by Ian Whates
And then, it was still.
Jackson let out a slow breath, his ears still ringing from the final shots of the battle. Next to him, Shira slid to the floor of the tower, her face matted with dust and sweat. Her hands shook and her breath was ragged.
Neeley let out a forced laugh. “What was that about it being a quiet night?”
Jackson set down his rifle, realizing he was still gripping it with white knuckles. “Yeah. Right.”
The sky glowed soft orange along the distant hills. With the rising sun came the return of their comrades, the caravan cutting a straight line across the desert.
Still dazed, Jackson plodded down the guard tower stairs to open the entry gate.
As the gate slid open, Jackson’s stomach churned when he saw the carnage of night’s battle up close under the faint daylight. The ground was saturated with white Selark blood flowing from the mutilated bodies that lay twisted amid the scorched hovercraft.
He stepped out of the gate and approached the closest hovercraft that had led the charge against the base. As he neared, he noticed a pool of red blood dripping out of the craft. Human blood.
“No!” The order to fire replayed in his head – every excruciating second of the energy blast careening through the air toward its target, engulfing craft in blinding burst of destructive force, electrocuting the passengers.
Human passengers.
He ran to the craft. The door was ajar, and he tore it open, not caring that the edges gashed his hands.
A bloodied body tumbled out of the open door. The empty eyes stared up at Jackson, mouth agape in a permanent cry of horror. Just enough of the uniform was visible through the blood and soot to see the insignia of Bravo Company.
Jackson’s eyes burned, the acrid taste of bile stinging the back of his throat. He had given the order to fire. Their lives were on him. His comrades had made it home, where they were supposed to be safe. He was supposed to protect them. But now they were dead – and it was because of him.
The weight of his uniform was too much. He wanted to fall to his knees, to cry and mourn for the loss of his fallen comrades. He had failed them, and there was nothing he could do to make it right.
Gravel crunched under heavy footsteps behind him, and Jackson hurriedly wiped his eyes. He couldn’t show weakness, not when there was still a war to fight. He turned to see Colonel Rimov approaching.
Rimov shook his head with cold pity, his mouth drawn. “Poor bastards. Must have got free in the commotion and stolen the hoverer. Led half the Selarks from the base right back here. We practically walked in to take it from the rest.”
Jackson clenched his hands in fists so the Colonel couldn’t see him tremble. He could still feel the empty eyes of the fallen soldiers boring into his back. “I didn’t know it was them, sir. Their codes –”
“You followed protocol,” Rimov assured him. “Bravo Company knew the risks.”
Jackson gazed numbly at the smiling faces of the other soldiers around him. They’d just killed thousands – even if they were aliens – and a squad of their own were dead at his feet. He shook his head, hardly believing that was his reality. Somewhere along the way, it had become all about the mission. They were all disposable, as long as the bigger fight was won.
Rimov clapped him on the back. “Come on. We finally have something to celebrate.”
Jackson followed the colonel across the bloodstained ground. “Yes sir.”
Round Trip
Robert Sharp
“If we could tackle the cosmos in a spaceship, the way sailors crossed the globe...”
– Janna Levin, How The Universe Got Its Spots
So, this isn’t my story.
It’s a strange tale that was told to me by someone else. There’s a peril, isn’t there, that when you pass on anecdotes some of the details get muddled? I do think this was told to me in good faith, but I’ll leave it to you to decide whether the story happened exactly as I was told, or whether the man embellished a bit around the edges. You know, for dramatic effect.
For what’s it’s worth, I’m convinced that he was telling the truth. I wouldn’t pass it on otherwise.
Okay, so the guy in question was one of those craggy types. His face was blotchy, with red veins running between wrinkles, like exposed strata on a cliff. But he wasn’t wild, he was properly groomed. He had closely cropped hair which I think of as practical, sensible. And he was wearing a starchy grey shirt buttoned tightly around his neck. As soon as I saw him I knew he had spent time in a regulated environment. The military, maybe, or perhaps a prison, either in a cell or in the guard tower.
Whatever he was, he was not someone whose fashion sense or whose mannerisms would help you place him in time or space. Instead he was the kind of person who you could meet in any place, in any time.
I have since wondered where else I could have been accosted by someone like him. I thought perhaps in one of those tea houses in the old part of Fez. Or maybe I would have seen him sitting calmly on a jetty in Manilla, picking his yellow teeth with the claw of a crab. Or maybe I could’ve found him propping up the end of the bar in a trendy Camden pub?
I’d love to say I met him somewhere exotic because it would have made me sound as if I was a more interesting person. But instead I met him in a really boring and tedious location, one which you’ll all be familiar with: at the coffee counter on board one of those big commercial lunar orbital platforms, waiting for a connecting shuttle to Jupiter.
Everyone knows how God-awful boring those journeys can be. The InterPlanSit companies all advertise ‘Jupiter’ but the cheap shuttles actually go to Jupiter-Ganymede or Europa or something. And so if you’re on a budget like me then you have to wait around for a hopper to get into the inhabited zones on the inner orbit. So there’s more waiting and travelling even when you get there.
Anyway, on that particular evening the connecting shuttle from the orbital platform was delayed by almost an hour. When the announcement came over the speaker everyone at the gate let out a groan, and I joined the queue for another latte. The place was heaving, and so I had to sit at a table that was already occupied. And there he was, this guy – the bloke with the messy meteor face – dumped on the plastic chair at the nearest table to the observation window.
He was wearing plain grey overalls, as if he was crew or something.
“Is this seat taken?” I asked.
He took a swig from a bottle of beer, which gave the game away. Not crew, he was a passenger like me.
“Help yourself”, he says. And he said it with, can I say ‘purpose’? It was as if he had not spoken to anyone in a long time, or perhaps was just learning a new language. But the accent was English. Northern.
So I sat down, and he didn’t say any more. But, well, we were stirring at the same table so it felt a bit awkward not speaking. It was as if we were on a bad blind date. So I said something predictable about the delay on the shuttle. You know, just to make conversation.
And instead of nodding, or agreeing, which is the ritual, he snorted, shook his head, and said something rude.
So now I was thinking, this is exactly like a blind date.
As if to seal that feeling, he leant over, calm as you like, and said: “Have you ever been in love”
“Sure” I said, and I wiggled my wedding ring at him.
And he smiled at me and his eyes just creased up like one of those concertinas the buskers play right outside the shuttle terminals. “I was in love” he said. “She was beautiful...”
And I must have visibly rolled my eyes here because he’s like, “Yes yes, I know everyone says that, but she was beautiful to me.”
Fine, I thought. Whatever.
“And we would argue all the time.”
That I was not expecting.
“We would argue,” he said. “We didn’t agree on much.”
Okay, so now I could see what’s happening, which was that I’m going to get stuck with this guy and I’ll be giving him a free
therapy session or something. And he just goes off on one.
He’s like “but, I loved her. I... really... cared... what she thought of me.”
He did a big inhale, as if he was sucking in the world. I could tell that I wasn’t supposed to interrupt.
“That was why we argued” he said. “She would accuse me of thinking something I didn’t think and I would get so, so, mad. But then I would say sorry or she would say sorry and the peace, of reconciliation, it was addictive, y’know?”
I didn’t know, but I nodded anyway.
Turns out they’d met on one of the lunar settlements. He was in the engineering corps, working on the life support systems, but she, she was an astronomer! She worked on black holes, she measured the background radiation from the Big Bang, and she wrote books about the shape of the universe.
I remember him saying that, by the way: “The shape of the universe.”
And my friend at the table, he puffed up with pride as he tried to explain her theories to me, second hand. He was inarticulate, but the gist was that the universe is big, very big, but it is finite and curved, just like a planet is curved. So if you set off on a journey and fly in a straight line, you’ll eventually come back to where you began. And if – and this is brilliant by the way – if space is curved like a Möbius strip, then when you come back, everything will be reversed.
“You send a right-handed hammer on the journey,” he said “and when it comes back it will be a left-handed hammer.”
He sat back when he said that, and I saw him searching my face, to check that I got the joke.
“That was Jenny’s joke” he said, and the smile melted off his face. So I asked him what happened.
“We argued. She had been offered a new post. On Pluto. They built this enormous facility out there. Next generation telescope. You get better readings, data or something. They wanted her to run it.”
I remember he bit his lip.
“I... said she couldn’t go. I mean, it’s Pluto so there aren’t any commercial shuttles, it’s seven week journey out there.
“‘You could come with me’ she said. But what would I do on Pluto. Be the janitor?
“And she said, ‘Well, I’m going anyway. In fact, I already accepted the job’.”
He clenched his fist around his beer. His knuckles went white, I thought he was going to break the neck of the bottle. “I got angry. I just could not believe how selfish she was being, and that’s what I told her.
“And she gave me such a look, I’ll never forget it: pity; distain. She was totally somewhere else. There was no love in her eyes. She just said, ‘You’re pathetic.’
“And then she went for a drive. She used to do that. Get into the private hopper and put herself into low lunar orbit for a few hours. Only this time, as she reached the apogee of her ascent, a mining freighter crested out of the dark side unexpectedly. It wasn’t supposed to be there. But then again, neither was she.
“She took evasive action, y’know. Swerved right like she was supposed to, the Law of Aviation and all that. So it wasn’t her fault or anything. But it didn’t stop the freighter ploughing straight through the hopper. She died immediately, with her anger for me still burning in her heart. My selfishness was the last message to pass through her mind, before she became charred stardust once more.”
He took another swig of beer at this point.
“I had nothing to bury. There was no spot I could walk by and leave a flower. She had been wrenched from me at the lowest point in our shared history. And because of the air circulation systems on our lunar pod, her overalls didn’t even smell of her.
“I found something of her in her papers, in her writings. In her theories of space-time, the curved universe. Of course I read the publications and the books many times over, but I also went looking for obscure comments she had made in the peer-review of other people’s work. I became something of an expert. Not in astrophysics, you understand. But in her. In the history of her work, how she came up with her Möbius strip theory of space-time.
“I also read the work of her detractors. Those who had said her theory was incomplete, flawed. I learned that hers was a minority view, that most people thought the universe was infinite. Some people had even ridiculed her. They made jokes about her. She had never shared any of this with me.”
There was this fervent look in his eyes now.
“And it was when I read those take-downs of her theories that the idea formed. I could do something to make it up to her. I could do something to prove the naysayers wrong. I could do something to show her I was not the selfish bastard she thought I was, that I knew her work mattered. I could do something to make her love me again.
“And so one day I walked into the restricted area of the lunar base, stepped onto one the long range military transport ships. And I stole it.”
I coughed into my space latte. “You stole it? But that’s an interplanetary crime. You’d be arrested.”
He smiled at me and shook his head in a sort of patronising way. “Yes, I would be arrested, as soon as I landed the transport on a planet or an asteroid or whatever.”
And that’s when I perceived the enormity of what he was telling me. “You never landed?”
“Of course I had all the mod cons for the journey,” he said. “3D Printer that even did food, electronic library, military grade Stem-o-Matic unit to regenerate human tissue. And a coffee machine.”
He spoke of navigation. I thought the point was to just go in a straight line but he says no, you do have to avoid star systems, ugly looking galaxies, but also – and this was the part that made me think of him as a sailor – you have to check the stars.
“It’s very difficult to get measurements when you’ve accelerated to almost the speed of light” he said. “But, if you wait a few months, or years, or decades, the computer will have some data.”
“I was looking for unexpected shifts in the way the stars moved, relative to each other. This was my chief role on the ship: to find the right angle at which to traverse the universe.”
“That would send me bonkers” I said. And he nodded.
“It would totally send you insane, yeah. But remember I was mad already. I stole a spacecraft in grief, and fled the solar system.
“Even so, those years reviewing trajectories of stars still a million light years away, overlaying them with calculated trajectories of the same, and seeing them match. These were my bleakest, most lonely days.
“But I had faith in Jenny and I knew that I could always do one more day of that work. One more comparison between the observed data and the mathematical prediction. And one unexpected night, my faith was rewarded! A set of stars were moving slower than they should. Just a touch. A few seconds difference from where they should be.
“So I steered the ship closer to that system. And they returned to moving at the speed that the mathematics predicted. But I had picked up a scent. I moved the ship back to its original trajectory and the phenomenon, the slow stars, returned.
“Trial and error, my friend. When you have eternity, that is as good as certainly.
“Eventually, I steered my ship to a camber and a path that made those distant stars move even slower. And with that, I had a second data point, an extrapolation, and a path that took me not only through space, but through time.
“Like a harbour pilot, I nestled my ship in this trench that I, with my three dimensions, could not see.
“And I watched as the stars around me slowed and slowed until, for one fine, black moment, they were not moving at all. I had reached the apex of the curve. The stars began to move again, retracing the trajectories I had previously mapped. I had performed a cosmic u-turn.”
“So you set a course for home?”
“No” he said. “My discovery of the temporal jet stream was empirical evidence for but half of Jenny’s theory. Returning to Earth at that point would not have vindicated her. I had to keep on the bearing through space that I had chosen, in the hope that
familiar star systems would resolve in my spyglass once more.”
“I read almost every book in the electronic library. I taught myself Arabic, Mandarin, Sanskrit. Curiously, despite years, decades of practice, I could find no talent for writing in those languages. I made my own translations, of course, almost doubling, trebling the library in the process. I wrote a single novel in my head. But poetry, good poetry, remained elusive.
“I didn’t see any point in memorising the Bible or the Koran, but I did memorise pi ten thousand places and wrote it out to a million digits, searching for patterns that might have been buried in the sequence. I found none.
“I spent six decades once, parked on an asteroid, mining ore. I had to repair some panels on the side of the freighter that had been eroded by long millennia of direct exposure to starlight.
“Above all, I searched the patterns of the stars. I would make diagrams of the constellations, as seen from the new angle that I, alone, perceived. For each new map I invented a new pantheon of Gods to live among the patterns. But I found them all empty, and weak.
“I took detours to exoplanets and sketched their features. I witnessed red alien sunrises, quasar rises, galaxy rises.
“I spent an hour of each day scanning every electromagnetic frequency, in the hope of picking up the sounds of an intelligent race. I heard nothing but white noise.
“You might ask whether I ever forgot the purpose of my voyage. Whether, in that unanimous night, I lost myself. And I say to you: never. Every day, when I hooked myself up to the Stem-o-Matic, I would put her in my mind. This was my evening ritual. As the machine replaced my tired flesh and revitalised my worn out organs, I would allow the thought of Jenny to reaffirm itself across the pathways of my brain. I think would have forgotten my own name sooner than I would forget the debt I owed her.”
“There’s an allegory” I said. “About a Greek ship that loses its parts and gets repaired, piece by piece.”
He nodded. “The Ship of Theseus” he said. “And with the Stem-o-Matic that’s certainly true. I’d say that none of the cells, no strand of protein, not even an atom that was within me when I started my voyage was in my body when I arrived back at the Moon. The only things that survived were patterns with an agenda.”