by Charles Yu
“Okay,” I say. “I’ll talk to him.”
That night I lie awake, staring out into the cosmic background radiation, trying to figure out what I could possibly say to the captain that would make him think I’m worth saving.
Tuesday:
We’re in the transporter bay. We beam down. Such a weird feeling. I wonder if anyone else is as excited as I am, but then I realize how dumb that is. Of course they aren’t. They do this three times a week, and they’re all bored of it. They’re management. Comfortable. Lazy, really. Ever since they instituted free soft serve in the officers’ dining quarters, the captain’s Lycra has been looking a bit tight around the middle. It’s hard not to notice.
As we’re dematerializing, the captain starts in with the monologue.
You can tell when he’s going to start with this nonsense, because he sucks in his stomach a little. He always does this in the transporter because we’re not allowed to move during molecular calibration.
And then he gets that off-into-infinity look. It’s the Age of Science Fiction, he says. Everyone stares straight ahead.
We have reached the point where our knowledge of the world now exceeds our ability to believe it, to believe what we are seeing, to believe what we are able to do.
He has a way of speaking in italics.
What we are capable of has caught up to, and even surpassed, our intuition about what should be possible. We have surpassed ourselves. And even though I’ve heard this monologue five thousand times over the ship’s speakers, and even though I know it was written by the ship’s speechwriter, I can’t help but feel just a little inspired, to remember just a little bit of what I felt, looking at the poster in the recruiting office that day, when I signed up for duty, imagining what it would be like to explore the universe.
And then we rematerialize on yet another world populated by sentient goo, and there’s green glop everywhere, and it’s oozing, which is how the glop procreates, and in the process of oozing, it makes a kind of groaning sound, and overall the whole planet smells like sulfur and even though it’s hard, I try to remember that each and every place in the cosmos is an opportunity for discovery and that each and every life-form is a treasure and a marvel and a wonder, and I take out my Life-Form Analyzer so that we can catalog this wondrous, marvelous, slimy goop.
On the surface, we look to the captain for his plan.
“Meet back here in an hour?” he says, shrugging.
Everyone mumbles agreement and wanders off. The medic heads for the lip of a nearby crater formation, pretending to look at readings on his handheld. Security chief says he’s going for a run. The XO is working on her résumé. She should have her own ship and everyone knows it. Instead, she’s stuck as number two for the drunkest captain in the fleet.
The captain strolls off, practicing a new monologue he thought up in the shower this morning.
That leaves the new ethnographer and me. She doesn’t look thrilled, but out of protocol introduces herself.
“Lieutenant Issa,” she says, a little stiff. She holds her hand out like she’s hoping I won’t actually shake it so she doesn’t have to touch me. She says she’s going to head over to a nearby cave and see if she can learn anything about the mating process. “You can follow me if you want,” she says.
I watch Issa collect slime samples for a while, with a very serious look on her face, but that gets boring so I wander over toward a nearby rock formation. There are weird noises coming from behind it. I look back at Issa to see if she hears it, too, but she’s focused on her work, so I keep going toward the noise, edging around to behind the rock.
I hear what sounds like the captain, groaning. He’s in trouble.
My muscle memory kicks in. I find a foothold in the boulder and hoist myself up onto the rock, just like we did in training. I land, ready to strike. I see the captain. He’s down on the ground, shirtless, wrapped in some kind of slime, covering his face and mouth like a mask.
I jump down on top of him and with both hands and all my strength manage to wrench the slime off his face.
The captain jumps up. Actually, he sort of jumps up and back and off whatever he was crouching over, and now he’s standing, flushed, with a wild look in his eyes and a fistful of goop in each hand.
“What the hell?” he screams at me.
I wasn’t expecting thanks from the captain, no, but certainly not this.
That’s when I notice that next to him is what appears to be a little sculpture that the captain has formed with his hands, out of goo. A little goo-person.
Oh.
The captain recovers his composure a bit, straightening out his uniform. “You didn’t see anything, yeoman,” he says, but not in a menacing, abuse-of-rank way. Even now, getting caught doing whatever it was he was doing, he’s a little charming. Pervy, but still charming. I guess that’s why he’s captain. “Let’s keep this between us dudes,” he says, and winks at me.
I say yes sir.
“It’s just,” he says, looking off into space. “It’s not as easy as it looks. Wearing this uniform.”
“Doesn’t look easy at all, sir.”
“Gets a little lonely out here,” he says, and for a second I think he might be moving in to hug me. Instead, he reaches down and picks up a handful of goo and sort of fondles it in his palm. “You married, yeoman?”
“I am.”
“Is she hot?”
“Sir?” I’m searching for an appropriate response, but he says never mind, so I turn and leave him alone with his goo-woman. Or maybe not alone. Who am I to judge? Maybe she brings him some comfort out here, out at the edge of this tired rerun of a galaxy.
Wednesday:
Another mission today. Another chance for random death. I don’t think it’ll happen just yet, still a little early in the week, but who knows? Yeomen have died on Wednesdays. Hell, yeomen have died on Mondays. We die. It’s the job. It’s actually in the job description.
Duties and responsibilities, Yeoman, Second Class:
assist in collection of soil and vegetation samples
be prepared to die for no good reason
Not exactly a good job for someone with a kid on the way. I did a good job in Maintenance, fixed the quantum possibility engine so the officers could go off and mess around in alternate realities. And this is the reward. A promotion—to this?
We beam down and split up. I tag along with Issa again. She collects samples. I try to assist her.
“What are you doing?” she says.
“Trying to assist you?”
“Please stop.”
“Look, I know you actually have a role to play. The thing is, I’m the yeoman, and I know you’re kind of new as an officer, so I don’t know if you know what being yeoman means in terms of my situation and all, but if you don’t let me pretend to be helping you, I don’t know what’s going to happen to me.”
Issa looks over at the XO, who seems to be sort of watching me, trying to figure out if I’m actually doing anything.
“All right,” Issa says. “Pick that thing up and sort of wave it around in this general area.” I tell her thanks.
We work for a while in silence, or rather, she works and I pretend to work, and it feels good, having a job to do, a purpose, even if it is a fake purpose.
It’s late when we get back. We go through the ion-scrub and then debrief, and by the time I get back to my quarters it’s past two in the morning. My wife’s in bed. I slip off my uniform, slide under the thin blanket, and drape my arm over her hip. She turns over and faces me.
“Good God,” I say. I don’t know if it’s the hormones or what, but she seems to be literally glowing.
“Shut up,” she says. “I’m huge.”
“Yes, you are. And I like it.”
“Did you talk to him yet?” she says.
I don’t say anything.
“You’re just going to let this happen. To yourself. To us, to your kid.”
“What am I supposed to
say?”
“How about, hey, Captain, I don’t feel like dying for no reason this week. You cool with that? Everyone cool with that?”
“It’s not like they want me to die,” I say, but even as I’m saying it, I’m remembering the slightly crazed look I saw in the captain’s eyes yesterday, playing with his goo-woman, and I get a hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach.
My wife turns over and slides back into me. She takes my hand and puts it under her shirt.
“That’s not how this ends,” she says. It’s just this very tiny, very pregnant lady, against the cold, dark expanse of this who-gives-a-shit universe, and yet the way she says it, it almost gives me a little bit of, I don’t know, hope? As if she could just refuse to live in a cosmos where that’s how this story could end. As if, by personal choice, by sheer will, she could collapse all of the possible worlds down to the one she wants, the one she needs.
Thursday:
Today’s world is a wet one, filled with moisture-based life-forms. One breath of the atmosphere will cause you to know the answer to every question you have ever asked yourself. Where am I? Why did I do that? Was I right? Do they like me? Do I deserve love? Am I going to heaven? Why do I keep doing this? An answer for every question. All the answers, all at once. Not a pleasant fate, so we all put on our gas masks. No one really wants to know the whole truth.
And, of course, there’s goo. The captain only seems to visit places with goo these days.
I wait all morning for a good moment, but the XO is still watching me so I have to pretend to be studying the environment. I make a face that I think of as Hmm This Life-Form Is Super-Interesting, and try to look as busy as I can.
After lunch, I get my chance. Everyone is taking a smoke break, except for the security chief, who is doing yoga. The captain tells everyone he’s going to take a leak and wanders off behind a grove of twenty-foot mushrooms. I wait a couple of minutes, then I follow him back there.
“Hey hey, look who it is,” he says.
“Captain, I need to ask you something.”
“Of course. Anything for my buddy. Assuming you’ve kept your mouth shut. Have you? Of course you have. Look at you,” he says. “Okay, sorry, that was mean. What do you want, man? Make it quick. This goo isn’t going to make love to itself.”
I watch him play with the goopy substance, lovingly sculpting it into a sort of lumpy mound.
“It’s Thursday.”
“Yeah, so?”
“I’m the yeoman.”
“Ah, yes,” he says. He stops what he’s doing and turns to look at me. “You want to know why you have to die.”
“Yeah. Uh, yes. I mean, yes. Sir.”
“Look, I’m not saying I’m happy about it. Or that I like it. I’m just saying, you know, it makes for a more interesting report. If stuff happens. As you can see,” he says, gesturing toward his gooey girlfriend, “it’s really freaking boring out here. And if Central Command ever realizes that, they’ll cut my budget and I’ll end up sitting behind a desk. So I need stuff to happen.”
“I get that stuff has to happen,” I say. “With all due respect, sir, I don’t know if you know this, but my wife and I, we’re expecting.”
“Oh, boo hoo. What am I going to do, kill Issa? Have you seen her? She’s super-hot. Kill my medic? Then how would I get my Vicodin, silly? You’re the yeoman, dude. Do your job and die.”
Friday:
No mission today, so in the morning I go down into Records. I find the quietest corner and ask the computer to pull up files on “Deaths, Weird.”
Three hundred seventy-one weird deaths come up, and they’re all yeomen.
Yeoman Tanaka died of laughter.
Yeoman Allen died of Leuchin fungus. According to the official report, it got a hold of her mind, and she wouldn’t get back into the transporter area. As the ship pulled away, her mind was being eaten by the fungus, each of her memories being stored forever in a fat cell of the creature, to be replayed forever in an endless loop.
Yeoman Cooper died of fright. A forty-three-year-old man with advanced hand-to-hand combat training. Died of fright.
Yeoman Rhee died of thirst on XR-11uu7S, a water planet. Of thirst. Oh, also? She drowned. She died of thirst while drowning, which doesn’t sound suspicious at all. The ship’s log says the captain made a grab over the side of the raft, but sources close to the incident report that it “wasn’t much of a grab.”
I read for hours, into the evening, and they’re all like that. Yeoman Nelson: indigestion. Yeoman Trammell: brain cramp. Yeoman Castellucci died from sneezing too hard.
Plausibly random-sounding deaths that the captain could not have foreseen or prevented that, on further inspection, sound like exactly the kind of thing it would be cool to report in a captain’s log.
I tell my wife about the records. She just looks out the porthole and doesn’t say anything. We both understand what I have to do. I’ve got to find a way to avoid dying, but if I actually manage to do that, we don’t know what would happen to her. She’s got to get off the ship tonight.
We eat dinner in silence. I start to do the dishes but she says why bother. I help her pack a small suitcase. She’s not mad at me anymore, she’s way past that, but the fact that she’s not crying is more than a little surprising. Sort of troubling.
Walking through the ship, we try to act casual, like we’re on our way to the medical bay for an appointment. When we get to the right place, we look around briefly and then duck into the cramped area where trash is held before it gets ejected out into space. We find an empty shuttle pod and I help her in. I try to give her one final kiss but she just looks at me, so disappointed, and slaps my face gently.
“I’m not going to die, okay?” I say. “I’ll find you somehow.”
“I love you,” she says. “But you’re an idiot.”
We hear someone coming and she shuts the hatch and I press the Eject button, and then she’s gone.
Saturday:
It’s a weird place to be. I’m not even mad about it anymore. I get it. This is my role. I get it.
We beam down safely onto the new planet and I breathe a little sigh of relief. At least it wasn’t the transporter.
We do our usual thing, and by three thirty in the afternoon, the thought is starting to creep into my head. Maybe. Maybe I’m the one, the only yeoman to ever survive his whole week on the away team.
Around six fifteen, the captain gathers us up, gives us a little parable about what we learned here. The thought is definitely in my head now, but I don’t even want to entertain it. More time goes by, and I’m thinking, here I am. I’m still here with fifteen minutes left.
It’s eight minutes to seven when the captain says it.
“You,” he says to me. Still doesn’t know my name. I wonder if I even have a name.
“Captain,” I say.
“I need your help collecting some samples,” he says. “Over there.”
Everyone tries to pretend they don’t know what’s happening, but as I’m walking away, I look back and catch them watching us, with grim looks on their faces.
We walk for a while. Far enough away so that, presumably, the rest of the team won’t be able to hear whatever horrible thing is going to happen to me. “Over there, behind that huge space-thingy,” the captain says. He actually calls it a space-thingy.
“You’re like not even trying anymore,” I say.
We go around the huge space-thingy and there, standing in front of us, is my wife, in all of her full-bellied glory, next to the shuttle pod I put her in yesterday.
“You, wha, how, uh?” I say. “You landed that thing?”
“Ugh, sometimes I can’t believe I married you,” she says. “The onboard computer, dummy. Hello? Technology? You don’t even have to know how to do anything anymore to have your own ship.” She looks at the captain. “Isn’t that right, chubbs?”
The captain has a look in his eyes, half terrified, half in love with her, and I have to admit,
she does look pretty incredible.
“What’s going on here?” I say, and it starts to dawn on me. “Yesterday, when I was in Records, you.”
“Went to see the captain, yeah. We struck a deal. I told him I’d prefer that my husband not die by himself on an empty planet,” she says. “And he clearly doesn’t want to be captain anymore.”
“It’s a win-win,” the captain says, getting into the trash pod. “Your wife’s a smart woman.”
“What are we going to tell the crew?” I say.
“Trust me. The crew is not going to care.”
Then my wife pantomimes killing the captain, pretending to smash a rock against his head while he makes elaborate and overly detailed dying sounds, both of them smiling at each other the whole time, like a couple of kids pretending to be space explorers.
Sunday (and Beyond):
In the end, the official report listed the cause of the captain’s demise as “Death by Space-Thingy.” An inquiry was made by Internal Affairs at Central Command, but that was quickly wrapped up when it became clear that all the crew members’ stories were consistent. Yeah, man, the space-thingy just totally came up and got him. The captain got to live out the rest of his years alone, on that planet, humping a pile of alien goop or whatever it is he wanted to do. The ship’s officers voted to give my wife a commendation, which she gladly accepted, and a job offer, which she politely declined. We had a party to celebrate our new captain (the former XO) and as usual there was cake and beer but it was different because, for the first time in a long time, we felt like we were searching again. In her first official action as our new captain, she admitted that we were totally lost, which everyone knew but the previous captain had been unwilling to admit, and she said that our new destination was home, wherever that might be, and we all agreed that it was as mysterious and noble a pursuit as any, and we all set our sights that way, hoping it would still be there if and when we found it.