Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (Volume One) (78 page)

And there I was, allowing myself to voice at least the smallest fraction of what I’d felt peering down into that abyss only a few minutes before. But I’d opened up to Joakim many times. He’d been a lover, on and off, and we’d once spent two nerve-wracking weeks together in quarantine after a lev4 biocontainment failure on Europa-Herschel. He was the closest thing I had to family.

“Wait just a sec,” Joakim said and, having returned the medpac to its assigned place on the wall, I turned to see what he was doing. There was a brittle, buzzing sound, a brief crackle of static, and I realized that I was hearing playback from the in-flight voice recorder. Joakim pressed review, and for a moment there was only the wind battering tirelessly at the hull of the shuttle again, and the gentler, mechanical noises coming from my EVA suit. Only the unsteady rhythm of my breath, inhalation and exhalation, made loud and inhuman by the acoustics of my helmet. But I wanted to look behind me, to be absolutely sure that it was my breathing I was hearing, to be sure we were alone in the shuttle.

“Right
there
,” he said and pressed play. “Listen to this, Audrey.”

There was more static, then what seemed to be a man speaking, and I stood over Joakim, wondering what he expected me to listen
for
, watching the display that turned what I was hearing into craggy red and green lines, making peaks and troughs of human voices and background noise.

“That’s Welles,” he said, “right there,” adjusting the input volume on his suit’s comm panel and leaning nearer the small speaker above the flap levers.

I’d never met the man, so I took his word for it. Most of the playback was all but unintelligible, a garbled weave of voices and ambient interference. And then, I clearly heard one voice rise above the din, not the one that Joakim had identified as Sam Welles, but a voice that might have been a woman’s, or a young boy’s.

“A self-contemplating shadow,” it said, pronouncing each syllable slowly, precisely. Joakim looked up at me, and I could see the confusion in his blue eyes. “Stretch out across the dread world, and the rolling of wheels – ”

And then there was another burst of static, much louder than the others, but I could hear someone laughing behind it, a high, lunatic sort of laughter, and I reached for the off switch. But Joakim intercepted my gloved hand halfway to the console. “No,” he said firmly, still looking up at me. “I need to hear this, Audrey.”

“No one needs to hear this shit,” I replied, trying in vain to pull my hand free of his grip.

The static faded quickly, but the laughter was still there, and now I could hear someone reciting what sounded like grid coordinates in the background. 

“Not
here
,” I pleaded. “Pull the tab, and we can hear it all back on the ship. But not
here
.”

“You shut
up
,” he growled, squeezing my hand so tightly it hurt, and so I didn’t say anything else and stopped struggling. I stood there, very still, and we listened.

“I fucking know blood when I see it,” Sam Welles insisted.

“Is that a shadow?” a frightened, panic-filled voice asked, another man speaking through the maniac laughter. “Is that a shadow, or the shadow of a shadow?”

“Jesus, look at the sky! Look at the fucking sky!”

“You will see,” the woman said, or the young boy, her or his voice like honey and sleep and warm sunlight leaking in through the sonic chaos, like rain falling on the roof of a burning house. “We are close now. We are coming across – ”

“Christ, it’s some sort of weapon,” the panicked man shouted, and the laughter grew louder, and louder, and louder, until I thought the speakers would blow. I shut my eyes and gritted my teeth, trying to remember prayers that I’d known as a child, but there was room for nothing in my head beyond the laughter.

“No, not thunder,” Sam Welles said. “Look away – ”

And then there was a loud
pop
, like the cork on a bottle of champagne, and the recording ended, and the speakers were silent again.

Slowly, Joakim relaxed his hold on me until I could slip my hand free. He wasn’t staring at me anymore, was staring instead out the windshield at the quarry stretching away in all directions.

“We’re not going to find anyone alive down here,” I said, and he nodded his head. I reached down, past him, pressing eject, and the VOR deck spat up a tiny platinum microtab. You never see those anymore, but the agency was still using them way back in 2197 when the
Gilgamesh
left Earth. I slipped it into a pocket and stood there, looking over Joakim’s shoulder at the darkened instrument panel.

“There’s no electric,” I said. “You told me the batteries are drained.”

“Yes,” he replied, sounding only half-awake. “There’s no electric. I told you that.”

“And auxiliary’s still on standby.”

“Yes,” he said and turned towards me again. He blinked, and I could see that he was crying.

Eject was manual, but the deck shouldn’t have played anything, not a sound, not a fucking squeak. But I was there, Zoraya, and so was Joakim, and we both heard it. 

“We have to get out of here,” I said, but he shrugged and then looked away from me again, resting a bulky index finger on the recorder. “I’m serious, Joakim. We have to get out of here right
now
.”

“If I press this button,” he said sleepily, speaking so softly that his voice was hardly more than a white-noise whisper through the comms. “If I press
this
button, we’ll hear it again, won’t we? You took the tab out, and the power’s down, but if I press this – ”

I covered his hand with my own, knowing that it would be useless to try and stop him, knowing how much stronger than me he was.

“Yes,” I said. “I think we will. But we’ve already heard it, and we have to leave.”

“We’re inside a ghost story now, aren’t we?” he asked.

“We need to find Umachandra and Peter,” I replied, because I wouldn’t have answered that question for anything short of a five-second tube back to Sol. “Joakim, you have to take your hand off the recorder and stand up, and we have to find them.”

Outside, the wind shrieked and buffeted the hull, and I remember wondering how many weeks, or months, or years it would be before a storm pushed the
Gilgamesh
shuttle over the edge of the terrace, and it tumbled into the black pool.

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.