I am aware of where I seem to be and what I seem to be doing, but I refuse to believe it.
This is one of the privileges I am afforded as a sentient and enlightened inhabitant of a rational universe. I can assess my surroundings. I can determine that I happen to be immersed in a luxurious steaming bubble bath, at just the right side of the pain threshold, that it is not cooling and that I am flushed from the heat; and that I happen to be clutching a lilac-scented bar of soap fresh enough to still bear the sculpted logo of the brand that it seems to be, my face tingling in the flushed manner that it tends to, when I am still adjusting to the temperature.
Okay. So I am taking a bath. Big deal.
Rub-a-dub-dub.
Further details, of which there are many, some suggesting delusional insanity:
My knees are little islands rising from the foam, being lapped at by the ripples caused by my every movement, and at the other end of this claw-footed basin there is a spout with twin dials to regulate the temperature, though that seems to be constant and so does the water level, which is not slowly escaping from the drain the way bathwater does whenever there’s an imperfect seal.
The air that brushes the exposed surfaces of my skin is foggy with ambient warmth, a steamy balm that feels good as it enters my lungs; and all that is as vivid and tangible as the idiotic rubber duck that bobs between my knees, a permanent wide-eyed idiocy stamped on its face.
I must say that this is the platonic ideal of hot bubble baths, a favorite indulgence to which I have treated myself, not quite daily or even weekly but often enough, over the years. It is as perfect as any bubble bath can be, warm and comforting and ridiculous in all the right measures, and the temptation is to do what these sensations have traditionally urged me to do, which is to say turn off my relentlessly logical mind and surrender to peace.
Okay?
But I am also aware that I am in outer space, that the claw-footed receptacle that contains what I am forced to consider a contained atmosphere is, just out of reach, frigid and deadly and focused on that task the space between planets is always focused on, snuffing out the life of any being who happens to be floating unprotected in this starry immensity.
I know the dimensions of what I guess I must call the bubble because the vapor rising from my water rises only about a man’s height above my head before it encounters the threshold between the atmosphere within and the vacuum without. It seems to collect against that invisible membrane, not enough to block my view of the surrounding stars, but enough to present a semblance of atmospheric turbulence that blurs the rest of the universe before escaping into the endless void.
When I first found myself in this impossible place, hours or days ago, I worried about the permeability of this bubble, fearing that what air I had to breathe would escape soon and leave me to asphyxiate where I grow pruny; but it has been a long time without any degradation of the atmosphere, days, and so I have had to accept that the unknown architect of my predicament, perhaps God, has engineered the water, or perhaps the bath, to keep the nitrogen/oxygen mix constant. I am not in danger of anoxia or of carbon dioxide buikdup. But I am in a bathtub between the planets and perhaps between the stars, and all this, all this, in the name of heaven, without mentioning the alien yet.
I will get around to mentioning the alien. I must. He is just outside my bubble, matching speeds as he races alongside me and tries to get my attention. He is quite insistent. I must get to him, but I am not quite ready, as my mind has reached its capacity just analyzing the implications of the tub. He is somewhat human, this alien, though a caricature of humanity, and his body language seems to indicate urgency, so I must sooner or later accept the impossibility that contains me and broaden my scope to accept this representative of another world who is gesturing for my attention, at a distance so minimal that were this a real bathroom I could roll my eyes, step dripping onto my bath mat, and cross the room to determine what the invader wants. One of the things that has kept me from doing so is the awareness that even if he’s real and not some hallucination, I cannot hear any of the vital, urgent things he’s saying and that therefore there must be hard vacuum between us, despite the negligible distance; and that therefore if I took one step out of that tub and stepped heedlessly into the emptiness I would not be able to benefit from his input into my situation. My eyes would bug out, my lungs would deflate, the sheen of bubbly water on my skin would freeze and boil simultaneously, and I would have time to consider just how stupid I was, just how much of a dumbass I would have just demonstrated myself to be in the face of a survival situation that some legitimate science fiction hero would have figured out and handled with aplomb long ago. It is not my fault that I am not Spock, nor the Doctor, nor the brilliant Andrea Cort of those novels I read years ago. I just know that I cannot deal with the alien now and that I do not want to think about him. Let him gesture. I can feel and sense that this is really happening, but I am not yet ready to think about it.
I shift positions, not by much but to satisfy my body’s hunger for movement. That’s another thing. It is the only kind of hunger I feel. I know that my stomach should be growling and that the back of my throat must be raspy from lack of water, and my normal biological process should have befouled my bathwater long ago. That would have been unpleasant. I have feared it coming but it has not come. Either my sense of time is off, or I have not been abandoned to this place without some kind of adjustment to my metabolism, to prevent the evacuation of bladder or bowels and the pollution of my medium. I suppose I should be grateful that whoever or whatever put me in this bath, with snakes – and I will describe the snakes soon -- without seeing to my long-term comfort; certainly, given the physics that I know regulate the reaction of human skin to warm bathwater, I should be grateful that the delicious comforting warmth that one feels after first immersing itself in liquid of this apparent temperature has not faded to mere wetness as my skin adjusted to the differential. These are good things.
But there are other things that have been neglected.
For instance, there has been no provision for emotional or intellectual stimulation. Back home in my regular life, a thing that I know must have existed but of which I can summon only the vaguest personal memories, I sometimes slipped into a warm tub with a paperback book in my one dry hand. I turned the pages with my thumb and enjoyed the plot while, myself, being an inhabitant of the pot that boiled. Sometimes I would read entire chapters that way. In my home the toilet was within reach of the tub and, when I had enough, I could place my current volume pages down on the lid, my place in the narrative thus assured as I used my toes to replenish heat, and lay back, my eyes closing as I surrendered to naptime. I have once or twice in my life stumbled into mentioning some book I read in the bathtub and been surprised into the reaction of whoever I was speaking to that this was deeply abnormal behavior, an eccentricity to be scorned even more than the perversion, in some eyes, of reading books at all. Who the hell takes a book into the bathtub with them, they wanted to know. What was wrong with me? I cited it as just something to do during my quiet time; and here, surrounded by infinite space and the sound of the waves lapping against the sides of my vessel, is nothing but quiet time. They should have given me a book. Or a book reader. And possibly loaded a bloody explanation. That would have been nice. Instead, they gave me a rubber duck, a bar of soap, and an alien in a state of panic.
That’s not nearly enough to occupy my mind, at a time like this.
* * *
There are two aliens now.
I did not see the second one arrive. I was engaged in not paying attention: not the wool-gathering, not-bothering to engage, sort of not paying attention, but the kind that involves active effort, like a child clapping hands over her ears and screeching, La la la, I can’t HEAR you, while her big bother’s trying to bother her with a gross joke kind of not paying attention, the kind that takes effort, the kind that involves obeying the command to, for god’s sake, whatever you do, not think of an elephant.
Have you ever done that, not think of an elephant? It seems a simple instruction. Just don’t think of an elephant. But then your mind, girding itself, responds with, what exactly am I not trying to think of, again? And you, seeking only to help out, picture an elephant, either a plush stuffed-toy kind of elephant or some creature from a nature documentary, standing in the middle of open savannah, being an elephant. “Oh,” you think, annoyed now, because you really were trying to not think of an elephant, “don’t do that again,” and your traitorous inner voice responds with, Do what again? And before long that inner voice provides you with enough elephant to repopulate the grasslands, from noble bull elephants protecting the herd from attacking lions, to old-fashioned circus performers riding oversized tricycles around a ring, to King Babar of the books I know about but have never read, to political cartoons about the Republican Party, to old pulp illustrations of that story about Conan the Barbarian trying to burgle “The Tower of the Elephant,” and so on, culminating with images that picture elephants engaging in activities no elephant ever has or ever should attempt, one leading to the next as your compulsive gray sponge spits out more elephants than any being, including horny elephants, could ever want. It is impossible to consciously not think of an elephant. Your imagination cannot help itself.
And it’s especially difficult now, given that the alien that has joined the first one racing beside my runaway space-faring bathtub, damnably happens to be an elephant.
I don’t think I can avoid this issue any longer. I’m not quite ready to think of or not think of the elephant keeping up to my bathtub on the right, but if this situation is just going to start piling up the impossibilities to some point of truly infinite absurdity, I need to address it and start actively looking fr a logical explanation.
So.
To summarize, I’ve been taking a bubble bath in deep space. I am breathing within some kind of contained atmosphere, in what seems to be hot water, though it never gets any colder and I never grow accustomed to its temperature due to my skin ultimately matching the temperature of the surrounding medium. I know that this one detail is unlikely to the point of near-impossibility and so I take special care to note it, because it’s hard data and I need such hard data to come up with some explanation that mighty conceivably include me being delirious or insane.
To my right, at about twice the distance that my old toilet was, back when I used to use it the bath-adjacent table where I used to put down my paperback books, is an elephant, chasing after me with the gait that real elephants use while charging, though to my knowledge no elephant has ever charged through interplanetary space in pursuit of a bathtub.
I will not think of that.
Damn it. I just did.
To my left, also pacing me, is the first alien I saw, the one who’s been keeping up with me since the beginning.
I specify that alien is a provisional explanation, the best I can do given my current limited capacity for acquiring data. I mean that I have no more information to go on than at the very beginning: that it was weird-looking and that I did not want to think about any more than I want to think of the --
Damn it again. Damn it all to hell.
Forget the elephant.
To my left is a green-skinned little man riding in the cabin of a cartoon red locomotive. By cartoon I mean that it is clearly animated, not just in the sense that it is in motion, but in that it appears to be a drawing, with simplified lines and detail work that includes two crossed white bandages on its chassis. What distinguishes it from a traditional terrestrial locomotive, let alone a cartoon one, is that its fore and aft sections are attached to rollers that are laying down track ahead and collecting it again, behind. The vehicle simulates the usual locomotive in that it therefore rides on tracks, though I am at a loss to justify such an arrangement being necessary where there’s no planetary surface that the rails need to be laid on. I have plenty of other reasonable design questions why the machinery has been set up this way, but that is another mental pathway that I can get lost on at distressing length and I will not allow it to occupy me, any more than I will think of the elephant. DAMN IT.
The locomotive has a smokestack that once every, it seems to be, five seconds or so, inflates with internal pressure and relieves itself with a puff of smoke. Although such smoke would dissipate quickly in a planetary atmosphere and even more quickly in vacuum the little puffs of smoke do not; they recede into the black distance and remain visible for a long time, useful in that, with a backdrop consisting of distant stars and absolutely no landscape they provide ample evidence of our forward movement. There is also on the roof of the cab a protruding whistle that gets excited, in a cartoonish way, at the same rate that the smokestack produces its clouds, and though there is vacuum between us and I cannot hear it I would bet any amount of money, if I had any, that it is at this intervals going, Whoot! Whoot!
(Do you see why I was not ready to actively think of this?)
Elephant.
God damn you, already. Leave my head alone.
The creature I think of an alien is holding on the open threshold of the cab and doing whatever he can on heaven and Earth to get my attention. He is shouting, waving his free hand, even jumping up and down a little, out of his urgent need for me to respond. He is wearing one of those old-fashioned blue-striped engineer outfits, including the cap, and whatever he has to say is urgent indeed, though the silence of vacuum means that he should either save his breath or find some place where breath is possible. He is human enough for me to read his expression, which is just the wrong side of panic. I have called him an alien and not an engineer because he appears to be a distant cousin of the big almond-eyed grays of UFO-cultist lore: no nose, no lips, and oversized eyes of the sort that, together, have always made the visiting aliens of popular folklore look like knockoffs of a human fetus. What he can be yelling, what he must want me to do, is beyond my imagination. But there’s lots of pointing involved. Every few seconds he jabs his oversized index finger at, I guess, my knees. The alternative, that he’s pointing at that private part of me that remains obscured by mountains of glistening white bubbles, is too risible to be borne: I mean, is he upset that I’m naked and taking a bath in what an alien engineer at the controls of a space-traveling cartoon locomotive might presume to be “in public”? Fine, I want to reply. Throw me a towel. And that prompts an entire series of unprofitable thoughts about how one would go about catching a towel that, tossed the short distance between his locomotive cand the bubble that contains me, would be briefly exposed to hard vacuum. Would it freeze? Burn? Absorb enough radiation to kill me? I don’t possess the scientific knowledge I would need to formulate the answer, and all of this is irrelevant anyway because he’s not offering a towel and I don’t think it’s what he’s trying to say anyway.
Then I realize that he’s changed strategies.
Aware that I cannot hear him and that the challenge of imparting entire sentences is beyond my ability to lip-read, he’s changed his strategy. Now he’s just yelling the same word, over and over, at what I would presume to be the top of his lungs, if lungs are indeed relevant to his alien anatomy. Determining the precise word is not an insoluble problem. It is a word I have seen other people mouth, from time to time, usually when they wanted to assault me from a distance. I presume that I have not consistently been offensive enough to invite it, but nobody speaking English is wholly free of exposure to this worst profane words, or of indictment for on occasion using them. He’s shouting this word, the F curse, over and over, with vehement extra emphasis now that he can see I recognize it. And this, alas, provides absolutely no clarity. So a cartoon alien – a clown, really -- in a shiny red locomotive wants to make anatomical suggestions. Maybe he wants to make a right turn and I refuse to get out of his way. Maybe he hates the human race on mere principle. Maybe there’s some cultural imperative understood by members of his ancient and noble species, that I have violated out of ignorance or cultural insensitivity, that would never understand because of the evolutionary gulf between us, and that even if an explanation was offered would sound like gibberish to me: an accusation, for instance, that I violated his Grifnil on the Holy Day of Yogsponk. Maybe he’s just a belligerent ass. Who knows? But there he is, shouting the word with as much vehemence as he can, as if could possibly provide the answer to anything at all. Shouting back mighty be the answer, but if he is hostile I don’t want to be hostile back. This is no time to provoke an interstellar war.
So I watch him fulminate for a while, offering no reply but silence, and after a while he gives up and collapses against the edge of the threshold, and damned if he doesn’t weep. A message has been sent, for some purpose incomprehensible to me, but no useful information has been received. He is frustrated. He is bereft. He is mourning his own failure to communicate. Part of me wants to tell him that it is his own fault for using bad language, and that is the part that makes me contemplate the nature of this failure, the bad language that is not just bad because it should never be uttered in a respectable place like church but because it fails to convey meaning. I find that I do not believe he was trying to abuse me at all. He had something very vital, very critical, to impart to me, something that he believed fully contained in his choice of word, but which I could not decode because I was alien to him and operating from a different set of assumptions. To believe otherwise is to believe the universe meaningless, and I will not do that even now, trapped in this place. Not even doing what I’m doing.
Not even remembering the elephant.
* * *
Interesting. A new element has been added.
There is a certain frustration attendant to this: to wit, there is already so much I cannot explain that the addition of yet another element is intensely frustrating. I know that supplemental detail helps resolve puzzles, but everything so far has seemed so random that this just new thing seems like another nonsensical detail to confound me.
It is a paperback book.
It only makes sense here because, as I’ve noted, I long made a habit of reading in the bath, and while here I bemoaned the absence of a book to occupy me while I lay here with pruning fingers. But I cannot read this because this particular book has been encased in some kind of indestructible plastic that my fingernails cannot tear asunder.
It appears to be a thriller, packaged as horrific science fiction. It’s called Submerged Through the Void. The author is one C. May Tarr IV and the cover image is of myself in my current situation, submerged chest-deep in an old-fashioned claw-foot tub, racing with abandon through interstellar space. I get the title and after some cogitation I also see that C. May Tarr IV, a name that for me evokes some author you would find in the earliest science fiction pulps, is a tortured almost-homophone for See Metaphor, which to me indicates that it’s at least trying to pointing me in the direction of a clue while not giving me one. The metaphor doesn’t seem to be the locomotive piloted by the clown, which isn’t on the cover and, I guess, outside the range of the instruction. There’s no elephant either, which is especially irritating, which means that is also outside the range of the advisory, but is annoying anyway, because it makes me think of the elephant. See Metaphor. Is the elephant supposed to indicate that those old-school politicians, the Republicans, are somehow to blame for my problems? I doubt it. I seem to remember that both the major American political parties of my youth, the Republicans and the Democrats, are gone, swept away when the shifting demographics of the time reorganized both into different coalitions, with new names that I’ve known all my adult life,but which remain fuzzy to me, lost in the memories I can’t access. And besides, there are no elephants on the book cover, anyway. Just me in my tub, soggy between the planets, perhaps between the stars; the reality I am supposed to focus on, that the book wants me to know.
There is a review quote, in italics, beneath the title. It reads, “A Thrilling Race Against Time, and a Hero who must gather the courage to see it! – Kirkus Reviews.” So, okay: the wispy, clouded nebula that provides the backdrop for that runaway bathtub is a clever phantasm, resolving after much examination into a screaming human face, a larger version of the face of the hapless figure in the bathtub. The close-up is key. I am supposed to recognize that face. In the context of the pictured bubble bath I make the cognitive leap that the face must be mine, even though I still don’t know who I am and the features are unfamiliar to me. The smaller image of myself is dozing. I place my thumb over the somnolent face and I can discern a definite vibration, generated by the book cover and carried through the plastic covering and the skin of my thumb. I cannot hear the sound it is making but I capture the rhythm of its song and perceive it as snoring.
So, okay, the guy in the tub, the version of me, is asleep, so persuasively so this portrait of me has been equipped with its own snore, which is definitely a new experiment in publishing.
It is not a gigantic leap to discern that whoever sent this book wants me to know I’m asleep, which would by itself be a welcome explanation for my nonsensical situation, but the major problem with taking it literally is that I happen to know that I am awake. I have already performed some basic experiments to confirm consciousness. I happen to know that you cannot feel pain in a dream. You can endure the conviction that you’re hurt, as in a dream I can summon from a childhood I otherwise remember only in errant fragments, of being cut in two by a guillotine blade dropping from the sky to cut me in half. In the dream my top half was separated from my bottom half, and so my eye had to regard my sundered legs from a distance, and tell me that I was feeling untold agonies from the separation. But I did not then, and have never, felt any real pain in any dream where I was wounded. I just knew that the pain was there. I posited pain, as an abstraction, though while asleep and watching these little mind-movies never possessed the wherewithal to know the difference. And this is importance because here in the tub I have been able to pinch the loose skin on the back of my hand with the grasping fingers of another and have been able to inflict enough pain to feel it. I have placed a soapy thumb between my teeth and bitten down hard, stopping only when my only options were to stop or scream, and that was definitively pain: definitely what would wake me up if I were asleep and churning the fantasies that come with sleep. So I’m not dreaming. I am awake and actually either spending the long interplanetary or perhaps even interstellar afternoon in a bathtub or only thinking I am, which would indicate a powerful perception problem, I guess.
I’m a hundred percent certain that I am on to something.
I glance at the book cover and find that the illustration has changed. Now it’s a different image, that of the same naked man adrift in a golden void, being menaced on all sides by snakes. They are cobras, all of them, converging on him from the boundaries of the frame. The author is the same, C. May Tarr IV, and the top review quote is now “…like all the devils of Hell were on his trail” – Kirkus Reviews, and there’s now a breathless line of publisher-written copy, With time running out for all humanity, will he see the truth before it’s too late? I get the impression that somebody’s screaming in my ear while trying to slap me awake. But I am awake – I mean, I once again test that postulate with a cruel pinch – and so it’s not a question of waking up, not exactly. It’s a question of finding the epiphany, of realizing.
Of understanding I am refusing to see.
I feel the truth just beyond the reach of these wrinkled fingertips. It’s something terrible, I know. I am aware of a terrible danger, threatening death or worse, and it takes everything I have to not shtug this all off, to not retreat to the warmth of this womb-like bath and embrace the soporific effects of the hot, steaming water.
Womb-like.
That means something. I’m sure of it.
A bathtub. A clown riding a locomotive. A bathtub. A bar of soap. A paperback book. Snakes. An elephant. Is that all one metaphor? Or many?
What am I missing?
I’m missing the soap.
Where’s the soap?
It was floating before.
Why can’t I find the soap?
Why is it so important that I find the soap?
Why do I suddenly feel cold inside, in a way that is not ameliorated by the steamy warmth of my surrounding atmosphere?
Help me.
Please help me.
* * *
I’m running out of time. I can tell because the chill inside me now definitely feels like a shutting-down from the inside-out, a sense of whatever powers me gradually fading away: a decline. I don’t need to see everything around me as it really is to know that it means I am dying and that the only way not to die is to find a path to understanding. I still haven’t found the soap, but I know that it is critical; as critical, or approximately as critical, as the shrink-wrapped paperback, which again has changed covers, with the same author and this time a title indicating a philosophical treatise, The Key To Life and Death. The illustration is a bleached human skull on what appears to be an African plain; the review quote is, “Tell all your friends!” – Kirkus. These new details provide me with no epiphanies, but they reek of immediate danger. I feel that if I manage to resolve this into anything concrete I will feel stupid for not getting it until now, but I can take what will no doubt be a public humiliation. It’ll be better than death.
The back of my throat burns. I remember being trapped, somewhere, in some place on fire. It is the aftermath of some terrible event, and the air around me is all billowing black clouds. I want to scream, but the air is scalding. My lungs rage from my insult, and my throat, my poor throat, feels like I just swallowed a fistful of razor blades and washed it down with pure acid. I remember being aware that I have just seared my lungs and having the warm, comforting knowledge that this means I will suffocate in less than a minute. I know I am dead, and from the point of view of what I know to be years later that before this happens I will be retrieved and frozen in cryo and sentenced to more life and that I will not take this as a blessing.
You can’t feel pain in a dream. But you can’t feel it in memory either. You can only remember the way you once reacted to it, not how you felt in full sensory detail, but how it felt to feel it, the overwhelming sensation that of how it felt to feel it. How it was so frightening, so overwhelming, that when you think it’s about to happen again your mind retreats inside denial, inside a metaphor.
A hiding place can be as comfortable as a warm bath.
It can be so comfortable you never want to get out, even if the whole universe outside you is screaming at you to wake up.
The title of the book has changed.
It’s now called, Just Look.
But at what?\
For some time I descend into despair. This is hell. This is nonsense. This is madness that no human being can figure out. And the worst part of it all is that it is ludicrous. The= worst thing Hell can be is ludicrous. Yes, it’s even worse than painful. Imagine a hell where you are pummeled by soft pillows for all eternity. No, it does not hurt. No, it will never hurt. But it’s all there is, all there ever will be, for centuries and millennia and eons, and there comes a time when every soft thwap is like another chisel to the brain.
Why can’t I get out of the bath? Why is there nothing but the bath?
I don’t even have the consolation of feeling clean. A bath only cleans if you then use a shower to rinse, and there is no shower here. You ever smell your own face? I smell my own face. I have been sweating down my cheeks for days or weeks now, and though I’ve occasionally wiped them there is still accumulated salt, and it smells funky. Were it not for the book continuing to assure me that I am running out of time, and all of humanity with me, I would presume this to be a permanent condition, like that hypothetical eternal beating with pillows; to always have a smelly face.
I am also aware that all this self-pity is unseemly.
I glance to my left, where the locomotive is still keeping pace. The clownish cartoon engineer is still framed in the doorway, but he is no longer gesticulating at me. He’s just floating there, blank-faced, reacting to me the way anyone reacts to a fixed feature of his landscape. I could wave back, I suppose, but what’s the point? He cannot communicate with me and I cannot communicate with him. Maybe he’s as tired of this existence as I am. Maybe he despairs over the failure of meaning as much as I do.
And meanwhile my goddamn face still smells.
What happens next is a pure, self-loathing impulse, something that should have happened before but which profound ennui over my situation has prevented until now.
I shift and sink my head under the surface of the water.
I don’t know. Maybe I just want to drown myself.
But in that instant everything changes.
What I see I have been seeing all along, but misinterpreting on the edges of drug-induced hypersleep.
It is not bathwater because it is not water.
The liquid has a light golden tint, uncomfortably close to that of urine. It appears carbonated, or at least like it releases gas for some other reason. Wherever I look, bubbles the size of pinpricks rise upward, gathering against the ceiling of this sealed chamber, where an angled surface urges them toward the exit ports where they are collected and recycled. The liquid itself is thicker than ordinary water, enough to cushion me against acceleration or sudden changes of course, as it would be, because this is not a bathtub but a travel pod, which actually is traveling through the interstellar gulf, as pictured.
Of course, there is no bubble of captured atmosphere above this liquid. There is just a ceiling, against which the bubbles pool and gather before being forced out those recycling ports. I was never head-and-shoulders above the surface of a bubble bath, though I was looking at the air trapped against my ceiling and seeing an atmosphere instead of the liquid I’m breathing.
This is what I have been forced to look at, what my twilight consciousness to explain with a fractured metaphor. My mind didn’t want me to be here, so it picked elements from my immediate environment and altered them to their more mundane equivalents, with more, like the elephant and some other things I have not figured out yet, forced into their own bizarre alternatives just to fit inside this image.
So: the snakes. They are the tubes that feed me, some of which feed me and dose me with various necessary medications while others carry away my wastes. They pierce my chest and my belly and there are two up my nose and I have a catheter and I have another thicket of flexible cords measuring this and that to make certain that the subject, myself, is being properly maintained.
I understand that this is where I have always been, all this time, and further I realize what this place is called. It’s a goldgel crypt, an environment where I am meant to dream in timeless slumber, while I travel the distance between a destroyed homeworld and a destination chosen for resettlement. It is a bath, all right; just not one meant for luxuriating in hot water. Something has obviously gone wrong with the mix, hence my consciousness. I am between consciousness and sleep, my sense of time supercharged, my mind experiencing a moment of borderline wakefulness as the days I have thought I was traveling space in a bathtub.
My right hand still grips what I thought was a bar of soap. It is a little white object attached to my palm and it is indeed about the size of a bar of soap, and for a moment I perceive it as an old-fashioned black telephone, complete with rotary dial. I only see that because my mind, still trying to explain it, has conjured it, and my mind has only conjured it because it is one element of antiquated technology I happen to know about, being a man with some basic interest in vintage artifacts like paperback books. The image is the best my mind can offer as explanation for why this object exists and what I’m supposed to do with it. But it must be a faulty metaphor, because even as I watch the black telephone fades away and the bar of soap returns, for some reason a closer analog to its true purpose. I have not figured this out yet but I can come back to it.
More to the point are the screens inset in the capsule walls to my left and right. They are designed to feed me information during moments of partial or even full waking. The one to my left is a view of what I imagined to be a cartoon locomotive. It is another pod like mine, mounted on a metallic strut, connected to mine by another strut, and backed by thousands of other pods just like it, bunched like grapes against a branching superstructure that stretches as far as the eyes can see.
Or not eyes; the image is after all a real-time video, providing a helpful image of the pod next to mine, as if that’s information I’m supposed to find useful when I’m vegetating in the next closest thing to sleep.
The space between my pod and that one is obscured by a haze of debris that includes a frozen human hand, severed from the form of the cartoon locomotive engineer. He is not alien and not a clown, but he might as well be, as he’s dead. Whatever happened to this pod has ruptured it, and the force of all that exploding liquid has carried his body to the threshold of the fresh opening, exposing him to the vacuum between us. He is caught where he is because he is still tethered in place by some of the wires and tubes meant to service his health while he lay in place, pruning. He does appear to be looking ay me, but this, I understand, is an illusion; his eyes are as open as his mouth, but he’s looking at nothing, as he will continue looking at nothing, forever. His constant furious wave is the product of a hand that cannot drift away to find its own destination, because by chance one of the more delicate tubes piercing his skin at the wrist remains intact, anchoring it in the gulf between us, anchoring the hand palm-out, almost as if it’s trying to get my attention.
I swallow the knowledge that in my semiconscious stupor I have been staring at a corpse on a screen and interpreting it in the most fatuous manner possible, because my mind would not accept what I actually beheld.
I can track my thoughts now. They are slow, drugged, and sludgy. I remember my name and I remember how I got here, how we have all gotten here, how we were all told were about to be unceremoniously evicted from the planet and how we built this ark, this survival mechanism for getting us to somewhere the survival of the species might be possible. Stupid details from the last few desperate years insist on intruding, and I wave them away, because they are not as important as what the images my mind dredged up were trying to tell me, most pressingly with the various covers of that paperback book. Clearly, whatever happened the pod next to mine, whether some kind of random collision with debris, or an actual attack by something sentient, was catastrophic; just as clearly, it remains a danger to me and everyone still traveling with me. Maybe everyone there is, period.
But I am trapped inside my pod. That I am alive, at all, is testimony that I am still within an airtight seal; that the fate of the man to my left testifies that even a complete rupture of this vessel will not allow me to escape it and take whatever concrete action might be possible, with nothing but my own volition, is also clear. I am not a captain. I am not a member of the crew. If either of those things exist, whether alive automated, I am not capable of acting to that extent. I am just a poor slob who, lying in his pool of piss-colored murk, happened to realize that something had gone wrong and happened to muster enough consciousness to, distantly, understand it. What did I think I could do? What could I amagine I could do?
I begin to wish that I’d remained asleep, or if that was not possible that I’d remained within the irritating whimsy of the claw-foot tub and the cartoon alien engineer. Oblivion may not be productive, after all, but it’s comforting, to someone who can do nothing. Even if he dies he can die in peace, spared the knowledge of local disaster, or imminent personal extinction. He can enjoy the gift of not knowing, of believing himself fine, of believing the apocalypse an abstraction, far away and not intersecting his orbit in the slightest. If I could return to that and leave the problem to be solved by someone else, I might consider it – but I never would, because I can sense now that it runs counter to who I am.
There always was something womblike about bathtubs.
I glance at the rectangular object attached to my palm, the one I’d imagined a bar of soap, and then briefly, before it changed back, into an old-fashioned black telephone. Why was it those two things, in particular? Am I expected to clean up this situation? Is that the idiocy I’m being told? Is it the telephone that I’m supposed to pay attention to, instead? I am stuck by what may connect a bar of soap and a telephone, especially such an antiquated telephone. The answer eludes me. It is in the place inhabited by the grand idea I have just before I fall asleep, that retreats behind fog and no longer exists when I wake. I have the idea that it will remain obscure for as long as the connection eludes me. I probe at it, and hammer it, and fail to force the available data into the hard action I need. The answer seems like it would be simple, like it must be simple, and yet it still seems absurdly complicated, too obscured beneath my veil of fog.
So all right, where’s the rubber duck?
What is the rubber duck?
It was something that existed as a constant inside the metaphor, and I cannot find it. I am aware, by now, that it cannot be literally a rubber duck. There is no reason except for whimsy to bring a rubber duck aboard a space-ark to a new world. I sense and reason that whimsy of that sort was in short supply when the crisis came. I can find no free-floating object, anywhere around me, that would be translate ta rubber duck in a bathtub. Its absence frustrates the hell out of me. What is it about a rubber duck? That it squeaks? Possibly. But there is no object around here that squeaks. There is no unaccounted-for object at all. I wonder if the rubber duck was not a symbol, but an unexamined association, something that just goes along with the premise of a bathtub – corroborative detail, if you will, something that came up not because it served the metaphor only because it was something I expected, like a saddle on a horse. But no. Now that I have started to decode this, I can feel its significance.
I ask myself what practical purpose a rubber duck serves in a bathtub.
The answer comes rolling in: none.
But no artifact exists without purpose.
Unless it’s…art?
No.
It’s whimsy.
A rubber duck is a toy. A rubber duck is a little floating object that mimics a cute personality, to share a bathtub with you. For an adult, it’s nostalgia for childhood. For a child, it’s company.
And what service does that company serve?
I get the answer:
Reassurance.
If you are a child, you are afraid. It is your default reaction to the unknown. Of course, childhood also means bravado it also means considering yourself indestructible. But you also live with fear built into you, a useful default to retreat to before you learn to distinguish the unknown from the genuinely dangerous. You have other things like that: a soft plushie animal, a flannel blanket, a favorite nursery rhyme that for you boils down to the comforting lie that there is nothing here that can hurt you. A rubber duck is physical manifestation of that promise. When I thought I was in a bathtub, it was a natural conjuration, a reassurance that everything was going to be all right. And now it is gone. I am aware that I am in danger. I know that the rubber duck is a false promise.
So, okay. I know what the bathtub is. I know what the snakes are. I know what the cartoon locomotive is. I know who the cartoon engineer is.
I do not yet know what the soap / telephone is.
And there is something still addressed, something that I now realize is the most important thing in this entire scenario.
The elephant in the room, the thing I have been so obsessed with not thinking about ot.
For the first time in I don’t know how long I check out the monitor to my right.
The object dismantling the pods on the struts in that direction looks enough like an actual elephant that I am in addition to my natural horror bitterly disappointed with myself for conjuring such a facile metaphor. It has a machine, not an animal. It has a thick gray body, a vast head with a central manipulative tentacle, and two sharp and narrow protrusions that it is currently using to rip its way inyo a pod near me, to get at the meaty corpsicle inside. The space behind it is rich with debris torn from pods like it, and empty pods reduced to empty shells now that the human beings inside them have been torn loose. There must be hundreds of the destroyed and thus hundreds of the dead: and part of my display is a numeric counting down the number of the living, as they are eliminated one by one. There are, I can see, still millions, though there is an another associated numeric that establishes how many tens of thousands are gone. There is a count of the invaders: hundreds of them, enough to slaughter al of us in no time at all. There is no way of telling whether the pachyderm-adjacent invaders are manned – or aliened – by living things like pirates interested in mining us for canned food, or mechanisms warring against us because of their programming, but they are here and they are ravenous and we will not survive long against them, if we do not activate some kind of defenses.
I want to scream.
But there is still the soap, that is sometimes a telephone, to account for.
Why would there be monitors inside a pod where I am meant to sleep my journey? For the same reason I have that object affixed to my mind. Because there have always been unexpected dangers, and there might well come a time when one of the sleeping must wake, summon consciousness, and take definitive action. Artificial intelligence might do the job, but there come times when whatever threatens us is nothing artificial intelligence can recognize or be programmed for. There comes a time when human senses can see, when it takes a human mind to react to an imminent threat.
The final puzzle piece snaps into place. This is a generation ship, with a large fraction of the human population asleep, a much smaller population servicing the needs of the whole. Armed, I presume. Just not aware. They need someone to tell them.
I only needed the command to initiate communication.
The object attached to my palm is neither an old-fashioned telephone or a bar of soap. But the two artifacts had a single word in common, and even as the armored marauders converge on my position, I form that word in my suddenly fully consciousness, fully remembering mind and blast the message through that connection the people who might come in time to save us.
Dial.