Vast by Linda Nagata

Author:Linda Nagata [Nagata, Linda]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Science Fiction
ISBN: 9780983110033
Publisher: Mythic Island Press LLC
Published: 2010-11-24T06:00:00+00:00

“NIKKO!” Lot could stand it no longer. “Nik-ko!” he roared.

He had stayed quiet during the aftermath of their passage, when the core cooled, and the Well water retreated on its own, seeping back through the walls into the ship’s regenerating tissue.

He had stayed quiet when Clemantine roused, gazing at him with eyes carefully empty of emotion. Makers had already cleaned away the scent of her sweat. She had told him, “Lot, let her go.”

Only then had Lot realized he still held Deneb’s hand.

Clemantine made the body disappear, but the images lingered. Lot could not forget the way Deneb had looked: her kisheer swollen and the papillae in her mouth, like fat fingers strangling her from the inside, her nasal tissue emergent, soaked in blood, her eyes—

He huddled against the wall, trying to recall the calming exercises he’d learned in Silk, and that he’d abandoned, until now. Closing his eyes, he performed breathing routines, sublimely conscious of the core’s imprisoning walls. Though he’d been born on a ship, in Silk he’d come to love open vistas and he craved them now.

Now.

The pace of his breathing picked up. He blew it back down, fighting a sense of entrapment until he could stand it no longer.

“Nik-ko!” he roared.

They heard him. Clemantine’s somnolent form stirred for the first time in hours. Urban woke too: Lot watched the peaceful lines of his sleeping face give way to a troubled perplexity. And Nikko manifested, a ghost at the chamber’s curving bow end.

As Lot turned to face him, the chill touch of a circulating breeze dragged past his face. “It’s cold in here,” Lot accused.

Nikko said, “It’s the same temperature it’s always been.”

“It’s not.”

Nikko’s chin rose. “The same temperature before the passage then.”

Lot felt a hard knot frozen in his chest. “She’s dead, and nobody has said a thing.”

“We have her ghost,” Nikko answered.

“Lot, I’m here.” Deneb’s voice issued from the wall behind his head. She sounded concerned, and a little confused. “You know there were copies.”

“It’s not the same.” She had been sensitive to the charismata; she’d made charismata of her own. That Deneb was gone.

He could not shake the image of her flesh swelling out of her scaled hide. She’d burned it into him with the charismata of her fear, like a hyperconscious drug injected in his spine.

“It shouldn’t have happened like that! Nikko, you forgot about us. You were thinking of the ship, what it could survive.”

Nikko’s posture possessed an artificial stillness. “Null Boundary’s neural tissue had priority, but I was thinking of you too. I knew your tolerances, and I made sure you came out all right.”

“But what about Deneb? She mattered too!”

“Lot, I’m still here.”

Nikko’s kisheer moved in slow, mechanical ripples. “It’s not my fault Deneb stayed with you. She should have dissolved herself. I did.”

“She’s not like you. She had a core persona.”

“Lot, stop it, please,” Deneb begged.

“She had a choice,” Nikko said. “Don’t blame me if she didn’t make the right one.”

His image winked out. Lot held on to a grip with whitening knuckles.

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