by Hugo Huesca
What would Abner have done? He didn’t know. But Hiroto knew what he would have wished. And he had a debt to pay to his old friend.
It was hard prepping the lift-off with only two pair of hands and not the four for which the ship’s controls had been designed. The sound of the engines annihilated the calm and peace of the night, which during the launch turned into day for a brief instant.
Hiroto, Junko and Xen saw how Host stayed behind further and further as space revealed itself in front of them. Junko placed her little hand on Hiroto’s forearm and he realized he was holding his breath.
For an instant, before the acceleration pushed him against his seat, he saw Brenda on the palace balcony. A little human figure with a white dress. He didn’t see her expression.
“You did the right thing,” Junko told him when Amaterasu floated freely on space.
“It didn’t feel like that.” Leaving Brenda behind was like losing a part of himself; and Junko, at his side, felt the same. But she was strong for him, and he needed her. He realized he loved her, desperately.
“She will be happy among my people,” Xen said, a couple of meters away from them, sitting in Abner’s seat. “Her heart had already sprouted with us.”
“And mine is here,” thought Hiroto, not without bitterness. “Forever, on this ship, as long as I’m alive. This is the heritage you left me, sensei.”
And he said, aloud:
“Junko, activate the MC core.”
“Last planet I found you’d have loved. Simple life, an entire planet covered in green, a giant garden. I couldn’t descend, the atmosphere was too corrosive. But the view, from up here…” Hiroto had planted some of Junko’s favorite flowers. He left them in front of the little cherry tree that barely grew half a meter over the ground. “In Amaterasu, everything is going as always: slowly getting worse. Everything, but the MC core, that one will never give up. Not much longer until the life-support goes too. Then I will be with you, my love.
With Hiroto the heart of the Amaterasu would finally stop. It had stubbornly held on for more than sixty years, chasing the daydream of a man whose face Hiroto had forgotten a long time ago.
He spent a couple hours fixing the part of the garden where he and Junko had seeded the most beautiful flowers they carried from Earth and Host. In the center was her tree. Underneath, Junko rested forever, surrounded by the garden she had loved.
“It will last much longer than me and the other systems of the ship,” thought Hiroto with satisfaction, leaving the garden. Without Brenda or Abner, there was little he could do to prolong Amaterasu’s life. So he had made sure that the computer of the ship would prioritize the energy of the greenhouse to make it last as long as possible. Maybe Xen could have done more. In the end, the little host had understood more of the secrets of the ship than Hiroto or Junko. Sadly, it turned out hosts lived only a fraction of a human life. Now his friend slept out there, somewhere in the cosmos, just as he had wished. He heard forever the song of the void.
“I wonder if I will have time to reach the tree, by my Junko, when my time is up,” Hiroto could feel it in his bones and in his body: Every morning he woke up colder, stiffer. Getting up was an agony, but it paled with other basic needs.
But lately, even the pain was going away. His time was running out.
He slowly wandered over the corridors that reached the cabin. He used a pair of weak and crinkled hands to hold tightly to the walls and guardrails. He had walked that path… so many times.
Hiroto let himself fall on his pilot seat and let out a heavy breath. He studied the feed of the console: the hydrogen extractors failed more and more to build the fuel that the engines turned into antimatter to feed Amaterasu. How his ship slowly died. One mishap here, another there.
He could barely remember his youth. Had he ever thought everything would end like this? Sure, he knew it was a possibility, a risk they were all taking. But he had never turned his sight away from that dream that didn’t exist anymore.
“I don’t know how I didn’t lose my head all these years,” he thought, but he wasn’t sure he hadn’t. How could he? He was alone. He had been alone for a long time now.
“It was when we decided to not have children,” he thought. The moment where he finally gave up hope. A new generation could have prolonged Amaterasu’s trip for a couple decades, perhaps. But to subject his children to the destiny that awaited him, right now? He could never do that to Junko.
And that choice had marked the difference between him and the man who had given him life so Hiroto could chase that egoist dream.
The old man, almost as an afterthought, realized his ship barely generated enough energy to keep the ship’s systems online. It was today, then. When everything ended. No more energy meant no more jumps and the computer that held the secret of the road home had never even come close to figuring it out. Hiroto realized he didn’t feel anything over it: not anger, not sadness, not even disappointment. He was spent.
“I spent so many years hating you,” he thought, thinking back to the old scientist. “But that was so long ago. In the end, neither of us got what we wanted.
“Ah, but I had her and together we saw some wonderful sights. And with Brenda, and with Xen and with Abner… We saw things no man has ever seen before. Yes, father, we are at peace.”
His trip was at its end. And soon, he would be with her. They would become a brief reference in history books, the disaster of the Amaterasu Project. Perhaps they would remember them too, back in Host. But no one would know how he had lived, and suffered and loved inside that ship, his life would disappear inside the empty shell of Amaterasu. He was at peace with that. And yet…
He decided for a last act of defiance. A waste of energy he would never have allowed even a year before. A last message.
“Will the transmitters still work?” he wondered. “I remember Brenda used them when the hosts contacted us. Perhaps I can use them one more time.”
Deep in the entrails of space, who would find him? But he had an idea; the same one, perhaps, that his father had had so many years ago: Maybe someone else succeeds where I failed. Maybe the dream doesn’t have to die today.
The message he sent was the following: “here rests the Amaterasu. In his insides lived and fought Junko and Xen and Brenda and Abner and Hiroto. They chased, to the limits of their strength, a dream they shared with all of mankind, and more. Know that in this ship we have loved and dreamt.”
The transmitters worked. He would need to take energy of other systems so the ship could broadcast continuously, but that didn’t matter now. It could take from everywhere, except the garden. Even life-support. Hiroto could feel anyway how his heart-beat slowed. That had been his last work. For the first time in the history of the Amaterasu, the transmitters burned at full power.
Let the ship speak as long and as far away as it could. Xen would have called it her own song for the void.
Satisfied, Hiroto rested against his pilot seat and closed his eyes. Soon… Maybe he would even reach the gardens if he hurried.
He opened his eyes again, surprised, when a sound that he had heard but once before, called on his computer’s screen. It was the sound of an incoming message. Hiroto received it with shaking fingers.
“We are your sons and your brothers. We have looked for many years, Amaterasu, flying after your trail. We are the heirs of your dream and we are many, now. Soon you will be home.”
Hiroto was short of breath. He could barely grasp what he was reading… How? Was it even possible? The message came with its origin coordinates. The computer of the ship processed them and it returned a pair of coordinates whose registry was already on the ship.
The message had come from somewhere he had jumped before… And then, suddenly, he understood the implications of what the computer had just done.
The only way of understanding those coordinates…
And not even finished thinking it, a single word appeared on all the screens of the cabin. “So
lving,” followed by a gigantic list of numbers and mathematical algorithms… no, it was a list. Of coordinates.
“Two pairs it could compare against each other… That’s what it needed,” Hiroto thought, while the numbers danced in front of him. “They never stopped believing in the dream, after all. They must have followed our steps… not only choosing a random point, but going after the road we left behind.”
Every time he jumped, the Amaterasu produced two pairs of coordinates: In and Out. In the end, the ships of Humanity must’ve reached Host. And there they would have found the registry of the messages Brenda had exchanged with the planet from the ship. There were coordinates there, too. And after feeding those to the computers…
Maybe Brenda had lived long enough to see what happened, then.
They must’ve chased after Hiroto for years, seeing how Amaterasu slowly left them behind at each jump. After all, the prototypes his father had designed couldn’t be replicated until decades after. But eventually, they gained ground. And today…
Hiroto’s finger rushed to input orders to the computer. He could feel his heart beat at full speed. He needed to see it.
And in front of him, the computer was placing a massive number of dots, an amount as big as the stars he had seen on a clear night back when he lived on Earth. Every single dot had been a jump Amaterasu made. He couldn’t remember them all.
Hiroto connected those in lines that extended all around the screen, in every direction, growing more and more. Millions. He and his friends had jumped millions of times, randomly, all over the universe and now he saw the fruit of that labor: Connected, the dots formed a map. The web of coordinates looked vaguely as a sphere on its perimeter, and on the inside of that sphere, the universe extended.
Hiroto waited until the computer finished the registry of all the coordinates he had chased following his father’s dream. His dream. When it was over, he realized he couldn’t feel his heart-beat anymore. He didn’t care.
In the screen in front of him, the map created after the trail of the Amaterasu had become a light guide that crossed the vastness of space. A brilliant road that would forever destroy the darkness and would forever guide mankind back home to the people they loved.
It was his legacy. And it was so beautiful.
In front of Hiroto, the Road of Fire extended.
Quark and the Martian Vampire
It was in Mr. Danglers’ funeral that Quark realized no one knew where, exactly, Old Sullivan had come from or what exactly he did around the Colony. Stranger still, no one seemed to care.
“I don’t know why the burial has to be in Administration,” Quark told his dad, hours before; while the man drove the buggy towards the main complex, where the burial was taking place. “It’s boring. I think Mr. Danglers would have liked to rest in his garden, that’s where he spent most of his time. I don’t think he liked the Bureau.”
“It’s a symbolic ceremony, kiddo,” his dad answered, eyes fixed on the treacherous Mars surface. The road had been paved years before, by the workers and robots of the colony. But no one told the red planet that, and sometimes huge stones, sharp as swords, would appear in the middle of the road and destroy even the reinforced tires of the buggies. “It means every settler is the heart of the Colony, so they go to the central building when they die. So future generations can remember the sacrifice of those who came before them and feel that they, too, are part of the same whole.”
Quark grumped in the backseat of the buggy. Yes, that was the official explanation, he knew that. He was eleven, not deaf. But the fact was, Mr. Danglers never gave one ounce of care to the Bureau. He had always cancelled his vote on the elections and frequently told Quark that he would be happy if everyone left him alone in his botanical garden. Maybe then he could do some god-darned science for once, instead of dealing with meddling kids messing up his tomatoes.
He knew that, because, when Mr. Danglers talked about meddling kids, he mostly meant Quark and his friends: Orion and Lizzy. They were the only kids in the settlement —plus a bunch of newborns—, because it was the first Mars Colony in history. That made him “the future generation” his dad liked to talk about.
“I just think he would have been happier in his garden, that’s all,” said Quark, looking out of the window. He was sad, but he would not cry. He was a Martian, and Martians had to be tough because the Red Planet was tough. He could also decide what it meant to be a Martian man, because he was the first. This point had been hotly debated with his friends, but he defended his birthright fiercely.
“Well, I think he would have been happier not dying at all,” said his dad with joviality. He looked at Quark’s mom, who was sitting on the copilot seat, combing her hair with one hand and with the other checking the last geothermic data the lab had sent them.
“That’s not an option,” Quark said, with grim dignity. He looked outside the window, dramatically, and sighed, watching the endless rocky terrain and jagged mountains extending over the horizon. “Us Martians know the Red Planet claims everyone in the end. So we choose to meet our fates with dignity—” he was going to add something about ‘the few, the proud,’ but his dad interrupted his inspiration most rudely, by laughing uproariously.
“You should meet your fate with dignity, Captain Quark, and do your homework. You have a test soon enough.”
Quark went red with indignation. What was that spiel about homework? Had the man no sense of honor, no sense of duty? Quark had to go and pay his respects to a fallen comrade! “I swear something is wrong with these earthlings,” he thought. “They have no respect.”
“Now, now, kids,” her mother interjected at that moment, without looking up from her thermal reports, “don’t fight in the buggy.”
“I’m not a kid!” they said, in unison.
Since the Administrative Complex was the heart and mind of the Colony, it was bigger than the standard habitat Quark’s family lived in. It was a group of interconnected buildings around a central structure, knit closely together. Inside you could find gardens, a school and even a cinema. His mother had once told him the original plans for the project involved a huge polyplastic dome. It would contain all the habitats now spread around the surface of the Colony; and each dome would be one different Colony, connected to others with special shuttles. It would feel just like Earth.
Sadly, the project was scrapped when someone pointed out that even the resistant polyplastic could collapse during a marsquake, or a rock hitting it during a dust-storm (it turned out this was an unfounded fear, since Mars dust storms were nowhere as mean as they had thought), or simply a small meteorite could puncture it. Then the settlers would die, because that’s what Mars did to people caught in its atmosphere without spacesuits.
So the Colony consisted of low, heavy, sturdy buildings mostly made by robots. Those mined and processed materials right here on Mars, years before Quark’s parents, and Mr. Danglers and everyone else had set foot on the planet. Most of the robots were still operative, and constantly working. Quark had learned in school that in the next ten years, plan was to double the Colony in size. Of course, Earth didn’t say much these days, so the project probably was scrapped.
His father drove up towards the Buggy landing zone, which served as an airlock; and called his arrival by radio. The computer hailed him and lowered the steel gate. Minutes later, Quark and his parents were walking through the reinforced passageways towards the Administrative building. For Quark it was a usual route, because his father and he used it every workday so Quark could go to school in the main Administrative building.
Quark spent the time raising a dignified complaint about his space-suit, “I’m tired of wearing it indoors every time I come here. I don’t mind it on planet-side excursions, but here? I’m the only one doing it.”
“Your friends have to wear it, too,” said his dad. “It’s a rule, kid. We have enough suits for adults stashed everywhere in case of depressurization. But you are still growing, it would be wasteful
to make new ones every couple of months.”
Martians shouldn’t waste resources, that one hit true. Quark let the matter drop, at least for today. His back itched, but he couldn’t scratch with the metal and plastic alloy covering his skin, could he?
The funeral services advanced in the main structure, at the park in front of the Bureau offices. It was not far from the room the Colony used as school.
Quark’s family was the last to arrive, but that was reasonable, since they lived the farthest away and had some equipment that needed constant checking. Everyone was there: about two hundred adults plus three kids and some babies. Technicians, scientists, engineers, bureaucrats, robotic-experts, astronomy specialists. Quark’s dad liked to say the Colony had one of the highest concentrations of Ph.Ds. in history. Quark had noted that even the man who had fixed some plumbing issue last month in his home had two of those.
And everyone was wearing black jumpsuits. Except Quark, of course, who was wearing space-suit orange, which clashed with the grim, serious atmosphere of the service.
“I don’t think Mr. Danglers would have minded,” he thought, while he walked to the park, behind his parents, “he mostly hung around in overalls. I think he talked to his tomatoes. He would probably have felt just as out of place as I do.”
His parents took their place in the circle that had formed around the center of the park, next to Mr. Gills, the chemist, and Mrs. Xin, the doctor. This year’s Bureau chief was Bob Cunningham; it was him talking at the podium in the middle of the park. Next to him, a technician whose name Quark didn’t know carried the urn where Mr. Danglers’ ashes rested.
“Dear friends,” Cunningham said, “we are gathered here to mourn the passing of a brave man. Henry Danglers was a treasured member of this community and his loss will be felt by each of us. When we volunteered to face this cruel harsh planet in name of humanity we…”