by John Varley
“The docking facilities!” Cirocco yelled. “They’re gonna grab us! Bill, start the engine sequence, stop the carousel, get ready to move.”
“But it’ll take us thirty minutes—”
“I know. Move!”
She caromed off the viewport and into her seat, reached for her microphone.
“All hands. Emergency status. Depressurization alert. Evacuate the carousel. Acceleration stations. Strap in.” She slammed the alarm button with her left hand and heard the eerie hooting begin in the room behind her. She glanced to her left.
“You too, Bill. Get suited.”
“But—”
“Now!”
He was out of his seat and diving through the access hatch. She turned and called over her shoulder.
“Bring my suit back with you!”
The object was visible out the window now, approaching fast. She had never felt so helpless. By overriding the attitude control system’s programing she was able to fire all the thrusters on the side of the ship facing Themis, but it was not nearly enough. The great mass of Ringmaster barely moved. Other than that, she could only sit and monitor the automatic engine sequencing and count the seconds as they dragged by. In a short time she knew they could not escape. That thing was big, and moving faster.
Bill appeared, suited, and she scrambled into SCIMOD to don her own suit. Five anonymous figures sat belted to acceleration couches, not moving, staring at the screen. She clamped her helmet, and heard chaos.
“Quiet down.” The chatter died away. “I want silence on the suit channel unless I ask you to speak.”
“But what’s happening, Commander?” It was Calvin’s voice.
“I said no talking. It looks like an automatic device is going to pick us up. This must be the docking facilities we were looking for.”
“It looks more like an attack to me,” August muttered.
“They must have done this before. They must know how to do it safely.” She wished she could convince herself of that. It didn’t help her credibility when the whole ship shuddered.
“Contact,” Bill said. “It’s got us.”
Cirocco hurried back to her station, just in time to miss seeing the grapple sweep over them. The ship jumped again, and awful noises came from the rear.
“What did it look like?”
“Great big octopus tentacles without the suckers.” He sounded shaken. “There were hundreds of them, waving around all over.”
The ship gave an even greater lurch, and more alarms began to sound. A firestorm of red lights spread across her controls.
“We’ve got a hull rupture,” Cirocco said, with a calmness she did not feel. “Losing air from the central stem. Sealing off pressure doors 14 and 15.” Her hands moved over the controls without conscious guidance. The lights and buttons were far away, seen through the wrong end of a telescope. The accelerometer dial began to spin as she was thrown violently forward, then to the side. She came to rest on top of Bill, then struggled back to her seat and strapped in.
When the buckle clicked around her waist the ship jerked backwards again, worse than before. Something came through the hatch behind her and hit the viewport, which developed a network of cracks.
She hung from her seat, her body straining forward against the belt. An oxygen cylinder flew through the hatch. The glass shattered and the sound of the impact was sucked away with the burst of cold, hard glass knives that turned and dwindled before her eyes. Everything in the cabin that wasn’t tied down leaped up and hurtled through the mouth of jagged teeth that had once been a viewport.
Blood pulsed in her face as she hung above a bottomless black hole. Large objects turned lazily in the sunlight. One of them was the engine module of Ringmaster, out there in front of her where it had no right to be. She could see the broken stump of the connecting stem. Her ship was coming apart.
“Oh, shit,” she said, then had a vivid recollection of a tape she had once heard from the flight recorder of an airliner. That had been the last word the pilot had uttered, seconds before impact, when he knew he was going to die. She knew it, too, and the thought filled her with a vast disgust.
She watched in dull horror as the thing that had the engines wrapped more tentacles around it. It reminded her of a Portuguese man o’ war with a fish snared in its poisonous grip. A fuel tank ruptured—soundlessly, with a strange beauty. Her world was coming apart with no noise to mark its passing. A cloud of compressed gas quickly dispersed. The thing did not seem to mind.
Other tentacles had other parts of the ship. The high-gain antenna almost seemed to be swimming away, but it moved too slowly as it tumbled down the well below her.
“Alive,” she whispered. “It’s alive.”
“What did you say?” Bill was trying to hold himself secure with both hands on the instrument panel. He was strapped solidly to his chair, but the bolts which held it to the floor had broken.
The ship shuddered again, and Cirocco’s chair came free. The edge of the panel caught her across the thighs and she cried out as she struggled to free herself.
“Rocky, things are falling apart in here.” She wasn’t sure whose voice it was, but the fear reached her. She pushed, and managed to open her seat belt with one hand while holding herself away from the panel with the other. She slipped out to the side and saw her chair bounce across the shattered array of dials, stick briefly in the frame of the broken port, and launch into space.
She thought her legs were broken, but found she could move them. The pain lessened as she drew on reserves of strength to help Bill out of his chair. Too late, she saw that his eyes were closed, his forehead and the inside of his helmet smeared with blood. As his body slithered loosely over the control panel she saw the dent his helmet had made in it. She fought for a grip on his thigh, then his calf, his booted foot, and he was falling, falling in the middle of a glittering shower of glass.
She came to her senses crouched in the leg well under the control panel. She shook her head, unable to recall what had put her there. But the force of deceleration was not so great now. Themis had succeeded in bringing Ringmaster—or what was left of it—up to its own rotational speed.
No one was talking. A hurricane of breathing came through the speaker in her helmet, but no words. There was nothing to say; the screams and curses had exhausted themselves. She got to her feet, grabbed the edge of the hatchway above her, and pulled herself through into chaos.
No lights worked, but sunlight spilled harshly across broken equipment from a large rip in the wall. Cirocco moved through the debris and a suited figure got out of her way. Her head throbbed. One of her eyes was swollen shut.
There was a lot of damage. It would take a while to get it cleaned up so they could get underway.
“I’ll want a complete damage report from all departments,” she said, to no one in particular. “This ship was never meant for that kind of treatment.”
Only three people were standing. One figure knelt in the corner, holding the hand of another who was buried in the wreckage.
“I can’t move my legs. I can’t move them.”
“Who said that?” Cirocco shouted, trying to make the dizziness go away by shaking her head, succeeding only in making it worse.
“Calvin, attend to the injuries while I see what can be done for the ship.”
“Yes, Captain.”
No one moved, and Cirocco wondered why. They were all watching her. Why were they doing that?
“I’ll be in my cabin if you need me. I’m not … feeling so good.”
One of the suits took a step toward her. She moved, trying to avoid the figure, and her foot went through the deck. Pain shot through her leg.
“It’s coming in, over there. See? It’s after us now.”
“Where?”
“I don’t see anything. Oh, God. I see it.”
“Who said that? I want silence on this channel!”
“Look out! It’s behind you!”
“Who said t
hat?” She broke out in a sweat. Something was creeping up behind her, she could feel it, and it was one of those things that only come out into your bedroom after you switch off the light. Not a rat, but something worse that had no face but only a patch of slime and cold, dead, clammy hands. She groped in the red darkness and saw a writhing snake dart through a patch of sunlight in front of her.
It was so quiet. Why didn’t they make any noise?
Her hand closed around something hard. She lifted it and began to chop, up and down, over and over as the thing flashed into view.
It wouldn’t die. Something wrapped around her waist and started to pull.
The suited figures jumped and ran around in the small space, but the tentacles shot out strings which stuck like hot tar. The room was laced with them, and something had Cirocco by the legs and was trying to pull her apart like a wishbone. There was a pain like she had never felt before, but she continued to chop at the tentacle until awareness slipped from her.
Chapter Four
There was no light.
Even that bit of negative knowledge was something to cling to. The realization that the swaddling darkness was the result of the absence of something called light had cost her more than she would have believed possible, back when time had consisted of consecutive moments, like beads on a string. Now the beads scattered through her fingers. They rearranged themselves in a mockery of causality.
Anything needs a context. For darkness to mean anything there must be the memory of light. That memory was fading.
It had happened before, and would happen again. Sometimes there was a name to identify the disembodied consciousness. More often, there was only awareness.
She was in the belly of the beast.
(What beast?)
She couldn’t remember. It would come back to her. Things usually did, if she waited long enough. And waiting was easy. Millennia were worth no more than milliseconds here. Time’s stratified edifice was a ruin.
Her name was Cirocco,
(What’s a Cirocco?)
“Shur-rock-o. It’s a hot wind from the desert, or an old model Volkswagen. Mom never told me which she had in mind.” That had been her standard answer. She recalled saying it, could almost feel intangible lips shape the meaningless words.
“Call me Captain Jones.”
(Captain of what?)
Of the DSV Ringmaster, DSV for Deep Space Vessel, on its way to Saturn with seven aboard. One of them was Gaby Plauget …
(Who is …)
… and … and another was … Bill …
(What was that name again?)
It was on the tip of her tongue. A tongue was a soft, fleshy thing … it could be found in the mouth, which was …
She had it a moment ago, but what was a moment?
Something about light. Whatever that was.
There was no light. Hadn’t she been here before? Yes, surely, but never mind, hold onto it, don’t let the thought go. There was no light, and there was nothing else, either, but what was something else?
No smell. No taste. No sense of touch. No kinesthetic awareness of a body. Not even a sense of paralysis.
Cirocco! Her name was Cirocco.
Ringmaster. Saturn. Themis. Bill.
It returned all at once, as if she was living again in a split second. She thought she would go mad from the flood of impressions, and with that thought came another, later memory. This had happened before. She had remembered, only to see it all slip away. She had been insane, many times.
She knew her grip was tenuous, but it was all she had. She knew where she was, and she knew the nature of her problem.
The phenomenon had been explored during the last century. Put a man in a neoprene suit, cover his eyes and restrain his arms and legs so he can’t touch himself, eliminate all sounds from the environment, and leave him floating in warm water. Free-fall is even better. There are refinements like intravenous feeding and the elimination of smells, but they are not really necessary.
The results are surprising. Many of the first subjects had been test pilots—well-adjusted, self-reliant, sensible men. Twenty-four hours of sensory deprivation turned them into pliable children. Longer periods were quite dangerous. The mind gradually edited the few distractions: heartbeat, the smell of neoprene, the pressure of water.
Cirocco was familiar with the tests. Twelve hours of sensory deprivation had been part of her own training. She knew she should be able to find her breathing, if she looked for it long enough. It was something she could control; a non-rhythmic thing if she chose to make it so. She tried to breathe rapidly, tried to make herself cough. She felt nothing.
Pressure, then. If something was restraining her it might be possible to pit her muscles against it, to at least feel that something was holding her, however gently. Taking one muscle at a time, isolating them, visualizing the attachments and location of each, she tried to make them move. A twitch of the lip would be enough. It would prove that she was not, as she was beginning to fear, dead.
She retreated from the thought. While she had the normal fear of death as the end of all consciousness, she was glimpsing something infinitely worse. What if people did not die, ever?
What if the passing of the body left this behind? There might be eternal life, and it might be passed in eternal lack of sensation.
Insanity began to look attractive.
Trying to move was a failure. She gave it up, and began ransacking her most recent memories, hoping the key to her present situation could be found in her last conscious seconds aboard Ringmaster. She would have laughed, had she been able to locate the muscles to do so. If she was not dead, then she was trapped in the belly of a beast large enough to devour her ship and all its crew.
Before long, that began to look attractive, too. If it was true, if she had been eaten and was somehow still alive, then death was still to come. Anything was better than the nightmare eternity whose vast futility now unfolded before her.
She found it possible to weep without a body. With no tears or sobs, no burning in the throat, Cirocco wept hopelessly. She became a child in the dark, holding the hurt inside herself. She felt her mind going again, welcomed it, and she bit her tongue.
Warm blood flowed in her mouth. She swam in it with the desperate fear and hunger of a small fish in a strange salt sea. She was a blind worm, just a mouth with hard round teeth and a swollen tongue, groping for that wonderful taste of blood which dispersed even as she sought it.
Frantically, she bit again, and was rewarded by a fresh spurt of red. Can you taste a color? she wondered. But she didn’t care. It hurt, gloriously.
The pain carried her into her past. She lifted her face from the broken dials and shattered windscreen of her small plane and felt the wind chill blood in her open mouth. She had bitten her tongue. She put her hand to her mouth and two red-filmed teeth fell out. She looked at them, not understanding where they had come from. Weeks later, checking out of the hospital, she found them in the pocket of her parka. She kept them in a box on her bedside table for the times she woke up with the deadly quiet wind whispering to her. The second engine is dead, and there’s nothing but trees and snow down there. She would pick up the box and rattle it. I survived.
But that was years ago, she reminded herself.
—as her face throbbed. They were removing the bandages. So cinematic. It’s a damn shame I can’t see it. Expectant faces gathered around—camera cuts quickly among them—dirty gauze falling beside the bed, layer upon layer unwinding—and then … why … why, Doctor … she’s beautiful.
But she hadn’t been. They had told her what to expect. Two monstrous shiners and puffed, angry red skin. The features were intact, there were no scars, but she was no more beautiful than she had ever been. The nose still looked vaguely like a hatchet, and so what? It hadn’t been broken, and her pride would not allow her to have it changed for purely cosmetic reasons.
(Privately, she hated the nose, and thought that it, along with her he
ight, had secured her command of Ringmaster. There had been pressure to select a woman, but those who decided such things could still not put a pretty five-footer in command of an expensive spaceship.)
Expensive spaceship.
Cirocco, you’re wandering again. Bite your tongue.
She did, and tasted blood—
—and saw the frozen lake rush up to meet her, felt her face hit the panel, lifted her head from shattered glass which promptly tumbled down a bottomless well. Her seat belt held her above the abyss. A body slipped through the ruins and she reached out for his boot …
She bit again, hard, and felt something in her hand. Ages passed, and she felt something touching her knee. She put the two sensations together and realized she had touched herself.
She had a slippery one-woman orgy in the dark. She was delirious with love for the body that she now re-discovered. She curled tight, licked and bit everything she could reach while her hands pinched and pulled. She was smooth and hairless, slick as an eel.
A thick, almost jellied liquid rippled through her nostrils when she tried to breathe. It was not unpleasant; not even frightening once she was used to it.
And there was sound. It was a slow bass, and it had to be her heartbeat.
She could touch nothing but her own body, no matter how she stretched. She tried swimming for a while, but could not tell if she was getting anywhere.
While pondering what to do next, she fell asleep.
Waking was a gradual, uncertain process. For a time she could not tell if she was dreaming or conscious. Biting herself didn’t help. She could dream a bite, couldn’t she?
Come to think of that, how could she sleep at a time like this? Having thought of that, she was no longer sure she had slept at all. It was becoming rather problematic, she realized. The differences in states of consciousness were tiny with so little sensation to give them shape. Sleeping, dreaming, daydreaming, sanity, madness, alertness, drowsiness; she had no context to give any of them meaning.
She could hear her terror in the increased rate of her heartbeat. She was going to go crazy, and she knew it. Fighting it, she held tenaciously to the personality she had reconstructed from the whirlwind of madness.