Robert Onopa, page 2
That’s when I made out Tessa’s voice on the com channel, throaty with desperation and fatigue. In my mind’s eye I could see her in the dim light. “Oh, Serge, it’s too late now. I don’t know why you’ve been so sad. I should never have let you go. I should have come down. I can only tell you how much I love you-I wish you’d get it, Serge, wish you’d understand. I need you. You always thought it was the other way around-Ineedyou . I don’t know what I’m going to do without you. . . .” She went on for a while-and then all I could hear was quiet weeping.
Something . . . snapped in me. It felt it like a small electrical charge, and from that tiny impulse I struggled against inertia and finally turned back toward the skiff. Tessa was firing off seismic rounds to get my attention, but I have to tell you, they weren’t what made me move.
I credit Tessa herself, the quality of her heart. It was what I could hear in her weeping, her willingness to reach out to me even after I seemed lost. She saved me that way, I think, touched my own heart, turned me away from the sad death I was surrounded with and was sinking toward, turned me back toward the ship. I’ve thought about it a lot since then. Really, it was Tessa who saved me.
I stepped heavily toward the lift cable. My suit felt as if it had turned to lead. I could see heat rising around me in visible wisps from the surface, shapes running with blood, I could hear a rising chorus of voices, howling as one. . . .
Eventually, the sunlight was so bright, so shot through with high-frequency yellows and pale, shimmering blues, that it was as if I was passing through flames themselves, as if my body was stepping through the heart of some strange fire. Voices screaming around me, white light devouring my sight, I found the heavy cable and clenched it in my hand.
* * *
That very day they pulled us out. They pulled usall out, all the skiffs, the whole C Survey. Only when we were all assembled for the journey back did we come to understand the depth of the trouble we’d been in. Two crews had been lost out of twenty-two, two entire skiffs. Think of it-almost one out of ten of us didn’t make it back. We lost tons of instrumentation and equipment. All for nothing-navigation errors corrupted every bit of the data. Besides the serious stuff, there were dozens of accidents, accounts of bizarre experiences like mine. As you know, the survey’s become something of a legend. You hear about it in the service bars, in the NCO clubs. All sorts of wild stories-as if what happened wasn’t wild enough!
The official line is that crews suffered under a kind of mass delusion, that some set of circumstances stressed us collectively. It caused us, as skiff crews, to translate our responses into the discourse of Dante’s imagination.
But the data’s not that coherent. I don’t think one in ten of us, of the crews on station, had actually read the poem. It hadn’t been on my mind for years.
Takahishi has an alternate explanation. He thinks that we stumbled onto one of the cosmos’ gallery of amazements, an alien race who took the transmissions that we humans have been flooding the galaxy with for a thousand years now-all the great works of art, our genome, our technology, our languages and works of literature, the details of history and daily life-and reconstructed a medieval Catholic milieu to test us once we arrived on their doorstep.
I don’t know. Why Dante? Why would they be so specific? Still, maybe Takahishi’s right. Extraordinary events require extraordinary explanations. Imagine for a moment that Takahishi’s explanation is true-a sun with three planets on which strange intelligences live out eternities enacting ideas that come from such a profound distance. Who could these intelligences be?
Personally I think the truth lies between the two explanations, that it’s stranger than even Takahishi imagines. Perhaps what happened to us can be seen as a message from the beings of that system. They accessed our computers, looked for a set of stories to describe us to ourselves. Maybe they knew what we had in mind for them-we’d come looking for planets to rearrange and terraform, after all. It could be that they took our inner lives, dramatized punishments for our mission, made them personal, and cast us away. I don’t know.
Of course, the way we’re finding minerals in the Arcturus sector nowadays, it’ll be a long time before we get back to that three-planet system to figure out what really went on. Tessa and I have talked about it a lot. She thinks it’ll be at least a thousand years before we get back there. Morgan agrees. The system’s out of the way, he says, and there’s just no percentage in going back.
Now, if you’ll be seated, Tessa will bring you some refreshments, and I’ll tell you some of the other stories we heard. We’ve got quite a bit of material from the fragmentary data, from the transcripts, from the reports. About the first planet. I don’t know much about the other two. That data’s been classified from the start. Morgan claims that the third planet-where we lost those two crews without a trace, first one crew and then the other that was sent to look for them-was a version of Paradise. Perhaps they’re in some kind of heaven, or maybe they died only thinking they were living out their fantasies.
Anyway, as for the planet Tessa and I were scouting, the first planet, we have some images to show you as well. Thank you, Tessa. See if you can make out the human shapes punished in what looks like an icy storm, or bodies ravaged by the swipes of snarling beasts. I know the images aren’t quite clear, but these are things survey crews claimed they saw, or heard, much as I did the bleeding suicides. The reports especially shake the soul-we have one of a woman, her intestines spilled from her body, who holds her severed head by its black hair like a lantern. I don’t remember her from Dante. At the planet’s south pole, Morgan claims he saw living shapes ripped and gnawed by packs of hydra-headed monsters. Is this a peek into the alien world? A hidden part of Dante’s? Ours? What a savage place the imagination can be!
Area Seven (rtf), Robert Onopa
