My breath is a piston that drowns out the Gelet’s buried engines, and then I let out a wail, which gets louder until it scathes my throat.
I can’t stop screaming, after holding it in so long. I scream into my helmet, so deep inside darkness that I have no sense of direction or escape route. I scream myself hoarse, remembering how I put my heart and sinews and guts into saving Bianca from herself, and only became her fool. Mouth says something that I can’t hear. My knees fail.
On my knees, a ragged sound tearing from deep inside me, I can’t bear this cold.
One of the Gelet pulls me upright, and gently peels the neckpiece off my survival suit. I feel the warm, wet feelers on my skin, and I get a series of impressions—
—a harpoon pierces my side, my own blood slick against my tentacles, fleeing for my life. I limp back home, with the last of my strength, and then I hang in a healing cocoon for an endless, itchy spell. My muscles cramp, and I think about the dream we all crafted among us, here in the city: bringing home our friend from the dusk, leading her down here with us. Finally living together, sharing all our stories with her, maybe even learning her stories, too. We shaped that vision together, and when I leave the husk of my convalescence, all my other friends keep reminding me of the dream we all had. Do I still believe, or did the spear poison my faith as it went into me? I’m not sure. The moment when I laid out that idea before our friend from the dusk, like a whole root system of possibility, is clouded by pain now. I struggle to hold on to that dream, but my memory itself feels wounded, deep in my core between my stomachs, maybe past healing. And then our friend from the dusk is back, and she brings other humans who want to communicate, and I can sense her hope, her courage, like a hot geyser from the deepest permafrost … and it’s okay. Even when another harpoon cuts through the snowy wind, even when I lose more blood, lose my balance, chip away part of my carapace as a tiny boot comes down, I remember the pure hope that I sensed, bursting out of her. Our friend from the dusk, she carried the other humans to us on the back of that hope. One Gelet falls dead, alongside the three dead humans, but I know her now, our human friend. When I get back to the city, I tell the others that I believe once more—
—Still on my knees, my throat still hot, I gaze up at this Gelet. I notice the hole in her carapace, and I gaze up at her round, sharp-toothed mouth, and the forest of tendrils undulating inside her pincer. Maybe I haven’t ruined everything after all. Her story settles into me, and I know I’m in the right place. I just hope Bianca is too.
I take a breath, replace my neck strap, and walk forward.
* * *
More and more Gelet cluster around us, and the air gets warmer, and that’s how I know we’ve reached the city. Even with the night vision, I only glimpse pieces of the architecture here and there. In the glow from a furnace, I see a chamber stretching over my head, dotted with openings that Gelet climb through, and filled with alien machinery: sharp teeth, curved fulcrums, and blobs of living matter. I feel my way along the curved walls, with Gelet guiding me.
At last we reach a room, shaped like the inside of a bottle, where the light blinds me. I risk taking off my helmet, and I see some writing, in No?lang. Next to me, Mouth hesitates, then removes her helmet too. We’re looking at a computer, Khartoum-built like all the computers on the Mothership, and it still works. The Gelet have reverse-engineered its solar cells to use power from the hot springs. The holographic display shivers, but stays readable.
“The Gelet are talking to the Mothership,” Mouth says. “But that’s … I mean, nobody talks to the Mothership, not for twenty generations. We don’t even have the protocols anymore.”
“Poor Pedro and Susana,” I say. “And Reynold. They would have died of happiness if they could see this.”
I try to get the computer to give me a real-time view of Xiosphant, so I can zoom in enough to see if Bianca somehow arrived safely. I could at least try to locate the Command Vehicle. The interface is pretty easy to understand. But whatever I do, I only see Xiosphant at some point in the past. Maybe the Mothership is flying over somewhere else now.
Instead, I find a schematic that says something in ancient script like, “Climate Projections: Original and Revised.” The original climate projection, from when we arrived here, looks like a steady line, with some increase in temperature due to human industry but a corresponding increase in stabilizing factors. The revised version looks like a tantrum: the lines start out straight, then jerk up and down.
“Well, shit,” Mouth said. “Even I can tell that’s not good.”
“There’s going to be more storms, and more disruptions in the water table for both cities. And there’s a seventeen percent chance of … I can’t read this.” I squint and try to remember my No?lang class. “Seventeen percent chance of catastrophic atmosphere loss.”
“As in, what? Like, we can’t breathe anymore?”
I toss my head.
The Gelet have reorganized the file systems, as if they want us to see certain things. The bottom of the display has a row of numbers: “07/20/3207 17:49.” I poke at random, and a holographic video appears in the middle of the jumble. A woman wearing some kind of uniform, with features somewhat like Bianca’s, looks right at us, and speaks in No?lang.
“My name is Olivia. I don’t know if anybody will ever see this. I’ve been inside this alien city for twenty-nine Earth rotations, according to this computer. When we detected this place with our orbital scans, we couldn’t have known how deep it goes, and most of the teams concluded it was either a natural ice formation or some sort of burrow system. I remember Richardson and Mbatha suggested it could be a built structure, but everyone else regarded this as a fringe theory at best, based on flimsy data. If only the rest of the science teams could see the interior structures and the complexity of these systems. These creatures are so much more advanced than we could have guessed, and they make me want to redefine all my ideas of technological and societal development.”
She looks in all directions, as if she’s scared that she’ll be caught. “These natives seem to regard geoengineering and bioengineering as two branches of the same discipline. They’ve rebuilt both themselves and their environment to cope with this planet’s unique challenges. Back on Earth, people theorized that a tidally locked planet would need some kind of ‘air-conditioning’ system, circulating hot air from the near side to the far side, to avoid weather instability and atmospheric disruption. And these creatures seem to have created something even better, using networked chains of flora to sequester and redistribute heat energy. They cultivate them inside dormant volcanoes and lava vents. It’s incredible.”
I’m not sure how much Mouth understands, but the word “flora,” combined with “volcanoes,” makes her stare.
“They use a form of touch telepathy, via this bodily secretion that’s somewhere between a neurotransmitter and a pheromone,” Olivia says. “They touch you, and you can share their memories, and the memories they’ve taken from others. There appears to be an olfactory component. Except that I can’t always tell if they’re showing me the past or their ideas for the future.”
She shudders without any warning, weeping into her sleeve. “They want to … they want to make me the same as them. They have a surgery, or some kind of procedure, that will change me, so I can communicate the way they do. They’ve shown me what they’re planning, and I won’t let them. I still have the medi-kit, and I can take all my palliatives at once. I won’t let go of my humanity. If anybody ever finds this video, please know, these creatures are not our friends. They want to remake us, the same way they’ve changed their environment and themselves. If you see this, fight them, fight them with your last—”
The video cuts out. I’m left staring at an empty space, feeling sorrow for a woman who died a long time ago, one way or another.
Then the meaning of her words starts to sink in, and I feel so light my whole body might be made out of billowing silk. Oh, of course. I want to laugh, and then I do laugh, and I keep laughing, harder and more raucous, until I realize Mouth is staring.
I start to explain what Olivia said, but Mouth understood most of it. Her nomads used No?lang for everything sacred.
“Why would they let us watch that?” Mouth says.
“Because they wanted to make sure we understood what they plan to do with us: give us their gift of communication.”