‘So they’ll just let you in for the asking?’ I said, changing the subject.
‘I won’t be the first.’
I looked down at her to see her grinning mischievously at me. It was a hint of the childhood she’d never had.
‘What do you mean?’
Her expression changed. ‘Are you all right with this now? With what they did to you?’
Another complicated question. I stroked her hair and looked down into her eyes. They were like mirror images of her real eyes. Now she would only ever see me through a machine, they same way I could see her. It had been so long that I couldn’t remember what it was like to see with real eyes.
‘When you first get augmented it’s really cool. All your new capabilities are exhilarating, I guess. You’re stronger, much faster, see and hear further, all that. But a horrible amount of my body is machinery.’ I felt her running her fingers up the scarred skin of my chest. She would feel the hardness of the armour under the skin. ‘You start to feel like part of you is missing, dislocated somehow. It’s like you know something is wrong but you don’t know what. I’ve heard people say that they feel like they’re haunting themselves. It’s the sort of thing that people say just before they go psycho.’ I played the tips of my fingers over the plugs in the back of her neck. ‘I’m just eager to hold on to what I’ve got left, I mean really eager.’ She pulled her hair down over the plugs in the back of her neck.
‘How do you feel?’
‘Really good,’ I answered straight away and then found myself surprised by the answer.
‘Everyone thought you were going to freak out.’
‘I did, didn’t I?’
‘Not as much as we thought you would. Mudge said you’d either try and throw yourself through the membrane -’ fat chance, I didn’t like vacuum ‘- or feed yourself into the toilet creature.’ She shivered as she said this. I don’t think she liked the toilet creature much.
‘Yeah, well, nobody else is an alien.’
‘You said I was.’
‘How many times do I have to apologise for that? Look, I saw what happened to Crom.’ Don’t call it Gregor. ‘And I don’t want to be like Rolleston.’
‘You don’t want to walk through railgun fire?’
I gave that some thought.
‘Depends on the cost.’ I wondered if I did have any extraordinary capabilities. I guess there was no real way to find out until something really bad happened to me. Well either that or I started self-harming.
‘Do you feel human?’ she asked.
I had to laugh at this.
‘What?’
‘The weird thing is, I feel more human than I have in a long time.’
‘So you’re going to accept it and, you know…’
‘What?’
‘Not be a difficult tosser about it?’
I started laughing as she smiled again. We lapsed into silence, enjoying each other’s company. Watching the industrious aliens, trying to ignore the sound of Mudge retching. It was romantic.
‘What are They going to do?’ I asked. The intelligence we had on Crom was sketchy at best, but the Cabal probably still had the ability to manufacture more. They could either destroy or control Them if they wanted.
‘They’re leaving,’ Morag said. She sounded so very sad. Like crying sad. ‘We’re too chaotic, too dangerous, too… too hateful, and duplicitous and greedy and violent.’ Now she sounded angry. ‘Even though we have enough of everything.’
I wondered how she could even imagine that after growing up in Fintry and the Rigs, where everything you needed just to live had to be fought for in one way or another. I held her close to me. Again she was being naive, but I couldn’t fault her logic. We as a race did have enough. I didn’t really have anything I could say to her.
‘They’re going far, far away, all of Them. As far as They can get, and when They see us coming in the future, if we have one, They’ll go further still because we can’t be trusted. It was what I told them to do.’
I wasn’t sure she quite understood the significance of what she had said. Here was an eighteen-year-old girl from what middle-class corporate wage slaves would describe as the dregs of society — though those dregs seemed to get larger and larger every day — advising an entire alien race on its foreign policy.
‘And They’re going to do that?’ I asked.
She nodded. ‘Our loss.’
She was right. This was a race that had gone from inert singing space coral to the technological equivalent of humanity in just a few years after the Cabal had provided the correct stimulus. Had we managed to communicate with Them peacefully the advances we could have made in biotechnology would have been staggering. Also I had heard Them sing.
Morag stood up and took me by the arm, pulling me after her. I stood and allowed myself to be dragged along.
‘Watch this,’ she said. She took me along a short corridor towards another membrane that led deeper into the rock. She pulled me towards it, reached out and pushed her hand through it.
‘Morag!’ But her hand was fine. She stepped through into another area of the asteroid. As she did the springy comfortable moss that I recognised from our side of the membrane started to appear under her bare feet. She pulled me through. There seemed to be a rush of air and it was slightly colder but warming up. The moss was continuing to grow in front of our eyes down the corridor.
Morag pulled me down the corridor into an area that I can only describe as a grotto. It didn’t seem to have the utilitarian but often beautiful look that Them-forms had. This looked like a human take on some kind of fairy-tale alien garden.
‘You made this?’ I asked her.
‘No, They did, but I asked Them to.’
‘Its not what you know,’ I said under my breath. She ignored me. Instead she lay down on the moss and pulled me down on top of her. I covered her mouth with mine.
This felt like a reward. Not Morag giving herself to me but both of us being here, alive. It felt like a reward for everything we’d been through because we’d been trying hard to do the right thing. I don’t know if we had, but intent’s got to count for something.
I just wish that Balor, Buck, Vicar and Gibby had made it and got their reward.
I wondered if I was going to start wanting to go home. Morag took me somewhere else.
‘So you’re really not coming?’
She was sitting up in the bed, the cover wrapped around her while I stood at the window looking out over the rooftops of wherever we were. The heat haze almost made it look pretty. I turned to look at her.
‘Morag, I know it seems like copping out to you but, as insane as the last three months have been, you weren’t there for the previous twelve years. The crawling through mud, the getting injured, starving, no sleep, bad drugs, fear all the time and seeing people you like die so often you stopped bothering to get to know them. I’ve had enough, and despite what you may think I have no stomach for killing humans.’
‘But it’s all right to kill Them?’ There was no judgement there, just a question.
‘It’s a lot easier, and They were mostly trying to kill me at the time. Look, I don’t know if I’m me or the alien…’ She started to interrupt me. ‘No, wait. But I should be dead, lucky breaks in combat aside.’ Though, thinking about it, none of them seemed lucky; they felt like they’d been won through blood and pain. ‘The radiation poisoning should have killed me. I’ve got a second chance in hopefully a changed world. I think it would be stupid and wasteful to just throw that away.’
She regarded me carefully for a while. I couldn’t work out the expression on her face. Then she smiled. ‘I think you are the alien.’
This confused me. ‘I thought-’
‘It sounds like you’re starting to care about yourself.’