by Peter Telep
The last time she had been here, the door had been broken in; now it was inside the house, clinging to a single hinge. Leaves, twigs, and other debris littered the foyer's concrete floor. The carpeting had been torn out of the house long ago, and the walls had sustained wounds from any number of weapons. At the foot of the stairs, beer cans and plastic six-pack holders lay strewn amid a sea of junk food wrappers. On one of the walls adjacent to the staircase, someone had spray-painted the words: NUKE THIS EYESORE! Shane kicked her way through the garbage and mounted the stairs. Lightning flashed again, and she welcomed the fact that its light illuminated her path. The wooden stairs were warped, and creaked from disuse. She reached the second-floor landing, feeling her chest begin to pound. She froze, listened to the sound of the rain outside, then shushed herself. She drew in long, slow breaths.
You're all right, Shane. You wanted to come here again. Remember?
It was right behind her, but she didn't want to look at it. Not just yet. She needed control. She swallowed, realizing her mouth was dry as a desert, then moved her tongue nervously over her teeth. Another breath. Shush. Another breath.
She turned toward the bedroom door. Then she closed her eyes and strode forward, sensing when she reached the threshold. She opened her eyes and—
—there was Daddy at the window, looking very handsome in his United States Marine Corps uniform. He lowered the lace curtain and turned to Mommy. "They're coming! The lights!" Daddy looked very worried—
Shane blinked hard. No, her father wasn't at the window. There wasn't much left of the window, and the lace curtain lay dirty and torn beneath it. She shot a look to the corner of the room—
—and there was Mommy in her Corps uniform, and she looked even more worried than Daddy. Mommy held Kim's hand and carried Shane's youngest sister, Lauren. "Come on, Shane. " Mommy rushed around the bed to the closet, let go of Kim's hand, then opened the door. She got on her haunches, looked at Kim for a second and then kissed her. She put Lauren down and kissed her, too.
"Mommy, I don't want to..." Shane bit her lower lip and felt like she was going to cry.
"I love you," Mommy said. "And you have to be strong now. Shane... take care of them. Remember how I told you..."
Shane felt her hands tremble. "Mommy, no... don't..."
Daddy burst into the room. "They're here! Hurry!"
She lost her balance and had to lean against the closet door for support. She forced herself to look up into the closet at the small hatch set into the ceiling. She shed her duffel bag and set the bouquet down on top of it. She swung her foot onto the knob of the closet door, and gripped the metal grillwork of the shelf. With a grimace and a groan, Shane drove herself up, quickly shoved open the hatch, got a hold on the frame, then pulled herself into the crawl space.
Sitting with her feet still dangling down into the closet, and hunched over a bit to avoid hitting her head on the rafters rising at a forty-five-degree angle away from her, Shane tried to repress a chill as she surveyed the nearest floor beams visible in the gloom. They, like the backside of the ceiling panels, were covered with a thick coat of dust and spanned by cobwebs. She found a particular floor beam and ran her fingers across it. Feeling what she was looking for, she stopped.
Of course, they were still there. She removed her hand and squinted at the wood—
—and sat between a shivering Kim and Lauren, holding them, they holding her. Each girl clutched the wooden brace with her free hand. Her sisters were breathing loudly, and Shane looked at Lauren, who was on the verge of screaming. She placed her hand over Lauren's mouth, and Lauren bit her. Shane winced as her tears came, then she shot a look through the grill of the air duct to see if they had been heard.
Long shadows rose across the bedroom walls. They looked like the shadows of people, but then one of them spoke, and he sounded like a computer, like the soldiers Daddy had warned her about.
"On the floor!"
Mommy and Daddy were shoved to their knees, and they held their hands behind their back like when they stood at attention. Shane saw the shadow of one of the soldiers raise his arm.
BOOM! BOOM!
Intense white light filled the room and razored through the slits in the air duct's grill and—
—the crawl space was dark and silent again. But then thunder clapped and a strong burst of wind swept over the house. Shane looked down, not realizing until she did so that she had been gripping the floor beam the way she and her sisters had that night.
She sat for a long while, her breath growing calm but her memories still locked into a sick loop that ran from the time she was five until the present.
That night, the road of her life had made an abrupt turn. A pair of shots had changed her from a little girl with loving parents to an orphan. She had fought with the bastards who had wanted to separate her from her sisters. At least Uncle Roger had stepped in—though forced—and had obtained custody of them. But Roger had been barely able to be an uncle, let alone both a mother and father. So Shane, over the years, had assumed the role of both sister and mother to Kim and Lauren. She hadn't wanted the role. She had just wanted to be a kid. Now, she wasn't going to get Kim away from the clubbing lifestyle, or get Lauren back into school. And every time Shane tried to discipline them, they would laugh at her, or blame her for their screwed-up lives. Well, she wasn't going to let them blame her anymore.
"I've been asking you why for sixteen years," she said softly, her voice sounding hollow and unfamiliar to her. "Just tell me there was a reason. Tell me they died for something.... And tell me why I did... nothing."
Sometimes she imagined a reply. This time she did not.
She climbed down from the crawl space, picked up her bouquet, and placed it on the floor where her parents had been murdered. With no one to hold her, she wrapped her arms around herself and stood there, squeezing out tears. It might have been a minute, an hour, a lifetime; she didn't know, but finally, she lifted her head and opened her eyes.
She crunched across broken glass to the window. The rain had stopped. She listened to the residual drops trickle through the leaves and limbs of a great oak in the yard.
A new sound cut into the night, the voice of distant fighter-jet thrusters echoing in the sky.
The jet called to her.
Shane probed the heavens, feeling the wind begin to dry the tears on her cheeks. As the sound faded, she turned from the window and fetched her duffel bag.
Outside the house, she considered delaying, to take one last look at the place, but instead she stared into the sky. The storm clouds were breaking, and the light from the crescent moon bled through them. Near the moon, a bright blue star glimmered.
"You're not that far away," she whispered.
four
Nathan and Kylen left Overmeyer's office and headed for the cafeteria. The furor of the meeting had left them famished.
"We'll have a last meal together," Nathan said angrily as they strode down the drab, purely functional hall. "God. I still can't believe how they screwed us."
"We can't spiral out of control on this. We have to think it out." Kylen's even voice was meant to settle him.
But there was no settling Nathan. "Yeah. We can easily reach a decision on this one. Yeah, over burgers and milk shakes we can figure out what's going to happen to the rest of our damned lives!"
They turned the corner and reached the door of the cafeteria. A small, digital sign mounted there spelled out the word: CLOSED.
Nathan charged the door, hammered the sign repeatedly with his fist until it broke free, emitting a tiny fury of sparks and smoke, before it hit the tiled floor.
Kylen shook her head. "You done?"
"I... I need some time... I just... I dunno... I gotta get out of here." Nathan jogged past her and broke into a full sprint down the hall.
"Nathan?"
He reached the door to the stairwell, yanked it open and began a double-time ascent.
Screwed me. Screwed me. Screwed me. I gi
ve. You take. Give. Give. Give. Take. Take. Take. Come here, Nathan. Let me slap you in the face. Come here, Nathan.
Let me boot you in the ass. Come here, Nathan. Let me show you just how much you're only a seven-digit number with spaces in between, a seven-digit number as replaceable as toilet paper....
Oh, and by the way. Come here, Nathan. I'm done screwing your professional life. Now, let me ruin you personally.
Nathan burst onto the roof, wholly out of breath. His temples throbbed and it seemed he'd lost control of his hands: his fists would not unlock. He ran through a row of tiny, meter-high satellite dishes, then slowed to a stop a short distance from the edge of the complex. A wall about knee high ran along the perimeter of the roof. Still panting, Nathan wandered to the wall and looked down at the lot below.
The ground traffic was heavy. Techs, engineers, colonists, administrators, and security personnel came to and from the complex. The monorail that shuttled people out to the launch pad was just coming into the station.
Nathan imagined what it would feel like to let himself fall from the building, to soar in the air and be at peace for a brief moment, at peace knowing that the decision had been made and there was no turning back. From the moment his feet would leave the rooftop, gravity—not the senators nor board of governors—would be in control of his fate.
He remembered when he was a kid and had jumped off the roof of the family farmhouse, thinking an umbrella would float him safely to the earth. Nathan wondered how many other kids across the globe had tried that same stunt.
What am I doing?
Turning away from the ledge, Nathan withdrew from the breast pocket of his jumpsuit a journal the size of an old paperback book. He opened the journal, took up the pen he used as a bookmark, and wrote the date at the top of the blank page. He moved the pen to the next line.
And all he could hear was that voice in his head.
Give. Give. Give. Take. Take. Take. Work hard. Dream. Get screwed.
Reaching for anything to replace his angry mood, he turned back to his last entry and read:
04-08-04
2100
Tomorrow is the simulated launch. I tried to call Mom and Dad but first they weren't home, and then there was a problem with the link. At least I got to talk to John and Neil. Neither of them knew what to say when I told them I would miss them. Dad's got them bottling up their emotions, just like he had me doing. But they'll learn, like I did. All it will take is a woman like Kylen.
Ah, Kylen... she's... God... beautiful. She's got me feeling things I've never felt before. She's got me imagining what our family will be like on Tellus. I've painted a whole future in my mind. That's it. That's what she does, she draws out my dreams and she turns them on their sweetest sides.
All right, she gets me choked up and makes me get all melodramatic and mushy, as Dad would say. But when I think about it, when you're going to go on a sixteen-light-year journey with someone, you'd better damned well like them.
Or, in my case, love the hell out of them.
Nathan clapped shut the journal. He sighed, then lifted his eyes to the stars.
I want to be there...
Then, at that moment, it was as though he were wiped out of existence by a supernova and reborn with a clear, invigorated mind. Toggles were thrown, connections were made, and sunrise was not far off. He thought of his relationship with Kylen in terms of the solar system. Yes, it sounded bizarre at first, but then he saw the link. Quickly, almost frantically, he opened his journal.
Nathan wrote furiously for perhaps fifteen minutes. At the sound of the rooftop door opening behind him, he shoved his pen into the journal, then closed and pocketed it. He looked over his shoulder to regard Kylen.
"Thanks for... the time."
"You all right?"
He faced her. "I, uh, I'm sorry about that back there."
"Forget it."
Kylen ran her thumbs along the chain holding her photo tags. The tags were not unlike old-style military dog tags, but were unofficial and had digital images of Kylen and himself on them. Her picture was perfect. His was of some monster who only slightly resembled him. Usually Kylen kept them tucked into her bra, but now she had them out. Obviously she had been looking at them. She let one hand fall away, then held the tags with the other.
Nathan frowned. "What do we do now?"
"Everyone is down saying good-bye to their families." He nodded absently.
She took his hand. "I never thought we'd be saying good-bye to each other."
"Then let's run away..."
She dropped his hand. "To a life of what? If we break the contract no one will employ us. We'll be indentured servants to the colonial program for twenty years."
Nathan gritted his teeth and cocked a thumb over his shoulder. "Did they keep their word to us? The program was all I ever believed in. And now there's nothing."
He wasn't sure why, but she appeared more hurt than she should have been by his last remark. He repeated the words to himself, and then he realized that it sounded as if he had never believed in her, only the program. And that wasn't true.
"Kylen, I didn't mean for it to—"
"You believed in equal rights for In Vitroes," she said, sidestepping his apology.
"Not at the expense of our rights. We've trained. We've sacrificed. We've dreamed... together. They're stealing that." He jerked away from her. "Our lives are over."
She stepped closer to him. "Nathan... we're not dying. Maybe we just have to find another dream."
Moving to the ledge, Nathan paused to stare at the rocket. He wanted to be aboard so badly that not only could he taste the desire, but every other sense was wired to the notion and blistering from an overload. "Kylen, there are twelve billion people in the world. Less than a thousand have the honor of going into space. In three hours, one of us will leave—forever—on the most powerful and complex machine ever built. One of us will travel faster than light, farther than most people will ever go, to a planet with eight moons, with a waterfall six times the width of Niagara and a tropical rain forest the size of Europe. It's a place with a better life." Slowly, he faced her. "And because of what they've done, one of us will be left behind to always wonder: Would my life have been extraordinary if I had gone?" Kylen bit her lip, and for a moment looked like a wounded little girl. Then she straightened and showed nothing but her business side. "We can't spend the last hours we have together as victims. We have to... somehow... take control."
Nathan felt his brow lift, almost involuntarily, but not quite. He had spent so much time being pissed off at the system that it hadn't occurred to him until now that there might be a way to bypass it.
No, there was definitely a way to bypass it. Any lock can be picked, any code broken. The trick would be to get help. And Nathan knew where to start.
"What are you thinking, Nathan?"
"Nothing."
five
"Nathan, you're out of your mind. I won't do it. No."
"We're talking about a seventy-kilogram differential between projected and final. Nobody's going to lose their job over it."
Colonial systems analyst Alex Foster shook his head, his triple chin wagging. The bear of a man leaned forward in his chair, pushing aside the laptop computer on his desk to make room for his arms. "Buddy, I know how you feel. When I heard, I felt like shit, too. But what's done—"
Nathan smote his fist on the desk top. "Is not done. All you have to do is pull up the cargo database and change one number. Then give me a couple of crate codes. That's it."
"I don't have the—"
"Bullshit. You've got clearance." Nathan crossed to the door of the small office, then thought better of leaving. He turned back. "Alex, I'm begging. My life, I swear, my life is in your hands, man. Help me."
Foster leaned back in his chair and pillowed his head in his hands.
"Please..."
Lowering his gaze, the systems analyst sighed.
On his way to the cargo warehouse
, Nathan realized that he wasn't going to be "right back" like he had told Kylen. He hoped she would do the right thing. His failure to return would mean that she would go on with the mission. He was saddened about not saying good-bye, but then again, he shouldn't feel that way. There was no need for a farewell.
Though the senators and governors had taken away his right to board the rocket, they hadn't taken away his I.D. tag, and that got him past the sentries posted at one of the warehouse's north side doors.
Inside, he stopped to make a quick survey of the hangar-like facility. Row after row of white polymer crates were being loaded onto the flatbeds of cargo vehicles by techs in clean suits. The crates would be taken out past the two great open doors on the west side of the warehouse and delivered to the launch tower. Judging from the cargo vehicles' present positions, Nathan figured that the last row of crates to be loaded was the one that paralleled the south wall, and that was a coincidence in his favor. The crate he wanted was in that row.
Keeping his head low, Nathan strode into the warehouse. The internal lights were mounted so high on the walls that they cast a weak glow over everything, and Nathan's passage was concealed mostly in shadow. He reached his destination without incident, for the techs were hustling to load crates and were much too intent on their work to notice a passerby.
Moving up the row, Nathan scanned the cargo. About midway up, he found it. The box was a perfect cube, with a width, length, and depth of about two and a half meters. Its I.D. plate read:
TELLUS COLONY: 85759448##-67854
Docket 347-89-789***
MOBILE WEATHER STATION
AND BALLOON ASSEMBLY
Nathan pulled his journal from his breast pocket and opened it to the back page. There he had written two sets of six numbers that Foster had given him. He knelt before the crate's access panel, then looked up at the small keypad on the crate. As he keyed each number, it was digitally displayed above the pad. The crate's seal blew, and Nathan put away his journal and pulled the panel back toward him, revealing the small weather station and balloon assembly. His original idea had been to squeeze between the sampling rods of the station and rest his head on the silk pile of the balloon. But his memory had painted the space between the two as much larger than it really was. In any event, there was no other option, so he would have to contort himself to get into the crate, shove an arm here, a leg there, perhaps have a knee up near his earlobe.