Eclipse Three

by edited by Jonathan Strahan

  I've asked to please not be disturbed for a couple of hours, and I've been promised my request will be honored. That should give me the time I need to finish this.

  Dr. Teasdale, I will readily confess that one of the reasons it's taken me so long to reach this point is the fact that words fail. It's an awful cliché, I know, but also a point I cannot stress strongly enough. There are sights and experiences to which the blunt and finite tool of human language are not equal. I know this, though I'm no poet. But I want that caveat understood. This is not what happened aboard Pilgrimage; this is the sky seen through a window blurred by driving rain. It's the best I can manage, and it's the best you'll ever get. I've said all along, if the technology existed to plug in and extract the memories from my brain, I wouldn't deign to call it rape. Most of the people who've spent so much time and energy and money trying to prise from me the truth about the fate of Pilgrimage and its crew, they're only scientists, after all. They have no other aphrodisiac but curiosity. As for the rest, the spooks and politicians, the bureaucrats and corporate shills, those guys are only along for the ride, and I figure most of them know they're in over their heads.

  I could make of it a fairy tale. It might begin:

  Once upon a time, there was a woman who lived in New York. She was an anthropologist, and shared a tiny apartment in downtown Brooklyn with her lover. And her lover was a woman named Amery Domico, who happened to be a molecular geneticist, exobiologist and also an astronaut. They had a cat and a tank of tropical fish. They'd always wanted a dog, but the apartment was too small. They could have afforded a better place to live, a loft in midtown Manhattan, perhaps, north and east of the flood zone, but the anthropologist was happy enough with Brooklyn, and her lover was usually on the road, anyway. Besides, walking a dog would have been a lot of trouble.

  No. That's not working. I've never been much good with irony. And I'm better served by the immediacy of present tense. So, instead:

  "Turn around, Merrick," she says. "You've come so far, and there is so little time."

  And I do as she tells me. I turn towards the voice, towards the airlock's open inner hatch. There's no sign of Amery, or anyone else, for that matter. The first thing I notice, stepping from the brightly lit airlock, is that the narrow, heptagonal corridor beyond is mostly dark. The second thing I notice is the mist. I know at once that it is mist, not smoke. It fills the hallway from deck to ceiling, and, even with the blue in-floor path lighting, it's hard to see more than a few feet ahead. The mist swirls thickly around me, like Halloween phantoms, and I'm about to ask Amery where it's coming from, what it's doing here, when I notice the walls.

  Or, rather, when I notice what's growing on the walls. I'm fairly confident I've never seen anything with precisely that texture before. It half reminds me (but only half) of the rubbery blades and stipes of kelp. It's almost the same color as kelp, too, some shade that's not quite brown, nor green, nor a very dark purple. It glimmers wetly, as though it's sweating, or secreting mucus. I stop and stare, simultaneously alarmed and amazed and revolted. It is revolting, extremely so, this clinging material covering over and obscuring almost everything. I look up and see that it's also growing on the ceiling. In places, long tendrils of it hang down like dripping vines. Dr. Teasdale, I want so badly to describe these things, this waking nightmare, in much greater detail. I want to describe it perfectly. But, as I've said, words fail. For that matter, memory fades. And there's so much more to come.

  A few thick drops of the almost colorless mucus drip from the ceiling onto my visor, and I gag reflexively. The sensors in my EVA suit respond by administering a dose of some potent antiemetic. The nausea passes quickly, and I use my left hand to wipe the slime away as best I can.

  I follow the corridor, going very slowly because the mist is only getting denser and, as I move farther away from the airlock, I discover that the stuff growing on the walls and ceiling is also sprouting from the deck plates. It's slippery, and squelches beneath my boots. Worse, most of the path lighting is now buried beneath it, and I switch on the magspots built into either side of my helmet. The beams reach only a short distance into the gloom.

  "You're almost there," Amery says, Amery or the AI speaking with her stolen voice. "Ten yards ahead, the corridor forks. Take the right fork. It leads directly to the transhab module."

  "You want to tell me what's waiting in there?" I ask, neither expecting, nor actually desiring, an answer.

  "Nothing is waiting," Amery replies. "But there are many things we would have you see. There's not much time. You should hurry."

  And I do try to walk faster, but, despite the suit's exoskeleton and gyros, almost lose my footing on the slick deck. Where the corridor forks, I go right, as instructed. The habitation module is open, the hatch fully dilated, as though I'm expected. Or maybe it's been left open for days or months or years. I linger a moment on the threshold. It's so very dark in there. I call out for Amery. I call out for anyone at all, but this time there's no answer. I try my comms again, and there's not even static. I fully comprehend that in all my life, I have never been so alone as I am at this moment, and, likely, I never will be again. I know, too, with a sudden and unwavering certainty, that Amery Domico is gone from me forever, and that I'm the only human being aboard Pilgrimage.

  I take three or four steps into the transhab, but stop when something pale and big around as my forearm slithers lazily across the floor directly in front of me. If there was a head, I didn't see it. Watching as it slides past, I think of pythons, boas, anacondas, though, in truth, it bears only a passing similarity to a snake of any sort.

  "You will not be harmed, Merrick," Amery says from a speaker somewhere in the darkness. The voice is almost reassuring. "You must trust that you will not be harmed."

  "What was that?" I ask.

  "Soon now, you will see," the voice replies. "We have ten million children. Soon, we will have ten million more. We are pleased that you have come to say goodbye."

  "They want to know what's happened," I say, breathing too hard, much too fast, gasping despite the suit's ministrations. "At Jupiter, what happened to the ship? Where's the crew? Why is Pilgrimage in orbit around Mars?"

  I turn my head to the left, and where there were once bunks, I can only make out a great swelling or clot of the kelp-like growth. Its surface swarms with what I, at first, briefly mistake for insects.

  "I didn't come to say goodbye," I whisper. "This is a retrieval mission, Amery. We've come to take you . . . " and I trail off, unable to complete the sentence, too keenly aware of its irrelevance.

  "Merrick, are you beginning to see?"

  I look away from the swelling and the crawling things that aren't insects, and take another step into the habitation module.

  "No, Amery. I'm not. Help me to see. Please."

  "Close your eyes," she says, and I do. And when I open them again, I'm lying in bed with her. There's still an hour or so left before dawn, and we're lying in bed, naked together beneath the blankets, staring up through the apartment's skylight. It's snowing. This is the last night before Amery leaves for Cape Canaveral, the last time I see her, because I've refused to be present at the launch or even watch it online. She has her arms around me, and one of the big, ungainly hovers is passing low above our building. I do my best to pretend that its complex array of landing beacons is actually stars.

  Amery kisses my right cheek, and then her lips brush lightly against my ear. "We could not understand, Merrick, because we were too far and could not remember," she says, quoting Joseph Conrad. The words roll from her tongue and palate like the spiraling snowflakes tumbling down from that tangerine sky. "We were traveling in the night of first ages, of those ages that are gone, leaving hardly a sign, and no memories."

  Once, Dr. Teasdale, when Amery was sick with the flu, I read her most of The Heart of Darkness. She always liked when I read to her. When I came to that passage, she had me find a pencil and underline it, so that she could return to it later.
>
  "The earth seemed unearthly," she says, and I blink, dismissing the illusion. I'm standing near the center of the transhab now, and in the stark white light from my helmet, I see what I've been brought here to see. Around me, the walls leak, and every inch of the module seems alive with organisms too alien for any earthborn vernacular. I've spent my adult life describing artifacts and fossil bones, but I will not even attempt to describe the myriad of forms that crawled and skittered and wriggled through the ruins of Pilgrimage. I would fail if I did, and I would fail utterly.

  "We want you to know we had a choice," Amery says. "We want you to know that, Merrick. And what is about to happen, when you leave this ship, we want you to know that is also of our choosing."

  I see her, then, all that's left of her, or all that she's become. The rough outline of her body, squatting near one of the lower bunks. Her damp skin shimmers, all but indistinguishable from the rubbery substance growing throughout the vessel. Only her skin is not so smooth, but pocked with countless oozing pores or lesions. Though the finer features of her face have been obliterated—there is no mouth remaining, no eyes, only a faint ridge that was her nose—I recognize her beyond any shadow of a doubt. She is rooted to that spot, her legs below the knees, her arms below the elbow, simply vanishing into the deck. There is constant, eager movement from inside her distended breasts and belly. And where the cleft of her sex once was . . . I don't have the language to describe what I saw there. But she bleeds life from that impossible wound, and I know that she has become a daughter of the oily black cloud that Pilgrimage encountered near Ganymede, just as she is mother and father to every living thing trapped within the crucible of that ship, every living thing but me.

  "There isn't any time left," the voice from the AI says calmly, calmly but sternly. "You must leave now, Merrick. All available resources on this craft have been depleted, and we must seek sanctuary or perish."

  I nod, and turn away from her, because I understand as much as I'm ever going to understand, and I've seen more than I can bear to remember. I move as fast as I dare across the transhab and along the corridor leading back to the airlock. In less than five minutes, I'm safely strapped into my seat on the taxi again, decoupling and falling back towards Yastreb-4. A few hours later, while I'm waiting out my time in decon, Commander Yun tells me that Pilgrimage has fired its main engines and broken orbit. In a few moments, it will enter the thin Martian atmosphere and begin to burn. Our AI has plotted a best-guess trajectory, placing the point of impact within the Tharsis Montes, along the flanks of Arsia Mons. He tells me that the exact coordinates, -5.636 ° N, 241.259 ° E, correspond to one of the collapsed cavern roofs dotting the flanks of the ancient volcano. The pit named Jeanne, discovered way back in 2007.

  "There's not much chance of anything surviving the descent," he says. I don't reply, and I never tell him, nor anyone else aboard the Yastreb-4, what I saw during my seventeen minutes on Pilgrimage.

  And there's no need, Dr. Teasdale, for me to tell you what you already know. Or what your handlers know. Which means, I think, that we've reached the end of this confession. Here's the feather in your cap. May you choke on it.

  Outside my hospital window, the rain has stopped. I press the call button, and wait on the nurses with their shiny yellow pills and the white pills flecked with gray, their jet sprays and hollow needles filled with nightmares and, sometimes, when I'm very lucky, dreamless sleep.

  Dulce Domum

  Ellen Kushner

  Come see my band, he'd say, and they pretty much always did. —Europe, huh? she asked languidly. They were lying in her bed, which was where he liked to be after the show, after they'd seen the band. Good sex, and the comfort of warm skin, and just enough talking to make it real.

  —R&B goes over big there. And they love Todd's chops: authentic African-American. They don't need to know he went to Buckley with us and played lacrosse.

  —Buckley, huh? She named some friends she said had gone there, and he knew one or two, but not well. A lot of those kids had gone away to boarding school after ninth grade, while he stayed in Manhattan with his family.

  —So do you like it there, in Europe?

  He stretched. —It's OK.

  —So do you, like, spend a lot of time in any one city?

  She wanted to know if he had a girlfriend there. Already she was trying to figure out if he was serious material. Oops, time to go. He kissed her, and she tasted very sweet. —Just here, he said, and kissed her again. —New York is home.

  New York was home, but in New York the band was no big deal. So they played in a few bars here, and they had dinner with their families, and escorted a friend's sister to a fundraiser for art or literacy or wildlife, depending, and maybe took a niece or a cousin's kid to see "Nutcracker." Then the band went on the road again, the road across the sea, where playing the chords in tight jeans was enough, knowing home was always back here, waiting for him to take his place. His family was here, colorful and stable, in the stone castle with big windows on the Park. A window would always be open for him to fly back through, no matter how big he got, or how long he was away.

  He fell asleep as soon as he'd come, and she didn't wake him, which was nice of her. His eyes snapped open at first light. It was an old East Village apartment with leaky venetian blinds. He was pulling on his jeans when he heard her say, Jet lag? and when he turned around she was spread out like a kid on the playground being an airplane, sleepily purring a sort of phlegmy Vroom, vroom, so he fell back onto her and improvised something about, Be my jet plane, baby, ba-dum, ba-dum, Gonna make your engine scream, so together they achieved one of those moments of intimacy that promise either a relationship's worth of in-jokes, or guaranteed embarrassment next time you meet.

  He took her phone number, but he doubted he'd be back.

  He called her late on Christmas Eve. She was home. She said, Come on up, which was good because he was standing at a payphone two blocks away, his cellphone deliberately run down, and it was raining.

  She was wearing sweatpants and a fleece bathrobe with moons on it. The "I don't care if I'm attractive or not" gambit. He called her on it by falling to his knees before her, singing softly, "Oh, holy night, the stars are brightly shiiiiining . . . ." So she took the cue and undid her sash.

  In the castle where he grew up, two kings ruled. It was a brown stone fortress at the edge of Central Park; on rainy days their nanny would send his sister and him running up and down the back stairwell, to work off energy. That was their tower, the northeast corner of the big building. A famous musician lived on another floor, and sometimes in his tuxedo on his way to the Philharmonic he would use the back stairs, too, but they knew it was really their tower.

  —You're not drunk, she said when she tasted his mouth. She seemed a little surprised. She must really like him.

  He made an effort. —I'm sorry, he said. —I was just, you know, kind of wondering if, if you—

  Her fingers were on his lips. —Shh. I know. I mean, I don't know, but I kind of do.

  She let him fall on her, graceless and helpless. She was so warm, so alive.

  He was allowed to think of them as kings. They were both golden, powerful men with strong wills and interesting work. When he was older, he'd made one joke about queens, and only one, and only once.

  She wriggled around and took him in her mouth.

  —Don't, he said. —Not now.

  —Right. She came back up, and smooched his ear. —Full frontal?

  He smiled in her hair. —Yeah.

  And they were there right now, he thought, or tried not to think. There, in their castle, high above the Park, wondering when he was going to turn up to drink eggnog and light the fire and see the tree. If they were thinking of him at all. If they even had a tree this year.

  He kept the last of his weight on his elbows, but he touched as much of her as he could, his front to hers, fitting her curves and pressing them down for the sense that there was something that could bear him,
and she could.

  They would ask his sister if she'd heard from him. They never pried, but when it came to something they both wanted, they didn't really care about privacy all that much. They didn't care that his phone was dead, or why.

  "Kay doesn't let his battery run down."

  "Not usually, no."

  "Is he coming?"

  He was. But not there.

  —But we aren't Oy Vey Jews, she was explaining to him. He must have apologized for bothering her on Christmas Eve, and started her on her story: —My grandparents were, like, all Philharmonic subscription, Opera Guild, Metropolitan Museum members, and my mom went to Vassar . . . You know.