A Forest of Stars - Kevin J. Anderson [140]
He knew he had been isolated too long when he started hearing—or perhaps imagining—sounds. Whispers and buzzing noises that could not be explained by the faint familiar hum of machinery. When he let his thoughts wander, they even sounded like words at the back of his mind.
“Hello?” Jess called, and the loudness of his voice startled him. His throat was hoarse, his vocal cords raspy from disuse. He shook his head. “Great, now I’m talking to myself.”
The odd noises were the audio equivalent of a shadow glimpsed from the corner of his eye. The harder he tried to listen, the fainter the sounds became. He sighed and tried to ignore them…but he had nothing else to occupy his thoughts.
He climbed down to the production decks, where automated distillers separated out the useful by-products of the nebular gases. Compressed elements filled small containers; tiny droplets of water continued to drip into the large, transparent cylindrical tank, raising its level by a mere centimeter each day. Jess sensed something here, a stirring movement of thoughts…as thin as a breeze but growing gradually stronger.
“Hello?” Jess shouted again, this time prepared for the echoes of his own voice. Nothing answered him, of course. He drew a deep breath of the oddly humid air in the production deck, chiding himself for his foolishness. Next he would start thinking his nebula skimmer was haunted…
Then the nightmares began.
Jess awoke with a start in his lonely bunk. A cold sweat soaked his sheets, and he gulped deep breaths, coughing, trying to clear his airway. In his dream, he was drowning, sinking ever deeper, unable to breathe, unable to find his way back to air or light. His lungs, his bloodstream, his mind, were full of water—made of water. The sensation was too real, engulfing him, overwhelming his thoughts, and he struggled toward wakefulness.
When he was younger, Jess had had nightmares about his mother and her slow, cold death in a crevasse on Plumas, gradually freezing, suffocating, protected only by her failing environment suit, deep, deep in the alien water and unreachable.
But this dream was different…frightening only in its strangeness. He sensed no threat or terror, just confusion.
His eyes burning, Jess climbed out of bed, nearly lost his balance, and leaned against the metal bulkhead for support. His hand came away wet.
He looked in surprise to see beads of moisture glimmering on the metal. His fingers tingled when he touched it. A tiny trickle formed from the condensed droplets and ran in a minuscule river down to the deck…like a flow of lifeblood.
His brow furrowed, Jess followed the moisture, searching for the source. There must be a leak somewhere, a breach in the life-support piping or a rupture in a coolant system. Out here, so isolated from all help, such tiny things could lead to disaster. But when Jess ran diagnostics of the environmental systems, everything checked out, running at optimal levels. Even the humidity registered as normal.
He returned to his cabin and found that the walls were dry again. Not a trace of the moisture remained.
Jess stood alone by his machinery down on the processing deck. The air felt damp and warm—strangely so, since the settings on his life-support systems had not been changed. He looked again at the clear liquid that had collected in the transparent holding cylinder.
Removing a sample of water from the container, Jess used the ship’s diagnostic lab to run a full detailed analysis. He checked the results twice, then ran the tests a third time. As a member of clan Tamblyn, he knew all about water extraction and purity tests. Technically, chemically, the substance was nothing more than pure water, collected one molecule at a time from the cosmic cloud.
Seeking confirmation, Jess sent out a signal to his scattered fellow nebula sailors. He asked if anyone else had experienced unusual results from the water the skimmers collected. His transmission was like a message in a bottle tossed into a sea, and he knew it would take days for a response.
When the answers finally