by Neil Clarke
“Lieutenant, I’d really appreciate it if you not work on any math.” Keesey said.
He had started physical therapy—work on a treadmill, standard weightlifting. It was very boring, but the doctors watched him closely. Maybe in case he started singing when he only meant to move his leg.
He stopped walking. The treadmill powered down. “What?”
“You have books to read, vids to watch. You should avoid mathematics problems.”
He laughed. Navigational math lived in his brain like his own heartbeat; he didn’t even think of it.
Keesey explained: “The mathematics involved in navigation instigated your injury. I don’t want you making it worse.”
“Doctor, what was wrong with my cortical map?”
She consulted her handheld, donned her pleasant demeanor. “I think you might benefit from some social time. Meet some of the other patients so you can realize you’re not alone here.”
He knew he wasn’t alone. He’d seen Morgan.
*
The common room where stabilized patients were allowed to socialize was carpeted, comfortable, and round. It gave an impression of nest-like safety. There were no corners to cower in. A few upholstered chairs occupied one side, some tables the other. The lighting was soft. An orderly stood watch inside the doorway.
Three people wearing hospital jumpsuits sat in the room, all apart from each other. Only one, a shorthaired woman curled up in one of the easy chairs, reading a handheld, looked up when Mitchell and Keesey appeared in the doorway.
The other two, a man and a woman, sat at different tables. The woman’s eyes were closed, and she nodded in time to some tune all her own. The man held a stylus and bent over a handheld datapad, which he marked now and then. There was something odd about him, something small and shrunken. Maybe because he wore a helmet shielding him down to his ears. Mitchell expected him to start banging his head against the table at any moment.
Mitchell whispered to Keesey, “What’s the point of socializing if no one talks to each other?”
“Have a little patience.” She gestured to the man and woman at the tables. “Communication is difficult for Jaspar and Sonia, so they’ve isolated themselves. That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t spend time in proximity with others. But here—this is Dora.”
No ranks, no surnames. Their old lives had been thoroughly erased here. He wanted his uniform back.
She led him to the side of the room where the woman watched them expectantly. “Dora? I’d like you to meet our new resident. This is Mitchell.”
“Hello, Mitchell.” Dora, head propped on her hand, smiled up at him.
Mitchell gave a mental sigh of relief. She sounded normal. Friendly, even. Not prone to screaming.
Keesey said, “Baz will come fetch you in half an hour.” She left them alone.
Dora gestured at the chair next to hers. “Sit. You look uncomfortable.”
“I am uncomfortable. I don’t think I belong here.”
“Because you’re not crazy. Because you’re not like them.” She nodded at the others.
“I’m not. I’m not.” Dora smiled a thin, cat-like smile. “What made them send you here?”
Dora smiled a thin, cat-like smile. “What made them send you here?”
“I don’t remember.”
She tapped her nose and grinned wider.
“So why are you here?” he asked.
She gave a demure tilt to her head. “It was a conspiracy. Captain didn’t like me. Some of the crew didn’t agree with the decision to lock me up. They’ll come back for me, break me out of here.”
And to think she acted so normal.
“Ah,” she said. “You’re giving me a look like now you think I’m crazy, too.”
“They break you out? Then what? You become pirates?”
“Hm, that sounds like fun. Didn’t you dream of that when you were a kid? Being a pirate, blazing across space having all sorts of adventures.”
“I was going to save innocent starships from the bad pirates. Kids never dream about being bad pirates; it’s always good pirates.”
“There are no good pirates.”
Mitchell gestured toward Jaspar and Sonia. “Do you know anything about them?”
Dora sat back in her chair. “Jaspar doesn’t do anything but work puzzles—for six-year-olds. Sonia will talk to you, but she won’t make any sense. Go try it.”
He half-expected this to be some sort of initiation—humiliate the new kid by making him try to find something that wasn’t there. But he crossed the room to Sonia anyway. She was pretty, if ragged. In her thirties, like all of them were, because that was when Mand Dementia tended to strike.
“Hello,” he said, sitting in the chair across from her.
She looked up. Her eyes were swollen, shadowed, tired. Her light-colored hair needed brushing.
“I’m Mitchell. I’m new, so I thought I’d introduce myself.”
She sat very still, in contrast to her previous nodding.
“Dora says you’ll talk.”
“Glass. Concerto for Violin,” she said in a hesitating voice.
Mitchell blinked, startled. “What does that mean?”
Her eyes glistened. There was a spark of something there, a flicker. Understanding. Sentience. Something that wasn’t insane. Like she was staring through the bars of a cage.
“Chopin. Opus 28, Prelude Number 6.”
Composers. Music. She was speaking pieces of music like they meant something. He stared at her, wishing he could understand, and it was like staring into his own future.
“Chopin. Opus 28, Prelude Number 6,” she called after him when he turned to leave. Her gaze pleaded, but he didn’t understand what she wanted. Except maybe out of here, like him.
He tried talking to Jaspar next, but the man turned his back on him, filling Mitchell’s sight with the off-white mound of his helmet—that was protecting what, exactly?
He returned to Dora, who explained, “She was a musician. The dementia crosswired music and language. Keesey thinks there’s some correlation between the mood or situation and what song she says. You know, ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ means ‘pissed off.’ I think it’s a smokescreen and she’s just hiding from everyone.”
“She looks like she’s listening to something.”
“The music in her mind. The doctors won’t let her listen to actual music. They’re afraid it’ll ‘reinforce faulty neural pathways,’” she said. She did a pretty good impression of Dalton’s flat tone. “I knew her, before. She associated every step of navigating to different songs. She said the sound of an M-drive powering up matched the opening measures of the overture to ‘The Marriage of Figaro.’ Then it all went to hell, I guess.”
If someone locked you in a room full of crazy people, was there any chance that you weren’t crazy?
She said softly, “You know, everyone here commits suicide sooner or later. The whole place is a futile attempt to keep us from killing ourselves. But everyone manages it. They can’t help us. This isn’t a hospital, it’s a hospice.”
Quietly he said, “How do you stand it?”
She spread her hand over the handheld in her lap. “I’m looking at this as a chance to catch up on my reading.”
“Lieutenant? It’s time to leave.” Baz stood at his shoulder. Mitchell hadn’t been aware of his approach. Meekly, he let the orderly guide him away.
Back in his room, he listened to the piece of music Sonia had named, the Chopin. A sad piano melody wafted gently from his terminal, like a ghost. He wondered what it meant to her.
Dora was wrong: This was not a place where navigators killed themselves. Keesey was wrong: he was not ill. He kept trying to remember what happened on the Drake. The thing Scott didn’t want him to remember, that the doctors didn’t want him to think about.
He’d signed in, said good morning to the captain, went to his station. We have an hour until we need to jump, Lieutenant. The first step to initiating a jump was ident
ifying the arrival matrix and locking in coordinates. The next step: convert the holography of local space from manifold to loop representation, another computerized operation that nonetheless required monitoring.
Ultimately the navigator, the human element, confirmed the optimum departure matrix generated by the navigation system, or chose an alternate. Then the M-drive would push the ship through it to emerge across interstellar space at the desired arrival matrix. At some level, even if only intuitively, he had to understand the mathematics that connected the two ends of the ship’s journey.
By remembering routine, he forced himself through his breakdown, moment by moment.
He confirmed the departure matrix—and it was wrong. The colors swirled around it like light bursting to its death, and the space through which the ship should have been traveling was a mouth waiting to devour them. It wasn’t a departure matrix but a black hole. The colors were wrong, the math was wrong, the computer was broken—
“Mitchell! Look at me.”
Keesey leaned over him. Her cool hand touched his cheek. His skin was clammy, and his heart was racing. He couldn’t control his breathing; air rasped roughly through his throat. He was on the floor of his quarters; some alarm must have summoned the doctor.
“What is it, Mitchell? What happened?” Her concern was professional, unemotional.
“I-I think I remembered something.”
“Can you describe it?”
He had to speak very carefully. He didn’t want to say the wrong thing. He had to say the thing that would explain all this away. “I saw colors. They were wrong.”
He winced and turned his head, or tried to, but Keesey held him in place. Baz stood behind her. A vent fan hummed somewhere.
“Make your mind a blank, Mitchell. Let the images fall away until you see nothing.” He obeyed her psychiatrist’s calm, and the colors faded. Baz came closer with a bottle and urged him to drink. Mitchell was obedient. The rehydrating fluid somehow made him feel weaker. He shouldn’t need all this attention, this treatment. He wasn’t sick.
“There was something wrong with the computer,” he tried to tell them. That would explain everything.
Keesey wrote on a handheld as she spoke. “Your cortical map shows a faulty connection within your visual cortex. You can’t trust your eyes, Mitchell. I know this is going to be hard, but I’d like you to limit your visual stimulation over the next couple of days. I can give you a blindfold if you’d like.”
Blindfold? Like taking away Sonia’s music.
“What are you writing down?” he asked. Maybe he shouldn’t be looking. Is this what she meant by visual stimulation?
“Some exercises we’ll try at your next session. We need to stabilize the dysfunctional area of the visual cortex. Please, rest your eyes if you can.”
If they could reduce his world to a tiny, thoughtless box, then nothing at all could damage him. They could blindfold him. But he was still going to try and remember.
*
“I overheard Dalton and Keesey talking about you,” Dora told him. He was sitting in his usual chair with his eyes closed. It didn’t help. If he could just figure out what was wrong with the computer . . .
She continued, “You’ve got the piss scared out of Dalton. He seems to think you should be locked up and tied down full time. You must have done something spectacular. On the other hand, Keesey thinks you’re the key to the holy grail that’s going to save us all.”
Dora was wrong—this wasn’t a hospice, this was a laboratory. A hundred years of interstellar travel and they hadn’t figured out how to prevent or treat Mand Dementia. That was why they were here; they were data points.
“I don’t know why either of them should think that.”
“Let me ask you a question. What is Mand navigation? Is it the math, or is it the mind of the navigator? See, the math alone isn’t enough. Otherwise the computers could do it all. But no—they need us to process it. Not just anyone can be a navigator. A navigator has to understand what the computer is doing when it crunches those numbers. All those aptitude tests—they’re measuring us, making sure we have the right kind of brain. We’re the key. So why does the Trade Guild have this place?”
She leaned over the arm of her chair and lowered her voice to a bare whisper. “The Guild doesn’t put us here because we’re crazy. They put us here because they’re afraid of us. It’s not that we’re sick. It’s that they can’t control us. We’re too powerful, and this hospital, this so-called disease, all the sedatives, it’s the only way they can keep us under control.”
Powerful? He was a navigator. Part of a crew. He wouldn’t do anything to hurt anyone. “We’re not that special—”
“Mitchell, what do we do?”
“We review the M-drive navigation system, confirming departure and arrival matrices—”
“Do we confirm them? Or do we create them?”
He stared at her. He had to squint against the light, and the colors seemed wrong.
Her eyes grew even wider. “What if some of us have learned to manipulate the process without M-drives, without starships? What would that make us?”
His voice was small. “Powerful.”
“It drives some of us crazy.” She nodded at Jaspar and Sonia at their same places at the table, absorbed in their same tasks. “But some of us are the next step in evolution. It’s not God that makes the Universe, it’s math. Know the math, and you are God.”
Mitchell found Baz and asked to be escorted back to his room. He flinched, though, when Sonia walked smoothly to intercept him before he reached the door.
She touched Mitchell’s arm. “Prokofiev. Prokofiev.”
He could only stare and wish to understand. Bowing her head, she stepped aside and let them pass.
“What did that mean?” Mitchell asked Baz.
“It doesn’t mean anything.”
They passed far enough along the curve of the station that the common room door was out of sight when a buzzer sounded, and Baz brought his wrist comm to his face. “Yeah?”
A desperate voice—Mitchell thought it belonged to the other orderly—replied. “Morgan knocked out Dalton and sealed himself in the decompression chamber.”
Baz ran, shouting, “Damn! Damn, damn—”
Running after him, Mitchell’s slippers skidded a little on the floor. This was what rebellion looked like in the Mand Dementia ward; he wanted to see it. Baz rounded a corner, flashed his wristband to open the door, and Mitchell followed him into the infirmary.
Jared pounded on the control panel of the decompression chamber and called Morgan’s name over and over. Baz joined him, pushing at the chamber’s sliding door as if he could open it with brute force. Impossible, of course, with the difference in air pressure. Mitchell had stopped in the doorway; Keesey pushed him aside.
“Oh no,” she breathed, her voice thick with despair.
Jared said, “He locked up the controls and pumped out all the air. I couldn’t do anything. I tried, but I couldn’t stop him, I couldn’t.”
Keesey’s face was twisted into an expression that might have been a comforting smile, or suppressed grief. She rested her forehead against the window. “Where is Doctor Dalton? Is he all right?”
Jared pointed back to where Dalton was sitting on the floor holding a cold compress to his head.
Mitchell’s feet were leaden as he moved toward the chamber door. He’d come this far. He had to see.
The chamber was a gray room, large enough for a stretcher. Morgan lay on the floor, curled in fetal position, naked. His hospital jumpsuit was tangled around his feet. The half-light that entered the chamber through the window cast weird shadows over him. His skin looked silver, painted with the dark splotches of burst blood vessels. His brown hair, haloed around his bent head, looked silver. He was hugging himself, as if this was what he’d wanted.
“Why?” Mitchell asked, his hand on the door, like he could reach through, reach him. Keesey said, “The air against his ski
n was screaming. He felt the air and heard it as screaming. He was trying to get away from the screaming.”
“I don’t understand,” he said. All people had to do to kill themselves in space was let the air out. It was so easy.
“Good,” Keesey said.
“What is he doing here?” Dalton said from across the room, pointing at Mitchell.
Keesey went over to him and commenced a hushed conversation, but at the last exchange Dalton’s voice carried.
“It’s cruel giving them hope, Ava!”
“Hush!” she hissed back.
Baz stayed with Mitchell, who stared through the window at the man lying curled in the gray shadows.
Morgan turned his head. His eyes opened and met Mitchell’s gaze. He blinked, and movement trembled along his arm.
“He isn’t dead.” Mitchell pressed both fists to the door and lurched forward until his nose touched the window. “He moved, he’s alive!”
Baz looked. “He hasn’t moved.”
“He did!”
Morgan brushed his hand along his cheek, tugging open his mouth, which was dark, bottomless and dark, like a black hole. “Open the door! He’s alive!”
Baz took hold of his shoulders and pinned him to the wall next to the hyperbaric chamber. Keesey stood in front of him. Mitchell hadn’t seen her approach.
“Mitchell, what did you see? Tell me what you saw.”
“There isn’t time, we have to save him, we have to—”
“It’s too late, Mitchell.” She held his cheeks in her hands. “Tell me what you saw.”
He wanted to pull away from them, their oppressive touches. He wanted to put space between them, because he didn’t trust them. But Baz held him firmly against the wall, and Keesey immobilized his face so he couldn’t look away. His throat tightened, and a primitive voice inside him tried to whimper.
“What did you see?”
He swallowed to clear his throat. “He turned his face. He looked at me. I saw his eyes; there was life in them.”
“Baz, are his eyes open?”
“No, doctor.”
“Mitchell, think about it. Does that seem possible? There’s no air in that chamber.”