by Erik Hanberg
“Right.”
“Won’t she adjust her plans?” Peter asked.
Shaw shook his head. “She’s been in a state of meditation for weeks now. Only pausing for basic necessities and even those are infrequent. But she hasn’t touched the Lattice console and she doesn’t have a ring. She doesn’t know what we’re planning.”
Ok. So he and Ellie are floating outside the ship in spacesuits. Then what? Shaw tried to picture the next step. Could they be rescued? Could they make it to Earth somehow? Or back inside the ship and then… then what?
“Ellie’s still eight months pregnant,” Peter said gently. “I can’t imagine being sucked out the door with the escaping atmosphere would be good for her or the baby.”
It was true. Unavoidably true. Shaw closed his eyes. The excitement of coming up with a plan fell away. And his energy fell further, as the surge of adrenaline that had fueled him since the morning’s vote wore off too. He realized just how exhausted he was. He felt like he was playing someone else’s game. A game whose rules had been set by other people… Taveena’s ship. Galway’s threat. Grace’s compromise.
The logical conclusion of it all was to kill Taveena and then save his family. Win the game.
He couldn’t ignore the twinge somewhere in the recesses of his brain that might be an alternative. A better way. That started with walking away from the game entirely. The problem was… what that meant in practice, he didn’t know. But something inside told him there was a better path. Exploring an alternate path meant the very real possibility of losing everything. He wasn’t sure he had the guts to face the consequences if he ended up being wrong.
“What next?” Shaw asked, his voice nearly a whisper.
“We can keep looking through the code,” Peter said. “Look for holes in the system, look for ways to gain control of the ship. Or…”
“Or?” Shaw prompted, after Peter was quiet for a few seconds.
“Or you can put down the ring and the wrap and just focus on being present with Ellie for this last week together.”
Shaw opened his eyes, and they were filled with anger. “Now?” he hissed. “You chose this moment—when my family and I have a week left to live—to turn back into a Blue Skyer evangelist?”
“You spent a lot of time in jumps over the past few months, time you could have spent with Ellie. That’s all I’m saying.”
“No, it’s not all you’re saying, you’re saying I’m an addict,” Shaw spat.
“Byron… I know you. And I know what they report about you. Long before all of this, you were scared you were an addict. Not as far gone as Elvin, obviously. And not an orgasm jumper—but you were scared of turning into an addict. And for a while Taveena and Wulf even convinced you that you were an addict. That’s one of the reasons you helped them destroy the Lattice in the first place.”
“Stop narrating my life,” Shaw snapped.
“I just think it’s worth asking yourself… what if they were right?”
Shaw left the jump abruptly.
Back in his bunk, he was breathing heavily. He tried to grapple with his sudden anger. He had wondered if he was addicted to the Lattice, so it wasn’t like Peter had introduced something new to him. And Peter had preached at him before about giving it up. What had set him off?
Shaw got his breathing under control. He realized that what had so aggravated him was not just the idea that he was addicted, but that Peter had given up and thought Shaw should too.
Shaw might be tired of playing other people’s games. And he might be looking for some sort of third way out of the mess he and his wife were in. But that didn’t mean he’d given up. Not by a long shot.
What he really needed was to talk things over with Ellie. If she would see him. He pushed himself out of bed and toward the door. He floated down a hallway and came to her bedroom. He knocked and strained his ears listening for an answer.
Of course, he wanted to talk to her about more than just the morning’s vote. He wouldn’t even talk, if it meant he could just lie in a bed next to her, his hand on her belly.
That dream, at least, wasn’t going to happen anytime soon.
Ellie had been happy to see him. For a few days. But that had been months ago. He didn’t notice at first, but she had slowly withdrawn from him on the ship. But then every time he asked if something was wrong, she denied there was a problem. He tried arguing back and he tried giving her space, but things didn’t improve.
One morning he woke up and realized she hadn’t come to bed. She’d found a different bunk off of a different hallway. More space for her and the baby, she told him. Easier to sleep without kicking him. He thought it might be enough to ease the tensions. But a few weeks later she could barely be bothered to reply to direct questions.
Recently he started using his Altair ring to jump into her prenatal appointments with her midwife and doctors on Earth. It felt perverted and twisted to eavesdrop on such basic things as the birth of his child, but what choice did he have?
It was in one of those jumps that he heard her tell the doctor she wanted to name their girl Jane. It was the first he’d heard mention of it.
Now she wasn’t even answering his knock.
He gave up. He used his finger to draw a large arrow on his wrap and left it sitting in the cushion of microgravity outside her room. The arrow hooked at the end and pointed her in the direction of the great room. They couldn’t afford to argue right now—if that’s what they were doing. They needed a plan. Today.
Two hours later, Ellie finally appeared in the great room of the ship. He’d spent the time floating through the room aimlessly, trying to keep himself occupied and to resist the urge to enter an immersive jump in case it caused him to miss her.
Ellie held up the wrap he’d scribbled a message on and left floating outside of her door. “This is what our marriage has come to?” she asked. “Leaving notes for each other?” Ellie floated into the room looking like—and Shaw hoped that she would never jump into his mind to hear this thought—a great walrus coasting on underwater currents into a lagoon. He felt like he hadn’t seen her in weeks. He couldn’t believe how big she had grown. Her face was rotund in a new way, but she really was glowing. That phrase he always assumed just meant “happy expectant mother” was actually true. Ellie was glowing, but he was pretty sure she wasn’t very happy at this moment.
He didn’t want to argue. He didn’t want to talk about their new deadline (in every sense of the word). All he wanted was to rush across the room and embrace her with every limb he had. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it. If for no other reason than he thought she wouldn’t allow it, and he didn’t know if he could survive the rebuff.
“A note is the only way you’ll let me get in touch with you,” he replied.
“I don’t want to fight,” Ellie said, shaking her head softly. “Not now.”
“We don’t need to fight. But we do need to talk about what I saw in a jump this morning…”
“I am supremely uninterested in hearing about your jumps, By.”
“What do you want to talk about then?”
“Nothing! Please. I have too many things to worry about right now. I can’t add your emotional state to the list.”
“All I do is worry about you. But you don’t give me any way in. I’m trying to save our lives. There was a vote—”
“No. I don’t know what you’re trying to do, but it’s certainly not that.”
“What on Earth is going on with you?”
“What on Earth? A funny time to ask me that,” Ellie said. She pushed off and went to the window, staring out over the planet.
Shaw took a deep breath. There was some way to relate to his wife. If he could just figure out the key that would unlock the mystery, he was sure they could talk it out. Maybe he could demonstrate that he’d been listening. “I know how you hid in St. Louis,” he started. “You told me about how you waited out the riots and the looting. The fight you had in the stairwell. And you k
now what I went through trying to get back to you. We both went through hell. But we’re here. We’ve been here for months, finally together…” Shaw stopped talking when he saw her.
Ellie was scrunched up into a ball, floating next to the window, her hands cupped over her ears. He had never seen his wife this way. He wanted to run and hold her, he wanted to flee.
“You don’t even hear yourself, By,” she finally whispered.
“What am I not hearing?”
“I can’t unsay it once I do. But I don’t know that I can unfeel it, either. There’s a wall between us and I have no idea how we’re going to get over it.”
“Tell me. It’s got to be the first step.”
Ellie took a few deep breaths, but she stayed curled. “It wasn’t an accident I was forced to hide with the Wendhardts upstairs. It wasn’t an accident that St. Louis became a war zone.”
“You told me what happened, El—”
“But you clearly weren’t listening!” Ellie snapped, her voice high with anger. “I’ve tried to tell you so many times, but you just keep equating what happened to you and what happened to me. You survived a hurricane, I had to fight a guy in a hallway, tom-a-to, tom-ah-to, let’s have sex like we used to.”
“This is not just about—”
“I know! I know. But that’s how it feels. Like I failed at being Penelope to your Odysseus. It’s not just that I had things happen to me during the Dark Eighteen Days. Listen this time, By. Really listen.
“After we finished the goop from the food printer, we didn’t eat for two days. Two days. The last of what the Wendhardts had on hand they gave to me. When we finally tried to escape and find food… we encountered that OJ in the stairwell. He knifed Joshua, and he was ready to kill all of us, if Drea and I hadn’t been able to push him over the rail. You hear that and… and… I don’t know what you hear when I tell that story. Adventure? But it was horror, By. Absolute horror. For two days our daughter didn’t eat! Two days I had my hands on my belly, thinking about this speck of cells no bigger than my fingernail, and hoping that she would make it. That the shelter our upstairs neighbors had offered, the food they’d given up for me and my child wouldn’t be in vain.
“After that fight in the stairwell… I was in shock. But I couldn’t afford to be. Drea had lost her husband, she was inconsolable. And then suddenly the Altair cavalry rides in and whisks me away. I was gone within minutes of them arriving. They left food with Drea, but they wouldn’t take her. After all we had been through, they wouldn’t let her come with me.
“So my life becomes this whirlwind and I barely have a chance to say goodbye to Drea before they tell me that Grace Williams has sent a team from Altair to save me. Why? Why do they care about me? And that’s when they drop the biggest bombshell of my life. That you were still alive. But they also told me I couldn’t see you yet, because you’d collaborated with the raiders. And that you’d agreed to do some work for Altair, or something like that, to make up for it. I couldn’t even comprehend what they were saying. What did any of it even mean? I didn’t know and they wouldn’t say.
“But I know you. The Civil War buff who jumps back to Gettysburg. Who studies old-fashioned military strategy for fun. I knew what the raiders would have wanted you for. That’s when I first felt dread. Because… Because I wasn’t happy you were alive—I mean I was, but now it was always overshadowed by fear. That creeping feeling that everything I’d been through—everything horrible I’d just put my daughter through—was because of you. Because you helped them. Then I saw the preview of your broadcast. You looked… tired. Awful, to be honest. Broken. Guilty… That’s when I knew that everything Grace told me was true.” She ended in a voice that was barely even a whisper.
Ellie brushed a tear from her eye.
Shaw tried to match her tone. “I did it because I wanted to see you,” he said quietly.
“I know!” Ellie exploded, her voice echoing through the great room. “I knew. I mean, I knew that then, before you even told me. I knew that you wouldn’t have done whatever you’d done unless you wanted to get back to me.”
“That’s right,” Shaw affirmed.
Ellie nearly cackled. “Don’t you see then? How that makes it so much worse for me? How it takes this whole terrible situation and twists it into a macabre farce. I spent two weeks in fear that I was going to lose my child, only to discover that the only reason I was going through it was because my husband wanted to get back to me and see that same child? It’s a monstrous universe that allows a woman less than a month into her pregnancy to go through that.”
“Ellie… I’m—”
“And then I finally see you. And you tell me about jumping into my head and seeing how angry I was at the Lattice. How in my grief over your death, I was furious. I wanted it destroyed because it had taken you from me. And to hear that’s what pushed you to their side, it was the knife turning in the wound. Because you knew,” Ellie spat. Whatever fury she’d kept bottled for the past few months was now coming out at Shaw as hot fire.
“A few days after we came back together on this ship,” she continued, “I went back in time and watched you on this ship. You were a prisoner of the raiders. You thought you were going to die in the vote. Wulf thought you were going to die. And so he gave you your ring back. I watched where you jumped and what you saw. And you saw me! You saw me tell my sister that I didn’t want anyone jumping into my head. I had forbidden my family from jumping into my thoughts, and I watched you listen when I told her that. But for some reason, you thought it didn’t apply to you. You jumped into my head anyway. And what you heard convinced you to work with the raiders. It’s the final twist of the knife.”
Shaw was dumbfounded. “But… after I died, why didn’t you want your family—or me—to jump into your thoughts? You and I have always been open to each other and shared those. I don’t understand.”
“My thoughts are not what define me!” Ellie raged. “I can spew hot acid at the Lattice in my head, but if someone had presented me with a button to destroy it, I wouldn’t have pushed it. I didn’t want my family in my thoughts because I didn’t want them trying to second guess me. And then you—you hear them and you set off to destroy the world! I can feel something and not act on it, By. Why can’t you?”
“You’re talking like I’m some dumb animal! Stimulus, response, stimulus, response. Like I can’t think for myself.”
“I hate what you did,” she whispered. “And that you did it for me. I hate myself, for whatever role I played. I hate that sometimes I wish that…”
Shaw turned away to look out the immense window. “Sometimes you wish that I had died,” he finished.
Ellie was silent. She finally whispered, “Yes. I was terrified to say it. But I was even more afraid that I didn’t have to say it anymore. That you would see it when I looked at you. So I hid.”
“Do you still love me, Ellie?” He asked. He listened to the silence.
“I don’t know, By,” she finally said.
“Is it over?” he asked, still looking out the window at the Earth below, afraid to face her and read the answer in her eyes. “You used the word ‘hate’ a lot in the last few seconds, enough that I have to wonder if you were talking about the obvious. ‘I hate you now, Byron Shaw, for everything that you did.’ Is that what you meant to say? Has this poisoned us?”
“Byron…”
“And is that why you’ve been meeting with your doctor on your own?” Shaw continued. “Do you want me to be the father? Or am I cut out of that role, too?”
“Byron!” Ellie cried.
Shaw turned to find that an entirely different scene had played out behind him than he’d expected.
Bubbles of a transparent liquid surrounded Ellie and Shaw, floating freely around the room. Ellie herself had a slight upward trajectory—slow, but noticeable. She was panicked, flailing.
“Ellie?” He waved his arms through the air, trying to get to her. In the process, he managed to swat through
a swath of the bubbles floating near him. They burst into a multitude of smaller bubbles and he suddenly registered a smell that was entirely new to him. Sweet almost?
He planted his feet on the window and kicked off in the direction of Ellie. Her loose dress was soaked around her midsection—and getting wetter. Ellie bumped her head into the ceiling of the room, finally stopping her momentum. In the weightless environment of microgravity, the still-discharging fluid had been enough to push her against the ceiling.
For every force there is an equal but opposite reaction.
Shaw arrived a few seconds later, steadying himself against the ceiling next to her. His eyes met Ellie’s through the bubbles of amniotic fluid between them.
“My water broke.”
Chapter 3
The gush of fluid was everywhere in the room now. Bubbles were floating in the air, stuck to the grey floors and wall. Splattered on the great curving window, distorting their view of the planet, each small prism refracting Earth’s blue light around the room.
Ellie was clutching at Shaw, and his arms were tight around her waist trying to hold her in place so she didn’t have to worry about anchoring to the ceiling. He put his hand on her short hair—her long locks had been cut months before to keep them from floating into her face—and stroked his hand through it. Her eyes were closed, her face pinched inward.
They remained in that tableau for several seconds.
Finally, Shaw sensed Ellie’s muscles relax slightly in his arms.
“I think I’m done,” she whispered. A few seconds later she grimaced.
“Are you in pain? Are there any contractions?”
“A little. I mean, I don’t know. I’ve had some Braxton Hicks contractions for weeks now—little practice squeezes before the main event,” she added. “This one is stronger… I think?” She bit her lip. “I don’t know, Byron.”
She started to cry. With no gravity to pull them down her face, her tears didn’t fall, they pooled under her eyes as a single mass. “It’s really going to happen,” she moaned. “Up here!”