One of the suits took a step toward her. She moved, trying to avoid the figure, and her foot went through the deck. Pain shot through her leg.
"It's coming in, over there. See? It's after us now."
"Where?".
"I don't see anything. Oh, God. I see it."
'Who said that? I want silence on this channel!"
"Look out! It's behind you!"
"Who said that?" She broke out in a sweat. Something was creeping up behind her, she could feel it, and it was one of those things that only come out into your bedroom after you switch off the light. Not a rat, but something worse that had no face but only a patch of slime and cold, dead, clammy hands. She groped in the red darkness and saw a writhing snake dart through a patch of sunlight in front of her.
It was so quiet. Why didn't they make any noise?
Her hand closed around something hard. She lifted it and began to chop, up and down, over and over as the thing flashed into view.
It wouldn't die. Something wrapped around her waist and started to pull. The suited figures jumped and ran around in the small space, but the tentacles shot out strings which stuck like hot tar. The room was laced with them and something had Cirocco by the legs and was tying to pull her apart like a wishbone. There was a pain like she had never felt before, but she continued to chop at the tentacle until awareness slipped from her.
CHAPTER FOUR
There was no light.
Even that bit of negative knowledge was something to cling to. The realization that the swaddling darkness was the result of the absence of something called light had cost her more than she would have believed possible, back when time had consisted of consecutive moments, Ue beads on a string. Now the beads scattered through her fingers. They rearranged themselves in a mockery of causality.
Anything needs a context. For darkness to mean anything there must he the memory of light. That memory was fading.
It had happened before, and would happen again. Sometimes there was a name to identify the disembodied consciousness. More often, there was only awareness.
She was in the belly of the beast.
(What beast?)
She couldn't remember. It would come back to her. Things usually did, if she waited long enough. And waiting was easy. Millenia were worth no more than milliseconds here. Time's stratfied edifice was a ruin.
Her name was Cirocco.
(What's a Cirocco?)
"Shur-rock-o. It's a hot wind from the desert, or an old model Volkswagen. Mom never told me which she had in mind." That had been her standard answer. She recalled saying it, could almost feel intangible lips shape the meaningless words.
"Call me Captain Jones." (Captain of what?)
Of the DSV Ringmaster, DSV for Deep Space Vessel, on its way to Satum with seven aboard. One of them was Gaby Plauget....
(Who is …)
... and ... and another was ... Bill ...
(What was that name again?)
It was on the tip of her tongue. A tongue was a soft, fleshy thing ... it could be found in the mouth, which was ...
She had it a moment ago, but what was a moment?
Something about light. Whatever that was.
There was no light. Hadn't she been here before? Yes, surely, but never mind, hold onto it, don't let the thought go. There was no light, and there was nothing else, either, but what was something else?
No smell. No taste. No sense of touch. No kinesthetic awareness of a body. Not even a sense of paralysis.
Cirocco! Her name was Cirocco.
Ringmaster. Saturn. Themis. Bill.
It returned all at once, as if she was living it again in a split second. She thought she would go mad from the flood of impressions, and with that thought came another, later memory. This had happened before. She had remembered, only to see it all slip away. She had been insane, many times.
She knew her grip was tenuous, but it was all she had. She knew where she was, and she knew the nature of her problem.
The phenomenon had been explored during the last century. Put a man in a neoprene suit, cover his eyes and restrain his arms and legs so he can't touch himself, eliminate all sounds from the environment, and leave him floating in warm water.
Free-fall is even better. There are refinements like intravenous feeding and the elimination of smells, but they are not really necessary.
The results are surprising. Many of the first subjects had been test pilots--well-adjusted, self-reliant, sensible men. Twenty- four hours of sensory deprivation turned them into pliable children. Longer periods were quite dangerous. The mind gradually edited the few distractions: heartbeat, the smell of neoprene, the pressure of water.
Cirocco was familiar with the tests. Twelve hours of sensory deprivation had been part of her own training. She knew she should be able to find her breathing, if she looked for it long enough. It was something she could control; a non-rhythrnic thing if she chose to make it so. She tried to breathe rapidly, tried to make herself cough. She felt nothing.
Pressure, then. If something was restraining her it might be possible to pit her muscles against it, to at least feel that some- thing was holding her, however gently. Taking one muscle at a time, isolating them, visualizing the attachments and location of each, she tried to make them move. A twitch of the lip would be enough. It would prove that she was not, as she was beginning to fear, dead.
She retreated from the thought. While she had the normal fear of death as the end of all consciousness, she was glimpsing something infinitely worse. What if people did not die, ever?
What if the passing of the body left this behind? There might be eternal life, and it might be passed in eternal lack of sensa- tion.
Insanity began to look attractive.
Trying to move was a failure. She gave it up, and began ransacking her most recent memories, hoping the key to her present situation could be found in her last conscious seconds aboard Ringmaster. She would have laughed, had she been able to locate the muscles to do so. If she was not dead, then she was trapped in the belly of a beast large enough to devour her ship and all its crew.
Before long, that began to look attractive, too. If it was true, if she had been eaten and was somehow still alive, then death was still to come. Anything was better than the nightmare eternity whose vast futility now unfolded before her.
She found it possible to weep without a body. With no tears or sobs, no burning in the throat, Cirocco wept hopelessly. She became a child in the dark, holding the hurt inside herself. She felt her mind going again, welcomed it, and she bit her tongue.
Warm blood flowed in her mouth. She swam in it with the desperate fear and hunger of a small fish in a strange salt sea. She was a blind worm, just a mouth with hard round teeth and a swollen tongue, groping for that wonderful taste of blood which dispersed even as she sought it.
Frantically, she bit again, and was rewarded by a fresh spurt of red. Can you taste a color? she wondered. But she didn't care. It hurt, gloriously.
The pain carried her into her past. She lifted her face from the broken dials and shattered windscreen of her small plane and felt the wind chill blood in her open mouth. She had bitten her tongue. She put her hand to her mouth and two red-filmed teeth fell out. She looked at them, not understanding where they had come from. Weeks later, checking out of the hospital, she found them in the pocket of her parka. She kept them in a box on her bedside table for the times she woke up with the deadly quiet wind whispering to her. The second engine is dead, and there's nothing but trees and snow down there. She would pick up the box and rattle it. I survived.
But that was years ago, she reminded herself.