Sunspot Jungle: Volume Two, page 6
Stephana felt a twinge of resentment toward this woman, identical to her in almost everything, who would travel to the other side of the Milky Way. To a certain degree she envied all her alter egos. After all, the key to the return, the anchor that tied the Terpsichore to St. Petersburg (to her St. Petersburg) lay in herself. The “here” of the ship found itself marked by the possibility of not-travelling, and that role belonged to Stephana. Therefore, essentially, when she looked at herself “through the window” (which was how the external recognition screen was called) she would only see her beloved St. Petersburg, whereas each of the others would see a different place in the galaxy matching their calculated possible destinations.
That was the other enchantment that made this journey possible. They didn’t need real engines nor even true machinery, merely by calculating the possibility of travel to a place with specific theoretical means and having the elements … was enough to do so.
“Remember,” Piotr whispered in her ear, “from now on you’re Salmon. Don’t forget, that will be your way of retaining your identity.”
“The one who returns to where they started from …” she thought. And she nodded silently while she watched as a copy of herself approached, someone identical in everything except her hair, which was a little darker, and an expression that looked slightly more determined.
“That must be enough, Salmon-Stephana,” she told herself. “Only you will return home because you’ll never get out of there; none of the others will manage it, that was the most efficient design. Remember, you are the one who will return, not them.”
Shaking the steady hand her other self extended to her, she almost felt pity for her. Wolf would see places that no one had ever seen; but she would remain there, and her memories would be passed on to the only version able to return: to Salmon, her self.
“In my reality, Papa married Major Dmitri Dmitrovic Griboyedin. Both were decorated with honors as heroes during the Great Event. My childhood was short but lovely.”
Stephana … Salmon-Stephana listened attentively to the story told by Panther-Stephana. This version of herself (happy, uninhibited, and much blonder) was missing her left eye (lost when she was a teenager during what she called a “not exactly orthodox” fencing practice), and in its place an enormous and ostentatious diamond sparkled. The jewel had belonged to the Kremlin’s Diamond Collection and was a gift from her fatherland for services she had offered during the events following the Great Event, known as the Brief Return. Events which none of the other versions of herself had ever heard and which Panther-Stephana didn’t wish to elucidate on for their being “too cruel.”
Salmon-Stephana, just like the immense majority of the new copossibles who now inhabited the Svekla, had always known that her father was bisexual (something perfectly normal for his family); what she had been unaware of were the feelings he had harbored for his comrade in arms, which in her own reality he had kept hidden. She now felt she knew her father a little better. No, in reality, she felt she knew him even less. But how much were the fathers of these other “selves” her own father?
She began to look at her co-possibles one by one. All of them were seated around the large meeting table, waiting for the precise moment to be able to arrive at the places where the Terpsichore already was.
By her side was Wolf-Soledad. Calm, sure, unhesitating. In the few hours they had been together, she tended to act as a guide. Behind her, like a giant’s decapitated carcass, stretched the cybernetic combat armor that followed her like a faithful hound. The terrible sword, over two meters of blued steel, shone at each of its many notches.
Beyond her, Panther-Stepahana continued speaking, revealing data and personal feelings that were completely unknown to Salmon-Stephana.
Next was Lizard-Stephana. This “other self” wore the most extravagant uniform: a metallic second skin, pinkish-orange in color with a Frigian hat and a line of dorsal plates with spines of that same material. Her wrist and elbow guards were covered with what might well have been plugs. Her eyes, which always appeared to be looking into other worlds, were constantly surprised by the images they captured of what surrounded her. She seemed to be submerged in a perpetual dream. Drugs? Direct mental stimulation? Augmented reality? Salmon-Stephana didn’t know.
On the other side of the ovoid glass table, right in front of Lizard-Stephana, was the co-possible who most unsettled her; the one Piotr had named Snake-Stephanie. The most stunning of all the co-possibles, she seemed to want to seduce everyone. It was difficult to follow her ruminations, which flowed along strange meanderings of thought. More than a discursive thread, she seemed to hold a single idea that mutated constantly. There was arrogance in her posture but as if it flowed naturally from her. She arrived at the Svekla enveloped in a voluminous but elegant white and gold extra-vehicular suit but now wore only the suit’s lower part. Snake-Stephana wouldn’t stop staring into her eyes, without blinking, a halo of red curls framing her features and falling over her naked torso. Was she flirting with her? Or simply playing with her mind? When Salmon-Stephana prepared to look at her next alter ego, she noted the slight movement of her lips forming a barely perceptible kiss followed by that haughty smile.
Swan-Dzhessika had observed everything and now smiled. She seemed an attractive creature, refined and extremely timid. Her hair was straightened and dyed jet black. When she realized she was being looked at, she blushed and lowered her head. How had she reached her position with such a shy nature? The only two times she had managed to speak without faltering, Snake-Stephana had mocked her for being “too idealist,” and nonetheless, she was always beside her that one found her. A remora of power, perhaps? Or had the swan succumbed to the serpent’s deadly seduction?
From the other side of the table’s pronounced curve was the most startling version of herself that she had seen: Eagle-Dmitri. This co-possible was male, and she didn’t know if he had been born that way or had chosen that gender. What is certain is that he had barely spoken, but he watched everything with such thoroughness that she had begun to wonder if he didn’t belong to some intelligence agency. However, he had presented himself as a shaman, a “person who knows.” Snake-Stephana had immediately asked if it weren’t ironic to expect the possibility of needing shamanic skills on a scientific expedition, but Eagle-Dmitri explained it as something perfectly plausible, something with which oddly enough Wolf-Soledad concurred.
Finally, far from the table and wrapped up in an anxious conversation were Whale-Dzhessika and Ant-Dhzessika. The first hummed her words between strident laughs and stentorian movements. The second nodded and opined with long monotonous sentences. Salmon-Stephana thought she understood why Piotr had given them those code names. Whale-Dzhessika, even wrapped in her iridescent extra-vehicular suit with its glass helm, was a sort of collective memory (her ability to remember was too powerful to not be the product of some artificial implant in her skull) but an exogenous one as if her particular reality didn’t share an atmosphere or an historic unity with the rest of the co-possibles. For her part, Ant-Dzhessika had been the engineer commissioned to construct the Terpischore in her reality; so Salmon-Stephana was completely sure that, knowing the mechanics of the ship as she must, it was impossible for her to be unaware that only one of the nine would return home. And nonetheless, the face of this variant was totally serene, accepting, warm. She faced self-sacrifice as an individual in the service of the collective: almost impersonal patience and efficiency, wrapped in a fiercely blood red-colored augmentation suit, her head shaved with an enormous logo tattooed at the crown of her skull.
She tried to glimpse all eight co-possibles in a single moment … all nine if she looked at her own reflection in the glass table … How could they be so fundamentally different among themselves? How, despite that, could they continue to be “the same woman” (or “the same man”) without being them? Because they weren’t copies; they were literally her.
And how would she manage to integrate all those memories into her own personality at the end of the mission?
Piotr’s hand on her left shoulder made her start. Suddenly, all eyes were on him. Each Captain had known him in their own reality, and all of them feared him to the same degree that they depended on him. That was perhaps the only feature that her co-possibles shared unequivocally with her.
“The exit is ready,” was the only thing the prosopon said, and the silence around them became thick, tangible.
They all stood in unison and dressed in their space suits or prepared their instruments or prayed their ritual songs or simply approached the Svekla’s sole hatch with resolution or fear.
All except for Salmon-Stephana.
Snake-Stephana noticed this, and a glimmer of understanding shadowed her features: she was the only one who would swim back upstream against the current, the only one who would return to the origin. To return home.
The woman smiled as she slid her suit over her naked breasts, wiggling her hips.
“Interesting,” the Snake told the Salmon. “I suppose that here the irony lies in the fact that who returns is alive and who remains is who dies.” Then she smiled even more, revealing pearly teeth, and ended with a sing-song voice, “Just the opposite of the fish.”
There was a twisted pleasure in that gesture and also a deep threat. Salmon-Stephan felt a visceral terror confronting this version of herself.
Serpent-Stephana sighed while she adjusted the lavish clasps of her elegant space suit and said to the air as if in the midst of a reflection. “It’s not fair. No, it isn’t.”
Then she walked resolvedly toward Swan-Dzhessika, took her in her arms, thin and fragile in her moss gray-colored suit, and kissed her strongly. The Swan smiled beneath the fierce kiss and rested in the Snake’s avid hands. But Snake-Stephana’s excitation only increased her vehemence until her fingers wrapped around Swan-Dzhessika’s fine neck. Despite the intervention of the rest of the copossibles, only Piotr’s superhuman force managed to pull the Snake away before she had asphyxiated the Swan.
Nonetheless, while the prosopon held her, the prey struggled frenetically to return to her executioner. Snake-Stephana smiled triumphantly and waited calmly for her to be released; then Swan-Dzhessika returned, submissive, to her side.
Nobody said anything when Snake-Stephan went to take her place in the line, waiting her turn at the hatch with the Swan at her side. Not even when the Swan lifted her black hair to offer up her neck. Not even when the Snake wrapped her fingers around it and began her panting constricting. Not even when bones that were too thin made a slight, muffled sound and Swan-Dzhessika’s head hung smiling to one side. Not even when at last Snake-Stephana let the slender body fall and smiled poisonously at Salmon-Stephana while saying, “It’s not fair that you don’t experience what we do. This is my gift for you, dear sister: carry your death in your memory when you return. The death of your feelings on killing yourself and that of dying by your own hand. You deserve it. Better yet, we deserve it.”
Only one voice crowned that pronouncement when Snake-Stephana crossed through the hatch, and it was Eagle-Dmitri saying “da” to helping a revived Swan-Dzhessika stand up again. A swan who crossed through the territories of a shaman because ultimately (just like all of them in that place) she was neither alive nor dead.
Suddenly, Salmon-Stephana … Stephana was about to be alone again. Alone with the prosopon because, at the moment that he opened the hatch and the first of her co-possibles crossed through it, all of them would. All except for her, of course.
Although she tended to consider herself the Ego.0, the point of departure, she knew rationally that she was no privileged being who belonged to a central university but just another possibility: the one who never left St. Petersburg. The one who had to fail in her attempt to travel.
Finally, at a sign from Piotr, the hatch opened …
… then, with the help of her combat armor, the Wolf unsheathed her sword. The titanic suit augmented its occupant’s reach, force, and velocity. Wolf and armor maintained the blade aloft and passed through the hatch. Barely over the threshold, she was greeted by the farthest reaches of space. The large engines visible just beyond the Wolf’s neck kicked in, but the near emptiness of space swallowed its sound. Around her: Perseus.
The enormous Svekla floated in the penumbra like a heterogeneous, synchronic mass, darkly purplish.
The soles of her armor clung to the surface of the ship, and she walked upon it as if her insignificant mass could compete against the eternal free fall of space. And as she walked, the Wolf observed, sword in hand, the indescribable magnitude of what surrounded her.
The probes that coated her suit were gathering up all the data it was possible to collect. These would later be given to Piotr for him to download into the Terpsichore’s multiple AIs.
Behind the ship rose a darkness splattered by light from the galactic arm. In front, dominating her view and her imagination, was the crab nebula: M1.
An intricate tangle of gas filaments, luminous and bright, expanded from the sphere of neutrons: the astonishingly colored aftertastes of its explosion and the naked heart of what had once been an enormous star, still beating frenetically. Golds, reds, and greens weaving one against the other through various wavelengths.
The Wolf howled at the crab of light while the multicolored ghost of the dead star blessed her sword held aloft.
Alone. Thanks to the nature of the ship’s non-space, at the moment it was possible for Stephana to be alone, she was. Alone, again. Alone with him, with it, with the ship and its mask. The beetroot and its wilted spirit. A faceless shell.
For some reason her mind returned to the trip she had made with her father to the Oranienbaum Palace. She was eleven years old, and they had been eating oranges. The park had been dyed with the colors of autumn and incipient cold. She remembered having entered the main hall, everything golden and yellow. Beneath her feet there were a series of astonishing images, and the reflectors made the gold dance in relays. But the tired echo of their steps and the grey autumn light that entered through the doors gave the atmosphere a sad and melancholic air, the sensation of something already lifeless. Suddenly, Stephana felt an urgent need to get out of there as soon as possible, to return to the garden, to the present, to the world of the living; but when she tried to tell her father this, she found him staring up at the arched ceiling with a look of astonishment. The young girl also looked up at this object that filled her father with awe and couldn’t help but join him in a long, silent moment of contemplation. Something within her shouted for her to lose no time in getting out of there before the sun was hidden and that hall, deprived of natural light, became a tomb; but another part of her begged her not to move an inch from beneath that enormous allegorical painting where Day conquered Night.
For some reason, she now felt just as she had done on that day. She looked at the door besides which the prosopon stood and trembled with the tension of those same contradictory impulses.
Finally, at a sign from Piotr, the hatch opened …
… Without even thinking about it, the Snake crossed the no-space delimited by the door and threw herself fully into the arms of a blinding light: the nucleus.
Her white and gold suit seemed to float in a sea of liquid gold like another star. The light was almost palpable, and the black visors of the Snake’s helmet darkened as much as they could. She was in the very heart of the galaxy. Where there were not stars but super-hot gas, electrons that hurtled madly along the remnants of what had once been a cluster of multicolored suns. A portentous whirlwind, a spiral of gas swirling within a singularity that was so large it held thousands of millions of heavenly bodies around it.
The energies wielded here were able to alter time and even space itself. The Snake knew that she approached the sancta sanctorum of the Milky Way, that this sacred seat of honor was protected by the angels of radiation: emissions that were so strong that nothing with biological life could survive their divine gaze. And nonetheless, far from fearing them, she activated her backpack’s thrusters and floated, approaching with a waving trajectory, toward the Everything that would reduce her to nothingness in mere moments.
Yes, when this was over she would leave there and go to the bridge over the Griboyedov Canal, the one that was held in the jaws of two pairs of griffins. She would stop on one side and would watch the light of the sun shining upon the gold of their wings. And she would listen to the birds in the white night, singing in the silence of a dawn that would shine as smoothly as a pearl. And then the sun would emerge without ever having set.
Yes, of course she would leave. And when she did so, everything would end. Everything and everyone. But did she really wish to leave? Did her co-possibles really matter so little to her?
Finally, at a sign from Piotr, the hatch opened …
… Hesitantly, reluctant and fearful, the Lizard passed through to the other side. If it had been up to her, she would have remained in her world of daydreams and oneiric symbols; but the Sun called her, and she couldn’t not heed its call. She had traveled far to arrive so close, barely eight light minutes away. The sun was her Lord. The plaques stuck to the back of her suit unfolded to receive the entire electromagnetic spectrum, and the drugs passed directly into her veins from the suit as if she were an extension of it and not the reverse. Her goggles, filtering in H-Alpha, showed her a sphere of gentle orange tones whose skin was a living surface populated by millions of salamanders who twisted upon themselves, blazing in eternal combustion, and in between them could be glimpsed, here and there, wells of magnetic darkness; while a gentle grayish tone surrounded everything in the majesty of its corona. Plasma curls larger than St. Petersburg, larger than Earth itself, extended like shy insects above the colossus.
And the Lizard slowly fried in contemplation of her Lord, closer than the winged-footed messenger, closer than any human had ever been. Close, too close, and it would never be enough.
