by Rob Favre
It was sleek, with smooth, simple curves. Nothing that looked like an engine, nothing that looked like a window, or a door. It was coated in a thin layer of grime, but if you brushed that away, underneath it gleamed like polished chrome. It was cool to the touch like metal, but had a surprising amount of give, almost like soft plastic. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear it had been created by aliens. It made the Hope/Freedom look like a rusty old steam engine by comparison.
And it was roughly the size of a school bus.
Vlad ran his hand appreciatively along the starship’s smooth side. He looked at the gray powder on his hand, rubbed it between his fingers. “Mustard, you told us this was a ‘very large’ starship.”
“I sure did, dude!” Mustard was bursting with pride at having been helpful.
Vlad’s shoulders sagged. He did not even have the energy to be angry anymore. “Mustard. This vessel will hold a handful of people, at best. There are thousands of us living here.”
“Oh, sure, dude. But it’s, like, way bigger than I am, right?”
Vlad and Dad exchanged a look.
We weren’t going to be able to get out in time.
Like a day at the beach without sunscreen, what ruined things for the people of Crunchberry 3 was too much sunshine.
Crunchberry 3 was what this planet’s previous colonists had called it, at least according to Mustard.
And I guess it’s not really fair to say that sunshine was the problem, since it wasn’t coming from Earth’s sun. It was coming from the three sisters that lit up our new sky. Mustard wasn’t really able to describe exactly what had happened, at least not without a lot of references to ranch dressing, but some gravitational interaction between the sisters led to a whole lot more energy being blasted out by Cordelia. Here on New Newton – sorry, Crunchberry 3 - the weather just got hotter and hotter at first. Before long, the plants started wilting and dying. The seas dried up, and right around then, the colonists called it quits. They packed up what they could into their starships and sailed off for greener pastures elsewhere in the galaxy. Mustard seemed sad when he was telling us this part of the story. Whether he felt bad that everyone had left him behind, or whether he’d just been programmed to seem like he felt bad, I couldn’t tell. But either way, I was surprised to find that I did feel kind of sorry for him.
Our geologists and biologists, including my mom, went to work analyzing the rocks and soil to see if they could prove or disprove any parts of Mustard’s story. They came back a day later and said that there was evidence that some kind of massive thermal climate event had happened, approximately eighty-four years ago.
Some astronomers and astrophysicists looked in the sky with their sensors and telescopes to see if there was any kernel of truth in what Mustard had told us. They came back a day later and said that there was no sign of anything like a “spicy jalapeno-grape cheez puff,” but that based on the radiation levels, stellar wind, and gravitational flux, the rest of what Mustard had described was plausible.
But even that wasn’t the bad news.
Zoe’s voice broke the monotonous rhythm of crunching gravel under our feet as we walked. “What will you tell the colony? What will we do?” It wasn’t until I heard her voice that I realized how long it had been since anyone had spoken. Even Mustard was unusually quiet.
My dad shook his head. “I don’t know, Zoe. We’ll tell them what we found, of course. How big it is. As for what we’ll do…” He shrugged. “The council will have to discuss it, I suppose. Though at this point, I don’t know what options we have.”
“The Heifer… is there no way to put her together again?”
His head shook again, this time with a grim frown. “Sadly, no. And even if we could put her back together, we don’t have the boosters we’d need to get her into orbit. And, even if we could somehow get her into orbit, we don’t have any fuel to power the reactor. We’d just be stuck up there instead of stuck down here.”
Zoe forced a smile. “At least my parents would stop complaining about missing the good old days.”
We all chuckled. Dad took a breath. “We’ll think of something, Zoe. We’ve got a little time yet, and we’ve got a lot of smart people. We’ll figure it out.”
Zoe smiled, and I think the clouds parted at the same moment, because the plain below us was suddenly bathed in brilliant light, shining down in rays that painted a shifting mosaic of black shadow and green grass, and the glass and metal of our home glinted faintly in the distance. Or maybe it had been like that all along and I only noticed when Zoe was smiling. Either way, I felt better. Dad was right – there was no reason to panic. We still had time to figure things out.
I took Zoe’s hand again, gave what I hoped was a reassuring squeeze. She squeezed back. That was something else that had changed in the last couple days. Zoe and I were closer than ever. Just my luck, I guess. I finally get things going in the right direction, and we learn the world is going to end.
The natural thing to ask when you find out that a stellar cataclysm fried your planet eighty-four years ago is “Is it going to happen again?”
After a few days of research, all the evidence pointed toward one answer: “Yes.”
Turns out there was a pattern, a certain point in the orbital paths of the three sisters where they aligned in a certain way resulting in a massive spike in radiation and stellar wind. Our researchers had models that could try to predict when it would happen again, and there was some margin for error of course, but it looked like it was going to happen again.
Soon.
Probably in less than twenty years.
And when it did happen, New Newton was going to be scorched clean, purged of any fragile impurities that might have found their way to its surface, including plants, Exmass trees, and us. If the metal-fused skeletons we’d found were any indication, it was going to get hot enough that staying here and waiting it out was not an option.
The goats were pretty tough, though. I figured they had at least a fighting chance.
Knowing that our new home was going to be incinerated was, unsurprisingly, a little distressing to everyone, but Mustard had given us some hope to go along with the bad news: when the last colonists left, they had left behind one of their interstellar vessels. Mustard had described it as “really, really big,” so there was a little bit of hope that maybe we could repair or refit it and evacuate everyone before things got warm. We’d set out the next day to the hatch in the valley, which Mustard had unlocked for us.
You already know how that turned out.
Now we’d seen the starship, so we knew Plan A wasn’t going to work. All we had to go was come up with Plan B. And we had some time to do it.
But it turns out that having too many plans can be just as bad as having none at all.
The boys were crushed to hear that the game was cancelled.
They had been looking forward to it all week. They had made a banner they were going to wave when Sylvester hit a home run, which they were certain he was going to do this time. The Tigers’ bullpen was pretty shaky, especially with Romero out for the series.
But the announcement came to all their devices a few hours before the opening pitch: Due to the weather, the Galactic Series is postponed indefinitely. A future message would contain details about the new schedule. Tickets would still be valid for the new dates. She let the boys have an extra patar after dinner as a consolation, which went a long way. They asked if they could go play outside once they were done. She looked out the window at the dust and grit blowing, listened to the wind howling, and told them they would have to play inside until bedtime.
As the boys took turns seeing how far they could jump off the couch, another message came across the device. It was red. Urgent. She knew what it was going to say before reading it, but she read it anyway. She read the words, over and over, but they refused to assemble into any kind of order in her mind.
They were activating Phase Five.
So, it was official. No
ignoring it now. She and Hal took a moment, held each other in silence. They had known this day was coming. Now all that remained was to be brave until the end.
She wiped the tears from her eyes, then went to the living room. “Boys, are you ready for an adventure?”
Chapter 11
“They’re idiots. All of them. They have no idea what they’re doing.” My dad was trying to keep his voice low. He was furious, but not furious enough that he wanted everyone to hear him.
He picked at his dinner with precise, agitated thrusts of his fork. Mom tried to be the voice of reason. “Logan, they’re not idiots. This is a tough situation. The answers aren’t always simple.”
“Seems pretty simple to me,” my dad grumbled.
“But other people have a different perspective than we do, Logan.”
“This isn’t about perspective, Celia. It’s about facts. The laws of physics.”
“I am well aware of the laws of physics, Logan. You just need to be patient. They’ll come around.”
Dad speared a hunk of potato, then set down his fork. He closed his eyes and rubbed his temples. “Been a long day. Think I’ll go lie down for a bit.” He stomped away from the table and out of the dining hall.
“You think he’s really going to go lie down?” I asked my mom as she picked up Dad’s discarded fork and finished off his potatoes.
“Oh, he’ll try. But he’ll be up and pacing again by the time we get back.”
“Mom… you think they’re going to come up with a plan, right?”
She chewed for a few seconds, thoughtfully. “I don’t know, Tom. I really don’t.”
It had been a long and tense couple of days. There had been closed meetings of the Council; there had been open meetings where the Council took questions and ideas from everyone. The last meeting had been in place of movie night, which was disappointing since the movie was going to be something good for the first time in weeks: Robocop. The reboot of the reboot, but still.
The meetings weren’t producing any solutions, at least not yet. They were still trying to get everyone to agree on the basics of what the problems were. How much of a threat were we really facing? The folks who knew about astronomy and geology said that it was real, but they were also basing their studies on tales from a talking hot dog, so there was a certain amount of skepticism about their conclusions. And even if everyone agreed on what the problem was, there wasn’t an obvious course of action to take. We could try sending out transmissions, hoping that someone out there would receive them and come to help, but there was no way of knowing if anyone was listening, or if they would even be willing or able to help. The starship in the mountain could get a handful of people off the planet, and maybe they could go get help, if we could get the ship working, but who would go, and who would they ask? There was a strong feeling among some of the Young Ones that we shouldn’t even be trying to come up with a solution. They just wanted to live the best lives they could here, and if something bad happened decades down the road, well, that happens. We can’t try to prevent every problem. That was the stuff that was driving my dad crazy. He couldn’t cope with the idea of knowing there might be a problem and not trying to solve it.
But I wasn’t as worried about all of this as I probably should have been, because something kept distracting me.
Zoe glided over to our table. She smiled at me, but addressed my mom.
“Hello, Mrs. Jenkins. You do not look at all old today.”
Mom smiled. “Hello, Zoe. How have you been?”
“Quite well, Mrs. Jenkins. Tom, I have dining room cleaning chores this evening. I was wondering if…”
“Sure, I’ll help!” I stood up so fast my chair almost bumped into a little kid who was walking behind me. His mom gave me a dirty look.
Zoe laughed at me. “I was going to ask if you would go for a walk with me after I am done, but since you are offering…”
If my mom was shocked that I had volunteered to take on extra chores, she kept it to herself.
This had been happening more and more since our adventure when we discovered Mustard. Zoe would come find me when she was free. I would go find her when I was free. Somehow, we both managed to be free at the same time a lot. But every hour I spent with her passed in the blink of an eye, and every second I wasn’t with her, I spent thinking of excuses to see her again. That night we scrubbed pots and mopped floors, and I loved it. When we finally finished, we went for a walk in the cool breeze as the stars came out.
We never seemed to run out of things to talk about.
“So, he is a man, who lives inside a robot?”
“Not exactly. He’s more like just a head, that’s taken off his regular body and put on a robot body instead.”
“How horrible. Why would he want such a thing done with his head?”
“He didn’t want it. See, they do it to save him, since he’s been shot a whole bunch of times, but they also want to use him…”
“I do not know how you can watch such things, Tom. Why are there no movies about kittens and puppies?”
“There are, but they don’t have as many explosions.”
“I would hope not.”
We rounded the corner of New Upper Stoor Edge and saw someone talking to Mustard. She looked up, recognized us, and started walking the other way. It was Renay. Mustard followed at her heels, like an eager, tentacled wiener dog in a bun.
“I think Renay might be avoiding me.”
Zoe raised an eyebrow. “Truly, no detail escapes your notice, most observant Old One.”
“You’re really gotten the hang of this sarcasm thing.”
“Thank you.”
“Have you talked to her? Do you know why she’s mad?”
“I have not talked to her, Old One. If you were as observant as you claim to be, you would have noticed that she is avoiding me as well. And I believe the reason for her feeling is plain to see.”
“Yeah, I guess. I feel bad though. I never meant to hurt her.”
Zoe took my hand, gave it a squeeze. Her skin was warm and soft. “Give her some time and space. She will learn to forgive your idiocy, in time.”
We didn’t see Renay or Mustard again the rest of the night. We did see just about every star in the galaxy, lying on our backs and staring off into purple infinity until it was too cold to stay outside anymore. I walked her home. At her doorway, she squeezed my hand and smiled. “Good night, Old One.”
Her smile was all I could see the whole way home.
“They are fools, and stubborn ones.” Gragg took a long, loud gulp of warm goat milk. I know, I know. I didn’t like it at first either, but you kind of get used to it after a while. It’s sort of like drinking liquid cheese. He belched. Angrily.
Rick looked like he wanted to say something, then thought better of it, then plowed ahead anyway. “They are only trying to help, father.”
“We are only just learning to live in this shapeless nightmare world. Now they tell us we will burn up if we stay.”
“If you do not like it here, you should not be against the idea of leaving.”
“That is not the point, son.” He said some other things. Rick probably answered. I could not see anything other than Zoe’s eyes as she looked at me from across the table. She smiled, and blushed, and looked down at her plate.
“I understand you, Gragg.” Marie squeezed his hand. “There is so much that we do not know. It seems rash to change everything based on the word of a talking sausage.”
“And he does not even speak right! He says ‘dude’ after every sentence!”
Rick was done being cautious and deferential now. He was sure he was right, and, in the grand tradition of teenagers everywhere, he was going to convince his parents that he knew better than they did. I was dimly aware that there might be a flaw in his plan. “But Mustard only delivered the message. Others have found evidence that shows he was right. They have looked with telescopes and microscopes.”
“Are those the telesc
opes and microscopes that made them think it was a good idea to come here in the first place? Because if so, I have my doubts about how good their predictions are.”
Gabby tugged at Marie’s sleeve. “May I have more cheese?” Marie nodded. Gabby jumped up, grabbed Zoe by the hand, and dragged her back up to the serving station. Zoe laughed and bounced away, and her golden hair floated delicately in the air behind her. Even when she was dragged by a child eager for more cheese, her movements were graceful and effortless. I could watch her do anything – walk, chew, breathe – and be entranced.
With Zoe out of view, I tried to pay attention to the conversation again, but there sort of wasn’t any. Gragg was purposefully chewing a mouthful of bread. Rick was drawing spiral patterns in his oatmeal. Marie, sensing it was not the time to try to say anything to either of them, spoke to me instead. “Tom, we are so glad you could join us for meal tonight. I have been glad that we are seeing more of you these days.”
I felt my cheeks getting warm. Why were they doing that? “Thank you, ma’am. It was kind of you to invite me.”
She smiled. “I was convinced by someone who really wanted you here.”
“How is Harold doing? I haven’t seen him in a while.”
“He is as happy as I have ever seen a dog. I worry about him still, in all this emptiness, but he seems to find his way home. Even with a whole planet to run in, he never wishes to be away from Gabby for too long.”
“Who does not? Who?” A plate full of white, wobbly cheese clattered down on the table as Gabby climbed back into her chair. It smelled faintly of socks and stale beer.
Marie smiled. “Harold, you silly child.”
Zoe sat back down too, a little out of breath. She smiled at me again and shrugged a little.
Marie and I talked to Gabby for a few minutes about Harold, and cheese, and her homework. She was a very big fan of two of those things.
Rick and Gragg got up from the table without a word and left the dining hall through opposite doors.