Coyote

by Allen Steele

  Yet where had it come from? Not from Earth, of that he could be certain. Who was aboard, and where was it going? His mind conjured countless possibilities as he washed his dinner dishes, then went about preparing an early breakfast he had never expected to eat. Why hadn’t it come closer? He considered this as he lay on his bunk, his hands propped behind his head. Perhaps it hadn’t seen the Alabama. Might he ever see it again? Not likely, he eventually decided…yet if there was one, wasn’t there always a possibility that there might be others?

  He realized that he had to record the incident, so that the rest of the crew would know what he had observed. Yet when he returned to the command deck and began to type a report into the ship’s log, he discovered that words failed him. Confronted by a blank flatscreen, everything he wrote seemed hollow and lifeless, nothing evoking the mysterious wonder of what he had observed. It was then that he realized that, during the six long months he had been living within the starship, never once had he ever attempted to write a journal.

  Not that there had been much worth recording for posterity: he woke up, he ate, he jogged, he studied, he got drunk, he considered suicide. Yet it seemed as if everything had suddenly changed. Only the day before he had been ready to walk into the airlock, close his eyes, and jettison himself into the void. Now, he felt as if he had been given a new reason to live…but that reason only made sense if he left something behind besides an unmade bunk and a half-empty champagne bottle.

  He couldn’t write on a screen, though, so he searched through the cargo lockers until he found what he needed: a supply of blank ledger books, intended for use by the quartermaster to keep track of expedition supplies, along with a box of pens. Much to his surprise, he also discovered a couple of sketchbooks, some charcoal pencils, and a set of acrylic paints and brushes; someone back on Earth apparently had the foresight to splurge a few kilos on art supplies.

  Gillis carried a ledger and a couple of pens back to the wardroom. Although the game table was ruined, it made a perfect desk once its top was shut. He rearranged the furniture so that the table faced the porthole. For some reason, writing in longhand felt more comfortable; after a couple of false starts, which he impatiently scratched out, he was finally able to put down a more or less descriptive account of what he had seen the night before, followed by a couple of pages of informal conjecture of what it might have been.

  When he was done, his back hurt from having bent over the table for so long, and there was a sore spot between the index and middle fingers of his right hand where he had gripped his pen. Although he had nothing more to say, nonetheless he had the need to say more; putting words to paper had been a release unlike any he had felt before, an experience that had transported him, however temporarily, from this place to somewhere else. His body was tired but his mind was alive; despite his physical exhaustion, he felt a longing for something else to write.

  He didn’t know it then, but he was beginning to go sane.

  As Gillis gradually resumed the daily schedule he had established for himself before the darkness had set in, he struggled to find something to write about. He tried to start a journal, but that was futile and depressing. He squandered a few pages on an autobiography before he realized that writing about his life made him self-conscious; in the end he ripped those pages from the ledger and threw them away. His poetry was ridiculous; he almost reconsidered a trip to the airlock when he reread the tiresome doggerel he had contrived. In desperation he jotted down a list of things that he missed, only to realize that it was not only trivial but even more embarrassing than his autobiography. That, too, ended in the wastebin.

  For long hours he sat at his makeshift desk, staring through the porthole as he aimlessly doodled, making pictures of the bright star he had seen that eventful night. He was tempted to find a bottle of scotch and get drunk, yet the recollection of what he had nearly done to himself kept him away from the liquor. More than anything else, he wanted to write something meaningful, at least to himself if not for anyone else, yet it seemed as if his mind had become a featureless plain. Inspiration eluded him.

  Then, early one morning before the lights came on, he abruptly awoke with the fleeting memory of a particularly vivid dream. Most of his dreams tended to be about Earth—memories of places he had been, people whom he had known—yet this one was different; he wasn’t in it, nor did it take place anywhere he had ever been.

  He couldn’t recall any specific details, yet he was left with one clear vision: a young man standing on an alien landscape, gazing up at an azure sky dominated by a large, ringed planet, watching helplessly as a bright light—Gillis recognized it as the starship he had seen—raced away from him, heading into deep space.

  Gillis almost rolled over and went back to sleep, yet he found himself sitting up and reaching for his robe. He took a shower, and as he stood beneath the lukewarm spray his imagination began to fill in the missing pieces. The young man was a prince, a nobleman from some world far from Earth; indeed, Earth’s history didn’t even belong to the story. His father’s kingdom had fallen to a tyrant, and he had been forced to flee for his life, taking refuge in a starship bound for another inhabited planet. Yet its crew, fearing the tyrant’s wrath, had cast him out, leaving him marooned him upon a habitable moon of an uncharted planet, without any supplies or companionship…

  Still absorbed by the story in his mind, Gillis got dressed, then went to the wardroom. He turned on a couple of lights, sat down at his desk, and picked up his pen. There was no hesitation as he opened the ledger and turned to a fresh page; almost as if in a trance, he began to write.

  And he never stopped.

  To be sure, there were many times when Gillis laid down his pen. His body had its limitations, and he couldn’t remain at his desk indefinitely before hunger or exhaustion overcame him. And there were occasions when he didn’t know what to do next; in frustration he would impatiently pace the floor, groping for the next scene, perhaps even the next word.

  Yet after a time it seemed as if the prince knew what to do even before he did. As he explored his new world he encountered many creatures—some of whom became friends, some of whom were implacable enemies—and journeyed to places that tested the limits of Gillis’s ever-expanding imagination. As he did, Gillis—and Prince Rupurt, who subtly became his alter ego—found himself embarked on an adventure more grand than anything he had ever believed possible.

  Gillis changed his routine, fitting everything around the hours he spent at his desk. He rose early and went straight to work; his mind felt sharpest just after he got out of bed, and all he needed was a cup of coffee to help him wake up a little more. Around midday he would prepare a modest lunch, then walk around the ring corridor for exercise; two or three times a week he would patrol the entire ship, making sure that everything was functioning normally. By early afternoon he was back at his desk, picking up where he had left off, impatient to find out what would happen next.

  He filled a ledger before he reached the end of his protagonist’s first adventure; without hesitation, he opened a fresh book and continued without interruption, and when he wore out his first pen, he discarded it without a second thought. A thick callus developed between the second and third knuckles of his right middle finger, yet he barely noticed. When the second ledger was filled, he placed it on top of the first one at the edge of his desk. He seldom read what he had written except when he needed to recheck the name of a character or the location of a certain place; after a while he learned to keep notes in a separate book so that he wouldn’t have to look back at what he had already done.

  When evening came he would make dinner, read a little, spend some time gazing out the window. Every now and then he would go down to the command deck to check the nav table. Eventually the Alabama’s distance from Earth could be measured in parsecs rather than single light-years, yet even this fact had become incidental at best, and in time it became utterly irrelevant.

  Gillis kept the chronometers covered; never ag
ain did he want to know how much time had passed. He stopped wearing shorts and a shirt and settled for merely wearing his robe; sometimes he went through the entire day naked, sitting at his desk without a stitch of clothing. He kept his fingernails and toenails trimmed, and he always paid careful attention to his teeth, yet he gave up cutting his hair and beard. He showered once or twice a week, if that.

  When he wasn’t writing, he was sketching pictures of the characters he had created, the strange cities and landscapes they visited. By the time he had filled four ledgers with the adventures of his prince, words alone weren’t sufficient to bring life to his imagination. The next time he returned to the cargo module for a new ledger and a handful of pens, he found the acrylics he had noticed earlier and brought them back to the wardroom.

  That evening, he began to paint the walls.

  One morning, he rose at his usual time. He took a shower, then put on his robe—which was frayed at the cuffs and worn through at the elbows—and made his long journey to the wardroom. Lately it had become more difficult for him to climb up and down ladders; his joints always seemed to ache, and ibuprofen relieved the pain only temporarily. There had been other changes as well; while making up his bunk a couple of days earlier, he had been mildly surprised to find a long grey hair upon his pillow.

  As he passed through the ring corridor, he couldn’t help but admire his work. The forest mural he had started sometime ago was almost complete; it extended halfway from Module C1 to Module C3, and it was quite lovely to gaze upon, although he needed to add a little more detail to the leaves. That might take some doing; he had recently exhausted the acrylics, and since then had resorted to soaking the dyes out of his old clothes.

  He had a light breakfast, then he carefully climbed down the ladder to his studio; he had long since ceased to think of it as the wardroom. His ledger lay open his desk, his pen next to the place where he had left off the night before. Rupurt was about to fight a duel with the lord of the southern kingdom, and he was looking forward to seeing how it all would work out.

  He farted loudly as he sat down, giving him reason to smile with faint amusement, then he picked up his pen. He read the last paragraph he had composed, crossed out a few words that seemed unnecessary, then raised his eyes to the porthole, giving himself a few moments to compose his thoughts.

  A bright star moved against space, one more brilliant than any he had seen in a very long time.

  He stared at it for a while. Then, very slowly, he rose from his desk, his legs trembling beneath his robe. His gaze never left the star as he backed away from the window, taking one small step after another as he moved toward the ladder behind him.

  The star had returned. Or perhaps this was another one. Either way, it looked very much like the mysterious thing he had seen once before, a long time ago.

  The pen fell from his hand as he bolted for the ladder. Ignoring the arthritic pain shooting through his arms and legs, he scrambled to the top deck of the module, then dashed down the corridor to the hatch leading to hub shaft. This time, he knew what had to be done; get to his old station, transmit a clear vox signal on all frequencies…

  He had climbed nearly halfway down the shaft before he realized that he didn’t know exactly what to say. A simple greeting? A message of friendship? Yes, that might do…but how would he identify himself?

  In that moment, he realized that he couldn’t remember his name.

  Stunned by this revelation, he clung to the ladder. His name. Surely he could recall his own name…

  Gillis. Of course. He was Gillis. Gillis, Leslie. Lieutenant Commander Leslie Gillis. Chief communications officer of…yes, right…the URSS Alabama. He smiled, climbed down another rung. It had been so long since he had heard anyone say his name aloud, he probably couldn’t even speak it himself…

  Couldn’t he?

  Gillis opened his mouth, urged himself to say something. Nothing emerged from his throat save for a dry croak.

  No. He could still speak; he was simply out of practice. All he had to do was get to his station. If he could remember the correct commands, he might still be able to send a signal to Prince Rupurt’s ship before it passed beyond range. He just needed to…

  His left foot missed the next rung on the ladder. Thrown off-balance, he glanced down to see what he had done wrong…then his right hand slipped off the ladder. Suddenly he found himself falling backward, his arms and legs flailing helplessly. Down, down, down…

  “Oh, no,” he said softly.

  An instant later he hit the bottom of the shaft. There was a brief flash of pain as his neck snapped, then blackness rushed in upon him, and it was all over.

  A few hours later, one of the ’bots found Gillis’s body. It prodded him several times, confirming that the cold organic form lying on the floor of Deck H5 was indeed lifeless, and relayed a query to the AI. The molecular intelligence carefully considered the situation for a few fractions of a second, then instructed the spider to jettison the corpse. That was done within the next two minutes; ejected from the starship, Gillis spun away into the void, another small piece of debris lost between the stars.

  The AI determined that it was no longer necessary for the crew compartments to remain habitable, so it returned the thermostat setting to fifty degrees. A ’bot moved through the ship, cleaning up after Gillis. It left untouched the thirteen ledgers he had completed, along with a fourteenth that lay open upon his desk. There was nothing that could be done about the paintings on the walls of Module C7 and the ring access corridor, so they were left alone. Once the ’bot completed its chores, the AI closed the shutters of the windows Gillis had left open, then methodically turned off all the lights, one by one.

  The date was February 25, 2102, GMT. The rest of the flight went smoothly, without further incident.

  Part Three

  COMING TO COYOTE

  URSS ALABAMA 8.26.2300 (12.6.2296 rel.) 0330 GMT

  Not long after Robert Lee was picked to be commanding officer of the Alabama, the Federal Space Agency sent him and eleven members of his flight crew to Arizona for survival training. At the end of the two-week seminar, the team was airlifted into the Sonora Desert northeast of the Mexican border, where they parachuted into the barren country with little more than their survival knives and a half liter bottle of water for each person. No rations, no communications gear, no compass. Until they reached the rendezvous point thirty miles away, they were expected to live off the land as best they could.

  As their leader, Lee was responsible for the well-being of the eleven men and women under his command, a task made more difficult by the fact that Tom Shapiro twisted his right knee upon landing. Dr. Rawlings—the original chief physician, who would later wash out of training and be replaced by Dr. Okada—bandaged Tom’s knee with a torn strip of parachute nylon, and Jud Tinsley cut a tree branch for him to use as a walking stick, but their trek across the desert was nonetheless reduced from an anticipated ten miles a day to less than seven. So there was little opportunity for Lee to reflect upon the harsh majesty of the Sonora, for every waking moment was focused upon the task of survival: finding their bearings, foraging for food and water, tending to minor injuries, keeping morale high. The shark-toothed mountains surrounding them became simply a backdrop for their ordeal, and he had no time to admire the towering organ-pipe cactus as anything more than a meager source of water.

  On their second night in the desert, the team curled up in the makeshift sleeping bags they had fashioned from their parachutes, hungry after having had nothing more than a few strips of undercooked lizard and some juniper berries for dinner, their sunburned skin chilled by the cold wind that moaned across the barrens after the sun went down. Exhausted beyond belief, his legs aching and his feet beginning to blister, Lee wrapped himself within his parachute, pulling it up around his head to prevent scorpions from climbing into bed with him. The flickering glow of the dying campfire was the last thing he saw before he closed his eyes; he couldn’t bring himself
to look up at the stars, for fear that he might spot the Ursa Major constellation. Although he hadn’t expressed his thoughts to anyone, Lee secretly harbored doubts about his ability to lead an expedition to 47 Ursae Majoris. Indeed, he was beginning seriously to consider tendering his resignation once he returned to Houston, thereby leaving Project Starflight.

  He didn’t know how long he slept, yet sometime in the middle of the night he abruptly awoke with the preternatural feeling that he was being watched. He couldn’t see or hear it, nonetheless he knew that a presence was nearby.

  Swaddled within his parachute, his hands tucked within his armpits for warmth, Lee remained still, listening for the slightest movement. For a long time he couldn’t hear anything save the wind, and he was almost ready to believe that it had only been a dream when pebbles softly clattered as if a weight had settled upon them, and it was then that he knew for certain that he was no longer alone.

  Heart hammering within his chest, Lee fought to control his breathing; he couldn’t see anything through the parachute, and he was acutely aware of just how vulnerable he was. Once again, he heard small stones make a hollow sound as they shifted together: this time it was much closer. Something had entered the campsite, and it was very close to him.

  Lee felt something gently prod his shoulder. He held his breath as paws padded only a few inches from his face; he smelled the rank odor of animal fur, and there was a faint snuffle as the intruder caught his scent. Whatever it was, it was standing directly above him. Studying him.

  He couldn’t hold his breath any longer. He hesitated, then snapped, “Get outta here…shoo!”

  There was a startled whuff! then the animal scampered away. Lee waited a few seconds, then whipped aside the parachute and sat up to gaze around the campsite. The moon had risen and hung directly overhead, casting a silver-white aura across the forms huddled around him; no one else had been disturbed and the intruder had disappeared.