The Fortress at the End of Time

by Joe M. McDermott

  The rooms were small and narrow novice chambers, but they all had windows out over to the city built into the rock itself. Bits of red and green cloth were really all that truly distinguished the carved stones of the village from the stone ground and blowing dunes. I sat in the room, feeling the strange weight of dry, warm air in that enclosed space, which lacked the familiar damp and dank of algae recycling tanks and recycled air over the very tanks that processed our bodily wastes. The station always had that smell, just below the threshold of our active noses, of algae and sewage and cleaning supplies that tried to mask it all. It was like living in a meticulously clean bathroom, in a hospital somewhere. I did not realize it until I sat in that room that smelled of dust and dry, hot wind. I remember the way oceans smelled just after a rainstorm. Memory is the story we tell ourselves, and it is a story of loss that feeds our suffering in the absence of all the great comforts of the Terran system.

  I did walk the orchard that night. Restless, I went back on my word to Brother Pleo and found the lamps and flashlights and GPS trackers. There were many empty hooks. I was not alone in the orchard. Irrigation lines ran dripping all night to slowly soak into the root zones. Field workers walked the lines, clearing out blown sand among the living ground covers with huge brooms. I did not recognize any of the plants, except the ones Pleo had identified. I was born at sea, and I knew only the sea and what vegetables and fruits could be found in cans and frozen bags. The brothers waved to me. Out at the edge of the fields, I ran my hands gently across the windbreaks that kept the worst of the dunes of sand from swelling over the trees and swallowing everything. The vast plains beyond rose and fell, empty and desolate. There were mountains, somewhere, and earthquakes and groundwater sinking in, destabilizing everything. People lived out there, in the far dune seas of this world, as isolated as I had been as a child on my parents’ boat. Out past the windbreaks, a single light shone in the windy dunes. I stared at it awhile, imagining what could bring someone to go walking out there in the shifting sands. The light flipped off by itself. If the person was in trouble, they could just push an alarm button on their GPS or their flashlight, or even just call on to the mainframe on any handheld or wearable, if they had one. In this wind, they could even shout. There were enough workers ready to hear and help. I was weak and tired and feeling all my days in zero-g before landing. I thought nothing of the light in the dunes.

  It was probably Jensen.

  I never spoke of it before. My career was clouded enough without this tiny revelation, and I guess it was my duty to report what I saw, and I omitted it. Not my greatest sin, but still, I am here to confess them all.

  By daylight, I was asleep, and woke up when Brother Pleo knocked on my door. “The medical technician is here, Ensign. Sergeant Anderson is not amused. Did you talk to him?”

  “On my way,” I said. Dragging myself from bed, exhausted and thirsty, I splashed cold water in my face, drank cold water, and got dressed quickly.

  Sergeant Anderson was already awake, sitting in the common room drinking red jujube tea. He was stiff and pale and furious. A man in plain denim stood apart from him, nervously tapping his foot.

  “Sergeant Anderson, are you amenable to a quick medical exam?”

  “I’m fine, Ensign.”

  “I’m sure you are . . .”

  “Then why call the damn technician? I don’t need a nurse. I’m fine.”

  “Sergeant Anderson, as a pilot talking to a pilot, I am concerned. You are displaying what appear to be symptoms, and I want a med tech that doesn’t answer to the admiral to check you out, okay? If I’m wrong, I’m wrong. We are still waiting for the contract negotiations to clear, and our shipment to load up. You will lose a few hours, nothing more, and it could keep you on track if you are cleared.”

  “Can we talk in private, Ensign?”

  “My room,” I said.

  He stood up slowly, and walked gingerly to the room. He winced when he sat down on the edge of my bed.

  I closed the door.

  “Of course, I have zero-g issues. Of course I do.”

  “You will get time planetside, possibly early release. Isn’t that what you want?”

  “No,” he said. “It’s what the admiral wants. I pissed him off once and he never forgave me. I got married. I brought her down to the planet and did it behind everyone’s back. I created paperwork and the need for a separate quarters for us both when I was in station, causing new cycling issues for the biotic crew. I did it without clearing it. We would not have been granted permission, Ensign. The military frowns on families until after retirement. I’ll retire. She’ll be up there. It’s his goddamn revenge.”

  “With early release, you will have to wait until the end of her assignment to see her, at all. That’s it. That makes sense.”

  He folded his hands. “Don’t let the bastards win, Ensign. Please, don’t.”

  “Your health could be in serious danger. Without treatment, you may not be any use to your wife at all when you retire to your homestead. No digging. No shoveling. No lifting or walking.”

  “Ensign, whose side are you on?”

  “I’m not on anyone’s side, Sergeant. I am not political. I am just concerned for your health. We can arrange some time down here to recover, and I can pick you up on the next supply line. I am in command, and can talk to the monastery. We do not have to force early release unless it is absolutely necessary. I don’t want you to experience a medical disaster when the station relies upon you. Think of your duty, Sergeant. If you lose blood pressure and pass out on a supply run, what happens, then? AI aren’t permitted to develop enough intelligence to navigate independently. You would be floating until someone comes to get you—me—and you might not even survive. You’d throw the supply chain out for months. I am concerned about the crew on that station, up there, all of them. I am not political, and I am not scheming. You had trouble holding your fork at dinner, Sergeant.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “This is off the records, okay? You will be examined in private. No one needs to know but you and me and the tech if there’s something wrong, and we will find a solution that is best for the whole Citadel, Sergeant. Nobody ‘wins’ in my command. We aren’t playing a game, out here. I don’t play games with people’s lives. I don’t do that. Not me.”

  “If nobody wins, everyone loses. Especially you, Ensign. Send the goddamn tech in here, and let’s get this over with. Goddamn. Good goddamn you’re stubborn. Goddamn.”

  The tech was tired. He had huge circles under his eyes, and dust on his clothes. “He don’t like me none, do he?”

  “He doesn’t like anyone, but he will see you. Go on.”

  “Anything in particular you want me took for, Ensign?”

  “Just do an examination. Discretion is critical. He is a proud man, and there are, apparently, political complications. Let’s keep this by the book, okay?”

  “You got it, Captain.”

  “Ensign,” I said. “I’m still pretty new.”

  “Want me to check you out, too?”

  “I don’t fly much. Maybe in a few years.”

  I waited in the cafeteria. Monks passed through, some chatting on obscure things, others silent and nodding. I did not see Jensen anywhere, but her recreation was her business. Likely she had left the monastery for some place nearby where she could be free of their derision for her heretical ideas. She probably knew some of the retired personnel on the ground, and was filling them all in about the latest gossip from the station. Undoubtedly, word had gotten around that Xavier died on my first flight.

  The tech returned with a grim look. He said he was sending his findings to the military tech to confirm the diagnosis.

  I nodded at him. “Am I correct in thinking he has spent too much time in zero-gravity?”

  “His bone density is fine. He has been exercising and taking supplements. But his tendons are really loose, and he could blow a knee out just walking too fast. More than that, he h
as Yakusaki syndrome. His involuntary muscles are too weak. He is having trouble keeping his blood pressure up and swallowing food. We need to keep him in bed for a while until he can recover his vascular strength. His heart is really weak. Ensign, I don’t think he should go back with you to the station. Every minute for him in zero-gravity is potentially going to push him into cardiovascular collapse.”

  “I will support whatever decision the station medical tech makes regarding the sergeant’s treatment. I wish my suspicion wasn’t accurate.”

  “Anyone could see it. Was someone trying to kill him with all that flying? He told me his schedule . . .”

  “The admiral always has good reasons for his decisions. There are more concerns in space than a single soldier’s health. We are not here on the ground, where a whole atmosphere protects us.”

  “Still, he could have died if he had kept flying.”

  “He knew that,” I said. “He knew better than anyone. He is not going to die, though, is he?”

  “No,” said the tech. “The syndrome was caught in time. I’ve already got my cardio machine coming up from the house to get his veins going stronger.”

  “Thank you for coming. I appreciate your time.”

  I knocked on the sergeant’s door. He called me in.

  “Bullshit,” he said.

  “It isn’t up to me what happens, next. Not even the admiral and HR in concert can overrule a medical diagnosis like this one. It goes up the ansible and back, and everyone takes what it says, period.”

  “You think I didn’t know?”

  “Suicide will not help you start a family with your beautiful wife.”

  “Do me a favor. I am not supposed to move. Get out of here before I get up and kick your ass.”

  “Of course, Sergeant.”

  I left for the town. What was I supposed to do, while I waited for the contracts to clear through Obasanjo? I went for a walk in the sun, and it was very, very hot and I had to stop and rest and peel my uniform off my back, lean into shade, and observe the empty village. Sunset was coming, and people were dusting off the solar panels and watering scrubby acacia trees and vegetable gardens with irrigation pulled from the monastery tanks. People saw me, and I saw them, but no one came over. A man was hanging cloth out to dry on a line. I felt a hum of insects: wild miner bees, black flies, and sweat beetles. They were brought with the trees to aid in decomposition of organic matter and pollination, but they weren’t enough. Buzzing with them were the pollination drones. They all came for me in the shade, where my back was wet with salt and sweat. The man waved me over when he saw me swatting.

  “Hi,” he said. “You military?”

  “I am. Are you?”

  “Retired,” he said. He was an older man, with a hard, muscular frame. He was hanging wet blankets up to dry. He reached into his basket and held out a bottle for me. “Put some block on, or you’ll cook like red meat, kid.”

  “Thanks.” It was hard to get it on with the sweat, but he invited me inside to cool off, too. “Corporal Garcia, retired,” he said, with one hand out. “Call me Jack. My daughter is boiling water for tea on the roof. She’ll be down. Her name is Amanda.”

  I shook his hand, and he was much stronger than me, and I felt like a kid in his grip, without any real knowledge about the lay of the land, the customs of the place. “I am Ensign Ronaldo Aldo. I am the new AstroNav.”

  “Not a lot of need for war pilots out here. Not much to steal and nowhere to take it. No sign of the enemy in a hundred years. Mostly jujube trees, and some cucurbits and peppers and buffalo grass. Acacias for the nitrogen and wood pulp. Amaranth in every garden. Lots of sand. Lots and lots of sand. We won’t be green enough for a real colony for two hundred years.”

  I made a noise of noncommittal in my throat, neither agree nor disagree. I changed the subject. “How do they keep the windbreaks from getting swallowed by a dune?”

  “We dig them out every couple days with tractors. Come on, I’ll get you some water. You need to drink more water, Ensign.”

  I accepted his invitation because I didn’t know what else to do with my time, and I was thirsty. He led me in deeper, away from the heat of the front wall, and it took me a few minutes for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. It smelled earthy, not dusty, and there was a damp in the air. A fish tank was pumping water through a hydroponic rack in the corner, and it filled the room with the smell of life. Everything was stone and recycled plastic, gray and dusty brown and worn from years of use and repair. He pulled a chair out for me. “Windbreaks,” he said. “I spend every night at the windbreaks. We dig it out in teams with heavy machinery if it gets bad. The monastery has a few backhoes in storage. I have to go through and clean out the joints afterward, get all the sand out of them. That’s what I do, these days. I used to be under Q.”

  “I haven’t seen a high level of technology here. It’s like something out of climate crisis history, all these desert huts and so few trees . . .”

  He pulled water from a tank in the wall. He handed me a mug of it. “Terraforming takes time, unless you want to risk getting a lot of people killed. We do fine, Ensign. Don’t say dumb shit. We work hard for this ball of dirt, and we don’t want some smarmy officer talking shit about our home.”

  “Sorry,” I said. I took a sip of the water. It was clean and warm. “I’m sorry. Honestly, all anyone talks about on the station is how difficult it is down here. It isn’t exactly easy up there, either. It’s our home, of course. But I admit that it is a challenging post for everyone.”

  “My wife used to say that anything worth doing is going to be hard work.”

  “She sounds like a smart woman. I will remember that when I meet her.”

  “She’s been dead a long time.”

  I opened my mouth, looking for something to say. I took a long drink of water instead.

  My eyes came around, and I considered the man in the dark hut. Jack Garcia was a lean, hard man, with a deep tan. He had thick black hair that fell down his back in ropy braids. He was looking at me with a sad smile.

  “I’m sorry about your wife,” I said.

  “It was a long time ago. It’s fine. Down here, everybody knows everybody’s business. It’s a small community. You can’t change your underpants, people don’t hear about it. It’s always nice to meet new people.”

  His daughter came in from a door that led to a stairwell with a hot, heavy pot. She was wrapped head to toe in cloth with nothing but her eyes showing. She placed the pot down and looked at me, pausing and confused. She peeled back the sunbleached cloth, a face beneath long and smooth, and surprised. “Uh . . . Hello? I don’t know you. We haven’t met. New clone?”

  She began peeling back more layers. First her gloves, then her mask. She was dark and beautiful, with pale blue eyes. Her hair was a dirty blond cotton puff with red streaks. She held out her hand. “Amanda,” she said. “You’re down from the station. You’re new.”

  I took it, gently. “I am. Ensign Ronaldo Aldo. A pleasure.”

  “I’m Amanda Garcia. Tea?” She rummaged in cupboards for cups. “Usually don’t see visitors during the day. You really should stay out of the sun. High UV here. You can get really burned. You look red around the edges.”

  The tea was made from a mash of jujube and some green herbs. It was sweet and medicinal and disgusting.

  “Thank you,” I said. “It is very good.”

  “I can tell you’re lying,” said Jack. “You remember real coffee, right?”

  “I do, and spiced chai with real coconut cream. The tea is still as good as can be expected until the next ice comet comes and we can expand our agricultural base. I am grateful for it.”

  “That is a good attitude to have, Ensign Aldo,” said Amanda. “I heard about you from Q, you know.”

  “Did you?”

  Amanda sat down beside her father. She blew on the hot beverage to cool it, then put it down beside her. She had been up in the heat just now, covered in cloth. She had no desir
e to drink her tea until it cooled. Even I was sipping to be polite. I was still sweating.

  “Do you want to know what Q told me?”

  “I prefer not to play gossip games, Ms. Garcia. It hurts the mission. Keep it to yourself, if you like. I don’t mind not knowing.”

  Honestly, I didn’t care what Q thought of me. He hadn’t minded the molestation of a new crewmember. To me, anyone who didn’t care about that was welcome to their own opinion about everyone.

  Jack Garcia took over. “He’s my old boss. He told us you were very green, and probably had no idea how to establish yourself on the planet, for your retirement.”

  “I think retirement is fairly distant, and I have responsibilities on the station, first.”

  “Do you think you will be promoted to transcend?” said Amanda. “Dad says sometimes officers get to be cloned again across the ansible.”

  “It isn’t up to me what happens.” It occurred to me, quite suddenly, that if Corporal Garcia was in touch with Q, this could be a far more important meeting than I expected. Without a war to fight, we turned our eyes and mouths inward, jockeying among ourselves for pride and position. I did not understand the politics of the station, but I did realize, even then, that politics could make or break my ability to transcend. My gut reaction was to avoid it all. I did not realize that this was being interpreted politically, not as what it was: a willful ignorance and an attempt to avoid all politics. Every noncommittal expression sealed my fate as a very politically motivated officer, and all I wanted was not to offend anyone.

  “Good luck with your review, Ensign,” he said. “I hear you’re gonna need it. Amanda, you think you can take the ensign on a tour of the planet? I think he could use some sightseeing.”

  “Do I have time to babysit him? I have actual work to do, Dad. I’ve got seeds to start in the basement, and I’m working on the sewing for the windbreak.”

  “I can do that, Amanda. Why can’t I do that?”

  She rolled her eyes. “You kill plants, Dad.”

  “I can do the sewing, at least. Ensign Aldo, if you want a taste of the future, you can go plant some seeds with us. Have you ever planted any seeds?”