The Space Between the Stars

by Anne Corlett

CHAPTER

  18

  Jamie woke the next morning with an ache in her chest, a dull-edged pain that made her want to go back and find him and say, I didn’t mean it like that. It had nothing to do with Daniel.

  Instead, she dressed and went down to the galley, where she found Lowry making breakfast for Rena and Finn. The lad looked up as she entered.

  “You okay?” she said.

  He nodded.

  “Bit of a scramble last night,” Lowry said, putting a bowl down in front of Finn. “Let it cool down.” He wiped his hands on a tattered towel. “Still, we’re on our way now.”

  “Do you think they’ll come after us?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Rena said. “We’ve got God on our side. The old world’s gone. They shouldn’t be trying to bring it back. We need to strip away all the things we did wrong. Make something new, something better.”

  The old world. A new world. Jamie was tired of hearing those words. Why couldn’t it be something in between the two? Her grandfather used to pick up little colored pieces of plastic on the beach. Nurdles, they were called. He kept them in a jar in the window of his little workshop in the village, like tiny, primary-colored pick-and-mix. People would often ask about them, their mouths making puckered Os of disgust when they found out they were fragments of industrial waste. All that mess in that beautiful ocean. When her grandfather pointed them to the glass and the pottery, they’d say, But that’s different.

  It seemed like there’d been a cutoff point, somewhere in human history. Anything discarded before that arbitrary date was archaeology, salvage, sometimes vintage. Anything after that was pollution and rubbish and we should be ashamed. To her grandfather, it was all part of what we’d made the ocean mean to us, and he gathered it all up and turned it into what the ocean meant to him. So tiny ships made of plastic pellets sat alongside bracelets of smooth pottery shards, and necklaces of sea glass wrapped in strands of silver filigree.

  You can’t pick and choose with history, he once said. If you want the glass and the china, you have to take the other things too. And you can’t wipe it away without unraveling the whole story of us and the sea.

  Somewhere above them Jamie heard the ring of footsteps on metal. She looked up and saw Callan and Gracie making their way toward the stairs. It was too late to make her excuses and slip away, so she went over to busy herself at the galley counter, not turning around for the brief flurry of greetings.

  “We need to jettison some weight,” Callan said after the courtesies were over. “They only gave us enough for a short run to the other capital planets. We should make Earth orbital station, but it’s going to be tight. The lighter we are, the further the fuel will stretch.”

  “And what happens when we reach the station?” Lowry asked.

  “If it’s unmanned, then we refuel there,” Callan said. “They gave me the access codes, so I could refuel on my runs.”

  “What if they change them?” Jamie said.

  “Then we have a problem,” Callan replied. “But I don’t think they can. Not remotely.”

  “And then we’re going to Earth?” Rena demanded.

  “Depends,” Callan said. “If there are any shuttles there, you can use one to get planetside. If not, and the fuel situation works out, then yes, I’ll take you down.”

  As Jamie poured herself a coffee, trying to look as though she were concentrating her entire attention on that simple task, Callan walked over and reached past her for a mug.

  “Any more of that?” He put his hand on her shoulder, making her jump slightly, sloshing her coffee over the counter.

  He pulled his hand away, leaving her skin cooling as the warmth of his touch faded. She thought there had been something in it. An apology perhaps, or a question.

  Are we okay?

  She cleared her throat. “Yes.” It came out too loud. She tried again. “Yes, I’ll make you one.”

  “So what if it’s manned?” Lowry asked. “Earth station, I mean.”

  “Let’s worry about that when we get there.”

  “We’re going to make it.” Rena’s voice quavered with certainty. “God is leading us home.”

  “Great,” Callan said. “But if you don’t mind, I’ll still take all precautions. I want most of these crates jettisoned. The airlock’s over by the main doors. If you get them stacked inside, I’ll open the outer doors.”

  “Don’t you want to check what’s in them?” Lowry asked.

  Callan shook his head. “Just get rid of them.”

  “I’ll deal with that,” Gracie said. “You need to go over the coordinates I set. I wasn’t sure which route you wanted to take.”

  “Okay.” Callan took the coffee that Jamie held out to him, wrapping his hand around it carefully, his fingers not touching hers. “Thanks.”

  • • •

  Despite Callan’s directive and Gracie’s impatience, Jamie lifted any loose lid she found. She wasn’t sure why it seemed so important to note the passing of the detritus of unknown lives. Maybe it was that the ending of those lives would have no other marker. So she opened the lids and peered inside at clothes, books, random pieces of clutter. An old-fashioned cast-iron casserole dish. An artist’s workbox and sketchbook, filled with images of sunset on some unknown world. A stack of diaries with the same girl’s name on each cover.

  When they’d dragged all the smaller containers across the floor to the airlock, Lowry walked over to the piano and ran his fingers across the keys. “Anyone fancy getting a last tune out of this?”

  When Gracie stepped forward, Jamie thought the engineer was going to brush aside his sentiment and begin moving the stately old instrument to its final silence. Instead, she pulled out the stool and sat down. There was a moment of pregnant stillness, and then her shoulders went back and she spread her hands across the keys. She sat bolt upright as she played, but the music that poured from beneath her fingers was an aching, swooping thing.

  Jamie didn’t know the piece, but there were odd little phrases—ripples of falling notes and contrapuntal shivers up the keyboard—that made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up with the sense that this was something she’d once known, or almost known, and had somehow lost.

  They all stood in silence as the piano sang, the flowing melody rising into the dark curve of the hold, merging with its own echoes. It grew louder, more insistent, with a throbbing ache in the bass line, set against the almost unbearable tenderness of the treble.

  When Gracie suddenly stopped playing, pulling her hands back from the keys as though they’d burned her, Jamie felt the loss as a physical shock. The tableau held for a moment. The woman at the piano, straight-backed and silent. The rest of them, frozen between shock and longing. Rena was crying silently, and for a fraction of a heartbeat, Jamie thought of going to her, putting her arms around the older woman’s gaunt frame, and telling her that it would be all right.

  A small sound from above pulled her attention from Rena. Callan was standing on the gangway, watching the scene below. As Jamie’s gaze fell on him, he turned his head and looked down at her, unsmiling. They stared at one another for a moment, and then he turned and walked away.

  “Come on.” Gracie closed the lid, keeping her back to the rest of them. “Let’s get this jettisoned.”

  As Rena muttered something and stumbled away toward the stairs, Jamie remembered that odd impulse to tenderness, but the moment had passed and she could no longer recall how it had felt.

  • • •

  Two days passed. Jamie saw very little of Callan, and when they did encounter one another, their exchanges were brief and awkward. A couple of times Jamie found herself wanting to put out a hand to stop him from walking away and say, Are we okay? But she was frightened he’d look at her and say, No.

  She spent a lot of time with Finn, sorting through the jar of sea glass as he created his elabor
ate patterns in shades of green and blue and amber. For the most part, he seemed to have come to terms with the random nature of the fragments, but every now and again he’d find two pieces that looked as though they might go together, and he’d spend a little while turning them against one another, trying to find the place where their sharp edges would slot into place.

  He didn’t seem unduly troubled when these efforts failed. Jamie was the one who was unsettled by them, as though she really thought there was a pattern there. Sometimes she’d think she could see it, and she’d find herself mimicking his actions, her fingers scuffing on the cracks and snags of the broken pieces. She preferred the older pieces, with their smooth curves and sand-glazed opacity. There was no temptation to try to force them together. Whatever edges and fault lines they’d ever had, they were gone now.

  They didn’t talk much. Sometimes Finn would make a fleeting comment on some fragment or other.

  Blue.

  Like a tear.

  Tiny.

  There was no value judgment in these passing remarks. He wasn’t comparing one piece to another and finding it wanting. She found herself replying in kind.

  Like an eye.

  Clear.

  Whenever she spoke, Finn smiled: just a sidelong twitch of his lips, accompanied by a swift glance at her face. There was something soothing and undemanding about these exchanges. There was no subtext, no nuances to be teased out and worried over. It was simple, uncluttered, and Jamie sometimes found herself looking at Finn with something that might almost have been a cautious, faltering love twisting in her heart.

  By contrast, Rena’s moods were growing more intense and less coherent. She prowled the corridors of the ship at all hours. Sometimes Jamie would wake in the night and hear the sound of those familiar halting footsteps in the passage. Once they stopped outside her quarters for a moment, and Jamie thought she heard the faint brush of a touch on the metal door, like someone thinking of knocking but snatching their hand away at the last moment.

  She tried to be kind to the other woman, but her attempts felt stilted and clumsy. They always seemed to be talking at odds, their remarks glancing off one another and sliding away at an angle. Maybe that fleeting instant of empathy had been all there could ever be between them. Perhaps it had slipped out of the airlock to float out there beside the piano, turning endlessly in the silence between the stars.

  Lowry was quieter than usual. He’d taken to spending time up on the bridge with Callan, although when Jamie passed by, they never seemed to be talking. When she asked him about it, he said he just wanted to see ahead of them. He looked tired, his face drawn. That old heart problem, he told her, brushing away her concern. It just slowed him down sometimes. He’d be fine. When he got to the sea, he’d rest and recover. He’d be fine.

  • • •

  On the third day, Jamie was eating lunch with Finn and Lowry when Callan came to find them. The galley was exposed now, without its wall of crates, and the sofas looked small and out of place in the great vault of the hold.

  “I’ve picked up a message,” Callan said. “From Alegria. They must have bounced it off a couple of the satellites.”

  “A message for us?” Lowry said.

  “For Earth station. Telling them we’re on our way, and that we don’t have permission to land on the planet.”

  “But there might not be anyone there,” Jamie said.

  “The message sounded fairly sure. They must have had contact. I haven’t picked anything else up, but I’ve only been monitoring sporadically.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “Not much we can do. We don’t have enough fuel to turn back, and the nearest planet is Alegria anyway. We may be able to convince them that we’re going back. Let them refuel us, and then land on Earth.”

  “You think that will work?” Lowry asked, doubtfully.

  “I don’t know,” Callan said. “They’re not going to want to keep us there, and they can’t turn us back without refueling us, or they lose the ship.”

  Lowry nodded, slowly. “So how long before we reach them?”

  “About twenty hours,” Callan said. “Midmorning tomorrow. I’ll let you know when I’ve made contact.”

  He nodded to them, bringing the discussion to a close, before walking away.

  Jamie gave it a few moments before heading back to her quarters, but just as she reached her door, she heard her name and turned to see Callan walking toward her.

  “I didn’t want to say anything in front of the others,” he said, stopping a few feet away. “But there was another message. Sent direct to us.” He hesitated. “Well, to you.”

  “To . . .” She stopped. She knew what he was going to say.

  “It’s from Daniel.” He didn’t look at her as he delivered that information. “I didn’t listen to it. Just enough to work out what it was.”

  For a moment she considered just thanking him politely, then going into her quarters and closing the door. But whatever there had been between Daniel and her, there was still a single thread of it running from her heart to his. It was fraying, stretched thin by the events on Alegria, but it was still there, and it would tangle and knot itself inside her if she didn’t find a way to break it once and for all.

  “Can I listen to it?”

  There was a second’s hesitation from Callan before he answered, and it occurred to her that he might have been expecting a different response.

  “I’ll set it up.”

  She followed him up to the bridge and stood by as he flicked a few switches before stepping aside to let her sit down in front of the screen.

  “Just hit the red button to start it. If you need me, I’ll be in my quarters. If you need anything, I mean.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  Just as he was about to duck out the door, he glanced back at her. “That blue button on the top right.”

  “This one?”

  “That’s right. If you ever needed to return a call to a stored location, that’s the button you’d press. While the message was playing. If there’s a working relay off the satellites, it will connect automatically. Just in case you ever need it.”

  After he’d gone, Jamie sat there for a few moments before leaning forward and pressing the red button. The grayed-out screen flickered and gave way to Daniel’s face, sudden and close-up, haloed in static.

  “Jamie.”

  She almost responded, forgetting it was a recording, but the message rolled on.

  “I hope you’re hearing this. I wasn’t sure whether to send it. The way we left things . . .” He glanced away, composing himself. “I suppose that’s the thing. We didn’t leave things, didn’t finish things, I mean. I thought we’d have time, or I’d never have walked away from you like that.” His gaze moved around, as though he were searching for her beyond the screen. “Jamie . . . look, it’s not too late to turn back. Everything you need is here. It wouldn’t have to be how you think. You can be part of it, help us rebuild the world and make it better. You could . . .” He stopped and rubbed at his face. “I’m not saying this right. That’s not why I’m asking you to come back. I love you. I’ll always love you. We can make it work. I know we can.” He broke off, glancing away from the screen again, as though someone had distracted him. When he turned back, he was brisk, businesslike. “Contact me if you get this.” Another pause, and then he lowered his voice and said, “I love you.” The message winked out.

  Jamie stared at the blank screen. She shouldn’t have listened to it. There was no going back from what had happened between them. So why was her mind suddenly working overtime, trying to unravel that certainty and replace it with a handful of ifs and maybes?

  No.

  He’d said his piece. She could delete the message and walk away.

  She reached out, slowly, and pressed the blue switch. The screen broke into
flickering bands of gray as the comm searched the airwaves. There were a few shadows moving behind the static, like ghosts floating out there between the stars, waiting for something to catch them and pull them in. But nothing else.

  She reached for the switch again, only to snatch her hand back as the distortions on the screen took shape and form and became Daniel.

  The image was blurred, constantly jumping and shifting, its lips moving just out of sync with bursts of incomprehensible static.

  “Jamie?” Another crackle swallowed his next words.

  “Yes. Can you hear me?”

  His image moved forward, fiddling with something, and some of the static fell away.

  “Can you hear me?” he echoed back to her.

  “Yes, I can hear you.”

  A pause, and then they both spoke at once. Or that was how it seemed, although he must have started first for them to clash across all the distance between them.

  Another pause, and then he said, “You go.”

  “I got your message.”

  “Yes, sorry.”

  “What?”

  “No, sorry, someone came in. We’re alone now.”

  “I’m not coming back.”

  The image wasn’t clear enough for her to see his expression change, but he leaned back, briefly lifting his hands to his face.

  “What went wrong?”

  “I think it was just life,” she said. “We stopped fitting together.”

  “But you did love me? Once?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me,” he said, leaning forward again, the urgency and need in his tone evident even through the lag and distortion of the airwaves.

  For a moment she thought he hadn’t heard her say she’d loved him, but then she realized he was begging her for something more. She fought the sudden urge to flick that switch and lose the conversation under the illusion of a broken connection.

  Thirteen years.

  The words were sharp and painful in her mouth as she began to speak. She told him how it had felt when he’d first smiled at her, how she’d felt when he first touched her. She told him about the toast, about the shoes and the hall cupboard. She told him that she’d wondered if the baby would have that same little crease above the bridge of the nose. She told him about the way he made her laugh by changing the lyrics of songs so they were about her cooking disasters or her attempt at painting the living room. She told him what she’d wanted for them, what she’d believed about them, and when she finally ran out of words, he was crying.