Lamb - 2/2

https://www.abctales.com/story/stephen-thom/lamb-12

 

Across a perpetual pitch-black ocean the Lamb drifted, centrifuge rotating in elegiac sweeps as if to drill a great hole in the heart of time and matter. At junctures its soft curves were cast in the kaleidoscopic glow of nebula, fuzzy colours gestating from the dark mire to blossom like bright souls, souls that we had lost, souls of the people we had tried to be.

K sunk in fractured images of home; dead fields, burning bodies, tunnels, bunkers, riots, love, somewhere in all of this -

He awoke breathing in rasps and turned in his bunk. A monitor embedded in the wall spread a luminous green wash through the gloom. There had been fourteen Lambs before this. None of them had succeeded in following the unmanned ark and its last package of pure prospective life. Fidgeting with his cover, he knew he took perverse pride in the finality of it all. One possible haven. Resources were spent.

When he twisted round again, he saw spiderish black lines creeping across the monitor. He blinked. The after-effects of decades-long deep sleep were atrocious. The ship's ceaseless hum coursed through his bed-frame and pillow.

I can't be the only person here. This isn't possible.

He looked back. Oilish trails were leaking down the green rectangle. He shrugged the cover off.

'Support.'

Tripping in the dim blush, he scrabbled for a t-shirt. He tried to press focus and perspective; allowed the circumstances to re-establish themselves in his mind. He moved for the door. The black spread was congealing on the monitor like sticky tarmac.

The bright glare of the corridor stung his eyes. His stomach tightened. In either direction, clotty black dregs were slicking across the walls with fluid motion. The white ovals adorning the peaks were dripping with the dark substance. K stepped backwards, face contorting. Then he was running.

'Support, status...'

As he dashed past, an orb untouched by the slick matter sparked yellow and detached with a jerk. Slim panels slid open behind it and its flapping frame fanned out.

'Stationary. We are stationary - '

The yellow oval, darting along beside K, shrieked a bluster of static and clattered into the floor, bouncing twice before righting itself.

' - in the orbit of an unmapped mass. Planet -'

The orb flickered and died in a prolonged series of squawking notes. K veered through the bridge door and punched in the lock code, watching black coils snake over the white ball as it closed.

Pacing over to a station, K pulled up the display on the main screen. He looked above the rows of consoles and monitors to the collection of white ovals running round the rim of the vast ceiling.

Dominating the width of the main screen was a grainy hulk of black planet. 

'Support, I -'

A yellow lamp snapped from the ceiling and flitted down to join him. Amongst the rush and the panic, K realised that he was profoundly sad. Something desperate hung in the air.

'We have been stationary since we crossed into its orbit,' intoned the orb. 

K studied the little oval hovering in front of him. It seemed to glisten and expand. For a split second his mind was full of people, a bustle of faceless people, and the rush of accompanying possibilities - of fear, of interest, but always limitless possibilities. 

They were all so sick, in the end. So sick you would have thought nothing pure remained. Nothing pure to carry.

His head felt leaden as he looked round. Webs of black string were seeping through the bridge doors.

'What - support, what the fuck is this? Is this some kind of fucking... gravitational pull?'

The light of the orb seemed further away now, a sorry flicker, but its voice came as if right beside his ear.

'We believe we know what this is,' it sang.

K could see the black spread streaming to engulf the bridge. His head sunk into his chest, and he pulled it up to take in the chunk of planet filling the screen.

'These are the oldest animals,' chimed the oval. 'They are the dinosaurs of the universe. They were here before anything else. We have heard of them... they rest in these spaces now.'

'It's a planet,' choked K, squinting at the black nooses writhing around his feet.

'It is not,' the orb lilted. 'It is a sentient being. We feel it. It wants to know you.'

K's eyes were welling up. 'I never did anything right,' he mumbled. The black threads looped around his forehead and in a beat, he felt calm. A great still settled over everything. The bridge, the screen, the oval orbs; everything retreated to be replaced by a thick black curtain within which moved varying degrees of shade, blending and tripping into indistinct figures. 

He knew for that time what it was to be outside of everything. To be pure and innocent again.

The shifting shadows trembled with a faint, organic crackle that seemed to clarify into the whispered chatter of a thousand ancient voices.

We were here before it all, they pressed. We have seen you move through everything.

K was aware of a dull ringing bleeding amongst the deep still. He felt at home; he felt he could die here.

The thick blackness broke to move with oblique fluctuations and in the darkest furrows he thought he heard them say:

We will see it again - 

Sharp ringing broke through the haze.

*

The alarm was deafening. K staggered back to see hundreds of oval orbs whipping around him, flowing bodies flapping and incandescent in the flurry. Their little frames burned clear, hot white as they burrowed into the swamped muck. The black coating snapped and slid from his body and he turned to see it retreating, as if sucked out, from the bridge. Cradling his head in his hands, he sank over the station as the orbs clouded together to flood out the door in pursuit, a brilliant, insuppressible yellow burst.

The controls dug into his cheek and the alarm faded. There was a seismic groan, and he felt the ship lurch into motion.

In a vacuum caught beyond two trapdoors, the cylindrical head of the Lamb slid from inquisitive black appendages streaking from a forgotten colossus. The longest black stalks flapped uselessly at the departing engines, as if it were the last contact between beings, as if none of us would ever talk again.

*

'-Lots OF different ways OF EXPRESSING that -' 

Her voice trailed off as she turned away from the metal tube and laughed.

'This is really pretentious.' She stood upright to shoot a withering look at him.

'But I like it, I don't care. We were told to experiment for this project. And I read about it.'

She leaned back down to the tube.

'And NOBODY is even GOING TO NOTICE WITH ALL THE OTHER NOISE ON TOOOOOP,' she boomed, her voice rotating and bouncing through the hollow.

'It doesn't matter,' he grumbled, setting the microphone down. 'It just matters that it's in there. I read it can be somewhere in the background. She said experiment, this seems cool, and no-one else is doing it, so there. Just in the background, so I know it's part of it.'

'JUSTSOYOUCANSAYYOUDIDIT,' rolled in waves through the tube.

'No. So I know it's in there. Kind of an echo of the place, underneath the song. And of you.'

'Can't we go to a field then, or somewhere nicer? Why does it have to be this crappy old temple?' She rapped at the hard surface around the tubing.

'Because it sounds cool,' he said. 'What would I get in a field, wind? I'm almost done, can you just say something nice, instead of moaning? All I'll have is textured complaints in the background. And it's not a crappy old temple. It might be crazy old, but some people say this place was the beginning of... everything, I guess. Wait 'til you hear the story.'

'I don't believe in all that stuff,' she muttered.

He looked round. Tourists swarmed in packs, raising phone screens like jewelled offerings towards the sheer sprawl of faded pods.

'Something nice. Please.'

She squinted at him in the sunlight, sighed, and kneeled down to the tube again.

'ILOVEYOU,' poured in binding waves and frequencies over to the microphone.

*

'Lamb 15. Seventy-two years, eleven months and five days - '

The oval light floated some distance away from him, elastic cape-body buffeting in the wind. K ignored the report as he crunched over the plain. Towering, craggy mountains skewered the skyline. His breath clouded against his visor as he knelt slowly to paw the arable earth. It flaked in his gloves and he felt the sting of isolation beneath his relief.

Against the mountain backdrop, the ark was embedded in the ground, its separate pods caked with centuries of dust. K could make out the dot of the orb far ahead now, a curious wisp sending up puffs of dust; but they were distant things, hopeful things, things we have yet to become.

***