[Jan Darzek 01] - All the Colors of Darkness

by Lloyd Biggle, Jr.

  “We did not save your life,” one of the males said. Darzek wondered if the inflective droop of his voice hinted at some future threat, or if he was merely adhering to a politely formal code of modesty.

  “At any rate,” Darzek said, “one or more of you brought me here, and treated my burns.”

  “That did not save your life, unfortunately. When you destroyed our power plant you also destroyed our air reserves. We have no means of replenishing them. We have no way to reach the safety of your planet. We are not even able to communicate with our people.”

  “In other words,” Darzek said, “my enthusiasm for doing a job thoroughly has landed all of us in quite a fix.”

  “In a fix, yes. So you will understand that we have not saved your life. We have only prolonged it and spared you some pain. We would gladly save it if we could, but we cannot. There is a small reserve of air in the capsule. Soon that will be gone, and then all of us will die.”

  “Very soon,” another male said, and the third echoed him. “Very soon.”

  The five alien faces gazed fixedly, not at Darzek—they continued to avoid his eyes—but past him. He would have given a great deal to know whether those enigmatically inexpressive faces masked violent emotions of anger, or contempt, or repressed homicidal intent; or—a much more horrifying thought—whether their emotions were as blank as their faces.

  CHAPTER 12

  As soon as Darzek regained his sight and his ability to move about, he found himself confronted with two singular problems.

  The first was of his own making. He was quickly able to detect minor differences in stature and facial proportions among the aliens, but he found it utterly impossible to pronounce their names. After one prolonged session of sputtering ineffectually, he determined to rechristen them with appellations more to his liking.

  He had already named one female Alice. He proceeded to call the other Gwendolyn. Miss X became Mr. X, and then, because the implied formality seemed ridiculous, Xerxes. Madam Z was altered to Zachary in similar, rapid steps. It then seemed only logical to refer to the third male as Y, which Darzek did until he could think of a masculine name beginning with Y; whereupon he changed the Y to Ysaye.

  Alice, Gwendolyn, Xerxes, Ysaye, and Zachary. The aliens themselves could have done no better, Darzek thought; except that the “Alice” seemed a bit too simple, too earthy, for the spectacularly unhuman alien physiognomy.

  He consulted Zachary. “Do you think Alice would mind if I changed her name to Alithia?”

  “I shall ask her,” Zachary said.

  He mounted the ladder, and Darzek followed him.

  The supply capsule was a tall cylinder with its entire internal circumference ingeniously fitted out for storage. There were deep revolving bins, drawers that pivoted outwards, compartments with doors that rippled down or sideways with the precision and speed of a zipper. The capsule was partitioned into four segments, each roughly ten feet in height, and a ladder ran from top to bottom and passed through circular openings in the partitions.

  Alice and Xerxes had established themselves on the upper level. Zachary presented Darzek’s question, pronouncing the names Alice and Alithia flawlessly. Alice, who did not speak English or any other terrestrial language, repeated them with equal precision. A discussion followed, which Darzek watched with interest.

  He had been unable to understand whether his determination to name the aliens had bewildered them or merely left them indifferent. They responded promptly to their names when he used them, but they politely avoided them when speaking of themselves.

  “She would like to know why?” Zachary said finally.

  “It seems more appropriate to her personality,” Darzek said.

  “How can that be? Is not a name only a label?”

  “Certainly not,” Darzek said. “Names have meanings, and the euphony is also important.”

  “What do these names mean?”

  Darzek searched his memory. “I can’t recall,” he admitted.

  “But why did you first call her Alice, if that name was not appropriate?”

  “It was the first thing I thought of.”

  There was further discussion, and then Zachary announced, “She says that you may call her anything you choose.”

  “Thank you,” Darzek said. “But on second thought I’ll continue to call her Alice. I’ve heard that it’s bad luck to change a name.”

  He went back down the ladder, chuckling to himself, while above him the implications of his last remark were discussed and debated. He had, he thought, given the aliens something to think about. He had the feeling that they needed it badly.

  The second problem concerned his inability to dress himself. His blindfolded impression that his entire body was swathed in bandages proved correct—because alien clothing consisted entirely of bandages. Wide strips of elastic-like cloth were wrapped in turn about the legs, the lower trunk, the upper trunk, and the arms. When done properly, with precisely the right amount of tension, the result was snug warmth and comfort and an exhilarating freedom of movement. Darzek recalled the elastic stockings and bandages used for certain medical purposes, and wondered if this odd apparel might not also have therapeutic qualities.

  His burned clothing had been discarded, but all of his possessions were scrupulously collected together in one small bin in his quarters, which were the lowest level of the capsule. He found there everything his pockets had contained, including his passport, penknife, cigarette case and lighter, pen and pencil, pocket secretary, photographs of Miss X and Madam Z in various disguises—and also his shoulder holster and automatic.

  “You’re giving this back to me?” he exclaimed.

  “Why not?” Zachary asked. “It is your property.”

  “I don’t suppose there’s much use I could make of it now,” Darzek conceded.

  “I do not suppose so,” Zachary said, but whether he was being ironic or merely polite Darzek could not decide.

  Having named the aliens and learned to dress himself, Darzek was confronted with the severest trial of his life. He had absolutely nothing to do, and yet he would not, he positively refused to, allow himself to be intimidated by the fact of approaching death.

  And the aliens were intimidated. They sought politely to ignore Darzek as he cheerfully invaded their quarters when he used the ladder to test his most recent attempt to clothe himself. They became increasingly withdrawn. At first he thought that they were bitterly and understandably resentful of him, since he was wholly responsible for their plight. It took him some time to decide that they were merely terrified.

  Alice and Xerxes sat opposite each other in the cramped space at the floor of the upper level, their gazes fixed upon some object or thought remote beyond the light years, and Alice sang. Her melodic line made slithering ascents and droops, the harsh alien language punctuated it with hisses, and in Darzek’s few moments of critical tolerance he found it only slightly less musical than a traffic siren.

  Gwendolyn, Ysaye, and Zachary crowded themselves into the level below and played a game—a game that Darzek, after a long session of watching from the ladder, dismissed as a particularly tedious variety of chess, with hallucinations. It was a four-dimensional game, played without a game board. The grotesquely fashioned pieces moved at different levels with the aid of various-sized blocks. The moves depended not only upon position but on the total number of moves that had been made. Darzek’s first attempt to understand the game was his last.

  He found it difficult to account for his conviction that the aliens had been frightened into an immobilizing hysteria. Their expressionless faces furnished no clues. He was quickly convinced that their voices did, for as his ear became attuned to them he found their speech, even in English, filled with amazing subtleties of nuance and inflection. He had, unfortunately, no way of telling what the nuances and inflections meant—though he reminded himself that he would have encountered the same problem with facial expressions. A smile, on the face of a nonhuman, m
ight indicate anger or deadly insult.

  His unaccountable awareness of the presence of a pernicious, all-engulfing dread persisted. He began to feel apprehensive himself, not of the approach of death, but of the aliens’ reaction to it.

  His wrist watch had stopped while he was blindfolded. When he attempted to reset it, all of his inquiries about time were politely turned aside. Finally he placed the watch in the bin with his other possessions.

  “Why worry about the hour,” he asked himself, “when you don’t know what day it is?”

  But the hours to worry about were endless. For a time he allowed his mind to be occupied with the lengthy and involved contemplation of trivialities. He bounced on his sleeping pad and pondered the nature of the smooth fabric and the soft, resilient substance it contained. He touched none of the storage compartments except the bin containing his own property, feeling that the aliens would interpret unauthorized snooping as further evidence of his depraved barbarism; but there were windowed compartments, with openings covered with an invisible, unbelievably tough film, and when he was alone he peered into them and speculated on their perplexing contents.

  He puzzled long over the ladder, which was of metal or a metallic-like substance and quite ordinary except for its unusual width and the depth and spacing of its steps. It seemed a fantastically crude object to be placed so prominently amid the capsule’s technological sophistication. He decided, finally, that no better method could be devised for making all parts of the capsule conveniently accessible with a minimum sacrifice of space.

  Gwendolyn and Zachary were experts in the weird game they were playing; Ysaye was evidently a novice. He was invariably eliminated in the early stages, and occasionally he would come down and talk to Darzek while Gwendolyn and Zachary withdrew into the complicated dimensions of their game, and grimly and silently battled to an incomprehensible conclusion.

  In the background, Alice’s song went on unceasingly.

  “I’ve been wondering about the air,” Darzek said to Ysaye. “Is it from your home planet?”

  “Yes.”

  “That means I’m probably the first human who has ever breathed the air of another world. I don’t know whether that’s a distinction or not, but I like the stuff.”

  “It suffers from being stored for so long,” Ysaye said.

  “Really? It seems sweet-tasting and invigorating to me.”

  “It has much more oxygen than your air.”

  Darzek’s feeling of physical well-being was such that inaction became intolerable to him. He first occupied himself with the routine exercises that the cramped space around the ladder permitted. Then, for the want of anything else to do, he began to jump. He could, by loosely using the ladder to guide himself, leap through the opening to the level above. With a feeling of sheer elation he dropped back to the first level and leaped again. He wondered if he could, with practice, jump through the two lower levels and disrupt the game in the third.

  Then Ysaye came climbing down to him. “* * * says—”

  “Who?”

  “* * *”

  “Alice?”

  “Yes. * * * says that physical effort makes you consume the air faster.”

  “Good idea,” Darzek said. “Why don’t we all exercise, and get it over with in a hurry?”

  For once he succeeded in disrupting an alien’s composure. Twice Ysaye’s mouth opened to speak, but he could find nothing to say.

  But Darzek resignedly stopped his exercising.

  Ysaye was the lonely one among the aliens, the outsider. Darzek felt increasingly sorry for him, and soon began to regard him with an unaccountable liking. Their conversations became more frequent and longer.

  “There is one thing that puzzles me,” Ysaye said.

  “What’s that?” Darzek asked, quickly analyzing the tone of voice for some indication of puzzlement.

  “When so many of its passengers did not reach their destinations, why did not your Universal Trans stop using its transmitters?”

  “That’s an interesting question,” Darzek said. He was savoring the final inch of a stringently rationed cigarette, and he took his time about answering. “The fact of the matter was,” he went on, “that there were no passengers who did not reach their destinations.”

  “I do not understand,” Ysaye said.

  “I could make it clear very easily, I think, but I’m not sure that I should.”

  “But why not?”

  “You refuse to answer my questions. Why should I answer yours?”

  “What have I refused to answer?”

  “Why were you attempting to sabotage Universal Trans?”

  Before Ysaye could comment, Gwendolyn summoned him for the start of a new game. When next he appeared he picked up the conversation where they had left off. Obviously he had been thinking over Darzek’s remark. “Do you mean that if we were to tell you what you want to know—about us—you would then tell us whatever we want to know about you?”

  “I hadn’t thought of it in precisely that way, but it sounds like a fair trade.”

  “I must first ask * * *.”

  “Who?”

  “* * *,” he said, starting up the ladder.

  “You mean Alice?”

  “Yes.”

  The song at the top cut off abruptly, and then after a brief interval started up again. Ysaye clambered slowly down. “She says no,” he announced.

  “A pity. We might have had an enjoyable talk.”

  “Since we are going to die anyway, I do not understand why you will not tell me.”

  “I was thinking the same thing. How much longer do we have?”

  “I do not know,” Ysaye said. “I think * * * knows, but she will not tell us. She thinks it best that we do not know.”

  “Anyway, it seems to me that I’d be taking a substantially greater risk. Sooner or later your people will check up on you. What would prevent you from leaving a written record of anything I say? Your successors would no doubt find a way to turn the information to their advantage. On the other hand, there’s no possible way I could get any information to my people—is there?”

  “I do not think it would be possible,” Ysaye said.

  “Even if we’re near one of the Moon stations, I doubt that this capsule is sticking up like a sore thumb.”

  “Like a sore thumb,” Ysaye repeated. He pronounced the last word with an inflected droop that Darzek was hopefully interpreting to mean puzzlement. “It is sunk into rock, and we are far from your Moon stations.”

  “Just what I meant. My people probably couldn’t find it even if they were looking for it. What possible harm could our conversation do?”

  “You do not understand. We must follow our Code. We have sworn to follow it. I should not talk with you even this much. * * * thinks we have already told you too much.”

  “Or that I’ve found out too much?” Darzek suggested. “As I said before, it’s a pity. Time hangs heavily here. I’ve faced death once or twice, but it was something that happened quickly, and I never had time to think much about it until afterwards. What does it feel like to suffocate?”

  He watched Ysaye closely as he spoke. The strangely concave facial features gave an impression only of an immense, utterly frigid indifference.

  * * * *

  The six of them waited, tedious hour after hour, with no expectation except for a time when their breathing would become laborious, when they would crowd to the top of the capsule where the air was freshest, or to the bottom—and Darzek spent some hours speculating as to which it would be—and lie gasping in a futile struggle to shred the dead air of its final traces of oxygen, and finally they would die.

  Would they be mercifully unconscious at the end? That was another matter for wearisome speculation.

  “It’s a little like a clock running down,” Darzek said to Ysaye. “Every breath, or every tick, takes us closer to the end.” After that he found himself intoning, in absent-minded moments, “Tick…tock…tick…tock.”<
br />
  Ysaye was not amused.

  Alice continued to sing. She sang in all her waking moments, with Xerxes listening to her mutely, whether in admiration or nostalgic desperation Darzek could not say. Gwendolyn and Zachary played their game and cultivated their appetites. In a short time their capacity for food became a thing to regard with awe and trepidation.

  “We’ll run out of food before we run out of air,” Darzek observed to Ysaye, who was dutifully acting as chef and waiter.

  “We have enough food to last for—for months,” Ysaye said.

  “If we do run out, it won’t be my fault,” Darzek said.

  He ate no more than enough to sustain himself, and merely to eat that much was a triumph of will power and self-control. The food came in a multiplicity of colors and—Darzek supposed, though he found it difficult to distinguish them—flavors. It was prepared to any desired temperature and served in deep, triangular bowls, sometimes as a thick soup taken with a tube, but more often compressed into small, moist, fibrous cakes that were eaten with the fingers. Whatever the color, or the temperature, or the consistency, Darzek found it uniformly distasteful.

  But it was a near-perfect food. The body absorbed virtually all of it, and the large compartment thoughtfully provided on the lower level for the private disposal of bodily wastes saw very little traffic.

  The cooking facilities intrigued Darzek most of all. The prepared food was placed in a thin, completely enclosed container that seemed metallic but was surprisingly light. A few seconds in the cooking slot, and the food was heated to order—piping hot for Darzek, or warm, for Gwendolyn’s level, or tepid, for Alice. The container remained at room temperature.

  “Why waste heat to heat the container?” Ysaye asked, when Darzek commented on this.

  “What’s the source of heat?” Darzek asked.

  “The Sun. The capsule stores the heat and uses it as needed.”

  “Good trick. Couldn’t you use that heat to send up a few distress signals?”