Miserond
Mark W. Tiedemann 


      Gil Citares hurried down the curving corridor, trying to catch up to the compact, dark woman ten paces ahead of him. She had cut her time short coming by his cabin to bring him along. Gil was grateful; he liked being present when fresh shipments came from the outer ring, though they were all the same. 
      "We've got about twenty seconds to spare," Jesca Rimin called over her shoulder as they entered the receiving lock. "We haven't slowed the ring yet." She flashed him a smile and his face tingled with pleasure. 
      The lock was a long room, split lengthwise by a thick transparency that separated the control console and various other apparatus from the receiving stage. The gate itself was a large featureless gray oval at the far edge of the stage. Jesca stepped up to the console and began working controls. 
      "Seal the door, would you?" she asked. 
      Gil turned to the exit and touched the switch. The door slid shut and sealed itself. As he turned back a voice echoed in the chamber, and throughout the ring. 
      "Attention. Ring deceleration will commence in fifteen seconds. Minus C protocols are in force. Stay where you are, do not wander the corridors until the all clear after acceleration." 
      The warning repeated twice more. 
      Jesca worked quickly, trying to make up lost time. She had cut it too close coming by his room. On the other side of the transparency, twin sets of columns moved out from the bulkheads to flank the portal. Energy soaks. 
      "We're decelerating," she said. The deck began to vibrate. A deep resonant hum permeated the air. Jesca checked her console. 
      "Velocities matched," Jesca said. She glanced up at the dark oval. "Corridor forming…" 
      As Gil watched, the flat gray began to break up, lighten in patches, until it was nearly white. Then it flashed briefly as the boundary was breached and corridor photons burst into the receiving chamber. The oval was haloed now, so bright it hurt to look at it. Gil squinted into the glare, barely diminished by the polarizing of the transparency. 
      Gil licked his lips nervously. The sound grew, the vibration increased. Ghost lights flickered at the edge of his vision. Suddenly a shape emerged from the brightness, moved forward slowly, and seemed to drift into the chamber. Behind that another one appeared. 
      "That's it," Jesca said finally. "Five crates." She touched one more switch and the brilliance began to fade. "Okay, Damon," she spoke into her console mic, "bring us back up to speed." 
      The portal resumed its flat gray seamlessness, leaving behind the five large coffinlike objects. The vibration diminished with the sound and, somehow, Gil felt more solid. 
      "Acceleration complete," the PA announced, "resume normal operations." 
      When the energy soaks cooled down the hot crates, Jesca opened the access through the transparency and stepped into the receiving theatre. Gil followed her in and together they began unlatching the dogs on the lids. 
      As he went from crate to crate, glancing cursorily over the manifest enclosed in each—datachits, new clothes, a shipment of wine, other consumables—his attention returned constantly to the portal. It had the look of a solid nothing, a hard emptiness that seemed simultaneously here and elsewhere. In a sense it was constantly open. Theoretically Gil could step through it. But the conditional nature of the ring made it a conditional reality. Given certain conditions, the portal was passable. Under prevailing conditions—the ring up to speed, the corridor unformed to the outer ring—there simply existed nowhere to pass through the portal to. 
      The staff had sent probes through, though, from time to time, just to see. No data had returned. 
      Being so close was disturbing. He shook his head and unlatched the last crate. The lid hissed open. 
      A man sat up, blinking. He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. Gil stared, transfixed, until the man lowered his hands and looked up. He blinked at Gil for a few seconds, then looked at Jesca. 
      "I didn't know we were expecting new personnel," she said. 
      "I'm a replacement," he said. "I need to see Jesca Rimin." 
      Jesca frowned. "I'm Jesca Rimin." 
      "I'm—" He pushed up out of the coffin, grunted. "My name is Ivelor. I need to see Gil Citares, too." 
      "I'm Citares." 
      "I'd like to speak to both of you. Privately." 
      "Finally," Gil said. 
      
      
      Gil sat alone in the observation chamber, immersed in the qualities of blackness on the panels before him. He had known darkness most of his life and sometimes, when especially masochistic and despondent, he had marveled at its varieties, from the bleak lightlessness of defeat to the electric storms of helpless rage. Black coffee, intractable mud, scorching tar, oil-tainted ice, waste smoke—all black in different ways, signifying different feelings, each marking a file in his memory of different places and people. But he had never seen a black like the one at the center of the ring. 
      The chamber was lit the color of a backlit bruise, blue and purple, from the play of doomed energies that crossed the panels in washes like storm clouds speeded up a thousand times. The graveyard of all matter, particles poured to destruction into the impossible bucket the ring encircled, a bucket shaped by the geometries of infinite stress. Gil had once wondered if the universe was alive, sentient. Perhaps not, he still had no answer, but, like the inmost hidden part of a human, the universe had a soul and it was just as lightless. 
      No one, Gil knew, ever saw another person's soul. What they saw, what they thought was the soul, was a reconstruction, a projection assembled through the medium of intellect and emotion. And like the images he now watched, equally false. 
      A door slid quietly open behind him. 
      In the upper left-hand corner of the display a splash of crimson light erupted. 
      "Gil…?" 
      Slowly, he twisted his head around to look up at Jesca, indistinct in the dark. Gil smiled and sighed. He patted the chair beside him, inviting. Jesca stepped down, sat. 
      "I'm being recalled," she said. 
      "Oh?" 
      "I didn't plan for this. I never intended to leave." 
      I know, Gil thought, and carefully said, "Maybe they'll send you back. Maybe they just want to ask some questions." 
      Gil sensed her shaking her head. He found her hand and held it. 
      "I might be gone a day, an hour, a year," she said. "I don't think anyone has ever left and returned before." 
      Gil nodded, almost answered Yes, someone has, but stopped himself. He glanced at her. She stared up at the display. Perhaps she had not seen his nod. 
      "Why would they do that?" Gil asked. "Your work—" 
      "—can be handled by someone else. My notes are all in the system. I just—" She squeezed his hand. "You could come with me." 
      "Excuse me?" 
      She squeezed his forearm with her free hand. "Why not? You said you were planning to leave eventually anyway. You could go out with me. At least that way we'd both know someone in the universe." 
      Gil stared at the displays, stunned mute and embarrassed by his silence. He did not want to hurt Jesca, but he could think of nothing to say. Finally she withdrew her hands. After a few more minutes she left the chamber. 


      Gil pulled the knife toward him along the groove in the box he cradled in his lap. The delicate coil of wood arced into the corner of his cabin with the other shavings. Gil widened the rut, deepened the stroke. He held the box at arm's length and turned to each face until he brought around the blank surface. 
      The door sounded. On the monitor Gil saw Ivelor waiting. He frowned and looked down at the box again. 
      "Let him in or pretend he isn't there?" he asked softly. The door sounded again and he sighed. "Let him in, I suppose. And I thought I'd been ignoring him so well." He flipped the box over to the face he had been working on and set the knife in the groove again. "Come in." 
      Ivelor stepped into the small cabin. The door closed behind him and he clasped his hands at his waist and surveyed the room. His gaze stopped at the neat pile of wood shavings. 
      "I didn't know what to expect coming here," Ivelor said then. "I was under the impression that you couldn't see the Hole, but there's a halo around it, dim and bluish." 
      "It's an illusion. You're seeing something that's not really there." He grinned at Ivelor's puzzled expression. "The glow is the escape of virtual particles from the event horizon." 
      "You're playing with me." 
      "No, no! I'm serious. One of the physicists could probably give you a better explanation. It's one of the things they study here. Theory predicts that in any isolated point in the universe, a certain amount of energy is inevitably present for a certain limited amount of time. Where there appears to be nothing concrete to provide that energy, one of two things must be true. Either that point has no property called time or particles will appear spontaneously to fulfill the energy/time requirement. These are virtual particles and they come in paired groups—a particle and its antiparticle, opposites—and since the universe seems to function according to certain statistical laws, for every cubic meter of space there will be a corresponding occurrence of energy/time pairs. They don't necessarily have to appear uniformly distributed, though, and in fact they aren't. Most of them seem to gather 'round the extremities." 
      "Black holes." 
      "Exactly. So what happens is the pairs appear at the event horizon. One plunges into the hole, the other makes good its escape. And that seems to account for the halo you saw." 
      "But if they're not real, how can they be seen?" 
      "Transubstantiation." 
      "Excuse me?" 
      "Not at all. When the lucky half of the pair manages to get away, the universe rewards it by granting it mass and substance. Of course, now we're in the 'real' universe, and there's no way you can have something for nothing. The mass comes from the hole itself." 
      Ivelor shook his head. "How is that possible?" 
      Gil shrugged elaborately. "That's one of the reasons this station was built, to study exactly that phenomenon." 
      "They don't call it transubstantiation, do they?" 
      "No, but maybe they should. Maybe if they looked at it that way it might be simpler to solve." He glanced at Ivelor. "You didn't come here to talk to me about theory. Are you really taking Jesca back?" 
      "No, I'm sending her back. I'm staying." 
      "Why?" 
      "That's not something I'm comfortable discussing with you." 
      "Oh, come on! We're all prisoners here, nothing we say or do has any effect Out There! For all you know the world that sent you is already gone, all the people who gave you orders dead. The only law here is gravity, so it's best not to hold onto things too tightly." 
      Ivelor cocked an eyebrow. "Statistics?" 
      "Pragmatics. Information we receive from Out There is meaningless. The only thing that counts is what we send out." 
      "Like virtual particles? No existence until they make good an escape from a black hole?" 
      Gil laughed. "Good! Very good! But so what? If you tell me about your mission here, what effect could that have on anything Out There until I leave?" 
      "Don't be so sure Out There is so disconnected from this place. I'll make a deal with you. You tell me why you're in here, I'll explain my purpose." 
      Gil peeled another curl off the box and Ivelor watched it trace its path into the corner. He frowned, dismayed, and Gil chuckled. 
      "Statistics," Gil said cryptically. 
      Ivelor nodded at the box. "Woodworking seems…incongruous. What is this?" 
      Gil handed it over. "This is me." 
      Ivelor turned it from face to face, his forehead creased in concentration. Gil watched him anxiously, enjoying this in spite of himself. 
      Finally Ivelor smiled. He held up a moire' pattern. "Your birth?" Gil nodded. Ivelor turned to a fractal solar system. "Your home." The happy and sad clowns of traditional theatre. "All your joy and sorrow." A yin-yang figure of two people locked in an act of love. "Your love." 
      Gil nodded, his heart pounding. Ivelor stared at the ring pattern, frowning. Finally he shook his head and handed it back. 
      Gil tapped the rings. "My salvation." 
      Ivelor reached out and touched the blank face. "What's going here?" 
      Gil set the box down and resheathed the carving knife. "Let me show you something." He stood and gestured to the door. 
      
      
      Ivelor craned his neck, eyes wide. Immense ribbing gave the impression that they stood within the belly of a snake. Sharp silvery and blue lines, connecting cables, relays, dark green quasi-organic machineshapes filled the crevices between the large smooth rolls of brownish-black. Gil looked up; his face and Ivelor's stared back, dimly reflected in the transparency that shielded the walkway, pale ghosts, eyeless. 
      "I always feel I've been swallowed when I come in here," Gil said. 
      "It's incredible." 
      "Improbable, at least." 
      Ivelor pressed his hands against the transparency and stared. "When I found out that I was coming here I was fascinated with the notion that I could step onto a platform, ride it for a while, and step off to find I'd left my old life fifty, sixty, a hundred years behind. I liked that idea, that I could walk away—spin away—from everything." 
      "Was your life so bad?" 
      "Complicated. Things are difficult to explain clearly when you're right in the middle of them." 
      "Are they any clearer now?" 
      "What were your reasons for coming here?" 
      "Several. For one, I'm a Living History. I represent a period in time and I'm traveling into the future to do exactly that. Also I have a decision to make. Choices." 
      "A decision that takes centuries to make? What will you do when you make it?" 
      Gil shrugged. "Finish what needs finishing." 
      "I'd rather not go back, but if I had a choice in the matter I'd like to go back when no one and nothing can remember the name Ivelor and the things that have attached to it. My life is caught up in repetition and I want it to end. I want to be no one." He turned to Gil. "Jesca Rimin is being recalled because she requested it." 
      "When?" 
      "Quite some time ago—time on the outside. In fact, the last request was the sixth. She's been granted the request each time. I'm here to find out why she has never emerged." 
      Gil laughed. 
      "It's not amusing," Ivelor said. 
      "Of course it is. If she requested it she'd be gone. She isn't." 
      "We have the record. In fact, we have a record of the day the both of you left." 
      "We didn't leave, though. We're both still here." 
      Ivelor nodded. "That's why I'm here. To find out why you're still here." Ivelor smiled quietly. "So why are you still here?" 
      Gil pointed through the transparency. "That direction lies the hole. If you stepped through the portal into the gravity well you would fall forever. Your body might well disintegrate at once, but how long might a thought last?" He pointed to the other side. "That way lies reality, what is commonly called the true world. But truth is what we say it is." He leaned against the wall. "My friend died. She was my best friend—my truth. We made the universe real for each other. We agreed on that, told each other that, and said that without each other the universe would not be worth inhabiting. And she died." 
      "You had a death pact?" 
      "Yes. It seems like a simple thing, too. One dies, the other follows. But to where? I've always prided myself on being a rationalist. If reality exists only at the event horizon of the conscious mind, then death is the abnegation of reality. But if reality persists after death, then either consciousness continues or…" He swallowed and laughed nervously. "The question is, follow her to where?" 
      "Does it matter?" 
      Gil stared at the far bulkhead until Ivelor cleared his throat quietly. "So," Gil said, "when is she supposed to go back?" 
      "At the next portal." 
      "You won't like it here. Nothing much happens for a long, long time." He laughed. "Of course, when things do happen they are odd. It's an extreme environment to say the least. We're traveling so close to the speed of light that it might as well be C—we call it C— and if we slow down too much we risk the entire structure crumbling into the Hole. We have to slow down to receive shipments from the monitor ring and it can get strange in here." He leaned toward Ivelor conspiratorially. "You can see ghosts sometimes. Walls swap sides, you get left and right confused, there's some debate about the cohesion of the ring fabric. All very technical, very interesting, and very scary." He chuckled and walked away. "See you around." 
      "Citares." 
      Gil stopped at the hatch. 
      "We do have a record. You came out of the main ring, got to the monitor ring, and went back. Who was your friend and when did she die?" 
      Gil stepped through the hatch. 
      
      
      Jesca waited impatiently at Gil's door. He watched her on the monitor, hands behind her back, bobbing on her toes. She had pressed the bell twice now. Gil set his box aside. Where was Ivelor? 
      She rang again and he opened the door. 
      She stepped just within the threshold. Her fingers curled up, almost fists. Gil shuddered. 
      "You made the request," she said. 
      Gil drew his lower lip between his teeth and stared up at her. He wanted to keep his expression neutral, as close to innocent as possible, but the twisting ache of deception worked at him. 
      Her anger was cut by bafflement. 
      "Let me talk to Ivelor—" he began, rising suddenly to his feet. 
      "Talk to him about what?" 
      "Letting you stay. If that's what you want." 
      "I'm not sure. If I left would you come with me?" 
      "Do you want me to?" 
      She nodded. 
      "I'll follow. After you've left—" 
      "We don't know how time connects up Out There, Gil. If you follow me a day later you don't know if I'll even be alive. I might be a century dead. Would you come with me?" 
      "I can't." 
      The door sounded again. Gil glanced at his monitor and saw Ivelor waiting. He stabbed the button. 
      Ivelor entered and looked from Gil to Jesca, back to Gil. 
      "It's almost time," he said. 
      "No!" Jesca said. 
      "Ivelor," Gil said, "you shouldn't stay. It would be best for you to go back with her." 
      "That's not possible." 
      "Anything's possible, especially now. Look—" 
      "Neither of you are listening. I don't want to leave." 
      Ivelor frowned at her. "But you requested—" 
      "No!" Jesca snapped. She jabbed a finger at Gil. "He made the requests, in my name." 
      Ivelor looked troubled by that. For a long moment he seemed indecisive, but then shook his head emphatically. "It doesn't matter. One of you has to leave." 
      "Take her," Gil said. "Do your job, follow your assignment. But go with her." 
      "I can't." 
      Jesca sighed. "Can't. Won't. What's the difference? I'm not going." 
      "You have to," both Gil and Ivelor said simultaneously. They gave each other startled looks. 
      "There was an accident," Gil said. He frowned, thinking for a moment that Jesca had said the same thing. She watched him, eyes moist and sympathetic. 
      "We were leaving the C ring. We wanted to stay together." 
      "Always. Friends, lovers, companions." 
      "From different times, but—" 
      "That didn't matter. We had each other." 
      "The gate fluctuated. Some of the transport crates were sucked out of the corridor—" 
      "We'd made a pact. Without each other there wasn't anyone. Nothing left…" 
      "When I returned to the main ring, though…I don't know, some reassembly of virtual particles, a trick of the time loop. For all I know an illusion." 
      "Reality is conditional here. Willed imagination may be all that's necessary…" 
      "But it's a loop," Ivelor said. "I won't pretend to understand it, but whatever happened here continues to happen. The same information has been coming out of the ring, over and over again, since the first request. A fundamental balance has been struck. I can't leave because I'm to stay here to take her place, unbalance the circumstances." 
      "But," Gil insisted, "if you just send her out without going along to verify her continued existence, then the whole thing may just collapse again." 
      "I don't think so," Ivelor said. "And you don't either. The effect keeps repeating because the loop is closed here, you're just re-living through each other. Something from the outside had to interrupt that. You must have figured that when you made the requests. You were inviting interference. In any case, it's nearly time." 
      He stepped outside and waited. 
      Jesca looked at Gil. "Why didn't you tell me?" 
      "I didn't want to take the risk that everything would repeat again. I didn't know if any act of will would cause the loop to close again." 
      "Do nothing and maybe it will change on its own?" 
      "Something like that." 
      "Come with me." 
      "It would be safer to go with Ivelor. We don't know how each other's presence might effect everything." She started to speak again. "No, please. I'm offering you existence." 
      "Transubstantiation?" 
      He smiled. "Whatever. If I can I'll follow." 
      "Promise?" 
      "Yes." 
      She leaned forward quickly and kissed his cheek. Then she was gone and his door closed. 
      He sat down and drew his legs up. He had worked this through a hundred times that he knew. He hoped he had it right. He glanced at his box. 
      "Attention. Ring deceleration will commence in fifteen seconds. Minus C protocols in effect. Stay where you are—" 
      But someone had to go with her. Someone had to witness her escape, to know she had reached the outer ring and the wider universe, and Ivelor would not… 
      Ivelor could request still another person come in from Out There who could. Then all the factors would balance—or unbalance, as Ivelor said—and Ivelor could remain and Gil could follow. 
      Gil sprang for the door. It was essential that someone go with Jesca, guarantee her existence by his presence. Otherwise an empty crate would arrive at the outer ring and everything would begin again. He rushed out into the corridor. He had cut the time close, though. 
      The deck vibrated, numbing shocks traveled up his shins. He ran toward the lock. Faint ghost lights flickered at the edge of his vision. 
      The corridor snaked as he watched, twisting from the left to the right. The bulkheads seemed to moved toward each other, stretching out and shrinking to a distant point that shifted and flexed. Gil stopped, but felt himself falling. He turned. Faces danced in the wall, countless masks with surprised expressions that reticulated back into the crystal fabric of the hull. His face felt drawn, a scream lost in his throat, but, he knew, resonant with the souls in the circle around him. Thunder rolled through him and his feet slipped. The serpentine corridor writhed behind him, before him, and he crawled. 
      He reached his door and pounded on the access button. It slid open and he stumbled in. 
      He sat next to Ivelor on the small cot, the box in his lap. He worked at the sixth face with an awl, driving a hole into its surface with methodical strokes. 
      The shavings on the floor had gathered themselves together into a shabby ball in the corner. The coils flicked in and out, changing places with each other constantly. He scooped it up, the dancing surface tickling his palms. He twisted out into the corridor again and ran toward the lock. 
      Jesca stood at the far end, waving to him, and he ran, on and on, hurrying, on and on, waving back to her as she waved to him, on and on and on