“It’s just that this thing has existed for so long, and no one knows anything about it,” Davida says. “That’s beginning to creep me out.”
“We know some things,” my father says, and goes into his lecture on the history of the Room. He doesn’t seem to notice that he’s talking mostly about conjecture and theory, but some of the others do. They squirm. He’s lost the attention he worked so hard to gain.
It takes Karl a while to shut my father down, but he finally does. Then Karl looks at me as if my father’s lack of social graces is my fault.
I give Karl a half smile and a shrug.
Karl gets my father to sit. Then Karl sets up the dive roster for the following day—Bria piloting one of the four-man skips (so that our teams don’t have to free-dive to get into far sections of the station) and Davida, Jennifer, and Mikk in the upper habitats—with a promise of more when we meet that night.
The team shifts, but this time it isn’t because of my father’s long-windedness. It’s because they’re excited.
It’s because they’re ready.
We all are.
TWENTY
For the next three weeks, we dive the station, making detailed maps, exploring the new and old habitats, sharing small discoveries.
Every night we meet in the lounge and watch the captured imagery of that day’s dives. The divers narrate and the others ask questions. That way, we all have the same information.
We learn quite a few things—the built-in furniture is the same in all of the habitats, although in the “new” section, as Karl likes to call it, it’s not dented or warped or even scratched.
The new sections contain a few other things—remotes attached to entertainment equipment, equipment that doesn’t seem to work “although it might if we can find a good way to power the entire station,” my father says. “Maybe the entertainment programming is supposed to come from the damaged central area.”
I don’t like having my father in the lounge at night. He’s not methodical and he’s given to supposition. I think supposition is deadly. Karl finds it fascinating, but he can separate out the supposition from fact.
I’m not sure some of the younger divers can. Although they occasionally find my father long-winded, they seem to like him. They may even admire him.
I don’t ask anyone what they think of him, not that they would give me an honest opinion. Everyone is aware that he is my father and that we aren’t on the best of terms.
Indeed, everyone else talks to him more than I do.
Including Riya, who daily complains that we are wasting her time and money. From the moment we arrived, she wanted us to go into the Room and do nothing else. Fortunately, Karl is in charge of this part of the mission, and Karl must talk to her, reminding her that caution is our byword and that even if we don’t recover her father on this trip, the information we gather might make it possible to recover him on the next.
One night, she came to me to complain. I waved her off. “You gave me as much time as I needed,” I reminded her.
“Yes,” she said. “I gave you that, not him.”
“And I placed him in charge while we’re at the station. I trust him.”
She glared at me. “I hope that trust isn’t misplaced.”
So far, it doesn’t seem misplaced. I approve of the way he’s handling the team—dividing assignments based on experience and on interest. It soon becomes clear who likes going through debris-crowded destroyed habitats and who prefers a minute exploration of the pristine edges of the station.
He also has kept track of the pilots—who handles the skip best in tight quarters and who is the most observant. And he hasn’t lost track of the Room.
Once a week, he and I have gone around its exterior. The first time, we mapped it. The second time, we mapped again to see if it had expanded. The third, we just observed.
The station hasn’t grown while we’re here. And we’ve seen nothing untoward about the Room, although on that first dive I was surprised to learn that the Room is encased on all sides.
For some reason, I thought part of it was open to space. I’m assuming that’s because I saw the lights and they seemed to lead somewhere. And also, I’m sure I thought the Room had unlimited space because it has taken so many bodies.
When you peer through the main window, you can see none of those bodies. In fact, you can’t even see the lights. It looks dark and empty, like the still intact habitats.
Only when you shine a light inside, it disappears into the darkness. It does not reflect back at you.
My father claims to recognize all of this, which is making Karl grow more and more exasperated with him. At one point, in one of our nightly meetings, Karl snapped at him, “I asked you to tell us everything you knew about the Room.”
My father shrugged. “I have.”
“Yet each night, you have some new observation, some new memory.”
My father didn’t seem perturbed at Karl’s tone. “You think small details are important, things I noticed but never really thought much about. So when I remember them, I tell you.”
Karl asked if there were other things like that which my father noted, things he wanted to tell us.
My father shrugged again. “I’m sure I’ll remember when the time comes.”
Karl looked at me and caught me rolling my eyes. But I said nothing to him or my father. Karl asked to command this part of the mission because he believed my observations and judgments would be compromised.
He’s only beginning to realize that my father’s are as well.
The readings have come back from the new habitats. They’re composed of the same material as the rest of the station, only it isn’t worn down by centuries. It does seem newer, just like the interior furniture does. A lot points to my father’s theory—that the structure is being built new—but I am not sure how.
If the station is adding to itself over time, I’m not sure what materials it’s using. My father seems ignorant of the law of matter conservation, so he thinks it possible to create something from nothing. I’ve never seen that happen.
Then, one night, I wake bolt upright on my bed, worried that the matter being used to make the new station comes from the bodies of the dead.
I have to do the calculations just to calm myself down. They show me that even with every part of a body being used, there isn’t enough material.
Either the station has some kind of supply, something we don’t recognize, or it’s bringing matter in from elsewhere.
Or it isn’t growing itself. It’s revealing itself, like I feared.
And I find a lot of evidence to support that theory. At least, evidence that part of me wants to believe.
I find myself wondering if the station isn’t going through the same sort of time split that Junior went through. Maybe the station is stuck in two different time frames. And like some stuck objects, it is slowly sliding out of whatever holds it.
Which would explain how it “grew” each time my father had visited, and why the newer areas don’t seem to age. Maybe the time split here is the opposite of the one we’d found on the Dignity Vessel.
Instead of time progressing rapidly in the part we can’t reach, it’s progressing slowly there—or maybe not at all. That the parts of the station being revealed are in a section between time, between dimensions.
I’m no scientist, and I have no way to test my theories. I don’t even want to mention them to Karl. He has enough to worry about.
I do mention one worry, however. I tell him it concerns me that the station has expanded outward, and I make him promise no skip and no diver will travel to the outer edges.