This was my ninth awake period of the voyage, and we’d built up so much velocity that little news from Earth could catch up to us. Although I’d been in deep sleep for six months, there was only a couple of weeks’ worth of news in the queue. No personal messages: That’s why I was in the service to begin with. No strings.
I’ve lived long enough to differentiate “news” from the reiterations of the same old human comedy. People continue to create arbitrary groups so they can fight with people in other arbitrary groups. Those who have a lot continue to try to convince those that have nothing that universal laws are to blame. Meanwhile, people keep butting their heads against those universal laws, and damned if they aren’t beginning to bend. Once I deleted items like those from the message queue, there was nothing left.
I selected some music and soon had the cabin rocking. Control preferred it quiet, but I figured by the time I actually heard something mechanical going wrong in the Unit, I’d probably be dead anyway. That’s what it’s like in space; you’re either bored to tears or being sucked into a vacuum. There’s not much in-between.
These kinds of things were going through my mind, which is my piss-poor excuse for not checking on the others right away. I waited for my head to clear and my heart rate to stabilize. I showered. I had a cup of tea and a biscuit. I turned the volume up some more. Control could kiss my ass.
Then I looked at the service log.
We had a cute little routine with the service log. None of us had been awake at the same time since we left five years ago. There were six of us, and we each had to be awake for a week every six months, since that’s the longest you can safely stay in deep sleep without working your muscles, eating real food, and getting some REM sleep and sexual release. (Yeah, I made that last one up. Not proven, but try to find a spacer that disagrees.) Because Control wants the Unit checked as frequently as possible, we stagger our awake periods. Because Control is stingy with the food and O2, they restrict us to the minimum time awake.
So we spend a good portion of our waking periods composing witty log entries for one another. Unfortunately, Mai Mu, who precedes me in the rotation, thinks she’s an artist and often fills page after page with her sketches. They resemble a child’s picture of an elephant, every part of the body in a different scale. Or maybe Picasso.
Nonetheless, I look forward to them. Solitude lowers your expectations.
This time, no drawings. No Kuro Kazuma’s haikus. None of Meng’s ruminations on Goethe. No performances by Sir Thomas, who’d carefully hidden his cello the day we embarked because he knew I’d jettison it as an act of compassion for composers everywhere.
No laundry list of duties, staff evaluations, plans, or way-over-my-head technical notes from Captain Kim.
That’s when I thought to check on their well-being.
Until that moment, I never realized that somewhere deep inside, I harbored the belief that losing five friends at once wouldn’t be five times as bad as losing one. I suppose it was doughnut thinking; the first one is great, the fifth is blah.
It’s not true. As soon as I saw the first body, I knew the rest would be dead. The readouts were there in plain sight, right in front of me when I woke up, but I hadn’t bothered to look. I had just assumed everything was all right. Things couldn’t be any less right.
I checked them over one at a time anyway. Every one hurt just as much as the first, or maybe more.
They weren’t smashed-faceplate dead. They were peaceful-sleep dead. They looked like they’d died at about the same time, and not too long ago; there wasn’t a great deal of decomposition.
I’m not a medicine man, but we’ve all had some basic training, including reading the diagnostics. So after I cried a while, ate a big bowl of spaghetti and half a dozen brownies (supplies being suddenly abundant), and received permission from myself to postpone the burial detail, I checked the medical histories.
They didn’t tell me a lot. It was as if their bodily functions, already dialed back by deep sleep to the minimum necessary to sustain recoverable normal life, had just drifted away. The heart rates dropped smoothly from twelve to zero over the course of several hours. The troughs of the brain waves got wider and wider. Body temperature only fell about twenty degrees, to room temperature. I got excited for a minute when I saw the line on the chart start to go back up slightly; then I realized it was the heat of putrefaction.
The life support system seemed to have malfunctioned. The emergency protocols didn’t kick in until they were almost dead. The stimulants, then the shocks, over and over again, only sent them into exaggerated cycles, until a cycle overlapped death. After that, we were just injecting and shocking meat.
I made a mental note to suggest to Control that the pods be equipped to automatically crash-refrigerate the dead until they could be returned to Earth.
For now, though, I had to improvise. It would have been very difficult to thread them into their suits, because they were beginning to melt a little, some skin turning slightly gooey. Instead, I removed their dog tags, zipped each into their own duffle bags, lashed them together, and tied them to the outside of the ship. With any luck, they’d still be there, flash frozen, when we got home. Slow acceleration has its good points, I suppose.
It was queer, but I didn’t feel as alone then as I had when the bodies were lying next to me. I sent a report back home, although I didn’t really need to; the daily readings were automatically fed back to base. There wasn’t a damn thing they could do about it anyway.
It is only now, after I’ve slept real sleep for about two days, that I’ve begun to consider what comes next.
A lot of redundancy had been built into our mission. Six of us had been sent on what was essentially a two-man mission, so that we had a backup crew and a back-backup crew, just in case. We carried enough provisions for twice our anticipated time in space. At the time, I thought it was overkill. I’ve since changed my mind.
I’m in a quandary about resuming deep sleep. If I keep my normal rotation, the Unit would be unmonitored for six months at a time, rather than a few weeks. We could drift irretrievably off course in six months. If I don’t hibernate, I’ll burn up at least fifteen bioyears twiddling my thumbs alone in a thirty-cubic-meter room with nothing but my doppelgänger to keep me company.
OK, truth is, that isn’t foremost in my thoughts. Fear is. I’m scared to death of returning to my pod. I’m obsessing over the fact that there are five dead people outside, who died in deep sleep for no discernible reason. If I were a gambler, I know where I’d place my bet on the viability of the sixth crew member, once he goes back under.
Day 1,692
Control equipped Mainframe with a huge entertainment library. It’s come as a surprise to me just how useless that collection is. I’ve tried all kinds: 3-D, 2-D, role playing, fantasy. I can only take a few minutes of any of them, though. The more images of people I see, the lonelier I become. Like pornography.
Day 1,694
Tomorrow I’m scheduled to go back into deep sleep. I spent today reviewing what I know of celestial mechanics. All I accomplished was confirming that, left to my own devices, I couldn’t find my own ass with two hands and a road map. I also spent some time reading up on alcohol stills and inventorying the drug supplies.
I know it doesn’t matter anyway. I can’t turn around now: not enough fuel. We need the mass of that sun to swing the Unit around without losing all of our momentum.
What is most frustrating is that the trip will be for naught. The original plan had some of us taking the excursion vehicle down to the planet as we passed it on our way into the system, then rendezvousing with the Unit on its way back out. Now it’s going to be like walking past a pastry shop window without a penny in my pocket. A twenty-year walk.
I field-stripped a couple of the pods right down to the chassis. I found nothing. I checked the air feed and reclamation system. It was A-OK. The nutrition system worked flawlessly. I didn’t see anything in the blood-monitoring system records.
I actually got to the point of getting dressed, sliding into my pod, and laying my head down on the pillow. Then panic set in. I couldn’t close the lid.
The faceplate looked like a giant hand about to close over my mouth. The skin jets looked like snake fangs. The rush of cool air felt like I’d stepped on somebody’s grave.
Day 1,696
I began going through each of the crew’s personal possessions, looking for clues or direction or, really, companionship. I started with the captain, since I was the captain now, and I needed some tips about maintaining crew discipline.
Captain Kim’s locker confirmed my impression that he was the world’s most boring man. There was almost nothing in his kit that wasn’t military issue: no family pics, no diary, no awards, no jujus, no candy, no jewelry, no bronzed baby shoes. At first, all I saw was regulation clothes, an elaborate shoe-shining kit, and some old manuals from the Academy.
At the bottom of the drawer, though, I found a neck chain. There were fifteen dog tags on it. They weren’t dated, but from the patina and, more importantly, by the sequence of political entities they fought for, I could see that they stretched back at least three hundred years. Kim after Kim after Kim, marching, drinking, whoring, fighting, dying in the service of the country du jour.
I took his tag off the chain around my neck and added it to his.
Day 1,697
Today I went through Sir Thomas’s effects. If Kim was parsimonious, Tom was profligate. He had a marvelous hand-carved wood chess set, a Go board with moonstone and hematite pieces, an antique cardboard backgammon board, tiny playing cards featuring the faces of famous composers, and a painted sheet-metal Chinese checkers board with exquisite stone marbles. I found that disheartening; the games all took at least two people to play.
I carefully leafed through his prized sheet music collection, browned and flaking at the edges, carefully preserved in plastic sleeves. None of it was more recent than the twentieth century.
For some reason he had also packed his performance outfit, a tailored black suit, ruffled white shirt, and black boots with shiny brass buckles. Perhaps he thought he might run across an alien civilization that didn’t know his reputation yet.
He also had brought a scrapbook of his performance programs, which dated back to when he was about ten. He’d never played large or prestigious venues, but rarely were there six months between performances, except when he was in the Academy or in space. I hadn’t properly credited the sacrifice it must have been for him to spend years with an audience of five.
He told me before we left that, like it or not, he’d be playing for all of us, a week each six months. Since we would be asleep, there was nothing we could do about it.
“If you could just applaud,” he’d said, “you’d be the perfect audience.”
I knew he couldn’t hear me, since he was floating outside, but I clapped for a while anyway.
Day 1,699
Opened Mai Mu’s locker yesterday, but I didn’t feel like writing about it for a while.
I expected to find it jammed with bad art. I’d seen the sketches, of course, but whenever we talked, which was a lot during our prep since we were often teamed up (we weighed about the same), she talked about all the other art she did: sculpture, ceramics, glass, wood carving. She made it all sound massive.
There was, in fact, a lot of art, but very little of it hers. Half of the locker was filled with exquisite miniatures of famous sculptures, each about fifteen centimeters tall. It wasn’t that I recognized them all, but the name of the piece and artist was engraved on each base. There was the Burghers of Calais by Rodin, Modigliani’s Head, Donatello’s St. George and the Dragon, Noguchi’s Mother and Child, Brushstrokes in Flight by Lichtenstein, and others. Each was in its own wood case. Each of the bases was a little worn, like someone had held it in her hands for a long, long time.
She was also a diarist, but wrote in Chinese. I couldn’t read it, but Mainframe could.
I never knew she felt that way about me. She seemed so assured, so professional, so decisive, so damned competent. I could have gone the rest of my life not knowing how she was attracted to me, or feeling the regret that came with that knowledge.
Day 1,700
Today I went through Kuro Kazuma’s things.
What a slob. I hate cockroaches, and thanks to his habit of hoarding crumbly cookies, we had them. You know what’s worse than stepping on a roach when you walk into the kitchen without turning on the light? Waking up with one floating an inch from your mouth, and not knowing if it was arriving or leaving.
Luckily, we had enough spin to keep the crumbs from floating away, so I shook out his stuff and swept up what fell.
He had a lot of civvies for a military guy. I had a hunch he didn’t bother to wear his uniform when he was awake alone. I can’t say much, since I usually don’t wear anything at all when I’m the only one awake.
He had some strange-looking outfits, historical stuff. There were several silk robes, which were entirely too small for me; he was a slight man. There were a couple of hats. The bright green silk fez fit me just fine.
At the bottom of his locker was a sword in a heavy leather scabbard. The long curved handle was ivory, elaborately carved with dragon heads, tails, talons, and little people in various stages of being devoured. I carefully drew the blade. It sounded sharp against the sheath, utterly smooth and foreboding.
The blade was greased to keep it from corroding. I wiped it off with one of his socks. I almost took my thumb off when I let my hand stray too close to the edge, so I had to take a half-hour break to administer first aid. Five minutes for the bandaging, twenty-five to work up the courage to look at the blood. We all have our demons.
The sword was amazingly heavy, the steel beaten so dense it felt like an anvil. I cautiously took a few swings the way I’d seen in old martial arts entertainments, and managed to neatly slice the cable to the backup environment monitor, which caused the primary monitor to immediately start whooping like a drunken cowboy. I put the sword away before I put a hole in the hull.
There were some photos in an envelope taped to the lid. I pulled them out and spread them on the floor. There was nothing written on the back of any of them, and they were mostly close-ups, so I couldn’t really tell who they were by context. Many may have been of him, but could just as easily have been his ancestors. I wished I knew something about him, but we’d never really talked about ourselves. We were too busy with the jokes, trying to outdo one other, each trying to capture the audience. I tried to remember one of his jokes, but for the life of me, I couldn’t. What’s worse, I couldn’t even remember any of my own.
Day 1,701
Last locker. Meng Ruixun. Probably the person I knew the best, since I almost married his sister, until it dawned on me that she was a raving lunatic. Meng had tried to warn me, but she had such a cute overbite I couldn’t hear him.
He was the world’s worst poker player, so I’d spent a lot of time in college playing cards with him. He had the money to spare, since his mother built the biggest specialty metals business on the planet.
In return, I helped him learn Western literature. I did such a good job that he soon made me feel like a dilettante. He was one of those people that could quote Goethe or Yeats or Kim-Juan off the top of his head. I can do it with commercials, but that doesn’t impress people so much.
He was that way about anything he tackled: consumed. He gathered information about a topic like a whale sucks in krill.
When I found out he’d been assigned to the team, I was flabbergasted. I couldn’t believe the Service would squander such talent on what would most likely be a wild goose chase.
He was convinced that he deserved a slot in the Unit, though. When we received that famous transmission, which confusingly seemed to arrive from five widely dispersed solar systems simultaneously, he didn’t sleep for almost a week. It was his wild-ass theory about what it meant that prevailed after
all the other wild-ass theories had been discredited. It was his research that found a way to assign probabilities to each of the systems as the true source of the signal. We were lucky that the closest system turned out to also be the most probable, because it was the only one we’d be able to reach.
In his locker, I found a letter from his mother. She’d made sure, before he left, to let him know what a burden he had placed on her heart by asking her to pull the strings necessary to get him assigned to the mission. She put it all down on paper so that he could refer back to it whenever his guilt started to slip.
I wasn’t surprised to find poetry. I knew he’d been writing since he was a teenager, but he’d never shown it to anyone. After I read it, I understood why.
It wasn’t bad. It wasn’t good. It was poetry written by someone who thought too clearly, who always knew the route from point A to point B and never got lost.
It was, however, intensely revealing. With all the scholarship and accomplishments, he’d still found time to stop and doubt the hell out of himself.
The hardest thing was the smell. Meng had a penchant for musky, sandalwoody cologne, and it permeated his locker. It reminded me, as nothing else could, of cookouts on his patio, holding his head while he puked Coors in the dorm head, bounce-racing on Mars.
Speak of the devil—he had a bottle of Coors in the bottom of his locker. He also had a dozen empties, which disappointed me. I’d have shared with him, if I’d thought to bring some. Probably.
I waited until later in the day, after dinner, before I cracked open the beer. I sipped it all evening, toasting Meng, savoring the flavor and the memories.
Day 1,708
20 (Earth) days down. 480 (Earth) hours. 28,800 (Earth) minutes. 5.4% of a (Earth) year.
About 5,475 days left. 131,400 hours. 7,884,000 minutes. 0.36% of the remaining journey in the bag already; only 99.64% to go.
No, wait, we have an update: 7,883,999 minutes. The multiplication took me a minute.
I’m going out of my mind, which is a short walk to begin with.
Orson Scott Card's InterGalactic Medicine Show Page 29