The Forever Watch Read online

Turns the focal point of her awareness. Raises her arm in greeting.

  Dizzying explosion of mental exchange, at thought densities that are beyond human.

  The thoughts are indecipherable, the strangest music in the mind, sensations, feelings, ideas flashing in the darkness like dying stars.

  The arm is a glossy grayish-blue. As is the flesh of everyone around her.

  Sleek and sinuous. They have twofold symmetry: two arms and two legs and distinct left and right sides, and a front and a back. And that is where any similarity in appearance to humanity ends. Tall, wiry, and lean, their thin coils of muscle anchor at strange angles around their joints. The feet have no toes and they also have no fingers. The long, narrow faces are so unlike anything else I have seen that it takes a moment of forever to take in the sight. The bulging foreheads are proportionately larger than ours, and there is no hair to frame the shapes of the faces. They have no eyes, though depressions above their cheeks imply some vestigial remnants that could have been eyes in some ancestral species. Psychic sight provides the visuals. There are but the tiniest slits for nostrils. And their mouths are narrow, with small, flattened teeth.

  Startlingly, they have the same, silvery emitter plates on their faces that we do.

  My mind keeps attempting to impose human proportions and musculature onto the experience, and of course it fails, just as it fails to properly interpret the senses and thoughts of a mind that is nothing like my own.

  They are strange to look upon but not ugly. There is a beauty to their smiles, which use fewer muscles than ours. Their clothes are simple in cut but radiate in colors the human eye does not see. They glide upon glowing currents of psi, willowy and graceful.

  A second dawn, and a second sun rises into an incarnadine sky.

  Her companion approaches. Their arms stop short of touching, but fingers of energy entwine, and that dense mental language roars, the music of an orchestra, so many layered threads of communication and melody, beats and hums and trills. There is something like warmth. There is something like love, but more than that, there is a profound, aching sadness, a sorrow that is quiet and mournful and all the colors of regret.

  Those suns cast their light past the ridge of a vast hollow in the ground below them. Floating above, tiny blue birds. Others like themselves flit across a gigantic structure taking shape within a scaffolding of titanic energies.

  I recognize that outline.

  The vision cuts out there. Dissolves into static and snow.

  Barrens and I come out of it and say nothing for a long time. We sink into the seat cushions. Less traumatizing than another Mincemeat memory, this is far more disturbing.

  He takes a rumpled handkerchief out of his pocket and slowly dabs at my tears.

  “That was the Noah, wasn’t it?”

  I swallow and clear my throat. “Maybe.”

  But if it was, then Noah was certainly not the name the Builders would have given to this ship.

  Impossibly large, there in its cradle. The sweep of those wings as they were formed from tons upon tons of plastech, the mighty reactor vessels being packed together in the rear, artificial mountains …

  It is worse for me than for Barrens. Since Callahan, he’s not trusted the Council propaganda indoctrinated in all of us. That is not me. For me, this hunt has been out of curiosity and my obligation to and affection for him, and of course I want to do something only I can do, but I still had my faith, my beliefs in what I knew to be real.

  I consider other possibilities. That it is a hoax. A prank left by clever young geniuses floating through the Nth Web. Or a failed entertainment project by an imaginative director.

  It explains too many things. It explains why our research and development has been so slow on the Noah, despite eugenics programs selecting for improved intelligence and abilities. We find it difficult to improve on any of the technologies of the ship and our implants and amplifiers; we have only adapted them. We still do not use more than a tiny fraction of the ship’s computing potential, we still have not touched the limits of the vast spaces of the Nth Web. Even the Implant technology in our heads—surely there is so much more it could be used for. All our improvements have been in the realm of programming, all software, or the usage optimization of existing equipment. No hardware. Little to no progress at all in the pure sciences; physics, math, chemistry, and biology have been at a standstill, and not because of the limited resources and population on the ship.

  The dormant nodes Lyn and I found are unused because we don’t know how to use them all. Possibly, the alien reactors powering everything simply don’t have as much fuel as they did during the time of the Builders, or maybe we use them too poorly to make the most of them. The Nth Web, our clumsy human programming running on top of the alien hardware, is just a façade. All the inefficiencies, all the cracks in the system, are because it is not a human system we built ourselves, but something bigger than us, something we do not fully understand.

  Perhaps it is all humanity can do to get the Builders’ technologies to work.

  I feel Barrens’s lips slide across my cheek, warm where they press against my bare skin, cool where it contacts my emitter face plates. We are together, but we are alone in our heads.

  Why hide the history of the Builders? Why conceal the origins of the ship? I have to stop. Where will my questions lead if I do not? Older questions then, why we had to leave Earth at all. What was the catastrophe that destroyed our home? Was it really destroyed? Just where are we going?

  I talk and talk and talk about what it could all mean. Barrens just sits next to me, listening, breathing.

  When I have run over the same ideas for the third time, he pulls me onto his lap, says slowly, “Mincemeat has nothing to do with the Builders though.”

  “Well … no. Perhaps they died before the ship even reached Earth. Or maybe there are some still alive, being kept by the Central Council? Maybe—”

  His paw enfolds mine. Warm, hard, it slows the unraveling tangle, the threads of possibility spooling out in my head.

  “For me,” he rumbles, chest against my back, “this is still about people dying. It is a big deal, Hana, I know it is. But it is too big for the likes of me, when all I want to do is hunt down whoever killed my friend.”

  A brief flare of anger dies out as fast as it flashes through me. Of course. Unless it has to do with these deaths, it is just a distraction to Barrens. For all that he loved spending today relaxing with me, it is the hunt that brought us together, and it is the hunt that matters most. Whatever reasons Information Security has for keeping the Builders and the origin of the ship a secret, they are huge and vast and far in the past. But individuals are still being vanished, and our files on Mincemeat continue to grow.

  The Hunter swarm is still finding more incidents that look like the work of Callahan’s killer.

  “Although…,” Barrens murmurs, frowning. “Nah. Never mind.”

  We lie in the darkness, waiting for sleep that does not come.

  8

  I add more security features to my miner of the Nth Web: Better protocols to quarantine suspicious data. Barrens is not concerned about what the pieces of Builder programming could do to it, but I am. It still grows and creeps through the Analytical Nodes of the ship, churning through deleted and missing data.

  Barrens keeps focused on what is in front of us, and not this great big mess of secrets hanging over history. He is still a cop looking for a killer. I’m still just a bureaucrat with some shortcuts through the system. I tell myself that the ship’s construction’s occurring someplace else and being done by others does not affect us. It does not affect the mission.

  Ah, but it does.

  A stolen moment on the rooftop of his precinct, overlooking Stern-2, one of the four arteries cutting a straight path all the way through the dense mass of construction in the Habitat Dome. Eight lanes wide, with ramps coming up off the center, rising up to the threadlike ribbons above the city. All the police, fire, and em
ergency-response centers are located close to one of these ramps, the better to quickly send a force to any location they are needed in a city that is vertical as much as it is horizontal.

  Not much rain scheduled for today, but here and there throughout the Dome, microclimates arise due to airflow and temperature pockets, and up here on the roof, there is wind and mist and fog. His arm around my shoulders feels warm, even through the layers of our coats.

  “It doesn’t feel like a Hunter to me.”

  He laughs quietly when I tell him that. “Too quirky to be Hunter? Could be you’re right. I think there’s a lot more we could be using it for. The right name will come.”

  Yes, there is the potential for so much more. Barrens would know, as he is expanding its functions. Occasionally, when I sample a cross section of the pieces of the swarm to see how its code is changing, the feel and response of some of the subunits has been tailored by another influence. I made this for him in the first place. I do not mind if he does his own customization, his own additions.

  “It won’t affect the primary search negatively, will it?”

  “No. It’s a population of semiautonomous programs—it would take a catastrophe to crash it now. Change it too much and you’ll just have created an offshoot population, your own little horde.”

  “Gotcha.”

  He lets go of me to light a cigarette, puffs a slow stream out into the cold air. Our shoulders still touch, and I like to think I can still feel him even through that slight contact.

  “I wish you wouldn’t smoke.” Even though most of the harmful chemicals are neutralized by catalysts integrated into the filter and throughout the substance of the cig, I just don’t like how it smells. Well. Sometimes I don’t like it, and sometimes the scent is comforting.

  “Yeah, sorry. Been cutting down though, haven’t I?”

  He has. “What are you adding to the data-miner, Leon?”

  “Stuff. There’s some other things I want to find. And I’ve got this idea, you see. I’ll tell you about it. I will. Right now, there’s not enough to it.”

  “Can’t you tell me now?”

  He purses his lips just so around the cig. “Nah. I mean, right now, we’ll just end up fighting about it.”

  Barrens goes on, “I’ll say something about how it can’t be just one guy anymore, there’s got to be a bigger cover-up, and then you’ll bang down the statistics and your higher clearance know-how and I’ll just stand there like a lump of smolderin’ coal and you’ll get that look on your face and say sorry, and it will be like we’ll pretend not to have talked about it.”

  Or he’ll bring up how my bosses have lied to me about the Builders, so what else are they lying about, and then he’ll be the one seeing that I feel hurt, whispering a quiet apology.

  It has gone that way before, just as he says. Neither of us want to fight about questions that have no answers.

  I shake off thoughts of how his cheeks and forehead turn bright red when he is passionate about something. I put aside his voice, at times too loud, at times too soft, and the restlessness of his hands when the ideas seem too big for his body. Our discussions about Mincemeat have grown heated; his theories growing wilder as I become more determined to shoot holes in them.

  I am still stunned by the enormous deception about the ship. Why cut the others out of our history? Why make up human inventors for all these alien innovations? An entire false origin of the life-changing technologies on the ship has been made up and taught to us. The ship is not human. Plastech and the Implants are also from the Builders. Nearly everything about our way of life exists as a mask built on top of what they brought to us from the stars.

  He sees something more than I do.

  Barrens struggles to tie it together, convoluted strings of intuitive jumps. Theories about fundamental wrongs with the whole society, and Mincemeat and hiding the Builders, are all tied together, and those are the fights where we get uncomfortably loud. The virtual board inside his head that he shows to me has grown and grown, a space with all these pictures and ideas and files pinned into place and linked together with thread. Monsters in the tunnels, Breeding Duty, the Builders, secret deaths, early Retirements, Mincemeat. He is much more aggressive now, with his theories that either Mincemeat is a man operating with the tolerance of the Central Council, or is an entire secret function of Information Security. The question marks from earlier are still there, but now he has theories bolded out under them; too many of them.

  Am I in denial? This other stuff with aliens, with the secrets held by the ship’s Council, surely that has nothing to do with this. And I still refuse to believe that Mincemeat is a state-sponsored execution program. It just doesn’t make sense that way. Too wasteful. And why such a gruesome means to do it?

  Those particularly bad fights only happened twice.

  Maybe this is what old-time marriage was like, knowing when not to talk about something anymore, and just accepting what’s there.

  “I’ll tell you when there’s something to it. Don’t like arguing with ya, Dempsey. I … I like us best when we’re quiet together.”

  I do too. “When will I see you next?”

  He bends low, brushes his lips across the spot behind my ear. “A week, tops.”

  Then he escorts me down to the lobby, and I leave to go back to my office, and he watches me until I get on the right bus.

  I worry when he is gone for a week or more. Though he is supposed to be a desk jockey, he still gets requested for pacification missions targeting turf wars between Psyn-dealers.

  When such violent encounters occur, all police staff in that section of the Habitat get called in for support, especially those with such a wealth of combat experience as Barrens. The damage and injuries from these incidents are reported to the public as accidents and equipment failure. But I know, because of the forms that pass through my office beforehand from the police requesting special dispensation to draw “tactical yield” levels of power from the grid.

  There is not a lot of crime on the ship. But even with surveillance technology the likes of which was beyond the dreams of the most paranoid authoritarian government on old Earth, with mind readers and data aggregrators and data-miners, the Psyn trade has proven impossible to stamp out.

  Over the years, I have approved dozens of drug-prevention programs. And every Keeper is expected to inculcate the dangers of illicit substances to their charges and, above all, to warn them of Psyn.

  Other drugs heighten pleasure, produce altered states, sometimes resulting in psychosis. But most of the damage they cause is internal.

  The official origin of Psyn is that some kids came up with it in a school laboratory for a project a hundred years ago. The unofficial story, which is limited to the police and to officers in other Ministries of my rank and above, is that it was an attempt by the Ministry of Energy to augment the ship’s fuel supplies by boosting the psionic abilities of test subjects to the point that they did not need amplifiers drawing on the power of the grid. An enzyme cocktail extracted from the pulverized amygdalae cloned from the strongest psychics of the first generation of the ship’s crew from centuries before, and reprogrammed nanomachines based on the ones that are used to form the neural Implant, Psyn works by creating a feedback loop between the Implant and brain, allowing the power to build continuously, briefly creating inside the skull the quantum signature of the ship’s psionic reactors. That’s what the reports say, though the equations are beyond me.

  What I know is that it works. It is Power, Power to avoid the destiny one’s tests results can limit life to.

  Power is addictive, and the psychic enhancement that Psyn grants has made it the only illegal drug that anyone risks Adjustment for. Every pleasure can be had in a legally obtained memory, for a price. But much more so than in any previous society, Power is money. A few precious milliliters of Psyn and a man of average touch can smash through a meter of hardened armor, without an amplifier. In school, in training, or at work, an undetec
table drop in the blood can enhance one’s performance for any psi-related task. On the edge of success and promotion or failure and punishment, the temptation for that little extra something is understandable.

  The cost is a steady loss of self-control, growing paranoia, eventual psychosis.

  Psyn can not only cause twisted dreams and nightmares of the first order, it can boost psionic ability enough to alter physical reality. To manifest nightmares and make them real. Even in those who react positively to Psyn, dangers are produced by the euphoria of power. Psyn-users often imagine themselves to be gods.

  I try not to imagine Barrens smashing through a wall, where await a dozen mentally disturbed, violent individuals dizzy with their drug-boosted powers, waiting for a chance to show what they can do without society’s expectations and rules holding them back.

  Each day, I watch out for the damage reports, the accidents that these encounters are hidden as.

  The week goes by and it is a relief when Barrens finally messages me that they’ve wrapped up another raid, that he’s safe, and would it be okay if I come by tonight?

  Most the time we are together, it is just how we like it. Quiet in each other’s presence, talking softly, or working, or touching, or sleeping.

  The work he does not tell me about does not bother me. We are our own selves still.

  But when he receives a message in the middle of the night that springs him to wakefulness and he prepares to depart to do who knows what, dressed in ordinary civilian clothes and not his police blues, I am unhappy.

  “I want to know, Leon. I’ve checked the rules—they can’t pull you for another operation for at least a whole week. You’re up to something else.”

  He pauses at my door, hand on the knob, shoulders wider than the doorframe, massive and imposing, an unreal figure, too large for the enclosed spaces of the ship. He looked most right when we were hiking through the false wilderness. He is meant for a larger world than the Noah.