Edge of Dark (20 page)

“It takes at least twenty-five people to keep this ship going. I'll see that you leave with thirty.”

“I've managed ranger troops of about that many,” he said.

She looked relieved. “I'll send some of my best crew.”

He covered his dismay by taking a bite of food. He'd expected this to be a smaller trip, a smaller spaceship, a crew of four to six. He didn't want Satyana to figure out how uncomfortable all of this opulence made him, how it stripped his sense of knowing what to do at any minute and how to act. The uncertainty unbalanced him; he had been confident in his job and his life for a very long time. “So what do you know about the Next? What should I plan for?”

“They're different. Not just from us, but one from another. As complex as human society. People forget that, lump them all together as robots. The ones I met were incredible—almost beautiful. And scary.”

He almost dropped his fork. “You've been past the Ring?”

“Before I established myself on the Deep. So, more than a hundred and fifty years ago. Far enough back my memories are fuzzy. But I do know they're offended when we call them pirates. They're like victims who have gotten over it and made themselves bigger and better.”

He frowned. “Victims?”

“We pushed them away from the sun. I suspect our ancestors thought they'd die off out there. But they didn't. Yes, they raid us. But do you blame them?”

“Yes.” He realized it was a reflexive answer, something he had learned but didn't know. “Well, maybe not. All my life, I've been taught to be afraid of them.”

She nodded, once more looking a little bit like he had passed a test.

“Why were you there?” he asked her.

“Making money. Smuggling. Not my own stuff—I was never a smuggler. I was a poor captain who didn't always pay close attention to the contents of her cargo hold.”

“Fine line, that,” he said.

She smiled. “I was young and very, very stupid. I liked risks. Someone paid me to take cargo out to the Edge and bring back cargo from there. I never saw what was in either shipment, just did what I was told. That happens, you know. They get part of what they need because our own black market feeds them.”

“Did you meet any?”

“Some. There are layers to the Edge. But I came away thinking they mostly just want to survive like everyone else.”

He thought for a moment before he answered. “So how do you explain the High Sweet Home?”

The two white-clad women came in, took their plates, refilled their water glasses and brought out fresh cookies that smelled of spices and oats. Satyana waited until the door had closed behind them. “The current theory is that they were showing their power, flexing muscle.”

He took a cookie, still warm from the oven. “But that's not what you think?”

She pursed her lips. “That's part of it. But they didn't just destroy the station. They
took
it. They obliterated everything military, but not the High Sweet Home herself, not the habitats and gardens and the like. Maybe they're examining our technology a little closer before they come in.”

He ate the cookie in two bites. “They're coming in?”

“We always knew they'd want to be closer to the sun someday.”

A cold settled on him, the cold of all the stories he'd been told as a child. “Do you know if they have any intentions regarding Lym?”

“Just rumors. Hopefully we'll learn more when we get to the Deep.”

“What rumors?”

She shook her head. A refusal. “Nothing credible.”

He was careful not to let his anger show. “Will they talk to us?”

She shrugged. “I don't know. But if you do meet them, pay very close attention. They don't think like we do at all. They're faster, they think faster. If they care about anything at all, they care about different things than we do.” She paused and leaned in toward him. “I would be very surprised if they have the kind of compassion we need them to have if we're going to survive our own stupidity. I suspect they don't care about us at all.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHRYSTAL

Chrystal could stand up. So she did. Sometimes for hours. She lived in a white box of a room, with a single blue wall. The wall had a mural of stars and nebulae, a thing so precise and fine that she could make out deep star fields and galaxies, even in a square inch. There had been a medical bed with straps, but now there was a single bed with a white bedspread and a blue pillow.

She had learned to do more than stand and sleep. She could raise her arms and lift her knees and turn her head. She could carry on complex conversations with Jhailing and Devi—the two distinct members of the Edge community she had learned to identify.

Music played.

Notes seemed to hang separated in the air in a beautiful dance. She could speed up or slow down her perception of them. She was certain she could hold any drumbeat.

Colors were brighter. Clearer. Best of all, darks had become penetrable. Nothing looked black any more. Not true black.

In no other way was she pleased to be in a robotic body. In fact, every time she marveled at some surprise discovery about her enhanced senses, she felt guilty. She should hate everything. She had been kidnapped and killed and her future had been stolen from her. She had been kept separate from her family. She hadn't felt their kisses or caresses or lovemaking in so long that her specific memories of them were fading. She would never hear their hearts beat.

Something ineffable had been stolen.

Jhailing spoke inside her head. That was the only way she could think of it.
Let's go out.

A slight interest touched her.
I'm ready
.

It will test your walking
. She had been walking inside of the small square room. But this time Jhailing directed her through the door—unlocked for the very first time of the many times that she had tried the knob. She walked a long time. She took turns as they were given her, practiced moving.

They passed through a busy part of whatever they lived on. It seemed more like a ship than a station, although she didn't quite know why she had decided that. They passed robots of all types and sizes.

She worked so hard that Jhailing called for a break at one point.
You still have to think your steps
, it said.
Rest. Your new mind needs time to synthesize, to make sense of all of the things it is learning to do with your new body
.

She complied, sitting down on the floor in the middle of the corridor.

I thought maybe you would stop at the next galley or common area
.

This is good enough
, she said. After all, she didn't eat any more.

To her surprise, Jhailing didn't protest.

She lay her head back against the wall and closed her eyes, briefly floating away from the myriad connections to her robotic body, letting all parts of her brain relax.

She had the sense that a long time passed, that maybe she'd been turned off and left and her brain had stopped thinking as her body stopped moving.

When they started again it was easier to walk and think about something else.
How much further?
she asked.

Not far
.

At one point, Jhailing said,
Turn right
, and Chrystal did.

Open the next door on your right
.

She did.

Go down the corridor and go through the last door on the left
.

Maybe she'd just follow orders until she walked herself to death.

She opened the door. Jhailing withdrew with no comment, and she felt the connection between them slip away. Inside, two robots sat at a kitchen table playing cards. Her people.

Jason and Yi.

Their robotic faces looked like themselves and not like themselves. They were naked, like she was. Other than her breasts, they had all been stripped of genitalia. Their skin looked like human skin, their shapes human down to the distribution of muscles, the differences between Yi's thin, gawky arms and Jason's broader biceps captured perfectly.

They stared at her.

She stared back. Her new and better vision helped her spot so many differences between what they looked like now and what she remembered that she wished she could cry.

She stepped toward them and suddenly all three were talking at once.

“We're lucky,” Yi said. “No other family is together. None.”

“What do you mean?” Chrystal asked.

“Over half of the people they tried this on failed. They couldn't make the connections that allowed their brains to communicate with robotic bodies.” Yi seemed to know quite a bit, since he went on. “We've been out a lot, but we've only been awake about three days' worth of real time. It seemed like months to me. What about you?”

She tried to count it up. “Weeks. At least weeks.”

“So maybe the sense of time is different for some of us than others,” Yi mused. “Obviously the same amount of real time has passed. We're all here now.”

She could practically see this engineer-brain working. It seemed so familiar. He was odd and wrong, downright creepy. They all were. But Yi was also Yi, and so a small sliver of her world felt right.

“Where's Katherine?” Jason asked.

“Jhailing told me she'd be here soon,” Yi said.

Chrystal felt a slight surprise. “Jhailing told me Katherine is having some trouble,” she said, “and he didn't say she was coming here.”

Jason spoke. “They didn't tell me anything.” He put a hand out to touch her robotic hand. The first touch between them in this form. The first touch from anybody since she had woken up dead. She turned her hand to grasp his. Her new hand was almost as finely muscled as the old one. His touch didn't feel like she remembered it, but she couldn't say why.

Jason's robotic eyes were almost the right color, except a more uniform split between gray and blue. He sounded tender as he asked her, “How are you?”

“Pissed off. Mournful.”

He nodded. “I think we all are.”

Yi said, “They can probably hear us talk.”

“No kidding,” she said.

Yi went on. “We all got torn apart—and reassembled. How do we know we're ourselves? All of our bodies are gone. Every molecule. We can't go back to them—they've been melted down for water and trace minerals.”

Chrystal had never doubted she had been murdered. That didn't keep Yi's words from bothering her, at least in a vaguely detached way. Intellectual emotion—that's how she thought of it. Deep. Deeper but not as hot as the real thing. She smiled, certain that if she had a mirror there would be no warmth in the smile. “Anybody have any idea how to commit suicide in a robotic body?”

“I told you they must be listening,” Yi said.

“I want them to know how upset I am. This is unfair. It's illegal. It violates the Deeping Rules.”

“Those are your rules,” Yi said. “The Deeping Rules don't even apply to me—I don't live there. These people have their own rules. I don't know about all of them—the Edge is vast. A society as strange as ours, with as many differences. But the ones that have been helping us are very intent on a goal. They feel like project managers.”

“Good analogy,” Chrystal said. “Like they have one goal and they're more focused on that than anything else. Not like us. We'd stop and talk about the latest concert or a great new pair of boots.”

“Right now? Would you?” Jason asked.

“No,” she said. “I'm busy trying to understand what happened to us.”

Jason stared at the blank wall in front of him. “Are we becoming them? Have we become them?”

Jason almost never voiced philosophical thoughts. Maybe after you lost everything that was all that was left. Her hand was still in Jason's hand. She took Yi's as well, and waited until Yi took Jason's other hand. “We aren't them,” she said. “We can never think that. They have a goal for us, and we can't help them reach it.”

Yi shook his perfect, robot head. They had his hair almost right, except that it wasn't tangled. She would be able to feel it if she touched it, but how would she know if it felt like his real hair? “You know what their goal is?”

“If they destroyed one of our stations, it has to be war. They have to be telling us they're coming for us,” she said.

Jason asked, “But why not just kill us? After all, they killed almost everyone else on the station.”

She tried to think about that. “They told me once. Jhailing did. He said it was to become ambassadors.”

“It's more than that,” Yi said. “They took young healthy adults, because no one else could survive the transition. Now they know who we all were, and they've sorted us based on who we know. People with no contacts are going into schools or into simple jobs. We're to help them talk to humans.”

He didn't sound like he was guessing.

“How do you know all this?” she asked.