by J J Perry
“It has something to do with optimizing the ion engine output.”
“It seems like you would be able to figure that out in your sleep. You got your PhD when you were twenty-one?”
“Nineteen. She wants to figure this out without my help. What’s that?” Suresh pointed to a closed file on screen.
“Oh, Control sends us little advisories all the time. This is something about REAP 19.”
“Open it. What does it say?”
Raul clicked the icon and produced the brief communiqué.
REAP 19 REPORT 176, PREVIOUSLY NOT INTERPRETABLE, INDICATES THREE MALE CREW MEMBERS EXPERIENCED EMOTIONAL INSTABILITY AND VIOLENCE. BEHAVIOR NOT UNEXPECTED IN MISSIONS OF THIS LENGTH AND OUTCOME IN MINIMALLY TRAINED ASTRONAUTS.OBSERVATION ADVISED.
“Wimps,” Suresh muttered. “Mental midgets have no business up here.”
“Are you men up for a speed climb?” Cyrus asked as he entered the room.
“Not now,” Raul said. He always avoided competition, Cyrus had noted, feeling physically outmatched. “I’ve got deadlines.”
“Hey, it’s not a competition.” Cyrus lied. He thought beating the big guy would not be hard. He had a lot of weight to haul up the wall.
“Sure,” Suresh said. “We can see what Leila is up to in Engineering when we start. She excels at speed ascent.”
They took stairs down to quarters and changed clothes. Suresh checked the computer, and Leila’s locator was still in Engineering. He called her. “The king and I are coming down to enter the shaft. Want to join us for a climb?”
There was a short delay before she responded. “Hi, Suresh. I think I’ll pass for now. It looks like you are in quarters. Are you headed this way?”
“Yeah, we’ll be there in less than a minute.”
“Check. See you.”
The two men took two more flights down to the bottom floor. Cyrus activated the door to Engineering. Inside, Leila and Chen seemed deeply engaged in screens showing formulae and calculations. Suresh studied the screens for a few moments. “Optimization algorithm. How is it going?”
“Not well. We might improve performance by less than 1 percent,” Leila said. “We are running some other scenarios and parameters to see if we can get better.”
“Have you looked at boosting the voltage even higher?” Suresh asked as he looked at the data.
“We are looking at that, yes,” Leila said.
“I don’t see a second derivative of the transformer function.”
“Chen, you’ve worked up a sweat,” Cyrus observed, sensing something was not right.
“We just turned down the heat,” Chen replied. “I’m not sure why it was so hot in here.”
“I was cold this morning.” Leila glanced at Chen as she turned to Cyrus. “I turned up the heat. How are you going to climb, friction or holds?”
The shaft of the ship contained an elevator, a staircase, and several conduits for electrical, plumbing, air, and other essentials. There was an access shaft that contained rungs on one side and small nubs for climbing on the opposite wall. It was almost one meter across in the short dimension. Thus, there were three methods of ascending, the ladder, the climbing holds, or a friction climb.
“Funny,” Suresh said. “It doesn’t seem warm to me. And, to answer your question, speed using holds. Are you sure neither of you wants to climb?”
“It’s tempting,” Leila said, “but I think I’m going to work on this project for a while and hit the bike later. Go ahead.”
“I think you’re wasting your time. The engine is as efficient as it can get. I’ve been over the engineering several times.”
A short door accessed the shaft where a climbing rope dangled down the center. Harnesses were stowed in a compartment near the floor. Cyrus pulled out the gear. They each put on a harness. The rope had an auto-belay feature. There was a timer to activate at the bottom that stopped when the climber touched a knob at the top. “How about a race?” Cyrus felt confidant, since he had much less weight to haul up. “No holds, only friction first.” He challenged.
Suresh nodded then ducked through the door into the shaft. He clipped on the rope, hit the timer, and started climbing furiously. For a large man, he was fast. Cyrus looked inside to watch him ascend about fifteen meters in seconds. The competition was over to his regret.
An hour later, the two men were recovering on the second floor after a grueling workout, drinking beer. “You should be getting some good data from the telescopes and imagers at this point, Suresh.”
“The microvibrations have stopped, and the acceleration is down to just above 1 g. Image quality is quite good. We keep transmitting good data.”
“I can’t believe how fast you climb. You’re not a small guy.”
“I have done this a long time. I wonder how long this would take when we’re weightless.”
“We hibernate as soon as we’re weightless.”
“A little before, actually.” Suresh stretched and flexed.
Cyrus looked at his arms and chest. “So you like to climb with your woman?”
“Sometimes. She has a high muscle-to-mass ratio and a high percentage of fast twitch fibers.”
“Is she fast?”
“Faster than I, just barely.”
“You are a lucky man to have her. She is beautiful, athletic, and brilliant. She must be quite a wife.”
“She is a teaser.” Suresh took a long draft then exhaled as he suppressed a burp. “She had to fight off so many suitors for so long that saying no has become a habit.”
“Should a wife not serve her man, Suresh?”
“She is otherwise the model wife,” Suresh said as he regretted giving any impression that he or his life was anything but perfect.
“Women you love can be difficult to understand, even for a genius like you.”
“Women, Cy? You also have more than one?”
“Not in this life.” He chuckled then took a long pull from his frosted mug. “What did you mean by ‘also’?”
“In my culture, it is acceptable, even admirable to have more than one woman.”
“Spaniards are the greatest lovers historically, Suresh. Have you taken note of Raul and Maricia?”
“I have three wives.”
Cyrus choked and spat out some of his brew in shocked surprise. He had thought that would have been winnowed out in the psyche screening. He mopped the table with a towel. Suresh brushed scattered droplets from his forearms. “How did you do that?”
“I find them all—useful.”
“Useful.” Cyrus felt a new respect for this man. “Which of your wives do you regret leaving behind, Suresh?”
“Sari. She was the yang for Leila’s sexual yin. One woman, my friend, by millennia of experience cannot meet all the needs of a complete man.”
“Wisdom for the ages,” Cyrus said as he hoisted his mug.
They sipped beverages in the empty mess hall. The cook-bot rolled in from the galley. “Men,” he stated, “do you want more beer or advice about women?” It moved on wheels and was vaguely humanoid with a head and binocular cameras. Brushed titanium made it durable and maintenance-free. It also matched many other objects in the galley such that when it was stowed, a novice could not tell it was a robot. It had eight appendages and was nicknamed Durgon Kushman, a bastardization of an Indian goddess’s name.
“Neither. I’m full of both,” said Cyrus.
“I think you’re full of shit, that’s what I think, but, hell, I’m just a stinking galley slave. Not that you’re not a fine fellow, Officer Paria.” Today’s accent was vaguely East Coast American.
“Speech program A11 C7, 2365 World Cup Final, India versus Argentina,” Suresh said. The robot then began projecting the football game requested.
“A fan of Indian soccer,” Cyrus observed.
&
nbsp; “Yes. One should support one’s own country, don’t you think?”
“I’m an exile. Persia is a smoldering wasteland. I usually root for the underdog.”
The conversation lasted a few more minutes until it was time to shower. The cook-bot was not through with the first half.
3.0
LAUNCH + 87 DAYS
Suresh looked at the data from his mass spectrometer and his magnetic resonance meter with satisfaction. Two vials each under a separate hood looked promising. He made a fist and pumped it in front of him as if he were hammering in success. “I am king,” he said to the empty room. He was certain that one of the chemicals would make hibernation safer, a small but significant improvement of tuphalonatide.
The other vial contained yet another iteration of a series of chemicals he had prepared for his Leila. He could not understand why the others had not worked. She remained disinterested in him. This was not new, but it bothered him.
As he sat in his swiveling chair pondering how to amp up her passion, since his concoction hadn’t done a thing yet, he lit a cigar, blowing the smoke into his third and last hood to avoid triggering an alarm. There was little that could match scientific success in a knotty problem. After a while, after an inch of savored Jamaican tobacco, he had another uncomfortable thought. Maybe she had libido and… This was a disturbing idea, something he could easily check on.
Leaving his stogy smoldering where the smoke was trapped and filtered, he scooted to his desk. A few minutes later, he had written a short program that would track locators over time and in three dimensions since launch. He ran the program, and eight lines appeared, one for each person on board. Most nights, the couple’s signals would end up together in quarters. He thought he should have included heart and respiratory rates so he could tell how often each pair was copulating. Maybe later. He saw that Leila and Chen’s signals ended up close about once a day for thirty minutes or longer, sometimes two or three hours.
His mouth went dry, and his skin prickled. It was time to check on their vital signs when they were close. It didn’t take long for him to discover rising rates at many of these times.
Cuckold.
No one takes a Brahmin’s mate, his treasure. Anger surged, his nostrils flared, his breathing deepened. Of all the people on board, she was screwing Chen, the wimp, most mornings just after Suresh had dosed her with the prior iterations of the vial under hood A. The aphrodisiac was benefitting the pencil-necked captain. It was more than maddening. He slammed his fist on the counter half a dozen times, bellowing in truculent treachery.
Most of the liaisons had occurred in Engineering, the least visited section of the ship. He went through the schematics. He magnified the locator history to the maximum resolution. He spent hours reviewing the information and finally decided on a course of action. It would need their unwitting cooperation, but, given enough time, it would happen. He would have a degree of revenge and give them both a painful reward and jolt his unfaithful wife’s fidelity back to him. Jolt. He was so clever with words.
3.1
LAUNCH + 88 DAYS
Savanna and Cyrus were sitting at a tiny half-circle table in their tight bedroom. She was sipping a synthetic sauvignon blanc, while Cyrus manipulated a colorful hand puzzle, trying to align the pieces. He had just finished his shift, working most of the night. Savanna broke the silence. “Raul is in CAC, right?”
“Yawning and stretching until you take over later,” he responded.
“Is your mood any better, Cy?”
“It is strange to think that we could find nothing at the end of this trip and die in this tin can.”
“I have the feeling we’re going to make it.”
“You keep saying that. I’m not so sure. I have been recalculating the odds.”
“Doing and redoing the numbers. That’s what you do.”
“Sometimes I think it is all in vain. Some bureaucratic committee in an obscure administrative boardroom decided that we should start a project that would bring the governments of the world together in peace. They found a common enemy—extinction. Then they found a solution—some ridiculously optimistic hope in unexplored space. Then they packaged the deal so well that a bunch of suckers offered to jump into the smoking volcano as a sacrifice to the god of false hope.”
“Cyrus, where do you come up with this futility junk?”
“It oozes out of boredom.” Monotony had set in after twelve weeks of routine. Claustrophobia had become oppressive as well.
“You spent too much time in the desert in your youth.”
“I moved out to the lush life when I was five,” he argued. “Most of those early years I don’t remember.”
“Your father died then you moved, right? Your mother died later, in Lebanon. How did they die? I don’t think you ever told me.”
Cyrus had learned for the first time during the tedium of travel that his father died a few days before his fifth birthday in a crowded bar where he had gone to kill the government officials that refused to recognize Persian refugees. He was twenty-seven at the time. When Cyrus was twelve, his uncle, his father’s brother, honorably slit his mother’s throat in Damascus after she was seen walking and talking with the same European man every day for a month. Time to read was discomforting. He felt changed by what he read.
“I don’t really know either.” Neither, apparently, did any of the psych screeners, counselors, analysts, or physicians that had evaluated him. “My parents died in separate accidents seven or eight years apart. My aunt and uncle raised me, insisted I was educated in Western schools.”
“I think it’s cruel not to tell you about your own parents. Is that cultural?”
He yawned and scratched his four-day stubble. “It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters, really.”
“Our mission will succeed, Cyrus. That matters.”
“It’s wishful thinking, the product of a random firing of synapses somewhere in your brain.”
She looked at him in anger. She picked up a tablet lying on the table and found where she had been reading. She took a sip from the clear stemware and adjusted her chair to disconnect from the conversation.
“I just need to sleep,” he said with resignation.
“You should shower and shave. You smell. I’m going to read.”
Cyrus fell into bed. Savanna tried to read but could not. It was both the wrong time of day and her growing irritation with her morose mate. She left. In the narrow hall, she heard harsh sounds of conflict from behind the Parambi-Nguyen door. She paused to see if she could understand what was being said. The sounds were too muffled. She moved away, concerned that one of the two might leave in a hurry and run into her. It was quiet behind Chen and Lucinda’s door. Feeling guilty, she skulked downstairs. It was too early for breakfast. She put her glass on a table and went into the fitness room where she hoped to sweat away ennui.
She wanted to jog but had left without her bra, which would add one additional dimension of pain. She was wearing baggy knee-length shorts and a loose tank top. She climbed on a bicycle and activated the large curved screen in front of it. She pedaled through Tuscany for sixty-five minutes, a route she had taken about six years earlier—a road she had ridden with Sasha. Where would she be today if she had stayed with the man she traveled with then? Not here. He was from wealth in Ukraine; blond, blue eyed, tall, and almost handsome in an irregular way. It was a great trip for young people falling in love, every night in a new village, late nights, late mornings, great food, different in each place. Long, fast rides. Gentle, slow sex, incredibly satisfying. Alexander was a writer, passionate and profound in the old Russian tradition. He liked to be called Sasha. He wrote in English as well as Russian. He would get up at night as she slept and compose short poems about something from the day before or the day ahead and leave it for her to find on top of her duffel bag or next to her toothbrush. He never wrote or spoke
in French. Perhaps that was why she left.
They lived together for eight exquisite months when she was eighteen. He introduced her to fine wines, vintages and vintners she could never afford, to restaurants far out of her range, and to pink and beige capsules she called REBs, rose et beige. They talked all day, even as they rode. He dreamed aloud of discovery, travel, new places, people, art, and pain. Early in the trip, he spoke of them leaving Europe, moving to New Zealand’s south island, farmland away from big cities and crowded countries as they cycled through a tunnel of trees, wind blowing so hard hearing was more difficult than biking. In the morning, she found another midnight Haiku stuffed into her sandal.
Light dappled by windy trees
Lit a textured path,
Savanna’s ascending way.
She kept a hundred crumpled sheets for years. The paper was no longer needed. Some of the poems were fixed in her memory. All of them were locked in her corner of the computer. That verse, far from his best, meant something very different now.
Leila arguing with Suresh was not unexpected. Couples will have their tiffs, and the close quarters, the uncertainty, and so much time to think, to spend together were a trial that few seemed to relish. They were not so loud, but the tension banged through the door as she had tried to eavesdrop.
She upped the resistance and pedaled faster, trying to wash away her own discord. Her thoughts returned to Sasha, who married just two years after their breakup. A woman from Belarus with money who grew up spoiled as did he, she was a competitive skier and well educated with fine features, perfect teeth, and clean hands without calluses. Not reared on a farm on the north coast of France, slopping pigs, shoveling chicken dung, pulling weeds, shivering in fog. Aristocrats. His idea of work was struggling for the right word or phrase for an event he could turn to insight or evoke some emotion. He knew intellectually about pain, unfairness, and chaos but had never lived it. He was an optimist. She had lived life the way he would never see it. Perhaps that was why she left.