In Space No One Can Hear You Scream (6 page)
Read In Space No One Can Hear You Scream Online
Authors: Hank Davis
Chirik looked around at us again in bewilderment, but he replied courteously, giving the stranger a description of our world.
“Of course,” said the stranger. “Of course. Sterile rock and metal suitable only for you. But there must be some way . . .”
He was silent for a while.
“Do you know what growth means?” he asked finally. “Do you have anything that grows?”
“Certainly,” Chirik said helpfully. “If we should suspend a crystal of some substance in a saturated solution of the same element or compound—”
“No, no,” the stranger interrupted. “Have you nothing that grows of itself, that fruktiffies and gives increase without your intervention?”
“How could such a thing be?”
“Criseallmytee I should have guessed. If you had one blade of gras, just one tiny blade of growing gras, you could extrapolate from that to me. Green things, things that feed on the rich brest of erth, cells that divide and multiply, a cool grove of treez in a hot summer, with tiny warm-bludded burds preening their fethers among the leeves; a feeld of spring weet with newbawn mice timidly threading the danðgerous jungul of storks; a stream of living water where silver fish dart and pry and feed and procreate; a farm yard where things grunt and cluck and greet the new day with the stirring pulse of life, with a surge of blud. Blud—”
For some inexplicable reason, although the strength of his carrier wave remained almost constant, the stranger’s transðmission seemed to be growing fainter.
“His circuits are failing,” Chirik said. “Call the carriers. We must take him to an assembly shop immediately. I wish he would reserve his power.”
My presence with the museum board was accepted without question now. I hurried along with them as the stranger was carried to the nearest shop.
I now noticed a circular marking in that part of his skin on which he had been resting, and guessed that it was some kind of orifice through which he would have extended his planetary traction mechanism if he had not been injured.
He was gently placed on a disassembly cradle. The doctor in charge that day was Chur-chur, an old friend of mine. He had been listening to the two-way transmissions and was already acquainted with the case.
Chur-chur walked thoughtfully around the stranger.
“We shall have to cut,” he said. “It won’t pain him, since his infra-molecular pressure and contact senses have failed. But since we can’t vrull him, it’ll be necessary for him to tell us where his main brain is housed or we might damage it.”
Fiff-fiff was still relaying, but no amount of power boost would make the stranger’s voice any clearer. It was quite faint now, and there are places on my recorder tape from which I cannot make even the roughest phonetic transliteraðtion.
“. . . strength going. Can’t get into my zoot . . . done for if they bust through lock, done for if they don’t . . . must tell them I need oxygen . . .”
“He’s in bad shape, desirous of extinction,” I remarked to Chur-chur, who was adjusting his arc-cutter. “He wants to poison himself with oxidation now.”
I shuddered at the thought of that vile, corrosive gas he had mentioned, which causes that almost unmentionable conðdition we all fear—rust.
Chirik spoke firmly through Fiff-fiff. “Where is your thinking part, stranger? Your central brain?”
“In my head,” the stranger replied. “In my head ogod my head . . . eyes blurring everything going dim . . . luv to mairee . . . kids . . . a carry me home to the lone prayree . . . get this bluddy airlock open then they’ll see me die . . . but they’ll see me . . . some kind of atmosphere with this gravity . . . see me die . . . extrapolate from body what I was . . . what they are damthem damthem damthem . . . mann . . . master . . . I AM YOUR MAKER!”
For a few seconds the voice rose strong and clear, then faded away again and dwindled into a combination of those two curious noises I mentioned earlier. For some reason that I cannot explain, I found the combined sound very disturbðing despite its faintness. It may be that it induced some kind of sympathetic oscillation.
Then came words, largely incoherent and punctuated by a kind of surge like the sonic vibrations produced by variaðtions of pressure in a leaking gas-filled vessel.
“. . . done it . . . crawling into chamber, closing inner . . . must be mad . . . they’d find me anyway . . . but finished . . . want to see them before I die . . . want see them see me . . . liv few seconds, watch them . . . get outer one open . . .”
Chur-chur had adjusted his arc to a broad, clean, blue-white glare. I trembled a little as he brought it near the edge of the circular marking in the stranger’s skin. I could almost feel the disruption of the infra-molecular sense currents in my own skin.
“Don’t be squeamish, Palil,” Chur-chur said kindly. “He can’t feel it now that his contact sense has gone. And you heard him say that his central brain is in his head.” He brought the cutter firmly up to the skin. “I should have guessed that. He’s the same shape as Swen Two, and Swen very logically concentrated his main thinking part as far away from his explosion chambers as possible.”
Rivulets of metal ran down into a tray which a calm assistant had placed on the ground for that purpose. I averted my eyes quickly. I could never steel myself enough to be a surgical engineer or assembly technician.
But I had to look again, fascinated. The whole area circumscribed by the marking was beginning to glow.
Abruptly the stranger’s voice returned, quite strongly, each word clipped, emphasised, high-pitched.
“Ar no no no . . . god my hands . . . they’re burning through the lock and I can’t get back I can’t get away . . . stop it you feens stop it can’t you hear . . . I’ll be burned to deth I’m here in the airlock . . . the air’s getting hot you’re burning me alive . . .”
Although the words made little sense, I could guess what had happened and I was horrified.
“Stop, Chur-chur,” I pleaded. “The heat has somehow brought back his skin currents. It’s hurting him.”
Chur-chur said reassuringly: “Sorry, Palil. It occasionally happens during an operation—probably a local thermoelecðtric effect. But even if his contact senses have started workðing again and he can’t switch them off, he won’t have to bear this very long.”
Chirik shared my unease, however. He put out his hand and awkwardly patted the stranger’s skin.
“Easy there,” he said. “Cut out your senses if you can. If you can’t, well, the operation is nearly finished. Then we’ll repower you, and you’ll soon be fit and happy again, healed and fitted and reassembled.”
I decided that I liked Chirik very much just then. He exhibited almost as much self-induced empathy as any reporter; he might even come to like my favourite blue stars, despite his cold scientific exactitude in most respects.
My recorder tape shows, in its reproduction of certain sounds, how I was torn away from this strained reverie.
During the one-and-a-half seconds since I had recorded the distinct vocables “burning me alive,” the stranger’s words had become quite blurred, running together and rising even higher in pitch until they reached a sustained note—around E-flat in the standard sonic scale.
It was not like a voice at all.
This high, whining noise was suddenly modulated by apparent words without changing its pitch. Transcribing what seem to be words is almost impossible, as you can see for yourself—this is the closest I can come phonetically:
“Eeeeahahmbeeeeing baked aliiive in an uvennn ahdeeer-jeeesussunmuuutherrr! “
The note swooped higher and higher until it must have neared supersonic range, almost beyond either my direct or recorded hearing.
Then it stopped as quickly as a contact break.
And although the soft hiss of the stranger’s carrier wave carried on without perceptible diminution, indicating that some degree of awareness existed, I experienced at that moment one of those quirks of intuition given only to reporters:
I felt that I would never greet the beautiful stranger from the sky in his full senses.
Chur-chur was muttering to himself about the extreme toughness and thickness of the stranger’s skin. He had to make four complete cutting revolutions before the circular mass of nearly white-hot metal could be pulled away by a magnetic grapple.
A billow of smoke puffed out of the orifice. Despite my repugnance, I thought of my duty as a reporter and forced myself to look over Chur-chur’s shoulder.
The fumes came from a soft, charred, curiously shaped mass of something which lay just inside the opening. “Undoubtedly a kind of insulating material,” Chur-chur explained.
He drew out the crumpled blackish heap and placed it carefully on a tray. A small portion broke away, showing a red, viscid substance.
“It looks complex,” Chur-chur said, “but I expect the stranger will be able to tell us how to reconstitute it or make a substitute.”
His assistant gently cleaned the wound of the remainder of the material, which he placed with the rest; and Chur-chur resumed his inspection of the orifice.
You can, if you want, read the technical accounts of Chur-chur’s discovery of the stranger’s double skin at the point where the cut was made; of the incredible complexity of his driving mechanism, involving principles which are still not understood to this day; of the museum’s failure to analyse the exact nature and function of the insulating material found in only that one portion of his body; and of the other scientific mysteries connected with him.
But this is my personal, non-scientific account. I shall never forget hearing about the greatest mystery of all, for which not even the most tentative explanation has been adðvanced, nor the utter bewilderment with which Chur-chur announced his initial findings that day.
He had hurriedly converted himself to a convenient size to permit actual entry into the stranger’s body.
When he emerged, he stood in silence for several minutes. Then, very slowly, he said:
“I have examined the ‘central brain’ in the forepart of his body. It is no more than a simple auxiliary computer mechanism. It does not possess the slightest trace of conðsciousness. And there is no other conceivable centre of inðtelligence in the remainder of his body.”
There is something I wish I could forget. I can’t explain why it should upset me so much. But I always stop the tape before it reaches the point where the voice of the stranger rises in pitch, going higher and higher until it cuts out.
There’s a quality about that noise that makes me tremble and think of rust.
Dragons
Sarah A. Hoyt
Being afraid of the dark is common among children, and would probably be considered more common among adults, if they weren’t embarrassed to admit it. Once, there actually were dangerous things out there, circling the fire (better not let it go out), looking in to the cave mouth with eyes reflecting that firelight, but now things are different. The night can be banished with a flip of an electric switch, and the deadliest predators are either extinct or kept in zoo cages. But suppose there were other, even deadlier creatures who moved away from the realm of machines and lights. Suppose they now lurk in the dark of space . . . waiting for an opportunity to show their power again.
Sarah A. Hoyt won the Prometheus Award for her novel
Darkship Thieves
, published by Baen, and has authored
Darkship Renegades
and
A Few Good Men
, two more novels set in the same universe, as was “Angel in Flight,” a story in the first installment of
A Cosmic Christmas
.
Darkship
Renegades is presently a Prometheus Award nominee. She has written numerous short stories and novels in a number of genres, science fiction, fantasy, mystery, historical novels and historical mysteries, much under a number of pseudonyms, and has been published—among other places—in
Analog
,
Asimov’s
and
Amazing
. For Baen, she has also written three books in her popular shape-shifter fantasy series,
Draw One in the Dark
,
Gentleman Takes a Chance
, and
Noah’s Boy
. Her
According to Hoyt
is one of the most interesting blogs on the internet. Originally from Portugal, she lives in Colorado with her husband, two sons and the surfeit of cats necessary to a die-hard Heinlein fan.
DRAGONS
Sarah A. Hoyt
“What if they were really there,” Jack said. He came out of the engine room, looking like something dredged up from a dark sea—all flying white hair, and wide blue eyes that looked like they should be blind. Spacer’s eyes they call them. “What if they were really there?” he asked. “Those monsters, those dragons, those creatures ready to swallow ships, ready to render humans mad, ready to tear apart the faint shell of reason we use to paint over what we don’t know?”
He’d been enlarging on this theme for the last three hours: the monsters who’d once threatened seafarers. He’d read to me from an account in the ship’s database—not standard issue I was sure—of a dragon-like creature flying round and round a ship’s sails and finally making them burn, and all the sailors lost, which made me wonder who’d written the account and known how many times the monster went around the mast and how his wings sounded like moth’s wings in the wind, and how he obscured the sun.
He’d been talking about it, all the while he was in the engine room, working on the faltering engine of this fifty year old mining ship. And from outside, now and then, as I listened to the tinker and swish of tools, to the idiot beeping of the machine as it tried to establish normal function, I’d shouted, “Then they weren’t. If they existed where did they go? Where did they hide?” Now I said it again, quietly, and I added, “Because we’ve crisscrossed the Earth with ships, and we’ve gridded her with communications satellites, and these monsters don’t exist.”
Jack gave me a slitty-eyed look, and a corner of his mouth twitched up. He was wiping his hands to a huge, oil-stained rag. It was as if the ship’s engine had bled all over them.
A two-man ship, is all this was. A two-man asteroid miner ship, one step up from a robot one, in that we could avoid collisions most of the time, and we didn’t get confused about what to mine.
My dad had done this for most of his life—had gone out and harvested minerals and rare earths from the asteroid belt. A month, two months, three months at a time, and come back home a little more tired, a little grayer, but with money to keep me in educational modules, and to keep Mom and me comfortable in our little house. He’d gone and come back, gone and come back, a fisherman in an endless sea, until the cold of space and the emptiness had bleached him away entirely. He’d died of one of those cancers long-time space miners get, and faded away into death like someone washed out to sea.
He’d left almost enough money to complete my training—almost—to become an interstellar navigator, to work in those ships that went out to the new colony worlds. Almost. I needed another six months, another module and then I could apply.
One trip out to the asteroids ought to do it, I’d thought, and I’d tried to find a ship that would take me—inexperienced and raw. There had been only Jack. Jack who’d taught Dad, Jack who’d been old when dad was an apprentice. Jack and the
Gone Done It
, his forever-breaking-down ship, cobbled together of salvage and will power.
And so here I was. A month trip. All I had to do was survive a month.
“Have you ever thought,” Jack said. He crossed the common room that was all we had outside the engine room and the storage room for our found materials, and dove into the cupboard for a piece of cheese. Hard cheese. He bit into it, leaving the mark of his teeth in the white-yellowness of the cheese. “Have you ever thought,” he said, “that the monsters were there; that they moved on? They were there when man first woke, when man first said
I am
, there in the darkness of the cave away from the camp fire, waiting, waiting. Any human who wandered away from the camp fire was slash, cut, gash.” He made vicious motions with the hand holding the piece of cheese. “Nothing but the remains found in the morning, half-eaten.”
“I imagine there were tigers and bears and stuff,” I said. I’d almost said saber-tooth tigers, but then I wasn’t sure if those had lived at the same time as humans. Natural history modules were extra and not needed for a space ship navigator. “Waiting to snack on a human,” I said. “But not supernatural monsters.”
Jack quirked an eyebrow at me. He had bushy eyebrows, very white, like the tentacles that grow over the eyes of certain dark-dwelling fish, and which give a sort of light to move by. “No?” he said. “But what if there were? And what is supernatural, exactly? Just a word people use to hide what they can’t explain. There’s always things people can’t explain. Imagine that there were those things, there, in the dark, waiting for humans to stray beyond safety and then—”
“I won’t suppose anything of the sort,” I said. “Stop trying to scare me. Did you fix the engine?”
He shoved the rest of the cheese in his mouth, wiped his fingers to the coveralls, leaving crumbs of cheese behind amid the oil smears. He waggled his hand at me. “Almost,” he said. “I can keep the artificial gravity on and the air purifying, but we’re still not moving. We’re marooned here. I’ll go do battle with it again.”
The engine room swallowed him. He left the door open, though, so he could talk. I wondered why he was talking to me about monsters, and figured it was part hazing since I didn’t quite belong to his world and never would, and part to keep himself amused while he worked.
I knew how to repair engines, too, at least in theory. I’d taken the module just before coming on this trip. But I didn’t know what had happened to the
Gone Done It
in the fifty years since she’d left the factory, and I doubted very much that her entrails resembled much of anything that the modules had shown me.
Jack had changed her, at least for the last thirty years, and he should know her way around her twisted, convoluted interior.
“Consider, young Pete, consider. Perhaps there were things out there. Why else would our ancestors write about them, our oldest songs and legends sing of them: of things of claw and tooth and scale, of night and infinite malice. Suppose they were made of something not-flesh, something our ancestors couldn’t kill. Consider they were rivals with humans—rival intelligences, zealously defending their space against the curious monkey-minds. When humans left the campfire, the place all other human minds know, the place all other humans tell each human he is safe and lit and rational, then these things pounce. They pounce in defense of their lair, of their secret dark. They kill and rend in order to be allowed to go on living.”
He banged something. It sounded like he was hitting metal hard with a hammer, and then there was a series of pings, that sounded like he’d managed to loosen a piece and was pulling it around, the other way, slowly. “They were there,” his voice came above the other sounds. “In the dark of the cave. But then more and more humans ventured out into that dark, humans learned to make torches, take the fire with them, make the darkness less dark.
“And the monsters fled, before the light of the torches, before the certainty of the human minds that they were safe. They gathered in distant lands, in forests, in plains where they could ambush the human mind, feed on human fear. The few who ventured there and survived brought out stories. Fearful stories of those who lurked there. They came with claw and tentacle and with tearing fang, and humans ran back with stories and warnings.
Don’t go into the forest
, they said. And
don’t stray far from the shore.
And maps were drawn with vast areas marked
Here there be dragons.
“But the humans came, over hill, around trees. They came in numbers, in family groups, in migratory bands. They cut down trees and built among them. What had been strange and wonderful became familiar, safe. The dangerous animals were killed and the suggestion of fangs, the shadow of claws retreated. The monsters retreated, to the cold, salty, trackless deep ocean, hovering over the unexplored waters. Till the humans went there too, and above the Earth, in the sky. And then the monsters fled, still further.
“These things were chased from Earth,” Jack put his head in the opening of the door, and grinned at me, a pantomime devil, his forehead sooted with machine oil, his eyes slanted and amused, and I thought he was laughing at me. This was almost all hazing, and he was laughing at me, amused at my discomfiture, waiting for my reaction. “Do you ever wonder?” he asked me, and raised his tumultuous eyebrows at me. “Do you ever wonder where they went? Where they are?”
“I imagine they went back to hiding under beds and scaring children,” I said, sardonically.
He went on, as if he hadn’t heard me, “They went out to the dark of space, to the unknown land out there—claw and wing, tentacle and fang. They wait out here, they wait—”
There was a particularly loud and vicious clang. “There will never be enough of us out here, far enough out here, to carry our light, our certainty of safety. Even the asteroid miners . . . How many are there at any time? A hundred? Fewer? Most places still send up robots to do the mining. It’s more loss of robots and time, more wasted trips, but fewer lives lost. There’s few of us, and space is immense. Out here—” Another clang, which gave me the impression that he’d gestured wide with his hand and hit something nearby. “Out here, they can live, undisturbed, they can spread and mutate and grow. They’ve found a place where we can’t overwhelm them, we can’t despoil them. They found their realm of cold and dark. We’re as nothing here. And when we venture here, they pounce—they come at us, to avenge their old wrong, their stolen paradise. We pushed them from the warm nights of Earth to here, and in the process we made them harder, sharper, more malicious. And they wait—for us.”
I sighed, and let my sigh be really audible. “I’m not going to be scared, Jack, I really am not. Did you tell these stories to my father? Was he scared?”
There was something like a short bark of laughter, and then, “I didn’t have to tell your father anything. He knew it already. There was this time, out in the belt—”
And then his voice died away, and a triumphant “aha!” came back, and there was a clang, and Jack came out, looking like he’d been crawling around in someone’s chimney, soot on his hair, soot marking his white eyebrows. He threw a wrench on the floor of the main cabin, and retreated to the fresher in the corner, with its vibro-clean.
I picked up the wrench and set it in the tool cabinet. When I’d come into the
Gone Done It
, there had been tools everywhere, and bits and pieces of material used for repairs. I’d tagged, organized it, put it away, and kept it put away, with no help from Jack. No wonder, I thought, the man dreamed of monsters hiding in dark and cluttered places. He’d been living in a dark and cluttered place when I’d got here.
That night we ate some dried fish, and a bit of hard bread. Food for asteroid miners was about as good as food had been for mariners. At least we didn’t have to drink grog, though given the
Gone Done It
’s ancient purification arrangements, it didn’t do to dwell too long on where the water we drank came from. And we didn’t.
We ate, and then we went to bed. The beds let down from the wall, each with a thin mattress and an ancient blanket that smelled as much of oil and soot as the rags that Jack used in the engine room.
We were in bed, one on either side of the cabin, when Jack said, “There was this one time, out in the belt—”
He sounded thoughtful, reminiscent, not at all like he’d sounded when he’d oh so obviously been trying to scare me. “Your father was standing guard—”
I didn’t say anything. It was one of those things. I knew Jack and Dad had taken some trips together. It was part of the reason that Jack had given me this chance at a trip, even though I was completely inexperienced. But the father I remembered was the man who came home with substantial funds for our account, the man who sat quietly, reading. The man who made Mother smile, and who never raised his voice to me.
I’d been torn, since I’d come on the ship with Jack, afraid of what he’d say. It sounds stupid and cowardly, but I wasn’t sure I was prepared to hear the man who was so neat at home had left tools and wrenches all over in the
Gone Done It
. It would be like looking at a side of him that my father had kept quiet, like peeking into someone who had been part of my father, but not the part Mother and I knew.
So I stayed quiet, and Jack was quiet a long time, and it seemed to me that he’d fallen asleep, but then he went on as though he’d been talking all alone, as though he spoke out of a deeper silence, as though I were remembering or seeing the same things he was remembering and seeing, and all he needed to do was give me a few words to remind me. “If he hadn’t been so fast on the uptake, Pete, the truth is, neither the
Gone Done It
nor I would be here. But it was all the work of a moment. By the time I came in, he’d chopped off the part of the thing that was inside the engine room, and he’d stopped the leak, and the only thing to say something odd had happened was that tentacle . . . It was the oddest thing, Pete . . . writhing and alive, but not flesh at all. It was as if it were made of darkness, built of shadow and gathered fear.
“When I turned the lights on, it vanished, but it left an icy feel in the air. An icy feel.”
I didn’t answer. I wasn’t sure he wasn’t asleep and talking out of a nightmare. Surely what he was talking about was a nightmare. My father—
If my father had seen something that fantastic, he would have spoken. When I talked of going to the stars, he would have warned me. Surely—
There was no time to dwell on it, and in the morning I woke to Jack shaking me. He’d fixed the sensors, and we’d located an asteroid that was all platinum and some rare isotopes, and he wanted my help with the robots, to do the mining.
Asteroid mining is not a physical occupation, not even when humans go out as miners. You don’t put on your spacesuit and step out, and grunt and sweat with your pickax, to extract minerals from the wandering space junk. No, you use the sensors to detect the ore or the minerals or the rare Earths. And then you send out a probe that brings the stuff in to be analyzed and confirm your find. And finally you send little robots out, an army of ant-shaped homunculi who crawled all over the asteroid and cleaned it of anything that might be valuable on Earth.