The Curve of The Earth (40 page)

[Twenty-nine minutes and seventeen seconds. You drifted, and they had to make a new hole in the ice. You floated past, eventually.]

Madeleine’s expression was set firmly to neutral as she watched. Her arms were above her head, resting on the top of the door frame. Perhaps she’d run out of emotion after pulling
her drowned husband out of the frozen sea, and the faint scowl she wore was the only remnant of her grief.

“She knew what I was trying to do, right? That I would have bled out otherwise?”

[Knowing that you had to and watching you do it are, I understand, two very different concepts. One is of the mind. The other is of the heart. She was distraught. She had to be stopped from diving in after you.] Michael walked through the techie to Petrovitch’s bedside. [Another thing. Your leg.]

He remembered being shot. At least twice. One bullet had passed clean through his thigh, missing his femoral artery. Another had hit his lower leg, and the only thing holding his foot on had been the friction between his socks and his trousers.

“Is it off?”

[From the lower thigh. The surgeon wanted to try and save the knee, but I persuaded him it would be better for you not to have to undergo long-term and potentially unsuccessful reconstructive surgery.]

They looked at each other, man and machine. “I’m running out of body parts,” said Petrovitch.

[If you want, I can show you a graph that predicts your complete replacement with cybernetics within thirty years.]

“Maybe later.” At last the burning pain started to recede. “Why are my ears cold?”

[You are wearing a cap which circulates cold water. It is usually used so that chemotherapy patients keep their hair. I suggested it might be useful here.] The avatar shrugged in a very familiar way. [I became an expert in your condition; it was necessary in order to ensure your survival. I would, however, like to discuss my earlier offer of reconstituting your personality as a virtual construct at some point.]

“Earlier offer? That was a decade ago.”

[You declined then. Perhaps recent events will cause you to reconsider.]

The doctor came back to Petrovitch’s face. He got out his torch again.

“Can you tell him to stop that? I’ll shove it up his nose and illuminate the inside of his skull in a minute.”

[That would require voluntary movement on your part. Something you lack to a great extent.]

Petrovitch didn’t need to move, though. The doctor’s phone beeped. He ignored it and carried on with his examination. It chimed again, more insistently, and eventually he pulled back to answer it.

He looked at the screen, and the message on it. He looked at the bed, then back to the phone. He frowned and approached.

“Dr Petrovitch?”

“Yeah. Thanks,” Petrovitch typed. “Can we lose the ventilator? It feels wrong. And don’t shine your little light in my eyes again. It hurts. And while you’re on, I’m fucking freezing and I can feel everything.”

“I was warned about this,” said the doctor. He told the rest of the intensive care team to stop for a moment, then put his mouth next to Petrovitch’s ear. “You’re my patient. You’ll do as I say.”

The phone buzzed with an incoming message. “You’ll be saying next you preferred me dead.”

“Or I could just let your wife in to see you, and you can sort out who’s in charge here with her.” He glanced at the door, and Madeleine’s gaze flicked from Petrovitch to the phone, and back to Petrovitch. Her expression didn’t change. The doctor’s did, though. “As next of kin, she gave me written consent. And frankly, I don’t want to be the one to piss her off, because she
looks ready to take someone’s – anyone’s – head off with her bare hands. I’d rather that wasn’t me.”

“I surrender.”

“Good. Because we’re not set up for repairing decapitations. Now shut up and stop harassing me. You seem to be in control of your faculties, but not your body. That part is my job, and I’ll do it the best I can.” He muttered something about governments and guns, then put the phone back in his scrubs.

As he retreated, the rest of the staff moved back in to continue what they’d started.

“Michael, I thought she’d be happy.”

[She was happy, Sasha. She was happy that for ten years no one was shooting at you or trying to blow you up. Now, as a result of what Lucy has done, everybody will be trying to shoot you and blow you up. And not just you, but her and Lucy, together with the rest of the Freezone. While you were dead, the President of the United States of America called us “the single most dangerous organisation in the history of civilisation”. Even accounting for hyperbole, that puts us in a difficult position.]

“Yeah, that’s good coming from him.
Mudak
.” Petrovitch programmed his heart to spin a little faster. “I wasn’t the one who shot down our First Contact.”

[All Madeleine can see is a war without end and an immediate future without you. Sooner, rather than later, she believes you will die, and there will be nothing she can do about it. She is already in mourning for you.]

The doctor had gone to the door, and Madeleine had stepped away to let him out. Petrovitch could see them through the glass, her with her head down, listening, and him with his head up, explaining what was going on.

When they were done, she resumed her vigil.

Petrovitch checked to see what was happening outside. The hospital was surrounded by camera crews and reporters, and he dipped into their broadcasts to catch a flavour of what they were saying.

“
Yobany stos
.”

[Did you expect people to react differently?]

“To be honest, I didn’t think about how they’d react at all. Who leaked it?”

[There was no leak. Marcus went to the UN, talked to the Secretary General, and addressed the Security Council even before you arrived at hospital.]

“And?”

[There is a very real risk of the United Nations expelling the United States. That pressure is likely to increase over the coming days as governments formulate their official response, rather than just preliminary reactions from their representatives in New York.] Michael’s avatar raised his eyebrows. [There is no other news. Some people believe us. Others do not, either because they prefer the lies or they hold, like Joseph Newcomen, that we must be alone in the universe. I change my mind when the facts change. Why won’t they?]

“No one said we were a wholly rational species.” Petrovitch could move his index finger. Just a little. The sooner he was out of this bed – which was where? Whitehorse? – the sooner he could get to work. It was a good job he didn’t need much sleep.

Valentina looked though into the intensive care ward, her thin face even more pinched and pale than usual. As she turned, he could see her
kalash
over her shoulder. This was what it had come to. All because of him.

No: all because of Lucy.

“Good girl,” he said.

D
R
. S
IMON
M
ORDEN
is a bona fide rocket scientist, having degrees in geology and planetary geophysics. He was born in Gateshead, England, and now resides in Worthing, England. Find out more about Simon Morden at
www.simonmorden.com
.

If you enjoyed

THE CURVE OF THE EARTH,

look out for

GERMLINE

by T. C. McCarthy

Germline (n.) the genetic material contained in a cellular lineage that can be passed to the next generation. Also: secret military program to develop genetically engineered super-soldiers (slang).

War is Oscar Wendell’s ticket to greatness. A reporter for The Stars and Stripes, he has the only one-way pass to the front lines of a brutal war over natural resources buried underneath the icy, mineral-rich mountains of Kazakhstan.

But war is nothing like he expected. Heavily armored soldiers battle genetically engineered troops hundreds of meters below the surface. The genetics—the germline soldiers—are the key to winning this war, but some inventions can’t be undone. Some technologies can’t be put back in the box.

Kaz will change everything, not least Oscar himself. Hooked on a dangerous cocktail of adrenaline and drugs, Oscar doesn’t find the war, the war finds him.

I’ll never forget the smell: human waste, the dead, and rubbing alcohol—the smell of a Pulitzer.

The sergeant looked jumpy as he glanced at my ticket. “
Stars and Stripes?
” I couldn’t place the accent. New York, maybe. “You’ll be the first.”

“First what?”

He laughed as if I had made a joke. “The first civilian reporter wiped on the front line. Nobody from the press has ever been allowed up here, not even you guys. We got plenty of armor, rube. Draw some on your way out and button up.” He gestured to a pile of used suits, next to which lay a mountain of undersuits, and on my way over, the sergeant shouted to a corporal who had been relaxing against the wall. “Wake up, Chappy. We got a
reporter
needin’ some.”

Tired. Empty. I’d seen it before in Shymkent, in frontline troops rotating back for a week or two, barely able to walk, with dark circles under their eyes so they looked like nervous raccoons. Chappy had that look too.

He opened one eye. “Reporter?”

“Yep.
Stripes
.”

“Where’s your camera?”

I shrugged. “Not allowed one. Security. It’s gonna be an audio-only piece.”

Chappy frowned, as if I couldn’t be a
real
reporter, since I didn’t have a holo unit, thought for a moment, and then stood. “If you’re going to be the first reporter on the line, I guess we oughta give you something special. What size?”

I knew my size and told him. I’d been through Rube-Hack back in the States; all of us had. The Pentagon called it Basic Battlefield Training, but every grunt I’d met had just laughed at me, and not behind my back. Rube. Babe. Another civilian too stupid to realize that anything was better than Kaz because Kazakhstan was another world, purgatory for those who least deserved it, a vacation for the suicidal, and a novelty for those whose brain chemistry was messed up enough to make them think it would be a cool place to visit. To see firsthand. Only graduates of Rube-Hack thought that last way, actually
wanted
Kaz.

Only reporters.

“
Real
special,” he said. Chappy lifted a suit from the pile and dropped it at my feet, then handed me a helmet. Across the back someone had scrawled
forget me not or I’ll blow your punkass away
. “That guy doesn’t need it anymore, got killed before he could suit up, so it’s in decent shape.”

I tried not to think about it and grabbed an undersuit. “Where’s the APC hangar?”

He didn’t answer. The man had already slumped against the wall again and didn’t bother to open his eyes this time, not even the one.

It took me a few minutes to remember. Sardines. Lips and guts stuffed into a sausage casing. Getting into a suit was hard, like over-packing a suitcase and then trying to close it from the inside. First came the undersuit, a network of hoses and cables. There was one tube that ended in a stretchy latex hood, to be snapped over the end of your you-know-what, and one that ended in a hollow plug (they issued antibacterial lube for
that
), and the plug had a funny belt to keep it from coming out. The alternative was sloshing around in a suit filled with your own waste, and we had been told that on the line you lived in a suit for weeks at a time.

I laughed when it occurred to me that somewhere, you could almost bet on it, there was a certain class of people who didn’t mind the plug at all.

Underground meant the jitters. A klick of rock hung overhead so that even though I couldn’t see it, I felt its weight crushing down, making the hair on my neck stand straight. These guys
partied
subterrene, prayed for it. You’d recognize it in Shymkent, when you met up with other reporters at the hotel bar and saw Marines—fresh off the line—looking for booze and chicks. Grunts would come in and the waiter would move to seat them on the ground floor and they’d look at him like he was trying to get them killed. They didn’t have armor on—it wasn’t allowed in Shymkent—so the guys had no defense against heat sensors or motion tracking, and instinct kicked in, reminding them that nothing lived long aboveground. Suddenly they had eyes in the backs of their heads. Line Marines, who until that moment had thought R & R meant safety, began shaking and one or two of them would back against the wall to make sure they couldn’t get it from that direction.
How about downstairs? Got anything underground? A basement?
The waiter would realize his mistake then and usher them into the back room to a spiral staircase, into the deep.

The Marines would smile and breathe easy as they pushed to be the first one underground. Not me, though. The underworld was where you buried corpses, and where tunnel collapses guaranteed you’d be dead, sometimes slowly, so I didn’t think I could hack it, claustrophobia and all, but didn’t have much choice. I wanted the line. Begged for a last chance to prove I could write despite my habit. I even threw a party at the hotel when I found out that I was the only reporter selected
for the front, but there was one problem: at the line, everything was down—down and über-tight.