Diving into the Wreck du-1

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  They met in his VIP cabin. It was large and lovely, with a bed the size of her quarters. But he wasn’t interested in sex, although they had some.

  He ordered food for them—an astonishing meal for a place this remote. Yet he didn’t enjoy the food. He picked at it, letting much of it go to waste. She couldn’t—she hadn’t had a meal this good since she was stationed here.

  But he waited until she was finished before he spoke.

  “How do you do it?” he asked. “How do you save lives when you know they’ll just go to waste?”

  She didn’t understand what he meant. “Go to waste?”

  “Most of your patients here, they’ll get sent back out and they’ll die out there. Or they’ll go home and they won’t be the same. Their families will no longer know them. Their lives will be different.”

  “But not wasted,” she said.

  He kept picking at the food. He wouldn’t look at her. “How do you know?”

  “How do you?” she asked.

  He shrugged.

  “Most of these soldiers I see, they’re children,” she said. “They’ll go home and remake their lives.”

  He shrugged again. “What about career military?”

  She set her own fork down and pushed her plate away. She realized then she had to pay attention to this conversation, that it seemed to be about one thing and was really about another.

  “Are you worried about what’ll happen to you after the ceremonies?” she asked.

  He shook his head, but he still didn’t look up. He was developing a bald spot near his crown, and he hadn’t paid for enhancements. The small circle of skin made him seem vulnerable in a way she’d never noticed before.

  “This isn’t about me,” he said, but she didn’t believe him.

  “You can stay in the military,” she said. “They need planners. Even in peacetime, they’ll need a standing army. Governments always do.”

  “Seriously, Nola,” he said with some irritation. “It’s not about me.”

  “What is it about then?” she asked.

  He shook his head again. The movement was small, almost involuntary, as if he were speaking to himself instead of her.

  “Your units? The people under your command?”

  He kept shaking his head.

  “Your injured?”

  “The dead,” he said softly.

  She was silent for a long time, hoping he would elaborate. But he didn’t. So she struggled to understand.

  “We can’t help them,” she said. “Even now with the technology that we have, the knowledge that we have, we can’t help them. We just try to prevent death.”

  “And how do you do that?” he asked, raising his head. “How do you know who’s worthy?”

  She frowned. She was a doctor. She had been all her adult life. “I don’t choose the worthy ones. That’s not my decision.”

  “I’ve seen triage,” he said. “You pick. You always pick.”

  Her breath caught.

  “I don’t choose by worthiness,” she said softly. “I choose by my skill level. I choose by time. Who will survive the intervention? Who will take the least amount of time so that I can get to other injured? Who will be the least amount of work?”

  That last made her face flush. She’d never admitted it to someone else before—at least not to someone who wasn’t a doctor, someone who wasn’t really faced with those decisions.

  “That’s how you pick who’s worthy,” he said.

  His words made her flush deepen.

  “Doesn’t that bother you? Don’t you look at the ones you didn’t even try to save, the ones you sacrificed for the others, and wonder about them? Don’t you sometimes think you made the wrong choice?”

  Her face was so warm now that it actually hurt.

  “No.” She wanted to say that with confidence, but her voice was small, smaller than she’d ever heard it around him. “If I thought I always made the wrong choice, I couldn’t do my job.”

  “But in the wee hours, when you’re alone … ?”

  She was staring at him. He hadn’t looked up once.

  After a moment, he shook his head a third time, as if he were arguing with himself.

  “Never mind,” he said. “I’m just tired.”

  Which gave her an excuse to leave.

  She had no idea it would be the last time she’d see him. The next day, he had left the outpost.

  And she never heard from him again.

  “I’m sorry,” I say after giving her a moment to return from the memory. “I don’t see how all of that meant he didn’t plan to go to the ceremony. I don’t see how this relates to the Room of Lost Souls.”

  She raises her eyebrows in surprise. I get the distinct feeling she has just decided I’m dumb.

  “He wasn’t thinking about the future,” she says. “He was thinking about the past.”

  “I got that,” I say, and hope the words aren’t too defensive. “But he makes no mention of the ceremonies or of the Room. So I’m not sure how you made the connection all these years later.”

  A slight frown creases the bridge of her nose. “The Room,” she says, “is a pilgrimage. Some say it’s a sacred place. Others believe only the damned can visit it.”

  My breath catches. I haven’t heard any of that before. Or maybe I have. I used to make it a practice of not listening to stories about the Room because I believed no one could understand that place if they hadn’t been there.

  “All right,” I say, “let’s assume he knew that. How do you know he went there next?”

  “His crew says so.” She crosses her arms.

  “I know that,” I say. “But you found this interchange important. Enlighten me. Why?”

  “Because I was stupid,” she snaps. “He wasn’t talking about me. He was talking about himself. His choices. His way of doing things. His losses. I’m sure he was reflecting on them because everyone expected him to celebrate the end of the Wars.”

  “He should have celebrated,” I say.

  She smiles faintly, then nods. For a moment she looks away. I can see her make a decision. She takes a deep breath and uncrosses her arms.

  “I agreed with you back then. I figured he should have been at his happiest. But he wasn’t so wrong about our jobs. I spent a lot of years as the chief surgeon on a military ship, and mostly I handled minor injuries and not-so-serious illness. But when we were in the middle of a battle, and the wounded kept pouring in, I just reacted.”

  I nod, not wanting her to stop.

  “I worked my ass off,” she says. “And people died.”

  She leans back, and rests her wrist on the side of the table. “I never, ever counted how many people I saved. I still don’t. But I know to the person how many have died under my watch,” she says softly. “I’ll wager Ewing knew too. And each one of those deaths, they take something from you.”

  A little piece of yourself, I almost add. But I don’t want her to think I’m sympathizing falsely, and I’m not willing to reveal as much of myself to her as she has revealed of herself to me.

  “He wouldn’t have been talking about death if he was going to go to those ceremonies,” she says. “He wouldn’t have been looking at the past. He would have been looking toward the future, at what we could build.”

  She sounds so confident. Yet they were just lovers, in passing, on a military outpost. How well did she really know him, after all?

  And how can I ask her that without insulting her further?

  So I try a different tack, partly to take my mind off those irritating questions and partly because I want to know.

  “You said it’s a pilgrimage. You said only the damned can get in.”

  Her frown grows. “Have you never heard of the Room?”

  “I know it,” I say, choosing my words carefully. “I just don’t know the legends.”

  And I should. I have learned that the legends are more important than “facts” or histories or stories they can verify. Because le
gends hold a bit of truth.

  “Do the damned go to get cleansed?” I ask.

  Her mouth closes. She takes a breath, sighs, then gives me that faint smile all over again.

  “Some say the Room bestows forgiveness on those who deserve it.” That faraway look appears in her eyes.

  “And those who don’t?” I ask.

  Tears well. She doesn’t brush at them, doesn’t even seem to notice them.

  “They never come back,” she says. Then she frowns at me. “You think he went for forgiveness, not to disappear.”

  I shrug. “The timing works. If he completed his pilgrimage to the Room, he could have gone to the treaty-signing ceremonies.”

  “With a pure heart,” she whispers.

  “He was a hero,” I say without a trace of irony. “Didn’t he have a pure heart already?”

  And for the first time, she has no answer for me.

  She has led me in a whole new direction. I’m not looking for the remains of a man. I’m looking for something unusual, something special.

  A man has a history, and occasionally he becomes a legend. But a man is rarely special by himself. Sometimes he becomes special in a special time. Sometimes he rises beyond his upbringing to become something new. Sometimes he starts a movement, or alters the course of a country.

  And sometimes—rarely—he changes an entire sector.

  Like Ewing Trekov supposedly did with his friends as they developed a plan for the war.

  But that story implies that he didn’t work alone. That if he had died before he came to this outpost, someone else would have picked up that mantle. That someone might not have performed as well. He—or she— might have done better. There’s no way to know.

  But like all humans, Trekov wasn’t entirely unique.

  The Room of Lost Souls is unique.

  No one knows exactly what it is or how it got to be. No one knows where it started or who built it or why.

  Places develop myths, become legends in ways more powerful than any human being ever can. Because beneath each legendary human is the reminder that he is human, that what makes him special is how he rose above his humanness to become a little bit more than the rest of us.

  Not a lot more. Just a little bit.

  Trekov was a man who had more children than he could count, who made love to women but apparently didn’t love them. A man who cared more about his work than his family.

  A man like so many others.

  A man who just happened to be the right man for the war he found himself in.

  But the Room—the Room existed before humans settled this sector. The Room shows up in the earliest documents from the earliest space travelers.

  And because it’s so old, and because no one knows exactly how it works or why it’s here or how it came to be, myths grew up around it.

  People go on a pilgrimage.

  Smart people, like Ewing Trekov.

  People believe the Room will do something for them. Change something about them. Satisfy something within them.

  The legends around the Room are fraught with danger. Space travelers are warned to stay away from it. I remember that much.

  I heard that much.

  But I’m not sure when. Or where. Or from whom.

  Still, I need to heed my own advice.

  I need to research the thing I think I know the best.

  I need to talk to the one other person who remembers it vividly.

  I have to talk to my own father.

  Much as I don’t want to.

  ~ * ~

  SEVENTEEN

  My father lives halfway across the sector, on a small planet whose only inhabited continent counts itself as one of the losers in the Colonnade Wars.

  He’s lived there for nearly two decades—and it’s a sign of how out of touch we are that I actually had to look that information up.

  My father’s house is a maze of glass, stairs, and steel. From the outside it seems haphazard, rooms on top of rooms, but from the inside, it has a wide-open feel, like the best cruise liners, designed not to take you to a destination but to help you enjoy the journey.

  He built his house in the center of a large blue lake, so at night the water reflected the skies above. If those skies are clear, it seems like he is in space, traveling from one port to another.

  He doesn’t seem surprised to see me. If anything, he’s a little relieved.

  I arrive in the middle of the afternoon, and he insists I stay at his house. I nearly decline until he shows me the guest room. It is at the very top of the house, glass on all sides except the part of the floor that covers the room below. The bed seems to free-float between the blueness of the lake and the blueness of the sky.

  The sun—too close to this planet for my tastes—sends light through the glass, but environmental controls keep the room cool and comfortable. My father shows me where those controls are so I can lessen the gravity if I want.

  It takes me a while to realize that my father’s house is modeled on the station that houses the Room of Lost Souls. We meet in the center room— the room that would be the Room of Lost Souls if we were on that station— and he offers me a meal.

  I decline. I’m too nervous in his presence to eat anything.

  My father is no longer the man I remember, the man who cradled me when I got out of that Room. That man had been in his late thirties, tall and strong and powerful. He’d loved his wife and his daughter, making us the center of his life.

  He’d commanded ships, built an empire of wealth, and still had time for us.

  He abandoned everything to figure out how to get my mother out of that place. His businesses, his friends.

  Me.

  Which makes it so strange to see him now, essentially idle, in this place of openness and reflected light.

  He still looks strong, but he hasn’t bothered with enhancements. His face has lines—sadness lines that turn down his eyes and pinch the corners of his mouth. He has let his hair go completely white, along with his eyebrows, which have become bushy. His mustache—something I considered as much a part of him as his hands—is long gone.

  He makes our greeting awkward by trying to hug me. I won’t let him.

  He acts like he still has affection for me. He does make it clear that he has followed my career—as much as he can through what little I make public.

  But he has respected my wishes—the wishes I screamed at him the last time I ran away from my grandparents—and has stayed out of my life.

  “You sent Riya Trekov to me,” I say.

  I can’t sit in the chair he’s offered me. I’m too restless in his presence, so I pace in the large room. The glass here opens onto the other rooms. Through their glass walls I can see still more rooms, and at the very end, the lake. Looking at it through all this glass makes it seem far away, and not real. It looks like a holograph of a lake, the kind you’d see on the distance ships of my childhood.

  “I figured if anyone could help Riya, you could.” His voice is the same, deep and warm and just a little nasal.

  I shake my head. “You’re the one who has done all the research on the Room.”

  “But you’re the one who has dived the most dangerous wrecks ever found.”

  I turn toward him then. He sits in the very center of the room. His chair is made of frosted glass, and the cushions that protect his skin are a matching white. He looks like he has risen from the floor—a creature of glass and sunlight.

  “You think this is like a wreck?” I ask. “Wrecks are known. They’re filled with space and emptiness. They have corners and edges and debris, but they’re part of this universe.”

  “You think the Room isn’t?” He folds his hands and rests his chin on his knuckles.

  “I don’t know what it is. You’re the one who has spent his life studying the damn thing.”

  So much for trying to hide my bitterness toward his choices.

  He grimaces, but nods, an acknowledgment that my bitterness has its re
asons.

  “Yes,” he says. “I’ve studied it. I’ve traveled to it countless times. I’ve sent people in there. I’ve repeated the same experiments that have been tried since it was discovered. None of them work.”

  “So why do you think Riya Trekov’s device will work?” I ask.

  “Because I was with her on one of the missions,” he says. “I watched people she paid go in and come back out.”

  “Empty-handed,” I say.

  He nods.

  “Yet she thinks someone can bring her father out.”

  “She might be right,” he says.

  “And if he can come out, so can Mother.”

  “Yes.” The word is soft. He lifts his chin off his folded hands. The knuckles have turned white.

  “If you believe this and you think I’m the one who can bring a lost soul out, how come you didn’t ask me to do this yourself?”

  “I did,” he says. “You turned me down.”

  I snort and sink into one of the nearby chairs. He’s right; he did contact me. I had forgotten it among his many summonses, all of which I ignored. But this one had been his last, a long plea explaining that he not only had a way into the Room of Lost Souls, he had a way to survive it.

  “When I was a kid, you said you never wanted me to go back in there,” I say, no longer trying to be polite. “You discouraged me from even going near the place, remember?”

  I had been fifteen and full of myself. I’d run away from my grandparents half a dozen times. They were in constant mourning for my mother, and believed I was no substitute. It was pretty clear that they blamed me for her loss.

  The final time, my father came after me, and I told him I could get my mother. I was the only one who’d come out alive. He owed me the chance to try.

  He had refused.

  I left him—and my grandparents—and never contacted any of them again. Although he kept trying to reach me. And I kept glancing at, then refusing, his messages.

  “I couldn’t risk letting you go in again,” he says. “We barely got you out that first time.”

  “Yet you recommended me when Riya Trekov came to call. Because she has a way out or because you don’t care anymore?”