In the Valley of the Kings: Stories (8 page)

What have the cold and flickering written on me?

I open my eyes, a struggle against the ice forming on them, and in a dark reflection on the screen I see only a few red welts burned on the dead-white skin above the brow. They could be letters. W? Y? Is this my name? I do not recognize it. The face is not the one I know. The lights swoon. The screen, the face and the lights all rush toward me.

Light broke through glass, resolving into blocks of bright color:
Environment,
they said:
Power, Communications
and other words I did not know:
Robotics, Geologic. Command
I thought I understood, but as I reached for it the screen decayed into fragments, re-forming into
Power:
bars of colored light that wavered.
Critical
pulsed red everywhere.
Time to Failure: 833991.
As I watched, the one became a zero, then a nine, and the time to failure was
833989.
I watched stupidly, wondering what increments of time these numbers measured. Whatever they were, I knew there would not be enough.

I backed out of the screen and found
Environment:
the ambient temperature displayed in large block figures was
251.
I stared at it and it too changed.
250.
There were other words:
Power Diversion,
which glowed brighter and dimmer, insisting on what I could not grasp.
Storage Initiated 21481024113645. Time to Equilibrium: 45562. 45561. 45560. Equilibrium Temperature: 98.

I did not need to guess what all this meant: I could see it in the frost that rimed the screen.

The lights flickered, or I did: for an instant I was falling down a warm smooth surface, sunlight filling my eyes. The darkness was nearer now. My hand a clumsy paw, I tried to change the settings on the screen, but everything I touched slid away. The temperature continued to count down. I stabbed at
Abort;
I grabbed a bar marked
Heat
and dragged it up. At the bottom of the screen
Warning
began to flash beneath the bars for
Carbon, Oxygen, Waste Processing, Lighting
and still more impending failures I only dimly understood.

All around me in the air a faint note droned, a static wailing. I watched the numbers measuring
Time to Failure
for a long time, thinking dully that if I watched long enough they might reverse their descent. Then the cold overwhelmed me and I flickered into darkness.

IN THE DARKNESS
, voices.

PAIN ASCENDING INTO
what must be me, I saw water pooling on a screen. My hand reached out and wiped it clear. It trickled slowly back. The screen shuddered under the water, and changed:
Communications.
Numbers rose or fell in no apparent order, charting the fortunes of strings of letters I knew could not be words.
LOS, TROS/TDRS, OIRescue1.
This last was blinking. I tried to make it do something, but it only blinked and counted.
940251,50,49.
The wailing persisted, following me far down the corridor.

In the galley I found a frozen mass of gruel on the floor, beginning to thaw. As I stooped to pick up the bowl my vision dimmed, returning as the low orange light of a dying afternoon. It shone through clear water, shallow, ripples throwing shadows on white sand. A bolide shed sparks high in an evening sky, the sky just coming on to darkness above a mass of trees. The rusted edge of a spade cut into clay, the harsh crunch of it a rush of nausea that brought me back to myself crouched over a seeping mass of oatmeal.

I crouched, listening.

The scratchy wailing had followed me. It hovered at the edges of hearing then scaled higher, the sound no longer audible except as pain. Then swooping, and a sudden rush of wind abruptly broken off. Silence, then the note returned, a high, thin whine.

I listened, waiting for more.

But nothing more: just the rising and falling, sudden lapses into silence that deepened, until sound insinuated itself again. It followed me through the corridors. I fell onto the bed and before I could do more than pull the mound of clothes and blankets over me I slept again.

IN MY SLEEP
the voices returned.

I WOKE TO
voices speaking quietly above my head. Over the persistent thin keening note one said:

And the other:

I ran. When I reached the cubicle I struck out with my open hand, pain flaring as it hit the screen. It flickered into light:
Communications.
I watched my fingers reach for a switch. The wailing note hollowed out, seeming to embrace an emptiness I could not imagine, immense, expectant.

I tried to shape words, but none would come: only inarticulate croaking fell from high above me. Preening underneath a glossy wing, a crow looked up and suddenly took flight.

I remained. Empty, moaning quietly with the note that wailed up and up a scale that seemed to reach out infinitely high. It was me. I had been wailing.

A click.

Suddenly I was expelling grotesque sounds, as if pieces of me were being ripped from deep inside.

A different voice. I tried to speak: an anguished croak, strangling as it escaped.

A long pause deep as grief.

Then, slow with doubt:

Then silence. Except for me, weeping.

IN THE MORNING
I awoke, agitated and empty, the sensation of weeping lingering in my chest. I tried to recall what had put it there.

I had heard voices.

Real ones?

The question struck me suddenly as funny. A laugh tore its way out, much as the sobs had earlier.

The lights flickered. In the burnished surface of the walls a ponderous shape turned slowly, showing a row of portholes, a ship sunk deep in dark water, settling. In one of the ports a light was burning. Then it was gone and only the wall remained, as blank as any wall.

I made my way to the galley, and as I made food for myself I discovered I could read. Not everything: some words escape me still. But this was a
Radarange,
by
Toshiba.
Inside the door I found instructions for its use.

The discovery excited me less than I might have expected. I remembered dimly struggling at a frost-covered screen. I had read words there as well. At the time, in the urgency of the cold, it had seemed I grappled not with words but the things themselves. Now, looking around me, I found words everywhere. And the flattened carcass of an animal that might have been a cat battened on by flies; a young woman whirling away on the wind; a dead calm sea with an oily sheen beneath a glaring sun. These things receded in flickering and nausea, leaving only distant wailing.

A voice struck the wailing silent.

The voices fell from everywhere at once. Perhaps, I told myself, this is the nature of hallucinations.

I listened for a long time, but there was only the wailing again, and a cascade of rustling as though dead leaves were blowing in the hall.

I looked: only the corridor receding into deeper shadow, the light flickering, and in the walls everywhere vague shapes were shifting, like frescoes long since painted over struggling to return. I shuddered, and as I did the shapes within the walls all shuddered too. The cold was coming back, the systems continuing their fall toward equilibrium. A wave flowed down the corridor, beckoning. The figures writhed.

The last thing I wanted to do was walk among those shifting forms. The floor beneath my feet was clouded. In its depths more shapes lay, their forms distorted.

I came again to the door that would not open. I placed a thumb in the scanner. Light welled up blood-red in my thumb and the door swung open.

Cold flowed out like a river. Tires squealed across concrete, glass shattered: a sudden blow to the chest but I was untouched and the place was silent, dark, and terribly cold. This, I thought, must be how equilibrium feels.

Another door. This also opened to my thumb, burning it white where it touched metal.

Light hollowed a room out of darkness, cavernous and still, the very air gelid. I pushed through the cold as I imagined the figures within the walls must force themselves, pushed through until I stood before what I had known I would find.

Seventy-two silver coffins stacked to the ceiling, their silver dulled by frost.

I stood before them, my thoughts empty, not even flickering: only the thin wailing reached here, a fly buzzing in my skull.

I realized irritably the fly was counting: Fifty. Sixty. Seventy. And one.

The buzzing stopped. I hung as well, waiting for the clock’s last tick.

It never came. The count stopped short. There should have been seventy-two.

The buzzing returned, strident against the silence. Insects crawled blindly over hexagonal cells, sealing them with restless palps. Behind the seals, dark shapes were twitching. The buzzing swelled.

I told it to stop.

And it stopped.

In the corridor walls the shapes still moved. Their motions quickened. I saw a face push to the surface as I passed.

Go away, I said, the words falling like stones.

It vanished.

I know how to make these visions disappear.

I know so much now.

I know where I am. I almost know what happened. I still cannot recall the moment when they reached T-zero on the count, and the device they had built out in the dark, on the methane ice the surveys name Eleusis, went terribly awry. Ten kilometers away, huddled in their shielded modules, they waited for something terrible to happen.

But what?

I could not recall. I remember only one of the senior scientists muttering
blasphemy
, and as the count descended past the 60-mark another raised his eyes to the light and I could see his lips begin to move.

Do I not recall this? Was this memory or dream? I know that I awoke, and when I woke I knew only something terrible had happened.

I must have functioned, somehow. No one but myself could have dragged those crates into the cold room. I tried, briefly, to recall this but the memory wasn’t there. I know this now as well: some things are never coming back.

And one of them is me.

A sudden flickering: the lights dimmed all the way to darkness, then flared. Shapes scattered and fled, as if sensing disaster. It no longer mattered. Rescue would arrive, but not for me. From the wall at my shoulder a face leered. “Go away,” I said again. I’ll be there soon enough.

The floor shook. For a moment I thought my voice might have shaken it, but it was just the ice below the station shifting. Nothing more, I told myself as I looked down.

Just below my feet, pale limbs lay locked in ice, faces grimacing as if in their last moments they cried out for mercy. Just below me two clutched each other close, their faces turned away as if in shame. Farther down and darker, two more still grappled, one tearing at the other with its teeth.

I was falling. In a moment I would find myself among them, and there was nothing I could do to save myself.