Chapter 7
I spent my first ever arcspace jump huddled in a hold with five hundred people, pressed down by the collars about our necks, chained together at wrist and ankle.
Nearly every creature who goes to space has the same initial reaction.
After the fear of launch, the terror of it, we look out into the dark and realise that we are tiny, insignificant, nothing.
We behold the world from which we came and realise how sacred and precious it is.
Many weep – such a delicate, wonderful thing, they say.
The most beautiful thing I have ever seen.
I did not have that experience. There were no windows, no sense of place.
The ship’s shields kept the forces of acceleration to within mere headache-inducing parameters, gravity a sluggish heaviness rather than a stomach-turning loss or a bone-cracking force.
There was no sense of time passing – merely the arrival of rations, the emptying of slop buckets, the locking once more of the hull door.
It was only the sudden change in gravity, the dropping-off of weight on bone that alerted me to our shift from sub-light speeds to FTL arcspace insertion.
That, and the other thing. The nameless thing that everyone shudders at when they speak of the dark.
The cobweb brushing across skin, a beetle crawling down the spine, a shadow in the corner of the eye.
No one quite sees the same thing as another; no one ever agrees on the notes of the lullaby they thought they heard, a tune half crooned, heard through the humming wall.
Someone cries out, they can see their lover – there, there, look, she’s right there!
We turn our faces away; there is nothing to be seen.
Another whimpers that there is a thing in the corner, if you only look just right – no, it’s gone now, but I feel it, I know it’s here. No, it’s not a monster, it’s not a man, it’s neither of these things, it’s…
… it’s something else. It defies speaking.
A man faints; a woman presses her hands to her eyes and screams, they’re moving, they’re moving, I can feel them moving!!
Xi flight protocol always advises against transporting massed groups of people through arcspace without providing separate quarters, or at the very least a cosy chair and a movie to watch.
Mass hysteria, psychogenic illness – they are real, oh but they are real, sigh the psychologists, all the more so when you bunch people together in the dark.
But this breezy dismissal of a traveller’s experience has to be balanced with another truth: that even the psychologists, with their strict mental discipline and educated understanding of how these things work, are a little fearful of the dark.
They hear the scrambling too.
Something in the wires.
Something in the vents.
Something with fingers of bone, knocking
knock knock knock
on the outside of the hull.
It is here.
It is there.
It is nowhere.
knock knock knock
It is waiting for you when you try to sleep, smiling and waving, the face of your grandmother reflected in the cup of water, only no, that’s not it at all; it was in the mirror, an alien looking back where you should have been, it’s in the voice that whispers in the hiss of pneumatics, it’s in the computer screen, a code that has no meaning and which yet you understand.
knock knock knock
And yes, of course. Of course. People know this.
They know it, and it’s easy to get a little anxious about the whole thing.
To start seeing things that aren’t there, to set each other off.
The vast majority of arcspace flights are safe, a simple trip from A to B.
The capacity to go faster than light outweighs the dangers – everyone agrees.
A risk worth taking for the beating of civilisation’s interplanetary heart.
But there are corners on the oldest ships where the dark settles, and not even the brightest light can burn it away.
It lingers, playing tricks on the eyes, even when the ships are in port; even when the engines are silent and everyone is gone save the maintenance crews.
No one who goes into that shadow comes out quite the same.
This is the price that is paid to defy the laws of space and time, and jump like thought across the stars.
We were sent to Hasha-to.
There was only one habitation on the surface, just on the night side of the terminator line of the sun-blasted, dust-frozen moon. A thick acidic atmosphere raged in perpetual storms, an endless thermal gale between day and night, the air trying to eat its way inside the broken cracks of the world.
On the sunward side, miners clad in mech suits taller than the average house pulled precious metals from the planet’s crust. Inside the night-side refineries, debtors rose to the ringing of the bell and returned to our cots at the blasting of a horn, skin scourged with compounds of arsenic, cell-dissolving polymers, bone-chewing catalysts and synthetic stains.
“Be proud of the scars you make here!” roared the dormitory speakers every morning. “Your scars are the only thing you have of value!”
Factory automata could have performed our labours, but they required skilled people to manufacture and maintain them.
Skilled people required education, and in the experience of the Ventures, education was a double-edged weapon.
Teach someone how to come up with new ideas, new concepts in the realms of engineering, design, industry, and what if they then came up with new ideas for something else?
What if they turned and said, “But isn’t there another way of looking at this… ?”
It had not always been this way with the Shine – there had been a time when learning was our sacred trust. That time had passed, ground down by powerful, comfortable men.
“Are you fucking dense? Move yourselves!”
Control on Hasha-to was simple enough. Every new group of inmates was reduced to nothing – no clothes, no food, no water.
When on the edge of madness, starvation, desperation, they were given a little bit of each.
I remember being grateful, so incredibly grateful, that my captors could be bothered to keep me alive.
I remember saying thank you for the drops that were put to my lips, as though those who fed me had not already taken me to the edge of death, ripped away any lingering dignity from my soul.
Thus I was quickly, efficiently and quietly broken, and didn’t notice it had happened, and said thank you for the privilege.
The scars I had been given in traffic control were badges of pride, markers of my status, and I had looked forward to acquiring the tapestry of cuts all the way around the lobe and onto the other side of my face that senior staff held.
In Hasha-to, the first scar I gained was when a hopper was overloaded and fell, scattering still-blazing stone across the workfloor.
Eleven people died; I got away with merely scorched lips and a messy line of fire up my left forearm, which I wrapped in proto-algae run-off from the kitchen vats after someone told me it would cool the blaze.
For a few weeks I was punished for my negligence by being assigned to external hub maintenance, shoved into a survival suit with an oxygen cartridge on my back and sent through the airlocks into the endless storm of Hasha-to to patch the acid-gnawed exterior of the factory.
If the atmosphere didn’t crawl through the endless micro-tears of eroded neglect that defined our survival suits and burn your skin off, fill your lungs with popping fluid, then the wind threatened to snatch you off your feet, fling you off out into the endless spinning dust. Stories abounded of people getting lost on the night side of Hasha-to just thirty or forty steps from the airlock of the base, spun round and round in the eddying dark until their air ran out or their suit melted from their bones.
I clung onto the few guide wires and handholds on the walls of the base, themselves acid-blasted frayed nothings waiting to snap. That’s what you did at Hasha-to. You clung on.
“Only three years more, and I’ll have paid my debt,” whispered my bunkmate, as the dormitory shuddered and howled with the storm outside. “I’ll start again. You’ll see. I’ve got it all mapped out.”
I didn’t say anything, and he didn’t expect me to.
The words he spoke were not for my sake.
A little hope – just a little hope – it was all that kept us alive.
Much as people will turn away from the things they fear the most, they will cling to hope, however implausible, however impossible, because if they do not, they must surely die.
I do not know if I had hope. My mind, my body – it all seemed so distant.
Eight Normmonths into my sentence – the months of Hasha-to were meaningless things – I saw the sign of the double suns for the very first time.
Debtors were constantly scratching some marker of their passage into the floors, walls, ceilings, any dark corner where they thought the guards wouldn’t look too closely.
It was a way, perhaps, of saying: look, look.
I’m still here. I was here. I lived. I am still alive.
I didn’t ask who made the mark, or what it meant. I felt I already knew.
Lhonoja, the Lovers, the binary star that would end us all, unstoppable, unnegotiable, the cleansing fire.
On Hasha-to, the end of the world seemed somewhat beautiful.