Leviathan Falls

Chapter Twenty-Six: Jim

Jim couldn’t sleep. He lay on the crash couch, the gentle one-third g of the burn settling him into the gel, and tried to will himself into a sense of peace and rest that wouldn’t come. Naomi, beside him, had curled onto her side, her back toward him. There had been a time when he’d slept with the lights entirely off, but that had been before Laconia. Now he kept them low—less than a single candle would have been but enough that when he woke from a nightmare, the familiar outlines of the cabin would be there to ground him. He hadn’t had a nightmare. He hadn’t slept at all.

Naomi murmured something in her sleep, shifted, and settled. Years of experience told him she was sloping down into the deepest levels of dream. Another few minutes and she’d twitch once like she was catching herself from falling, and after that, she’d snore.

This was the life he’d dreamed of during his imprisonment. This was what he thought he’d lost forever: suffering a little insomnia while his lover of decades rested at his side. That the universe had given it back to him after he’d given up hope flooded him with a profound gratitude when it didn’t frighten him. This was so small, so precious, and so fragile.

They were both mortal. The one thing he knew for certain was that this couldn’t last forever. Someday, there would be a last meal with Naomi. Someday there would be a last sleepless night for him. A last moment hearing the Roci’s drive humming around him. He might know when it came, or it might only be clear in retrospect, or it might end for him so quickly that he never had time to notice all the beautiful, small moments that he was losing.

Naomi jerked, went still, and then the low, soft rumble of her snore began. Jim grinned through his weariness, counted her breaths up to two hundred to give her time to fully commit to slumber, and then pulled himself up out of the couch and dressed in the gloom. When he opened the door to the corridor, Naomi turned to look at him. Even though her eyes were open, she wasn’t awake.

“No troubles,” he said. “Keep sleeping.”

She smiled. She was beautiful when she smiled. She was always beautiful. He closed the door.

They’d made it almost three-quarters of the way to the Falcon, and were in the earliest part of their braking burn. Elvi’s messages to them—that they could dock, that she’d see to it that there wasn’t a security problem, that they were welcome—had a sense of normalcy that didn’t match the situation at all. Even as Naomi had responded with their flight path and expected intercept coordinates, Jim had been struck with the absurdity of treating it like popping over to someone’s apartment for dinner, when in reality it was more like conspiracy to commit treason. But the Derecho hadn’t followed them through the gate, and there was literally no place else for a ship to hide. At some point, Adro had been a solar system capable of sustaining life. Now it was a star, a green diamond the size of a gas giant, the Falcon, and the Rocinante.

Jim reached the lift and rode it slowly up through the quiet ship until he reached the ops deck. Alex was standing beside a crash couch, a bulb in his hand and the bright gate on the screen in front of him. They were far enough from it now that, if he’d gone outside, Jim wouldn’t have been able to distinguish it from the billions of stars. On the scopes, it radiated swirling waves of aurora-like energy.

“Hey,” he said.

Alex looked over his shoulder. “What’re you doing up?”

“Couldn’t sleep. Thought I’d see if you wanted me to take watch.”

“I’m fine,” Alex said. “I’m shifted over. This feels like midafternoon to me. You want a beer?”

“A midafternoon beer?”

“I didn’t say it was morning,” Alex said, and scooped another bulb off the crash couch. Jim caught it, broke the seal, and took a long swallow.

“I’ve never understood people who like beer without gravity,” Alex said. “That’s not a drink. That’s a vaguely alcoholic kind of foam.”

“No argument,” Jim said, then nodded toward the screen. “Anything?”

“Nothing new, but…” Alex gestured at the bright ring. “I don’t know. I keep looking at it. Wondering what the hell it’s doing.”

“Well, it hasn’t killed us. That seems like a good start.”

“Could definitely be worse. But… You think you know something, right? Then it turns out you were only used to it. It does something, and it does something, and then after a while, you think that’s what it does. Then it turns out there was this whole other thing, maybe.”

“Using a microwave as a lamp, because it has a light in it,” Jim said. He tried to remember where he’d heard that analogy.

“Yeah, exactly,” Alex said. “You thought you knew it, but you were only familiar with it.”

Jim took another sip of the beer. The hops tasted like mushroom, for good reason. “I’m hoping that Elvi has figured some things out. I mean, she’ll know better than we do.”

“We can hope,” Alex agreed, then squeezed the last of the beer out of his bulb and tossed it into the recycler. His belch was deep and satisfied.

“How many of these did you have?” Jim asked.

“A few.”

“Are you drunk?”

Alex considered the question. “A little, I guess.” He lowered himself into the crash couch. “There was this time when I was a kid, I had a really crap babysitter. I was maybe nine? She was sixteen. And we watched this monster film. A huge cat monster that lived underground, and it got pissed off by some seismic surveys. Came to the top and started tearing up cities and collapsing tunnels. Scared the shit out of me.”

“Weird the things that get to you when you’re a kid,” Jim said.

“I knew it wasn’t for real. I was young, I wasn’t dumb. But it still scared me, and the thing my dad told me that actually got me past it? He showed me how it wouldn’t scale.”

“Wouldn’t scale?”

“Volume goes up by cubes. A cat big enough to crush a city wouldn’t be strong enough to stand up, even at Martian gravity. Its bones would break under its own weight. And that did it for me. I was all right, because I saw it couldn’t work. This is like that cat, it doesn’t scale.”

Jim sat with that for a second. “Either you’re too drunk or I’m not drunk enough. I don’t get it.”

“The gates. The systems. It’s bigger than us. It’s bigger than we can be. I mean, have you ever thought about what it would be like to see every system there is now? To see just the places where we are? There’s thirteen hundred seventy-three gates—”

“Seventy-one. Thanjavur and Tecoma are gone.”

“Thirteen hundred and seventy-one,” Alex agreed. “Now let’s say you plot it so that you don’t have to slow down when you get to the ring space. Accelerate all the way to the ring gate, brake all the way back to the goldilocks region at wherever you’re going. Maybe take you a month to do it.”

“You’d run out of reaction mass.”

Alex waved the objection away. “Pretend you could stock up in flight. All the reaction mass and fuel and food and everything. And liquid helium to boil off the waste heat.”

“So ignoring every actual constraint that makes it impossible?”

“Yeah. Five billion klicks a month, every month. No time on the float. No time at the planets. Just—” He threw his hand forward, a gesture of speed.

“All right.”

“Hundred and fifteen years. Start it the day you’re born, and finish it an old man, and never see anything but the inside of your ship. Take a week at each planet—not each city, not each station, each planet—to play tourist? Add another twenty-eight years. A hundred forty-some years old. That’s a solid lifetime, just to take a peek. Get the lay of the land. Never see the same place twice.”

Jim thought about that. Between working for the Transport Union back in the day and fleeing with the underground, he’d been to more systems than most people ever would, and it was still probably under three dozen. He knew how many more there were, how many he’d never see, how many Naomi was trying to coordinate. Alex was right. It was daunting. Maybe more than daunting.

“And that’s not the worst of it,” Alex said. “By the time you’re done, there’s been a century of change at the place you started from. It won’t be the same. All the places you visit start changing into new ones the second you leave.”

On the screen, the bright gate shifted and muttered. The false-color map showed radio waves and X-rays pouring out of it. Jim couldn’t help imagining it as a vast eye looking back at them.

“This is all too big for people,” Alex said. “The things that built it? Maybe they could handle it, but we’re not designed for this scale. We’re trying to get big enough we can make it work, but we’re breaking our legs just standing up.”

“Huh,” Jim said. And then, a moment later, “You got any more beer?”

“Nope.”

“Want some?”

“Yep.”

With its drive off, the Falcon was no more than a small, oddly shaped asteroid at first. It was a little under three hundred thousand kilometers off the Adro diamond, orbiting it like a tiny artificial moon. The artifact itself was eerie: vast and green and flickering now and then with murky internal energies like storms that penetrated deep into the flesh of the object. The planet. The library. Jim knew enough about Elvi’s preliminary work that he could appreciate the supremely unnatural aspects of the thing: that it didn’t collapse under its own mass, that it was connected using the same locality-breaking principles as the ring gates, that it had the capacity to hold vastly more information than humanity had generated in its millennia of progress. The Falcon—pale-skinned and half-organic the way Laconian ships all were—would have been unnerving in any other context. Here, Jim felt a weird kinship with it. The technology might be alien, but the design language was mostly human.

Alex brought them into a matching orbit, maneuvering the Rocinante gently into place until the two ships seemed like they were already connected. Locked by the common forces of velocity and gravity. The Roci’s crew gathered at the crew airlock as Amos prepared to extend the docking bridge.

“You know what’s funny?” Jim said. “I feel certain this door will open and Tanaka will be standing there with a bunch of Laconian Marines in power armor ready to charge across.”

Teresa rolled her eyes, but Naomi laughed. “That’s not going to happen.”

“Of course not. But I’m certain it will. That’s weird, right?”

She took his hand, squeezed it once, and as she looked into his eyes, she said, “This is all right. Elvi is with us, and she’s in command of this ship.”

“Besides,” Alex said, “if she’s not, they’ve had plenty of time to call for backup. No one’s here besides the two of us.”

Jim nodded. He knew that the fears were irrational. That didn’t keep him from feeling them, but it did make it a little bit easier to take them lightly. Alex was right. They’d announced Elvi’s complicity to her crew the moment they’d transferred into the system, and no one had sounded the alarm as far as they could tell. The connection of their two ships, the transfer off the Rocinante and onto the Falcon, was almost symbolic compared with what they’d already done.

Amos clicked the last of the safety latches into place and keyed in the syncing protocol. A soft hissing vibration meant that the docking bridge was moving out, creating a corridor between the ships.

“Still, I don’t think we should all go over,” Naomi said. “Not at the same time, anyway.”

“Not until we know the situation over there,” Alex agreed.

“Not ever,” Naomi said. “One of us is always on the Roci. That’s a rule. I trust Elvi, and I trust her to know her crew. But I trust us more.”

Alex raised his hand like a schoolboy answering a question. “I’m happy to keep an eye on the farm if y’all want to go over.”

“I think Amos should stay too,” Naomi said.

“Better if I came with,” Amos said. “Nothing happening over here Tiny can’t keep eyes on.”

Naomi hesitated, and Jim wondered for a moment what would happen if she told Amos he had to stay. Maybe Naomi had the same doubt. “All right,” she said. “Alex and Teresa stay here for now. The rest of us go make introductions.”

Naomi caught his eye and lifted one eyebrow. She meant that he didn’t have to go. He shrugged. He meant that he did.

“Works for me,” Amos said, hauling himself into the airlock. “And we got a seal, pressure, and an invitation.”

Jim followed Naomi into the airlock and felt it in his bones when it cycled shut behind them. His fear of Tanaka had shifted. Now some part of him expected the outer airlock door to open onto the void, for the air to flow out and death to rush in. Instead, there was a soft clank, a hiss of gas as soft as an exhalation, and the gangway. The Falcon’s outer airlock was already open, and the three of them launched across to it. The air smelled different. Bright and astringent.

When the Falcon’s outer door closed, its inner door opened, and Elvi Okoye was there. Fayez floated beside her with a black-eyed girl. Elvi smiled, but she looked terrible. Her skin had an ashy tone, and her arms and legs were visibly atrophied.

“Naomi, Jim,” she said, drifting toward them like an obscene parody of an angel. “It’s good to see you again. And Amos.” As she stopped herself with a handhold, Elvi’s gaze flickered across Amos, and for a moment there was something almost like hunger in her eyes. The focus of a taxonomist on an important new species. “I’d heard you changed like Cara and Xan. I would really love to do a few medical scans while you’re here. If that’s all right with you?”

“If it helps, Doc,” Amos said, then turned to the black-eyed girl. She had very different features from Amos, but the blackness of their eyes, the grayness under their skins, left Jim’s brain trying to see the similarity as a family resemblance. “Hey, Sparkles.”

The girl frowned and started to say something, then stopped.

“Well,” Fayez said. “This is just awkward as hell, isn’t it?”

Elvi shook herself and motioned them in. “Please come in. I’ve had a little welcoming party set up, and we have a lot we need to talk about.”