The Colour of the Void

The jump drive started acting up just off the Argus Cluster, about a third of the way to the colony. We had to drop out of warp, but Dewey said he could fix it. He said there was nothing to worry about, so we started limping the rest of the way to the sixth moon of Tanis.

The grav rings were the next thing to go, spinning slowly to a halt and leaving us floating up and down the corridors of the ship. We should probably have been more alarmed, but we saw it as nothing more than an amusing anachronism, an annoyance that nobody had needed to deal with in decades.

We didn’t know what to do with the colonists when the stasis pods began to fail. Dewey did everything he could, but we still had to watch a thousand green status indicators flicker and fade to black, one by one. I can hear their voices sometimes, begging us to do something, to try something else. To save them.

Remek went missing a few days later. We never did find his body – we assumed he must have hurled himself out an airlock rather than go on living another moment aboard a ship full of ghosts – but we did recover a rambling screed from his log files that was equal parts suicide note, confession to the crime of murdering the colonists, and doomsaying lunacy. We read it only once before deleting it.

Everybody started spending more and more time on their own after that. Dewey slept less and less, and eventually moved down onto a cot in the engine room; I haven’t seen him since main power failed and the core systems got shunted over to backup. Claire and Samara, on the other hand, decided to discard their duties and our company in favour of the pleasure of each other’s bodies. I have since seen one or the other of them occasionally surface for food, though more often than not they send Luiz around to collect their supplies for them, when he isn’t busy watching them, or scouring the ship for something to drink, or vaporize, or otherwise ingest to get him through another day living in his own tomb.

Mariah has taken to haunting the darkened ship like a spectre, searching for something she’s never going to find. I came across her on the ship’s observation deck the other day – the memory is so worn now, was it actually just the other day? – staring up out of the ceiling’s massive curved panels of transparent plasteel. There were tears in her huge green eyes, and she wore the awestruck look of prey held in the maw of a ravenous beast.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” She didn’t turn to look at me floating there next to her.

“What is?”

Mariah kept her gaze fixed on the void.

“The colour between the stars, Howard. I’ve never seen anything like it.” There was an edge of mania in her voice.

“Neither have I.”

I studied Mariah as she studied the darkness. She cocked her head to one side, like a dog hearing its master’s voice.

“Can’t you hear them? I can.”

For the span of a heartbeat I felt like maybe I wasn’t truly alone on the ship after all; someone else heard the voices of the dead begging for salvation, someone who could share that burden with me. But Mariah must have seen some trace of confusion somewhere behind my eyes. She shook her head sadly, fresh tears spilling down her cheeks.

“No, you don’t hear them. They’re not speaking to you. Not yet.” She wiped at her cheeks with the heel of her palm, studying me just as intently as she had been studying the stars. She seemed able to read my thoughts. Perhaps she was. Perhaps they knew my mind and shared its contents with her, whoever or whatever they were. “You think I’ve gone crazy. I haven’t, but I don’t mind. I’ve simply seen the truth, and heard the truth.”

She was right. I did think she was crazy. When I left her floating there in the dark of the observation deck I counted her among the dead, cracked and broken beyond repair. But now, days or weeks or months later, I’m not sure. Now when I look out upon the space between the stars, obscene colours disagree and break and scatter beneath the weight of my gaze. And the colonists balk when I strain to hear their pleas, ceding the floor to the voices of the stars, and of those things that exist behind and between the stars. They do not speak to me so much as around me, an incidental eavesdropper on an eternal conversation, but even that is enough. Now I know the truth of the abyss: we are not the masters but the slaves, not the shepherds but the sheep. When our simian species slipped its surly bonds to touch the face of God, we thought we could lay claim to the heavens because we found them empty. Such a childish, colonial little mind! Instead our steps among the stars have merely been those of intruders exploring the rooms of a wondrous mansion thought abandoned and derelict – but now the masters of the house are coming home to put us back in our place.

We saw a doorway to the future, but we should have remembered that there is danger in open doors. Anything at all might happen through an open door.

Are these celestial whispers the voices that Mariah’s been listening to? It seems they must be, for there is space for no other sound in my head now, but whenever our wandering paths cross she still merely smiles sadly and cries a little and shakes her head. Why? What do they speak to her that they don’t speak to me? What lies do they pour into her ears?

And even though Mariah and I see each other less and less, there’s nowhere on the ship they can’t find me, nowhere I can hide from their gaze. But out there, among the stars, I could wear the colour and be safe. I could be a part of the colour.

Jesus. Now I’m really starting to sound like Remek. Perhaps you should just delete this right now.