“More like a week,” Pav said.
“Okay, tell me how. But first, can we get out of this shit?”
The trip to “shore” was like a slog through coastal mud—amazingly tiring, even for a distance of less than a hundred meters.
Without discussing it, the group had simply headed en masse for the nearest “dry” place, which was an open space between two tall, featureless buildings. Rachel was the first to emerge. “Careful,” she said. “There’s some kind of step here.”
Pav saw that there was a solid border around the giant pool of plasm. He had to pull himself up, another procedure that was far more taxing than he expected. “Is gravity higher here?” he said aloud.
“I think it’s just that stuff,” Rachel said. “It grabs you.”
“This plasm…it looks like the same sabudana that got pumped through the tunnels,” Pav said.
He saw that Yvonne was struggling to extricate herself, so he stepped back in to help her. Then he helped Zhao, who was trying to hop on one good ankle. Eventually they were all together, bent over and panting, in what looked, Pav thought, like an alley in a terrestrial city—minus the graffiti, dirt, and noise.
“What did you call this?” Rachel said.
“Sabudana,” he said. “Like tapioca.”
“Okay.” She sniffed. “Sure doesn’t smell like pudding.”
“I don’t believe it’s supposed to be edible,” Zhao said.
“Too bad,” Pav said. “I could eat a liter or two.”
Suddenly Yvonne stepped away from them, vomiting against the nearest wall.
Rachel was already with Yvonne, holding her from behind as she retched. “I’m all right,” she kept saying, clearly lying.
She was sobbing now, too. And who could blame her? Pav knew few of the details, just that the American Venture lander had carried a small suitcase nuclear weapon…and that to protect the vehicle from some menace—Pav didn’t know exactly what—Yvonne Hall had detonated it, destroying Venture and Brahma, which had landed nearby, and vaporizing herself.
Pav couldn’t imagine being in a situation where he would pull that trigger, knowing he would be killing himself dead dead dead.
Even if, as it turned out, it was not so permanently dead.
Then, to wake up…where? In some kind of alien cocoon?
Pav wanted to vomit in sheer sympathy.
“Here,” Zhao said, offering Yvonne the water bottle—which still had a couple of centimeters of water in it! He’d been holding out on them. Fucking figured.
Rachel was rubbing Yvonne’s back, looking and acting very grown-up. It was fascinating how different this teenage girl turned out to be. She wasn’t completely a brat, anyway.
“This is so…strange,” Yvonne said. “One second, I was…fighting off Downey. Then…I’m in some vat of some kind, trying to breathe—”
“We know,” Rachel told her.
“How can you know?” Zhao said. “None of us can know what this is like!”
“I talked to my mother after she came back,” Rachel said, suddenly sounding like someone twice her age. “I haven’t had the experience, okay, but I’ve been thinking about this for days now.”
“It’s not just…coming back,” Yvonne said. She was steadier on her feet now. “It feels as though I just saw that timer count down to zero about fifteen minutes ago. I was there, then I was nowhere.” She forced a smile. Then she pointed to Pav. “Then you tackled me. Why’d you do that?”
“To save you,” Rachel said, “from a cat’s-eye.”
“Which is what?” Before Pav could venture an explanation, which was sure to be argued by Zhao, Yvonne waved her hand. “Never mind about that. I think I could ask a million questions and still not run out.” She raised her eyes to the unfamiliar structures around them. “What happened to me, where we are. And what the hell you people are doing here.”
Rachel’s account of the twin vesicle/Objects, their launch at Bangalore and Houston, and their “collection” of almost two hundred humans, took several minutes. It would have been completed more quickly, but Yvonne kept interrupting. She was especially troubled by the connection between her detonation of the nuke aboard Destiny and the launch of the Objects. “So you’re saying I caused it? Nobody has any idea what was going on there…what my orders were! I mean, look at this place! Are they saying I was wrong?”
“Nobody is making any judgments,” Zhao said. Fair enough; in Pav’s view, based on subsequent events, the Coalition and NASA would have been better off staying away from Keanu—or, if they had to land, bombarding the place. “Everyone understands that you were only following instructions.”
“Shit, yeah! They should ask the White House or headquarters. They could ask my father about my instructions.”
Mention of Gabriel Jones caused Rachel and Pav to look at each other. Zhao knew of the relationship between the JSC director and Yvonne, too. He gestured to Rachel. “Go ahead, tell her.”
“Tell me what?” Yvonne said.
“Your father was one of the Houston people who got scooped,” she said.
“He’s here? My father is here?”
Pav thought Yvonne was about to collapse. He and Zhao took her arms, but she steadied. “Okay, okay.” She was shaking her head, as if recovering from a punch. “The others in the crew? Tea, Zack. The Brahma guys…”
“Tea, Taj, Lucas, and Natalia went home on Destiny,” Pav said.
“On Destiny?” Pav had to explain the bizarre “snowplow” landing the orbiting Destiny had made on Keanu’s surface.
“Where’s Zack Stewart?”
“With us,” Rachel said. “Well, with the others back in the habitat.”
“Good. He’s a good guy.” Yvonne still looked uncertain. “You know, as we talk, I’ve got another input. It’s sort of a voice, but not a voice.”
“In your head?” Pav said.
She nodded. “It’s like having…sound and some kind of video streaming right past your ears and eyes.”
“What about?” Zhao asked.
Yvonne closed her eyes and put her hands over her ears.
“Yvonne,” Rachel said, only to have Yvonne flap her hands and shush her.
“Let me think! Jesus!” She walked away.
Rachel turned to Pav. “Did you ever see Cowboy?”
He wanted to laugh; with all this, the girl thought about the dog. “No.” Just the one sea of plasm was large enough that it was possible the dog had splashed down some distance away, unseen but still safe. It could have hit another lake.
But the animal could just as easily have slammed into one of these buildings. “We can start looking whenever we—”
Yvonne suddenly returned, all business. “Okay,” she said. “I think I’m getting used to what’s going on. Somebody or something is telling me or making me feel things. And they can make it kind of urgent. Right now they or it are telling me there’s something we all need to see.” She looked up, then scanned the tops of the buildings. “It’s that way,” she said nodding forward.
Zhao was shaking his head. “We have no time for sightseeing. We need to find a way back to our habitat.”
Yvonne turned to look at him. She was taller than Zhao and loomed over the Chinese spy by half a head.
Her expression was odd, too. “We said, you need to see this.”
We? Pav looked at Rachel, then Zhao. Suddenly none of them felt inclined to argue.
JAIDEV
From the time Jaidev was seventeen until he was fired by Vikram Nayar, his life had consisted of work or furtive sex. Money, status, none of those had mattered. It was all about doing the work and finding a partner for the night. Or the hour. Or the next hour. So far, life here in the Keanu habitat had been much the same.