Thousands of images flashed through Spider's brain, too fast to follow any of them. He didn't even get impressions, just a smear of colours, shapes, voices, and sensations, none of which lingered. For a moment he was so overwhelmed he wasn't even aware of his body, and when the real world came back, it hit him like a falling tree. He toppled over the catwalk railing and fell into the hydroponic water below.
Somewhere nearby, a woman screamed.
The roots tangled around Spider's limbs like a nest of snakes, as if they were tentacles trying to drag him down to drown. He fought his way back to the surface and grabbed one particularly thick step that had grown around one of the catwalk supports, using it to haul himself back up to the walkway. With his head out of the water, sounds flooded in. Alarms were blaring. Lights were flickering. Electricity was sparking and whining. Machinery was making unhealthy noises.
"Get down from there!" a male voice was shouting from somewhere below and behind Spider. "Get down!"
"I've got you!" a woman said from the opposite side, just above and ahead of him. "Give me your hand."
Spider was seeing spots, as if he'd looked directly into the sun. He couldn't see who was speaking, but she sounded close. He put out a hand in the direction of the voice and was greeted by a startled gasp. His searching fingers did not find any help, but did find the ballister and the root wound around it. Using that, Spider dragged himself back up over the railing, and landed in a heap on the cold metal. His vision was still pulsing with ghostly yellow-grey lights as he raised his head to try to see what was happening.
There was a woman standing over him. He got a glimpse of red pigtails and a white lab coat. Most of her face was obscured behind the reflection of the ceiling in her breathing mask, but he could see her mouth, hanging open in shock and horror. She was staring at him as if he were some kind of monster, something she'd never seen the like of before. Spider shook his head, trying to clear his vision, and she reacted by staggering back, landing on her backside on the catwalk and then scrambling backwards on all fours, still gaping.
"Get down!" the male voice repeated from below. "Miss Au..."
He was interrupted by the emergency doors rumbling open, and the sound of dozens of footsteps as soldiers surged in for the second time that day. Spider got to his feet, fighting to ignore the taste of blood in the back of his mouth and the persistent ringing in his ears, and saw that there were dozens of them. Several surrounded Dr. Tham at his console, ordering him to put his hands on his head and get down on the floor. He obeyed. More climbed the ladder to seize the young woman, who was still looking at Spider in astonishment as they dragged her down to the ground.
Spider hadn't realized there was a second entrance to the hydroponic chamber at the other end of the catwalk, but there must have been, because a moment later he found himself being grabbed from behind. He struggled free of at least three sets of hands, and ran in the direction the woman had been taken instead, leaping from the top of the ladder to land hard, just beyond where the soldiers were forcing her onto her knees. She let out a surprised shriek.
A similar cry came from the other side. Spider looked and saw Dr. Tham... or at least, it looked like Dr. Tham. The man staring back at him had the same round face, the same shiny bald head, and was wearing the same white coat. Instead of having his head fulyl shaved, however, he now had a fringe of hair around the sides, and under the coat he was wearing a black shirt with a zipper up the front, instead of the green one with the sweater vest. He, too, stared at Spider as if looking at something beyond his comprehension.
"Địt mẹ!" he exclaimed.
Spider turned towards the door, hoping to run, but it was far too late for that. A dozen men and women surrounded him. He hissed at them and threw himself against the nearest person, knocking the man over into two colleagues, but before he could get up somebody had pressed a stun gun into Spider's lower back. He collapsed to the ground, twitching and yelling.
Somebody took the collar of the white lab coat Spider was still wearing and yanked it down over his shoulders, rolling the garment up to tie around his wrists. Two more people dragged him back to his feet, while a third pulled the beanie off his head and got a handful of his dreadlocks, forcing him to raise his head. From there he could see on his right, the woman with the pigtails kneeling with her back to him while a soldier pointed a gun at her head – her face wasn't visible, but her shoulders were shaking with sobs. On Spider's left, Dr. Tham was pleading with his own captors to let his assistant go.
In between the two, people moved out of the way to clear a path to the door, and the woman called Da Silva strode into the room, furious.
Like Dr. Tham, Major Da Silva looked... different. She still had straight dark hair pulled up under her cap, but she was now wearing pearls instead of red gems in her ears, and her uniform had changed. All the uniforms had changed. Instead of the dusty green camouflage Spider was used to seeing on human soldiers, these people were dressed in dark, mottled shades of teal blue. It would probably blend in better on Pandora than the usual colour... had some new regulation been put in place during the afternoon?
Da Silva saw Spider, and stopped short. She looked him over from his bare feet to his Omatikaya loincloth to his chest to his face, as if she'd never seen him before, and then said, "who the hell are you?"
"You met me earlier!" he protested.
"No, I'm pretty sure I'd remember meeting a guy dressed like George of the Jungle," she said. "What's your name?"
"Spider Socorro. I'm here with Quaritch."
Another soldier forced Spider's hand onto a scanner, and then handed the machine to Da Silva. She waited while it searched for his fingerprints. The display cycled through files, and then offered three possible matches, each with no more than a 45% probability.
How was that possible? Spider had been fingerprinted when they'd first brought him back to Bridgehead, and his prints had matched the ones on file from Hell's Gate. He'd used his handprint to gain access to the dining facilities. Why was it suddenly missing?
Tham was being escorted out of the room, still begging his captors to free the young woman. "She had nothing to do with it!" he insisted, as soldiers dragged the two of them into the hallway. "She kept telling me this was a terrible idea! I made her do it! You can watch the security footage, I promise you!" His voice was different, too – where he'd had a heavy accent before, he now sounded like an American. He continued to shout as they took him away down the hall.
Da Silva handed the fingerprint scanner back to an underling and shook her head. "Shut this place down – properly this time. Looks like we'll need guards around the clock. Get me all the cameras... and get a cheek swab from George." She pointed a thumb at Spider. "If his fingerprints won't tell us who he is, maybe his DNA will."
People moved to start taking the lab apart, while Spider was frog-marched out of the room after Tham and the woman. The hallway outside was almost as chaotic as it had been after the initial incident that morning, but now instead of scientists fleeing, it was all people coming in. Soldiers were swarming, bringing with them all kinds of unfamiliar and complicated equipment. Some of the machines were so big they required carts or robotic walkers to move them.
Most of the alarms had been silenced, but now a new one went off at the west end of the hall, and Spider looked up. When he'd lived at Hell's Gate, that had been an emergency exit, opening to the outside. He was still wearing a mask and so were his escorts, but the men holding him automatically reached to double-check that theirs were sealed before the door could open. That gave Spider the opportunity to twist out of their arms and run for that exit. Quite where he'd go after getting out, he didn't know – he'd used to know every hiding place for kilometres around from playing with the Sully kids, but those were all destroyed now – but the point was to get there.
Before he could reach it, the door banged open, and a Na'vi man forced his way in. Under the circumstances, this was somebody Spider was unusually happy to see.
"Quaritch!" he shouted.
Quaritch did not appear to hear him. He was forcing his way forward, and anybody who didn't get out of the way simply got mowed down. The same would have happened to Spider if he hadn't pressed himself against the wall to let the man pass by. Quaritch did not even look down at Spider as he passed, heading for the lab door.
"Quaritch!" Spider repeated. "Over here!"
Again, he was ignored as the man ducked into the lab and vanished from sight.
The soldiers had caught up with Spider. He struggled, but one of them brandished the stun gun in his face, and he had to let them drag him down to the brig. There, they held onto him while scraping the inside of his cheeks for live cells, and then threw him into a cell of the other type.
This wasn't like the room he'd been assigned at Bridgehead. This was like the place they'd locked him up when they'd first brought him back – a tiny space with one uncomfortable bed, a toilet, a sink, and no windows or privacy. As soon as the soldiers let go of him, Spider turned to try forcing the door open again, but he wasn't fast enough. The transparent panel slid into place and a buzzer announced the locks engaging.
Spider knew it was useless, but he hammered on the polycarbonate with both fists, shouting at them. The soldiers backed up a bit, as if he were a wild animal they were afraid of, but then they stopped, and just watched as he raged at them.
Finally, his hands bruised and his voice hoarse, Spider gave up and sat down on the bed. The soldiers stayed where they were, and only moved when two new people arrived. These were even more soldiers in the dark teal fatigues – a black man with his head shaved, and a woman with straight brown hair in a ponytail. The woman was holding a holopad.
"Hello in there!" said the man, rapping on the window.
Spider gave him the finger.
The soldier's eyebrows quirked, but he didn't comment. "What's your name?"
"Spider."
"Spider?"
"Miles. Miles Javier Socorro."
The man looked over his companion's shoulder at the holopad display. She shook her head.
"How long have you been on Pandora?" the man wanted to know.
"I was born here," Spider told him. "Right here, at Hell's Gate."
"That a fact? Who are your parents?"
"Miles Quaritch and Paz Socorro. They're both dead. I was here with Quaritch's recombinant, along with Lyle Wainfleet and Geoffrey Baxter." Even if for some reason they didn't have the records of his parents – maybe the accident in the lab had caused computer problems, messing up the records? – they must know who the recoms were. They were impossible to miss, and Quartich, at least, had just been there.
The woman scrolled through a list on the holopad, and then shook her head again.
As useless as he knew it to be, Spider nearly started yelling and pounding on the window again. He did not, however, because he realized there was somebody else he needed to bring up. There were at least two people at Hell's Gate who definitely knew who he was.
"Nash and Mary McKosker!" he said. "They know me! They brought me up after my parents died."
The holopad chimed, at the same moment as the woman looked up and said, "they exist."
"They do?" The man looked at the display again, as the couple's pictures popped up. "That's a start. Get them in here."
"I think they're already here," the woman said, looking over her shoulder at the door. "They're the couple who were demanding their daughter back."
"Their daughter?" asked Spider. The McKoskers didn't have a daughter.
"Somebody go and get them," the man ordered, ignoring Spider.
Two of the other soldiers left the room. A few minutes passed by in silence, while the woman scrolled through more information, and the man just watched Spider like a banshee with its eye on a hexapede. Spider himself paced up and down the room, trying to resist the urge to start yelling again. They were more likely to be nice to him if he stayed calm, but it was hard.
The door opened again, and the soldiers returned with the McKoskers behind them.
Both were in their pyjamas, and it seemed like they'd been doing some personal grooming. Mary must have dyed her hair, because the grey Spider had noticed earlier was no longer visible, and Nash had shaved off his moustache, which he'd never done in all the time Spider could remember. Those were strange things for them to have been doing in the middle of the night, but it didn't matter – other than that, they were as familiar as they'd been that morning, and this time, Spider was delighted to see it. He ran up and put his palms on the window.
The couple stopped short, shocked.
"Nash!" said Spider. "Mary! Get me out of here."
Mary took a step backwards, and Nash put his hands on her shoulders protectively. They stared for a moment, and then Nash turned to the man who'd been questioning Spider and said, "what the hell is this?"
"He says you're his foster parents," the man replied.
Nash and Mary clearly didn't know how to react to that. They looked Spider over in undisguised horror, and Nash said, "he looks like he was raised in a zoo."
"You don't know him, then," said the soldier.
"We've never seen him before in our lives," Nash replied.
Now Spider banged on the window again. "I was in your quarters today!" he shouted. "You said I was always welcome!"
Mary turned away. "Please," she said, "can we just get Catherine and go home?"
"Of course, Mrs. McKosker," said another soldier. "This way, please." He put a hand on Mary's back, and escorted the two of them out of the room again. Nash looked back over his shoulder with an expression of disgust, as if Spider were some kind of mangy animal.
"What happened to trying to be a family?" Spider hollered after them.
The door slid shut behind them.
Spider sat down heavily on the bed, surprised by just how betrayed he felt. He didn't like the McKoskers and they often seemed like they didn't like him, either... but they'd always been unwilling to give up on at least what they thought was best for him. For them to summarily disavow him like that, to not even talk to him... that hurt. Was it a punishment for him sneaking out in the middle of the night? Usually they were happy to settle for a lecture and a grounding.
When Spider looked up again, everybody was gone – not just the McKoskers, but the soldiers, too. Not that it mattered. There'd been no way to escape the cell at Bridgehead, and this one was even smaller and barer. He just had to hope that Quaritch would come for him... but Quaritch had walked right past him like he wasn't there? Had he just not heard? Or would he, too, start claiming that he didn't know who Spider even was?
And to think, the McKoskers just being nice had made him feel unbalanced. This was way worse.
He paced up and down the little room some more, and tried to move the bed to see if he could use a part of it to wedge the door open next time somebody came in. It was bolted to the floor and wouldn't budge. He checked under the mattress and in the toilet tank in the dim, desperate hope that some previous inmate had left something behind that he could use to break out. There was nothing.
It felt like hours passed, but there was no clock in the room and the lighting never changed, so Spider had no way to be sure. Eventually, though a group of soldiers returned to stand outside his cell. Among them, this time, was Major Da Silva.
Spider didn't bother standing up this time. He just sat there on the floor, glaring at her through his dreadlocks.
She studied him for a moment, and then said, "Mr. Socorro."
Spider didn't answer her.
"Mr. Socorro," she repeated. "You don't exist. Your fingerprints, your DNA, they're not in any database. We cross-checked with Bridgehead and three other outposts. The people you say are your parents never existed, and I'm told the people who raised you don't remember you. So... what are we going to do with you?"
She sounded almost as if she felt sorry for him... but what got Spider's attention was that at least one of the things she'd just said was not true.
"What about Quaritch?" he demanded. "He exists. I saw him!"
"Did you?" she asked. "Where?"
"He came barging in from outside and ran down the hall to the lab," Spider said. "I called to him, but he didn't hear me."
Da Silva frowned thoughtfully. "Where do you think you are, Mr. Socorro?"
"Hell's Gate," Spider said.
"And does Hell's Gate look like you remember it?"
"Yes." Not that Spider had seen very much of it... at least, not since people started saying they didn't know him. "What's going on?"
"I don't know if it's a good idea for me to answer that," said Da Silva. "Not yet, anyway. I think it's best for everybody if we keep you under our protection until we've got a better handle on this situation."
Spider wasn't fooled by that for a moment. "You're gonna keep me locked up."
"You're safer that way," Da Silva told him.
"Safe from what?" he asked. "I want to talk to Quaritch!"
Da Silva shook her head. "If you mean who I think, then he's one of the things we're protecting you from. I'm sorry that we have to keep you in here, but I suspect that if I put you somewhere less secure, you're going to vanish on me, and I don't think we can afford that. We'll try to make you a little more comfortable, and see if we can get everybody some answers." She turned to go.
Spider had one idea left. "Baxter!" he said.
Da Silva stopped. "Who?"
"Baxter," Spider repeated. "The other recom – his name is Geoffrey Baxter. Dr. Tham wanted him to make tsaheylu with the plant, but something happened when he touched it. Can I talk to him?"
"No," said Da Silva. "You cannot."
"Why not?"
She had to think about it for a moment. "In his case, it's because nobody can talk to him. He's dead." And with that, she left the room. Spider had no idea if what she'd just told him were true or not.
Somebody else brought Spider some blankets and pillows for the bed. A slit opened in the transparent door so he could hand these through, and then closed behind them. The man then changed a setting on the cell so that the window turned cloudy white, allowing some privacy.
"If you need anything, let us know," he said, and then the lights went out.
Although he was exhausted, Spider didn't feel like sleeping. He felt like if he did, something else insane would happen and he would miss it. He did eventually lie down, though, simply because there was nothing else to do. He left the blankets and pillows on the floor, lay down on the bare mattress, and closed his eyes...
... then opened them wide again, as startling images danced in front of them. For a moment Spider lay there, breathing hard and blinking into the darkness. The visions had appeared to him like an afterimage from staring at something too long, except that he hadn't been staring at anything. Was it just a symptom of too much stress and confusion after not enough sleep? He closed his eyes again.
It returned immediately, a slew of different sensations. He saw roots, moving and twisting themselves into loose soil like fingers digging into it. A moment later, they were fingers, both pink human ones and blue Na'vi, squeezing the damp dirt. Spider could feel the cool moisture of it, the grit getting under his fingernails. He could smell the earthy scent.
Then there were more: people and animals, some of which he knew and some he didn't. Humans and Na'vi in different moods, some welcoming and some hostile, some familiar and some strangers, some familiar and yet impossible to place. Water. Earth. Music. The shimmering tendrils of the Tree of Souls. The heady scent of ko'onspul flowers. There was a sense of a puzzle he was supposed to be solving, a task he had to complete, but Spider didn't know what that might be. He didn't know where to begin.
He opened his eyes again. Now there were afterimages, pulsing phosphenes snaking across his vision as if he were seeing the veins in his own retinas. What was that? Spider felt oddly as if he'd seen all these things before, but how could that be when he didn't know what half of them were? Were they the things he'd briefly see and totally failed to comprehend when he'd touched the roots?
Was that what tsaheylu was like?
When Spider did finally manage to fall asleep, the same images haunted his dreams, mixing with more familiar nighttime visions and the events of the day into intense and distressing nightmares. He was riding a banshee – he often dreamed about that, but the dream had never been about trying to catch somebody who was falling. Who was he reaching out for? Was that Dr. Tham's assistant? Was it his fault she'd fallen? Then he was in the water, with the roots dragging him down – but then they weren't dragging him into water, they were pulling him into the earth, while giants all around him were digging their fingers into it.
He woke with a start when somebody turned the lights back on. Spider had slept very badly, and he sat up slowly, rubbing at his itching eyes and trying to clear his head. The lights seemed blindingly bright, but it was possible to make out that the panel had turned clear again, and somebody was standing outside.
"Breakfast,"s aid a voice.
It took a few more moments of blinking for Spider to make his tired eyes focus, and then suddenly he was wide awake. His visitor was not one of the soldiers. It was Dr. Tham's mysterious assistant.
Her face was visible now. She was small and wiry, with red hair worn in long pigtails that fell in front of her shoulders, bright blue eyes, and fair skin spattered with countless faint freckles. Last night she'd been wearing a white lab coat. Today that was gone, and she was dressed in a blouse with green flowers on it and blue jeans. The surprising thing, however, was just how young she was – no older than Spider himself, possibly even younger.
Why did she look so familiar? It was more than just having seen her yesterday and then having her appear in a dream. Possibly she had the same feeling about him. She was no longer staring at him as if he were some kind of weird bug, but her head was tilted slightly to one side as if she were trying to figure him out. That, too, was oddly familiar, and yet weirdly wrong. She shouldn't look like that.
"Breakfast," she repeated, holding up a covered tray.
"Thanks," said Spider.
The slit in the panel slid open again, and she passed the food in to him. When he took the lid off the tray, he found a bacon and egg sandwich, hash browns, apple slices, and a glass of orange juice. The smells made his stomach gurgle. He sat down on the bed, then paused and looked up at the girl again. Was she just gonna stand there and watch him eat?
She seemed to realize she was staring, and quickly looked away. "Um," she said. "Possibly weird question. Do you know me?"
"I don't think so," said Spider, although he was oddly unsure. Her voice, a little deep for a girl's, gave him that same sense of uncanny familiarity as her face. He'd heard it before, it just wasn't quite right somehow. "Should I?"
"Maybe." Her eyes darted to the right, then to the left. "What's your name?"
"Miles Socorro. People call me Spider. What's yours?" Maybe that would help him figure it out. Maybe she was somebody he had met, briefly, and that was why he felt like he recognized her.
"Catherine Augustine," she replied. "People call me Kitty."
Spider jumped like he'd gotten an electric shock, spilling orange juice in his lap. Augustine. Was that it? Did she remind him of... she did look like Dr. Augustine, kind of. Spider knew the woman's face from her logs. This girl had the same colouring, and although her face was softer where Dr. Augustine's was made of sharp angles, the resemblance was undeniable once pointed out. But that wasn't half the kick in the gut that the nickname Kitty was. If it hadn't been for the short I sound...
That was it. She reminded him of Kiri, and now that Spider had put that into words, it was so obvious he couldn't believe he hadn't recognized it right away. The way she tilted her head, the way her eyes moved, even the slightly gawky way she stood... if Kiri had been an avatar, this was exactly what her human driver would have looked like.
What was this?
He tried to think of something to say. The first thing he managed was, "Augustine? Like Dr. Grace Augustine?"
"Yeah." The girl nodded. "That's my Mom. You know her?"
"She's alive?" Would that be the weirdest thing Spider had heard today? He wasn't even sure.
"No! She died before... it's complicated," Kitty said. She thought for a moment. "You know who she is, and you know she's dead... but you think she might not be?"
"I don't know," said Spider. "I have no idea what's going on. Nobody here knows me, even the people who are supposed to!"
"Like who?"
"Like the McKoskers! Yesterday they were saying they were sorry and they wanted to be a family, today they say they don't know who I am! Or even Dr. Tham and Major Da Silva. They both met me earlier in the day, and then suddenly they don't recognize me. Quaritch walked right by me even when I called for him."
"You mean Kavuk?"
"What?" asked Spider. She spoke the word as if it were a name, but it wasn't – it was the Na'vi word for betrayal. That was definitely what Spider had felt when the McKoskers didn't know him, but what did she mean by it?
Kitty shook her head. "I have a hypothesis," she said.
"Okay," said Spider, and waited for it.
"I've been helping Dr. Tham with his root sample for a few months now," she said. "It seems to be communicating with something, but not with us, and as Mom understood the functioning of the mycorrhizal complex, it shouldn't be able to exchange signals with something unless there's macro-scale physical contact." She laced her fingers together, in imitation of tendrils joining for tsaheylu. "Dr. Tham has evidence of quantum tunneling behaviour in the nanotubules, though, and some of the proteins are polarized in a way that suggests they could be used to store q-bits – so I thought, what if it's communicating with another universe, one that is tied to the mycorrhizae? What if the signals are able to tunnel through an alternate reality to keep in touch with the bulk eco-consciousness?"
Spider blinked at her. "What?" he repeated.
Kitty looked sheepish. "Sorry. I was speaking Science, wasn't I?"
"Is that what that was?"
She tried again. "I can't prove it, obviously, but I think the plants are talking to themselves in a parallel universe. They can't do that without relying on the nonzero probability that the wave function will propagate in..." she paused and took a deep breath, holding up a finger as if to scold herself. "In quantum physics stuff can disappear here and reappear over there just because Why Not. I think the sample is making its thoughts disappear from this universe and reappear in another one to get around the fact that it's cut off from the rest of the jungle. Okay?"
"Okay," said Spider. That made at least relative sense.
"Right," Kitty nodded, relieved. "I think it did the same thing to you." She looked down for a moment. "Does that sound crazy?"
"No," said Spider right away, and he meant it. An alternate universe? Earlier in the day, the McKoskers welcoming him back had made him feel like he'd fallen into another world... the McKoskers claiming they didn't know him only hours later seemed even more so. Da Silva telling him he didn't exist, and all the slight but weird little differences in the people... on the one hand, yes, the idea of literally falling into an alternate universe was crazy, but on the other, what else could this possibly be?
Maybe it was weird that he immediately believed it, but maybe it also had something to do with who was telling him. Because if this were an alternate universe, then Catherine Augustine might not just look like Kiri.
"One more question," said Kitty. "Just to be totally sure. Do you know... his name is Tsamtxín, but nobody calls him that. They call him Tslikxyu."
The word referred to any of several crawling creatures, bugs and lizards... or spiders. Spider felt his stomach turn inside-out. If this universe's Kiri were human, then who was he? "I don't know him."
She nodded. "Good."
"Good?"
"Yeah." She smiled. "If you knew him, then my hypothesis would be wrong. If you don't... then I think I know what happened to him, and how to get him back."
Spider knew where this was headed. "Is your hypothesis that he's where I came from, and if I touch that plant again, it'll switch us back?" That seemed pretty straightforward. Could it really be that easy?
"Exactly!" said Kitty.
"Great! When can we try?"
She took a step back. "Not now... I'm not supposed to be down here. Nobody's allowed back into the lab right now anyway, but I think I know somebody who can help us with that. I just need a chance to talk to him. I promise," she added, "I'll be back as soon as I can." She started to back away.
"Wait," said Spider. Something had occurred to him. Whatever it was his alternate would find at Hell's Gate, it was not going to include Kiri. "What if your friend doesn't have a version of you there to help him?"
She paused. "I don't know. I guess we'll see."