Infinite Day

by Chris Walley

  Merral stared at the helmet, aware of his distaste for it and all it stood for. Then he took off the jacket, noticing for the first time the weird serpentine symbol of the Dominion high on the left-hand side.

  “Very well, let’s use them. But first let’s cancel out that horrid emblem.”

  For Merral, thoughts of arms and armor briefly receded that evening. The musical event was four songs by a duo and some tunes from a small jazz group and a Mozart string quartet, and the evening was rounded off with Charlie Chaplin in City Lights. Betafor joined them for the music and the film and commented afterward that though she found both interesting, as an Allenix unit she didn’t “need a diversion.”

  “Do you like music?” Merral asked.

  “It is just vibrations.”

  From the seventh day new and alarming phenomena were reported. For the first time there were noises: a barely audible faint rustling as if paper were being crumpled. Then came a faint, untraceable whispering and the sound of tiny footsteps that came and went. Some claimed to have heard far-off cries.

  As if this were not enough, the manifestations seemed to become deeper and more solid. In the midmorning, Merral and Vero came across a hooded figure standing in a corridor that, had it not been faceless, might have been staring at them. And that night something that might—or might not—have been a dog wandered through the bedroom and had a bleary-eyed Lloyd reaching for a weapon.

  Slee started work on his mural and soon drew attentive admirers who tried to guess who was being depicted. Merral was portrayed early on as a man in muddied clothes holding a small tree in one hand and a trowel in another.

  For several days, the manifestations faded and were rarely seen. Instead, the effects seemed to be psychological. On the morning of the ninth day, Merral woke with a strange and terrible sense of desolation. He felt with an unshakable certainty that the mission was doomed and resolved to meet with Luke after the morning service to see how they could give up and return. As he stood there at the service wrapped in despair, the chaplain walked to the front.

  “Who here has in the last few hours felt overwhelmed by dread or fear?” Luke asked.

  At first, with slow reluctance and then with ever-increasing speed, three quarters of those present put up their hands. Without expression, Luke cast his dark eyes slowly around and nodded. Then he put his own hand up. “And what’s wrong with the rest of you?”

  Amid relieved laughter, he ordered the singing of the most triumphant hymns in the Assembly songbook, and the darkness lifted.

  That evening someone reported hearing a child crying. When he slept, Merral had new dreams, but these were graphic and potent ones, centered on Anya. They left him feeling both guilty and vulnerable.

  The loss of color began to weigh on minds. Soon, the very idea of color began to be no more than a fantastic memory. Indeed, sometimes Merral wondered whether he really had known such a thing. Had it all been a myth? Even with closed eyes, it became hard to imagine reds and yellows, pinks and oranges, and all the innumerable shades of green in leaves. Others apparently felt the same. Fortunately some of his dreams were peaceful and in color, making sleep a blessing.

  Some people became irritable, others depressed. There were complaints about the food. By day eleven, emotions were running so high during a basketball match that angry shouting erupted between the two sides. As a result it was agreed that it would be better to do things that united rather than divided, and the tournament was dropped.

  Yet Azeras grunted to Merral, with apparently genuine amazement, how remarkably limited the effects were. He seemed to think about something and said quietly, “I might almost believe—only almost, mind you—that you have someone looking after you.”

  Without thinking Merral replied, “I believe we have.”

  Azeras gave a shrug that seemed to concede bewilderment and walked away. Merral’s claim was supported that night in an unexpected way. He had a dream of such vividness that when he awoke he could remember every detail. In his dream, he saw a pale gray spaceship plunging onward into a leaden darkness. But the darkness was not empty; it was full of terrible, flying things bearing wings and eyes and tentacles that seemed to press around the ship. Yet on the vessel stood a colossal figure as tall as the ship was deep, robed in gleaming white, who swung a mighty, glittering sword this way and that. At his untiring blows, the creatures fled.

  The next morning Merral reported the vision to Luke. The chaplain merely nodded, opened a small notebook, and added a new tick to a list. He totaled them up.

  “Nineteen,” he said with a lean smile.

  “Nineteen what?”

  “Nineteen separate reports of the same dream.” There was another smile. “Vero says the envoy is ‘riding shotgun,’ whatever that means.”

  Despite the alarms caused by the manifestations, both crew and soldiers kept busy at their appointed tasks. By the end of the second week there was such a sense of routine that the crew took to wandering around in T-shirts and shorts. After considering the matter, Merral allowed it but insisted that the soldiers stay in some form of uniform.

  Merral, Lloyd, and Vero found time to open the containers that had been recovered from Langerstrand and look at what was inside. They found data folders, food items, medicines, and items of clothing. Some of the medical information confirmed that the ambassadors had been surgically modified humans, and Merral stared, utterly appalled, at diagrams indicating where the modifications had been made. There was also much that seemed to have belonged to Lezaroth: a pistol, a dress uniform complete with military ribbons, a cap, and even his armor suit. Although similar to the armor they had already found, this seemed to be of a finer workmanship. Yet as Merral looked through the contents of the containers, he found no clues to the man he pursued across space.

  He sat staring at the material and pondering Lezaroth. Where are the pictures of his family? Where is any diary or notebook? Where are there any details of his favorite music or his favorite paintings? Is this absence of information because he took it all with him or because this man has no deeper dimensions? Can it be that the Dominion has produced that ultimate monstrosity: the man who is just a warrior and nothing else?

  Merral picked up the helmet and stared at it, seeing his own reflection in the visor. How alien is this culture! Physically, we are all men, and there is little difference between him and me except some small-scale genetic modifications. Yet how vast is the gulf between what we really are!

  Then pushing his meditations to one side, he walked to the large room that had been cleared as a training facility. It was full of the soldiers trying on armor. Merral looked at the jackets and saw that the curving emblems had all been overstamped by two deep scores at right angles.

  The snake is crushed. It is good.

  Merral got everyone’s attention. “Now we learn to work and interact in this armor. We need to be able to use all that these suits offer without even thinking about it. It is not going to be easy.”

  It wasn’t.

  Merral also kept on at learning Saratan but had to force himself to do so. It was not the difficulty of the task; it was not a hard language with its simple if rigid grammar, and many words he recognized as having an English or even an early Communal origin. What put him off were other things. For one, there seemed to be an excess of military terminology and metaphors so that in Saratan you always seemed to be talking about “crushing,” “destroying,” or “devastating.” For another, the language had an abundance of oaths and curses that invoked the powers; these he noted but refused to utter. He was also struck by a striking sexism; it took some time before he realized that to call any man a “woman” was to offer a humiliating insult.

  He practiced his Saratan with Betafor and Azeras separately and both made helpful suggestions. Once Azeras frowned. “Merral, you speak far too politely. In a military context you must be deferential if you are addressing a superior or overbearing if you are addressing an inferior. You speak as if to friends.�
�� And at another phrase, Azeras shook his head angrily. “No! There’s too much . . . geniality in your voice. Make it more abrasive!”

  His Saratan was corrected more analytically by Betafor. “The lower frequencies are missing,” she said. “Try to say the words more deeply.” She stared at him. “The human voice is a very inefficient mechanism for speaking.”

  Far easier than learning the language of Sarata was acquiring the dress of a Dominion captain. Merral had two of Lezaroth’s uniforms modified to fit him. Extending the need for authenticity to its limits, he took Lezaroth’s pistol and practiced walking around with it at his belt in a swaggering manner that Azeras and Betafor assured him was appropriate for all Dominion captains. When he fired it on the range—it shot dense metal rounds at high speed—he found himself so impressed with its accuracy that he adopted it as his own weapon and handed the other pistol back to Lloyd.

  One night, Vero commented on the pistol. “How does it feel to wear his gun?”

  Merral lay back on his bed and stared at the ceiling before he answered.

  “Two things. It constantly reminds me of our goal—of the need to defeat Lezaroth.”

  “And?”

  “It worries me. I have taken on this man’s weapon. Do I slowly take on other aspects of who he is? Do I metamorphose into the Assembly’s Lezaroth?”

  “It’s a risk. But only if you let it happen. And knowing you, you won’t.”

  Merral said nothing. I am less sure.

  As the days passed, all the soldiers and crew acquired pastimes to keep themselves occupied. One soldier said to Merral, “It’s my chance to read all those books I never got round to.” A drama team formed; Merral was astonished to find that Vero had even arranged for a small supply of theatrical makeup to be shipped on board. Others did jigsaws, claiming that the absence of color made them more challenging while another did life sketches in black and white. Slee’s mural of accurate but sympathetic caricatures of the soldiers and crew expanded. Vero was drawn walking along with his snub nose so deep in an old book that he was clearly about to fall down a hole. Luke was drawn in engineer’s overalls with a Bible poking out of one pocket and a multispanner set out of the other.

  Merral, trying to take a break from endless management, weapons training, and learning Saratan, decided to spend some time on his castle tree simulation. He had hoped that in that electronic world there might be color, but a quick glance had shown there wasn’t. Nevertheless, he decided that his artificial form of nature would be a definite improvement on the arid, metallic world of the Star. So he sat down in the room he shared with Vero and Lloyd and, with his aide keeping an eye open for manifestations, donned imaging glasses and entered the program. Not wishing to taunt himself with yet another world drained of color, he set the program to a date in early November.

  He found himself in a landscape with a thin film of snow on frozen ground and the great tree towering up black against a leaden sky of flying heavy clouds. Merral reminded himself that even outside the ship it would have been an almost monochrome world. On the tree, the final remaining leaves were whirling away as the great boughs were lashed by the wind. He found that, given the enormous height of the tree, the gusts at the top were enough to snap off boughs, which collapsed and tumbled down, shattering others beneath them, so that a whole side of the tree could be damaged. After thought, he modified the highest branches so that it was only the tips rather than the whole bough that snapped off. Reruns of various wind speeds suggested that this gave rise to much less damage.

  Eventually he emerged from his simulation and took off the glasses. Lloyd, sitting reading on the other side of the room, looked up.

  “Enjoy that, sir?”

  “Yes, Lloyd.” How can I not enjoy such a world? A place where I face no weird and troubling evils, where I don’t have to command men and women who expect me to get it right, and where I am in control.

  “Anything happen here?”

  Lloyd made a dismissive cluck and pointed to a paper bag in the corner. “Just one of them things. A sort of caterpillar. Kicked it into the bag in one.” He gestured with his foot.

  “Did you enjoy that?”

  Lloyd grinned. “Kind of. I’m thinking of inventing ghost slug golf.”

  Merral began to worry about Vero. His friend spent his spare time working with the Library files he had brought and also with the data banks from the Star itself. He seemed to sleep little, and Merral sometimes awoke at night to see, on the other side of the room, a slight figure hunched over a dull gray screen of a diary.

  “What have you found?” he asked him one morning.

  Vero ran his fingers over his curly hair. “Everything. And nothing.” A look of intense frustration crossed his face. “I am slowly piecing together how the Freeborn and the Dominion came to be. I now understand them better.”

  “And will that help us?”

  There was a pause.

  “My friend, I have faith it can.” But that was as far as he would go. Merral found himself somewhat ill at ease both about the answer and also Vero’s increasingly obsessive air. But as he had more pressing and more tangible issues to worry about, he put aside his misgivings about Vero.

  One particular cause for worry was Azeras. He was generally to be found on the bridge, where he and Laura had developed what was evidently a distant, if effective, relationship. Merral characterized him as a man always on the margin of things, somewhat aloof, frequently gloomy, always preoccupied. Several times, Merral had to repeat questions to Azeras before he got an answer.

  When not working with the captain or the engineer, the sarudar would walk silently around the ship. He would attend the morning and evening services but always sat at the back; he never sang and no amens came from him. Luke spent some time with him but refused to reveal what transpired in those meetings other than to say it was “a sad and difficult case.”

  Once, Merral tried to discuss the future with Azeras. “Sarudar, assuming we can get the hostages and head back safely, then we will need to talk about your future.”

  So slight was the nod that Azeras gave that Merral wondered for a moment if he ought to repeat his comment. “If you wish,” he added eventually, “we might be able to dispense with your services. You could then go or stay.”

  Azeras sighed. “Where?” he said slowly. “I can make no decision yet.”

  Then suddenly the stony exterior seemed to crack. “Commander, I fear for what I will find when we reach Sarata. In my heart, I believe my people are now finished. The True Freeborn are no more.” He gave Merral a mournful look. “A whole civilization crushed completely by the Dominion.”

  “Can you be sure?”

  Azeras shook his head. “No. Not yet. I have not quite given up hope. Some communities may have survived. People may have fled in ships. It would be nice to think so.”

  Then with shoulders stooped, he walked away. Merral found himself wondering how Azeras would react if they were indeed to find that all his people had been destroyed.

  Slee’s black-and-white cartoons of the inhabitants of the Star soon grew beyond their original single wall. One day Merral caught Betafor gazing at a drawing showing her at the helm of a spacecraft with her long fingers waving over the controls.

  “Do you understand what Slee is doing?” he asked.

  “I think so. But I am puzzled about why there are so many distortions and inaccuracies.”

  Seized with a sudden desire to tease her, Merral said, “Betafor, those are to make them more truthful.”

  “That makes no sense.”

  No, it doesn’t. “Let me try to explain. . . . It’s because . . . well, in order to highlight really important things sometimes artists need to hide other things.”

  “I see. The human understanding of events is so irrational that you need inaccuracy to correct it?”

  “Sort of.”

  The creature stared at him for some moments. “If errors are more truthful than the truth for you, then the su
premacy of the Allenix would seem inarguable.”

  The color dreams continued. One night Merral dreamed of a green marshland with water lilies, surrounded by trees and kingfishers of dazzling blue diving in and out of the water. Another night, he was in a walled garden in May, with clematis covering the brickwork walls and pergolas with mounds of flowers on which butterflies of dazzling colors fluttered.

  As they traveled on, the purpose of the mission stayed central. Despite the distractions and concerns, the training for the rescue persisted. Abilana insisted on—and got—a daily training slot on battlefield medical techniques. Watching the imagery of injuries was the only time Merral was grateful for the lack of color.

  They trained extensively with the weapons, and rooms full of targets were created where the soldiers could practice and drill. Given that the Star and the Comet were sister ships, there were many simulated assaults; the soldiers trained themselves to know their way round rooms and corridors even in darkness. And slowly the men and women acquired competence and an ability to work together.

  Yet Merral, watching them carefully, did not find his mind put at ease. These men and women seem to be excellent. But these are exercises; how will they perform facing the real thing?

  8

  On the Nanmaxat’s Comet, Isabella had decided that she must keep a log of the voyage. She had made the decision shortly after Commander Lezaroth selected her as contact officer. It was partly to stop her from losing track of time and partly to keep note of the requests she was already being given; but she also saw it as a chance to make an account of events. The role she had to play was potentially so significant that she wanted it recorded. She hoped that she would be a success; it was plain that her appointment was not universally approved.