The Other Side of Far Away (part one) ***** His heart skips a beat and catches the rebound. He gasps, jerks once—as if to break a fall—and settles, after only a moment, into the humid warmth of his own sweat on bed-sheets and a cover thrown askew and knotted around the bare, sweat-slick flesh of his ankles. It is 2am by Darrow Larkin’s subjective reckoning, but the darkness around him is foreign and impenetrable. It is heavy with foreign sounds: the subjective, metabolic thumps, whispers and hums of a very foreign place. Shaken and cold with evaporating sweat, he rakes tousled hair from his brow, and searches the darkness for signs of his own life. He is far from home. The darkness belongs to a stranger. The bedding lacks the comfort of familiar scent. Jarus and Amelia are not with him, breathing heavily in the narcotic clasp of deep and untroubled sleep. He is alone. Utterly. Remnants of the troubling dream cling to him, and each eye-blink echoes the presence of grinning Nemaeans, their teeth like serrated obsidian daggers and eyes like boiling globs of lethal and amoebic quicksilver. The image fades, unraveling itself between half-thoughts and sensory impressions tangled in a complex and senseless muddle. The Nemaeans, as he’d dreamed them, spoke in a language he didn’t understand; they called it Russian, but he’d never heard Russian people talk like that. They showed him impossible things. It rains on Nemaean vessels! The moons of Mars are smaller than these ships! Each of those unwelcome thoughts triggers a deeper recall of the dream, and its singular, troubling source. “My name is Oleg,” the pilot-diplomat said, when Darrow first came on board. He wore pale skin. His eyes were the color of his hair; his hair was like midnight, shaded—oh, so faintly—with a dusting of cinnamon, a dusting of chocolate. He was young: a teenager, as Darrow judged him. Oleg. He recognized the name. Its pronunciation—Ahl-YEK—muddled his expectations of its spelling, and thus any real grasp of the name itself and the dark-haired/pale-skinned boy it belonged to. “I am your guide,” Oleg said, in spooky, flawless Centralist Standard. He spoke without the sonorous and glutinous accent Darrow had expected. “Welcome to the Nemaean Territories,” he said, and there was earnest sincerity in his voice. It seemed—at least in that moment—as if he truly enjoyed the prospect of extending hospitality to a Centralist, a consumer-citizen of the Earth-Allied Corporate Governments. “Thank you, Oleg; I hope that our meeting and our negotiations are mutually beneficial.” Oleg smiled, as if he believed what he’d heard. But something in his posture and in the depths of his dark, dark eyes spoke differently: as if he’d just heard—and recognized—a lie. “You speak on behalf of your political party? Maklan, McIntosh, and Craye?” Darrow nodded. “I speak on behalf of Maklan, McIntosh, and Cray, and for myself as well. The Nemaean Government has afforded me an honor in allowing me to render my services in the name of diplomatic exchange and—hopefully—deeper understanding.” “You volunteered to come here? So far from home?” “Yes.” “You are not afraid of us?” “Should I be?” “I hope not.” And again, that horrible, predatory sincerity marked Oleg’s words. He skewered Darrow with a long and unblinking gaze. A dozen negotiators and their aides had debarked from the shuttle. A dozen Nemaeans greeted them and a dozen more stood around the periphery of the monstrous landing bay. Members of the Frontier Guard, if Darrow recognized their black uniforms…members of the Cloister, as well, if those black, priest-cassocks were any indication. Oleg, however, wore the gray tunic and pants of a pilot-diplomat. His feet pointed into soft, gray boots. He wore the marks of web-ware just beneath his skin, and Darrow saw the spider-silk traceries, like quasi-metallic veins in the colors of silver and mother-of-pearl. “Your quarters,” Oleg said, “are this way.” It took only a few minutes (by train) to reach his quarters: a full suite of rooms, as well-appointed as any Centralist penthouse. He wondered where—on this leviathan ship—Oleg lived. He wondered how much of this ship—this world with engines—he might get to see. The prospect was exciting… …and more than a little daunting. Oleg’s eyes, for as friendly as he seemed, were terrifying. So dark and predatory! So invasive! * * * “You said yes?” Amelia asked, over a dry Martini and two skewered olives. “I said yes,” Darrow confirmed. They’d met for lunch at the quiet expense of Amelia’s favorite restaurant. It had been Darrow’s idea and Amelia immediately knew that something was wrong. It soured her mood; it drove her through one Martini as a warm-up for the second. And now, in soft and expensive lighting, Amelia pinched her lips together as if she’d just taken something sour onto her tongue. “Why?” “It’s a rare opportunity. If I pass this up, another might not come. I’m under scrutiny,” Ami…there are a million other historical continuity managers out there, and they’re all willing to kill for this chance.” Amelia smirked. “The chance to advance their careers, or to flirt with insanity?” “The chance to do something that matters.” “You don’t have to go to Nemaea just to prove that you’ve got balls. You don’t have to board one of those god-awful ships and deal with whatever it is the Nemaeans will, undoubtedly, put into your head.” “You make it sound like they’re monsters, Ami.” “They are monsters, Darrow. You know that as well as I do.” “Ami—” —“They nuked Earth. They nuked Luna. They evaporated Pluto and a dozen Kuiper sub-planets.” “That was a long time ago.” “And you think that makes a difference?” “They want to talk,” Darrow said behind a nip of his own frothy brew. “They may want to trade.” “They’re as afraid of us as we are of them…more, maybe. Talking isn’t their interest, Darrow. They want something else.” Silence. He’d been through this with her: once, twice, three times before. It was the same argument, the same sick, combative dance. “I’ve already said yes,” Darrow said, after a long, long pause. “The ball is in motion.” “And there’s nothing to keep you here?” “I’ll only be gone for a week, and out of that week, I’ll be on board a Nemaean ship for three days. That’s it.” “Three days,” Amelia said. “That’s it.” “And who will you be, Darrow, when you get back?” He shrugged. “I’ll be the guy that you love; my career will advance, and I’ll have more money to spend on you.” “Yeah?” Amelia asked, twirling olives in a bath of vodka and dry vermouth. “Yeah,” Darrow said. “I promise.” “I don’t care about the money, Darrow, or the prestige; I just want you to be the one who comes back, and not some stranger wearing your body.” * * * “It must be boring,” Oleg says, “to sit and listen to the endless prattle of diplomats.” Darrow shrugs. “It isn’t so bad,” he says. “But do you really care?” “I work in the interest of history…the future; what I record, the accounts I provide, will help future shareholder-citizens to understand their own lives in a broader context.” They are seated in a bar on Obedskaya Prospekt: one of the longer, wider onboard streets. It is a loud and vibrant, traffic-clogged corridor, bordered on either side by restaurants and bars, boutiques, salons, and strange businesses of alien, arcane pedigree. The bar—a place called Three Golden Flies is a boggling nightmare of shadows and complicated, industrial textures. It is—Darrow thinks—like the deep and intimate workings of a starship’s engine core; it is not a comfortable place, by Core World standards, not the sort of place where drinks should be served. And yet… He has spent the day listening to polite, diplomatic bickering. And now, he unwinds, at Oleg’s invitation, in the bowels of a starship larger than either of the moons of Mars. There is music here: something jarring and atonal, abstract and amorphous. It is a shock to Darrow’s senses, a thing he cannot understand. It is a croon as Oleg defines this particular style of song, though Darrow hears it as a complicated primal scream back by metal-saws, drums, and the sloshing, whistling sigh of a cardiac ultrasound. Music. The Nemaean people are inscrutable, nightmare monsters if this aesthetic defines some intimate aspect of their mass psyche. They like this stuff? Darrow wonders. They understand it? “And what will you say to history?” Oleg asks. “The same thing any other historian might say: this is who we are. This is what we’ve done.” An expression of brow-knitting confusion masks Oleg’s disturbingly youthful features. “You’re a continuity editor,” he says. “This is the same as a historian?” “Yes.” Oleg laughs and takes a sip of his dark, frothy brew. “This is not the Nemaean way of seeing things.” Darrow smiles. “I know,” he says, and sips his own beer: a ship-local specialty, as Oleg defines it: brewed three decks down, where hops are grown, where farmers tend to ship-adapted fields of gene-tweaked grain. There are whole forests down there as well: birch trees and oaks, poplars, and shaggy, moppish willows. There are rivers. There are lakes. There are things with no business on a spaceship, but spaceship is such an imprecise term, when it comes to describing the whale-gray leviathans so common to the Nemaean interstellar realm. Some ships, Oleg says, contain deserts, but those ships—he says—don’t serve diplomatic functions. There is a strange and inscrutable logic to what Oleg has said, but Darrow cannot actually define it. “I want to show you something,” Oleg says. “May I?” “It all depends,” Darrow answers, evasively—of course—but with as much casual ease as he can manage. Oleg shrugs. “It is not sensitive,” he says. “But I think it is important for you.” “Important…?” Darrow asks. “Yes.” Another sip of beer, and then, Oleg sits back. “By your own account, you are concerned with what you will say to the future. I cannot tell you what to say, or how to say it, but I know that Nemaea is something alien and dark for you. I don’t mind this, but I think it is only right for you to see something that only a Nemaean could show you…because maybe you can help your people to understand us in a way that makes us less terrifying.” Darrow shrugs. “Okay,” he says. “But in all honesty, I’m not sure that Nemaeans are seen as such a monstrous terror…not anymore. It’s been a long, long time since the war; scarcely anyone remembers it.” “But,” Oleg said. “We nuked Earth. We nuked Luna. We evaporated Pluto and a dozen Kuiper sub-planets.” The words are a chilling echo of words he’s heard before. Back there. Far, far away. Oleg should not know them, should not have been able to speak them in the haunting, haunted tone of voice he’s just managed. “My wife said those exact words,” Darrow said. Oleg nodded. “Yes. I know.” “You know?” “Yes,” Oleg said, as if revealing trivial, common knowledge. “You dream loudly. Everyone on this ship can hear you, even when we are not listening.” Something wet and cold spills from the root of Darrow’s brain: it is dark, cloying, and utterly uncomfortable. Fear is a word that can scarcely encompass even a fraction of what it is. Words. There are no words. Nothing Darrow can grasp or make to describe what his body knows in this precise, unending moment. It is a feeling, Darrow thinks, like death…like the epiphany at the end of a snake’s venomous bite, that the world, the universe is something else, and that any man with mates and accomplishments is…nothing in comparison to that. Oleg, standing just barely beyond his own teenage years, has just spoken of dreams he shouldn’t know. He has heard them, and so he knows Amelia, he knows Jarus. He knows Darrow in ways that no one should. From the inside. And now, submerged in the atonal sea of crooning dissonant music, Darrow sinks into the knowledge that everyone in this bar sleeps with him, in the darkness. They are the darkness…listening to him: whether they want to or not. Listening… …listening. “Please,” Oleg says, quietly, and as if wounded. “Let me show you something. I think you need to see it. I think,” he pauses, as if in search of the right words, and Darrow wonders at the emotions flashing in the depths of his eyes. His brow, Darrow sees, knits in consternation and something, inarticulate and feral, masks his face, twitching through muscles and reddening a blush across his cheeks. “I think,” he says again. “That you need to see it, to understand it.” Darrow nods, numbly. For a long moment, there is silence between them, and Darrow steals a sip of his brew to hide the tremble dancing through his hands. It is a useless gesture. His hands don’t know how to lie, how to bluff, how to hide their own, sudden trembles. But he takes a sip of cool, bitter beer as best he can and places the mug squarely on the table. “Okay,” Darrow says, seeing no other way out of this. He wants to return to his quarters and pack his bags. He wants to return to his own ship: the diplomatic cruiser over a mile in length, moving through space, just beyond the hull of this massive, nightmarish monstrosity of a ship. He wants the mission to end, to be over. He wants to return home: Now. But he cannot. Not yet. Like it or not, he must see the thing Oleg wants to show him. Oleg reaches across an expanse of table space and clasps his trembling hand. His touch is warm; his skin is incredibly soft, incredibly human, and for a moment—though no longer—it feels right. When Jarus clasps his hand in this way, it is a comfort, and in Oleg’s skillful copying of the gesture, Darrow knows that he has taken that right out of his mind and uses it. “Please,” Oleg says. “Don’t be afraid of me. Don’t be afraid of anyone on this ship. We are not monsters. Please,” and here, Oleg’s voice grows heavy and tortured, as if the urge to cry is locked deep within the hollow of his throat. His eyes spark with naked entreaty. “I will not demand that you trust me,” he says. “But I want you to.” Darrow can say nothing to that, and so he closes his eyes and nods. It is all he can do. …to be continued… ** ** ** Part two (the conclusion) of this tale will come up tomorrow. I’d like to send a heart-felt thank you to NefariousDrO for creating the Nemaean ships you see in the image accompanying this text. He’s good with starship renders in general, and he has a particular feel for Nemaea; that’s always a good thing. Hopefully you’ve enjoyed part one of this tale and as always, thank you for viewing, reading, and commenting.