Dead Astronauts Read online

  The probability was that they would never know. The way most never knew half of anything and had to be content.

  “Catch me if you can,” the blue fox sometimes said to Moss in joyous reverie. “Catch me if you can.”

  But they never could.

  v.

  the first glimpse

  was always the most fatal

  Only Chen had ever worked for the Company. Some version of it he had left far behind on the map. And so, the first glimpse of the Company building each time was always the most fatal for him. The trauma of it had been known to pull him apart at the seams, it left to Moss to hold him together, for he had the power to dissolve into the sky almost against his will, leave Grayson and Moss on their own, nothing ever his problem again.

  Before the tidal pool rules, the three had smashed in the front door of the Company. They had laid siege. They had attacked from afar, through proxies. They had lured Company lackeys into sabotage. They had led uprisings of biotech. They had done this and they had done that. They had been wounded and changed and poisoned and defeated too many times, only got out because of Moss. All the Mosses. Could only regroup because of her.

  Had to wait. Try more circuitous ways. Come back much later. After the damage had mostly been done. Irredeemable. Irreparable. Yet they still meant to repair it.

  Each time: What next? What now?

  Each time, the obstacle seemed more insurmountable.

  Chen: “Couldn’t you find a future that’s a paradise, where we could live out our days together?”

  But that was a joke. Because Chen knew none of those timelines contained a Moss, a Chen, a Grayson. Because those timelines did not exist. The Company had tick-engorged itself across all timelines.

  This was the problem. You could try to live out your days and years in some remote corner, but even that place would be blighted by the Company, by what happened in the City. They would find you, in time. You would be reminded of your own unwillingness to fight against your fate. The three would become one and one and one, and then none.

  Grayson: “There will be a next time.”

  Moss never replied. She would be thinking of what she had received from Grayson because she loved her, too much. How without Grayson she would not have known to resist. Because Moss had been too close in, too close to Charlie X and, by extension, the dark bird. How Grayson had been like original sin, how Moss was now more fully herself than before.

  That they might next succeed. That failure might no longer be about a semblance of the future. That, in the end, they were three, not an army.

  * * *

  The Company always looked basically the same: whether an enormous white egg or a vast gray triangle or a ziggurat or a series of spires, like a fractured cathedral. Holding ponds for biotech rejects always hunched up against the side, a convenient hell or purgatory, full of dying life, and then lines of invisible defenses across the wasteland beyond. Sometimes things flew through the air that should not have been able to fly, molecules of iridescent blue and green that scintillated and changed shape, ever vigilant.

  This version retained the white-egg structure but had curved lines running through the architecture so that it resembled a giant egg slicer with a metal egg sliced within it. A lazy riddle interrogating itself about some other, unrelated question.

  This version had propagated the holding ponds across the entire expanse of what was normally desert, and still was, in a sense.

  “How did It escape?” Grayson would ask as they stared at the Company.

  “We never escaped; It was always there.”

  “Can It be put to the good?” Grayson would ask.

  “No, It cannot. It must be burned to the ground.”

  “But could we persuade It?”

  “Only if you could find a human heart to persuade.”

  “Only if you could find something other than a human heart.”

  “What will replace It if we succeed?”

  “Anything is better.”

  But without the Company, they could not have fought the Company.

  But this made them at times suspicious of their own three selves.

  But they had no choice now but to go on.

  In this version, birdsong filled the City, but it was just an echo of nanites created to give the illusion of bird life through ghost calls.

  “What will you miss?” Grayson would ask, already knew the answer.

  I’ll miss you.

  vi.

  no one should feel responsible

  for the whole world

  Grayson’s past lay very far from home, always sending data and signals without knowing if they made it back. Just one of three vessels forging ahead. Two destroyed by asteroid strike. Her crew dead from all the ways space could murder you: lack of resources, bad decisions, disease, freak injury, the cosmic scale, sun flares, infighting.

  Reaching the outermost point, or at least the farthest Grayson could bear. In a suit, looking at rock, rock underfoot. Caressed the outline with one thick glove. Unsure if the formation was the fossil of some alien intelligence, the suggestion of a helmet, of a face. Or just a coincidence, an outline she wanted to see. Would never know.

  Feeling in an irrational way that she was looking at her fate if she continued outward bound. Weary. Sick of no grass, no trees. No horizon other than the dark or artificial light. Paltry samples. Paltry evidence.

  Knowing that humanity was alone. That even a sea of water could not produce advanced life-forms unless the exact conditions were right. That she didn’t in the end care for the microscopic depiction of life. That bacteria warring with bacteria could not evoke in her any kind of awe, that she should stop taking samples of water traces.

  She tried to feel for a tremor or warmth in the stone beneath her glove, but the fabric was too thick for anything but the pulse of her own breathing.

  Time to return.

  Only to then spend a century finding her way home, through all the strange wormholes in the universe. Come to think of it as a useless mission. Come to think of herself as a ghost during that time, lost among the stars and star matter, haunting herself, haunting dead space, haunted by her many selves. Left behind: the dead crew, buried beside the fossil that might be in her head.

  Did she deserve to live after the death of her crew? She had no answer, had decided for no good reason that the atoms of which she was made were not yet ready to disperse to form someone or something else.

  Thus, Grayson wandered alone and in her own thoughts, at times in danger and at times held in thrall to such cosmic places full of wary (cold) wonder that she could not find the words, and so words fell away from her for a time … because they were useless.

  Fell away along with so much else that by the time she found the moon base, she would not have recognized rescuers as fellow human beings.

  If there had been anyone living on the moon base.

  If it wasn’t clear all the astronauts were dead.

  If she hadn’t known home still lay below her.

  * * *

  Grayson returned to a version of the City that held no life. The blackened, flame-eaten forms of people and animals were strewn everywhere. Caught in mid-flight or huddled in corners. The runneling of flesh that forced some flush against the ground, as if returning to the earth might save them.

  Fire and chemicals formed a kind of haze over the bodies, an unholy mist. Hiding and revealing and hiding again as it lingered over the dead. As if the Company had sent the mist to hide its crimes.

  Roamed that landscape in shock, unaware of just how much time had passed since she had gone into space. Roamed the City as an astronaut might, still in her suit, in constant contact with the life pod.

  Grayson had had perhaps a decade of solitude and air left at the base to look down on Earth’s ravaged face and try to convince herself that all would one day be better. But instead she’d returned to Earth, burning enough of the pod’s remaining fuel on reentry that she could never go back
. Her reasons were sound enough: She felt too alone, more alone than just being one person. Too much carnage in memoriam there.

  Eye reporting data dispassionate, she had sorted through the City’s wreckage much as a parent might go through a child’s messy room. A child missing or passed away. What was valuable. What had been cast aside. What overused. But unable to put it back in order.

  In space, discipline meant life or death. Here, there had been no penalty for freedom until the end.

  In the twisted remains of the Company building, Grayson found evidence that some had survived and fled west. So she had taken her life pod west, headed for the coast, adrift and aimless. Or maybe not so aimless. What Grayson had planned to do there, she did not know. Perhaps she would have explored until the pod’s fuel ran out. Perhaps she planned to die. Perhaps she had some better idea that never came to pass.

  But it was there she found a treasure, beneath the broken pink stucco archway that once greeted tourists to a marine amusement park. In its crumbling state, the broken-down cement walls and rising seas had conspired to create artificial tidal pools full of strange life.

  Tending to them was Moss.

  * * *

  Grayson found Moss early in the morning, the air fresh enough that she had taken off her helmet. Moss crouched by a tidal pool, cataloging its contents, regulating temperature, encouraging some organisms, discouraging others.

  Moss presented ethereal. She presented as naïve, with green eyes that blazed at Grayson as she turned from her crouch, startled at the appearance of this sudden visitor.

  Moss had not spoken to another person for months. Grayson recognized a fellow explorer; she saw in those tidal pools an infinity. Stars reflected there.

  “You don’t come back often,” Moss said. “Sometimes I search for you. But most times you die up there.”

  “I don’t know what that means.” Soon enough, she would.

  “And I’m sorry,” Moss said. Staring so nakedly at Grayson that she looked away.

  “For what?”

  “That you’ve seen so much you loved destroyed.”

  “Hasn’t everyone.”

  “You’re an astronaut,” Moss said, turning back to her work. “The scale is different.”

  “We each handle what we can.”

  “No one should have to feel responsible for the entire world.”

  Grayson had no answer to that. She considered Moss again. There was a hard edge to Moss, she decided, despite her empathy. What some might call hidden depths. Nothing simple about a person who loved the sea so much she couldn’t live without it. Nothing simple about Moss, as Grayson discovered over the next few weeks: cheerful, bright-eyed, optimistic. All of that was difficult; pessimism was easy.

  But Moss was purely tactical, tending to her tidal pools. Perhaps Grayson could convince her to be strategic. Once she understood the woman. Although, for a time, it was Moss who convinced Grayson. For a time, Grayson was content living by the sea.

  That first day, when Grayson couldn’t meet Moss’s gaze, she already knew she had fallen in love. Didn’t know Moss had taken human form that first day just for her.

  And, in the end, it was Moss who found the way, who had always known the way.

  Who was the way.

  vii.

  by these signs

  they knew they were home

  The Balcony Cliffs building was much as Chen remembered it—so much so that Moss and Grayson went on ahead to ensure that Chen did not already live there. But Chen’s old apartment was empty, rich with trash and giant silverfish. The silverfish danced and paraded and showed no fear, as if the three truly were ghosts.

  Moss didn’t consider the apartment abandoned. She had always loved seeing silverfish. While they offended Grayson’s sense of a recoverable future. It was a visceral reaction—her brain always reminded her that every living thing was sacred now. That any life was a good sign.

  “In the end, the silverfish shall inherit the Earth,” Moss said, content. “And they shall build towers in the desert and create a great civilization.” For that was one of the myths told in the City.

  But the point was: No Chen that they could find, and the fox had told Moss that no Moss grew here, in the City. Perhaps Moss grew farther afield, but this was no help to them.

  Grayson had yet to encounter another Grayson in their travels, felt an irrational sense of loneliness when the other two told tales of their doubles. Because what no Grayson meant was that she had perished across most timelines before she made it back to Earth. Because no Grayson could flourish out there for long. A gloved hand across unforgiving stone.

  Chen and Moss both welcomed finding the Balcony Cliffs’ swimming pool again, deserted and full of brackish water without much alive in it. Moss would fix that, not because it affected the mission but because it was in her nature. Because she always hoped to leave things behind that were better than she had found them.

  They would claim an empty apartment near the southern edge of the Balcony Cliffs, with an ease of exit toward the ravine that served as preamble to the Company lands. They would be silent and incognito and try to blend in with the others who lived in that space.

  “I lived here in mine.”

  “In mine, I never knew about this place. I lived in the ruined observatory. In the basement. Before I met Moss.”

  “I visited a friend here, once.”

  “You had a friend? Doubtful.”

  A sculpture of a giant bird. The corpse of a dog. A ruined dollhouse.

  By these signs they knew they were home.

  Their tenth City.

  * * *

  After the Balcony Cliffs’ attack beetles had been repulsed, after the scavengers received the message, the three regrouped behind a door blocking off a corridor near the southern entrance. Easily defendable. The door’s graffiti featured laughing foxes playing in the desert, each with but a single eye. Chen drew in the second eye on each to balance the equation. Moss reinforced the microbial sensors. There should be no tickle, no trace so light that Moss should not know it in time.

  Grayson distrusted the lack of resistance; they had repulsed multitudes in past versions. But though she trained her eye across beams, blueprints and ghost layers bursting across her line of sight … she could parse no threat beyond the usual.

  Still …

  “We should move up our timeline,” Grayson said.

  “But not blind. Not from panic.”

  “It’s not panic. It’s common sense.”

  “What if the fish is stubborn? What if the fish resists?”

  “I’ll go,” Chen said. “I will convince the fish.”

  “No,” Moss said. “It must be me or some part of me.”

  “Then I will stand watch.”

  “We must just go in and do what we came here to do.”

  “I’ll go,” Chen repeated, with the force of a slammed door.

  But the door had already been shut. Grayson and Moss ignored him.

  Soon they would need the blue fox to say yes to them. They would need to be sure the duck with the broken wing didn’t interfere.

  Soon, too, their faery mode might not be enough. Sometimes they had to wear their contamination suits. Depending on Moss’s senses, Grayson’s eye, Chen’s prophecies. What did contamination mean in this City, and which way did it flow?

  Each Company building was different. But recon had diminishing returns and too many risks. So they rehearsed their plan, with the aid of the old dollhouse found by Grayson (once again). The Company had seven floors, but it was still easier to visualize using dolls and furniture and rooms than diagrams scratched in the dirt. Some things never changed.

  They must get some version of Moss inside the Company building, to compromise the portal wall, to infiltrate the wall of globes.

  But they’d been wrong about one thing.

  Chen was still there. Chen had been lying in wait. Chen had never ambushed them before. Chen had either been there or not been
there. That was all.

  An evil star.

  Perhaps they should have aborted the mission right then, moved on, found another City, another Company.

  viii.

  like two people trying

  to become one person

  Chen ambushed Chen in a corridor distant from their apartment, near the swimming pool. Chen did not reach out to Moss or Grayson, who were already in the apartment; the danger seeped into their minds instead as an unease, took a long time to coalesce. Then burst forth as a star as radiant as Chen’s hand drifting bright across the horizon.

  It happened too often. This withholding by Chen. This self-sacrifice. They could not tell if this was out of loyalty to his other self, from his pervading guilt, or the simple logic that it made no sense for all three of them to risk harm. Yet each time was more dangerous, for it had come to seem the Company sensed their presence, their mission, on some subconscious level. Thus cast out all Chens, or, in some cases, killed them, snuffed them out. Or made them more belligerent.

  This Chen roared, brought down heavy fists on Chen’s back, cursing his own name, as Chen smashed into Chen’s midriff, already enraged by his termination.

  They remained close as wrestlers, clasping each other’s shoulders with meaty hands. The sweat, ache of muscles, and desperation that choreographed their movements. Chen was confident and resigned; he knew from prior experience he likely must fight to the death, as much as he wished not to. Locked now in a fatal embrace, both sets of legs churning, wide stance, looking from above like some bizarre crab or starfish in two parts or like two people trying to merge and become one person.

  “Submit,” Grayson’s Chen muttered in Chen’s ear.

  “Never. Abomination. Traitor,” came the reply.

  “Get out. Stop helping them. Stop the hurting.”

  “Die die die.”