The Space Between the Stars

by Anne Corlett

  Callan was doing something over by the doors. As Jamie hesitated, he turned back toward her. “How long till we can get up and running?”

  She stared at him in surprise. “What . . .”

  “She hasn’t cooled down much.” The response was unfamiliar and female, and it came from somewhere behind Jamie. She turned to see a woman standing on the steps at the side of the hold. She was well-built, probably in her fifties or thereabouts, with cropped gray hair. “We can be off-planet in less than ten minutes.”

  Callan turned to Jamie, jerking his head toward a row of fold-down seats near the doors. “You three strap yourselves in. It can be a bit bumpy, and I’d rather not deal with broken bones from people who haven’t got their space legs yet.”

  “How long do we need to stay strapped in?” Jamie said.

  “Until I tell you otherwise.” As he set off up the stairs, the gray-haired woman was already disappearing through a doorway at the end of the landing.

  As they strapped themselves into the jump seats, the ship shuddered, the engines beginning a hard bass crescendo. The noise was unmuted by any passenger-friendly soundproofing. Here they were just cargo, and cargo didn’t need to hear itself think. Rena was saying something, her mouth moving, her fingers pulling at the straps across her thin chest. When Lowry put his hand on her arm she fell still, although her face remained creased and anxious.

  Lowry glanced at Jamie, eyebrows raised.

  You okay?

  She nodded. As the engines rose she was aware of an unexpected sense of elation. She was here, in her skin, feeling the sensations thrumming through her. She wasn’t dust, mingling with the dirt of a frontier world. She couldn’t tell the exact moment when they left the ground, but she felt a heaviness settling on her limbs, as though her body were fighting the rise of the ship, struggling to stay earthbound.

  Beside her, Lowry had closed his eyes. Rena was twisting her hands together, lips moving as though in prayer. As the engine roar fell to a dull rumble, then eased down again to a lower vibrato, her voice started to break through, disjointed and fractured.

  . . . the meek, the dispossessed . . . shall inherit . . . in the void, in the space between the stars . . . his voice . . .

  Jamie closed her own eyes. The heaviness was increasing, weighing her down. There was a muffled darkness just below the bottom edge of her thoughts. If she fell into it, it would be like floating in space, out there between the stars and beyond the world.

  I’m tired, she thought, surprised she had room for something so ordinary.

  Her thoughts were fragmenting as exhaustion flooded through her. Odd words and random images ricocheted off one another, broken and meaningless. The sea rose around her, and her mother’s voice said two and it didn’t work. Then the ocean tipped sideways and she slid through it, as a woman who’d once lived on the floor below talked about algebra. Earth always sings, she thought, and in that moment it made perfect sense. Daniel was watching her. He always brought a loaf back from the bakery when he went out for a morning run. It made him smell of fresh bread. Then he’d shower, and call her to join him, and sometimes she would, and his hands would be on her, and she’d smile, lean back, and close her eyes.

  There was a voice nearby, but Jamie didn’t know if it was real.

  . . . the void . . . broken pieces . . .

  She made an effort to focus.

  What were the odds of survival again?

  No. They’d made it. They were alive.

  And with that last flare of coherent thought, Jamie tipped over the edge into sleep.

  It’s summer and her baby is gone.

  It was a slow unraveling of a loss. By the time they found the silence that should have been a heartbeat, he was long gone. How long, no one could say. No one was saying much at all. It was all hushed voices and unfinished sentences. Euphemisms, hands moving in helpless patterns, as though the necessary information could only be conveyed through some invisible cat’s cradle.

  Your loss.

  The process.

  Investigations.

  No one came right out and said, Your baby’s dead. He died inside you and you never even knew.

  For a little while she thought that meant it wasn’t true. There were no signs. He was still locked tight inside her body. Perhaps they’d gotten it wrong.

  She held on to that thought, a faint gray line of comfort, stretching back to the time when he was a solid certainty inside her. She held on to it through all the silent scans and silent hours in between, right up to the moment when the nurse’s masked face hung over hers, a professional smile crinkling her eyes.

  And when she woke, scooped out and scraped clean, her stomach shriveled to a slack, barely there swell, she thought, There we go, then.

  Daniel wants to talk. He wants to hold her, to wrap himself about her in the dark. He wants to be so close that she wonders if he’s trying to climb inside her, to occupy that vacated place below her heart. Sometimes she thinks that she might claw her way out of her skin, just so she’ll be out of his arms.

  She knows he’s hurting, but his pain is different. It’s cleaner than hers. She hadn’t wanted a baby—it was him who wanted it so much—and she sometimes wonders if that made it her fault. In the first weeks of pregnancy, she felt nothing but resentment. Every surge of nausea, every conspiratorial wink, everything she couldn’t eat or couldn’t drink or couldn’t do, it all combined in a roiling mass of fear and loneliness.

  Things changed when she felt the first shiftings of life inside her. There was no rush of love, no sudden understanding of what it all meant, but she became aware of a settled resignation. It was going to happen, whatever regrets she might be entertaining in the darkness after midnight while Daniel smiled in his sleep. As the baby grew, she found herself touching her stomach, very lightly, as though to avoid him knowing she was there. She started thinking of the two of them as on the same side. When people fussed over her with overdone smiles she’d send a sharp thought inward to her baby, imagining him turning his head to listen. He was the only one who ever heard that inner voice of hers, and it made them co-conspirators against the world.

  Now he’s gone, and he’s left a space inside her, all echoes and emptiness.

  Daniel wants them to see a counselor. She’s still bleeding, and he wants her to sit there and find a way to put this hole in her racked and broken body into words. And once it’s summed up and written down, that will be it for him. It will be done and they can move on.

  There’s a part of her that wants that for him, for both of them. But the greater part of her can only think of one word that would fit.

  Over.

  CHAPTER

  5

  There was a low thrum at the edge of consciousness.

  The generator at the main house acting up again.

  No.

  That wasn’t right. She wasn’t in her bed. She was upright, her neck cricked at an awkward angle, and something pulled tight across her chest.

  She opened her eyes and looked out across the dim hollow of the hold.

  The hold.

  The ship.

  The seats beside her were empty, but as she stared around the hold, she heard footsteps, and Lowry ducked out from between the crates.

  “You’re back with us, then.”

  “How long was I asleep?” Jamie undid her harness.

  “Less than an hour,” Lowry said. “You didn’t miss much. Callan’s given us a brief tour, that’s all. I’ll show you your quarters.”

  “Where’s Rena?”

  “Lying down. She’s not a great flier.”

  Jamie glanced sideways at him. “Have you known each other long?”

  “Trying to work us out?” Lowry flicked her a swift smile.

  Jamie started the automatic denial, feeling for some more socially acceptable motive for the questi
on. Then she stopped. So few of them left. Why not just say what you meant?

  “Yes.”

  “That’s all right. I know we must make a bit of an odd pair.” Lowry’s smile stayed in place, but Jamie thought she could detect a slight wariness in it. “Like I said, we were both based at the same hospital a few years back. I used to take services there. Rena was one of the regulars.”

  “She’s Catholic?”

  “She was.”

  Jamie had always thought that Catholic was something you were or you weren’t, like being Jewish, but both Lowry and Rena had apparently left their old faith behind.

  “So you stayed in touch?”

  “On and off over the years. Then she contacted me when she wanted to come to Longvale, and that was that.”

  Jamie thought that was very far from being that, but she didn’t push the point. “Fancy giving me the tour?” she said instead.

  Lowry smiled. “I don’t think I’ll be much of a guide. It all looked the same to me. But I’ll do my best.”

  Jamie followed him up the stairs and into a starkly functional corridor, with exposed pipes running along the ceiling, and bundles of wires that disappeared through jagged gaps in the walls. There was a dull, metallic smell, and the air tasted stale. At the far end there was a heavy door that clunked open when Lowry heaved a handle on the wall.

  “We have to keep these shut.” He pulled another lever to close the door behind them. “Callan was very clear about that.” He gave a slight grimace. “His engineer was even clearer.”

  “Engineer?”

  “The tall woman. She’s . . . formidable.”

  After a short flight of stairs, they came to a hallway with doors along both sides.

  “That one’s yours, I think,” Lowry said, counting along the doors. “Rena’s at the far end. I’m next to her.”

  When he turned the handle, the door clanked sideways into the wall cavity. The quarters beyond were cramped and utilitarian, with a drop-down bunk folded up against the wall. Below, there was a metal desk that looked as if it would also stow flat. A pair of slimline lockers flanked the door, and at the far end Jamie could see a low cupboard that probably hid a toilet and sink. The only other piece of furniture was a wooden chair tucked under the desk, its top edge splintered and cracked, as though the cabin’s resident had repeatedly forgotten to move it out of the way before dropping the bunk down.

  Jamie didn’t want to think about that unknown occupant, but their presence was unavoidable. A coat hung from a wall hook, and there were a few bits and pieces on the desk and some pictures propped up on a small shelf.

  “I’ll leave you to get settled,” Lowry said. “I was thinking of scraping some sort of dinner together if you feel like joining me? Unless you want to go straight to bed.”

  Jamie could see blankets trapped between the bunk and the wall. The bed hadn’t been stripped since it was last slept in. “I’ll come down.”

  Once Lowry had gone, Jamie turned to the row of photos on the shelf. One showed a young man and woman holding hands on the steps of a small house. She was tiny and blond, with cropped hair, and he was tall, a little gawky-looking, but with a sweet, tilted smile.

  Had this been his cabin, or hers? Jamie felt a dragging reluctance to know the answer to that question, but she went over and opened one of the lockers. The clothes inside clearly belonged to a woman. She closed the door, gently, and turned to her own belongings.

  She sat down on the chair with her rucksack propped between her knees and started to empty out its contents. She stacked the things from the store on the desk and then unpacked her clothes, her canvas shoes, and the little bag with her toiletries, piling them on the floor beside her feet.

  The bottom of the bag was taken up with things that she couldn’t claim to need but hadn’t been able to leave behind. She took out an old wooden cigar box with an incongruously elaborate catch. Her grandfather—her mother’s father—used to collect stamps in it, but now it held odd fragments of Jamie’s life. A tiny Paddington Bear, hatless, fur rubbed away in places, letting the plastic show through. A little pewter horse. A patchwork roll holding a sewing kit that had belonged to her grandmother’s grandmother. A silver christening spoon engraved with her name. A pack of miniature playing cards. Three plain gold wedding bands, distinguishable only by the fact that her mother’s ring hadn’t worn as thin as those of her grandmother and great-grandmother. At the bottom of the box there was a bundle of postcards, the top one showing the great sweep of the bay at Belsley.

  She placed the box on the table, along with a multicurrent charger, her e-reader wrapped in an old sweater, and a couple of print books—old favorites bearing the stamp of the secondhand bookshop she used to visit when she was young.

  The sea blanket was at the bottom of the bag, rolled tight around a glass jar with a crackle-glazed ceramic lid. The contents were packed too close to rattle as she turned it upright. It was full of sea glass, bright-hued fragments with their broken edges worn smooth by years of tumbling against the Northumberland shoreline. Most of the pieces were the greens and blues that you found at every Belsley low tide, but she could also see scarlets, ambers, and a few of the multicolored fragments from the old Victorian glass factory down at Seaham.

  Her grandfather had taken her there a few times, and they’d combed the tide line, intent on their task, speaking only to say, Here, look, look at this. The old man made jewelry from the sea glass, setting it in fine silver wire for bracelets and necklaces. The Seaham glass was the most popular, but he always let Jamie keep the best of it.

  In between the bits of glass she could glimpse fragments of pottery: curves of delft and slivers of rough-thrown terra-cotta. She used to have one jar for glass and one for pottery, but just before she left Earth she spent a whole evening sifting through, shedding all but the most striking pieces.

  Her thumb briefly caressed the jar’s smooth flanks, and then she placed it on the desk and stood up. She piled her clothes on the chair, reluctant to oust the cabin’s former occupant from her locker. She hesitated for a moment, then took the stack of postcards out of the cigar box. Turning to the shelf, she pushed the frames gently to the back, so that she could lean her postcards against them. She didn’t turn the cards over, but she knew what she’d see if she did. Her stepmother’s handwriting was sloped and untidy, and she never left room for everything she wanted to say, having to finish sideways along the edge, or crammed in below the address. There was never anything vital, just little moments in a life that had kept rolling on after Jamie had left. The cards had come at regular intervals when Jamie first left Earth, and while they’d become more infrequent in recent years, they’d still turn up every now and again. Perhaps there was one sitting on the sideboard at her old flat on Alegria.

  We’re all well. The weather’s been unsettled but it’s getting better now. The tourists are here, and there’s a little girl next door who has a purple hat just like that one you used to wear. Hope you’re well and happy. All love.

  Jamie felt a chill of discomfort, as though she was an interloper in this little room. One of the cards had slipped down, revealing the picture behind. The blond girl stared out into the cabin, her smile frozen.

  It’s not my fault, Jamie thought, almost aggressively, but she’d lost any desire to linger there.

  Outside, she tried to retrace Lowry’s directions but found herself in an unfamiliar passage with a row of open entryways along the wall. She was about to turn back when she caught the faint echo of voices. She stepped through the first doorway and squeezed along a narrow service passage lit by emergency strips. It gave out onto a hallway with an open door at one end. The gray-haired engineer was standing in the doorway, her back to Jamie.

  “I just don’t see why it had to be us who picked them up,” she was saying to someone out of sight.

  “We’re heading to the capital anyway.” I
t was Callan’s voice. “It’s not like we’re going out of our way.”

  “Shouldn’t we be finding out what shape the central worlds are in before we start collecting waifs and strays?”

  Jamie took a cautious step back and then froze as the engineer turned her head slightly.

  “We know there are other survivors,” Callan said.

  “But we’ve no idea whether there’s any sort of administration or just a load of people running around like headless mice.”

  “It’s done.” Callan raised his voice. “It’s my ship, and I made the call. If you don’t like it, you don’t have to stay.”

  “I didn’t say I didn’t like it.”

  “You didn’t have to,” Callan replied. “Now, unless there’s something else . . .”

  The woman shrugged and turned away, her gaze immediately falling on Jamie.

  Her expression tightened, and she walked over and fixed Jamie with a level stare. “You shouldn’t be up here. What are you doing?”

  “I’m sorry. I got lost.” She stuck out her hand with a conciliatory smile. “I’m Jamie, by the way.”

  For a moment she thought the other woman was going to ignore her outstretched hand, but then the engineer reached out and gave it the briefest of shakes. Her nails were blunted and oil-stained.

  “Gracie.”

  “Are you two the only crew?”

  “There were five of us,” Callan said. He was standing in the doorway, watching them. “But the other three were planetside on Nassau when the quarantine kicked in. When we set down, there was no sign of them. No sign of anyone.”

  “No one at all?”

  Callan shrugged. “There were no signals and we weren’t exactly in a position to perform a fingertip search. Our people were gone.”

  “I’m sorry,” Jamie said. It felt trite and ham-fisted, like all the people who’d said they were sorry when they heard about the baby.