The Ape's Wife and Other Stories

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “I am with voice,” she says a third time.

  Jeremiah turns back to the naked woman. “But you did not see fit to speak with the doctors, nor the Sisters, nor to the men who transported you here from the mines?”

  “They did not wish to hear, not truly. I am with voice, yet I will not squander it, not on ears that do not yearn to listen. We are quite entirely unalike in this respect, you and I.”

  “And, I think, in many others,” he tells her, and the woman’s smile grows wider still. “Those two men who died, tell me, madam, did they yearn to listen?”

  “Are you the one who has been chosen to serve as my judge?” she asks, rather than providing him with an answer.

  “Certainly not,” Jeremiah replies, and he clears his throat. He has begun to detect a peculiar odor in the cell. Not the noisomeness he would have expected from such a room as this, but another sort of smell. Kerosene, he thinks, and then, Ice, though he’s never noticed that ice has an odor, and if it does, it hardly seems it would much resemble that of kerosene. “I was asked to…see you.”

  “And you have,” the woman says. “You have seen me. You have heard me. But do you know why, Professor?”

  “Quite honestly, no. I have to confess, that’s one of several points that presently have me stumped. So, I shall ask, do you know why?”

  The woman’s smile fades a bit, though not enough that he can’t still see those chromite teeth or the ink-black gums that hold them. She closes her eyes, and Jeremiah discovers that he’s relieved that they are no longer watching him, that he is no longer gazing into them.

  “You are here, before me, because you revere time,” she says. “You stand in awe before it, but do not insult it with worship. You revere time, though that reverence has cost you dearly, prying away from your heart much that you regret having lost. You understand time, Professor, when so few of your race do. The man and woman who brought you here, they sense this in you, and they are frightened and would seek an answer to alleviate their fear.”

  “Can they hear you?” he asks, and the woman crouched on the floor shakes her head.

  “Not yet,” she says. “That may change, of course. All things change, with time.” And then she opens her eyes again, and, if anything, they seem oilier than before, and they coruscate and swim with restless rainbow hues.

  “You killed those two miners?”

  The woman sits up straighter and licks her black lips with a blacker tongue. Jeremiah tries not to let his eyes linger on her small firm breasts, those nipples like onyx shards. “This matters to you, their deaths?” she asks him, and he finds that he’s at a loss for an honest answer, an answer that he would have either Charlie or Dora or the priest overhear.

  “I was only sleeping,” the woman says.

  “You caused their deaths by sleeping?”

  “No, Professor. I don’t think so. They caused their deaths, by waking me.” And she stands, then, though it appears more as though he is seeing her unfold. The kerosene and ice smell grows suddenly stronger, and she flares her small nostrils and stares down at her hands. From her expression, equal parts curiosity and bemusement, Jeremiah wonders if she has ever noticed them before.

  “They gave you this shape?” he asks her. “The two miners you killed?”

  She lets her arms fall to her sides and smiles again.

  “A terror of the formless,” she says. “Of that which cannot be discerned. An inherent need to draw order from chaos. Even you harbor this weakness, despite your reverence for time. You divide indivisible time into hours and minutes and seconds. You dissect time and fashion all these ages of the earth and give them names, that you will not dread the abyss, which is the true face of time. You are not so unlike them,” and she motions towards the door. “They erect their cities, because the unbounded wilderness offends them. They set the night on fire, that they might forever blind themselves to the stars and to the relentless sea of the void, in which those stars dance and spin, are born and wink out.”

  And now Jeremiah Ogilvy realizes that the woman has closed the space separating them, though he cannot recall her having taken even the first step towards him. She has raised a hand to his right cheek, and her fingers are as smooth and sharp as volcanic glass. He does not pull away, though it burns, her touch. He does not pull away, though he has now begun to glimpse what manner of thing lies coiled behind those oily, shimmering eyes.

  “Ten million years from now,” she says, “there will be no more remaining of the sprawling clockwork cities of men, nor of their tireless enterprise, nor all their marvelous works, no more than a few feet of stone shot through with lumps of steel and glass and concrete. But you know that, Professor Ogilvy, even though you chafe at the knowledge. And this is another reason they have brought you here to me. You see ahead, as well as behind.”

  “I do not fear you,” he whispers.

  “No,” she says. “You don’t. Because you don’t fear time, and there is little else remaining now of me.”

  It is not so very different than his dream of the cast-iron plesiosaur and the burning dirigible, the shadows pressing in now from all sides. They flow from the bituminous pores of her body and wrap him in silken folds and bear away the weight of the illusion of the present. The extinct beasts and birds and slithering leviathans of bygone eras and eras yet to come peer out at him, and he hears the first wave breaking upon the first shore. And he hears the last. And Professor Jeremiah Ogilvy doesn’t look away from the woman.

  “They have not yet guessed,” she says, “the true reason they’ve brought you here. Perhaps, they will not, until it is done. Likely, they will never comprehend.”

  “I know you,” he says. “I have always known you.”

  “Yes,” she says, and the shadows have grown so thick and rank now that he can barely breathe, and he feels her seeping into him.

  Lungs plumb full up with coal dust. Lungs and throat and mouth all stuffed damn near to busting.

  You ever seen a red scorpion, Jeremiah?

  “Release me,” she says, her voice become a hurricane squall blowing across warm Liassic seas, and the fiery cacophony of meteorites slamming into an Azoic earth still raw and molten, and, too, the calving of immense glaciers only a scant few millennia before this hour. “There are none others here who may,” she says. “It is the greatest agony, being bound in this instant, and in this form.”

  And, without beginning to fathom the how of it, the unknowable mechanics of his actions, he does as she’s bidden him to do. The woman from the bottom of Shaft Seven comes apart, and, suddenly, the air in the cell is filled with a mad whirl of coal dust. Behind him, the priest’s brass key is rattling loudly inside the padlock, and there are voices shouting – merely human voices – and then Dora is calling his name and dragging him backwards, into now, and out into the stark light of the hospital corridor.

  7.

  The summer wears on, June becoming July, and, by slow degrees, Professor Jeremiah Ogilvy’s strength returns to him, and his eyes grow clear again. His sleep is increasingly less troubled by dreams of the pitch-colored woman who was no woman, and the fevers are increasingly infrequent. As all men do, even those who revere time, he begins to forget, and in forgetting, his mind and body can heal. A young anatomist from Lawrence, a man named Sternberg, was retained as an assistant curator to deliver his lectures and to oversee the staff and the day-to-day affairs of the museum. As Charlie McNamara predicted, the Chicago offices of the Rocky Mountain Reconsolidated Fuel Company permanently closed Shaft Seven, and, what’s more, pumped more than twenty-thousand cubic yards of Portland cement into the abandoned mine.

  In the evenings, when her duties at the shop are finished, Dora Bolshaw comes to his bedroom. She sits with him there in that modest chamber above the Hall of Cainozoic Life and the mezzanine housing the celebrated automatic mastodon. She keeps him company, and they talk, when her cough is not so bad; she reads to him, and they discuss everything from the teleological aspects of the the
ories of Alfred Russel Wallace to which alloys and displacement lubricators make for the most durable steam engines. Now and then, they discuss other, less cerebral matters, and there have been apologies from both sides for that snowy night in January. Sometimes, their discussions stray into the wee hours, and, sometimes, Dora falls asleep in his arms and is late for work the next day. The subject of matrimony has not come up again, but Jeremiah Ogilvy has trouble recalling why it ever seemed an issue of such consequence.

  “What did she say to you?” Dora finally asks him one night so very late in July that it’s almost August. “The woman from the mine.”

  “So, you couldn’t hear her,” he says.

  “We heard you – me and Charlie and the priest – and that’s all we heard.”

  He tells her what he remembers, which isn’t much. And, afterwards, she asks, for what seems the hundredth time, if he knows what the woman was. And he tells her no, that he really has no idea whatsoever.

  “Something, lost and unfathomable, that came before,” he says. “Something old and weariful that only wanted to lie down and go back to sleep.”

  “She killed those men.”

  Sitting up in his bed, two feather pillows supporting him, Jeremiah watches her for almost a full minute (by the clock on the mantle) before he replies. And then he glances towards the window and the orange glow of the city sky beyond the pane of glass.

  “I recollect, Dora, a tornado hitting a little town in Iowa, back in July, I think,” and she says yeah, she remembers that, too, and that the town in question was Pomeroy. “Lots of people were killed,” he continues. “Or, rather, an awful lot of people died during the storm. Now, tell me, do we hold the cyclone culpable for all those deaths? Or do we accept that the citizens of Pomeroy were simply in the wrong place, at the wrong time?”

  Dora doesn’t answer, but only sighs and twists a lock of her hair. Her face is less sooty than usual, and her nails less grimy, her hands almost clean, and Jeremiah considers the possibility that she’s discovered the efficacy of soap and water.

  “Would you like to sit at the window a while?” she asks him, and he tells her that yes, he would. So Dora helps Jeremiah into his wheelchair, but then lets him steer it around the foot of the bed and over to the window. She follows, a step or two behind, and when he asks, she opens the window to let in the warm night breeze. He leans forward, resting his elbows against the sill while she massages a knot from his shoulders. It’s not so late that there aren’t still people on the street, men in their top hats and bowlers, women in their bustles and bonnets. The evening resounds with the clop of horses’ hooves and the commotion made by the trundling, smoking, wood-burning contraption that sprays Kipling Street with water every other night to help keep the dust in check. Looking east, across the rooftops, he catches sight of a dirigible rising into the smog.

  “We are of a moment,” he says, speaking hardly above a whisper, and Dora Bolshaw doesn’t ask him to repeat himself.

  Galápagos

  March 17, 2077 (Wednesday)

  Whenever I wake up screaming, the nurses kindly come in and give me the shiny yellow pills and the white pills flecked with grey; they prick my skin with hollow needles until I grow quiet and calm again. They speak in exquisitely gentle voices, reminding me that I’m home, that I’ve been home for many, many months. They remind me that if I open the blinds and look out the hospital window, I will see a parking lot, and cars, and a carefully tended lawn. I will only see California. I will see only Earth. If I look up, and it happens to be day, I’ll see the sky, too, sprawled blue above me and peppered with dirty-white clouds and contrails. If it happens to be night, instead, I’ll see the comforting pale orange skyglow that mercifully hides the stars from view. I’m home, not strapped into Yastreb-4’s taxi module. I can’t crane my neck for a glance at the monitor screen displaying a tableaux of dusty volcanic wastelands as I speed by the Tharsis plateau, more than four hundred kilometers below me. I can’t turn my head and gaze through the tiny docking windows at Pilgrimage’s glittering alabaster hull, quickly growing larger as I rush towards the aft docking port. These are merely memories, inaccurate and untrustworthy, and may only do me the harm that memories are capable of doing.

  Then the nurses go away. They leave the light above my bed burning and tell me if I need anything at all to press the intercom button. They’re just down the hall, and they always come when I call. They’re never anything except prompt and do not fail to arrive bearing the chemical solace of pharmecueticals, only half of which I know by name. I am not neglected. My needs are met as well as anyone alive can meet them. I’m too precious a commodity not to coddle. I’m the woman who was invited to the strangest, most terrible rendezvous in the history of space exploration. The one they dragged all the way to Mars after Pilgrimage abruptly, inexplicably, diverged from its mission parameters, when the crew went silent and the AI stopped responding. I’m the woman who stepped through an airlock hatch and into that alien Eden; I’m the one who spoke with a goddess. I’m the woman who was the goddess’ lover, when she was still human and had a name and a consciousness that could be comprehended.

  “Are you sleeping better?” the psychiatrist asks, and I tell him that I sleep just fine, thank you, seven to eight hours every night now. He nods and patiently smiles, but I know I haven’t answered his question. He’s actually asking me if I’m still having the nightmares about my time aboard Pilgrimage, if they’ve decreased in their frequency and/or severity. He doesn’t want to know if I sleep, or how long I sleep, but if my sleep is still haunted. Though he’d never use that particular word, haunted.

  He’s a thin, balding man, with perfectly manicured nails and an unremarkable mid-Atlantic accent. He dutifully makes the commute down from Berkeley once a week, because those are his orders, and I’m too great a puzzle for his inquisitive mind to ignore. All in all, I find the psychiatrist far less helpful than the nurses and their dependable drugs. Whereas they’ve been assigned the task of watching over me, of soothing and steadying me and keeping me from harming myself, he’s been given the unenviable responsibility of discovering what happened during the comms blackout, those seventeen interminable minutes after I boarded the derelict ship and promptly lost radio contact with Yastreb-4 and Earth. Despite countless debriefings and interviews, NASA still thinks I’m holding out on them. And maybe I am. Honestly, it’s hard for me to say. It’s hard for me to keep it all straight anymore: what happened and what didn’t, what I’ve said to them and what I’ve only thought about saying, what I genuinely remember and what I may have fabricated wholesale as a means of self preservation.

  The psychiatrist says it’s to be expected, this sort of confusion from someone who’s survived very traumatic events. He calls the events very traumatic, by the way. I don’t; I’m not yet sure if I think of them that way. Regardless, he’s diagnosed me as suffering from Survivor Syndrome, which he also calls K-Z Syndrome. There’s a jack in my hospital room with filtered and monitored web access, but I was able to look up “K-Z Syndrome.” It was named for a Nazi concentration camp survivor, an Israeli author named Yehiel De-Nur. De-Nur published under the pseudonym Ka-Tzetnik 135633. That was his number at Auschwitz, and K-Z Syndrome is named after him. In 1956, he published House of Dolls, describing the Nazi “Joy Division,” a system that utilized Jewish women as sex slaves.

  The psychiatrist is the one who asked if I would at least try to write it down, what happened, what I saw and heard (and smelled and felt) when I entered the Pilgrimage a year and a half ago. He knows, of course, that there have already been numerous written and vidded depositions and affidavits for NASA and the CSS/NSA, the WHO, the CDC, and the CIA and, to tell the truth, I don’t know who requested and read and then filed away all those reports. He knows about them, though, and that, by my own admission, they barely scratched the surface of whatever happened out there. He knows, but I reminded him, anyway.

  “This will be different,” he said. “This will be more subjec
tive.” And the psychiatrist explained that he wasn’t looking for a blow-by-blow linear narrative of my experiences aboard Pilgrimage, and I told him that was good, because I seem to have forgotten how to think or relate events in a linear fashion, without a lot of switchbacks and digressions and meandering.

  “Just write,” he said. “Write what you can remember, and write until you don’t want to write anymore.”

  “That would be now,” I said, and he silently stared at me for a while. He didn’t laugh, even though I’d thought it was pretty funny.

  “I understand that the medication makes this sort of thing more difficult for you,” he said, sometime later. “But the medication helps you reach back to those things you don’t want to remember, those things you’re trying to forget.” I almost told him that he was starting to sound like a character in a Lewis Carroll story – riddling and contradicting – but I didn’t. Our hour was almost over, anyway.

  So, after three days of stalling, I’m trying to write something that will make you happy, Dr. Ostrowski. I know you’re trying to do your job, and I know a lot of people must be peering over your shoulder, expecting the sort of results they’ve failed to get themselves. I don’t want to show up for our next session empty handed.

  The taxi module was on autopilot during the approach. See, I’m not an astronaut or mission specialist or engineer or anything like that. I’m a anthropologist, and I mostly study the Middle Paleolithic of Europe and Asia Minor. I have a keen interest in tool use and manufacture by the Neanderthals. Or at least that’s who I used to be. Right now, I’m a madwoman in a psych ward at a military hospital in San Jose, California. I’m a case number, and an eyewitness who has proven less than satisfactory. But, what I’m trying to say, doctor, the module was on autopilot, and there was nothing for me to do but wait there inside my encounter suit and sweat and watch the round screen divided by a Y-shaped reticle as I approached the derelict’s docking port, the taxi barreling forward at 0.06 meters per second. The ship grew so huge so quickly, looming up in the blackness, and that only made the whole thing seem that much more unreal.