No rescue vessel appeared, nor any sign of any other escape pods from the ship. It was difficult to measure the passage of time, but it was no more than a few weeks before we gave up all hope of being rescued. We confessed to one another that we hadn’t ever really thought it possible that help would arrive. In time, we even came to believe it.
My dreams grew worse, such that it was rare that a night passed without some terror rousing me from my sleep. When I mentioned these to the others, even those who claimed not to have been troubled by nightmares indicated with their haunted expressions that they in fact had been. We wondered whether there might not be some characteristic of our diet, perhaps undetected microorganisms in the condensation, that could account for these nightly visions, but when we finally had a chance to ask Kloster his opinion, on one of his rare appearances at mealtime, he claimed that his own sleep was untroubled and that he had no notion which might be disturbing the rest of us. He put it down to stress over our circumstances, and he went about his business.
I wanted to believe the engineer was right, but when I awoke from a dream, the image fresh in my mind—of my hands wrapped around Nayrami’s thin bird-like neck, or of Phedra standing over me with a disruptor pistol in hand, or of coming upon Serj lying in pieces on the ground, his entrails a feast for a flock of flyers—I found it hard to dismiss it so easily.
We began to explore, more to stave off boredom than to pursue any curiosity. We carried disruptors at our belts, of course, to fend off any errant flyers, but we were quite safe, for all that.
The planetoid of Eventide was denser and more massive than its small dimensions would suggest. This we knew, but until one of us did it, we had no notion than a person on foot could walk in a circuit around the planetoid’s surface in the equivalent of just a few days. Eventide’s gravitational attraction was a substantial portion of Earth-normal, only a few percent less than that of Disocur. And, despite our best efforts, we found no other members of the local ecosystem than the fronds, the scurries, and the flyers, as much as our palates—weary of a steady diet of condensation and roasted scurry—would have preferred some variety.
That such an unlikely environment supported a single organism, much less three, was hardly a surprise. Since the days of the Diaspora, humanity had learned that life was ubiquitous, hiding in virtually every imaginable planetary crevasse.
If life itself was everywhere, however, sentience sadly was not. The only self-aware beings humanity encountered out among the stars were those that they brought with them, or those which they engendered once they arrived. With sufficient time, resources, and desire, it was conceivable that we survivors could uplift the simple organics of Eventide into proper sentience, but it hardly seemed worth the trouble, even in purely theoretical terms.
And, in short order, we had explored all that there was to explore. Except for the caves. The planetoid was riddled with subterranean passages, from microfissures to massive caverns, but they were cold, and dark, and foreboding, and none of us liked to linger too long in them. None but the engineer. Kloster seemed to have found a new home, there in the dark recesses of Eventide, and as time went on, he visited our little community of frond-built structures less and less. When he did return to the surface, on rare occasions, it was only for brief visits, during which he would question each of us in turn about all that had happened in his absence, as though he were compiling a personal history of our collective experiences.
Still my dreams grew worse, and from their haggard and haunted looks I knew that the others’ sleep was no less troubled. In our waking hours, we found it difficult to separate the real people before us from the actions our minds had attributed to them in our nightmares. In some cases, such as the dreams of strange pairings, as when I dreamed that I was pair-bonded to Phedra and not to Serj, this made for uncomfortable encounters, when I forgot that the affection I felt was only imagined, and a tender caress in passing gave offense. But mine was not the first such transgression, and tempers quickly calmed.
One night, I dreamed that Kloster had failed to construct the makeshift Mind that housed the ghost of Farise, and that he had bonded to Nayrami. But their pair-bond, in my dream, was an unhappy one, and ended badly.
The population of scurries around our encampment grew thinner as time went on, forcing us to go further and further afield to find meat for our table. I took to hunting alone in the “mornings,” going out with my disruptor sidearm—at its lowest setting the beam was sufficient to kill the creatures without disintegrating them altogether—and returning hours later with enough food for all of us.
On the day it happened, I managed to catch only two scurries, and I knew that we’d be eating slim for dinner that night. I called to Serj as I stepped inside our frond shelter, joking that he’d have to curb his appetite for one night, at least, but that I’d make it up to him when we doused the lights.
There he was, in our cot, lying naked next to vast amount of green-tinged skin, cascades of copper-reddish hair falling over his chest.
It took me a moment to work out the tangle of limbs and flesh, but then I have never been very quick.
“Tamsin?” I said aloud, as she and my partner turned, eyes wide, startled by my early return.
“Zihl, wait . . .” Serj said, raising a hand to me.
My disruptor was at my belt, and then it was in my hand. I don’t recall a transition between the two states, though there must have been. My vision went red, and my thoughts boomed in my head like the sound of the
Phonix
’s lower decks imploding. I could see Serj’s lips moving, but nothing he said made it into my head. I thumbed the disruptor’s beam to full dispersal and fired.
Serj and Tamsin, locked in a final embrace, faded like an afterimage as their bodies’ quanta decohered, subatomic particles displaced in all directions, accompanied only by a low, sullen hiss from the sidearm’s barrel.
But as they died, erased from existence, the image of their death was overlaid in my mind with countless other images of death and loss, the same as those that had haunted my dreams these many months, but now more immediate, more vivid. They were all real, and none of them was.
I reeled back, clutching the sides of my head, and for an instant I couldn’t bring to mind what had just happened. Had I just beamed Serj and Tamsin into noncorporeality? And if I had, which was my partner and which the interloper? Or had it been another whom my beam had struck, or another who had been about to beam me?
Reality reasserted, and I remembered what I had done, but even then my grasp was tenuous, and I felt as though I might slip back into a myriad of unreal worlds at any moment.
Throwing my disruptor to the ground and racing from the shelter, I headed for the caverns.
I had to find Kloster. He would know what to do.
I don’t know how long I searched for the engineer in the darkened caves of Eventide. Hours? Days? Longer? I passed through caverns large enough to house the
Phonix
itself, and crawled through tunnels scarcely wider than my shoulders, and I forgot all about hunger, and thirst, and fatigue. I thought of nothing but everything that I had lost, and the nightmares that plagued us, and the frozen sky, and the crash, and the sure certainty that there must be an answer to all of it, and that Kloster must have it.
I cannot say whether some part of me recognized that the walls along which I groped were no longer rough stone but cool and polished metal, or that my eyes, long accustomed to the darkness, could again see in the gradual gloom ahead. I think, in fact, that I was almost nose-to-nose with the engineer before it even registered on my consciousness that he was before me. The dawning realization that he stood before a massive wall of metal, covered with strange shapes and symbols, followed at some distance.
“Ah, Assistant Astrogator,” Kloster said, with a resigned nod, looking up from his work. “Well, what was it this time?”
I stammered, my throat parched, my tongue thick in my mouth.
“Well, come out with it, Zihl, what happened?”
“Serj . . .” I began, my voice croaking. “With Tamsin. In our bed.” I tried to swallow but passed only dust and air.
“Go on,” the engineer said, waving his hand impatiently. “Serj was your partner, I believe, and you found him in the arms of another.”
I looked down at my hands, cut, bruised, and filthy from my journey through the caves.
“I had my disruptor . . .” I said, and could go no further.
Kloster rubbed his chin, thoughtfully. “I shouldn’t be surprised, I suppose. The pairing of Tamsin with Phedra was never particularly stable.”
The Engineer clapped his hands together and turned to face the metal. He began moving the shapes and symbols in sequence, at a lightning pace.
“What . . . what is this?” I managed to croak, and waved a bloody finger toward the towering wall. The metal of which it was constructed was one I had never seen before, shimmering and strange, and seemed to shift beneath my gaze.
“Hmmm?” Kloster glanced back over his shoulder, distracted. “Oh, this? This, my dear Zihl, is the proof that the Demiurgists would murder their own children in their beds to possess. This is not a planetoid. It never was. This is an ancient engine, capable of warping the fabric of space-time around it. Everything between here and the surface is merely matter that has accreted to the engine’s surface, over countless eons.”
I staggered back, blinking lids over bloodshot eyes, my mouth working soundlessly.
“At some point, probably before the Old Earth cooled, the engine malfunctioned and pinched off from normal space into its own pocket continuum. That’s what attracted the
Phonix
as we transitioned back from underspace. We never could have escaped, if that’s what you’re worried about. Not once we passed within the event horizon of the engine’s space-time bubble. But while it’s taken long years, I’ve been able to master the rudiments of the engine’s controls, so that I can now manipulate the flow of time within the bubble.”
“Time?” I said, feebly.
“Yes, rolling it backward and forward, trying to find the proper combinations. If we’re to live here, it may as well be in the best circumstances, yes? But so far, I’m afraid it always ends badly. That’ll be the cause of the nightmares, bleed-through from the other iterations, but that’s a small price to pay, don’t you think?” He grinned, darkly. “But it could be worse, after all. You could be forced to remember all of the iterations, like I do.” He mimed a shiver, and shook his head, comically.
I stepped forward, raising my hands.
“We’ve done all of this before?”
“Yes, Zihl,” Kloster said, a touch of sadness in his voice, “but I’m confident that I’ll work out all of the suitable variables, given time.”
The Engineer reached out a thin finger, and touched a final symbol on the metal wall, and the world fell away.
It was everywhere.
It was nowhere.
I remembered all of it, and I remembered nothing.
It was . . .
It was while burying Dobeh that Tamsin first caught my attention. In the strange twilight of Eventide, she shone like a distant star, her crimson hair and eyes standing out like firelight against the cool emerald of her skin. She smiled, and I knew then that we’d be paired.
What We Still Talk About
Scott Edelman
S
elene, blue pill cupped in one palm, wondered where she would find the strength to raise the small lozenge to her lips. The longer she stared out at the harsh landscape, the heavier the morning dosage seemed in her hand.
The dome had hoped that she and her husband would find the vista in which it had chosen to place them that morning pleasing, but for Selene, the generated location was a failure, as had been its other recent choices. Karl would perhaps feel differently, but for Selene, as the rocks stretched on, rough and dry and red, the scene brought to mind nothing so much as the interior of her own heart.
She closed her fingers tightly around the pill and could feel its smooth metallic surface grow sticky from her sweat.
“Does anyone,” she said, in a soft, uncertain voice, “remember how to get to Earth?”
The words spurted out of her so suddenly that she was startled. Her question had exploded on its own without even the thought of an audience that might receive it.
“Did you hear what I just said, Karl?” said Selene. “Or did I only think it?”
“I heard you, darling,” said Karl, lifting wiry arms above his head as he stretched out on rainbow sheets that shimmered with his movements. “It just took me a moment to digest it. I haven’t thought about Earth in years.”
“Oh, please, Selene,” said Karl, entering through one of the bedroom’s irises while bearing a tray of drinks intended to cool them from their lovemaking. “Earth is so boring. Promise me that you’re not thinking of going back there again. You’re not really—are you?”