Gamut Magazine
Issue #5

The Unravelling

By: Sheila Massie

Do not leave.

The words, translated as best we could, were inscribed on the alien artifact dangling from a delicate silver chain around my neck.

I knelt beside a row of carrots in Garden Habitat One, running my fingers through the fronds. The feathered greenery was tipped with silver, almost metallic in appearance. Glancing around, I could see splashes of silver everywhere in the garden—silver splattered on leaves, streaked across apples and pears hanging from trees, adorning the lettuces, the beans, the pea pods.

We were further away from Earth than any human had ever been. A cold fear crept down my spine.

I glanced up at the canopy of lighting and watering systems which arched overhead. The growing lights were darkened now. A misted rain fell. Between the weavings of the life-support, the stars were sprinkled like spilled salt across the cold blackness of space, turning slowly. The Earth had long since faded from view. We were almost among the strange stars now, just at the outer reaches of the solar system, on the long journey to Alpha Centauri.

It wasn’t only the plants that had new growths of silver on them, only hours old. I examined the palm of my hand. In the dim light of the alien stars, my skin glimmered with veins of silver as well. There was no pain, and as I traced my fingertips along the veining, I could not discern any change in the texture of my skin.

I stood, and my fingers reached for the charm I wore on the chain around my neck, a habit of decades. The charm was a round, flat wafer the size and color of an ancient coin, worn smooth and thinner at the edges, the remnants of a tiny messenger ship from Alpha Centauri. It had been thicker once, and pock-marked with pinprick divots—it had thrummed with alien energy. It was dead now, its message delivered.

Do not leave your planet.

Lien’s voice broke the silence. “Commander.”

I startled in surprise. She stood stiff and immobile at my shoulder, hands clasped tightly together in front of her, knuckles strained and white, as though to contain her trembling. I reached a hand toward her, then stopped. I thought she might break apart if I touched her.

“Is Vogel doing any better?” I asked, though I suspected the answer already.

Lien shook her head, “It has progressed to her limbs and her face now.”

“We’ve heard nothing from Earth?” I asked. It was too soon. I knew it was too soon. We were only at the edges of the solar system, a ship within sight of land, and yet still so very far from home.

Lien shook her head emphatically, “Not yet.”

I raised my shirt to expose my floating ribs, where my skin had silvered and was peeling away in threads. Lien pulled up her sleeve to reveal the same happening to her.

“All of us?”

“Apparently so,” Lien said, rolling her sleeve down and settling its cuff against her wrist. “Everyone is gathering in the Lounge.”

I nodded in acknowledgement and turned away from her. As I hurried through the garden, desperately questioning old assumptions made a decade ago when I accepted this assignment, I tapped my cheekbones with my fingertips, fighting down a rising panic.

The Lounge was filled to capacity, crowded with crew and passengers. Silver gleamed like twinkling starlight throughout the cavernous room, shining from every exposed skin surface. The panic in the air was palpable, barely constrained. I paused at the threshold, touching a finger again to the alien hardware that hung around my neck. I stalled, frozen with fear, gulping down a few hard breaths. Gradually, those in the room realized that I was there on the landing at the entrance. They turned to me. I put my hands on the railing to steady their trembling.

“Are we under attack, Commander?” someone shouted from the sea of bodies glinting silver, the voice strident with agitation, with terror.

“They told us not to leave,” someone else called out.

“If we turn back now, will they accept our surrender?”

The message from Alpha Centauri was assumed to be a threat. What else could it be? We had bristled at the thought of an alien species denying us travel to the stars. The stars beckoned, and we knew now with certainty there was intelligent life out there. We would go and meet it. I would.

I spent a decade, after the message came, learning diplomacy and military strategy as twin shields against whatever spear they might bring against us. I was the only one on board who knew the entirety of the message. And thus, the only one who might have anticipated what was now happening.

A scream pierced the chaos. A shred of silvered flesh detached itself from someone and floated upward, undulating in the air currents of the room, like a fish swimming against the current. I tried to breathe, but my lungs felt imprisoned. I coughed violently.

I turned to Lien and said, urgently, naming the ship’s Navigators, “Find me Ojo, Matheson, and Abril. We must return to Earth.”

My face began to itch. I tore at my cheek. My hand came away with strands sparkling like waterfalls through my fingers. I shook them off and they hovered near me, haloing my temples.

It wasn’t until I was accepted as Commander for the mission that the rest of the Alpha Centauri message was revealed to me. After I was told, I was given permission to abandon the mission, without repercussions to my distinguished career.

Vogel gasped. We all turned to look at her. She was the first to have symptoms and the least recognizable now. She gleamed argent along all of the planes of her body and she shone at cheekbone and temple and collarbone. Long, silvered strands floated around her, swirling and dancing, rotating and twisting, as though she were the center of a spiral galaxy. Flecks of blood sprayed out like escaping stars, silvered, returned.

The second part of the message had been so incomprehensible I could do nothing but dismiss it as nonsense. It had to have been an error of translation. I set my path on that belief, and the path of my crew, and all the passengers under my protection.

The threads were moving away from Vogel now, coalescing into a tangled mass, like seaweed set free of its seafloor mooring. There was nothing of her left as her ribs peeled away and her heart unravelled. The tangle of glimmering threads floated towards the viewing pane where we had gathered, such a short time ago, to watch Earth disappearing behind us. It pressed up against the transparency, then pushed through, out into space.

I realized then that the message was not an error of translation. Nor was it a threat. It was a warning. A warning made with compassion and hope.

We were all unravelling rapidly now, as though longing to follow Vogel. I tugged at a thread which wound around my forearm, wincing as skin and flesh and muscle helixed away. My fingers dissolved into a starburst of bone fragments.

Do not leave. Do not leave your planet. [Pronoun] will never let you abandon [exit? depart? withdraw?] [pronoun] for the stars. Our planet is the same.

The last of the threads peeled away from my core in a ripple of silver. My consciousness was disassembled, unwound, disconnected and…then…reconnected, brought together, made whole. My silver threads followed the others through the skin of the ship, out into space, returning home, to Earth.

Sheila Massie is a speculative fiction writer of mostly fantasy and horror, favoring both dark and hopeful (though not always in the same story). She holds a 4th degree black belt in TaeKwon-Do and, when away from her writing desk, trains empowerment self-defense instructors internationally. She enjoys a good sipping tequila, can’t live a day without cheese or tea, and doesn’t like mornings. She lives with her husband and her brat of a Miniature Rottweiler in Victoria, BC, Canada.

error: Content is protected !!