Amdi Silvestri
Let me make something clear – I know nothing. I understand nothing. I don’t fake knowledge or wisdom. I never correct other people, even when I think what they’re saying is wrong. I know facts, but I don’t believe in them like some people, where numbers and lists have taken the place of gods. In ancient Greece, Pythia – the oracle of Delphi – proclaimed that Socrates was the wisest man. When confronted with this, Socrates is reported to have said he only knew that he knew nothing. It’s referred to as the Socratic paradox and allegedly derives from Plato’s account of Socrates, although Plato never used those words, which makes the famous portrayal of wisdom a piece of fiction. That fact comforts me immensely, because it underlines the magnitude of what Socrates never said. I can’t explain why – or more correctly, I couldn’t before our last trek.
The life of a surveyor is one of solitude. I know I’m not alone on board the ship, but mentally it’s a barren state. I’m part of a three-person crew. You know the system: a surveyor, a navigator, and an engineer. Me, Leslie, and Diana. We can count on each other, but they’re not my friends. They’re two sets of eyes and skills different from mine. We claim as a team, and we fight as a team, but when it comes to setting foot on new and distant chunks of space rock, I’m the go-to guy. You’ve never been alone like you’re alone on some meteor or planetoid hurtling through space at a billion miles an hour. That aloneness comes from only being tethered to the small survey-ship by a radio beam; from being the first living thing on a dead world – not for the first time in a thousand years, but for the first time ever; from probing rocks; entering caves; finding remains. You can’t explain that to a navigator or an engineer. They sit in the comfort of the ship while you feel and see the universe. And the more you feel and see, the more you understand that you don’t know anything at all. You only know Earth-stuff. Knowledge related to a small world on the outskirts of the galaxy. In space, who the hell cares about what a table is, or chivalry, or who Socrates was and what he didn’t say? In the grand scheme of things, you are as knowledgeable as a puddle of barf.
And yet.…
You use that grasp on the world to try and understand the rest. We use our Earth physics to slingshot survey ships across the void to nearby stars and meteor swarms in search of new raw materials. We view newfound places with human understanding and make sense of them. And it works. We navigate, or as Leslie would say, we extrapolate the unknown as if it was known to us. Smartass, that Leslie, but he’s right. We fake what we know. But not me. I wear my stupidity and failure to grasp as a badge of honor. That’s why I’m so good at my job. I never pretend. I only review. And after our last mission, I know that I was right not to pretend. Yet it doesn’t give me any comfort at all.
* * *
We received the transmission somewhere en route to Gliese. The flurry of space probes released fifty years prior had advanced in a spherical pattern from Earth in every possible direction. Back in school, we were shown how it worked by gluing small wooden pearls to a balloon and then blowing up the balloon. The wooden pearls were originally close to each other but grew farther and farther apart. Every single pearl was a probe hurtling through space, picking up on interesting stuff and transmitting it in a bubble. Near Gliese a lot of the probes’ circles collided, so it seemed a good place to snatch information.
Right after we’d learned about the probes in school, I had a dream about them. I was floating in a sea of black, everything serene and mind-numbing: a state of lucidity. And then disturbances arose from everywhere. Suddenly I was thrown back and forth as the information bubbles of all the probes interlaced right where I was, and the swirling mass of data pounded on my face, until the bone broke and I was conquered by teeming facts. I went under, and the calming blackness which had held me afloat now sucked me under. Then I woke. Shivering and cold. With a perfect imprint of the dream chiseled into my cerebral cortex.
“G67-577-45478,” Diana said, and glanced at the screen. She let out a sigh as she read the information. She nodded sagely. “Well, it seems the probe picked up a rogue.”
“A rogue what?” asked Leslie, chomping down on one of the chocolate bars from his never-ending stash. He lived on coffee and chocolate, eternally high.
“Looks like a rogue dwarf planet. About the size of Pluto,” she answered. Diana’s brow had curled into a twisted knot. Her gray eyes scanned the screens. I put down my copy of Seneca’s Medea and looked over her shoulder. The craft was so small. The only official test you had to pass to become a probe-hunter was to prove you didn’t suffer from claustrophobia.
“Hm,” she added. “Strange it wasn’t picked up earlier. It’s quite big.”
“Probably a husk,” said Leslie. Now all of us stared at the screen.
“Doesn’t look like a husk. Check out the number of satellites. It’s like a stampede,” said Diana.
I pointed to the row of numbers at the bottom of the screen.
“G67-577-45478 has just become the latest addition to the satellite gathering. Quite the gravitational pull.”
Diana leaned back and shot us both a glance.
“What do you say, boys? Should we keep on course, or check if something wonderful just fell into our laps?”
“With that many space rocks, a couple of them are bound to be worth something. Iridium would fetch a nice price, and if not, a lot of people still like gold,” said Leslie, and I could almost see him salivating at the prospect of a finder’s fee. The greater the value, the greater the reward. It struck me – not for the first time – that Leslie had found the job of his dreams. He could just loaf around, eat chocolate, and rake in the rewards. Not an iota of manual labor was required of him.
“Well,” I said reluctantly. “Most of them are so small. Is it really worth our trouble?”
“Why not?” answered Diana. “We’ll just register the find as one big haul. Call it the pebbles of sand. There could be anything in that cloud of satellites. Who knows how long that rogue bastard has been tumblin’ through the yonder. It might have picked up wonders.…”
“Also rhyming now, are we?” said Leslie.
“I have to do something to pass the time before you two nannies make up your mind,” she whipped back at him.
I looked at the screen. A torrent of red-tinted numbers swirled in and out, more numbers coming in as I watched. It really was quite spectacular. Normally a heavenly body – I never used that word in talk, as it was hard for Leslie to contain his snickering – didn’t have that many followers. It wasn’t uncommon to see a bunch of asteroids or a planet with moons in orbit around a sun, but as I looked on, the number jumped into the thousands. This really was out of the ordinary.
“How long will it take us to get there?” I asked.
“A couple of days,” said Diana. “It’s headed more or less straight for us, so a small course correction and we can saunter over to it. It’s really no trouble. It would actually take us longer to avoid it.”
“So, it’s dropping straight into our lap?” asked Leslie, eyes glittering.
“Mmm.”
“Then why the hell not? If it turns out to be shit, we’ll dodge it and be on our merry way.”
Diana shot me a glance. Her eyes were tired; too many hours staring at the screens.
“Elben? You up for a bit of exploring?”
“Call me Columbus,” I said, and Leslie let out a hoarse laugh.
I still remember that sound. And I thought about Columbus being a homicidal maniac, not the benevolent caregiver history had alchemized him into. I kept thinking about Columbus the next couple of days, while we pulsed through space, sometimes me at the helm, sometimes Leslie, none of us touching any of the dials. Diana tried to get as much rest as possible, as she always did before a grounding. She had to steer the small ship, and a single mistake could turn us into the equivalent of a moth squashed against the front window of a belterdrill. We didn’t speak much, and when I wasn’t on duty, I slept and finished reading Medea.
After a couple of years, you get used to the monotony of space flight. Even when folding the matter of everything into micro-worm-points, one after the other until space looks like a piece of embroidery, traveling takes a long time. Space is so immense that even thoughts have trouble keeping up. That’s why I read, and that’s why I think about dead and demonic explorers. You need to delve into set things, otherwise your mind wanders…and if it wanders long enough, it gets lost. Back on Earth, it’s possible to find a lost mind. Out here? Not a chance. It’s gone forever.
People go bent. Sometimes halfway, more often in a complete circle, where their brains loop. It’s not a pretty sight, and I’m not quite sure we were ever meant to venture beyond our planet. We’re not structured for it. Some of the surveyor teams return with strange stories that belong in the realm of myth and not in this world of science. Some have seen vast bodies lounging across supposedly empty tracts of space, moving slightly as if in dreams. Other travelers report photon shows to challenge the Northern Lights, and one man was certain he saw a message written in ancient Hebrew across a blue sun. The letters were 1,000 miles tall and spelled out a warning. Don’t dive into the Black Sea, it said. Bonkers, I thought. Now, well.…
We didn’t discuss the satellites; no point. As long as they were far away, they were nothing more than rows of numbers on a screen. Occasionally, Diana let a remark slip, mostly along the lines of which elements were found in different chunks, or how far from the planet we were, but those slim interjections became part of the background murmur, and I cherished the silence. Even Leslie kept his mouth shut. Now I wonder why. Usually he was a chatterbox, going on and on about some trivial detail, or facts he’d read or heard.
Great wads of space filtered through our engines as we punched hole after hole in the fabric of reality and dragged ourselves ever closer to the wandering rogue. Suns flared, planet systems dwindled, until one night Diana woke us from sleep.
“Get up, boys. We’re about to enter vision land. I know you lot love to look at things,” she said. Rubbing my eyes, I rose, and Diana pressed the visor-button. Most of the time the ship was a metal box; no need to think about aerodynamics in space, and we got all our information from a row of sensors. Now the reinforced metal plate slid from the glass and showed us a piece of the ink-black void. Somehow, I had pictured an image of flooding lights, yet why would I? A rogue planet had no sun to keep it warm or make it visible. The only thing we could see was a suite of blacks.
“Not much of a show,” remarked Leslie. He was standing close to me, rivulets of sweat clinging to his forehead. “Floodlights?”
“We’re still too far off. Would do squat,” Diana answered.
I leaned forward, as if the extra inches would let me see something hidden to the other two. At that second, a star disappeared behind a body, and a glittering pinch hit my cornea. I yowled in pain, clasping both hands to my eyes. For a second I could see a cloud of color, then it was gone, and so was the pain.
Both Leslie and Diana stared at me.
“What happened?”
“A reflection?”
I stabbed in the dark, removing my hands from my face.
“A reflection of what? From where?” asked Diana.
“The planet, I guess. Or one of the satellites. It came from straight ahead. You must have seen it!” I said.
“Nope,” said Leslie. “Nothing there. Could have been a trick of the light, but I guess you need light for that.”
Diana locked her stare onto the void. Then suddenly her head jolted back, a whimper tumbling over her lips. I clasped both hands to her shoulders, and when I turned her chair to look at her, for a sliver of a second I saw a dazzling point of light making its way across her irises. It was no larger than a needlepoint, and as I looked on, it dove into her pupil and disappeared. A small ripple appeared against her eyes’ borders, and then her gaze was still again.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
“Sure,” she answered and wriggled from my grasp.
“I also saw the reflection. Maybe the planet is covered in ice. The albedo could be acting like a prism.”
Leslie leaned forward, scanning the vast darkness inch by inch.
“If it’s ice, shouldn’t it be white?” he asked, and then let out an “Ouch.” He touched his temple. “Yep. Something’s there. Did you see it?”
We shook our heads. I’d seen no light beyond the first. I looked to the dashboard. The numbers twirled in their dance. They showed no increase in the number of photons, nor any sort of explosion. It was as if nothing had happened.
My mind bolted to Columbus. On his journey to the New World, he experienced the burning of the sea. One night while standing at the helm of the Santa Maria, off the coast of Bermuda, he was mesmerized by an ‘elfin light’. In his diaries, he described the phenomenon as ‘like the light of a wax candle moving up and down’ in the water. I had no idea what the flame of a wax candle looked like, but I knew what he had seen. It wasn’t anything profound, or even that special. Many had seen it before him.
It was the bioluminescence of microscopic plankton-creatures. They twinkled and shone, every blink of blue light a strip of information. They communicated, but to Columbus, it was just slowly moving bluish light. I think about that often now. He saw, yet he didn’t understand.
“Makes you wanna go careful on those floodlights,” Leslie remarked. “I wouldn’t want a headful of pain.”
“Don’t be stupid. Distance, Leslie, distance. We’re too far away to affect anything,” Diana said. She had turned back to the helm, and slowly we advanced on the blacks which lay ahead.
Leslie looked a bit hurt. “Light travels,” he murmured under his breath.
He was right. And none of us stopped to ask where the light had come from.
* * *
Enveloped in the darkness of space, we slowly approached the bulbous nuances of black. Diana kept the visor open, and as we got closer, a movement of shapes dotted the view. They seemed lighter than normal space rock, in both color and weight, yet the rogue itself didn’t change at all. It kept its brownish hue, not letting go of any secrets. The absence of light played tricks on me, and my brain started to make reality of the shapes. One looked like a crumbling tower, another shape shot across several others, twirling like a demonic ballet dancer. Most of them were oblong, and I thought of dominoes and obelisks as black as knowledge.
I looked at the info screen. New numbers came piping in. The rogue had no atmosphere to speak of, and even if it had, it would have lain frozen on the ground with no sun to heat it up. Intertwined with the planet stats were swathes of information, vast bundles about all the satellites. Diana pressed a couple of buttons and brought our ship into orbit configuration. Then she leaned back in her seat and placed both hands behind her head, scanning the satellite facts.
“Hmm…that’s strange. Quite a lot of biomaterial. And the biggest satellite is only the size of our ship. Perhaps fragments of an asteroid with its own biosphere?”
“If that’s asteroid fragments, then it was blown up by something with a ruler. Most of them are the same shape,” said Leslie. “And biospheres are exceedingly rare. They just don’t happen. Amino acids, yes. True biomass, no.”
I looked from the numbers to space. The view slowly moved in an arc as the ship glided into an empty space among the clutter of satellites. They remained in darkness, blobs of black, and I felt a tingling sensation down my back. Normally things weren’t that black. Yes, space was dark, but light had billions of years to fill it up. We should be able to see something, yet we couldn’t. Just shapes and movement, as if space itself was a shadow cast by another body entirely.
“Diana,” I said. “The floodlights. I want to see what’s there.”
“Cover your eyes,” she said, and flipped the switch.
White light poured into blackness and illuminated our neighbors. I flinched and squinted, then opened my eyes as there was no glare. At first, I couldn’t see what it was. It looked like a miniature mountain range, with peaks and valleys. Gray, very gray, and spinning lazily. Then I saw the big eye socket. There was no eye, for it must have boiled away into space an eternity ago, and it wasn’t human. It wasn’t even human-like, apart from the socket. It looked moldy, and caved-in. Halfway down the mountainous body, twice as big as Leslie, was a large uneven hole. Inside it, stillness and black.
“What the.…” whispered Leslie.
Diana pointed. Next to the body was another. The size of a small dog, but still wearing something I could only call a space suit. Something artificial, constructed to protect against the void. Fabric. Insulation. Even a clear part resembling a helmet. Next to the small figure was something that made me think of a figurehead I once saw in a book. It had watched…all the way across the Atlantic.
The Santa Maria, Columbus’s flagship from Europe to the New World, had a figurehead of a mermaid or a siren. She had the tail of a fish, but it was elongated and asymmetrical, and didn’t have the plump sexuality of a typical mermaid’s tail. In comparison, she was distorted and…wrong. The upper body was that of a slim and young woman, her hair billowing in the breeze, and she was trumpeting a conch shell, her gaze locked onto the vast unknown. This looked almost like her, if only she had been alive at one point. This mermaid wasn’t wearing a space suit. She was naked, that much was clear, and her body had suffered the effects of space. Her skin was covered in holes and sores, and around her, in their own system of gravity, was a vast collection of droplets of many colors. Green, red, and brown pearls circled her body, and her face was a display of pure agony. Her mouth was open, rows upon rows of shark-teeth erupted from her gums, and her tongue had frozen in a burnt red. The eyes were gone but remains clung to the skull’s spiral-holes. They could once have been black as onyx. Now they were shattered globes.
As I looked on, more bodies appeared, flickering in the floodlights of our ship. Most had space suits on, but a few, like the mermaid, were naked. Some were humanoid, some were akin to other Earth-shapes, like reptiles, vertebrates, insects, and some – like the mountainous creature – were like nothing I had ever seen, yet still I knew they were life. Life that had once contained thoughts and perhaps feelings. Every single one seemed strained, as if during the moment of death, their bodies had tightened in pain. Every mouth was open, frozen in a silent mask of pain.
“It just goes on. There’s thousands of them. All milling around that rogue,” Leslie whispered, more to himself than to us.
“Sixteen thousand seven hundred and eighty-one, and counting,” Diana answered. “I guess that’s the biomass.”
We stared solemnly as a shape within a see-through cocoon floated by. The suit was almost transparent, and behind the veil we could sense a sprouting of limbs, thousands of branch-like extrusions wrapped around each other. On one side, metallic tubing grew from the cocoon and ended in a clear balloon which looked like a carboy. Clearly some form of breathing apparatus.
“Why are they all here?”
Leslie asked the question we had all been asking ourselves.
“I guess some of them knew they were headed outside their ships. Why else would they be wearing suits?” Diana answered slowly, every word dripping with doubt.
“I guess so,” answered Leslie, and tilted his head as the skeletal remains of a humanoid drifted by.
Dots of flesh remained, but the body appeared mummified by cosmic rays. A new skin made of ice had formed around the bones, giving the creature a crystaline appearance. The ice was so perfect I thought of it as a suit. The creature’s mouth was standing ajar in a silent scream, the windpipes brimming with torment. We just stared in silence, until Leslie broke it.
“Let’s just fucking register this shit, and go.”
“Register it as what?” was the mesmerized question from Diana.
“We can’t register the find. We haven’t checked the rogue,” I said, wresting my gaze from the graveyard in front of me, and I looked at the looming shape of the planet beneath us.
It was a uniform brownish gray, a dirty ball whirling through nothingness. It had no oceans, no distinct landmasses, no mountains, no life. It was just a handful of dry mud. And yet, my mind’s eye suddenly presented me with circles, a row of slowly dancing rings, and I thought about Rodrigo de Triana, the lookout on the Pinta. At two in the morning he’d spotted land and shouted the good news to the rest of the crew. The captain of the Pinta verified that it was indeed land and fired a lombard to alert Columbus on board the Santa Maria. Columbus later said that he’d seen the coast hours before the lookout did, and claimed the lifetime pension promised by the Spanish king to the first person to sight land.
“You really want to land?” asked Diana, turning in her seat to look at me.
“Why not? I think they’ll look upon us with kind eyes back home. This place proves life. It proves intelligence. It’s a goldmine of knowledge. This is no mere element haul – this is fucking unique. So what if it’s creepy? It’s also valuable. There’s close to seventeen thousand bodies floating right outside. I don’t know if every single one is a separate species, but even if there were only two, it would still be the find of the century.”
“But the rogue.…”
“I think the find will count as a whole,” said Diana. “Leslie?”
He nodded. “I agree. Let’s register and fuck off.”
They both looked at me, knowing what had to be done to properly register. Suddenly I felt the presence of my space suit behind me, looking at me from the cabinet. To make a find official and open for sale, we needed physical proof. Video could be tampered with.
“You’re up for it, Elben?” Diana asked, both of them looking at me. “Could be over and done in a couple of minutes. And then we won’t have to return here unless they want to give us a medal on site, so to speak.”
“Don’t you find it strange?” I replied. “Where did they all come from? And where are their ships? Why are they all floating, crystalized in pain?”
“You know what?” said Leslie, and bit off a chunk of chocolate. Some smeared his incisors. “I don’t know, and I don’t care. We need this. And you’re our surveyor. You’re the best man for the job.”
“If you don’t go out there we’ll never know,” said Diana. Her words struck true. Could I live without knowing? “You live for answers, Elben. I have never seen so many in one place.”
“I could go,” offered Leslie. “It’s been years since my last EVA, but I guess I’ll manage.”
Silence invaded the ship. Leslie was right, it was my job. And Diana was right. It wouldn’t take that long. I looked at the floating corpses. Skulls and skin burned by radiation, and frozen by near-zero. They twirled and spun, and whatever secrets they had were locked away from my open gaze. It was magnificent and horrifying.
“No,” I finally answered. “This, I have to do. And I will do it. On one condition.”
“Being?” asked Diana.
“I’ll need a tether.”
* * *
With a hissing sound, the airlock spat me into space. I hovered for a second while the nozzles adjusted my position. Then I started to climb through the ship. Normally, I spacewalked without a tethering. I was more than adept at using my suit’s nozzles to navigate, and the curling line had a tendency to get in my way. But this time it was different. None of the corpses had any sort of fastening rope, broken or intact. I wasn’t going to make that mistake.
I grabbed the rung of stairs that followed the back of the ship like a stegosaurus’s fin, and gradually made my way to the front. From behind the glass, Diana and Leslie looked at me. Leslie even gave me a thumbs-up, but the nice gesture didn’t reach his face. It was set in a grim mask, a compound of worry and uncertainty. I gave a half-hearted wave and turned to the minuet of corpses that lay in front of me.
They were dancing in frozen misery among themselves, around the rogue that had stolen them – but from where? The closest was still inside an intact suit, and I wondered for a second whether the body had decomposed in quiet speculation, if the life support system had kept everything moist and teeming. Then I dismissed the notion. Whatever was inside that suit had cooled down a long time ago. I grabbed what I thought of as a leg and pulled the body closer. It glided lazily toward me.
I halted the suit by the helmet. It was covered in rime and ice, making everything inside it seem blurry. When I reached out to rub off some of the white, I could almost feel the cold through my own suit, and I don’t know how, but suddenly I knew this body was old. It had been here for a long, long time, slowly circling in utter stillness. It had been here for decades, centuries, maybe even millennia, in a never-ending, never-changing dance.
In the helmet lay nothing but darkness. No head, nor face, nor eyes greeted me. Just disintegrated dust. I grabbed the torch in my belt. A laser-beam no wider than a hair appeared, and I focused it on what I thought of as the helmet’s latch. It bit through the metal, cloth, and crystal, and with a jolt the helmet tilted back. A brownish fan of matter spewed from the hole, and I wrenched the helmet off. The fan changed to a veil of particles, and beneath them was the body.
It was skeletal. It was brittle. And it too was screaming. I had cut it from its chrysalis, and after so many years, its cry was freed. I saw it hidden inside every fleck of matter which exploded from the suit. The creature had died of a pain so deep it had left indentations in the bone. It was broken and smashed, some pieces were missing, and fractures ran the length of the skull. Yet the thing that made me go quiet was that it looked human. The jawline, the molars, the collarbone were all there, exactly where they were supposed to be.
I had seen that smashed-up face before, in a childhood dream, where it was my face that was smashed. I vividly remembered the dream-sounds, of things pounding to get in, pounding, pounding. Making way for something foreign to inhabit me. Back then, I had awoken. Now there was nothing to awake from.
“Are you all right?” Diana asked over the radio.
“Be quiet,” I whispered, afraid of my voice. “We’re in a graveyard.”
The words just emerged. I hadn’t even thought about them, but when I heard myself using the word, I knew it was right. This was a vast burial ground, filled with the bones of a thousand species. None of these creatures had just died here, but had become the necropolis itself, a sprawling monument to something I didn’t understand. Then I glanced downward, and an inkling was thrust upon me.
The brown surface rippled like a veil, and then became transparent. Beneath the cloaking, I saw a lens as big as a lake, set in a telescope the size of a building. It was metal; it was crystal; it was mechanical; it had a vast array of transmitters and receivers moving in a slow and insect-like jitter, slurping information down every orifice and antenna. Inside the lens, which managed to fold in every possible angle, was a shimmering lining that felt like breath evaporating off a windowpane. It caressed my eyeballs, and then a sudden flash of light lit up my mind like a flare. This was the glare that had shone into us. It had come from beneath the surface. I wanted to turn my head, but I found myself mesmerized by the rogue.
Next to the lens, the spyglass, was another. Next to that, another. And another. And another. Near identical telescopes were standing shoulder-to-shoulder across the planet, covering every inch of the surface. They billowed, like reeds, yet remained inanimate. All of it was artificial. This rogue had never been born from a tumultuous soup of hydrogen and time, it had been shaped and fitted with instruments that I recognized, but did not know, and then hidden in a cloak. For a mad second, I wanted to draw my laser torch and fire it at the crystal eyes, try to destroy one of them. But I knew it was a futile task. No weapon could hurt the rogue. It was skulking and learning, and all around it, space was shivering. It was a contraction, no, it was a refraction – not of light, but of space. It was there, it was very much there, but it also wasn’t. It belonged somewhere else, yet nowhere I could understand.
The human-like corpse had drifted away. I caught Diana’s eye. She was frantically signaling at me. Get in, she told me in signs. I turned my head and was suddenly flooded with dead bodies. The rotation had brought us closer to a concentrated cloud of remains, and I dodged as well as I could, but was grazed and bumped by a multitude of corpses. I looked into a melted face behind a bubble helmet, another body looked like it was carved from stone, a third just a husk that broke against my suit and covered me in the dust of its insides. Not a single creature was the same. They were all different species, all unique.
“Elben, what’s happening? Everything is going smudgy! We can’t see a thing.”
“Bodies. Death. Looking through telescopes. Scooping up information,” I answered in a disjointed staccato. “It’s a zoo and a carousel. They have inner light. They travel. We are seen. Instruments. So many instruments. Not from here—”
I had barely spoken the last word before I felt a tug and I bashed into a body. I fended it off with my arms, pushing it away, but another took its place. It was darker than dark inside the cluster of death. I could sense space around the bodies, but in my mind, they somehow made up what was real. They connected into a story that was whispering itself to me in a language I didn’t understand. It was a long and winding legend, one that stretched so far back in time, that I lost the concept itself. Then the corpse-cloud broke, and the ship was right in front of me.
I clashed into the metal shielding, spun around like a top, and was swallowed by the hatch. It shut behind me, leaving me wide-eyed and illuminated by the row of warning lights. I just stood there, pulsating, as the air lock was pumped full, and outer sounds returned to my world. Someone engaged gravity and my feet now clung to the floor. A brownish dusting fell from my suit and settled on the floor. I looked down.
Something small, no larger than my shin, still clung to the suit. It was wearing a suit of its own, bluish in hue and with a protruding, glistening helmet that looked like the beak-mask which plague doctors wore. Inside it were eyes, still recognizable as such, but the body was lifeless.
I don’t know if it had grabbed onto me, or if it just got caught in my suit. But it was the first thing Leslie looked at when he opened the door.
* * *
We fled from the place like an explosion, or so I was told when I came to my senses again. Diana just did the equivalent of flooring a car and bolted from the rogue and its collection of corpses. I never lost my senses; they were just wrongly configured for a while, and everything I watched was in doubles, like after seeing a bright flash. Then they returned to normal, and I tried to answer all their questions, most of them without making any sense. I could not explain what had happened, and when I told them about the planet and its trillion telescopes, they tried to believe me the best they could. Luckily, we had the small body to prove we weren’t insane.
We registered the find, handed over the data, the video, the small body, and our story. They didn’t believe us, and it didn’t help when there was no trace of the rogue anywhere. They checked every probe for information and sent out other survey ships, but with no results. The planet had gone, taken its swirling cemetery with it. The body was the only thing that kept us out of jail. Data, stories, and images could all be forged, but the small astronaut from another race couldn’t be dismissed. They still have it, probably locked away somewhere. I haven’t seen it since. Neither have I seen Diana or Leslie. We split and didn’t look back, hoping that on our own it would be easier to get new gigs. The last I heard, Diana was somewhere near Alpha Centauri, and Leslie was servicing ships between missions.
And me? I have trouble with everything, but in particular the image of the rogue planet. I often dream about it. Sometimes I think of it as a cancerous cell that has invaded a healthy body. At other times it looks like a probe, not at all unlike the flutter of metal we sent into space ourselves many years ago. I have no idea why it was watching, but watching it was. And sending, too. When I close my eyes, I more often than not see that small sliver of light that burst from the rogue, and I can feel it somewhere in my mind. When it happens, I don’t know if I’m a lighthouse, or a homing beacon, or something entirely unfathomable. The only thing I’m certain of is that it’s keeping tabs on me.
Christopher Columbus died alone and impoverished in Valladolid in 1506. He was only fifty-four. His entire life he’d believed the world was set against a backdrop. The Sun, the Moon, and the stars all had their fixed positions in the firmament, and behind them was nothing but God. I have been thinking about that a lot. Perhaps he was right. Perhaps the rogue was the equivalent of a spotlight or a microphone thrust into the stage, and as soon as it fulfilled its purpose, it was pulled away. Perhaps all the bodies were being drawn to this place like moths to a flame. I don’t know. I don’t know.
I don’t know. I don’t know.
I haven’t been away from Earth since we returned. Space has lost its allure, but I can’t get away from space. I have become one of the stories that people tell. I have become the laughingstock; one of the fucking mad people. Yet I’m not. I know that I haven’t gone bent. And I fear that the others, the people I so easily dismissed as lunatics in the past, may be just as sane as me. If they are, what we call space is something not at all natural, and perhaps isn’t even there. What we see is just a clever backdrop, and behind the scenes somebody or something is keeping an eye on us.
And the worst thing is – and I have thought this over a hundred times – around the rogue was a dance of death, a collection of pained creatures stemming from a thousand worlds or realities, and why would it keep it there? That’s the worst thing…because I can only see one answer. It liked to look.