可怜的小Daniel Collins。无人在凝望我。
I
在第一天，他哭了，因为此时他是真正的孤身一人。
他的引路星降临在他身上，给了他最渴望的东西：感知和接纳。现在，他蜷缩在冰冷的月面上，泪痕凝固在脸颊上。他躺在地上瑟瑟发抖，人格的残余就像白沙一样覆在他毫无血色的肉体上。在他睁开双眼之前，地球已经完成了升落。
在第二天，他站起了身。
这个动作不费吹灰之力，因为他正处于失重状态。他远眺绵延不绝的地平线，在漆黑的天空下，环形山连绵起伏、一望无际。数十亿星辰像闪烁的白金，但他的眼中只有——那个遥远的蓝绿色球体。他凝视片刻，想到无数的人在下面徘徊，对真实一无所知。他觉得自己就像一只高居在林冠的动物，看着蚂蚁在林地上行进。如果它们知道天空的广阔就好了。
他戳了戳躯干，但没有感觉到疼痛，也没有撕裂的迹象。虽然他不记得自己被劫持的确切时间——刺眼的光线、可怕的声音，还是发生在大学里的什么？但他知道那比他想象的还要痛苦。现在，他的身体恢复了，步伐显得轻松起来。他选择忽略肋骨下的细微起伏，忽略延展的腹部，忽略被抬高的感觉，忽略迈步时身体拱起和吐息的方式。这些东西很难面对，在他的胃里留下了不安的重量。
他沉思片刻后，选择了一个方向走去。
在地势崎岖的地方，他手脚并用，小心翼翼地攀爬，以免失去对上升势能的控制。在倾斜向下的地方，比如火山口或类似的地形，他就让重力承载自己的重量，以滑动代替行走，双臂呈扇形张开，让沙石如瀑流下。当他厌倦了行走，就会轻轻地跪下，趴着用手指捋过细软的白沙。接着是如醉如痴地空想，任由沙粒冲刷他过去的记忆。
所有家乡的人们，他想， 如果他们现在能看到我就好了。
他从未感到疲倦；其实不然，因为当他的呼吸变得稀薄时，他只需记住他没有呼吸，亦没有脉搏。他已经死了，这对于一片死地来说再合适不过。在这样的时刻，对自己未死之身的意识会让他充满想象力和无限的喜悦，他甚至会猛地冲出去——或者说在低重力下尽可能地冲出去——向山上冲去。他几乎像在嬉戏着，匆忙地爬上最大的岩石。在登上岩壁后，他朝着虚空尖叫，像一个战胜了死亡的人那样狂笑。心满意足之后，他会把自己扔向地面，在缓缓下降后毫发无伤。在这样的时刻，他感到无比幸福。
有时，他的未死之身并不会带来笑声，也没有微笑，甚至连最微小的满足感也没有。他会将身子蜷缩成一团，埋下脸颊，挤出冰冷的泪水，直到在伪装的疲惫中沉睡过去。醒来后，周而复始。
除了偶尔起伏的高地，这片景色几乎毫无特色。荒凉得令人麻木，刺骨的寒冷让人难以置信。他一生都在研究这个地方；这就是他的一生，而现在他就在这里——空间与皮肤之间毫无隔阂，他感受到赤脚踏在白沙上的触感，向着无空气的天空呼出虚无。他想知道徒步绕行月球一周需要多长时间。随后他意识到，即便他真的做到了，他也永远无法知晓答案。
然后，那种感觉开始蔓延。一种渐进且无可避免的感觉，未知逐渐失去控制，可预测性逐渐消失，填补了间隙。须臾之间，白色的山丘恢复了原状——无尽的单色。
他强迫自己去感受饥饿，因为连饥饿感也离他而去。他弯下腰，尝了一口白沙，用牙齿磨碎了尘沙，但这既没有让他感到痛苦，也没有感到愉悦。味觉完全不存在。
我现在该怎么办？他咆哮着——当然是在脑海中，他的声带无法发出声音。他向天空呼喊，向上帝呼喊，向他的母亲呼喊，向月亮呼喊。祈求着一个迹象，一条信息。
他坐了下来，但双腿并没有感到轻松，因为他从未感到过疼痛。即使月亮陷入黑夜，睡意也没有降临。
II
第三天他听到了声音。
It swept low across the lunar dunes from beyond the higher peaks, wavelike. When he closed his eyes he thought he could see it like a vibration in his mind’s eye. It sounded just like a woman singing—almost perfectly. That sound, he had heard it once before, on that dusk walk, when he first felt the lunar eye on his back, when he first communed with his lunar guardian. The voice, which had eluded him even in his dreams, even when she loomed above him, ready to pluck him from his life and grant him higher sight. Even then she was silent. But now…
He climbed to one knee from his sandy bed, then stood. The sound ebbed and flowed, tracing the contours of the land exactly, as if it had shaped it. He followed it, a puppet pulled by strings. The voice led him far, farther than he had traveled the day before. Up and up he climbed. Through lava valleys and ancient pockets, depressions in the lifeless surface never graced by conscious sight. Reaching the zenith of a peak, he lost his footing. Slipping on the loose rock, he stumbled and fell, rolling headfirst into a primordial abyss. The descent was slow but final. At the bottom of the deep pit he looked up. The walls were sheer rock, impossible to climb. It was dark, too. So dark he had to feel his way around on his knees. That voice still trailed, elusively, one step ahead.
Trapped, he decided his best course was to follow it. The rational side of his brain, for the last time, gave way to his aching heart. That voice would lead him out of here, to something more. It would show him his purpose.
Feeling through the dark, he felt good. The sound itself was more than enough to keep his wandering mind occupied. It was tenfold more interesting than the lunar terrain, and even down here in the dark it kept him thinking, anticipating his encounter with the source.
Then it halted.
The wall came out of the dark, fast; the dead end of the cave. He did not know it was there until his momentum halted—he could not feel the pain of its impact. He explored in the dark, felt the panic rise like bile in his throat. That sound was gone—almost, as if it had been intensely muted by the cave. If he concentrated, he could feel it riding on the edges of his senses. Pressing an ear to the cave wall, he listened, praying for the voice to return. Indeed it did, but from somewhere deeper, muddied by thousands of meters of rock and frozen lava. He began to dig, for there was nothing else to do. He scratched the cave wall until the nail was worn to a stump, yet he persisted.
He lost a sense of time there, for it was impossible to measure change in the land of darkness. That voice, ever far away. The cave, impenetrable. Then something gave. A shifting of stone deep underground, a pocket of air, bubbling. Something nigh imperceptible caused an avalanche of matter until—
The wall was gone, crumbled; the cave stretched on, deeper, taking on a new shade of blackness. The voice returned in full strength. A bright roar now, it called him forward, that effervescent tongue beckoned him, pleading him on with gentle words.
If there had ever been doubt about the nature of this message, it was extinguished upon entering the lunar depths. Down here the air was moist, dampened somehow by forces beyond scientific comprehension. He had long left the world of reason, but even this was confounding. Was he approaching the lunar core? Some change in atmosphere hitherto undiscovered by modern science? And then the wonder was back, the bleak nature of his lifeless condition suppressed by a boundless joy, the joy of discovery. His joy, his wisdom.
The voice seemed to share in his excitement, sewing new words into its lullaby. Pressing him onward. He now walked faster than it could pull him, and he seemed to move a beat ahead of its tempo, gaining on the source.
Around him, the cave shifted. The lunar rocks turned from bloodless white to something else, impossible to notice by sight in this darkness but perceptible nonetheless. He ran a hand across the cave wall and felt smoothness where before it had been rough. The texture felt almost like glass, bending and warping into something unlike anything in the known solar system. Had this been another undiscovered feature of the lunar core? Or was this something else?
The cave walls melted and reformed like the song that led him forward into unknown depths. That was the only certainty; that he had been travelling down. He felt it in his inner ear like a diver, the pressure of space and rock pressing him down, grinding him into bone meal.
The voice pitched up, a sweet loop, then settled low again. He felt his heart flutter. He was in love! This was what had spoken to him all those years ago, this was his guardian. The essence of the moon, distilled sanctity, peace, and love. Love most of all, for that was what his dead cells craved most in this instance. In a loveless, lifeless place, love was all he needed.
Just another step.
One more curve around a bend, one more stumble in the dark.
Another change in his surroundings. He knew not when it happened, the switch in his orientation, but he felt with every step forward the gradual release of that pressure, felt the legions of stone loosen their hold on him. He realized he was moving up, passed the threshold, and now was rising.
Rising like the tide. An inevitable force. As the moon was destined to wane and wax, he was destined to reach the voice, to meet his lover.
He walked. Through the dark, through his echoing breath. Hand grazing the silt and the mud he marched onward, up, that sound dangling ahead of him. Sight blessed by light, dancing thinly through the waves of the voice, through stringy vines dangling from the cave ceiling. New textures under his feet—soft, mushy, things that hissed and squeezed between his toes. When he emerged from the cave he was someplace else.
His senses took it for Earth at first. His ears imagined birdsong, his eyes distant lake-filled mountains and frosted peaks. Rabbits and deer like those that lived back home, playing in the fields.
He was wrong.
This was not Earth. This was not a place built for creatures of reason, logic, cause and effect. Water. Trees. Wrong! His mind objected. Lakes. Mountains. Wrong. Deer. Wrong. Wrong wrong wrong—
And yet the voice lingered. Taunted him forward. Giggling in some secret joke.
My love! he thought.
And so he walked, trailblazed the flat expanse.
Nothing sat right in his mind. On either side, the liquid was iridescent, glittering patterns of pink-purple madness. Things shifted and moved beneath, straining with ill-formed eyes to watch him walk past. The mountains were not distant—far closer, and twisted, they formed impossible angles of red stone. The sky was blue—wrong, yellow, a toxic choking sight that stole his absent breath. He bent over, hurling his guts, feeling the texture of the red dirt. It felt like broken glass, splintering his skin and shredding his nails.
Teary-eyed, he reared his head and searched the sky for a sign. It was mulling, endless radioactive clouds, spilling to infinity. Nothing broke that barren horizon save for the tall, arching, yawning black shapes that stepped like cats over the impossible rocks.
He was far from home. Nowhere could something like this exist. A barren place, yet so dreadfully familiar.
His love was close. He could feel it, as real as the saffron-colored rain on his skin. He let his pace quicken, convinced that this place was some kind of illusion, a madness-induced symptom of undeath. His love would set this straight, dispel the mystery and make things right. She had selected him. Him! Of all the pleading, praying, groveling humans she had been forced to endure, it was he who she plucked, sewed up, and set on his present course. It was not—could not—be for nothing.
Her song led him far, sent him trudging through sludge seas, beneath looping cliff faces. He hid from the gaze of those arching things, ever so human yet intrinsically, inexplicably foreign—a sight not meant for human eyes.
He walked until it lost its meaning. The landscape never softened, never varied beyond its innate harshness. This planet willed him to die, but he could not.
Is this my test? To thin the wheat from the chaff? he thought. That song, that looping, dancing, beautifying song!
III
The structure before him seemed to sprout from the very soil, as if grown from a seed. Situated in the crux of a bowl-shaped formation, surrounded on all edges by perforated red rock drizzling streams of iridescent antimaterial sludge. It was unmistakable, even in the heavy yellow mist. He spent the fourth grade in a similar building, its mass-produced design just small and light enough to be set up anywhere a modular classroom was needed. Atop it loomed a tall black radio mast, its flashing red eye piercing the air. Her voice was loud and clear. Her song was elevating, a trilling mass of harmonies spreading out and forever, from here.
From here! he thought. Her voice? Could it be here?
The door was ajar, so he let himself in, stooping low to fit his frame inside.
The interior was in disarray; desks and computers toppled, bunks fitted with raggy, torn sheets. Cans of food split open and trashed, their rotting contents caking the floor. He pressed himself inside. At the far end, sitting at an arrangement of electronics before a spanning, dirty window, was a skeleton. Its bones were warped as if bent by heat, but not broken. The flesh had sloughed into a wet pile around the skeleton’s swivel chair. A pair of headphones were affixed to the skull; upon investigation, he realized they were fused to the bone.
The electronics appeared functional—an assortment of dials, tubes, screens, and a microphone—so he flipped a red switch and turned it on. The thing made a grinding noise, then produced a low tone punctuated by human whistling from speakers unseen. He jumped back, startled, then settled. All around him were papers of a multitude of colors. He reached into a pile of coffee-stained documents. They were covered in incomprehensible jargon, a littering of names, codes, places. Phrases of antiquity, they hurt his eyes to read. But something compelled him:
We catch glimpses of the other between blinks. We see the world as its inverse. Mailumar, the moon and the planet as one. Its body is foreign. Its rocks are strange and hostile to the eye. They twist and mock the senses, the colors off-putting.
This is wrong! It’s not her words! Where is she, where is she? He clamped his eyes shut, yet the words lingered.
Its dust holds no remembrance of the suffering of man. Its water is poison, thick and oily. Its life is vile. Strange fish and stranger things tall and arching. Yet in it we see what was, is, and is yet to be.
The pain was intense, a burning behind his eyes. He tried to shut it out, to remember the voice of his lover, his guardian, she who had brought him so far, had made him something more than human. But the words buried themselves deep, burning a hole in his memory.
We see our future. We see all possibilities. Today's broadcast is dedicated to the other, Mailumar. We send our ambassadors to confer with what is not and never could be. We hope the other gives us audience.
The words were no longer coming from the page but from the speakers around the room. A woman spoke in steady, droning syllables. Chanting rhythm, filling the gaps in all things. He was on the floor now, curled into a ball, crying tears into nothingness, his hands clamping his ears so tightly they bled pale blood. That voice, his lover’s.
He screamed. Pure, refined terror.
"Stop," he said, when he could not keep the words inside any longer. "Stop stop stop stop stop! Please, please, you're killing me."
The other waits patient for our time. We give thanks to the planet Mailumar. Keep her close so we may hear her whispers. We pray our bodies may one day be ready for the voyage. Blessings to the ambassadors. Let them return triumphant and in good spirits. Humanity will evolve like it always must. Let it be painless. Prepare, and—
Then it was gone. The electronics buzzed a low hum. The woman was silent in all but her slow, steady breathing on the other end.
His mind was racing, but before he could move she spoke:
Daniel Harriet Collins.
Brave, lonely
Daniel
Collins.
Is
that
you?
He tried to rise but his strength had been sapped as if drunken by a cosmic mouth. Was this her? If so, why did her words hurt? Her intonation, her phrasing. It was all like the voice he had been following, yet here there was more. Another layer of meaning that his mind wrestled to understand.
My ambassador.
My envoy.
Oh, how I’ve longed for you.
Then she froze, shifting her tone imperceptibly. He felt a shiver run through his body. The channel had been turned.
I must apologize
for the deception.
But I have need of you.
She chose you
for one reason or another.
And for that she is part of you
as is this place.
The channel changed again, and the voice was now morose.
我很遗憾地通知你
你的星球，
Mailumar
已经不复存在。
逃遁，
或者更糟，
像他们所有人一样。
雨要来了，
你看，
她也害怕了。
我们都恐惧着，
Daniel Collins。
他的头脑一片空白，完全被催眠了。知觉脱离了他的感官。他呆滞地瘫倒在地板上，在那遥远的失落之地，传来了一位真正的导师的声音。
害怕什么呢，
可怜的
Daniel
Collins？
嗯。
你
将
看见。
七天、七首诗、七位午夜徘徊者的力量在他眼前一闪而过。他死去而后重生。他窥见了一角。霎眼间，便消失了。
