Work Text:
“Statement of Madalia Sallow, regarding her time in an unlicensed space flight program in the Australian Outback. Statement taken direct from subject 11th May, 2018. Statement begins.
“Just call me Dalia, e’rybody did. It woulda been…2010. Somewhere in The Gibson Desert, I don’t remember the specifics, only that the nearest road was a long way off. There was this boy there, his name was Oliver. He couldn’t have been more than 17, a real sweet kid, always called me Ms. Dalia, said his mother would have his head if she ever heard him say it otherwise. I liked him, his manners and accent reminded me a’ home. I didn’t like being there though. The air was wrong, and sometimes I felt like I couldn’t breathe, like it was too heavy for my lungs to take in. It always felt like I was being pushed down an’ down an’ down an’ down into the soil. The open sky was heavy there. The inside of the facility wasn’t any better, most of the ceilings were glass and the rooms were as empty as they coulda’ been in a place like that, so you were always aware of how ephemeral gravity’s hold on you was. It sorta felt like if you stepped wrong you’d fall up until you were swallowed by the freezin’ void of space. At the time I thought it’d be better once I actually got into space. I was wrong.
“It got so much worse once I was on the Icarus space station. My every waking moment was spent aware that a single pebble could punch a hole in the delicate shell of the station and then all our air would go rushing out into the infinite nothin’ that surrounded us on all sides. That the very same pebble -if it hit at a slightly different angle- would make all 495 tons of metal that made up the Icarus implode in an instant. In one direction was several minutes of all the water in my body boiling while I simultaneously froze to death, and in the other was the prospect of having metal shove its way into every part of my body, tearing muscles, shattering bones, if I was lucky it’d hit a vital organ and offer me a quick death; if I wasn’t I’d bleed out in immeasurable pain as my blood boiled and my body froze and the station drifted into nothin’ for the rest of time. The knowledge built and shrunk and grew and expanded and diminished and compounded until it was crushing me and freeing me and surrounding and deserting me and there and gone and up and down and everything and nothing and yes and no and sharp and soft and it sunk into my bones and infused my blood like a good cup of tea.
“The terror of it was almost paralyzing.
“Almost. It tore me apart, and that was delectable too. The tightening of my skin until it split, the dirt that spilled out of the tear, the void around me that it tried to fill in vain… oh Lord it was delicious.
“A‘course, the others on the station didn’t think so. It wasn’t their fault they couldn’t see past the initial, instinctual terror; but, fault or no, I couldn’t just leave them. They’d’a told somebody on the ground what had happened and that…well it woulda ruined everything. So I removed them from the equation. Before you ask, no, I didn’t kill them. Not immediately, at least.
“Are you familiar with the myth of Dionysus and the Sailors? I didn’t think so. The short of it is this: A crew of sailors kidnaps Dionysus while he’s asleep on a beach. He asks to be let go, with a promise of rich rewards if they do; and a warning of great ill to come if they don’t. The sailors don’t know who he is – they think he’s simply a mortal prince, somebody who’ll fetch a good ransom, and nothing more – so they refuse. Dionysus warns ‘em again that they’ll earn the wrath of the gods if they continue on this course, and again they ignore him. Dionysus, seeing that he won’t convince the sailors, turns his bonds, the mast, and the oars into snakes, which he commands to attack them. Then he fills the boat with the sound of panpipes and the smell of grapes, and conjures the illusion of a tiger round himself; driving the sailors to madness as he dances joyfully through the mayhem. Eventually the sailors throw themselves overboard to escape the visions that chase ‘em, and Dionysus pities ‘em – an’ turns them into dolphins, sparing their lives.
“I’ve always found the story fascinatin’. The delight inherent to the madness, the panic in the hollows of the joy, the insidious creeping unease that must’a slowly overcome the sailors – thinning their blood and dissolving their bones in the basic terror. Can you blame me for wantin’ to try it for myself?
“Always Shifting I Cannot Think – in fragmenting me – gave me the opportunity to find out what it feels like to be somebody else’s madness, ‘stead of your own. I’m sure it won’t surprise you to find that I liked it.
“A’course I didn’t let the others throw themselves out the airlock; no matter how many ‘a me there was I still didn’t know how to do everything that needed to be done to keep the station running til’ we got down, but…well I didn’t need them sane. I just needed them functional. And they were! The shuttle came and collected us exactly when it was supposed to, and we all remained unharmed until we were back on solid ground.
“Soon as I was back in the lab though, I kept thinkin’a how miserable I’d been there before. The thoughts stuck in the folds of my brain like lint in a grease trap; the wrong thing stuck in the wrong place and not even getting filtered out for its trouble. I figured it wasn’t fair that the sponsors and scientists and suchlike got to make me miserable and have no consequences for it. So I gave ‘em some consequnces of my own design; if they wanted to know what the infinite cruelty of space feels like, I was gonna show ‘em. I was so generous that I even made sure they stayed dead once they finally kicked it.
“The lab hands I was a bit kinder to, they didn’t know what they were doin’, so i just fed them to Forever Deep Below and let it have its fun with ‘em.
“Oliver though… Oliver was more difficult to deal with. See, I didn’t wanna kill him; he was sweet he didn’t deserve that, but I couldn’t just let ‘im go; he mighta told somebody what’d happened— and I rather wanted my disappearance to be an unsolved mystery. Cliche, I know but the heart wants what it wants…when you’ve still got one, that is. So what was a girl to do with a boy she didn’t wanna kill and couldn’t let go? Why, scramble his thoughts and take his tongue so he couldn’t tell anybody even if he could think to say it a’course! Then send him back home for his mama to cry over and his daddy to grumble over and his town to whisper about behind both a’ their backs. I still visit him on occasion, just to check on him, make sure his daddy ain’t kicked him out on the street. He don’t deserve that, he didn’t know what he was getting himself into when he signed on to work on the Icarus, he was just a kid; the poor thing.
“The lab itself I tore apart with my bare hands just to feel the sharpness of the torn metal scraping over my skin, making my nerves raw and shaking and exquisitely, brilliantly buzzing. Mostly I Buried the pieces but I did blow some of ‘em up. Not to feed any of my patrons, just because I like to watch the fire… and it was as good a way as any to keep my molotov making skills sharp. You ever looked at a fire? I mean really looked, not just glanced at it but watched it? All those beautiful everchanging patterns… y’know I’m half convinced that if my patrons hadn’t claimed me when they did the Burning Destruction would have.
“There, I’ve given you a story Archivist now is that all you wanted or were you keen to try messing with The Vast again?”
“Ah, no… Th- That was all.”
“Good, Statement Ends.”