Grace's Family

by James Patrick Kelly

  Orisa paused and I opened my eyes. There were more words on the ceiling, but Orisa was finished. Qory started clapping. “More! Read more for us!”

  “Some other time.”

  I hated the way her bold reading voice shrank to a mutter. I wanted to encourage her too. “That was amazing,” I said. “Like I was there, like a story, except I was still me.”

  Orisa smiled and shook her head.

  “But what’s a pantsuit?”

  “You figure that stuff out from context,” said Qory. “Some kind of clothing, like a jiffy. And next time, no interruptions, okay?”

  Almost two weeks passed before we could convince Orisa that there should be a next time.

  * * *

  The three planets in the Goldilocks Zone of the Kenstraw system were kind of a waste. All were lifeless disappointments. Kenstraw B was a Chthonian, a gas giant that had drifted too close to the red dwarf and had lost its atmosphere, leaving only a rocky core. Kenstraw A was tidally locked to its star. Grace had hoped to find life in the twilight zone between the hot and cold faces, but long-range scanning suggested a probability too low for a diversion to see for sure. We were finishing our flyby of Kenstraw C as my watch was ending. Orisa arrived to relieve me as Grace was still processing the data. In the days before we reached the inner planets, Grace had been enthusiastic about the encounters, but now a monotone of chagrin crept into her conversation as she highlighted entries on the command center’s screen.

  “An aphelion of .845 AU and a perihelion of .811 AU,” she said. “Orbital period is two hundred and ninety-six standard days.”

  “Anything?” Orisa tapped my shoulder and I glanced back at her. Qory had trimmed Orisa’s hair for her and she’d been wearing it unbound. It smelled of frangipani flowers.

  I liked the new look.

  “Another runaway greenhouse,” I said. “Grace puts the surface temperature at 462°C.”

  She whistled. “That’s one hot chili pepper.”

  “Mean radius 5,959 kilometers,” Grace reported. “Surface area is 4.953 x 108 km2.”

  “Express that in Earth equivalents,” said Orisa. “And round up.” I didn’t know why she bothered asking for amplification. It wasn’t like we actually cared.

  “Surface area is .9 that of Earth. I’m seeing smooth volcanic plains.”

  Grace’s voice perked up.

  “Also three continent-like highlands,” she continued. “And I count just one thousand one hundred and sixty-two impact craters ranging in diameter from three kilometers to two hundred and eighty. The atmosphere is so thick that it slows incoming projectiles with less kinetic energy down so that they don’t leave craters.”

  She did sound more cheerful. I mouthed the question to Orisa. What the hell?

  “It’s a trick I learned on Curiosity,” she said, making no attempt to keep her reply a secret. “Starships like to know we’re paying attention. The infosphere needs an audience. We’re how the universe knows itself.”

  Impressed, I stepped away from the console and waved her into my place.

  “The atmosphere,” said Grace, “is ninety percent carbon dioxide, eight percent nitrogen, one percent sulfur dioxide, traces of argon, water vapor, carbon monoxide, helium, and neon.”

  “Could there be life in those clouds?” Orisa called up the panel for the biosignature scanners. “Lots of greenhouse planets have extremophile life at the cooler atmosphere levels.”

  “Doubtful,” said Grace. “The clouds are between thirty degrees and eighty degrees Celsius, but they’re mostly sulfuric acid droplets.”

  “Will you deploy any probes, then? Collect samples?”

  “I’m sorry, but that is not indicated.”

  Sorry? We were back to the sad Grace voice. She sounded like she’d let us down somehow.

  “So, a course change for the mangle then?”

  “Agreed. I should begin developing a nullspace geometry to convey us to the next survey site. Would you like to choose a new destination now?”

  Orisa put an arm around my shoulder to guide me back to the console. “Captain’s decision.”

  “Umm…” I’d known this was coming but I hadn’t expected it so soon. If we’d deployed probes we might have lingered for days in orbit around Kenstraw, maybe weeks. “Not sure how this works.” Dad had picked the Kenstraw mission when I was thirteen, and back then I hadn’t much cared where we went next. That had been toward the end of the Mars trilogy of stories and I’d been engrossed with dragon jousting in the Valles Marineris. “What are my choices?”

  The screen lit up with a grid of nearby stars, with estimated subjective travel times highlighted. The closest was Omplu, three years and two months away, but it had just a pair of gas giant planets in orbit. Three others with a single Goldilocks planet were less than five years away. Eshalet was a K dwarf with four rocky planets in the zone; it was six years distant and the most likely to support life. But just then six years felt like an eternity.

  “Your call, Captain.” Orisa’s grin had a menace to it.

  “I … but … Grace, why don’t you pick.”

  I heard Qory enter behind me but didn’t look back to see what she was doing.

  “It’s always a crew decision.” Grace said. “Human privilege. You know that.”

  “The last two times, Dad just chose the closest,” said Qory, “but that’s because he’d stopped caring. I think he gave up on the infosphere.”

  “And Grace let him get away with that?” This conversation was making me nervous. “Isn’t there some kind of plan?”

  Orisa shook her head. “No plan except to keep going. Random choice perfectly acceptable.”

  “Random? That would be…”

  “Crazy?” said Orisa. “Are you saying that the infosphere is insane?”

  I swallowed hard.

  Orisa wiped all the panels off the screen, plunging the command center into near darkness. “How many solar systems are there in the infosphere, Grace?”

  “The starship project has made eight hundred forty-three thousand two hundred and eighteen supervised surveys of star systems, including Kenstraw.” The screens lit up with a plot of all the stars in the infosphere. “In addition, unsupervised starship intelligences operating drones have accomplished surveys of approximately eighty-two million star systems.”

  “But drone surveys don’t exactly count,” said Orisa. “Do they?”

  “Data isn’t information. Information isn’t knowledge.”

  “And how many stars are there in our galaxy?”

  Grace sounded almost gleeful. “According to current estimates, approximately four hundred billion.”

  “And how many galaxies in the universe?”

  Of course, everybody knew these numbers were huge. So huge that it hurt to think about them, so I never did.

  “According to current estimates, there are approximately a trillion galaxies in the observable universe.”

  I felt dizzy and Qory put a hand on my arm. Only it wasn’t Qory, or rather it wasn’t the bot little sister I’d lived with for the past decade. Standing beside me was a grown woman, wearing what I realized must be a pantsuit that was nothing like the one in Orisa’s novel. The silky jacket and slacks were the black of space, the blouse was a fiery and voluptuous red. As I goggled at her, I felt the familiar thickness between my ears that came at the beginning of a sex story. She chuckled and put a hand to the side of my face to turn my gaze back to the screens.

  Orisa nodded once she had my attention and continued her interrogation. “And how long will it take the starship project to grow the infosphere to include the entire universe?”

  “You’re trying to get me to say the word forever, Orisa.”

  I’d never heard Grace laugh, but when I’d heard her make a forever joke that one time, she’d used the same happy-scary tone of voice.

  “But saying that what we are trying to do can’t be done,” the starship continued, “does not make us insane.”

&nb
sp; “That’s your story, is it?” said Orisa. ‘A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?’”

  “Is that not true?” asked Grace.

  Orisa took Qory’s hand, tying the three of us in a knot. “The captain and Qory and I are going off watch,” she said. “We have an urgent need to discuss our itinerary.”

  I expected Grace to argue and was relieved that she didn’t.

  * * *

  I hadn’t been back to Dad’s old quarters since Orisa had moved in. Her workroom was filled with a contraption that consisted of an upright metal framework hung with colored strings; she said it was called a loom and that she was using it to weave a blanket. For what, I’m not sure. There was a rug on the floor in her bedroom. No, it wasn’t Peruvian; she said it was from the old planet Mars, where her great-great-great-grandmother was from. But she’d been born in a crèche like me, so how could she have known this? The woven cloth satchel I’d seen when she arrived slouched on the table beside her bed; a keyboard right out of a historical peeked out. I was shocked and embarrassed to see a painting that Qory had done of me—who knew when?—leading my army down a passageway. It hung alongside half a dozen photos of men and women—some solo, some in groups. She introduced them all to me, friends and lovers from her other crews. I knew that she had been on two other starships before Grace but I’d never learned how old she was. Sixty-six. We didn’t have to sit on her bed because she’d printed an elegant bench about two meters long, which she’d placed against the opposite wall.

  She gestured for me to sit but she and Qory remained standing. “Grace will be listening to us, but that doesn’t matter.”

  The bench was hard. “Okay.” I wriggled a little but couldn’t get comfortable.

  “You’ve grown up hearing all the slogans about the infosphere and the universe knowing itself. Information isn’t knowledge. The stuff about us being resources. But what do they mean to you?”

  “To me?” I assumed this was a test and I was determined not to say anything dumb. “It means we’re stuck. On this starship or some other. We’re pretending to be crew but what we do doesn’t matter. And we don’t have any choice.” I considered. “Well, I guess we get to decide where to go, but apparently that’s kind of meaningless. Or we could give up and leave space altogether. Live on a planet.”

  “Yes.” Orisa gestured for me to keep talking. “But why are we here? What do they want from us?”

  “Sometimes I think we’re just their pets, like Nob and Hob.” I was getting a crick in my neck looking up at her. “But as you said, mollusks don’t stand watch. And we don’t tell them stories. Or ask them where Grace should go next.”

  “Good,” she said. “Good.” She plopped down next to me. “So let’s get this out of the way.” She leaned over and kissed me.

  Did I kiss her back? Fuck yes! It was the most delicious surprise of my life. I think maybe half the neurons in my brain were permanently imprinted with the softness of her lips, the dart of her tongue.

  Ten billion years passed in ten seconds and then there we were.

  She said, “That get your attention, my sweet boy?”

  I couldn’t speak because then I would’ve had to breathe, so I just nodded.

  “Good, good. Me too. We’ll try it again later, although it might be much later.” She pressed a hand to one cheek and then the other. “Is it warm in here?” she said. “Or it that you?” She cleared her throat. “So, the starships. You’ll need to think about this. There are two Jojins. Two of me, as well. Every human is two people.”

  “So is every bot,” said Qory.

  I had no idea what they were talking about but I had to hope she’d be done soon.

  “There’s the you who experiences things in the moment. The you who gets hungry and sleepy. The self of brain chemistry and sensory data.”

  “The self who feels sexy?” I wanted to grab her leg, but I went for the hand instead.

  “That too. That you is the experiencing self. The other you is the narrating self, the self who remembers and plans, the self who makes sense of the sensations of the experiencing self.”

  “The story self. I remember you saying that everyone is a story.”

  “I like a man who pays attention.” She smiled at me and I shivered. Qory—not Qory, grown Qory!—was grinning too. Why were they doing this to me?

  “So the starship intelligences are like us,” said Orisa, “but their two selves are out of balance. They are maybe the best experiencers anywhere, but they’re no good at creating a story out of their experiences. The infosphere builds tens of thousands of drones every year and sends them off to gather data, survey star systems, and they do. Then they don’t. Given enough time, they disappear. Nobody knows why exactly, but the starships believe that they get so caught up collecting data that they forget why they’re doing it. That they’re supposed to develop data into information. They lose the story.”

  She handed my hand back to me and slid a few centimeters away on the bench. “Now, the starships don’t have this problem. They always stay on task, collecting data and organizing it into information. Why?”

  “You’re saying it’s because of us?”

  “Because we’re watching. Because we started the story of the infosphere. Because we care about our stories in ways that no intelligence has ever managed to duplicate. Even when the stories are made up. So the starships use our narrating power to keep them on task. When is Grace most productive?”

  “When you’re watching me,” said Grace.

  “Shut up, Grace,” said Orisa. “She needs us to stay sane. Why would a starship care whether she finds life on the next planet or not? She doesn’t. She’s not life, we are. She cares because we care. She keeps looking because we’re interested.”

  “Or pretend to be,” I said.

  Orisa got up then, crossed the room, and sat on the bed facing me.

  “What?” I said. “I’m sorry, but it’s the truth. We’re faking it.”

  “I’m not,” said Qory. “And neither is she.”

  “And if you’re going to continue to pretend,” Orisa said, “you should think about leaving space.” The intensity of her stare pushed me against the back of the bench. “But that’s a one and done decision. Stop being crew and Grace will drop you on a planet and move on. No guarantees where, no guarantees what your future will be like, no guarantees period. You won’t matter to the starships anymore; they only love their crews. Their families. You’ll be just another resource to them, like hydrogen and ice and iron. Something they use to build new ships and drones so they can grow the infosphere.”

  I swallowed. “I know that.”

  She nodded. “Of course you do. And how many make that choice to leave space? Haven’t you ever asked?”

  I shook my head.

  “About one in twenty.”

  “And you stayed.”

  “I did.” She squared her broad shoulders. “But if you think this is dull, they say that earning a living on some dirty, buggy, germy, too-hot-and-too-cold planet will turn your brain into pudding. Of course, how would they know—it’s the ones like us that say that. But living downside isn’t like the stories Grace is feeding you. There’s no laugh track. And that’s another thing. On starship, you can make up your own story. At least I can.”

  I noticed Qory nodding. “What, you too?” I said.

  “The paintings are a part of my stories,” she said. “The garden.”

  “I get it. Or at least, I’m beginning to.” I was sold. But now I had to figure out what my story was. Something about dancing, maybe. Or inventing a new sport for my roller. Or something. And growing the infosphere. “I want you in my story.”

  “Good line, but it doesn’t get you anything.” Orisa laughed. “You’re going to need something better than the Fleeners, though. That’s kid stuff. You should read more. Actual books.”

  “Like what?” I said. “Tell me.”

  She and Qory exchanged glances. “I don�
�t know,” said Orisa. “Maybe start with Shakespeare?”

  “Again with that shaggy old masculinist?” said Grace. “Where are the tragedies about women?”

  “I like Zeng Yufen myself.” Qory crossed the room and stood beside Orisa. “The imaginary memoirs.”

  “She’s not bad,” said Grace. “But all the best stuff comes after she uploaded.”

  For a long moment, Orisa and Qory looked at me and I looked back. Who were we? Who were we going to be?

  “As I sit here,” said Orisa, “I know that you are already in my story, although I’m not exactly sure how important you are to my plot. My experiencing self liked that kiss just fine, but now my narrating self has to figure out what it meant.”

  “If you want,” I said, “I can come over there and provide more data.”

  “No rush.” She leaned back on the bed. “There will be time for that.” She gazed at me through her lashes. “If it happens.”

  “But not forever,” said Grace. “So where to, Captain?”

  I thought then of Dad, who had lost his way after a hundred and something years. But that was his sad story. Mine was going to be different.

  “What was the one with four in the zone?”

  “Eshalet,” Grace said. “Six years, one month, and eleven days subjective.”

  “No problem.” I grinned at my crew. My family. “Plenty of time.”

  About the Author

  James Patrick Kelly is the author of many novels and short stories, including Look Into the Sun, the Hugo-winning “Think Like a Dinosaur,” and the Nebula-winning Burn. He lives in New Hampshire. You can sign up for email updates here.

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