The Void (27 page)

“What I really need,” he said to himself, “is Cyrus.”

The words had no sooner left his mouth than he regretted them. Even though this had been their first job together, he'd known Cyrus through the trade for several years. While they had never been particularly close, he'd always liked him. He'd also met his wife once, daughter too.

He did not relish the thought of their next meeting. It had been the spacing guild's tradition for as long as it had existed that a dead crewman's fellow guildsman, and not the captain, was responsible for notifying the next of kin. And while Cyrus wasn't dead, he might as well have been.

Aidan didn't turn when he heard the door slide open behind him. “Back so soon?” he asked over his shoulder, his attention focused on a micro screwdriver he had jammed into a broken motherboard.

“But, my friend,” he heard his own voice say, “I never left.”

“I should be surprised,” Aidan thought. He wasn't. Not at all. He had expected this, somewhere, deep inside. Had known it must come, from the first instant he looked up at the familiar corridors of the derelict
Singularity
on Captain Gravely's video feed, since the moment that the captain and Dr. Ridley had walked down hallways that he had also trod in dreams he wished he had never seen.

Even before then, really. When he stood on the deck of his old ship, in the most recent dream, and watched the image of his past self do things he could not recall and hoped never really happened. Yes, he had expected this. In fact, he had hoped for it. Needed it, really. He needed answers.

He turned in his chair and looked upon the image of himself, dressed in the blue jumpsuit he often wore, his hands crossed across his chest. He was as Aidan had seen him in the dream. Younger, less worn, as if years had passed between them.

“You're not surprised to see me, I take it?”

“How could I be?” Aidan said. “I know you so well.”

His doppelgänger snorted. “Do you? Or am I the one person you don't know at all?”

“I know you're not real,” Aidan said. “I know you're an illusion, a figment of my own imagination. Some combination of the effects of the dreams and the gravitational forces of the black hole. That's all you are. And I don't have time for you.”

Aidan spun his chair around, turning his back on the phantasm that stood nonchalantly just beyond the filaments of darkness in the engine room.

“That won't work, Aidan,” the voice behind him said. “I'm not going anywhere.”

Aidan turned back, and sure enough, the other was still there. The perfect copy of Aidan, sandy-brown hair and a small scar beneath his left eye from a high school fight over a basketball game.

He didn't feel any of the things he should have. No terror. Not even confusion. His rational mind kicked in at that moment. He evaluated the situation, took stock of what was happening to him. Perhaps he was standing in the presence of a demon, a shape-shifting beast intent on driving him insane. Or an alien maybe, one that had come aboard the ship and now sought the undoing of its newest possessors. For what purpose, only it knew. Or maybe—and was this better or worse?—this was all within his mind, brought on by stress and creeping madness.

“The latter is more accurate,” the thing said.

Aidan rubbed his tired eyes. He was slipping now, slipping away. His mind was breaking and if he didn't get a hold of himself, he was afraid he might never recover.

“You're finally beginning to see things as they truly are.”

Aidan looked up at the doppelgänger, his head cocked to the side. The image of what could best be described as pity on his face.

“I'm here to help you, Aidan. I'm here to help you see.”

“See what?” Aidan said, putting aside the absurdity of all of this, accepting, for the time being at least, that it was real. “If you wished to help me, you'd go away.”

“I can't do that,” he said, a flat implacable look spreading across his face. “There is a hole in your mind.”

Now all of the things that should have happened from the very beginning did. Aidan felt a chill ripple down his spine as his blood went cold and his hair stood on end. Fear came into his heart as he thought back on Lieutenant Felix, a mere boy who had murdered his shipmate on the
Alabama
, and the words he had spoken from his cell. “There is a hole in your mind,” Felix had said. “A time will come where you will be called upon. And in your hands will rest the fate of many. Perhaps then you can redeem your lost soul.”

“Have you come to fill it?” Aidan asked the spirit of his past.

“I can do nothing alone. You must see for yourself. You must remember, if you are to keep your mind from shattering like a thousand pieces of glass.”

“I don't understand,” Aidan said, almost desperately.

The other Aidan walked down the steps, into the well of the engine room. It ran its hands along the console, picking up the ax that had been used to destroy it, all while Aidan wondered how much of this was real and how much a mere illusion.

“Oh what violence man can do to his own creations,” it said. “Damage them at times. Destroy them at others. Wouldn't you agree?”

Aidan said nothing, and the thing frowned.

“Your dream, Aidan, the one you had aboard the
Chronos
. Have you not wondered about what you saw?”

“I saw you,” Aidan said.

“No. You saw yourself. You saw the thing you won't let yourself remember. The thing you did. The thing that haunts your unconscious mind even now.”

“I did nothing,” Aidan said. “It was an accident.”

“How can you be so sure? After all, you don't remember it. Do you? You only remember the dream.”

Spawn of Hell or the making of his own mind, the thing knew him too well. Aidan didn't know what happened that day on the
Vespa.
But he could not shake this sinking suspicion that it was his fault. Not in some trivial way. Not the result of some misplaced sense of responsibility, spun from the guilt of a survivor. No, something far more tangible than that. He did remember the dream all too well. What he had seen himself do, just before the scream woke him.

It was a simple thing to destroy a starship. Far too simple, really. Aidan had thought on it often, wondered why the engineers never fixed the problem. It was a trade-off. On the one hand, people didn't trust the computers, the machines. No matter how advanced or sophisticated they were, even if they were far less prone to error than the men who ran the ships.

So there were always mechanisms, manual overrides. One of those involved the power allocation to the warp drive. Overload it, and the core would breach. At that point, the destruction of the ship was inevitable.

And that's exactly what the dream had shown him. His hands, typing in the commands to direct far too much power to the warp core. It would have been simple after that. Fire the standard engines, move the ship out to trans-Plutonian space. Send out a false emergency broadcast. Get into an escape pod and wait. Till breach was imminent, till there was nothing more that could be done to stop it and save the ship.

Then launch. Launch and watch the ship as it drifted away, growing smaller and smaller until replaced by a fireball ten times its size, one fed by the oxygen in the ship before it suffocated in the vacuum of space. Then nothing but debris and wreckage. And the bodies of the dead.

“But that's not possible,” Aidan said, looking up at the other with confusion written on his face, arguing with his own thoughts. “I was injured. Burned.” He was on the ship when the disaster started. That was the only explanation. “If it had happened the other way, if I was the cause, then I would have been fine.”

“Oh, Aidan,” the doppelgänger said with real pity in his voice, “what a web of lies you have created. And how tangled in them you are. I don’t even know how to begin to free you.”

“No more games!” Aidan shrieked. “Show me why you're here!”

“Why was the last dream different, Aidan?” he said, stepping around the table between them and facing Aidan, close enough that the two men could touch if they dared. “Why did it change? Why did you see something new?”

“What does this have to do with anything?”

“Answer the question, Aidan, if you can.”

“I don't know. I'd seen all there was to see. I'd reached the end of the dream.”

The other laughed.

“Men see the same dreams for fifty years, Aidan. Have you ever heard differently? Can you name one other case like yours? Any other who has not lived the same nightmare over and over and over again? Yet you were different. Something happened, Aidan. Something happened in the dream. Think back to the last time you stood on this ship, before you had your breakdown. What did you see? And what have you forgotten?”

Aidan did think back. Back to the last warp jump he had taken on the
Vespa
, before the doctors told him that a combination of exhaustion and hysteria had kept him confined to the infirmary. For rest, they said. He had been here, on this ship. Standing on the bridge. Staring up at the endless darkness of empty space.

That inevitable future, fifty billion years hence. When every star was dead and all life extinguished. Nothing but vacant black holes remained to mark the passage of what had been the bright wonder of the universe. What had he done then, when faced with such an inevitable fate, such an awful truth?

He had believed since that moment that he simply woke up to a world where the sun still shone, where the stars still beckoned in the night sky. But now, as he stood in the engine room, and as the other Aidan stared at him with unblinking eyes, he realized none of that was the truth. Something else had happened.

Aidan glanced up at his doppelgänger, at that demon from his own mind. His mouth fell open. In shock, maybe. Or in hope that he was wrong. Hope that the other would disabuse him of the truth that had come tumbling forth in his mind.

He had not woken from the dream in that one instant of crushing truth. Instead, he had turned to find that the shadow wall stood behind him. It had always been a part of his dream, of course. But never like this. Never simply appearing. Never beckoning, as this one seemed to do. Promising an escape from the end of time.

He had two choices, it seemed. He could stand and witness the end of all things, be in the presence of an emptiness so vast, so complete, that it threatened to swallow him whole. Or he could do something that heretofore he would have called truly insane. To pass through the wall of shadow and witness what lay beyond.

In one moment of pure impulse, Aidan made a decision and dove, head first, through the shroud.

It was not until Aidan left his feet that he asked himself why he was doing this. It wasn't until the die was cast, the Rubicon crossed, that Aidan's rational mind questioned the wisdom of his actions. After all, it was only a matter of time until he would wake and emerge from the dream, away from that place.

It was too late for regret. When Aidan passed through the shadow wall, he knew what regret truly was. What lay in the spaces between space and what was the substance of shadow. The fall did not end quickly has he had expected, sprawled on the ship floor just beyond the wall of night through which he had passed. No, the shadow divided more than the dimensions of a room. It split space and time and distance. It was the seam where our world connected with some unknown other.

Aidan fell headlong into that world. He did not fall freely. Rather it was as if the air—if it was air—of that great labyrinthine blackness had substance of its own, thickness and viscosity, like oil more than air. Aidan slipped through, floating as much as falling, until he landed with a thud upon an obsidian beach on the shores of a putrid, dead sea.

How many times did his mind break in those next few moments? How many ways was it twisted and torn? Was it the sky? That purple dark dome that pulsated and undulated, echoing the living membrane of an ungodly organ? Was it the great, black sun that shone darkness down upon him, like the pupil of a massive eye? An inversion of the sun's gift of light and warmth?

Perhaps it would have been those things, were it not for what he saw as he crawled up the obsidian beaches to their very crests. There he looked down on a city of febrile darkness and the Stygian-spired mountains that surrounded it, their tooth-like peaks piercing into the sky like a beast ready to devour, more maddeningly high than any ever known on Earth.

Those who dwelt within that city had come for him. These he had seen before, he guessed, if only the barest image of them, the slightest vision. How would he ever describe such beings? They were the darkness made manifest. Tall and thin, and made in the image of man it seemed, if only his outline. Two legs, two arms. A torso and a head.

But there the similarities ended. They walked in a halting fashion, like their bodies were struck with palsy, as if walking was foreign to them. They seemed to shake and jerk with every step they took. Their backs and their arms and their legs seemed permanently, if ever so slightly, bent, adding to the grotesqueness of their movement. They held their hands in front of them, their long, thin, snake-like fingers reaching for Aidan.

Their faces were the worst. Their skull-like visages, without the shimmering whiteness, but all the blank emptiness where the nose, the eyes and the mouth should be. Yet they saw Aidan as they stumbled toward him. And the darkness seemed to move with them.

They whispered, voicelessly perhaps, if all of this was truly in his brain. Whispered his name. Aidan screamed. He screamed like so many others who had come before him to those Plutonian shores. Screamed until the darkness closed in upon him and he remembered no more.

“So you see now,” the other said. “You see the truth. You see what happened to you on the
Vespa
.”

Aidan did see. But still, he did not know the whole truth. He could not remember what happened after the folding darkness had enveloped him. He could not say where he had gone from there or what had happened when he woke.

“I went to the infirmary,” he said out loud. “They said I was fine. They said it was just fatigue.”