2254


X.

Routine took over, foul and uninviting. Aspen and the rest were recalled to Earth and other projects; the team scattered as far as human exploration dared. Morden was one of the few who opted to stay and were allowed to do so: Holtz, again. He still lived in same hotel room, sharing a space with Denni that seemed a little cooler with every passing day. 'Familiar strangers', Denni called their situation somewhat derisively, but he wasn't even sure that they were that anymore.

He hadn't remembered Sarah's 4th birthday, either.

Work-wise, the grip of academia grew a little tighter, and his patience with it all a little thinner. He ached for something he did not understand and could not, in truth, remember, dosing himself with REM-less pills and sleepwalking through his lectures. I wonder what the others are doing, he often thought, more by reflex than by any genuine curiosity. His former fellow team members were simply out of sight and thus out of mind, and would that all things in his new life could be that simple!

He thought that Kirkish had gone off-world, like the rest of the team, so was understandably surprised when he found her waiting outside the Syria Planum University's lecture theatre one morning. She wore black slacks and a black sweater - non-clothes, and a world away from her familiar blue jumpsuit - and her hair was shorter, and dyed dark brown. He almost didn't recognise her. "Morden?"

He almost dropped the stack he'd been carrying. A couple of lagging students - doubtless waiting to make eyes at him in the hope of raising their grade - ran to help him. He waved them off and settled the stack back on the desk. "Mary? My God. I haven't seen you in months! How are you? You look - different." She looked awful. Dark hair did not suit her, and nor did dark clothes. Her pale skin looked washed-out beneath them, and thin as tissue paper. She had dark shadows under her eyes, deepened by the neon lighting inside the emptying lecture theatre.

"Morden. Do you have a minute?"

"I - yes." His next class wouldn't be for another couple of hours. It was a little early for food, but - "Coffee?"

"Sure."

They sat in the canteen, seated in one of the far corners on plastic chairs, their coffee in plastic mugs and resting on a plastic table that teetered uncertainly whenever either of them leaned against it. "I thought you'd left Mars for pastures new," Morden said, attacking his portion of allotted caffeine with gusto. It was all Earth-imported; the only luxury he bothered with.

"I did."

"Where did you end up going? I didn't hear anything through the IPX newscasts." He still kept up with the feed, even though there was hardly anything on there to interest him anymore. But, then, what else was he supposed to do? The university had plenty of feeds but not much on them; the linguistics department was so up-and-coming that he'd ended up as the head of it, more or less by accident. Morden thought that maybe Holtz had pulled a few strings to get him the position. Not tenured, though: that brought with it guaranteed Martian citizenship, and Holtz had seemed to him a bit skittish on the subject. At any rate, he had his office, with his name on the door, a hundred or so adoring students, mainly female, and a collection of archaeological artefacts gathering dust on the shelf.

He was honestly surprised to see Mary Kirkish again. He had thought that she had disappeared back into the main PIX pool of project-work. He supposed that it was the way of all things bright and fascinating: the biotechs, the guards, the systems techs, everyone, in short, needed a bit of a break. And Mars wasn't precisely Terra Nova, what with one quarter of the population below the Earth Alliance poverty line and the domes still under threat. He wasn't surprised that most of the others had scattered; he thought that he would have liked to go someplace else himself. He'd tried, even; it was Denni, in truth, who'd kept him here.

"Where are you going to go, then? Earth? Or some other forsaken place, to live out of a suitcase for months at a time? And what am I supposed to tell Sarah in the meantime?"

You could come with me, he'd told her, lying.

She'd laughed in his face. "You go, then. Go if you need to. But I'm staying right here, and so is Sarah."

So, he'd stayed, mainly because she was right: there wasn't anywhere for him to go. Wherever you go, there you are, his mother had used to say, God rest her soul. And wherever he went, his brain went with him. And his dreams.

Especially his dreams.

("Well," Denni said, finding a pack of the REM-less pills in his bag. "This explains a lot."

It's not like that, he'd wanted to say, not at all. It's the opposite of what you think; I'm not taking too many, I'm not taking enough, I can't make the dreams stop without them.

His mouth stayed stubbornly closed as if speech, too, was another thing he had forgotten.)

"Where have I been? I suppose I've just been around," Kirkish said at last. "Keeping out of sight, mostly."

That caught his attention. "What do you mean?"

She lowered her voice. "Psi Corps."

"What about them?"

"Haven't you noticed what's been happening? Eric Lustig, Yasser Onweni - the rest of them -"

"What about them?" he asked helplessly. He didn't recognise either of those names.

"They were biotechs. Both of them died recently."

"I'm sorry. How did it happen?"

Kirkish waved a hand to indicate the universe. "Oh, they made it look like industrial accidents, but I know what happened. They wouldn't stay put, they wouldn't cooperate, so Psi Corps killed them."

Silence. "Oh," Morden said at last, at a loss as to what to say other than that. She's gone off the deep end, and no mistake. "Are you sure?"

"Yes!" And she launched into a detailed explanation - with visibly restrained hand-waving - as to how she knew, for a fact, that Psi Corps had killed two insignificant biotechs whose names Morden had never bothered to learn.

It's a hell of a shame to lose Kirkish this way, he thought. She was always a bit on the wary side, but I didn't think that she'd slip into out-and-out paranoia. "Mmmmm," he said in all the right places, and otherwise tuned her out. His eyes skipped across her form, taking her in and weighting it all and judging her in one swift movement. She was tired, yes, and possibly sleep-deprived. She'd also lost some weight, and as she'd never been precisely plump, it showed in the thinnest of her limbs. Her wrist bones jutted out like wounded birds, all angles and thin, papery skin. She sipped her coffee too quickly, as if trying to get it all inside before she'd have to dash off again; he did not doubt that she ate the same way.

"I'm leaving," she said, the coffee leaving a thin film against her upper lip. She licked it away anxiously, her tongue darting out. "I was passing through Mars - sometimes you have to backtrack - and I wanted to warn you. You're safe as long as you stay still, somewhere visible. They don't worry about you then. They don't have to pin you down anywhere. And the Mars councillors - you're visible - they'd notice if you disappeared. But -" she tore another packet of sugar open and dumped the contents into her half-empty mug. "Just in case you do decide to leave soon." She said it as if it had some significance. "I wanted to warn you."

"All right," he said. "That was very kind of you, Mary." He knew better than to pretend collusion when he did not believe her, but neither was he confrontational. "I can't say that I've noticed anything, but, as you say, I've been planet-bound since the dig. If I decide to leave, I'll keep your warning in mind." He called a waiter over, and ordered them each a sandwich.

Mad, he thought, walking home afterwards. She's gone completely mad. And how had he appeared to her? He'd drifted off at some point, only for a second or two, but enough to catch her notice. It was a tiny moment of inattention, but it nagged at him. A few months previously, his attention wouldn't have wandered. Was this, then, the first signs of inertia, of a loss of intellect of - God help him - age? He had been feeling run-down as of late; older than his years would indicate. Maybe it was the ship's influence, he thought, not for the first time. All that radiation - it could have had long-term effects… And if it had affected him - his concentration, his focus, his ability to think about his lexicographic research, or Sarah's birthday, or Denni's day, or anything other than the fragging ship…! - of course, of course it could have affected Mary Kirkish. No, more than that - it was even more likely that it had. That it had affected all of them, to varying degrees. That those biotechs had been clumsy, yes, and so those accidents had come about; that Kirkish's natural wariness of Psi Corps had been amplified to out-and-out paranoia...

That his own mind was now a foreign place. It was more than possible. In fact, it was beginning to look likely.

*

He took the long way home. He was increasingly choosing this path, even though it added at least an hour to his journey. He got home past dinnertime, surprised to discover that Denni wasn't there. Sarah had already been collected from school, and the sitter was helping her put various multi-coloured blocks together and knock them down again.

"Daddy!" Sarah squealed and jumped up. She ran to him and he fell to one knee, arms outstretched. Shyness suddenly overtook her; she little hid her face in her hands, stopping just short of his grasp. "Daddy?"

"Hi honey," he pulled her in, tucking her against one hip. She wriggled, evidently uncomfortable, and turned her face away when he tried to give her a kiss. "How was school?"

She mumbled something against his neck and kicked, wriggling desperately.

"All right. I guess you don't want to be held today." He set her down and off she went, hiding behind David's shoulder. "Hello, David," he belatedly remembered to say. The sitter was so quiet and kept Sarah so studiously occupied that often Morden could forget that either of them were in the room. "How was she today?"

"Good, Dr Morden," David said, and smoothed Sarah's unruly caramel hair. "Very happy, very inquisitive. They were doing some finger-painting in class, she was very excited. I don't know why she's become so shy so suddenly."

She doesn't like strangers, Morden thought but didn't say. "Well, that's fine. I can take over - you can have the rest of the evening off, if you like."

David didn't wait to be told twice. "Thank you."

Sarah hid behind a sofa for a full hour and refused to come out, only emerging when she heard her mother's voice in the hallway. "Argh! Bureaucrats!" Denni raged, stomping into the main living area. She seemed surprised to see him; expecting the sitter, probably.

Morden tried to look sympathetic. "Bad day?"

Denni slammed her bag down on the table. "Engineers!" She fumed.

Morden raised an eyebrow at that, vaguely alarmed at the use of one of Denni's worst epithets. "What happened?" He asked tentatively, folding his paper.

"You would not believe the day I've had! These paper-pushers wouldn't know a good idea if it jumped up and bit them. I was talking to Elena Yan about starting up the -"

Whatever Denni had to say was cut off by the quiet beep of the incoming call. He looked at her apologetically. "Hold that rant."

He toggled the main comm. switch and settled in front of it. "Morden, go." A familiar face resolved out of the opening static. "Aspen!"

"Hello, Morden," Aspen's bearded face smiled back. "I hoped you'd still be at the same place."

"My God. I haven't spoken to anyone from the team in months, and now two in one day!"

"Ah, so she contacted you too, hmm?" Aspen raised an eyebrow. "Yes, we do seem to have rather lost Mary to her demons. But that's enough of that; I didn't call interstellar to reminisce."

"Oh?"

"No. Listen - I've got a job for you, if you're interested."

Morden could feel his eyebrows climbing to his hairline in response to both Aspen's words and to Denni's stare, drilling its way into his left shoulder blade. "What sort of job?"

"Set your comm. to receive - have a look at these." Glyphs filled the screen, carved into the familiar stone monuments; some into what looked like walls; some into - God - some across the bruised, blue-black skin that seemed to pattern the inside of his eyelids. Aspen smiled. "Look familiar?"

He forgot to get back to Denni's bad day that evening, too busy looking the prelim data over, and by the time he remembered the next day, there was no point in inquiring. He rather thought that asking might make it a great deal worse.

*