Cibola Burn

She sat up and turned reluctantly to the side. It was there. Black and bright at the margins. She felt a stab of almost supernatural fear. She’d thought – hoped – it would be gone. Whatever it was, she had passed through it, been ripped apart by it, and still been simple enough to reassemble herself on the other side. It had saved her, and she had never seen anything in her life that filled her with a deeper dread than that complex darkness.

She moved back, her legs aching. She stood. She was aware that she was weeping without knowing why exactly she was doing it. Hunger and fear and relief and exultation and mortal fear. It was too much. That was fine.

The voice that came to her was human and distant. Was Holden.

“Elvi? Elvi! Are you there?”

“I’m here,” she shouted.

“Did we win?”

She took one long breath. Then another.

“Yes,” she called. “We won.”

Interlude: The Investigator

— it reaches out it reaches out it reaches out it reaches out —

One hundred and thirteen times a second, it reaches out to report that the work is done. If something accepted the report, it could stop. It will never stop. It feels no frustration and no fear. It feels the investigator moving within it and around it. The investigator exceeds its boundary conditions. It tries to kill the investigator. It fails. It feels no distress at the failure, and it reaches out, it reaches out, it reaches out —

The investigator looks into the eye of death, and can’t see it. It knows, and that is enough. It feels pleasure and regret because they are part of the template. It says a name – Julie. It remembers taking a woman’s hand in its own.

The investigator reaches out, reaches down. It broadens like an eternal, endless inhalation, and spreads to fill all the places that it can reach, that have been reached. That are. It reaches out it reaches out it reaches out, the ticking on an insectile leg, a spark closing a gap, endlessly, and the investigator feels it, encompasses it. The scars reach out, the other minds. Some are frightened, some are lost in dreams that have been going on for years, some are grateful. They sing to the investigator, or they accuse it, or they plead with it, or they scream. They are aware, and powerless as they have ever been. The investigator touches them as it touches everything. It tells them not to worry. That it’s driving this bus.

Don’t worry, it says. We’re gonna be fine.

The investigator pushes his hat back, wishes he had a beer. He likes this woman. This Elvi. He wishes he’d had a little more time to know her. He wishes he had a little more time. He doesn’t care. He has died a million times since he died. The void has no mysteries for him now.

He connects, and the investigator becomes the world. He feels it everywhere. The orbital bases, the power cores in the crushing depth of the ocean, the library vaults where the old ones had lived, the signaling stations high in the mountains, the cities deep beneath the ground. He is the world.

There is a struggle at the end. There’s always a struggle at the end. He’s not scared, and so all through the world, the others aren’t either. You’re like Peter Pan, she says. When a child died, Peter Pan would fall halfway with them. So they wouldn’t be scared.

Weird. And that’s a kid’s story? Anyway, it’s not me, the investigator says, smiles at her. Holds her hand. I don’t go for half.

— it reaches out and it reaches out and it reaches out and then it stops.

Chapter Fifty-Five: Havelock

Blue. That was what he forgot every time. He knew it intellectually, sure. Sky-blue sky, after all, but spend a few years on a station or a ship and it was one of those details that slipped away. He didn’t even know he’d forgotten it until he had a moment like this. He leaned on his cane and lifted a hand to shade his eyes and looked up past the green-gray clouds to the wider blue sky.

It’s pretty, isn’t it?” the woman asked. Lucia, her name was. First Landing’s physician, Basia’s wife, Felcia and Jacek’s mother. “Makes you want to stay.”

“No,” he said. “Makes me want to be home already.”

“If you lived here…” she said.

“Not a chance,” he replied, and chuckled.

The Rocinante sat on the muddy ground behind him, more or less where the landing pad had been back when there had been a landing pad. All of that was gone now. The scientific huts, the buildings of First Landing, even most of the mining operation. Everything had been scraped flat and clean. Only the erosion ditches showed where the flood had been now that the waters had gone.