Andromeda Expedition

by Carlos Arroyo González

  The Titan stopped on the clayey sand with its tires crackling on it like dry twigs on a campfire.

  “Gentlemen,” Isaac said, adjusting the belt of his bathrobe. Inside the spacecraft it was the only thing he wore. Fox had come to think that he wore it as a kind of amulet, perhaps to protect the spacecraft from its inevitable self-disintegration, or maybe even that threadbare garment was somehow part of the insane structure of the spacecraft, so that if he took it off something would fall apart, and chain everything else together, like a house of cards of nuts and bolts whose central pillar was that tattered bathrobe. “I'll need a couple of hours to isolate the hole in the air propulsion system. If not, we risk being flooded by the water and sinking.”

  Edelmann got out even before the engines stopped. He stood arms akimbo in front of the ocean, like a Spanish conquistador facing a strange land he had just landed in.

  Isaac stepped out of the spacecraft (he had put on his suit, but Fox sensed he was wearing it over his inseparable bathrobe) and ran a hand over his dust-covered titanium back. The Titan seemed to thank him with a final purr of the engine relaxing.

  “Did you see that?” Edelmann said. “It's like it never ends.”

  Fox looked up at that horizon so far away that it seemed to merge with the sky. He felt vertigo dancing with his brain. A vertigo very similar to the one he felt ten years ago while he was fitting Bruce into that old closet (like Emily stuffing her dolls into the little house he had given her for her birthday), and he didn't even have room to think, “I can't believe I'm doing this,” because that dazzling vertigo flooded everything.

  Her knees were shaking. The wind shook the too-loose fabric of his suit, producing a sound that resembled the flapping of a giant insect.

  After a few minutes, he watched in amazement as Dr. Edelmann walked toward the water and entered the ocean.

  “Hey, are you crazy?”

  “Come on, cheer up,” Edelmann said through the suit's intercom. “It will do you good for your recovery.”

  He walked into the water. The dark water splashed with crimson reflections (like a dark, bleeding mist) reached his knees, his chest, and finally the doctor submerged and disappeared under that darkness.

  Fox surprised himself by actually considering going in there. In fact he had already taken a couple of steps, as if the ocean was drawing him in with the force of its tide. Well, maybe a little dip near the shore would help him relax after all. A little vaccine against fear. This time he wouldn't have to go all the way to the buoys. Just as far as he wanted. The water of the Great Ocean of Erebus licked the black boots of his suit, as if they were part of the ocean and now it was reclaiming them. Fox ran ocean in without giving himself time to think any more and dove in.

  Pharex filtered in thin curtains of flickering light, restless. The sand formed sinuous ripples that were lost in the distance. Among them, every now and then he saw some small crab-like animal, but with a more bulging shell. He combed the sand with his fingers, unleashing an ochre mist that floated off into the darkness beyond, the one he dared not look at. The rocks, the same clay color as the beach sand, formed homogeneous blocks on which grew topaz-colored algae that entrusted the movement of their soft stems to the delicate swaying of the waters. Following suit, Fox let his arms and legs loose and closed his eyes, savoring the feeling of peace. When he opened them, the peace turned into a great anguish that gripped his throat. Looking down, he saw only darkness. All around, there was no sign of any rock, let alone the shore. The surface, up there, sparkled with the reflections of the first light of day. He swam up there as fast as he could. When he reached the top he sighed in relief to see that the shore was only a few yards away. Still he swam there as if death was chasing him.

  As he swam, among the drops of water that, like pearls, held within them that ashen light, he thought he saw Edelmann drag something out of the water and into the Titan.

  It's not an eclipse. It's a fucking spacecraft.

  The day of the invasion, directed by Alessandro Vitali.

  The glare of the holomap painted the tired features of General Amiens blue. Except for his nose, which was red and cold as an iceberg. He had no idea what had happened to the heating but at least the cold helped him stay awake, so he wasn't complaining too much. He unbuckled his belt. He was tired of keeping his belly at bay, more so under the circumstances. Besides, it was making him gassy. And that plus the more-than-possible kidney stone scared him too much.

  The auxiliary display was flashing. URGENT MESSAGE.

  Amiens touched it, hoping it was news from the lunatics they had sent that planet in the middle of buttfuck nowhere. But it was not the face of the madman, but that of Officer Brighton. On his livid skin, two bluish rings stood out around his eyes. His hair was tousled like a stork's nest. His beard, if it could be called that, was formed by several islands of sparse hair, thick strands that looked more like thorns than hair.

  “General, I am sending you the data with the updated situation. When you accept, the holomap will be updated automatically.”

  I know how the damn holomap works, Amiens thought. But he didn't feel like arguing. He really just wanted to dive into a bathtub full of hot water, take a rubber ducky and float it while listening to the records of that Swedish hippie band he had discovered at an antiques market. Maybe later he would even uncork that bottle of wine. After all, he might not have many more chances.

  “Good. Send that data. And shave yourself. Over.”

  When he accepted the submission, the holomap for a few moments became a blur of three-dimensional pixels. Then it materialized again. Now the entire planet was surrounded by giant cruise spacecrafts, like the one that had been lurking over the Mediterranean for weeks.

  He entered his office. He opened the locker for the first time in more than twenty years. Behind the door he saw Paula's photo taped to it. It was from the day of her graduation. She wore a dazzling smile. After what he ate that day, Amiens did not eat again for two days. On the coat rack, a single aviation uniform, covered in dust. Amiens took it down and shook it out. He placed it in front of him and looked at himself in the mirror at the back of the room. More than one foot of body protruded on each side of the uniform. He opened it and dug inside. He doubted he still had blood circulation in his legs, but the seams seemed to be holding. Uniform made the old school way, by hand. The zipper at the top didn't close more than two inches. He looked at himself. He looked like a pile of hairy flesh being devoured by a gray cloth monster with its copper-toothed jaws wide open. So he put on a white T-shirt underneath and managed to solve that inconvenience. He finished off the picture with the medals he had won during the Niobium Wars, in which with only three spacecrafts he had managed to reduce a New West squadron to ashes, during the early stages of the war.

  He called Officer Brighton, who answered at once.

  “Destiny is calling.,” said General Amiens.

  Objection! It was not provocation, he himself has admitted it before this court!

  Suspicion, directed by W. W. House

  Through the skylight of his small cabin on the Titan, Fox wondered which of those stars was the Sun.

  Isaac's repairs had taken a little longer than expected, and Fox decided to try to get some rest, since among other things, he had no idea how to help. In fact, he doubted that anyone in the universe had the slightest idea about how to help repair that structure, made by Isaac in his own way, as a password that guaranteed him exclusive dominion over that deformed aberration. The Great Ocean was whispering its lullaby only a few feet beyond where Fox was lying on the narrow polyurethane mattress in that tiny cubicle in the bowels of the mechanical arthropod that was dragging them into the ocean.

  “Do you want a tow?” said Bruce's older brother Sheldon that sultry August day on the beach at Bradley Falls.

  Fox knew that was the last moment he could back out. He would just have to say so. His buddies couldn't force him to go in there.

  “Only as far as
the buoys.”

  He made up his mind, he would not go into that nightmarish ocean where the previous crew had died. He would say that he would wait for them right there, take some reserves from the pantry and wait there lying on the sand....

  A dark mass of slumber swallowed him up, until he was lodged in the very center of that abyssal lethargy, rocked by the gentle murmur of the ocean.

  A squawk, he did not know whether from his dream or from reality, woke him up. It was still dark over Erebus.

  Dr. Edelmann was outside, throwing pebbles at his window. He was laughing.

  He tried to penetrate into what could be going on in the man's mind to make him behave that way, but the truth was that he could not find any rational explanation.

  He hurriedly put on his suit and went outside. He ran towards Edelmann and rushed at him, knocking him down. In the gloom, he saw Edelmann's amused look.

  “What's the matter with you!” Fox said, grabbing him by the shoulders and slamming him into the sand. Every time he hit, there was a soft, muffled sound.

  Edelmann looked like he was about to choke on his own laughter. Fox pulled off his helmet. He punched him in the cheekbone, then in the nose.

  When Edelmann coughed, a spray of blood spattered Fox's visor. He clenched his fist high in the air, about to unleash it full force against the doctor's face. Edelmann's glasses glittered in the Kronos light. The night wind from Erebus swept a cloud of sand past them. Fox stood up. Before walking away, he could see Dr. Edelmann drawing his notebook and scratching out a suspicion.

  When dawn broke, judging by the height of the waves, it must be much windier. The first thing he felt was something cold in his chest. When his eyes became accustomed to the light, he saw Dr. Edelmann in front of him, dressed in his white coat with the Edelmann Corporation logo on it. He was auscultating his chest with a stethoscope. He had a concentrated expression on his face, his nose and angular cheekbones outlined by the light coming through the window. The wounds still glistened. A cut on his cheekbone and a shatter on the bridge of his nose. The immensity of the ocean waters captured in the lenses of his glasses. As he breathed, the air emitted a faint whistling sound as it exited through his nose and shook the blond hairs that stuck out of it.

  “What are you doing? Get out!”

  “Good morning, Mr. Stockton. How are you this morning?”

  Fox tried to condense his thoughts into a glance.

  Edelmann's pen flew over the notebook.

  “Very interesting,” he put it in the pocket of his coat. “Very well, we'll be leaving in five minutes. Isn't that exciting?”

  Then he started dancing around the room. He was even mumbling a tune that Fox couldn't make out. He moved from side to side, waving his arms left and right. At one point he picked up a pen and held it to his mouth and mouthed a few words of his song. He held the microphone up to Fox, who remained mute. Dr. Edelmann took the microphone from him and made robot-like movements as he left the room and closed the door.

  A man could swim through the aorta of a blue whale. There's a septillion planets out there.

  Volpenier, Exobiology and Probability

  The Titan entered the water with the help of its mechanical limbs, and once it reached a place where it didn't touch the bottom, retracted them. There was a sucking sound. It seemed to Fox as if the Titan was filling its ailing titanium lungs with air before setting out on that long journey over the surface of the Great Ocean.

  As they pulled away from the shore, before losing sight of it, Fox thought he was still in time. He could still turn back. He wouldn't even have to say anything. He could simply open the top hatch, jump into the water, and swim to shore, perhaps hearing behind him some diagnosis from Dr. Edelmann. That would be all. Maybe the scratching of his pen on the notebook. A price he was willing to pay.

  He grabbed the handle of the upper hatch, the one on the cockpit roof.

  Edelmann entered.

  “What are you doing?” he said.

  “What?”

  “You' re grasping the hatch opening handle.”

  Fox looked at his hand and was almost surprised to see it there.

  “I was just checking to make sure it was securely closed,” he withdrew his hand.

  Dr. Edelmann nodded slowly.

  “I understand.”

  He wrote something down in his notebook and circled it.

  Erebus' endless afternoon was at its halfway point. It was a hot and crushing afternoon, which the Titan's lame air conditioner barely managed to alleviate. Fox wandered around the ship, looking for a redoubt where he could cool off, like a jackal looking for a cave in the desert. But of course, there was only the spacecraft and the Great Ocean. A part of him was asking, even shouting, to tell Isaac to stop the ship so he could take a swim, if only for a few seconds. But just imagining floating on those unexplored, totally unknown waters, miles deep, made his blood run down to his feet.

  “What's here?” Emily had said once, reaching her little hand across the blue of the earth globe that Fox had on his desk, before it all came crashing down.

  “That's all water.”

  He remembered the look of astonishment on his little daughter's face, when she understood what that answer implied.

  “You're a liar, daddy. That's impossible.”

  He imagined a three-dimensional representation of that place. He imagined that in honor of the immensity of Erebus, the sphere should be larger than usual. It would be an almost completely black ball with reddish brushstrokes, the color that the sea stole from the atmosphere, with a splash in a tiny area that would represent Algea.

  What if all that was useless? He was, after all, trusting a nutcase sponsored by a drug dealer from the slums of Koi City. He felt stupid. He thought about what he would be doing right now if he were on Earth. Probably lamenting in some cold corner of his apartment, thinking about how to keep his memories buried for another day, pushing them down, stuffing them in the basement of his mind like Emily with her dolls in the playhouse, and like he had done with Bruce's corpse in that rotten closet. Well, he supposed that after all, even if they found nothing but water there, the difference wasn't so bad.

  But the heat... He felt the fabric of the uniform stealing every molecule of oxygen from him. And from the instant they stopped seeing the shore it was as if Bruce's face, contorted into a horrible grimace, had come back stronger than ever, like an old friend who had returned after a long journey and reproached him for not having come to visit him. “It was cold in there, you know, it was cold inside that damn closet.”

  He passed Dr. Edelmann's door. He was bent over a large book with photographs or illustrations. Looking closer, Fox could see that it was a book on human anatomy. He continued walking across the uneven floor of the Titan. Behind door number two, Nova was performing a kind of sensual and sinister rain dance. Routine maintenance of her synthetic joints. Like tai chi for androids. He wished the dance would work and unleash a wild storm that would further increase the abyssal depth of the ocean. Then he would go naked out to the deck and stay that way until he felt he was suffocating.

  In the cockpit, Isaac was checking some plans drawn in pen, with lines that had little semblance of accuracy. There were erasures, ink smudges, coffee stains. He held up a metal contraption, like a silver cube (tin plates held together by clumsy welds) with a wooden handle by which Isaac held it. On the top face of the cube was a plate of what looked like clear plastic full of scratches and fingerprints. Through it was a small screen with blinking dots glowing on curves with several interlocking parallel lines. It emitted a soft, almost imperceptible beeping sound. Fox felt like he could breathe a little easier in the cockpit.

  “Nice maps, Isaac. Did you make them?”

  Isaac peered over the bathrobe without moving his eyes from the device.

  “Yes. Cartography is one of my specialties,” he licked his lips sonorously, as if trying to absorb his own tongue.

  Fox looked at that strange horiz
on.

  “I'm still not used to it. I imagine you've heard the recordings by now. What do you think happened to them?”

  Isaac seemed to be looking for his answer in the bottom of that luminous box.

  “It seems that the catalyst exerted some kind of negative influence on that Amundsen. I'd say that he let himself be influenced by this place, and the catalyst was just the spark that set off the chaos. That's why I made sure to bring in one of the top specialists,” Fox felt his heart racing, like a small animal trapped in there struggling to escape, perhaps diving into the water and swimming for shore, feeling the black void beneath his feet. “In any case, I'm sure we'll soon find out. Why don't you go up on deck? You can go without a helmet for quite a while before you start to suffocate.”

  Fox thought that was an excellent idea.

  Upstairs, he stripped off his suit and stood in his boxers, using the suit itself as insulation on the burning titanium deck (at least Isaac said it was titanium, although Fox was pretty sure it was nothing more than ordinary tin), he lay down under the heat of Pharex. He felt every muscle relax. The droplets escaping from the waves crashing against the spacecraft cooled him. For the first time in a long time he felt something akin to relaxation and rest. Provided, of course, he didn't think too much about the abyss that loomed below them, about that knife sticking out of Bruce's neck, or about Emily, twenty million light years away, on a planet assaulted by the most ruthless beings in the history of the universe.

  When Pharex went down, the darkness in the ocean was complete except for a thirty-feet or so encirclement around the Titan, where the lights surrounding the spacecraft, like dozens of watchful eyes, plucked flashes of orange and purple from the churning surface. Inside the cockpit, the bluish glow of the screens.