Clarkesworld: Year Seven

by Neil Clarke

  (”You okay?” Wen asked him as he stood up, and he said, “Fuck,” more emphatically than he’d ever said anything to her, more than he remembers ever being.

  He staggered to his room and sat on the edge of the bed, tried not to vomit.

  She already had it.

  She was sick, he knew it, he could tell, something in her voice that had been trying too hard not to shake.

  He’d only heard her voice twice, but some things you can tell.

  Planetside made him dizzy; he projected the kingfisher picture at full opacity on his windows until he could look around again.

  It resembled her, he’d decided a long time back; he’d never seen her, but the way it looked across the water like it could see the future seemed about right.

  Its name was Halcyon smyrnensis, and Home, and Preetha; one name piled on top of the other.)

  On the next pass, he repoints the telescope and takes a picture of Sinope, a little red glint in the garland of minor moons.

  This is what Sinope looked like fifty-three minutes before you opened this message. She says, Be well.

  He thinks about what will happen in the time it takes the message to get there. They’ll be on the far side of Jupiter by then, and the lights will be coming up slowly, pretending dawn, and he’ll be here with channels open, hoping she’ll come on the line and tell him that, fifty-three minutes ago, she was cured.

  (It’s hopeless. He knows already. Whatever news comes across that line won’t be good, and he won’t know until it’s too late. You get far enough away from something, there’s nothing you can do.)

  But the light from Europa right now would be reaching her by then, and she would have a picture of Sinope.

  Sometimes just looking at a moon was medicine; if it worked for Galileo, it was worth a try.

  She doesn’t answer.

  He puts a cot in the comm room.

  Wen doesn’t say anything.

  (It’s for the best. If he explained that he had a picture of a kingfisher, and that he’d sent Galileo’s notes to an interplanetary Ground Control, and that they should send paper and pencil on the probe to Gliese, and that he had to stay right where he was in case he heard back from Bangalore, it wouldn’t look good.

  She wouldn’t argue—she seemed to know when people had their reasons—but she wouldn’t think the reasons were connected, and they are; they are.)

  The message comes back a week later, over official channels.

  It’s patchy, as if the machinery is going, or her voice is.

  He sits more forward in his chair with every word.

  “Dr. Hammond died. Sometime early morning, maybe 0430, actual time unknown—I didn’t sleep for very long, but when I woke up she had gone. It’s just me.“

  The horror fades. Panic edges in.

  Where are the others, he almost yells into the mic, who would leave you alone like this, but the question would take an hour to reach her, and that isn’t the thing he wants her to hear from him last.

  (It would be the last; her voice is going, he realizes now what it means.

  This will be the last.

  His hands are shaking.)

  So instead he says, “Roger that, Preetha. Please update us with any message for the Manu, and continue to report.”

  He says, trying to be steady, “Everyone from home wishes you well.”

  They send an ethicist and a psychologist to the comm center a few hours later, to talk to Henry and Wen about whether the ship should know.

  “This puts them under a lot of unnecessary stress,” one of the ethicists argues.

  “Good,” Henry says. “They have a lot to live up to.”

  The other one says, “Informing them of a change like this could be more stressful than useful. They already know the importance of a clean landing on this.”

  He says, “After this they fucking well better.”

  Eventually, Wen snaps.

  “This entire operation hinges on the crucial importance of full information,” she says, cutting off the psychologist halfway through a sentence about perception of failure. “It’s been that way since my forebears set foot here. Earth trusted them enough to send them. If we can’t trust them with information, we should tell them to turn around. Do you want to tell them that? Because I’m not going to.”

  And before they can object, she hits the button to bounce it to the transport, so the skeleton crew that’s still awake will know what’s happened.

  When they’re gone, muttering about calling her before the Ethics Board, Henry says, “There might be a record of something else on the Manu.”

  She looks over at him, parsing what he’s done.

  “Sometimes records are faulty,” she says. “Sometimes Jupiter interferes.”

  They sit side by side, looking out at the cloud and the ice and the red day rising, channels open for messages that don’t come.

  (The message Wen sent is a duplicate.

  Henry hit send before they ever showed; he hit send before he ever paged Wen and told her there was something she needed to see.

  He hit send as soon as it came over the transom, and his hand stopped shaking.)

  “To the Europa Base, and the crew and passengers of the Manu: We on Earth who have dreamed of exploration honor your mission, and have faith that what you work to build will come back to you a hundredfold.

  For those who will go on to Gliese 581, that hidden world that holds our future in it; you are the children of Galileo, and we send our hopes with you.

  The citizens of Earth wish you good journey, and good homecoming.”

  He takes a crawler out to the dark side.

  Ahead of him is a blue marble (behind him is a bead of jasper).

  The blue marble isn’t winking—looking from here, there’s no marked difference from what it used to be. It will take some generations yet. When the water swallows up the last of it, the Evrard Telescope will show a surface of near-unbroken blue.

  The grandchildren of Europa will be taken out to the dark side (no helmets, by then), and they’ll hold up binoculars and be instructed to look carefully for the bluest thing they can see.

  (It won’t be Rigel, the teacher will have to remind them. Keep your eye out for something steady—you’re looking for a moon, not a star.)

  Through his binoculars, he can see India passing out of sight; somewhere on what’s left of the land is the place where Kai died, fifty-three minutes before he got her last transmission.

  It’s the first time he’s looked at something, and really known.

  (Preetha means, The palm of the hand; it means happiness; it means beloved; one on top of the other.)

  (To See the Other) Whole Against the Sky

  E. Catherine Tobler

  Close your eyes. As you travel farther away from me, your ship becoming little more than a pinprick of light amid infinite pinpricks of light, I want you to remember me as I was the first time you saw me, in the field. The day I glowed.

  All right, it was an interface malfunction, but I still glowed. You told me I had been set on fire, that I was all colors and so seemed white, holy, pure.

  How we laughed.

  Query: If two interstellar ships leave Point A in the same instant, traveling at identical velocities in opposite directions, at what distance does communication between Ship A and Ship B break down?

  As first meetings go, it wasn’t terrible.

  When you’re assigned a new partner, you never know how you’ll mesh. In this business, it usually doesn’t matter. We are expendable and know that from the outset. What matters are the multitrillion dollar cargoes of compressed titanium, the ships, the Manifest Destiny. The fallibility of machines in the vastness of deep space means bringing a human to tend them, to coddle when needed. Assigning one crewmember per ship keeps costs down. Keeps the murders down, too. The company took its time in understanding this. They tried multiple configurations: complete crews with chains of command; pairs; loners.

  The tr
aditional chains of command became problematic almost from the outset, crews slaughtering each other over money and station when they realized both were all they would have in the deep black. Sometimes it went quickly: the men killed each other over the women, the women killed each other over the men. When the wreckage of the Prospero was finally recovered, the company required only two more similar incidents to convince themselves.

  Launched-as-pairs had more success in the early years, but the fucking ruined everything. Regardless of sexual orientations, interests, configurations, it always came to fucking. Two humans, confined in an enclosed space for more years than one can rightly imagine when the contracts are signed, create an immense amount of havoc, destruction, ejaculate, and blood.

  Providing crewmembers with other means of relief for such long voyages was deemed outside the company’s scope, if lacing MREs with birth control and controlling one’s carry-on luggage was not. Even employing homophobes in an effort to avoid such base desires did not have the desired outcome. They fucked, killed their partner, and then went insane as the ship drifted untended. One can presume with half a dozen such reported incidents, there were three to five times more that number.

  The proper custodians were deemed to be loners, us. Those content to exist with a minimum of contact. While suicide remains a concern in certain circles—circles that will never reach the uppermost levels—we are used to anhedonic wonderlands, to agoraphobic serenity. With a communications unit for holographic interaction, we do what we do best: talk behind our aliases as we ensure the natural hum and shiver of the machines around us. For a loner, this is the precisely perfect occupation, a diet of minimally invasive companionship that can be closed at a moment’s notice.

  Response: “If” is a terrible word. When two interstellar ships leave Point A. There is no “if” involved, for the ships do leave, in the same instant, traveling at identical velocities. Ship A heads toward illusory west. Ship B heads into illusory east. Point A becomes the anchor around which all other stars move, a point where you can calculate all those distances you love so well.

  At what distance does communication between the ships break down? Never. This is the awful truth. The ships will continue to communicate, via radio frequency waves and pings. It is the people on board the ships who lose the ability to communicate. The VR interface no longer interfaces. One can send time delayed holograms via the interface, but even this data becomes obese. It is stripped, to voice alone, which travels faster than you might imagine—what is the speed of a whisper in the dead of night? It is like a well-barbed arrow, sharp and fierce. But even voice becomes too heavy in the deep black, so thought and emotion are condensed into communiques, nearly old fashioned letters which speak perhaps twice as well as any VR interface might. They are slow, but allow for harder truths. In the end, there will be only silence, even as the ships whisper via radio, via small Bracewell probes launched into the black in an attempt to extend communication range. Ships don’t care how long a thing takes. Neither do loners. Usually.

  “Are you awake? I hope you’re awake.”

  They were the first words I spoke to you as I waited for your avatar to log in to the virtual environment. The first place I conjured for you was that field, empty but for the grass and the sky. Earth blues and greens, mid-summer, Northern Hemisphere. It could have been anywhere of course. I chose these intentionally. Not to ground you in something familiar, but to show you something familiar to me.

  “Sometimes the avatar takes a while to come online.”

  I could see your name on my console, small and green and hovering in the lower left. You weren’t a known entity to me then, but Company-approved nonetheless and green-lighted. I walked a slow circle as I waited, hands outstretched to brush the scentless white blooms that reached up through the grass. I couldn’t feel the grass either, of course, but memory filled those blanks easily enough. Drought grass stubble, my palms would itch. The grass moved in a slow wave even though there was no wind. If I concentrated elsewhere, the scent of coffee intruded, so I didn’t.

  You coalesced from copper clouds. Tall, though not as tall as you would become. Pale, but not so pale yet, either. I stopped pacing and curled toes into grass that did not exist. “I don’t mean to get you out of bed.” Of course, I did; the Company required such things. “Can you confirm the distance?”

  Your voice cracked as it came online—I blamed the interface even then, because your voice was only ever even from this moment on. “Eleven,” you said, and it seemed as though you had not spoken for a very long time. “Eleven point two AU.”

  “And the other?” My hands paused in the grass even as yours reached for it. “Earth?” How far were we at this point? Was your ship processing data as it should? Our numbers should match, they should always match.

  It happened then, that burst in the interface and your eyes went wide. I thought I could see my reflection in your eyes (you chose blue, so did I)—the way I seemed to glow as if lit from within, but nothing inside me would ever burn so bright.

  You told me I had been set on fire, and your hands reached from the grass, toward me. I did not move, knowing there might be a touch, avatar against avatar, but I would not feel it. All colors, you said, and looked as though you were warming your hands against a campfire. “Holy, pure.”

  We laughed, maybe the first thing we did in unison. We both knew it for a lie, considering where we were and who we must be. Loners.

  “Can you confirm the distance?”

  Your head came up, eyes taking in the landscape beyond me. Your hands slid into your pockets that formed at the mere idea of pockets crossing your mind, a place to put your hands so they would not enfold me. Your avatar flared with light then, a pulse of blue as the interface crackled.

  “Two hundred seventy-seven thousand—”

  Our minds have trouble comprehending such distances. The system compensates, makes it momentarily bearable. I drew up a chart between us, a familiar thing to anyone schooled in astronavigation (we both were). My fingers pulled gleaming lines like neon spaghetti from apparent nothingness, to illuminate the distance from here to there, but not back again.

  “ . . . six hundred AU,” you finished. How could we be so far away from Earth?

  “Sleep now,” I said, and erased the hovering lines with a sweep of my hand. You would be tired. It was hard coming out of hypersleep—in the latter days and when ships flew with full crews, it was the point when a good percentage of shipboard deaths occurred, crew disoriented and wary of everything. A body needed time. A body needed distance.

  “Online in another two hours for recalibration.”

  Query: Do east and west exist in space? North and south?

  You will think your ship is haunted; the Company tells us it is a commonplace belief, so includes this amusing anecdote in all briefings. You always laugh, until you sign the contract, find yourself on board and in the depth of space, and start to hear things. Most cities are haunted and as your ship is a city for one, so too does it hold its ghosts. You bring them on board with you—eidolons, fears, illusory things that should be beyond people of our training and education. Still, Einar murmurs.

  Einar is more like a city than not, despite its population concerns. A vast array of universe-traversing equipment rises around your room as it does mine, a one-room studio which looks much like the spaces we occupied before the Company offered its contract. Beyond the borders of tidy, automated kitchens and icon-laden desks, is a window that surveys the labyrinthine network of power conduits and production stations. Stations only you will use, but not today. In the distance, a vacuum door lit overhead with a perfectly white LED sign which reads “Cargo Observation.”

  You won’t like this door, no one does. It will come to be your least favorite part of the ship. You can cross the pleasantly padded deckplate as you want, jog through the maintenance corridors to clear your mind, but the door you will avoid. It is the starkest reminder that you are somewhere else, somewhere far from
home. Such reminders are reason enough to keep the window’s opacity set to maximum, preserving the room’s Terran simplicity. Your desk is orderly, fingerprints erased almost as they are left. Beyond this space, the conduits and especially the door will fade.

  Not that you see them often. Any corridor can be transformed with the brush of a hand, any thought overlaying the great gerbil maze with varying degrees of falsehood. Atmosphere condensers become the trees of Central Park in early fall, with customizable time-of-day and alterable crowd density controls. Neat stacks of cargo crates make for lovely park benches and with one simple command, squirrels will always come for the acorns you never hold.

  The surreality of the corridors have hidden the haunting for some time, daunted your belief. The Company told you, after all, that you would hear things on occasion. The Company was diligent enough to train you on the sadly predictable failures of the human mind during long periods of isolation. Is it worse or better then, time spent together? It’s hard to say, because while it eases one ache, it intensifies others. We may come to think the sounds are us, moving ever closer to each other, stumbling in dark corridors as we reach for each other’s light, even though we know this is improbable. We occupy identical ships, with identical cargoes, heading in opposite directions.

  It was certainly one of the squirrels. You think you hear a metallic bang, like a foot stubbed somewhere deep in the corridors. The squirrel that was not there never turned, merrily eating the acorn that was not there, that had never been in your hand, and surely didn’t respond when you asked, “Did you hear that?”

  A proper New York squirrel always turns at the first shock of sound, gone to the treetops after a noise like that. Street animals know best that cruelties always awaited the careless in a city. Even Einar. Perhaps especially so.

  Response: You will come to understand that north, south, east, or west do not exist within in the limitless black of space. Compass points lose merit where there is no center from which to reach. There is no pole, no equator. Compass points can be manufactured as one manufactures anything. From the requirements of one’s mind, anything might spring.