when I was a young boy of nine or ten, in love with terror and with the
idea of remorseless fate. These days, it held no special appeal for the
very reasons that I had liked it so much then.
We listened to the silence on the tape for a while, and then we could
hear Delacroix’s voice in the distance, evidently coming from another
room.
I cranked up the volume, but I still couldn’t make out what the man was
saying.
“Who’s he talking to? ” Bobby wondered.
“Himself, maybe.”
“Maybe to his family.” His dead family.
Delacroix must have been roaming, because his voice rose and fell
independent of my use of the volume control.
At one point he cruised past or through the kitchen, and we could hear
him clearly enough to determine that he was speaking in that strange
language again. He was ranting with considerable emotion, not in the
flat dead voice he had last used when sitting at the recorder.
Eventually he fell silent, and a short while later, he came back to the
recorder. He switched it off, and I suspected that he rewound it to see
where he had interrupted himself. When he began to record again, his
voice was low, sluggish, once more crushed flat by depression.
“Computer analysis revealed that the red sky was an accurate color.
Not an error in the video system. And the trees that framed the view of
the sky … they were gray and black. Not in shadow. That was the true
color. Of the bark. The leaves. Mostly black mottled with gray.
We called them trees not because they looked like trees as we know them,
but because they were more analogous to trees than to anything else.
They were sleek … succulent … less like vegetation than like flesh.
Maybe some form of fungus. I don’t know. Nobody knew.
Eight hours of unchanging red sky and the same black tree sand then
something in the sky. Flying This thing Flying low. So fast. Only a few
frames of it, the image blurred because of its speed. Enhanced it, of
course. With the computers. It still wasn’t entirely clear. Clear
enough. There were lots of opinions. Lots of interpretations.
Arguments. Debates. I knew what it was. I think most of us knew, on some
deep level, the moment we saw it enhanced. We just couldn’t accept it.
Psychological block. We argued our way right through the truth, until
the truth was behind us and we didn’t have to see it anymore. I deluded
myself, like all the rest, but I don’t delude myself anymore.” He
settled into silence. A gurgle and splash indicated that he was pouring
something out of a bottle into a glass.
He took a drink of it.
In silence, Bobby and I sucked at our beers.
I wondered if you could get beer in this world of the red sky and the
fleshy black trees. Although I like a beer occasionally, I would have no
difficulty living without it. Now, however, this bottle of Corona in my
hand was the avatar of all the countless humble pleasures of daily life,
of all that could be lost through human arrogance, and I held fast to it
as though it were more precious than diamonds, which in one sense it
was.
Delacroix began to speak in that incomprehensible tongue again, and this
time he murmured the same few words over and over, as though chanting in
a whisper. As before, though I couldn’t understand one word, there was a
familiarity in these syllables and in the cadence of his speech that
sent a corkscrew chill through the hollows of my spine.
“He’s drunk or kooking out, ” Bobby said. “Maybe both.” When I began to
worry that Delacroix would not continue with his revelations, he
switched to English.
“Should never have sent a manned expedition across. Wasn’t on the
schedule. Not for years, maybe not ever. But there was another project
at Wyvern, one of many others, where something went wrong I don’t know
what. Something big Most of the projects, I think … they’re just
money burning machines. But something went too right in this one.