Stars That Sing the Requiem

by Deb Houdek Rule

  Hovering over the keyboard, Melanie wrapped her legs around a post to anchor herself. With two fingers she tapped out a longer message. She wrote in English, not caring if he understood, not caring if he could even receive her English characters. Into the keyboard she poured contempt for the unseen man in the other ship. The automatic tracking and data relay systems found the frequency for her, aimed the dish and sent the message.

  His answer came, as she expected, thirty-two orbits later when the tracking computers told her he would again be in position. Though in Russian, his answer made it clear he understood her English message. Sorrow, rather than hate, was the tone of the words she read on the screen. “Could I not say the same of you?” he wrote. “What would it gain us? Come, let us talk of more civilized times.” The rest of his message was a rambling discussion of the drug habits of nineteenth century British poets. Melanie found a grin twisting her face as she reached the end.

  Rapping so hard on her keyboard that she had trouble holding herself in place, Melanie refuted all of his points and sidetracked into the relative merits of “Frankenstein.” Her fingers hesitated nearly a full orbit before she ended her note with, “My name is Melanie.”

  As the deep color of a jungle broken by branching rivers passed beneath the ship, Misha told her, “I looked up the meaning of your name. It means ‘black’ or ‘dark.’ How lovely and appropriate for one who falls through the endless night of space. I shall call you Melanishka, and treasure each word that comes from your fingers to grace my screen and fill my heart.”

  Melanie laughed, the unfamiliar sound startling her. “And you, Misha, you are named ‘Michael’ for an angel,” she wrote her brief reply, then spent three orbits defending her claim that “Frankenstein” was, indeed, the first science fiction novel ever written.

  In the next thousand orbits they argued, debated and joked about a hundred subjects, from the Greek myths to the history of Japanese sword making. His humor was quirky, Melanie discovered, leaning heavily on puns that she sometimes had trouble translating, but that always filled her with delight once she did. She found herself anticipating waking up with joy, to having his words waiting to greet her, a happy light in the darkness.

  A comet came and went unseen through the star system, leaving a trail of debris behind it. Melanie dreamed of Misha as the planet entered the comet’s debris. In her dream she could feel his hands, soft and stroking, the warmth of his breath on her neck, the feel of his body against hers. Never once, in the dream, did she try to see his face. She woke in floating darkness and pretended he was still there.

  “Look at the planet,” was the message awaiting her. It was the first time he’d ever mentioned the world over which they fell. Through the port the planet was in night. Streaks of light slashed the blackness.

  “No. No. No!” Melanie's fingers on the keyboard screamed. “Not again. Stop it.” Her hands hunted for the launch buttons, striking them over and over, but no roar of rocket engines answered her commands. Where was her launch partner to activate the dual controls? She called out a name, but there was no one in the ship to answer.

  Even as Misha’s reply soothed, it radiated a grief as deep as hers. “They’re meteors, Melanishka, only meteors. No more missiles. We’ve fired them all. There’s nothing more we can do to that poor world. And no one to order us to do it.”

  They spoke no more of the dead planet. In the next three thousand orbits they spoke of love and sex and dreams.

  As the ship passed over a crater where one had not existed before, Melanie noticed the time lengthening between Misha’s messages. Curious, she asked the ballistics computer to track his orbit. He was dealing with foreign technology, she reasoned, perhaps his systems didn’t hold his orbit as precisely as hers.

  The answer stunned her. Quickly, she demanded the computer to consider more variables. “Misha,” she sent urgently at the next window, “you need to do an OMS burn at…” and she fed him the coordinates and duration of the burn. “Your orbit is decaying.”

  Misha’s reply was slow in coming. “I know, Melanishka,” he said and she could feel that he had written the words slowly. “I used all my fuel repositioning so I could talk to you.”

  As the ship crossed a dawn with rainbow highlights sparkling off the clouds and shimmering ocean, Melanie worked hard at the ballistics computer to see if she could reach Misha’s ship.

  “I’m sorry. I can’t reach you,” she wrote, the words wrenched from her unwilling fingers.

  “I know,” was his two word reply.

  “I love you,” he said on the orbit before his last.

  “Don’t go away,” she answered, not knowing if the message would reach him.

  Alone in the silence, she crossed the terminator into night over Gibraltar. Blossoms of clouds colored in swirls of rose and gold tried to push their way through the narrow gap into the Mediterranean Sea. Somewhere beyond the bulging horizon, Melanie knew, a new meteor burned through the atmosphere.

  In the lone ship, automatic systems obediently worked, resetting a long string of messages, readying them again for playback.

  On the screen a message waited; a single, backwards “R.”

  THE END

  Terra Formation

  Jurnee Ha’Dastra danced down the dim corridor, leaping over sleeping bodies, dodging cups, bottles, and debris. Wake up, wake up, she longed to shout, today is the day! It’s Deceleration Day… and I’ll be at the helm. Ship and sleepers ignored her silent enthusiasm, clinging yet to the night. Jurnee whirled in the air as she bounded over a snoring man, one of Deceleration Eve’s revelers still recovering in the passageways. Litter from the parties gave her ship an untidy look. Just so everything was set for the turn-over, a little slackness on such an occasion wouldn’t matter.

  Climbing a ladder – needing only her hands for ascent in the low gee – Jurnee reached the access corridor to Control. Close to the axis of the tumbling ship, the gravity here was delightfully light. Merrily, she punched in her ID, drumming her fingers on the scanner with open impatience while the pesky machine contemplated her DNA pattern. Nothing if not thorough, MS DNAvigator eventually conceded she was herself and slid back the door to admit her.

  Control’s well-lit corridors acknowledged neither night nor day, those artificial circadian rhythms perpetuated by the ship’s cargo. Don’t call them “cargo” she’d been told again and again. “You were one once, too,” Mother reminded her. It wasn’t kind of the crew to call the passengers “cargo,” and certainly it irked her before she became crew. Now she knew the term for what it was, a harmless separation between those of differing priorities. The cargo had their own names for the crew, ones she wisely never shared with her new colleagues. “Their purpose is themselves,” an aging helmsman told her once. “But our purpose is them. What are we without the passengers, the future colonists?” Free, Jurnee thought, biting her lip to keep from saying it aloud.

  Never mind that now, Jurnee redirected her thoughts to the day’s tasks and adventures. Leaning into Comm she waved a hand at Marco.

  “Hi.”

  He looked up from his screens. “Soon, huh?” he said in an amazing simulation of cheerfulness, his creased face twisting into an unaccustomed smile. As Jurnee continued striding past, Marco leaned out into the corridor calling after her, “And happy birthday.”

  Jurnee grinned at him, waving her thanks as she masked astonishment. In all the last five years that gruff old man had not said so many words to her. Though she’d relentlessly badgered him with daily greetings and smiles, Marco rarely so much as grunted in return. Jurnee supposed she could understand his reticence. Marco was one of the Originals; she one of the younglings rising to replace them. For twenty-five years he’d planted himself every day in that chair and unsuccessfully hunted all the bands of the EM spectrum for intelligible word from Home. Home they still called it, all the Originals did.

  Not so with Jurnee. This ship was her home, the stars it sailed her backyard. She knew every
micron of this ship, cherished its decks and corridors more than a lover’s caress; understood its intricacies better than those who long ago hewed it from an asteroid.

  The door to Command whispered aside and Jurnee paused, as she always did, to savor the sight before her. Crystalline stars – one brighter than the rest – arched over her. DopplerPro and StarVu 2 corrected for the tumble, and for the red-shift their .7c velocity caused. To stand here was as near as a human could come to standing bare beneath the stars. Or so she imagined. Originals, both crew and cargo, claimed no screen could reproduce the majesty of standing on the face of a world with the heavens displayed all around them.

  The thought put a sour damper on Jurnee’s excitement. Never would she understand this fascination with planets. After a quarter century on the ship surely even the ones most devoted to grubbing away their lives in planetary dirt could see this was a better life. Once at a ship council she’d even argued that they should abandon their quest and set a new course. Steer away from this dreary star. Fly outward and onward. Let’s see a nebula up close, or find out where stars are born. Why ignore glories beyond imagining, she’d exclaimed, to hunt out balls of dirt?

  Even Jurnee blushed at the memory. She’d been young then. Now she knew the real route to her goals was to make the ship hers, to be its master. Then she could command it to sail wherever her dreams chose to take it. Yes, indeed, as Captain she’d…

  “Ha’Dastra,” the sharp voice snapped again.

  “Sir!” she responded, automatically straightening and whirling. “Yes, Captain.”

  A hint of flame still showed in the woman’s silver hair. Her stern demeanor remained one of harnessed fire. Captain Leifsdätter harangued Jurnee mercilessly during the last five years. Harsh as she’d been, Jurnee knew she also understood people didn’t crave, struggle, and study for crew positions unless they shared the starfarer’s yearning for the great whatever that lay beyond. If anyone understood such things, it was Captain Leifsdätter, Jurnee thought, remembering some of the tidbits she’d gleaned of Captain’s history, and the reasons she’d been given command of this first interstellar ship.

  “Happy birthday, crewman Ha’Dastra,” Captain intoned. The rest looked up from their positions, echoing the sentiments. “Your birthday is always special to everyone on board, but today it’s as special – perhaps more so – than it was on Launch Day twenty-five years ago!” It both embarrassed and gratified Jurnee that her birthday was part of the biggest ship’s holiday, a holiday bonding crew and colonists. They could have decelerated at a somewhat lower gee than that calculated but they’d waited, wanting Deceleration Day to be the same day as Launch Day – also the day of birth of their first ship-born child; Jurnee Ha’Dastra, Journey to the Stars.

  Captain waved and two stewards rushed forward, a candle-lit cake carried between them. Jurnee laughed with delight at the sight of it. The chocolate-iced cake was in the shape of the ship, something Jurnee had never seen from the outside.

  “Blow out the candles and make a wish,” the Second told her. “And make it a good wish. You’re our lucky token you know.”

  “I wish…” she began, sucking in a breath as she did.

  “No, don’t tell,” several of the crew called at once. Jurnee lost her lung full of air laughing and had to take another breath to aim at the candles.

  I shall wish, she thought, contemplating the bright flames, but not for what they wish. Feeling a bit disloyal for her thoughts, Jurnee couldn’t suppress the desire that burned in her more fiercely than any other. I hope we don’t find a suitable planet here, she aimed the wish at whatever gods of human imagination were in charge of birthday wish-fulfillment. I wish us to sail on to the next world, and the next, never having to stop and stay, never grubbing out our lifetimes on the ground, never trapped beneath a smothering atmosphere…

  “Blow out the candles already,” Second admonished with joking impatience. “You’ll make us late for the day’s other big event.”

  Jurnee exhaled with a whoosh, extinguishing all the candles on the ship-cake. With its candles burned out, the image suddenly struck her as a sorrowful sight, devoid of the life that gave it light. On odd sense of an omen – perhaps of a wish fulfilled, or denied – came over her.

  ~~~

  Jurnee trudged down the corridor toward Control. A year of deceleration at 1+ gee dampened her interest in planets even more. If they found one around this wretched star, and it turned out to be habitable, Jurnee prayed that it had a lower surface gravity.

  Marco only grunted in reply to her half-hearted greeting. He didn’t bother to turn around but remained hunched over his equipment as it struggled to dredge a message from the background static. Noise blared from his speakers, a deafening multi-phonic hiss upon which Marco concentrated with grim intensity.

  Hurrying as much as her aching feet allowed, Jurnee strode into Control. The star, so close it overwhelmed all else, glared from the dome. Glancing down, Jurnee focused on Control. Positions she’d scarcely noticed before were now manned and the focus of much attention. Ship handling – her department – was ignored unless one of the planet hunters needed the ship turned this way or that to enhance one of their endless, tedious readings.

  Jurnee plopped down on the sofa by her station. With a sleepy yawn and wave of her hand, the overnight helmsman acknowledged her relief. After she’d gone, Jurnee signed on, asking for a quick rundown on the ship’s status. The computer behaved with sullen annoyance when she did so, as though she was usurping its rightful role.

  Briefly clicking off her throat mic, she whispered, “Too bad, sister. I’m flying this ship, not you.” Not entirely true, she had to admit to herself, but she’d never cede dominance to a piece of software. The cozy living room arrangement of Control indicated most clearly the human role in ship handling was mostly that of observer, something Jurnee resented, performing as many manual operations as possible. Jurnee suspected that the computer regarded the display screens as an indulgence to human voyeurism rather than a thing of real necessity.

  “Show me recent findings,” she ordered, turning the sub-vocalizing mic on again. Information scrolled past, obediently pausing when her eye movement halted. Umm… The gravimetric guys seemed to be onto something. Well, that was appropriate. It had been their counterparts back on Earth that chose this star. That it had planets they were certain, having determined the presence of gas giants orbiting it from wobbles in the star. The question which couldn’t be answered until now was whether it also had smaller planets; planets with gravity, temperature, atmosphere, and water enough to make them possible homes for humans.

  So many variables. Jurnee leaned back and contemplated them. Even if they found a planet orbiting at the right distance, all the other factors made it profoundly unlikely they’d score a hit on their first try. They’d have to go on to the next star. Probabilities were on her side.

  Captain strolled through Control, stopping at each station, asking questions, examining data. Jurnee straightened. Captain never slouched. Look at her now, with a spring in her step that defied the uncomfortable gee force. If she was to be Captain she’d have to learn to emulate Captain’s manner. She’d have to be the one that everyone else aspired to be like. And if that meant that she would have to sacrifice all for ship and crew, as Captain Leifsdätter had unflinching prepared to do on the mission that had earned her renown, well… Jurnee suspended the thought. Would she go back to being cargo if that was required of her? Settle on a planet and never again sail the stars? Give up her chance to be Captain of this ship? With a rebellious inward scowl, Jurnee considered the galling possibility that she might not have what it took to someday be in command of this expedition.

  “Crewman Ha’Dastra.” The firm, even voice came from behind her left shoulder.

  She turned. “Captain.”

  Captain nodded toward Jurnee’s screens. “Reviewing the planetary data, I see.”

  “Yes, sir,” she answered and waited.

 
; Captain seemed more interested in conversation than in business for she said, “Yes, it seems today may be another big day for us.” She chuckled and Jurnee stared up in surprise. She’d never heard Captain laugh before. “It’s your birthday again. Jurnee Ha’Dastra, you are, indeed, our lucky token. Now I’m sure of it. Something big is in store for this ship today.”

  No sooner did she speak than the doors to Control slid aside again. Captain’s face froze, the happy expression fading into its normally stern mask. Gradually the chatter in Control ceased and all eyes turned toward the doorway. Standing there, face set and gray, stood Marco. In all the years she’d been with the crew, Jurnee had never seen Marco enter this room. Now he stood, staring blankly at the star, holding a printout in his hand.

  Captain walked slowly up to him.

  “Marco? What is it?”

  He blinked, refocusing slowly on Captain’s face. With a hand trembling, he held up the print. “I’ve gotten a message from Earth,” he said, the crack in his voice leaving no doubt but that it was bad news.