The Light Years

by R. W. W. Greene

  “Your contract said you had to be a doctor.”

  “That was the only criteria. My deal was for six years, though. Medical school is expensive on Freedom, and Ma negotiated schooling for the other kids, too. By the end of it we had a lawyer, a doctor, and a horticulturist in the family.” His smile faded. “I went back to see them a time or two, but it was hard. They’d gotten older, and I hadn’t. My sister, the horticulturalist, was the last to go. I missed her funeral by five years standard.”

  The whistling sound outside the car dulled, and the ride got smoother.

  “Will they pick us up with the Hajj?”

  “Nah. Maneera will have got us stowage on some tug or other hauling between the stations. We might even be riding on the outside of it in suits. She’s always looking for ways to save pennies, especially on this trip out.”

  “What’s special on this trip?”

  “Let’s say there’s a lot chewing into our profit margins this time out.” He yawned. “I’m going to catch a few winks. You might be wise to do the same.”

  He got up and headed toward the bank of sleeping capsules that ringed the center of the elevator. Each coffin-sized capsule was kitted out with a sleeping pad and an entertainment center. Elevator passengers could rent them by the hour.

  I had slept fine the night before, if not long, and I wasn’t the least bit tired. I pulled my reader out of my pocket. The message icon was flashing. I pulled out the headphones so only I would hear the playback and pressed the “retrieve” button.

  My mother’s face blinked into focus on the small screen. She’d been crying. “I am sorry I was short with you this morning,” she said. “I was tired and…” She shook her head. “That’s not it. I was angry at you for going and angry at myself for making you go. We had such hopes, your father and I. We shared them with each other like prayers. So little in life was as we hoped. I always wanted to be close to you, Hisako. I think we were once, but you always seemed to prefer your father. I was mad at both of you for that. I knew we would only have you for so long…”

  She was thousands of miles away and receding fast, but my arms suddenly ached to gather her in and hold her.

  “This is not how I wanted to say goodbye,” she said, “but it is better than this morning. Find me when you come back. Your father made a recording before he died. He asked me to play it for you on the day you left, and I nearly forgot.” She smiled sadly at the memory card in her hand. “Maybe I tried to forget. I love you.” She inserted the card into her console, and the screen flickered again.

  I never realized how much the disease had taken away from my father. He had always been thin, but sickness made him gaunt and gray, what was left of his lungs fighting for any scrap of air. Through the video, he smiled at me.

  “I know I look like shit. I don’t feel so great, either, chuchu.” He tapped the doc strapped to his chest. “Box says I’ll be feeling better soon though.”

  He struggled to adjust his pillow and sit up straighter.

  “My family died coming to Gaul. I told you that, right? I can’t remember. The rest of us got to live for a while at least.” He inhaled deeply, unleashing a round of racking coughs.

  A past version of my mother stepped to his side to help. The coughing petered out, and my father was silent while my mother wiped blood from his mouth. “No time for small talk, I guess.” He tried to smile, but it was more of a wince. “I love you, chuchu. I wish I could have come to your wedding. I know it wasn’t your idea, but I’m sure you were the most beautiful, brilliant thing there. We did what we could with what we had. Don’t think too badly of us.” He looked off screen to my mother. “I want to sleep. I’m done.”

  The message ended. A flashing icon on the screen asked me if I wanted to replay it. I wiped my eyes and shut the reader down. I took my seatbelt off and walked to the observation gallery. We were nearly high enough to see the curve of the planet. My mother was down there, as were the bones of her parents and her husband. I rested my forehead on the window. The space outside refused to absorb my misery and guilt. My mother hadn’t had much of me in the last ten years or so. I hadn’t given myself to her like a good daughter should, and now she was alone. I made an effort to shake it off. There were at least a hundred people on the elevator. Mine couldn’t have been the saddest story going into orbit that day.

  I went back to my seat. The reports on the vid screens were all about the “countless lives lost to the senseless attacks.” None of the talking heads admitted that there would likely never be a true count of those lives. It was La Merde after all; they were all just refugees, too dumb to live outside the shadow of the elevator.

  I used my wedding ring to unlock my access to the Hajj records and accounts. I was rich, at least by my parents’ standards. In two years, I could sell my shares and retire, maybe even set myself up in a private dome. I compared my fortune to the ship’s operating costs and understood why the captain said she was living job to job. The profit margin was distressingly small. The ship had to fly constantly or no one made anything at all. The Hajj was three years overdue for an overhaul, a year overdue for an atmosphere exchange. The cost savings had paid for my education and upbringing.

  Dooley returned from his nap in a few hours. “That’s better,” he said. “I hate having to take stimulants. That little nap will keep me going until tonight.”

  “I caught up on the news. It’s a real mess down there.”

  “Probably worse than the news is saying. I never want to see that again, and I only worked with the ones whole enough to try to save.” He pursed his lips. “There’s a vid playing in about ten minutes. A comedy, I think. Want to catch it with me and then grab some dinner?”

  Our ride from New Berlin Station turned out to be the cargo hold of an equipment shuttle. We squeezed in with the other commuters for the ride to Versailles Station. Dooley showed me how to prop myself against the packing crates so the sudden acceleration wouldn’t send me ass over teakettle into the wall. While we were waiting for takeoff, he walked among the riders offering advice and first-aid appropriate to their various ills. Motion sickness was the big one. He spent a good bit of time talking to a group of riders heading back to the Hajj with us.

  “It’s the same every time we make planetfall,” he said when he returned. “Someone falls in love and spends the first couple weeks of a run bemoaning that she’ll be old and married by the time we come back this way.”

  “Have you ever been in love?”

  “With someone other than my wife, you mean?” He rubbed his forehead. “No. I’ve been obsessed a time or two but never in love. It took Maneera and I a couple of years to get to that point, and it wasn’t always easy.”

  The shuttle shook, and the acceleration pressed me against the crate I was leaning on.

  “There we go. We’ll be at Versailles in about an hour.” He closed his eyes and, to all appearances, went back to sleep. This time I let myself join him. The sound of snores and murmurs around me faded into my dreams.

  Sometime later, Dooley shook me awake. “Here we are, lass. You’ve been here before, so I expect you can find your way to the ship.”

  I blinked sleep out of my eyes.

  “I’ve got to see a man about restocking my bar. I hope the cargo pod made it up before the attack.”

  He left me to fend for myself. The last time I’d been on the station had been for a long weekend with Francis. He’d tried to induct me into the “Freefall Club” on the shuttle to our rented orbital, but the whole thing had been so awkward that I gave up in the middle of it. The fact that he even knew how to use the Velcro straps we found on board squicked me out. The orbital had been dark and kind of damp. If someone had been religiously tending to its systems, it would have been nice enough, but as an occasional getaway it just wasn’t getting the right maintenance. The environmental system was overgrown, and Francis had balked when I suggested we spend some of our time tending it.

  “I didn’t come up here to wee
d a garden,” he said.

  He ended up with a respiratory fungal infection, so I guess I proved my point.

  The space station had started as a couple of the evacuation ships and a raft of shipping containers, and it had grown without much planning ever since. It served mostly as the endpoint of the elevator and, as such, had become the hub of off-world trading. There were always ships coming in and out. One Trader ship had been parked there for five years due to some kind of legal battle between the family that ran it and its investors.

  No one had told me how quickly I needed to get onboard the Hajj, so I stopped in the food court for a box of noodles and sat down to eat. It was the first meal I’d eaten since breakfast with my mother. When I finally presented myself to the Hajj dockmaster and asked to board the ship, a tall, blonde woman came out to meet me. Her name was Vladlena “Call me Vee” Mullova.

  “Can I carry anything for you?”

  “I just have this bag. The rest of my stuff should have come up yesterday.”

  “Your closet made it up just before the shit hit the fan,” she said. “You’ll be able to get to it when you want to. Is there anything you need right now?”

  I couldn’t think of anything, so she sent my bag ahead and offered me a tour of the ship. “Just the fun parts,” she said. “You’ll get to know the boring bits soon enough.”

  Someone had tried to make the corridor we were in warm and friendly by painting it. The scheme was just a little off somehow, like the painter saw color differently than I did. Since humanity had now evolved for thirty generations under six different suns, that was probably true. But there was no disguising the fact that the paint had gone over bare metal, and the steel-grid decking and the pipes running overhead were less than homey.

  “It smells stale in here,” I said.

  “Our air mass is overdue for an exchange, but it’s safe. The air in your cabin will be fresher. Do you need something to eat?”

  I told her about the noodles.

  “We can see the cafe on the last leg of the trip then. How about a drink?”

  “I could use one.”

  Vee took me along two unmarked corridors and down a ladder. We emerged in a small space that looked like a blind welder had banged it together out of shipping containers. The crazy color scheme continued in here, and someone had hung up signs and pictures representing all the human planets. A small stage took up the floor space at one end. It was strange but cozy.

  “This is Terry’s Place,” Vee said. “Our home away from home.”

  The kid behind the bar was picking his nose. I was relieved to see him wash his hands before reaching into the ice bucket to make us cocktails.

  “What is it?” I studied the murky fluid in the glasses he put in front of us.

  “A Dooley special. I just followed his instructions,” he said. “We almost never know what it is. It’s bound to be strong though, so tread carefully.”

  It tasted like powdered lemon-drink mix and pepper, and it burned going down to tell me it was working.

  Vee and I carried our drinks to a table near the wall. “I asked to be the one to meet you because I wanted to clear the air. Adem and I were in a relationship before you got married, and I didn’t want you to hear that from anyone else.”

  “Were you in love?”

  “It was purely recreational. Are you okay with that?”

  “I barely know Adem, and we haven’t even had a conversation that lasted longer than two minutes. The last time I saw him he was keeping my ex-boyfriend alive.” I lifted my glass. “To clearing the air.”

  We clinked our cloudy cocktails.

  “What do you do here?” I said.

  “I work in the medical center. My parents bought me a half-share as a graduation-from-med-school gift. I grew up on Nov Tero.”

  “What’s that like?”

  “Cold. We only have the one city, but it’s bigger.”

  I took another sip of the horrible cocktail. Things had started to soften around the edges, and that was just fine with me. “What do you do for fun around here?”

  She unzipped the top of her utilisuit and tied the arms around her waist. The t-shirt she wore underneath revealed a lot of muscle. “It’s a lot like university. We work. We drink. We hook up. Most of us study. I’m about a quarter of the way through a degree in computer science. I’m working with Odessa for that. We play games. I read a lot. Go to the gym. It’s not so bad. Most of the crew only sign on for a few years. They work, make some money, and move on.”

  “But nothing is the same when they get back.”

  “That’s the appeal of being here for a lot of people. You literally can’t go back to whatever you were escaping.”

  “Don’t you miss your parents?”

  “They have their own lives, and I have a good excuse for not calling all the time.” She pointed at my drink. “Finish that up, and I’ll show you the rest of the ship.”

  I gulped down the rest of the cocktail. “I can’t feel my teeth.”

  “That’s how you know it’s working. This way.” Vee led me down another long hallway.

  “I didn’t expect everything to be so…”

  “Don’t say dirty or the captain will have us all down here scrubbing.”

  “I was going to say worn. It’s clean but it looks used.”

  “The Hajj launched more than a thousand years ago. It’s clocked a lot of kilometers. It’s from the Middle East somewhere. Persia. Is that right?” She tapped her chin. “Something like that. The Sadiq family was part of the wake crew. The captain’s grandmother got the ship when the crew’s descendants drew lots.” She slid open a door in the wall. “This is mass-grav control. You probably know more about it than I do. It’s the one system the captain has inspected every time we stop. It’s expensive but without it–”

  Instant death. I patted a console and offered it friendly thoughts.

  “You’ll get to know it, I’m sure. You specialized in mass-grav theory, right?”

  “United Americas physics and engineering. Mass-grav. Wormholes. All the fantasies of the past.”

  “I wonder why,” she said.

  Vee led me down a flight of stairs. The door opened to a multi-level room. “Life support,” she said.

  “Another thing I know nothing about.”

  “Maybe that’s the captain’s way of making sure you spend plenty of time with Adem. He’s not an expert, but he knows more than most.”

  “I didn’t see any of that on his profile.”

  “You won’t see a lot of things there. He grew up on the ship, so he knows at least a bit about everything. He’s the official generalist.” She pointed to the far corner of the room. “There are a couple of stills back there. Adem makes the best hooch.”

  “Is that where the cocktails come from?”

  “Dooley usually gets a pod of beer at the start of each run, but once it’s gone it’s all homemade.”

  “This does feel like university.”

  “Told you. Let me show you the medical center, and then we’ll grab some lunch. Adem’s not aboard yet, so it’s up to me to keep you entertained.”

  Vee was doing a nice job of being friendly. “So, more cocktails, then?”

  ADEM

  Versailles City, Oct 24, 3260

  The older boy Adem had rescued had put a big piece of wedding cake in front of an elderly woman. “Cake,” he said. “It’s good.”

  The woman pushed the cake around the plate with her fork and spouted something angry in a language Adem didn’t recognize.

  “My name is Raul.” The boy took the woman’s fork and ate a bite of the cake. “It’s safe to eat. It’s sweet.” He handed the fork back to her, and she smiled mostly toothlessly at him. She wolfed the rest of the cake down.

  “She didn’t trust it. It looked too EuroD,” Raul told Adem.

  Gifts from La Mur always came with strings. Resettlement came with La Merde. Welfare came with sterilization or prison for illicite birth. Adem
hoped the rich food from the wedding wouldn’t make anyone sick. “She’s going to be alright. That girl you helped. Chuchu.”

  Raul snorted. “That’s not her name. It means ‘darling girl.’ It’s probably something her mother called her. All the girls are ‘chuchu’ if you ask them. She’s crippled. Might have been better if she died.”

  Adem frowned. “You can’t mean that.”

  “She can’t work. She’ll end up a beggar. Maybe starve to death. She might not be thankful that you saved her, spaceman.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Ten, I think. Maybe nine? My uncle said he can get me work in the mines when I’m twelve.”

  The younger boy Adem had pulled out of the toppled hut had spent one night on a triage cot then grabbed as much food as he could and ran back into La Merde.

  “Did you get any of the cake?” Adem said. There’d been a surprising amount of food left over from the banquet but after two days of feeding victims and volunteers it was mostly gone.

  “My father said sweets make you weak, although he never ate them and now he’s dead.” Raul rubbed his chin.

  Adem pulled his reader out of his pocket and reset it. “Take this. Learn to read. Study. Maybe you can do better than the mines.”

  Raul turned the reader over and over in his hands. “I could just sell it.”

  “It might be worth more to you if you keep it. There are games on it, too.”

  Raul slipped it into his dirty clothes. “If the older kids see it…”

  “Be careful. Be smart.” Adem’s sinuses were coated with dust. He ripped off part of his shirt sleeve and blew his nose into it. “I have to go. Will you be alright?”

  “It’s warm tonight. I’ve eaten. Tomorrow? Who knows? Maybe I will see my uncle and get my supper there.”

  “Where will you sleep?”

  Raul perked up. “You looking for a date? How much do you have?”