Richard Russo

by Ship of Fools

  I felt bad, as if I had made some mistake, or misunderstood something. I almost called after him, but held back. There was something about Francis that moved me, and I wished I knew how to make things better between us. But I felt stupid, and had no idea what to do.

  Footsteps broke into my thoughts. I turned, and saw Father Veronica standing just inside the hold, scanning the darkness.

  “Bartolomeo?”

  “I’m here.”

  “Where? I can’t see you.”

  I stepped away from the shuttle. She saw me and started across the metal floor, her steps loud and echoing.

  “Pär told me you would probably be here.” She smiled, and seemed genuinely pleased to see me. “So it’s true, you’ve been released.” Her smiled faded. “I’m sorry I never could visit again. You asked me to let it go, but of course I couldn’t. For a while I tried to convince Bishop Soldano or the captain that you should be allowed visitors, but it was futile. I finally stopped trying after two or three months. But I thought of you often.”

  “Did you pray for me?”

  “Not the way you might think.” I thought she was going to explain, but she didn’t.

  “I tried to see you as soon as I was released,” I told her.

  “Yes, Father George told me.”

  “He said you were gone, and that no one knew where you were.”

  She nodded. I waited for an explanation, but it soon became obvious she was not going to give me one.

  “He seems to think the alien ship has been delivered to us by Satan,” I added.

  I expected her to laugh, or at least smile, but instead she sighed. “There’s something about that ship, Bartolomeo, something . . .”

  “Evil?” I suggested.

  “Not exactly. Malign, perhaps.”

  “I’m not sure I understand the difference.”

  “Perhaps malign is the wrong word. ‘Dangerous’ might be better. Lethal. But without intent. I don’t know, I can’t explain what it is I feel, but it’s something substantial.” She glanced at the shuttle. “Is this the one you’ll be taking?”

  “Yes.” I hesitated. “I wish you were going with us.”

  “I wanted to,” she said. “Despite my reservations about that ship. Bishop Soldano told me that Eric Casterman would be going as the Church’s representative, and I asked if I could replace him. The bishop refused.” She paused. “Perhaps it’s better this way.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it is, that’s all.”

  I wanted to know what she was thinking, but apparently she wasn’t going to tell me.

  “How soon are you going?” she said.

  “Four days. Maybe five. I don’t think there’s any rush.”

  “Let me know when everything is ready, and I’ll come by and bless the ship.”

  “And will you pray for our success?”

  “Someday we’ll have to talk about that.”

  “Talk about what?”

  “Prayer. Most people have the wrong idea about it.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “That prayer is to ask for things. To make requests of God.”

  “It’s not? Then what is it?”

  She shook her head. “Some other time, Bartolomeo. It’s a serious subject, and not to be dealt with lightly.”

  “All right, some other time.”

  “Do let me know when you’re prepared to leave.”

  “I will.”

  She turned, and I watched her walk away, feeling as always an aching sense of loss. Pathetic.

  25

  GHOSTLY blue light and a black surface that seemed to draw in that light and swallow it: that was the alien ship from two, three kilometers away as we slowly approached. Already the ship was blotting out much of our field of vision, cutting off the stars like a rent in the universe.

  Nikos was right. The alien vessel was enormous, and it seemed we were being deliberately sucked into it. I also felt a hint of what Father George and Father Veronica had suggested—the sense of some malign quality to the ship, though it appeared dead and harmless.

  I was in the front cabin with the pilot, watching the alien starship grow and spread all around us, appearing to extinguish the stars in all directions until there was nothing to be seen but the black mass coming at us. I felt lost in all that darkness, and I had the strong urge to retreat from the pilot’s cabin, find a window looking back at the stars. For a moment I had to close my eyes, overwhelmed.

  “Jesus,” I whispered, opening my eyes once again to that dark immensity.

  “Don’t take His name in vain,” the pilot said to me.

  I turned to her, but there was no indication that she’d been joking. “Sorry,” I said. She shrugged, not looking at me, keeping her gaze on the ship ahead of us and the instrument panels. I wondered how many of his own “agents” the bishop had managed to include on this expedition.

  We passed near one of the bright blue navigation lights, a space buoy hovering untethered. More blue lights in the distance helped provide a sense of perspective that threatened to disappear as we neared the black vessel. We passed another blue beacon, then another, until there were no more to be seen. Then, directly ahead of us, I made out an oval of dim white lights on the black surface, and some of the surface features became indistinctly visible—half-pods, shallow depressions, a series of raised ridges, long thin projections.

  “The white lights mark the entrance,” the pilot said. She slowed the shuttle’s progress, and eventually brought us to a halt seventy-five meters from the alien vessel; then she turned the shuttle around so the bow faced away from the ship, and the stars came into view once again. She had orders to leave if anything serious went wrong and she thought the shuttle and those aboard it were at risk, even if it meant leaving people behind on the alien ship.

  I regarded the dense, crystalline ocean of stars, unable to pick out the Argonos from among them. Although I could no longer see it, I could feel the alien ship behind me, could feel it drawing all of us toward it, both physically and psychologically. My skin buzzed with fear and anticipation.

  ONCE outside, Trace Youngman took the lead, pushing off the shuttle; he drifted across the seventy-five meters and landed gently on all fours just outside the circle of lights. We would use suit jets to get back to the shuttle, since it was smaller and easier to miss, but this was the easiest and presumably safest way to reach the ship.

  “Don’t kick with too much force,” Youngman reminded me, his voice clear and sharp inside my helmet. “And you’ll be surprised at the number of projections that will serve as handholds.” Youngman and Winton were taking me on a reconnaissance excursion, to give me a feel for the alien ship before we officially resumed exploration with the new teams.

  Like most of the inhabitants of the Argonos, at least those in the upper levels, I’d made a number of excursions outside the ship, but I was thankful for the reminder. I flexed my knees slightly, then straightened them and floated off. I was overcautious, perhaps, and it took me much longer to reach the alien ship, but I landed only a few meters away from Youngman, hardly feeling my touchdown. Almost immediately I had a grip on a smooth-cornered cube projecting from the ship’s hull, and anchored myself.

  Then I made my first mistake: I looked “up” along the ship’s hull. The hull rose vertically to the sky above me like the metal face of an insurmountable cliff. Suddenly I lost my orientation, and the stars seemed to shift, lurching into slow, slow motion; with no gravity, I suddenly felt that if I didn’t hang onto the ship I would fall away from it, hurtle helplessly into the cold night of space. I scrambled desperately for a second handhold, while my legs were flailing about of their own volition, my feet searching for some purchase.

  “Relax,” Youngman said. “I warned you about this. This ship is huge, and the way it sucks light away . . . Stop struggling and don’t look at anything except the surface directly in front of you.”

  My left hand found another proje
ction, and I did just as Youngman told me—stared at the hull in front of me, and stopped the kicking of my legs. Another minute or two, and my breathing had returned to normal.

  “You okay?” Youngman asked.

  I nodded. “Yes.” My mouth was dry, but I did feel fairly calm. “I’m fine.” As a test, I worked my way across the dozen or so meters to Youngman’s side, without trouble.

  Within minutes Winton had joined us. We gathered together inside the lights, around a rectangular panel larger than I had expected—about ten meters long and eight or nine wide. Youngman popped open a smaller panel above it, twisted something inside, and the large panel slid open. He went in first, swinging himself into the ship, and saying, “Wait here for a minute.” A few moments later, the interior of the air lock brightened slightly, and Youngman said, “Come on through.”

  The air lock would have been large enough for all twelve members of the team; it was illuminated with a ghostly light from two portable lanterns that had been mounted to the air lock walls with adhesive pads. Every passage and room in the alien ship had to be illuminated.

  When Youngman wheeled the outer door shut, cutting off the night and the stars and sealing us inside, I felt a brief shiver of panic. Then the inner door slid open, as large as the outer one, and we moved through dim light growing dimmer until Youngman switched on the next lantern. Even then the passage—far larger than any passage on the Argonos—remained dark: the lanterns cast faint gray light like the Argonos lights at night.

  “Raise the brightness,” Winton said. “He’s here to see what it looks like.”

  Youngman looked at me. “They’re on reserve mode, to prolong battery life. But I can boost them.”

  “No,” I said. “This is fine.” The truth was I liked it better that way. I was afraid the wonder and mystery would be dispelled by brighter light.

  We weren’t very far inside when we entered the spherical chamber I’d seen in Winton’s video. Nylon straps were webbed across the opening through which Santiago had fallen to his death. I drifted over to it, anchored myself, then put one hand through a gap in the webbing. As my hand inched forward, I expected to feel the faint tug of gravity giving it new weight. I felt nothing, and aimed my hand torch through the webbing, playing the beam along the length of the room. It was a long way down.

  “I thought there was gravity in here,” I said.

  “There is,” Youngman replied.

  I reached my hand and arm farther into the room, but still felt nothing. I released the hand torch and it hung in the air by my fingers, drifting slightly but otherwise not moving, and certainly not falling.

  “What the hell . . . ?” Winton said.

  “How far in does it start?”

  “It starts right inside the doorway,” Youngman answered. By then he was beside me, and thrust his own hand and arm through the webbing. “I don’t understand.” He grabbed my hand torch, then gently tossed it toward the far end of the room. It drifted steadily, but never picked up speed, and when it eventually struck the far wall or floor, where Santiago’s body had lain, it bounced off at an angle and headed back to us, though far more slowly now.

  “I don’t like this,” Youngman said. “I don’t like this one bit.”

  Winton joined us, and, as if to confirm things for herself, inserted her own arm through the webbing, all the way to her shoulder. “What the hell is going on?” she said.

  We hovered together around the opening.

  “Ideas?” I said.

  No one offered any at first, then Youngman said, “Maybe after Santiago fell in, it triggered something, and the gravity got turned off.”

  “Except the gravity was still there for days,” Winton pointed out. “Hell, I think it was there the last time I came in here. That was three weeks ago, but still . . .” She shook her head. “I suppose it’s possible this ship isn’t so dead after all.”

  “What?” I said. “There are aliens still alive somewhere, and they’ve switched it off?”

  “I don’t know. You have a better idea?”

  “No.”

  No one spoke, no one offered any answers. Distressed, we moved on.

  NOW I saw first-hand what Nikos had tried to explain to me—that there was no evidence of human hand or mind to be seen. We pulled ourselves along corridors far higher and narrower than those on the Argonos; or far shorter and wider from the alternate perspective. We entered rooms and cabins and chambers unfathomable in design and purpose—devoid of machinery or tools or instruments or furniture, devoid of objects altogether.

  There were recognizable doorways, like those of the air lock, with mechanisms workable by human hands encased in pressure suit gloves, but our hands did not fit well around or into those mechanisms, and the necessary actions were often awkward and unnatural.

  We saw no signs or labels or other kinds of markings anywhere, nothing with letters, characters, ideographs, nothing to convey a message or notice or identification or warning. If there were any, they were unrecognizable as such, like an alien Braille.

  Alien. That’s what that ship was, there was no doubt.

  We came to a long, wide room or corridor that corkscrewed several hundred meters deeper into the ship. This was the site of the second and third casualties. The walls were ridged with silver-blue metal ribs that glinted in the lantern light. These ridges were sharper than surgical blades, and when a woman named Zellie Askan pulled herself into the room she brushed against the walls and the fine edges sliced open her pressure suit. Not knowing what had happened, Michael Singer rushed to help her, and contact with the ridges sliced open his suit as well. The cuts in the suits were so numerous, and so long and deep, that repairs were impossible. Within minutes, they both were dead.

  Passage through the corkscrew was relatively safe now. A taut cable ran the length of the corridor right down the center. We attached short safety lines from our suits to the cable—the lines didn’t allow enough freedom for us to make contact with the surrounding walls—then pulled ourselves along the cable to the far end.

  The rooms and passages in the alien starship were so empty. Barren. It was certainly possible that furniture, appliances, instruments, or other accouterments of daily life had at one time been mounted on the walls, connected to power grids, and could be so again. Perhaps not, perhaps they never had been. Who could say?

  I thought about the rooms and cabins on the Argonos, different areas of the ship serving different functions, and I could hardly imagine any of them ever appearing quite so empty without aggressive efforts to strip them bare. Why would we ever want to do that? Why would anyone want to do that?

  In the end I was left with a terrible sense of disappointment. I had expected wonders, indecipherable devices, marvelous instruments and tools whose purpose could not be divined, enigmatic chambers filled with artifacts so perplexing yet awe-inspiring, they would leave the mind reeling, overcome by amazement. But the utter emptiness seemed to dispel the wonder that might otherwise have existed.

  Near the end of my “tour,” Youngman pointed to the doorway where Goran Durra was killed. After working out the mechanism for the door—a thick, metal panel that slid back into the wall to create an opening—Durra started through the doorway. The metal panel slammed shut on Durra, crushing him. There was no suit rupture, but by the time he was freed and rushed back to the Argonos, he had died of extensive internal bleeding. Now, even though I knew the panel was secure, I pulled myself quickly through the doorway, my stomach tight.

  Finally we came to a wide, cylindrical room with coppery walls, entering at what appeared to be the “bottom.”

  “This is as far as we’ve explored,” Youngman said. “Sinclair died here.”

  “What happened?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “You don’t know.”

  “She was on a team with two others,” Youngman explained. “They’d just worked out the entrance to this room, but they’d been inside this ship for hours at that point, so they
decided to hold off, return to the module, then come back later. The other two left first. They hadn’t gone far when they realized Sinclair wasn’t with them. They called to her, but she didn’t respond. When they backtracked, they found her drifting in this room. She was dead. No call, no signal . . . not a sound.”

  “Cause of death?”

  “Unknown.”

  “Autopsy?”

  “They did one. Couldn’t find a thing. She just died. That’s when they decided to suspend exploration for a while.”

  “Aren’t you afraid to be here?” I asked.

  Youngman shook his head. Winton said, “Not really. That’s why we’re here with you and not someone else.” She smiled at me. “Are you afraid?”

  I looked around that coppery, cylindrical room, at what appeared to be another hatch or door at the far end, and thought about the prospect of resuming the exploration of this enormous and mysterious vessel. I tried not to think about the now zero g room or the bishop’s clandestine excursion to this vessel.

  “No,” I finally replied. “I’m not afraid.”

  There seemed to be nothing else to say. We started back.

  LATER that evening, Cardenas came to my makeshift cabin. I was on my pallet, reviewing the notes I’d made from repeated viewings of the previous excursion recordings. I didn’t expect any new insight or revelation, but it was something to do.

  “Sorry if I’m disturbing you,” she said. “I need to speak to you, privately.”

  A churning began in my stomach. I had no idea what she would say, but I figured it couldn’t be good. “Close the door.”

  She shut the door and held herself against the wall, facing me. I’d always admired Cardenas, partly because she was a member of the crew—I admired everyone in the crew, to an extent, because they were so much their own people, staying outside of all the social and political machinations on the Argonos—but also because of the way she represented them on the Executive Council. Like Geller, she always argued for what was best for the ship as a whole, not for herself or for any one faction. Although I would never have said we were friends, she was one of the few people who I believed did not actively dislike me—that was worth a lot.