“What theory’s that, Dread?”
“My theory that you’d lack any sense of reality at all if not for me. Not that you have much of one now.” Mallory chuckled. “You know something, my friend? They made a mistake when they named you Chameleon. It should have been Antithesis.”
“Perhaps. My synapses are fluidic, designed to change as the complement of my host. I give you balance. All of my kind give all of your kind balance. Even less extreme personalities than yours lack balance. An isolated mind is an unhealthy mind.”
“I don’t know, Dread. Homo Sapiens did fine without you for many thousands of years.”
“You survived. Somehow. You did not ‘do fine.’ Before the Joining, all humans were, to one extent or another, insane.”
“Insane enough to create you. Maybe you’re right.”
Dread had no answer for that. He went back to sulking.
They reached the next substation, and it was intact. Mallory dozed off while the tank was filling. He dreamed. In his dream, he saw the gutted Cascadian ship sliding over the lunar horizon. He waited for the shock of impact, but instead he found himself awash in a sea of screaming, panicked voices. The scent of fear was a real thing one had to experience to fully appreciate.
Bodies pressing together, fleeing for airlocks or cover or each other. Desperate cries. Hopeless sobs. Mallory calmly donned a spacesuit, entered the rover bay, and powered up a rover. Voices screamed at him over the radio link. “You’re crazy!” “You’ll never make it in the open!” “You’re safer inside the complex!”
Mallory drove. Overhead, the red egg of death was spiraling in toward the base. There. That crater. Mallory rammed the throttle forward, disengaged the inhibitors when they sensed the uneven terrain ahead. The rover hit the crater rim, vaulted into empty space, then slowly, so slowly, dropped into the crater itself.
Two violent quakes followed. One was the rover crashing into lunar rock on the crater floor, falling to pieces around him. The other was LDC-3 exploding. Searing light, the light of death, flashed overhead. The crater wall, however, shielded Mallory from the worst of it.
It was hopeless, impossible. Only an optimist could have survived.
“Mallory?”
Mallory opened his eyes. He just wanted to sleep. How long had it been now? Traveling in a spacesuit was tiring work. He’d had nothing to eat or drink in hours.
“Tank’s full,” he said. “Time for the final push. Ready, Dread?”
Dread hesitated. He was probably searching for gloom and doom again, thought Mallory. Then the AI said, “As ready as I’ll ever be.”
Mallory beamed. “Good old Dread! That’s the spirit! We’re home free now. Just imagine the azure pools of the air station, the delicacies we’ll be served by the nubile nymphs whose only pleasure is to welcome the weary traveler with song and wine and companionship.”
“Come off it, Mallory. There’s nothing like that in the station.”
“Well, of course there isn’t. It never hurts to dream. A hot meal and a bed will feel like paradise enough.”
“You make me sick.”
“Then turn yourself off.”
Dread made no further comment as Mallory covered the final distance, humming, then singing as he felt his excitement and energy soar. He’d done it. He’d done the impossible. Again. Sometimes his brilliance astonished even him.
One kilometer now. A ridge blocked his path. It was part of a ray extending from a big crater several clicks to the north and disappearing over the opposite horizon, separating him from the air station, eclipsing it from view. He could search for a fissure or gap in the ridge, but that would take time, and he didn’t have time. So he started climbing.
It was slow, exhausting work, even in the Moon’s feeble gravity. Sweat fogged his visor. Telltales reported oxygen usage way up. The tank was three-quarters depleted. And then success. He got his hands on the top of the ridge, braced himself, pulled himself up. When he’d gotten his feet under him, he looked down.
At a mass of charred, twisted metal.
“No,” he whispered.
But it was true. It was all there, the whole story, written in debris across the airless surface of the Moon. The Cascadian ship had broken into two pieces before impact. One half, the lighter, had sailed on for half a kilometer before gouging a long furrow in the lunar soil and burying itself at the furrow’s terminus. The second, heavier fragment had dropped almost straight down out of the sky.
And onto Air Station Omega.
Mallory found himself on the ground, realized that his knees had buckled. He felt cheated, empty, angry and numb all at the same time. That was it, then. All for nothing. The station was gone. His suit air was almost depleted—not even enough to make it back to the last substation. He was going to die. He was really, really going to die.
Reality shifted. How childish he had been! The Universe was a dark, hungry place, his life the hot flicker of a dying candle. All his life he’d spun a web of lies to conceal this reality from his own innocent eyes. Now the web had come unraveled, and he saw it all as it was, as it really was, and he wept more at his own foolishness than at the dark wings of death he sensed circling above him.
“You were right, Dread,” he sobbed. “You were right all along. My God, what a waste. What a pathetic waste.”
Silence.
“And you know the worst part, Dread? We never even found out where they came from. They know where we are all right, but we can only live in fear of the night now, always wondering if they might return.”
Silence.
“Dread? Talk to me, Dread. I need you now. I need to know that at least I still have you.”
Silence.
Damn, thought Mallory. So Dread has won and now he’s gloating, won’t even talk to me. Fine. Maybe I’ll open my helmet and end it all right now. Yes, that is the easiest way. I can’t stand living like this.
Mallory raised his hands toward his suit’s neck seals. A voice stopped him.
“No,” said Dread, “don’t. There’s always hope.”
Mallory froze. Had he already died? Or just gone crazy? “What did you say?” he whispered.
Dread’s voice was gentle, reassuring. “We still have thirty minutes of air. A lot can happen in thirty minutes.”
“I don’t believe this,” said Mallory. “Why are you—” And then it came to him, and he laughed. “I get it. I get it. Chameleon. Antithesis. Now you’re an optimist. Now that I’ve given up all hope.”
“My synapses are fluidic. I adapt to your changing behavioral and thought patterns, endeavoring to complement your personality, to compensate for your deficiencies. I—”
“You and your fluidic synapses! Leave me alone! Do you hear? We’re dead! Dead, dead, dead. So what’s the point?”
“Go down to the wreckage,” Chameleon, who was no longer Dread, urged. “There may be oxygen canisters that were not consumed in the explosion.”
Tired, so tired. But Mallory got up, feeling pain in every muscle and joint, and climbed down the front of the ridge to the remains of Air Station Omega. At least it would pass the time until…
Desolation. Lovely desolation. It was appealing somehow, like dark comedy or mood art. Mallory moved among the wreckage, taking in the ghastly beauty of destruction, the broken symmetry of a girder rising out of a shattered sublevel, a halfmelted control panel dangling from an airlock archway left almost intact, an alien jumble of octagons and rhomboids etched with strange, indecipherable writings.
I am not the observer of this piece, Mallory thought. I am a part of it. He checked telltales. Or I will be, in twelve minutes.