The Gone World
Page 35
“Get in,” said Moss, climbing from the canopy to let him pass, needing to escape these people. She found her footing on the Cormorant’s boarding ladder, but once she made it down a few rungs, clutching hands yanked her off, tossed her aside to the tarmac. At least a dozen people had made it to the Onyx, and more were coming. They crawled over the ship, trying to find openings. She saw another Cormorant, the Lily of the Valley, streak past and swerve into the sky, bodies strewn along its runway. They’ve gone mad, thought Moss. She turned back to the Onyx and saw people ejecting the bodies of the dead, throwing corpses away like unwanted ballast.
“Shannon!”
She heard him: O’Connor. He was with Njoku, the snow blowing in slashing gusts between them. He waved to her, but she lost sight of them in the storm, in the rush of people heading toward the farther runways in anticipation of another Cormorant. Moss fought her way through the masses, into the terminal. The hallways were quiet compared to the clamor outside. She took off her heavy space suit, wearing only her long underwear. Luggage was strewn about the airport, abandoned in the mad rush to catch ships to escape. She found a U.S. Navy tracksuit in a duffel and a flight jacket with VFA-213 patches: the Blacklion, a double-tailed lion drawn in stars. She put it on.
The Navy had abandoned most of the base. The streets were empty, the snow mounting in sifting drifts. Moss brushed off a half foot of snow from her truck, listening to the engine crank before it turned over. More people streamed in through the abandoned station gates as she sped away, the streets of Virginia Beach swept with snow but passable. She had always imagined immense traffic jams in the event of cataclysm, but there were no cars on the road, only a few that had been pulled to the berms, abandoned. Everyone’s dead in their homes, she thought, or stuck in ice. There were a few other cars on the highways, their brights only dim spots in the blizzard.
Four people clustered on the roadside gazing at the White Hole, immobile, utterly paralyzed, their mouths hanging wide, extended open as if their jaws had been stretched apart. The silver filled their mouths; it looked as if each gurgled a mouthful of mercury. The silver ran down their cheeks, over their necks. She didn’t see her first pack of running men until well outside the city, a group of thirty or so runners, nude and barefoot despite the freezing winds. She had almost imagined the running men as something funny, absurd, but seeing them terrified her, running desperately without thought of bodily injury or endurance, their faces twisted into expressions of blank rage, some of them screaming. They ran like they were being chased by a swarm of stinging insects, passing into the forest that edged the interstate, disappearing into the woods. They would run until their bodies disintegrated, Moss knew. If they made it to the shore, they would run into the water to drown. She drove recklessly, spinning out on the icy roads, swerving lanes, panic settling over her that she was wrong to be here, so wrong, that she should have docked at the Cancer, should be among colleagues, far from here, leaving the dying Earth to seek a new refuge somewhere out in endless space.
Night descended as she entered the forest, and the glare from the White Hole reflected off the blizzard snowfall and bathed the evergreens in silver. The fires that would devour the Monongahela National Forest, and all forests, had burned since the White Hole appeared, and Moss saw firelight flickering deep in the woods on either side of her like will-o’-the-wisps or ghostly torchlight processions. The access route leading up toward the Vardogger was impassable. Moss abandoned her truck and climbed, sliding hopelessly down the snowdrifts until she grappled tree trunk to tree trunk, dragging herself upward by gripping saplings and using them like climbing cords. Any moment your skin might burn, the QTNs might fill you, you might shed these clothes and run, you might join a pack, you might be lifted into the air . . .
She staggered into the clearing where Nestor had once shot Vivian, where Marian’s bones were once found, where Marian’s echo had been recovered. The woods were on fire. She struggled for breath, the freezing air and smoke and ash burning in her lungs. Her body ached.
“Oh, God,” she said, heart pounding from the climb, but she continued through thicker pines and soon dropped several inches into deeper snow. She had found the runnel that Nestor once followed, the shallow ditch of the creek that had run dry. The cairns were near here, she remembered, but they would be buried under snow. She heard rushing water and followed the sound on a downward slope. A Navy truck was left here, iced over. They hadn’t yet fenced this area off, though they’d planned to before the evacuation. She saw heavier equipment, abandoned. Some trees had been cleared from the zone, were piled like lumber. The white Vardogger tree was untouched by snow.
Moss ran her hand over the bark; it felt like cold steel. She fell to her knees, hoping the tree would open, would multiply, to show her a path of trees, but nothing happened. The wind pushed through the hemlocks, the sound like a broom sweeping concrete. This was where Nestor had left her to die. In one of her futures, he had betrayed her here. What had happened to Nestor? She imagined him crucified, upside down in a forest of other crucifixions, but the thought seemed too cruel, despite his future cruelty. She chose to remember how his body had looked silvery in the moonlight of that first night they’d spent together, how his freckles had formed a constellation over his heart. She was filled with sorrow.
She stood, walked away from the tree, turned back.
There was only one tree.
No.
Mursult had written that the path might be a trick of the eyes. That it might always exist but remain unseen, or that it might be a function of QTNs in the blood, or that it might open whenever the B-L drive misfired. In any case there was no telling when or even if the tree would form an infinite path that led to Libra. The hour is late, Nestor had said. What do I do? Moss screamed, raging, nervous. What do I do? Time passed, the snow and violent wind numbed her, she bundled in her coat, concerned about QTNs that must be in the air. They must be filling me, she thought. They must be saturating my blood.
Will I die here? She wondered if her death would come while she waited for a path to appear. Nothing as violently bizarre as what QTNs might do with her, but naturally, a natural death in this unnatural cold. The flight jacket she had taken from Apollo Soucek was leather, lined with wool, but the cold seeped through and hoarfrost froze over her hair when she tucked her face deep into the lining. She pulled her arms in from the sleeves, breathed onto her fingers, but her skin stung and tingled, and she knew she would soon lose feeling.
Walk. Move. Keep your blood flowing.
Twilight. She went to the clearing, to the river, and returned to the white tree. When she passed the tree, the landscape changed around her. She lost sight of the Navy vehicles and the felled evergreens. The pines had grown in, were thick, and she pushed through branches, hoping to find that infinite path, but instead came back to the same white tree. Or . . . this must be a different tree.
She was in the thin space, she realized, but the path of trees that Hyldekrugger had followed wasn’t here; there was only a dark forest, boughs and branches, needles that scratched her. She came again to the white tree, and although she knew she was caught up in this place, just as she’d been caught here before her crucifixion, she began to panic, lost. She forced her way through dense pine boughs and came into the clearing, to the rushing black river, but she was on the wrong side of the river, she felt, the same sense that Njoku and O’Connor had described when they were here. She saw the white tree across the river, but she had come from the white tree. It should be behind her.
Marian crossed this river, she remembered, and I crossed the river with Hyldekrugger. But the pathway of trees hadn’t appeared for her, and there was no tree fording the river. Shannon Moss climbed from this river, the echo, she thought, just before Cobb beat her to death.
She approached the river, toed the bank. The swift water broke against boulders into white water, misting her with river spray. She could make it across, though, maybe. There were enough stones in the wa
ter, sharper rocks jutting above the rapids; they could be stepping-stones, she thought.
You’ll die, Shannon. You’ll get hypothermia in that water, with no place to dry off, with the air so cold. You’ll die.
But she scrabbled down the snow-covered bank, gauging her distance to the nearest rock, a few feet ahead. She stepped wide across the river onto the rock and found her footing, trusting her weight to her prosthetic leg. The wind ripped at her, and she shivered. The next rock was closer, with a wide flat section she could land on. She gathered herself, took another step, but her prosthetic knee joint gave when she needed it to lock, and she slipped and fell, gashing her head against the jagged stone before the current carried her under. Her entire body felt lacerated by the cold water, and her lungs constricted in the frigid rush; she couldn’t breathe. She was submerged, and she flailed in desperation; her hands groped, scraping against rocks, but she couldn’t find purchase. The river carried her. She reached above the water, and her fingers touched smooth wood. She grabbed for it, caught herself, held fast to the branch, and pulled her head above water, gasping. She heaved herself from the river, scrambling onto the felled tree, the bridge. She had found the Vardogger, and she hugged it, lying on her chest. Her clothes were soaked with river water, fast becoming a shell of ice. She had to warm up somehow, or she would die.
THREE
The wind battered her. Her fingers were numb, her toes. I don’t know what to do. Take off the wet clothes? I’d freeze. But I’ll freeze with them on. The Vardogger trees ahead of her were like an illusion of forced perspective, each tree along the path slightly smaller than the preceding, until the farthest tree was only a point of white almost lost against the snow. If I die, I’d rather slide back into the river to drown than just freeze to death here on this tree.
The river was inviting—she could still slip in. I shouldn’t have climbed out, she thought, and imagined being swept away as peaceful, like falling asleep somewhere familiar after being gone so long. She looked around her, taking in the world a final time, everything reduced to monochromatic shades, white trees, white snow, black water, evergreens turned the color of charcoal in the dim light. Only the blot of orange retained vital color. A body, in orange. In the distance by the tree line. She had seen the orange with Hyldekrugger, was seeing the orange again now—a thin space. Over the years as she adjusted to the confusion of the accident that had cost her leg, Moss had considered the woman in orange as something like a crack in her psyche that needed to be repressed, and so she rarely thought about the woman but dreamed of her often. Strange dreams where they interacted, traded places, back to the way things were supposed to have been. And now she knew that this woman in orange was Shannon Moss, that when she was pulled from her midair crucifixion, when she was boarded onto the Quad-lander, the pilots were different men from those she remembered. There had been so many small differences from one life to another, but she’d experienced such trauma that she’d rationalized these changes. Now she knew: she realized now that when she was saved, she’d been pulled into this woman’s life, this woman in orange.
She struggled against the wind, back toward the clearing. She followed the Vardogger path to the line of evergreens, to the body in orange. The orange space suit was a modified Extravehicular Mobility Unit, the orange the color for trainees. She brushed away snow that had accumulated on the body, flipped the body over, and saw her own face through the visor. A younger face, twenty years younger. Moss cried huge tearless sobs seeing this young woman. A child, still just a child. Remembering herself, her own face so changed, imagining her own life cut short at this early age.
“I’m sorry,” said Moss. “I’m sorry but I have to do this.”
She unlocked the connection between the orange suit’s torso assembly and pants, pulled off the woman’s boots.
“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” she said, sliding the woman from the pants, from the torso assembly and sleeves. The woman’s long johns were dry. Moss stripped her, allowing herself only a single glance at the young woman’s legs. She pulled off her ice-encrusted clothes and traded them for the dry clothes, thick pants and boots. Putting on these suits was always an ordeal, much easier with another person’s help, but Moss managed alone. NSC’s designs had been modified from the suits NASA used, had been slimmed down. The torso assembly would be difficult. Usually she would have used a harness that held the suit in place while she stepped into it, but here she had to crawl inside, extending her arms through the sleeves. She locked the helmet into place, latched the buckles around her torso. Warmth returned immediately, thawing her. She sat beneath the pine boughs, shivering while she warmed. Numb and sluggish, but the feeling returned to her extremities, warmth spreading outward. The naked body of Shannon Moss lay supine, pillowed on a drift of snow. The suit’s dosimeter was black. This woman had died of radiation exposure, the QTNs. She was beautiful, thought Moss, in the way people realize about themselves twenty years too late. Her golden hair outspread, snowflakes settling on the surface of her blue eyes, snow accumulating over her skin. Moss watched the snow, and by the time she was warm enough to stand and move, the snow had buried this other body.
She followed the path of trees, but the trees themselves were repellent. She struggled against the wrongness of this place. She had no plan; even assuming she could relocate Libra by following the Vardogger path, she didn’t know what she would do. Remarque had been trying to spark a cascade failure, a catastrophic collapse in Libra’s B-L drive that would have destroyed the ship and everyone on it—but B-L drives were designed with a series of fail-safes, nothing Moss knew how to overcome. And she didn’t have her sidearm or a weapon of any kind to defend herself during the mutiny, if indeed she found mutiny. The hanged men wailed as she crossed the felled tree. Mursult’s letter to Durr had warned against straying from the Vardogger path, and as she glanced to either side of her, seeing snowy fields and distant trees, the temptation was to veer from the path to escape this Terminal chaos and the abhorrent repeating trees. Moss didn’t believe in God, but she increasingly believed in hell—and farther away in the distance she saw that the air had crystallized and that what she’d taken for mountains were clashing floes of ice, and she thought that despite their abstract beauty this might indeed be perdition.
There was a man in the path, ahead of her, shambling. She glimpsed him, his gray silhouette veiled by snow, but recognized him as Hyldekrugger only as she neared. His coat and the blankets he’d draped himself with were scattered across the ice, blown about by the wind; he had taken off his shirt, and his skin was burned red-violet and black with dead flesh. He scratched at his chest, drawing thin lines of silvery blood. His lips were silver, and some silver had dribbled down his chin, wetting his ruddy beard.
“I’m boiling,” he said when his eyes focused on Moss, plaintive, and he fell to his knees in front of her. “There’s too much fire,” he said. “Help me, please.”
Moss kept her distance, but she wasn’t afraid. She knew his mind was gone. Hyldekrugger watched her, vaguely. He coughed up blood, but his blood was mixed with silver, and more silver rose in his mouth and overflowed his lips. “You ain’t real,” he said. “You ain’t even real, it’s just me here.” But as she left him, he called out, “Help me, you’ve got to help me!” until the wind overwhelmed his words and the blizzard enveloped him.
Moss felt the QTNs now, too—that first heat of interior chemical burn she remembered from before her crucifixion. She hurried. The Vardogger trees were on fire around her. She walked the flaming path until sparks of blue caught her attention and she saw Libra like a black gash on the horizon. At the dome where Hyldekrugger’s sentinels had kept their watch, naked men stared toward the sky, their mouths filled with silver. Crewmen of Libra, the survivors of the mutiny, Cobb among them, their lives suspended in the Terminus, dribbling silver from their mouths to coat their bodies in gleaming streams. Above them hung bones and specks of meat and veins traced delicately in the air, lungs and a hear
t and other organs displayed, and skin fluttering in the wind like a silk banner waving at the death of mankind. Hyldekrugger was already a ghost to her, and this was what remained of his followers; all the death they waged was a levee against the tide, but the levee had broken and left them wasted in the flood. As Moss neared the ship, she noticed that Libra’s hull was enclosed in ice; long spikes encased the bow like a jagged carapace and would have encased the stern, too, were it not for the flashes of blue radiating from the B-L, melting it back. Moss left the Vardogger path only when she could touch the hull. She followed along the hull until she found the gangway stairs that led to the airlock and found the red-thick blood that had been painted there, and the fingernails.
The black river would be painless.
She shook these thoughts. The airlock was iced over, so she struck at the ice with the metal cuff that locked her suit’s glove to her sleeve. She thought of the first time she had stepped through this airlock: the swift loss of gravity, Hyldekrugger holding her.
In the brig for eleven years, she reminded herself, fearing the immortality of being stuck in Libra’s Gödel curve. No room for error. She would have to attack the B-L drive, somehow spark the cascade failure. If she failed, she might not ever know she’d failed; she would be in the loop with no one to ever retrieve her.
QTNs accumulated in her, she felt them like pinpricks. She struck at the seal of ice, frantic, I have to get inside this thing, she thought, away from the Terminus. And then what? That first time inside Libra, after she had lost gravity, after Hyldekrugger caught her, she remembered that Hyldekrugger had waited for the sound of gunfire before moving from the airlock. Someone murdering the bull nuke, Moss remembered, the officer responsible for the nuclear reactor. He must have been trying to spark the cascade failure.
If I move quickly, she thought.