“I’m not out here,” said the voice.
“Where are you?”
“…nowhere.”
I looked at Szpindel. Szpindel looked at me. Neither of us spoke.
James did. At long last, and softly: “And what are you, Amanda?”
No answer.
“Are you Rorschach?”
Here in the belly of the beast, it was so easy to believe.
“No…”
“Then what?”
“N…nothing.” The voice was flat and mechanical. “I’m nothing.”
“You’re saying you don’t exist?” Szpindel said slowly.
“Yes.”
The tent breathed around us.
“Then how can you speak?” Susan asked the voice. “If you don’t exist, what are we talking to?”
“Something…else.” A sigh. A breath of static. “Not me.”
“Shit,” Szpindel muttered. His surfaces brightened with resolve and sudden insight. He pulled his hand from the wall; my HUD thinned instantly. “Her brain’s frying. We gotta get her inside.” He reached for the release.
I put out my own hand. “The spike—”
“Crested already, commissar. We’re past the worst of it.”
“Are you saying it’s safe?”
“It’s lethal. It’s always lethal, and she’s out there in it, and she could do some serious damage to herself in her pres—”
Something bumped the tent from the outside. Something grabbed the outer catch and pulled.
Our shelter opened like an eye. Amanda Bates looked in at us through the exposed membrane. “I’m reading three point eight,” she said. “That’s tolerable, right?”
Nobody moved.
“Come on, people. Break’s over.”
“Ama—” Szpindel stared. “Are you okay?”
“In here? Not likely. But we’ve got a job to do.”
“Do you—exist?” I asked.
“What kind of stupid question is that? Szpindel, how’s this field strength? Can we work in it?”
“Uh…” He swallowed audibly. “Maybe we should abort, Major. That spike was—”
“According to my readings, the spike is pretty much over. And we’ve got less than two hours to finish setting up, run our ground truths, and get out of here. Can we do that without hallucinating?”
“I don’t think we’ll shake the heebie-jeebies,” Szpindel admitted. “But we shouldn’t have to worry about—extreme effects—until another spike hits.”
“Good.”
“Which could be any time.”
“We weren’t hallucinating,” James said quietly.
“We can discuss it later,” Bates said. “Now—”
“There was a pattern there,” James insisted. “In the fields. In my head. Rorschach was talking. Maybe not to us, but it was talking.”
“Good.” Bates pushed herself back to let us pass. “Maybe now we can finally learn to talk back.”
“Maybe we can learn to listen,” James said.
We fled like frightened children with brave faces. We left a base camp behind: Jack, still miraculously functional in its vestibule; a tunnel into the haunted mansion; forlorn magnetometers left to die in the faint hope they might not. Crude pyronometers and thermographs, antique radiation-proof devices that measured the world through the flex and stretch of metal tabs and etched their findings on rolls of plastic. Glow-globes and diving bells and guide ropes strung one to another. We left it all behind, and promised to return in thirty-six hours if we lived so long.
Inside each of us, infinitesimal lacerations were turning our cells to mush. Plasma membranes sprang countless leaks. Overwhelmed repair enzymes clung desperately to shredded genes and barely delayed the inevitable. Anxious to avoid the rush, patches of my intestinal lining began flaking away before the rest of the body had a chance to die.
By the time we docked with Theseus both Michelle and I were feeling nauseous. (The rest of the Gang, oddly, was not; I had no idea how that was possible.) The others would be presenting the same symptoms within minutes. Without intervention we would all be vomiting our guts out for the following two days. Then the body would pretend to recover; for perhaps a week we would feel no pain and have no future. We would walk and talk and move like any living thing, and perhaps convince ourselves that we were immortal after all.
Then we would collapse into ourselves, rotted from the inside out. We would bleed from our eyes and mouths and assholes, and if any God was merciful we would die before splitting open like rotten fruit.
But of course Theseus, our redeemer, would save us from such a fate. We filed from the shuttle into a great balloon that Sarasti had erected to capture our personal effects; we shed our contaminated space suits and clothing and emerged naked into the spine. We passed single-file through the drum, the Flying Dead in formation. Jukka Sarasti—discreetly distant on the turning floor—leapt up in our wake and disappeared aft, to feed our radioactive cast-offs into the decompiler.
Into the crypt. Our coffins lay open across the rear bulkhead. We sank gratefully and wordlessly into their embrace. Bates coughed blood as the lids came down.
My bones hummed as the Captain began to shut me off. I went to sleep a dead man. I had only theory and the assurances of fellow machinery that I would ever be born again.
Keeton, come forth.
I woke up ravenous. Faint voices drifted forward from the drum. I floated in my pod for a few moments, eyes closed, savoring absences: no pain, no nausea. No terrifying subliminal sense of one’s own body sloughing incrementally to mush. Weakness, and hunger; otherwise I felt fine.
I opened my eyes.
Something like an arm. Grey and glistening, far too—too attenuate to be human. No hand at its tip. Too many joints, a limb broken in a dozen places. It extended from a body barely visible over the lip of the pod, a suggestion of dark bulk and other limbs in disjoint motion. It hovered motionless before me, as if startled in the midst of some shameful act.
By the time I had breath enough to cry out, it had whipped back out of sight.
I erupted from the pod, eyes everywhere. Now they saw nothing: an empty crypt, a naked note-taker. The mirrored bulkhead reflected vacant pods to either side. I called up ConSensus: all systems nominal.
It didn’t reflect, I remembered. The mirror didn’t show it.
I headed aft, heart still pounding. The drum opened around me, Szpindel and the Gang conversing in low tones aft. Szpindel glanced up and waved a trembling hand in greeting.
“You need to check me out,” I called. My voice wasn’t nearly so steady as I’d hoped.
“Admitting you have a problem is the first step,” Szpindel called back. “Just don’t expect miracles.” He turned back to the Gang; James on top, they sat in a diagnostic couch staring at some test pattern shimmering on the rear bulkhead.
I grabbed the tip of a stairway and pulled myself down. Coriolis pushed me sideways like a flag in the breeze. “I’m either hallucinating or there’s something on board.”
“You’re hallucinating.”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I. Take a number. Wait your turn.”
He was serious. Once I forced myself to calm down and read the signs, I could see he wasn’t even surprised.
“Guess you’re pretty hungry after all that exhausting lying around, eh?” Szpindel waved at the galley. “Eat something. Be with you in a few minutes.”