by C. Gockel
The image of the sun crescendoed into false-color mappings of radio, ultraviolet, gamma ray, particle, and magnetic field emissions. A storm of color boiled off the surface of the sun. Aeon would be a mote caught in the maelstrom.
“Shielding sufficient to protect us from cosmic radiation is sufficient to protect us from solar events,” said a woman at the Astro/Survey station, quoting the Mission Book word for word. But she sounded worried.
“Yeah, but does it say that holds true when we’re this close to a sun? Look it up,” Bix snapped.
Bix paced toward Life Support. He covered the mike of his headset to address Catharin only. “Is this what you meant when you said we should run an attitude check?”
Catharin nodded.
“Good idea, damn it. Life Support, how fluid is the water?”
Miguel answered, “It was not supposed to freeze in starflight, and with the exception of some incidental ice, it—”
Bix cut him off. “Good. Dump the reservoirs into circulation.”
“That’s a good call,” Miguel remarked to Catharin as he keyed in commands to move the water. “Water is a radiation buffer. Circulating it in the pipes will help protect us.”
“Program the ship announcer for an evacuation order,” Bix ordered.
“Where?” asked Miguel.
Bix stalked back toward the Flight station. “Joel, can we keep the star shield turned into the brunt of the storm all the way through it?”
“The attitude thrusters’ll go haywire in the storm unless they’re shut down,” Joel answered. “It’s an electromagnetic pulse situation—right, Orlov?”
The chief engineer spoke slowly. “Expect voltage surges in circuits throughout the ship as a result of the sunstorm, and incident gamma radiation causing random bit errors in the control circuits.”
“Random bit errors?” echoed somebody at a subsidiary station. “There are always those.”
“Not like this,” Bix answered. Catharin had never seen him so galvanized. “Hordes of errors. Some’ll do mischief. Remember, this ship is a distributed computer with machinery stuck on the ends.”
Orlov said, “Under these circumstances, attitude thruster malfunction is probable. I recommend against using them.”
“Then I can’t guarantee our backside won’t catch hell from the sunstorm,” Joel said.
“The stasis vaults, in the very middle of the ship, are the best place for people to be,” Catharin said. “The deeper into the stasis vaults the better.”
Bix said, “Life Support, announce a general evacuation to the central ranks of the stasis vaults.”
Joel looked over at Catharin with a lifted eyebrow. “The more frozen people between us and radiation, the more cover?”
“They’ve got stasis containers around them. We don’t,” she said.
Bix said, “Also announce that the ship’s elevators are not to be used. It’s ladders all the way. In a sunstorm the ‘vators might stop working—or go the wrong way.”
Joel groaned. “Exercise, here we come!”
Bix turned toward Engineering. “Orlov, we’ve got to have the engine on to keep up the ship’s magnetic field. That field will shield us from ionized particle radiation. But it’ll also get a helluva twang. What do you advise? Turn off the engine and the field and let the material shielding handle the radiation—or keep the engine on and put up with massive induced voltages in the engines?”
Orlov protested. “Main engine damage would leave us unable to make planetfall!”
“Dead in the water,” Bix agreed.
Joel said tersely, “We’ve started running into radiation effects. I’ve got static in the thruster control circuits.”
The control center hummed with the signal lights and chimes of dozens of ship systems being shut down. Catharin took the stasis control substations on every level offline, so that no concatenation of random bit errors in computer chips would accidentally revive someone from stasis. Beside her, Miguel muttered in Spanish. On the Big Picture, the sunstorm lifted into the chromosphere like an ominous, gaudy banner.
“Man, look at all those sunspots. This star is sick!” Joel said.
Bix said, “Ours gets that way. I rode out the solar storm of seventy-three on the Regina. We turned around at Venus and limped home. Almost didn’t make it.” He scowled at the memory. “Aeon’s closer to the event than we were then, but better shielded against cosmic rays, and this is just a solar flare, so—”
“Captain?” said the woman at Astro/Survey. “It’s bigger. If this were our sun, it’d be a ten-thousand-year event.”
Joel whistled. “Sounds like Sim Supe ran out of likely possibilities and started in on unlikely ones.”
Miguel spoke up. “Without the ship’s magnetic field to deflect ions around the ship, many more particles from the sun will stream through the ship. There will be secondary radiation when those particles strike the hull and the corridor walls and—” he shot Catharin a dark, serious glance “—the stasis container walls. The people in the containers will experience damaging secondary radiation.”
“Damn,” Catharin whispered. “We have to save them from that.”
“Right. We keep up the magnetic field and risk damaging the engines,” Bix said, grim and terse. “I figure one hour to max trouble. Then two or three hours of transit through the storm and what can go wrong, will,” he said.
Orlov said, “Does that mean we’ve got four or more hours of this charade left?”
“Damn right.” Sweat beaded across Bix’s forehead. “And it may turn out to be Judgment Day.”
“I object!” Orlov’s words sounded so out of place that Catharin broke off what she was doing to stare at the engineer. Other faces turned toward Orlov in equal surprise. He slammed his hand on the console and continued, “We need to practice doing this part of the mission right. Instead, what we have here is so unrealistic that it’s absurd!”
“No,” said the voice of the Sim Supervisor, on the common link, audible to everyone. “Not unrealistic. Merely unlikely. There’s a big difference. Proceed, ladies and gentlemen.”
The narrow pallet extended out from an opening in the wall in the small, barren white room. The pallet’s medical chart bore only a name: catharin firenze gault. The chart was blank because it hadn’t been activated yet, Catharin reminded herself. Not because she was dead. At least not yet.
Catharin gingerly seated herself on the pallet to wait. It was cold in here. Her clothing was no help. The close-fitting underwear, patterned with small tubes woven throughout like lace, would cool her body in stasis, and the tubing already felt chilly to her skin.
She stared at the square opening in the wall. When she reached the first unconscious stage of stasis, the pallet would slide into the wall—carrying her into the stasis container, which stood open, waiting like a crypt.
Two more containers in this vault waited for Bix and Joel. Their time would come a few days from now.
Shivering, Catharin felt vulnerable, anticipating the arrival of the medic who would put her into stasis. Would the medic be aloof? Skittish? Or absurdly reverent, as though embalming her for the hero’s grave? She had seen all of those attitudes in medics putting people into stasis.
The chamber door swung open. A silver-haired old woman entered the room, moving with the hesitancy of somebody unaccustomed to anything but Earth gravity. Astounded, Catharin said, “Miranda?”
Miranda Blum, the chief assessor, and long before that, Catharin’s favorite professor from medical school, and now the last face Catharin would see before the stars, hugged her. Catharin felt Miranda’s embrace through the stiff lacy tubes of the cryogenic underwear. Then Miranda attached an intravenous line to Catharin’s arm. Stasis chemicals began trickling through the tube into Catharin’s body.
“Are you frightened?” Miranda asked.
“Very,” Catharin said in a low voice.
“Good. Otherwise I’d assess you abnormal. Think of it as death.”
“That’s what I’m trying not to think.”
“Give up. Relax.” Miranda sounded calm. “We all leave this world sooner or later.”
“You took a chance, Miranda, coming into space. Your time could have come sooner.”
Miranda shrugged. “Not much sooner.” She was 112 years old, nearing the longest life span that modern medicine had enabled people to attain. “I wanted to apologize to you.”
“For preparing me for this?” Catharin remembered hours of lectures and grueling tests in the medical field of cryostasis. At dinners and teas in Miranda’s home, the professor had shared her fears about the future of civilization on Earth and her dreams about the stars, and helped Catharin form her own.
“For your career choice, I congratulate myself. The apology is a different matter. Do you remember Joseph Devreze? I reviewed your interview with him, afterwards.”
“He’s not easy to forget. Miranda, did I make the right decision about him?”
“Quite. It was the decision I’d have made, had I wanted to live with the consequences. Which I most definitely did not.”
“What do you mean?”
“Devreze lied to you, my dear. He had antagonized someone with inordinate political influence. Never mind the details—the matter will be of no relevance on the other end of your trip. To put it briefly, it was made clear to me that if I let Devreze escape to the stars, both my reputation and my finances would be ruined in retaliation. I must say, Devreze picked no ordinary enemy.”
Catharin felt her face flush with anger. “That bastard.”
Miranda chuckled. “Yes, but an invaluable bastard. Officially, I left the office on urgent business, and a resourceful staffer passed the case on to you. I orchestrated it so that the person accountable for admitting Devreze into the starship—you—won’t be coming back either.”
Catharin vented her consternation in a long sharp breath. “And he lied through his teeth. It’s a good thing I’ll have ten years awake to cool off before I see him again.”
Miranda checked her watch. “What do you think of my choices, especially the rest of the crew?”
There was a taste on Catharin’s tongue now, like a laboratory chemical or bad white wine. Catharin heard herself say, “Since you ask, I’m not sure that Orlov is the right chief engineer.”
Miranda’s elegantly thin eyebrows arched up. “He was the best qualified inside the age limits. Credentials, psychological stability, motivation—Orlov has it all.”
“He’s barely inside the age limits. Just like Bix,” Catharin said. “But unlike Bix, he can be too rigid. We had one simulation that was the kind called Judgment Day, where everything goes wrong. It was grueling. And he was uncooperative. He demanded that things go right, not wrong. I think his stability can manifest itself as rigidity under certain kinds of stress.”
“Oh, I don’t think you should worry about him.”
“I’m not worried.” That was true. The beginning of stasis involved anesthesia that felt somewhat like inebriation. Catharin felt her worries trickling away.
“Remember that the gate has two sides. It’s more of an airlock, really.”
“Airlock?”
“When the ship reaches the new world, someone will have to decide who to let out of stasis, and when. For a while, you will be the gatekeeper. If Orlov really is unsuitable, revive his backup.”
“That’s tempting,” Catharin murmured. She felt relaxed, almost woozy. “His backup is a good friend of mine.”
“Do you have a personal-effects locker?”
Catharin twisted around to reach a latch beside the vault. A small locker door hinged down.
Miranda took something out of her pocket and showed it to Catharin: a man’s heavy, plain wedding band. “I would have given this to my own child, if I had children. It’s an heirloom from my husband’s family. May I give it to you, instead?”
Feeling light-headed, Catharin lay back on the pallet. “That would mean so much to me that I don’t know what to say, except thank you.”
Miranda Blum added the ring to Catharin’s jewelry bag and snapped the locker door shut. “It belonged to my husband’s great-grandfather, who fled from Europe to America in the mid-twentieth century as a refugee. He left behind his house, his homeland, wearing the clothes on his back and the ring on his finger. But he took his violin, of all things to drag around the world when his life was in danger! He was a classical violinist, you see. Culture was as important to him as life itself.”
“We have music. To help wake up, we’ve prerecorded instructions to ourselves with music.” The white ceiling swam in Catharin’s sight. She closed her eyes.
“You have everything,” Miranda said. “Never before have people been able to take everything at once, to a truly new world.”
Dark light swirled behind her eyelids as Catharin murmured, “Books. Music. Science. Medicine . . . .”
She felt Miranda’s hand pressing hers, and heard Miranda say in a voice choked with feeling, “And all my love.”
Catharin sank into a brightly dark oblivion.
2 Glass Time
She dreamed of herself as a pane of glass, a window fixed between winter night and a dimly lit dining room with table and china place settings, empty. Congealed motionless, colder than cold, she did not freeze. Frozen water crystallizes into ice or snow. Glass does not.
A voice told her to wake up. The star flight is over, wake up, urged the voice, contralto—Catharin’s own. She willed her eyelids to open, and saw a blurred whiteness, a ceiling above her. I am in the starship, and the journey is over, said the voice. Music percolated into Catharin’s mind with the voice, and the bright notes helped Catharin comprehend the words.
The starship had left Earth centuries ago. Never to return to the home world. The ship had crossed star space to terraform a new planet: still nothing but the future’s plan. For her, now, reality was only a sliver of possibility, so narrow that it constricted her heart, which could find no space to make a beat. Her blood stagnated. The edges of the ceiling frayed to blackness.
The music—a simple, strong, lilting melody—moved her out of paralysis. She bent her arms. That hurt but gave sudden depth and breadth to her reality. Her heart pounded; her blood coursed, free fluid. She sobbed in relief.
Catharin felt cold from the inside out. A draft felt warm on her face and blew strands of hair into her eyes. The draft came from the wall behind, from her niche in the stasis vault. The stasis machinery had extended her pallet out of the vault and into the room. For another minute she just listened to Copland’s Appalachian Spring. The voice speaking over the music in her ears said, “This is all about people building a new life in a new world, and that’s exactly what I’m here for, and it’s time to get up now.”
Flexing her hands felt like finding shards of glass in every joint. But she knew what had to be done. She had practiced often enough. Methodically she disconnected the stasis tubes from her body. She took out the earplug, still playing her prerecorded voice and music. Pushing back the stasis shroud, she sat up. She gasped as pain flared through her torso like a firecracker burst.
She looked around for Bix and Joel. They lay on their own pallets, all but motionless. Despite the ministrations of the stasis machinery, which for nine hours had slowly warmed and detoxified the blood and given patterned electrical stimulation to their muscles, the male astronauts had not completely revived.
Everyone you’ve ever known on Earth will be gone. She remembered explaining that to someone else. Now it hit her. Faces swam in her mind’s eye. People she’d loved, liked, hated. All of them were dead.
Miranda Blum had stood beside her before stasis.
Miranda had been dead for centuries.
Alive, awake, utterly alone, Catharin swayed on the brink of panic. Friends and colleagues and thousands of colonists lay in the vaults. Cryostasis was an unnatural condition closer to death than to life. At worst something went wrong and it destroyed its subjects. Had everything gone wr
ong? she wondered frantically.
Then she remembered the Book. Mission rules, the Book, specified what the first crew member revived from stasis had to do with total concentration. Help the other two up.
Standing, Catharin found her flight coveralls where she had left them, folded and clamped in a rack on the wall, but a strange silver dust rimed them now. She shook off the dust and painfully climbed in. A weird tang coated her tongue, the aftertaste of stasis chemicals in her bloodstream.
As she fumbled with the coveralls, the bold shoulder patch caught her eye. Over the letters AEON 2093, it depicted something like a Christmas tree ornament, a ball with a tapering spike on one end and a knob on the other. Catharin traced the edges of the shiny silver design with her finger. Like an ornament onto a tree, the starship had to be hooked onto a new planet. It was up to the crew to do it. She managed to zip up her coveralls, then turned to her colleagues.
She switched on the medical chart labeled hubert “bix” bixby. Bix was very much alive, vital signs excellent, hovering just below the threshold of consciousness. Catharin expelled a shaky sigh. She disconnected his tubes and removed his earplug. The voiceandmusic cue had not been enough to wake him. Taking his hand, she talked to Bix about the ship having made its voyage, and work needing to be done, until his eyes snapped open. “Ship okay?” His voice was a sandpapery rasp.
“If you’ll get up, we can find out,” she answered. He moved, giving an explosive groan.
The other medical chart said joel john atlanta. His color was good—the rich, chocolate skin color of the healthy Joel. His shroud looked ruffled, so he had stirred without rousing. “Joel. Good morning. Time to rise and shine.” As she disconnected him from the stasis machines, he moaned. Catharin touched his hand. Her pale fingers contrasted with his dark skin. “Joel, we’re here. Wake up—” with deliberate significance, she added, “—star voyager,” and gently moved his arm back and forth.