Arkwright

by Allen Steele

  This data was the voice of Galactique. The ship was already three and a half light-years from Earth the day my father took me in his lap and, in a moment of sobriety that was becoming increasingly scarce, patiently explained what he and Mom and Grandpa and Grandma and Uncle Win and Aunt Martha did for a living: they were listening for reports sent from a vessel on a long, long journey to a distant star, waiting for the day many years in the future—sometime in July 2135, in fact—when we would finally learn that it had safely arrived.

  “See, everything the ship tells us about what it’s doing comes to us here.” Dad shifted me from one knee to another as he pointed to the holoscreen floating before us. “All those numbers are codes, and the codes let us know that the ship is doing just fine.”

  “Uh-huh.” I gnawed the knuckle of my left thumb as I gazed at the glowing columns of letters and digits. “I don’t know what they mean.” I was pretty smart for a seven-year-old, but not that smart.

  “Don’t do that.” Dad gently pried my thumb from my mouth. “It’ll make your teeth crooked. Sure, you don’t know what they mean, because they’re in code—short for what the ship wants to tell us. But since we know what the codes stand for, we can figure it all out, and if they tell us something’s going wrong, we can tell the ship how to correct itself and make things right.”

  “Although it takes a while,” Grandpa added. My grandfather was seated in a chair on the other side of the ring, studying another display as he listened to us. “We can’t tell at once what Galactique is telling us because it’s so far away, and Galactique won’t know what we’re telling it for the same reason.”

  “I don’t understand.” I fidgeted in my father’s lap, but nonetheless, I was fascinated. I tended to chew my thumb when I was trying to figure something out. “Why does it take so long?”

  “How fast does light travel? Do you remember?”

  “Umm”—I sought to remember what Uncle Win had taught me just last week—“186,000 miles per second.”

  “That’s right! Good girl! And that’s also how far the laser beam carrying data from Galactique travels in one second. It can’t travel any faster because a laser is just a concentrated form of light, and…?” He waited for an answer.

  “Nothing moves faster than light!” I was proud of myself for knowing what Dad meant. “Nothing! Nothing at all!”

  “Okay, so let’s figure it out. How many seconds are in a year?”

  “Ummmm…” I started to raise my knuckle to my mouth, and he pulled it away again. “A lot?”

  “That’s as good an answer as any. A lot. And if you multiply all those seconds by 186,000, and then take that number and multiply it by”—Dad paused to run his forefinger down the display, pulling up the figure for Galactique’s current distance from Earth—“3.523 lights, or light-years, that’s how far away the ship is from us. Which means that it now takes three and a half years for us to hear anything Galactique has to say to us and another three and a half years for it to hear anything we’d have to say to it today.”

  I stared at the holo. “Three and half years?”

  “Uh-huh. And getting longer all the time.”

  I remember that day well, for in that instant, I had an epiphany seldom experienced by little girls and sometimes never fully realized by quite a few adults: a sense of the vastness of space and time, the sheer enormity of the cosmos. Not only was the distance between the stars greater than I’d thought it was, but the implication that the universe itself was unimaginably huge was a revelation both awesome and frightening.

  Suddenly, I’d become a tiny and inconsequential little thing. The bottom had dropped out from under me, and I was an insignificant particle of a far greater whole.

  I shivered. The hollow concrete eggshell of the MC had become a cold and forbidding place. I had an urge to scramble out of my father’s lap and run from the building, never to return again. But Dad put his arms around me and pulled me closer, and then he whispered something in my ear that I’d never forget.

  “Do you want to know a secret?”

  I looked at him. “What?”

  Dad glanced over his shoulder to make sure that Grandpa wasn’t listening in. Satisfied that he wasn’t, he went on. “There’s a little boy aboard Galactique.”

  “Really?” I was astonished.

  “Shh!” Dad raised a finger to his lips. “Yes, there is. He’s asleep just now and won’t wake up until Galactique reaches Eos, but yes, he’s there. And it’s our job to make sure he gets safely to the place where he’s going. Understand?”

  “Uh-huh.” I thought about this a moment. “Dad, what’s his name?”

  My father hesitated, and then he gave me an answer. “Sanjay.”

  3

  Later in life, I’d often wonder why my father told me that this imaginary child was a boy and why he’d picked the name Sanjay. Perhaps it was only a spur-of-the-moment decision, the sort of embellishment a father would add to a fairy tale. Yet it’s also possible that he might have been revealing a subconscious regret. Maybe he’d wanted a boy instead of a girl, and he would have named this boy Sanjay if things had been different.

  Yet this didn’t occur to me at the time. The revelation that there was a little boy asleep on Galactique provoked a different kind of wonder. As I lay in bed that night, the lights turned off and the blankets pulled up against the winter cold, I didn’t sleep but instead gazed up at the ceiling, thinking about Sanjay. Dad told me very little about him, but it didn’t matter; my imagination supplied the details, and before long, he became as real to me as any living person.

  Sanjay was my age, naturally, and like me, he also had the dark skin and straight black hair of someone with an Indian-American heritage. He slept in what my father called “suspended animation” because that was the only way he’d be able to survive the half-century-long voyage to Eos, but I figured that, every now and then, he’d wake up, knuckle the crust from his eyes, and then rise from his little bed and wander through the ship just to see what was going on. In my mind’s eye, Galactique was very different from what it actually was; it was the kind of spaceship I was familiar with from the old science fiction movies I sometimes watched with Uncle Win, who had a fondness for such things. Sanjay would gaze through portholes at the passing stars, have a cup of hot chocolate and a cookie, check the instruments to make sure the ship was still on course, and then get sleepy and return to bed again.

  No one knew about Sanjay except my father. The little boy was a shared secret that we tacitly agreed to keep from my mother, grandparents, and the Crosbys. And since I’d found that there was little I could talk about with the few other children I knew—the two girls, Joni and Sara Ogilvy, were only interested in their dolls and the pony they wouldn’t let me ride, and I tried to avoid seeing the boy, Teddy Romero, who was scary and a little mean—I didn’t reveal his existence to them. Which was just as well. Sanjay was just as lonely as I was, which made me feel a certain kinship toward him. He was the little brother I didn’t have, the playmate I’d been denied. He became a friend I’d never actually met yet with whom I carried on many conversations, always when I was certain no one else was around.

  As imaginary friends go, Sanjay was wonderful. Nonetheless, I was aware of the fact that my little chats were rather one-sided and that he wasn’t really talking to me. I also knew that, even if he did occasionally wake from his long slumber, anything that he might actually want to say to me wouldn’t be heard for years. Still, I wanted very much to speak to him. I considered the problem for quite a while, and then one day, I approached my father with my solution.

  “I want to send a message to Sanjay,” I said.

  It was an afternoon in late spring. The winter snows had melted, and there were new leaves on the trees. My father was behind the observatory, standing on a stepladder to clean the solar panels that, along with a small wind turbine on a nearby hilltop, supplied Juniper Ridge with its electricity. His eyes were puffy—he’d slept on the living room co
uch again, having come home from the Kick Inn late the night before—but he managed a smile as he climbed down the ladder to patiently listen while I explained what I wanted.

  “You know it’ll take a long time for it to get there,” he said when I was done.

  “Yeah, I know. But he can hear it when he—” I stopped myself. Dad didn’t know that Sanjay wasn’t always asleep. “Whenever he wakes up,” I finished.

  My father nodded but didn’t say anything as he wiped his hands on the cloth he’d been using to clear the spring pollen from the photovoltaic cells. “It’s very expensive to send a signal to Galactique,” he said at last. “If I let you do this, it can only be one time. And you’ll have to make it very short—no more than a minute. Understand?”

  A minute seemed much too short for everything I wanted to say to my friend. “All right. Just a minute. Please, Dad.”

  “Okay, then. We have to send some course data next Wednesday, anyway. Write down what you want to say and show it to me first, and if I think it’s short enough, I’ll let you record it, and we’ll attach it to the next pulse.” He paused. “But don’t let anyone else know you’re doing this, okay? Sanjay is still our little secret.”

  I grinned and happily nodded, and over the next week, I wrote a short script for what I wanted to say. Knowing that I had only sixty seconds, I rewrote it again and again, pruning unnecessary words and revising my thoughts, and then I carefully rehearsed it while keeping an eye on the clock to make sure that I didn’t exceed the time limit. The following Tuesday, I showed the handwritten script to my father while he was standing watch in the MC. He liked what I had to say but made me read it aloud while he timed me. Satisfied, he told me to come back the next night, which was when he was scheduled to send the transmission.

  The scheme almost fell through at the last minute. After dinner, I walked over to the dome at the appointed hour only to discover that Dad and I weren’t alone. Uncle Win was there too, and while he and I got along just fine, when it came to Galactique, he tended to be rather humorless, often saying that keeping track of the ship was “a sacred trust.” He wouldn’t understand the notion of sending a nonessential video to the ship.

  Dad caught my eye when I came in, and he silently placed a finger to his lips. I kept the message in my pocket and remained quiet while he and Uncle Win checked and rechecked the coded material they were preparing to transmit. Then Dad drained the last of the coffee in his mug, idly wished aloud that he had more, and asked Winston if he’d mind going back to the house and brewing another pot. Uncle Win was a coffee bug, and everyone was in favor of doing whatever it took to keep Dad away from the Kick Inn, so he was only too happy to comply.

  As soon as he was gone, my father hustled me to a chair in front of the console where the videocam was located. He fitted me with a headset and did a brief mike check and then stepped out of range of the lens. “We’re all set,” he said, pointing to the keyboard. “Whenever you’re ready, just push the Enter key and start talking.”

  “Okay.” I spread the wrinkled notebook pages out on the console.

  “You’ve only got one shot at this. Make it count.”

  “Okay. I will.” I took a deep breath, nervously fussed with my appearance. I was wearing my nicest blouse and skirt and had even put a little yellow silk flower in my hair. Then I touched the key and looked straight at the lens.

  “Hello, Sanjay,” I began. “My name is Dhanishta Arkwright Skinner, and I’m calling you from Earth…”

  4

  Sanjay wasn’t real, but thinking about him so much accustomed me to imagining Galactique in vivid terms, so it was easy for me to visualize what was happening there.

  A little more than three and a half years later, my message was received by the ship, along with a related set of instructions my father hadn’t told me about. Since they were prefixed as a nonessential communiqué not to be opened until after the ship reached Gliese 667C-e, the AI stored them in memory and then proceeded to the more important material.

  Galactique’s course was taking it in the general direction of the galactic center, just below the plane of ecliptic. By then, the ship’s point of origin was no longer visible; Earth’s sun, along with its family of planets and neighboring stars, had vanished into a conical zone of darkness that had appeared behind the ship. The same Doppler effect caused by the ship’s relativistic velocity—a little more than 93,000 miles per second—caused the stars around and in front of Galactique to redshift, changing hues slightly as they seemingly migrated in the direction of travel, while at the same time causing infrared and ultraviolet sources to enter the visible spectrum as seemingly new stars.

  If there had been any living passengers aboard, they would have been confused by the display. Galactique’s AI, along with the array of lesser computers it managed, was prepared for these phenomena. The navigation subroutines ignored the visual distortions and instead took their bearings from galactic coordinates, taking into account the parallax motions of the nearby stars. There was little chance that the ship would get lost on its way to Eos, but just to make sure, Juniper Ridge periodically transmitted navigational updates.

  In turn, Galactique responded by confirming its status, using the twin high-powered lasers that had been elevated from its service module shortly after launch. The beamsail itself, no longer serving as the propulsion system, now performed a second role as the ship’s receiving antenna, using sensors threaded through its carbon-mesh surface.

  On the whole, though, the ship’s navigation system was mainly autonomous. It had to be. Although the time dilation effect of .5c caused the hours to pass more slowly aboard Galactique than they did on Earth, many years went by between the moment the ship sent back its confirmation signal and the moment it was received on Juniper Ridge.

  I was fifteen years old when I learned that the message I’d sent Sanjay had been heard.

  5

  This was one of the few good things that happened to me in that year of my life. When my grandfather, who’d read the message the night before during his watch in the MC, told me about it the following morning over breakfast, it came as a poignant reminder of one of the last fond memories I had of my father, who was no longer living on Juniper Ridge.

  Dad had become tired of the observatory’s isolation. As the years went by, he gradually came to regret leaving behind the freewheeling life he’d led before rejoining his family and sharing their commitment to the Galactique Project. He’d been a drifter before then, and as he approached his forties, he began to miss his old ways. My father still loved me, but relations with my mother had become strained. They still slept in the same bed, but days would go by when they wouldn’t even look at one another, let alone share a kiss. The Kick Inn had become the center of his social life, and there were nights when he didn’t even bother to come home but instead crashed on the couch of one of his drinking buddies.

  We didn’t know it, but he’d also met a local woman, a lady named Sally Metcalfe, who liked single-malt whiskey as much as he did. Their friendship didn’t become a full-blown affair for quite a while, but it wasn’t lost on Mom that her husband’s eye had begun to wander. She never fully recovered from the head injury she’d sustained years earlier, and her distrust of outsiders soon extended to Dad as well. I often heard my parents arguing from the other side of the wall that separated my bedroom from theirs, and although my grandparents tried to bring peace to the family, it was becoming increasingly obvious that, little by little, Dad was withdrawing from us.

  One Saturday afternoon shortly after my fifteenth birthday, I went with Grandpa and Grandma on a shopping trip to Pittsfield, the nearest large town. Uncle Win and Aunt Martha were in California for an astrophysics conference at UC–Davis, and Dad claimed to not be feeling well, so we left Mom in the MC while we went to buy new clothes for me.

  Pittsfield shopping trips were always special, and I didn’t get new clothes as often as I would have liked. It was a happy day for me until we returned.
The first thing we noticed when we pulled up in front of the house was that Dad’s car was missing.

  Mom was still in the observatory, analyzing the latest data received from Galactique, so she was completely unaware that, sometime in the last several hours, he had thrown his clothes into a couple of suitcases, left a brief, impersonal note on the kitchen table—Going away for a while. Don’t call me … I’ll come back when I’m ready!—and taken off.

  Grandpa tried calling him anyway, but he never received an answer. Although my father’s car was found in the parking lot of the Boston transtube station, his phone’s GPS locator remained active for a few days, so Grandpa was able to track Dad’s westward route on the tube through New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, until the signal vanished in Indiana. Apparently, Dad remembered that he could be traced that way and ditched the phone while changing trains at the Indianapolis station. Grandma went into Crofton and visited the Kick Inn, and from its denizens, she confirmed what Mom had suspected: Dad had been seeing another woman, and apparently she’d persuaded him to run away with her. Where they were headed, though, was anyone’s guess. The drunks only knew that Sally used to live “somewhere out west” and that she’d often talked about going back.

  I spent the next couple of days in my room, lying in bed with the blankets pulled up over my head, refusing to talk to anyone. Through the wall, I often heard Mom crying. Sometimes we both wept at the same time, but never together. Truth is, I had never been as close to my mother as I’d been to my father. Mom had always been a little aloof, preferring the role of tutor and disciplinarian, while Dad had been the one who gave me piggyback rides when I was little, took me hiking and swimming in the summer and snowshoeing in the winter (when he wasn’t drinking, that is), and told me about Sanjay.