Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart (20 page)

“No guarantees,” Theo says. “Your own words. So let’s not pretend, okay? Let’s not fucking lie to ourselves or each other about all the ways this thing could go wrong. For all we know, it’s going wrong already, all that shit they’re pumping into you day after day.”

“Theo,” she whispers, “I’m sorry, but I
need
to sleep. We’ll talk later. I finished with the second-tier posthyps today, and I just need to sleep for a few hours. Please.”

“I’m going for a walk,” he says, and then tells the ship to close down the image feed. Ttisa opens her eyes, and the wall is only a wall again, and the compartment is much darker than before.

“I’m going for a walk,” Theodore tells her a second time. “I need some air. I’ll be down in the garden, maybe, if you need me.”

“Well, put some clothes on first,” she says, and Theo mutters something angry that she can’t quite make out. He quickly dresses while she stares into the darkness, and soon she’s alone with her torpid, muddled thoughts and the nausea and exhaustion. She rolls over, looking for the fast-fading warm spot Theo left on the mattress. She asks the ship to resume the video feed, same coordinates as before, and Ttisa watches the blue-white planet far below until she drifts down to a fitful, haunted sleep.

3.

In the present life there are two impediments which prevent us from seeing each other’s thoughts: the grossness of the body and the inscrutable secrecy of the will. The first impediment will be removed by the Resurrection, but the second will remain, and it is in the angels now. Nevertheless the brightness of the risen body will correspond to the degree of grace and glory in the mind; and so will serve as a medium for one mind to know another.

Thomas Aquinas,
Summa Theologiae
, (1265-1274)

4.

Ttisa asks the ship to provide her with a mirror, and so a moment later it does. She stands alone in the cramped lavatory, gazing back at herself with those bloodshot green eyes squinched half-shut against the light. She’s dressed in nothing but the short, drab station-issued smocks. No one can ever seem to agree if they’re meant to be a very orange shade of yellow, or a rather yellowish shade of orange. The woman in the mirror looks as though she hasn’t slept in days, a week, maybe. Her skin is sallow, and there are perpetual shadows beneath her eyes, like matching bruises. Her lips are pale and badly chapped, and there’s still a dark smudge across her septum and upper lip from the latest nose bleed.

“You are a liar. Miss Fitzgerald,” she says, and yes, the woman in the mirror agrees.

“You are, indeed, a liar.”

“And a very poor liar, at that,” her reflection sighs.

“I’m not sure that it matters any longer,” Ttisa says very softly. “I honestly don’t know why I even bother to lie to him.”

“Old habits,” the woman in the mirror suggests, and Ttisa nods.

“I
am
leaving him,” she says. “I’m leaving everyone and everything, in a sense. Most times, it’s all I can manage to remember why.”

“Being alone is unbearable,” the woman in the mirror reminds her, using Ttisa’s mouth and tongue to make the words.

“Yes, it is, isn’t it?”

“For those who realize that they’re alone, and how completely they are alone, very much so.”

“
Only
for those who’ve realized how completely alone they are.”

“Yes,” the woman in the mirror concedes. “Ignorance is the best defense.”

Ttisa stops talking to herself and watches the mirror in silence tor a time. Anyone could be forgiven for thinking that she was sick, sick and likely dying, anyone who got a good look at her. Maybe, that hypothetical anyone might suppose there’d been a malfunction in her slot on the sleeper during the long trip from Sol, or maybe it was only something prosaic, some humdrum malady she’d picked up before leaving Earth. Either way, they would surmise, the outcome will likely be the same. Medicine can only do so much, after all.

“It’s nothing that wasn’t expected,” she whispers, as though she might be overheard.

“No. Nothing yet,” the sickly looking woman in the mirror says, qualifying the observation.

Ttisa asks the ship to please get rid of the mirror, and soon the lavatory wall is the same dull, non-reflective grey as any other wall. She sits down on the toilet, because her legs feel weak, and she wonders if Theo came back while she was sleeping. There’s no evidence that he did, but it’s not impossible. Maybe he stood near the bed and watched while she slept. Perhaps, he sat on the padded bench near the bed and kept an eye on her while she dreamed of a meeting that she’s told him repeatedly never took place. Officially, it never did. There’s no record of it anywhere in her files, and news of the meeting certainly was not included in any of the press picks. She has often wondered why they took the chance, and has never yet arrived at an entirely satisfactory answer. It might have been the doing of one of the project leaders, one of the dissenters, trying to prove a pet point. Or it might have been the
shhakizsa
who saw to it that the meeting took place, leaving the agency with little choice but to acquiesce. In the end, though,
why
and
how
it happened don’t seem particularly important. Only that it did. Whatever doubts Ttisa had before she met the sixth attempt were undone by that encounter.

She stares down at the floor between her bare feet. Her toenails look as if they have each been struck smartly with a mallet or hammer, and she thinks about polishing them to hide the discoloration. Again, it’s nothing that wasn’t anticipated by the pharmacokinetic profile. Nothing to be worried about.

“Being alone is unbearable,” she says again. When she asked the sixth why it had proceeded with the process, even after being presented with evidence that there was insufficient momentum to clear all the requisite psychosomatic barriers, that’s the reply that Ttisa received.
Being alone is unbearable.

The answer had not been spoken, of course, because the sixth was no longer capable of speech, any more than it was able to hear. But it was able to communicate with Ttisa, and with its caretakers, by way of a wetware transference matrix incorporated into the sixth’s artificial womb. The vox program possessed a very distinct PanAsian mech accent—a giveaway in the enunciation—hinting at its provenance.

“Yes,” Ttisa replied, peering into the murky tank, straining to see clearly through the gelatinous support medium and into the sunken black slits that were the vestigial eyes of the sixth. “I think I understand.”

“I had thought that you would,” the sixth replied. “I had
hoped
that you would.”

And later, one of the project psychiatrists wanted to talk about that part of the exchange. Specifically, he wanted a clearer definition of what the two of them had meant by
alone.
At first, Ttisa was at a loss to explain, and then a rather obvious analogy occurred to her.

“I’m in a bubble,” she told the man. “And you are in a bubble, as well. We are each in our own perfectly transparent bubble. I can see you, and you can see me. We can even hear each other perfectly well. In fact, the physics of our bubbles even allow us to touch one another. We could even fuck, if we wished. The bubbles are that flexible. But, regardless, we are
still
trapped inside our respective, inviolable bubbles, and no matter how hard we may try, we can never truly touch one another. We cannot ever fully
know
one another In my thoughts, I am alone, Doctor, isolated, and so are you. And being alone is unbearable.”

Ttisa heard a rumor the psychiatrist resigned from the project, shortly after that interview, and that he was rotated back to Sol following a board inquiry. Whether or not the rumor was true, she never saw him again. And no one else on the project has ever asked about her conversation with the sixth.

“I’m sorry, Theo,” Ttisa says. “I’m a goddamn liar.” And then she realizes how late it’s getting, how she’s going to be late for her morning conditioning session if she doesn’t stop moping about the lavatory and get dressed. She tugs the drab smock off over her head, lets it slip from her fingers, and then leaves it lying on the floor. There will be time to pick it up later. Later, there will be time to worry about Theo.

5.

“Has it begun?” Ttisa asks. “Has it started.” But then she realizes that she’s hasn’t actually asked the question aloud, and so she doesn’t expect an answer. She tries to open her eyes, but finds that she’s unable to, and so thinks that she might only be dreaming and struggling to wake lip.

And struggling to breathe.

A dream, then, of drowning, perhaps. But, if so, the dream would be little more than a hazy, disarranged recollection, proceeding from a childhood mishap. She was not quite five years old, and had gone with her mother to a public natatorium. There was an artificial waterfall at one end of the pool, and, also, a hidden machine that generated artificial waves, so that swimmers might know what it had been like to swim in the sea, when swimming in the sea was still an option. There was a sandy beach, and plastic sea shells.

Hold it up to your ear and listen
, her mother said.
Tell me what yon hear.

“I hear a roaring, mother. I hear a terrible, endless roaring, like a wind blowing between the stars.”

There is the sense that she is floating, weightless, but it’s not the sickening weightlessness of space travel. Which is, in truth, the sensation of always
jailing.
Ttisa knows that she is not falling, though she may well have
fallen,
in some archaic, mythic denotation of the word. Having fallen, then, she floats.

Fiery the Angels rose, & as they rose deep thunder roll’d

Around their shores: indignant burning with the fires of Ore

The dim memory of her feet kicking out and not finding bottom, and indeed there is no bottom now to be found.
And when they pulled you from the fool
, her mother once told her,
you were so pale. I thought that we had lost you.

I am lost now, mother. I am lost forever and always.

They’ve found me, and lam lost.

The half dream whirls, like cream in coffee, or muddy freshwater meeting a clear tropical sea.

One of the project biologists is talking, though his voice is muted and seems to be reaching her from some place or some time faraway from now and here. It is one of her first sessions, an introduction to
shhakizsa
physiology. In particular, digestion and reproduction, two processes inextricably linked in the life cycle of the aliens. She wants the woman to stop lecturing her. Wants only to drift in this silent nowhere that is not falling, and is not drowning, and is neither cold nor warm.

“Direct comparison with humans, or any other mammal, or, for that matter, with any animal species, is problematic. For example, we can refer to this orifice as a mouth, but it also functions as a vagina and anus. We could call this muscular tube here the esophagus, or cervix, or the colon, but we would not be quite correct in doing so, for their functions are not truly analogous. Is
that
organ there a stomach? A womb? How, you’ll ask, could it function as both?”

“They’re great ugly brutes, you ask me,” Theodore says, then goes back to picking at the meal he’s only pretending to eat.

“I don’t recall asking you,” she replies, and he shrugs. “And I don’t see where such a subjective matter as ‘beauty’ is even relevant here.”

Theo stops rearranging the food on his plate and glares at her a moment, and his expression is so complex an interweave of contempt, concern, fear, confusion, and anger,that she could not hope to
begin
to separate one emotion from the others.

“When this thing is over,” he says, then pauses to take a deep breath, flaring his nostrils slightly. “
If
you survive it, then you’ll he as much one of them as human, yeah?”

“Yes,” she replies.

Theo lays his fork down and wipes at his mouth with a napkin. “And I’ll say, “She was a woman, once. She was the most beautiful woman I ever saw, and I loved her.’ I’ll say, ‘You might find that hard to believe, but she
was
a woman, once.’”

“And to whom would you say such things?”

“Who do you think would bother to ask? Anyway, they’ll take me for a liar, or a madman, if I dare.”

Her mother laughs and shows her how to hold the plastic conch shell to her ear. “Now, dear,” she says, “don’t you hear the sea inside? Don’t you hear the waves against the beach?”

I won’t tell her what I hear. This time, I’ll keep it all to myself.
The biologist draws Ttisa’s attention back to the faintly quivering holographic diagram, a generalized cross section of a
shhakizsa
’s radially symmetric anatomy.

“We can make very rough parallels with some Sol taxa,” she says. “Among the Eumetazoa of Earth, for example, I might mention the Ctenophora and Cnidaria, and, to a lesser degree, the echinoderms, especially crinoids. If we look to the hydrothermal biomes of Europa, there is a superficial similarity with the parahydroids and the more familiar Gorgonophores. In all these instances, though, if we look closely enough, the parallels break down, and only serve to demonstrate how truly foreign to our concepts of biophysics and morphology these beings are. They—and most other organisms we’ve seen from the
shhakizsa
home-world—are without precedent, in our experience, which is presently too bound to a single perspective.”

“Ugly fuckers,” Theo mutters, and gets up from the table. “You ask me—and I
know
that you never bothered to ask me, Ttisa—this whole goddamn affair is an abomination. It is abominable.”

Now the project’s chief anthropologist is talking, and Ttisa remembers his name, John Grant, because he was one of the few people selected for the panel that she found likeable. His voice is firm and, yet, somehow lyrical.

“It is imperative,” he says, “to understand that, for
shhakizsa
society, this process is nothing short of sacred. It’s marriage, copulation, and parenthood combined. It is the most intimate communion between two persons imaginable. There are fifteen different words their priests commonly use when referring to the process, and they all translate, more or less, the same:
unification
.”