Antoinette didn’t think she would ever find out exactly where this was. The Captain had brought her here on his own strict terms, and maybe she would never be allowed to see it again.
‘Antoinette.’ The voice was a hiss, a modulation of the waterfall’s sibilance.
‘Yes?’
‘You’ve forgotten something again, haven’t you?’
Did he mean the torch? No, of course not. She smiled. Despite herself, she hadn’t been quite as forgetful as she had feared.
She slipped on the goggles. Through them she saw the same glade. The colours, if anything, were even brighter. Birds were in the air, moving daubs of red and yellow against the blue backdrop of the sky. Birds! It was great to see birds again, even if she knew they were being manufactured by the goggles.
Antoinette looked around and realised with a jolt that she had company. There were people sitting at the table, on the logs placed either side of it.
Strange people. Really strange people.
‘Come on over,’ one of them said, inviting her to take the one vacant place. The man beckoning her was John Brannigan; she was certain of that immediately. But yet again he was manifesting in a slightly different form.
She thought back to the first two apparitions. Both had evoked Mars, she thought. In the first, he had been wearing a spacesuit so elderly that she had half-expected it to have an opening where you fed in coal. The second time the suit had been slightly more up to date: not modern, by any stretch of the imagination, but at least a generation beyond the first. John Brannigan had looked older then as well — by a good decade or two, she had judged. And now she was looking at an even older counterpart of him, wearing a suit that again skipped fashions forwards another half-century or so.
It was barely a suit at all, really, more a kind of cocoon of something resembling silver-grey insect spit that had been neatly lathered around him. Through the transparent material of the suit she glimpsed a vague tightly packed complexity of organic-looking mechanisms: kidney-shaped bulges and purple lunglike masses; things that pulsed and throbbed. She saw lurid-green fluids scurrying through miles of zigzagging intestinal piping. Beneath all this the Captain was naked, the vile mechanics of catheters and waste-management systems laid out for her inspection. The Captain appeared oblivious. She was looking at a man from a very remote century; one that — on balance — seemed more distant and strange than the earlier periods she had glimpsed in the first two apparitions.
The suit left his head uncovered. He looked older now. His skin appeared to have been sucked on to his skull by some vacuum-forming process, so that it hugged every crevice. She could map the veins beneath his skin with surgical precision. He looked delicate, like something she could crush in her hands.
She sat down, taking the place she had been offered. The other people around the table were all wearing the same kind of suit, with only minor variations in detail. But they were not all alike. Some of them were missing whole chunks of themselves. They had cavities in their bodies which the suits had invaded, cramming them with the same intricacy of organic machinery and bright-green tubing that she could see inside the Captain’s suit. One woman was missing an arm. In its place, under the spit-layer of the suit, was a glass moulding of an arm filled with a tentative structure of bone and meat and nerve fibre. Another one, a man this time, had a glass face, living tissue pressed against its inner surface. Another looked more or less normal at first glance, except that the body had two heads: a woman’s emerging at more or less the right place and a second one — a young man’s — attached above her right shoulder.
‘Don’t mind them,’ the Captain said.
Antoinette realised she must have been staring. ‘I wasn’t…’
John Brannigan smiled. ‘They’re soldiers. Forward deployment elements in the Coalition for Neural Purity.’
If that had ever meant anything to Antoinette, it was history she had forgotten a long time ago. ‘And you?’ she asked.
‘I was one, for a while. While it suited my immediate needs. We were on Mars, fighting the Conjoiners, but I can’t say my heart was entirely in it.’
Antoinette leaned forwards. The table, at least, was completely real. ‘John, there’s something we really need to talk about.’
‘Oh, don’t be such a spoilsport. I’ve only just started shooting the breeze with my soldier buddies.’
‘All these people are dead, John. They died — oh, conservative estimate? — three or four hundred years ago. So snap out of the nostalgia trip, will you? You need to get a fucking good grip on the immediate here and now.’
He winked at her and bobbed his head towards one of the people along the table. ‘Do you see Kolenkow there? The one with two heads?’
‘Difficult to miss,’ Antoinette said, sighing.
‘The one on her shoulder’s her brother. They signed up together. He took a hit, got zeroed by a spider mansweeper. Immediate decap. They’re brewing a new body for him back in Deimos. They can hook your head up to a machine in the meantime, but it’s always better if you’re plumbed into a proper body.’
‘I’ll bet. Captain…’
‘So Kolenkow’s carrying her brother’s head until the body’s ready. They might even go into battle like that. I’ve seen it happen. Isn’t much that scares the hell out of spiders, but two-headed soldiers might do the trick, I reckon.’
‘Captain. John. Listen to me. You need to focus on the present. We have a situation here on Ararat, all right? I know you know about it — we’ve talked about it already.’
‘Oh, that stuff,’ he said. He sounded like a child being reminded of homework on the first day of a holiday.
Antoinette thumped the table so hard that the wood bruised her fist. ‘I know you don’t want to deal with this, John, but we have to talk about it all the same. You cannot leave just when you feel like it. You may save a few thousand people, but many, many more are going to die in the process.’
The company changed. She was still sitting at a table surrounded by soldiers — she even recognised some of the faces — but now they all looked as if they had been through a few more years of war. Bad war, too. The Captain had a clunking prosthetic arm where there had been a good arm before. The suits were no longer made of insect spit, but were now sliding assemblages of lubricated plates. They were hyper-reflective, like scabs of frozen mercury.
‘Fucking Demarchists,’ the Captain said. ‘Let us keep all that fancy biotech shit until the moment we really needed it. We were really kicking the spiders. Then they pulled the licenses, said we were violating terms of fair use. All that neat squirmy stuff just fucking melted overnight. Bioweps, suits — gone. Now look what we’ve got to work with.’
‘I’m sure you’ll do fine,’ Antoinette said. ‘Captain, listen to me. The Pattern Jugglers are moving the ship to safety. You have to give them time.’
‘They’ve had time,’ he said. It was a heartening moment of lucidity, a connection to the present.
‘Not enough,’ she said.
The steel fist of his new arm clenched. ‘You don’t understand. We have to leave Ararat. There are windows opening above us.’
The back of her neck tingled. ‘Windows, John?’
‘I sense them. I sense a lot of things. I’m a ship, for fuck’s sake.’ Suddenly they were all alone. It was just the Captain and Antoinette. In the bright lustre of his reflective armour she saw a bird traverse the sky.
‘You’re a ship. Good. So stop whining and start acting like one, beginning with a sense of responsibility to your crew. That includes me. What are these windows?’