In the Valley of the Kings: Stories

by Terrence Holt

  I have done this before.

  I don’t know how many times I have awakened to this emptiness, run through these empty corridors banging on doors that only echo. Does time even matter in this place? Perhaps that is what has broken: time, not me.

  If time is broken, then it was I who broke it. This knowledge rises out of emptiness, but the downward count of every clock confirms it.

  I FOUND FOOD—and the remains of other meals, torn wrappers everywhere, a solidified mess in the cooker. One meal I must have tried to eat without heating. Another I seem to have crushed and mixed with water. There are dozens of them.

  It took some time to clear the debris away, chip out the black and stinking thing in the oven. I found food, drawers full of silver packets with labels I could not read. My hands took one and tore it, dumping out the contents. Diagrams on the package showed me what to do, and when it emerged steaming from cooker I bent over it, baffled. Something was missing.

  It had no smell. It had no taste. And though I cannot recall what these things were, I know that once they were a part of food.

  There are no windows.

  I know what windows are. Within me I almost see them: half open, curtains of some thin transparent substance shifting in a breeze. I cannot see what lies outside them.

  There should be windows.

  WHEN I WOKE I saw a screen, flickering. A clock with too many numbers. The blankness broke then, into then and now, sleep and waking. In broken flashes I remembered: White clouds vanishing. Steam rising from a bowl.

  What makes everything flicker so? Is it in this place, or is it me? Which would be worse?

  Could there be something worse?

  The numbers on the clocks are counting down.

  THERE IS A door I cannot open. It lies across a path my legs keep taking. I found myself before it again, blank.

  I reached out a hand. Its shadow trembled as it climbed the flat blue surface to touch my fingertips. The surface was so cold it seemed to seize me. I stood for a long time, held by the cold, feeling the hard surface beating with my pulse.

  It took an effort to free myself, and more to keep from running as I went.

  I STRUGGLED INTO waking, into light, into myself. The room lay as I had left it the night before, if that was night, if this is morning.

  Night, morning. Evening. Light flickered, and I shuddered under it, falling back almost into memory of something vast, substantial, something to which I once belonged. A moon, almost full. Its light sleeking smooth black water.

  Moon. I clutched at the word, held it, listening.

  It told me only this: I do not belong here. I come from somewhere else.

  What place could that have been? And if there is some other place, what place is this? Why are there no windows? What lies outside?

  Is there an outside?

  I WAKE. I wander. And I return each time to this screen. Like an open window, it draws me. I watch the letters flash onto the screen, rise, and vanish into what white space lies beyond its borders. I tap out messages to nowhere. No messages return.

  I understand now that no one reads this. I do not think anyone will ever read this.

  THERE IS A way to bring words back. There are keys that shift them from wherever they have gone. This discovery moves me in a way I cannot understand; I know only that, since I have found a way to bring words back, I cannot leave this screen. I am searching for something. I will know it when I find it, I tell myself.

  Something flickers, stopping me. Stunned to silence, I gaze, dizzy, as if looking down from a great height.

  Out of these endless rows of empty letters, I have recognized a word.

  Discovery.

  Is there such a word? Discovery. Discovery. Discovery. The more I look at it, the less it means.

  I have spent hours searching. Words float up on a cold whisper in me—island, realm, domain—but on the screen itself I see only wave after featureless wave of words I cannot read.

  But for Discovery. I can return, again and again, and find it always there, always the same. Discovery. Discovery. It makes my hand shake so I can barely press the keys.

  The room leaps into being with a force that startles me.

  I know what discovery means.

  I will keep up this record. Someday I may discover how to read it. I may come back someday and find that I have written everything I want to know.

  SINCE MY DISCOVERY yesterday, more words have returned. When I opened my eyes they seized on things, and as I saw I named them. I saw light panels, acoustic tile, the intercom, and a collection of tools I do not recognize as my own, but I know they include screwdrivers (Phillips and Torx), forceps, Metzenbaum scissors. My eyes fastened on these things as though they could feed hunger.

  Hunger: I know that word as well. It drives me down the corridor to this galley, this kitchen, this cabinet, these bowls.

  I stand at the counter and lift a spoonful steaming to my mouth. Sweet.

  Anger flares as suddenly as what flickers from the emptiness. I have thrown the bowl across the room. It bounces violently and spins across the floor.

  It should have shattered. I don’t know how I know that. I only know it should. And that it fell unnaturally slow. Even Earth is broken. Earth. I repeat the word until, diminished to a distant groaning in the floor, it fades.

  What is Earth?

  It has become like that. I had thought that my discovery, even if of one word, had made a difference. I had thought the emptiness had broken. I know differently. I am broken. I feel the emptiness more, now that one edge of it is lifted: its edges cut me, each new recovery telling me how much more remains in shroud.

  At each encounter a new wound opens: as I stoop to wipe the gruel from the floor I flicker, and hear a voice speak reassuringly from far above my head. I look up, and only the blank white panel burns there, but as I blink in the light I feel warmth upon my skin, and hear a roaring hushed by distance. Warmth shudders through me, telling me how very cold this place is: how my fingertips are pale, and the mist that fills the air and fades in front of me is breath.

  Now I smell what could be cold itself, the essence of it, sharp, penetrating: snow. It swirls around me, and I rise so suddenly the room whirls again and as all settles I am here again among so much I still cannot name. In a flicker I could disappear. I could vanish into mist. Or worse: in that flickering I might fail to vanish and remain, impaled on the moment when everything comes clear.

  NOW I WAKE to worse than emptiness. With each day as more words return I see more clearly, sense distinctly—even the chill across my skin is sharper, punctate, each hair rising on my skin and pricking me with cold. Punctate; pricking: the words and sensations drive each other on, crowding me toward some end I cannot see except flickering among trees pierced through by sunlight, shadow stippling countless blades of grass. A pane of glass, crazed, doubling everything beyond. A black sphere rolling down a smooth, reflecting slope until this too drops away and I am standing in the corridor outside my room, the chill fuming off my skin. I see a river risen in flood, a legal document I cannot read, a diagram explaining the formation of hail, an enormous fish turning lazily, its outstretched pectoral fin transparent, and through it, through distortions of glass and water I almost see what lies beyond the glass: a sofa covered in a pastel blur, a vase of what might be tulips on the end table, beyond that a window, and through the window vague masses of trees, penetrated by sunlight.

  There was a time when these visions, these memories, and the power to name them could have saved me. But now they only force me to acknowledge none of these things helps me. None of them approaches what I need to know. I begin to understand that there are questions I have forgotten. How did I come here? What am I? What happened to make me this shadow of a man?

  Shaking off the image of a blue balloon against a bluer sky, I rise, unsteady, and down the corridor I weave among ghosts. In the walls, if I look too long, images surface almost near enough to see: ants circling endlessly
around a pool of tar; a single sheet of paper fluttering as it falls; I see a drawer full of cutlery; a hook drawing yarn; I see stars.

  I shake, and shake again. Even more than the pressure of these illusions the cold bears in on me. I cannot concentrate. My breath begins to come in gasps, the clouds lay frost on any surface I come near. I begin to understand something very simple: if this cold deepens I will die—another thing I have not seen though it is everywhere around me. Die: the word shudders through me. Before I understand it has become another long confusing spasm that will not release me until I fall to one knee. My hand burns in contact with the floor. I stand and stagger down the flickering corridors, blind to any purpose until I find myself in a cubicle full of screens.

  The screens in front of me flicker faster now. The lights are flickering overhead. Some terrible event is coming. I sink to the chair, bow my head in misery until my forehead presses against the keys. They burn. I imagine the letters branding me, inscribing there the triumph of whatever makes the cold.

  What have the cold and flickering written on me?

  I open my eyes, a struggle against the ice forming on them, and in a dark reflection on the screen I see only a few red welts burned on the dead-white skin above the brow. They could be letters. W? Y? Is this my name? I do not recognize it. The face is not the one I know. The lights swoon. The screen, the face and the lights all rush toward me.

  Light broke through glass, resolving into blocks of bright color: Environment, they said: Power, Communications and other words I did not know: Robotics, Geologic. Command I thought I understood, but as I reached for it the screen decayed into fragments, re-forming into Power: bars of colored light that wavered. Critical pulsed red everywhere. Time to Failure: 833991. As I watched, the one became a zero, then a nine, and the time to failure was 833989. I watched stupidly, wondering what increments of time these numbers measured. Whatever they were, I knew there would not be enough.

  I backed out of the screen and found Environment: the ambient temperature displayed in large block figures was 251. I stared at it and it too changed. 250. There were other words: Power Diversion, which glowed brighter and dimmer, insisting on what I could not grasp. Storage Initiated 21481024113645. Time to Equilibrium: 45562. 45561. 45560. Equilibrium Temperature: 98.

  I did not need to guess what all this meant: I could see it in the frost that rimed the screen.

  The lights flickered, or I did: for an instant I was falling down a warm smooth surface, sunlight filling my eyes. The darkness was nearer now. My hand a clumsy paw, I tried to change the settings on the screen, but everything I touched slid away. The temperature continued to count down. I stabbed at Abort; I grabbed a bar marked Heat and dragged it up. At the bottom of the screen Warning began to flash beneath the bars for Carbon, Oxygen, Waste Processing, Lighting and still more impending failures I only dimly understood.

  All around me in the air a faint note droned, a static wailing. I watched the numbers measuring Time to Failure for a long time, thinking dully that if I watched long enough they might reverse their descent. Then the cold overwhelmed me and I flickered into darkness.

  IN THE DARKNESS, voices.

  I heard—

  —sunspots.

  A voice.

  —no voice.

  I swear.

  —not human.

  PAIN ASCENDING INTO what must be me, I saw water pooling on a screen. My hand reached out and wiped it clear. It trickled slowly back. The screen shuddered under the water, and changed: Communications. Numbers rose or fell in no apparent order, charting the fortunes of strings of letters I knew could not be words. LOS, TROS/TDRS, OIRescue1. This last was blinking. I tried to make it do something, but it only blinked and counted. 940251,50,49. The wailing persisted, following me far down the corridor.

  In the galley I found a frozen mass of gruel on the floor, beginning to thaw. As I stooped to pick up the bowl my vision dimmed, returning as the low orange light of a dying afternoon. It shone through clear water, shallow, ripples throwing shadows on white sand. A bolide shed sparks high in an evening sky, the sky just coming on to darkness above a mass of trees. The rusted edge of a spade cut into clay, the harsh crunch of it a rush of nausea that brought me back to myself crouched over a seeping mass of oatmeal.

  I crouched, listening.

  The scratchy wailing had followed me. It hovered at the edges of hearing then scaled higher, the sound no longer audible except as pain. Then swooping, and a sudden rush of wind abruptly broken off. Silence, then the note returned, a high, thin whine.

  I listened, waiting for more.

  But nothing more: just the rising and falling, sudden lapses into silence that deepened, until sound insinuated itself again. It followed me through the corridors. I fell onto the bed and before I could do more than pull the mound of clothes and blankets over me I slept again.

  IN MY SLEEP the voices returned.

  What did it—

  —one knows.

  What if it—

  —couldn’t.

  Was it—

  —it failed.

  I WOKE TO voices speaking quietly above my head. Over the persistent thin keening note one said:

  What if it didn’t?

  And the other:

  —wouldn’t be going in.

  I ran. When I reached the cubicle I struck out with my open hand, pain flaring as it hit the screen. It flickered into light: Communications. I watched my fingers reach for a switch. The wailing note hollowed out, seeming to embrace an emptiness I could not imagine, immense, expectant.

  I tried to shape words, but none would come: only inarticulate croaking fell from high above me. Preening underneath a glossy wing, a crow looked up and suddenly took flight.

  I remained. Empty, moaning quietly with the note that wailed up and up a scale that seemed to reach out infinitely high. It was me. I had been wailing.

  A click.

  I heard it again.

  Suddenly I was expelling grotesque sounds, as if pieces of me were being ripped from deep inside.

  Not human.

  A different voice. I tried to speak: an anguished croak, strangling as it escaped.

  —alive?

  A long pause deep as grief.

  No.

  Then, slow with doubt:

  I hope not.

  Then silence. Except for me, weeping.

  IN THE MORNING I awoke, agitated and empty, the sensation of weeping lingering in my chest. I tried to recall what had put it there.

  I had heard voices.

  Real ones?

  The question struck me suddenly as funny. A laugh tore its way out, much as the sobs had earlier.

  The lights flickered. In the burnished surface of the walls a ponderous shape turned slowly, showing a row of portholes, a ship sunk deep in dark water, settling. In one of the ports a light was burning. Then it was gone and only the wall remained, as blank as any wall.

  I made my way to the galley, and as I made food for myself I discovered I could read. Not everything: some words escape me still. But this was a Radarange, by Toshiba. Inside the door I found instructions for its use.

  The discovery excited me less than I might have expected. I remembered dimly struggling at a frost-covered screen. I had read words there as well. At the time, in the urgency of the cold, it had seemed I grappled not with words but the things themselves. Now, looking around me, I found words everywhere. And the flattened carcass of an animal that might have been a cat battened on by flies; a young woman whirling away on the wind; a dead calm sea with an oily sheen beneath a glaring sun. These things receded in flickering and nausea, leaving only distant wailing.

  A voice struck the wailing silent.

  It isn’t human.

  God have mercy.

  Yes have mercy.

  The voices fell from everywhere at once. Perhaps, I told myself, this is the nature of hallucinations.

  I listened for a long time, but there was only the wailing again, and a c
ascade of rustling as though dead leaves were blowing in the hall.

  I looked: only the corridor receding into deeper shadow, the light flickering, and in the walls everywhere vague shapes were shifting, like frescoes long since painted over struggling to return. I shuddered, and as I did the shapes within the walls all shuddered too. The cold was coming back, the systems continuing their fall toward equilibrium. A wave flowed down the corridor, beckoning. The figures writhed.

  The last thing I wanted to do was walk among those shifting forms. The floor beneath my feet was clouded. In its depths more shapes lay, their forms distorted.

  I came again to the door that would not open. I placed a thumb in the scanner. Light welled up blood-red in my thumb and the door swung open.

  Cold flowed out like a river. Tires squealed across concrete, glass shattered: a sudden blow to the chest but I was untouched and the place was silent, dark, and terribly cold. This, I thought, must be how equilibrium feels.