There was a fire in space. The bone-white rock and soul-black sky were gashed with crimson as the U.S. ship Prospice glided down, retrorockets blazing, to the lunar surface. Smoke and dust billowed up and hung, nearly weightless, like pillars to commemorate the landing; but the massive engines gave no roar—no murmur—of a triumph. The flare of color faded, and the silence stayed.
Bob Evans, mechanic, squinted out the porthole. “Gad dang it, Baruk, how the hey d’you land so close to the airlock without hittin’ nothin’?”
Rivka Baruk, pilot, peeled off her aviators and said matter-of-factly, “Same way I do everything, Bob: like a badass.”
“All right, people.” Tim Farmer, only person present with a gun, gave a brisk hand-clap. “Let’s suit up and get in there. Joe, you hang close to me, all right?”
“The penis mightier than the sword, baby!”
Rivka cracked a smile. “I think you mean the pen is, Joseph.”
“I like my way better.” Joe N’Donza was a journalist with Rolling Stone, and he acted like it.
There, neatly queued in the airlock: five EVA suits. They’d grown sleeker as we edged into the second half of the century, but the helmets were still essentially fishbowls; and they almost certainly weren’t even necessary, but for protocol. Rivka shrugged and sealed her helmet into place, playing well with others.
The long, flexible air-tunnel had already extruded automatically from the ship and mated with the docking station’s outer door. Farmer tapped a button on his lapel to activate their link with the ground crew.
“Seattle, we’re in position, over?”
The 1.3-second delay.
Then, in their earpieces: “Roger that, Prospice, stand by for warm welcome.”
There was a clunk and a hiss as the station’s airlock opened; a moment later, Farmer pressed a switch on the interior bulkhead, and the shipside door opened as well. Motes of star-lit space-dust drifted uncertainly in the entryway, twenty meters distant.
“How’s it look up there, Prospice?”
Farmer gave a brisk nod. “Atmo’s up and running five by five, Seattle. We’re heading in now. Farmer out.”
He led the way, with Rivka on his six and the others floating close behind. As they entered the station, they took off their helmets and turned on their magnetic boots.
“All right,” Farmer said yet again. “Evans, what’s our first stop?”
Bob gestured down one of the three corridors leading into the depths of Lunar Station Kilo Six. “Check the cameras, first thing. Kept tellin’ ’em, it’s prob’ly just the cameras.”
“After you, sir.”
“Why thank you, sir.”
Joe gave a happy shiver. “My first moon base landing! I feel all grown up.”
“Well, you’ve gone over ninety seconds without making a dick joke,” Rivka admitted. “Does seem like progress.”
“Whoohoo!”
The five of them trudged, ka-chunkily, down the corridor with their helmets in the crooks of their elbows. Farmer’s sidearm hovered, tethered, at his hip. They passed a few doors and stopped at one that said VIDEO. The silence was fathomless.
Rivka gave Bob a nudge. “Waiting for something?”
“Well—” Bob gave a large, friendly, nervous grin. “I mean, I’m sure it’s just the cameras acting up. But I mean—”
Farmer stepped forward. “Just in case there’s a bug-eyed monster in there. I gotcha.” He didn’t draw the .45, but he thumbed back the restraint on the holster. Then he opened the door.
After a rapid half-glance, he took a longer look. Then at last he said, “Clear,” and stepped inside. Rivka followed, then the others. As expected, it was a large metal rooms full of keyboards and screens.
Bob cracked his knuckles. “Awright, gadgets, talk to me now!”
As he began his diagnostics, the rest of them paced about the room and found seats. Joe leaned forward and peered at the fifth member of their team. “You really don’t talk much, huh?”
Ariana Croft, xenobiologist, flexed the corners of her mouth in token of a smile.
“What if it is an alien, Croft? It’s possible, isn’t it? Anything’s possible! What if you guys built this station in some poor moon-schmoe’s backyard and he’s just sniffing around trying to suss out what the hell you’re doing on his property?”
“If there are schmoes on the moon, Mr. N’Donza, they are not of the sniffing kind. Olfactory diversities notwithstanding, no proboscis, by definition, can detect a scent in a vacuum. And as you’re well aware, this is not my station.”
Oh, he knew. Geoff Meese, the world’s first trillionaire, was also the first private citizen to legally own real estate in outer space; and Meese did everything he could to stay on the covers of magazines like Rolling Stone, so nobody could forget it.
“Just humor me, madam, I beg of you. Hypothetical, counter-factual, Devil’s Advocate now: let’s say we find a sentient creature living on the moon, and he or she or it somehow communicates to us that Kilo Six is built right on top of his, her, or its ancestral home. Thousand generations of moon-schmoes living out their lives on this very spot, let’s say. What then? Take a hike, moonies, we’re Americans!”
Ariana’s keen emerald gaze shifted for a fraction of a second—not floorward to ponder, but up to the ceiling in a flicker of oh for fuck’s sake eye-roll. Rivka grinned: for the taciturn scientist, this was the equivalent of a fifteen-second sigh of exasperation.
“As exciting as it no doubt sounds to you, I’m afraid we won’t be displacing any indigenous peoples here today. First and foremost, that would be unethical; and immediately second, the public backlash would be more than even Mr. Meese could reasonably endure.”
He opened his mouth. She raised her finger.
“Thirdly, sir, the likelihood of a sentient lunar creature having a property concept is preposterously low. Living on a world with no analogues whatsoever to what we consider metabolic necessities—air, water, fire—it would have a biology so radically different from ours that its psychological makeup would almost surely be concomitantly divergent from our own.”
He nodded excitedly, keeping up. “Yes. Yes! This is what I need, the oracle speaks! But tell me this, now tell me this, ma’am, please: if there is such a creature, and if its mind is so utterly different from ours—how do we talk to it? What does it even mean to be sentient, then, exactly?”
Ariana declined the bait. “I’d be speculating.”
“Ha ha, no speculating on the moon. Try this: you’ve read Lovecraft?”
“I am familiar with the works of that hateful and bigoted individual.”
“Ah yes! Yes, not the nicest man in the world, but a literary genius nonetheless. He argued that if there were other intelligences in the universe, they would be so different from us that our concepts of good and evil would shrivel up in the face of them. What do you say?”
“That is tripe. However different a race might be from ours, it still exists in the same universe. It still interacts with time and space, matter and energy, in some comprehensible way. The sheer, bare fact of existence is common ground enough that we can never be hopelessly alien to another intelligent race.”
“What gorgeous eyes you have, Ariana.”
“Oh, stuff it.”
Rivka burst into laughter, and Farmer into applause.
Then Bob said: “Guys? Guys!”
Farmer and Rivka jumped up. Bob was jabbing his finger at one of the screens. “There it is. Ain’t nothin’ wrong with this video. That thing’s real.”
Joe and Ariana came up behind, and they all stared at the monitor. It was down in the hydroponics area: a long, curving shadow on the floor, half a meter wide. Two weeks ago, the techs down on Earth started noticing it on the security feeds—it would appear in various rooms, apparently at random, and hover for anything from a minute to half a day. They had no idea what solid shape could be casting a shadow, or what sort of malfunction would cause one to appear on the cameras, and finally Meese had ordered Rivka to bring a team up to check it out.
“Well,” she said, “at least it’s not a bug-eyed monster.”
Farmer gave another brisk nod. “Let’s get down there.”
Kilo Six wasn’t quite ready for habitation, though the atmospherics were all in order. Robots and various machines were completing the construction, and a crew of ten was set to take occupancy in about eight more weeks. They’d be the first human beings to spend a year on the lunar surface. As the astronauts clumped along the corridor, they passed a titanium personage with a humanoid head and torso and a large multi-legged oblong for a lower body—a sort of misbegotten 21st Century centaur. It waved a metal arm and said, “Hi there! Welcome to the moon!”
“Fuck off,” said Farmer.
“Yes sirree!”
When they reached the hydroponics section, he motioned for them to hang back. Before opening the door, he pulled the weapon from its holster, tip pointed down. “All right now.”
Farmer stepped slowly into the room and moved down the aisle of ferns and rutabagas. The white fluorescent light was strong and steady.
There was a long, curved shadow on the floor, just as they’d seen on the monitor. Nothing was casting it. Farmer looked around and shouted, “Hello?” Nothing happened.
Rivka joined him; the other three crowded behind, more tentative. “What the hell is it?” she said.
Glancing around at the walls and ceiling, Farmer scratched his head. “I got no idea.”
“What if it’s an alien?” Joe asked, lowering his voice involuntarily.
“It’s just a dang shadow on the floor,” Bob said. He sounded half relieved and half angry.
“Careful, Bob,” Ariana said. “We don’t know what an alien life form might look like.”
“Ain’t no God-damn life form, for Christ’s sake.” He stepped forward, but Farmer caught his arm.
“Hey now, take it easy there, Evans.”
Bob shook loose. “I don’t like it,” he said. All anger now and no relief. “I ain’t afraid of it!” Kneeling with a sudden lurch, he slapped his gloved hand onto the shadow.
No one spoke.
“Bob?” Rivka said after a moment. “You okay?”
He got to his feet. He turned in her direction—oddly, awkwardly.
“. . . Bob?”
“It doesn’t live on the moon,” he said.
Then he screamed. The scream of an abattoir, of a holocaust, louder than a human voice should ever be. Vomit projected from mouth and nostrils, bladder and bowels erupted in his suit, and the screaming never faltered. They could hear bones cracking in his arms from the spasmodic clenching of his muscles; they could see his hair turning white. Screaming, screaming, then his hands flew up and ripped both ears from his head. His teeth snapped down and half a tongue spat from his mouth like a wriggling red fish. The skin of his face was ripping as he screamed. His eyes grew wider, wider, till the orbs were expelled from the sockets.
Rivka heard her own voice shrieking, “Jesus Christ!”
Evans passed out. The abrupt stillness was as shocking as the scream. They all stood frozen, staring at their friend, too stunned to move or think or breathe. With his feet magnetized to the floor, he hung in the zero G like a scarecrow, crucified. The vomit floated all around him in a slowly expanding halo. His eyeballs hovered near his face, attached by optic nerves. The silence was horrible.
Static in the earpieces. Then: “Ah, Prospice, everything okay up there? You guys are live, remember? What just happened to Bob, is he sick?”
The ground crew had visual but no audio. They couldn’t hear the silence.
“Prospice, do you copy? Come in, Prospice, over.”
“Home,” said Rivka. “Let’s get back home.” She slapped her lapel. “We read you, Seattle. We’re coming home. Tim, gimme a hand here.” She caught one of Bob’s limp, drifting arms. Farmer shook himself out of the daze and grabbed the other, activating his commlink at the same time.
“Yeah. Uh, yeah, Seattle, we read you. Evans just had some kinda severe fit. We gotta get him Stateside, stat.”
“R—Rivka?”
Ariana’s trembling finger pointed to the floor where the shadow had been.
“Did you see where it went?” Rivka demanded.
Ariana shook her head. Her face was like ashes in snow.
“Well, come on. Let’s get outta here before it comes back.”
They turned off Bob’s boots and maneuvered his weightless bulk up the corridor the way they’d come. At the video room, they stopped.
A shadow on the hallway floor.
“It’s playing with us.” Joe’s voice was completely different. The wacky DJ persona was gone. Here was the real guy, Rivka thought: this was the reporter who embedded with the 51st Marine Battalion at Kaliningrad Oblast.
Farmer’s teeth ground audibly. “It’s just—a fucking—shadow.”
“Tim,” Rivka said sharply. “Don’t—”
“I won’t. I’m not that dumb.” He turned. “Hey! Robot!”
The centaur-thing came gliding toward them, its many legs pushing off various surfaces. “Well hello there, partner! What can I do ya for?”
“Shut up and go touch that shadow on the ground there.”
The robot obeyed. Nothing happened.
“Well?” Farmer demanded.
“I’m ready to help,” it said, relentlessly chipper. “Just tell me what you need!”
“Did you feel—do you detect anything?”
“Negatory, good buddy.”
“Go past it.”
“Will do!”
The robot glided smoothly down the hall.
“We could go over it,” Rivka said hesitantly. “Turn off our boots.”
“Prospice, can we get a sit rep? We’re seeing that shadow on the floor again, over?”
“I can’t,” Ariana said. “I won’t.”
“All right, all right.” Farmer slapped his lapel. “Seattle, just—stand by. Turn him loose, Baruk.” He gave Bob a gentle push and let him float down the passage. “Hey, robot! Get this man onto the ship, now.”
“Yessir, will do!” Two metal legs collected the unconscious man and brought him in tow.
“All right.” Farmer turned off his boots. “Worst case, we’ll just have Tin Man load us all in the rocket.”
Rivka scowled. “The ship can’t fly itself, dipshit.”
“So Meese’ll send another ship after us. We’re gonna be fine. Everything’s fine, there’s no problem here.”
“Prospice, what is happening, over?”
“I’m jumping over a shadow, Seattle. Giant leap for mankind.” Checking the safety on his weapon, Farmer flexed his knees and launched himself along the passageway.
The silence returned. It was like a blast furnace. Searing, blinding. Horrible.
Rivka called, “Tim?”
“Oh my God,” Ariana whispered.
“Tim!” Rivka shouted. “Come on, man, talk to me.”
“Prospice, what the hell is going on up there?”
Farmer floated all the way to the airlock. His shoulder bumped the doorframe as he passed, turning his body, and he went drifting toward one of the bulkheads. The frame cut him off from view.
“Damn it.” Rivka hit her comm. “Seattle, get that robot to secure Farmer, will you? I think he’s lost consciousness.”
“Roger that, Captain Baruk, but let’s get an update. What exactly happened to our men?”
She opened her mouth to reply, but stopped: the shadow had disappeared again.
“Captain? Come on, somebody talk to us.”
“Go!” Rivka shouted. “Go, go, go!” She turned off her boots and flung herself recklessly up the hall in Farmer’s wake.
Joe yelled, “Rivka, wait!”
The bang of a gunshot.
“What the fuck was that?” As she approached the doorway, little red globes meandered through the air to meet her. And a little red shard of skull. “Farmer!”
He was in the airlock—mostly. On the bulkheads, the ceiling, the floor. Bits were drifting up the air-tunnel toward the ship; bits were drifting back into the hall. The majority of him was huddled in a corner, wreathed in scarlet smoke. The eyes were looking straight at Rivka.
Silence.
Finally, Joe came floating up the hall to her side. He stopped himself at the doorway and stood next to her, gazing at the wreckage. He started to speak—choked—cleared his throat. Then, “Rivka. Snap out of it.”
“We can still get home,” she said quietly.
He shook his head.
She didn’t look where he pointed. She knew.
Ariana was sobbing. The tears and mucus made a haze around her face.
“Seattle,” Rivka murmured.
Joe closed his eyes.
“Seattle?” She pressed her lapel. “Prospice to ground crew, come in!”
“God,” Ariana breathed. She hadn’t moved, but her voice carried in the hush. “Oh, God. Oh, my God.”
Now Rivka heard her own teeth grinding. “Fine. We left our helmets in the video room. We’ll exit the station through the rear airlock and get back to the ship from outside.”
“Is it in the tunnel?” Ariana called. “It’s in the tunnel, isn’t it?”
“It doesn’t matter!” she snapped. “We’ll just go around it.”
Joe put a hand on her shoulder. “Stop. That thing is toying with us. It’s not gonna let us go around.”
She smacked his arm away. “What, then? What else? There’s plenty of ammo left, N’Donza, should we just save time and shoot ourselves?”
“We wait. We’ve gotta be smart about this, Captain. They’ll send another ship. Meantime, we need to sit still and not play that thing’s game.”
The robot emerged from the tunnel. Perambulating, spiderlike, it passed through the airlock. “Duty calls!” it said happily. “Time to get back to work.”
“Listen, Rivka,” Joe insisted. “This thing wants us to squeak and run around in circles. If we make ourselves poor sport, it will lose interest.”
“How do you know that?”
“I don’t know how I know. I trust my gut. Now let’s take a breath, we need to stop and take a breath.”
“What about Evans? He could die if—”
“We can’t help him if we’re dead too. You know this. Come on, breathe. Think.”
She turned away from Farmer. “Okay.” Deep breath in. “Okay.” Deep breath out. “Thanks, Joe.”
He nodded. “I’m sorry for your friend.”
“Yeah. All right, let’s get back to the video room and regroup. The food supplies—”
With a whining ping, the Kilo Six PA system came online. A querulous but resonating voice said, “Crew of the Prospice.”
“Oh shit.”
“This is Geoff Meese. I don’t know what kind of sick game of Russian Roulette you’re playing up there, but I won’t have my station associated with a suicide drug cult or whatever the hell it is. You are ordered to board your ship and return to Earth immediately, is that clear? I am now deactivating all surveillance feeds, so any whacko political statement you’re trying to make will never be seen. You are to return to Earth at once.” The thump of a fist on a tabletop. “At once!”
The PA went dead. The lights in the hall turned off. Ariana started to scream.
“Son of a bitch,” Rivka snarled, ripping the flashlight from her belt. “Come on, help me get her up.”
“Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait. This could be good.”
“Wh—?!”
He held up his hands. “Just think for a second: no light means no shadow. No shadow, Rivka.”
A sunrise in her face. “I’ll be damned. All we had to do was redirect some blood from your dick to your brain.”
He grinned.
“Meese can turn off the lights, but he won’t kill the air supply. That’d be clear-cut murder. We can use our flashlights for short bursts and make our way to the dormitories. There’s already canned goods and water back there.”
He threw a surprisingly sharp salute. “O Captain, my Captain.”
They headed back down the hall and scooped up the hysterical xenobiologist. Joe ducked into the video room and collected three helmets, just in case. Then they made their way toward the dormitories. Rivka clicked on her light for only a second at a time, every minute or two; the halls were long and straight, so they didn’t need much help to find their path.
When they reached the dorms, they got Ariana into a bunk and scrounged up straws and bottled water. Sat down to collect themselves.
“I’m gonna keep the light off, if you’re okay with that,” Rivka said. “If that damn thing’s in here with us, I don’t wanna know about it.”
“Agreed.”
They took in water. Took in air.
Rivka slammed her fist against the bulkhead. “God damn that Meese.”
“The man’s bluffing, you know,” Joe said. “This is all very public. He’s trying to cover his ass, but he’ll have to do everything in his power to rescue us if he doesn’t want to fry. There’s probably a ship in the air already.”
“You’re right. You’re right. Take about two and a half days. But that assumes the—the shadow leaves us alone all that time.”
“All we can do is all we can do.”
“. . . Joe, what is it? What do you think it is?”
“I think Croft was right,” he said, a dark voice in the darkness. “I think it’s something inhuman. Just enough like us to be capable of malice.”
“You believe in—stuff like that? Evil?”
He exhaled through his nose. “My grandmother was a Rwandan Tutsi. She was eight years old when the Hutus came with machetes. Slaughtered her whole village—her parents, her sister. Even their animals. She hid in a latrine for twelve days. When I came home from Kaliningrad, I asked her that same question: ‘Mémère, do you believe in Evil?’ She looked at me and saw what I had seen with the Marines. She said, ‘You and I, Joseph, we do not need to believe. We know.’”
A cracked whisper: “You’re wrong.”
They turned toward the bunk. “Ariana?”
“There’s no Evil. No Good. There’s just science. That thing isn’t hunting us for sport. It’s running an experiment.”
“Look, we don’t know that,” Rivka said. “We don’t know anything. You’re both projecting your own experiences.”
“I do know.” Raw from screaming, Ariana’s voice was harsh and strange. Ugly. “I know what Evans and Farmer saw.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The shadow. We can’t see where it comes from because it’s being cast by a higher-dimensional object. It’s being cast down into our universe by something studying us from above—or not above, but in some direction we don’t have a concept for. Like a petri dish.”
“Oh come on, you said yourself we can only speculate about alien—”
“No.” A rasp—almost a doglike growl. “That’s the party line. I don’t have to speculate. I’ve been on the other side. I’ve been the one running the tests.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“The Earth is a rat-maze, you imbecile. It’s taken us four billion years, but we’ve finally gotten out. Earth-born life is building colonies beyond the planetary surface. Now the experiment enters a new phase. Now we get new rewards—or disincentives.”
Joe’s voice was a gathering stormcloud. “Disincentives?”
“What could Bob and Tim have seen?” Ariana hissed. “What could drive them mad in the blink of an eye like that? When they touched it, when they touched that higher power, they got a glimpse of its perspective. They saw beyond the cage of four dimensions. The blink of an eye for us could have been a billion years of agony for them. A billion years of truth.”
“What truth?” Rivka scoffed. “That humans are tiny fish in a much bigger pond? So what, we already knew that.”
“Knowing it means nothing. Seeing it—seeing it—”
The lights came on. The three of them jumped to their feet.
“What’s going on?” Joe asked.
“Dunno.” Rivka hit her lapel. “Seattle? Seattle, come in, over.” No reply. “Damn it.”
Ariana’s whisper: “There.”
A long, curving shadow, half a meter wide. It lay between Ariana’s bunk and the spot where Joe and Rivka had been sitting. She had no exit from the room without stepping over it.
She shook her head. “I won’t see what they saw.”
“Ariana, calm down.”
“I won’t see it.”
“Ariana! Just keep still. Don’t move. As long as we don’t—”
It moved.
Rivka nearly swallowed her tongue. “Jesus, it’s moving. I thought—it’s never moved before.”
“The prey knows it’s being hunted,” Joe said grimly. “The rules of the game have to change.”
Very, very slowly—glacially—the shadow curled. Like a pseudopod. Moving across the floor. Closer to the bunk.
“I won’t see it!” Falsetto like a dog whistle, barely audible. It might have sounded almost funny, somewhere else. “You can’t make me!” She jumped up on the mattress.
“Ariana,” Rivka cried. “Just—” She stopped. Just what?
Every suit had a flashlight on the belt. Ariana snatched her light and smashed it on the wall. The shadow crept along the floor, lengthening, like the shade of a tree at nightfall. It crept up the wall and onto the bed. Moving faster now.
“Ariana, don’t!” Joe shouted. “Throw me the flashlight. Come on now, throw it here.”
Don’t what? Rivka thought. What could she be planning to—
“No!” Ariana howled, as it stretched across the blanket to her toes. “No, no, no!”
And she stabbed herself in the neck. Blood splashed across the wall to her left, and a hideous gobbling poured from her mouth. She stabbed again, and again, and again. Crackle of small bones in her windpipe—gust of red air from her trachea—then, at last, the gush of her jugular.
Too late. It rose against the glare of lights; it covered her in cool shade. They could see her eyes go red as the vessels popped inside. A gurgling moan, “Nnnnnnnn—”
The lights went out.
Rivka didn’t mind the dark. She liked it, in fact. She loved to curl up under the sheets when it stormed, with the rain for window-music and the flicker of cloud-bolts the only hint of light. It was like a womb—warm and dark and safe, and never lonely. Always enfolded by the beat of a mother’s heart.
But the silence.
She turned on her flashlight. Ariana was suspended in the air, one foot still on the mattress, arms akimbo. A galaxy of arterial spray surrounded her, red-shifted, traveling outward in majestic waves until it reached a surface and turned to splatter. Like the heat death of the cosmos—that labyrinth for disposable specimens.
“Fuck this.” Rivka turned on her boots and stomped out of the room.
Joe came after her. “Rivka? Rivka!”
“Stop. Don’t even think about telling me to calm down.”
“Where are you going?”
“I’m getting on my ship and I’m going home.”
“Wait, wait, look!”
In the beam of her light, the shadow lay across the floor. It wasn’t moving yet, but it didn’t matter. This game only ended one way.
She set her jaw. “I’m done playing, Joseph. Are you with me, or not?”
He took a breath. Held it. Let it out. “Yeah. Let’s do it.”
She held out her hand and he clasped it tight, their fingers interlacing. Side by side, they stepped into the shadow.
Into the Light.
Dark toolshed in the daytime. A hole in the roof—a single ray of light. Specks of dust, islands in the nothingness. But step into the ray, look up through the hole, and the dark shed disappears. Azure seas, white clouds like sails, and golden luminosity, the mariner’s reward. Joy, beauty, freedom: stare into the sun! Keep staring—everything goes black, forever. A ring of gold (gold comes from stars) around a coal of horrifying anguish, burning through the retinas, up the optic nerves into the limbic core and down the stem into the reptile brain where serpents gnaw the roots of the World Tree and coil around the Fruits of Knowledge, down and down, through Good and Evil, through the planet’s core till down is up, out through the continents, shattering the gravity wells, returning to the source, the blazing wellspring, solar empyrean, heart of darkness, cosmos full of dust motes, every mote a cosmos of its own, up through the tower of stacked realities, Platonic shadows—up from Flatland, off at right angles to Nature and God, out into the JESUS FUCKING CHRIST PLEASE NOOOOOOOOO
many flies get into my
when are the skin dog
not to eat that part of the
“. . . long I’ve been standing here? If Ariana’s right, then that thing is seeking knowledge, and that means it doesn’t know everything. So, what if it’s bigger than we are? It’s not God.”
“You’re right. And you’re beautiful.”
“Seriously, Joseph, tie a rubber band around that thing. You’d be twice as smart if it wasn’t pulling half your blood supply.”
“I’m already too smart as it is. Wait a minute, where are we? How did we get here?”
She looked around. Brick walls? And down at her hands. Whose—? Rivka’s hands, of course. She was standing in a room with Joe N’Donza, back on Earth.
“Whoa. Trippy.”
“Captain Baruk?”
The man came into focus. Geoff Meese.
“You’ll need to make a statement, of course. But, well, it appears that you acted with—a degree of—heroism. Bob Evans is expected to recover. Turning off the lights may have been, may have been a somewhat hasty—ah—decision on my part, and for that, I will certainly admit that mistakes were made. Obviously, you and Mr. N’Donza will receive suitable—”
Rivka broke his jaw.
There was quarantine—lawyers—reporters. Her sleep was dreamless, her waking hours a blur. “Rome wasn’t built in a day, Baruk,” Joe said. “It will take us months to sort this out in our heads. Years, maybe.”
“And decaliters of bourbon.”
“First round’s on me. If they ever let us out of here.”
And at times she felt strangely happy, as if she had learned some great secret, though it strayed from her memory. And after a time, she began to dream again, and glimpses of it came to her in dreams. And it seemed good to her, like the warmth and comfort of a secret fire. But there was something else, she knew, beyond the firelight—waiting with timeless patience for the flare of color to fade.
The silence.
J.B. Toner studied Literature at Thomas More College and holds a black belt in Ohana Kilohana Kenpo-Jujitsu. He has published two novels, Whisper Music and The Shoreless Sea, and shorter works with Nightmare, Suspense, Unfit, First Things, Brick Moon Podcast, and other venues.
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