by Unknown
He found himself staring at the cryocapsules cradling their precious cargo. A terrible thought entered his mind.
Drawn like a moth to a flame, he walked towards the nearest intact cryocapsule, blood pounding in his head. He would only be borrowing a little. He only needed a little.
The surface of the capsule was fogged with condensation. He wiped it away, hands shaking. The shape of the man inside became clearer. Joshua froze. The man was missing his arms.
There was no mistake. Each arm had been severed at the shoulder, clean cuts almost surgical in precision.
His gaze went to the opened cryocapsules. The ghastly realization dawned.
There are no other survivors, Sara had told him.
“You shouldn’t have come here.”
Joshua turned around. Sara stood in the doorway, laser welder pointed at him. Her face was white. “You shouldn’t have seen.” She fired.
Joshua dropped, the heat of the beam spearing over his shoulder. He rolled sideways as the beam tracked his path, lines of molten metal marking its wake. When he hit the base of a cryocapsule, he scrambled to his feet and ducked behind it.
“Sara, what have you done?”
“You don’t know what I’ve been through. What it took to survive…”
Her footsteps approached. Joshua pulled away from his shelter and ran across to the next aisle. He swept his gaze over the rows of cryocapsules, realizing for the first time that the cables trailing from them were corroded, that their lights blinked in meaningless patterns.
“How many years since you woke, Sara?” he called. “Five? Ten?” Long enough for stores to rot, for hydroponics to fail. “How long have you been trapped here, alone with all the dead?”
“Shut up!” She punctuated her words with another blast of the laser welder. Joshua edged along the aisle towards the next. “I didn’t have a choice. I tried to wake Robert. I tried to wake them all. But they thawed out dead. Every time. And then—” Her voice cracked. “And then the food ran out.”
The final aisle. Sara was just around the corner. Joshua spotted a lone cryocapsule sitting a short distance from the others, cables attaching it to them like a long umbilical. Scant cover, but better than nothing. He made a dash for it, just as Sara strode into view.
“Get away from that!” she cried.
A lance of fire pierced his legs. He muffled a cry as he stumbled the last few steps, moving like a machine with jammed pistons, before collapsing against the side of the cryocapsule.
He looked up as Sara’s shadow fell across him. Her eyes burned with white hot rage and grief.
“Who is it, Sara?” he asked. “Who’s in this cryocapsule?”
She hesitated, chest heaving as she gulped down the stale air. “My daughter.”
So that was it — the reason why she had chosen to live on despite the slim chance of ever being rescued, the reason for the desperate things she had done to survive. Because she wasn’t alone. She had someone to live for.
“I’m going to take her, and get off this ship, and there’s nothing you can do to stop me.” She raised the laser welder, knuckles white around the grip.
“Sara, she’s gone. What you’re doing won’t bring her back.”
“Shut up.” Her eyes were still hard, but they were bright as well, glistening with unshed tears. “You’re lying.”
“I’m not lying. You know I’m not lying.”
“No!” Sara gestured with the laser welder. “You — you can bring her back! You can make her live forever!”
He saw the desperation in her face; he saw the hopeless denial. And he recognized it. A sense of vertigo assailed him.
You could cling to an illusion for a very long time. That was easy. The hard thing was letting go.
I’m sorry, Lucas.
I wish I had come with you then. But I can’t unmake the past. And now you’ve gone where I can’t follow.
Goodbye.
“I wish I could bring her back,” Joshua said. “But I can’t restore the dead to life. I can only help the living.” Gently, he added, “She’s gone on ahead. Let her go.”
Sara stared at him for a few moments, her gaze darting about his face, searching for the truth. Then the laser welder dropped from her grip. She sank to her knees and wrapped her arms around the cold, lifeless cryocapsule.
“All I wanted was a new life with the people I loved. So what was it all for?”
Joshua pushed himself painfully to his hands and knees and placed a hand on her shoulder. Some fluke of the universe, some chance in a million, had spared her the fate of everyone else aboard, but that would not be any comfort now. “You still have a life ahead of you. It doesn’t end here.”
“I don’t deserve to live!”
“That’s not for you to decide.” He watched her struggling with her despair, and remembered. “Do you think you’re the only one who has ever committed terrible acts to survive? You can always redeem yourself. But first you have to live long enough.”
He had survived the fall of Nocturne, lived through the internment camps, and witnessed the riots of ‘76. He had outlived more friends than Sara would ever make. But still he kept going. “It has to mean something. We’re here, against all the odds. We have to make it mean something.”
She turned her tear-streaked face to him. “What do I do now?” she whispered.
“I don’t know yet,” he said honestly. “But you’ll find out.”
“Look up there.” Lucas pointed at Capella, winking in the distance; the bright blaze of Sirius; the warm glow of Antares; and behind them, the shimmering expanse of the Milky Way. “That’s where I’m going. To the stars.”
Lucas’ eyes lit up as he spoke. All Joshua could think of were the vast dark spaces between, the immensity of distance.
“But the stars are suns,” Joshua said. “You’ll never be able to look on them up close.”
“If you’re talking about this sun, then yes. But we’ve never felt the light of a different sun.” Lucas turned his face skyward. “There are a billion billion stars out there, Joshua. Who’s to say one of them won’t shine kindly on us?”
“Shepherd?” Zheng’s voice crackled over the commlink.
Joshua jerked awake. His back creaked with stiffness from having fallen asleep sitting against the cryocapsule, head bent at an uncomfortable angle.
“Zheng! About time. Are you all right?”
“We had to swing behind the sun until the phase oscillations damped out, but we’re all in one piece. How about you?”
“I’ll make it. Just come pick me up.”
“Did you find what you were looking for?”
“Not exactly. But I found what I needed.”
“What about the colonists?”
He glanced at Sara, sleeping peacefully beside him. He didn’t know what would become of her now, where she would go, or what her future held. But that would be for her to decide.
“One survivor.”
* * * * *
Anne Mok lives in Sydney, Australia, where she juggles legal editing by day with fiction writing by night. She is a graduate of Clarion South. “Beacons Among the Stars” came from wondering about the lack of stories about vampires in space, and believing that they deserve to go to the stars too. She is currently working on a novel set in the same universe.
The Big Empty
By Thomas S. Roche
The things wait for Eve in the shadows of Paradise, at the base of the second set of spirals well past the desiccated sorghum stalks, the place where darkness claims the last pale whispers of the Level 85 grow lamps.
At least, that’s what the stories say.
But, then, stories don’t scare her. They don’t scare any of her kind; Agarthans have very little fear and almost no imagination. Yes, there are stories in Agartha, like the ones of the things that live below Level 85. But there are not many of them. But Those legends are aberrations. ‘Art’ in the city of Agartha is the art of the well-delivered lecture on plan
t biology. Agarthans do not tend to conjecture. They do not react to speculation.
They respond to evidence, even when it is fragmentary.
So the Halloween tales of dark things that drink blood in the shadows don’t worry Dr. Eve Mojica at all.
What worries her are the lights.
There’s nothing growing on Level 85. Eve is given to understand that there has never been anything growing there, which is probably why someone many years ago thought up the story of the monsters to explain why there were grow lamps there.
Eve looks at the lamps as she spirals down past them on the death-black stairway built of carbon-fiber composite. There are ten full banks of glaring sun-spectrum lights exactly like what hovers over the now-dead fields on Levels 20 through 70 — the fields that used to grow food for the 100,000 residents of Agartha.
So … why grow lamps on the big empty of Level 85?
Eve asks Gaardner, Captain of the Frosties.
He looks at Eve pointedly.
Eve doesn’t like that. Eve doesn’t like being looked at any more than the Frosties like being not looked at when someone is talking to them. Eve doesn’t like eye contact.
Far worse, like all Frosties, Gaardner tends to forget that Agarthans like Eve have easily dark-adapted eyes. This was partially bred and partially genetically engineered, but for some reason the Frosties can’t remember it. So whenever they talk to Eve, they blind her with those multimillion-lumen tactical flashlights, which he does when she asks him about the grow lights on Level 85.
Eve puts her hand up to block the beam.
He says, “Sorry.” He lowers his light.
Eve repeats her question: “Why grow lamps on Level 85?”
“It’s nothing. Superstition. It’s just because of the stories. Stories. That’s all.”
Ondrusek overhears this. She’s second in command of the once-frozen soldiers — a Lieutenant. But Eve’s the lone Agarthan and the only plant biologist on this mission, so in that sense Eve outranks her as completely as Gaardner outranks Ondrusek. So if he won’t tell Eve, he won’t tell Ondrusek.
Eve opens her mouth to respond to Gaardner’s dismissal; she thinks better of it and nods, even though she knows what Gaardner said can’t be true. Every watt-hour counts; here are millions of them, slowly cooking rocks fifteen levels and four hundred fifty meters below the lowest hydroponics bays. What kind of sense does that make? And Agarthans don’t do anything that doesn’t make sense.
Ondrusek seems to think Eve understands what the Captain is getting at, so she looks at Eve, seeking eye contact.
Eve doesn’t like her doing it any more than she liked Gaardner doing it.
Even though Ondrusek’s face is savagely haloed in the blinding lights, Eve squints and tries to read her face. She can’t. It’s hard enough for Eve to deal with that. Like all the Frosties, Ondrusek has shiny, blotchy stains across her skin from her long sleep in liquid nitrogen. Eve finds it unsettling at a distance and repulsive up close. Agarthans have smooth skin and that’s what Eve is used to finding attractive or even tolerable.
But that is far from the most unsettling thing about Ondrusek, or any of the Frosties. To communicate, they rely on facial expressions and eye contact. Eve can’t read these facial expressions on the malformed faces of 21st-century humans. Specifically bred and engineered not to read expressions in faces, at least not naturally, Eve was also built not to react if she stumbles upon them.
Things are pretty cozy in Agartha; this helps keep everyone polite.
So Eve shrugs; it’s a gesture the ancient humans do that means ‘insufficient data’, or something like that. Eve has been working on that gesture. She is not at all sure she does it adequately, but at least it gets Ondrusek to stop looking. Ondrusek looks away, in fact, with unsettling quickness.
Gaardner growls, “Let’s keep moving.”
The spiral stairway cuts through a smooth, ancient lava tube.
Eve and the others circle and circle and circle. They’ve much further to travel — down.
“Doctor, do you have a soul?”
This is Gaardner; he is given to such non-sequiturs during rest periods.
Eve says: “I’m sorry, Captain. I don’t understand the question. You’ll need to be more direct.”
Gaardner says bitterly, “All right, I’ll be more direct. At what point does a human cease to be a human? How’s that for more direct?”
Eve says: “Not very.”
Gaardner glares at her, thinking. “Let’s try a different tack, then. Are we the same species?”
Eve can handle that question.
She says: “Captain, whether you or I could reproduce naturally and produce generatively viable offspring is entirely open. It wouldn’t be allowed, and such an endeavor would be of no interest to any Agarthan beyond scientific curiosity. So it can’t be settled whether we are the same species or not. Additionally, your sexual potency is at issue, given the cryosleep. It is unlikely you could even achieve sexual congress with any female, let alone an Agarthan.”
Eve gets the sense her response hasn’t gone over very well. She’s never seen a Frosty’s blotchy skin patches go so many shades of pink in the course of ten seconds.
Gaardner finally sputters, “You really don’t have souls. What’s inside Agarthans, Doctor? Just a big empty?”
Eve says: “I don’t understand your question, Captain. Please be more direct.”
He sighs. “You want direct? Here’s direct. When I went to sleep I thought I was saving the race from extinction. They said, When you wake up, you’ll kill anyone we tell you to, capisce? I said, Hell, yeah. I’m saving the race from extinction, why not? I woke up and they told me, There’s your enemy. I was expecting to fight — I don’t know. Aliens? Mutants? Monsters? That’s not what I got. No, your forefathers pointed me at this pathetic band of surface survivors and told me to kill. Doctor, I don’t know if you know much about what happened in the war, but it was twenty years after the solar flares. Twenty years! These scrappy little sons-of-bitches had survived as a society for twenty years! Not well, mind you — there wasn’t much left — but they’d made it. They’d had children, they’d raised children; they’d lived through a scourging of the Earth unlike anything in the Bible or wherever. To them, Agartha would have been Paradise.”
He speaks with mounting animation, which makes Eve extremely uncomfortable.
So she says helpfully: “Yes. Paradise. That’s what we call it. Colloquially, I mean — the way in your time this planet was called both Earth and The World. Historically, Agartha was a paradise at the center of the Earth—”
Gaardner ignores Eve and talks louder, trembling, panting slightly. “These were men and women I would have been proud to call brothers. Well, they found Paradise, all right. They found Paradise and asked to be let in. They were barely alive. They showed up in jerry-rigged tanker trucks, using hardware-store respirators, diving masks, buddy-breathing on old oxygen canisters — they had hunting rifles and crossbows and hatchets. They knew they couldn’t last much longer, so they said Save us. My bosses said, No, we don’t think so. The survivors fought their way into Level 0 before the City Managers — your, what, great-great-great-great whatever umpteen times grandfathers and grandmothers — they pointed us at them and said, Kill. So I killed. Life expectancy had to be like twenty-eight or thirty with the low oxygen levels and the lack of food and medicine and the new diseases. I killed children, Doctor. I killed lots and lots of children. I have to live with that.”
Eve says helpfully: “Yes. You do.”
Gaardner continues as if he hasn’t heard her. “And a thousand years later I wake up and find you, Doctor, the precious seed of the human race, the fruit of my labors. And I don’t even recognize you as human.”
Discomfited by her inability to understand what Gaardner is trying to say, Eve tells him: “As I believe I implied earlier, you are arguably as inhuman as I. Had you the capability, I would suggest we mate and settle the matter, as
revolting as that would be for me. But as I mentioned, you would be incapable.”
Gaardner loudly talks over her. “What I’m trying to say, Doctor, is that if you had to pull the trigger on a hundred kids in dime-store respirators who wanted to come in out of the rain, would you have done it? And if you did, would it bug you? Would you be haunted by it, the way I am?”
Eve says: “Understanding your emotional makeup is well beyond me, but no, I don’t believe I would have killed children. Even an order from the City Managers must be countermanded if it engenders the potential extinction of a viable species.”
Gaardner makes a gasping noise. He looks distinctly like he has been struck with a club or a fist or an open palm — Eve has come to recognize at least that response.
She finishes her thought: “As I said, the question of whether you and I are the same species is sufficiently ambiguous that I would be forced to protest, even to my own sacrifice. I would not kill those children, Captain, and in fact I would physically defend them even against other Agarthans. To fail to do so would abdicate all the social responsibility that has been explicitly bred, engineered and trained into me over the course of a thousand years, specifically to prevent atrocities such as the ones you committed. Does that answer your question?”
Gaardner is trembling.
Eve says: “Captain, are you sick?”
His voice shakes as he says, “Yeah, I think maybe I am. You’re saying that I’m the one who doesn’t have a soul.”
Eve says: “I’m sorry, Captain. You’ll need to be more direct. I don’t understand the question.”
He says, “Yeah. There’s a lot of that going around lately.”
The party has passed below the brightly lit level 85 and is already descending the stairs between Level 88/89 when the first soldier goes over the edge.
Durgin is a big, hulking freezerburned brute. Eve is close to Durgin. Frosties have paused behind Eve to point out a glittering field of flowstone with their blazing lights. They’re making cooing sounds at it. The Frosties ahead of Eve and Durgin are moving fast.
So Eve is stuck behind Durgin when he stops, leans against the railing, and lifts his shotgun. He aims the forestock tactical light out into the big empty black, and sweeps the beam around.