The Other Side of Far Away (conclusion) **** “I envy you,” Jarus said, on the day before Darrow’s departure. “Nemaea…the other side: not everyone gets the chance to go there.” Darrow smiled. “You’d go there, given the chance?” Jarus nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “Just to see one of their ships; they’re alive, you know…cybernetic-hybrid organisms. It takes a pretty remarkable bunch of people to embrace something like that. We could, I suppose, but we just don’t want to; we have our reasons: valid ones…good ones. The Nemaean’s though…they’re different. Loopy. Strange. It’s why we don’t get along, ultimately; they buy into a different mindset, different ethics, and they’re just stubborn enough to say screw you to us. I’d pay to do what you’re doing, though. I’d pay, gladly.” And now, Darrow walks the length of a short corridor with Oleg at his side; they are miles away from the bar, the darkness, and the disturbing music. It is quiet here, and dark in a different sort of way. The walls are mottled with some odd, translucent material. Green light shines from behind it, and something moves within that light. Darrow thinks of lampreys and squids: nightmare things, if their diffuse shadows are any indication. The deck is dark and polished to a high sheen. It feels, Darrow thinks, as if he walks—beside Oleg—through the innards of some massive and mysterious machine. The shadow-things on the other side of the light-mottled wall press against it—here and there—like blind things in the strangest of aquariums. They have passed others on the way here: men and women by their common appearance, but aliens to Darrow, as he glanced at their faces and wondered what they thought, and how it might have been possible for them to hear his dreams, as Oleg indicated that they did. Some of them—young ones, mostly—acknowledged Oleg with friendly bobs of the head, cryptic hand-gestures, smiles. They’d taken a tram from the bar to this region of the ship, and other passengers stared, some with open curiosity; others wore inscrutable expressions: belligerence, Darrow thought, and something else as well… Now, alone with Oleg, he approached the massive barrier of closed doors, hewn from the same material as the walls. They were dark and four times the height of a very tall man. They were the doors of a cathedral, a pagan temple of massive proportions: doors, Darrow thought, for the inhabitants of Atlantis, Thule, or mythic Valhala, and centered on each, the Lion of Nemaea, stylized and rampant, his fanciful claws curved and golden. “Outsiders,” Oleg says quietly, “do not see this place. It is no secret; I can show you, but few other Centralists even know such a place exists.” * * * It is a vast, oblate chamber, larger than a stadium. Larger than a shuttle-bay. It is dim…stygian. The slate-gray floor is dotted here, there, and there with islands of light thrown down from some unfathomable height. Darrow reels in the throes of sudden vertigo, as if Oleg has led him to the lip of a precipice and nothing but hard interstellar vacuum looms ahead and around him. The air is cool and dry. Crisp. Darrow cannot find the sides of the room, nor its ceiling; but the front consists of a vast splatter of stars and the baleful, clotted, dusty smear of an emission nebula, glaring with stars locked in its gut. Vast and ragged gouts of black, light-absorbing dust obscure the roiling, turbulent glow, like islands in the strangest of seas. They are dark matter clouds, cold: a halo of dark nebulae, locked in some kind of complex gravitational dance with the glaring, baleful monstrosity beyond. The room is not open as the sprawling, awesome vista implies; it exists as any viewing arena might, behind a transparent, polarized wall, a holo-screen, or a 2D projection of stunning clarity. Darrow recognizes the glowering stellar nursery: the Scythian Nebula. There are hundreds of people in this chamber, men: pale men and dark men—Darrow sees—in all of the shades of humanity. They were worshippers or some sort, Darrow thinks, motionless and held rapt by something only they can see. It is not the sight that shocks Darrow as much as the sound. The air is heavy with a complex, polyphonic, throat-singer’s hum that recalls the poetry of thunder. It is a human sound: hundreds of voices weaving an abstract chant in the nebula-colored darkness. “Bratik,” Oleg says. Darrow recognizes the word. Brothers. “Your brothers?” “Some of them.” “What are they doing?” “They are singing. They are the voice of this ship. They are singing to the others.” “The other ships?” “Yes.” Darrow remembers the approach: two Core System diplomatic carriers maneuvering into rendezvous with three Nemaean medium cruisers. It is common to find triads of such ships, nosing through the interstellar depths in close formation, like a pod of whales, or the galaxy’s strangest angels of death. There are theories as to why three leviathan vessels might always fly together, but none of those theories seems to hold water. There is no recognizable logic to such behavior, and now—standing in the most unexpected of rooms—Darrow tries to make sense of what Oleg has just said. These men are singing to the other two ships in formation. “I don’t understand.” “This ship. He is alive. He sings to his mates.” Oleg nods toward a cluster of men, all poised as if frozen, their mouths open, their eyes closed. “They are his voice. Our ships are like we are; when they sing together, they are not so lonely.” Oleg smiles, faintly, and the expression—in the dim, baleful light, is a fragile thing, Darrow sees: earnest and shy. He is, Darrow thinks, a boy sharing the most cherished of his secrets. “This,” Oleg says, “is what I wanted to show you. I don’t know how to say what this is, or what it means, but it is who we are. Nemaeans. I know that there was war between us: I know The Widow’s Year, but I was not born during that time. There is a lot for you to hate about us, and a lot for us to hate about you. But you are here now, and you say that you want to make an account of something for the future…for history. “I want to do the same thing, Darrow, and so I show you this. Maybe you can think something good about this, or maybe not, but now, you have seen it. You will return home, on the day after tomorrow, and when you do, you will return to your mates, your life, and the other parts of your job. I will remain here. On this ship. But maybe, when you go back, and you are with your mates, you can go to an observatory and show them the whole stretch of the Nemaean Interstellar Territories and tell them how today you learned that our ships sing to each other so that they are not so lonely.” Oleg shrugs. “There is more, Darrow. Some of it is good, and some of it is not so good, but this does not matter. I wanted to show you this thing.” * * * Three Golden Flies is a different kind of bar, when Darrow returns. It is late, and troubling dreams have chased him from slumber. Darrow is alone, now; Oleg is elsewhere, asleep…if he even sleeps on what Darrow judges as a normal day/night cycle. He has thought, briefly, to bring another member of the diplomatic team here: to show them an interesting, local place, to share his discovery of a decent, local beer. But now, he is thankful to be alone and seated at the main bar. A dark, frothy brew stands centered between his trembling hands. “He should not have done that.” The shocking intrusion of a stranger’s voice draws Darrow from his thoughts. He shifts, catching sight of pale skin, blond hair (short) and angular, Slavic features of Ukrainian origins, perhaps…or Russian, Belorussian, or even Lithuanian. Something. Only different now, shifted. Nemaean. The stranger wears dark clothing: a cassock and sandals. He is a priest by the implications of that stark, ecclesiastical uniform; he is a devout follower of some old faith, based in what remains of Moscow or Minsk, Kiev or Riga. No medallion hangs from his neck, no Church Slavonic crucifix, heavy with the slant of an additional, rakish cross-bar. He is young…perhaps no older than Oleg. He is handsome, but something in his expression reminds Darrow of a knife’s lethal edge. “I’m sorry?” Darrow says, as the stranger sidles onto the barstool at his side, nodding to the bartender for a beer, and—surprisingly—two shots of something clear and strong. Darrow watches both the stranger and the bartender as troubling music jostles around him in the sustained discordance of a traditional Nemaean croon. There is silence embedded in the music; it is an echo of the cassock-garbed stranger’s long, contemplative silence. He is a member of the Cloister, Darrow knows. He is—maybe—one of the shadowy Brothers whose job is to monitor the long, boring border-shift negotiations Darrow himself has been hired to attend, and to manipulate—later—in subtle, correct ways. It is chilling to face his counterpart, now, as negotiations are ending. “Your woman-mate,” the stranger says. “She is afraid that we will change you.” There is no need to ask how he knows that; Oleg has already explained. Everyone hears everyone else’s dreams here. They listen through the ship itself, Oleg has said, groping, Darrow remembers, for just the right words. “Oleg,” the disturbing, handsome stranger says, shrugging. The bartender has delivered beer and two shots. He slides one, diminutive glass to Darrow. “Oleg has shown you our singers. He told you of our consociate dreaming, though he was smart enough to refrain from demonstrating it. This has changed you in small ways, and you will take this change with you. Home. What will happen to you there? What will you become?” Darrow closes his eyes, cold and far beyond comfort. He shrugs. “I don’t know.” It’s an honest thing, the only thing he can say. “Oleg means well,” the stranger says. “Do not be angry with him, when…next year…or later, you begin to confront things that you do not wish to think about. He wants what we all want.” “And what would that be?” Darrow asks, with more challenge in his voice than he intends. The stranger smiles. “Understanding,” he says. “We are human, just as you are. We are changing, yes…becoming what Nemaea demands of us, just as you are becoming more of what the Central Systems demand of you. We are more alike than different. Oleg wants you to know this. All of us want the same thing.” Silence. The stranger raises his shot glass and urges Darrow to do the same. “It is traditional,” he says, “to breathe a toast into the air before drinking warm vodka.” Darrow touches his shot glass. “I can’t think of an appropriate toast.” He knows the Nemaean custom. He has heard the verbose, poetic toasts: always offered by a local toast-master, a man with a gift for subtle, playful wit. “There is only one, appropriate for this moment,” the stranger says. Darrow nods. “To understanding,” the stranger says. “To understanding.” Vodka, warm and fiery, slides down Darrow’s throat and burns in the pit of his stomach. * * * “I want you to be careful,” Amelia said on the day that Darrow left. “I will,” he promised. “I want you to come home,” she said. “You, and not some Nemaean changeling.” “The Nemaeans don’t make changelings.” “But they do. You just don’t believe in them.” He touched her hands. “I’ll come home, Ami. I promise.” He kissed her, as softly and with as much conviction as he could manage. And now, hours away from his mission’s closure, Darrow stands alone in the incongruous comfort of an observation lounge, staring into open space. He can see another behemoth cruiser in the distance, one of two. The other—the third ship in the flotilla—remains hidden from this particular vantage point. There are other ships in this strange, hybrid fleet: Centralist cruisers: a diplomatic carrier and its escort. Each of them gleams in baleful nebula-light, each of them are clearly visible from here. Darrow can sense their scale and to his eye, they are enormous vessels, each a mile in length. Not as large as anything that might confront a Nemaean battleship, but large, nonetheless. Only here, and now, they are little more than specks: minnows swimming between three Nemaean whales. It is an expensive achievement (by Centralist standards) to build on such a scale: one mile from bow to stern, proclaiming the ascendancy of humankind and the glories of the Unified Corporate Planetary States; but here…way out in the interstellar boondocks, monster starships swim through hard, interstellar vacuum. Large Centralist ships are nothing in comparison to them: brine shrimp swimming beside whales. “Your ship,” Oleg says. “He is silent. He does not sing.” “No,” Darrow says. “Is it lonely to fly on such a vessel?” “Sometimes.” Oleg closes his eyes. “You are brave,” he says. The comment is incongruous and challenging; it speaks of a different flow of logic…different existential assumptions. “Brave?” Darrow asks. A shudder. Oleg hugs himself as if chilled. “I am Nemaean,” he says quietly. “I cannot face such loneliness.” Darrow smiles and touches Oleg’s shoulder. “You’re human,” he says. “You can adapt to anything. Look around you. Look at that nebula out there, spewing radiation across this sector of the galaxy. Look at your ships and where you commonly fly. It takes quite a lot to do such things, and you’re Nemaean…you do these things every day of your life.” Oleg smiles. “This is nothing,” he says. “It is simply every day.” And, for an instant, he is as chilling as the singers in their vast auditorium, or the cassock-garbed brothers like yesterday’s stranger in the bar. They are all as human as Oleg, and Oleg is as human as Darrow himself, but different, as well…a member of a hive, perhaps, or something else…something distinctly Nemaean. Darrow cannot fully comprehend what this means, to him, to Amelia, to humanity at large. But it means something. It is inscrutable, dark, and at its core, terrifying, but he cannot comprehend it. Not yet. He will. Later, as the black-clad brother told him in the bar-noise and discordance of Three Golden Flies. Later, when he is alone with Amelia, or with Jarus. It will come to him: a silent, personal apocalypse if his misgivings mean anything. And now—long before it happens—he wonders who he will be when it takes place, and who he will become. Will it weaken his resolve to stay back there, in the familiar Core Systems…or will it drive him to do something different…to seek out singers on ships like space-swimming krakens with coral for skin? He can only wonder. “You must leave soon,” Oleg says. “Yes.” Oleg nods and smiles. “Thank you,” he says. “For what?” “For letting me show you who we are.” Darrow smiles and feels a twinge of haunted sadness. “Thank you,” he says. “For showing me.” In an hour, he will be gone, and Oleg will be someone to remember. Later. * THE END And so we come to the end of yet another Nemaean tale. There will be more. I suspect that Ilya, Aleo, and Dorianna will finally step forward and continue with their saga. It’ll be quite interesting to see how these “independent” parts fit in, especially since Ilya and Oleg actually know each other, though their initial meeting, as depicted in “the Guardian” is little more than a minor point in that plot. Do they remember each other? Oleg was just a kid during that first meeting—years ago—and though he’s still a kid, more or less, he’s a bit older here. Hmm…funny how things work out in fictional universes. Again, I’d like to send a special thanks to NefariousDrO for the Nemaean ships he’s rendered and allowed me to shamelessly appropriate here and in other Nemaea-related posts. As always, thank you for viewing, reading, and commenting, and I hope you’re having a great weekend and beginning of yet another week.