Chapter 4 #3
“Not personally,” Ishtan said with subdued pride, “but a colleague of mine brought me back a piece of a mural from the ship that washed up near P’Ilani.
Oh, it’s a beautiful mural. If you ever have the opportunity, I highly recommend vising the institute.
It really is a sight to see. Sychi has nothing of that sort, but maybe if we may extract this one—” He suddenly stopped. “There it is.”
Ahead, the corridor opened into a large chamber with sloping walls.
Like the petals of a rosebud, they reached towards the apex, nearly twenty metres in height.
At one time, the space had been well lit and vibrant, before decay and wear made it a barren tomb.
The curved ceiling glowed dimly from some internal source.
As far as the light permitted Iris to see, the walls were painted with peeling colours.
Images of pale people and alien places in hyperrealistic form smiled at him from the walls, their faces monstrously large.
Iris wasn’t superstitious, but he recited a prayer anyway, just to be sure.
Meanwhile, Ishtan produced a small flashlight from his pocket and ran the warm yellow beam across the paintings.
“This mural, for example, will be removed in pieces and taken back to my department. This is a career-making discovery, Iris. Truly, this was worth waiting forty years for. Have you ever seen anything like it?”
Iris had not. He was busy fighting a rising mixture of panic and disgust in his stomach.
The coming-and-going pulse he initially sensed once he had entered the ship was stronger here, reverberating through the domelike ceiling.
It echoed through his limbs, starting from the balls of his feet and snaking its way through his fingertips, as if the ship was saying, tread carefully for you do not belong here.
His own heart fought against its uneven pace, but it was losing more and more with each passing second.
Then there were the faces.
Frozen and uncanny, they smiled at Iris with their cold, flat eyes, some stripped of pieces of their bodies where the plants had gotten to them.
Soon the mural would be taken apart, shipped to the Sychi Institute, or displayed at some prestigious gallery, removed from the ship, pinned and hoisted against some paneling.
Iris swayed on his feet, a fresh wave of bile threatening to escape.
“This is one of the originals,” Iris heard Ishtan say, his voice coming to him as a distant echo.
“I predict it was here when the ship took off. Now, the ones I will show you in just a moment are even more fascinating.” He walked back down the corridor, and Iris followed mechanically, his stomach doing somersaults, vision receding into a darkened tunnel.
“Did you feel that?” he asked Ishtan, struggling to keep up, the academic’s steps suddenly too fast.
“Feel what?” Ishtan threw a glance over his shoulder, hand tugging at his beard.
The heartbeat, Iris wanted to say, the heartbeat of some monstrous thing.
What words were there at his disposal to describe the nameless fear that had overtaken him?
If he were to speak now, he would be reduced to a rambling mess or, worse, frighten Ishtan for no good reason. He shook his head instead.
They passed the stairwell and ventured down the corridor in the opposite direction.
This part of the deck lay in massive disrepair.
Wires hung from overhead where the vines had punctured the ceiling panels.
Water dripped down bare walls, leaving green mold growing in its wake.
There was no pulse here, no rhythm that Iris could feel even as he pressed his palm flat against the wall. Here was reprieve—at last.
From the silent dark, like a ship materialising from gate space, the first mural emerged before them.
Even in the twilight of the corridor, Iris was struck by the vibrancy of its colours, the way they had persisted through centuries to deliver their message.
Broad, unpolished strokes ran the length of the wall, depicting scenes from everyday life on the ship.
Some figures picked fruit, others played strange games.
But there was a deliberate division, an artistic distinction between the two groups that had inhabited the ship.
On a superficial level, they differed in clothes, in both hue and make.
Most striking was the passengers depicted in almost uniform like outfits, identical in cut and their dark fabric.
Taking a closer look, Iris noticed these figures were often armed with both primitive weapons and firearms.
He thought back to the lone passenger, reclined, dead on the couch, pistol in hand. Perhaps Iris had misinterpreted the scene. Maybe the stranger hadn’t been looking for a way out at all.
“What do you make of this, Ishtan?” he asked, carefully studying the archaeologist’s upturned, awestruck face.
“I think things got complicated aboard the ship as time passed,” Ishtan said. “They often did, you know. No matter how big you build them, the crews almost always develop some form of cabin fever. Something about not being under open skies. It’s a miserable existence.”
Iris followed the mural down the corridor, the painting changing tone the farther he ventured.
There was violence in the art now. Depictions of death and executions.
Reds and blacks dominated the wall, and amid the carnage, a spherical red eye watched it all, impartial, disinterested.
It presided over the death, a vengeful god in whose name the slaughter was enacted.
Violence, both as mutiny and desperation, was not uncommon on generation ships, of this Ishtan was correct.
Almost every ship Iris had read about as a child provided records of such events.
Trailing his eyes along the mural and upwards, Iris noticed that the cameras, placed along the edge where the wall met the ceiling, had all been shattered.
A few broken cameras here and there were expected, but all the cameras?
Iris made a mental note to see if the cameras on any of the other decks were in similar shape.
Then, before he could fully recover, the pulsing rhythm returned, but this time it attacked Iris in sequences, forcing his heart to skip beats. With every remaining ounce of self-control, Iris resisted the urge to reach inside the sleeve of his robe for protection.
Breathe. VIFAI’s quiet voice came through the surge of primal fear Focus on your breathing, Iris.
That little slip was enough to power the panic into an allencompassing state.
VIFAI had only used his name once before.
There was never a need. But now it gave itself away in that one word—it was scared as well.
Iris wrapped his arms around himself and trembled from both fear and his irregular heartbeat.
He looked up at the mural, and the eye—the red, ever-watching eye—looked right back.