“Hello!” called Jules, more as an exclamation than a greeting. It took us a moment to understand that he was responding to a face that had appeared in the porthole of the hatch: some cosmographer come to see why the big scope had gone dark. Based on Jules’s lessons, I guessed, from the hue of her eyes and the shape of her nostrils, that she was Fthosian. And, though it would take some time to learn Fthosian facial expressions, I reckoned I had now seen two of them: befuddlement followed by shock as a matte black space suit of unfamiliar design loomed in her window. Jules grabbed handles flanking the hatch and pressed his face plate against the glass. Then we all had to turn down the volume in our phones as he began to holler in what I assumed was Fthosian. The woman inside got the idea and pressed her ear against the window. Sound would not travel through the vacuum of space, but, by shouting loud enough, Jules could excite vibrations in his face-mask that would be transmitted by direct contact into the glass of the porthole and thence into the cosmographer’s ear.
He repeated himself. He somehow managed to sound more cheerful than desperate. His tone seemed to say it was all in good sport. The woman’s lips moved as she shouted back.
The dome illuminated. I reckoned she’d hit the light switch, to get a better look at what was going on. But on second thought this light was pouring in through the gap between the hemispheres. The sun must have risen? We’d been warned of explosive sunrises. But this seemed explosive in more ways than one; the light flared, faded, and flared brighter. It burbled and boiled. A silent concussion passed through the frame of the icosahedron. Lio sprang up so smartly that he almost committed the fatal mistake of flying straight up out of the dome and off into space. But he caught himself short by gripping the comm wire that linked him to the rest of us, and swung around above the telescope mirror until he finally contrived to stop himself short on the edge of a dome-half. The light, which was slowly dying, reflected in his face mask. “The World Burner,” he said, “I think they must have blown the propellant tanks.” Then, with a sudden exclamation, he pushed off and glided back “down” to what I was thinking of as the floor of the dome. For the giant hemispheres had gone into movement, and the slit between them was narrowing decisively. The lights really did come on now.
The slit disappeared with a clunk, felt not heard. For better or worse, we were trapped here now. I kept eyeing the big red emergency button. I had eight minutes.
A readout on my display began to change: outside air pressure, which had been a red zero ever since I’d been launched into the vacuum of space, was climbing up toward the yellow zone. Jules had noticed the same thing; he went over to a grated vent near the hatch and reached for it. His arm was batted aside by inrushing air.
“Thank Cartas,” Arsibalt said, “I don’t care what cosmos this air came from. I just want to breathe it.”
“While we are waiting, re-acquaint yourselves with the doffing procedure,” Lio told us. “And show yourselves.” He pulled up the screen that had been hiding his readouts. The rest of us did likewise. For the first time in a couple of hours we were able to see one another’s faces on the speely screens and to check one another’s readouts. I could not see everyone in the group, because we were distributed around a cluttered and complex space “beneath” the mirror supports. But I could see Jesry, who had two minutes. I had five. I swapped canisters with him; it was taking a long time to pressurize the dome.
A few minutes later the external pressure readout finally changed from yellow to green: good enough to breathe. Just as my oxygen supply indicator was going from red (extreme danger) to black (you are dead). With my last lungful of Arbre air I spoke the command that opened my suit to the surrounding atmosphere. My ears popped. My nose stung, and registered a funny smell: that of something, anything, other than my own body. Lio, who’d been keeping a sharp eye on my readouts (I had less oxygen than anyone else that I could see), stepped behind me and hauled the back of my suit open. I withdrew my arms, got a grip on the rim of the HTU, and pulled myself, stark naked, out of the accursed thing. I breathed alien air. My comrades watched me with no small interest. The only other Arbran to have breathed this stuff had been the Warden of Heaven, who apparently hadn’t lasted more than a few minutes. My hands flew to my face. I kneaded it, scratched my nose, rubbed a week’s sleep from my eyes, ran my fingers up into my hair. Could have thought of more edifying things to do, but it was a biological imperative.
Lio groped on his front, found a switch, flicked it. “Can you hear me?”
“Yeah, I can hear you.” The others took to groping for their switches.
“Not that it makes a difference—since we all have to get out—but what is it like, my fraa?”
“My heart is pounding like crazy,” I said, and paused, since to say that much had worn me out. “I thought I was just excited, but—maybe this air doesn’t work for us.” I was speaking in bursts between gasps for air; my body was telling me to breathe faster. “I can see why the Warden of Heaven blew an aneurysm.”
“Raz?”
Breathe, breathe. “Yeah?” Breathe breathe breathe…
“Get me out of this thing!” Lio insisted.
Jesry grabbed Lio, spun him around, yanked his door open. Lio got out of his suit as if it were on fire. He floated over with a mad look on his face. All my habits from home told me to get out of Lio’s way when he approached in that mood, but I simply didn’t have the strength. His arms, which had subjected me to so much rough treatment over the years, came around me in a bear hug. He pressed his ear against my chest. His scalp was like thistles. I felt his rib cage begin heaving. Jesry and Arsibalt and Jules were swimming free of their suits. Jules went straight to the hatch, threw a lever, and shoved it open. Everything faded—not to darkness but to a washed-out yellow-gray, as if too much light were shining through it.
Fraa Jad and I were floating in a white corridor. I was naked. He was dressed in one of the grey coveralls we’d brought up in our kit. Evidence suggested he had been rummaging in a steel locker set into the wall. Two clumps of silvery fabric were floating near him. He teased one open. It turned out to have arms and legs. From time to time he glanced my way. When he noticed me looking at him, he tossed me a grey packet in a poly bag: another folded-up coverall. “Put this on,” he said. “Then, over it, the silver garment.”
“Are we going to put out a fire?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
The effort of tearing open the poly wrapper set my heart pounding. Pulling on the coverall plunged me deep into oxygen debt. Once I had recovered enough to get a few words out, I asked, “Where are the others?”
“There is a Narrative, not terribly dissimilar to the one you and I are perceiving, in which they went to explore the ship. Their plan is to surrender peacefully whenever someone notices them.”
“Is there any particular reason they left us behind?”
“Emergence from the suit after so long. Finding oneself in a confined space after having grown accustomed to the unobstructed vastness. Breathing an atmosphere from a different cosmos. Effects of long-term weightlessness. General stress and excitement. All of these induce a syndrome that lasts for a few minutes, a kind of going into shock, that can produce confusion or even loss of consciousness. Soon it passes, if one is healthy. I infer that it was too much for the Warden of Heaven.”
“So,” I tried, “after we doffed the suits, we were all confused or unconscious for a few minutes. Meaning—in your system of thought—we lost our grip on the Narrative. Stopped tracking it. Whatever faculty of consciousness enables it continuously to do the fly-bat-worm trick—it shut down for a while, there.”