Through a Dark Blue Lens: Chapter Six
Through a Dark Blue Lens
Chapter Six: Properly DisconnectedBy: Peter R. HeatonAnya stared through a haze at the cerulean and silver glow-eels, watching as they traced their path through ink-black water. My soul?, the voice had echoed as she told his story, My soul is so old--so cold--you couldn’t even dip your toes in it.
“Should have killed him,” said Ezbelda, who passed her a long slender tube that disappeared beneath the table between them as Anya finished her story. Ezbelda wore a loose, sleeveless poncho of white fabric and gold buttons: a muscular forearm revealed, holding the pipe expectantly.
“Everything is violent with you,” Murray, the doughy man seated to their side, replied. Anya examined the sigil of the starkisser conglomerate he wore falsely on his synth-suit but did not recognize it.
The things we humans waste our time on, she thought, a smile beginning to cross her face, as she took a long pull on the tube. A groomed and thin white beard came to a sharpened tip at his chin--the yazzat smoke, on more than one occasion, sending her the humorous vision of him tenderly trimming the tip to perfection.
“You don’t complain when my nails are tracing across your back,” Ezbelda retorted
“What is pleasure without pain?” Murray shot back.
They were liars, both. Not starkissers, but eyes: purveyors of lies and rumor and the truths that linger in-between. She thought of something clever to say to them but it drifted away on a cloud of smoke, Au revoir!, the thought sang.
The musky taste of the slowly burning yazzat filled mouth and lungs as Anya inhaled again. Her eyes traced the smoke as she exhaled. Again they were drawn to the colored eels weaving in the background. The eels rhythmic dance began to ooze and melt, becoming gray, and they were eyes now, and she knew they were Antonio’s. She thought of their last kiss and shuddered--not wanting to think about what had happened to him since she’d left him in a pheramol-induced slumber with the caretaker, who she’d gagged and tied up at gunpoint. Anya had pocketed enough NC between them that she’d been able to get a sprinter off Gliese that afternoon.
After that she went from Silf, Hhrenstone, Boulderbase, The Slivers and finally, here: Bozren and their widely known yazzat dens. It was different than the other drugs she’d taken--the synthetic stuff that was so prominent on Old Earth.
The two eyes she had befriended, Ezbelda Tin and Morse Murray. They all three had stories, and the two eyes pressed her about Old Earth, for it seemed like they had been everywhere but there. They liked best, those stories of the mudmen and the tunnel rats--the humans that were not humans but were still.
She handed the tube over to Morse. Somewhere--outside perhaps--a boulder crumbled under the near-field detonation. A man, a voice she knew, a wavelength she’d once overlapped, struggled under a brutal sun, whose rays cooked him even through the heavy environsuit, trying to manipulate the freed starite into the processing chute. He looked up at her and he was singing:
Don’t be blue,
I’ve got the fix for you,
I’ll make you happy, maybe,
Pure high, like dark blue,
pie-eyed, no curfew,
I’ll make you happy, maybe,
‘cuz I’ve got the fix for you,
So don’t be blue, baby,
I’ve got the fix for you,
‘cuz it’s one for me,
and it’s one for you.
“Thank you for listening, dear,” David said, calmly. And then he wasn’t there, the yazzat taking Anya back to the present reality.
“So have I earned it yet?” she asked pulling her gaze from his. Anya directed her words at Elzbelda who was the financier of their duo. But Morse would have his say and they’d both have to be onboard if they were all to coexist. Eyes made their trade in unsolicited intelligence--a delicate practice, and caution was always the better part of valor. It wasn’t simple, to be an eye—so they told her—because if there was one thing that existed in abundance in the universe, it was nothing.
Making the nothing something, that was the mint money, Morse had said to her so coolly she’d felt a shiver run down her spine.
Or maybe he had said it just now, and the seconds between had expanded and burst, taking Anya back to the moment when the words drifted from between his lips. The two eyes exchanged a glance. Morse handed Ezbelda the tube but she pushed it back at him.
“Think on it a bit,” Anya said.
Another boulder cracked. More starite into the chute. Sweat the man cannot wipe free, runs down his face like shadows he wishes he did not cast. He sings his song or moans about how cold his soul is. Even out there, under the hot labor world suns, he still thinks his soul the coldest.
Morse took another long pull on the tube. “Nope.”
“Just, no?” Anya said, snarling.
“Nah.”
She looked at Ezbelda for help. The woman shrugged.
“But I don’t care where. And you could use a third. How many do you know scored pheramol on Gliese? And how many of those didn’t get caught?” For a moment the eels coalesced back into Antonio’s eyes and she struggled to push the regret away.
That set Morse to thinking. He wrinkled his nose, took another draw from the tube, fiddled with the tip of his white beard-point, and then looked at Ezbelda. “We’d need more supplies.”
“I’ll bring my own.”
“Oh, will you?”
“I’ve got credits left still.”
“It’ll cost you,” Morse replied, “ride’s not free.”
“I just said I’ve credits left.”
Ezbelda cut in. “Come now, Morse. She is our kin, in action if not in name. She left her home, alone, to explore the universe. Let us take her to the edge. Let her see a place unkissed by man. Let her take a xenogenic breath.”
“You’ve heard her stories,” Morse said, gauging Anya with narrowed eyes, his white brows bowing to each other, “you want to trust her out there?”
“She’s only dangerous to men who love her, Morse. You don’t love her, do you?”
Anya almost interject then, but the yazzat rolled that thought through her mind. She’s only dangerous to men who love her. Their faces came to Anya briefly in the smoky haze: David and Antonio and Jolly Locks, and even a few others when she’d been much younger, before she’d ever dared to see the tunnel rats on her own. None of them, except Locks, had come out better after crossing paths with her.
The smoke was swirling and twisting, bending and colliding and it reminded her of the chaos of the mindfield. A simultune began playing in the background. She saw the readout, just as it had been:
Five, two year labor world rotations. And then Antonio--scorched earth.
Morse continued his words echoing around her, finding the beat of the simultune whose source she couldn’t place. “How can one really know? We’ve only spent the better portion of a few days together. Perhaps her charm can melt my icy heart.”
“I wouldn’t let that happen,” Ezbelda snapped.
“No, you wouldn’t.”
There was a strange yazzat silence then--they passed the tube around, each with their own thoughts, the drug spinning them round and round in their head so they might explore angles of it that they may never have. The yazzat kept bringing Anya the other way, toward Old Earth and a panic began to set in.
“Please,” she said finally, “I don’t care where it is I just …” Things were different out here than on Old Earth. But things were different everywhere, wasn’t that why she had left?
“What?” Morse prodded her.
“I don’t want to go the other way.”
Ezbelda put a hand on hers. “I don’t want you to either. The fortunate leave and the unfortunate go back.”
“The fortunate are the ones who are never there to begin with,” Morse snorted.
Anya looked at Ezbelda as genuinely as she could: “I thought there was something better out here, something more real than what I had, something more real than that life. Besides, there’s nothing left for me there--you know all about that.”
“Morse, damn you, the place we’re going, if it is true, is there a better place for a woman lost among the stars? I don’t think so.” Ezbelda waited a moment for Morse to respond but he only crossed his arms. Fed up, Ezbelda looked at Anya with a smile: “We’ll take you--”
“Wait a--”
“Enough, Morse, unless you want me to clobber you on the head hard enough to shoot your eyeballs out.”
And then there was no more discussion about it--another yazzat silence settled in and it seemed that Morse Murray had accepted the fact. Anya never asked where they were going--she’d find out soon enough, wouldn’t she? She met them a few days later at the launchpad of their ship, the Wandering Eye, a few crates of supplies hovering behind her.
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WANDERING EYE - NATIVE INTERFACE - CODE: IRIS - OS 5952.3
ACCESS GRANTED. USER: ANYA REYES
WELCOME, MS. REYES
QUERY RECEIVED: Tantalus. ACCESSING QUERIX DATABASE
WIKON: TANTALUS
DISCOVERED: 2448, by Captain Eamon Vohn, commanding the A.R.G.O.S. vessel Ambrosia, based on research by Charlotte Vohn.
RETRIEVING FACT DUMP
The Ambrosia is one of only three vessels believed to have successfully charted Tantalus
Corruption of data files have given various starpoints for the planet’s locations
No further contact has been made with the crew of Ambrosia, Kiskitan, or The Voyager
A summary of white papers suggests the existence of a life-form capable of communicating via dreams, referenced as the lystere
There is a scientific bounty, sponsored by the leading research companies and mega-corporations
RETURN: NULL
The screen shifts.
QUERY RECEIVED: Labor Worlds, Gliese. ACCESSING QUERIX DATABASE.
A landscape of brightness. A vidrec of some labor world along the Penal Belt. One man collapses of exhaustion. No one notices.
ALERT: USER NOT PROPERLY DISCONNECTED. PLEASE DISCONNECT PRIOR TO SYSTEM EXIT.
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Onward the Wandering Eye went, closer to the edge--floating, along the universe’s cosmic wind. There: A cliff, waiting, and beyond it: the starless night, the place the lystere call home.
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Nets cast: redirects along a thousand frequencies. The scanner’s song, Morse had called it. Newsfeeds, public posts, private messages all ripped open as easily as a paper envelope, all spilling their secrets into their pan. They sifted the data, and the yield was enough for them to forget, for a time, where they were going, and why.
Anya slept: forgotten relationships and remembered fears. When she woke, she pushed what she didn’t want away, into that box deep inside, the one whose walls were lined with shattered glass, whose interior was lit by a fire fueled with things it ought not to be.
One such bit of data--a few gigabytes emitted from a half dozen frequencies--stood out: a single star, its edges kissed by the vacuous eclipse behind it. How could they not see it? Coordinates. The Kiskitan. Anya remembered the results of the query and begged them to go.
What was a roll of the dice when they were up so big? Anya argued. Morse agreed, and Ezbelda—if there was one among them that wanted to see the edge more than the others it was her. And they did stumble over the edge of the universe, as simply as any other threshold--as if they hadn’t reached the edge, but instead, the edge had reached them:
Along the stars they drifted, closer and closer to the coordinates…
At Quir-el they hear the story of a prince who slumbers in an endless dream, drifting in the spaces between universes, in the realm of the lystere.
The shores of Man-don Di’yoon--mirrored by a pink sea, as if eternally bathed by a setting sun--echo with the verses of the Dreamer. The setting sun begats the next verse, and so on. ‘And so on it shall be’, echoes the refrain.
Over the viridian fog of the Camphor Downs, they see the slumbering Izerac--the spider; the worm. The Swallowed feed the Izerac and its dreams feed the Swallowed. It always is. It always is not.
On Luschyton the naked shadow weavers, under the moon-twins of Kykkith, chant from the book of the pale spider, and Anya hears the chittering in the caverns, and sees the eyes in the dark.
In the Coliseum of Pith they watch the silent tragedy of Evincarustran, the man who had all the strength of the stars but was plagued to travel the dimensions to save his daughter, failure always one step ahead.
Under the crystal tears shed by the Arvarda Leng they observe the mute-monks of Mulrulond bury the first child born within their walls for a decade. It is there that Morse departs, enthralled by the solemnity of the ceremony, and neither Anya nor Ezbelda find it strange.
By the citadel stones of Soros-at-the-Sanctum they read the inscriptions carved in moonbone and dusted with pearl-of-polish: of the Automaton, Jahari, and how it was given life by the Mechineers of Vyse and blessed to become the Emissary of the Sacrosanct.
They see the spirits of the once living ghendi of Gargosh sparkle over the streams of the Silvarnium, tasting fruits cultivated by the long-deceased inhabitants, and sleep beneath roofs that have stood for longer than humanity’s existence.
All the contents of Fates Athenaeum: books and scrolls of secret power, ledgers of the most reclusive organizations, the original inscriptions for fire and sowing harvest--all manner of all knowledge--are revealed to them for three days, fourteen hours, thirty-two minutes and ten seconds. Dr. Providence is always precise in matters of time.
When Anya reached the Shining Wastes, and saw Ur, the numen nomad, she found that she was alone. A fortune of fate: it was not befitting to seek the presence of the Lonely Wanderer when in the company of friends. A single finger extended and it was in that direction where she finally found the Kiskitan.
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It was not Tantalus they found. But another place, with another name, but a place kissed by the lystere all the same. Or had it found them first? And their voyage only a kaleidoscope of memories that did not belong?
The outpost ship, the Kiskitan, unfurled like a hand in death, its landscape a payload of crooked starsteel and crumbling corcrete.
David, lingering in the shadows, whispering about the temperature of his soul.
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