by R. Lee Smith
“Enjoy your flight, Miss Bierce.”
“I hope you can say that all day, because I’m not moving until I get this cleared up and seeing as I’m standing in the boarding hub of the friggin’ Pioneer, I think you can safely assume I’ve got nowhere else to be.”
Crewman Scott continued to hold out the map.
Amber folded her arms across her chest and waited.
The other uniformed people in the hall were still watching them.
“I’m sorry,” Scott said with a polite smile. This time, it made it to his eyes, but not in a very polite way. “I don’t have anything to do with the bed assignments. Please follow the green line. There are other people waiting for assistance.”
“I want to speak to your supervisor.”
“This is a starship, Miss Bierce, not a Starbucks. I don’t have a supervisor, I have commanding officers. You can speak to one by going to the family housing bay and picking up any courtesy phone. If you’ll please follow the green line—” he suggested, reaching past her to scan the next man in line.
Amber took the scanner out of his hand and set it down firmly on the desk. “I’ll let you know when we’re done here, pal.”
“Miss Bierce—”
“Everly,” she countered. “Get your goddamn supervisor.”
Nicci shuffled off to one side, looking slightly relieved now that the situation was being handled by a person and in a manner she was accustomed to. The people behind them in line gave them a little space. Crewman Scott stared at her, his mouth shut tight and his ears brick-red, then turned around and walked stiffly up the hall to the place where the other red-suited Manifestors were standing. They listened to whatever he had to say and soon one of them came for Amber.
“Good morning,” he said pleasantly. “I’m Steven Fisch, the docking coordinator. How can I help?”
“She doesn’t like her assigned—”
“I’m handling it, Scott,” said Fisch, still pleasantly and without looking at him. “What seems to be the trouble?”
“My sister and I signed up for a five-year contract,” said Amber, presenting her thumb for him to scan, which he did. “And I was told we’d be stationed together for the flight and at the colony.”
“Mm-hm. And it looks like you’ve both been assigned to beds in the family housing unit.”
“Right, on different floors and different, um, letters. That’s not acceptable to me,” said Amber as Nicci sidled up closer to her. “I’m not looking for trouble, but I was told we’d be together and I kind of want what I was promised.”
“I understand.”
“We don’t have anything to do with the bed assign—”
“I’m handling it, Scott,” said Fisch again, not quite as pleasantly as before. He pushed a few buttons on his digireader. “It looks like you waited for the last minute before signing on with us, Miss Bierce. And Miss Bierce,” he added, with a nod to Nicci, who nodded nervously back at him. “I’m afraid the group units in family housing filled up months ago. There’s nothing left except singles and frankly, I’m a little surprised you got beds there at all. It’s just like any big event, Miss Bierce. These are the best seats in the house and after a certain date, you just don’t find two of them together. I’m sure the recruiters made you all kinds of promises to get you, but they don’t have anything to do with you once you’re on board and they shouldn’t have made you any promises at all.”
“I realize this seems like a petty problem to you,” Amber began.
Crewman Scott uttered one of those huffy little breaths that snotty people liked to use when they didn’t quite dare to laugh out loud. Amber was willing to overlook it this time, but Fisch’s face went cold.
“Excuse us for just a moment, please,” he said, and took Scott aside.
Amber couldn’t hear anything that was said and couldn’t hazard any guesses to judge by Fisch’s broad and rather bland face, but she waited and watched Scott’s ears turn red with a faint sense of satisfaction. In less than a minute, Fisch was back, smiling again.
“I apologize for the interruption, please go on. A petty problem…?”
“We’ll both be in Sleep,” said Amber. “I get it. We won’t be conscious, we won’t be lying there missing each other for years, we won’t miss anything at all. But we’ve been checking in for three hours already. I’ve got no reason to expect to check out in less time. And yeah, it may only be a few hours, but it’ll be a few hours on another planet, for God’s sake, and I want my sister with me.”
“Please,” said Nicci.
Fisch glanced at her and his eyes lingered. When he looked back at Amber, he seemed somewhat less politely pleasant and more sincerely thoughtful.
“Isn’t there anything you can do?” asked Amber. “We don’t have to be in family housing. We just want to stay together.”
He hmmmed again and checked with his digireader, tapping the stylus through several screens before frowning at her. “I think we could find a way to accommodate you, Miss Bierce, but you need to understand that once you’re confirmed to a bed, those may be your living quarters for quite a long time after we arrive.”
“We know.”
“The family units are much larger and, honestly, far superior in terms of comfort and entertainment purposes. The general housing mods are pretty much your beds, some public showers and a cafeteria. There’s no comparison to family housing. To prison, maybe, but not to family housing. And signing you off on a corporate mod or a suite or anything like that is simply out of the question, so if that’s what you were hoping…”
“General housing works just fine if we’re together.”
Fisch tapped his stylus against the top of his reader and glanced at Nicci. “Miss Bierce?”
Nicci stepped back, holding her case in front of her like a shield against his attention. “I…I guess. I don’t know. Amber?”
“Please,” she said.
“All right,” said Fisch, in that rising, sighing, I-wash-my-hands-of-this way that people use when they think you’re making, if not the biggest mistake of your life, at least the one people will be bringing up for the next ten years to embarrass you. “Scott, come over here, please. Gen-Pop hasn’t been boarded yet, so we’re just going to take two beds in the women’s dorm and bump them up to family housing, then put the Bierces in their place. See how I did that?”
“Yes, sir.”
Fisch sighed. “Scott, for God’s sake, relax. Mr. Fisch will do just fine. Did you see what I did?”
“Yes, um…yeah.”
“Okay, it’s probably not going to be the last time, so do the best you can with it and try to remember that these people are not the enemy.”
Scott’s ears pinked. “Yes, sir. Mr. Fisch.”
“Good. I’ll take over here for a bit. Why don’t you help these ladies with their cases and get them settled in their beds?”
Pink deepened into red. “Um…sure. I could do that. I don’t mind.” He turned stiffly to Amber, hesitated, and then turned away and took Nicci’s things.
She could have let it go. She should have let it go.
Amber cleared her throat and held out her duffel bag.
Scott did his best to stare her down, but Fisch was standing right there and now he was watching pretty closely too. He took the strap out of Amber’s outstretched hand and slung it over his shoulder with as much dignity as such a menial task allowed. He started walking, his boots clicking firmly along the grey stripe on the floor like it was a tightrope over lava.
“He looks mad,” whispered Nicci, following close behind Amber as they moved out of the intake line, away from the rumbling, stuffy excitement of a thousand nervous families and into the largely empty corridor leading to the general housing mods. “I don’t think he likes you very much.”
“He doesn’t have to like me,” Amber told her, talking low but making no real effort to be inaudible. She didn’t care if Crewman Everly Scott heard this or not. “There’s going to be fifty thousand people and an ali
en planet to entertain us where we’re going. We’re never going to see each other again.”
Scott did not reply or give any indication that he’d even heard them. He brought them into the empty, echoing, half-lit elevator bay and over to the lift marked with an A. Between the gunmetal-grey paint and the stark stenciled lettering, everything looked very much like a military operation. Cold. Authoritative. Menacing.
The lift was big enough for fifty people, according to the capacity rating posted above its utilitarian doors. The sound of three people breathing was very loud. They went up just one level and Nicci was clinging before the doors dinged open.
The first two doors on the first left-hand hall were theirs. WA-0001 and WA-0003. They opened at a swipe of their keycards on what indeed appeared to be a broom closet: narrow enough to touch both walls at once while keeping her elbows bent, just deep enough to accommodate the Sleeper, with a door she had to duck through and a ceiling that did not allow for jump rope.
Crewman Scott dropped Amber’s duffel and went inside to secure Nicci’s to the wall. He opened up her Sleeper and moved back as far as the dimensions of the room allowed. He waited.
Nicci looked at Amber. “Do I…just get in?”
“Yeah, that’s what they said at the seminar.”
“I don’t…I mean…Do I take my shoes off?”
“You can if you want,” said Amber, and Scott said, “No, you can’t. No loose articles in the cabin.”
“She can put them in her bag,” Amber told him.
“I already secured her bag.”
“You can unsecure it and secure it again with her shoes inside!”
“I’ll just wear them,” said Nicci, looking and sounding right on the edge of tears. “Okay?”
Amber looked at her, feeling her temper at full throb right behind her eyes, and then turned that look on Crewman Everly Scott. “Listen, Space-Scout.”
“Amber, please!”
“You got a problem, you take it up with me, you don’t take it out on my sister.”
Scott gave her a cold look and a wide smile and said, “Just lie down, Miss Bierce, and we’ll get you all tucked in!” in a voice like preschooler’s poison.
Nicci slunk past Amber, her head bent and lips trembling. She sat on the edge of the Sleeper, kneading at its hard sides as she looked one last time from Amber to Scott and back to Amber. “Please,” she said, but whether it was please say we don’t really have to do this or please don’t fight, she didn’t know. Scott put his hand on the Sleeper’s lid and Nicci lay obediently down, even as she gasped out the first hoarse sob. The lid shut, snapped, hissed, and the single panicked, silent cry that Amber saw her sister make faded into sleep. Or into Sleep, she guessed.
The snake-like cable of the umbilicus slipped out of its port inside the tube and slithered under Nicci’s shirt. She watched it tunnel across her sister’s unmoving body until it reached her navel. The stiff fabric of her clean, white, colonist’s shirt bulged and then slowly deflated. In almost the same instant, the panel above the Sleeper lit up, all its many systems diligently engaged. Amber could look at that panel and see that her baby sister’s heart was no longer beating, her lungs were no longer working, her brain was no longer thinking, and all this, according to the Sleeper, was perfectly normal.
She looked dead.
“Any time,” said Scott, waiting in the hall.
Amber backed up until the door hissed shut on the sight of Nicci in her (coffin) tube. She told herself they had nowhere to go, no one to take them in. This was the only way out. It was the only choice.
‘I just killed my sister,’ she thought.
“Your turn,” said Scott, printing out a nameplate on his scanner and inserting into the protective sleeve on door WA-0003. He did not pick up her duffel bag. He opened up her Sleeper and stood back against the wall.
This was really it. She was going to close her eyes and it would be over and either she’d wake up on Plymouth and she’d be fine, or…or she wouldn’t. And that would also be fine, she supposed. At least, it’d be just as over.
Amber slid her duffel bag into the rubbery, vaguely unpleasant-feeling net and gave it a pull to make it retract, just like in orientation. She got into the Sleeper, wriggling over as far as she could and very much aware of Scott’s contemptuous stare as he watched her try not to overfill the narrow mat. Just watching.
“You waiting for a tip?” she asked, knowing she was blushing and hating him for seeing it.
“Your shirt’s pulled up,” he told her flatly.
Amber reached down, her face in flames and her chest in knots, to tug the stiff fabric down over the exposed swell of her stomach. There was no one to reprimand him for his huffy little laugh now; he made sure she heard it.
“Yeah, they must have been desperate, all right,” he said, dropping the lid on her. She never had the chance to say anything back. She heard the snapping sound of the lid’s locking mechanism, but not the hiss of the gas.
She was asleep when Scott held his middle finger up to the glass plate before her face and called her a bitch. She was asleep when her tube wormed its umbilicus under her tight shirt, asleep when it punctured her navel and began the painful process of rendering her dormant for the flight. She slept through the next four days as the rest of the colonists were processed and the ship steadily filled. She slept through the historic speech of Manifest Destiny’s charismatic leader as the Pioneer’s mighty engines fired up behind him on the video screen in the press room where he was still standing, very much on Earth. She slept through thirteen routine medical scans and six hundred thirty-three automatic maintenance cycles before she slept through the asteroid field that pierced the hull and pulled the active crew out into space through approximately seven thousand coin-sized holes. She slept through two hundred sixty-six years of Tunneling as the speakers above her bed blatted a polite, unheard alarm. She slept through the crash. In the last eleven minutes, as her umbilicus began to retract its countless filaments and her Sleeper gently reanimated her long-static cells, Amber dreamed of the beach and her mother was there, smoking one of her endless cigarettes, and they stood hand in hand together to watch the sun set so red over the ocean, and all the gulls were screaming…
4
Amber woke up on her side, which she knew only because she could sort of feel the hard mat under her cheek and the cold, curved glass panel of the Sleeper’s lid pressing on her nose and forehead. She tried to roll over, but couldn’t. Her limbs were dead; she was beginning to register the discomfort of her arms crossed and crushed against the Sleeper’s wall, but she still couldn’t do anything about it. God, how annoying.
She had always been a light sleeper and was used to coming up and alert at a moment’s provocation, but she couldn’t do it this time. The Sleeper’s computer had complete control and seemed far more concerned with talking about the process of waking her up than actually doing it. She could hear it through the speakers in its pleasantly androgynous, vaguely British-sounding voice: “—is estimated to complete in…five minutes seventeen seconds. Please remain calm. Your movements have been inhibited during Sleep. This condition is temporary and will be restored upon removal of the umbilicus.”
Right. She remembered now. The orientation seminar had explained all this. Although she couldn’t move, she could feel herself twitching as the computer systematically tested her muscles. She could also feel it where the vent was gently blowing on her ear. Why the hell was she on her side, anyway? The seminar had assured all of them that Sleep wasn’t really sleep and there wouldn’t be any dreams, but she’d had a real whopper. She didn’t understand how she could have thrashed around when she was supposed to have been paralyzed, but maybe that was just for the landing, not the whole flight.
And what had the big nightmare been? Why, a trip to the beach with her mother. Bizarre. Bo Peep Bierce did not take her babies on outings. Oh, they’d gone to the courthouse a couple of times, and when they were very young, they used to wal
k down to the childcare place together until Bo Peep failed a drug test and got kicked out of all the state programs. Other than that, Amber couldn’t think of a single trip they’d taken together, unless it was to get drugs.
‘Maybe that’s why you dream about it,’ she thought to herself, and would have rolled her eyes except that they were still kept shut and paralyzed.
It had been such a vivid dream, though. So vivid that she could still imagine the smell of her mom’s cigarettes. So vivid that she could still hear…
What…What was she hearing? Was that…people?
She was on her side…but she wasn’t really on her side, was she? The vent was blowing on her ear and the glass partition of the lid was right up against her face and her arms with all her weight behind it. She wasn’t on her side; the Sleeper was.
Amber could feel the fear leap into her, but she couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, couldn’t even open her eyes. The computer kept stubbornly monitoring and testing, untroubled by the smoke it gently breathed in at her along with the oxygen and the screams she could hear behind the walls. It didn’t sound like a couple panicking colonists getting cold feet on their new planet. There were so many people screaming that they had formed a single, endless, ululating voice. That didn’t take just a lot of people. That took hundreds. Maybe thousands. Maybe…all of them.
Amber tried again to break the paralytic hold of the Sleeper on her body, but the only result of all her invisible efforts was a mild musical tone before the pleasant voice interrupted itself to say, “Heart-rate elevated. Please remain calm. Your reactivation is proceeding normally and will complete in…three minutes eleven seconds. You are not paralyzed. Your movements will be restored when the umbilicus is withdrawn. Please remain calm.”
Three minutes? Something was burning. People were screaming. How much worse could this get in three whole minutes?
Again, she fought to take back possession of her body, but focusing all the willpower in the world couldn’t even open her eyes.
“Please remain calm,” said the voice after another censuring chime in her ear. “Your reactivation is proceeding normally and will complete in…one minute fifty-seven seconds. You are in no physical danger. If a medico must be dispatched to attend you, you will be liable for the cost of any restraining measures. Please remain calm.”