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Athlacarta: The Second Letter:
Dear Adler,
I have a dream, often, that always ends here: the five-fingered shape of a black-gloved hand hardens out of the dark, stamping the wall so close to my face that I feel the scant brush of ballistic fiber against my cheek. He pushes off the wall, propelling himself down the corridor in apparent ignorance of me. He is so close I can smell him, even today, sweating cold as I write you this thing in assured peace and safety. He smells of life, of excited sweat, mingled with more artificial traces of singed firing residue and pleasant aftershave. He is human, just like you, or I, or any of the rest of these men who have come to destroy what I have known my whole life as constant. He is human.
I wonder, less often than I used to, if this wasn't the critical juncture... if I had stayed in my bedroom like an obedient station-brat, would I have been able to have seen them as soulless, as demons? If I had been able to see them as demons, (and, subsequently, not come to contemplate all those deeper evils, which come not by nature but by choice), would I have lived to tell you this story?
Alive or dead, the Prince's men remain like ghosts in my thought, in every dream that I wake remembering. I can imagine them, with such a flawlessness of recollection the likes of which I can't even apply to any given night's morning. There are their solid shapes in the spacious blackness, as happy blind and weightless as they would have been on land in pleasant weather. The rest of us were totally lost... experienced only with the occasional drill of session in a simulator, our limbs were useless in zero gravity.
The night was beginning to become populated with sound at that point, people in the rooms around me waking without fathoming the fate we were already sealed to. I could hear voices occasionally, muffled through the honey-comb of walls that extended around me in every direction; every one confused and bewildered, most becoming frightened, but not like they would be.
You were not a citizen of Athlacarta. I think I know that now... It makes sense that you would have come from further out, from a life hard enough that at least some of our catastrophe must seem so pedestrian.
I got out. Clumsy and disoriented as I was, fear drove me from my cocoon... nobody learns to live with the feeling of being caged, waiting for the coming slaughter. I don't think I knew, at the time, what was coming... I can say I'm sure I didn't have any concrete evidence. It's difficult to sort that all out now because the memory of what was before is so steeped in the memory of what came after. I definitely got out, though, into the darkened hallway. The body is a prison when you have no senses... no light, no sound, no weight on your bones to offer bearing to the mind...
In the support circles I've been shuffled through, people are all full of sensations. They hear the missiles fired to disable the gravitational and electric fields that kept the station in order. They hear the perfect rhythm of the Prince's many footsteps, feel the chilly mass of his company spreading out through the station like a quick moving and deadly virus.
There was nothing of the kind. They were invisible, like a dream that someone else is dreaming while I can only, powerlessly, watch them sleep.
Slowly, the sounds of faceless voices from behind the closed doors began to be somewhat more audible, their words still muffled and unintelligible for the soundproofing that cushions the hallway.
I was there, too, with my body pressed into a notch in the wall barely big enough to accommodate me. I don't know how to describe what happened next... the climate of the passage changed, so subtly that no language I've learned could adequately express it. There was a fluctuation in temperature, there was a shift in the silent air, there was a shadow cast by light too dim to register on my perception. I think we are more perceptive than we even realize, or utilize... and I think it is all these things that teaches us to know when we are not alone in a room.
With horror, I came to understand without question that there were other bodies in the hall, flowing soundlessly in a river of black-clad limbs that rendered them unreal in the dark. There is, I am convinced, deep genetic memories of an experience like this, where from dreams in which the dreamer is unable to scream, to utter any sound at all, are born. I counted, against my will, first twos then fours, so sure I would be seen that my heart scarcely dared to beat within my breast.
I was not, I fear to admit, canny enough to have been deliberately hiding at that moment. Rather, I'd gotten from the confines of my room to the relatively larger space of the passage and panicked. Paralysis had me in full rigor, I could no more think than I could move, all before my near-brush with this faceless enemy. The miracle, here, was not that he didn't detect my presence but that I didn't suffocate by the sheer force of my own will conspiring against me.
That is one of the worst feelings I can remember, knowing that my luck wouldn't hold out, that there was no true avenue of escape over the false and fleeting securities of my mind. It is one of the worst, though there have been worse since then.
Sincerely yours,
Cass.
I have a dream, often, that always ends here: the five-fingered shape of a black-gloved hand hardens out of the dark, stamping the wall so close to my face that I feel the scant brush of ballistic fiber against my cheek. He pushes off the wall, propelling himself down the corridor in apparent ignorance of me. He is so close I can smell him, even today, sweating cold as I write you this thing in assured peace and safety. He smells of life, of excited sweat, mingled with more artificial traces of singed firing residue and pleasant aftershave. He is human, just like you, or I, or any of the rest of these men who have come to destroy what I have known my whole life as constant. He is human.
I wonder, less often than I used to, if this wasn't the critical juncture... if I had stayed in my bedroom like an obedient station-brat, would I have been able to have seen them as soulless, as demons? If I had been able to see them as demons, (and, subsequently, not come to contemplate all those deeper evils, which come not by nature but by choice), would I have lived to tell you this story?
Alive or dead, the Prince's men remain like ghosts in my thought, in every dream that I wake remembering. I can imagine them, with such a flawlessness of recollection the likes of which I can't even apply to any given night's morning. There are their solid shapes in the spacious blackness, as happy blind and weightless as they would have been on land in pleasant weather. The rest of us were totally lost... experienced only with the occasional drill of session in a simulator, our limbs were useless in zero gravity.
The night was beginning to become populated with sound at that point, people in the rooms around me waking without fathoming the fate we were already sealed to. I could hear voices occasionally, muffled through the honey-comb of walls that extended around me in every direction; every one confused and bewildered, most becoming frightened, but not like they would be.
You were not a citizen of Athlacarta. I think I know that now... It makes sense that you would have come from further out, from a life hard enough that at least some of our catastrophe must seem so pedestrian.
I got out. Clumsy and disoriented as I was, fear drove me from my cocoon... nobody learns to live with the feeling of being caged, waiting for the coming slaughter. I don't think I knew, at the time, what was coming... I can say I'm sure I didn't have any concrete evidence. It's difficult to sort that all out now because the memory of what was before is so steeped in the memory of what came after. I definitely got out, though, into the darkened hallway. The body is a prison when you have no senses... no light, no sound, no weight on your bones to offer bearing to the mind...
In the support circles I've been shuffled through, people are all full of sensations. They hear the missiles fired to disable the gravitational and electric fields that kept the station in order. They hear the perfect rhythm of the Prince's many footsteps, feel the chilly mass of his company spreading out through the station like a quick moving and deadly virus.
There was nothing of the kind. They were invisible, like a dream that someone else is dreaming while I can only, powerlessly, watch them sleep.
Slowly, the sounds of faceless voices from behind the closed doors began to be somewhat more audible, their words still muffled and unintelligible for the soundproofing that cushions the hallway.
I was there, too, with my body pressed into a notch in the wall barely big enough to accommodate me. I don't know how to describe what happened next... the climate of the passage changed, so subtly that no language I've learned could adequately express it. There was a fluctuation in temperature, there was a shift in the silent air, there was a shadow cast by light too dim to register on my perception. I think we are more perceptive than we even realize, or utilize... and I think it is all these things that teaches us to know when we are not alone in a room.
With horror, I came to understand without question that there were other bodies in the hall, flowing soundlessly in a river of black-clad limbs that rendered them unreal in the dark. There is, I am convinced, deep genetic memories of an experience like this, where from dreams in which the dreamer is unable to scream, to utter any sound at all, are born. I counted, against my will, first twos then fours, so sure I would be seen that my heart scarcely dared to beat within my breast.
I was not, I fear to admit, canny enough to have been deliberately hiding at that moment. Rather, I'd gotten from the confines of my room to the relatively larger space of the passage and panicked. Paralysis had me in full rigor, I could no more think than I could move, all before my near-brush with this faceless enemy. The miracle, here, was not that he didn't detect my presence but that I didn't suffocate by the sheer force of my own will conspiring against me.
That is one of the worst feelings I can remember, knowing that my luck wouldn't hold out, that there was no true avenue of escape over the false and fleeting securities of my mind. It is one of the worst, though there have been worse since then.
Sincerely yours,
Cass.