Whiskey Romeo

by James Welsh

  For example, with a clockwise flick of her wrists, Winter could feed starlight through one of the port exhausts, causing the launch to break hard to the right. This was an especially useful maneuver for dodging meteoroids, something Winter had done more than once. Winter, along with many other pilots, had long-since forgotten the novelty of steering a ship by bending light by hand. But Chroma thought the controls were even more beautiful than she was.

  But the dream woke up and Chroma found himself back in his seat, his face twisting into a chameleon green. He repeatedly whispered something so softly that even he could not hear what it was. But the man in the chair next to him, Edmund Liber, noticed that Chroma’s lips were mouthing words. Liber, a middle-aged man with a head too big for his neck and windy hair, grinned a crooked smile and said, “Are you praying, Doctor?”

  Chroma did not answer, and so Liber persisted. “Who is it that the engineer prays to, anyway?”

  “My ruler,” Chroma grunted.

  “Ha, a ruler!” Liber laughed. “Who else?”

  “Quiet, Edmund,” Winter said, her eyes still on the window, her hands still in the control panel. “You don’t want me to put you outside, now do you?”

  “Don’t bother,” another of the miners, Alaois Dart, said.

  “But sound doesn’t travel in space,” Winter pointed out.

  “Trust me – Edmund will find a way to make that voice of his travel,” Dart said dryly.

  The others snorted, and Liber turned away and looked out the window, his cheeks citrus. While Liber was the spark running on the fuse, Dart was the pair of fingertips that choked the flame. He had long, red hair and a beard that clawed at his face. The fire that was inside of him was tempered by the depth in his eyes, a haunted look so deep he would never be able to swim up to its surface. And Dart was afraid of the deep water in his eyes and his hair washed with fire. Dart suffocated under the rock of his fears, but he was the chains of order that Liber needed.

  Dart leaned towards Chroma – as best as he could, being strapped to his seat – and whispered, “Don’t mind Edmund. He’s still learning, just like the rest of us.”

  Before they launched, Chroma had watched Liber feeding an imaginary seagull in the hangar. Edmund was still learning, alright. But Chroma said nothing, his nausea mistaken for dignity.

  “Well, I’m glad I’m not the only one who’s afraid of flying,” Dart said, more to himself than to Chroma. Chroma glanced at the miner and noticed for the first time that Dart had a piece of paper in his hands. Dart’s trembling hands were tearing the paper apart in a winter of shrapnel. Dart did not seem to notice that his lap was littered with crumbs of paper. “The others made fun of me, you know. They keep telling me that space is a vacuum, and that I’m being afraid of nothing, quite literally…”

  “I’m not afraid of flying,” Chroma interrupted, “at least not for the reasons you think.”

  “Oh,” Dart said, shrinking.

  “Well, it’s true. Everyone has their reasons.”

  “So, what’s yours?”

  Winter’s light voice glided through the cabin of the spaceship. “I’m interested in hearing this too. I want to hear what the thinking man thinks of a flying woman’s flying.”

  Chroma sighed. It felt like everywhere his words stepped, there were tree roots sticking out of the ground. “It’s not your flying, Pilot Winter. It’s because – well, before I went on my first spaceflight, I had asked an old astronaut what drifting in space felt like. He told me that it was like sitting on the edge of a skyscraper and letting your feet dangle in the air.”

  Dart shuddered. “I could never do that.”

  “I have,” Chroma said. “I sat on a skyscraper I helped design in Pittsburgh. I drew the plans for the building’s water filtration system, as a favor to an old friend. That system was something – sure, it took up the whole roof, but it could store rainwater, strain it, and give the workers something to drink on those blasted summer days. Once it was built, I sat on the edge of it, and kicked my feet in the thin air.”

  “And you weren’t scared?” Dart asked.

  Chroma shook his head. “Not for a moment. Even though – with just a single slip, I might add – I would have gone from being the tallest man in town to the shortest in just a few seconds. And you want to know why I wasn’t afraid?”

  “Why?”

  “Well, it’s because I designed it, that’s why. I wouldn’t have sat on the edge of it if I didn’t already know it was perfect.” Chroma paused, as he realized he stepped outside of his ego on the last note of the sentence. He reworded himself, saying, “If I didn’t already know it was the best I could do, that is.”

  Chroma gestured at the ship’s hull around them. “And you see this? I didn’t design a rivet of this. I could break the ship apart and look at the pieces, but that would be like a surgeon guessing what kind of a man you are just by looking at your brain. The only creature that can understand the invention is her inventor. For all we know, these windows could crack any second, and we could go flying into space.” Chroma noticed the heavy fear settle in Dart’s face. “I’m sorry, Mr. Dart. I just needed an example. It’s not likely to happen.”

  “Not likely,” Dart repeated, trying to be brave.

  “We’re almost there, gentlemen,” Winter announced abruptly, startling Chroma and the other passengers. “And Dr. Chroma?”

  “Yes, Pilot Winter?”

  “You’re going to fall off that skyscraper sooner or later, and the first time you do, you won’t have a parachute.”

  Chroma tried to construct a clever retort, but he didn’t have the time. Already, the space station was growing in the window. The station – or Harbor, as the miners called it – looked like the unfinished skeleton of a sphere, with just two curved ribs forming the foundation. In the center of Harbor there was a large disc, almost as black as the space around it, spinning on an axle. Chroma could definitely see the inspiration of a gyroscope in the station’s design.

  “Is that disc what controls the station’s gravity?” Chroma asked.

  Winter nodded. “It induces gravity strong enough that you would think you’re still on Earth.”

  “How fast does it rotate?”

  “You ask a lot of questions, doctor.”

  “And I hope you’ll have just as many answers.”

  Winter smiled humorlessly. “It spins once every five minutes.”

  “Wouldn’t it have to spin faster to give off that much gravity?” Chroma asked, thinking of a carousel and the g-forces it radiated by flinging the riders in a tight circle.

  “It’s made of compressed matter. The disc weighs something like 600,000 tons. If you were to spin it any faster, you would get crushed down to an eighth of yourself – if you were lucky.”

  “Ah,” Chroma said, inhaling the logic.

  Harbor had four docks available for launches. Winter locked the ship into the north dock, followed a few moments later by the audible click that signaled the launch had landed and that it was safe to disembark. During the trip to the station, the passengers had been starved of gravity, and the weightlessness was playing tricks on their minds. But now, being so close to the station’s disc, the passengers found their weight, and they seemed to feel heavier than ever before. They unbuckled themselves from their seats and stood up, groaning as their bones woke up. They shuffled thickly out of the little Ship Delta and into the outer ring of Harbor.

  As they climbed down a ladder into Harbor’s curved hallway, Chroma took one last look at the launch through one of the station’s many windows. From there, it was obvious what was not apparent during the trip, that the launch was connected with one of its sibling ships. The launches were connected by their hulls, making their launch look like it was casting its reflection on the water of space. The fused ships were a necessary idea, since the cargo they carried was too heavy for any one launch to transport. The cargo, held securely in place between the ships’ hulls, was Chroma’s invention, and the w
hole reason as to why he traveled light-years from Earth to the edge of humanity, the frontier between the creation of civilization and the destruction of space.

  Chroma smiled a little at the perfection of the device. Some inventions devolve from their birth on paper to their actual construction, but the invention did not lose any of its spark. To him, it was like a rose that sprouted between the pages of a book, its wonder preserved as it aged. He did not regret an inch of it, because he made sure that it was cut flawlessly before it was built.

  His daydream stuttered as Dart’s voice rang down the thin hallway, “Dr. Chroma, are you coming?”

  “I’m right behind you all,” Chroma sighed, turning away from the window as the airlocks snapped close and the fused launches began to leave the dock, still towing his invention with them. His creation was gorgeously curved, and how was he rewarded? He was surrounded by people who were not only edged with mistakes but proud of them, from the sharp-tongued pilot to the terrified man to his insane colleague. It was worse than getting a single speck of mud on a pair of white shoes. Here, he felt the brain of every human mistake wrap itself around his neck. It was a contamination, and if he was a praying man, he would have prayed for his sterile classroom back on Earth, where everything was more than right to the end.

  But if he had stayed home, he knew that his Professor Reynolds would have never forgiven him. He had to sail from shore and deep into the sea where no wind breathed. He had to get stranded to understand just how small he was and how large the world was.

  ***

  2170 AD

  As Chroma squeezed his way past a pack of students in the corridor, he suddenly realized that old Veil Hall was created in the image of a beached cargo ship. There was no other explanation. The corridors were cramped, the doors were the shape of chicken eggs, and the windows looked suspiciously like portholes. At the thought, Chroma suddenly felt seasick, although he had never even seen the ocean outside of the jail of pictures. It would not be for many more years until he stood in the ocean, the saltwater rinsing his soles.

  The young Chroma halted at a closed door at the end of the hallway. Standing tall over the door was a sign: Thesis Room. He exhaled hard, his cheeks puffing like sails, and glanced through the window perched on the door like a wreath. The hallway behind him was narrow, but the room beyond the window was deep, rows of desks thick. Most of the desks were empty, which made the filled desks stand out even more.

  Sitting in the front row were five old professors, coughing into their handkerchiefs and wiping their sweaty foreheads with the same handkerchiefs. Between the handful of them, the professors knew everything about engineering, down to the crushed lead’s shadow on the textbook’s page. There was Professor Savile, who designed exoskeletons that allowed the wearer to lift a ton easily. There was Professor Outram, famous for designing self-healing roads that, when a car drove over them, the concrete’s molecules became excited and reformed themselves. There was Professor Chenoweth, who pioneered wireless electricity and cut the Gordian knot of power cables. And there was Professor Arnodin, who once won a game of poker blindfolded.

  Professor Reynolds sat in the chair closest to the door. He was easily the oldest of the elders, with a ravine face and threads of white hair. And yet, even with his walking cane, Professor Reynolds was able to get to the Thesis Room and sit down even before Chroma had turned the corner in the tight hallway. Chroma wished that his professor and mentor had walked with him into the torture room. But through the pane of glass, Chroma saw that Reynolds was leaning towards the other professors, whispering something. Reynolds’ back was to the window, and so Chroma could not possibly translate what the professor was whispering. And so Chroma invented the words, his paranoid mind imagining all of the terrible things Reynolds could be saying about him. To think that was fiction, and yet it drove Chroma mad – he wondered if this was how writers felt.

  Chroma breathed for a long moment, deflating his fears the only way he knew how. He twisted the doorknob and stepped into the room, swinging the door open like a cape. The professors stopped whispering and turned and looked at Chroma, who looked back. An awkward silence flooded between the two shores of men.

  After a few moments, Chroma found his words. “Good afternoon, professors.”

  The professors mumbled something back, as good as a response Chroma could hope for. He walked past the gauntlet of academics and set his bag heavily on the desk at the front of the room. As he began taking out copies of his thesis, handing out thick packets to every professor, he noticed a familiar face at the back of the room. The face was wrinkled, but he couldn’t tell where her smile ended and her elderly years began. Chroma suddenly felt a wave of guilt – he had invited her, not actually expecting her to come, and still she did. He had not printed out a copy of his thesis to give to her. For once in his life, Chroma was not prepared, and this bothered him more than the class of professors he had to teach.

  And he would have never invited her if Professor Reynolds had not suggested it. He wanted to be an engineer among engineers, to walk among a breed of mirrors. She was a sweetheart to him any other time, but inside of that classroom, he suddenly realized how much of an anomaly she was. She had never learned a day of engineering in her life, and she somehow did not regret it. When Reynolds recommended it, Chroma could not fathom his professor’s logic at the time. To him, it was an error, and there was no space in engineering for errors.

  But, as Chroma looked down at his thesis, his eyes hopscotching over the nausea of charts and data and obscure mathematics, the bolt of Reynolds’ genius hit him. He remembered one class he had with Reynolds, where the graying professor said the only way you could master engineering was by teaching it to the world. If he could teach her the idea he held in his hands, he would win that day. If she could understand the revolution in his thesis, then the professors certainly would too.

  With a shaky bravery, Chroma walked to the back of the classroom and handed her his last remaining copy of the thesis, all without a word. He walked back to the front of the room, turned towards his audience, and said quietly, “Let’s begin.”

  ***

  2195 AD

  The way Harbor was built reminded Chroma of a ship on its side, sinking after it hit a patch of rocks. The spinning disc at the center of the ring demanded that the floor be what would have otherwise been the left wall. This ensured that they could walk easily through the space station, their feet firmly planted into the Harbor’s center of gravity. That, and given Harbor’s distinctive shape, made Dr. Chroma feel as if he was perpetually walking downhill. It made Chroma wonder if he was descending the well of Hell itself. It didn’t help that the walls on either side of him pressed on his arms like a claustrophobic vice. Chroma began breathing quickly and heavily, testing Harbor’s state-of-the-art oxygen recycling system.

  Chroma glanced up at the single pane of glass that made up the ring’s roof. The glass was beautifully curved and about two feet thick. The glass was a story in itself, the result of trillions of tiny nanite robots assembling together before intentionally overheating. Once they overheated, the robots died and the grains of their corpses fused together into the window. Nothing short of a comet could have broken that window.

  And so, as Chroma and the miners squeezed through the mechanical crush, the rolling window overhead gave the illusion of an impossibly high ceiling. The stars painted into the charcoal ceiling looked like the chandeliers of glowworms in a cave back home. The light slowed his breathing by just a little, but it was enough.

  After a few minutes of walking, the walls began to yawn, until he was able to open his arms wide without touching the gut of cables running along the walls. It was there where the bridge was planted on Harbor. A stretched bubble almost two stories tall and thirty feet long, the bridge was lined with massive computer screens. There was a miner sitting in front of each screen, their eyes dulled by the flashing lights just inches away. They had controls nearly identical to what Pilot Winter had ab
oard the launch. As a miner scribbled instructions into the watery control pad with a gloved hand, the computer followed just as fluidly.

  Whatever it was the miners were typing made no sense to Chroma – it looked more like notes on sheet music than words on the page. Still, that didn’t mean the instructions were nonsense. If anything, they were writing out the future of humanity. Somehow, the scribbles translated into the gears twisting and whirring in the series of quantum mirrors orbiting the star Carina. As Carina cracked her whip of sunlight into the cold space, the quantum mirrors twisted in whatever direction it took to capture the most neutrinos possible. The mirrors conducted the electrons until the satellites were soaked through with light. Inside of the mirrors, the quantum gears spun into an infinite blur, fueled by the neutrinos and passing that energy instantaneously to their twin gears on power plants back on Earth. To the miners, the whole operation was smarter than they could ever dream of being. To Chroma, it was a mess that could only get better.

  As Chroma descended a short staircase to the lower level of the bridge, he saw there was a large projection in the center of the room. The projection was a three-dimensional sonar map of the star system, courtesy of dozens of buoys long-since launched to all corners of the map. Chroma stopped in front of the map and stared at it in awe, something that he rarely did. He had read about the projection map, but he had never seen it in action. It was so detailed, he could even see a miniature version of Harbor on the map. The Harbor was sitting more than a million miles away and on a separate but parallel orbit with the planet Janus. Chroma noticed a spare pair of the magnetized gloves sitting on the ledge of the projection. He looked around and, with no one noticing, he put on the gloves and delicately pressed a finger into the portrait of the space station. As he pressed deeper into the representation, the map zoomed in until Harbor took up the entire projection. With another hand, he could spin the projection and see every ghostly detail.