Asimov's SF, April-May 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Her face was so warm now that it actually hurt.

  “No.” She wanted to say that with confidence, but her voice was small, smaller than she'd ever heard it around him. “If I thought I always made the wrong choice, I couldn't do my job.”

  “But in the wee hours, when you're alone...?”

  She was staring at him. He hadn't looked up once.

  After a moment, he shook his head a third time, as if he were arguing with himself.

  “Never mind,” he said. “I'm just tired.”

  Which gave her an excuse to leave.

  She had no sense that it was the last time she'd see him. The next day, he had left the outpost.

  And she never heard from him again.

  * * * *

  “I'm sorry,” I say after giving her a moment to return from the memory. “I don't see how all of that meant he didn't plan to go to the ceremony. I don't see how this relates to the Room of Lost Souls.”

  She raises her eyebrows in surprise. I get the distinct feeling she has just decided I'm dumb.

  “He wasn't thinking about the future,” she says. “He was thinking about the past.”

  “I got that,” I say, and hope the words aren't too defensive. “But he makes no mention of the ceremonies or of the Room. So I'm not sure how you made the connection all these years later.”

  A slight frown creases the bridge of her nose. “The Room,” she says, “is a pilgrimage. Some say it's a sacred place. Others believe only the damned can visit it.”

  My breath catches. I haven't heard any of that before. Or maybe I have. I used to make it a practice not to listen to stories about the Room because I believed no one could understand that place if they hadn't been there.

  “All right,” I say, “let's assume he knew that. How do you know he went there next?”

  “His crew says so.” She crosses her arms.

  “I know that,” I say. “But you found this interchange important. Enlighten me. Why?”

  “Because I was stupid,” she snaps. “He wasn't talking about me. He was talking about himself. His choices. His way of doing things. His losses. I'm sure he was reflecting on them because everyone expected him to celebrate the end of the Wars.”

  “He should have celebrated,” I say.

  She smiles faintly, then nods. For a moment she looks away. I can see her make a decision. She takes a deep breath and uncrosses her arms.

  “I agreed with you back then. I figured he should have been at his happiest. But he wasn't so wrong about our jobs. I spent a lot of years as the chief surgeon on a military ship, and mostly I handled minor injuries and not-so-serious illness. But when we were in the middle of a battle, and the wounded kept pouring in, I just reacted.”

  I nod, not wanting her to stop.

  “I worked my ass off,” she says. “And people died.”

  She leans back, and rests her wrist on the side of the table. “I never, ever counted how many people I saved. I still don't. I suppose I could look it up. But I know to the person how many have died under my watch,” she says softly. “I'll wager Ewing knew too. And each one of those deaths, they take something from you.”

  A little piece of yourself, I almost add. But I don't want her to think I'm sympathizing falsely, and I'm not willing to reveal as much of myself to her as she has revealed of herself to me.

  “He wouldn't have been talking about death if he was going to go to those ceremonies,” she says. “He wouldn't have been looking at the past. He would have been looking toward the future, at what we could build.”

  She sounds so confident. Yet they were just lovers, in passing, on a military output. How well did she really know him, after all?

  And how can I ask her that without insulting her further?

  So I try a different tack, partly to take my mind off those irritating questions and partly because I want to know.

  “You said it's a pilgrimage. You said only the damned can get in.”

  Her frown grows. “Have you never heard of the Room?”

  “I know it,” I say, choosing my words carefully. “I just don't know the legends.”

  And I should. I used to believe that legends were more important than “facts” or histories or stories I could verify. Because legends held a bit of truth.

  “Do the damned go to get cleansed?” I ask.

  Her mouth closes. She takes a breath, sighs, then gives me that faint smile all over again.

  “Some say the Room bestows forgiveness on those who deserve it.” That faraway look appears in her eyes.

  “And those who don't?” I ask.

  Tears well. She doesn't brush at them, doesn't even seem to notice them.

  “They never come back,” she says. Then she frowns at me. “Perhaps he went for forgiveness, not to disappear.”

  I shrug. “The timing works. If he completed his pilgrimage to the Room, he could have gone to the treaty-signing ceremonies.”

  “With a pure heart,” she whispers.

  “He was a hero,” I say without a trace of irony. “Didn't he have one already?”

  And for the first time, she has no answer for me.

  * * * *

  She has led me in a whole new direction. I'm not looking for the remains of a man. I'm looking for something unusual, something special.

  A man has a history and occasionally he becomes a legend. But a man is rarely special by himself. Sometimes he becomes special in a special time. Sometimes he rises beyond his upbringing to become something new. Sometimes he starts a movement, or alters the course of a country.

  And sometimes—rarely—he changes an entire sector.

  The way Ewing Trekov supposedly did with his friends as they developed a plan for the war.

  But that story implies that he didn't work alone. That if he had died before he came to this outpost, someone else would have picked up that mantle. That someone might not have performed as well. He—or she—might have done better. There's no way to know.

  But like all humans, Trekov wasn't entirely unique.

  The Room of Lost Souls is unique.

  No one knows exactly what it is or how it got to be. No one knows where it started or who built it or why.

  Places develop myths, become legends in ways more powerful than any human being ever can. Because beneath each legendary human is the reminder that he is human, that what makes him special is how he rose above his humanness to become a little bit more than the rest of us.

  Not a lot more. Just a little bit.

  Trekov was a man who had more children than he could count, who made love to women but apparently didn't love them. A man who cared more about his work than his family.

  A man like so many others.

  A man who just happened to be the right man for the war he found himself in.

  But the Room—the Room existed before humans settled this sector. The Room shows up in the earliest documents from the earliest space travelers.

  And because it's so old, and because no one knows exactly how it works or why it's here or how it came to be, myths grew up around it.

  People go on a pilgrimage.

  Smart people, like Ewing Trekov.

  People believe the Room will do something for them. Change something about them. Satisfy something within them.

  The legends around the Room are fraught with danger. Space travelers are warned to stay away from it. I remember that much.

  I'd heard that much.

  But I'm not sure when. Or where. Or from whom.

  Still, I need to heed my own advice.

  I need to research the thing I think I know the best.

  I need to talk to the one other person who remembers it vividly.

  I have to talk to my own father.

  Much as I don't want to.

  * * * *

  He lives halfway across the sector, on a small planet whose only inhabited continent counts itself as one of the losers in the Colonnade Wars.

  He's lived there for nearly t
wo decades—and it's a sign of how out of touch we are that I actually had to look that information up.

  My father's house is a maze of glass, stairs, and steel. From the outside it seems haphazard, rooms on top of rooms, but from the inside, it has a wide-open feel, like the best cruise liners, designed not to take you to a destination but to help you enjoy the journey.

  He built his house in the center of a large blue lake, so at night the water reflects the skies above. If those skies are clear, it seems like he is in space, traveling from one port to another.

  He doesn't seem surprised to see me. If anything, he's a little relieved.

  I arrive in the middle of the afternoon and he insists I stay there. I nearly decline until he shows me the guest room. It is at the very top of the house, glass on all sides except the part of the floor that covers the room below. The bed seems to free-float between the blueness of the lake and the blueness of the sky.

  The sun—too close to this planet for my tastes—sends light through the glass, but environmental controls keep the room cool and comfortable. My father shows me where those controls are so I can lessen the gravity if I want.

  It takes me a while to realize that my father's house is modeled on the station that houses the Room of Lost Souls. We meet in the center room—the room that would be the Room of Lost Souls if we were on that station—and he offers me a meal.

  I decline. I'm too nervous in his presence to eat anything.

  My father is no longer the man I remember, the man who cradled me when I got out of that Room. That man had been in his late thirties, tall and strong and powerful. He'd loved his wife and his daughter, making us the center of his life.

  He'd commanded ships, built an empire of wealth, and still had time for us.

  He abandoned everything to figure out how to get my mother out of that place. His businesses, his friends.

  Me.

  Which makes it so strange to see him now, essentially idle, in this place of openness and reflected light.

  He still looks strong, but he hasn't bothered with enhancements. His face has lines—sadness lines that turn down his eyes, and pinch the corners of his mouth. He has let his hair go completely white, along with his eyebrows, which have become bushy. His mustache—something I considered as much a part of him as his hands—is long gone.

  He makes our greeting awkward by trying to hug me. I won't let him.

  He acts like he still has affection for me. He does make it clear that he has followed my career—as much as he can through what little I make public.

  But he has respected my wishes—the wishes I screamed at him the last time I ran away from my grandparents—and has stayed out of my life.

  “You sent Riya Trekov to me,” I say.

  I can't sit in the chair he's offered. I'm too restless in his presence, so I pace in the large room. The glass here opens onto the other rooms. Through their glass walls I can see still more rooms, and at the very end, the lake. Looking at it through all this glass makes it seem far away, and not real. It looks like a holograph of a lake, the kind you'd see on the distance ships of my childhood.

  “I figured if anyone could help her, you could.” His voice is the same, deep and warm and just a little nasal.

  I shake my head. “You're the one who has done all the research on the Room.”

  “But you're the one who has dived the most dangerous wrecks ever found.”

  I turn toward him then. He sits in the very center of the room. His chair is made of frosted glass and the cushions that protect his skin are a matching white. He looks like he has risen from the floor—a creature of glass and sunlight.

  “You think this is like a wreck?” I ask. “Wrecks are known. They're filled with space and emptiness. They have corners and edges and debris, but they're part of this universe.”

  “You think the Room isn't?” He folds his hands and rests his chin on his knuckles.

  “I don't know what it is. You're the one who has spent his life studying the damn thing.”

  So much for trying to hide my bitterness toward his choices.

  He grimaces, but nods, an acknowledgement that my bitterness has its reasons.

  “Yes,” he says. “I've studied it. I've traveled to it countless times. I've sent people in there. I've repeated the same experiments that have been tried since it was discovered. None of them work.”

  “So why do you think Riya Trekov's device will work?” I ask.

  “Because I was with her on one of the missions,” he says. “I watched people she paid go in and come back out.”

  “Empty-handed,” I say.

  He nods.

  “Yet she thinks someone can bring her father out.”

  “She might be right,” he says.

  “And if he can come out, so can Mother.”

  “Yes.” The word is soft. He lifts his chin off his folded hands. The knuckles have turned white.

  “If you believe this and you think I'm the one who can bring a lost soul out, how come you didn't ask me to do this yourself ?”

  “I did,” he says. “You turned me down.”

  I snort and finally sink into one of the nearby chairs. He's right; he did contact me. I had forgotten it among his many summonses, all of which I ignored. But this one had been his last, a long plea explaining that he not only had a way into the Room of Lost Souls, he had a way to survive it.

  “You used to say you never wanted me to go back in there. You discouraged me from even going near the place, remember?”

  I had been fifteen and full of myself. I'd run away from my grandparents half a dozen times. They were in constant mourning for my mother, and believed I was no substitute. It was pretty clear that they blamed me for her loss.

  The final time, my father came after me, and I told him I could get my mother. I was the only one who'd come out alive. He owed me the chance to try.

  He had refused.

  I left him—and my grandparents—and never contacted any of them again. Although he kept trying to reach me. And I kept glancing at, then refusing, his messages.

  “I couldn't risk it,” he says. “We barely got you out that first time.”

  “Yet you recommend me to go in when Riya Trekov comes to call. Because she has a way out or because you don't care any more?”

  His cheeks flush. “You didn't have to agree.”

  The chair is softer than I expect. I relax into it. “I know,” I say, giving him that much. “Her plea interested me.”

  “Because of your diving,” he says.

  I shake my head. Because I have nothing left. But I don't say that.

  “I recommended you because you're trained now,” he says. “Of everyone I know, you have a chance, not just to get out. But to get out with something. You've become an amazing woman.”

  I no longer know him. I can't tell if he's being sincere or if he's trying to convince me.

  He's still a man obsessed. I wonder what he'll do if he recovers the remnants of Mother. Her “soul” or her memory or even her self. He's lived for decades without her. If she's still alive, she's spent double her initial lifespan inside a single Room.

  I came here to find out one thing. So rather than debate the merits of my experience or the point of his obsession, I say, “Tell me what happened. How did we end up at the Room? How did we lose Mother?”

  “You don't remember?” he asks.

  The lights, the voices. I remember. Just not in any detail.

  “My memories are a child's memories,” I say. “I want the real story. The adult story. Mistakes and all.”

  We had no home. I didn't remember that, just like I didn't remember moving onto the ship six months before. My parents had sold our house and had put everything they had into his business, a fleet of cargo ships that ran all over the sector.

  The business had become a success when my father stopped caring about the ethics of the cargo he carried. Sometimes he brought food or agricultural supplies to far-flung outposts. Someti
mes he brought weapons to splinter groups rebelling against various governments.

  He didn't care, so long as he got his payment.

  He made so much money, he no longer needed to run the fleet, but he did. Still, my mother begged him to buy land and he did that too. This land, kilometers and kilometers of it, the entire lake and the surrounding greenery.

  He promised her they would retire here.

  But they were still young, and he loved travel. He commanded the lead vessel because he owned it, not because he was good at piloting or even at leadership.

  He tells me about the trips, about the deliveries, about the crew. The ship had a contingent of forty regulars, with two dozen others whom he'd hired for larger jobs. Sometimes they worked the cargo, sometimes they repaired the ship. Always they listened to him, whether he was right or not.

  But he wasn't the one who commanded them to the Room of Lost Souls. That was my mother. She had heard about it, studied it, thought about it.

  She wanted to see it.

  She didn't believe a place that old—human-made—could exist in this part of space.

  “She was trying to be a tourist,” he says now. “Trying to make all this travel work.”

  But I wonder. Just like I wondered about Trekov. If my mother had done all the studying, had she been planning a pilgrimage? Because of my father's business or because of some problem all her own?

  I realize, as I'm sitting there, I know even less about her than I know about my father. I only know what I remember, what her parents told me in their grief, and what my father is telling me now.

  “I took her there,” he says. “With no thought, no study. I thought it was just an ancient relic, a place that we could see in half a day and be gone.”

  “Half a day,” I mutter.

  He looks at me, clearly startled that I spoke.

  “So she planned to go to the Room?”

  “That was the point of our visit,” he says.

  “And she wanted to take me?” I can't believe anyone who studied that place would bring a child to it.

  “You suited up and followed her. You grabbed her hand as she went through that door. I think you were trying to keep her from going inside.”

  But I wasn't. I was entranced with the lights, as fascinated as she had been.