Remembrance - Part 1
#1 of Remembrance
First in a multi-part story. It's a bit of an experiment for me, trying something sci-fi and clean. Subsequent chapters will be clean, too, so I apologize in advance but this won't be titillating stuff :) Comments/critique is welcome, as always.
Brief synopsis : A crewmember of an interstellar vessel begins having strange experiences while in a state of suspended animation, and must find a way to explain the inexplicable.
When Damian opened his eyes, the last thing that he expected to see was sunlight. More than sunlight, though, his eyes were treated to an expanse of green in every direction; towering trees covered with hanging vines and creeping mosses, bright flowers resembling hibiscus dangling between enormous leaves the size of his torso, and even gigantic ferns that sprouted up around the bases of the gigantic trees. It was like the scene out of an old drawing of a jungle, of the way they used to look, long before he had been born.
Shaking his head and closing his eyes, he drew in a deep breath, but realized it was more than just the vision before his eyes that was unexpected. The air filling his lungs was warm, moist and heady, tasting of wet earth and life. At least, that was what came to his mind, that the strange tastes tingling on the tip of his tongue are what one would taste in a genuine rainforest. His tongue, too long accustomed to dry, cool, sterile air did not know how to cope with the dirty, natural, vibrant flavors. He could not help but to gag.
Opening his eyes once more, he tried to take in the alien landscape around him, wondering how he had gotten here - if here was anywhere at all. Still recovering from the brief gag, he suddenly came to the realization that he was standing upright rather than lying down, as he had last remembered, as his body insisted that it should be. Feeling his body pitch forward at the sudden sensation of vertigo, he flailed for something to grab hold on, something to steady himself against, when he noticed that his hands were already occupied. A long, crude wooden spear, topped by a spearhead of what might have been flint and tied off with some kind of natural fiber, it was a weapon as primitive as it was unexpected. He reacted by planting the end of the staff in the ground to balance himself. It was enough to keep him from falling over.
Recovering his balance, Damian noticed a little flurry of activity around him - or, at least, the sounds of it. Small creatures scurried through the underbrush, too quick and too small for him to see, made frightened little chirps and squeaks as they scampered away, leaving the oversized ferns to sway and dance in their wake. Soon they were lost in the sounds of the forest beyond, a vague cacophony of sounds that filtered in through the foliage, distant yelps and squawks and trumpeting sounds that made the entire jungle itself seem alive, as if it might begin moving all at once, of its own accord, and perhaps swallow him whole.
A strange sound behind him met his ears, a sort of grunt followed by a soft little hiss. It was not the sound itself that confused him as much as the fact that, somehow, he understood the implicit message behind that sound : Be quiet. Startled by the fact that the sound could somehow carry some kind of meaning to it, he quickly turned around to look behind him, looking for the source of the sound. At first, his eyes saw little other than the continuing expanse of green, foliage swaying gently from one side to the other, trunks so old that the moss covering their trunks was beginning to grow a coat of moss of its own. But then, a little hint of motion caught his eyes, betraying the shape that didn't quite fit in the array of foliage before him.
An old memory, buried deep among the myriad of other bits of information gathered from his childhood days, rose to the surface of his conscious mind. The animal crouched beneath the tree looked like a curious cross between reptile and avian, covered half in scales and half in feathers. Any school-aged child could identify the beast that was looking right back at him - it was a dinosaur. It had been too long since he had read on the subject to identify the exact species, but some dusty recollection in his head told him it was one of the maniraptoran dinosaurs, looking like an oversized bird with hands and wicked claws. The creature was every bit as tall as he was, and it was staring right back at him.
Damian thought he should be afraid. In fact he could feel himself beginning to quiver and shake, yet somehow he did not feel so afraid that he lost control. He was able to stand his ground, watching the raptor with a mixture of fear and curiosity and confusion. That same little part of his brain that remembered the word maniraptoran also reminded him that there was something else he was seeing, something that did not make much sense at all. He remembered hearing that these dinosaurs were supposed to be covered with feathers, not just a narrow crest running from their heads on down to their tails. Its tail seemed too short, and its body too upright; it didn't look anything at all like the pictures he had seen, the reconstructions painstakingly built from decades of paleontological research.
More than that was the fact that the creature was holding a spear, exactly like the one he was holding. That, he knew, was not possible. Dinosaurs did not make tools, they did not use tools. Yet here was one, holding a spear, staring at him intently. Again it uttered that same little grunt and hiss, and again his brain picked up on the meaning behind the sounds. Stay quiet.
Before he could react, before he could figure out what was going on, and before he could even figure out how to get his legs to move and run away, another sound caught his attention. A quiet rustling sound rose up from the forest just to the side, catching not only his attention but that of the raptor that was standing in front of him. Before his eyes, a second such creature stalked out of the foliage, coming to a stop hardly feet away from him in the clearing. He was no longer confronted by only one of the frightening beasts; there were _two_of them.
The second dinosaur breathed a little series of quiet chirps and whistles, but to his confusion, Damian realized that the sound was not mere bestial calls in his ears. Again, as before, the sound had a clear intent, an unmistakable meaning behind it : It is coming. Be ready.
Several chirps of different tones and voices suddenly rang out around him, and he became aware that there were not only the pair of dinosaurs, but there was an entire _pack_of them around him. A quick glance around and he was able to count no less than six including the newcomer, all of them partially hidden among the foliage, all of them incongruously bearing those crude spears. He found himself no longer worried with trying to figure out what was going on, or how he had gotten here, as much as he was concerned with the fact that he would be an easy target for these creatures. Armed with a spear, he might stand a chance against one. A whole pack of six could have taken him down in a heartbeat.
Yet the raptors seemed to show little interest in him. They had to have seen him; he knew they had seen him. The first raptor had looked right at him, and as his eyes scanned the rest with a nervous incredulity, he was certain that at least a couple of them glanced back in his direction before their attention was fixed back on the jungle, the very spot where the newcomer had emerged. A part of him wondered why they ignored him. Perhaps they were not hungry. Perhaps they had never seen a human before, and didn't realize that he might be edible. There were a hundred possibilities he could think of.
The why was not nearly so important to him at that moment. The very fact that they seemed uninterested in him meant that he might have a chance to escape. Willing his legs to move, as slow as he possibly could, he began to back away from where he stood.
That was when another sound caught his ears. It was much like the sound of the newcomer dinosaur approaching through the jungle, the light rustle of heavy leaves brushing one against another. The sound was slower, somehow more deliberate, and, he realized, larger. It was as if more than one of the creatures were about to step out into the clearing, perhaps even an entire pack of them. When he finally spotted the forest itself beginning to move, he realized that it was not a pack of raptors, at all.
A massive head, every bit as large as himself, slowly poked its way out of the trees overhead. Its motion was slow, deliberate, and surprisingly fluid, much more agile and elegant than a beast that size seemed like it ought to be capable of. Though nothing more than its head was visible, the shape was something that was beyond unambiguous, a form that even his uneducated mind could not doubt. Rows of teeth, visible as the beast's jaws were held slightly slack, seemed like nothing short of whole swords in and of themselves. There could be no question that he was staring at a tyrannosaur.
Any hint of calm, detached observation that might have held him still thus far evaporated as the enormous beast took another step forward, surprisingly quiet for its size, looming over him and frightfully close. Abandoning himself to abject fear, Damian let out a cry that came out sounding more like an inhuman shriek before he turned, dropping the spear that was in his hands and running in the opposite direction as fast as he could. He could hear the rex bellow out a truncated roar that sounded more like some kind of hellish bark, but he did not bother to turn around and look over his shoulder to see if the beast was pursuing him. The only thing that mattered was that he was running.
As he ran, he was aware that he was still shrieking, his voice hardly breaking long enough for him to breathe in before he resumed the panicked shriek. Tree branches slapped at his face as he fled, rocks and sticks jabbing into the soles of his feet, but none of that was important to him at all. He knew the beast was behind him - he could not see it, could not hear it, but somehow, he knew it was there, right behind him.
Damian did not get far. He was betrayed by an exposed root that poked up out of the floor of the forest, an unyielding little loop that snagged his foot and pulled him down, tumbling over the rocks and fallen branches and slowly decaying detritus that was scattered all around. His breath was torn from his chest as he rolled, seeing nothing except for green and blue and the occasional brown flash in his vision wheeling around like some kind of terrible kaleidoscope, before he finally came to a rest, on his back, face to face with the tyrannosaur.
The antediluvian predator was surprisingly far away from him, following him in an almost leisurely pace, loping after its prey with no concern for speed. Still the beast crossed the distance in but a few heavy steps, towering over him, cocking its head and looking down at him with a dispassionate look.
He thought it would strike immediately, but it paused for a moment. He did not know why, and did not care. Damian had recovered enough of his breath to once again gasp, throwing his arms up in front of his face as if he could somehow ward off the impending attack with nothing more than his hands. It was in that moment that he finally noticed a fact that his brain simply refused to comprehend in any kind of logical fashion. His arms were lined with short, colorful feathers, almost like stunted wings. His hands had become three-fingered graspers, his nails replaced with sharp talons and his palms covered in pebbly scales.
If he hadn't been staring right up at the jaws of a hungry tyrannosaur, the sight of his hands might have terrified him. Instead, the rex breathed out another staccato little roar, rearing its head back and opening its jaws wide. Reflexively he screamed once again, his voice coming out in that strangled shriek, throwing his hands up over his face. Before his vision was blotted out by his arms he could see the rex's massive head bearing down on him, jaws wide, ragged and deadly teeth coming right for him, while in the background a half a dozen spear-wielding raptors were bounding toward him out of the forest.
As his vision went dark, his ears rattled with the sound of the rex's roar. He could feel the hot, fetid breath washing over him, reeking of rotted meat and blood and death, and in that instant he knew his life was forfeit.
Damian could do nothing but scream in horror.
The feeling of teeth like daggers tearing and crushing into his skin did not come. He cried out for as long as his lungs held air, and when they were empty again he drew in a deep, gasping breath. His eyes popped open but did not find the sight of massive jaws bearing down on him. Instead it was the sterile, clinical white plastic of his stasis chamber, the translucent window over hid head offering a dull vision of the nothingness beyond. Still he was panicked, still he could not make sense of what was going on, and he let out another terrified scream.
His arms flailed, his fists pounding on the cold, uncaring plastic that enshrouded him. It did not yield. His mind struggled to make sense of what was going on. He was no longer in some kind of prehistoric jungle, he was back in his stasis chamber, the place he should have been to begin with. Lifting his head and looking around him with wild eyes, he spied the tube that was still attached firmly to his chest. Grasping and pulling on it, he gasped at the unpleasant sensation of the tube sliding out of the port in his chest until it finally slipped free.
The latch slid open with a little hiss, and he was free. Kicking upward he pushed the pod open, his arms flailing again to find the edge and pull himself up, glancing around himself while still in a panic. There was nothing but the quiet, empty corridor on either side, stasis pods like his own stretching out into the distance beyond the edges of his sight. It was what he had expected to see to begin with.
He felt something hot sliding between his thighs. Coming to his senses, he glanced down and cringed at the sight; he had pissed himself. The heat spread up to his cheeks as he flushed with embarrassment, in spite of the fact that there was not a soul to see him in his predicament. There would not be another person on the entire ring that was awake at this time.
Breathing deeply to calm himself, Damian hauled himself up out of his pod, shaking visibly all the while. It wasn't abnormal to wake up from stasis feeling weak and confused, and he had a routine to help firmly root himself in the here and now. He reminded himself of the size and scope of the ring, a massive structure, a full kilometer in diameter, slowly rotating around the axis of the ship to provide at least a partial approximation of gravity. There was a stasis pod placed every three meters. There was a bulkhead that split the ring up into segments every 310 meters. Each bulkhead enclosed a space of four meters. There were one thousand sleepers in the ring; nine hundred and ninety-nine now that he was awake.
The procession of facts helped ground him, but he still had to remind himself of who he was. Lieutenant Damian Hess, one of twenty four helmsmen who took turns manning the great ship Hope on its long journey to the Alpha Centauri system. For as advanced as the navigation computers were, the ship still required a living, human being to be at the controls at all time, and he was one of those human beings. This would be the beginning of his six day rotation, sharing his duties with two other lieutenants on a staggered schedule; there was always two of them out of stasis at any given time. For six days he would be tasked with the safety of the nearly ten thousand souls sleeping on the ship, and then he would return to stasis to sleep for sixty-six days. The cycle would continue time and time again, sixty times in all, before they arrived at their destination.
He tried to count the cycles in his head. Already he had come out of stasis fifty one, no, fifty two times. This would be his 53rdcycle. Not once during all those cycles had he so much as dreamed up a good meal during stasis. Dreams were not supposed to be possible.
"Why now?" He asked the question to the dry, sterile air that was pumped through the ring, knowing full well no one would answer.
The skin of his thighs was beginning to itch from being soaked in urine. Cursing quietly at his own mishap, he pulled himself up out of the pod and looked back into it with dismay. He knew the inside of the chamber would be automatically cleaned and sterilized before he entered it again, but there would be no time for him to go to the shower and wash up before he reported for duty; he was expected in the command center too quickly for that.
He stepped to the side of the now-empty pod to where a makeshift locker was located next to the machinery connected to the pod, the heart and soul of the system that enabled them to remain asleep for long periods of time. Glancing furtively up and down the corridor - in spite of the fact the he knew there would not be anyone looking - he stripped his soiled jumpsuit off, letting it fall to a pile around his ankles. The cool, clean air felt good against his flesh, even if he had to wait until much later before he had a chance to clean himself off.
His locker was stocked with more clean jumpsuits, simple affairs that where nothing more than plain, white uniforms with no distinguishing features other than a name stitched into the left shoulder. There were some who figured it was to put everyone on equal footing, but the real answer was much simpler. It was far more efficient to mass-produce identical uniforms in different sizes.
It took him only a few moments to get changed, sniffing to satisfy himself that he did not stink of piss. Turning away from his stasis pod, he shivered slightly again at the memory of what had just happened there. What should not have happened there.
Damian found himself looking down at each of the pods as he passed. In the dim light of the corridor, he could not quite see through the frosted, translucent panels, could not quite see the faces of the dozens upon dozens of people that he had not met, whose names he did not know. They were little more than dark silhouettes of the frozen forms inside. He found himself wondering, as he glanced down at the evenly spaced pods, if any of them were going through the same thing that he was, were having some sort of dream that they should not be having. It was something that he couldn't know. The silhouetted figures that he passed might as well have been corpses.
The nearest bulkhead was about a hundred meters away from his pod, just close enough that he could see it in the distance. The curvature of the ring as he walked made it look as if he were going to be walking up an ever-increasing slope, leading his body to expect the exertion. When it did not come it threw his sense of balance off, leaving his steps uncertain, an adjustment that he still had not been able to make, even after the dozens of times that he had made that same trip. Damian did not think it was the sort of thing he could ever get used to.
His mind began to gloss over for the remainder of his walk. Unwelcome images of dinosaurs and curtains of verdant forests flashed through his head, numbing his senses. He remembered how his hands had looked, and the memory made his fingers feel strange, numb, like they weren't really there. Even as he reached out to pull open the heavy latch holding the door of the bulkhead shut, he felt like he was pulling at something slick and oily, something that wanted to slip from his grasp.
A small chamber between the pair of bulkheads coincided with one of the large spokes, connecting the outer ring to the axis, the main body, of the ship. The only way to get from the ring to the center was up a ladder that rose half a kilometer straight up. Every fifty meters a platform had been built into the vertical shaft, where a climber might stop and rest, but Damian would not have to take advantage of the rests. He was in good physical condition, and the false sense of gravity would only lessen as he got higher. More than that, though, his mind continued to wander and he hardly even noticed the passage of each rung as he made his way to the top.
At the very center, he found himself in a cylindrical chamber with five ladders branching off in every direction. At one point, he had heard a long discussion about the physics of the rotating hub, how when he moved into the adjoining chamber - which was stationary - he had to grab hold of the stabilizing bars to cancel out the rotation that his body had gained in the ring. They had explained how, every time, it transferred a little bit of rotational energy into the axis of the ship, and how tiny adjustments had to be made with the navigational thrusters, and how each time he made the trip cost the ship a small amount of energy and therefore such excursion had to be limited. Even when he had sat through the lecture, much of it had gone through his head. Enough of the ship's systems were automated, to the point that it would correct for any minute errors caused by the conservation of rotational energy, that its pilots did not have to have a full understanding of it.
But now, with his mind otherwise occupied, it was all a blur to him. The motions were automatic as he grabbed the handholds to stabilize himself and pull himself forward, through a heavy latch, and begin to float forward into the command module. He was so preoccupied that he hardly noticed when he floated through another latch and into the cramped quarters that served as the nerve center of the entire ship.
"Ah, there you are, Damian." The voice belonged to the first man that he shared a shift with, a lieutenant every bit as young as himself named David Stark. They had never met before the journey began, but for the first three days of every cycle he worked side by side with the man for sixteen hours a day. They had become friends, almost out of necessity.
Damian blinked at the sound of his own name. Grasping another handhold, he maneuvered himself carefully into the unoccupied seat, pulling a strap around to help hold him in place. "David."
"You okay? You look a little out of it."
He did not reply immediately. The small module was surprisingly simple for being the command center for the ship. It was little more than hemisphere of a room a half dozen meters across, with a pair of chairs bolted in to what served as the "floor". In front of the chairs was a bank of computer screens, and numerous controls. Most of the ship's operations were automated, and for the bulk of the time the men and women who sat at the controls did nothing other than to monitor the readouts, make slight corrections when the ships computers calculated that they had strayed too far off course, or the navigational sensors had detected some small object they had to avoid, or perhaps some other unforeseen circumstance. It was very rare that he had to actually touch the controls, but, out of some kind of habit or routine, he let his fingertips brush over every one as he settled in to the seat. "I'm fine."
The other man shrugged his shoulders, and turned his attention back to the readouts. "Could have fooled me. You look a little shaken up."
"I'm fine," he repeated, his voice a little hollow and unconvincing. He did not want to breach the subject of the startling dream. It was something that shouldn't have happened; there was no reason to discuss it at all. Even with a friend.
"All right, so you don't want to talk. That's fine."
It wasn't true. He did want to talk, just not about what had happened, not about what he had dreamed, not about how he felt. He wanted desperately to get his mind off it. Even as he ran his fingertips over one set of controls, he realized that his hands were still shaking. He still hadn't calmed down. "How's your shift gone?"
David shrugged his shoulders again. "Not bad. Uneventful, as always. Had a relay back from the advance probe, everything is still looking good for our arrival. Oh, we got a message back from Earth. They're halfway done building Destiny, and they've tested the new engines out. Imagine, by the time they get her up and running, those lucky bastards will get here in half the time."
Destiny was to be their sister ship, carrying the second wave. She was a much larger ship, designed to carry up to a hundred thousand colonists in stasis. "Any other news? How are things going back on Earth?"
"Same as always," David replied, his voice lined with the same grim sense of resignation that he felt when he heard the news. Not that he expected otherwise - in over fifty cycles, he had read more than a dozen reports that had slowly made their way from home, and not once had there ever been good news about how things were going back home. He supposed that it served to justify their mission, to make sense of what they were doing, but it did little to take the edge off, to lessen the disappointment.
Not knowing how to respond, he punched in a quick command on the console in front of him. The panel lit up with a display of space as seen from the external cameras, the Alpha Centauri system looming bright in front of them. From this distance, the pair of stars that made up the system were well separated, two bright stars that barely fit on the same display anymore. The bigger, brighter A star burned in dazzling fashion on the periphery of the display, while the dimmer, more humble B star occupied the center, for it was their ultimate destination. Spinning around that star was a planet, a barren world that nevertheless had what they were looking for : water, oxygen, and a suitable temperature.
It was no Earth, but it would be home. It had to be.
As he flicked the display off and began to monitor the steady stream of data that the ship's computers fed him, he resigned himself to silence. His attempt at shifting the conversation and keeping it up had failed. The next eight hours sitting next to his companion would be long, but the next eight - spent alone with his thoughts - promised to be much, much longer.