Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea (28 page)

She only asked about Amery once.

We were both crammed into the warm cocoon of her sleeping bag, or into mine; I can’t recall which. Probably hers, since the micrograv restraints in my bunk kept popping loose. I was on the edge of dozing off, and Sam asked me how we met. I made up some half-assed romance about an academic conference in Manhattan, and a party, a formal affair at the American Museum of Natural History. It was love at first sight, I said (or something equally ridiculous), right there in the Roosevelt Rotunda, beneath the rearing
Barosaurus
skeleton. Sam thought it was sweet as hell, though, and I figured lies were fine, if they gave us a moment’s respite from the crowded day-to-day monotony of the ship, or from our (usually) unspoken dread of all that nothingness surrounding us and the uncertainty we were hurdling towards. I don’t even know if she believed me, but it made her smile.

“You’ve read the docs on the cloud?” she asked, and I told her yeah, I had, or at least the ones I was given clearance to read. And then Sam watched me for while without saying anything. I could feel her silently weighing options and consequences, duty and need and repercussion.

“So, you
know
it’s some pretty hinky shit out there,” she said, finally, and went back to watching me, as if waiting for a particular reaction. And, here, I lied to her again.

“Relax, Sam,” I whispered, then kissed her on the forehead. “I’ve read most of the spectroscopy and astrochem profiles. Discussing it with me, you’re not in danger of compromising protocol or mission security or anything.”

She nodded once and looked slightly relieved.

“I’ve never given much credence to the exogenesis crowd,” she said, “but, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph…glycine, DHA, adenine, cytosine, et cetera and fucking et cetera. When – or, rather,
if
this gets out – the panspermia guys are going to go monkey shit. And rightly so. No one saw this coming, Merrick. No one you’d ever take seriously.”

I must have managed a fairly convincing job of acting like I knew what she was talking about, because she kept it up for the next ten or fifteen minutes. Her voice assumed that same sort of jittery, excited edge Amery’s used to get whenever she’d start in on the role of Io in the Jovian magnetosphere or any number of other astronomical phenomena I didn’t quite understand, and how much the
Pilgrimage
experiments were going to change this or that model or theory. Only, unlike Amery, Sam’s excitement was tinged with fear.

“The inherent risks,” she said, and then trailed off and wiped at her forehead before starting again. “When they first showed me the back-contamination safeguards for this run, I figured no way, right. No way are NASA and the ESA going to pony up the budget for that sort of overkill. But this was
before
I read Murchison’s reports on the cloud’s composition and behavior. And afterwards, the thought of intentionally sending a human crew anywhere near that thing, or, shit, anything that had been
exposed
to it? I couldn’t believe they were serious. It’s fucking crazy. No, it’s whatever comes
after
fucking crazy. They should have cut their losses…” and then she trailed off again and went back to staring at me.

“You shouldn’t have come,” she said.

“I had to,” I told her. “If there’s any chance at all that Amery’s still alive, I had to come.”

“Of course. Yeah, of course you did,” Sam said, looking away.

“When they asked, I couldn’t very well say no.”

“But do you honestly believe we’re going to find any of them alive, that we’ll be docking with anything but a ghost ship?”

“You’re really not into pulling punches, are you?”

“You read the reports on the cloud.”

“I had to come,” I told her a third time.

Then we both let the subject drop and neither of us ever brought it up again. Indeed, I think I probably would have forgotten most of it, especially after what I saw when I stepped through the airlock and into
Pilgrimage.
That whole conversation might have dissolved into the tedious grey blur of outbound and been forgotten, if Bae Jin-ah hadn’t killed herself on the return trip, just five days before we made Earth orbit.

March 23, 2037 (Tuesday)

Tuesday night now, and the meds are making me sleepy and stupid, but I wanted to put some of this down, even if it isn’t what they want me to be writing. I see how it’s all connected, even if they never will, or, if seeing, they simply do not care.
They,
whoever, precisely, they may be.

This morning I had my first session with you, Dr. Eleanor Teasdale. I never much liked that bastard Ostrowski, but at least I was moderately certain he was who and what he claimed to be. Between you and me, Eleanor, I think you’re an asset, sent in because someone somewhere is getting nervous. Nervous enough to swap an actual psychiatrist for a bug dressed up to pass for a psychiatrist. Fine. I’m flexible. If these are the new rules, I can play along. But it does leave me pondering what Dr. O was telling his superiors (whom I’ll assume are also your superiors, Dr. T). It couldn’t have been anything so simple as labeling me a suicide risk; they’ve known that since I stepped off
Pilgrimage,
probably before I even stepped on.

And yes, I’ve noticed that you bear more than a passing resemblance to Amery. That was a bold and wicked move, and I applaud these ruthless shock tactics. I do, sincerely. This merciless Blitzkrieg waltz we’re dancing, coupled with the drugs, it shows you’re in this game to win, and if you
can’t
win, you’ll settle for the pyrrhic victory of having driven the enemy to resort to a scorched-earth retreat. Yeah, the pills and injections, they don’t mesh so well with extended metaphor and simile, so I’ll drop it. But I can’t have you thinking all the theater has been wasted on an inattentive audience. That’s all. You wear that rough facsimile of her face, Dr. T. And that annoying habit you have of tap-tap-tapping the business end of a stylus against your lower incisors, that’s hers, too. And half a dozen carefully planted turns of phrase. The smile that isn’t quite a smile. The self-conscious laugh. You hardly missed a trick, you and the agency handlers who sculpted you and slotted you and packed you off to play havoc with a lunatic’s fading will.

My mouth is so dry.

Eleanor Teasdale watches me from the other side of her desk, and behind her, through the wide window twelve stories up, I can see the blue-brown sky, and, between the steel and glass and concrete towers, I can just make out the scrubby hills of the Diablo Range through the smog. She glances over her shoulder, following my gaze.

“Quite a view, isn’t it?” she asks, and maybe I nod, and maybe I agree, and maybe I say nothing at all.

“When I was a little girl,” she tells me, “my father used to take me on long hikes through the mountains. And we’d visit Lick Observatory, on the top of Mount Hamilton.”

“I’m not from around here,” I reply. But, then, I’d be willing to bet neither is she.

Eleanor Teasdale turns back towards me, silhouetted against the murky light through that window, framed like a misplaced Catholic saint. She stares straight at me, and I do not detect even a trace of guile when she speaks.

“We all want you to get better, Miss Merrick. You know that, don’t you?”

I look away, preferring the oatmeal-colored carpet to that mask she wears.

“It’s easier if we don’t play games,” I say.

“Yes. Yes, it is. Obviously.”

“What I saw. What it meant. What she said to me. What I think it means.”

“Yes, and talking about those things, bringing them out into the open, it’s an important part of you
getting
better, Miss Merrick. Don’t you think that’s true?”

“I think…” and I pause, choosing my words as carefully as I still am able. “I think you’re afraid, all of you, of never knowing. None of this is about my getting better. I’ve understood that almost from the start.” And my voice is calm, and there is no hint of bitterness for her to hear; my voice does not betray me.

Eleanor Teasdale’s smile wavers, but only a little and for only an instant or two.

“Naturally, yes, these matters are interwoven,” she replies. “Quite intricately so. Almost inextricably, and I don’t believe anyone has ever tried to lie to you about that. What you witnessed out there, what you seem unable, or unwilling, to share with anyone else – ”

I laugh, and she sits, watching me with Amery’s pale blue eyes, tapping the stylus against her teeth. Her teeth are much whiter and more even than Amery’s were, and I draw some dim comfort from that incongruity.

“Share,” I say, very softly, and there are other things I
want
to say to her, but I keep them to myself.

“I want you to think about that, Miss Merrick. Between now and our next session, I need you to consider, seriously, the price of your selfishness, both to your own well being and to the rest of humanity.”

“Fine,” I say, because I don’t feel like arguing. Besides, manipulative or not, she isn’t entirely wrong. “And what I was writing for Dr. Ostrowski, do I keep that up?”

“Yes, please,” she replies and glances at the clock on the wall, as if she expects me to believe she’ll be seeing anyone else today, that she even has other patients. “It’s a sound approach, and, reviewing what you’ve written so far, it feels to me like you’re close to a breakthrough.”

I nod my head, and I also look at the clock.

“Our time’s almost up,” I say, and she agrees with me, then looks over her shoulder again at the green-brown hills beyond San Jose.

“I have a question,” I say.

“That’s why I’m here,” Dr. Eleanor Teasdale tells me, imbuing the words with all the false veracity of her craft. Having affected the role of the good patient, I pretend that she isn’t lying, hoping the pretense lends weight to my question.

“Have they sent a retrieval team yet? To Mars, to the caverns on Arsia Mons?”

“I wouldn’t know that,” she says. “I’m not privileged to such information. However, if you’d like, I can file an inquiry on your behalf. Someone with the agency might get back to you.”

“No,” I reply. “I was just curious if you knew,” and I almost ask her another question, about Darwin’s finches, and the tortoises and mockingbirds and iguanas that once populated the Galápagos Islands. But then the black minute hand on the clock ticks forward, deleting another sixty seconds from the future, converting it to past, and I decide we’ve both had enough for one morning.

Don’t fret, Dr. T. You’ve done your bit for the cause, swept me off my feet, and now we’re dancing. If you were here, in the hospital room with me, I’d even let you lead. I really don’t care if the nurses mind or not. I’d turn up the jack, find just the right tune, and dance with the ghost you’ve let them make of you. I can never be too haunted, after all. Hush, hush. It’s just, they give me these drugs, you see, so I need to sleep for a while, and then the waltz can continue. Your answers are coming.

March 24, 2037 (Wednesday)

It’s raining. I asked one of the nurses to please raise the blinds in my room so I can watch the storm hammering the windowpane, pelting the glass, smudging my view of the diffident sky. I count off the moments between occasional flashes of lightning and the thunderclaps that follow. Storms number among the very few things remaining in all the world that can actually soothe my nerves. They certainly beat the synthetic opiates I’m given, beat them all the way to hell and back. I haven’t ever bothered to tell any of my doctors or the nurses this. I don’t know why; it simply hasn’t occurred to me to do so. I doubt they’d care, anyway.

I’ve asked to please not be disturbed for a couple of hours, and I’ve been promised my request will be honored. That should give me the time I need to finish this.

Dr. Teasdale, I will readily confess that one of the reasons it’s taken me so long reach this point is the fact that words fail. It’s an awful cliché, I know, but also a point I cannot stress strongly enough. There are sights and experiences to which the blunt and finite tool of human language are not equal. I know this, though I’m no poet. But I want that caveat understood. This is not what happened aboard
Pilgrimage
; this is the sky seen through a window blurred by driving rain. It’s the best I can manage, and it’s the best you’ll ever get. I’ve said all along, if the technology existed to plug in and extract the memories from my brain, I wouldn’t deign to call it rape. Most of the people who’ve spent so much time and energy and money trying to prise from me the truth about the fate of
Pilgrimage
and its crew, they’re only scientists, after all. They have no other aphrodisiac
but
curiosity. As for the rest, the spooks and politicians, the bureaucrats and corporate shills, those guys are only along for the ride, and I figure most of them know they’re in over their heads.

I could make of it a fairy tale. It might begin:

Once upon a time, there was a woman who lived in New York. She was an anthropologist and shared a tiny apartment in downtown Brooklyn with her lover. And her lover was a woman named Amery Domico, who happened to be a molecular geneticist, exobiologist, and also an astronaut. They had a cat and a tank of tropical fish. They always wanted a dog, but the apartment was too small. They could probably have afforded a better, larger place to live, a loft in midtown Manhattan, perhaps, north and east of the flood zone, but the anthropologist was happy enough with Brooklyn, and her lover was usually on the road, anyway. Besides, walking a dog would have been a lot of trouble.

No. That’s not working. I’ve never been much good with irony. And I’m better served by the immediacy of present tense. So, instead:

“Turn around, Merrick,” she says. “You’ve come so far, and there is so little time.”

And I do as she tells me. I turn towards the voice, towards the airlock’s open inner hatch. There’s no sign of Amery, or anyone else, for that matter. The first thing I notice, stepping from the brightly lit airlock, is that the narrow heptagonal corridor beyond is mostly dark. The second thing I notice is the mist. I know at once that it
is
mist, not smoke. It fills the hallway from deck to ceiling, and, even with the blue in-floor path lighting, it’s hard to see more than a few feet ahead. The mist swirls thickly around me, like Halloween phantoms, and I’m about to ask Amery where it’s coming from, what it’s doing here, when I notice the walls.