©1993 D. A. Houdek

No reproduction or distribution without consent of the author

1872 words

"Silence At the Fall of Night" was published in the Summer 2000 issue of Terra Incognita science fiction magazine.

Silence At the Fall of Night

by

D. A. Houdek

A single letter stared out of the flickering screen.

Huddled in darkness, Melanie hugged her knees to her chest and shivered. Her eyes locked onto the screen, onto the letter that invaded her solitude. Melanie floated unmoving, not really seeing it, not acknowledging its existence.

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Only the faint light of the monitors and controls penetrated her den of night. Letting the currents of air turn her, Melanie faced the huge quartz port. Beyond it, the planet hung, enveloped by a blackness broken only by the flare of lightning through distant, silent storms. The blue/white bursts of lightning used to make her cry, trembling with the anguish of horrible memories. No longer. She only saw the darkness that surrounded the light. Darkness. Darkness and silence. Wrapping them around her like a comforter, she watched the globe slip by.

Ten more minutes to the terminator. Ten more minutes to the light. She shuddered.

The letter was still there. She could feel it burning into her back. Not until the first rays of the star crested the curve of the planet did she turn around and face the screen.

It was the letter "R."

No, not truly an "R." It was backwards. A backwards "R."

"Ya," Melanie whispered, pronouncing the Cyrillic letter in a voice husky from disuse. One letter that said too much. "Ya means ‘I.’"

It was from him. The Other. The unseen, unheard, evil one. The enemy. Melanie knew he was there. Always, always he was there, riding his ship in an orbit that kept the planet between them. It was a message from the CISsie ship.

Her mind blank of coherent thought, Melanie let the letter fill her eyes until the dazzling light of the sun reached the port, filling the dark womb of her ship with scorching brightness.

Slamming her hand down on ‘clear,’ Melanie opened her mouth in a long, soundless scream.

* * *

Each orbit took her over a different part of the planet in an endlessly repeating pattern. She used to remember how many orbits there were in a day, twelve… sixteen… twenty… It didn’t matter. There was no more day or night, only dayside, nightside, over and over, orbit after orbit.

Pressed flat against the port, Melanie watched the world drift by. If she held very still and breathed lightly, the microgravity would pull her mass down against the window. For three orbits she had been thus.

The ship quivered as a thruster fired, automatically correcting her course. How many orbits since I had to do anything? she wondered vaguely. One hundred? One thousand?

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A few more minutes to blessed night. Then she’d turn around. In the darkness she’d be able to face what she knew awaited her on the comm screen. Melanie had heard the soft chime beckon for her attention. How long had it been since that first offending message had appeared? Thirty orbits? One hundred? Or had it never really existed at all? Melanie wasn’t sure.

Around her the air grew stale. Fighting the urge to pant, she remained still. She’d gone to rip out the control circuits for the air flow to find they were already gone. After smashing the secondary controls, she’d lain against the window waiting for the final night to come over her.

Then the chime had sounded.

On the planet, as the night became complete, Melanie saw lights dusting the nightside, their patterns forming the shapes of cities. A faint smile curved her lips. So everything was all right after all.

Click. With a hiss the vents filled the chamber with freshly scrubbed air. Melanie gulped, the rush of oxygen making her dizzy. Triple redundancy in the air systems, she realized dully. She blinked. The cities had vanished… All that remained were the pale green streamers of the southern aurora, their ghostly tendrils playing through the night. There had been a lot of auroras since… And a lot of lightning.

The air flow wafted her nearly weightless body from its position. Melanie steeled herself to face the comm screen. More of the foreign, invading characters awaited her. Edging panic, Melanie translated the words, "I am Misha. You?"

He wanted her to speak to him.

Melanie spent the next fifty-seven orbits in the back of the ship, hiding among the hydroponics tanks, as far from the comm screen as she could be.

* * *

There were five more messages before Melanie answered. "Go away!" was all she sent. Misha responded with a long, excessively cheerful narrative about how he had been manipulating his orbital maneuvering system for months (How many orbits is that?!) to put his craft into a position where he could get a message to her around the curve of the planet. The message was cut off in the phrase, "short of fuel now, but…"

With a cool, relaxed certainty, Melanie slapped the airlock control. It was so clear, so obvious. Simply step outside into the nothingness and… The airlock wouldn’t cycle. Puzzled, she studied it. The outer door was open. Left open from the outside. She wondered who could have left the ship and not returned.

The continuation of the message came as her ship, falling in its endless orbit, passed over the ragged shapes of fjords. Clouds like frosting glazed the coastline. "But it was worth it," the message said.

Hovering over the keyboard, Melanie wrapped her legs around a post to anchor herself. With two fingers she tapped out a longer message. She wrote in English, not caring if he understood, not caring if he could even receive her English characters. Into the keyboard she poured contempt for the unseen man in the CISsie ship. The automatic tracking and data relay systems found the frequency for her, aimed the dish and sent the message.

His answer came, as she expected, thirty-two orbits later when the tracking computers told her he would again be in position. Though in Russian, his answer made it clear he understood her English message. Sorrow, rather than hate, was the tone of the words she read on the screen. "Could I not say the same of you?" he wrote. "What would it gain us? Come, let us talk of more civilized times." The rest of his message was a rambling discussion of the drug habits of nineteenth century British poets. Melanie found a grin twisting her face as she reached the end.

Rapping so hard on her keyboard that she had trouble holding herself in place, Melanie refuted all of his points and sidetracked into the relative merits of "Frankenstein." Her fingers hesitated nearly a full orbit before she ended her note with, "My name is Melanie."

As the deep color of a jungle broken by branching rivers passed beneath the ship, Misha told her, "I looked up the meaning of your name. It means ‘black’ or ‘dark.’ How lovely and appropriate for one who falls through the endless night of space. I shall call you Melanishka, and treasure each word that comes from your fingers to grace my screen and fill my heart."

Melanie laughed, the unfamiliar sound startling her. "And you, Misha, you are named ‘Michael’ for an angel," she wrote her brief reply, then spent three orbits defending her claim that "Frankenstein" was, indeed, the first science fiction novel ever written.

In the next thousand orbits they argued, debated and joked about a hundred subjects, from the Greek myths to the history of Japanese sword making. His humor was quirky, Melanie discovered, leaning heavily on puns that she sometimes had trouble translating, but that always filled her with delight once she did. She found herself anticipating waking up with joy, to having his words waiting to greet her, a happy light in the darkness.

A comet came and went unseen through the star system, leaving a trail of debris behind it. Melanie dreamed of Misha as the planet entered the comet’s debris. In her dream she could feel his hands, soft and stroking, the warmth of his breath on her neck, the feel of his body against hers. Never once, in the dream, did she try to see his face. She woke in floating darkness and pretended he was still there.

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"No. No. No!" Melanie's fingers on the keyboard screamed. "Not again. Stop it." Her hands hunted for the launch buttons, striking them over and over, but no roar of rocket engines answered her commands. Where was her launch partner to activate the dual controls? She called out a name, but there was no one in the ship to answer.

Even as Misha’s reply soothed, it radiated a grief as deep as hers. "They’re meteors, Melanishka, only meteors. No more missiles. We’ve fired them all. There’s nothing more we can do to that poor world. And no one to order us to do it."

They spoke no more of the dead planet. In the next three thousand orbits they spoke of love and sex and dreams.

As the ship passed over a crater where one had not existed before, Melanie noticed the time lengthening between Misha’s messages. Curious, she asked the ballistics computer to track his orbit. He was dealing with CISsie technology, she reasoned, perhaps his systems didn’t hold his orbit as precisely as hers.

The answer stunned her. Quickly, she demanded the computer to consider more variables. "Misha," she sent urgently at the next window, "you need to do an OMS burn at…" and she fed him the coordinates and duration of the burn. "Your orbit is decaying."

Misha’s reply was slow in coming. "I know, Melanishka," he said and she could feel that he had written the words slowly. "I used all my fuel repositioning so I could talk to you."

As the ship crossed a dawn with rainbow highlights sparkling off the clouds and shimmering ocean, Melanie worked hard at the ballistics computer to see if she could reach Misha’s ship.

"I’m sorry. I can’t reach you," she wrote, the words wrenched from her unwilling fingers.

"I know," was his two word reply.

"I love you," he said on the orbit before his last.

"Don’t go away," she answered, not knowing if the message would reach him.

Alone in the silence, she crossed the terminator into night over Gibraltar. Blossoms of clouds colored in swirls of rose and gold tried to push their way through the narrow gap into the Mediterranean Sea. Somewhere beyond the bulging horizon, Melanie knew, a new meteor burned through the atmosphere.

In the lone ship, automatic systems obediently worked, resetting a long string of messages, readying them again for playback.

On the screen a message waited; a single, backwards "R."

THE END

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