Thrum

I dream that I am falling. Pioneer grows ever smaller as I tumble away, my tether trailing out behind me. Her hull winks in the starlight until she is a speck of light, and then nothing at all. I’m falling and falling, though I can’t feel the rush of air around me, or see the ground rush up to greet me. I feel nothing but the pull of unseen gravity. Infinite night surrounds me like smoke in water, pooling above my earlobes, wreathing itself in my hair. I’m wearing no helmet. I’m wearing nothing at all. The darkness, the swell of space, softly curls against me, covering me, snaking into my nose and my ears and finally my eyes, filling up the gaps between eyeball and skin, around into the socket, flowing into me until I’m full to burst. I’m blind. I’m in agony. I can’t yell, or thrash to free myself. I’m frozen in place while the universe drowns me.

A choked cry wakes me, and I’m drenched in cold sweat. The bedclothes cling to clammy flesh. My hair sticks to my face. Coughing, I realize the strangled cry was my own.

“Jesus,” I say, pulling damp sheets away from my bare legs, hating the feel of it. My underclothes are soaked through.

I mutter a quiet prayer of thanks to my foresight, rummaging in my knapsack for a fresh set. I toss the sweat-soiled pair to the other side of the small room, and I’m naked, shivering as my sweat dries in the chill air. I remember what I saw before, the last time I slept here. Dorian, or a shape like him, either real or imagined. A watching shadow.

My gut knotting sickeningly, my gaze darts to the far corner. And even though the lights are on and I’m awake, a horrible sensation takes hold of me. As if I almost saw, just for an instant… a flickering darkness. A black cloud vanishing.

It’s late. I haven’t slept properly in days. And I know that minds play tricks, even in the most familiar circumstances.

Just to make sure, because I’ll never get back to sleep in this state, I go to the corner. I press my hand to the walls, look up at the ceiling, down to the floor. I even crouch on my hands and knees and prod at the floor as if there’s a trapdoor there, like I’m sleeping in some Victorian-era hoax house. As if I’ve been lured in to watch a fake seance, only to discover that there are magnets in the table and I’ve been tricked by Pepper’s ghost.

But there’s no trapdoor, no mirrored glass, no vent from which a gust of air might burst and startle me.

I remember I’m naked, and hurry to pull on the clean pair of underclothes. A clean jumpsuit comes next, then socks. As I lace up my boots, I wish I knew how long I slept. The viewscreen is ever-night, the slow passage of celestial bodies across a dark canvas.

This time, when I leave my room chewing the last of my nutrient bar, I hesitate outside the door. I have no idea what Dorian could be doing, how he spends his time when he’s not comforting lost humans. Before he left me here, after the memorial, he said again, “Call for me if you need anything.” But surely he can’t hear me throughout the ship. Unless there’s an acoustic design, like the ship is a cosmic whispering gallery.

I don’t want to call for him. The memory of his hands on me, his breath on my ear, catches in my throat like a half-swallowed pill. But at the same time, I realize I’m dying to be near him. He’s like an itch I can’t scratch. I want to understand him. To know what sort of thing he is, what his true form might look like.

What I do know is that I can’t trust myself around him.

The thought sits heavily in my stomach, setting me on edge. I try to shove it aside, letting loose a wretched sigh. I can’t wander the ship alone; it will bring me in a loop again, back to my room.

“Dorian,” I say, feeling oddly shy. Will he think I’m pathetic, hanging around my room until my host comes to lead me around like a lost puppy?

And then there are footsteps, and I turn to see Dorian.

He’s wearing the same outfit as before, as if he fell from the worn cover of a Victorian novel. And I lose my breath for a moment at the sight of him, though I already know how he looks. His eyes are like the night, ever the same yet always changing, constellations wheeling across his visage like shining beacons.

“How did you get here so fast?” I ask. “I mean, did you walk here?”

He narrows his eyes, smiling thoughtfully. “I got here in my own way. How can I assist you, Ami?”

I frown. He won’t answer anything. I wonder if it’s deliberate, or whether he truly worries that my frail human mind can’t grasp the concept of him. “I want to fix my comms array,” I announce. “I brought my tools, but I may need materials. I can give you a list of what I’d need, if… if you happen to have any spare parts lying around.”

It’s a wild shot in the dark, but he doesn’t immediately shut me down. Instead, shockingly, he nods. “I’ll see what I can find.”

My heart leaps. If I can fix the comms array, and the fuel tank, then maybe… but I don’t let myself think that far ahead. I should operate as if I’m never going home. Then I ask, “Would you mind talking to me, while I work? I’d like to learn more about you. Not in an invasive way. I just… want to get to know you.”

He smiles, his eyes glinting with understanding. “You want to study me.”

“Get to know you.”

He tilts his head, and I suddenly feel that I’m the one being studied, plastered to a petri dish and held up to a microscope. “We can do, or talk about, whatever you’d like, Ami.”

I swallow dryly. “Okay, great.”

“Ask me something.”

“Now?”

He nods. “Anything.”

“Right, well…” I consider all the thousands of questions that have been clanging around in my head since I woke up from stasis. “Why did you pick Dorian Gray?”

“It was an interesting book.”

I raise a brow. “You read it?”

His mouth twitches as if he’s trying not to laugh. “It’s not that long.”

“Listen, I realize you went through the entire welcome package in record time. I mean, faster than any human could begin to compute all that information. And learned a language on top of that. But you also read the book?”

“Yes,” he says. “I read them all.”

If I were a cartoon, my jaw would be on the floor. He can’t mean what I think he means. “Wait. All what?”

“All the books.”

“By Oscar Wilde?”

“No, all the books. Every book in your welcome package. Earth’s literary canon.”

I splutter, momentarily lost for words. That’s over half a million books.

“Why?” he asks, lips curling in a slow smile. “Do you find that impressive?”

I’m suddenly blushing, but I can’t help it. I do. I find it very impressive. “Are you even biological?” I ask. “Are you an android?”

He laughs, the second time I’ve heard it, a halting, deep reverberation in his chest. I like the sound. It’s warm and open. “No,” he says. “I’m not an android. But I have a very complex brain. Earth neuroscientists would enjoy analyzing it.”

“They fucking would,” I agree, laughing a little despite myself.

“I liked Oscar Wilde the best,” Dorian says. “Funny. Sad. Lovely prose. And I liked the name Dorian Gray.”

“Is that why you’re… dressed like that?” I ask, waving a hand at his cravat, crisp frock coat, starched high collar.

He visibly swallows and glances away. “No,” he says. “Not quite.”

How strange. I wish he’d open up and tell me everything, everything. I want to know more. I want him to lay himself bare to me. I want to chart his nervous system, count his lungfuls of air, unfurl his DNA one strand at a time. “Do you identify with Dorian Gray?”

He blinks, visibly surprised at the question. “Do you think I should?”

“I asked you.”

“No,” he answers. “I’ve never had a portrait done.”

And then I’m laughing, and he joins me, and he leads the way to the docking bay, half a step ahead of me. We walk together, sharing space. But as we pass through the ship, the laughter fades into cold unease as I become distracted. Because with every step, I hear that distant sound more loudly. That hum, the engine’s roar, the strange tinnitus of deep space, the thing Dorian doesn’t hear.

But I say nothing. I don’t want to admit to Dorian that I’m worried I might be going insane. It’s not his problem. And Lily, whose problem it would have been as the crew’s Psych expert, is gone.

I’m grateful for the potential distraction of repairing the comms array. It will give me something to do with my hands, and then… maybe then I’ll feel better.

Keep telling yourself that, Ami.

Dorian leaves me alone in the docking bay, promising to return with tools. I don’t know where he’ll get them, but I try not to dwell on the implications. I don’t like thinking about the fact that everything around me, other than Pioneer, is not what it looks like.

The vast room seems to swell around me, the humming growing louder with it. I try to ignore how terrible I feel, how utterly isolated. I had known going into this mission, that I would be subjected to the strange and new, even bombarded by sensations and experiences that my brain might struggle to process. But the push and pull of fright and curiosity, of want and sharp-edged grief, threatens to wrench me apart on a molecular level.

And even as I shiver in the cold emptiness of that place, I ache to explore. I imagine the ship as if it’s a sort of fluid thing, ever-changing, rooms moving and rearranging themselves, a labyrinth while I’m a hapless Theseus.

Who, then — or what — is the Minotaur?