by John Varley
"Calvin, attend to the injuries while 1 see what can be done for the ship."
"Yes, Captain."
No one moved, and Cirocco wondered why. They were all watching her. Why were they doing that?
"I'll be in my cabin if you need me. I'm not ... feeling so good".
One of the suits took a step toward her. She moved, trying to avoid the figure, and her foot went through the deck. Pain shot through her leg.
"It's coming in, over there. See? It's after us now."
"Where?".
"I don't see anything. Oh, God. I see it."
'Who said that? I want silence on this channel!"
"Look out! It's behind you!"
"Who said that?" She broke out in a sweat. Something was creeping up behind her, she could feel it, and it was one of those things that only come out into your bedroom after you switch off the light. Not a rat, but something worse that had no face but only a patch of slime and cold, dead, clammy hands. She groped in the red darkness and saw a writhing snake dart through a patch of sunlight in front of her.
It was so quiet. Why didn't they make any noise?
Her hand closed around something hard. She lifted it and began to chop, up and down, over and over as the thing flashed into view.
It wouldn't die. Something wrapped around her waist and started to pull. The suited figures jumped and ran around in the small space, but the tentacles shot out strings which stuck like hot tar. The room was laced with them and something had Cirocco by the legs and was tying to pull her apart like a wishbone. There was a pain like she had never felt before, but she continued to chop at the tentacle until awareness slipped from her.
CHAPTER FOUR
There was no light.
Even that bit of negative knowledge was something to cling to. The realization that the swaddling darkness was the result of the absence of something called light had cost her more than she would have believed possible, back when time had consisted of consecutive moments, Ue beads on a string. Now the beads scattered through her fingers. They rearranged themselves in a mockery of causality.
Anything needs a context. For darkness to mean anything there must he the memory of light. That memory was fading.
It had happened before, and would happen again. Sometimes there was a name to identify the disembodied consciousness. More often, there was only awareness.
She was in the belly of the beast.
(What beast?)
She couldn't remember. It would come back to her. Things usually did, if she waited long enough. And waiting was easy. Millenia were worth no more than milliseconds here. Time's stratfied edifice was a ruin.
Her name was Cirocco.
(What's a Cirocco?)
"Shur-rock-o. It's a hot wind from the desert, or an old model Volkswagen. Mom never told me which she had in mind." That had been her standard answer. She recalled saying it, could almost feel intangible lips shape the meaningless words.
"Call me Captain Jones." (Captain of what?)
Of the DSV Ringmaster, DSV for Deep Space Vessel, on its way to Satum with seven aboard. One of them was Gaby Plauget....
(Who is …)
... and ... and another was ... Bill ...
(What was that name again?)
It was on the tip of her tongue. A tongue was a soft, fleshy thing ... it could be found in the mouth, which was ...
She had it a moment ago, but what was a moment?
Something about light. Whatever that was.
There was no light. Hadn't she been here before? Yes, surely, but never mind, hold onto it, don't let the thought go. There was no light, and there was nothing else, either, but what was something else?
No smell. No taste. No sense of touch. No kinesthetic awareness of a body. Not even a sense of paralysis.
Cirocco! Her name was Cirocco.
Ringmaster. Saturn. Themis. Bill.
It returned all at once, as if she was living it again in a split second. She thought she would go mad from the flood of impressions, and with that thought came another, later memory. This had happened before. She had remembered, only to see it all slip away. She had been insane, many times.
She knew her grip was tenuous, but it was all she had. She knew where she was, and she knew the nature of her problem.
The phenomenon had been explored during the last century. Put a man in a neoprene suit, cover his eyes and restrain his arms and legs so he can't touch himself, eliminate all sounds from the environment, and leave him floating in warm water.
Free-fall is even better. There are refinements like intravenous feeding and the elimination of smells, but they are not really necessary.
The results are surprising. Many of the first subjects had been test pilots--well-adjusted, self-reliant, sensible men. Twenty- four hours of sensory deprivation turned them into pliable children. Longer periods were quite dangerous. The mind gradually edited the few distractions: heartbeat, the smell of neoprene, the pressure of water.
Cirocco was familiar with the tests. Twelve hours of sensory deprivation had been part of her own training. She knew she should be able to find her breathing, if she looked for it long enough. It was something she could control; a non-rhythrnic thing if she chose to make it so. She tried to breathe rapidly, tried to make herself cough. She felt nothing.
Pressure, then. If something was restraining her it might be possible to pit her muscles against it, to at least feel that some- thing was holding her, however gently. Taking one muscle at a time, isolating them, visualizing the attachments and location of each, she tried to make them move. A twitch of the lip would be enough. It would prove that she was not, as she was beginning to fear, dead.
She retreated from the thought. While she had the normal fear of death as the end of all consciousness, she was glimpsing something infinitely worse. What if people did not die, ever?
What if the passing of the body left this behind? There might be eternal life, and it might be passed in eternal lack of sensa- tion.
Insanity began to look attractive.
Trying to move was a failure. She gave it up, and began ransacking her most recent memories, hoping the key to her present situation could be found in her last conscious seconds aboard Ringmaster. She would have laughed, had she been able to locate the muscles to do so. If she was not dead, then she was trapped in the belly of a beast large enough to devour her ship and all its crew.
Before long, that began to look attractive, too. If it was true, if she had been eaten and was somehow still alive, then death was still to come. Anything was better than the nightmare eternity whose vast futility now unfolded before her.
She found it possible to weep without a body. With no tears or sobs, no burning in the throat, Cirocco wept hopelessly. She became a child in the dark, holding the hurt inside herself. She felt her mind going again, welcomed it, and she bit her tongue.
Warm blood flowed in her mouth. She swam in it with the desperate fear and hunger of a small fish in a strange salt sea. She was a blind worm, just a mouth with hard round teeth and a swollen tongue, groping for that wonderful taste of blood which dispersed even as she sought it.
Frantically, she bit again, and was rewarded by a fresh spurt of red. Can you taste a color? she wondered. But she didn't care. It hurt, gloriously.
The pain carried her into her past. She lifted her face from the broken dials and shattered windscreen of her small plane and felt the wind chill blood in her open mouth. She had bitten her tongue. She put her hand to her mouth and two red-filmed teeth fell out. She looked at them, not understanding where they had come from. Weeks later, checking out of the hospital, she found them in the pocket of her parka. She kept them in a box on her bedside table for the times she woke up with the deadly quiet wind whispering to her. The second engine is dead, and there's nothing but trees and snow down there. She would pick up the box and rattle it. I survived.
But that was years ago, she reminded herself.
-as her face throbbed. They
were removing the bandages. So cinematic. It's a damn shame I can't see it. Expectant faces gathered around---camera cuts quickly among them-dirty gauze falling beside the bed, layer upon layer unwinding-- and then
. why... why, Doctor... she's beautiful.
But she hadn't been. They had told her what to expect. Two monstrous shiners and puffed, angry red skin. The features were intact, there were no scars, but she was no more beautiful than she had ever been. The nose still looked vaguely like a hatchet, and so what? It hadn't been broken, and her pride would not allow her to have it changed for purely cosmetic reasons.
(Privately, she hated the nose, and thought that it, along with her height, had secured her command of Ringrnaster. There had been pressure to select a woman, but those who decided such things could still not put a pretty five-footer in command of an expensive spaceship.)
Expensive spaceship.
Cirocco, you're wandering again. Bite your tongue. She did, and tasted blood-
-and saw the frozen lake rush up to meet her, felt her face hit the panel, lifted her head from shattered glass which promptly tumbled down a bottomless well. Her seat belt held her above the abyss. A body slipped through the ruins and she reached out for his boot ...
She bit again, hard, and felt something in her hand. Ages passed, and she felt something touching her knee. She put the two sensations together and realized she had touched herself.
She had a slippery one-woman orgy in the dark. She was delirious with love for the body that she now re-discovered. She curled tight, licked and bit everything she could reach while her hands pinched and pulled. She was smooth and hairless, slick as an eel.
A thick, almost jellied liquid rippled through her nostrils when she tried to breathe. It was not unpleasant; not even fright- ening once she was used to it.
And there was sound. it was a slow bass, and it had to be her heartbeat.
She could touch nothing but her own body, no matter how she stretched. She tried swimming for a while, but could not tell if she was getting anywhere.
While pondering what to do next, she fell asleep.
Waking was a gradual, uncertain process. For a time she could not tell if she was dreaming or conscious. Biting herself didn't help. She could dream a bite, couldn't she?
Come to think of that, how could she sleep at a time like this? Having thought of that, she was no longer sure she had slept at all. It was becoming rather problematic, she realized. The differences in states of consciousness were tiny with so little sensation to give them shape. Sleeping, dreaming, daydreaming, sanity, madness, alertness, drowsiness; she had no context to give any of them meaning.
She could hear her terror in the increased rate of her heartbeat. She was going to go crazy, and she knew it. Fighting it, she held tenaciously to the personality she had reconstructed from the whirlwind of madness.
Name: Cirocco Jones. Age: thirty-four. Race: not black, but not white, either.
She was a stateless person, legally an American but actually a member of the rootless Third Culture of the multi-national corporations. Every major city on Earth had its Yankee Ghetto of tract houses, English schools, and fast-food franchises. Cirocco
had lived in most of them. It was a little like being an army brat, but with less security.
Her mother had been an uninarfled consulting engineer who often worked for the energy companies. She had not intended to have children, but had not counted on the Arab prison guard. He raped her when she was captured after a border incident between Iraq and Saudi Arabia. While the Texaeo ambassador negotiated her release, Cirocco was born. A few nukes had been sown in the desert by then, and the border incident was a brush-fire war by the time Iranian and Brazilian troops overran the prison. As political balances shifted, Cirocco's mother made her way toward Israel. Five years later she had lung cancer from the fallout. She spent the next fifteen years undergoing treatments slightly less painful than the disease.
Cirocco had grown up big and lonely, having only her mother for a friend. She first saw the United States when she was twelve. By then she could read and write, and could not be developmentally harmed by the American school system. Her emo- tional development was another matter. She did not make friends easily, but was fiercely loyal to those she had. Her mother had funny ideas on how to raise a young lady, and they included handguns and karate as well as dancing and voice lessons. Outwardly, she did not lack self-confidence. only she herself knew how frightened and vulnerable she was beneath it all. It was her secret-- one she kept so well that she fooled the NASA psychologists into giving her command of a ship.
And how much of that was true? she wandered. There was no point in lying here. Yes, the responsibility of command frightened her. Perhaps all commanders were secretly unsure of themselves, knew deep inside that they were not good enough for the responsibility thrust upon them. But it wasn't the sort of thing one asked about. What if the others weren,t scared? Then your secret was out.
She found herself wondering how she had come to command a ship, if it was not what she wanted. What did she want?
I'd like to get out of here, she tried to say. I'd like something to happen.
Presently, something did happen.
She felt a wall with her left hand. In time, she felt another with her right. The walls were warm, smooth, and resilient, just as she imagined the inside of a stomach would be. She could feel theni moving past her hands. And they began to narrow. She lodged, headfirst, in an uneven tunnel. The walls began to contract. For the first time, she felt claustrophobic. Tight spaces had never bothered her before.
The walls pulsed and rippled, pushing her forward until her head slipped through into coolness and a rough texture. She was squeezed; fluid bubbled out of her lungs and she coughed, in- haled, found her mouth filled with grit. She coughed again and more fluid came out, but now her shoulders were free and she ducked her head in the darkness to avoid getting another mouthful. She wheezed and spit, and began to breathe from her nose.
Her arms came free, then her hips, and she began digging at the spongy material that enclosed her. it smelled like a childhood day spent in a cool, bare earth basement, in that narrow space adults visit only if the plumbing is acting up. It smelled like nine years old and digging in the dirt.
One leg came free, then the other, and she rested with her head bent into the air pocket formed by her arms and chest. Her breath came in wet spasms.
Dirt crumbled behind her neck and rolled down her body until it nearly filled her air space. She was buried, but she was alive. It was time to dig, but she could not use her arms.
Fighting panic, she forced herself up with her legs. Her thigh muscles knotted, her joints cracked, but she felt the mass above her yielding.
Her head broke through into light and air. Gasping, spitting, she pulled one arm out of the ground, then the other, and clawed at what felt like cool grass. She crawled from the hole on hands and knees and collapsed. She dug her fingers into the blessed ground and cried herself to sleep.
Cirocco didn't want to wake up. She fought it, pretending she was asleep. When she felt the grass fading away and the darkness returning, she opened her eyes quickly.
Centimeters from her nose was a pale green carpet that looked like grass. It smelled like it, too. it was the kind of grass found only on the greens of the better golf courses. But it was warmer than the air, and she couldn't account for that. Perhaps it wasn't grass at all.
She rubbed her hand over it and snffied again. Call it grass.
She sat up and something clanked, distracting her. A gleaming metal band circled her neck, and other, smaller ones were on her arms and legs. Many strange objects dangled from the large band, held together by wire. She slipped it off and wondered where she had seen it before.
It was amazingly difficult to concentrate. The thing in her hand was so complex, so various; too much for her scattered wits.
it was her pressure suit, stripped of all the plastic and rubber seals. Most of t
he suit had been plastic. Nothing remained but the metal.
She made a pile of the parts, and in the process realized just how naked she was. Beneath a coating of dirt her body was com- pletely hairless. Even her eyebrows were gone. For some reason that made her very sad.
She put her face in her hands and began to cry.
Cirocco did not cry easily, nor often. She was not good at it. But after a very long time she thought she knew who she was again.
Now she could find out where she was.
Perhaps a half hour later she felt ready to move. But that decision spawned a dozen questions. Move, but to where?
She had intended to explore Themis, but that was when she had a spaceship and the resources of Earth's nest technology. Now she had her bare skin and a few bits of metal.
She was in a forest composed of grass and one species of tree. She called them trees by the same reasoning she had used on the grass. If it's seventy meters tall, has a brown, round trunk and what looks like leaves far above, then it's a tree. Which did not mean it might not cheerfully cat her if given the chance.
She had to get the worries down to a manageable level. Rule out the things you can do nothing about, don't ftet too much about the things you can do little about. And remember that if you're as cautious as sanity would seem to dictate, you'll starve to death in a cave.
The air was in the first category. It could contain a poison.
"So stop breathing, at once!" she said, aloud. Right. At least it smelled fresh, and she was not coughing.
Water was something she could do little about. Eventually she would have to drink some, assuming she could find it-which should go right to the top of her list. When she found it, perhaps she could make a fire and boil it. If not, she would drink, microscopic bugs and all.
And then there was food, which worried her more than anything. Even if there was nothing around that wanted to make a meal of her, there was no way of knowing if the food she ate would poison her. Or it might be no more nourishing than cellophane.
