Topic: Shelley's Wilderness

Ali al Amat

Date: 2009-01-26 23:46 EST
"I went into the deserts of dim sleep— That world which, like an unknown wilderness, Bounds this with its recesses wide and deep—"

Percy Bysshe Shelley



That night, as if his subconscious could not possibly bear his happiness, Ali had another episode. Exhausted and content, he tumbled into bed after one o'clock. Sleep immediately snatched him up and carried him away. It was peaceful slumber, the kind of sleep so deep that one is utterly unaware of the self or the passage of time. He slept for three hours...

...then he came to the gradual realization that he was awake again, hanging in the pilot's web of his Slideship, the helmet socketed into the shunt atop his skull. He'd just brought the ship out of a Slide. Through the shunt, he was still intimately connected with the ship's sensors: its body was his body, its skin his skin. Everything the ship saw, he saw.

Below him, the planet Killarney twirled gracefully under the light of her sun. She was a smaller planet, densely settled. Using the interconnected sensors, he saw swirling clouds, pale blue oceans. The landmasses were surprisingly green: the local population was fiercely protective of their world's ecology. They were just as fiercely religious and argumentative, which was why he was here with a full company of mercenary soldiers.

"Port of Killarney Central, this is FSS Looking Glass, requesting permission to land," he said as the post-Slide schizophrenia drained out of his mind, leaving him whole again. Being a part of the normal spacetime continuum meant there was no need for the protective, destructive induced madness any longer; its absence left him shivering, so tired he could hardly keep his eyes open. But he was a pilot, a soldier, a professional. So he repeated his request, and kept what was left of his mind focused on the task at hand.

There was no reply. He shifted his vision with a twitch of his head up almost to gamma, then down through infrared, down into microwave and radio frequencies. The planet was screaming at itself—he could see twice, three times the usual amount of signal traffic. But none of it was being directed up at him.

"Killarney Central, I repeat, this is FSS Looking Glass, requesting permission to land. We are on an adjudication mission and have highest clearance. Central, do you read me?"

Silence. He filtered through the net of signal with his fingertips, picked one out at random and listened in. What he heard was nothing like he'd hoped, and everything he'd feared. At once he sent the hard acceleration warning blaring through the ship. In the web, he flipped one hundred eighty degrees, body arched in a perfect swan dive; in response, the ship altered its tumble around the planet into a dive onto



the top of the stair into the basement, where he had never been before. His jadda, his grandmother, was gone to the market. His father was away on business. None of the servants saw him leap through the closing door. He was six years old, not yet ready for Bast's embrace, but soon, soon; and he was a sharp boy, a clever boy, a boy who stole the key to the basement from his father's study. He would know what was down in this place that was kept from him. No one would ever keep secrets from him again, not even his father with the cold cruel green eyes that could devastate Ali with a look.

The light was dim, only a row of bulbs strung along the ceiling over the stair. The air was close and warm, even though it was the rainy season, and cool outside. There was dust on every step, save where his father Raza's footprints fell. He was too afraid to sneeze. He kept his hand on the naked wooden rail, and put his bare feet inside his father's footprints so that they would not show. Below there was another landing. Beyond that, only darkness.

His imagination, well-fueled with the stories of a thousand worlds, was running completely amok as he padded slowly down the stair. What was down there" Fabulous treasure, awesome weapons, a fantastic ship



shuddered with the abruptness of his landing, but the struts held. In the pilot's web, he shuddered himself and went limp. Outside in the spaceport he could see as if looking with his own eyes a scene of utter chaos. People were assaulting the gates, crawling over the walls, trying desperately to find some way to get into the few ships that hadn't already taken flight from the five-minute war that was about to begin.

"Captain" What are we supposed to do?" Rainier, his first mate, said into his ear. With the ship at rest the mate had crawled out of his cradle and was now at the backup stations and shunted into the ship's communication. "I heard what you heard. They're going to start the bombing runs any minute now. We're too late. What are we doing here?"

"We're taking on as many of them as we can," Ali told him. "Get the soldiers out of their berths and open the doors."

"But we can't hold all of them! They're going to swarm the ship!"

"Arm the soldiers and go. Do it!" He roared, aloud rather than through the neural comm, as Rainier continued to hesitate.

The colonists surged forward at the sight of the ship's cargo door opening, only the soldier's assault rifles keeping them from fulfilling Rainier's prophecy. It was never fully under control, but the mob managed to funnel itself into the ship with a minimum of injury.

He started to believe that he had a chance to save them all, to fit them all through the door



right there, with his hand on the knob. He turned it. It was not locked. Burning in a fever of fear and impatience, he opened the door at the bottom of the stair and fumbled for the light switch, it was some sort of dimmer that brought the light up



on his thirty-six degree mark, just over the horizon. A launch signal. The bombing had begun. He had minutes to get his ship away or he, his soldiers, and all the colonists were dead. He frantically began twisting his body through the engine hot-ignition sequence.

"Close the doors!" Rainier yelled to the soldiers below. The first mate was still in the comm and saw the launch, and his voice reflected outrage and panic down the channel. "We have to get out NOW!"

The doors were closed in time, but the ship was still powering up for takeoff when the first bombs fell. Terrible flowers bloomed all around him in a blaze of heat and light



that brightened slowly, slowly, and he realized that he was looking right into the mouth of the skeleton of a great cat, and its mouth was open, fangs the size of his hand yawning



with the screams of the colonists as they were incinerated even as they pounded on the doors of the ship, begging for a salvation that he had denied them. He watched them blown to ash and cinders, their flesh burning faster than their tottering skeletons. Shunted into the ship, there was no way not to experience each death at once, in three hundred sixty degrees.

There was no way to stop feeling the hammerblows of the bombs as they fell. Everything the ship felt, he felt, and the world was



ending, he was going to be swallowed whole, and he cried



and he screamed in agony



and he was on the floor beside the bed, his scream echoing in the confines of the rented room. It was dark. He was alone. The clock read four-fifteen.

He did not sleep again that night. The next night the cycle repeated itself; the following day, he stumbled through his work at the hospital. The third night he tried to keep himself awake, but sleep caught and dragged him under and into a third cycle.

The looks the nurses were giving him were full of concern, rather than mischief...that much was almost a relief.