Алан Дин Фостер - Relic

They halted before a pair of open pods. Bac’cul and Cor’rin had already entered theirs. The transparent covers were closed, the occupants awake and relaxed. He noticed that Cor’rin was wearing a customized sensory eyeband. One of her three hands was conducting a diversion silent and unseen. Interstellar travel was plainly not for the claustrophobic. He eyed his own waiting deuomd nervously.

“What do I do if I get inside and find that I can’t stand it, or that I’m having trouble?”

Kel’les eyed him tentatively. “What kind of trouble?”

The human’s mouth twisted slightly. “If I knew, I’d tell you now.”

His handler’s voice was soothing. “I have seen how you deal with the unfamiliar, Ruslan. You will have no trouble. But if you do, simply announce the nature of the difficulty. The information will be relayed to the appropriate personnel and your problem will be dealt with promptly.”

Kel’les’s patient, confident tone was reassuring. Climbing into the deuomd, Ruslan lay back against the cushioned interior. Engineered to accommodate travelers with far more outrageous physiognomies than his, it had no trouble molding itself against him. He felt better already. His weight activated the deuomd’s functions. There was a soft hiss as the cover began to slide from his feet toward his head. He spoke quickly but calmly before the lid could shut out the rest of the universe.

“If I do have trouble and declare it, what will be the likely response?”

“Your unit will analyze your observations and react accordingly.” The cover was nearly closed now. “Most likely you will be appropriately sedated and sleep through the remainder of the voyage.”

After that he could no longer hear Kel’les. It did not matter. The intermet had nothing else to tell him and he could think of nothing else to ask.

It was utterly silent within the deuomd. There was a surprising amount of space in which he could move around, doubtless because the wider triangle-shaped pelvis of the Myssari demanded it. He did not feel cramped. Whether he would feel the same way in another hour or so was a different matter. With all that had been going on, he had forgotten to ask how long the trip was going to take. Since no one had said anything to him about emerging for meals, or exercise, or voiding wastes, he assumed it would not take very long. No more than half a day, surely. Although it was all relative. The time that transpired inside the deuomd, inside the ship, might not be the same time that passed outside. So much depended on the skill of the cyborg pilot.

What would snapweft overflow feel like? He looked forward to possibly finding out with a mixture of awe and trepidation. Surely it was not potentially fatal or Kel’les would have so informed him. Unless his handler and the two scientists thought it better to keep certain information from their prize specimen.

There was a lurch. The ship starting out and away from Myssar orbit? he wondered. Or entering a distortion, an anomaly? Feeling nothing, he was suddenly disappointed.

An hour passed. In response to his verbal query, the flexible deuomd supplied diversions. Music, visuals, olfactory refractions: anything he could think of that he had learned from the Myssari. It was all very unextraordinary. The deuomd in which he lay was designed to promote sleep without the aid of drugs.

Somnolence was a state he was on the verge of entering when something stuck the dull blade of demand into his mind and he was cast outside himself. He remembered Kel’les’s words.

Overflow.

The snapweft was struggling with a current. Along with the other passengers who had remained awake, Ruslan found himself swimming hard to keep his consciousness from descending into madness.

The longer it lasted, the more he came to realize that he was overdramatizing. Focusing on regulating his breathing calmed him. No system of interstellar transport that regularly risked the sanity of those who utilized it would remain long in favor. That didn’t mean he was not unsettled.

He was receiving, or perceiving, a fraction of what the mechasymbiote pilot was sensing as he fought to utilize the outré physics that permitted travel between star systems. The more Ruslan tensed and twitched and grimaced and whined within the security of his deuomd, the more his respect for the unseen snapweft grew. Outside the spherical ship was a universe that was beautiful only in images. In person and up close its aberrations and contortions manifested themselves in shapes and sensations that ran the gamut from off-putting to nightmare.

What was the thing that brushed against the hurtling orb and left bits of its incomprehensible mentality clinging to those stretched out within? Shards of id, like strips of seaweed damp and chill, stuck to his mind until the snapweft lurched the ship leftward and a force to which Ruslan could not put a name brushed off the subconscious silt. Tendrils of another eldritch shape bigger than a star, but stretched so thin that the atoms of its being seemed stitched together only by lines of cooperating positrons, swallowed the ship. To Ruslan and the other travelers, it was less than a breath; to the snapweft, a mind-wrenching throb. Shrugging it off, the pilot pressed on, dodging and dancing, a juggler of lives and machinery and instrumentation. It was the ship and the ship was it.

Outside and beyond, stars and nebulae and blobs of unidentifiable matter and antimatter and far smaller things maintained their stately dance through the firmament, coldly indifferent to a minuscule sphere bearing tiny knots of sentience. So easy to vanish in that vastness, such a simple matter for beings that were less than nothing to disappear. Not out of maliciousness but from Nature’s deadly apathy did those who braved the gulf between star systems occasionally perish.

Finally Ruslan slept. Slept and dreamed and remembered. Even while trapped on a world of the dead and dying, his had been a childhood full of questioning hope. He had passed through adolescence and on into young adulthood while those around him, everyone he knew, had expired from the Aura Malignance. It was the speed that was so daunting, the absoluteness that was so appalling. There was no remedy, no vaccine, no escape. Walk, think, then shudder. Sometimes panic when realization set in. No time for much more as the cerebroneural connections failed. Eyes fluttering, people staggered, stopped, and toppled over. Usually individually, sometimes in groups, occasionally in rows. He remembered entire streets full of people collapsing like dominoes. No wonder a cure had never been found. Despite walls of redundant prophylactics cast up in attempts to protect them, the scientists and physicians who had tried desperately to find a cure for the apocalypse had perished before they could even understand what it was they were struggling to fight.

Gradually the streets had grown empty. Eventually even automated public transport stopped. As it had on every other human-occupied world, a stillness and silence descended on Seraboth that was quieter than the inside of his mind when he was sound asleep.

There had been an old man. Ruslan had encountered him decades ago while wandering the streets of his home city. Searching for others—hopefully at first, then reluctantly, and at last with only the most bitter resolve—found him with only corpses for company. Until the old man.

The slender elder, his clothing worn, his visage weathered, had not simply dropped dead like hundreds of thousands of others. Something in him, genetics or resolve, had kept him upright a while longer than was typical. When young Ruslan had come upon him, he was leaning against a wall, coughing and starting to slump. With a cry Ruslan had rushed to him, thrilled to find someone else, another human, alive. As he drew near, the man turned toward him. Shaking his head slowly, he bestowed a sad smile on the young man.