Estimated oxygen time: 11:57:24
How strong is human habit, I thought after hearing Alex’s confession. All that determination, and still when I found him he was climbing that wall, ready to give up again.
“You still with us?” he asked the moment he was done, not letting the silence linger. “Or did my story bore you to death?”
“Still here,” I croaked. “Just surprised.”
“Surprised to find out what kind of person I am?”
“Surprised you could do that sort of thing. You remind me of her.”
“The future hostage?”
“Yes. The way you stay you.”
“God,” he said, and for the first time he sounded tired. “I wish that were true.”
Now he accepted the silence. I had settled by then into a comfortable numbness, watching the constellations, made of points of light both transient and static. But that wasn’t true, was it? All of it was moving, changing. It was just that some parts were changing faster than others.
“Yossi?”
“Hmm?”
“Can I ask you a question?”
“Sure.”
“Do you know her? Keren.”
“What does that mean? Of course.”
“I’m thinking about how surprised you were by my confession. By what I’ve done and haven’t done. Can you really say you know this girl? What she likes to eat, how she resolves an argument? What kind of face does she make in her sleep?”
I didn’t even know if she liked the porridge in jail; I thought she did. I remembered how she’d almost resolved one argument, though, charging forward with her fists clenched. “Maybe not. What’s your point, then? That I give this up? Because I might.”
“Not that you should give up. If you think you’re not going to die in the next hour, there’s more that you could do.”
“Like what?”
ֱHe sighed so deeply I felt his chest deflate. “ֱLook at our shadows, walking beside us. They don’t know where they are going, and they don’t know why. Maybe, if I were a shadow, I’d think that I was choosing where to go, even if it was the real person who was blocking the light that would decide. I could let go of my idea that I’m changing anything, and still keep moving.”
I looked sideways, at the shapeless blot of shadow and tried to understand what the hell Alex’s point was.
“Stop planning, he said, as if responding to my thoughts. “Stop trying to decide what should happen. Just… let things unfold, and trust that it will be alright.”
Why would anything be alright? “I’ve had a really shitty day, ok? I don’t want a pep talk.”
“Then what do you want?”
I want Vempress dead, I thought, but didn’t say. “I think you know.”
He was silent again. In front of us, the airlock was close enough to reflect the strobing light from the edges of the smaller crater. “Yeah,” he said finally. “I know.”
“Don’t you hate her?”
“I don’t. There’s only one person I’ve ever managed to hate, and it isn’t either of you. How can you hate someone who’s so desperately afraid?”
Another long silence. I’d asked him to kill before I knew what he’d been through, what he was trying to atone for, and he’d forgiven me for it. Now I’d asked him again, even though I knew what it would take from him.
He exhaled loudly, theatrically. “Fine. I’ll take care of it.”
“I understand if you’re mad.”
“Not mad either.”
“I don’t want her to kill you,” I whispered.
“At least we know what happens if she does.”
“What?”
“I die,” he said, and I heard the smile in his voice. It reminded me of someone but I didn’t remember whom. “Come on: lighten up, will you? The ride’s almost over. Try to enjoy what you have left.”
Enjoy the last hours of your life, bleeding in a sealed bag, barely awake. Waiting to die -no, waiting to be humiliated, toyed with and killed. Fuck you, Alex.
I closed my eyes. It was impossible to think of anything other than my final hour. I tried to remember Keren’s face, and our talks in the cafeteria, but everything seemed so far away, fading like a dream.
“What about you?” Alex asked. “Did you get a chance to confess?”
“What do I have to confess? Dear Pythia, I’m a fucking idiot. Always have been. The end,” I told Alex. “I’m tired, and I wish I could have done more.”
I did remember Keren then. I knew that she’d be angry at me for thinking about what was or should have been and ignoring this person who existed right here, right now, even though he’d soon be nothing but a dry corpse. This person who’d chosen to spend what little time he had left carrying me on his back. And what had I done? Asked him to spend his last hours killing.
“Are you really going to do it?” I asked him.
“I’ll do what needs doing,” he said, avoiding the harsh, specific terms like one avoids a thorny bush.
“Do you think it’ll actually work?” I sounded like an old man, helpless and confused.
“Some things will happen, one way or another, and after they do, someone will stand and judge if they worked or not. Close enough?”
I raised my head to look at the crater. What was left of the way seemed impossibly long, but I didn’t want to risk him being seen by Vempress if she was waiting there. It had been dangerous enough to take Alex so far, now that I thought about it. “Put me down,” I asked, and he lowered me gently to the ground. “You know, I finally figured it out. There’s no real meaning to anything we do out here. All of this would be wiped clean, and it doesn’t matter. We just pretend it does, because we’re afraid.”
“But that’s wrong, you idiot,” he said, and for the first time there was anger in his voice, admonishment.
“How?”
“You’re alive, you’re suffering, and that’s meaning. You feel sadness and joy, and those are real. There’s meaning wherever you go.” His voice deepened. More than the confession itself, these words were the song of his life. “You can’t go without it any more than an asteroid can go out of space—wherever you go, there’s meaning, even if that meaning is despair over what you think is a lack of meaning. Even if it’s suffering. Without meaning, this would have been nothing but cold rocks, starlight, and wet automatons going through their motions, and the consequences of their actions wouldn’t matter either way. But good and bad are real. You feel them in your bones. That’s all the meaning you need. Don’t give up yet.”
“What does that mean?”
He shrugged. “You’ll figure it out. Goodbye for now.”
“For now. Thanks, Alex.”
He batted a hand, as if blocking my compliment. “My pleasure.” He set off on his way, quickly, now that he could move unhindered.
The philosophy didn’t help, not really, but I wasn’t as afraid as I was before. Not as alone. Soon, I thought, and took one shaky step forward, marveling at how every single fiber of my being strobed with pain. I wondered what was going to happen next.
#
Estimated oxygen time: 11:52:12
I didn’t see her coming. I was staggering upwards towards the airlock when something came quickly from the side, snagging me suddenly and painfully upwards. I grabbed it - a taut ribbon of suit. I tried looking to the other end of it, but the world was spinning around me, and it’s not that seeing Vempress would have helped.
I slammed against the smaller crater’s floor like a slab of fake meat onto a cutting board. I managed to protect my visor with my good arm, and an electric numbness spread from my elbow to the rest of it. I lay on the ground for a moment, waiting to see if my breath would return. It did, in the form of a long, tired groan. The pain wasn’t as strong as before, as if my body had begun to realize that I wasn’t paying much attention to its messages anymore, and stopped trying. I rolled over.
I was right by the airlock. Standing on the rock across the metal hatch was David, a blade strapped to one side and the canister on the other. He looked at me for a moment, then broke away, guilt on his face. Beside him were two residents I’d never seen before—a man and a woman, standing on the toes of their boots in a display of compliance. They looked tired and greasy, as if they’d been out here for a while. One of them had Anaxagoras’s gloves on, but if they’d found weapons, they hadn’t brought them here. They gazed at the sky in awe. Neither Alex nor Vempress was in the airlock, but above us I could vaguely make out a silhouette against the stars.
Her voice, though, was clear. “Speak.”
I opened my mouth, but I didn’t know what it was that I was supposed to say. “I…”
“Residents of Last Day Town!” David called, clarifying my mistake ceremonially. I turned to him, as did the two residents, their expressions equal parts despair and hope. “Listen carefully, because I’m about to explain how you’re going to survive.” He pointed at the woman. “You, how long do you have left?” Despite the rude words, his tone was still soft and empathetic.
“Six and a half hours,” she said.
He pointed at the man. “And you?”
“Two hours, twenty-five minutes,” he said, in a voice that made it clear he didn’t quite believe what he was saying. “Please, you—”
“Quiet,” Vempress said, a hoarse voice from above. “Continue.”
David coughed. There was something different about him, the power at his back now, he was commanding, authoritative. Even if it weren’t for Vempress above them, I think they would listen to him just the same. “Every single person who has ever been thrown out here wanted one thing - more time. More oxygen. It’s a tragedy to be thrown out here, and it’s a tragedy to die out here. But it’s a much bigger tragedy to know that you could have done something to save yourself, and haven’t. When Vempress had first reached the Pit, as soon it was formed, she realized this. She was among the first here, and she put order to the chaos.”
The man looked at the side of his visor, then back at David. His mouth opened, then closed.
“Above anything else, Vempress wants to survive. But that doesn’t mean we cannot live well in her shadow,” David looked up for a moment, as if to see if his words pleased her. “If we serve her well, she’ll give us some of her oxygen so that we may live on and on and on. She’ll give us everything we need—food and water and shelter; even time to sleep.”
The man was fidgeting now, but he kept silent. David looked at his face, and a grimace passed across his own like a shadow.
“But if one of us were to get greedy and tried to betray her, there would be hell to pay. A punishment worse than death. As this man, will soon be made example of.”
David looked down at me, sorrow in his eyes, then up at her, and finally at the residents. He carried on, his voice unchanged. “You might be wondering why we’re recruiting you. Why there aren’t already people in your place, doing what I just told you that you would do. The answer is that this man,” he pointed down towards me, “tried to overthrow Vempress, to turn this into a place where everyone is equal.”
So did you.
David continued. “That is, equal enough to die the same futile death. If you met him, he might have told you about how things were before. Those are lies.” He said it so smoothly, so confidently, that even I, for a moment, thought he was speaking the truth. “Lies that he used to convince some of the residents to attack Vempress. Those residents are now dead.” He paused, to let the meaning of that sink in. “The Pit has always been like this, except for short bouts of chaos. But in the end, Vempress always restores order.” The new residents nodded warily, signaling that they were way beyond receptive to his message.
“Admit it,” Vempress commanded. This time she was clearly talking to me. I wanted to deny it, to tell the truth. But Vempress and David already knew the truth, and to the newcomers it wouldn’t matter either way. I thought of Keren cursing me as Vempress tortured her for days or weeks...
“It’s true.” My voice sounded like someone else’s; someone I hated and despised. “Everything he said is true.”
“Elaborate.”
“Last Day Town is just a story. I made it up.”
“Why?”
I knew that there was something she wanted to hear, but my mind wasn’t clear yet.
“Why?” She was still hidden, above, but her presence somehow intensified.
“I wanted to make a difference,” I spat, as if she’d knocked the words out of my mouth. “I wanted to be the one who decided how things would work, and I didn’t care what I’d have to do to get it.” Somehow, I managed to make this lie sound honest, even in my own ears.
“You really didn’t.” She said, pleasure thick in her voice “And now you’ll pay.”
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
The eyes of all three followed something from above me, right down to the horizon. I felt the gentle pressure of a jetpack exhaust against my suit as she landed beside me. I didn’t even turn to look.
She lifted me by the suit’s life support. She must have pulled with one arm, because the other held the blade just above my shoulder, so it entered my field of vision to my right. I tried to guess what would happen next. I knew that she wouldn’t let me breathe vacuum or slit my throat—that wouldn’t be enough for her. Not that it mattered. There was no hope for this body, regardless of oxygen supply.
The sound of the wrench screwing the bolts against the piping reverberated through my suit, surprising me. She wasn’t going to cut me open, I realized, because she’d found something worse to do.
My muscles tightened. If I moved forward, pushed my throat against the blade… My brain reeled with enabling lies—Keren might not even come here at all; she might be exonerate, or… Anything that would let me forfeit this punishment. But I didn’t dare move. I didn’t dare avoid my responsibility. I shook. My teeth clenched. Just do it; get it over with, I wanted to say, but my lips refused to move.
The metal shut off, a grave sound, and I began to suffocate. The air was fine at the start, but I couldn’t help hyperventilating. It became warmer, more humid. Less like clean air, more like waste, like exhaust, and every breath felt more and more like I wasn’t breathing at all, like I wasn’t taking it in. Each breath worse than the one before it. The feeling was not of my lungs bursting, but of pure panic—my lungs pumped faster and faster, but no matter how much air got in and out, I couldn’t breathe.
I regretted everything. I shouldn’t have tried to outsmart Vempress. I shouldn’t have tried to make anything better for Keren. I shouldn’t have visited Last Day Town with the hope of changing anything. I thought of Anaxagoras, of Pythia, of how ruthless it had once seemed to me to cut someone out of their suit. Now that fate seemed fortunate beyond belief. Fuck all of that—I reached for Vempress’s blade, to push it into my shoulder and be done with it, but it wasn’t there anymore.
I turned around, but she’d already retreated to a safe distance, leaving me to struggle. I lost balance, my legs getting in each other’s way, and started falling slowly. I barely felt it when I hit the rock.
I saw David there, terrified as if it were him that was about to be tortured. The woman, looking at me with horror, and the man beside her, detached and indifferent behind a glaring red color.
Wait: what red color?
It was coming from my visor. The oxygen meter showed zero hours, zero minutes, and zero seconds, which made no sense. Am I dead? No, you can’t think when you’re dead. Maybe I’d read it wrong; my vision had gotten blurry, after all. Something had happened to make my vision blurry, hadn’t it? Something was wrong with my lungs—they were pumping and pumping but I didn’t feel like I was breathing. Why wasn’t anyone helping me? I must have been punished for something. No reason to keep me alive in this state if I wasn't being punished for something. I grasped at memories: I’d failed someone; betrayed someone’s trust. I was ashamed of myself for betraying someone, but who? Someone flying, pretending to smile. Pretending she wasn’t afraid.
Keren? Was Keren choking me to death because I’d fucked everything up? Or was it Ayelet, finally taking revenge for how I’d ruined the beautiful life we were supposed to have together. I deserved it, either way. But Keren was still in jail, and Ayelet wasn’t going to be thrown out. Was she? I wish that I could see, but everything was black. None of it made sense. Reality didn’t make sense. I coughed, again and again.
Maybe Alex could kill her, whoever she was. He’d been trained for it—or was that another dream? That hoarse laughter, somewhere out there in the darkness. Rachel, maybe? I remembered asking her to kill, but was it me that she was supposed to shiv? If so, why hadn’t she done it already? Wherever she was, she must have been distracted, enjoying herself. If Alex came now, he could stab her with whatever he’d found, or even just beat her, or me— anything, just make this end...
Someone rolled me onto my belly, and I heard the beautiful, heavenly sound of metal sliding on metal as the wrench reconnected my oxygen back, bringing me back to life. My tired lungs brought in fresh, wonderful air. I barely had in me the strength to breathe, but every breath was sweet, and a feeling of pure, intoxicated joy filled me. My vision cleared, the black screen between me and the world dissolving.
My visor was covered in spittle, but I saw that the display had turned from red to violet. The numbers made sense again. Almost twelve hours. The pieces fell back into place—Vempress behind me, punishing me for the failed attempt to capture her, while giving the new Residents of Last Day Town a taste of what they had to look forward to, if they dared rebel.
I raised my head off the ground. The residents looked at me with horror. David wore the expression of a child trying to choke down tears. Good, I thought. He deserves to feel guilty.
“Speak,” she said, from above.
David swallowed. “What you just watched Vempress use is The Wrench, and it’s the tool that will let us survive here. If you tend to your duties well, Vempress will take away your used oxygen tanks and give you new ones. But oxygen doesn’t grow on trees, not out here– if we want it, we’ll have to take it. More accurately, make sure Vempress can take it—kill or incapacitate the newcomers that come through this airlock once every two hours, without any cuts in their suits. That’s all she asks of us, and in return she’ll take care of everything else.”
The two residents nodded. Their heels were touching the ground now.
“Ask the women their names,” Vempress said. “If her name is Keren, you leave her alive. For meֱ.” There was a smile in her voice again, a crooked expression, full of teeth. I shuddered. “Now lie still, so I can unscrew your oxygen again.”
“How many times are you going to do this?” The male newcomer asked.
“Vempress,” David corrected him. “How many times are you going to do this, Vempress?”
“Until the oxygen runs out,” she said. “Unless he dies first.”
“Please Vempress,” David cried, a hand reaching forward in plea. “We could use the time better.”
“Silence, Pythia. Tell me, Visitor, are you one of those people who pretend that they are immortal in some way, to try to distract themselves from how undeniably fucked they are? If you are, I suggest you start doing so now.”
I closed my eyes and waited, but nothing happened for ten shallow breaths, then twenty. I opened my eyes.
Alex descended from the plane in a great leap and landed in front of us, at the edge of the little crater. He stabbed the rock with a metal pole and brought himself to an accurate, decisive stop. The absolute fucking idiot: why didn’t he sneak up from behind? Why didn’t he just kill her? What’s he waiting for?
“Excuse me,” he said, panting with effort. The light of the airlock strobed white, and I saw his face for an instant, furrowed with worry, but also determined. “My name is Alex. A pleasure to finally meet you.”
She’d pulled me up to my knees, and stood behind me. Over my shoulder the blade peeked again, pointing absently in Alex’s direction. “I know you,” she said.
“We’ve actually met before,” he conceded, “though not as formally as I would have liked. We never got a chance to talk.”
“You were there, by the shuttle.”
“I was.” From this distance, I couldn’t tell if he was looking at her, or at me. “I was there when we tried to… dethrone you.”
“But you didn’t.”
“No. I ran away the moment it became clear you were going to win.”
“And you expect that to make us allies?” There was amusement in her voice, she was enjoying his defiance, just like she’d enjoyed mine. I didn’t like where this was going. Just kill her already.
“Hard to imagine, isn’t it?” He seemed too comfortable, too confident.
“What should I do, then?” she said, using that ancient trick again, trying to draw on uncertainty.
Alex didn’t squirm. “That’s not for me to decide. I can only do what I’ll do, and you will what you will.”
“You’re not afraid to die, is that it?”
“There are things I fear more.”
She hesitated. “Even if that’s true, I have no reason to kill you. And I need one more Resident,” she said, her words thick with her old purr. “You haven’t done anything. I forgive you.” The blade was still pointed right at him.
He tilted his head to one side, considering. “Oh, that is clever,” he said. “Forgiving me now, so that anyone trying to rebel will know that each of their comrades could betray them and still be forgiven by you, weakening overall trust. Nice. But I didn’t ask for forgiveness. It’s not yours to give.”
“Oh, isn’t it?”
“You’re not God.” His words had that ring again, of a deep truth being spoken.
I could almost feel her smiling in the silence behind me, even before she answered. “Out here I am.”
His gaze sharpened, and I could feel the culmination of all the knowledge he’d collected about her, from me, perhaps from David, and his own eyes, divining the words it would take to shake her out of her inhuman self-control, if only for a moment. “Gods don’t die.”
And it worked. The rage that coursed through Vempress’s body was so violent that I felt it seize both of us.
The entire world quieted in anticipation as he chose the right words. “And you’re going to die out here. Sooner or later, your time will come, just like it will for the rest of us.”
She threw me down, and for a moment I was relieved that she would leave me alone. Then I heard her working wrench with jerky movements. I took a breath, stretching my ribs so wide it hurt.
She dislodged the oxygen tank from my back, then used my damaged shoulder as a foothold and kicked me back, and everything went blank with the pain, like white lightning cutting through my body.
I came to an instant later and raised my head. She was halfway up the rise to Alex, blade in one hand, wrench in the other. Her battle cry echoed through my otherwise silent helmet—the awful silence as my life support stopped working. I kept the air in my lungs; my heart already beat like it was trying to punch its way out of my chest.
The only reason Alex wasn’t already dying was that she’d forgotten about the spear gun; that, in her rage, she wanted to strike him down, not shoot him from afar. Was that what he’d planned all along?
He raised one hand, not a combat maneuver but a gesture, as if urging an old friend to calm down and listen. She ignored it and swung the blade. I recognized the form of her swing—expertly lunging forward, pre-compensating for her target’s retreat. But Alex didn’t retreat; he just stood there; his hand held up to be sliced open; the one thing she hadn’t expected him to do: nothing. Her swing was too wild to stop, and the blow that was supposed to nick his suit sliced into his arm, all the way to the bone.
He didn’t move, aside from the stutter of the impact. All was quiet except the air escaping through the narrow space between the blade and the edge of the tear. There was no blood; the hypercooled metal had frozen it into place. The blade must have cut all the way to the bone. How stoic, how impossibly heroic, to remain sile -
He screamed, primal and wordless, voicing pain and injustice and cruel futility.
Vempress tried to pull back the blade, but it was lodged in the frozen mass of flesh and blood of what used to be his arm. He raised the other one and struck the brittle metal with a closed fist, breaking the weapon into fragments. She cried out and pulled back the handle, only a lone metal shard sticking out of it now. She screamed, almost as he had, and thrust the broken sword into his chest. His scream turned into an exhausted moan, and he gripped both of her hands, even with a piece of grey metal jutting out of one of his forearms.
“Pythia!” she barked, and twisted the weapon lodged inside Alex’s flesh, his grip too weak to stop her. A spray of red droplets burst out of the hole, and Alex whimpered.
The Residents watched, confused, as David pulled himself to the edge of the crater, where Alex and Vempress stood in their deadly embrace. When he reached them, still crawling, he froze.
“Get him off!” Vempress commanded, her voice like the crack of a whip, but still David didn’t move, his blade clasped impotently at his side.
Alex turned to him and said, quietly, “Today, please.” Only then did I realize why they’d spoken behind my back. Oh, you clever bastards.
Vempress threw a confused glance at David, who finally moved. His teeth were clenched so hard that muscles flexed all the way from his jaw to his temple. His eyes were wide open, as if he was preparing to endure great pain. His hand closed around the speargun that was tied to her with a band, while the other unclasped the blade at his side and cut the band. She shrieked at him as he took her weapons, as if he had torn away her bag, leaving her helpless and exposed, and he threw the speargun at my direction. It fell halfway between me and them, and I started falling toward it.
He released the torch and let it drop beside him, but as he grabbed the wrench, she grabbed it too, with one hand. She must have managed to get one hand loose.
The three of them struggled but she gripped the tool so hard, even with one hand, that he could not pull it away. With a violence I hadn’t thought he was capable of, David rose off the ground and placed both of his boots against the woman, pulling the tool away. After a moment he fell onto his back, victory in his hands. His expressions changed too quickly for me to decipher, my vision obscured.
She looked down at him as he fell, then to the controls, as she tried controlling the jet with her free arm, the one opposite the interface. A man was holding one arm closer to the controls, and his face was frozen. Mummified? Still, he looked at me, his face an odd mask of mixed suffering and acceptance, regretting nothing. Saved. Her expression was the opposite, and they seemed like they were one creature; like a two-headed god. Then the other man, what was his name? looked at me, and begged me not to do something. But what?
There was a speargun in my hands, and I was pointing it right at her. First of all, dispose of the threat. One man moved out of the way, the other couldn’t be hurt anymore. She looked at me with such hate that it might have stopped me if I had literally anything to lose. I pulled the trigger, felt the powerful spring strain my good shoulder and the spear shot out right at her. I thought I’d missed until I noticed the dust swirling around them as she began rising into space along with her human-made manacle.
She’s leaking, I celebrated. I killed her. Then I noticed the loose pipe in the jetpack, spewing its content uncontrollably. I hadn’t hit the suit, but one of the jetpack’s pipes. Dammit. They gained speed and height, Vempress and Alex, those were their names, revolving, until they were too fast and far to return. We all watched them until they shrank into nothingness. I thought, strangely, that wherever they were going, they were bound to at least have one final, interesting conversation.
The man stood there with the tools in his hand and looked at me, obviously unsure what he was supposed to do next. I remembered thinking that he’d had a plan. Even through the fog closing on my mind, I could piece together what needed to be done.
“Torch,” I gasped, voiceless. “Wrench.”
He was confused. “But, you can’t reconnect your own oxygen…”
“Now!”
He threw them at me, and I managed to catch them, fumbling in the advancing darkness. I held the weapon in one hand, the life-stealing tool in the other.
I couldn’t let that thing exist. If it did, Vempress, yes, that was her name, Vempress could keep taking oxygen from anyone. Where is she? How did I get The Wrench? It didn’t matter now. Fuck her and her damned immortality.
“Are we going to steal oxygen for you now?” a woman said, her voice dry. I looked around at the residents, trying to find the voice. One seemed subdued, an expression of humiliated acceptance; another’s face was keen, focused; the third seemed devastated by sorrow. All flinched when I looked at them. Why was it so hard to focus my eyes? I felt like I was going to pass out, and I couldn’t afford that.
I gazed at the tools in my hands. Without the tools of power, there could be no King. And that is who I will allow myself to become if the blue-eyed man connected my oxygen. A liar, a manipulator, doing anything to have some control, no matter how much suffering it caused others. I saw the future clearly, how using the tool once meant using it again, and again, until we became exactly what we tried to kill…
I flicked the trigger on the torch, feeling the gentle thrust of the little white flame, and brought the wrench against it. Only the now exists, and in this moment, I am the most noble, the most beautiful that I can be. This is my legacy. It started changing colors, and the plastic bent and melted, quickly losing all form. I found the speargun laying at my feet, and did the same to it. I threw the torch as high as I could, still on, and the flame pushed it, spun it farther and farther away.
Why was it so hard to think? The oxygen, I finally remembered. I need to reconnect my oxygen. I looked at the deformed lump that had once been the wrench, and realized.
Oh.
A woman cried out in grief. Yael? Keren? Ayelet? None of them were here. I looked at the Residents, howling despair and rage at what I’d done to them, some trying to fall to their knees but floating in space, curled up into balls. Horrible guilt shone in a man’s blue, compassionate eyes. They’re going to remember this. Remember me.
I hadn’t thought about what I’d take from them by succeeding here, and I was taken aback by their grief.
Funny. Despite everything that had happened here, I hadn’t found the time to grieve. But this was the last chance – all I’d wanted to do was fix the damage I’d done. Did I even do that?
Was it all going to be better? If she came here, and she suffered and died, like many other dozens over many other days, would that count? They’d choke, or if their friends weren’t cowards, they’d have someone kill them before they went mad as their life-support collapsed. You can’t change anything.
I laughed, a long laugh that turned into a long, painful cough, as my lungs tried to push out an obstacle that wasn’t there. In the darkness, one of them came closer, warily, and I reached out to him with a fumbling hand. When he took it in his, I felt a sense of gratitude I hadn’t known was possible.
It became darker still; my vision diminished to a pinpoint. Within that pinpoint, everything was lit with the colors of precious metals. I looked up and saw something gold and silver passing far above us, gleaming in the darkness. I almost remembered what it was.
Swifts flying in the sunset? No, Tsur, lounging in front of the living room screen, watching swifts in flight in an old Earth documentary. He is becoming so much like his old man, isn’t he? “Listen,” I say, and I tell him everything, everything that I have to say, though I can’t remember what it is even as I’m saying it.
He is gone now, and the beautiful light is gone too. All around me are faces, their expressions grave in that shadow of that twinkling, dying light.
Now, as they hold my hands, they are cutting me out of my suit.