Bright Star

by Talia R. Blackwood

  Phae takes the can from my hand. “Stop it. I’ll try to request another one.”

  “No, no, forget it,” I say. I’m thinking maybe I can drink the sanitizer steam, after condensing it. It may be an idea. Instead I open the package of freeze-dried food he brought earlier. But as soon as the heavy smell of rot spreads from the tear in the wrapping, I put it aside.

  I simply can’t eat this food.

  Phae looks at me with a worried expression.

  I sigh and get up from the bed. “How about if we go to check this damn sarcophagus operating system?”

  MY UNIFORMS are too large for him. Prince has to hold up his pants with his hands; otherwise they continue to slide down from his slim hips. I think I could find smaller uniforms in the storerooms, and I propose to go there, but it’s a two-hour trip. “It doesn’t matter,” Prince says. “Let’s go into the cocoon to take a look at this damn emergency communication system.”

  He’s so out of place here. He can’t even drink or eat. This gives me heartache, and I would immediately go to the storerooms to look for fresh rations, even though I know perfectly well there are none. The storerooms are great, but in nineteen broad cycles, I’ve explored them far and wide.

  We squeeze into the service elevator and climb up to the cocoon. When the elevator discharges us in the room, Prince gasps, holding his head. “Holy shit. I don’t think I can get used to these tubes. They spit clones in the same way as rations, right?”

  Indeed. “The main elevator is much slower,” I say, “but you need to travel half an hour to reach it.”

  He shakes his head and walks into the cocoon, clenching the waist of his pants in his closed fist. He stops to observe the open sarcophagus with a frown. The aliens have been here, but they didn’t touch anything.

  Prince, in his free hand, is holding the alien medicine orb. He didn’t want to abandon it in my cubicle. He looks for a place to put the ball down without it rolling away, but there are only flat surfaces. He ends up placing the orb into the padding of the sarcophagus interior.

  Prince examines the keyboard on the side of the coffin and touches it. The wall becomes blue and inscriptions I can’t read fill it almost entirely. The voice says, “Please complete the code to log in.”

  I join him. “The code is Bright Star.”

  “Bright Star?” Prince says, raising his eyebrows. “As in Keats’s poem?”

  Obviously I have no idea of what he’s talking about.

  His expression softens. “In the poem, Keats wishes to be as steady as the star to watch over his sleeping love. I suppose this represents our situation very well.”

  I blink. Prince smiles and types the letters on the keyboard quickly.

  “You are logged in,” the voice says. “Welcome to Cryodream, Hibernation Operative System of Stellar Dream Corp.”

  “Give me more info,” Prince requests.

  To my wonder, Corp responds to him.

  “This is Cryodream, hibernation OS three, version two-dot-one, Guardian Clone interface, Interstellar Colonization Ship Class, patent by Stellar Dream Corp, all rights reserved. Press any key to continue.”

  “Stellar Dream Corp? Never heard of it,” Prince comments. He presses a key.

  “Main menu. Press the key for the action, or vocalize the action. A: start the emergency protocol; B: close all the systems and run an emergency scan; C: contact Corp; D: enter the options menu.”

  “Oh my god. It’s an operating system for idiots.”

  “No, just for guardian clones,” I comment.

  Prince turns to look at me. “Damn. I’m sorry, Phae. I didn’t mean….”

  “Main menu. Press the key for the action, or vocalize the action—”

  “C, contact, you idiot!” Prince shouts.

  “Request accepted. Please wait. Impossible to perform the request. No channels found.”

  “Oh, fuck.”

  “Main menu. Press the key for the action, or—”

  Prince snorts impatiently. “Okay, I got it, give me the options menu.”

  “Request accepted. Please wait. Loading options menu.”

  A long list appears on the wall, enough to make me dizzy. The voice begins to vocalize each of the items in the list, but Prince has already chosen the one that interests him. How the hell can he read so fast?

  Prince begins to surf endless submenus. He goes so fast that the system doesn’t have the time to read aloud for the idiots. From what I can understand, he checks all the communication channels again without success, then performs a scan of the communication systems to verify if they work correctly.

  At the end, Prince shakes his head. “I don’t understand. Everything seems to work, but on Earth no one answers. No one, neither on the surface nor in the Moon Base, nor on any of the orbiting bases. I can’t even receive. I can’t get anything, not even the damn weather forecast from some weather satellite. The most logical thing that comes to my mind is that something interrupts the communication between Earth and us.”

  “Can you contact another planet, in addition to Earth?”

  Prince almost jumps. “But of course! Thanks, Phae. We are more than halfway. We should be able to contact the Otherworld colony.”

  He gets back to work on the keyboard.

  I wait, observing him. I’d like to ask him things, like if all purebred humans are as good as him at reading and interacting with operating systems, or if it’s something only the Princes can do, but I dare not disturb, and let him work. My questions would open a lot of similar questions, and I’d want to ask him what his food looks like, what kind of life he made on Earth and in what place he lived, and how one could live in any place that isn’t a spaceship, and if on Earth there are spiders or if it’s just a thing of the spaceships, and so on. The remaining sixty years of travel wouldn’t be enough for all the questions I have.

  Prince manages to obtain a communication channel with the place he called Otherworld, and exults. He sends what he defines as an automatic Mayday on a radio beacon. I don’t know what he means, but I refrain from asking annoying questions and wait, confident. After just a few minutes, the system opens a channel of battered communication with a military base orbiting around Otherworld. Prince hugs me, then hurries to hold up his pants, because a giant face is trying to materialize in the middle of the white noise rustling on the wall.

  The face turns out to be that of a bald man. I think it’s a clone and not a purebred, although I don’t know how I understand. Perhaps because he has no hair, or because of the blank look, more similar to mine than to Prince’s gaze, which is rich with incomprehensible hues. I observe the clone with wonder. He’s the first living human being I’ve seen apart from Blasius, Prince, and myself.

  I think I don’t like him. His eyes are strange, very tight, with the corners folded upward. His face gives me a sense of discomfort. But maybe it’s because his head on the wall is as tall as me.

  “Otherworld here, we have received your Mayday, identify yourself,” the clone on the wall says, gaze downward to something under his hand, maybe a keyboard.

  Prince takes a breath. “This is a colonization ship of Stellar Dream Corp, and I am Kian Jaymes Eldon Newell, son of the Prime Minister of Worldwide Union Cuthbert Newell.”

  I remain silent, in awe. I never imagined Prince had so many names and so many titles. Or even that he remembered them.

  The clone raises his eyes and peers at us. “Worldwide Union of Earth?”

  “Sure!” Prince yells. “What other Worldwide Union?”

  “The Worldwide Union doesn’t exist anymore,” the clone explains. “Earth doesn’t exist anymore.”

  Prince freezes. “What? What the hell are you saying?”

  The clone tries to look at us between the white noise that engulfs the communication. His stare gives me an unpleasant shiver down my spine. His eyes are strange, too stretched, the pupils so big and black they fill his eyes almost completely. “How long have you been traveling?”

&nbs
p; Prince is pale. In a whisper, he says, “Ninety-four years. Ninety-four terrestrial years.”

  “Oh, I understand.” The clone nods. “The protocol provides that first contact with subjects who have traveled too long in space must be done by medical personnel able of providing psychological support, so I—”

  “Tell me what happened to Earth,” Prince interrupts him. “It’s an order, clone.”

  The clone blinks and hesitates, but only a couple of seconds. “Thirty-six years ago, terrestrial years, Earth underwent what was called the Last Judgment. A group of terrorists had given way to a nuclear war. The nuclear winter kicked off climate change and earthquakes have shifted the axis of rotation. Currently, Earth is reduced to an uninhabited rock.”

  Prince staggers. I grab him around his waist.

  That insensible clone doesn’t wait for Prince to digest the news. “What is the reason for your emergency?” he asks.

  Prince is dazed. “We had an… alien contact.”

  A pause.

  “Did you say alien contact?”

  “Yes, dammit, yes! Listen to me, soldier. I am the son of the last Prime Minister of Earth and I want to talk with the senator currently in office in your colony. I am the betrothed of his son, or his grandson.”

  “Yes, sir,” the clone says without hesitation. “I’ll pass your request to my superiors. Hold on, please.”

  The wall turns blue. Prince leans on me. “I can’t believe it. He was telling the truth? And why would he lie? Earth is really gone? Everybody is dead?”

  He’s pale, on the verge of fainting, and looks at me with eyes big and scared. I massage his back. “Listen, Prince. That is, Kian Jaymes… and everything else.”

  He smiles, perking up a little. “Call me Prince, I prefer it. I love how you say it.”

  I fight the urge to lift him off the ground and bring him back to my cubicle, where he can be only mine. “Listen, Prince. Don’t think about what happened to Earth right now. First we have to get out of this situation. You have been able to contact Otherworld. In any case it’s closer than Earth.”

  He smiles at me, grateful. I want to kiss him, and I see the same need in his eyes, but the wall in front of us suddenly comes to life. Prince and I jolt.

  I can’t believe my eyes.

  In front of me, on the wall, in the midst of interference shocks, opens up an absurdly colorful world. All those colors hurt my eyes. I see a huge room with walls that aren’t made of metal, but of other materials I can’t recognize. The seats are soft and swollen. In a kind of hole in the wall is burning a small cluster of flames similar to those one can see when opening the incinerator hatch. And at the bottom, the very bottom, opens a chasm coated in glass, and behind the glass looms an Outside that isn’t black, but a color I’ve never seen and to which I can’t give a name, furrowed with fluffy things made—perhaps—of steam. I get dizzy and stagger.

  A man, a purebred, is sitting on the soft furniture in front of the small fire. I hadn’t even noticed him, distracted by everything else. He’s a rather young man, not young like Prince or me, but definitely not as old as Blasius. In addition to having hair, he also has hairs on his chin. He’s semireclining on the soft furniture, holding something in his hand that looks like a transparent cylinder with liquid inside. “Kian?” he calls, narrowing his eyes to focus on us. “Kian Newell? Is it really you? The military base has contacted me right now, but I couldn’t believe it.”

  “Yes, I am,” Prince says. “Who are you?”

  “Reinhold Coburn, Senator of Otherworld.” He raises and leans forward, resting his arms on his knees to focus on Prince. “And your future husband, according to the agreement my grandfather had with your father. Here on Otherworld, we have schools and streets named after you. But I was sure you were a legend and you had never left Earth.”

  Prince takes a step forward, straightening his back and trying to hide the fact that he has to hold up his pants. “I still have about sixty years until I arrive. I think I could be promised to your son or grandson.”

  “Maybe,” the man says, tilting his head. “But I could find the last terrestrial, the legendary son of the last Prime Minister of Earth, too interesting to leave him for my son or my grandson.”

  The purebred looks at Prince as if he is hungry. I don’t like him. “In the school where I studied there was a statue of you. Is not that crazy?”

  Prince smiles brightly, tilting his head to the side and shifting his weight on the other foot. I don’t feel like smiling at all, but maybe this is the way in which humans interact with each other.

  “Listen, Reinhold,” Prince says in the sleepy voice he used with me in our moments of intimacy. Now it bothers me, listening to him using the same caressing tone with this human. “Can I call you Reinhold?”

  The man waves his hand. “Make it Rein.”

  “All right, Rein. I woke up in the middle of deep space, on this piece of junk, alone, apart from my guardian clone. Apparently the system has awakened me from suspended animation due to an alleged alien contact.”

  “An alien contact?” The man chuckles, leaning back in the cushions as if he enjoys our misfortunes a lot.

  “Whatever,” Prince says. “As you can imagine, learning what happened to Earth shocked me, and I was wondering… an important senator like you certainly has faster means to come and rescue a living legend like me….”

  The man doesn’t stop chuckling. As if our lives in danger were just a funny thing. I hate him.

  “Maybe. It depends.”

  “Depends on what?” Prince asks with just a slight note of irritation.

  The senator drinks from the transparent cylinder, and I understand it’s a can made of glass for liquids. “On your arguments. In theory, since all of your ancestors are deceased, every beneficial agreement I could have from our union has vanished into thin air. You no longer have a political or economic value. You might be interesting only because of your legendary quality. But I’m not sure it’s enough. You have to have good arguments to convince me to keep my commitments to you.”

  Prince smiles. From the way he does, I understand he would gladly jump on the hateful man rather than smile, but for some reason he must keep smiling. I give up trying to understand the purebreds’ behavior. Far simpler to be a clone.

  To my wonder, Prince ceases to hold up his pants and lets them fall to the floor. He also gets rid of his top, yanking it above his head with a gesture of defiance. His naked body, pale and thin, is heartbreakingly beautiful in the yellowish light of the senator’s fire that flows from the magic wall.

  “These are my arguments,” Prince says, always with a smile that’s not a real smile on his face. “Do you like them, Rein?”

  The man sinks more in the soft seat, looking slightly bored in front of a show that makes me want to scream and cry for its magnificence. He smirks. “Not bad. You need to put on a few pounds, but I appreciate the effrontery. I’ll send a rescue vessel. It’ll contact your junk in….”

  The man fiddles with something bright on the low table in front of him. I understand it’s a keyboard made of transparent glass, or something like that. “In nine years, more or less.”

  “Nine years?” Prince exclaims, clenching his fists. “Is this the best you can do?”

  The odious human raises his eyebrows. “My vessels are faster than your wreck, but they can’t exceed the speed of light, of course. This is the best I can do for you, terrestrial. It’ll take nine years to reach you and another nine to come back to Otherworld. You will be here more or less in eighteen years, just in time to brighten up my middle age with that skinny but interesting body of yours. Oh, I recommend you get back into the sarcophagus. Certainly you don’t want to waste your only exchange value.”

  Chapter 8

  “WHAT AN asshole son of a bitch,” I blurt out as soon as the senator closes the communication. I bend down to pick up my clothes with anger.

  I’m in shock over what has happened to Earth. I still fin
d it hard to believe. If Earth is destroyed, Otherworld is all that remains of the human race. I try to remember everything I know about Otherworld, which is shamefully little. An earthlike planet, colonized by a small group of scientists and volunteers. I hope they have done a good job in creating a strong community. However, this senator seems precisely like all the men I had to deal with on Earth.

  Yeah, I have always been treated as an object, and apparently this is my destiny. The senator of the colony is willing to save me just because I’m a statue in his school. I’ll continue to be his prize for my whole life, probably.

  “Prince?”

  Phae approaches and puts his arms around me, massaging my back, and I’m grateful to have him at my side in a moment like this. He’s the only one able to give me all the affection I need, without asking anything back. I let my clothes fall and lean on him, resting my forehead on his chest.

  “You okay, Prince?”

  “Yes, yes, honey.” I touch his face. The comparison with the slimy senator makes him look even more precious. “Don’t worry. This senator is exactly like all the people I met. I can twist him around my fingers like nothing.”

  “But when you arrive, he will… yes, he will do to you the things we did together, right? The talk was all about that, right?”

  No, he’s not stupid. I bite my lower lip. Giving my ass to the senator is a price I have to pay, and it isn’t even the thing that scares me the most. But do I really have to inflict Phae, so innocent, with this shit?

  I grin. “I don’t know if the senator will remain so interested in my body after nine years of hard life on this ship.”

  Phae gasps, shocked. “What?”

  I put my hands on his shoulders and look into his eyes. “Listen to me, Phae. The senator has no way of knowing if I actually go back in the sarcophagus or not. And when the rescue ship comes, they certainly won’t go home empty-handed, even if they discover I’m not frozen. Meaning I am not obliged to go back in there.”