by Hanuš Seiner
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“Let us remind ourselves of our destiny.”
The captain approached the command console slowly. Characters of the Vaían alphabet lit the screen. Clusters of the crew stood in the front cabin patiently, hiding in the dimness of the large space. Their bowed faces were not only disfigured by the inexorable signs of the virus; submission had erased the gleam from their eyes, humiliation had engraved deep wrinkles in their skin. What followed resembled a bitter elegy.
“We live in stillness and darkness,” the captain read.
“We live in stillness and darkness,” fifty voices echoed.
“… deep under our conquerors’ boots.”
“… deep under our conquerors’ boots.”
A narrow line of the ship’s front windows ran behind the captain’s back. The faint lights of the cabin reflected from the surface of the thick glass. Beyond it, the shields glinted dark blue, those heavy lids of vanadium steel closed five years ago, never to open again.
“But in ourselves, we bear the legacy of those who came to raise us up,” the captain continued.
“But in ourselves, we bear the legacy of those who came to raise us up,” the crew whispered mechanically.
“… and thus our enslavement has meaning.”
“… and thus our enslavement has meaning.”
In the short periods of silence, the quiet song of the running engines could be heard. Their sound wavered with the rhythm of the crew’s words. The virus mediated the crew’s feelings to the engines, just as it opened their minds to the engines’ distant thoughts.
“Even though our gift became a burden…”
“Even though our gift became a burden…”
“… we still can pass its power unto humanity…”
“… we still can pass its power unto humanity…”
“… as Vaían asked us and as we promised Vaían.”
“… as Vaían asked us and as we promised Vaían.”
They all knew the words by heart and long ago had ceased searching for solace in them. They only found the unrelenting truth about what they really were.
“That is our destiny,” the captain concluded the ritual.
“That is our destiny,” fifty bowed heads repeated after her.
She touched the screen with her fingertips. It went dark again.
“This is how we remind ourselves of our destiny, as well as that of all the other crews. You may return to your posts. Thank you.”
1.
Threads of rain drummed relentlessly on the car’s roof. Streams running down the windows merged and went separate ways again. The air suffocated with water and the smell of wet earth. I stopped where the muddied road met a tall razor wire fence. I almost couldn’t see the gate in the thick rain; if it weren’t for the guard’s booth, it would have seemed that the fence crossed the road ruthlessly and gave no one from the outside a chance to reach the peak of the towering cone.
A soldier in a green-gray raincoat walked to the car and waited for me to roll down the window. Splashes of freezing water fell upon my arm. The soldier looked inside, at me and then Janita crouching in the passenger seat, and finally at the cigarette box I handed to him along with a file in a waterproof folder. He took both in his cold, calloused fingers. I saw him checking the small bundle of wrinkled banknotes amidst the cigarettes; not a bribe, just a token of gratitude for limiting the personal searches and interrogations of my clients to the necessary minimum. He grunted approvingly, pocketed the file and box under his raincoat, and hurried to the booth.
We remained silent. My gaze traveled to the rearview mirror. The wiper fought the assaults of water tenaciously and at times, I could recognize the outline of a village crouching by the cone’s base. From this far, it resembled a stone battleship on a dark sea of the fields, the crows a parody of its gulls. The cone itself could have been a freak wave about to sweep the ship into the muddy depths. But the scene was motionless, still like the lives of those buried deep underneath.
“Is everything all right? Is it supposed to go like this?” Janita was studying me with her Europan eyes the color of sesame seeds. I nodded.
* * *
When Janita first came to my office two weeks ago, I found nothing unusual about her. She was a little sleep-deprived and disoriented by the change in gravity and the openness of spaces on Earth; like all my clients. She introduced herself; I glanced through her application and gestured at her to sit down. By the rules, I had to first ask her a couple of questions to make sure that she wasn’t just impersonating the real Janita Paltev. Like her birth date.
“June third, year seventy-one.”
Or her nationality.
“The Free Republic of Europa and Ganymede.” (Oh, the mixture of bitterness and pride in all of their voices! Some even answered Vaían. As long as they didn’t daringly write it in their forms, I ignored it. I don’t look for trouble.)
The next question was necessary: “Whom are you visiting?”
“Corporal Petr Paltev. My father.”
“On which ship?”
“The Destroyer of Seven Villages,” she replied without hesitation, though the answer wasn’t simple. Each of the ships’ names consisted of five Vaían symbols whose meaning depended on the three-letter cipher key used to read them. By applying the trigrammatons, The Destroyer of Seven Villages could also be called The Obsidian Snail, Deep Slumber, Embrace of Aldebaran, or Devil’s Martyr. The cycle was closed; by applying the next key, Devil’s Martyr would change back into The Destroyer of Seven Villages. It remained difficult for people to shake off the feeling that one of the ciphers of the cycle is the basic one, and they obstinately insisted upon it. However, the Vaían civilization saw no difference in them; the cycle didn’t begin or end anywhere and the ship bore all the names at once. More complex ciphering loops built upon the trigrammaton cycle. But Vaían didn’t have the time—or will—to give humans all the four- or five-letter keys to the tetra- and pentagrammaton cycles, therefore their extent and structure remained unknown despite all the government cryptologists’ best efforts.
“Reason for the visit?”
She shifted in her seat. “Death in the family. My father’s sister succumbed to cancer a month ago. I want to tell him in person. Anyway, he needs to sign papers regarding the inheritance; she had no children…”
I was leafing through the file. Everything seemed to be in order.
“Do you have a statement of health from an approved physician?”
She handed me a folded piece of paper. I looked at it and felt the tickle of complication.
“This is just an unverified copy. You need an original or a certified copy.”
“Oh,” she breathed out. “But the original is on Europa. Can’t you certify it?”
I
gave her the copy back. “I could but won’t. There are three army hospitals with the necessary certification in town and they can give you a new statement in any of them. With some luck, you can get it today and we can resume tomorrow. What do you say?”
I really don’t look for trouble. Janita, however, morphed into one big trouble at that moment. “I can pay you. A lot. More than you’d think. Just certify the copy, please, and take me to the Destroyer.”
She was still the shy girl with speckled skin and slumped shoulders. Yet whereas five minutes ago, I’d thought she was afraid of me, now I felt afraid of her.
“Please,” she insisted. “It’s the most important thing in my life. And even though you don’t realize it now, yours, too.”
I should have called the guards. Or I should have soothed her somehow, waited till her departure and then informed the police or my superiors. Instead, I watched in silence as she raised her pale, sinewy arm, as if made of glass noodles, and pulled aside her hair. Her bared temples revealed what they had to reveal.
“Oh, damn,” escaped me. I hadn’t seen anything like this for four or five years. After the last refugee camps on Earth had closed, I hoped never to see it again. The viral incubant was swirling among her hair roots, drawing spirals, symbols, labyrinths of images, resembling the dark Maori tattoos. I did not dare to guess how many people Janita had to bribe, blackmail, kill, or sleep with to get here, into the comfortable chair in my office. The Europan guerrilla army extended its fingers to me across half the system and grasped my throat. Opposite me sat a true pro-Vaían fundamentalist, and on her body, she was carrying the alien civilization’s gift to humanity.
Thursday, August 30, 2192
I finally succeeded in cadging some writing accessories from the guards. For the first time after more than a year of trying, they didn’t dismiss me with a touch pad limited to Earth alphabets. I received a plain pencil like I haven’t seen since childhood, and a thick pad with lined paper. It smells of glue and ancient times. I kept leafing through its empty pages and smelling it all afternoon. Now I’ve finally decided to start writing.
In those endless requests, I always stated that I would like to keep a diary. I will try to abide by that and each day record what I felt or thought. I cannot bring testimony of much else; the days here are monotonous, neatly outlined from the cell lights turning on in the morning, through the grueling walk in the corridors, to the allowed hour of univision in the evening. I don’t talk to anyone. Sometimes when I thank the cook for her soup in the canteen, she smiles but stays silent. I visit the gym but I haven’t made any friends there. I take the dumbbells from their racks in silence and return them also in silence. Without a word, I browse through the books in the small library. It’s maddening. Now I can hardly control the surge of words flooding to the tip of my pencil. Someone is finally listening to me, though he cannot answer—but he will remember my words, undistorted.
I’ve been thinking about luck during today’s lunch. Long ago I read somewhere that each man has a measure of luck given by destiny. He will use it fully but cannot expect a drop more. That’s supposed to be why healthy, happy, and resilient people succumb to fast fatal illnesses or accidents; or why the unfortunate barely making a living, cast out by the society, almost miraculously make their way through the maze of freezing nights, dirt, and street wars. If there’s any seed of truth in it, I believe we have already used all our luck. How else could one describe those unbelievable four years of contact other than luck? How else can I describe the feeling spreading through all of Europa and the other moons? I do not regret any second I had the honor to enjoy Vaían’s presence in the solar system. I don’t regret any unfulfilled dream, any false expectation. When the revolution came, we were still so amazed by our luck that we were unable to fully grasp its impact. It was like a windstorm, perversely beautiful in its force of destruction. It broke everything we had hoped for and separated us and Vaían forever.
Under the pretext of saving humanity (but what is humanity if not the courage to explore the unknown?), the revolutionaries woke us from our happy dreams and made us monsters, freaks. They took no shame in stealing everything Vaían had given us, did not hesitate to distort its legacy in their interest. Still, my heart fills with joy when I recall those four years, and no prison can ever change it. I keep writing in Vaían symbols and using my tautogram for my name. And if I cannot personally deliver my testimony of the star travelers to the generation of my children, this notepad hopefully may.
2.
Janita quickly refuted my notion that all infected civilians ended up either incarcerated or executed.
“You’re placing too much faith in the inner planets’ propaganda,” she replied, and sipped her coffee. We were sitting in a small, clean bistro under a marquee, shielded from the fine rain. Janita wore a fine knitted cap covering her forehead and temples. She looked very pretty in it but that wasn’t the reason I agreed to another meeting. Nor the money, even though I’d kept pretending I cared about it. The bistro was empty and the waitress carefully avoided our table, perhaps repelled by the symbol of a federal agent on my lapel.
“As the revolution grew into a war,” Janita explained quietly, “lots of volunteers tried to relieve the suffering of the crews of destroyed ships, and accepted their incubants, especially in field hospitals and refugee camp infirmaries. The government mostly tracked down the doctors but not the auxiliary staff. I was in the first semester of a nursing school and helped out as a nurse in the Saint Cross Hospice.”
I didn’t know that place but could imagine it: dirty, bloodied beds; dim lights; overworked doctors. The agony the crews suffered away from the engines, their feeling of separation and missing an integral part of them, so strong that they truly bled from their nonexistent injuries. Although the presence of the other infected relieved their pains, the Europan fleet members would die after a couple of weeks without their ships.
“Our viral codes had never been compiled through longer than three-letter keys and never entered Vaían technology’s fields,” she concluded. “That’s why we were able to last away from the other carriers. A week of fever, headache, and cramps and the infection faded; only the original incubant remained.”
She kept talking in plural but I could not imagine how many of these voluntary carriers could outlast the war. A dozen? A hundred? A few dozen could be enough for rekindling the long conflict’s fire, especially now, when the inner planets’ attention faltered.
Just a few years ago, our conversation would have been impossible. The whole system crawled with spies and everyone watched everyone else for a sign of anything Vaían in the gleam of their eyes. But the war sucked money out of all of us, and without it, it was a long journey to Jupiter. The repressions, resistance, and confused political situation out there could stay out of Earth’s interests. We were on the victorious side without admitting that actually we only prevailed over ourselves. Of the whole war, only seven clay cones remained on Earth, burying the crews of seven Europan ships alive. And, of course, the unceasing terawatts of energy their engines kept spewing out.
I forced my face into a casual smile. “And what about me? What’s the chance I get infected when we descend into the throat together?”
I knew the crew presented no danger to me. The virus in their bodies was old, ingrained in their biomagnetic fields like a wood stain. It had brushed against me many times. Yet the maze of Janita’s hair could hide a much more aggressive Minotaur.
She shook her head. “The virus doesn’t spread so easily. An incubant cannot infect you. Even if I allowed it to expand to all of my body, the transmission is not easy. You would have to want it.”
The most fundamental question remained unasked, unanswered between us. We kept playing the game that Janita was really a dutiful daughter wishing to visit her father and I’d look away from her missing medical statement. She could never get one as a carrier. “But the meaning of what she’d said earlier still haunted me. “The most imp
ortant thing in your life.” That didn’t bode well.
* * *
The station on the cone’s apex resembled a starfish. Endless lines of pylons stretched in all directions, laden with garlands of cables. Some junctions gave off little sparks in the unceasing rain.
I sent Janita, tired from the long travel in Earth’s gravity, to sleep and went to look into the mouth of the cone. I knew the guard stationed there well. When we sat on the edge, legs dangling to the rim of the first collar of coils, he produced a bag of roasted peanuts.
“Want some, agent?”
The throat underneath us faded into distorted distance. Nine hundred meters of shielding and high-voltage filters, nine hundred meters of paranoia, not letting even a shred of the virus reach Earth’s surface. The descent took a day and a half, including two eight-hour acclimation stops. The throat wasn’t a place created for people. It was a dangerous tangle of field lines and dipoles. The difference between the electric potentials by its mouth and base, inside near the ship, constituted hundreds of millions of kilovolts. The throat pumped air into the buried ship so that the engines wouldn’t waste their energy on recycling, and all rations, water, and medicine went down through it. In the opposite direction, the energy of Vaían engines surged up the outer collars of the throat; that energy which had rendered most power plants on Earth useless. Janita had been right; it was barbaric.
“Some pretty young girl again, eh, agent?” the soldier asked me, and crunched another peanut.
“I don’t pick them,” I smiled sadly. “It’s they who pick me.” Janita knew very well whom to pick. I had worked on Ganymede for a long time, so long that I almost became a Jovian. I was alone on Earth. Only a small stack of divorce papers divided me from the family left out there. I’d managed to screw up my life and return to Earth just before the contact. Before the Jovian moons became the promised land—or Vaían’s slave, depending on the point of view. Surprisingly, my personal connections to Ganymede didn’t impede my rise in the career hierarchy. I went through the training for work in the throat and took a medical course for first aid to people under the influence of strong electromagnetic fields. I became a government-approved guide in the sporadic journeys of relatives and friends to the ships’ crews. But deep inside, I have never been a textbook earthling protecting Humanity (with a capital H) and loathing everything Vaían. I could be swayed. Yes, I could be bribed.