Planetfall (21 page)

She gives a concerned glance. “Ping me if you need me,” she whispers back, not tearing her attention away from Marco fully. She knows my chip will automatically inform her if there's something seriously wrong.

I push my way past the people between me and the gates, grateful that I'm so close to the back. No one cares about what I'm doing; they're all fixated on Marco and the drug-induced crap he's spouting like a transcendental experience.

My heart is pounding like there are dogs hunting me and by the time I'm through the gates and around the edge of the city I feel like I'm about to have a full-blown panic attack. I haven't had one for years.

Initially I head toward the colony, falling back on old techniques my father taught me when I suffered from them as a teenager. I focus on my breath and stop trying to work out why
I feel so panicky. All that matters is getting a steady inward-and-outward rhythm.

Soon they'll all come out and go to the Dome. There will be food and drink and laughter and all the things I can't face right now. I change direction and head for the southern gate. Maybe I'll find some peace between the grass and the sky.

ONCE I'M OUT
of the colony and putting distance between myself and God's city behind me with every step, my heart steadies itself and it's easier to breathe again. I listen to the distant animal calls, the gentle wash of sound from the breeze through the grasses, and I can't understand why I felt so panicked. It's over now. It's done. The spectacle has given everyone the excuse to come together, to focus on the positive aspects of the past year and the perfect excuse to drink and eat far too much. All the worry about whether Carmen would derail it, all the concern over getting the props in place and whether the leading man would speak the right lines—all that is over now. Mack will be his usual self once more and won't demand anything of me over and above my usual duties.

I'm free to solve the puzzle of the city now. If people remark on my absence, Kay will explain. They saw the sling; they'll be primed for it.

I walk a little farther until I can't hear anything from the
colony and then make a little patch to sit on by walking in a circle, easing the stalks flat with the toe of my boot. I'm like a slow, ungainly cat making a temporary place to sun myself. When there's a small circle of flattened grass, I plunge myself into a green well, lidded with nothing but the blue sky. It hasn't rained for over a week now, and it's not forecast for another three days.

Once I'm relatively comfortable, I pull the CrawlerCam data that's been processed through the visengineering software. An electric thrill shoots through my chest when I see it's already modeled fifty objects.

Looking through them one by one makes me feel like an archaeologist. There are tools and things clearly made for some function or other, made mysterious to me by the distance of time and culture. All the items listed as missing from our party's original manifest are there in remarkably good condition apart from a bent prong on one of the probes. I spot something with a similar piece of hinged metal to the artifact I found and put them together, forming something like a visor with a couple of attachments I can't explain. I find three lenses, their width matching the two roughened sections of the piece I have at home, the third matching a section of one of the attachments, perhaps for enhanced magnification.

After a couple of hours working through the individual models, I'm beginning to see a possible theme. I free my arm from the sling, too excited to be held back by working one-handed any longer. I open a new design project and import some of the objects in, piecing them into a whole until I can see a flight suit taking shape. The wing piece I saw before is now part of a larger whole with a mirror of it forming what seems to be a retractable pair that can be housed in something akin to a backpack.

The pilot would have been about five feet tall with longer fingers than that of the average human and an extra knuckle
in each one, by the look of the gloves. There's nothing left of them, not even a skeleton, which makes me shiver.

I try to imagine that person from another world gliding down, probably from a ship in close orbit, landing and walking into God's city still wearing the very craft used to make Planetfall. There are only enough pieces for one suit. He or she came alone. Perhaps the pilot was also a Pathfinder, having had the same encounter with a mysterious plant and the same compulsion to eat it.

Suh said the pheromones from the plant—and the seed itself—would work only on humans. The city responds to human touch—at least on the outside; I've never dared touch anything in there without a glove. The flight suit was designed for a humanoid shape. I lie back on the stalks, unable to keep sitting now that my mind is so filled with the ramifications of this find. Could it be that humanity wasn't just an evolutionary quirk of Earth alone? Could it be that our existence was somehow engineered and the same process carried out across multiple solar systems in the galaxy? Could it be that God scattered our building blocks, then called us back when we were ready?

I'm getting ahead of myself—these are just conclusions I've leaped to in the moment, hardly backed up by rigorous testing and data. But I can't help but be snared in the jaws of the idea that we're one of many seedlings evolved in isolation but part of a larger project. I'm sweating. I'm too small and feeble to hold these ideas and questions inside without feeling strained at the seams. I start to laugh; then I want to weep; then I'm covering my eyes, unable to even look up at the clouds as all I believed about us as a species unravels within me.

Then I wish I didn't know about the room and the suit inside it. I wish I never came here. I should have stayed on Earth and let Suh go. How much easier to regret not leaving than being
here now—knowing so much and yet so little—so very far from home. I could have saved those lives, been the person my father hoped I would be, been there for him as he became frail and protected him from a world leaving him and his values behind. I could have been there for my mother too, when her string of lovers finally came to an end and she was facing death alone.

Where Dad had wept and doused me in bitter regrets and drowning loss, Mum listened and nodded when I explained I was leaving on Atlas when it was ready. And for the first time there was no sense of exasperation or dismissive assumptions that what I was talking about was so unfathomable it wasn't even worthy of discussion. She just nodded as I rattled off the reasons that formed my preemptive defense.

She'd wept in front of her friend when I made my announcement. He hadn't wanted to be there, but she had insisted, thinking I was about to tell her I'd been nominated for some sort of award or that I was off to another country after being headhunted by some prestigious gov-corps. She could think that because she didn't understand I'd never work for something like that.

So I had to tell her I was leaving on Atlas in front of a stranger and that meant she had to put on the show of being distraught until she'd pushed him out the door. She made a passing attempt to make it look authentic by dabbing at her eyes as she came back to the living room, and I didn't call her out on it. Perhaps part of me wanted to believe the tears. Perhaps the rest of me thought I should let her do what she felt she needed to in order to maintain her facade. I don't remember as clearly as I do the sight of the old plane trees in the London square her flat overlooked. It was fenced off from people who couldn't afford to touch the peeling bark on the trees. Those were reserved for dogs owned by the wealthy to piss against three times a day when walked by the au pair.

She sat in her usual way in the antique chair, recently upholstered in the latest fashionable fabric, perched in a position that made her figure look perfect. She had been arranging herself to look her best for so long she didn't realize she did it anymore.

She didn't say a word until my unnecessary defense fizzled out. I should have known I wouldn't get the same response from her as from my father, but telling him had been so traumatic I'd readied myself anyway.

For a moment, I thought she just didn't care. Then I realized that she understood why I had to go. I didn't even have to justify it.

We looked at each other for what seemed like a long time. I met her gaze and she met mine without even a flicker of performance or social agenda. I fancied I could see someone real, looking out of her eyes like a lone woman looking out from a house on a hill.

“When do you go?”

“In about eighteen months, if everything goes according to schedule. I almost didn't tell you until just before I went, but one of the psychs on the project, Dr. Lincoln, said we should tell people when we're certain. To give us time to—”

“I'm glad you told me. I understand. It would kill you to be left behind, always wanting to know what they'll find. You wouldn't be living anymore, wishing yourself so far away.”

I cried then. I cried like Dad did when I was in his house. I had known myself so much better by virtue of her being such a different creature from me. But the one time it meant the most, she understood.

She was right. I had to come. Just like I had to know what that bit of metal was and what was in that room, and what it could mean.

Who do I talk to now about the objects in God's city? Do
I want to inflict this on anyone else? Everyone here has a right to know about what I've found, but they could unravel too. Our little colony, huddled in the shadow of God's city, built on lies and hopes, could be shattered.

Or would it? Would it simply put the city into perspective? Would it make us study it more and keep one eye on the sky for the arrival of another Pathfinder? Would it help bring Suh down from her unique pedestal? Perhaps it would do some good.

My hand is pressing too hard on my eyes and bursts of ghostly light splash across my private darkness. I'm thrown back to a night as a child when I learned that I could still try to look even with my eyes closed. The thought plunged me into a panic when it felt like I could never rest again; my eyes didn't feel closed even when they were shut tight. I just couldn't help trying to pierce my own darkness.

Now I open them and watch a lone cloud, fearing I'll never rest again, but for a different reason. I'll never know who wore that suit. I could recover the pieces and see if any genetic material has been preserved, but even if I build a model of that person, I'll never know what they loved or feared or hoped for. Perhaps the pilot didn't die and then rot away, instead taking off the suit and abandoning it in one of the tunnels. Maybe he or she reached the top room too. Maybe . . .

An urgent message arrives from Mack and I'm tossed back into the fear that something terrible has come about because of that fake seed. I watch the icon flash insistently, unable to summon the courage to open it. I know it has something to do with Sung-Soo. Something to do with the way he looked as Marco spoke. My body knows it; it knew it back then and drove me out of the city.

Another icon begins to flash; over ten messages have arrived in the last minute. Then another. My stream is full of mentions
of my name, but I don't dare open it and read what they're saying. I shut the notifications off, sit up and tuck my arm back into its sling as my heart feels like a ram trying to butt its way out of the cage formed by my ribs. I'm paralyzed by fear of what is happening back there. I imagine a fierce crowd baying for blood, having learned the seed is false and that I was the one who planted it.

But if they know that, they have to know about Mack.

Perhaps his urgent message is a call for help. A tight croak is squeezed through my throat as I realize I have to open it. He may need me.

I can feel my pulse in my throat as I blink twice at the icon and the text floats across my vision. I have to read it twice to get the meaning through the thick fog of anxiety.

Ren, you need to watch this. Sung-Soo is saying things about you and I don't know what to believe.

There's a share link below and my chest burns as I'm unable to take another breath. My cheeks are burning and my lips tingling. I can't handle this. I close the message box and curl into a ball, letting myself tip onto my side, holding my slinged arm tight against myself with the other.

It has to be about my house. He threatened me and now he's making good on his promise and I want to run. An urgent message from Kay arrives and my fear sucks in shame and guilt with it, like a black hole within my chest, pulling everything into itself. The fear and guilt are compressed as more images of people outside my house burst into my imagination, making a dense ball between my lungs, growing every second.

The MyPhys software pops up. “Your health care provider
is requesting access to your physical well-being files. Would you like to give permission?”

I can't speak. I tuck my head down until my chin is pressing against my chest.

“Your health care provider will access your current well-being files in ten seconds if you do not respond.”

I can't breathe. My lungs are turning to stone inside me, my throat to iron, my skin to wet paper. I want to dissolve into the earth below me, to collapse into a pile of component parts, all the little pieces of my mosaic no longer held together.

The voice counts down. I'm unable to stop it. When it reaches zero a dialog box pops up, showing the things Kay is looking up right now. My heart rate, my blood pressure, my oxygen saturation, and then lines and lines of other data fly up the screen. I recognize neurotransmitters and find my voice. “Stop it,” I yell. “MyPhys, stop access!”

The connection is broken and I curse myself for not acting sooner.

Another warning icon, just for a second it seems, and then I can hear Kay. It's her privilege, as my doctor and as one of the colony's emergency health care providers, to be able to speak to me via the chip without any need for permission to be established.

“Ren, you're having a panic attack. I want you to listen to my voice. You're going to be okay.”

She doesn't know anything.

“This will pass. All you need to do is focus on something nearby. You're out in the grasses—find a cloud to watch; can you do that for me? I want you to look at the cloud and breathe in to the beat of three and then out again.”

Even though I don't want to, even though I can't believe it
will do any good, I look up and find a cloud that's too rounded and generic to be imagined into the shape of anything else. I let her talk me down and my breathing eases.

Right up until another message arrives from Mack, tagged “urgent” again.

“I'm going to come out to you,” Kay says.

“No.”

“I want to help you back and make sure you're okay. You can come to mine if you don't want to go to the med center.”

“No. I'll be okay.”

“Has Mack pinged you? Is that what set this off?”

Her question confuses me briefly. She may have been with Mack and Sung-Soo. She may know too!