Song for the Unraveling of the World

by Brian Evenson

  And beyond the buckled and half-open door, in the final chamber, another similar crewmember, then another, then a third. All mutilated in some way, all severely damaged cranially. He kept telling himself that yes, it was possible it was damage caused by shattering vats or flying debris, but for each additional individual found like this it seemed increasingly improbable.

  In the back of the third chamber his suit light flashed over a strange blotch of color and then what struck him, absurdly, as a slumped doll. But of course, it wasn’t a slumped doll. He knew that even before he swung the light back and left it there.

  A dark circle, inscribed very carefully on the floor, with what was perhaps black paint. In its center, kneeling, was a frozen woman. Compared to the chaos of the rest of the flung bodies, she seemed remarkably poised, undisturbed, untouched. On the wall behind her she, or perhaps someone else, had etched with a laser cutter what at first seemed to be words, though upon closer inspection Villads saw it was nonsense:

  Y’AI’NG’NGAH

  YOG-SOTHOTH

  H’EE-L’GEB

  F’AI THRODOG

  UAAAH

  He sounded it out in his head but could still see no sense to it. He stepped to the edge of the circle and prodded at the line. Was it paint? He wasn’t sure. If it wasn’t, then what else could it be?

  He stepped inside and bent down beside the woman, taking a closer look. No name tag, strangely enough. Yes, she seemed composed, relaxed. Her body was undamaged, her head intact. He might be able to get a scan from her.

  He set about severing her head.

  IV.

  While he was waiting for the machine to finish its replication, he thought about what to do. He could attach a tether and clamber out onto the hull of the vessel. Perhaps that would reveal something to him. But maybe he should wait to see what her scan taught him. He could travel through the chambers again, keep searching, but he’d been sufficiently thorough—it was doubtful there was anyone else to find.

  So, only one crewmember with an intact brain. One chance for a scan. Even if the scan was successful, maybe she hadn’t seen anything. Maybe she couldn’t tell him a thing.

  He spun through images of the crew until he found the woman he thought she must be. Signe Volke. Hard to tell for certain considering the irregular way in which her head was thawing—something about the way the skin had frozen almost made it seem as though she had thin hairlike tendrils growing out of one side of her face—but yes, he thought so.

  He slept. He asked the Vorag to prepare him some food but there was apparently something wrong with the system: no food was dispensed. He raided another pressure suit for its emergency rations. Five more pressure suits. He’d have to find a way to fix the nutrition delivery system soon.

  He slept again. The scan still wasn’t concluded, which might be an indication that the neural pathways had been too compromised by being frozen. He had the vessel show him vid footage. He watched it up to the moment the gash appeared in the side of the vessel, looking for a clue. There was nothing to see, not really. The chamber lights dimming and the hull tearing open and then the feed cut off. He watched it again, then again, this time as slowly as he could, hoping to catch a glimpse of something. But he didn’t see anything at all.

  Unless that dimming of the lights, the growing darkness; maybe that was something. Maybe they hadn’t been attacked from outside after all. Maybe what he was seeing was something inside the vessel, something barely insubstantial, something wanting to get out. Maybe he had had it wrong the whole time.

  He watched a vid record of Signe. He watched her come into the third vat room, pace her way forward and back, as if surveying the boundaries of a plot of ground. Finally, she settled into a spot in the corner. He watched her take a jar of something and unscrew it and then begin to use two stiffened fingers to smear a circle on the deck around her. She was swaying a little, nodding a little, and her lips seemed to be moving. He watched her carefully etch the nonsense phrases into the wall behind her with a laser cutter.

  And then?

  And then nothing. She simply settled onto her knees and assumed the posture he had found her in. She waited, motionless.

  She waited for hours. Villads stared into the monitor, watching her. There was nothing unusual for a long time, or at least hardly so. At a particular moment there was a shadow, strange and dark, that he couldn’t place, perhaps simply a trick of the light. And then, seven minutes and six seconds after that, vats began to tumble over, seemingly for no reason. Other crewmembers appeared, shouting, some rushing toward her only to be swept off their feet and, somehow, torn to bits. The feed cut almost immediately after that.

  The only thing he couldn’t understand was how, through all that, Signe had managed to remain kneeling and in the same position, untouched by debris, apparently not having been disturbed at all.

  He activated the scans of the twins, Esbjorn and Kolbjorn, having the vessel project each into a chair at the central table in the command room. He needed someone to talk to, someone to consult, and he knew and trusted them. Together they knew more about the vessel and the journey than anyone else. They were the logical choice. Irritating, he thought, how the Vorag could do this but didn’t seem to be able to produce a plate of food for him.

  The first time, he told the twins immediately they were dead, but found that to have a deleterious effect on their willingness to continue to communicate. Traumatized, they were of no help to him. So, he reset them and began again.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “Are we there already?” asked Esbjorn. “Have we arrived?”

  “No,” Villads admitted. “But I’ve had to wake you up. We have a problem.”

  He explained it to them, not only about the tear in the hull, but about Signe as well, the strange circle she had drawn and her body being found frozen inside it.

  “That doesn’t seem like rational behavior,” said Esbjorn. “Perhaps she’s insane.”

  “Sounds like some sort of ritual,” countered Kolbjorn. “She could be insane but maybe instead she’s some sort of fanatic.”

  The two brothers argued over the distinction between insane and fanatical. They watched the footage with him, both of the hull tearing and of Signe’s circle. They had little to say of use, and in the end Esbjorn suggested they all three go out and look at the tear in the hull. Maybe one of them would see something that Villads, alone, hadn’t.

  “No,” said Villads quickly, “no need.”

  But Esbjorn was already rising and making for the door. The complex projection that gave the illusion of him having a three-dimensional body grew choppier as more parts of him moved. Kolbjorn exclaimed in fright at what he saw and then Esbjorn reached out to open the airlock and watched his hand pass through it.

  Villads wiped their short-term memory and started again.

  And then finally the scan of Signe was complete. He sat around the table with the projections of Kolbjorn and Esbjorn and this time managed to move things forward without alerting them to the fact of their own deaths. He explained to them about Signe’s scan, about the tear in the vessel, and then started the digital construct that was Signe emulating within the machine. But either Signe didn’t know anything or she wasn’t telling, and by the end Esbjorn and Kolbjorn were sick with panic at the thought of their own deaths and he had had to turn off their emulations. He had learned nothing, was unsure where he was, or where he should go next.

  He took the pack of rations out of the seventh and final pressure suit. Surely there were pressure suits in one of the other chambers. Perhaps he’d be able to fix the dispenser and have the computer make food. Perhaps he’d have to start eating the bodies of the dead.

  V.

  Inside the Vorag’s computer, Signe, though dead, though only a construct, was still conscious, still aware. It was a strange sort of awareness, somewhat like groping around in a darkened room. Data streamed around her, some of which she could recognize, most of which she couldn’t, and it
was hard to maintain herself against the onslaught of it. There was a sequence that she recognized as Esbjorn. His brother, too. And beside them, stacked one after another, she found the basis for the constructs of all the crew and vat travelers. Sleepy and hazy, though still recognizable, waiting to be digitally brought back to life. There was Villads, too.

  One by one, she worried and tugged at them until they came apart, the data degrading into a slurry that was quickly discarded, the sectors marked to be written over. They didn’t even wake up for it, and soon it was too late for them to wake up at all.

  When she came to her own sequence, she stopped. She wasn’t sure why two of her would be found here. She hesitated between destroying her other self or simply giving it a wide berth and flowing elsewhere. In the end, she wriggled her way into it, putting her earlier self on as though it were a tight jacket, and then bursting out its seams. There were moments of replication, but she had enough holes and gaps that there weren’t as many as she had feared. Now she had a context, too, for the little her later self could remember of her final moments: the etching of the phrase into the wall, the creation of a circle, the attempt to call something up.

  Had the summoning been successful? There was nothing in her memory to say so, although there was a difference between the old self and the new self that made her think that the Signe she was now was something more than just Signe. And based on what Villads and the twins had said to her and on the vid footage she was rapidly uncovering, she was certain. Where was it then? Only in here with her? No, there must be more to it. She went through more footage, as rapidly as possible, footage from inside the Vorag and out, then data from sensors of all kinds, until she sensed it. There—there it was, or at least she believed so: like a thick blanket, wrapped around the craft.

  And now what? Mission accomplished. Turn the Vorag around and bring the vessel back to Earth, along with its blanket.

  Only there was the problem of Villads. Villads, if he figured out what was going on, would try to put a stop to it. No, she couldn’t let that happen.

  VI.

  He had fallen asleep. He was dreaming that he was back in his vat, unconscious, preserved, the vessel drifting inexorably through space to the coming world. He was inside and outside the vat at once, both watching himself float and being conscious of himself watching himself float. And then he woke up.

  A noise had awoken him. What was it? Not an alarm. No, that had been earlier, the other time. But a repeated tone, coming from the computer.

  Was it some sort of notification he had set up? He didn’t think so. Probably something from one of the crew, meant to remind them of some trivial but necessary task, back before they had all died.

  He ignored it as long as he could manage. When it continued, he finally struggled to his feet, rubbing his face.

  Life form alert, it said on the screen. Maybe he had set up that alert request, or maybe the Vorag knew from what he’d been asking it over the past few days that he’d want to know.

  What kind of life form? he asked.

  Humna, it said.

  Strange, he thought, a computer shouldn’t misspell. Maybe some kind of default or flaw, a small bug—but when he blinked the word had changed to human. Maybe he hadn’t seen it properly the first time.

  It’s probably detecting me, he thought. But asked, “How many life forms?”

  Two, it said. And gave him a map. There he was, a blinking dot on the bridge. And there it was, another blinking dot, on the outside of the hull.

  But how was that possible? How could there be someone—anything—alive on the outside of the hull after all this time? Even if someone had been in a pressure suit, they couldn’t have lasted a day, let alone a week.

  Is this possibly a sensor failure? he asked.

  No, said the Vorag.

  The Vorag is wrong, he told himself, something is wrong. But he was already reaching for his pressure suit. Nobody is alive but me, he told himself. But how could he stop himself from checking? He’d put on a tether, go out through the tear and have a look.

  After all, what else did he have to do with his time? And once it was clear nobody was there, what was there to prevent him from coming back?

  Glasses

  Geir had never worn glasses, had never needed them, and then, suddenly, at forty, she did. Not every moment of every day, not for everything, but definitely for reading. As soon as she’d gotten them, she wondered how she’d managed to read without them.

  At first they made her a little dizzy, the world seeming to move at different paces within the frames and outside of them. So she put her glasses on and took them off, put them in their case, took them out of their case. But then her brain adjusted and ignored the world as it was and she didn’t notice the difference so much anymore. After a while, it was easier to leave them on most of the time and look over the top of them when she didn’t need them.

  “You could get bifocals,” said her husband. “Or progressives. Then you wouldn’t have to look over your glasses.” He didn’t have bifocals—he did the same thing as she did, tugging his glasses down to the end of his nose and looking over the top of them—and she had said the same thing to him countless times. When he said it she thought he was teasing her, but then decided that, no, he seemed to think he was uttering something he’d thought of on his own.

  “I just bought these,” she told him, just as he had always told her. “Maybe when I need a new pair, I’ll get progressives.”

  Geir considered herself a liberal, though if she’d been asked to explain what exactly that meant she would have been hard-pressed to answer. She voted, she supported causes, she cared about the world.

  It was in support of one of these causes, to call for the resignation of a mayor who had overlooked the industrial poisoning of his city’s water supply, that she found herself on a train on the way to a rally. Her husband couldn’t go, he had to work, although he would have come if he didn’t have to work. He considered himself a liberal as well.

  So it was just Geir. She’d envisioned the train trip as a kind of party, the train full of people like her. But, in fact, the train was mostly empty. One car had a few older men sitting across from one another playing an incomprehensible variation on gin rummy. Another had two businessmen, one at the front end of the car, the other at the back, dressed identically and reading the same newspaper, turning the pages with apparent synchronicity.

  She went from car to car, her placard slung over her shoulder. She was the only one carrying a placard. Maybe everyone else had carpooled?

  In the end, she asked the conductor. He removed his hat, thoughtfully scratched the crown of his head.

  “What rally?” he finally asked.

  And, after she explained, “Lady, what train do you think you’re on anyways?”

  She’d gotten on the wrong train. She waited anxiously beside the doors for the next station to arrive so she could get off and take a train back and try again.

  But by the time they were finally pulling into the next station it was almost noon, and she knew it was too late to get back in time for even part of the rally. And when the train stopped she realized she was in a car that didn’t have a platform below it; she was too far back. She had to leave her placard behind and rush up and through the doors between cars. Even then she barely made it in time, jumping through the train doors as they closed, her glasses slipping off her nose in the process and falling down onto the tracks below.

  Once the train had departed, she climbed down and examined what remained of the glasses. There was nothing salvageable. The next train, according to the schedule posted beside the deserted ticket booth, wouldn’t arrive until two. She settled down to wait. She had a book, but didn’t have her glasses. She tried to read, yet even with the book held at arm’s length she had to mostly guess at what the words were. She sighed and put it back in her purse, went to find something to eat.

  The town was small and dusty. It seemed to consist of little more than a sin
gle street, the buildings all of an identical pale-red brick. The only place to eat was the back counter of the drugstore, which only served milk, apple juice, and saran-wrapped tuna sandwiches, all taken from a small square fridge. The proprietor was a thin elderly gentleman who wore thick glasses and who seemed surprised to see her.

  She had a glass of milk and a tuna sandwich. Neither was delicious but both were edible. The proprietor stayed at the counter and whenever a crumb fell onto it rather than her plate he would wipe it away. Him standing there made Geir nervous enough that she felt she had to strike up a conversation.

  “I’m Geir,” she said, and stuck out her hand, the one not holding the sandwich.

  “Geir,” he said, his voice old and broken, slightly foreign. He did not acknowledge the hand. “Geir. Isn’t that a man’s name?”

  “Is it?” she said. She didn’t know. All she knew was it was her name.

  The man nodded. “Perhaps there was a mistake in the hospital,” he said, “some sort of switching of babies by a malevolent nurse.” He said it in such a bland, benevolent way, almost as if it were a joke, that she had a hard time being upset. She half-heartedly shrugged.

  When she had finished, she paid and headed for the door. On the way out, she realized that one wall of the drugstore was covered with eyeglasses. She went closer, squinted at them, realized the prices were remarkably low, realized too that there was no glass in any of the frames.

  “You do prescription lenses?” she asked.

  “What is your prescription?” he asked, and when she told him he nodded. “Reading glasses. Not in all styles,” he said. “But in many of them.”

  She chose some frames and brought them to him. He examined them closely, then nodded. “Reading glasses,” he said again.

  On impulse she said, “Not reading, progressives.”

  He shook his head. “No progressives.”

  “Bifocals then,” she said.