by Neil Clarke
Logic said no. Common sense said no. He swallowed again, this time to quell a growing nausea. He saw what he saw. She was asking him to deny the truth of his own observation. He said, “The M-drive isn’t supposed to be possible. But it is.”
Keesey held one of his arms, Baz held the other. Their grips were tight; he couldn’t get away from them. If he could just get to Morgan, he’d show them. He lurched, writhed, strained to escape. Keesey pinned his upper arm between her arm and body, pulled up his sleeve, and slapped a patch on his wrist. Immediately a flush like warm syrup flowed up his arm, to his heart, to his head. His knees buckled. She and Baz lowered him to the floor.
A Keesey-shaped shadow knelt by him. She brushed her hand over his face, touching his eyes, closing his eyelids for him, and the world was dark. “Go to sleep, Mitchell. Just go to sleep.”
Mitchell worked to move his lips, to say something, to scream, to curse them. To curse them for being right.
. . . an hour later he was screaming about flying monkeys to starboard . . .
Space could be described in terms of numbers and colors. Hydrogen burned orange, helium glowed red. But when the colors were wrong, he—
He couldn’t remember.
He awoke in his quarters, his cell, lying on the bed. When he sat up, his belly lurched sickeningly, and he lay back down. He had seen a dead man move, and it hadn’t been real.
At least, they told him it hadn’t been real.
A navigator told the captain what departure matrices to use. They were invisible, regions in space identified only by the navigator. The captain trusted him to know the way. Captain Scott had always trusted him. He was used to being trusted. He was used to seeing what others couldn’t. To doubt this, to doubt that he could see what others couldn’t—he could never trust himself again.
Morgan had been trying to tell him something. That last look he had given him, those wide-open eyes. If Morgan had wanted to kill himself, there were easier ways.
He wondered what was under Jaspar’s helmet. How had he tried to kill himself?
But what if Morgan hadn’t been trying to kill himself? He’d gone to that specific place, like it was one end of a set of coordinates of a journey he’d plotted. That was the matrix he’d found; he’d needed to launch himself from there to get to the place he really wanted to be—away from here. The jump hadn’t worked. That happened sometimes.
Morgan had tried traveling without a ship, and he’d sent Mitchell a message. Looked in his eyes and told him, it almost worked. They could see what no one else could.
The door opened, and Keesey appeared, smiling and happy, as if nothing bad happened, ever. She had the attitude of a doctor about to give a child an injection.
“Hello, Mitchell. How do you feel?” She’d been watching for the moment he woke, he was sure.
“Numb,” he said flatly.
“The sedative’s still wearing off.”
“What difference does it make?”
He didn’t know what was worse—being treated like a sullen teenager or discovering that he was acting like one. He didn’t have any dignity left.
She continued. “I’d like to help you figure out what’s going on inside your head. The kind of things a cortical map can’t tell us.”
He turned his head toward the wall and shut his eyes, because tears threatened to fill them. He was trapped on so many levels he’d lost count. On the station, in the ward, within his own mind.
“Nobody will ever let me on a ship again. And I don’t know why. I just want to go back to the Drake.”
After a moment of thoughtful silence, she asked a question that sounded genuine and not like a scientist fishing for answers. “If you hadn’t become a navigator, what would you be?”
He’d joined Trade Guild and applied for shipboard duty because he loved space. He’d become an M-drive navigator because he could, he had the aptitude, and the Trade Guild had gladly taken him and assigned him to Mil Div. Being a navigator had seemed as close as a human being could ever get to the stars. The math was the language he used to understand space.
“Maybe mathematics. Cosmology.”
“The theoretical side of M-drive navigation.”
“I suppose.”
He’d always visualized his journeys through space. They happened quickly, leaping over real space, but he always imagined stars, gases, nebulae soaring past him in a blaze of color.
Keesey said, “I’ve observed—in a completely unscientific fashion, mind you—that there are two kinds of navigators. There are those who are tested, identified as having the proper aptitude, and recruited. For them, it’s a job, like any other. Then there are those who love the work, who couldn’t think of doing anything else. They live for the distances between the stars. I’ve observed that everyone who ends up in this ward falls into the latter group.”
So, those who loved navigation would eventually be destroyed by it.
One glimpse of the Drake. To say goodbye, to have one more chance to try and remember. If he could see the Drake again, he might remember. If he could see anything besides these corridors, the lab, the walls of his tiny room. A longing overcame him, a physical pain settling in his gut. He refused to wipe away tears, because if he brought his hands to his face, Keesey would know he was crying.
Careful to steady his voice, he said, “I’d like to see outside. The station has to have an observation area near the docking ports. I want to see a ship again. Any ship.”
Spoken aloud, the desire sounded vague and childish.
“I’m not sure that’s feasible. The sensory input might trigger another episode.”
How many patients had she watched kill themselves, and still she smiled. Such blind dedication was its own insanity, but Keesey wasn’t the one locked in a cell.
“Then when can I leave my quarters? I’d like to go to the common room.”
“So you can talk to Dora some more? I know what she says, what she thinks. She’s paranoid, in a clinical sense.”
He tried sitting up again and managed to keep his stomach on an even keel. He stared at the gray rubberized floor instead of Doctor Keesey and her pitying, patronizing face.
“Dora says that all the patients here commit suicide.”
“Dora says a lot of things.”
I’m going to die soon. Being here, that was the only conclusion Mitchell could draw.
“She says Dalton thinks I should be locked up. Why would he think that?”
“I think you shouldn’t listen to everything Dora says.”
He looked up, glaring. “I don’t have anyone else to talk to.”
“I’m sorry, Mitchell, but we need to stabilize your neural—”
She didn’t need to do anything. It was all about him, his brain; he was the one who had to live with it. He’d lost his rank somewhere. Wasn’t Lieutenant anymore, just Mitchell.
“Doctor, I need to know what happened on the Francis Drake.”
“I’m sorry, but I don’t think you should.” She paused a moment, her mouth open in mid-sentence. Then changed her mind. “We haven’t been able to do much about controlling OSDS, much less curing it. The physicists who understand the M-drive don’t know anything about physiology, and the doctors don’t know anything about the M-drive. Sometimes I think we’re just waiting for the genius who’s an expert in both to come along and tell us what we’ve been doing wrong.”
Mitchell took a deep breath, ignoring the pressure of the headache that threatened to build whenever he tried to think too hard, to dig in those places in his mind. His own body was telling him to leave it alone.
“The colors were wrong. I remember looking at the monitor, and the colors were wrong.” Something was wrong with the departure matrix. He’d chosen a course correction, an alternative that would avoid the wrongness he was sure was there. He’d announced the course correction, he’d entered the course correction—
Frowning, he touched his temple and shook his head. It was gone, what happened nex
t was gone from his mind, and the pressure was building.
Keesey gripped his wrists. Startled, he flinched back.
“Mitchell,” she said, her voice stern. “Stop. Stop trying to remember. The more you do, the more you’ll exacerbate the problem. That’s where the damage started, with those memories. So just—just stop.”
She let him go and went to his desk computer, typed in a few commands. Music started, something slow and classical.
“I’ve disabled the screen on your computer. You only have audio output now. I’d like you to just listen for a while. All right?”
Who was he to argue? He didn’t say anything, didn’t even nod or shake his head. She wasn’t giving him a choice, no need for him to respond.
She left, and the door shut and locked.
M-drives pushed ships between coordinates in space dozens of light-years apart. Dora insisted some navigators—the elite ones, the crazy ones—could create jump points themselves. Mitchell had never heard of such a thing. Wouldn’t someone have tried it by now?
Maybe they had and ended up here. Sedated in a featureless room, like him.
Everything that could be done could be described by mathematics. Sometimes the equations took years to discover, and M-drive mechanics were only a hundred years old. What if the technology could be scaled down to the size of an individual human body? It was a nice idea to think about, so Mitchell did.
The room could be described in terms of dimension and volume. His chair, his position on it, his distance to the door, graphed and defined.
If a memory could be delineated by the laws and structures of mathematics, then the equations defining it could be discovered, reconstructed, remembered. And he could escape from this.
The point on the middle of the plane of the door had a set of coordinates in space, identifiable along a standard set of recognized coordinates. Or he could define his own system, with that point on the door as zero-zero-zero. Any location Mitchell could wish to find himself, from any place on Law Station to, say, the bridge of the Drake, had another concrete set of coordinates. He had only to identify those coordinates, describe those coordinates. In those terms the entire Universe was finite, concrete, describable. In the end, those numbers defined what one could know, what one could manipulate.
That was all navigation was, identifying two points and traveling the most likely route between them. The math, the ships, the drive, were only tools that enabled people to travel more easily. But what if, what if . . . What if they’d been missing something all along?
He put his hand flat against the door that would not open for him. Given this point in space had a finite value, and some other point in space also had a finite value, and an equation could be found describing a relationship between them, and the path between them could be collapsed, the distance between them could be made into nothing. He could step through the door.
He’d done this a hundred times, sitting in the navigator station of the Drake. He knew the process so well, his training had ingrained it in him so thoroughly, it was part of his mind, second nature, as unconscious as dreaming.
Captain Scott said, “Greenau, do you have our heading?”
“Yes, sir. Transferred to your monitor.”
And the matrix was there. He could touch it. He could put his fingers inside it, work it open wider, stretch it open, and he could climb through and out, away from here. He dug with his fingers to make the area wider, to make a doorway. He should have listened to Dora. People would be able to travel across the galaxy with a thought. No more ships, no more danger. When he stepped through the door, he’d find Keesey and show her she was wrong, that there was more happening here than a neurophysiological disorder. Humanity was on the cusp of learning something it couldn’t yet control. The navigators who were patients here were only the first pioneers, sacrificed for the pursuit of knowledge. Mitchell felt proud to be in their company.
Only a little more, and the point would be wide enough for him to climb through.
“Lieutenant!”
The sound was a shockwave rattling his ears.
“Lieutenant Greenau! Mitchell!” Baz appeared out of nowhere. No—he’d opened the door, and he shoved Mitchell back, grabbing his hands.
Mitchell tried to explain. “No, it’s all right. I know what I’m doing. It’s all in the mathematics.”
“Mitchell, focus on me. Focus.”
That was what Keesey had said to Morgan. Mitchell looked at Baz, the cleanshaven face lined with worry. Mitchell’s gaze furrowed with confusion.
“Mitchell, look at your hands.”
He did, as Baz lifted them to hold before him.
They were bleeding, the fingertips shredded, bits of torn flesh dripping red. Mitchell lurched, trying to get away from the vision, but they were his own hands, and they followed him.
He fell against the wall, breathing hard, his arms rigid before him.
Baz touched the door controls. The door shut, revealing a red stain, blood smeared across the metal from the point through which Mitchell had been trying to escape. He’d rubbed his hands raw and bleeding against the door. Where he’d seen a jump matrix, there’d been nothing.
So what had there been when he directed the Drake to those coordinates, the ones he’d been so sure were safe?
“Come on, Mitchell. Come on, buddy.” Baz manhandled him off the floor, got him to stand, and walked him, puppet-like, to the infirmary. He murmured condescending encouragements. Mitchell heard them only distantly. He kept staring at his hands, which were the wrong color.
This time when he woke up, he was restrained. His hands, still stiff and sore from treatment, rested at his sides. He couldn’t move his legs. He lurched up anyway, thinking he must have been imagining it, that he couldn’t really be tied to the bed. He got his shoulders off the padding, then had to stop, because no matter how much he pulled and strained, he couldn’t move any farther.
He rattled his hands to make the bindings rub and squinted against the searing light that lanced pain through his mind. His whole head throbbed.
“Please,” he said, clearing a hoarseness from his throat. “Turn the lights down, please. They’re too bright.”
“The lights aren’t on, Mitchell,” said Doctor Keesey’s voice, but he couldn’t see her, couldn’t even tell where she was. She might have been close by and whispering. He winced. He knew he was in the infirmary. It smelled like the infirmary. He didn’t know anything else.
“I don’t understand.” The rich tone of despair in his own voice startled him. The voice came from another place, far from here, a place he hadn’t yet arrived.
Someone touched his arm, and he let out a startled yelp, because he hadn’t heard anyone approach the bed, but someone must have. Another dose of sedative warmed his blood, soothed his muscles, and he fell asleep gratefully.
Another voice woke him, this one speaking very close by.
“I don’t have much time, Mitchell. But I wanted to talk to you. You did it, didn’t you?”
He opened his eyes and was more relieved than he could have imagined to see the beds, supply cupboards, and equipment of the infirmary around him, gray and lurking in the dimmed to near-nothing light.
Dora was leaning on the bed, speaking close to his ear.
“Dora.” His mouth was sticky, his throat dry. His wrinkled jumpsuit scratched against his skin, his scalp itched, and he suspected he smelled ripe. He felt like an invalid, too sick for the luxury of a shower.
“Easy.” She rested a hand tenderly on his arm. “Mitchell. You have to tell me how you did it.”
“Did what?”
“Saved Morgan. You saw him—the orderlies were talking about it. You saw his soul pass on. That was what you saw, wasn’t it? He jumped to the next phase, and you saw it, and you’re getting ready to follow him. I want to know how you did it.”
Mitchell stared at her, meeting her wild-eyed gaze. Her fingers clenched on his jumpsuit, like she expected him to help her someh
ow, even though he was the one strapped to the bed. One of her hands had a fresh white bandage wrapped around it.
“You aren’t supposed to be here, are you?”
“I cut my hand. I did it so they’d bring me here.” She displayed the bandage. “I had to talk to you. You have to tell me what you saw.”
“I don’t know what I saw, Dora. I don’t know.” His visual cortex was damaged . . .
“But you do. You’re special. You are, Dalton says so. Tell me about Morgan. Tell me.”
Baz or one of the doctors must have been in the next room, distracted while Dora stole in to speak with him. Dora’s urgency must have meant she didn’t have much time until they discovered her and returned her to her quarters. Which meant Mitchell didn’t have much time, either.
He had to learn to the truth.
“Dora, untie me. Undo the straps, please. Then I’ll tell you.”
Nodding slowly, she touched the straps, studied them a moment, then moved to a control panel at the head of the bed. She tapped a couple of keys, and the tension on the straps released. He could move his feet, and by wriggling his hands he freed his wrists.
Dora held his hand and pressed something flat into the palm.
“I took Baz’s wristband. He didn’t notice. You’re going to follow Morgan, aren’t you?”
“Maybe, maybe—”
“Dora!” Keesey called, reprimanding, from across the room. “Dora, I asked you to wait in the chair.”
Mitchell wrapped his hands around the loose straps and hoped the doctor didn’t examine him too closely. Dora didn’t move until Keesey called again.
“Dora.”
Slowly, Dora stepped away, her gaze still on him, not wavering, until she reached the doorway where Keesey was waiting. The doctor was a shadow, indistinct in the room’s dimness, but he recognized her shape, her posture.
“Mitchell?” she said. “Are you all right?”
He swallowed back a laugh. “Not really.”
“I know this is difficult.” She sounded sympathetic, but it was the sympathy of a person who didn’t really know what she was sympathizing with. “I’ll come back to talk with you in a little while, all right?”