this, I understand, was a mistake. I have no power to bring her back. Why I have failed, I cannot say: in a world so soon to vanish into my imagination, this incapacity remains a mystery. Some fault in me, some defect: I know that now. And there is no escape. What baffles me, what lies hidden in the ice, the darkness, even in these words: it will always be with me. And I with them.
I made my way back down the ridge, back to where the worst is yet to come.
NOW TIME AND this account have intersected. I am here at this screen. This is the present moment. The worst has not yet happened. And now, as words and time are joined, I begin to understand. The worst will never happen. I have fallen, and part of my damnation is that the fall will never end. I have only words and time. And they both go on, it seems, forever. I came back from Eleusis holding a mystery within me. I read it there, just as I read it now in the figures writhing in the walls, in the guilt that haunts me. I read it everywhere. I read it here. It is eternity.
MY BREATH HAS faded: the white clouds disappear almost before I release them. I am becoming a ghost. I reach the door, perform the empty ritual at the lock and it swings open. The cold has lost its power over me. I am colder.
I face the wall of coffins, but I am not here for them. At the end of the wall they form, there is a gap. I push through.
In the space behind the coffins, piled in a chaotic tangle, each wrapped crudely in sheets and blankets, garbage bags, Mylar and vinyl and Tyvek and in one case a cocoon of gauze blotched vividly with blood, I find the failed priests of Project Orpheus. Here are the other bodies I have hidden, as I have hidden so much else.
I know why we came here. And why we came so far. What Project Orpheus was meant to do. Why they brought the coffins. And how I came here as well. There is no darkness any more, nowhere left to hide.
The coffins were carrying experimental subjects. And one of them was me.
HOW COULD I have imagined that mere words could recall the dead? If all these efforts were spent in vain, what hope had words to offer?
Was there ever hope? Even now, I cannot imagine what they hoped, those who built that engine on the ice, what they dreamed of on their journey to the limits of Creation. I can only imagine what silence settled over that voyage, with us as their unquiet cargo. What did they think: that they could wrench the dead out of the ether, compel us, like electricity, to arc from their dreams into the world? Did anyone stop to wonder what might happen then?
What happened then. After everything went wrong, and it was I alone who stirred, only I who woke into a world more terrible than ever I had imagined. By then their hopes, whatever they had been, had died with them.
Or almost. The last of their earthly hopes survives, just as long as this story continues.
Words have only this power: they keep me here. I make an offering of myself to them. It is all that they deserve.
Somewhere above, a ship approaches. A few more days must pass before gravity and inertia bring them overhead. I can imagine them entering the station, encumbered in their spacesuits and their innocence. It will be dark, and cold. Will they recognize the darkness? Will they understand the cold? I know they fear what they will find. They should. But their fear is as nothing to what awaits them here. I would pity them, but what is the pity of a shade?
I would laugh, if I could. For all their fears, they will find at first only me, frozen here at this keyboard. They will wonder at it, and the very oddness of it will spare them, for a little while, from understanding what I still conceal. Even when they realize what they have found, it will make no difference, not in the end. No matter what they find here, Death will find them whether they understand it or not. I take some consolation in that, and hope the wish is
I made my way back down the ridge, back to where the worst is yet to come.
NOW TIME AND this account have intersected. I am here at this screen. This is the present moment. The worst has not yet happened. And now, as words and time are joined, I begin to understand. The worst will never happen. I have fallen, and part of my damnation is that the fall will never end. I have only words and time. And they both go on, it seems, forever. I came back from Eleusis holding a mystery within me. I read it there, just as I read it now in the figures writhing in the walls, in the guilt that haunts me. I read it everywhere. I read it here. It is eternity.
MY BREATH HAS faded: the white clouds disappear almost before I release them. I am becoming a ghost. I reach the door, perform the empty ritual at the lock and it swings open. The cold has lost its power over me. I am colder.
I face the wall of coffins, but I am not here for them. At the end of the wall they form, there is a gap. I push through.
In the space behind the coffins, piled in a chaotic tangle, each wrapped crudely in sheets and blankets, garbage bags, Mylar and vinyl and Tyvek and in one case a cocoon of gauze blotched vividly with blood, I find the failed priests of Project Orpheus. Here are the other bodies I have hidden, as I have hidden so much else.
I know why we came here. And why we came so far. What Project Orpheus was meant to do. Why they brought the coffins. And how I came here as well. There is no darkness any more, nowhere left to hide.
The coffins were carrying experimental subjects. And one of them was me.
HOW COULD I have imagined that mere words could recall the dead? If all these efforts were spent in vain, what hope had words to offer?
Was there ever hope? Even now, I cannot imagine what they hoped, those who built that engine on the ice, what they dreamed of on their journey to the limits of Creation. I can only imagine what silence settled over that voyage, with us as their unquiet cargo. What did they think: that they could wrench the dead out of the ether, compel us, like electricity, to arc from their dreams into the world? Did anyone stop to wonder what might happen then?
What happened then. After everything went wrong, and it was I alone who stirred, only I who woke into a world more terrible than ever I had imagined. By then their hopes, whatever they had been, had died with them.
Or almost. The last of their earthly hopes survives, just as long as this story continues.
Words have only this power: they keep me here. I make an offering of myself to them. It is all that they deserve.
Somewhere above, a ship approaches. A few more days must pass before gravity and inertia bring them overhead. I can imagine them entering the station, encumbered in their spacesuits and their innocence. It will be dark, and cold. Will they recognize the darkness? Will they understand the cold? I know they fear what they will find. They should. But their fear is as nothing to what awaits them here. I would pity them, but what is the pity of a shade?
I would laugh, if I could. For all their fears, they will find at first only me, frozen here at this keyboard. They will wonder at it, and the very oddness of it will spare them, for a little while, from understanding what I still conceal. Even when they realize what they have found, it will make no difference, not in the end. No matter what they find here, Death will find them whether they understand it or not. I take some consolation in that, and hope the wish is
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