Terrence Holt - In the Valley of the Kings - Stories

The screens in front of me flicker faster now. The lights are flickering overhead. Some terrible event is coming. I sink to the chair, bow my head in misery until my forehead presses against the keys. They burn. I imagine the letters branding me, inscribing there the triumph of whatever makes the cold.

What have the cold and flickering written on me?

I open my eyes, a struggle against the ice forming on them, and in a dark reflection on the screen I see only a few red welts burned on the dead-white skin above the brow. They could be letters. W? Y? Is this my name? I do not recognize it. The face is not the one I know. The lights swoon. The screen, the face and the lights all rush toward me.

Light broke through glass, resolving into blocks of bright color: Environment, they said: Power, Communications and other words I did not know: Robotics, Geologic. Command I thought I understood, but as I reached for it the screen decayed into fragments, re-forming into Power: bars of colored light that wavered. Critical pulsed red everywhere. Time to Failure: 833991. As I watched, the one became a zero, then a nine, and the time to failure was 833989. I watched stupidly, wondering what increments of time these numbers measured. Whatever they were, I knew there would not be enough.

I backed out of the screen and found Environment: the ambient temperature displayed in large block figures was 251. I stared at it and it too changed. 250. There were other words: Power Diversion, which glowed brighter and dimmer, insisting on what I could not grasp. Storage Initiated 21481024113645. Time to Equilibrium: 45562. 45561. 45560. Equilibrium Temperature: 98.

I did not need to guess what all this meant: I could see it in the frost that rimed the screen.

The lights flickered, or I did: for an instant I was falling down a warm smooth surface, sunlight filling my eyes. The darkness was nearer now. My hand a clumsy paw, I tried to change the settings on the screen, but everything I touched slid away. The temperature continued to count down. I stabbed at Abort; I grabbed a bar marked Heat and dragged it up. At the bottom of the screen Warning began to flash beneath the bars for Carbon, Oxygen, Waste Processing, Lighting and still more impending failures I only dimly understood.

All around me in the air a faint note droned, a static wailing. I watched the numbers measuring Time to Failure for a long time, thinking dully that if I watched long enough they might reverse their descent. Then the cold overwhelmed me and I flickered into darkness.

IN THE DARKNESS, voices.

I heard —

— sunspots.

A voice.

— no voice.

I swear.

— not human.

PAIN ASCENDING INTO what must be me, I saw water pooling on a screen. My hand reached out and wiped it clear. It trickled slowly back. The screen shuddered under the water, and changed: Communications. Numbers rose or fell in no apparent order, charting the fortunes of strings of letters I knew could not be words. LOS, TROS/TDRS, OIRescue1. This last was blinking. I tried to make it do something, but it only blinked and counted. 940251,50,49. The wailing persisted, following me far down the corridor.

In the galley I found a frozen mass of gruel on the floor, beginning to thaw. As I stooped to pick up the bowl my vision dimmed, returning as the low orange light of a dying afternoon. It shone through clear water, shallow, ripples throwing shadows on white sand. A bolide shed sparks high in an evening sky, the sky just coming on to darkness above a mass of trees. The rusted edge of a spade cut into clay, the harsh crunch of it a rush of nausea that brought me back to myself crouched over a seeping mass of oatmeal.

I crouched, listening.

The scratchy wailing had followed me. It hovered at the edges of hearing then scaled higher, the sound no longer audible except as pain. Then swooping, and a sudden rush of wind abruptly broken off. Silence, then the note returned, a high, thin whine.

I listened, waiting for more.

But nothing more: just the rising and falling, sudden lapses into silence that deepened, until sound insinuated itself again. It followed me through the corridors. I fell onto the bed and before I could do more than pull the mound of clothes and blankets over me I slept again.

IN MY SLEEP the voices returned.

What did it —

— one knows.

What if it —

— couldn’t.

Was it —

— it failed.

I WOKE TO voices speaking quietly above my head. Over the persistent thin keening note one said:

What if it didn’t?

And the other:

— wouldn’t be going in.

I ran. When I reached the cubicle I struck out with my open hand, pain flaring as it hit the screen. It flickered into light: Communications. I watched my fingers reach for a switch. The wailing note hollowed out, seeming to embrace an emptiness I could not imagine, immense, expectant.

I tried to shape words, but none would come: only inarticulate croaking fell from high above me. Preening underneath a glossy wing, a crow looked up and suddenly took flight.

I remained. Empty, moaning quietly with the note that wailed up and up a scale that seemed to reach out infinitely high. It was me. I had been wailing.

A click.

I heard it again.

Suddenly I was expelling grotesque sounds, as if pieces of me were being ripped from deep inside.

Not human.

A different voice. I tried to speak: an anguished croak, strangling as it escaped.

— alive?

A long pause deep as grief.

No.

Then, slow with doubt:

I hope not.

Then silence. Except for me, weeping.

IN THE MORNING I awoke, agitated and empty, the sensation of weeping lingering in my chest. I tried to recall what had put it there.

I had heard voices.

Real ones?

The question struck me suddenly as funny. A laugh tore its way out, much as the sobs had earlier.

The lights flickered. In the burnished surface of the walls a ponderous shape turned slowly, showing a row of portholes, a ship sunk deep in dark water, settling. In one of the ports a light was burning. Then it was gone and only the wall remained, as blank as any wall.

I made my way to the galley, and as I made food for myself I discovered I could read. Not everything: some words escape me still. But this was a Radarange, by Toshiba. Inside the door I found instructions for its use.

The discovery excited me less than I might have expected. I remembered dimly struggling at a frost-covered screen. I had read words there as well. At the time, in the urgency of the cold, it had seemed I grappled not with words but the things themselves. Now, looking around me, I found words everywhere. And the flattened carcass of an animal that might have been a cat battened on by flies; a young woman whirling away on the wind; a dead calm sea with an oily sheen beneath a glaring sun. These things receded in flickering and nausea, leaving only distant wailing.

A voice struck the wailing silent.

It isn’t human .

God have mercy .

Yes have mercy .

The voices fell from everywhere at once. Perhaps, I told myself, this is the nature of hallucinations.

I listened for a long time, but there was only the wailing again, and a cascade of rustling as though dead leaves were blowing in the hall.

I looked: only the corridor receding into deeper shadow, the light flickering, and in the walls everywhere vague shapes were shifting, like frescoes long since painted over struggling to return. I shuddered, and as I did the shapes within the walls all shuddered too. The cold was coming back, the systems continuing their fall toward equilibrium. A wave flowed down the corridor, beckoning. The figures writhed.