The Very Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  Then the nurses go away. They leave the light above my bed burning and tell me if I need anything at all to press the intercom button. They’re just down the hall, and they always come when I call. They’re never anything except prompt and do not fail to arrive bearing the chemical solace of pharmaceuticals, only half of which I know by name. I am not neglected. My needs are met as well as anyone alive can meet them. I’m too precious a commodity not to coddle. I’m the woman who was invited to the strangest, most terrible rendezvous in the history of space exploration. The one they dragged all the way to Mars after Pilgrimage abruptly, inexplicably diverged from its mission parameters, when the crew went silent and the AI stopped responding. I’m the woman who stepped through an airlock hatch and into that alien Eden; I’m the one who spoke with a goddess. I’m the woman who was the goddess’ lover, when she was still human and had a name and a consciousness that could be comprehended.

  “Are you sleeping better?” the psychiatrist asks, and I tell him that I sleep just fine, thank you, seven to eight hours every night now. He nods and patiently smiles, but I know I haven’t answered his question. He’s actually asking me if I’m still having the nightmares about my time aboard Pilgrimage, if they’ve decreased in their frequency and/or severity. He doesn’t want to know if I sleep, or how long I sleep, but if my sleep is still haunted. Though he’d never use that particular word, haunted.

  He’s a thin, balding man with perfectly manicured nails and an unremarkable mid-Atlantic accent. He dutifully makes the commute down from Berkeley once a week, because those are his orders, and I’m too great a puzzle for his inquisitive mind to ignore. All in all, I find the psychiatrist far less helpful than the nurses and their dependable drugs. Whereas they’ve been assigned the task of watching over me, of soothing and steadying me and keeping me from harming myself, he’s been given the unenviable responsibility of discovering what happened during the comms blackout, those seventeen interminable minutes after I boarded the derelict ship and promptly lost radio contact with Yastreb-4 and Earth. Despite countless debriefings and interviews, NASA still thinks I’m holding out on them. And maybe I am. Honestly, it’s hard for me to say. It’s hard for me to keep it all straight anymore: what happened and what didn’t, what I’ve said to them and what I’ve only thought about saying, what I genuinely remember and what I may have fabricated wholesale as a means of self-preservation.

  The psychiatrist says it’s to be expected, this sort of confusion from someone who’s survived very traumatic events. He calls the events very traumatic, by the way. I don’t; I’m not yet sure if I think of them that way. Regardless, he’s diagnosed me as suffering from Survivor Syndrome, which he also calls K-Z Syndrome. There’s a jack in my hospital room with filtered and monitored web access, but I was able to look up “K-Z Syndrome.” It was named for a Nazi concentration camp survivor, an Israeli author named Yehiel De-Nur. De-Nur published under the pseudonym Ka-Tzetnik 135633. That was his number at Auschwitz, and K-Z Syndrome is named after him. In 1956, he published House of Dolls, describing the Nazi “Joy Division, the Freudenabteilung,” a system that utilized Jewish women as sex slaves.

  The psychiatrist is the one who asked if I would at least try to write it down, what happened, what I saw and heard (and smelled and felt) when I entered the Pilgrimage a year and a half ago. He knows, of course, that there have already been numerous written and vidded depositions and affidavits for NASA and the CSS/NSA, the WHO, the CDC, and the CIA and, to tell the truth, I don’t know who requested and read and then filed away all those reports. He knows about them, though, and that, by my own admission, they barely scratched the surface of whatever happened out there. He knows, but I reminded him, anyway.

  “This will be different,” he said. “This will be more subjective.” And the psychiatrist explained that he wasn’t looking for a blow-by-blow linear narrative of my experiences aboard Pilgrimage, and I told him that was good, because I seem to have forgotten how to think or relate events in a linear fashion, without a lot of switchbacks and digressions and meandering.

  “Just write,” he said. “Write what you can remember, and write until you don’t want to write anymore.”

  “That would be now,” I said, and he silently stared at me for a while. He didn’t laugh, even though I’d thought it was pretty funny.

  “I understand that the medication makes this sort of thing more difficult for you,” he said, sometime later. “But the medication helps you reach back to those things you don’t want to remember, those things you’re trying to forget.” I almost told him that he was starting to sound like a character in a Lewis Carroll story—riddling and contradicting—but I didn’t. Our hour was almost over, anyway.

  So, after three days of stalling, I’m trying to write something that will make you happy, Dr. Ostrowski. I know you’re trying to do your job, and I know a lot of people must be peering over your shoulder, expecting the sort of results they’ve failed to get themselves. I don’t want to show up for our next session empty-handed.

  The taxi module was on autopilot during the approach. See, I’m not an astronaut or mission specialist or engineer or anything like that. I’m an anthropologist, and I mostly study the Middle Paleolithic of Europe and Asia Minor. I have a keen interest in tool use and manufacture by the Neanderthals. Or at least that’s who I used to be. Right now, I’m a madwoman in a psych ward at a military hospital in San Jose, California. I’m a case number, and an eyewitness who has proven less than satisfactory. But, what I’m trying to say, Doctor, the module was on autopilot, and there was nothing for me to do but wait there inside my encounter suit and sweat and watch the round screen divided by a Y-shaped reticle as I approached the derelict’s docking port, the taxi barreling forward at 0.06 meters per second. The ship grew so huge so quickly, looming up in the blackness, and that only made the whole thing seem that much more unreal.

  I tried hard to focus, to breathe slowly, and follow the words being spoken between the painful, bright bursts of static in my ears, the babble of sound trapped inside the helmet with me. Module approaching 50-meter threshold. On target and configuring KU-band from radar to comms mode. Slowing now to 0.045 meters per second. Decelerating for angular alignment, extending docking ring, nine meters, three meters, a whole lot of noise and nonsense about latches and hooks and seals, capture and final position, and then it seemed like I wasn’t moving anymore. Like the taxi wasn’t moving anymore. We were, of course, the little module and I, only now we were riding piggyback on Pilgrimage, locked into geosynchronous orbit, with nothing but the instrument panel to remind me I wasn’t sitting still in space. Then the mission commander was telling me I’d done a great job, congratulations, they were all proud of me, even though I hadn’t done anything except sit and wait.

  But all this is right there in the mission dossiers, Doctor. You don’t need me to tell you these things. You already know that Pilgrimage ’s AI would allow no one but me to dock and that MS Lowry’s repeated attempts to hack the firewall failed. You know about the nurses and their pills, and Yehiel De-Nur and House of Dolls. You know about the affair I had with the Korean payload specialist during the long flight to Mars. You’re probably skimming this part, hoping it gets better a little farther along.

  So, I’ll try to tell you something you don’t know. Just one thing, for now.

  Hanging there in my tiny, life-sustaining capsule, suspended two hundred and fifty miles above extinct Martian volcanoes and surrounded by near vacuum, I had two recurring thoughts, the only ones that I can now clearly recall having had. First, the grim hope that, when the hatch finally opened—if the hatch opened—they’d all be dead. All of them. Every single one of the men and women aboard Pilgrimage, and most especially her. And, secondly, I closed my eyes as tightly as I could and wished that I would soon discover there’d been some perfectly mundane accident or malfunction, and the bizarre, garbled transmissions that had sent us all the way to Mars to try and save the day meant nothing at all. But
I only hoped and wished, mind you. I haven’t prayed since I was fourteen years old.

  March 19, 2037 (Friday)

  Last night was worse than usual. The dreams, I mean. The nurses and my physicians don’t exactly approve of what I’ve begun writing for you, Dr. Ostrowski. Of what you’ve asked me to do. I suspect they would say there’s a conflict of interest at work. They’re supposed to keep me sane and healthy, but here you are, the latest episode in the inquisition that’s landed me in their ward. When I asked for the keypad this afternoon, they didn’t want to give it to me. Maybe tomorrow, they said. Maybe the day after tomorrow. Right now, you need your rest. And sure, I know they’re right. What you want, it’s only making matters worse, for them and for me, but when I’d finally had enough and threatened to report the hospital staff for attempting to obstruct a federal investigation, they relented. But, just so you know, they’ve got me doped to the gills with an especially potent cocktail of tranquilizers and antipsychotics, so I’ll be lucky if I can manage more than gibberish. Already, it’s taken me half an hour to write (and repeatedly rewrite) this one paragraph, so who gets the final laugh?

  Last night, I dreamed of the cloud again.

  I dreamed I was back in Germany, in Darmstadt, only this time, I wasn’t sitting in that dingy hotel room near the Luisenplatz. This time it wasn’t a phone call that brought me the news, or a courier. And I didn’t look up to find her standing there in the room with me, which, you know, is how this one usually goes. I’ll be sitting on the bed, or I’ll walk out of the bathroom, or turn away from the window, and there she’ll be. Even though Pilgrimage and its crew is all those hundreds of millions of kilometers away, finishing up their experiments at Ganymede and preparing to begin the long journey home, she’s standing there in the room with me. Only not this time. Not last night.

  The way it played out last night, I’d been cleared for access to the ESOC central control room. I have no idea why. But I was there, standing near one wall with a young French woman, younger than me by at least a decade. She was blonde, with green eyes, and she was pretty; her English was better than my French. I watched all those men and women, too occupied with their computer terminals to notice me. The pretty French woman (sorry, but I never learned her name) was pointing out different people, explaining their various roles and responsibilities: the ground operations manager, the director of flight operations, a visiting astrodynamics consultant, the software coordinator, and so forth. The lights in the room were almost painfully bright, and when I looked up at the ceiling, I saw it wasn’t a ceiling at all, but the night sky, blazing with countless fluorescent stars.

  And then that last transmission from Pilgrimage came in. We didn’t realize it would be the last, but everything stopped, and everyone listened. Afterwards, no one panicked, as if they’d expected something of this sort all along. I understood that it had taken the message the better part of an hour to reach Earth, and that any reply would take just as long, but the French woman was explaining the communications delay, anyway.

  “We can’t know what that means,” somebody said. “We can’t possibly know, can we?”

  “Run through the telemetry data again,” someone else said, and I think it was the man the French woman had told me was the director of flight operations.

  But it might have been someone else. I was still looking at the ceiling composed of starlight and planets, and the emptiness between starlight and planets, and I knew exactly what the transmission meant. It was a suicide note, of sorts, streamed across space at three hundred kilometers per second. I knew, because I plainly saw the mile-long silhouette of the ship sailing by overhead, only a silvery speck against the roiling backdrop of Jupiter. I saw that cloud, too, saw Pilgrimage enter it and exit a minute or so later (and I think I even paused to calculate the width of the cloud, based on the vessel’s speed).

  You know as well as I what was said that day, Dr. Ostrowski, the contents in that final broadcast. You’ve probably even committed it to memory, just as I have. I imagine you’ve listened to the tape more times than you could ever recollect, right? Well, what was said in my dream last night was almost verbatim what Commander Yun said in the actual transmission. There was only one difference. The part right at the end, when the commander quotes from Chapter 13 of the Book of Revelation, that didn’t happen. Instead, he said:

  “Lead us from the unreal to real,

  Lead us from darkness to light,

  Lead us from death to immortality,

  Om Shanti, Shanti, Shanti.”

  I admit I had to look that up online. It’s from the Hindu Brhadāranyaka Upanishad. I haven’t studied Vedic literature since a seminar in grad school, and that was mostly an excuse to visit Bangalore. But the unconscious doesn’t lose much, does it, Doctor? And you never know what it’s going to cough up, or when.

  In my dream, I stood staring at the ceiling that was really no ceiling at all. If anyone else could see what I was seeing, they didn’t act like it. The strange cloud near Ganymede made me think of an oil slick floating on water, and when Pilgrimage came out the far side, it was like those dying sea birds that wash up on beaches after tanker spills. That’s exactly how it seemed to me, in the dream last night. I looked away, finally, looked down at the floor, and I was trying to explain what I’d seen to the French woman. I described the ruined plumage of ducks and gulls and cormorants, but I couldn’t make her understand. And then I woke up. I woke up screaming, but you’ll have guessed that part.

  I need to stop now. The meds have made going on almost impossible, and I should read back over everything I’ve written, do what I can to make myself clearer. I feel like I ought to say more about the cloud, because I’ve never seen it so clearly in any of the other dreams. It never before reminded me of an oil slick. I’ll try to come back to this. Maybe later. Maybe not.

  March 20, 2037 (Saturday)

  I don’t have to scream for the nurses to know that I’m awake, of course. I don’t have to scream, and I don’t have to use the call button, either. They get everything relayed in real-time, directly from my cerebral cortex and hippocampus to their wrist tops, via the depth electrodes and subdural strips that were implanted in my head a few weeks after the crew of Yastreb-4 was released from suborbital quarantine. The nurses see it all, spelled out in the spikes and waves of electrocorticography, which is how I know they know that I’m awake right now, when I should be asleep. Tomorrow morning, I imagine there will be some sort of confab about adjusting the levels of my benzo and nonbenzo hypnotics to ensure the insomnia doesn’t return.

  I’m not sure why I’m awake, really. There wasn’t a nightmare, at least none I can recall. I woke up and simply couldn’t get back to sleep. After ten or fifteen minutes, I reached for the keypad. I find the soft cobalt-blue glow from the screen is oddly soothing, and it’s nice to find comfort that isn’t injected, comfort that I don’t have to swallow or get from a jet spray or IV drip. And I want to have something more substantial to show the psychiatrist come Tuesday than dreams about Darmstadt, oil slicks, and pretty French women.

  I keep expecting the vidcom beside my bed to buzz and wink to life, and there will be one of the nurses looking concerned and wanting to know if I’m all right, if I’d like a little extra coby to help me get back to sleep. But the box has been quiet and blank so far, which leaves me equal parts surprised and relieved.

  “There are things you’ve yet to tell anyone,” the psychiatrist said. “Those are the things I’m trying to help you talk about. If they’ve been repressed, they’re the memories I’m trying to help you access.” That is, they’re what he’s going to want to see when I give him my report on Tuesday morning.

  And if at first I don’t succeed . . .

  So, where was I?

  The handoff.

  I’m sitting alone in the taxi, waiting, and below me, Mars is a sullen, rusty cadaver of a planet. I have the distinct impression that it’s watching as I’m handed off from one ship to the other. I imagine
those countless craters and calderas have become eyes, and all those eyes are filled with jealousy and spite. The module’s capture ring has successfully snagged Pilgrimage’s aft PMA, and it only takes a few seconds for the ring to achieve proper alignment. The module deploys twenty or so hooks, establishing an impermeable seal, and, a few seconds later, the taxi’s hatch spirals open, and I enter the airlock. I feel dizzy, slightly nauseous, and I almost stumble, almost fall. I see a red light above the hatch go blue, and realize that the chamber has pressurized, which means I’m subject to the centripetal force that generates the ship’s artificial gravity. I’ve been living in near zero g for more than eleven months, and nothing they told me in training or aboard the Yastreb-4 could have prepared me for the return of any degree of gravity. The EVA suit’s exoskeleton begins to compensate. It keeps me on my feet, keeps my atrophied muscles moving, keeps me breathing.

  “You’re doing great,” Commander Yun assures me from the bridge of Yastreb-4, and that’s when my comms cut out. I panic and try to return to the taxi module, but the hatchway has already sealed itself shut again. I have a go at the control panel, my gloved fingers fumbling clumsily at the unfamiliar switches, but can’t get it to respond. The display on the inside of my visor tells me that my heart rate’s jumped to 186 BPM, my blood pressure’s in the red, and oxygen consumption has doubled. I’m hyperventilating, which has my CO2 down and is beginning to affect blood oxygen levels. The medic on my left wrist responds by secreting a relatively mild anxiolytic compound directly into the radial artery. Milder, I might add, than the shit they give me here.