Infinity Beach - Jack McDevitt [135]
Kim’s normal high spirits never returned. She no longer wandered through the ship on her own, but rather stayed close to Solly. She read more extensively than ever before, mostly books and articles in her specialty, but also novels and histories and even Simon Westcott, the classic second century philosopher who’d tried to explain how consciousness had developed in a mechanistic universe.
Occasionally, when she was alone, she caught herself speaking to the visitor. “I know you’re there,” she told it, keeping her voice down so Solly wouldn’t overhear.
“Why don’t you show yourself?”
Toward the end of the voyage, the debate went underground, where it simmered like a waste-disposal system occasionally leaking noxious fumes. There was simply nothing more to say. During the last three weeks, Kim saw nothing out of the ordinary. She tried to talk herself into dismissing the apparition, or at least into locking it away in a corner of her mind where it could cause no disruption, much as she had the earlier experience at Remorse. But then she’d been able to get away from the Severin Valley. Now she was bolted in with the thing.
So there’d been an uneasy moratorium, a studied avoidance of the subject. Conversation necessarily became guarded rather than informative, ceremonial rather than intimate. It was like having a rhinoceros on board, whose presence no one wanted to recognize.
On the last day, however, as they approached jump status, Solly broached the subject. “I’m sorry the flight turned out the way it did,” he said.
His tone suggested he wasn’t holding her aberration against her. “It’s not your fault,” she said, carefully restraining the anger that began to stir.
“We need to decide whether we’re going to report the incident.”
Translation: Do you want to admit to having a hallucination?
They were both in the pilot’s room. Everything was in order, and the clock was counting down. Solly was waiting for the status lamps to light, after which he would push the EXECUTE key, and they would leap across into their own universe.
“Got a question,” Kim said, casually.
“Go ahead.”
“When we use the hypercomm transmitter, how do we know it’s in use?”
His jaw tightened. “Could you rephrase that, Kim? How could I not know I’m using it?”
She tried again. “When we’re communicating via hypercomm, does something light up on the status board?”
“Right here.” He pointed at a pair of lamps atop the communication console. “Orange means Ham’s begun the operation, that a channel is being opened, and green means it’s okay to talk.”
“Can you test it?”
“Test what?”
“Test the system. See if it works.”
“Kim, why?” He looked puzzled.
“Humor me, Solly. Please.”
Ordinarily he would simply have asked Ham to open the channel. Now it was necessary to pull the control board across his lap, consult his manual, press some keys.
“Well?” she asked.
“That’s odd.”
No lights.
“Problem?”
“The status lamps should have lit up,” he said.
“So as things are now, if someone were transmitting, we wouldn’t know.”
He checked the bulbs. Both were scorched. “How’d you guess?”
She shrugged. “It seemed like a possibility.”
He went back to the utility locker and returned with fresh lamps. “This has to do with the intruder, right?”
“I don’t like what’s happening, Solly.” She was suddenly desperately weary, anxious to see real sunlight again, and a real ocean. The virtual expanses of Hammersmith’s projection system just didn’t cut it. No matter how vast the stretches of sea and beach might appear, she always knew she was inside a chamber. “When do you expect we’ll be docking?” she asked.
“About six in the morning.”
It was not quite ten A.M., and they were