Analog SFF, June 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Then, he'd wait twenty-five more years, alone, if he lived, and as an elderly man, he would welcome the next crew to their two weeks of busy wakefulness.

  It was unlikely he would meet a third crew. He would be ninety-seven years old, and despite what he said, he certainly would not be alive when she awoke.

  She had closed her eyes as the cocoon's lid came down. Her muscles tightened. In a blink, the pain would come, the one-hundred-year blink.

  And it did.

  It took several hours before she could shuffle to the infirmary. Waking was worse this time. Doctor Arnold said, “We haven't gone a fifth of the way, yet.” He massaged her hands, lighting them with a million wincing tingles. “Some of the medical staff may stay awake longer than the two weeks for research.” Even though he was young, like her, tiny creases that would become worry lines were evident on his forehead.

  She thought his eyes were kind, though. He flinched when she flinched. “Sorry,” he said. “I'm trying to be gentle.”

  When Meghan reached her room, she pulled the protective plastic off her bed and found a fragile note folded on her pillow from Crew Chief Teague, who wrote, “Try the wall now.” He had signed and dated it twenty years earlier. An old man wrote this, she thought.

  She waved her hand at the sensor, provoking a cascade of pain down her side. The wall flickered. The speakers whispered. Then the Crystal River winked into existence. Water burbled over rocks. Leaves rasped against each other. A long cloud in the distance slid slowly across a mountaintop.

  How long had Teague worked on the wall? A present for a young girl he would never see again.

  The speakers popped twice, like a computer chip crunching somewhere, and the sound turned off, then the image brightened and washed into a pure white. Meghan shaded her eyes before it too vanished. His repair lasted for ten seconds. How long had he worked on it? She tried to open the service panel, but it remained stubbornly closed. Frustrated, she slapped her hand against it, then grabbed the iron candleholder from under the bed. Its sharp end pried the small hatch open. Looking at the circuit board underneath revealed nothing, though. Circuit boards were not her area of expertise. The hatch wouldn't reclose.

  Meghan stared at the blank wall for a long time before seeking out Dr. Arnold and his soft, kind hands.

  “What is that?” he asked, pointing to the candleholder.

  Meghan turned the artifact over in her fingers. She hadn't realized that she still carried it. “It's all I have from Earth. It's a miner's light.”

  She slept with him for the rest of the two weeks until they returned to the cocoons again. The first time, as she pulled his shirt over his head, he said, “You're going to have to quit calling me Dr. Arnold. My name's Sean.”

  Once, she woke up, still unfamiliar with Sean's shape, and listened to his breathing in the dark room. If she tried hard, it reminded her of wind through the leaves.

  * * * *

  Isaac considered the various forms of meditation. He'd learned to plant a question in his mind, then to spend the day or days or weeks contemplating its implications and meaning. While pondering the question, he would read from the Bible or the many studies in the monastery's library. Meditation was best during his vows of silence. At length, the question would glow in his head, like campfire coals. Now, lying on his bed, squeezing his arms close to his body, trying not to shiver, he considered why God allowed cold. Genesis told him that cold was one of the ways God showed man that the Earth would continue. It said, “While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.”

  Twice in the night, the roof creaked loudly, the second time dumping a pile of snow onto the floor. Holding the Tommy Sticker high, he could see where a board had broken. He wondered how he could get outside of the generator house to knock snow off the roof, but the wind roared and the window showed no outside light at all now. He wasn't sure if it was day or night. Was such a storm normal? He had no mountain experience. The monastery had been challenging, but it didn't teach him how to survive here. If it had snowed for forty days and forty nights for Noah, instead of raining, it could hardly be worse than this.

  The Bible wasn't clear on snow. Mostly it appeared in the comparison “white as snow” in a dozen passages. He remembered somewhere the prophets linked it to leprosy. By candle he found the verse in Numbers. Turning the pages with his mittens was impossible, so he shucked them off and put them between his legs to keep them warm. The passage said, “And the cloud departed from off the tabernacle; and, behold, Miriam became leprous, white as snow: and Aaron looked upon Miriam, and, behold, she was leprous.” In Exodus he came across Moses turning a rod into a snake and back into a rod again. Then God said to Moses, “Put now thine hand into thy bosom. And he put his hand into his bosom: and when he took it out, behold, his hand was leprous as snow.”

  Even God didn't like snow.

  The roof creaked again, sending another icy spill to the growing pile.

  The door wouldn't move. Forcing the weight that rested against it was impossible, so he tried the window and pushed it up. A solid white wall stood revealed. He jabbed a shovel into it, dumped snow on the floor, dug in again. A half hour later, he'd cleared a tunnel to the surface, about a foot above the window. He pushed the snowshoes out the hole and, then climbed after them. The wind slammed into his face when he rolled to the surface, and his arm sank to his armpit when he tried to right himself. Strapping on the broad snowshoes took longer than he wished. Snow worked its way into the top of his shoes, froze into little balls on his gloves and fell down his collar. He couldn't see even to the trees that stood twenty yards away from the generator house. His eyes watered, and his cheeks stung. The air's gray luminosity revealed that it was day, but he could barely tell, nor did it matter.

  He had imagined by the height of the snow on the generator house that the river valley would be twenty feet under, but he could see now that a huge drift covered the house. Standing on the showshoes, his chest was as high as the roof's eave, but the snow on the roof was piled higher than his head. Isaac realized that knocking the weight off could be dangerous. If it all came off the steep roof at the same time, it could easily bury him, so he tentatively dug into the overhang, stretching as far as he could with the shovel. A slab dropped off, revealing the wood shingles beneath. Another jab broke free a coffin-sized slab that made a thud he felt through his feet. A crack opened up in the bank of snow that remained on the roof. Isaac backed away as fast as he could as the gap widened, and two thirds of the mass slid ponderously off, leaving only a thin sliver at the ridge.

  Snow covered the hole he'd just climbed from, blocking his way back.

  “Crackers,” he said, the strongest explicative he used. Breath froze on his chin. Before he could get back into the house, though, he needed to sweep the other side. Lifting knees high to clear the snowshoes, he moved around the building.

  As he waded through the drift, he thought about the book of Amos, which said, “And I will smite the winter house with the summer house; and the houses of ivory shall perish, and the great houses shall have an end, saith the Lord.”

  What Isaac needed here was a little smiting.

  By the time he'd finished, dug his way back into the generator house and closed the window, he was exhausted, but, more dangerously, he was freezing. The fire in the stove had gone out, and without a buffering layer of snow on the roof, a draft blew through the room. The water wheel had picked up an ominous screech, so instead of trying to light the fire, he put a candle into the Tommy Sticker and walked down the stairs. Ice had formed in the trough where the stream entered the generator wheel, and now water poured onto the floor, deflected by the blockage. The wheel turned half as slow as it should. Water poured onto the floor, some of it freezing against the wood, but most flowing down the slant to the far wall.

  Too tired even for a well earned, “Crackers!” he swung the two-pound hammer against the blockage. It barel
y chipped, and he lost his footing, sprawling beneath the water wheel. Icy water drenched him. Isaac scrambled away, slipping on the slick floor. If he didn't clear the trough soon, the wheel would freeze solid. It could become unusable until spring, and only then after extensive repair.

  Carefully, this time, keeping his weight distributed on both feet, he sidled toward the trough, hammer in hand. He thought of Lamech, Noah's father, who the Bible said of, “And he called his name Noah, saying, This same shall comfort us concerning our work and toil of our hands, because of the ground which the LORD hath cursed.”

  The ice was the curse, the hammer the work. So cold he could hardly hold the heavy tool, Isaac swung it against the obstruction.

  * * * *

  When she woke again, an elderly man leaned over the cocoon. “Don't move, Meghan. You shouldn't feel pain, but you're likely to be nauseous for a few minutes.”

  She closed her eyes. I'm five-hundred-and-twenty-years-old now, she thought. Over thirty-five hundred years to go.

  When she opened her eyes, the old man still leaned in, looking concerned. His hand reached over the edge to cup her upper arm. “Are you okay?”

  Tentatively, she nodded, then waited to see if the movement would bother her. Her stomach twisted, but the discomfort passed. “I think so.” Her joints didn't ache, but her thinking felt fuzzy. She looked at him closely. “Crew Chief Teague?” He shook his head. “No, he's dead.” She squinted. “Dr. Arnold?”

  He nodded. “I'm still Sean. It took years to figure out what was wrong with the long sleep.”

  “How many?”

  “Almost forty.”

  She remembered Sean's smooth skin. How he felt when she woke but he still slept. How he'd held her when she talked about Earth and her fears.

  “I'm dying,” she had said, their last night together. “We will never get to where we are going, and we will never go back.”

  The night before, a hundred years earlier, Sean had rocked her gently, holding her head to his chest. “We're not dead yet.”

  Now, Meghan didn't recognize his eyes. He held out a hand to help her from the cocoon, but she didn't take it. He was a stranger. She sat up on her own, felt sick again. When it passed and she climbed out, Sean stood back, looking at her sadly. “I missed you,” he said.

  “It's only been a few minutes for me.”

  “That's true.”

  She stood awkwardly for a minute, unsure of what to say.

  Finally, she offered, “I have work to do.”

  “Of course. Me too.” Lights flickered on the other cocoons, and she realized he'd woken her first.

  For the first week, she only saw him at meals, but she sat on the other side of the cafeteria. She tried not to think about the blank wall and her candleholder keepsake. With effort, she avoided pulling the box from under the bed. She thought, maybe if I don't look at it, I won't long for it. I won't miss it. Meghan concentrated on the hydroponic tanks. Every connection needed to be refitted. She retooled valves, serviced pumps, recalibrated the chemical testing equipment, met with the horticulturists who talked about genetic drift, mutations, and evolution. Over the course of five hundred years, the plants adapted to the artificial environment. The most efficient at extracting nutrients from the fluids flourished. The more aggressive that grew faster or taller crowded out their weaker cousins.

  She couldn't sleep during her rest hours, so she wandered back to the hydroponics rooms. All the plants were low growers, flourishing under lights hanging from the ceiling. Tomatoes, strawberries, cucumbers, ferns of various sorts, beets, peppers, and numerous others. Nothing that grew tall. Tree seeds were held in storage for planet fall when they reached Zeta Reticuli, although there was a question if they would germinate. No one had ever planted a four-thousand year-old seed before. She walked down the long row, letting the palm of her hand brush the plant tops while imagining the aspen the ship carried. Would there be an aspen grove one day on the planet orbiting Zeta Reticuli? Aspen preferred to spread from their roots. If just one seed germinated, she could grow a forest. Would Earth trees flourish so far from their native sun?

  The fear gathered in her chest like a tightness, so she rubbed her fist between her breasts as she walked, trying to work through the tension. At the end of the row of vegetation, she looked up one of the ship's long spokes, a huge hollow chamber that reached the ship's core, the center they revolved around to produce the illusion of gravity. She'd grown used to the effect that had disoriented her at first, moving from the claustrophobic pressure of the growing room to the shocking reach of empty space. She crossed the fifty-foot diameter of the spoke to get to the next row of plants.

  At the end of the final workday before entering the cocoon again, she walked through the plants one last time. They smelled wet and vaguely chemical, but not green, not natural at all, so she kept going until she reached Sean's room and raised her hand to knock. She paused. It seemed that only two weeks ago she had kissed a young man good-bye. She couldn't picture the ship without him. Every day she expected to see him turn a corner, to join her in the hydroponic labs. He never did. Instead, an old man looked at her mournfully when she passed. He sacrificed forty years to save her and the rest. She almost left.

  When he opened the door, Meghan said, “I missed you too.”

  Sean let her in, the age spots on his hand were prominent in the harsh, hallway light. “I have something for you.” He opened a drawer and removed the metal candleholder. “I know how much it meant. I thought about having them open it for you. We could find out if there's anything inside.”

  She traced her finger along the loop where the candle would have been placed. Rubbed the rough brass cap at one end. If held the wrong way, it looked like a weapon, the five-inch long, narrow spike that would hold the antique in a mine wall or stuck into wood could also hurt someone. “I'd forgotten about it,” she lied.

  As they talked quietly in his room, she started to see the man she used to know. Beneath the thinning hair, behind the wrinkles and tiredness, she recognized him.

  When they slipped under the sheets later, Sean said, “I don't have as much to offer as I did before. I'm not ... young.”

  “Just hold me, then, and let's sleep.”

  But after hours of listening to his soft breathing and thinking that he still sounded a little like wind through aspens, he woke up, and Meghan found he had more life in him than he thought.

  * * * *

  Isaac stood next to the cold stove. His clothes no longer dripped. They crackled when he moved. Next to his skin, though, they were soaked, and he could feel them sucking away the little heat that remained. One ceiling board had broken completely while he'd knocked the snow off the roof, and the supplies directly underneath were covered, including the boxes of matches. He scooped snow off the floor in double handfuls until he found them, but the boxes were squashed and the matches ruined. The match heads smeared against the striker when he tried to light them.

  Dully, his head feeling sluggish and slow, he knelt on the pile of snow for a minute. Flakes came down through the hole in the room, swirling in a breeze that hadn't been there before. Without matches, he'd never light the fire. Maybe he could get the snowshoes back on and make his way to the miners’ cabins, but he knew the steep trail, completely hidden in the storm, would be almost impossible to hike, even if his clothes weren't already wet and he wasn't exhausted. He couldn't feel his knees against the snow, and the cold crept up his legs. He thought about just staying still. His chin drifted to his chest. Resting sounded good. In a few minutes, he would get up, but for now, a little sleep was all he needed. The vibration and steady thumping of the generator below annoyed him though, then, frightened, he stood. If he slept, the generator would surely freeze, and so would he. If he didn't have duties, he could rest, but the others depended on him.

  Isaac waved his arms to restore circulation, slapping his hands against his arms, then staggered toward the stairs. With renewed vigor, the wind shook the hous
e. No light came from the depths. His candle had gone out, so he swept his hand against the wood, careful to not fall again on the slick floor, until he hit the Tommy Sticker. Water gurgled against the power wheel behind him. With a yank, he pulled the candleholder from the wood, forced himself to climb the stairs, before sitting by the stove. It took a dozen tries to unscrew the brass cap holding the matches. There were only three. Carefully, he lit one, but before he touched the candle, the breeze blew it out. He nearly wept. With the new hole in the roof, there was no place he could guarantee the next match would stay lit long enough to start the fire.

  He opened the stove door, pushed his hands inside, out of the wind, to light the second match. It flicked to life, but the draw up the chimney immediately snuffed it out.

  Isaac took a deep breath, closed the stove flue to stop the wind, and mumbled a prayer before lighting the last match. The water in his shoes felt like it was freezing. He couldn't feel his feet at all. The match caught, held steady. Carefully, he pushed the candlewick into the flame. It flared into life. He jammed the candle between two charcoaled logs in the stove before feeding kindling to the flame. Soon, smoke flowed from the open stove. Isaac coughed, and his eyes teared, as he kicked the stool apart for bigger pieces of wood, the last fuel in the house, but he didn't open the flue until a healthy flame filled the iron stove. Heat baked off the sides. His gloves steamed on top of the stove as he warmed his hands. Piece by piece, he removed his clothes to hang around the stove before wrapping his blanket around his shivering shoulders. Water dripped from his coat and pants. Heat rolled off the stove, tingling his cheeks, sending stabbing sparks through his toes and feet. He grimaced and moved closer.