Analog Science Fiction And Fact - May 2014

by Penny Publications

  We are, for each other, the most wonderful kind of distraction.

  I think the technical term I once saw used in an old movie is fuck buddy.

  Of course, sometimes I think having a fuck buddy is sowing some unfortunate seeds with Chris. Especially when it's obvious that Chris is feeling sorry for himself: left out of the mix, the poor bastard.

  So what? It's not my fault he's a fatass.

  Janicka likes buff.

  And buff is the one thing I've got in ample supply.

  I guess Chris will just have to get over it?

  Audio Journal Transcript: Day 8,613

  I hurt a man today. Badly.

  I suppose I should have seen it coming.

  Janicka and I had been getting gradually more adventurous and flagrant with our behavior. In different parts of the ship. In places where someone might walk in and catch us. It was fun. It was exciting. The more risks we took, the greater the heightened emotional and physical pleasure.

  What was it Mama always said? It's all fun and games... until someone gets hurt.

  Chris came into the galley late one night—to find Janicka and I going at it rather frenetically and noisily on one of the tables.

  He started screaming at us. And called her a whore.

  So I clocked him.

  One shot, to the face. I didn't even think twice about it.

  Broke his nose, his cheek, and put him into a coma...

  Now I'm sitting at his side in the medical bay every day while Janicka scours the medical computer trying to find out what to do about his condition. We don't dare put him back in stasis like this, but we're not exactly sure that letting him float along at the edge of death is a good idea either. Neither of us has the kind of medical training that someone like Li has. I've even considered waking Li long enough to ask for her help. I resist the idea only because I can't face admitting to her that I've done what I've done—to Chris in rage, or with Janicka in lust.

  Mama and Papa are still trapped in virtual amber, like always.

  As if their son hasn't become an altogether different person than he started out being as a boy, long ago.

  All I feel now... is empty.

  Audio Journal Transcript: Day 8,648

  Chris came out of it today. Much to my relief.

  He was still banged up pretty bad, but he was conscious. And didn't remember a thing about my having put his lights out for him.

  Janicka and I haven't yet had the heart to spill the beans.

  But I think Chris is smart enough to have figured it out.

  All three of us adults are just sort of trying to keep things puttied together, because the kids have been acting out something fierce—since Chris has been down.

  If Janicka and I had been overly concerning ourselves with our libidos, Chris had been pouring all of his time into keep the kids squared away. And in a rather thankless fashion to boot.

  No wonder he screamed at us. Like a housewife who's logged too many sleepless hours, only to find her husband off drinking and pinching bottoms at a gentleman's club.

  I've profusely apologized to Chris, for shirking. I've put myself to work on the daily chores list like never before. Both to keep myself occupied—so that thinking about what had happened didn't hurt as much—and to make it up to the man however I can.

  Janicka?

  Janicka... has withdrawn.

  Audio Journal Transcript: Day 8,679

  You know what?

  The mission planners for this trip totally screwed up.

  And do you want to know why?

  There's nothing in the Osprey's extensive and voluminous operations library that discusses the fixing of broken people.

  Regardless of whether or not Chris has forgiven me, there's still the question of justice. You can't just hit a man like that, and get away with it.

  One of the kids suggested we have a trial. Like on Earth.

  I told them it was an excellent idea.

  With Chris rescued, Janicka reluctantly called the tribunal to order, and the kids all heard my confession, with the medical records as evidence. When it came time for sentencing, Janicka was stumped. But the kids were quick on the uptake. Put him in time out!

  I'll be departing for one of the observation bubbles soon. For six months solitary confinement. No entertainment, other than one hour of music per day. I'll take a week's worth of rations with me, and someone will come every week thereafter to retrieve trash, give me new food and water, and make sure I haven't done anything unfortunate to myself.

  A small part of me dreads the sentence.

  But then again, I feel like it's a great object lesson for the kids. When we left Earth behind, we also technically left civilization. But civilization is also something you carry with you in your heart. Your soul. I am afraid I've gradually turned barbarian since I got the news that I can't go to sleep like all the rest. It's time for me to relearn my manners. So that the kids will know that regardless of where we are in space, the rules are still the rules. And when you break the rules, there are consequences.

  Audio Journal Transcript: Day 8,700

  It's been hard, being stuck out under the stars all day every day. Nothing to do. Not even the gym. No chance of escape—they didn't let me keep a suit, not even in case I might need it. I don't even have any reading material, because they wouldn't give me a pad or a computer terminal.

  But once a day, I do get my music.

  Selected at random from the massive MP3 archive that the Osprey brought with it from Earth. Millions of recordings. Decades worth of listening. And for one hour each day I'm able to partake.

  Sometimes it's classical, like Mozart.

  Sometimes it's jazz.

  Other times it's the latest—at the moment of our launch—pop stuff from any dozen Earth cultures: Japanese, Chinese, Korean, North American, French, et cetera.

  And still other times it's spoken word.

  I think I like that best of all.

  Not exactly audio books. But poetry and short stories.

  There was an old actor named Geoffrey Lewis who told wonderful tales set to music. I recognize his distinctive voice from some of the old movies I've seen over my long years of being permanently awake on the ship. Celestial Navigations, they're called. Haunting pieces, in that I sometimes hear myself in them: the eternal wandering man, in search of himself, or his idea of the perfect woman.

  Speaking of which, it's been difficult not having access to Janicka.

  Chris is the only one who comes to see me every week, bringing fresh food and hauling out my waste in sacks which I fill and tie off: sorted by color for recycling.

  He doesn't say much, and neither do I.

  But I dream about Janicka.

  And, sometimes, I dream about Li too.

  The stars are crystal clear all day and all night.

  When I get to go back inside, with the others, I want things to be different.

  Audio Journal Transcript: Day 8,860

  I'm a free man again.

  Whatever hard feelings there might have been, between Chris and I, they seem to be settled. He's healthy, and appears no worse for wear. And none of us can say that I wasn't given ample time to consider my sin, and reform. Which I was determined to prove was the case.

  And Janicka is still distant.

  Which is, I suppose, to be expected.

  I think both of us were more than a little ashamed of ourselves, for what happened, and why. There haven't been any sexual encounters since I came back inside. Nor have I desired any, really. Janicka and Li are like night and day: the one soft and gentle and earnest, the other muscular and forceful and daring. I can't say I regret having been physical with ei ther one of them. But I think Janicka and I both believe that it's for the best that we don't try to pick up again right where we left off.

  Our fuck buddy days are over.

  So I've gone back to work, and the kids are working with me, and while I still have a blank, terrified spot in my heart
over the fact that I am essentially trapped on the Osprey, a man without a world, it's easier to ignore that spot when I am busy.

  Audio Journal Transcript: Day 9,082

  Janicka is dead.

  Stupid accident. None of us could have predicted it. Janicka went outside for routine maintenance on one of the external radiation sensors when a piece of dark interstellar debris clipped her helmet. Just, slice, one second Janicka was alive and working, the next... half her head was gone and she was dangling backward along the hull by her safety tether.

  I demanded to be the one to go out and get her.

  I got her all the way back to the maintenance bay, her corpse limp, before it hit me.

  Our first bona fide casualty. Nobody had been naïve, about the risks. When we left Earth. All of the adults had been volunteers, and while those of us who'd been kids hadn't necessarily understood the danger, coming of age on the Osprey meant becoming intimately familiar with that danger. We were totally dependent on the ship, and on each other, to keep us alive. Not a lot of margin for error. And while an interplanetary voyage of a few weeks was now as safe and routine as intercontinental airline travel had become in my great-great-grandfather's time, traveling from star to star is brand new. Never been done. Totally without precedent.

  We got Janicka's body into a man-sized sack, sealed it up, then Chris and I both suited up and took her back outside. To the very rear of the ship, where the glow of the fusion drive lit the edges of the radiation shield and push-plate that formed an inverted twin to the mushroom-shaped bow shield at the front of the ship.

  We debated who should cast Janicka into the void.

  As the only person aboard who'd been intimate with her, I mumbled a few words on her behalf. Then cursed myself for not having anything more eloquent to say. Just as nobody in the planning stages had thought to consider what might happen if the people went haywire, there was nothing in the training nor the library for dealing with death.

  Janicka was too stark a reminder to me that it would probably be me in that sack some day: a relic of the trip, soon to be disposed of.

  Which made up my mind for me.

  I told Chris we aren't doing any space burials.

  Janicka is going to stay in cold storage on the outside of the ship until we reach our new home, and then she's going to be goddamned buried in the goddamned soil like the pioneer woman that she is.

  Chris nodded his head through the clear face plate of his helmet.

  He likes the idea too.

  And so it is.

  There's a "graveyard" on the Osprey now. A graveyard for one, right down at the base of the pusher-plate where we seldom ever have to go. Janicka will be tethered there, frozen by the blackness of space, until we get to Delta Pavonis—and she can be given proper honors under a new sun.

  Audio Journal Transcript: Day 10,000

  Ten-kay Day.

  Just like any other day.

  After Janicka's death, Chris and I decided not to wake up any other adults. Not before it was his turn to go back to sleep, and the cycle would begin all over again.

  Lately the kids have been pestering me about Earth.

  For them, it's been just four years.

  For me...?

  I'm probably older than my parents now. Biologically, as well as emotionally.

  Each year that passes, my memories of Earth become more like hardcopy photos: still possessing the same colors and shapes that they always have, but flat. Yes, flat. And so very, very far away.

  I've started running a contest with the kids to see who can draw, each week, the most imaginative example of a possible animal we might meet when we land on our new world at Delta Pavonis. The kids have really taken the idea and run with it, too. Now all the screen savers all over the control room and, indeed, all over the ship, are filled with drawings of rampaging two-headed tyrannosaurs, unicorn snakes with rainbow wings, gargantuan protowhales with eight flukes, and still other creatures too imaginative or even disturbing to adequately describe.

  I've archived all of the drawings with my journal, so that anyone listening in the future can take a look. I like what the kids have done. I hope our new planet doesn't let them down.

  I think I am going to miss these kids when they go back to sleep.

  Audio Journal Transcript: Day 12,150

  It's time. Not only for Chris and the boys and girls—young men and women, really—to reenter their long, quiet night of stasis, but also to turn the engine off.

  We're going to spend the next twenty years coasting. Having burned the fusion reactor for the last three decades, we've got three-fifths of our original fuel load left. And the math is holding steady: with two decades of free flight, we can turn the drive back on for braking, dropping gradually back down the relative velocity curve to something approaching normal interplanetary speed.

  We haven't gone that slow in many a year.

  Yet, we've only ever reached a fraction of the ultimate velocity: the speed of light.

  I've been thinking that if they're going to build more ships like the Osprey, it's going to be like building time capsules in each instance. Oh, we get radio messages from Earth and are more or less up to date on what's going on, but the further we've traveled the more detached from home we've become.

  Or, I should say, the more detached I have become.

  Chris still suffers from a shade of homesickness.

  I think he truly regrets coming on the trip; some days.

  Which I thoroughly and completely understand.

  But at this point there is only one way to go, with only one way to get there, and all anybody who is awake can do is muddle through his or her assigned tasks, make sure the broken stuff gets fixed, and hope that when we finally do touch soil again, it's as promising and marvelous a landscape as I think all of us have unconsciously come to hope it will be.

  Audio Journal Transcript: Day 15,000

  I don't check in with my journal much these days.

  Turning fifty means not having to say you're sorry.

  I'm the grandpa on the boat now. Or maybe an eccentric uncle?

  The rotation schedule got fouled up when we had three more deaths. Extra people had to be woken up early. Now there are four bodies in the graveyard, including a child's. Which made me quite sad. The little ones deserve to see their new home even more than the adults who started out on the trip fully-grown.

  Watching a child die was about as hard as seeing Janicka die, or putting Li to sleep knowing that when she woke up again, it would probably be me who'd have passed on.

  But I eat right and I use the gym and I do what I can to make sure the grim reaper stays far away. One thing about a trip like this: it's a test case in seeing how much interstellar radiation a body can absorb before the cancers explode and take over. Even with shielding, I figure I've absorbed far more gamma rays than is reasonably healthy. And while the stasis beds could keep a tumor from sprouting full-bloom, my metabolism is alive and well and churning at 100 percent. If a metastasis chooses to present itself, I am not sure there's a hell of a lot I can do to slow it down.

  No worries.

  In the past I've had to get dental work done.

  If I need to have a tumor mass of any sort removed... there are people that can be woken up for that.

  What matters most right now is that we're over halfway to Delta Pavonis. Not that you'd notice it from looking outside. Delta Pavonis is still just a star in space, like the Sun. We're out of the Oort Cloud by a good ways, and things in interstellar space are just a whole lot of black nothing. But knowing that there's now less time in front of us than behind us is somehow... invigorating. I don't know. I think it's a little like taking a long family car trip: Are we there yet? No, not yet, but soon.

  Hah. Soon. Indeed.

  How warped my sense of time has become, as I've gotten older.

  The days pass much more quickly than I remember them passing when I was twenty-five, or fifteen for that matter.


  I am friendly with the new crew, but not intimate.

  Certainly not to the degree I've been with past crews.

  It's hard to relate to the kids—regardless of whether they woke up as children, or woke up as adults.

  Lately I spend most of my time just wandering the ship. Passing through all the corridors and passageways, riding the IST up and down, up and down. Visiting all the familiar spaces and trying desperately to recapture that feeling I had when I was eight years old, and everything was exciting and new.

  Audio Journal Transcript: Day 17,500

  I've been accused of playing favorites.

  I can live with that accusation.

  So what if I rigged the wake-up schedule to my liking?

  There are some people who were never going to spend any significant time awake anyway.

  To prove my point I showed the plaintiff a roster of all names currently in stasis: 48 men, 49 women, 112 girls, and 83 boys. All of the adults drew lots when they volunteered to come on the trip, and all of them swore to uphold their part of the bargain, if they happened to be one of the ones assigned to an "awake" shift in support of the Osprey. Did it really matter if I scrubbed my parents from the next stint? Or Li, who was actually supposed to be awake now —for the first time, not the second.

  I once read that a military general on Earth said: No battle plan survives contact with the enemy. The trip to Delta Pavonis is a war of attrition. Fuel dwindles, supplies get used up, reserves are recycled, reused, recycled, and re-reused, to the point that waste must inevitably be jettisoned. Frankly I am amazed we haven't had worse problems than we've already experienced.

  And if a couple of untimely deaths gave me an excuse to swap a few names around on the list, who are the newbies to argue with me about it?

  I'm old enough to be their father for Christ's sake.

  Of course, my list of names did not include the ten thousand embryos also being carried in stasis: an entire, healthy human gene pool, with plenty of room to spare.