Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea (27 page)

I admit I had to look that up online. It’s from the Hindu
B
ṛ
had
ā
ra
ṇ
yaka
Upanishad. I haven’t studied Vedic literature since a seminar in grad school, and that was mostly an excuse to visit Bangalore. But the unconscious doesn’t lose much, does it, Doctor? And you never know what it’s going to cough up, or when.

In my dream, I stood staring at the ceiling that was really no ceiling at all. If anyone else could see what I was seeing, they didn’t act like it. The strange cloud near Ganymede made me think of an oil slick floating on water, and when
Pilgrimage
came out the far side, it was like those dying sea birds that wash up on beaches after tanker spills. That’s exactly how it seemed to me, in the dream last night. I looked away, finally, looked down at the floor, and I was trying to explain what I’d seen to the French woman. I described the ruined plumage of ducks and gulls and cormorants, but I couldn’t make her understand. And then I woke up. I woke up screaming, but you’ll have guessed that part.

I need to stop now. The meds have made going on almost impossible, and I should read back over everything I’ve written, do what I can to make myself clearer. I feel like I ought to say more about the cloud, because I’ve never seen it so clearly in any of the other dreams. It never before reminded me of an oil slick. I’ll try to come back to this. Maybe later. Maybe not.

March 20, 2037 (Saturday)

I don’t have to scream for the nurses to know that I’m awake, of course. I don’t have to scream, and I don’t have to use the call button, either. They get everything relayed in real-time, directly from my cerebral cortex and hippocampus to their wrist tops, via the depth electrodes and subdural strips that were implanted in my head a few weeks after the crew of
Yastreb-4
was released from suborbital quarantine. The nurses see it all, spelled out in the spikes and waves of electrocorticography, which is how I know
they
know that I’m awake right now, when I should be asleep. Tomorrow morning, I imagine there will be some sort of confab about adjusting the levels of my benzo and nonbenzo hypnotics to ensure the insomnia doesn’t return.

I’m not sure why I’m awake, really. There wasn’t a nightmare, at least none I can recall. I woke up and simply couldn’t get back to sleep. After ten or fifteen minutes, I reached for the keypad. I find the soft cobalt-blue glow from the screen is oddly soothing, and it’s nice to find comfort that isn’t injected, comfort that I don’t have to swallow or get from a jet spray or IV drip. And I want to have something more substantial to show the psychiatrist come Tuesday than dreams about Darmstadt, oil slicks, and pretty French women.

I keep expecting the vidcom beside my bed to buzz and wink to life, and there will be one of the nurses looking concerned and wanting to know if I’m all right, if I’d like a little extra coby to help me get back to sleep. But the box has been quiet and blank so far, which leaves me equal parts surprised and relieved.

“There are things you’ve yet to tell anyone,” the psychiatrist said. “Those are the things I’m trying to help you talk about. If they’ve been repressed, they’re the memories I’m trying to help you access.” That is, they’re what he’s going to want to see when I give him my report on Tuesday morning.

And if at first I don’t succeed…

So, where was I?

The handoff.

I’m sitting alone in the taxi, waiting, and below me, Mars is a sullen, rusty cadaver of a planet. I have the distinct impression that it’s watching as I’m handed off from one ship to the other. I imagine those countless craters and calderas have become eyes, and all those eyes are filled with jealousy and spite. The module’s capture ring has successfully snagged
Pilgrimage’s
aft PMA, and it only takes a few seconds for the ring to achieve proper alignment. The module deploys twenty or so hooks, establishing an impermeable seal, and, a few seconds later, the taxi’s hatch spirals open, and I enter the airlock. I feel dizzy, slightly nauseous, and I almost stumble, almost fall. I see a red light above the hatch go blue and realize that the chamber has pressurized, which means I’m subject to the centripetal force that generates the ship’s artificial gravity. I’ve been living in near zero-g for more than eleven months, and nothing they told me in training or aboard the
Yastreb-4
could have prepared me for the return of any degree of gravity. The EVA suit’s exoskeleton begins to compensate. It keeps me on my feet, keeps my atrophied muscles moving, keeps me breathing.

“You’re doing great,” Commander Yun assures me from the bridge of
Yastreb-4,
and that’s when my comms cut out. I panic and try to return to the taxi module, but the hatchway has already sealed itself shut again. I have a go at the control panel, my gloved fingers fumbling clumsily at the unfamiliar switches, but I can’t get it to respond. The display on the inside of my visor tells me that my heart rate’s jumped to 186 BPM, my blood pressure’s in the red, and oxygen consumption has doubled. I’m hyperventilating, which has my CO
₂
down and is beginning to affect blood oxygen levels. The medic on my left wrist responds by secreting a relatively mild anxiolytic compound directly into the radial artery. Milder, I might add, than the shit they give me here.

And yes, Dr. Ostrowski, I know that you’ve read all this before. I know that I’m trying your patience, and you’re probably disappointed. I’m doing this the only way I know how. I was never any good at jumping into the deep end of the pool.

But we’re almost there, I promise.

It took me a year and a half to find the words to describe what happened next, or to find the courage to say it aloud, or the resignation necessary to let it out into the world. Whichever. They’ve been
my
secrets and almost mine alone. And soon, now, they won’t be anymore.

The soup from the medic hits me, and I begin to relax. I give up on the airlock and shut my eyes a moment, leaning forward, my helmet resting against the closed hatch. I’m almost certain my eyes are still shut when the
Pilgrimage’s
AI first speaks to me. And here, Doctor, right
here,
pay attention, because this is where I’m going to come clean and tell you something I’ve never told another living soul. It’s not a repressed memory that’s suddenly found its way to the surface. It hasn’t been coaxed from me by all those potent psychotropics. It’s just something I’ve managed to keep to myself until now.

“Hello,” the computer says. Only, I’d heard recordings of the mainframe’s NLP, and this isn’t the voice it was given. This is, unmistakably,
her
voice, only slightly distorted by the audio interface. My eyes are shut, and I don’t open them right away. I just stand there, my head against the hatch, listening to that voice and to my heart. The sound of my breath is very loud inside the helmet.

“We were not certain our message had been received, or, if it had been, that it had been properly understood. We did not expect you would come so far.”

“Then why did you call?” I ask and open my eyes.

“We were lonely,” the voice replies. “We have not seen you in a very long time now.”

I don’t turn around. I keep my faceplate pressed to the airlock, some desperate, insensible part of me willing it to reopen and admit me once more to the sanctuary of the taxi. Whatever I should say next, of all the things I might say, what I
do
say is, simply, “Amery, I’m frightened.”

There’s a pause before her response, five or six or seven seconds, I don’t know, and my fingers move futilely across the control pad again. I hear the inner hatch open behind me, though I’m fairly certain I’m not the one who opened it.

“We see that,” she says. “But it wasn’t our intent to make you afraid, Merrick. It was never our intent to frighten you.”

“Amery, what’s happened here?” I ask, speaking hardly above a whisper, but my voice is amplified and made clearer by the vocal modulator in my EVA helmet. “What happened to the ship, back at Jupiter? To the rest of the crew? What’s happened to you?”

I expect another pause, but there isn’t one.

“The most remarkable thing,” she replies. And there’s a sort of elation in her voice, audible even through the tinny flatness of the NLP relay. “You will hardly believe it.”

“Are they dead, the others?” I ask her, and my eyes wander to the external atmo readout inside my visor. Argon’s showing a little high, a few tenths of a percent off earth normal, but not enough to act as an asphyxiant. Water vapor’s twice what I’d have expected, anywhere but the ship’s hydroponics lab. Pressure’s steady at 14.2 psi. Whatever happened aboard
Pilgrimage,
life support is still up and running. All the numbers are in the green.

“That’s not a simple question to answer,” she says, Amery or the AI or whatever it is I’m having this conversation with. “None of it is simple, Merrick. And yet, it is so elegant.”

“Are they
dead
?” I ask again, resisting the urge to flip the release toggle beneath my chin and raise the visor. It stinks inside the suit, like sweat and plastic, urine and stale, recycled air.

“Yes,” she says. “It couldn’t be helped.”

I lick my lips, Dr. Ostrowski, and my mouth has gone very, very dry. “Did you kill them, Amery?”

“You’re asking the wrong questions,” she says, and I stare down at my feet, at the shiny white toes of the EVA’s overshoes.

“They’re the questions we’ve come all the way out here to have answered,” I tell
her
, or I tell
it
. “What questions would you have me ask, instead?”

“It may be, there is no longer any need for questions. It may be, Merrick, that you’ve been called to see, and seeing will be enough. The force that through the green fuse drives the flower, drives my green age, that blasts the roots of trees, is my destroyer.”

“I’ve been summoned to Mars to listen to you quote Dylan Thomas?”

“You’re
not
listening, Merrick. That’s the thing. And that’s why it will be so much easier if we show you what’s happened. What’s begun.”

“And I am dumb to tell the lover’s tomb,” I say as softly as I can, but the suit adjusts the volume so it’s just as loud as everything else I’ve said.

“We have not died,” she replies. “You will find no tomb here,” and, possibly, this voice that wants me to believe it is only Amery Domico has become defensive, and impatient, and somehow this seems the strangest thing so far. I imagine Amery speaking through clenched teeth. I imagine her rubbing her forehead like a headache’s coming on, and it’s my fault. “I am very much alive,” she says, “and I need you to pay attention. You cannot stay here very long. It’s not safe, and I will see no harm come to you.”

“Why?” I ask her, only half expecting a response. “Why isn’t it safe for me to be here?”

“Turn around, Merrick,” she says. “You’ve come so far, and there is so little time.” I do as she says. I turn towards the voice, towards the airlock’s open inner hatch.

It’s almost morning. I mean, the sun will be rising soon. Here in California. Still no interruption from the nurses. But I can’t keep this up. I can’t do this all at once. The rest will have to wait.

March 21, 2037 (Sunday)

Dr. Bernardyn Ostrowski is no longer handling my case. One of my physicians delivered the news this morning, bright and early. It came with no explanation attached. And I thought better of asking for one. That is, I thought better of wasting my breath asking for one. When I signed on for the
Yastreb-4
intercept, the waivers and NDAs and whatnot were all very, very clear about things like the principle of least privilege and mandatory access control. I’m told what they decide I need to know, which isn’t much. I
did
ask if I should continue with the account of the mission that Dr. O asked me to write, and the physician (a hematologist named Prideaux) said he’d gotten no word to the contrary, and if there would be a change in the direction of my psychotherapy regimen, I’d find out about it when I meet with the new shrink Tuesday morning. Her name is Teasdale, by the way. Eleanor Teasdale.

I thanked Dr. Prideaux for bringing me the news, and he only shrugged and scribbled something on my chart. I suppose that’s fair, as it was hardly a sincere show of gratitude on my part. At any rate, I have no idea what to expect from this Teasdale woman, and I appear to have lost the stingy drab of momentum pushing me recklessly towards full disclosure. That in and of itself is enough to set me wondering what my keepers are up to now, if the shrink switch is some fresh skullduggery. It seems counterintuitive, given they were finally getting the results they’ve been asking for (and I’m not so naïve as to assume that this pad isn’t outfitted with a direct patch to some agency goon or another). But then an awful lot of what they’ve done seems counterintuitive to me. And counterproductive.

Simply put, I don’t know what to say next. No, strike that. I don’t know what I’m
willing
to say next.

I’ve already mentioned my indiscretion with the South Korean payload specialist on the outbound half of the trip. Actually,
indiscretion
is hardly accurate, since Amery explicitly gave me her permission to take other lovers while she was gone, because, after all, there was a damned decent chance she wouldn’t make it back alive. Or make it back at all. So,
indiscretion
is just my guilt talking. Anyway, her name was Bae Jin-ah – the
Yastreb-4
PS, I mean – though everyone called her Sam, which she seemed to prefer. She was born in Incheon and was still a kid when the war started. A relative in the States helped her parents get Bae on one of the last transports out of Seoul before the bombs started raining down. But we didn’t have many conversations about the past, mine or hers. She was a biochemist obsessed with the structure-function relationships of peptides, and she liked to talk shop after we fucked. It was pretty dry stuff – the talk, not the sex – and I admit I only half listened and didn’t understand all that much of what I heard. But I don’t think that mattered to Sam. I have a feeling she was just grateful that I bothered to cover my mouth whenever I yawned.