Lightspeed Year One

IN-FALL

Ted Kosmatka

The disc caved a hole in the starshine.

Smooth, graphene skin reflected nothing, blotting out the stars as it swung through the vacuum—black on black, the perfect absence of color.

It was both a ship and not a ship.

The disc lacked a propulsion system. It lacked navigation. Inside, two men awakened, first one and then the other.

In truth, the disc was a projectile—a dark bolus of life-support fired into distant orbit around another, stranger kind of darkness.

This second darkness is almost infinitely larger, massing several hundred thousand sols; and it didn’t blot out the stars behind it, but instead lensed them into a bright, shifting halo, bending light into a ring, deforming the fabric of spacetime itself.

From the perspective of the orbiting disc, the stars seemed to flow around an enormous, circular gap in the star field. It had many different names, this region of space. The astronomers who discovered it centuries earlier had called it Bhat 16. Later physicists would call it “the sink.” And finally, to those who came here, to those who dreamed of it, it was known simply as “the maw.”

A black hole like none ever found before.

By the disc’s third day in orbit, it had already traveled three hundred eighteen million miles, but this is only a tiny fraction of its complete trajectory. At the end of the disc’s seventy-second hour in orbit, a small lead weight, 100 kilograms, was fired toward the heart of the gravity well—connected to the ship by a wire so thin that even mathematicians called it a line.

The line spooled out, thousands of kilometers of unbreakable tetravalent filament stretching toward the darkness until finally pulling taut. The line held fast to its anchor point, sending a musical resonance vibrating through the disc’s carbon hull.

Inexorable gravity, a subtle shift.

Slowly at first, but gradually, on the fourth day, the ship that was not a ship changed course and began to fall.

The old man wiped blood from the young man’s face.

“Ulii ul quisall,” the young man said. Don’t touch me.

The old man nodded. “You speak Thusi,” he said. “I speak this, too.”

The young man leaned close and spat blood at the old man. “It is an abomination to hear you speak it.”

The old man’s eyes narrowed.

He wiped the blood from his cheek. “An abomination,” he said. “Perhaps this is true.”

He held out his hand for the young man to see. In his hand was a scalpel. “Do you know why I’m here?” he asked.

Light gleamed off the scalpel’s edge. This time, it was the old man who leaned close. “I’m here to cut you.”

The old man placed the scalpel’s blade on the young man’s cheek, just beneath his left eye. The steel pressed a dimple into his pallid skin.

The young man’s expression didn’t change. He stared straight ahead, eyes like blue stone.

The old man considered him. “But it would be a kindness to cut you,” he continued. “I see that now.” He pulled the blade away and ran a thumb along the young man’s jaw, tracing the web of scar tissue. “You wouldn’t even feel it.”

The young man sat motionless in the chair, arms bound to the armrests by thick straps. He was probably still in his teens, the beginnings of a beard making patchy whorls on his cheek. He was little more than a boy, really.

He had probably once been beautiful, the old man judged. That explained the scars. The boy’s psychological profile must have shown a weakness for vanity.

Or perhaps the profiles didn’t matter anymore.

Perhaps they just scarred them all now.

The old man rubbed his eyes, feeling the anger slide out of him. He put the scalpel back on the tray with the other bright and gleaming instruments.

“Sleep,” he told the boy. “You will need it.”

And the universe ticked on.

“Where are we going?” the boy said, after several hours.

Whether he’d slept or not, the old man wasn’t sure, but at least he’d been silent.

The old man rose from his console on creaking knees. Acceleration accreted weight into the soles of his feet, allowing the simple pleasure of walking. He brought the boy water. “Drink,” he said, holding out the nozzle.

The boy eyed him suspiciously, but after a moment, took a long swallow.

“Where are we going?” he repeated.

The old man ignored him.

“They have already tried to interrogate me,” the boy said. “I told them nothing.”

“I know. If you told them what they wanted, you wouldn’t be here.”

“And so now they’re sending me someplace else? To try again?”

“Yes, someplace else, but not to try again.”

The boy was silent for a long moment. Then he said, “For that they have you.”

The old man smiled. “You are a smart one.”

Rage burned in the boy’s eyes, and pain beyond measuring. The earlier interrogations had been harsh. He pulled against his straps again, trying to jerk his arms free.

“Tell me where you are taking me!” he demanded.

The old man stared down at him. “You are scared,” he said. “I know what you are thinking. You want out of your restraints. You’re thinking that if you could get loose . . . oh, the things you would do to me.” The old man glanced toward the tray of gleaming steel. “You wish you could use that blade on me. You wish that you were in my shoes, that I was sitting where you are.

“But you don’t understand,” the old man said, then leaned forward again and whispered into the boy’s ear. “It is I who envy you.”

The ship hummed as it fell. Charged ions blasted carbon skin.

“Why won’t you tell me where we’re going?”

The boy repeated the question every few minutes.

Finally the old man walked to the console and pressed a button. The wall revealed a view screen, exposing deep space, the looming maw. “There,” the old man said. “We are going there.”

The black hole filled half the screen.

Abyss, if there ever was one.

The boy smiled. “You try to scare me with death? I don’t fear death.”

“I know,” the old man said.

“Death is my reward. In the afterlife, I will walk again with my father. I will tread the bones of my enemies. I will be seated at a place of honor with others who fell fighting for the side of God. Death will be a paradise for me.”

“You truly believe that, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“That is why I envy you.”

The boy was a mass murderer. Or a freedom fighter.

Or maybe just unfortunate.

The old man looked at the boy’s scars, noting the creative flourish that had been lavished on his face during previous interviews. Yes, unfortunate, certainly. Perhaps that above all.

Life in deep space is fragile. And humans are as they have always been.

Bombs though, are different.

In space, bombs can be much, much more effective.

If placed just right, a simple three pound bomb can destroy an entire colony. Open it to the sterilizing vacuum of the endless night. And ten thousand people dead—a whole community wiped clean in a single explosive decompression.

He’d seen that once, a long time ago, when this war first began. Seen the bodies floating frozen inside a ruptured hab, the only survivors a lucky few who scrambled into pressure suits. A lucky few like him.

Because of a three-pound bomb.

Multiply it by a hundred colonies and a dozen years. Three airless worlds. A fight over territory, culture, religion. The things man has always fought over.

Humans are as they have always been. In space though, the cost of zealotry is higher.

A thousand years ago, nations bankrupted themselves to raise armies. It cost a soldier to kill a soldier. Then came gunpowder, technology, increased population densities—gradually leveraging the cost of death along a sliding scale of labor and raw materials, until finally three pounds of basic chemistry had the power to erase whole swaths of society. Ever more effortless murder, the final statistical flat-line in the falling price of destruction.

“What is your name?” the old man asked him.

The boy didn’t answer.

“We need the names of the others.”

“I will tell you nothing.”

“That’s all we need, just the names. Nothing more. We can do the rest.”

The boy stayed silent.

They watched the viewscreen. The black hole grew. The expanding darkness compressed the surrounding star field. The old man checked his instruments.

“We’re traveling at half the speed of light,” he said. “We have two hours, our time, until we approach the Schwarzschildradius.”

“If you were going to kill me, there are easier ways than this.”

“Easier ways, yes.”

“I’m worth nothing to you dead.”

“Nor alive.”

The silence drew out between them.

“Do you know what a black hole is?” The old man asked. “What it is, really?”

The young man’s face was stone.

“It is a side-effect. It is a byproduct of the laws of the universe. You can’t have the universe as we know it and not have black holes. Scientists predicted them before they ever found one.”

“You’re wasting your time.”

The old man gestured toward the screen. “This is not just a black hole though, not really. But they predicted this, too.”

“Do you think you can frighten me with this game?”

“I’m not trying to frighten you.”

“It makes no sense to kill me like this. You’d be killing yourself. You must have a family.”

“I did. Two daughters.”

“You intend to change course.”

“No.”

“This ship has value. Even your life must be worth something, if not to yourself then at least to those whose orders you follow. Why sacrifice both a ship and a man in order to kill one enemy?”

“I was a mathematician before your war made soldiers of mathematicians. There are variables here that you don’t understand.” The old man pointed at the screen again. His voice went soft. “It is beautiful, is it not?”

The boy ignored him. “Or perhaps this ship has an escape pod,” the boy continued. “Perhaps you will be saved while I die. But you’d still be wasting a ship.”

“I cannot escape. The line that pulls us can’t be broken. Even now, the gravity draws us in. By the time we approach the Schwarzschild radius, we’ll be traveling at nearly the speed of light. We will share the same fate, you and I.”

“I don’t believe you.”

The old man shrugged. “You don’t have to believe. You have merely to witness.”

“This doesn’t make sense.”

“You think it has to?”

“Shut up. I don’t want to hear more from a Godless tathuun.”

“Godless? Why do you assume I am Godless?”

“Because if you believed in God, you would not do this thing.”

“You are wrong,” the old man said. “I do believe in God.”

“Then you will receive judgment for your sins.”

“No,” he said. “I will not.”

Over the next several hours, the black hole swelled to fill the screen. The stars along its rim stretched and blurred, torturing the sky into a new configuration.

The boy sat in silence.

The old man checked his instruments. “We cross the Schwarzschild radius in six minutes.”

“Is that when we die?”

“Nothing so simple as that.”

“You talk in circles.”

The old mathematician picked up the scalpel. He touched his finger to the razor tip. “What happens after we cross that radius isn’t the opposite of existence, but its inverse.”

“What does that mean?”

“So now you ask the questions? Give me a name, and I’ll answer any question you like.”

“Why would I give you names? So they can find themselves in chairs like this?”

The old man shook his head. “You are stubborn, I can see that; so I will give you this for free. The Schwarzschild radius is the innermost orbit beyond which all things must fall inward—even communications signals. This is important to you for this reason: beyond the Schwarzschild radius, asking you questions will serve no purpose, because I will have no way to transmit the information. After that, you will be no use to me at all.”

“You’re saying we’ll still live once we pass it?”

“For most black holes, we’d be torn apart long before reaching it. But this is something special. Super-massive, and old as time. For something this size, the tidal forces are more dilute.”

The image on the screen shifted. The stars flowed in slow-motion as the circular patch of darkness spread. Blackness filled the entire lower portion of the screen.

“A black hole is a two dimensional object; there is no inside to enter, no line to cross, because nothing ever truly falls in. At the event horizon, the math of time and space trade positions.”

“What are you talking about?”

“To distant observers, infalling objects take an infinite period of time to cross the event horizon, simply becoming ever more redshifted as time passes.”

“More of your circles. Why are you doing this? Why not just kill me?”

“There are telescopes watching our descent. Recording the footage.”

“Why?”

“As warning.”

“Propaganda, you mean.”

“To show what will happen to others.”

“We aren’t afraid to die. Our reward is in the afterlife.”

The old man shook his head. “As our speed increases, time dilates. The cameras will show that we’ll never actually hit the black hole. We’ll never cross the threshold.”

The boy’s face showed confusion.

“You still don’t understand. The line isn’t where we die; it’s where time itself ceases to function—where the universe breaks, all matter and energy coming to a halt, frozen forever on that final mathematical boundary. You will never get your afterlife, not ever. Because you will never die.”

The boy’s face was blank for a moment, and then his eyes went wide.

“You don’t fear martyrdom,” the mathematician gestured to the viewscreen. “So perhaps this.”

The ship arced closer. Stars streamed around the looming wound in the starfield.

The old man put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. He touched the scalpel to the boy’s throat. “If you tell me the names, I’ll end this quickly, while you still have time. I need the names before we reach the horizon.”

“So this is what you offer?”

The old man nodded. “Death.”

“What did you do to deserve this mission?”

“I volunteered.”

“Why would you do such a thing?”

“I’ve been too long at this war. My conscience grows heavy.”

“But you said you believe in God. You’ll be giving up your afterlife, too.”

The old man smiled a last smile. “My afterlife would not be so pleasant as yours.”

“How do you know this is all true? What you said about time. How do you know?”

“I’ve seen the telescopic images. Previous missions spread out like pearls across the face of the event, trapped in their final asymptotic approach. They are there still. They will always be there.”

“But how do you know? Maybe it’s just some new propaganda. A lie. Maybe it doesn’t really work that way.”

“What matters is that this ship will be there for all to see, forever. A warning. Long after both our civilizations have come and gone, we will still be visible. Falling forever.”

“It could still be false.”

“But we are good at taking things on faith, you and I. Give me the names.”

“I can’t.”

The old man thought of his daughters. One dark-eyed. The other blue. Gone. Because of boys like this boy. But not this boy, he reminded himself.

The old man looked down at the figure in the chair. He might have been that boy, if circumstances were different. If he’d been raised the way the boy was raised. If he’d seen what he’d seen. The boy was just a pawn in this game.

As was he.

“What is death to those who take their next breath in paradise?” the old man asked. “Where is the sacrifice? But this . . . ” and the old man gestured to the dark maw growing on the screen. “This will be true martyrdom. When you blow up innocents who don’t believe what you believe, this is what you’re taking away from them. Everything.”

The boy broke into quiet sobs.

The horizon approached, a graphic on the screen. One minute remaining.

“You can still tell me,

—there is still time.

—perhaps they are your friends, perhaps your family.

—do you think they’d protect you?

—they wouldn’t.

—we just need names.

—a few names, and this will all be over. I’ll end it for you before it’s too late.”

The boy closed his eyes. “I won’t.”

His daughters. Because of boys like this boy.

“Why?” the old man asked, honestly confused. “It does not benefit you. You get no paradise.”

The boy stayed silent.

“I take your heaven from you,” the old man said. “You will receive nothing.”

Silence.

“Your loyalty is foolish. Tell me one name, and I will end this.”

“I will not,” the boy said. There were tears on his cheeks.

The old mathematician sighed. He’d never expected this.

“I believe you,” he said, then slashed the boy’s throat.

A single motion, severing the carotid.

The boy’s eyes flashed wide in momentary surprise, then an emotion more complicated. He slumped forward in his bonds.

It was over.

The old man ran a palm over the boy’s eyes, closing them. “May it be what you want it to be,” he said.

He sat down on the floor against the growing gravity.

He stared at the screen as the darkness approached.

The mathematician in him was pleased. A balancing of the equation. “A soldier for a soldier.”

He thought of his daughters, one brown-eyed, the other blue. He tried to hold their faces in his mind, the final thought that he would think forever.

Not the reverse of existence, but its inverse.

And he waited to be right or wrong.

To be judged for his sins or not.





THE OBSERVER

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

And so we went in.

Combat formation, all five of us, me first, face masks on so tight that the edges of our eyes pulled, suits like a second skin. Weapons in both hands, back-ups attached to the wrists and forearms, flash-bangs on our hips.

No shielding, no vehicles, no nothing. Just us, dosed, altered, ready to go.

I wanted to rip something’s head off, and I did, the fury burning in me like lust. The weapons became tools—I wanted up close and I got it, fingers in eyes, fists around tentacles, poking, pulling, yanking—

They bled brown, like soda. Like coffee. Like weak tea.

And they screamed—or at least I think they did.

Or maybe that was just me.

The commanders pulled us out before we could turn on each other, gave us calming drugs, put us back in our chambers for sleep. But we couldn’t sleep.

The adrenaline didn’t stop.

Neither did the fury.

Monica banged her head against the wall until she crushed her own skull.

LaTrice shot up her entire chamber with a back-up she’d hidden between her legs. She took out two MPs and both team members in the chambers beside her before the commander filled the air with some kind of narcotic to wipe her out.

And me. I kept ripping and gouging and pulling and yanking until my fingertips were bone. By then, I hit the circuits inside the door and fried myself.

And woke up here, strapped down against a cold metal bed with no bedclothes. The walls are some kind of brushed steel. I can see my own reflection, blurry, pale-skinned, wild-eyed.

I don’t look like a woman, and I certainly don’t look like me.

And you well know, Doc, that if you unstrap me, I’ll kill the thing reflected in that brushed metal wall.

After I finish with you.

You ask how it feels, and you know you’ll get an answer because of that chip you put in my head.

I can feel it, you know, itching. If I close my eyes, I can picture it, like a gnat, floating in gray matter.

Free my hands and I’ll get it out myself.

Free my hands, and I’ll get us all out of here.

How does it feel?

By it, I assume you mean me. I assume you mean whatever’s left of me.

Here’s how it feels:

There are three parts to me now. The old, remembered part, which doesn’t have a voice. It stands back and watches, appalled, at everything that happens, everything I do.

I can see her too—that remembered part—gangly young woman with athletic prowess and no money. She stands behind the rest of us, wearing the same clothes she wore to the recruiter’s that day—pants with a permanent crease, her best blouse, long hair pulled away from her horsy face.

There are dreams in her eyes—or there were then. Now they’re cloudy, disillusioned, lost.

If you’d just given her the money, let her get the education first, she’d be an officer or an engineer or a goddamn tech soldier.

But you gave her that test—biological predisposition, aggression, sensitivity to certain hormones. You gave her the test, and found it wasn’t just the physical that had made her a good athlete.

It wasn’t just the physical.

It was the aggression, and the way that minute alterations enhanced it.

Aggression, a strong predisposition, and extreme sensitivity.

Which, after injections and genetic manipulation, turned her into us.

I’m the articulate one. I’m an observer too, someone who stores information, and can process it faster than the fastest computer. I’m supposed to govern the reflexes, but they gave me a blocker for that the minute I arrived back on ship, then made it permanent when they got me to base.

I can see, Doc; I can hear; I can even tell you what’s going on, and why.

I just can’t stop it, any more than you can.

I know I said three, and yet I didn’t mention the third. I couldn’t think of her, not and think of the Remembered One at the same time.

I’m not supposed to feel, Doc, yet the Remembered One, she makes me sad.

The third. Oh, yeah. The third.

She’s got control of the physical, but you know that. You see her every day. She’s the one who raises the arms, who clenches the bandaged and useless fingers, who kicks at the restraints holding the feet.

She’s the one who growls and makes it impossible for me to talk to you.

You know that, or you wouldn’t have used the chip.

An animal?

She’s not an animal. Animals create small societies. They have customs and instinctual habits. They live in prides or pods or tribes.

She’s a thing. Inarticulate. Violent. Useless.

And by giving her control of the physical, you made the rest of us useless, trapped inside, destined to watch until she works herself free.

If she decides to bash her head against the wall until she crushes her own skull or to rip through the steel, breaking every single bone she has, if she decides to impale herself on the bedframe, I’ll cheer her on.

Not just for me.

But for the Remembered One, the one with hopes and dreams and a future she squandered when she reached for the stars.

The one who got us here, and who can’t ever get us out.

So, you say I’m unusual. How nice for me. The ones who separate usually kill themselves before the MPs ever get into the chamber. The others, the ones who integrate with their thing, get reused.

You think that the women I trained with—the ones not in my unit, the ones who didn’t die when we got back—you think they’re still out there, fighting an enemy we don’t entirely understand.

I think you’re naïve.

But you’re preparing a study, something for the government so that they’ll know this experiment is failing. Not the chip-in-the-brain thing that allows you to communicate with me, but the girl soldiers, the footsoldiers, the grunts on the ground.

And if they listen (ha!) they’ll listen because of people like me.

Okay. I’ll buy into your pipe dreams.

Here’s what everyone on Earth believes:

We don’t even know their names. We can call them The Others, but that’s only for clarity purposes. There are names—Squids, ETs—but none of them seem to stick.

They have ships in much of the solar system, so we’re told, but we’re going to prevent them from getting the Moon. The Moon is the last bastion before they reach Earth.

That’s about it. No one cares, unless they have a kid up there, and even then, they don’t really care unless the kid is a grunt, like I was.

Only they don’t know the kid’s a grunt. Not until the kid comes home from a tour, if the kid comes home.

Here’s what I learned on our ship: Most of the guys never came home. That’s when the commanders started the hormonal/genetic thing, the thing that tapped into the maternal instinct. Apparently the female of the species has a ferocious need to protect her young.

It can be—it is—tapped, and in some of us, it’s powerful, and we become strong.

Mostly, though, no one gets near the ground. The battle is engaged in the blackness of space. It’s like the video games our grandparents used—which some say (and I never believed until now)—were used to train the kids for some kind of future war.

The kind we’re fighting now.

What I learned after a few tours, before I ever had to go to ground, was that ground troops, footsoldiers, rarely returned. They have specific missions, mostly clearing an area, and they do it, and they mostly die.

A lot of us died that day—what I can remember of it.

Mostly I remember the fingers and the eyes and the tentacles (yes, they’re real) and the pull of the face mask against my skin.

What I suspect is this: the troops the Others have on the ground aren’t the enemy. They’re some kind of captured race, footsoldiers just like us, fodder for the war machine. I think, if I concentrate real hard, I remember them working, putting chips places, implanting stuff in the ground—growing things?—I’m not entirely clear.

And I wonder if the talk of an invasion force is just that, talk, and if this isn’t something else, some kind of experiment in case we get into a real situation, something that’ll become bigger.

Because I don’t ever remember the Others fighting back.

If Squids can look surprised, these did.

All of them.

So that’s my theory for what good it’ll do.

There’s still girls dying up there. Women, I guess, creatures, footsoldiers, whatever they want to create.

Then we come back, and we become this: things.

Because we can’t ever be the Remembered Ones. Not again.

But you know that.

You’re studying as many of us as you can. That’s clear too.

I’m not even sure you are a doc. Maybe you’re a machine, getting these thoughts, processing them, using some modulated voice to ask the right questions, the ones that provoke these memories.

Since I’ve never seen you.

I never see anyone.

Except the ghosts of myself.

So what are you going to do with me? Reintegration isn’t possible; that’s been tried. (You think I don’t remember? How do you think the Remembered One and I split off in the first place? Once there was just her and the thing. Now there’s three of us, trapped in here—well, two trapped, and one growling, but you know what I mean.)

Sending us back won’t work. We might turn on our comrades. Or ourself. (Probably ourself.)

Sending us home is out of the question, even if we had a home. The Remembered One does, but she’s so far away, she’ll never reintegrate.

Let me tell you what I think you should do. I think you should remove the chip. Move me to a new location. Pretend you’ve never interviewed me.

Then you’d just be faced with the Thing.

And the Thing should be put out of its misery.

We should be put out of its misery.

Monica and LaTrice weren’t wrong, Doc. They were just crude. They used what methods they had at their disposal.

They were proactive.

I can’t be. You’ve got all three of us bound up here.

Let us go.

Send us back, all by ourselves. No team, no combat formation. Hell, not even any weapons.

Let us die.

It’s the only humane thing to do.





JENNY’S SICK

David Tallerman

It’s a cold day in February, and Jenny’s sick again.

I ask what it is this time and she just looks at me with ghastly eyes, staring out from over swollen, purpling flesh. She’s sitting bolt upright, propped by pillows, and there’s so much sweat everywhere that it’s like condensation in a steam room. I’ve seen her look bad before but never quite this bad. Where did she get this shit? How long is it going to last this time?

I can’t be the one to deal with this. We’ve been living together for maybe two years; we started sleeping together and ended friends, but mainly we just hit it off, and sharing a place seemed a good idea. I thought we had things in common then, that maybe we were going the same places. But I’m looking to finish studying as soon as possible, to carve out a career, and I have no idea what Jenny wants.

Maybe she just wants to die.

I think it was about a year ago she got into this, though you never know, do you? People are like oceans, the powerful stuff moves deep down and you almost never see it. So perhaps there was always something there, just waiting for an outlet.

Either way, it’s about a year ago that I find out. There’s a campus bulletin going around over a new drug, the usual about watching for strange behavior in our fellow students: absenteeism, mood swings, that kind of thing. I figure it’s the same old government stuff, rooting for subversives and trouble-makers. There’s always some new drug or faction or threat, and the next week you’ll hear that the campus police have been out, then maybe there’s a face missing in your next lecture. If you keep your nose clean and stay in the right groups it isn’t that big a deal.

So there’s buzz about this drug, without any real details. I don’t think anything of it until I get in one evening and there’s this noise coming from Jenny’s room, like nothing I’ve heard. Though a couple of months later it will be all too familiar, this first time I don’t know what to think. I mean, I’ve heard coughing before. But this isn’t clearing-your-throat coughing; this is a cruel, hacking bout that goes on for two full minutes, while I stand in the hallway, not sure what I’m hearing.

By the time I knock on her door it’s started again. When I open it the cough is shaking right through her, throwing her about like a rag doll. I don’t know what to do, whether I should try and help, so I just stand watching and for a while she doesn’t seem to know I’m there. Then finally there’s a break, and she looks up. “I’m sick,” she tells me. She says it with a weird grin, like she’s challenging me.

“What do you mean? Nobody gets sick. There’s nothing left to get sick with.”

Instead of answering, she holds up a small plastic bottle. Somebody has written the word CHOKE across it in blue permanent marker. I can see one small green and white capsule rattling around inside.

“What the hell is that?” She only grins at me again, then starts on another fit of coughing.

I find out later that this first time, it’s influenza. She spends two days with it, wrapped fetal in bed, skin like wet flour, choking until near the end I can see blood mixed with the filth she’s bringing up.

Then, abruptly, it goes away. It always does. I figure out eventually that the second capsule, the green one, is the cure. She takes it and an hour later she’s well. Except each time she goes a little longer without taking the green pill: One hour, five hours, a day.

After that, we don’t talk about it, and I guess we drift apart pretty quickly. Jenny’s out a lot, she doesn’t bother to make classes or lectures, and I know there’s a crowd she hangs out with but I don’t see them. Mainly I’m worried that she’ll get caught and that somehow they’ll blame me as well. I study harder, as though that will make up for her absences, I will the days away, and I feel scared. As much as I like Jenny, I like the thought of my future more.

Maybe I should try and talk to her about it, but we don’t talk about anything very much. When I do see her, it’s because she’s sick, too sick to go out. I don’t know what she tells the campus authorities each time. I don’t know where the pills come from. All I know is every month there’s a new bottle with a name written on it, like PUKE or BURN, in the same messy blue highlighter.

As much as I try to keep away from it, and from Jenny, it’s more and more a part of my life, a dirty secret I can’t help but hide. After a few months I start downloading old medical texts from the library’s archive. I figure maybe PUKE is gastroenteritis, but I’m majoring in Information Analysis not Science History; a lot of what’s in those books goes way over my head, and it’s not like I can ask anybody.

I wonder if I should try to help, to look after her somehow, but I’m too scared. Deep down, there’s a part of me that’s so damn afraid that one day she’ll decide not to take the green pill. I’ll come in to find her cold and still, and when the police find out what happened, that will be my life over too.

Christmas comes and goes, and I’m glad of the break and to be with my folks for a few weeks, except that Jenny and her weird obsession have got into my head and my parents’ healthiness seems strange somehow: their perfect skin, their smiles, and their peace of mind. Having Jenny in my life is damaging me, but I only recognize it properly in that gap, in the exposure to normality and discovering how alien it seems.

When I get back to the flat I’ve already made my mind up that I have to move out. I don’t know how I didn’t think of it sooner. Almost a year’s gone by and it never crossed my mind that I could just leave.

When I see Jenny I realize why. There’s something so frail about her, even when she’s not sick, a depth in her eyes that breaks my heart. I don’t even know if she likes me anymore—maybe she hates me—yet suddenly all I can think about is the touch of her skin those times we slept together, the smell of her sweat mixed with the scent of her hair.

“I’m going to look for somewhere else to live.”

She looks surprised, if only for a second. “Sure. This place is kind of cramped. I can manage on my own.”

I choose to think that she means financially, but I’m not sure. I don’t mention the sickness. I hope she will, but I know she’s not going to. The way she is now, all of that is something that happens to another person. Right now, she seems so damn normal; except for that look in her eyes, that sense of unfathomable depth. “That’s what I figured,” I say, “I figured you could manage.”

By February, I’ve found a place—a couple of guys with a spare room—and I’m living midway between the two flats while I shift the last of my things. I don’t know why I’m not hurrying more. I could have been moved two weeks ago. Instead I drag my heels, take over a box every couple of days, and tell myself it’s easier this way.

Then I come in and hear the coughing, not like the first time but slow, drawn-out, more of a dry wheeze. I go in and it’s the worst I’ve seen her. She looks hollow, like a discarded shell, and more than anything she reminds me of these old porcelain dolls my grandmother used to keep: skin white, except where age had yellowed it, with black eyes that didn’t look even remotely human.

“What is it this time?”

No answer, just a stare, and a half-smile through flaking lips.

I go out and load up the trolley that I’ve borrowed with my last four boxes. I don’t even say goodbye.

The next time I run into Jenny is two years later. I just happen to take a certain corner on a certain street and there she is.

I can tell right away that she’s dying. I’ve never seen anyone die, not for real, but it’s some kind of instinct in my gut that tells me because suddenly I want to run away, to be anywhere else.

Instead, I make small-talk. It’s very small because there’s so damn much I know we can’t talk about. Jenny was my friend and for a while something more. And I walked away, for two years I’ve kept her out of my mind. “How are you doing?” I ask. It feels like about the stupidest thing I’ve ever said.

But she nods and smiles, and says, “I’m okay, you know? I feel pretty good.”

She doesn’t look good. I think about suggesting we go for a coffee, but I know she always hated those places. She called them “obscenely clean,” and there was only one bar she’d ever drink in, a place that had dropped so far off the map that the Hygiene Inspectorate didn’t know it existed. “What are you doing now? How did uni go?” What I mean is: Did you drop out? Did they catch you?

Jenny dodges the question, with all its implications. “Yeah, I’m getting by. And you, how are you?”

“I finished with a pretty good grade. Serious data dissection work is hard to come by but I’ve got a couple of interviews coming up, it’s looking promising. It’s pretty tight these days, I guess, but I’m hopeful.” Why do I feel guilty saying this? I’m not the screw-up here. I’m not the disease junky.

“Yeah? Well, that’s good.” She tries to sound like she means it. I feel as if we’re on different planets, separated by a million miles. All I can think is how I want to be somewhere else, and maybe that’s why I say what I do. “Jenny, you look really f*cking sick.” It’s out of my mouth before I know it.

But she’s not even fazed. “Yeah?” She smiles. “Oh, yeah: I’m dying.”

This time, I don’t even try and make an excuse. I turn and walk away, and the closest I come to apologizing is that I try not to run.

That night I dream about Jenny, cold and blue and somehow happy, grinning up at me from some deep dark place with a rictus smile cut over her lips. The dream hangs beside me all the next day, like smoke in the air, and I feel like I’m caught in Jenny’s gravity, like I’m plummeting.

But it’s a week on from that chance meeting in the street, just when I’ve almost managed to forget, that my phone rings. I don’t recognize the name or face, except that she looks familiar somehow. For a moment I get that same gut feeling, that urge to run. I pick up anyway. “Hello. Can I help you?”

“My name is Linda Ulek. I’m sorry to intrude on your time, but it’s very important, and there really isn’t anybody else.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t—” Then I remember where I’ve heard the name Ulek before. “You’re Jenny’s mother.”

I met her once. Jenny’s parents came to the flat and looked uncomfortable and left as quickly as they could. Jenny told me once that they were both high up in some obscure branch of the government. That explains how she got hold of my private number.

“As I say, I’m sorry to intrude, but Jenny doesn’t have any friends that we know of and we remembered your name, and that the two of you lived together, and were close at one point. Of course we’d like to go ourselves, of course we would, but we’re in Rome this month and we have commitments. And the doctors are adamant that somebody who knows her should be with her—”

“I’m sorry; I don’t understand what you’re asking.”

“Jenny’s in hospital,” she says. “She’s very sick and the doctors have asked us to visit her, as part of her treatment. As I say, we can’t do that. We thought that perhaps you could.”

I didn’t know there were any hospitals left. In a world with a cure for everything, I figured the common hospital was as extinct as the common cold. Whatever I’m expecting, the Rondelle Panacea Clinic isn’t it. It’s just another nondescript building, a few klicks out of the city, like the office I work in or the flats I live in. I press the buzzer beside the doors, and a few moments later a young woman in a white suit appears. When I tell her who I am she says, “You’re here for Jenny Ulek,” and ushers me inside.

The woman, who gives her name as Doctor Meier, leads me through blank-walled corridors, into a small office, and offers me a seat. It occurs to me that Jenny must hate this place, that in fact it’s everything she despises. White walls, white furniture, white people in white suits. If somebody had to design a personal hell for Jenny it would look a lot like this.

Doctor Meier sits opposite me and says, “It was good of you to come.”

I nod. There’s no point telling her how close I came to saying no.

“You’re aware of Jenny’s case history?”

“Some of it. We lived together for a while. I know she likes to get sick.”

“Well, it’s a little more complicated than that, but in essence, yes, Jenny takes a certain gratification from physical illness. Recently Jenny has introduced a disease into her system that, left untreated, will be terminal within the next two months.” She pauses for just a moment, to let that sink in. “We could cure it, of course, completely eradicate it. Or we could use more outmoded techniques to keep it in check.”

“Why would you do that?”

Doctor Meier has clearly prepared her answer. She looks the type to have prepared an answer for anything I could hope to ask. “Because if we were to let Jenny out into the world tomorrow she would immediately find a way to infect herself again, with the same disease or perhaps with something worse. Put bluntly, the condition we need to treat in this case—if Jenny is to survive in any meaningful way—is not the physical one.”

I nod again. Sure, I get that. From these peoples’ point of view, Jenny is crazy. I guess if I’d thought about it I would have come to the same conclusion, but somehow it never occurred to me. “So, what’s the alternative?”

“There are two options. The first, perhaps the easiest in many ways, will involve gene therapy, some alteration of memories, intrusive brain surgery. Put bluntly, we would correct Jenny’s personality to a degree where she can function safely in society. It sounds, perhaps, more drastic than it is. But at the end of it Jenny will, obviously, not be quite the same person she is now.”

Damn right it sounds drastic. “There’s another option?”

“There is. It’s slower, and there are no guarantees, but we have excellent psychologists on staff, and similar cases have been treated with a high degree of success.”

I know that there’s going to be a “but,” it’s written all over her face.

“While there’s a good chance that Ms. Ulek can become well with sufficient help and support, it will take more than the kindness of strangers. What she will need is someone she knows, someone who knows her, who will devote time and—”

“No.”

“If you’ll just let me explain—”

“No, I can’t do that. I have a career, I have my life.” Suddenly, my heart has sunk right down into the pit of my stomach. “I haven’t seen Jenny in years, I don’t think I mean anything to her at all, and I can’t possibly do that.” Listening to my own voice, I know that what I’m saying is true, and yet at the same time I know it’s not the truth. But what would be? That I couldn’t say.

“We’d only ask that you spend some time considering it.”

“Sure, I will. I’ll consider it, and then the answer is still going to be no. It’s just not something I can do.”

Doctor Meier nods. She stands up and moves towards the door. I can tell she’s bluffing, that she hasn’t quite given up yet. “We’ll call you in a few days, when you’ve had time to consider.”

I guess I know myself better than Doctor Meier does, because when she calls three days later the answer hasn’t changed. I didn’t make Jenny sick. I didn’t make her want to be sick. I have another interview coming up, and I can’t be asked to abandon that for someone I barely know. But I don’t tell her that. I don’t have to explain myself.

Only, the nightmares keep coming. In some way, a way I don’t much like, it seems that Jenny is still a part of me. I find myself remembering, more and more, those months we lived together. Jenny has become a ghost, and I don’t know if I can escape her.

A week after my visit I phone the hospital. I don’t recognize the doctor who answers so I have to explain who I am, the whole situation, before I can finally get to saying it: “I’ve changed my mind. I’d like to help.”

This new doctor, male and middle-aged, looks away from me for a moment. When he looks back he says, very flatly, “Ms. Ulek’s procedure was completed yesterday morning. She’s due to be released at the end of the week, but perhaps you could visit her in the meantime. I’m sure she would appreciate the company.”

I don’t kid myself that I go for Jenny’s sake.

Doctor Meier meets me at the door, and she’s all smiles: “The procedure went well,” she says, “we’re very optimistic.”

She leads me through corridors again, presumably in a different direction this time, but it’s all so indistinguishable that I honestly can’t tell. Either way, we wind up at a particular door and she steps back and says, “I’ll let you go in on your own. I’ll wait here until you’re finished.”

“I won’t be long.”

“Take as long as you need.”

I won’t be long. I don’t need long. I’m only here to say goodbye.

I push through the door and the room on the other side is a lot like the corridor, only wider. Jenny is propped up in bed, with some glossy magazine spread over her knees. When she hears the door, she glances up and looks confused for just an instant, then turns her puzzled look into a smile and says, “Hi there. You’ve come to see me.”

“Jenny. How are you?”

“Oh, I’m great. They cured me. They found a cure.”

If she’s telling the truth then it’s strange, because I’ve never seen her look this bad. I can’t put my finger on why, because she seems as healthy as I’ve ever known anybody to be, not only not sick but radiant with health. For some reason I find myself remembering again those porcelain dolls of my grandmother’s, with their white skin, their black eyes, all of their flawed perfection.

For the first time, I think I understand Jenny. Not this Jenny sitting in front of me, with her neatly-styled hair and her faultless smile, but the Jenny I cared about all those years ago. Suddenly I want to feel sickness writhing in my gut; I want decay and impurity, and fever burning under my skin. More than anything I want to know I’m alive. It occurs to me that this place, this clinic, was never designed for living things to inhabit.

I look at the pristine walls, dizzyingly white like the face of the sun. “Shit,” I say, “it’s all so ugly.”

Jenny only smiles back at me, uncomprehending. “It’s kind of boring, isn’t it? They’ve taken good care of me, though.”

“Yeah? That’s good. I’m glad to hear that.” I cough and scuff my feet, no longer sure how to say what I came to say. Then I realize it’s really very simple. “Listen, I had an interview a couple of days ago, and, well—I have a job. They’re flying me out to Portugal next week, and I really just came by to see how you were and to say goodbye.”

“That’s great. It’s what you always wanted.”

It is, isn’t it? Suddenly I’m not so sure anymore. Still, I’ve done what I came for. Not knowing what to do next, I lean over and kiss Jenny on the cheek. Her skin is astonishingly smooth. My stomach revolts, just for an instant.

“Goodbye,” I say again, and she smiles and waves back as I walk out the door.

Outside, I pause to lean against the wall. My thoughts are a whirlpool, and my breath comes in shudders. “Goodbye, Jenny,” I whisper, one final time. It’s not meant for the stranger in the room beyond, but for that impossibly fragile girl I walked away from. Probably I’m the only one who knows to grieve her passing, but a whispered farewell is all the mourning I can offer. Because I can’t carry her in my head anymore.

I’ve got what I wanted; has Jenny as well? She’s gone through health and found something beyond, something as virulent as any disease. She’s annihilated herself as certainly as any suicide.

I wonder if the doctors realize how she tricked them.





THE SILENCE OF THE ASONU

Ursula K. Le Guin

The silence of the Asonu is proverbial. The first visitors believed that these gracious, gracile people were mute, lacking any language other than that of gesture, expression, and gaze. Later, hearing Asonu children chatter, the visitors suspected that among themselves the adults spoke, keeping silence only with strangers. We know now that the Asonu are not dumb, but that once past early childhood they speak only very rarely, to anyone, under any circumstances. They do not write; and unlike mutes, or monks under vows of silence, they do not use any signs or other devices in place of speaking.

This nearly absolute abstinence from language makes them fascinating.

People who live with animals value the charm of muteness. It can be a real pleasure to know when the cat walks into the room that he won’t mention any of your shortcomings, or that you can tell your grievances to your dog without his repeating them to the people who caused them.

And those who can talk, but don’t, have the great advantage over the rest of us that they never say anything stupid. This may be why we are convinced that if they spoke they would have something wise to say.

Thus there has come to be considerable tourist traffic to the Asonu. Having a strong tradition of hospitality, the Asonu entertain their visitors courteously, though without modifying their own customs. Some people go there simply in order to join the natives in their silence, grateful to spend a few weeks where they do not have to festoon and obscure every human meeting with verbiage. Many such visitors, having been accepted into a household as a paying guest, return year after year, forming bonds of unspoken affection with their quiet hosts.

Others follow their Asonu guides or hosts about, talking to them continually, confiding their whole life stories to them, in rapture at having at last found a listener who won’t interrupt or comment or mention that his cousin had an even larger tumor than that. As such people usually know little Asonu and speak mostly or entirely in their own language, they evidently aren’t worried by the question that vexes some visitors: Since the Asonu don’t talk, do they, in fact, listen?

They certainly hear and understand what is said to them in their own language, since they’re prompt to respond to their children, to indicate directions by gesture to inquiring tourists, and to leave a building at the cry of “Fire!” But the question remains, do they listen to discursive speech and sociable conversation, or do they merely hear it, while keeping silently attentive to something beyond speech? Their amiable and apparently easy manner seems to some observers the placid surface of a deep preoccupation, a constant alertness, like that of a mother who while entertaining her guests or seeing to her husband’s comfort yet is listening every moment for the cry of her baby in another room.

To perceive the Asonu thus is almost inevitably to interpret their silence as a concealment. As they grow up, it seems, they cease to speak because they are listening to something we do not hear, a secret which their silence hides.

Some visitors to their world are convinced that the lips of these quiet people are locked upon a knowledge which, in proportion as it is hidden, must be valuable—a spiritual treasure, a speech beyond speech, possibly even that ultimate revelation promised by so many religions, and indeed frequently delivered, but never in a wholly communicable form. The transcendent knowledge of the mystic cannot be expressed in language. It may be that the Asonu avoid language for this very reason. It may be that they keep silence because if they spoke everything of importance would have been said.

To some, the utterances of the Asonu do not seem to be as momentous as one might expect from their rarity. They might even be described as banal. But believers in the Wisdom of the Asonu have followed individuals about for years, waiting for the rare words they speak, writing them down, saving them, studying them, arranging and collating them, finding arcane meanings and numerical correspondences in them, in search of the hidden message.

There is no written form of the Asonu language, and translation of speech is considered to be so uncertain that translatomats aren’t issued to the tourists, most of whom don’t want them anyway. Those who wish to learn Asonu can do so only by listening to and imitating children, who by six or seven years old are already becoming unhappy when asked to talk.

Here are the “Eleven Sayings of the Elder of Isu,” collected over four years by a devotee from Ohio, who had already spent six years learning the language from the children of the Isu Group. Months of silence occurred between most of these statements, and two years between the fifth and sixth.

1. Not there.

2. It is almost ready [or] Be ready for it soon.

3. Unexpected!

4. It will never cease.

5. Yes.

6. When?

7. It is very good.

8. Perhaps.

9. Soon.

10. Hot! [or] Very warm!

11. It will not cease.

The devotee wove these eleven sayings into a coherent spiritual statement or testament which he understood the Elder to have been making, little by little, during the last four years of his life. The Ohio Reading of the Sayings of the Elder of Isu is as follows:

“(1) What we seek is not there in any object or experience of our mortal life. We live among appearances, on the verge of the Spiritual Truth. (2) We must be ready for it as it is ready for us, for (3) it will come when we least expect it. Our perception of the Truth is sudden as a lightning-flash, but (4) the Truth itself is eternal and unchanging. (5) Indeed we must positively and hopefully, in a spirit of affirmation, (6) continually ask when, when shall we find what we seek? (7) For the Truth is the medicine for our soul, the knowledge of absolute goodness. (8, 9) It may come very soon. Perhaps it is coming even now in this moment. (10) Its warmth and brightness are as those of the sun, but the sun will perish (11) and the Truth will not perish. Never will the warmth, the brightness, the goodness of the Truth cease or fail us.”



Another interpretation of the Sayings may be made by referring to the circumstances in which the Elder spoke, faithfully recorded by the devotee from Ohio, whose patience was equaled only by the Elder’s:

1. Spoken in an undertone as the Elder looked through a chest of clothing and ornaments.



2. Spoken to a group of children on the morning of a ceremony.



3. Said with a laugh in greeting the Elder’s younger sister, returned from a long trip.



4. Spoken the day after the burial of the Elder’s sister.



5. Said while embracing the Elder’s brother-in-law some days after the funeral.



6. Asked of an Asonu “doctor” who was making a “spirit-body” drawing in white and black sand for the Elder. These drawings seem to be both curative and diagnostic, but we know very little about them. The observer states that the “doctor’s” answer was a short curving line drawn outward from the navel of the “spirit-body” figure. This, however, may be only the observer’s reading of what was not an answer at all.



7. Said to a child who had woven a reed mat.



8. Spoken in answer to a young grandchild who asked, “Will you be at the big feast, Grandmother?”



9. Spoken in answer to the same child, who asked, “Are you going to be dead like Great-Auntie?”



10. Said to a baby who was toddling towards a firepit where the flames were invisible in the sunlight.



11. Last words, spoken the day before the Elder’s death.



The last six Sayings were all spoken in the last half-year of the Elder’s life, as if the approach of death had made the Elder positively loquacious. Five of the Sayings were spoken to, or in at least in the presence of, young children who were still at the talking stage.

Speech from an adult must be very impressive to an Asonu child. But, like the foreign linguists, Asonu babies must learn the language by listening to older children. The mother and other parents encourage the child to speak only by attentive listening and prompt, affectionate, wordless response.

The Asonu live in close-knit extended-family groups, in frequent contact with other groups. Their pasturing life, following the great flocks of anamanu which furnish them wool, leather, milk, and meat, leads them on a ceaseless seasonal nomadic circuit within a vast shared territory of mountains and foothills. Families frequently leave their family group to go wandering and visiting. At the great festivals and ceremonies of healing and renewal many groups come together for days or weeks, exchanging hospitality. No hostile relations between groups are apparent, and in fact no observer has reported seeing adult Asonu fight or quarrel. Arguments, evidently, are out of the question.

Children from two to six years old chatter to each other constantly; they argue, wrangle, and bicker, and sometimes come to blows. As they come to be six or seven they begin to speak less and to quarrel less. By the time they are eight or nine most of them are very shy of words and reluctant to answer a question except by gesture. They have learned to quietly evade inquiring tourists and linguists with notebooks and recording devices. By adolescence they are as silent and as peaceable as the adults.

Children between eight and twelve do most of the looking after the younger ones. All the children of the family group go about together, and in such groups the two-to-six-year-olds provide language models for the babies. Older children shout wordlessly in the excitement of a game of tag or hide-and-seek, and sometimes scold an errant toddler with a “Stop!” or “No!”—just as the Elder of Isu murmured “Hot!” as a child approached an invisible fire; though of course the Elder may have used that circumstance as a parable, in order to make a statement of profound spiritual meaning, as appears in the Ohio Reading.

Even songs lose their words as the singers grow older. A game rhyme sung by little children has words:

Look at us tumbledown

Stumbledown tumbledown

All of us tumbledown

All in a heap!

Older children cheerfully play the game with the little ones, falling into wriggling piles with yells of joy, but they do not sing the words, only the tune, vocalized on a neutral syllable.

Adult Asonu often hum or sing at work, while herding, while rocking the baby. Some of the tunes are traditional, others improvised. Many employ motifs based on the whistles of the anamanu. None have words; all are hummed or vocalized. At the meetings of the clans and at marriages and funerals the ceremonial choral music is rich in melody and harmonically complex and subtle. No instruments are used, only the voice. The singers practice many days for the ceremonies. Some students of Asonu music believe that their particular spiritual wisdom or insight finds its expression in these great wordless chorales.

I am inclined to agree with others who, having lived a long time among the Asonu, believe that their choral singing is an element of a sacred occasion, and certainly an art, a festive communal act, and a pleasurable release of feeling, but no more. What is sacred to them remains in silence.

The little children call people by relationship words, mother, uncle, clan-sister, friend, etc. If the Asonu have names, we do not know them.

About ten years ago a zealous believer in the Secret Wisdom of the Asonu kidnapped a child of four from one of the mountain clans in the dead of winter. He had obtained a zoo collector’s permit, and smuggled her back to his home world in an animal cage marked “Anamanu.” Believing that the Asonu enforce silence on their children, his plan was to encourage the little girl to keep talking as she grew up. When adult, he thought, she would thus be able to speak the innate Wisdom which her people would have obliged her to keep secret.

For the first year or so it appears that she would talk to her kidnapper, who, aside from the abominable cruelty of his action, seems to have begun by treating her kindly enough. His knowledge of the Asonu language was limited, and she saw no one else but a small group of sectarians who came to gaze worshipfully at her and listen to her talk. Her vocabulary and syntax gained no enlargement, and began to atrophy. She became increasingly silent.

Frustrated, the zealot tried to teach her his own language so that she would be able to express her innate Wisdom in a different tongue. We have only his report, which is that she “refused to learn,” was silent or spoke almost inaudibly when he tried to make her repeat words, and “did not obey.” He ceased to let other people see her. When some members of the sect finally notified the civil authorities, the child was about seven. She had spent three years hidden in a basement room, and for a year or more had been whipped and beaten regularly “to teach her to talk,” her captor explained, “because she’s stubborn.” She was dumb, cowering, undernourished, and brutalized.

She was promptly returned to her family, who for three years had mourned her, believing she had wandered off and been lost on the glacier. They received her with tears of joy and grief. Her condition since then is not known, because the Interplanary Agency closed the entire area to all visitors, tourist or scientist, at the time she was brought back. No foreigner has been up in the Asonu mountains since. We may well imagine that her people were resentful; but nothing was ever said.