Том Светерлич - The Gone World

Marian crossed this river , she remembered, and I crossed the river with Hyldekrugger. But the pathway of trees hadn’t appeared for her, and there was no tree fording the river. Shannon Moss climbed from this river, the echo , she thought, just before Cobb beat her to death.

She approached the river, toed the bank. The swift water broke against boulders into white water, misting her with river spray. She could make it across, though, maybe. There were enough stones in the water, sharper rocks jutting above the rapids; they could be stepping-stones, she thought.

You’ll die, Shannon . You’ll get hypothermia in that water, with no place to dry off, with the air so cold. You’ll die.

But she scrabbled down the snow-covered bank, gauging her distance to the nearest rock, a few feet ahead. She stepped wide across the river onto the rock and found her footing, trusting her weight to her prosthetic leg. The wind ripped at her, and she shivered. The next rock was closer, with a wide flat section she could land on. She gathered herself, took another step, but her prosthetic knee joint gave when she needed it to lock, and she slipped and fell, gashing her head against the jagged stone before the current carried her under. Her entire body felt lacerated by the cold water, and her lungs constricted in the frigid rush; she couldn’t breathe. She was submerged, and she flailed in desperation; her hands groped, scraping against rocks, but she couldn’t find purchase. The river carried her. She reached above the water, and her fingers touched smooth wood. She grabbed for it, caught herself, held fast to the branch, and pulled her head above water, gasping. She heaved herself from the river, scrambling onto the felled tree, the bridge. She had found the Vardogger, and she hugged it, lying on her chest. Her clothes were soaked with river water, fast becoming a shell of ice. She had to warm up somehow, or she would die.

The wind battered her. Her fingers were numb, her toes. I don’t know what to do. Take off the wet clothes? I’d freeze. But I’ll freeze with them on. The Vardogger trees ahead of her were like an illusion of forced perspective, each tree along the path slightly smaller than the preceding, until the farthest tree was only a point of white almost lost against the snow. If I die, I’d rather slide back into the river to drown than just freeze to death here on this tree.

The river was inviting—she could still slip in. I shouldn’t have climbed out , she thought, and imagined being swept away as peaceful, like falling asleep somewhere familiar after being gone so long. She looked around her, taking in the world a final time, everything reduced to monochromatic shades, white trees, white snow, black water, evergreens turned the color of charcoal in the dim light. Only the blot of orange retained vital color. A body, in orange. In the distance by the tree line. She had seen the orange with Hyldekrugger, was seeing the orange again now—a thin space . Over the years as she adjusted to the confusion of the accident that had cost her leg, Moss had considered the woman in orange as something like a crack in her psyche that needed to be repressed, and so she rarely thought about the woman but dreamed of her often. Strange dreams where they interacted, traded places, back to the way things were supposed to have been. And now she knew that this woman in orange was Shannon Moss, that when she was pulled from her midair crucifixion, when she was boarded onto the Quad-lander, the pilots were different men from those she remembered. There had been so many small differences from one life to another, but she’d experienced such trauma that she’d rationalized these changes. Now she knew: she realized now that when she was saved, she’d been pulled into this woman’s life, this woman in orange.

She struggled against the wind, back toward the clearing. She followed the Vardogger path to the line of evergreens, to the body in orange. The orange space suit was a modified Extravehicular Mobility Unit, the orange the color for trainees. She brushed away snow that had accumulated on the body, flipped the body over, and saw her own face through the visor. A younger face, twenty years younger. Moss cried huge tearless sobs seeing this young woman. A child, still just a child. Remembering herself, her own face so changed, imagining her own life cut short at this early age.

“I’m sorry,” said Moss. “I’m sorry but I have to do this.”

She unlocked the connection between the orange suit’s torso assembly and pants, pulled off the woman’s boots.

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” she said, sliding the woman from the pants, from the torso assembly and sleeves. The woman’s long johns were dry. Moss stripped her, allowing herself only a single glance at the young woman’s legs. She pulled off her ice-encrusted clothes and traded them for the dry clothes, thick pants and boots. Putting on these suits was always an ordeal, much easier with another person’s help, but Moss managed alone. NSC’s designs had been modified from the suits NASA used, had been slimmed down. The torso assembly would be difficult. Usually she would have used a harness that held the suit in place while she stepped into it, but here she had to crawl inside, extending her arms through the sleeves. She locked the helmet into place, latched the buckles around her torso. Warmth returned immediately, thawing her. She sat beneath the pine boughs, shivering while she warmed. Numb and sluggish, but the feeling returned to her extremities, warmth spreading outward. The naked body of Shannon Moss lay supine, pillowed on a drift of snow. The suit’s dosimeter was black. This woman had died of radiation exposure, the QTNs. She was beautiful , thought Moss, in the way people realize about themselves twenty years too late. Her golden hair outspread, snowflakes settling on the surface of her blue eyes, snow accumulating over her skin. Moss watched the snow, and by the time she was warm enough to stand and move, the snow had buried this other body.

She followed the path of trees, but the trees themselves were repellent. She struggled against the wrongness of this place. She had no plan; even assuming she could relocate Libra by following the Vardogger path, she didn’t know what she would do. Remarque had been trying to spark a cascade failure, a catastrophic collapse in Libra ’s B-L drive that would have destroyed the ship and everyone on it—but B-L drives were designed with a series of fail-safes, nothing Moss knew how to overcome. And she didn’t have her sidearm or a weapon of any kind to defend herself during the mutiny, if indeed she found mutiny. The hanged men wailed as she crossed the felled tree. Mursult’s letter to Durr had warned against straying from the Vardogger path, and as she glanced to either side of her, seeing snowy fields and distant trees, the temptation was to veer from the path to escape this Terminal chaos and the abhorrent repeating trees. Moss didn’t believe in God, but she increasingly believed in hell—and farther away in the distance she saw that the air had crystallized and that what she’d taken for mountains were clashing floes of ice, and she thought that despite their abstract beauty this might indeed be perdition.

There was a man in the path, ahead of her, shambling. She glimpsed him, his gray silhouette veiled by snow, but recognized him as Hyldekrugger only as she neared. His coat and the blankets he’d draped himself with were scattered across the ice, blown about by the wind; he had taken off his shirt, and his skin was burned red-violet and black with dead flesh. He scratched at his chest, drawing thin lines of silvery blood. His lips were silver, and some silver had dribbled down his chin, wetting his ruddy beard.