The Final Frontier

by Neil Clarke

  “Speedy. Slows. Down.” She paused. “We. Don’t. Know. Why.” Another pause. “Act. Normal. More. Later.”

  —act normal?—

  —we’re fucked—

  “Comm.” He screamed. “On.”

  “Careful,” she said. “Adel.”

  He felt a slithering against his suit as she let go of him. He bashed at the comm switch and brought the suit lights on.

  “ . . . the most amazing experience, isn’t it?” she was saying. “It’s almost like you’re standing naked in space.”

  “Kamilah . . .” He tried to speak but panic choked him.

  “Adel, what’s happening?” said the Godspeed. “Are you all right?”

  “I have to tell you,” said Kamilah, “that first time I was actually a little scared but I’m used to it now. But you—you did just fine.”

  “Fine,” Adel said. His heart was pounding so hard he thought it might burst his chest. “Just fine.”

  DAY TWELVE

  Since the Godspeed left the orbit of Menander, fifth planet of Hallowell’s Star, to begin its historic voyage of discovery, 69,384 of us stepped off her transport stage. Only about ten thousand of us were pilgrims, the rest were itinerant techs and prospective colonists. On average, the pilgrims spent a little over a standard year as passengers, while the sojourn of the colony-builders rarely exceeded sixty days. As it turns out, Sister Lihong Rain held the record for the longest pilgrimage; she stayed on the Godspeed for more than seven standards.

  At launch, the cognizor in command of the Godspeed had been content with a non-gendered persona. Not until the hundred and thirteenth year did it present as The Captain, a male authority figure. The Captain was a sandy-haired mesomorph, apparently a native of one of the highest G worlds. His original uniform was modest in comparison to later incarnations, gray and apparently seamless, with neither cuff nor collar. The Captain first appeared on the walls of the library but soon spread throughout the living quarters and then began to manifest as a fetch, that could be projected anywhere, even onto the surface. The Godspeed mostly used The Captain to oversee shipboard routine but on occasion he would approach us in social contexts. Inevitably he would betray a disturbing knowledge of everything that we had ever done while aboard. We realized to our dismay that the Godspeed was always watching.

  These awkward attempts at sociability were not well received; the Captain persona was gruff and humorless and all too often presumptuous. He was not at all pleased when one of us nicknamed him Speedy. Later iterations of the persona did little to improve his popularity.

  It wasn’t until the three hundred and thirty-second year that the stubborn Captain was supplanted by a female persona. The new Speedy impressed everyone. She didn’t give orders; she made requests. She picked up on many of the social cues that her predecessor had missed, bowing out of conversations where she was not welcome, not only listening but hearing what we told her. She was accommodating and gregarious, if somewhat emotionally needy. She laughed easily, although her sense of humor was often disconcerting. She didn’t mind at all that we called her Speedy. And she kept our secrets.

  Only a very few saw the darker shades of the Godspeed’s persona. The techs found her eccentricities charming and the colonists celebrated her for being such a prodigious discoverer of terrestrials. Most pilgrims recalled their time aboard with bemused nostalgia.

  Of course, the Godspeed had no choice but to keep all of us under constant surveillance. We were her charges. Her cargo. Over the course of one thousand and eighty-seven standards, she witnessed six homicides, eleven suicides and two hundred and forty-nine deaths from accident, disease, and old age. She took each of these deaths personally, even as she rejoiced in the two hundred and sixty-eight babies conceived and born in the bedrooms of Dream Street. She presided over two thousand and eighteen marriages, four thousand and eighty-nine divorces. She witnessed twenty-nine million eight hundred and fifteen thousand two hundred and forty-seven acts of sexual congress, not including masturbation. Since she was responsible for our physical and emotional well-being, she monitored what we ate, who we slept with, what drugs we used, how much exercise we got. She tried to defuse quarrels and mediate disputes. She readily ceded her authority to the project manager and team leaders during a colonizing stop but in interstellar space, she was in command.

  Since there was little privacy inside the Godspeed, it was difficult for Kamilah, Adel, Jarek, Meri, Jonman and Robman to discuss their situation. None of them had been able to lure Sister out for a suit-to-suit conference, so she was not in their confidence. Adel took a couple of showers with Meri and Jarek. They played crank jams at top volume and whispered in each other’s ears as they pretended to make out, but that was awkward at best. They had no way to send or encrypt messages that the Godspeed couldn’t easily hack. Jonman hit upon the strategy of writing steganographic poetry under blankets at night and then handing them around to be read—also under blankets.

  We hear that love can’t wait too long,

  Go and find her home.

  We fear that she who we seek

  Must sleep all day, have dreams of night

  killed by the fire up in the sky.

  Would we? Does she?

  Steganography, Adel learned from a whisperer in the library, was the ancient art of hiding messages within messages. When Robman gave him the key of picking out every fourth word of this poem, he read: We can’t go home she must have killed up would. This puzzled him until he remembered that the last pilgrim to leave the Godspeed before he arrived was Upwood Marcene. Then he was chilled. The problem with Jonman’s poems was that they had to be written mechanically—on a surface with an implement. None of the pilgrims had ever needed to master the skill of handwriting; their scrawls were all but indecipherable. And asking for the materials to write with aroused the Godspeed’s suspicions.

  Not only that, but Jonman’s poetry was awful.

  Over several days, in bits and snatches, Adel was able to arrive at a rough understanding of their dilemma. Three months ago, while Adel was still writing his essay, Jarek had noticed that spacewalking on the surface of the Godspeed felt different than it had been when he first arrived. He thought his hardsuit might be defective until he tried several others. After that, he devised the test, and led the others out, one by one, to witness it. If the Godspeed had actually been traveling at a constant 100,000 kilometers per second, rocks dropped anywhere on the surface would take the same amount of time to fall. However, when she accelerated away from a newly established colony, rocks dropped on the backside took longer to fall than rocks on the frontside. And when she decelerated toward a new discovery . . .

  Once they were sure that they were slowing down, the pilgrims had to decide what it meant and what to do next. They queried the library and, as far as they could tell, the Godspeed had announced every scan and course change she had ever made. In over a thousand years the only times she had ever decelerated was when she had targeted a new planet. There was no precedent for what was happening and her silence about it scared them. They waited, dissembled as best they could, and desperately hoped that someone back home would notice that something was wrong.

  Weeks passed. A month. Two months.

  Jonman maintained that there could be only two possible explanations: the Godspeed must either be falsifying its navigation reports or it had cut all contact with the Continuum. Either way, he argued, they must continue to wait. Upwood’s pilgrimage was almost over, he was scheduled to go home in another two weeks. If the Godspeed let him make the jump, then their troubles were over. Hours, or at the most a day, after he reported the anomaly, techs would swarm the transport stage. If she didn’t let him make the jump, then at least they would know where they stood. Nobody mentioned a third outcome, although Upwood clearly understood that there was a risk that the Godspeed might kill or twist him during transport and make it look like an accident. Flawed jumps were extremely rare but not impossible. Upwood had lost almost five kilos
by the day he climbed onto the transport stage. His chest was a washboard of ribs and his eyes were sunken. The other pilgrims watched in hope and horror as he faded into wisps of probability and was gone.

  Five days passed. On the sixth day, the Godspeed announced that they would be joined by a new pilgrim. A week after Upwood’s departure, Adel Ranger Santos was assembled on the transport stage.

  Sister was horribly miscast as Miranda. Adel thought she would have made a better Caliban, especially since he was Ferdinand. In the script, Miranda was supposed to fall madly in love with Ferdinand, but Sister was unable to summon even a smile for Adel, much less passion. He might as well have been an old sock as the love of her life.

  Adel knew why the Godspeed had chosen The Tempest; she wanted to play Prospero. She’d cast Meri as Ariel and Kamilah as Caliban. Jonman and Robman were Trinculo and Stephano and along with Jarek also took the parts of the various other lesser lords and sons and brothers and sailors. Adel found it a very complicated play, even for Shakespeare.

  “I am a fool,” said Sister, “to weep when I am glad.” She delivered the line like someone hitting the same note on a keyboard again and again.

  Adel had a whisperer feeding him lines. “Why do you weep?”

  “Stop there.” The Godspeed waved her magic staff. She was directing the scene in costume. Prospero wore a full-length opalescent cape with fur trim, a black undertunic and a small silver crown. “Nobody says ‘weep’ anymore.” She had been rewriting the play ever since they started rehearsing. “Adel, have you ever said ‘weep’ in your life?”

  “No,” said Adel miserably. He was hungry and was certain he would starve to death before they got through this scene.

  “Then neither should Ferdinand. Let’s change ‘weep’ to ‘cry.’ Say the line, Ferdinand.”

  Adel said, “Why do you cry?”

  “No.” She shut her eyes. “No, that’s not right either.” Her brow wrinkled. “Try ‘why are you crying?’ “

  “Why are you crying?” said Adel.

  “Much better.” She clapped hands once. “I know the script is a classic but after three thousand years some of these lines are dusty. Miranda, give me ‘I am a fool’ with the change.”

  “I am a fool,” she said, “to cry when I am glad.”

  “Why are you crying?”

  “Because I’m not worthy. I dare not even offer myself to you—much less ask you to love me.” Here the Godspeed had directed her to put her arms on Adel’s shoulders. “But the more I try to hide my feelings, the more they show.”

  As they gazed at each other, Adel thought he did see a glimmer of something in Sister’s eyes. Probably nausea.

  “So no more pretending.” Sister knelt awkwardly and gazed up at him. “If you want to marry me, I’ll be your wife.” She lowered her head, but forgot again to cheat toward the house, so that she delivered the next line to the floor. “If not, I’ll live as a virgin the rest of my life, in love with nobody but you.”

  “We can’t hear you, Miranda,” said the Godspeed.

  Sister tilted her head to the side and finished the speech. “You don’t even have to talk to me if you don’t want. Makes no difference. I’ll always be there for you.”

  “Ferdinand,” the Godspeed murmured, “she’s just made you the happiest man in the world.”

  Adel pulled her to her feet. “Darling, you make me feel so humble.”

  “So then you’ll be my husband?”

  “Sure,” he said. “My heart is willing . . .” he laid his hand against his chest, “ . . . and here’s my hand.” Adel extended his arm.

  “And here’s mine with my heart in it.” She slid her fingers across his palm, her touch cool and feathery.

  “And,” prompted the Godspeed. “And?”

  With a sigh, Sister turned her face up toward his. Her eyelids fluttered closed. Adel stooped over her. The first time he had played this scene, she had so clearly not wanted to be kissed that he had just brushed his lips against her thin frown. The Godspeed wanted more. Now he lifted her veil and pressed his mouth hard against hers. She did nothing to resist, although he could feel her shiver when he slipped the tip of his tongue between her lips.

  “Line?” said the Godspeed.

  “Well, got to go.” Sister twitched out of his embrace. “See you in a bit.”

  “It will seem like forever.” Adel bowed to her and then they both turned to get the Godspeed’s reaction.

  “Better,” she said. “But Miranda, flow into his arms. He’s going to be your husband, your dream come true.”

  “I know.” Her voice was pained.

  “Take your lunch break and send me Stephano and Trinculo.” She waved them off. “Topic of the day is . . . what?” She glanced around the little theater, as if she might discover a clue in the empty house. “Today you are to talk about what you’re going to do when you get home.”

  Adel could not help but notice Sister’s stricken expression; her eyes were like wounds. But she nodded and made no objection.

  As they passed down the aisle, the Godspeed brought her fetch downstage to deliver the speech that closed Act III, Scene i. As always, she gave her lines a grandiloquent, singing quality.

  “Those two really take the cake. My plan is working out just great, but I can’t sit around patting myself on the back. I’ve got other fish to fry if I’m going to make this mess end happily ever after.”

  To help Adel and Sister get into character, the Godspeed had directed them to eat lunch together every day in the Chillingsworth Breakfasting Room while the other pilgrims dined in the Ophiuchi. They had passed their first meal in tortured silence and might as well have been on different floors of the threshold. When the Godspeed asked what they talked about, they sheepishly admitted that they had not spoken at all. She knew this, of course, but pretended to be so provoked that she assigned them topics for mandatory discussion.

  The Chillingsworth was a more intimate space than the Ophiuchi. It was cross-shaped; in the three bays were refectory tables and benches. There was a tile fireplace in the fourth bay in which a fetch fire always burned. Sconces in the shapes of the famous singing flowers of Old Zara sprouted from pale blue walls.

  Adel set his plate of spiralini in rado sauce on the heavy table and scraped a bench from underneath to sit on. While the pasta cooled he closed his eyes and lifted the mute on his opposites. He had learned back on Harvest that their buzz made acting impossible. They were confused when he was in character and tried to get him to do things that weren’t in the script. When he opened his eyes again, Sister was opposite him, head bowed in prayer over a bowl of thrush needles.

  He waited for her to finish. “You want to go first?” he said.

  “I don’t like to think about going home to Pio,” she said. “I pray it won’t happen anytime soon.”

  —your prayers are answered—buzzed minus.

  “Why, was it bad?”

  “No.” She picked up her spoon but then set it down again. Over the past few days Adel had discovered that she was a extremely nervous eater. She barely touched what was on her plate. “I was happy.” Somehow, Adel couldn’t quite imagine what happy might look like on Sister Lihong Rain. “But I was much smaller then. When the Main told me I had to make a pilgrimage, I cried. But she has filled with her grace and made me large. Being with her here is the greatest blessing.”

  “Her? You are talking about Speedy?”

  Sister gave him a pitying nod, as if the answer were as obvious as air. “And what about you, Adel?”

  Adel had been so anxious since the spacewalk that he hadn’t really considered what would happen if he were lucky enough to get off the Godspeed alive.

  —we were going to have a whole lot of sex remember?—buzzed plus

  —with as many people as possible—

  Adel wondered if Sister would ever consider sleeping with him. “I want to have lovers.” He had felt a familiar stirring whenever he kissed her in rehearsal.


  “Ah.” She nodded. “And get married, like in our play?”

  “Well that, sure. Eventually.” He remembered lurid fantasies he’d spun about Helell Merwyn, the librarian from the Springs upper school and his mother’s friend Renata Murat and Lucia Guerra who was in that comedy about the talking house. Did he want to marry them?

  —no we just want a taste—minus buzzed.

  “I haven’t had much experience. I was a virgin when I got here.”

  “Were you?” She frowned. “But something has happened, hasn’t it? Something between you and Kamilah.”

  —we wish—buzzed plus.

  “You think Kamilah and I . . . ?”

  “Even though nobody tells me, I do notice things,” Sister said. “I’m twenty-six standard old and I’ve taken courses at the Institute for Godly Fornication. I’m not naïve, Adel.”

  —fornication?—

  “I’m sure you’re not.” Adel was glad to steer the conversation away from Kamilah, since he knew the Godspeed was watching. “So do you ever think about fornicating? I mean in a godly way, of course?”

  “I used to think about nothing else.” She scooped a spoonful of the needles and held it to her nose, letting the spicy steam curl into her nostrils. “That’s why the Main sent me here.”

  “To fornicate?”

  “To find a husband and bring him to nest on Pio.” Her shoulders hunched, as if she expected someone to hit her from behind. “The Hard Thumb pressed the Main with a vision that I would find bliss on a threshold. I was your age when I got here, Adel. I was very much like you, obsessed with looking for my true love. I prayed to the Hard Thumb to mark him so that I would know him. But my prayers went unanswered.”

  As she sat there, staring into her soup, Adel thought that he had never seen a woman so uncomfortable.

  —get her back talking about fornication—minus buzzed.

  “Maybe you were praying for the wrong thing.”