Coyote

by Allen Steele

  Lee remained awake the rest of the night, gazing up at the stars. He didn’t consider himself to be a religious person, yet he knew that he had just experienced a moment of spiritual awakening. When the sun rose over the mountains, he was ready to take his people out of the desert; never again would he be uncertain about his leadership ability. By the time they arrived at the rendezvous point, all thoughts of resignation had been forgotten.

  He told no one about what had happened, then or later. His encounter with the coyote was meant for him, and him alone.

  And now it’s 232 years later, and for some reason this memory comes back to him as he watches Kuniko Okada carefully remove plastic surgical tubes from his arms. Gelatinous blue fluid trickles down his naked body, staining the towel wrapped around his waist; Lee stares blankly at the biostasis cell from which he has just emerged, his mind numb from his long and dreamless sleep.

  Dr. Okada’s hands tremble as she withdraws another tube from his forearm. Although she was the first to awaken, she hasn’t quite shaken off the aftereffects of the somatic drugs. Lee finds himself staring at a dimple in the soft flesh on top of her skull; the last time he saw Kuniko, her raven hair had fallen to the base of her neck, yet like everyone else aboard—himself included—she had shaved her head shortly before entering biostasis. Everyone aboard Alabama was bald now; he’d better get used to it.

  On the other side of the compartment, Tom Shapiro sips water from a foam cup, his elbows resting on his knees. The first officer looks up at him, gives Lee a tired smile. “Think it was going to be this bad?”

  Lee slowly shakes his head. He knows he should be grateful to be feeling anything at all. Until now, the record for human hibernation had been eighteen months, during tests conducted at the Marshall Space Flight Center. They proved that long-term biostasis was theoretically possible, yet there was no way anyone could be sure that the Alabama’s crew would remain safely in comalike conditions for over two and a quarter centuries. Lee looks up at Kuniko. “How…did the others pull through?”

  “Think so. Haven’t checked everyone yet, but…” Okada pulls out the last tube, then gently tapes a square of surgical gauze across the wound in his arm. “Something you should know, Captain. One of the cells was empty when I woke up. Someone was revived before me.”

  “Before you?” Lee doesn’t quite understand. “Run that by me again. Weren’t you supposed to…?”

  “This one, skipper.” Shapiro nods toward the coffinlike cell closest to him; like the others on the hibernation deck, it has been lowered from its niche in the bulkhead. “It’s dry. Nobody’s been here for a while.”

  Gently massaging his sore arm, Lee slowly rises to his feet. His legs are like stiff rubber, yet he impatiently shakes off Okada’s hand as he shuffles across the deck to inspect the cell. Its fiberglass lid is shut. As he gazes through its inspection window he can see that it’s empty, its suspension fluid drained. The status panel is blank, so there’s no easy way of determining who had once been inside, yet as Tom said, it hasn’t been occupied for a very long time.

  “Dana’s gone below.” Shapiro staggers to his feet, stumbles over to a storage locker; he pulls out a headset, fits it over his ears. “I’ll have her check it out.”

  “Do that, please.” The fourteen biostasis cells in Deck C2A were occupied by Alabama’s command team; once the AI revived Dr. Okada, she would have then resuscitated Dana Monroe, the chief engineer, in order for her to inspect the ship’s major operating systems. Lee himself and Tom were next in line, followed shortly by Jud Tinsley, his executive officer, and Sharon Ullman, the senior navigator. Lee gazes around the compartment. Tinsley sits up in his cell and, hands clasped around his knees, takes his first breaths of fresh air; Sharon is still immersed in suspension gel, oxygen mask in place around her face. The other cells remain in vertical position, their occupants sleeping for a just little while longer. Kuniko, Dana, Tom, Jud, Sharon, himself…so who else was there?

  “Gillis,” Okada says quietly. “Now I remember. He’s in that cell.”

  “Yeah, sure. Les.” Lee tries to shake off the cobwebs. Leslie Gillis, the chief communications officer…but why would the AI have revived him before Kuniko? He’s about to ask this question when Shapiro looks up at him.

  “Skipper? Dana reports that the ship’s in good condition and we’re on course, but…” He listens to the voice in his headset. “Something’s happened.”

  “Is there a problem?” Lee becomes a little more alert.

  “Not a problem…or at least it doesn’t seem that way. She…” Shapiro holds up a finger as he listens. “She’s found something in the ring corridor, and we ought to take a look at it.”

  “Let me talk to her.” Shapiro pulls off the headset and hands it to him; Lee holds the headset to his ear. “What have you found, Chief?”

  “Hard to explain, sir.” Monroe’s voice is tinny. “Maybe you should see for yourself. It’s in the ring, just before you get to the hub hatch. I don’t know how or why, but…”

  “Chief, I’ve already got one mystery. I don’t need another. What’ve you found?”

  “The walls, sir. Someone’s painted the walls.”

  Dana Monroe touches the headset lobe, lets out her breath as she rests against the console of the main engineering station. Although Alabama has decelerated to a little less than one-quarter gee, her muscles are unaccustomed to any sort of exercise. It’s difficult for her to remain standing for very long; indeed, climbing down the hub access shaft to the command center took a supreme effort. She feels a pang of regret for having urged the captain to leave the hibernation module before he’s ready, but it can’t be helped; something strange happened during the ship’s long voyage, and it’s her duty to inform the commanding officer.

  Yet that’s not her job just now. Her primary responsibility is ascertaining that Alabama’s major systems are nominal and that the ship hasn’t suffered any significant damage. Settling into her accustomed seat, Dana taps instructions into the keyboard, studies flatscreen readouts. So far as she can tell, everything is as it should be…in fact, even a little better than she expected. Fuel reserves at 17.3 percent, almost 3 percent higher than anticipated; the ramscoop must have located more molecular hydrogen than had been theoretically projected. The main engine automatically shut down three months ago; the fusion reactor is in medium-power mode, operating at the levels sufficient to maintain electricity for ship’s internal systems. Minimal hull erosion; the buffer field had apparently protected the ship from interstellar dust, and there’s no sign of leakage from any of the payload modules. Magnetic sail successfully deployed shortly after engine shutdown; it’s now acting as an enormous drag chute, using 47 Ursae Majoris’s solar wind to gradually decelerate the ship from its .2c cruise velocity. Major life-support systems…

  “Whoa,” she murmurs. “What’s this?” Dana enlarges a portion of the screen, then types in another query to double-check her findings. No, it’s not a mistake: potable water reserves down 20.4 percent, oxygen-nitrogen by 21.9.

  She whispers an obscenity. When she saw the walls in the ring corridor, she suspected the worst. Someone had been up and around during Alabama’s outbound leg; judging from the amount of air and water he or she had consumed, they managed to survive for quite a long time.

  A stowaway? Not unless he was suicidal. Still alive? Impossible; no one who hadn’t been in biostasis would have lasted so long. Although she hasn’t found a body, this is a big ship; there are dozens of places where someone could curl up and die…

  A chill runs down her back. This isn’t something she wants to explore just now; once the rest of the command team is awake, she’ll tell them what she’s discovered. One thing at a time; just be glad you’re alive. Dana observes her reflection in the nearest flatscreen. Not bad for a 268-year-old bald lady…

  She rubs her eyelids, yawns. God, why should she feel so sluggish? It’s not as if she hasn’t slept enough lately. And it’s probably the last time she�
��ll have the command center all to herself; once everyone else has been revived, over a hundred people will be elbowing each other for room.

  Groaning with effort, Dana pushes herself out of her chair. Clutching the ceiling rails, she moves across the deck to the navigator’s station. She reaches down to pull aside the plastic cover, then stops herself. In the dim half-light cast by ceiling fluorescents, she notices that the translucent sheet is spotted with filmy brown splotches. Curious, she gently scratches at a spot; it comes up easily, staining the tip of her finger.

  Fungus. But the ship was decontaminated before it left Earth. So how could…?

  Later. Like the captain said: one mystery at a time, please. Dana uncovers the nav console and lets the sheet fall to the floor, then searches the panels until she locates the porthole shutter controls. She presses the buttons, watches as the shutters outside the rectangular windows slowly move upward. Raw sunlight lances through the thick glass; she winces against the glare, reflexively raising a hand to her eyes. Then the windows polarize and now, past the long shadow cast by the ramscoop, she sees a brilliant white orb.

  47 Ursae Majoris. Dana lowers her hand. Tears well at the corners of her eyes.

  “Hello, sweetheart,” she whispers through the tightness in her throat. “You’ve got company.”

  Snowcapped mountains above vast plains of high grass, where six-legged felines roam between oddly twisted trees. Multicolored birds soar through a purple sky, silhouetted against an enormous ringed planet looming above the horizon. In the far distance, ships move across a sapphire ocean, their sails billowed by a warm breeze. A caravan of wheeled carts drawn by shaggy oxlike creatures trundles down a road, pennants fluttering in the winds. Upon the crest of a low hill, a handsome young man dressed in medieval regalia gazes down upon this panorama; behind him stand a multitude of characters: warriors, noblemen, merchants, a beautiful woman, a small child.

  Nearly sixty feet long, the mural wraps itself almost entirely around the inside wall of the ring corridor, its concave surface lending the painting a three-dimensional effect. The illusion isn’t accidental; the artist placed the closer objects near the top and bottom of the wall and put the more distant objects toward the center. His attention to detail was extraordinary; every single feather on the birds has been individually colored, and even the mountains have distinct ridges and gullies.

  Fascinated, Lee gazes upon the mural for a long time. “Les had a lot of time on his hands,” he says at last, very quietly.

  “Thirty-two years.” Shapiro studies the readout on his pad; he’s used it to access the ship’s log. “He was revived on October 3, 2070, and died on February 25, 2102.” He shakes his head. “He must have been out of his mind at the end.”

  Lee steps a little closer to the mural, gently touches it with his finger. Acrylic paint. Doubtless from the small supply of art materials in cargo. “Does it say why he was revived?”

  Shapiro shakes his head. “Only that it was by accident. Ditto for cause of death…the AI reports that his body was found at the bottom of the hub shaft. He was jettisoned into space shortly afterward. Everything else is pretty much routine…maintenance reports, navigational updates, that sort of thing. Very little about Gillis himself. It’s almost as if he wasn’t here.”

  The captain slowly walks to where the mural ends, his hands thrust in the pockets of his robe. The painting was left unfinished: only pencil outlines, without any coloration. This was probably where Gillis was working when he died. If Les was in his early thirties when he came out of biostasis and he managed to survive alone aboard the Alabama for the next thirty-two years—a fact even more mind-boggling than the artwork he had created—then he would have been in his sixties when he died. Back home, that would be considered middle age, but out here on his own, with no chance of cellular rejuvenation…“Poor bastard probably fell off the shaft ladder, broke his neck.”

  “You’re probably right.” The first officer shuts the pad. “If we look around, maybe we can find a diary or a journal. That’s what I would have done, if I were he.”

  Lee nods; he’s still examining the mural. With no sunlight to fade the paint and the ship’s internal temperature lowered to fifty degrees, it has remained perfectly preserved for nearly two hundred years. Yet he can only wonder what it means. What is this place, and who are all these people? “Look around. There may be something that explains this. But that’s not what concerns me just now.”

  “Like, how he managed to stay alive so long?” Tom’s face is grave. “I was just thinking about that.”

  “Uh-huh. Gillis had to eat, and there was no food aboard except the expedition rations. If he got to them…”

  “I know. We could be in trouble.” Shapiro turns to head back down the corridor. “I’ll check the cargo modules, see how much of a dent he put in the stores.”

  “Do that, please. Let me know what you find” Upon further thought, Lee grasps Shapiro’s shoulder. “And Tom…keep it quiet, at least for the time being. No sense in alarming anyone unless…I mean, until we have to.”

  Shapiro nods. Down in Deck C2A, Dr. Okada is bringing up the remaining members of the command team; over the course of the next couple of days she’ll work her way through the Alabama’s hibernation decks, gradually reviving the rest of the crew. They will have a hard enough time just learning how to walk again; after that, they’ll spend two weeks in close confines. It won’t do anyone much good to learn that they don’t have as much food as they had when the ship departed from Earth. “Understood, sir,” he says quietly.

  “Thank you. Carry on.” Lee waits until Shapiro has disappeared up the bend of the corridor, then he closes his eyes and lets out his breath. “Damn it, Les,” he whispers to himself. “Why didn’t you…?”

  What? Commit suicide? Give up his life for the sake of 103 people who would remain in biostasis for the next two centuries? Perhaps that would have been the honorable thing to do, but Lee can’t honestly say that he would have sacrificed himself had he been in the same position. Instead, he can only feel respect for someone who managed to stay alive on his own for more than thirty years. Alive, if not necessarily sane…

  Lee takes another moment to study the mural. The kids will probably love it, even if they don’t know what it means. Then he continues down the corridor, heading in the direction of the hub shaft. Time to go below and see if Chief Monroe has found anything to be happy about.

  URSS ALABAMA 8.27.2300 (12.7.2296 rel.) 1432 GMT

  Jorge Montero found his son on Deck C7D, the wardroom one level below the ship’s mess. Unlike their parents, Carlos and his sister, Marie, had recovered from biostasis fairly quickly: the advantage of youth. However, while Marie obediently remained by Rita’s side while she languished in her bunk, it hadn’t been long before Carlos found another teenage boy. Jorge had left his family for only a few minutes to fetch some water for his wife; when he returned he discovered that Carlos had vanished, leaving Rita distraught and Marie almost in tears.

  Jorge stayed with Rita and Marie long enough to calm them down, then he went looking for his son. It wasn’t easy; the Monteros had been assigned to four berths on Deck C4B, halfway down one of Alabama’s two habitation modules, and the decks themselves were mazes of lockers and double-decker bunks. Almost everyone had been brought out of biostasis, and it seemed as if every square inch was jammed with people: squeezing past each other in the narrow aisles, waiting for their turn to visit the lavatories, sitting cross-legged on narrow bunks, chatting with one another in passageways. Noise everywhere: lockers opening and slamming shut, footsteps across metal floors, the constant hubbub of overlapping voices. It hadn’t seemed as if there were this many people aboard when the ship left Earth. On the other hand, considering how happy everyone had been to escape with their lives, perhaps there simply hadn’t been enough time for anyone to feel cramped before they went into hibernation.

  As Jorge made his way through the ring modules, though, his anger gradually began to
subside. Although many of these people were strangers, quite a few were old friends…and almost all were fellow political dissidents who had been smuggled aboard the Alabama at the last minute. He found Henry Johnson leaning against the hatchway of the tunnel leading into Module C3; as Henry turned around, Jorge saw that he was talking to Bernie Cayle, another former colleague from Marshall Space Flight Center. No wonder he didn’t recognize them at first; like Jorge himself, their heads were shaved. The three friends greeted each other with bear hugs and backslaps; although it seemed as if they had last seen each other only a few hours ago, they were all aware that 230 years had passed—226, if you counted in the time-dilation factor—since they entered biostasis. A few minutes later, upon climbing up the ladder to Deck C3A, he discovered Jim Levin and his wife, Sissy, sitting on their bunks. Another warm reunion, during which Jim told Jorge that he had seen Carlos only a few minutes earlier, along with a boy he didn’t recognize. Sissy was upset because their sons, Chris and David, had taken off with Carlos and two other kids: a boy and a girl, neither of them ever seen before. Jorge promised that he’d send their children home once he tracked them down. By now he was more amused than irritated. Nothing changes: teenagers tend to travel in packs, whether they are in a shopping mall or aboard a starship.

  Yet his smile faded as he came around a corner and discovered four men seated together on a pair of lower bunks, their knees nearly touching as they blocked the aisle. Even without their hair or uniforms, he recognized them immediately: the URS soldiers who had boarded the Alabama shortly before launch and who had still been in the ship when it left Highgate. Their leader was nowhere in sight; the men were quietly murmuring to one another when Jorge came upon them and fell silent as their eyes turned in his direction. They regarded him with sullen contempt, not bothering to move aside so he could pass between them; they knew he was a D.I., and they despised him not only for what he was but also for his role in bringing them to this place. Jorge decided not to push his luck; he turned and went back the way he came, and heard coarse laughter behind his back.