“I too, because it is a reflex, but I am not sure that we really need to. It’s like a sailing ship which was equiped with an engine. And all systems of the starship is fed with the energy of our despair. Therefore, when it grows, light becomes brighter, and what has gone dead, turns on again.
“But corpses…”
“That’s just it! We cannot die! We have tried already numerous times! But every time when we kill a body, on the matrix of our soul a new one is recreated! The law of increase of despair won’t allow us to escape! Neither us, nor anyone else. Sooner or later all will fall into despair. At first, the crews of interstellar ships like us, then the whole civilizations, whose sense will reach an adequate level to enter into resonance with universal despair directly. Probably sooner or later even stars and galaxies will evolve to the same level, and in the whole universe nothing will remain except dark matter filled with infinite despair. Actually this process is already closer to the end than to the beginning: There is already four times more dark matter than what we consider normal.”
“And bandages?” asked Linda, clutching at a straw. “Well, let us assume we revived without clothes. It is logical, but didn’t somebody bind us up? And why did we need it in the first place?”
“They are not bandages,” Victor sighed. “It’s dead skin. Our subconsciousness tried to save us from the truth, representing it as just dried bandages. Look! Look at them attentively!”
The woman brought her bound up arm to her eyes. Now she saw that the edges of the “bandages” were actually ugly peeling scars, and on the cadaverous-gray surface of the “bandages” it was possible to make out pores and some separate not yet fallen out hairs. That means, her head also… her face actually wasn’t wrapped. It became these terrible rags.
“A soul it not just personality,” Adamson continued to explain. “The energy matrix stores the information about the body as well, otherwise resurrection would be impossible. Naturally there is no information about clothes there, nor about putrefactive bacteria. That’s why bodies don’t decay here. Small wounds don’t influence this matrix, but those that are really serious and cause especially severe pain are reflected in it. That’s why we revive with dead skin or, at least, with scars in place of such wounds. However, even this won’t help us die. We tried. Oh my God, how many times we’ve tried.
Linda shuddered and with a groan fell to her knees, clenching her head with her hands. Now she too could not escape the memories which rushed on her like a torrent. She now remembered how she had torn her own face and squeezed out her eyes—how with all her force had pushed off her feet from the floor, empaling herself through the stomach and breast on pipes, cut out the schematics of the damned ship on her own body, hung, stretched on wires, while the man now speaking with her skinned her slowly…
“Remember how you crucified me?” she dully asked.
“No,” he answered. These memories were probably too awful, and his subconscious still tried to hide at least them. “Could it be that I… though, of course, who else… what for?”
“I begged you myself—to torture me as long and painfully as possible. I couldn’t do it myself, I have tried already. I hoped that I would go mad. That such pain would destroy my mind, and I wouldn’t revive any more.”
“And I had agreed, though I understood that there would be nobody to render me the same service. But all the same it was no go. And then we tried to achieve the same goal by destroying our own brains. But it also didn’t help. Only the amnesia after revival was deeper. Maybe the point is that the nerve tissue of a brain itself cannot feel pain.”
“But why did we destroy all equipment? Simply out of despair?”
“Not only. The devices would quickly reveal the truth to us. We tried to prolong the pleasure of ignorance after the next revival. After all, in order to feel the whole power of despair it is necessary to realize it to the full extent.”
“And now? Are we realizing? I myself feel awful and frightened, but I wouldn’t again go in for that, about what I’ve asked you before.”
“Still not realizing to the full. Some time is required. It’s like an automatic tuning… but later even that pain will seem to you the lesser evil, than the despair! We already have gotten rid of tools because of fear of the pain which we would cause ourselves with their help later, and when ‘later’ came, we damned ourselves for having done so.”
“I’ve told you, we had not to read it!”
“Sooner or later the despair all the same would cover us—even without hints. It happened already many times, since the very first time when we didn’t know what was what yet. And beyond that, with each new death and revival this period is reduced.”
“Thus, we haven’t much time.” Linda stood up. “We should do something!”
“We can do nothing.” Victor shook his head. “We or anybody in the universe. Despair is not a god, not any sentient essence with which it would be possible to negotiate. The most cruel god can be cajoled with prayers and victims. But we deal with an absolutely stupid natural power—with the fundamental law defining the direction of all processes in the universe. Against it everything is impotent.”
“Last time we jammed the doors of several rooms where I usually revived,” Linda had remembered, “but I have all the same appeared in one of them. How does it do this?
“I think those are the features of the dark matter. Remember that our coordinates are actually smeared out across the universe.”
“So, we can pass through walls?”
“Consciously, no.” Victor punched a wall to make his point. “But the death is probably similar to the transition into a quantum state, and revival to a collapse of a wave function—only not within the universe, but within the ship.
“Can our souls exist without bodies?”
“As far as I understand, no. Anyway, such a condition would be unstable. Therefore, each time new bodies are formed.”
“But it happens only on a ship entered into the dark phase by the Kalkrin generator. We cannot leave the ship, can we?”
“No. From our point of view, the space is closed within a field created by the generator.”
“And if we blow up the ship?”
“I don’t think that it will destroy the field. I’ve said already, it is kept stabilized during a long time not by the generator, but by ourselves.”
“But in an explosion we would be lost simultaneously! Till now we could not achieve that, even when we tried. Probably, in that case a field will slack? And, the main thing, the biosynthesizer with its protoplasm will be destroyed! New bodies will simply have nothing to arise from!”
“Well,” Victor responded slowly, “maybe we still have a hope to die—theoretically. For in practice we can’t destroy the ship. Only in idiotic old fiction were spaceships equipped with self-destruction systems. I would like to ask those authors of such bunk, whether their own cars, trains, planes were supplied with such systems? And if no, why the devil would the designers of spaceships should behave differently?”
“We have no fuel,” Linda reasoned, “but that is speaking about a reactor which fed the generator. But we still should have onboard landing modules for delivery of biorobots to planet surfaces and back. And they have their own engines. If I remember correctly, it’s a chemical fuel.
“Yes,” he nodded. “We didn’t want to cause a damage to planets’ biospheres . Therefore, no radiation, but chemical components should be enough for a good explosion. I do not know whether we can manage to do it. All right, there is nothing to lose all the same. Let’s go. The hangar deck is on the third level.
They didn’t risk using the now working lift, remembering (Victor especially), how it had ended last time. Driven by hope and fear—hope to die and fear not to have time to do it before the despair would fall upon them again with its full power—they ran down the stairs. When they at last rushed into the hangar deck after that racing on a spiral staircase, they felt themselves a bit giddy, while in former times these trained astronauts would not even notice such an easy challenge. It is probable that all that had happened contributed to such exhaustion.