Dancing with Eternity

by John Patrick Lowrie

  As we climbed, slugs began to emerge from the gate. When we were high enough to be able to look down on their shells, we turned back to see what they were doing. It turned out to be nothing much. As more slugs appeared through the gate their urgency seemed to evaporate and they started to slowly wander around again like nothing had happened. And still no suit alarms had gone off. We had escaped. I was gasping for air and trembling with relief or exhaustion or both.

  Steel turned on Archie like a viper: [I hired you as a science officer! I expect you to do your job!]

  [Captain, I— I’m sorry, but—]

  [I don’t need your apologies. I need you to perform. I don’t know what I hit but I do know that if you had been at the controls—]

  [Captain, I can’t just ... I— I mean I think we need to ... we have to—] Then, as if they had never been, Archie and Marcus vanished.

  It was so fast. They just disappeared. No slugs were even close to us. It wasn’t until much later that I put together what I had seen. It didn’t make any sense to me. I mean we had descended sixty thousand meters to get down to Eden. We knew what we were doing. It just couldn’t have happened. We weren’t that high up, barely ten meters, a three-story building. It simply didn’t make sense. On such a complex undertaking, a mission of such profound significance, how could such a small thing, a tiny, stupid thing take two of our company? Arch had simply slipped in a puddle of water on the slick metal, she got tangled in Marcus’ legs and they both went over the side. It was shocking to see how furiously the gravity of Brainard’s Planet slammed them into the ground.

  I think Alice was the first one to realize that they were lost. Half her life had been spent where people were unprotected. She screamed their names with a heart-wrenching anguish. Someone was saying, “They can’t upload. They can’t upload.” I think it was me.

  [I’m not getting any life signs,] Yuri was already on the move. [We need to get down there.]

  He was right, but how? They had fallen on the side away from the trail, landing on solid rock beside a small field of tubes. We had to walk back down the sculpture until we got low enough to jump off. We made our way to their sides as quickly as we could, but it took several minutes. Alice was crying. Yuri kept saying: [I’m not getting any life signs.] He was the first to reach them. There were still no suit alarms. Yuri’s e-suits had worked, had held up even in a fall of ten meters, but it hadn’t mattered. The poor human bodies inside were broken, smashed. They didn’t work anymore.

  We urgently tried to think of something to do, but there was nothing to do. We tried to keep our heads like Marcus would have wanted, but Marcus was lost to us. We tried to think what medical steps Archie would have taken but it was too late for medical steps and Archie was lost to us, too. We were impoverished, devastated. We had lost two human perspectives forever.

  For a long time we couldn’t move, that is, we moved but we didn’t go anywhere. We didn’t want to move Arch or Marcus for fear of hurting them. We did this knowing that nothing could hurt them anymore. Still, the thought of picking them up with their bones broken seemed unconscionably cruel. Moving from the last place we had had them was an admission of fate that we weren’t yet prepared to make. We wandered, we stood, we started to say things. We expected Marcus to pull us together, cut the skag and get us moving again, but he remained as still and silent as his fallen comrade. My dear friend. My dear, dear friend, Archie. What were we going to do?

  Daimler’s voice was gentle, soothing as it came to us from the ether: [Estelle, it’s time to go home. Gather your friends and let’s get you back up to the Lightdancer.]

  Steel looked at us vacantly. Her eyes were dead. Her face was dead. Finally, in a voice that was dull and empty she said, [All right. Let’s ... let’s all ...] She started to walk off.

  “We’re not leaving them here.”

  She turned back, [What?]

  “We’re not leaving Archie and Marcus here.”

  [What do you mean? They’re ... they’re gone ...]

  Alice moved to my side, [Mom, we have to take them with us. We can’t just leave them.]

  [Why? We can’t ... we can’t re-boot them. They’re ... they’re ...]

  [We have to take them with us, mom.]

  “We have to.”

  She stared at us uncomprehending. But she said, [Okay,] and walked back to the two inert e-suits. We decided that Yuri, Steel and Tamika would carry Marcus. Alice and I would take Arch. We rolled the suits over onto their backs. I hadn’t looked into the faceplates until then. They didn’t look like themselves anymore. Their faces were distorted, broken. One of Archie’s eyes had, had ... I couldn’t look at it as we lifted her, but I was glad I had her shoulders and not Alice.

  There was a mechanical quality to it. A certain amount of weight had to be transported back to the habitat. It had to be carried by us. Yuri figured out a way to lock the elbow and shoulder joints so the suits carried most of the burden. Still we had to stop from time to time to rest. The slugs didn’t follow us. They didn’t bother us at all. We walked right past several of them as we rounded the bottom of the iron sculpture. We noticed them hardly any more than they noticed us.

  The lifeless globe of the moon lit our way as we trudged back to base. It was past the zenith and descending before we made it to the hab. We de-suited and went inside, but we left the bodies of our friends in their suits. There was no reason to take them out. Tamika and I lay together that night. I don’t know if we slept. Sometimes we cried. Sometimes we raged. We were all so close to each other in the hab the two of us couldn’t really talk without bothering everyone, so we logged on with each other for some part of that endless night. She’d known Marcus for a long time. A long, long time. She was heartbroken but more than that she was angry. I was angry, too. We raged that Steel had had to push things so far and our rage was amplified by our ambivalence. Would we have done the same in her place? Would we have risked lives to save a life with so little chance of success?

  My heart was glad that Alice still had Yuri to sleep with. They took great comfort in each other. Steel lay by herself.

  In the morning we prepared to leave. The hab and lab would stay behind and slowly run out of power. They would probably be discovered soon, but we would be gone. Draco and The Pleiades could puzzle out the mystery as best they could. It didn’t seem to matter to us. As we were loading Arch and Marcus onto the ultra-lights, Yuri touched helmets with me: “We need to talk,” was all he said. Then he went on Steel’s system: [Hey, Mo. Help me check out this engine. It was running a little rough on the way back from the canyon.]

  “Okay.”

  As Steel, Tamika and Alice went to shut down the lab, Yuri and I went around to the back of the ultra-light in question. As they disappeared behind the hab we touched helmets again. “We have to figure out a way of getting this data out,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean it’s all on Steel’s I. S.”

  “Yeah, I know. But, but won’t they—”

  “Think about it, Mo. You saw how Steel has been behaving. She knows she can’t use it to save Alice, so she’s through with it. Do you trust Daimler to release it? They’re going to quash it. They’ll either keep it for themselves or they’ll just hide it. It’s illegal to come here, remember?”

  “But, but none of us are on the net. How can we—”

  “We have to figure out a way. Three people have given their lives for this information. I don’t want it profiting some damn syndicate. I want it out where everyone can use it. Who knows where this stuff might lead us? The Brainardites don’t have nanotechnology; they have picotechnology, femtotechnology. Smaller than that. We don’t even have a word for it. We can’t let the Bayernische Syndicate keep it or lock it away where no one will ever see it.”

  The problem had never occurred to me, but now I was worried about it. I didn’t want Arch or Marcus or even Drake to have given their lives to profit the syndicate that had killed my wife. Yuri was rig
ht. I didn’t trust Daimler and I didn’t trust Steel. We had to figure out a way to get around Steel’s security safeguards. But if anyone could do that it was Yuri, and he was asking me.

  Of course, it wasn’t until we got up to the Lightdancer that our real problem hit us in the face. We were two perspectives short. Marcus had jury-rigged the engine when they were missing only one perspective and still they had undershot their target by more than three hundred light years. How were we going to get back? We were twelve hundred light years from Earth. How close was the nearest inhabited planet? How could we even get that far? It seemed impossible. The three nearest systems had been sterilized in the plague: Elysium, Paraiso and Cielo were all within fifty light years but they were lifeless rocks. Nothing was left there. Steel, Daimler and Tamika were plugged into Steel’s system, poring over maps, trying to come up with a plan, but they didn’t appear to be getting anywhere.

  Sometimes, though, it just depends on your relationship with a particular word. It was Alice who gave us our answer. It was in the form of a demand. Above tense, quiet deliberations that wavered between angry and desperate Alice’s voice rang out: “I want to go home.”

  At first her response seemed childish, which wasn’t surprising considering her age. Steel glanced at her testily as we floated in control. “That’s what we’re working on, Alice, how to get back to Earth—”

  “I don’t want to go back to Earth. I want to go home!”

  Steel didn’t have much patience left, “Alice, this is not the time. I don’t even know what you mean. Just let us—”

  Yuri said, “She wants to go back to Eden.”

  Steel was stunned, incredulous, “What?”

  “I want to go back to Nazareth. It’s the only real home I’ve ever known. I want to be around people my own age, who are the same as me. I want—”

  The viper we had seen in Steel came out again: “Alice, stop it! That’s nonsense. It’s ridiculous. We’ve had a setback, that’s all. We’re going to keep looking for a cure until we find one. We will never give up!”

  “Mom, you know what Archie said. There isn’t time. There are too many possible combinations of genes. That’s why we came here in the first place.”

  “We’ll make time—”

  “We were gone for thirty years, mom! They hadn’t made any progress. Archie said—”

  “Archie is just one person—”

  “Archie is DEAD! Don’t you GET THAT? Archie is dead, Marcus is dead, Drake is dead, Dad is dead, Jacob is dead. How many people do you have to kill before you let go of me?”

  The rage I saw in Steel’s eyes took me back to the bridge at Neuschwanstein. These people—Steel, Krupp, Daimler, members of the syndicates—were used to getting their way in everything. Nothing in the universe could deny them. Their power was limitless, their appetites without boundaries. Steel kicked against a bulkhead and launched herself at Alice, grabbing her by the wrists. Alice curled up in a ball and they tumbled over each other in mid-air as Steel slapped at her again and again.

  “Mom, STOP IT!! WHAT ARE YOU DOING?”

  Tamika grabbed Daimler as Yuri and I launched ourselves toward Steel. Between the two of us we managed to haul her off of Alice. Our momentum carried us across the control room, and I banged my head into an instrument panel. It must have cut my scalp; blood was floating through the air in streams and globules.

  Steel screamed at us, “Get your hands off me! GET YOUR HANDS OFF ME!”

  I said, “Sorry, Captain. Not until everybody settles down.”

  “I AM THE CAPTAIN OF THIS SHIP. I ORDER YOU TO RELEASE ME!”

  Yuri said, “We can’t do that, Captain. Please calm down. Please.”

  Steel’s struggles sent us tumbling, and I hit my head again in the very same place. “Ouch! Goddamn it. Please, Captain. You have to calm down.”

  “LET GO OF ME!”

  “No.”

  She was still breathing hard, but she stopped her struggling. It was Tamika who spoke next: “Eden is only twenty-three light years from here.” I remembered! Of all the worlds close to Brainard’s Planet, Eden had been spared because it had been cut off from all human traffic. We were between the Orion spur and the Perseus arm, in a relatively dust-free part of the galaxy. We had a real chance of making Eden, even traveling in rational space. Twenty-three years would pass for the rest of humanity, but we would hardly age. Tamika continued, “We can drop Alice off on Eden and then head for Ultima Thule.”

  I asked, “How far is Ultima Thule beyond Eden?”

  “Ninety-eight light years.” That was quite a jump, but still, between the galactic arms, we just might pull it off.

  Steel tried to pull free of us again, but we managed to hold onto her. “I FORBID it!” she yelled.

  Tamika responded evenly, “Sorry, Captain. I’m taking control of the Lightdancer. Yuri, Mo, place the Captain and Daimler under arrest. Cut off their net access.”

  “You need to think about what you’re doing—” Daimler started.

  “You can log on from here if you want,” Tamika continued. “We’ll all be arrested and Alice will be returned to Eden by Traffic Control. Or you can resist and we’ll eject you into space. It won’t kill you, but for the second before you upload it’s going to be very uncomfortable. By the time Traffic Control gets here we’ll be long gone. One way or another, Alice is going home.”

  We heard a banging resound through the ship. Tamika said, “I think Ham heard the commotion. He seems to be upset. Alice, would you go down to his compartment and take care of him?”

  Chapter 38

  It took us four weeks—ship time—to get to Eden. After Yuri and I put Steel and Daimler in her quarters I tried to bullet Archie so she could look at the cut on my head. Things like that kept happening for a while.

  We would bring Steel and Daimler their meals. Daimler would talk to us, but Steel was silent. She wouldn’t even look at us. Alice tried to visit but Steel wouldn’t see her. She got worse and worse. She didn’t seem to be sleeping or bathing.

  Tamika decided that Yuri and I would accompany Alice down the escarpment to the surface. I couldn’t believe we were going to make that climb again. Tamika would stay on board to watch over and tend to our two prisoners.

  Before we left I tried one last time to get Steel to see Alice. We were in orbit; everything was in suspension. I floated to their hatch and knocked. Daimler greeted me and asked me in.

  Steel was looking out at Eden, turning beneath us. Her hair was dirty, her arms clutched across her chest. She looked much thinner. I spoke to Daimler, “I— I was just wondering if, if Steel wanted to see her daughter before we left.” She didn’t turn.

  Daimler pointed at her. His voice was low and urgent. “Look at her. Is there any reason to keep putting her through this?”

  I wasn’t sure what to say at first. “Alice just wants to say goodbye.”

  “You people have made your decisions. Fine. There is no possible reason to keep her in this mental anguish.”

  “I— I don’t—” was all I could get out.

  Daimler didn’t answer. He simply turned to Steel and said, “Estelle, we have a visitor. Estelle?”

  She turned. Her eyes were wells of rage and grief. There was nothing left of her but anger, desperation. She rasped, “Why is she doing this to me? WHY is she DOING this to me?”

  “Steel, she— she just wants ... she wants a chance to have a life, some kind of a life.”

  She wanted to scream but her voice was a dry wasteland. “She WANTS to have a LIFE? That’s what I want to give her!” She launched herself at me, fists clenched in front of her. “YOU! You were supposed to save us! You were supposed to—” She collided with me, beating me anywhere she could reach. I was surprised at how weak she had become.

  “Captain, please—” Daimler and I tried to get hold of her arms.

  “Estelle, it’s all right. It’s all right.”

  She kept beating and punching and wailing until Daimler got h
er under control. Her eyes and nose were flinging liquid into her hair as she whipped her head around. Her chest convulsed with her sobs.

  “She can’t take this anymore. She needs relief,” Daimler said.

  Suddenly she changed. Her sobs stopped. She shrugged out of Daimler’s grasp and put her arms around my neck, kissing it as she whispered, “I can give you anything, anything you want.” She pulled me into her, crushing her breasts into my chest. She tried to kiss me through the floating mat that was her hair.

  “Captain, this is not my decision—”

  Daimler pulled her off of me again. “Estelle, this won’t do. Now, now—”

  She curled into a ball and started sobbing again. Daimler took her in his arms, pushed off the bulkhead and carried her back to the glass wall that looked out onto the quiet cosmos. He petted her, then came back to me and whispered, “I beg you to have pity on her.”

  “What do you want me to do?” I whispered back. “All of this is the result of her decisions. She chose to go to Eden, to marry, to have children, to destroy her children’s family. My father would have called this karma.”

  Daimler said, “I call it cruelty.”

  “What do you want me to do?” I repeated.

  “Just let me take her down to medical and erase the last two or three decades of her memory. That’s all I ask.”

  I was shocked. I couldn’t reply for a moment. I thought of all the things that I could have erased but hadn’t, never would. I thought of what Yuri carried around in him, too respectful of his fallen enemies to ever relieve himself of the burden of carrying their memory.

  “She— she wants to forget ... everything?” I looked at her staring vacantly at the stars and hugging herself.

  “She needs to,” Daimler replied. “Sometimes it’s better to forget.”

  And what have you forgotten? I thought. “Can’t this wait until we get back?”