The Voyage of the White Cloud

by M. Darusha Wehm

  “You’ll only need to hide for a generation, two at the most,” Sunni said. She was whispering, even though there was no one else in the room. Hélène was keeping watch outside and they’d decided not to even tell Linae. Sunni told herself that the fewer people who knew about this, the easier it would be to keep the secret, but she worried that Linae wouldn’t approve.

  Since the machine had gone online, Sunni had found herself drifting apart from Linae. Maybe it was the lack of a common focus, maybe it was Linae’s blind acquiescence to the council’s requirements. Regardless, Sunni had found herself spending more time with Hélène and now she didn’t think she could possibly talk to Linae about their plans. She hoped that once the new constructs were installed in the machine and the Hélène construct was safely hidden away, that things might go back to normal.

  “When we gave the council the requirements for installing the new Ghosts,” she said to the machine, “we gave them the net details—the schematics with you already in there. If you stay inaccessible for, say, a hundred years, there’s no way they’ll ever know you’re there.”

  The image on the screen shook her head. “I hope you’re right,” she said. “Do you think they would erase me if they found me?”

  Sunni shook her head, but said, “I don’t think so. But really, I don’t understand their thinking at all. Part of me worries that this is all about controlling information, making sure that the council can determine what version of history is passed on.”

  “People have always tried to control how they are remembered,” Hélène said. “I’ll do my best.”

  “That’s all any of us can do,” Sunni said. She smiled at the image of her friend one last time, then began to type the commands which would hide the construct program. She felt her stomach lurch as the screen winked out and the image of Hélène disappeared. She had to blink back tears as she finished.

  “How did it go?” Hélène asked as Sunni crept out of the room.

  “Okay,” Sunni said and turned to her friend. “Do you think we did the right thing?”

  “About what? Hiding the construct? Going along with the council?”

  “No,” Sunni said, “building the machine in the first place. There’s something terrible about watching someone just turn off like that…” She saw a look pass over Hélène’s face and reached out to touch her arm. “She’s fine. She said so herself. She would have told us if it was… unpleasant.”

  Hélène didn’t say anything for a moment, her eyes looking at something in the distance only she could see. “I’m sure you’re right,” she said.

  Chapter 20

  The Last Hero

  Kris stared out the porthole, the deepness of space vast and empty before her. There was nothing to see, but she wan’t really looking. It had been four days since the funeral ended. The long, interminable funeral.

  The entire ship grieved for Moana, the last of the original crew. Moana Hue, the last hero of the White Cloud. Everyone aboard paid tribute to her, bemoaned the loss to their culture, declared how special she was to them all, but she was Kris’s mother. Where was her private grief? Where was her moment to weep not for the end of an era, but for her personal loss?

  Something caught her eye and she momentarily thought it was something outside the ship, but it was just a reflection in the port. She turned to see Captain Toov standing behind her. “How are you holding up?”

  Kris shrugged. “Mum was old. We all knew it would happen sooner or later. But…”

  The captain took a step toward her and put a hand on her shoulder. She squeezed lightly. “It don’t think it matters how much we’re prepared for it,” the captain said, “it still hurts when they go.” Kris nodded. “We can manage a few days without you, if you want to take some time.”

  “Thanks,” Kris said, “but I think I need the distraction.”

  The captain nodded. “Well, if you change your mind, just say the word. I know you haven’t really had a lot of time to take care of yourself.”

  “I’ll be okay,” Kris said and she believed it. With her mother being the last living original crew member, she had been the last of her peers to have her parent die. She knew that she would be fine, everyone else was fine. It was the way of life. Everything that lives will die. She knew all this. But somehow it didn’t feel normal. It felt like the end of everything.

  “How are you doing, mum?” Penny leaned against the doorjamb, her brows furrowed. Kris almost laughed—she had the concerned parent look down pat.

  “Everyone keeps asking me that,” Kris said. “Do I look like I’m about to have a breakdown or something?”

  “No.” Her daughter was so much like a mother hen, Kris sometimes wondered where she got her personality. She didn’t know much about the sperm she’d used to get pregnant—all they did was make sure there wouldn’t be some kind of genetic problem. Otherwise it was lucky dip. She guessed that the seed stock must have had a particularly nurturing temperament. “We’re just concerned. It’s a hard time for you right now.”

  Kris bit back a snarky reply. It was hard to remember that her daughter was an adult woman, soon to be a mother herself. She had opinions, ideas and knew probably at least as much about life as Kris did herself. It just felt wrong to be given advice by her own child. “Thanks for worrying about me,” Kris said, “but I’ll be all right. Everyone is looking out for me, I’ve got more than enough support. Really, I could probably use being left alone more than anything.”

  Penny looked hurt and Kris instantly regretted her choice of words. “I don’t mean you,” she said, taking her daughter’s hand and pulling her fully into the quarters they’d shared until recently. “Come on, why don’t I let you make me some dinner and we’ll talk, okay?”

  “Sounds good, mum,” Penny said and started rummaging around in the small galley. Kris sank into a chair and marvelled at how what had started out as her daughter comforting her had turned itself around to the opposite.

  Kris walked on to the bridge, the proposal for a new collision-avoidance protocol open on her handheld. She’d stared at it for most of the previous evening, then had finally just gone to bed when she noticed that she hadn’t scrolled past the first few paragraphs. She wondered if maybe the captain was right, and she should take a few days off. But what would she do? Let Penny fuss over her and drive her insane? Hide in her quarters watching stories and brooding? She couldn’t imagine anything other than work that would make her feel normal again, and so here she was taking her watch on the bridge.

  Her mother hadn’t been part of the bridge crew, but one of her closest friends was the navigator. Kris had grown up listening to Yolanda telling stories about the years of calculations that went into the journey, the thrill of liftoff, the terrifying first few years of the journey. Kris had found the technical talk enchanting, and a welcome relief from most of her mother’s friends’ discussions of old Earth, building a new society, and men. They talked a lot about men.

  Kris, obviously, would never meet a man. To hear most of the members of her mother’s generation talk, this was either the greatest tragedy of their circumstances or the main reason they’d volunteered for the mission. Kris didn’t understand, and honestly wished they would stop talking about it. They were stuck with the reality they had, and besides, the choice they’d made to have an all-woman crew was logical.

  The ship had to be a light as possible at initial launch, but they would need food for the initial journey and equipment to build a whole society. The only way to make it work was to start with just a few dozen people, but there wouldn’t be enough genetic diversity among a few dozen to start a whole new chapter of humanity. Indeed, there wouldn’t be among their children and grandchildren either. So it was decided.

  The best answer was to launch an extensive sperm bank with an all-woman crew. Of course, it was unfair, but many more people would have liked to be aboard the White Cloud than it could possibly hold anyway, women and men. Necessity trumps inclusion.

&nbs
p; Kris thought about necessity a lot. Even when she was young, she knew that she wanted to be one of the people who made the ship work. She studied science and engineering, but the concepts were like foam. The more she tried to hold on to them, the more quickly they dissolved away. She still clearly remembered a moment from her childhood: she would have been about thirteen years old and desperately struggling in school. She came home one day to find Yolanda visiting her mother. The two women were drinking spirits—a controversial act. One of the maintenance technicians had began fermenting and distilling the drink and there was a small uproar among some of the people on board. Kris was mildly shocked to see her favourite adult indulging in this new vice. Her mother, on the other hand, didn’t surprise her at all.

  “Hiya, kiddo,” Yolanda said, slipping off the stool she’d been sitting on and coming over to Kris. She smelled a bit funny as she gave Kris a quick hug, but she let it go. “How’s my future pilot?”

  Kris never knew exactly what set her off. The realization that Yolanda was as human as her mother? The afternoon she’d spent sweating over a calculus problem that she still didn’t understand in the least? Whatever it was, without warning her throat closed up and tears sprang to her eyes.

  She was mortified. She did not want Yolanda to see her cry. She couldn’t speak and still keep the tears at bay, so she just ran into the small room she had in her mother’s quarters. She closed the door, flopped on to the bed, and jammed a pillow over her head. She cried as quietly as she could.

  Yolanda was good about it. She and her mother left Kris alone that night and even though her mother interrogated her the next morning, Kris didn’t care what she thought. She just mumbled something about hormones, her mother nodded sagely, and that was the end of it. When she ran into Yolanda in the canteen a few days later, though, Kris felt her chest tighten as soon as she saw her mother’s friend standing in line for breakfast. She fought the urge to just leave, but she was hungry and if she didn’t eat then she’d either be late for her physics class or she wouldn’t get another chance to eat for hours. Neither option was appealing, so she swallowed her fear and got in the line.

  “Maybe she won’t see me,” Kris thought, but as soon as Yolanda had gotten her bowl of rice and beans, their eyes met. Kris tried to pretend that she hadn’t seen anything, but Yolanda came right over.

  “Come sit with me,” she said. “Make me forget that I’m eating pinto gallo for the eight hundredth day in a row.”

  “Uh, okay,” Kris said, wishing there were some way to avoid this conversation. She got her breakfast and slipped into a chair across from Yolanda without catching her eye. She began to eat methodically.

  “Have you ever met Dionne?” Yolanda asked between bites. Kris shook her head. “You know she’s the ship’s mate—the second in command?” Kris nodded. “She’s great. Really keeps things together on the bridge. When I was studying, she used to come and give me tutorials. Not on the math and science, I was fine with all that. But about discipline, honour, service. The things that I never really had a lot of time for, but that I learned make all the difference between a successful crew and a merely competent one. Without her help I never would have become the navigator, hell I probably wouldn’t have made on to the final crew list at all.”

  “Okay,” Kris said, wondering what this reminiscence had to do with anything. She was nearly done her pinto, though, so she was pretty sure she could get away before this conversation took any more strange turns.

  “Yeah, there are a lot of different skills that we need on the bridge, and once it’s all up to you new generation, that’s going to be even more true. I think it’s easier for us in some ways. Sure, a lot of us miss home—I mean old Earth. But we all chose to be here. We’re heroes, at least in our own minds.” She laughed. “But your generation and those who come after have to do the real work of keeping this rust bucket running. And making sure that society stays alive, too. It’s not easy, the legacy we’ve left you.” She put down her fork and looked at Kris. She felt like Yolanda’s eyes were boring into her. “I know you can do it.”

  She stood and picked up her breakfast dishes. As she walked away she said, “Oh yeah, and Dionne? She can’t even add two and two without a computer.”

  “Good to see you, sir,” Andie, the navigator said, slipping out of Kris’s way as she headed for her desk. Andie had replaced Yolanda a few years back, shortly before Yolanda had died. Kris was still in training then, officer training at Yolanda’s encouragement. She had so wanted to see Yolanda’s proud face among the audience at her graduation. She was certain that if it hadn’t been for that awkward breakfast, she’d have failed to gain entry to any engineering program and would have spent her life bitterly engaged in some desperate third or fourth choice job. Her mother hadn’t understood what drove her, her only advice that she aim for a career doing something less challenging.

  “You don’t have to work so hard,” she often said. “There’s so much more to life than work—family, friends, love, art. Why not find something that comes easily, that you’re good at, or at least that brings you joy? It’s so hard to watch you struggle.”

  She never understood and Kris never learned how to explain it. Kris sometimes thought that there was something fundamentally different between those who had grown up with dirt under their feet, on a planet that might have been dying but that was still inherently hospitable to life. The ship was comfortable enough, but there was never a second of doubt that, in space, life was a profoundly unnatural state.

  Once in the later stages of her training, Kris spent an evening drinking with a couple of her fellow students. It must have been shortly after Yolanda died—Kris was never much of a drinker. They were talking about their parents, life, the usual things people just embarking upon adulthood tend to contemplate.

  “Sometimes I think my mother has a sense of entitlement that I just can’t understand,” Kris said, passing the bottle across the table.

  “I know,” Rachel said, her head nodding as if she had no control over it. “It’s like they think that there’s something special about them, about all of us, really. Like the universe ought to care or something.”

  “They started believing all the things people said about them,” Kris said, “that they were heroes, the new great explorers, saviours of humanity. I mean, come on, that’s a burden and a half to carry.”

  They’d laughed, partly at the hubris of their parents, but also because it softened their own sorrow. Because they knew the truth. They weren’t heroes, none of them. They weren’t saviours, great leaders or even cowards fleeing their responsibilities to Earth. They were just people. Fallible, weak, ambitious people.

  Now that Moana was dead, Kris couldn’t stop herself from thinking about her mother. She must have been an ambitious woman once, she’d never had gotten aboard the White Cloud otherwise. Her work was certainly important; the botanical gardens which grew their food were as crucial to the success of their journey as any other part of the ship. But she never seemed to take it very seriously. She did her work, solved problems when they arose, and seemed to enjoy it enough. But it never consumed her. There was no passion, no struggle. And to Kris that felt not only too easy, but somehow mildly offensive.

  To her, work had always been the most important thing she could imagine for her life. As a small child, she had played “manager” after visiting her mother at the agricultural centre. Her mother had told all her friends, laughing at how cute it was. It never felt cute to Kris—it was important preparation. This separation between her own values and her mother’s apparent nonchalance covered their relationship like the kinds of fungus that Moana spent her days eradicating.

  Now, as she sat at her desk on the bridge, staring blankly at a proposal she should have been able to explain in her sleep, Kris thought she maybe understood. Moana was the youngest of the initial crew members, barely in her twenties when the ship launched. It was part of the design of the mission—staggered ages as well as a diversity o
f skills. Someone had to be the one who would be last, and Moana had known that it would most likely be her. If it had been Kris, she would have spent her life focussed on that one fact. She would have let it define her, consume her, as she had her own position as ship’s mate.

  But ship’s mate, while prestigious and important, was just a job. A hundred people would hold it before the journey was over. But there could be only one last hero. And, Kris realized now, it didn’t mean anything. That was what her mother had been trying to tell her all along. That she and her drunken friends had been right—they were just people. They were all just people.

  “Can I have a word, sir?” Kris stood at the door to the captain’s study. Petra Toov looked up and smiled.

  “Of course, come on in.” Kris stepped though the entranceway and let the door close behind her. She settled into the seat across from the captain and fiddled with her handheld. She had never felt unsure of herself in this office. Even when she was pushing herself in training, struggling to be top of her class, she never felt that she didn’t belong. The bridge, even the captain’s own study, always felt more like home to her than anywhere else on the ship. Until now.

  “Kris,” the captain said after the silence had gone on too long. “You know I’m always here for you. Anything you need, you just let me know.”

  Kris bit her lower lip and nodded. She let the silence grow a little more, then said, “I never paid much attention to plants. That was mum’s thing but it didn’t interest me. I could never see myself anywhere but the bridge, so everything else was just a distraction.”

  “You’re very focussed,” the captain said.

  “I do know a little about gardening, though,” Kris went on as if the other woman hadn’t said a word. “You can’t live with the head of the agricultural program and not pick up on a few things. Light and shadow. That’s something I know. Most plants won’t thrive if they’re in another, larger plant’s shadow. The big one just pulls all the light, all the nutrients and the little one dies. It’s normal, it’s obvious, and I’ve known it all my life.” She paused again and stared off into the middle distance. “So why did it take me so long to notice that I was trying to live in my mother’s shadow? And that she spent so much of her own life trying to get out of my way?”