Heads. Part 11

The clocks silently counted their numbers. William walked down the bridge and made a final adjustment in the right hand pump with a small hex wrench. 'Cross your fingers,' he said.

'Is this it?' Rho asked.

'In twenty seconds I'll tune the pumps to the cells, then turn off the magnetic fields ...'

'Good luck,' Rho said. He turned away from her, turned back and extended his arms, folding her into them, hugging her tightly. His face shone with enthusiasm; he seemed gleeful, childlike.

I clenched my teeth when he tuned the pumps. The sensation was trebled; my long bones seemed to become flutes piping a shrill, unmelodic quantum tune. Rho closed her eyes and groaned. 'That's atrocious,' she said. 'Makes me want to c.r.a.p my pants.'

'It's sweet music,' William said, shaking his head as if to rid himself of a fly. 'Here goes.' He beat the seconds with his upheld finger. 'Field ... off.' A tiny green light flashed in the air over the main lab console, the QL's signal.

'Unknown phase reversal. Lambda reversal,' the QL announced.

'G.o.d d.a.m.n it all to h.e.l.l!' William shrieked, stamping his foot.

Simultaneously with his shout, there came the sound of four additional footstamps above the cavern overhead, precisely as if gigantic upstairs neighbours had jumped on a resonant floor. William held his left foot in the air, astonished by what seemed to be echoes of his anger. His expression had cycled beyond frustration, into something like expectant glee: Yes, by G.o.d, what next?

Rho's personal slate called for her attention in a thin voice. My own slate chimed; William was not wearing his.

'There is an emergency situation,' our slates announced simultaneously. 'Emergency power reserves are in effect.' The lights dimmed and alarms went off throughout the lab. 'There have been explosions in the generators supplying power to this station.'

Rho looked at me with eyes wide, lips drawn into a line.

The mechanical slate voices announced calmly, in unison, 'There has been apparent damage to components above the Ice Pit void, including heat radiators.' This information came from auto sentries around the station. Every slate in the station - and emergency speaker systems throughout the warrens and alleys - would be repeating the same information.

A human voice interrupted them, someone I did not recognize, perhaps the station watch attendant. Somebody was always a.s.signed to observe the sentries, a human behind the machines. 'William, are you all right? Anybody else in there with you?'

'Mickey and I are in here with William. We're fine,' Rhosalind said.

'A shuttle has dropped bombs into the trenches. They've taken out your radiators, William, and all of our generators are damaged. Your pit is drawing a lot more power than normal I was worried perhaps-'

'It shouldn't be,' William said.

'William says it shouldn't be drawing more power,' Rho informed the anonymous watch attendant.

'But it is,' William continued, turning to look at his instruments.

'Phase down lambda reversal in all cells,' the QL announced.

'-you folks might be injured,' the voice concluded, overlapping.

'We're fine,' I said.

'You'd better get out of there. No way of knowing how much damage the void has sustained, whether-' 'Let's go,' I said, looking up.

Chunks of rock and dust drifted into the overhead net, making it belly in and out like the upside-down bell of a jellyfish.

'Lambda reversal ending in all cells,' the QL said.

'Wait-' William said.

I stood on the bridge between the Cavity and the disorder pumps. The refrigerators hung motionless in their intricate suspensions. Rho stood in the door to the lab. William stood beside the Cavity.

'Zero attained,' the QL announced.

Rho glanced at me, and I started to say something, but my throat caught. The lights dimmed all around.

Distantly, our two slates said, Time to evacuate ...

I turned to leave, stepping between the pumps, and that saved my life ... or at any rate made it possible for me to be here, now, in my present condition.

The pump jackets fluoresced green and vanished, revealing spaghetti traceries of wire and cable and egg-shaped parcels. My eyes hurt with the green glare, which seemed to echo in glutinous waves from the walls of the void. I considered the possibility that something had fallen and hit me on the head, making me see things, but I felt no pain, only a sense of being stretched from head to feet. I could not see Rho or William, as I was now facing down the bridge towards the entrance to the Ice Pit. I could not hear them, either. When I tried to swivel round again, parts of my being seemed to separate and rejoin. Instinctively, I stopped moving, waiting for everything to come together again.

It was all I could do to concentrate on one of my hands grasping the bridge railing. The hand shed dark ribbons which curled towards the deck of the bridge. I blinked and felt my eyelids separate and rejoin with each rise and fall. Fear deeper than thought forced me to stop all motion until only my blood and the beat of my heart threatened to sunder me from the inside.

Finally I could stand it no more. I slowly turned in the deepening quiet, hearing only the slide of my shoes on the bridge and the serpent's hiss of my body separating and rejoining as I rotated.

Please do not take my testimony from this point on as having any kind of objective truth. Whatever happened, it affected my senses, if not my mind, in such a way that all objectivity fled.

The Cavity sphere had cracked like an egg. I saw Rho standing between the Cavity and the laboratory, perfectly still, facing slightly to my left as if caught in mid-tum, and she did not look entirely real. The light that reflected from her was not familiar, not completely useful to my eyes, whether because the light had changed or my eyes had changed, I do not know. In addition there came from her - radiated is not the right word, it is deceptive, but perhaps there is no better - a kind of communication of her presence that I had never experienced before, a shedding of skins that lessened her as I watched. I think perhaps it was the information that comprised her body, leaching away through a new kind of s.p.a.ce that had never existed before: s.p.a.ce made crystalline, a superconductor of information. With the shedding of this essence Rho became less substantial, less real. She was dissolving like a piece of sugar in warm water.

I tried to call out her name, but could make no sound. I might have been caught in a vicious gelatin, one that stung me whenever I tried to move. But I could not see myself dissolving, as I saw Rho. I seemed immune at least to that danger.

William stood behind her, becoming more clear as Rho dissipated. He was farther from the Cavity; the effect, whatever it might be, had not worked quite as strongly on him. But he too began to shed this essence, the hidden music that communicates each particle's place and quantum state to other particles, that holds us in one shape and one condition from this moment to the next. I think he was trying to move, to get back inside the laboratory, but he succeeded only in evaporating this essence more rapidly, and he stopped himself, tried instead to reach out for Rho, his face utterly intent, like a child facing down a tiger.

His hand pa.s.sed through her.

I saw something else flee from my sister at that moment. I apologize in advance for describing this; I do not wish to spread any more or less hope, to offer encouragement to mystical interpretations of our existence, for as I said, what I saw might be a function of hallucination, not objective reality.

But I saw two, then three, versions of my sister standing on the bridge, the third like a cloud maintaining its rough shape, and this cloud-shape managed to move towards me, and touch me with an outstretched limb.

Are you all tight, Micko? I heard in my head if not in my ears. Don't move. Please don't move. You seem to be ...

Suddenly I saw myself from her perspective, her experience leaching from her, pa.s.sing into me, like a taste of her dissipating self in the superconducting medium.

The cloud pa.s.sed through me, carried by some unknown inertia of propagation through the bridge rail and out over the void, where it fell like rain. Was I to fade as well? The other images of Rho and William had become mere blurs against the laboratory, which was itself blurring, casting away fluid tendrils.

Oddly, the Cavity containing the copper samples a.s.sumed they were the cause of this, their new condition, announced by the QL, zero Kelvin - seemed more solid and stable than anything else, despite the fine cracks across its surface.

Because of my position between the disorder pumps - and I repeat, this is only my speculation - I seemed to have suffered as much dissolution as I was due, whereas everything else became even less real, less material.

The bridge slumped, stretching beneath my weight as if I stood on a sheet of rubber. I performed some gymnastics and caught the rails with both hands. I could not stop the plunge downwards, however. I was dropping towards the lower structure built to hold the heads. I tried to climb but could not gain purchase with my feet.

My descent continued until the bridge and my legs actually pa.s.sed through the ceiling of the lower chamber. A sharp pain shoved like a spear through both limbs, gouging through my bones into my hips. Looking up for some new handhold, some way of stopping my fall, I saw the laboratory rotating loosely at the centre of the void, shedding vapours. Rho and William I could not see at all.

A sensation of deep cold surrounded me, then faded. The refrigerators fell silently all around me, pa.s.sing through the chamber and casting up slow ripples of some cold blue liquid that had filled the bottom of the pit. The liquid washed over me.

I describe the rest knowing perfectly well it cannot be anything more than delirium.

How is it that instinct can be aware of dangers from a situation no human being could ever have faced before? I felt a terrified loathing of that wash of unknown liquid, abhorrence so strong I crushed the bridge railing between my hands like thin aluminium. Yet I knew that it was not liquefied gas from the refrigerators; I was not afraid of being frozen.

My feet pulled up from the mire and I hooked one on to a stanchion, lifting myself perhaps a metre higher. Still, I was not out of that turbulent pool, and it seeped into me.

I began to fill with sensations, remembrances not my own.

Memories from the dead.

From the heads, four hundred and ten of them, leaking their patterns and memories across a transformed and crystalline s.p.a.cetime, the information slumping into a thick lake not of matter, not of anything anyone had ever experienced before, like an essence or a cold brew.

I carry some of these memories with me still. In most cases, I do not know who or what they might come from, but I see things, hear voices, remember scenes on Earth that I could not possibly know. I have never sought verification, for the same reasons I have never told this story until now - because if I am a chalice of such memories, they have changed me, replacing some parts of my own memories shed in the first few instants of the Quiet, and I do not wish that confirmed.

There is one memory in particular, the most disturbing, I think, that I must record, even though it is not verifiable. It must have come from Kimon Thierry himself. It has a particular flavour that matches the translated voices and visual memories I played for Fiona Task-Felder. I believe that in this terrible pond, the last thoughts of his dying moment permeated me. I loathe this memory: I loathe him.

To suspect, even deeply believe, in the duplicity and the malice and the greed - in the evil - of others is one thing. To know it for a fact is something no human being should ever have to face.

Kimon Thierry's last thoughts were not of the glorious journey awaiting him, the translation to a higher being. He was terrified of retribution. In his last moment before oblivion, he knew he had constructed a lie, knew that he had convinced hundreds of thousands of others of this lie, had limited their individual growth and freedom, and he feared going to the h.e.l.l he had been taught about in Sunday school ...

He feared another level of lie, created by past liars to punish their enemies and justify their own petty existences.

The memory ends abruptly with, I suppose, his death, the end of all recorded memories, all physical transformations. Of that I am left with no impressions whatsoever.

I rose above this hideous pool by climbing up the stanchions, finding the bars stronger the farther from the Cavity they had initially been, stronger but losing their strength and shape rapidly. I scrambled like an insect, mindless with terror, and somehow I climbed the twenty metres to the lip of the doorway in complete silence.

Perhaps three minutes had elapsed since the bombing, if time had any function in the Ice Pit void.

A group of rescuers found me crawling over William's white line. When they tried to go through the door and rescue the others, I told them not to, and because of my condition, they did not need much persuasion.

I had lost the first half-centimetre of skin around my body from the neck down, and all my hair, precisely as if I had been sprayed with supercold gas.

For two months I lay in dreamless suspended sleep in the Yin City Hospital, wrapped in healing liquid, skin cells and muscle cells and bone cells migrating under the guidance of surgical nano machines knitting my surface. I came awake at the end of this time, and fancied myself - with not a hint of fear, as if I had lost all my emotions - still in the Ice Pit, floating in the pool, spreading through the spherical void like water through an eager sponge, dissolving slowly and peacefully in the Quiet.

Thomas came to my room when I had a firmer grasp of who I was and where. He sat by my cradle and smiled like a dead man, eyes gla.s.sy, skin pale.

'I didn't do so well, Mickey,' he told me.

'We didn't do so well,' I said in a hoa.r.s.e whisper, the strongest I could manage. My body felt surrounded by ice cubes. The black ceiling above me seemed to suck all my substance up and out, into s.p.a.ce.

'You were the only one who escaped,' Thomas said. 'William and Rho didn't make it.'

I had guessed that much. Still, the confirmation hurt.

Thomas looked down at the cradle and ran his gnarled, pale hand along the suspension frame. 'You're going to recover completely, Mickey. You'll do better than I. I've resigned as director.'

His eyes met mine and his mouth betrayed the presence of an ironic smile, fleeting, small, self-critical. 'The art of politics is the art of avoiding disasters, of managing difficult situations for the benefit of all, even for your enemies, whether they know what's good for them or not. Isn't it, Mickey?'

'Yes,' I croaked.

'What I had you do ..

'I did it,' I said.

He acknowledged that much, gave me the gift of that much complicity but no more. 'The word has spread, Mickey. We really hurt them, worse than they know. They hurt themselves.'

'Who dropped the bombs?'

He shook his head. 'It doesn't matter. No evidence, no arrests, no convictions.'

'Didn't somebody see?'

'The first bomb took out the closest surface sentries. n.o.body saw. We think it was a low-level shuttle. By the time we were able to get a search team off, it must have been hundreds of klicks away.'

'No arrests ... what about the president? Who's going to make her pay?'

'We don't know she ordered it, Mickey. Besides, you and I, we really zapped her. She's no longer president.'

'She resigned?'

Thomas shook his head. 'Fiona walked out of an airlock four days after the bombing. She didn't wear a suit.' He rubbed the back of one hand with the fingers of his other hand. 'I think I can take the blame for that.'

'Not just you,' I said.

'All right,' he said, and that was all. He left me to my thoughts, and again and again, I told myself- William and Rho did not escape.

Only I remember the pool.

Whether they are dead, or simply dissolved in the Ice Pit, floating in that incomprehensible pond or echoing in the s.p.a.ce above, I do not know. I do not know whether the heads are somehow less dead than before.

There is the problem of accountability.

In time, I was interrogated to the limits of my endurance, and still there were no prosecutions. The obvious suspicions - that the bombers had acted on orders from Earth, if not from Fiona Task-Felder herself - were never formalized as charges. The binding multiples wished to return to normal, to forget this hideous anomaly.

But Thomas was right. The story made its rounds, and it became legend: of Thierry's having himself harvested and frozen, an obvious apostasy from the faith he had established, and the violent reluctance of his followers to have him return in any form.

In the decades since, that has hurt the faith he founded in ways that even a court case and conviction could not have. The truth is less vigorous a prosecutor than legend. Neither masterful politics nor any number of great lies can stand against legend.

Task-Felder ceased being a Logologist multiple twenty years ago. The majority of members voted to open it to new settlers, of whatever beliefs; their connections with Earth were broken.

I have healed, grown older, worked to set lunar politics aright, married and contributed my own children to the Sandoval family. I suppose I have done my duty to family and Moon, and have nothing to be ashamed of. I have watched lunar politics and the lunar const.i.tution change and reach a form we can live with, ideal for no one, acceptable to most, strong in times of crisis.

Yet until this record I have never told everything I knew or experienced in that awful time.

Perhaps my time in the Quiet was an internal lie, my own fantasy of justification, my own kind of revenge dreamed in a moment of pain and danger.

I still miss Rho and William. Writing this, I miss them so deeply I put my slate aside and come back to it only after a time of grieving all over. The sorrow never dies; it is merely nacred by time.

No one has ever duplicated William's achievement, leading me to believe that had it not been for the bombs, perhaps he would have failed, as well. Some concatenation of his brilliance, the guidance of the perverse QL and an unexpected failure of equipment, a serendipity that has not been repeated, led to his success, if it can be called such.

On occasion I return to the blocked-off entrance of the Ice Pit. Before I began writing, I went there, pa.s.sing the stationed sentries, the single human guard - a young girl, born after the events I describe. As director of Sandoval BM, partic.i.p.ant in the mystery, I am allowed this freedom.