There was something somewhere, a flutter, or a movement, a sound hardly audible over his increasingly rapid breathing. No, not even that, just a vibration, something he was feeling through the soles of his boots.
But no, perhaps not after all. Perhaps nothing.
Still, a feeling like he was being observed, an itching between his shoulder blades.
He tried to ignore it. He continued from vat to vat, examining each one, assessing his resources, as if he were the lord of the vats. But there were no resources left, not really. When he was done, he went to the next chamber and found it just as hopeless. And then went on to the final one.
Just outside the door he found the body of a uniformed crew member. SARL, the nametag read, though he could not tell if that was the whole name because of the way the man’s right arm and a portion of his side was missing, cleanly sheared off. Perhaps he had been sucked brutally through the closing doorway when the atmosphere had fled the ship, but that seemed nearly impossible. His head, too, had been reduced to a dull slurry, scattered with crystals of ice. Nothing there to salvage, no way to gather a scan of the man’s mind.
And beyond the buckled and half-open door, in the final chamber, another similar crewmember, then another, then a third. All mutilated in some way, all severely damaged cranially. He kept telling himself that it was possible it was damage caused by shattering vats or flying debris, but for each additional individual, this seemed increasingly improbable.
In the back of the third chamber, his suit light flashed across a strange blotch of color and what struck him, absurdly, as a slumped doll. But of course it wasn’t a slumped doll. He knew that even before he swung the light back.
A dark circle, inscribed very carefully on the floor with what was perhaps black paint. In its center, kneeling, was a frozen woman. Compared to the chaos of the rest of the bodies, she seemed remarkably poised, undisturbed, untouched. On the wall behind her she, or perhaps someone else, had etched what at first seemed to be words, but upon closer inspection, Villads saw it was nonsense:
Y’AI’NG’NGAH
YOG-SOTHOTH
H’EE-L’GEB
F’AI THRODOG
UAAAH
He sounded it out in his head but could still see no sense to it. He stepped to the edge of the circle and prodded at the line. Was it paint? He wasn’t sure.
He stepped inside and bent down beside the woman, taking a closer look at her. No nametag, strangely enough. She seemed composed, relaxed. Her body was undamaged, her head intact. He might be able to get a scan.
He set about severing her head.
IV.
While he was waiting for the machine to finish its replication, he thought about what to do. He could attach a tether and clamber out onto the outside of the vessel. Perhaps that would reveal something to him. He could travel through the chambers again, keep searching, but he’d been thorough—it was doubtful there was anyone else to find.
So only one crew member with an intact brain. One chance for a scan. Even if the scan was successful, maybe, she hadn’t seen anything and couldn’t tell him a thing.
He spun through images of the crew until he found the woman he thought was her. Signe Volke. Hard to tell for certain, considering the irregular way her head was thawing—something about the way the skin had frozen almost made it seem as though she had thin, hair-like tendrils growing on one side of her face—but yes, he thought so.
He slept. He asked the Vorag to prepare some food but there was apparently something wrong with the system: no food was dispensed. He raided another pressure suit for emergency rations. Five more pressure suits before he’d have to figure something else out. Either he’d have to find a way to fix the ship’s nutrition delivery system or he’d have to start eating corpses.
He slept again. The scan still wasn’t concluded, which might indicate that the neural pathways had been too compromised by being frozen. He had the ship show him vid footage. He watched it up to the moment the tear appeared in the side of the ship, looking for a clue. There was nothing to see, not really. The chamber lights dimmed, the hull tore open, and the feed cut off. He watched it again—and again, this time as slowly as he could, hoping to catch a glimpse of something. But he didn’t see anything at all.
Unless that dimming of the lights, the growing darkness, was something. Maybe they hadn’t been attacked from outside after all. Maybe what he was seeing was something in the ship, something barely substantial, something wanting to get out. Maybe he had it wrong the whole time.
He watched a vid record of Signe. He watched her come into the third vat room, pace her way forward and back as if surveying the boundaries of a plot of ground. Finally, she settled on a spot in the corner. He watched her take a jar of something and unscrew it and begin to use two stiffened fingers to smear a circle on the deck around her. She was swaying a little, nodding a little, and her lips seemed to be moving. He watched her carefully etch the nonsense phrases into the wall behind her with a laser cutter.
And then?
And then nothing. She simply settled onto her knees and assumed the posture he had found her in and waited, motionless.
She waited for hours.
Villads stared into the monitor, watching her. There was nothing unusual for a long time, or at least hardly so. At a particular moment, there was a shadow, strange and dark, that he couldn’t place—perhaps just a trick of the light. And then, seven minutes and six seconds later, vats began to tumble over, seemingly for no reason. Other crewmembers appeared, shouting, some rushing toward her only to be swept off their feet and somehow torn to bits. The feed cut almost immediately after that.
The only thing he couldn’t understand was how, through all that, Signe had managed to remain kneeling and in the same position, untouched by debris, seemingly undisturbed.
He activated the scans of the twins, Esbjorn and Kolbjorn, projecting each into a chair at the central table in the command room. He needed someone to talk to, someone to consult, and he knew and trusted them. Together they knew more about the ship and the journey than anyone else. They were the logical choice. Irritating, he thought, how the Vorag could do this but couldn’t produce a plate of food.
The first time, he told the twins immediately they were dead but found that to have a deleterious effect on their willingness to communicate. They were of no help to him. So he reset them and began again.
“Hello,” he said.
“Are we there already?” asked Esbjorn. “Have we arrived?”
“No,” Villads admitted. “But I’ve had to wake you up. We have a problem.”
He explained, not only about the tear in the hull but about Signe as well, the strange circle she had drawn, and her body frozen inside it.
“That doesn’t seem like rational behavior,” said Esbjorn. “Perhaps she’s insane.”
“Sounds like some sort of ritual,” countered Kolbjorn. “She could be insane, or she might instead be some sort of fanatic.”
The two brothers argued over the distinction between insane and fanatical. They watched the footage with him, both of the hull tearing and of Signe’s circle. They had little useful to say, and in the end, Esbjorn suggested they all three go out and look at the tear in the hull. Maybe one of them would see something that Villads, alone, hadn’t.
“No,” said Villads quickly, “no need.”
But Esbjorn was already rising and making for the door, the complex projection that gave the illusion of him having a three dimensional body growing choppier the more parts of him that moved. Kolbjorn exclaimed in fright at what he saw and then Esbjorn reached out to open the airlock and watched his hand pass through it.
Villads wiped their short-term memory and started again.
And then the scan of Signe was complete. He sat around the table with the projections of Kolbjorn and Esbjorn, and this time managed to move things forward without alerting them to the fact of their deaths. He explained about Signe’s scan, about the tear in the ship, and t
hen started the digital construct that was Signe without projecting her. But either Signe didn’t know anything or she wasn’t telling. By the end, Esbjorn and Kolbjorn were sick with panic at the thought of their own death, and he had had to turn off their emulations. He had learned nothing.
He took the pack of rations out of the seventh and final pressure suit. Surely there were some other pressure suits in one of the other chambers. Perhaps he’d be able to fix the dispenser. Perhaps he’d have to start eating the bodies of the dead.
V.
Inside the Vorag’s computer, Signe, though dead, though only a construct, was still conscious, still aware. It was a strange sort of awareness, somewhat like groping around in a darkened room. Data streamed around her, some of which she could recognize, most of which she couldn’t, and it was hard to maintain her identity in the onslaught. There was a sequence that she recognized as Esbjorn. His brother, too. And beside them, stacked one after another, she found the basis for the constructs of all the crew and vat travelers. Sleepy and hazy but still recognizable, waiting to be digitally brought back to life. There was Villads, too.
One by one, she worried and tugged at them until they came apart, the data degrading into a slurry that was quickly discarded, the sectors marked to be written over. They didn’t even wake up for it, and soon it was too late to wake up at all.
When she came to her own sequence, she stopped. She wasn’t sure why there would be two of her here. She hesitated between destroying her other self or simply giving it a wide berth and flowing elsewhere. In the end, she wriggled her way into it, putting her other self on like you might a thick jacket. There were moments of replication, but she had enough holes and gaps that there weren’t as many as she had feared. Now she had a context, too, for the little her later self could remember of her final moments: the etching of the phrases into the wall, the creation of a circle, the attempt to summon a dark god.
Had the summoning been successful? There was nothing in her memory to say so, but there was a difference between the old self and the new self that made her think that she was now something more than just Signe. And based on what Villads and the twins had said to her and on the vid footage she was rapidly uncovering, she was certain. Where was it then? Just in here with her? No.
She went through more footage as rapidly as possible, footage from inside the Vorag and out, and then data from sensors of all kinds, until she sensed it. There, there it was, or at least she believed so: like a thick blanket, wrapped around the craft.
And now what? Mission accomplished. Turn the Vorag around and bring the ship back to earth along with its blanket.
Only there was the problem of Villads. Villads, if he figured out what was going on, would try to put a stop to it. No, she couldn’t let that happen.
VI.
He had fallen asleep. He dreamed that he was back in his vat, unconscious, preserved, the ship drifting inexorably through space to the coming world. He was inside and outside the vat at once, both watching himself float and conscious of himself watching himself float. And then he woke up.
A noise had awoken him. What was it? Not an alarm. No, that had been earlier, the other time. A repeated tone, coming from the computer.
Was it some sort of notification he had set up? He didn’t think so. Probably something from one of the crew, meant to remind them of some trivial but necessary task back before they had all died.
He ignored it as long as he could manage, then finally struggled to his feet, rubbing his face.
Life form alert, it said on the screen. Maybe he had set up that alert request, or maybe the Vorag knew from what he’d been asking it over the last few days that he’d want to know.
What kind of life form, he asked it.
Humna, it said.
Strange, he thought, a computer shouldn’t misspell. Some kind of default or flaw, a small bug—but when he blinked the word had changed to human. Maybe he hadn’t seen it properly the first time.
It’s probably just detecting me, he thought. But he asked, How many life forms?
Two, it said. And gave him a map. There he was, a blinking dot on the bridge. And there it was, another blinking dot on the outside of the vessel.
But how was that possible? How could there be someone or something alive on the outside of the hull after all this time? Even if someone had been in a pressure suit, he couldn’t have lasted a day, let alone a week.
Is this possibly a sensor failure? he asked.
No, said the Vorag.
The Vorag is wrong, he told himself, something is wrong. But he was already reaching for his pressure suit. Nobody is alive but me, he told himself. But how could he stop himself from checking? He’d put on a tether, go out through the tear, and have a look.
After all, what else did he have to do with his time? And once it was clear nobody was there, what was there to prevent him from coming back?
Brian Evenson is the author of a dozen books of fiction, most recently the story collection A Collapse of Horses (Coffee House Press 2016) and the novella The Warren (Tor.com 2016). He is the recipient of three O. Henry Prizes as well as an NEA fellowship. His work has been translated into French, Italian, Greek Spanish, Japanese, Persian, and Slovenian. He lives in Los Angeles.
Be On Your Way
Heather Hatch
Illustrated by Yves Tourigny
Throwbacks. That’s the slang, and I can almost hear them thinking it as I board the shuttle. I guess it is technically true, just not how they mean it. Or maybe that’s how we all think, those of us so-called Purists. The Left-Behinds, that’s a different matter. But my people? No, for the most part, we wanted this—to be left behind by newsci genomeering. We have our own grand design, or that’s what I was always told.
I’m given a breather along with the weird looks because I can’t survive the O2 mix on the shuttle. It should be okay once we’re on the cruiser proper, but for now, it’s canned air. The apparatus I’m given is old as hex, and though the clerk assures me it’s clean, I have my doubts. Same with the grav-seater I’m shown to with an additional look of pity. Well, scratch him—I may not be genned for spaceflight, but I’m still tougher than I look. At least, I’ll be left alone back here, and I can keep closer track of the heart.
I check the heart’s containment before we get underway. It’s pushing unlaw not to have a permit, but it is personal carry, and it’s contained by newsci codes as well as hex. I could tell them it’s Frog, and they’d let it pass as Purist scratch; they’d be wrong and right at the same time. I’m more worried because the composition is very flashy, and someone might try and steal it. It was sliced out of the meteor field on Nix, and it’s got rare elements. We refined it ancient ways, and it’s so hex I can feel it pulsing, but that’s not what any newsci will see. Once I know it’s safe and sealed, I pray for Frog’s blessing for my work. After that, it’s just waiting.
It’s not a long flight. It used to take longer to fly across the continent, so I don’t feel I can complain too much, even though I do feel truly sliced when the steward comes to let me out. He’s got that same look, like he thinks he knows how I feel, and he’s brought a cup of water. An actual cup! It amuses me, but I don’t trust what’s in it. Probably something that’s been sitting in a plastic bottle for Frog knows how long. The way the newhumes metabolize stuff, they don’t even think about that sort of thing.
Finally, though, we’re at the ship—the grand old Galaxy Cruiser. I picked this one because it is old; reliable scratch that’s never been updated for the latest modsets because it still does its job just preach. That means I don’t have to worry about breathers or any of the rest of that since the atmo’s pretty base with just enough chems pumped in for the spacies who can’t handle ground truth anymore. I did my research, which is important if I want to do what I’m here for.
And I’m here for a job, even if that’s not what my co-passengers think. That’s why the looks of pity. Most of them only see Purists on the run, trying to slic
e their way off the ground and away from whatever “backward” hole they came from. It suits me to let them believe I’m one of those because, if they knew why I was heading out into the stars, they’d be looking at me less preachy.
I’m going to Saturn.
The Galaxy Cruiser hits up the sats there and every other planet each trip out, so it isn’t that dramatic. All kinds of earthers, even newhumes, head out there for timeouts, so no one’s going to blink at that. Lots of the sats on Saturn offer good prices for seeing the rings, and there’s a few older terrahomes out on the moons where the atmo is base enough that earthers can longterm it if they don’t mind a little postnat genomeering or some bodywork modsets. Throwbacks are known to run off to any of the planetary sats and terraed moons, too, so I’m not out of place. I’m not here for a timeout, though, and it’s not the rings I’m after.
People think that Throwbacks, especially Purists, are all wrapped up in oldways, that we’ve got no sci at all or nothing new, that we’re not interested in the future. I guess that’s fly for a lot of Purists but not my people. We’ve got sci; it’s just nothing like the spacies have. They just want to rocket out into space, terra every rock they can reach, and leave Earth and earthers as far behind as they can. Newhumes had to let a lot of things go to slice themselves up the way they have. They’ve put their faith in genomeering and rocketing and abandoned everything else.
And now, they’ve pushed far enough that there are things out there—old things, Frog things—that are starting to look back. They don’t know what they’re in for.
My people though?
We have hex—real hex, not like old story hex—and we have oldsci, and we know. We take the newsci they put out, and we add it to the rest. We’ve been at this a long time, since before spacies were as old story as any kind of hex. We knew what was out there, knew that no genomeering would help them when they rocketed out too far. And we knew a better way and a better place.
Ride the Star Wind: Cthulhu, Space Opera, and the Cosmic Weird Page 9