In the Ocean of Night

PART THREE

He woke, staring up into an iron-gray sky glowing with dawn.

He woke alone.

The being was gone. The faint trembling pressure had seemed to ride behind his eyes; now Nigel felt only a hollow absence of something he could scarcely recall.

He sat up in his sleeping bag, felt a buzzing dizziness, and lay back again. A horned lizard froze on a nearby rock and then, sensing his relaxation, darted away.

There were two places, he thought, where people feel closer to the source of things. The ocean, with its salty memory of origins. And in the desert—bleached, carved, turning beneath a yellow flame, a place reduced to the raw edge. And yet it was alive with a fine webbing of creatures. Perhaps that was why the being wanted to come here.

He remembered buying his backpack, goosedown sleeping bag and boots in a Mexico City shop. Remembered the short flight into the high desert. Remembered walking.

And sensed something behind his memories…

Of standing in a high place, looking down on a flat checkerboard of things, of categories and coordinate systems and forms.

He had watched himself. Seen a bird sheltering in a mesquite plant. Watched the first layer: Bird. Wings. A burnished brown. Phylum-order-class-genus-species.

Watched the second layer: Flight. Motion. Momentum. Analysis.

And saw at last that there was an essence in the way he filtered the world. That beyond the filter lay an ocean. A desert.

That the filter was what it meant to be human.

There was something more, something larger. He snatched at it but it…it brushed by him. He dimly saw the fabric of something… and then it was gone.

Nigel blinked. He lay on a shelf of worn rock, his body rubbed and warmed by the goosedown bag. The hill beside him glowed soft and golden; the horizon brimmed with light.

What had he learned? he thought. Factually, nothing. There were glimpsed aspects, nuances, but nothing concrete. The being had come. It provided some cushion for him during those dark hours in Mexico City (had he really fluxed the window? thought of jumping?). And the being had gone, seeped away in the night.

Nigel frowned, stretched, relaxed. His calves ached from walking. His stomach rumbled with hunger. He reached over to his backpack and fished out a dried fruit bar. His saliva wetted a bite and the flavor of strawberry filled his mouth.

What was it? After all he’d been through, Nigel still knew nothing about the alien that was useful. No facts, no data. One does not ask questions of a ghost.

He chewed, watching the filling sky.

Alexandria, Shirley—all behind him now. Ironic, how close you could be to someone, how much he’d thought he loved Shirley. Now, after all she’d done, there was only a dull, sour memory.

And questions. Had he really loved Shirley, or was that another illusion? The only person he had ever been sure of was Alexandria. And she was gone. Through the Snark he had known some faint trace of her, for a while. Perhaps some fraction of her remained in the Snark, some shadow.

He blew his nose on a handkerchief. The cloth came away with a smattering of blood; the night air had dried out his nasal passages.

Nigel smiled. Was the blood a sign of life? Or of death? Everywhere was ambiguity.

And yet…he wanted answers. He needed to know. Of his old world only one fragment remained: the Snark. There he must go. NASA and Evers would be stepping-stones outward and there would be others, other people who could help. There would be some resistance to him at NASA, he knew, particularly after the business about signaling the Snark first. Nigel Walmsley, the mad astronaut. But he would get through that.

He rubbed his eyes, smoothing the fretwork of crow’s feet. What he needed, after these two days with the being-behind-the-eyes, was people. The simple touch of his own kind. And he needed help to deal with NASA. But most of all, people.