by Neil Clarke
“Sure.”
When she was gone, he slid off the bed to his feet, and his head swam and vision wavered. He was still tired and woozy; whether from the remnants of the sedative or his rebellious senses, he didn’t know. He was ill. He could admit that now. It only meant he had to be a little more careful. He slipped Baz’s band around his wrist.
The corridor was empty. He reached the first bulkhead door. He showed the wristband to the scanner.
The door slipped open, an escape portal, and a weight lifted from his mind. Free. He could run if he wanted.
You’re going to follow Morgan.
If he could only see space again, see ships traveling against the backdrop of stars, he’d remember, and everything would be all right. He’d remember and tell them what really happened.
He passed the common room. Only Jaspar was inside, which was too bad. If Sonia had been there, he might have asked her if she wanted to go with him. It didn’t matter what she replied; the words that came out of her mouth didn’t matter, as long as she went with him.
Still working on impulse, he crossed the room and took hold of the man’s helmet. Jaspar looked up at him. If he had looked at all confused or scared, Mitchell would have left him alone. But the man looked resigned. So Mitchell took off the helmet. His stomach spasmed with shock.
Jaspar was missing about a third of his skull, a great bite taken out of the right side, from his temple to the top of his ear and disappearing around to the back. A jagged edge of bone showed under his skin, which stretched to cover the remains of his head, dipping like a sinkhole into a concave space where the right half of his brain should have been. Looking at him from the left side, one might never guess he had anything wrong with him. From the front, he was a ruin.
Mitchell carefully set the helmet back in place. It protected whatever was left.
“What happened to you?” Mitchell breathed. Jaspar looked back and couldn’t say.
Everyone here commits suicide.
Whatever Jaspar had done hadn’t been successful. Mitchell turned and ran.
He coded open the next bulkhead door and left the ward. He could tell by the smell, which turned industrial instead of antiseptic. The corridor branched ahead, and Mitchell guessed which one would lead him to the center of the station, to the docking area. Other people he encountered struck him as strange-looking, as if he were traveling in a foreign country. He took calming breaths and tried not to look out of place. He knew the formulae that could take him from one end of the galaxy to the other. There ought to be formulae, equations, to do anything. He should find a way to turn invisible, so no one would see him. Visibility was all a matter of light and color. Space was color, the color of numbers. He could make himself transparent.
The corridor he followed now was straight, not curved, indicating he was walking along one of the spokes, toward the center of the cylindrical station. The gravity should be lessening. Mitchell stretched, lengthening his stride, to see if he could fly yet.
He keyed himself through two more bulkhead doors. Other corridors branched off to different levels, other departments, other wards. Mitchell’s heart lurched at the sight of blue Mil Div uniforms. He almost stopped to study the faces of those who wore them to see if Captain Scott was among them, if he recognized any of his crewmates. But that was unlikely. Surely the Drake had left the station by now.
Mitchell’s steps developed spring, but he wasn’t yet weightless. Ahead, the corridor opened into a wider thoroughfare, large enough for mechanized carts to travel. Equipment lockers lined the walls, vacuum suit closets in place between airlock doors. He could just go through the airlock and fly away. He could follow Morgan into an airless world.
He turned right and looked for an observation area.
“Mitchell! Mitchell, stop!” Both Keesey and Dalton appeared at the intersection of the corridor.
Mitchell ran.
“Stop him! Somebody stop him!”
He hunched his shoulders and kept on, grimly staring ahead, anticipating obstacles. Station personnel stared after him, shocked, or looked back at Keesey and Dalton pounding after him. Ahead, the corridor bulged outward. In most station designs, this meant there was some kind of work area, often with view ports that would let him see the ships in the dockyards. He was almost there. He just needed a glimpse of a ship’s running lights in space.
Somebody tackled him. A man half a head taller wearing a Mil Div uniform enclosed him in a bear hug and slammed him against the far wall. Mitchell’s head rang with the impact. He couldn’t hope to escape. He tried anyway, bucking and thrashing against his captor.
“Mitchell, look at me! Look at me!” Sweaty hands pressed against his cheeks. He shook his head, trying to break free of their grasp. “Mitchell!” Keesey shouted, pleading.
You’re going to follow Morgan.
He begged, “Let me look! I just want to look! I’m not going to kill myself, I’m not going to do anything! I haven’t done anything! Let me go!”
Multiple grips pinned his arms to the wall now. Others had come to help, he didn’t know how many. The more he struggled, the harder they held him. When he felt his sleeve being pushed up, he knew it meant somebody wielded a sedative patch.
Mitchell screamed in defiance; his voice echoing in the steel corridor startled him. “Mitchell!” Keesey managed to make herself heard over his noise. He clamped his mouth shut.
In the sudden quiet, the scene paused for a moment. Dalton held the patch ready but hadn’t yet pressed it against his arm.
Softly, Mitchell said, “Let me look. Just let me look outside one more time. Please. Please trust me. Please.”
This was his last chance at life.
He saw his desperation clearly reflected back at him in Keesey’s gaze. He thought he knew: She wanted to cure all her patients, and she kept failing. In him she was failing again.
He whispered, “You’ve never tried giving us what we want. What can it hurt? I’m already dead. Let me look.”
Dalton released him first. Then Keesey said, “Let him go.”
It had taken two others besides the doctors to restrain him. They all stepped back, tense, even Keesey, like he was a wild animal and they couldn’t predict what he’d do next. He moved deliberately, brushing his sleeves back into place. He would give them no cause to capture him like an animal and drag him back to the cage. Keeping a shoulder to the wall, he moved toward the observation area. The others followed, forming a half-circle around him, penning him in.
At last he rounded the corner, entered the darkened observation area, and his knees almost buckled. He leaned against the wall, and his eyes stung with tears.
The windows looked out over the edge of the dockyards where Law Station opened into space. A trio of ships was in dock and there was a scattering of light from the hull of the station—traffic guides, lights shining out of other view ports. The rest of the view looked into the black and the points of light of distant stars.
The Universe opened before him. This was seeing home after a long, impossible journey.
He put his face close to the window and cupped his hands around his eyes to cut out reflections.
Ships, bulging lengths of steel, drifted in the open. The blisters of modular sections—decks, sensory apparatus, weaponry, docking space—made their silhouettes uneven, monstrous, confusing. The shapes distracted the eye, which looked for the streamlined profile of something that might swim through water but only found these accreted, inartistic objects. Yet they moved so gracefully. The eye could not judge their scale against the backdrop of shadow and gray steel. He was watching a scene impossibly distant. Yet the lights threatened to swallow him.
One of the ships was a Research Division cruiser, probably returned from a frontier mission for a refit. The other two were Mil Div. The far one—his heart fluttered, because it was a courier class, a sleek, minimalist ship built for speed, blockade running and dodging firing lines. The Francis Drake was a courier. They were the prettie
st ships in the fleet. It might even be—hard to tell from here.
His brow furrowed, he pulled away from the window. “Is that the Drake in dock?”
“Yes,” Keesey said.
“She should be long gone by now.” He turned back to the window, rubbed his sleeve over it when his breath fogged it.
“Look again.”
He watched for a long time, as long as he needed. The ship was locked into longterm docking, not simply linked by umbilical and airlock tubes like the other ships. She’d been damaged, a hole blasted into her starboard side as if a great monster had taken a bite out of her. Lights moved around her like fluttering insects: repair drones, suited workers on maneuvering platforms. A search light happened to run over the name written in bold cursive: M.D.S. Franc—. The remaining letters were charred.
The ship looked a little like Jaspar’s skull.
His mind formed the question, what happened, but he did not speak the words. A neural pathway that had been ruptured rebuilt itself when offered the proper bridge.
He pressed his hand to the window.
He put his thumb on the duty roster scanner inside the hatchway to the bridge.
“Good morning, Captain.”
Captain Crea Scott spared a glance over her shoulder. “Lieutenant. We have an hour until we need to jump. That enough time?”
“Yes, sir. The arrival matrix data’s on the console?”
“Ready and waiting.”
After two years together on the Francis Drake their routine was well practiced. He passed along the bridge’s upper walkway, paying only cursory attention to the displays and consoles that monitored the ship’s systems, nodding to the crewmates who looked up from their work, and arrived at the hatchway leading down to the navigator station.
M-drive navigation was a one-person booth isolated from the rest of the bridge. He settled into the couch, belted in, and activated the console. Monitors, scanners, processors lit up, casting a cool glow and humming comfortably. It was his own realm—quiet, secure, and powerful. Here, he controlled the equipment that could propel the ship light-years across space.
He clipped his comm piece over his ear and called up the navigation data, destination, and optimum window of arrival. With the ease of habit, he started the process that would identify the departure matrix for the most efficient jump to the designated arrival matrix.
Departure matrices flashed on the holographic display in unfamiliar hues. He frowned, reviewed the data, then cleared the equations. He had time; he’d simply run the calculations over again.
If he weren’t entirely clear on which matrix they left from and where they were arriving, the ship would break apart as it tried to make the crossing. An anomaly in the possible departure matrices made him pause. If he wasn’t certain about a matrix, he rejected it.
He’d never failed to find a departure matrix before. The Universe was massive and diverse; a solution could always be found. But this time they were all mouths, ready to swallow him, spitting out the wrong colors. The numbers cycled and showed him a void.
Except one. There it was, the solution. The matrix that would carry them safely away from this hole in space. He entered it, and the numbers flashed red.
Captain Scott said over the comm, “Greenau, do you have our heading?”
“Yes, sir. Departure matrix data transferred.”
A silence answered him. The workings of the ship hummed and murmured.
“Greenau, send those coordinates again, please.”
He did, with a touch of frustration.
“We can’t follow that heading, Lieutenant. Those coordinates are inside the hull of the ship.”
Of course not, the M-drive would push the ship into itself, making for one hell of an explosion. But Mitchell couldn’t ignore the numbers.
“It’s the only one, Captain.” All the other colors were wrong.
“Mitchell, are you all right?”
“There aren’t any other matrices. The space here is wrong. The colors are wrong.”
“Oh my God—”
They didn’t know it, they couldn’t see what he saw. He had to save them.
He’d fought as every crewmember on the bridge tried to stop him, because he thought he was saving them. That he could see something no one else could see. It never occurred to him that he’d gone mad. They’d seen it instantly—everyone knew what could happen to navigators, they all knew the symptoms. Still, he’d managed to get to the helm and punch in the drive protocol with the faulty departure matrix still entered—
They should have killed him before letting him get that far. They stopped short because he was theirs.
Parts of three levels ripped open instantly, spilling the ship’s guts to the void. Captain Scott managed to cut all the ship’s power, deactivating the drive before the ship was destroyed completely. The ship’s medics sedated Mitchell. The accident had killed twenty people, a third of the crew. Through sheer, stubborn heroism, Scott and the remaining crew patched up the ship and managed to fly to Law, the closest outpost. There, Lieutenant Mitchell Greenau could be deposited with people who might be able to explain what had gone wrong with his mind.
Head bowed, Mitchell knelt on the floor below the window as Doctor Keesey explained.
“The dysfunction usually develops gradually. The patient experiences memory loss, synesthesia, schizophrenia, dystonia, ataxia—any number of neurological anomalies. The captain of the ship will take a navigator off duty at the first signs. A sudden, catastrophic episode like yours is very rare.”
Who had died? He wanted to ask, but he doubted Keesey would know. Twenty names were too many to remember. But Mitchell would have to learn someday who among his friends and colleagues he had killed.
“You saw the right numbers, like you always saw,” Keesey said. “But your mind showed you something else.”
“Captain Scott didn’t want me to know what happened.”
“Because she knew it wasn’t your fault. It’s a terrible memory. I’m sorry.”
A memory that, for all he had struggled to reclaim it, now felt pristine, nestled in the center of his mind.
Mitchell felt calm now. Dalton stood nearby, and Keesey knelt beside him; both were watchful, like they expected him to break, or burst, or something, with the knowledge he had found.
Keesey finally said, “Mitchell, how do you feel?”
He despised that question.
He chuckled a little. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry—”
“Mitchell—”
He could look up, and even at this awkward angle he could see lights on the opposite curve of the station, the blackness of the shadows. The beauty was an ache in his gut. That he could still feel that beauty startled him. “Don’t isolate us from what makes us happy. We kill ourselves trying to get back to it.”
“Are you ready to come back to the ward?”
He climbed to his feet, using the wall as a prop. He looked out the window again to the stark vastness of even this little corner of space. “Just another minute, Doctor.”
They waited for him.
When Mitchell finally returned to the common room, Dora wasn’t there. She’d made an escape attempt and had been sedated.
Jaspar was at his usual table, working his word puzzles on his handheld. Mitchell found what had happened to him: he’d tried to close his head in a bulkhead door. No one knew why. The trauma team got to him quickly, and he’d survived, somehow. People were resilient.
Sonia was also present, humming, her eyes closed. Mitchell sat across from her.
He placed a player with earpieces in front of her. She stopped humming. She looked at him, her gaze narrowed and confused.
“It’s yours.”
Her hands trembling, she reached for the headphones. They skittered away from her fingertips the first time, but she caught them, slapping her hand to the table. Then she hooked on the earpieces.
Mitchell had gotten Keesey to give him records of Sonia’s musical vocab
ulary, all the pieces of music she’d been known to speak of. He convinced the doctors to let her have the player.
She touched the play key. Her face tightened, an expression of anxious disbelief. Then tears slipped down her cheeks. Mitchell heard the music, a faint buzzing through the earpieces, and his fists clenched nervously. He thought she would smile. He wanted her to smile.
Then she did smile, though she still didn’t relax, and Mitchell realized that she was concentrating on the music with every muscle she had. She met his gaze, and he thought she looked happy.
James Patrick Kelly has won the Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards. He has written novels, short stories, essays, reviews, poetry, plays and planetarium shows. His most recent publications are the novel Mother Go (2017), an audiobook original from Audible and the collection The Promise of Space (2018) from Prime Books. In 2016, Centipede Press published a career retrospective Masters of Science Fiction: James Patrick Kelly. His fiction has been translated into eighteen languages. He writes a column on the internet for Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine and is on the faculty of the Stonecoast Creative Writing MFA Program at the University of Southern Maine. Find him on the web at www.jimkelly.net.
THE WRECK OF THE GODSPEED
JAMES PATRICK KELLY
DAY ONE
What do we know about Adel Ranger Santos?
That he was sixty-five percent oxygen, nineteen percent carbon, ten percent hydrogen, three percent nitrogen, two percent calcium, one percent phosphorus, some potassium, sulfur, sodium, chlorine, magnesium, iodine and iron and just a trace of chromium, cobalt, copper, fluorine, manganese, molybdenum, selenium, tin, vanadium and zinc. That he was of the domain Eukarya, the kingdom of Animalia, the phylum Chordata, subphylum Vertebrata, the class Mammalia, the order Primates, the family Hominidae, the genus Homo and the species Novo. That, like the overwhelming majority of the sixty trillion people on the worlds of Human Continuum, he was a hybrid cybernetic/biological system composed of intricate subsystems including the circulatory, digestive, endocrine, excretory, informational, integumenary, musculo-skeletal, nervous, psycho-spiritual, reproductive, and respiratory. That he was the third son of Venetta Patience Santos, an Elector of the Host of True Flesh and Halbert Constant Santos, a baker of fine breads. That he was male, left-handed, somewhat introverted, intelligent but no genius, a professed but frustrated heterosexual, an Aries, a virgin, a delibertarian, an agnostic and a swimmer. That he was nineteen Earth standard years old and that until he stumbled, naked, out of the molecular assembler onto the Godspeed he had never left his home world.