Interlude
A passenger who entered arcspace with blue eyes emerges on the other side of the voyage with green.
A scar on a person’s right hand is now on their left.
Or perhaps more – perhaps you come out of the dark and find every organ in your body is inverted, heart moved from one side to the other, spleen switched round.
You probably don’t even know until you have some troubles in later life, and the doctor opens your scan with a cry of “Bugger me, have you seen yourself in the mirror lately?!”
A woman once came out of arcspace who knew every detail of her life – except it was not her life, it was the life of another from far, far away, rendered in perfect detail, and when she met with her child at the end of the journey, she stood there baffled and proclaimed: I’m dreadfully sorry, I have no idea whose offspring this is.
It is hard to tell whether the hysteria some people experience on entering and leaving arcspace is a manifestation of the otherness of that interstitial space, or merely the result of centuries of being told how alarming the dark is, how frightening and grave it is to cross between the stars.
Some scientists say they can prove – definitively prove – that the madness is caused by some manner of external interference with the broken minds of those who scream, and howl, and tear at their skin and hair – but their results are almost never replicable in double-blind studies, and so the question persists.
Most Pilots go mad before they die.
Inconsistently mad – that is the frustration.
Sometimes the madness is a wild, murderous thing – a fascination with flesh, a compulsion to rip and rend and see how the tiniest part of the greatest things is made to work.
Sometimes it’s a harmless sort of insanity.
One Pilot became obsessed with a certain kind of beetle, and was perfectly calm so long as there was always one in the room, happily munching a leaf.
Another lost the capacity to understand the difference between me and you, overwhelmed by interconnectedness, and eventually went to live with the noksha, who don’t care for such distinctions anyway.
A few created gorgeous, abstract pieces of art – great weavings of scavenged fabric, or paintings made with ink ground from precious stones – in an attempt to express something of their thoughts, some fraction of their meaning, but it’s never quite right.
Never quite says enough, they say. Some critics claim they find the work unbearable, impossible to look at, but they probably felt that way even before they saw the final piece.
The Lux refuse to travel in arcspace at all, and instead cross the stars in their vast slowships, sleeping the centuries away on their long voyages.
They say there is a kind of purity to going slow.
They say that arcspace allows us to forget how extraordinary are the distances we travel, and how tiny we are in the great black.
Our egos, our egos, they chant – left unchecked, our egos can grow as big as the distances we traverse.
Let us be small. Let us be humble. Let our voices be carried off silently into the dark.
Various words are ascribed to the “otherness”, the unknowable “thing” waiting in the dark. Common ones are: uncanny, malign, sinister, slippery, clawing, cruel, malevolent, mischievous, ominous, perverse, baleful, dire, poisonous, evil.
These are foolish words, for they assume that language has any meaning to the realms of nothingness, where time and space are impenetrable dreams. There are ideas of morality, ethics – even sentience – that are utterly inappropriate, crushingly crude in their inspace-centricity, and thus a waste of everyone’s time.
Only the Lordat, those priests with shaved heads and endless droning chants designed to inspire as much tedium as possible in the hearer, have got it right.
The dark, they say, does not care for such petty concerns as hearts, minds or souls.
The great unknowable has one nameable feature, and one alone: it is curious.