(Inspired by “The Black Hole,” by Soundgarden)

I noticed her as soon as the transport docked and I knew, right away, she would give me trouble.  Don’t ask me why I picked her out of the crowd.  It’s not like she was unique, at least not then. She was just a face, one of a thousand gray, wide-eyed, empty faces, pressed against the plexi, peering out through the steam and laser guides, trying to get a sense of what to expect. It’s understandable; everybody wants to know what’s around the corner, catch a little glimpse of their own future if they can manage.

The thing is, if you’ve never been to Nadir, there’s no way you’re going to be prepared, Not for the sky filled with what looks like billions of bits of mica and stone flowing around the planet like unbound rivers. Not for the landscape that’s like an endless sheet of bubbling liquid slate, dotted with our lifedomes on the planet’s heatside.

There’s no way in hell they can picture the sun. But they always try and they always fail. You can see the disappointment in their giant bottomless eyes and in the way the corners of their mouths don’t quite curve down.

This is not what I expected, the faces say. This is not what I wanted.

We see thousands of transports every year, streaming in like pods of metallic whales, belching their grey eyed, slack-bodied cargo into our midst.  We see them all so we know.  We know and, after a time, we stop caring about them. Not in the way that is dismissive of them or the pain that brought them here. No one could be that heartless. But there are so many of them, coming in constantly with the one goal in mind, you have to get steely about it. You have remember that this is their choice and whatever happened that led them to Nadir, however tragic it might have been for them, is done. It’s just the catalyst. Once they get here they are, basically, sheep.

Oh, we don’t kill them. We don’t hurt them at all. Once someone comes to Nadir they are past all that. After the thin and icy non-sleep of their ride to this place, you might even say we treat them kindly.

I’ve been in cold sleep a few times in my life, each time worse than the last. They call it that because, for short distances, say, like hopping between Sol and Centauri Cygnus, it’s a lot like sleep. You slide into the travel couch; the gate comes down; the place floods with E2; your conscious mind disappears. You wake up with a little tingle in the skin, a bit of a tickle in the throat and, inside an hour, you’ve forgotten the whole thing.

You can get away with calling that cold sleep when the effect is so small. But, when you’re pushing the rim, when you’re making jumps so big you need Breach technology to thin down the parsecs, you don’t call it sleep, cold or otherwise. You don’t give it a name at all.

It’s not sleep, for one thing, which you’ll know if you’ve done it. It’s like being dead. It’s like being dead and aware of it but only from a distance. It’s like being dead and watching yourself dead and not caring and hating yourself for not.

Nadir is right on the Rim. It takes three hops to get here. Three hops with just enough time out of the sleep couches to dread being sent back in. People go mad from it sometimes. I’ve seen it. They fight like rabid animals not to be put back in and have to be tranqued or worse to make them settle. But you have to because, as gut-wrenchingly awful the Sleep is, staying awake in the Breach is worse.  No one who’s seen that will talk about it and I, for one, don’t need to hear it.

I’ve done three rotations to Nadir. That means fifteen times in and out of Sleep so far and another three waiting when my remaining months here are done.

There are two sorts of people who come here. There’s the ones like me, who need the cash this sort of duty generates and have the kind of mind that doesn’t break on distance and loneliness and have no ties at home.  Since the war with the Mercanti you’d be surprised how many of us there are, willing to do just about anything to keep body and soul together.  The other kind are those who come to stay.

The war did ugly things to all of us. Everybody lost someone. Too many of us lost everything. You could say I’m in that last group.

Both my brothers died when the Epoch was lost, fighting a Mercanti seedship. Both my folks went not long after. Pop contracted Beck’s Palsy and quickly withered to nothing the way leaves do in the autumn. Mom took a walk into the Pacific and never came back. I guess one son left wasn’t good enough.

The other kind of person who comes to Nadir is what we call a Diver.

“Transport in dock, solid,” said the overcom. “Ushers stand to, prepare for disembark.”

The ground rumbled underneath my boots and I could barely feel it through the thick treads.  I watched the massive ramp doors fold down to the gangway, pushing the steam ahead of them like the unclasping hands of one of those ancient gods. Zeus, maybe.

I couldn’t hear the noise, of course.  When we’re outside the domes, our protective gear insulates us against, well, pretty much everything you’d think.  We can move around okay, do the little bit of work it takes to open a few doors and get the slidewalks going for the new arrivals. We can see what’s directly in front of us through the slit they machined into the helmet but that’s it.  We don’t spend much time outside.

Nadir isn’t a friendly place, in case you haven’t guessed.  Oh, it’s not like it’s trying to kill us, not on purpose. It’s just a hunk of rock doing the same dance the planets at Sol do. It’s about ninety million miles out, like Earth. Like Mercury it shows one face to the stars and one to, well, what would be a sun if we had one. It’s got enough mass left for just under Earth-normal g and spews just enough of itself up on a constant enough basis in those big bubbling eruptions to create atmo.  Don’t think about breathing it.  It’s mostly ethane, they say, nothing our lungs can process, or our skin for that matter, but you need the pressure pushing down just as much as you need the gravity so the techs score it a win. 

They say Nadir might have been the core of a Jupiter-sized gas giant once-upon-a-time. Now it’s heatside and darkside and it looks like a half-eaten snow cone. Technically Earth has terraformed worse places than this but they all have something Nadir doesn’t.

“Ushers, stand to,” said the overcom. “Alphanumeric groups to disembark in primary arrival pattern.  Take all precautions.”

They call us Ushers. I don’t think it’s meant to be ironic. Certainly it’s not jokey. There’s not much smiling on Nadir. Not much to smile about.

We get outfitted with the protection suits, assigned a bunk, a cubby and our list of duties and safety precautions; the rest is pretty much clockwork.  The transports come at their assigned times; we stand by until the doors open, wait until the border walls rise up to keep the worst of the wind at bay and then, when they come down the planks, we take charge of our specific clusters.

There’s no difference between them. They’re broken into groups of fifty, one Usher per, then herded like the cattle they are into the processing node.

Whatever they were back on Earth or whatever colony world spawned them, by the time they find Nadir, they are just remnants. Not really human anymore aside from their basic physical resemblance to their old species, they’re really just the implications of people, the last whispered memory.

The girl I’d noticed ended up in my group, still nothing special to her beyond the caprice in my own mind that drew me to her in the first place.  Closer now, I could pull out a few more things, minimum clues to her past that, under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t have bothered to catalogue.

She’d been youngish, maybe as young as twenty-nine. Someone had molded her long hanks of black hair into the regulation bun on the back of her head.  Her skin was chalky gray behind the plexi bag that made up her hood, giving her the appearance of having been sculpted. Her coversuit, so much less protection against Nadir than my own bulky construction, seemed to hang on her skeletal body like a shroud.  The codes on her ident badge said she was from Europa. Maybe she was somebody’s mom. Maybe she was a sister. She was definitely a daughter and that was the gist.

Now, remember, please, that none of this was remotely unique. She was, despite my singling her out, nearly identical to the other forty-nine empty vessels in her cluster. Even their genders and original ethnicities had been subsumed into the uniform not-black-not-white pallor shared by their fellows.

Why don’t they wear the same protective gear that we Ushers do?  That would be the question most prominent in most minds seeing us first, standing like little siege towers, our bulky metallic armor proof against the elements and then seeing them, an army of ghosts shambling forward in their cloaks of plastic. You’d think they were statutes or mannequins except they each wore a simple rebreather to prevent asphyxiation.

They don’t wear protection because they don’t need it. The will never leave Nadir. Their bodies still have to eat and breathe for a little longer and their skin can’t take the acid content of the winds so we give them just enough to keep them all in one piece before Diving. After? Well.

None of them looked up. None of them looked at any of us or at each other. They stood at something like a slouching form of attention, neither anticipating nor dreading the words that would put them in motion again.

“Welcome to Nadir,” I said. My voice always sounded as though it were being pulled through a sieve when the communications filter got hold of it. “Follow me and we’ll get you processed.”

I didn’t have to look to see if they would. 

Processing takes less time now than it did when Nadir was first colonized. There are more Ushers now, for one thing, and the number of Divers topped out at a half a million a year long before I signed on.

The place works like a machine, ticking them in and out like a clockwork toy. The weirdest thing is that no one predicted how many people would opt for the Dive once the opportunity presented.  There are just so many of us now. Human beings, I mean. Hundreds of trillions.

We’ve terraformed and colonized all of the Sol system. Hell, the Jovians spent thirty odd years claiming they were their own separate nation due to all the people living on those damned moons.

Proxima Centauri is ours. The Numeric systems, Aleph through Nod. Yeah, there are a lot of us spread out across the galaxy and that’s not even counting the various asteroid confederacies and corporate station-states. 

With all that forging outward and happy breeding going on it stands to reason that there would be a few who wanted something different. Even if only one percent of one percent of us wanted out of the normal flow, you’re still talking about hundreds of thousands of people. Maybe even millions.

There was a wonk out here a couple years back, a poly-psych guy doing some university study. He had this theory that the people who take the Dive are sort of a safety valve for the rest of us. They opt out of the normal flow so that we can all dig in that much deeper.  When I asked him how the Ushers fit in to his model he went all quiet and folded up inside himself.  Barry. His name was Barry.

The point is, once travel to Nadir hit peak capacity back in the ‘50s, it’s held steady and so has the army of Ushers it takes to get the Divers where they’re going.

There’s another reason processing doesn’t take long. Most of the work is done back home, long before the Divers set foot on their transports, much less Nadir.  They leave most of themselves behind with only the final formalities falling to us.

We take and erase their names from the System. We take and erase their biometrics. We take any statement they might want to make (there never are any) and then the rest is what cattle drivers have been doing since the days when they still had cattle drives.

The worst part really is the waiting. Each Usher has to wait with their squad until a tube car becomes available.  Just waiting with the Divers isn’t so bad. They don’t do anything except sit staring straight ahead until the overcomm tells us all to move.

It’s the sitting that gets you.

It’s the sitting that gives you time to think and, no matter what the Head Usher says, no matter how many times the overcomm sounds the warning Do Not Empathize With the Divers. They don’t want it and you can’t afford it, it doesn’t matter. They still look like human beings; that’s the problem. Even though their minds don’t work like ours anymore, even though they are little more than fleshy mannequins by the time we get them, they still look and move like humans.

Sitting there watching that many human beings who’ve opted for the Dive rather than, well, anything else, it gets the mind working. You can’t really help it.

What makes a Diver, right? That’s the big question. One of.  What makes them the way they are, what they are, all of a sudden. What makes them want what they want? 

When I’m waiting with them, my mind drifts to my own life, to the awful hand fate dealt my family and how that makes me alone in a universe that gets simultaneously smaller and larger as we push out into it. I’ve had enough tragedy in my life to fill a thousand cups but, somehow, I’m not interesting in letting the whole thing go.

None of the Divers are children or adolescents. There is a precisely equal number of males and females, creepy. Most chilling to me is the fact that the percentage of Divers sent by each colony is always the same, regardless of population size. You’d think it would tip one way or the other once in a while. Having exact ratios like that, that remain constant under all circumstances, it puts some people in mind of some sort of intelligence driving it all.  There isn’t but it can feel there is.

There are hundreds of conspiracy cults related to the Dive. The biggest of them think it’s proof of the Hand of God guiding us and that the Divers are going to meet Him or Her or It.

It could be true, I guess, if you’re already disposed to believe in such things. I’m not so it doesn’t really work for me.  Correlation isn’t causation, right?

Some think Diving is a way for Coregov to weed out dissidents and make them disappear. The last doesn’t hold up, of course. None of the conspiracy stuff does when you get down to it. We Ushers have a good laugh at all the theories and speculation.  We’re the only people who are in a position to know anything about Divers or the Dive; not even the techs can do more than theorize.

We get closer to it all than any humans in the System. We come from all walks of life. We also chose to come here rather than anywhere, everywhere else. Each of us has a story that we are not throwing away, some tragedy we overcame that allows us to stand this close to the Divers without screaming. We are the only ones in any sort of position to see or know what’s what.

We know nothing.

There’s no real rhyme or reason to who goes for the Dive.  They also come from all walks, all ethnicities and, though none of them are under thirty years old, some of them are into their centuries when they reach Nadir.

Barry’s theory on that was that the brains of children don’t finish baking until they’re in their mid twenties or early thirties.  Something about Diving means you have to be an adult.

“Hilo Prescott-Smith,” I said in the by-the-book cadence I’d developed over the years. “I take your name.  I take your codes. I take your metrics for family and career. You are free of obligation to the Core. You owe no debt to the System. You are a Diver now. Do you have any statement to make for the Ledger?”

Of course Hilo Prescott-Smith did not. He only sat there on the opposite side of the cubicle as the previous thirty in my cluster had done, silent, staring, waiting for the preliminaries to be finished. I told him he was clear to Dive and to return to his original seat in the cluster to await transportation.

“Parvatti Rieder-Glenn, step up,” I said, already beginning the cursory once-over of her final history.  She was Jovian, from Europa Deus, once a teacher, once a mother, once a member of the Church of Prometheans, my parents’ faith.  She’d given it all up for the Dive a little less than a year previous.  There were no images attached. There never were.

“Parvatti Rieder-Glenn,” I intoned, looking up at her. She was the same woman I’d pegged at the dock and who my mind kept drifting towards in the minutes since.

I didn’t know her. I didn’t know anyone anymore.  My family was gone.  All my friends from the war were either dead or still in service and therefore incommunicado.  There was something about her, though, something vaguely magnetic that tugged at me. I shook it off. “In accordance with Coregov Order 14639, I accept your application for the Dive. In order to verify that you are not impaired, damaged or in any way coerced into being here, please answer, ‘yes,’ to the following questions.”

Divers could usually manage a syllable or two when pressed so getting through the disclaimer section of the processing documents was usually quick. She ticked off her ‘yeses’ and then I gave her the last rites.

“Parvatti Reider-Glenn, I take your name. I take your codes. I take your metrics for family and career. You are free of obligation to the Core. You owe no debt to the System. You are a Diver now. Do you have any statement to make for the Ledger?”

“Yes,” she said in the thin raspy thing that Divers had for voices. Once they became what they are, they stopped speaking except when absolutely necessary so the pipes were always a bit rusty. “Thank you, Captain Go.”

And then I realized I wasn’t alone. I knew Parvatti Reider-Glenn. I remembered her. I had once saved her life.

My name, for the record, is not Go. I was never a captain in the Mech Corps, never higher than lieutenant. My name, for the record, is Phillip Corazon-Aboud. I was born in Luna City and my parents, upper middle-class code scribes, lucked into an IPO whose success netted the family enough money to relocate to Earth.

I grew up in an exburb of the San Francisco Collective. I grew up in the upper middle– upper middle school nodes, upper middle friends and lovers, upper middle life and dreams.  I played sports, devoured pop music, gamed in VR, fell in love; I was normal.

When the Mercanti attacked the Stella colony my older and younger brothers signed up to fight them. By the time they wiped out the Colton corporate asteroid platforms, all six thousand of them, I knew it was my turn to go.

My parents were against it, of course. They’d been against my brothers too. There were other people for that job, they said to each of us in turn. The System would best be served by my going into normal business, getting married to Sarah, having a normal life at home. Otherwise what was the point of all the military sacrifices?

I had a talent for code too and they saw a bright future for me. Of course they, like so many parents those first few years, lost the argument. Like my brothers had done, I signed up to fight.

They were both on the Epoch when it sacrificed itself to destroy a Mercanti seedship.  I narrowly missed assignment to the Apex which is marked as MIA to this day. Instead I showed skill for Class U Mech warfare, city fighting, so I was assigned to the garrison on Isis.

Isis wasn’t a rim world and it wasn’t particularly close to the Core so the soldiers who got duty there had to live with a strange mix of elation that they wouldn’t be facing down seed dragons and spore children like those at the front and disappointment at being essentially left out of the fight.

The Mercanti had a hell of a gauntlet to run if they meant to attack Isis.

We drilled hard, daily. We kept our mechs in prime condition, thinking of them as more than man-shaped tanks you could wear like armor. We thought of them as our real bodies and out real bodies as their heats and brains. We stayed sharp as diamond-tipped drills but we knew the battle wouldn’t come to us.

We were wrong.

It’s hard to describe what a seedship looks like from a planet’s surface. They’re huge, of course. They dwarf even the Sabre class Breach vessels by a factor of three at least.

Picture, if you can, a small city made out of vines and melanoma appearing in the sky. Picture that city seeming to explode into millions of chunks of slippery, oozing debris and then realizing that the city didn’t explode; it erupted. The debris turn out to be spore pods, still in their millions, hurtling down at a killing speed.

The Mercanti don’t actually fight, you know. I don’t know of anyone who’s ever seen one of them. Their seed vessels–  reapers, we call them– just slide into orbit over a world they’ve decided they want and  let fly with millions of spore pods.

The pods hit the surface and kick out millions of spores. The spores transform anything organic, anything alive that they touch, into what we call spore children. They’re monsters, that’s all, like things out of your worst nightmares. They’re just tentacles and mouths and teeth and all they want it is to kill everything alive around them, even other spore children.

Once you’re infected the transformation is explosive. It takes under ten seconds for their genes to attack and modify anything unlike. Under five, usually. In less time than it takes to tell I saw hundreds of people turned from normal human beings running for their lives into these things that looked like they were literally born in Hell.

We scrambled as soon as the reaper appeared, naturally; dirt-mechs to the cities to make sure the evac went smooth, air-mechs to the sky to drive the reaper off or kill it if they could.

Until the Sabre class was built with Breach engines that could swivel around into cannon mode, no one had ever driven a reaper off, much less destroyed it. The best anyone had ever done was save some tiny portion of the populace.

By the time my squad hit the city you knew this wasn’t going to be a clean getaway. As we dropped out of the support carrier, landing like thunderbolts on the pavement below, we could already hear the blood-curdling wailing of thousands of spore children coming to life.

“Scramble beta,” our captain told us. “Single sweep. Grab who you can and punch out.  Any BEM contact, any at all, you put it down hard. Dust off here in twenty ticks. Affirm.”

We affirmed and took off in every direction.

The first time I saw Parvatti Reider-Glenn she was screaming her father’s name as her mother dragged her and her sister away from what had been the family home.  It was early morning so the younger child was still in pale blue pajamas. Parvatti and her mother both wore synthsilk undertunics and shorts. Obviously they’d been getting ready for work and school when all hell hit their home.

It was a prefab thing, one of those old-style house-in-a-box jobs from the colony’s early days. Two stories, a yard and a massive gaping hole in the roof where the spore pod had smashed through.

Her mother was obviously running on adrenaline and fumes, just on the still-sane side of shock and that only because she had her girls to think of.  Parvatti just kept screaming for her father in that voice of absolute despair and terror that only children seem to manage. It went right through me.

“Run for the park,” I told them. “A ship’s on the way. Stay in the center of the street. Mechs are everywhere.”

The mother nodded, still holding on with just her fingernails, and moved to do as I said. As I turned to head towards the house, knowing what I would find there wouldn’t be pretty, I heard her cry out.

“Parvatti! No!”

Something small and pastel red whipped past my mech’s iron shin and I knew it was the girl, Parvatti, running for the house.

I had split second to make a choice. I told the mother to go, not looking back to see if she obeyed me and then hit the afterburners to catch up to the screaming teenager up ahead.

I caught her just as she reached the door, scooped her up in one giant steel hand and cradled her against my chest just in time. The spore child that had once been Parvatti’s dad had finished consuming his body and transformed into something that looked like a forest of serpents with mouths for heads and mouths for eyes and mouths all over. Sensing the new flesh so close the tentacles exploded outward at us, hitting my mech with enough force to send me staggering.

There’s a stack of ways to fight spore children in space. Space itself is deadly enough sometimes if you keep your wits about you. When you’re planetside you’re talking nukes or fire. 

We knew the city would be overrun in instants; if the brass meant to save Isis, the nukes were already in the air. If they were, I had even less time to get Parvatti out of there and back to the dustoff or we’d go up in the same mushroom cloud that the spore children had coming.

But I couldn’t use my cannon while holding her; she’d be flash-fried in the heat exhaust. There was no time to be elegant. I swiveled the cannons off my mech’s rear carapace and popped the screaming girl into one of the vacant tubes.  My body would shield her from the worst of the heat and, so long as I didn’t turn my back, the spore child couldn’t touch her.

The spore child, screaming and keening, flailing at me like nightmare death, ripped out of the front door and at us.  I braced, firing both cannons at white intensity, sunhot fire blasting out of their barrels incinerating even the air between us as I backed away.

Parvatti went on screaming her father’s name but was soon drowned out by the sound of my fire, the spore child’s dying wail and the explosion of her family home going up.

“Daddy’s gone, kid,” I said as the Mercanti monster crumbled to dust and ash in front of me. “And so are we.”

We made it to the dustoff point with seconds to spare. Parvatti’s mother waited by the hatch of the last transport holding her little sister against her shoulder. The shock hadn’t taken her yet. Fear over Parvatti had beaten it back for the moment. I watched her face nearly crack to bits as I bent low and literally handed her daughter back to her.

“Scott?” said her mother. I guessed she meant her husband. I shook my mech’s giant head.

“Didn’t make it, ma’am,” I said. “Sorry.”

Then she was, I don’t know, angry maybe. Her whole brown, hawkish face clouded over and she told me never, not ever, to be sorry for what I had not done. I’d saved her child.  I’d saved both of her children and their mother as well. I should never, ever, apologize for that. She told the girls to thank me but Parvatti wouldn’t. She wouldn’t even look at me. She had retreated somewhere inside, somewhere deeper than shock, deeper than grief and there was no room for anyone else.

“He looks like Captain Go,” said the other child whose name I never got.  Captain Go was a character from one of her kidvids, a sort of roving freelance mech who went around stopping crimes and battling super-villains. “Thank you, Captain Go!”

Then they were hustled onto the transport, I got scooped up by one of the returning air mechs and all of us got the hell off Isis.

I hate to say it but I forgot about Parvatti, her sister and her mother and the horrible thing the Mercanti had made of her father. After that incident my garrison was reassigned to the front where I saw worse, much worse than what happened on Isis. We got most of the colonists out that time, after all, and I didn’t know then how rare and lucky that was.

Now that girl, that screaming, desperate, brave girl who had been willing to risk death or worse to save her dad, had given herself up for the Dive.

She was looking at me too, actually looking at me as if she could see me, which was also something Divers never did.

Stammering a little, I told her to take her seat. She was officially a Diver now. She had to wait. She did as she was told and, after that one moment of departure from normal procedure, didn’t utter another word.

It shook me. I admit it. It wasn’t that she made me remember the war; I put everything from that time behind me a long time ago and, like I said, the thing with Reider-Glenn family was not even close to the worst I survived. It was something subtler than that, something oddly personal. I just couldn’t get her out of my head, not even after I ferried her cluster into the tube car and rode with them out to the darkside.

What is Nadir, right? You want to know and I should tell. What is the Dive and why do the Divers come here? Why are they drawn here from all the distant corners of the System Collective to make their end on the darkside?

I would have told before and I will now but only because my mind wandered back to all those points after I left Parvatti and the others at the darkside gate.

A lot of it I don’t know because I can’t do the math and I don’t know the physics. A lot of it I don’t know because it’s classified at levels far above my pay grade. A lot of it I don’t know because, frankly, nobody knows it and, maybe, nobody can.

What I do know is this:

Nadir has no sun.

It has an orbit. It has a year. Every once in a while, they tell me, whenever it manages to snag a passing asteroid in its gravity well, it has a sort of moon. That hasn’t happened for a while. 

Instead of a sun, Nadir has a black hole. It is the only planet we’ve found anywhere that orbits a black hole and a good deal of what goes on here is wonks, techs and other big brains trying to figure out the hows and whys of it all. They’ve been out here nearly a century and, from the looks of it, it’ll be at least that long before they make a dent.

Nadir’s black hole is its sun but, unlike every other sun in known space, the stuff it radiates- hard, short band radiation and more gravitons than any self respecting anything has a right to- well, it kills matter, right?  It breaks matter down into tiny, chewable chunks that, I guess, it can eat.  It does it slow, from the inside out, slicing through the subatomic bonds that hold everything together.

That’s why our sky looks the way it does and that’s why Nadir’s heatside faces away from the center of the system and the darkside looks less like a planet and more like a massive chunk of termite-infested wood.

Now, I confess, even after all my time there, most of this was pretty opaque to me and I’m not sure I’ve got it all locked in yet.  This little that I do know came from the search I did in the central archive that night.  Even that couldn’t tell me what I needed to know about the Divers. For that I needed Kirsch.

Rebeka Kirsch was nearly half as old as me and about six times smarter.  She hailed from Bradbury Tower, the oldest settlement on Mars.  Unlike the rest of us dour old burnouts who found our way to Usher duty on Nadir, she managed to be mostly cheery most of the time. She was tallish, with a soft comfortable face and attitude that seemed to get you talking, telling the truth, even if you hadn’t meant to.

It was a great quality to have if you were the company psych. Ask me what possessed a kid like her to crawl out here to the darkest part of the rim and I have no answer for you. She played a hell of a chess game, beat me more times than not and pretty quick too. She was usually awake at the time.

“Let me get this straight,” she said, rubbing her eyes. She was on the back end of her sleep rotation, early morning for her, and what I needed from her wasn’t getting through. “You want me to explain the Dive to you?”

“Yeah,” I said, leaning in the lip of the hatchway. “And quicktime, if you can.”

“What’s the hurry,” she said. She slid out her bunk and into some surprisingly cute bunny slippers before crossing to pull on the lab coat she used as a robe.  Her brown bangs hung over her eyes and I knew she was only even tolerating this because we’d shipped out together. We’d pulled the longest duty together on this miserable rock and I guess that made us friends.

“I just need to know,” I said.

“How long have you been here?” she said. She knew how long; she was cranky.

“Same as you, Dr. Kirsch.”

“So, a long time.”

“Bek, come on.”

“All right,” she said. She had got a cup of something steaming in her hand and had settled into her favorite recliner to sip.  “But I don’t know why you care. You’re still a human being.”

“And the Divers?” I said. “What are they?”

“Well,” she said after a long sip. “That’s tricky.”

I listened to her talk for the better part of an hour. When she was done I thought my head would pop from the words and concepts she’d poured in.

It made sense. It was insane. It made sense. It was insane.

“The first Diver,” she said.  She stopped herself, thinking. You could always tell when she was thinking something serious; the shine went out of her eyes like she’d retreated somewhere inside to pull out whatever nugget she was about to deliver. “The first Diver wasn’t a Diver, right. We didn’t have Nadir then so there was no place to take the Dive. His name was Downey. He was a miner in the Sol local belt. Copper, I think.

This was a while back, last century, when they still used the big diggers with the partial AI interface. This guy was just a normal bloke, probably a Delta grade or a Gamma.”

Basically like me, I thought. Just some guy scratching out a little living, trying to keep life quiet and under control. In my mind this Downey guy looked like me.

“So this Downey’s crew was on down shift,” she went on. “Fourteen hour digs, ten for recreation and sleep. This guy was up before the rest, working on some glitch in his interface, trying to get the digger’s AI to stop asserting its own opinions or something. We don’t really know.  We do know that he took the thing up to the surface of the rock they were mining for some kind of test spin.  He stayed tethered to the locator grid according to protocol but his blip went red about two hours later. They sent out search party for him and snapped him up pretty quick.”

“What was the issue?”

“No one knows,” she smiled, seeing the unsatisfied look on my face. “His rig was fine, just switched off, but Downey was, well, you and me would take one look at him and say,  ‘Diver.’ Back then nobody had ever seen one.  They thought he was injured at first.  Then they thought he was crazy. After they figured out he wasn’t, they got scared.”

“Of a Diver?” the idea of one of these ghostly, barely there, once-people could muster enough personality to scare someone made me smile. No chance. “What did he do, blink at them too hard?”

“He just talked, Phil,” she said, sipping. “He talked a lot.”

Again I was at a loss. Parvatti Reider-Glenn had barely managed to hiss out a single sentence; it seemed to have taken all she had to muster those few words. The idea of a Diver talking long enough, coherently enough to interest anybody was just weird.

“What the hell did he say?” I said.

“He told them about their lives,” she said. “He told them how long they would be, when and where they would die. He told them when the next solar storm was coming. He told them how much C-rust was eating the mining colony buildings. He told them how many hairs they had on their heads.”

“What,” I said, trying to process. “He was psychic? Like a carnival fortune teller.”

“He was a Diver, Phil,” she said. “Who do you think told us about Nadir?”

“He knew about this miserable rock?” I said. “How could he possibly have-“

“The Divers see, ” she said. “Nobody knows how but they see reality as it actually is and it does something to them. It changes their bodies, their minds, right down to the molecular.”

“And the Dive?”

“It’s how they stop. It’s the only way they can make it stop.”

“Why would they want to?”

“They see everything, Phil,” she said, sipping. “They know everything.  Can you imagine what that’s like? I can’t.”

“Yeah, but, they could have helped us,” I said, images of the war, of the dead and the dying, flooding me. “ They could have told us about the Mercanti. They could have stopped the war. They could have-“

Kirsh was shaking her head. For the first time the expression of vague amusement had left her face. She looked sad. She looked sad for me.

“That’s not how it would have been, Phil,” she said.  “You know what would have happened. Things would have been worse, much worse than anything the Mercanti War did to us. Think.”

So I did. I thought about knowing everything about everything and how it would change us, how the knowledge of every subtle movement, of every great moment, of every lie and every beautiful notion would have killed our species. It would have locked us in the Now.  Everything humanity had ever done or aspired to doing would have been crushed into perfect horrible stillness like a trillion flies in amber.

“So, the question isn’t, ‘Why would they want it to stop?’” said Kirsch, as understanding washed over me. “The question is, ‘Why wouldn’t they?’”

“All that,” I said as I gave up trying to fully process it. “All that just from thinking?”

“You’re acting like this is some big secret,” she said. “I promise you, it’s not.”

Of course it wasn’t.  I thought of Downey, the first Diver, and how he must have known even then that he was only the first and that each one coming after offered the same choice and the same doom. After he explained to them what the flood of more like him would do to all of us, the people listening must have thought of Nadir as a gift from heaven.

“But they go out there,” I said pointing out the porthole. We couldn’t see the darkside from where we sat, even if the winds hadn’t been hurricane high and the world wasn’t always night. We felt it though.  I did. “With nothing. They go out there.”

“You’re not listening,” she said. “You never listen.”

“I’m trying,” I said. “I really am. It’s just so crazy. It’s too big.”

“You know that old saying about reality being what we make it?” I did and said so. “Turns out it’s true.”

“Jesu,” I said. “Jesu Deus.”

“Yeah,” she said. “That too.”

A moment stretched out between us while my body argued with my mind about what to do next.

“I need to see her again,” I said eventually, coming down on it.

“Who, this Parvatti girl?”

“Yeah.”

“Didn’t you listen to what I said?” I told her I had. “But you still want to see her again.” I told her I did. “She’s not the girl you’re remembering, Phil. She’s a Diver now. Hell, she’s Diving.”

“Yeah,” I said. “But still.”

Bek was pretty understanding after that. After she was fully awake and caffeinated she put on her psych-ops hat and shrunk my head good. If she was going to help, she wanted to make damned sure I hadn’t gone buggy.

It stood to reason, didn’t it, that some Usher at some point would meet up with someone out of their past and that someone would be a Diver? Maybe it was a little weird that it happened so soon, after only eighty years of people taking the Dive, but math is math and odds get bent all the time.

“Look at the Breach technology,” she said. “Even the people who came up with it have a hard time understanding exactly how it works.”

I gave her that but what she was saying about the Divers, about the Dive, it was just too strange.

“You’ve seen the Mercanti, up close,” she said. “And you’re still here and you’re still sane. How strange is that?”

I shut up after that and so did Bek. She walked with me through the Psych division– corridors their lights at half to indicate Night Cycle– past the Processing arena with its empty sea of cubicles, all the way down to the tube car junction. There were no security locks on anything. There was nothing on Nadir worth stealing.

While Bek called a tube car in from wherever, I pulled an Usher suit from the emergency locker and buckled myself inside.

“I don’t know what you think you’re going to find out there,” she said as the tube car rumbled into the junction.

“Let you know when I get back,” I said. The look on her face told me she knew I was lying.

It took a lot less time than you’d think to find her. 

No one rides out to the darkside with the Divers when they go. From the meridian tube car junction on everything is automated.  This time, when the tube car passed the meridian, I didn’t get off,

The ride was smooth enough, not that the Divers would notice if it wasn’t. It came to a hissing stop about four hundred clicks in. The doors opened and I stepped out.

She was waiting there, right there at the exit, in that same plexi shroud, still wearing her breather. The others were too, if it came to that. They all just stood there in the same cluster they’d left as. Of course they did. Once they were on the darkside, there wasn’t any need to walk or move. The black hole began to eat them right away.

“You shouldn’t have come,” said Parvatti. “There’s nothing here for you.”

“I just need to know,” I said. “I just need to know why.”

“Your friend, Dr. Kirsch told you,” she said.

“Not that,” I said. “I don’t care about all that.”

“I know,” said Parvatti. Of course she knew. She knew everything. They all did. I could feel them suddenly all looking at me, looking into me, even the ones whose heads were turned away. They knew. “You want to ask, after all I survived, after you saved my life on Isis, why I would come here to die.”

“Yeah,” I said and I could feel my heart racing, my skin wet with sweat. It was some kind of fight-or-flight response but I was doing neither.

“You want to ask that but it isn’t what you want to know,” she moved close to me, speaking in a tone that was both hollow and, somehow, comforting.

I wondered if she really felt the compassion she conveyed or simply knew what sequence of sounds I needed to hear to accept that she felt it. I wondered if it mattered.

“I want to know why,” I said again, feeling the sentence wasn’t finished somehow yet not knowing what could cap it off.

“We’re not alive anymore,” she said. “Not the way you know Life. We’re part of the cosmos. We’re part of Nadir. We’re part of all of Jupiter’s moons and the microbes living in your intestines. We’re part of everything.”

“You’re going to die out here.”

“Yes,” she said and almost managed a smile. “Soon. Nadir’s sun will break us down like rust eating a battleship. We will falter and then we will die.”

“You want that,” I said, swiveling my helmet to get a look at as many of their faces as I could. “You all want that.”

“Right before the end,” she said. “Right before our minds go dark we will be what we were before. All the connections will be broken and we will be what we were meant to be.”

“Why,” I said again. I sounded like a child to myself, a toddler who first discovered the question and couldn’t put it down until it was used up, never knowing it never would be. “Why did you thank me? At processing. You said, ‘thank you, Captain Go.’”

“Because you saved my life.”

“What I did on Isis was my job,” I said.

“I wasn’t talking about Isis.”

So, that’s it. That was two months ago. Parvatti Reider-Glenn and all the others are gone now, rusted away by our black sun until they were nothing more than the flickery mica confetti that swirls around Nadir. I can’t say I miss her. I never knew her.

I put in my transfer files after that. I asked Kirsch to do the same and, strangely, she agreed. There really wasn’t much call for a shrink on Nadir. Everyone there knows exactly what they’re about and why. Her job was to sort that out for those who don’t.

“Ah, hell,” she said. “You were my best patient and you only showed up the one time.”

I wasn’t looking forward to the months in cold sleep that would take us back to the Core, her to her family and me to, well, I didn’t know.

Parvatti pops up in my mind from time to time, unbidden, of course. She probably always will. I think of her just sitting there with the others, basking in the empty light of Nadir’s black sun. I think of what all they knew and how much they knew they shouldn’t.  I think of her in that last moment she spoke of, when enough of her had been eaten away to let what was left live again, however briefly.  I think about her face as the weight of all of our lives was finally lifted from her.

I like to think she was smiling.

~ fini ~