by Kali Wallace
The door opened into a long corridor, flanked on either side by glass walls. The red lights rose to welcome us, but the growing rooms behind the walls remained dark. Our reflections on the glass were ghosts of murky red punctuated by careless flashes of white. Moving through that corridor, there was a nervous jolt of fear every time somebody saw a motion they did not expect, then turned, breath caught and blood racing, to find it was only their own helmet-blank visage looking back at them.
There were no dead in that long corridor. The researchers must have evacuated to other parts of the ship. Zahra moved ahead of me; I did not stop her. There were no wrong turns for her to make until we reached the garden.
At the end of the long passage, the ship opened into a large, round atrium. In the center was a fountain. The water was enclosed in an elegant tangle of transparent pipes, with algae and aquatic plants filtering the water as it flowed. The water was stagnant now, and the algae and seaweed in the pipes had long since died.
Zahra reached the atrium first. The light from her headlamp bloomed to fill the space as she looked up, and she gasped.
“What is it?” Panya asked.
Zahra did not answer. The rest of us were only a few meters behind. I joined her at the edge of the garden. It had been beautiful once, a quiet green place of leaves and mist, wrapped on every side by vines and flowers, grasses and ferns, with a winding path for strolling when the ship was under acceleration, seats and alcoves for quiet relaxation, soft full-spectrum light giving the appearance of gentle sunlight that brightened and faded with the schedule of a natural day.
There was no green anymore. The plants had all died and withered, their leaves turned to crisp paper, their stalks blackened and brittle. There was no light. There were only the dead.
Arms frozen around each other in a grotesque sculpture, waxy and pale among the branches and leaves. Faces, barely human anymore, staring blankly into the darkness. I tried to count the bodies. Twenty, thirty, forty. My mind stuttered. Vines and tendrils of once-vibrant plants had continued to grow after the humans had died, wrapping around them, drawing them into a dry, crumbling substrate. Leaves had grown into hair. Flowers had bloomed and died where eyes and mouths ought to have been. Hands reached, feet dangled, and faces, so many faces, yawned in the peculiar distortion of desiccation. The corpses had shriveled to brown, frost-burned husks.
They looked as though they would crumble to dust at the slightest touch. I curled my fingers at my sides.
Zahra cleared her throat. For a second I imagined that the rasp of her breath over the radio was faster, edging toward panic, but she controlled it quickly. “They didn’t . . . it doesn’t seem like . . .”
“What? What’s going on?” Malachi said, coming up to join us. He looked up at the garden. “For fuck’s sake. What are you—fuck. Why are there so many of them here?”
“They didn’t die like the others,” Zahra said. “Look.”
She was right. There were no marks of violence on these bodies. No torn skin or flesh, no clothing stained with blood, no wounds at all. By the fountain there were two women clinging to each other, heads tilted together, eyes closed.
A shape moved beside me and I started. It was Panya. “Oh, that’s awful. Why didn’t they call for help? Didn’t anybody know they were here?”
“This looks more like what Zeffir-1 is supposed to do,” Malachi said. “Doesn’t it? Did the virus affect them differently?”
I had no answer for him. I had seen only the mindless violence of Lago’s virus. Nothing I remembered, and nothing in the records from House of Wisdom, explained the presence of so many here who died quietly, slowly enough that they could cling together in their final moments. Whether or not they were infected, I could guess why they had come here. My father’s work had brought life into space, where no life should thrive—and that meant breathable air, naturally cleansed, even if all of the machines that normally chugged and churned around them fell silent.
“They were waiting for rescue,” I said. “They thought they could survive here.”
“But—no, that only makes sense if the ventilation system shut down?” Malachi said, then shook his head quickly. “Of course it would have been. The virus was airborne. That would have been the first thing they tried, if the quarantines failed.”
I didn’t correct him, although I knew the virus had not been airborne, no matter what SPEC believed, or let the public believe. I would have contracted it if it were, as I had spent days breathing the same air as everyone who fell ill, across multiple levels of the ship. I trusted my mother’s conclusions in those final frantic hours more than I trusted the distant determination of SPEC.
“But the ventilation isn’t shut down now. The air mix in here is the same as everywhere else we’ve been,” Malachi added, more quietly. “I don’t know. I could be wrong.”
“How frightening that must have been.” Panya was on the edge of tears.
“We’re wasting time,” Zahra said. “We’re going up?”
“Yes,” I said. “All the way.”
She kicked away from the wall—with too much force, I knew that even as she moved—and caught herself on the pipes of the fountain in the center of the atrium. She swung around to awkwardly arrest her own motion, righted herself, and began to pull upward.
There was a nudge at my back: Dag, urging me to follow.
In a tangled thicket beneath the first arched bridge was a man I knew. I recognized him from the bold, dark tattoos that covered his face and neck. His name was Ulan. He had been one of my mother’s engineers, the one who developed materials strong enough to withstand the forces exerted by her experimental engines. I remembered him most by the booming quality of his laugh, the strength of his hands, the way he would spin me around and fling me across the workshop while I shrieked with laughter and my mother rolled her eyes in annoyance. He had little sisters and brothers and nieces and nephews on Earth, all living aboard one of the floating cities in the Pacific that had been admitted into the Councils when Ulan was a child. His mother used to send him recorded messages of the entire family grinning and waving and shouting hello. I had been so jealous of them—it looked so fun, to be there on the sea surrounded by friends and family, so different from the life aboard House of Wisdom, where there were few children, and my parents rarely had time to play with me.
I had never wondered how Ulan died. I had never thought about him at all.
“Move,” said Dag. “Keep going.”
His voice was gruff, but I thought I heard, for only a moment, the slightest hint of something almost like pity. I reached ahead, found a metal rail to grasp, pulled myself past Ulan. I wanted to say his name aloud—to tell somebody, anybody, that he had been a person I knew, that he had a family who had loved him and missed him. I could not make a sound.
On the other side of the bridge, I followed Zahra upward, upward, while the others trailed behind. When the girls reached the bridge, Ariana shrieked at the sight of Ulan’s face tangled in the gray leaves, and that shout hit me like a blow to the chest. I heard her scream, and echoed with it I heard all the others, the screams and pleas and desperate, gurgling gasps that filled my nightmares.
I closed my eyes, but it didn’t help. Ulan’s face was there, even in the darkness. I could not move. They had screamed, the infected and the dying. They had screamed as panic ripped through every person aboard, shouted and cursed and thrashed, clawing at their own skin and scrabbling for phantoms moving through their bodies. I had never forgotten, but I had always been able to push them down, to muffle them, if not ever truly silence them. Voices over the radio joined with the chorus from the past. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t open my eyes. I would only see them again, all the dead, their faces shriveled and inhuman.
“—the fuck is he doing?” Henke, angry.
“Is he having some kind of fit?” Panya, concerned.
“
We don’t have time for this.” Zahra, ever in a hurry.
I wanted to tell them I could hear them just fine. Every word throbbed in my skull like a hammer blow. They needn’t speak so loudly. It was too much, too many layers of fear and pain. The thorns of panic tore at the inside of my throat, the walls of my chest. The voices blended together into an unintelligible roar.
Then: a pressure on my arm.
“Jas,” Baqir said. “Jas, hey, come on.”
He gripped my elbow, slid his hand up my arm and around my shoulder, pulling me into a sidelong embrace.
“You’ve got to breathe. You’re going to pass out.”
“The suit,” I started to say, but my voice hitched, choking on the words. My vision blurred with tears. I raised my hand to wipe them away but tapped uselessly against the helmet instead. “Suit won’t let me.”
“Let’s not test it, okay?” Baqir said. He kept one arm around me, pressed his other hand to my chest; through his glove and my suit I could feel the metallic lines of his prosthetic fingers. “You need to breathe.”
I leaned my head toward him. Our helmets tapped together. “I am breathing.”
“You need to breathe and not talk,” he said.
His voice was so serious, so concerned, I sniffled and tried to do as he said, inhaling and exhaling. There was motion around me, and through the blur of tears I saw the others moving upward, upward. There were three levels to go.
Finally, Baqir said, “You okay now?”
“Do you remember,” I said, “that time you asked me what I was so afraid of all the time?”
He rubbed my arm lightly. “Yeah?”
Of course he remembered; I hadn’t thought he would forget. It was at the beginning of our second year of upper school. Our first year we had been assigned different roommates—new students were encouraged to expand their social horizons—but for the second we got to choose. I had no other friends, so my choice was obvious, but I had worried all summer Baqir might want to live with somebody else. But he never mentioned it, never brought up the possibility, and by the time the school year began, I was both thrilled and terrified—thrilled that we would be together all the time, terrified for the same reason, because by that point, fourteen years old, I had certainly figured out that the way I felt about Baqir was not the way he felt about me. I was sure he would notice that I sometimes lingered too long watching him while he bent over his schoolwork or when he stretched after waking in the morning. He would notice, and he wouldn’t be cruel about it, that wasn’t his nature, but as soon as he understood, something would break between us, something irreparable, and everything would change. I carried that fear with me during the first days of that school year.
Then I woke one morning to find Baqir already awake, sitting on the edge of his bed with his elbows on his knees, watching me. My heart leapt into my throat. He was going to tell me that he wanted to move to another room. He wasn’t comfortable sharing with me. He was sorry but he just couldn’t. I was so sure of what he would say.
But what he said instead was that he’d noticed I was having nightmares, and he wanted to know what it was that frightened me so much in my dreams. His own worst dreams, he said, were of being back in the refugee camp at the edge of the wasteland, lying in a cot beside his sick sister and not knowing if she would survive the night, knowing only that his parents wept every day because the children weren’t getting better, and being so afraid he wouldn’t notice her dying that he couldn’t breathe. He had never told me that before, but he told me then in a quiet, sad voice. He wanted to help. He knew what it was like to be afraid of the past. He didn’t like seeing me so scared.
I knew that morning that the love I had for him wasn’t going away. Not then, not ever. I resigned myself to a thousand small joys and heartbreaks every day because he didn’t feel the same way, and it wasn’t going to change.
The answer I had given him then, three years ago, was honest but incomplete.
I knew they were all listening. There was no privacy in the linked radios. The whispers we shared in that dead place were for everyone, but in that moment I didn’t care.
I said, “This.”
Baqir lifted one eyebrow, an expression that under normal circumstances would make my heart skip. “This?”
“This is what I’m afraid of all the time,” I said. “I don’t want to be back here.”
His dark eyes regarded me thoughtfully from behind his helmet. He had never asked me to fill in the blanks of what had happened aboard House of Wisdom. He had known there were lacunae in what the public knew and what I shared, but he never demanded those secrets from me, just as I never asked for the childhood he had spent living in a refugee camp in the desert. We had always been so very careful of the separate horrors of our past, so mindful of the most jagged edges of memory. If he had pushed, I probably would have caved, but resented him for it, and he would have been so eaten up with guilt we might not have come back from that.
“We’ll get out of this,” Baqir said. “We will.”
The panic had mostly passed, leaving in its wake a shivery, cold fear I did not know how to banish. I gently squeezed Baqir’s hand on my chest to tell him it was okay to let go. He did so, slowly. I yearned for the pressure of his arm around me the moment it was gone. I wanted to answer his reassurance, to tell him that I had a plan. But the others were listening, and we had a long way to go.
SPEC RESEARCH—PRIMARY EDUCATION OUTREACH #98832-V
PUBLIC COMMUNICATION TRANSCRIPT (AUDIO/VIDEO)
Source: HOUSE OF WISDOM, SPEC RESEARCH
TimeDate: 10:01:34 07.14.392
TITLE: Voices from the Past—Deep Space Archaeology on HOUSE OF WISDOM
[CHIN, M. and LAGO, G. are standing together in a large, bright laboratory. Visible in the background is the tail end of UC33-X.]
CHIN: Good morning, everyone! My name is Dr. Ming-shu Chin, and this is my friend Dr. Gregory Lago. We’re scientists here on the research ship HOUSE OF WISDOM. I’m a geologist, and Dr. Lago is an archaeologist.
LAGO: You might be wondering why a geologist and an archaeologist would bother coming into space. After all, there isn’t any dirt for us to dig around in up here. Look, our hands are clean! Not a speck.
CHIN: But there is a lot we can learn in space, especially if we work together. What we’re learning right now is part of a story that began a very long time ago. Hundreds of years ago, people built very large ships to travel into space. They were looking for other planets that might be like Earth. They were hoping to find new places to live.
LAGO: We don’t know what became of most of those ships. They stopped sending messages back to Earth centuries ago. Space is very big, and space travel is very dangerous. But we do know where one of them ended up.
[CHIN and LAGO approach UC33-X.]
LAGO: You’re probably wondering what this thing is, and I don’t blame you. When astronomers first spotted it, they didn’t know either. They named it Unidentified Craft 33-X, which is a silly name, but it seems to have stuck. The astronomers didn’t even see it like we normally think of seeing things. They heard it instead, because it was sending out a radio signal. Have a listen.
[A woman’s voice speaks briefly in an archaic language.]
LAGO: If you listen carefully, you can probably recognize most of the words. The woman in this message is speaking a language we now call Archaic Mandarin Chinese, which is an old version of the same Chinese language you may be learning in school, along with your other language lessons. She recorded her words a very long time ago, very far away, and sent them back to us on this probe so we could hear them.
CHIN: We don’t know that woman’s name, but we know she lived aboard a ship called MOURNFUL EVENING SONG, which left Earth hundreds of years ago. She sent this spacecraft back to Earth to let us know about MOURNFUL EVENING SONG’s lo
ng journey. But there’s a problem. This little craft has been traveling through space for a very long time, through deep cold and powerful radiation and unpredictable magnetic fields. The data in this probe’s computers are very old and very badly damaged. That’s where my friend Dr. Lago comes in.
LAGO: Space archaeologists may not have dirt and ruins to dig around in, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have artifacts to study. To hear what the people who recorded these messages wanted to tell us, we have to understand the very old technology they were using as well as all the ways the message has been damaged by its time in space. We have a lot of special techniques for piecing together old data like this and listening to what they had to say.
CHIN: What is she saying, Dr. Lago?
LAGO: That’s a good question. Let’s play it again, only this time we’ll play the restored and repaired version.
[A woman’s voice speaks briefly in an archaic language.]
LAGO: What she’s saying is that the people aboard MOURNFUL EVENING SONG found a planet they wanted to explore.
CHIN: That’s astonishing!
LAGO: It is, and now it’s your turn to shine. Dr. Chin is what we call a planetary geologist. Planets and moons are her specialty.
CHIN: We don’t know yet how far this probe has traveled or what secrets it holds inside, but we do know what direction it came from. We can point our telescopes in the right direction to look for the planet MOURNFUL EVENING SONG might have found. From that we can learn a great deal about planets outside our solar system—and about what ancient humans were looking for when they launched their ships to find them.
LAGO: A long time ago, when the United Councils of Earth were brand-new, the founder Leung Ma-Lin said, “The past is a mirror, and only by examining it can we examine ourselves.” That is the lesson both geologists and archaeologists must remember every day.
