Frozen Orbit

by Patrick Chiles

  Traci would’ve reminded him that people were more than just clever machines. Feelings were too complex and subjective to be readily understood. It was possible to map brain chemistry and observe subtle metabolic changes—how complex systems behaved—but the nagging question at the end was always why? And not just the simple lizard-brain response to hunger or fear or attraction: That feeling of self-awareness was the key attribute. It was the ability to recognize yourself as a unique part of your environment, the ability to understand those primal motivations itching at the back of your mind which couldn’t be predicted or modeled.

  Daisy’s delicate chime interrupted him: would you like to finish your match? i have analyzed traci’s strategy and can suggest a likely endgame.

  Now there was a loaded statement if he ever heard one. “You’re talking about chess, right?”

  An hour left until shift rotation, Jack was making sure the turnover log wasn’t missing anything important like an air leak or boarding action by alien space pirates. That was, of course, for the official shift log that was transmitted back to Houston. By the time it was received and picked over by Mission Control, their response would arrive just in time for the next shift turnover.

  The unofficial log, which Roy seemed to care most about, was kept in a simple spiral notebook in a utility pouch behind the commander’s seat. This was the one where the crew could write down their individual thoughts, uncensored and unafraid: gripes, concerns, personal notes, all fair game. As with Arkangel’s crew, it was the human desire for some measure of autonomy.

  Despite using the apparent minimum amount of words allocated to a human mind, Roy knew how to lead. Managing personalities in such extreme isolation was a skill that Jack wasn’t sure he could cultivate enough to command his own expedition someday. He wasn’t even sure if he wanted to. Where else was there to go after he’d been to the end of the solar system?

  The distances involved just to get anywhere even mildly interesting were hard to relate in everyday terms: Take the Sun, shrink it down to the size of a pumpkin, and place it at one end of a football field. Earth would be a raisin at the twenty-five-yard line, Jupiter a grapefruit in the opposite end zone, and Pluto would be a mustard seed on the other side of town.

  At that scale the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, would be a melon clear across the ocean. Traveling to the next adjacent stellar neighborhood was so far beyond the reach of any conceivable technology that it almost defied comprehension. Even if they could carry enough reaction mass to reach fifty percent of light speed, it would take almost ten years just to do a quick flyby. Add another four or five to slow down enough to make orbit somewhere interesting. It would be simpler to figure out how to make a ship that fast than it would to keep it functioning long enough for humans to survive the trip.

  That was assuming they would be content living in a confined space for ten or fifteen years. Experiments with hibernation were promising, but in the end humans had emotional needs: They felt, they hurt, they laughed, they fought, they loved, they lost. No one could know what the psychological toll might be when the round trip was almost half a lifetime, not to mention the relativistic effects. Anyone who went would have to be willing to return to a world vastly different from the one they left. It would be easier to never come back.

  Jack looked up from his notes. Traci. He’d let her get away with sulking in her room for most of their shift. He poked his head through the gangway in the deck, looking down into the crew compartment. Her door sat ajar—an invitation, maybe? He glided down the ladder into the living area and hopped off toward her room. He knocked quietly and waited.

  Nothing. He knocked again before easing the door open to an empty room. After so many weeks out here, this was the first time he’d gotten a peek at her inner sanctum.

  Christmas lights were strung around the overhead and colored LEDs bathed the room in a cheery glow. The partitions were covered with hi-res beach photos with inflatable palm trees and pink flamingos fixed to the corners opposite her bed. He imagined her floating here in solitude with old Jimmy Buffett music playing in her headphones.

  He hated Jimmy Buffett.

  She wasn’t in her room and she hadn’t come back to the Ops deck. There were any number of modules where she could’ve hidden, but he knew where she had to be. Jack slid farther down the gangway and into the main access tunnel.

  It was lined with pressure doors, each opening into a different utility module, but the greenhouse module was closest to the entrance. Originally an experiment for long-duration flights, its big observation dome had quickly made it into a favorite destination. Now that they were relying on it to supplement their diets, no one minded the extra time spent working beneath the big windows while surrounded by live vegetation.

  No matter how many times he went, drifting through the passageway and into the greenhouse’s lush tunnel of sunlit foliage felt weirdly dangerous, like he’d abandoned the ship’s protective cocoon to step outside. Every time he opened the hatch, Jack halfway expected a rush of air to spit him out into the void.

  The aroma was overwhelming, a jarring change from the sterile air in the rest of the spacecraft. Layers of hydroponic racks overflowed with ripening vegetables along the full length of the module.

  He found her at the far end of this verdant tunnel, inside its octagonal glass ceiling and staring off into space. She was curled up as if she’d been lying on a sofa at home, maybe looking through her window at a spring rain. A book floated beside her. Outside, black sky beckoned.

  “I know you’re there,” she said tartly. “I can smell you.”

  “Sorry,” he said, self-consciously checking himself. “I didn’t—”

  “I meant that I can smell anyone coming in here,” she interrupted. “It’s the vegetation. Same way you can smell a thunderstorm coming in the summer.”

  Jack was dubious. “You can’t actually do that. Can you?”

  “Sure I can. You never smelled the water in the air?”

  “You remember I’m from Seattle, right? There’s always water.”

  “What about in Houston?” she asked. “Or the Cape?”

  He wrinkled his nose as if she’d just waved a basket of rotten eggs in front of it. “In Houston I was just happy if the wind wasn’t coming off the Gulf. All I could smell was oil rigs. And you’re changing the subject.”

  “Am I? We haven’t even started a conversation yet.”

  “I was hoping to finish our last one.”

  “That was an argument, and you were baiting me.”

  “Guilty as charged,” he said, head hung low. “And I’m pretty sure you meant something else about my smell.”

  “Maybe. I did have a right to get a couple digs in at you.”

  “Maybe,” he agreed. “I’m really—”

  “Sorry?” she cut him off again. “I’m being generous because there’s no choice. We’re stuck with each other.”

  “That’s not a healthy way of putting it.”

  “It’s not healthy to ridicule your friend’s beliefs either.”

  “But what if the thing you believe in is demonstrably false? If you were talking about Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny—”

  “Demonstrably false?” She held up her hands as irritation flared in her eyes. “That’s your problem. You think you came up here to apologize but instead you’re pissing me off all over again. Can you just not help yourself?”

  It was a good question. “Possibly it’s because I can’t understand how someone as smart as you can still hold on to old myths.”

  She rolled her eyes. “And the problem with arrogant skeptics like you is that you just can’t be civil with someone who might think differently. You treat faith like it’s a hobby.” She stared out at the stars beyond the dome. “I can’t look at nature and accept that it all happened by random chance, not when I think about everything that had to be just right for us to exist. It can’t all be entropy and chaos.”

  “Intelligent design? It’s a ci
rcular argument, that all existence would be impossible without some kind of master plan behind it. How can we test for something that’s assumed to be unobservable? That’s not science.”

  “I never tried to claim it was,” she said. “We’re talking about philosophy. Reducing everything to observations and proofs seems like a painfully limited worldview.”

  “How am I limiting myself by not believing in the Easter Bunny?”

  She ignored his sideways insult. “There’s a decent mathematical argument for design in the Cambrian explosion,” she said. “If you think of genes in terms of information theory, then the available storage capacity within pre-Cambrian organisms shouldn’t have been enough to create so many new species in only twenty million years.”

  “Doesn’t mean it’s impossible.”

  “It doesn’t, but I like to think it leaves the door open for a higher power.”

  “And a nonzero probability means we can’t rule it out. If it can’t be observed or tested, we can’t make any statements about its existence.”

  “We can’t test for the multiverse either,” Traci said, “but we accept quantum string theory when it’s based on nothing but mathematical proofs.”

  “That’s a whole other kind of weirdness I’m not prepared to argue,” Jack said. “Just be careful with that whole ‘God of the gaps’ thing. It might be tempting, but it’s always vulnerable to the next discovery. We’re supposed to be scientists, right?”

  Traci grew quiet. The background hum of circulation fans threatened to drown out all else until she finally stirred. “Actual scientists think we’re just a bunch of rocket jocks who got lucky,” she sighed. “Some of us more than others.”

  Now he felt whipsawed. Where had that come from? Weren’t we talking about philosophy?

  Yet he couldn’t ignore her implication. Mission Operations had unleashed a phalanx of psychiatrists upon the astronaut corps to screen crews for this uniquely isolated mission. The Hoovers were without question a perfect fit. Pairing up the other half of the crew had been almost comically delicate: a room full of dour medical professionals, interspersed with old cranks like Grady Morrell, judging who among fifty or so Type-A nerds were best suited to hook up and not get all dramatic about it if things didn’t work out. “So, yeah,” he fumbled. “That again?”

  “That again,” she sighed.

  Jack locked eyes with her. “Listen. You’re too good of a pilot for that kind of self-doubt. So what if you weren’t one of Grady’s favorites? Neither was I. Maybe less so.”

  “Maybe?”

  “Okay, definitely less so. But we’re here and he’s not. Who cares which one of us got priority so long as we’re in it together?” That felt close. He drew a breath, not sure if he should say what was burning him up. “And you know what? Far as I’m concerned, the shrinks were right. I don’t care what else happens, there is nobody I’d rather be out here with than you.”

  A feeble smile. “Think the shrinks are disappointed?”

  “I don’t care if they are. What you think matters, not them.” They had to be curious, though. She and Jack were the two most qualified people who also happened to be the most compatible with one another. That nothing had happened yet, after two years of training in near-isolation and months in space, was not something one generally put in the daily mission reports: Captain’s Log, Stardate 2032.6: Jack and Traci sittin’ in a tree, K-I-S-S . . .

  She pushed herself out of the window to literally fly into his arms, her inertia driving him into the wall.

  Startled, he caught the full force of her embrace. His mind was a jumble, shocked and aroused and pleasantly surprised by how much more powerful this felt in zero-g. No wonder those private space stations were selling so many rich couple’s retreats.

  The press of her lips came like a bolt of electricity, snapping him back into the moment.

  She drew back, blushing. “Sorry. I just really needed to hear that.”

  “No need to apologize. So, we’re good?” He wasn’t sure that was a dumb question at this point.

  “We’re good.”

  “Now what?”

  “I don’t know. I really like you. And I feel the same way—there’s nobody I’d rather be out here with than you.” Her eyes closed tight, as if she were bracing herself. “I’m just not sure that I like, well . . . ”

  “Men?” he blurted out, as if the raw disappointment itself had torn the thought from him.

  “Surprised?”

  “I wouldn’t even know how to answer that without insulting you.” Of all the shocks he’d tried to prepare himself for, this one hadn’t made the list. Maybe it was due to the fact that she didn’t at all fit whatever stereotypes he’d once had, her petite build and blue eyes and perfectly upturned nose and pageboy haircut that framed her face like a halo in zero-g . . .

  Oh crap. I really am attracted to her.

  “I’m glad you care enough to not try forcing it.”

  He’d have taken her embarrassed smile as flirtatious until about two seconds ago, which made this all the more confusing. “I don’t get it. All this time in close quarters and I’m just now finding this out? Not that I expected anything to happen, but . . . ” How well had they gotten to know each other if he’d missed that little detail?

  “None of the supposedly smart people at NASA picked up on it, either,” she deadpanned. “This doesn’t change anything.”

  Now he was confused. “How’s that? Unless you decide to, you know, switch teams?”

  “You don’t understand,” she said patiently. “I’m not even sure I’m on anyone’s team. Haven’t been since college, and I kept too busy ever since to let myself find out.”

  Jack gestured between them. “Did this just help you figure that out?” he asked, a little too hopefully.

  “Don’t know,” she said, embarrassed. “Either way, I’ve got this whole ‘religion’ thing to struggle with keeping me in check. Sorry.”

  “Again, no apologies. Your life is your business. I won’t try to influence you.”

  “I know you won’t,” she said. “I’m glad we could finally have this talk.” And with that, she gave Jack one last peck on the cheek as she brushed past him for the gangway.

  He floated alone in the tunnel of vegetables, touching the warm spot on his cheek and wondering what had just happened.

  This is the weirdest day of my life.

  20

  Mission Day 155

  Velocity 739,970 m/s (1,655,266 mph)

  Acceleration 0.0 m/s2 (0 g)

  Designed to withstand the worst abuses the cosmos could conceivably throw at it, protecting its human occupants from cosmic rays and hard vacuum, in the end it was the dismal science of economics that most threatened the deep-space vehicle Magellan.

  The most forward-thinking members of the world’s Billionaire’s Club were the same ones who had sacrificed most of their personal fortunes to make spaceflight available to, if not the masses, at least mostly normal people with big dreams and matching bank accounts. And that was okay, they’d calculated, because that’s how progress worked: A hundred years ago, none but the wealthy could afford to cross the Atlantic on an airliner. All of that eventually changed as time and economies of scale moved price points down to less stratospheric levels, and they’d expected the same with spaceflight.

  For the most part it had been working out, if slowly. To the most pragmatic of those forward-thinking billionaires, this came more as a relief than any kind of personal validation. They knew precisely what was at stake, and it wasn’t anything as cataclysmic as the end of human civilization or some environmental catastrophe.

  Fears of extinction-event asteroids or a runaway greenhouse effect might have launched a thousand potboiler novels but the smart money was on money itself, or rather the eventual lack of it. And because the smart ones created their wealth, they were cagey about protecting it. Their fortunes weren’t built by hitting the sperm jackpot through inheritance, and they certainly hadn’t
done it by spending more than they made. Watching the fiscal insanity that had overtaken the world for too long, they instinctively recognized that it would not, could not, go on forever. Debt piled on top of debt, compounding to the point where there was literally no way on Earth to grow out of it.

  The time had come to look beyond Earth.

  Saving civilization from its collective credit binge would take an explosion of wealth not seen since America’s westward expansion or the Industrial Revolution. With just about every avenue on Earth exploited, moving out into the solar system was going to be the only way to do it quickly enough. It held no guarantees, but they knew it was the only chance. Just as internal combustion engines and the internet had been the enabling technologies of their time, so would affordable transportation into orbit be for the new space economy. Cheap rockets were the hare, desperate to pass an enormous tortoise with a fifty-year head start in a race against time that too few appreciated or understood.

  As is too often the case, the tortoise won.

  It was easy for politicians to pretend the crash came out of nowhere, but the die had been cast through years of ill-conceived laws and make-believe budgets that only served to shield the connected and placate the ignorant. Faced with their own troubles, the rest of the world suddenly decided it could no longer afford to keep buying American debt.

  It was a popular notion to suspect a Chinese conspiracy to wreck the dollar, though the devastating effects of the US crash on their own economy quickly put that theory to rest, rapidly devolving into a worldwide bank run. Perhaps in a few decades it could be understood once historians and economists and forensic accountants had the luxury of piecing together a clear picture out of the rubble.

  NASA was of course not immune from the reckoning, for who could be foolish enough to spend billions on outer space when so many of their fellow citizens were suddenly out of work?

  Owen Harriman might have been, were he high enough up in the government’s hierarchy. As it was, he could only relay the bad news to Magellan: