The Fiddle is the Devil's Instrument: And Other Forbidden Knowledge by Brett J. Talley

Author:Brett J. Talley [Talley, Brett J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: JournalStone
Published: 2017-04-21T05:00:00+00:00

THE SUBSTANCE OF SHADOW

They tell me that space didn't always drive men mad. But I find that hard to believe. I suppose if all you ever did was float around the Earth, go to the moon, take a walk in the void, then space is an adventure. But it's not like that anymore. Not out here.

“This can't be right.”

David is talking to himself. He keeps looking at the same coordinates. I know he isn't talking to me, so I just let him repeat it over and over again. “This can't be right.”

They say that the problems began when they started going farther. To Mars. Venus. Beyond. It was Earth, you see. People were fine when they could see Earth. When it was just beyond them. Like they could reach out and touch it. But when it was no more than a great, big, blue star…when it was gone, truly gone, irrevocably gone…then they would break. And it's a dangerous thing, that. Nothing worse than a mad man when you are oh so very far from home.

I had woken David from his cryo-sleep. The message came through at 22:30 hours Earth-time. It sounded like words, but none I could understand. I traced the origin of the signal to a blank part of space a half day from our location. Just a dark and empty spot. Nothing there.

Not at first.

“You'd better wake Captain Alexi.”

I've thought I was losing it before. On the interstellar flights. When it's not just the Earth but the sun itself that dims into blackness and the void. Those flights only take a few weeks now, since they invented the FTL drives. I remember when I was a kid, they said that was impossible. That our physics wouldn't allow it. So we found new physics to fit our dreams. So now we do it all the time. Flip a switch, watch the Earth and Jupiter and Neptune disappear behind you. And then it's just you. Just you and some points of light to keep you warm. But they give no warmth.

One story has always stuck with me. One story I never forgot. The space jockeys talk about it, or whisper about it, at least. Some say it was the Chronos, others the Excelsius or the Kobiyashi. I don't guess it matters. But they all agree that the ship left Earth with a crew of three men, just like our ship. Two were in cryo-sleep. Just like our ship. But something went wrong. The one who stayed awake, somewhere out there in that endless night, he saw something. Something so terrible, so terrifying that he couldn't go on. Some say he killed himself. Others just say he snapped. That he walked into the crew's quarters, overrode the computer and went to sleep. And so the Chronos never reached its destination. Instead it sails on through the void. For hundreds of years it will continue, until the ship has gone so far that it leaves our very galaxy. Until even the Milky Way is just a pin-prick of light in the distance.

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