The Gone World

by Tom Sweterlitsch

  “They don’t stop,” said her mother. “You listen to me,” she said, staring hard into her daughter’s eyes. “If it’s in them, it’s always been in them and always will. He’ll destroy everything about you, he’ll take everything that was good. You’re worth more than that.”

  “It’s nothing like that, I’m telling you—”

  “Protect what you have, even if it means losing everything you think you want.”

  Moss had aged as she traveled IFTs, even as the rest of time stood still, catching up with her mother incrementally over the years. Since her mother had been pregnant with Moss when she was young, only seventeen, Moss sometimes thought she might actually catch her mother in age, or pass her by. As her mother examined Moss’s face, however, the hot light of the kitchen lamp warming her skin, Moss had never felt more like a child. They ordered pizza and settled in for a night of television. Her mother kept the living-room lights low, and in just the harsh blue flicker of the television Moss found herself staring at the photograph of her father in his Navy whites, grinning until the end of time. They watched ABC News, her mother smoking cigarettes. The news of Brock’s funeral had been buried beneath the news of a cult in California, thirty-nine members discovered dead, a mass suicide.

  “Of all the . . . you hear about this?” asked her mother.

  “No,” said Moss.

  “Thought the damn comet was a spaceship, so they killed themselves. They thought if they killed themselves, the spaceship would beam them up, like in Star Trek,” she said. “All wearing the same sneakers. Look at that, they’re showing one of the bodies. Look at the sneakers.”

  A body draped in a purple tarp, only the slacks and black-and-white sneakers visible, brand-new sneakers, bought for the occasion of death. They watched Beverly Hills, 90210 and Party of Five, shows her mother followed, but Moss let her mind wander to the Vardogger trees, the infinite paths—to Remarque ordering her crew to self-destruct Libra and commit mass suicide like the Heaven’s Gate cult, believing that if her crew died, then the world they had wrought would die with them. Her mother had fallen asleep in her chair by the time the local news came on, her glass of whiskey still in one hand, her cigarette in the other, burning down. A house fire, Moss imagined—she wondered in how many IFTs the cigarette dropped ash to the floor, caught the carpet on fire. Moss brought an ashtray over, a clay monstrosity she’d made for her mother in first or second grade, stubbed out the cigarette.

  She expected more of the Heaven’s Gate suicides on the news, wanted to hear more about the spaceship these people thought was flying the Hale-Bopp, but the news was filled instead with a different cosmic event. Images of people gathered in fields, crowding hilltops and the roofs of buildings, staring at the night sky. The Star of Bethlehem had returned, some said—the Star of Bethlehem hanging in the sky, eastward. Some said the star was pointing the way to Bethlehem, some thought it represented the second coming of Christ, though the talking-head astronomers offered differing explanations. Another comet, some said, coming into our viewing region in a cyclical manner, an unprecedented doubling of comets, the Star of Bethlehem and Hale-Bopp like twin silver lights. Others claimed that the shining celestial event was more likely a distant supernova, the light just now reaching the Earth from a star that had died magnificently several billion years ago. Moss’s eyes, however, filled with tears that spilled down her cheeks. She unlocked the side door and walked into the street and faced the east. There were already others out on the street, looking up, shielding their eyes. The event was like a shining star, a star extraordinarily bright—bright enough to seem like a nighttime sun casting the Earth in a cold glare that washed out color and heightened shadow. The moon was dim, as were other stars—as was Hale-Bopp, that silvery smudge that had hung grandly in the sky for the past several weeks. The new light felt like the brightest light Moss had ever seen, and it grew ever brighter as she stared. It meant the death of everything she’d ever known. The White Hole had appeared. The Terminus had come.

  Her cell phone rang, and she checked the number: O’CONNOR.

  “We’re still alive,” she said.

  “We have work to do.”

  TWO

  She drove to Virginia by the pale luster of the White Hole, a blinding disk bounded by a halo of night. Four a.m., but people gathered on their lawns and lined the roads, staring eastward, the unnatural light reflecting against their faces reminding Moss of faces in a movie theater. At dawn the sun rose pallid, but the sky remained preternaturally gray, the temperature dropped, and soon Moss turned on her windshield wipers against fat snowflakes that spun in the air. The radio was full of prophecy at the Star of Bethlehem, announcing the second coming of Christ—a child had been born in Puerto Rico in the instant the White Hole appeared, he’d been named Jesus, and already the infant was hailed as the sublime sign announcing the end of time. Winter was general over the Earth; even the sandblasted deserts of Africa experienced snowfall. NPR news reported that suicides lined the streets of Manhattan, Los Angeles, London, copycat deaths of Heaven’s Gate, bodies draped in sheets. There had been minor looting of shoe stores, people stealing the black-and-white Nikes favored by the cult. This is how the world ends, Moss thought. No panicking, no riots. No reports of the hanged men appearing, or of people running in herds, not yet anyway, though when she arrived in Virginia Beach, its few snowplows deployed laying salt and scraping the roads clear of slush, she learned that scores of people had congregated on the beach, that they had bent and flailed in concert, a sort of calisthenics, before wading into the ocean to drown.

  Naval Air Station Oceana was in the midst of Operation Saigon when Moss arrived at the gates. The president’s and vice president’s families would be flown here on Marine One, would be boarded onto Eagle, a Cormorant shuttle kept ready for this moment. Their families and the members of their essential staff would rendezvous with TERNs Group 6, the USS James Garfield, at the Black Vale Station. NSC soldiers were notifying civilians who’d been chosen for evacuation, a life-or-death lottery plagued by nepotism, a supposed mix of genetics, genders, and aptitudes that a think tank of politicians and scientists had devised in consultation with the military to represent the last best hope to revive mankind. Moss drove the streets of the base and saw one of the Cormorants taking off, its flight path over the churning Atlantic. She met O’Connor at the NCIS offices.

  “We have a new crime scene,” he said.

  There would be a final Cormorant, a last ship held to transport NCIS and NSC staff who assisted with Operation Saigon in these final hours. Moss was prepared to miss that flight. Now that the White Hole shone, now that QTNs flooded every man, woman, and child, soon to wipe away consciousness like a whiff of ether, she knew she would work against the Terminus until she, too, was wiped away. She hadn’t remained with NCIS all these years to save herself, to book passage on a lifeboat leaving Earth—she had joined to help people, to protect the innocent, and she felt that everyone was innocent in the face of dissolution. She took out her yellow legal pad, uncapped her pen.

  “Tell me what we have,” she said.

  “The appearance of the White Hole coincides with the launch schedule of a Cormorant shuttle called Onyx,” O’Connor said. “The B-L fired last night, at 10:53 Eastern—the exact moment the White Hole appeared.”

  “A Navy ship will bring the White Hole,” said Moss, shaking her head. “Who?”

  “The ship was registered as public/private,” said O’Connor. “Black Vale reports that the Onyx was requisitioned two days ago, by Senator Curtis Craig Charley.”

  “C. C. Charley’s the chairman of the Armed Services Committee,” said Moss.

  “He’s close with Admiral Annesley.”

  “So Onyx sailed Deep Waters, returned with the White Hole in its wake. It would have followed the Onyx’s Casimir line,” said Moss. “But why is the Onyx a crime scene?”

  “Because everyone on board is dead,” said O’Connor. “Could be something as simple as a mechani
cal failure, but we have to find out. The B-L launch was successful, but Black Vale received the Onyx’s emergency beacon. We get first crack at the ship, but we have to move. NSC will take Onyx from us as soon as they need it for the evacuation, but they want us to determine what happened in case it represents a threat to the evacuees.”

  The Grey Dove was cleared for departure within the hour, one of the few departing Cormorants not ferrying evacuees to dock with the massive TERNs. Moss taxied with the other Cormorants, wondering how quickly the effects of the Terminus might manifest. She launched, cutting through dense, snow-spitting clouds that spired into violent plumes stretching magnificently upward. She imagined everyone on Earth already in a state of living death. She imagined crucifixions, imagined running to the sea. The Grey Dove broke from Earth, and Moss floated into the main cabin, her view of Earth no longer one of tender blue fragility but of a white-palled planet, an eye milky white and blind.

  —

  The Onyx was a Cormorant, identical to the Grey Dove. It looked like a mirror-smooth piece of black glass, almost indistinguishable from the surrounding night except for the silvery planes of the wings and some hull sections that caught the glare of the White Hole and reflected cast-off light from the moon. The Grey Dove’s AI maneuvered close to the Onyx while Moss prepped for the crime scene, wearing the olive-green space suit marked NCIS and checking her camera, the film. The Grey Dove chirped a three-point alert once it had closed the gap between ships, matched rotation with the Onyx. Moss fastened her helmet, floated into the tubular airlock. The airlock of the Onyx was only twenty-five feet away, but the distance between ships was a span of open space. The Onyx and the Grey Dove spun in relation to each other, like the two parts of a binary star. The Onyx’s airlock was directly in front of her, unmoving. She gripped its steel handlebars while she worked to quell the sense of vertigo that curled through her stomach at the thought of floating from one ship to the other. My God, she thought, still just a girl from Canonsburg when faced with a space walk. Moss had seen marines do this maneuver, jumping ship to ship, countless times, soldiers leaping from the lip of one ship and floating—sometimes untethered—across the gap as easily as jumping over a sidewalk puddle. Moss attached one end of her tether to the Grey Dove, tugged on it experimentally.

  She stepped into space, an infant on an umbilical cord, full of adrenaline as she drifted between ships. And soon the Onyx’s hull loomed large enough that she could reach out and grab hold of the airlock, pulling herself the rest of the way.

  “Onyx, this is Shannon Moss. Please unlock the port airlock.”

  The lock snapped open. Moss hooked her tether to the Onyx, stitching the ships together, then pushed open the airlock and crawled inside. She waited for the Onyx’s green light of pressurization before she swam into the body of the ship, through the lightless airlock tube, her path lit only with the penlight attached to the side of her helmet. She gasped when she saw the bodies in the main cabin—there were twelve, naked, floating in the airless, lightless room like icebergs under dark water. Her penlight spotlighted wherever she looked. Globules floated among the bodies, some as large as her fist—blood, she knew, fractionated, large water spheres filled with sprays of red platelets and yellow plasma like the swirls of color in hand-blown glass ornaments.

  “Onyx,” said Moss. “Lights, please.”

  The interior of the ship illuminated the ghastly dead and their floating blood. It struck her that the bodies looked like they might have been dead for only a few minutes, but she knew that was because there was no oxygen to trigger decomposition. Years could pass and they would look virtually the same.

  They killed one another, she thought, that much was clear. The bodies were marred with slash marks and other cutting wounds and blunt-force trauma. Some of their bones had been broken; in one case a snapped shinbone had poked through the victim’s skin. A long gash flared across one man’s spine; another had entrance wounds over his heart, several stab marks. She counted: someone had stabbed this man at least thirty times, mincing his heart and lungs. Like documenting a crime scene that’s been put in a box and shaken, she thought. She recognized the senator, C. C. Charley, his body on the ceiling, his foot caught in wiring. His stomach had been opened, and his guts had leaked out across the ceiling like the long tentacles of a crimson squid. Moss took photographs. Smaller blood droplets hung like a rainstorm frozen in place, the fine mist painting Moss’s space suit as she moved through the ship, snapping pictures. After every few shots, she wiped blood from her lens.

  She measured the distances between bodies, taking notes with pencil in the notebook fastened to her suit. She used yellow cords to tie the bodies to the ceiling and walls so they wouldn’t drift. A ghastly concern, but despite their weightlessness these bodies’ masses were the same as they would have been on Earth and could crush or injure her like falling debris if she were to bump one, set it moving.

  Where were the murder weapons? She began to find them, handmade things: a shard of a mirror duct-taped to a length of pipe, pieces of a shattered faceplate fastened to the fingers of an EVA glove. She bagged the shivs in plastic evidence sacks. They had used the rather dull knives from the mess room, scissors, and some of the decedents had bruising that indicated they were choked and beaten to death when weapons weren’t available. The sailors would have had firearms, but Moss saw no indication that they’d been discharged. She couldn’t find bullet wounds in any of the bodies. The image of what had occurred here turned in her mind, and she closed her eyes to regain herself. She had excused herself to vomit at crime scenes before, cleansing herself to refocus on the work, but vomiting at this crime scene, into her helmet, would be disastrous. She waited for her nerves to calm, for the flopping sensation in her stomach to level. Deep breath. Being up here alone with so many bodies was claustrophobic; the Onyx enclosed her. She opened her eyes.

  The onboard computer recorded that the life-support system had been cut manually. Moss weighed the extent of the damage these people had inflicted on one another, the sheer butchery. She imagined some sane sailor cutting life support just to make the killing stop. Or maybe he’d cut life support in order to kill everyone with a single stroke. The crew of the Taurus, that first NSC ship to encounter the Terminus, had met a similar fate, a sudden flash of insane violence—and Nicole had spoke of Esperance, sailors killing one another on those icy shores until the Navy SEALs, Cobb and Mursult, had helped the survivors regain their sanity.

  Three and a half hours documenting the main cabin before moving through the ship. She found the commanding officer’s body in the galley, a knife stuck in his back. There was still food in his mouth—either he’d paused in the killing to have supper or was the first to have died, someone ambushing him as he ate. She found another body shoved into the toilet compartment, his lips cut away from his face to reveal his teeth. Distracted by the grotesquerie of the mouth, she didn’t recognize the corpse until after she’d taken pictures of him.

  Driscoll. Dr. Peter Driscoll, the scientist who appeared to me as a simulation. She recognized his hair, that white whoosh. Without his lips, Driscoll’s teeth could almost be mistaken for a cheek-spanning grin, his dark eyes wide open, his eyebrows lifted, as if he, too, were surprised at what had happened here. Senator C. C. Charley, Dr. Peter Driscoll—Moss formed a guess about the party aboard the Onyx. She expected to find other future founders of Phasal Systems on this ship, engineers and physicists from NRL, if anyone ever took the trouble to identify the bodies. She found Admiral Annesley’s corpse floating chest-down near the floor like a bottom-feeding fish. Moss flipped the corpse over and saw that the man’s face had been cut away.

  Another corpse she recognized, drifting near the sleeping compartments—a woman’s body, obese, her flesh floating outward. Carla Durr had been gutted, slashed from neck to belly. In the moment of her death, she must have plunged her hands into her breast cavity and tried to pull herself apart. It looked like she was revealing her rib cage and organs, so
me of which had floated away.

  We saved your life, and what did you do with it?

  The Navy had arrested Carla Durr in her hotel room in Chevy Chase and questioned her. She had sold Patrick Mursult’s secrets to Admiral Annesley, Moss figured. How much money had Durr received, what other favors than this voyage to Deep Waters? Whatever information she’d sold had led to this.

  The thought came to Moss.

  A chain of information: Patrick Mursult to his lawyer, Carla Durr, Durr to Admiral Annesley, to Dr. Peter Driscoll, to Senator C. C. Charley—Hyldekrugger had been breaking the chain. But I saved this woman’s life. I should have let her die. The thought was repugnant, but as Moss looked at the lawyer’s ruined body, the enormity of what had hinged on her decision to save this woman’s life rushed over her, when in the hospital she had told O’Connor that they weren’t too late to stop the killing. But I should have let them kill her—it was clear to her now. What was one life set against all life? Hyldekrugger had been right: killing this woman would have broken the chain, would have staved off NSC from discovering Esperance for another few years at least.

  It’s my fault.

  Moss screamed, thinking, No, letting the lawyer die wasn’t right, that wasn’t the right answer. And she turned inward, surrounded by butchered corpses, thinking about inevitability. Throughout her professional life, Moss had lived with the idea of the Terminus sweeping closer, but now her mind opened to the idea that it had all been because of her, that her career in NCIS had set her on the path to the Mursult investigation, and every bit of evidence she uncovered, culminating in her decision to intercede in the killing of the lawyer Carla Durr, had ensured that NSC would rediscover Esperance sooner and sooner and sooner. I ended the world, she thought, looking at the dead that surrounded her, but their eyes offered no solace. She felt trapped here, spun in webs, the White Hole a spider’s eye bearing down on her.