by Rob Favre
We zipped over an amusement park. Roller coasters and Ferris wheels blurred by or either side of us. The entire thing must have covered several square kilometers. We were past it in around seven seconds.
“Just how big is this ship?”
Xerxes puffed up with pride. “It is the very latest in XRT’s line of luxury yachts. Juliana only just purchased it. Two hundred seven point nine kilometers from stem to stern.”
My brain went numb trying to figure out how many Heifers would have fit inside this thing. I just hoped these light cubes were easy to control, because walking back was not going to be an option, unless we had a week or so to make the journey.
In an instant, we stopped. We floated motionless in a darkness broken only by meter-wide glowing blue jellyfish. Their delicate tentacles waved peacefully, drifting on some unseen current.
A door opened next to one wall of our light cube. On the other side was a simple room, furnished in rich wood and potted orchids. The far wall had a viewport showing the planet below. A woman stood facing the planet with her hands clasped behind her.
“Right on time,” she said in a soft voice. “Please, come in.”
The boys were finally asleep, breathing peacefully in their tent. She was hungry, and grimy, and tired, and her back ached from sleeping on a thin mat. But everyone had made it through another day.
Hal gave her shoulder a squeeze. “There’s something I need to show you. Come on.”
He led her by the hand down an empty hallway, past bedrooms that nobody could use, with only a flashlight to pierce the darkness.
“Hal, where are we going?”
They rounded a corner, and he shone the light into the center of an empty room.
She gasped.
Then she gave him a hug.
In the middle of the room was a blanket, a vase full of paper flowers, a jar of blueberry jam, and two spoons.
She couldn’t see his face, but she heard the smile in his voice. “It’s been a while since we had a date. I thought you could use a night out.”
They sat close together on the blanket, eating jam out the jar. They talked and laughed. After a while she started crying, for no reason at all. She cried and cried, and Hal just held her. They went back when the air started to get stale.
Chapter 21
“Come, watch with me.”
Juliana had dismissed Xerxes, and Renay and I were alone with her in the room. We joined her at the viewport, where she looked out at dozens of hulking starships and thousands of smaller vessels tracing slow paths between them, hanging over the pink and blue planet far below. I was relieved to see that she did not have any extra arms, or noses, or lips.
“I like the serenity of the moving parts, the ticking of a clockwork symphony. Purposeful, but fluid and dynamic. We are so small, the universe so big. Each part fits into the larger workings, has its own role to play. Thinking about that brings me peace. Don’t you agree?”
I wasn’t too sure what I was agreeing to, but I said, “Yes.”
Juliana turned and looked us over. She had a radiant, angelic beauty. If I didn’t know better, I would have thought her creamy skin and golden hair were glowing slightly.
“I see Xerxes has dressed you. You both look marvelous. He can be prickly, but he is quite good at what he does. I do hope he was not too rude to either of you.”
Renay and I both shook our heads. He had been quite rude, but neither of us was going to mention it.
Juliana turned back to the view of the planet. “Do you know why I wanted to meet you?”
“Um… because you can’t send us brain messages?”
Her laugh tinkled like chimes blowing in a soft breeze. “That is true, but it is not what caught my interest. I wanted to speak to you because you visited one of my fabrication facilities for a very unusual reason. You must tell me if some part of this story was misconstrued by my subordinates. You wished to prevent the retirement of a single marketing drone?”
“If you mean Mustard, well… yes, ma’am.”
She smiled, slowly and completely, like the sun coming up over the mountains. “How delightful. I am so pleased to find this is true. You must tell me your story. How did you come to meet this marketing drone? And why is it so important to you?”
I started to tell the story of how we met Mustard, but one thing sort of led to another and pretty soon Renay and I were telling the entire story of, well, everything. Juliana was a good listener, and she seemed to be really interested in what we told her. We covered a lot: The Hope/Freedom, and what happened with the Young Ones and Captain Jimmy, and the colony and the baseball diamond and Mustard and the doom that awaited everyone on the planet. I didn’t mention Zoe. She asked Renay to tell her story too, and she did: growing up on the ship, learning much later about who actually built it and why, having her home destroyed in a fiery landing and learning what a planet is and how to live on one. She did not mention Zoe, either. At one point, some refreshments appeared on a glowing table. I don’t remember exactly how they got there, but there were strawberries, so I didn’t care.
Juliana wore a thoughtful smile as Renay and I munched on perfectly sweet, ripe fruit. She sat down and a light stool winked into existence. “What a fascinating and unlikely story. All of those old slow colony ships, built before the dark matter drive, were thought to have been lost. Until just this moment, we have had no contact with any survivors. How fantastically unlikely that of all the places in the galaxy, you chose to come here, to meet with me. And all at the direction of a marketing drone.” She reached out a hand and began tapping her finger in thought. Each time she brought it down, a tiny disc of light appeared for her finger to strike against, then vanished as soon as she lifted it. “I recall the incident on Crunchberry 3. It was a rustic retreat, a place to go to experience the wilderness when all of this became too much.” Her hand swept in a graceful arc, taking in the room, the ship, the planet, the stars, and left a delicate sprinkle of glittering rainbow dust in its wake. “It was only a few decades old when the stellar feedback cycle was discovered. Several lives were lost due to a liftoff malfunction in the evacuation. No further attempts have been made to build there, obviously, since anything there is doomed to be melted.”
“Well, yeah, you see, that’s kind of why we’re here. We kind of wanted some help. Everything there is, as you say, doomed to be melted. And some of what’s there is all the people we love.”
She tilted her head, ever so slightly. “Did you come here to ask me to stop the stars from flaring up? Do you believe I have that power?”
It had honestly never occurred to me to ask about that approach. “Not really. We were mostly just hoping to get everyone off the planet and take them someplace safe. Do you have that power?”
Juliana took a deep breath, held it, and exhaled slowly as a single tear trickled down her luminous cheek. “How marvelous. Against all odds, you survived a thousand years in the stars, only to arrive at a doomed destination. And then you turn around, searching the galaxy for help, simply out of loyalty to your families. It is beautiful. The struggle, so visceral. Almost…” She closed her eyes and her voice dropped to a melodic whisper. “Almost human.”
As the silence grew longer and longer, Renay and I exchanged a glance. Neither of us quite knew what was happening now. She spoke up first. “Does that mean you are going to help us?”
Juliana beamed. Her smile lit up the room, and I don’t mean that as a metaphor. I’m pretty sure it actually made the light in the room brighter. “The artist becomes part of the tale, of course. Juxtaposition of the formal and the spontaneous. Ouroboros of fact and fiction, each informing and changing the other. Yes, I will help you. But you must also help me.”
I laughed. When I realized she wasn’t joking, I stopped. “What could we possibly do to help you?”
“I have a few questions I would like you to answer.”
“Again, please,” Juliana called from left field. “I want to get it from this angle as we
ll.”
Xerxes fumed on the pitcher’s mound. “Mistress Juliana, are you certain we can’t stop now? If we continue much longer, I may begin to sweat.” He was wearing a perfectly accurate replica of a Giants home jersey, circa 1980, and he was very much hating every instant of it. I was wearing one too, and I hated it as well, but for very different reasons. I was still a Dodgers fan, after all.
“One more, Xerxes. I want to make sure we get this right.”
Xerxes took all the rage he felt at the outfit he was being forced to wear and channeled it into a burner of a fastball. Credit where it’s due – for someone who had probably never played baseball, or any sport for that matter, at any point during his four-hundred-year lifetime, he wasn’t bad at this. The pitch was low and outside. I was a little rusty. I made contact, a grounder into the second base gap. I was disappointed, though; a pitch like that, I should have knocked out of the park.
We were in the baseball diamond on Juliana’s yacht. It was a gorgeous, perfect place to play baseball. Soft and dust-free infield, perfectly mowed outfield. I couldn’t tell you how tall this particular chamber was, but above us it looked like a blue sky and a perfect summer afternoon sun. There was a soft breeze that smelled like cut grass and hot dogs. They even had actual hot dogs – Mustard was over there now inspecting the condiment bar. Someone had taken their dream of the perfect experience of baseball and made it real. When Juliana first brought us down here, I’ll admit, I teared up a little.
Juliana called out from left field. “Very nice. Thank you both. That is enough for now.”
Xerxes threw down his glove and hat and stomped off, muttering. I swung the bat idly back and forth. It had nice balance and felt like it might even be made of real wood.
Juliana had arrived from the outfield. “Thank you for helping me with this. You are an unprecedented source of knowledge about prehuman history. I can learn about how the ancient game was played from old recordings, but the grain and texture are lost. I want to smell the leather, to hear the crack of the bat.”
“Glad I could help. This is a fantastic field you have here. I would be in here every day if I had something like this. Do you come down here very often?”
Juliana smiled and shook her head. “No, this is in fact my first visit. This vessel is relatively new. There are entire decks I have yet to set foot on. But I am in no rush. They will be there for me when I feel the need to explore.”
I decided to ask a question that had been nagging at me ever since we’d arrived two days ago. I kept expecting to have it answered in the course of visiting other parts of the ship, but we’d been to something like twenty different locations and I wasn’t any closer to an answer. It was time to just ask directly. “Is there someone who… works on all of this? Cuts the grass? Chops up the onions for the hot dogs?”
Juliana shrugged. “There are machines that handle all of that. They tend to stay out of sight when people are around, so as not to interfere with the mood the designer was trying to create. To be honest, I have not given it much thought. Things just work the way they are intended to work. That is part of what one pays for when one buys a vessel like this.”
“If you don’t mind my asking, just how many people are on board this vessel?”
“Oh, I believe you have met all of us. Xerxes and Hyacinth, and myself of course.”
I noticed that she didn’t include me or Renay in her list of people on board. Was that just a slip? Or was she saying exactly what she meant?
“So, this whole yacht, hundreds of kilometers long. The beach, the amusement park, the baseball diamond, the jungle, the submarine in the aquarium – it’s all just for you?”
She laughed. “Well, yes. It is my yacht. Who else would it be for?”
“It’s just… how could you ever use all this? What is this all for, if it’s just you here?”
Juliana’s face took on a thoughtful look. She smiled patiently. “I struggle to remember your perspective. Your time is so short. You must feel its unavoidable weight, pressing constantly. Anything beyond what you see in your few precious moments is wasted, and worse, a reminder of all that your short life did not afford you time to experience. Tom, my heart aches for you. This is why stories of aboriginals draw me so. The pressure of impending mortality heightens every element, distills it.”
“What do you mean, ‘aboriginals?’”
“Aboriginals are the protean form of humanity, before it reached its current, perfected form.”
“Am I one of them?”
She looked confused. “Of course, Tom. Did you not know?”
“I’m just as much a person as you are.”
She smiled again. It was the look of a parent patiently explaining how the world works to an inquisitive toddler. “I understand that you think that. But, genetically speaking, you are about as similar to a spider or an ant as you are to me.”
“That doesn’t mean anything. I can still think, and dream, and feel.”
“For now, yes. But your body is still burdened by flaws. Your genes evolved in the wild, unguided by purpose or design. One day you will get sick, or hungry, or your nerves and organs will wear down. You will die, and I will still be here, just as I will ten thousand years after that. We humans long ago rid ourselves of the flaws you must tragically bear.”
“And what about everyone back on Earth? The Dodgers? The other tribes? Are they human?”
“Humans very rarely see any need to return to Earth now. Most of us haven’t seen it since we left, or have simply never been there. There is an entire galaxy to explore. So much to see that is not as untidy and… dangerous as Earth.”
“So, what gives you the right to leave? The people there don’t have any galactic yachts to fly around in.”
“Tom, those who had the means and motivation to improve themselves did so, and left the Earth to see what other wonders the galaxy holds. Those who did not, stayed behind. But nothing keeps them there. They are free to leave if they wish.”
“You don’t think being immortal and impossibly wealthy gives you just the tiniest bit of an advantage?”
“My lifespan is a boon, it is true, but I cannot help being made this way, any more than I can alter the lifespan of those who are born to die. But Tom, I want you to know that I plan to bestow upon you a type of immortality.”
“Oh? And how are you going to do that?”
Her smile radiated starlight. “I will tell your story.”
“Great. That’s super helpful. But right now, while I’m still using up my precious moments or whatever, what about our deal? I’ve answered all your questions, Renay has answered all your questions. You said if we helped, you’d get our people off of New… off of Crunchberry 3.”
“And so I shall. You may go rest now. I will see to the preparations.”
I nodded. “Thank you. And please, we don’t have much time. For all we know, the stellar thing is already happening. We are later than we thought already. We have to get there as soon as we can.”
“I understand.” She gestured with her fingertips and a box of light appeared behind me. “Return to your quarters for now. I will contact you when the arrangements are made.”
I stepped into the box and zipped away, not feeling much more confident in the direction things were going.
Renay and I sat together on a log under a coconut palm, watching a pair of monkeys jump around the jungle canopy above us. I couldn’t tell whether they were living monkeys or robots or something in between; after everything I’d learned, I wouldn’t have been surprised either way. Preston was around here somewhere, stalking birds in the damp ferns. We hadn’t seen him today, but about an hour ago we’d heard him roar someplace off in the distance. After we’d been on the yacht for a day or so, Renay had started to worry about him, and asked Juliana if she could bring Preston on board so she could take care of him. Juliana had been delighted by this request, of course, and arranged to have our ship brought up with Preston inside. Then she’d turned him loo
se in this jungle that she happened to have on board her ship, because of course she had a jungle on board her ship. He seemed to like it here, at least. Renay and I had sort of set up camp here so we could keep an eye on him, and it’s where we spent most of our time when we weren’t being interviewed.
I took a bite of pineapple. Like all the food here, it was juicy and delicious. I was eager to get back home, but some small part of me was sort of hoping we could take a bunch of leftovers with us when we got there.
“So, what did Hyacinth want to talk to you about?” I asked.
Renay rolled her eyes. “She wanted to hear the entire history of ‘fashion’ among the Young Ones. How fabric choice was influenced by resource scarcity, something about the evolution of officer uniforms into symbols of a pseudoreligious ruling caste. Honestly, I did not understand what she was asking most of the time.”
“Did you make up some answers?”
“On the spot. I told her there was a phase where everyone wore hats made of chicken bones.”
“Can’t wait to see that in the movie. Oh, wait, we won’t be able to see it, will we?”
Renay giggled. She did her best impression of Juliana. “My lovelies, I am sorrowed that your primitive brains will not be able to experience my masterwork.”
“You really have the hand gestures down. But you need to glow a little more.”
Juliana had patiently explained to us that the pieces of art she made were called “brainies.” They were sort of like movies, but they play directly in the viewer’s mind. “Humans” these days were hardwired with the cybernetic interfaces they need to talk directly to computers, and download brainies, and even send messages to one another without talking. This was why there weren’t any visible controls on the ship we came here in – there was no need for them, since everything was being controlled directly by the brains of the people on board. We “aboriginals”, of course, lacked the necessary wiring in our brains to do any of that. Juliana had looked genuinely sad for us as she explained her art, knowing that we would never be able to experience it. She was genuinely sad about a lot of things. It was getting tiresome.