“Tess?” he whispered again, his soft voice rising out of the breeze. “How would you like a star?” She barely opened an eye and didn't move from where she'd sweated into his shirt. He reached out his arm, making sure she was watching, and stretched out his fingers as if wrapping them around the moon. The breeze ebbed and the road on the other side of the old maples was quiet. She sat upright, squinting at his outstretched hand, to his square features pulled into deep thought, and back out to his hand. She didn't notice him eyeing his watch.
“Presto-mesto,” he said, and a white star, framed perfectly in the moon's crescent, flickered to life. Tessa breathed through her mouth. It moved, slowly at first, but more and more quickly toward the edge of the moon. Her face was cooling quickly away from his chest. “Should we name it after you?” He picked away a few strands stuck to her cheek. Her eyes were transfixed. “I think we should.” They watched as it approached the limb of the crescent, suspended in the thick smell of cut grass, gasoline, and his old shirt. “I'll tuck it behind the moon for now,” he said, reaching up and brushing a hand along the sky. The star slipped around the edge of the moon and vanished.
Her breath barely passed her open lips.
The evening kept still.
Long moments lingered before she turned to him, brow twitching slightly, eyes searching his face. The breeze had not returned, and the crickets seemed to silence. They looked at each other in the hush.
Long after she went to bed and watched the moon ease itself down the panes in her window, the fields were still quiet.
* * * *
For four years the scene was repeated every thirty days, whether he halted her and her mother in the middle of a grocery parking lot or woke her in the middle of the night to stick their heads out under the window sash. It took those four years before classmates laughed at her for believing it was named for her. She didn't say anything to her father, but he noticed one night she was watching him instead of her star. Neither of them mentioned it when the next thirtieth day came and passed unnoticed.
Tessa's limbs ached as her flesh was ground against bones. A red warning light flashed on her retina, then a diagnostic schematic, a flurry of code lines as the CV attempted reroutes, and a flash of all-clear green before her vision was back to the onrushing limb of the moon and the green digits counting seventeen. Eighteen.
She'd written one of her first book reports about the bridge. She'd laid out her ebook on her windowsill one evening and downloaded page after page about its creation, including the famous, century-old video from Tokyo. Out of a scruffy lab of bare wires and tubes, a nervous, grinning scientist tossed a grapefruit into a small metal ring, and without so much as a flash or a blink, the grapefruit was suddenly dropping out of a second ring at the end of the table. Overnight, conversations turned to uses for bridges. Walk from your parlor in Louisiana to your mother's kitchen in Scotland. Ride your bicycle to a business meeting across the Pacific. Airline stocks plummeted but eased back once sobriety settled in: The tiny, two-meter wormhole had used more power in four seconds than all of Tokyo could in a day, and no amount of ingenuity seemed able to bring Mom's kitchen within walking distance. “The first wormhole,” she had scrawled under the twilight stars, “was stuck."
Twenty-one gees. Twenty-two. Their tiny compartment, long ago sardonically nicknamed a “Concussion Vehicle” by its pilots, was housed in a massive electromagnetic sheath that pulled at the slight attraction of water molecules in their bodies to counteract some of the acceleration. Not enough, Tessa thought. The spokes lifted her ribs for another breath, dragging with them tendon and cartilage twenty times their normal weight. The view of the looming lunar surface suddenly rolled as the protospike twisted, corrected course, and twisted again. The magnetosheath stabilized different tissue with different force; blood and neural tissue more, fat and bone much less. The protospikes could supposedly deliver up to forty-eight gees of acceleration once they spun up to full bore, but the hardest anyone had ever been pushed yet was twenty-four-point-one. Tessa's last four launches had all been about twenty-four-point-one, with every launch a thousandth of a gee faster than the last. The far side of the bridge was always accelerating away, and they were always pushing harder to catch up. Each launch just a little faster. Her blind eyes widened as the counter moved past twenty-four. And to twenty-five. The digits switched to red. The impellers pushed against blood. Her larynx vibrated under the respirator as she watched the impossible; twenty-six.
A bridge was cheaper than only one kind of transportation—stellar. Though complex, arduous, and outlandishly expensive, the bridge held out a promise to humankind that no one had thought possible. To build a bridge to the stars, one ring would reside near Earth, while the other ring would be placed at the destination. Getting the second ring to that destination so many light years away, however, was the challenge. The scientific world struggled, hoping for another miracle, but none came. The second ring would have to be pushed to a nearby star by simple, old-fashioned, mass-rejection rockets. Getting it there would take two hundred years, but humanity's expedition to the stars would begin.
In any other decade the bridge would have remained only a dream, but the world was at peace, economies were expanding, and generosity was chic. They built it in twelve years. Economies contracted, but the money flowed. Other sciences were curtailed, but they built the rings. One orbited the Moon and the other was sent toward the nearby dwarf star, Lalande 21185. Lalande had a halo rich in complex elements—a perfect first stop on the journey into the stars. Every thirty days the bridge would be opened to refuel the far ring's engines and perform maintenance. The world watched the launch of the far ring, nicknamed Betty, already seen as a symbol of better days as living conditions in smaller countries began to dip and petty squabbles grew to small conflicts. The golden age collapsed and it was back to a world in flux.
At twenty-eight gees, Tessa's fear became panic. Her heart raced, but the respirator kept her breathing even. She felt as if she was suffocating. She thought her skin would split where the helmet was hitting her and draging itself down either side of her face. Her shoulders dislocated one after the other and despite the impellers moving her blood, her vision was tunneling, the distorted image of the lunar surface tearing by as they dropped through their perigee. Only seconds now ... Twenty-nine. The spokes lifted her ribs for another breath.
“Why do they have to send people?” her father had asked when she had shown him the eyelets drilled into her ribs. His first trip off-world. Just to see her. “Can't they automate it somehow?"
He'd tried to hide it, but she'd caught the look on his face. She'd regretted showing him then. It was one thing to hear about the eyelet implants, the nauseating neuro-mineral injections and other procedures pilots had to undergo to survive a launch. Quite another to see fifty-six holes perforating your daughter's chest. She tucked her shirt in without looking up.
“They do automate it, most of it at least. But it's too important not to back it up with a human presence. The simplest programming error and it's all over.” They sat alone at a small table in the dark wood-paneled pilots’ lounge, looking out a wide window into the gridwork of the orbiting Darkside Station. The moon's surface moved perceptibly below; the tourists’ observation deck above but far away enough for them to feel private. And the near end of the stellar bridge, the thirty-meter ring called Alice, lit up by a plethora of floodlights and flashers. She watched his face flicker with their pulses, cheeks and wrinkles sitting younger in the zero gravity. A gentle chime sounded in the lounge.
“Does that mean their launch has started?"
Tessa nodded. “They'll be here in eighteen minutes. I hate to say it, but it's not a lot to see. About a half second before they get here, the magnetic cocoon jettisons the concussion vehicle from the protospike, sending it through those rings.” She pointed out the window and he leaned against the glass to see. “Those rings magnetically guide the CV during the last second so it hits Alice dead-center. B
ut the CV is moving so fast that you probably won't even see it. It'll go through to the other ring, Betty, and come to a dead stop. They send the gamma burst directly after it and that gets absorbed by Betty's collector to recharge her engines. Then we do maintenance."
“How can you handle a dead stop?” he said, still looking out the window.
“It's not really a dead stop at all. Really just the opposite. Betty's been accelerating away toward Lalande for eighty years now and she's reaching relativistic speeds. She's just over 5 percent light speed now, so when we go through, we're actually being instantly accelerated to her fifteen thousand kilometers per second, and the energy to do that has to come from somewhere. Most of it turns into a physical drag on Betty, and the rest of it comes out of ... us.” She realized she was unconsciously fingering an eyelet. “Our body temperatures drop to near absolute zero instantly. Most of the hardware in the CVs are microwave heaters. We're sort of cooked back to normal in about six millionths of a second."
She'd trailed off near the end. The same pang of wishing she hadn't told him the details.
“That's why we go through the launch,” she continued, quieter. “We have to do everything we can to minimize the drag on Betty. The faster we go into Alice, the less drag on Betty as she yanks us up to speed."
She played with the sealed straw in the Chardonnay bonded to the table. The lounge was perfectly quiet, lit only by small table lamps and the flashers from outside the window. It was a long moment before she realized he was looking at her in the reflection. Had been.
“They want to name the town park after you,” he said when their eyes met in the glass. He smiled and focused his gaze outward. Distant lights reflected under his brows. “Tessa J. Bruncsak Park.” He smiled wider, turning toward her. “Did I tell you I got asked for my autograph again? At the gas station. And your mother's Bible study group bought her a telescope kit, but I'm having a terrible time trying to put the thing together."
Sipping at her straw, Tessa just smiled. Another chime sounded and his eyebrows raised a bit.
“They're approaching perigee. They'll be here in about a minute."
“Does it hurt?"
The question caught her off guard, and though he'd asked it, it seemed to catch him off guard too. He seemed flustered.
“Yeah. Yeah, it does, sort of. But it's not so bad. It's only eighteen minutes, and it goes by quicker than you'd think.” She watched him across the table, nodding slowly. Trying to convince himself.
“You couldn't tell when you saw my quarters,” she said, “but I get a fantastic view out my window. Every few days I wake up to have the entire Earth lighting up my room. It's nothing like moonlight. It's warm. Palpable, even. I can usually tell where Ohio is. I lie there and stare at the whole globe, and do you know what I'm thinking? That I'm so proud of us. I'm so proud of us as a species. We may be absorbed in our regular lives like any other animal, but we came together, just once, just this one time, and we did something impossible. We stepped beyond every expectation we ever, ever had of ourselves. And I lie there thinking, ‘Here I am. Part of this one, giant, unimaginable baby step.’ It's worth everything I can give it."
“But there's still something bothering you."
Her eyes widened almost imperceptibly.
“I'm your dad,” he pretended to shrug it off. “I can tell things."
Tessa scratched the side of her nose, looked at her drink and out the window before answering.
“It's the other side,” she said directly to him, feeling as if she'd slipped from stellar pilot to little girl cringing from the darkness in the closet.
“It's not the acceleration or all the things that might go wrong. It's the sky out there. It's not black. It's gray."
His brow furrowed.
“When you go through that bridge and it closes behind you, you are utterly ... you are unchangeably alone. Around here space is black because you've got the Sun and the Moon and Earth all radiating light, and space is just black in comparison. You can see stars of course, but it's nothing like out there. Out there you're thirty trillion kilometers from anything. The sun is so far away you can't tell it from any other star in the sky. And with nothing stronger than starlight around, you see more stars than you'd believe. In every direction the sky is dusted with them. And between any two stars is another and another. The longer you stay out there, the more your eyes adjust and the more you see until you can hardly distinguish them apart and before you know it, there is no more blackness, just a thin gray mist of stars in all directions. And it's always there, always in your peripheral vision, always reminding you how unfathomably far away you are from everyone and everything. It's like suffocating under a crushing emptiness. Like drowning, unable to get back to the real world, watching the surface recede."
She pushed the straw around the sealed glass.
“For four hours you're just praying that the bridge will open up the way it should and take you back. For four hours you almost can't concentrate because you feel how horrifyingly delicate that thread is that connects you back. That thread breaks, and you drown. For four hours, you pray."
Though it never seemed like he'd moved, she realized he was holding her hand on the table. Three gentle chimes sounded over the intercom. A brilliant orange blaze as Alice spun open and a flash past the window as the concussion vehicle hurtled into the ring. Over the intercom, the fast exchange between the Darkside controllers and the pilots on the other side. The blinding glare of the gamma burst laser pumping energy into Betty's collector. And three seconds later the bridge shut, leaving tourists on the distant observation deck still snapping pictures.
She'd watched it all reflect off his face. He hadn't taken his eyes off her.
“I am with you,” he said. “Always."
* * * *
In her launches she never actually saw Darkside Station, much less Alice. After lifting out of perigee, the ring would clear the lunar horizon and hit her and Loránd before she could even catch the streak on her retina. This time her eyes were rolled back into her head anyway.
The acceleration halted abruptly, throwing her head forward as the magnetosheath ejected their tiny pod and the protospike rocketed past the station. The sudden relief of pressure always made her lungs feel like bursting before the respirator equalized itself. She pulled her eyes forward and her retina was awash for half a second in the warm, fire-like glow of the wormhole before the image abruptly changed to a status grid. The heaters worked. The impellers released her eardrums and the flood of voices from Darkside Control rushed in.
“CV One, this is Darkside, you are out-transit, awaiting go."
No time to mince a syllable. Thirty-one fusion generators were exhausting themselves to keep the bridge open for its twenty-one seconds. The respirator snapped itself out of her teeth. The autopilot had already pulled their tiny pod to the edge of the ring and anchored them. Green lights fluttered across her vision. “Betty reports All Green.” Instantly her vision switched to the forward camera as she heard Loránd relay, “Confirm All Green.” The sound was not his voice just as her report wasn't hers. Neither of their larynxes was functional. Their helmets read their lips. Tessa looked around, the forward camera spinning to match the twitches of her blind eyes. She saw Betty's arc, so much thinner and weaker than Alice's. Cables holding it together. Small micro-meteor holes, pointed out with flashing crosshairs and dates they were logged in by previous crews. The gallium-antimony collector, the eight ion engines with their invisible thrust, more meteorite damage then usual, but everything in order. “Betty Visual All Green,” her synthetic voice sounded immediately.
Loránd did not confirm.
“Loránd! I—Darkside, this is—"
“CV One, we've got his vitals,” Control cut her off. “He's blacked out, Tess. Darkside firing.” Neither they nor Tessa could stop to check on her copilot. No abort. They could never abort.
The forward camera twitched as she watched. The gamma burst fired. Through the
wormhole, Darkside Station seemed a few meters away but was nearly invisible as light radiating from it was stretched and robbed of its energy, dropping down from the visible to the deep infrared. She could only make out ruddy outlines where the sun glinted off metal. By the time the gamma burst came through the bridge it was little more than a red glow warming the collector.
“Darkside. Need emergency medical ready on in-transit."
The refueling took the final twelve seconds. Forty-eight percent of that energy would be used to reopen the bridge for their return journey. Forty-eight percent to open it again in thirty days for the next crew. Only 4 percent went into propulsion. No room for errors.
“Already in scramble, CV One. We're reporting an acceleration anomaly."
“Confirm, we're—"
The gamma burst ended and lights on her retina flickered as bridge began shutdown.
“Just hang in there, Tess. Darkside out."
Silently, the orange glow in Betty's maw evaporated, leaving Tessa blinking at darkness before Betty's arcing silhouette began to take shape against the countless billions of tiny, unblinking stars.
* * * *
“Loránd!” her electronic voice rang out. “Ceevee, give me the internal camera.” Lasers played through her cornea and the image of the cabin appeared. She could hear the cam above her head hum as her eyes focused it on the seat behind her. Inside his helmet, Loránd's eyes were closed. “Loránd!” she tried to yell, but the lipreader only sounded calm. “Ceevee, medical report on Loránd."
Asimov's SF, February 2006 Page 4