Authors: Christopher McKitterick
*Maybe a city. Where are you?
*
*I’m afraid something is happening to me,* Miru stated, still focusing his thoughts. *I’m afraid that remaining too long in here is dangerous. I seem to be fading. I’m sorry I cannot quantify what is happening to me except to say that I am mentally fading.
*
*And our bodies are—what? Gone?
*
*I have never been inside here before,* Miru said, somewhat irritably. *It seems that one entering the artifact is absorbed or otherwise dispersed. If my body is gone yet my mind is still active, that would be the only explanation. Perhaps this is, indeed, an organism and we are its prey.
*
Nostalgia and sadness touched Miru. He had not been contacted by aliens; indeed, his companion in death was a man who, in more mundane situations, would be his enemy. Miru was dying, yes, he recognized that now. But that was not what caused him distress. Rather, he sensed that he stood overlooking a great precipice of knowledge. He had glimpsed the bridge that led to understanding—maybe more than that; maybe he had glimpsed understanding itself—but then he was alone again, alone and blind and senseless and dying. All for nothing. He could not contact anyone. He could not transmit what he had learned to the next explorer, giving him or her advance information on conditions within the object. He would die for nothing, like his parents. Like that gang-boy he had found floating among hungry, biting minnows beneath the Island waves; the boy had changed in death, had lost his power and terror and become a simple corpse. For nothing. Perhaps Miru’s parents could have become great leaders in the world had they survived; perhaps the gang-boy would have grown up to teach other boys how to escape the grip of gangs yet remain safe and psychologically intact on the Island.
All for nothing. Nothing. The work on Luna, hundreds of hours spent coring and laying wire, nothing. Years spent analyzing 3VRD geologic data about dead, empty worlds, nothing. The great discovery of an alien artifact or organism on Triton, nothing. His whole life had proven to be nothing more than one long, meaningless chain of worthless effort. And how was anyone else different? They weren’t. He realized that here, in a ravenous sphere on a barren and worthless world, all the millennia of effort exerted by billions of humans had amounted to nothing. A great vacuum of space engulfed him, stretching off into infinity, almost never encountering motes of matter as nothingness extended outward from him, the nothingness at the center of his nothing universe.
Those millennia of callused human hands chipping stone, casting bronze, driving spikes into steam-train railways, and finally operating flow-valves with 3VRD manipulators could have been the long springtime. But now winter would fall.
*We found the artifact too early,* Miru said. *Rather, it was time for us to find it, this, the bridge to transcendence revealed, but we’ve remained nasty children with holocaust toys certain to one day—intentionally or accidentally—destroy us. Here, all our potentialities could have been accessed. I see it now. And if we survive the coming war—and there will be war, my brother Jackson, Jackson the Destroyer
. . .
if we survive the beasts you’ve set loose, we will grow sleepy with age, and fear and ignorance and apathy will destroy what’s left of our curiosity. And we will die. Here, here already we die. We cannot even understand this teaching tool they’ve given us—they the benevolent or pragmatic aliens. It’s a teaching tool, don’t you see? What else would it be. And our failure means our death, and our death will bring the fear and anger of those who knew we entered, and the teaching tool will ultimately be the seed of our destruction. It will be the teaching tool of the intelligent beetles, when their time comes. Or their destruction, as well.
*We were not ready, he finished, his voice now barely noticeable in his own mind. Oh, it is not your fault, brother Jackson. No, I too am sorry. We die together. Witness the fall of the human race! The fault lies at the rough feet of our ancestors who never matured beyond the brutish nature of those who sired them. We stood briefly upon our collection of worlds, pondering the galaxy with minds barely sentient, before the cold reasoning of that galaxy devoured us. Observe!
*
And he began to laugh away the last of his energy, quick to be done with the whole, long, filthy mess. He felt the contamination of the entire human race upon his skin of his mind, and he was sick and in a hurry to be done with it.
As Miru’s words ran like voiceless messengers through the corridors of Pehr’s mind, Pehr grew ashamed, then afraid, and finally angry. As Miru’s words faded more and more into the hungry blackness, Pehr stretched himself toward the hopeless man. He would not give up, not now. He would not let Miru give up. He could not bear to think he would die alone, that he would be alone for eternity. And what would eternity be like? What comes next? EarthCo’s careful cultivation of the gods of profit and security offered no comfort here. At the same time, he also knew every other human god would be powerless in this realm of alien gods. Anyway, Pehr had never sought comfort in the intangible. The only real comfort he had ever found came in the form of men and women and a little boy who had accompanied Pehr in a pocket into this alien place. Pehr seized upon the old comfort of that cloth boy, then reached out a mental hand to Miru.
He felt himself weaken a bit. If anyone were to ask to define how it felt, he couldn’t have said. The mental image of himself shrank, his thoughts grew quieter, his sight grew dimmer—
*I can see!* he called to Miru.
*What does it look like?
*
Miru asked. His words seemed to come from only inches away—a purely figurative description—and were much louder and clearer.
*It’s, it’s
. . .*
Pehr attempted to but he could not describe what he saw, for when he tried to do so, his mind’s eye promptly failed to see anything, and he couldn’t remember how it—which he hadn’t really seen—had looked.
But then he suddenly remembered, as if from his long-ago memory, a man in a spacesuit looking up at a black, starry sky. The man stood on the surface of a moon, Earth’s Moon. Pehr somehow knew the man was wondering how many centuries would pass before men stood on worlds encircling alien suns.
Now Pehr was the distant stars peering across great expanses at the man, and Pehr saw the man’s dark, quiet face and dark, questioning eyes. The suit was familiar: NKK issue. Without needing to ask, Pehr knew this was Miru.
His mind seemed to be operating more clearly now, without the distractions of flesh and neurons and headcard or any of its constant blabbering. No shows, no scripts. He was the captain of his own destiny, and he seemed, for the first time in his life, able to think. He seized on a sudden inspiration.
*
Who are you?
* Pehr asked, remembering Janus’ question in the
Bounty
’s escape pod, and how the question had elicited such a clarification of himself. He could, again, see every blade of grass and lichen-covered crack of concrete and drop of blood of his life, a young woman’s exquisite, retreating back, an expressionless face. . . .
*Who am I?* Miru said. *What—*
*No, no; just think it without trying to talk. I can see you.
Show
me who you are.*
Miru was silent.
*Don’t be afraid,* Pehr said. *I think that’s how this works. And I’ll show you me, too. If we’re going to survive in here, we’ll need to cooperate. Did you notice how your voice is stronger? I did that.*
*How?*
*I don’t know, except that I noticed you were growing quiet and I still felt very strong. I wanted to hear you better, and it just happened. Show me who you are. Just do it. Just do whatever you need to do to show me who you are, just as I need to show you who I am, and we’ll bust out of here. Don’t try to tell me, just try to understand yourself. I think I just saw a little of you, like a clue. Do you understand?*
*It’s illogical,* Miru said.
Pehr noticed that, whatever he had seen—had he really seen a man in a spacesuit?—had fled from his mind. He had no mental image. Was he dying?
*Do it now!* Pehr demanded. *Your logic will kill you. If you die, I die, and I’m not ready no matter how grandiose you think it’ll be to watch the fall of humanity. If this artifact is a teaching tool, why else would we be here together, blind and alone but somehow able to communicate, unless we’re supposed to work together? Dammit, we’ve got to help one another.*
Something changed.
Pehr grew dizzy with disorientation. But then he saw a sort of landscape stretch out before him, and he remembered. He remembered where and who he was, and what was happening, because a fog seemed to lift from that landscape. The fog was a palpable blackness, it was nothingness and emptiness, it was a barrier to understanding.
Beneath the fog a man waited. This time, the man wore no spacesuit. He looked wise and gentle, but did not smile. He had the features of an Asian, of the enemy NKK soldier. But this was Miru.
Pehr’s eyes opened, and so followed every other sense. And he felt he could cry, if he were a crying man.
The man disappeared but didn’t; Pehr disappeared but didn’t. They became the landscape, which was a man’s life. The final feeling that quivered through Pehr was fear, but he knew that fear just came from ignorance and would destroy everything. So he opened his mind and shut off his thoughts and let worlds pour into him.
Here and there, mists cleared, briefly but always long enough to see the scenes beneath the mists. It was as if the universe were a series of scenes, cast about randomly in a sea of mist that the mind defined as
utter nothingness
. But after experiencing a few of these scenes—not seeing, because he lived those scenes for as long as they had lasted in their original context—he recognized a greater scheme, an arrangement of the scenes into what he had first glimpsed as landscape. The universe unfolded more than three dimensions; scenes were scattered in a pattern that wove a greater whole, a sort of sphere of experiences composed of smaller or larger spheres within, each a moment or a year in duration, like floating worlds packed closely together.
The landscapes themselves—which together formed the worlds that created the greater picture—rose up around him as if he were there. A vast floating island, sharp rusted metals and glinting plastics, crowded the sky with towers and bridgeheads and countless wandering people. The island’s walls melted away, and within he saw rooms smaller than those of the eighter.
Then the other he—for now he realized he was not Pehr Jackson or Liu Miru, but someone exponentially greater than either alone
. . .
the other he bounded down a long cement staircase, being careful to avoid the fourth one, where a bomb had exploded. And now he watched the spade-shaped bomb rise in a slow arc from the open hand of a teenaged boy with a snarling grin creasing his face, the bomb sailing like nothing more than a butterfly or wasp; other boys sitting on the steps, engrossed in a 3VRD game of Snatch, a young boy standing on a yellow patch of grass in the yard, the yard bordered by tall green weeds and vines that snarled themselves up the chickenwire fence that surrounded the eighter’s yard, barbed wire dull rust topping the fence where one of the vines broke out in an oblivious cluster of purple grapes too small to eat except for the birds, which occasionally swooped down from the always-hazy sky with little patches of blue that shone occasionally, through which the sun yellow burned the skin so the little boy watching the bomb arc through the air.
Closer now, he had to wear special cream on his skin to not develop the cancer; and still the bomb sailed through the air, the birds seeming to reveal a kind of prescience, for they flew away just as the spade-bomb fell toward the steps where the teenagers now blinked because the younger boy had cried out to them, “Watch out!” over their commlines and out loud intheflesh; he watches them hurl their hard, lithe bodies over the sharp, broken, plastic edge of the staircase many meters from the ground;
thud-crack!
the bomb hits the steps and explodes, and a great white and brown cloud of dust and light flashes into the air, one boy suddenly crying out as a red streak leaps out from his cheek, the young boy named Pehr in the yard standing still and so furious he could run out into the street after the other boys who were racing away in their ground-car which bellowed a cloud of stinking methane-puff, as they called it; he swears to teach those boys to never again do that, not here, not to the boys who like him, not near his house or Teresa or Mom whom he loved more than everything in the world, himself included.
And another boy, same age no a little older and named Liu, running as fast as his feet could carry him along a banging gangway hovering above crashing waves below, the Island huge and ominous towering above him, he hears in his bones the massive creaking of its hull and infrastructure, sightless windows above glinting in the sunlight, almost a hundred meters of living and office space: “No, you must never go there and bother those important men and women,” Mother explains, and the good teacher in his head who was transparent, really, although sometimes eventually he began to pull interest from the boy, especially after seeing the man who looked like Father in the water.