The Final Frontier

by Neil Clarke

  They hadn’t debated options because they weren’t going to have any. This part of it—even assuming the planet were hospitable enough to let them set up in the first place—would be a lot harder than the voyage. It didn’t bear discussion.

  SOPHIE (2126)

  Waking. Again? Trying to rise up out of that dream of sinking back into the dream of rising up out of the. Momma? All that okay.

  Soph? Upsa daise. Allons.

  Sergei?

  She was sitting on the cold, hard deck, gasping for breath.

  Good girl, Soph. Get up, sit to console, bring spectroscope online. What we got? Soph! Stay with!

  She sat at the console. The screen showed dimly, through blurs and maculae that she couldn’t blink away, a stranger’s face: ruined, wrinkled, sagging, eyes milky, strands of lank white hair falling from a sored scalp. With swollen knuckles and gnarled fingers slow and painful under loose sheathes of skin, she explored hard lumps in the sinews of her neck, in her breasts, under her skeletal arms. It hurt to swallow. Or not to.

  The antisenescents hadn’t worked. They’d known this was possible. But she’d been twenty-five. Her body hadn’t known. Now she was old, sick, and dying after unlived decades spent on a slab. Regret beyond despair whelmed her. Every possible future that might have been hers, good or ill, promised or compromised, all discarded the day they launched. Now she had to accept the choice that had cost her life. Not afraid of death, but sick at heart thinking of that life, hers, however desperate it might have been on Earth—any life—now unliveable.

  She tried to read the logs. Files corrupted, many lost. Handwritten copies blurry in her sight. Her eyes weren’t good enough for this. She shut them, thought, then went into the supply bay, rested there for a minute, pulled out a printer and scanner, rested again, connected them to the computer, brought up the proper software. That all took a few tiring hours. She napped. Woke and affixed the scanner to her face. Felt nothing as mild infrared swept her corneas and mapped their aberrations. The printer was already loaded with polycarbonate stock, and after a minute it began to hum.

  She put her new glasses on, still warm. About the cataracts she could do nothing. But now she could read.

  They had braked once, going around B. Rosa had executed the first part of the maneuver, following Zia’s plan. His cushion shot. But their outgoing velocity was too fast.

  Sergei continued talking in the background, on and on as he did, trying to get her attention. She felt annoyed with him, couldn’t he see she was busy?

  Look! Look for spectra.

  She felt woozy, wandering. Planets did that. They wandered against the stars. How does a planet feel? Oh yes, she should look for a planet. That’s where they were going.

  Four. There were four planets. No, five—there was a sub-Mercury in close orbit around B. The other four orbited A. Three were too small, too close to the star, too hot. The fourth was Earth-like. It was in an orbit of 0.8 AU, eccentricity 0.05. Its mass wass three-quarters that of Earth. Its year was about 260 days. They were still 1.8 AU from it, on the far side of Alpha Centauri A. The spectroscope showed nitrogen, oxygen, argon, carbon dioxide, krypton, neon, helium, methane, hydrogen. And liquid water.

  Liquid water. She tasted the phrase on her tongue like a prayer, a benediction.

  It was there. It was real. Liquid water.

  *

  But then there were the others. Fourteen who could not be roused. Leaving only her and Sergei. And of course Sergei was not real.

  So there was no point. The mission was over however you looked at it. She couldn’t do it alone. Even if they reached the planet, even if she managed to aerobrake the ship and bring it down in one piece, they were done, because there was no more they.

  The humane, the sensible thing to do now would be to let the ship fall into the approaching sun. Get it over quickly.

  She didn’t want to deal with this. It made her tired.

  Two thirds of the way there’s a chockstone, a large rock jammed in the crack, for protection before the hardest part. She grasps it, gets her breath, and pulls round it. The crux involves laybacking and right arm pulling. Her arm is too tired. Shaking and straining she fights it. She thinks of falling. That was bad, it meant her thoughts were wandering.

  Some day you will die. Death will not wait. Only then will you realize you have not practiced well. Don’t give up.

  She awoke with a start. She realized they were closing on the sun at its speed, not hers. If she did nothing, that was a decision. And that was not her decision to make. All of them had committed to this line. Her datastream was still sending, whether anyone received it or not. She hadn’t fallen on the mountain, and she wasn’t going to fall into a sun now.

  The planet was lost in the blaze of Alpha A. Two days away from that fire, and the hull temperature was climbing.

  The A sun was hotter, more luminous, than B. It couldn’t be approached as closely. There would be less decel.

  This was not her expertise. But Zia and Rosa had left exhaustive notes, and Sophie’s expertise was in winnowing and organizing and executing. She prepped the reactor. She adjusted their trajectory, angled the cushion shot just so.

  Attitude thrusters halted the ship’s rotation, turned it to rest in the sun-shield’s shadow. Gravity feathered away. She floated as they freefell into light.

  Through the sunshield, through the layers of carbon, aerogel, through closed eyelids, radiance fills the ship with its pressure, suffusing all, dispelling the decades of cold, warming her feelings to this new planet given life by this sun; eyes closed, she sees it more clearly than Earth—rivers running, trees tossing in the wind, insects chirring in a meadow—all familiar but made strange by this deep, pervasive light. It might almost be Earth, but it’s not. It’s a new world.

  Four million kilometers from the face of the sun. 2500° Celsius.

  Don’t forget to strap in. Thank you, Rosa.

  At periapsis, the deepest point in the gravity well, the engine woke in thunder. The ship shuddered, its aged hull wailed and boomed. Propellant pushed hard against their momentum, against the ship’s forward vector, its force multiplied by its fall into the star’s gravity, slowing the ship, gradually turning it. After an hour, the engine sputtered and died, and they raced away from that radiance into the abiding cold and silence of space.

  Oh, Sergei. Oh, no. Still too fast.

  They were traveling at twice the escape velocity of the Alpha C system. Fuel gone, having rounded both suns, they will pass the planet and continue out of the system into interstellar space.

  Maneuver to planet. Like Zia said. Take all genetic material, seeds, zygotes, heatshield payload and drop to surface, okay? Best we can do. Give life a chance.

  No fuel, Sergei. Not a drop. We can’t maneuver, you hear me?

  Her mind is playing tricks. She has to concentrate. The planet is directly in front of them now, but still nine days away. Inexorable, it will move on in its orbit. Inexorable, the ship will follow its own divergent path. They will miss by 0.002 AU. Closer than the Moon to the Earth.

  Coldly desperate, she remembered the attitude thrusters, fired them for ten minutes until all their hydrazine was exhausted. It made no difference.

  She continued to collect data. Her datastream lived, a thousand bits per hour, her meager yet efficient engine of science pushing its mite of meaning back into the plaintext chaos of the universe, without acknowledgement.

  The planet was drier than Earth, mostly rock with two large seas, colder, extensive polar caps. She radar-mapped the topography. The orbit was more eccentric than Earth’s, so the caps must vary, and the seas they fed. A thirty-hour day. Two small moons, one with high albedo, the other dark.

  What are they doing here? Have they thrown their lives away for nothing? Was it a great evil to have done this? Abandoned Earth?

  But what were they to do? Like all of them, Roger was a problem solver, and the great problem on Earth, the problem of humanity, was unsolvable; it
was out of control and beyond the reach of engineering. The problems of Gypsy were large but definable.

  We were engineers. Of our own deaths. These were the deaths we wanted. Out here. Not among those wretched and unsanctified. We isolates.

  *

  She begins to compose a poem a day. Not by writing. She holds the words in her mind, reciting them over and over until the whole is fixed in memory. Then she writes it down. A simple discipline, to combat her mental wandering.

  In the eye of the sun

  what is not burned to ash?

  In the spire of the wind

  what is not scattered as dust?

  Love? art?

  body’s rude health?

  memory of its satisfactions?

  Antaeus

  lost strength

  lifted from Earth

  Reft from our gravity

  we fail

  Lime kept sailors hale

  light of mind alone

  with itself

  is not enough

  The scope tracked the planet as they passed it by. Over roughly three hours it grew in size from about a degree to about two degrees, then dwindled again. She spent the time gazing at its features with preternatural attention, with longing and regret, as if it were the face of an unattainable loved one.

  It’s there, Sergei, it’s real—Ghost Planet Hope—and it is beautiful—look, how blue the water—see the clouds—and the seacoast—there must be rain, and plants and animals happy for it—fish, and birds, maybe, and worms, turning the soil. Look at the mountains! Look at the snow on their peaks!

  This was when the science pod should have been released, the large reflecting telescope ejected into planetary orbit to start its year-long mission of measuring stellar distances. But that was in a divergent universe, one that each passing hour took her farther from.

  We made it. No one will ever know, but we made it. We came so far. It was our only time to do it. No sooner, we hadn’t developed the means. And if we’d waited any longer, the means would have killed us all. We came through a narrow window. Just a little too narrow.

  She recorded their passing. She transmitted all their logs. Her recent poems. The story of their long dying. In four and a quarter years it would reach home. No telling if anyone would hear.

  So long for us to evolve. So long to walk out of Africa and around the globe. So long to build a human world. So quick to ruin it. Is this, our doomed and final effort, no more than our grieving for Earth? Our mere mourning?

  Every last bit of it was a long shot: their journey, humanity, life itself, the universe with its constants so finely tuned that planets, stars, or time itself, had come to be.

  Fermi’s question again: If life is commonplace in the universe, where is everyone? How come we haven’t heard from anyone? What is the mean time between failures for civilizations?

  Not long. Not long enough.

  Now she slept. Language was not a tool used often enough even in sleep to lament its own passing. Other things lamented more. The brilliance turned to and turned away.

  She remembers the garden behind the house. Her father grew corn—he was particular about the variety, complained how hard it was to find Silver Queen, even the terminated variety—with beans interplanted, which climbed the cornstalks, and different varieties of tomato with basil interplanted, and lettuces—he liked frisee. And in the flower beds alstroemeria, and wind lilies, and Eschscholzia. He taught her those names, and the names of Sierra flowers—taught her to learn names. We name things in order to to love them, to remember them when they are absent. She recites the names of the fourteen dead with her, and weeps.

  She’d been awake for over two weeks. The planet was far behind. The hibernation cocktail was completely flushed from her system. She wasn’t going back to sleep.

  ground

  rose

  sand

  elixir

  cave

  root

  dark

  golden

  sky-born

  lift

  earth

  fall

  The radio receiver chirps. She wakes, stares at it dumbly.

  The signal is strong! Beamed directly at them. From Earth! Words form on the screen. She feels the words rather than reads them.

  We turned it around. Everything is fixed. The bad years are behind us. We live. We know what you did, why you did it. We honor your bravery. We’re sorry you’re out there, sorry you had to do it, wish you . . . wish . . . wish . . . . Good luck. Good-bye.

  Where are her glasses? She needs to hear the words. She needs to hear a human voice, even synthetic. She taps the speaker.

  The white noise of space. A blank screen.

  She is in the Sierra, before the closure. Early July. Sun dapples the trail. Above the alpine meadow, in the shade, snow deepens, but it’s packed and easy walking. She kicks steps into the steeper parts. She comes into a little flat just beginning to melt out, surrounded by snowy peaks, among white pine and red fir and mountain hemlock. Her young muscles are warm and supple and happy in their movements. The snowbound flat is still, yet humming with the undertone of life. A tiny mosquito lands on her forearm, casts its shadow, too young even to know to bite. She brushes it off, walks on, beyond the flat, into higher country.

  thistle daisy cow-parsnip strawberry clover

  mariposa-lily corn-lily ceanothus elderberry marigold

  mimulus sunflower senecio goldenbush dandelion

  mules-ear iris miners-lettuce sorrel clarkia

  milkweed tiger-lily mallow veronica rue

  nettle violet buttercup ivesia asphodel

  ladyslipper larkspur pea bluebells onion

  yarrow cinquefoil arnica pennyroyal fireweed

  phlox monkshood foxglove vetch buckwheat

  goldenrod groundsel valerian lovage columbine

  stonecrop angelica rangers-buttons pussytoes everlasting

  watercress rockcress groundsmoke solomons-seal bitterroot

  liveforever lupine paintbrush blue-eyed-grass gentian

  pussypaws butterballs campion primrose forget-me-not

  saxifrage aster polemonium sedum rockfringe

  sky-pilot shooting-star heather alpine-gold penstemon

  Forget me not.

  Vandana Singh is an Indian science fiction writer and professor of physics currently inhabiting the Boston area. Her stories have been published in numerous venues, including reprints in several Year’s Best volumes. She is the author of two short story collections, The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet and Other Stories (Zubaan/Penguin India 2008) and Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories (Small Beer Press 2018). For more about her, see vandana-writes.com.

  SAILING THE ANTARSA

  VANDANA SINGH

  There are breezes, like the ocean breeze, which can set your pulse racing, dear kin, and your spirit seems to fly ahead of you as your little boat rides each swell. But this breeze! This breeze wafts through you and me, through planets and suns, like we are nothing. How to catch it, know it, befriend it? This sea, the Antarsa, is like no other sea. It washes the whole universe, as far as we can tell, and the ordinary matter such as we are made of is transparent to it. So how is it that I can ride the Antarsa current, as I am doing now, steering my little spacecraft so far from Dhara and its moon?

  Ah, there lies a story.

  I have gone further than anyone since my ancestors first came to Dhara four generations ago. As I stare out into the night, I can see the little point that is my sun. It helps to look at it and know that the love of my kin reaches across space and time to me, a bridge of light. I am still weak from my long incarceration in the cryochamber—and filled with wonder that I have survived nearly all the journey to the Ashtan system—but oh! It takes effort even to speak aloud, to record my thoughts and send them homeward.

  I am still puzzled as to why the ship woke me up before it was time. During my long, dreamless sleep, we have sustained some mild damage from space debris, but the self-repa
iring system has done a good enough job, and nothing else seems to be wrong. There were checks against a half-dozen systems that were not of critical importance—I have just finished going through each of them and performing some minor corrections. In the navigation chamber the altmatter sails spread out like the wings of some marvelous insect—still intact. I put my hands into the manipulation gloves, immediately switching the craft to manual control, and checked. The rigging is still at a comfortable tension, and it takes just a small twitch of a finger to lift, rotate, lower or twist each sail. It is still thrilling to feel the Antarsa current that passes through me undetected, to feel it indirectly by way of the response of the altmatter wings! A relief indeed to know that the sense I had been developing of the reality, the tangibility of the Antarsa sea is not lost. We are on course, whatever that means when one is riding a great current into the unknown, only roughly certain of our destination.

  There is a shadowy radar image that I need to understand. The image is not one of space debris, but of a shape wide in the middle and tapered at both ends, shutting out the stars. It is small, and distant, traveling parallel to us at nearly the same speed, but subsequent scans reveal no such thing. My first excited thought was: spaceship! But then, where is it? If it came close enough for my sensors, why did it choose to retreat? If this is why the ship woke me, which seems logical, then why didn’t it wake me earlier, when a nearly spherical piece of space rock hit us? When we grazed past a lone planet that had been shot out of some distant, unstable solar system?

  The ship’s intelligence is based on the old generation ship AI that brought my ancestors to Dhara. It has a quietness and a quick efficiency that one would expect of an artificial thinking system, but there are aspects of it that remind me of people I know. A steadiness masking a tendency to over-plan for contingencies. That might be why it woke me up—it is a secret worrier, like my superficially calm mother Simara, so far and so long away. I will never see her—or any of them—again. That thought brings tears to my eyes.