by Rob Favre
While he was gone, I looked around for a shelf or closet or something to store the food in, but the cabin wasn’t equipped with much storage space. Actually, any storage space. Or entertainment, for that matter. I’d figured there would be consoles or screens or something, but it was wood everywhere, without a switch or button or hidden panel anywhere, at least not that I could find. Were the people of the future just really boring? Did they play a lot of card games?
Didn’t matter. Zoe would be here with me.
I had just finished shoving all our supplies into a messy pile in the corner when the door opened. I broke into a grin and turned around.
My grin ended. I froze.
“Hey, dude. Ready to get out of here?” Mustard wiggled past me. The door closed behind him, and I was face to face with someone I was not expecting to see.
“Tom,” Renay said quietly, “what are you doing here?” From the look on her face, she was just as confused about this situation as I was.
“I should ask you the same thing.”
“I asked Mustard to take me someplace to get help. It seemed no one else was willing to, so I decided it would be me. But why are you here?”
“Same reason. Save the planet.”
An expression I didn’t recognize and couldn’t explain washed over her face. “Did… Mustard tell you? You… wanted to come with me?”
“Renay, I… had a different plan. I’m sorry. Mustard got some things mixed up.”
Mustard looked as confused and innocent as a talking hot dog possibly could. “I don’t understand, dude. You we could leave as soon as she’s here. And look, she’s here.”
“Mustard, you know who I…”
“You didn’t say who you meant! You just said ‘she.’”
Storm clouds gathered on Renay’s face. “Oh. I see. You were going with her.”
“This is not my fault, dudes. You know I have trouble with pronouns.” Mustard was starting to sound indignant. “Tom, you said you wanted to leave when she got here. Renay, you are in love with Tom.”
“Mustard!” Renay and I shouted together.
“Now everyone’s happy! Except maybe Zoe. But she’s not here. Everyone here is happy. Awesome flavor!”
Renay’s voice was quiet, measured, precise. “Mustard, open the door. The Old One here wants to be a hero. If Zoe wants to go with him, that is fine by me.”
“Yeah, Mustard, we need to sort this out. Open the door.”
Mustard grimaced, and each of his tentacles formed the shape of a question mark. “I mean, if that’s what you want. Seems like a drastic step to me. Guess I don’t understand you as well as I thought.”
“Whatever, Mustard, just let us out.”
“Whatever yourself, dude. I will ask for clarification about pronouns when I talk to people in the future. I’m surprised you are willing to die just to make me feel bad.”
A buzz of fear started in the back of my brain. “Mustard – what are you talking about?”
“You want me to open the door.”
“I did. I do.”
Mustard twisted his tentacles into a knot of concern. “Dude, did nobody explain this to you? In space, there isn’t any air. And you need air to, like, live?”
“Space? Mustard, what are you talking about? Just open the door and we’ll…”
The deck beneath our feet vanished. Renay gasped in surprise.
I looked down at New Newton, a blue and gray orb floating peacefully in a sea of black night. It was still dark on the part of the planet we could see. I thought I saw a tiny glint of light. It could have been our colony, but it was so far away that it was impossible to say for sure.
“Mustard,” I whispered, barely able to speak at all, “is that… real?”
“Sure thing, dude.”
“I never felt us move. There was no noise, no acceleration.”
Mustard snorted. “Of course not, dude. What kind of ship do you think this is?”
“Mustard, bring the floor back.” Renay’s voice was flat, robotic. The floor reappeared. Renay leaned against the bulkhead, and slowly slid to the floor until she was hugging her knees. She buried her face. I couldn’t tell whether she was crying.
“No, no, look, we can fix this. Mustard, just take us back. There’s still time.”
Renay’s soft voice was muffled by her legs. “It is not that simple, Old One.”
“What do you mean?”
“We cannot go back.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Ask the sausage.”
I managed to pry a crude explanation out of Mustard. Once the ship is in space, it powers itself using something called “dark matter,” which floats freely all through space, but can’t be seen or touched. I thought he was making this up, but I checked it out later and it seems like a real thing. Anyway, this works great for traveling in space because it’s like taking a boat out onto a sea of gasoline. Wherever you go, there’s more fuel. But a planet’s atmosphere gets in the way of the dark matter drive, so that won’t work until the ship is actually in space. The ship uses chemical fuel to get off the planet, and it only carries enough fuel for one launch. This was our only shot. If we went back now, we weren’t getting off of New Newton ever again.
My body slowly went numb as I realized what this meant.
“Maybe we should still go back. Maybe they can think of another plan. We don’t have to…”
“We do.” Renay’s voice was icy.
“But there must be a way to…”
Renay looked up. She had been crying. “There is no other way, Tom. You know this, or you would not have concocted this plan. You and her.”
“Renay, you understand… we’ll be gone for like twenty years.”
“A sacrifice you were happy to make when you were going with her.”
A thick, stifling silence filled the cabin. Mustard made a joke about chicken wings crossing the road. Neither of us responded at all. I stared at the wood-paneled wall, trying to think of a way out, but I knew Renay was right. No matter how I tried to tip the scales, when I weighed the happiness of three people against the future of thousands, the answer always came back the same.
There was no choice.
There was no way out.
There was only one thing to do.
“Renay, if it means anything… I’m sorry.”
She was staring at the floor, cheeks wet with tears. She didn’t look up. “I am sorry too.”
I turned to Mustard and nodded. “Okay, let’s go.”
“Time for an extreme adventure to outrageous places! Let’s go to Planet Awesome Flavor!”
“Mustard,” Renay and I sighed in unison.
“What? There are Moltencheese…”
I cut him off. “Take us to Earth, please, Mustard.”
“But, dude, Awesome Flavor is, like, so much closer! There are cheddar gnomes there who could help, floating palaces of X-treme chili pretzel nuggets. We could be there in half the time it would take to get all the way to Earth!”
I actually thought about it, for a few seconds. Half the time was tempting. Not only would it give us more time to get everyone off the planet before things got really bad, it would mean half as much time for me and Renay to be stuck in here together. The problem was that Mustard was the only one describing this place, and he had been catastrophically wrong about a lot of things, especially things related to food. There was only one planet in the galaxy where I was sure we would find someone to ask for help.
“Mustard. Earth. Let’s get this over with.”
Mustard turned the floor transparent again as we flew away. New Newton shrank and shrank until it was just a dot, a tiny point of light among millions of others.
Somewhere on one of those dots was Zoe.
I tried to say goodbye, to put it behind me. But all I could think about was the last time she’d kissed me.
The last time she would ever kiss me.
It was quiet in the old chambers. Still built
from the original parts of Heifer, from back when the colony was new. It was old now, dusty and creaky, full of shadow and memory. Nobody else had come here for a very long time. There were more modern and convenient places to do everything these days. But there was something comforting and familiar about this place. Some part of her would always feel at home here.
She had thought about this moment for many years, wondering what it would be like, what would finally force her to take this last step. But now that the moment was here, there was not much to actually do. It came down to entering a few commands and then waiting. The thaw cycle took a while. She just sat, and listened to the wind, and tried not to think too much about what was coming. It was hard not to.
After a while, the glass lid hissed open. The freezer’s inhabitant blinked, sat up, stared in confusion. Then, a moment of recognition. A thousand feelings washed over her face at once.
“Hello, sister,” she managed to croak. “You have surely grown up.”
“Hi. Yeah, I guess I have.”
“Are they here?”
“I’m sorry, but… no. They didn’t come back.”
Her sister deflated. “I see. So, you are waking me because…”
“It’s happening.” She smiled. Despite the circumstances, despite everything, it was good to see her sister again after all this time. “Come with me. You have to meet your nephews.”
Chapter 13
I held a ball of light in my hand. It shimmered and rippled, like a light glowing at the bottom of a pool. It was firm but weightless. I could squeeze it and feel it pressing back against my hand, but it didn’t take any work to hold it up. It had taken me a long time to get used to how this stuff worked. Luckily, time was the one thing I had a limitless supply of.
I tossed the ball at the wall of the cabin. It bounced silently off the wall and returned to my hand. You could tell the computer to make it play just about any noise you wanted when it bounced, but it drove Renay pretty crazy to hear a fart or a quack every few seconds for hours at a time, so I had set it bounce off the wall silently. Sometimes when I got really annoyed with her it would “accidentally” switch back to playing burps or something.
The nice thing about playing with a ball controlled by a computer is that it can do things a real ball can’t. For about a week I had it set so that instead of bouncing off the wall, it would go into the wall and come back out from the same spot on the wall behind me. Once in a while, when I was feeling especially bored, I would have the light ball come at me and try to hit it with a light bat. It was kind of fun for a while, but nothing like the real thing. A bat made of light doesn’t weigh anything, so the timing of my swing was way off, and there was no satisfying crack when my weightless bat hit the weightless ball. I did get Mustard to play the sound of a cheering crowd every time I got a hit, until that drove Renay crazy too.
In a way, it was satisfying to have a ball that always returned to my hand when I threw it. I felt like I was a sorcerer or something. But it was something you could only do for so long before you got bored. These days, I always seemed to have more time than I had things to do. God help me, sometimes I found myself daydreaming about doing chores.
“Shut off the ball game, Mustard.” The ball winked out of existence mid-flight.
“Dude, do you want to play the number guessing game?”
“Not now, Mustard.”
“I’ll keep it between zero and 1 times ten to the twelfth. Please?”
“Not now, Mustard.”
I was hungry, but I’d already had my ration of actual food for the day, and I wasn’t ready to face the prospect of eating more nutrient paste yet. I’d already played as much light ball as I could handle. I sat back on my light couch and wished I had thought to bring a book or something. But then, when I packed for this trip, I hadn’t expected to spend so much of it alone.
“I need to come through, Tom.” Renay’s voice came through the wall, crisp and businesslike.
“Fine. Come through whenever you want.” I didn’t get up.
“Thank you.” She pushed aside the makeshift curtain we’d fashioned out of bags and scraps of clothing that were too tattered to wear anymore. It went right down the middle of the cabin, giving each of us had half the cabin to live in. There was less space, but things were more peaceful this way. We tried sharing the entire cabin at the beginning of the trip. It hadn’t gone well.
Renay walked through my half of the cabin to the food paste dispenser without glancing toward me. At least I assume that’s what she did, since I wasn’t looking at her either. But she usually didn’t look at me when she came through, just like I didn’t look at her when I had to cross her territory to get to the bathroom. The food paste made a slurping sound as it plopped into her bowl.
“Don’t forget to bring that back. They stink when you just leave them out unwashed.”
“Do not worry, I will bring it back. But I do not see how you could smell it over the stench of your garments.”
“I’ll do the laundry as soon as we get to a planet that has a washing machine.”
She crossed back to her territory without another word. Her footsteps sounded angry.
We had tried to make things work, at first. We were both polite, gave each other space. But when you’re trapped in a single room with someone for weeks, you start to get on each other’s nerves, even in the best of circumstances. And these were not the best of circumstances. She knew that I’d planned to be here with Zoe, not with her. I didn’t try to pretend otherwise. And I tried not to blame her for what happened, but sometimes my thoughts caught up with me and I ached with how much I missed Zoe. Even if I did somehow see her again, she’d be a grown woman who’d long since forgotten me and moved on with her life. Sometimes my head got so full that it pushed tears out onto my cheeks. When that happened, it was hard not to blame Renay for being here instead of Zoe.
And I knew it was hard for her too. She never told me why she decided to leave, but Mustard doesn’t have much of a filter, and he told me some things that Renay probably wished he’d kept secret. She told him about how hard it was, seeing me with Zoe every day and knowing that I would never look at her that way. I guess she figured if she came out here, she would be able to save the colony and also not have to see me every day. Half of her plan still had a chance to work.
So, I saw her every day, wishing she was someone else. And she saw me every day, knowing that’s what I was wishing. We did our best. But when things are tense already, hurt feelings lead to angry words, and things can spiral out of control really quick. Eventually, we agreed it was best for both of us if we just saw each other as little as possible. So, we built the best wall we could. It was a quiet and lonely way to live, but it was better than tears and yelling. Most of the time.
I closed my eyes and thought about Zoe’s hair, blowing in the night breeze as we looked down on the colony from a hilltop in the chilly darkness.
Only four months until we reached Earth.
Renay was crying again. She tried to be quiet about it, usually, but I could always tell. It made me wish the engines on this ship made as much noise as the giant reactor on the Heifer had, but they were frustratingly silent. There was so much silence, sometimes it would swell up like a tide that you could drown in. Mustard said that since the propulsion system was not based on matter, there was nothing to create any vibrations, so no noise. I supposed I would have hated months of constant loud vibrations too, but sometimes it felt like I was living in a library. I could hear my own footsteps when I walked. And Mustard really only had one volume level. Every time he talked, it seemed like he was shouting.
I stepped over to the wall and pulled a fold aside. Renay was lying on her light couch, facing the wall, curled up into as tight a ball as she could, clenching slightly with every sob. I felt bad for her. I almost stepped in, to comfort her, to say a kind word, to do anything. But since what she was crying about was the fact that I was here, I figured that would probably just make it wor
se. I watched her for a few moments. If she noticed me there, she didn’t give any sign. I let the wall flutter closed and turned away without a word.
I really wished for something to watch or listen to. The ship had no screens, no projectors, no speakers – no way to play media that I could find. I asked Mustard what people did to keep themselves busy on a ship like this, and he said that they heard music or watched brainies. He really couldn’t explain what “brainies” were in any way I was able to understand. And when I asked about listening to music, he started singing. I didn’t ask about music after that.
“Mustard, can you open the view?”
“Sure thing, Dude!”
The wall fell away and I was standing in front of endless blackness.
Even moving at close to light speed, the stars were still so far away and so far apart that you couldn’t see them move. The only sign we were moving was the blue color of the stars in front of the ship. Dad had explained this to me one time when we were talking about fast travel. It’s called the Doppler effect – the light waves coming from the stars in front of the ship are compressed because we’re crashing through them so fast, and our eyes see light with a shorter wavelength as blue. When Renay opened her view in the back half of the ship, the stars there looked red, because the light from them was struggling to catch up to us, so its wavelengths were longer than normal, which looks red to our eyes. Toward cold sadness, away from warm comfort. If Zoe were with me, would it be toward cool relief and away from scorching danger?
Renay stopped crying. I hoped she was asleep.
One of those bluish dots out there was the Sun. In about two more months, we would be there.
“I need to come through,” she said from the other side of the wall.
“Go ahead.”
Renay pushed back a fold in the wall and slipped through. She was wearing a one-piece outfit with long sleeves and sort of attached shorts that came to her mid-thigh. It wasn’t a color, exactly. From a distance it would have looked bright green, but when you got close enough, you’d see that it was textured to look exactly like a coating of pickle relish, softly oozing even when the wearer was holding still. In the middle of the chest and back was a bright yellow logo for a product called “KoiDogs.” I tried not to think about what those might have contained.