She wasn’t asleep, though her eyes were closed. She could hear the others talking. Hear the steady hiss of her suit’s air pumps, and the endless clicking on the radio. Yet she wasn’t totally awake, either. Parts of her mind had shut down, from exhaustion, from disorientation.
She went away. She went to another place.
She knew exactly where it was. Texas, where she’d grown up. Some time in the forties, because she was sitting on a porch looking out over a yard of poorly tended grass. Her dad had been out of work in those years, suffering from depression—this was before the treatments. Her mom had worked ninety-hour weeks selling real estate, and neither of them could focus long enough to clean up the yard.
The moonlight lay thick on the grass, making it look like a blanket of gray hair. Just like Nani’s hair. Nani—it was the only name she’d ever called her grandmother—was sitting on the porch swing, swinging back and forth, and Parminder was curled on her lap. The old woman was smiling and patting her cheek.
It wasn’t so much a dream as a free-form sort of memory. This had actually happened. She remembered it. She could hear the cicadas, millions of them out there in the grass. They sounded like sirens, maybe, or distant car alarms. Their song rose and fell, faded to nothing and then swelled to be so loud it hurt her ears.
Nani was singing to help her granddaughter fall asleep, singing to the bass line of the swelling roar of the cicadas, in the dark, in the Texas night.
They weren’t alone.
Someone was very close by. Watching them, but not saying anything. Not moving. Just standing there, looking. She couldn’t even make out his face, couldn’t see his expression. She tried to sit up, to look. To see who had come to sit with them on the porch. But Nani shushed her and put a hand over her eyes, laughing a little as she continued to sing.
Parminder reached up with both of her tiny hands and pried open Nani’s fingers, which made the old woman laugh more. Parminder looked between the gate of the fingers, looked out into the dark, and there he was—
Sunny.
Which made her smile, which made Nani laugh, and the cicadas went crazy, and Parminder was so happy to see Sunny sitting there, sitting in a rocker next to them, just watching them together.
There were so many things she wanted to tell him. So many words she hadn’t gotten to share with him, thoughts and feelings that had gone unexpressed. But now he was here, and there would be time, in this cozy, warm place—
Sunny started to get up. To climb out of the chair, using both hands, except only the top half of him lifted up. He was split across the middle, and his legs fell away from his torso and thumped onto the wooden slats of the porch. From the empty space in his middle, tendrils shot out like party streamers, twisting in the air as they covered Nani and Parminder, covered the porch and writhed away across the grass.
Rao’s eyes shot open and she sat up, sat up shaking and scared, so terrified.
In the dark.
In the dark of 2I. She could still hear the cicadas. No.
No.
That was just the rising and falling, ever-present clicking. The sound of 2I flapping its magnetic field wings in the void. That was all it was.
Not so much a dream, nor a memory. She’d let her thoughts wander.
She couldn’t afford to let that happen again.
When Jansen woke up, she checked her clock and saw she’d slept for nearly three hours. It felt as if she’d just closed her eyes for a second. She sucked at her water hose and rotated her wrists—they were stiff because she’d been using her hands as a pillow. Her neck hurt because it was impossible to sleep in gravity in a space suit and not wake up with your neck as stiff as a board.
She sat up and swung her lights around, looking for the others. Rao was still asleep, sprawled on her stomach with her face down. Jansen could hear her snoring, even though she’d switched off her suit radio.
Hawkins was standing in the water, maybe fifteen meters away. Just standing there, facing away from her, with his lights pointed in what looked like random directions.
Jansen moved carefully, climbing to her feet despite the protestations of her knee and her hip. She walked toward him until the water lapped at her boots.
“Hawkins?” she said.
“We have a couple problems to solve,” he told her. “Can you bring me the telescoping boom lamp?”
She walked back to where they’d stowed their supplies. The TBL was tied to one of their backpacks, collapsed to make it easy to carry. When she’d rummaged around Orion looking for anything that could generate light, it was one of the first things she’d grabbed. The TBL was a high-power lamp with an integrated battery, mounted on the end of a series of nested aluminum pipes—like a one-legged camera tripod. It could be extended to nearly three meters when you pulled out all the sections. It was designed to be mounted on the outside of Orion’s HabLab to provide illumination if they needed to carry out repairs in space.
She grabbed it and brought it to him. He was looking at something just under the surface of the dark lake.
“Here,” he said, squatting down in the water. “You see it?”
Jansen peered into the water. Just beyond where Hawkins crouched, dark shapes writhed across the bottom. Branching, snakelike tendrils.
“Oh shit,” she said, and jumped backward, falling on her ass. Hawkins didn’t move. He was so close to the things, the things that had killed Stevens—
Except no; when she looked at them again, they weren’t moving. Not now.
“Be careful!” she called out. She edged closer to take another look, unsure why they hadn’t already tried to snare Hawkins in a living, squirming net.
She saw they covered the whole surface of the drum beneath the water, a carpet of roots or tentacles or… who knew what. The last time she’d seen them they’d been moving with incredible speed. Now they looked as if they’d grown there years before, like the root network of a houseplant in a pot that was too small for it.
“They’re everywhere,” he told her. “I walked about fifty meters either way along the shore, and everywhere I looked, there was the same thickness of them. There’s no way forward except through them.”
Maybe Rao had heard them talking. She walked toward them, bleary eyed and sniffling. When she arrived at the edge of the water she squatted down and adjusted her suit lights to point at the tendrils.
“They’re not moving now,” Hawkins said. “Maybe they drowned.”
Rao scowled in concentration. “They lived inside Stevens’s body just fine. They don’t need to breathe, or at least—” She trailed off. “There’s something… something familiar about these,” she said. “I’m having trouble making the connection, but—”
Tiny bubbles formed on the surface of the mat of tendrils. One by one they detached and rose to the surface to pop. “This is where the oxygen is coming from,” she said. She fiddled with the trace gas analyzer on the front of her suit, leaning far out over the water. “Every time those bubbles pop, the O2 level goes up, just a smidge. Yeah. Yeah—they were supplying oxygen to Stevens’s brain, at the end. They kept him alive long enough to… do whatever he did. That got their attention.”
She had strayed a little too close to the water. It lapped against her boots. Jansen reached down and grabbed her arm to pull her back.
Hawkins extended the boom of the TBL. “I’m going to try something. Get ready to haul me out of here if they grab me,” he said.
It turned out he’d wanted the TBL only because it was the closest thing they had to a stick. He grasped it in both hands and then jabbed at one of the tendrils.
Jansen realized she was holding her breath.
He poked another tendril. And another. They didn’t react. Didn’t move. He passed the TBL back to her. Then he took a step forward. Right onto the carpet of roots.
“Don’t!” Rao said, reaching for him.
Jansen inhaled sharply. But it was OK.
The tendrils didn’t grab him and pull h
im down under the water. They didn’t move at all. She watched as Hawkins experimented with jumping up and down on them, making the water splash up all around him. Nothing.
“OK, good,” he said. “Whatever happened before, the last time you were in here, they’ve settled down now. I think we have to assume that they’ll stay dormant while we walk to the structure.”
“That’s a big assumption,” Jansen said. But she knew there was nothing they could do about it. If they wanted to reach the structure, if they wanted to find Foster and his crew—they had to take the risk.
PARMINDER RAO: I guess maybe I knew as soon as I saw the “tendrils.” My theory had to be right. But I’m a scientist. We don’t jump to conclusions. I needed more evidence before I told the others what I was thinking.
WATER TRAVERSE
They didn’t talk.
It would have taken too much energy.
They waded out into the dark water, which quickly rose to their knees. Each step was hard. Jansen had to push her legs forward, through the resistance of the water. She had to test her footing every time she put her weight down. The tendrils grew thick and fat as they moved away from the shore. They were hard as wood, exactly like tree roots. It was like wading through a mangrove swamp, she thought. Except it wasn’t. At all.
Jansen had mounted the TBL on her back with its pole half-extended, so that it made a spotlight around them. She’d thought it would help them find their footing. She had been wrong. The water, when undisturbed, simply drank up the light and gave nothing back. Every time she moved, though, even the slightest bit, she created splashes and ripples that danced with reflected light, bright spots like fish swarming around her. The darkness, which had always been unrelenting, was shattered now by their light, and it felt like a violation. As if they were intruding on something that wanted to stay in the shadows.
It was exhausting, walking like that. She was already working on a sleep debt, and she knew you couldn’t pay those back. She felt the weight of her suit and her backpack digging into her shoulders. She had gulped down a food tube before they left Orion, but now she was ravenously hungry again. She wasn’t sure how much farther she could go.
She looked back at the others. Rao was picking her way along carefully, her arms out parallel to the water as she struggled for balance. Hawkins seemed to be having an easier time of things. He looked almost as if he were just strolling along through the water. He was fifteen years her junior. He had been trained to a peak of physical perfection by the space force. Of course he was fine.
Of course he was.
Except—then he stopped, and Rao stopped with him. Jansen realized she’d been listening to the two of them plash along, shoving the water noisily ahead of them, the whole time. It was the only sound in that dread place except for the constant wailing, clicking cry on the radio. She had been only liminally aware of the sound of the splashing, however. Until it ceased.
She turned, struggling with the water, and looked at Hawkins. Her treasonous body surged with endorphins, glad enough for a moment’s break.
“This won’t work,” he told them.
Jansen said nothing. She was breathing too heavily to talk.
“When we started, the water was up to our knees,” he told her.
The water was up to their chests now. It was getting deeper. There was no reason to think it wouldn’t continue to do so. Before long it would be up to their helmets. Their suits would protect them from being submerged in the inky water, sure, but she couldn’t…
She couldn’t bear the thought. She couldn’t even imagine walking forward, completely underwater, lost in some undersea kingdom of darkness and fright and the rootlike tendrils. It was as if she were trying to imagine walking through a brick wall.
“Our suits are too buoyant,” he said. “We’ll start floating soon. Unless we want to swim to this structure of yours.” He gave her a sharp look. As if he expected her to tell him that yes, they would have to swim from here.
She shook her head.
“What do we do?” Rao asked.
Jansen turned around in a circle. Hoping to find some spit of dry ground they could climb up onto. Maybe just so they could take a rest. There was no such thing, of course. All she saw was water, more water everywhere. Water full of floating, bobbing chunks of ice that hadn’t quite melted yet. She used her suit lights to scan a few of the bigger pieces.
“Come on,” she said.
The ice floe Jansen had found was nearly three meters across. A big slab of ice whiter than the fabric of their suits. It glistened in their light, already melting in the warm air. She could almost see through its thinnest part, and definitely saw bubbles of air—argon or oxygen, it was impossible to say—trapped inside.
It nearly capsized when she scrambled up onto its back, and for a moment she imagined its huge bulk flipping over on top of her, pinning her under the water. But she moved fast and got herself spread across its area as best she could, and it fell back into the water with a mighty slap that sent a cascade of black droplets flying away from her. She rolled over onto her back and gestured for Hawkins and Rao to follow.
Hawkins came first, clambering up onto the floe, grunting and swearing. Water poured from the folds of his suit, water that ran across the ice and sluiced away. Rao took her time, putting her arms up on the ice first, then slowly, carefully sliding up until she was sitting on it, cross-legged.
It took Jansen a long time to get up on her feet. The floe rocked back and forth every time she moved and threatened to throw her onto her back. With time, and patience, and a lot of waving her arms around for balance, she made it. She rose to a standing posture. Then she extended the TBL to its full extent. That gave her three meters of pole to work with. The water was only a little more than a meter deep.
She shoved the boom of the TBL down into the black water. It scraped against one of the rootlike tendrils, then got lodged in some unseen branch or fork and held. Cautiously she leaned her weight on the pole, and the whole floe glided forward, in the opposite direction from her push.
The direction of the structure, their destination. Far off across the lake of black water.
The resistance of the water stole her precious velocity from her after just a few seconds. The floe started to spin, then slowed to a halt again. She pushed the pole down into the roots and heaved once more, and the floe moved again.
She had a raft. A raft to sail that stygian sea. Even that basic success, that tiny victory, made her want to cry.
PARMINDER RAO: It was hard to think. I mean, literally, it was hard to get thoughts moving through my head. The darkness was bad. Nobody was talking—maybe that would have helped, if we’d been chattering away, but… I think there was something more to it. Maybe 2I’s magnetic field. NASA claimed it wasn’t strong enough to have physiological effects, but I was there, and I’m not so sure. I’ve seen papers about the effects of magnetic fields on human nervous systems. Get hit with more than a couple of teslas at a time, and they can shut your brain down like flipping a light switch. At lower levels magnetic fields can cause dizziness and disorientation. Maybe that’s all it was.
Rao took a turn poling them along, pushing endlessly against the floor of the drum. The light on top of the telescoping boom lamp moved over them in a steady rhythm. The water splashed and gurgled as they jerked along, a few meters at a time.
She watched the water, because there was nothing else to look at. Sometimes it cleared enough she could see the network of rootlike structures on the bottom, a pattern that she’d studied so closely it felt as if it were inscribed on the inside of her skull. The exact same pattern they’d etched across the walls of Wanderer when they—when Stevens—
She pushed that thought aside.
Hawkins was perched at the front of the floe, staring forward into the darkness as if he found his own thoughts displayed there. She thought perhaps the dark water was a kind of screen, like the black glass of an old television. Jansen shifted around on the ic
e to face Rao. “We’re still on course?” she asked.
She had sent Rao the data from her inertial compass, which had recorded her path from her last excursion into 2I. Back when all this water had still been frozen. “We’re getting close to where you found the memory stick,” Rao told her.
Jansen wriggled her eyebrows back and forth as if they itched. Rao could sympathize—there would be no way to scratch them with her helmet on. “How are you feeling?”
“Fine,” she said.
“I mean, are you getting tired? Want me to take a turn with the pole?”
“No, I’m good,” Rao said. “This place is funny, right? Funny.”
Jansen sighed and stuck her leg out across the ice, stretching it. “Funny weird, yeah.”
“I’ve been thinking about what’s up there.” She let go of the pole with one hand and pointed upward. Not that there was anything to point at but darkness. “There’s another sea up there, isn’t there? Water and ice and… whatever. Above our heads. Gravity in the drum points outwards, in all directions. If we could see, we would see the drum curving up around us, forming a cylinder. We would see the water on every side, and straight above, too.”
“I’m kind of glad I can’t see that,” Jansen said. “It would always feel like it was about to come pouring down on my head.”
“We evolved on a flat world,” Rao said. “We had no way to tell that it was round until we figured out the math. Anything born in this place wouldn’t have that luxury. They would grow up knowing the world was a drum. They wouldn’t know anything about stars. They wouldn’t know there was a universe outside.”
“You think that’s why they didn’t respond to our signals? Why we can’t seem to communicate with them?”
“Because they can’t imagine there’s anything outside to talk to?” Rao asked. “From their perspective? For thousands of years, there wasn’t. They were between stars, in a place almost as dark as this.” She pushed down hard with the pole. She could feel when she was shoving against one of the rootlike structures and when the pole touched the smooth surface of the drum. “No,” she said. “They know that Earth is there. Maybe not in the same way we think about it. Maybe to them planets aren’t balls of rock rotating in space, maybe they see them as… I don’t know.”
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