by Ian Whates
Cold. That was the thing.
That was what had crept up on me.
I sat up. I was outside, in the darkness, in my indoor clothes. Scalded with the cold. My whole body shook with a Parkinsonian tremor. I angled my head back and the stars were all there, the Southern Fish, the Centaur and the Dove; the Southern Cross itself; Orion and Hydra low in the sky; Scorpion and Sagittarius high up. Hydra and Pegasus. I breathed in fire and burned my throat and lungs. It was cold enough to shear metal. It was cold enough to freeze petrol.
I got to my feet. My hands felt as though they had been dipped in acid, and then that sensation stopped and I was more scared than before. There was nothing at the end of my arms at all. I tried rubbing my hands together, but the leprous lack of sensation and the darkness and my general sluggishness meant I could not coordinate the action. My hands bounced numbly off one another. I became terrified of the idea that I had perhaps knocked one or more fingers clean off. This looks ridiculous as I write it down, but there, in the dark, in the cold, the thought gripped my soul horribly.
I had to get inside, to get warm. I had to get back to the base. I was shuddering so hard I was scared I might actually lose balance with the shivering and fall down – in which case I might not be able to get back up again. Ghastly darkness all about. Cold beyond the power of words to express.
I turned about, and about again. Starlight is the faintest of lights. I could see my breath coming out only because of the vast ostrich shaped blot that twisted in my field of vision, blocking out the stars. I needed to pick a direction and go. But I couldn’t see any lights to orient me. What if I stumbled off in the wrong direction? I could easily stagger off into the wilderness, miss the base altogether. I’d be dead in minutes.
I addressed myself: take hold of yourself. You were dragged here – Roy dragged you here. Runty Roy; he couldn’t have removed me very far from the base. Presumably he figured I wouldn’t wake up; that I’d just die there in the dark.
“Okay,” I said, and took another breath – knives going down my throat. I had to move. I started off, and stumbled over the black ground through the black air. I began to fall forward – my thigh muscles were cramping – and picked up the pace to stop myself pitching onto my face. My inner ear still told me I was falling, so I ran faster. Soon I was sprinting. It’s possible the fluids in my inner ear had frozen, or glued-up with the cold, I don’t know. It felt as if I were falling, but my feet were still pounding over the ice, invisible below me. I felt like a diver, tumbling from the top board.
And then I saw the sea – I was at the coast. Obviously I wasn’t at the coast because that was hundreds of miles from the base. But there it was, visible. There was a settlement on the shore, a mile below me, with yellow lights throwing shimmery ovals over the water. There was a ship, lit up like a Christmas decoration, balanced very precisely on top of its own lit reflection. I must have been ten degrees of latitude, or more, further away from the pole, enough to lift the moon up over the horizon. The texture of the sea was a million burin-marks of white light on a million wavelets, like pewter. There was no doubting what I was seeing. My whole body trembled with pain, with the cold, and I said to myself I’m dying, and I’m hallucinating because I’m dying. I must have run in the wrong direction. I felt as if I’d been running all my life, all my ancestors’ lives combined.
There was a weird inward fillip, or lurch, or clonic jerk, or something folding over something else. I was conscious of thinking: I’ve run the wrong way. I’ve missed the base.
And there was the base. Now that I was there, I could see that Roy had covered the common room window on the inside with something – cloth, cardboard – to make a blackout screen. He had not wanted me to see the light and follow it as a beacon. Now that I was there, I could just make out the faint line of illumination around the edges. I couldn’t feel my hands, or my feet, and my face was covered with a pinching, scratchy mask – snot, tears, frost, whatever, frozen by the impossible cold to a hard crust.
I slumped against the wall, and the fabric of my shirt was so stiffened it snapped. It ripped clean away when I got up.
The door. I had to get to the door – that was when I saw... I was going to say when I saw them but the plural doesn’t really describe the circumstance. Not that there was only one, either. This is very hard to put into words. There was the door, in front of me, and just enough starlight to shine a faint glint off the metal handle. I could not use my hands, so I leant on the handle with my elbow, but it did not give way. Locked, of course locked. And of course Roy would not be opening for me this time. Then I saw – what I saw. Data experiences of a radically new kind. Raw tissues of flesh, darkness visible, a kind of fog (no: fog is the wrong word). A pillar of fire by night, except that “it” did not burn, or gleam, or shine. “It” is the wrong word. “It” felt, or looked, like a great tumbling of scree down an endless slope. Or rubble gathering at the bottom and falling up the mountain. Forwards, backwards.
It was the most terrifying thing I have ever seen.
There was a hint of – I’m going to say, claws, jaws, a clamping something. A maw. Not a tentacle, nothing so defined. Nor was it a darkness. It made a low, thrumming chiming noise, like a muffled bell sounding underground, ding-ding, ding-ding. But this was not a sound-wave sort of sound. This was not a propagating expanding sphere of agitated air articles. It was a pulse in the mind. A shudder of the soul.
I could not get inside the base, and I was going to die. I felt the horrid cold in the very core of my being. Then “it” or “they”, or the boojummy whatever the hell (I choose my words carefully, here) it was, expanded. Or undid whatever process of congealing that brought it – I don’t know.
Where I stood experienced a second as-it-were convulsive, almost muscular contraction. Everything folded over, and flipped back again. “It”, or “they” were not here any longer. In fact they had been here eons ago, or were not yet here at all.
I was standing inside the common room.
Do not demand to know how I passed beyond the locked door. I could not tell you.
The warmth of the air burned my throat. I could no longer stay standing. I half slumped, half fell sideways, and my arm banged against one of the heaters – it felt like molten metal, and I yelled. I rolled off and lay on the floor, and breathed and breathed.
I may have passed out. I have no idea how I got inside. I was probably only out for a few moments, because the next thing I knew my hands were in agony. Absolute agony! It felt like the gom jabbar, like they had both been stuffed into a tub of boiling water. Looking back, I can now say what it was: sensation returning to my frostbitten flesh. But by God I’ve never felt such pain. I screamed and screamed as if the Spanish Inquisition had gone to work on me. I writhed, and wept like a baby.
Somehow I dragged myself into a sitting posture, with my back against the wall and my legs straight out on the floor. Roy was standing in the common room doorway. In his right hand he was holding what I assumed to be a gun, although I later realised it was a flare pistol.
“You murdering bastard,” I said, “have you come to finish the job? You going to shoot me down like a dog?” Or that’s what I tried to say. What came out was: “yrch yrch orch orch orch’. God, my throat was shredded.
“The thing-in-itself,” he said. There was a weird bend in his voice. I blinked away the melting icicles from my eyelashes and saw he was crying. “The thing-as-such. The thing per se. I have experienced it unmediated.” His face was wet. Tears slippy-sliding down, and dripping like snot from his jowls. I’d never seen him like that before.
“What,” I croaked, “did you put in my whisky?” Oh God, the pain in my hands! And now my feet were starting to rage and burn too. Oh, it was ghastly.
He stopped crying, and wiped his face in the crook of his left arm. “I’m sorry,” he said. Even at this juncture he was not able to look me in the eye. He lifted his right hand, holding the flare pistol, slowly, until he was holding it acros
s his chest, like James Bond in the posters.
I was weeping – not because I was scared of dying, but just because my hands and feet hurt with such sharp and focussed intensity.
Roy took a breath, lifted the flare pistol to his own head, and pulled the trigger. There was a crunching bang, and Roy flopped to the ground. The common room was filled with fluorescent red-orange light and an extraordinarily loud hissing sound. For a moment we were in a luridly lit stage-set of Hades.
What had happened was this: the tip and fuse of the flare projectile had lodged itself in Roy’s skull, and had ejected the illumination section and its little asbestos parachute at the ceiling, where it snagged against the polystyrene tiles and burned until it was all burned out.
I sat in that ferociously red lit room, with molten chunks of polystyrene dripping onto the carpet. Then the shell itself burnt free and fell to the ground, where it fizzled out.
Roy was not dead. Nor was I, amazingly. It took me a while, and an effort, and the whole way along I was sobbing and begging the cosmos to take the pain away; but I got to the radio, and called for help. They sent an air ambulance. They laid a pattern of flares on the unlit runway during their first flyby and landed alongside them on their second. It took four hours, but they got to us, and we did not die in the interval.
I crawled back to Roy, unconscious on the floor, and pulled the shell-tip from the side of his head. There was no blood, although the dent was very noticeable – the skin and hair lining the new thumb-sized cavity all the way in. There was little I could do, beyond put him in the recovery position.
Then I clambered painfully on the sofa, my hands and feet hurting a little less. Surprisingly enough, I fell asleep – Roy had dissolved a sleeping tablet in the whisky, of course, to knock me out; and when the pain retreated just enough the chemical took effect. I was woken by the sound of crashing, and crashing, and crashing, and then one of the ambulance men came through the main door with an axe in his hand.
We were flown to Halley, on the coast – the subject of my vision, or whatever that had been. We were hospitalised, and questioned, and my hands were treated. I lost two fingers on my left hand and one on my right, and my nose was rescued with a skin graft that gives it, to this day, a weird patchwork-doll look. I lost toes too, but I care less about those. Roy was fine: they opened his skull, extracted a few fragments of bone, and sewed him up. Good as new.
I don’t think they believed his version of events, although for myself I daresay he was truthful, or as truthful as circumstances permit. The official record is that he had a nervous breakdown, drugged me, left me outside to die and then shot himself. He himself said otherwise. I’ve read the transcript of his account. I’ve even been in the same room with him as he was questioned. “I saw things as they really are, things per se, I had a moment – that’s the wrong word, it is not measured in moments, it has always been with me, it will always be with me – a moment of clarity.”
“And your clarity was: kill your colleague?”
He wanted the credit all to himself, I think. He believed he was the individual destined to make first contact with alien life. He wanted me out of the way. He didn’t say that, of course, but that’s what I think. His explanation was: my perceptions, my mental processes and imagination, would collapse the fragile disintermediating system he was running to break through to the Thing-as-Such. I confess I don’t see how that would work. Nonetheless, he insists that this was his motive for killing me. Indeed, he insists that my reappearance proved the correctness of his decision, the necessity for my death – because by coming back at the time I did, I broke down the vision of the Ding-an-Sich, or reasserted the prison of categorical perception, or something, and the aliens fled – or not fled, because their being is not mappable with a succession of spatial coordinates the way ours are. But: I don’t know. Evaporate. Collapse away to nothing. Become again veiled. He wrote me several long, not terribly coherent letters about it from Broadmoor. I still prefer the earlier explanation. He was a nerd, not right in the head, and a little jealous of me.
So, yes. He happened to buy Lezlie’s Dear John. She couldn’t cope with the long distances, the time lags between us meeting up, she’d met someone else... The usual. After he drugged me and left me outside to die, Roy left the letter, carefully opened and smoothed out, face up on the desk in my room. It was going to be the explanation for my “suicide”. People were to believe I couldn’t handle the rejection, and had just walked out into the night.
His latest communication with me from Broadmoor begged me to “go public” with what I had seen; so that’s what I’m doing. You’ll grasp from this that I don’t know what I saw. I suppose it was a series of weird hallucinations brought on by the extreme cold and the blood supply intermitting in my brain. Or something, I don’t know. I still dream about them. It. Whatever. And the strange thing is: although I know for a fact I encountered it (them, none, whatever) for the first time in Antarctica, in 1986, it feels – deep in my bones – as if I have always known about them. As if they visited me in my cradle. They didn’t, of course.
I saw the John Carpenter film The Thing for the first time recently. That wasn’t one of the VHS tapes they gave us back then to watch on base. For obvious reasons. That’s not what it was like for me. That doesn’t capture it at all. They, or it, or whatever, were not thing-y.
They are inhuman. But this is only my dream of them, I think. It is not a dream of a human. It is not a dream of a thing. Or it is, but of a sick kind of thing. And, actually, no. That’s not it.
He keeps writing me. I wish he’d stop writing.
THE SULLEN ENGINES
GEORGE ZEBROWSKI
George Zebrowski’s Brute Orbits won the John W. Campbell Award, Cave of Stars was chosen for Science Fiction, the 101 Best Novels 1985-2010, and Stranger Suns was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. A multiple Nebula Award nominee, he was also a finalist for the Theodore Sturgeon Award. His newest novel is Empties (Golden Gryphon). Co-edited with Gregory Benford is Sentinels in Honor of Arthur C. Clarke (Hadley Rille), while Decimated presents ten collaborations with Jack Dann (Borgo). His backlist is available via SF Gateway and Open Road: www.openroadmedia.com/george-zebrowski.
“...we curse the obstacles of life as though they were devils. But they are not devils. They are obstacles.”
– John Erskine,
The Moral Obligation
To Be Intelligent, 1915
“YOU DON’T REALLY hate cars,” Bruno said, frowning at her. “We still need them.”
“It’s the engines,” said June, “and the bad drivers, even if the cars ran on perpetual motion.”
“No drivers would be best, I suppose,” he said.
“Our toys only magnify human error,” she said, looking away from him, thinking of how human-infested vehicles victimized walkers, flashing contemptuous, pitying glances at pedestrians, oblivious to their own sacrificial time payments and lost lives. When the price of oil was up, fatalities went down by fifteen thousand; profits warred with safer engineering.
Safer, but never safe.
Life’s crawling insufficiency grimaced at her from behind the inconceivable scenery of the universe, in which sudden awareness asked: what are we and where are we going?
“Hey, lady, whaddya waiting for!” cried a voice from a giant truck one wintry morning. She had waved the driver on, then strolled around behind him. Insulted by her caution, he honked his horn and pulled away in a haze of blue exhaust. How many respiratory deaths in that one puff? Thirty thousand a year in one state alone. The ironies abounded.
Aging drivers drifted through red lights, asleep or suicidal. Conniving engines rumbled in predatory readiness where the lights were never green long enough.
Scurry across, humiliated by the flesh-operated machines waiting to run you down, growling, maiming and killing as the toll of personal transport, daring her to do without.
JOSEPH COTTEN WAS telling young Tim Holt that automobiles migh
t well become a profitable curse, adding nothing to the human soul.
Bruno guffawed, more impressed by his big TV’s crisp black and white than by Orson Welles’s 1942 take on Booth Tarkington’s 1919 Pulitzer Prize novel, The Magnificent Ambersons.
Agnes Moorehead’s Aunt Fanny was saying that she wouldn’t be surprised if a law banned the sale of cars as concealed weapons.
“Well whaddya know,” Bruno said, “sounds like you.”
“All that foresight was already too late,” June said.
“Shoulda-would-a-could-a,” Bruno said. “But pretty good for back then.”
June muttered, “... much too late.”
“Well,” Bruno went on, “who knew? Asimov said that it was easy to predict horseless carriages, but not urban sprawl or pollution.”
“Or the sexual opportunities for kids,” June said.
“Yeah – motel rooms on wheels,” her husband said with glee, glancing up at the ceiling. “Recliner seats and steering wheel up against your back. Lots of fun.”
“You don’t much care, do you?” she shouted.
He said more seriously, “Horseless carriages were easy to see coming, accident rates and planetary damage only a little more difficult, but urban sprawl and changes in sexual behavior would have been hardest, not to mention cars and terrorism. At the turn of the last century Scientific American laughed at the idea of airliners carrying hundreds of passengers. I’m well aware.”
