Antoinette put on the goggles. The view through them was like a smoky counterpart of the real room, with red Canasian numerals tumbling in her right visual field. For a moment nothing else changed. The haphazard skeletal machine — the class-three apparition — continued to stand amid the discarded slurry of junk from which it had been birthed, one limb frozen in the act of tossing her the goggles.
‘Captain…’ she began.
But even as she spoke the apparition and its detritus were merging into the background, losing sharpness and contrast against the general clutter of the chamber. The goggles were not working perfectly, and in one square part of her visual field the skeletal machine remained unedited, but elsewhere it was vanishing like buildings into a wall of sea fog.
Antoinette did not like this. The machinery had not threatened her, but it troubled her not to have a good idea of where it was. She was reaching up for the goggles, ready to slip them off, when a voice buzzed in her ear.
‘Don’t. Keep them on. You need them to see me.’
‘Captain?’
‘I promise I won’t hurt you. Look.’
She looked. Something was emerging now, being slowly edited into her visual field. A human figure — utterly real, this time — was forming out of thin air. Antoinette took an involuntary step backwards, catching her torch against an obstruction and dropping it to the floor.
‘Don’t be alarmed,’ he told her. ‘This is what you came for, isn’t it?’
‘Right now I’m not sure,’ she breathed.
The human figure had stepped out of history. He wore a truly ancient space suit, a baggy, bulging affair of crinkled rust-orange fabric. His boots and thick-fingered gloves were clad in the same tawny material, ripped here and there to reveal a laminated mesh of underlying layers. He wore a dull silver belt festooned with numerous tools of unclear function. A rugged square box hung on the chest region of his suit, studded with chunky plastic-sealed controls large enough to be worked despite the handicap of the gloves. An even larger box sat on his back, rising above his neck. Moulded from bright red plastic, a thick ribbed hose dangled from the backpack over his left shoulder, its open end resting against the upper shelf of the chest-pack. The silver band of the suit’s neck ring was a complexity of locking mechanisms and black rubberised seals. Between the neck ring and the upper part of the suit were many unrecognisable logos and insignia.
He wore no helmet.
The Captain’s face looked too small for the suit. On his scalp — which appeared shaven — he wore a padded black and white cap veined with monitor wires. In the smoky light of the goggles she couldn’t guess at the shade of his skin. It was smooth, stretched tight over his cheekbones, shadowed with a week’s growth of patchy black beard. He had very fine razor-cut eyebrows, which arched quizzically above wide-set, doglike eyes. She could see the whites of those eyes between the pupil and the lower eyelid. He had the kind of mouth — thin, straight, perfect for a certain superciliousness — that she might find either fascinating or untrustworthy, depending on her mood. He did not look like a man much inclined to small talk. Usually that was all right with Antoinette.
‘I brought this back,’ she said. She stooped down and picked up the helmet.
‘Give it to me.’
She moved to throw it.
‘No,’ he said sharply. ‘Give it to me. Walk closer and hand it to me.’
‘I’m not sure I’m ready to do that,’ she said.
‘It’s called a gesture of mutual trust. You either do it or the conversation ends here. I’ve already said I won’t hurt you. Didn’t you believe me?’
She thought of the machinery that the goggles had edited out of her vision. Perhaps if she took them off, so that she saw the apparition as it really was…
‘Leave the goggles on. That’s also part of the deal.’
She took a step closer. It was clear that she had no choice.
‘Good. Now give me the helmet.’
Another step. Then one more. The Captain waited with his hands at his sides, his eyes encouraging her forwards.
‘I understand that you’re scared,’ he said. ‘That’s the point. If you weren’t frightened, there’d be no show of trust, would there?’
‘I’m just wondering what you’re getting out of this.’
‘I’m trusting you not to let me down. Now pass me the helmet.’ She held it out in front of her, as far as her arms would stretch, and the Captain reached out to take it from her. The goggles lagged slightly, so that a flicker of machinery was briefly visible as his arms moved. His gloved fingers closed around the helmet. She heard the rasp of metal on metal.
The Captain took a step back. ‘Good,’ he said, approvingly. He rolled the helmet in his hands, inspecting it for signs of wear. Antoinette noticed now that there was a vacant round socket in one side, into which the red umbilical was meant to plug. ‘Thank you for bringing this down to me. The gesture is appreciated.’
‘You left it with Palfrey. That wasn’t an accident, was it?’
‘I suppose not. What did you say it was — a “calling card”? Not far from the truth, I guess.’
‘I took it as a sign that you were willing to talk to someone.’
‘You seemed very anxious to talk to me,’ he said.
‘We were. We are.’ She looked at the apparition with a mixture of fear and dangerous, seductive relief. ‘Do you mind if I ask you something?’ She took his silence to indicate assent. ‘What shall I call you? “Captain” doesn’t seem quite right to me, not now that we’ve been through the mutual-trust thing.’
‘Fair point,’ he conceded, not sounding entirely convinced. ‘John will do for now.’
‘Then, John, what have I done to deserve this? It wasn’t just my bringing back the helmet, was it?’
‘Like I said, you seemed anxious to talk.’
Antoinette bent down to pick up her torch. ‘I’ve been trying to reach you for years, with no success at all. What’s changed?’
‘I feel different now,’ he said.
‘As if you were asleep but have finally woken up?’
‘It’s more as if I need to be awake now. Does that answer your question?’
‘I’m not sure. This might sound rude, but… who am I talking to, exactly?’
‘You’re talking to me. As I am. As I was.’
‘No one really knows who you were, John. That suit looks pretty old to me.’
A gloved hand moved across the square chest-pack, tracing a pattern from point to point. To Antoinette it looked like a benediction, but it might equally have been a rote-learned inspection of critical systems. Air supply, pressure integrity, thermal control, comms, waste management… she knew that litany herself.
‘I was on Mars,’ he said.
‘I’ve never been there,’ she said.
‘No?’ He sounded disappointed.
‘Fact of the matter is, I really haven’t seen all that many worlds. Yellowstone, a bit of Resurgam, and this place. But never Mars. What was it like?’
‘Different. Wilder. Colder. Savage. Unforgiving. Cruel. Pristine. Bleak. Beautiful. Like a lover with a temper.’
‘But this was a while back, wasn’t it?’
‘Uh huh. How old do you think this suit is?’
‘It looks pretty damn antique to me.’
‘They haven’t made suits like this since the twenty-first century. You think Clavain’s old, a relic from history. I was an old man before he took a breath.’
It surprised her to hear him mention Clavain by name. Clearly the Captain was more aware of shipboard developments than some gave him credit for. ‘You’ve come a long way, then,’ she said.
‘It’s been a long, strange trip, yes. And just look where it’s brought me.’