“My father went swimming in that one,” Nikomastir replies, and gives me a defiant glare. “It’s perfectly safe, I assure you.”
I doubt, of course, that any such lake exists. If it’s there, though, I hope he isn’t fool enough to go swimming in it. My affection for the boy is real; I don’t want him to come to harm.
But I let the matter drop. I’ve already said too much. The surest way to prod him into trouble, I know, is oppose him in one of his capricious fancies. My hope is that Nikomastir’s attention will be diverted elsewhere in the next day or two and all thought of that dismal house, and of the fiery lake that may or may not be behind it, will fly out of his mind.
It’s generally a good idea, when visiting a world you know very little about, to keep out of places of unknown chemical properties. When we toured Megalo Kastro, we stood at the edge of a cliff looking down into the famous living sea, that pink custardy mass that is in fact a single living organism of gigantic size, spreading across thousands of kilometers of that world. But it did not occur to us to take a swim in that sea, for we understood that in a matter of hours it would dissolve and digest us if we did.
And when we were on Xamur we went to see the Idradin crater, as everyone who goes to Xamur does. Xamur is the most perfect of worlds, flawless and serene, a paradise, air like perfume and water like wine, every tree in the ideal place, every brook, every hill.
It has only one blemish—the Idradin, a huge round pit that reaches deep into the planet’s primordial heart. It is a hideous place, that crater. Concentric rings of jagged cooled lava surround it, black and eroded and bleak. Stinking gases rise out of the depths, and yellow clouds of sulfuric miasma belch forth, and wild red shafts of roaring flame, and you peer down from the edge into a roiling den of hot surging magma. Everyone who goes to Xamur must visit the Idradin, for if you did not see perfect Xamur’s one terrible flaw you could never be happy on any other world. And so we stared into it from above, and shivered with the horror we were expected to feel; but we were never at all tempted to clamber down the crater’s sides and dip our toes into that realm of fire below.
It seems unlikely to me that Nikomastir will do anything so stupid here. But I have to be careful not to prod him in the wrong direction. I don’t mention the lake to him again.
Our exploration of Sidri Akrak proceeds. We visit new swamps, new groves of fetid-smelling malproportioned trees, new neighborhoods of misshapen and graceless buildings. One drizzly disheartening day succeeds another, and finally I am unable to bear the sight of that brown sky and greenish sun any longer. Though it is a violation of our agreements, I stay behind at the hotel one morning and let the other three go off without me.
It is a quiet time. I spend the hours reflecting on our travels of years past, all the many worlds we have seen. Icy Mulano of the two suns, one yellow, one bloody red, and billions of ghostly electric life-forms glimmering about you in the frigid air. Estrilidis, where the cats have two tails and the insects have eyes like blue diamonds. Zimbalou, the sunless nomad world, where the cities are buried deep below the frozen surface. Kalimaka, Haj Qaldun, Vietoris, Nabomba Zom—
So many places, so many sights. A lifetime of wonderful experiences; and yet what, I ask myself, has it all meant? How has it shaped me? What have I learned?
I have no answers, only to say that we will continue to go onward, ever onward. It is our life. It is what we do. We are travelers by choice, but also by nature, by destiny.
I am still lost in reverie when I hear Velimyle’s voice outside my window, calling to me, telling me that I must come quickly. “Nikomastir—” she cries. “Nikomastir!”
“What about him?”
But she can only gesture and wave. Her eyes are wild. We run together through the muddy streets, paying no heed to the bulky and grotesque Akrakikan monstrosities that occasionally intersect our path. I realize after a time that Velimyle is leading me toward the tumbledown house at the edge of town that Nikomastir has claimed as his family’s former home. A narrow grassy path leads around one side of it to the rear; and there, to my amazement, I see the phosphorescent lake of Nikomastir’s fantasies, with Mayfly beside it, leaping up and down in agitation that verges on frenzy.
She points toward the water. “Out there—there—”
On this ugly world even a phosphorescent lake can somehow manage to be an unlovely sight. I saw one once on Darma Barma that flashed like heavenly fire in rippling waves of cobalt and amethyst, magenta and gold, aquamarine and emerald and jade. But from this lake emanates the most unradiant of radiances, a dull, prosaic, sickly gleam, dark-toned and dispiriting, except in one place off toward the farther shore where a disturbance of some sort is setting up whirlpools of glinting metallic effects, swirls of eye-jabbing bright sparkles, as though handfuls of iron filings are being thrown through a magnetic field.
The disturbance is Nikomastir. He—his body, rather—is tossing and heaving at the lake’s surface, and all about him the denizens of the lake can be seen, narrow scaly jutting heads popping up by the dozens, hinged jaws snapping, sharp teeth closing on flesh. A widening pool of blood surrounds him. They, whatever they are, are ripping him to shreds.
“We have to get him out of there,” Mayfly says, her voice congested with horror and fear.
“How?” I ask.
“I told him not to do it,” says trembling Velimyle. “I told him, I told him, I told him. But he plunged right in, and when he was halfway across they began to break the surface, and then—then he began screaming, and—”
Mayfly plucks urgently at my sleeve. “What can we do? How can we rescue him?”
“He’s beyond rescuing,” I tell her hollowly.
“But if we can get his body back,” she says, “there’ll be a way to revive him, won’t there? I know there is. Scientists can do anything nowadays.” Velimyle, more tentatively, agrees. Some kind of scientific miracle, Nikomastir gathered up and repaired somehow by the regeneration of tissue—
But tissue is all that’s left of him now, frayed sorry scraps, and the creatures of the lake, frantic now with blood-lust, are devouring even those in furious haste.
They want me to tell them that Nikomastir isn’t really dead.
But he is: really, really, really dead. Dead forever. What has been played out on this shore today was not a game. There is nothing that can be saved, no way to regenerate. I have never seen the death of a human being before. It is a dizzying thing to contemplate: the finality, the utterness. My mind is whirling; I have to fight back convulsions of shock and horror.
“Couldn’t you have stopped him?” I ask angrily, when I am able to speak again.
“But he wanted so badly to do it,” Mayfly replies. “We couldn’t have stopped him, you know. Not even if we—”
She halts in midsentence.
“Not even if you had wanted to?” I say. “Is that it?” Neither of them can meet my furious gaze. “But you didn’t want to, did you? You thought it would be fun to see Nikomastir swim across the phosphorescent lake. Fun. Am I right? Yes. I know that I am. What could you have been thinking, Mayfly? Velimyle?”
There is no sign of Nikomastir at the surface any longer. The lake is growing still again. Its phosphorescence has subsided to a somber tarnished glow.
For a long time, minutes, hours, weeks, none of us is capable of moving. Silent, pale, stunned, we stand with bowed heads by the shore of that frightful lake, scarcely even able to breathe.
We are in the presence of incontrovertible and permanent death, which to us is a novelty far greater even than the living sea of Megalo Kastro or the blue dawn of Nabomba Zom, and the immense fact of it holds us rooted to the spot. Was this truly Nikomastir’s ancestral world? Was his father actually born in that great old falling-down house, and did he really once swim in this deadly lake? And if none of that was so, how did Nikomastir know that the lake was there? We will never be able to answer those questions. Whatever we do not know about Nikomastir that we have already lea
rned, we will never come to discover now. That is the meaning of death: the finality of it, the severing of communication, the awful unanswerable power of the uncompromising curtain that descends like a wall of steel. We did not come to Sidri Akrak to learn about such things, but that is what we have learned on Sidri Akrak, and we will take it with us wherever we go henceforth, pondering it, examining it.
“Come,” I say to Mayfly and Velimyle, after a time. “We need to get away from here.”
So, then. Nikomastir was foolish. He was bold. He has had his swim and now he is dead. And why? Why? For what? What was he seeking, on this awful world? What were we? We know what we found, yes, but not what it was that we were looking for. I wonder if we will ever know.
He has lived his only life, has Nikomastir, and he has lost it in the pursuit of idle pleasure. There is a lesson in that, for me, for Velimilye, for Mayfly, for us all. And one day I will, I hope, understand what it is.
All I do know after having lived these hundreds of years is that the universe is very large and we are quite small. We live godlike lives these days, flitting as we do from world to world, but even so we are not gods. We die: some sooner, some later, but we do die. Only gods live forever. Nikomastir hardly lived at all.
So be it. We have learned what we have learned from Nikomastir’s death, and now we must move on. We are travelers by nature and destiny, and we will go forward into our lives. Tomorrow we leave for Marajo. The shining sands, the City of Seven Pyramids. Marajo will teach us something, as Xamur once did, and Nabomba Zom, and Galgala. And also Sidri Akrak. Something. Something. Something.
HINDSIGHT
Sarah Langan
Second Coming is docked two miles underground. She’s made of a collapsible, repulsion-attraction subatomic slurry that the astrophysicists are convinced will survive the gravitational anomaly called Black Betty. Yes, the ship will survive; it’s her human cargo that’s doomed.
Sarah Vaughan walks between rows of gurneys in heavy Van der Waals boots. She’s been aboard Second Coming six months now, and has gotten to know the feel of this ship: her soft, organic skin; her hissing breath; her ceilings and floors, which flip-flop depending on the capriciousness of gravity. At first, buried so deeply under Omaha’s dirt, Second Coming was a citadel. But this close to the end of it all, ghosts inhabit the cabins of every room. Sarah hears voices over the speakers that aren’t quite human, and sees memories from life back in Scottsbluff that feel real enough to touch. ”Doctor,” Sarah’s patients groan in a Greek Chorus that reverberates like microphone feedback, “Help me!”
Sarah, a stout, practical woman of forty, surveys the wide wasteland of them, and wonders where to start.
Click! The overhead sick bay speaker buzzes to life. She strains to hear through the ion static:
“Good Morning, Citizens of Second Coming!” Osgood Blunder, Captain and Emperor of the Second Coming, announces in monotone. His tracheotomy makes him sound like a drive-through fast food booth operator.
“As you know, impact with Black Betty is less than four hours away, but our diligent computational engineers made a breakthrough last night. The upload of human consciousness to the safety of Second Coming’s mainframe is finally at hand. Rejoice! The flesh will fail, but the spirit, dear Romans, will endure!”
Osgood Blunder breaks for applause, and throughout the ship, even in the infirmary, manic screams of victory burst and then disappear like collapsing stars. Blunder’s corporation, Kliffoth Cybernetics, funded Second Coming, and hand-selected its passengers. Without Blunder, there would be no ship at all. During their long captivity down here, the crew have come to think of him as a God.
“I’ll see some of you on the other side. The rest, fear not, for you witnessed the next leap in human evolution, when mankind became his own God,” Blunder says as static whines. ”We’ll be calling lottery numbers throughout the day. Remember, transgressors will be shot and stored as protein, so please Respect your Authority, and stand by.”
Sarah picks a path through the prostrate bodies. There are 2,104 colonists; 1,693 have surrendered their names for numbers and logged into her greenly-lit sick bay. Some occupy gurneys; others lean against walls or curl themselves fetal. She piles her tray with needles and liquid Valium. They’ll need it today because she gets the feeling that their luck is an upside-down horseshoe, all run out.
She calibrates, measures, injects. It’s routine by now. There’s no medicine left except for this. All day, all night, it’s Flick!-Puncture!-Squirt! Then move on to the next. And the next. And then next. Each have numbers branded against their foreheads. It’s best to look there, and not in their eyes.
Flick!-Puncture!-Squirt!-Move on!
Flick!-Puncture!-Squirt!-Move on!
Sarah stops paying attention at patient thirty-four, and almost gives the guy an air bubble heart attack. He wouldn’t notice—he’s insane. You can tell which patients have Black Betty’s Disease, because they’ve got no whites to their eyes. It’s like their souls are drowning.
Flick!-Puncture!-Squirt!-Move on!
Flick!-Puncture!-Squirt!-Move on!
Best not to think about the Hepatitis she’s spreading. Or worse. It’s a mercy, she tells herself when she gets to patient 342, who’s just eight years old, with impossibly knobby knees.
Flick!-Puncture!-Squirt!
He looks up at her with eyes that are entirely black, and there is movement between pupil and iris. There is something swimming in there, trying to break out.
“It’s really happening. They’ve started,” Sarah’s husband Joe Vaughan calls as he enters the sick bay wearing heavy boots that suction the slurried ground. His fine, blonde hair floats like jellyfish strands in this diminished gravity.
“Blunder went first, of course,” Joe continues. His voice sounds far away, but it echoes, too, so the words collapse on each other like overlapping Venn Diagrams. “He’s in the machine. The hard scientists are next, then they say we’re up.”
“Oh, Christ,” Sarah answers. “I’m not ready. Are you?” Though Blunder has the textbook knowledge, he wants her life experience as a physician in the system. He’s promised to upload her family, too. But this close to the end, nothing is certain.
Joe hops up and down a couple of times. His boots make a slurping sound, and the image of him blurs as if he’s moving extra fast. Quite literally, he’s not the man she married. The closer they get to Black Betty, the more it messes with the chemistry of their brains. Like a magnet pressed against a head full of metal.
“We’d better get to the engine room with the kids. They’ve already shot some line cutters. There’s going to be a riot,” Joe says.
Sarah looks at her tray of meds, and across the room, too. She flicks on the sick bay’s satellite viewer, which shows images of space and of Earth.
It’s shocking, how quickly the planet has changed . . . Unfathomable quantities of garbage spin like Saturn’s rings around the Earth’s fattened waist. Sea water laps the continents; across Central America, the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans kiss.
Joe reaches the knobs, and sharpens in on Scottsbluff, Nebraska, where they used to live. A lone wanderer wearing an atmosphere suit scavenges through a drifting pile of husked wheat from a broken silo, but the grain pelts him hard and fast. It’s like sand slipping through his fingers.
Joe puts his arm around her, and, with their eyes, they follow the wheat through the air, and into space, and finally, through Black Betty.
“Hand me the Valium, will you?” Sarah asks.
Joe squints with bad eyes until he finds the proper bottle. He’s been eating carrion; Sarah suspects prion infection.
“We could wind-up stuck inside Second Coming, part of the machine,” Sarah says. “It might be better to die.”
She’s said this before, or Joe has. Each time the issue arises, they assume opposite sides of the argument, and fight until they’re tired of words. In the end, it doesn’t matter. They’re going to do it, no matter what.
> “We’ve got to go,” Joe says. She hears the words again and again, even though she knows he says them only once. Déjà vu. Time is slowing and spreading. Her ghost of five minutes ago injects an eight-year old boy with dead eyes. Comfort him, her present self wants to scold. He’s all alone.
The sick bay is a field of bodies. Abandoned. Forsaken, because the engineers believe their insanity will infect the machine. They’ll meet Black Betty in corporeal form from this room, while the lucky few whose numbers get picked will live on inside Second Coming. Technological Singularity trumps Gravitational Singularity. It’s a boxing match: Mankind in one corner, God in the other.
“Let me finish with the injections, so at least they’re calm when it happens,” Sarah says.
Joe shakes his head. The kids are waiting, is what he’s saying without words. The kids come first. Before morality. Before their parents’ survival. Before the rest of the human race, if necessary. She knows this. All parents know this. But still, she can’t leave her patients without offering them some solace.
Onscreen, the closer they get to the anomaly, the more she expands, like a pupil exposed to dark. Just inside her edges, something moves. Something like life.
Or maybe something like God.
Three more hours to impact, and counting.
Joe punches his suction boots against Second Coming’s slurry floor, which is becoming less solid with every passing second. “Okay,” he says. “For you.”
Then he lifts a syringe, and together, they Flick!-Puncture!-Squirt!, until every patient in the ward is drugged or dead.
From the corner, the ghost boy watches.
The day Black Betty appeared, Sarah was still home on maternity leave with baby Sally, but she’d known something was coming. Already, magnetic north had reversed without warning. You could see the Northern Lights as far south as Costa Rica. Migratory birds’ internal radar had jammed, too. They flew outside the troposphere, then plummeted from loss of oxygen. Roads and roofs and empty farmland hosted their open graves. No one knew how their loss would affect the ecosystem, but mornings without their songs seemed more bereft.
Lightspeed: Year One Page 26