"Close your eyes," she says, and I do. And when I open them again, I'm lying in bed with her. There's still an hour or so left before dawn, and we're lying in bed, naked together beneath the blankets, staring up through the apartment's skylight. It's snowing. This is the last night before Amery leaves for Cape Canaveral, the last time I see her, because I've refused to be present at the launch or even watch it online. She has her arms around me, and one of the big, ungainly hovers is passing low above our building. I do my best to pretend that its complex array of landing beacons is actually stars.
Amery kisses my right cheek, and then her lips brush lightly against my ear. "We could not understand, Merrick, because we were too far and could not remember," she says, quoting Joseph Conrad. The words roll from her tongue and palate like the spiraling snowflakes tumbling down from that tangerine sky. "We were traveling in the night of first ages, of those ages that are gone, leaving hardly a sign, and no memories."
Once, Dr. Teasdale, when Amery was sick with the flu, I read her most of The Heart of Darkness. She always liked when I read to her. When I came to that passage, she had me find a pencil and underline it, so that she could return to it later.
"The earth seemed unearthly," she says, and I blink, dismissing the illusion. I'm standing near the center of the transhab now, and in the stark white light from my helmet, I see what I've been brought here to see. Around me, the walls leak, and every inch of the module seems alive with organisms too alien for any earthborn vernacular. I've spent my adult life describing artifacts and fossil bones, but I will not even attempt to describe the myriad of forms that crawled and skittered and wriggled through the ruins of Pilgrimage. I would fail if I did, and I would fail utterly.
"We want you to know we had a choice," Amery says. "We want you to know that, Merrick. And what is about to happen, when you leave this ship, we want you to know that is also of our choosing."
I see her, then, all that's left of her, or all that she's become. The rough outline of her body, squatting near one of the lower bunks. Her damp skin shimmers, all but indistinguishable from the rubbery substance growing throughout the vessel. Only her skin is not so smooth, but pocked with countless oozing pores or lesions. Though the finer features of her face have been obliterated-there is no mouth remaining, no eyes, only a faint ridge that was her nose-I recognize her beyond any shadow of a doubt. She is rooted to that spot, her legs below the knees, her arms below the elbow, simply vanishing into the deck. There is constant, eager movement from inside her distended breasts and belly. And where the cleft of her sex once was… I don't have the language to describe what I saw there. But she bleeds life from that impossible wound, and I know that she has become a daughter of the oily black cloud that Pilgrimage encountered near Ganymede, just as she is mother and father to every living thing trapped within the crucible of that ship, every living thing but me.
"There isn't any time left," the voice from the AI says calmly, calmly but sternly. "You must leave now, Merrick. All available resources on this craft have been depleted, and we must seek sanctuary or perish."
I nod, and turn away from her, because I understand as much as I'm ever going to understand, and I've seen more than I can bear to remember. I move as fast as I dare across the transhab and along the corridor leading back to the airlock. In less than five minutes, I'm safely strapped into my seat on the taxi again, decoupling and falling back towards Yastreb- 4. A few hours later, while I'm waiting out my time in decon, Commander Yun tells me that Pilgrimage has fired its main engines and broken orbit. In a few moments, it will enter the thin Martian atmosphere and begin to burn. Our AI has plotted a best-guess trajectory, placing the point of impact within the Tharsis Montes, along the flanks of Arsia Mons. He tells me that the exact coordinates, -5.636 ° N, 241.259 ° E, correspond to one of the collapsed cavern roofs dotting the flanks of the ancient volcano. The pit named Jeanne, discovered way back in 2007.
"There's not much chance of anything surviving the descent," he says. I don't reply, and I never tell him, nor anyone else aboard the Yastreb-4, what I saw during my seventeen minutes on Pilgrimage.
And there's no need, Dr. Teasdale, for me to tell you what you already know. Or what your handlers know. Which means, I think, that we've reached the end of this confession. Here's the feather in your cap. May you choke on it.
Outside my hospital window, the rain has stopped. I press the call button, and wait on the nurses with their shiny yellow pills and the white pills flecked with gray, their jet sprays and hollow needles filled with nightmares and, sometimes, when I'm very lucky, dreamless sleep.
Dulce Domum by Ellen Kushner
Come see my band, he'd say, and they pretty much always did. – Europe, huh? she asked languidly. They were lying in her bed, which was where he liked to be after the show, after they'd seen the band. Good sex, and the comfort of warm skin, and just enough talking to make it real.
– R &B goes over big there. And they love Todd's chops: authentic African-American. They don't need to know he went to Buckley with us and played lacrosse.
– Buckley, huh? She named some friends she said had gone there, and he knew one or two, but not well. A lot of those kids had gone away to boarding school after ninth grade, while he stayed in Manhattan with his family.
– So do you like it there, in Europe?
He stretched. -It's OK.
– So do you, like, spend a lot of time in any one city?
She wanted to know if he had a girlfriend there. Already she was trying to figure out if he was serious material. Oops, time to go. He kissed her, and she tasted very sweet. -Just here, he said, and kissed her again. – New York is home.
New York was home, but in New York the band was no big deal. So they played in a few bars here, and they had dinner with their families, and escorted a friend's sister to a fundraiser for art or literacy or wildlife, depending, and maybe took a niece or a cousin's kid to see "Nutcracker." Then the band went on the road again, the road across the sea, where playing the chords in tight jeans was enough, knowing home was always back here, waiting for him to take his place. His family was here, colorful and stable, in the stone castle with big windows on the Park. A window would always be open for him to fly back through, no matter how big he got, or how long he was away.
He fell asleep as soon as he'd come, and she didn't wake him, which was nice of her. His eyes snapped open at first light. It was an old East Village apartment with leaky venetian blinds. He was pulling on his jeans when he heard her say, Jet lag? and when he turned around she was spread out like a kid on the playground being an airplane, sleepily purring a sort of phlegmy Vroom, vroom, so he fell back onto her and improvised something about, Be my jet plane, baby, ba-dum, ba-dum, Gonna make your engine scream, so together they achieved one of those moments of intimacy that promise either a relationship's worth of in-jokes, or guaranteed embarrassment next time you meet.
He took her phone number, but he doubted he'd be back.
He called her late on Christmas Eve. She was home. She said, Come on up, which was good because he was standing at a payphone two blocks away, his cellphone deliberately run down, and it was raining.
She was wearing sweatpants and a fleece bathrobe with moons on it. The "I don't care if I'm attractive or not" gambit. He called her on it by falling to his knees before her, singing softly, "Oh, holy night, the stars are brightly shiiiiining…" So she took the cue and undid her sash.