Don’t lie.
“I know.”
We will know.
Evans scratched at his ear. The disembodied voice echoing through the empty chamber wasn’t loud, but it was close. Like someone talking at regular volume, but directly beside him. It made the hairs on the back of his neck stand stiff with a primal kind of fear. He was being watched, and of course they would know if he was lying. That was the point of this.
“I won’t,” he said.
Your name and rank?
“Lucar Evans Parker, Second-in-Command of DSV-1861.”
Thank you. Your age?
“Thirty-seven.”
Your actual age.
Evans sighed.
“I’ve lost count. Best estimate is 6,200.”
You’re close. 6,245. You like long voyages?
“Sometimes. They have longer leaves.”
Do you prefer leave to voyaging?
“Yes.”
Why?
“They’re a nice break. Who doesn’t prefer them?”
Now is not the time to ask questions.
“Sorry.”
Are you ready to proceed?
“No. But I will.”
Why?
“What are you asking?”
This is your examination. Now is not the time to ask questions. Why aren’t you ready?
“Because I’m not lying.”
Evans was happy to hear and feel the silence his reply caused. He wondered how many people before him had tried to lie about being ready, as if anyone was really ready for this. Maybe they expected some falsehood, despite the surety in the warning. Bravado was a trait to be valued in a Lucanor. But honesty, or maybe it was sincerity, was valued more. This was supposed to be test of that. that’s what they said, anyway. That was what Evans was here to test.
When will you be ready?
“I won’t be.”
Why?
“Who could be ready for this? Evans smiled. “Has anyone actually been ready?”
Now is not the time to ask us questions. It is your evaluation.
“Shouldn’t it begin, then?”
Now is not the time to ask questions. Are you ready?
“No.”
Then we cannot begin.
“We will begin if I am ready or not. I’m not going to be ready for everything I face as a Lucanor.”
Do you think you will pass?
“Yes.”
Even if you aren’t ready?
“Yes.”
What makes you think that?
“We’ll call it confidence. I’m prepared, even if I’m not ready.”
Those words are similar enough.
“Sure.” Evans chuckled. “I’m glad you appreciate technicality. Are you ready?”
This is your evaluation. Now is not the time to ask questions.
“I know.”
You may proceed.
“Thank you.”
Evans stretched his shoulders and walked up from the narrow entrance hall to a set of metal stairs. His footsteps echoed around the currently empty chamber. Dim lights in the corners alerted him to chamber’s sheer size. The amount of resources the DSS put into the test still staggered him. He hadn’t lied to them. He wasn’t ready. All the reading and the training. The thousand-year flights and the time distillations. They were supposed to prepare you for something like this, if you had the drive to make it this far. The problem was nobody except the Lucanors knew quite how far this was. Nobody mentioned what happened if you failed the test, but Evans hadn’t met anyone who had.
We’ll begin shortly. Center your mind.
“At once.”
He closed his eyes. His breathing slowed. In the stillness of the chamber, the only thing he could hear now was his heartbeat. The space between the beats was getting faster. There was anxiety, sure, and a healthy kind of excited anticipation. At least he had really made it this far. That means they at least thought he had a chance of passing. He knew some of those thoughts and feelings interrupted what was supposed to be a clearing mental exercise, and tried to dispel them. But his heart beat all the faster when he detected the increasing light around him.
It was a warm light, almost akin to some planets’ suns. The heat felt familiar, carried on a breeze he realized had blown up around him. On the breeze came smells he’d thought he’d long forgotten. Summer grasses he’d found nowhere else. Flowers that bloomed for only a single week on his home planet’s year. Water, warmed by the sun and detectable only to those who’d grown up around it. it almost felt relaxing.
That was, until Evans remembered the nature of the Lucanor exams. This was not supposed to be a relaxing experience, as much as every part of his bodied cried out in the comfort of nostalgic familiarity. What betrayed him, again, was his heart. It had gone from beating rapidly in his chest to beating rapidly in his throat. It made it hard to answer when the voice swept over him again.
This is it?
It almost sounded incredulous. Evans had to stop himself from laughing.
“I think so.”
Your eyes are still closed.
“They are. But I know where I am.”
Where?
“My family’s gardens back on Aradan. If I can guess, I would say it was a summer almost six-thousand years ago.” He opened his eyes. “I remember that summer.”
This is it?
Evans opened his eyes.
“This is it.”
He looked down from the top of a small hill at a shimmering pond. Flowers and tall grass swayed around his feet and poked up around rocks and boulders lining a path down to the banks. A tall tree covered in dark leaves stretched its branches out across the water. Its leaves rustled with the grasses in the gentle breeze that carried all the familiar scents Evans recognized before he matched them with the sights surrounding him. he breathed deep, and fixed his eyes ahead of him. He knew that if he turned around, he could see his old house, maybe his parents sitting on the porch or his sister beginning her walk to announce dinner’s expected time. But the sight before him held him fixed, and that was the purpose of the evaluation.
A small boat drifted lazily on the pond’s waters, its oars raised up and away to let its travel be free. Two figures reclined in the middle between the oars, looking up at the sky. Their voices only just carried on the breeze, marked by the excited intonations of genuine conversation and laughter too gentle to be forced. Their words, Evans was annoyed to find, were muted by the gradual erosion of even his own memory. But their shapes were sharp, and clean.
We warned you not to lie to us.
“I’m not,” Evans said.
You’re telling us this is it?
“Yes.”
But it looks so peaceful.
“It was.” Ernest swallowed. “I think the fact that it was is the key to understanding why this is really it.”
I don’t follow.
“Then you should follow. Let’s get a better look.”
Evans walked down the path lined with stones towards the shores of the lake. He noted, with some surprise, the way the long strands of grass genuinely tickled against his trouser leg. The warmth of the sun was as real as he could remember it, as was the feeling of the breeze. One could lose themselves in a feeling like this, and therein was part of the danger in the Lucanor examination. It was as easy to get lost on a voyage as it was in one’s own mind. He wondered whether the test was actually safer than what it would allow him to do if he passed. When he passed.
The way the small stone he kicked splashed into the water when he reached the pond’s shore was striking in its realism. He watched the ripples play out across the water and disappear when they met the boat’s frame. The two figures in the boat seemed not to notice it. They were too engrossed in each other, invested in whatever muted conversation Evans could hear but not understand.
A young you.
“Correct.”
The other?
Evans turned from his younger self to look at the woman sitting across from him. She relaxed against the bow of the small boat, one pale, ring-covered hand resting lazily in the water. Her eyes, a warm brown, slipped shut with another gentle laugh. Her short, curly brown hair danced when she shook her head in delayed disapproval in whatever joke the young Evans had told her. There was that smile that had been so familiar to him the times he’d been able to coax it from her. He hadn’t been lying. Evans was not ready for this.
Who is that?
“Raven Omysies, at the time the heir to the throne of Omysies Bretta. We met while part of their family was touring our system. They used Aradan as their recovery before voyaging back.”
And this is it?
“It is. It was a wonderful summer, it really was. Omysies Bretta is mainly a desert planet, you see. They chose Aradan as their getaway because we had so much water. That was what this was. She was almost a thousand by the time we met, even if we were both really just in our twenties. But it was her first time on a boat. A small pond like this was as vast as the sea to her.” Evans sighed. “So were our thoughts on the future, at the time.”
There’s the pain?
“There’s some of it. I was the second child of the ruling family of Aradan. What opportunities did I really have? But my sister was never a great socializer, so it was up to me the host. It was, as I said, wonderful.”
Evans sat on the banks of the pond and watched the boat twist lazily in the breeze. He rubbed his hands together. There was even the approaching chill of night. That was a nice touch. He sighed.
What are you feeling?
“Sad,” he said. “You ever feel so happy you feel sad about it, because you know you’re going to want to feel that way for the rest of your life? That’s what this was.”
Interesting. Why?
“Why?” Evans threw up his hands. “Because she’d already voyaged. She knew what it felt like. Do you know how much something like that messes with you? A thousand years rolled into one minute experience, knowing when you wake up the worlds and the lives you’ve known won’t exist, but you and everyone else on your ship will? For all she knew Omysies Bretta wouldn’t even exist by the time she returned to it. whoever thought of sending man into space never considered, never really considered, the emptiness in it. It’s a void for a reason, you know.”
So why did you join the DSS?
“Because she was going to do it again. So, why shouldn’t I?”
What do you mean?
“She was going to go back to Omysies Bretta at some point, with the rest of her court. By the time she got there, I would be dead. My planet would be dead, inasmuch as it would no longer be my planet. There’s a feeling you get, on the yearlong leave they give you between voyages, of understanding that. Why do you think DSS crews stay together so long, why it’s so rare to change ships? There’s no other way to handle being alone, except by being alone together.”
But you’ve served on a different ship on each of your voyages.
“Of course I have. By the time I signed up, I was already alone. Nothing was going to comfort that.”
Have you visited Omysies Bretta on any of your leaves?
“No.”
Do you know what became of her?
“No.” Evans groaned. “What kinds of questions are these? Even if I did, unless I left on a ship the very next day, a hundred or so years would have passed before I arrived. She’d have had a life without me. It doesn’t matter. I’ve had one without her now.”
So why is this it?
“Why?”
Why?
Evans leaned back on the soft grass. He smelled the gentle aroma of it and the flowers beneath it crushed under his stiff, new uniform. The clouds drifted overhead, turning all the colors of home he missed as the sun he knew he’d never feel again touched down on the hills he’d never hike in again. there, he knew, was the answer to the questions they were looking for. He couldn’t lie to them, of course. He was surprised to have made it this far.
Evans closed his eyes, and shrugged.
“Because this isn’t anything.” He felt the grass under him transition to the cold metal floor of the chamber so slowly that it was barely uncomfortable. “It was never anything.”
What?
“That day, this memory, it never happened. I wish it had. She was going to leave, to voyage back, but there was time, still, to take her out on the pond like she’d been asking all summer. It was the one thing she wanted to do, and I don’t know why we never got around to it. I was going to ask her, and then… time got away from me.”
H-how…
Evans smiled when he heard some affect slip into the voice.
“How was I able to see it so clearly you could project it? Remember it?”
Yes.
“Because it’s a dream I wish I still had.” Evans opened his eyes, and found his arm reaching up for the dimly lit dome where only minutes ago there had been the clouds of Aradan. “At this point, I don’t think I even remember her or feel the way I did. But I love my dreams of what might have been because they were the last dreams I had about what might have been. I signed up for the DSS the week after she left, and then the voyages began. You lose some sense of meaning watching the entire universe slip by every single time you blink. If I ever think I wanted to feel something again, I just have to remember that I had dreams like that once. They’re more real than reality now. It’s not a lie, and that’s why it took you so long, but it’s not reality. It’s something a little bit more. How many Lucanors still have hope for what they do?”
Now is not the time to ask questions.
“I’m happy your programming’s still function,” Evans said through a chuckle. “These are things I wouldn’t expect you to understand.”
He rose from the floor and stretched. The small groan and the cracking of his shoulders echoed through the empty chamber. His eyes adjusted to the dim light. He saw the cameras that would have been watching him, followed their wires down the stairs he climbed to get to the center. Evans started towards them.
Where are you going?
“Out.” He shrugged. “I was really curious if I would be able to that to you.”
You can’t lie.
“I didn’t. I told you that already.”
But it wasn’t true.
“True enough you couldn’t tell the difference.” He spread his arms wide and stopped at the top of the stairs. “And you were actually able to make it real. Now you’ll never know, except that I’ve told you. But can you trust me anymore?”
Now is not the time to ask questions.
“Yeah, you’re right about that.” Evans paused, his foot on the next step down. “I’ve asked enough already. Be interested to see my results though. I meant what I asked: When was the last time you’ve met a Lucanor who still has hope about any of this? Space is a void for a reason. Whatever mission you think you need a new one for had better be damn important. There’s hundreds of them, and you came to me. Now you know I don’t need to tell the truth not to lie. And I still have hope. What do you think about that?”
Now is not the time to ask questions.
Evans smiled.
“Then, when?”