7

 

 

WE HAD NO HOME. I didn’t remember that, just like I didn’t remember moving onto the ship six months before. My parents had sold our house and had put everything they had into his business, a fleet of cargo ships that ran all over the sector.

The business had become a success when my father stopped caring about the ethics of the cargo he carried. Sometimes he brought food or agricultural supplies to far-flung outposts. Sometimes he brought weapons to splinter groups rebelling against various governments.

He didn’t care, so long as he got his payment.

He made so much money, he no longer needed to run the fleet, but he did. Still, my mother begged him to buy land and he did that too. This land, kilometers and kilometers of it, the entire lake and the surrounding greenery.

He promised her they would retire here.

But they were still young, and he loved travel. He commanded the lead vessel because he owned it, not because he was good at piloting or even at leadership.

He tells me about the trips, about the deliveries, about the crew. The ship had a contingent of forty regular with two dozen others whom he hired for larger jobs. Sometimes they worked the cargo, sometimes they repaired the ship. Always they listened to him, whether he was right or not.

But he wasn’t the one who commanded them to the Room of Lost Souls. That was my mother. She had heard about it, studied it, thought about it.

She wanted to see it.

She didn’t believe a place that old—human-made—could exist in this part of space.

“She was trying to be a tourist,” he says now. “Trying to make all this travel work.”

But I wonder. Just like I wondered about Trekov. If my mother had done all the studying, had she been planning a pilgrimage? Because of my father’s business or because of some problem all her own?

I realize, as I’m sitting there, I know even less about her than I know about my father. I only know what I remember, what her parents told me in their grief, and what my father is telling me now.

“I took her there,” he says. “With no thought, no study. I thought it just an ancient relic, a place that we could see in half a day and be gone.”

“Half a day,” I mutter.

He looks at me, clearly startled that I spoke.

“So she planned to go to the Room?”

“That was the point of our visit,” he says.

“And she wanted to take me?” I can’t believe anyone who studied that place would bring a child to it.

“You suited up and followed her. You grabbed her hand as she went through that door. I think you were trying to keep her from going inside.”

But I wasn’t. I was entranced with the lights, as fascinated as she had been.

“I saw you go in,” he says. “I called to you both, but the door closed behind you.”

“And then?” I ask.

“And then I couldn’t get you out.”

Minutes became hours. Hours became a day. He tried everything short of going in himself. He smashed at the window, tried to dismantle the walls, sent in some kind of grappler to grab us. Nothing worked.

“Then, one day, the door opened.” His voice still holds a kind of awe. “And there you stood, your hands over your ears. I grabbed you and pulled you out, and held you, and the door closed again. Before I could go in. Before I could reach inside…”

His voice trails off, but I remember this part. I remember him clinging to me, his hands so firm that they bruise me. It feels like he holds me for days.

“You couldn’t tell us anything,” he says. “You didn’t think any time had gone by at all. You were tired and cranky and overwhelmed. And you never wanted to go in again.”

“You asked?”

He shakes his head. “You said. Without prompting. We stayed for a month. We never got her out.”

And then he ordered the ship to leave. Because he knew he could spend the rest of his life struggling against that place. And he had a child. A miracle child, who had escaped.

“I dropped you with your grandparents and came back. I figured I could go in and get her. But I couldn’t. Except for you, I didn’t know anyone who had gotten out.”

“Which is why you want me to go,” I say.

He shakes his head. “I’ve found people willing to go inside. Nothing comes out.”

“I thought you said you went with Riya Trekov. That she has a way out.”

“She does. People go in. They come out. But they’re always alone.”

Now I ask him. “What’ll you do if you get her? She won’t be the same. You’re certainly not.”

“I know,” he says, and for a moment, I think he’s going to leave it at that. Then he adds, “None of us are.”

 

***

 

We talk long into the night.

Or rather, I listen as he talks.

He tells me what he knows about the Room. He has an almost encyclopedic knowledge of the place, combined with a series of theories, myths, and legends he has collected over the decades.

What it all comes to is what I already know: No one knows who built the Room or the station it’s on. No one knows when it was built—only that it predates the known human colonization of this sector. No one knows what its purpose was or why it was abandoned.

No one knows anything, except that people who go in do not come out.

Unless they’re protected by Riya Trekov’s device.

The device, as my father explains it, is a personal shield, developed by a company that’s related to my father’s old business. The shield relies on technology so old that few people understand it.

Sometimes I think all of human history is about the technology we’ve lost. We’re constantly reinventing things.

Or recovering them.

Apparently, this device is something reinvented.

How it works is simple: It acts like a spacesuit—creating a bubble around the user that contains both environment and gravity and anything else the user might need.

It has the same flaws a spacesuit has as well: It allows a person to enter an environment but not interact with it—or at least, not interact in important ways.

But the shield is different from a spacesuit as well. From the first discovery of the Room, humans have tried to enter wearing spacesuits, and that has not worked.

So Riya Trekov’s device negates something—or protects against something—that a spacesuit does not. Somehow, that device—that bubble it creates—is the perfect protection against the Room.

At least that is what my father would have me believe.

That’s what Riya Trekov showed me briefly on Longbow Station.

But now I have more qualms than before. Because the more my father talks, the more disgusted I become.

He has spent all this time studying the Room. He has made that Room his life’s work.

Yet he has never been able to risk that life, not even to pull me or my mother out of the Room.

As he paces around me, I think of all the times I’ve gone into a wreck, how I’ve looked for trapped divers, what I’ve risked to recover their bodies.

I’ve only failed to recover one.

On the Dignity Vessel. I left one of my divers behind because he was trapped in something I did not understand.

Like I do not understand Riya Trekov’s device.

Like I do not understand the Room.

People have devoted their lives to the mystery that is the Room, and have learned nothing.

Unlike them, I do not want to learn anything. I don’t even want to recover my mother or Ewing Trekov—both of whom I consider dead.

I want to see the Room for myself, to satisfy some curiosity that has plagued me since I was ten years old. In that, perhaps, I am more like my mother than my father. If his story is to be believed—and I am not sure it is—then my mother just wanted to see the anomaly for herself.

Which is, in part, what I want to do. But more than that, I want to see, experience, and understand from an adult perspective what had so influenced me as a child.

I want to know how much the Room formed me, the embittered wreck diver, the woman who once believed that preserving the past was more important than any money that can be made from it.

The woman who believed—and maybe still does—that the past holds secrets, secrets which, if understood, can teach us more about ourselves than any science can.

I do not tell my father any of this. I let him believe I’m doing a job. I pretend to be interested in all that he tells me.

And I pretend to be surprised when he tells me he wants to join me.

He says he wants to see the Room one last time.