by Chaz Brenchley

 

Terminal

by Chaz Brenchley

unspeakable journeys

into and out of the light

 

He stood on the Tower of Souls, and watched her fly.

Say it another way, he stood on the high-stacked bodies of his Upshot kind, but that was nothing: filing. Bureaucracy. Paranoia.

It was the locals, the natives, the dirigibles - she called them dirigistes, but that was ironic - who had built and named this height, who gave a value to these discards. Black discs, each one identical, each one uniquely coded: each one the residue of a human passing through. A carbon footprint, she liked to say.

At other terminals, other Upchutes, the discards were racked in vaults, in coded order, physical back-ups of what the record said: never needed, simply because they were there and known to be there. What greater security could anyone ask for? Here, they stood in another kind of order. As soon as the dirigibles understood what the discards were, what they meant - in so far as they did understand, in so far as free-floating bags of gas could understand the motives and intentions, the physics and biology of meat and bone, of mammals - they had taken possession, demanded it. They saw humans walk into the 'Chute, they saw them gone, and only these discs remaining; they claimed the discs, and built - well, this. A tower. Tower of Souls, just as they built for themselves, their own waymarkers, their almost-holy statements, we were here.

It made sense, he supposed. It was the same message, even. And there was no risk, however much the bureaucracy disliked it: dirigibles were as careful of every discard as the most paranoid could wish. Just, they layered them into a tower, high and broad and solid, mute testament to how much traffic this terminal had seen in its century of standing. The Upshot might not be many, reckoned against downside populations, but they did like to keep moving; every stopover, every staging-post meant another discard, another disc.

This tower was tall enough by now to be a feature of the landscape, standing higher than the terminal roof, though the spire of the 'Chute still dwarfed it. The landscape could use a few features, he thought, weary of endless wind-blown plains; which was surely why the dirigibles built their towers, and just as surely why she flew from here, and why he clambered up behind to watch her.

It was only by grace that the dirigibles allowed it. Hard-earned grace he liked to say, but she wouldn’t have it so. She said that grace could never be deserved; it came as a gift, the soul of generosity. Like flight, she said, to earthbound creatures; like transit to the Upshot, immeasurable grace.

Even on a low-grav world, flying was still a matter of faith as well as engineering. He always said he himself had faith too much; he believed very firmly in the solidity of things, and the susceptibility of air. She seemed to believe what people told her, and the evidence of her eyes. Therefore she flew, while he kept himself grounded. He watched her soar, and checked her equipment scrupulously, before and after. And talked to her, mid-flight -

"How's the wind?"

"Easy; always easy, this late. Fresh at dawn, but that's fun too. You should try it."

"What can you see? Tell me what you see."

"Nothing new. The sun's so low, the spire's shadow goes all the way to the horizon like a road, so straight - but you know that, you can see it from down there..."

"Not so far. My horizon's a lot closer. And for me it is a road, I could walk it if the sun stayed still."

"You do that, then. I'll hold the sun steady, I can almost reach her from here..."

"Not so high! Don't fly so high. I told you before, keep the tip of the spire in your eyeline and stay below it. That suit's not rated for heights above a thousand metres."

"Well, it should be. I'm fine. Anyway, I can too see the spire..."

"Only by looking down. Don't lie to me, I need magnification just to find you. Come back."

"Coming! Whee—!"

"—Not like that, not all at once! Woman, do you want to see me die here?"

"Sole purpose of dive. Ready to catch you when you fall. I thought it would be ironic."

- because he thought he was her anchor, her tether to the fixities of life. He really thought she needed one.

 

He thought they all did. So too did the downsiders, legislating for the Upshot community. Set free to roam as far as any 'Chute could fling, essentially rendered into information, they must necessarily be tethered by that same information: a backstory that led all the way, traceable through every separate body, every discard, to the one that they were born with, however long ago. Identity was absolute, and paranoia was the key. If one mind, one personality could migrate from one body to another - and have that body grown specifically for them, to a DNA-weave of their devising - then how could anyone be sure that the person they spoke to today was the same person they were speaking to yesterday? The body might match entirely, but that meant nothing any more. Questions of identity had to be cut entirely away from the physical; which meant by definition that no Upshot could be allowed two matching discards. They called them discards, even while the bodies were still growing in the vats, to emphasise the temporary; and every DNA profile was one-use-only, and whenever someone went through a 'Chute they were fitted into a discard not quite entirely at random. They might emerge as any racial mix and any gender, any body type; the only certainty they had, they would not be the person that they had been going in. If no one looked to recognise an Upshot from one trip to the next, if identity was carried in the mind and not the body, then no one stood in danger of deception. Paranoia was a virtue; people's private codes and passwords were intimate, intense, not to be stolen or given away.

Like all the Upshot, his life was an open book, a matter of public record: how he had been flung out of school, out of the army, out of any discipline he'd tried; how in the end, almost in desperation, he had been flung into orbit to work on terminal construction. His home world wouldn't tolerate a 'Chute downside, but they had the schematics and the skills for an orbital platform, and chemical rockets to get there, and the benefits were too great to ignore. So it was built, and in the building of it he found a life he could cherish. The intimate spaceside disciplines that his and his co-workers' lives depended on; the extraordinary physicality of working roustabout in a suit, in vacuum, in nul-g; the extraordinary physicality of his co-workers in the dorm-ships, inter-shift, where rules and limits seemed all to have been left behind, downside; the constant call, no, suck of the stars, which were not a background to his new life so much as the vessel that contained it.

And then at last the 'Chute was finished, and he was eager in the queue to be away. His original body was abandoned, crushed and dried, compacted and coded by the process that his people had signed up to, compulsory paranoia; he'd been flung far and far, to another planet and another job, building mineworks for a new colony. He might have stayed, he might have found himself a family and another life again. In fact, though, he had been she in that new incarnation. After so long as a male, the shock of change was enough to be dealing with; pregnancy was something else again, and not to be considered. Besides, it was a wild ride, this being flung from one body to another. Why, whyever would he only taste it once...?

So he'd gone on, from that world to another, and another; and like most of the Upshot, he'd acquired the taste first and then the habit of it. And after a while, of course, he began to understand its deeper meanings - functional immortality, to be brief, in a life constantly refreshed by new horizons, new opportunities, new flesh - and he had yet to meet anyone with a good reason to offer, why he should turn away from that.

Here, now, he'd met her, who offered him the opposite.

 

The suit she flew in stretched into webbing between arms and legs when she spread-eagled, which gave her not quite enough lift to glide in this thin air; even the teasing tug of gravity here would be enough to haul her down to ruin from a height. Extra lift came from the impellers at wrist and ankle. Eventually, with practice, she'd get fine control the same way.

Eventually; not yet. That day she came down fast and awkward, even when she wasn't trying to scare him into a cardiac arrest. Diving she was good at, that sudden plummet where her body was cooperative with all the other forces acting upon it; she was made to fall, as they all were. A steady descent was something else, unfamiliar, unnatural. Unappealing, perhaps.

He watched her come down, said,

"I don't suppose even you can miss the planet, but you're sure as hell going to miss me. You'll miss the whole tower, if I don't jump to catch you."

"So jump," she said. "Take a chance."

She swooped in, tumbling as she tried to brake and stall and so drop neatly to his side, to prove him wrong. Tried and failed, tumbled catastrophically and would have overshot and fallen thirty metres to the ground, out of any hope of control or recovery. It wouldn't have killed her - probably - and the Upshot always have the option to move on from a broken body in extremis, though the move might be unwelcome at the time. Still, he leapt - too high for his own comfort - to catch her ankle, and his weight was enough to pull her down, while her momentum rolled them over and over on that broad platform and they had cause again to be grateful how many of their kind had been this way before them.

When they stopped, where they stopped, she pulled her helmet off and shook her hair loose and grinned at him, sweating and exhilarated. He could only hold to the lean solidity of her and marvel at his privilege, at her trust, at how close they were to the edge.

"You see?" she said. "My chevalier. Always ready to catch me, should I fall."

"Always bruised," he said, "from needing to."

"Yes. Ouchie. Worth it, though. Worth every bruise and every bleeding scrape."

And she was, of course, worth all of that and more. Much more. The Upshot could be as heedless with their hearts as with their bones and bodies, in a life where staying put was stagnation, another life entirely; where moving on - even if they moved together - still meant other bodies on other worlds. It was hard to commit to someone who might be another gender next time round, was sure to be another type, as would you be too. Physical attraction faltered in those shifts, and they were too abrupt to mend in other ways.

He'd never learned to be so casual in possession, of himself or of his lovers. They had been few, then, necessarily; there had been more pain than plenty. Upshot or downside, people mishandled his heart as they did him, mistaking his intensity for passion, his failures for greed. He hurt, and moved on, and took his hurting with him.

It had been a burden, but she freed him. Not of his nature, none the less she delighted in it; and yes, she would come on with him, the two of them together and let the 'Chute fling them where it would, into anything, they could survive it. If she fell, he would be there to catch her; when she flew, he would be there to watch her. One day, perhaps, he could learn to fly himself...

 

They lay sprawled and sore together on the Tower of Souls, and here came a dirigible, flying above them. Or floating, perhaps, if one could float with purpose. At least some of the time they did that, they had purpose. They couldn't have built this tower otherwise, nor their own.

They built nothing else, that he knew about. Until the first tower was discovered, people thought they only drifted on the wind. Some refused to call them sentient, arguing that they had no more need of intelligence than they did of buildings, engines, any product of mind and work together. Great bags of gas, feeding from the medium they floated in: why would evolution burden them with brains or self-awareness?

Then someone spotted the first of the towers - its shadow, rather, seen from orbit like a needle laid dark and unnatural across the land - and that wasn't a question any longer.

That they had language took longer to discover, and still needed machinery to decode it. They spoke metabolically, drifts of shadow and substance beneath a semi-translucent skin; they needed a day to share a greeting, a month to have a proper conversation. They'd intertwine dangling filaments to stay together, to keep a stray gust from interrupting. Not often, though. He supposed, if you had to reorder your digestion - the closest way he could imagine it - to communicate by gastric rumbles, nothing so simple and convenient as farting, you'd be frugal. You'd save it up. And want to be damn sure the other party was paying attention; repeating yourself would mean going back to the beginning, filling your stomach, starting the whole process again.

So no, this dirigible wasn't going to talk to them, nor them to it. By chance or by intent - he couldn't guess which - it was going to pass directly overhead, and all he could do was watch. Observation of course was interaction, but it did feel a little one-sided. He had no idea whether the dirigible reciprocated, whether it saw him too or how else it might be sensing where he was, what he was, what he did. Somehow, surely; but it had no discoverable eyes, nor any other organ that the xenobiologists could identify as sensory. Precious few organs of any kind, the way he'd heard it. Dirigibles were seemingly careless of the bodies of their dead; after the first few curious post mortems, so were the scientists who studied them. Inside the collapse of the ripped glassine tegument they could trace a few membranes and a primitive digestion, some hint of a nervous system trailing through the fronds, tendrils, call them what you would that hung below. That was all. What fluids, what gases, what more solid masses might hold the mind of a dirigible could still be only guessed at.

A century of study? What was that? It had taken long enough to understand how much the piercing mattered, that they never found a body not torn open.

 

This one - and if he'd seen it before, he couldn't tell; they really did look all the same to him - seemed to hover a while above them where they lay, though the things moved so damn slowly it was hard to be sure. Maybe it was only caught in an eddy of air, some freak of turbulence caused by the tower or the great spike of the 'Chute behind it. At any rate, he had plenty of time to gaze up at it. The sun on its flank drove light and colour through its skin and deep into the gaseous swirls within, he'd seldom seen so much of mystery; and there was the great dark shadow of a soulstone in its belly, unmissable, enough to make anyone wonder how for so long they had not been missed from the corpses.

On Earth, some birds swallowed gravel and stored it in their gizzards to substitute for teeth. On this world, a mature dirigible untethered from its parent needed some substitute for absent mass, something to keep it upright and manoeuvrable against the wind; and so it would ingest what the first people here had termed keelstones, or simply ballast.

It had needed time, linguists, computers to come close to understanding what the dirigibles called them, which was - or might be - soulstones.

 

She was quicker to recover from her plummet, his grab, their mutual tumble. Also, she was possibly - no, certainly - less curious about the alien that hung over them, its wafting filaments not so far at all above his face. He had jumped for her; he could jump for this too. He wasn't going to say so, for fear she might try it. She wouldn't think of it on her own account; her attention was otherwise, on him. Her hand was on his clothes, in his clothes, unzipping as it went.

He said, "Don't, not here...!"

"Exactly here," she giggled, "and - oh, here, too. Why not here?"

"Look up."

"I've seen. So what? If it's watching, who cares? Who knows? It can't tell anyone; what would it say? Take half a year, just to misunderstand us..."

That might be true. Perhaps thought was as slow as conversation, where it depended on the leak of gases through semi-permeable membranes. Or whatever they did, however they did it. It didn't matter. He felt observed, considered, weighed in judgement; never mind that he couldn't understand the judgement, there were other things he equally couldn't do under others' eyes. Tendrils. Scrutiny.

He pulled away from her questing fingers, hasty to fasten his clothes again. She pulled faces at his back; he knew it, he could feel them. Sometimes he couldn't believe how young she acted. She might still have been in her earliest sequence of discards, barely left home, despite what the record said. It was rare to have come so far and give no signs of being older than your body, not to have picked up even a cynical veneer; he joyed in her enthusiasm, and mocked it, and felt as baffled by her as a dirigible must be.

 

The way down the tower was a perfect spiral ramp, built into the solid structure as soon as the dirigibles understood that if they raised this thing, people would insist on climbing it. It had taken them a while, three metres or so of accumulated height, to come to that understanding, so the ramp only started that distance above the ground; below was smooth solid wall of stacked discards. In this gravity, three metres could be jumped either way, up or down, but the need to do it amused him every time.

Just as well, when little else in the climb or at the top amused him. She delighted him constantly and disturbed him constantly, kept him on the razor edge of anxiety; sometimes he felt like a parent, having to watch his child fly. Which was absurd, she was older than he was, with a trail of discards twice the length. She didn't like to talk about the past, though, so he never pressed her to it; which made it hard to remember that distance travelled, when all he saw was the bright youth of her body and all he heard was the dizzy enchantment of her voice.

Today he heard that voice laughing back at him, he saw that body a turn below, disappearing a turn and a half ahead; she took the steep smooth ramp at a bounding run, while he walked it like a model of good sense and cursed her in a steady monotone. Even now she couldn't let him be easy, no, never that...

At the foot of the ramp, the flat platform; the jump. And her waiting below, making as though to catch him; and tangling her arms around him, stretching for a kiss and getting it here in the tower's shadow, regardless of whether the dirigible still hung overhead; and walking that long shadow as though it really were a road, for that way lay home, more or less; and walking it hand in hand then arm in arm then closer yet, her arm around his waist and his slung over her shoulders as she tucked herself beneath it: she as shifting, as restless, as physically demanding as he was patient and willing to take whatever came. Willing and wondering and never demanding anything, for fear of losing whatever it was that he had already, her whimsical devotion or her trust.

Home for now, for here was a canister habitat, dropped in from orbit to accommodate the first arrivals, those who built the terminal long ago. It had been his, till she arrived; now they shared it. There was more comfort in the newer dormitories, but he'd preferred the option of sleeping single, a cabin to himself and nearest neighbours a walk away. Now he had her, constantly in his sight, and isolation was another kind of blessing. The Upshot were not body-shy, they couldn't be; when every relocation meant another body and the old one left empty for disposal, shed like a dead skin, what was there to protect? And yet, he wanted privacy from his own kind as much as he did from alien observers; he could never be comfortable sharing a bed in a shared room, in earshot of others.

It was also true that he could never be comfortable with her, in company or alone, but that was another matter. Nothing that she said or did worked to his comfort or content. She kept him nervous, alert, constantly watchful; other people had to tell him he was happy.

She said, "How will we choose where to go next? When we move on?"

He never had chosen, not like that. He stayed where he was until the work was done that he'd signed up for, or until he'd done something so stupid or so graceless that staying no longer seemed to be an option. Repercussions made an effective motive force. Then he'd contact the Bureau and ask about jobs elsewhere, take the first that came available, take the fling.

Now, with two of them, he supposed it would be different. He couldn't even imagine now, what it would be that would make them move. Both at once and both together - how could that work?

He said, "You choose. I'll follow you." There was always work for a roustabout, out on the edge; empires overreach themselves, always, and their peoples scrabble to keep up. But - it struck him, suddenly - what if she chose to go inwards, towards the centre of things, the ancient settled heart worlds?

She was here, though, now, not doing that; her record showed a face turned always to the ever-expanding frontier, as his own did.

She smiled, and said, "Yes. I'll do that. You tell me when."

Which should have answered his own unspoken question, but this was what she did, she taught him anxiety: it might be his to say, but he wanted to please her, he wanted to pick just the right time. How would he know, how could he tell when she was ready...?

He guessed she'd make it clear, when the time came. She seldom did ask a question without having the answer right there in her grasp, held up for him to see it.

 

The dirigible shadowed them, all the way back. Actually, with the sun so low, its shadow never touched ground where he could see it, but it lingered in the air above and behind them as they walked, in the corner of his sight if he only turned his head a fraction. He wondered if they had curiosity, these creatures: for sure they had some sense of life beyond themselves, that first gift of sentience, or else they would never rip open each other's corpses and salvage the soulstones, to build towers like fingers breaking up out of the soil.

That was all they did build, all the mark they made on their world; grazers and drifters, they needed nothing more. Sometimes he thought he was much the same: he grazed on a world's interest, and then moved on. He left more solid monuments behind him, but that was camouflage, meaningless, the excuse and not the purpose. They intrigued him, with their towers of the dead; something they memorialised, though whether it was the dead or the death or the survivability of stone, he couldn't tell. 'Soulstone' was the best label anyone could offer, it was hard to call it a translation and even that hint of religious significance made him suspicious, but the facts were undeniable. They did salvage the keelstones of their dead, and build them into towers, and revere those towers; they did do the same with the Upshot's discards, to the point where it had needed slow discussion and eventual consent - grace, she called it - to allow people the climb up their own Tower of Souls, to give them a vantage-point and a view across this dreary landscape.

To give her a launching-point to fly from.

 

Alone for sure, canister'd, contained, with the door dogged shut behind them: here he could shuck his clothes off, peel hers away from sticky skin and make her sweat again before they washed, before they sprawled again in the ruin of their bed and she said, "Low-g, I do love it. When we fuck, we fly. It's so new—"

And then she was abruptly silent, until she said, "New to this body, I mean—"

Which was just as stupid, because they'd been doing it for months now, since she'd first occupied that body.

He said nothing, and she heard that; and turned her back, drew her legs up, huddled herself against him and shivered in their shared heat.

"Who was she?" he asked - which was stupid in itself, because if there was one question he knew the answer to, it was that one. The record said exactly who she was and who she had been.

"You mean, who am I?"

"Yes."

Her voice had shrunk within her, as she was trying to shrink within herself, to be unnoticeable. His arms were around her, but that was a helpless gesture, a mockery of protection. She said, "I was downside, of course, just a girl, but I ran errands to the terminal. For my father, or for anyone who'd send me. I loved it there. I met her, and we were friends. My first adult friend, my first alien friend. She'd been so far, seen so much; I couldn't get enough of her.

"And she stayed, longer than... longer than most of you do. Long enough for me to grow to adulthood, way longer than anyone stayed there, on my homeworld. It wasn't a welcome place to be. They allowed the terminal, they used it for trade, but the Upshot were confined to the compound and none of us were let leave. They said it was our religious duty, to keep within the bounds our god had set us; I think it was political, they thought too many of us would leave if any went. But I wanted, I wanted to go. So much, I wanted it...

"And then she said she wanted to stay. She was tired, she said, and she wanted to grow old in a body she was comfortable with; and she'd met a man she'd like to make a family with. It was illegal, of course, but she worked in records and her friend drove trucks in and out of the compound all day long. Between them, they could make it work. Except that the Upshot keep such careful track of their people, not like mine; she needed someone willing to be sent on in her name...

"She said she'd change the record, so the machines couldn't see I wasn't her. And of course, once I was here, whole new body, official body, then no one need ever know. She gave me all her codes, her passwords, everything. I only had to be careful not to talk too much, about that life I haven't had.

"And I've messed it up already, first world I came to. You won't, you won't tell them, will you? You won't tell anyone...?"

He wouldn't need to. The woman had lied to her. A terminal's local records could be overwritten, perhaps, by a skilled hand, to fool the 'Chute's internal logs into believing that this body being presented for discard was the one supplied however many years ago to such-and-such an Upshot personality. Internal logs and local records were audited, though. Necessarily, of course they were; and no hand was skilled enough to hide the marks of its meddling from audit. Besides, there was the physical record, tissues taken from the body at time of discard to be matched against those taken at time of issue. Those matches were always made.

She had, how long, a few months more at most? He wasn't in records, he didn't know the frequency of audit. Only the certainty. All the Upshot knew. And that woman had sent a downside innocent into this all unaware, purely for camouflage, a placeholder to distract attention for a while, until authority caught up. She would have known when the next audit was due; likely she timed all this to happen immediately after the last, to buy her the maximum time to slip away with her lover. Planets are large; even a cooperative government might struggle to locate two people who've had time and motivation to bury themselves in new identities far from the Upshot compound.

Meanwhile, this girl, authority would know exactly where to find her. And would come, detain and question. She would confess; she could do nothing else, and it didn't matter anyway. Her body would speak against her.

And then - after how long, how many days of terror and despair? - they would put her in the 'Chute, and send her nowhere. The body would be a discard, recorded, preserved, as they all are; her self would be lost information, deleted, irrecoverable. She'd be dead.

People called them immortal, the downsiders did, but they were very wrong. Everyone dies, in the end. Accident, negligence, deliberate choice: their own, or someone else's.

Everyone dies; everyone lies. He said, "Don't worry, nothing terrible will happen. Just be careful, and don't let it slip to anyone else. You're with me now, I'll look after you." Ready to catch her, should she fall. "We'll move on soon; if we just keep moving for a while, we can leave trouble behind, and give you enough real planets to talk about, you won't even have to remember you've got anything to hide. I promise. We'll ask about work tomorrow, register as willing to transit. Meantime - well, this is meant to be a rest day. Let's do something wildly unrestful..."

So they did that, though she was tearful and needy, so little like the woman that he'd known these last months; and then he teased her, tempted her into showering and eating before he took her quietly back to bed and held her till she slept.

And lay awake all night, deliberately, standing vigil over his beloved; and in the morning, early, when she roused, he brought her coffee and bakies in bed.

When she rose, he had her flying-suit laid out and ready:

"Sun's just coming up," he said. "You could have an hour in that dawn wind you love so much, before we have to get serious. Could be your last chance; when a job comes up, they won't hold it open if we don't go stat."

"Come with me?"

"Of course. When did I ever not?"

She purred at him, and wriggled into the suit's cling. "Promise not to shout, if I go high?"

"Promise to be sensible, and I won't shout. Of course, if the wind should happen suddenly to lift you higher than you were ready for, I'd have nothing to shout about, would I...?"

"I might have to dive quite suddenly too, to correct for that."

"So you might."

 

So they retraced their steps of last evening, through the clear shimmer of the dawn. When they reached the Tower of Souls he boosted her up to the ramp-platform, though she really didn't need the help, and followed with a barely-graceless scramble.

They climbed the truncated spiral to the broad top, and he wondered aloud what the dirigibles would do when the logic of that spiralling ramp had brought the whole edifice to a point, to match the 'Chute it shadowed.

"Start another tower, of course," she said. "Why not? They've made plenty for themselves."

Which was true, of course, they had; dirigibles had few offspring and long lives, and there were nevertheless many towers. But none of those seemed to be finished, they were all works in progress, waiting on another death. This that they built for human discards had a necessary terminus, and he wasn't sure how they would deal with that.

Still, at least he wouldn't be here to learn.

He checked her impellers and webbing one last time, and kissed her, and let her go.

She leapt from the tower, arms and legs astretch and impellers hissing. She caught the air, or her suit did; seized it, climbed it, conquered it.

Went high and higher, and he said not a word.

Surmounted the spire tip of the 'Chute, and higher yet.

Was a glory, a shimmering speck in sunlight, a mote of something lovely.

Until the impellers failed, all four of them at once, all at the utmost of her flying height.

He had no magnification, but he knew. Her voice would have been in his ears, screaming the news of it, but he'd killed the sound long since.

He knew the moment when it happened, and he knew what she did to save herself; how she spread her arms and legs to use the webbing as much as she could, to drag what little speed she could from her disaster. How she tried to spiral down towards the tower, where he waited, ready to catch her if she fell. He was her solution; surely he would save her now.

How the webbing ripped loose in a second and final calamity, and then she had nothing that mattered: no hope, no steerage, nowhere to turn.

 

He stood on the Tower of Souls, and watched her fall.

 

 

 

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