Kazinski is a miserable specimen. Nauseous, dizzy, she can barely stand. Her brain failed to learn a very simple fact early on, and now she is utterly fucked from the lack of it. Kazinski, quite literally, does not know which way is up.
"Let's start again", I tell her, as if this time it might help.
"Just send me back, I'll tell you anything you like, just send me back up the well". It occurs to me that this might possibly be a kind of torture. Not by any of the human rights conventions, but awful all the same. I remember footage of jellyfish pulsing in frantic confusion. Clots of them, flickering feeble lunatic strobes. Hunting for even a rudimentary sense of direction. Eventually they stopped bringing them down. Now they're everywhere up there you can find water, just like Kazinski's kin. If you believe her.
"Your clan, your tribe, whatever they call themselves these days, where are they?"
"I've told you", she heaves out with foetid breath. "They're in the walls, in the tanks. The tubes. You put us up there. Every big crew, all of the stations. All of it. The cult's in all of it."
She starts hacking up a laugh, as if she's made some kind of evil joke. I don't even understand the language. Half of it is metaphor, it's arcane references and bad poetry. The other half is horrifying if it isn't.
"You put us in basements, you buried us with the machines, and then you put us up there."
They can't be everywhere. They can't be in every one of the two thousand or more man-made bodies in orbit.
Kazinski vomits again. She smiles shakily up at me afterwards. Her teeth are grey, her skin wrinkled before its time. She looks like death.
"We own it all now".
"Let's start again", I tell her, as if this time it might help.
"Just send me back, I'll tell you anything you like, just send me back up the well". It occurs to me that this might possibly be a kind of torture. Not by any of the human rights conventions, but awful all the same. I remember footage of jellyfish pulsing in frantic confusion. Clots of them, flickering feeble lunatic strobes. Hunting for even a rudimentary sense of direction. Eventually they stopped bringing them down. Now they're everywhere up there you can find water, just like Kazinski's kin. If you believe her.
"Your clan, your tribe, whatever they call themselves these days, where are they?"
"I've told you", she heaves out with foetid breath. "They're in the walls, in the tanks. The tubes. You put us up there. Every big crew, all of the stations. All of it. The cult's in all of it."
She starts hacking up a laugh, as if she's made some kind of evil joke. I don't even understand the language. Half of it is metaphor, it's arcane references and bad poetry. The other half is horrifying if it isn't.
"You put us in basements, you buried us with the machines, and then you put us up there."
They can't be everywhere. They can't be in every one of the two thousand or more man-made bodies in orbit.
Kazinski vomits again. She smiles shakily up at me afterwards. Her teeth are grey, her skin wrinkled before its time. She looks like death.
"We own it all now".
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