantula Boy.” I looked around the patio. “Nobody?”
“Different tribe?” Viktor suggested. Chimp did that sometimes, dropped a member from one tribe into rotation with another as a hedge against any disaster that might decimate a social group. Easier to integrate into a group you already know, or something.
I raised my eyes to the heavens. “Chimp? You know who I’m talking about?”
“No one named Tarantula Boy was assigned to Eriophora,” Chimp reported.
“That’s not his name, that’s just what he was.”
“Can you describe him?”
“Dark hair? Average height? Whitish?” I strained for details. “Really nice guy?”
Viktor rolled his eyes.
“He kept a tarantula on his shoulder! That doesn’t narrow the field a bit?”
“Sorry,” Chimp said. “I’m not getting any hits.”
“It would have been contraband,” Viktor pointed out. “He’d’ve cranked his personal privacy settings at the very least.”
He had a point. Eri’s biosphere was fine-tuned for ecological balance and perpetual motion. Mission Control, clinically obsessive, would have taken a very dim view of anything it considered even remotely invasive.
Lian stood, flickered.
“Li? Turning in?”
She shook her head. “Think I might just—go for a walk, first. Take in something real for a change.”
“Caves and tunnels,” Viktor remarked. “You’re welcome to ’em.”
“Who knows.” She managed a smile. “Maybe I’ll find Easter Island.”
“Good luck with that.”
She vanished.
“Another nomad,” Park said.
“Another?”
“You do realize she’s following in your footsteps.” Which I hadn’t. Although I did tend to wander the corridors after a build, shoot the shit with Chimp before bedding down.
“Anyone notice anything off about her?” I asked.
Viktor stretched, yawned. “Like?”
I wondered how I’d feel if someone spread news of my private breakdown all over the tribe, and opted for discretion. “She didn’t seem kind of—subdued?”