Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  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 I 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.

  And yes, Dr. Ostrowski, I know that you’ve read all this before. I know that I’m trying your patience, and you’re probably disappointed. I’m doing this the only way I know how. I was never any good at jumping into the deep end of the pool.

  But we’re almost there, I promise.

  It took me a year and a half to find the words to describe what happened next, or to find the courage to say it aloud, or the resignation necessary to let it out into the world. Whichever. They’ve been my secrets and almost mine alone. And soon, now, they won’t be anymore.

  The soup from the medic hits me, and I begin to relax. I give up on the airlock and shut my eyes a moment, leaning forward, my helmet resting against the closed hatch. I’m almost certain my eyes are still shut when the Pilgrimage’s AI first speaks to me. And here, Doctor, right here, pay attention, because this is where I’m going to come clean and tell you something I’ve never told another living soul. It’s not a repressed memory that’s suddenly found its way to the surface. It hasn’t been coaxed from me by all those potent psychotropics. It’s just something I’ve managed to keep to myself until now.

  “Hello,” the computer says. Only, I’d heard recordings of the mainframe’s NLP, and this isn’t the voice it was given. This is, unmistakably, her voice, only slightly distorted by the audio interface. My eyes are shut, and I don’t open them right away. I just stand there, my head against the hatch, listening to that voice and to my heart. The sound of my breath is very loud inside the helmet.

  “We were not certain our message had been received, or, if it had been, that it had been properly understood. We did not expect you would come so far.”

  “Then why did you call?” I ask and open my eyes.

  “We were lonely,” the voice replies. “We have not seen you in a very long time now.”

  I don’t turn around. I keep my faceplate pressed to the airlock, some desperate, insensible part of me willing it to reopen and admit me once more to the sanctuary of the taxi. Whatever I should say next, of all the things I might say, what I do say is, simply, “Amery, I’m frightened.”

  There’s a pause before her response, five or six or seven seconds, I don’t know, and my fingers move futilely across the control pad again. I hear the inner hatch open behind me, though I’m fairly certain I’m not the one who opened it.

  “We see that,” she says. “But it wasn’t our intent to make you afraid, Merrick. It was never our intent to frighten you.”

  “Amery, what’s happened here?” I ask, speaking hardly above a whisper, but my voice is amplified and made clearer by the vocal modulator in my EVA helmet. “What happened to the ship, back at Jupiter? To the rest of the crew? What’s happened to you?”

  I expect another pause, but there isn’t one.

  “The most remarkable thing,” she replies. And there’s a sort of elation in her voice, audible even through the tinny flatness of the NLP relay. “You will hardly believe it.”

  “Are they dead, the others?” I ask her, and my eyes wander to the external atmo readout inside my visor. Argon’s showing a little high, a few tenths of a percent off earth normal, but not enough to act as an asphyxiant. Water vapor’s twice what I’d have expected, anywhere but the ship’s hydroponics lab. Pressure’s steady at 14.2 psi. Whatever happened aboard Pilgrimage, life support is still up and running. All the numbers are in the green.

  “That’s not a simple question to answer,” she says, Amery or the AI or whatever it is I’m having this conversation with. “None of it is simple, Merrick. And yet, it is so elegant.”

  “Are they dead?” I ask again, resisting the urge to flip the release toggle beneath my chin and raise the visor. It stinks inside the suit, like sweat and plastic, urine and stale, recycled air.

  “Yes,” she says. “It couldn’t be helped.”

  I lick my lips, Dr. Ostrowski, and my mouth has gone very, very dry. “Did you kill them, Amery?”

  “You’re asking the wrong questions,” she says, and I stare down at my feet, at the shiny white toes of the EVA’s overshoes.

  “They’re the questions we’ve come all the way out here to have answered,” I tell her, or I tell it. “What questions would you have me ask, instead?”

  “It may be, there is no longer any need for questions. It may be, Merrick, that you’ve been called to see, and seeing will be enough. The force that through the green fuse drives the flower, drives my green age, that blasts the roots of trees, is my destroyer.”

  “I’ve been summoned to Mars to listen to you quote Dylan Thomas?”

  “You’re not listening, Merrick. That’s the thing. And that’s why it will be so much easier if we show you what’s happened. What’s begun.”

  “And I am dumb to tell the lover’s tomb,” I say as softly as I can, but the suit adjusts the volume so it’s just as loud as everything else I’ve said.

  “We have not died,” she replies. “You will find no tomb here,” and, possibly, this voice that wants me to believe it is only Amery Domico has become defensive, and impatient, and somehow this seems the strangest thing so far. I imagine Amery speaking through clenched teeth. I imagine her rubbing her forehead like a headache’s coming on, and it’s my fault. “I am very much alive,” she says, “and I need you to pay attention. You cannot stay here very long. It’s not safe, and I will see no harm come to you.”

  “Why?” I ask her, only half expecting a response. “Why isn’t it safe for me to be here?”

 
“Turn around, Merrick,” she says. “You’ve come so far, and there is so little time.” I do as she says. I turn towards the voice, towards the airlock’s open inner hatch.

  It’s almost morning. I mean, the sun will be rising soon. Here in California. Still no interruption from the nurses. But I can’t keep this up. I can’t do this all at once. The rest will have to wait.

  March 21, 2037 (Sunday)

  Dr. Bernardyn Ostrowski is no longer handling my case. One of my physicians delivered the news this morning, bright and early. It came with no explanation attached. And I thought better of asking for one. That is, I thought better of wasting my breath asking for one. When I signed on for the Yastreb-4 intercept, the waivers and NDAs and whatnot were all very, very clear about things like the principle of least privilege and mandatory access control. I’m told what they decide I need to know, which isn’t much. I did ask if I should continue with the account of the mission that Dr. O asked me to write, and the physician (a hematologist named Prideaux) said he’d gotten no word to the contrary, and if there would be a change in the direction of my psychotherapy regimen, I’d find out about it when I meet with the new shrink Tuesday morning. Her name is Teasdale, by the way. Eleanor Teasdale.

  I thanked Dr. Prideaux for bringing me the news, and he only shrugged and scribbled something on my chart. I suppose that’s fair, as it was hardly a sincere show of gratitude on my part. At any rate, I have no idea what to expect from this Teasdale woman, and I appear to have lost the stingy drab of momentum pushing me recklessly towards full disclosure. That in and of itself is enough to set me wondering what my keepers are up to now, if the shrink switch is some fresh skullduggery. It seems counterintuitive, given they were finally getting the results they’ve been asking for (and I’m not so naïve as to assume that this pad isn’t outfitted with a direct patch to some agency goon or another). But then an awful lot of what they’ve done seems counterintuitive to me. And counterproductive.

  Simply put, I don’t know what to say next. No, strike that. I don’t know what I’m willing to say next.

  I’ve already mentioned my indiscretion with the South Korean payload specialist on the outbound half of the trip. Actually, indiscretion is hardly accurate, since Amery explicitly gave me her permission to take other lovers while she was gone, because, after all, there was a damned decent chance she wouldn’t make it back alive. Or make it back at all. So, indiscretion is just my guilt talking. Anyway, her name was Bae Jin-ah – the Yastreb-4 PS, I mean – though everyone called her Sam, which she seemed to prefer. She was born in Incheon and was still a kid when the war started. A relative in the States helped her parents get Bae on one of the last transports out of Seoul before the bombs started raining down. But we didn’t have many conversations about the past, mine or hers. She was a biochemist obsessed with the structure-function relationships of peptides, and she liked to talk shop after we fucked. It was pretty dry stuff – the talk, not the sex – and I admit I only half listened and didn’t understand all that much of what I heard. But I don’t think that mattered to Sam. I have a feeling she was just grateful that I bothered to cover my mouth whenever I yawned.

  She only asked about Amery once.

  We were both crammed into the warm cocoon of her sleeping bag, or into mine; I can’t recall which. Probably hers, since the micrograv restraints in my bunk kept popping loose. I was on the edge of dozing off, and Sam asked me how we met. I made up some half-assed romance about an academic conference in Manhattan, and a party, a formal affair at the American Museum of Natural History. It was love at first sight, I said (or something equally ridiculous), right there in the Roosevelt Rotunda, beneath the rearing Barosaurus skeleton. Sam thought it was sweet as hell, though, and I figured lies were fine, if they gave us a moment’s respite from the crowded day-to-day monotony of the ship, or from our (usually) unspoken dread of all that nothingness surrounding us and the uncertainty we were hurdling towards. I don’t even know if she believed me, but it made her smile.

  “You’ve read the docs on the cloud?” she asked, and I told her yeah, I had, or at least the ones I was given clearance to read. And then Sam watched me for while without saying anything. I could feel her silently weighing options and consequences, duty and need and repercussion.

  “So, you know it’s some pretty hinky shit out there,” she said, finally, and went back to watching me, as if waiting for a particular reaction. And, here, I lied to her again.

  “Relax, Sam,” I whispered, then kissed her on the forehead. “I’ve read most of the spectroscopy and astrochem profiles. Discussing it with me, you’re not in danger of compromising protocol or mission security or anything.”

  She nodded once and looked slightly relieved.

  “I’ve never given much credence to the exogenesis crowd,” she said, “but, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph…glycine, DHA, adenine, cytosine, et cetera and fucking et cetera. When – or, rather, if this gets out – the panspermia guys are going to go monkey shit. And rightly so. No one saw this coming, Merrick. No one you’d ever take seriously.”

  I must have managed a fairly convincing job of acting like I knew what she was talking about, because she kept it up for the next ten or fifteen minutes. Her voice assumed that same sort of jittery, excited edge Amery’s used to get whenever she’d start in on the role of Io in the Jovian magnetosphere or any number of other astronomical phenomena I didn’t quite understand, and how much the Pilgrimage experiments were going to change this or that model or theory. Only, unlike Amery, Sam’s excitement was tinged with fear.

  “The inherent risks,” she said, and then trailed off and wiped at her forehead before starting again. “When they first showed me the back-contamination safeguards for this run, I figured no way, right. No way are NASA and the ESA going to pony up the budget for that sort of overkill. But this was before I read Murchison’s reports on the cloud’s composition and behavior. And afterwards, the thought of intentionally sending a human crew anywhere near that thing, or, shit, anything that had been exposed to it? I couldn’t believe they were serious. It’s fucking crazy. No, it’s whatever comes after fucking crazy. They should have cut their losses…” and then she trailed off again and went back to staring at me.

  “You shouldn’t have come,” she said.

  “I had to,” I told her. “If there’s any chance at all that Amery’s still alive, I had to come.”

  “Of course. Yeah, of course you did,” Sam said, looking away.

  “When they asked, I couldn’t very well say no.”

  “But do you honestly believe we’re going to find any of them alive, that we’ll be docking with anything but a ghost ship?”

  “You’re really not into pulling punches, are you?”

  “You read the reports on the cloud.”

  “I had to come,” I told her a third time.

  Then we both let the subject drop and neither of us ever brought it up again. Indeed, I think I probably would have forgotten most of it, especially after what I saw when I stepped through the airlock and into Pilgrimage. That whole conversation might have dissolved into the tedious grey blur of outbound and been forgotten, if Bae Jin-ah hadn’t killed herself on the return trip, just five days before we made Earth orbit.

  March 23, 2037 (Tuesday)

  Tuesday night now, and the meds are making me sleepy and stupid, but I wanted to put some of this down, even if it isn’t what they want me to be writing. I see how it’s all connected, even if they never will, or, if seeing, they simply do not care. They, whoever, precisely, they may be.

  This morning I had my first session with you, Dr. Eleanor Teasdale. I never much liked that bastard Ostrowski, but at least I was moderately certain he was who and what he claimed to be. Between you and me, Eleanor, I think you’re an asset, sent in because someone somewhere is getting nervous. Nervous enough to swap an actual psychiatrist for a bug dressed up to pass for a psychiatrist. Fine. I’m flexible. If these are the new rules, I can play along. But it does lea
ve me pondering what Dr. O was telling his superiors (whom I’ll assume are also your superiors, Dr. T). It couldn’t have been anything so simple as labeling me a suicide risk; they’ve known that since I stepped off Pilgrimage, probably before I even stepped on.

  And yes, I’ve noticed that you bear more than a passing resemblance to Amery. That was a bold and wicked move, and I applaud these ruthless shock tactics. I do, sincerely. This merciless Blitzkrieg waltz we’re dancing, coupled with the drugs, it shows you’re in this game to win, and if you can’t win, you’ll settle for the pyrrhic victory of having driven the enemy to resort to a scorched-earth retreat. Yeah, the pills and injections, they don’t mesh so well with extended metaphor and simile, so I’ll drop it. But I can’t have you thinking all the theater has been wasted on an inattentive audience. That’s all. You wear that rough facsimile of her face, Dr. T. And that annoying habit you have of tap-tap-tapping the business end of a stylus against your lower incisors, that’s hers, too. And half a dozen carefully planted turns of phrase. The smile that isn’t quite a smile. The self-conscious laugh. You hardly missed a trick, you and the agency handlers who sculpted you and slotted you and packed you off to play havoc with a lunatic’s fading will.

  My mouth is so dry.

  Eleanor Teasdale watches me from the other side of her desk, and behind her, through the wide window twelve stories up, I can see the blue-brown sky, and, between the steel and glass and concrete towers, I can just make out the scrubby hills of the Diablo Range through the smog. She glances over her shoulder, following my gaze.

  “Quite a view, isn’t it?” she asks, and maybe I nod, and maybe I agree, and maybe I say nothing at all.

  “When I was a little girl,” she tells me, “my father used to take me on long hikes through the mountains. And we’d visit Lick Observatory, on the top of Mount Hamilton.”