Asimov's SF, April-May 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “I saw you go in,” he says. “I called to you both, but the door closed behind you.”

  “And then?” I ask.

  “And then I couldn't get you out.”

  Minutes became hours. Hours became a day. He tried everything short of going in himself. He smashed at the window, tried to dismantle the walls, sent in some kind of grappler to grab us. Nothing worked.

  “Then, one day, the door opened.” His voice still holds a kind of awe. “And there you stood, your hands over your ears. I grabbed you and pulled you out, and held you, and the door closed again. Before I could go in. Before I could reach inside....”

  His voice trails off, but I remember this part. I remember him clinging to me, his hands so firm that they bruise me. It feels like he holds me for days.

  “You couldn't tell us anything,” he says. “You didn't think any time had gone by at all. You were tired and cranky and overwhelmed. And you never wanted to go in again.”

  “You asked?”

  He shakes his head. “You said. Without prompting. We stayed for a month. We never got her out.”

  And then he ordered the ship to leave. Because he knew he could spend the rest of his life struggling against that place. And he had a child. A miracle child, who had escaped.

  “I dropped you with your grandparents and came back. I figured I could go in and get her. But I couldn't. Except for you, I didn't know anyone who had gotten out.”

  “Which is why you want me to go,” I say.

  He shakes his head. “I've found people willing to go inside. Nothing comes out.”

  “I thought you said you went with Riya Trekov. That she has a way out.”

  “She does. People go in. They come out. But they're always alone.”

  Now I ask him. “What'll you do if you get her? She won't be the same. You're certainly not.”

  “I know,” he says, and for a moment, I think he's going to leave it at that. Then he adds, “None of us are.”

  * * * *

  We talk long into the night.

  Or rather, I listen as he talks.

  He tells me what he knows about the Room. He has an almost encyclopedic knowledge of the place, combined with a series of theories, myths, and legends he has collected over the decades.

  What it all comes to is what I already know: No one knows who built the Room or the station it's on. No one knows when it was built—only that it predates the known human colonization of this sector. No one knows what its purpose was or why it was abandoned.

  No one knows anything, except that people who go in do not come out.

  Unless they're protected by Riya Trekov's device.

  The device, as my father explains it, is a personal shield, developed by a company that's related to my father's old business. The shield relies on technology so old that few people understand it.

  Sometimes I think all of human history is about the technology we've lost. We're constantly reinventing things.

  Or recovering them.

  Apparently, this device is something reinvented.

  How it works is simple: It acts like a space suit—creating a bubble around the user that contains both environment and gravity and anything else the user might need.

  It has the same flaws a space suit has as well: It allows a person to enter an environment but not interact with it—or at least, not interact in important ways.

  But the shield is different from a space suit as well. From the first discovery of the Room, humans have tried to enter wearing spacesuits, and that has not worked.

  So Riya Trekov's device negates something—or protects against something—that a space suit does not. Somehow, that device—that bubble it creates—is the perfect protection against the Room.

  At least that is what my father would have me believe.

  That's what Riya Trekov showed me briefly on Longbow Station.

  But now I have more qualms than before. Because the more my father talks, the more disgusted I become.

  He has spent all this time studying the Room. He has made that Room his life's work.

  Yet he has never been able to risk that life, not even to pull me or my mother out of the Room.

  As he paces around me, I think of all the times I've gone into a wreck, how I've looked for trapped divers, what I've risked to recover their bodies.

  I've only failed to recover one.

  On the Dignity Vessel. I left one of my divers behind because he was trapped in something I did not understand.

  Like I do not understand Riya Trekov's device.

  Like I do not understand the Room.

  People have devoted their lives to the mystery that is the Room, and have learned nothing.

  Unlike them, I do not want to learn anything. I don't even want to recover my mother or Ewing Trekov—both of whom I consider dead.

  I want to see the Room for myself, to satisfy some curiosity that has plagued me since I was ten years old. In that, perhaps, I am more like my mother than my father. If his story is to be believed—and I am not sure it is—then my mother just wanted to see the anomaly for herself.

  Which is, in part, what I want to do. But more than that, I want to see, experience, and understand from an adult perspective what had so influenced me as a child.

  I want to know how much the Room formed me, the embittered wreck diver, the woman who once believed that preserving the past was more important than any money that could be made from it.

  The woman who believed—and maybe still does—that the past holds secrets, secrets which, if understood, can teach us more about ourselves than any science can.

  I do not tell my father any of this. I let him believe I'm doing a job. I pretend to be interested in all that he tells me.

  And I pretend to be surprised when he tells me he wants to join me.

  He says he wants to see the Room one last time.

  It takes months to put a team together. The people who want to go to the Room are not experienced divers, or experienced space travelers for that matter. The people who do not want to go are the ones I need.

  I am able to buy some of them—money goes a long way with people who live on the edge—but I cannot buy all. Most importantly, I cannot buy Karl, who was with me on the Dignity Vessel job.

  At first, he won't even talk to me. But eventually, his curiosity gets the better of him. He agrees to meet me in the old spacers’ bar in Longbow Station.

  I am at the station alone. I told my father that I would not be able to recruit when he was around. He has a reputation for being difficult and for thinking he's in charge. I actually got him to sign legal documents attesting to the fact that he would not run anything on board my ship or do anything to command (or jeopardize) my expedition.

  I am using three factors in picking my team: I want people who are creative—both mechanically and intellectually; I want people who have dived the most dangerous wrecks in the sector; and I want people who are honest.

  Finding the last two is relatively easy—divers have to be honest or they don't survive. The survivors are usually the ones who have been on the most dangerous missions.

  But most divers leave the creativity to the person in charge of the mission. Since, in the past, that was me, I never had the opportunity to work with other dive team leaders.

  Except Karl.

  He started his business after I quit mine. He took over my routes, and I didn't interfere with him because I believed I would never wreck dive again.

  But that isn't the only reason I want him.

  I want him because he's trustworthy—and he's dangerous.

  I don't know a lot about his personal history, but I do know a few things, things I've observed and things he's told me.

  He's ex-military and he's excellent with a knife. He can kill anything—and has, twice on dive trips, once before I knew him, and once after he opened his own business and trusted the wrong person.

  He's cautious to a fault and yet oddly fearless. I say oddly because
I've seen him back away from a dive because of worries about it, only to see him conquer those worries and go in.

  I respect that about him.

  I also know he can get my people back to Longbow if something happens to me.

  He can get them back and he can handle my father.

  Those elements are more important than creativity, more important than diving ability, more important than survival skills.

  He has just come off a run of his own. He won't tell me where, which leads me to believe he has discovered a wreck he doesn't want me to know about.

  His angular face seems even thinner than before, and his gray eyes seem silver in this light. He looks older, as if leading his own expeditions has taken something out of him.

  He wears a thin white shirt over his slender chest. His pants are too loose, suggesting that the thinness in his face isn't my imagination. He's lost weight.

  He straddles a chair across from me, using the chair's back as protection between us. He wraps his arms around it and stares at me.

  “You have some nerve,” he says.

  “Yes, I do.” I smile.

  He doesn't smile back.

  Then I sigh and let the smile fade. “I would like to hire you for a run.”

  “And I would like to tell you to go fuck yourself.” But he doesn't move. “But if I do, you'll just keep asking me. So I came to hear what you have to say and to tell you no in person.”

  I understand why he's angry at me. I also understand if he never works with me again. When I hired him to go to the Dignity Vessel, I didn't tell him what we were diving, even though I knew.

  I didn't tell any of my team. I didn't want them to bring preconceptions to the dive.

  That was just the first mistake I made on that trip—if I had spoken up, we might not have gone in, and we wouldn't have lost two divers.

  Karl swore he'd give up diving after that, but he didn't. It's a hard profession to renounce. There isn't much left in this sector that allows the kind of freedom, risk, and adventure real wreck diving does.

  “Just hear me out,” I say to him.

  This time, I tell him everything. I tell him about my past, about my father, about Riya Trekov and her father. I tell him about the Room and its dangers. I tell him about the pilgrimages and the quasi-religious symbolism others have found in the place.

  Then I tell him what I remember of the Room itself.

  That's when he finally moves. Just a little, but enough so that I know I've hooked him somehow.

  And I'm not quite sure how.

  “If what you say is true,” he says, “this is the second wreck you want to bring me to that's out of time.”

  My breath catches. I knew that the station and the Room don't belong. I haven't allowed myself to make the mental comparison to the Dignity Vessel.

  “You think it's related to the Dignity Vessel?” he asks.

  “I don't know,” I say. “There's always a chance. But I worry about preconceptions.”

  “Yeah,” he says dryly. “I remember that about you.”

  The words sting.

  “I might be wrong,” I say. “Preconceptions might be necessary. I don't know. I just know I'm going to do this job as if it's a dive, and I want the best team possible.”

  “You realize the chances of someone dying on this trip are very high,” he says.

  “Yes.” I swallow. That someone will probably be me.

  He sighs. He's clearly thinking about the offer. We haven't talked money yet. I doubt money will mean much to him.

  “What do you get out of this?” he asks. “Reconciliation with your father?”

  I shake my head. “I want nothing from him.”

  “Yet you bring him along. That could compromise us right there.”

  I like the word “us.” I didn't expect it. But I don't show him that I've noticed.

  “I know it could,” I say. “I'll need help minimizing contact with him.”

  “And your mother.” He shakes his head. “This is fraught with emotion. You taught me that dives should have no emotion.”

  And yet our last dive was filled with it. We were trying to recover a body, and we couldn't. It devastated us both.

  “I know,” I say.

  “If I go,” he says, “I run the mission.”

  My entire body freezes. “How can it be my mission if you run it?”

  “The dives,” he says. “Anything to do with the Room. If I say we pull out, we pull out. If I say we leave someone behind, we leave them.”

  I bite my lower lip. I'm barely breathing.

  “C'mon, Boss,” he says, using my old divers’ nickname. “You know that's why you're asking me to go. I'm the only one qualified, and the only one you'll listen to. You know that when I say we have to leave, I'll be right.”

  I let out the breath I was holding. Part of me has relaxed. He is right. That's why I chose to approach him. Because of our history. Because I know he's more cautious than I am, and because he has nothing at stake.

  Except proving to me that I can be wrong.

  “No grudges?” I ask.

  He smiles for the first time. It's a sad smile. “I've lost two divers in the years since the Dignity Vessel. I don't know if I would have made the mistakes you made, but I've made some of my own. I think I'm finally beginning to understand you. So, no grudges. I'll do what's best for the mission, not what's best for Riya Trekov or your father. Or for you.”

  I nod. “You haven't even asked about money.”

  “I know you'll be fair,” he says. Then his smile grows. “And I've always wanted to see the Room. The most mysterious place in this sector. I say let's go.”

  * * * *

  Maybe that's why such places catch and kill so many. Because they capture the imagination. Certainly that's why so many stories spring up around them.

  And so many myths.

  With Karl at my side, I do even more work. We sort through the repeated histories, and try to find the sources of various legends. We trace the Room in the modern era as best we can, and we ghoulishly make a list of all the souls known to have been lost in the place.

  There are more than five hundred—and that's just recorded losses. Who knows how many others there were? No one has kept track of the abandoned single ships found near the station, or people on a pilgrimage all on their own.

  In passing, I say to Karl that what we've learned isn't worth the time we've spent. And he says what we've learned is that there are no odd recorded stories, things that don't quite fit into the other stories.

  Maybe there's even a recognizable pattern. There certainly is to the losses. What happened to my father and his crew is the same as what happened to the very first ship that discovered the place, centuries ago.

  “The same,” I say, “except me coming out of that Room.”

  “Except that,” Karl says.

  * * * *

  In the end, we put together a team of ten, not counting me or Karl or Riya or my father.

  Karl will lead the mission once we arrive at the station. Until then, I am in charge. I'll be in charge again when we leave the station as well. It's only when we're docked—when we're near the Room—that Karl will have control.

  We use the Business. It has never been so full—at least not as long as I owned it. My father has the captain's cabin, which assuages my conscience. I've cut him off from all command and all control, which has to be difficult for him. So I reward him with the best quarters on the ship.

  Riya has the third best cabin. Mine is second best, and with its dedicated hardwired computer, I don't want anyone near it.

  The dive team has the rest of the main deck and Karl has the only room on the upper deck. It has the best views, and is impressive, should anyone visit him. I want him to look powerful and in charge, even before he is.

  Some—including my father—believe that I placed Karl in charge of the mission at the station because Karl and I are lovers. The dive team knows differently—it's no secre
t in the diving community how angry Karl was with me after the events with the Dignity Vessel—but they're under orders not to correct that misperception.

  Karl helped me vet the dive team. Two women who'd been on some of his previous dives, an old-timer who has more experience than me and Karl combined, three superb and fearless pilots, three young men hired more for their strength than their diving ability, and another old colleague, a woman who had accompanied me on my earliest professional dives.

  I have decided to treat this as a real dive, which means that we are focusing on the station, not just the Room. From everything that Karl and I have found, it seems people who have gone to the station have gone for the Room—or only spent time in the Room.

  No one has given the habitats more than a cursory examination, not even the scholars. In fact, the scholars have mostly relied on the discoveries of others, being too afraid to examine things themselves.

  On the first day out, I brief the dive team about our mission. We meet in the lounge. The Business's lounge is not for recreation. I put all of my playback and analysis equipment here. I also use it to analyze upcoming dives. There are comfortable chairs as well as two sofas, but they're arranged in an uncomfortable pattern—a semi-circle facing the various screens and portholes.

  Nine members of the dive team are here, as well as myself and Karl. I have banned Riya and my father from attending any meetings about the upcoming dives. The missing member of the team is the pilot who is currently flying the ship.

  The team spreads around the lounge, trying to look casual, but I recognize the emotions here. Everyone is excited. The work is what they live for—it's what I used to live for—and when they're approaching something new, it's thrilling, not frightening.

  I haven't felt the thrill yet. I haven't felt fear either, which I consider a victory. What I am feeling is nervous. I have no idea how any of this will play out.

  I'm not sure how I want it to.

  Still, I try to maintain an upbeat attitude, the way I used to do when I started dangerous dive missions in the past. I walk in front of the screens, looking every member of the team in the eye as I speak.

  I am not as honest with them as I was with Karl. I do mention problems—my father, the loss of my mother to the Room, which is why Karl will lead once we get to the station—but I do not mention my own reservations.