Fleeting Glimpse

by David Gowey

  “But I know that won’t stop you. It’s an indefinite article, you know. A land of promise. The original pioneers thought that North America was the promised land and for them, it was. And then when the first of us went to Mars and Jupiter and Venus, they all thought they had the same thing, and I really think they did. I hope you find yours too, Brother Peterson.”

  Frank reached out to take Bishop Lim’s hand but instead, her holographic form went right past it and took him in a hug. He’d been nervous about getting a sensory feedback implant a few years back, even with his company insurance, but the little electric pulses that tricked his brain into thinking that this last embrace was as real as if she’d been in the bridge with him were convincing enough to make all the expense worth it. Not bad for two people who’d never been huggers in the first place, Frank thought.

  “I’ll miss having you around,” she said.

  “Even when I slipped a little false doctrine into my lessons?”

  “Especially then.” They stepped apart, one bitter old man and one English teacher in charge of two hundred and fifty souls that somehow managed to still be precious all this way out here. “If you ask me, we could use a little more heresy in the High Priests group. It keeps them all on their toes instead of just droning on from the manual because the teacher forget to prepare the lesson.”

  “I’m sure someone else’ll step up. I’ve got my eye on Brian, personally.”

  “Could be.” Bishop Lim—Elizabeth—just stood there and nodded, then flicked her eyes around the inside of the bridge. “Are you going to take me on a tour?”

  “Just so you can find the contraband? No way.”

  “I won’t bust you over a little caffeine,” she said. Then her expression softened, maybe at something in Frank’s own face that he didn’t want to admit was there. “Really, you don’t have to do it if you don’t want to.”

  “Eh, there’s just not much in here to see. I have pretty simple tastes.” More accurately, there was no need to show his friend around what was just as likely to be an expensive coffin as it was a one-way trip to a little earthlike planet he’d picked out last year. Outside of a shelf of books that would only really do him any good on the way in from the system’s Oort Cloud on standard drive, all he had was precisely what he needed: food for the surface, a few space suits, habitat materials, and a holo frame of the only face he truly missed. Taking Elizabeth through this little art installation of an old man’s death wish wouldn’t make either of them feel better. Or younger, for that matter.

  His friend sighed.

  “It looks like a good ship. Not remotely my area of expertise, though. Should be fun, getting to the other side.”

  “Well, when you put it that way…” It sounded a little too much like the end to Frank’s ears, and he’d already had enough of those thoughts on his own without anyone else’s corroboration.

  “I’m sure it’ll all be fine.” Bishop fell silent, and Frank commiserated. He wasn’t really sure what to say either.

  Of course, where Frank was going, that feeling of distance and attending insignificance when contrasted against the infinity of creation would only be amplified by about seventy-three thousand times. He wondered how hard it had hit the other members making their way out to the colonies, where their descendants would get to talk about them in the same way that Grandma Ann talked about old Olaf. Pioneers, not in boats or wagons, but in the kind of starships into which Frank and so many others had poured centuries of applied knowledge to make sure that anyone who tried something even remotely as crazy as what he was doing soon would at least survive long enough to pass back through the veil under the light of a new sun.

  Sure, everyone in the Church knew that Earth was where all the action would happen, whenever it finally did, and yet… Maybe the promise of a new Earth in some indeterminate future didn’t mean quite as much to someone who could already go out and find one, if only they had the time and money, and Frank had both. He wondered if it was just something in their blood that pulled them away from the comfortable and familiar against their better judgment, if you could call it that.

  Sister Lefler certainly had called it that last week, when she’d said that twenty-five hundred and eighty-two years was just too long to wait around for the Big One, and therefore it was surely coming for Earth any day now, but Frank wasn’t too worried about that. It wasn’t really his time schedule that mattered here. Plus, it’s not like he could ever go so far away from Earth that the planet’s Creator couldn’t find him again.

  And so that Creator’s common judge over the little ward at Triton L2 bid Brother Frank Peterson a good day, and what she meant by it was a good life, however much longer it lasted.

  There wasn’t much work left to do. Much like the piano arrangement of Lang’s Seventh he’d once tried to finish, there was only so much you could poke at something before the urge to tinker outpaced the urge to finish. Soon enough, you’d be stuck with an undertaking that blew past all its hopeful deadlines like a runaway comet and morphed into some vaguely conceived form looming on the horizon of wishful thinking. The symphony arrangement was one thing; let his executor of estate dig it out of his old files and do with it what she will. The ship, though… Too long fiddling with bits that had already seen more than their fair share of fiddling and he’d have one awkward Sunday to look forward to, like Tom Sawyer back at his own funeral. That was to be avoided at all costs.

  Frank wrapped up his work a few hours later. With a few days yet under standard drive until he reached the edge of his navigation lane, there would still be time to tinker. As it turned out, he didn’t do anything of the sort.

  The ship launched that night. For lack of a more melodramatic name, he logged it with Triton station port authorities as the Ocean Cloud and took his drive time to read instead, not knowing if he’d get the chance to do it again. Palmyra and Kirtland and Nauvoo came and went in his mind, faded visions of utopia he now shared with thousands of long-dead dreamers who never got to see them reach their full glory either. Then again, maybe that was never the plan after all. Maybe the only reason for all that was to drag so many flawed creations along mile by grueling mile, kicking and screaming as they always went, through as many earthly attempts at a heavenly ideal as it took before we could finally get the picture. That sounded about right for Someone who played the long game. The longest game.

  He slept like a baby the whole way. What he’d heard was right after all; no dreams, but enough stiffness in his joints that it really did feel like he’d been out for ten months. The trip in from the Oort Cloud of his new star was nothing special, and so he read some more. Mostly, though, he longed to walk on land. How he’d made it ninety-five years and then thirty-five lightyears without even going planetside once, he wasn’t quite sure. All he knew was that he wanted it more than he’d wanted anything in his life, except for Sabiya, of course.

  Watching a holo projection of the seven planets in the system he didn’t feel like naming glitter like jewels across sixteen or so AU of yet-uncharted space, Frank wondered what she now thought of all this foolishness. Probably, she’d just laugh and roll her eyes, like the time he’d floated the idea of buying season tickets. You think we’ll be going to Jupiter enough to get our money’s worth, she’d asked. He’d replied that it was the principle of supporting the team and if they made it to a couple games, then that was even better. Hopping out to an uninhabited planet in a private starship was a great many orders of magnitude more spontaneous than blowing a couple thousand on glorified souvenirs.

  Yep, Frank was sure she’d be laughing right now; hopefully with him instead of at him, but he’d take what he could get.

  The descent from orbit went off without a hitch, and he almost wondered what the catch was here on his very own planet. Maybe solar flares, or eye-dwelling parasites, or something far more devious than anything he could imagine having never even been on any planet before, much less one on which he was the first human ever to set foot.


  But what it lacked in comforts of home, it made up for with the view. Ocean Cloud came down on one of the flatter parts of a plain that rolled off toward a horizon that only lacked a bedraggled handcart company to silhouette against itself. Off to his left was a low ridgeline that overlooked a bubbling stream, where some orange lichen-looking vegetation was the only thing that reminded him that this was not in fact a period drama about the blessed, honored pioneers, but a real alien planet. Frank set himself down on one of the bigger rocks and placed the shoulder bag he’d brought out from the ship at his side.

  There were sixteen billion people on Earth, twenty-five million on Epsilon Indi b, and five hundred thousand on Shinasi. But here on Frank’s Planet, population one, the sun was coming up over the mountain he’d decided just then to name after his dog. Mount Ralph. It may not have been the most awe-inspiring name anyone ever thought of, but there was no one else here to tell him any different, so it stuck.

  He was gonna miss that dog. Ralph didn’t have much company on the list of things that Frank Peterson was gonna miss. His wife, well… He was gonna see her when this was all over no matter what, so that was different. But basketball games and old combustion engine trucks: now there were two things his little kingdom couldn’t provide. Would he miss them too much, though? Would ten years go by out here and then twenty and then it’d hit him like a ton of bricks that he didn’t have a clue who was taking the Solar League Championship? Maybe it wouldn’t matter; his own Longevity Voyagers wouldn’t be getting a ring any time soon. Being out here would definitely save him the heartache of the last five seasons being repeated again, that was for sure.

  At least there was one comfort of home he wouldn’t miss out here. Reaching into his bag, he pulled out the only bottle of Coke for probably twenty lightyears around, besides the others back in the ship. Not a can, but a real, honest-to-goodness glass bottle, frosty as anything he’d have once taken out of the fridge back home.

  It opened with a satisfying crack. The thought occurred to him as he almost moved to throw the cap away that he would be the first person to litter on his new planet, and so he stashed it in his pocket instead.

  Didn’t make any sense to be the first one to dirty up a perfectly good planet.

  Waiting on the Rain

  It always rained on Lorakast. Something about the orbital distance or screwy atmospheric modeling, they’d said in the preliminary report on the way here, but there had to be more to it than that. Years in the business had taught Rell that much. She watched the rain pattering and pinging off the thick window that separated her from death by hypoxia and wondered where they’d gone wrong. Interplanetary Resources Incorporated only sent upper-level inspectors like herself when something had gone wrong, so it was her first assumption. But the colonial governor wasn’t cooperating, and that made things tricky.

  She’d been in situations like this before. There was the riot a couple years ago, where the Thevashi ambassador had thrown such a fit over IRI’s installation on Gasin b that only the threat of RSA navy support had called off what promised to be a slugfest in orbit between prospector escorts and a surprisingly large contingent of alien scouts and their human buddies. Rell could deal with aliens and had on plenty of occasions; it was her fellow humans for whom she couldn’t find an ounce of patience.

  Nothing had gotten out of hand. The translators had done their job with consoling the vaguely ursine attackers that this wasn’t just a smash-and-grab operation by IRI, that the terraforming operations were proceeding on schedule to bring about a human-tolerable atmosphere and not just a Thevashi-intolerable one. By the end of the little scuffle, the aliens packed up and headed home, appeased but not for long. What bothered Rell the most was that some people out there still thought she was some kind of monster.

  And for what? For accelerating nitrogen production on a cyanide-and-sulfur wasteland that not even a Josikan would look at twice? For pushing out a bunch of claim-jumpers like the Thevashi whose only dog in the colonization fight was getting there first, and not preserving natural habitats as they claimed? And natural habitats for what? The only things alive on Gasin b were extremophilic bacteria that were already found across half the system anyway. Let the xenobiologists—and yes, Rell would still call them that, no matter how often she was told it was insensitive—take their samples and move on. It wasn’t like they were paving over Ryosh c, for heaven’s sake. Her boss might even balk at that one.

  The door pinged softly behind her.

  “What is it?” Rell asked.

  “News from HQ,” answered a tinny voice.

  “Well, get in here then.” A slight whooshing sound admitted her assistant, Arin. He was far too young for her, and that was saying something, either about IRI’s standards for new hires or how far her own ambition had taken her. She’d have to think about it later, after a few too many drinks and a blatant disregard for both of their duties the next morning. “What’ve you got?”

  “It’s not good. Looks like we have friends coming in a few weeks out.”

  “Thevashi?”

  “Yep. A whole fleet of ‘em.” It figured. They’d been blockading settlements all over the Rim Systems Alliance, all because the Colonial Council were a bunch of bleeding-heart pushovers. You’d think success at Gasin b would’ve stroked their egos enough to get them to intervene more often, but all it took was one bad election to put all the hawks out on the streets.

  And now there was an enemy fleet inbound, with nothing but gas and dust between them and Rell. This never would’ve happened in HPEL space, she thought bitterly.

  Arin’s silence afterward made her anxious.

  “They say anything else?” Looking over at the young man, his fingers tapped at the side of the tablet they carried as if mimicking the raindrops. That made her feel worse.

  “They’re… They’re armed. Big time. At least one Vanguard-class battlecruiser and a whole bunch of escorts.”

  Her heart sank. How did the Thevashi get their hands on that kind of firepower? And what kind of person would just hand something like that over to a bunch of alien extremists, much less use it themselves? She wanted to grab someone by the collar and tear the answer out of them, but she knew Arin wouldn’t know and the governor’s staff would be just as useless.

  “What’s the time stamp?”

  “Three weeks ago, Earth Standard Time.”

  Three weeks. That meant the fleet must’ve been spotted on the way out of Thevashi space or somewhere near there before the news was relayed on to Khorast. From there, regional reps for the Rim Systems Division would have to get together with corporate reps from Earth to decide what the company would do, then consult with RSA officials to settle on a cooperative course of action. It was clear now that that course of action was to just sit back and let it happen.

  “So we’re already dead,” she said, with the same tone she’d use if she was pointing out that it was raining. “You don’t bring a battlecruiser this far out just to kindly ask us to move.”

  Arin didn’t need to say anything to agree with her. Instead, he just sat down next to Rell on her bed and put the tablet next to him, fingers now tapping away at his right thigh. She wondered what his subconscious was trying to type out on there but figured it probably started with H and ended with ELP. That or it started with F and had the same number of letters. Either way, she was right there with him.

  While everything else around them seemed to have changed with the news, the sky was still the same: rumpled, slate-gray clouds hung over the impermeable dome that would be required for human life here for at least the next seventy-five years. Or at least would’ve been required, until the Thevashi brought down whatever it was they had with them this time on top of their heads, possibly within the next few hours. Rell probably wouldn’t even be able to catch a glimpse of their drive flares in orbit before they did it.

  The thought tore her mind in two directions at once. She’d always looked at death as some faraway thing for old p
eople and soldiers, not climatologists. With it coming toward her now quite literally at the speed of light, her animal half wanted to slink away while the human half felt like some little guppy ensnared by a dangling light. She knew the light would kill her, but couldn’t she just take it in for a few more moments before those needle teeth snapped shut on her forever?

  It was a tempting but unproductive thought, and Arin spoke again before she could take it any farther.

  “I see why you do it,” he said, gesturing at the room with his hand. “Cut out all the noise and just have a room to yourself. I’d do it too if I made the big bucks like you.” It was true enough; she did make the big bucks, and taking calls from far-flung outposts and government officials was what attractive assistants were for. And it was also true that she liked it this way. No tablets, no net, just her and the problem at hand.

  But there was more to it than just the silence that even Arin wouldn’t know about. No matter how silent it was outside, inside was always another story, especially here. All these conflicting reports, pushback from the governor, corporate directives left unchecked: they were all raindrops on the window and Rell had to pick which ones were seeded with something true or useful in the second between impact and rolling down the glass and into oblivion. Arin couldn’t know that, could he?

  “Must be nice.”

  “It can be,” she replied, then let out a deep breath. “I just figured I’d have a little more warning before I went, you know? Like ‘I’m sorry but the cancer’s inoperable and you have six months to live’ kind of warning, not some glorified telegram that came a few weeks too late to matter anymore. They could be in orbit right now, for all we know, just waiting to open up on us with a plasma lance. Makes me sick.”