1. Voices From Between Stars
The blackness between stars is a bottomless kind, and heavy. It’s loneliness at its most profound and astonishing. It’s enough to break a man when he considers himself in relation to it.
He listened to the echo of his words rebound from the high walls, though he hadn’t spoken at all.
The deep silence returned quickly to the observation deck. He was weary but wakeful with troubled thoughts. Everyone was asleep. The lights everywhere dimmed to night-time luminescence. The station slept, the void waited. In the uneasy peace he fretted.
Hello.
He spun, dashing an elbow against the porthole glass in his fear. He looked across the shadow-drenched room: he was alone. Where the speaker was he didn’t know but he knew he’d indeed perceived the voice it was an unfamiliar voice belonging to no man or woman of his sparse crew.
Again: Hello.
He flung himself the length of the wall. The instinctual gesture, hastened by the reflexive fear he felt at that alien voice, itself unnerved him. Arriving at the console owning the corner of the room, his hand moved to touch the prominent crimson button in its centre.
Stop. Do not touch it. Do not wake them. There is no reason.
Again he raked the large room with eyes grown accustomed to the uncertain lighting conditions but questioning every console and curvature of hull made strange and threatening through the deception of shadows.
“Johnson?” he called in a tremulous voice, hand trembling on the air over the console. “Horace? Simmons?” But of course he knew it was no member of his crew, each of whom slept and dreamed then. It was only ever he who paced the station during the lonely hours.
Stay your hand. Let them sleep. They are tired. Let us speak.
He trembled. He considered his sanity after years of interstellar travel and limited social contact outside of the men and women with whom he journeyed and who were potentially crumbling mentally as he might be. He pondered the last five years stationed where he was and the toll this type of extended isolation must take on the mind, the senses.
“Where are you?” he repeated. “Who are you? How did you get inside this station? We received no transmissions, no notification of visitors. Come out if you want to talk.”
No answer came. In the great stillness he felt his breathing grow calmer, though a cold sweat chilled him beneath his suit.
He peered through the porthole glass near at hand. The blackness seemed deeper then, beyond measure as it was always and yet more bottomless still. An endless field of ink. Light years of abyss. A distant nebula cast its forlorn glow amid the colossal dark, appearing weak, falteringly casting its light.
Somewhere out there he’d once had a wife: this thought came to him then as it often did. Perhaps she still lived somewhere, alone, too, among all the void.
He felt his eyelids as a great weight then. He was weary, despite his uncanny predicament and fear. He needed sleep, too, but knew this to be a fruitless notion. Even the sleep inducers didn’t help him anymore. He hadn’t slept for years.
“I said: who are you? Come out if you want to speak with me. I’m the captain here. This station is under my command. Please.” He cringed at the plaintive note in this final word, effectively crushing his attempted voice of authority. He shuddered at his faltering courage. In that moment – queerly time-stilled and growing more somnolent as seconds passed – he considered things such as past missions and his myriad career stations and those things he’d left behind him throughout the long years. He felt time in his skin, within his bones. It blanched his hair. It liver-spotted his hands. It muddled memory. It bowed him deckwards. It was the weight of the universe he carried inside himself, he understood at last.
And then the voice was with him again.
Yes. Let us speak. We will speak of things great and things small.
A queer peace overcame him. The initial apprehension he’d experienced while in the presence of the inexplicable speaker seeped from him. He stepped from the console and its array of warning communications. An intense curiosity – the likes of which he recalled from long, long ago, during his nascent days of travel and exploration, before concepts of infinity and hopelessness became birthed in him – arrived with his newfound serenity.
He glided across the room. He eased himself into a chair. He swivelled it to face the windows lining the length of the opposite wall. He waited. He was patient. The universe slept. The universe slumbered and he was prepared to converse with its dream-voice. He was prepared to speak with any voice then that called to him from the endless kilometres and silence, and which might provide him answers to the questions that hounded him and kept him haunting his station in the bottomless hours, keeping perpetual vigil at portholes everywhere.
2. Only Another Mote Swallowed
Are you prepared to begin our conversation?
The captain ruminated. Wonderment touched him. Under its influence he said, “Let’s begin by you telling me who you are, and why you’ve come here, and how you came to arrive here.”
Silence. Only the low machine-hum of the walls and ceiling, the subtle pulse of the station’s electrical heart reaching through the floor and touching the astronaut through his boots. Then:
No. Let us begin this way: Tell me who you are, and why you are here, and how you have come to be here.
The astronaut shuddered. He thought. He knew not how to answer the voice. He thought with great concentration. A distant ache awakened in his temples. A moment later he whispered, “I…I don’t know.” In the wake of his admission a strange relief filled him. He sighed audibly. His heart – which had quickened to a racing pulse – fell back into its lazy rhythm. He waited, anxious. He was eager – and fearful – to learn the answer to these questions.
The voice was there again then.
Yes. These puzzles you cannot decipher.
A touch of resentment touched the man. The certainty of the voice and its claim vexed him. He was an intelligent man, of many years’ experience in a variety of disciplines. He was a man of science, dedicated to its principles and tenets. The deciphering of puzzles had always seemed an essential component of who he was.
He said, “I’m here to…to study, and to learn. I’m a scientist.”
The voice, though still solemn, yet seemed to stab the air.
What have you learned?
He thought. He fidgeted in his chair. Its leather groaned mournfully. After a moment he gave his answer. “I’ve seen great things,” admitted the astronaut. “Things of wonder.”
Have you? What have you seen?
He thought a moment. He considered the many races he’d encountered in his decades of exploration. He recalled the myriad creatures he’d examined. He considered the friendships he’d made (and, against his will, thought also of those he’d lost through the years). He remembered pleasant times, exciting times, days of progress in the duties of science and discovery to which he’d dedicated himself.
He said, “I’ve seen so many things. I’m blessed, truly, to have seen so much. And I’ve done things. Good things. I’ve done good deeds and am proud of them.”
Oh? And what good have you done? Tell me.
The astronaut thought. His head throbbed with his fervent concentration. He was a man of science and therefore had many stories to recall. There had been days of adventure, young and hot-blooded, and nights of discovery and experiment. Faces and landscapes flitted across his mind’s eye. A vision of fire and courage seized his roaming thoughts. He latched onto this. He said:
“I once saved a man’s life on a colony world, Bruntell-IV, thirty years ago or more. An elderly man, he’d been farming his plots. A geyser had spouted under his feet. He’d been blinded and burned badly, and then swallowed by the torn ground. I’d been on a hazard team there. We arrived, and I was first to follow him down. Another eruption – a farm or two down the line – caused a ripple that hit our hole. There was rock fall everywhere. There was no room for anothe
r rescuer to climb down with me. I found the farmer deep down. He was hysterical with pain. He was…He’d been burned badly. The smell of it was…the smell was awful; cooked meat, but different. Like nothing I’d ever smelled, it…I calmed him, somehow, I don’t know how but I did. No, I remember: I told him about his family, waiting above. How they were waiting for him, worrying for him. A wife and daughter, I think that was the thing that calmed him. He became brave like I asked him to be for me. He cried the entire climb up, but he was brave and didn’t scream or fight me despite his huge pain. We made the climb but barely, before another geyser fired down the line, nearer this time, and we ran. All of us together, family and our team, running through the fiery fields; they had to move the farm afterwards, it became so bad in their area. The land just burned up completely. But…I saved him. I saved the farmer. I…This is one good thing I’ve done. There are others, of course, but this one…This is one good thing that I’m proud to have done. I gave a family back their father. I brought him up from the hole and…this…This is good.”
In the wake of his story, the astronaut shivered, noting the returned tone of entreaty his words carried. Misplaced, surely, but then he’d never felt so uncertain of the deed’s significance – and his own valour – when recalling the tale in the past. He waited, chilled. Before him through the porthole glass the darkness seemed to flicker at the stars’ edges, hungrily.
The voice was there. It said:
No. You have done no good. Never in all your life have you done anything. This gesture you describe is meaningless, as invisible as your existence.
The astronaut rose with a show of indignation, eyes livid, fists clenched at his sides, but felt the reflexive nature of the gesture even as he played it out. He fell back into his chair a moment later with a disheartened-sounding sigh from its leather cushion, his brief ire evaporated. A yet more pervasive feeling of weariness came over him. He was drained of what little energy he’d owned earlier. He felt drained in a deeper way than he’d ever felt before.
He resigned himself to his defeated mood. In the aftermath of the voice he only murmured, despondent, “Then…why? What’s the point of…Why would we try, if...Why am I…Why am I…?” And realizing he’d already spoken the question which plagued him he repeated with finality: “Why am I?”
A cold laughter sounded in the machine quiet. Surrounded by it, he suddenly thought of his childhood home, so far in time and space. He envisioned his little old house in the quiet county where he’d lived with his mother and father and younger brother before the nearby river claimed him, drowning him on a winter’s afternoon when he’d slipped through a fissure in its ice floor and been lost. He thought particularly of snow in these old times: snow drifting from the evening sky while he watched entranced from his bedroom window, with his brother at his elbow in the before-years, just as spellbound by the phantom-like drifts gathering outdoors as he was; and then, in the after-years, alone in his window aerie, but still watching the descending sheets of ice as if seeking to decipher something from them before succumbing reluctantly to drowsiness and going to bed.
The laugher fell like snow in the observation deck, unabated. He shivered beneath it. He flinched before it, as if it carried wind with it. His breath drifted thickly, a ghostly stream like ectoplasm exiting his mouth. Anger ignited in him again at that inclement clamour, utterly indifferent to his plight and to the confusions and emotions seizing him all at once.
“Why are you...You’re laughing at me. Don’t laugh at me...Why would you do that when I... I ... I...?”
The laughter grew. It echoed in the air. It stormed about his ears. He shut his eyes against its savage clamour.
The astronaut, suddenly frantic with the need for his query answered, shouted, “Answer me! Why am I here? Why am I? Why am I here? Why am I?”
After an endless moment, the laughter dwindled. The voice came again and it said:
You ask why. But how can I answer you? How can I answer you when you would never understand the answer?
A notion came to the man: if this was the essential him – this mote-like insignificance – then so be it. As a man stunned by his loneliness, and made incalculably desperate by it, he had a simple plea to make and nothing else.
“Tell me! Fuck you and tell me! Please will you tell me!”
The laughter dwindled incrementally, as if it had left his side and drifted further across the deck; a moment of stillness in which the astronaut trembled and sweat cold sweat. Then the voice was there with him again.
You wish an answer to why. Here is one answer: We do not visit you anymore. Nor will we ever again, except for perhaps in many and many millions of years, treating you ever as curiosity. We grew quickly bored with you. As a species you grew tiresome to watch, even if initially we were curious; your development slow and your inclination towards the primitive elements of hatred and violence disheartening. We grew weary of watching you early on. And, of course, all of what I have said to you now is a lie.
The man, who had been clinging to every word, trembled in the newly descended silence. A gasp left him. He shook his head. He was confused, aghast, angry and humbled within the presence of the voice that lay beyond explanation or reason.
“Do you mean to say...that…you’re not – that you were – “
The laughter returned to claim the room. Though it was a human trait, its icy sound held no humanity whatever.
The astronaut reeled in the wake of the revelation. “You lied? You lied about – none of that is true?”
No.
“You never...You never came, and watched over us?”
No.
“You won’t return to us? Because you never-“
No.
“Are you even...Do you even come from out there?” Here the astronaut gestured frantically to the window. The blackness beyond seemed to breathe at the glass. He’d never felt so lonely in all his life. Wifeless and friendless: this state was that which had filled him with loneliness before. Now, though, a new weight was upon him. Now, for the first time in his fifty-eight years, the astronaut understood what it was to be alone in the universe.
No, came his answer.
“Are you from…?” He raised a hand to his temple, too afraid to give voice to the notion of senility or madness having conquered his intellect and reason.
No, came the answer.
“Who are you? What are you? Oh, please…”
A hush in the room. The man trembled. Tears wetted his cheeks. Space licked at the porthole glass.
And:
I am a malicious god. I am lies. I am everything. I am nothing. I am you.
“I don’t understand.” The astronaut wept. He ran his hands through his silvered hair. He shook his head. He was unable to think. Lucidity was too deeply buried beneath the deluge of his tears. “I don’t understand this. I can’t understand this.”
Laughter again. From its midst, words:
At last. You accept the truth of this.
The voice ceased. The room remained quiet but for the sound of the breaking man. Eventually, the astronaut watched space again. Minutes or hours or days he put his gaze into the void. After a time, he considered his companions slumbering at that moment, perhaps walking in dreams much more serene than this. Perhaps their dreams made sense to them. Perhaps their dreams felt right to them and their bodies remained still, at peace, while they roamed in these places of ease.
Suddenly, a queer thought arrived. Perhaps the voracious void on the opposite side of the glass summoned it. Perhaps the conversation he’d taken part in had awakened it from where it might have slept dormant within him. The astronaut whispered, “Will they awaken? My friends? Have you harmed them? Will they awaken?”
Does it matter?
The astronaut sat pondering this question. Outside the window space continued to breathe its cold unfathomable breath. He felt it then inside himself, too: a cold beyond sensation.
He knew then, of course, that it had been
there all along.
3. New Loneliness
He murdered them.
Each caught fragile in sleep. Methodically he made rounds of each sleep capsule in turn. Using a simple butcher’s knife retrieved from the kitchen he whispered open the glass from around them and slit their throats and watched entranced the spurting of blood from their throats. He’d left each of them hurriedly but for Simmons, whom he killed last and who he raped even while she convulsed in the pooling curdle of her blood, eyes like twin moons orbiting an uncannily frenetic dance in the electric darkness. As he committed this act he understood its human character, and remained unmoved by it. Given his new knowledge this was a triviality. Given his new understanding he felt nothing from the act at all, neither pleasure nor self-loathing nor any emotion between these poles.
A realization came to him as he left her bloody and still in her capsule: He was more alone in the space station without them; friends, peers, companions of long years now never to awaken. He was more alone in the wake of this holocaust, with only the wicked or wise voice ghosting his steps and thoughts. He felt his new solitude in his heart. Deeper inside himself than this, too, in some place in which he’d never experienced emotion of any kind until then. He shuddered. He shuddered deeply and despair – true despair, undiluted by lingering traces of his old reserve or naiveté or optimism – awoke in him.
He drifted through the silent halls. The murder-knife he clutched reflexively in his fist. Blood was congealing along the arm of his suit, in the thick hair along the back of his hand. This remnant of his companions he took with him into the bowels of the station. Their memories he took with him, too. Johnson, snow-haired and bespectacled and wearing his wrinkles regally; friend of old since their days serving on hazard teams on multiple worlds; Samson, brilliant and eccentric and as enthused as young scientists came, perennially immersed in his work to the neglect even of satisfying simple needs of the body, seemingly oblivious to the long glances following him from the station’s few women; Simmons: red-haired, full-lipped, his hunger for her unabated since the sole moment they’d shared a clandestine accident together; alone in the kitchen during sleep-hours, both of them alert and perturbed by the lonely months accumulating on the station; sharing a kiss, and then another, and then sex on the floor and afterwards vowing to never bow to temptation again, from respect for their respective families, so far in space but ever close in their thoughts.
His footsteps rang loudly in the corridor. He cringed at their echoes, a reminder that he and no one else heard them.
Then the voice and his loneliness grew.
You are tired. You have not slept in a very long time.
He stopped in his place. Silence. He looked about him. The overheads, set to night-time mode, were dim and suffused the corridor in a somnolent orange glow. He shook his head fiercely but the echo of the voice remained.
He reeled on his way. He felt inebriated, befuddled, and steadied himself with a hand along the rounded wall as he went. When he arrived upon the observation deck once more he crossed immediately to the porthole wall. His breath frosted it. His breathing, ragged, grew calmer while he stared into space.
Countless kilometres away, a blue line crossed the black. A comet wending its way from somewhere to elsewhere. Its flight made him frown. Its icy beauty awakened an ache everywhere. The solitary glow of it in the wasteland before him brought to mind the predicament of his life. He thought of his wife but found, as he’d been finding of late, that he could no longer recall the colour of her eyes, was no longer able to conjure the kind of smile she’d smiled when he might have done something kind for her. Perhaps he’d simply never done anything kind for her at all.
The voice:
You are very, very tired.
He sought to see his wife’s eyes, but found only stars pulsing in the black void.
He plunged the knife blade into his neck. He gasped, cried out. The pain startled him. Blood jetted. Red rivulets ran down the glass. His hands grew sticky in its mire. The pain grew and engulfed him. Distantly he thought how peculiar that the pain, stemming from the knife inside his neck, should travel everywhere throughout his body and reach even his toes in his boots. He placed his fingers around the resin-glazed wooden handle and, struggling with the awkward angle, managed to guide the blade with a violent wrench from its initial point of entry and gouge it through to the front of his throat until the pain became unbearable. He was blinded by it. His vision swam with stars and faces half-remembered: a derelict shipyard like a desiccated wilderness trapped to forever orbit a desolate star; lush-furred herd animals, coats striped with crimson and white, gambolling in a savannah in a world visited once but remaining with him forever for its abundance of natural beauties and sheer, untouched purity and peace; a blackened farmer screaming amid fire and rock; a teenaged girl smiling at him from across a classroom, the same age as him and with his sandy hair colour but owning a beauty surpassing anything incredible that there might have been in him.
Vaguely he sensed his knees touch the deck heavily. He knelt in place, awash in reeling pain. His thoughts were a quagmire. Through their tangled fibres a question struggled to be voiced:
Have I done good?
He thought this while trying to regain his feet, staggering in his place, clutching at the cold glass before him, reddening it everywhere.
The answer floated to him from the blackness encroaching:
No. You have never done good. You could never do good.
Through the red agony a quiet desperation seized him.
Have I done...bad?
The unequivocal answer came:
No. You have done nothing at all.
The voice dimmed even as it spoke, like a light put slowly out. Then it was faded altogether, leaving the astronaut with his new solitude. With it filling him up – blackening his vision, muddying his hearing, devouring him inside in deep places – he slid the length of the glass wall until deepest, deepest sleep finally claimed him.
4. Silent Universe
Hours or days or years later.
Haunting a dimly-lit hallway, he watched through the porthole glass.
A star shifted. A shadow grew in its centre: a ship formed from this. Its engine-fire frosted in the blackness. Minutes and minutes and minutes passed. It drew closer. The nearer it came to the station the more ragged became its appearance, evidence of its having travelled long, and far. It contained stories, he considered, stories and memories within its scarred hull and its many walls and its men and women.
And for what? thought the new astronaut, watching the ship draw ever nearer.
And for what, he found himself thinking forlornly many minutes later when the clamour of the ship attaching itself like a bug to the immense station’s hull sent prolonged, groaning dinosaurian echoes through the many corridors and rooms and decks.
And for what, he thought desperately when, thirty minutes after this, the sounds of heavy footsteps invaded the silence with their echoes reverberating everywhere through the empty station.
And for what, he thought, suddenly calmer, as the group of astronauts drew within sight at the opposite end of the corridor he haunted; striding down the long hallway, their suits bulky and casting horrid shadows before them, the beams from their head-lamps a divine blue cutting away the dark in thin, efficient pieces.
And what for?
No answer came from the blackness, until he gave it with his own voice:
You have come all this way for nothing. There are no answers for you here. You are not meant to know. We are unable to learn.
The astronauts slowed their progress and peered about them, as if suddenly attuned to the great voice of the void surrounding them; or of the immense emptiness of the desolate space station; or as if sensing the ghost of something savage and bloody hiding in the matrix of the station beneath their boots, trapping the echoes of their voices between the stifling walls.
Then, unnerved but confident that they alone owned the derelict
station, they continued on their way, their lights pushing back the shadows.
In the wake of their noisy passage, a voice:
I am a malicious god. I am lies. I am everything. I am nothing. I am you.
Welcome, to these rooms barren but for you.
The GRim
Rob Bleckly
From Out of the Dark Page 5