2312

Now she floated in pure and complete blackness. Her eyes were open and yet she didn’t see a thing: not her hand before her face, not a glint of light anywhere. The space she was in seemed as infinite as the cosmos itself, or else just a bag around her head. There were voices here and there, coming from various distances. They all sounded hushed, as if in the dark people naturally whispered-although forward along the centerline, it seemed by the faint pull of the g, there was some kind of game or sport being played, with whistles and beeps and shouts of laughter. From another direction came the sounds of guitar and oboe, playing a baroque duet. She jetted toward it cautiously, hoping to hear it better. Halve the distance, double the sound. On the way she passed the paired breath of a couple having sex, or so it seemed. This was a noise that could draw a crowd as much as music or sport. There had been assaults in blackliners; people had done unspeakable things, or so one heard. In fact it was hard to believe anyone would care enough to impinge so drastically on anyone else. Why care that much? What would it do?

The continuous pure dark soon began to be marked in her vision by blotches of color, then by memories of sights that seemed to be there in her eye. She closed her eyes, and colored bars redoubled. Color everywhere; it reminded her of that time years before when she had ingested the Enceladan suite of aliens, a crazy act which she usually managed not to remember. The votaries sitting around lit candles; Pauline, newly inside her, warning her not to do it; the little chalice full of Enceladusea irwinii and other Enceladan microscopic life-forms; the votary giving it to her and saying, “Do you understand?” and Swan replying that she did, the biggest lie of her life; the taste of the infusion, like blood; the heave in her stomach; the way after a moment of blackout the candlelight returned and grew too bright to look at; the waves-on-the-beach roar all through her, everything becoming brilliantly stuffed with color, Saturn looking like a confection of mint and cantaloupe. Yes, a period of synesthesia, with all her senses on fire; and at one point she had had the sudden realization that she would never be the same. Infecting herself with an alien, was it wise? No, it was not! Crying out then as if poisoned, trapped in a kaleidoscope, a roaring in her ears, exclaiming over and over, But I was-I was Swan-I was-I was Swan-

Now she did her best to throw the vivid memory into darkness away from her. She spun weightlessly with the effort, which had caused her to wrench her body into a knot. As she spun, it began to seem that the guitar and oboe she heard were actually at quite a distance from each other. Was it really a duet at all? How would that work if the two of them were half a kilometer apart? There would be a distinct time lag, each for the other. She tried to focus on them, hear if they were in concert or not. In the pure black she would never know.

Miserably she realized that this was going to go on for as long as she was in here. No face to cling to with one’s gaze, nothing at all to see-her memory and imagination would run riot, her starved senses left to spin hungrily, making things up-nothing but her unhappiness for company. Pure being, unadulterated thought, revealing what the phenomenal world could hide but not change: the blank at the heart of things.

Her stomach grumbled and she ate part of her belt. She relieved herself in a bag inside her suit and cast the sealed bag toward the ground; janitorbots would sniff it out and take it away. She kept seeing images of Alex’s face, and she clung to them as precious memories she would need to hold to forever, but they made her groan too. She mewed like a hurt beast, she couldn’t help it.

“You are perhaps experiencing an episode of hypotyposis,” Pauline said aloud. “The visionary imagination of things not present before the eyes.”

“Shut up, Pauline.” Then, after a while, she said, “No, I’m sorry. Go on, please.”