I tried hard to focus, to breathe slowly, and follow the words being spoken between the painful, bright bursts of static in my ears, the babble of sound trapped inside the helmet with me. Module approaching 50-meter threshold. On target and configuring KU-band from radar to comms mode. Slowing now to 0.045 meters per second. Decelerating for angular alignment, extending docking ring, nine meters, three meters, a whole lot of noise and nonsense about latches and hooks and seals, capture and final position, and then it seemed like I wasn’t moving anymore. Like the taxi wasn’t moving anymore. We were, of course, the little module and I, only now we were riding piggyback on Pilgrimage, locked into geosynchronous orbit, with nothing but the instrument panel to remind me I wasn’t sitting still in space. Then the mission commander was telling me I’d done a great job, congratulations, they were all proud of me, even though I hadn’t done anything except sit and wait.
But all this is right there in the mission dossiers, doctor. You don’t need me to tell you these things. You already know that Pilgrimage’s AI would allow no one but me to dock and that MS Lowry’s repeated attempts to hack the firewall failed. You know about the nurses and their pills, and Yehiel De-Nur and House of Dolls. You know about the affair I had with the Korean payload specialist during the long flight to Mars. You’re probably skimming this part, hoping it gets better a little farther along.
So, I’ll try to tell you something you don’t know. Just one thing, for now.
Hanging there in my tiny, life-sustaining capsule, suspended two hundred and fifty miles above extinct Martian volcanoes and surrounded by near vacuum, I had two recurring thoughts, the only ones that I can now clearly recall having had. First, the grim hope that, when the hatch finally opened – if the hatch opened – they’d all be dead. All of them. Every single one of the men and women aboard Pilgrimage, and most especially her. And, secondly, I closed my eyes as tightly as I could and wished that I would soon discover there’d been some perfectly mundane accident or malfunction, and the bizarre, garbled transmissions that had sent us all the way to Mars to try and save the day meant nothing at all. But I only hoped and wished, mind you. I haven’t prayed since I was fourteen years old.
March 19, 2077 (Friday)
Last night was worse than usual. The dreams, I mean. The nurses and my physicians don’t exactly approve of what I’ve begun writing for you, Dr. Ostrowski. Of what you’ve asked me to do. I suspect they would say there’s a conflict of interest at work. They’re supposed to keep me sane and healthy, but here you are, the latest episode in the inquisition that’s landed me in their ward. When I asked for the keypad this afternoon, they didn’t want to give it to me. Maybe tomorrow, they said. Maybe the day after tomorrow. Right now, you need your rest. And sure, I know they’re right. What you want, it’s only making matters worse, for them and for me, but when I’d finally had enough and threatened to report the hospital staff for attempting to obstruct a federal investigation, they relented. But, just so you know, they’ve got me doped to the gills with an especially potent cocktail of tranquilizers and antipsychotics, so I’ll be lucky if I can manage more than gibberish. Already, it’s taken me half an hour to write (and repeatedly rewrite) this one paragraph, so who gets the final laugh?
Last night, I dreamed of the cloud again.
I dreamed I was back in Germany, in Darmstadt, only this time, I wasn’t sitting in that dingy hotel room near the Luisenplatz. This time it wasn’t a phone call that brought me the news, or a courier. And I didn’t look up to find her standing there in the room with me, which, you know, is how this one usually goes. I’ll be sitting on the bed, or I’ll walk out of the bathroom, or turn away from the window, and there she’ll be. Even though Pilgrimage and its crew is all those hundreds of millions of kilometers away, finishing up their experiments at Ganymede and preparing to begin the long journey home, she’s standing there in the room with me. Only not this time. Not last night.
The way it played out last night, I’d been cleared for access to the ESOC central control room. I have no idea why. But I was there, standing near one wall with a young French woman, younger than me by at least a decade. She was blonde, with green eyes, and she was pretty; her English was better than my French. I watched all those men and women, too occupied with their computer terminals to notice me. The pretty French woman (sorry, but I never learned her name) was pointing out different people, explaining their various roles: the ground operations manager, the director of flight operations, a visiting astrodynamics consultant, the software coordinator, and so forth. The lights in the room were almost painfully bright, and when I looked up at the ceiling, I saw it wasn’t a ceiling at all, but the night sky, blazing with countless fluorescent stars.
And then that last transmission from Pilgrimage came in. We didn’t realize it would be the last, but everything stopped, and everyone listened. Afterwards, no one panicked, as if they’d expected something of this sort all along. I understood that it had taken the message the better part of an hour to reach Earth, and that any reply would take just as long, but the French woman was explaining the communications delay, anyway.
“We can’t know what that means,” somebody said. “We can’t possibly know, can we?”
“Run through the telemetry data again,” someone else said, and I think it was the man the French woman had told me was the director of flight operations.
But it might have been someone else. I was still looking at the ceiling composed of starlight and planets, and the emptiness between starlight and planets, and I knew exactly what the transmission meant. It was a suicide note, of sorts, streamed across space at three-hundred kilometers per second. I knew, because I plainly saw the mile-long silhouette of the ship sailing by overhead, only a silvery speck against the roiling backdrop of Jupiter. I saw that cloud, too, saw Pilgrimage enter it and exit a minute or so later (and I think I even paused to calculate the width of the cloud, based on the vessel’s speed).
You know as well as I what was said that day, Dr. Ostrowski, the contents in that final broadcast. You’ve probably even committed it to memory, just as I have. I imagine you’ve listened to the tape more times than you could ever recollect, right? Well, what was said in my dream last night was almost verbatim what Commander Yun said in the actual transmission. There was only one difference. The part right at the end, when the commander quotes from Chapter 13 of the Book of Revelation, that didn’t happen. Instead, he said:
“Lead us from the unreal to real,
Lead us from darkness to light,
Lead us from death to immortality,
Om Shanti Shanti Shanti.”
I admit I had to look that up online. It’s from the Hindu Brihadaranyaka Upanishad. I haven’t studied Vedic literature since a seminar in grad school, and that was mostly an excuse to visit Bangalore. But the unconscious doesn’t lose much, does it, doctor? And you never know what it’s going to cough up, or when.
In my dream, I stood staring at the ceiling that was really no ceiling at all. If anyone else could see what I was seeing, they didn’t act like it. The strange cloud near Ganymede made me think of an oil slick floating on water, and when Pilgrimage came out the far side, it was like those dying sea birds that wash up on beaches after tanker spills. That’s exactly how it seemed to me, in the dream last night. I looked away, finally, looked down at the floor, and I was trying to explain what I’d seen to the French woman. I described the ruined plumage of ducks and gulls and cormorants, but I couldn’t make her understand. And then I woke up. I woke up screaming, but you’ll have guessed that part.
I need to stop now. The meds have made going on almost impossible, and I should read back over everything I’ve written, do what I can to make myself clearer. I feel like I ought to say more about the cloud, because I’ve never seen it so clearly in any of the other dreams. It never before reminded me if an oil slick. I’ll try to come back to this. Maybe later. Maybe not.
March 20, 2077 (Saturday)
I don’t ha
ve to scream for the nurses to know that I’m awake, of course. I don’t have to scream, and I don’t have to use the call button, either. They get everything relayed in real-time, directly from my cerebral cortex and hippocampus to their wrist tops, via the depth electrodes and subdural strips that were implanted in my head a few weeks after the crew of Yastreb-4 was released from suborbital quarantine. The nurses see it all, spelled out in the spikes and waves of electrocorticography, which is how I know they know that I’m awake right now, when I should be asleep. Tomorrow morning, I imagine there will be some sort of confab about adjusting the levels of my benzo and nonbenzo hypnotics to insure the insomnia doesn’t return.
I’m not sure why I’m awake, really. There wasn’t a nightmare, at least none I can recall. I woke up, and simply couldn’t get back to sleep. After ten or fifteen minutes, I reached for the keypad. I find the soft cobalt-blue glow from the screen is oddly soothing, and it’s nice to find comfort that isn’t injected, comfort that I don’t have to swallow or get from a jet spray or IV drip. And I want to have something more substantial to show the psychiatrist come Tuesday than dreams about Darmstadt, oil slicks, and pretty French women.
I keep expecting the vidcom beside my bed to buzz and wink to life, and there will be one of the nurses looking concerned and wanting to know if I’m all right, if I’d like a little extra coby to help me get back to sleep. But the box has been quiet and blank so far, which leaves me equal parts surprised and relieved.
“There are things you’ve yet to tell anyone,” the psychiatrist said. “Those are the things I’m trying to help you talk about. If they’ve been repressed, they’re the memories I’m trying to help you access.” That is, they’re what he’s going to want to see when I give him the disk on Tuesday morning.
And if at first I don’t succeed…
So, where was I?
The handoff.
I’m sitting alone in the taxi, waiting, and below me, Mars is a sullen, rusty cadaver of a planet. I have the distinct impression that it’s watching as I’m handed off from one ship to the other. I imagine those countless craters and calderas have become eyes, and all those eyes are filled with jealousy and spite. The module’s capture ring has successfully snagged Pilgrimage’s aft PMA, and it only takes a few seconds for the ring to achieve proper alignment. The module deploys twenty or so hooks, establishing an impermeable seal, and, a few seconds later, the taxi’s hatch spirals open, and I enter the airlock. I feel dizzy, slightly nauseous, and I almost stumble, almost fall. I see a red light above the hatch go blue, and realize that the chamber has pressurized, which means I’m subject to the centripetal force that generates the ship’s artificial gravity. I’ve been living in near zero g for more than eleven months, and nothing they told me in training or aboard the Yastreb-4 could have prepared me for the return of any degree of gravity. The EVA suit’s exoskeleton begins to compensate. It keeps me on my feet, keeps my atrophied muscles moving, keeps me breathing.
“You’re doing great,” Commander Yun assures me from the bridge of Yastreb-4, and that’s when my comms cut out. I panic and try to return to the taxi module, but the hatchway has already sealed itself shut again. I have a go at the control panel, my gloved fingers fumbling clumsily at the unfamiliar switches, but can’t get it to respond. The display on the inside of my visor tells me that my heart rate’s jumped to 186 BPM, my blood pressure’s in the red, and oxygen consumption has doubled. I’m hyperventilating, which has my CO2 down and is beginning to affect blood oxygen levels. The medic on my left wrist responds by secreting a relatively mild anxiolytic compound directly into the radial artery. Milder, I might add, than the shit they give me here.
And yes, Dr. Ostrowski, I know that you’ve read all this before. I know that I’m trying your patience, and you’re probably disappointed. But I’m doing this the only way I know how. I was never any good at jumping into the deep end of the pool.
But we’re almost there, I promise.
It took me a year and a half to find the words to describe what happened next, or to find the courage to say it aloud, or the resignation necessary to let it out into the world. Whichever. They’ve been my secrets, and almost mine alone. And soon, now, they won’t be anymore.
The soup from the medic hits me, and I begin to relax. I give up on the airlock and shut my eyes a moment, leaning forward, my helmet resting against the closed hatch. I’m almost certain my eyes are still shut when the Pilgrimage’s AI first speaks to me. And here, doctor, right here, pay attention, because this is where I’m going to come clean and tell you something I’ve never told another living soul. It’s not a repressed memory that’s suddenly found its way to the surface. It hasn’t been coaxed from me by all those potent psychotropics. It’s just something I’ve managed to keep to myself until now.
“Hello,” the computer says. Only, I’d heard recordings of the mainframe’s NLP, and this isn’t the voice it was given. This is, unmistakably, her voice, only slightly distorted by the audio interface. My eyes are shut, and I don’t open them right away. I just stand there, my head against the hatch, listening to that voice and to my heart. The sound of my breath is very loud inside the helmet.
“We were not certain our message had been received, or, if it had been, that it had been properly understood. We did not expect you would come so far.”
“Then why did you call?” I asked and opened my eyes.
“We were lonely,” the voice replied. “We have not seen you in a very long time now.”
I don’t turn around. I keep my faceplate pressed to the airlock, some desperate, insensible part of me willing it to reopen and admit me once more to the sanctuary of the taxi. Whatever I should say next, of all the things I might say, what I do say is, simply, “Amery, I’m frightened.”
There’s a pause before her response, five or six or seven seconds, I don’t know, and my fingers move futilely across the control pad again. I hear the inner hatch open behind me, though I’m fairly certain I’m not the one who opened it.
“We see that,” she says. “But it wasn’t our intent to make you afraid, Merrick. It was never our intent to frighten you.”
“Amery, what’s happened here?” I ask, speaking hardly above a whisper, but my voice is amplified and made clearer by the vocal modulator in my EVA helmet. “What happened to the ship, back at Jupiter? To the rest of the crew? What’s happened to you?”
I expect another pause, but there isn’t one.
“The most remarkable thing,” she replies. And there’s a sort of elation in her voice, audible even through the tinny flatness of the NLP relay. “You will hardly believe it.”
“Are they dead, the others?” I ask her, and my eyes wander to the external atmo readout inside my visor. Argon’s showing a little high, a few tenths of a percent off earth normal, but not enough to act as an asphyxiant. Water vapor’s twice what I’d have expected, anywhere but the ship’s hydroponics lab. Pressure’s steady at 14.2 psi. Whatever happened aboard Pilgrimage, life support is still up and running. All the numbers are in the green.
“That’s not a simple question to answer,” she says, Amery or the AI or whatever it is I’m having this conversation with. “None of it is simple, Merrick. And yet, it is so elegant.”
“Are they dead?” I ask again, resisting the urge flip the release toggle beneath my chin and raise the visor. It stinks inside the suit, like sweat and plastic, urine and stale, recycled air.
“Yes,” she says. “It couldn’t be helped.”
I lick my lips, Dr. Ostrowski, and my mouth has gone very, very dry. “Did you kill them, Amery?”
“You’re asking the wrong questions,” she says, and I stare down at my feet, at the shiny white toes of the EVA’s overshoes.
“They’re the questions we’ve come all the way out here to have answered,” I tell her, or I tell it. “What questions would you have me ask, instead?”
“It may be, there is no longer any need for questions. It may be, Merrick, that
you’ve been called to see, and seeing will be enough. The force that through the green fuse drives the flower, drives my green age, that blasts the roots of trees, is my destroyer.”
“I’ve been summoned to Mars to listen to you quote Dylan Thomas?”
“You’re not listening, Merrick. That’s the thing. And that’s why it will be so much easier if we show you what’s happened. What’s begun.”
“And I am dumb to tell the lover’s tomb,” I say as softly as I can, but the suit adjusts the volume so it’s just as loud as everything else I’ve said.
“We have not died,” she replies. “You will find no tomb here,” and, possibly, this voice that wants me to believe is only Amery Domico has become defensive, and impatient, and somehow this seems the strangest thing so far. I imagine Amery speaking through clenched teeth. I imagine her rubbing her forehead like a headache’s coming on, and it’s my fault. “I am very much alive,” she says, “and I need you to pay attention. You cannot stay here very long. It’s not safe, and I will see no harm come to you.”
“Why?” I ask her, only half expecting a response. “Why isn’t it safe for me to be here?”
“Turn around, Merrick,” she says. “You’ve come so far, and there is so little time.” I do as she says. I turn towards the voice, towards the airlock’s open inner hatch.
It’s almost morning. I mean, the sun will be rising soon. Here in California. Still no interruption from the nurses. But I can’t keep this up. I can’t do this all at once. The rest will have to wait.
March 21, 2077 (Sunday)
Dr. Bernardyn Ostrowski is no longer handling my case. One of my physicians delivered the news this morning, bright and early. It came with no explanation attached. And I thought better of asking for one. That is, I thought better of wasting my breath asking for one. When I signed on for the Yastreb-4 intercept, the waivers and NDAs and whatnot were all very, very clear about things like the principle of least privilege and mandatory access control. I’m told what they decide I need to know, which isn’t much. I did ask if I should continue with the account of the mission that Dr. O asked me to write, and the physician (a hematologist named Prideaux) said he’d gotten no word to the contrary, and if there would be a change in the direction of my psychotherapy regimen, I’d find out about it when I meet with the new shrink Tuesday morning. Her name is Teasdale, by the way. Eleanor Teasdale.
The Ape's Wife and Other Stories Page 12