Leviathan Falls

Chapter Thirty-Two: Kit

Many, many things were known, but some were bright and immediate. Fortuna Sittard was both capital city and company town. The hexagon/pentagon tessellation of the Nieuwestad logo really was inspired by the surface of a football. The city was less than ten years old, but already half a million people lived there at the edge of a massive tectonic escarpment where the highland rivers were cutting valleys as they flowed down toward the southern sea. The morning sun would come through the windows and spill across the ceiling over the bed, every imperfection in the surface throwing a tiny shadow in the rose-colored light.

There were other things, less bright but just as much known. A coffeehouse in Toronto where a man and woman had said goodbye for the last time, and the way the scent of baked apple would still make her cry sometimes. A recurring pain in a chest that the doctors called idiopathic angina but that carried all the fear and threat of heart attacks. The pattern of an old melody on piano keys adapted because the left hand was missing a pinkie. The spilling grammars of Italian and Czech. A great wash of memory and significance and knowledge, there but grayer somehow. Lapping like the little waves at the edge of a lake.

Eyes opened and saw where the shadows would be. Legs shifted out from under a blanket, but they weren’t anyone’s legs. They just were. A woman muttered in her sleep, dreaming that she was in a dance recital and had forgotten all the moves. The toilet was a few steps away, and for a moment there were other toilets to reach from other rooms. Some on the left, some on the right, some down the hallway or the stairs. More than a few built into the wall of the ship’s cabin, complete with vacuum flow for when the drive was off and everything was on the float.

Nearby, a finger touched the light switch, and a glow filled the air. A hand fumbled with a warm, soft penis, and urine spilled down to the white ceramic bowl. There was relief, and then soap and warm water and the light put out.

A child slept in the nursery. He was already large for his crib. That was a known thing. And farther, but not too far, there was a daughter already getting up for work, her attempts to be quiet more alerting than outright noise would be. And there was no one in the house but silence and the thumb-sized grubs they call “cricket slugs” on Pathé. And ships’ drives hummed and thrummed—all the ships’ drives in chorus like cicadas.

The hand that had touched the light switch pulled aside the curtains. The window had spots on it where old raindrops dried, and beyond that, the stars. A woman’s voice said Kit? and more eyes opened. A naked man stood at the window, looking out at the night, but something was very wrong with him—right, but not right. Familiar, but unfamiliar. Reversed, because he wasn’t in the mirror and then he wasn’t the person who saw himself in the mirror and then he was.

“Kit?” Rohi said again, and Kit fell back into himself like he’d jumped off a building. His head spun as he staggered to the toilet, dropped to his knees, and vomited into the bowl. When he was empty, he retched for a while, each spasm more painful than the one before, but slowly gaining more time between them. Bakari was crying and Rohi was singing to their boy, soothing him, cooing to him that everything was all right.

Eventually the vertigo passed, and Kit was himself again. In the planetary gravity of Nieuwestad his body felt heavy in a way that somehow felt different than acceleration on a ship, even though Einstein had proven it wasn’t. He washed out his mouth at the little metal sink and walked back to the bedroom. Rohi was curled on the pillows, Bakari asleep in the crook of her arm with his closed eyes shifting in a dream. Kit’s skin stippled itself with gooseflesh from the cold, and he pulled on a set of thermal underwear. He didn’t have pajamas.

It had started on the Preiss. It had started the moment they’d died. Kit didn’t say it, but he was sure that was what had happened. The dark things, more real than anything real, had blown him and his baby away like handfuls of dust in a high wind. That was death. And then their clock had been inverted. They hadn’t been reborn, but un-killed. The man who wasn’t in the room with them had managed it with a vast effort. An effort that had exhausted him. Kit had been disoriented, grateful, confused, frightened. He’d been lost for a flashbulb moment in a cacophony of memory and identity and sensation.

And there had been voices. Not real ones, not words. He wasn’t developing aural hallucinations. But he’d remembered things, known things from lives he hadn’t led. While they were questioned by the Laconians from the Derecho, when they’d been released to finish the journey to Nieuwestad, even for a time after they’d arrived and been escorted to the orientation campus.

The thing where he lost the idea of Kit in a stream of consciousness that wasn’t his? This was new. It had only come a few times, but afterward he felt thinner and less connected to reality. Like the essential self he’d always known—the thing he meant when he said “I”—turned out to be less an object and more a kind of habit. Not even a persistent habit like taking drugs or gambling. The kind of thing you could take or leave. Coffee with breakfast instead of tea. Buying the same kinds of socks. Existing as an individual. All things he could do or not do without much changing. Another wave of nausea rolled through him with the thought, but it faded.

He slipped into the bed, trying not to wake them. Bakari was a warm, soft stone. Nothing short of Armageddon was going to wake him now. Rohi didn’t open her eyes, didn’t shift on the mattress. He was almost able to convince himself she was asleep when she spoke.

“Are you all right?”

“You were at a dance recital,” he said, softly. “But you’d forgotten all the choreography. You had to improvise it all on the fly, and it wasn’t going right.”

She was silent for a while. “It’s getting worse, isn’t it? It’s happening more often.”

Kit sighed. On the ceiling above them, the first faint shadows were starting to form. “Yeah.”

“For me too,” she said.

The first two weeks of orientation had been held in a wide auditorium large enough to seat three thousand, though there were fewer than six hundred new immigrants in their cohort. The stage was set a little off-center to give over one wall to vast windows that looked out over the escarpment. The local tree analogs were complexes of mosslike growths that built up like vast coral reefs, and they shimmered silver to green to ruddy orange depending on the temperature and the direction of the wind.

With Bakari in the company daycare facility, Kit’s mornings had been presentations by the Jacobin-Black Combined Capital welcome team and representatives of the unions talking about Nieuwestad as a planet and Fortuna Sittard as a city. They would have sixteen-month years and thirty-two-hour days. The local biosphere relied on compounds that weren’t toxic but could be irritating, so keeping inside the sealed areas of the city was recommended. They got maps of the city—commissary, medical complex, entertainment district, public swimming pool, religious facilities. The procedures for reporting legal infractions to security, and security infractions to the union reps, were detailed, and Kit and Rohi had to mark that they’d been briefed and understood. The JBCC welcome team led them in songs about teamwork and fellowship, and even the union reps joined in.

With Rohi at his side, Kit felt a little bit grounded in the sea of new voices and faces, the disorienting prospect of the life his new contract had created for him. There might be hundreds of new faces and all the displacing details of coming to live in a new city on a new planet, but Rohi was there, and she was his anchor.

The third week, with his feet a little more nearly under him, he started his workgroup orientation, and Rohi started hers. Halfway through the first day, he realized it was the longest he’d spent away from her since they’d boarded the Preiss back in Sol system.

There were only six people joining the civil engineering team. They met in a classroom that looked like a hundred classrooms he’d been in before—thin industrial carpet with a pattern to hide stains, sound-absorbing hardfoam walls, recessed lighting that was cheap because everyone everywhere used printed parts from the same design. His new superior was an attractive woman named Himemiya Gosset. She had a tight smile and a habit of stroking her chin when she was thinking, and Kit realized halfway through the second day that he’d read an article she’d written about the use of local materials in large-scale water recycling plants. Slowly, the unease and wariness and bone-deep sense of displacement started to give way to enthusiasm and even excitement about the work he’d be doing.

It was the middle of the third day and Gosset was preparing to take the six of them over to the offices where they’d be assigned workstations and meet the full engineering team, when a security officer stepped in the little classroom and pulled her aside. Their conversation was brief, but it brought visible distress to the senior engineer’s face. Kit knew before she turned back to the classroom that something had happened, and that it had to do with him.

“Kamal?” Gosset said. “Word, please.”

Kit stepped over to the pair of them. The other five were quiet behind him.

“There’s a medical issue,” the security man said. “I can take you to the infirmary.”

“Rohi?” Kit asked.

“It’s your son, sir. I’m afraid he’s been taken to the infirmary. You should come now.”

“Is he all right?” Kit said, but the security man didn’t answer.

Gosset nodded sharply toward the door. The universal gesture for Go. “Don’t worry about missing the walk-through. We’ll get you caught up later.”

“Thank you,” Kit said by reflex. He wasn’t paying attention to her. Something was wrong with Bakari. His heart was bright and fast, and he could feel his pulse in his neck.

He held back the urge to ask the security man what had happened, when it had happened, what was wrong, how they knew it was wrong, what they’d done about it, and the thousand other things the man didn’t know. Instead, he sat in the small electric cart as it zipped through the wide concrete-and-conduit access corridors of the city, and leaned forward as if he could will it to go faster.

The infirmary was mostly underground, but the lights were tuned to a spectrum that mimicked the afternoon sun of Earth. The flowers at the intake station were fake, but they smelled real. The security man walked behind Kit like an apology. Even before Kit reached the reception desk, an older man in a doctor’s coat was striding out toward them. Kit was expected.

“Mr. Kamal,” the doctor said, gesturing toward a pair of pale wooden doors. “This way, please.”

“What happened?” Kit asked.

Instead of answering, the doctor turned to the security man and said, “Thank you very much.” It was polite, but it was a dismissal. Kit had the sense that whatever the conversation was, it would be private. Maybe that was company policy for JBCC. Maybe it was something else.

They pushed through the doors and into the halls of the infirmary. They were wider than standard, wide enough to let two hospital beds pass each other with room for medics at their sides. The floral smell of reception gave way to something harsher.

“Your son is stable,” the doctor said. “The daycare watch reported that he was acting strangely. For a time, he became entirely unresponsive.”

“I don’t know what that means,” Kit said.

“I believe he had a seizure of some kind. My preliminary scans don’t show any congenital abnormalities or tumors, so that’s good. But there was… some odd activity in his insular cortex.”

“But he’s okay?”

“He’s fine now,” the doctor said. “We’re going to watch him, and I would like to run a few tests. Just rule out as much as I can.”

“But he’s going to be okay.” Kit didn’t say it as a question. He asserted it as if the universe would take its directions from him.

The doctor stopped, and Kit went on for another two steps before he paused and turned back. The discomfort on the doctor’s face was plain.

“We have a standing order from the Laconian Science Directorate. Any issues or abnormalities that arise among people who were on the Preiss are to be documented and the data sent to Laconia.”

“Because of the thing that happened?” Kit said.

“There are thirteen hundred systems. Laconia doesn’t even have a formal political officer on Nieuwestad,” the doctor said. “If the report back to Dr. Ochida slipped behind my desk? It could be months or years before I noticed. Given who your father is, I thought perhaps…”

The doctor inclined his head. He was graying at the temples, and deep wrinkles marked the corners of his eyes and mouth. He was old enough; he might have known the Rocinante before the Transport Union was even formed. He might be part of Naomi Nagata’s underground movement.

“Thank you,” Kit said.

The doctor’s smile was calm and calming. He led Kit to a glass doorway where the privacy setting had turned the clear pane to a gentle frost. Kit slipped in. The soft hum and pop of the medical scanners was like wind in trees. The bed was sized for an adult, and Rohi lay on her side with Bakari snuggled up to her chest. His eyes were closed, and his right hand was curled in a fist under his chin as if he were deep in thought. Her voice was soft and lilting. The cadence she fell into when she was lulling the baby to sleep.

“The Anteater said, ‘Of course we’re friends. Why would we not be?’ And the cunning clever boy who looked just like Bakari said, ‘Because you eat ants, and the anthill is made from them.’”

Kit eased himself onto the foot of the bed, resting his hand on her ankle. She smiled and went on.

“‘You are made from many things too,’ the Anteater said. ‘You are made up of skin and hair and eyes and bones and blood and wide, strong muscles. Do you hate the doctor when he takes a blood sample to keep you well? Do you hate the barber when he cuts off a bit of your hair? I love the anthill because it helps me live, and it loves me because I help keep it healthy by taking away the ants that are worn out. Just because you’re made from something, that doesn’t mean that’s all you are.’ And then the clever young boy who looked just like Bakari understood. And that’s the end of the story.”

Rohi lapsed into silence. Bakari sighed softly and nuzzled more deeply into the bed. He looked fine. He looked healthy.

“I don’t know that story,” Kit said. “Where’s it from?”

“Aesop?” Rohi said.

“I don’t think so.”

“Maybe I made it up. I don’t know anymore.”

I think it was a philosopher, a voice in the back of Kit’s mind murmurs. I can’t remember his name. The voice isn’t Kit’s. It isn’t anyone he recognizes, but he remembers the book—orange with a complex design on the front and thin pages of high-quality paper. It isn’t a book he’s read. There was a time when these wandering memories bothered him. Now they seem almost normal. That which can’t be avoided must be embraced. Someone had said that to him. His grandmother. Kit had never met his grandmother. The room around him spun a little, but only a little.

“Can you imagine what it would be like?” Rohi asked. “It’s hard enough for us, and we already know ourselves. I’ve been me for decades. Imagine being as little as him. Still figuring out where your body ends and the world begins, and having to deal with… this.”

“We don’t know it’s that.”

“We can’t prove it,” Rohi said. “But I know. Don’t you?”

He curled down onto the bed, resting his head against her thigh. The medical mattress hissed and shifted, accommodating his weight. Her body was warm against his cheek. He remembered how, during the pregnancy, she’d always been warm as a furnace, even in the winter. No matter how cool they kept the bedroom, she’d kick off the sheets. He thought it had been her. He thought that had been him. But maybe it was someone else’s memory. Someone from the Preiss or one of the other ships. It was so hard to be sure.

“I was so scared when they told me they’d brought him here,” Rohi said. “I’m so scared all the time.”

“I know. I am too.”

“Do you ever want to let go? I keep thinking what it would be like to fall into being the anthill and just never be the ant again. Even if I died, I might not care. I might not notice.”

“I would.”

“Not if you were in there too.”

“I will always care about you,” Kit said. “I will always care about him. Nothing will ever change that. No matter how much this happens. It won’t erase me, and it won’t erase how much I love you.”

Rohi made a soft sound, hardly more than an exhalation with intent, and rested her fingers on Kit’s head, stroking him gently because they both knew he was lying.