Daenek crouched at the end of the empty hallway, bringing his knees up to his chest. He was numb with exhaustion and despair, a hollowness that reached into his limbs, his fingers. It seemed now as if his life had dissolved, melting away to reveal the bones of its real nature. A series of corridors that ended here at this dead end. The Lady March was somewhere in one of the passageways, and Stepke, and Rennie and Lessup. Somewhere also in there was Daenek himself. A fragment that could never be found again. A father that did not exist, had been no more than himself.
The corridors had grown lighter or darker at times, but all had led to this final point. The point where death began from the inside out, a seed that would never stop growing until it dissolved everything into its darkness.
He turned his head and saw his face reflected in the shiny metal of the corridor’s wall. He saw the pain beneath the skin, and the corrosive knowledge below that. No longer a mask, no longer the face of a thane. It was his own face now.
For a moment, he thought he could hear someone, a woman, singing. But there was no sound in the corridor. He laid his head against his knee. He was too tired to even recognize the voice or the sad words it sang inside himself.
Epilogue
When he was carried aboard the ship we all knew he was going to die. Die, and be jettisoned between stars. Ship crews are a superstitious lot, and we won’t abide a corpse aboard. The blank eyes in the face that turned towards the wall beside his couch when anyone approached—something between them was already dead. I would bring his meals—set them down beside him. Hours later I would take them away untouched. I was glad when I was transferred to another section of the ship, so I wouldn’t have to be there when his body, both heavier and lighter the way the dead are, would be carried out.
But he lived somehow. He got off the ship in that city in that world to which his passage had been arranged—so I heard from the landing crew when we were outways again. I talked with the crew members who had spoken to him while he was still aboard and learned nothing. They were already forgetting about the man, the memory of him merging with our ignorance of his past.
I signed off at the next planetfall and spent the better part of my saved pay going back. A medic assistant can always find another berth. And I wanted to know how a man lives who has seen—I guessed—the things I was afraid to look at.
I didn’t know his name, so it took me two days to find him. He remembered me from the starship—he said he was afraid of ever forgetting anybody again. The older part of that city was built on great steel piers over the ocean. We sat on a little deserted platform that jutted farthest out into the sea-wind, while the waves made the supporting shafts tremble, although they were anchored to the rock beneath the ocean bottom.
He told me he had made money to live in odd, scuffling ways—the sorts of things people do who are too obsessed with something inside them to notice or care what other people think of them. I didn’t find out what that something was. There would be long silences while he looked out at the dark water.
When the sun started to set and the air grew cold, I decided to leave him. Before I could get up he turned his head towards me and held my gaze. His eyes weren’t the same flat spaces they had been aboard the starship. They read the question beneath all the others I had asked.
“Information, theory,” he said simply. His eyes didn’t move from mine. “I learned it from the communications officer aboard the starship. When I first saw him—he looked in on me while I was still just lying there waiting to die—he reminded me of another man I knew a long time ago, one who had spent his life travelling aboard a different kind of ship. Maybe it was just a kind expression on the officer’s face that was the same. Anyway, after a while I found my way to the ship’s communications room.
“He let me stay there for hours while he monitored the messages that came to the ship. All the worlds in the galaxy seemed to speak in that little room. That’s where I learned this language—the world I was born on has different ones.”
“After I could speak it, the communications officer spent his time talking to me. He was a lonely man, too, and appreciated having something human near him. I don’t know what I was listening for. I don’t even remember most of what he said—he talked about everything. One time, though, he said something about entropy, noise and death, and I asked him what he meant.”
I waited while he looked out at the ocean for a moment, then turned back to me.
“Entropy,” he continued, “can be defined in terms of signal-to-noise ratios. That’s how the communications officer would think of it. As things degenerate, the noise level becomes greater and greater until it drowns out the signal. That signal becomes lost, eaten away by chaos. Noise equals death.
“But I have—within me—a signal that hasn’t died.”
He touched his chest with the fingers of one hand.
“A signal that’s still intact, untouched by the noise of time, passed down by my father and his fathers before him, in a way you know nothing of. And even though all the people who ever lived died—it’s all right. Because they’re part of that signal now. That human message. So I can’t give up now, die and let noise, darkness, overtake first that world and then all the others. When I’ve mastered the signal, the power, when I can defeat entropy, I’ll go back, and then . . .”
He fell silent and turned away again.
I got up and held my arms against the cold. The last light was reddening the ocean. Before I walked back into the sections of the city that had warmth and people like me, he looked up and almost smiled. Behind his eyes, he was seeing something else.
“Rennie always hated it,” he said, “when people did things without having what she thought were good reasons but it’s still all right.”
I hurried away. When I looked back I could see his outline sharp against the dying light.