And I wondered if it would ever reach the bottom.
I cannot recall exactly what happened next, Zoraya. I only know that somehow I managed to get Joakim up and moving again. The wind was worse than when we’d entered the vessel, raising veils of rust-colored dust that made it difficult to see more than a dozen or so feet ahead, and I cursed the lot of us for not thinking to set up a safety line. But Umachandra and Peter were almost exactly where we’d left them, not far from the steep and crumbling edge of the terrace.
Peter was sitting cross-legged on the ground, using his gloved fingers to draw in the dust, and she was standing over him. Umachandra turned towards us, her face dimly illuminated by the lights inside her helmet and the photophores glowing violet beneath her skin. She motioned for us to hurry.
“Come on,” I urged Joakim, who kept lagging behind. He would stop and look back at the shuttle, and I’d have to take him by the hand and pull him stumbling along.
“I can’t see the sun,” he said. “How can it be night already, Audrey? Were we away that long?”
“There’s no sun here. There never has been,” I replied, too angry and scared and entirely beyond caring what I should or shouldn’t say to him. “You just keep walking.”
“We have to find them. They can’t have gone very far.”
I clung to his left hand and towed him forward through the dust and gathering gloom, watching as Umachandra and Peter seemed to grow less and less distinct the closer we came to them. Part of me knew that it was only a trick of the storm, and I tried to give all of me over to that rational, diminishing sliver of my mind.
“We can’t leave them out here,” Joakim said.
“They’re dead. They’ve all been dead for two weeks.”
“You don’t know, Audrey,” and he was absolutely on the line about that, Zoraya; I didn’t know. Of course I didn’t know. But, after hearing what I’d heard on the tab, I fucking hoped and prayed to all the merciful gods and saints of Earth, every deity I’d never believed in and never would, that I was right.
“You have to keep walking, Joakim. I won’t be able to carry you if you don’t.”
“We’re sane,” he muttered, the rising wind snatching at his voice. “Both of us, Audrey. We’re sane people. Sane people don’t hallucinate.”
“Yes, they fucking do,” I shouted back at him. “Sane people hallucinate all the goddamn time,” and then Umachandra was standing right there in front of me, the soft light around her face like a halo.
Mother Mary comes to me…
“Help me with him, please,” I said, and she nodded and quickly slipped an arm around Joakim’s shoulders. I knew she could lift him if she had to, if I needed her to.
“Is Peter all right?” I asked, and she shook her head.
“We should have listened to Evelyn,” Umachandra said. “We should have listened to Connor when he wanted us to get – ”
“We’re on our way,” I said, and she laughed.
“We’ll leave when and if it lets us,” she hissed through the speakers on her helmet, almost whispering, as though she were afraid someone or something besides me were trying to hear her over the wind. I didn’t have the courage left to ask what that might be, or what she was talking about.
“Where the fuck have the two of you been?” she asked.
Joakim looked at her and then at me, like a child asking permission to speak.
“On the shuttle – ” I began, but Joakim was pointing at the timepiece on my wrist.
“I was almost ready to take Peter and get the hell out of here,” Umachandra said. “I checked the shuttles twice, ours and the derelict, and wherever you were, Audrey, you weren’t there.”
“How long?” Joakim asked her. “How long were we gone?”
He knew the answer already, and so did I.
“Almost three hours. I was afraid that you’d become disoriented in the storm and wandered over the edge.”
We weren’t on the Gilgamesh shuttle.
We never listened to the tab.
Which would explain why it wasn’t in my pocket when we got back to the Montelius.
We got lost in the sandstorm.
Except the sandstorm didn’t begin until after we left the abandoned shuttle.
Or –
I’ve squandered my life asking these questions, Zoraya. There are no answers. There is no truth. There are only terrible questions containing ever more terrible questions, an infinite regression of improbable unlikelihoods leading nowhere at all.
By the time we reached Peter, the wind was letting up and visibility was improving. He was still sitting on the ground, only a few feet from the edge of the terrace, and he held a chunk of shale the color of cinnamon in his right hand, which he’d used to scrape things into the stone in front of him. If they were meant to be words, they were written in no alphabet I’d ever seen.
“It’s still there,” Umachandra said, and she pointed across the chasm towards the far wall of the quarry. I looked, squinting through the haze, but it was almost a mile to the other side, and I couldn’t see anything except the far rim of the pit silhouetted against the sky.
“Peter says he can’t see it, but I’m not sure he’s telling the truth. It came out of the pool. Since then, it’s just been sitting over there, watching us.”
“I can’t see anything,” Joakim said, beginning to sound more like himself and less like a sleepwalker.
Umachandra tapped hard against one of the instrument casings strapped to her thigh. “It doesn’t scan, but it’s animate. So either it’s an inorganic or the calibration on this box is off.”
“Or it isn’t there,” Joakim said.
“Trust me, Hamilton. It’s fucking there,” Umachandra shot back, her vertical pupils contracting to slits, but I caught a fragile tone in her voice, more anxious than defensive, that showed just how badly she needed someone else to see it.
I opened my mouth to say that I didn’t and, in any case, we should worry about it later, but then the shadows hugging the opposite side of the pit seemed to shift subtly, and there was movement, and I realized that I did see it. It was nothing definite, nothing I could ever recall in any detail, like catching a fleeting glimpse of something enormous and black moving slowly beneath stagnant, muddy waters.
Do I remember that?
I mean, do I really remember that?
Joakim told Jedda Callahan that Umachandra and I had seen the most. But I don’t recall ever having told Joakim what I thought I saw crouched on the other side of the quarry. Did Umachandra tell him before she died?
It was only there a moment, a deeper shade of darkness folding or unfolding, coiling or uncoiling –
Dark revolving in silent activity.
A self-contemplating shadow, in enormous labors occupied.
I’m not going to write any more, not tonight. But I won’t sleep, either. I’ll sit here until dawn, and then I’ll find some excuse to get dressed and go out. There’s the four A.M. aerobus, flashing red and blue, red and blue, and I can’t remember if I fed the cats. I’ve been writing for hours, and my hand hurts like hell. I want to stop thinking about Piros, and I want the sun to rise.
And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.
Is that how I’ll end this? Like Ishmael quoting from The Book of Job? I’ve never been much for fiction, much too busy with those things which I thought might be true, instead. But I’ve always loved Melville, especially Moby Dick. I read somewhere that Ishmael means “God hears” in Hebrew. So the epigraph seems appropriate.
I watched the sun rise and sipped at hot black tea, Matthieu snoring contentedly in my lap. Today is turning out to be a sky day. We get fewer of them every year. The clouds broke apart not long after dawn, and there’s so much blue, the clean pastel blue of a living world. I remember Joakim’s eyes being almost that same shade of blue. The sunlight sparkles brilliantly across the snow, making strange diamonds of the long icicles drooping from the eaves, and it might only be a midwinter’
s day out there.
So, I’ve been sitting at the bay window for the last couple of hours, feeling the sun against my face. Matthieu and Léon are curled up together on the writing desk in front of me. Sabine is missing the show, but then she seems ever lost in her own secret affairs. I believe there’s a lot of ink remaining in this pen.
Zoraya left just a little while ago.
She came this morning with three grey-suited men from ANSA’s Office of Personnel and Interdepartmental Security. I wasn’t even surprised. I would have liked to have been, but I wasn’t. I might even have been relieved. One of the three men (they each told me their bland, interchangeable names, but I’ve forgotten them all) read the preliminary charges against me while Zoraya held my hand like the friend she’s spent so much time pretending to be.
“You’re an agent?” I asked her, when the men were finished telling me what I’d done wrong, and she said that she was, that she’d been watching me for a long time. I’m not sure I buy that. It would have been easy enough for them to have reprogrammed her after Jedda Callahan came to me, or at any other time. As late as last night maybe, the client that was more important than chess, the Belgian Gemini. It might have happened then. She wouldn’t know. I prefer to believe that this is what has happened, though it seems, somehow, like a selfish conceit.
“You’ll remain under house arrest,” she said, “until such time, if any, as the agency judges you to have ceased to pose a risk to project security. It won’t be so bad, Audrey. You can even keep your cats. And I’ll always be right down the hall. I’ve been assigned to guard you.”
I watched the three men for a few seconds, their faces hidden behind sleek masks of metal and plastic. One of them crossed and then uncrossed his legs, like he was nervous, or bored, or had to take a piss.
“You make a life sentence sound like a holiday,” I said, and Zoraya sighed and glanced down at her hands.
“It may not be life,” she said. “In two years, your case will be filed with the executive court – ”
“ – and,” I interrupted, “in thirty-one months I’ll be eligible for formal charges and a pre-trial hearing, which will be delayed, indefinitely, because the agency can’t risk this going to trial.”
“Audrey, we’ll make the best of it, together.”
“Bray,” I said, and one of the men rose, the one who’d been crossing and uncrossing his legs, and went to my writing desk. He separated the first page of the manuscript from the rest and held his right hand a few inches above the page, the photoset implanted in his palm scanning it from top to bottom.
“Aren’t they going to take it?” I asked.
“For the moment, we think it’s safer here, with you,” she replied. “You can even finish it, if you’d like. I’d be interested to know how it ends.”
“Haven’t they told you?”
“I know what I need to know. But that’s not the same as getting your impressions, in your words, the way you remember what happened.”
“What if I want to destroy it?” I asked, smiling, and Zoraya looked up at one of the two ANSA men, then back at me.
“We’ll have a record of the document. If you want to dispose of the original, you may. But I think it should go to the archives, don’t you? You’ve worked so hard on it.”
Before they left, one of the three men implanted a locater tab in my spine, somewhere between my third and fourth cervical vertebrae. There was hardly any pain at all, and only a few drops of blood.
So. I am writing this last part down for myself, or for no one at all. Maybe I’m writing it for Joakim. I might let you see it, Zoraya. Or whoever you are now. But I’m not writing it for you. I suspect you know “the facts” better than I could ever recall them. The eight months that we spent in orbit around Piros, waiting for the Galatea. The discovery that Anastazja Osmolska was still alive on Gilgamesh, though she’d managed to cut out her own tongue and amputate most of her fingers before blinding herself with a welding torch. You probably have at least limited access to the transcripts of our debriefings before the tube back to Sol. And whatever they finally decided should be recorded about Umachandra’s death during Martian quarantine, you know about that, too. And Peter Connor’s suicide one week later, after they scrubbed his memory. Joakim’s years in and out of psychiatric hospitals. The decision to cancel any further expeditions to Gliese 876 after the Ivanov made it back with only half its human crew alive. Etc. & etc.
You know all that shit, Zoraya. You don’t need “my impressions” of what did and didn’t happen.
As for the rumors of coded ftl signals emanating from Piros, and the twelve deaths on Ganymede-Kobayashi Station last January, and the stories the pro-earthers have started cuffing all the webzats about alien plagues and cover-ups and sightings of “dark bodies” out beyond the Kuiper Belt, again, you’ll know more about these things than me. And if you don’t, remember, it’s nothing the agency needs you to know.
I’ve written enough now. I don’t want to write any more, ever again.
I only want to sit here in the warm sun with my cats and hope that we get a full sky day.
And I only am escaped…
Addendum:
The Worm in My Mind’s Eye
Excerpt from the medical log of the starship Aegis (ANSA R18.0F65, slip 7, 987.EC1 fell), entered by Jaeng Li Chieu, Ph.D., Mission Specialist.
Entry Voice-Dated 5/2/23; transcript 87-234B12.
Release Code 5; STATE BLUE EIGHT:
The noises at the door have stopped.
I was having trouble concentrating. The questions they kept asking me through the door. I don’t have answers for them, except the answers they have already found for themselves. The revelations of our solitude. Of the void and the fire speckling the void. I don’t have to repeat those things, do I? It isn’t necessary. The morphine and sendep drips don’t help, either. They dull the pain and dull my mind and I would use less, but can’t seem to override the 712s’ procedure command that regulates minimal dosage.
I’ll bet that Tyler could, but Tyler is only a noise at the door.
We’ve been busy with my left thigh for the last two hours. In the mirrors, I can see the red-grey weave of my flesh, a stark, living sculpture the bots are making of me. They are precise and neat, and this is no ruthless flaying. They don’t make mistakes. They know that it’s important that I see everything. They keep the incisions clean with suction thumbs while burning scalpel fingers uncover the deeper, more profane, most sacred secrets.
Almost all of the quadriceps femoris is now exposed. The bot I call Blink has just finished measuring the anterior surface of the rectus femoris. I know the measurements will be precise. I trust their calculations. Their reliability leaves me free to see past the facts, the facts that are necessary, but which also obscure the truth. I need to be free to see deeper, to find the fire the stars have buried inside me.
The fire that is burning us all alive.
It slipped in through my eyes, the glimmer of slithering furnaces, helium, hydrogen, photons racing effortlessly through pupil and lens and vitreous seas, sizzling down optic nerves to the hemispheres of my brain.
My left lateral circumflex fermoral vein, I think that’s what they’re pointing to now, something pulsing faintly in the red and white and black cavity of me. They know what I need to see, because I told them everything before we began. That was a long time ago. No one was at the door then. That was a long time ago. I’m trying to remember things from books and vids and anatomy lectures, from desiccated cadavers in antiseptic labs. The lcf passes behind both the sartorius and rectus femoris muscles, and there it divides into three branches, the ascending, transverse, and descending branches. The first branch crosses the hip to join a network with the terminal branches of the superior gluteal and deep iliac circumflex arteries. They’re showing all these things to me, not dead, not pickled, not preserved, but alive and fleeting, and somewhere in there I’ll see the fire.
Or I’ll see it somewhere e
lse, instead.
There’s still a lot of me unopened.
The descending branch passes downward behind the rectus femoris with a single long branch descending all the way to the knee to join an aspect of the popliteal artery.
I sound like a lecture. I am a lecture, Xiao Chen, and you’ll complain because I’m in English, instead of Mandarin.
You’ll never see the fire.
My skin is leaves now. My skin is pages. They are turning me, the robots, and I unfold for them like a book, or a flower, or clean white sheets.
I unfold for me.
Without the noises at the door, there’s only the wet sounds the 712s make as they work, and the mechanical sounds of the life support. The pumps that have taken over for my deflated, absent lungs, the gentle chug of the hemofiltration servos that do what my kidneys did before the droids cut them both out and placed them carefully in separate jars of 24-percent permafix solution. They are yours, Xiao Chen. The display above me hums very faintly, showing stats that seem increasingly unimportant, less vital – blood pressure 95/60, pulse 65 bpm, core body temp 35.8 Celsius – the irrelevant details of my failing biology floating in tangerine light.
The kidneys suspended in their jars, not quite weightless, the half-circle mask that was the right side of my face, thirty-two teeth, the fingernails from my left hand. Add these things and subtract anything that seems misleading.
I don’t want to die. That’s not what this is about.
Blink is indicating the sartorius now, which I have asked them to try and remove intact. Xiao Chen, do you remember me telling you that the sartorius is the longest single muscle in the human body? Iliac spine to tibia, a span of tissue like roots pushing deep below the earth, squeezing past other roots and soil and flesh and bone.
I am coherent. Don’t let them tell you otherwise.
I know what’s happening to me.
I know why.
They would stop, even now, if I instructed them to stop. They would open the door for Tyler and Peeples and the rest, and the noise would stop. If I let them. But then there would be new noises, wouldn’t there? And those new noises would be worse. I could stop them with the touch on a single key on this pad. It would be that easy. Death is always easy. I almost hit that key twice yesterday, or hours ago, however long, I’m not certain. Is that the proximal gracilis, the adductor longus? I’m not sure. There’s sweat in my eyes. That’s why there are notes.
Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (Volume One) Page 61
