Mortal Remains

by Christopher Evans

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Hard Science Fiction

Synopsis

The Solar System is ours. Biotechnology has provided the Settled Worlds with a riot of habitable environments; sentient craft ply the routes between the planets; the souls of the dead live on in the Noosphere, a psychic Net where they can be contacted by the living. Paradise? Not quite - and when a strange womb is recovered from a living spaceship crashed on Mars it swiftly becomes the focus of intrigue and murder as the Settled Worlds begin to disintegrate under the strain of a vicious interplanetary war between two rival factions.

Release date: October 31, 2013

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 316

Sample

The houses breathed quietly in the dawnlight, leathery domes exhaling steam plumes into the chill morning air. Tired though she was after working all night in the city, Marea kept to the gravity trail, passing neat houses with their clusters of flowering oxygenia, her cloak tightly wrapped about her head and shoulders.

The sky was turning rose-gold with the approach of dawn. High on the horizon, she saw a streak of light which she first took to be a shooting star; but it did not vanish as she stared at it.

Their house stood apart from the others in a tree-fringed hollow. It opened a sleepy eye as she approached, then its doormouth parted, enveloping her in warm living air. As soon as she was inside, her cloak slid from her shoulders and scuttled over to the heart to bask in its warmth.

Marea found her husbands in the living chamber, both in a state of agitation. Yuri lay feverish on his bunk, his blanket cowering on the floor as if it had been hurled there in rage or delirium. Salih was fussing over him, trying to dab his brow with a damp cloth.

Marea hastened to the bedside. Yuri’s eyes were closed, though she was sure he was conscious. Their console squatted unheeded in one corner, its big bulbous optic showing the weather forecast for the Tharsis region.

‘Has he been like this all night?’ she asked Salih.

He nodded anxiously, touching the womb-sac at his side. Salih was eight months pregnant, and Yuri’s various sicknesses had grown ever more demanding each week that passed.

‘Have you called the doctor?’

‘I spoke to him myself!’ Yuri cried, raising himself from his pillow. ‘He was rude, unprofessional!’

He sank back down again. His face shone with sweat, and his eyes were glazed. They closed again.

‘The doctor said there was nothing physically wrong with him,’ Salih announced sheepishly. ‘He said it was transference, sympathetic pregnancy pains.’

Which was what they had known all along. And yet Salih continued to behave as if he was actively causing Yuri’s ailments.

‘Did he recommend anything?’ Marea asked, barely controlling her impatience.

‘Bindweed tea,’ Salih replied. ‘As a sedative and restorant.’ He fiddled with the attachment joining the polymer umbilical to his navel. ‘We’re out of it. I didn’t like to leave him.’

Marea gave a great sigh, then turned and went out, calling for her cloak. It was dozing, but it stirred reluctantly, loping over to her and clambering up on her shoulders. The door-mouth opened at her command.

Outside, the sun was just rising over the rim of the canyon. The streak in the sky was still visible, broader, brighter now.

Their horse was about to foal and could not be ridden. Marea went around to the back of the house where their tractor sat, its scandium flanks and balloon wheels coated with a season’s rusty dust. She wiped clean the sunsensors with a gloved hand, climbed up into the driver’s seat and punched the ignition. Nothing. She tried again. To her surprise, the engine began to hum, then whined into life.

Grinning, Marea put the tractor into gear and headed off. The grin belied her irritation. Really, both her husbands were infuriating at times. Yuri was temperamental and demanding, while Salih was a caring and domesticated man who unfortunately lacked initiative. They tended the crops in their plantation while Marea pursued her career in the city. Two standard years into their marriage and she continued to debate the wisdom of the contract, as she had done from the start. Both Salih and Yuri had been persistent suitors, and in the end she had just given in. Now there was to be a child, and it might have been triplets or quads if she hadn’t stood firm. Not that the Marineris Valley was overpopulated – she simply hadn’t wanted the responsibility of more than one child, and damn the social stigma. Neither of her husbands knew that the egg which she had donated had come not from her own womb but from the ovum bank in Bellona.

Of course it was unforgivable: a deceit and a betrayal of both men. But the truth was she could not envisage a permanent life with them, and leaving would be far easier if any child of theirs was no flesh of hers. There were times when she despised herself for even thinking this. Really, both Salih and Yuri deserved a better wife.

She drove the tractor off the gravity trail, her weariness lifting a little with the diminished tug on her flesh and bones. She followed the rough track which wound gradually upwards through oxygenia scrub and crater plantations of omicorn that shone lemon and lime against the ochre earth.

As the sun warmed the land, the frost around the houses’ vent holes melted away; water began to trickle in irrigation channels. To the south, vapours rose from the squat towers and pyramids of Bellona as the city stirred with the morning. The bright streak in the sky was more like a flaming meteor.

‘What do you suppose that is?’ she said aloud to her cloak.

The creature twitched on her shoulders but made no other response. It had no language, no intelligence really, just the instincts and capacities for which it had been fashioned.

‘You can get down,’ she told it, beginning to feel warm.

The cloak slithered off her shoulders and curled up on the passenger seat, its pointed snout buried under black-furred paws, slitted grey eyes closed.

At the very edge of the plantation she found the craterpool where the bindweed grew. The canyon walls reared up directly ahead of her, blotched with blue-green aquavines whose pods exploded like gunfire each spring, sending torrents of water down the slopes to irrigate the valley.

Suckerflies were darting over the icy surface of the water, so Marea approached cautiously and cut a handful of the tall bindweeds at the pool’s edge. She sliced off the best of the leaves and put them in her pouch.

A distant sound like a terrible shrieking carried to her ears.

She looked up and saw the flaming meteor – huge now, and plunging directly towards the ground. The tortured sounds grew louder, and Marea saw that it was not a meteor but a mothership, irreparably damaged, blistered and blazing with friction heat, screaming in agony.

Her cloak began to mewl in alarm. It scuttled out of its seat and darted for cover under the tractor.

Marea stood transfixed. The ship was big, its serpentine head opening out into a bulging mottled body of fins and tendrils and a ragged, charred hole where the vent ducts should have been. Its neck reared and twisted, and the shrieking sounds continued, awesomely loud.

All Marea could do was stand and watch. At the very last moment before the ship disappeared from sight behind a jagged elbow of the canyon, she thought she saw an emergency pod eject from its head and go spiralling down. Then there was a huge explosion which sent her reeling.

As she lay there, tangled among the bindweed, fragments of the ship’s polymer hull began to rain down on her, drifts of fibre and organic coolant, shards of bulwark chitin and bone.

She scrambled to her feet. A cloud of dust was rising from the side canyon known as Snake Vale. Without a moment’s hesitation, Marea hurried off towards it.

The mothership had come down close to where Snake Vale joined the canyon proper. There was little left of it. As the dust settled, Marea saw that the head and neck were just a gory mass of charred tissue and splintered bone. There was no hope of finding any of the crew alive. Even the heat-resistant hull had burned away, and only the ship’s broken ceramic ribs and spine remained of the superstructure.

She approached the wreckage with caution. The heat was intense, oils and other secretions sizzling on twisted metal plates, greasy smoke rising up into the pink sky. Then the ship lurched, and Marea leapt back in terror, thinking it was about to rear up. But it was only the foreribs collapsing as the great beast settled further in its death.

Marea scanned the surrounding slopes. Wreckage was strewn everywhere, bloody flesh and plastic littering the aquavines. Then she saw it. Halfway up one of the slopes the emergency pod was flashing whitely in the dawn.

Marea scrambled up the slope, stumbling through the woody vinestems which hugged the ground like coiled rope. She was puffing like a house by the time she reached the pod.

There was a dark spot at the centre of the pod, and when she touched it the pod flipped open. Inside the small compartment nestled an egg.

It was no bigger than a baby’s head, a perfect fleshy oval swirled with purple and red veins. A womb. Marea instinctively searched for the umbilical, intending to connect it to the navel implant which she had had put in in case Salih proved unequal to the pregnancy. But the womb had no umbilical.

Gently, she lifted it out. It was warm to the touch, and she felt as if the life inside was snuggling in her arms, relieved to have escaped a death that Marea knew someone had planned for it.

She clutched the womb to her breast and fled back to the tractor. Soon other people from the surrounding plantations and from Bellona itself would come to investigate the crash. She had to get the child away to safety, hide it in case the people who wished it harm should find it.

Her cloak came out from under the tractor to greet her, its broad furry tail sweeping the dust in pleasure.

‘Look what I’ve got,’ she said to it. ‘A baby.’

She climbed into the tractor and opened the storage bin behind her seat. The cloak loped after her, curious and puzzled.

‘We’re going to look after it,’ Marea told her pet. ‘But you mustn’t tell anyone. Not even Yuri and Salih.’

She wrapped the womb in an emergency thermal blanket. It fitted perfectly in the bin. She closed the lid and locked the latches.

‘Not a word,’ she reminded the cloak, who was peering into her face, eyes wide with uncomprehending inquisitiveness. ‘This is a secret between the two of us.’

She swivelled around in her seat and started up the tractor. As she moved off, she realized that she had lost the pouch containing the bindweed. She gave the engine full throttle.

*

The room was white, and there was a window opposite with a pale blind drawn on it. For some time I knew nothing, registered nothing, apart from this. Then gradually I became aware that I was lying in a bed, groggy and weak, unable even to raise my head.

Time passed, and I did nothing except stare at the featureless ceiling and walls. It was an effort to keep my eyes open, to do anything except register my shallow breathing. It was slow and delicate, like drawn-out whispers, or sighs.

Then at length I became aware of a movement nearby. A woman’s face loomed in front of my eyes.

She was fair-haired and olive-skinned, with strong, attractive features. Only by looking at her did it register on me that I was a man. She smiled down at me. I was seized with terror.

I felt her hand behind my head, lifting me up. I tried to scream, but couldn’t. I wanted her away from me, was terrified without reason at the sight of her.

She was holding a cup to my lips.

Somehow she made me drink. The water went down my throat like a cool balm. I hadn’t realized how parched I was.

Some of my terror must have registered in my eyes, because she stroked the side of my face with her fingers.

‘It’s all right,’ she whispered. ‘Just rest. You’re going to be fine.’

Her voice was gentle, encouraging, and I sensed that it was important to her I did recover. But this did nothing to reassure me. I was certain she meant me harm.

She lowered my head to the pillow. And then she was gone.

Marea met Tunde at the terminus on the outskirts of Bellona. His shuttle, a crystalline spirogyrator, landed on time but he was delayed at customs. There was a heavy security presence everywhere, helmeted politia toting pulse-pistols and stopping people at random for questioning. Marea had to show her identity disk, and its information was double-checked with a console before the officer was satisfied.

When Tunde finally emerged, his big dark face broke into a broad grin at the sight of her. They embraced one another. Though they had met strictly through business and saw one another only infrequently, they had become good friends.

‘What’s going on here?’ he asked her. ‘You at war or something?’

Marea shrugged. ‘There’s some security flap. As usual, no one’s told anyone what’s happening.’

Marea had a company gravlev waiting outside the terminus, a compact but racy two-seater into which Tunde’s frame barely fitted. He was tall for a Venusian, and might have passed as a native of Mars.

‘How long’s it been?’ he asked her.

‘Nearly a year.’

‘That long? You’re looking as good as ever.’

‘You’re only saying that because you know I’m married.’

He grinned again. ‘How are they both?’

‘We’re soon to be parents.’

‘Really? How many?’

‘Just the one.’

He adjusted his seatbelt. ‘Very frugal of you. No instant family, eh?’

‘I persuaded them against it.’

He eyed her. ‘This some sort of ideological statement?’

Little did he know.

‘Maybe it is.’

He didn’t follow this up. ‘Boy or girl?’

‘We decided to leave it in the lap of the gods.’

She drove off, merging with the city-bound traffic.

‘How’s your trio?’ she asked presently.

‘Blooming,’ he replied. ‘Eight years old now. They keep Yolande and me occupied, I can tell you. You should come and visit us sometime.’

‘Venus? I’ve never even made Olympus Mons.’

‘You’d like it. Richer air, plenty of water.’

‘Bioforms oozing out of the slime everywhere.’

He chuckled. ‘Something like that. Who’s carrying the baby?’

‘Salih. We were going to draw lots, but he insisted.’

He gave an exaggerated sigh. ‘You’ve broken my heart. I was hoping you’d pack them in and run away with me.’

She pulled out to avoid a decipede that had halted and was retching in the inside lane. ‘You’d never leave Yolande and the kids, and you know it. Uh oh.’

The traffic was slowing, piling up as they approached a toll gate. Once again, armed politia were checking IDs and baggage.

It was half an hour before they were through. Tunde always travelled light, his attaché case containing a single change of clothing and his comlink. He kept another wardrobe in the company apartments, so regular were his visits to Mars. An officious female officer insisted on checking every detail of his business. While Marea simmered with irritation, Tunde remained implacably courteous and cooperative. Finally they were waved on.

‘I could have hit her,’ Marea said as soon as they were clear.

‘Wrong move. You get their backs up and they’ll find ways of delaying you longer. Relentless courtesy, that’s the answer. It unnerves them, and they can’t wait to be rid of you. What are they worried about, anyway? Found a nest of Augmenters or something?’

Marea kept her eyes on the road.

They lunched in the company dome, overlooking the extractor pens. Some of the great beasts were dozing in the midafternoon warmth while others continued to munch their quota of ground rock.

Tunde had slept through the interplanetary leg of his flight and was ready to get on with business. His company, Vesta Variations, supplied hers with custom-grown bioforms – everything from surveyor hounds to armour-plated borers. Marea left him with the line managers who were better equipped to explain the difficulties their extractors were experiencing with the gastro-smelting of certain lanthanide ores currently in great demand. There were limits to even her tolerance, and the attraction of watching behemoths excrete gleaming nodules of neodymium had long waned.

Marea had been on duty since dawn that morning, and her work was over for the day. But she had arranged to have dinner with Tunde in Bellona that evening – he was on a short visit, and she wanted to make the most of him – so she went to the recreation dome and sat in a masseur for an hour. Afterwards she checked her locker to ensure that the womb remained safe inside the holdall where she had hidden it.

As before, the womb was warm to the touch and apparently quite vital. For three days she had hoarded it and pondered over its self-sustaining nature. She could only guess at how developed it was: five months, perhaps, in comparison with an ordinary umbilical womb. How did the embryo obtain oxygen and food for its development? She had never seen anything like it, but she daren’t make any enquiries for fear of arousing suspicion.

Two colleagues were coming down the corridor. She hastily returned the womb to the locker. Ever since the crash at Snake Vale there had been politia everywhere, conducting searches in the city and countryside alike. There was no official explanation, but Marea was positive it had to be connected with the womb; they knew it had survived, and they wanted it. What for? She hadn’t the faintest notion. All she knew was that she had to protect it, keep it safe.

She asked a console beside the levelator to call home. Presently its optic flashed into life, showing Salih seated at the kitchen table.

‘How is he?’ she asked immediately.

‘Bilious,’ Salih replied, looking pained. ‘But the fever’s passed.’

‘Tell him to go out for a walk. Get some air.’

‘He was asking for bindweed tea.’

‘Why doesn’t he get it himself?’

Salih appeared taken aback. ‘What are you so angry about, Marea?’

‘Nothing.’ She was impatient with the trivialities of their relationship – especially with Tunde in town. ‘I’m going to be late. I have to take a client to dinner.’

‘What time will you be back?’

She suppressed a sigh. ‘When you see me.’

She heard Yuri’s voice, demonstrative and wheedling. Salih gave him his attention for a moment, then turned back to Marea.

‘Yuri was wondering if you’d bring him home some dispepsin, if it’s not too much trouble.’

Salih’s tone was perfectly reasonable, but to Marea it was like an accusation, a moral obligation.

‘Can’t you get it from the store?’

‘He prefers the brand they sell in Omnimed.’

‘Don’t count on it,’ she said. ‘End call.’

The optic went grey. When Marea did not move or speak, it shuffled over to its usual place in an alcove.

She took the gravlev back into town and sat in a park. The city busied itself around her, workers boarding serpentines, cleaners munching debris from disposall chutes. Lights came on in window slits, holograms shimmered into life, green beetles emerged from flagstone cracks and crawled over her boots, denizens of the city’s nooks and crannies with agendas wholly unhuman.

A passing console stopped to announce a public vote on the question of funding for an experimental centre where children would be gathered together on a daily basis to learn from tutors rather than getting their education at home. Marea listened briefly to the summary of the issues, then voted against the proposal. She paged the news. Most of it was routine Martian affairs with no mention of the womb, though one item from the Uranian ecosphere featured the grisly suicide of a woman who had inexplicably gone berserk in her compartment in Umbriel East, mutilating her living chamber before hurling herself out of the window. It was hard to credit, unnerving to dwell upon. Imagine going mad. Imagine killing yourself. The whole thing was disgustingly primitive.

Across the square was one of the city’s shrines, a tiered dome of roserock and mirrored plass topped by a silver needle jutting to the heavens. Inside there were several levels ringed with booths. Bored-looking intercessors patrolled the balconies or sat with visitors at whorlwood tables in the central concourse.

Marea entered a booth on the second level, locking the door behind her and sitting down at the Noosphere interface. It comprised a white neural hood laced with biocircuitry that coiled into the prayer terminal with its hand sockets and touchpad controls.

She pulled the hood down and focused on the icon, a swirling kaleidoscopic crystal. She tried to empty her mind, to concentrate wholly on herself and her identity as Marea Elodaris, twenty-six standard years old, a native of Bellona City on Mars, shipment facilitator for Marineris Metal Conglomerates. She filled her mind with as much of the pure essence of herself as she could. And she felt the Noosphere begin to stir, to reach out the warm dark folds of its vast communality towards her.

As always, she sensed Takti, her maternal grandmother, most strongly. She was a wry and mischievous woman who had raised her after her parents emigrated to Ganymede with their new quins when she was two years old. Her grandmother had died and been absorbed into the Noosphere five years before, and she greeted Marea with her customary warmth and pleasure. But there were others, too – great-grandparents and their ancestors on both sides of the family, much of her whole lineage stretching right back to the distant days when the Solar System was first settled and the Noosphere established. Most she had never known except through the Noosphere, but they had become friends and counsellors to her, confidants who offered their own wisdom and that of the billions who had entered the Noosphere on death. They spoke to her not in words but in a flood of moods and emotions that enriched her own understanding and calmed the anxieties of the physical life which they had now transcended.

There were people who communed with the Noosphere every day, some for days on end, but Marea was not one of them. She rationed her visits, fearful of the dependency that often characterized the Devout. Today, however, she was in pressing need of her ancestors’ guidance. As the multiplicity of their personalities jostled in her mind, she opened herself fully, reliving the morning of the mothership’s death fall and everything that had flowed from it. What was she to do with the womb? Was the security clampdown in the valley connected with it?

She expected a calm and calming response from Takti and the host, and was taken aback when they responded with unease and even agitation. They confirmed with urgency that to possess the womb was to be in great danger. The womb was important, though her ancestors could not make clear to her why. There was a faction in the physical world that wished to acquire it and would stop at nothing to do so. Her very life might be in danger. Yet to surrender the womb to the authorities would also be to draw unwelcome attention to herself and court a different kind of danger. The responsibility was not hers. She must relieve herself of it.

Marea raised the hood, breaking the connection. The entire emotional tone of the response had startled her, even though it had merely confirmed her own suspicions. And she was not simply shocked, but also irritated. Takti, whose presence always overpowered that of all the others, seemed almost disapproving in her unease. Marea felt a little like a precocious child being scolded by censorious parents for being too forward. She left the booth and hurried out of the shrine, avoiding the eyes of any intercessors.

Almost an hour had passed since she had entered the booth: time often sped by when she communed with the Noosphere. She drove back to the recreation dome.

With some trepidation she approached her locker, certain she would find it empty, ransacked or surrounded by politia who would arrest her on sight. But the womb was in the holdall, warm and alive. Closing up the bag, she heaved it over her shoulder, shut the locker and left.

As she was heading down the corridor, a console paged her. Its optic winked on to show Tunde.

‘Marea,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry, but I’m not going to be able to make dinner.’

She did not try to hide her disappointment.

‘We’ve got a real problem with the extractors. One of them’s died, and I’m trying to arrange immediate freight back to Venus.’

‘Where are you?’

‘At the terminus. I may be here all night.’ He shrugged helplessly. ‘The wheels of bureaucracy …’

‘Damn.’ The holdall was heavy in her hands. She did not know what to do with it, or with herself. ‘Have you eaten?’ she asked.

He shook his head.

‘I’ll come over. Be with you in half an hour.’

She ended the call before he had the chance to protest.

The terminus was on the far side of the city, an octagon of interconnected runways and control tower mushrooms. Tunde was sitting outside a sterile room in one of the off-planet warehouses.

‘You look terminally bored,’ Marea said to him.

The pun was feeble. His only response was to shake his head wearily.

‘How long have you been here?’

‘Hours. I’m waiting for customs to OK the carcass.’

Through the door window, Marea could see a trio of customs people inspecting the dead extractor. It was a calf rather than fully grown, but it filled the chamber. It had been laid on a huge slab, its ample belly lasered open to reveal the organoceramic digestive tract. Fortunately the blood had been drained from the beast, and Marea was just about able to bear the sight of undigested ore in its stomach and lumps of slag in a slit portion of the lower intestine. One of the officials was running a bioscanner over the innards.

‘They’re checking it for bugs,’ Tunde said. ‘They’ll only let it through when they’re satisfied it’s clean.’

‘Do you have to wait here?’

‘I stayed on hand in case anything cropped up.’

‘Come on. Let’s go and eat.’

In fact eating was the last thing on her mind, but she was restless and wanted to get as far away as possible from any sort of officialdom.

They rode the levelator up to the restaurant.

‘What’s in the bag?’ Tunde enquired.

‘Don’t ask.’

He scrutinized her with a mixture of interest and suspicion.

‘It’s not a bomb,’ she said defensively.

He smiled. ‘You say the nicest things.’

The restaurant had a surprisingly varied menu, and Tunde insisted she try the oolaga soup, a regional Venusian speciality. Marea dutifully spooned her way through the dish, thinking as she did so that she preferred protein spirals when they didn’t wriggle in the mouth.

Tunde showed her holos of his son and two daughters at play in the Lavinia theme park. Neither of them personally knew one another’s families, but that was part of the fun. They bantered and flirted with one another as was their custom, though this had a serious edge. If she had met Tunde before she married, and if he had been a free man … well, it was foolish to speculate, really. They had met one another too late and had to settle for the kind of close friendship that neither of them could allow to slide into something more intimate for fear of ruining everything.

Marea sipped her frostwine. It was then Tunde told her that this was to be his last visit to Mars for the foreseeable future.

‘I’m moving from product development to home sales.’ He sounded apologetic. ‘It’s a sideways move. Sideways and slightly downwards, I suppose, but I asked for it. The kids are growing up, and I’m missing a lot of them with all this travelling.’

It made sense: he had always doted on his children.

‘I’ll miss you,’ she said.

‘Likewise.’ He stared at her across the table, suddenly very serious. ‘What’s up, Marea? You look worried half to death.’

‘I’m hoping I can keep the oolaga down.’

He didn’t smile, just kept staring at her.

It was all she needed – a show of real concern. She proceeded to pour out the whole story, as she had done to the Noosphere but now bringing it right up to date. Tunde listened without comment until she stopped talking.

‘And it’s here?’ he said. ‘In the bag under the table?’

She nodded, checking for the umpteenth time that no one nearby was listening to them.

‘Has anyone else checked it out?’

She shook her head.

‘I still don’t understand why you think someone wants to harm it.’

‘I can’t explain it. It’s an overpowering feeling, a certainty. My ancestors felt the same, don’t forget. I’ve got to get rid of it, Tunde, but make sure it’s safe with whoever it’s passed on to.’

Tunde looked out the window as an interworld sicklewing took off along a runway, phosphor-nodules twinkling in the dark.

‘I think I may know someone,’ he said.

Marea had been half hoping for this; at the same time she knew what a wrench it would be to surrender the womb to anyone else.

‘Who?’ she said.

‘Someone on Venus.’

‘You’d sneak it back there?’

‘I’d have to. And it would take the heat off you, wouldn’t it?’

‘But how? They’re searching everyone and everything. You’d never get it through customs.’

He winked at her. ‘Maybe I won’t have to carry it.’

A light speared into my eyes, making me close them instantly. I did not dare open them again; I merely lay there, too limp to move. My insides felt as if they had been liquefied.

I could hear sounds, someone talking, but it was distant, muffled. I tried to concentrate and listen without opening my eyes, without letting them know I was awake. But it was like being under water; I couldn’t make out anything. All I knew was that there were two different voices.

Presently they diminished and drifted away as I sank down again.

It was past midn. . .